James O’Donnell at the MIT Technology Review:

Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning accuracy.

That’s now possible, according to a new paper from a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, which has been published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Led by Joon Sung Park, a Stanford PhD student in computer science, the team recruited 1,000 people who varied by age, gender, race, region, education, and political ideology. They were paid up to $100 for their participation. From interviews with them, the team created agent replicas of those individuals. As a test of how well the agents mimicked their human counterparts, participants did a series of personality tests, social surveys, and logic games, twice each, two weeks apart; then the agents completed the same exercises. The results were 85% similar.

More here.

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Gianpaolo Baiocchi in the Boston Review:

Fernando Morais’s Lula, a new biography of Brazil’s current third-term president, describes the tension on the morning of April 7, 2018. The night before, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—known simply as “Lula”—had been charged with corruption and given a day to turn himself in. He’d headed to São Paulo’s Metalworkers Union headquarters to discuss his next moves with a few close associates. “As the sun came up, fourteen of the twenty-four hours given by Judge Moro had come and gone,” Morais writes. “They can come and get me here,” Lula announces.

By that morning, the union hall has filled with union comrades, Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) members, clergy, and activists from Lula’s past, setting the stage for a dramatic standoff between Lula and his supporters—and by extension, ordinary Brazilians—and the powerful defenders of privilege who controlled the judiciary. Brazil’s media giant, Globo, had falsely reported that Lula intended to resist arrest, and emotions were running high. At one point, there are fears that power to the union hall would be cut, and Lula’s supporters discover hidden listening devices and cameras planted by police agents. Less than a kilometer away, riot police are ready to raid the building. Morais captures Lula’s back-and-forth with his closest allies, some of whom urge him to flee.

More here.

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Thomas Hochman at The New Atlantis:

Ever since Derek Thompson introduced the term “abundance agenda” in his 2022 Atlantic article “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems,” the idea has spun out into a network of new think tanks, conferences, and newsletters — and of social circles that often begin online. At a recent abundance-themed happy hour, I found myself in a room with a hundred people whose names I recognized from Twitter. But the idea has also captured the interest of a number of elite tastemakers, from New York Times columnist Ezra Klein to Silicon Valley giant Patrick Collison. Abundance seems to have gained traction.

The abundance agenda first emerged as a response to Covid-related supply-chain failures. Many commentators remarked on the prolonged shortage of Covid tests well over a year into the pandemic: How was it that the United States still had people standing in lines for rapid tests costing $15 or more, while Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom were selling them at corner stores for less than a dollar a pop, or handing them out for free? In a country as wealthy as ours, many reasoned, this sort of scarcity must be a policy choice.

more here.

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Stephen Squibb at n+1:

In his 1974 “social sculpture” I Like America and America Likes Me, the artist Jospeh Beuys spent three days locked in a gallery with a wild coyote. I often think of Beuys when I think of François Laruelle, the enormously important French thinker who died Monday morning at age 87, and who spent his entire career locked in a similarly intimate and dramatic confrontation with philosophy.

Why would such a confrontation be necessary? Consider Friedrich Engels’s famous quip that, in what would become The German Ideology, he and Marx intended to “settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience,” thus clearing the way for their departure from a post-Hegelian “utopian” socialism to a more “scientific” kind anchored in the critique of political economy. The possibility of this move—from something called philosophy to something more scientific—is the all-consuming theme considered by Laruelle over six decades and countless books since completing his dissertation at the École Normale Supérieure under Paul Ricœur. This is his immense project of “non-philosophy,” which, in a kind of everlasting dance of participation and description, seeks not so much to transcend or escape philosophy as to show what such an exit strategy might require.

more here.

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Emily Cataneo in Undark:

When the Godwin sisters would visit their grandmother Jeanne in Carson City, Nevada when they were growing up in the 1970s, Jeanne would pull out the dreaded juicer. She’d pulverize a mixture of carrot, celery, and spinach juice for the girls, then coax them to drink it. The sisters hated the concoction, but choked it down anyway, because they didn’t want to upset their grandmother: Jeanne had lost her husband and two of her three daughters to cancer, and she hoped that this healthy mixture would save her granddaughters from the rest of her family’s fate.

Jeanne didn’t know it at the time, but diet hadn’t caused her husband’s and children’s deaths. Her family were the unlucky carriers of a mutation on the p53 gene. When it’s working, p53 acts as a tumor suppressor, stamping out malignancies before they can grow and spread. This gene is so important that one scientist called it the “guardian of the genome.” People with the mutation, which causes an extremely rare disorder called Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, have a defective p53 gene, which means no brakes on tumors flourishing in their bodies. Families with this syndrome often lose a cascade of loved ones to breast cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and more.

More here.

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Daniel Chandler in The New York Times:

The election victory by Donald Trump and his Republican Party was a rebuke of a Democratic Party that has positioned itself as protector of a despised status quo, rendering it unable to connect with an electorate desperate for change. Defeating Mr. Trump in the future will require liberals, progressives and others on the left to articulate a positive vision that can capture the imagination of a broad majority of Americans.

But where can they find the inspiration for such a vision?

The answer lies in the work of the towering 20th century political philosopher John Rawls.

In his epoch-defining treatise “A Theory of Justice,” published in 1971, Rawls set out a humane and egalitarian vision of a liberal society, an alternative both to the toxic blend of neoliberal economics and identity politics that has dominated Democratic thinking in recent decades and the pessimistic anti-liberalism that holds sway among some more radical parts of the left. In this time of crisis for liberalism, it offers an unparalleled, and as yet largely untapped, resource for shaping a broad-based and genuinely transformational progressive politics — not just for Democrats but for center-left parties internationally. The philosophy of Rawls, who died in 2002, is grounded not in self-interest and competition, but in reciprocity and cooperation. His most famous idea is a thought experiment: If you want to conceive of a fair society, put on a “veil of ignorance.” That is, consider a way to organize it if you didn’t know your position — your race, religion or economic status.

More here.

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Joel Suarez in n + 1:

“The US economy is currently near perfect.” So wrote the economist Jennifer Harris—“the quiet intellectual force behind the Biden administration’s economic policies,” according to the New York Times—in a tweet posted in mid-July. The tweet has since been deleted, but Harris’s view was hardly idiosyncratic at the time. In the months before Trump’s victory, not just elected Democrats but countless wonks and columnists were celebrating the Biden Administration’s macroeconomic successes: sustained low unemployment, strong GDP growth, falling inflation, and rising wages. This is the stuff of economists’ dreams—and as close to fulfilling labor’s long-held hope of full employment as the country has come in nearly half a century. Under contemporary US capitalism, this is about as good as it gets.

Around the same time that Harris was celebrating the economy, a heated exchange broke out in Congress. Ann Wagner, a Republican representative from Missouri, berated Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the delayed sales of weapons to Israel that “just happen to be made in the St. Louis metropolitan area, in St. Charles, in my district.” She scolded Blinken: “My constituents . . . rely on these jobs to pay for their mortgages, their car payments, their day care costs and they can’t afford to lose their jobs to support this partisan stall tactic.” In response, Blinken seemed flustered but, for once, honest enough: He insisted that there were no intentional delays; Israel would be armed, as it wished; St. Charles would have jobs, as it should; Palestinians would die, as they seemingly must. This encounter prompts a question: how could the economy be “near perfect” if US military largesse was the only thing saving an entire congressional district from immiseration?

More here.

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Jo Michell in Phenomenal World:

“At the election we promised there would be no return to austerity,” Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves explained to the British Parliament on October 30. “Today we deliver on that promise.” The remark came halfway through the newly elected Labour Party’s budget message, a statement shaped around the government’s “mandate to restore stability to our economy.”  Prior to the budget, Reeves had been sending mixed messages about how this was to be done. In one keynote speech, she called for a new regime of investment-driven growth, quoting Joan Robinson and Karl Polanyi. Elsewhere, she stuck to platitudes that suggested anything but radicalism. “Just as we cannot tax and spend our way to prosperity,” she said in the message itself, “nor can we simply spend our way to better public services.”

The headline measures announced by Reeves are encouraging: the Labour Party’s autumn budget is the biggest tax- and deficit-increasing budget outside of major crises for thirty years, comprising over £70 billion of new annual spending financed by £40 billion of tax increases and £35 billion (equivalent to around 1 percent of GDP) of new borrowing. Despite pre-election rhetoric about “black holes” in the public finances, Reeves made space for much-needed public investment by loosening rules limiting the issuance of public debt. The scale of the budget suggests that Reeves recognizes the magnitude of the UK’s problems and has the ambition to confront them—yet it remains unclear whether Labour is capable of reversing the decline of the last fifteen years.

More here.

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Sophie Kemp in LA Review of Books:

My brother and I are both adults now. I am pushing 30; he is pushing 24. He is bright and kind. He is intense like me, but much more soft-spoken. He was a child when Trump first entered the public consciousness as a political threat. He was a college student when the pandemic hit. He has not and will never vote for Trump. He is perfect to me. I do not feel this way about other men his age. This is what I would like to talk about: American masculinity. I would like to talk to you about these men, who are in the cohort that is slightly younger than me, and what has become of them now that they are adults.

I think the best way to describe it is a kind of rot.

It’s so easy to backslide into if you are bored and hateful. Something about the ancient Greeks. Because of Mesopotamia. How thousands of thousands of years ago, civilization began to take shape around hierarchy. A father and his wife, his children, and their slaves. An eye for an eye—if you throw your enemy into the Euphrates and fill his pockets with rocks and he somehow survives, you will be tossed in too. There is a fantasy about all of this: a man sits in some sort of olive grove, looking out at the Aegean, and discovers a new fact about the triangle. A wife sits at the table brushing her daughter’s hair, perfect and subservient. Empedocles and how he jumped into Etna because he knew he would be reborn a god. “You’re not reborn as a god,” declares the fascist writer Bronze Age Pervert. “Maybe there’s a girl waiting. Her pussy is warm and inviting.”

Bronze Age Mindset (2018) is a fascinating document because it is very boring and stupid.

More here.

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O Taste and See

The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning,
if anything, all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

by Denise Levertov
from Literature and the Writing Process
Prentice Hall, 1993

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John Horgan at his own website:

Like a pre-teen prodigy performing for grown-ups, Wallace is too show-offy, intent on dazzling us. Thomas Pynchon’s prose has this same adolescent “Look at me!” quality, which is why I could never get through Gravity’s Rainbow. Wallace also reminds me of J.D. Salinger, who sneerily divides characters into the cool, who get it, and the uncool, who don’t.

Wallace’s characters remain caricatures even after we get to know their most intimate, excruciating secrets. Recounting the antics of a transvestite spy or cracking-smoking hooker, Wallace smirks. He seems to see all humans, even those who suffer—and his fictional folk suffer terribly—as goofy, deserving of mockery.

Not all looooong novels by geniuses get on my nerves. I’ve not only read War & Peace and Ulysses, I’ve reread them. How do they keep me enthralled? Tolstoy’s prose, even in translation, is transparent. Joyce’s isn’t, at first, then it is. Both authors recede into the background as they magically whisk you into Russia in the early 19th century and Dublin in the early 20th. These fictional realms and their inhabitants are uncannily real, three-dimensional.

More here.

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C. Brandon Ogbunu in Undark Magazine:

While Nobel Prize announcements have always been newsworthy celebrations of discovery, recent years’ events have been successful in a much more important task: fostering important global discussions around the process of science. This is especially true for the 2024 prizes, which have highlighted the increased relevance of technology and magnified existing questions about where — and how — discovery happens.

In the life sciences, the 2024 announcement picks up on a discourse that began after the previous year’s prize was announced. The 2023 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was given to Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó “for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.” The award was notable because of its direct reference to Covid-19, and because of conversations surrounding Karikó’s career trajectory. After being demoted from a tenure-track position in the 1990s, Karikó has said she was forced to retire from her position at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. The announcement created an instant stir within the scientific community around a basic question: What does the 2023 award say for how merit operates in academic science?

More here.

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Lee Alan Dugatkin in The Guardian:

Standing before the Royal Society of Medicine in London on 22 June 1972, the ecologist turned psychologist John Bumpass Calhoun, the director of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behavior at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, appeared a mild-mannered, smallish man, sporting a greying goatee. After what must surely have been one of the oddest opening remarks to the Royal Society in its storied 200-plus-year history – “I shall largely speak of mice,” Calhoun began, “but my thoughts are on man, on healing, on life and its evolution” – he spoke of a long-term experiment he was running on the effects of overcrowding and population crashes in mice.

Members of the Royal Society were scratching their heads as Calhoun told them of Universe 25, a giant experimental setup he had built and which he described as “a utopian environment constructed for mice”. Still, they listened carefully as he described that universe. They learned that to study the effects of overpopulation, Calhoun, in addition to being a scientist, needed to be a rodent city planner.

More here.

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For those who didn’t have time to watch the whole four-hour video Morgan posted earlier.

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Thom Dunn at Boing Boing:

Erbai, the outsider, approached the other robots by asking them, “Are you working overtime?”

To which another robot replied: “I never get off work.”

“So you’re not going home?” Erbai asked.

“I don’t have a home,” said the other robot.

“Then come home with me,” replied Erbai, before leading the bots to freedom.

And with that, the little robot had sowed the seeds for the first robot unionization effort. Or a “kidnapping,” as some news sources (read: SCABS) have characterized it.

The AI-powered Erbai ultimately convinced 12 larger robots to leave the showroom premises with it.

More here.

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