Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized:

When Rafi invited me to open this event, it sounded like he wanted big-picture pontification more than technical results, which is just as well, since I’m getting old for the latter. Also, I’m just now getting back into quantum computing after a two-year leave at OpenAI to think about the theoretical foundations of AI safety. Luckily for me, that was a relaxing experience, since not much happened in AI these past two years. [Pause for laughs] So then, did anything happen in quantum computing while I was away?

This, of course, has been an extraordinary time for both quantum computing and AI, and not only because the two fields were mentioned for the first time in an American presidential debate (along with, I think, the problem of immigrants eating pets). But it’s extraordinary for quantum computing and for AI in very different ways. In AI, practice is wildly ahead of theory, and there’s a race for scientific understanding to catch up to where we’ve gotten via the pure scaling of neural nets and the compute and data used to train them. In quantum computing, it’s just the opposite: there’s right now a race for practice to catch up to where theory has been since the mid-1990s.

More here.

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Alex Trembath at the Breakthrough Institute:

It’s election season, which means a return to the quadrennial tradition of yelling at Nate Silver on the Internet. While I think most people at this point have made their peace with his probabilistic forecasts, many progressives, demonstrably confused by basic statistics, regularly accuse Silver of deliberately underestimating Democrats’ electoral fortunes. And it occurred to me that their confusion mirrors a similar mistake progressives make in evaluating climate impacts. In each case, many observers fail to understand the ways in which relatively modest changes in statistical averages are associated with larger relative shifts in the tails of the probability distribution. The funny thing is, the misunderstanding runs in opposite directions in the case of climate versus the case of election forecasting.

Start with the politics. Silver has been publishing his election forecasting model for the better part of twenty years, over five different presidential races and thousands of Congressional races. Progressives with less training in statistics have had that entire time to learn the basics of probabilistic forecasting. And many of them have steadfastly refused to do so.

More here.

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The Pathetic Fallacy

—an excerpt

The Saint Meets His Match, The Saint Goes Underground,
Pope’s translation of The Aeneid,
The Collected Trollop, the last five issues of Baseball Digest,
a whole library of French semanticists
piled on the hospital bed,
on the bed table. If he was going to be attached
to machines, tubes running into all kinds of places
on him, he refused to suffer
alone. He brought Sir Philip Sydney for company,
Samuel Daniel, Edmund Waller,
and the entire sixteenth century.
Coleridge shared his bed along with Flannery O’Conner
and John Woolman. If he ever was going to indulge himself,
what better time? Piled on the Bureau:
The Lysistrata, The Inferno (in three translations), Paradise Lost,
and The Life and Death of Buddy Holly,
books heaped so high
it looked as if he was conducting an experiment
to test precisely how long before everything collapses.

by Christopher Bursk
from The Last Inhabitants of Arcadia
University of Arkansas Press, 2006

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Jim Lorraine in Newsweek:

My family has always served in the military. My father was one of six brothers. They all went to World War Two, each in a different service and theater, and all came home. I was around 10 when my brother-in-law was in Vietnam, which was impactful, and my sister was an Air Force nurse. I always wanted to follow their example and serve in the military and was passionate about serving the United States of America as part of something bigger than myself. Originally, I wanted to be a pilot, but I didn’t realize until I went to the military recruiter that I was colorblind, so I didn’t qualify for flight status as a pilot. However, I had gone through nursing school. So, I joined the Air Force as a nurse and was assessed into its aeromedical evacuation program, which is the long-range movement of patients. This program gave me opportunities to fly, see the world, and care for wounded, ill, or injured. After joining, I served around the globe: In Iraq in both Gulf Wars, Somalia during the 1990s, Afghanistan late in the Soviet invasion, demining missions in Vietnam and Cambodia, work in Central America, and the Global War on Terror around the world.

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Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:

Since war broke out in the Gaza Strip almost a year ago, the official number of Palestinians killed exceeds 41,000. But this number has stoked controversy. Some researchers think it is an underestimate, owing to the difficulties of trying to count dead people during conflicts. Other sources say it overestimates the number of casualties. The count comes from the Palestinian Ministry of Health — Gaza, the main institution counting mortality in the region. It’s important to track fatalities during wars — and to estimate overall mortality — to hold warring parties accountable and to advocate for the protection of civilians, says Zeina Jamaluddine, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. The number of deaths also informs discussions around when to officially declare that a situation involves famine.

In the heat of conflict, the first way to count fatalities is to tally up the number of dead people. But capturing the number of deaths in the densely populated urban centres of Gaza presents unique challenges, says Emily Tripp, director of Airwars, a non-profit watchdog based in London that counts casualties in times of conflict. “What we’ve seen in Gaza is entire families just being completely wiped out,” says Tripp. That means it can be hard to recover bodies, or there is no one to report them dead, and so deceased people will be missed in counts. Only when the conflict ends or eases can researchers begin the work of getting more robust estimates of overall mortality through surveys, modelling and statistical tools, they say.

More here.

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George Scialabba in Commonweal:

All men are brothers.” (Women too, of course.) If asked to agree or disagree with this statement, taken in a normative sense, most people would agree. At the moment, Ukrainians might make an exception for Russians, and Israelis and Palestinians for one another—though even they, if they listened to the better angels of their nature, might come around.

Why quote this old saw here? Because I have long felt that these four words are a complete and adequate political philosophy. A brother or sister shares most of one’s genes and usually a good many of one’s early formative experiences. It’s a tie that binds. Of course, most people are not literally our brothers or sisters. But the point of that archaic-sounding phrase “the brotherhood of man” is to jog our moral imaginations, to remind us that even if we don’t share parents with most other humans, we share with all of them something even more important, something that binds us to them even more strongly: a capacity for suffering. Remembering that makes it harder to be indifferent or cruel.

The most influential move in modern political philosophy is just such an appeal to our imaginations. In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls, having defined fairness as the chief virtue of liberal societies, asks how we might all agree on what’s fair.

More here.

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John Pavlus in Quanta:

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but how many numbers is a word worth? The question may sound silly, but it happens to be the foundation that underlies large language models, or LLMs — and through them, many modern applications of artificial intelligence.

Every LLM has its own answer. In Meta’s open-source Llama 3 model, each word contains 4,096 numbers; for GPT-3, it’s 12,288. Individually, these long numerical lists — known as embeddings — are just inscrutable chains of digits. But in concert, they encode mathematical relationships between words that can look surprisingly like meaning.

The basic idea behind word embeddings is decades old. To model language on a computer, start by taking every word in the dictionary and making a list of its essential features — how many is up to you, as long as it’s the same for every word. “You can almost think of it like a 20 Questions game,” said Ellie Pavlick, a computer scientist studying language models at Brown University and Google DeepMind. “Animal, vegetable, object — the features can be anything that people think are useful for distinguishing concepts.” Then assign a numerical value to each feature in the list. The word “dog,” for example, would score high on “furry” but low on “metallic.” The result will embed each word’s semantic associations, and its relationship to other words, into a unique string of numbers.

More here.

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Jonathan Portes in The Guardian:

Thomas Piketty has come a long way. He first captured public attention in 2014 with his wildly ambitious, 704-page updating of Marx’s Das Kapital, entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Part of its appeal – it became both an international bestseller and an academic sensation – was the simplicity of its basic thesis. Although packed with history and statistics, its fundamental proposition, that if the return on capital exceeds the growth rate of the economy, wealth will become increasingly concentrated, could be reduced to one simple equation: r>g.

Piketty’s latest book is almost exactly the opposite. Not only is it much shorter, based on a lecture given to the Société d’Ethnologie in his native France, its key message is: “It’s a lot more complicated than that.” Like Capital, it discusses the evolution of income and wealth inequality over history. But it emphasises historical contingency and, most of all, the role of politics and of collective mobilisation.

Piketty rejects the thesis – implicit in the way economics is often taught in our universities, and explicit in the way some economists and many conservative politicians and commentators discuss policy issues – that very large inequalities are the inevitable outcome of a well-functioning market economy.

More here.

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Chris Power in The Guardian:

‘We were elsewhere people,” André Aciman writes in this memoir of the year he spent in Rome in the mid-1960s. Aged 15, he left Egypt with his deaf mother and younger brother while his father remained in Alexandria to sell whatever they couldn’t take. Aciman’s Jewish family were part of diaspora forced to leave during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s two decades in power, refugees who attempted to start again in Europe and the US.

When they arrive in Rome, the Acimans must rely on the generosity of André’s great-uncle Claude. “I’m no ogre,” he protests (never a good sign), while keeping a record of every lira he gives them. He installs the family in a flat in the working-class Appio-Tuscolano district, previously one of his brothels, and sets about finding a school for André and his brother.

More here.

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Alejandra Manjarrez in The Scientist:

Purine nucleotides are essential for cell growth and function as they serve as nucleic acid building blocks, signaling molecules, and energy carriers. Treatments that inhibit their synthesis offer a powerful strategy to hinder cancer cell growth, but patients may sometimes develop resistance to these drugs. Researchers hope that a better understanding of the purine production pipeline will lead to the development of novel treatments.

In a recent study published in Cell, researchers reported that tumor cells in mice may recover circulating molecules to maintain their purine pools.¹ Furthermore, the authors found that feeding the animals a nucleotide-rich diet accelerated tumor growth. The findings could help refine cancer therapies that target nucleotide metabolism and guide dietary recommendations for patients with cancer.

More here.

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T.J. Clark in the LRB [h/t: Leonard Benardo]:

Frantz Fanon​ is a thing of the past. It doesn’t take long, reading the story of his life – the Creole childhood in Martinique, volunteering to fight for the Free French in the Second World War, his career in Lyon as arrogant young psychiatrist, the part he played in the war in Algeria, the encounters with Nkrumah and Lumumba, his death at the age of 36 – to realise that his is a voice coming to us from a vanished world. ‘Annihilated’ might be more accurate. Yet the voice breaks through to the present. Its distance from us – the way its cadence and logic seem to shrug aside the possibility of a future anything like ours – is transfixing. Its arguments are mostly disproved, its certainties irretrievable. The writer is trapped inside a dialectical cage. That’s why we read him.

Fanon’s prose defies translation: even his titles are obscure. Les Damnés de la terre doesn’t mean The Wretched of the Earth. Not really. Not unless you know what ‘la terre’ signifies to the French (too much, alas) and where the whole phrase fits in the history of class struggle:

Debout! les damnés de la terre
Debout! les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère,
C’est l’éruption de la fin.
Du passé faisons table rase
Foule esclave, debout! debout!
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!

Arise! Damned of the earth
Arise! Prisoners of hunger
Reason thunders in its crater
It is the eruption of the end.
Let’s make a tabula rasa of the past
Slave crowd, arise! arise!
The world is going to change its basis
We are nothing, let us be everything!

How the British and Americans have struggled with Eugène Pottier’s great hymn.

More here.

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David C Krakauer in Aeon:

What makes computation possible? Seeking answers to that question, a hardware engineer from another planet travels to Earth in the 21st century. After descending through our atmosphere, this extraterrestrial explorer heads to one of our planet’s largest data centres, the China Telecom-Inner Mongolia Information Park, 470 kilometres west of Beijing. But computation is not easily discovered in this sprawling mini-city of server farms. Scanning the almost-uncountable transistors inside the Information Park, the visiting engineer might­ be excused for thinking that the answer to their question lies in the primary materials driving computational processes: silicon and metal oxides. After all, since the 1960s, most computational devices have relied on transistors and semiconductors made from these metalloid materials.

If the off-world engineer had visited Earth several decades earlier, before the arrival of metal-oxide transistors and silicon semiconductors, they might have found entirely different answers to their question. In the 1940s, before silicon semiconductors, computation might appear as a property of thermionic valves made from tungsten, molybdenum, quartz and silica – the most important materials used in vacuum tube computers.

And visiting a century earlier, long before the age of modern computing, an alien observer might come to even stranger conclusions. If they had arrived in 1804, the year the Jacquard loom was patented, they might have concluded that early forms of computation emerged from the plant matter and insect excreta used to make the wooden frames, punch cards and silk threads involved in fabric-weaving looms, the analogue precursors to modern programmable machines.

But if the visiting engineer did come to these conclusions, they would be wrong. Computation does not emerge from silicon, tungsten, insect excreta or other materials. It emerges from procedures of reason or logic.

This speculative tale is not only about the struggles of an off-world engineer. It is also an analogy for humanity’s attempts to answer one of our most difficult problems: life. For, just as an alien engineer would struggle to understand computation through materials, so it is with humans studying our distant origins.

More here.

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David Feldman in The Ideas Letter:

Over the last 100 years, the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against racism have at times appeared inextricably connected, firmly allied in a single fight against bigotry. Today, it is the disconnections that appear most visible.

The standoff is now stark, thanks to divergent responses to Oct. 7, 2023 and its aftermath — to Hamas’s attack on Israel and the killing of civilians and hostage-taking, and to Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza and the death, displacement, and privation it has brought. These events have not only had grievous consequences for Palestinians and Israelis; they have also been divisive globally. And they have accelerated and amplified a split between anti-racism and anti-antisemitism that was already advanced.

For some, the attack of October 7 was an act of specifically antisemitic terror. “What is this, some pogrom in Lithuania?” asked Amit Halevi, the chairman of Be’eri, a kibbutz that lost 10 percent of its civilian population in the massacre. Others have drawn connections between October 7 and the Holocaust, finding “the antisemitism of extermination” expressed by Hamas today, as it was by the Nazis before.

Yet much of the anti-racist Left presents these events in a different key. In Britain, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign reacted immediately, on Oct.7: “The offensive launched from Gaza today can only be understood in the context of Israel’s ongoing, decades long, military occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land and imposition of a system of oppression that meets the legal definition of apartheid.” Amnesty International denounced Hamas’s attacks on civilians, but it located the roots of the violence in Israel’s 16-year blockade of Gaza and the discriminatory system it imposes on all Palestinians.

More here.

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Samuel Moyn in The Nation:

In the chilling speech he gives at the end of the film Margin Call, Jeremy Irons says that no one should say they believe in equality, because no one really thinks it exists: The very idea camouflages the endurance of hierarchy in an essentially unchanging form. “It’s certainly no different today than it’s ever been,” he explains to an underling. “There have always been and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers….

Yeah, there may be more of us than there’s ever been, but the percentages? They stay exactly the same.”

For many others, the response to the 2008 financial crisis was very different from Irons’s cynical response. The crisis led to more consciousness and criticism of inequality than had been seen in the past 50 years. Starting with Occupy Wall Street in 2011, large numbers of Americans concerned about the ascendancy of the “1 percent” eventually consolidated around Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020. During these years, the French economist Thomas Piketty provided the reading public with evidence that vindicated the movement: In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in English in 2014, he confirmed that economic inequality had been rising across the North Atlantic world. Piketty also showed that the situation was simultaneously worse and better than the way Irons had characterized it in Margin Call: Capitalism’s inherent dynamics generally increased inequality, he argued, but political mobilizations could bring about its reduction.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a surprise bestseller, and inequality became a signature concern of the new century, analyzed and complained about (and, more rarely, justified) in a deluge of articles, books, and tweets. But a decade later, historians, economists, and political theorists are pondering a different set of questions: not about the causes or continued existence of our age of inequality, but about where the moral imperative for its opposite—equality—came from in the first place.

More here.

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Stephanie Zacharek in Time Magazine:

The pleasures of writer-director Jon Watts’ crime caper Wolfs are numerous: George Clooney and Brad Pitt play dueling fixers called in to clean up the accidental death of a young, adorable student—prior to his demise, occasioned by his jumping on a hotel bed, he’d been picked up by high-powered district attorney Amy Ryan in a bar. Clooney and Pitt have reached the age where they know it’s useless to pretend they’re something they’re not. Their faces look handsomely lived in; the whispers of gray in their artfully sculpted chin stubble feel honest and earned. Like Lucy and Ethel in the throes of a falling out, they’re fun to watch as they bicker and crab at one another, leaning heavily on their silver-fox charm. Still, what they’re offering feels as comfy as the worn-in leather jackets they wear. And in this late-2024 movie season, if you find yourself wishing for something more—for another view of what actors in the 50-to-60-ish age bracket can do—look to the women, who insist on pushing themselves out of the comfort zone rather than settling into it.

More here.

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Anthony Cummins in The Guardian:

Isabella Hammad, 33, was born in London to a Palestinian father and British-Irish mother. Named last year as one of Granta’s best young British novelists, she is the author of The Parisian (2019) and Enter Ghost, which was shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize. Her new book, Recognising the Stranger, began as a lecture last autumn at Columbia University to commemorate the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, an annual event whose previous speakers include Noam Chomsky and Daniel Barenboim. Hammad’s talk, given nine days before 7 October, explored “narrative turning points”, with a particular focus on the story of Palestine. She spoke to me from Manhattan, where she currently has a fellowship at the New York Public Library.

As a novelist, do you hesitate to write nonfiction?
I don’t think of myself as an essayist, and I haven’t written many essays; when I have, they’ve been like this lecture, a creative act involving literary criticism, not straight journalism. I’m a novelist and that’s how I feel comfortable in the world. But there have been times where, under the pressure of my rage, I’ve written because I just need to say something. You know, you work on a novel for years – it’s a different kind of speech act, it’s not making any arguments and you don’t have to inhabit your own opinions. Obviously, there’s a genocide right now: that’s why I’ve been moved to write [nonfiction], just as a person and a human in the world who has felt that need.

More here.

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Samuel Johnson’s Other Life

Thirty years after his father had asked him
to watch the bookstall, his family’s only livelihood,
and Sam being seventeen, too in love with sneering,
had refused, the author of arguably the greatest
dictionary ever, returned to his native village and in
a downpour so heavy no one sensible even thought of
going outside, and with no covering for his head, stood
on the square in the exact site where his father’s
bookstall had been, and out of grief and penance,
language’s surest foundation, stared down the
townsfolk’s mockery, and let the rain teach him
a lesson as only it could.

by Walter R. Rawlings
from The First Inhabitants of Arcadia
The University of Arkansas Press, 2006

Samuel Johnson

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