Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie in Polycrisis:

Watch the Korean Peninsula. It is in South Korea that the New Cold War has most visibly upset the delicate balance between industry, security, and domestic politics.

South Korea’s growth miracle has been based on deterrence and detente between China, its main trading partner; the United States, its ally and security guarantor; and North Korea, its neighbor with newly developed intercontinental ballistic missiles. The country has been on hair-trigger alert since last October, when North Korea stepped up its barrage of ballistic missile tests, including launching one over Japan. In a show of strength, South Korea launched its own ballistic missile, but the weapon malfunctioned, crashing in the coastal city of Gangneung, where the resulting fire raised panic of a North Korean attack.

Now that North Korea has demonstrated the ability to strike the US homeland, South Koreans worry that Washington might abandon them in a conflict to protect US cities instead. Today, 71 percent favor developing their own nuclear weapons. “New York for Berlin” was the central extended deterrence dilemma of the old cold war. The new question is: Would the Americans really trade “Seattle for Seoul?”

Last week, while the national security advisor Jake Sullivan was unrolling the “new Washington consensus” (the subject of our next dispatch), Presidents Biden and Yoon were holding security and trade negotiations in DC that resulted in a Washington Declaration. “Our mutual defense treaty is ironclad, and that includes our commitment to extended deterrence,” Biden said, referring to the treaty signed to end the Korean War seventy years ago. For his part, Yoon referred to the “unprecedented expansion and strengthening” of the US nuclear umbrella. The upshot was that South Korea agreed not to pursue its own nuclear weapons program in return for a greater decision-making role in US military planning should North Korea launch a nuclear attack.

More here.

Yakov Feygin in Building a Ruin:

My theory of how economics interacts with policy is a bit more complicated than some more popular accounts. Very good studies on the anthropology of economics as a profession and policy-making discipline. For example, Marion Fourcade, and Elizabeth Popp Berman’s work, have noted that economics’ political influence and professional formation are deeply embedded in particular differences in local political cultures. Thus, for example, I think that in the United States, lawyers tend to be very important transmitters of economic ideas into policy. American policymakers tend, themselves, to be lawyers, and the government itself has deep legal performativity, even in the bureaucracies.

Despite these longer structural patterns, in the past few decades, I think there has been a bit of technological disruption in how economics and economic ideas move into action. A few years ago, I coined the term “posting to policy pipeline” to describe how the econ blogosphere and Twitter have become key sites of idea making. Before the advent of these new forums, the top economic journals really dominated everything and painted the conventional wisdom as having some scientific validity. After the advent of social media, one could not only call Larry Summers an idiot to his face without being invited to an exclusive meeting but also explain to a large audience precisely why he was an idiot.

Like all technical changes, the emergence of the posting-to-policy pipeline had a strong social component.

More here.

Virginia Morell in Lapham’s Quarterly:

A member of the pea family, M. pudica is a small plant with tiny leaflets paired along the length of each stem and pretty lavender-pink globular flowers. The leaves give it a fernlike, feminine look, although it is also armed with thorns to ward off attacks. It’s native to Central and South America but has spread throughout the tropics partly because of its popularity as a novel ornamental that exhibits a fascinating behavior: if you touch a single leaf, the plant will swiftly fold up all its leaves before your eyes. Only a soft touch is required to bring on this collapse; after a while, you can also watch as the wilted-appearing mimosa sets about righting itself and reopening its leaves. You may have discovered the mimosa’s animal-like trick in an arboretum or store where the plants are sometimes displayed or sold. The rapid response to being touched is another defensive tactic—it startles most insects, as it does naive humans.

M. pudica and its curious actions were known to Western science even before 1753, when Linnaeus officially named the species. Many leading scientists of the day, including Robert Hooke (the English natural philosopher best known for being the first to see and describe a cell via a microscope) and later the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck studied the plant. Lamarck was particularly struck by how mimosas eventually no longer respond to being repeatedly touched.

More here.

Tilda Wilson in NPR:

Fatimah Asghar is the first recipient of the Carol Shields prize for fiction for their debut novel When We Were Sisters. The award was announced Thursday evening at Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tenn. They will receive $150,000 as well as a writing residency at Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Asghar’s When We Were Sisters is a coming-of-age novel that follows three orphaned Muslim-American siblings left to raise one another in the aftermath of their parents’ death. The prize jury wrote that Asghar “weaves narrative threads as exacting and spare as luminous poems,” and their novel is “head-turning in its experimentations.” When We Were Sisters reflects some of Ashgar’s own experiences both as a queer South Asian Muslim and a person whose parents died when they were young. In October, they told NPR’s Scott Simon that being on the margins of society and vulnerable from such a young age was a window into “a certain kind of cruelty that I think most people don’t have a reference point for.”

Ashgar said that the stories they read about orphans while growing up never really rang true — that they’d always think “this doesn’t feel accurate.”

More here.

John Banville at The Guardian:

At the start of this marvellous, engrossing and illuminating study, Julian Bell poses a simple question, one that will recur throughout the book: “What is nature?” Easy to ask, yes, but not so easy to answer. The word “nature” itself comes, of course, from the Latin natura, which Bell translates as “having-been-born-ness”, and which he allies with “physics” from the Greek physis, “‘whatever grows’ or ‘whatever has a body’”. This version of nature he sets against the godly supernatural, and against the mind and consciousness.

By now we are on page two. However, we should not be daunted. Things will become simpler as we go on. Given the author’s Bloomsbury antecedents –he is the son of Quentin Bell, the art historian, nephew and biographer of Virginia Woolf – we might expect, we might dread, a precious style and an impregnable self-regard. Not a bit of it. Natural Light is as light and natural as its subject warrants, a “mystery journey” on which we will encounter wondrous sights and uncover troves of treasure. It’s even funny, in places.

more here.

Dwight Garner at the NY Times:

Now comes a new novella, “Death of an Author,” a murder mystery published under the pseudonym Aidan Marchine. It’s the work of the novelist and journalist Stephen Marche, who coaxed the story from three programs, ChatGPT, Sudowrite and Cohere, using a variety of prompts. The book’s language, he says, is 95 percent machine-generated, somewhat like the food at a Ruby Tuesday.

Well, somebody was going to do it. In truth, other hustlers out there on Amazon already have. But “Death of an Author” is arguably the first halfway readable A.I. novel, an early glimpse at what is vectoring toward readers. It has been presided over by a literate writer who has pushed the borg in twisty directions. He got it to spit out more than boilerplate, some of the time. If you squint, you can convince yourself you’re reading a real novel.

more here.

Seven in the Woods

Am I as old as I am?
Maybe not. Time is a mystery
that can tip us upside down.
Yesterday I was seven in the woods,
a bandage covering my blind eye,
in a bedroll Mother made me
so I could sleep out in the woods
far from people. A garter snake glided by
without noticing me. A chickadee
landed on my bare toe, so light
she wasn’t believable. The night
had been long and the treetops
thick with a trillion stars. Who
was I, half-blind on the forest floor
who was I at age seven? Sixty-eight
years later I can still inhabit that boy’s
body without thinking of the time between.
It is the burden of life to be many ages
without seeing the end of time.

by Jim Harrison

Benj Edwards in Ars Technica:

During his response, Snoop described how conversing with a large language model (such as ChatGPT or Bing Chat) reminds him of sci-fi movies he watched as a kid. Showing that he keeps up with current events, Snoop also referenced Geoffery Hinton, who resigned this week from Google so he could speak of the dangers of AI without conflicts of interest:

Well I got a motherf*cking AI right now that they did made for me. This n***** could talk to me. I’m like, man this thing can hold a real conversation? Like real for real? Like it’s blowing my mind because I watched movies on this as a kid years ago. When I see this sh*t I’m like what is going on? And I heard the dude, the old dude that created AI saying, “This is not safe, ’cause the AIs got their own minds, and these motherf*ckers gonna start doing their own sh*t. I’m like, are we in a f*cking movie right now, or what? The f*ck man? So do I need to invest in AI so I can have one with me? Or like, do y’all know? Sh*t, what the f*ck?” I’m lost, I don’t know.

More here.

Ingo Venzke in the European Review of Books:

The phrase « it’s not too late », for me, brings an artificial smile. I stumble onto it as I walk into a bookstore and see the flashy Carbon Almanac (2022) promoted at the entrance, one of many such books to appear in the last, late year. It shouts from the cover: « It’s not too late. » The foreword was written by Seth Godin, a marketing guru out of the dot-com avantgarde. What will save us is « the hope that comes from realizing that it’s not too late. » The refrain is a staple of the genre. Another entry, a new report from the Club of Rome entitled Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity, offers a kindred burst of optimism about the future against the backdrop of a bleak present. Greater planetary health and social well-being are within reach. The authors will « show you that this is indeed fully possible ». Meanwhile the heavy-weight United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released two punchy reports of its own in 2022. They hammered the message that countries’ pledges to cut emissions fall far below climate change targets, and that the impact of climate change is already devastating for many parts of humanity, the ecosystem, and for the biodiversity that now suffers a mass extinction.

Earth for All may have drowned in the sea of climate commentary. But it is worth reading, for what it is, and what it is not.

More here.

Ram Manikkalingam in SCMP:

The International Monetary Fund approved a US$3 billion loan to Sri Lanka a month ago as the first step in restructuring its debt. This is a significant victory for Sri Lanka’s President Ranil Wickremesinghe and could lead to a gradual stabilisation of the economy and the government’s turnaround from bankruptcy.

After the “staff-level agreement” signed with the IMF six months ago, Sri Lanka’s debt restructuring has finally been approved by the IMF board. In this restructuring, China played a major role. As Sri Lanka’s (and the world’s) largest sovereign creditor, China joined Western governments and India in providing the assurances that unlocked the financing.

But is China’s role in Sri Lanka’s debt restructuring a one-off or a signal that China’s position on sovereign debt has shifted – something that could lead to a global policy breakthrough in negotiating debt restructuring?

More here.

Tristan Abbey at The New Atlantis:

A little history never hurt anybody. We can start the clock in 1920. In February of that year, the journal Nature reported the results of an experiment conducted by a British scientist named Francis William Aston. A future Nobel laureate, Aston’s job at the famous Cavendish Laboratory was to estimate the masses of chemical elements. At the time, it was believed that a single helium atom comprised four hydrogen atoms, suggesting that the mass of a single hydrogen should be exactly one-fourth the mass of a helium. Aston determined this was not, in fact, the case. Hydrogen atoms were just a smidge heavier than they should have been. When four hydrogen atoms fused into a helium, where did the extra mass go?

Enter Arthur Eddington, a British scientist who served essentially (but not merely) as Albert Einstein’s chief popularizer. In August of that year, Eddington delivered a lecture in which he described how stars in outer space were “drawing on some vast reservoir of energy by means unknown to us.”

more here.

Henry Miller at The Paris Review:

So many times, in listening to you, I have had the feeling that the word neurosis is a very inadequate one to describe the struggle which you are waging with yourself. “With yourself”—there perhaps is the only link with the process which has been conveniently dubbed a malady. This same malady, looked at in another way, might also be considered a preparatory stage to a “higher” way of life. That is, as the very chemistry of the evolutionary process. In the course of this most interesting disease the conflict of “opposites” is played out to the last ditch. Everything presents itself to the mind in the form of dichotomy. This is not at all strange when one reflects that the awareness of “opposites” is but a means of bringing to consciousness the need for tension, polarity. “God is schizophrenic,” as you so aptly said, only because the mind, whetted to acute understanding by the continuous confrontation of oscillations, finally envisages a resolution of conflict in a necessitous freedom of action in which significance and expression are one. Which is madness, or, if you like, only schizophrenia. The word schizophrenia, to put it better, contains a minimum and a maximum of relation to the thing it defines. It is a counter to sound with …

more here.

Ted Chiang in The New Yorker:

When we talk about artificial intelligence, we rely on metaphor, as we always do when dealing with something new and unfamiliar. Metaphors are, by their nature, imperfect, but we still need to choose them carefully, because bad ones can lead us astray. For example, it’s become very common to compare powerful A.I.s to genies in fairy tales. The metaphor is meant to highlight the difficulty of making powerful entities obey your commands; the computer scientist Stuart Russell has cited the parable of King Midas, who demanded that everything he touched turn into gold, to illustrate the dangers of an A.I. doing what you tell it to do instead of what you want it to do. There are multiple problems with this metaphor, but one of them is that it derives the wrong lessons from the tale to which it refers. The point of the Midas parable is that greed will destroy you, and that the pursuit of wealth will cost you everything that is truly important. If your reading of the parable is that, when you are granted a wish by the gods, you should phrase your wish very, very carefully, then you have missed the point.

So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

More here.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Antibodies are among the immune system’s key weapons against infection. The proteins have become a darling of the biotechnology industry, in part because they can be engineered to attach to almost any protein imaginable to manipulate its activity. But generating antibodies with useful properties and improving on these involves “a lot of brute-force screening”, says Brian Hie, a computational biologist at Stanford who also co-led the study.

To see whether generative AI tools could cut out some of the grunt work, Hie, Kim and their colleagues used neural networks called protein language models. These are similar to the ‘large language models’ that form the basis of tools such as ChatGPT. But instead of being fed vast volumes of text, protein language models are trained on tens of millions of protein sequences. Other researchers have used such models to design completely new proteins, and to help predict the structure of proteins with high accuracy. Hie’s team used a protein language model — developed by researchers at Meta AI, a part of tech giant Meta based in New York City, — to suggest a small number of mutations for antibodies. The model was trained on only a few thousand antibody sequences, out of the nearly 100 million protein sequences it learned from. Despite this, a surprisingly high proportion of the models’ suggestions boosted the ability of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, ebolavirus and influenza to bind to their targets.

More here.

Plea to a Particular Soft-handed Goddess

Where there are no streets
the world is less remembered
and hypotheses are lean and scattered.

I kneel before a pine tree standing;
listen to the locust-singing of my soul;
hope for a brimful of some sort.

I pray for raindrop ablution;
for embodiment of sandhill dreams;
for a scheme to end

this bughouse commotion;
these spasms of faddism.
The question is:

How to work out a pardonable truce
between one’s honest opinion
and the official attitude.

What I really want is for you
to come and stand beside me
and probe with pagan tenderness

Beyond my bone-weight
until you find a forgotten disclosure
like the surprise of my being.

by Parm Mayer
from Heartland, Poets of the Midwest
Northern Illinois University Press, 1967

Matt Hrodey in Discover Magazine:

In a lab mouse version of The Truman Show, researchers from Harvard Medical School constructed a little world for a new paper. An eight-inch-wide platform raised 20 inches off the ground stood at the center, covered in mouse bedding. All around curved a tall LED screen, blank until a white, disorienting stripe flashed to one side or the other. The researchers were looking for head direction cells in the mouse, which act as an inner compass in the brains of humans, insects, animals and fish. While not a proper magnetic compass, this neural compass acts as a relative one based on landmarks instead of Earth’s magnetic field. In humans, it spans several different brain areas, including the anterodorsal thalamus, the area targeted in the mouse study.

All neural compasses include brain cells with preferred firing directions, meaning they fire continuously and spew neurotransmitters when the head is pointed in a certain direction. But how do they know when that’s happening?

More here.

Steven Poole in The Guardian:

Do we see the world directly, or do we make some of it up? It was the great 19th-century scientist Hermann von Helmholtz who first argued that some unconscious process of logical reasoning must be inherent in optical and auditory perception. That insight was rediscovered in the late 20th century, leading to the modern consensus of cognitive science: we think we see and hear the outside world directly, but most of our experience is created by the brain, meaning its best guesses are based on limited information as to what might really be out there. In other words, we are constantly filling in gaps with predictions.

The Sussex-based cognitive philosopher Andy Clark provides an engaging overview of what he slightly over-claims to be this “new theory” of predictive processing. It is demonstrated in enjoyable and surprising ways: for example, by “Mooney images”, which at first look like random monochrome noise, until you are shown a more detailed second version; you can then “see” (and can’t unsee) the real image in the original. Your predictions have now been updated to be more accurate. People, it turns out, can also be primed to hallucinate Bing Crosby singing White Christmas while listening to pure white noise.

More here.