Christmas Cocktail: Smoking Bishop

Sip: on a Smoking Bishop – as featured in the final heartwarming scene of A Christmas Carol

Christmas Holiday Browsing:

• We just touched the sun for the first time

• In other out-of-this-world news, Dennis Villeneuve is making a film of the epic sci-fi novel Rendezvous With Rama

• Thinking on a cosmic scale can make you happier

• Sitting near a window in the office can make you smarter

• The greatest radio show ever (In Our Time) discusses A Christmas Carol

Listen: Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home), Lady A

To the lights on the tree

I’m watching them shine

You should be here with me

Baby please come home…

Have a wonderful Christmas. Regular posts will return in the new year.

A Fourth Revolution: will China win?

China is close to achieving a critical mass of skills, technology, and supply-chain depth that will leave the United States behind—just as the United States left Britain behind during the twentieth century.

That’s from a sobering essay by David Goldman, arguing that China has developed a significant lead in the core technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, primarily AI and 5G. And, Goldman argues, “Digital technology is a winner-take-all world“.

If China creates the dominant firms with AI/big data applications, trillions of dollars of wealth will migrate to China from the United States. The capacity of American firms to maintain high levels of R&D and preserve America’s technological edge will erode rapidly.

You can see where this is going…

The United States can still lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution. But we do not have a lot of time to lose. China is close to attaining a critical mass of talent, skills, technological capacity, and logistical depth with a population nearly five times that of the United States. At some point in the foreseeable future, the United States will not be able to catch up.

Goldman favours a smarter, old-style industrial policy to carry the day. Is that really a magic bullet? Food for thought, anyway.

Read the whole thing.

Towards an un-social society?

South Korea, a country at the forefront of technological innovation, appears to be using the pandemic to build back lonelier, if this report of its plans for an “untact” society (one that minimises face-to-face human contact, especially with strangers) are right. You may think that sounds like a nightmare, but there will be contact-free solutions to help you with that too.

Loneliness among elderly people – an existing problem in South Korea only exacerbated by the pandemic – is also receiving the untact treatment.

SK Telecom’s AI Care service is among several being deployed across the country that allows seniors living alone to interact with an AI speaker by asking it to play music, have a simple conversation, perform quizzes, or even call for help in an emergency. The system has reportedly reduced loneliness among users, and even been credited with saving lives by the country’s president.

Using innovation to streamline the routines of everyday life makes sense, but quite a lot of the point of everyday life is to spend it in human company. Let’s hope it doesn’t give Number Ten any ideas.

A Christmas ghost story

With Omicron on the prowl and the nights drawing in, why not take a break from it all with a tall tale of imaginary horrors?

Stigma is an excellent half-hour chiller from the BBC archives that’s just landed on iPlayer. Part of the old series A Ghost Story for Christmas, this compressed drama isn’t especially seasonal but it is genuinely creepy. Unlike the older, familiar ghostly masterpieces of M.R. James, Stigma is made (and set) in 1977, and features a modern, middle-class family – mother, father (Peter Bowles), and teenage daughter Verity – who live in an old country cottage. They decide to dig up an ancient menhir in the back garden… It doesn’t go well.

If this whets your appetite, another minor classic in the same vein is Robin Redbreast from 1970, which is itself a precursor to The Wicker Man, made just three years later. What made the Seventies a golden decade for this kind of horror? Discuss. But first, draw the curtains, turn down the lights and enjoy…

Prepare for the century of the internet (maybe)

A bullish essay in Foreign Policy from the always-interesting Balaji Srinivasan, co-authored by Parag Khanna, makes the case that neither China nor America can win the twenty-first century, because it already belongs to the rapidly-developing, decentralised technology of Web3.

[R]ather than a unipolar Pax Americana or a bipolar “New Cold War,” the future will be a decentralized race to the top as countries, cities, companies, and communities—physical and virtual—compete to attract talent and capital. We do not argue that states are irrelevant; rather, they will be more relevant if they embrace the arrow of history and work with the network and less relevant if they attempt rearguard actions against it.”

Given how badly some older utopian predictions about the internet’s power to limit central power have fared, all this should be taken with a heavy pinch of salt. Talk of inevitability is always questionable. But it’s a clear statement of the optimists’ position, and a useful corrective to other narratives of inevitability, especially about the rise of China.

Read the whole thing.

Friday Cocktail: Egg Nog

Sip: on some seasonal Egg Nog, with this simple, shaker-based recipe

Weekend browsing:

• Chessboxing I: a new documentary, By Rook or Left Hook, now available to stream

• Chessboxing II: the first post-pandemic live event in London, Season’s Beatings 2021, this Saturday night. Tickets here, or watch free on livestream

• Engage warp drive: has a new discovery shown a physics-friendly path to faster-than-light travel?

• A fan-funded film about the birth of Christ has topped the US box office and taken $10m in its first week. There’s a livestream on Monday night at 1am GMT for night owls

Listen: John Prine, Christmas in Prison

“She reminds me of a chess game

With someone I admire

Or a picnic in the rain

After a prairie fire…“

Never mind the news, get boosted

While Westminster, as usual, tears itself apart over petty infighting, the only news that really matters is that an Omicron wave looks very likely to be heading our way, and fast. It could peak as early as the start of January.

The wisdom or not of the government’s Plan B isn’t important. Get your booster jab now, get some decent masks and take sensible precautions. With luck, the UK’s vaccine wall should limit severe symptoms and death, but it’s too early to know. A huge wave of infections could still cause real problems, and there are some worrying signs that younger patients are ending up in South African ICUs.

You can read one of the best summaries so far here. (He may update with a new post later today). A few key points:

Omicron re-infects those who have already been sick, or breaks through to those who have been vaccinated, much more than Delta.

…we don’t know if it causes less severe disease yet, our evidence is ambiguous.

Omicron cases on average are much more mild because there will be a much higher percentage of re-infections and breakthrough cases, which are highly protected against severe disease.

There is going to be a period early in 2022 when there are quite a lot of Omicron cases, such that it will be difficult to remain uninfected and it will likely be difficult to get any kind of medical treatment at a hospital. Be ready.

Also be ready in case of lockdowns and other government restrictions, especially if you live in Europe where they’ve shown a willingness to use them. And if you’re immunocompromised or otherwise at high enough risk you need to be sure to not get Omicron, then the price of success is getting super paranoid soon and lock down hard, for at least several months.

Read the whole thing.

Thinking with Lego

A wonderful little video about the power of progressive tinkering to solve increasingly more challenging problems. A Lego car is re-engineered to cross ever-larger gaps, and it’s compulsive viewing. There’s also another one about climbing over a growing pile of books.

Many years ago I wrote a column about Lego the company, which ended up being quoted in a book on creativity. The Danish toymaker had a fascinating ride back to profitability, partly by letting tinkerers freely invent what to build next with its bricks. There’s clearly no end in sight.

What’s lurking on the dark side?

Is it a “space hut”? Is it a cube? It’s probably a strangely-regular boulder, but China’s moon rover has spotted a curious object hiding on the dark side of the moon.

Sadly it will take a couple of months before the rover can get close enough for a decent look and burst sci-fi dreams of a monolith straight out of Arthur C Clarke’s 2001.

On the other hand, the US government appeared to acknowledge the reality of UFOs earlier this year, so who knows?

A creativity lesson from The Beatles

The epic Beatles documentary Get Back is a long but inspiring watch. For those without a Disney+ subscription, this incredible clip is one of the most exciting moments, as Paul McCartney creates Get Back from thin air.

And for larger lessons about how to be productively creative, from someone who’s watched the whole thing for you, this piece is worth a read.

Friday Cocktail: Celebration

Sip: on a Celebration. Happy advent.

Weekend browsing:

• Coffee may protect against Alzheimer’s

• A camera the size of a salt grain

• AI helps advance the frontiers of mathematics (it can also make you an artist)

• Great books online, with a nice (and free!) layout

Listen: The Beatles, Something In The Way She Moves

“Something in the way she knows

And all I have to do is think of her

Something in the things she shows me…“

Have a great weekend.

Jimmy Carr: philosopher?

Jimmy Carr has a book out and he gives a wide-ranging and very interesting interview here. Lots of unexpected insights into his life and more generally on success, how to get it and how to cope with it.

In one fascinating aside, Carr describes becoming better at schoolwork after some years being a rebel. He says he approached it not just by applying himself to subjects but instead by understanding the cultural code he was being asked to perform, a topic the economist Tyler Cowen also focuses on. Carr says that getting an A for a history essay is about understanding the form and what it needs to be, less than about knowing history. As a meta-insight, in the hands of an obviously very bright guy, I suspect that has stood him in good stead for all kinds of challenges.

If you’re interested in how to approach cultural code-cracking as a practice, try this.

What happens if we find a cure for ageing?

A new study from the online US journal Aging sounds too good to be true.

“the nearly 8-year reversal in the biological age of individuals taking Rejuvant® for 4 to 10 months is noteworthy, making the natural product cocktail an intriguing candidate to affect human aging”

Things too good to be be true usually are, but even if this particular supplement doesn’t work, the evidence seems to be mounting that ageing can be treated as a disease and quite possibly slowed, if not reversed. Over the years ahead, it may well be that healthspan (the portion of life spent in good health) will be extended radically, and perhaps even lifespan as well. That would be wonderful, but also bring huge social disruption. Are we thinking hard enough about what will happen if we actually get there?

HAL, draw me a picture…

A new capability for our new robot overlords servants. With the Pixray tool you can type in a description and let the AI generate a picture for you. It will even do its best to imitate an artist’s style if you ask.

Requests produce somewhat mangled results, one part astonishingly good, one part mutant horror that belongs dead. But it’s an impressive start. AI could already write your emails and even program computers for you. Now it can make you into a kind of conceptual artist.

Try this one yourself. Just be polite, in case Skynet is watching.

Transcendence and giant rodents in Argentina

My friend Dominic Hilton on form in Perspective Magazine, writing about his trip to see a physiotherapist in Buenos Aires but also about life, God, giant rodents and home invasions.

“My seventy-three-year-old physiotherapist, Sylvia, is a tiny, birdlike woman who wears flesh-coloured spandex onesies that leave painfully little to the imagination. Her hair is blue-purple and clearly not real, while her bustling surgery in an unfashionable barrio of Buenos Aires is dark and subterranean, like Hitler’s bunker. The walls of the waiting room are crowded with dozens of yellowing certificates awarded decades ago by something called the Argentina Society of the Shoulder and the Elbow. A rickety school desk is home to two wartime field telephones, and behind it stands an improbable antique switchboard with multicoloured jacks and plugs, alongside what looks like an Enigma machine, held together by strips of adhesive tape.”

The whole thing is never what you expect. Recommended.

Friday Cocktail: The Pilgrim

Sip: on a Pilgrim (Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends!)

Weekend browsing:

• $100m to Caltech for research into space-based solar power

• RIP, Robert Bly, poet and author of Iron John

• Natural artworks in Wales

Listen: Winter Poem, by Robert Bly

“…the way of those

who are wounded and want to live:

…”

Have a great weekend.

Men are more violent. Are women more intolerant?

The economist Tyler Cowen is very interested in the feminisation of society as women gain more positions of power. It’s a trend Cowen sees as strongly net positive for men and women, although he is open to the downsides that inevitably come with it.

One of those unexpected downsides is raised in a controversial new Substack essay from Noah Carl, suggesting that the increase of women in academia has made the problem of wokeism worse.

To put the dilemma crudely: we know men are, on average, more violent; are women, on average, more intolerant?

Carl got drummed out of Cambridge for his interest in questions like these, although he received plenty of mainstream support in the wake of his sacking, including from The Times. That doesn’t mean any of his actual conclusions are right, of course.

Here, Carl draws on a number of sources to support his case that there is a particular gender divide in academia, with female academics more likely to support imposing diversity quotas and the cancellation of threatening viewpoints, as against academic rigour and freedom of thought. Carl’s sources include a report by Eric Kauffman. Having checked out the original, Carl seems to over-egg Kauffman’s more nuanced conclusions. Still, it’s not the only piece of evidence he presents.

As it happens, I came across an astonishing data point recently in my own researches. The University of California’s Higher Education Research Institute regularly surveys American college teachers. In 2007-8, for the first time they asked full-time undergraduate faculty members how many thought it was very important or essential for undergraduates to be “encouraged to become agents of social change”. Male faculty were split, with 49% in favour (just 44.6% among full professors, with junior staff more sympathetic). However, a remarkable 75% of female faculty supported politicised teaching (71.6% even among full professors).

Whether we need to explain that difference by summoning “Just-So” stories of evolutionary biology as Carl would is another matter. Women, especially in the more radical corners of academia (where they are over-represented), see their status as under threat from discrimination and ally with other victim groups to fight back. It would be surprising (sexist?) to expect women not to make common cause and further their own interests. Arguably, the real problem is that no one has been maintaining the guard-rails set up to prevent the politicisation of education.

In any case, surveys like Kauffman’s show that age is a huge and salient predictor of attitudes among academics, male and female. Wokeism is going to gain ground on campus as the younger generation rises in seniority. What to do about that is a far harder question.

What if we could cure obesity?

What to make of the intractable, growing problem of obesity? According to The Lancet:

“Unlike other major causes of preventable death and disability, such as tobacco use, injuries, and infectious diseases, there are no exemplar populations in which the obesity epidemic has been reversed by public health measures.”

What if the reason obesity is proving so hard to counter is that we don’t have a good model of what’s causing it? It would hardly be the first time. And there are some odd data points that don’t fit with a model that focuses on willpower, exercise and our changing diets, such as the great fattening of lab animals under tightly-controlled conditions, and a number of other mysteries.

The last in a remarkable series of online essays lays out the possibility that the obesity epidemic is the result of environmental contamination, and proposes an experimental program to assess if this hypothesis is true. The best way to prove it? Remove contaminants and see if that cuts obesity.

“The contamination theory of obesity has to be possible, in the sense that we know chemicals can cause weight gain and we know various chemicals are in the environment. […] If this theory is correct, then we have a good shot at doing what we really want to do — actually curing obesity — and no result could be more convincing than that.”

This is a crazy idea, and it might well be wrong. But curing obesity is an enormous prize. In the face of a big problem no one knows how to solve, maybe a crazy idea can break the deadlock.

Read the whole thing.

The law that launched wokeism

An essay in American Affairs by the ever-interesting Richard Hanania on Vivek Ramaswamy’s new book Woke Inc. turns out to be much more than a book review. It’s actually a good overview of Hanania’s thesis (developed at more length here) that woke capitalism, and wokeism more generally, has its roots in the legal consequences and subsequent executive orders and related regulations that follow America’s Civil Rights Act in 1964.

“The main components of wokeness can be traced to legal developments in the 1960s and 1970s: among them the ideas that disparities imply discrimination; that offensive speech must be curtailed; and that people must be conscious of race throughout their daily lives. Surely wokeness has intensified in recent decades, but civil rights law can help explain why no institution wants to be the one to stand up to woke mobs. If every other company is making investments in DEI and invit­ing critical race theorists to speak, how does it look if yours is the one business that does not? This can be seen as a collective action problem, in that while businesses would have fewer costs if they did not have extensive HR and diversity bureaucracies, every individual company has an incentive to do at least as much as everyone else to prove to governments and the courts (as well as NGO activists, elite university grad­uates, the media, and so forth) that they are sufficiently fighting “dis­crimination.” One way to understand the “Great Awokening” of the last decade is that culture, aided by social media, is finally catching up to fundamental assumptions of the law.“

There’s much more that could be said on this topic, especially about how these legal changes interacted with America’s universities, given Hanania’s focus is the workplace. But as Hanania explores in this essay, the astonishing thing is how blind most people are to the legal background of the woke revolution. Railing about wokeism without understanding the core issues is a recipe for futility. Not that Hanania is exactly an optimist.

“A worldview that has captured every institution, from the federal government and health organizations to fashion magazines, is not going to be extracted from American society. […] This might be a depressing message, but when one side controls virtually everything, survival is the best any remaining opponents can realistically hope for in the short term.

Read the whole thing.

Why on earth would you write…?

…when the world will give you almost no reward for the enormous effort?

An attempt at an answer from the poet Dana Gioia (brother of the brilliant music critic Ted). This is the latest part in his new series of short videos. Worth checking out, if only for his incredibly soothing voice.

Dana Gioia’s new memoir, Studying with Miss Bishop, is also a moving record of his own journey in the world of words. Here’s the opening paragraph:

“Every reader has two lives—one public, the other secret. The public life is the one visible to teachers, friends, and families, though none of them ever sees it fully. It consists of homes and houses, schools and schoolmates, friends and enemies, lovers, colleagues, and competitors. This is the realm of experience universally known as real life. But every true reader has a secret life, which is equally intense, complex, and important. […] Some books guide us. Others lead us astray. A few rescue or redeem us. All of them confide something of the wonder, joy, terror, and mystery of being alive.“

Buy the book here.