This is possibly the best book on chess strategy I have ever read, and as soon as you've got a chapter or two into it you wonder why it hasn't been doThis is possibly the best book on chess strategy I have ever read, and as soon as you've got a chapter or two into it you wonder why it hasn't been done before: an excellent sign, of course. The author's plan is splendidly logical. Based on a large number of games, he picks out the two dozen or so structures which occur most often and gives you a chapter on each. He explains the key plans for both players and shows you example positions. He does it all with great assurance.
It's so convincing, and at the same time so simple, that after finishing it I couldn't help wondering if it was some kind of trick. Many self-help books are like that: you're made to believe that you have been magically transformed, whereas the only magic was in the process that directed money from your bank account to the author's. I consequently held off posting my review until I'd had enough time to see if it really was impacting my results. But a couple of months later, my remaining doubts have disappeared. Not only are my ratings on chess.com and lichess considerably improved, I often find myself thinking about the book's advice when making critical decisions. You have to be very sceptical indeed not to believe that it's had a positive effect.
If you're already a reasonably good player and want to get better, invest in a copy of Rios! You won't regret it. ...more
You know I never meant to hurt you. I love you. But sometimes you get me so mad. I can't help it, I'm jealous and righteous. That's hoBaby, come back.
You know I never meant to hurt you. I love you. But sometimes you get me so mad. I can't help it, I'm jealous and righteous. That's how I am. I thought you liked me that way.
Okay, I called you weak and sinful and unclean. Sure, I could have expressed it better. I just wanted to help you. How can we work things out if I don't tell you when you're wrong? Really, I did it for us.
I said I was sorry I burned nine million of your sisters at the stake. I guess I shouldn't have tortured them first either. But maybe it wasn't that many, it's hard to be sure. And it was a long time ago. I think we should draw a line. Talking about this again will only make us both miserable.
I've told you, baby, I want to save you from the Evil One. Sometimes it's hard, but that's not my fault. Well, I know you say I made him, and that's true in a way. But it's not as simple as you think. You're just a girl, you don't understand this properly. I don't want you to spend eternity in Hell. Don't make me put you there. It's your choice.
Of course I exist. That's a terrible thing to say. Now you've really hurt my feelings. If I decided to smite you or something, a lot of people would call it divine justice. Think about that for a minute.
I first came across this wonderful version of the Faust myth forty years ago and have reread it several times since, but when I looked it up on WikipeI first came across this wonderful version of the Faust myth forty years ago and have reread it several times since, but when I looked it up on Wikipedia the other day I discovered some interesting things I hadn't known. Not only did Beerbohm really have a painter friend called Rotherstein, Rotherstein really created a pastel portrait of the hapless Soames, the one that "existed so much more than its subject".
[image]
Even more astonishingly, Soames did indeed turn up in the Reading Room of the British Museum in 1997. Some incurable sceptics will no doubt claim this was a stunt organised by an American magician called Teller who is known to admire Beerbohm's story, but nothing will convince these people, not even first-hand eyewitness reports. It is as plain as day that Beerbohm is just telling us the truth: Soames, who had always been convinced that he would sooner or later be recognised as the genius he knew himself to be, inadvisedly sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for five hours in the future and was cruelly disappointed. I cannot help thinking that a few self-published authors here on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ might learn something from this incident.
Together with our Canberra friend Kirsten, another fan, I have put together a LARA version of Enoch Soames which you can find ; Kirsten has supplied the voice, and I have added French glosses to the words. Our little contribution towards Beerbohm's noble project of convincing the world that Soames really did exist. __________________ [Update, Nov 16 2020]
Soames fans who don't already know about it (I didn't) should look at Enoch Soames: The Critical Heritage. Among other tantalizing details, ...more
A few weeks ago, I was chatting with Jen when the subject of the Prisoner's Dilemma came up. Jen said she'd read about this and related cases of the TA few weeks ago, I was chatting with Jen when the subject of the Prisoner's Dilemma came up. Jen said she'd read about this and related cases of the Tragedy of the Commons, where a good result could be obtained if people cooperated, but the structure of the payoffs encourages antisocial behaviour that is to everyone's disadvantage. It is indeed depressingly easy to come up with examples: most of the problems facing the world today, from climate change to the toilet paper shortage, are some version of the same problem. Jen said her first reaction had been a refusal to accept that we couldn't do better than this, but after some thought found it was hard to come up with any specific ideas. I had to admit that I was in the same position.
What surprised me most was that, even though the Prisoner's Dilemma is clearly of fundamental importance, I knew virtually nothing about it. I decided I would try to become less ignorant, and after searching around ordered a copy of the 2015 CUP collection. It was a mixed bag; the standout paper was the first one, by someone called Ken Binmore. I'd never heard of Binmore, but the paper was so interesting and well-written that I had to find out what else he'd done. A little more search led me to Natural Justice.
You only have to read a few pages of Binmore to see that he is an extremely smart and well-informed person who's familiar with a wide range of subjects. He tells you he was originally a mathematician, then drifted into economics and game theory. But he's also seriously up to speed on philosophy, evolutionary biology, empirical psychology and political science. The theory he's put together makes use of all of this. Trying to summarise it in a Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ review is an impossible task - Natural Justice is itself no more than a popular summary of Binmore's two volume magnum opus, Game Theory and the Social Contract - but let me at least give you a trailer and encourage you to check it out for yourself.
Natural Justice is a work of moral philosophy, but it's not like other moral philosophy I have come across. Up until now, if you'd asked me what moral philosophy was, I'd have said it was about telling you how should live your life, helping you understand which actions are good, right or fair, as opposed to bad, wrong or unfair. Binmore is impatient with all this, and brutally says that we've been discussing such questions for two thousand years without making much progress. He wants to get back to fundamental issues: what do "good" "right" and "fair" mean in the first place? Your reaction may be that this is going to get us into even more trouble, but initial impressions are often wrong. Binmore's plan is simple and logical. Human beings are living creatures who have evolved. In every human society, we use moral concepts all the time, so we must have evolved them. How? What evolutionary strategies do they belong to? Why are they useful to us?
These questions are so natural that I'm kind of shocked I haven't thought more about them. Quite likely there's more than one possible line of attack; Binmore says the one he's developed has its roots in the work of Rawls, Harsanyi and above all Hume, but he's combined their ideas in interesting new ways and gone much further. First of all, for reasons familiar both to economists and evolutionary biologists, he assumes that people are mostly driven by self-interest. (More about the "mostly" soon). Sometimes our interests will come into conflict, and sometimes there will be ways in which we will gain from cooperating. As we can see from the Prisoner's Dilemma, things are not so simple. It'll often be the case that cooperating will gain - but we can't cooperate unless we trust each other, and where will the trust come from?
But as everyone who's looked at the Prisoner's Dilemma knows, if you play it multiple times then people can reach an equilibrium where they all play strategies which make cooperation the rational thing to do: basically, they learn to punish anyone who doesn't cooperate by refusing to cooperate with them. In general, economics and evolution show us that these situations normally end up in some kind of equilibrium. In most cases, there will be several possible equilibria. An example that's used many times in the book is Rousseau's Stag Hunt. Two hunters can each catch a rabbit if they hunt on their own - but if they cooperate, they can catch a stag, and half a stag is much better than a rabbit. There is one equilibrium where they hunt separately, and one where they hunt together. Binmore calls these equilibria examples of "social contracts". The question is how we choose between the different social contracts available, and try to move towards the more efficient ones.
So far, this is just game theory, and it's been done many times before. It gets interesting when Binmore introduces the notion of fairness. Binmore thinks that fairness is something we have in our genes: every society has a version of the Golden Rule, do as you would be done by, and it never needs to be explained. He looks at the hunter-gatherer societies that have survived long enough to be studied by modern anthropologists, and says they all have pretty much the same structure. There are no chiefs (when I read a book on Wangkatja grammar last year, I remember being surprised to find there is no native Wangkatja word for "chief"), and people share the results of hunting fairly. But what does "fairly" mean?
Binmore argues that this is the key, the thing that makes us human; no other species seems to have any notion of fairness. Following Rawls and Harsanyi, he says the observed facts suggest we have an evolved ability to put ourselves in two different people's positions (one of the people might be ourself) and compare them. This is what lets us feel that an arrangement is fair or unfair. We imagine being those two people, and try to decide which role we'd prefer to take. For this to be possible, we need a sense of empathy. Binmore draws an important distinction between "sympathy" and "empathy". He uses "sympathy" to refer to the feelings we have for our family and other people close to us: we care about their well-being in the same way that we care about our own. "Empathy" is the ability to put ourselves emotionally in someone else's position, but without necessarily caring about them. In a nice example, he considers the conman who tricks gullible old ladies out of their life savings. He needs to be good at empathizing with his victims to make the scam work, but he doesn't sympathise with them at all.
Binmore's heroic attempt to develop a formal treatment of empathy, and relate it to fairness, is the centre of the book. He says it's no accident that we easily confuse sympathy and empathy. The fact that they feel similar is most easily explained by assuming that sympathy came first - a great many species care about their kin, for obvious evolutionary reasons - and that the mechanism was gradually adapted by evolution to permit empathy as well. The thing that's so remarkable in his account is the level of detail. Empathy, as conceptualised by Binmore, is a faculty like language. We are all born with an ability to learn language, but how we learn it depends on our cultural surroundings, and is to quite a large extent under our control. I am again surprised that I haven't thought about this before, but it seems perfectly reasonable to say that empathy is the same. Different cultures evidently empathise differently, and within the same culture the rules for empathy change over time. Binmore, who never removes his game theorist hat even when talking about the most philosophical of ideas, relates this to the balance of power between the different agents involved, and provides a detailed analysis of how empathy fits into game theoretic strategic play. If empathy and a sense of fairness were developed by evolution, that can only be because they are fitness-enhancing: they give us more productive ways of balancing power, and as power relationships change then empathy relations also change. Trying to think of concrete examples, the one that occurs to me first is the way women's status has changed in Western society over the last century. Women have negotiated themselves a lot more power, and I think that has indeed changed the way in which men empathise with them.
I have merely scratched the surface of Binmore's remarkable book - which, I should add, is not just thought-provoking but charmingly written and often very funny. If only more philosophy were like this. I must get hold of Game Theory and the Social Contract. _______________________
[Update, Oct 20 2020]
Binmore continually refers to Rawls, so I thought I should read A Theory of Justice. I was struck by the following footnote in §23:
10. Theory of Games as a Tool for the Moral Philosopher (Cambridge, The University Press, 1955). On the analysis he presents, it turns out that the fair division of playing time between Matthew and Luke depends on their preferences, and these in turn are connected with the instruments they wish to play. Since Matthew has a threat advantage over Luke, arising from the fact that Matthew, the trumpeter, prefers both of them playing at once to neither of them playing, whereas Luke, the pianist, prefers silence to cacophony, Matthew is allotted twenty-six evenings of play to Luke’s seventeen. If the situation were reversed, the threat advantage would be with Luke. See pp. 36f. But we have only to suppose that Matthew is a jazz enthusiast who plays the drums, and Luke a violinist who plays sonatas, in which case it will be fair on this analysis for Matthew to play whenever and as often as he likes, assuming as it is plausible to assume that he does not care whether Luke plays or not. Clearly something has gone wrong. What is lacking is a suitable definition of a status quo that is acceptable from a moral point of view. We cannot take various contingencies as known and individual preferences as given and expect to elucidate the concept of justice (or fairness) by theories of bargaining. The conception of the original position is designed to meet the problem of the appropriate status quo. A similar objection to Braithwaite’s analysis is found in J. R. Lucas, “Moralists and Gamesmen,� Philosophy, vol. 34 (1959), pp. 9f. For another discussion, consult Sen, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, pp. 118�123, who argues that the solution of J. F. Nash in “The Bargaining Problem,� Econometrica, vol. 18 (1950), is similarly defective from an ethical point of view.
What is remarkable is that Binmore, whom I'd been thinking of as virtually a disciple of Rawls, bases his entire theory of fairness on bargaining - but bargaining in the original position. Binmore knew Rawls well, and I'm curious to know if Rawls ever retracted his claim here....more
Let's start with the most important thing: if you have any interest in finding out where technology is heading, please read this book. I particularlyLet's start with the most important thing: if you have any interest in finding out where technology is heading, please read this book. I particularly recommend that people who know something about moral philosophy do so. You may dislike Human Compatible, you may object to the way the author treats your subject, but you really ought to learn about what's happening here. Moral philosophy has become shockingly relevant to the near-term future of humanity.
I'll back up a little. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the idea that machines may soon be smarter than humans has gone from science-fictiony scare talk to a sensible projection where the disagreements are not about if, but when. Some experts are saying fifty years from now, some are saying twenty or thirty, some ten or even five. But there's general consensus that we're talking decades, not centuries; this is something that many people alive now will probably see. Since machines evolve much more quickly than humans, once they've overtaken us they will rapidly leave us far behind. Unless we find some other way to destroy ourselves first, we're soon going to be sharing our planet with non-human beings who are vastly more intelligent and capable than we are. As Russell says, it's surprising that we aren't more concerned. If we were told that a fleet of super-advanced aliens was on its way towards Earth and would be landing in thirty to fifty years, we'd be running around in small circles hyperventilating. Well: we are proposing to build those aliens and install them in every home, and many of us are still not taking it seriously. But more and more people are. Bostrom's widely read Superintelligence was the point where the idea went mainstream, and it was soon followed by Tegmark's Life 3.0, du Sautoy's The Creativity Code and other books. Human Compatible is the latest installment.
In contrast to the other authors (Bostrom is a philosopher, Tegmark a physicist and du Sautoy a mathematician), Russell is a leading expert on AI. He is coauthor of the world's most widely read AI textbook, teaches at Berkeley, and is connected to pretty much everyone in the business. If he doesn't know what he's talking about, no one does, and he is very concerned. He doesn't try to scare you or sell you apocalyptic visions of the impending Singularity; in fact, he goes to some lengths to downplay the more sensational claims. He just says very calmly that this is something that's going to happen, so we should prepare as well as we can. If possible, he would like us to slow down the pace of progress a bit, so that we could have a better chance of seeing where we're headed. But he's right in the middle of the Silicon Valley madness, and he knows that's not going to happen: the value of real, general-purpose AI is measured in the trillions of dollars. All the big players are frantically competing to get there first. What can we do?
Well, he's very smart, and he's thought about it carefully, and he has an idea he's put a lot of work into. I'm not sure I believe it, but it's better than anything else I've seen. Following the preceding books in this thread, he considers what will happen when we have superintelligent AIs. We won't be able to control them in any normal sense of the word; our only realistic chance is to build them so that their goals are aligned with ours, in other words so that they want what we want. But we're only going to get one shot at this, since once they've been built we probably won't be able to switch them off or change them. Unfortunately, experience with technology suggests that nothing works the way it's meant to first time, and we don't even have a clear notion of what we want these godlike machines to be able to do.
So, by a process of elimination, we're left with one alternative. We decide to be upfront about the fact that we don't know what we're trying to achieve, and we directly build that into our architecture. As Russell says, over the last thirty years the concept of uncertainty has come to pervade the whole field of AI, with one exception: we always say we know what the software is supposed to achieve. But why? In fact, it's more logical to say we're uncertain about that too. Just as a speech recogniser uses a noisy audio signal to try and work out what was probably said, and a self-driving car uses a noisy video signal to work out where the truck probably is, one of Russell's new generation machines will examine all our noisy preference signals - verbal, physical, financial, whatever - to work out what we probably want, and try to respond to it. As new information comes in, it will update its picture accordingly. The technical name of this idea is "Inverse Reinforcement Learning", IRL.
I am, to say the least, conflicted about IRL. Intellectually, it is fascinating, not least because it puts theoretical philosophical ideas center stage and turns them into practical engineering issues. As Russell says, what we're doing is building a machine whose top-level operating principle is some version of consequentialist utilitarianism. There are so many interesting questions. Where is the machine going to get its preference signals from? Will it consider all kinds of signals equally? (When the robowaiter tries to decide whether to bring you dessert, it will weigh up competing factors: you can't take your eyes off your neighbor's chocolate mousse, your cholesterol is slightly high, you said "no" but you hesitated, and you sometimes like to be surprised). Will preference signals from all people be weighed equally? (If your robot only cares about your preferences, then it would have no reason not to kill or steal if it calculates that will be to your advantage; but why would anyone buy a robot which is likely to go off to Somalia to help people who need it more than they do?)
Above all, how do we know that IRL will work reliably? Remember that we only get one shot at a solution. A large part of the attraction is that IRL is a mathematical algorithm, so you can in principle apply mathematical methods to prove that it does what it's supposed to. It works for simple examples, and it is indeed comforting to be shown a toy scenario where a simulated IRL robot decides that it should let its owner switch it off because the risk it will do something bad is larger than the upside of being around to help. But will this technology scale to dealing with billions of people, all with their own agendas? Russell says he's optimistic it will, but what else can he say? And there are other fundamental problems. Can we be sure that people's preferences really mean anything? The book gives examples of how easy it is for machines to manipulate people. Russell calmly tells us it's more or less certain that social media has inadvertently caused the resurgence of fascism by feeding users data which makes their political opinions more extreme, so that they are easier to predict and have a higher click-through rate. That kind of phenomenon seems to offer numerous possibilities for an IRL machine to end up doing things which it might formally count as satisfying people's preferences, but which from our present perspective seem highly undesirable.
Damn... how did we get into a situation where our whole existence could hinge on quickly resolving tricky philosophical problems that may not even have solutions? All I can say is, if you do happen to be one of those rare people who's received formal training in moral philosophy and knows something about it, please consider volunteering for frontline service. The world needs you more than you know. _________________________ [Update, Nov 22 2020]
Having just finished Rawls's A Theory of Justice, I am even more concerned about IRL-based architectures. Rawls is good at exposing the downside of utilitarianism as a guiding principle, and the version of utilitarianism described here comes across as a particularly brutal one. ...more
I read some excellent books in 2018; here are my top 10. They're all so different and so good in their own various ways that it seemed unfair to compaI read some excellent books in 2018; here are my top 10. They're all so different and so good in their own various ways that it seemed unfair to compare them, so I've put them in alphabetical order:
Albert Einstein-Max Born, Briefwechsel 1916-1955 I am ashamed that I had to wait until now to discover what a truly admirable person Max Born was, both as a scientist and as a human being. This book is supposed to be an edited edition of his correspondence with Einstein, but it's a memoir at the same time. Genuinely inspirational.
An Orchestra of Minorities Just a fantastic novel, completely different from anything I've ever come across. Read it.
La Danse de Gengis Cohn Well, who would have thought you could write a witty comedy about Auschwitz that is at the same time deeply respectful towards the victims of the Shoah? Romain Gary shows you it's possible.
L'enfant perdue The last volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels is as amazing as the others, maybe even more so.
Litli prinsinn I discovered that I could (sort of) understand Icelandic! Not only that, the book got us started on developing an exciting new software tool to help people who are learning to read in a new language. Oliver Byrne: The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid You can present Euclid so that it's fun. Check it out if you don't believe me.
Putin's Russia Brilliant, no-holds-barred reporting from a journalist who wasn't afraid to risk her life to tell you what's really going on. They got her in the end, but her work is still here annoying the evil bastards who are trying to take over the world.
Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth The ultimate birthday present for any Tolkien geek. Uppgång & fall This unassuming little comic book is the best shot I've seen in ages at explaining why everything is so totally fucked up, and what we might do about it. Yay Liv Strömquist!
I hope something there made you reach for your credit card. They're all solid gold....more
This ought to be a question of burning interest to almost everyone, and yet, for some reason, hardly anybody over the age of seventeen sWhat is real?
This ought to be a question of burning interest to almost everyone, and yet, for some reason, hardly anybody over the age of seventeen seems to take it seriously. If you ask the adults, no one's sure whose responsibility it is. They send you over to talk to the sociologists, who shrug their shoulders; sorry guv, nuffin to do wiv us. Try philosophy, they're just down the street. The philosophers look embarrassed, and explain that yes, absolutely, they used to be in charge of it, but now it's been handed over to physics. The physicists tell you that of course they know the answer: there is no such thing as reality. If you aren't happy with that, go and talk with the sociologists. And round you go again. This book, I am pleased to say, does take the question seriously. Rather than limiting himself to one single viewpoint, which as we've seen lets it get away, Adam Becker pursues all three lines of investigation simultaneously, and manages to present something which looks surprisingly like an answer. It's a complicated answer, and you need a three hundred page book to explain it properly, but I would summarise it like this.
About a hundred years ago, a group of physicists made some astonishing discoveries. This work, which soon started going by the name of "quantum mechanics", had enormous philosophical implications: in comparison, the Copernican revolution was no more than a minor footnote. It showed that the nature of reality was completely different from what had previously been believed. It was also, unfortunately, rather difficult to understand, and could only be explained well in mathematical language. Even worse, it turned out to be a source of incredible military and economic power: it made possible the development of weapons and technologies that had previously not even been dreamed of.
Power, as is well known, corrupts, and this new power corrupted at every level. In particular, it corrupted intellectually. Physicists, who in the 1920s had been familiar with philosophy and well-disposed towards philosophical ways of thinking, became arrogant and impatient with the philosophers. What were they doing, sitting around dreaming about eternal verities, when physicists had important work to do? The physicists decided they could take care of the philosophy themselves. They cobbled together some theories from the currently fashionable positivist school and breathed a sigh of relief. We don't need to worry about what "reality" is; there is no such thing as "reality", and the mere fact that you ask the question shows you are an ignorant layman. We have a picture of what happens in quantum mechanics which we call the "Copenhagen interpretation", and it's the only possible answer. We have mathematically proved it.
A few people whispered that the proof seemed to have a hole in it and the Copenhagen interpretation didn't actually make sense, but they were ignored. Who cared what these crazy dissidents thought, when physics departments were being showered with money by people who wanted more magical devices? The math worked: it didn't matter what it "meant". In a phrase which came to encapsulate this whole world-view, shut up and calculate. The philosophers, who should have been keeping an eye on things under the academic world's informal separation-of-powers system, had lost all confidence. They no longer had any power. When they tried to object, they were slapped down by the physicists: no one cares what you say, when you don't understand the complex math on which quantum mechanics is based. Physicists who did understand the math and still had a philosophical outlook were contained in other ways. If they tried to publish work, it was usually rejected as "not real physics". If they persisted, they were labelled as unemployable, and refused promotion or worse.
It's an absolutely fascinating chapter in the development of human thought, and Adam Becker, who's done a huge amount of background research, explains it very well. He starts off with a quote from Ursula Le Guin, and if you're a fan of The Dispossessed you'll soon recognise the story: this is Shevek, but not as a fictional character. Read it and find out what's really been going on....more
Whenever you read a book that the author seriously cared about, you realise after a while that in fact it's two books: there's the book that got written, the one you're holding in your hands, and there's the other book, the one the author wanted to write but couldn't, due to the problems inherent in being a mortal human being. Sometimes the distance between the two books is close enough that you can believe they're the same. (I don't know how one would improve Candide or Alice in Wonderland; maybe Voltaire and Carroll did). But in other cases, it's clear that the two books are different. The authors of the New Testament would have liked to set down a clear and complete account of the life of Jesus Christ and the events it inspired, but, since the four Gospels contradict each other on numerous points, they must have fallen short of their ambition. For similar but slightly more complicated reasons, it seems that Plato's Dialogues also fail to report accurately the teachings of Socrates. Moving on to more recent cases, Wittgenstein famously apologised for not being able to write a better book than the Philosophical Investigations, which nonetheless is often cited as the twentieth century's most influential work of philosophy; and, a personal favorite, Jan Kjærstad's Jonas Wergeland trilogy gives you numerous clues about the nature of the true, ideal version of the book, and how it differs from the imperfect copy you have received.
I think Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale also belongs to this distinguished club. On the surface, the novel is straightforward. It appears to be a minutely detailed, ultra-realistic account of the narrator's life, starting with her childhood in a poor quarter of Naples and showing how she becomes a famous author who, in particular, has written this book. The unifying theme, which gives the novel its title, is her friendship with Lila, a woman she has known since they were both small children. If you read it in this way, it's easy to see why it's often been compared to Knausgård's Min kamp, another long and ostensibly autobiographical ultra-realistic novel. I did indeed start reading both Knausgård and Ferrante from this obvious point of view, and I'm not trying to convince you that there's anything wrong with that. Perhaps both novels are just what they appear to be on the surface. But, at least from my perspective, they diverged more and more as they progressed. What Knausgård wants to do, it seemed to me, is to show you how suspect the whole notion is of being a novelist. You take your life and the lives of the people around you, and you turn them into a story which you sell for money. There's a certain amount of this in Ferrante too, and some of the moral disgust that Knausgård so effectively inspires. But I don't think that's the core of the book.
Knausgård is, or at least pretends to be, an egotist, and his book is all about ego, and in interviews he sticks to the line that everything in it is true. But Ferrante has gone to great lengths to stay anonymous, and no one knows who she is. She drops hints in her novel, which contains numerous novels-within-the-novel, that at least some of it is true. Evidently the narrator, who's also called Elena and who also claims to have written the book, could to a certain extent be her. But it's also clear that Elena Greco can't be the same person as Elena Ferrante. And at the same time, she drops contradictory hints that the book may not really have been written by either Elena. Maybe it was written by Lila. But finally she denies this too.
The thing that makes the book so unusual is that it manages to keep the ambiguity between truth and fiction all the way through. We don't know if Elena really exists; all we know is that someone who calls herself Elena exists, that she wrote L'amica geniale, and that, in some unspecified way, it is inspired by real events. But more and more, one feels that the identity of the author is irrelevant. The important character isn't the vain, superficial, and not overly bright Elena. It's her friend Lila, who comes across as a truly admirable person; a person one could compare with Socrates, whom Plato says was, of all the men of his time he had known, "the wisest and justest and best". Lila is sometimes described in similar terms, by people who are surprised to hear themselves say it. Elena is ultimately disappointed with her novel, because she knows she has failed. She has lost Lila, and despite all her work she hasn't been able to tell us what she was really like.
Did Lila exist, in some sense? I assume we will never find out. But at least we have this account of her life, distorted and imperfect and incomplete as it is. It's a completely stunning achievement....more
Superintelligence was published in 2014, and it's already had time to become a cult classic. So, with apologies for being late getting to the party, hSuperintelligence was published in 2014, and it's already had time to become a cult classic. So, with apologies for being late getting to the party, here's my two cents.
For people who still haven't heard of it, the book is intended as a serious, hard-headed examination of the risks associated with the likely arrival, in the short- to medium-term future, of machines which are significantly smarter than we are. Bostrom is well qualified to do this. He runs the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, where he's also a professor at the philosophy department, he's read a great deal of relevant background, and he knows everyone. The cover quotes approving murmurs from the likes of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Martin Rees and Stuart Russell, co-author of the world's leading AI textbook; people thanked in the acknowledgements include Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of Google's Deep Mind. So, why don't we assume for now that Bostrom passes the background check and deserves to be taken seriously. What's he saying?
First of all, let's review the reasons why this is a big deal. If machines can get to the point where they're even a little bit smarter than we are, they'll soon be a whole lot smarter than we are. Machines can think much faster than humans (our brains are not well optimised for speed); the differential is at least in the thousands and more likely in the millions. So, having caught us up, they will rapidly overtake us, since they're living thousands or millions of their years for every one of ours. Of course, you can still, if you want, argue that it's a theoretical extrapolation, it won't happen any time soon, etc. But the evidence suggests the opposite. The list of things machines do roughly as well as humans is now very long, and there are quite a few things, things we humans once prided ourselves on being good at, that they do much better. More about that shortly.
So if we can produce an artificial human-level intelligence, we'll shortly after have an artificial superintelligence. What does "shortly after" mean? Obviously, no one knows, which is the "fast takeoff/slow takeoff" dichotomy that keeps turning up in the book. But probably "slow takeoff" will be at most a year or two, and fast takeoff could be seconds. Suddenly, we're sharing our planet with a being who's vastly smarter than we are. Bostrom goes to some trouble to help you understand what "vastly smarter" means. We're not talking Einstein versus a normal person, or even Einstein versus a mentally subnormal person. We're talking human being versus a mouse. It seems reasonable to assume the superintelligence will quickly learn to do all the things a very smart person can do, including, for starters: formulating and carrying out complex strategic plans; making money in business activities; building machines, including robots and weapons; using language well enough to persuade people to do dumb things; etc etc. It will also be able to do things that we not only can't do, but haven't even thought of doing.
And so we come to the first key question: having produced your superintelligence, how do you keep it under control, given that you're a mouse and it's a human being? The book examines this in great detail, coming up with any number of bizarre and ingenious schemes. But the bottom line is that no matter how foolproof your scheme might appear to you, there's absolutely no way you can be sure it'll work against an agent who's so much smarter. There's only one possible strategy which might have a chance of working, and that's to design your superintelligence so that it wants to act in your best interests, and has no possibility of circumventing the rules of its construction to change its behavior, build another superintelligence which changes its behavior, etc. It has to sincerely and honestly want to do what's best for you. Of course, this is Asimov Three Laws territory; and, as Bostrom says, you read Asimov's stories and you see how extremely difficult it is to formulate clear rules which specify what it means to act in people's best interests.
So the second key question is: how do you build an agent which of its own accord wants to do "the right thing", or, as Socrates put it two and half thousand years ago, is virtuous? As Socrates concludes, for example in Meno and Euthyphro, these issues are really quite difficult to understand. Bostrom uses language which is a bit less poetic and a bit more mathematical, but he comes to pretty much the same conclusions. No one has much idea yet of how to do it. The book reaches this point and gives some closing advice. There are many details, but the bottom line is unsurprising given what's gone before: be very, very careful, because this stuff is incredibly dangerous and we don't know how to address the critical issues.
I think some people have problems with Superintelligence due to the fact that Bostrom has a few slightly odd beliefs (he's convinced that we can easily colonize the whole universe, and he thinks simulations are just as real as the things they are simulating). I don't see that these issues really affect the main arguments very much, so don't let them bother you if you don't like them. Also, I'm guessing some other people dislike the style, which is also slightly odd: it's sort of management-speak with a lot of philosophy and AI terminology added, and because it's philosophy there are many weird thought-experiments which often come across as being a bit like science-fiction. Guys, relax. Philosophers have been doing thought-experiments at least since Plato. It's perfectly normal. You just have to read them in the right way. And so, to conclude, let's look at Plato again (remember, all philosophy is no more than footnotes to Plato), and recall the argument from the Theaetetus. Whatever high-falutin' claims it makes, science is only opinions. Good opinions will agree with new facts that turn up later, and bad opinions will not. We've had three and a half years of new facts to look at since Superintelligence was published. How's its scorecard?
Well, I am afraid to say that it's looking depressingly good. Early on in the history of AI, as the book reminds us, people said that a machine which could play grandmaster level chess would be most of the way to being a real intelligent agent. So IBM's team built Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, and people immediately said chess wasn't a fair test, you could crack it with brute force. Go was the real challenge, since it required understanding. In late 2016 and mid 2017, Deep Mind's AlphaGo won matches against two of the world's three best Go players. That was also discounted as not a fair test: AlphaGo was trained on millions of moves of top Go matches, so it was just spotting patterns. Then late last year, Alpha Zero learned Go, Chess and Shogi on its own, in a couple of days, using the same general learning method and with no human examples to train from. It played all three games not just better than any human, but better than all previous human-derived software. Looking at the published games, any strong chess or Go player can see that it has worked out a vast array of complex strategic and tactical principles. It's no longer a question of "does it really understand what it's doing". It obviously understands these very difficult games much better than even the top experts do, after just a few hours of study.
Humanity, I think that was our final warning. Come up with more excuses if you like, but it's not smart. And read Superintelligence....more
I couldn't possibly write a review of this. Even a short book would not do it justice. ________________________
Proust quite frequently refers to Plato.I couldn't possibly write a review of this. Even a short book would not do it justice. ________________________
Proust quite frequently refers to Plato. I particularly liked this passage, which I just noticed in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs:
And Françoise, when transmitting to us the Marquise's message: "She said to me, 'You'll be sure and bid them good day,' she said," counterfeited the voice of Mme. de Villeparisis, whose exact words she imagined herself to be quoting textually, whereas she was really corrupting them no less than Plato corrupts the words of Socrates or Saint John the words of Jesus.
I am shocked to discover that Wittgenstein plagiarised the essential elements of the Tractatus from this tragically unknown author. His ill-conceived I am shocked to discover that Wittgenstein plagiarised the essential elements of the Tractatus from this tragically unknown author. His ill-conceived additions cannot be said to improve the book....more
After watching the new movie last week, I had to reread the book.
Well, the text version is better, but the movie is reasonably faithful to it and doeAfter watching the new movie last week, I had to reread the book.
Well, the text version is better, but the movie is reasonably faithful to it and does sometimes manage to supply a charming or witty illustration. For example:
"...would make a great present for somebody who's never heard of GoodReads before, like maybe a caveman Praise for What Pooh Might Have Said To Dante:
"...would make a great present for somebody who's never heard of GoodReads before, like maybe a caveman recently unfrozen from an ancient glacier" - BirdBrian
"Having observed both Counsel extremely closely, I am compelled to find that the market value of Mr Rayner's efforts is precisely Nil" - Ian G
"... something rather amateurish that looked like it had been done in somebody's back room" - notgettingenough
"Manny doesn't like Harry Potter and sometimes I get mad at him and threaten to throw him into the ocean" - Mariel
"I bought this as a gift for my mum and there was rather more sex in it than I had expected." - Hamish
"... a waste of time... you can read all that stuff for free online" - Paul B
"The future is an endless oneupmanship to see who can write the wittiest, most popular 200-word capsule review on fuck-all. This is Manny’s fault." - MJ
"... call it Rue Vomitorium" - David C
"... good if you read it in the original failboatese" - Vote Whore
"... almost... funny" - Traveller
"... just ... some ... book" - Michael P
"Will you enjoy this? In a word, no, unless you are a masochist" - Sean D
"Never in my life I seen a more desperate attempt to get votes" - Alfonso
"... advertising..." - Esteban
"If I'd been drinking I think it could have made me seasick" - Tabitha
"The thing about Manny... he almost never throws feces at random strangers." - Kat
"... explicit ... the author has failed ..." - Scribble
"... rattling a virtual tip jar at every opportunity ..." - Jason P
"Manny, you sure are fascinated with Stephenie Meyer" - Rowena M
"GoodReads in-jokes ... off-putting ..." - Cecily
"... book snob ... insecurity ... stupid ..." - midnightfaerie
"... sexist garbage ... if you ask me, he is off his onion ..." - Nandakishore
"... ridiculous ... dilettante ..." - Rlotz
"... a pain in the testicles ..." - Faek
"... pompous ..." - Heep
"... silly ..." - Stian
"... enough..." - Alan B __________________________________
Over the last couple of years, several kind people have asked whether I'd considered publishing a collection of my best reviews. I always replied that I appreciated the suggestion, but it didn't seem like a sensible thing to do. But, a few weeks ago, I started wondering whether I shouldn't give it a shot after all. If Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ unexpectedly folded up - these things happen - it would be so annoying to lose my writing. Self-publishing has become cheap and easy. And I've got a fair amount of experience with type-setting. How much work could it be to implement a few scripts to turn HTML into LaTeX and then upload a PDF file to Lulu?
Well, it's never quite as straightforward as you think, but here is the result. For the benefit of other people who may feel tempted to do the same thing, let me give you the key lessons I've learned from this little adventure:
1. Sign up an editor and some readers. No author can be objective about their own work; they need keen external eyes to tell them both what's good and what's bad about it. It was fortunate for me that notgettingenough, who has long-term experience with publishing, took an early interest in the project and was willing to act as editor. She ruthlessly corrected several of my dumber ideas, forced me to think about issues I'd happily have ignored, and made sure that the book was produced to professional standards. My advisory committee - BirdBrian, Mariel and Ian - read through the manuscript and gave me encouragement and helpful suggestions. They convinced me that it was worth continuing and taking the time required to make it look good. Thank you, guys! You have all been so thoughtful and patient, and I greatly appreciate it!
2. Think carefully about which reviews to include. Not groaned over my initial selection, which probably took an hour to do and had no structure whatsoever. She encouraged me to group the reviews by style and type of book, after which I saw that some things were grossly overrepresented. Even if bashing Twilight is the Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ national sport, I didn't need this many examples of the genre. And much as I love writing about Flaubert, Proust, Wittgenstein and Kasparov, it's likely that the average reader will not share my enthusiasms to the same degree.
3. Acquire at least a smattering of knowledge regarding copyright. As I now understand it, most quoted text that might appear in a Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ review should be covered by the rules on Fair Use. I found the following passage from helpful:
Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:
- The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
- The nature of the copyrighted work
- The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
- The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work
The distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.
The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: "quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied..."
Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that copyrighted images are generally not easy to include: the problem is that you'll be using the whole image, rather than just an illustrative part of it. Martha, my talented cover artist, had put together the following very attractive cover:
[image]
But, alas, the Estate of E.H. Shepherd thought this was an "inappropriate" use of Pooh Bear's image and politely but firmly refused to grant me permission. I didn't even get that far with Penguin (Jemima Puddle-Duck) or Gallimard (the Little Prince), who still haven't given me any clear answers. Not, in her capacity as excutive editor, made the sensible but painful decision to go for a simpler solution.
So there have been a few rough moments, but all in all I found this an interesting and rewarding experience. And now, I hardly need add, I'm curious to see if anyone is going to buy it! It's available from ....more
I was looking for a Christmas present for my nephew the other day when I noticed an edition of Aesop's Fables in Blackwells. I had a copy myself when I was looking for a Christmas present for my nephew the other day when I noticed an edition of Aesop's Fables in Blackwells. I had a copy myself when I was a kid, and it was one of my favourite books. I can't guess how many times I read it.
Thinking about it now, it surprises me to realise how fresh and up-to-date it still feels. Most of the stuff from that period is starting to slip away; most people don't read the Bible any more, or Homer, or Euripides, or Seneca. Obviously, they're still acknowledged as timeless classics, but an effort is required. Our culture has moved on, not necessarily in a good way. But Aesop's Fables doesn't require effort. It could have been composed yesterday. I can easily see him as a Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ contributor, posting a story every now and then and picking up plenty of votes. He'd fit right in and be one of the most popular people on the site.
At age eight, I got nearly all the stories, but there were a couple that puzzled me. If you happen to be a precocious kid, I'd be curious to know what you make of the following, which I only figured out much later:
The Woman and the Wine-Jar
A woman is walking along one day when she finds an empty wine-jar. She picks it up and sniffs it appreciatively.
"Ah!" she sighs. "What you must have been in your prime, when the very dregs of you are so lovely!"
There's this moment in Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale where fifteen year old Elena gets a letter from her friend Lila. Elena is a diligent straight-There's this moment in Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale where fifteen year old Elena gets a letter from her friend Lila. Elena is a diligent straight-A student, and Lila has been forced to drop out of school years ago. But Elena realises, to her horror, that Lila is a much better writer than she is. Her unique voice comes straight off the page: it's like listening to her talk. Elena feels everything she's ever written, every well-composed essay that her teachers have praised in class, is stilted and awkward in comparison. There's no life in them.
Well, reading Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is a bit like that. Bechdel ignores all the rules. It's a YA graphic novel, but it's written in a densely allusive literary style. It's impeccably tasteful, but it contains explicit images of young dykes getting it on with each other. It's a comedy, but some of the funniest bits are about her beloved father's suicide at the age of 43.
Most impressively, none of it feels forced, none of it feels like someone trying to impress you with their cleverness. There are many references to Proust, and Bechdel seems to have effortlessly internalised one of the key lessons of la Recherche: just do what you find interesting, don't worry if no one else understands. Though I think she has not had to wait as long as Proust did for the world to catch up with her.
Like Elena, I look at Fun Home and think: Damn. I don't know how to write at all, do I?...more
The Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich spent three years interviewing people who had been involved in Chernobyl: villagers from the surroundingThe Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich spent three years interviewing people who had been involved in Chernobyl: villagers from the surrounding area, "liquidators" (members of the cleanup squad), widows and children, nuclear scientists, politicians, even people who, incredibly, had moved to Chernobyl after the accident. She presents their words almost without comment. Sometimes she adds a [Laughs]; sometimes [Stops]; sometimes [Starts crying]; sometimes [Breaks down completely]. I am not sure I have ever read anything quite as horrifying. It is like a very well written post-apocalyptic novel in many voices, and it's all true. Here are some extracts.
From the translator's preface:
The literature on the subject is pretty unanimous in its opinion that the Soviet system had taken a poorly designed reactor and then staffed it with a group of incompetents. It then proceeded, as the interviews in this book show, to lie about the disaster in the most criminal way. In the crucial first ten days, when the reactor was burning and releasing a steady stream of highly radioactive material into the surrounding area, the authorities repeatedly claimed that the situation was under control.
From the Historical Notes:
During the Second World War, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children.
From a liquidator's account:
We had good jokes too. Here's one. An American robot is on the roof of the reactor for five minutes, then it breaks down. The Japanese robot is on the roof for five minutes, then it breaks down. The Russian robot's been up on the roof for two hours! Then someone shouts over the loudspeaker: "Private Ivanov! Two hours more, and you can take a cigarette break!"
From a nuclear physicist's account:
There's a moment in Ales Adamovich's book, when he's talking to Andrei Sakharov. "Do you know," says Sakharov, the father of the hydrogen bomb, "how pleasantly the air smells of ozone after a nuclear explosion?"
From a politician's account:
I was First Secretary of the Regional Committee of the Party. I said absolutely not. "What will people think if I take my daughter with her baby out of here? Their children have to stay." Those people who tried to leave, to save their own skins, I'd call them into the regional committee. "Are you a Communist or not?" It was a test for people. If I'm a criminal, then why was I killing my own grandchild?" [Goes on for some time but it is impossible to understand what he is saying]
From a teacher's account:
Our family tried not to economize, we bought the most expensive salami, hoping it would be made of good meat. Then we found that it was the expensive salami that they mixed the contaminated meat into, thinking, well, since it was expensive fewer people would buy it.
From a widow's account:
When we buried him, I covered his face with two handkerchiefs. If someone asked me to, I lifted them up. One woman fainted. And she used to be in love with him, I was jealous of her once. "Let me look at him one last time." "All right."
From a father's account:
My daughter was six years old. I'm putting her to bed, and she whispers in my ear: "Daddy, I want to live, I'm still little." And I had thought she didn't understand anything.
From the author's afterword:
These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unseen. I felt like I was recording the future.
His wife has left Wilderness Tips lying on the coffee table, and he picks it up. Over the last twenty years, several women have told him to read it. HHis wife has left Wilderness Tips lying on the coffee table, and he picks it up. Over the last twenty years, several women have told him to read it. He doesn't like to be pushed into things.
Now, though, his curiosity has got the better of him. The first few pages do make him a little uneasy. The scene where the boys are spying on the waitresses' beach party through their binoculars. He also feels like a voyeur. But that soon disappears. He isn't overhearing her private conversations: Margaret is talking directly to him. After a while, he identifies the tune that's started playing in his head. He goes over to the CD shelf, and looks around until he finds the Roches. He skips forward to "The Married Men".
One in Louisiana, one who travels around One of them mainly stays in heart-throb town I am not their main concern, they are lonely too I am just an arrow passing through
He can hear Margaret's ironic, teasing, sexy voice, as they lie in bed together and she tells him another story. "It's something that happened to a friend," she says, and he wonders if it actually happened to her, or if she made it up. He doesn't care. It's enough just to listen to her.
One of them's got a little boy, other one he's got two one of them's wife is one week overdue
I know these girls they don't like me, but I am just like them picking a crazy apple off a stem
He's in the middle of "The Bog Man" when he realises that his wife's come in and is looking at him curiously. He has to suppress a guilty start.
"Did you learn anything useful?" she asks.
He doesn't quite know what to make of her inflection. What was that French expression she likes?
"Mi-figue, mi-raisin," she says. Damn! She's reading his mind again. He wonders what else she discovered there.
"It's okay, honey," she adds softly, as she comes over and sits next to him. "I'm so glad you finally read it," and for some reason he finds that he has tears in his eyes, and she does too. ...more
A fantastic book! I have not come across anyone, not even Steven Pinker, who does such a good job of showing you how exciting linguistics can be. His A fantastic book! I have not come across anyone, not even Steven Pinker, who does such a good job of showing you how exciting linguistics can be. His bold and unconventional history of the English language was full of ideas I'd never seen before, but which made excellent sense. And, before I get into the review proper, a contrite apology to Jordan. She gave it to me six months ago as a birthday present, and somehow I didn't open it until last week. Well, Jordan, thank you, and I'll try to be more alert next time!
So, the book. I'm a linguist of sorts myself, though a rather different kind to McWhorter: his work has centered around the things that happen to grammar when different languages come into contact with each other, while I use grammar as a way to construct speech-enabled software. But, as you'll see a bit later, the fact that we both give a central place to grammar means that our research directions have more to do with each other than you might first think. In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, McWhorter looks at the history of the English language from his unusual viewpoint. The language has clearly changed a lot since it came into existence; why did it evolve the way it did? McWhorter's answer is that the big changes happened when speakers of different languages started mingling together. He focuses on three changes of this kind.
The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ policy reasons)
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