Somehow I’m not pushing things out to the blog like I feel I should be doing. Yeah, I know I’m just pulling out of my annual melancholy phase, but still, things are piling up in my notes and my mind. Time to take stock, to ramble on through.
From progress studies to progress
That’s the big thing, one of them anyhow. I’ve been hanging out at the Progress Studies Slack and have watched Jason Crawford’s video about the current state of the movement (!) and I’ve got something to say. But banging it into shape has been tough.
What I’ve read and listened to seems somehow thin and not up to changing the tides of history. But then who and what IS up to changing the tides of history? Isn’t that a bit much? No. Not if you’re talking about pulling the (Western) world out of the current slump.
One problem, it seems to me, is that the optimism these folks feel, are looking for, seems grounded in the optimism of the 1950s and 60s. It’s Walt Disney’s optimism, which energized me when I was young. But the world’s changed since then. And, yes, these neo-progressives know that, but those changes haven’t been absorbed into their rhetoric, their mythology. They’re leaning on an old mythology. They’re oriented primarily toward science and technology – technology as a driver of economic growth – and that’s understandable. Those topics have traditionally be covered under a rubric of progress. But there’s also the arts, culture in general, institutions and society – all of it has to change if we’re to progress, really progress. I see indications of that in the prose, but I don’t feel it in the pace and the rhythm.
AI limits once again
I keep thinking about how fruitless conversations about how so many conversations AI potential are. Superintelligence, whether benevolent or malevolent isn’t going to happen. The notion isn’t even coherent.
Consider, on the one hand, the prospect of colonizing Mars. Compare that with the prospects of superintelligence somehow emerging in the world. Those are two very different kinds of conversation. The framework for the Mars conversation is richer and more highly articulated than that for the AI conversation. It’s the difference in those frameworks that interests me. Beyond immediate prospects the AI conversation is mostly hope/fear and conjecture, with little technical basis. The Mars conversation is different. We know the basic science underlying the technology that will be required. We can estimate time-frames and costs, perhaps only to an order of magnitude, but we can’t do that for the AI conversation.
Not sure how much I have to say about this.
Downton Abbey, David Chase, Cary Grant & Grace Kelly
Here I’m thinking of some quick media notes, but these have been on the to-do list for weeks and still haven’t been written.
Downton Abbey: It’s comfort food. It’s about society as personalized Gemeinschaft being eclipsed by formal and impersonal Gessellschaft. The series centers on an aristocratic family and their servants. The class division between the Crawley and their servants is strong, almost but not quite absolute. Yet relations across that line are strong, cordial, even intimate. That’s Gesselschaft, and it’s slowing being eclipsed by a more corporatized social world. That society simply doesn’t exist for we who watch the program in the 21st century. As I said, it’s comfort food.
David Chase: He was a writer and producer on the Rockford Files in the 1970s and he created The Sopranos at the turn of the millennium. I’m interested in the ‘transition’ from the earlier show to the later. Jim Rockford was a private investigator who lived in a trailer on the Malibu beach. He was basically honest and hardworking, but skirted the fringe of legitimate society. Tony Soprano, of course, was a mob boss. Hardworking, but dishonest, and he had a family, a wife and kids. How/Does the difference between these two shows track changes in American society over the last quarter of the 20th century? Note that in this the first quarter of the 21st century we’ve saw a lot of “quality TV” located on society's margins, Deadwood, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Orange is the New Black, etc. Why?
Cary Grant kisses Grace Kelly: In Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. And it freaked me out: Ewww! Why? I’m sure it was the difference in their ages, he was in his 50s and twice her age. But why should that bother me (now)? It’s common enough in movies, and even in real life. Have my attitudes changed recently for whatever reason, or is there something about the film itself that triggered my reaction? There’s another extended kissing scene in which Hitchcock is clearly playing off the cliché of romantic fire works: It’s night, Grant and Kelly are in a hotel room in front of a window. What’s outside the window? Fireworks. The camera switches back and forth between them and the fireworks behind them.
There’s some other media notes I’m thinking about, but those are the most interesting ones.
Straussian reading
Tyler Cowen refers to “Straussian reading” now and then at Marginal Revolution. What’s it mean? Yes, Strauss is Leo Strauss, whom I haven’t read, but just what is Straussian reading? When I did a quick Google search I discovered that I’m not the only one who wants to know. The matter comes up every now and then in the comments at MR. I’ve been working on this post quite a bit over the last three days or so, which is way more time than I’d intended to spend on it. I discovered that Žižek’s has offered a Straussian reading of Black Panther. Cowen and Žižek live in very different intellectual universes. What’s up?
Math and Poetry
It’s not so much poetry I’m thinking about, but literary criticism. Mathematics papers are dense with notation. If you don’t understand the notation, you can’t read the papers. Literary criticism is without notation. But it has its own density, its own requirements – and I’m not primarily refer to the jargon of so-called Theory. How do we characterize the conceptual density that supports literary criticism?
Boundaries
At various times I have written about the distinction between one’s rights, interests, and duties as a person and the rights, interests, and duties one has as a member of an organization. In particular, I have written about how Donald Trump seems in capable of making that distinction.
There are other distinctions like that, such as 1) between one’s personal aesthetic taste and greatness, and 2) in the world of social work, one’s ability to like a client as a person and one’s duty to the client as a social worker. Other versions of the distinction?
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