There’s more to progress than (mere) productivity: What about diversity of occupational specialization?

The literature on economic growth seems to have settled on productivity as the defining measure of progress, which is not unreasonable. But there is a largely empirical literature from the second half of the previous century that was interested in cultural complexity. That literature was mostly and anthropological interest in preliterate societies, though there was some archaeological work on ancient civilizations as well. That work, as far as I know, has been given almost consideration in economist’s study of growth.

In the mid-1990s the late David Hays undertook a review and synthesis of the literature on cultural complexity: The Measurement of Cultural Evolution in the Non-Literate World (1998). I would like to quote a passage from that book. Though I quote it without explain the context, the import should be obvious enough (p. 203):

Using the 1953 Yellow Pages for central Los Angeles, Naroll estimated that there must exist 500 craft specialties in that area, and guessed at 1000 or more in “the entire Los Angeles settlement” (1956:702). That would be 10-20 times as many as his regression line predicted:

What is involved may be a curved line of regression or it may be a step function, a jump from one allometric line to another reflecting a sudden fundamental change in developmental dynamics . . .

[…] The number of occupational specialties recognized by the United States government in its official classification is in the tens of thousands. But something different again can be seen in contemporary life. Whereas middle-aged workers who lose factory jobs have much difficulty preparing for a new kind of work, educated young persons switch from one specialty to another spontaneously. The concept of a lifetime dedication to a single craft specialty, which may be as old as burnt pottery and woven cloth, is perhaps about to lose its hold on economic life.

Two things: 1) that regression line was based on studies of non-literate cultures. The number of craft specialties would seem to represent a fundamentally different kind of social organization, rather than simply more and more of the same old same old. 2) What about the proliferation of craft/occupational specialties in the last quarter to half a century?

That may not represent growth as economists understand it, but it surely represents an important aspect of cultural change. Perhaps the economists need to take account of it.

More Caven Point – trees, leaves, bushes, grass, buildings, sky [urban pastoral]

Some notes on the fourth photo, reading it from bottom to top. The blurry stuff at the bottom is plants relatively near to me while I'm focused on those sky scrapers in the distance. That's a deliberate feature of my aesthetic. I have no interest in pretending that we're looking directly at the world; those blurs are an artifact of the photographic process. But they are also explicit markers of distance. What appears to be a horizontal canopy above the bottom edge is just that, a canopy over a walkway along the water's edge. My guess is that it is there to protect people from stray golf balls from Liberty National Golf Course, immediately above.

You can see a green to the right, then a bit of sand trap, and then behind that some rough, and some shrubs, and the roof-line of some building (I don't know what). Then you see the tops of four mid-line buildings belonging to an apartment complex called The Beacon. That complex started life as a hospital built by Boss Hague back in the 1930s. The two sky scrapers are quite new and were built by the Kushner Corporation. Jared Kushner is Trump's son in law and as far as I can tell, more or less runs the Federal Government.

Finally, the owner of Liberty National is trying to enlarge the course by taking over Caven Point so he can place three holes there. The dispute between him and the Friends of Liberty State Park over Caven Point has gotten quite nasty.

The Simulation Hypothesis, a reductio ad absurdum [where have all the good minds gone, stark raving mad]

Tyler Cowen has an interesting take on the simulation hypothesis (the idea that we’re living in a computer simulation):

As you may already know, my view is that there is no proper external perspective, and the concept of “living in a simulation” is not obviously distinct from living in a universe that follows some kind of laws, whether natural or even theological. The universe is simultaneously the simulation and the simulator itself! Anything “outside the universe doing the simulating” is then itself “the (mega-)universe that is simultaneously the simulation and the simulator itself.” etc.

I agree with him on that first clause, there really is no proper external perspective (a problem that Kant, among others, wrestled with). As for the rest of it, well, OK, why not?

But it seems to me that it does empty Bostrom’s thought experiment of most of its juice. As Bostrom originally proposed the simulation hypothesis there is a carefully prepared frame and set-up (Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?, Philosophical Quarterly, 2003, vol. 53, No. 211, 243-255). First he argues that we ourselves are not so very far from having the computational capacity to simulate a full-on human consciousness. If we can do one, then surely we’ll be able to do 100s, 1000s, millions and billions! At this point a probabilistic argument places us in the future watching over the shoulders of superintelligent beings with super-duper-intelligent computers running scads of simulations of the world and somewhere in one of those simulations we’ll find ourselves.

Except of course we won’t. We’ll just get dizzy.

That is, the simulation hypothesis is not just the bare idea that we’re electrons spinning around in a cosmic computation. It’s the whole frame that contextualizes that idea. And that frame holds out the hope that out/up there somewhere are beings who see and understand all.

Except of course they don’t. As they are us.

What kind of blinders must one assume in order to find such puzzles intellectually worthwhile?

I note, that for all the criticism and ridicule it has received, post-modern literary criticism hasn’t produced anything sillier than the simulation hypothesis, and its siblings, the various conceptions and contraptions of transhumanism. And then we have the foundations of physics with its five decades of empirically fruitless theorizing. Has the whole world gone mad?

* * * * *

For more on the simulation hypothesis see these older posts:

My problem with the simulation argument: It’s too idealist in its assumptions (all mind, no matter), July 25, 2018

Two silly ideas: We live in a simulation & our computers are going to have us for lunch, July 22, 2018

Does the future of AI belong to deep pockets? [Gwern addendum]

3.Overall, there is a “de-democratization of AI research” due to the rise of DL, which requires lot of computing power. There's an uneven access to computing power, which resulted in this current divergence b/n haves & have-nots, “compute divide”(similar to the “digital divide”)

— Abeba Birhane (@Abebab) October 30, 2020

Taken together, this suggests that due to the rise of deep learning, we have even more diversity problem in AI research than ever!

— Abeba Birhane (@Abebab) October 30, 2020

As far as I can tell, there's no particularly good reason to think that deep pockets belong to those with greater imagination. And, I must admit, my biases are rather in the other direction. I suspect that those with deep pockets are likely to seek out intellectually conservative investigators in order to protect their investment. See, for example, Gwern on the scaling hypothesis:

The blessings of scale in turn support a radical theory: an old AI paradigm held by a few pioneers in connectionism (early artificial neural network research) and by more recent deep learning researchers, the scaling hypothesis. The scaling hypothesis regards the blessings of scale as the secret of AGI: intelligence is ‘just’ simple neural units & learning algorithms applied to diverse experiences at a (currently) unreachable scale. As increasing computational resources permit running such algorithms at the necessary scale, the neural networks will get ever more intelligent.

When? Estimates of Moore’s law-like progress curves decades ago by pioneers like Hans Moravec indicated that it would take until the 2010s for the sufficiently-cheap compute for tiny insect-level prototype systems to be available, and the 2020s for the first sub-human systems to become feasible, and these forecasts are holding up. (Despite this vindication, the scaling hypothesis is so unpopular an idea, and difficult to prove in advance rather than as a fait accompli, that while the GPT-3 results finally drew some public notice after OpenAI enabled limited public access & people could experiment with it live, it is unlikely that many entities will modify their research philosophies, much less kick off an ‘arms race’.)

More concerningly, GPT-3’s scaling curves, unpredicted meta-learning, and success on various anti-AI challenges suggests that in terms of futurology, AI researchers’ forecasts are an emperor sans garments: they have no coherent model of how AI progress happens or why GPT-3 was possible or what specific achievements should cause alarm, where intelligence comes from, and do not learn from any falsified predictions. Their primary concerns appear to be supporting the status quo, placating public concern, and remaining respectable. As such, their comments on AI risk are meaningless: they would make the same public statements if the scaling hypothesis were true or not.

Depending on what investments are made into scaling DL, and how fast compute grows, the 2020s should be quite interesting—sigmoid or singularity?

Gwern has a more favorable view of AI than I do, and greater faith in the efficacy of mere scaling, but I do share his skepticism about motivation. These people, whatever they think of themselves, are not intellectual adventurers setting off for intellectual adventure in parts unknown. They are well paid clerks in search of titillation.

Friday Fotos: FR8s, graffiti at Caven Point

The Ranch [all in the family | Media Notes 51]

I started watching The Ranch when it first started streaming in 2018 and stuck with it for, say, a season and a half and dropped it for whatever reason. I got back to it a few weeks ago and am now well into the fourth and final season. As the title implies, it’s set on a small family-run ranch in Colorado. Willa Paskin noted in Slate:

The Ranch is a red-state sitcom, though it takes place in the swing state of Colorado, and is good enough to be watched by people of any political affiliation. The goodness sneaks up on you. It is a sitcom that is meatier than it is funny, unusually in touch with the painful, disappointing aspects of life. […] But The Ranch is sophisticated in pursuit of its audience, preferring to dignify the Bennetts’ hardscrabble circumstances than to raise anxiety by fixating on their precariousness.

That’s a fair assessment.

The ranch is run by patriarch, Beau Bennett (Sam Elliot) and his two sons, Colt (Ashton Kutcher) and Rooster (Danny Masterson), while Maggie Bennett (Debra Winger) runs a local bar. She’s estranged from, then divorces, her husband, Beau, but they maintain more or less cordial relations. Relations between Beau his two sons, Beau and Rooster, are at best problematic. While the individuals try hard, Bennetts are a dysfunctional family. In a way, the harder they try, the more dysfunctional they are.

There’s some good work to be done analyzing just how this family functions, but that’s more than I want to take on in this brief note. I note that Beau, Colt, and Rooster drink a lot and, as I already mentioned, Maggie runs a bar. Though she doesn’t have a drinking problem, she does like marijuana, as do others in the community. And at least one character, who becomes central in the later seasons, has a serious addiction problem. The show harbors no pretense that this rural community is a drug-free zone.

The show runs a continuous narrative, rather than a succession of half-hour episodes, and the Bennetts seems to live at the edge of financial disaster. So the plot has the feel of free-form improvisation; these people are just making things up as they go along. That’s one thing.

The other is that, because the Iron River Ranch is a family farm, family life and work life and intertwined. Much of the conflict within they family, especially between the three men, but not only them, is around and about roles in running the farm: Who is competent in what tasks and who has what rights and obligations? This dynamic is set off against the Neumann’s Hill ranching corporation, which plays a more prominent role in as the series moves on. Neumann’s Hill wants to dominate and buy up everything thing it can while the Bennetts want to remain free and independent. As the four season moves along – I’m only about half way through it – Neumann’s Hill seems to be winning.

These two issues, the lack of security and constancy in life, and the relationship between family and business life, seem to define the overall scope of this series. How do those issues speak to the American public? I don’t know. I’d really like to know the demographics of the audience. How will that audience be voting in this coming presidential election? There’s an obvious appeal to Trump’s America, but I’m not in Trump’s America and I like the show. Yet, it’s one thing for me to say that the show appeals to Trump’s America, but does it? I was right about NCIS, am I right about this?

I note that the show makes no reference to current presidential politics, so one can only guess at how, say, Beau Bennett voted in 2016 or how he’d vote in 2020. I’d like to think that, though he’s a gun-toting conservative and proud of it, he couldn’t stomach Trump. But he certainly couldn’t stomach Biden either. Perhaps he’d write in Reagan, which he’s done before.

Is American exceptionalism at core a detachment from reality?

John Gray reviews Bruno Maçães, History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America, in The New Statesman, October 28, 2020.

So:

For the Portuguese former diplomat Bruno Maçães, however, the decoupling of American culture from the objective world is a portent of great things to come. Finally shedding its European inheritance, America is creating a truly new world, “a new, indigenous American society, separate from modern Western civilisation, rooted in new feelings and thoughts”. The result, Maçães suggests, is that American politics has become a reality show. The country of Roosevelt and Eisenhower was one in which, however lofty the aspiration, there was always a sense that reality could prove refractory. The new America is built on the premise that the world can be transformed by reimagining it. Liberals and wokeists, conservatives and Trumpists are at one in treating media confabulations as more real than any facts that may lie beyond them.

Maçães welcomes this situation, since it shows that American history has finally begun. As he puts it at the end of this refreshingly bold and deeply thought-stirring book, “For America the age of nation-building is over. The age of world-building has begun.”

And:

American thought has always tended to a certain solipsism, a trait that has become more prominent in recent times. If Fukuyama and his neoconservative allies believed the world was yearning to be remade on an imaginary American model, the woke movement believes “whiteness” accounts for all the evils of modern societies. America’s record of slavery and racism is all too real. Even so, passing over in silence the repression and enslavement of peoples outside the West – Tibetans, Uighurs and now Mongols in China, for example – because they cannot be condemned as crimes of white supremacy reveals a wilfully parochial and self-absorbed outlook.

Wokery is the successor ideology of neo-conservatism, a singularly American world-view. That may be why it has become a powerful force only in countries (such as Britain) heavily exposed to American culture wars. In much of the world – Asian and Islamic societies and large parts of Europe, for example – the woke movement is marginal, and its American prototype viewed with bemused indifference or contempt.

In contrast, Russia:

Reflected in varying degrees throughout the west, America’s immersion in self-invented worlds contrasts starkly with Russian practice. Like the US, Russia conceals awkward facts behind a media-created veil. Unlike those in the US, Russia’s ruling elites know this virtual world is deceptive. The point is not to create a new reality but to obscure what is actually happening. When Vladimir Putin asserted that Russian forces had not entered Ukraine, no one apart from a handful of anti-western ultra-leftists believed him. When the Kremlin denies Russian pilots are targeting schools and hospitals in Syria, there is well-founded disbelief. When officials deny that the Russian state had any hand in the 2018 Novichok attack in Salisbury and the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, hardly anyone believes this is true. Nonetheless, the continuous repetition of these falsehoods has succeeded in clouding perception of the behaviour of Putin’s regime.

The Chinese project of cultural homogenization is borrowed from the West:

Regime-friendly Chinese intellectuals are fond of telling western visitors that China is not a nation state but a “civilisation state”, and there has been a shift towards touting the merits of Confucian governance. Yet in many ways Xi’s regime is copying the homogenising national states constructed in Europe after the French Revolution. Like them, it aims to impose a monoculture where different ways of life existed before. In Revolutionary France, which under the ancien régime contained many languages and peoples, this was achieved through military conscription and a national education system. Another, more violent process of nation-building by ethnic cleansing occurred in central and eastern Europe after the collapse of the Hapsburg empire.

Following these precedents, Xi is using the state machine to fabricate an immemorial Chinese nation and obliterate minority cultures. As in its pursuit of maximal economic growth, China is building a future imported from the Western past. ... How curious if, as the 21st century staggers on, a hyper- authoritarian China emerges as the only major state still governed by an Enlightenment faith in progress.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

UFO Events, a Thought Experiment about the Evolution of Language

I'm bumping this to the top in general principle. And because of this recent string of tweets involving me, Dan Everett, and Mark Changizi. See also this more recent post, Gestalt Switch in the Emergence of Human Culture.

The problem of human origins, of which language origins is one aspect, is deep and important. It is also somewhat mysterious. If we could travel back in time at least some of those mysteries could be cleared up. One that interests me, for example, is whether or not the emergence of language was preceded by the emergence of music, or more likely, proto-music. Others are interested in the involvement of gesture in language origins.

Some of the attendant questions could be resolved by traveling back in time and making direct observations. Still, once we’d observed what happened and when it happened, questions would remain. We still wouldn’t know the neural and cognitive mechanisms, for they are not apparent from behavior alone. But our observations of just what happened would certainly constrain the space of models we’d have to investigate.

Unfortunately, we can’t travel back in time to make those observations. That difficulty has the peculiar effect of reversing the inferential logic of the previous paragraph. We find ourselves in the situation of using our knowledge of neural and cognitive mechanisms to constrain the space of possible historical sequences.

Except, of course, that our knowledge of neural and cognitive mechanisms is not very secure. And large swaths of linguistics are mechanism free. To be sure, there may be an elaborate apparatus of abstract formal mechanism, but just how that mechanism is realized in step-by-step cognitive and neural processes, that remains uninvestigated, except among computational linguists.

The upshot of all this is that we must approach these questions indirectly. We have to gather evidence from a wide variety of disciplines – archeology, physical and cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and the neurosciences – and piece it together. Such work entails a level of speculation that makes well-trained academicians queasy.

What follows is an out-take from Beethoven’s Anvil, my book on music. It’s about a thought experiment that first occurred to me while in graduate school in the mid-1970s. Consider the often astounding and sometimes absurd things that trainers can get animals to do, things the don’t do naturally. Those acts are, in some sense, inherent in their neuro-muscular endowment, but not evoked by their natural habitat. But place them in an environment ruled by humans who take pleasure in watching dancing horses, and . . . Except that I’m not talking about horses.

It seems to me that what is so very remarkable about the evolution of our own species is that the behavioral differences between us and our nearest biological relatives are disproportionate to the physical and physiological differences. The physical and physiological differences are relatively small, but the behavioral differences are large.

In thinking about this problem I have found it useful to think about how at least some chimpanzees came to acquire a modicum of language. All of them ended in failure. In the most intense of these efforts, Keith and Cathy Hayes raised a baby chimp in their household from 1947 to 1954. But that close and sustained interaction with Vicki, the young chimp in question, was not sufficient. Then in the late 1960s Allen and Beatrice Gardner began training a chimp, Washoe, in Ameslan, a sign language used among the deaf. This effort was far more successful. Within three years Washoe had a vocabulary of Ameslan 85 signs and she sometimes created signs of her own.

 

The results startled the scientific community and precipitated both more research along similar lines—as well as work where chimps communicated by pressing ironically identified buttons on a computerized panel—and considerable controversy over whether or not ape language was REAL language. That controversy is of little direct interest to me, though I certainly favor the view that this interesting behavior is not really language. What is interesting is the fact that these various chimps managed even the modest language that they did.

The string of earlier failures had led to a cessation of attempts. It seemed impossible to teach language to apes. It would seem that they just didn’t have the capacity. Upon reflection, however, the research community came to suspect that the problem might have more to do with vocal control than with central cognitive capacity. And so the Gardners acted on that supposition and succeeded where others had failed. It turns out that whatever chimpanzee cognitive capacity was, it was capable of surprising things.

Note that nothing had changed about the chimpanzees. Those that learned some Ameslan signs, and those that learned to press buttons on a panel, were of the same species as those that had earlier failed to learn to speak. What had changed was the environment. The (researchers in the) environment no longer asked for vocalizations; the environment asked for gestures, or button presses. These the chimps could provide, thereby allowing them to communicate with the (researchers in the) environment in a new way.

It seemed to me that this provided a way to attack the problem of language origins from a slightly different angle. So I imagined that a long time ago groups of very clever apes – more so than any extant species – were living on the African savannas. One day some flying saucers appeared in the sky and landed. The extra-terrestrials who emerged were extraordinarily adept at interacting with those apes and were entirely benevolent in their actions. These creatures taught the apes how to sing and dance and talk and tell stories, and so forth. Then, after thirty years or so, the ETs left without a trace. The apes had absorbed the ETs’ lessons so well that they were able to pass them on to their progeny generation after generation. Thus human culture and history were born.

Now, unless you actually believe in UFOs, and in the benevolence of their crews, this little fantasy does not seem very promising, for it is a fantasy about things that certainly never happened. Further, even if this had happened, it does seem to remove the mystery from language’s origins. Instead of something from nothing we have language handed to us on a platter. We learned it from some other folks, perhaps they were little short fellows with green skin, or perhaps they were the modern style aliens with pale complexions, catlike pupils in almond eyes and elongated heads.

But, and here is where we get to the heart of the matter, what would have to have been true in order for this to have worked? Just as the chimps before Ameslan were genetically the same as those after, so the clever apes before alien-instruction were the same as the proto-humans after. The species has not changed, the genome is the same – at least for the initial generation. The capacity for language would have to have been inherent in the brains of those clever apes. All the aliens did was activate that capacity. Once that happened the newly emergent proto-humans were able to sustain and further develop language on their own. Thus the critical event is something the precipitates a reconfiguration of existing capabilities.

However, language origins is not our problem. We are searching for the origins of music. So, instead of alien instruction in Hebrew or Sanskrit we can imagine alien instruction in samba or polka. The basic configuration and dynamics of the story remains the same. However, to make it real we have to get rid of those aliens and their instruction. Instead of the aliens we have only our group of clever apes. They are going to have to instruct one another. What we are looking for is a a way to get a gestalt switch in group dynamics that supports new modes of neural dynamics in the brains of individuals who are interacting with one another in a group.

Let us call this the Gestalt Origins Hypothesis:

Gestalt Origins: The precursor to music arose when groups of hominids interacted in a way that triggered a new configuration of operation in their existing nervous system.

Notice that I talk of a precursor to music. I don’t think we can get from ape to music in a single bound. We need at least one precursor, something that is rhythmic, like music, but not yet fully formed. In order to get even that far, so my argument goes, our proto-humans need better control over their vocal cords than apes have, they need more rhythmic sophistication, and greater mimetic capacity.

Notice that this story says nothing about the adaptive value of music. I do intend to get around to that toward the end of the chapter, but that’s not my primary concern. My primary concern is getting our ancestors to the point where a gestalt switch can happen that will bring about a precursor to music, something we can call musicking. In order for that to happen we need to solve an adaptive problem or two. But those adaptations are not about music; they are about its precursors. Once music-making is going along smoothly we need another gestalt switch to differentiate it into language and music proper.

A world and its reflection [Caven Point, Liberty State Park]

Covid-19 virus has mutated during the course of the pandemic

This work was done by an exceptional team of virologists at UTMB. It's rigorous and shows pretty clearly that G614 increases infectivity in human lung cells & primary airway cultures.

Increased infectivity means the virus can enter host cells and replicate more efficiently.

— Dr. Angela Rasmussen (@angie_rasmussen) October 26, 2020

They also tested this in a hamster model of COVID-19. The hamsters had higher levels of infectious virus in their nasal washes compared to the lungs, suggesting a possible mechanism for how D614G may be more transmissible as previously hypothesized. pic.twitter.com/2ONJR5eAYf

— Dr. Angela Rasmussen (@angie_rasmussen) October 26, 2020

Further tweets in the stream:

If hamsters are shedding more virus in their upper respiratory tracts, then they are more likely to be contagious by producing infectious droplets and aerosols with higher concentrations of infectious virus. This is the type of data we need to get to understand this question, BUT

Transmission itself wasn't tested. Ideally, they would have set up two hamster cages in the same room or in cages with shared air to see if G614 was transmitted more efficiently or to more animals than D614 virus.

Since transmission studies weren't part of this paper, ultimately whether or not D614G increases transmissibility remains unknown. No doubt those studies are in progress. Ideally these will be performed in multiple transmission models to confirm the findings.

The good news: at least in hamsters, this mutation didn't appear to confer any observable differences in pathogenicity. The virus may be mutating—because that's what RNA viruses do—but it's not becoming more virulent.

The second good news: serum from hamsters infected with D614 virus neutralized G614 virus in culture, suggesting that vaccines (all designed against D614 spike) will work against either variant.

My take home: while the jury's still out on whether this variant is more transmissible in the real world, it still can be neutralized by antibodies against all the vaccine candidates. It's not mutating into something more dangerous or pathogenic. It's behaving like a normal virus

Ultimately it doesn't matter whether D614G is more transmissible or not: the message to everyone is avoid getting EITHER variant of SARS-CoV-2.

Stay the course and stay safe, so that you can be protected against all known variants when a safe, effective vaccine is ready.

"Wall of Fame" [now gone]

Adam Roberts reviews Kim Stanley Robinson's "Ministry of the Future" – Reimagining how we think about the future

He’s ambivalent:

It’s a righteous novel, and I’m a KSR fan of longstanding, so I expected to like Ministry of the Future. And I did, if only up to a point. Beyond that point I ... didn't, really. Nonetheless, I’d suggest, or I would if it didn’t just look perversely contradictory, that the very reason I didn’t much like The Ministry of the Future is actually an index of its success: its ambition, its throughline and above all its—well, it’s ministry.

He goes on, “fat book…thin on plot,” which is hardly surprising. The plot is strung between two poles, one located in the Ministry based in Zurich and the other in a clinic in Northern India. Lots of leaden dialog, lots of information dumps, plenty of future tech, some gee-whiz, some not so much. This is all standard book-review stuff and Roberts handles it very well. Where he shines, though, is in his final two paragraphs:

The negative way of spinning all this would be to say that this novel can be a dry read, sometimes positively drought-dry. There are stretches here which are, baldly stated, an effort for the reader to push through. But the positive way to spin it would be to see it as a novel not just about climate change, but about the kind of stories we tell ourselves about disasters like climate change. Those stories are, clearly, not helping. Take ‘eucatastrophe’, Tolkien’s term for a thrilling story in which disaster impends, becomes more and more inevitable and then is averted at the very last moment. It’s a real workhorse of storytelling nowadays, the eucatastrophe, especially in cinema. There is a threat to the whole world! Let’s imagine that as a singular, external thing: an asteroid on collision course, a huge invading alien spaceship. Then let’s draw out the approaching disaster and make it seem like it could never be overcome. Finally, bam: rabbit from hat, the hero saves the day at the last minute.

The Ministry for the Future is, in effect, saying: that’s a bad story—not bad in entertainment terms but bad in verisimilitude terms. It is saying: we are actually, right now, indeed facing a threat to the whole world, but it’s not a single thing it’s a complex and deeply-embedded function of human interrelation and social praxis. It’s not exterior to us, it is us. And it won’t be solved by a single heroic flourish in the nick of time. It will be solved by a congeries of difficult, drawn-out, collective labour, much of which is so inimical to ‘popular narrative’ that we dismiss it as boring. It’s not boring, though: it’s literally life-and-death. And so one part of our large, human task will be: to reconfigure the kinds of stories we are telling ourselves about disaster and how to avert it.

Notice that word, “verisimilitude”, used about a work of fiction pitched in the future, albeit the near-enough future, a future at least some of the readers of the book will live into.

* * * * *

Check out KSR’s recent interview in The Jacobin:

I’ve steeped myself in the utopian tradition. It’s not a big body of literature, it’s easy to read the best hits of the utopian tradition. You could make a list, I mean roughly twenty or twenty-five books would be the highlights of the entire four hundred years, which is a little shocking. And maybe there’s more out there that hasn’t stayed in the canon. But if you talk about the utopian canon, it’s quite small — it’s interesting, it has its habits, its problems, its gaps.

Famously, from Thomas More (Utopia) on, there’s been a gap in the history — the utopia is separated by space or time, by a disjunction. They call it the Great Trench. In Utopia, they dug a great trench across the peninsula so that their peninsula became an island. And the Great Trench is endemic in utopian literature. There’s almost always a break that allows the utopian society to be implemented and to run successfully. I’ve never liked that because one connotation of the word “utopian” is unreality, in the sense that it’s “never going to happen.”

So we have to fill in this trench. When Jameson said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, I think what he was talking about is that missing bridge from here to there. It’s hard to imagine a positive history, but it’s not impossible. And now, yes, it’s easy to imagine the end of the world because we are at the start of a mass extinction event. But he’s talking about hegemony, and a kind of Marxist reading of history, and the kind of Gramscian notion that everybody’s in the mindset that capitalism is reality itself and that there can never be any other way — so it’s hard to imagine the end of capitalism. But I would just flip it and say, it’s hard to imagine how we get to a better system. Imagining the better system isn’t that hard; you just make up some rules about how things should work. You could even say socialism is that kind of utopian imaginary. Let’s just do it this way, a kind of society of mutual aid. And I would agree with anyone who says, “Well, that’s a good system.”

The interesting thing, and also the new stories to tell if you’re a science fiction novelist, if you’re any kind of novelist — almost every story’s been told a few times — but the story of getting to a new and better social system, that’s almost an empty niche in our mental ecology. So I’ve been throwing myself into that attempt. It’s hard, but it’s interesting.

Three kinds of red [fall foliage]

Infants, toddlers, and young children react to daddy after he's shaved his beard

They show an interesting range of reactions: surprise, shock, disapproval, anger. Some of them aren't sure who this stranger is.

Friday Fotos: Foreign places in the key of burnt orange

Is the fact that ideas are nonrival the key to economic growth in the 21st century? Or: What’s an idea? [the peculiarities of economic models]

I’ve been chewing on one particular paragraph, the final one, of Bloom et al. “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”[1] Why? Because it bears on just what (these particular) economists mean by “idea”. Early in the paper they noted that “ideas are hard to measure” (p. 1108), noting that appropriate units of measure are far from obvious. They went on to note that “in some ways a more accurate title for this paper would be ‘Is Exponential Growth Getting Harder to Achieve?’” Which brings up the question of why didn’t they choose that more accurate title? Custom, perhaps? I don’t know.

How do you measure ideas?

I understand the problem. I’m not at all sure that “idea” can even be a properly technical term, thinking perhaps it’s better regarded as an informal common-sense term with but limited use in technical work. In any event, when it comes to actually measuring ideas, the authors use proxies in two of their three case studies. In their study of semi-conductor manufacture they use research effort as measured by wages as a proxy for ideas (p. 1129) and in their study of seed lines they use R & D expenditure (pp. 1120-1121). Their measure was more direct in the case of pharmaceutical development; they counted articles in the PubMed database as identified by appropriate key words (pp. 1125-1126).

I have no problem with that. But it does mean they tend to tread ideas as atomic entities with no properties beyond the fact that they can be counted, if only indirectly, and that they can be shared. And that brings us to the final paragraph of the article.

Key insight: Ideas are nonrival

Economist distinguish between things that are rival and things that are non-rival. When something is a rival good only one person or entity can use it. If Amalgamated Mining owns a particular deposit of iron ore that means that, for example, Universal Minerals cannot mine that deposit. Ideas, in contrast, are nonrival. The fact that Jim Manley knows Newton’s laws of motion doesn’t preclude anyone else from understanding and using them.

With that mind, considered the highlighted passage from the final paragraph (p. 1139) of Bloom et al.:

That one particular aspect of endogenous growth theory should be reconsidered does not diminish the contribution of that literature. Quite the contrary. The only reason models with declining research productivity can sustain exponential growth in living standards is because of the key insight from that literature: ideas are nonrival. For example, if research productivity were constant, sustained growth would actually not require that ideas be nonrival; Akcigit, Celik, and Greenwood (2016) shows that rivalrous ideas can generate sustained exponential growth in this case. Our paper therefore suggests that a fundamental contribution of endogenous growth theory is not that research productivity is constant or that subsidies to research can necessarily raise growth. Rather it is that ideas are different from all other goods in that they can be used simultaneously by any number of people. Exponential growth in research leads to exponential growth in At. And because of nonrivalry, this leads to exponential growth in per capita income.

The first highlighted passage seems to suggest that that idea that ideas are nonrival is due to the tradition of research on endogenous growth theory. That doesn’t make any sense since the nonrival nature of ideas follows from the definition of “nonrival,” which is independent of that research tradition.

What’s going on? Two paragraphs earlier they had noted that: 1) endogenous growth theory assumes constant exponential growth given constant research productivity, and 2) their article reports a variety of work showing that, in fact, over past few decades it requires more and more research to sustain exponential growth. This final paragraph is an effort to reconcile theory with evidence. The rest of the paragraph after the highlighted section does that.

How does it do it? Not very well, it seems to me, not very well. They cite a paper showing that it is possible to get sustained exponential growth from constant productivity if ideas were rival. However, it turns out that productivity is not constant (the burden of the article) and, wouldn’t you know, ideas aren’t rival either. Surely that must be why exponential growth remains possible.

Really? I understand that that works within the bounds of endogenous growth theory. But it seems awfully flimsy to me. It amounts to little more than saying exponential growth remains possible because ideas are ideas. And that’s not very helpful. Ideas were always nonrival; it’s not as though that property miraculously emerged in time to allow endogenous growth theory to save the appearances – a phrase, incidentally, that dates back to Plato.

It might be more useful to figure out what it is about the current run of ideas that makes them less productive. That’s what I’ve done in my working paper, Stagnation and Beyond: Economic growth and the cost of knowledge in a complex world, which is what I’ve done in my recent working paper on stagnation [2]. But there I was concerned with cognitive architecture and the relationship between ideas and the world. I didn’t treat ideas merely as countable atomic units. Whether my argument is going in the right direction, that’s another matter. But it doesn’t depend on a truism.

References

[1] Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb, Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? American Economic Review 2020, 110(4), https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20180338.

[2] William Benzon, Stagnation and Beyond: Economic growth and the cost of knowledge in a complex world, Version 2, Working Paper, August 2, 2019, 62 pp., https://www.academia.edu/39927897/Stagnation_and_Beyond_Economic_growth_and_the_cost_of_knowledge_in_a_complex_world.

Mid-day sun on an overcast day, with trees

Environmental change forced humans to become more adaptable 320,000 years ago

Smithsonian Magazine, "Turbulent era sparked leap in human behavior, adaptability 320,000 years ago", October 21, 2020:

For hundreds of thousands of years, early humans in the East African Rift Valley could expect certain things of their environment. Freshwater lakes in the region ensured a reliable source of water, and large grazing herbivores roamed the grasslands. Then, around 400,000 years ago, things changed. The environment became less predictable, and human ancestors faced new sources of instability and uncertainty that challenged their previous long-standing way of life.

The first analysis of a new sedimentary drill core representing 1 million years of environmental history in the East African Rift Valley shows that at the same time early humans were abandoning old tools in favor of more sophisticated technology and broadening their trade networks, their landscape was experiencing frequent fluctuations in vegetation and water supply that made resources less reliably available. The findings suggest that instability in their surrounding climate, land and ecosystem was a key driver in the development of new traits and behaviors underpinning human adaptability.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

The underlying research, Richard Potts et al. Increased ecological resource variability during a critical transition in hominin evolution, Science Advances 21 Oct 2020: Vol. 6, no. 43, eabc8975, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abc8975

Abstract: Although climate change is considered to have been a large-scale driver of African human evolution, landscape-scale shifts in ecological resources that may have shaped novel hominin adaptations are rarely investigated. We use well-dated, high-resolution, drill-core datasets to understand ecological dynamics associated with a major adaptive transition in the archeological record ~24 km from the coring site. Outcrops preserve evidence of the replacement of Acheulean by Middle Stone Age (MSA) technological, cognitive, and social innovations between 500 and 300 thousand years (ka) ago, contemporaneous with large-scale taxonomic and adaptive turnover in mammal herbivores. Beginning ~400 ka ago, tectonic, hydrological, and ecological changes combined to disrupt a relatively stable resource base, prompting fluctuations of increasing magnitude in freshwater availability, grassland communities, and woody plant cover. Interaction of these factors offers a resource-oriented hypothesis for the evolutionary success of MSA adaptations, which likely contributed to the ecological flexibility typical of Homo sapiens foragers.

On the beach

On why comparisons between brains and computers are problematic at best [the brain is analog, not digital]

Matthew Hutson, How Much Can Your Brain Actually Process? Don’t Ask. Slate, March 29, 2016.

This is a useful summary comparison between digital computers and the brain: "Reported estimates of how much data the brain holds in long-term memory range from 100 megabytes to 10 exabytes—in terms of Thriller on MP3, that’s either one album or 100 billion albums. This range alone should give you an immediate sense of how seriously to take the estimates." Here's the good stuff:

The fundamental difference between analog and digital information is that analog information is continuous and digital information is made of discrete chunks. Digital computers work by manipulating bits, ones, and zeroes. And operations on these bits occur in discrete steps. With each step, transistors representing bits switch on or off. Jiggle a particular atom on a transistor this way or that, and it will have no effect on the computation, because with each step the transistor’s status is rounded up or down to a one or a zero. Any drift is swiftly corrected.

On a neuron, however, jiggle an atom this way or that, and the strength of a synapse might change. People like to describe the signals between neurons as digital, because a neuron either fires or it doesn’t, sending a one or a zero to its neighbors in the form of a sharp electrical spike or lack of one. But there may be meaningful variation in the size of these spikes and in the possibility that nearby neurons will spike in response. The particular arrangement of the chemical messengers in a synapse, or the exact positioning of the two neurons, or the precise timing between two spikes—these all can have an impact on how one neuron reacts to another and whether a message is passed along.

Plus, synaptic strength is not all that matters in brain function. There are myriad other factors and processes, both outside neurons and inside neurons: network structure, the behavior of support cells, cell shape, protein synthesis, ion channeling, vesicle formation. How do you calculate how many bits are communicated in one molecule’s bumping against another? How many computational “operations” is that? “The complexity of the brain is much higher at the biochemical level” than models of neural networks would have you believe, according to Terrence Sejnowski, the head of the Salk Institute’s Computational Neurobiology Laboratory. “The problem is that we don’t know enough about the brain to interpret the relevant measurement or metric at that level.”

There's more at the link.

Fighting the Big Tech ecosystem

Kara Swisher, The Justice Dept.’s Lawsuit Against Google: Too Little, Too Late, Oct. 20, 2020.

There’s no such thing as a single entity called Big Tech, and just saying it exists will not cut it. The challenges plaguing the tech industry are so complex that it is impossible to take action against one without understanding the entire ecosystem, which hinges on many monster companies, with many big problems, each of which requires a different remedy.

Certainly reforming Section 230 could help. But other tools may be needed, like significant fines, as well as new state and federal laws, enforcement of existing regulations and increased funding for agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, along with more aggressive consumer action and media scrutiny.

Apple’s control over the App Store and its developers? Perhaps some fairer rules over how to operate when it comes to fees and approvals, since separating the apps from the phones is a near impossible task.

Amazon’s problem with owning a critical marketplace platform where it sells its own goods alongside third-party retailers? Simply put, should Amazon be allowed to sell its own batteries if it also controls the store for a lot of batteries? It sounds like separating Amazon retail products from the store itself might be a possible solution, as well as establishing much less porous walls between the various Amazon businesses.

Facebook and its damning “land grab” and its “neutralize” emails (referring to squelching rivals), as well as its worrisome domination of the online discourse and news distribution across much of the world? This one is harder, but some breakup of its units, say a cleaving of Instagram and WhatsApp, might be a step in the right direction, along with figuring out a way to make its controversial editorial decisions more transparent and systemic rather than the more random Whatever Mark Zuckerberg Says This Week they have become.

And Google, of course, which is now for the first time ever in a real fight with the United States government? It was in early 2013 that the F.T.C. commissioners decided unanimously to scuttle the agency’s investigation of Google after getting the company to make some voluntary changes to the way it conducted its business. This despite a harsher determination by its own staff in a 160-page report, which came to light in 2015, that Google had done a lot of the things that the Justice Department is now alleging, including that its search and advertising dominance violated federal antitrust laws.

How fastText and BERT encode linguistic features

We find that most of the information for linguistic features (e.g., grammatical gender, number and animacy) are located in subsets of 5 to 10 neurons. We are able to find these subsets with a novel generative probe based on a Gaussian assumption.

— Lucas Torroba Hennigen (@ltorroba1) October 20, 2020

Another exciting bit of related research (coming to a conference near you!) is that mBERT encodes linguistic features using the same neurons across distinct languages. For instance, Hindi and Latvian use the overlapping neurons for number and gender. This was quite unexpected! pic.twitter.com/HzKwXu6sSE

— Lucas Torroba Hennigen (@ltorroba1) October 20, 2020

Experimental work conducted on 36 languages from the Universal Dependencies corpus. Joint work with @adinamwilliams and @ryandcotterell

— Lucas Torroba Hennigen (@ltorroba1) October 20, 2020

Abstract for the linked article:

Most modern NLP systems make use of pretrained contextual representations that attain astonishingly high performance on a variety of tasks. Such high performance should not be possible unless some form of linguistic structure inheres in these representations, and a wealth of research has sprung up on probing for it. In this paper, we draw a distinction between intrinsic probing, which examines how linguistic information is structured within a representation, and the extrinsic probing popular in prior work, which only argues for the presence of such information by showing that it can be successfully extracted. To enable intrinsic probing, we propose a novel framework based on a decomposable multivariate Gaussian probe that allows us to determine whether the linguistic information in word embeddings is dispersed or focal. We then probe fastText and BERT for various morphosyntactic attributes across 36 languages. We find that most attributes are reliably encoded by only a few neurons, with fastText concentrating its linguistic structure more than BERT.

From Hoboken's Pier 13 to the Chrysler Building

Are Inventors or Firms the Engines of Innovation?

Article by Ajay Bhaskarabhatla, Luis Cabral, Deepak Hegde, and Thomas Peeters in Management Science, published online Oct. 7, 2020.

Abstract: In this study, we empirically assess the contributions of inventors and firms for innovation using a 37-year panel of U.S. patenting activity. We estimate that inventors’ human capital is 5–10 times more important than firm capabilities for explaining the variance in inventor output. We then examine matching between inventors and firms and find highly talented inventors are attracted to firms that (i) have weak firm-specific invention capabilities and (ii) employ other talented inventors. A theoretical model that incorporates worker preferences for inventive output rationalizes our empirical findings of negative assortative matching between inventors and firms and positive assortative matching among inventors.

H/t Tyler Cowen

The sad truth about social media

This is what I have been saying. All the cute and clever content moderation policies and fact-checking and media literacy efforts — none of it matters.

We built a system that amplifies torrents of garbage and rewards garbage slingers.

The problem with media is media. https://t.co/BREofGxlXR

— SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN🗽🤘🏽 (@sivavaid) October 20, 2020

The Boys: Superheroes for the Trump Era? [Media Notes 50]

Just watched the Netflix series, The Boys, which came out in 2019 and is based on a comic book from 2006-2008, about which I know nothing. Here’s the basic premise (Wikipedia):

The Boys is set in a universe where superpowered individuals are recognized as heroes by the general public and work for the powerful corporation Vought International, which markets and monetizes them. Outside of their heroic personas, most are arrogant and corrupt. The series primarily focuses on two groups: the Seven, Vought's premier superhero team, and the eponymous Boys, vigilantes looking to bring down Vought and its corrupt superheroes.

The Boys are led by Billy Butcher, who despises all superpowered people (whom he calls “Supes”) and the Seven are led by the narcissistic and violent Homelander. At the start of the series, the Boys are joined by Hughie Campbell after a member of the Seven accidentally kills his girlfriend, while the Seven are joined by Annie January, a young and hopeful heroine forced to face the truth about those she admires. Other members of the Seven include the disillusioned Queen Maeve, drug-addicted A-Train, insecure the Deep, the mysterious Black Noir, and narcissistic Homelander. The Boys are rounded out by tactical planner Mother's Milk, weapons specialist Frenchie, and superpowered test subject Kimiko. Overseeing the Seven is Vought executive Madelyn Stillwell, who is later succeeded by publicist Ashley Barrett.

That’s the general idea. We get quite a bit about the personal lives of, say, ten of the major characters, including, in a number of cases, tangled relationships with parents or parent surrogates.

But I wish I had a more extensive and fine-grained knowledge of superheroes against which to read this series. How original is the corporate premise? I know, from a movie or three, that the Avengers has some kind of corporate identity beyond merely teaming-up time and again. And, while they have their personal idiosyncrasies, they aren’t vain, self-serving, two-faced and corrupt in the way The Seven are. There’s nothing new about evil mega-corporations, of course, but the linkage between Vought and The Seven does seem new.

During the first episode or two I saw the possibility of turning such a series into a critique of the business to superhero films and comics, but nothing like that has appeared, nor did I expect it. Still, if you just cranked the right knob up to eleven, that’s where it would take the series.

The overall plot seems driven by three arcs: 1) Butcher’s desire for revenge, 2) some kind of interaction between Hughie and Annie, and 3) a drive toward, well, world domination by (some of) the Supes. It’s this last drive coupled with the need the Supes have for the adulation of the crowd that makes this seem particularly Trump-like. Since the series has been made during Trump’s presidency that seems possible, either through deliberate intent by the creators or simply by osmotic awareness of the current scene. How much of that is there in the comic books? All of it or only some of it?

Of course Trump did come not out of nowhere, even if his 2016 victory was unexpected and unforeseen. The cultural forces were there and those forces have certainly been alive in popular culture.

Above all I’m thinking about role superheroes in people’s imaginative lives. There is a need to make sense of the world to the extent – in time, space, and causal nexus – that we are aware of it. Superheroes, even or perhaps especially corrupt ones, are mediating figures in this process. In the first place they are concrete individuals, not abstract actors like corporations and governments. But these individuals are powerful enough that they can, as individuals, motivate the actions of corporations and governments. Moreover, as individuals, they have their merely personal stories, which we can identify with. In this series the story of Homelander in particular is filled with personal details, some of the sort that suggest or even require a psychoanalytic reading.

Finally, I note that the series has scenes of extravagant violence.

BTW, what is it with Fresca?

Graffiti, bold is gold

Investment and the conditions for exponential growth [#Progress Studies | Tech Evol]

At the end of their article, Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? (2020), Nicholas Bloom, et al. Begin to draw some conclusions, thus (p. 1134):

The evidence presented in this paper concerns the extent to which a constant level of research effort can generate constant exponential growth, either in the economy as a whole or within relatively narrow categories, such as a firm or a seed type or a health condition. We provide consistent evidence that the historical answer to this question is “no”: as summarized in Table 7, research productivity is declining at a substantial rate in virtually every place we look.

A bit later (p. 1138):

This analysis has implications for the growth models that economists use in our own research, like those cited in the introduction. The standard approach in recent years employs models that assume constant research productivity, in part because it is convenient and in part because the earlier literature has been interpreted as being inconclusive on the extent to which this is problematic. We believe the empirical work we have presented speaks clearly against this assumption. A first-order fact of growth empirics is that research productivity is falling sharply.

Future work in the growth literature should determine how best to understand this fact.

In my 2019 working paper in which I commented on this paper, Stagnation and Beyond: Economic growth and the cost of knowledge in a complex world, I argue that what they see as a decline in research productivity reflects the (unavoidably) increasing costs of obtaining knowledge about the world and then briefly outline that account of cultural ranks that David Hays and I have developed. It is my impression that the growth literature centers on the growth accompanying the Industrial Revolution, which is a reflection of Rank 3 modes of thought, in terms of our account. Perhaps the usual growth models, where “a constant level of research effort can generate constant exponential growth,” are valid for the conditions obtaining during the Industrial Revolution but fail because those conditions no longer obtain. We are moving into a different world which may well require different models.

That is to say, it is inappropriate to search for a growth model that is valid everywhere and always. There is no such thing. Rather different material and cultural circumstances require different models. Note that I am not proposing potentially hundreds or even tens of models. I am proposing only a handful, corresponding to the handful of cultural ranks we have proposed.

And that brings me to another excerpt from Hays’s The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks (1993). This excerpt is the opening section of Chapter 6, “Investment; with a life-cycle cost analysis of one individual human being.” Hays uses the idea of the factory to characterize rank 3 economic production, though of course he realizes that agriculture continues and that there are rank 3 innovations other than the factory system. I follow this excerpt with a brief comment about the specific case studies Bloom et al. develop in their article.l

As I have mentioned before in this series of excerpts, Hays wrote the book for an online course in the 1990s and distributed the book to students on an MS-DOS disk – chosen by the school, I assume, as the least common denominator among personal computer operating systems. Thus it was written as a text file in a simple hypertext system. It was never published in hardcopy. I reproduce it below more or less as Hays created it, in a mono-spaced font.

Investment

Capital is a concept of rank 3, but investment in skill and land were necessary in ranks 1 and 2. Sapients who believe in the future will attempt to prevent the net worth of Earth from declining.

6.1. INVESTMENT

6.1.1. Stone Tools and Hides Require Skill
6.1.2. The Land
6.1.3. The Factory System

The main investment in rank 1 is the acquisition of lore. For rank 2, the improvement of land for agriculture requires large investment. In rank 3, capital is assembled to invest in the ensembles of machines that produce large quantities of goods – and to invest also in transportation, communication, urban systems, and education.

Day by day a person works and uses the fruits of his (or her) labor for subsistence (food, clothing, shelter), for ritual, for pleasure, and so on. Whatever the rank, if each day's consumption equals each day's income, there is no investment.

Investment is the conversion of a portion of income into capital. The purpose of investment is to increase expected future income. Consumption yields instant gratification; the investor has to postpone gratification. The future increment must be larger than the present decrement to justify investment. Maybe I will put aside a dollar a day this year, but I want to get back two dollars a day next year!

The theory of rank says that the nature of capital changes from rank to rank, according to the technology. Figure 6.1 contains a sort of chronology of investments.

6.1.1. Stone Tools and Hides Require Skill

Rank 1 lives by hunting and gathering. In fact, most people of rank 1 seem to live, or to have lived, mostly by gathering with occasional feasts when the hunters get lucky. Emphasis on hunting appears to be sexist; women do the bulk of gathering. What do rank 1 people have that they do not consume on the day they get it? Some weapon-tools, a little clothing made from hides, and very simple shelter. My impression is that they are willing to leave these things behind and make new ones. An igloo does not pin down an Eskimo as your home holds you.

So rank 1 has almost no material capital; but it does have skill. The best over-simplification is probably that the rank 1 person's head is as full as yours or mine. Our knowledge is more specialized, and I assert that our knowledge is more abstract. One of us can teach video, one can repair automobiles, and so on; I can't teach video, and I suppose that only a few of us can. The rank 1 person is also a specialist, in a way that is not so obvious: The rank 1 person's concrete skills are specific to an environment, a climate, a range of vegetation and animal life, an area on a map.

But these skills are considerable, and take time to acquire. Little or none of them are acquired in situations comparable to schooling. Mostly the children watch adults, help, imitate, and play. No doubt they get some verbal guidance, orally since there is no writing. But not a great deal. The investment necessary to acquire skills is made in childhood. Children work less than adults, or at least less productively. A rank 1 society does not put its children to doing routine simple tasks and thus preclude their acquiring adult skills, as Britain did during the worst part of the Industrial Revolution. But at puberty the children must be ready to play adult roles. The rank 1 adult's skills are as fixed as our speech patterns. Few of us learn a second language after puberty with the exact speech patterns of a native speaker, and no one in rank 1 acquires a new skill after puberty.

Japanese temple

平安神宮 pic.twitter.com/PmY6x5Woy5

— 御手洗剛/GoMitarai (@otearai0312) October 19, 2020

Long term storage in the human brain [ANNs pale in comparison]

Chromatin as long-term storage. Amazing. Though I think we now have several layered intra-cellular and synaptic mechanisms for long-term memory storage? It's become quite the thicket -- and well beyond anything imagined by ANNs, even now.

— Mike Sellers - always working on N+1 projects (@onlinealchemist) October 19, 2020

Some cross street in Hoboken

A couple of seconds of Louis Armstrong as a news boy in his teens?

According to this article by James Karst, in 64 Parishes, that clip, shot in 1915, may be our earliest film clip of Louis Armstrong:

An eight-second silent film clip shot in that year and posted on the Getty Images website captures a sea of humanity a stone’s throw away, on the other side of the Canal Street neutral ground; the camera is facing down Canal toward the river, probably at Dauphine Street, near the flagship D. H. Holmes store.

White women and men, all of them in hats, stride past one another. Several men in suits stand at the corner, perhaps waiting for someone. A young boy looks toward the street as he holds a woman’s hand. Automobiles and a streetcar are visible in the background.

Just over three seconds into the footage, an adolescent black boy walks into the scene. He is wearing a newsboy cap. The sleeves of his white shirt are rolled up to the elbows.

The boy turns around. He’s selling a newspaper, what appears to be the New Orleans Item.

The boy seems to acknowledge the camera, perhaps the only person in the clip who does so overtly. For a brief moment he flashes a brilliant smile, showing ease as a young black man among white pedestrians during a particularly oppressive period of the Jim Crow era. And then he turns away to continue selling his paper.

That newsboy, according to two prominent jazz historians, appears to be Armstrong himself, at thirteen or fourteen years of age. If it is him, it would be the oldest video footage of the future recording star by well over a decade, and it would depict him at a critical crossroads in his life, after he had left the stability of the Colored Waif’s Home and before he became a full-time working musician. It would also presumably depict him around the time his voice changed from a tenor to his famous baritone, presumably calling out the headlines as he hawked the paper.

Denis DiBlasio performing in the Zone ["I don't know if it's like a drug induced kind of thing"]

About DiBlasio:

Baritone saxophonist, flautist, educator, composer, arranger, Executive Director of The Maynard Ferguson Institute of Jazz and head of Jazz and Composition programs at Rowan University, DiBlasio is an international clinician/performer. Keeping things simple, honest, and positive keeps his schedule extremely busy booking dates sometimes three years in advance. Relevance, attainability and fun make up the foundation of his friendly approach.

This long interview with Brett Primack ('Jazz Video Guy') covers DiBlasio's years with Maynard Ferguson and his three decades as a jazz educator. Starting at roughly 1:07:50 DiBlasio talks about playing "in the zone":

I know right away where it is. I don't need to, I know how it feels and when you play and you can nail it and the whole band's working like a unit, it's that weightless kind of, no I don't know if it's like a drug induced kind of thing. But when you hit the zone, you can almost feel what everyone's doing. You know what they're doing; you're all thinking as one organism. And when you hit it, you hit it and you're doing things as a group and yourself that you've never done. Your ego is out of your playing and you're not fighting with the horn; you're prepared musically and you're not trying to do anything; you're letting it happen and you're playing with the right guys, all things being equal. And when you hit those zones, which don't always happen. In fact most of the time they don't.

But this is why people like to play with certain people. And when you listen to like A Love Supreme and like that quartet with John [Coltrane] and McCoy [Tyner] and Jimmy [Garrison] and Elvin [drums] you know you just kind of hear this place that they get this is just, it's like zone and sometimes you hit it and you don't know why. And you're in it and really it's weightless. You don't feel weight, you don't feel the horn, you don't even know where you're at. And it's all just working together and then you kind of land and come back.

And when that happens, like I, I kind of cherish that feeling when it happens. And you could do it when you're practice, you can do it with other people. But when you hit this zone, for me it's like man, that really felt great, and then most of the time like you don't hit it, or whatever like that "Salt Peanuts" thing [which we heard earlier in the interview], if you can't hear well, you're not going to be in the zone. You're going to be working to make sure it doesn't fall apart. Or if it's too loud or it's too soft or whatever, you're holding it together. That's a different head, and when I listen back to that recording ["Salt Peanuts"] I think I wish I would have heard better, I wouldn't have sat on one note for half a minute you know....

But when you do hit the zone, I'm more about that, like I, and you know, you can't try and hit it. You have to relax your way into it. It's a real, I don't know if it's a Zen thing or whatever it is, but you can hit and man when you hit it, it's like whooo! this is, I don't even know what time it is.

Primack goes on to note that he sometimes slips into the zone when he's editing video and that, as a long-time listener, he can always tell when the musicians are in the zone.

I've gathered anecdotes of musicians in the zone into a downloadable PDF, Emotion and Magic in Musical Performance,Version 6, https://www.academia.edu/16881645/Emotion_and_Magic_in_Musical_Performance_Version_6.