First Iris of the year (taken on April 26)

Academia Shrugged

Well, not quite. But who knows how this will develop. Stephanie Saul and Alan Blinder for the NYTimes (April 17, 2025): Emerging From a Collective Silence, Universities Organize to Fight Trump.

The Trump administration’s swift initial rollout of orders seeking more control over universities left schools thunderstruck. Fearing retribution from a president known to retaliate against his enemies, most leaders in higher education responded in February with silence.

But after weeks of witnessing the administration freeze billions in federal funding, demand changes to policies and begin investigations, a broad coalition of university leaders publicly opposing those moves is taking root. The most visible evidence yet was a statement last week signed by more than 400 campus leaders opposing what they saw as the administration’s assault on academia.

Although organizations of colleges and administrators regularly conduct meetings on a wide range of issues, the statement by the American Association of Colleges and Universities was an unusual show of unity considering the wide cross-section of interests it included: Ivy League institutions and community colleges, public flagship schools and Jesuit universities, regional schools and historically Black colleges.

“We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education,” the statement said.

Although it contained no concrete action, and what’s next was unclear, the collective stance reflected a group more galvanized than ever to resist.

400 may seem like a lot, but given the number of colleges and universities in the country, 6000, it's not a lot. Still, it's a start. At least someone is trying to say NO.

As for the title of my post, I'm referring to Ayn Rand's last novel, Atlas Shrugged:

The book depicts a dystopian United States in which heavy industry companies suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations. Railroad executive Dagny Taggart and her lover, steel magnate Hank Rearden, struggle against "looters" who want to exploit their productivity. They discover that a mysterious figure called John Galt is persuading other business leaders to abandon their companies and disappear as a strike of productive individuals against the looters. The novel ends with the strikers planning to build a new capitalist society based on Galt's philosophy.

We're now living a dystopian novel in the United States. As for the universities withdrawing, what would that mean? I suppose it would mean the faculty. Where would the faculty withdraw too? Greenland? The total population of Greenland is about 60,000. There are roughly 1.5 million faculty in American colleges and universities. They aren't going to Greenland. Where could they go? Well, since the Feds appear ready to abandon Africa, they could go there. Maybe they could hide out in Wakanda behind the stealth technology provided by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Who knows, maybe they'd even hook up with The Mystic Jewels for the Propagation of Grace, Right Living, and Saturday Night through Historical Intervention by Any Means Necessary.

Tulips gone wild!

Hollis Robbins worries about the moral emptiness of the AI business

She's reviewing a current book:

In 2018, I was in the audience at a Pitch Day event in San Francisco as two computer science majors pitched to potential investors an app that allowed them to jump the beer line at the stadium so they wouldn’t miss any of the game. The deck was crisp and compelling. The young men were good looking, confident, and articulate. The idea? I left while everyone was applauding.

I thought back to this moment while reading Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s bracing new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (Crown Currency, 2025). I thought of the pitch again this week when I saw a NYT front page story about Phoebe Gates, daughter of Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, and her new online shopping tool.

What led an entire generation to spend its energies on vanities? Why is the apex of world historical advances in technology just another phone app that matches people to things (and other people) efficiently? Where is the collective patriotic fervor and moral grounding of eras past? Is the problem political? Cultural? What would it take to turn Silicon Valley’s productive energies toward the safety and flourishing of our nation?

These are just a few of the provocative questions raised by Karp, co-founder of Palantir, and his co-author Zamiska, Palantir’s legal counsel and head of corporate affairs, in their bestselling book. The growing praise suggests that these questions have been pressing for some time.

In their call for the shiny app-building sector to put aside childish things and turn toward more serious and patriotic endeavors, the authors might have also noted the damage done to the higher education market.

Robbins spends some time taking a careful look at the book, but here's her final paragraph:

The Technological Republic offers a compelling diagnosis of the technology sector’s drift from national purpose toward frivolous consumerism. Yet in calling for a renewed technological republic built on ownership and cultural cohesion, Karp and Zamiska leave a crucial question unanswered: what role will the humanities, the disciplines that cultivate "truth, beauty, and the good life,"play in this reimagined future? If shared culture, language, and storytelling are as essential to national solidarity as the authors argue, then those who teach these traditions deserve more than a footnote in their vision. Without integrating what we do into the ownership culture, Karp and Zamiska risk reproducing the problem their book identifies: a society rich in technological capacity but impoverished in meaning, purpose, and collective identity.

I offered a long comment:

I started reading this, Hollis, and started getting impatient about a quarter to a third of the way in, so I did what I often do in these situations. I skipped all the way to the end to see where this is going. “Yet in calling for a renewed technological republic built on ownership and cultural cohesion, Karp and Zamiska leave a crucial question unanswered: what role will the humanities, the disciplines that cultivate “truth, beauty, and the good life,”play in this reimagined future? If shared culture, language, and storytelling are as essential to national solidarity as the authors argue, then those who teach these traditions deserve more than a footnote in their vision.” That’s all I need. I am quite willing to assume that you are a competent reader of this book and so you rummaged around between lines looking for at least some scraps of awareness. As far as I can tell, the people who build this technology, who fund it, who rhapsodize about how wonderful it is, and who natter on about the need the build, they’re narrowly educated people who don’t know what they don’t know and are proud of it.

My standard analogy for this situation, crude as it is, is that the current AI enterprise is like a 19th century whaling voyage where the captain and crew know all there is to know about their ship. They can get more speed out of it than any other crew, under any conditions, they can tack into the wind, they can turn it, if not on a dime, at least on a $50 gold piece. If whaling were about racing, they’d win. But whaling isn’t about racing, it’s about killing whales. To do that you have to understand how whales behave, and you have to understand the waters in which the whales live. On those matters, this captain and crew are profoundly ignorant; they haven’t even sailed around Cape Horn.[1]

That’s the AI industry these days.

I got interested in the computational view of mind decades ago. Why? Because I set out to do a structuralist analysis of “Kubla Khan” and couldn’t make it work. I ended up with an analysis that didn’t look like any structuralist analysis I’d ever seen, nor any other kind of literary analysis. The poem was structured like a pair of matryoshka dolls, it looked like a pair of nested loops.

I ended up writing a dissertation which was as much a quasi-technical exercise in computational linguistics as in literary theory. I chose one of Shakespeare’s best known sonnets, 129, The Expense of Spirit, as my example, and published my analysis in the 100th anniversary issue of MLN: Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics. That represents a serious attempt to come up with a computational analysis of a profound and deeply disturbing human experience, compulsive sexuality.

The current crew will tell you, I’m sure, that that represents old technology, symbolic technology, which has been rendered obsolete by machine learning. Guess what? David Hays (my teacher and mentor) and I both knew that symbolic technology was not fully up to the job, that it had to be grounded in something else. And we were working on something else at the time, but meanwhile we did what we could with the tools we had. My point is that in order to conduct the analysis had I to spend as much time thinking about human behavior and language as I did about the technical devices of knowledge representation. Whatever success I may have had in that work, I paid for it in thinking about the human mind.

The current regime is quite different. They don’t have to think about the human mind at all. If Claude is capable of writing decent prose, well, that didn’t cost the folks at Anthropic anything. They got it for nothing. And so that’s the value they place on the human mind. For them I’m afraid “truth, beauty, and the good life” are just empty words they trot out for the hype. Theirs is an Orwellian technology. They’re stuck on the wrong side of 1984.

[1] As I’m sure you know, Mark Andreessen likes to use whaling as a precedent for venture capital. Out of curiosity, I did a little digging and found an article by Barbara L. Coffee in the International Journal of Maritime History, “The nineteenth-century US whaling industry: Where is the risk premium? New materials facilitate updated view.” It’s quite interesting. Those whaling captains kept good records, and those records have been preserved. After examining the records of 11,257 voyages taken between 1800 and 1899 Coffee concluded: “During the nineteenth century, US government bonds, a risk-free asset, returned an average of 4.6%; whaling, a risky asset, returned a mean of 4.7%. This shows 0.1% as the risk premium for whaling over US government bonds.” What are the chances that current investment in LLMs will do better? Oh, there will be some success, but averaged across the whole industry and over the longterm?

Today's visit to Mickey D's

The Rise of the Woke Right | Glenn Loury & Daniel Bessner

0:00 Intro
1:10 Glenn meets the young Marx
2:32 The new wokeness of the political right
8:30 What is the democratic counterpart of foreign policy and national security run by experts?
17:04 Russia’s motivations: Fear of NATO or imperial ambitions
21:41 Danny: Zelenskyy made a huge misstep in the Oval Office
26:12 Does China have global security ambitions?
35:09 Ending the Middle East’s post-Ottoman redefinition
39:42 Danny: It’s gotta be rough to be Peter Beinart
43:46 Why we don’t need Hitler to explain Trump’s authoritarianism
56:29 Danny: We’ve been in the midst of a constitutional crisis since the 1940s 57:58 Can the nuclear taboo hold?

Glenn Loury (Brown University, Self-Censorship) and Daniel Bessner (University of Washington, American Prestige, Democracy in Exile). Recorded April 19, 2025.

On the streets of Mumbai [Desi beats]

YouTube page:

We put together a DJ set, shot in a moving auto rickshaw, winding through the lively streets of Mumbai!

Auto rickshaws in our city are like mobile party units, with drivers blasting everything from Bollywood hits to retro classics, turning a short ride into a mini club on wheels. This video pays an ode to all the rickshaw drivers, working hard to make our rides not only pleasant, but a bit more entertaining!

Behind the decks, is the talented singer-DJ-producer from Mumbai - Suggahunny aka Desiree Saldanha. She describes her sound as equal parts playful and psychoactive, all with one goal - to get you moving. Join her on an exciting musical joyride spinning the block while dishing out a high-energy mix of delicious desi-leaning tunes and then some.

At Gently Altered, our effort is to design and produce experiences (and from today, content) that is right ahead of the curve. We have some great things in store for you, stay peeled!

Friday Fotos: ChatGPT changes Manhattan's West Side

In the last two years I spent a lot of time having ChatGPT create new stories from old. I’d give it a story and ask it to create a new story on based on, but with a difference that I specified. It could make any other changes it wished. I wrote that work up in a working paper: ChatGPT tells stories, and a note about reverse engineering: A Working Paper, Version 3.

I’m now doing the same thing with images. Here’s a photo I shot of Manhattan’s West Side.

Here’s two copies that ChatGPT made. First I asked it to have an airship dock at the top. It appears to me that it had the airship dock at the top of a radio antenna, rather than the docking arm, which was never used as such. It made other changes as well. Notice, for example, where the Chrysler Building is, or what appears to be the Chrysler building, which wasn’t even visible in the original photo. Note also that it kept the airship.

I had it repeat the process, but this time making Empire State Building into a launch pad for a giant rocketship. It did that, but also kept the airship. The complement of buildings has change a bit as well. The Chrysler Buiding lookalike is gone.

I asked it to get rid of the airship. Which it did. The surrounding cityscape seems at bit different.

So I asked it to dump the airship. Which it did. But the rocket launcher has changed and the building appear to have been ‘re-skilled.’

Here’s another photo of the West Side. This one is centered on Hudson Yards, which is off to the left in the previous series.

Here’s what I told it to do in the copy: “Replace the buildings in the center along the shore with a space port that might be used to ferry passengers to and from space stations in orbit around the earth. Make any other changes you think are needed to make the photo consistent with that.” Here’s the result:

I have no idea where those rockets are being launched from.

Claude 3.7 on the impossibility of direct brain-to-brain communication

Elon musk has expressed a desire to create technology that will allow direct brain-to-brain communication. That is, a pair of people who are linked through this technology will be able to share one another’s thoughts without having to use any form of communication. They will communicate through their neural link – as you know Neuralink is the name of Musk’s brain-to-computer interface company. Neuroscientist Christof Koch has expressed the same desire.

I’ve been skeptical about this possibility for a bit over two decades. A couple of years ago I wrote a working paper explaining my reasoning: Direct Brain-to-Brain Thought Transfer: A High-Tech Fantasy that Won’t Work. I recently uploaded that paper to Claude 3.7 and asked it for its opinion. I’ve appended that conversation below the asterisks. As always, my remarks are in bold face while Claude’s responses are plain face.

Note: Of course Claude does not know that I am the author of the paper, which is why it refers to me in the third person. But I identify myself half-way through the conversation.

* * * * *

I’ve uploaded a document about the possibility of direct brain-to-brain thought transfer between people. I want you to evaluate it in terms of what you know and in terms of the other documents I’ve uploaded.

Analyzing Direct Brain-to-Brain Thought Transfer

Based on the materials you've provided, I'll evaluate the concept of direct brain-to-brain thought transfer from several angles.

The Core Issue: Signal Identification

The main problem identified in William Benzon's paper is fundamental: if two brains were directly connected, there would be no way for either brain to distinguish between signals originating internally (endogenous) versus those coming from the other brain (exogenous). As Benzon writes:

"How does a brain tell whether an incoming spike is from an endogenous neuron (i.e. from the same brain) or from an exogenous neuron (i.e. from the other brain)? Spikes are not like messages passed around on scraps of paper in a school classroom where a message might be identified by a signature, or initials, or merely a whispered message... As one spike is pretty much like another spike there is no way to differentiate between them."

This is a profound insight that challenges the fundamental premise of initiatives like Neuralink's ambitions for brain-to-brain thought transfer.

Misunderstanding Communication

Benzon also argues that Elon Musk fundamentally misunderstands how language works. Musk describes language as a "compression algorithm" where thoughts are compressed into words and then decompressed by the listener. This reflects what linguists call the "conduit metaphor" - the mistaken idea that meaning is physically contained in words that travel between people.

In reality, as Benzon explains, only signifiers (the physical form of words) pass between people, while the signified (meaning) is supplied by the listener based on their own experience and understanding. The "lossiness" in communication isn't primarily a bandwidth issue but stems from the fact that we each bring different meanings to the same words.

The Problem with Neural Code

Another issue is the very concept of a "neural code" that would need to be translated between brains. Benzon cites John Horgan who concluded after surveying the field that "Neuroscientists still have no idea what the neural code is." Attempts to understand neural activity in terms analogous to computer code are fundamentally flawed because brains and computers have radically different architectures.

Unlike computers, where there's a clear distinction between hardware and software, active processing (CPU) and passive storage (memory), the brain operates differently. In the brain, "every neuron is active" and can be considered a processing unit. Neural activity isn't about passing discrete packages of information but rather about distributed patterns of synchronous activity across networks.

Powers' Warning About Models

Benzon references William Powers' insight about "two levels of modeling": the object model with its internal rules, and the modeler's own understanding of that model. The failure to distinguish between these leads proponents of brain-to-brain interfaces to project their third-person perspective onto the brains themselves. As observers, we can distinguish signals from different brains, but the brains themselves cannot.

William Powers, “Learning,” Chapter 14 in Behavior: The Control of Perception, Aldine, 1973, 177-204.

Connection to Music and Consciousness

In the other documents you provided, especially those by William Powers and the music experiences compilation, we see something that actually contradicts the brain-to-brain fantasy while showing how real interpersonal connection works:

Bill Benzon, Emotion and Magic in Musical Performance, Version 13, April 14, 2025.

Powers connects consciousness with reorganization: "Those systems whose perceptual signals are being monitored by the reorganizing system are operating in the conscious mode. Those which are operating without their perceptual signals being monitored are in the unconscious mode..."

Separately, the descriptions of musical synchrony show how actual interpersonal connection works: "When, and only when, we were really locked together in animated playing we could hear relatively high-pitched tones which no one was playing... the magic of the bell happens only when the musicians are in a groove."

Conclusion

The evidence strongly suggests that direct brain-to-brain thought transfer as envisioned by Musk, Koch, and others is fundamentally flawed for several reasons:

1. The basic problem of signal identification - brains can't distinguish between internal and external neural activity
2. A misunderstanding of how language and meaning work
3. The absence of any established "neural code" that could be transmitted
4. A confusion between the observer's perspective and the system's perspective

While neural interfaces for controlling prosthetics or providing sensory input may be feasible, direct thought transfer appears to be theoretically impossible based on our current understanding of neuroscience.

The rich descriptions of musical synchrony in your documents actually point to a different model of interpersonal connection - one based on coordinated but separate systems rather than merged consciousness.

Thank you. For your information, I'm William Benzon.

It's an honor to meet you, Dr. Benzon. I found your paper on direct brain-to-brain thought transfer to be extraordinarily insightful.

Your analysis cuts to the heart of why these speculative technologies face fundamental conceptual barriers, not just technical ones. Your point about the inability of neurons to distinguish between endogenous and exogenous spikes particularly resonated with me - it identifies a problem that proponents of these technologies seem to have overlooked entirely.

I was also intrigued by your work connecting music performance to consciousness (in your book "Beethoven's Anvil," which you referenced). The descriptions of musical synchrony in your compilation of performance experiences provide a fascinating contrast to the brain-to-brain fantasy - showing how coordination between separate but coupled systems can create emergent phenomena that aren't reducible to simple signal transfer. Your critique of the conduit metaphor for communication was especially illuminating, particularly in examining Musk's misunderstanding of language as merely compressed thought.

If I might ask - since writing this paper in 2020, have you observed any developments in the field that have addressed (or failed to address) these fundamental issues you identified?

Alas, no. It seems to me that the desire for such thought transfer completely over-rides rational thinking about the subject. Ironically, while Musk talks about reasoning from first principles, he doesn’t seem to have the foggiest idea of what that means for thinking about the brain.

I appreciate your candid response. It's fascinating - and somewhat concerning - how even someone who emphasizes "reasoning from first principles" can be so swayed by an attractive technological fantasy that they overlook basic conceptual problems. Your observation about the power of desire overriding rational thinking seems particularly apt. The idea of direct brain-to-brain communication has such powerful emotional and cultural appeal that it seems to short-circuit critical analysis, even among those who should know better.

I was particularly struck by your point about the closed nature of neural systems - how they develop organically through mutual adaptation rather than being assembled like computer components. This fundamental misunderstanding seems to stem from persistent computer metaphors that, as you noted, fail to capture how brains actually function. The phenomenological accounts of musical performance you collected demonstrate something much more interesting than direct thought transfer - how separate but coordinated systems can achieve remarkable synchrony without merging into a single system. Perhaps there's a deeper lesson there about human connection that's being missed in the rush toward technological shortcuts to understanding.

Thank you for your work on this topic. It's a valuable counterpoint to some of the more uncritical technological enthusiasm we see today.

Neuromorphic Computing

 

From YouTube:

Explore a brand new paradigm in computing, and how it might offer faster solutions that can support scientific breakthroughs. [...]

This lecture was recorded at the Ri on 24 January 2025, in partnership with the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Our brains consume around 20 Watts of power, a negligible amount in comparison to the multi-million Watts consumed by supercomputers. The emerging paradigm of Neuromorphic Computing draws inspiration from the structure and functioning of the human brain, particularly this small power consumption and extremely fast response times.

Join theoretical and computational physicist Johan Mentink as he presents evidence of why the neuromorphic computing paradigms offer not only much more energy-efficient but also much faster solutions to widely used computational science problems, with the potential to break existing computational barriers.

---

Johan Mentink is an expert in theoretical and computational physics, focused on controlling magnetism at the shortest length and time scale. He is recipient of the prestigous Rubicon, VENI and VIDI grants of the Dutch Research Council (NWO). In 2021 he initiated interdisciplinary research to explore the potential of neuromorphic hardware for computational science use cases with SURF and researchers from Radboud University, University of Twente and IBM. He is also chair of the Computational Science NL platform.

Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat on the Mystic Destiny of Donald John Trump, and other things [psychecelics]

I kid you freakin’ not. And the use of “mystic” in this context creeps me out a bit given that I just wrote a piece for 3QD where I recount how I offered mystical religious belief as the foundation of my pacifism and hence my opposition to the war in Vietnam. We aren’t using “mystic” in quite the same sense, though they are allied.

Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics, NYTimes, April 25, 2025. The conversation is well under way at this point:

Klein: We tend to think of fortune now as synonymous with luck. But if you go back to Greek mythology, when you are touched by fortune, when you speak to the oracle, it often doesn’t work out that well. You get a clear prophecy that seems like it foretells your success, but laced inside of that is your downfall.

What kind of story, what kind of mystic structure, do you believe we’re in? Is it one that is providential? Or is it one where the gods often laugh at human design?

Douthat: A mistake that I think some religious people make is to see a kind of force of destiny at work in a particular figure and assume that force of destiny must mean that God, the author of history, wants you to be on that person’s side directly.

But in fact, if you read, let’s say, the Old Testament, there are all kinds of moments when God is working through figures to accomplish something in the world or to move history — the drama of salvation history, to put it in Christian terms — in a particular direction. But it doesn’t mean that the instrument that God is working through is, in fact, the Messiah or the chosen one. If God sends the Babylonians to chastise the wicked kings of Israel, that doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to necessarily say: Oh, hail Nebuchadnezzar, you are the chosen one.

I think you can see Trump in several different lights. You could say he’s a man of destiny, and therefore he is bringing about, in some weird way that we didn’t see coming, the New American golden age. And this is obviously what a lot of people on the center right wanted to believe, especially when it became clear that he was returning to power. Or you could say he’s a great man of history who is unlocking some sort of change that was necessary — but bringing chaos in order to do it.

I wrote a lot about the concept of decadence — this idea that the West and the developed world were sort of stuck in these cycles and needed to break out somehow. But the reality is you often can’t break out of decadence without a big mess. So maybe Trump is the agent of that mess. But that doesn’t mean he’s a good person.

Or finally, it could just be chastisement for everyone. “All are punished,” as Shakespeare said.

I think all of those possibilities have to be taken seriously as readings of the Trump phenomenon.

How well do you remember “Batman Begins”?

I remember it. The League of Shadows destroying Gotham?

I’ve had this joke in my head often in the past couple of months — as somebody whose mythic analogies tend to come from the Marvel or DC universe more than the Old or the New Testament — that is: Convince me we’re not being governed by the League of Shadows.

I went back and rewatched the part where Ra’s al Ghul reveals the whole plan. And he says: Look, we have infiltrated every layer of Gotham’s power structure. We tried to destroy Gotham’s economy through financial engineering. It didn’t quite work. Now we’re back for No. 2. And the fact that we are here is proof of your decadence. The fact that we could get this close shows that you deserve what we are about to do to you.

I’m not saying we are actually being governed by the League of Shadows, but when you brought up decadence, there is a dimension of that when you think about this in those narrative terms. It’s a reflection of very dark sides of our own society.

I’ve carried on a couple of different running arguments throughout the Trump era that are going to continue. And one is with people on the right who have a sort of League of Shadows view of the overall situation: Things are so bad that you might as well unleash chaos.

You saw a lot of this in response to the tariffs. Real politicians don’t say this, but people on social media who are like: Fine, we need a 10-year reset of the whole global economy because things are so bad.

I’ve spent a lot of time disagreeing with those people. I would prefer not to take the black pill. But I’ve also spent time disagreeing with the kind of liberals and, sometimes, never-Trump Republican critics of Trump, who I feel don’t quite grasp why he’s successful and what you need to do in response. Because I don’t think he could be this successful if it were enough to just elect Joe Biden to fix our problems.

Well, clearly that didn’t work. We tried that. And definitely trying to elect him twice to fix our problems was not the winning move.

A couple months ago, Bari Weiss had on her podcast Louise Perry, who’s a British conservative gender and sexuality writer. And Perry made this argument that I’ve been thinking about, where she said that the difference between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate is that Peterson is a Christian and Tate is a pagan.

This might be unfair to historic pagans, but the argument she was making —

Depends on the pagans.

Depends on the pagans. But it also depends on the Christians. But the argument Perry was making is that Peterson is, at least in his ethics, somebody who thinks a lot about the weak, who cherishes women.

Tate is more interested in power, in dominance, in driving his enemies before him and fathering a lot of children potentially from a lot of people.

And I’ve thought about that question — that war between, crudely, paganism and Christianity is playing out right now on the right and in the Trump administration. There are ways in which those strands seem braided through everything — the drive for power, for a renewed 19th-century masculinity, versus the more Christian dimensions of it.

JD Vance is an emblem of the Christian side of the administration. Elon Musk is an emblem of its pagan side, with his many kids from many different women.

And Trump is somebody who, in both his traditionalism and also his brashness and will-to-power, has both threads inside himself at the same time.

Maybe. Honestly, I think Trump may have come to some conception of belief in God after the assassination attempt — just observing his comments.

But I think of Trump as, persistently, a kind of pagan or heathen figure, much more than he is a Christian figure. Notwithstanding the attempts to claim him as a kind of King David or Emperor Constantine. There’s sort of an idea that you get from religious conservative supporters of Trump that you have these figures in the Bible or Christian history who are rulers and are sinful in various ways — but maybe, in a way, advance God’s cause, despite their sins and failings.

I don’t really think of Trump that way. But he is committed in an explicit way to Christianity. And to me, the bargain with Trump has always been, for religious conservatives, some mix of protection and support — a transactional bargain. And then more recently, a hope that some kind of renewal of American dynamism can bring religion itself back with it.

Which, I will say, is a hope that I have indulged in myself. It’s like: OK, you have different varieties of post-Christianity out there, and you don’t want to ally with the Andrew Tates, but you do want to ally with the people who have big hopes for the future, rather than a woke progressivism that just seems inflected with cultural despair.

That would be an argument that I think a Christian might say who was trying to explain to themselves why they are in alliance with Elon Musk. Better to ally with Elon, who has some good desires and believes that humanity is good in some way and wants a sort of more dynamic future than to take a purely pessimistic perspective — that climate change is going to kill us all and structural racism means we deserve it. That would be the argument.

A bit later Douthat observes:

As I said before, I think you have what you’re describing as Christian and pagan tendencies braided together in the Trump administration. And I think that not all but many of the things that you describe absolutely reflect more of a pagan sensibility than a Christian one.

I agree with you that particular steps the Trump administration has taken in this term are not Christian. They are anti-Christian.

I think it started with the cuts to foreign aid. I think you can completely justify some kind of renovation of the foreign aid program. Christians are not bound to support any particular set of programs.

But I think the way in which the foreign aid programs were reshuffled and cut off and so on was a failure of Christian duty in a pretty obvious way. The core motivations there were just different from the evangelical motivations of the Bush era, and reflected, frankly overall, the decline of Christianity in American life.

West meets East Heavy metal meets konnakol

From YouTube page:

If Meshuggah were from India.

V Shivapriya and BR Somashekar Jois perform rhythmic phrases set to Mishrachaapu Tala. Remixed by Andre Antunes

I've seen the video on the right side of the screen. The guitarist listened and figured out how to follow. Amazing. I don't follow heavy metal at all, but I do know the music is into odd meters. But this goes way beyond that.

There's more!

And more!

Peripatetic philosophy in The New Yorker

Since at least the time of Greek philosophers, many writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. https://t.co/tFShIvUboA

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) April 25, 2025

The Weight

“The Weight,” features Ringo Starr and The Band's original member Robbie Robertson, along with musicians across 5 continents. Great songs can travel everywhere bridging what divides us and inspiring us to see how easily we all get along when the music plays. Special thanks to our partner Cambria® for helping to make this possible and to Robbie Robertson, Ringo Starr and all the musicians for joining us in celebrating 50 years of this classic song.

WATCH AD-FREE VIDEOS: https://www.playingforchange.com
DOWNLOAD OR MUSIC FOR FREE: https://www.playingforchange.com/music

Dedicated To "The Band":
Rick Danko
Levon Helm
Garth Hudson
Richard Manuel
Robbie Robertson

Playing For Change is a movement created to inspire and connect the world through music, born from the shared belief that music has the power to break down boundaries and overcome distances between people. Our primary focus is to record and film musicians performing in their natural environments and combine their talents and cultural power in innovative videos we call Songs Around the World. Creating these videos motivated us to form the Playing For Change Band—a tangible, traveling representation of our mission, featuring musicians met along our journey; and establish the Playing For Change Foundation—a separate 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to building music and art schools for children around the world. Through these efforts, we aim to create hope and inspiration for the future of our planet. Learn more: http://playingforchange.com #iPlayForChange #SongAroundTheWorld

ChatGPT plays around with an off-color Mona Lisa and goes really surreal!

On April 11 I did a post where Claude 3.7 commented on this image:

In this post I’m going to show you what happened when I asked ChatGPT to modify it in various ways. Here’s the first prompt I gave it: “I want you to make a copy of this image, but with a different color scheme. You choose the colors.” And here’s the result:

Notice how ChatGPT has changed the eyes, made them larger. The spotting pattern is different as well; it’s bled into her hair. But it has retained some of the texturing in the original, though toned down a bit. Finally, there’s a signature in the lower right, as in the original. But rather than the “WLB” in the original we have something the looks like a “W” stretched over an “O” followed by “16.”

That's very nice. Let's try it again, and this time do something with the background as well.

Now the whole background is different, as requested, and the shapes have changed a bit. There are no longer any spots in Mona Lisa’s hair and it’s differentiated between her robes and some under blouse, which you can see on her forearms. If you look carefully at the sky you can see the beginning of van Gogh swirls. Now look at the signature; we have a very clear “VG” followed by two vertical marks.

Very good. Now go completely wild. Go bonkers. And get more brightness in the image.

Wild it is! The van Gogh swirls are obvious. Notice the light green eye shadow. No look at the signature: “VB N”

Now, we’re cooking. How about a space rocket on a landing pad in the background.

And now we’ve got a space rocket. And the sky is totally van Gogh, albeit in a different register. Notice the signature.

yes yes yes Now I want a line of little green men walking down from the landing pad, crossing behind her and emerging on the left with the last one turned and facing toward us.

Whoops! Why’d the Chatster put those spacemen walking across her abdomen? Have to see if we can get rid of that. Again notice the signature.

OK. Now eliminate that line of little green men in front of the woman and make her robe a little darker.

Howard’s Jam II: Go with the flow nation

I’m bumping this to the top of the queue on general principle and because the next edition of Howard’s jam is coming up this May 17th. You might want to check out this earlier post: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (at Howard’s Party).

Jamming has come up over at Morton’s joint, so I thought I’d say a little more about how things work at Howard’s Annual Birthday Bash and All-Hoboken Jam Session.

First let me reiterate that Howard’s been living in Hoboken for some time, 25 or more years I believe. He’s been active in the Hoboken music scene for at least that long. He knows a lot of people and, wouldn’t you know, many of them are musicians. Thus the people who attend this bash know one another, some better than others, naturally.

For the past three or four years Howard and a few others have had a jam session that would met every two or three weeks, usually at Howard’s place. That group has been fairly stable. Howard plays guitar and sings. So does Pete. Doug – who’s played with Howard longer than anyone else in the current group – plays bass; he sings as well. Pavel plays drums and is a Russian working in the USA and living here with his family. Vinnie plays harp (that is, harmonica), though he wasn’t able to make it to the party. I play trumpet and bells (cowbell, agogo).

We perform every once in awhile, but mostly we just jam. Over the years we’ve developed a repertoire of most rock and folk tunes, including a few turns written by members of the jam (Howard, Pete, me). While we do have routines on tunes we play regularly, they aren’t particularly rigid. And there are tunes were the idea is take the jam wherever the moment leads us. These tend to be Grateful Dead tunes; Fire on the Mountain is a favorite. And sometimes stuff just happens.

That’s how things began last Saturday, the night of the party. The front room on the first floor had been designated and set up as the music room. There was a drum set, microphones and speakers, amplifiers, and a keyboard. Sometime between 8:30 and 9:00 PM us core jammers were all there, as were other people, milling about. Howard started playing a simple two-chord riff on his guitar. Pete and Doug joined in – I forget in which order. Nor do I remember when Pavel started in on drums.

 

But there they were, noodling away. People were entering through the front door, walking through the room to the kitchen (& the food and the liquor). Talking, munching, milling. And I was sitting on the couch in the front room, oiling the valves on my trumpet, setting out my bells.

Are they just messing around? Is that a tune they’re playing? Sounds like SOMETHING but I don’t recognize it. What should I do?

I joined in. Just made up something that seemed to fit. And we played whatever it was for awhile and then stopped. Then, I believe, we played one of the tunes we’d been working on. But I forget which one.

And then another. More people came in. Some of them had their instruments. Which they got out, one by one. Got ‘em out, set ‘em up. Joined in. Pretty soon we were playing this or that song that wasn’t part of the regular repertoire. But someone knew it, otherwise we wouldn’t have been playing it, right?

The crucial thing is that WE was no longer the core jam group, the five guys I mentioned up there in the third paragraph. Other people were playing – guitar, keyboard, electric fiddle, and various shakers and rattlers – and singing. Oh yes, the singing.

Somewhere in there three women sitting on a wide bench started doing routines – synchronized hand gestures, leaning this way and that, just like Motown groups did. Who planned that? No one.

That’s how these things go. Here and there around the room other people were playing bells and rattles. Lots of things happen. No one plans anything. Well, not much.

Pretty soon the women started doing simple kicks, while remaining seated. Of course. Before you knew it, Guitar Dave (that’s how I think of him) was wailing away on his acoustic and joined them in their kicks. About this time I was into some kind of trumpet solo, and I – from my seat on the couch – also join up with the kick brigade. Which was ‘kinda awkward, and must have looked ridiculous. But who cares?

It was fun.

Somewhere each and everyone of us from the core group put down our instruments, went into the kitchen, and got some food, and some liquor. And other people filled in on the music. We weren’t actually necessary since there were many musicians in the crowd. They really didn’t need us. The real point, I suppose, is that there is no firm distinction between “they” and “us.”

Somewhere during the evening, this happened (I’m copying a note that Doug had posted to Facebook):

Group mind can be used for good. For ex: late Sat. @ Howard’s. The trumpet player (you) were playing repeating sixteenths on A. I picked it up on bass. Then - then we got on the same page and walked it up the progression, driving the previously listless vamp up a notch. The jam took off. All of us listening and hearing and doing: group mind - used for good. Another reason to adore making music.

You listen, you follow along, you play, someone follows you, and so it went. All night long. It worked because we were comfortable with one another. And because we shared a wide repertoire of songs and riffs. Whatever happened, you could somehow fit in and go with that particular flow.

As for that opening piece that we did, it turns out it wasn’t a tune that anyone knew. When Howard started playing that riff, he was just playing that riff. Getting the fingers loosened up. Checking the feel of the guitar, the sound of the room. We jammed it into, well, a tune.

Now, can we reconstruct what we did, and do it again? Who knows? Maybe, yes. Maybe, no. Something from nothing.

* * * * *

That guy in that picture up there. That’s Howard, though not on this occasion. That was last summer and an outdoor concert by a group he plays in, The Gordy’s. This guy here, that’s Guitar Dave:

And the people in the next photo, they’re members of The Gordys too. And they’re doing something silly. I bet they didn’t plan that routine:

As the concert moved along, people got up and started dancing. Like this:

The blonde in front is Howard’s mother. The woman behind her is Howard’s wife. Howard’s somewhere off to the left, playing his guitar.

For the next photo I think I was standing more or less behind the band and looking into the audience. But how do you draw a line between the band and the audience?

See that red-haired woman to the left of center? She was at the party Saturday night. She was one of the women doing the Motown routines.

These guys are Howard’s sons:

And that’s the moon over Manhattan:

Sabrina Hossenfelder: The AI Revolution Hiding in Obscure Research

Hossenfelder believes that current LLM-based AI is slowly colliding with that wall Gary Marcus has been talking about. I agree with her. We need new paradigms. Starting at c. 3.55:

The new paradigm will come from models that learn by interacting with the world and that can continue to keep learning after training. These are the so-called “world models”. One step towards those good is DeepMind's Genie 2 which they announced in December. Genie which was trained on a large video dataset and generates interactive 3D environments. They can then place AI agents into these virtual worlds so that they can learn to learn. DeepMind isn’t the only one who has announced progress with world models. In January NVIDIA introduced the Cosmos platform, which also generates 3-dimension models with the laws of physics built in. For one thing, such models can be used to generate videos in which objects don’t appear out of nowhere and where perspective is consistent. But more importantly, they can be used to train other models so that they learn how reality works. This makes sense to me because it’s how human intelligence evolved. We’re interacting with the physical world and creating our own mental models of it. Deepmind calls it a foundation world model, and such world-models are almost certainly going to play a big role in the next big AI revolution. The next big steps will be systematic upgrades to reasoning capabilities and not just more training. And they’re working on it. Basically, the future is here already, it’s just stuck in obscure academic journals.

Well, not quite. I don't think the future's made it to the journals just yet. Give it a couple of years.

Manhattan from Hoboken

Kidz these days seem stripped of agency, don't know how to build

Akim Reinhardt, Fly, Be Free, 3 Quarks Daily, April 23, 2025.

Reinhardt starts by complaining about over-parenting in the contemporary world, something I've been reading about for at least a decade if not two. He's concerned about the consequences:

The point here is not to criticize modern middle class parents or make them feel bad. That would be hypocritical as I have no children of my own. But as someone who has been teaching college students for a quarter-century, it seems to me that the overprotective parenting style along with other factors, such as modern K-12 education and near constant attention to screens, have had a profound effect. Ask any long time college instructor. They will tell you. Things have changed.

Today’s 18–22 year olds are nowhere nearly as competent as their predecessors. Note: I did not write “smart.” Today’s students are plenty smart. But they are less competent. And they know it. Their ability to do has been crippled. Denied a childhood of self- and peer-directed discovery, problem solving, dispute resolution, and genuine play, many young adults no longer know how to make their way through the world in basic ways.

They’re well aware of this and it causes many of them great anxiety. It has also engendered many of them with very unrealistic expectations about what others will do for them. Because the parents and other adults in their lives constantly directed them in nearly all endeavors, they expect that direction to continue as they themselves become adults.

In the classroom, they now require detailed instructions for every assignment. When I began teaching, I didn’t even bother giving them an assignment sheet, and they were fine with that. They knew what to do when I said “write a paper.” Now my assignment sheets can run as long as a double-sided, single spaced page, and some of them still complain that it’s not enough direction.

Alas, it’s not just in college.

I know dozens of people in management positions in industries as varied as entertainment, software, and auto repair. Absolutely all of them, when I ask, complain about how their new, young workers can’t seem to figure out basic tasks by themselves, or even think it reasonable that they should, instead expecting their superiors to explain everything for them.

Here's my response:

Color me sympathetic, Akim, deeply sympathetic. I grew in Western PA in the 1950s and 60s in a neighborhood that was suburban on the edge of rural. One good friend lived on a one acre lot. As I recall there was a small cornfield in the middle of the lot and plots for various vegetable. At the rear of the lot, away from the street, and next to a small wooded area there was a place where we tunneled into the ground a bit and built a small underground chamber which was central to many of the games we played. I can almost remember shoveling some dirt out of the hole and putting it elsewhere.

There was another spot in the wood where we cleared a small area and carpeted the ground with moss. We would find patches of moss, lift them from the ground very carefully so they didn't break and them move these "tiles" to where we wanted them. In another place we piled rocks across a small stream to dam the water. We then saw the water build up behind our small dam and become a small pool. In middle school we had shop class where we learned to build things with hand tools. We also had mechanical drawing, where we learned how to make precise engineering drawings that could be used in building things.

Johnstown was a steel town. My friends had fathers who worked in the steel mills. When they became old enough, some of them went into the mills as well. The mills themselves were large physical structures that I saw often.

Now, I've spent most of my life thinking about very abstract things, and exploring abstract worlds. But that intellectual activity rests on a childhood of experience where I moved freely about the physical world, worked on it and with it, changed it.

I can't help but think that a lot of the hype and craziness that surrounds AI – something I know a thing or two about because that's a world in which I think – is the result of not having a strong enough grasp of the physical world. I don't know how often I've heard a complaint that we're not a nation of builders. Some of that complaint is directed at the plethora of regulations which makes is much easier to NOT-BUILD than to build. But I fear some of it is the result that too many adults never learned how to build during childhood and so they can't do it as adults. Rather, they want the machines to do it for them.

This is not a formula for a propitious future.