Let's not forget the flowers

On the Appeal of the Rockford Files [Media Notes 164]

I’m currently working my way through The Rockford Files for the fourth, if not the fifth, time. I watched the program when I was originally broadcast back in 1974-1980, and I’ve watched it online several times in this century. Part of the program’s appeal certainly comes from the star, James Garner.

Garner is a handsome middle-aged man, six feet and perhaps an inch or two tall. He plays an easy going character, James Rockford, who is masculine without being macho. He can handle himself in a fight, which he frequently has to do, but he’s not a martial artist or a superhero. He’s competent, but vulnerable and takes his lumps. He likes sports, going to games, going fishing, often with his dad. He’s single, but is attractive to women, and kind. He’s had affairs in the past, and has one or three in the course of the show, he may even have been close to marriage.

Much of the appeal stems from the fact that he’s an interstitial character, if you will. He falls between the keys, lives in the cracks. While he makes a living, just barely, he’s not chained to a 9-to-5 job. He’s not been broken to harness.

He’s an ex-convict who’s been pardoned. Was he ever guilty? Probably not, but I don’t recall off hand. Does it matter? He’s damaged goods. He lives in a beat-up trailer on the beach at Malibu, a marginal dwelling in a desirable location.

He makes his living as a private investigator, which is depicted as a marginal occupation in this, and other shows, but not always. While he’s a decent and honest man, he does quite a bit of sneaking around and more than a little deception. There are a number of episodes where he orchestrates a complex con, though on behalf of a good cause. Always.

He’s got a good friend on the police force, Lt. Dennis Becker, but is otherwise persona non grata with the police force. And he’s friends with a good lawyer, Beth Davenport, who once had a crush on him. He’s also got an ex-con pal, Angel Martin, who’s a bit more marginal than he is, and cowardly as well, yet somehow manages to retain Rockford’s loyalty.

All of which is to say, he doesn’t work within the confines of work-mode, as I’ve been writing about it. Life is not easy for Jim Rockford. He’s often broke, and in at least one episode that I can remember, in danger of losing his home. But his life is interesting and challenging.

I wonder, off hand, how many TV shows present us with lives that are NOT dominated by work mode? And in work-place shows, just how is work depicted? How much entertainment presents us with alternatives to work-mode? And how often is the alternative presented as a critique of work-mode?

Is The Rockford Files a critique? I don’t think so. It’s not pointed enough. Perhaps that’s why it’s been so popular. It presents a clear alternative, a clear difference-from, but it never goes so far as to present the work-a-day world as a soul-destroying trap. 

* * * * * 

Also about The Rockford Files: Myth-Logic and a Lady Librarian in The Rockford Files, Myth-Logic and a Lady Librarian in The Rockford Files 2.

Place cells: How your brain creates maps of abstract spaces

YouTube:

Artem Kirsanov

In this video, we will explore the positional system of the brain - hippocampal place cells. We will see how it relates to contextual memory and mapping of more abstract features

OUTLINE:
00:00 Introduction
00:53 Hippocampus
1:27 Discovery of place cells
2:56 3D navigation
3:51 Role of place cells
4:11 Virtual reality experiment
7:47 Remapping
11:17 Mapping of non-spatial dimension
13:36 Conclusion

An old man taking breakfast at the bar as the sunlight streams across his back

AI and economic growth: Short-term vs. long-term constraints

Here's Arnold Ling's whole column (title above) for June 30, 2025:

Luis Garicano writes,

When productivity crushes prices, quantity must rise proportionally to maintain economic weight. But we don't use 40,000x more light than in 1800. Maybe 100x. Human demand has limits.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. My thoughts:

1. I don’t like using light as an example, because it is not as if a general-purpose technology suddenly appeared. You can argue that the electric lightbulb appeared suddenly, but I think that by that point in history it was not some enabling technology that was going to increase productivity everywhere.
2. That said, the point is well taken that there are sectors of the economy where productivity grows faster than demand, so that relative prices fall. And there are sectors of the economy where demand grows faster than productivity, so relative prices rise.
3. The classic example for many decades is that productivity has risen faster than demand in food and material goods. Demand has risen faster than productivity in health care and education. Hence, Mark Perry’s famous Chart of the Century, which I think people get carried away with.
4. The electric motor was a classic general-purpose technology that eventually pushed productivity up faster in manufacturing than in health care or education.
5. Computers and the Internet are also general-purpose technologies. It seems to me that their big effect showed up in finance and logistics, with Wall Street exemplifying the former and Wal-Mart and Amazon exemplifying the latter.
6. Some people see the new AI models as a general-purpose technology. I believe that is true with 90 percent probability.
7. In the short run, the gain in productivity from AI will appear with a lag, for the same reason that general-purpose technologies always increase productivity with a lag: slow diffusion and cultural resistance.
8. In the long run, the question is how much AI can improve productivity in health care and education. The potential seems quite high. If the gains do show up there, that will break the pattern of the last century-plus. As productivity in those sectors eventually grows faster than demand, relative prices will fall, and resources will move elsewhere. I would bet that we are at least two or three decades away from reaching that point.
9. Because the mix of goods and services shifts so much as technology changes, long-run comparisons of GDP are not at all precise. It is brave to try to come up with a single number that compares an economy that produces horseshoes and wheat to an economy that produces smart phones and pizza delivery.

Garicano's tweet, referenced by Kling, is the first in a stream that eventually points to his blog post, Can AI solve Europe’s problems? Silicon Continent, June 26. 2025.

Peekabo between the blinds

What Michael Tilson Thomas learned from James Brown (a lesson in groovology)

YouTube:

In this web exclusive, conductor and composer Michael Tilson Thomas sits down with CBS News' Lesley Stahl to discuss his family history of show business; mentoring and directing young musicians; and the competitive element of his relationship with Leonard Bernstein. He also gives Stahl a lesson in conducting, including how to "mix it up," and explains why D♯ and E♭ – which share the same key on a piano – can represent two different notes.o

I've cued the video to c. 15:45 where Tilson Thomas talks about how he was influenced by James Brown (aka "the hardest working man in show business"):

Leslie Stahl: We talked so much about Leonard Bernstein's influence on you
but there was somebody else in the music world
who you also say you learned a great deal from
people are going to be stunned to know that it was James Brown
the James Brown
explain that
really what What did you learn from him
I'm stunned by this

Michael Tilson Thomas: well he was a total stage person you know
when he was on stage he was just on fire
in a whole other kind of way
and he was a performer

Stahl: yes

Thomas: astounding performer
and from the first time I heard him
there was just a level of attack in his music making
which was just like right here right now this is how it goes
and I was so impressed by that 
and then as I got to know him a bit more 
and got to go to some of his rehearsals
I saw the way he handled all that
you know how very very specific he was
with all of his musicians about exactly exactly what he wanted
and also what he didn't want
and at the same time he was always very very encouraging and very um inspiring
frightening sometimes
but basically challenging inspiring
and he was amazed to meet someone like me who was so much younger
yet I knew his music really well
i mean really well
the songs that I most admired of his are not the top 40 songs
but some other songs which were not big hits
but are so amazing what they do
sometimes with very limited means
so he has a song called
Goodbye My Love
this is not a song that many people know
and it just consists of bass player
i don't know if it was Bootsie Collins
but someone in that era that all they do is goa
da [Music] da da that's all it is
and then he sort of sings and talks his way through the song
it's half singing half talking
goodbye my love d
you're throwing me away [Music]
now sometimes people come to the end of an experience ...
that's all it is
but every one of those
little goodbye my love
is has a different slightly different shape
it's a slightly different glyph
and it's so profound each one of those little nuances
and there are a number of his songs
that weren't top 40
but that played with that kind of idea
between speaking and singing and whatever
and they were really profound 
I think

Stahl: now I have to go listen
I love that

I only ever saw James Brown once, and that was quite late in his career, when he was singing "Living in America" (a song I played with The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band). He'd put on a little weight, but he could still do the splits. I first became acquainted with him when I saw a film of the 1964 T.A.M.I. show during my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins. The show featured 12 acts, ending with James Brown followed by the Rolling Stones. From the Wikipedia entry:

T.A.M.I. Show is particularly well known for the performance of James Brown and the Famous Flames, which features his legendary dance moves and explosive energy. In interviews, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones has claimed that choosing to follow Brown and the Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Bobby Bennett, and Lloyd Stallworth) was the worst mistake of their careers, because no matter how well they performed, they could not top him. In a web-published interview, Binder takes credit for persuading the Stones to follow Brown, and serve as the centerpiece for the grand finale in which all the performers dance together onstage.

Right on, Keith! Compared to James Brown's moves, Mick Jagger looked stiff as a robot.

But I digress. Back to the interview. Stahl asks him about what a conductor does and through that they they segue to a discussion of Mahler, a composer whom Tilson Thomas dearly loves, as did his mentor, Leonard Bernstein, as do I. I was in school in Buffalo while Thomas was the conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic. My teacher, David Hays, had help organize an open rehearsal of Mahler's Second Symphony to be performed, I believe, in the gym on the campus of Buffalo State University, as opposed to SUNY Buffalo, where he taught and where I was a student.

It was stunning. The orchestra set up on the floor of the gym and at least some of the audience was there on the floor as well. I certainly was. What I remember is that Tilson Thomas's beat seemed to be ahead of the orchestra by a fraction of a second, so it was as though he was pulling the orchestra behind his baton. It seemed like he was dragging the baton through a vat of molasses rather than simply waving it in the air. The resistance of the virtual molasses, that's what connected the baton with the orchestra. That's where the music lived.

Some interesting comments about Mamdani

Shadows

On the post-Enlightenment evolution of moral universalism

Michael Jetter, On the post-Enlightenment evolution of moral universalism, The Economic Journal, 2025;, ueaf049, https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueaf049

Abstract: Is humanity’s circle of moral concern expanding? I explore frequencies of morally universal language in 15m book publications in American English, British English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian from 1800-2000. In each language, morally universal terminology diminished markedly. This pattern also emerges in Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew books. I test two prominent hypotheses predicting moral universalism, pertaining to reason and religiosity. Reason-based terminology indeed correlates positively with purely morally universal terminology – but also (and more strongly so) with morally communal terminology. These empirical patterns cast doubt on claims of (i) moral universalism expanding and (ii) reason being its driver.

I wonder. Back in 2012 Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac issued an interesting report through Stanford's Literary Lab: A Quantitative Literary History Of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method. They studied a corpus of roughly 3000 novels and found that word usage shifted from abstract terms to concrete. I suspect that that shift would also appear as a loss of moral universalism but, depending on what actually happened in those novels, that might not actually be the case. (My post on this study.)

Could this sort of thing be going on in Jetter's study as well? I don't know, but note that his study does not seem confined to novels (I've not read the article, only the abstract.)

Balaji on the current state of AI adoption & building on it

Yes. A few miscellaneous thoughts.

(1) First, the new bottleneck on AI is prompting and verifying. Since AI does tasks middle-to-middle, not end-to-end. So business spend migrates towards the edges of prompting and verifying, even as AI speeds up the middle.

(2) Second, AI… https://t.co/mWF4ax6EkY

— Balaji (@balajis) June 28, 2025

Read through the whole list, It's interesting, esp. 3 & 6 & 8.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

The Ferry to Wall Street

How I became an adult in Baltimore, 1965 to 1973

Standing on the balcony, blowing at post horn.

I entered Johns Hopkins University as a freshman in the fall of 1965 and graduated in 1969 with a degree in Philosophy. I spent three more years then getting a master’s degree in humanities while also working in the Chaplain’s Office as a conscientious objector to military service. When I published my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (2001) I dedicated it to my five fathers. I worked with two of them at Johns Hopkins, Richard Macksey and Chester Wickwire. (My first father, of course, is my biological father, William Benzon. David Dysert is my second, he was my music teacher for five years. David Hays is my fifth; he was my Ph.D. teacher and mentor. We later became colleagues.)

While the pieces I list in this post hear cover much of what happened to me during those formative years, they don’t cover everything. For one thing, my relationship with my sister changed substantially during that time, though that didn’t happen in Baltimore. I should probably say a bit about other faculty members, Maurice Mandelbaum (philosophy), Neville Dyson-Hudson (anthropology), Arthur Stinchcombe (sociology) and Mary Ainsworth (psychology). Nor do I say anything about my friends Henry Shapiro, Fred Portnoy, Peter Barnett (whom I have kept up with), Ivia Waterman and Al Crowley, Frank Munley (I’ve also kept up with him), Vicki Pollard, and Donna Keck. I might also say a word or two about the strange (sexual) affair I carried out through the phone over the course of, I don’t know, two or three months. And perhaps I should say something about the letter I published in Playboy in 1966 since it was my first national publication (of sorts). Perhaps I do some more writing about that period of my life. But for now, this is what I’ve got.

* * * * *

My Annus Mirabilis

“Annus Mirabilis” – a somewhat pretentious term meaning “wonderful year,” and used in mostly obsolete contexts.

These two papers are about the period from 1968-1972, when I settled on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” as the focus of my intellectual life, a focus that remains with me to this day. I originally published “Touchstones” in December 1975 in, Paunch, a journal edited by my teacher, Art Efron. The current version contains annotations that bring it more or less current. It loops back to several childhood experiences which I identify as precursors to events that happened during those years, including both my structural analysis of “Kubla Khan” and the LSD trip I took in January 1972 got me “unstuck,” freeing me up both to finish my work on “Kubla Khan” and to enroll for trumpet lessons at the Peabody Conservatory.

Touchstones • Strange Encounters • Strange Poems • the beginning of an intellectual life, November 2015, Academia.edu. https://www.academia.edu/9814276/Touchstones_Strange_Encounters_Strange_Poems_the_beginning_of_an_intellectual_life

An esoteric interpretation of my annus mirabilis, 1968-1971 https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/05/an-esoteric-interpretation-of-my-annus.html

This is rather different from all the other papers here as it is mostly written by ChatGPT as it interprets a series of events. First what happened to me in the course of writing four term papers in the course on Romantic literature where I settled on “Kubla Khan.” The first two papers involved distinctly different altered states of consciousness, while the last two did not. Then I tell ChatGPT about a mystical experience I had while performing with a rock band some time in 1971. I asked ChatGPT to interpret these events using concepts from Hinduism and Buddhism. The Chatster concludes: “This is not just an academic coming-of-age story. This is a spiritual initiation disguised as a liberal education.”

Johns Hopkins, Academics

Dick Macksey was my mentor at Johns Hopkins, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student. Without him, I don’t know what I would have done. Earl Wasserman introduced me to the close reading of poetry and, in particular, to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

“It got adults off your back” – Richard Macksey remembered, 3 Quarks Daily, Aug. 19, 2019, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2019/08/it-got-adults-off-your-back-richard-macksey-remembered.html At Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/40040691/_It_got_adults_off_your_back_Richard_Macksey_remembered

Earl Wasserman, a lifelong student, a scholar’s scholar, New Savanna, September 27, 2018, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2018/09/earl-wasserman-lifelong-student.html

This one is about the Tudor and Stuart Club, a literary society. I was the club secretary for two or three years. This one gives you a glimpse of academic life outside the classroom.

Old School: Torpor and Stupor at Johns Hopkins, 3 Quarks Daily, Nov. 13, 2017, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2017/11/old-school-torpor-and-stupor-at-johns-hopkins.html

This is the first thing I published in the student newspaper. It’s a review of John Barth’s story collection, Lost in the Funhouse, which is written as a parody of the book. I’m told that Barth liked it.

John Barth and Me, Having Fun [Trapped], New Savanna, April 3, 2024, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2024/04/john-barth-and-me-having-fun-trapped.html

In this longish blog post I talk about the three universities is knew, Johns Hopkins for undergraduate school, State University of New York at Buffalo for my Ph.D., and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for my first and only faculty job.

The Hunt for Genius, Part 5: Three Elite Schools, New Savanna, July 23, 2019 (originally posted in October 2013) https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-hunt-for-genius-part-5-three-elite.html

Chester Wickwire [Johns Hopkins]

All of these blog posts involve Chester Wickwire, the Chaplain at Johns Hopkins. I participated in various programs run by him during my undergraduate years and then worked in the Chaplain’s Office to fulfill my Selective Service obligation as a conscientious objector to military service.

Living with Living Creatures: Will We Become the Apocalypse, New Savanna, May 22, 2011, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/05/living-with-living-creatures-will-we.html

Break! How I Busted Three Trumpeters Out of a Maryland Prison, New Savanna, August 3, 2012, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2016/04/break-how-i-busted-three-trumpeters-out-of-a-maryland-prison.html

How I Freaked the Secret Service and Live to Tell About It, New Savanna, Nov. 5, 2014 https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/11/how-i-freaked-secret-service-and-lived.html

Music

Music has always been important in my life. The first two pieces are about music I heard in Baltimore while the third is about the rock band I played in during 1969-1971. Some of the gigs I played with that band are among the happiest moments in my life but the last gig was something else entirely, a mystical experience that shook me to the core.

Ecstasy at Baltimore’s Left Bank Jazz Society, 3 Quarks Daily, May 2, 2016, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2016/05/ecstasy-at-baltimores-left-bank-jazz-society.html

Rahsaan works the crowd, New Savanna, December 6, 2022, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/12/rahsaan-works-crowd.html

White Light and Basement Joy: Into The Saint Matthew Passion and Beyond. 3 Quarks Daily, May 19, 2025. https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/05/white-light-and-basement-joy-into-the-saint-matthew-passion-and-beyond.html

Politics

My college years came as the Civil Rights movement peaked and as the anti-war movement peaked. I protested the war in Vietnam, became a conscientious objector to it, and spent a good deal of time with political activists in Baltimore. These blog posts present two aspects of that engagement.

Breaking down monogamy in Baltimore in the early 1970s, New Savanna, March 30, 2025 https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/03/breaking-down-monogamy-in-baltimore-in.html

I became a conscientious objector during the War in Vietnam, New Savanna, April 14, 2025, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/04/i-became-conscientious-objector-during.html

In Love

The second paragraph: “At the time, I thought I was in love. But, considered as a love relationship, it would’ve made a strange movie. For the love was mostly in my mind, not in the relationship.” And then there’s Christel, who had been my first year German teacher, and Dante and his beloved Beatrice, whom I knew not at all except at the remostest distance.

My First Muse, and My Second, New Savanna, September 3, 2011, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/09/my-first-muse-and-my-second.html

Some flowers, white and yellow

Thought Anchors: Which LLM Reasoning Steps Matter?

I'm very excited about our vision for "mech interp" of CoT:

Study reasoning steps and their connections - analogous to activations

Don't just read it: study attn, causally intervene, and, crucially, resampling - study the distn over CoTs, not just this one

There's lots to do! https://t.co/HCYOWBXoak pic.twitter.com/JvPN1VNult

— Neel Nanda (@NeelNanda5) June 26, 2025

You might want to read through the whole thread. And here's the paper at the center of it:

Paul C. Bogdan, Uzay Macar, Neel Nanda, Arthur Conmy, Thought Anchors: Which LLM Reasoning Steps Matter? arXiv:2506.19143 [cs.LG] https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.19143

Abstract: Reasoning large language models have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in many fields. However, their long-form chain-of-thought reasoning creates interpretability challenges as each generated token depends on all previous ones, making the computation harder to decompose. We argue that analyzing reasoning traces at the sentence level is a promising approach to understanding reasoning processes. We present three complementary attribution methods: (1) a black-box method measuring each sentence's counterfactual importance by comparing final answers across 100 rollouts conditioned on the model generating that sentence or one with a different meaning; (2) a white-box method of aggregating attention patterns between pairs of sentences, which identified "broadcasting" sentences that receive disproportionate attention from all future sentences via "receiver" attention heads; (3) a causal attribution method measuring logical connections between sentences by suppressing attention toward one sentence and measuring the effect on each future sentence's tokens. Each method provides evidence for the existence of thought anchors, reasoning steps that have outsized importance and that disproportionately influence the subsequent reasoning process. These thought anchors are typically planning or backtracking sentences. We provide an open-source tool (this http URL) for visualizing the outputs of our methods, and present a case study showing converging patterns across methods that map how a model performs multi-step reasoning. The consistency across methods demonstrates the potential of sentence-level analysis for a deeper understanding of reasoning models.

Gender malleability during sex

Some years, no, decades, ago, I had this idea that in sexual intercourse, it is helpful if one party brings a vagina to the occasion while the other brings a penis, but it doesn’t much matter who brings what, nor that they make the same choices on all occasions. All that is necessary is that they agree on who is what at any given time. Physically, that doesn’t make sense, I know. But then sex isn’t merely or entirely physical. Anyhow, in this video Kate speaks to that long-ago insight. It seems that I’m not the only one who has that crazy idea.

YouTube: 

Kate always felt there was more to experience in sex than what a social gender assignment might indicate. One fateful night, Kate and a partner were able to explore how both of them could have their minds and bodies offer new sensations they had only dreamed of...

This story was recorded at The Mystery Box Show on October 7, 2016 at The Alberta Rose Theatre. The Mystery Box Show is Portland's only live storytelling series focused on true stories of sex and sexuality.

For more stories and upcoming show dates visit http://www.mysteryboxshow.com

My Standard Breakfast at Turning Point (one of them)

Silicon Valley is going nuts chasing superintelligence (whatever that is)

Cade Metz, The A.I. Frenzy Is Escalating. Again. NYTimes, June 27, 2025.

Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence frenzy has found a new gear.

Two and a half years after OpenAI set off the artificial intelligence race with the release of the chatbot ChatGPT, tech companies are accelerating their A.I. spending, pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into their frantic effort to create systems that can mimic or even exceed the abilities of the human brain.

The tech industry’s giants are building data centers that can cost more than $100 billion and will consume more electricity than a million American homes. Salaries for A.I. experts are jumping as Meta offers signing bonuses to A.I. researchers that top $100 million.AI

And venture capitalists are dialing up their spending. U.S. investment in A.I. companies rose to $65 billion in the first quarter, up 33 percent from the previous quarter and up 550 percent from the quarter before ChatGPT came out in 2022, according to data from PitchBook, which tracks the industry.

“Everyone is deeply afraid of being left behind,” said Chris V. Nicholson, an investor with the venture capital firm Page One Ventures who focuses on A.I. technologies.

This astonishing spending, critics argue, comes with a huge risk. A.I. is arguably more expensive than anything the tech industry has tried to build, and there is no guarantee it will live up to its potential. But the bigger risk, many executives believe, is not spending enough to keep pace with rivals.

“The thinking from the big C.E.O.s is that they can’t afford to be wrong by doing too little, but they can afford to be wrong by doing too much,” said Jordan Jacobs, a partner with the venture capital firm Radical Ventures.

The biggest spending is for the data centers. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google have told investors that they expect to spend a combined $320 billion on infrastructure costs this year. Much of that will go toward building new data centers — more than twice what they spent two years ago.

As OpenAI and its partners build a roughly $60 billion data center complex for A.I. in Texas and another in the Middle East, Meta is erecting a facility in Louisiana that will be twice as large. Amazon is going even bigger with a new campus in Indiana. Amazon’s partner, the A.I. start-up Anthropic, says it could eventually use all 30 of the data centers on this 1,200-acre campus to train a single A.I system.

Specialization:

But as venture firms double down on their deal making, there is less appetite for investing in general A.I. systems designed to do everything, because that work is dominated by established companies like OpenAI and Google. Instead, they are starting to focus on A.I. that does specific tasks, like Ribbon, a company that does A.I. for job interviews, and Eleos Health, which creates A.I. to record and summarize doctor visits.

And then there’s Columbus:

Tech companies acknowledge that they may be overestimating A.I.’s potential. But even if the technology falls short, many executives and investors believe, the investments they’re making now will be worth it.

“Christopher Columbus thought he was headed to the Orient, and he ended up in the Caribbean,” said Mr. Nicholson of Page One Ventures. “He did not get to where he thought he was going, but he still got to a place that was highly valuable.”

That’s true, but if the “highly valuable” new territory is to be exploited, it’s going to require new ideas and new ideas ARE just what ISN’T being cultivated in this spending spree.

Meanwhile, around the corner, Mike Isaac and Cade Metz report on Mark Zuckerberg’s “catch-up” spending spree, motived by the fear that Meta has fallen behind in the race for “superintelligence”. He’s offering unprecedented compensation packages, some as high as $100 million. The final paragraph:

“In Silicon Valley, you hear a lot of talk about the 10x engineer,” said Amjad Masad, the chief executive of the A.I. start-up Replit, using a term for extremely productive developers. “Think of some of these A.I. researchers as 1,000x engineers. If you can add one person who can change the trajectory of your entire company, it’s worth it.”

A view from the table top

Ross Douthat interviews Peter Thiel, who is clueless

Ross Douthat, Peter Thiel and the Antichrist, NYtimes, June 26, 2025.

They start out with economic stagnation:

Douthat: So I want to start by taking you back in time about 13 or 14 years. You wrote an essay for National Review, the conservative magazine, called “The End of the Future.” And basically, the argument in that essay was that the dynamic, fast-paced, ever-changing modern world was just not nearly as dynamic as people thought, and that actually, we’d entered a period of technological stagnation. That digital life was a breakthrough, but not as big a breakthrough as people had hoped, and that the world was stuck, basically.

Thiel: Yes.

Douthat: You weren’t the only person to make arguments like this, but it had a special potency coming from you because you were a Silicon Valley insider who had gotten rich in the digital revolution.

So I’m curious: In 2025, do you think that diagnosis still holds?

Thiel: Yes. I still broadly believe in the stagnation thesis. It was never an absolute thesis. The claim was not that we were absolutely, completely stuck; it was in some ways a claim about how the velocity had slowed. It wasn’t zero, but 1750 to 1970 — 200-plus years — were periods of accelerating change. We were relentlessly moving faster: The ships were faster, the railroads were faster, the cars were faster, the planes were faster. It culminates in the Concorde and the Apollo missions. But then, in all sorts of dimensions, things had slowed.

I always made an exception for the world of bits, so we had computers and software and internet and mobile internet. And then the last 10 to 15 years you had crypto and the A.I. revolution, which I think is in some sense pretty big. But the question is: Is it enough to really get out of this generalized sense of stagnation?

The conversation goes on in that vein, and then:

Thiel: Well, I think there are deep reasons the stagnation happened. There are always three questions you ask about history: What actually happened? And then you have another question : What should be done about it? But there’s also this intermediate question: Why did it happen?

People ran out of ideas. I think, to some extent, the institutions degraded and became risk averse, and some of these cultural transformations we can describe. But then I think to some extent people also had some very legitimate worries about the future, where if we continued to have accelerating progress, were you accelerating toward environmental apocalypse or nuclear apocalypse or things like that?

But I think if we don’t find a way back to the future, I do think that society — I don’t know. It unravels, it doesn’t work.

The middle class — I would define the middle class as the people who expect their kids to do better than themselves. And when that expectation collapses, we no longer have a middle-class society. Maybe there’s some way you can have a feudal society in which things are always static and stuck, or maybe there’s some way you can ship to some radically different society. But it’s not the way the Western world, it’s not the way the United States has functioned for the first 200 years of its existence.

Two things: 1) Back in the 1990s my friend Abbe Mowshowitz was talking about virtual feudalism, which is where he saw us headed. He hired me to ghost an article about that but, alas, he was unable to publish it, so I eventually posted it as one of my working papers: Virtual Feudalism in the Twenty-First Century.

2) I sorta' kinda' agree with Thiel about being stuck. But I think about history in a very different way. I think in terms of cultural evolution, specifically, the theory of cultural ranks that David Hays and I sketched out back in the 1990s. [Here's a brief guide: Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society.] At the moment we're stuck "treading water," as it were, in Rank 4, but haven't made it to the next level. Just what that next level will turn out to be, that's not at all clear, & that's where I talk about the Fourth Arena, thus: Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted. When I say that Thiel is clueless, that's what I'm talking about; he has no sense of cultural evolution, of a succession of cognitive architectures, or the mind itself, taken collectively, as a driving force in history.

Back to the conversation, and Homo economicus:

Douthat: So you think that ordinary people won’t accept stagnation in the end? That they will rebel and pull things down around them in the course of that rebellion?

Thiel: They may rebel. Or maybe our institutions don’t work, since all of our institutions are predicated on growth.

Douthat: Our budgets are certainly predicated on growth.

Is that a law of nature, or a contingent matter of historical circumstance?

On the nexus of Silicon Valley, stagnation, and Trump:

Douthat: What did Trump do in his first term that you felt was anti-decadent or anti-stagnation? If anything — maybe the answer’s nothing.

Thiel: I think it took longer and it was slower than I would’ve liked, but we have gotten to the place where a lot of people think something’s gone wrong. And that was not the conversation I was having in 2012 to 2014. I had a debate with Eric Schmidt in 2012 and Marc Andreessen in 2013 and Bezos in 2014.

I was on “There’s a stagnation problem,” and all three of them were versions of “Everything’s going great.” And I think at least those three people have, to varying degrees, updated and adjusted. Silicon Valley’s adjusted.

Douthat: And Silicon Valley, though, has more than adjusted ——

Thiel: On the stagnation question.

Douthat: Right. But a big part of Silicon Valley ended up going in for Trump in 2024 — including, obviously, most famously, Elon Musk.

Thiel: Yeah. And this is deeply linked to the stagnation issue, in my telling. These things are always super complicated, but my telling is — and again, I’m so hesitant to speak for all these people — but someone like Mark Zuckerberg, or Facebook, Meta, in some ways I don’t think he was very ideological. He didn’t think this stuff through that much. The default was to be liberal, and it was always: If the liberalism isn’t working, what do you do? And for year after year after year, it was: You do more. If something doesn’t work, you just need to do more of it. You up the dose and you up the dose and you spend hundreds of millions of dollars and you go completely woke and everybody hates you.

And at some point, it’s like: OK, maybe this isn’t working.

On Mars, AI, and progress, with a conversation between Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis (CEO of DeepMind):

Thiel: Yeah. And the rough conversation was Demis telling Elon: I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m building a superhuman A.I.

And Elon responds to Demis: Well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I am turning us into interplanetary species. And then Demis said: Well, you know my A.I. will be able to follow you to Mars. And then Elon went quiet. But in my telling of the history, it took years for that to really hit Elon. It took him until 2024 to process it.

Douthat: But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe in Mars. It just means that he decided he had to win some battle over budget deficits or wokeness to get to Mars.

Thiel: Yeah, but what does Mars mean?

Douthat: What does Mars mean?

Thiel: Well, is it just a scientific project? Or is it like a Heinlein, the moon as a libertarian paradise or something like this?

Douthat: A vision of a new society. Populated by many, many people descended from Elon Musk.

Thiel: Well, I don’t know if it was concretized that specifically, but if you concretize things, then maybe you realize that Mars is supposed to be more than a science project. It’s supposed to be a political project. And then when you concretize it, you have to start thinking through: Well, the woke A.I. will follow you, the socialist government will follow you. And then maybe you have to do something other than just going to Mars.

Douthat: So the woke A.I., artificial intelligence, seems like, one, if we’re still stagnant, it’s the biggest exception to the place where there’s been remarkable progress — surprising, to many people, progress.

It’s also the place — we were just talking about politics — where the Trump administration is, I think, to a large degree, giving A.I. investors a lot of what they wanted in terms of both stepping back and doing public-private partnerships. So it’s a zone of progress and governmental engagement.

And you are an investor in A.I. What do you think you’re investing in?

Thiel: Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of layers to this. One question we can frame is: Just how big a thing do I think A.I. is? And my stupid answer is: It’s more than a nothing burger, and it’s less than the total transformation of our society. My place holder is that it’s roughly on the scale of the internet in the late ’90s. I’m not sure it’s enough to really end the stagnation. It might be enough to create some great companies. And the internet added maybe a few percentage points to the G.D.P., maybe 1 percent to G.D.P. growth every year for 10, 15 years. It added some to productivity. So that’s roughly my place holder for A.I.

It’s the only thing we have. It’s a little bit unhealthy that it’s so unbalanced. This is the only thing we have. I’d like to have more multidimensional progress. I’d like us to be going to Mars. I’d like us to be having cures for dementia. If all we have is A.I., I will take it. There are risks with it. Obviously, there are dangers with this technology. But there are also ——

Now that was interesting, very interesting, Mars as a political project. Hmmmm. And then they launch into a conversation about smart people:

Thiel: But I share your intuition because I think we’ve had a lot of smart people and things have been stuck for other reasons. And so maybe the problems are unsolvable, which is the pessimistic view. Maybe there is no cure for dementia at all, and it’s a deeply unsolvable problem. There’s no cure for mortality. Maybe it’s an unsolvable problem.

Or maybe it’s these cultural things. So it’s not the individually smart person, but it’s how this fits into our society. Do we tolerate heterodox smart people? Maybe you need heterodox smart people to do crazy experiments. And if the A.I. is just conventionally smart, if we define wokeness — again, wokeness is too ideological — but if you just define it as conformist, maybe that’s not the smartness that’s going to make a difference.

I note that smart people aren't going to get anywhere if they're working with the wrong ideas. There were a lot of smart people in the 17th century, but they didn't have radios and airplanes. It's not that they weren't smart enough, rather, the intellectual foundations weren't there for them to work from.

And then they veer off into transhumanism and Christianity and cryonics and and ... the Antichrist? That's where I get off the bus, but you might find it interesting.

Follow the woman in the red dress

Male and Female book genres

Which book genres are men or women more likely to leave reviews for?

On Goodreads, the most masculine genre is philosophy, whereas the most feminine one is historical romance.

I wonder what Khamenei is reading! https://t.co/cM7W4DsqqG pic.twitter.com/8V5Wznwtmq

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) June 19, 2025

H/t Tyler Cowen. 

The upset in New York City

Bernie would have beaten the Clinton machine in 2016 had the DNC (in Liz Warren's words) not "rigged" the election.

Zohran just did that to the Cuomos.

Economic populism is the path for Dems, but instead they tried to destroy both because their donor base demands corporatism.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 25, 2025

Check out this post from two days ago: The New York Times interviews Andrew Schulz [“America’s Foremost Political Journalist”]. Where it says:

the Democrats are like tied to the same you know uh corporations that are funding the Republicans
and they can’t actually push back against those corporations because they get so much funding from them [...]
so what they have to do is they made it an identity politics issue

A festival of tulips

Zohran Mamdani emerges out of the scrum of the NYC Democratic primary for mayor

Liam Stack, A New Political Star Emerges Out of a Fractured Democratic Party, NYTimes, June 25, 2025.

The national Democratic establishment on Tuesday night struggled to absorb the startling ascent of a democratic socialist in New York City who embraced a progressive economic agenda and diverged from the party’s dominant position on the Middle East.

As elections go, Tuesday’s party primary for mayor was a thunderbolt: New York voters turned away from a well-funded familiar face and famous name, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, and in doing so made a generational and ideological break with the party’s mainstream. They turned to a 33-year-old, three-term state assemblyman, Zohran Mamdani, who ran on an optimistic message about affordability and the rising cost of living that has eluded many national Democrats.

What became vividly clear on Tuesday, as votes were counted across the racially and economically diverse neighborhoods of New York, was that Mr. Mamdani had generated excitement among some — though not all — of the traditional pillars of winning Democratic voter coalitions.

Democratic leaders badly want to win over young voters and minority groups in the coming 2026 and 2028 elections — two groups they have struggled to mobilize since the Obama era — but they also need moderate Democrats and independents who often recoil from far-left positions. [...]

That Mr. Mamdani had such success while running on a far-left agenda, including positions that once were politically risky in New York — like describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and calling for new taxes on business — may challenge the boundaries of party orthodoxy and unnerve national Democratic leaders.

Does democratic socialism have a chance?

The enthusiasm that Mr. Mamdani generated among a swath of New Yorkers looking for fresh leadership called to mind the insurgent campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential race and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her upset victory in a 2018 House primary.

All three are democratic socialists, a once fringe movement popularized by Mr. Sanders that calls for reining in the excesses of capitalism and curbing the power of the wealthy.

Mr. Sanders and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom endorsed Mr. Mamdani, remain popular progressive figures but have had only limited impact on changing the Democratic Party’s agenda and messaging.

A key question is how the Democratic donor class and business community, which was already unsettled by Mr. Mamdani’s rise, will react to his apparent victory. Business leaders may flock to his rivals in the general election in November, or try to use super PACs to stop him.

The Democratice party establishment didn't do so well:

As recently as last month, few people expected Mr. Mamdani to beat Mr. Cuomo, 67, who benefited from near universal name recognition, a deep war chest, and the endorsement of party heavyweights like former President Bill Clinton.

But the embrace of the party establishment may have done Mr. Cuomo no favors in a race that appeared to be marked by a deep hunger for change.

“Voters are not happy with the national party establishment and want to focus on building a movement,” said Basil Smikle, a professor at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies. “I think that’s key here. Mamdani created a movement around his candidacy.”

There's more at the link.

Self-Verification Limits of LLMs

Kaya Stechly, Karthik Valmeekam, Subbarao Kambhampati, On the Self-Verification Limitations of Large Language Models on Reasoning and Planning Tasks, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.08115.

Abstract: There has been considerable divergence of opinion on the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While the initial optimism that reasoning might emerge automatically with scale has been tempered thanks to a slew of counterexamples--ranging from multiplication to simple planning--there persists a wide spread belief that LLMs can self-critique and improve their own solutions in an iterative fashion. This belief seemingly rests on the assumption that verification of correctness should be easier than generation--a rather classical argument from computational complexity--which should be irrelevant to LLMs to the extent that what they are doing is approximate retrieval. In this paper, we set out to systematically investigate the effectiveness of iterative prompting in the context of reasoning and planning. We present a principled empirical study of the performance of GPT-4 in three domains: Game of 24, Graph Coloring, and STRIPS planning. We experiment both with the model critiquing its own answers and with an external correct reasoner verifying proposed solutions. In each case, we analyze whether the content of criticisms actually affects bottom line performance, and whether we can ablate elements of the augmented system without losing performance. We observe significant performance collapse with self-critique and significant performance gains with sound external verification. We also note that merely re-prompting with a sound verifier maintains most of the benefits of more involved setups.

Tal Wilkenfeld sings the National Anthem

I didn't know what to expect, and of course the sight of someone with a guitar-shaped instrument made me think of Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix, Wilkenfeld is not. But she is astounding in her own way, not the least in the way she recomposes the melody, pitch-shifting the line to fit her voice.

Charlie Chaplin comments on the dignity of work

Modern Times, 1936 (Wikipedia):

Modern Times is a 1936 American part-talkie comedy film produced, written and directed by Charlie Chaplin. In Chaplin's last performance as the iconic Little Tramp, his character struggles to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film also stars Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford and Chester Conklin.

Modern Times has won many awards and honors, and is widely considered one of the greatest films ever. It was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

How the movie begins:

The Tramp works on an assembly line, where he suffers greatly due to the stress and pace of the repetitive work. He eventually suffers a nervous breakdown and runs amok, getting stuck within a machine and throwing the factory into chaos; he is then sent to the hospital. Following his recovery, the now-unemployed Tramp is mistakenly arrested in a Communist demonstration. In jail, he accidentally ingests smuggled cocaine, and in his subsequent delirium, he avoids being put back in his cell. When he returns, he stumbles upon a jailbreak and knocks the convicts unconscious for which he is hailed as a hero and given special treatment. When he is informed that he will soon be released due to his heroic actions, he argues unsuccessfully that he prefers life in jail.

St. James Infirmary Blues [Yo-Yo Ma & The Silkroad Ensemble]

Surely we get to choose what AI technology we want to implement

Tim Wu, A ‘White-Collar Blood Bath’ Doesn’t Have to Be Our Fate, NYTimes, June 24, 2025.

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the A.I. company Anthropic, recently predicted that half of entry-level positions in fields like law, consulting and finance could meet this fate in just a few years. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, has predicted that A.I. will replace many of Meta’s programmers within the next year or two.

Optimists push back with a different prediction, forecasting that A.I. won’t replace white-collar workers but will rather serve as a tool that makes them more productive. Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the computer chip maker Nvidia, has argued that “you’re not going to lose your job to an A.I., but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses A.I.”

Both sides in this debate are making the same mistake: They treat the question as one of fate rather than choice. Instead of asking which future is coming, we should be asking which future we want: one in which humans are replaced or only augmented?

Right! We get to choose.

The distinction between augmentation and replacement can be subtle. Any technology — from the stone ax onward — replaces some human work in the course of augmenting it. The key question is whether the tool enhances our abilities while still leaving us in control of how to use it. As Steve Jobs once put it, a computer can be “a bicycle of the mind.” Just as a word processor allows writers to write without having to laboriously correct and retype manuscripts, so too A.I. should help humans devote ourselves to our most significant and interesting challenges. [...]

The augmentation approach to A.I. isn’t just about preserving jobs (though that’s important, too). It’s also about keeping human interests central to our future. That may seem like an obvious goal, yet it is alarmingly easy to lose sight of. All systems are vulnerable to mission drift — when they gradually, often imperceptibly diverge from their original purpose — but the risk is compounded if we allow autonomous A.I. systems to run the show.

Rebuilding the middle class:

Augmentation is not any kind of panacea: In yielding greater efficiencies, it will lead to job loss. But that was also true of augmenting technologies like the tractor and the personal computer, innovations that were worth their disruptive trade-offs.

There’s a world of difference between productivity gains and a systematic plan of industry-eliminating unemployment. Indeed, as the economist David Autor argues, A.I., done right, could help rebuild the middle class by giving a broader range of workers access to expertise such as software coding that is currently concentrated among higher-skilled workers. It all depends on how the technology is implemented.

There's more at the link.