Tuesday, May 5, 2026
Pretty Woman [Media Notes 179]
I’ve seen Pretty Woman (1990) at least three times, once when it came out, once before on streaming, and just last night. I like it. It’s a nice romantic comedy and something of a fairy tale, but that’s OK, I suppose.
It is very much a story of its time. Richard Gere plays a corporate raider, Edward Lewis, but not one so ruthless as Michael Douglas playing Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987). Julia Roberts plays a Hollywood street walker, Vivian Wood. Lewis picks her up, because he knows where his hotel is, but also because she seems to know something about the car he’s borrowed from his lawyer (a Lotus), and ends up engaging her for the week. She accompanies him to several business meetings, but also to a night at the opera. They fall in love, of course; he relents on the deal he’s been chasing; and she goes back to New York with him where, we are to presume, they live happily ever after.
The world, of course, is not like that, not quite. And I doubt that anyone over twenty who saw the movie believes that. But it’s a nice alternative to the self-glorifying Gordon Gekko. I can even believe that Gordon Gekko would have liked it, or if not Gekko himself, perhaps his understudy, Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen). Corporate raider types are not long on self-knowledge, no more than today’s Silicon Valley tech bros, and so are as vulnerable to fairly tales as to tales of Viking raiders.
And perhaps that’s why I like it. It’s as though Gordon Gekko is so reprehensible in his thralldom to Homo economicus that Hollywood just had to show us an antidote. It picked a perennial, the Hooker with a Heart of Gold, disguised, in this case, as a hooker who knows how to drive a stick shift and carries a rainbow assortment of condoms in her thigh high boots. Which is to say, the film acknowledges that we need some kind of Homo ludens alternative, even one that includes a bunch of rich folks stomping divots on a polo field, not to mention that Mr. Lewis betrays his soulfulness by noodling on the lounge piano in the wee hours of the morning.
The movie resonated with the public and made Julia Roberts a star. From the Wikipedia entry:
Pretty Woman received mixed reviews from critics upon release, but widespread praise was directed towards Roberts' performance and her chemistry with Gere. It had the highest number of ticket sales in the US ever for a romantic comedy, with Box Office Mojo listing it as the number-one romantic comedy by the highest estimated domestic tickets sold at 42,176,400, slightly ahead of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) at 41,419,500 tickets. The film grossed US$463.4 million worldwide and at the time of its release, was the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, behind only E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ($701 million at the time), Star Wars ($530 million at the time), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ($474 million at the time), and Jaws ($470 million at the time). It was also the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time (surpassing Rain Man) until it was surpassed by Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991, but remained the highest-grossing R-rated film released by Walt Disney Studios (surpassing Cocktail), holding the record for 34 years until Marvel Studios' Deadpool & Wolverine surpassed it in 2024.
From critic snippets Wikipedia:
Pretty Woman received mixed reviews from critics, with positive reviews praising the stars' chemistry and the dialogue. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 64% based on 78 reviews. The website's critical consensus states, "Pretty Woman may be a yuppie fantasy, but the film's slick comedy, soundtrack, and casting can overcome misgivings." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 51 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.
The film's detractors criticized the overuse of the "hooker with a heart of gold" trope.[14] Others opined that the film sugarcoats the realities of sex work. [...]
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "D," saying it "starts out as a neo-Pygmalion comedy" and becomes a "plastic screwball soap opera", with the "kinds of characters who exist nowhere but in the minds of callowly manipulative Hollywood screenwriters". Gleiberman conceded that with the film's "tough-hooker heroine, it can work as a feminist version of an upscale princess fantasy." [...]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave a positive review, praising how the film is about "a particularly romantic kind of love, the sort you hardly see in the movies these days". He added it "protects its fragile love story in the midst of cynicism and compromise. The performances are critical for that purpose. Gere plays new notes here; his swagger is gone, and he's more tentative, proper, even shy. Roberts does an interesting thing; she gives her character an irrepressibly bouncy sense of humor and then lets her spend the movie trying to repress it. [...]
The New York Times' Janet Maslin wrote: "Despite this quintessentially late 80's outlook, and despite a covetousness and underlying misogyny [...] 'Pretty Woman' manages to be giddy, lighthearted escapism much of the time. [...]
Carina Chocano of The New York Times said the movie "wasn't a love story, it was a money story. Its logic depended on a disconnect between character and narrative, between image and meaning, between money and value, and that made it not cluelessly traditional but thoroughly postmodern." In a 2019 interview, Roberts expressed uncertainty over whether the film could be made today due to its controversial premise, commenting, "So many things you could poke a hole in, but I don't think it takes away from people being able to enjoy it".
I’m with Ebert on this one.
Monday, May 4, 2026
Beyond Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Diverse Thoughts on Religion
New working paper. Title above, link, abstract, contents, and introduction below.
Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/166252443/Beyond_Wittgensteins_Ladder_Diverse_Thoughts_on_Religion
Abstract: First, a record of thoughts and incidents in the author’s life which span a field of religious application and inquiry. Then a series of dialogs with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, which probe the limits of human thought and experience, asserting a metaphorical correspondence between a succinct assertion of Christian doctrine and a statement about man’s place in the cosmos from Neil deGrasse Tyson and deriving theological assertions therefrom, and a look at the continuum between belief and disbelief eventuating in idea that the Silicon Valley conception of A.I. is idolatrous.
Contents
Introduction: Am I becoming religious? It feels weird to think so. 2
Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? 5
What Cannot Be Spoken 18
From the Baby Jesus to Neil deGrasse Tyson 21
Effing the ineffable 25
From Atheism to Idolatry 32
Introduction: Am I becoming religious? It feels weird to think so.
The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.
If, a decade ago, you’d told me that one day I would attend church services regularly, I’d have said, “No way.” If you’d asked me that a year ago, my answer would have been the same. Yet here I am, attending All Saints Episcopal in Hoboken. It’s only been three months, but that’s already more than I’ve attended a church service the entire time from my early teens up through the end of last year – the Sunday Experience (pp. 7 ff.) at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s doesn’t count since that didn’t happen in a church, not so important, and was not grounded in any religious doctrine, more to the point. I’ve just recently posted comments in a discussion of Christianity at the Brainstorms online community. And then we have the articles making up the rest of this document, at article posted to 3 Quarks Daily, “Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?” and several posts from my New Savanna blog.
To be honest, just earlier today I felt twinges of uncertainty at the possibility that people might think of me as being religious? Really? Nor have I ever been one of those people who presents themselves as spiritual, but not conventionally religious. I just haven’t thought of myself in those terms, though I must admit that I’d recently been flirting with the idea that I’m a secular mystic. That never seemed quite right to me, but it wasn’t quite wrong either.
Why did I decide to start attending All Saints? I decided that I needed to meet people, to be among others in a way that isn’t, for example, a bowling league, a reading group, a musical group, or a neighborhood association. I am I looking for, you know, fellowship?
When I’m sitting there in the nave of All Saints I do wonder what others might think of me. I don’t participate in all the standing and sitting that an Episcopal service entails, nor do I recite the Nicene Creed, nor take communion (on Easter, with larger than usual attendance, I noticed another person, a woman, who didn’t take communion). But no one has said anything. I do think such things while sitting there. But I also think about how old these stories are, these Biblical stories, and how remarkable it is that some many people over the years have organized themselves around these stories. And just WHAT do the others here actually believe? I suspect the range is wide.
That’s one thing. But there’s something else, something that I’ve only just realized in the last week or so. There’s AI, artificial intelligence. Oh, I’ve known about AI most of my adult life and I’ve done research in a kindred discipline, computational linguistics. I’m currently engaged in research about LLMs (large language models) and have blogging a lot about AI and LLMs since the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022. I’m even working on a general-audience book about it: Play: How to Stay Human in the A.I. Revolution. But I’ve only just now realized that that is probably what’s behind my interest in matters religious.
It’s clear that A.I. poses profound philosophical problems and will force us to restructure our entire ontology. That effort is drawing me into religious waters. For it seems to me that the view of A.I. that dominates Silicon Valley is idolatrous, as I bring up later in this document (pp. 37 ff.). Or consider this passage from a doctrinal note by Pope Francis:
105. However, the presumption of substituting God for an artifact of human making is idolatry, a practice Scripture explicitly warns against (e.g., Ex. 20:4; 32:1-5; 34:17). Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that “have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can “speak,” or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work.
I’m not at all sure that I want to endorse those words – in some sense I’m pretty sure that I do not – but something like that in a way that I cannot now specify, that seems plausible to me.
I suppose, then, that this is where I am, between those words of the Pope and a need for fellowship. Where I’ll do, I won’t know until I move along.
* * * * *
Here’s what’s in the rest of this document. Except for the illustrations, the first of these pieces is completely mine. The rest involve a dialog with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot.
Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? – Incidents, thoughts, vignettes, events from my life, from age six to yesterday, all somehow bearing on religious belief and experience.
What Cannot Be Spoken – Comments about Wittgenstein’s framing of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
From the Baby Jesus to Neil deGrasse Tyson – The possibility of constructing a theological argument spanning the conceptual distance between a cosmological belief I entertained as a young child and an observation Neil deGrasse Tyson made about man’s position in the cosmos.
Effing the ineffable – About the many ways the world exceeds human language and experience. As Claude observes: “The mystic, the philosopher of language, and the cosmologist end up at adjacent campsites, each having climbed a different face of the same mountain. None of them can quite describe the view.”
From Atheism to Idolatry – In a way, this is about the boundaries of religious discourse. It also suggests that Silicon Valley doctrine about artificial intelligence is idolatrous.
Is Laufey jazz? [cultural hybridization]
YouTube:
Laufey is the world's most famous living jazz musician (according to Spotify streams). What does that mean for jazz?
A very interesting and well-informed post about cultural hybridization.
Our (grim) yuppy legacy [the triumph of Homo economicus]
Dylan Gottlieb, How Yuppies Changed America, NYTimes, May 4, 2026.
So much of what we take for granted today — from our meritocratic rat race to our gentrified neighborhoods to our culture of overwork, fitness training and foodie obsession — was born in the yuppie-made 1980s. In that moment, they fashioned a bargain that we are still living with: An increasingly diverse professional class signed up for a life of hard-won affluence, at the cost of deep inequality for everyone else.
Yuppies were called into being by the forces that were remaking the economy in the 1980s. After the Carter and Reagan administrations loosened the regulations governing Wall Street, finance began to generate a greater share of profits than manufacturing or services. Investment banks and law firms now shaped the fates of the corporations they had once served. As America hitched its fortunes to finance, those banks and firms began to chop up, spin off, merge, offshore or otherwise squeeze short-term value out of the nation’s legacy corporations. But to do it, they needed legions of employees to handle the grunt work: the proofreading, drafting and document review that kept the takeover machinery in motion.
o find those employees, recruiters flooded the campuses of America’s elite universities. In 1976, less than 5 percent of surveyed seniors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School were headed to Wall Street for investment banking. By 1987, it was one in three. At Yale, 40 percent of the entire graduating class of 1986 applied to work at the investment bank First Boston.
High-level grunt work:
Once they were hired, aspiring yuppies were expected to work more hours, often on smaller and less intellectually demanding piecework. They were also given less meaningful training, all for narrower chances of promotion to partner. As the professional world was beginning to diversify, it became an increasingly miserable place to work. This was no accident: The legal and financial bosses who were commanding these diverse armies of young professionals sought to extract maximum value out of their labor.
This early wave of yuppies contains the origins of our present-day meritocratic competition, which turned college admissions into something akin to “The Hunger Games.”
Grunt work all the time in everything:
On the job, newly minted yuppies were also sold a particular story: Upward mobility was open to anyone with the right degree and the right work ethic. [...]
That dogged pursuit of the strenuous life extended from the workplace into yuppies’ leisure time. They developed a passion for road races like the New York City Marathon. This wasn’t the casual jogging that countercultural types had embraced in the late 1960s. It was distance running, and it required the same self-control and long-range planning that characterized yuppie careers. [...
The yuppies also helped forge our modern foodie culture: one that required wealth but also the cosmopolitanism to know that, say, balsamic vinegar, sun-dried tomatoes and Manchego cheese were foods worth savoring.]
They consumed the Democratic Party:
Yuppies also redrew our political map. They helped to shift the Democratic Party away from the unions, Black Americans and urban bosses of the New Deal coalition and toward the interests of metropolitan professionals. During the 1980s, a new generation of politicians and donors — people like Gary Hart, Chuck Schumer and Bruce Wasserstein — remade liberalism for the postindustrial era. The meritocratic ethos of the trading floor, they reasoned, should govern society at large. Innovation, not regulation or redistribution, would drive growth. And the sclerotic regulatory state was only hampering it. What was needed instead was a nimbler government that oversaw a technology-heavy economy, with yuppies at the vanguard.
Hello inequality my old friend:
The rise of the yuppie was not without its costs. The upper echelons of our society became more inclusive in terms of race, ethnicity and gender — but only for those who ran a gantlet of educational and professional challenges on their way to the top. By admitting women and members of racial minorities, the new yuppie elite helped obscure the skyrocketing economic inequality that would soon become a central fact of American life. Since the 1980s, upwardly mobile yuppies have left blue-collar, pink-collar and less-educated service workers further and further behind.
Resentment sets in:
After decades sitting atop this brutal hierarchy, yuppies and their arrogance bred new resentments. In the 2010s, a brand of populist conservatism opposed nearly every tenet of the yuppie dream, from racial and gender diversity to educational meritocracy to frictionless finance and globalization to gourmet culture and the very idea of urban living itself.
This response was unsurprising given the real harm done by Wall Street firms to blue-collar America. But the wounds were as much psychic as they were economic. Racial grievance gave the movement its power. So did geographic and class-based resentment of the cosmopolitan elite that yuppies embodied. After all, locally rich but less educated white people — owners of car dealerships and construction companies across the South and Midwest — were among the fiercest populist conservatives.
And this set the stage for Donald Trump.
Today, the class of people once known as yuppies are both everywhere and under threat. The Trump administration’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion and affirmative action might damage the recruiting pipeline that has conveyed women and members of racial minorities into the professions. Employers will have to rely on more informal and more discriminatory forms of hiring: personal connections, nepotism and cultural “fit,” all of which tend to favor the privileged. Our professional class may shrink, welcoming only the sons and daughters of the already rich. [...]
What’s more, the rollout of A.I. threatens to decimate entry-level professionals [...] Even a moderately secure upper-middle-class lifestyle might soon be out of reach.
The upshot:
Yuppies were the first class of young people to be drawn into the sweatshop of the meritocracy. Now is the time to rethink the bargain they made, which offered diversification and affluence at the cost of exploitation and broader inequality. If history teaches anything, it is that if a class can be made, it can also be unmade.
There's more at the link.
Sunday, May 3, 2026
The White House endorses research on psychedelics
Andrew Jacobs, A Long, Strange Trip: How the G.O.P. Came to Embrace Psychedelic Drugs, NYTimes, May 3, 2026.
Mindbending may be just the word to describe the Oval Office ceremony on April 18, when President Trump ordered federal agencies to speed up research into the potential therapeutic uses of illegal psychedelic compounds like LSD, peyote and MDMA.
Here was a law-and-order Republican and lifelong teetotaler championing the hallucinogenic substances that a previous Republican president, Richard Nixon, had condemned as “public enemy No. 1.” [...]
Mr. Trump’s bold efforts to soften the federal government’s stance on certain illegal drugs have been head-spinning — last month, the Justice Department, at the president’s behest, loosened restrictions on medical marijuana, too.
But experts in the field are not entirely surprised.
They note a steady easing of public opposition to psychedelics in recent years, much of it shaped by research that has chipped away at the stigma by demonstrating the drugs’ potential to treat intractable mental health conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and substance abuse.
There's much more at the link.
Perhaps AI won’t suck up all the jobs
Ezra Klein, Why the A.I. Job Apocalypse (Probably) Won’t Happen, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.
Economists, I’ve found, are quite skeptical that mass joblessness is on the horizon. In “What Will Be Scarce?,” Alex Imas, an economist at the University of Chicago, tries to clarify the mistake most A.I. discourse, in his view, makes. “The answer to any question about the future economics of advanced A.I. begins with identifying what becomes scarce,” Imas writes.
For most of human history, calories were scarce. Our energy went into finding or growing food. Agriculture steadily made food more plentiful and goods became scarce. Then goods were scarce; hand-me-down clothes were common and tools were expensive. Innovations in technology and manufacturing made goods cheaper. Then, technical knowledge became scarce: Doctors, lawyers and software engineers are paid high salaries because of the rarity of what they know. The fear is that A.I. will make knowledge plentiful; that it will turn the fruits of learning into a commodity as surely as manufacturing turned clothing into a commodity and industrial agriculture made strawberries commonplace.
But something is always scarce. People are looking at the economy as it exists and asking which tasks A.I. can do; they should be asking which jobs people won’t want A.I. doing, or which services A.I. will make us want more of.
Here is a poetic finding from econometrics: As the rich get richer, they want more from other humans, not less. They “shift their spending toward goods and services where the human element, the experience or the social meaning matters more,” Imas writes. They seek out clothing with a story, food with a provenance, doctors who make house calls, therapists who make them feel seen, tutors who know their children and personal trainers who work around their injuries. This, Imas says, is “the relational sector” of the economy, and it will explode. Instead of so many human beings working with computers, they will work with other human beings.
There's more at the link.
Presiding over a declining America, Trump hastens the descent
Two from today's (May 3, 2026) New York Times. First, China is on the rise and ready to move beyond America. Then we have the decline of the American empire.
China Rising
Jacob Dreyer, Trump Is Coming to a China That Has Moved On, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.
Deng Xiaoping, the former Chinese leader, once said: “If China wants to be rich and strong, it needs America.” But this isn’t the same country that once looked to a U.S. president’s visit as a moment of global validation. It is a country where the realization has dawned that it may have learned all it can from America and has begun to chart its own course.
This was bound to happen as China grew stronger and richer. But Mr. Trump has accelerated this shift. China’s people have watched with a mix of fascination and revulsion as the president — through his abortive tariff wars, the war with Iran and callow allegiance to financial markets — has completed America’s transformation from a model to emulate to a troublesome distraction to be managed. With sinking approval ratings and potential losses awaiting in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump will arrive in Beijing a more diminished figure in Chinese eyes than perhaps any visiting U.S. president. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
This matters, both for the visit itself and for the future of the relationship between the two countries. China’s leaders, aware of Mr. Trump’s weakness and perfidy, are unlikely to strike any meaningful bargains with him. His actions strengthen China’s Communist-ruled system at home by making it look superior by comparison.
Many Chinese people increasingly view the United States less as the lodestar it once was and more as a cautionary tale. Popular sentiment in China is of course state-managed, but it resonates because it mirrors what the Chinese see for themselves. I hear it in daily conversations: Chinese friends who return from America with tales of homelessness, dilapidation and political rancor, which contrast sharply with China’s clean and safe cities, gleaming infrastructure and political stability.
After a couple of paragraphs acknowledging that many Chinese “worry that China isn’t ready to fill [America’s] shoes” in the world and acknowledging that “China, after all, has its own problems,” Dreyer moves on:
Still, there is a clear sense about the need to move past America. Mr. Trump will be gone in two years, but Mr. Xi can rule for as long as he wants and has laid out ambitious plans that are likely to survive him. Those plans include a China that is at the center of new types of energy, the use of data and technologies like artificial intelligence for urban management, the delivery of public services, cheaper health care and better access to education. Chinese people also see that the world is increasingly open to adopting Chinese technology, products, investment and other solutions, maybe even its governance ideas.
There's more at the link.
An Empire in Decline
Christopher Caldwell, America Is Officially an Empire in Decline, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.
The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.
A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”
Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”
And yet here we are, ankle-deep in a Middle Eastern quagmire, one that Trump himself laid the groundwork for when he withdrew from Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka JCPOA) in his first term. After two paragraphs in which Caldwell sketches out how Netanyahu suckered Trump into this quagmire, Caldwell has a paragraph in which he sketches out a parallel “with Britain a century ago: deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent.” He concludes:
Mr. Trump was the perfect candidate for Americans who suspected something had gone wrong with their elites. His argument, basically, was that American-led globalism was so beneficial to politicians that once in power, they would defend it even against their voters, no matter what they said while campaigning. Events, alas, have proved him right.
Suckered again.
Saturday, May 2, 2026
Social learning for food among cockatoos
Kate Golembiewski, What’s Safe to Eat? Birds of a Feather Learn Together, NYTimes, May 2, 2026.
By watching their peers, dolphins learn to capture fish in empty conch shells, then ferry the shells up to the water’s surface in order to eat. Octopuses can master experimental tasks by watching their tankmates in the laboratory. Crows follow the cues of others in their flock to attack specific humans who have harassed fellow crows in the past.
Scientists call it “social learning,” and it essentially means monkey see, monkey do, an adage that turns out to apply to many animals beyond just primates. Now, a study of Australia’s sulfur-crested cockatoos shows that the birds employ social learning to understand whether unfamiliar foods are safe to eat.
In more forested areas of the cockatoos’ native range in Australia, New Guinea, and Indonesia, these mohawked parrots eat plant roots, seeds, fruits and insect larvae. But the birds have learned to thrive in urban environments. “They’re everywhere in Sydney,” said Julia Penndorf, a behavioral ecologist and lead author of the study in PLOS Biology, who encountered the birds as a postdoctoral researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra.
In urban areas, the birds have expanded their diets to include nonnative plants and nuts, including almonds and sunflower seeds people offer to them, and they can be seen prying the lids off garbage bins in order to forage.
“The big issue with urban birds is, they kind of eat everything,” Dr. Penndorf, who now works at the University of Exeter, said. This expanded diet is high-risk, high-reward: the birds have more options for food, but there’s always a chance that strange new snacks might be poisonous.
Dr. Penndorf and her colleagues wondered if the highly intelligent cockatoos might owe their varied urban diets, and, in turn, their takeover of the city of Sydney, to social learning.
The rest of the article discusses an ingenious experiment by which Penndorf and her colleagues verified that cockatoos could learn what foods to eat from one another,
Elon's lawyers are not allowed to invoke AI Doom in his lawsuit against OpenAI
Yesterday, a federal judge barred Elon Musk's lawyers from arguing that AI could threaten humanity in his lawsuit against OpenAI.
— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) May 1, 2026
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit focused on developing AI safely. But our recent @NewYorker investigation documented how some researchers at the… pic.twitter.com/3XGB2ohjth
Friday, May 1, 2026
Interesting action at Academia.edu
Here’s four successive months:
January 2026:
It’s relatively constant, with a peak at 49 and three troughs at 10.
February 2026:
There’s a rising trend through the month with the peak above 60 hits at the end of the month and one just below that four days earlier.
Now March 2026:
It’s pretty much up and down, but there’s an early peak above 70 and things seem fairly steady for the last week and a half. A low dips down to 10.
April 2026:
It seems fairly high on the whole. Three peaks above 60 distributed over the month, with a trough at 21 and a later one at 22-23.
Throughout this period I’ve been in the 99.5 percentile. How long before I break 99.9?
Why Do I Like Veronica Mars? [Media Notes 178]
I watched the series when it first aired back in 2004-2005 and liked. It seemed a bit like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not with the mythology and such, but in underlying sensibility. We have a teenaged girl undertaking an adult role in the world. Buffy had to save it, Veronica merely solved mysteries, first of all the mystery of her best friend’s murder & her mother’s disappearance, which, I suppose, are cosmic enough.
Here’s how Wikipedia describes the show:
Veronica Mars is an American teen neo-noir mystery drama television series created by screenwriter Rob Thomas. The series is set in the fictional town of Neptune, California, and stars Kristen Bell as the eponymous character. The series premiered on September 22, 2004, during television network UPN's final two years, and ended on May 22, 2007, after a season on UPN's successor, The CW, airing for three seasons total. [...]
The character Veronica Mars is a student who progresses from high school to college while moonlighting as a private investigator under the tutelage of her detective father. In each episode, Veronica solves a different stand-alone case while working to solve a more complex mystery. The first two seasons of the series each had a season-long mystery arc, introduced in the first episode of the season and solved in the season finale. The third season took a different format, focusing on smaller mystery arcs that would last several episodes.
That’s a start.
Neptune is a small town not far from the Mexican border. It’s got a rich side and a middle class to poor side. Both sides meet in high school, where they clash. Veronica’s middle class; her murdered best friend was rich. So that’s part of the tension and the vibe, Veronica shuttling between the two. Her boy friends are from the rich side. Her running buddies, not so much. One of them is a Hispanic head of a biker gang. It’s an interesting mix.
I supposed I could say that Kristen Bell sparkles as Veronica, but I’m sure Veronica would cringe at the word “sparkles,” probably Kristen too. Heck, I cringe at it as well, but there it is. Enrico Colantoni plays her father with deadpan cool. You may have seen him as Mathesar in Galaxy Quest. Come to think of it, Veronica Mars has Galaxy Quest undertones. Overtones?
You get the idea.
Friday Fotos: Messages written in shells
Mum’s the word.
I see you.
One if by land, two if by sea.
Does not compute.
Just talking trash.
Thursday, April 30, 2026
A Quick Ramble: Computational Compressibility (order in the universe), Religion & Signaling, Silicon Valley vs. Pope Leo [+Latour]
I’m thinking there’s a relationship between computational compressibility (as an index of order in the universe) and my current interest in religion, which is what the other two items are about.
Computational Compressibility and order in the universe
I’ve been particularly pleased by my recent working paper: On Method: Computational Compressibility in Complex Natural and Cultural Phenomena. I’m not quite sure why I find it so pleasing. That it crosses disciplines, that’s nice: weather, microbiology, chess (AI), finance economics (asset pricing), film studies (Hollywood Economics), and cultural evolution (Macroanalysis, 19th century novel). But it’s the specific mode of the argument; it’s about description, about what kinds of things exist.
I began by framing the discussion in terms of Stephen Wolfram’s distinction between computational reducibility and computational irreducibility. I think we’ve got to look at that distinction in terms of Miriam Yevick’s 1975 distinction between holographic or Fourier logic and sequential logic. I think Wolfram’s notion of computational reducibility implies Yevick’s sequential logic. As far as I can tell, her notion of holographic logic doesn’t register with respect to Wolfram’s distinction. But it may be that what I’m calling computational compressibility (within the realm of irreducibility) resonates with her notion of holographic logic.
A random system would of course be irreducible, but that is an extreme case. The systems I looked at in that paper are not random, but the order they exhibit allows them to occupy only a relatively small region of the state space potentially open to them. Given appropriate data about the behavior of the system, that region can be identified through a computational process. Thus they are computationally compressible. The phenomenon of computational compressibility indicates order, but order of a kind that’s different from reducible order. Generative order?
Religion & Signaling
Glenn Loury has a recent video where he distinguishes between what we might call the propositional content of an utterance and its signal value. Explains that at some length in a recent lecture he gave at Stanford, Self-Censorship, Social Information, and the Conditions of Public Reason. In the lecture he examines three cases: race in America, academic life, and Israel and Gaza. His point is that in public discourse on these topics (and others) the signal value of what one is saying often eclipses the propositional value of one’s assertions. This often results in self-censorship where a person withholds their (propositional) views for fear of signally the wrong values.
Thus, in racial discourse:
A key question in this discourse is why racial inequality persists. In this domain speech is saturated with moral meanings. Claims about inequality, education, crime, family structure, or historical responsibility are rarely heard simply as attempts to explain social outcomes. They are taken also as signals of moral orientation—of sympathy or indifference, solidarity or hostility, compassion or disdain. For many audiences, answers to that question relying on structural causes are regarded more favorably than accounts emphasizing cultural factors. Speakers adapt accordingly—many by holding their tongues.
I think lots of discourse is like that. It seems to me that much religious discourse is like this. The conservative Christian arguments against biological evolution never made much sense to me as propositional assertion, nor did the accompanying belief about the age of the earth, but as signaling, those beliefs make more sense.
I'm thinking this signaling business is about coordination, about establishing a rock-bottom level of interpersonal coordination, of common knowledge. I need to think about this some more.
Addendum, May 2, 2026: This post about Bruno Latour's conception of modes of existence is relevant here, each with it own “felicity conditions,” as he calls them.
Silicon Valley vs. Pope Leo
I’ve only recently learned that Pope Leo XIV has decided to make AI a central concern of his papacy. Given that I think that the common Silicon Valley view of AI is idolatrous, or at best straddles the border, I’m wondering if we’re going to see a grand debate and battle between the Pope and Silicon Valley apologists. When I put the question to Claude, here’s how it responded:
Your instinct is well-founded, and Leo XIV has already moved aggressively on this front. Let me lay out what's emerged so far.
Who he is and what he's signaling
Leo XIV — born Robert Prevost in Chicago, the first American pope — identified AI as a central challenge from his very first formal address to the cardinals after his election in May 2025. His choice of the name Leo was itself a signal: Pope Leo XIII confronted the industrial revolution with Rerum Novarum (1891), defending workers' rights and the common good. By taking that name, the new pope announced that the Church would face today's technological upheaval with similar clarity.
The specific critique — and it maps closely onto your "idolatry" framing
This is where it gets interesting for your purposes. In what has been called a programmatic document on AI for World Communications Day, Leo warned that "behind this enormous invisible force that involves us all, there are only a handful of companies — those whose founders have recently been presented as the creators of the 'Person of the Year 2025.'" He expressed "serious concern regarding the oligopolistic control of algorithmic and artificial intelligence systems capable of subtly shaping behaviors and even rewriting human history."
That last phrase — rewriting human history, including the history of the Church — is remarkable. He's naming a power claim that goes beyond economic disruption.
His core argument is that "the challenge is not technological, but anthropological. Safeguarding faces and voices ultimately means safeguarding ourselves." He described face and voice as "sacred," given by God, "the constitutive element of every genuine encounter."
At a Vatican gathering that included representatives from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, IBM, Meta, and Palantir, he said: "The person is not a system of algorithms: he or she is a creature, relationship, mystery."
The "data is not wisdom" theme
He has repeatedly insisted that "the ability to access vast amounts of data and information should not be confused with the ability to derive meaning and value from it," and that "authentic wisdom has more to do with recognizing the true meaning of life than with the availability of data." This is a direct counter to the implicit epistemology of Silicon Valley — the notion that intelligence is fundamentally information processing, that more data equals more understanding.
Where this connects to your book
Your framing of the dominant Silicon Valley attitude as idolatrous is theologically precise in a way that Leo XIV would likely recognize. The classic definition of idolatry isn't crude statue-worship — it's the attribution of ultimate value and salvific power to something that is not God. When figures like Altman, Musk, or Kurzweil speak of AI as the path to immortality, the transcendence of human limitation, the solution to death — that's structurally idolatrous in the theological sense. It substitutes a human artifact for the divine.
Leo has the resources of the entire tradition of Catholic social teaching to bring to bear on this — not just as ethics but as a rival anthropology. The Church's claim that the person is "creature, relationship, mystery" is not compatible with the claim that the person is, at bottom, a computational process that can be replicated, extended, or superseded by a sufficiently powerful machine.
Whether this becomes a genuine face-off rather than parallel talking depends on whether Silicon Valley feels the need to respond. So far, the tech executives seem to be treating Vatican engagement as a reputational opportunity — showing up in Rome, being photographed, nodding about "human dignity" — without conceding much. The more interesting question is whether Leo pushes beyond dialogue into something more like confrontation. The Rerum Novarum precedent suggests he might: that encyclical didn't merely express concern about the industrial revolution, it made specific demands.
The coming AI-driven workplace apocalypse [We aren't ready]
Jasmine Sun, The A.I. Fear Keeping Silicon Valley Up at Night, NYTimes, April 30, 2026. Sampled from the article:
The opening paragraph:
Most people I know in the A.I. industry think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it. I live in San Francisco, among the young researchers earning million-dollar salaries and the start-up founders competing to build the next unicorn. While Silicon Valley has long warned about the risk of rogue A.I., it has recently woken up to a more mundane nightmare: one in which many ordinary people lose their economic leverage as their jobs are automated away.
Silicon logic:
But even those who view the idea of a permanent underclass as overblown tell me that the meme contains a kernel of truth. [...]
Most economists and A.I. experts do not expect this scenario, but the persistence of the permanent underclass idea should concern all of us. First, because it signals how much collateral damage the A.I. companies will tolerate en route to A.G.I. And second, because the production of a social underclass is a policy choice. Instead of waiting for impact, we need to think seriously — now — about how we plan to support workers through A.I. disruption.
If left to its own devices, Silicon Valley may summon a permanent underclass through its own market logic. If you believe that human-substituting A.I. is inevitable, then every company should race to be the one to build it — and claim a market valuation the size of the economy and then some.
Unimaginative techno-determinism:
Tech workers, for their part, are scrambling for lucrative A.I. jobs in hopes of securing financial freedom — even when they harbor ethical hangups. [...]
This apparent dissonance can be justified if you believe that the arc of technological progress is fixed. For instance, the founders of Mechanize, a once buzzy start-up with a mission to “enable the full automation of the economy,” argued in a blog post that “the only real choice is whether to hasten this technological revolution ourselves, or to wait for others to initiate it in our absence.”
Many A.I. employees are ultimately motivated by visions of a beautiful future: a promised land where goods are cheap, diseases are cured, and abundant machine labor liberates humans to enjoy lives of infinite leisure. But increasingly, they also worry about triggering a jobs apocalypse along the way. “There are some people who care about jobs and inequality because they really care about people. There are others who think this is going to lead to instability, insurrection and revolution, and that’s bad for business,” said a researcher who has worked at two frontier A.I. labs...
And, I would add, if and when that future arrives, we'll not be ready. Why? Because we train adults to become addicted to work mode (Homo economicus). As a result, they won't know what to do with the leisure (Homo ludens).
An emerging techno-federal oligarchy (a successor to Eisenhower's "industrial military-complex"?):
At the same time as A.I. erodes ordinary workers’ leverage, it may concentrate power and wealth in large companies and the U.S. government — two entities whose interests are increasingly linked. A.I.-related investments such as software and data centers accounted for 39 percent of U.S. economic growth in the first three-quarters of 2025, per an analysis by the St. Louis Fed. That gives the federal government a vested interest in sustaining the A.I. boom. Mr. Amodei acknowledges that this concentration can lead to “the reluctance of tech companies to criticize the U.S. government, and the government’s support for extreme anti-regulatory policies on A.I.”
In March, the company started the Anthropic Institute to house its teams working on economics, societal impact and frontier safety. The institute is led by Jack Clark, the affable British journalist turned A.I. billionaire and Anthropic co-founder, who seems to be replacing Mr. Amodei on the media tour of late. When we spoke, I asked Mr. Clark if he, too, expects A.I. to create a permanent underclass.
“This is basically a societal choice,” he replied. Like Mr. Altman and Mr. Amodei, Mr. Clark sees the default path for A.I. as dire: one where we “let technology rip, and don’t think about the social effects until later.” But he also feels optimistic that sufficiently conscientious A.I. builders and policymakers can steer the ship away from the storm.
I have little faith in those (mythical) A.I. builders and policymakers. Meanwhile:
On the evening of Feb. 25, several dozen A.I. employees and civil society advocates gathered in a converted warehouse in San Francisco’s sleepy Dogpatch neighborhood to hear the Democratic pollster and strategist David Shor. The event was titled How to Prepare Our Politics for A.G.I., and doubled as a fund-raiser for a new “six-to-nine-month sprint” to rally Democratic politicians around the campaign issue of A.I. job displacement. [...]
While the American public ordinarily hesitates to support left-wing policies like a jobs guarantee or single-payer health care, A.I. seems to expand the political Overton window. “Right now, the argument is, ‘You’re all about to lose your jobs, and the choice is either you get nothing and starve, or we do something fair,’” Mr. Shor said. “People don’t want to be members of the permanent underclass.”
Not all policies are created equal, however. A universal basic income is unpopular, but a federal jobs guarantee has legs, Mr. Shor found. American voters don’t care about beating China, but they are excited about A.I. curing diseases. And, crucially, populism sells. In one of the top-performing political ads that Mr. Shor’s data firm tested, the nameless narrator declares: “We make the corporations and billionaires who profit from A.I. pay their fair share.” The ad concludes: “They work for the bots. We work for you.”
The near term:
If current trends continue, A.I. models and agents will be capable of performing a wider range of knowledge-work tasks at higher levels of complexity. At that point, A.I. shifts from automating single tasks to taking over entire roles. Hiring may slow in accounting, marketing, design, administrative work and other white-collar professions.
The work force will shift toward less automatable jobs where humans retain a comparative advantage — such as entrepreneurship, care work, the skilled trades and entertainment like sports and the performing arts. We will also see new jobs we haven’t imagined yet, in numbers we cannot predict. Many displaced workers will struggle to retrain, as they have in past automation waves. Education, health care and tax systems will require an overhaul if white-collar employment is no longer a reliable path to middle-class stability. [...]
But the debate over the most extreme scenarios conceals a more immediate threat: Even in the most limited case, A.I. will break the career ladder for millions of current and future workers, a prospect often waved away with euphemisms like “transitional friction.” The Oxford economist Carl Benedikt Frey puts it plainly: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
Class solidarity?
In this sense, A.I.’s broad capabilities foster a rare class solidarity between white-collar and blue-collar workers. When 20-something software engineers in San Francisco talk about escaping the permanent underclass, I hear them projecting concerns about their own precarity: What happens if the invisible hand of the market decides that my skills are no longer valuable? Who will catch me if I fall? For once, a rarefied class of employees — those used to being the automaters, not the automated — is reckoning with their potential obsolescence.
The final paragraphs:
Society’s ability to cushion A.I.’s disruption may determine whether we get to reap its gains at all. Without a safety net and a transition plan, blunt protectionism is workers’ rational response to automation. If you hear that A.I. will entrench a permanent underclass, you’ll do anything to stop it. [...]
And what if we don’t act? [...] In March, the Palantir chief executive, Alex Karp, spoke on a panel with the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien. “The biggest challenge to A.I. in this country is political unrest,” Mr. Karp said. “If I were sitting here in private with my peers, I’d be telling them the country could blow up politically and none of us are going to make any money when the country blows up.”
Wednesday, April 29, 2026
AI spending is out of control [Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick]
Karen Weise, A.I. Spending Sets a Record, With No End in Sight, NYTimes, April 29, 2026.
For the past two years, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta have repeatedly set records for how much they are spending on artificial intelligence.
On Wednesday, the four giants did it again.
In the first three months of the year, the four companies reported in their financial results, they plowed a total of $130.65 billion into capital expenditures, largely spending on data centers that power A.I. That figure — which was another record — was more than three times what the Manhattan Project cost to develop nuclear bombs and 71 percent higher than what the tech giants spent in the same quarter a year earlier.
All of the companies said they would be spending even more, totaling roughly $700 billion this year. Meta, for one, raised its spending forecast for 2026 to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from its previous prediction of $115 billion to $135 billion. Google also boosted its projection, to at least $180 billion, and said its spending would be “significantly” higher next year.
The big four – Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta can afford it because they “continue to dominate in core businesses that spew cash, such as serving ads on YouTube or Instagram, delivering items in a few hours or tallying cells in Excel.” They've entered into circular relationships and Anthropic and OpenAI which have, in turn, “committed to spending hundreds of billions on computing power that the tech giants provide.” Yada yada so forth and so on et cetera et cetera:
Some of the tech companies have justified their building binge by saying they cannot meet all the demand. But analysts said there were risks if the companies became too dependent on two young customers: OpenAI and Anthropic.
More than 40 percent of Microsoft’s $625 billion in outstanding cloud contracts, for example, come from OpenAI, the company said in January. This week, Microsoft and OpenAI announced new terms that loosened their ties.
Betting so much on OpenAI and Anthropic is a gamble. But even if the start-ups flop, the tech giants are likely to weather the losses because of their size, scale and other businesses, said Matt Stucky, who manages tech investments for Northwestern Mutual.
“The core business,” he said, “is good.”
I think they're taking the economy for a Nantucket sleigh ride.
Excerpts from Séb Krier's Omni-Thread from February
https://x.com/sebkrier/status/2018351274127962300?s=20
1. Existing models will continue improving and getting better. And they will continue to be trained while accounting for all sorts of things like cost, efficiency, steerability, personality etc. as we already see today. I think it’s more obvious than ever that there is likely no convergence to the One Big Model. [...]
4. Here, there is still a lot to work out, and I expect high complementarity with human workers for at least the next decade. Roles will evolve: as you start doing less coding, your work looks more like technical product management. [...]
5. You just keep going up layers of abstraction, and humans continue steering complex multi-agent systems, until fixed costs bite. Part of the reason why humans always stay at the top of the chain is that many decisions made are normative: about what you want to happen, where you want things to go, how you want to react to changes. This requires inherently human inputs, since there's no point in having an AI decide this alone no matter how smart without eliciting more information about what the relevant humans prefer. Put differently: the telos of the whole system is the amalgamation of what users/consumers/businesses want, and tracking whether you're actually achieving that requires human input. This is already the case today with highly complex gigantic companies that make 1000 opaque decisions a minute.
6. Remember, this doesn’t violate the basic fact that market-coordinated economic activity is downstream of consumer and business demand. Capital isn’t some sort of independent force of the universe. What is being built depends on buyers/consumers that are ultimately human, even if occasionally intermediated by agents. The "AI decides everything" frame misses something fundamental about what economic and political systems are for. But as we go through these transitions, there are also costs or externalities (both pecuniary and non-pecuniary). Some people lose jobs. New industries cause unforeseen harms. Terence Tao has a great analogy: the abundance of food solved famine, but of course also led to harms like obesity. The solution is not to slow down abundance, but to develop the right norms, technologies, and laws to curb the excesses.
7. Accounts of full disempowerment assume democracy disappears, but I don't think all roads lead to autocracy. I don’t think ‘this time it’s different’. Growth and innovation historically benefited from free trade and liberal democracy, and this will be the case here too because of its impacts on investment, human capital, institutional quality, self-correction mechanisms, and ensuing fly-wheel effects. [...]
8. As the world goes through these transitions, we will probably continue to see many commentators gloss over the vast benefits and improvements humanity will see. Progress in longevity, cured diseases, consumer welfare, massive reduction in poverty and famine, better education and so on. The arguments for market coordination over some sort of early-Soviet or Maoist collectivism apply even more in this world, not less. The world will generally become materially richer. [...]
9. If we allow sufficient deployment of technology, robots, AI and so on, while ensuring the supply of energy, housing, and other important inputs isn’t constrained to a strangling degree, then the production of many goods and services will go down in price. [...] In general I am more concerned with customer service operators in Bangalore than I am with upper middle class white-collar professions in the West. I think FDI [foreign direct investment] and aid will be critical if we want humanity to thrive.
10. But this doesn't justify regressive populist policies or a 'pause'. It's not even optimal if we were being maximally selfish, and the equivalent of saying "poverty, misery and illness should be preserved for a longer period of time, for the benefit of a particular group of workers in time." Opposing AI or technological progress is a particularly nasty version of degrowth: it kills people, it entrenches poverty, and generally locks in all sorts of tragedies for the benefit of a comfortable elite who can easily thrive with the status quo. However, this does mean ensuring the right welfare systems, democratic protections, ‘societal resilience’, public infrastructure etc is important, as many have repeatedly noted over time. Just because things net out positively doesn’t mean ignoring those who lose out in the short run is the best we can do. There’s so much work to be done still if you want to build a better world, and I think we desperately need new, better economists, scientists, sociologists, artists, and politicians more than ever. I have more faith in the zoomers than some of my peers!
[Hmmmm.... I'm not so sure of 10. Don't know what it means.-BB]
12. In the future, I expect politics and governance to be an increasingly important component of people's lives: many will care deeply about how things are organised and managed at the local or national or international level. Personally, I think it’s fine if a large fraction don’t care much about those issues most of the time, since I don’t think there’s an obligation for everyone to have an opinion on everything, and that preference will likely be easy to satisfy. [...]
13. And I do think status games will continue, albeit in a much more diverse ecosystem of sub cultures and geographies. But again: always has been. Even today plenty of people more interested in art have zero envy for techbro founder lifestyles, and conversely many engineers couldn't care less about being perceived as cultured. As people get richer, much of this will evolve too. [...]
14. Ultimately, AGI will bring about huge positive transformations for the world, many of which are hard to describe: could anyone at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution have told you about video games, eye surgery, deep sea diving, street tacos, and mRNA vaccines? [...]
15. Lastly, so much of the field uses "this time it's different" as hand-wavey justifications for flouting norms, justifying unusual political measures, ignoring fragile progress built on centuries of trial and error, and various yet-to-be seen proposals for haphazard action (made confidently despite the uncertainty that one might guess would come with handling unprecedented phenomena). I think this is misguided: AGI will be huge, and of course will affect everything around us; but in many ways it’s also not different, and as always, there's a lot to learn from History. Much still needs to be built, except that this time you will also have millions of agents by your side to make progress. 🚀
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