Friday Fotos: Leaves

What is the mind (and what can we know of it)?

In a recent working paper, Toward a Theory of the Corpus [1], I suggested

that we think of the mind has a high-dimensional space of word meanings. That idea is explicit in each of the pieces, though different mathematical models are used. The researchers who use these models do not, however, think of them that way, at least not so far as I can tell. They think of the models as being about texts, and thus about the meanings of words in texts. But how are these texts created? Where do the words come from? Surely the words are placed in texts by minds somehow engaged with the world, whether the real world or some fiction is secondary. If those high-dimensional spaces are about texts, they are also about the minds that created the texts.

Now, that is a strange thing, very strange, to think of the mind as a high-dimensional space of verbal meanings. If you wish, think of it as a metaphor, one we can operationalize through the use of mathematical models. And we don’t have to think of it as a metaphor that somehow exhausts the mind. I certainly don’t. There is more to the mind than words; there are perceptions, motivations, and feelings. We’re dealing with an idealization, a conception of the mind, not the mind itself. (p. 21, see also pp. 24-25, 27)

I found that strange when I first suggested it, and still find it a bit strange. The mind is a high-dimension space? What’s that?

Perhaps it would be better to think of the mind as evolving through or unfolding in a high dimensional space. The high-dimensional space is just a system of coordinates, like the latitude and longitude coordinates used to map the earth’s surface. The mind exists in that space. What we’re interested in is the regions in that space and how attention, say, can move from one region to another. Some regions will be adjacent, and some will not. And so forth.

But I’m not ready to start proposing regions. Though ultimately that’s what I want to do. I want to follow literary texts through this space and see what kinds of paths they take. By analyzing those paths in relation to the text it should be possible to begin making sense out of the various regions.

Let’s set that aside. I just wanted to get that up there.

Now, here’s the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for mind:

The mind is a set of cognitive faculties including consciousness, perception, thinking, judgement, language and memory. It is usually defined as the faculty of an entity's thoughts and consciousness.[3] It holds the power of imagination, recognition, and appreciation, and is responsible for processing feelings and emotions, resulting in attitudes and actions.

Here the mind seems to be a container for various psychological processes. And that’s a very different conception from the one I’ve proposed above.

Or is it? The terms are certainly different. What can you do with this standard conception?

As far as I can tell about all that is in face done with the bare bones conception of mind is to argue whether or not computers can constitute minds or whether or not the mind exists in the brain. It’s not clear to me that this conception does much useful intellectual work. I don’t find arguments about whether or not computers can have minds to be very useful.

As for minds and brains, well, there we have my metaphor of the mind as neural weather. That harks back to Walter Freeman’s work on the complex dynamics of the nervous system. And, of course, Freeman talks the brain’s high-dimensional state space, which is some kind of relative of the high-dimensional semantic space that I talk about above. Just how close a relative, that’s hard to say. Each point in Freeman’s space is a state of the brain. Each point in a corpus model is a word meaning. Those are very different things. Though we might bring them together by thinking of each point in a corpus model as the target of focal attention or perhaps as a basin of attraction in a dynamical model of neural activity [2]. And now things are beginning to get just a little interesting.

However, I don’t think I want to start wandering down that path just yet. Let’s just leave it there, hanging in the air as it were.

But we’re now back at corpus semantics. That’s been around for awhile and has proven quite useful. All I’m trying to do is provide a motivated way of interpreting corpus semantics as being about the structure of mind. And if we can do that I think we can begin to move beyond Martin Kay’s provocative observation [3]:

Symbolic language processing is highly nondeterministic and often delivers large numbers of alternative results because it has no means of resolving the ambiguities that characterize ordinary language. This is for the clear and obvious reason that the resolution of ambiguities is not a linguistic matter. After a responsible job has been done of linguistic analysis, what remain are questions about the world. They are questions of what would be a reasonable thing to say under the given circumstances, what it would be reasonable to believe, suspect, fear or desire in the given situation. If these questions are in the purview of any academic discipline, it is presumably artificial intelligence. But artificial intelligence has a lot on its plate and to attempt to fill the void that it leaves open, in whatever way comes to hand, is entirely reasonable and proper. But it is important to understand what we are doing when we do this and to calibrate our expectations accordingly. What we are doing is to allow statistics over words that occur very close to one another in a string to stand in for the world construed widely, so as to include myths, and beliefs, and cultures, and truths and lies and so forth. As a stop-gap for the time being, this may be as good as we can do, but we should clearly have only the most limited expectations of it because, for the purpose it is intended to serve, it is clearly pathetically inadequate. The statistics are standing in for a vast number of things for which we have no computer model. They are therefore what I call an “ignorance model”.

Kay is right, in the context that most interests him, machine translation, we ARE using “statistics over words ... to stand in for the world construed widely”. What I’m suggesting is that there is a way to use those statistics to tell us something about the mind, perhaps construed loosely.

Loosely is better than nothing. And we can use it to lead us further on.

References

[1] William Benzon, Toward a Theory of the Corpus, Working Paper, December 31, 2018, 46 pp. Academia, https://www.academia.edu/38066424/Toward_a_Theory_of_the_Corpus_Toward_a_Theory_of_the_Corpus_-by;

SSRN, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3308601.

[2] That brings us within range of my notes on attractor nets. See William Benzon, Attractor Nets, Series I: Notes Toward a New Theory of Mind, Logic and Dynamics in Relational Networks, Working Paper, 2011, 52 pp., Academia, https://www.academia.edu/9012847/Attractor_Nets_Series_I_Notes_Toward_a_New_Theory_of_Mind_Logic_and_Dynamics_in_Relational_Networks.

[3] Kay, M.: A Life of Language. Computational Linguistics 31(4), 425-438 (2005), http://web.stanford.edu/~mjkay/LifeOfLanguage.pdf.

FDR 4: What about the Indians?

Let’s pick up where we left off, with Trump. Consider this tableau:

There’s Trump on the side of that column at the right. Look at the face of that column. It may be a bit difficult to see, but that’s an Indian (aka Native American). We’ll come back to that. Look at the top of that column. I don’t know what “BDC” stands for, but “DON’T BE A VICTIM” is clear enough. While you are free to read that as a comment on the Indian, I’ve got an image (which I’m not posting) that shows that it was on the column before the Indian was.

Now scan over toward the left, looking at all the graffiti as your eyes move along. There’s a lot of THAT at FDR. We’ve got layers of paint, how many, who knows? Now look at the far left at that black panel on the column. We’ve got the letters “fdr” (in lower case) enclosed in a keystone shield, where we understand the keystone to by symbolic of Pennsylvania (“the keystone state”). Up at the top we have “SOBER VS. WASTED” and at the bottom, “WE HAVE YOU”. In other words, this is home, we are family.

THAT’s our context, all of it.

Look at this photo from 2017:

Look at the second column from the right, behind a low mound of dirt. Yes, it’s small, but I wanted you too see the image in its unblemished state. The image shows an Indian on horseback. To the right of his head it says, beneath what appears to be a halo or perhaps a crown, “SACRED LAND”. That, presumably, is a comment on FDR itself. Here’s a more recent photo, one with some red scrawls across it:

We can now see that it depicts a statue of an Indian on horseback, with “FDR” on the pedestal. Whatever the red markings are about, the underlying image is invoking the American Indian to consecrate – “SACRED GROUND” – FDR.

Now let’s go back where we started. Here’s the face of that column that had Trump on one side:

The figure is clearly male and the long hair and feathers indicate that he is Indian. The jacket almost looks like a double-breasted blazer or sport jacket. Almost. He’s holding something in his left hand. It looks like an arrow, but I can’t really tell. But we can’t be mistaken about the fact that he’s emerging from a keystone on which the letters “fdr” are inscribed in Black-letter font. The letters anchor the image to the skate-park itself. The keystone anchors the image in political structure of American history while the Indian links the image to the people who inhabited the land prior the colonization.

More later.

Cognition and visual perception are rhythmic

This rhythmic phenomenon still blows me away three years after publication.https://t.co/3n8LkBacLt

— Graeme Moffat (@graemedmoffat) January 3, 2019

Chelsea as seen from Hoboken

The rise of condensed matter physics [Is particle physics over?]

Condensed matter physics, what's that?

Well, think about it. As far as I know, which isn't very far, matter exists in various forms, solid, liguid, gas, and plasma. Which of those would you think of as being condensed (relative to the others).

Solid, certainly, and perhaps liquid, no?

Yes. Condensed matter physics is different from (high-energy) particle physics and cosmology. The physics that shows up in most popular science books is either particle physics or cosmology, you know, quantum mechanics, many universes, strings, bang bangs, black holes and the rest. Old timers like Newton and Galileo aside, that seems to be the public face of physics. But there's more to the discipline than that, a lot more.

But I'm not doing this post to provide my own account to condensed matter physics. I'm writing to call your attention to a recent article in Physics Today, "When condensed-matter physics became king" by Joseph Martin. King starts at the beginning of the 19th century, when it was just one science among others, and quickly brings us to the beginning of the 20th century, when physics had become the preeminent science. Physics had become

“king” in the sense that it came to occupy a central role in Western culture. Physicists marshaled cultural resources—institutional spaces, audiences, patrons, and trust—to create an environment in which their science would become the one most trusted both to probe nature’s secrets and to spawn new technologies.

Similarly, in 1900, when physicists were just beginning to probe the secrets of the atom, the prominence that the physics of complex matter would hold by the turn of the 21st century was scarcely conceivable.

That's the story Martin tells, about the rise of complex matter physics, which is still, alas, more or less invisible to the general public.

I have no intention of summarizing the article, which involves, among other things, the interplay between "pure" and "applied" physics. Rather, I want to leave you with a few paragraphs  from near the end:

In 1972 Anderson published a landmark essay in Science entitled “More Is Different,” in which he argued that each new scale of complexity that scientists engaged with promised a cornucopia of new fundamental and intellectually stimulating questions.13 As condensed-matter physicists tackled more complex physical phenomena, they could therefore expect to open up new intellectual frontiers. Adopting the name condensed-matter physics was more than a simple rebranding. It represented a priority shift driven by changes in both the intellectual and professional circumstances of US physics.

Condensed-matter physicists would test those priorities during the debates that swirled around the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in the early 1990s [...]. In what high-energy physicists perceived as an unprecedented act of betrayal, many prominent condensed-matter physicists, including Nobel laureates Anderson and Nicolaas Bloembergen, opposed the SSC—not only in private but also before the policymakers who controlled the project’s fate.

It was a conflict of ideals. For high-energy physicists, the route to fundamental knowledge was a one-way road leading to smaller and smaller length scales. Condensed-matter physicists, who perceived fundamental knowledge at many scales, argued that the funding regime that supported projects like the SSC hamstrung other fields in physics, including and especially their own. As Anderson told Congress in 1989, condensed-matter physics was “caught between the Scylla of the glamorous big science projects … and the Charybdis of programmed research … where you are asked to do very specific pieces of research aimed at some very short-term goal.”

Gripes like Anderson’s were timeworn. Solid-state and condensed-matter physicists had long defended their intellectual worth against charges that they were engaged in Schmutzphysik, or “squalid state physics.” And the concern that big accelerator facilities were vacuuming up funds that might otherwise be dispersed more equitably had been voiced repeatedly since the mid 1960s. But the significant numerical superiority solid-state and condensed-matter physics had enjoyed for decades, combined with the resurgence of its intellectual program, emboldened the field’s leaders. By the late 1980s, condensed-matter physicists were prepared to argue not only that they deserved a place at the core of the discipline but that their aims better represented the aims of physics as a whole than did the parochial interest of high-energy physicists.

Will the CERN Large Hadron Collider turn out to be the last of those big beasts? Is particle physics over, as Sabine Hossenfelder suggests?

Veggie virtuosity

Just skip over the preliminaries about making the instruments. The performance starts at 1:39:

I was hoping to go to Juilliard on a tuber-and-cucurbit scholarship.

See Toto's 'Africa' played on some sweet potatoes and a squash https://t.co/hBMau2JVpb

— Jack Lynch (@JackLynch000) January 2, 2019

Rocks, leaves, people

Rebecca Kukla: A philosopher talks about the value of boxing

Tyler Cowen has had a recent conversation with Rebecca Kukla, a philosopher at Georgetown. She's also a serious boxer. He asked her about it:

COWEN: From a philosophical point of view, why is boxing good for you? And who’s the philosopher with the best theory of exercise?

KUKLA: From a philosophical point of view, why is boxing good for me? I don’t know if this is technically from a philosophical point of view, but here’s two things. One is, I think philosophers who only do philosophy and nothing else tend to be bad, boring philosophers. Closely related to everything I’ve already ended up saying today, and closely related to what I just said about Rousseau.

I have a new colleague this year at Georgetown, Femi Taiwo. He just finished his PhD at UCLA. Fantastic young philosopher. He gave an interview recently, and one thing he said really stuck out for me, which was that so many philosophers think that philosophy is about responding to other texts and other people, and they forget that it’s, first and foremost, about responding to the world.

And I think that if you just do philosophy, you literally don’t have material. You can read other people’s philosophy books and respond to them, but you don’t have any actual, rich, juicy material. So, for me, having a lot of other things in my life other than philosophy has always been where I’ve got . . .

Imagine if you were a stand-up comic, and all you did is sit there and try to write comedy all day long. You wouldn’t have any material. I don’t actually think it’s very different. Philosophers and comedians have almost the same job, which is to come up with sharp, penetrating, quirky insights about the world, so you need to be out there in the world.

Imagine if you were a stand-up comic, and all you did is sit there and try to write comedy all day long. You wouldn’t have any material. I don’t actually think it’s very different. Philosophers and comedians have almost the same job, which is to come up with sharp, penetrating, quirky insights about the world, so you need to be out there in the world.

So I’ve always had a lot of things that I’ve done, other than philosophy, that have mattered to me intrinsically for their own sake, but also instrumentally. I think they’ve made my philosophy better. Boxing falls under that general category.

The other thing is, though, I don’t regulate my emotions very well unless I can exhaust myself, honestly. And I just write better and work better and think better, and I’m a calmer and more level-headed and smarter person, if I have managed to get out my rather large amount of energy and aggression. So it’s extremely helpful for me to exhaust myself in the ring many times a week in order to do the rest of what I’m supposed to do.

Compare this with Joe Rogan's remarks about martial arts.

FDR 3: How does Trump show up at the park?

I’ve been blogging about how politics, broadly construed, shows up in the graffiti and street art at FDR skate park in south Philadelphia. In one post we’ve seen how patriotic symbols and dress are transformed and appropriated for FDR itself. In another we’ve seen expressions of war and peace. What about President Trump?

Yes, he shows up there. But let’s start back in 2014. Consider this photo:

In upper right corner you can see a crude bust at the top of a pedestal-like formation. Here’s a close-up:

It’s crudely rendered and is unpainted. Was it supposed to represent anyone in particular? I have no idea.

Now look at this photo from 2017. You can see that bust along the mid-line above the center:

It’s now been painted. The face is flesh-colored and the lips are red (though it’s hard to see them in this small an image). What color is the hair? It’s yellow, that is, blonde. Was that done to evoke Trump? I don’t know. But certainly his blonde hair is used as an identifying feature.

Now look at the bowl behind the bust, a bit below it and to the left. We see what appears to be “TRUMP CAN’T PUMP” on the wall in crude letters. Someone was thinking about Trump and put that up on the wall. I don’t see any obvious and strong connection between those letters and that bust, but those letters do make it clear that some thoughts about Trump do show up on these walls.

Here’s a photo I took in December of 2018.

“FUCK TRUMPS” is clearly scrawled on that bump. The anger is directed, not just at the president, but at his whole family. And this looks like an image of Trump:

Judging from the texture of the marks I’d say that it is a poster that has been pasted to the pillar, a so-called wheatpaste. I don’t know the significance of the lettering, “SYAM”. I did a quick web search but didn’t turn up anything that is obviously related. In particular, I didn’t turn up other images of such a poster. They might be there on the web, but it will take more searching than the five or ten minutes I did.

Now look at the medallion at the lower left. We have lettering around the silhouette of an elephant. Across the top we have “ANGRY ELEPHANTS” and “SPREAD PLAGUE” along the bottom. I’d guess that “PWW” at the left somehow identifies the person or group that placed that medallion on the pillar. Is it the same person who pasted up the poster? I don’t know, but there is a resonance between the two. I find it difficult NOT to see that elephant as the symbol of the Republican Party, which seems to have become the party of Trump.

Some yards away we see an elephant, an angry elephant:

Is there an intentional relationship between this elephant and the one in the medallion? Were they placed there by the same person, by people in dialog? I don’t know.

Finally, here’s a photo of that bust:

The hair is still yellow; the lips are red, but the neck and lower jaw has been painted red as well. There must have been a reason, but I can’t hazard a guess as to what it might have been. Does anyone at FDR think of that bust as representing Trump? I don’t know.

The only thing that’s clear is that Trump is represented at FDR, and not favorably. I don’t recall seeing any other national political figure on those walls. If I’d seen one, I’d have photographed them. For what it’s worth, while Pennsylvania went Republican in the 2016 presidential election, Philadelphia went Democrat.

What would a new year be without flowers?

Transcendental Critique? The peculiar case of UNIX and race in America in the 1960s

Bumping this to the top for the sake of the second appendix, where I note that the war in Vietnam was critical in the development of containerized shipping. So, now the demonstration, such as it is, embraces race and UNIX, from Tara McPerson's now classic article, and my contributions, containerized shipping and the Vietnam War, all aspects of a putative modularization that happened in the 1960s American culture. Color me skeptical.

* * * * *

Back at the beginning of the summer [of 2016] when the LARB hatchet job on digital humanities was rippling through the internets I came across Tara McPherson’s 2012 article on racism and UNIX during the 1960s, a juxtaposition I thought strange, but intriguing [1]. But the article has been widely influential, so I decided to read it [2].

It is an impressive piece of work. But I don’t believe it. McPherson makes no causal claims, which is good; because I can’t see any way causal claims can be made. But without causal claims, what’s the point? It reads like a critique of a sprawling Pynchonesque novel, not like sociological analysis of mid-century American society. But then it’s not sociology is it? It’s cultural criticism. Perhaps there are limits to cultural criticism. That’s what this is about, those limits.

I’d been meaning to write a detailed post on this, but between this and that my mind moved on and I had little choice but to follow it. Instead I’ve taken an email I’d originally written to a colleague, edited it, and added some new material to round things out.

McPherson on UNIX and Race as “Operating Systems”

McPherson is looking at two phenomenon of the 1960s: the development of the UNIX operating system for digital computers and the reconfiguration of race relations though civil rights activism, legislation, and ripple effects. These two phenomena resemble one another in their “modularity.” On that account McPherson seems to be arguing that mid-century American society was run by some mysterious and hidden “operating system” of which these two phenomena are expressions.

On the one hand we have Unix. Just what is it? Well, it’s computer software that performs the functions of a computer operating system – the software that handles the computer’s basic function. It’s code, but we can’t understand what that is without knowing something about what computers are and how they operate. Physically, we can imagine a printout of the code. But the resemblance McPherson is interested in won’t be visible there. We could also imagine flow charts or other visualizations, and those would be rather sprawling and complex and the resemblance won’t really be there either, because flow charts are static. What she’s interested in is dynamic function, and she presents that to us through quotations from design documents and such. This is very abstract stuff.

And so is the racial dynamics. Concretely we’ve got people, where they are located, and how they move in time and space. We can see (and imagine) the people readily enough, but the phenomena she’s interested in aren’t readily visible on the ground. Given prior knowledge of those phenomena, signs of them may be visible (for example, the boundary between a black neighborhood and a white one), but the phenomena are only really identifiable through an act of investigation (observation, data gathering) and subsequent analysis. You can detect neighborhood differences as you move though a city, but you can see the patterns that interest McPherson only by looking at appropriately marked maps. And we need a succession of maps of the same area to determine the change over time. So, while we’re interested in the disposition of physical stuff in time and space – people on the land – the identification of the relevant patterns requires a fair amount of abstraction. These phenomena cannot be directly observed in a physical way – which is why we need social science research to identify them.

In both cases, Unix and race, we’re operating at a remove from lived experience (a phrase that’s been showing up quite a bit in my reading on these matters).

Modularization, however, is a very general phenomenon. Surely there must be other cases during the 1960s (as well as before and after). And McPherson does mention others. The one that sticks in mind is the splintering of academic knowledge in more specialized disciplines – another abstract case. But she pulls back from going into these other cases, insisting on coming back to her core cases, Unix and racism.

Another Case: Containerization

Let me suggest a different kind of case: containerization in freight shipping. I don’t have any good sense of the timing. It certainly dates back to the 19th century. What I have in mind is the proliferation of purpose-built container ships. Did that experience a big rise in the 1960s? The Wikipedia article on container ships asserts that the first purpose-build container ships were constructed in the 1950s and that their use in trans-Atlantic shipping between the USA and Rotterdam commenced in 1966. What I’d really like to know, for example, is when the freight terminals in lower Manhattan, Hoboken (where I now live), and Jersey City (where I’ve lived most of the last 15 years) were abandoned in favor of terminals in Newark Bay because the container ships were too big to dock there. My sense of the issue, which is not very deep, is that the period when freight shipping abandoned New York Bay for Newark Bay is when the big rise occurred.

However that issue works out, just think of containerization. It is obviously modular, and in a physically visible sense. Anyone who lives near a substantial freight port has seen containers stacked on land and perhaps stacked above the decks of very large ships. Others may have seen containers stacked on mile-long freight trains. And if you’ve not seen these things directly, you may well have seen photos or illustrations of them (e.g. in the current article in the NYTimes on the SNAFU at the new locks of the Panama Canal, which is what brought containerization to mind).

Transformation: FDR then (2014) and now

If you line up the left-most pillars in both images things should fall into place. The creature in the lower photo appears to be modeled after Wylie Coyote; notice the eyes.

Round 2: Andreessen Horowitz & Talent, further thoughts (for 2019 going forward)

I’ve continued to think about the Andreessen Horowitz Cowen conversation:

I decided that, in making my earlier remarks, perhaps I’d been distracted by the reference to black musicians, you know that “very small group of people that created every new musical art form in the last century.” So I listened to it again and, yes, I was pulled a bit off track be that reference. Yes, it’s the musicians who created the music, but they didn’t create the music business. That’s something else. That takes other talent sets working in conjunction with the musicians. Getting those things to work together, that’s the trick.

Early on one of them talked of how “talent is a network” of individuals working toward a common goal. While, yes, they ARE interested in identifying individuals with talent, they’re just as interested in the problem of assembling networks of them: How do we identify compatible individuals and help them toward the common goal? That’s a more sophisticated problem, one that recognizes that talent must have a context in which it can blossom.

What I’m thinking is that the entertainment business as such dates from the early 20th century, with roots in music publishing, vaudeville, and the theater (with book publishing somewhere off to the side). Then we get sound recording, movies, and radio and the entertainment business as such arises to provide “content”, as they call it these days, for those media. Venture capital dates after WWII and really got going with high tech. Thus when these guys talk of Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley, they’re using those a figures for the entertainment business and the tech business.

But venture capital is one step further removed from the end product. Record companies actually produce the records – well, these days they’re mostly not records, but that’s a different story, one that leaks into the tech story. Movie companies produce movies (sorta’, because it’s not like the old days with the studios). Venture capital firms produces the companies that produce the goods or services.

But still, there are similarities. About three quarters of the way along Cowen asks Andreesen, “What’s the last thing software will eat?” (“Software is eating the world” seems to be the company motto). His reply, at about 32:35:

Basically it’s this question of how do you organize a small number of people to do something new. And by the way that can be a start-up company, that can be many other kinds of efforts where you need a small number of people to do something new. It can be a new political campaign, a new activist movement, whatever. But a small number of people to do something new. Right. And how do you pick, if you’re going to finance or donate or fund those things, how do you pick ones you want to donate to and then how are those things actually gonna’ run. Right.

And the new part that’s really important, like, the little known fact, for example, about venture capital, there is term in venture capital and hedge funds called “carry”, called “carried interest” with is the sort of profit participation that the VCs or hedge fund managers make. The term “carry” actually comes from whaling, in the sixteen hundreds, in the Atlantic Ocean. The term “carry” was the people who would finance captain and the crew of the boat, like the boat actually would run as a startup. There was equity participation for all the people in the boat and then they would pick the captain, you’d raise money in town, you’d raise capital. And then the boat would go off and take down a whale, right, and about three quarters of the time it would come back. [...] Carry was the portion of the whale that the investors got.

If you think about it, the process if you’re like in, I don’t know, Boston or wherever in like 1675 and you’re trying to say, OK, this ship, this captain, this crew, this mission, in these waters, with these weather patterns, how are they going to behave under pressure, what’s gonna’ happen when things go wrong, and is the crew gonna’ mutiny, and like many any money doing this, and like the whole is just such an intricate kinda’ puzzle. And it revolves around people. Setting up a whaling expedition [...]

Tech startups are the same way. By the way you know greenlighting a movie a TV show in Hollywood, it’s the exact same kind of process. And it’s just it’s so intangible and so much based on the interaction of a small number of people who are going to be under extreme pressure. If we could figure out how to automate that, we’d fund that company and then retire. But at least we don’t know how to do that.

Yes, that IS a problem, isn’t it?

What are the limits of our capacity for institutionalization? What happened, what did we learn, that allowed us to make a business out of entertainment? What happened a bit later on that allowed us to make a business out of creating new companies? I’m thinking that it’s the movie business that is the bridge between these two phenomena.

Perhaps more on that later, but see my earlier remarks on anti-trust in movies in my review of Hollywood Economics for some cues.

Trump as King Cyrus, or, The Bible's got a place for all of us

And here's Trump's place:

Cyrus, in case you’ve forgotten, was born in the sixth century B.C.E. and became the first emperor of Persia. Isaiah 45 celebrates Cyrus for freeing a population of Jews who were held captive in Babylon. Cyrus is the model for a nonbeliever appointed by God as a vessel for the purposes of the faithful.

That's from a NYTimes op-ed by Katherine Stewart, Why Trump Reigns as King Cyrus. It continues:

As the Trump presidency falls under siege on multiple fronts, it has become increasingly clear that the so-called values voters will be among the last to leave the citadel. A lot of attention has been paid to the supposed paradox of evangelicals backing such an imperfect man, but the real problem is that our idea of Christian nationalism hasn’t caught up with the reality. We still buy the line that the hard core of the Christian right is just an interest group working to protect its values. But what we don’t get is that Mr. Trump’s supposedly anti-Christian attributes and anti-democratic attributes are a vital part of his attraction.

Today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they sound as if they prefer autocrats to democrats. In fact, what they really want is a king. “It is God that raises up a king,” according to Paula White, a prosperity gospel preacher who has advised Mr. Trump. [...]

The great thing about kings like Cyrus, as far as today’s Christian nationalists are concerned, is that they don’t have to follow rules. They are the law. This makes them ideal leaders in paranoid times.

And so:

I have attended dozens of Christian nationalist conferences and events over the past two years. And while I have heard plenty of comments casting doubt on the more questionable aspects of Mr. Trump’s character, the gist of the proceedings almost always comes down to the belief that he is a miracle sent straight from heaven to bring the nation back to the Lord. I have also learned that resistance to Mr. Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.

This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.