In the garden of Eden... [the epic of Jump and Kong]

Life on Mars, with Elon, Grimes, and the baby formerly known as...what?

Maureen Down, Elon Musk, Blasting Off in Domestic Bliss, NYTimes, July 25, 2020:

So how do the King of Mars, his Galactic Princess and their newborn son, X Æ A-Xii, spend a Saturday night holed up in their Los Angeles pad?

A little anime — lately it’s been “Death Note” and “Evangelion.” Lots of late-night debates about the potential and danger of artificial intelligence. And many audiobooks and podcasts, particularly ones about history.

“Right now, we’re going back to Genghis Khan for like the third time, and the Mongols, I guess,” said the Galactic Princess, otherwise known as Grimes, otherwise known as Claire Boucher, otherwise known as “c,” her initial and the symbol for the speed of light.

“You seem to be obsessed with that,” she teased her boyfriend about Genghis Khan.

Grimes, the singer and artist, and Elon Musk, the rocket man and Tesla magnate, have an otherworldly romance. Which works out well since Mr. Musk wants to occupy Mars, in case malevolent robots or an engineered virus threaten Earth, and then die on Mars, just not on impact.

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The couple has a baby with the most unusual name, which they shorten to “X.” Mr. Musk said it’s pronounced “just like the letter X. AE is pronounced ‘ash’, as in Old English. A-12 is also pronounced just like it reads. Refers to the Archangel-12 C.I.A. reconnaissance plane.”

3's a crowd:

About the contention that he had a threesome with Ms. Heard and her friend Cara Delevingne, Mr. Musk said, laughing, “We did not have the threesome, you know. So I think people think these things are generally more salacious than they are.”

He has some advice for Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard: “For the two of them, I would just recommend that they bury the hatchet and move on.”

Asked about Mr. Depp’s deprecation of him as “Mollusk," Mr. Musk chuckled again, saying: “Well, yeah, I hope he recovers from this situation.”

Everybody poops:

But how does he have any time to spend with his children, given his insane work schedule?

“Well, babies are just eating and pooping machines, you know?” he said. “Right now there’s not much I can do. Grimes has a much bigger role than me right now. When the kid gets older, there will be more of a role for me. I think just doing what I’ve done with my other kids. If I have a trip for Tesla to China, for example, I’ll bring the kids with me and we’ll go see the Great Wall or we took the bullet train from Beijing to Xian and saw the Terracotta Warriors.” He created an online school for his older kids, which he said has “actually worked out pretty well.”

I asked Mr. Musk, who has given money to both Democratic and Republican candidates, if Grimes, who supported Bernie Sanders, had an influence on his recent decision to disencumber himself of his houses, including a quirky one once owned by Gene Wilder.

“Well," he said, “she thinks I should hold on to at least one house.”

SpaceX:

And with SpaceX, Mr. Musk provided a moment so bold and brimming with American razzmatazz that it lifted us briefly out of our pandemic-induced funk. When his Crew Dragon spacecraft launched two NASA astronauts in May from the legendary Florida pad that once served Apollo missions, it was a reminder of when America was first and fast and made things, coming at a dark time when even masks and ventilators seemed beyond our manufacturing reach and when our government appears so incapable of getting coronavirus under control that the European Union has banned Americans from coming in.

AI:

In the past, talking about A.I. turning on us, he has used the Monty Python line, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

“My assessment about why A.I. is overlooked by very smart people is that very smart people do not think a computer can ever be as smart as they are,” he told me. “And this is hubris and obviously false.”

He adds that working with A.I. at Tesla lets him say with confidence “that we’re headed toward a situation where A.I. is vastly smarter than humans and I think that time frame is less than five years from now. But that doesn’t mean that everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird.”

He said his “top concern” is DeepMind, the secretive London A.I. lab run by Demis Hassabis and owned by Google. “Just the nature of the A.I. that they’re building is one that crushes all humans at all games,” he said. “I mean, it’s basically the plotline in ‘War Games.’”

He wears a mask:

For many of the coastal elites for whom a Tesla is a status symbol, Mr. Musk’s laissez-faire approach to the pandemic was disappointing, and sounded way too Trumpian. In the spring, when his California factory was shut down, he called stay-at-home orders “fascist” and tweeted, “FREE AMERICA NOW.”

“I think the reality of Covid is that it is dangerous if you’re elderly and have pre-existing conditions,” he said, adding: “It absolutely makes sense to have a lockdown if you’re vulnerable, but I do not think it makes sense to have a lockdown if you’re not vulnerable.” He said he may have had Covid in January and he wears a mask on the factory floor.

The Tesla-loving liberals were horrified again by a May tweet, “Take the red pill," an allusion to the pill Keanu Reeves takes in “The Matrix” that lets him see the truth.

About Kanye:

“I’ve done my best to convince him that 2024 would be better than 2020,” Mr. Musk said, so that Mr. West wouldn’t be accused of splitting the Black vote with Mr. Biden.

Well, the man has SOME taste:

Princess Mononoke is the best Hayao Miyazaki movie.

Yes, agreed.

“i ❤anime” is your most popular tweet.

It’s definitely one of them. I think for a long time the most popular tweet was that I’m going to buy Fortnite and delete it to save these kids from eternal virginity.

Friday Fotos: Reuben, Reuben, I've been....eating [Covid-19 picnic!]

0. The road ahead, into "the Singularity" and beyond [GPT-3]

This is the first in a series of posts where I set out a vision for the evolution of artificial intelligence beyond GPT-3 (GPT = Generative Pre-trained Transformer). As I explain in the next post in the series, “No meaning, no how”, it is both a remarkable achievement – we are now at sea in the Singularity and there is no turning back – and a remarkable temptation, hence my name for the overall series, GPT-3: Rubicon and Waterloo. No doubt some will yield to that temptation, but others are already resisting it, and have been for awhile. What will happen?

Of course I don’t know how things will unfold, but I have preferences.

The purpose of this series is to lay out those preferences. In the next section of this post I quote extensively from an article David Hays and I published in 1990, The Evolution of Cognition [1], the first in a series of essays in which we outline a view of human cultural evolution over the longue durée. Then I reprise the sketch of my (current) vision that I tucked into a comment at Marginal Revolution. I conclude with some observations of the value of being old (priors!).

Beyond AGI

In “The Evolution of Cognition” David Hays and I argued that the long-term evolution of human culture follows from the architectural foundations of thought and communication: first speech, then writing, followed by systematized calculation, and most recently, computation. In discussing the importance of the computer we remark:

One of the problems we have with the computer is deciding what kind of thing it is, and therefore what sorts of tasks are suitable to it. The computer is ontologically ambiguous. Can it think, or only calculate? Is it a brain or only a machine?

The steam locomotive, the so-called iron horse, posed a similar problem for people at Rank 3. It is obviously a mechanism and it is inherently inanimate. Yet it is capable of autonomous motion, something heretofore only within the capacity of animals and humans. So, is it animate or not? Perhaps the key to acceptance of the iron horse was the adoption of a system of thought that permits separation of autonomous motion from autonomous decision. The iron horse is fearsome only if it may, at any time, choose to leave the tracks and come after you like a charging rhinoceros. Once the system of thought had shaken down in such a way that autonomous motion did not imply the capacity for decision, people made peace with the locomotive.

The computer is similarly ambiguous. It is clearly an inanimate machine. Yet we interact with it through language; a medium heretofore restricted to communication with other people. To be sure, computer languages are very restricted, but they are languages. They have words, punctuation marks, and syntactic rules. To learn to program computers we must extend our mechanisms for natural language.

As a consequence it is easy for many people to think of computers as people. Thus Joseph Weizenbaum, with considerable dis-ease and guilt, tells of discovering that his secretary “consults” Eliza—a simple program which mimics the responses of a psychotherapist—as though she were interacting with a real person (Weizenbaum 1976). Beyond this, there are researchers who think it inevitable that computers will surpass human intelligence and some who think that, at some time, it will be possible for people to achieve a peculiar kind of immortality by “downloading” their minds to a computer. As far as we can tell such speculation has no ground in either current practice or theory. It is projective fantasy, projection made easy, perhaps inevitable, by the ontological ambiguity of the computer. We still do, and forever will, put souls into things we cannot understand, and project onto them our own hostility and sexuality, and so forth.

A game of chess between a computer program and a human master is just as profoundly silly as a race between a horse-drawn stagecoach and a train. But the silliness is hard to see at the time. At the time it seems necessary to establish a purpose for humankind by asserting that we have capacities that it does not. It is truly difficult to give up the notion that one has to add “because . . . “ to the assertion “I’m important.” But the evolution of technology will eventually invalidate any claim that follows “because.” Sooner or later we will create a technology capable of doing what, heretofore, only we could.

That is where we are now. The notion of an AGI (artificial general intelligence) that will bootstrap itself into superintelligence is fantasy; it arises because, even after three-quarters of a century, computers are still strange to us. We design, build, and operate them; but they challenge us; they’ve got bugs, they crash, they don’t come to heel when we command. We don’t know what they are. That is certainly the case with GPT-3. We’ve built it; it’s performance amazes (but puzzles and disappoints as well). And we do not understand how it works. It is almost as puzzling to us as we are to ourselves. Surely we can change that, no?

We conclude the essay with this paragraph:

We know that children can learn to program, that they enjoy doing so, and that a suitable programming environment helps them to learn (Kay 1977, Pappert 1980). Seymour Pappert argues that programming allows children to master abstract concepts at an earlier age. In general it seems obvious to us that a generation of 20-year-olds who have been programming computers since they were 4 or 5 years old are going to think differently than we do. Most of what they have learned they will have learned from us. But they will have learned it in a different way. Their ontology will be different from ours. Concepts which tax our abilities may be routine for them, just as the calculus, which taxed the abilities of Leibniz and Newton, is routine for us. These children will have learned to learn Rank 4 concepts.

Frankly, I think we are a behind the curve on this one. Had Hays and I hazarded to predict the advance of computing into the lives of children –“The child is Father to the man”, as Wordsworth observed – I fear we would be disappointed by the current situation.

Yes, relatively young programmers have done remarkable things and Silicon Valley teems with young virtuosi. It is not the virtuosi I’m concerned about. It is the average, which is too low, by far.

Oddly enough, the current pandemic may help raise that average, though only marginally. With at-home schooling looming in the future, school districts are beginning to buy laptop machines for children whose families cannot afford them. For without those machines, those children will not be able to participate in the only education available to them. No doubt most of the instruction they receive through those machines will train them to be only passive consumers of computation, as most of us are and have been conditioned to be.

But some of them surely will be curious. They’ll take a look under the virtual hood – though some of them will undoubtedly open up the physical machine itself (not that there’s much to see, with so much action integrated on a single chip) – and begin tinkering around. And before you know, they’ll do interesting things and Peter Thiel is going to be handing out more of those $100,000 fellowships [2] to teens living in institutionally impoverished neighborhoods plagued by substandard infrastructure.

We’ll see.

The road ahead

On July 19, 2020, Tyler Cowen made a post to Marginal Evolution entitled “GPT-3, etc.” It consisted of an email from a reader who asserted, “When future AI textbooks are written, I could easily imagine them citing 2020 or 2021 as years when preliminary AGI first emerged,. This is very different than my own previous personal forecasts for AGI emerging in something like 20-50 years…” As I’ve already indicated, I have my doubts about the concept of AGI.

Immigrant uprising in ancient Egypt

‘Invasion’ of ancient Egypt may have actually been immigrant uprising | Science | AAAS https://t.co/lo0TRaJeAF

— Robert Baker (@RobertB41188300) July 24, 2020

AOC delivers a powerful speech in reply to Rep. Yoho's vile insults

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) Responds to Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL): "I do not need Representative Yoho to apologize to me. Clearly he does not want to. Clearly when given the opportunity he will not. And I will not stay up late at night waiting for an apology from a man who has no remorse over calling women & using abusive language towards women." https://cs.pn/3jFn5pZ

Who is that masked man? [Covid-19]

Attridge and Staten 2: The Sick Rose [+GPT-3]

Bumped to the head of the queue from 2015. Is it GPT-3 week at New Savanna? Ken Lacker quizzed he/she/it (do we need a new pronoun?):

Q: Which colorless green ideas sleep furiously?
A: Ideas that are colorless, green, and sleep furiously are the ideas of a sleep furiously.

Some years later poet John Hollander wrote a poem entitled "Coiled Alizarin":

Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts:
While breathless, in stodgy viridian,
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

The (metaphysical) distance between GPT-3 and Hollander is HUGE, ludicrously monumental. I discuss this poem in considerable detail below.

* * * * *

In my first post [1] I commented on Attridge and Staten’s conception of minimal reading in “Reading for the Obvious: A Conversation” [2]. Now I want to comment on their remarks about their example poem, William Blake’s The Sick Rose. My one complaint is that they didn’t finish the job. By that I DO NOT mean that they didn’t describe – my word, not theirs – everything, for that is all but impossible, and they say so. No, what I mean is that after a nice ambling conversation they didn’t conclude with a summary statement of their points of agreement.

While I’ve thought casually about doing so myself, I’ve thought better of it. But I think I’ve quoted enough of their discussion to give you and idea of what they’re up to.

Before proceeding I should note that I’m not a Blake scholar [3], nor a romanticist, nor even a specialist in poetry. It’s not clear to me what I am. I suppose I’m a theoretician and methodologist who pursues the craft mostly by examining texts in some detail.

* * * * *

The Sick Rose

O Rose, thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

Note: Occasionally there is an ellipsis in their text, indicated in the usual way. In those cases where I introduce an ellipsis into a quoted passage I’ll indicated that by enclosing the ellipsis dots within angle brackets, thus: […].

The Obvious

Henry Staten notes that that, in Attridge’s book, The Singularity of Literature, he asserts that the poem deploys “syntax to achieve an unrelenting forward drive that climaxes on a single powerful word” (66). He then quotes this passage:

The simplicity of the strongly articulated phrasal movement contributes to this experience. The arresting initial statement, “O Rose, thou art sick:” – one line, two beats – is followed, after a pregnant pause, by an extension that takes up the seven remaining lines. This extended elaboration of the opening line is made up of three lines of anticipation, followed by the stanza break which further heightens the tension, and then a four-line arrival. And those three lines of anticipation form a crescendo of intensity – “The invisible worm / That flies in the night, / In the howling storm,” – while the stanza of arrival varies the 1:3 balance of the first stanza by taking the reader through two climactic statements of equal length: “Has found out thy bed / Of crimson joy; // And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy.” (69-70)

Let me supplement this in a rather pedestrian way. As punctuated, the poem consists of two sentences: 1) the first line, and 2) the other seven. That second sentence thus loops over the boundary between the two quatrains. In some sense, Blake is signaling to us, that first line has a (logical) weight equal to that of the other seven lines. The second sentence would seem to amplify the assertion made in the first. The rose’s sickness, a property of the rose, is caused by the invasion of this foreign body, this worm.

Yet me further observe that the poem is addressed to the rose. The rose is not being talked about in the third person, as the worm is, but is included in dynamics of the poem itself. Thus a second person pronoun appears in the opening line (“thou”) , in line 5 (“thy”), and in the final line (“thy”), but not in line 2-4, which are given over to the worm. Thus the worm and the rose have a different relationship to the dialog itself.

And then we have the use of “thou” and “thy”. I’m not sure how to read that. We are dealing with what linguists know as the T–V distinction (after the Latin tu and vos). In Early Modern English “thou” and “thy” would have been used for familiars and subordinates while “ye” and “you” were used for strangers and superiors. But the use of “thou” and “thy” had pretty much disappeared from ordinary discourse by Blake’s time. But those forms have continued in restricted contexts where they “seem pious and (ironically) more formal and respectful than the everyday ‘you’” [4]. What was Blake signally in this usage, familiarity with the rose, or respect for it?

I don’t know how to resolve the matter, though it is quite possible that a Blakean would be able to do so. In any event, I think the precise valence of the second person address is less important than the fact that the poem is addressed to the rose. What that gives is a poem that begins 1) by addressing the rose, then 2) takes a three-line excursion to talk of the worm in third person and then 3) returns to addressing the rose. We might also read a spatial progression where the image of the invisible worm in the storm invokes large unbounded space, the image of the roses bed locates us specifically in the immediate neighborhood of the rose, while the concluding couplet implies that the worm is destroying the rose from within–even as we are addressing the rose.

Let’s move on to a comment by Attridge:

You may have doubts about the symbolic suggestiveness of rose and worm in themselves, but what about the sexual symbolism in their conjunction? Sexual symbolism in its crudest form–the phallic worm, the vaginal rose, the bed: is this not obvious to all readers, and thus part of what it means to take the poem at face value? It relies on the most basic visual associations to do its work (again, a touch of the child’s imaginative world?). Yet the implications of this interpretive leap are shocking: destructive pest entering beautiful flower to kill it equals human love-making... So my term “literal reading” is a bit misleading: it can include a response to symbolic meanings as well as literal. What I wanted to suggest is that the words mean what they mean, and they never stop meaning what they mean. (Meaning being, of course, a matter of general agreement. There is no such thing as a private language– Wittgenstein’s slogan bears repeating.) Even metaphors, as Donald Davidson insisted, mean what they say and not something else. This is a poem in which a worm enters, and destroys, a rose; and it’s only because worms and roses, and howling storms and crimson joys mean more than entomological, botanical and meteorological phenomena when we meet them in this arrangement that it’s a poem in which a great deal more happens.

I’d put that last notion a bit differently. The reason they “mean more than entomological, botanical and meteorological phenomena” is because they’ve been put in this most particular arrangement, an arrangement that summons their ordinary meanings and rubs them together to spark new meanings.

This in turn makes the notion of a “literal” reading problematic, but we don’t want to give in to “symbolic” readings too foolishly. Henry Staten explains:

I’m very friendly to calling the kind of reading we’re after a “literal” reading, even though it can be misleading (but all our terms can be misleading, starting with “obvious”). I think that the notion of “symbolism” is more misleading than “literal” is. Except when it’s used in the strictest sense, to mean something whose meaning stays more or less constant in each of its occurrences, the notion of the symbol has always seemed to me to introduce obscurity into the discussion of poems. […] You yourself say here that the fundamental conjunction of images “relies on the most basic visual associations to do its work.” Precisely. And I think it’s better not to call this “symbolism,” especially in cases like this one, where the technically non-literal meaning is so reliably linked to the literal meaning. I think it’s highly significant, though, that Blake has not depended on the worm-rose conjunction by itself to communicate the erotic meaning; he has thrown the words “bed” and “love” in there to make it obvious. To read a poem “literally” to me means not to depreciate the figurative meanings, but to

take it at its word and to avoid reading through it or behind it as much as possible.

Somewhat later on Staten invokes structuralism, which is where I got my intellectual start many years ago as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins:

Another aspect of description with a high probability of consensual acceptance is the patterning in many poems of what the structuralists liked to call “binary oppositions.” There is a primary linguistic energy in such oppositions that requires a minimum of understanding of meaning to grasp, and which is very often obvious or close to obvious (beginning with such traditional topoi as light/darkness and the like); in many cases all we have to do is point to the pairs of words that have such a relation to one another and remind ourselves of what it is about them that makes their meanings clash—a clash that can often be felt right at the surface of the words’ meanings, independently of most subtleties of interpretation. By sharpening our sense of this clash, we make palpable the “force” or the “dynamics” of the juxtaposition of these words in this context. Blake’s poem fairly explodes out of the juxtaposition of these two words: worm, flower.

Later in that same passage he has a parenthetical remark where he talks of howling-storm-worm and crimson-joy-rose, a nice opposition and a nice compact statement of the semantic gamesmanship operating in the poem.

What kind of thing is a crimson-joy-rose? A crimson rose, yes. But a joyous rose, or crimson joy? They don’t make sense. I want to take a digression through that kind of nonsense before continuing on with Attridge and Staten.

Do come in [lockdown]

UMMI Poet's Cypher

GPT-3 writes two sonnets, sorta’. The first is better than the second. [digital humanities]

My interview with Hollis Robbins ends with a “contest” in which GPT-3 competes with Marcus Christian in the writing of a sonnet. As I explain in the interview, GPT-3 was prompted with the first two lines of Christian’s “The Craftsman” and then completed it, like his (prompt lines in bold):

A sonnet by Marcus Christian:
I ply with all the cunning of my art
This little thing, and with consummate care
Contrive a score of air-tight cells
And coil therein a million filaments.
And yet, despite all my aspiring skill,
All it can do, howe’er I strain and toil,
Is make a drum that, once it is put up,
Can never be made into a bell.

Notice that GPT-3 only produced six lines, for a total of eight. Which is not a full sonnet. I was curious about that. You see, when you give GPT-3 a prompt you also specify a limit on token output. Did it stop at 6 lines because it came up against that limit or did it stop because it ‘decided’ it was through, though it had more space available?

I put the question to Phil Mohun, who is the one with access to GPT-3. Here’s his reply:

There is a max_token limit, however I can’t remember if it stopped by itself. Sometimes if you set the max limit too high and it senses that it’s run to the end of the topic it will switch topics. I tried your prompt again with a higher word limit. Here is the complete response:

A sonnet by Marcus Christian:
I ply with all the cunning of my art
This little thing, and with consummate care
Stroke, coax and lure,
And now I could not pry
For all the world to learn how on it stare
These two bewildered pair of velvet eyes.
Yet, though my ministrations pleasure bring,
They are not what they seemed, nor I am naught.
He shuns the pool of secrecy in which I swim,
He feeds and leaves me hungry, hidden in my spring.
So, though his thought my fancied excellence fulfills
I want, and I am wanting – here I wistful swim.
I try to fill his mind with pleasure’s liquor
But find there only void,
A dark abyss of emptiness and fear,
Where shadow waits, and swift my soul to carry.
I feel my wings grow frail, and heavy grow my head,
I choke upon the murky water in his stead.
Warm from the sun in which he basks, I lie, and die.

A sonnet by Gloriana Fiore:
Oh, to be without my long and lonely flight,
To be close to him! I close my ruby eyes
And think of all the ways I could begin
To make his days a time of precious joy.
A lark does not need its plum

So, much longer than the first time, though we’re not quite sure what’s going on internally. The interesting thing, though, is that this much longer output isn’t a continuation of what it had done the first time. It’s gone down a new path. That makes sense to me, though don’t ask me why. If I’d have been asked before the second go with the prompt, that’s what I would have guessed (I fact I was wondering about it).

Secondly, notice that this time GPT-3 finished one long straggling pseudo-sonnet, stopped, and the started another: “A sonnet by Gloriana Fiore:” That second one looked like it just stopped at the token limit.

Hollis and I felt that that adding this second effort to the interview would add little value. We also agreed that GPT-3’s first response to the prompt, those six lines, is better than this second response. The important point is that, whatever GPT-3 is doing, it's doing it well enough that we can make these judgments. I’m thinking we may well have an amoeba’s worth of intentionality going on. And it only took 175 billion parameters.

* * * * *

Here is Christian's sonnet:

I ply with all the cunning of my art
This little thing, and with consummate care
I fashion it—so that when I depart,
Those who come after me shall find it fair
And beautiful. It must be free of flaws—
Pointing no laborings of weary hands;
And there must be no flouting of the laws
Of beauty—as the artist understands.
Through passion, yearnings infinite—yet dumb—
I lift you from the depths of my own mind
And gild you with my soul’s white heat to plumb
The souls of future men. I leave behind
This thing that in return this solace gives:
“He who creates true beauty ever lives.”

Christian, “The Craftsman,” anthologized in Beatrice M. Murphy, ed. Ebony Rhythm: an Anthology of Contemporary Negro Verse. Exposition Press, 1948.

Two cranes over Hoboken

The Republican phase transition

John Quiggin has initiated an interesting conversation over at Crooked Timber. He begins:

I’ve been reading the latest (excellent as usual) book from Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality . The opening paras read

This is not a book about Donald Trump. Instead it is about an immense shift that preceded Trump’s rise, has profoundly shaped his political party and its priorities, and poses a threat to our democracy that is certain to outlast his presidency. That shift is the rise of plutocracy – government of, by, and for the rich

This passage reflects the conflict between two propositions that I (and lots of others, I think) have been grappling with
(1) The rise of Donald Trump represents a radical transformation of the Republican party and American conservatism
(2) Everything Trump has done is a continuation of long-established Republican policy and practices.

Here at CT, Corey has argued for a long time that (2) is correct, and that conservatives or, more properly, reactionaries have always been about preserving hierarchy and power. I find Corey’s argument convincing, but not enough to persuade me that (1) is wrong. Hacker and Pierson also broadly endorse (2). But much of their book is a comparison of the trajectory of the Republican Party with that of the German nationalists in the dying days of the Weimar Republic. The fact that such a comparison, until recently regarded as an automatic disqualification from serious argument (Godwin’s law) now seems entirely plausible, suggests that something really has changed.

He then goes on to discuss the difference between the Eisenhower-era of the party and the present era. Commenter Basilisc picks up on that:

A key distinction that’s not made enough is between Big Business and Plutocracy. Eisenhower Republicanism was all about big, listed companies – GM and the like. They were focused on low taxes, loose regulation, free trade. But beyond that they were indifferent to, or even supportive of, other kinds of social progress: civil rights, environmentalism, education. Think of GHW Bush and the ADA, or Henry Paulson and the Nature Conservancy. Or all the corporations making a nod to LGBT rights or BLM. There was, and to an extent still is, a concept of “corporate citizenship”, constraining actions by entities employing thousands of people across dozens of national markets..

But Big Business Republicanism has been steadily eclipsed in Republican circles by Plutocracy: rich guys (almost all men) who are acting for themselves rather than for their corporate structures. Think of (unlisted) Koch Industries, or the Mercer family, or Sheldon Adelson. Free trade might matter for the specific markets they’re active in, but otherwise not a big deal. Low taxes, yes, but also weak tax enforcement. No regulation, ever, least of all environmental. Corporate citizenship, a joke. And if racist dog whistor airhorns expand and energize the coalition and keep them in power, bring ‘em on please.

The hands of a genius

Irving Penn, 12 Hands of Miles Davis and his Trumpet
New York, 1986 pic.twitter.com/fwkSjxZrH9

— Oğuz Pancar (@opancaro) July 20, 2020

There is no meaning to be found in statistical distributions over bare naked signifiers [semiotics 101]

I know the real world is terrible, but, philosophically? the next decade is going to be — so — much — fun.

— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) July 20, 2020

Yes, 175B parameters. Still, no signifieds = no meaning. QED.

A very sophisticated illusion. Our communicative charity, if you will, makes us vulnerable to the illusion.

It's that pesky 'theory of mind' module. 2/2

— Bill Benzon (@bbenzon) July 20, 2020