Klaas is back in session yet again

“Passionate, insightful, and occasionally jaw-dropping, Corruptible sets out the story of the intoxicating lure of power—and how it has shaped the modern world.” —Peter Frankopan, internationally bestselling author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

“We know power corrupts, but how exactly? Is it a quick moral collapse or a slow rot? Dangerous as a drug addiction, power changes both those who have it and those who just want a quick fix. Klaas gives us a new, insightful, and seditious road map to this primal urge to dominate, which, thankfully, not all of us share equally.” —Richard Engel, chief foreign correspondent of NBC News

“The power-hungry don’t ask why, they only ask why not…. Keeping such people far from the levers of power is at least half the battle, as Brian Klaas explains so well in Corruptible—a GPS system for navigating a world increasingly full of illiberal democracies, modernized dictatorships, and populists who care only for power.” —Garry Kasparov, chairman of both the Renew Democracy Initiative and the Human Rights Foundation and former world chess champion

“A brilliant exploration… This book builds Brian Klaas’s reputation, offering an essential guide through our world of democratic decay, corruption, and cronyism.” —Dan Snow, bestselling author of On This Day in History

Brian Klaas rocks. I am havin' too much fun, deeply into this one. Just as with his prior book Flukes.

 

Could not be more timely, in the wake of Donald Trump's election victory.

 

The book is packed with cool observations.

 

More...

Baby Faces and Bigotry

In your daily life, you likely encounter dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of strangers. Even in places you frequent, such as the grocery store or your office building, you’ll cross paths with people who are completely unknown to you. If you’re a frequent flier, or if you live in a major metropolis, encountering people who speak a different language, wear different clothes, or come from different cultures is routine.

But for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, such encounters were exceedingly rare. Because of territoriality, venturing into unknown land was akin to playing Russian roulette. The biologist and author Jared Diamond, in his book The World Until Yesterday, argues that hunter-gatherers classify everyone into three groups: friends, enemies, or strangers. Friends are those dozens of families that make up your band, or who are from bands you’re on good terms with. Enemies are people you recognize, but are from a rival band that lives in the same area. The third camp—strangers—are rare. But, to be safe, you must automatically assume they’re potential enemies. In the prehistoric past, hunter-gatherers would never meet someone who was from halfway across the world, meaning that encounters with people from different races were effectively close to zero. As a result, racism couldn’t have been reinforced by psychological evolution over hundreds of thousands of years the same way that biases for height and gender were. Plus, given the origins of our species, most Stone Age hunter-gatherers didn’t look remotely like modern Europeans or Americans. So, is all racism culturally learned?

Unfortunately, our Stone Age brains produce serious biases about people who look different. For survival, our social species has evolved to quickly use cues to identify whether someone is like us, and a friend, or unlike us, and a potential foe. This impulse gives rise to what social scientists call sorting between “in-group” and “out-group” individuals. In-group individuals are to be embraced, while out-group individuals are to be shunned, driven off, or even killed. Crucially, those from an out-group are more likely to be people that we see as potential threats—a point that we’ll return to momentarily.

Today, many people still rely on these arcane, bigoted sorting mechanisms as a cognitive shortcut, even though it’s completely irrational…

…Our prehistoric templates for determining in-groups and out-groups shift our behavior, even when it’s irrational and damaging to our best interests. We trust those whom we identify with. But we’re suspicious of those who don’t seem to be “one of us.

In the modern world, those templates from ancestral brains intersect with centuries of explicit and implicit culturally learned racism to create even more biased assessments of those who are from a different, particularly minority, ethnic group. That’s demonstrated with some depressing research that shows white Westerners sometimes behave as though black people are “strangers” who are potential threats—a phenomenon that further compounds the systemic institutional racism that plagues modern societies.

All human faces can be scored by how baby-faced they appear (the technical term is babyfaceness). Countless experiments have demonstrated that we instinctively pay attention to this trait when assessing others—and judge them based upon it. In the criminal justice system, there’s evidence that judges and juries treat baby-faced defendants as less responsible or culpable for their actions than less baby-faced defendants, even if they’re the same age. We seem to automatically believe that babyfaceness is a proxy for innocence. As a result, those who are more baby-faced are often perceived as less threatening than those with more hardened, adult facial features.

But there’s a disheartening twist.

Studies have found that whether babyfaceness helps or hurts you gain power is dependent on race. Here’s what the research seems to show: Black people are more likely to be viewed by white people as threatening. That’s partly because of the “strangers” template in our Stone Age brains and partly due to a long, grotesque history of learned and internalized racism. No surprise there. But just as white people are more prone to viewing black people as threats, they’re less prone to viewing baby-faced black people that way, according to experiments. Further research has shown that, in a white-dominated society, baby-faced black people are therefore more able to attain power than less baby-faced black people. White people view black people with more adult faces as a threat, leading to reduced career advancement. According to this research, this relationship is inverted for white people. In similar studies, baby-faced white CEOs were perceived to be weak rather than threatening. In a white-dominated society, it seems that having a baby face helps you if you’re black and hurts you if you’re white. It’s horrifyingly bonkers. But it seems, on aggregate, to make a difference that compounds preexisting racial biases in society. The point is this: irrational evaluations of faces based on archaic threat instincts still seem to be entrenching inequality in our modern world.

This could partially explain (but never excuse) why highly qualified people from ethnic minorities often get passed over for leadership positions in favor of less qualified white people…

Klaas, Brian. Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us (pp. 79-82). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

Indeed.
 

DIGRESSING FOR A MOMENT

Brian has a Substack site he's named The Garden of Forking Paths. I'm a paid subscriber. Snippet below from a recent post:

How I write
I, like everyone else, learned to write by reading. Brains are pattern detection machines, and we intuit how those patterns should look by observing them elsewhere.

But creativity requires recombination that breaks patterns; if we only recreated the world as we observed it, nothing new would ever be produced. The Middle Ages captured this dynamic by giving the world florilegia, or “gathered flowers,” which were bound anthologies of various snippets of wisdom or creativity.

All ideas are built on life’s florilegia, and a writer’s brain, like a flower, can only grow if it is given the right sustenance. That sustenance is some combination of life experience and observation, interaction with clever and passionate people, and, of course, reading.

Every writer, like every human, is a sort of mind thief—not due to plagiarism or dishonesty—but simply because our brains cannot produce a purely “original” idea. Creativity is little more than interesting, novel synthesis. Just as a musician is swayed by the tunes they feed their minds, so too is a writer shaped by the authors they deliberately consume. If I am writing a whimsical essay, I might sit down and read Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut for an hour before I start typing, an offering of time to my playful muse as much as a subconscious prime for the mind.

As I’ve written previously, every good idea I’ve ever had has sprung, at least in part, from someone else’s good idea.

If you want to write, you must do at least two things relentlessly: observe the world and read. Crucially, though, you must observe and read what you don’t know, because otherwise the soil around you becomes overly stale. I have decidedly strange interests, so my bedside table is currently occupied by a teetering stack of books: one about plant consciousness; another about consumerism in modern Christianity; one on the history of ignorance; a Slow Horses thriller for good measure; and a delightful tome about the decline of belief in magic...

Be Yourself
When we converse, we are allergic to inauthentic interaction. You know what I’m talking about: the office bore who is always networking, always saying aggravating phrases like “let’s connect,” but never actually connecting with anyone. Our minds come, I happily note, fully equipped with bullshit detectors, and this aptitude for sniffing out fakery carries over into the realm of the written word. There is a lot of inauthentic same-y sludge out there, which has an astonishing tendency—at least on the nonfiction side of the ledger—to always appear, like an obscenely wealthy but dimwitted demon, on the bestseller lists in airport bookshops.

Even non-fiction requires characters. It’s obvious that fiction is character-driven. But conveying any idea in a compelling way for us—The Storytelling Animal—requires narrative, and narrative often works best when it flows, at least in part, through intriguing people...

Great advice. You ought read that entire essay.

 

QUICK REACTION

I was a rather unremarkable "B" student through high school. But, I always loved to read, from early childhood. I have routinely read multiple books and periodicals ongoing throughout my entire adult life. When I finally entered undergraduate school at the age of 34 in 1980, I first took the CLEP exam (College Level English Proficiency). The national 99th percentile score at the time was 920.

Mine was 965. It saved me a year of Freshman English classes.

You just gotta read.

Now nearing age 79, I continue to average 2-3 books a week, 6 subscribed periodicals, and the broad raft of online prose.

Brian is right. Read. Explore. Be awake. And, learn to compose stories.

We'll take this riff up more fully later.

BTW, Klaas was back in earlier session on Nov 7th.

DEC 1ST UPDATE

.

I finished reading Corruptible. Marvelous. You owe it to yourselves to read and enjoy.

On to the next topics...

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Klaas is in Session

…On the day it happens, change any detail—no matter how seemingly insignificant—and you end up with a different child.I Suddenly, you have a daughter instead of a son, or vice versa—or just a different son or daughter. Siblings often diverge in unexpected ways, so any change in who is born will radically change your life—and the lives of countless others. But it’s not just the one day that a child is conceived that matters. Instead, amplify that contingency by every moment of your life. Each detail in the entire chain-link architecture of your lifetime had to be exactly as it was for the exact child who was born to be born. That’s true for you, for me, for everyone.

Yet again, the motivational posters have sold you short. “You’re one in a million!” they shout at you with uplifting glee. Try one in a hundred million, because that’s how many competitors, on average, your single-celled predecessor outswam to successfully become half of yourself.

You matter. That’s not self-help advice. It’s scientific truth. If someone else had been born instead of you—the unborn ghost whom you outcompeted in the existence sweepstakes—countless other people’s lives would be profoundly different, so our world would be different, too. The ripples of every life spread out, in unexpected ways, for eternity.

These are awe-inspiring truths. Yet, in modern life, many of us feel like easily replaced cogs in a vast, cold machine. As global corporations sprawl and we seek help from call centers rather than corner stores, many modern systems make us feel interchangeable. Workers robotically follow protocols, checklists, and scripts, engines of efficiency that strip us of our individuality. Humans begin to feel like robots who eat. It dehumanizes us. It doesn’t matter who turns the crank, so long as it gets turned.

But what if that dystopian viewpoint is completely wrong?

Let’s consider two opposite conceptions of how history works. In one vision of historical change, there’s the storybook reality: Change is ordered and structured. The convergent trajectory of events means that individuals come and go, but trends dominate. Where do the trends come from? We’re never explicitly told, only that the aggregation of humans has produced a path toward an inevitable outcome and we’d better prepare ourselves. The trend is destiny. History is written by unseen social forces, and the main characters are powerless to alter the plot.

On the opposite extreme, individuals reign supreme because the idiosyncratic behavior of a single person can reroute us all onto a different path. The logical extension of that viewpoint—rooted in chaos theory—means that every individual isn’t just capable of changing history. Rather, we are each changing history constantly, with every action—even every thought. Who is doing something can matter as much as what they’re doing. If that’s true, it would yield an empowering fact: it’s not just that everything you do matters, but also that it’s you, and not someone else, who’s doing it. Perhaps every one of us creates our own butterfly effect because each of us flaps our wings a little bit differently.

These two conceptions of change are fundamentally different. So, are we just along for the ride, or does each of us determine the destination?

Klaas, Brian. Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters (pp. 159-162). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

So, I'm into Chapter 9 of 13, and just have to share what I'm finding thus far. A totally fun read, much more edifying and enjoyable than the shitshow comprising our news this week. I gushed a la Fanboy on "Twitter" that "Chapter 6 was worth the entire cost." I meant it.

BTW, Brian has a Substack. I signed up. 50 bucks for a year.

I have my picks with Substack broadly (weak, limied formatting capabilities, like Medium), but Brian's Substack has a lot of cool stuff on it.

 

Interesting Brian Klaas presentation below.

 

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Science Magazine has certainly been quite the book citation resource of late: "Flukes," "Countdown," and "Imagination."

 

QUICK SHITSHOW ERRATA

 

Okeee-Dokeee, then.
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Flukes, only Ch's 12 & 13 to go.

 

More to come ASAP.

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The Edge of Chaos?

 

 An 11 minute video that should be well worth your time.

As modern humans we experience a different world and experience than  anyone who has ever come before us. This is because we've inverted the dynamics of how our lives unfold. We live on a planet defined by local stability, but global instability. The hunter-gatherers that came before us lived in a world that was defined by local instability, but global stability, says political scientist Dr. Brian Klaas.

As hunter-gatherers, their day-to-day lives in their local environment was unpredictable. Now we have flipped that world. We experience local stability, but global instability. We have extreme regularity in our daily lives. We can order products online and expect exactly when they're going to arrive. We can go to Starbucks anywhere in the world and it's going to taste roughly the same.

But our world is changing faster than it ever has before. Consequentially, when things do go wrong, the ripple effects are much more profound and much more immediate. This is where that sort of aspect of global instability becomes very  dangerous.

'eh?

See "We don't have to destroy ourselves."

 

NOTE: A recent post-Klaas read that started me down my current exploratory path.

 

It eventually led me here today.

 

With several intermediary stops along the way (more on those in a bit). Paul Davies in particular is knocking me out at the moment. e.g.,

Re that last slide: "...from the informational architecture in their heads..."

 

Yikes. Nita Farahany, anyone?

CITE FROM THE EPILOG...

…In this book I have charted a burgeoning new area of science. As I write, scarcely a day passes without the publication of another paper or the announcement of a new experimental result having a direct impact on the physics of information and its role in the story of life. This is a field in its infancy and many questions remain unanswered. If there are new physical laws at work – informational laws, perhaps involving state dependence and top-down causation – how do we mesh them with the known laws of physics? And would these new laws be deterministic in form or contain an element of chance, like quantum mechanics? Indeed, does quantum mechanics come into them? Does it in fact play an integral role in life? In addition to these imponderables lies the question of origins. How do life’s informational patterns come into existence in the first place? The appearance of anything new in the universe is always an amalgam of laws and initial conditions. We simply don’t know the conditions necessary for biological information to emerge initially, or, once left to get going, how strong a role natural selection plays versus the operation of informational laws or other organizational principles that may be at work in complex systems. All this has to be worked out.

There will be those who object to dignifying the informational principles I have been elucidating with the word ‘law’ in any deep sense. While most scientists are happy to treat information patterns as things in their own right for practical purposes, reductionists insist that this is merely a methodological convenience and that, in principle, all such ‘things’ can be reduced to fundamental particles and the laws of physics – and hence defined out of existence. They don’t ‘really exist’, we are warned, except in our own imaginings. While reductionists may concede that certain rules ‘emerge’ in complex systems, they assert that these rules do not enjoy the fundamental status of the laws of physics that underlie all systems. The reductionist argument is undeniably powerful, but it rests on a major assumption about the nature of physical law. The way the laws of physics are currently conceived leads to a stratification of physical systems with the laws of physics at the bottom conceptual level and emergent laws stacked above them. There is no coupling between levels. When it comes to living systems, this stratification is a poor fit because, in biology, there often is coupling between levels, between processes on many scales of size and complexity: causation can be both bottom-up (from genes to organisms) and top-down (from organisms to genes). To bring life within the scope of physical law – and to provide a sound basis for the reality of information as a fundamental entity in its own right – requires a radical reappraisal of the nature of physical law, as I am arguing.

It would be wrong to think that these arcane deliberations are important only to a handful of scientists, philosophers and mathematicians. They have sweeping implications not just for explaining life but for the nature of human existence and our place in the universe. Before Darwin, it was widely believed that God created life. Today, most people accept it had a naturalistic origin. While it is true that scientists lack a full explanation for how life emerged from non-life, invoking a one-off miracle is to fall into the god-of-the-gaps trap. It would imply a type of cosmic magician who sporadically intervenes, moving molecules around from time to time but mostly leaving them to obey fixed laws. Yet within the broad scope of the term ‘naturalistic’ lie very different philosophical (even theological) implications. Two contrasting views of life’s origin are the statistical fluke hypothesis championed by Jacques Monod and the cosmic imperative of Christian de Duve. Monod appealed to the flukiness of life to bolster his nihilistic philosophy: ‘The ancient covenant is in pieces,’ he wrote gloomily. ‘[Man’s] destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose . . . The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man.’12 In responding to Monod’s negative reflections, de Duve wrote, ‘You are wrong. They were,’13 and proceeded to develop his view of what he called ‘a meaningful universe’. Boiled down to basics, the issue is this. Is life built into the laws of physics? Do those laws magically embed the designs of organisms-to-be? There is no evidence whatever that the known laws of physics are rigged in favour of life; they are ‘life-blind’. But what about new state-dependent informational laws of the sort I am conjecturing here? My hunch is that they would not be so specific as to foreshadow biology as such, but they might favour a broader class of complex information-managing systems of which life as we know it would be a striking representative. It’s an uplifting thought that the laws of the universe might be intrinsically bio-friendly in this general manner.

These speculative notions are very far from a miracle-working deity who conjures life into being from dust. But if the emergence of life, and perhaps mind, are etched into the underlying lawfulness of nature, it would bestow upon our existence as living, thinking beings a type of cosmic-level meaning.

It would be a universe in which we can truly feel at home.

Davies, Paul. The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life (pp. 215-217). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

More to come...

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Klaas is again in session

"Do I recognize my own country any longer?"

   

 

From Brian Klaas's Garden of Forking Paths Substack: "The Tattered Republic"

The most salient divides in contemporary American politics are about how we react to one man, not policy disagreement.

First, there are those, like me, who experienced immediate revulsion at the personality traits—the narcissism, the abusive punching down, the gleeful cruelty—unapologetically dripping from every cell in his body. In this group are people who are True Never Trumpers, who would rather chew glass than vote for him.

Second, there is the Hold Your Nose Brigade. These voters may find Trump distasteful and immoral, but they want a tax cut, or a secure border, or they don’t want a woman in charge, or they are just pissed off about the price of milk. For this group, cognitive dissonance exists—they may object to the cruelty and the crimes—but that discomfort is not overpowering enough to sway their vote. (Trump beat Harris because this already substantial group expanded. It’s that simple).

Third, there are the people for whom—in the words of Adam Serwer—“The Cruelty is the Point.” This bloc cloaks itself in welcoming iconography of the flag and charitable symbols of religion while rejoicing at callous jokes about minority groups and fantasizing about treason trials and mass detention camps. For some, Trump’s narrow escape with death in Butler, Pennsylvania was proof that God had sent a fresh messiah, delivered straight to us from those most ascetic of earthly bastions: reality television and a golden penthouse.

It is easier to function as a democracy when the divides are about ideas, not individuals. After all, the sentiment that many Americans are expressing far more often—both on the Trumpian right and the Democratic left—is this: “I truly don’t understand how you could vote for that.”

But today, for those who have little reason to feel personally scared about being targeted or made to feel unwelcome by the resurrection of MAGA might, many are facing a different kind of fear, captured by more abstract uncertainties. What kind of world will my kids grow up in? How do I live in a community where half the people either celebrate cruelty or at least endorse it with their vote? Do I recognize my own country any longer?

Do I recognize my own country any longer?

 

Not so sure this week.

 

Now, I have scant rational reason to feel "personally scared of being targeted" in light of my age (soon to be 79) and ailments (Parkinson's, artificial aortic valve), but I have loved ones, including offspring all the way to my glorious great-grandson Kai...

But, Trump et al and Heritage Foundation, y'all too can kiss my irascible Irish ass. And you poignant Theobros as well.

Do yourselves a favor and read Brian's excellent book.

Notwithstanding that I find Substack to be a relatively shitty authoring platform (right down there with Medium, lol), I subscribe to Brian's stack (as well as several others). His latest post is a gem.

UPDATE

Click

…[A] majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. Some Democrats, still gripped by the lure of wonkery, continue to scratch their heads over which policy proposals might have unlocked more votes, but that was always a mug’s game. Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. (Choosing to be eaten by a shark rather than electrocuted might be a personal preference, but it’s not a policy.) His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa…

Trump and his coterie must now govern. The last time around, Trump was surrounded by a small group of moderately competent people, and these adults basically put baby bumpers and pool noodles on all the sharp edges of government. This time, Trump will rule with greater power but fewer excuses, and he—and his voters—will have to own the messes and outrages he is already planning to create.

Those voters expect that Trump will hurt others and not them. They will likely be unpleasantly surprised, much as they were in Trump’s first term. (He was, after all, voted out of office for a reason.) For the moment, some number of them have memory-holed that experience and are pretending that his vicious attacks on other Americans are just so much hot air.

Trump, unfortunately, means most of what he says. In this election, he has triggered the unfocused ire and unfounded grievances of millions of voters. Soon we will learn whether he can still trigger their decency—if there is any to be found.

 

NY TIMES' FRANK BRUNI

 

As Election Day neared, Democrats’ hopes soared. I know because I saw it and heard it all around me — the widening smiles, the brightening voices. Vice President Kamala Harris was ascendant. Donald Trump was done. People could just feel it.

They were reacting to polls, though they were picking and choosing: To listen to them, that outlier survey in Iowa, which augured a Harris victory in a red state that she ended up losing by about 13 percentage points, was some amalgam of the burning bush and the Rosetta stone.

They were reacting to momentum, which is a word as squishy as a wet paper towel and a concept beloved by dreamers whose yearning outstrips actual evidence.

But they were reacting above all to Trump. To how epically awful he was being. In his increasingly saturnine and serpentine remarks, he imagined Liz Cheney facing a fusillade of bullets, he called Democrats “demonic,” he said that he should never have left the White House after the 2020 election. All of this was characterized by many observers as the most self-destructive, disastrous conclusion to a presidential campaign that they’d ever beheld. And all of it was identified by the optimistic Democrats around me as the last straw.

Americans—at least the ones whose minds weren’t firmly made up—would surely abandon Trump now. There was a limit to the cruelness and craziness they’d abide.

That judgment, of course, was terribly wrong…

UPDATE

 

Apparently, Heritage Foundation Tough Guy Mike Howell has some post-reelection testosterone competition.

 

 I give you MAGA Mike Davis.

'Think long and hard': MAGA ally issues ominous threat to Dem prosecutors over Trump cases

Attorney Mike Davis, who has long been rumored as a candidate for attorney general under Donald Trump’s new administration, issued an ominous threat to New York Attorney General Letitia James and “Democrat prosecutors” on Thursday: “proceed accordingly.”

The Trump ally made the intimidating remarks two days after Election Day during an interview with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson, where James, who oversaw Trump’s New York fraud case, became the center of the attorney’s scorn.

“Let me just say this to Big Tish James: I dare you to try to continue your lawfare against President Trump in his second term because, listen here, sweetheart, we're not messing around this time and we will put your fat ass in prison for conspiracy against rights, I promise you that,” Davis said at the beginning of his dark rant against prosecutors who pursued criminal cases against the now-president-elect… [via Rawstory]

 

Ahhh... The Manly swagger.

 

Surf their website. You easily find links to the "Donate" page, and no contact links going to the preening Principals.

 

More to come...

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Klaas is once again in session: Taleb's turkey.

The Zero Numerator problem.

  

I: Don’t Draw a Black Ball from the Urn of Invention

“It is an unnerving thought,” Bill Bryson once wrote, “that we may be living the universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.” Our sensations of awe and beauty, our intense ability to love, our self-aware consciousness may each be unparalleled—a rare instance of the universe perceiving itself.1

But as humans, we also possess an awesome capability known to no other species on the planet: we can make ourselves extinct. No matter how much octopuses scheme or chimpanzees twirl rudimentary tools, they cannot destroy themselves. We are in our own club, trapped in a cage of existential risk—designed by our cleverness, as seemingly inescapable as the march of progress, and with the unfortunate potential to kill us all…

…[F]or those who favor complacency, it’s important to note: just because something has been alright for a long time, doesn’t mean it will continue to be alright forever. Taleb uses the parable of the turkey on a farm, a plump bird who sees the farmer as a lovely man who comes to bring him food, without fail, every day. The farmer is his friend, his provider, his carer—until one day, right before Thanksgiving, ruin comes unexpectedly. We would be wise not to be that turkey.

V: We Don’t Have to Destroy Ourselves

If Bostrom is correct that a black ball is lurking in the urn, then he points to two possible solutions to mitigate our cataclysmic end. The first is a non-starter: create such extensive policing surveillance that “any halfwit” can’t destroy humanity because every halfwit is constantly being monitored to ensure they don’t take advantage of an “easy nukes” scenario.

The more realistic scenario is difficult, but not impossible: true global governance of existential risks. This requires unprecedented cooperation to avoid unprecedented consequences. So far, our track record is not great…

…[As] Filippa Lentzos of King’s College London explained to me previously, there still is no international organization with enforcement power that regulates or inspects all of the most potentially dangerous labs in the world—those known as biosafety level 4, or BSL-4 labs. It’s such an obvious area of potential risk—and we continue to allow a laissez-faire attitude, leaving these decisions mostly to national governments. The same is broadly true of artificial intelligence, where the technology is rapidly outpacing regulation.

But we don’t have to accept reckless courting of existential risk. If we fear a black ball is being withdrawn from the urn, we have the power to stop it. It’s a choice…

The point is not to suggest that existential risks are overblown—they’re clearly not. Whether it’s extreme climate change, nuclear apocalypse, devastation from artificial intelligence, mirror life or other biothreats, we are living in an unprecedented era of a new power—the power to destroy ourselves.

But humans can be astonishingly wise when it counts most; if we demand that our leaders take these threats more seriously; and if our politicians have the courage to create new, powerful international agencies that have the teeth to manage and mitigate the lurking black balls that could end our species, then I’d be far more willing to bet on humanity’s longevity.

Despite our cornucopia of flaws, we are worth saving; a species defined not just by our maddening defects, but by our unique curiosity, wonder, awe, love, beauty, ingenuity, and kindness. And yet, nobody can save us but ourselves…

Yeah, Klaas is once again back in session. The foregoing is excerpted from his Substack newsletter series. Do yourself a favor. Read his books and subscribe to his Stack. See also this post.

This stuff coheres nicely with two books in progress at the moment.

 

 

From The Demon in the Machine

FROM THE IDEA FACTORY

Introduction
WICKED PROBLEMS

This book is about the origins of modern communications as seen through the adventures of several men who spent their careers working at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Even more, though, this book is about innovation—about how it happens, why it happens, and who makes it happen. It is likewise about why innovation matters, not just to scientists, engineers, and corporate executives but to all of us. That the story is about Bell Labs, and even more specifically about life at the Labs between the late 1930s and the mid-1970s, isn’t a coincidence. In the decades before the country’s best minds began migrating west to California’s Silicon Valley, many of them came east to New Jersey, where they worked in capacious brick-and-glass buildings located on grassy campuses where deer would graze at twilight. At the peak of its reputation in the late 1960s, Bell Labs employed about fifteen thousand people, including some twelve hundred PhDs. Its ranks included the world’s most brilliant (and eccentric) men and women. In a time before Google, the Labs sufficed as the country’s intellectual utopia. It was where the future, which is what we now happen to call the present, was conceived and designed.

For a long stretch of the twentieth century, Bell Labs was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. It was arguably among the world’s most important commercial organizations as well, with countless entrepreneurs building their businesses upon the Labs’ foundational inventions, which were often shared for a modest fee. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t Bell Labs’ intended function. Rather, its role was to support the research and development efforts of the country’s then-monopolistic telephone company, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), which was seeking to create and maintain a system—the word “network” wasn’t yet common—that could connect any person on the globe to any other at any time. AT&T’s dream of “universal” connectivity was set down in the early 1900s. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for this idea to mature, thanks largely to the work done at Bell Labs, into a fantastically complex skein of copper cables and microwave links and glass fibers that tied together not only all of the planet’s voices but its images and data, too. In those evolutionary years, the world’s business, as well as its technological progress, began to depend on information and the conduits through which it moved. Indeed, the phrase used to describe the era that the Bell scientists helped create, the age of information, suggested we had left the material world behind. A new commodity—weightless, invisible, fleet as light itself—defined the times.

A new age makes large demands. At Bell Labs, it required the efforts of tens of thousands of scientists and engineers over many decades—millions of “man-hours,” in the parlance of AT&T, which made a habit of calculating its employees’ toil to a degree that made its workers proud while also keeping the U.S. government (which closely monitored the company’s business practices and long-distance phone monopoly) at bay. For reasons that are conceptual as well as practical, this book does not focus on those tens of thousands of Bell Laboratories workers. Instead, it looks primarily at the lives of a select and representative few: Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and William Baker. Some of these names are notorious—Shockley, for instance, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 and in his later years steadfastly pursued a scientific link between race and intelligence. Others, such as Shannon, are familiar to those within a certain area of interest (in Shannon’s case, mathematics and artificial intelligence) while remaining largely unknown to the general public. Pierce, a nearly forgotten figure, was the father of satellite communications and an instigator of more ideas than can be properly accounted for here. Kelly, Fisk, and Baker were presidents of the Labs, and served as stewards during the institution’s golden age. All these men knew one another, and some were extremely close. With the exception of Mervin Kelly, the eldest of the group, they were sometimes considered members of a band of Bell Labs revolutionaries known as the Young Turks. What bound them was a shared belief in the nearly sacred mission of Bell Laboratories and the importance of technological innovation.

The men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what Kelly once called “an institute of creative technology.” This description aimed to inform the world that the line between the art and science of what Bell scientists did wasn’t always distinct. Moreover, while many of Kelly’s colleagues might have been eccentrics, few were dreamers in the less flattering sense of the word. They were paid for their imaginative abilities. But they were also paid for working within a culture, and within an institution, where the very point of new ideas was to make them into new things…

Gertner, Jon. The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (pp. 1-3). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

NOTEWORTHY

  

 

Hmmm... "Wicked Problems?" Recent book I've read. 

 

UPDATE: CLAUDE SHANNON OF BELL LABS

 

 

I don't know that my Dad ever knew him. Pop worked in semiconductor R&D, one of myriad lower level lab technicians. 

 

More shortly...

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Samuel Alito's Dobbs Love Child turns two

June 24th, 2022 ... Dobbs

   

Moreover, let's be perfectly clear about the intentions of the Alito camp allies.

 

 

The 900+ page Project 2025 "Action Plan Playbook" (pdf) negatively cites the word "abortion" 198 times (repeatedly conflating it with other hated "liberal" policies), and is utterly clear regarding its reactionary "Christian conservative" goal of establishing constitutionally-protected, vigilantly-enforced "Personhood at Conception."

 

JOHN OLIVER ON PROJECT 2025

 

134 days to the November 5th 2024 U.S. elections.

 

RELENTLESS WHITE CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST THEOCRATS

 

I have no problem with any of these reactionary people and groups advocating for their fatuous causes (look up the two doozy books depicted above). Where they cross over from advocacy to (more and more overt) coercion is where my red line resides.

 

Below, just ran across these two beauts on TwitterX:

 

JUNE 25 UPDATE

"Trump 2024 examines the presidency of Donald Trump through the eyes of 25 Evangelical Leaders. These leaders include:

Dennis Prager, Franklin Graham, Mike Huckabee, Tony Perkins, Irvin Baxter, Jerry Boykin, Damon Friedman, Brigitte Gabriel, Jack Graham, Harry Jackson, Jack Hibbs, Dr. Robert Jeffress, Alveda King, Mike Lindell, Bob McEwen, Eric Metaxas, Star Parker, Tony Perkins, Sammy Rodriguez, Dave Robbins, Don Stewart, Stephen Strange, Randall Terry, Paula White, Jeff Wickwire."

Quite the crew.

 

BRIAN KLAAS

Five Reasons Trump 2.0 Would Be Worse
There's a widespread misconception that a second Trump term would be just like the first. That's a catastrophic misreading of American politics—and the unprecedented risks if he wins. 

Brian rocks.

AND, RECALL SPIRITUAL WARRIORS 2024?

 

More to come...

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Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key I-695 highway bridge

Above: Prior to today.

 

Wow. An unreal day here. This Singapore-flagged container ship lost power at about 1:30 a.m. while leaving port and took out the bridge A 1.6 mile span, most of it gone in mere seconds There is live fixed-camera video footage of the impact and total collapse. Terrible.

We live on the north side of Baltimore city, just below Towson. The bridge that collapsed is just below Dundalk, southeast of downtown (red text). One of the nation's busiest international seaports. Tens of thousands of Baltimore area residents are about to lose their jobs in the wake of the lengthy economic disruptions shortly to ensue. Auto traffic here is about to go glacial. Like it wasn’t already.

Elon's Twitter "X" platform has been blazing with hyper-moronic troll crap all day. It's all Biden's fault; It was an ISIS attack; Putin's revenge; Invading Mexican illegals; Woke Libs are at fault; It’s the upshot of DEI…

"The bridge collapse is a tragedy. But for many on the right, it’s also an opportunity to spread conspiracy theories, encourage chaos, push bigotry and resentment, stoke fears, and do Donald Trump’s bidding by smearing Biden. This ugly response is a burden on those directly affected in Baltimore and elsewhere. It’s also a deliberate effort to undermine collective solidarity and resilience.

Far right populist rage makes it harder to respond to emergencies, and often compounds them in terrifying ways. Facing down disasters requires calm, deliberation, and a willingness to set aside one’s immediate comfort and fear for a broader good. The right’s go-to response of panic and paranoia makes us all less safe by sowing confusion and promoting a reactionary brand of politics.

Worms of the brain
Disasters are by their nature unexpected and chaotic. It can be difficult to figure out causes and responsibilities in the heat of the moment, especially when the first priority has to be to rescue victims, not to assign blame.

There will no doubt be an investigation into what happened on the container ship. All indications at the moment though are that the explanation for the disaster is what it appears to be in footage of the incident — the ship’s power failed, resulting in an unintentional collision with the bridge. President Joe Biden referred to the disaster as an “accident” in remarks on Tuesday.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley said “there is absolutely no indication that there is any terrorism or that this was done on purpose.”
Have these reassurances stopped salivating MAGA vultures from rabid fear-mongering and irresponsible dipshittery?

No, of course not…" [ Brian Klaas ]

 

I THINK WE ALL NEED A GOOD LAUGH TODAY
  

ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS!

 CODA

The Francis Scott Key bridge SE of Baltimore came into service 47 yrs ago. It remains the size it was when completed. But, what is the average upper size differential of cargo ships passing under it (or, now, into it) today?

My son and his wife own a sailboat, which they dock in Fell’s Point. We've been out to the Key Bridge.

Terrible.

OH, AND ONE MORE THING

“When the Dali cargo ship demolished that bridge support on Tuesday, it also obliterated all the ridiculous lies and myths our demagogues have been spreading around immigration. There were no sex traffickers aboard the Key Bridge that night. Nobody was dealing fentanyl. They were not “animals,” but fathers and husbands like Suazo and Luna, whose wife occasionally showed up in her food truck to bring the men tacos and pupusas. They were filling potholes so their children could have an even better life.

These six workers who perished were not “poisoning the blood of our country,” they were replenishing it. This is a moment of clarity when we need to reject the national disease of xenophobia and restore our faith in the United States as a beacon for the best people like Suazo. They may have been born all over the continent, but when these men plunged into our waters on Tuesday, they died as Americans.”

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