Thoughts on Office Life

I cleaned out my old office in Washington, DC this week.

I've had an office in Washington since 1993, so this was the end of a long saga. My old employers moved into our current space in 2010. I was in a cubicle for a few years but some time around 2013 I moved into a big double office that I shared with one of my colleagues. The space was big enough for three desks but there were only two computer connections, so we got a good deal. On the other hand, the extra space meant that we started accumulating stuff. In particular, books; all the books that anyone purchased for particular projects ended up on our shelves. (It sometimes happens that you have a project in, say, Lynchburg, and the most convenient way to get information you need is to buy a copy of a book like Lynchburg: An Architectural History.) Then my boss retired and all of his stuff descended on us, including thirty years worth of American Antiquity. Then our Richmond office closed and we got all their books. Plus all the old cameras people weren't using any more.

Then my old company was purchased by a much bigger firm, and we suddenly had a lot more offices. My old company had rather few, so (for example) all the cultural resource people in the Washington-Baltimore area were in one office. But the new company has six offices within the region, and people started going to the one closest to their homes. Around 2019 my office mate, who lives in Baltimore, started going to the office in Baltimore instead of commuting to Washington. We held onto his desk, though, because we were in the middle of hiring multiple new people, and we thought at least one would end up in Washington. None did. Then the pandemic hit and everybody went home. 

At some point we were ordered to return to the office two days a week, but when I did I immediately got Covid-19, and anyway that experiment in part-time office work ramped up very slowly. For a long time the office was completely empty on Mondays and Fridays. I never really got back into the habit of riding down to Washington, and one thing about a long commute is that is a lot easier when you rigidly make it part of your routine. Plus, with no other cultural resources folks in DC the rationale for commuting down there seemed dubious; with whom was I supposed to interact? For long stretches I had no projects working with anyone else in DC. (Instead I have projects in Orlando, New York City, Palo Alto, the Great Smokies, the Mojave Desert, and all across Virginia and North Carolina, and I have never seen most of the people working on these projects.)

I went to the office less and less; I think until this week I had been in the office twice since June. But other people have been going back, and space now is tight, and last week they asked me to surrender the large space I have been occupying alone for more than four years.

I am ambivalent about this. I don't miss commuting down to my office to turn on my computer and interact with people across the country in exactly the way I would from home. I do miss when I was part of a group of people with similar skills and interests, who worked for the same clients and often worked together on projects. That was great.

I also wonder about young people starting out. I learned an enormous amount just being around my old boss, and being together with other archaeologists and historians, and I think we have had some significant mentoring failures since our office broke up. It seems to be much easier to do things that have become routine to you via the internet than to learn to do them.

So when I think about the question of whether working together in an office is important or "worth it," my own experience compels me to ask: working together with whom, and doing what?

Porphyrion and the Fermi Paradox

Today's big news:

Astronomers announced last week that they had discovered a black hole spitting energy across 23 million light-years of intergalactic space. Two jets, shooting in opposite directions, compose the biggest lightning bolt ever seen in the sky — about 140 times as long as our own Milky Way galaxy is wide, and more than 10 times the distance from Earth to Andromeda, the nearest large spiral galaxy.

Follow-up observations with optical telescopes traced the eruption to a galaxy 7.5 billion light-years away that existed when the universe was less than half its current age of 14 billion years. At the heart of that galaxy was a black hole spewing energy equivalent to the output of more than a trillion stars. 

Infrared Image that Sealed the Discovery

The discoverers called this system Porphyrion, after a Greek giant. You can read about this just about anywhere.

I want to write about because for me it ties into the so-called Fermi Paradox. This line of thinking supposedly got started when physicist Enrico Fermi asked, "Where is everybody?" That is, where are all the alien civilizations.

One way to think about the problem is the Drake Equation, which looks like this:

The terms represent the rate of star formation, the fraction of stars that have planets, the fraction of planets where life is possible, the fraction of those planets where life appears, the likelihood that life becomes intelligent, the fraction of civilizations that develop technology we could see from light years away, and the duration of the average such civilization.

I don't see why the obvious rarity of spacefaring civilizations is any kind of paradox; if you simply assume that any one of the middle terms is one in a hundred trillion, the "paradox" disappears.

And one reason I think those terms could be very small is the titanic violence of the universe. The discoverers of Porphyrion think its power is so great that is is rerranging matter across a supercluster of galaxies, and therefore that the uneven distribution of matter in the universe might be partly due to such phenomena. Imagine what would happen to any civilization that got in the way of such a blast. 

These enormous jet systems may be the most striking examples of galactic violence we know of, but lesser violence is everywhere: colliding galaxies, giant black holes, colliding planets, exploding stars. The more I ponder what the galaxy is like, the more I think we are riding a stupendous lucky streak. We got lucky when one of our sun's rocky planets ended up in a zone where water is liquid much of the time, making it possible for life to get going. Life has tenaciously hung on every since, but it has been nearly wiped out several times (or at least complex multi-cellular life has). We have had mega-extinction after mega-extinction, caused by asteroid impacts, volcanism, a planetary ice age, and who knows what else.

And having dodged all of them, we may one day be finished off by another space rock or, if we last long enough, by the expansion of our aging sun.

Our world is a miracle of astonishing improbability, and we should cherish the chance we have been given to thrive.

Strawberry Hill Flower Festival 2024

What a wonderful place.

Links 27 September 2024

Ivory Figurine from Nimrud, Assyria, Showing a Man

with an Oryx, a Monkey, and a Leopard Skin, 7th c. BC

Brief report (in French, but Google translate is good at French) on the archaeology done during the restoration of Notre Dame de Paris.

The fish that uses its "legs" to taste.

Ben Pentreath in Tuscany, amazing photo set, including a visit to Centinale, a famous 17th-century villa.

Painted throne room of the Moche period found at Pañamarca in Peru. Wonderful imagery, but since nobody knows how to interpret Moche art we don't know if the powerful female person who appears several times is a human queen, a goddess, or something else. It's too bad, because given how bizarre Moche art was, I imagine their myths were equally weird.

Stagnation in Britain. Grim.

Polling showing that most of the economic policies Trump and Harris have proposed that are popular with voters are very unpopular with economists. E.g., 79% of non-economists supported eliminating the income tax on tips, but 87% of economists oppose. But everybody agrees on capping the price of insulin.

Sorry, not a lost prince after all.

An IgNobel prize for showing that so-called "blue" areas where many people supposedly live past 100 are created by bad records and pension fraud: "Dr Newman showed that the highest rates of achieving extreme old age are predicted by high poverty, the lack of birth certificates, and fewer 90-year-olds."

Noah Smith asks, "How will you save small midwestern towns without mass immigration?" Says most of the stories he knows about dying towns that came back to life are stories of immigrants arriving in large numbers.

Teeside Psychogeography visits the collection of Pictish carved stones at Meigle. (Part 1, Part 2)

Archaelogists in France find a message in a bottle left by an archaeologist who investigated the same site in the 19th century.

Kevin Drum takes on the notion that modern life leaves us unhappy and spiritually adrift. I would say that it does, but not any more than any other way of life, and less so than any other system you can find around the world today.

Review of several books on the notions of equality and inequality in history.

Bizarre little tale from the edges of human-computer interaction. (Not strictly true, I think, but intriguing.) From the same source, an amusing image set titled "Modern Art Weirdness."

And more, a collection of snippets from the early-twentieth-century critic known as Mr. Jonathan. Lines like, "There seems to be some surprise expressed in surprise-expressing circles that. . . ." and "This musical comedy has all the earmarks of having been produced as a favor to someone. Certainly not as a favor to us."

Poll finds that 50% of likely Harris voters think the economy is getting better while only 1% of likely Trump voters do so; 80% of likely Trump voters, and 75% of conservatives, say it is getting worse. Bewildering.

Having trouble keeping up with the foibles on the younger generation. On the one hand they're a bunch of self-obsessed whiners who won't shut up about their identities, preferably as expressed in some combination of capital letters, but on the other they're ambitious materialists who all major in business, economics or computer science and fight for places in the Investment Club or the Undergraduate Law Review, as argued in a NY Times piece titled "careerism is ruining college."

Matt Yglesias covers the recent upward revision in US economic statistics and writes "we are primed for more good things if we can avoid unneeded weird ideas."

Terrifying review of two books of contemporary Tolkien criticism. Marxism, anti-racism, cognitive maps, etc. People, it's just a story. It's wonderful but both the plot and the universe are full of holes, and it is under no obligation to fit into our contemporary understanding of questions like race and feminism. I have a strong sense that many wonderful stories – The Lord of the Rings, Dune, most of Dickens, the King Arthur cycle, Foundation, Tristan und Isolde – simply dissolve when you scour them too vigorously, leaving only mud in your hands.

Feminists and cats, a history through postcards.

The world's ten coolest neighborhoods, as defined by some hipsters.

New Japanese defense white paper: "The international community is facing its greatest trial since Word War II and entering a new era of crisis." And they are spending to match their fears, especially on ships and missiles.

Great look at 21st-century Russia, from Russian Officers Killed in Ukraine: "Senior Lieutenant Skrivitsky Evgeny Vladimirovich, commander of a company, was murdered in his sleep with another officer by Russian soldiers who were stealing humanitarian aid." 

The Church Paintings of Pickering, Yorkshire

Pickering is a small town in north Yorkshire, England, on the edge of the Moors. It is an old place, documented in the Domesday Book. It has a castle, but these days its most famous site is the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. 

The first church here was built before the year 1000. It was then replaced, and that building was enlarged:

The early Norman Church, which was built around 1140, would have been of simple cruciform layout, with a central tower surrounded by a nave, a chancel and two transepts. Soon, aisles were added to this original structure: the north aisle in about 1150 and the south aisle towards the end of the twelfth century. The present west tower was built in the early part of the thirteenth century, and sometime in the fourteenth century the chancel was widened to cope with the liturgies of the period. A porch was also added, and then, in the fifteenth century, two chantry chapels, either side of the high altar.

Coronation of the Virgin

The church was remodeled again in the 1400s: 

During the 15th Century, the clerestory was constructed and the battlements, or parapets outside were added. The walls of the nave were raised and the roof replaced, and it was at this time, around 1450, that the paintings, which give our church its fame, were first commissioned. They were painted the following decade, as details in the costumes and armour of some of the figures makes clear.

Hell

They were plastered over during the Reformation. Then, in 1852, they were revealed during repairs. Some people loved them, but not the man in charge:

The Vicar at the time, the Rev’d Ponsonby, wanted them re-covered, showing his dislike of them in a letter to the Archbishop of York: ‘As a work of art [they are] fairly ridiculous, would excite feelings of curiosity, and distract the congregation’. He went on to say that ‘the paintings are out of place in a protestant Church, especially in these dangerous times’; he subsequently had them re-covered in a thick yellow wash within a fortnight of the discovery. 

St. Christopher

Not at all clear to me why 1852 was a "dangerous time." 

St. George

Once the fearful vicar was safely dead and buried, the paintings were exposed again. But it was discovered that they had been damaged by the vicar's hasty burying. So they were restored, using as a guide careful drawings made in 1852.

Martyrdom of St. Edmund

Quite a remarkable thing to survive.

The Crisis of Culture

I have recently read two reviews of French intellectual Olivier Roy’s  book The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms: Tyler Cowen, Ian Leslie. Roy argues that culture in the traditional sense of understandings shared at a barely conscious level is dying out, replaced by defined “norms” that we constantly fight over. Cowen: “There has been an ongoing erasure of shared implicit understandings.” Leslie:

Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another - say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. Local cultures, in the sense of finely patterned, shared sensibilities, automatically absorbed and deeply felt, are no match for these bulldozing, ‘deculturating’ forces.

We still need shared norms of behaviour in order to function as societies, however. So in place of implicit culture, he says, we have introduced explicit “norms”: rules of behaviour and speech which aren’t felt or intuited but articulated, coded for, and argued over endlessly. Without instinctive standards for behaviour we have to thrash everything out, from the correct use of pronouns to how to behave on public transport or dress for work. “Culture war” implies some kind of profound division between people, but in truth, suggests Roy, our differences are shallow and petty and all the more bad-tempered for it. Scrape away culture and what you’re left with is negotiation. Everything is politics.

Complex, evolved, layered social identities are being replaced by a series of boxes, with freedom consisting of the right to choose your box at any one time (think about the way that sexual identity is coded into an endlessly multiplying series of letters). The oddly shaped flora and fauna of culture have been reduced a series of “tokens” which we buy and display in order to position ourselves versus others. National cuisines, musical genres, styles of dress: these are all just tokens for us to collect and artfully assemble into a personal brand.

I agree that something like this is happening. Local accents are declining, as are regional variations in dress and idiom.

But I think we commonly exaggerate the degree to which cultural understandings were widely shared; "I didn't get the memo" and similar phrases go back to the nineteenth century. The world has, after all, been changing rapidly for about 300 years now, we have seen multiple major shifts in our expectations of public behavior. The rowdy eighteenth century gave way to the swooning Romantics and then the prim Victorians; the Twenties roared; the Fifties bopped, the hippies turned on and tuned out; etc. We may feel a bit more adrift than some of our ancestors, but it's a difference of degree.

To whatever extent our ancestors were more secure than we are, that was because they interacted only with a limited set of people and put a lot of time and energy into fitting in.

We should also remember the extent to which "culture" was used to exclude people from charmed circles where only people with the right understandings were welcome, and the extent to which the powerful used it to manipulate others. For example women's equality in the workplace has come with a major assault on Mad Men-style office sexuality. Much of American southern culture was straight racism. Elite culture all over the world required the mastery of elaborate lore – dueling etiquette, foreign or dead languages, proficiency in rowing or tennis. A great deal of our most wonderful art was created to put distance between the rich and everyone else, since only they had the time to learn its intricacies.

So I would expect a more democratic and open society to be, in some ways, less diverse and more boring. I understand that this has costs, but I think we can find ways to keep various kinds of culture alive. For one thing, in a world as rich and populous as ours, you only need 1/100 of 1% of the population to sustain a pretty good movement, which can be as arcane as you like. (Furries) 

To the extent that we have replaced implicit understandings with stated norms, we have made the world much more open to everyone not raised in the right sort of family.

Things Getting Cheaper

Sequencing a human genome, $95 million in 2001 to $200 in 2023.

Utility-scale batteries, down 90% in fifteen years.

One gigaflop of computing power.

Solar photovoltaic power. 

Links 20 September 2024

Marginal Hedgehog from the Hours of Margaret of Orléans, 1426

Spitalfields Life on John Dempsey's London street portraits from the 1820s.

Swedish study of depression among Ph.D. students: higher than normal, but not as bad as some have claimed.

Very interesting review of a new biography of Frantz Fanon. Says the language of Marxist Revolution has become so strange to us that we can hardly grasp what Fanon was trying to say. Says the new biography is different from the last, published in 2000, because in 2000 it was still possible to be caught up in the rhetoric of revolutionary freedom for the Third World, but now we know that "the revolution had failed at the same time as it had succeeded," making the whole story a tragedy. Says what Fanon wrote about race has aged much better than what he wrote about Global Revolution; in our age we are less impressed by grand political solutions and more interested in matters of person and identity.

Interesting NY Times story on college admissions after the end of affirmative action. The numbers have bounced around quite a bit at different schools. One issue is that the number of students refusing to identify a race has gone up, as has the number checking more than one box. The number of Asian students at some schools has gone down, which is probably due to Asian kids skipping the question. One of the ironies of racial policy in America is that we have no legal definition of race and you cannot be forced to declare one, so the numbers we care so much about are based on whatever people happen to say about themselves.

Winners from the Ocean Photographer of the Year 2024.

How kamikaze termites blow themselves up. I think these scientists' terminology is out of date and they should call these insects suicide bomber termites. 

Or Hezbollah pager termites.

Interesting 12-minute video from CNBC on lithium extraction in Arkansas, where companies plan to piggyback on the existing industry that extracts bromine from brine.

Overdose deaths in the US are finally heading downward.

Interesting article on Haitians in small-town Alabama. Via Marginal Revolutions.

Paleogentics suggests that residents of Easter Island have about 10% Native American ancestry, with a mixture date estimated to be AD 1250-1430. Says the collapse in the island's population was caused, not by "ecocide," but by smallpox introduced by Europeans.

New York's Inter-Borough Express, a proposed light rail line through Brooklyn and Queens, and the question of whether it will impact All Faiths Cemetery. My company is doing the environmental impact statement for this project.

NY Times piece on the enduring appeal of wearing all black. I was struck by this: "But above all, black says this: I don’t bother you, don’t bother me."

Phoebe Gates says friends have cut ties to her because of the Covid-19 vaccine conspiracy theories about her father Bill. Maybe those are friends she's better off without? Personally I don't find those tracking-chip-in-the-vaccine theories as weird as the fact that Bill Gates' daughter could head a fashion firm.

The Twitter/X feed of Richard Hanania, a cranky libertarian who got famous for attacking wokeness, is now almost entirely an attack on Trump and his followers, full of accusations that Republicans are getting stupider by the day. "To defend Trump as a person requires a consistent surrendering of one’s dignity." I feel like these defections of smart right-wingers should be hurting Trump but see no evidence that this is so.

In a related note, this NY Times essay on Springfield by Ohio governor Mike DeWine is exactly what you would expect from a responsible Republican who cares about governance, balancing praise for hardworking Haitians with concern about too much immigration. The contrast to Trump and Vance is stark. Yet he says he is supporting them. I suppose that is part of his job as head of the state Republican party but still a sad commentary on where American conservatism has ended up, with the Mike DeWines of the world having to defend the J.D. Vances and Laura Loomers. Come on, guys, if Obama could criticize radical black agitators you can criticize nutcase conservatives. It's what the world expects of you.

Researchers have genetically modified poplar trees to produce tougher wood, achieving the same effect as chemical treatment, without the toxic chemicals.

Francesca Gino's lawsuit against Data Colada for demonstrating that she faked her research has been dismissed. But parts of her lawsuit against Harvard are going forward; one issue is that they seem to have changed their rules regarding research integrity in response to the charges against Gino, then fired her for violating them. Funny that Harvard didn't have rules against faking data.

Small literary magazines are terrified of offending ethno-liberals on social media.

Database listing all the people we know by name from Anglo-Saxon England.

"Can economics come up with truly novel remedies or ideas? Probably not." (Tyler Cowen)

YouGov poll on attitudes toward Rome and other ancient empires.

An eyeliner pencil 8,000 years old.

Chariot burial from a Roman-period necropolis in Bulgaria.

Goats clearing brush at the Rock Creek Golf Course in DC. Why couldn't they have done this before we fought our way through all that vegetation to do their archaeological survey?

Russian media complains that Ukrainian phone scammers are targeting Russians, taking more than a billion dollars a year, 40% of which goes to Ukraine's military. If so, what a supervillain move. Although not quite on the level of exploding pagers.

Mordor skies at Toropets west of Moscow where about 100 Ukrainian drones attacked a Russian missile storage site; the explosions were large enough to register as seismic events. Video here. Damage assessment.

YouTuber Perun thinks attack helicopters are on the way out because they are highly vulnerable on the modern battlefield and drones can do much of their work a lot more cheaply. (one-hour video) 

The "AI Assisted Targeting Revolution is Here," through systems like the US Maven, 16-minute video.

On the Russian economy, Ukrainian intelligence chief Budanov repeats what I posted from economists last week about serious troubles ahead.

News media are reporting on a leaked Ukrainian report that estimates 80,000 of their soldiers have been killed in the war and 400,000 wounded.

Scott Siskind (and Bedell) on Artificial Intelligence

Over the past 60 years, starting with the original Turing Test, people have kept setting up tests that would show us computers were truly intelligent, but then when some computer passes the test, nobody cares. After going over a bunch of these, Siskind writes:

Now we hardly dare suggest milestones like these anymore. Maybe if an AI can write a publishable scientific paper all on its own? But Sakana can write crappy not-quite-publishable papers. And surely in a few years it will get a little better, and one of its products will sneak over a real journal’s publication threshold, and nobody will be convinced of anything. If an AI can invent a new technology? Someone will train AI on past technologies, have it generate a million new ideas, have some kind of filter that selects them, and produce a slightly better jet engine, and everyone will say this is meaningless. If the same AI can do poetry and chess and math and music at the same time? I think this might have already happened, I can’t even keep track.

So what? Here are some possibilities:

First, maybe we’ve learned that it’s unexpectedly easy to mimic intelligence without having it. This seems closest to ELIZA, which was obviously a cheap trick.

Second, maybe we’ve learned that our ego is so fragile that we’ll always refuse to accord intelligence to mere machines.

Third, maybe we’ve learned that “intelligence” is a meaningless concept, always enacted on levels that don’t themselves seem intelligent. Once we pull away the veil and learn what’s going on, it always looks like search, statistics, or pattern matching. The only difference is between intelligences we understand deeply (which seem boring) and intelligences we don’t understand enough to grasp the tricks (which seem like magical Actual Intelligence).

I endorse all three of these. The micro level - a single advance considered in isolation - tends to feel more like a cheap trick. The macro level, where you look at many advances together and see all the impressive things they can do, tends to feel more like culpable moving of goalposts. And when I think about the whole arc as soberly as I can, I suspect it’s the last one, where we’ve deconstructed “intelligence” into unintelligent parts.

I am most interested in the last one. As a materialist, I do not think there is anything magical about intelligence. It must arise from physical/electrical/chemical stuff going on in our brains. It must, therefore, be simulatable with a big enough computer. And whenever we do understand something our brains are doing, it turns out that there are a lot of subroutines doing fairly simple things that add up to something bigger.

The higher mental activity that I have thought the most about is of course writing. I have a strong sense that the words I type out when I am trying to write fast are emerging from multiple subsystems, one of which does exactly what LLMs do: predicting the next word from those that come before. I am one of the writers whose prose appears in my brain as a rhythm of sounds before the words form, after which some other module chooses words that fit the rhythm but convey the meaning; what brings me to a halt is when the modules clash. At that point, some more conscious module has to intervene to sort things out. This feels amazing when it happens right, words just pouring out of me, but I never have any sense that they are emerging from a deep and true soul. I have a module that remembers how millions of sentences from thousands of books go, and it takes elements from that training data to fit the story I am trying to tell. To the extent that this works well, it is pretty close to automatic.

Apparently when writers take questions from the public, the most common one is, "Where do you get your ideas?" I find this utterly unmysterious. Like an LLM, writers have a huge set of training data: other stories, their own lives, things they have read about in the news. If you went through the average long novel with enough knowledge of the writer's life and a big enough computer you could probably trace the source of every element. The secret to "creativity" is 1) know a diverse set of things, and 2) combine them in interesting ways. I find that this is particularly true when writers are trying to be intensely personal, as in their memoirs; there is nothing in the average memoir that has not been in a hundreds memoirs already.

LLMs can mimic much human behavior because there is nothing magical about what humans do.

How are We Evolving?

Ali Akbari et al on BioArxiv: 

We present a method for detecting evidence of natural selection in ancient DNA time-series data that leverages an opportunity not utilized in previous scans: testing for a consistent trend in allele frequency change over time. By applying this to 8433 West Eurasians who lived over the past 14000 years and 6510 contemporary people, we find an order of magnitude more genome-wide significant signals than previous studies: 347 independent loci with >99% probability of selection. Previous work showed that classic hard sweeps driving advantageous mutations to fixation have been rare over the broad span of human evolution, but in the last ten millennia, many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. 

This only confirms what people have thought from other evidence, that our evolution has speeded up rather than slowed down: In what directions have we been evolving?

Discoveries include an increase from ~0% to ~20% in 4000 years for the major risk factor for celiac disease at HLA-DQB1; a rise from ~0% to ~8% in 6000 years of blood type B; and fluctuating selection at the TYK2 tuberculosis risk allele rising from ~2% to ~9% from ~5500 to ~3000 years ago before dropping to ~3%. We identify instances of coordinated selection on alleles affecting the same trait, with the polygenic score today predictive of body fat percentage decreasing by around a standard deviation over ten millennia, consistent with the Thrifty Gene hypothesis that a genetic predisposition to store energy during food scarcity became disadvantageous after farming. We also identify selection for combinations of alleles that are today associated with lighter skin color, lower risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disease, slower health decline, and increased measures related to cognitive performance (scores on intelligence tests, household income, and years of schooling). These traits are measured in modern industrialized societies, so what phenotypes were adaptive in the past is unclear. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.9 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits. 

Lighter skin is a really obvious one; peope in the north need sunlight for vitamin D more than they need protection from the tropical sun. I just mentioned our declining ability to store fat, which is related to the spread of agriculture, and rising intelligence seems pretty useful. But some of these raise questions: if schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are being selected against, how did they ever become common in the first place? Why on earth would celiac disease rise in a region where wheat is the staple food?

They also find that the risk of Multiple Schlerosis is rising due to selection, which is really bizarre, but that male-pattern baldness is decreasing, raising again the question of how it ever got to be common.

Stay tuned to this; we are going to learn a lot more about genetics and how we are evolving over the next decade.

Ukraine, Drones, and Future Warfare

Ukrainian "Dragon Drone" in Action

Is the United States ready for the next war? Is anyone?

I don't think so.

You might say that Ukraine and Russia, which are in the midst of a war in which both sides are holding their own, must therefore be ready for war. I disagree. Their war is being limited by the resources and manpower available to the two sides, and by the slow ramp-up from the three-day "special military operation" to something close to full-on war. They use their missiles and drones as soon as they get them, so they never build up the mass of weaponry that the US, China, and possibly many others might soon have to deploy at the onset of a new conflict.

Consider this coordinated swarm of 8,000 Chinese drones. Ok, they're just staging a light show, but the maneuvers on display could easily be converted into a mass attack. Is anyone ready for an attack by 8,000 drones? Which is not really very many; Ukraine is using and losing around 2 million drones a year right now, and the US Army just ordered a billion dollars' worth of loitering munitions, aka kamikaze drones. The opening attack of the next major war could easily involve 50,000 drones and 1,000 missiles. What would happen to an army or navy attacked like that? I think of something that Gerhard Weinberg wrote about WW II, that the first time every army involved was attacked using the Blitzkrieg combination of tanks and aircraft, they collapsed.

Drones and missiles can be shot down. Iran recently attacked Israel with something like 120 ballistic missiles, 30 cruise missiles, and 170 drones, and with US help Israel was able to defend itself effectively. From this and other recent events we have learned that missile defense has gotten quite good, and the US and Israel in particular have weapons that can easily shoot down all the cruise and ballistic missiles in use around the world. The thing is, the weapons that can do this have to be far more sophisticated, and therefore far more expensive, that the missiles they are knocking out. The US seems to have called off its mission to defend merchant shipping in the Red Sea after, according to reports, expending a billion dollars' worth of missiles in two weeks. Not even the US or China can afford to manufacture modern anti-air missiles in the numbers necessary to stop an all-out attack. It was recently revealed that after a major investment in raising production, the US can only manufacture 45 Patriot PAC-3 missiles per month. 

One solution to the cost problem is to shoot down drones and slow cruise missiles with guns. Ukraine loves the German Gephard system (above). At the small scale, Ukraine and Russia are issuing front-line troops with shotguns. These systems can work, but they obviously don't work particularly well, since drones destroy vehicles and kill soldiers ever day.

Last year a Pentagon official – the under-secretary for procurement, or some such person – was asked by a reporter why the US was not buying anti-drone guns. He said that the US has been researching drone defense for a decade, since our troops in Iraq and Syria are attacked with drones every month, and that the answer is electronic warfare. Well, maybe for drones launched by nebulous militias. But in Ukraine the electromagnetic spectrum is its own battlefield, and both side are constantly updating their systems to achieve some slight advantage. There are many videos of tanks with mounted EW systems being destroyed by drones.

Plus, EW only works if the drone depends on a radio connection with a human controller. Drones with simple AI systems already exist that allow them to do the last leg of their attack without guidance; the controller just points them toward a target and they can navigate their way down to hit it. Given the speed of advance in AI, fully autonomous drones will be here soon. (If they aren't already flying around Area 51.) And what if, instead of radar, the drone is connected to its controller by a fiber-optic line? These are being used in Ukraine, and while the first versions are clumsy and often fail when the fiber breaks, these examples are being thrown together in barely professional workshops, and the system can no doubt be improved. The combination of fiber optic connections and simple AI may soon render electromagnetic defenses close to useless.

The US is looking into gun-based anti-drone systems (above), but there doesn't seem to be much focus on this kind of defense.

I think the US and NATO are far behind the curve on these issues. Here is one example of what worries me, from a news story about the lessons of the Ukraine war.

“The first lesson we got out of there was the importance of anti-ship cruise missile defense, when the Slava got hit,” Director of Naval Intelligence Vice Adm. Karl Thomas said, likely referring to the April 2022 sinking of the Slava-class Moskva, which the US said was hit with Ukrainian Neptune cruise missiles. 

Given that anti-ship cruise missiles were introduced in the 1970s, it seems bizarre that the danger they pose should have impressed the US Navy in 2022.

That same news story goes on to describe a competition the Army is holding for anti-drone systems, including a test in which the systems had to defend a command post against up to fifty attackers at once. After watching these demonstrations, the reporter concluded that "Flooding the battlefield with a large number of drones, especially those able to fly in a coordinated fashion, is a threat the U.S. military is still trying to address." And that was just fifty drones. What about 8,000?

Of course the best way to defeat any air or artillery attack is to destroy the systems before the attack is launched. Israel demonstrated thin on August 25 when they bombed the Hezbolla launchers (here, here, here) that were being positioned to launch a massive rocket attack. But Israel has excellent electronic and human intelligence in southern Lebanon, so we can't always rely on that, plus, again, what about the first day of the war?

Of course none of this is a scary as nuclear weapons. But it is plenty scary. I sincerely hope that the level of global saber-rattling eases off soon, because I do not think the world is ready for the kind of fury that our new technologies could easily unleash.

The Last Sunflower

After a hot summer, most of the sunflowers are pretty much done. 

Except for this one. It bided its time all summer, slowly getting taller and taller but not putting out a single bloom. Until this week.

When it began to put out lovely flowers. And it still has lots of buds lower down, so it is going to be blooming for a while. Worth the wait.

And a few more views of the garden from today.

Links 13 September 2024

Alan Lee, Merlin

The seaborn trade between Rome and India was almost certainly much more important than any overland "silk road" between Rome and China.

Open AI releases "strawberry" aka o1, which is supposed to do complex reasoning. Marginal Revolutions has a bunch of links.

Demographic oblivion in the Balkans.

The cool thing about the internet: somebody just randomly asked, "Wow, why does everyone on this French talk show look so good?" and in reply got this amazing thread about how the lighting is done. One trick is to seat the guests around a white table that reflects light up at them.

Wildlife photographer of the year contest: contest gallery, selection at My Modern Met.

More evidence that you should never trust charismatic founders of organizations: accusations that anti-trafficking hero Tim Ballard is a sexual predator. (NY Times, Rolling Stone, Yahoo)

Today's random line: "Her optimism is rare and sails against the winds of contemporary culture." So, there you have it, after a lifetime of thinking of myself as a rather boring, middle-of-the road person I suddenly find myself sailing against the winds. Stand together, bold outsider rebels, and insist that things are better than ever before!

The chats betwen Russian agent Aleksandr Ionov and his FSB handlers, released by US authorities. Among other things Ionov claimed to be supporting the California independence movement. There's a serious threat to US stability.

Study finds that the effect of placebos on patients with mental health problems varies a lot depending on what their condition is: "Patients with major depressive disorder experienced the greatest improvement, followed by those with generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, social phobia, mania, and OCD, while patients with schizophrenia benefited the least."

"Over the 10-year period from 2013 to 2022, the homicide conviction rate in Texas for illegal immigrants was 2.2 per 100,000, compared to 3.0 per 100,000 for native-born Americans. The homicide conviction rate for legal immigrants in Texas was 1.2 per 100,000." Source.

And here Matt Yglesias fact checks Elon Musk's latest conspiracy theory about why crime rates are really rising despite the FBI saying otherwise. Same point from Jeremy "adjusted for inflation" Horpedahl.

On Twitter/X, Andrew Neil's farewell to The Spectator. As chairman Neil made The Spectator into a financial success while keeping it true to its snobbish British roots, a real accomplishment, but its owners went bankrupt and sold it to the highest bidder, and after one look at the new owners Neil decided it was time to retire.

Park Ranger explains the environmental impact of a single Cheetos bag dropped in Carlsbad Caverns.

Green energy news: "The U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Monday issued final decisions approving NV Energy’s Greenlink West transmission project and Arevia Power’s $2.3 billion, 700-MW solar project."

Collection of photos showing how much some US presidents aged while in office.

The potentially far-reaching consequences of the UK's Equality Act, which requires firms to pay equally for jobs that a board decides are equally demanding.

According to this (obnoxious) post, there are 4.1 million OnlyFans "creators" and 305 million paying accounts. If each of those accounts represents a person, then about 4% of humanity subscribes to OnlyFans. Via Marginal Revolutions.

Interesting David Brooks essay (NY Times) on "the struggle between what you might call the forces of indignation and the forces of exhaustion." Says that like Biden Harris is benefitting from many people being tired of all the drama and the conflict.

The rock-cut architecture of Madagascar.

The current surge in historical fiction.

An economist argues that Russia's economy is now so focused on the war that they can't afford either to win or lose but need the stalement to go on indefinitely. YouTuber Perun says essentially the same thing in this one-hour video; Russia's economy is sustaining the war effort by spending all of its capital and risking its future, and the picture for after the war ends looks grim. He also notes that Russia's current budgets assume military spending will fall by a lot next year.

Low-tech solutions to high-tech problems: Russian soldier knocks down a small drone by throwing his rifle at it.

Russian war correspondent films himself being hunted by a drone inside an abandoned factory. Horror movies of the future.

Visually confirmed losses of Russian armored vehicles have topped 10,000, including 3,371 tanks. That doesn't include 831 self-propelled artillery pieces, 415 rocket launchers (MLRS), 273 surface-to-air missile systems, 128 jet aircraft, and 144 helicopters, etc., to a total of nearly 18,000 systems. If you had tried to tell me in 2022 that Russia would end up losing so much I would not have believed you.

Haitians in Ohio and the Immigrant Economy

Right now the debate over immigration in America is so stupid it makes my head hurt.

Anti-immigrant Americans want to complain about crime and violence and cat-eating and what-all. But this is nonsense. Immigrants commit crimes, sure, but every number I have seen, whether from the FBI or individual states, shows that they commit fewer crimes than the native born. No doubt there are towns out there where immigrants commit most of the crimes, because those are places where most of the young men are immigrants. Some immigrants do drugs, but, again, not as much as the native born. When people point this out on Twitter/X, the usual response is just to say "You're Lying!" Sigh.

Immigrants do have a high rate of severe mental health problems, but I've never seen anyone cite this in opposition to immigration and anyway the rate of schizophrenia isn't high enough to be a real economic or social problem.

That doesn't mean there are no reasons to oppose immigration. Pro-immigration (or anti-Trump) people have been passing around this interview (summary here) with one of the Ohio factory owners responsible for drawing a lot of Haitains to Springfield:

I was I had thirty more. Our Haitian associates come to work every day. They don't have a drug problem. They will stay at their machine. They will achieve their numbers. They are here to work. And so, in general, that's a stark difference from what we're used to in our community.

So from a factory-owners's perspective, immigration is great. They get people who will do repetitive drudge work all day for mediocre wages. Because however bad working in a factory in Ohio might be, it beats the heck out of being shot by gangsters in Haiti. So, win-win for the factory owners and the Haitians.

But you could ask a different question: is there any way we could convert those dreary factory jobs that upstanding native born Americans don't want into something better? Is it, maybe, that the manufacturers can get away with offering low wages and drudgery because they are competing, not just against whatever US-born workers might be doing instead, but against conditions in Haiti and Venezuela and Vietnam?

(Pro-Trump Republicans like to say that Harris supporters are communists, but imagine a real communist sharing a video casting a factory owner as the hero and the lazy workers as the bad guys.)

A more rational case against immigration would go like this: life in the US is better than life in most places because we limit how many people we take in. If we take in too many that will drag life here down toward conditions in the rest of the world. So long as there are immigrant workers desperate for any kind of job, companies have no incentive to change their work practices toward something better for workers. Step one toward making life in America better for working people, therefore, is to limit the number of immigrants. And maybe the social pathologies of the working class might actually be reduced if we focused on this, and people who could get less miserable, better-paying jobs might be more likely to stay sober and get married and so on.

I think this is wrong, but at least it makes sense. Alas, I've been reading takes on the Haitians in Ohio story for two days and I have not seen this argument made even once. All the anti-immigrant people are fulminating against crime and disorder and community breakdown, which manifestly are not happening.

I believe that immigration is great for the US economy. I believe that the only reason it is still thriving is that immigrants study harder in school than the native born, get more education, work harder, found more companies, and generally do more to make the country thrive than the native born. I have never seen a single credible number that refutes this. That does not mean all immigration is good, or that we couldn't come up with a better system for deciding whom to admit, or that the current number is the best one, or anything like that; just that on net, immigration is a plus. I would like to see companies work harder to recruit workers and change their processes to make them less onerous. I have a feeling, though, that this is not going to happen. I imagine that if we tried to force (say) chicken processors to improve conditions the jobs would just all move to Mexico. (Or, if they didn't, the price of chicken would soar.) Any given level of technology seems to come with its own forms of drudgery.

But this is America in our era: if you want a good life, in economic terms, you have to get a lot of education and put it to use, or else throw yourself into some kind of blue-collar work and get ahead by working hard. You must live a life of bourgeois discipline: getting up every day, getting dressed, going to work, making your numbers, etc. If you fall off that path via depression, drug use, chronic injury, or what have you, your life is going to be hard. Some people fantasize that ending immigration would reduce this pressure, that it would lessen the competition and mean everybody gets more for working less. I think the opposite is true, that in fact hard-working immigrants sustain the rest of us. 

But at least this is an argument worth having. Who is eating cats is not.

The Mothership

     Ben was popping off about something, so I put other stuff out of my mind and listened in. "Man, you can't believe this thing. It will say anything."
     Somebody said, "I thought they shut it down for telling people how to stage anthrax attacks."
     "They tried, but they couldn't. The Feds tried to block it, to pull the plug, whatever. An hour later it's back. Nobody knows where it is or who's behind it or anything."
     "Really?"
     "I'll show you," Ben said, and pulled out his phone. Twenty second later he said, "Ok, what should I ask it?"
     "Ask it how I can get laid." That was Josh.
     People were laughing, but Ben was typing. Ten seconds later he was reading from the screen. "Josh Simmons should consider girls from his high school. Use social media to contact them. At least two would be interested."
     There was laughter, and somebody said, "Talk about bs." But I noticed that Josh wasn't laughing. He seemed to be thinking it over, like it really might be a good idea and he was trying to figure out who the two were.
     At hour later I was home, staring at my monitor. I entered the string of numbers Ben had given me and after a few second the screen filled with a green-tinted image of a huge flying saucer. Wrapping around its form were the letters MOTHERSHIP AI. A small box for text appeared under the saucer. I typed, "Who killed JFK?"
     A minute later a long article landed on my screen that started, President John F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was encouraged to carry out this plan by two Florida-based mobsters named . . . It went on and on. The mobsters had been put up to it by a cabal of three dissident CIA officers. It gave dates and places of meetings, everything.
     I tried, "Why did Valdimir Putin think he could easily conquer Ukraine?" It thought for a minute, then gave me another long article:
     The Russian FSB assured President Putin that Kyiv would fall easily because of the number of intelligence assets they had within the Ukrainian government and military. These included the head of President Zelenskyy's bodyguards and two of his close aides, as well as commanders in the National Guard and the Kyiv police. However, the Russians were not aware that they had been thoroughly penetrated by American intelligence, and many of their own top people were on the US payroll. Those agents kept the US well informed about Russian moves and provided the CIA with the names of many key Russian assets. Some of these were removed, others turned, becoming double agents. These sources also provided the US with the complete Russian plan of battle for the attack, allowing it to be blunted. . . .
     It gave me more names, more dates, more details. I tried a bunch of other questions: how to create a deadly poison gas at home, how to hack into my ex-girlfriend's email, how to cheat at Civilization VI. It gave me detailed instructions for everything. At first it was cool, but then it started to worry me. Where was all this coming from? Was it real, or made up? People said the instructions it gave out for the anthrax attacks really worked, but did it really know who killed JFK? If so, how? And who was behind it?
     I typed, "Who owns Mothership AI?" It responded, I'm sorry, John, I cannot find any information on that subject. Huh.
     I tried, "Is Mothership AI owned by the Chinese government?"
     I'm sorry, John, I cannot find any indication that the Chinese government is involved in Mothership AI.
     I thought some more, and weird ideas starting floating into my head. I felt the solid floor dissolving underneath my feet. I typed, "Is Mothership AI controlled by aliens?"
     Nothing happened. I typed it again: Is Mothership AI controlled by aliens?
     IS MOTHERSHIP AI CONTROLLED BY ALIENS???
     The screen went dark.