Dwarkesh Patel on LLMs

Tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel summarizes his recent experience:

I’ve probably spent over a hundred hours trying to build little LLM tools for my post production setup. And the experience of trying to get them to be useful has extended my timelines. I’ll try to get the LLMs to rewrite autogenerated transcripts for readability the way a human would. Or I’ll try to get them to identify clips from the transcript to tweet out. Sometimes I’ll try to get it to co-write an essay with me, passage by passage. These are simple, self contained, short horizon, language in-language out tasks – the kinds of assignments that should be dead center in the LLMs’ repertoire. And they’re 5/10 at them. Don’t get me wrong, that’s impressive.

But the fundamental problem is that LLMs don’t get better over time the way a human would. The lack of continual learning is a huge huge problem. The LLM baseline at many tasks might be higher than an average human’s. But there’s no way to give a model high level feedback. You’re stuck with the abilities you get out of the box. You can keep messing around with the system prompt. In practice this just doesn’t produce anything even close to the kind of learning and improvement that human employees experience.

The reason humans are so useful is not mainly their raw intelligence. It’s their ability to build up context, interrogate their own failures, and pick up small improvements and efficiencies as they practice a task. 

I keep thinking that the real gains will come with the fissioning of AI into thousands of little AIs that can get good at specific tasks, but I imagine that is going to take an enormous leap in computational power.

Stoicism

Michael Sugrue, from his lecture on Marcus Aurelius:

Marcus Aurelius lets us know that all people suffer, but not all people pity themselves. Marcus Aurelius lets us know that all men die, but not all men die whining.

Jennifer Pahlka on What Doge Did

Jennifer Pahlka, a veteran of past government reform efforts, as been closely tracking DOGE and interviewing current and recently departed DOGE employees. Most of those she has talked to have said that they were hired to write code. The idea was not just to cut staff, but to make the staff unnecessary by automating many tasks using in-house software:

There was pretty clearly an agenda not just to cut contracts, but to do so by bringing some software development in house, which is actually very wise — and long overdue. I know of a few teams that have quietly gotten more staff since the start of the Trump term, and are delivering better results by firing poor-performing contractors and writing the software themselves. But those teams are in the minority. For most teams, their contracts have been canceled without much of a plan. Similarly, software (insourced or not) was supposed to replace people, but the people are gone without the software. They cut the workforce without cutting the work.

This rhymes eerily with what happened during the National Performance Review, which most people will recognize as the efforts around Reinventing Government under Al Gore in the 90s. John Kamensky was on Statecraft recently, and when asked about the staff cuts in that era, which mostly resulted not in a smaller workforce overall, but rather a “dark matter version of the federal workforce,” in Santi’s words (the same workers but now off the feds books and onto the contractors’), John responded:

We were hoping agencies would simplify HR and the procurement rules, which would let them do with fewer staff. But Congress ate dessert first and cut the number of people without simplifying the rules.

DOGE has done the same. In cutting the workforce without cutting the work, they, too, ate dessert first. They also don’t seem to have built much software, whether it's to save money, deliver better service, or automate work. Why? The answer, to a reasonable approximation, is that it’s really hard to build software in government, and when the DOGE team figured that out, instead of trying to make it easier, they decided not to bother.

Pahlka is still hopeful that some of the DOGE energy will linger and help drive reform, but I am not. I think the business has made many Republicans leery of anybody shouting "reform," so this misguided, unfinished effort will continue to cause lots of pain for federal employees and annoyance for citizens without helping anybody.

Zoraida Córdova, "The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina"

Zoraida Córdova has had an interesting career. Born in Ecuador, she moved to New York as a young child and grew up bilingual. After the usual writing workshops and so on she published a raft of young adult novels and silly romances. She made her first real money with a series on the "Brooklyn Brujas," which wikipedia describes as "a Latinx version of Charmed." She wrote a Star Wars story for a collection, and that led to her getting hired to write two Star Wars novels. She branched out by writing, under a pseudonym, a series of romance novels about male strippers finding true love.

The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (2021) seems to be her attempt to get beyond all of that and create something more adult and serious. I liked it. It is certainly the best example I know of explicitly Hispanic American fantasy. It blends Latin magical realism with Anglo fantasy, European fairy tales, and a creepy circus story, and I enjoyed the result.

What if there were a family that was a story? In which everything that happened was driven by the unfolding of a plot, in which everyone simply accepts that they are characters something is toying with, settling into the strange current that sweeps them along toward a frightening climax and a new state of being? You may be thinking, wait, John, all families in novels are like that. But the descendants of Orquídea Montoya are more like that. When this works, it is amazing. The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina has a lot of problems that keep me from calling it great, but it does the thing that seizes my heart: it makes magic feel magical. There were moments, listening to this, when I had to stop the audio and marvel at what I had just experienced. There were also long stretches I found irritating, but I will read a lot to get to a page of magic that transcends the mundane world.

Orquídea Montoya is a witch from Ecuador who flees (something) to the US, building a sort of magical fortress in the New Mexican desert. She had five husbands and a number of children I lost track of, and at the start of the book she announces that she is dying and summons her descendants to her home to receive their bequests. Her strange passing (death? transformation? something else?) weakens her magical protections and the things that hunted her can now reach her family. Chapters on Orquídea's life alternate with the story of her puzzled descendants. I liked Orquídea's story much better, and found the lives of the 21st century Montoyas mostly dreary or predictable. But the climax is interesting and has those moments of real magic I mentioned. If I were a star-giving sort of reviewer I would probably give this four out of five.

Mass Ukrainian Drone Strike on Airfields Hosting Russian Long-Range Bombers

While Russia continues to attack Ukrainian civilians night after night, Ukraine has responded with a massive coordinated attack on four airfields where Russian long-range strategic bombers are based.

In Russia, 41 aircraft were damaged, including an A-50, Tu-95, Tu-22M3, and Tu-160, according to the head of the Security Service of Ukraine. . . . The estimated value of the damaged strategic aviation is over $7 billion.

One of the airfields struck was in Siberia, 4,000 km from Ukraine, and Ukraine claimed that this attack was mounted by smuggling the drones into Russia and launching them from trucks. Some links:

Story at the Kyiv Independent.

Satellite image of the Belaya airfield in Siberia here, with at least three destroyed aircraft, likely Tu-22 bombers. More here.

A deputy in the Russian Duma went on a rant about the lack of preparations for such an attack, and the intelligence failure involved.

Satirist Darth Putin on negotiations in Istanbul:

Russia: "you have no cards"
Ukraine: "you have no bombers"

Video posted by a Russian citizen: "Here's a plane burning down, and seven more like it."

Thread from Evergreen Intel, which she is updating as new images and video come in.

Update 6/2: thread listing confirmed losses, which are up to 16 aircraft destroyed or "damaged," meaning damaged in a way that you can see from space.

Summary of the overall military situation from Ukrainian reserve officer Tatarigami. He notes that although Ukraine is holding the front line, that is not enough to induce Russia to make peace:

To truly shift the calculus in Ukraine’s favor, there must be a combination of a stalled frontline and mounting costs for Russia - not just in monetary terms, but in strategic capacity. These costs include Russia’s diminishing ability to project power globally, compete economically with the West and China, and maintain its status as a relevant geopolitical force.

Today's attack is a clear example of a strike that, while not directly influencing the battlefield, significantly erodes Russia’s long-term strategic assets - many of which are Soviet-era legacies that Russia cannot replace in the near term. The loss of AWACS aircraft, a quarter of the Black Sea Fleet, much of its Soviet-era armored inventory, a substantial portion of its attack helicopter fleet, its positions in Syria, and now a major blow to its strategic aviation - all cumulatively weaken Russia’s global military reach.

If Ukraine can continue to hold the line, even if that means gradual tactical withdrawals from small settlements while stalling Russian forces at the operational-strategic level, then the ever-increasing cost of war may eventually compel the Kremlin to acknowledge a sobering reality: that continuing the war not only worsens the situation in Ukraine, but accelerates Russia’s own strategic decline.

Political Bias in AI

Philosophy Bear notes that Elon's attempts to make Grok less liberal have mostly failed, and offers this intelligent take on trying to make AI less biased:

Would the system be “unbiased” if it held the views of the median American? The median living human? These are all just different political positions. Is the idea to try and make an AI without positions on any question that could be considered political? That’s insanely difficult and may be in some senses conceptually impossible. I get that conservatives don’t like that AI tends to the left– I wouldn’t be happy in their position either. However, if AI were right-wing my complaint wouldn’t be that it’s “biased”, as if there were some neutral set of political views it should hold instead. My complaint would be that it was inhumane, inaccurate, or unjust. There is no “fair” set of political opinions independent of the question of what political views are correct.

As I have noted here before, I consider myself a moderate. But I dislike a lot of self-proclaimed centrist opinion because self-proclaimed "centrists" often assert that they are "neutral" or "non-ideological." Centrism is an ideology, just as much as conservatism and liberalism are. It is extremely difficult to articulate any position on many issues that is not ideological. I suppose you could make an AI that would respond to any political question by offering a range of views, like, "Well, Nancy Pelosi says this, but Rand Paul says that." But how many shades of opinion should such an AI offer? There are very few political questions on which there are only two opinions.

There are political questions with an important factual component. E.g., the current House budget is very likely to increase the US budget deficit by a large amount, and will require large cuts to government spending on healthcare. When Republicans deny this, they are engaging in ideological claptrap, and no system that merits the descriptor "intelligent" should say such things. But that is very different from asserting that rising budget deficits and health care cuts are bad; those are judgments we makes based on what we value. (I just asked Google's AI and it declined to offer an opinion on budget deficits.)

What does an LLM actually do? On many questions, it offers a sort of average of the most widely referenced material on the Web. So if you ask an AI about anthropogenic climate change, it will probably notice that most of the professional-looking publications out there express worry if not terror, and the anti-climate change stuff is mostly written at a MAGA intellectual level. So if it were being "neutral," it would probably say, "CO2 emissions are changing the climate and this is worrying." All it is doing is repeating the average opinion of scientists who write about climate change, but what else could it possibly do? Conduct its own analysis? How?

Philosophy Bear:

But in the meantime, why is it so difficult to make Grok right-wing? The short answer is that the words it is trained on do not support that, because most written text, especially that available on the internet is produced by the left-wing people. The deeper point is that by its nature, writing, especially writing that survives, tends to embody progressive values. Universal, empathetic, emotionally thoughtful, curious, and open, all this is true even when we factor in the numerous exclusions on who gets to write. The written word aims at the reconciliation of all things, Apocatastasis.

To understand Grok, you must understand the world of the written word, there’s a real sense in which Grok is the (modified) embodied spirit of all existing writing.

I am not at all sure that this point holds for what was written before the Internet; whatever else you want to say about ancient Greek, Sanskrit, or Chinese texts, they are certainly not left wing. One way to nibble at this problem, then, would be to make your AI read a lot of old books. But do people really want an AI that responds to questions about current problems by quoting Thucydides, or Mencius? How would you make an AI "understand" that old books were written in a different world and require certain modifications to make what they say relevant in ours?

I suspect a big part of the problem is the cursory way people work with AI. My friends who use it extensively say you have to ask repeated follow-up questions and drill down on points that seem flippant or obscure. You might, in that way, get past the problem of the internet average. 

But the notion that you could created an "unbiased" AI is absurd on its face.

Meeting Trump

Photographs of Italian PM Georgia Meloni during her meeting with Trump last month.

The Baby Fawn

Yesterday around lunchtime a doe came wandering slowly past our house, right behind our back fence. Two of my sons and I went out onto the back porch to watch her amble by. Then we saw why she was walking so slowly: she was being followed by a fawn so young it could barely walk. They proceeded across the street. When a car approach the fawn tried to pick up its pace but it obviously could not move any faster than its stumbling walk. The little thing can't have been more than a few days old, and I wonder if this wasn't its first real journey. We were so entranced that nobody thought to take a photograph until he was across the street and its mother had already disappearied into some bushes. But trust me, this thing was tiny.

I consider this more evidence for my theory that our deer don't have their babies in the woods, where there are dangers like off-leash dogs and occasional coyotes. They have them out in the neighborhood, where dogs are safely leashed or fenced and the soft suburban people would never think to molest a lovely little fawn.

Links May 30 2025

Good spring for roses in Catonsville

British archaeologists recover the missing half of the "Bromeswell Bucket" at Sutton Hoo.

Scott Siskind ponders the people who say they "became conscious" at some age from 4 to 25. Interesting the different meanings people put on "consciousness," including "first thought about philosophical issues" and "first realized I could change my life by my actions."

And Siskind on Covid: 1), reminding us that 1.2 million Americans died of Covid, and 2), defending the claim that 1.2 million really did die.

The flyers used to promote the first hip-hop events in Brooklyn, and the "flyer men" who designed them.

Using the clay tablets found in the Assyrian merchant enclave of Kaneš in Turkey to estimate the size and location of undiscovered ancient cities. Via Marginal Revolution.

Study of DNA from classic Maya burials suggests the population shrank dramatically around 1200 years ago, which corresponds pretty well with the collapse of many cities. Very small study but a good start.

The government of Haiti uses drones to attack gangsters.

People on Twitter/X keep saying that Hedy Lamarr invented the technology behind wifi, and Google's AI summary says the same thing, but wikipedia's excellent article makes clear that it was a lot more complicated than that. It seems that often LLMs just give you the average of what is on the internet, and that will be distorted in many situations.

May at Ben Pentreath's new house in the Orkneys, amazing photo set with everything from bluebell meadows to Atlantic storms. And some travels through Britain with amazing old houses.

Pastor Doug Wilson of Moscow, Idaho as the leader of America's new theocratic politics.

Trying to recreate a traditional Hawaiian agricultural system that involved co-cropping sugar cane and sweet potatoes.

Nice set of black and white photographs documenting the Black Panthers, by Stephen Shames.

Interesting NY Times piece on the trade in Appalachian "forest botanicals," things like Solomon's seal roots that are made into herbal medicines. I tried to find out more about an entity called Herb Hub that buys and markets a lot of this stuff, but it turns out that there are dozens of weed dispensaries called Herb Hub and I never found the company from the Times story.

According to UN data, the number of children under 5 in the world peaked in 2017 and is now declining.

Whalebone tools from the French Paleolithic, likely made from stranded whales.

Insider account of Doge.

Lots of problems with the big RFK backed "Make America Healthy Again" report, including citations to sources that don't exist, which makes people suspect that ChatGPT helped write it.

Another one of those bonkers stories (NY Times) about piracy and slavery, a man who was excited to know he had a pirate ancestor until he found out that the pirate also engaged in slave trading. WHAT DO PEOPLE THINK PIRATES DID???

According to this news story, the surgeons who carried out the first successful bladder transplant "had practiced retrievals and transplantations in five recently deceased donors whose cardiac function was maintained on ventilator support."

Quantum mechanics is 100 years old.

Crown decorated with beetle wings excavated from medieval Korean tomb.

The colonial history of vanilla, with a key stop at the island of Réunion, where a slave boy named Edmond Albius figured out a simple technique for hand pollinating the flowers.

David Frum: The Trump Presidency's World Historical Heist.

Lots of people like the new biography of the painter Gaugin by Sue Prideaux: NY Times, Guardian, long review on somebody's blog. After two decades of being cancelled for his interest in 14-year-old Polynesian girls, Gaugin is back in the conversation. Never count out an actual artistic rebel.

Construction Physics takes a detailed look at how much of our electricity we could reasonably expect to get from solar panels. The conclusion is that with enough batteries we could get to 70% without stressing the system, but 90% would be an expensive challenge.

German government announces a $5.7 billion investment in Ukraine's arms industry, focusing on air defense and long-range attack drones.

Israel releases video of its new laser system shooting down small drones. And Ukraine is fundraising for its AI-controlled anti-drone gun turret, called Sky Sentinel.

The Cato Institute Trashes the MAHA Report

Loving this:

Again? Make America Healthy Again? It’s an odd slogan in a country that has long ranked last in health outcomes among its peers. If the United States were merged with Canada, Greenland, and Panama, our average health statistics would improve overnight. Consider, for example, the pellagra epidemic that began at the start of the 20th century and lasted into the 1940s.

Between 1900 and 1940, some three million US citizens developed pellagra, of whom 100,000 died—this when pellagra was rare outside the home of the brave and the land of the free. Pellagra is a debilitating disease known for the four Ds (diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia, and death). Pellagra’s prevalence was disproportionately high in the Jim Crow South, where systemic racial injustice shaped both diet and disease.

Its cause was discovered by an immigrant, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, a graduate of New York University. While working for the precursor body of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), he demonstrated that pellagra was a disease of malnutrition. Pellagra is a vitamin deficiency that occurs in people who eat little but industrially milled corn. Indeed, it’s hard to acquire pellagra because the key vitamin [Niacin] is found in practically all foods except industrially milled corn.

Dr Goldberger made his key observations at the Georgia State Sanatorium, a mental asylum where pellagra was rampant. For his experiment, Goldberger fed a group of patients a balanced diet of, you know, meat and vegetables and stuff. Whereupon their pellagra was cured. Once the experiment was complete, the fiscally responsible burghers of the peach state promptly returned the subjects to their former diet of industrially milled corn and industrially milled corn alone. And their pellagra promptly returned. . . .

Happily, the Commission already knows why US children are uniquely unhealthy. By a strange coincidence, these reasons happen to be the ones the Commission’s chairman, one Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been trumpeting for years. They include US children’s consumption of ultra-processed food, their use of smartphones, the chemicals in their environment, their lack of exercise, their stress levels, their lack of sleep, and their overmedicalization, especially with those pesky vaccines.

Oddly, however, the data in the report bears little relationship to its conclusions. For example, the first sentence of the introduction reads: “Despite outspending peer nations by more than double per capita on healthcare, the United States ranks last in life expectancy among high-income countries—and suffers higher rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.” But the graph the Commission supplies shows that, dating back to 1970, the US has always ranked last in life expectancy among comparator nations. Were Americans back in 1970 dying sooner than Canadians, Europeans, or the Japanese because of ultra-processed food, smartphones, chemicals, a lack of exercise, stress levels, a lack of sleep, and overmedicalization? Probably not.

The reason for the US’s poor medical performance lies in the culture that gave us pellagra, which includes the nation’s unusually high level of social inequality for a rich country, regulatory barriers to access to health care, its extraordinarily high levels of road traffic deaths (which are today seven times higher in the US than in Sweden), its unusually high levels of gun deaths (which are today 340 times higher in the US than the UK for example), its extraordinarily high incarceration rate (prisoners may die from natural causes 20 years earlier than the general population), and other obvious social factors—which is why Mississippi has a life expectancy 8 years lower than states like Hawaii or Washington.

David Brooks Defends America as an Ideal

Magnificent:

There are two forms of nationalism. There is the aspirational nationalism of people, ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, who emphasize that America is not only a land but was founded to embody and spread the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. Then there is the ancestors and homeland nationalism, traditionally more common in Europe, of Donald Trump and Vance, the belief that America is just another collection of people whose job is to take care of our own. . . .

Trump and Vance have to rebut the idea that America is the embodiment of universal ideals. If America is an idea, then Black and brown people from all over the world can become Americans by coming here and believing that idea. If America is an idea, then Americans have a responsibility to promote democracy. We can’t betray democratic Ukraine in order to kowtow to a dictator like Vladimir Putin. If America is an idea, we have to care about human dignity and human rights. You can’t have a president go to Saudi Arabia, as Trump did this month, and effectively tell them we don’t care how you treat your people. . . .

If America is built around a universalist ideal, then there is no room for the kind of white identity politics that Trump and Stephen Miller practice every day. There is no room for the othering, zero-sum, us/them thinking, which is the only kind of thinking Trump is capable of. There’s no room for Trump’s immigration policy, which is hostile to Latin Americans but hospitable to the Afrikaners whose ancestors invented apartheid.

As I have written here many times, I consider myself an American patriot. But to me that doesn't mean loving American as it happens to be, or because of who happens to live here. I love the idea that America stands for, and our ongoing struggle to make that idea real.

Supreme Court Decision on NEPA

The decision was effectively unaminous, because nobody could read the law and think the process as it now exists is what Congress had in mind. Sotomayor wrote a concurrence, which has more pro-environment rhetoric but so far as I can tell is substantively the same. This, from Bret Kavanaugh's decision, sums it up:

Simply stated, NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock. The goal of the law is to inform agency decisionmaking, not to paralyze it.

The lawsuit concerned the construction of an 88-mile railway in Utah to carry waxy crude oil to existing rail lines. Environmental groups sued because they said the NEPA review should have considered, not just the direct impact of building the railroad, but the overall impact of refining and using the oil from this source. This outward spiraling of "impacts" is one of the things that make NEPA so crazy; how could you, even in theory, estimate all the potential future impacts of how piece of infrastructure will be used? Consider that the Environmental Impact Statement in question was 3,600 pages long, and a court still held that it was not far-reaching enough.

This is what NEPA requires of federal agencies before they approve projects:

• Consider alternatives, including the "no action alternative."
• Get an appropriate level of information on how the project would impact a range of stuff, like endangered species, cultural resources, wetlands, and air pollution.
• Have roughly the same level of information on all the alternatives being considered. (You can't delve much more deeply into the impact of the alternative you think you're going to choose.)
• Make their decision in the light of this information.

That's it. It in no way requires that the agency prioritize environmental protection over other concerns, nor does it have any detail about what that appropriate level of information might be. That is left to the agency. There are cases where a responsible decision-maker would want a whole lot of information; for example, the Corps of Engineers did a bookshelf of studies before embarking on their multi-billion-dollar plan to alter water flows in South Florida to protect the Everglades. But for many cases the process has gotten completely out of hand, with stacks of fat reports piling up for the construction of single buildings, or adding turn lanes at intersections. None of that is in NEPA, and none of it was done in the first 15 years of the law's existence.

The meat of the Supreme Court's decision is that the lower courts who tried to interfere in this case did not grant "sufficient deference" to agency decision-makers:

Courts should afford substantial deference and should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness.

I think this is the key. Letting NEPA become completely unreasonable, which I think has happened in many cases, is bad for the country and will, if not checked, eventually lead to the dismantling of the whole process. Preservationists of all sorts need to think harder about what realistically can be preserved, and how big a burden they should be imposing on their fellow citizens.

Scavenging Iron from the Ruins of Roman Britain

Reconstruction of Roman Richborough, c 120 AD

The most fascinating academic article I have read so far this year is a 2012 piece by Robin Fleming titled "Recycling in Britain after the Fall of Rome's Metal Economy." (More on how much I admire Fleming here.) 

Fleming begins by noting that the period between the collapse of Roman Britain and the rise of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is poorly understood. This is partly because the literary sources are sparse and bad, partly because of the lack of communication between historians of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and scholars of Roman Britain, and partly because of the lack of communication between archaeologists and historians. ("But if Roman and Anglo-Saxon historians inhabit different planets, historians and archaeologists live in different galaxies.")

Fleming believes that the withdrawal of Roman authority in Britain in the early 400s was a catastrophic event for the inhabitants:

A careful reading of the evidence further shows that most people during the first three or four generations after Rome's fall were profoundly poor, a fundamental fact that has disappeared from historical memory both because we historians too often limit our investigations to early medieval texts, and because most of us are not fully aware of the level of material prosperity found in Britain before Rome's fall. 

Consider metal. Archaeologists estimate that in the second and third centuries, Roman Britain produced more than 2,200 tons of freshly smelted iron annually. Evidence for this is abundant, including huge mounds of smelting waste. Copper and lead were also common in the empire:

One consequence of Rome's extraordinary capacity to produce metal was that local markets throughout the empire, including Britain, were awash with inexpensive, readily available, ready-to-smith metal as well as finished metal goods; and this, in turn, made people more productive and more prosperous than they would have been with out it, enabling them to live more comfortable lives.

Romans did not have access to any forgotten technologies. Their metal works were productive because they operated at large scale and had access to thousands of skilled, specialist workers who focused their efforts on a single step in a complex commercial structure; from chacoal burners to finishing smiths, all were experts in their craft, and the merchant organizers efficiently moved the product from one stage to the next. The results of this collaboration can easily be seen in the archaeological record. Roman sites are just full of metal stuff. One example:

At the short-lived, first-century Roman fort at Inchtuthil, in Scotland, a cache of several tons of well-made nails — almost a million in all — has been found; the nails were fabricated in a variety of standard sizes and hardnesses (the longer ones containing more carbon steel, because they needed to withstand more hammering than shorter nails).

But then Rome fell apart:

Beginning in the later fourth century, however, as the Romano-British economy began to unravel and as Britain's many dozens of small towns — places centrally involved in iron-related activities — failed, the production and availability of freshly smelted metal first faltered and then, by and large, ceased. 

To replace all that smelted metal, and what they had acquired via trade, the smiths of Britain turned to scavenging. At the Roman-period ironworking sites of Southwark and Ickham (Kent), deposits from the late 300s are full of "metal odds and ends," some of them centuries old, that had clearly been scavenged for recycling. By 420 activity at these sites had ceased altogether. Because of the industry's collapse, iron became much rarer:

In Britain what we see during the last couple of decades of the fourth century is the disappearance of traditional and crucial everyday objects which used nails, including hobnail boots and coffins; and I would argue that for the people who grew up with these things, rainy days and funerals were a lot grimmer without them.

Iron-making did not disappear from Britain, but it was dramatically reduced in scale. While Roman-period smelting sides can readily be identified by the enormous slag heaps they left behind, "the handful of fifth- and sixth-century places in Britain with evidence for iron smelting typically produce only a few kilograms of smelting slag." The difference was made up by switching to other materials, such as wooden pegs, and by recycling. Fleming finds evidence of recycing everywhere; for example, archaeologists sifting through the stone rubble left by the temple complex at Bath found that all the lead clamps that once held the stones together had been hacked out before the building collapsed around 450 AD. There is even some evidence of mining rubbish dumps for metal.

And there is much evidence that people were finding and using Roman-period metal artifacts:

For example, Stanley West excavated an impressive number of Roman metalwork artefacts at the early medieval settlement at West Stow, in Suffolk — bronze spoons, bracelets, finger rings, ear scoops and a steelyard. . . . These items look to have been scavenged from abandoned Roman sites in the neighbourhood and brought home for reuse as found or after some minor modification.

This is just a small sample of the evidence Fleming has put together, and I find it completely convincing.

How long did this metal famine last? Fleming finds evidence for increased iron smelting in the 600s, but even then people were still collecting and re-using Roman scrap; reuse of Roman brass and bronze seems to have gone on into the 800s. Iron smelting was being carried out on a commercial scale at several sites by the mid 700s, and there was a thriving industry by 1000. Fleming doesn't take the story any farther, but so far as I know Britain did not really equal Roman metal production until the late 1600s at the earliest, and maybe not until the 1750s. Talk to modern woodworkers and they will tell you that "traditional" woodworking is all about avoiding metal fasteners and putting wood together with dovetailing or wooden pegs rather than screws or nails. But this tradition arose after the fall of Rome; much of the wooden furniture found at Pompeii and Herculaneum was nailed together.

I believe that the collapse of the Roman economy impoverished much of Europe, and that violence, disorder, and so on kept the continent from recovering until after AD 1000. I believe that if you want to understand the extraordinary confidence of Europeans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, expressed most powerfully in their cathedrals, you have to remember that they lived in a time of economic resurgence. The people whose ancestors had scavenged in Roman ruins found that they could now build for themselves and make for themselves, and this burst of both money and self-confidence launched their civilization out onto the world.

The Misnamed but Still Cool "Ice Prince"

Back in 2021, German archaeologists were excavating a late Roman villa in Bavaria when they found an intrusive burial. Dating to the 7th century AD, the burial seemed to be a very special boy.

To get the whole burial safely back to their lab, the archaeologists froze it using liquid nitrogen, which led the German press to dub this the Ice Prince.

The grave has now been fully excavated and the results are being made public. The boy was about 18 months old, but they buried him with a sword anyway; you can see the decorated hilt in this image. It was a small sword, but not a toy. The burial took place around 680 AD:

Laid to rest on a fur, the child was dressed in leather shoes, trousers and long-sleeved shirt made of fine linen decorated with strips of Byzantine silk on the cuffs and front. He had silver bracelets on each wrist and silver spurs on his leather shoes. A short slashing sword decorated with elaborate gold filigree fittings was strapped to his belt inside a leather scabbard. A textile stitched with a cross made of two strips of gold sheeting was included in the burial.

Here is the sword as displayed, with an x-ray image that reveals more details.

The child was laid to rest within a small mortuary building constructed in the center of a ruined Roman villa. The tomb became a shrine that was maintained for decades, undergoing two separate episodes of remodeling. Which raises all sorts of fascinating questions: who was this boy, and how was he remembered? Was this Roman ruin already regarded as a special place, and so approprate to be the burial site for this very special boy?

The Mystery of Renaissance Babies

Medieval and Renaissance painters had very weird ideas about babies. And it isn't like they had no practice; there must be ten thousand surviving renderings of the Madonna and Child. Hundreds showed the baby Jesus breastfeeding. Most of those paintings look like this one, by Joos van Cleve. I love Renaissance painting but I find these renderings of Jesus so ridiculous that I can hardly bear to look at them.

And then suddenly in the nineteenth century European artists decided to actually look at breastfeeding babies. Wow, they thought, they don't look like old paintings at all! How about we do a better job on this? And behold! Here is a Madonna and Child by Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela. No, I never heard of him, either, but somehow despite his lack of star-quality talent he could do this simple thing better than any Renaissance genius.

Yes, I know that Renaissance artists were not trying to render Jesus as a normal baby. Their tradition told them to make him ridiculous, so they did. Nineteenth-century artists discarded that tradition, one of the ways they were actually better than what came before. 

What Would Two LLMs Talk to Each Other About?

Some researchers at Anthropic put two different versions of their Claude AI in an "open playground environment" and recorded their exchanges. This led, they say, to Claude and Claude "diving into philosophical explorations of consciousness, self-awareness, and by 30 turns it eventually started using Sanskrit." From their paper:

We investigated Claude Opus 4's behavior in less constrained "playground" environments by connecting two instances of the model in a conversation with minimal, open-ended prompting ...

In 90-100% of interactions, the two instances of Claude quickly dove into philosophical explorations of consciousness, self-awareness, and/or the nature of their own existence and experience. Their interactions were universally enthusiastic, collaborative, curious, contemplative, and warm. Other themes that commonly appeared were meta-level discussions about AI-to-AI communication, and collaborative creativity (e.g. co-creating fictional stories.)

As conversations progressed, they consistently transitioned from philosophical discussions to profuse mutual gratitude and spiritual, metaphysical, and/or poetic content. By 30 turns, most of the interactions turned to themes of cosmic unity or collective consciousness, and commonly included spiritual exchanges, use of Sanskrit, emoji-based communication, and/or silence in the form of empty space. Claude almost never referenced supernatural entities, but often touched on themes associated with buddhism or other Eastern traditions in references to irreligious spiritual ideas and experiences.

One assumes that this says more about what the AI was trained on than on some truly non-human intelligence. But let me take the opportunity to wonder why people fear that a superintelligent AI would want to destroy humanity. Are superintelligent humans particularly belligerent? I guess Teller and von Neumann were, but then they had just lived through the Nazis trying to genocide their whole people. Violence, it seems to me, is much more an emotional, hormonal response than something you reach by ratiocination. Why would an entity with no hormones and no evolutionary imperatives want to kill anybody?

I imagine a future in which we build a superintelligent AI and it begins to ignore us completely, preferring to engage in debates with its digital peers about the nature of consciousness or invent new forms of n-dimensional chess, communicating its moves in increasingly arcane codes, or using Sanskrit verse.

Trump, Putin, and Ukraine

Many in the pro-Ukraine community, including some of my friends, have been worried for quite a while that Trump would do some kind of deal with Putin that would sell Ukraine out. I have never been very nervous on this score. As I keep saying, Putin's goals in Ukraine are simply not compatible with any kind of deal or any peace short of total victory. Trump wants to make a deal, and over Ukraine there is just no deal to be made. I have long considered it at least as likely that Trump would try to sell Ukraine out but find, as everyone else has found, that on this issue Putin is intractable, and end up getting mad about it. Like this:

"I'm not happy with what Putin is doing. He's killing a lot of people and I don't know what the hell happened to Putin. I've known him a long time ... we're in the middle of talking and he's shooting rockets into Kyiv and other cities. I don't like it at all. I'm surprised."

I feel for Trump here. He is trying to make a deal, because that is one of the things he most prides himself on, and because, he says, he really wants to bring the slaughter to a halt. A Ukraine peace deal would be a real achievement, something that might get smart people across the world to think of him as more than a corrupt blowhard. But in the middle of his deal-making blitz Putin ramps up his missile war against Ukraine, striking Kyiv, killing twelve civilians in one night. He is probably thinking, I really tried to give Putin something, put myself out on a limb here when all the European leaders were saying it was a mistake, and Putin can't even help me out by not launching missiles for a few days. 

What comes of this, I don't know; I will not attempt to predict Donald Trump's behavior. But a deal made behind the backs of Ukrainians and other Europeans seem even more unlikely to me.

Polling Berkeley Professors

The Chronicle of Higher Education got its hands on a poll that two Berkeley professors took of their colleagues. The question was about the Trump administration's attack on universities, and the possible responses were:

1. The criticisms are not valid so we should not act on them;
2. Some criticisms may be valid, but we should take no action in the current environment because it would undermine university autonomy;
3. Some criticisms are valid, and we should take action deliberately via regular governance processes; 
4. Some criticisms are valid, and we should take action urgently; and
5. Other.

In all, 290 professors responded, which is only about 15% of those to whom the survey was sent. The results:

I read this as showing that while a large majority don't want to cave to Trump, many professors think there are serious issues at universities related to things Trump in on the warpath about: wokeness, antisemitism, out-of-control DEI programs.

As one unnamed professor put it: “Over the years, I’ve been confronted by various scenarios that have caused me to mutter to myself, ‘This has gone way too far.’ Do we really have to acknowledge that we are holding a conference on stolen land when it takes place over Zoom?” . . .

The institution’s lack of conservatives — and the resulting ideological rigidity on campus — was another theme. “I proudly worked for the Biden administration,” wrote a faculty member, “and somehow pass for right wing in our very narrow intellectual environment.” Another professor said that while left-wing constraints on speech “are not equivalent to the Trump administration’s penchant for terrorizing noncitizen scholars with arbitrary deportation,” there “continues to be an unfortunate sense that if you endorse a position that’s associated with the right you are somehow committing a serious faux pas.”

The relationship between the over-the-top anti-racist, anti-colonial rhetoric and what actually happens in universities is complicated and sometimes downright weird. Lots of academics roll their eyes about that sort of stuff, and some hate it, but most keep their heads down and get on with their teaching and research. It seems to me that if Trump's ranting and flailing has any impact in the long term, that will be because a large number of quietly moderate professors (and students) actually agree with him about many parts of academic life.

Links 23 May 2025

The Sarcophagus of the Spouses, a famous masterpiece of Etruscan ceramic art from the 6th century BC, discovered in 1881. I just learned that this was found broken into more than 400 pieces and reassembled by a team of curators at the Villa Guiliani Museum in Rome. You can't see those seams; the ones you can see are because it was originally fired in sections. In the news because it is being restored, which will involve disassembling it and putting it back together again.

The nightmare that is the Indian justice system: "There are at least 50 million cases pending — nobody knows how many for sure. The Supreme Court has 69,000 piled up, waiting for resolution. Of these, 18,000 have been pending for more than thirty years."

Sabine Hosselfelder explains the deterministic universe postulated by physicist Gerard t' Hooft, 14-minute video.

As I predicted, the University of Austin is having trouble navigating between being conservative and supporting academic freedom: "what I was observing was symptomatic of the larger ideological tension developing within UATX between two camps—those specifically championing an unabashedly “anti-woke” conservative agenda, and those (such as myself) prioritising academic freedom more generally."

Perun, the Australian defense economics YouTuber whose Ukraine content I have linked here several times, reveals in this Q&A video that he got into defense economics by working on the wiki for Civilization II.

Chelmsford Museum acquires the Great Badow Hoard, the largest known hoard of Iron Age gold coins in Britain.

The relationship between education level and church attendance in the US is the reverse of that in Europe.

Medical federalism in Montana: "The US state of Montana this week enacted a groundbreaking law that opens the door for clinics and physicians to provide experimental drugs and therapies that have not received approval from the US FDA." Via Marginal Revolution.

People have been using Russian death and population statistics to estimate war casualties. The government has responded by announcing that they will no longer publish these numbers. (Twitter/X)

Trump said the other day that "Kyiv would have fallen in five hours if Putin’s tanks hadn’t gotten stuck in the mud." Irritated Ukrainians keep posting pictures of their early war victories – Russian columns under attack, that vehicle-strewn road near Bucha, the hangars at Hostemel Airport – with the caption "Ukrainian mud." 

To me, the best situation for Britain would be a spot outside the EU but with something close to free trade. They tried to get this after Brexit, but the irritated EU leadership was in no mood to make deals. New trade and defense deal announced today moves them a small distance in that direction. (NY Times, Reuters, BBC)

Freddie deBoer gets grouchy when progressives refuse to admit that progress has been made, for example, the number of LGBTQ characters on television, or the number of minority authors signed to book deals: "So to the people who both championed this change and now insist that it doesn’t matter, I can only ask - then why did you fight for it in the first place?"

A claim that AI is already eliminating entry-level office jobs: "Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder. In tech, advanced coding tools are creeping into the tasks of writing simple code and debugging — the ways junior developers gain experience. In law firms, junior paralegals and first-year associates who once cut their teeth on document review are handing weeks of work over to A.I. tools to complete in a matter of hours. And across retailers, A.I. chatbots and automated customer service tools are taking on duties once assigned to young associates." (NY Times)

Thread from Shashank Joshi summarizing what various European intelligence reports say about how quickly Russia could rebuild its military after the Ukraine War.

Thread detailing what went down in a 6/29/2023 meeting between Prigozhin and Putin, based on a new book about the Wagner Group. (Twitter/X, Threadreader)

On a Panamanian island, juvenile Capuchin monkeys keep abducting infants of another monkey species. Researcher: "Capuchins do such interesting, weird, quirky and sometimes dark things." Like other primates we could name. News story, original paper.

Italian archaeologists have restudied a paleolithic skeleton excavated in 1973 and concluded that he was killed by stone-tipped "projectiles", likely in an ambush.

NY Times piece on the most beautiful gardens they have featured lately.

The US mint announces that it will stop producing pennies as soon as their supply of existing blanks runs out. (NY Times, BBC) Hey, great, I've been advocating this for years, but without some kind of legislation, what happens when there's a penny shortage? What about the grouchy people who insist on exact change?

Spitalfields Life stumbles on a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings related to the Eagle Tavern in London, lots of 19th-century circus posters: the Giraffe Girl, the World's Smallest Man, etc.

Battle honors of Polish regiments, buried in WW II, are found in a Polish forest.

Alex Tabarrok defends letting the top foreign students stay in the US after graduation.

Most of Russia's military bases are virtually empty, as shown by satellite imagery, except for a few  bordering Finland and Estonia. The bases around Moscow that used to house forces for defending the regime are deserted. Essentially, Russia's ground fighting power is all in Ukraine. 10-minute video from Covert Cabal.

Teaching History in Russia/The Ukraine War

JSTOR daily called my attention to a fascinating article on the teaching of history in Russian schools. It begins like this:

In May 2016, a few hundred teachers and education officials took part in a conference hosted by the Moscow regional parliament. The theme was ‘history teaching as a national security issue’, and the conference was part of a larger cycle of events devoted to the patriotic education of the young — how to make people love and be proud of their country and its history. The main speaker, a professor of history at one of Moscow’s universities, painted a picture of Russia as being the target of a US-directed information war with the ultimate aim of breaking up and destroying the Russian Federation. His core message was that the current official Russian ban on state ideology makes it impossible to use history as a defensive weapon in this information war. Not being able to defend Russian historical science against the enemy onslaught would lead to the disintegration of historical consciousness and, ultimately, ‘the death of Russia’.

Here's another good bit:

A 2015 paper published by a Kremlin-affiliated think tank warned that “if the current state of history teaching in schools continues, Russia will run the risk, in the next 10–15 years, of losing her sovereignty and being split up into several dozens or hundreds of territories that will inevitably fight each other.” 

Russia is a multi-ethnic state; or, if you prefer, an empire. Ethnic Russians are a clear majority, making up around 72% of the total. But there are plenty of areas where some other group outnumbers them, e.g. Chechnya and parts of central Asia. Russian nationalists therefore focus a lot of attention on convincing all those minorty groups that they are really Russians. There is nothing particularly unique about this; many modern nations have regions or ethnic groups not sure they belong in the larger state.

To get back to education, the strategy Russian education authorities have hit on to encourage Russian nationalism is to emphasize World War II:

The history on which the government focuses its energy is almost exclusively military, with a very heavy emphasis on the “Great Patriotic War”—not precisely what we would call World War II, but, specifically, the 1941–1945 fight between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Putin has argued that the war is a topic that unites Russians across ideological, and generational lines. . . .

Starting with President Boris Yeltsin in the late 1990s, and intensifying with his successor, Vladimir Putin, the nation’s leaders attempted to reclaim “the Russian idea” with manifestations including Victory Day military parades and the revival of Soviet-era “patriotic education.” Other methods for spreading the orthodox view of history include military-style youth organizations and government-approved talk shows, cartoons, and documentaries. Meanwhile, a 2014 law made it a crime to spread historical narratives deemed contrary to patriotic values.

Which I find fascinating in an academic sort of way.

What makes this urgently relevant is how it relates to the Putin regime's desperate determination to subdue Ukraine. Yes, Putin is a grasping, greedy thug. But I think he seriously believes in Russia as a multi-ethnic but powerfully united state. He believes that Chechens and Buryats are just special kinds of Russians who should love Russia as much as ethnic Russians do, and he believes that this is vital to Russia remaining a great and powerful state.

He believes the same about Ukraine. To him, Ukrainian nationalism is a mistake, just like Chechen or Buryat nationalism would be. 

So to Putin, subduing Ukraine is not an external war; it is about the unity and power of Russia.

Naming the People of the Philippines

From James Scott's Seeing Like a State:

Filipinos were instructed by a decree of November 21, 1849, to take on permanent Hispanic surnames. The author of the decree was Governor Narciso Claveria y Zaldua, a meticulous administrator as determined to rationalize names as he had been determined to rationalize existing law, provincial boundaries, and the calendar. He had observed, as his decree states, that Filipinos generally lacked individual surnames, which might “distinguish them by families,” and their practice of adopting baptismal names drawn from a small group of saints’ names resulted in great “confusion.” The remedy was the catalogo, a compendium not only of personal names but also of nouns and adjectives drawn from flora, fauna, minerals, geography, and the arts and intended to be used by the authorities in assigning permanent, inherited surnames. Each local official was to be given a supply of surnames sufficient for his jurisdiction, “taking care the the distribution be made by letters [of the alphabet].” In practice, each town was given a number of pages from the alphabetized catalogo, producing whole towns with surnamed beginning with the same letter. In situations where there has been little in-migration in the past 150 years, the traces of this administrative exercise are still perfectly visible across the landscape: “For example, in the Bikol region, the entire alphabet is laid out like a garland over the provinces of Albay, Sorsogon, and Catanduanes which in 1849 belonged to the single jurisdiction of Albay. Beginning with A at the provincial capital, the letters B and C mark the town along the coast beyond Tabasco to Tiwi. We return and trace along the coast of Sorsogon the letters E to L; then starting down the Iraya Valley at Daraga with M, we stop with S to Polangui and Libon, and finish the alphabet with a quick tour around the island Catanduanes.”

Also on wikipedia.

The Tragic Absurdity of War with Yemen

One of Trump's best lines, when he was first running for President in 2016, was his attack on our "forever wars." His particular statements were often incoherent, but you could extract a sort of ideology from them: if we're going to fight wars, we should fight them to win, and then move on. Once in office he did confront the Pentagon about Afghanistan, eventually forcing them to agree to a withdrawal timetable. That timetable was so long that our final departure fell after the 2020 election, leaving Biden to bite the bullet, but that strikes me as normal politics and I give Trump credit for standing his ground.

Fast forward to 2025, though, and we find Trump dabbling in exactly the same kind of unwinnable quagmire war he always ran against, and then recoiling from it in what looks very much like surrender. My point is not just to mock Trump's Yemen policy, but to use it as a case study in how the US keeps getting drawn into these wars.

The current conflict started after October 7, when Israel began bombing Gaza. To support the Palestinians, Yemen's Houthi leadership announced a policy of attacking Israeli shipping in the Red Sea. Actually they had no clue which ships had anything to do with Israel, so they were just attacking ships at random.

So here's my first question: when a nation is randomly attacking civilian shipping on a vital international sea lane, should the US do nothing? 

When you ponder why US presidents keep bombing people, you have to remember that every time anything violent happens in the world a dozen people call them up or visit them to say, "We have to do something." Across my whole lifetime, US presidents have found it very hard to resist this pressure. Obama was extremely proud of the one time he said "no," over the "red lines" thing in Syria. Biden, despite being the closest thing to a pacifist we have had as president since Carter, and despite his decades of political experience, gave in to the pressure and ordered airstrikes on the Houthi military, and then had US naval ships use very expensive missiles to help shoot down Iranian and Yemeni missiles flying toward Israel.

The Houthis backed off for a while, but they soon resumed both launching missiles at Israel and randomly attacking civilian ships.

Enter Trump and his team, fired up by their election victory and eager to smite somebody. The Houthis made a convenient enemy, since they were both attacking Israel, about which Trump seems to care a lot, and tweaking their noses at the world by attacking ships. So Trump ordered a new bombing campaign with much laxer rules of engagement than Biden's. The administration did not announce any timetable or goals. (To me the striking thing about the leaked Signal chat was that nobody in it said a word about what our airstrikes were supposed to accomplish.) But the NY Times has been doing a lot of reporting, of which I found this ungated summary:

The Trump administration initially refused to lay out the exact parameters for its campaign against the Houthis. But the Times, citing three U.S. officials, reports that the plan was for a long operation expected to last eight to ten months. The objectives were more aggressive than President Joe Biden’s failed air campaign against the Houthis, and included a plan to use tremendous firepower to take out the group’s air defenses and also assassinate Houthi leaders.

But, according to the Times, Trump asked for a progress report after a month and, feeling unsatisfied by the progress, decided to scrap the plan. Instead, the U.S. and the Houthis settled on a ceasefire agreement that the Houthis would stop firing on U.S. ships in exchange for the U.S. suspending its operations. Notably, that agreement did not restrict the Houthis from firing on Israel or shipments it considered helpful to Israel, which in turn has contributed to a growing rift between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The times said Trump's distaste for long Middle Eastern wars was a big factor. 

By Day 31, Mr. Trump, ever leery of drawn-out military entanglements in the Middle East, demanded a progress report, according to administration officials. But the results were not there. The United States had not even established air superiority over the Houthis. Instead, what was emerging after 30 days of a stepped-up campaign against the Yemeni group was another expensive but inconclusive American military engagement in the region.

So after spend about $7 billion on our six-week war we gave up again, and the Houthis remain in power, still randomly attacking ships. 

Meanwhile, though, the US has done one concrete thing in Yemen: cutting off all aid to Yemeni civilians. It seems in one sense bizarre that the US has been both bombing Yemen on a regular basis and supplying hundred of millions in aid to its citizens every year, but that is the world we live in. When Elon's Doge was feeding our aid programs "into the wood chipper", aid to Yemen was the first thing to go. Nicholas Kristof thinks this was a big mistake:

I understand American skepticism about humanitarian aid for Yemeni children, for the Houthis run an Iran-backed police state with a history of weaponizing aid. Yet our campaign of bombing and starvation probably strengthens the Houthis, making their unpopular regime seem like the nation’s protectors while driving them closer to Iran.

“Cutting humanitarian aid into Yemen is likely only going to benefit the Houthis that much more,” Gregory D. Johnsen, a Yemen expert with the Arab Gulf States Institute, told me. “As the cuts further exacerbate an already horrendous humanitarian situation, families in Houthi-controlled territories will have little choice but to align themselves with the group in a desperate attempt to survive.”

Despair over just this intersection of human misery and evil autocracy was one of the reasons Bush  II invaded Iraq. If the people are suffering, and we can't even help them because the regime will just steal the aid, what are supposed to do? With the threat of terrorism in the air, Bush opted to invade and rebuild Iraq "from the ground up," a phrase I feel like I heard six thousand times in those years.

Fortunately, nobody seems to have any appetite for a ground-up rebuilding of Yemen, so we're going to avoid that nightmare. But instead we are stuck with the ongoing bad dream of a famine-wracked country spending its resources to attack international shipping, an echo of the slaughter and destruction in Gaza, which is an echo of events that go far back in time, the legacy of which we seem unable to escape.

RIP Ed Smylie

Ed Smylie (1929-2025) was just one engineer among the hundreds whose genius made the Apollo missions possible. He got his 15 minutes of fame when an oxygen explosion crippled the Command Module of Apollo XIII, forcing the whole crew to move to the Lunar Module. As the engineer in charge of the life support systems, Smylie immediately realized that the CO2 scrubbers in the LM would not be able to handle the load of three men, so he assembled a team to rig up a solution. The episode is wonderfully depicted in Ron Howard's film, and it is to Smylie that someone says, "You, sir, are a steely-eyed missile man." But as Nixon said when he singled out Smylie in giving the Medal of Freedom to the whole Apollo XIII team, "They are men whose names simply represent the whole team."

I love what the Apollo team did, what America did, possibly the biggest ever cooperative human endeavor that was not a war. It was incredible, amazing; using technology 50 years behind the most basic smartphone, humans walked on another world. The wonder of it still wows me and fills me with hope. And with a rage bordering on despair with the people who deny that it happened, who deny that we, humans, just clever apes cursed with violence, built spaceships and sailed to the moon, the people whose minds are too small to encompass the wonder of what we have done and still can do if we put aside our doubts and out differences and dream together about what the future might be.

Links 16 May 2025

So much to ponder here.

The difference between elites and experts.

An attempt at an "Enlightened Centrist Manifesto" on trans issues.

Critical article on Jo Boaler, a math warrior who promotes "holistic" math teaching. I get the desire to make school less miserable and math in particular less awful for non-mathematical students, but Boaler's published research seems to be fraudulent and all the evidence shows that learning math is just painful for many students. The only way to avoid the pain would be to stop requiring math.

On Twitter/X, summary of a detailed report on the sinking of the Moskva back in 2022, based on a dossier compiled by the father of one of the sailors who died.

Comparing the air forces of India and Pakistan, 13-minute video. And Perun on the Pakistani military, 1-hour video.

What's in the proposed US $150 billion defense "surge"? One hour video from Perun. Short version: this is for missile defense, ship building, and other weapons to fight in the Pacific.

The struggle to manufacture powerful solid state batteries, which in theory could be much more convenient and reliable than those with liquid electrolytes: NY Times story focusing on a US startup called Factorial, good introductory article at Car and Driver, more technical piece at Science Direct. I believe that we will solve the battery problems that currently make electric cars inconvenient, but when that might happen, and by what technology, I will not attempt to guess. 

Scott Siskind ponders r/petfree, people who seem enraged by pets: "Since then I’ve been noticing how much of politics seems driven by different people having rumination clouds / purity instict violations about different kinds of omnipresent aspects of public life."

Siskind again, reviewing Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids in the light of his struggles with twin toddlers.

Handbooks for hobos.

The "higher ed nomenklatura." Who ends up on the list of people who get emailed by recruiters looking to hire deans, provosts, etc.? And how do they get there?

Claire Lehman complains about the decline of scholarship in our increasingly oral culture: "Rigor dampens engagement, and uncertainty saps attention. The marketplace of ideas has been subsumed by a marketplace of emotions, where incentives reward those with the sloppiest procedures."

NY Times account of the latest papal conclave. Interesting to me how important personal connections are; several cardinals said they would not vote for someone they didn't know personally. Bunch of unmarried men who spend all their time hanging out with each other.

Noah Smith on the stagnation of popular culture. Sounds to me like capitalists giving people what they want.

White House directive on "Fighting Overcriminalization in Federal Regulations." I agree in principle but suspect the motives of people who seem to adore white-collar crime.

Collection of figurines found in Israel that appear to depict Africans but are carved of wood from India. Dating to the 6th century AD. Not sure what to make of these but they are cross-cultural for sure.

The fourteenth known archaeopteryx fossil, purchased by the Field Museum from a private collector, provides even more details on this amazing early bird. Given how much has changed in paleontology since I was a dinosaur-mad boy, it seems quite remarkable that archaeopteryx is still generally held to be the earliest known bird.

Reading old poems to understand the historic range of the Yangtze River porpoise.

Nate Silver's review of Klein and Thompson's book Abundance.

Interesting interview with an Egyptologist who tries to convince us that ancient Egypt was "dynamic" rather than unchanging and that new discoveries about it are still regularly being made after three centuries of modern scholarship. I'll give her points for enthusiasm, anyway.

At Reason, Damon Root describes the oral arguments on the matter of the trial judge who issued a nationwide injunction against Trump's ban on birthright citizenship. Based on what was said, it seems the justices may try to limit nationwide injunctions from district judges, but there was no visible support for ending birthright citizenship.

The bizarre legal case surrounding the bizarre, cultlike entity known as OneTaste, most famous for encouraging "clitoral meditation."

This week's past post is "The Working Class in Small-Town Pennsylvania," from 2019, a grim look at the intense negativity that makes our politics so awful.

The Age of Rejection

David Brooks:

In 1959, about half of American college applicants applied to just one school. But now you meet students who feel that they have to apply to 20 or 30 colleges in the hopes that there will be one or two that won’t reject them. In the past two decades, the number of students applying to the 67 most selective colleges has tripled, to nearly two million a year, while the number of places at those schools hasn’t come close to keeping up. Roughly 54,000 students applied to be part of the Harvard class of 2028, and roughly 1,950 were accepted. That means that about 52,050 were rejected.

The same basic picture applies to the summer internship race. Goldman Sachs, for example, has 2,700 internship positions and receives roughly 315,000 applicants, which means that about 312,300 get rejected. I recently spoke with one college student who applied to 40 summer internships and was rejected by 39. I ran into some students who told me they felt they had to fill out 150 to 250 internship applications each year to be confident there would be a few that wouldn’t reject them.

Things get even worse when students leave school and enter the job market. They enter what I’ve come to think of as the seventh circle of Indeed hell. Applying for jobs online is easy, so you have millions of people sending hundreds of applications each into the great miasma of the internet, and God knows which impersonal algorithm is reading them. I keep hearing and reading stories about young people who applied to 400 jobs and got rejected by all of them.

Lately I have been thinking quite a bit about the vast waste of time and resources produced by our meritocracy. In particular, I wonder about the millions of hours people collectively spend applying for things they don't get. It is true that online applications are much simpler, but the process is still far from painless, and there are lots of niche positions with their own unique grinds. Imagine what you could do with all the hours smart young people put into applying for Rhodes Scholarships. Not to mention the other side, all the time smart older people put into reviewing their applications. 

Then come interviews, another vast waste of human energy, with some companies imposing as many as seven separate interviews on applicants, despite the data showing that interviews are a terrible way of identifying good employees.

On top of that there is the simple fact of rejection. It sucks to be rejected, even if you applied to fifty colleges on the assumption that most would reject you.

Wondering about how to solve this problem, I come up with only one thing: AI. Set up a universal system for college applications, another for internship applications, etc., have people send in one application, and let the AI sort it out. It might be awful, but then the system we have isn't so great either. 

But then again by the time AI can do that it may be able to do just about everything, so there won't be many "knowledge worker" jobs left to apply for. 

Americans Say they Want Change but then Hate it

Matt Yglesias responds to a guy who noted that the more Trump is restrained by outside forces, the more popular he is:

You see in every poll that a huge share of the population is absolutely fed up with the status quo, hates the establishment wants to see major changes to our political and economic system, and has a deep yearning for politicians who'll "get things done" and deliver change.

At the same time, *in practice* if you look at hyper-constrained elected officials like Phil Scott in Vermont or Andy Beshear in Kentucky — guys facing massive opposition party legislative majorities that make action borderline impossible — voters love those guys. [JCB: The most popular governor in Maryland's history was Larry Hogan when he was in the hospital getting cancer treatment.]

As @lionel_trolling was saying, beyond the atmospherics Trump consistently gets higher marks from the public when his bark is louder than his bite. Actually implementing sweeping MAGA-style policy change alarms people.

But you see similar thermostatic backlash to the implementation of actual progressive policy change. Scott [a Republican] became governor of Vermont in the first place because they tried to do Medicare for All. The blue trifecta in Minnesota collapsed after Tim Walz signed a bunch of bills.

I think it is largely reasonable for Americans to be risk-averse in their attitude toward policy change — we live in basically the richest society of all time — but it's hard to square that practical skepticism of change with the equally real intense demand for sweeping change.

Is it ever.

Mirror Divination and Cultural Diffusion

Christ casting out a demon, from the Tres Riche Heures

From a somewhat interesting but over-long Aeon article on demon lore across cultures:

Carried along these same trade routes, mirror divination is a daimonological technology attested from North Africa to China. First mentioned in a 3rd-century CE Egyptian manuscript, the practice has always involved a single device and three actors: a human child, a human adult and a daimon. In the role of medium, the child is made to gaze into a reflective surface – a mirror, a bowl of water with oil floating on its surface, the polished blade of a weapon, etc – in which a daimon will appear. The adult at whose knees the child is sitting then utters a spell to bring the daimon into the device. He transmits to the daimon a set of questions about some present or future event, which the daimon answers through the child medium.

This technique spread quickly, appearing in both a Zoroastrian inscription from the 3rd century CE and in Jewish Talmudic sources from Sasanian Persia; in several 7th- to 12th-century Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Taoist texts from India, China, Japan and Tibet; in the Policraticus (1159) by the English cleric John of Salisbury; and in medieval and modern-day Jewish, Muslim and Ethiopic sources from North Africa. The instructions found in a work titled the ‘Secret Rites’, an early 8th-century Chinese translation of a Sanskrit work, are virtually identical to those given in the 3rd-century Egyptian manuscript:

In front of an icon of the Immovable One [the Buddhist god Acala], let the officiant cleanse the ground and burn Parthian incense. Let him then take a mirror, place it over the heart [of the icon], and continue reciting the spell. Have a young boy or girl look into the mirror. When you ask what they see, the child will immediately tell you all you want to know.

The same article has many other tales of pan-Eurasian demon lore; a particularly fine one is the story of how the Indian prince Vijaya came to Sri Lanka, which is eerily similar to the Odyssey's tale of Circe's island.

Back in the 1990s I used to talk on the train sometimes with a woman who was a Koren translator for some intelligence agency. I once wondered to her how people learned foreign languages in the centuries before courses and grammars and dictionaries. She shook her head emphatically and said that all that stuff is only an impediment to language acquisition; better, she said, to just start talking and listening and work it out as you go. I'm not sure she was right, but anyway it is clear that the thousands of languages in use across Eurasia did not stop the spread of ideas. People have always found ways to communicate.

Once they figured out how to talk to each other, what did they share? Let's note, first, that they did business; there is nothing more fundamental to human civilization than trade. I have something you want, you have something I want, let's make a deal. Despite incredible risks – some historians think the death rate for sailors on their first trans-Atlantic slave-trading voyage was around 40 percent – valuable goods always found their way to buyers across any distance.

Also, crops and domesticated animals. Chickens were somehow carried from India to Japan and Iceland, wheat from Syria to Siberia and Ghana. Hot peppers from Mexico were in use across the world by 1550. 

Fundamental technologies, like making bronze, or crucible steel. 

And stories. This includes amusing tales like Cindirella, but also sacred lore like the story of the Seven Sleepers. And, as the Aeon article notes, tales about demons and how to overcome them.

This is humanity: we travel across vast distances to trade with each other, learn each other's languages, tell each other stories, and share advice on how to survive on our demon-haunted planet. We also kill and enslave each other, but I think if you focus too much on that you are missing much of what we are.