The imagined future

"At some point, I suppose we all start imagining the future in terms of the past." - Warren Ellis

Book Series worth reading

I feel like there used to be a lot more books series that I loved, where I would wait for the next book, and basically consider it an auto buy. 

These days the list is a lot shorter, so I did some goodreads research on my last 6 years of reading, and put together some lists.

Series that were great but the next book may never come (Just saying).

• The Kingkiller Chronicle - Rothfuss

Rothfuss will probably never finish this series, but the sheer ambition, lyricism, and (frankly) hubris of this series just makes you sit back and admire it. Every sentence seems crafted, and there is a lot to enjoy in the two main books. (The slow regard of silent things is a short story and a little different in style).

• A Song of Ice and Fire - Martin

I remember first reading A Game of Thrones in the late 90's and being absolutely blindsided by the ending (that went on to shock a bunch of people in the TV show much later). I had read some Grimdark at that point, but this was the best I have ever read, and I have been very impressed by a lot of it, although I think George has got himself a little lost in the plots at this point. The Dunk & Egg short stories are also very good.

• Gentleman Bastard  - Lynch

I have never encountered swearing as inventive, as creative, and as supportive of the story as the foul-mouthed thieves of Lynch's world. The first two books in particular are absolutely amazing, and there are also some nice short stories in this world as well.

Series that were great but have now completed, or the author died, and I still reread.

• Discworld  - Pratchett

The best. There may never be an author that does it as well as peak-Pratchett. Start with Guards! Guards! and read the books that every author looks up to. Sheer genius. 

 

• Culture  - Banks

Banksy got it, he realised that every SF novel has an infinite special effects budget, and he had the imagination to use it. Iain Banks is best known for his Culture novels, and they are a ton of fun. Space ships with insane names, bad attitudes, and a taste for intrigue; they tolerate the human meat sacks, but only to a point. 

• Vorkosigan Saga - Bujold

Lois McMaster Bujold has won 6 Hugos (4 best novels and 2 best series) and there is a reason, she makes bold, astonishing narrative decisions that seem impossible, but somehow seem to work. 

• Hyperion Cantos - Simmons

• Aubrey & Maturin  - O'Brien

Series that are great and I buy the next book when it comes out:

• The Tyrant Philosophers  - Tcahikovsky

• Stormlight / Mistborn - Sanderson

• Jackpot  - Gibson

• Penric and Desdemona  - Bujold

Conservatism

Saw a thought provoking definition of conservatism recently (via Charles Stross' Blog). 

"There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

 

I then discovered that the originator of this quote was often misattributed, which led me to the original quote (from a Frank Wilhoit) in a blog post. The broader comment was very interesting, particularly the implication:

"The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis"..."The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone."

 

So... 

 I then wanted to keep a copy of all of this for reference, so created this article, including the entire text from the blog comment: (I've corrected some minor typos):

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

For millennia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudo-philosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudo-philosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.

No, it ain’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Arrgh! Henry Kissinger talking about expert systems.

Arrgh, Henry Kissinger talking about expert systems, nothing could trigger me faster. Thank you Bernard, here I go:

Firstly: Chess and go are examples of how well cognitive systems perform is closed environments, where all the rules are known and the goal perfectly clear. Expert systems are just algorithms designed to optimise the win conditions and nothing more, it is indeed humans who set this win conditions, and they (as with all engineering projects) need to choose the speed at which they develop. Self driving cars have been in development since 1995. Companies that have pushed too hard too fast (Tesla, Uber) have seen what often happens to such efforts, and more cautious companies (Google) are developing solutions that are much more robust.

Now to the three areas of concern raised by Henry:

1 - Unintended results, Yes! science love unintended results as it can point the way to new paths of understanding, but this is how we as humans can challenge our assumptions. We set the win conditions and are then amazed when the computer finds an original new path too them. This is the very nature of science. It works better than just bombing Laos.

3 - Expert systems cannot explain the rationale, I am very sceptical about this, as again it is the programmer who set (and can audit) the win conditions. The solutions may seem strange, but they will always be defined by clear criteria, which can be interrogated. If you want to look for weird win conditions, Henry was the master of that in his foreign policy.

2 - AI may change human thought patterns and goals. The more I thought about this the more I realised that HK had a point, albeit one that is regularly made. Facebook and Google are platforms using cognitive systems to sell clicks of advertisements (or lie about clicks and then sell them). This has lead to everyone getting to live in their little echo chamber and struggling to engage with alternate points of view. 

So the real concern is how to we broaden the human mind to consider multiple perspectives and care about the results of our actions. I struggle to see how a national vision on A.I. will help us, although a bit more philosophy in our schools and universities might be a good step. Seems a shame Kissinger didn't raise that.

Jordan Peterson, winning isn't everything.

I am assuming that readers of this have seen the Jordan Peterson - Cathy Newman interview which has catapulted Mr. Peterson to fame (perfect book launch!). It is compelling viewing, and has been viewed a bit under six million times in the last week. The Australian news paper has also had a series of articles about Peterson and responses to the interview. If you have not seen the interview please take a look:

There is no debate that Ms. Newman got owned, there has been a lot of analysis of the interview, but the main point is that Ms. Newman was unprepared for what she was getting into, a debate with a empirical clinical psychologist.

As a result of this I started to watch some of Mr. Peterson's videos on YouTube, and discovered that all of his lectures are available, and he is a fantastic thinker, and very interesting chap. I particularly enjoyed his viewpoint on atheism)

However the point I wanted to try to capture in this article is that I did think Mr. Peterson made two errors (and possibly only two) and that they are worth noting as they speak to errors that can be made by those people who believe they are winning any argument.

Firstly, beginning at 21:44 Ms. Newman is forced to carefully reconsider her beliefs about free speech, it is the most amazing moment of the interview, Mr. Peterson has made his argument so compellingly, that she is forced to reconsider her beliefs and re-examine her intellectual rigour live!

Mr. Peterson makes his first and simplest mistake then; he says "Ha! gotcha!" acknowledging that Ms. Newman has been playing gotcha politics all interview and yet he has created the moment.

Ms. Newman is doing a very brave thing here, she is genuinely thinking, and about to come up with a reasonable point, and doing it all on live TV (something Peterson has done all interview), and at that point the best thing to do is to wait for your opponent to develop their argument, not to embarrass them. Mr. Peterson has held the upper hand in the interview the entire time, and that was the only point where I felt he lost it.

Finally, when Ms. Newman does develop her augment further, Mr. Peterson says something very interesting, namely that he would address his students by transgender pronouns if asked personally to do so. This is seemingly at odds to his previous position established on air that he would refuse to do so (at 0:48):

Mr. Peterson denies changing his position, and yet it seems to me that he has made a change here, and possibly just to ensure that Ms. Newman has nowhere to run in the interview.

So while I have developed a great interest in Mr. Peterson's work, my lessons from the interview come mainly from what I see as his mistakes...

Quotes

“It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
- Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind


"We have True Wisdom, Divine Speed, and Maximum Justice. We are, this fine diurnal period kicking serious ass. We are green across the board. The system likes me a lot, and I am awful damn fond of it, too. We have Total Mutual Respect and Admiration." - Daniel Keys Moran, The A.I. War.

On Statues

In the Australian article “PC extremists police thought by rewriting the world’s history” Brendan O’Neil talks of removing statues: 

“In truth, there’s nothing good in this mob-like erasure of history. It’s a reactionary, even Orwellian, movement.”

The the West Australian article “Both sides wrong on burqas"Paul Murray talks of removing statues:

“They want to obliterate the parts of history that offend them, rather than use them as evidence to point to the failings of the past.”

I disagree, I think the details matter. Let us look at the case of the statue amidst all the controversy, that of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville. The statue was erected in 1924, well after the civil war, and was erected with a speech about “the moral greatness of the old South”. 16 Blacks were lynched in the United States of America that year, as statues like these were erected as part of a movement to recast the civil war as a conflict between interpretations of the Constitution. The same year as Lee’s statue appeared in Charlottesville, Virginia passed laws which strengthened definitions of who was “colored” and who was “white”, and which reinforced the law prohibiting interracial marriage. Then, two years later, the state passed a law to enforce racial segregation in places of public entertainment.

By Cville dog - Own work, Public Domain, Link

Black people in Charlottesville have walked past that statue for more than 90 years, and their taxpayer dollars have funded the maintenance of a statue designed to recast history. Last year a young high school girl petitioned the City to have the statue removed. This is an appropriate way to address these concerns, and reflects a respect for the law. The City Council considered the request, and eventually decided to remove it, leading to the protests that have occurred.

By abc News

The disturbing presence of white supremacist groups at the recent protests show that these groups understand the real significance of the statue, as well as the importance of continuing to re-position the “Old South”. These protests and the terror attack that followed has certainly reinforced the validity of the original request to remove it.

Statues and public art celebrate history, and there are times when that celebration is not appropriate. Move them to museums and provide appropriate historical context.

Regarding the original article, making broad sweeping statements is always dangerous, but it particularly so when it energises neo-nazis and hate groups, public debate needs to improve in our nation’s papers.


Sources:

• http://www.chesnuttarchive.org/classroom/lynching_table_year.html
• https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/charlottesville-rally-protest-statue.html