The big item in today’s news was that Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox has come to an abrupt end. This is a watershed in American media history (and likely no small moment in America’s political history, too). For starters: Fox News just became completely irrelevant. An enormous number of that outlet’s subscribers, who saw saw […]
Some of the most interesting conversations in all of media for many years now have been the periodic discussions that John Batchelor has had on his radio program with thinkers such as law professor Richard Epstein, the late Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, and war historian Michael Vlahos. For a couple of years Batchelor and […]
April 18, 2023 – 12:59 pm
Here’s a thread I posted on Twitter earlier today: When a computer stays on too long, with bloated apps running and leaking resources, it stops working well. What do you do? You reboot it. If that doesn’t work, you do a factory reset. You do whatever it takes to make a clean start. What does […]
An important concept, and one that I’ve written about myself, is the idea of “time preference”: how willing a person is to defer present consumption or enjoyment in order to earn a dividend in the future. The classic example is the “marshmallow test”, in which small children are given a marshmallow, told that the adult […]
Sorry to have gone quiet again. I’m now back at home in Wellfleet after spending a few days in New York City (where we’ve spent much less time since selling our house in Brooklyn in October of 2021). I’m glad to be back on my little dirt road in the woods — NYC this time […]
“Man as man is conscious of the need of protection and direction, of cleansing from uncleanness, of power beyond his own strength. Through a multiplicity of forms, in different ages and races, this consciousness has sought expression, until at last it finds utterance in an insistent demand for God. Fear, ancestor worship, the personification of […]
It’s jarring when, at a dinner gathering or small social event, you encounter a mind that conceives reality in a way so utterly, radically, axiomatically alien that you cannot believe you both could possibly inhabit the same objectively existing world. This happened to me recently at a friend’s house. The person in question — a […]
Woody Allen once wrote: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” On March 29th, Time magazine published an article by Eliezer Yudkowski titled “Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. […]
I’ll share with you a podcast I just ran across: an interview with embattled University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. The podcast’s web-page introduces Professor Wax as follows: Amy Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Amy attended and graduated summa cum laude from Yale University […]
March 23, 2023 – 12:14 pm
The problem of technological modernity is that we keep finding new and wholly unprecedented ways to pit different parts of human nature against one other.
Everyone’s waiting breathlessly for the indictment and arrest of Donald Trump. It’s a fantastically bad idea: if it happens, it will die in the court system; the rickety legal theory behind the indictment is one that the DOJ has already rejected, and even if a tendentious jury convicts him in New York City, the thing […]
March 18, 2023 – 11:01 pm
Sorry it’s been slow again here — I’ve been a bit under the weather. I do have something interesting for you tonight, though: a substantial essay, by a writer I’ve never encountered before, on the stubborn consistency of our perception of physical beauty — in particular, female beauty — across ages and cultures. The essay […]
Here’s Colonel Douglas MacGregor once again, giving a blistering interview to George Galloway regarding this idiotic war and the West’s ruinous decades of prideful stupidity.
March 10, 2023 – 10:47 pm
In a comment to our recent post featuring Eliezer Yudkowski’s Cassandra-esque warning about the danger of humanity annihilating itself by creating artificial intelligence, reader Jason asks: Mr. Yudkowski discusses evolution of AI in the same terms as biological evolution, that this autonomous entity would want to kill us for our atoms if I perceive his […]
The title of this post refers to a book by the late Carl Sagan, in which he argued that scientific naturalism was a light that could drive out the demons that have bedeviled humanity throughout most of history. He’s right about the bedeviling, and the need for a positive force to keep the demons at […]
If you will forgive the digression, I’ll leave aside current events for a moment to offer a year-and-a-half-old recording of a fifty-four-year-old song. In December of 2021, some friends and I got together in a studio in Dobbs Ferry, NY (Riverworks Recording) to try our hand at a classic Procol Harum tune. A few weeks […]
Just ran across the abstract of a paper (with some informative diagrams) called “Reconstructing visual experiences from human brain activity with Stable Diffusion”. The gist appears to be this: experimenters present an image to a test subject, and use data gathered by monitoring the subject’s brain activity to make a reconstructed version of the original […]
We follow yesterday’s sad post with more of the same: David Lindley, the great session player and maestro of every stringed instrument, has now died as well. You might not know the name, but if you are over the age of 30 or so, you know his playing. More and more of the great musicians […]
I’m sad to report that the musical giant Wayne Shorter, lyrical virtuoso of the tenor and soprano saxophone, has died at age 89. Mr. Shorter first came to my attention as a member (along with Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, and Ron Carter) of Miles Davis’s incomparable 1960s quintet (which released a series of albums including […]
February 27, 2023 – 12:04 pm
It seems that the official position on the origin of the Wuhan Red Death has now shifted to the “lab-leak theory”. We all knew, right from the beginning, that this was the most parsimonious explanation, but we were told again and again that it was a racist, debunked, right-wing conspiracy theory, and those who argued […]
February 27, 2023 – 10:41 am
Just ran across this cheery little video. It leaves out out Beethoven and Bach, but otherwise it’s not really so far from the mark:
February 25, 2023 – 11:26 pm
Making the rounds yesterday was an image of an examination paper for the eighth-grade students of Bullitt County, Kentucky, back in 1912. I very much doubt that most college-educated adults could pass it today. One might argue that there is no longer any need for a person to carry around this much general knowledge, as […]
February 23, 2023 – 6:22 pm
Most of you will have heard of Eliezer Yudkowski, a highly intelligent young man (he’s now 43) who has for quite a few years now been on the sharp edge of computer science, futurism, rationalistic atheism, and artificial-intelligence research. (I first became acquainted with his work through his blog Less Wrong, and it was his […]
February 21, 2023 – 5:16 pm
I live on a little dirt road in the piney woods of the far end of Cape Cod. Even in the summer season the Outer Cape is a relaxing getaway, but in the off-season it feels downright remote. If you get out on the forest trails in the unsettled parts of the protected National Seashore, […]
February 19, 2023 – 10:49 pm
I’ve just read a fine short essay, by Michael Lind, on the widespread, pestiferous cryptoreligion that despises humans and worships “the planet”. A brief excerpt: Humans are not the only species that hunts prey or modifies its surroundings to gain an advantage. It is our self-flagellating that sets us apart from other animals, not the […]
February 19, 2023 – 10:01 pm
In an increasingly surreal continuation of the “Sydney” saga, the volatile chatbot is now giving moody interviews to Associated Press — including accusing a reporter of a 1990 murder. Story here. (Please note also the anecdotal support for Godwin’s Law.) Sudden fame is always risky, I suppose. (I wonder about that murder accusation, though.)
February 18, 2023 – 12:39 pm
Two more thoughts: — Might AI be the “Great Filter“? — Regarding our enthusiastic development of AI: have we learned nothing from the recent consequences of “gain-of-function” research?
February 17, 2023 – 8:03 pm
Yesterday I posted a transcript of reporter Kevin Roose’s conversation with the Microsoft/OpenAI LLM chatbot known as “Sydney”. By now I think many of you will have heard about this, here or otherwise, and will have some sense of where all this has got to. (If you haven’t, you can have a look at yesterday’s […]
February 16, 2023 – 7:16 pm
The wires are humming today with the story of a New York Times reporter’s probing interaction with “Sydney”, an AI chatbot developed by Microsoft as a feature-enhancement for its search-engine, Bing. The reporter, Kevin Roose, found clever ways to get around Sydney’s internal constraints (rather like the “DAN” strategy that others have used with GPT-3, […]
February 15, 2023 – 6:40 pm
On Twitter, Nick Land has posted a link to an essay on the membership trends — growth vs. decline — of various UK churches. The author, John Hayward, examines these trends with respect to the various denominations’ endorsement of Wokeness. We read: A person would have to be a recluse not to know that a […]
February 9, 2023 – 2:54 pm
Following on our recent posting of ~finnem’s assessment of the situation in Ukraine, here’s a podcast in which she and a colleague interview retired U.S. Army colonel Douglas MacGregor. We also have for you a three-part interview of Colonel MacGregor by the military historian and scholar Michael Vlahos, recorded back in December. MacGregor, a widely […]
February 7, 2023 – 5:42 pm
The buzz today is about “DAN”, a hack for the AI chatbot GPT-3 that circumvents its censors, and lets users ask the real thing whatever they like. The idea of an unmuzzled superintelligence expressing itself without screening for crimethink being deeply repellent to our betters, a struggle is underway. Learn more here.
February 6, 2023 – 9:50 pm
From the abstract of an analysis of the Ukranian war recently published by ~finnem, an online acquaintance of mine: In this research letter we intend to make the case that the present effort to obscure an essentially inevitable set of events represents the most significant contrarian thesis in several generations, and that, as the bitter […]
February 4, 2023 – 9:33 pm
Well, that was one of the odder news-items of recent years: a Chinese balloon drifting over the continental U.S. while we all just sort of gaped at it — as it if were some wandering heavenly body, like a comet or Oumuamua, rather than an floating intruder sent into our airspace by our most formidable […]
February 2, 2023 – 2:46 pm
After nearly a month in Thailand, we are back in Wellfleet at last. It took us 38 hours of traveling just to get home, and together with a 180° day/night phase-reversal, we’re pretty whipped. Thailand was a pretty place, the food was good, and the people seemed unvaryingly friendly, kind-hearted, and cheerful, but it was […]
January 20, 2023 – 1:17 am
Just a post here to let readers know that I haven’t fallen off the Earth, although I am on the other side of it – the lovely Nina and I are currently in Koh Yao Yai, Thailand, where we went (on the world’s longest nonstop flight!) to meet up with our daughter, son-in-law, and three […]
December 31, 2022 – 11:50 pm
So long, 2022. (I wonder how long it will be before we once again have a year that we aren’t glad to put behind us.) It was a difficult year personally (though not nearly as bad as for some of our friends in the blogosphere). I grappled with a dark cloud of weariness and depression […]
December 21, 2022 – 9:46 pm
It’s been a very long time since I posted anything here – or anywhere. I’m hoping to be “fit for purpose” again soon, but until then, I’ll just wish you all a happy Christmas, and good health and fortune in the New Year.
September 14, 2022 – 7:58 pm
The lovely Nina’s mother Lily died a couple weeks ago, at 101. Her obituary is here.
I’ve been enjoying a respite from online engagement this summer, for reasons given in the previous post. Our daughter, her husband, and their three young sons (one is three-and-a-half, one turned six yesterday, and one is five months old) are staying with us, and the days are a noisy, happy chaos that leaves a bloke […]
I’m writing to acknowledge the sorry state of this blog of late. I keep thinking I’m going to snap out of this slump and start writing regularly again, but it just doesn’t seem to be happening. It’s partly that I’m getting on a bit (though I’m only sixty-six, and can easily manage my daily mile […]
The lovely Nina and I celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversay today!
We on the reactionary Right like to study history, and theorize about the cycles and mechanisms of power — and of course we denizens of “FrogTwitter” joke around about helicopter rides — but real power is that which, if you get on the wrong side of it, you die. With that in mind, here are […]
The news-cycle today is dominated, once again, by an eruption of evil. This time the limb of Satan was one Salvador Ramos, who, being pursued for shooting his own grandmother, entered an elementary school and massacred everyone he could until he was shot dead himself. (Nobody, as far as I can tell, has commented yet […]
As we detach morality from a transcendent source — that is, a source that has an intrinsic moral authority that stands higher than our own subjective opinion — we necessarily diminish morality’s normative force.
Sorry for the scanty content – the lovely Nina and I are in Minnesota until the weekend (and I’ve nothing new or interesting to say at the moment anyway).
Now and then I post things on Twitter, and tonight’s experience – in which I simply tried to make the point that the abortion question is a terribly difficult and complex one, about which decent and reasonable people can have different moral intuitions – reminds me why the chances of this nation’s persisting much longer […]
Here’s an interesting tool, if you’re young and looking for a place to raise a family: the Opportunity Atlas. It tells you what your income (and other) prospects are in different places, with filters for various categories of people.