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Blog: Crooked Timber
I've been doing a bunch of talks and events online, mostly not CT related, but a couple that might be interesting to readers. One that certainly is is this conversation with Francis Spufford, which is a coda to Red Plenty. Some of my bits of the conversation build on this Long Now talk from a […]
Blog: Crooked Timber
Last year, I received an email asking if I would write an introductory essay for the Tor Essentials reissue of Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Icehenge. It took me approximately thirty seconds to convince myself that this was not some kind of hallucination, and another three or four to type YES! OF COURSE!!! and hit reply. It […]
Blog: Crooked Timber
So Noah Smith has a quite negative review of Acemoglu and Johnson's recent book, Power and Progress, a book that I myself liked very much. Before letting rip, Noah says nice things about Acemoglu and Johnson, and I'll do the same here for him. There are a lot of people on the left who detest […]
Blog: Crooked Timber
So Cosma Shalizi and I have an article (messy pre-print) coming out Real Soon in Communications of the ACM on democracy, polarization and social media. And Nate Matias, who I'm friends with, has forceful objections. I've promised him a response – which is below – but am doing it as a blogpost, since I think […]
Blog: Crooked Timber
If you've studied game theory, you've probably come across the mixed-motive coordination game, a simple one-shot game in which two representative actors have to figure out how to coordinate so as to find a mutually beneficial equilibrium – but have different interests over which equilibrium they choose. And if you studied it a couple of […]
Blog: Crooked Timber
Back in the day, there used to be a lot more arguments across blogs. Perhaps we'll see more of it happening again as Twitter continues its collapse into a dwarf star composed of degenerate matter. To get things started, this seems to me to be a quite wrongheaded claim by Tyler Cowen. In a […]
Blog: Crooked Timber
Back in April, Johns Hopkins' Center for Economy and Society and Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences held a workshop on the political ideologies of Silicon Valley. It was a great event, in large part because it brought together a somewhat disconnected community. People had been thinking about Silicon Valley in history, […]
Blog: Crooked Timber
When Sam Altman was ousted as CEO of OpenAI, some hinted that lurid depravities lay behind his downfall. Surely, OpenAI's board wouldn't have toppled him if there weren't some sordid story about to hit the headlines? But the reporting all seems to be saying that it was God, not Sex, that lay behind Altman's downfall. […]
Blog: Crooked Timber
Marc Andreessen's recent "tech optimist manifesto" is one of the most significant statements of Silicon Valley ideology. As I've written elsewhere, it's actually less a political manifesto than an apostolic credo for the Religion of Progress. The words "we believe" appear no less than 113 times in the text, not counting synonyms. The core precept […]
Blog: Crooked Timber
In order of relative clout. I've been meaning to do some version of this for years …
Blog: Crooked Timber
Last September, Abe Newman, Jeremy Wallace and I had a piece in Foreign Affairs' 100th anniversary issue. I can't speak for my co-authors' motivations, but my own reason for writing was vexation that someone on the Internet was wrong. In this case, it was Yuval Harari. His piece has been warping debate since 2018, and I have been grumpy […]
Blog: Crooked Timber
As Chris suggests, one of the most memorable disasters at Crooked Timber was the seminar on David Graeber's book, Debt. Timothy Burke described it at the time as conveying: that feeling of grad school as Hobbesean nightmare, of small arguments quickly and casually intensified into thermonuclear exchanges, losing all potentially meaningful disagreements along the way. […]
Blog: Crooked Timber
It's over a week since the Economist put up my and Cosma Shalizi's piece on shoggoths and machine learning, so I think it's fair game to provide an extended remix of the argument (which also repurposes some of the longer essay that the Economist article boiled down). Our piece was inspired by a recurrent meme in […]
Blog: Crooked Timber
Attention conservation notice 1 – a long read about a simple idea. When reading trolls, focus on the anodyne-seeming starting assumptions rather than the obnoxious conclusions. Attention conservation notice 2 – This is also available via my Substack newsletter, Programmable Mutter. I'll still be writing on CT, but I have a book with Abe Newman […]
Blog: Crooked Timber
There's a backstory behind this Washington Post story on Republican persecution of academics, and it's one that doesn't make the Intercept look good. Jordan's colleagues and staffers met Tuesday on Capitol Hill with a frequent target of right-wing activists, University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, two weeks after they interviewed Clemson University professors who also […]