Tl:dr - A US government-funded study allowed African American men with syphilis to go untreated, long after cheap effective treatments were available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study I knew about this one (EVERYBODY should know about this one). But Natasha Tidd’s excellent book “A Short History of the World in 50 Lies” has a great chapter on this. In... Continue Reading →
Ressentiment, white rage and… Samuel Johnson?
Hardly a new observation, but I just quote posted this on Bluesky in response to someone who had copped flak for writing an obituary of a talented black female scientist, Gladys Mae West. "Nothing drives sexist racists more wild than evidence that there are women of colour smarter than them, who achieved more than they... Continue Reading →
Useful dystopian fiction about US breakdown – ideas? (I have three)
UPDATE - three suggestions by a whip-smart friend... Well, fiction can help us make maps of the way the world is/might be going (1). Given the long-gestating but finally arriving proper shitshow in the USA (2), it seems like a good idea to get together a fiction reading list. Without further adieu (3) they are... Continue Reading →
Mark Carney as new liberal hero – “the capacity to stop pretending” Er, climate change?
I'd recommend a close listen to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's barn-storming speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos just now. (Video with adverts here). Transcript here. On a superficial level, because it's nice to see someone kinda-sorta getting up on their hindlegs against the Trump gang. On a slightly deeper level because it's... Continue Reading →
Undisprovability, laissez faire and the rest of it
I've been writing Conversation pieces for over 10 yrs, since near the beginning of my PhD. Some of them are now cringe, others stand up. The latest is here. A short rant Lots of academics working in social sciences and humanities seem, to me, to have "physics" envy - and a 19th century, pre-Einstein etc... Continue Reading →
The ominous parallels – AI and Carbon Capture and Storage
Should probably turn this into some think piece for some paywalled academic journal that nobody reads. Citations are the currency blah bah. In the meantime - it occurred to me today as I shlepped into town (a useful 15 minute walk) that there are some interesting (ymmv) parallels between "Artificial Intelligence" and "carbon capture and... Continue Reading →
The epistemological blizzard has crossed the threshold, and it’s overturned the order of the soul
The title is a reference to this typically-cheerful Leonard Cohen number from 1992. Basically, humans have always (1) struggled to make sense of a cruel and complicated world. Religion did okay for us - especially when it was the (Greek) gods - a bunch of powerful petulant teenagers (at best), toying with the humans: a... Continue Reading →
LLMs will lead to heart-ache, confusion and worse.
I was reading John Michael Greer on “cognitive collapse” and this leapt out at me. “Since they’re not intelligent—LLMs, that is—they lack the capacity to check their output against the real world, which leaves them vulnerable to model collapse: the process by which the internal model of reality programmed into them drifts disastrously away from... Continue Reading →
We are terrible at meetings – all kinds
Over the last month I've collected yet more examples of just how terrible "we" are at meetings (online, in meatspace, hybrid, whatever). I did not need these, or go looking for them. But there they were.... By "we" I do not just mean social movement "activists" looking to create momentum behind a campaign - my... Continue Reading →
Mobile phones as id portals – affordances affording fascism…
I was, to my wife's exasperation, a (very) late adopter of mobile phone technology; I have luddite tendencies, after all. Anyway, this isn't about me (it turns out some things aren't! Who knew). This is about how we think about mobiles. They are sold as wonderboxes that have the world's knowledge at our fingertips. As... Continue Reading →
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