Cuttings: October 2024

The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think – article by Shannon Vallor on Noema, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “At a machine learning conference in September of 2023, I asked the Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio why we keep hearing about ‘superhuman‘ AI when the products available are so far from what a human is, much less superhuman…. I asked him, isn’t this rhetoric ultimately unhelpful and misleading given that the AI systems that we so desperately need to control lack the most fundamental capabilities and features of a human mind? How, I asked, does an AI system without the human capacity for conscious self-reflection, empathy or moral intelligence become superhuman merely by being a faster problem-solver? Aren’t we more than that? And doesn’t granting the label ‘superhuman‘ to machines that lack the most vital dimensions of humanity end up obscuring from our view the very things about being human that we care about?… I was trying to get Bengio to acknowledge that there is a huge difference between superhuman computational speed or accuracy — and being superhuman, i.e., more than human. … Bengio refused to grant the premise. Before I could even finish the question, he demanded: ‘You don’t think that your brain is a machine?’ …Our disagreement was not about the capabilities of machine learning models at all. It was about the capabilities of human beings, and what descriptions of those capabilities we can and should license….For decades, the AI research community’s holy grail of artificial general intelligence (AGI) was defined by equivalence with human minds — not just the tasks they complete….But OpenAI and researchers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio are now telling us a different story. A self-aware machine that is ‘indistinguishable from the human mind‘ is no longer the defining ambition for AGI. A machine that matches or outperforms us on a vast array of economically valuable tasks is the latest target…. OpenAI’s AGI bait-and-switch wipes anything that does not count as economically valuable work from the definition of intelligence. That’s a massive erasure of our human capacity and a reduction of ourselves that we should resist. Are you no more than the work you completed today? Are you any less human or less intelligent if you spent your waking hours doing things that do not have well-defined ‘solutions,‘ that are not tasks that can be checked off a list, and that have no market price?… The struggle against this reductive and cynical ideology has been hard-fought for a few hundred years thanks to vigorous resistance from labor and human rights movements that have articulated and defended humane, nonmechanical, noneconomic standards for the treatment and valuation of human beings — standards like dignity, justice, autonomy and respect. Yet to finally convince us that humans are no more than mechanical generators of economically valuable outputs, it seems to have only required machine tools that generate such outputs in our primary currencies of human meaning: language and vision. … The battle is not lost, however. As the philosopher Albert Borgmann wrote in his 1984 book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, it is precisely when a technology has nearly supplanted a vital domain of human meaning that we are able to feel and mourn what has been taken from us. It is at that moment that we often begin to resist, reclaim and rededicate ourselves to its value.… We are in danger of sleepwalking our way into a future where all we do is fail more miserably at being those machines ourselves. Might we be ready to wake ourselves up? In an era that rewards and recognizes only mechanical thinking, can humans still remember and reclaim what we are? I don’t think it is too late. I think now may be exactly the time.“

The Enduring Influence of Marx’s Masterpiece – article by Wendy Brown in The Nation, from her forward to a new English translation of Marx's Capital, listed by John Naughton in his Observer column. ”Marx knew that [capitalism’s] unprecedented order of production and destruction, extraction and exploitation was not easy to see or understand. This was especially so because it took place under the sign of freedom—free markets, free humans, and the free circulation of labor, capital, and commodities. Grasping capital’s power and reach thus necessitated broadening and deepening the scope of political economy, departing from economists’ calculative economic frameworks for historical, philosophical, social-theoretical, and even theological ones. It requires leaving what he called the ‘noisy sphere’ of the market not only to enter the factory (posted with its sign, ‘No admittance except on business’) to see where wealth was produced, but to adopt a framework that accounts for the perversity and illusion of markets coming to stand for the whole. It requires understanding why capital’s complex and distributed workings are less visible to the eye than previous modes of political economy, how its freedoms obscure the drives and effects that make it the greatest system of domination ever made or inhabited by humans. All of these requirements are counterintuitive to those who equate capitalism with markets, where buyers and sellers, supply and demand, money and price, are the only things elemental and visible. What was necessary to capture and analyze capital’s vastness, power, complexity, and opacity, then, was not merely a new description of it but ‘a critique of political economy,‘ Capital’s subtitle. Political economy itself has a dual venue and meaning for Marx: It refers to practical arrangements, to practices of knowledge and, as we shall see, to their complex cogeneration and entwining. Critique of the practical arrangements entailed discerning both how capitalism worked and did not work, its engines and drives, its structural crises, and its wide ramifications and effects beyond markets. Critique of knowledge practices related to political economy included both its popular and erudite forms—the language of capitalists, the language of scholars, and the language of those in between such as that of left polemicists and journalists. Critique of erudite knowledge in turn comprised scope, method, and conceptualization as well as content. Marx’s task in Capital was enormous.“

The long and the short of our confidence in AI – review by Rob Nelson of AI Snake Oil (by Arvind Narayanan and Sayesh Kapoor) and The Ordinal Society (by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy) on AI Log, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “[Since their book project was announced in 2022, their Substack] has established Narayanan and Kapoor as among the most visible skeptics of Silicon Valley’s bullshit. They dismantle the misleading claims of technology companies, journalists, and academics by writing clearly about how the technology should be understood and evaluated. Crucially, they provide social context, not just technical insight, to make sense of how genuine technological progress, as well as ballyhoo and fraud, have shaped the market in products ‘powered by AI.’ That market changed dramatically just as the two started writing. One of Narayanan’s early posts about students turning in machine-generated essays anticipated what happened in late 2022 when OpenAI hooked up GPT-3.5 to a chatbot interface and accidentally created The Homework Machine. ... As Narayanan and Kapoor observe [from their concise re-telling of the 80-year story of computing], the goal of generality in computing is connected to efficiency and ‘is a special case of the fact that capitalist means of production strongly gravitate toward more automation in general.’ The idea of automating knowledge work has produced much excitement among technology barons and concern among the newly attentive public. This helps explain why discussions of AGI are so often conducted using the vocabularies of dystopian science fiction and eschatological religion.... The Ordinal Society explains something often missing from critical accounts about internet technology and AI.… Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy show that [consumer behaviors play a major role in] the degradation of the Internet. It is not simply the brothers of technology and greedy corporations who have made these markets in snake oil. Our own, often unexamined, desires are the foundation for the digital world we find ourselves inhabiting.... Fourcade and Healy, both social scientists, are concerned about Silicon Valley’s demand for and control of data….This data imperative, turning our digital waste into profitable commodities, has been ‘a cultural and political accomplishment,’ as well as an economic triumph for Google and the other increasingly giant technology companies. The Ordinal Society surveys how academic social science has responded to these developments in ways that are useful for anyone who wants to understand how social theory explains digital capitalism. It offers two insights that help explain markets in AI snake oil. The first is the danger the data imperative poses for social science.… [Tech companies] have asserted control over ’the production of social-scientific knowledge by way of their domination over the data economy.’ This has left social scientists outside looking in as ’what previously was a free flow of data easily scraped from the web can suddenly disappear into walled gardens or behind an application programming interface (API) that is exorbitantly expensive to access.' As Narayanan and Kapoor also make clear, the data theft and lack of transparency associated with training the largest AI models have made this problem worse.,,, The other insight is that this new world of measurement presented in algorithms has enormous appeal for individuals. Knowing our numbers … gives us a sense of who we are and a way to measure who we might become. These ordinal scales use data about our past to tell us what we desperately want to know: our future. In an uncertain world, these numbers fix us.… We compare our numbers to the average or to the scores of our classmates or neighbors. Like the bureaucracies that manage these predictive systems, individuals can use their outputs to understand their risk of dying of heart disease or getting diabetes, or their chances of getting a car loan or being admitted to or hired by an elite college. The rankings pioneered by US News serve a similar purpose for administrators of universities and hospitals.For both individuals and institutions, the ordinal processes of digital capitalism answer the questions ‘Where do I fit?‘ and ‘How do I improve my position?‘ with numbers, models, and methods. The Ordinal Society is, so far, the most interesting analysis of the social world we have created out of our ‘desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in our minds.‘“

Kill Lists – article by Sophia Goodfriend in the London Review of Books, referenced in The Guardian First Edition newsletter 18 October 2024. "The IDF doesn’t always advertise its new capabilities. In April, the Israeli/Palestinian website +972 Magazine and other outlets reported that Israeli intelligence units are using algorithmically generated kill lists to determine targets for missile strikes across the Gaza Strip. ‘I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism,’ one of the soldiers interviewed said. ‘The machine did it coldly.’ ... The IDF has a number of AI-assisted systems. Aviv Kohavi, its chief of staff until early last year, gave an interview about the new technology to Israel’s largest daily paper, Yedioth Ahronoth.... Three tools in particular have been widely used across Gaza over the last two years: Lavender, Gospel and Where’s Daddy. Lavender provides a list of people to be approved for assassination. Gospel tries to determine where they live, or where they store weapons and plan military operations. Where’s Daddy sends alerts when the targets enter their family homes, so that the air force knows when to strike. All of these tools rely on machine learning systems to trawl through masses of data from a variety of sources, including drone and satellite reconnaissance, location monitoring, social media scraping and transcripts from phone calls, text messages and encrypted messaging applications. Algorithms determine patterns based on where someone went, at what time, to whom they talked and how often. These systems allow the military to bypass the many intelligence analysts, munitions experts and lawyers who were once required to determine valid targets and authorise attacks. Kohavi b0asted that the new tools are capable of supplying twice as many targets in a day – at least a hundred – as intelligence units used to come up with in a year."

How to use your senses to help beat depression – article by Norman Farb and Zindel Segal in The Guardian. "Modern life seems designed to stop us from being alone with our thoughts and feelings. Our days are built from the bricks of work and play, mortared by media and intoxicants.... Most people would agree that we need an occasional break from constant activity, but we seem unable to take advantage of our time off; rumination rushes in, spoiling what should be a period of respite.... The problem is that keeping our brains busy isn’t an effective form of relief. Instead, sensing the world – the sunlight on your skin, a gurgle in your belly, the thump of your heartbeat – without rushing back into thought and judgment, is what enriches and restores us. Before you label that emotion that seems to be bubbling up, ask: what does it feel like? Because when we are unable to stay with raw sensation, defaulting instead to ideas about those sensations, it can actually have disastrous consequences for our mental health. That’s what we’ve found in our research, which explored how the balance between thinking and sensing impacts wellbeing.... So keeping in touch with sensation, particularly in times of stress, may be a potent but overlooked resource for mental health. What we call 'sense foraging', purposely shifting attention to the sensory world with a willingness to be surprised, is one way of practising doing this, and it’s a skill that almost anyone can develop. If staying busy and distracting ourselves are both modes of largely automatic thinking, to truly give ourselves a break – and reduce the risk of becoming depressed – we need to switch into sensing, a fundamentally different mode that is receptive rather than agenda driven. By developing sensory 'muscles', we get better at taking in new information, which stimulates new trains of thought. This provides relief from rumination, potentially bouncing you out of the mental rut you’re stuck in."

I see the worrying consequences of assisted dying in other countries. Britain’s bill needs a radical rethink – article by Lucy Thomas (palliative care and public health doctor) in The Guardian. "In [Lord Falconer's] bill [soon to be debated in the House of Lords], as long as someone has mental capacity and is likely to have less than an arbitrarily chosen six months to live, they can receive assistance to end their life. There is no requirement that the causes of their suffering be explored, let alone addressed, nor that they receive care or support of any kind.... [It] implies that such patients are primarily motivated by uncontrollable pain or other intractable symptoms, and are fundamentally different to anyone else with suicidal thoughts. This is not my experience. The terminally ill patients I’ve cared for who’ve considered ending their lives have had the same complex range of concerns as other suicidal patients and, most importantly, have been equally responsive to care and support.... The implications of using terminal illness to determine eligibility for assisted dying extend far beyond those who actively want to end their lives. Once assisted dying is normalised as a healthcare option for terminally ill people, everyone with a terminal illness would have to consider whether they, too, should opt for it.... Why, then, is this medicalised approach supported by many who consider themselves compassionate and progressive? Few seem to realise that there is nothing inevitable about basing access to assisted dying on medical conditions, nor requiring doctors to provide it... If our motivation is compassion, and our aim is to relieve intractable suffering, then surely eligibility should be based on an assessment that someone’s suffering is intractable – not whether or not they have a particular illness, disability or life expectancy, nor any other external judgment about what makes a life worth living. Assisting someone to die would then be an option of last resort, to be used only if all other options to support them and address their suffering had been tried."

Pioneering aerial photographer’s pictures show England of the 1930s – article by Steven Morris in The Guardian. "They are not yet a century old but a collection of black and white photographs taken by a pioneering aerial photographer shows how very different aspects of everyday life are for Britons today. The images, taken by Arthur William Hobart in the 1930s as he leant out of a biplane, capture people moving about on horse-drawn vehicles as well as in motorised ones, and rivers teeming with working boats. There are striking images of industrial sites hemmed in by the terraces that housed their employees, and scenes of the British seaside that look a lot more genteel and less crowded than some of today’s brash resorts. Historic England is releasing pictures from Hobart’s Air Pictures Portleven collection after organising and digitising them. The collection features 242 images showing national landmarks, towns and cities, industrial sites, construction projects, cliffs and beaches, documenting the era between the two world wars."

How artificial intelligence is changing the reports US police write – article by Sukey Lewis in The Guardian. "A handful of California departments ... have started to use or test ... AI-powered software developed by Axon, an industry leader in body cameras and tasers. Axon said the program can help officers produce more objective reports in less time. But as more agencies adopt these kinds of tools, some experts wonder if they give artificial intelligence too big a part in the criminal justice system. 'We forget that that document plays a really central role in decisions that change people’s lives,' said Andrew Ferguson, a criminal law professor at American University Washington College of Law who wrote the first law review article on AI-assisted police reports, which he expects to publish next year.... Prosecutors make charging decisions, judges make bail decisions and people make decisions about their own defense based – at least in part – on what is on this initial piece of paper. 'If part of that is being shaped by AI, it raises some real concerns about whether we can rely on it,' Ferguson said. The potential for error or bias introduced by AI is still being studied. But, he added, law enforcement leaders have an understandable desire to improve efficiency. ... [Officer Wendy] Venegas in East Palo Alto said the program helped her overcome writer’s block, especially after a long day on patrol. She can just push the Draft One button on her computer, and a narrative based on the audio transcript of her bodycam footage appears within seconds.... Draft One is also changing the way she works in the field. Because the report is based on the audio transcript, Venegas said she will purposefully talk about what is happening during an incident. 'I’ll be like, "Did you see that? The mirror is broken,"' Venegas said. '"Did you see that? There’s stuff on the floor. The knife, the bloody knife, is on the floor."' An Axon product designer, Noah Spitzer-Williams, said this was one of the most surprising and fascinating side-effects of the software: it incentivizes officers to be more verbal overall, even talking into their camera’s microphone to provide context – like the parole status of a subject or whether a weapon has been reported before arriving at a scene – so the audio transcript contains key details that Draft One puts in the report. 'Then, during the interaction, the officer is asking more questions,' Spitzer-Williams said. 'They’re echoing back statements like, "OK, Jimmy. You’re giving me consent to search your backpack."' Spitzer-Williams said this also helps community relations because officers are explaining what they’re doing and why. But research by the American Civil Liberties Union shows the ways officers’ real-time narration has also been used to manipulate evidence. A common example is when officers shout 'stop resisting' to justify use of force even when the individual is complying. Axon’s Spitzer-Williams said he did not believe Draft One will make this 'real concern' any worse."

How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war – article by Naomi Klein in The Guardian. "What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it? Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity?... In Israel’s case, there was a near instant move to graphically re-create the events of 7 October as mediated experiences, sometimes with the goal of countering false claims that deny any atrocities occurred, but often with the explicit goal of reducing sympathy for Palestinians and generating support for Israel’s rapidly expanding wars. Before the one-year mark, there was already an off-Broadway “verbatim play”, called October 7, drawn from witness testimony; several art exhibitions, and at least two 7 October-themed fashion shows... Then there are the 7 October films, already an emerging subgenre. First came the Israeli military’s Bearing Witness, which compiled the most graphic and horrific moments captured on video that day. Within weeks of the attacks, it was being screened to curated audiences of politicians, business leaders and journalists everywhere from Davos to the Museum of Tolerance in LA.... With very few exceptions, the primary goal of these diverse works seems to be the transference of trauma to the audience: re-creating terrifying events with such vividness and intimacy that a viewer or visitor experiences a kind of identity merger, as if they themselves have been violated.... All efforts at commemoration aim to touch the hearts of people who were not there. But there is a difference between inspiring an emotional connection and deliberately putting people into a shellshocked, traumatized state. Achieving the latter result is why so much 7 October memorialization boasts that it is “immersive” – offering viewers and participants the chance to crawl inside the pain of others, based on a guiding assumption that the more people there are who experience the trauma of 7 October as if it was their own, the better off the world will be. Or rather, the better off Israel will be....There is a difference between understanding an event, which preserves the mind’s analytic capacity as well as one’s sense of self, and feeling like you are personally living through it. The latter produces not understanding but what [sociologist Amy] Sodaro has called a 'prosthetic trauma', which, she writes, is highly conducive to 'a simplistic dualism between good and evil that has important political implications'. Consumers of these experiences are encouraged to feel a distilled bond with the victims, who are the essence of good, and a distilled hatred for their aggressors, who are the essence of evil. The traumatized state is pure feeling, pure reaction. Vision is narrowed, tunneled. In this state, we do not ask what isn’t included in the frame of the immersive experience. And in the case of the deluge of immersive art being produced to commemorate 7 October, what is not included is Palestine, specifically Gaza. Not the decades of strangled conditions of life on the other side of the wall that led up to the attacks – and not the tens of thousands of Palestinian people, including wrenching numbers of infants and children, whom Israel has killed and maimed since 7 October. And that is precisely the point."

Anxiety can make you fear the worst, but don’t let it ruin your life – article by Anna Mathur in The Guardian. "Has anyone ever told you to 'stop worrying' or that 'it will all work out in the end'? It doesn’t really help, does it? After more than 10 years of working with clients as a psychotherapist, I am so aware of the headspace that worry and anxiety consumes.... As a child, I was full of worry, having lived through one of my own worst-case scenarios: losing a sibling. No matter how many times someone told me not to worry, it never silenced the thoughts and fears in my mind. How can someone reassure me that the worst probably won’t happen when, in one way, it already has?... Instead of doing everything I could to ease and avoid life’s uncomfortable truths, I sought a deeper acceptance of them. Through using this approach, I discovered that anxiety finally began to loosen its grip. In researching my book I discovered 10 uncomfortable realities that many of us are afraid to face – ways you can thrive amid these uncertainties and embrace more of life’s joy, despite full awareness of what’s at stake. (1) Some people don't like me.... (2) I am going to fail... (3) Life isn't fair.... (4) I will hurt people I love... (5) I can't always be fully present.... (6) People misunderstand me.... (7) I am not good enough.... (8) Bad things will happen.... (9) I will lose people I love.... (10) I am going to die. ... There is an African proverb that captures my motivation behind seeking more acceptance of these truths. It goes: 'When death finds you, may it find you alive.' I don’t want to wait until a curveball trauma forces me to be grateful for the joys in my life and the limited opportunity I have to embrace them, nor do I want to wait until I’m older and (more) grey to care less what others think. I don’t want to live a half-life blighted by fear of failure or bad things happening, and I don’t want you to have that either."

Hew Locke’s British Museum looting exposé: ‘inescapably, deeply shocking’ – review by Adrian Searle in The Guardian. "Part history lesson, part crime scene, Hew Locke’s What Have We Here? is filled with beauty and horror. At the heart of the show, in the Great Court Gallery of the British Museum in London, are looting and vandalism, the destruction of societies, the erasure of cultures and the enslavement of their peoples. All are embedded in the British Museum’s own history and holdings. And that’s without even touching on the frieze of sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens, and the sorry story of their acquisition, or to whom exactly many of the other objects in the museum might be returned, even if there was a will to do so. Where are the pre-Columbian Caribbean Taino people now, whose hardwood spirit-figures of a birdman and of Boinayel the Rain Giver were found in a cave in Jamaica in 1792. The sculptures entered the British Museum’s collection, while the Taino were mostly wiped out, if not by murder then by diseases to which they had no immunity, following the arrival of the Europeans. ... Locke’s terse little notes are placed beside many of the exhibits he has chosen from the collection. Working with his partner, curator Indra Khanna, and with the curators of the British Museum, Locke has done much more than set his own sculptures and images among works in the museum’s collection. He has also borrowed from the Royal collection, the British Library and elsewhere to make an exhibition that is inescapably, deeply shocking. This is an exhibition that looks not only at works in the collection themselves, but also at what they once meant and the further meanings and resonances they have accrued in their journeys here. The show’s title appears plain enough. After that, everything is complicated."

Millionaire business owners urge Rachel Reeves to raise £14bn from rise in capital gains tax – article by Richard Partington in The Guardian. "Rachel Reeves has been urged by a group of millionaire business owners to raise £14bn from an increase in capital gains tax at this month’s budget, arguing it would have no impact on investment in Britain. Ahead of the chancellor’s set-piece event on 30 October, the group of wealthy investors said increasing the tax rate on asset disposals would help to raise vital funds for public services and would not lead to slower economic growth. In a report by the centre-left IPPR thinktank, which carries influence with the Treasury, the millionaire entrepreneurs said they would welcome an increase in the rate levied on capital gains to match the higher rate of income tax. The report showed that capital gains tax (CGT) was not a primary driver of investment decisions, with entrepreneurs more focused on issues including access to financing, market opportunities, and broader economic conditions. Mark Campbell, the millionaire co-founder of Higgidy pies, said higher rates of CGT would not 'scare away real investors' in Britain. 'Entrepreneurs don’t think about [it] when they create businesses. [It] would not have stopped us investing in Higgidy,' he said."

When I delivered the worst of news to my dying patient, she cried, but not about her prognosis – article by Ranjana Srivastava in The Guardian. "When [oncologists like me are] called to see a patient at the tail end of an admission, it’s to deliver the worst kind of bad news. Or more accurately, to collect the fragments of bad news into a cogent explanation and confirm what everyone has hinted at: the illness is serious and the prognosis grave. [One patient] is a wife, mother and the kind of amicable person one could readily imagine delivering just-baked cookies to a friend or offering to mind a neighbour’s baby. After weeks of investigations for recurrent cancer, she is despondent. One surgeon places her on the operating list. A second, junior surgeon isn’t convinced but holds his tongue. A third surgeon, who was scheduled to perform the operation, cancels it and I see why: while surgery is technically feasible, the most predictable outcome would be to prolong hospitalisation at the risk of wasting what precious time remains of her life. She has a clear-eyed understanding of her impossible situation but still, filling in the gaps feels punitive. I tell her the surgeon was right to spare her the futile surgery. We discuss that chemotherapy would be unhelpful. She asks how long, then adds she figures time is short. I touch her arm, swallow and nod. And then she is crying. The teardrops are plunging from her eyes, sliding down her cheeks and into the back of her sleeve. I look around for tissues; she tearfully jokes that we are in a public hospital. But here is the thing. She isn’t crying because I have just admired her unrivalled poise. She is not even crying about her prognosis or that she won’t see the grandchildren growing up. She is crying, she says, because kindness melts her.... Her account underlines an important attitude among patients that is often missed by doctors. We like to think patients judge us for our medical acumen but, in fact, they observe the words we say, the empathy we show and the kindness we offer. This is a lesson as abundantly available as it is hard to absorb. It illustrates the continuing gap between how doctors and patients view what really matters in medicine. Doctors are trained to think too much and feel too little. Our patients know we think enough but want us to feel more. As technology, machinery and bureaucracy overwhelm us, the essence of good medicine remains an open secret. Days after we meet, the loose ends are tied and the patient is preparing to go home for the last time. She reassures me that she is leaving with a light heart, which feels impossible under the circumstances but is a testament to her character. She reflects that she will always remember the warmth that I and others showed her. How telling it is that we came nowhere near extending her life and yet her prevailing response is one of gratitude."

Why our ideas about protest and mob psychology are dangerously wrong – article by Dan Hancox in The Guardian. "Our politics, media and pop culture have always been stacked with these myths – with people in power decrying mindless mobs, madding crowds, unthinking masses, stampeding hordes and herd mentalities.... Le Bon’s seminal work [of 1895], The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, is one of the bestselling nonfiction books of all time....He is still regularly cited by columnists and politicians in 2024 to condemn the mania of the mob. But there are two problems with this pervasive received wisdom about crowd psychology and behaviour. The first problem – and it’s quite a big one – is that the work is verifiably, scientifically, nonsense. Le Bon was an eccentric, war-traumatised eugenicist and proto-fascist, terrified by the growing demands of the French masses for democracy and socialism, and The Crowd is fuelled by fear and loathing, not research.... The second problem with the myths of mob mentality, homogeneous 'herd logic' and contagious crowd violence is that they are incredibly persistent – in spite of being false – because defaming the crowd will always serve elite power and undermine democracy.... Fortunately, a new generation of crowd psychologists are developing fresh ideas. Detailed case studies conducted by academics such as Stephen Reicher and Clifford Stott have proved what many of us know instinctively: that joining a crowd of like-minded souls brings us kinship, confidence, and joy – and that every crowd contains a multitude of behaviours and psychological responses. Reicher uncovered what might be an unpalatable truth in his seminal study of the 'riot' in St Paul’s, Bristol, in 1980: that joy, warmth and solidarity are often experienced even while cars are being set alight. Far from erasing our sense of self, coming together with fellow football fans, music fans, or people with the same political or religious affiliations, is greatly affirming.... This doesn’t mean all crowds are forces for good, of course. While my reporting has taken me to inspiring political protests, hedonistic global carnivals and other festivals in the name of journalism, I have also borne witness to sinister crowds, such as the fascist paramilitaries of the Magyar Gárda in Budapest and a proto-Trump Tea Party rally in White Plains, New York; I have even been to watch Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. Watching with horror the racist riots in August this year, I was unsurprised that many anti-racists opted for the classic Le Bonian interpretation: here is the deranged, brainless violence of the mob. But it does nothing to strengthen the cause of anti-racism to apply the same baseless analysis to crowds we dislike. When you call a violent fascist 'brainless', you are not just skipping a much-needed reckoning with their hateful ideology, you are also letting them off the hook for their conscious decisions and actions."

15 years of Horrible Histories: kids’ TV so good it’s getting a Bafta – article by Michael Hogan in The Guardian. "Hooray for Horrible Histories. It was announced today that, in its 15th year, the beloved CBBC sketch show will receive a Bafta special award in honour of its 'extraordinary cultural and social impact'. Based on the bestselling books by Terry Deary, it blazed on to our screens in 2009 and gave patronising children’s programming a hobnail boot up the backside. It spoke to young viewers in a language they understood. Sophisticated sketches were mixed with pop video parodies. The emphasis was always on the gruesome, anarchic, anti-authoritarian and scatological, inspiring six- to 12-year-olds to engage with the past.... In the comedic lineage of Monty Python and Blackadder, it became cult viewing for parents too.... Regardless of demographics, Horrible Histories remains one of the most inventive, exuberant and flat-out funniest shows on TV. Its theme song and continuing mission statement? 'Gory, ghastly, mean and cruel. Stuff they don’t teach you at school.'"

‘I miss her a lot’: Andrew Garfield telling Elmo about grief was his best work yet – article by Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. "Two days ago, a video of [actor Andrew Garfield] talking to Elmo [on Sesame Street] was released online. In it, Garfield discusses the death of his mother and the complicated forms that his grief has taken. 'I’m just thinking about my mum today,' he tells Elmo. 'She passed away not too long ago, and I miss her a lot.' Elmo tells Garfield that he gets sad when he misses people, but Garfield replies that: 'Sadness is kind of a gift. It’s a lovely thing to feel, in a way, because it means you really love somebody when you miss them … it makes me feel close to her when I miss her.' Something like this – an actor simplifying bereavement for the benefit of a puppet – could be cloying. Yet there is absolutely no doubt that Garfield is being utterly sincere. He stumbles over some of his lines. His eyes prick with tears as he speaks. It is not, as you can imagine, something you should watch without steeling yourself a bit beforehand.... To some extent, I can relate. My mum died a couple of years before Garfield’s, and in similar circumstances. Like Garfield, I had to go and promote something while it was happening.... And I was only talking to a few hundred people at a time. Garfield had to talk to the entire world, while simultaneously knowing that most people just wanted to know if he was going to be Spider-Man again. The fortitude this must have required. However, in this most recent instance, Garfield at least had Elmo to help him. This must have been some comfort because there’s something about Elmo, some innate puppet magic, that allows whoever he’s talking with to be the version of themselves that they most are.... [Garfield's] Elmo segment let him take a step back from his memefication [of the promotional trail for his new film] and talk about something that truly matters to him, with far more genuine emotion than stars often show while they’re out punting their movies. We should be thankful for the both of them."

‘You tried to tell yourself I wasn’t real’: what happens when people with acute psychosis meet the voices in their heads? – article by Jenny Kleeman in The Guardian. "If you hear voices, clinicians don’t generally ask what they’re saying to you, beyond whether they are asking you to harm yourself or others.... A clinician may diagnose a patient with psychosis, and prescribe them medication or CBT, without knowing what the patient’s voices say to them. ... Prof Julian Leff was seven years into his retirement when the idea of avatar therapy came to him. After a celebrated career as a social psychiatrist and schizophrenia specialist at University College London, Leff was sitting at home in Hampstead, pondering the results of a survey that reported the most distressing aspect of hearing voices was the feeling of helplessness. On the rare occasions when his patients had had meaningful exchanges with their voices, he knew they had felt more in control. 'I thought, how can I enable the patient to have a dialogue with an invisible voice?' Leff said in an interview for a documentary made in 2018, three years before his death.... Leff was awarded a small grant for a pilot study in 2008. He recruited Mark Huckvale, professor of speech, hearing and phonetic sciences at UCL, to be in charge of the tech. They tinkered with existing police identikit software, animating digitally created faces in three dimensions so they could nod, smile and maintain eye contact.... The avatar was a floating, moving head on a computer screen, voiced by Leff, who would be in a separate room to the patient, watching via webcam. He could speak to the patient in his own voice, guiding them through the dialogue, and then switch with the click of a mouse to the role of the avatar on the patient’s screen, its lips synched to his speech. The setup allowed him to act as a therapist to the patient and a puppeteer to the avatar. At first, the avatar would say typical lines the patient had shared with Leff: often degrading, abusive phrases. But over the course of six sessions, the dialogue would change, with the avatar yielding to the patient, transforming from omnipotent to submissive. At all times, Leff and the patient were to treat the avatar as if it were an entirely real third party. Sixteen people – all of whom had heard voices for years, despite being on medication – participated in this pilot study.... To Leff’s surprise, [two of the participants] stopped hearing their voices entirely after only three sessions. While most patients did not experience such a dramatic change, the results were still impressive: for 13 of the 16 participants, voices remained, but they were less frequent and intrusive, and suicidal feelings were significantly reduced."

Eternal You: it’s impossible not to be horrified by this AI quest to bring the dead back to life – review by Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. "Eternal You is a 100-minute dive into the cold and murky waters of the digital afterlife industry. To those of you blessedly unfamiliar with this phenomenon – as I was before I watched this world-tilting, mind-galvanising film – there are companies dedicated to using AI to create convincing avatars of dead people. The whole of internetted human history is crunched, including whatever digital footprint left by the deceased, plus whatever details the bereaved care to add and then, for a small sum, loved ones can communicate once again with the departed.... It is impossible not to be horrified by the whole thing. It is impossible not to notice the expansive understanding of humanity emanating from critics such as Sherry Turkle and Carl Öhman compared with the flippant demeanour of most of the tech bros and others behind the development of the technology. With special mention going to the founder of Project December, Jason Rohrer, whose wife had the idea before he did but didn’t tell him because, he laughs: 'She thought it shouldn’t be done, or something.' Rohrer laughs his way dismissively, too, through Angel’s distress after [the AI version of her dead partner] Cameroun tells her he is in hell. 'I’ve got some bad news for her – in my opinion … her whole belief system [Christianity] is flawed.' It is not his job, Rohrer insists, to keep warning people not to buy into the illusion: 'That doesn’t make for a good experience.' And, the thought hangs unspoken in the air – a good experience is what people pay for.... Eternal You is a film about many things. At one level, it’s about technological innovation, brilliant minds, practical and legislative conundrums, the best and worst of free-market capitalism. At another, even perhaps for people of a naturally less luddite bent than myself, it is about the eternal exploitation of the desperate by the greedy, cruel or unthinking. It’s also about the opening up of an abyss of horrors masquerading as answers to unbearable longings, into which some people will willingly jump, others will fall, and over whose edge all of humanity will eventually be dragged, kicking, screaming, but with no other choice. It is about the death of grace, the death perhaps of the meaning of life itself."

‘You can’t shoot climate change’: Richard Seymour on how far right exploits environmental crisis –interview by Maya Goodfellow in The Guardian. "An examination of the far right globally, Disaster Nationalism isn’t strictly about the climate crisis. But they are clearly connected. While disaster-laden fantasies capture imaginations, the environmental crisis lurks in the background. Seymour wants to interrogate this: why is fictional collapse so appealing, so exhilarating, when we live in a world of already existing, real disasters? If people are miserable, insecure and humiliated, the far right offers a specific remedy in disaster nationalism, Seymour argues. 'It offers the balm, not just of vengeance, but of a sort of violent reset which restores the traditional consolations of family, race, religion and nationhood, including the chance to humiliate others.' ...'If I agree to fantasise about gruesome, erotically charged scenarios for whose reality I’ve been given no good evidence, I am not simply lacking ‘critical skills’ or ‘media literacy’: the fantasy is doing something for me. It is staging something that I want, even if I don’t want to want it. And if that fantasy is then adopted by numerous others, for no good reason, then the wish obviously isn’t reducible to personal psychopathology but is rooted in a shared social condition.'... And that shared social condition is crucially affected and shaped by climate breakdown. The 2020 Oregon wildfires are illustrative, sweeping through the western US state after a series of chronic disasters: the credit crunch, skyrocketing rural poverty, alcoholism, suicide above the norm and a breakdown of local news, leaving Facebook and Nextdoor to fill the void. But when mostly white, rural, conservative Christians see the fires, it’s not climate change or capitalism they blame. Spontaneously – not orchestrated by any one person or politician – it is the conspiracies they’ve heard that make the most sense of something so large and so destructive: Antifa, doing the bidding of the Democrats whose aim is to usher in communism, are to blame, wanting to kill people like them to remake America. Ideas like these spread like a contagion and the threshold for their uptake isn’t necessarily that high.”

Cuttings: September 2024

There is no "woke mind virus" – article by Dan Williams on Conspicuous Cognition website, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Gad [Saad’s] The Parasitic Mind [is] a book-length complaint about ‘mind viruses’ like ‘postmodernism, radical feminism, and social constructivism’, all of which are ‘bound by the full rejection of reality and common sense.’ Saad is not alone in his analysis of ‘woke’ ideas. In the past several years, talk of the ‘woke mind virus’ has itself gone viral among right-wing culture warriors…. Since 2016, it has [also] been the favourite metaphor adopted by the opposite side in the culture war to characterise online misinformation and conspiracy theories…. [But] this metaphor rests on an inaccurate picture of human psychology and social behaviour that functions to demonise, not understand. Because of this, it poisons public debate, increases polarisation, and hinders our collective capacities to understand the world and each other. I will make three general points: (1) The ‘mind virus’ metaphor assumes the truth is self-evident, so false beliefs must stem from irrationality. This neglects how people form beliefs based on different information, trusted sources, and interpretive frameworks, which means rational individuals can easily develop radically divergent worldviews. (2) People often embrace and spread ideas because they serve practical goals beyond truth-seeking. For example, religious, ideological, and conspiratorial narratives often serve propagandistic functions or promote people’s social interests. Such motivated reasoning looks nothing like the passive infection by ‘mind viruses’. (3) Belief systems do not spread via simple contagion. They are maintained through complex social dynamics and incentives in which members of belief-based tribes win status by enforcing, rationalising, and spreading bespoke realities."

Remaining steadfast in non-violence -–quoted from Jean Zaru’s book Occupied with Non-Violence, in Daily Meditation, Center for Action and Contemplation. “I call myself a Quaker or a Friend. And Friends, throughout history, have maintained a testimony to nonviolence. War, we say, is contrary to the teachings of Christ. Therefore, we are challenged to live in the presence of that power which wins through love rather than through war. This is no easy testimony..Early on in my struggles [as a Palestinian] with living nonviolently in a situation of violence, I found myself at a crossroads. I needed to know in my own deepest convictions whether I really did believe in the power of nonviolence to transform a situation of conflict.… How can I have peace within when I worry so much about life in general and the lives of my family members?… How can I have peace within when our movement is restricted in our own country, when walls are built to imprison us and separate us from one another?… As Palestinian women, we have a special burden and service. We are constantly being told to be peaceful. But the inner peace of which I speak is not simply being nice, or being passive, or permitting oneself to be trampled upon without protest. It is not passive nonviolence, but the nonviolence of courageous action…. What is that inner force that drives us, that provides regeneration and perseverance to speak the truth that desperately needs to be spoken in this moment of history?… If I deserve credit for courage, it is not for anything I do here, but for continuing in my daily struggle under occupation on so many fronts, for remaining samideh (steadfast) and, all the while, remaining open to love, to the beauty of the earth, and contributing to its healing when it is violated.”

Precipice by Robert Harris: the PM and the socialite – review by Alex Preston in The Guardian. "Precipice is set in the summer of 1914: 'that improbably glorious summer' before the great war opened up a chasm in the world.... We first meet the Honourable Venetia Stanley, daughter of Lord and Lady Sheffield, in the buildup to a tragedy. She is part of a louche and aristocratic set, the Coterie, known for their cynicism and excess. Venetia decides not to join a cruise on the Thames during which one of their members, Sir Denis Anson, drowns. Venetia has other things on her mind. Although only 26, she’s in the midst of a romantic entanglement with the 61-year old Liberal prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith.... The letters from Asquith to Venetia were written in the white heat of political life, with Ireland on the verge of revolution and war glowering on the horizon. This backdrop makes their content all the more jaw-dropping. They intermix the moonings of a love-sick teenager with spectacularly indiscreet revelations about the inner workings of government. Venetia’s letters to Asquith have been lost, and so Harris only has one side of the conversation. The novel’s brilliance lies in the way the author has written into the void, giving life and voice to Venetia, bringing her to dazzling life through her imagined letters to Asquith and Harris’s portrait of a bright, unconventional and complex young woman seeking to escape the strictures of her aristocratic upbringing."

A cool flame: how Gaia theory was born out of a secret love affair – article by Jonathan Watts in The Guardian. "What has been lost in the years since Lovelock first formulated Gaia theory in the 1960s, is that the initial work was not his alone. Another thinker, and earlier collaborator, played a far more important conceptual role than has been acknowledged until now. It was a woman, Dian Hitchcock, whose name has largely been overlooked in accounts of the world-famous Gaia theory.... They became not just collaborators but conspirators. Hitchcock was sceptical about JPL’s approach to finding life on Mars, while Lovelock had complaints about the inadequacy of the equipment. This set them against powerful interests. At JPL, the most optimistic scientists were those with the biggest stake in the research. On 31 March 1965, Hitchcock submitted a scathing initial report to Hamilton Standard and its client Nasa, describing the plans of JPL’s bioscience division as excessively costly and unlikely to yield useful data.... She felt that information about the presence of life could be found in signs of order – in homeostasis – not in one specific surface location, but at a wider level. As an example of how this might be achieved, she spoke highly of a method of atmospheric gas sampling that she had 'initiated' with Lovelock... This plan was brilliantly simple and thus a clear threat to the complicated, multimillion-dollar experiments that had been on the table up to that point."

The Many Lives of James Lovelock by Jonathan Watts: man of many myths – review by Philip Ball in The Guardian. "Lovelock’s Gaia theory has, ever since its inception in the late 1960s, been whatever one wants to make of it: a smokescreen for polluting industries, a clarion call for environmentalists, a revolution in the earth sciences, a conceptual framework for astrobiology, a spiritual movement for reconnecting to the living earth. Remarkably, Lovelock himself embraced each of these positions at some time or another during his 103 years on the planet. Having worked for the Medical Research Council ... during the war, Lovelock quit a comfortable academic position to become a freelance inventor and consultant for clients ranging from the Ministry of Defence to Nasa (especially on what became the Viking lander missions of the 1970s that searched for signs of life). In the mid-1950s he invented an instrument called the Electron Capture Detector, which allowed substances in the air to be detected with unprecedented sensitivity. Those studies led him to conceive of the atmosphere itself not as an aspect of the environment to which life adapts but as a component of the 'Earth system' that life is constantly shaping. In collaboration with the American microbiologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock shaped these ideas into the Gaia theory, which suggests that the whole planet functions rather like a living organism, stabilised by feedbacks between the biosphere, oceans, atmosphere and geosphere. ... It was Lovelock’s Wiltshire neighbour, William Golding, who suggested naming the idea after the Greek goddess – a 'poison gift', according to philosopher Bruno Latour, as the mythic associations alienated many scientists. Much of this is well known, but Watts digs deeper to find the source of Lovelock’s contradictory, maverick nature...."

These 21st-century demagogues aren’t mavericks, they’ve repeated on us throughout history – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "I’ve spent part of my summer reading Arno Mayer, the great historian who died in 2023. His book Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956, published in 1971, could have been written about any of the rightwing populists we face today... Mayer’s descriptions of the demagogues of his period are uncannily familiar. These leaders created the impression 'that they seek fundamental changes in government, society, and community'. But in reality, because they relied on the patronage of 'incumbent elites' to gain power ... they sought no major changes 'in class structure and property relations'. In fact, they ensured these were shored up. For this reason, Mayer explains how rightwing populists expose and overstate the cracks in a crisis-torn society, but fail to 'account for them in any coherent and systematic way'. They direct popular anger away from genuine elites and towards fictional conspiracies and minorities. They variously blame these minorities (whether it be Jews, Muslims, asylum seekers, immigrants, Black and Brown people) for the sense of inadequacy and powerlessness felt by their supporters; helping 'humiliated individuals to salvage their self-esteem by attributing their predicament to a plot' and giving them immediate targets on which to vent their frustrations and hatreds.... But there is one major difference. In Mayer’s era, the development of what he called 'crisis strata' of disillusioned, angry men to whom the demagogues appealed was a result of devastating war or state collapse. The rabble-rousers were able to appeal both to angry working-class men and to anxious elites by invoking the spectre of leftwing revolution. None of these conditions pertain today in countries like our own. So how does the current batch of populists succeed? I think they are responding to a crisis caused by a different force: 45 years of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism simultaneously promises the world and snatches it away. It tells us that if you work hard enough, you too can be an alpha. But it also creates the conditions which ensure that, no matter how hard you work, you are likely to remain subordinate and exploited.... It is in the vast gap between the promises of neoliberalism and their fulfilment that frustration, humiliation and a desire for vengeance grow: the same emotions that followed military defeat or state collapse in Mayer’s time. These impulses are then exploited by conflict entrepreneurs."

The Golden Road by William Dalrymple: when India ruled the world – review by Fara Dabholwala in The Guardian. "Forget the Silk Road, argues William Dalrymple in his dazzling new book. What came first, many centuries before that, was India’s Golden Road, which stretched from the Roman empire in the west all the way to Korea and Japan in the far east. For more than a millennium, from about 250BC to AD1200, Indian goods, aesthetics and ideas dominated a vast 'Indosphere'. Indian merchants, travelling huge distances on the monsoon winds, reaped vast profits from its matchless cloth, spices, oils, jewellery, ivory, hardwoods, glass and furniture. The Golden Road deftly charts these economic developments. But Dalrymple’s larger theme is India’s intellectual hegemony. As he shows, during this era India was the great religious and philosophical superpower of Eurasia, with lasting effects into the present. The book focuses first on the spread of Buddhism, which from a marginal Indian sect in due course became central to Chinese, Japanese and Korean culture, as well as flourishing elsewhere in the region. It then traces the extraordinary adoption of Hindu and Sanskrit culture by rulers across south-east Asia who were swayed by the prestige of these Indian modes of thought and life.... Finally, The Golden Road tells the gripping story of how fundamental astronomical and mathematical tools such as our modern number symbols, the decimal system, algebra, trigonometry and the algorithm were developed in India and spread across the world and, along with the Indian game of chess, eventually reached the backward cultures of Christian Europe."

In the face of grief, it’s hard to find the right words to say. What matters is that you keep trying – article by Ranjana Srivastana in The Guardian. “As I grow older, so grows the number of my friends experiencing their first ‘real‘ grief. The loss of a parent heads that list, a loss so hard-hitting that it’s impossible to describe its manifest implications. After [the] funeral [of a friend’s mother, who died suddenly], I text a tentative, ’How are you?’ ‘OK,’ she says. It’s the text equivalent of a shrug. I wish I had a better question. The next day, I ask if there is anything I can do – even though I tell other people this is one of the worst ways to ‘help‘. I promise to let you know, she replies, in the way of every polite, overwhelmed person. I yearn to do better.…I can’t help thinking that my good intention runs deep but my words keep missing the mark. Still, I want to obey the first commandment of friendship: showing up. I remember reading a paper about the surprising value of even a brief check-in with one’s friends: ‘We document a robust underestimation of how much other people appreciate being reached out to.’ In other words, people who initiated even brief and casual check-ins with their friends underestimated how much the friends appreciated hearing from them. Now I decide to take the same approach with my grieving friend. Instead of quietly receding and waiting for her to engage with me, I text a short message most days. You’re in my thoughts. What prayers will you do today? It must be difficult talking to so many people. Are you getting some sleep? The individual messages feel a little lame but I keep hoping that their sum will amount to an embrace.”

The big idea: how the ‘protege effect’ can help you learn almost anything – article by David Robson in The Guardian. "Over breakfast this morning, I enjoyed a short chat with Mia, my new Spanish study buddy. I went over some of the stuff from my recent lesson and explained what I have learned about the psychology of happiness from a Spanish-language podcast. By the end of the 10-minute conversation, I felt that I had embedded more of the vocabulary, grammar and turns of phrase than if I’d done an hour of textbook exercises. Mia, however, does not exist in real life: they are an AI that I created to take advantage of a phenomenon called the 'protege effect'. According to a wealth of psychological research, we learn more effectively when we teach someone else about the topic we’ve just explored – even if that person doesn’t really exist. There are few shortcuts to mastery, but the protege effect appears to be one of the most effective ways of accelerating our knowledge and understanding. The principle of 'learning by teaching' was pioneered in the early 1980s by Jean-Pol Martin, a French teacher in Eichstätt, Germany who wished to improve his students’ experiences of learning a new language by allowing the teens themselves to research and present different parts of the curriculum to their classmates. ... Learning through teaching was relatively slow to catch on elsewhere, until a group of scientists at Stanford University began to test the idea scientifically. In one of the first experiments, Catherine Chase and colleagues recruited 62 eighth-graders from the San Francisco Bay Area, who were tasked with using a computer program to study the biological changes that occur when we get a fever. Over two lessons, they had to read a text and then create an on-screen flowchart illustrating the different processes and the relationships between them. For half the teens, the exercise was presented as a form of self-study. The others were told that their diagram would help to teach a virtual character, who appeared as a cartoon on the screen.... At the end of two 50-minute classes, the participants who had been assigned the role of teacher had learned considerably more of the material, with much stronger performance on test questions. Intriguingly, the improvements were particularly marked for the least able students; they performed at the same level as the highest achievers in the control group. Chases’s team named this the protege effect, and it has since been replicated many times. These later studies suggest that learning by teaching is more powerful than other mnemonic techniques such as self-testing or mind mapping. The brain boost appears to arise as much from the expectation of teaching as the act itself. If we know that others are going to learn from us, we feel a sense of responsibility to provide the right information, so we make a greater effort to fill in the gaps in our understanding and correct any mistaken assumptions before we pass those errors on to others. Articulating our knowledge then helps to cement what we have learned."

Wikipedia is facing an existential crisis. Can gen Z save it? – article by Stephen Harrison in The Guardian. "Content from the free internet encyclopedia appears in everything from high-school term papers and pub trivia questions to search engine summaries and voice assistants. Tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT rely heavily on Wikipedia, although they rarely credit the site in their responses. And therein lies the problem: as Wikipedia’s visibility diminishes, reduced to mere training data for AI applications, it also loses prominence in the minds of readers and potential contributors.... At last month’s annual Wikimania conference ... many of the speakers highlighted how Wikipedia faces an existential threat of fading into obscurity or disrepair. But there was also talk of a solution that may help secure Wikipedia’s future, or at least prevent its premature demise: recruiting more younger editors from generation Z and raising their awareness of how widely Wikipedia content is used across the internet.... As a tech writer, and in my research of Wikipedia for my novel The Editors, I have often heard the same handful of issues that dissuade the younger generation from joining the cause. First and foremost, the smartphone is gen Z’s preferred internet access device, but it’s not an easy tool for editing Wikipedia. Even the savviest digital natives find it frustrating to edit the encyclopedia with a small screen.... Another obstacle to attracting gen Z contributors is that today’s Wikipedia is simply more established.... It’s harder for new editors to find their way in. Previous generations often began by making small edits, like fixing typos or spotting vandalism, but nowadays many of these tasks are handled by automated tools. Without clear entry points, new editors may dive into editing more contentious articles, where a single misstep could trigger harsh feedback.... While the different generations may eventually find common ground, the future relationship between human editors and AI remains uncertain. Will AI eventually replace human volunteers? Let’s hope not. Compiling an encyclopedia requires making judgments that are best understood by humans, who know the social context."

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman: time to relax – review by Simon Usborne in The Guardian. "I have always resisted anything that smells a bit self-helpy. Perhaps it’s because I’m pretty content with my pretty average, relatively low-stress life, where days seized and squandered pass in fairly equal number, attended by tides of frustration or mild satisfaction. Thankfully, as readers of Oliver Burkeman’s old Guardian column already know, he’s a self-help sceptic, too. He doesn’t trade in magic bullets or revelatory hacks. Indeed, he rejects the premise that life can be somehow mastered and the implication that, until we manage get to that point, we’re still half-formed. Floundering is living, too, Burkeman explains. And if there is any key to success, it’s giving up altogether the quest for super-productivity and rejecting the nagging impulse to get on top of things. Instead, we’d all be happier and more productive if we did what we could – and no more – while embracing our imperfections. Now that’s the kind of pep talk I can get on board with. Meditation for Mortals follows the bestselling Four Thousand Weeks, in which Burkeman sought to realign our relationship with time and what we might do with it. The new book is thematically similar but more snackable, which is perfect for those of us whose imperfections include attention issues. Its 28 short chapters are meant to be read daily as a month-long 'retreat of the mind', but are just as illuminating if you use a dip-in, dip-out approach."

The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke: a doctor’s remarkable account of an organ transplant – review by Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. "In 2017, a nine-year-old girl from Devon was involved in a car crash that left her with a catastrophic brain injury.... As Keira lay in intensive care, a young boy from Cheshire was on his eighth month in hospital with a dangerously enlarged heart.... In The Story of a Heart, Dr Rachel Clarke writes about the feat of modern medicine that allowed Keira to give life to Max by donating her heart. As the author of Dear Life, about the reality of end-of-life care, and Breathtaking, an account of the Covid crisis (later adapted for TV by Line of Duty’s Jed Mercurio), Clarke has made her name telling tough medical stories in a way that is accessible and humane. As well as a tender account of two families linked by tragic circumstances, and the transfer of a human organ from one body to another, The Story of a Heart provides a detailed map of the surgical innovations, people and logistics that allowed that transplant to happen.... As she traces the complex medical journeys of Keira and Max, Clarke takes regular detours into the lives of those looking after them – the book features a lengthy cast of paramedics, ICU staff, anaesthetists and surgeons – as well as the scientific discoveries that inform their treatment.... There are moments, within this intricate tapestry, where Clarke’s evocative, empathetic writing makes you catch your breath. Taking in the spectacle of drivers in gridlocked traffic miraculously making way for an ambulance, she reflects on the unspoken knowledge 'that nothing more substantial than the whisper of fate keeps the people they love from the horror of such a blue-lit dash, the vehicle emblazoned with the cruellest combination of words: children’s intensive care ambulance'."

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers: a riveting rollercoaster ride from Arles to the stars – review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "Neither The Poet nor The Lover, whose portraits open this heart-stopping Van Gogh exhibition, were quite what they seem. The Lover’s eyes gazes dreamily from a face of blue-green tints, wearing a red cap flaming against an emerald sky, in which a gold moon and star twinkle. In reality, he was an army officer called Paul-Eugène Milliet, whose affairs were less ethereal than the painting suggests. 'He has all the Arles women he wants,' wrote Van Gogh enviously. The Poet’s face, meanwhile, is anxious and gaunt, its ugliness badly hidden by a thin beard, as the night around him bursts into starshine. He was a Belgian painter called Eugène Boch whose work Van Gogh thought so-so. But beggars can’t be choosers. They were among the few friends Van Gogh had in Arles, after he arrived in February 1888 to renew himself. Why does this exhibition start with these two paintings, instead of the blossoming trees or golden fields he painted that spring? The answer lies in the portraits’ very lack of prosaic fact. Van Gogh is an artist we’re still catching up with.... The Van Gogh this great show explores, with moving and addictive aplomb, is barely an observer at all. He transfigures what he sees. It starts with those portraits of ordinary blokes in whom he sees eternal romance and poetry, proof of how utterly he remade the world around him. This is a journey not to the actual town of Arles, where if you go looking for The Yellow House you’ll find just a plaque, but the Provence in Van Gogh’s mind – or, I want to say, his soul."

Solved: the mystery of how Victorians built Crystal Palace in just 190 days – article by Donna Ferguson in The Guardian. "Experts have discovered that the answer to this 173-year-old riddle lies in the first known use of standardised nuts and bolts in construction – a humble engineering innovation that would power the British empire and revolutionise the industrial world. Measuring a colossal 92,000 sq metres, the groundbreaking iron and glass structure of the Crystal Palace was built in just 190 days to house the 14,000 exhibitors taking part in the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, in Hyde Park, London. Newly analysed evidence suggests the pioneering building could not have been built without cutting-edge Victorian technology: interchangeable nuts and bolts that were made on machines to match one standardised size across the industry. Prior to this, skilled craftsmen would typically make each individual nut and bolt bespoke and ensure they fitted together. Since no two screws were necessarily alike, it was almost impossible to replace one that got lost or broken, causing “endless trouble” for contemporary engineers and ensuring big construction projects relied primarily on bricks and mortar.Prof John Gardner, of Anglia Ruskin University,... approached the Crystal Palace Museum, which houses the remnants of the building, to get hold of some of the original nuts and bolts and analyse them ... and discovered they were all standardised.... 'They were using a standard that had been suggested by Joseph Whitworth 10 years before, in 1841, but wasn’t adopted as a British standard until 1905. That was an absolutely groundbreaking decision by Fox Henderson [the construction firm that built the palace], because it meant you could have a nut made in one workshop and a bolt made in another – and they could fit together.'”

Mother State by Helen Charman; What Are Children For? by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman: the body political – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "'Motherhood is a political state,' declares the poet and Cambridge academic Helen Charman at the beginning of Mother State, her provocative and wide-ranging study of 'motherhood' in all its iterations, and its relationship to the wider social context in Britain and Northern Ireland over the past 50 years.... She revisits the heyday of the 1980s women’s peace camps at Greenham Common, and shows that, even at the time, feminists were arguing over the centring of maternal anxiety as a driver for anti-nuclear activism. Another chapter, titled Mother Ireland, looks at the history of women’s involvement in Northern Irish political struggles since the 1970s, on either side of the divide, and how mothers, as both combatants and peacemakers, were also battling 'the gendered expectations of their own communities'.... The ambivalence over biological motherhood among many millennial women that Charman touches on is at the heart of What Are Children For?, co-authored by US journalists Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman and prompted by their frequent conversations on their own uncertainty. They, too, acknowledge the explicitly political nature of the issue; since the repeal of Roe v Wade, the lack of access to safe abortion in many US states means that pregnancy is potentially a life-threatening condition, creating a further deterrent on top of the obvious material factors of cost-of-living and career disruption. They are also conscious that the topic of declining fertility rates 'has been so thoroughly co-opted by the far right' that many feminists are loath to tackle it, choosing instead to see falling birthrates as a sign of positive social change.... So many of the issues covered in both these books were subjects of fierce debate when I became a mother 22 years ago. The fact that women are still fighting the same battles is a wearying reminder of how contingent any victories have been, and how essential it is to keep expanding these conversations because, as all the writers point out, finding better solutions should not be the sole responsibility of women."

‘Many people would throw a tantrum at this point’: An Israeli and a Palestinian discuss 7 October, Gaza, and the future – edited dialogues between Orla (Israeli) and Christine (Palestinian) in The Guardian. Both living in New York, they met on the docuseries Couples Therapy, in which Orna was the couples therapist and Christine one of the participants. "Orna: As a couples therapist, I typically sit as the person outside of a conflict, and I can almost always tune in to each person and understand why they’re feeling the way they’re feeling.... That business of getting out of your own perspective, holding it lightly and understanding another perspective – I believe in that. When it comes to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, that’s what I have always tried to do. One of the shocking things that happened to me on 7 October, and I think to many people, is that I temporarily lost that ability. When I first heard about what Hamas did, and heard from friends in Israel about what they were going through, I was just like: 'Oh, I had it wrong. Maybe I was just a fool all along, and those extreme rightwingers actually had it right.' My whole internal system of making sense of the conflict in the Middle East collapsed. I lost my ethics. I lost my purpose. I lost my belief.... As I started reading what Israel began doing in Gaza, Israeli narratives were being spun to justify its war machine as if this was the only response imaginable. Once Israel unleashed the IDF on Gaza, I could no longer hold on to this idea that Israel was just a victim, because it was not just a victim. And ever since, I’ve gradually lost my identification with much of the Israeli narrative about itself, which is a very complicated place to be. I feel endless grief about Israel, what Israel was and what I understand it to be now. It’s probably my deepest source of grief."... "Christine: I want you to see what I see; to put yourself in the shoes of Palestinians as it relates to the type of daily violence that we are being subjected to and have been subjected to long before 7 October. You’ve changed my mind about there being different kinds of violence, but I have a hard time condemning Palestinian resistance. .... I think what is difficult to ascertain is how the Palestinians would react if we were free, because ever since Israel was created, we’ve been subjugated by systems of oppression. I struggle with the question of trying to blame Palestinians. I do agree that if we had leadership that could unify the Palestinian people and come to some sort of negotiations that didn’t require unilateral concessions on the part of Palestinians who have already lost so much, of course, that would be wonderful. However, many of our best leaders have been imprisoned or assassinated by Israel." ... "Orna: Palestine and the occupation is one thing, and then there are the surrounding Arab countries, and their absolute disgust at having a western Israeli Jewish state there. Their war is not your war. Their war is a war against the invasion of a different kind of culture into the region." "Christine: I guess what I want to clarify is that the Arab world attacking Israel has less to do with the fact that Israel is Jewish and more to do with the fact that it was perceived as a colonising power. Many of the people who are the founders of modern political Zionism and contributed to the creation of the state of Israel called it a colonial project." "Orna: We can debate different versions of why the Arab world is at war with Israel. But the wars are the reason Israel needs an army – it wouldn’t have survived for a second without one. The issue for the Arab world is not this tiny piece of land. It is the presence of a very small group of people that represent the west and its differing economic, political and social systems."

Hilary Mantel was my mentor. Here are seven things she taught me about writing, and life – article by Katie Ward in The Guardian. "In 2007 I was an aspiring young novelist with a manuscript that had been rejected by 43 literary agents.... At the time Hilary was a well-established author of fiction and memoir. But this was two years before Wolf Hall was published and the stellar success that was to follow.... To me, Hilary was a calm voice at the end of an email, patiently telling me what I needed to hear. She became a beloved friend who I stayed in touch with for 15 years and saw occasionally in person. I treasured every moment I spent with her, always trying to absorb her wisdom between fits of giggles. On Sunday 22 September it will be the autumnal equinox, and the second anniversary of Hilary’s death. While darkness and daylight are briefly balanced, here are the things I learned from her. (1) Know how your story ends and write towards it.... (2) Write every day.... (3) Greatness and gentleness are possible.... (4) Back yourself.... (5) The quality of writing matters more than quantity.... (6) We don’t reproduce the past, we create it.... (7) Our best ideas have a timeline of their own...."

My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir by Sarah Moss: an interrogation of an eating disorder – review by Ellen Pierson-Hagger in The Guardian. "Sarah Moss’s memoir, the story of how her upbringing developed in her a lifelong, destructive relationship to food, is full of daring. It is a complicated tale and her telling is many-sided, as full of devastation as it is wisdom.... The author, an academic, is best known for her novels (most recently The Fell), in which she variously dissects the climate emergency and Britishness after Brexit. Here she continues to write with wit about humans’ relationship to the natural world.... A tension is evident from the first few pages. After a section of Moss’s second-person narrative (she addresses herself as 'you' for the bulk of the book), another, italicised voice appears, contradicting her, telling her to 'shut up, no one cares', accusing her of lying. This is the niggling voice in the back of your head, the one that makes you doubt what you know to be true. Its presence is felt throughout."

On Freedom by Timothy Snyder: an essential manifesto for change – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "In the years since the 2016 US presidential election there has been no more significant critic of the advance of Trump’s form of nihilism than Timothy Snyder. The Yale history professor effectively took a sabbatical from his day job in 2017 to write On Tyranny, a series of 20 lessons derived from his close study of totalitarian regimes in Europe in the last century and how they might apply to the US in this one. He followed that book, in 2018, with The Road to Unfreedom, an illuminating and disturbing account of the ways in which Vladimir Putin’s war on truth was being seeded as a global virus, promoted by the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley, and amplified by the self-serving populists in the White House and Downing Street and elsewhere.... On Freedom is a companion volume to those earlier books, penetrating in its analysis of our current crises – of information and climate and civil society – and clear in its prescriptions for change. In it, Snyder reclaims several words that have been co-opted by the so-called libertarians of the right, not least his titular subject, which here becomes defined not as a negative – as in 'freedom from' regulation, or from the demands of fact, or from social obligation – but as an active, physical demand.... It has been Snyder’s developing contention as a writer that the body is where we site our opposition to the dehumanising advance of 'screen culture'; he has encouraged a vigorous 'corporeal politics', voting with paper ballots that can be counted and recounted; eye-to-eye interaction, rather than social media; marching and debating, not online likes and anonymous snark.'Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on a screen,' he wrote in 2017. 'Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.'"

Occult? Try upstairs! Inside the world’s weirdest library, now open to the public – article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. "'We are essentially devoted to the study of what you would now call memes,' says Bill Sherman, director of the Warburg [Institute, London]. To clarify, the institute is not a repository of Lolcats and Doges, but of global cultural history and the role of images in society, with a dazzling collection ranging from 15th-century books on Islamic astronomy, to tomes on comets and divination, not to mention original paintings used for tarot cards (about which a show opens here in January). At least half of the books can’t be found in any other library in the country.... The institute was founded in Hamburg at the turn of the 20th century by pioneering German art historian Aby Warburg, whose work focused on tracing the roots of the Renaissance in ancient civilisations, mapping out how images are transmitted across time and space.... It has been an essential resource for artists and scholars for decades, but few outside the rarefied ranks of researchers knew the Warburg was there.... [Now,] where once visitors were greeted with an off-putting glass screen and security desk, a new welcoming entrance leads you through to the gallery, where an opening exhibition charts the journey of the institute, alongside artist Edmund de Waal’s Library of Exile of books by exiled authors. Windows from the entrance foyer provide views down into the new archive reading room – giving a glimpse of the previously hidden inner workings of the institute – and across to the auditorium, which appears to float in the white-tiled courtyard, illuminated by light-wells either side.... The expansion has also enabled the full reinstatement of Warburg’s unique cataloguing system, with four floors each dedicated to Image, Word, Orientation and Action – 'uniting the various branches of the history of human civilisation,' as his close collaborator, Fritz Saxl, put it, breaking culture free from the confines of its usual disciplinary silos. There are few other libraries in the world where you might open a drawer of photographs marked Gestures, to find thematic folders labelled Fleeing, Flying, Falling, along with Denudation of breast, Grasping the victim’s head, and Garment raised to eyes (Grief). Warburg’s unusual system might not have caught on elsewhere, but it still provides a powerful way for artists, writers and researchers to make unexpected connections and pursue fertile tangents – preceding our world of swiping through hashtags, links and recommended feeds by a century."

The Wild Robot: heartfelt animated adventure is a soaring success – review by Adrian Horton in The Guardian. "The titular robot here is Rozzum Unit 7134, assumedly a Silicon Valley invention, if Silicon Valley tried to update the Jetsons’ household assistant, whose delivery is foiled by a typhoon. Instead, she washes ashore on a remote Pacific north-west-esque isle. The robot, convincingly voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, has the flat affect of Amazon’s Alexa and the purely task-oriented mindset of programming, plus enough of a hint of confused yearning to immediately root for her. For The Wild Robot, written and directed by Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) performs a sly, absorbing and extremely effective sleight of hand: the more time we spend with the robot – the more its programming trains on new input, to use the parlance of generative AI – the more it underscores the deep, inarticulable and sacred wells of human feelings, the exact things that cannot be programmed or manufactured. That this film, based on the book series by Peter Brown, does so while also being a highly enjoyable and lusciously detailed story about a misfit, amid a community of charismatic woodland creatures, makes it one of the best animated films of the year, rightfully considered the frontrunner for an Oscar."

‘Everyone is thinking at the same time’: how Codenames became the board game of the decade – article by Charis McGowan in The Guardian. "My mother and I, like millions of other people across the world, have become addicted to Codenames, the biggest breakthrough board game of the past 10 years. The game has been likened to a crossover between charades and Battleship: two teams face each other over a grid of cards, each of them displaying a single word. Only the “spymasters” on each team know which of these cards represent secret agents, but to help their teammates expose them quicker than their rivals, they are only allowed to give one-word clues. The best players are able to come up with word associations that connect two, three, four or even more cards at a single stroke. Teammates with an instinctive understanding of the lateral connections in each others’ minds tend to do particularly well at this: couples, siblings and best-friend teams have a natural advantage. But when the hints fail to register, like [sometimes between him and his mother], the mutual incomprehension can feel existential. I’ve heard people say it’s a great date game to suss out potential partners who really get you (and put a red flag on those who don’t)."

Social workers in England begin using AI system to assist their work – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. "Hundreds of social workers in England have begun using an artificial intelligence system that records conversations, drafts letters to doctors and proposes actions that human workers might not have considered. Councils in Swindon, Barnet and Kingston are among seven now using the AI tool that sits on social workers’ phones to record and analyse face-to-face meetings. The Magic Notes AI tool writes almost instant summaries and suggests follow-up actions, including drafting letters to GPs. Two dozen more councils have or are piloting it. By cutting the time social workers spend taking notes and filling out reports, the tool has the potential to save up to £2bn a year, claims Beam, the company behind the system that has recruited staff from Meta and Microsoft. But the technology is also likely to raise concerns about how busy social workers weigh up actions proposed by the AI system, and how they decide whether to ignore a proposed action.... One pilot council said it needed greater reassurance that the AI tool was accurately summarising meetings before notes went on file about potentially life-changing choices."

Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation by Danny Dorling: essential reading – review by Kate Womersley in The Guardian. "Inspired by the 1964 documentary Seven Up!, which followed 14 children born in 1957, Dorling’s book enters the private worlds of seven typical five-year-olds – born in the autumn of 2018 – who represent today’s spread of family income in the UK. These range from 'Monday’s child' Anna, an average representative of the bottom 14% of children who has 'less than a large posh coffee' spent on her needs weekly, via 'Thursday’s child' David, whose dad incessantly worries about his insecure income, to 'Sunday’s child' Gemma, daughter of successful corner shop owners yet her father feels the pinch and is flirting with far-right ideas. As a group, children entering primary school in the UK – for whom the most significant ABCs are austerity, Brexit and Covid-19 – have never had it so bad. Not since the Great Depression has the UK been so unequal, home as it now is to the greatest concentration of poor children in Europe. Rather than wealth, Dorling focuses on weekly disposable income after housing costs, as accommodation is a non-negotiable outgoing and a much greater percentage of income at the bottom of society than at the top. While Seven Up! chose to highlight extreme lives rather than averages across society, Dorling shows how the UK has been 'stretched apart' and, moreover, how inequality is starkest for families with young children. He has constructed his seven characters through thousands of data points; they are highly factual fictions. He cleaves to his theme on economic income, explaining that 'none of the eight "protected characteristics" enshrined in UK law matter even a fraction as much as income and wealth' when it comes to inequality: whether or not you can afford a winter coat, internet access, heating, holidays, a new kettle if the old one breaks, or a school friend over for tea are what segregates us. Through these windows on each child’s life, Dorling exposes how financial inequity affects housing, education, health, employment, tech access, social care, rent and food. The stress for families of securing these necessities hums through the chapters."