Cuttings: April 2024

The State of the Culture 2024 – blog post by Ted Gioia, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “We’re witnessing the birth of a post-entertainment culture. And it won’t help the arts. In fact, it won’t help society at all.… The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity…. This is more than just the hot trend of 2024. It can last forever—because it’s based on body chemistry, not fashion or aesthetics. Our brain rewards these brief bursts of distraction. The neurochemical dopamine is released, and this makes us feel good—so we want to repeat the stimulus…. So you need to ditch that simple model of art versus entertainment. And even ‘distraction’ is just a stepping stone toward the real goal nowadays—which is addiction.… The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers.“

The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’ – article by Alex Blasdel in The Guardian. "Perhaps the story to be written about near-death experiences is not that they prove consciousness is radically different from what we thought it was. Instead, it is that the process of dying is far stranger than scientists ever suspected. The spiritualists and parapsychologists are right to insist that something deeply weird is happening to people when they die, but they are wrong to assume it is happening in the next life rather than this one. At least, that is the implication of what Jimo Borjigin found when she investigated the case of Patient One. In the moments after Patient One was taken off oxygen, there was a surge of activity in her dying brain. Areas that had been nearly silent while she was on life support suddenly thrummed with high-frequency electrical signals called gamma waves. In particular, the parts of the brain that scientists consider a 'hot zone' for consciousness became dramatically alive.... Areas of her brain associated with processing conscious experience – areas that are active when we move through the waking world, and when we have vivid dreams – were communicating with those involved in memory formation. So were parts of the brain associated with empathy. Even as she slipped irrevocably deeper into death, something that looked astonishingly like life was taking place over several minutes in Patient One’s brain.... 'The brain, contrary to everybody’s belief, is actually super active during cardiac arrest,' Borjigin said. Death may be far more alive than we ever thought possible."

Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? – article from 2015 by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "There was only one truly hard problem of consciousness, [David] Chalmers said [in a conference paper in 1994]. It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it?... Chalmers’s 'zombie' thought experiment is his attempt to show why the mechanical account is not enough – why the mystery of conscious awareness goes deeper than a purely material science can explain.... Imagine that you have a doppelgänger. This person physically resembles you in every respect, and behaves identically to you; he or she holds conversations, eats and sleeps, looks happy or anxious precisely as you do. The sole difference is that the doppelgänger has no consciousness; this ... is what philosophers mean by a 'zombie'.... And the fact that one can even imagine this scenario is sufficient to show that consciousness can’t just be made of ordinary physical atoms. So consciousness must, somehow, be something extra – an additional ingredient in nature... Not everybody agrees there is a Hard Problem to begin with... Daniel Dennett, the high-profile atheist and professor at Tufts University outside Boston, argues that consciousness, as we think of it, is an illusion: there just isn’t anything in addition to the spongy stuff of the brain, and that spongy stuff doesn’t actually give rise to something called consciousness.... Consciousness, according to Dennett’s theory, is like a conjuring trick: the normal functioning of the brain just makes it look as if there is something non-physical going on. To look for a real, substantive thing called consciousness, Dennett argues, is as silly as insisting that characters in novels, such as Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter, must be made up of a peculiar substance named 'fictoplasm'; the idea is absurd and unnecessary, since the characters do not exist to begin with. This is the point at which the debate tends to collapse into incredulous laughter and head-shaking: neither camp can quite believe what the other is saying."

Why I wrote an AI transparency statement for my book, and think other authors should too – article by Kester Brewin in The Guardian. "‘Where do you get the time?' For many years, when I’d announce to friends that I had another book coming out, I’d take responses like this as a badge of pride. These past few months, while publicising my new book about AI, God-Like, I’ve tried not to hear in those same words an undertone of accusation: 'Where do you get the time?" Meaning, you must have had help from ChatGPT, right?... This was why, having finished the book [on the impact of AI on the UK labour market], I decided that my friends were right: I did need to face the inevitable question head-on and offer full disclosure. I needed an AI transparency statement, to be printed at the start of my book.... I decided on four dimensions that needed covering. First, has any text been generated using AI? Second, has any text been improved using AI? This might include an AI system like Grammarly offering suggestions to reorder sentences or words to increase a clarity score. Third, has any text been suggested using AI? This might include asking ChatGPT for an outline, or having the next paragraph drafted based on previous text. Fourth, has the text been corrected using AI and – if so – have suggestions for spelling and grammar been accepted or rejected based on human discretion? For my own book, the answers were 1: No, 2: No, 3: No and 4: Yes – but with manual decisions about which spelling and grammar changes to accept or reject. Imperfect, I’m sure, but I offer my four-part statement as something to be built on and improved, perhaps towards a Creative Commons-style standard."

Does Counter-Terrorism Work? by Richard English: a thoughtful and authoritative analysis – review by Ian Cobain in The Guardian. "Richard English, the author of Does Counter-Terrorism Work?, is a professor of political history at Queen’s University Belfast, and has dedicated decades to the analysis of terrorism and to governments’ efforts to overcome it. Given that the choices made in counter-terrorism policy impact directly upon each of us every day, it is a vitally important area of study.... English believes that post-9/11 counter-terrorism was far too short-termist, that the histories of Afghanistan and Iraq were 'substantially ignored in a disgraceful fashion' and that the US became overly impressed with its own early military successes in both countries.... He cautions that very few counter-terrorism campaigns will ever achieve complete strategic success. Unconvinced by those who claim bullishly that the Provisional IRA was 'defeated', he argues persuasively that the republican movement’s sustainable campaign of violence was suspended only because its pragmatic leaders decided that they might more likely achieve their objective – a united Ireland – by peaceful means. Equally, he is sceptical of those among his fellow academics who argue that counter-terrorism operations will inevitably promote terrorism.... English judges that if any counter-terrorism campaign is to achieve even partial strategic victory, it must be conducted in a patient, well-resourced manner, with clear objectives. Given that terrorists often seek to provoke outrage and overreaction, the public should be encouraged to be realistic about the limits to what can be accomplished. He also concludes that to avoid failure, counter-terrorist efforts must be integrated into broader political initiatives: 'We should not mistake the terrorist symptom for the more profound issues that are at stake.'”

Shakespeare’s Sisters by Ramie Targoff: four women who wrote the Renaissance – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "Virginia Woolf, in her seminal essay A Room of One’s Own, famously asserted that any hypothetical sister of William Shakespeare would have had her literary gifts thwarted from the outset, thanks to the restrictions on women’s education in the Elizabethan age, not to mention the burdens of motherhood and domestic drudgery. In the last few decades, the field of feminist literary and historical studies has vastly expanded, holding up to the light those female writers who, despite Woolf’s dismissal, did exist and create in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Ramie Targoff... sets out to examine the life and work of four of the most prominent in Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance. One is the prolific diarist Anne Clifford, who ... in Targoff’s account ... emerges as determined and independent minded, her writing offering a vivid account of her personal battle to assert her rights after she was disinherited from her father’s estate. Targoff’s other three subjects are equally fascinating. There’s Mary Sidney, sister of the poet Sir Philip and later Countess of Pembroke, whose translations of the Psalms were praised by her male contemporaries, including John Donne; Aemilia Lanyer, daughter of an Italian (possibly Jewish) immigrant musician, whose name may be more familiar since Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s 2018 hit play Emilia brought her to a new audience; and Elizabeth Cary, a child prodigy who went on to become the author of the first published play by a woman in English, despite having 11 children. These women and their writings are not unknown, but to see their individual and occasionally interwoven stories set out side by side is to understand with greater clarity that, while Woolf was not wrong about the obstacles faced by female writers, she was mistaken about the quality and reception of their work."

Michael Palin on the loss of his wife of 57 years: ‘I’d love Helen to still be here, telling me off’ – interview by Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian. "Helen died at the Marie Curie Hospice in Hampstead, north London, last May. Palin says the final couple of weeks, with their three children there, too, could not have been happier. 'Just before she died, when she knew she was going to die, were actually some of the best times we’ve had. I was prepared for it. Helen had taken the decision that she wasn’t going to carry on having dialysis. She was amazingly well looked after, and all the family were there. And that was the payoff for all those years, those 60 years.' He talks so tenderly about Helen and the end of her life. Then he comes to an abrupt stop, as if clicked out of hypnosis. 'Sorry, I’m waffling,' he says. No you’re not, I say. I ask what he means by the payoff. 'Well, because we’d spent so long together, we knew each other pretty well.' He pauses. Even he knows this is an understatement too far. 'Very, very well. It didn’t all have to be stated why we’d like this or that. We didn’t have to say a lot. It was just there. So knowing that she had two weeks to live, somehow everything that had been part of our relationship made it much easier to deal with her departure.'”

‘Children are being used as a football’: Hilary Cass on her review of gender identity services – interview by Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. "In the autumn of 2019, leading consultant paediatrician Hilary Cass agreed to conduct a review of international research into puberty blockers for NHS England.... The work has ...placed her at the vortex of a debate she describes as toxic, politicised and ideological.... The scope of her review is huge; she has set out to review all the available evidence on which gender medicine has been based globally, as well as trying to answer the puzzling question of why the numbers of children seeking referrals to gender clinics in the UK and in other developed countries began an exponential rise in around 2014, and why so many more girls began seeking treatment.... 'The toxicity of the debate has been so great that people have become afraid to work in this area.' Medical professionals experienced a sense of fear 'of being called transphobic if you take a more cautious approach', she said. Others were worried that they might be accused of conducting 'conversion therapy if, again, they take a cautious or exploratory approach'.... The consequence of this rising nervousness among clinicians over the past 15 years has been that many children exploring their gender (which Cass describes as 'a normal process' in adolescence, not necessarily requiring any NHS input) have been prematurely diverted towards chronically oversubscribed specialist clinics, and left sitting on waiting lists for years, without any support. 'There are many more young people now who question their gender; what’s really important is they have a space to be able to talk to somebody about that and to work that through.'... Cass believes that for a minority of young people medical transition will be the right option, but she is clear that there is no solid evidence basis justifying the use of hormones for children and adolescents. Her earlier research has led to a decision by NHS England to stop prescribing puberty blockers to children and the new research recommends 'extreme caution' before prescribing masculinising and feminising hormones to under-18s. 'We’ve got it locked into this focus on medical interventions. And certainly some of the young adults said to us, they wish they’d known when they were younger, that there were more ways of being trans than just a binary medical transition,' she said."

‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine – article by Rashid Khalidi in The Guardian. "While much has changeda in the past six months, the horrors we witness can only be truly comprehended as a cataclysmic new phase in a war that has been going on for several generations. This is the thesis of my book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: that events in Palestine since 1917 resulted from a multi-stage war waged on the indigenous Palestinian population by great power patrons of the Zionist movement – a movement that was both settler colonialist and nationalist, and which aimed to replace the Palestinian people in their ancestral homeland. These powers later allied with the Israeli nation-state that grew out of that movement. Throughout this long war, the Palestinians have fiercely resisted the usurpation of their country. This framework is indispensable in explaining not only the history of the past century and more, but also the brutality that we have witnessed since 7 October. Seen in this light, it is clear that this is not an age-old struggle between Arabs and Jews that has been going on since time immemorial, and it is not simply a conflict between two peoples. It is a recent product of the irruption of imperialism into the Middle East and of the rise of modern nation-state nationalisms, both Arab and Jewish; it is a product of the violent European settler-colonial methods employed by Zionism to 'transform Palestine into the land of Israel', in the words of an early Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky; and it is a product of Palestinian resistance to these methods. Moreover, this war has never been one just between Zionism and Israel on one side and the Palestinians on the other, occasionally supported by Arab and other actors. It has always involved the massive intervention of the greatest powers of the age on the side of the Zionist movement and Israel: Britain until the second world war, and the US and others since then. These great powers were never neutral or honest brokers, but have always been active participants in this war in support of Israel. In this war between coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed, there has been nothing remotely approaching equivalence between the two sides, but instead a vast imbalance in favour of Zionism and Israel."

An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi: an insider’s take – review by Simukai Chigudu in The Guardian. "There is no shortage of big tomes about Africa written by old Africa hands – those white journalists, memoirists, travel writers or novelists who know Africa better than Africans. This genre, lampooned by Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay How to Write About Africa, weaves together stories that exalt the continent’s landscape but decry its politics, that revere its wildlife but patronise its people, that use words such as 'timeless', 'primordial' and 'tribal' when explaining Africa’s historical trajectories. Zeinab Badawi’s An African History of Africa is a corrective to these narratives. Ambitious in scope and refreshing in perspective, the book stretches from the origins of Homo sapiens in east Africa through to the end of apartheid in South Africa. It is informed by interviews Badawi conducted with African scholars and cultural custodians, whose expertise, observations and wisdom are threaded through the book.... This, her first book, emerged from a nine-part documentary series for BBC World News.... She recounts the epic ruling lineages and dynastic rivalries of north Africa, centuries before the birth of Christ; the fraught expansion and syncretic incorporation of the Abrahamic faiths into the social fabric of the horn of Africa; the rise of the west African kingdoms that powered the global economy when Europe was reeling from the Black Death in the late middle ages; the underappreciated accomplishments of African world-building as memorialised in the majestic stone ruins of southern Africa’s hinterlands. She pays assiduous attention to gender throughout, often pointing out the overlooked ways women have shaped the world around them. She slips into the present tense when discussing the imprint of slavery and colonialism on Africa’s development and on contemporary debates about how we reckon with the past."

Reading Lessons by Carol Atherton: breathing new life into old texts – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "For the past 25 years [Carol Atherton] has taught both GCSE and A-level in state secondary schools in Lincolnshire. Now, in a dozen carefully prepared 'reading lessons', she demonstrates how a generous and attentive teacher is able to wrestle meaning and relevance from old warhorses such as An Inspector Calls and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.... Throughout Reading Lessons, Atherton weaves incidents from her own young life to explain why a career in teaching remains, for her, the highest good. From a northern working-class family, she got into Oxford and did PhD research on the development of English literature as an academic subject. All of which might make her seem overqualified for her present position. That, at least, is how it seems to her pupils who, heads full of which jobs pay best, ask wonderingly: 'Miss, why are you just a teacher?' The question is entirely reasonable coming from a generation that has been told that education is a purely transactional business. Atherton’s broader response is simply that nothing is more valuable than teaching a subject that encourages young minds to push beyond the confines created by the algorithms of social media, which is where her pupils live when they are not underlining bits of text in coloured Biro. Unlike any Stem subject,'doing English' requires young readers to enter imaginatively into the lives of others. And that, for 'Miss', remains the greatest transferable skill of all."

How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English – Techscape newsletter by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "If you’ve spent enough time using AI assistants, you’ll have noticed a certain quality to the responses generated.... Some of the tells are obvious. The fawning obsequiousness of a wild language model hammered into line through reinforcement learning with human feedback marks chatbots out. Which is the right outcome: eagerness to please and general optimism are good traits to have in anyone (or anything) working as an assistant.... And sometimes, the tells are idiosyncratic. In late March, AI influencer Jeremy Nguyen, at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, highlighted one: ChatGPT’s tendency to use the word 'delve' in responses... A brief explanation of how things work...[A Large Language Model (LLM)] is raw. It is tricky to wrangle into a useful form, hard to prevent going off the rails and requires genuine skill to use well. Turning it into a chatbot requires an extra step, ... reinforcement learning with human feedback: RLHF.... An army of human testers are given access to the raw LLM, and instructed to put it through its paces: asking questions, giving instructions and providing feedback. Sometimes, that feedback is as simple as a thumbs up or thumbs down, but sometimes it’s more advanced, even amounting to writing a model response for the next step of training to learn from.... I said 'delve' was overused by ChatGPT compared to the internet at large. But there’s one part of the internet where 'delve' is a much more common word: the African web. In Nigeria, 'delve' is much more frequently used in business English than it is in England or the US. So the workers training their systems provided examples of input and output that used the same language, eventually ending up with an AI system that writes slightly like an African. And that’s the final indignity. If AI-ese sounds like African English, then African English sounds like AI-ese. Calling people a 'bot' is already a schoolyard insult (ask your kids; it’s a Fortnite thing); how much worse will it get when a significant chunk of humanity sounds like the AI systems they were paid to train?"

Everything Must Go by Dorian Lynskey: apocalypse now – review by Fara Dabhoiwala in The Guardian. "Why do we obsess about the end of the world as we know it? The answer may seem obvious: it’s happening... Yet, as Dorian Lynskey argues in his clever and voluminous new book, there’s more to it than that.... this outlook is not new at all. There may in fact be a basic psychological explanation for why humans have always been fascinated by the end of days. Everyone knows that they are going to die. But we also all like to think that our particular span on Earth is somehow special. Perhaps speculating about the end of the world is a way of connecting those two things, of creating a grand narrative that aligns what are otherwise two random, unconnected plots. After all, by placing ourselves at the end of the biggest story of all, we simultaneously place ourselves at its centre: Après moi, le déluge. For centuries, religions had a monopoly on this subject: the end of the world would come about through divine intervention, rather than by human or natural actions. [but] Everything Must Go is about how, over the past 200 years, writers and artists have built on this inheritance to create new kinds of non-Christian eschatology. Ever since Lord Byron’s poem Darkness (1816), which dispensed with God, people have been creating secular fictions about the three main non-divine ways in which things might end – the annihilation of the planet, the extinction of humankind or the collapse of civilisation. Movies, radio broadcasts, comic books, pop songs, plays, novels, paintings, television shows, video games – it turns out that these scenarios have inspired a huge amount of detailed invention, mainly for entertainment. We love to wallow in our worst nightmares."

As an immigrant I’m undervalued, and my wife has no sympathy – advice column by Philippa Perry in The Guardian. "I went to a lecture recently in Mexico given by the psychotherapist Guy Pierre Tur and, referring to Donna Hicks’s work on dignity, he said: 'When I hear a foreign accent, I hear effort; where I see difference, there is courage; where I see discrimination there is resilience; where I see denied dignity, I see strength and survival.'”