Alan Jacobs

Ask yourself: do you really need to check your RSS newsfeed before you get home, or reply to that email before you can think about your answer? Is this really how you want to be spending your time?

That’s exactly the question Robert Matuksy wants you to answer every 20 minutes while you’re online. Matusky wrote a simple bit of computer script – you can copy and paste it right here – that, once installed, pauses everything you’re doing on the computer three times each hour with the question “Consider if this is really how I need to be spending my time. Continue?” Answer “yes” and the clock starts over again; answer “no” and the program exits until you start it up again.

The growth of sociable robotics is one thing that changed my mind. People are so vulnerable and so willing to accept substitutes for human companionship in very intimate ways. I hadn’t seen that coming, and it really concerns me that we’re willing to give up something that I think defines our humanness: our ability to empathize and be with each other and talk to each other and understand each other. And I report to you with great sadness that the more I continued to interview people about this, the more I realized the extent to which people are willing to put machines in this role. People feel that they are not being heard, that no one is listening. They have a fantasy that finally, in a machine, they will have a nonjudgmental companion.

There are no shinpads like Puskás shinpads.

These once-isolated people, a tiny group, have no system of numbers; their sentences cannot accommodate subordinate clauses or other forms of recursion (embedding phrases), and they are not impressed by the Gospel of St Mark in Pirahã, not least because it is a story composed by someone they do not know, about someone they have never heard of, in a time and place that has no meaning for them. The Pirahã people tend to confine their discourse to things they know about, and their verb forms can be suffixed to distinguish between hearsay, inference and observation. They have no perfect tense.

On the other hand, they can also sing, hum, yell and whistle information to one another. So they have four additional speech forms as well as a very precise vocabulary for their environment and everything in it that matters to them. If there is some deep structure that underpins all 7,000 human languages – a universal grammar or language acquisition device or language instinct, already hard-wired in the human brain at birth – Pirahã seems to be an exception.

Brittanica went bankrupt in 1996, long before Wikipedia was a crowdsourced gleam in Jimmy Wales’ open-access eye. In 1990, the company had $650 million in revenue. In 1996, it was being sold off in toto for $135 million. What happened in between was Encarta.

Not because Encarta made Microsoft money (it didn’t), or because Brittanica didn’t develop comparable products for CD-ROM and the web (they totally did, with the first CD-ROM encyclopedia in 1989 and Brittanica Online in 1994). Instead, Encarta was an inexpensive, multimedia, not-at-all comprehensive encyclopedia that helped Microsoft sell Windows PCs to families. And once you had a PC in the living room or den where the encyclopedia used to be, it was all over for Mighty Brittanica.

When Wikipedia emerged five years later, Brittanica was already a weakened giant. It wasn’t a free and open encyclopedia that defeated its print edition. It was the personal computer itself.

It takes discipline to say, “let’s take care of the customer, and think of the long term” when you’re talking about normal amounts of money. When the amounts of money become as staggering as they were in the mid-2000s, the game – at best – becomes “how can we convince ourselves that we’re taking care of the customer.” Because what if the only way to take care of the customer is to get out of the game? Which was certainly the case with sub-prime-mortgage-backed-CDOs by the mid-2000s. How do you turn off the machine that is responsible for the lion’s share of your firm’s profits? And if you don’t, then what exactly do you mean when you say you’re taking care of your customers?

The financial crisis should have led to a dramatic, wrenching shrinkage in the size of Wall Street. The businesses that were at the center of the crisis – mostly derivatives and structured products businesses – should have shrunk to tiny fractions of their former size, both in response to greater regulation and in response to customer’s shunning the products. But finance as it had come to be practiced had become not only too big to fail, but possibly too big to shrink, in any meaningful way, and our political response was not merely to fend off collapse – that was necessary – but to nurse the industry back to something resembling its former health – which not only wasn’t necessary, but was actively dangerous to our political and economic future.

If you talk to people on Wall Street now, they talk about the job market still being tough, particularly for new entrants, but they have no idea what tough would really mean. The industry is still enormously too big, enormously too profitable. We can’t fix the culture of a firm like Goldman so long as it’s still doing the same kind of business. Long term, the only way to fix Wall Street is to finally break it.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here: Dante’s medieval classic the Divine Comedy has been condemned as racist, antisemitic and Islamophobic by a group calling for it to be removed from classrooms.

The epic poem, written in the 14th century, is split into three parts, tracing the poet’s journey through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. It is seen as one of the cornerstones of world literature. But the Italian human rights organisation Gherush92, which advises UN bodies on human rights issues, wants it to be removed from school curriculums, or at least used with more caution, because it is “offensive and discriminatory” and young people lack the “filters” to understand it in context.

Gherush92 singled out some particular cantos from Dante’s masterwork for criticism: Inferno’s 34th, which tells of Judas, endlessly chewed in the teeth of Lucifer, and 28th, in which Mohammed is depicted torn “from the chin down to the part that gives out the foulest sound”, as well as Purgatorio’s 26th, which shows homosexuals under a rain of fire in purgatory. The work, it says, slanders the Jewish people, depicts Islam as a heresy and is homophobic.

preciseandtowering:

1,000 words, right here.

(via Telegraph)

I don’t believe that individual people are objective. They bring their biases, conscious and unconscious, to pretty much everything they think about. If you dig into Wikipedia’s underpinnings, you can see those biases clashing as people edit and counter-edit each other.

But I do believe there is such a thing as truth, and that argument among all of us half-blind people moves us closer to it. Wikipedia as a whole is way closer to the whole truth than any one contributor to Wikipedia can be. And you’d like to think that Wikipedia, and even the entire internet, will move closer and closer to the truth. Maybe, long after even the electronic edition of Britannica is gone, the idea of Britannica can remain for us what it once was for me–a kind of Platonic ideal that we aspire to evolve toward even if we can never reach it, something that has a kind of reality even if we can never touch it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.