Quotulatiousness

January 28, 2025

AI, the iPhone, and other tech whizzery are not the most important inventions ever

Filed under: Health, History, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Freddie deBoer reacts to so, so many technically illiterate hot takes about this or that latest bit of techno-woo bling being given accolades as “the most important invention”:

Years ago, I think in 2010, Business Insider invested a great deal of hype and hoopla into a list they developed of the one hundred most important inventions of all time. I have tried and tried to find a link, including via the Internet Archive, but no dice; I’ll chalk it up to linkrot, the endless deterioration of the web over time, Business Insider‘s paywall, and their convoluted publishing history. You’ll have to take my word for it that, in a list that was released with great fanfare, they rated the iPhone as the most important invention of all time. Not antibiotics, the plow, or alternating current, not anesthesia or the lightbulb, but the iPhone, which took a bunch of things that already existed (cellular telephone service, email on the go, a touchscreen) and put them in one remarkably profitable package. The Business Insider list isn’t alone in putting the iPhone so high on ranked lists of human achievement. There’s plenty you can find, including a British survey that put the iPhone at number eight, ahead of the internal combustion engine, or this New York Times podcast which puts the iPhone at number three, although the list seems to be partially tongue in cheek. There’s a lot you could ask about such a choice, including epistemological questions inherent to putting a cellphone above the electricity-generating technologies that power it. But my visceral response to this kind of thinking — and even aside from ordinal lists of importance, the smartphone-supremacy attitude is very common — is to say, wow, these people must really enjoy shitting in the yard.

Plumbing — bringing fresh water from one place to another and disposing of human waste via engineering — goes back to antiquity, and you occasionally find claims of affordances like flush toilets in ancient times. Today, modern people in most developed parts of the world have constant access to free-running clean water and toilets that can remove physical waste to a secure processing facility or holding unit, with heated water on demand a very nice extra. That’s largely a 20th-century and forward phenomenon. There were pretty sophisticated sewer systems in Victorian London, the White House got running water in the Jackson administration, and as usual major metropolitan areas in rich countries were ahead of the game generally. But it wasn’t until the 1920s or so that indoor plumbing became a true mass phenomenon, again only in wealthy countries, and it was perfectly common for a soldier coming home from World War II in 1945 to be coming home to a house with a well and an outhouse. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a majority of American homes had indoor plumbing, which means that the beginning of the Space Age overlapped with a period where most Americans couldn’t wash their hands whenever they wanted to. And, as cool as NASA and launching satellites and orbiting the Earth and traveling to the Moon are, their practical impacts on human life pale in comparison to modern plumbing.

So when I read people putting the iPhone as the pinnacle of human ingenuity, I have to imagine that they’re big fans of shitting in their yard. Because if faced with a choice, they’ve indicated that they’d choose their smartphone over their toilet! And that’s quite a choice. It might be worth doing a little reality check in that regard by spending a month without one and then a month without the other. So you see how life feels without your smart phone for 30 days, and then you see what it’s like to not be able to access indoor plumbing for 30 days. You have to piss and shit outside. You have to walk to a well, if you can find one, to get (hopefully clean) water, and then you have to heat it up on your stove if you want it hot. You can’t shower, and taking a bath would be a remarkably laborious process that still left you with tepid water. And this isn’t just a question of comfort but a question of essential hygiene, by which I mean medically-relevant hygine — cholera, typhoid, gastrointestinal worms, scarlet fever, hepatitis, and many more diseases were massively harder to avoid before mass indoor plumbing. I don’t know you, personally, but I feel considerable confidence in suggesting that your desire to avoid those diseases is greater than your attachment to Instagram.

That’s the shitting in the yard test, or the indoor plumbing test, for those who prefer to avoid vulgarity. The test requires you to compare the hype about a particular tech product up against the actual brick-and-mortar changes wrought in the great period of human advancement that began sometime in the late 19th century and ended sometime in the late 20th; the modern flush toilet is just a particularly relevant example. Is Zoom really a bigger part of your life than food refrigeration, a technology that has saved untold millions of lives over the decades by dramatically reducing deaths from foodborne illness? Is cloud storage really a bigger deal than infant vaccines, which save six lives a minute? Does Android Auto really rate when compared to the airbag? You can call these questions obtuse, and some do, but they are natural and necessary things to think about in an era of obsession with artificial intelligence. (By which people mean LLM/neural net-based artificial intelligence, which is a whole other thing.) When you say that AI is the most important invention in human history, you’re making some really, really powerful claims. And yes, you have to then justify saying that AI is more important than, for example, the transistor, self-negating claims that deny the importance of technologies that make large language models possible. But you also have to justify saying that AI is more important than, like, the bowl. By which I mean, bowls. To put food in. To eat out of. Try and spend the rest of your life without ever using another food container and get back to me about whether ChatGPT is more important. Food containers are inventions!

“Like Sulla, [Trump]’s been taking names, and he has a list”

Filed under: Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

So-called “Sulla” (probably from the time of Augustus) after a portrait of an important Roman from the 2nd century BC.
From the Glyptothek collection via Wikimedia Commons.

The comparison of Trump to the man who prefigured Julius Caesar in the final years of the Roman Republic is, we should all passionately hope, more rhetorical than realistic. Sulla came to power in Rome after being, in his view, illegally removed from his rightful position, and he came wading through the blood of his enemies. He then created a brand new position for himself, using the old and disused title of “dictator”, but piling on far more power than any earlier dictator had held (the irregular election was held in hearing distance of where Sulla’s army was busy executing many of his captured enemies). He used his power to reconfigure and codify the rules by which the Republic was run, to “restore the Republic” to what he imagined was a purer, better nation. He set a precedent that would be followed a generation later by Julius Caesar and the end of the Republic was clearly in sight.

Trump has come again to power, from which he believes he was illegally removed, although he has not been wading through the blood of his enemies. He has been using the powers of his position very actively, but thus far seems to be staying within the bounds of the Constitution (mostly). On his Substack, Glenn Reynolds says that the second Trump presidency will be much worse for his political opponents than if he’d won his second term in 2020, and I think that’s the right analysis:

Well, if you follow me here, you probably don’t need to be told how fast Trump is moving. But I have a few other thoughts here that didn’t fit the column. The main point is that the Democrats’ over-the-top rule-breaking, norm-busting attacks on Trump have backfired bigly. I like to use the Tolkien quote, “oft evil will shall evil mar”, and that happened here for sure.

A second consecutive Trump term would have been better, from my perspective, than Biden’s sham administration, obviously. But it certainly would have been better for the Democrats than this second non-consecutive term. Trump spent the past four years not only planning his comeback, but planning what he would do after his comeback.

In his first term he was too busy running to plan, and he was naïve about how Washington and the federal government – and the Republican Party – actually work. Not so much anymore. I’ve seen people – to continue the Tolkien reference – compare him to Gandalf the White coming back after battling the Balrog, and that’s not a bad analogy.

Then there’s this one, which pretty much sums up what I’m saying here. Like Sulla, he’s been taking names, and he has a list.

And there’s this:

It really is. Trump could get carried away with this stuff at some point, but at present he seems to be settling all family business in a very measured way. Where the opening months of the first Trump Administration were confused – Omarosa in the White House? – this time around he’s realized that personnel is policy, and he’s clearly done a lot of thinking about who his personnel will be. And it’s no coincidence that he’s put a lot of people who were victims of various government agencies in charge of those same agencies. Not much danger of them going native, I think.

A second consecutive Trump term would have delayed the advance of the left/Democrat agenda, and pushed it back in some minor ways, but would probably have ultimately been no more than a bump in the road for that agenda. This Trump term will likely burn it down.

What Britain desperately needs is common-sense pointy stick controls

Britain’s gun laws make Canada look like the wild west, yet the government still wants far greater control over objects that can be used as weapons. The conviction of the Southport murderer, who used a knife obtained through Amazon, seems to have given the British government under Kurt Stürmer Keir Starmer an excuse to crack down even further on any kind of device with a sharpened blade rather than the criminals who wield them:

Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana.
Photo released by Merseyside Police.

“Time and again, as a child, the Southport murderer carried knives. Time and again, he showed clear intent to use them,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote in a piece for The Sun about Axel Rudakubana, who admitted murdering three girls and injuring others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last year. “And yet tragically, he was still able to order the murder weapon off of the internet without any checks or barriers. A two-click killer. This cannot continue. The technology is there to set up age-verification checks, even for kitchen knives ordered online.”

What Starmer mentioned but glossed over is that Rudakubana was three times referred to a program intended to divert people from radicalization and terrorism before authorities lost interest in him. At the time of his arrest, he had a copy of an Al Qaeda training manual, which led him to being charged and sentenced for terrorism. He also possessed the deadly poison ricin that he’d manufactured himself in sufficient quantity to conduct a mass attack.

Rudakubana was a human bomb waiting to go off. But Starmer focused not on officials’ failure to pay attention, but on knives — edged tools that are among humans’ earliest and most important creations.

“Online retailers will be required to ask for two types of ID from anyone seeking to buy a knife under plans being considered by ministers to combat under-age sales after the Southport murders,” reports Charles Hymas of The Telegraph. “Buyers would have to submit an ID document to an online retailer and then record a live video or selfie to prove their age.”

It’s difficult to see how an ID check is going to stand between those planning mayhem and tools first crafted 2.6 million years ago in their most primitive form and still used by people every day. My dentist forges knives in his backyard for fun. One of my nephews turns files into knives on a grinding wheel. Scraping an appropriate material against a stone will give you an edge and a point. ID checks don’t seem like a barrier to people with bad intentions and the ability to make ricin in their bedrooms.

A Case History in Ridiculously Restrictive Policies

This is why the U.K. strikes many Americans as the reductio ad absurdum of policies that demonize objects rather than targeting bad actors. Opponents of authoritarian laws ask: What will the authorities do once they’ve made firearms difficult to legally acquire, and crime continues? Will they ban knives?

The answer from the U.K., which already has restrictive gun laws, is yes, they will ban knives — or at least impose access and carry restrictions and consider forbidding blades to have points. The result has been a black market in smuggled and illicitly manufactured firearms that will inevitably extend to knives. Harmless people are now arrested for having Swiss Army knives in car glove compartment or for possessing locking knives on the way home from jobs that require them. And the country’s crime problems continue to grow.

That’s bad enough, but U.K. authorities, like those elsewhere, also prefer to surveil the entire population to detect anything they could call a danger to public order, rather than focusing on specific individuals harming others.

“There are now said to be over 5.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK,” according to Politics.co.uk. “Surveillance footage forms a key component of UK crime prevention strategy,” but “the proliferation of CCTV in public places has fueled unease about the erosion of civil liberties and individual human rights, raising concerns of an Orwellian ‘big brother’ culture.”

The British government also monitors online activity to an extent that Edward Snowden deemed it “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.”

That surveillance turns up comments, jokes, and rants authorities just don’t like. “Think before you post,” the government warns people. “Content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal.” But the authorities enforce a broad definition of unacceptable material. People have been arrested for dressing as terrorists for Halloween, for making intemperate online remarks, and for just getting things wrong when posting on the internet (they’ll need a big paddy wagon for that one).

Dining at the Wild Parties of Regency England

Filed under: Books, Britain, Food, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 24 Sep 2024

Drop biscuit-style cakes with dried currants

City/Region: London, England
Time Period: 1806

In the 18th and 19th centuries, members of the aristocracy threw wild parties called routs. These parties, which sound akin to a modern frat party, eventually devolved to rooms stuffed with way too many people, so that attendance consisted of jostling from room to room before leaving. If you were lucky, you could grab a rout cake to help sustain you while you party hopped.

These cakes are dense and dry, but not unpleasantly so. While they are delicious, because of the dryness I recommend enjoying them with a cup of coffee, tea, or party beverage of your choice. They’re just sweet enough, and the flavors of the brandy and the flower waters shine through.

    Rout Drop Cakes
    Mix two pounds of flour, one ditto butter, one ditto sugar, one ditto currants, clean and dry; then wet into a stiff paste, with two eggs, a large spoon of orange-flower water, ditto rose-water, ditto sweet wine, ditto brandy, drop on a tin-plate floured; a very short time bakes them.
    A New System of Domestic Cookery by A Lady (Maria Rundell), 1806.

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QotD: Was Einstein a science-denier?

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Albert Einstein was a charmingly blunt man. For instance, in 1952 he wrote a letter to his friend and fellow physicist Max Born where he admits that even if the astronomical data had gone against general relativity, he would still believe in the theory:

    Even if there were absolutely no light deflection, no perihelion motion and no redshift, the gravitational equations would still be convincing because they avoid the inertial system … It is really quite strange that humans are usually deaf towards the strongest arguments, while they are constantly inclined to overestimate the accuracy of measurement.

In a few short sentences Einstein completely repudiates the empiricist spirit which has ostensibly guided scientific inquiry since Francis Bacon. He doesn’t care what the data says. If the experiment hadn’t been run, he would still believe the theory. Moreover, should the data have disconfirmed his theory, who cares? Data are often wrong.

This is not, to put it mildly, the official story of how science gets made. In the version most of us were taught, the process starts with somebody noticing patterns or regularities in experimental data. Scientists then hypothesize laws, principles, and causal mechanisms that abstract and explain the observed patterns. Finally, these hypotheses are put to the test by new experiments and discarded if they contradict their results. Simple, straightforward, and respectful of official pieties. The Schoolhouse Rock of science. Or as Einstein once described it:

    The simplest idea about the development of science is that it follows the inductive method. Individual facts are chosen and grouped in such a way that the law, which connects them, becomes evident. By grouping these laws more general ones can be derived until a more or less homogeneous system would have been created for this set of individual facts.

See? It’s as easy as that. But then, Einstein finishes that thought with: “[t]he truly great advances in our understanding of nature originated in a manner almost diametrically opposed to induction”.

Was Einstein a science-denier? I’m obviously kidding, but this is still pretty jarring stuff to read. How did he get this way? Einstein’s Unification is the story of the evolution of Einstein’s philosophical views, disguised as a story about his discovery of general relativity and his quixotic attempts at a unified field theory. It’s a gripping tale about how Einstein tried to do science “correctly”, experienced years of frustration, almost had priority for his discoveries snatched away from him, then committed some Bad Rationalist Sins at which point things immediately began to work. This experience changed him profoundly, and maybe it should change us too.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Einstein’s Unification, by Jeroen van Dongen”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-05-27.

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