Category: The Arts

My very excellent Conversation with Paul Graham

Here is the audio and transcript, here is the episode summary:

Tyler and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham sat down at his home in the English countryside to discuss what areas of talent judgment his co-founder and wife Jessica Livingston is better at, whether young founders have gotten rarer, whether he still takes a dim view of solo founders, how to 2x ambition in the developed world, on the minute past which a Y Combinator interviewer is unlikely to change their mind, what YC learned after rejecting companies, how he got over his fear of flying, Florentine history, why almost all good artists are underrated, what’s gone wrong in art, why new homes and neighborhoods are ugly, why he wants to visit the Dark Ages, why he’s optimistic about Britain and San Fransisco, the challenges of regulating AI, whether we’re underinvesting in high-cost interruption activities, walking, soundproofing, fame, and more.

Of course mostly we talked about talent selection, here is one bit:

COWEN: If you think that something has gone wrong in the history of art, and you tried to explain that in as few dimensions as possible, what’s your account of what went wrong?

GRAHAM: Oh, I can explain this very briefly. Brand and craft became divorced. It used to be that the best artists were the best craftspeople. Once art started to be reproduced in newspapers and magazines and things like that, you could create a brand that wasn’t based on quality.

COWEN: So, you think it’s mass media causing the divorce between brand and craft?

GRAHAM: It certainly helps.

COWEN: Then talent’s responding accordingly. Fundamentally, what went wrong?

GRAHAM: You invent some shtick, right?

COWEN: Right.

GRAHAM: And then — technically, it’s called a signature style — you paint with this special shtick. If someone can get some ball rolling, some speculative ball rolling, which dealers specialize in, then someone buys the painting with your shtick and hangs it on the wall in their loft in Tribeca. And people come in and say, “Oh, my goodness, that’s a so and so,” which they recognize because they’ve seen this shtick. [laughs]

COWEN: Say, if we have modernism raging in the 1920s, and the ’20s mass media is radio for the most part —

GRAHAM: No, no, no, newspapers were huge. Modernism was well —

COWEN: But not for showing paintings, right? There’s no color in the papers. You had to be —

And here is one exchange on talent:

COWEN: Why is there not more ambition in the developed world? Say we wanted to boost ambition by 2X. What’s the actual constraint? What stands in the way?

GRAHAM: Boy, what a fabulous question. I wish you’d asked me that an hour ago, so I could have had some time to think about it between now and then.

COWEN: [laughs] You’re clearly good at boosting ambition, so you’re pulling on some lever, right? What is it you do?

GRAHAM: Oh, okay. How do I do it? People are, for various reasons — for multiple reasons — they’re afraid to think really big. There are multiple reasons. One, it seems overreaching. Two, it seems like it would be an awful lot of work. [laughs]

As an outside person, I’m like an instructor in some fitness class. I can tell someone who’s already working as hard as they can, “All right, push harder.”

[laughter]

It doesn’t cost me any effort. Surprisingly often, as in the fitness class, they are capable of pushing harder. A lot of my secret is just being the person who doesn’t have to actually do the work that I’m suggesting they do.

COWEN: How much of what you do is reshuffling their networks? There are people with potential. They’re in semi-average networks —

GRAHAM: Wait. That was such an interesting question. We should talk about that some more because that really is an interesting question. Imagine how amazing it would be if all the ambitious people can be more ambitious. That really is an interesting question. There’s got to be more to it than just the fact that I don’t have to do the work.

COWEN: I think a lot of it is reshuffling networks. You need someone who can identify who should be in a better network. You boost the total size of all networking that goes on, and you make sure those people with potential —

GRAHAM: By reshuffling networks, you mean introducing people to one another?

COWEN: Of course.

GRAHAM: Yes.

COWEN: You pull them away from their old peers, who are not good enough for them, and you bring them into new circles, which will raise their sights.

GRAHAM: Eh, maybe. That is true. When you read autobiographies, there’s often an effect when people go to some elite university after growing up in the middle of the countryside somewhere. They suddenly become more excited because there’s a critical mass of like-minded people around. But I don’t think that’s the main thing. I mean, that is a big thing.

Definitely recommended.

Behavioral Economics and ChatGPT: From William Shakespeare to Elena Ferrante

We prompted GPT-4 (an artificial intelligence large language model) to use literary fictional characters to play the Dictator game, a classic behavioral economics experiment. We prompted GPT-4 with 148 characters from the 17th century to the 21st century. Their 888 decisions were used to compare characters over time as well as characters to human players. There is a general and mainly monotonic decrease in selfish behavior over time in literary characters. 41% of the decisions of 17th century characters are selfish compared to just 21% of the decisions of characters from the 21st century. In the Human-AI comparison, Humans are much more selfish than the AI characters with 51% of humans making selfish decisions compared to 28% of the AI characters. 

Here is the full (short) paper by Gabriel Abrams (a junior in high school).

My Conversation with the excellent Noam Dworman

I am very pleased to have recorded a CWT with Noam Dworman, mostly about comedy but also music and NYC as well.  Noam owns and runs The Comedy Cellar, NYC’s leading comedy club, and he knows most of the major comedians.  Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Tyler sat down at Comedy Cellar with owner Noam Dworman to talk about the ever-changing stand-up comedy scene, including the perfect room temperature for stand-up, whether comedy can still shock us, the effect on YouTube and TikTok, the transformation of jokes into bits, the importance of tight seating, why he doesn’t charge higher prices for his shows, the differences between the LA and NYC scenes, whether good looks are an obstacle to success, the oldest comic act he still finds funny, how comedians have changed since he started running the Comedy Cellar in 2003, and what government regulations drive him crazy. They also talk about how 9/11 got Noam into trouble, his early career in music, the most underrated guitarist, why live music is dead in NYC, and what his plans are for expansion.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: If you do stand-up comedy for decades at a high level — not the Louis C.K. and Chris Rock level, but you’re successful and appear in your club all the time — how does that change a person? But not so famous that everyone on the street knows who they are.

DWORMAN: How does doing stand-up comedy change a person?

COWEN: For 25 years, yes.

DWORMAN: Well, first of all, it makes it harder for them to socialize. I hear this story all the time about comedians when they go to Thanksgiving dinner with their family, and all of a sudden, the entire place gets silent. Like, “Did he just say . . .” Because you get used to being in an atmosphere where you could say whatever you want.

I think probably, because I know this in my life — and again, getting used to essentially being your own boss, you get used to that. Then it just becomes very, very hard to ever consider going back into the structured life that most people expect is going to be their lives from the time they’re in school — 9:00 to 5:00, whatever it is. At some point, I think, if you do it for too long, you would probably kill yourself rather than go back.

I’ve had that thought myself. If I had to go back to . . . I never practiced law, but if I had to take a job as a lawyer — and I’m not just saying this to be dramatic — I think I might kill myself. I can’t even imagine, at my age, having to start going to work at nine o’clock, having a boss, having to answer for mistakes that I made, having the pressure of having to get it right, otherwise somebody’s life is impacted. I just got too used to being able to do what I want when I want to do it.

Comedians have to get gigs, but essentially, they can do what they want when they want to do it. They don’t have to get up in the morning, and I think, at some point, you just become so used to that, there’s no going back.

Recommended, interesting throughout.

Sinead O’Connor, RIP

Sinead O’Connor was a great singer–never more evident than in her collection of standards, Am I Not Your Girl? The entire album is wonderful. So sad to hear of her passing. Here on the painful decline of a marriage, Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home. Kills me every time I hear it.

From Faith and Courage, I love The Lamb’s Book of Life.

Out of history we have come
With great hatred and little room
It aims to break our hearts
Wreck us up and tear us all apart
But if we listen to the Rasta man
He can show us how it can be done
To live in peace and live as one
Get our names back in the book of life of the lamb

Here to cheer me up is Sinead in happier times, Daddy I’m fine, also from Faith and Courage.

Amazingly, her album of reggae songs Throw Down Your Arms, is very good. Who else could have pulled that off?

One more, from the Chieftain’s Long Black Veil–many great songs but none better than Sinead’s Foggy Dew, now the definitive version.

And back through the glen, I rode again
And my heart with grief was sore
For I parted then with valiant men
Whom I never shall see n’more
But to and fro in my dreams I go
And I kneel and pray for you
For slavery fled, O glorious dead
When you fell in the foggy dew

RIP Sinead. Thank you for the great music.

How to assign property rights in actor AI likenesses

This is an issue in the Actors and Writers Guild strikes, with a key issue being whether studios should be making “take it or leave it” offers which give them rights to the AI likenesses in perpetuity, even for extras.  Here is part of my take in my latest Bloomberg column:

I suggest that the eventual strike settlement forbid studios from buying the rights to AI likenesses for more than a single film or project. Or, as a compromise, the contract could be for some limited number of projects, but not in perpetuity. Actors thus would remain in long-run control of their AI likenesses, yet if they wanted to keep selling those likenesses – project by project – they could do so.

Note that this proposal is along some dimensions quite inegalitarian. That is, future stars would end up much richer and the large numbers of actors who fail would end up slightly poorer. They would not be paid small upfront sums for rights that would quickly become worthless.

We can feel better about that trade-off if we consider the interests of the fans. Many people (myself included) enjoy the image and thought of Han Solo (one of Ford’s most famous roles), whether or not they are paying money in a given year to see the Star Wars movies. Would those fans prefer that Ford or some movie studio be in control of the Han Solo image?

The answer may depend on the wisdom and aesthetic taste of the actor in question, but overall I would opt for actor control of the AI likenesses. At least some actors will care about the quality of the projects their likenesses are attached to, rather than just seeking to maximize profit from deploying the likenesses. So, if the question is whether an AI likeness of Han Solo can greet visitors at the entrance to a Disney ride, Disney might say yes but Ford might say no, or at least he would have that choice.

Having celebrity images remain scarce rather than overexposed is a good aesthetic decision, even if it keeps some market power in the hands of Ford, his eventual heirs and future movie stars more generally. With these additional restraints on AI likenesses, we will likely end up with a more exciting, less tired and less overexposed kind of celebrity culture, and I hope that leads to broader social benefits, if only by cultivating better taste among fans and viewers.

Such a proposal is not so unusual when viewed in a broader context. Standard labor contracts don’t allow you to sell your labor to your boss in perpetuity, as you always retain the right to quit. Few people consider that limitation on contracting objectionable, as it protects human liberty against some hasty or ill-conceived decisions, such as selling yourself into slavery. If your AI likeness ends up being such a good substitute for your physical being, as it seems our current technological track may bring, why should we not consider similar restrictions on the contracts for the AI likeness?

Worth a ponder, these are not easy issues.

Art market fractionalization

From an email sent to me by The Art Newspaper:

Fractionalisation and tokenisation of art are all the rage. While the notion of unlocking the value in an artwork by selling shares in it has been around for over a decade, a slew of new initiatives is taking it to an explosive new level.

Among the splashiest new launches is the Artex Stock exchange out of Liechtenstein, co-founded by financiers Prince Wenceslas von Liechtenstein and Yassir Benjelloun-Touimi, the latter seemingly the driving force. The project buys art (its first acquisition is Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1963) bought for $52m in 2017 at Christie’s and now valued at $55m. Investors can buy shares for as little as $100 in the Bacon, which can be traded (or technically, the company that owns it) on the Liechtenstein MTF (an alternative trading platform). Other paintings will follow; trading starts on 21 July.

These ideas seem weird to me.  The more wonderful it is to own art, the lower should be its pecuniary rate of return, as recompense.  So why buy into fractional shares of an art work?  You don’t get to hang it on your work, and at the same time you get the subpar rate of return resulting from the fact that some people do get to hang it on their walls.

My excellent Conversation with David Bentley Hart

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

David Bentley Hart is an American writer, philosopher, religious scholar, critic, and theologian who has authored over 1,000 essays and 19 books, including a very well-known translation of the New Testament and several volumes of fiction.

In this conversation, Tyler and David discuss ways in which Orthodox Christianity is not so millenarian, how theological patience shapes the polities of Orthodox Christian nations, how Heidegger deepened his understanding of Christian Orthodoxy, who played left field for the Baltimore Orioles in 1970, the simplest way to explain how Orthodoxy diverges from Catholicism, the future of the American Orthodox Church, what he thinks of the Book of Mormon, whether theological arguments are ultimately based on reason or faith, what he makes of reincarnation and near-death experiences, gnosticism in movies and TV, why he dislikes Sarah Ruden’s translation of the New Testament, the most difficult word to translate, a tally of the 15+ languages he knows, what he’ll work on next, and more.

Hart is probably the best-read CWT guest of all time, with possible competition from Dana Gioia?  Excerpt:

COWEN: If you could explain to me, as simply as possible, in which ways is Orthodox Christianity not so very millenarian?

HART: Well, it depends on what you mean by millenarian. I’d have to ask you to be a bit more —

COWEN: Say the Protestant 17th-century sense that the world is on the verge of a very radical transformation that will herald in some completely new age, and we all should be prepared for it.

HART: Well, in one sense, it’s been the case of Christianity from the first century that it’s always existed in a time between times. There’s always this sense of being in history but always expecting an imminent interruption of history.

But Orthodoxy has been around for a while. It’s part of an underrated culture, grounded originally in the Eastern Greco-Roman world, and has a huge apparatus of philosophy and theology and, I think, over the centuries has learned to be patient.

The Protestant millenarianism you speak of always seems to have been born out of historical crisis in a sense. The rise of the nation-state, the fragmentation of the Western Church — it’s always as much an effective history as a flight from history.

Whereas, I think it’s fair to say that Orthodoxy has created for itself a parallel world just outside the flow of history. It puts much more of an emphasis on the spiritual life, mysticism, that sort of thing. And as such, whereas it still uses the recognizable language of the imminent return of Christ, it’s not at the center of the spiritual life.

COWEN: How does that theological patience shape the polities of Orthodox Christian nations and regions? How does that matter?

HART: Well, it’s been both good and bad, to be honest. At its best, Orthodoxy has cultivated a spiritual life that nourished millions and that puts an emphasis upon moral obligation to others and the life of charity and the ascetical virtues of Christianity, the self-denial. At its worst, however, it’s often been an accommodation with historical forces that are antithetical to the gospel, too.

It’s often been the case that Orthodoxy has been so, let’s say, disenchanted with the millenarian expectation that it’s become a prop of the state, and you can see it today in Russia, in which you have a church institution. Now, this isn’t to speak of the faithful themselves, but the institutional authority of the state — of the institution, rather, of the church more or less being nothing but a propaganda wing of an authoritarian and terrorist government.

So, it’s had both its good and its bad consequences over the centuries. At its best, as I say, it encourages a true spiritual life that can teach one to be detached from ambitions and expectations and the violent projects of the ego. But at its worst, it can become a passive participant in precisely those sorts of projects and those sorts of evils.

Recommended, interesting throughout, and yes I do ask him about the Baltimore Orioles.

My excellent Conversation with Reid Hoffman

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

In his second appearance, Reid Hoffman joined Tyler to talk everything AI: the optimal liability regime for LLMs, whether there’ll be autonomous money-making bots, which agency should regulate AI, how AI will affect the media ecosystem and the communication of ideas, what percentage of the American population will eschew it, how gaming will evolve, whether AI’s future will be open-source or proprietary, the binding constraint preventing the next big step in AI, which philosopher has risen in importance thanks to AI, what he’d ask a dolphin, what LLMs have taught him about friendship, how higher education will change, and more. They also discuss Sam Altman’s overlooked skill, the biggest cultural problem in America, the most underrated tech scene, and what he’ll do next.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Given GPT models, which philosopher has most risen in importance in your eyes? Some people say Wittgenstein. I don’t think it’s obvious.

HOFFMAN: I think I said Wittgenstein earlier. In Fireside Chatbots, I brought in Wittgenstein in language games.

COWEN: Peirce maybe. Who else?

HOFFMAN: Peirce is good. Now I happen to have read Wittgenstein at Oxford, so I can comment in some depth. The question about language and language games and forms of life and how these large language models might mirror human forms of life because they’re trained on human language is a super interesting question, like Wittgenstein.

Other good language philosophers, I think, are interesting. That doesn’t necessarily mean philosophy-of-language philosophers à la analytic philosophy. Gareth Evans, theories of reference as applied to how you’re thinking about this kind of stuff, is super interesting. Christopher Peacocke’s concept work is, I think, interesting.

Anyway, there’s a whole range of stuff. Then also the philosophy, all the neuroscience stuff applied with the large language models, I think, is very interesting as well.

COWEN: What in science fiction do you feel has risen the most in status for you?

HOFFMAN: Oh, for me.

COWEN: Not in the world. We don’t know yet.

HOFFMAN: Yes. We don’t know yet.

COWEN: You think, “Oh, this was really important.” Vernor Vinge or . . .

HOFFMAN: Well, this is going to seem maybe like a strange answer to you, but I’ve been rereading David Brin’s Uplift series very carefully because the theory of, “How should we create other kinds of intelligences, and what should that theory be, and what should be our shepherding and governance function and symbiosis?” is a question that we have to think about over time. He went straight at this in a biological sense, but it’s the same thing, just a different substrate with the Uplift series. I’ve recently reread the entire Uplift series.

Self-recommending!

Emergent Ventures winners, 26th cohort

Winston Iskandar, 16, Manhattan Beach, CA, an app for children’s literacy and general career development. Winston also has had his piano debut at Carnegie Hall.

ComplyAI, Dheekshita Kumar and Neha Gaonkar, Chicago and NYC, to build an AI service to speed the process of permit application at local and state governments.

Avi Schiffman and InternetActivism, “leading the digital front of humanitarianism.”  Avi is a repeat winner.

Jarett Cameron Dewbury, Ontario, and Cambridge MA, General career support, AI and biomedicine, including for the study of environmental enteric dysfunction.  Here is his Twitter.

Ian Cheshire, Wallingford, Pennsylvania, high school sophomore, general career support, tech, start-ups, and also income-sharing agreements.

Beyzamur Arican Dinc, psychology Ph.D student at UCSB, regulation of emotional dyads in relationships and marriages, from Istanbul.

Ariana Pineda, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern. To attend a biology conference in Prospera, Honduras.

Satvik Agnihotri, high school, NYC area, to visit the Bay Area for a summer, study logistics, and general career development.

Michael Loftus, Ann Arbor, for a neuro tech hacker house, connected to Myelin Group.

Keir Bradwell, Cambridge, UK, Political Thought and Intellectual History Masters student, to visit the U.S. to study Mancur Olson and Judith Shklar, and also to visit GMU.

Vaneeza Moosa, Ontario, incoming at University of Calgary, “Developing new therapies for malignant pleural mesothelioma using epigenetic regulators to enhance tumor growth and anti-tumor immunity with radiation therapy.”

Ashley Mehra, Yale Law School, background in classics, general career development and for eventual start-up plans.

An important project not yet ready to be announced, United Kingdom.

Jennifer Tsai, Waterloo, Ontario and Geneva (temporarily), molecular and computational neuroscience, to study in Gregoire Courtine’s lab.

Asher Parker Sartori, Belmont, Massachusetts, working with Nina Khera (previous EV winner), summer meet-up/conference for young bio people in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Nima Pourjafar, 17, starting this fall at Waterloo, Ontario.  For general career development, interested in apps, programming, economics, solutions to social problems.

Karina, 17, sophomore in high school, neuroscience, optics, and light, Bellevue, Washington.

Sana Raisfirooz, Ontario, to study bioelectronics at Berkeley.

James Hill-Khurana (left off an earlier 2022 list by mistake), Waterloo, Ontario, “A new development environment for digital (chip) design, and accompanying machine learning models.”

Ukraine winners

Tetiana Shafran, Kyiv, piano, try this video or here are more.  I was very impressed.

Volodymyr Lapin, London, Ukraine, general career development in venture capital for Ukraine.

What should I ask Ada Palmer?

I will be doing a Conversation with her.  She is a unique thinker and presence, and thus hard to describe.  Here is a brief excerpt from her home page:

 I am an historian, an author of science fiction and fantasy, and a composer. I teach in the History Department at the University of Chicago.

Yes, she has tenure.  Her four-volume Terra Ignota series is a landmark of science fiction, and she also has a deep knowledge of the Renaissance, Francis Bacon, and the French Enlightenment.  She has been an advocate of free speech.  Here is her “could be better” Wikipedia page.  The imaginary world of her novels is peaceful, prosperous, obsessed with the Enlightenment (centuries from now), suppresses both free speech and gender designations, and perhaps headed for warfare once again?

Here is her excellent blog, which among other things considers issues of historical progress, and also her problems with chronic pain management and disability.

So what should I ask her?

My excellent Conversation with Seth Godin

Here is the audio, video, and transcript from a very good session.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Seth joined Tyler to discuss why direct marketing works at all, the marketing success of Trader Joe’s vs Whole Foods, why you can’t reverse engineer Taylor Swift’s success, how Seth would fix baseball, the brilliant marketing in ChatGPT’s design, the most underrated American visual artist, the problem with online education, approaching public talks as a team process, what makes him a good cook, his updated advice for aspiring young authors, how growing up in Buffalo shaped him, what he’ll work on next, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: If you were called in as a consultant to professional baseball, what would you tell them to do to keep the game alive?

GODIN: [laughs] I am so glad I never was a consultant.

What is baseball? In most of the world, no one wants to watch one minute of baseball. Why do we want to watch baseball? Why do the songs and the Cracker Jack and the sounds matter to some people and not to others? The answer is that professional sports in any country that are beloved, are beloved because they remind us of our parents. They remind us of a different time in our lives. They are comfortable but also challenging. They let us exchange status roles in a safe way without extraordinary division.

Baseball was that for a very long time, but then things changed. One of the things that changed is that football was built for television and baseball is not. By leaning into television, which completely terraformed American society for 40 years, football advanced in a lot of ways.

Baseball is in a jam because, on one hand, like Coke and New Coke, you need to remind people of the old days. On the other hand, people have too many choices now.

And another:

COWEN: What is the detail you have become most increasingly pessimistic about?

GODIN: I think that our ability to rationalize our lazy, convenient, selfish, immoral, bad behavior is unbounded, and people will find a reason to justify the thing that they used to do because that’s how we evolved. One would hope that in the face of a real challenge or actual useful data, people would say, “Oh, I was wrong. I just changed my mind.” It’s really hard to do that.

There was a piece in The Times just the other day about the bibs that long-distance runners wear at races. There is no reason left for them to wear bibs. It’s not a big issue. Everyone should say, “Oh, yeah, great, done.” But the bib defenders coming out of the woodwork, explaining, each in their own way, why we need bibs for people who are running in races — that’s just a microcosm of the human problem, which is, culture sticks around because it’s good at sticking around. But sometimes we need to change the culture, and we should wake up and say, “This is a good day to change the culture.”

COWEN: So, we’re all bib defenders in our own special ways.

GODIN: Correct! Well said. Bib Defenders. That’s the name of the next book. Love that.

COWEN: What is, for you, the bib?

GODIN: I think that I have probably held onto this 62-year-old’s perception of content and books and thoughtful output longer than the culture wants to embrace, the same way lots of artists have held onto the album as opposed to the single. But my goal isn’t to be more popular, and so I’m really comfortable with the repercussions of what I’ve held onto.

Recommended, interesting throughout.  And here is Seth’s new book The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams.

My Conversation with Anna Keay

A very good episode, here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler sat down with Anna to discuss the most plausible scenario where England could’ve remained a republic in the 17th century, what Robert Boyle learned from Sir William Petty, why some monarchs build palaces and other don’t, how renting from the Landmark Trust compares to Airbnb, how her job changes her views on wealth taxes, why neighborhood architecture has declined, how she’d handle the UK’s housing shortage, why giving back the Koh-i-Noor would cause more problems than it solves, why British houses have so little storage, the hardest part about living in an 800-year-old house, her favorite John Fowles book, why we should do more to preserve the Scottish Enlightenment, and more.

And here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Which are the old buildings that we have too many of in Britain? There’s a lot of Christopher Wren churches. I think there’s over 20.

KEAY: Too many?

COWEN: What if they were 15? They’re not all fantastic.

KEAY: They’re not all fantastic? Tell me one that isn’t fantastic.

COWEN: The Victorians knocked down St. Mildred. I’ve seen pictures of it. I don’t miss it.

KEAY: Well, you don’t miss something that’s not there. I think it’d be pretty hard to convince me that any Christopher Wren church wasn’t worth hanging on to. But your point is right, which is to say that not everything that was ever built is worth retaining. There are things which are clearly of much less interest or were poorly built, which are not serving a purpose anymore in a way that they need to. To me, it’s all about assessing what matters, what we care about.

It’s incredibly important to remember how you have to try and take the long view because if you let things go, you cannot later retrieve them. We look at the decisions that were made in the past about things that we really care about that were demolished — wonderful country houses, we’ve mentioned. It’s fantastic, for example, Euston Station, one of the great stations of the world, built in the middle of the 19th century, demolished in the ’60s, regretted forever since.

So, one of the things you have to be really careful about is to make a distinction between the fashion of the moment and things which we are going to regret, or our children or our grandchildren are going to curse us for having not valued or not thought about, not considered.

Which is why, in this country, we have this thing called the listing system, where there’s a process of identifying buildings which are important, and what’s called listing them — putting them on a list — which means that if you own them, you can’t change them without getting permission, which is a way of ensuring that things which you as an owner or I as an owner might not treat with scorn, that the interest of generations to come are represented in that.

COWEN: Why were so many big mistakes made in the middle part of the 20th century? St. Pancras almost was knocked down, as I’m sure you know. That would have been a huge blunder. There was something about that time that people seem to have become more interested in ugliness. Or what’s your theory? How do you explain the insanity that took all of Britain for, what, 30 years?

KEAY: Well, I think this is such a good question because this is, to me, what the study of history is all about, which is, you have to think about what it was like for that generation. You have to think of what it was like for people in the 1950s and ’60s, who had experienced, either firsthand or very close at hand, not just one but two catastrophic world wars in which numbers had been killed, places had been destroyed. The whole human cost of that time was so colossal, and the idea for that generation that something really fundamental had to change if we were going to be a society that wasn’t going to be killing one another at all time.

This has a real sort of mirror in the 17th century, during the Civil War in the 17th century. There’s a real feeling that something had to be done. Otherwise, God was going to strike down this nation, this errant nation. I think for that generation in the ’50s and ’60s, the sense that we simply have to do things differently because this pattern of life, this pattern of existence, this way we’ve operated as a society has been so destructive.

Although lots of things were done — when it comes to urban planning and so on — that we really regret now, I think you have to be really careful not to diminish the seriousness of intent of those people who were trying to conceive of what that world might be — more egalitarian, more democratic, involving more space, more air, more light, healthier — all these kinds of things.

Definitely recommended, with numerous interesting parts.  And I am very happy to recommend Anna’s latest book The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown.

My excellent Conversation with Jessica Wade

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the summary:

She joined Tyler to discuss if there are any useful gender stereotypes in science, distinguishing between productive and unproductive ways to encourage women in science, whether science Twitter is biased toward men, how AI will affect gender participation gaps, how Wikipedia should be improved, how she judges the effectiveness of her Wikipedia articles, how she’d improve science funding, her work on chiral materials and its near-term applications, whether writing a kid’s science book should be rewarded in academia, what she learned spending a year studying art in Florence, what she’ll do next, and more.

Here is the opening bit:

COWEN: Let’s start with women in science. We will get to your research, but your writings — why is it that women in history were so successful in astronomy so early on, compared to other fields?

WADE: Oh, that’s such a hard question [laughs] and a fascinating one. When you look back at who was allowed to be a scientist in the past, at which type of woman was allowed to be a scientist, you were probably quite wealthy, and you either had a husband who was a scientist or a father who was a scientist. And you were probably allowed to interact with science at home, potentially in things like polishing the lenses that you might use on a telescope, or something like that.

Caroline Herschel was quite big on polishing the lenses that Herschel used to go out and look at and identify comets, and was so successful in identifying these comets that she wanted to publish herself and really struggled, as a woman, to be allowed to do that at the end of the 1800s, beginning of the 1900s. I think, actually, it was just that possibility to be able to access and do that science from home, to be able to set up in your beautiful dark-sky environment without the bright lights of a city and do it alongside your quite successful husband or father.

After astronomy, women got quite big in crystallography. There were a few absolutely incredible women crystallographers throughout the 1900s. Dorothy HodgkinKathleen LonsdaleRosalind Franklin — people who really made that science possible. That was because they were provided entry into that, and the way that they were taught at school facilitated doing that kind of research. I find it fascinating they were allowed, but if only we’d had more, you could imagine what could have happened.

COWEN: So, household production you think is the key variable, plus the ability to be helped or trained by a father or husband?

The discussion of chirality and her science work is very interesting, though hard to summarize.  I very much like this part, when I asked her about her most successful unusual work habit:

But just writing the [Wikipedia] biography of the person I was going to work with meant that I was really prepped for going. And if I’m about to see someone speak, writing their biography before means I get this. That’s definitely my best work habit — write the Wikipedia page of what it is that you are working on.

I don’t agree with her on the environment/genes issue, but overall a very good CWT, with multiple distinct parts.

How to visit Italy

Ajit requests such a post, and I note that plenty of people have plenty of experience with this topic.  So I’ll offer a few observations at the margin:

1. Venice, Florence, and Rome have, on average, the worst food in Italy.  They have some wonderful places, but possibly hard to get into, requiring advance planning, and often expensive.  For random meals, those cities are not impressive, noting that Rome, due to its size, is much better than Venice or Florence.

2. My favorite “single sights” in Italy, moving beyond the core sights of Rome, Venice and Florence, are the Giotto chapel in Padua, the Basilica in Ravenna, and the Cathedral in Monreale in Sicily (near Palermo).  To this day, they remain underrated sights.  As for the major cities, both Genoa and Torino are underrated.

3. My favorite food in Italy would be in Sicily, Naples, and the lower-tier towns of the North, such as Bologna and Parma.  The area near Torino/Piedmont would be another contender.  I have heard Veneto is wonderful for food, though have only had a single meal there, which was indeed outstanding.  In Sicily, don’t order the usual Italian dishes (which are available and excellent), rather look for regional offerings which reflect the area’s Arabic heritage.  Orange slice and mint — bring it on!

4. Usually there is little gain from pursuing Michelin-starred restaurants in Italy.  You want the “two-forker” places with outstanding regional cuisine.  Originality, which is rewarded by the Michelin system, too often is a negative in Italian food.

5. Italy has a large number of third-tier towns which are wonderful for walking through.  But you don’t need to overnight in them, so there is much to be said for randomly driving around Italy, but avoiding the larger cities.  Stop, walk for a few hours, take a meal, and then move on.

6. There is a great deal of available trip prep material for Italy in the form of movies, fiction, and history.  Most of all, however, you should focus on using picture books to have an advance sense of the art and architecture.  The classic book on Italy, Luigi Barzini’s The Italians, is still worth reading.  And often the postwar fiction, or even Manzoni, are better trip prep than the very famous classics such as Dante and Petrarch (though you should read them anyway, but for other reasons).

What else?

Alex Murrell, The Age of Average

One of the best essays of this year, though I think the author considerably underrates how much heterogeneity we are building on the internet, globally, and also through GPT models.  Nonetheless an excellent read with some hard-hitting points and good photos to illustrate.  Here is one excerpt:

This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.

Welcome to the age of average.

Here is a photo of some (supposedly different) current cars:

You can read the whole thing here.  Note that in my model, the homogenizations we do observe spring precisely from the greater diversity on the fringes of the distribution.  People at the edges can get exactly what they want, so the fight over the mainstream middle becomes all the more mainstream, as it is targeting the true conformists in that particular area.