Category: The Arts
The museum culture that is internet
The Tank Museum in Bovington, England, doesn’t usually rank among the world’s great museums. Located next to a military base in serene countryside, the collection of around 300 armored vehicles attracts only a few hundred thousand visitors a year, mainly families on rained-out beach vacations.
Yet there is one place where it not only ranks among the world’s largest museums, but surpasses them: YouTube.
The Tank Museum’s channel has over 550,000 subscribers — surpassing the Museum of Modern Art (519,000), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (380,000) or the Louvre (106,000).
In April, it announced it was the first museum to get over 100 million views on YouTube, with weekly clips including intensely detailed discussions on tank history, chatty videos of the curators’ favorite war machines and newsier items on how armored vehicles are being used in Ukraine.
Here is more from the New York Times, via Philip Wallach.
Should child influencers have stronger rights to the income they generate?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. You can think of this as a government regulation issue, but alternatively you could frame it as the government enforcing individual property rights that currently are absent. Here is one excerpt:
More and more children, by which I mean minors below legal working age, are producing content as online influencers. A lot of Instagram or YouTube or TikTok accounts feature such children, and they can be cute, endearing or (depending on your mood) annoying — as well as profitable. By one estimate, the most successful children working in this area — called “kidfluencers” — can generate more than $20 million a year in revenue…
Legally, these children have no claim to the income their sites generate. Thankfully, many parents are loving and generous. But not all. There is no data on how social media earnings are distributed within the family, but the long history of child movie and TV stars indicates that many receive little or nothing.
But change is afoot, and this is mostly a good thing:
Enter the state of Illinois, where a recently passed law gives successful child social media stars a right to some percentage of the earnings they generate, to be held in a trust in their name until they turn 18. Such legislation has precedent. In the early days of Hollywood, California passed the Coogan Law, which gives child actors a right to a certain percentage of earnings, which employers have to place in trust accounts. New York has passed similar legislation.
The social media case is tougher to enforce, because often the parents themselves are the de facto employer and there is no contract specifying terms. And how is the relative contribution of the child to the family income to be assessed? (Time spent onscreen? Cuteness? What if the social media presence leads to a book contract or podcast?) Nonetheless, the law sends a clear signal that the children do have some rights to the generated income, and grown children can sue their parents if the money is not passed along.
Note however that: “It is neither practical nor desirable for the state to insert itself into family decision-making on a regular basis.” So we should expect only limited gains from such legislation. Furthermore, unlike with child stars in the movies and on TV, there is no real paper trail of contracts and transactions. On the upside, those superior property rights for “kidfluencer” income might get some kids to want to work more, rather than less.
Not everyone will like that outcome of course.
I thank Anecdotal, and also A., for pointers on this issue.
Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
I’ve been reading and rereading biographies of Bach lately (for some podcast prep), and it strikes me he might count as the greatest achiever of all time. That is distinct from say regarding him as your favorite composer or artist of all time. I would include the following metrics as relevant for that designation:
1. Quality of work.
2. How much better he was than his contemporaries.
3. How much he stayed the very best in subsequent centuries.
4. Quantity of work.
5. Peaks.
6. Consistency of work and achievement.
7. How many other problems he had to solve to succeed with his achievement. For Bach, this might include a) finding musical manuscripts, b) finding organs good enough to play and compose on, c) dealing with various local and church authorities, d) migrating so successfully across jurisdictions, e) composing at an impossibly high level during the four years he was widowed (with kids), before remarrying.
8. Ending up so great that he could learn only from himself.
9. Never experiencing true defeat or setback (rules out Napoleon!).
I see Bach as ranking very, very high in all these categories. Who else might even be a contender for greatest achiever of all time? Shakespeare? Maybe, but Bach seems to beat him for relentlessness and quantity (at a very high quality level). Beethoven would be high on the list, but he doesn’t seem to quite match up to Bach in all of these categories. Homer seems relevant, but we are not even sure who or what he was. Archimedes? Plato or Aristotle? Who else?
Addendum: from Lucas, in the comments:
In which sector are the top performers stupidest?
One of my core views is that the most successful performers in most (not all) areas are extremely smart and talented. So if you are one of the (let’s say) top fifty global performers in an area, you are likely to be one sharp cookie, even if the form of your intelligence is quite different from that in say academia or the tech world.
You might that a sport such as basketball selects for height, and thus its top performers are not all that mentally impressive. But I’ve spent a lot of time consuming the words of Lebron James, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (including a podcast and a dinner with the latter), and I am firmly convinced they are all extremely intelligent. From what I’ve read about supermodels, they are also an extremely intelligent group at the very top. There are many good-looking women, but managing your career to get to the top in a non-self-destructive fashion still requires extreme talent.
In general, most forms of top achievement involve knowing how to practice and knowing how to manage your career, both of which are likely to select for both smarts and determination.
So what then is the area where top performers are just not that smart? Comments are open.
Doha travel notes
Qatar is a greatly underrated tourist destination.
The Museum of Islamic Art is one of the finest museums in the world, with a collection of unsurpassable quality, drawing on Islamic creations from as far away as Sumatra and the Philippines, as well as the more familiar Persian, Indian, Turkish, and Central Asian items. The I.M. Pei building offers fantastic views, and there is an Alain Ducasse restaurant on the top floor.
The National Museum of Qatar is more didactic, but still I found it spectacular, including the architecture and external sculptures on the front side of the building. Usually I dislike audiovisual displays in museums, but their films on the history of Qatar — shown on very large Imax-like screens — were spectacular. The costumes and jewelry displays are hard to top. “Culture” and “growth” seemed to be the organizing themes of the exhibits. The progressions were logical, and at the end of it all I came away thinking that Qatar has had cultural sophistication for a long time, and is not just a place where they throw a lot of money at art. I fell for their propaganda, but now I am going to read up and see just how true that is.
In value terms, the government of Qatar is the largest buyer of art in the world. The country has other notable museums as well, but I did not have the time to visit them, as sometimes their hours are irregular, or they are private collections which require special appointments.
In most public spaces you will see some attempt to make them look creative or aesthetic. By no means do all such displays succeed, but they are always trying. Many of the contemporary buildings, or sculptures along the road, are worthy of inspection.
In the water you still can see wooden dhows, and on the roads you might see a man in desert gear shepherding his camels across the road. The main souk has a whole section devoted to falcons and falconry. The souk at dusk is magnificent.
Overall the place feels cheerier and homier than does Dubai. Everyone I met was friendly. English is the lingua franca, and most of the people here do in fact speak reasonable English.
“Cultural Village” and “Pearl Island” are hard to explain, but they are parts of town worth a visit, moving at times in Las Vegas and “Venetian” directions.
The nearby development of Lusail (is it a separate city?) has some iconic buildings and is worth a visit, check out the medical center, it looks better in real life than in the photos.
Doha sparkles when it comes to food. The Parisa Persian restaurant in Souq Waqif (don’t go to the other Parisa restaurant, supposedly it is worse) was the best fesanjan I ever have had, excellent decor too.
Saasna is one local high-quality place for Qatari food. Not cheap, but excellent ingredients. The dishes skew in the Saudi direction (“lamb shank on saffron rice,” or “beef stewed with wheat”) rather than Persian.
Good Indian and Chinese places seem to abound, I even saw an apparently high-quality Miami restaurant. The breakfast at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel was first-rate, most of all the pistachio labneh.
Based on n = 6, this seems to be one of those countries where they ask if you want lemon in your sparkling water, you say no, and they give it to you anyway.
On Fridays, the country does not open until 1:30 p.m., so if you are doing a short visit try to avoid that day.
The on-line visa form was easy to fill out, and I received a positive response within seconds.
Going in August, as I have done, is not crazy. Sometimes the temperatures reach 47 degrees or higher, but somehow it is manageable, or at least it was for me. Perhaps more people are around other times of the year? In any case you should go, as Qatar ought to join the list of must-visit destinations, and it is easy enough to combine it with other trips, given the use of Doha as an air hub.
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?