Interesting links and quotes: TikTok politics, social incompetence, the Gutenberg parenthesis, illegal AI chess
And more...
Hello,
Welcome to Cultural Capital.
*** I was very glad to bump into a reader this week who has followed approved Cultural Capital ideology and got rid of his smartphone. I’m thinking of writing something on how to quit your phone and why so if you want to get in touch (by replying to this email or in the comments) I’d be interested to know how you’ve done it and how you’ve found the experience. In fact I’m interested in any readers living without smartphones. Let me know if that’s you. ***
How iPhones are driving men and women apart
Really fascinating interview with the demographer Alice Evans by the New York Times’s Rouss Douthat on his podcast Interesting Times.
Evans argues that falling birthrates are less to do with growing individual freedoms or declining economic opportunity but are instead directly traceable to the spread of hyper-addictive personal entertainment technology in the early twenty-first century: TikTok, Netflix, video games, online pornography… (is Cultural Capital a hyper-addictive entertainment technology?)
Evans says that Silicon Valley has successfully out-competed most other forms of entertainment and is now out-competing human interaction itself. Quite chilling.
The data undeniably shows that when given the choice to socialise or stay at home playing video games or scrolling TikTok a lot of people increasingly choose the digital option.
We do have this big increase in personal online entertainment, whether it’s watching shows on Netflix, sports bets — online gambling has become absolutely massive across Brazil and Latin America more broadly. You can go on PornHub. Online connectivity enables people to stroll on Instagram, play Call of Duty, World of Warcraft.
So we are all retreating into digital solitude. I think that’s partly because technology makes it nicer and easier to stay at home — you can work from home — and some of these apps are so hyper-engaging that you get distracted by the constant stream of dopamine hits as each app, as each technology company competes against others to keep its users hooked.
And effectively, the tech is outcompeting personal interactions. That’s my fear.
If your social skills atrophy or never develop because you spend your life in a condition of digital solitude it’s going to be much harder to form relationships. And it seems a lot of the falling birthrate is attributable to the fact people are less likely to form couples.
You may have to buy an NYT podcast subscription to listen (it’s pretty cheap). The transcript is here.
The smallness of the past
One of the hardest things to do when reading history is to keep in mind the sheer smallness of the past. In modern terms most medieval cities were more like large-ish villages or small towns.
Our twenty-first century world is so big. Every day of my life I see thousands of strangers streaming up and down the streets of London and I walk in the shadows of towering skyscrapers. This is unbelievably unusual in the context of the way most humans in history lived until about five minutes ago.
Dan Jackson posted this map on Twitter.
The first book explosion
In the first fifty years after the invention of the printing press more books were produced in Europe than the previous twelve centuries combined. An extraordinary and exciting revolution in the intellectual life of Europe. I love reading the letters of the renaissance humanists who were just thrilled to be alive at a time when there were more and more books available and everyone seemed to be getting cleverer and more interesting. Sample quote:
Oh century! Oh letters! It is a joy to be alive! Studies thrive and minds flourish! Woe to you, Barbarians! Accept the noose, look forward to exile!
(Basically the opposite of every column I’ve ever written in The Times.)
It was also a great time to be a publisher:
[A publisher] was, equipped to print whatever the public demanded, at incredibly low prices, with practically no competition and the whole of ancient and medieval literature to choose from. Literary property was free, there were no royalties, no copyright, no censorship regulations, and no reviewers.
From The Gutenberg Parenthesis by Jeff Jarvis which I’m reading at the moment. Very highly recommended.
Is ChatGPT conscious?
Headlines to which the answer is no...
So many intelligent people don’t seem to remember how much text LLMs have absorbed, including thousands of sci-fi stories about conscious robots and such things. It’s of course impressive how fluently these LLMs can combine terms and phrases from such sources and can consequently sound like they are really reflecting on what consciousness is, but to me it sounds empty, and the more I read of it, the more empty it sounds. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The glibness is the giveaway. To my jaded eye and mind, there is nothing in what you sent me that resembles genuine reflection, genuine thinking.
I think this is a good description of current AI prose. “Glibness” is precisely the word. Evidently a lot of people don’t notice it as I see more and more obviously AI-generated or AI-aided content around, especially on Substack.
How maps changed our brains
Fascinating (I thought) on how the invention of maps transformed our understanding of our place in the world:
By 1520, however, only a minute fraction of Europe’s population had ever seen a map. No geography was taught in schools or universities, except for a very few, mostly in Germany, where Ptolemy was introduced. Without the habit of conceptualising space, a traveller going to war or work could not link his separate impressions to the nature of his route as a whole or extend them imaginatively to the unseen parts of the area through which he was passing; a man could not visualise the country to which he belonged; a landowner, unable to ‘see’ his properties as a whole was not concerned to concentrate his scattered holdings by sale or exchanges; a ruler, unable to ‘see’ his kingdom was not perturbed by bargaining away provinces that map-conscious generations were to see as essential to strategic frontiers; governments, informed by verbal descriptions, were unable to judge the resources in men and materials of their rivals; generals miscalculated their lines of communications and found it difficult to work to a systematic
From JR Hale’s classic book Renaissance Europe: 1480-1520 which I read last week and loved. Really highly recommended to anyone interested in the period. Another data point in my theory that many older history books are often better-written and more compelling than most recent ones.
The rise of Robert Jenrick
Harry Lambert profiles Robert Jenrick the anti-immigration Tory MP with designs on the leadership:
[Jenrick] and Forman have cracked a nascent political art: putting out punchy, provocative vertical videos designed to go viral. “How long should someone who’s raped a child go to prison for?” “We need to know the truth about who is committing crime in our country.” “Why is it that Keir Starmer’s Attorney General, Richard Hermer, represented all these clients?” Each one, a minute or two long, shows an impassioned Jenrick walking and talking to a moving camera, with clips, captions, cardboard cut-outs and occasional cameos deployed to fuel his point.
I have to say this strikes me as a deeply stupid and depressing development in our politics. I’m not sure a country in which people are making their minds up about candidates on the basis of TikTok videos is going to make great political choices. Or even remain a democracy for very long. We know that areas with high levels of TikTok usage are more likely to vote for populists.
I also have to say I find Jenrick totally uncharismatic and fake. I suspect his moment will fade. Famous last words…
Why ChatGPT can’t play chess
Very helpful essay from the AI expert Gary Marcus who is the most prominent and persuasive sceptic of large language models. The core of Marcus’s argument (roughly) is that LLMs are extremely advanced prediction machines but lack an internal model of the world.
This means that despite being impressive writers and researchers they fall down on apparently easy skills like playing chess which other forms of AI cracked decades ago.
As Marcus says, LLMs have “have a lot of stored information about chess, scraped from databases of chess games, books about chess, and so on” but no internal logical model of how a chessboard works:
This allows them to play chess decently well in the opening moves of the game, where moves are very stylized, with many examples in the training set…
As the game proceeds, though, you can rely less and less on simply mimicking games in the database. After White’s first move in chess, there are literally only 20 possible board states (4 knight moves and 16 pawn moves), and only a handful of those are particular common; by the midgame there are billion of possibilities. Memorization will work only for a few of these.
So what happens? By the midgame, LLMs often get lost. Not only does the quality of play diminish deeper into the game, but LLMs start to make illegal moves.
Why? They don’t know which moves are possible (or not) because they never induce a proper dynamic world model of the board state. An LLM may purport to play chess, but despite training that likely encompasses millions of games, not to mention the wiki page The rules of chess, which is surely in every system’s training set, and countless sites like chess.com’s how to play chess, also presumably in the database of any recent, massive model, it never fully abstracts the game.
Why are men better at chess?
Again on the chess theme… Very interesting column by Dominic Lawson on why men outperform women at competitive chess. It’s not about intelligence:
Men are more disposed to the intense and passionate obsessiveness, shutting out all external activities and interests, required to become the world’s best over the confines of the 64 squares. Or, as the late Dutch grandmaster Jan Hein Donner put it: “What is going on in their heads is narcissistic self-gratification with a minimum of objective reality, a wordless snuffling and scrabbling in a bottomless pit.”
Until next week!
James
I always enjoy the double standard where women can be better than men in any number of fields but if men are better than women at something (say at chess) it’s because they are actually worse! Narcissistic self gratification . . .
I keep feeling I'm ignorantly missing something that must be obvious when confronted with opinions of people - including many AI researchers - who suggest LLMs are in any way conscious or even intelligent in remotely human way.
I'm not sure if it's the fact that those people exist largely in the semi autonomous world of text fragments and code themselves and thus believe that this is what world is made of -- but the chess example is an excellent demonstration of a wider fact: LLMs know, in the sense of understanding and being able to reliably manipulate and generate from, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the world outside their training data and (if prompted) a quick search of generally available Internet sources. And even their "factual" knowledge -- not understanding which they have none of -- is unreliable, especially as you go down to anything even remotely detailed or niche or lower level.
And I'm saying it as someone who uses LLM to bounce ideas of, and tidy up/structure my own thinking all the time, and effectively. Especially for therapeutic/counselling adjacent purposes for which they have plenty of material to be useful at.
As to writing, it's not just substack. I've read a (good in ideas) piece in legacy media recently that abounded with "it's not X, it's Y" phrasing and dashes so beloved of ChatGPT. And yes, while the thought was there, and valuable, the execution was mediocre LLM slop.