Fragmentos (19/01/25)

CIA, Siria, Stalin, Beatles

“How to Raise Your Artificial Intelligence: A Conversation with Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

There is an implicit intuitive model that everyday people (including very smart people in the tech world) have about how intelligence works: there’s this mysterious substance called intelligence, and as you have more of it, you gain power and authority. But that’s just not the picture coming out of cognitive science. Rather, there’s this very wide array of different kinds of cognitive capacities, many of which trade off against each other. So being really good at one thing actually makes you worse at something else. To echo Melanie, one of the really interesting things we’re learning about LLMs is that things like grammar, which we might have thought required an independent-model-building kind of intelligence, you can get from extracting statistical patterns in data. LLMs provide a test case for asking, What can you learn just from transmission, just from extracting information from the people around you? And what requires independent exploration and being in the world? (…)

This is representative of what’s called Moravec’s paradox: things that looked as if they would be really, really hard for AI and require a lot of intelligence, like playing chess, turned out to be relatively easy. And things that look like any two-year-old can do them, like picking up an object and putting it in a pot and stirring it, are actually really hard. LLMs have made that paradox more vivid. (…)

I like to tell people that everything an LLM says is actually a hallucination. Some of the hallucinations just happen to be true because of the statistics of language and the way we use language. But a big part of what makes us intelligent is our ability to reflect on our own state. We have a sense for how confident we are about our own knowledge. This has been a big problem for LLMs. They have no calibration for how confident they are about each statement they make other than some sense of how probable that statement is in terms of the statistics of language. Without some extra ability to ground what they’re saying in the world, they can’t really know if something they’re saying is true or false. (…)

There’s an evolutionary argument that the time when “intelligence” shows up in evolution is in the Cambrian explosion. Before the explosion, you had lots of organisms like sponges living on the bottom of the ocean, and they had a wonderful life where food wafted over them and they extracted it. But what happens in the Cambrian is you start having organisms with eyes and claws, or what biologists call actuators and sensors. When you get actuators and sensors, you can perceive things and move, and that’s a really different niche for an animal. That’s when you start getting neural systems and brains because you need a brain to coordinate action and sensing. And when you get a bunch of these animals together, they start trying to find prey and avoid predators. You get a perceptual system that’s connected to the outside world and taking in information about the world, and a motor system that’s connected to the outside world and going out and changing the world. This is a foundational kind of structure for which you need to have the kind of truth-seeking intelligence we are talking about.

There are some interesting attempts within robotics and AI to use reinforcement learning to try and get systems that are motivated to find truth. Instead of just trying to get rewards like a higher score in a game, these systems are motivated to get information or to try to be more effective in the world. And I think that might be the right route to think about for something that looks like the intelligence that evolved in the Cambrian.

“When the C.I.A. Messes Up” (The New Yorker)

It has been tempting to view the C.I.A. as omniscient. Yet “The Achilles Trap” (Penguin Press), Steve Coll’s chastening new book about the events leading up to the Iraq War, in 2003, shows that the agency was flying blind. Washington’s failure to foresee the Kuwait invasion was just one of what Coll calls a “cascade of errors” that would start several wars and end many lives.

Saddam made miscalculations, too. Their gravity became clear once the U.S.-led coalition entered the Gulf War and vanquished Iraq’s military with a thunderous swat. The ground fighting, absurdly one-sided, lasted only a hundred hours. Saddam was cruel, but he was not usually foolish. Couldn’t he see what he was up against?

Actually, he couldn’t. “Like many people in the Middle East and elsewhere, Saddam thought of the C.I.A. as all-knowing,” Coll writes. Saddam assumed that Washington was fully aware of his plans to take Kuwait, and he mistook Bush’s lack of objection for tacit permission. Years later, while imprisoned, he confronted a C.I.A. officer about this. “If you didn’t want me to go in,” the officer recalled Saddam asking, “why didn’t you tell me?” (…)

Saddam, in fact, had destroyed his chemical and biological arsenals and ended his nuclear program after the Gulf War. Yet “he assumed that an all-powerful C.I.A. already knew that he had no nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons,” Steve Coll writes, and so he concluded that foreign inspections must be part of a coup plot. (…) Saddam saw spies around every corner. This was reasonable, given the C.I.A.’s history, but Coll shows that it was exactly the wrong fear. U.S. intelligence had missed Saddam’s Kuwait-invasion preparations, his nuclear program, and his subsequent disarmament. His real problem was not what the C.I.A. knew but what it didn’t. (…)

Would more information have helped? No doubt, and Coll’s book illustrates the costs of ignorance magnificently. It may be consoling, then, that the twenty-first century has been a golden age of data mining. Intelligence officers, who once subsisted on trickles of information, are now drinking from the fire hose. The C.I.A. today is only a piece of what Wilford calls “the sprawling intelligence-industrial complex”; roughly two million individuals have access to classified information.

Wilford struggles to see this as an improvement, however. The C.I.A.’s trail of havoc, he feels, stems not from the ineptitude of its officers but from the audacity of its mission. Superintending global politics is a vast undertaking, requiring both a deep understanding of many places and the sort of hubris that makes that deep understanding difficult. And, because Washington has been insulated from the worst consequences of its mistakes, it has rarely been forced to learn from them. In the end, the C.I.A. has the power to break things, but not the skill to build them.

“Ecuador’s Risky War on Narcos” (Jon Lee Anderson - The New Yorker)

The country was in crisis. For decades, Ecuador, a small nation of eighteen million people, was generally regarded as a peaceful, stable place, at least by regional standards. Tourists came to see the Andes and to retrace Darwin’s route through the Galápagos Islands. Thousands of Americans retired there, seeking an easygoing, inexpensive life. But across the border in Colombia the cocaine trade was flourishing. Despite a fifteen-year anti-trafficking effort supported by the United States, by 2016 the country was producing more of the drug than ever, accounting for an estimated sixty per cent of the world’s supply. In the past few years, Ecuador—which has a dollarized economy, a modern road system, and major ports on the Pacific—has become a critical hub for the Colombian drug trade. Devastating violence and corruption followed. Particularly on the coast, where drug gangs dominated, killings became commonplace, and many Ecuadorians fled, heading to safer parts of the country or to the U.S. (…)

While campaigning, Noboa had often stopped short of endorsing a military solution to his country’s gang problem. Now he declared a sixty-day state of emergency and sent in the Army to take control of the prisons. Ecuador’s gangs fought back. Across the country, they set off car bombs, triggered prison riots, and attacked police stations; amid the chaos, a leader of Los Lobos also escaped from jail. At the height of the tumult, on January 9th, gunmen broke into the studios of TC Televisión, in the coastal city of Guayaquil. The station was in the middle of a news broadcast, and the cameras kept rolling as reporters and studio employees pleaded for their lives. The attackers, most wearing masks, put guns to their captives’ heads and ordered them to lie down. Before anyone could be killed, a police task force arrived and arrested the assailants. But Ecuadorians were shaken: a near-massacre had played out on live TV. (…)

"Noboa told me that his administration had intelligence showing that some sixty per cent of the province’s political class was involved with traffickers, who used public-works contracts to co-opt officials and to launder their profits. Anyone who opposed them was murdered. Last July, the mayor of Manta, Agustín Intriago, was inspecting a sewage facility when hit men drove up and shot him to death; a woman talking with him was also killed. The day I arrived in Ecuador, the country’s youngest mayor, Brigitte García, was shot to death in her home town of San Vicente. Her body was found in a car, alongside the corpse of her press officer.

“My Search for Hidden Meanings in Beatles Songs” (Ted Gioia)

The Beatles became famous when I was four years old. My first experience with music criticism happened when older kids argued about their songs.

Those Beatles lyrics stirred up constant debates back then. Nobody could agree on what they meant.

Nowadays, you can go to Wikipedia or Genius.com and get a full rundown on any hit song. Everything is explained and documented.

But in those pre-digital days, we had no authorities to turn to. So we constantly argued over what our favorite songs were really about. (…)

Censorship was always on our mind back in the 1960s and 1970s. We all assumed that the bands were putting secret messages into the lyrics—they couldn’t speak openly, because they would get shut down by the government.

That was a reasonable assumption. Black musicians had been doing it for decades. Those old gospel, blues, jazz, and rhythm-and-blues songs are filled with hidden meanings. (…)

Those songs were a huge puzzle, almost impossible to solve. But we knew we had to try.

If we could just unlock the code, we would finally learn all those mysterious things that the System (= parents, teachers, ministers, scout leaders, etc.) didn’t want us to know.

There’s no way I can convey to youngsters today how important this was to that generation. Or to me personally. This whole way of viewing music doesn’t exist anymore.

And the intense generational conflict underway raised the stakes further. We knew with absolute conviction that these Beatles songs were for us—not them—and that there was some pathway to liberation encoded in this music. (…)

Yes, I laugh at all this today. And, most of all, I laugh at myself.

But am I better off now, when I can go to Wikipedia and learn that “Norwegian Wood” is about cheap wood paneling used by interior decorators?

I don’t think so.

A creative world is degraded when it banishes all mystery and ambiguity and open-endedness. When rationalism, logic, and data take total command over culture, something vital and urgent is lost.

Maybe that’s why I avoid reading detailed critical assessments before I listen to a new album nowadays, or watch a movie, or read a book. It’s shameful for me to admit—because, after all, I am a critic—but my aesthetic experience is enriched when my first encounter with a work is direct and unmediated. (…)

This is a good place to remind you: The most intense aesthetic experiences are always accompanied by a sense that you still haven’t fully grasped the meaning. You may have gotten part of it, and have tasted some of its delights, but there’s still more out there—at some deeper level—waiting to be tapped.

(By the way, if I had to sum up the greatness of Shakespeare in thirty seconds, I’d point to that last paragraph.)

“Fitzcarraldo Editions Makes Challenging Literature Chic” (The New Yorker)

Impressively, four of the writers who have been named Nobel laureates in the past decade are on Fitzcarraldo’s roster. In addition to Tokarczuk, the house publishes the work of Svetlana Alexievich, of Belarus (2015); Annie Ernaux, of France (2022); and Jon Fosse, of Norway (2023). (...)Although Fitzcarraldo now turns a profit, Testard cannot match mainstream commercial publishers financially, and for the most part he can afford to pay advances only in the low four digits. For some writers, being offered a bigger advance elsewhere after a Fitzcarraldo-instigated success is an opportunity that would be reckless to turn down. Bennett was wooed by the publisher Cape for her follow-up, the 2021 novel “Checkout 19.” Bennett said, “It wasn’t a decision I made lightly at all. There were a few tears involved.” Testard told me, “We couldn’t compete on the money, and she needed money, and that’s fine.” To writers who stick with Fitzcarraldo, Testard offers the opportunity of being impeccably published, and being seen in esteemed editorial company. Tynan Kogane, a senior editor at New Directions, in New York, said of Testard, “He’s gotten this very strange reputation as a Nobel whisperer.” Testard is also known for being committed to nurturing a writer through an entire career. He told me, “If you come to me with your first book, and I believe in you as an author, and I believe in the writing, and it doesn’t work and it sells five hundred copies, we will still do the next one, and the next one, because it takes time.”In fact, only one of Fitzcarraldo’s titles has sold fewer than a thousand copies, and many have sold far more. For literary writers, the prospect of such old-school loyalty from a publisher allows for a freedom of imagination that might be impossible elsewhere. (...)

Testard’s bilingualism gives him an advantage in a publishing industry in which the ability to read languages other than English is surprisingly uncommon. Not only does he read many French authors before they are translated into English; as a French reader, he is also introduced early to authors in various other languages, because French publishers tend to be far quicker than British or American ones to issue translations. Testard read Svetlana Alexievich in French before seeking to acquire “Second-hand Time,” an oral history of post-Soviet Russia, in 2014, during his first visit to the Frankfurt Book Fair, an annual gathering where international rights are sold.“I was walking around with one blue book and one white book,” he recalled of the fair. That year, the Frankfurt conference coincided with the announcement of the winner of the Nobel Prize, and Alexievich was considered one of the front-runners to win. He recalled, “I was basically told, ‘You’ve got no chance.’ ” When Patrick Modiano was named the winner, the heat went out of the competition for “Second-hand Time”; within a week, Testard had acquired the rights to Alexievich’s book, for what was for him the huge sum of thirty-five hundred pounds. The next year, she won the Nobel, and the English-language translation that Testard had commissioned, from Bela Shayevich, was sold to a U.S. publisher for a quarter of a million dollars.

“The Magic Mountain Saved My Life” (George Packer - The Atlantic)

Hans Castorp stays too, obsessed with his own temperature chart, and with the entrancing Clavdia Chauchat, a young tubercular Russian with “Kirghiz eyes,” bad posture, and a habit of letting the dining-room door slam behind her. Almost half the novel goes by before Hans Castorp—who has by now been on the mountain for seven months—talks with Clavdia, just as she’s about to depart. On the night before she leaves, he makes one of the most bizarre declarations of love in literature: “Let me take in the exhalation of your pores and brush the down—oh, my human image made of water and protein, destined for the contours of the grave, let me perish, my lips against yours!” Clavdia leaves Hans Castorp with a framed X-ray of her tubercular lung.

I fell under the spell of Hans Castorp’s quest story, as the Everyman hero is transformed by his explorations of time, illness, sciences and séances, politics and religion and music. The climactic chapter, “Snow,” felt as though it were addressed to me. Hans Castorp, lost in a snowstorm, falls asleep and then awakens from a mesmerizing and monstrous dream with an insight toward which the entire story has led him: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.” (…)

Mann published no fiction for the duration of the war. Instead, he became a very public defender of imperial Germany against its adversaries. For Mann, the Great War was more than a contest among rival European powers or a patriotic cause. It was a struggle between “civilization” and “culture”—between the rational, politicized civilization of the West and Germany’s deeper culture of art, soul, and “genius,” which Mann associated with the irrational in human nature: sex, aggression, mythical belief. The kaiser’s Germany—strong in arms, rich in music and philosophy, politically authoritarian—embodied Mann’s ideal. The Western powers “want to make us happy,” he wrote in the fall of 1914—that is, to turn Germany into a liberal democracy. Mann was more drawn to death’s mystery and profundity than to reason and progress, which he considered facile values. This sympathy wasn’t simply a fascination with human evil—with a death instinct—but an attraction to a deeper freedom, a more intense form of life than parliaments and pamphleteering offered. (…)

Mann now recognized political freedom as necessary to ensure the freedom of art, and he became a sworn enemy of the Nazis. A Nobel Prize winner in exile, he emerged as the preeminent German spokesman against Hitler who, in lectures across the United States in 1938, warned Americans of the rising threat to democracy, which for him was inseparable from humanism: “We must define democracy as that form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of man.”

He was speaking at a moment when the dignity of man was locked up in Nazi concentration camps, liquidated in Soviet show trials, buried under piles of corpses. Yet Mann urged his audiences to resist the temptation to deride humanity. “Despite so much ridiculous depravity, we cannot forget the great and the honorable in man,” he said, “which manifest themselves as art and science, as passion for truth, creation of beauty, and the idea of justice.”

Could anyone utter these lofty words today without courting a chorus of snickers, a social-media immolation? We live in an age of human self-contempt.

“Meet the outspoken maverick who could lead India” (The Economist)

Mr Modi’s position is not immediately under threat. Aged 74, he seems in good health and BJP officials have denied that the party’s rules require retirement at 75 (although it has ousted some veterans that way). Nor is Mr Gadkari the only potential successor. Opinion polls suggest that the frontrunner is Amit Shah, who is home minister, the BJP’s electoral strategist and Mr Modi’s confidant. Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, usually ranks in second place, with Mr Gadkari third.But Mr Modi’s successor will be decided by the upper ranks of the BJP and RSS, not by opinion polls. And many of them do not trust Mr Adityanath, who hails from a rival Hindu-nationalist group. He is also highly controversial among foreign governments and secular-minded Indians because of his own record of Islamophobic remarks and policies. Mr Shah, meanwhile, is so closely tied to Mr Modi (and has so many enemies) that he could well be sidelined as soon as the prime minister retires.Both Mr Modi and Mr Shah have also been tainted by the general-election result. And on top of the Adani scandal, they face allegations that Indian officials were involved in the killing of a Sikh activist in Canada and the attempted murder of another in America (India denies all the Canadian allegations but is co-operating with the American investigation). Mr Gadkari is untarnished by such problems. He is seen by foreign officials as the BJP’s moderate face and by business leaders as a champion of public-private partnerships in infrastructure. He is liked by some opposition leaders, which helps in coalition building. And his popularity in Maharashtra, including among Muslims, has helped the BJP keep control of Nagpur (whose national parliament seat he has held since 2014) and to win, with its allies, the recent state election there. His other strength is his relationship with the RSS, which is headquartered in Nagpur.

“Can Western carmakers derisk in China? The unreality of geoeconomic realism” (Adam Tooze)

And why do Germany’s car-makers continue to stubbornly invest in China despite Olaf and Ursula’s fashionable worries about Taiwan? Because, already back in 2008 China became the largest car market and has since consolidated that position, far ahead of the United States, the EU and Japan. It was a profitable market for sure. But, it is by no means a cage. You can certainly leave. You fight to stay because you fear losing touch with the direction of the global industry. Exiting or deprioritizing China would be a defeat with strategic consequences.Source: StatistaIf you are in the business of making cars and selling cars at the global level, which is the aspiration of a VW and the German high-end marques, but also the likes of Toyota and, perhaps, GM, then being in China is not a basket you do or don’t put your eggs into. China is not a market that you can derisk from, or balance with other markets. It is the market, it is the country where both in terms of trends of consumption and production, the future of the global industry is likely to be decided.Traveling in China recently with a senior manager from a German car-maker, he observed quite simply: “If we are in the business of making cars we have to be in China. If we aren’t here, we aren’t in the business.”To put the same point another way, rebalancing from China may reduce your risks in the event of a war over Taiwan. But car firms are car firms. They don’t organize their strategy around the war-games of military think tanks. Exiting China, if you are a car-maker, doesn’t derisk your business. It substantially increases the risk that you do not stay on pace with the trends in the world’s leading market. It increases the risk that you get blindsided by competition you did not see coming.

“Stephen Kotkin on Stalin, Power, and the Art of Biography” (Conversations with Tyler)

“The Backstory Behind the Fall of Aleppo” (New Lines Magazine)

Jolani is best understood as a Syrian cut from the same cloth as the Assads: brutal, cynical and triangulating, with a tendency to always come out on top. He outsmarted the leaders of the world’s two largest terrorist organizations. Baghdadi and his deputies in Iraq never fully trusted their Syrian lieutenant when Jolani diplomatically ignored their instructions and created his own fiefdom in eastern and northern Syria in 2012-2013. Abu Ali al-Anbari, Baghdadi’s top aide at the time, after weeks of his own field investigation in Syria, reported back a scathing appraisal of Jolani: “He is a cunning person; two-faced; adores himself; does not care about the religion of his soldiers; is willing to sacrifice their blood in order to make a name for himself in the media; glows when he hears his name mentioned on satellite channels.” (…)

In time, however, the face grew to fit the mask and al-Nusra really broke with al Qaeda. It renounced transnational jihadism in favor of the nationalist variety and got down to the sort of state-building enterprise al Qaeda never managed. (Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has done the most granular analysis of this enterprise, which includes everything from regulating the local power grids to directing traffic and mounting a COVID-19 relief policy.) The organization later renamed itself, twice, ending up as HTS, which stands for the Levant Liberation Committee.

Its reinvention is part genuine evolution — a technocratic Salafism — and part public relations gambit to persuade external stakeholders it is no longer a threat to anyone save Assad and his saviors. Jolani followed events in Afghanistan closely and wants HTS to become a downier, more tolerant equivalent of the Taliban, complete with international acquiescence to, if not recognition of, his rule.

He will have noticed, for instance, that the Taliban leadership is now not only regularly hosted in Qatar and coordinates with the United States as per the conditions of the Trump-brokered Doha Agreement; it also routinely travels to Moscow, in spite of Russia’s proscription of the Taliban as a terrorist entity. (…)

Aleppines are naturally fearful of HTS’ fundamentalist designs and are well aware of its documented abuses against secular activists and political opponents. Yet in the midst of much dire forecasting (and plenty of misinformation being spread online), events so far suggest HTS is behaving pragmatically. Its militants were dispatched right away to safeguard banks from looting. On the first night of its occupation, HTS turned off the electricity for factories, thereby affording civilian residences 16 hours of uninterrupted power, something they haven’t enjoyed since 2012. Jolani has paid specific attention to reassuring Christian and Kurdish civilians now under his dominion, and has even offered safe passage of Kurdish militants out of Aleppo with their weapons.

It’s still early days. But if HTS seeks to administer a demographically diverse city, unlike a smaller, more culturally conservative hamlet in the northwest, it will have to accommodate its ideology to a more cosmopolitan local population. Turkey understands this. So does the regime.