Gwern > Books: read‎ (2098)

A clearly written history of the decipherment of Linear B, structured as a 3-part autobiography with linguistic background interspersed chronologicall

A clearly written history of the decipherment of Linear B, structured as a 3-part autobiography with linguistic background interspersed chronologically as understanding of Linear B & Crete developed.

Fox’s mission, as she makes clear, is revisionism: drawing heavily on personal letters, she casts Alice Kober (incidentally, a graduate of Hunter High School & teacher there) as the Rosalind Franklin of Linear B, and castigating Michael Ventris. In this, she does not particularly succeed; she’s reduced to arguing that perhaps Kober could have and that despite her increasing age, strong hostility towards speculating about what language it was written in or trying to match up anything, and methodical approach, she might have succeeded where omnilingualist Ventris did a few years later. Which is not very persuasive since she doesn’t show such creative leaps in her earlier work, Ventris independently discovered some of the same things, and in any case, intellectual history does not typically assign credit based on what someone might’ve done if they had lived longer because that is unknowable and many people fail to live up to their initial promise as they regress to mediocrity or just go off on fatally unproductive tangents (eg Isaac Newton or Einstein). Fox’s hostile approach to Ventris left a bad taste in my mouth, as Ventris does not appear to have had an easy life whatever his ‘privilege’ and there’s an unpleasant emphasis on how he wasn’t credentialed like Kober (apparently it’s not cool to be the underdog outsider if you’re a white male).

Actually, the impression I strongly got was that long duration from discovery to Linear B’s decipherment reflects not so much Linear B being extraordinarily difficult or bad luck by Kober, so much as as the severe damage done to research progress by the refusal to share data by almost all parties involved beginning with Arthur Evans (an academic sin which we remain all too familiar with), continuing with Blegen, and through to Kober - by my counting, once more than 200 inscriptions became even semi-publicly available in the mid-1940s, the solution followed in 1952 after not even a decade! As is not that surprising in retrospect, inasmuch as the language turned out to be the obvious one and lots of proper names survived into Greek sources and so were available for Rosetta Stone-style comparison. Kober’s exhaustive cross-classifications on 180000 index cards, which took so many years, would have been trivial with a full corpus and a 1950s-era computer, or even just an electromechanical IBM card machine (which could do sorting, cross-tabulation, and other summaries); it leaves one with a sense of pity and disgust to see so much effort expended on such a extraordinarily inefficient way of going about things when waiting a decade or two would have reduced a task from requiring multiple years of labor to weeks or months. While granted Kober didn’t have the budget for renting such equipment, that doesn’t necessarily justify such an approach. Sometimes the time is just not ripe for attacking a problem and one should have the good judgment to work on something else for a while instead of childishly insisting on working on that one thing, which often helps with the original thing as well (perhaps Kober would’ve gotten that tenured position if she had something, anything else to show published; I’ve noted in my other reviews that during the post-WWII hyper-expansion of America, getting tenure at a university was apparently as easy as falling off a log, even for women, so Kober’s failure with Penn is all the more striking). So a sobering double lesson for modern researchers: data hoarding can be extraordinarily harmful and is probably not stigmatized or penalized nearly enough, and stubbornness about a topic to research can be as much a fault as stubbornness about the details of a theory about that topic.

One of the things I dread in a work like this is an author who is in a hurry to cover up and hide all the technical details and dreads that her audience is too dumb, ignorant, and impatient to reach any genuine understanding and settles for ‘lies to children’. She seems to avoid this trap and I felt, at least as a non-classicist and non-linguist, that I got an intelligible and reasonably accurate understanding of the intellectual puzzle and accomplishment of the decipherers.

But was Linear B really worth reading about? The decipherment of hieroglyphics, of course, unlocked an extraordinary array of Egyptian riches from the baroque mythology, endless ancient Egyptian history, and many interesting magical, religious, and everyday letters and documents; there is no question as a layperson that you are interested in what hieroglyphics have to say even more than in how they say it and how they were unlocked. Mesopotamian clay documents are often boring, but so many survive and give us things like Gilgamesh that there too the results seem worth learning about, even the commercial ones which can build up a whole market economy before our eyes. With Linear B… the deciphering turns out to be the most interesting part. The documents are boring and the world depicted in the administrivia is about exactly what you would expect from reading about the palace, a totalitarian agricultural economy, and are a disappointment. A few enigmatic names and allusions are a poor catch. (It is just as well Nero didn’t see the true translation of the tablets discovered during his reign, because he would have been greatly disappointed to see nothing at all on the level of the memoirs of a participant in the Trojan War.) With Linear B, the journey is more interesting than the destination, which makes the account somewhat sterile. (In contrast, while I haven’t been able to finish reading Empires of the Plains, Henry Rawlinson had an extraordinarily interesting life and provided the gateway to the ancient Mesopotamian world.)

18 short stories typically with an ironic SF or fantasy tinge and heavy reliance on twist endings (more like Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives or C

18 short stories typically with an ironic SF or fantasy tinge and heavy reliance on twist endings (more like Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives or Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others than The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq). As with most anthologies, the quality is uneven.

Decent:

Poor:

An engaging multi-biography/history of the repeatedly-reinvented Kelly criterion, mixed in with overviews of Claude Shannon, John Larry Kelly, Jr., Ed

An engaging multi-biography/history of the repeatedly-reinvented Kelly criterion, mixed in with overviews of Claude Shannon, John Larry Kelly, Jr., Ed Thorp, and their famous gambling adventures in beating blackjack and roulette and, as some of the first ‘quants’, the stock market. (Like Thompson sampling, the Kelly criterion has been reinvented many times; Poundstone lists at least 4 inventors: Kelly, Leo Breiman, Bernoulli, and Henry Latané.)

Poundstone starts with the early mob and the ‘numbers racket’ and sports gambling, where Kelly’s metaphor of ‘the wire’ giving an edge on betting was quite literal: spotters at the race-tracks would race to communicate the results to bettors and bookies across the country, so they could take bets on already-won races, leading to mob wars over the lucrative monopoly over using telephones/telegraph services to communicate said results, which constituted a remarkable fraction of telecom profits. (Shades of HFT.) Thus, notorious characters like Bugsy Siegel enter into a book about statistics as gambling becomes a major revenue source replacing the loss of alcohol. (Poundstone speculates that Edgar Hoover’s famous denial of the existence of the Mafias was due to being paid off by betting on fixed horse races.) The mob part may seem like a colorful and interesting yet irrelevant diversion, but it sets the context for inveterate mob gambler Manny Kimmel (famous for betting on anything, and knowing clever tricks like betting people about whether anyone in the room shared birthdays - in other words, one of the only practical applications of the birthday paradox I’ve seen outside of cryptography), who, aside from being the founder of Time Warner (!) would eventually pop up as Thorp & Shannon’s bankroller. Thorp then enters the picture as a grad student deeply interested in making money using physics, starting with roulette wheels, which didn’t work out initially, and then publishing an instantly famous paper on beating blackjack with card counting, which brought him to Shannon (for mechanical & mathematical assistance) and Kelly (for deciding how much to bet) and Manny Kimmel (for the money to bet with). An interlude brings in Kelly and his Kelly criterion itself, and makes clear the connection to information theory and efficient markets: a few bits of information about outcomes (ie having probabilities which do not match the implicit probabilities in the prices of bets/investments) equates to excess returns, and the more information, the larger the returns with aggressive betting. The Kelly criterion optimizes the extraction of money, compared to other betting strategies like the martingale which don’t take into account the extra information. While excellent in theory, Thorp/Shannon/Kimmel’s (Kelly was uninvolved and busy chasing the still-elusive dream of voice synthesis) blackjack did not go well: the casinos shamelessly cheated any customer doing well, Thorp claims one even drugged him twice (although he was never beaten by casino thugs like other card counters), and new unpopular rules were announced to negate card counting. So Thorp moved onto roulette and the stock market. Thorp’s first big edge was in warrants: since warrants expire quickly, they need to go to 0 or 1 over a short time period, and if the market is efficient, they should follow a random walk of the sort familiar in physics from molecules, and their expected value easily calculated… and mispriced warrants spotted and purchased. Which sounds a bit paradoxical. And the risk of buying warrants can be offset just buy buying or selling short just some of the underlying stock. Thorp made money off warrants, and then published the strategy for increasing the credibility of his new hedge fund, and moved onto convertible bonds by applying similar reasoning: the bond should have a certain value which reflects the probability that the stock will spike high enough to make the built-in option worth exercising, and since stocks should follow a random walk, all you need to know is the variance… inventing Black-Scholes. With Kelly, he could bet heavily on the safest profitable investments, up to 150% of the fund, without blowing up. (In one amusing anecdote, Black-Scholes used their pricing model to spot a particularly mispriced warrant; then the company changed the terms of the warrants, wiping out the warrant holders and Black-Scholes, in a way that insiders had known was coming and sold all their warrants.) Thorp had a genius for regularly spotting these sorts of opportunities, and Poundstone says ‘“I’ve estimated for myself that if I had to pay no taxes, state or federal, I’d have about thirty-two times as much wealth as I actually do,” Thorp told me recently’ (Thorp’s net worth is estimated somewhere in the hundreds of millions) because his fund would have grown much faster if it could’ve reinvested all its earnings & profitability didn’t have to take into account taxation. This is plausible considering compound growth, the fund’s final 15.1% average annual return, and what ultimately killed Thorp’s fund: involvement in Michael Milken’s financial empire as their stock broker, which, as part of Rudy Giuliani’s crusade in applying RICO to anything possible to get himself elected, turned up some tax fraud on Thorp’s fund’s part (he blames his partner who was in charge of the implementation end of things). The timing was particularly bad for Thorp because investors would flock to hedge funds during that time period, as exemplified by LTCM, which Poundstone devotes a section to, arguing that LTCM also exemplified the perils of non-Kelly investment by putting too much at risk (which seems a little tendentious, since my understanding was that the real problem was they underestimated the correlations of many assets in an economic crisis; the underestimation led them to overbet and thus exposed them to huge losses, and some formalized Kelly-like proportional investment wouldn’t’ve saved them from the fundamental mistakes, any more than the KC saves you from an incorrect estimate of your edge or assuming that correlated bets are independent). Thorp returned to trading eventually, and in terms of his lifetime performance:

In May 1998 Thorp reported that his investments had grown at an average 20 percent annual return (with 6 percent standard deviation) over 28.5 years. “To help persuade you that this may not be luck,” Thorp wrote, “I estimate that…I have made $80 billion worth of purchases and sales (‘action,’ in casino language) for my investors. This breaks down into something like one and a quarter million individual ‘bets’ averaging about $65,000 each, with on average hundreds of ‘positions’ in place at any one time. Over all, it would seem to be a moderately ‘long run’ with a high probability that the excess performance is more than chance.”

Thorp’s money may continue on:

The Thorps recently endowed a chair at the University of California at Irvine mathematics department. The gift consists of one million dollars to be invested entirely in stocks, with the university limited to withdrawing only 2 percent a year. The fund is expected to compound exponentially in inflation-adjusted dollars. Ultimately, Thorp hopes, it will fund the most richly endowed university chair in the world, and will help draw exceptional mathematical talent to UC Irvine.

Poundstone goes in more depth into the statistics than I expected, and although there’s not that much that can be said about the Kelly criterion (particularly in 2005, before the latest burst of interest in it due to evolutionary & biological interpretations of the Kelly criterion & probability matching/Thompson sampling), he benefits tremendously from extensive access to Shannon’s papers and Thorp’s reminiscences about his mob connections while trying to beat the casinos. Indeed, some of the reviews criticize the characterization of Thorp as almost forgettable and perhaps insufficiently critical due to Poundstone’s dependency. What is a little remarkable to me is how well Shannon did financially by 3 early venture capital investments, and how little Shannon contributed intellectually after his information theory paper; I had always somehow assumed that Claude Shannon, a genius who had offhandedly made a major contribution to genetics simply because his advisor forced him to work on genetics, and had created fully-formed information theory, had died in the 1950s or something, because how else would such a genius have not made further major contributions? But no! Shannon died in 2001! Ramsay died on the operating table; von Neumann had cancer; Kelly himself dropped dead of a stroke on a NYC sidewalk; Pitts was mentally ill and died of alcoholism; but Shannon was rich, tenured, sound as a bell in mind & body, and infinitely respected - what was his excuse? Poundstone explains that Shannon was simply too unambitious (and perfectionist) to work hard on any big topics or write up and publish properly any of his findings! (Instead, he worked on an endless succession of hobbies like juggling or Rubik’s cube or discovering that the smallest ride-able unicycle is >18 inches.) One of the more depressing demonstrations that raw genius is not enough.

I did not notice any major errors (asides from perhaps a confusion of Euler and Gauss, and overstating the obscurity of Louis Bachelier's life). One downside is that despite the involvement of Jimmy Savage, Poundstone never mentions the connections to subjective Bayesianism, personal interpretations of probability, or Thompson sampling. (Which would, if nothing else, have partially explained why Savage's career was so peripatetic - it wasn't just his acerbic opinions as Poundstone claims.)

As a professor, I am given a research assistant each year. Over the last twenty or so years, I have received some extraordinary assistance from some very good workers, students, and eventually, peers and coauthors.
About once a year I receive an offer, usually by email, from someone who wants to work as my research assistant for free. Typically the offer is accompanied by a resume, and for the most part these resumes appear quite good. The emails sound reasonable and friendly.
I turn such offers down. I don't think the applicants are lemons, but still I find that one research assistant is for me the right number, at least if I have a good one, as is usually the case. Even when it comes to the assistant whom I have the time to manage, I am most of all concerned about having a conscientious person at my disposal.
The work with an RA is basically a team relationship, and the core problem is that I don't have the time to build another team, even if it doesn't cost me any money upfront. I don't have the time to work with and manage another person. To put this point in a broader business context, until another good manager is hired, there is no point in employing another assistant. It's the manager who is the scarce input, and that is one way to think about why managerial salaries have been going up so much. Managers play a role of growing importance in coordinating complex, large-scale production processes.
...To hire a risky and iffy worker, without a competent overseer, simply isn't worth it, no matter how low the wage. And so a lot of workers have a hard time being picked up and integrated into productive teams.
It is precisely that process that managers are paid to make work more efficiently. It is a process that is continuing its long, long trend toward increasing importance. And, finally, it is why managers are being paid more.

The Theory of Special Operations by William McRaven 1993 is a book-length thesis describing 8 case-studies of special ops missions and the degree to w

The Theory of Special Operations by William McRaven 1993 is a book-length thesis describing 8 case-studies of special ops missions and the degree to which they adhere to a few principles for spec-ops success that McRaven extracts from their successes/failures. The case-studies are in chronological order and primarily WWII-oriented:

The principles themselves boil down to finding a chink in enemy defenses, concentrating force on it as fast as possible, achieving immediate relative superiority to those enemy forces in the way, and executing a well-trained & rehearsed minimal possible mission. Or as he puts it: “simplicity, security, repetition, surprise, speed, and purpose”.

Arguably, all of these principles could be boiled down to a single principle of speed - complex unrehearsed operations with multiple objectives by uncommitted troops against a waiting enemy cannot be fast, while speed dictates all of the other requirements (except perhaps ‘security’). It’s surprising to read through his case-studies and realize that in many cases, the critical part of the operation lasts no more than 5 minutes, or even under a minute. For example, the successful part of the St Nazaire raid, from when the hellburner was first attacked by German artillery to when it rammed itself into the drydock gates (and the destruction of the drydock became guaranteed as the explosives/ship could not possibly be removed) was that short (the rest being, McRaven points out, an unnecessary debacle, and on a grand strategy level, destroying the drydock was probably not even helpful); the Gran Sasso raid, from when the Italian guards finally challenged the German commandos to securing Mussolini, was maybe a minute.

The importance of speed strikes me as being, in some respects, due to the vulnerability of large organizations; McRaven notes that all of the the case-studies involved greatly out-numbered commandos, often by orders of magnitude with enemy units within relatively close range, often heavily out-gunned, often attacking positions heavily fortified against exactly the kind of attack done (eg Raid on Alexandria, St Nazaire, Operation Source), with objectives that can sometimes be defeated if the enemy reacts quickly enough (the Italian guards could’ve executed Mussolini, the Japanese guards the POWs, the Entebbe terrorists could’ve killed their hostages, the Tirpitz/Valiant/Queen Elizabeth captains could’ve dragged chains to dislodge limpets & moved their ships to avoid the mines planted underneath, etc). Why then are spec-ops not doomed to failure? Because the enemy is unable to collectively think, react, and execute a counter-plan as fast as the commandos can, who have executed the plan many times previously in practice, need only a few minutes to do so, and have a ‘distributed knowledge’ of the plan & objectives allowing independent-yet-coordinated action. The OODA loop is just inherently too slow for physically separated forces to recognize the threat, realize it’s local and not part of a broader attack, deduce the objectives, counter-attack, and execute the counter-attack; given enough time, the enemy forces can do all this and crush the commandos (St Nazaire) but by that point, they should be long gone. The commandos sting the elephant and flee before the tail can smash them into paste. The parallels with computer security and cyberattacks is clear: a hack can take months or years to research and craft, but when triggered, it can attack and finish within seconds or minutes, far outspeeding the merely human defenders. (A Silicon Valley startup analogy also makes itself; indeed “simplicity, security, repetition, surprise, speed, and purpose” would not be a bad set of founding principles for a startup!)

The case-studies themselves are interesting. McRaven was able to interview a number of people involved in the case-studies as well as visit the locations to see them for himself. It’s interesting to note the presence of gliders in at least two of the WWII case-studies, because of their stealth advantage right up to the instant before landing, but never afterwards, and I can’t remember the last time I heard of gliders used by militaries; I wonder if that’s because parachute technology has evolved to the point that steerable parachutes obsoleted gliders? The Battle of Fort Eben-Emael case-study was particularly interesting because while most histories mention that it was a huge success for the invasion thanks to the gliders, McRaven emphasizes that the gliders were only a small part, and the reason the German commandos succeeded so thoroughly was because they deployed a new bomb technology, shaped charges, which literally shattered the Belgium defenders and their fortifications; otherwise, they would have successfully landed on the grassy field above the underground fortress but found themselves trapped in a deadly killing field between the various bunkers & cupolas. Deception plays surprisingly little role in most of the operations considering its outsized role in the public imagination (the St Nazaire raid ship briefly pretended to be German; Gran Sasso brought along an Italian general in the gliders to confuse the Italians; Operation Entebbe likewise involved the commandos pretending to be locals until they reached the building with the hostages, apparently successfully confusing the terrorists inside).

McRaven himself, although I hadn’t realized it when I downloaded the book on a whim, may be a familiar-sounding name; turns out that he has since been putting his theory into practice as a major controller of American special operations during the War on Terror, in particular heading the Osama bin Laden raid. In retrospect, one can see how the OBL raid largely conforms to McRaven’s principles: a fast in and out raid in as few stealth helicopters as possible with little or no coordination with the locals, given that Pakistan/ISI had been sheltering OBL and would doubtless tip him off despite the danger of operating so near a Pakistani base, an operation rehearsed extensively with replica models.

The thesis was apparently quite popular and was republished in 1995 as Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice. Disadvantages to the online thesis version: big PDF, harder to search due to OCR errors, a lot of typos, and the photographs McRaven included of all the sites he could visit are unfortunately totally destroyed by the photocopier/scanner (although the diagrams are still legible). A skim of the Libgen EPUB version suggests that you might be better off with that edition (although it appears to drop the photos entirely).

"Similar opinions have continued to be expressed down the centuries, and modern scholars (men) have often been equally irritated by her. She has been dismissed by some as a mere chatterbox of a woman, and _The Pillow Book_ considered to be nothing more than a silly gentlewoman’s idle thoughts spilling themselves haphazardly on to the page. It is common in Japan to contrast her with Murasaki Shikibu, and those who side with Sei Shōnagon in this perceived rivalry are often characterized as vacuous and frivolous."

While not as read as the classic Heian-era waka poets, themselves vastly less read than the haiku poets, the Man’yoshu remains the first Japanese poet

While not as read as the classic Heian-era waka poets, themselves vastly less read than the haiku poets, the Man’yoshu remains the first Japanese poetic collection of note and something I’ve always meant to read. Even if the MSY wasn’t important as a foundational text or one of the major scholarly projects of Japanese literature, it is still of note for the diversity of its verse forms, contributors (not just aristocrats or townmen), topics (eg genuine poverty), and documenting early Japanese culture/politics/life. Reading Keene’s Seeds in the Heart which devotes a large section to the MSY, I decided I had put it off long enough. There aren’t many translations of it online, and this was the largest I found.

Keene, as it happens, wrote a preface to this 1965 edition. He notes that the anonymous committee authors & 1940 date of its composition means the original Introduction (a long and extensive description of MSY-era Japan and facts of life relevant to interpreting the poems, such as the sending of expeditions to China and the ill-fated political alliances with Korean kingdoms) will raise some eyebrows:

we cannot help but be struck by the repeated allusions to a philosophy of the Japanese state which, though normal in 1940, has largely been discredited since. Not only is the imperial authorship of many poems stressed (though more recent scholars cast doubt on these attributions, aware that anonymous poems were often dignified by associations - however unlikely - with rulers of the distant past), but the glory of the Imperial House itself is proclaimed in a manner as foreign to the Japanese of today as to ourselves: “Turning to human relations, Japanese clan morality in its purified form - namely, that which is based upon the consciousness of the Imperial House as the supreme head of all clans - manifests itself in the NSY in spontaneous sentiments of the loveliest kind, giving the Anthology its chief distinction.” During the war years of 1941-45, the “spirit of the MSY” was constantly invoked by literary men. They meant by the phrase worship of the Emperor and an insistence on “pure Japanese” virtues untainted by foreign influence or by the over-refined, effeminate sentiments displayed in later poetry As a result of the defeat of Japan in 1945, the MSY acquired still another meaning: this time it was acclaimed as a “democratic” anthology that was given its chief distinction by the poetry of the common people (or of the humbler ranks of the nobility), unlike subsequent anthologies filled with jejune compositions by the decadent courtiers. The poetry of the MSY is sufficiently varied and abundant to afford corroborative evidence for all these theses, but though each is tenable as an interpretation of part of the work, it cannot be accepted as a judgment of the whole. The compilers of this edition, emphasizing the “cheerfulness” of an age when the Imperial family ruled without interference, declared that the “prevailing atmosphere is happy, bright and peaceful”. Yet surely the “Dialogue on Poverty” by Yamanoe Okura (pg 205) offers unmistakable evidence that, whatever conditions may have prevailed at the court, all was not joy and light in the villages…Again, such an assertion as “But filial piety, so sincere, intense and instinctive as shown in the Manyo poems is not likely to be duplicated by any other people and under any other social order” is certainly open to challenge, if not to being dismissed outright as absurd. But this nostalgic view of a distant golden age deserves our attention still, if only as a traditional, persistent Japanese interpretation of the MSY.

Keene is, if anything, far too kind to the Introduction. I had come across references to the Japanese literary world’s perversion during the imperial period and the phrase “spirit of the MSY”, but I admit I had never understood how exactly a poetry collection could be employed in imperial propaganda but the Introduction is quite blatant, to the point of comedy (it’s difficult to not roll my eyes when the authors rhapsodize over how Shintoism involves belief in “mysterious powers which moved and had their being in nature”, while Taoism is a “cult that was imported from China…compounded with all manner of folklore and superstition…a belief in fairies and genii” and Confucianism irrelevant pedanticism unnecessary to the Japanese as it was merely “a canonical basis for those social values that had already prevailed. Loyalty, filial piety, brotherly affection, conjugal devotion, faithfulness, etc, taught by Confucianism, were virtues that had naturally grown within, and been fostered by, the clan system of Japan”). As Keene notes, the mentions of poverty undercut the Edenic pretensions, to which I would add the disturbingly frequent regularity of dead bodies by the road side, drafting peasants for border guards, conquest expeditions, and vagueness and lack of mention of any genuine accomplishments in the frequent praise of the emperors. I suppose as a surviving example of imperial propaganda, the Introduction is of some interest on its own but I wonder if it can be trusted for background and if Keene was right in keeping it unedited from the original version.

In any event, the poems are the main event, and Keene praises the translation as of high literary quality, so I should not be let down. Having read so much of the Heian-era poetry, I found the MSY ones interesting. They are clearly ancestors, showing both the early development of the waka and what would become stock themes, but also ‘roads not taken’, in particular the long verse forms like the choka. The waka could never express a vivid description of warfare like Hitomaro does in one choka, and it would be difficult indeed to think of a waka or several waka which could equate to his choka mourning his wife. One wonders what Japanese poetry lost by the possibility of the choka verse falling into obscurity and unreadability; I don’t think it would’ve choked off the waka’s growth, but allowed expression of weightier topics (a need which seems to’ve been only poorly satisfied by turning to Chinese kanshi).

On the downside, while the choka are impressive, for the most part, I am left unimpressed by the MSY corpus. Almost all poems come across in the English as plain statements and restatements. Yes, I know the MSY style is to be straightforward and not as indirect or complicated as the later Heian poems like the Kokinshu - but still. A poem should not read like prose. And for the most part, they do. The selection is also weakened by the inclusion of many trivial pieces which praise the Emperor in ways which are either boring or bullshit (although I suppose I can’t blame the poets for their sycophancy, which they at least had excuses and good practical reasons for writing, but should blame the translators for their ideology in emphasizing those poems out of the enormous MSY corpus).

Some of the ones I did like:

Man’yoshu 1964, pg352:

  "To what shall I liken this life?
It is like a boat,
Which, unmoored at morn,
Drops out of sight
And leaves no trace behind."

Yamabe no Akahito, Man’yōshū VIII: 1426

  "To my good friend
Would I show, I thought,
The plum blossoms,
Now lost to sight
Amid the falling snow."

Kuramochi Chitose; 326-7 VI: 913-4; pg198:

  "The beach is beautiful; and there grow
The sea-tangles swaying,
Lapped by a thousand waves
In the calm of morning,
And by five hundred waves
In the evening calm.
O Suminoe Beach,
Where white-crested waves are racing around!
Could I weary of watching, not only now,
But day in, day out, over and over again,
As those waves break on the shore?

[Envoy]
Let me go, with my clothes stained
For remembrance with the yellow clay
Of Suminoe's shore, which white-crested waves
Visit, ceaselessly lapping!"

Hitomaro, 103-5/ II: 199-201, pg127:

  "...Forthwith our prince buckled on a sword,
And in his august hand
Grasped a bow to lead the army.
The drums marshaling men in battle array
Sounded like the rumbling thunder,
The war-horns blew, as tigers roar,
Confronting an enemy,
Till all men were shaken with terror.
The banners, hoisted aloft, swayed
As sway in wind the flames that burn
On every moorland far and near
When spring comes after winter's prisonment.
Frightful to hear was the bow-strings' clang,
Like a whirlwind sweeping
Through a winter forest of snow.
And like snow-flakes tempest-driven
The arrows fell thick and fast.
The foemen confronting our prince
Fought, prepared to a man to perish,
If perish they must, like dew or frost;
And vying with one another like birds upon the wing,
They flew to the front of battle -
When lo, from Watarai's holy shrine
There rose the God's Wind confounding them,
By hiding the sun's eye with clouds
And shrouding the world in utter darkness...."

As important as his Catholicism was to him, the insertions of God into his poems often comes off as blunt, didactic, and unconvincing, especially compared to his ability to lyrically evoke nature, and I often felt that a poem would have been better off without it, quite aside from the apparently baleful effects of becoming a Jesuit on his life. (One author argues that Hopkins could not have been Hopkins without a devotion to God to drive his verse; but Nature has always served poets adequately in this regard…) His friend and editor, Robert Bridges, in the afterword quite accurately describes Hopkins’s faults: the grammar and syntax is unusually elliptical and out of order, exacerbated by the use of ambiguous words or simply obscure ones, often jammed together or rewritten to suit the rhythm (scrambling the sense even further), and the use of appallingly conventional rhymes. (One thinks of people who have mastered erudite vocabularies, but have not mastered when to use those words.) Hopkins, in other words, needed an editor. Bridges defends Hopkins as growing out of his excesses at his untimely death, and it is to be regretted that we’ll never know what poetry a mature Hopkins might have written; had he lived to a ripe old age, he might be as well remembered as Robert Frost is, instead of as an obscure and little-read experimentalist.

In descending order, I particularly liked:

“Spring and Fall”

“The Wreck of the Deutschland”

Overall, I felt Hopkins’s corpus exhibits more frustrated promise than reward.

I read the Project Gutenberg edition.

Then I noticed another bemusing fact. The Pirahãs would converse with me and then turn to one another, in my presence, to talk about me, as though I was not even there. "Say, Dan, could you give me some matches?" Xip06gi asked me one day with others present. "OK, sure." "OK, he is giving us two matches. Now I am going to ask for cloth." Why would they talk about me in front of my face like this, as though I could not understand them? I had just demonstrated that I could understand them by answering the question about the matches. What was I missing?

Their language, in their view, emerges from their lives as Pirahãs and from their relationships to other Pirahãs. If I could utter appropriate responses to their questions, this was no more evidence that I spoke their language than a recorded message is to me evidence that my telephone is a native speaker of English. I was like one of the bright macaws or parrots so abundant along the Maici. My "speaking" was just some cute trick to some of them. It was not really speaking.

Pirahãs listen carefully and often follow the exhortations of the kaoaib6gi. A spirit might say something like "Don't want Jesus. He is not Pirahã", or "Don't hunt downriver tomorrow", or things that are commonly shared values, such as "Don't eat snakes." Through spirits, ostracism, food-sharing regulation, and so on, Pirahã society disciplines itself.

...something that I thought would make them understand how important God can be in our lives. So I told the Pirahãs how my stepmother committed suicide and how this led me to Jesus and how my life got better after I stopped drinking and doing drugs and accepted Jesus. I told this as a very serious story. When I concluded, the Pirahãs burst into laughter. This was unexpected, to put it mildly. I was used to reactions like "Praise God!" with my audience genuinely impressed by the great hardships I had been through and how God had pulled me out of them. "Why are you laughing?" I asked. "She killed herself? Ha ha ha. How stupid. Pirahãs don't kill themselves" they answered. They were utterly unimpressed. It was clear to them that the fact that someone I had loved had committed suicide was no reason at all for the Pirahãs to believe in my God. Indeed, it had the opposite effect, highlighting our differences.

...I was surprised that the Pirahãs did not seem tired at all, however. In the village the Pirahã men avoided carrying heavy things. When I asked them for help in carrying boxes or barrels and such, they were always reluctant to respond. When they did help, they could barely lift things that I could carry with ease. I had just assumed that they were weak and lacked endurance. But I was wrong. They didn't normally carry foreign objects and they didn't like to display their ignorance of how to handle them.

We applaud the work of our colleagues in zoology, evolutionary science, psychology, and education to appreciate the genetic and evolutionary roots of intelligence and to move forward to define intelligence. We are confident that the next 50 years of intelligence research will usher a new age in our understanding, evaluating, and enhancing intellectual development.

I went for my final exam at EHE and found out I’d lost another half pound, ending at 156.5 (total weight loss: 16 pounds). I’d gone down two belt sizes. Dr. Harry Fisch told me that my lipid panel numbers “are so good, they’ll give you a heart attack” (HDL: 48, LDL: 62). I more than halved my body fat percentage. I can now run a mile in less than seven minutes as opposed to not at all. I have a visible chest.

Relax. The chances that an AI equipped with the Master Algorithm will take over the world are zero. The reason is simple: unlike humans, computers don’t have a will of their own. They’re products of engineering, not evolution. Even an infinitely powerful computer would still be only an extension of our will and nothing to fear...The optimizer then does everything in its power to maximize the evaluation function—no more and no less—and the evaluation function is determined by us. A more powerful computer will just optimize it better. There’s no risk of it getting out of control, even if it’s a genetic algorithm. A learned system that didn’t do what we want would be severely unfit and soon die out. In fact, it’s the systems that have even a slight edge in serving us better that will, generation after generation, multiply and take over the gene pool. Of course, if we’re so foolish as to deliberately program a computer to put itself above us, then maybe we’ll get what we deserve. The same reasoning applies to all AI systems because they all—explicitly or implicitly—have the same three components. They can vary what they do, even come up with surprising plans, but only in service of the goals we set them. A robot whose programmed goal is “make a gooddinner” may decide to cook a steak, a bouillabaisse, or even a delicious new dish of its own creation, but it can’t decide to murder its owner any more than a car can decide to fly away. The purpose of AI systems is to solve NP-complete problems, which, as you may recall from Chapter 2, may take exponential time, but the solutions can always be checked efficiently. We should therefore welcome with open arms computers that are vastly more powerful than our brains, safe in the knowledge that our job is exponentially easier than theirs.