The Aristocrats, Addiction, and Artificial Intelligence: Is There A Common Good Approach To Public Data?
Francis Galton, Alfred Wallace, and Charles Darwin were the first machine learning experts. Who are their heirs?
Have we lost our geniuses or are their fruits all around us?
In reading Erik Hoel’s pretty good essay on the collapse of aristocratic education and with it the decline of genius I have a few things I thought I might add. If you’re not inclined to read such a long essay there’s a podcast discussion that’ll give you most of what you want. (Hurray for podcasts. Should I do a podcast? I wonder…)
To be blunt: I’m not totally convinced by Hoel’s argument that aristocratic education is waning and with it there is a corresponding decrease in the number of geniuses. Still, I do think Hoel’s work is a welcome jumping off point for a larger discussion about education and aristocrats and scientific progress.
There’s the obvious personal side of this analysis which is that many of the people who are lamenting the decline of genius are halfwits themselves who feel as if they never quite lived up to their potential. Indeed many of these people have spent much of their formative years discussing building things but never actually building them.
Partly this has been because our society has become a lot more intolerant of risky behavior like inventing and partly it’s because there really is such a thing as a permanent record known as the Internet. (Thanks Facebook!) It’s hard to let your failures become less public over time when there’s a record of everything you’ve ever done for all to see.
You wouldn’t want to get canceled, would you? So enjoy your Pax Americana and do nothing with your life, Boomer and Boomer Son. Take your cushy job and go to sleep with your iPhone or your Internet porn. It’s not 1984 we need to worry about when we are living Brave New World.
A friend of mine likes to say that New York was the it place before the advent of the I-Phone made it the Bay Area.
I’m not so convinced. I think 2008 created a sort of revolution whereby the Chinese state bailed out America’s housing market after the unwise decision to allow so many to buy homes that they could ill afford. China, in turn, got a lot of cash from the United States and that cash was then deployed to jointly develop a number of products.
Among them: the iPhone (largely good) and Facebook (largely exploitative). With the iPhone came the app economy and that app economy pushed a number of Chinese-backed apps onto an unsuspecting world.
This turn of events led to Chimerica, from which we are slowly disentangling ourselves ever since coronavirus upended the global supply chain.
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There simply weren’t as many distractions for other generations who often had to deal with boredom. We wanted the Library of Alexandria but we wound up with spiritual opium. It’s this ratting ourselves out to a Jeffrey Epstein in every pocket that has so many of us so spooked about modern technology.
We lack geniuses because would-be geniuses have become addicts. We’ve hitherto explored the role that LinkedIn cofounder (and Jeffrey Epstein friend) Reid Hoffman played in dressing up the Seven Deadly Sins as technology and how the Heavenly Virtues might rescue us.
Another way to think of Silicon Valley is taking Chinese cash and addicting the West to their vices. This way considers that technology is but a way of enslaving us, not liberating us.
Still another way of thinking about it is that many of the Silicon Valley companies are barred from China not out of some protectionist measure but because the Chinese state knows that these technologies are dangerous. Silicon Valley then isn’t so much a harbinger of the future but a return to our more decadent past. It’s a force for regression, not progress.
This mass addiction was known at the time as The Atlantic helpfully recalled in 2016 when it explored Reid Hoffman’s 2011 essay.
“Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins,” the LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist said. “Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed. With Facebook, it’s vanity, and how people choose to present themselves to their friends.”
Hoffman and his Chinese-Vietnamese-American business partner Eric Ly made LinkedIn to make legible a lot of the social, business connections of every day life. Is it any wonder then that LinkedIn is a fertile recruiting ground for Chinese spies? You can read about it in BBC, NPR, or New York Times.
How are you supposed to build something wonderful if the means of detecting it (and thereby stopping it) have gotten better and better over time?
Such detection gets better and better over time thanks to science fiction writer David Brin’s corollary to Moore’s Law. As the chips get faster and smaller, so too do the sensors. Sensor detection leads ultimately to censoring or vetoing that which you don’t like.
You might just find that if you’re working on a problem where another country is ahead of yours on a technical question you’ll be smeared and called a Holocaust denier or worse. (This isn’t personal but they just want to make it hard for you to raise money to continue on your project.) You can sue if you want to but there’s no guarantee you’ll win. And that’s before we even get into all the Americans who are compromised by foreign billionaires.
There are a lot of maybes here about what went wrong. Maybe publishing takes too few risks. Maybe the very rich in our society are unwilling to be the sort of patrons needed for these kind of geniuses to thrive. Maybe there’s a demographic issue where the next generations tend not to be of the same genetic stock as the generation that comes after them.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. Or maybe academia itself is not conducive to the good life. Maybe what we are really coming to understand is that a lot of people were miseducated by letting their schooling interfere with their education and that true education is always that interplay of practical and philosophical knowledge. Such an understanding was well known to the ancients who believed that the best life was a combination of thought and action. Or, if you like, Thoughts and Adventures.
Nearly everywhere I care to look it seems to me that the aristocratic tutoring model seems alive and well in the classical music world that my girlfriend makes her own.
If you follow closely some of the works of some of the best entrepreneurs you’ll find that many of them were de facto tutored. The most obvious example is Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world, who was essentially raised by his grandfather, Laurence Gise, and whose family successes look quite astounding when taken in total. To study Bezos (and especially his maternal line) is to be blown away by the accomplishments of this family which gave us the post-World War II state. Bezos was long considered a child prodigy.
We’ve explored Gise and the role he played in shaping Amazon’s founder in other posts here.
But we need not look only there. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen readily discusses the role that reading and his mother’s involvement with the library system. The youngest self-made billionaire in American history — Palmer Luckey — was homeschooled before dropping out of community college altogether.
You might well quibble with me that Microsoft, Amazon, and Oculus (now Facebook) constitute a kind of genius but I’d doubt you’d get very far. The geniuses of our time became business people.
Genius is fundamentally about application and there we have fallen down by encouraging a romantic understanding of knowledge at the expense of public benefit. We don’t talk about the two pizza teams who are essential to the modern world.
My own education, including as it did stints in public and prep schools, was rigorously supplemented by my father, who was trained as a scientist and later became an internationally traveling entrepreneur, and my mother, who studied as a geographer, traveled the world, and later had a career as a public school teacher.
To this day my father asks me what I’m reading and I had better have a satisfactory answer.
The autodidacts all know one another and their networks are very intertwined.
I often run into other autodidacts and we keep tabs on one another’s work. Indeed some of the best investments I have ever made have come from tapping into this world. Oftentimes an autodidact will necessarily offend certain pieties. In some cases this is all but a necessity to “mine” underexplored areas.
I think the real reason we don’t have as many geniuses in our society is that we have forced them to go into hiding. Or they get tempted by intellectual cul de sacs.
Let’s not forget that Isaac Newton was obsessed with alchemy and Nikola Tesla had his whacky ideas. And who could forget that wild letter where Claude Shannon recommended the work of L. Ron Hubbard?
Who knows if any of these ideas are right. I sure don’t. I’m not a genius and if I were I’d lie about it just to be safe. The life of the genius isn’t pleasant.
I live in fear that someone will know the sorts of books I’ve read and considered. When people can be canceled for expressing fondness of certain historical thinkers you have a real problem, especially when those thinkers were, however flawed, the font of thinking that drove the 21st century.
Every time is a time of persecution for interesting minds and our time has turned it into a witch trial especially if you like the contributions of the Dead White Men and seek to emulate them in the here and now.
We aren’t allowed to talk about natural intelligence these days. No! We have to talk about artificial intelligence. What a shame.
What is that? This artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence is really an outgrowth of statistics — itself a product of empire. The reason the British Empire and now the Chinese Empire is so good at artificial intelligence is that it is a logical outgrowth of another time period — the age of Exploration and Mandarinization respectively.
Statistics are the thing that large states need to run. A failure to keep good records is a surefire way to lose control of the empire. Empires persist only to the extent that they stay on top of the latest technological trends. So that’s why a lot of the anti-AI activism seems to be funded by foreign or criminal connected groups. It’s why the ACLU is suing Clearview.AI. You want to make it hard for your adversaries to detect the spies coming freely within your country.
Foreign actors don’t want their competitors to have a leg up. This is protectionism by another means and precisely why the European Union is so worried about companies like Clearview.AI. Europe can't compete and they know it.
We are, however, allowed to talk about artificial intelligence and depending on your point of view, it’s either going to kill us or liberate us. I have somewhat of a different view. I think most AI projects, Open AI included, simply don’t work all that well for anything useful. I look upon the $1B spent on OpenAI by Microsoft as a kind of waste at best and payoff at worst.
You might think all of this as Johnson’s law of AI: I believe artificial intelligence only works when it has large, good datasets, no element of surprise, and when it focuses on biology. Biology hasn’t even begun to be mined for its insights.
I think AI can work when it comes to behavior but that such predictive models are always a bit dangerous when it comes to the vagaries of human behavior.
You want kind, not wicked games, and much of the work comes from trying to discern what is and isn’t a kind or wicked game. Otherwise it’s Garbage In, Garbage Out.
The Age of Exploration is something I’ve spent a great many years studying quite closely, especially as it wound up with the British Empire, the emergence of which I regard as one of the most important scientific and culture affairs in world events.
One of my good friend and colleagues — Gavan Tredoux — is an amateur historian and has even written books about Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin. I’ve reproduced his thread here.
Galton, of course, wasn’t alone. There was a veritable cottage industry of people collecting all manner of specimen and phenomenon.
Among my favorite books of this period is one that Galton actually disliked called Heredity: a Psychological Study of its Phenomena, Laws, Causes, and Consequences (1875) by Théodule-Armand Ribot. If you have some French I recommend it in the original language. I found it so arresting that I couldn’t put it down at the Hawaiian villa I was staying in! Much of it doesn’t stand up to scientific rigor but it’s not bad for something written nearly a hundred and fifty years ago.
Reading old books and testing their assumptions with new tech is the secret to my successes. Only by entertaining the controversial or the dated can you discover the truly interesting.
Nearly all discussions about the decline in intelligence starts with the rise of the British Empire and so it’s there that we might turn. We need to focus and see the world as these great thinkers and explorers did.
How did they see the world?
Well, they collected everything, and tried to infer laws of nature from their collection which they displayed and debated at dinner parties. You were expected to have something to show for yourself.
You’ve no doubt gotten a taste of this when you went to a Museum of Natural History and observed the taxidermy on display. When you look at it all, you know that none of that stuff would fly today. But in its day, it was an essential part of the scientific method.
We have simply continued the discovery age by using the latest in technology. We still have so much more to go as a recent chart in Nature reveals.
This is the successor to the great naturalist expeditions.
Alfred Wallace trekked all over the world collecting specimens and selling them.
We could once again have the drawing rooms and studies and the dinner parties instead of the man cave but that would require understanding a sense that there is such a thing as the public good and the very rich have an obligation to maintaining it.
In our own day public data, like photos or material on social media sites, can be processed for the public good too. I’m proud that the company Clearview.AI which I cofounded boldly decided to go in this direction.
Only by having a sense of the public good can we cultivate the sort of scientific progress want. We’d have to cultivate a return of the gentleman and that, of course, has its complications given that the official line is that we are all equal irrespective of our sex, race, and ability.
To the left, it’s hard to understand that duties come with privileges. To the right, that privileges come with duties.
There weren’t as many confusions in the past.
The life of a genius isn't pleasant
This is one of your best “thoughts and adventures”. I’m inspired to read an old book.