2024 Year-Ender
If you are aware of all Internet traditions, you remember that the end of the year is the time when Bookandsword Blog posts about the state of the author and the state of the blog. There is a lot to talk about!
Read morenot an expert
Things in Society Change Very Quickly Nowadays
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BC had a slightly more exciting than ordinary election, in which the party which had the second most seats and formed government from 2002 to 2017 changed its name and dissolved itself, a party which got less than 2% of the vote and no Members of the Legislative Assembly in the last election came three seats short of a majority, the former head of the Green Party said he would vote for someone whose party is not sure that climate change is real and worth taking action to reduce, and there were bomb threats and hangings in effigy. Amidst that, party politician Kareem Allam is talking about why he changed parties, and he says:
we had MLAs that had been there for 15, 20 years, and we had staff that were 20 years old. All they had ever known were these MLAs, and things changed a lot, and things in society change very quickly nowadays. So it wasn’t reflective and there weren’t really debates of new ideas and new approaches, and there was a sense of stagnation that was occurring around that.
Now, its hard to be eloquent in an interview, especially when you are trying carefully not to offend former or current allies. But that makes me think about the history of the Salish Sea about 150 years ago.
Read moreAre 80% of Patreon Pledges Hidden?
Patreon is essential for funding many types of digital creations. Patreon is not the best at processing payments or building and running websites. So a lot of us are very interested in them as a business because they offer an alternative to surveillance advertising and creating merchandise or face-to-face services to sell, but they seem kind of flimsy. Because they are a private business, we have to guess a lot. One of the things we have to guess about is whether they are a $24 million / year business or a $120 million / year business. (All sums in this post are in US dollars).
Read moreForecasting Future Wars is Hard
Since 1805, combat between well-equipped air and naval forces has become rarer and rarer. This is because states which can produce such forces have little to gain from fighting one another, and because it has become harder and harder to sustain such forces at all. In the 19th century, the Royal Navy was usually overwhelmingly superior to everyone else (although the French and the United States sometimes gave it a run for its money). Since the 1950s, the US air force has had a similar advantage over everyone else’s. Small states look at these navies and air forces, decide they can never defeat them, and either stop bothering with their own navies and air forces, or side with one of the big powers, or hide in harbour or in neutral countries when war approaches (the fleet-in-being strategy). Big states do some spectacularly stupid and thoughtless things, but rarely something as stupid as getting into a war with their allies or a nuclear power, and pretty much all the states with sophisticated air forces and navies are either each other’s allies or nuclear powers.
This means that stories about how a future naval or air war would go are fantasies based on speculation and imagination and peacetime tests, not observation and experience of actual warfare.
Read moreJust Another Grunt
Early on, the Indy Neidell World War Two documentary split off a series War Against Humanity from its narrative of the ground and surface naval wars. Their story presents the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ in December 1944 as a trivial thing, because the allies quickly put forces in place so that German forces could never break through to anywhere really dangerous, and because by the standards of winter 1944/1945 the forces involved were not huge. They even spend lots of time talking about how specific Anglo generals tried to take credit or shift the blame. I feel like that is the wrong story to tell, because the real story is all the ordinary people who ended up dead, or crippled, or frostbitten when they had started to think they would survive the war more or less intact. Here is one of those stories by the late Fred Pohl:
Read moreGoogle Forgets the Old Web
A senior Google Search staffer recently claimed that Google does not downgrade older pages in search results. For the record, it was Tim Bray in 2018 who demonstrated that Google was not returning the only page with a string if that page was more than 5 to 10 years old. He could find that same page with DuckDuckGo. As he put it, Google is losing its memory. He documented the same problem again in February 2022. A Marco Fioretti also found that Google was refusing to return some old pages in 2018.
Read more2023 Year Ender
A lot of things happened in 2023! Because I am tired I am going to list them briefly.
I applied and interviewed for some professional jobs and found one last group of academic possibilities which still seems worth trying.
Read moreWho Said “Technology Makes the World Smaller”?
Today I will put on my Quote Investigator hat to ask a simple question: where did the cliche that technology makes the world smaller comes from? Back in 2005 Thomas Friedman had to torture metaphors to declare that The World is Flat because ‘the world is small’ was too common a topos in the business press. As I was refreshing my memory of the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three German Intellectuals defending Kaiser Wilhelm’s invasion of Belgium, I noticed a familiar phrase in the pacifist counter-manifesto. That sent me to Google Books to look for parallels.
Read moreLendering’s Law on Experts and Misconceptions
The 2010s were a difficult decade which destroyed our ability to believe in some solutions to problems, but did not provide alternative paths to follow. That decade left many of us in a state of what the Greeks called aporia. At the start of the decade, Jona Lendering had some thoughts about one problem, the spread of misinformation from bad pop books, documentaries, and the Internet. Here is how he saw it in the hopeful time around 2010.
Read moreWhat Are ‘Big Idea’ Books?
Over on the group blog Crooked Timber there is a retrospective post on David Graeber’s Debt ten years after they hosted a discussion of the book on the blog. The post and comments say something very important about ‘big ideas’ books which scientists mostly take for granted, but might not be obvious to curious, clever people who are not active in research:
Read moreI think the best way to understand Graeber is as a writer of speculative nonfiction. He is often wrong on the facts, and more often willing to push them farther than they really ought to be pushed, requiring shallow foundations of evidence to bear a heavy load of very strongly asserted theoretical claims. But there is value to the speculation – social scientists don’t do nearly enough of it. Sometimes it is less valuable to be right than to expand the space of perceived social and political possibilities. And that is something that Graeber was very good at doing.
Henry Farrell
