Got a lot of these.  Gotta get 'em out there. 

“If we are to understand how politics and markets work at the moment, we need to pay attention to how algorithms work, and how the economy is being remade from the ground up by these new forms of information processing.” Well this is a bit hyperbolic, isn’t it, but Henry Farrell is a political scientist, and they’re not especially known for over-developed historiographical muscles.  But he’s not all bad, to be honest.  And he does have some good suspicion about algorithms, over against real hyperbolists, Silica or otherwise:

What commentators like Harari don’t get is the ways in which these systems are not only incapable of grasping the messiness of actual human social systems, but also able to actually exacerbate the flaws of central planning. For authoritarian countries, China in particular, you have these feedback loops between the categories that people are using to try and understand the world in the central committees, and the actual world they are trying to explain. We know how politics work in these systems. Very often, if you’re not implementing the thought of the beloved chairman, your superiors will decide that there’s something wrong with you and you’re obviously a problematic political element who needs to be eliminated. So the categories you use are likely to reflect the ideas of your superiors, even if you know that they’re wrong.

The technologist Maciej Ceglowski describes machine learning as “money laundering for bias.” That can have terrible consequences if machine learning reflects the categories of official thought, and then interprets the policy consequences in terms of these categories too, so that bias compounds bias. This then creates incentives for ever more distorted ways of understanding the world which are implemented through these algorithms and which then create these feedback loops which get worse and worse, and lead, perhaps, to human tragedy, but also to these authoritarian systems not working in the cool, clean, beautiful and efficient way that pundits like Harari expect.

Also, this nice contrast: “Hayek is a prophet, but Lindblom is a comparativist.”  I think we need fewer prophets and more comparativists in academia.  Plus it’s actually harder.  Worth your read, though it is a bit long.

Good article about a philosopher’s critique of “evolutionary psychology” as a field.  And an interview with her as well.

On distraction in a time of pandemic.  

Interview with a guy who just published a history of the restaurant over the past 2000 years.  When no one is, you know, going to a restaurant.

Nice article about the velocity with which early Homo Sapiens colonized spaces beyond Wallace’s Line.  Shows how quickly and vigorously humanity populated everywhere conceivable on the earth.  (And for an account of what the “Wallace Line” is, here’s an ok place to start; but basically, it’s an imaginary dividing line between Bali and Lombok in the Indonesian archipelago, that separates Asian flora and fauna from Australopacific flora and fauna.)  

What did the Russians do in the 2016 US election?  Quite a lot, actually.  They amplified social divisions and media hysteria.  Anyone who says they had no role in the election of Donald Trump is kidding you.  The book reviewed here has all the goods.  

A cool piece on Mieko Kawakami, a Japanese novelist whose work addresses the situation of women in Japan, and perhaps beyond.