Figure and ground
I always felt I was lazy. It took my mother, of all people, to disabuse me of this notion. I have three degrees, she pointed out. Multiple books, a Fulbright. True. So maybe I’m microscopically lazy but macroscopically persistent, always looking to dodge trivialities and self-abasements – invoices, forms, marketing – but happy to try difficult, interesting things when the time’s right.
And so, with excuses in early, I write to you from the Compton Stand at Lord’s Cricket Ground. I should be doing invoices, forms, marketing. But it’s a shimmering 24° and one of the few benefits of ditching a perfectly good career is the opportunity to choose your schedule. Invoices are for rainy days.
Life is pretty good. My wife and I celebrated our tenth anniversary (life tip: marry the kindest person you know). I finished up with the RSPCA – dream gig, tbh – gave some talks (Research by the Sea, Duke University, a privacy keynote for a large media group), and have a couple of gigs to keep me going through summer. I’ve made a start on my book and PhD plans. I’m also learning French again, which prompted a Parisian day trip. 27,000 steps / blinding sun bouncing off balcony windows / thin-jawed women tossing spent rollups into street planters / rupturing soufflés: injectez-le dans mes veines.
But the micro/macro distinction crops up here too. Life is good… but life isn’t good, is it? Macroscopically, globally, politically, it feels like we’re toppling into disaster. My happiness is in part just luck and privilege. I’m not a trans person vilified by their government; I’m not being starved by aid blockades. How to handle the guilt of my own flourishing when the world’s coming apart at the seams?
A simple model I’ve been considering of late: two poles of concern, if you like, a Me-pole and a You-pole. At one end, you prioritise your own interests. Slap on the SPF and enjoy the cricket; ignore the emails; nip to Paris for the day. But egocentrism erodes social goods. It harms other people. So perhaps you reject it and skew the other way, anchoring your wellbeing to the trajectory of the world. But that undertow will easily drown you. The beneficence of caring only about others seems noble, but in truth few of us can endure that level of self-sacrifice. Total empathy harms you. And so most of us stumble in the fog between these extremes, recoiling from either end when the shame or the sadness becomes too much to bear. I plug away at my pleasant life with heartache for what’s happening to us. Perhaps you feel similarly, smiling but seconds from tears.
There are other kinds of tears, fortunately. I don’t mind confessing I cried a little when Rory won the Masters. Look, I know you don’t like golf, but let me at least sell you the hero’s journey: an exceptional, vulnerable individual overcoming his demons in front of millions of desperate viewers. As Kevin Van Valkenburg writes, Rory is accessible in a way elite sportspeople usually aren’t, ‘like in stories when a god would fall for a human and the result would be a child with remarkable gifts but the same flaws and emotions as a normal person.’
From the available evidence – the charitable foundation, the generous press room comments – Rory McIlroy seems good. But Rory McIlroy isn’t always nice. I’m increasingly sure that being good requires occasional unpleasantness to the right people at the right time. I think Rory understands that, and his hostility to the corrupting influences in his beloved sport adds to his appeal IMO. Sometimes we all need a reminder what Lawful Good looks like.
I was on Reid Blackman’s Ethical Machines podcast, discussing my research into the ethics of A/B testing. A proper supervisorial grilling, it was. We skipped my prep about various categories of harmful experiments and went for the jugular of whether the datafied mindset behind testing is bad. I say yes because 1. it essentially rests upon and/or rehashes a debunked idea (verificationism) and, more importantly, 2. looking only at numerical data can blind you to qualitative moral feedback, such as evidence you’re harming someone. Anyway, listen to the episode. Reid’s a smart one.
A spot of writing, although I’m mostly on book duty now:
Hallucinations and fabrication – ‘While fabrication is an architectural by-product, it’s also a consequence of the values big AI companies have chosen to promote and deprioritise.’
The business case caveat – ‘There’s a common trap here. If your ethical arguments are entirely financial then you’re unwittingly claiming ethics should be entirely subservient to the profit imperative.’
On AI maximalism – ‘I suspect much will depend on the dissonance between political and public perceptions of AI. Today’s public mostly fears AI, for reasons both justified and unjustified.’
I was interviewed about skeuomorphism for promising new magazine Digital Frontier. Credit to the reporter for entertaining the word’s actual meaning – a previously functional design element retained ornamentally – rather than conflating it with the use of physical metaphor, as most people do. I’ll be on a SXSW-adjacent fringe event for the magazine on 3 June.
Current faves include the woodwind-heavy, wistful soundtrack to tea-making game Wanderstop; the farcically multitomatoed greengrocer that’s opened down the road; losing enough weight to ride up the digital version of Alpe d’Huez. Adolescence was nowhere near as good as claimed but still worthwhile. Less so the BBC’s dumbed-down Chess Masters, which we stuck with mostly because my wife apparently enjoys me yelling ‘just play Qg6 ffs, what are you doing?’, etc. at the screen.
As always, replies are welcome. What’s new? How’s your summer looking? How are you coping?
Cennydd
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