You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
It's a smugness born of the view that politics is less a terrain of clashing values and interests than a perpetual pitting of the clever against the ignorant and obtuse. The clever wield facts and reason, while the foolish cling to effortlessly-exposed fictions and the braying prejudices of provincial rubes. In emphasizing intelligence over ideology, what follows is a fetishization of "elevated discourse" regardless of its actual outcomes or conclusions. The greatest political victories involve semantically dismantling an opponent's argument or exposing its hypocrisy, usually by way of some grand rhetorical gesture. Categories like left and right become less significant, provided that the competing interlocutors are deemed respectably smart and practice the designated etiquette. The Discourse becomes a category of its own, to be protected and nourished by Serious People conversing respectfully while shutting down the stupid with heavy-handed moral sanctimony.(For the record, I liked the West Wing, a lot. But I also can very much see how it helped to shape an idea about how politics works - or should work - that is far from the reality of what happens in Washington.) ["How Liberals Fell in Love with the West Wing" - Luke Savage - Current Affairs - June 7, 2017]
The stations—which didn't so much scan as photograph books—had been custom-built by Google from the sheet metal up. Each one could digitize books at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour. The book would lie in a specially designed motorized cradle that would adjust to the spine, locking it in place. Above, there was an array of lights and at least $1,000 worth of optics, including four cameras, two pointed at each half of the book, and a range-finding LIDAR that overlaid a three-dimensional laser grid on the book's surface to capture the curvature of the paper. The human operator would turn pages by hand—no machine could be as quick and gentle—and fire the cameras by pressing a foot pedal, as though playing at a strange piano.In the end, though, my favorite article about technology was a profile of Claude Shannon by Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni for Aeon (August 30, 2017). The piece dives into Shannon's history and the invention of information theory, which still plays an incredibly important role in computing today. The article is well-told, covers a fascinating subject (both the person and his studies), and manages to explain very complex ideas simply (one of my favorite things). Here's an excerpt:
Shannon's ‘mathematical theory' sets out two big ideas. The first is that information is probabilistic. We should begin by grasping that information is a measure of the uncertainty we overcome, Shannon said – which we might also call surprise. What determines this uncertainty is not just the size of the symbol vocabulary, as Nyquist and Hartley thought. It's also about the odds that any given symbol will be chosen. Take the example of a coin-toss, the simplest thing Shannon could come up with as a ‘source' of information. A fair coin carries two choices with equal odds; we could say that such a coin, or any ‘device with two stable positions', stores one binary digit of information. Or, using an abbreviation suggested by one of Shannon's co-workers, we could say that it stores one bit.["The Bit Bomb: It took a polymath to pin down the true nature of ‘information'. His answer was both a revelation and a return" - Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni - Aeon - August 30, 2017]
Imagine an artificial intelligence, [Bostrom] says, which decides to amass as many paperclips as possible. It devotes all its energy to acquiring paperclips, and to improving itself so that it can get paperclips in new ways, while resisting any attempt to divert it from this goal. Eventually it "starts transforming first all of Earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities". This apparently silly scenario is intended to make the serious point that AIs need not have human-like motives or psyches. They might be able to avoid some kinds of human error or bias while making other kinds of mistake, such as fixating on paperclips. And although their goals might seem innocuous to start with, they could prove dangerous if AIs were able to design their own successors and thus repeatedly improve themselves. Even a "fettered superintelligence", running on an isolated computer, might persuade its human handlers to set it free. Advanced AI is not just another technology, Mr Bostrom argues, but poses an existential threat to humanity.Universal Paperclips goes beyond imagining it and puts you in the drivers seat as the paperclip maximizer. It's amazing, and interesting, and teaches you a lot about how the world works (one tiny non-spoiler-spoiler: all companies eventually become finance companies). As John Brindle explains in his excellent writeup (December 6, 2017) of the game:
When we play a game like Universal Paperclips, we do become something like its AI protagonist. We make ourselves blind to most of the world so we can focus on one tiny corner of it. We take pleasure in exercising control, marshalling our resources towards maximum efficiency in the pursuit of one single goal. We appropriate whatever we can as fuel for that mission: food, energy, emotional resources, time. And we don't always notice when our goal drifts away from what we really want.All of this sounds pretty highfalutin for a game about paperclips, but somehow it makes sense when you play. [Universal Paperlips (iOS Version) - Frank Lantz - October 9, 2017]
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Quinones's investigation is the similarities he finds between the tactics of the unassuming, business-minded Mexican heroin peddlers, the so-called Xalisco boys, and the slick corporate sales force of Purdue. When the Xalisco boys arrived in a new town, they identified their market by seeking out the local methadone clinic. Purdue, using I.M.S. data, similarly targeted populations that were susceptible to its product. Mitchel Denham, the Kentucky lawyer, told me that Purdue pinpointed "communities where there is a lot of poverty and a lack of education and opportunity," adding, "They were looking at numbers that showed these people have work-related injuries, they go to the doctor more often, they get treatment for pain." The Xalisco boys offered potential customers free samples of their product. So did Purdue. When it first introduced OxyContin, the company created a program that encouraged doctors to issue coupons for a free initial prescription. By the time Purdue discontinued the program, four years later, thirty-four thousand coupons had been redeemed.The other shows the depth to which OxyContin, and the opioid addiction it brought with it, has devastated a place like West Virginia. In "The Addicts Next Door" (June 5, 2017), Margaret Talbot lays out the tragic tale of Berkeley County as a view into what's happening throughout the rest of the state; "West Virginia has an overdose death rate of 41.5 per hundred thousand people. (New Hampshire has the second-highest rate: 34.3 per hundred thousand.) This year, for the sixth straight year, West Virginia’s indigent burial fund, which helps families who can’t afford a funeral pay for one, ran out of money." She describes the damage to West Virginia's children – "One of the biggest collateral effects of the opioid crisis is the growing number of children being raised by people other than their parents, or being placed in foster care. In West Virginia, the number of children removed from parental care because of drug abuse rose from nine hundred and seventy in 2006 to two thousand one hundred and seventy-one in 2016." – and how some doctors are teaching regular citizens to use Narcan, a drug that can immediately counteract the effects of an overdose: "[Dr.] Aldis taught his first class on administering Narcan on September 3, 2015, at the New Life Clinic. Nine days later, a woman who'd attended the class used Narcan to revive a pregnant woman who had overdosed at a motel where they were both staying. During the next few weeks, Aldis heard of five more lives saved by people who'd attended the class." I know there were many other portraits like this throughout the year, but this is the one I found most affecting. ["The Addicts Next Door" - Margaret Talbot - New Yorker - June 5, 2017]
Suddenly, the prospect of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the most hermetic power on the globe had entered a realm of psychological calculation reminiscent of the Cold War, and the two men making the existential strategic decisions were not John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev but a senescent real-estate mogul and reality-television star and a young third-generation dictator who has never met another head of state. Between them, they had less than seven years of experience in political leadership.The second piece, which was my favorite of the bunch, came from Michael Lewis with his Vanity Fair deep dive into the Department of Energy, "Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House" (September, 2017). The details are astonishing and describe the governmental organization responsible for our nuclear capabilities as in complete disarray. This bit, about why you don't want people who dreamed of working on nuclear weapons actually working on nuclear weapons, stuck with me the most:
The Trump people didn't seem to grasp, according to a former D.O.E. employee, how much more than just energy the Department of Energy was about. They weren't totally oblivious to the nuclear arsenal, but even the nuclear arsenal didn't provoke in them much curiosity. "They were just looking for dirt, basically," said one of the people who briefed the Beachhead Team on national-security issues. " ‘What is the Obama administration not letting you do to keep the country safe?' " The briefers were at pains to explain an especially sensitive aspect of national security: the United States no longer tests its nuclear weapons. Instead, it relies on physicists at three of the national labs—Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia—to simulate explosions, using old and decaying nuclear materials. This is not a trivial exercise, and to do it we rely entirely on scientists who go to work at the national labs because the national labs are exciting places to work. They then wind up getting interested in the weapons program. That is, because maintaining the nuclear arsenal was just a by-product of the world's biggest science project, which also did things like investigating the origins of the universe. "Our weapons scientists didn't start out as weapons scientists," says Madelyn Creedon, who was second-in-command of the nuclear-weapons wing of the D.O.E., and who briefed the incoming administration, briefly. "They didn't understand that. The one question they asked was ‘Wouldn't you want the guy who grew up wanting to be a weapons scientist?' Well, actually, no."["Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House" - Michael Lewis - Vanity Fair - September, 2017]
The rule is you don’t talk about politics on the trail. The truth is you can’t talk about diversity in the outdoors without talking about politics, since politics is a big reason why the outdoors look the way they do. From the park system’s inception, Jim Crow laws and Native American removal campaigns limited access to recreation by race. From the mountains to the beaches, outdoor leisure was often accompanied by the words whites only. The repercussions for disobedience were grave.In May, Ian Parker wrote "What Makes a Parent" (May 22, 2017) for the New Yorker, the story of a custody battle for an adopted son between a lesbian couple. The question at the heart of the case is what is a parent:
New York's statutes describe the obligations and entitlements of a parent, but they don't define what a parent is. That definition derives from case law. In 1991, in a ruling in Alison D. v. Virginia M., a case involving an estranged lesbian couple and a child, the Court of Appeals opted for a definition with "bright line" clarity. A parent was either a biological parent or an adoptive parent; there were no other kinds. Lawyers in this field warn of "opening the floodgates"—an uncontrolled flow of dubious, would-be parents. Alison D. kept the gates shut, so that a biological mother wouldn't find, say, that she had accidentally given away partial custody of her child to a worthless ex-boyfriend. But many saw the decision as discriminatory against same-sex couples, who can choose to raise a child together but can't share the act of producing one. Judge Judith Kaye, in a dissent that has since been celebrated, noted that millions of American children had been born into families with a gay or lesbian parent; the court's decision would restrict the ability of these children to "maintain bonds that may be crucial to their development."In July, Masha Gessen wrote "The Gay Men Who Fled Chechnya's Purge" (July 3, 2017) for the New Yorker. It's an absolutely heartbreaking story at every moment. In August, Jay Caspian Kang wrote about the hazing death of Michael Deng at the hands of an Asian-American fraternity in "What a Fraternity Hazing Death Revealed About the Painful Search for an Asian-American Identity" (August 9, 2017). As the title suggests, Kang turns it into something even bigger than the tragic story of another fraternity hazing death:
"Asian-American" is a mostly meaningless term. Nobody grows up speaking Asian-American, nobody sits down to Asian-American food with their Asian-American parents and nobody goes on pilgrimages back to their motherland of Asian-America. Michael Deng and his fraternity brothers were from Chinese families and grew up in Queens, and they have nothing in common with me — someone who was born in Korea and grew up in Boston and North Carolina. We share stereotypes, mostly — tiger moms, music lessons and the unexamined march toward success, however it's defined. My Korean upbringing, I've found, has more in common with that of the children of Jewish and West African immigrants than that of the Chinese and Japanese in the United States — with whom I share only the anxiety that if one of us is put up against the wall, the other will most likely be standing next to him.In December, Wesley Morris (who wrote one of my favorites from last year, "Last Taboo") profiled the director of this year's breakout movie Get Out in "Jordan Peele's X-Ray Vision" (December 20, 2017). I'm sure there's a bit of recency bias with this pick, but I finally got around to watching Get Out this month and, despite my assumption it could never live up to all the hype, it was so interesting and weird that it definitely reached the bar. Then I read this article and Morris writes about race as well as anyone out there and Peele made a movie that tackles questions of race as interestingly as any in recent memory and when you put the two of them together you get stuff like this:
Peele had been talking about the restricted ways bigotry is discussed. “We’re never going to fix this problem of racism if the idea is you have to be in a K.K.K. hood to be part of the problem,” he said. The culture still tends to think of American racism as a disease of the Confederacy rather than as a national pastime with particular regional traditions, like barbecue. “Get Out” is set in the Northeast, where the racial attitude veers toward self-congratulatory tolerance. Mr. Armitage, for instance, gets chummy with Chris by telling him he’d have voted for Obama a third time. “Get Out” would have made one kind of sense under a post-Obama Hillary Clinton administration, slapping at the smugness of American liberals still singing: “Ding dong, race is dead.” Peele shows that other, more backhanded forms of racism exist — the presumptuous “can I touch your hair” icebreaker, Mr. Armitage’s “I voted for Obama, so I can’t be racist” sleeper hold are just two. But Clinton lost. Now the movie seems to amplify the racism that emanates from the Trump White House and smolders around the country.As with all the other categories, each of these are deserving of a choice (and in the end I'm writing about them all because I think they're all very worth reading), but I think if I had to pick one I'd go with Kang's piece about a hazing death at an Asian-American fraternity. It tells a familiar story from a different perspective and draws a spectrum in a space we normally see as singular. ["What a Fraternity Hazing Death Revealed About the Painful Search for an Asian-American Identity" - Jay Caspian Kang - August 9, 2017 - New York Times Magazine]
The year, at its outset, did not seem to be a particularly auspicious one for women. A man who had bragged on tape about sexual assault took the oath of the highest office in the land, having defeated the first woman of either party to be nominated for that office, as she sat beside a former President with his own troubling history of sexual misconduct. While polls from the 2016 campaign revealed the predictable divisions in American society, large majorities—including women who supported Donald Trump—said Trump had little respect for women. “I remember feeling powerless,” says Fowler, the former Uber engineer who called out the company’s toxic culture, “like even the government wasn’t looking out for us.” Nor did 2017 appear to be especially promising for journalists, who—alongside the ongoing financial upheaval in the media business—feared a fallout from the President’s cries of “fake news” and verbal attacks on reporters. And yet it was a year of phenomenal reporting. Determined journalists—including Emily Steel and Michael Schmidt, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, Ronan Farrow, Brett Anderson, Oliver Darcy, and Irin Carmon and Amy Brittain, among many others—picked up where so many human-resources departments, government committees and district attorneys had clearly failed, proving the truth of rumors that had circulated across whisper networks for years.While the reporting was clearly amazing (it's worth reading or re-reading all the articles mentioned by Felsenthal), two essays on the movement, where it came from, and what it means stood out for me. The first, from November by Claire Dederer in the Paris Review, asks "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?" (November 20, 2017). The second, which I just read this week, opened the Winter issue of n+1 magaizine. "In The Maze" (December, 2018) by Dayna Tortorici covers #MeToo, but also finds a string that goes back before 2017's women came forward, to a general shift that has left some white men to feel like victims. She makes a compelling case that #MeToo is part of a much broader change happening in the United States and was a big component of the resentment that fueled Trump's rise over the last few years. It ties together the themes of 2017 as well as anything I read this year:
Must history have losers? The record suggests yes. Redistribution is a tricky business. Even simple metaphors for making the world more equitable — leveling a playing field, shifting the balance — can correspond to complex or labor-intensive processes. What freedoms might one have to surrender in order for others to be free? And how to figure it when those freedoms are not symmetrical? A little more power for you might mean a lot less power for me in practice, an exchange that will not feel fair in the short term even if it is in the long term. There is a reason, presumably, that we call it an ethical calculus and not an ethical algebra. Some things are zero sum — perhaps more things than one cares to admit. To say that feminism is good for boys, that diversity makes a stronger team, or that collective liberation promises a greater, deeper freedom than the individual freedoms we know is comforting and true enough. But just as true, and significantly less consoling, is the guarantee that some will find the world less comfortable in the process of making it habitable for others. It would be easier to give up some privileges if it weren’t so traumatic to lose, as it is in our ruthlessly competitive and frequently undemocratic country. Changing the rules of the game might begin with revising what it means to win. I once heard a story about a friend who’d said, offhand at a book group, that he’d throw women under the bus if it meant achieving social democracy in the United States. The story was meant to be chilling — this from a friend? — but it made me laugh. As if you could do it without us, I thought, we who do all the work on the group project. I wondered what his idea of social democracy was.["In The Maze" - Dayna Tortorici - n+1 - December, 2017]
There’s a strict hierarchy of drivers, depending on what they haul and how they’re paid. The most common are the freighthaulers. They’re the guys who pull box trailers with any kind of commodity inside. We movers are called bedbuggers, and our trucks are called roach coaches. Other specialties are the car haulers (parking lot attendants), flatbedders (skateboarders), animal transporters (chicken chokers), refrigerated food haulers (reefers), chemical haulers (thermos bottle holders), and hazmat haulers (suicide jockeys). Bedbuggers are shunned by other truckers. We will generally not be included in conversations around the truckstop coffee counter or in the driver’s lounge. In fact, I pointedly avoid coffee counters, when there is one, mainly because I don’t have time to waste, but also because I don’t buy into the trucker myth that most drivers espouse. I don’t wear a cowboy hat, Tony Lama snakeskin boots, or a belt buckle doing free advertising for Peterbilt or Harley-Davidson. My driving uniform is a three-button company polo shirt, lightweight black cotton pants, black sneakers, black socks, and a cloth belt. My moving uniform is a black cotton jumpsuit.There were two very different pieces from the Guardian. The first, "'London Bridge is down': the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death" (March 17, 2017), laid out in amazing detail what will happen when Queen Elizabeth dies. The second, "Why we fell for clean eating" (August 11, 2017), goes deep into the weeds of the clean eating craze and just how crazy much of it is. It also includes what may be the most transferable sentence of 2017: "But it quickly became clear that 'clean eating' was more than a diet; it was a belief system, which propagated the idea that the way most people eat is not simply fattening, but impure." Replace the words "clean eating" and "diet" and you have a pretty good descriptor for everything that seems to be happening around us right now. But in the end, my very favorite of this category came from the article very hardest to categorize: Kathryn Schulz's "Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank them" (November 6, 2017). I'm still not sure I can do this justice, but the basic premise is that our ability to rank the "realness" of imaginary beings like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or ghosts, is a critical part of our humanity. I love this article partly because I can't imagine pitching it to a New Yorker editor, partly because it was a nice break from the onslaught of 2017, and partly because it was just super interesting.
Patterns of evidence, a grasp of biology, theories of physics: as it turns out, we need all of these to account for our intuitions about supernatural beings, just as we need all of them to explain any other complex cultural phenomenon, from a tennis match to a bar fight to a bluegrass band. That might seem like a lot of intellectual firepower for parsing the distinctions between fairies and mermaids, but the ability to think about nonexistent things isn’t just handy for playing parlor games on Halloween. It is utterly fundamental to who we are. Studying that ability helps us learn about ourselves; exercising it helps us learn about the world. A three-year-old talking about an imaginary friend can illuminate the workings of the human mind. A thirty-year-old conducting a thought experiment about twins, one of whom is launched into space at birth and one of whom remains behind, can illuminate the workings of the universe. As for those of us who are no longer toddlers and will never be Einstein: we use our ability to think about things that aren’t real all the time, in ways both everyday and momentous. It is what we are doing when we watch movies, write novels, weigh two different job offers, consider whether to have children.Since there's a lot here, I've got two choices: ["Why we fell for clean eating" - Bee Wilson - The Guardian - August 11, 2017] ["Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank them" - Kathryn Schulz - New Yorker - November 6, 2017]