Not even wrong

Reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus for the Telegraph

In his memoirs, the German-British physicist Rudolf Peierls recalls the sighing response his colleague Wolfgang Pauli once gave to a scientific paper: “It is not even wrong.”

Some ideas are so incomplete, or so vague, that they can’t even be judged. Yuval Noah Harari’s books are notoriously full of such ideas. But then, given what Harari is trying to do, this may not matter very much.

Take this latest offering: a “brief history” that still finds room for viruses and Neanderthals, The Talmud and Elon Musk’s Neuralink and the Thirty Years’ War. Has Harari found a single rubric, under which to combine all human wisdom and not a little of its folly? Many a pub bore has entertained the same conceit. And Harari is tireless: “To appreciate the political ramifications of the mind–body problem,” Harari writes, “let’s briefly revisit the history of Christianity.” Harari is a writer who’s never off-topic but only because his topic is everything.

Root your criticism of Harari in this, and you’ve missed the point, which is that he’s writing this way on purpose. His single goal is to give you a taste of the links between things, without worrying too much about the things themselves. Any reader old enough to remember James Burke’s idiosyncratic BBC series Connections will recognise the formula, and know how much sheer joy and exhilaration it can bring to an audience that isn’t otherwise spending every waking hour grazing the “smart thinking” shelf at Waterstone’s.

Well-read people don’t need Harari.

Nexus’s argument goes like this: civilisations are (among other things) information networks. Totalitarian states centralise their information, which grows stale as a consequence. Democracies distribute their information, with checks and balances to keep the information fresh.

Harari’s key point here is that in neither case does the information have to be true. A great deal of it is not true. At best it’s intersubjectively true (Santa Claus, human rights and money are real by consensus: they have no basis in the material world.) Quite a lot of our information is fiction, and a fraction of that fiction is downright malicious falsehood.

It doesn’t matter to the network, which uses that information more or less agnostically, to establish order. Nor is this necessarily a problem, since an order based on truth is likely to be a lot more resilient and pleasant to live under than an order based on cultish blather.

This typology gives Harari the chance to wax lyrical over various social and cultural arrangements, historical and contemporary. Marxism and populism both get short shrift, in passages that are memorable, pithy, and, dare I say it, wise.

In the second half of the book, Harari invites us to stare like rabbits into the lights of the on-coming AI juggernaut. Artificial intelligence changes everything, Harari says, because just as human’s create inter-subjective realities, computers create inter-computer realities. Pokemon Go is an example of an intercomputer reality. So — rather more concerningly — are the money markets.

Humans disagree with each other all the time, and we’ve had millennia to practice thinking our way into other heads. The problem is that computers don’t have any heads. Their intelligence is quite unlike our own. We don’t know what They’re thinking because, by any reasonable measure, “thinking” does not describe what They are doing.

Even this might not be a problem, if only They would stop pretending to be human. Harari cites a 2022 study showing that the 5 per cent of Twitter users that are bots are generating between 20 and 30 per cent of the site’s content.

Harari quotes Daniel Dennett’s blindingly obvious point that, in a society where information is the new currency, we should ban fake humans the way we once banned fake coins.

And that is that, aside from the shouting — and there’s a fair bit of that in the last pages, futurology being a sinecure for people who are not even wrong.

Harari’s iconoclastic intellectual reputation is wholly undeserved, not because he does a bad job, but because he does such a superb job of being the opposite of an iconoclast. Harari sticks the world together in a gleaming shape that inspires and excites. If it holds only for as long as it takes to read the book, still, dazzled readers should feel themselves well served.

Choose-your-own adventure

Reading The Importance of Small Decisions by Michael O’Brien, R. Alexander Bentley and William Brock for New Scientist, 13 April 2019

What if you could map all kinds of human decision-making and use it to chart society’s evolution?

This is what academics Michael O’Brien, Alexander Bentley and William Brock try to do in The Importance of Small Decisions. It is an attempt to expand on a 2014 paper, “Mapping collective behavior in the big-data era”, that they wrote in Behavioral and Brain Sciences . While contriving to be somehow both too short and rambling, it bites off more than it can chew, nearly chokes to death on the ins and outs of group selection, and coughs up its best ideas in the last 40 pages.

Draw a graph. The horizontal axis maps decisions according to how socially influenced they are. The vertical axis tells you how clear the costs and pay-offs are for each decision. Rational choices sit in the north-western quadrant of the map. To the north-east, bearded capuchins teach each other how to break into palm nuts in a charming example of social learning (pictured). Twitter storms generated by fake news swirl about the south-east.

The more choices you face, the greater the cognitive load. The authors cite economist Eric Beinhocker, who in The Origin of Wealth calculated that human choices had multiplied a hundred million-fold in the past 10,000 years. Small and insignificant decisions now consume us.

Worse, costs and pay-offs are increasingly hidden in an ocean of informational white noise, so that it is easier to follow a trend than find an expert. “Why worry about the underlying causes of global warming when we can see what tens of millions of our closest friends think?” ask the authors, building to a fine, satirical climax.

In an effort to communicate widely, the authors have, I think, left out a few too many details from their original paper. And a mid-period novel by Philip K. Dick would paint a more visceral picture of a world created by too much information. Still, there is much fun to be had reading the garrulous banter of these three extremely smart academics.