{"id":3976,"date":"2024-09-03T10:13:38","date_gmt":"2024-09-03T10:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3976"},"modified":"2024-09-06T10:19:10","modified_gmt":"2024-09-06T10:19:10","slug":"not-even-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3976","title":{"rendered":"Not even wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus for the Telegraph<\/a><\/p>\n

In his memoirs, the German-British physicist Rudolf Peierls recalls the sighing response his colleague Wolfgang Pauli once gave to a scientific paper: \u201cIt is not even wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some ideas are so incomplete, or so vague, that they can\u2019t even be judged. Yuval Noah Harari\u2019s books are notoriously full of such ideas. But then, given what Harari is trying to do, this may not matter very much.<\/p>\n

Take this latest offering: a \u201cbrief history\u201d that still finds room for viruses and Neanderthals, The Talmud and Elon Musk\u2019s Neuralink and the Thirty Years\u2019 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: \u201cTo appreciate the political ramifications of the mind\u2013body problem,\u201d Harari writes, \u201clet\u2019s briefly revisit the history of Christianity.\u201d Harari is a writer who\u2019s never off-topic but only because his topic is everything.<\/p>\n

Root your criticism of Harari in this, and you\u2019ve missed the point, which is that he\u2019s 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\u2019s idiosyncratic BBC series Connections will recognise the formula, and know how much sheer joy and exhilaration it can bring to an audience that isn\u2019t otherwise spending every waking hour grazing the \u201csmart thinking\u201d shelf at Waterstone\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Well-read people don\u2019t need Harari.<\/p>\n

Nexus\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Harari\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Humans disagree with each other all the time, and we\u2019ve had millennia to practice thinking our way into other heads. The problem is that computers don\u2019t have any heads. Their intelligence is quite unlike our own. We don\u2019t know what They\u2019re thinking because, by any reasonable measure, \u201cthinking\u201d does not describe what They are doing.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s content.<\/p>\n

Harari quotes Daniel Dennett\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

And that is that, aside from the shouting — and there\u2019s a fair bit of that in the last pages, futurology being a sinecure for people who are not even wrong.<\/p>\n

Harari\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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: \u201cIt is not even wrong.\u201d Some ideas are so incomplete, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[392,678,1183,1182],"class_list":["post-3976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-ai","tag-information","tag-populism","tag-totalitarianism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3976"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3979,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3976\/revisions\/3979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}