On restarting karate at age 71 (Saturday Sept 3rd 2022)

Gedan Barai (low block)

 "So before I went I was thinking about the last time I went to a karate class where I had to sit on the floor and spread my legs very wide and bend towards each foot, and it was very painful; also do ferocious push-ups on a hard wooden floor. 

That quite exhausted me but this was actually not at all such a bad experience. The guy who runs it, I'd say he's ISTJ (we're talking Myers-Briggs here) with a big extraverted presence though - plenty of charisma. According to his website he’s a spiritual kind of person - into Daoism - but very different from my T'ai Chi teacher, who's really free and easy. This guy is quite imperious; he called people out: ‘You look at me when I'm talking. Karate, it's serious stuff. If you're here, you do it right.’

So they all came in their gear, their white gis. The first thing that struck me: they were driving here from wherever they lived, parking their cars in the car park. I walked in and followed them: the dojo is actually the gymnasium at the back of the building facing the sports field. 

It's a hard polished, wooden floor. There were about, I would say, 20-25 people there: some brown and black belts, some orange belts; quite experienced people and a few white belts showing absolute beginners.  The age range was enormous. I was obviously the oldest person there at 71, there were some people below the age of 11: a little girl of seven or eight, a little boy. And then some kids around 11 or 12 and some young men. 

I was placed at the left side of the line as a newbie with the higher grades towards the right. We started by getting down on our knees and sitting on our heels. So, he says, you'll find this posture quite uncomfortable (a euphemism for painful) but this is what we do. 

It certainly is quite uncomfortable, kneeling on a hard, wooden floor sitting on your heels. So, we did that for a minute or two. I was thinking, this is the first test: if you can handle the pain you've already passed. Then we did warm-ups, the kind that we do before the Shibashi QiGong. 

Then we practiced kihon, basic techniques: some standard punches, punching and advancing, that kind of thing, getting the postures right.  And then towards the end some forward kicks, balancing on one leg, flicking the other leg out like a whip, out and back again, then stepping forward and turning. And it all looked more dynamic than T'ai Chi ever does because things were being done fast and with aggression. 

The Sensei was working with one of the orange belts as his opponent to show exactly how to do the punches, how to do the ward-off deflects and so forth. So that was good and I didn't find it too tiring. It's a bit of a workout but not a super-hard one. Not to the point of sweating or physical exhaustion or anything. I know that when you do things like sparring - kumite - where you're moving very fast, and extended kata sequences, you'll be working much harder. 

The padded boards he promised would arrive soon: then you'd definitely be doing more work than just learning the moves, which is what we were doing today. We finished on the hour and that was it. The cost was six pounds  and the next session is on Tuesday evening half past six. 

I spoke to the Sensei afterwards and said, thank you very much, and he seemed a perfectly friendly kind of guy, so that was my day." 

"And what are your thoughts on going?" 

"Well, I think it's, I think it's good. I mean, I got to see the people who know what they're doing. They were performing well in my opinion, linking up moves and doing extended sequences, looking very crisp and balanced - so fast! 

There are three things you're doing in karate. One is that you learn kihon, the basics of the moves themselves: how to do a punch, a block, how to do a kick. 

The  second thing is, you learn kata, a kata is an extended sequence like the T'ai Chi form where you're doing a succession of punches, blocks, spin turns and kicks, joining everything up. And the third is called kumite, which is choreographed sparring, at least initially. 

Later, in competitive kumite, you have an opponent and you could be doing freeform sparring with them. I don't know how he does it. I don't know whether he pads people up and has them, you know, hitting with a sort of muffled force. 

He was a bit short-handed today because his other black belts who normally assist him were all away on holiday . So I didn't see anything like that and we just did the basics today.“

Is Revolutionary Marxism dead for ever? Yes

At Marx's funeral in Highgate cemetery on March 17th 1883 there were only 11 or 12 mourners present. Marx "had established no place of significance in the politics and intellectual life of Britain.Indeed, at his death Marx did not have a lot to show for his life’s work: his major political effort since the failure of the 1848 revolution, the First International, had foundered by 1873."

Marxism as a mass ideology was the subsequent creation of Engels as populariser, fueled by developments within capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century which led to the development of mass trades unions and social-democratic parties. These organisations found in Marxism a thoroughgoing critique of a still-harsh capitalism and the hazy promise of a utopian future for the working masses.

The disintegration of the Russian feudal-autocratic state in 1917 was inappropriately theorised by Lenin and Trotsky as the template for revolutionary transition in the advanced capitalist countries. This template endures in the contemporary Trotskyist movement. 

Few believe in it now.

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The intractable problems of Marxism include: the nature of nationalism; the enduring centrality of the family; the lack of revolutionary consciousness within the working class; the inability to theorise the existence of necessary, structural contradictions between the forces and relations of production within capitalism; and the reasons for the easy restoration of capitalism within the former USSR - rather than the expected transition to democratic socialism. 

These all point to the limitations of the framework Marx originated and which his Leninist and post-Leninist successors deepened and extended.

It is the hallmark of a (self-serving) ideology that it refuses to confront those questions which intellectually embarrass it. Truth is bypassed in favour of group cohesion and narrow groupish interests. That is exactly how Marx defines an ideology: he did not expect Marxism itself to succumb - a failure of analysis on his part.

In his economic and philosophical writing Marx freely admitted that he was abstracting away from human nature. His interest was sociology: those human relationships and interactions which underpin and constitute generalised commodity production, the defining feature of the capitalist mode of production. His worker and capitalist archetypes were psychological ideal-types, exemplifying the social requirements and dynamics of their roles: they were deliberately not cast as rounded human beings. 

An unfortunate simplification.

In the twenty-first century, we know a great deal more about human drives and behaviours. The limitations of natural solidarity - as evidenced in revealed behaviour - are seen in preferences for family and friends. Loyalty to abstract causes - often laudable - is  often more about advertising personal worth (commitments to honour, sacrifice, ethics) than an exceedingly-scarce generalised altruism. In an atomised society this substitutes for the more organic status markers available in traditional societies.

An observation: I observe this to be the case, I do not express a normative opinion although Marx himself was a fan, seeing the destruction of all traditional forms of social life as an essential engine of progress, most notably in that famous passage in the Communist Manifesto.

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The scale of the capitalist economy - now thoroughly global - far outstrips the span of emotional or cognitive commitment of any individual worker, capitalist or petit-bourgeois. The Marxist dreams of conscious social relationships to organise and regulate the economy more equitably than the operations of the market have failed whenever tried: so-called socialist economic formations collapsing into bureaucratism and nepotism.

It was noteworthy that the experiments in workers control of factories in the old Yugoslavia were prone to takeovers by the managerial elite and/or profitability failures due to the inability to rationalise the workforce.

Change in a dynamic economy requires a measure of brutality - but the turkeys don't care to vote for Christmas.

In the absence of a compelling narrative of transition to a post-capitalist economy (what means? what ends?), any plausible road to a communist future has simply evaporated, no longer existing in any sense recognizable to the original Marxist tradition.

Identity politics - Wokeism - represents the final abandonment of the central (and correct) Marxist tenet that specific economic relations constitute the foundation of any viable society. In Wokeism we see a withdrawal from any radical critique of capitalism, its replacement by assertions of utopian egalitarianism (equality of outcomes) in ways that actually support the endless capitalist project of labour-supply flexibility.

A globalised capitalism works best with rational, low-touch states which establish a minimally-obstructive framework for production and exchange at all geographical scales, minimising transaction costs. Borders with their irritating bureaucracy and tariffs should be eschewed; all social groups encouraged to present themselves freely to the labour market. 

The Progressive manifesto writes itself.

The Woke vanguard, the SJWs, occasionally push things too far - as young zealots often do - and have to be reined in. The media sees to it.

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There will be no more significant Leninist-style revolutionary parties earnestly striving to lead the struggling masses to an opaque victory. The revolutionary Marxist project is just too decoupled from reality - although it took the failures of the 1970s, 80s and 90s to finally appreciate it.

Use the power of the state as a countervailing force against capitalism's well-known divisive excesses by all means - the revisionist social-democrats have been advocating that since before Edouard Bernstein.

The author who best understands the potential for it all to go wrong in the future is surely S. M. Stirling: I point you in the direction of The Domination of the Draka and in particular, its fourth volume, Drakon - featuring Homo Drakensis/Homo Servus: genetic masters and slaves.

Why wouldn’t they - if they could?

A Sociobiological take on Absurdism

Albert Camus

According to Wikipedia:

"Absurdism is the philosophical theory that existence in general is absurd. ... An important aspect of absurdism is that the absurd is not limited to particular situations but encompasses life as a whole. ... An important component of the absurd on the practical level concerns the seriousness people bring toward life. This seriousness is reflected in many different attitudes and areas, for example, concerning fame, pleasure, justice, knowledge, or survival, both in regard to ourselves as well as in regard to others. 

But there seems to be a discrepancy between how serious we take our lives and the lives of others on the one hand, and how arbitrary they and the world at large seem to be on the other hand. The collision between these two sides can be defined as the absurd. This is perhaps best exemplified, for example, when the agent is seriously engaged in choosing between arbitrary options, none of which truly matters."

Yes, the universe doesn't care.

So what should the Absurdist do in a universe without meaning? According to Camus, "there are three possible responses to absurdism: suicide, religious belief, or revolting against the absurd."

Camus prefers option 3, although according to his own criteria this also makes no sense.

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Philosophers tie themselves in knots because they operate only in the realm of ideas. When a problem is intractable, it invariably means that we've reached the limits of the paradigm itself. 

Like those irremovable infinities in physics.

A better approach is to generalise: is life absurd to a housefly? To ask the question seems to involve a category error (perhaps houseflies don't have elaborated intuitions regarding the absurdity of existence?). 

Bear with me.

In a natural sciences paradigm, houseflies are an instance of a biological system which exploits free energy - prevalent on Earth - to sustain a Darwinian process of self-replication. Living things are what you may well get in physics given the boundary conditions on this planet. 

So you might as well - or as uselessly - ask whether the universe itself is absurd. Good luck with that, as you ponder something from nothing.

Absurdism only becomes real when human beings - who, as articulate social mammals, readily self-understand as purposeful, causal and meaning-driven - apply this essential framework of social life to the ultimate underpinnings of what it is to be human.

When framed like this, Absurdism is the pessimistic pseudo-answer to the pseudo-question: "What is the Meaning of Life?".

The answer is that the whole concept of "meaning" (= purpose) is in the end ungrounded, and thus unanswerable. The better question is to ask why we carry on doing what we do, to which the answer is that our rationality is the slave to our desires, which in a Darwinian sense are optimised for the survival of our descendants (and hence, usually, ourselves). 

If there were any Absurdists who cared to take the suicide route, then the genes which encoded such excessive rationalism were lost to the gene pool.

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Why am I reading Camus ('The Plague')? 

Because the hero of Jerry Pournelle's military-SF book "Prince of Mercenaries" (John Christian Falkenberg) recommends it to the main POV character, Prince Lysander of Sparta. 

Good advice.

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Postscript (20th July 2022)

I finished The Plague and was struck both by its immersion in the plague-ridden city of Oran - the compelling reactions and sentiments of the unfortunate inhabitants - and the conceptual responses of the author's main protagonists.

In the presence of arbitrary death, the priest, Father Paneloux, asserts an 'all-or-nothing' Christian faith, a faith without reason or understanding; the traveller, Tarrou, is a disillusioned left-wing activist and seems to have reconciled himself to an abstract humanism based on 'sympathy' (rather Buddhist, I thought); the hero, Dr. Rieux, seems to put his trust not so much in grand abstractions as in the individual: the conscious, feeling personality to be protected from suffering and death.

If Absurdism is the rebuttal of all grand schemes for humanity, perhaps Dr Rieux's way is best, grounded as it is in the specifics of being human that predate knowledge, memory or competencies: the raw experience of waking up in the morning without even knowing where or who you are ... but knowing nevertheless that you are. 

Being human may be absurd, but we are human - that is our point of departure, not the standpoint of the cold universe. That I think is Camus's philosophy here: our values come from our emotions, not our intellects.

Correspondence with my co-blogger

I am too busy to write fiction - the success of NUPES has opened up all kinds of possibilities for the French Left. But my co-blogger's recent thoughts are perhaps of some interest below.

Adam Carlton.

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A wave of A.I. experts left Google, DeepMind, and Meta—and the race is on to build a new, more useful generation of digital assistant

This is probably worth keeping an eye on. If they can make the concept work it's rather transformational.

At last, you get to speak to a human-level agent rather than navigating endless menu trees and then waiting 30 minutes to speak to an incompetent…

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How the Left fell for capitalism - Progressives were always part of the corporate elite

I liked this article - a goodish critical framework - although as a wannabe-leftist the author still cleaves to the 'Standard Social Science Model'. The heavily-ideological SSSM delivers the utility of progressive leftism to the interests of the most advanced, technocratic and global forces of contemporary capitalism.

An ideology is a set of ideas which appear objective and coherent but which justify and legitimate the existing order of society by occluding essential aspects of the truth. Progressive Leftism is such an ideology.

The correct starting point for a science of human affairs is rooted in the biology of our particular hyper-social primate species. But sociobiology is so subversive in its implications that it was sadly cancelled decades ago.

Interesting that sociobiology is as lethal to political Marxism (Leninism, Trotskyism etc) as it is to elite-friendly progressivism!

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My own view of Marxism, Adam, is that Marx's economic analysis of capitalism (generalised commodity production, labour power not labour, capital - and economic categories in general - as social relationships not 'things') is spot on.

His rather diffuse political ideas about future communism were methodologically unsound (see Popper's critique of historicism) and fatally undermined by Marx's essentially blank slate view of human nature. That's why I agree with E. O. Wilson's classic epitaph for Marxism: "Great theory; wrong species".

He meant that communism works for ants and bees as they are genetic clones. Humans are not.

At least not till the Draka engineer the rest of humanity in that direction 😨🤔… or perhaps the Chinese…

"The Rover" - Led Zeppelin

Help! I have this wonderful - if massively underrated - track from Led Zeppelin colonising my head.

How will I ever liberate myself?

Do I even want to?

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Lyrics

I've been to London, seen seven wonders I know to trip is just to fall

I used to rock it, sometimes I'd roll it

I always knew what it was for

There can be no denying, that the wind'll shake 'em down

And the flat world's flying, and there's a new plague on the land

Traversed the planet, when heaven sent me

I saw the kings who rule them all

Still by the firelight and purple moonlight I hear the rested rivers call

And the wind is crying, from a love that won't grow cold

My lover, she is lying, on the dark side of the globe

You got me rocking when I ought to be a-rolling

Darling, tell me, darling, which way to go

You keep me rocking, baby, then you keep me stolen

Won't you tell me, darling, which way to go, that's right

Oh how I wonder, oh how I worry, and I would dearly like to know

I've all this wonder, of earthly plunder, will it leave us anything to show

And our time is flying, see the candle burning low

Is the new world rising, from the shambles of the old

If we could just, if we could just, if we could just

If we could just, if we could just join hands

That's all it takes, that's all it takes

That's all it takes, that's all it takes.

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Lyrics (1972) seem more relevant than ever...

My Bucket List (as of 2025)

Clare disapproves of bucket lists: 'Be in the moment!'

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And I secretly agree with her. I don't believe in bucket lists either. Daoism reminds us that life isn't a checklist to conquer, but a process to embrace. And this.

Yet here are my bucket list items:

1. Keep my wife happy - ongoing (blog post).


2. Climb Pen-y-Fan - achieved in September 2012 (blog post).


3. Program a working theorem prover for the Predicate Calculus - achieved in March 2017 (blog post).


4. Understand General Relativity to the extent of grasping quantitatively the precession of the perihelion of Mercury - achieved (June 10th 2019, blog post) using the spacetime metric, not via tensors and differential geometry.


5. Create items of art for my grandchildren - achieved (2019, 2021) by proxy through the writing skills of Adam Carlton: Freyja’s Deathbed Conversations: and other stories and Donatien's Children.


6. Learn the T'ai Chi 24 step Yang-style short form - accomplished end of 2022.


7. Learn the T'ai Chi sword form - started January 2023, achieved June 2023.


8. Pass first grading in Shotokan Karate (orange belt) - achieved November 2022. 


9. Be received into the Catholic Church - achieved Easter 2023.


10. Get my personal philosophy sorted out - ongoing (blog post).

Removed from bucket within the last five years

1. Learning Quantum Field Theory in detail.


2. Understanding General Relativity via tensors/differential geometry.


3. Improving guitar, eg fingerpicking - my fingers hurt too much.


4. Achieve brown belt in karate: actually, I sadly retired June 23 with yellow belt (7th kyu) due to chronic sciatica - too old.

Additions in December 2025

1. Learn fingerpicking for solo Blues. I now understand that, with a decent guitar and new strings, you just have to work through the pain and let the calluses grow. Technique is a longer journey, but, who knows, I may even learn to sing (it worked for Dylan)!


2. I am thinking about learning the fifth Heian kata, Heian Godan, which is quite dissimilar to the first four - a bit of primeval Okinawan violence seeping into the choreographed Heian catalogue. Learning kata is an effort, although one circumscribed by a few weeks of intensive study.

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The owl spreads its wings

 

Image by Dawn Whitney-Hall

Hegel wrote that the owl of Minerva takes wing at dusk. Any wisdom we might have (philosophy, self-knowledge) postdates the raw events of life. We experience - and only then the possibility of reflection and understanding.

And so in our last decades we draw a balance sheet. Our work in the world is mostly done: others will move the world forward: build families or utopias or theories of reality.

What is left to us is character itself: the perfection of self before we vanish like fleeting dew before the gathering light of a new day without us.

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The psychotherapy community talks about the balanced type development of maturity; the Taoists talk about harmony and following the Way.

I agree with both. 

As 'stuff' which is conscious, we should do everything in our power to get this business of 'being' right. Not let ourselves down; not be marked down by those who interact with us.

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What does failure look like?

A memory at which I cringe. Twenty years ago a discussion with a senior UK television executive. The consultancy I worked for was intending to do a project of some kind with him. I was under-briefed on the TV industry, an omission of which I was starkly aware.

With a much better prepared, but more junior colleague I met with him at a café in Paddington station. We talked and I have to say I monopolised the conversation, bombarding him with urgent questions as my ignorance and insecurity strove to get a handle on his world and the issues confronting him. He visibly shrank back under this remorseless hammering. My embarrassed friend interrupted me: "Why are you asking our client? I know all about this…"

I ignored him.

I never had any contact with that executive again. The project did not go ahead.

Another client described me once, frankly: "You make me feel like a butterfly, trapped by a pin, while you dissect me."

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What do the advocates of mature type development and of the Tao tell us?

My MBTI is INTP (P shading to J). In the Jungian telling, I normally present an open, ideas-oriented face to the world (secondary, extraverted N) while my introverted analytic self tries to synthesise the logic of it (dominant introverted T)

But when I'm stressed and off-balance my subconscious anxieties take the driving seat. To quote a personality website:

"The dominant function of the INTP is their Ti, when they are in their shadow they become more focused on Te. When the INTP attempts to dominantly use this function it can cause them to be more direct, and even a bit aggressive in their attempts to get things done."

So that was me when I felt out of my depth. If only I had had the maturity and self-insight to recognise what was going wrong - and to stay balanced and calm!

But when one is 'trapped' in the constraints of career, there is little space for the cultivation of the self. Growing up remains a postponed project of one's later years. Better late than never.

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Just as traditional Chinese medicine is a phenomenological approximation to scientific biology, so I used to imagine the Tao (The Way) as a pre-scientific cosmology. But of course it isn't.

The precepts of Taoism - the flow of water, the fluent motions of animals such as cats - prioritise categories of harmony which are at root psychological archetypes.

One is reminded of athletes talking of being in the zone, and going with the flow.

It is the battering of threats, physical and social, which judder us out of the flow, which force a conflict between id and superego which throws the ego into anguished incompetence. Hell is other people with destabilising agendas, threatening situations.

Yet there are no 'situations in themselves'; there are only our attitudes to situations: the framing, the paradigm in which we comprehend and emotionally react to them. And our reactions are our own - ours to frame. We have choices if we are self-aware enough. We are not condemned to be a slave to the shadow. 

I take Taoism to be a framework for self-preparation for just that. To consciously self-monitor and find a harmonious, balanced, mature response to events. All of them. Not to be possessed by one's Inferior function. I believe they call it Mindfulness.

How?

Ritualised forms or katas such as those of T'ai Chi or Qigong direct the mind-body complex towards self-confidence and calm. That which is attained during practice may spill over into general life. Sometimes all you need is a catalyst.

So I think I see a goal (I am aware that the real goal is to have no goal).

Grow up finally. Be wiser. Finish the work.

May 2022. 

"Donatien's Children" - new SF novel by Adam Carlton

Link to PDF

I have now completed the text for this, my first science-fiction novel (I published a book of short stories in 2019: Freyja’s Deathbed Conversations: and other stories).

"Donatien's Children" is now available on Amazon as a Kindle eBook - the paperback version will be there in a day or two, but you may read the novel for free by following the link below the image above (PDF). Let me know if you find any typos or errors which need attention via comments below.

Here's a summary of the book: first the blurb and then a longer guide. It will answer your first question: Donatien?

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Donatien's Children

Introduction

The StarDrop Corporation emerged from nowhere offering new technologies for fusion power, spaceflight and synthetic life. Petra Schelling, teen chess prodigy, was recruited by an intelligence agency to spy on StarDrop - before vanishing. James Melrose, her controller, is told that losing an agent is regrettable but it happens. But why has Petra now become a high-profile StarDrop agent of influence?

StarDrop’s Artificial People are suddenly everywhere in entertainment, the media, politics and top jobs. Friendly, attractive and smart, they are indispensable in tough assignments such as the mission investigating an anomaly on the larger Martian moon, where an artefact suggests StarDrop might be of extraterrestrial origin.

Élise and Mireille Fossey: two sisters, one a journalist, the other a researcher. For Élise, StarDrop will lead her into more than lethal peril; for Mireille, the corporation may be humanity's finest opportunity... or maybe a deadly, existential threat.

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Themes

Prologue:        I’m Not Awake - 2022

Part 1: La Maîtresse des Échecs - 2023

Part 2: Petra - 2028 (winter to autumn)

Intermission: Mother Christmas (2029)

Part 3: La Double Inconstance (2030 winter to 2031 summer)

Part 4: La Philosophie dans le Salon (2032 spring-summer)

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Part 1 considers what remains of a competitive activity when the machines have comprehensively surpassed human-level performance; and the nature of an equilibrium when you can always win through cheating. I had cycling - road racing - and Lance Armstrong in mind when I wrote this part.

Part 2 leverages my own experiences working in an industrial research lab, although nothing remotely as exciting ever occurred. Petra is very loosely modelled after my divisional director; other characters are also variants of colleagues.

Part 3 follows the theme of La Double Inconstance, a romantic comedy by French playwright Pierre de Marivaux first performed in 1723. A young woman, Sylvia, is kidnapped from her lover, Arlequin, by the Prince who intends to marry her. Through a complex series of engagements the Prince and his smart female servant Flaminia conspire to break the Sylvia-Arlequin relationship, resulting in a switch of partners.*

Part 4 follows (very loosely!) a theme from La Philosophie dans le Boudoir, published in 1795 by Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade. Set in a bedroom, the two lead characters argue that the only moral system that reinforces the recent (1789) French revolution is libertinism. Dolmancé is the most dominant (and evil) of the characters in the dialogues. Eugénie (a fifteen year old) has been sent by her father to be corrupted by him and his associates into libertine ways. The fifth section, a lengthy political monologue, comprises de Sade’s manifesto.*

That short book - French and English versions freely available in PDF format on the Internet - is almost unreadably graphic in places in its gleeful accounts of the most depraved sexual practices. Considered pornographic for centuries, it is now considered an extreme polemic on sexual politics. 

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* Some of the text here edited from the corresponding Wikipedia articles.

Prof Jo Phoenix and the Open University

Following the report in The Times today about Professor Jo Phoenix's forced resignation from the OU, I have sent the letter below to the Vice Chancellor, Tim Blackman by email.

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Dear Vice Chancellor,

As an OU graduate, I have financially supported the university for many years, being particularly grateful for its teaching expertise in STEM subjects.

But after reading about the hounding of Jo Phoenix in today's Times I have decided to terminate my DD to you.

This is not the kind of university culture I can identify with.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Nigel Seel.

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I am genuinely disgusted. The OU pioneered high-quality university-level teaching for a generation of predominantly working-class people who were ignored by hidebound traditional universities. The quality of their science, mathematics and computer science courses was uniformly high - really impressive.

This latest capitulation to the anti-science lobby within the university itself just crosses a line for me. We've lost another university.

Sad.

Sudowrite: an AI writer's assistant document

 

Sudowrite: an AI writing assistant

Here are the opening paragraphs of my forthcoming Christmas story, Mother Christmas, to be posted here mid-December. How would a state-of-the-art, GPT-3 powered AI writing assistant carry the narrative on?

This is how I start:

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“Mother Christmas

Long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer… what? 

Abuse? Intrusiveness? More tedium?

It’s been another quiet afternoon. Times are certainly hard in retail this joyous season. The Great Stagnation, they’re calling it.

But hark! First the echoing clacks of shoes on marble, then these three emerge around the corner to my left, tired refugees from the mall’s lengthy main aisle. Mummy, Daddy and Teenage Boy. Their clothes are dowdy and unfashionable: meet the drabs.”

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I paste this into Sudowrite (free trial) and ask it to continue. It offers me three choices: here is what I’d reckon to be its best effort.

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“The boy is doing his best to look cool, but he’s having trouble hiding the fact that he’s bored out of his mind. He’s got that glazed expression that says ‘My life is so lame.’

And it is.

He might play football for his school, he might have a couple of mates, he might have a girlfriend… but he has no idea what it means to be alive. His world has been boxed in by rules and regulations. He’s not allowed to explore new frontiers, to take risks.

It’s just a matter of time before he rebels. Then he’ll be right back here on the couch next to yours truly, joining the other drabs, the whole miserable army of them.

The family drabs are followed by the sole remaining customer of the day. She’s wearing a jacket of some kind on top of a formal-looking dress - a rare mix for this town, let alone this time of year. She’s a special one. Not part of the drab folk. You can tell.

She approaches the counter with a spring in her step, the only customer who’s not traipsing through this place like a cross between a junkie and someone who’s just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

She’s quite pretty, actually, if you like the wide-mouthed, round-eyed type.”

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I think that’s pretty creditable actually, though it's not the way I was taking the story. It’s all been synthesised by the program, none of it copied wholesale from the net. The style is quite zingy, the descriptions fresh.

The program has a bunch of tools. It will elaborate descriptions. So if I select: ‘mall’s lengthy main aisle’, Sudowrite offers ten possibilities; here are the first three:

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1. The aisles of the mall are long and meandering, stretching as far as the eye can see. They have a wide vista that gives a bird’s eye view of the mall. The windows that line the aisles are covered in frost. They’re as hard as ice.

2. The air around the mall has a distinct yet not unpleasant odor. In the midst of all this Christmas cheer, you notice a faint yet pungent smell. You can taste the freshness of holiday spices and marzipan and anise and oatmeal and honey and clove and cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger and all the other things that make you think of Christmas.

3. The main aisle of the mall is worn down by age and use. It’s polished by the feet of shoppers, but the tread marks are long gone.

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Other tools include offering you twists in your story, developing characters and even writing poems. I haven’t tried all these functions.

So what do I think? 

If you treat it as a souped-up Thesaurus it’s easy to see the value (although at $20 per month the subscription is expensive). At the paragraph level it’s producing good material which is easy to treat as a first draft. You get endless new texts with a press of the ‘Wormhole’ button.

What it cannot do is coherence. The things the author cares about: the consistent evolution of character, plot dynamics and the use of everything to achieve the desired effect; all this vanishes when control is transferred to Sudowrite or similar GPT-3 based tools.

An obvious application is what you might call 'coerced writing': those essays you have to hand in, those stereotypical pieces needed for boss or brochure. Where you don’t care about the specifics of the text, where you feel no personal involvement… well, this tool sure adds value. But teachers beware!

Note

Let me add a more technical thought. I’m not an expert in ‘autoregressive language models’. I know something about deep-learning systems. My own mental model of Sudowrite and its brethren is that by training on massive Internet text corpora, it has synthesised high-level concepts spanning paragraphs of text. It’s this multi-sentence conceptual competence which accounts for its meaningful paragraphs. 

We see something similar in game-playing programs such as AlphaZero which beat human champions at Go and Chess with élan. The concepts are not isolated pearls; they cohere into strategies.

We’re not yet at Orwell’s vision of novel-writing machines churning out prole-fiction as in 1984; but nor do we seem that far from it.

Finally, here’s a Sudowrite poem: my title, my first two lines as seed.

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“A Girl Like You

You must, he said, have many carefree offers

Are you an actress or a catwalk model?

No, I'm not, she said. “I am the girl of your dreams.

I know all this because I am your interlocutor.

You are the boy of mine, and I’m the girl like you.

I am the girl of your dreams, she said.

My eyes are blue or green or gray,

My hair is brown, red, blonde, or black.

I am tall or short.

I am rich or poor, smart, athletic, funny, or serious.

I may be your childhood sweetheart or the girl next door.

I may be your high school or college girlfriend.

I can be your lover, friend, muse, soulmate.

I am the girl of your dreams, and you are the boy of mine."

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I’ve read a lot worse.