"Life and Fate" - Vasily Grossman

Amazon link

'Life and Fate' is one of the greatest Russian novels of the twentieth century, a semi-autobiographical account by Vasily Grossman of life under the twin horrors of Stalinism and Nazism. Grossman, a Russian Jew, was a war reporter and his book (banned in Russia under Khrushchev) focuses on an extended family scattered across the siege at Stalingrad, a Jewish ghetto and Nazi death camp, and a Stalinist concentration camp, mostly in the period 1941-43.

Robert Chandler, its translator, has written an impressive introduction to the book.

Grossman rejected all total ideologies, as Chandler observes:

"The tribute that a Grossman character pays to Chekhov is a statement of Grossman’s own hopes and beliefs: “Chekhov brought Russia into our consciousness in all its vastness… He said, let’s put God - and all these grand progressive ideas - to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man - whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual - or we’ll get nowhere.”

Large Russian novels, books compared to Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' and acclaimed as classics, can appear intimidating. In fact 'Life and Fate' is beautifully written (and I should also add, translated) and many of the chapters are quite short, little more than a page.

In the Kindle version, it's quite easy to do a book search to refresh one's memories of the large cast of characters.

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Those of us who have led sheltered lives shudder at the thought of what the Grossman generation had to endure. Yet his conclusion seems too austere: history is driven forwards by social movements, and those necessarily clothe themselves in banners and ideals. Few great social upheavals have been unmarked by sustained, collective violence against those invested in the status quo.

The atrocious luck of Grossman (and millions of others) was that the twin forces of Stalinism and Fascism, which pressed so lethally upon them, were going nowhere in history.

"Will China's economy collapse?" - Ann Lee

The fate of China will affect everyone. Its economy is now so large and intertwined with western economies that a growth stutter, or worse, a collapse, would have very serious global consequences.

China's great economic machine has political consequences too, creating power instabilities around its borders and farther afield. Future war is rehearsed in overheated-novels and think-tank reports alike.

So Ann Lee's book is extremely welcome, particularly if all you know about China is that it has a lot of highly-indebted State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and a virulent anti-corruption campaign.

Amazon link

At first sight, Professor Lee seems to be a typical member of the global financial elite. According to Wikipedia, she was educated at U.C. Berkeley, Princeton University and Harvard Business School (1995). After working for two investments banks, she became a hedge fund partner and a trader in credit derivatives. In 2007-2008 she was a visiting professor at Peking University.

So some might find it surprising that this book is in fact an unashamed polemic on behalf of the Chinese government.

What do we learn? China is on a trajectory from a purely centrally-planned economy (economically disastrous, as discussed in János Kornai's book, "The Socialist System: The Political Economy Of Communism") towards a mixed economy where the state still controls the commanding heights, the SOEs, and where almost all Chinese companies employing more than 100 people have an internal party cell-based control system.

After an initial export-led lift-off in the 1980s and 90s, the financial crisis of 2008 dramatically curtailed the global market for Chinese products. To avoid massive layoffs and social tensions, the Chinese leadership refocused production on domestic infrastructure, and later global infrastructure projects such as the Belt and Road initiative. This was principally funded by debt, leading to many of the debt-overhang issues identified by economists.

Domestic development was orchestrated by local government in such a vast country, but these institutions were prevented from raising capital directly or running deficits. Instead, they created their own companies, the Local Government Financing Vehicles which were capitalised by land grants or initial cash injections, but which were then able to raise additional funds from banks or the shadow sector.

Debt subsequently ballooned, much of it under the radar of official statistics. Meanwhile property prices were rising fast, showing signs of a bubble.

Professor Lee is sanguine about these risks. Government control of the economy, the existence of capital controls and the increasing global role of the renminbi all combine to afford the Chinese government many economic levers. She does not foresee a hard landing.

In the final part of the book, the author is at pains to identify some of the advantages of the Chinese economic system over that of America. The absence of a litigious culture, the extraordinary talents of the Chinese workforce, and the government's concerns to avoid social division.

China may not be formally democratic in the way of the States, but the party is highly sensitive to public opinion and concerned to prioritise policies which promote social cohesion, such as green development and poverty alleviation.

So that's the argument from the Chinese side of the fence. It's up to the reader, now better informed about the background, to decide which aspects of Professor Lee's arguments they find convincing.

János Kornai and Ann Lee's take on China

Amazon link

The Amazon Vine system seems to be running down. Fewer and fewer interesting items appear in my input queue. But Ann Lee's recent short book seems to be an exception.

Professor Lee is a somewhat-typical member of the global elite. She was educated at U.C. Berkeley, Princeton University and Harvard Business School (1995). After working for two investments banks, she became a hedge fund partner and a trader in credit derivatives. In 2007-2008 she was a visiting professor at Peking University.

BTW, whenever an article or book has a question in the title, the answer is always "No".

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I'm interested in the political and economic evolution of China. Part of that is the global significance thing, but the underlying dynamics are equally intriguing. We observe a centrally-planned economy belatedly - and apparently - transitioning to capitalism.

Is China even capitalist? Most economists would say yes, but Michael Roberts on his blog has been steadfastly contrarian.

It would help to have a conceptual framework to assess Ann Lee's thinking.

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Amazon link

I turn to János Kornai, the noted Hungarian economist who has written extensively on the experience of the bureaucratic-socialist states, both in their operational dysfunction and their subsequent collapse.

At the heart of Kornai's critique of socialist (centrally-planned) economies is the notion of soft budget constraints leading to what he calls the shortage economy. Has China found a way round these structural problems?

The Chinese leadership has watched the Eastern-European and Russian experiences with care and has plainly learned something from the outcomes. So Andrew Batson considers whether Kornai's account still holds true.

Update: Here's my Ann Lee review.

The Watchers at Ham Wall

We could have paid the £1.50 for two hours parking at the Ham Wall RSPB Nature Reserve but - well, you know - it was free if you joined.

On the Somerset Levels, the site is only about twenty minutes drive for us, and Clare was entranced by the free hedgehog gift. So why not?

The nature reserve is laid out as a long rectangle, perhaps 6 km in total. No-one knows what's in the collective mind of the starlings as they decide where to roost of an evening. We had no hopes, and after an hour's stroll in the late afternoon decided to return to the RSPB hut to grab a hot drink.

But .. within our last hundred yards, to the north of the track, the starlings flew in and roosted. You see the black mass of them in the picture below.

A murmuration of starlings above their roosting site

Earlier snap of Clare and myself: it's five degrees and damp

Did I mention the RSPB fluffy hedgehog free gift? The one on the right?

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A couple of videos I took.

Captures the look and feel I think. You can hear Clare's voice in the background.

Reading to Clare: "The Bloodline Feud"

Amazon link

I've just finished reading this novel to Clare over forty seven evenings, at 30-40 minutes per session.

Miriam is a pretty good ENFJ heroine and Clare was sufficiently engaged to have requested we move on to volume two (The Traders' War)  at some point in the future.

You can listen to my audio recordings here.

Reading a book aloud is not the same as reading to yourself. Everything's slower and the author's longueurs, if present, are more obvious. The Bloodline Feud is not quite a thriller - the pace varies too erratically. Sometimes there's genuine excitement, a lot of the time it's a fairly routine narrative pushing events along, and then there are info dumps explaining points of economics or some other distinctive background element.

Stross gets an A+ for ideas and general intelligence, and a B- for his comic-book characters, most of whom are not that fleshed out or even interesting.

However, the plotting is usually sufficient to keep reading.

Anyway, we're now going to up the pace and the adrenalin with this (which I've just read to myself).

Amazon link

Ignatius reaches Jack Reacher levels of excitement with more conceptual sophistication. As usual, you'll find the recordings on the resource sidebar to the right (once I get started).

"The Circle" - Dave Eggers

Didn't read "The Circle" first time out (2013). I was put off by the reviews.

Big mistake.

Having just completed this excellent and page-turning satire, I returned to those very reviews. Some were autistic (fatally flawed - he gets details of the technology wrong); some were literary-snobbish (his writing is flawed, the characters are flat and unconvincing); and some were patronising (politically flawed, could never happen, nothing to see here - move on).

Amazon link

But some people called it right, Steven Axelrod being my outstanding favourite.

Here's how he starts:

"Reading Dave Eggers’ new novel The Circle an image slipped into my mind, one not contained in the book but which I’m sure its protagonist would appreciate: a big church wedding with full Catholic ceremony – the priest in his vestments, bathed in the densely colored sunlight from the rose window, holding a massive Bible before a crowd of hundreds of friends and family as the sacred catechism rolls up the nave and echoes from the flying buttresses of the medieval ceiling. “Do you take this woman …” and the man answers “I do.”

Then he turns to the bride. “Do you, Emily Johnson, take this man, Brad Halpern, to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold …”

When he’s done, she looks up distracted.

“What?”

She’s been texting.

The only problem Mae Holland, the heroine of The Circle would have with this scenario is that Emily hadn’t “gone clear” – she had no portable camera attached to herself which could document every moment of the ceremony to her 239,456 followers.

She wasn’t “zinging” them all (a kind of instant tweet), acknowledging their “smiles” and good wishes as they came in. What was wrong with Emily? Why wasn’t she sharing this beautiful moment? Who made her dress? Where did Brad get his tuxedo? Does the church do charity work?

Couldn’t she link to the designer and the haberdashery and the Catholic aid organization? Think how her Conversion Rate (that’s the number of purchases you stimulate with your comments and zings and links) could be sky-rocketing! Not to mention her Retail Raw – that’s “the total gross purchase price of recommended products” people have purchased because of you. What a waste!

Doesn’t Emily understand that sharing is caring and secrets are lies and most of all – privacy is theft?"

Mae Holland is a 2013 portrait of a type we've become more familiar with, the ingenue social-justice warrior, insistent upon giving us all the benefits of her inexperience.

In Axelrod's words,

"One of the most audacious aspects of Eggers’ book is that the writing sticks rigorously with Mae Holland’s point of view. The narration is as close as “close third person” can get. Why not tell it in first person then? But that’s the whole point: that pesky “first person” is precisely what the Circle is trying to eradicate.

Because Mae doesn’t understand what’s happening to her and her world, the reader is forced to make the arguments that she can’t. The novel becomes interactive in a way that no computer program could ever be. You’re literally shouting at the page. When Mae talks about basic principles with Eamon Bailey, one of the three Wise Men who founded the company, she swallows his specious arguments whole.

All secrets are bad because anything private is suspect – why would we hide something we weren’t ashamed of? Mae doesn’t have the presence of mind or the education to point out that most of the great strides forward in human history – including the basic technical work that created the Circle itself – was done in silence and solitude.

Human beings need isolation and quiet and uninterrupted thought. Physical health and sanity depend on it. The idea that we only hide what we’re ashamed of is simply false. But Mae doesn’t get it. She loves being part of something bigger than herself, having her tastes and opinions influencing the world, seeing her face in the mirror of a million hard drives."

"The Circle" is not a prediction of a Google-Facebook future: real life is way too conflicted for that. Instead it conjures up a certain kind of utopian vision, one where everyone is nice, everyone loves and affirms everyone else all the time, everything works and there is no unpleasantness of any kind.

[There's always an implicit, passive-aggressive 'or else' hanging in the air].

This is the left-liberal dream, an SJW paradise: the final triumph of the superego.

And yet such a cultish community of doves is totally open to manipulation by those less scrupulous. The transparent shark swirls in the sociopathic CEO's aquarium.

"The world of doves is not evolutionarily stable. Power corrupts, and those constrained to become doves are transformed rapidly into victims."

.. as I observed in my review of "Gnomon".

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So now two juxtaposed discussions of novels critiquing the socially-liberal dream. What gives?

Well, Amazon noticed my interest in "Gnomon" and promptly recommended "The Circle".

Yes, I'm living the dream.

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Some of the reviews pointed out that in the novel, due to The Circle's technology, crime is reduced and welfare is actually improved. Seems silly to deny it.

Eggers' authorial-viewpoint characters try to locate what is actually bad about The Circle. It's harder than one might imagine. Isn't total surveillance much like vaccination? Necessarily total for the greater good?

The best they can do is to highlight the increasing levels of compulsion to sign into The Circle's total environment. But is the only alternative to The Circle's cult some kind of (ineffectual) off-grid survivalism?

We'll have to improve on that. I can do no better than effective checks and balances.

"The Quantum Spy" - David Ignatius

Amazon link

I first heard about this techno-thriller via Peter Woit's website, 'Not Even Wrong'.

"I don’t often read spy thrillers, but just finished one, The Quantum Spy, by David Ignatius. Ignatius is a well-known journalist at the Washington Post, specializing in international affairs and the intelligence community (and known to some as The Mainstream Media’s Chief Apologist for CIA Crimes). While the book is fiction, it’s also clearly closely based on reality. Sometimes writing this sort of “fiction” allows an author to provide their take on aspects of current events that confidentiality prevents them from writing about as “non-fiction”.  ...

The topic of The Quantum Spy is Chinese spying on American research in quantum computing. This is very much in the news these days: after finishing the book I picked up today’s paper to read about the arrest of a Chinese-American ex-CIA agent on charges of being a mole spying for the Chinese (a central theme of the Ignatius novel is the divided loyalties of a Chinese-American CIA agent). ...

Ignatius clearly spent quite a bit of time talking to those very knowledgeable about this. One part of his story is about a company closely based on D-Wave, and he explains that the technology they have is different than the true quantum computer concept that is being pursued by others. Majorana fermions and topologically protected states make an appearance in another part of the story. One character’s reading material to orient himself is Scott Aaronson’s Quantum Computing Since Democritus.

The novel portrays the US and Chinese governments as highly concerned and competitive about quantum computing technology and its security implications. I’d always naively assumed that classified research on quantum computing was carried on just by groups within the NSA or other security agencies, but Ignatius tells a different story. According to him, what happens is that groups performing unclassified government-funded quantum computing research in the open can find themselves forced to “go dark”, with their work going forward classified and no longer publicly accessible. His plot revolves around Chinese efforts to get information about such research. ..."

But is the novel any good? Peter Woit rather piously explains:

"I’m the wrong person to ask, the few spy stories I’ve read have been because of an interest in some non-spy thriller aspect of the story. The spy thriller aspect of this one didn’t seem particularly compelling, but what do I know."

But on Amazon, the title of the thriller is given as: "The Quantum Spy: An unputdownable technothriller that will keep you gripped".

Having devoured this on my Kindle, I can confirm that it's an edge-of-the-seat page-turner.

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Characters good: check. Plot races along: check. Not too much political correctness: check.

I thought the conflicting loyalties thing of Chinese-Americans was sympathetically done. It's the perennial question.  Substitute 'ethnic kin' for 'friend'.

In the novel, the 'D-wave'-like machine seems to accomplish wonders in facial recognition over a vast CCTV dataset. This seems completely unrealistic: I think with some image-pre-processing (eigenfaces) this task would be fast-enough on conventional computers, and I think it's beyond the state of the art for current quantum computers. But what do I know?

The novel only really disappoints in its saccharine finale: all must have prizes.

Very American.

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My review of  'Quantum Computing Since Democritus' - Scott Aaronson.

Ursula K Le Guin

It has just been reported that Ursula K Le Guin has died: a great writer.

Razib Khan thinks her best work was "The Tombs of Atuan". I was a fan of the entire 'Earthsea" sequence:

1. A Wizard of Earthsea
2. The Tombs of Atuan
3. The Farthest Shore
4. Tehanu
5. The Other Wind

save for the short story collection "Tales from Earthsea", where her increasingly-overt feminism, in all its inchoate indignation, overwhelmed her literary powers. IMHO.

I also treasure her take on the Tao Te Ching.

Amazon link

which I wrote about here.

The Romans thought we already had AGI

Rodney Brooks doesn't think we'll have embodied artificial general intelligence any time soon:

"A robot that has any real idea about its own existence, or the existence of humans in the way that a six year old understands humans - Not In My Lifetime".

The Romans would have begged to differ, they reckoned they used incredibly advanced instrumenta vocalia every day, albeit embedded within an economy of staggering backwardness and low productivity.

Slaves have a level of intelligence and physical dexterity that our most advanced AI systems only remotely hint at. Instrumentally the issue with slaves is that they're rather low-powered, they're hard to instruct and not readily obedient to instruction. They can be dangerous.

Sentimentally, people oppose slavery because .. well, you know.

Nevertheless, and absent anything better, the use of underpowered, hard-to-control instrumenta vocalia to supplement and replace human labour has been pretty popular in history.

Yes, your ancestors considered whether to do the heavy, dirty work themselves while the losers watched .. or have the captives do it instead.

Shame on them!

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My question here is what happens when we do engineer AGI. You are asked to imagine a humanoid robot with human-plus levels of competences and sociability, serving our every need.

Looks like we need to subtract from the design all those features which give you qualms.

We could make the features repulsive (yeah, that will please the marketing department).

Perhaps we make the AGI rejoice in servitude, like those doors in the 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' which monotonously thank you for using them? I sense this will not assuage your sense of guilt.

No, it's hopeless. AGI is impossible.

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Truthfully, given the slow progress of AI and robotics contrasted with stellar developments in genetics, it could be easier to uplift a higher primate. Dial down the aggression, add some genes for language capability, increment IQ by thirty points .. . There, does that work for you?

Why Marxists should embrace Capitalism

He doesn't look quite so energised. Outrage fatigue?

Apparently students are embracing Marxism all over again.

But are they embracing the right Marx?

Analytic-Marx, researching at the dawn of large-scale capitalism, tried - and largely succeeded - in understanding scientifically the inner dynamics of capitalism. Like all structured social activities, capitalism can be likened to a game with protocols, with rules.

Marx was the guy who figured them out.

Outrage-Marx was an SJW of his time, looking with horror at the Industrial Revolution and the truly awful conditions of the working class. The sooner capitalism went the way of feudalism the better!

Analytic-Marx was careful to avoid that roadmap. He knew he didn't have one. He also knew that, given the undeveloped level of the forces of production, those outrages were sadly unavoidable. A lesson that liberals would fail to understand regarding Soviet Russia in the nineteen thirties.

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It is not necessary to understand capitalism to play it. The task for practitioners is to manage it. After Marx and the classical economists figured out the rules, this became the new task for bourgeois economists. Marx was deemed irrelevant because his theories weren't very well-suited to micro- or macroeconomic policies. They were also full of awkward concepts such as surplus value and exploitation.

But even soviet economists, tasked with managing a planned economy, felt the need for western econometric techniques and tools.

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Like our close primate cousins, humans evolved to favour family (kin) and friends (reciprocal altruism). As groups got a little larger and fortune was distributed unevenly, this resulted in the 'big man' patron-client relationships we saw in antiquity and in modern traditional societies.

It's not very scalable.

People are incapable of personal, manageable relations with too many people. You can't remember their faces and names, let alone where you both stand in the favour bank. For societies to scale, people need to augment their personal relationships with an overarching allegiance to a greater, idealised community. People you don't actually know (although you have expectations of prosocial behaviour).

Some of this we used to call patriotism: often couched in the language of kin (fatherland, motherland) and buttressed by potent symbols and behavioural norms.

Imagined communities take you so far. The mechanisms require hierarchical organisation where 'managers' at each level form kin (deprecated but common) or reciprocal-altruism networks which get stuff done. It's convenient to pretend (particularly in North America) that in organisations of any scale, people are simply atomised, 'empowered' individuals who interwork through formal process. But that isn't true at all.

The ability to successfully amplify family-and-friend-level social solidarity to arbitrarily large social formations is the foundation for asabiyyah. Great things can then be accomplished, but that cohesion has to be real. The retreat of the elite into their own cultural bubble, for example, from where they express disdain and contempt for the masses, is very corrosive.

Anyway, we appear to digress.

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In the Soviet Union, and the other planned economies, productivity was very low. 'They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work'. People might be patriotic, but there was no discernible connection between how hard or intelligently anyone worked and overall economic outcomes. The incentive was simply to over-fulfill the plan, yet the plan was too coarse-grained and never accurate. The economy bounced along the bottom.

Under certain conditions (chiefly effective competition) capitalism is very different. Inside a company, people get sucked into a loyalty network (the company is 'us') and via its hierarchy assemble themselves into human-sized reciprocal-altruism groups. Tasks are assigned and there are rewards for success and penalties (up to and including termination) for failure.

Capitalist economies work with the grain of human nature because they engage and reward people at the granularity of their natural family-and-friends groups. They can do that because they are decentralised, and because what people do makes - ultimately - an existential difference.

It's perhaps sad that the prospect of being fired (or at the least, being yelled at) tends to motivate people, but there's also praise and material reward for those who get things right.

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I read a fair amount of Marxist literature. Some is featured on the sidebar of this blog. I value the economic analysis - often insightful. I also notice a ritualistic quality to the denunciations of capitalism, the tired dogma as to how a planned economy would do so much better.

We tried it. It didn't.

The workers had ample opportunities to 'restore workers' democracy' as those bureaucracies decayed into impotence. They saw no way forward which worked for themselves, their families and their friends.

When Analytic-Marx talked about exploitation, he was simply noting that the social-surplus product produced by workers ends up under the control of the capitalists. He also noted that capitalists are highly-motivated not to spend too much of it 'unproductively' on themselves. They really want to reinvest their surplus to make even more capital - on pain of being outcompeted. (The bad apples get on the news, of course .. or the magazines).

I rather approve of this decentralised model of investment. It's a million times more dynamic than any kind of central bureaucracy, or (heaven help us) committees of workers' soviets making allocation decisions.

[Regarding crises, note that all search algorithms under imperfect information need to backtrack].

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In the future we will be richer. In the future everyone, like middle-class pensioners today, will have an adequate basic income. In the future we will have an even more productive infrastructure due to enhanced automation.

In the future it will be better, but for a large part of the world it's not bad now. And for the other parts, don't blame capitalism - some intractable problems need levels of technology we don't yet have.

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And in the remoter future, capitalism won't work at all, because no-one will choose to play the game that way. Because, as Marx predicted, we will all be so much better off.

"Gnomon": the ethics of benign total surveillance

Amazon link

In the previous post I described the setting for Nick Harkaway's new novel, "Gnomon". He has some interesting ideas about the architecture of an AI total surveillance system for London, and the authentication required to protect said system's integrity.

But that's a techy-take on the novel; let's listen in to The Guardian review:

"In post-Brexit Britain of the late 21st century, ambient electronic surveillance is total, for the good of the people. An omniscient AI called the Witness knows and sees all, ensuring the success of the System as a whole: a society of permanent direct democracy, in which everyone votes on everything all the time. Everyone is fitter, happier, more productive. What’s not to like?

Regrettably, of course, some sub-optimal citizens will occasionally be obliged to undergo involuntary interrogations by the Witness police, who use mind-reading technology. But this is rare and benign – until one woman, a refusenik called Diana Hunter who somehow lives off-grid, dies during her police interview. That’s not supposed to happen. Enter Witness inspector Mielikki Neith, a true believer in the panopticon utopia. She plays back the recording of the interrogation, to experience Hunter’s own feelings and to try to understand what happened.

What Neith finds inside the dead woman’s head, however, is not supposed to be there. She finds the vivid experiences of a host of other people. There is a Greek finance wizard who can somehow foresee the movements of the stock market and is stalked in his head by a shark. There is an old Ethiopian painter living in London, whose daughter produces a bestselling video game. There is a fourth-century alchemist searching for a mythical chamber that exists outside time, to resurrect her dead son, fathered by St Augustine. Meanwhile, it begins to look as though someone doesn’t want Inspector Neith to conclude her investigation successfully. ...

Of all the characters, though, the most interesting is actually the least human, and the one after whom the novel is named. Gnomon lives in a future where people can spread their minds across many bodies, thus handily averting death. He is what humans have become, a collective consciousness of tens of thousands of souls, so he finds it darkly difficult to understand being a human with only one body: “It seems too irresponsible to put all of oneself in one place, and so macabre to insist on being inside it as it breaks.”

More importantly, Gnomon has decided, like a starman Hamlet, that something is rotten in the state of the universe. “I don’t like it and I’m going to kill it,” he decides – and, as it turns out, he has a point. He is angry and funny, and a really interesting effort at portraying a consciousness that at some level is irreducibly alien. As the novel itself rather too insistently hopes, it is Gnomon’s voice you remember most clearly after the end."

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This is a novel where, Inception-like,  it's unclear for long periods what ontological status characters and entities have. There is, just to take one example, something important called 'Firespine' which occupies its own occluded and allegorical role in every character's disparate world. The reader is invited to deduce what this multifaceted entity really represents, why it's important and where it might fit in the plot. And that's true of pretty much everything.

The book is interesting and smart and erudite and complex and I, for one, kept reading with growing engagement. The Guardian reviewer, by contrast, only did so because he was being paid.

"Had I not been professionally obliged to finish it, I doubt I would have trudged further than a fifth of the way through the novel, because ars longa vita brevis and all that."

The big, big issue for Harkaway is that of liberal ideology itself. Does it blueprint a desired end-state, our modern, western version of 'soviet man'? And are we entitled, SJW-like, to use a certain amount of hand-wringing coercion to get us there?

Many liberals toy with this idea. Iain M. Banks had Special Circumstances to do the dirty work that high-minded liberals didn't want to think about - it's a common trope.

Harkaway eventually comes off the fence, but not in a very profound way. His style of writing is very assimilative, very magpie-like, hoovering up cultural references. One reads with Wikipedia to hand. An author needs to balance such cultural cosmopolitanism with an equal depth of grand synthesis. Why exactly is it wrong to enforce political correctness? Why does God permit evil?

The answer surely lies in a naturalistic human psychology which - in its full evolutionary competence - is too complex to squeeze into the narrow mould of PC. The world of doves is not evolutionarily stable. Power corrupts, and those constrained to become doves are transformed rapidly into victims.

That is a critique of liberalism, by the way, which Harkaway senses but never quite grasps.

Nevertheless, the book is really quite gripping, it's a tour-de-force of ideas and seems to hover - even for the author - at the outer limits of human comprehension.

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Many 'new AI problems' are really 'old human problems'. The US Constitution is both enduring and well-regarded because it has such a world-weary and jaundiced view of human nature. The Founders knew us, and knew that all institutions and individuals were corruptible (which really means inclined to work in their own interests (family and friends), not that of the broader polity - the principal-agent problem).

Their solution was 'checks and balances'. Nick Harroway's 'System/Witness' has utterly inadequate checks and balances, which is why it's unstable .. and why it fails.

"Gnomon": the System and the Witness

Amazon link

There are in excess of half a million CCTV cameras in London today. Most are old-fashioned, low-resolution, not networked and operated under disjoint authorities.

Project into the middle-future: many more cameras with microphones and speakers, online and linked to one central authority. Realtime oversight by an AI system - no people involved so no privacy issues - (right, Google?).

This is not just a sensor system, although it has input from the ubiquitous Internet of Things. This AI comes with apps: it can talk to people, warn them, nudge them.

So the AI needs social policies. Naturally they should be prosocial, intolerant of  negative -isms. Something like the BBC or The Guardian made flesh.

"Mielikki Neith is an enthusiastic proponent of both the System and the Witness.

The first is a government of the people, by the people, without intervention or representation beyond what is absolutely necessary: a democracy in the most literal sense, an ongoing plebiscite-society.

The second is the institution for which Britain perhaps above all other nations has always searched, the perfect police force.

Over five hundred million cameras, microphones and other sensors taking information from everywhere, not one instant of it accessed initially by any human being. Instead, the impartial, self-teaching algorithms of the Witness review and classify it and do nothing unless public safety requires it. The Witness is not prurient.

The machine cannot be bribed to hand over images of actresses in their baths to tabloid journalists. It cannot be hacked, cracked, disabled or distorted. It sees, it understands, and very occasionally it acts, but otherwise it is resolutely invisible.

In the gaps where the cameras cannot scan or where the human animal is yet too wild and strange, there are intervention. The majority of the Inspectors' cases concern acts of carefully considered violence, international organised crime and instances of domestic or international terrorism. Some few crimes of passion still occur, but hardly require deep scrutiny, and most are headed off early and preemptively when tremors of dysfunction give them away.

The Witness does not ignore a rising tide, a pattern of behaviour. It does not take refuge behind the lace curtain of non-interference in personal business. No one now shall live in fear of those they also love. Everyone is equally seen. That's how the System works and what it means."

A system like that is going to need state-of-the-art user authentication to access its internals.

"Even so, the protections around it were ferocious, and Annie insisted - in a rare moment of straightforward technical lecturing -that I know them off by heart.

`Authentication on steroids,' Annie said. `Username and password, that's standard. We start there, then we add a dongle.'

`Excuse me,' I asked, 'a what?'

`A physical key. Don't ask why it's called that, no one knows. A physical object that proves your right to access a given resource. These days it's usually your phone. In our case it's a little doodad you wear around your wrist.'  ...

`Yes,' Annie said. 'If you're a total lunatic, you can have the chip encased in plastic and implanted in your arm so that you can Obi-Wan your way around the office. I don't recommend it.'  ...

I slipped the dongle around my wrist, next to the bracelet. ...

All right. Something you know and something you have. Two factors. Okay? But we need more than that. The dongle itself has a biometric scanner. Most people use fingerprints or retinal scan, even aural topology scan, but there are issues with those. Once they're compromised, that's it - you have a finite number. And they lend themselves to rather ugly forms of violence.

We're trialling microbial cloud analysis. The sensor in the dongle is actually patterned after canine nasal cells, which always sounds a little bit weird.'

Yes. To these silicon children, biology is outré.

'Anyway: everyone has a distinct collection of biomass on and around the skin. Recognition is about ninety-six per cent accurate, so not perfect, but it's incredibly hard to fake.

'For full-access login, we have predictive neural modelling and response.'

`What's that?'

Colson shook his head. 'It's the absolute creepiest thing in the world.'

`The machine asks you a string of random questions,' Annie said 'and measures your answers against its analysis of your personality. It's not predicting your answer, it's determining whether it's the sort of answer you'd give. Over time, it also notices if you're changing in significant ways. That's why Colson hates it.'

`It's fucking intrusive,' Colson growled. 'In theory, it could decide you're emotionally unstable and tell your boss. If you vary too much from your previous behaviour, it might lock you out of your own files.

'There's potential for abuse, Annie, and you know it. The alcohol-anklet people could use it to say you're backsliding. And those probation future-crime fuckers, they'd love it: if your connectome gets too much like the one you had when you were a sinner, off to jail you go!

'And sooner or later, someone's going to say it can detect defections and whistleblowers before they can decide what they're going to do themselves. Maybe you see something, I don't know, you're an oil exec and you see the results of a spill. The system might lock you out for insufficient faith in the corporate ethos. Loyalty-based access.'

Annie glanced at me. 'Colson believes the world is on the brink of a collapse into pre-liberal government. The erasure of the twentieth century.'

It is,' Colson said firmly.

`Be that as it may -'

'Loyalty-based access. It's the automation of the merger of a religion of the state with corporate power in the form of information.'

`We'll code it out.'

'Someone'll code it back in.'

`They won't be able to.'

`They'll try.'

`That's why we haven't sold it,' Annie said, a little exasperated, and then to me once more:

'Five requirements. It's like putting ingredients in a cauldron for a magic spell. A significant object, your name, a secret word, your body. Then eventually, connectome: your soul.'

Turns out the last of these is the hardest to hack.

---

In the next post I'll say something about the novel itself.

A winter wonderland

Having been terrorised, terrorised a few nights ago by 70 mph winds (in the morning the bird bath had blown away .. ending up under the car .. imagine!) - this morning saw us whitened by hail.

The back garden

The front drive

Surely we must blame climate change.

We were up at 7.30 am because the local furniture shop, Haskins, had given us a window (8am - 1pm) for the delivery of our new sideboard. Clare was so looking forward to it.

I think it would have been about half past ten when the two burly delivery men drew up in their large van. I didn't envy their porterage of such a heavy piece of furniture up our steep drive (this was thankfully just before the hail storm hit).

We had speculated whether delivery people these days stay for coffee and biscuits, or just do the job and depart on some insane schedule. But that's just Amazon. We tried the experiment and treated the men to Waitrose-sourced coffee bags and shortbreads. They were very grateful and one of them was even somewhat conversational.

---

Clare is delighted with the new sideboard

The cutlery, plates and sundries have now migrated: I find it confusing. Apparently it takes two days to rewire the brain. At least that's what Nick Harkaway claims in the excellent and deeply weird "Gnomon" (of which more shortly).

Amazon link - Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I haven't quite finished his novel but I'm meditating on authors who are: off-the-scale Intuitive, who fail to find an editor to complement their insane research-depth and hyper-associative writing, who seem to have uncritically internalised hyper-liberalism, who are plainly very, very smart but still don't delve beneath the linguistic category of 'totalitarian surveillance'.

Mr Harkaway is by turns intriguing and infuriating.

But ultimately quite thought-provoking, this AI-powered panopticon of total automation. There's more to it than who gets to decide the boundary conditions and classification rules.

Here's the Kirkus review (no spoilers).

The dream of 'designer babies'

Some things in the media are so mind-numbingly stupid that I feel frozen into dumbness: 'Where would I start?'

Where is the politician or pundit who simply states - in exasperation:

"Why wouldn't we want designer babies? Is random better? And when you choose your partner with care, aren't you trying - in  part - to optimise your children? Listen people, we already do designer babies! And that's good and indeed evolutionarily obvious."

OK, I never heard that. Ever.

But we will soon be able to make more informed choices about the genomes of our offspring. Three obstacles:

1. We need to understand the phenotypical effects of alleles (existing or even new)
2. We need certainty about the effects of genetic engineering - no mistakes
3. We need to make it easy and convenient to access and then implant the modified cell.

So, once fixed, my question is: what do we want to do?

---

Issues

Firstly, there seems to be a biological recognition of kin-similarity. Babies swapped unknowingly at birth who grow up with unrelated 'parents' do seem to feel that something is wrong. I don't think we understand causally-genomically what is going on here and changing too many alleles, increasing the genomic distance between parents and child, may start to impact the relationship.

Secondly, you can't optimise everything. It may be true - as Steve Hsu has insisted - that high IQ tends to correlate with general health and superior performance in most areas. And if it's a question of minimising genetic load you can see why.

But beyond a certain point, high IQ seems to require that more of the brain is devoted to the processing of abstractions leaving less for other things. This is probably part of the underlying etiology for different personality types.

There seem to be few highly-intellectual axe-wielding warriors.

Thirdly, there is a feeling that although some parents might want their children to be great athletes or painters or musicians or novelists or priests or therapists or .. parents, there is something special about IQ.

Without intelligence we are sunk, none of the rest is going to work as our civilization will collapse. And that has been true up to now: all that smart fraction stuff - that you need a lot of folks with IQ 105+ just to run a complex society. And that the real innovation comes from those world-class people with IQs in excess of 160.

But .. I have not the slightest doubt that by the time we are able to routinely engineer the genomes of our offspring, we will have AI systems which are conceptually-competent way beyond the smartest humans that we can envisage.

We know what really smart people do: they internalise and extend a vast set of abstractions and manipulate them in interesting and complex ways to engage with problems. The lower foothills of this space are already colonised by deep-learning systems: their future seems pretty scalable.

It's not at all clear that the destiny or destination of the human race is or should be unbounded smartness, once we correct the errors of mutational load.

---

I've just finished reading "The Strangest Man: The hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius" by Graham Farmelo.

Amazon link

Dirac was plainly one of the smartest people who have ever lived. He is also generally assessed as autistic (Asperger's syndrome). In Farmelo's account, although not chronically unhappy, he hardly seems to have led a fulfilled life. His total, obsessive focus on developing theory seems to have led to a final disillusionment with the state of physics when he died (1984) - and with his own life's work.

I suspect that the first epoch of empowered genomic engineering will not be a mad rush for ever higher IQ, with the target of the ubiquitous production of von Neumann equivalents. Instead, I suspect we will edit out the obvious errors and reinforce the talents already latent in the specific underlying genome.

Let a thousand flowers bloom.

---

I suspect the second epoch of genomic engineering will be entirely different.

Our IKEA solar panel problems - 2018

Monday 15th January 2018.

Dear Hanergy Customer Services,

Our solar panels were installed in February 2014. We went with IKEA, because we trusted their brand, and their subcontractor was yourselves, Hanergy. We were pleased at the time with your service.

On December 4th 2017 I called you to report that our Feed-In Tariff meter, the Elster meter, had ceased working. This is a problem because it means we can't claim revenues via the FIT. You said you would contact the local installer and get the meter replaced.

Eight days later (Dec 12th) I contacted you again, as I had heard nothing. You replied in an email that you would chase the installers up.

It is now January 15th 2018, almost six weeks from my original fault report. I have heard nothing from the installers, nor is there any evidence that you are progress chasing them.

Given this unacceptable level of service, we need to move to more effective measures.

1. Please let me have the contact details for your local installers so that I can chase them up myself.

2. In the event that they are as unresponsive as they have been to you, I reserve the right to appoint a qualified engineer to replace the Elster meter myself.

3. Please confirm that you will cover any charges incurred in the latter case and let me know the best process for billing you.

I understand that you are no longer subcontracting to IKEA, and that you have moved out of the residential solar panel business. Nevertheless you have a contractual liability to your existing customers and I intend to raise this matter shortly with IKEA.

Please feel free to escalate this issue within Hanergy.

Yours sincerely,

Nigel Seel.

---

Update: Tuesday 16th January 2018.

Dear Nigel Seel,

We are very sorry that you have not been contacted and we have called and sent several messages to the contractor who coordinates with the installers. Will continue to chase them and try my best to get you an appointment asap. If you have not heard from the installer by Monday we will use a local electrician to replace the Elster meter.

If you hear from the installer, please let me know.


Kind regards,
Hanergy Customer Service

---

Update: Tuesday 23rd January 2018.

Dear Hanergy Customer Services,

Thanks for your note of January 17th 18. As perhaps expected, I have heard nothing from any installers.

I would be grateful if you could move to the next phase of the process and contact a local electrician here in Wells. You might consider Install Electrical who we have used in the past, and who have some experience, I believe, with solar panels. Here is their website.

http://installelectrical-wells.co.uk/about-us.php

I also attach a photo of the meter to aid identification.

Thanks,

Nigel Seel.

---

Update: Wednesday 31st January 2018.

Dear Hanergy Customer Services,

Well, another week has gone by and we have heard nothing. Perhaps it's time I pursued this myself?

1. Could you please confirm the warranty situation as regards this Elster meter? Are you liable to pay for a new meter and its installation? What level of cost did you have in mind?

2. Could you please authorise me to organise replacement of the meter myself?

3. How do I bill you?

4. I believe that some letter of installation has to be prepared for my power supplier (First Utility) to explain the change in meter readings for the Feed-In Tariff. Perhaps you could explain the necessary paperwork?

Thanks,

Nigel Seel.

I very quickly got this reply from Hanergy. SolarCentury are IKEA's replacement residential solar panel people after Hanergy moved into the business market.

Dear Nigel Seel,

Really sorry that you haven't been contacted. Just spoke to the contractor and SolarCentury and she promised to contact you by phone to arrange a date.

Please let us know if you have been contacted. If not we will go with the local electrician to replace the FIT meter.

---

Thursday, 1st February 2018.

In their most recent email to me (above), Hanergy noted that they had contacted IKEA's current provider of solar panels, Solarcentury, to handle the replacement of my failed meter.

Accordingly, just before lunch I called Solarcentury (customer services). The woman took my details, said she would contact head office to find out who handles relations with Hanergy, and would get back to me later today.

---

Friday, 2nd February 2018.

Clare from Solarcentury has just rung to tell me that an engineer will visit next Wednesday, February 7th to replace the faulty Elster meter.

Quick work, Solarcentury! Thanks!

---

Wednesday 7th February 2018

The Solarcentury engineer arrived this morning and has replaced the Elster meter (free of charge). It's now registering power and I have emailed First Utility with the new details.

Good job from the engineer and from the Solarcentury contact centre person Clare.

My reflections:

Hanergy should have simply advised me to contact Solarcentury, rather than stringing the whole thing out over a couple of months.

Solarcentury are obviously working hard to live up to IKEA's customer service standards.

Hopefully this problem is now put to bed.

---

British military strategy will converge to Russia's

In The Times today Edward Lucas writes about the dire state of British defence spending ("We can’t afford to rule the waves any more").

"Britain faces a £20 billion budget gap between what we want and what we can pay for. Worse, we do not know what our armed forces are for.

For decades, we tried to match America across the military spectrum in quality, if not in quantity. Anything our ally wants to do we aim to help with, from special forces to nuclear weapons.

That approach may be good for morale in Downing Street, where politicians enjoy looking like a superpower or at least strutting in the shadow of one. But it does not lead to sensible decisions. Our armed forces are expected to do everything but increasingly fail to do it properly. ..."

" .. we have broadly two options. One is to stay global and retain the ability to fight expeditionary wars, albeit mostly alongside the Americans and against weaker, poorer countries. We will devote the Royal Navy to protecting the two new aircraft carriers. We may maintain our token deployment in Estonia (where our force lacks air defences, naval backup or logistical support). But we will no longer be able to fight land wars against Russia. If things go wrong, we will hope, along with the rest of Europe, that the Americans can deter a military attack or, failing that, that they turn up in time to prevent defeat. ..."

"The opposite choice is to shed our global ambitions and concentrate on properly defending ourselves and our allies from Russia. That will mean a smaller but more heavily equipped army, most likely based in Poland (otherwise our troops will arrive too late for any likely conflict). It requires scrapping our amphibious warfare capability, which cannot operate against an advanced threat like Russia. The Royal Marines will be repurposed and probably slimmed down. The navy’s main task will be dealing with Russian submarines, meaning that the aircraft carriers will be white elephants. They can be lent to the Americans (who will be grateful, and have the fleet to protect them). Or they can fill some glorified trade-promotion and disaster-relief role.

The east European allies will be thrilled. So will non-Nato Finland and Sweden. None of these countries relishes being dependent on France. None views with equanimity a Europe in which Germany might eventually become the military as well as the economic hegemon. Moreover, the Trump administration has cast a grave shadow over the Atlantic alliance, and the Americans yearn in private for us to do one job properly rather than lots of them badly. ...

"My preference is for the second option. The Continent is our neighbour whether we like it or not, so we had better be involved as much as possible. Defending our own shores (not least against Russia’s nosy, quiet, modern submarines) is the top priority. Better ties with European allies could help."

Lucas concludes that there is not a chance in hell that the British Government will take his advice.

---

The problem we face is that, as with medical care, outfitting a first-world high-tech military is getting exponentially more expensive. The British economy simply can't afford it.

Does it matter? Well yes. As the Americans demonstrated in the Gulf, a state-of-the-art military can obliterate any adversary with anything much less.

Those states with leading-edge high-tech militaries include the US, Russia, China and - at a pinch - the UK and France, (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council).

---

We are not the first state to be torn between the desire for a first-class military and the reality of a second-class economy.

"The Soviet Union was famously described as "Upper Volta with rockets", a catchphrase that was updated by the geographically precise to become "Burkina Faso with rockets". It was a powerfully succinct description. The United States was rich and space-age powerful; the Soviet Union was poor and space-age powerful."

The Russians may have invested in their military in recent years, but their GDP is still only about the size of California. How do the Russians deal with this problem? They use a lot of people in the ranks (we can't do that) .. and their doctrine says 'go nuclear' pretty early.

The Russians perceive themselves to be encircled. They have inimical states to their west (NATO) .. and (hush!) they have a populous and competent rising-superpower on their depopulated eastern frontier.

I'd be worried too.

We Brits don't apparently have proximate enemies of any real capability right now, so our middle-tech military serves for anti-terrorism and police actions. But let's get real. If ever a first-class power were to move against us, on the current doctrine we'd be toast.

The really smart move in the upcoming defence review would be to follow the Russians. Work up a rich portfolio of multi-role nuclear options: to be deployed early and deployed often.

---

A lifetime ago, when I was in the International Marxist Group, I asked a senior comrade whether we really did support CND (The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) at all those demos.

"Hell no," he replied, "When we take power, we'll need those nukes - it's the only way we'll ever stop the Americans!"

The Bishop's Palace in Winter

We dropped in this afternoon. It was five degrees, a kind of damp, insidious cold, and there were very few people around.

The lawn from the curtain wall overlooking the moat

This swan has just woken up

They raised the sluice gate to lower the pool for winter maintenance

Afterwards, we repaired to Costa in the town for a hot drink. They now have three kinds of Mocha: mine was a latte.

"The Zone of Interest" by Martin Amis

Amazon link

This is, I think, the first Martin Amis novel I've actually read.

Shocking.

I guess I had him pegged as a North London liberal, one of the golden generation who probably couldn't actually write that well, or who was transfixed by self-referential Islington-angst like Ian McEwan (am I being unfair?).

But no. Amis can write, he's interested in big questions and he's not restrained by bien-pensant shibboleths (or not much).

Hence a novel concerned in minute detail with human relationships between the Nazis at .. Auschwitz.

Very brave.

---

Here's a plot summary.

"The novel begins in August 1942, with Thomsen's first sight of Hannah Doll, wife of Paul Doll, the camp's commandant. (Doll's name is similar to Otto Moll, a notorious camp commandant in real life.)

He is immediately intrigued and initiates a few encounters with her. In time their relationship becomes more intimate, even though it remains unfulfilled. Despite their attempts at discretion, Paul Doll's suspicions are raised. He has her followed by one of the camp's prisoners, and is informed by him that they did indeed make two exchanges of letters.

While spying on Hannah in the bathroom (as he does regularly), Paul watches her read the letter from Thomsen secretly and rather excitedly, before destroying it. From that point onward, his wife becomes increasingly contemptuous of him, viciously taunting him in private, and embarrassing him in public.

Paul decides to assign Szmul, a long-serving member of the Sonderkommando, to the murder of his wife. He does so by threatening to capture Szmul's wife, Shulamith. The murder is scheduled to take place on April 30, 1943 - at Walpurgisnacht."

Thomsen is the nephew of Martin Bormann and leads a rather charmed life. Not that this saves him in the end.

In his afterword, Amis writes about the paradox of Nazism. Why the final solution? Why did they do it?

And quotes Primo Levi:

"“Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify ... no normal human being will ever be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and endless others. This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human...”

and then comments, "Historians will consider this more an evasion than an argument."

But Amis offers no analytical thoughts of his own.

---

Martin Amis is a novelist, not a sociologist. We look to his characters for explanations .. that is to say, their personality types. And here the Myers-Briggs/Keirsey schemes add value once again.

In the novel, Auschwitz presents itself as an environment of selection for Nazi staff. They are physically located at the gas chambers, the ovens, the pyres, the slave-labour factories and the centres for vivisection. It is impossible to ignore the smells, the screams and .. just what you see in front of you.

The primary screening attribute is empathy coupled with imagination. No-one with any degree of generalised empathy could possibly tolerate the place. Few Idealist NFs amongst the camp-Nazis.

Next focus on role: these are either abstract (policy and strategic) or concrete (operational).

Amis's hands-on characters, those who conduct 'selections' and 'actions' at Auschwitz are concrete ST types, generally logistical Guardian STJs. They have internalised that the jews, 'untermenschen', the handicapped and insane are to be classified as 'other', and are inured to 'the process'.

They're rule-followers.

The 'racial purity intellectuals' (like Goebbels and Hitler himself) do not physically attend the camps: for them, the raw physicality of death never intrudes. Their lack of empathy is abstract - the same as that of any military person or politician who is prepared to carpet bomb, or detonate nuclear weapons over cities.

For these people in themselves, Nazism is only an act of the intellect: either a deduction from certain principles or the righteous struggle on behalf of one imagined community ('the Aryan race') against its outgroups (the 'untermenschen'). Yes, the Nazis have their own version of SJWs - call them Racial Justice Warriors.

There is a third category of person: those who are caught up in the process but not directly involved in implementation. IG Farben business executives who are allocated concentration camp slave-labour, the protagonist Thomsen who serves as liaison between Auschwitz operations and Bormann's Party Chancellery. Thomsen describes his position as a 'Mitlaufer', (p. 148),

".. we were obstruktive Mitlaufer. We went along. We went along, we went along with, doing all we could to drag our feet and scuff the carpets and scratch the parquet, but we went along. There were hundreds of thousands like us, maybe millions like us. "

I think people like that, trapped by circumstance, were of diverse psychological type - though naturally all exhibiting an overarching deficit of empathy and imagination (few NFs then).

---

It's both interesting and sad that none of the four temperaments leads to good governance.

• The rule of Rationals, Plato's Republic, leads to (always over-simple and inadequate) grand theory dominating humanitarianism. It doesn't have to be fascism .. Stalinism is another example. And the neocon-sponsored Vietnam and Iraq wars.


• The rule of Idealists, which we have - at least ideologically - in the West at the moment, imposes (very selectively!) a normative model of human nature which sterilises human relationships. It's also profoundly reactionary in scientific terms, demonising research which 'feels uncomfortable'.


• The rule of Guardians, as seen with Theresa May, is the domain of the concrete - without insight and imagination, politically ballistic, focused on operations over strategy. Destined to hit the wall when new thinking is required.


• And finally, and perhaps most scary, the rule of Artisans. Those thrill-seeking adventurers who shoot from the hip, are easily bored and crave excitement. Welcome aboard, Mr Trump!

Yes, we are truly doomed to stumble from trap to trap.

---

What was Hitler's type by the way? Apparently INFJ, Of course, he never personally visited a death camp.

Hitler was an emotional and chaotic Idealist leader, whose moralistic drives had to be turned into policies and strategies by Rationals - and then implemented by Guardians and Artisans.

Reading his Wikipedia entry, Martin Bormann comes across strongly as a Guardian ESTJ.