I read today that Bill Bryson has retired from writing. He will spend his time reading and 'rolling on the floor with his grandchildren'. He is a year younger than I am.
Bryson has given plenty of pleasure to millions over the decades with his (middlebrow, faintly comic) writing. I doubt he will be much read in fifty years time.
Similar limitations of audience and time confront the writers of blogs. I have been writing this one, on and off, since 2005. Yet it languishes in obscurity and I am comforted by that. By contrast, those people with visibility (the kind of people I feature on the web-version sidebar) have tens of thousands of readers and hundreds of comments on each post.
Yet Scott Alexander stopped writing SlateStarCodex and the world continued on its axis. We kind of forgot about SSC. Blogging is both ephemeral and a hamster wheel for those who gain prominence. I have tended to think of it as a place to park my thoughts so I can move on - with a frisson of danger because I do so publicly. However these days my thoughts are more nihilistic - it's even a contradiction in terms to write as I do here.
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I've spent a lot of time trying to come to terms with Marxism. Here are my conclusions in brief: Marx mostly wrote about economics, his political views were hopes more than plans or analyses, his philosophical views (alienation, species-being) were primitive and over-abstract in modern terms as well as plain wrong.
I just read Ian Steedman's book (1981 - I'm late to the party) where he laments just how much Marxist thought is sterile dogmatism focused on defence of the 'Great Man's Thought'. I have no idea whether Steedman's Sraffa-based analysis is correct - I lack the patience to engage with his detailed matrix-models - though I note that no-one seems to have refuted it. But economics thinking seems to me to be in the doldrums as capitalism continues to evolve: I am getting more attracted to Steve Keen's critique.
I stand by my view that capitalism's endless trajectory towards total automation, replacing the totality of workers' physical and cognitive abilities, in the end undermines the search for profitability on which capitalism depends. There are no profits without wage-labour with positive surplus value. I remind myself, and you, that this could conceivably be achieved with androids.
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Another theme of this blog has been science-fiction. SF always reflects the preoccupations of the age: in the ascendant-fifties engineering exuberance; at present the 'Great Awokening' of the embittered-credentialled in a time of secular stagnation and drift. I find myself out of sympathy with tendentious fiction: more directly, I find it unreadable.
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Before I leave to spend more time reading or rolling on the floor with young kin, I will indulge my presumptuousness one final time by saying that I see great things ahead for genomic engineering and AI. We are on the cusp of understanding so much more about genotype-phenotype connections, knowledge which can then be put to engineering use, while the modularisation we see in biological brains must surely lead to the development of distributed, persistent neural-net architectures for situated cognition. No more blank slates!
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Thanks for reading!
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