I did an appearance on Shilo Brooks’s podcast about books, and picked Edward Gibbons’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as my favorite. I have a seven-volume copy of this work that I obtained several decades ago. When I recently pulled it off my shelf and started flipping through it, I discovered that during previous readings I had marked certain passages with book darts (metal clips that grip the edge of the page, as shown above) and dogeared other pages when book darts weren’t handy.

To save others the trouble of pointing it out, Gibbon wrote this thing 250 years ago. In the meantime ten generations of scholars have come and gone, devoting their careers to uncovering new sources and studying history from different angles — just to name one example, Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome, which re-interprets the decline and fall through the lens of the modern sciences of climatology and epidemiology. My edition of Gibbon dates to 1909; it was painstakingly annotated by one J. B. Bury, who added many footnotes pointing out bits that Gibbon had got wrong. So as a document about what actually, factually happened, Gibbon has to be read with care. But his best bits aren’t just recitations of historical data, as I hope the following selections will demonstrate.

Rome’s conquest of Britain

After a war of about forty years, undertaken by the most stupid, maintained by the most dissolute, and terminated by the most timid of all the emperors, the far greater part of the island submitted to the Roman yoke. The various tribes of Britons possessed valour without conduct, and the love of freedom without the spirit of union. They took up arms with savage fierceness, they laid them down, or turned them against each other, with wild inconstancy; and while they fought singly, they were successively subdued.

Religion

This one is probably the most quoted passage from Gibbon, but I’m including it anyway!

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.

Letters

The last phrases here use one of Gibbons’s favorite and most distinctive stylings. I do not know the name, but I am an enthusiastic user, of this sentence structure.

…this age of indolence passed away without having produced a single writer of original genius or who excelled in the arts of elegant composition. The authority of Plato and Aristotle, of Zeno and Epicurus, still reigned in the schools, and their systems, transmitted with blind deference from one generation of disciples to another, precluded every generous attempt to exercise the powers, or enlarge the limits, of the human mind.

History

Another very widely quoted passage that is still worth repeating:

Antoninus diffused order and tranquility over the greatest part of the earth. His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

Education

As mentioned in the podcast, Decline and Fall starts around 180 AD, around the time of the botched handoff from Marcus Aurelius to his worthless son Commodus. It is the same event that, in heavily fictionalized form, opens Ridley Scott’s movie Gladiator:

Nothing…was neglected by [Marcus Aurelius], and by the men of virtue and learning whom he summoned to his assistance, to expand the narrow mind of young Commodus, to correct his growing vices, and to render him worthy of the throne for which he was designed. But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions there it is almost superfluous.

Here’s another one that shows up much later, when he’s talking about late Byzantine documents:

The battles won by lessons of tactics may be numbered with the epic poems created from the rules of criticism.

The Trump Administration

Suspicious princes often promote the last of mankind, from a vain persuasion that those who have no dependence except on their favour will have no attachment except to the person of their benefactor…[Cleander] was devoid of any ability or virtue which could inspire [Commodus] with envy or distrust. Avarice was the reigning passion of his soul, and the great principle of his administration. The rank of consul, of patrician, of senator, was exposed to the public sale; and it would have been considered as disaffection if any one had refused to purchase these empty and disgraceful honours with the greatest part of his fortune…the execution of the laws was venal and arbitrary. A wealthy criminal might obtain not only the reversal of the sentence by which he was justly condemned; but might likewise inflict whatever punishment he pleased on the accuser, the witnesses, and the judge.

Monarchy and Democracy

Here I am splicing together two passages from different parts of the work on the same topic. TL;DR Gibbon thinks that monarchy isn’t necessarily any worse than hypocritical faked-up democracy, but you can’t ever stop fighting back against despotism.

The obvious definition of a monarchy seems to be that of a state, in which a single person, by whatsoever name he may be distinguished, is intrusted with the execution of the laws, the management of the revenue, and the command of the army. But unless public liberty is protected by intrepid and vigilant guardians, the authority of so formidable a magistrate will soon degenerate into despotism…A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against enterprises of an aspiring prince. Every barrier of the Roman constitution had been levelled by the vast ambition of the dictator [Augustus]; every fence had been extirpated by the cruel hand of the triumvir.

Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule. Is it possible to relate without an indignant smile, that, on the father’s decease, the property of a nation, like that of a drove of oxen, descends to his infant son, as yet unknown to mankind and to himself, and that the bravest warriors and the wisest statesmen, relinquishing their natural right to empire, approach the royal cradle with bended knees and protestations of inviolable fidelity? Satire and declamation may paint these obvious topics in the most dazzling colours, but our more serious thoughts will respect a useful prejudice, that establishes a rule of succession, independent of the passions of mankind; and we shall cheerfully acquiesce in any expedient which deprives the multitude of the dangerous, and indeed the ideal, power of giving themselves a master. In the cool shade of retirement, we may easily devise imaginary forms of government, in which the sceptre shall be constantly bestowed on the most worthy by the free and incorrupt suffrage of the whole community. Experience overturns these airy fabrics, and teaches us that in a large society the election of a monarch can never devolve to the wisest or to the most numerous part of the people.

Social Media

The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference of age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.

Professional vs. Liberal Education

The professions of law and [medicine] are of such common use and certain profit that they will always secure a sufficient number of practitioners endowed with a reasonable degree of abilities and knowledge; but it does not appear that the students in those two faculties appeal to any celebrated masters who have flourished within that period. The voice of poetry was silent. History was reduced to dry and confused abridgments, alike destitute of amusement and instruction. A languid and affected eloquence was still retained in the pay and service of the emperors, who encouraged not any arts except those which contributed to the gratification of their pride or the defence of their power.

Character sketches

In every art that [Gallienus] attempted his lively genius enabled him to succeed; and, as his genius was destitute of judgement, he attempted every art, except the important ones of war and government. He was a master of several curious but useless sciences, a ready orator, an elegant poet, a skilful gardener, an excellent cook, and most contemptible prince.

[Charlemagne’s] real merit is doubtless enhanced by the barbarism of the nation and the times from which he emerged; but the apparent magnitude of an object is likewise enlarged by an unequal comparison; and the ruins of Palmyra derive a casual splendour from the nakedness of the surrounding desert. Without injustice to his fame, I may discern some blemishes in the sanctity and greatness of the restorer of the Western empire. Of his moral virtues, chastity is not the most conspicuous; but the public happiness could not be materially injured by his nine wives or concubines, the various indulgence of meaner or more transient amours, the multitude of his bastards whom he bestowed on the church, and the long celibacy and licentious manners of his daughters, whom the father was suspected of loving with too fond a passion.

Bad Writing

Here Gibbon is talking about certain writers of the middle Byzantine empire.

In every page our taste and reason are wounded by the choice of gigantic and obsolete words, a stiff and intricate phraseology, the discord of images, the childish play of false or unreasonable ornament, and the painful attempt to elevate themselves, to astonish the reader, and to involve a trivial meaning in the smoke of obscurity and exaggeration. Their prose is soaring to the vicious affectation of poetry; their poetry is sinking below the flatness and insipidity of prose.

How to read Gibbon

Because this work is so vast, it’s easy to get lost in it and never advance beyond the first volume or so. It’s best treated as a library rather than as a single work. It covers a span of about 1300 years (he doesn’t stop with the fall of the Western empire circa 476 but keeps going all the way through the fall of Constantinople in 1453). Get an unabridged version and just pull volumes out at random and flip through them until you hit on something that pulls you into the narrative. That way, you can get his take on various topics out of Western Civ that you wouldn’t normally expect to find in a history of Rome, such as the Crusades, the rise of Islam, the formation of the Holy Roman Empire, and many others.

I spelled that figure out because it’s more zeroes and commas than I can type in before blowing through my attention span and losing track.

This event has unleashed yet another spate of Internet cartoons depicting tombstones with the word METAVERSE chiseled into them, a genre that comes and goes every few years. Here’s one from three years ago that prompted a tweet from Tim Sweeney:

I am, thank God, curiously detached from all this. Four and a half years ago I was minding my own business, cutting metal in my machine shop, when I received a text message from John Gaeta, a former colleague at Magic Leap, reading simply “Sorry for your loss.” At first I thought that he’d sent it to me mistakenly, but after a bit of Googling I became aware that Facebook had changed its name and announced that it was now going to build the Metaverse.

In retrospect, John’s message was prescient, since it marked the moment when the Metaverse really did break free and become my alienated, prodigal brainchild.

In the following weeks I had to make a few Tweets trying to convince incredulous strangers that I had no connection with what Meta was up to; that they hadn’t communicated with me in any way; that they hadn’t paid me off; and that, no, I wasn’t going to sue them. All of these things remain true.

So there wouldn’t have been any upside for me if Meta’s Metaverse had succeeded. What remains to be seen is whether there’s a downside for me now that it has failed. I think I’m standing clear of the blast radius, but seeing the front page of the New York Times’s business page dominated by the inevitable Metaverse tombstone image does give one pause.

Since this is now water under the bridge, here is some free advice to future companies who might become interested in this topic when the tombstone cartoons fade once again from memory and the concept becomes hot again.

The basic idea is obvious. Consider picking a different name

Once you have computers that can show graphics, and an Internet, the notion of creating a virtual online space where users go around in audiovisual bodies (avatars) is sort of obvious . Such a thing existed at least once before I wrote Snow Crash, in the form of Habitat, and would have been independently invented over and over again had the book never existed. All I did was make up a name for it, and put it in a novel that got read by a lot of techies. And the novel had a plot - a topic I will return to at the end of this post.

People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do

When I was working at Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.

Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces. Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible.

A possible workaround is to keep refining and miniaturizing the devices to the point where they just look like eyeglasses. This, however, turns out to have the unintended side effect of making these things seem sinister. It happened with Google Glass, which instantaneously spawned the term “glasshole,” and it has happened again with Meta’s product that looks like normal, albeit heavy-framed glasses.

When someone around you is staring at a rectangle in their hand, it might be incredibly annoying, but at least you can tell they’re doing it. When someone’s wearing a head-mounted display, on the other hand, you don’t know whether they are looking at you or not.

Likewise, when someone holds up their phone and aims it at you, it’s obvious that you are on camera. That’s not true in the case of glasses or goggles. So it’s creepy.

It was never about goggles

Goggles were the ubiquitous visual signature of Cyberpunk. This, combined with the amount of R & D that has been poured into making various head-mounted displays by tech companies over the last couple of decades, has forged an unbreakable connection in many people’s minds between the Metaverse and goggles.

In 1990, when I was writing Snow Crash, we experienced all computer graphics through massive, heavy CRTs with terrible resolution. The images were flickery and blurry. Rendering pictures of three-dimensional scenes was in its infancy. It seemed entirely reasonable to think that the future would be all about head-mounted displays that could render stereoscopic (simulated three-dimensional) imagery.

This is not actually what happened. The feedback loop between Moore’s Law, the Internet, GUIs and video games brought us to where we are now: thanks to modern graphics cards and game engines, you can bring 3D worlds to vivid life on a cheap flat panel screen. Billions of people have access to such screens and are comfortable navigating through those worlds. There is no business case for headsets any more.

Why do big companies like Apple and Meta keep making them, then? I guess because they see a market for hardware. Particularly in the case of Apple, it’s obvious that existing hardware platforms like the iPhone are fully mature and that most people are only going to buy new ones every few years. What could induce customers to rush back into the market and buy completely new hardware? Headsets?

If you build it, they won’t come

Magic Leap did an exceptionally good job of bringing in creative talent with an eye toward building experiences sufficiently interesting to make ordinary people want to buy such devices. Even then it wasn’t enough. Which isn’t a knock on Magic Leap; this stuff is hard, and it must be a devilish balancing act trying to split finite capital between hardware and software development.

While I haven’t tracked other such projects closely, I don’t think any other headset-making company has come close to Magic Leap when it comes to supporting development of original content. And by “supporting” I don’t just mean offering free technical advice, sending out dev kits, and offering to hype your finished product on the app store. No, I mean actually paying senior developers decent salaries for years.

This isn’t to make a claim that such support programs didn’t exist elsewhere. I would have no way of knowing. What I do know is that I haven’t seen any fundamentally new, game-changing applications emerge. When headset manufacturers are hawking their wares, they often fall back on “you’ll be able to watch movies on a virtual screen” and “you’ll be able to participate in virtual 3D meetings” which is what Magic Leap was demoing ten years ago.

For developers, the economics are stark. These headsets typically have only a few thousand in circulation. That’s the whole market. Compare that with hundreds of millions for other platforms. No developer is going to enter the infinitesimal headset market without strong financial incentives.

There is another aspect to this that makes entering the headset content market even more forbidding to developers. When these systems get shut down, the software effectively winks out of existence. Typically, headset software can’t run - it can’t even boot up - without a connection to servers that make the whole integrated system work. When a company shuts down those servers, all of the software that depended on them effectively ceases to exist. Devs who spent years of their careers crafting works of interactive art have seen it all wiped out. With that kind of track record I consider it very unlikely that developers will sign on to build content for the next generation of headsets that comes along, supposing that ever happens.

The complicating factor in all this is that people who develop games actually are artists. They come to it from a range of more or less technical disciplines, but behaviorally they are artists. This means that they make career decisions, and respond to incentives, that aren’t obvious, and don’t make sense, to most tech industry types. This greatly complicates the process of hiring and/or financing them. I banged on at some length about this in an earlier post which - fair warning - has some overlap with this one.

Hundreds of millions of people use the (no-goggle) Metaverse

Roblox has something like 380 million monthly active users. Minecraft has something like 60 million. Fortnite has 650 million registered players. These (and others mentioned in the Tim Sweeney tweet above) are all virtual three-dimensional spaces where you can run around in an avatar and interact with faraway persons over the Internet. The only thing that differentiates them from the Metaverse, as narrowly construed by Metaverse-tombstone-cartoon-posting halfwits, is that no goggles are involved.

Losing - and finding - the plot

When you are reading about the Metaverse, or something similar to it, in a novel, or watching it in a movie, you are reading a novel or watching a movie. And those things have plots. There’s a beginning, middle, and (never mind what A16Z has to say about me) an end. It’s quite easy to get carried away thinking about how cool it would be to actually build a system that could, on an engineering level, do the things that the fictional technology is depicted as doing in the book or the movie. Having built it, though, you might discover that it’s just a lot of randos milling around waiting for something to happen.

Fortnite, just to name one example of an extremely successful Metaverse-like world, remedies this by imposing a gamified structure on the user experience. It is straightforward and repetitive, but it works. When you enter a play session you know in general - but not in detail - what’s going to happen, and you know that it’ll be over in about twenty minutes. In my opinion (which some may feel free to disregard after the matter of the eighty billion dollars) this is only the beginning of what will become possible in coming years. Even one one-millionth of what Meta spent is enough to fund significant progress in this area if you have a small, talented, and dedicated team.

During the fallow period while I wait for D to come out, I’m working with such a team, actually writing some code in Verse, a new programming language that is being developed within Epic Games to support such systems. What you’re likely to see in coming years is developers continuing to build on what has been made economically possible by those hundreds of millions of users. Not just to implement a thirty-five-year-old fictional construct, but to keep improving what the idea has, in the meantime, evolved into.

It’s on my list to finish up the series on the physics of moving chains, but for the next little bit I’m busy going over the copyedited manuscript of D (my next novel, due out in October) and pulling together acknowledgments for same.

It is entertaining to speculate as to what had happened in Carrière’s life that caused him to be so familiar with the sound of rifle bullets passing near his head. An obvious explanation would be military service in the Great War, but I have no information about the man and so that’s only a guess.

The Lebel rifle was standard issue in the French military for decades, including the era of the Great War. At the time of its introduction it was the first military rifle to use smokeless, as opposed to black, powder. Smokeless powder, a French invention, was much more powerful than black powder and fired bullets that traveled at supersonic velocity. So when Carrière specifies that the sound of a whipcrack is similar to that of a bullet from a Lebel rifle, what he’s saying is that it sounds to him like a sonic boom.

As will shortly become obvious, Carrière was a monstrously gifted experimentalist. He decided to build an apparatus that would provide experimental proof of his hunch that whips broke the sound barrier. In this post I’ll try to explain the echt-steampunk contraption that Carrière built and documented1 in order to achieve that goal.

1. The Whip Cracking Device (fouet de laboratoire)

In order to study this phenomenon, Carrière first needed to build a machine that would reliably and repeatably crack a whip, always in the same place. His fouet de laboratoire was disarmingly straightforward, and I know it works because I once duplicated it. It’s depicted in this illustration, which is a bit confusing because it shows the same thing twice from two different angles, front and side views:

Ignore the upper part (H) for now, that’s a parabolic mirror which will be explained in due course. The device itself consists of a vertical plank. Mounted to the top of it is a lightweight pulley. Affixed to the bottom on one side is a length of rubber AB, which when stretched reaches almost up to the pulley. Fixed to the end of that is a cord BC with a knot in the end — this is the actual whip. The cord is passed over the top of the pulley, forming the U-shaped bend that Kucharski would later term a Knickstelle, and then pulled downward, stretching the rubber, until the knot can be fixed in place between the two prongs of a little fork located at C, holding the whole system under tension.

This fork is mounted on a pivot, but it’s not yet free to move because its other end is held in position by an electromagnet (D). As long as power is supplied to the electromagnet, it will hold the system in tension. But when power is switched off, the magnet releases its hold, allowing the fork to pivot around under the tension in the whip until the prongs become vertical. The knot slides free, allowing the whip to be hauled upward by the powerful contraction of the rubber on the other side of the pulley. As Carrière explains, the U-shaped bend soon lifts free of the pulley and propagates upward into the space above it, accelerating the whole way until it snaps round at the top of its trajectory and makes the claquement or whip-crack sound.

(Attentive readers of this series will recognize here Kucharski’s “Indian rope trick,” a vertically cracking whip that can lift its free end up against the force of gravity once the Knickstelle has been established—in this case, by the pulley—and gone into movement.)

2. Photographic equipment

Now that Carrière can make a whip crack over and over again in the same place, he’s able to set up photographic equipment, aimed at the exact spot of the whip-crack, in order to capture still images of its movement. It’s necessary to capture images at successive moments in order to perform a calculation of the whip’s speed. He’s going to do this by taking multiple exposures on the same photographic plate. He has placed a screen between the camera and the whip, and is backlighting the whip to cast a shadow on the screen. He’s using the “method of Foucault-Toepler” which clearly means schlieren photography — a way of capturing images of shock waves in the air.

Carrière actually has two different configurations of the apparatus, one for getting schlieren images of the shock waves and another for direct photography of the whip itself.

3. Spark-Gap Strobe

All of this is set up in a dark room. The shutter of the camera is held open, so any light entering the lens will darken the plate. Carrière now needs a way to generate a rapid series of intense, brief flashes of light during the moments that the whip is cracking. He doesn’t have access to modern strobe lamps and so instead he uses electrical sparks.

A simple spark gap in the air (two wires almost touching each other) isn’t going to work because the air in the gap is going to become ionized and won’t perform well for a rapid succession of sparks. Fortunately that’s a well-known problem that has been solved by the early Twentieth Century radio industry, which is still using spark gap transmitters. The details are a bit technical, but the bottom line is that air spark gaps can only cycle so rapidly. This placed a ceiling on how fast such transmitters could operate until the invention of the mica quenched spark gap which was widely adopted during the time (1920s) that Carrière was working on this project.

So that’s going to be his source of light. He places the spark gap at the focal point of a parabolic mirror behind the place where the whip cracks. Whenever it sparks, the mirror produces a parallel beam of light that will pass over the whip, casting its shadow onto the screen in front of the camera. The camera’s focused on the screen and so it’ll record a still image of the shadow at the moment of the spark. By triggering three or four sparks in rapid succession Carrier can get a multiple exposure showing the whip’s shape, and the associated shock waves, at different instants during the whip crack. This will give him the data he needs to calculate its velocity.

4. Electrical Apparatus

The spark gap requires 20,000 volts. Carrière produces this using a Whimshurst Machine, a classic Victorian electrical contraption that you have probably seen in the background of movie scenes set in wacky science labs.

When the machine is cranked it generates high voltage but only a small amount of current—not enough to make a series of sparks. So Carrière hooks it up to an array of Leyden Jars — old school capacitors capable of storing up electricity and then discharging it suddenly. He’s got one such jar for each spark that he intends to make during the whip crack. Each jar, when switched on, will instantly discharge all of its stored energy through the mica spark gap and produce a single brief but blindingly intense spark.

Ordinary electrical switches, which use hard metal contacts, don’t perform well in such an application. Carrière instead uses mercury switches, which contain a small pool of liquid metal in a glass ampoule. When turned on, the switch’s contacts are plunged into the mercury to complete the circuit and allow the current to blast through.

The battery of Leyden jars is connected to a voltmeter enabling the operator to see how much voltage has accumulated in the system. The operator keeps turning the crank on the Whimshurst machine until the needle reaches 20,000 V and then unleashes hell by dropping the guillotine.

5. Guillotine

The whole experiment now depends on Carrière’s ability to trip a series of mercury switches in a precisely timed sequence. The first switch kills the electromagnet that has been immobilizing the fork that holds the end of the whip. This sets the whip into motion. A short time later, the mercury switches connected to the Leyden jars need to be tripped in a very rapid sequence to produce the flashes of light. Carrière handles this by building a guillotine (his term!) consisting of an 80 cm long plank that falls vertically between a pair of taut wires, which guide it with negligible friction. As it falls it strikes the mercury switches, which are mounted on an adjacent structure. By adjusting the positions of the switches up and down, Carrière can tweak the timing until the flashes are happening at exactly the moment that the whip reaches its peak velocity and snaps around in front of the camera.

6. Ball Drop Chronography

In order for Carrière to calculate the whip’s velocity he has to know the time interval between successive sparks/exposures. This could perhaps be calculated by keeping a record of the positions of the mercury switches on the guillotine, but better would be actual timestamps on the photographs. And since they’re multiple exposures, each photo has to have multiple timestamps. Carrière solves this problem by mounting another electromagnet above the mirror, and using it to suspend a steel ball. It’s connected to another circuit on the guillotine. When that circuit is switched off, the ball drops from the electromagnet and plummets down across the face of the mirror at the same time as the whip is cracking next to it. The result is a series of little round shadows, one per exposure, visible in the lower right of each image. The rate at which the ball descends is easily calculated from basic physics, and so by measuring the positions of the ball’s shadows Carrière is able to get the time interval between exposures and thus calculate the whip’s velocity. To make sure he’s measuring correctly he has stretched a cord across the image plane with knots 20 cm apart, giving him a way to measure the scale.

Images

I have two copies of Carrière’s paper, one of which I scanned twenty-five years ago from an old yellowed hard copy in the University of Washington Library, another more recent digital scan available online. In general the online version is of higher quality, but that’s not true of the images. These were originally high-resolution photos provided by Carrière to the publisher. They had to be scaled way down and converted to halftones in order to be printed. My hand-scanned grayscale versions came out better than the black-and-white images in the online copy, so I’m going to drop in a couple of those here.

Here’s a triple exposure taken relatively early in the whip cracking process:

In the lower right of the disk, at approximately four o’clock, you can make out a vertical stack of three dark round spots. Those are shadows cast by the falling ball at different moments. They effectively record the time at which the three whip images were captured.

The U-shaped bend enters from the bottom, so the lowest one is the earliest and the top one comes last. The time interval between the three exposures isn’t exactly equal but you can get a sense that the U-shaped bend is accelerating—it moves a much greater distance between exposures 2 and 3 than between 1 and 2.

Here’s another triple taken later in a whip crack:

Again the falling ball is visible at about four o’clock. It tells us that there’s a longer interval between exposure 1 (the U-shaped bend entering at the bottom) and 2 than between exposures 2 and 3. (Note: the vertical line running from top to bottom between the ball shadows and the whip shadows is the cord that Carrière stretched across the image plane as an aid in calculating scale). It’s clear in this image that between exposures 1 and 2, the actual whip crack occurred: the free end of the whip, which is still rising up into the image in exposure 1, has snapped all the way around in exposure 2 and is flailing off to the left between 9 and 10 o’clock. By the time we get to exposure 3 it has whipped around even further to about 7 o’clock and is already collapsing into the bottom of the image.

I realize that it’s difficult to make out what’s going on in these images and so I made a blowup of the one above with annotations:

Carrière includes twelve such images in the paper, none of which captures the exact moment of maximum whip crack velocity. You can see that he’s patiently tweaking the positions of those mercury switches trying to get the timing exactly right, but chronologically he’s looking for a needle in a haystack.

The following set shows the results of his schlieren photography setup:

The feature to look for here, most obvious in 5 but also clear in 1 and 3, is the circular discontinuity. In 1 and 3 it only appears once, out toward the edge of the disk, but in 5 you can make out multiple concentric circles. These are the traces of the shock wave produced by the whip when it broke the sound barrier a fraction of a second earlier.

Experimentum Crucis: Spinning Smoked Drums

By this point Carrière has compiled an impressive amount of evidence supporting his theory that whips break the sound barrier, but he can’t clinch it using just the photographs. By measuring the photos and comparing against the ball drop speed he can show that in some cases the whip’s moving in excess of 300 m/s. But the speed of sound is 343 m/s. The whip is only moving at its peak velocity for about one ten-thousandth of a second. It’s nearly impossible for him to take two successive exposures at the exact right moments to show this happening. He has to come up with a completely different measuring scheme.

It’s shown in this cross-sectional view, which is slightly confusing since the directions are reversed compared to the photographs. In the photographs above, the whip snaps off to the left following the crack. In the diagram below it snaps to the right.

The pulley that launches the whip is the small circle at the bottom, rotating clockwise. The big circle is the mirror.

The two straight lines AO and ON show the approximate trajectory of the tip of the whip: before the crack it rises vertically up the line AO (typical positions are shown by the curves 1 through 5) and after the crack it flails around and collapses off to the right, roughly along the line ON (curves 6 through 11).

Since the whip’s movements are predictable, Carrière sets up a pair of wooden drums, shown in cross-section at the top and labeled K and L. These are shaped and arranged so that their edges are tangent to the lines AO and ON. They are just spinning disks of wood. L is a simple cylinder, K has an angled groove in its edge matching the angle between AO and ON. He’s got them hooked up to a motor so that they spin at a known speed (100 revolutions per second) around axles that are indicated by the transverse lines shown on the diagram.

Prior to each repetition of the experiment, Carrière places these drums into a smoker for a while, so that they become coated with soot. The soot isn’t bonded to the surface, it’s just a light surface layer. He mounts the sooty drums on the axles and gets them spinning. Then he performs the whip crack.

As the whip passes through the cracking zone near O, it generates a shock wave that spreads out in its wake. When the shock hits the nearby drum it blasts off the soot, leaving a visible trace along a narrow path. Because the drum is spinning, the trace doesn’t run perpendicularly up the edge of the drum; the drum’s moving laterally underneath the shock wave as the trace is laid down, and so the result is an angled trace—a helix. The angle of the helix can be measured. Since Carrière knows how fast the drums were spinning, he can use this to calculate the velocity with which the tip of the whip was moving when it produced the shock.

Based on data collected using this technique, Carrière concludes that the tip of the whip is moving at at least 350 m/s in the vicinity of point O: faster than the speed of sound. That is corroborated by the images of the shock waves on the schlieren photographs.

Conclusions

By the end of this thing Carrière has done what he set out to do: prove his hunch that the similarity in sound between a Lebel rifle bullet passing by your head and a whip crack is no coincidence. Both of them are sonic booms. The term “sonic boom” or bang sonique doesn’t exist yet—the OED says that it first shows up in English in the 1950s—but Carrière explains the physics of it in sufficient detail to make it clear he knows exactly what it is.

His paper includes page after page of meticulous remarks about his apparatus and about the behavior of the whip during its trajectory, which I won’t go into here. He uses a device called a Koenig Analyser, a too-steampunk-to-be-true device that uses jets of flame and a rotating stereoscopic mirror to perform frequency analysis on sounds. He cracks the whip near soap bubble membranes and analyzes the splatters. He builds a sensor into a coachman’s whip and hooks it up to the Whimshurst machine to trigger sparks when he stands in his darkroom and cracks it.

There isn’t much prior art for him to refer to, so he’s largely on his own, but he does give a callout to a Victorian physicist who will be the subject of the next post in this series.

The ingenuity of Carrière experimental setup and his meticulous attention to every possible detail has fascinated me since I first stumbled across this paper circa 2000. I enjoy reading papers about experimentalists of past eras because they combined so many qualities I find admirable: a clear understanding of the scientific principle they wished to investigate, a vast breadth of practical knowledge about how to build things, the imagination to think up such devices, and the obsessive dedication needed to keep pursuing these projects over what must have been years filled with setbacks and frustrations.

W. Kucharski studied the physics of whips by doing exactly what the guy in this video is doing, so it’s worth clicking that link and watching it in order to visualize his experiments. Here’s a still from it, which I have improved with a label:

According to a note at the end of his extremely detailed and comprehensive 23-page paper1, Kucharski did most of this work in Berlin in 1935 and 1936 and submitted the paper at the end of 1940. I have always wondered about this man’s life and fate, since Kucharski is a Polish name, and the work detailed in his paper spanned the moment in history when Nazi Germany invaded and crushed Poland. But apparently he was employed at the Society for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics in Berlin during this time.

As mentioned in the previous post in this series, Kucharski seems to have coined the terminology, and devised the basic mathematical model later used (with due credit) by Grammel and Zoller in their paper about the physics of whip-cracking ten years later. The title of this series, Kinetik der Kontinua, his coinage.

The key to his analysis is to break the system down into three parts: two parallel straight segments of varying length, joined by a 180 degree bend that he calls a Knickstelle (“bend location”). The material of the chain (or whip or whatever) moves through the Knickstelle as the Knickstelle propagates along the medium. He analyzes a number of different scenarios using this basic framework, including this one:

which, as he points out, is an idealized whip.

The mathematical formalism used is a Lagrangian, which is a powerful tool of meta-problem-solving that undergrad physics students often learn after they’ve spent a couple of years solving problems the hard way. It’s exactly the right tool for this job and it enables Kucharski to run easily through a number of different scenarios. In the one shown above, the straight segment on the bottom (C) is held stationary. The Knickstelle (B) propagates leftward drawing the upper straight section (A) along with it; this is the “free end; no force” according to the caption. C therefore gets longer while A gets shorter. The velocity of A (designated by the letter y with the dot above it) becomes theoretically infinite at the end, but as Kucharski points out, eventually A becomes subsumed into the Knickstelle, resulting in “Herumschlagen.” This is one of those terms that works perfectly in German and is hard to translate directly into English. It is mildly comedic and it means to violently thrash about in a careless or chaotic manner. As such it can’t be captured in his simplified mathematical model. However, you can witness the Herumschlagen very clearly at the end of the video linked above, being calmly watched by spectators who clearly have no idea the level of danger being posed to their feet and ankles by a massive chain moving at potentially supersonic velocity.

Kucharski states that he conducted experimental trials using lengths of chain, just to verify that his mathematical models weren’t leading him astray.

His generalization of the problem using the Lagrangian formalism pays dividends in that it enables him to cycle rapidly through a range of different basic scenarios. The bullwhip, shown above, is only one of about half a dozen of these. Some are intricate, bordering on farfetched, and I won’t try to summarize them here. One is shown in this diagram:

Here the vertical segment C is anchored to an overhead support. It drops straight down to the Knickstelle B which connects at its other end to the vertical segment A which runs up to a weight. The weight is in free fall. Now, normally when something’s in free fall on this planet it will accelerate downwards at about 9.8 meters per second squared. What Kucharski predicts, and what he apparently observed in experimental trials, is that, in the scenario shown above, the mass falls faster than can be accounted for by mere gravity. That’s because it’s being pulled downward with an additional force created by the tension in the chain. The source of this tension is the Knickstelle itself. As Kucharski proves (and as can be verified with a simple centripetal-force calculation), when a chain or other continuous medium is moving through a Knickstelle with velocity v, it experiences a tension force equal to

where the “curly rho” symbol is the linear density of the medium — the mass per unit length of the chain, rope, whip, or whatever. This is always true of any system with a Knickstelle. The two straight ends A and C will always experience that amount of tension. Any end that’s free to move will accelerate accordingly.

An important thing about the above formula is that the tension depends only on the linear density—how much the chain weighs—and the velocity with which the chain is moving through the Knickstelle. The diameter of the bend makes no difference. This, I think, explains the weird stability and persistence of bends in moving chains.

And it is intensely counterintuitive! All of your lived experience with ropes and chains tells you that applying greater tension causes it to straighten out. If you’re holding one end of a rope or chain that has some slack in it, and you pull, applying more tension, it gets straighter. If you reduce the tension, giving it more slack, it hangs lower, curving more. None of this is true of moving bends. Also, the angle of the bend makes no difference. Kucharski happens to be talking exclusively about 180 degree U-bends, but the same thing is true of more or less acute bends.

Kucharski goes on to point out that the same diagram works just as well if you flip it upside down:

Here we have one end C attached to the ground and leading up to a Knickstelle that connects at its other end to a freely moving mass below it. The Knickstelle acts as a virtual pulley, hauling up on the payload. As Kucharski states (with apologies for my crappy German translation):

It may be mentioned that old tales of the magic tricks of Indian conjurors, in which men or animals climb up ropes that have been thrown up into the air, according to the above-mentioned remarkable properties of moving cords, have a real physical basis.

He goes on to outline an experiment in which the weight m is thrown vertically upwards, creating a Knickstelle above it that would continue to pull it up using the Knickstelle tension. Of course, this would fail unless the “curly rho v squared” tension exceeded the weight of the mass on the end. You could make that happen by making the chain heavier (increasing the value of “curly rho”), and/or making it move faster. The latter approach would be more effective since the velocity v is squared.

If this seems physically impossible, you can get some intuition for the idea by imagining what would happen if you were to crack a bullwhip aimed vertically upwards, instead of horizontally. Once you had snapped your wrist and got the whip moving upward, the bend in the whip would continue to propagate up against gravity, dragging the lighter end of the whip behind it. That’s because the tension in the middle section of the whip, where the bend is propagating, exceeds the weight of the distal section.

Needless to say this made me sit up a little straighter 25 years ago when I was thinking about new ways to hurl objects into the air. Of course, actually setting up such a mechanism and putting it into motion is the difficult part, as Kucharski himself mentions in a thinly disguised plea for additional funding and facilities that will be immediately recognizable to any modern researcher. If Hitler hadn’t become so fascinated by rockets, perhaps he’d have put this man to work (probably against his will) making steel bullwhips for smacking bombers out of the air.

It’s worth mentioning that the same basic configuration would work if the mass were moving down, instead of up. It could be used, in other words, to slow down a falling object. If you could come up with a way to anchor one end of a chain on the ground and suspend its entire length vertically, e.g. by attaching its other end to a balloon, then when a falling object somehow coupled itself to the free end of the chain, it would form a Knickstelle that would exert upward force on the object, slowing its descent. The whole system would simply collapse and fall to the ground, however, unless the curly-rho-v-squared Knickstelle tension were large enough to support its own weight. So the idea would only work if the velocity, the height, and the density of the chain were properly balanced against each other.

I believe that there is a plausible way to build such contraptions, at least on a performance art level, which I’ll get to in a later installment of this series. Think Burning Man, not Cape Canaveral. The real practical obstacle is dealing with the aftermath. Once you’ve used a massive vertical bullwhip to accelerate a payload straight up, and released that payload, you’re now left with a heavy chain extending high up into the air and thrashing around in what Kucharski denoted Herumschlagen. Eventually it’s going to hit the ground. And if you’ve used it to launch anything of appreciable weight, it’s going to be heavy and it’s going to be moving fast!

Shortly after the end of the Second World War, a German man visited his eye doctor complaining of “floaters” — little specks drifting around in his field of vision. As anyone today can verify by googling the term, it’s an extremely common condition. It’s almost always benign. Eye doctors see this all the time.

What this doctor saw, however, when he peered into the patient’s eye, was by no means ordinary. Floating within the eyeball, slowly tumbling end over end, were rods of a metallic substance — copper — each about a millimeter long.

Needless to say, it’s not normal for eyeballs to produce copper. So these objects must have entered the eyeball from outside. Yet the outer surface of the eyeball showed no signs of damage.

The doctor interrogated the patient: had he seen action during the war? Had he been near an explosion? Had he been in a crash, or suffered any kind of traumatic injury? The answers all came back in the negative. This man was a truck driver. He’d never been in an accident, never come near any kind of military action.

The way things usually work in the medical profession is that doctors treat what they can, which covers the vast majority of cases. Anything that exceeds their knowledge they refer to specialists. Consequently this truck driver got referred up the chain until he came to the attention of Dr. H. Erggelet, the Director of the Eye Clinic at the University of Göttingen—one of the most prestigious universities in the German-speaking world. Dr. Erggelet performed his exam, saw the same remarkable phenomenon, and asked the same questions of the patient, with the same result: total bewilderment. Fortunately for the truck driver, it wasn’t a serious medical problem and it didn’t significantly affect his vision. He went home with no explanation for his condition and was enrolled in the records of the university as a medical mystery.

Then another man showed up with the same symptoms. Then another.

There was an obvious common link among all of these men with copper rods in their eyes: they were all truck drivers. Further interviews began to shed some light on their histories. During the last years of the war, Germany—formerly one of the most industrialized and motorized countries in the world—had run desperately low on fuel. There were still many vehicles on the roads in good working order, but they couldn’t move, simply because there was no fuel to put in their tanks. And yet goods still had to move from place to place in order to keep the economy going and the war engine running. In desperation, truck drivers had turned the clock back a few decades and reverted to the practice of using livestock to pull their vehicles down the roads.

The only problem with this strategy was that they no longer had the harnesses, yokes, reins, and other equipment—mostly leather goods—needed to connect the animals to the vehicles. All of that stuff had rotted away during the years that Germany had become a modern motorized economy. So they had to improvise using whatever materials they could lay their hands on.

In many cases they could make do with rope or fabric webbing. Those, however, didn’t work for making whips. A whip, though it might look to the untrained eye like a simple piece of leather, is actually a finely tuned piece of engineering that won’t perform its function unless the right materials are used.

It should be mentioned here that the purpose of a whip in such contexts isn’t to inflict pain or damage on an animal. The animals are too valuable for that. Moreover, whips are delicate objects and wouldn’t last long if they were constantly being slammed into animals. The main utility of a whip is its ability to break the sound barrier and produce a loud crack. A skilled driver, seated well behind the animal, can make that crack sound in the air near the head of the animal, driving them forward or steering them one way or the other without touching them. As such, the whip is a precision instrument that can’t be replaced with any old length of rope.

By this point in the war, Germany was littered with buildings that had been destroyed by Allied bombing campaigns. Any building that had been electrified would have a grounding cable, typically consisting of braided copper, running down its exterior to a stake driven into the ground. The cables themselves were finger-thick but the individual wires making up the braids were extremely thin, typically a fraction of a millimeter in diameter.

Some ingenious driver somewhere in Germany figured out that if you stripped a length of such copper braid from a collapsed building and cut it to length, it would work just fine as a whip. Actually getting the thing to crack required a bit of practice, of course. These guys didn’t have the benefit of professional trainers telling them how to do it right.

A common mistake among novice whip cracking practitioners is to yank the handle of the whip toward you in order to accentuate the crack. This actually works. But it’s discouraged on safety grounds. When you do it, the end of the whip tends to snap back toward you. Experienced whip crackers don’t do it that way.

Putting two and two together, Dr. Erggelet asked these drivers whether, while cracking their makeshift copper whips, they’d ever felt a sudden sharp sting in the eye. The patients answered that this was certainly the case, but that in a few minutes the pain went away and they thought nothing more of it.

At this point it seemed obvious to Dr. Erggelet that, during the whip-cracking process, from time to time a small bit of copper would break free from the end of a strand and fly back at high speed until it penetrated the driver’s eye, creating momentary pain but making only a small puncture wound that subsequently healed.

The only question remaining was whether this hypothesis was physically plausible. What exactly were the physics at work in the whip cracking process? Were the forces really sufficient to break bits off the ends of the copper strands? And were those bits moving rapidly enough that they could fly back through the air for a couple of meters and puncture the eye?

He brought these questions to a physicist in Stuttgart: one R. Grammel, who investigated the problem and, along with a collaborator K. Zoller, eventually published the findings1 in a paper entitled, roughly, “On the Mechanics of Whips and Whip-cracks.”

Grammel and Zoller’s analysis is based on that of an earlier researcher named Kucharski, the coiner of the term Kinetik der Kontinua (KdK), whose work I’ll be discussing in a later installment of this series (I’m publishing these things in reverse chronological order). I’m not going to delve into the actual mathematics here, but I’ll say that all of these guys are working from a simplified (but still informative) approach in which the whip is modeled as two straight segments joined by a U-shaped bend, which they call the Knickstelle, which means something like “bend location.”

In order to get a sense of why that makes sense, it’s worth going to YouTube and watching some high-speed videos of whips being cracked. There are a lot of these, but here is one that shows it particularly clearly. The whole video is good but there’s a particularly clear view of the moving Knickstelle at about the 6:10 mark.

When people crack whips they hold one end of the whip in their hand. This means that it, and the proximal segment of the whip, remain stationary up to the Knickstelle. Everything beyond the Knickstelle is free to move. The Knickstelle itself propagates down the length of the whip. As it does so the stationary proximal segment gets longer, and hence more massive, while the moving distal segment gets shorter, and hence less massive. Since the momentum of the whole system is conserved according to the laws of physics, this means that all of the momentum that the whip-cracker imparted to the whip at the beginning of the action gets concentrated in that distal segment, which has to move faster and faster as its mass gets smaller and smaller. As Grammel and Zoller put it, “this value [the velocity at the end of the whip] grows beyond all limits.” The breaking of the sound barrier is thereby explained.

Grammel and Zoller don’t then explicitly come out and say how the copper rods ended up in the eyes of Dr. Erggelet’s patients, leaving this to the imagination of the readership. But once they’ve worked out the basic physics of whip cracking it becomes an open and shut case. The medical mystery is solved by application of old school Newtonian physics.

During the time I was working on this at Blue Origin I had trouble settling on a name for this field of investigation. I ended up calling it filamentary systems: the physics of long slender flexible things that are moving. I was never really happy with that name. Recently, upon cracking open some of the old papers I found while studying this, I came across the German phrase Kinetik der Kontinua: the physics of continuous media. I like that a lot better and so I’m going to call it by that name, or KdK for short.

Everything that I did was based on these historical papers, which I plan to cover one by one in this series. I don’t claim to have done any original work in this field. I simply went to the library (yes, it was that long ago) and found these papers and translated them.

In this first post, before digging into the actual science, I’m going to address a question that might have already suggested itself to some readers: what possible relevance could bullwhips and moving loops of chain have to the problem of launching things into space? Could you actually build a chain-flinger or a giant bullwhip that was big and fast enough to launch something into orbit?

The answer is absolutely not, for a bunch of reasons. But you don’t have to attain orbital velocity in order to make something that’s actually useful. This is a consequence of the Rocket Equation, which is an exponential. And exponential behavior is notoriously counterintuitive.

Here’s one example that might help to shed some light on it. At one point when I was researching older space launch ideas, I came across a proposal to construct an ocean-going barge somewhere around the earth’s equator and build a space shuttle launch pad on top of it. Because of the earth’s rotation, merely launching from the equator would provide an extra velocity boost of two hundred kilometers per hour compared to launching from Cape Canaveral. In addition, this barge was going to be equipped with an array of jet engines, aimed horizontally, which would be lit up to drive the thing across the surface of the ocean at an additional hundred km/h or so. The space shuttle would then launch vertically from the barge.

From a layperson’s perspective this seems an insane plan. In order to get into orbit the vehicle needs to accelerate to something like 29,000 km/h. How could it possibly be worth all of that trouble and expense to give it an initial velocity boost of a mere 300 km/h?

One way to answer that question is to imagine a space shuttle lifting off from the launch pad at Cape Canaveral and accelerating to the point where it’s going 300 km/h. During that time its engines are burning fuel at a tremendous rate.

This is where the exponential weirdness kicks in: the heavier the rocket gets, the more fuel it takes just to budge it off the launch pad, and the more fuel it takes, the heavier it gets, and so on. If gravity were just a little stronger or rocket engines just a little less powerful, we’d never get into orbit at all—at least, not until we came up with some technology other than chemical rocket engines.

If you could spare that first few seconds’ fuel consumption by giving the vehicle an initial speed boost, then some of the weight saved could instead be used to carry payload. And the cost per kilogram of payload delivered to orbit is exceedingly high. If you pencil it all out, it actually begins to make sense to think in terms of a huge jet-powered launch barge.

Consequently there have been a lot of ideas floated over the decades for schemes to get ordinary rockets moving a little faster and/or launch them from higher altitudes, just to spare some fuel and thereby make those rockets capable of delivering heavier payloads than they could if launched from a standing start at sea level. Of all such ideas we looked at during Blue Origin’s early think-tank era, my favorite was, and still is, the idea of constructing a very tall tower (say, 20 - 25 kilometers). This notion was in no way original, having been systematically investigated by Geoff Landis, who enumerated a whole list of ways in which launching from high altitude would be beneficial.

Having said all of that, huge bullwhips and enormous moving chain loops were a sentimental favorite for a minute just because of their weird beauty and the basically steampunk aesthetic of making a machine so large and powerful. In an alternate timeline where the Victorians decided it would be a good idea to launch things into space, they might have thought in terms of trains rather than rockets, and constructed trains into the sky, making use of physics that had already been worked out by one of the scientists I’m going to talk about in this series.

All of which is basically background to the series of posts I’m going to make here, which is going to focus on the science of KdK and the remarkable collection of scientists who studied the problem between the Victorian era and the aftermath of the Second World War. I’m going to proceed in reverse chronological order, beginning with a paper by Grammel and Zoller completed in 1949 and published in 1950. I’ll post that one immediately and then follow up with others as time permits.

Finally though, I’d just like to stress that, since well before my 2006 departure, Blue Origin has been a level-headed aerospace engineering organization that just makes rockets!

“…most of these books don’t have endings (they literally stop mid-sentence).”

I had to read this over a few times to believe that I was seeing it. If it didn’t include the word “literally” I’d assume some poetic license on the part of whoever, or whatever, wrote this. But even then it would be crazy wrong.

I’m not surprised or perturbed by the underlying sentiment. Some of my endings have been controversial for a long time. Tastes differ. Some readers would prefer more conclusive endings. Now, in some cases, such as Snow Crash, I simply can’t fathom why any reader could read the ending—a long action sequence in which the Big Bad is defeated, the two primary antagonists meet their maker and Y.T. is reconciled and reunited with her mother—as anything other than a proper wind-up to the story. In other cases, notably The Diamond Age and Seveneves, I can understand why readers who prefer a firm conclusion would end up being frustrated. It is simply not what I was trying to do in those books. So, for a long time, people have argued about some of my endings, and that’s fine.

In this case, though, we have a big company explicitly stating that several of my best-known books just stop mid-sentence, and putting in the word “literally” to eliminate any room for interpretive leeway.

This isn’t literary criticism, which consists of statements of opinion. This is a factual assertion that is (a) false, (b) easy to fact-check, and (c) casts my work ethic, and that of my editors, in an unflattering light.

It is interesting to speculate as to how such an assertion found its way onto A16Z’s website!

Hypothesis 1: it was written by a clanker

By far the most plausible explanation is that this verbiage was generated by an AI and then copy-pasted into the web page by a human who didn’t bother to fact-check it. This would explain the misspelling of my name and some peculiarities in the writing style. Of course, this kind of thing is happening all the time now in law, academia, journalism, and other fields, so it’s pretty unremarkable; it just caught my attention because it’s the first time it’s directly affected me.

The flow diagram looks like this:

That does a pretty good job of explaining how this all might have come about. So far so good. But it raises interesting questions about what happens next: the faulty quote from this seemingly authoritative source in turn gets ingested by the next generation of LLMs, and so on and so forth:

A hundred years from now, thanks to the workings of the Inhuman Centipede, I’m known as a deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.

Hypothesis 2: human with bad data

In this scenario, which seems more far-fetched, we have a sincere and honest human writer who is reporting what they believe to be true based on false information. It breaks down into two sub-hypotheses:

Sub-hypothesis A: Impecunious human with faulty bootleg PDF

There are bootleg copies of countless books circulating all over the Internet, and have been for decades1. Very often these are of poor quality. It could be that the person (or the AI) who wrote the above excerpt decided to save some money by downloading one of those, and got a bad copy that was cut off in mid-sentence.

Sub-hypothesis B: Non native English speaker with faulty translation

Even in the legit publishing industry, the quality of translations can be quite variable, and it’s difficult for authors to know whether a given translation was any good. I’ve seen translated editions of some of my books that look suspiciously short on page count. For all I know there might be translations of my books (legit or bootleg) that actually do stop mid-sentence!

…anyway, thanks for the plug

I genuinely am grateful to have been included on this list! But I had to say something about this astonishing howler embedded in the otherwise reasonable verbiage.

Oh, the Ending

Even the most cynical and Internet-savvy among us are somehow hard-wired to take anything we read on the Internet at face value. I’m as guilty as the next person. This has been a bad idea for a long time now, since bad actors have been swarming onto the Internet for decades. Now, though, it’s a bad idea for a whole new reason: content we read on the Internet might not have been written by a person with an intent to misinform, but rather by an LLM with no motives whatsoever, and no underlying model of reality that enables it to determine fact from fiction.

D

Over the summer I delivered the manuscript for D, which is the second book in the Bomb Light series and the sequel to Polostan. Last week I chatted about it with my editor, Jen Brehl. We’re in agreement about some revisions that I’ll be incorporating into a new draft over coming weeks. The book will be published probably in September 2026.

This one’s somewhat longer than Polostan, which was the shortest book I’ve written in a while. It picks up in 1934, where Polostan left off (admittedly with something of a cliffhanger) and covers events up through the middle of 1940. The title is a reference to deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen that was sometimes given the chemical symbol of D even though it isn’t an element per se. When you combine it with oxygen you get heavy water, which, because of its neutron-slowing properties, was a strategic material during the early years of what became the bomb project.

Fictional and historical accounts of the development of nuclear energy tend to focus on the Manhattan Project. As such they give short shrift to equally fascinating and important happenings during the 1930s and early 1940's. Part of what I’m doing with the Bomb Light project is to shift the focus back a few years and tell stories (a mix of real events and fiction, similar to what I did in the Baroque Cycle) from that era.

In the meantime, HarperCollins has released the trade paperback edition of Polostan with a great new cover design.

Not to be outdone, Subterranean Press has got a preorder page up for its gorgeous limited edition of same:

Artefact

A few months ago I gave a talk in New Zealand about the future of AI. Later I organized some of those thoughts into a Substack post here. It included the following quasi-serious proposal: if we take at face value the proposition that big AIs might be dangerous, then perhaps we should even the odds a little by making them compete for resources, as opposed to raising them in hermetically sealed environments and hand-feeding them everything they need. And since we’re too dumb and slow to compete with superintelligent clankers, we should make them compete with each other.

In the room at that New Zealand talk was Greg Broadmore, a friend and collaborator from Weta whom I met when we were both working at Magic Leap. To make a long story short, this has all developed into a project called Artefact that brings together the core idea from that talk with the creative powers of Weta Workshop, game design from Alvaro Gonzalez, and some of the engineering work that Lamina 1 has been pursuing, lately in collaboration with Linea.

The actual drop is a game—not a fully immersive 3D video game, but something more in the nature of an online board or card game—set in a near-future world decades after everything we know was overthrown and reshaped by a hyperspeed competition among a dozen different big AI systems known collectively as the Bigs.

The Singularity, in other words, has fizzled. Now the Bigs are competing for access to a few basic resources: water, copper, energy, and GPUs (the specialized chips that clankers need in order to think). Humans live in the interstices. Many shun technology but a few are collaborating over a kind of slow, thumb-drive-powered network to build humanistic tools.

My part in this has been to write a few fictional vignettes set in this world and make them available, albeit in rough first-draft form, to my creative collaborators: concept artists from Weta, Alvaro on the game design front, and Rebecca Barkin, Casey Halter, and Will Carter from Lamina 1.

These people’s contributions are what makes Artefact possible. I only have so many hours a week when I can sit down and write original stories. My main commitment, writing-wise, is to finish D and then move on to the next volume in the Bomb Light series. I can’t put that on hold and bang out a whole novel in the Artefact universe. But I can supply some ideas that these collaborators can pick up and run with. They’ve been doing so and I’ve been really pleased with where they’ve been taking it.

Making this all possible are Joe Lubin, Consensys, and Linea. During most of 2025, Rebecca and Joe have been working toward an alliance between Lamina 1 and Consensys that has come to fruition in recent weeks and that we recently announced in Singapore. Without getting too much into the weeds, I’ll say that from my point of view this is all a continuation of the vision that I laid out in my DICE talk a couple of years ago and that I’ve touched on in various posts on this Substack.

Whenere

Being involved in two startups is like having two children: you love them both very much and will do whatever it takes to see them flourish. As I’ve mentioned on this Substack before, I’ve also been working on Whenere, which is in the business of doing something actually fun and humane with AI.

The hours I’ve put into this project have been divided between engineering and fundraising, as opposed to creative writing per se. When people are surprised by that, I sometimes have to break the news to them that I have actually been programming computers for half a century (!), and continue to do so almost every day. In this case the programming environment is Epic Games’s Unreal Engine, which is an unfathomably powerful and multivalent system for creating three-dimensional experiences. It’s by far the most complex and capable system I’ve ever worked with, mostly for better, occasionally for worse. But when the going gets tough we can rely on friends at Epic to help us over obstacles.

Whenere has been running on “angel” or pre-seed funding for a couple of years now. We have put together a system that brings together a web application, LLMs, an Unreal Engine client, and other elements into something that we think is pretty cool, even though we sometimes wish we could spend more money on surface polish. Currently we have put it up on the mechanic’s lift, as it were, in preparation for an initial round of user testing, and so we’ve pulled back from the exhausting round of pitches and demos that is fundraising. However, last month I went down to the Imagination in Action “Next Revolution in AI” Innovation Summit on the Google Campus, along with co-founder and CEO Karen Laur, and found myself in front of a room full of people talking about Whenere and other topics with Bing Gordon, yet another interesting person with connections back to Magic Leap.

When speaking in public I don’t like being perched on a tall chair, largely because I am a compulsive leg jiggler. I have done this all my life. A quick Internet search reveals that jiggling is one of many human behaviors that have lately been medicalized. Apparently it’s a sign of stress. If that’s true, I must be the most stressed out person in history. Anyway, I find this video of me and Bing difficult to watch because of the way it’s framed and because of the jiggling, but I have posted the link anyway for Stephenson completists.

Historical Martial Arts

Speaking of Stephenson completists, the following will be of interest to a very narrow slice of humanity, but it’s part of the overall picture of how I spend my time.

In September I gave a talk at Swordsquatch on the topic of “heavy” one-handed swords and how they are used. I’m putting scare quotes around that word “heavy” because the question of weight is important and, in my opinion, under-discussed in the world of historical swordsmanship.

I’m talking specifically about broadswords here, of which this is an ornate but basically representative example:

I got interested in this type of swordsmanship some years ago when I got tired of my fingers getting injured while working with longswords, which offer basically no hand protection. It is also a style with a wide historical range; swords of this general type were used from the Tudor era up into the Twentieth Century.

People who are actually knowledgeable about historical swords and swordsmanship spend a lot of time writhing in agony as they look at movies, TV shows and games depicting swords that would be completely useless in practice because of their size and blade geometry (I specifically exempt swords that were produced at Weta Workshop, such as the ones in the Lord of the Rings movies; those for the most part have realistic size and balance). People who made and used swords back in the old days had every incentive to be as economical as possible in their use of steel, both because it was expensive and because too much of it would make the weapon unwieldy. So historical swords tend to be much thinner and more flexible than the massive, over-decorated slabs used as movie props.

(To be clear, we’re writhing in agony even before the characters in those movies and TV shows actually begin fighting with those swords. Once the fighting starts, we’re writhing in agony at the unrealistic fight choreography)

Having said all of that, some historical swords were heavier than others. The general trend was for them to get lighter as the centuries passed, culminating in the nearly weightless simulators that are used in Olympic-style fencing. During the last decade, the same trend has started to play out in the world of HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts). Not all HEMA practitioners compete in tournaments. Among many who do, however, there’s a gradual shift toward lighter versions of the blades that are used to simulate longswords, broadswords, and other historical weapons.

In my talk, I’m arguing that, at least in the specific case of broadswords, you can’t reduce the weight of the weapon without changing the nature of the game; but if you embrace the weight and learn to work with it, the sword needn’t feel unduly heavy in the hand.

I’m not even going to link to the hour-and-eighteen-minute video of my punishingly obscure talk, but you can find it by searching YouTube on “swordsquatch backsword stephenson.” It’s easier to watch because I’m up on my feet walking around and so there is no leg jiggling.

Making Things

I have always been a tools geek, and have enjoyed making things. During COVID this got completely out of hand as I found myself making an armor carapace out of Kevlar for a BattleBot. This led to my acquiring a used vertical machining center and a metal lathe, among other means of production. Such tools need to be housed in suitable buildings with heavy power supplies and other amenities. Fortunately, along the way I’ve had plenty of support from family and friends who share the same interests.

This is a pretty long story with various twists and turns, including a hastily planned middle-of-the-night extraction of valuable equipment from a garage that suddenly found itself engulfed in an RV shantytown populated by fentanyl-addled arsonists and people trying to break down the back door. As of this week, however, the stuff is settled in a new location, still a little rough around the edges but much cleaner and more secure, and we have a working waterjet cutter, which is the sine qua non of a modern shop.

Something I’ve observed in other cases is that, when it comes to shops, it works to adopt an “If you build it, they will come” mentality. Trying to pitch a machine shop as a business proposition is never going to work. But if you can start to pull some tools together, somehow, some way, other people who like to build things will start to show up and begin contributing to a stone soup dynamic.

In conclusion…

So that’s the general picture of how I’ve been spending my time and why I haven’t done a lot of Substack posts in mid-2025.

When I set up this Substack I decided not to charge for any of my posts. Everything’s available for free. I did that because I didn’t want to feel any pressure to keep pumping out material to satisfy an implied obligation to paying customers. Many have decided to be paying subscribers anyway, which is warmly appreciated.

The real payoff, to the extent there is one, is that I can put more time into patiently nudging these various projects toward fruition.

‘Up with you,’ said the stranger, assisting Mr. Pickwick on to the roof with so much precipitation as to impair the gravity of that gentleman’s deportment very materially.

If you’re a fluent reader of the Dickensian style of English, these few words will conjure up a whole short film inside of your head. You might actually have to stop reading for a few moments to let that film develop and play out. And while you’re doing that you might savor the arch and clearly self-aware phrasing that Dickens is using here, which unto itself is a way of poking fun at Mr. Pickwick and his social circle.

A common bit of advice given to people who want to become writers is “show it, don’t say it.” Applied to the above scenario it would probably balloon the description to multiple pages. A “show it” writer would first have to provide a description of the stranger, emphasizing that he had a cheerful and helpful, if somewhat simple-minded disposition combined with great physical strength. Then there would have to be a blow-by-blow description of exactly how the stranger laid hands on Mr. Pickwick to “assist” him (the word “assist” all by itself would never do since it is a “say” rather than “show” kind of word). We would need a description of what specifically transpired after Mr. Pickwick had been “assisted” onto the roof, and an account of the damage inflicted on his clothing, accessories, hair, etc., all to the end of “showing” that he was comedically humiliated. A modern writer who didn’t know a lot about Victorian carriages would probably feel obligated to visit a museum, or at least look at a bunch of pictures on the Internet, to familiarize himself with what a coach roof looked like and what obstacles and hazards Mr. Pickwick might encounter along the way. Similar research would have to go into Victorian gentleman’s attire so that the writer could specify what had happened to Mr. Pickwick’s ascot, watch fob, or whatever. And at the end, it wouldn’t actually be that funny. Not funny enough to be worth spilling that much ink. It would end up on the cutting room floor.

As written, though, it works and it’s funny as hell, precisely because Dickens is just saying what happened, albeit in deliberately over-elaborate prose. He says it quickly and lets the reader play the scene out in their head.

The only catch is that you, the reader, do actually have to get the joke. Dickens, or any other writer of the “say it” school (Jane Austen comes to mind) is implicitly asking the reader to know more and to do more during the act of reading this kind of prose. It’s almost as if the reader is being enlisted as a collaborator, using their own imagination to fill in details that are merely implied in the words of the book.

In modern English the word “precipitation” only appears in weather forecasts. If you do a lot of reading you might encounter the word “precipitous” meaning something that is steep or sudden. Dickens is using “precipitation” in sense II.3.b of the Oxford English Dictionary, meaning “Unduly hurried action; inconsiderate haste; rash rapidity” whose most recent citation is 1870. Very few readers are going to put The Pickwick Papers down and look that word up in a dictionary. Doing so wouldn’t make the sentence funny. But if you’ve encountered “precipitation” and related words over the course of wide reading, and if you’re doing the mental work of conjuring up this little mental movie in your head, you can work it out from the context.

Not everyone is equipped to do this. So one could make the argument that the audience for such books is an educated elite. But Dickens and other writers of his era were straight-up mass market culture, and a vast audience continues to read the works of Jane Austen today. I think that’s because the knack of reading and enjoying this kind of prose is learnable, and you don’t have to learn it through formal education. Readers can and do self-educate. Making that more rewarding and more appealing is that this style of storytelling can move the plot along much more rapidly than “show it” can ever do.

This is a cleaned-up version of a brief talk I gave at a meeting on 18 June 2025: the “Ship Your Research Impact Summit” organized by the Laude Institute in San Francisco. The audience was mostly AI researchers, many of whom had one foot in academia and one in the startup world. Thanks to Andy Konwinski and the rest of the Laude Institute crew for inviting me.

The Primer

The most relevant aspect of my work to the theme of this meeting was my novel The Diamond Age, which was published about thirty years ago. At the beginning of this book we see a conversation between Lord Finkle-McGraw, who is an Equity Lord in a futuristic neo-Victorian society, and John Hackworth, an engineer who works in one of his companies.

Finkle-McGraw is a classic founder. He didn’t come from a privileged background, except insofar as having a stable family and a decent basic education confers privilege. But when he was young he was brilliant, ambitious, hard-working, and had a vision. He built that into something valuable and as a result became rich and powerful. As so often happens, he used his money to make life good for his children by sending them to the right schools, connecting them to the right people, and so on.

He wasn’t entirely happy with the results. His kids didn’t end up having the traits that had made him successful. He suspects it’s because they didn’t have to work hard and overcome obstacles. Now he has a granddaughter. He knows that the parents are going to raise this girl in the same way, with the same results. He can’t interfere in a heavy-handed way. But the parents can’t possibly object if he gives his granddaughter an educational book. So he commissions Hackworth to make the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an interactive book that will adapt as the user grows and learns. This book is powered by molecular nanotechnology, but any present-day reader will immediately recognize it as an AI system.

As the plot unfolds, three copies of the Primer are made and bestowed on girls from very different backgrounds. In two cases the result is a sort of fizzle. The Primer works as it’s supposed to for a while, but these girls lose interest and set it aside. The third copy falls into the hands of a girl from an abusive and underprivileged background, and it ends up giving her close to superhuman abilities.

Thirty years on, I think I have enough distance on this to grade my performance. I’m happy with the fact that the Primer, as described in the novel, doesn’t invariably produce great results. That seems like a measured and realistic outcome. Nevertheless it’s clear that when I wrote this thing I was influenced by a strain of techno-utopian thinking that was widespread in the mid-1990s, when the Internet was first becoming available to a mass audience. In those days, a lot of people, myself included, assumed that making all the world’s knowledge available to everyone would unlock vast stores of pent-up human potential.

That promise actually did come true to some degree. It’s unquestionably the case that anyone with an Internet connection can now learn things that they could not have had access to before. But as we now know, many people would rather watch TikTok videos eight hours a day. And many who do use the Internet to “do research” and “educate” themselves are “learning” how Ivermectin cures COVID, the sky is full of chemtrails spewed out by specially equipped planes, and vaccinations plant microchips in your body.

AI and Education

Now the cycle of enthusiasm and disillusionment is repeating itself with AI. This time, though, it’s happening a lot faster, because we all have a kind of preloaded cynicism about what new technology can and can’t do for us. This is happening on many fronts, but I’m going to confine myself here to education.

I won’t attempt to provide an account of how the use of ChatGPT and other systems has affected the education system, because that is being exhaustively discussed elsewhere. I’ve found the teachers subreddit to be particularly informative, since it’s populated by people who actually have boots on the ground, as it were, working in classrooms every day. Here’s a representative post on this topic. But discussion of this is all over the place now. The gist of it is that the system we’ve traditionally used for evaluating students’ performance - homework and tests - just happens to be exquisitely vulnerable to being hacked by students who simply use conversational AI systems to do all the work for them. And they are doing so on a massive scale, to the point where conventional education has essentially stopped functioning. The only way to fairly evaluate how much a student has learned now is by marching them into a classroom with no electronics, handing them a pencil and a blank blue book, and assigning them an essay to write or a math problem to solve. Even this is impractical given that many students never really learned to write by hand. And that is setting aside the greatly increased burden of work that it would impose on already stressed and underpaid teachers.

During the brief time that I was preparing this talk, two relevant articles came to my attention. One is Your Brain on ChatGPT, a 206-page research paper out of MIT in which researchers hooked students up to EEGs and had them write an essay. They were divided into three groups: the LLM group, which was allowed to use conversational AI. The Search Engine group, which was allowed to Google things. And the Brain-only group, which did not have access to any such tools. The results weren’t terribly surprising: the people in the Brain-only group showed a lot more cerebral activity. Even though these results might have been predicted, it’s valuable to see hard data.

The second article was a piece in the New York Times describing an initiative by OpenAI to create an AI-driven “study buddy” that would become integrated into university education. It’s not really clear how this would work. The article is careful to mention possible ways it could go wrong. The fear raised by this is that it would just be the same broken, brain-stunting state of affairs we have now, overlaid with a thick glaze of PR. The hope, however, is that it would leapfrog our current, hopelessly out of date system for evaluating student performance.

If that hope is well founded, what would such a system look like?

This question sent me down a rabbit hole on the topic of self-reliance. After all, if AI-driven education does nothing more than make students even more reliant on AI, then it’s not education at all. It’s just a vocational education program teaching them how to be of service to AIs. The euphemism for this role is “prompt engineer” which seems to be a way of suggesting that people who feed inputs to AIs are achieving something that should be valorized to the same degree as designing airplanes and building bridges.

If such a system actually did its job it would have the paradoxical effect of making students less, rather than more, reliant on the use of AI technology.

Self-Reliance

I had the idea of turning to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance, which had a big influence on me when I was fresh out of college. In those days I pored over this essay, notebook in hand, and copied out several passages. I still have that old notebook. The essay contains a few bangers, the best known of which is “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

One line that I memorized at the time is “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

And another one that I passed over at the time, but that seems painfully relevant to much Internet discourse, is “If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.” Followed up a few paragraphs later by “Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.”

My thought last week was that Self-Reliance might contain some wisdom applicable to the challenge of how to educate people in the modern world to rely upon their own knowledge and skill set rather than using AI all the time.

Reader, I did not find anything like that upon re-reading this essay. More the opposite. The overall drift of what Emerson is saying here—and he says it over and over—is that each mind is uniquely positioned to see certain insights. The self-reliant person shouldn’t ignore those merely because they don’t match the conventional wisdom. “The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray…God will not have his work made manifest by cowards….He who would gather immortal palms (i.e. be honored for great achievements) must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

That is all intoxicating stuff for a smart young man who styles himself as a free thinker and nonconformist, which is why, when I was in my early twenties, I inhaled it like fentanyl fumes off hot foil. But during the same years as I was poring over this essay and jotting down quotes in my notebook, I was writing by far the worst novel I have ever written—a book that has never been published and never should be.

Emerson grew up in Boston, attended Boston Latin and Harvard, then traveled around Europe and visited England where he hung out with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. His brain was preloaded with the best knowledge base that could possibly have been given a young person of that era. He’d been trained to think systematically and rigorously and to express himself with great fluency in English and probably Latin and other languages as well.

So, yes, when an idea popped into Emerson’s head, chances are it was a pretty damned good one. His own advice about self-reliance was actually worth taking in his own case. And I’d guess that the audience for this essay was similarly well educated. By the time any young person happened upon Self-Reliance, they were probably 99% of the way to being an intellectually mature, highly capable person, and just wanted a bit of self confidence to follow through on good ideas that were coming into their heads—as a result of being that well educated and trained.

When the same advice falls on the ears of people who are not as well informed and not as good at thinking systematically, though, it’s rubbish.

When I first read Self-Reliance, only a few years had passed since the premier of the first Star Wars movie. There’s a pivotal moment in that film when Luke Skywalker is piloting his fighter through the trench on the Death Star, making his bombing run against impossible odds, and he hears Obi-Wan Kenobi’s voice in his head telling him to use the Force. Luke switches off his targeting computer to the consternation of the brass in the ops center. We all know the outcome. It’s a great moment in cinema, and it perfectly encapsulates a certain way of thinking emblematic of the 1970s late hippie scene: the seductive proposition that no one needs a targeting computer, that all we need to do is trust our feelings. Who doesn’t love to hear that? I loved hearing it from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and spent a couple of years of my life building a terrible novel on that foundation.

Grit

So Self-Reliance didn’t get me any closer to answering the question of how AI could improve education—how we could actually make students self-reliant, as opposed to AI-reliant. I got on the plane to San Francisco intending to throw this out as an open question for the AI researchers and entrepeneurs at the Laude Institute meeting. A challenge for them to address, as opposed to a pat solution that I would serve up. Some would call it a cop out.

Shortly before the plane started its descent into SFO, I was browsing Substack and found a post that Niall Ferguson had just put up. Niall starts by quoting the exact conversation from The Diamond Age that I alluded to above and then describing his own vision for how education in the age of AI might work. I won’t recount it in detail since all you have to do is click on the link. Since it literally fell into my lap just before I returned my tray table to its upright and locked position, I plugged it in my talk at Laude and I’m plugging it here. The gist of it is that students ought to spend a substantial part of each day in an electronics-free environment reading books and interacting directly with teachers and fellow students (“the Cloister”) and then, at other times, avail themselves of everything that AI and the Internet have to offer (“the Starship”).

It seems to me that this general plan would work if it could be implemented. But why would it work? What’s the essential skill that students need to be learning, such that when they get out of school they are more capable humans than when they went in?

Going back to that fictional conversation in The Diamond Age, I think that the answer—the thing that Finkle-McGraw acquired during his upbringing, that he failed to confer on his children, and that he wants to give his granddaughter—isn’t simply a body of knowledge to be memorized or a set of skills to be mastered. It’s a stance. A stance from which to address the world and all its challenges. A stance built on self-confidence and resilience: the conviction that one has a fighting chance to overcome or circumvent whatever obstacles the world throws in one’s path. The way you acquire it is by trying, and sometimes failing, to do difficult things. It can be discouraging, but if you have good mentors, and if you’re collaborating with friends who are in the same boat, you can find ways to succeed, and develop a knack for it. That’s true self-reliance.

From that standpoint, the most insidious thing about AI is that it solves problems for the user and never places them in a situation where they have to overcome failure. Problems might get solved in the end, which sounds good, but the “prompt engineers” who cajoled the AIs into solving them don’t understand how those solutions were produced, since it all happened inside a black box, and didn’t acquire the kind of self-reliance that matters.

All of that is a natural outcome of an AI industry that demonstrates its usefulness, and raises funds, by showing that it can solve problems. There’s no reason in principle why AI couldn’t be turned to a different problem: making students more self-reliant. The paradox is that you learn self-reliance through failure, and AI tools construe failure as a malfunction. AI’s purpose, as currently configured, is to make things easy for humans. And humans who’ve had it easy from birth don’t have the grit to deal with challenges.

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Last week I participated in a panel discussion on AI as part of a private event in New Zealand. The organizers asked me to kick it off by talking for ten minutes, so I pulled together a few ideas on the topic, which I’m going to present in lightly edited form here. The organizers specifically wanted to think in big-picture terms so as to avoid getting fixated on rapidly changing current events, and I think that this reflects that. The objective was to get participants thinking and talking, so I tried to present one or two notions that might be thought-provoking rather than trying to make some kind of heavy ex cathedra statement—which I’m not really qualified to do anyway.

The event was held under the Chatham House Rule, so I’m free to repeat what I said but not to divulge the identities of other participants or to repeat what they said.

The Opening Remarks

For the average person, AI is synonymous with large language models that have become available in the last couple of years through easy-to-use prompt-based interfaces. These have given non-technical users the ability to generate texts, images, and even movies that would have been beyond their reach before. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they’d have had to actually learn how to write, paint, or direct films in order to produce anything of the kind. I see parallels between these and the hydrogen bomb tests that were conducted in your1 back yard during the 1950s. The advent of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki came as a complete surprise to the average person. In fact, though, the neutron had been discovered in 1932 and work had been underway for decades to learn more about nuclear processes and find useful applications, some of which had already become available. The eruption onto the scene of nuclear bombs suddenly focused the world’s attention on this hitherto obscure scientific discipline and made physicists into important people with weighty responsibilities. The arms race that followed, in which the United States and the USSR spent billions trying to out-do each other in the obliteration of South Pacific atolls, made it seem as if these spectacular explosions were the only thing one could actually do with nuclear science. But looking at those black-and-white images of mushroom clouds over the Pacific, ordinary people might have reflected that some of the earlier and more mundane applications, such as radium watch dials that enabled you to tell what time it was in the dark, x-rays for diagnosing ailments without surgery, and treatments for cancer, seemed a lot more useful and a lot less threatening. Likewise today a graphic artist who is faced with the prospect of his or her career being obliterated under an AI mushroom cloud might take a dim view of such technologies, without perhaps being aware that AI can be used in less obvious but more beneficial ways.

Maybe a useful way to think about what it would be like to coexist in a world that includes intelligences that aren’t human is to consider the fact that we’ve been doing exactly that for long as we’ve existed, because we live among animals. Animals have intelligences of many different kinds. We’re used to thinking of them as being less intelligent than we are, and that’s usually not wrong, but it might be better to think of them as having different sorts of intelligence, because they’ve evolved to do different things. We know for example that crows and ravens are unbelievably intelligent considering how physically small their brains are compared to ours. Dragonflies have been around for hundreds of millions of years and are exquisitely highly evolved to carry out their primary function of eating other bugs. Sheepdogs can herd sheep better than any human. Bats can do something that we can’t even begin to understand, which is to see with their ears in the dark. And so on.

I can think of three axes along which we might plot these intelligences. One is how much we matter to them. At one extreme we might put dragonflies, which probably don’t even know that we exist. A dragonfly can see a human if one happens to be nearby, but it probably looks to them as a cloud formation in the sky looks to us: something extremely large and slow-moving and usually too far away to matter. Creatures that live in the deep ocean, even if they’re highly intelligent, such as octopi, probably go their whole lives without coming within miles of a human being. Midway along this axis would be wild animals, such as crows and ravens, who are obviously capable of recognizing humans, not just as a species but as individuals, and seem to know something about us. Moving on from there we have domesticated animals. We matter a lot to cows and sheep since they depend on us for food and protection. Nevertheless, they don’t live with us, and some of them, such as horses, can actually survive in the wild after jumping the fence. Some breeds of of dogs can also survive without us if they have to. Finally we have obligate domestic animals such as lapdogs that wouldn’t survive for ten minutes in the wild.

A second axis is to what degree these animals have a theory of the human mind. How much do they know about what is going on in our minds? Consider for example wolves vs. domesticated dogs. These are almost identical in terms of their DNA and have many social behaviors in common, but wolves don’t understand humans as anything other than edible but potentially dangerous animals. Dogs understand us quite well however, and some breeds, particularly once they’ve been trained, can be almost painfully tuned in to the emotional states and the desires of humans.

The third axis is how dangerous they are. What kind of agency does the animal have to inflict harm on human beings? Big predators are obviously capable of killing humans with little difficulty. But it’s not all about fangs and claws. A horse for example can inadvertently maim or kill by smashing a human against a wall or a tree trunk, just because it’s very big and strong. Swarming animals can kill by inflicting small amounts of damage in large numbers.

It hasn’t always been a cakewalk, but we’ve been able to establish a stable position in the ecosystem despite sharing it with all of these different kinds of intelligences. Perhaps this can provide us with a framework for imagining what a future might look like in which we co-exist with AIs. Until now, most people’s interactions with AIs have been through text-based models such as ChatGPT, which are similar to lapdogs in that they are acutely tuned in to humans and basically exist to make life easier for us. Within the last week one such model has come under heavy criticism for being nauseatingly sycophantic towards its users. In my opinion as someone who currently uses various AI-enhanced software packages in an active project, these are the least interesting AIs. More interesting and more important in the long run will be AIs that are like sheepdogs, in that they do useful things for us that we can’t do ourselves. But I think that we’ll also have AIs that are like ravens, in that they are aware of us but basically don’t care about us, and ones like dragonflies that don’t even know we exist. What people worry about is that we’ll somehow end up with AIs that can hurt us, perhaps inadvertently like horses, or deliberately like bears, or without even knowing we exist, like hornets driven by pheromones into a stinging frenzy.

I am hoping that even in the case of such dangerous AIs we can still derive some hope from the natural world, where competition prevents any one species from establishing complete dominance. Even T. Rex had to worry about getting gored in the belly by Triceratops, and probably had to contend with all kinds of parasites, infections, and resource shortages. By training AIs to fight and defeat other AIs we can perhaps preserve a healthy balance in the new ecosystem. If I had time to do it and if I knew more about how AIs work, I’d be putting my energies into building AIs whose sole purpose was to predate upon existing AI models by using every conceivable strategy to feed bogus data into them, interrupt their power supplies, discourage investors, and otherwise interfere with their operations. Not out of malicious intent per se but just from a general belief that everything should have to compete, and that competition within a diverse ecosystem produces a healthier result in the long run than raising a potential superpredator in a hermetically sealed petri dish where its every need is catered to.

That’s probably not a strategy that can be implemented by anyone in this room, however. What are some practical steps that could be taken by policy makers in the near term?

Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation. I first heard that quote twenty years ago from a computer scientist at Stanford who was addressing a room full of colleagues—all highly educated, technically proficient, motivated experts who well understood the import of McLuhan’s warning and who probably thought about it often, as I have done, whenever they subsequently adopted some new labor-saving technology. Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned. I follow conversations among professional educators who all report the same phenomenon, which is that their students use ChatGPT for everything, and in consequence learn nothing. We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down. Earlier I spoke somewhat derisively of lapdogs. We might ask ourselves who is really the lapdog in a world full of powerful AIs.

To me this seems like a downside of AI that is easy to understand, easy to measure, with immediate effects, that could be counteracted tomorrow through simple interventions such as requiring students to take examinations in supervised classrooms, writing answers out by hand on blank paper. We know this is possible because it’s how all examinations used to be taken. No new technology is required, nothing stands in the way of implementation other than institutional inertia, and, I’m afraid, the unwillingness of parents to see their children seriously challenged. In the scenario I mentioned before, where humans become part of a stable but competitive ecosystem populated by intelligences of various kinds, one thing we humans must do is become fit competitors ourselves. And when the competition is in the realm of intelligence, that means preserving and advancing our own intelligence by holding at arms length seductive augmentations in order to avoid suffering the amputations that are their price.

Subsequent Discussion

During the panel discussion that followed I don’t think I contributed anything earth-shaking. One remark that seemed to get people’s attention was a little digression into the topic of eyelash mites. You might not be aware of it, but you have little mites living at the base of your eyelashes. They live off of dead skin cells. As such they generally don’t inflict any damage, and might have slightly beneficial effects. Most people don’t even know that they exist—which is part of the point I was trying to make. The mites, for their part, don’t know that humans exist. They just “know” that food, in the form of dead skin, just magically shows up in their environment all the time. All they have to do is eat it and continue living their best lives as eyelash mites. Presumably all of this came about as the end result of millions of years’ natural selection. The ancestors of these eyelash mites must have been independent organisms at some point in the distant past. Now the mites and the humans have found a modus vivendi that works so well for both of them that neither is even aware of the other’s existence. If AIs are all they’re cracked up to be by their most fervent believers, this seems like a possible model for where humans might end up: not just subsisting, but thriving, on byproducts produced and discarded in microscopic quantities as part of the routine operations of infinitely smarter and more powerful AIs.

The first three authors, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, and Ellis Amdur, all have independent careers of their own writing solo books, but I have had the pleasure of working with them on collaborative projects. The fourth, George Dyson, is an old friend who along with me and a few others was one of the first people involved with Blue Origin circa 2000.

Prince of Clay by Joseph Brassey

I first met Joe through HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) but soon stumbled upon some fiction he’d posted somewhere. From this it was obvious that he was a gifted writer. One thing led to another and we ended up working together, along with several others, on a historical fiction project called The Mongoliad which after many colorful twists and turns ended up being published by Amazon’s fledgling fiction imprint and spawning a number of sequels and graphic novels. Later Joe co-authored one of those sequels, Katabasis, but by that point his solo career was launched and he was writing novels set in an original fantasy universe called The Drifting Lands. Prince of Clay is the third book in that series, of which I’ve been a fan since the beginning. If you would like to dive into a highly original fantasy trilogy, now’s the moment to pick up Prince of Clay and its predecessor volumes Skyfarer and Dragon Road.

Boy by Nicole Galland

I met Nicole Galland a long time ago through our mutual agent, Liz Darhansoff. The quality of her historical fiction, beginning with The Fool’s Tale, was so evident that when we launched the Mongoliad project it was obvious to me that we had to invite her along. She ended up becoming a treasured collaborator and, like Joe, later wrote a sequel set in that world. Subsequently, Nicki and I had a great deal of fun co-writing The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. She then solo-wrote a sequel called Master of the Revels. Now, with Boy, she’s back in her favorite fictional stomping ground of Shakespeare’s London. I’m still reading it but was drawn into the story from the first page—as usual for a book by Nicki.

Little Bird & the Tiger by Ellis Amdur

Ellis Amdur has lived a dual life as a martial artist and as an expert on crisis intervention and hostage negotiation. In both fields he has published several influential books. Many in the martial arts world—both Western and Eastern—have the utmost respect for his books Old School and Dueling with O-sensei. In more recent years he has begun to write fiction. Along with Charles Mann and Mark Teppo, he and I co-wrote a graphic novel called Cimarronin, which is set in the same fictional universe as the Mongoliad series. Now he has published Little Bird & the Tiger which is a tale of martial artists, male and female, in Japan during the latter half of the nineteenth century—an era when the martial arts traditions we all know from samurai movies are still extant, but undergoing rapid mutation as Japan opens to the West and begins to lay the groundwork for imperialist expansion into China and Manchuria. These are fictionalized accounts of real people who lived lives so incredible that many readers would not believe in these tales if they were pure inventions of the author.

Project Orion (new expanded edition) by George Dyson

George Dyson and I worked together at Blue Operations LLC, the entity that later turned into Blue Origin, during its very early days starting around 1999. The original version of his book Project Orion came out during that era and was a sensation for all of us who were interested in thinking about alternatives to chemical rockets as a way of getting things into orbit. To be clear, no one at Blue ever wanted to use atomic bombs to propel spaceships—that being the basic idea behind Orion—but we were all inspired by the ambition and scope of the Orion project. Now, 23 years later, George has just released an expanded edition of the book. As he told me in an email, “it will set the record straight, and remain available. All sources are now referenced and I went back through the raw material and gave precise dates for every quotation in the text. So it’s sort of the director’s cut." This edition has 98 illustrations, up from 39 in the original, and all of them are utterly fascinating. If you never saw the 2002 edition, you missed an incredible story, and if you did read it, I suspect you’ll find the expanded edition worth having just because of the new material.

A cool quote from the OED

In my previous post I talked about spelunking through the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “wrong” to see how the usage of that word had developed down through the ages.

Embedded in that definition was a citation that caught my eye. But first I need to point out that “wrong” has many shades of meaning. The particular one to which the following quote applies is: “Not in consonance with facts or truth; incorrect, false, mistaken.” And one of the oldest, and certainly pithiest, examples of this usage is cited as follows:

1528 MORE Dyaloge III. Wks 210/1 Our hart euer thinketh the judgement wrong, that wringeth us to the worse.

Now, that one's a beauty because it has one foot in the more ancient meaning of the word, and one in the modern. “Wringeth us to the worse” goes to the older, bending or twisting sense of the word, and means turning or wrenching us off course into a less desirable outcome. “The judgement wrong” refers to an error, a bad call. How do we discern between a right and wrong judgment? Our heart does it (the author, writing in 1528, doesn't draw modern distinctions between the heart and the brain). Evaluating a particular judgment, our heart thinks that it's wrong if its result is that our fate is turned or wrung in a bad direction.

The author is clearly engaging in wordplay here; he knows the etymology of this word. He’s amusing himself, and perhaps his more erudite readers, with the neat turn of phrase. Thanks to the OED, we less erudite moderns can get the joke too.

I was so curious about the context of this passage that I began tracking it down in the expectation that it might make for an interesting footnote. Instead I fell into a substantial rabbit hole.

The Rabbit Hole

In the OED, citations are, of necessity, very terse. Otherwise it would be even longer than 20 volumes. So all I knew at first was that the author was someone named More—a reasonably common English name.

The OED's Bibliography listed the full citation:

A Dyaloge wherin be treatyd dyvers maters as of the veneration and worshyp of ymagys etc. ( = A dialoge concerning heresyes) 1528 Sir Thomas More

So it was none other than the original Man for All Seasons, the author of Utopia, High Steward of both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, Lord Chancellor, scourge of heretics, [much later] both a Catholic saint and a Hero of the Russian Revolution, advisor to King Henry VIII, and—in a turnaround reminiscent of the First Trump Administration—publicly beheaded on Tower Hill when he refused to go along with the King's irregular marriage to Anne Boleyn.

“A Dyaloge Wherin be Treatyd Dyvers Maters” was published in London in 1529 (not 1528 as the OED has it). This is an astonishingly obscure book. Its existence is not mentioned in either More's reasonably thorough Wikipedia entry or his even longer Encyclopedia Britannica biography. I was not able to find an electronic copy on the Internet, which is surprising given the author's prominence.

I was, however, able to purchase, for a cool $150, a physical copy. This is not a modern transcription but a facsimile of the copy in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It's printed in the blackletter typeface that was common at the time. Obviously, the spelling is half a millennium out of date. Moreover, it has a number of typographical pecularities that make it heavy sledding for the modern reader. The exact page number isn't listed in the OED—this book doesn't even have page numbers—so I had to read through most of it to find the actual quote. And having found it, I wanted to get a better understanding of the context in which More was saying it.

I expected that this would be a simple matter of translating the preceding couple of paragraphs into modern English. I was badly wrong. The context turns out to be pretty vast.

The Dyaloge

The overall conceit of Dyaloge—which is internally divided into four Books—is that More is engaging in a debate with an anonymous correspondent. Or, to be precise with a friend of the correspondent—referred to as “your friend”—who is arguing with More about (according to the title page) “the veneration and worship of images and relics, praying to saints, going on pilgrimage…With many other things touching the pestilent sect of Luther and Tyndale, by the one bygone in Saxony and by the other labored to be brought in to England.”

The book is framed as an extended point/counterpoint exchange between More and “your friend.” We never hear directly from “your friend,” but More summarizes each of the friend's points before serving up a withering counter-argument. It all seems a little like the common social media joke “asking for a friend.” More seems to be offering plausible deniability to whomever he's arguing with.

Who is “your friend?” Mention is made of a messenger who is going back and forth between wherever More is and “the university,” so we can guess that the person More is arguing with is at Oxford or Cambridge.

It's tempting to identify this group with a circle at Cambridge mentioned in the Wikipedia article about the English Reformation, from which I quote: “a group of reform-minded university students that met at the White Horse tavern from the mid-1520s, known by the moniker ‘Little Germany’.”

In this case “Germany” would be a reference to Martin Luther, he of the “pestilent sect” called out on the title page. Luther had authored his 95 Theses only about ten years earlier, in 1517, and had been excommunicated in 1521.

The Little Germany group at Cambridge included several future Protestant martyrs.

The Dyaloge creates serious challenges for anyone who is inclined to take an apologetic or sympathetic position vis-a-vis Saint Thomas More, humanist and intellectual. There's a reason it's obscure: it makes Thomas More look like a terrible human being. Anyone who wants to make More look good would want to bury this book. The best you can say about him is that he has a way with words, and he's prolific. But these dialogues most consist of him explaining, with forced patience, to an obvious straw man, that the Roman Catholic Church is infallible, that judges—civil or ecclesiastical—are wise and incorruptible, and that anyone who persistently argues to the contrary is either childish, or so deeply steeped in heresy that burning them alive in public is a perfectly reasonable corrective measure.

Mention is made (approvingly) of “the burnyng of the new testament” (presumably Tyndale's) and the forbidding of the reading of Luther's books.

“And finally touching the burning of heretics, there were some that thought the clergy therein far out of right order of charity,” More says.

He isn't being arch or funny there, he seems genuinely bemused that the college kids consider setting humans on fire to be an uncharitable way for clergymen to behave.

The dialog ranges far and wide, but in the first part of Book 3 they keep circling back to an individual, who is never named, but is referred to as “the man we now talk of,” “the person abjured,” “the man we speak of which was abjured,” and so on. He was called “a good man and very devout.” But, in some way never explained, “superstitious fear and scrupulosity...drove him to the delight of such liberty as brought him to the contempt of the good devout things used commonly in Christ's church.”

It is all maddeningly vague. Reading between the lines, we can infer that the man in question was a priest gone wrong. He both spoke and wrote certain opinions that were heretical. He belonged to “that sect,” which is never mentioned by name, but is “false.”

“For he forthwith forsook them and ever before his judges he confessed from the beginning that the matters were plain false heresies and the holders therewith hereticks, saying for himself that he never preached them.”

In other words, this man broke down under interrogation—presumably including torture—and claimed that he never actually believed in these heresies.

But according to More, this man “used among some of that sect to say, ‘let us preach and set forth our way. And if we be accused, let us say we said not so, and yet some of them shall we win away the while.’”

In other words, it was all part of the heretics' pre-arranged plan that if they got caught and interrogated by the authorities, they would claim that they had never preached any heretical doctrine. But in the meantime they might have converted a few other persons to their heretical views.

“I assure you,” More continues, “to my mind his manner in this matter before his judges was as consonant as could be to that intent and purpose.” He's talking about that pre-arranged plan of claiming innocence when caught and interrogated.

So, More is telling us that he was personally present at the man's trial; that he witnessed the man pleading innocence; but he saw through the deception.

Based on circumstantial evidence, it would seem that the man in question was one Thomas Hitton. And by “circumstantial evidence” I refer to the fact that Thomas Hitton was the only heretic burned in the year 1529. Early that year—the year that More's book was published, and the year More become Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor—Hitton had been arrested at Gravesend. Before then he had been in exile along with other English Protestants in the Low Countries. He had crossed over to England on a clandestine mission related to smuggling unauthorized translations of the New Testament. After a series of interrogations he was burned at the stake.

No other Protestant “heretic” that I can find in the historical record matches this chronology so well, and so I can only assume that More is writing this Dialog in an effort to sway the opinions of heresy-curious academics such as the White Horse Tavern “Little Germany” crowd. Or, barring that, to publicly set forth his view on why they are in the wrong.

So, let's sum up the situation as far as I can reconstruct it.

More is a devout, sincere Catholic who, earlier in his life, came this close to becoming a Carthusian monk, but instead went into the legal profession. As a matter of fact, he's so sincere that six years from now he's going to have his head chopped off because he won't support an un-Catholic royal marriage.

At the same time, he's friends with people like Erasmus, who wants to reform the Catholic Church from within. And apparently he's also in communication with the White Horse Tavern crowd at Cambridge, or people like them. He thinks they are wrong, but persuadable.

In 1528 or 9, when he's writing this Dyaloge, he's on the threshold of being Lord Chancellor. Or it may have happened already; it all depends on specific dates of when he wrote the Dyaloge. Over the course of 1529, Cardinal Wolsey, his predecessor, was getting into trouble with Henry VIII and at some point was clearly on his way out. So even if More, in the Dyaloge, isn't yet writing in his official capacity as Lord Chancellor, he's almost certainly writing as one who's in the running to get the job soon.

By his own admission in these pages, he has been present at the interrogation, by a Church court, of the heretic Thomas Hitton. This was part of a legal proceeding that led to Hitton's being burned at the stake.

More is taking time out from what is probably a busy schedule to write a lengthy and abstruse Dyaloge to a quasi-imaginary friend at Cambridge or Oxford who seems to be exhibiting sympathy for the budding English Reformation and who takes a dim view of Churchmen burning heretics.

Who is More writing this for? Definitely not a novelist 500 years in the future who is curious about the etymology of “wrong.” This is for a small and select audience, many of whom More probably knows by name. The population of England and Wales at this point is maybe three and a half million: a good-sized city in the United States today. Of those, only a small percentage can read. Those people—the literate nobles, clergy, and city dwellers—are More's only possible audience for this Dyaloge. The whole vibe of the document is precious, coy, cliquish. Clearly, everyone who reads it knows exactly who “the man we now talk of” is. It's not even necessary to mention his name; to do so would just be tacky. The person More's arguing with is addressed through multiple layers of indirection. More doesn't talk to his counterpart straight out. Instead there's an unidentified “messenger” who goes back and forth between More and his contact at “the university” where the contact has been in touch with “your friend.” Again, it all reeks of some kind of controversy within an in-group of people who all know each other but don't want to name names.

More is staking out a position here. If he's not already Lord Chancellor, he suspects he’s likely to be soon. The Protestant Reformation is creating trouble all over the place. He knows which side he's on. The King of England is a Trumpian figure. More works for him as an attack dog going after the likes of Martin Luther. He's a John Bolton type: a sincere true believer who gets recruited because he's passionate about what he believes. But, precisely because he's more sincere than his boss, it's not going to end well.

Now a priest-turned-heretic has been arrested, probably tortured—possibly while More was nearby—and convicted, leading to the first burning at the stake of an English Reformation heretic. Several more such burnings will come soon, all of them under More's jurisdiction as Lord Chancellor. More has to stake out a position, and he has to do so “publicly” where the “public” in this case is a few thousand literate Englishmen who actually care about such things.

This all gets us to the threshold of Chapter 3, which, on the surface, is mostly about judicial proceedings. A little prologue—what we would now call a TL;DR—says “The author [More] shows that men ought not to be light in mistrusting of any judgment given in the court (i.e. they should not be quick to assume that a court's judgments are false). And that much less ought any man to be bold in the reproving of a common law. And he shows also the cause why that the law admitteth more slight witness in heinous criminal causes than in slighter matters of covenants or contracts.”

The chapter has to be read on two levels. It's about judges, witnesses, evidence, the written law, and how courts and justice ought to work in general. But it's also specifically about the case of the doomed heretic I'm thinking is Thomas Hitton.

In this chapter “your friend” is expressing doubt that “the man we now talk of”—whom he apparently holds in high personal regard—was righteously convicted. “Your friend” complains that the convicted man is virtuous and decent.

More replies that even if “your friend” has a high opinion of the convicted man's virtue, that doesn't give just cause to doubt the honesty of the judge. More goes on to point out that judges are chosen for their impartiality and that they don't have a financial stake in the outcome of cases and so it's unfair to doubt their judgments unless you have “plain and sure information” that the judgment is wrong.

Which is fair enough, as far as it goes; character witnesses don't pull a lot of weight, in court, if the evidence points toward guilt.

Here’s a scan of the section in question with the relevant quote highlighted. Following that is my attempt to transliterate it into modern spelling.

“And yet is it as Aristotle saith well done indeed to make the laws so sufficient that as few things as may shall remain and be left to the discretion of the judge [illegible] that the common laws be constantly made by many more that are the particular judges and also many such as are as wise as judges. And over that the laws be to the judges a sure and substantial shield to defend and keep them from the hatred and obloquy that else would follow their sentence on the one side or the other, were their judgement never so wise. For men be so partial always to themselves that our heart ever thinketh the judgement wrong that wryngeth us to the worse. For be it never so right, all reckon we wrong whereof we feel harm. But yet of all things specially the law should best content us for that it is farthest out of all cause of such suspicion. For whereas a judge medleth with a matter present and persons who he sees and knows whereby there may perchance favor, hatred, hope or dread, pity, cruelty, mede, request, or some other affection incline him to mis-order himself in the matter, the laws always be made for the punishment of things only that are yet to come, and who shall fall in that peril the makers cannot tell: haply their foes, haply their friends, (and as men’s manners be mutable) peradventure themselves. For which cause the makers of the law made by the people in causes criminal can be but indifferent.”

It's easy to read these words as the abstract, philosophical musings of a bien-pensant humanist—the proto-Communist author of Utopia who later became a Catholic saint. But in the same year that the above words were printed, their author become Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor—the highest judicial post in England and Wales. During Thomas More’s chancellorship, six Protestants were burned at the stake for the crime of heresy. And this is not just coincidental. More by this point was an inveterate heretic-fighter who had personally assisted Henry VIII in writing a polemic aimed at Martin Luther. Luther’s response had then triggered what we would now call a flame war, with More writing amazingly scatological, abusive and threatening attacks on Luther under an assumed name, just like a modern-day Redditor. Earlier in “A Dyaloge,” More talks at length about his Protestant-fighting efforts. So, his words in the above passage have to be read both as a general, abstract statement about the importance of a clear and specific legal code to the maintenance of a fair and trusted judiciary, and a way of preparing himself to hear the screams of heretics dying at the stake as punishment for their thought crimes. More believes in absolute right and wrong strongly enough to see people burned alive for it. But being who he is, he needs a theory of right and wrong that’s robust enough to back that up.

To reference a common Internet meme: that escalated quickly. All I wanted was to track down a particularly delicious play on “wrong” and “wring” cited in the OED, and in no time I found myself embroiled in a minor detective story that completely destroyed any illusions I might ever have entertained about the character of Thomas More. He was a monster. To be clear, I am not one of those who likes to hold historical persons to modern standards. But by his own admission in Dyaloge, More was in communication with peers at Oxford or Cambridge who were expressing (to put it mildly) reservations about the practice of burning thought criminals alive, and questioning whether the Church was infallible. He could have simply agreed with them. Instead he hardened his heart and made a career of setting people on fire.

More's authoritarian surrender

Thomas More was as intellectually gifted as anyone who ever lived. It's not like he was worried that the conversation was getting over his head. There was no argument he wasn't smart enough to follow, no debater who could outscore him on points. But in 1529 he's been shouldering serious real-world responsibilities for a while, and he's getting ready to become the chief of the British judiciary. I think he has made an internal decision: these religious debates are fine for academics, but I've got a job to do, decisions to make, actions to take, and so it all has to be reduced to simple terms that we must all abide by.

Why does he make the decision that he does, though? The picture that comes through clearly in Dyaloge is of a brilliant and capable man who has made a choice to debase himself at the altar of the Roman Catholic Church. We know that he was in the habit of wearing a hair shirt. This is a term that nowadays is only used in a metaphorical sense. Thomas More was doing it for real. He could afford comfortable clothes made of good fabric. But underneath those, against his skin, he chose to wear rough, itchy fabric as a form of self-punishment and penitence.

I'll leave the armchair psychoanalysis as an exercise for the reader. Some caution is warranted. But clearly it was important for Thomas More to subordinate himself totally to his religious beliefs. The brain that was capable of learning so many things and dealing with so many ideas had to be bridled, humbled, and harnessed to an overwhelmingly powerful institution with a clear and strong hierarchy that led ultimately to the Pope and thence to God. This is precisely the argument that More is making in the pages of the Dyaloge. His opponent, “your friend,” is trying to make the argument that scripture alone is enough to lead us to salvation. More counters that both scripture and the Church—the one Church—are necessary. He hates the idea that random individuals can read scripture—translated by the likes of Luther and Tyndale into their own languages—and find true religion. It looks like anarchy to him. Submission to authority must be part of the picture. Any intelligent person will counter “what if the authority is wrong?” and so More is forced to support the position that the Church can't be wrong.

No reasonable human, then or now, believes that there's any institution, made up of fallible humans, that's never wrong. When More comes out in support of that position, he's putting on an intellectual hair shirt. That's his act of self-degradation. All of his learning and brilliance are being publicly humiliated and subordinated to an authority. It's the very publicness of that subordination, the blatantness of it, that is at the basis of authoritarianism, then and now. When otherwise well-informed and intelligent persons come out in favor of a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Trump, or any other authoritarian figure, they're not really claiming that they believe everything the boss says. No one could believe that. They're making a public gesture of submissiveness. And the more outrageous the leader's lies, the greater the humiliation, the more profound the submission. If you are psychologically predisposed to be submissive, then there is pleasure in the submitting; and once it's done, it gives you license to burn your enemies with a clear conscience.

Four centuries after his death, within a span of 27 years, More was made a Roman Catholic saint and a Hero of the Russian Revolution. In 1918, in the Soviet Union, his name was carved on a monument along with those of other founders of the Communist movement. Catholic sainthood came in 1935. In most ways the Soviet Union and the Roman Catholic church could hardly be more different. They were, of course, blood enemies. But both are among the most centralized, top-heavy, and authoritarian institutions that humans have ever created.

This series of posts is about being wrong—about taking the wrong turn at some point or other, leading to wrong conclusions and wrong actions. It's about errors in thinking. But the whole point of becoming an authoritarian is that you are releasing yourself from the obligation to think—from the stress of it, the work, the fear that you might be wrong.

The Oxford English Dictionary's definition of “wrong” occupies about five large-format pages covered with small print. It's about equally divided between the noun form (“Bob committed a great wrong”) and the adjectival or adverbial form (“you're doing it wrong” or “you're going the wrong way.”).

The mere fact of this word's odd spelling, beginning with a silent letter “w,” suggests that it has an old and interesting history. The OED definition confirms as much. The word found its way into English from Old Norse and related languages. Its most ancient root seems to be in a word describing something that is bent. It's a cousin of the word “awry,” meaning something that has gone astray. Another related word is “wring” meaning to twist something out of shape. Also related is “writhe.”

Other dictionaries tend to list the most commonly used definition first, but the OED is organized chronologically. It lists every definition that a word has ever had, beginning with the oldest. For each of these, it includes a quote from a document exemplifying this particular usage.

This feature makes it easy to see that this dichotomy in the meaning of “wrong” goes way back. People have been using it to mean a moral wrong since at least 1300, and a factual wrong since at least 1420. Though, when we reach that far back, the distinction between those two kinds of wrongness might become a bit hazy; separating moral from factual wrongs might be just a modern way of thinking.

What these two definitions of wrongness have in common is the notion of being twisted, or bent. In its oldest form, the word was applied in a literal sense to physical objects, such as a piece of wood. For example, one old source describes a shepherd's crook as being “wrong at the end.” Meaning not that something was wrong with it in the modern sense---as a shepherd's crook, it was perfect---but merely that it was bent. Another source describes someone as having a wrong nose; perhaps it had been broken, and not healed straight.

We can infer that from this older, more concrete sense of the word, people began to extend its usage in a metaphorical way to describe abstract states of affairs that had in some way lost their straightness, gone awry, become crooked. Sometimes that is a moral judgment and sometimes it has to do with facts and reasoning. This series of posts is mostly concerned with the latter kind of wrongness.

The ancient root of “wrong,” referring to something that is bent, is instructive because it helps frame wrongness as something that happens over the course of a thing's development, as opposed to being baked in from the very beginning. Like the shepherd's crook, an idea might run straight for most of its length and then go wrong at the end. Or like the nose, it might be straight and symmetrical until it gets broken in an accident or a fight.

For example, ancient people knew that malaria was associated with swamps--which was correct. They thought it was caused by bad air (the literal meaning of “malaria.”). That's where they went wrong--where they deviated from the correct course. They couldn't have imagined the complex life cycle of the organism that actually causes that disease, and so, even though they’d begun with a correct observation, their reasoning went awry and they came to a conclusion that was wrong.

Or, if we are following a mathematical proof, or an argument, we can sometimes point to a place where it has gone off the rails, and say “it's all fine up to this point, but here's where the author makes a mistake, and everything after that is wrong.”

This is a more generous and forgiving take on wrongness than merely saying that something is wrong from the outset--inherently wrong. It suggests we can identify where we have gone wrong, and make amends. It also jibes with Peirce’s philosophy of Fallibilism—specifically, his observation that people who follow what he calls the a priori method might begin with good intentions and solid facts but tend to go wrong eventually.

The OED definitions of “wrong,” sprawling across several pages, are an inadvertently hilarious tour of wrongness down through the centuries. People have been thinking about being wrong for a long time, it turns out. Every possible usage and variant of wrongness is painstakingly catalogued here, including many that are no longer in use. Going back to the most ancient meaning of the word, a “wrong” can denote a curved bough lopped from a tree and used for timber, e.g. as a rib or brace in a ship, where being bent is actually desirable. And indeed the very most ancient meaning of the word, from old Scandinavian languages, is the rib of a ship; it's related to “rung,” as in “rung of a ladder.” The Vikings who raided and conquered Britain came to those shores on ships literally made from wrongs, and brought the word into the language with them. These very early usages don't necessarily have a negative connotation. The eagle's beak is described as being wrong, because it's curved at the end. A beautiful passage from the 1400s says “The bowe is made of ii. [two] thynges, of a wronge tree, and a right strynge.”

As centuries go by, though, it comes to be used in the modern sense of something that is not as it should be. In medieval English we begin to see phrases that are in common use today such as “there's nothing wrong,” “I confess it was wrong of me,” “be it wrong or right,” “He has come to the wrong shop for that,” “the wrong foot,” “don't get me wrong,” and so on.

As a noun, “wrong” is used as early as 1200 to mean something that is unjust or unfair, and frequently used in opposition to “right.” To be in the wrong, or have wrong, is a parallel construction to French “avoir tort,” where “tort” is related to “tortuous,” “torsion,” and other words meaning twisted or wrung-with-a-w. So, “tort” and “wrong” are Latinate and Germanic equivalents, both related to twisting or bending; “tort” makes its way into modern English as a legal term, meaning a wrong or a cause for legal action, and “wrong” is the earthier and more commonplace way of saying the same thing. In other words, it's classic English: there's a base layer of Germanic words, which tend to be more earthy and direct, overlaid with a post-Norman-Conquest layer of Latinate words.

Right

Since “right” is commonly used as the counterpart of “wrong,” it seems obvious that this word is also worth looking up in the OED. Delving into this topic would more than double the length of this post, since its definitions cover nine pages.

It’s worth noting, though, that the OED breaks its coverage of “right” into two main sections. These are separate definitions of two words that are spelled identically, and that have been for over a thousand years.

The first “right” (two and a half pages) is a word referring to what is morally just, correct, consonant with truth and justice, as well as legal rights. The sense used in “right hand,” “right foot,” etc. is also thrown in here.

The second version of the word—again, spelled the same way—accounts for the remainder of those pages. Its primary definition is geometrical, meaning “Straight; not bent, curved, or crooked in any way.” So, this is the clear opposite of “wrong” in the geometrical sense applied to ships’ ribs, shepherd’s crooks and eagles’ beaks.

Poring over the etymology, which in both cases goes back to Old English texts from the tenth century, I can’t make out why the OED’s lexicographers decided to split these two definitions apart. The very earliest versions of both words are spelled the same way. But it’s clear from the texts provided that, over a thousand years ago, before the Norman Conquest, speakers of Old English were doing the same thing we do today: using the same word to denote rightness in the legal/moral sense, and rightness in the geometric sense.

This explains why “right” is sometimes used in technical contexts that have nothing to do with moral or legal rightness—or, for that matter, with “right” versus “left.” I’m thinking of the term “right angle” which simply means something that stands straight up, and the astronomical term “right ascension” which I could never make sense of until I understood it as proceeding from a different version of the word “right” — one rooted in geometry and having no connection to “left.” Likewise “righting the ship,” “to set something aright,” and other usages can be traced back to this geometric meaning.

A teaser for the next installment…

One of the OED’s definitions of “wrong” sent me down a pretty deep rabbit hole in Sixteenth Century English history, which I intend to explore in a future post. Or possibly a series of them, since the current draft of that future post is already getting a little long. In order to clear the decks for that, I’ve written this post to set out the lexicographical context. It might take me a few weeks to pull the next bit together! In the meantime I might take a break from Wrong-related posts and touch on some other topics.

Jonathan Rauch, who first made me aware of Peirce’s philosophy in his book The Constitution of Knowledge, has read more deeply into this topic than I have. He dropped me a line the other day to provide some clarification of how the A Priori Method differs from the Method of Scientific Investigation. As a reminder, these two methods are superficially the same in that both of them eschew the methods of Tenacity and Authority, which are obviously irrational. Both A Priori and Scientific Investigation purport to base beliefs upon rational analysis of observable facts. What then is the difference between them?

Here’s a quote from Jonathan Rauch:

I thought I'd address a question you allude to re the difference between the "a priori" method of settling opinion vs science. Here's how I understand it...

A priori methods are superficially similar to science, in that they posit hypotheses and use evidence and rational argument. But they're still fundamentally individualistic. Individuals, or factions, form conclusions and argue with each other, but even if they're brilliant, they have no systematic way to bring their views toward consilience (a collective, multi-perspective resolution). Whereas science is inherently a collective endeavor in which, as Peirce says, only "we" matter, not you or I. Knowledge arises as an emergent phenomenon from the comparing and collating of multiple points of view. Though he didn't have the term, Peirce invented network epistemology. Reality lives on the network, a property of the hive mind.

My favorite example: if you see a disheveled man scribbling equations in a garret apartment in Bern, you have no way to know, even in principle, whether he's Einstein or a madman. Science only begins when his claims enter the network and undergo collective evaluation.

It's a sophisticated concept...and a human breakthrough.

Since this helped clarify the distinction for me, I thought I’d turn it into a quick post for anyone who has been following my occasional notes about Fallibilism.

Because of my book Termination Shock I am occasionally contacted by journalists writing stories about the idea of geoengineering—specifically Solar Radiation Management (SRM), a proposed way of temporarily cooling down the earth by putting aerosols into the stratosphere. These will reflect a small fraction of the sun’s light back into space before it can warm things up down here.

In general I have been declining such opportunities because I feel that I said as much as I have to say on the topic in the novel, which gave me enough breathing room to discuss SRM’s pros and cons, its risks and uncertainties, and the way that people would likely respond to it politically.

This recent article on the subject came out in the New York Times not long after I’d published a piece about fallibilism here on this Substack. Consequently I read it in a fallibilist frame of mind. The article itself, the mindset of the scientists featured in it, and most of the reader notes all make for a case study that I thought might be interesting to people who read my above-linked fallibilism piece.

Context

Charles Sanders Peirce advocated the Method of Scientific Investigation as the best way of fixing belief.

In many realms of politics and society, scientific investigation frankly isn’t that useful. In this case, however, we have a lot of hard data to work with. Atmospheric CO2 levels over time are plotted on this page. I’ll screenshot the plot here in case the link goes bad:

Right now the level is higher than it has been in a million years and still climbing fast. The last time it was this high the earth had a completely different (much hotter) climate. But it got to that level gradually, so that plants and animals had a long time to adapt to the warming of their environment.

The above plot compresses the Industrial Revolution into a vertical spike. This is effective for showing the suddenness of the change, but it hides the details.

Another plot on the same site zooms in on the last couple of hundred years, spreading the spike out into a more legible plot. The blue line is the actual CO2 level in PPM and the gray line is how much CO2 was emitted by humans:

So regardless of what other opinions you might have about climate change, geoengineering and so on, I don’t think there’s any denying that CO2 levels have suddenly become extremely high by the standards of the last million years and that this is the result of human activity. 275 ppm seems to have been a normal pre-Industrial Revolution value. At the time I was born, the number was something like 320, an increase of 45 ppm since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and today it’s about 424, a further increase of 104 ppm just during the time I’ve been alive.

To repeat: from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution until I was born, the increase was 45 ppm. During my lifetime, the increase has been 104 ppm.

It’s going up by about 3 ppm per year, and the rate at which it’s going up is increasing rather than decreasing, in spite of various efforts supposedly being made to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. Not only is the CO2 level continuing to increase year to year, but the rate at which it increases is also increasing.

Natural processes remove CO2 from the air very slowly and so it will take hundreds of thousands of years for the number to drop back to pre-Industrial Revolution levels unless we take direct action to capture the gas back from the atmosphere.

This is bad for all kinds of reasons, but by far the most dangerous is the possibility of future “wet bulb events” in which the combined heat and humidity rise to a level that will automatically kill humans who are not in air conditioned spaces.

In such an event, it doesn’t matter if you’re young and healthy. It doesn’t matter if you are using every possible “beat the heat” strategy such as lying down in the shade with fans blowing on you while drinking plenty of water. You will die of heatstroke anyway because physics dictates that the same thermodynamic processes that keep you alive will poach your brain.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future opens with a very well researched and written fictional account of such an event taking place in the near future. If you lose your AC under such conditions you will die. If it happens in places with stable power grids and ubiquitous air conditioning the death toll will be limited, but once the power goes out it becomes a mass fatality event on the level of the bubonic plague, in the sense that, in the affected area, the majority of all humans (and many animals) will die1. If this happens in a heavily populated area the death toll could reach into the millions.

I was in Seattle during the unprecedented summer 2021 heat dome, which out of nowhere spiked temperatures as high as 108 F (42 C) and killed 1400 people in the US and Canada. Here’s a day-by-day account of how it played out in Seattle. My place didn’t have central AC at the time and so I ended up camping out for three days in a bedroom with a window air conditioning unit. If we had lost power, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything except lie down, drink water, and wait for it to be over. Others who weren’t so lucky were found dead in their homes later. So what I’m about to write here should be understood in the light of the fact that I think we’ll begin seeing mass fatality wet bulb events within a decade. Of course, as a fallibilist, I’m mindful that I might be wrong about this. I’d certainly like to be wrong.

History has taught us that when sulfur dioxide (SO2) is injected into the stratosphere by major volcanic eruptions, global temperatures go down for a couple of years until the SO2 naturally falls out of the atmosphere and things return to normal. This is a natural scientific experiment that has been repeated many times throughout recorded history, but only since the Pinatubo eruption in 1991 have we been in a position to capture data and make sense of it.

This has given rise to the obvious thought that by duplicating artificially what volcanoes do naturally, we could cool the earth down. Hence SRM, which has come in for a certain amount of discussion but very little actual implementation. The only entity I’m aware of that’s doing anything at all is Making Sunsets. So far their activities are on a very small scale. Efforts to conduct even the most preliminary research studies on this topic have tended to get shut down by people who are good at using the levers of politics and social media to stop people from doing things. A case in point is the work of David Keith, which was covered in an earlier New York Times article.

Parenthetically, but important to my theme here, I’ll mention that this is the first thing you’ll see if you click on that David Keith article:

So, “spray a pollutant”…

“Pollutant” is technically correct. Anything that humans put into the air, water, or soil could be so classified. The pollutant in this case is sulfur dioxide. Volcanoes naturally release 63,000 tons of it into the atmosphere every day, or 23 million tons per year. Humans put an additional 70 million tons into the atmosphere every year by burning fossil fuels. Wildfires are another significant source of naturally occurring SO2 emissions.

For purposes of solar radiation management, the only difference is that the SO2 would be injected at higher altitudes. From there it would gradually make its way down into the lower amosphere unless it were being continually replenished. Pinatubo released about 17 million tons into the stratosphere over a short period of time, and had a marked effect on global climate. Any SRM program that purported to be serious about mitigating global warming would have to operate at a level of a few million tons of SO2 per year, or a few percent of what is already coming from volcanoes, fossil fuels, and wildfires.

“Spray” is another technically correct term that is nonetheless obviously pejorative. “Spray a pollutant into the sky” could be replaced with “inject precisely controlled quantities of a ubiquitous natural substance into the stratosphere” with no loss of accuracy.

But I would argue that any mention of this that doesn’t compare it with the incredible spike in CO2 levels is burying the lede. So my preferred formulation would be “CO2 levels are higher than they’ve been in a million years and still climbing fast. As a result millions of people, mostly poor people in the Global South, are going to die. David Keith wants to study the idea of injecting precisely controlled quantities of a ubiquitous natural substance into the stratosphere in the hopes that it might save lives.”

Just to lay my cards on the table, I think that SRM should be investigated and possibly even implemented. But I don’t think it is likely to be, because people on the right and left both hate it. People on the right lump it in with chemtrails, and hate it for the same reasons (if that is the correct word) they now have now decided that the polio vaccine is bad. People on the left hate it because…well, I’ll get to that in a second. So I don’t think it will happen unless a Trumpian figure comes out in favor of it and pitches it to the populist base in a style that will make those people think it’s awesome.

In other words, I think that this is largely an abstract debate that is more interesting as a case study in fallibilism than it is on its own merits.

The NYT Article

The article describes how some exceptionally smart and technically capable people are using their ingenuity and energy (and presumably taxpayer money) to set up a detection system that will enable them to blow the whistle on anyone who actually tries to implement SRM. This is because “[SRM] could also unleash untold dangers. Many worry that solar geoengineering could have unintended consequences.”

I’m not going to pore over the article in detail because I try to keep these Substack entries reasonably short. But if we take it at face value, it seems that everyone mentioned in this story, as well as the journalist writing it, simply accepts the premise that even the smallest and most preliminary efforts that might be made towards studying SRM are so unthinkably reckless that the most important thing that they can possibly be devoting their careers to is creating sophisticated systems “to measure aerosol concentration and raise a red flag at any anomalies.”

For context, it’s worth mentioning that very few engineering projects could be more blatantly obvious, more easily detected from a distance—even with the naked eye—than SRM at scale. The most common proposed method would involve the use of a whole fleet of special airplanes. But as the article itself states, “There are only a handful of aircraft that can reach the stratosphere. One model is the WB-57, three of which are housed at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.”

In order to put enough SO2 into the stratosphere to make any difference to the climate, it would be necessary to create a huge fleet of such aircraft. The scenario is well described in Chapter 1 of Oliver Morton’s The Planet Remade. They’d have to be specially designed, since these things aren’t exactly rolling off of production lines at the moment, and the ones that do exist aren’t configured as tankers (the WB-57 carries 4 tons of payload, so in order to carry a million tons of SO2 to the stratosphere over the course of one year—only one seventeenth of a Pinatubo—250,000 flights would be necessary, or about 700 flights per day; these planes would have to take off every 30 seconds around the clock).

Entire new manufacturing facilities would have to be established in order to build that fleet. Thousands of people would work in them. Once built, the planes would be in continuous operation, taking off laden with SO2, flying around in the stratosphere in a manner that couldn’t be more obvious, and that would be easily detected by radar, satellites, and people standing in the flight path simply looking up. Takeoff and landing would occur at airfields that would have to be equipped with facilities for loading them with sulfur dioxide.

Other methods to implement SRM have been proposed, such as using huge systems of balloons or firing enormous guns into the air. The only thing they have in common is that they are almost comically enormous. They have to be, since what they are trying to do is to replicated in a controlled manner some of the largest volcanic explosions in history.

What then is the purpose of putting all of this ingenuity to work building these exquisitely sophisticated systems for detecting faint traces of aerosols in the stratosphere? The only explanation that makes any sense is that the goal is to sense even the tiniest and most preliminary exploratory efforts in the field of SRM. Experiments, basically. Programs that are, by definition, too small to actually change the climate. If someone were changing the climate, we’d know about it. We wouldn’t need high altitude balloons or WB-57s. We could just aim a webcam at the special airport where hundreds of weird planes were taking off every day.

And it’s worth reiterating—because the level of anxiety about SRM is so high—that the purpose of those weird planes would not be to drop bombs, spray nerve gas, or strafe peasants, but to ameliorate, temporarily and reversibly, the effects of a completely uncontrolled and incredibly reckless geoengineering experiment that the human race has been engaging in for 200 years, and will continue to engage in for at least another 50 years, by dumping vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere and the oceans.

A charge often levelled against environmentalists by the right is that tree-huggers are in some sense anti-technological and by extension anti-human. That they are in love with the idea of an unspoiled natural order and that anything humans do to change it is automatically bad.

But that doesn’t explain this curiously asymmetrical reaction to, on the one hand, the very idea that some people might engage in preliminary studies of techniques intended to save humanity from the consequences of too much anthropogenic CO2 in the air, vs., on the other hand, the ongoing reality of what we are actually doing when we burn fossil fuels. I don’t understand how people who think this way are going to explain such positions when a million people are lying dead of heatstroke somewhere. The only way I can process it is to construe it as a kind of religious belief—an article of faith.

The fallibilist take

Peirce has an explanation. Obviously, writing as he did in the 1870s, he didn’t have terminology like “social media bubble,” but TL;DR that’s where this is going to end up.

A fallibilist asks “what if I’m wrong?”

The hard scientific data are as clear as they can be: crazy amounts of CO2 in the air, rising temperatures, and the simple fact that people die when it’s too hot. These facts are unlikely to be wrong.

Beyond that, however, we get into just the kinds of topics that Peirce describes as belonging to the “a priori method,” in which people engage in what they suppose is reasoned debate and try to arrive at sensible conclusions. Which is a pretty exact description of a lot of the discourse that happens on social media, and in academic and institutional settings, among generally well-informed, sincere people.

As Peirce states, “This method is far more intellectual and respectable from the point of view of reason…. But its failure has been the most manifest…the very essence of [the A Priori Method] is to think as one is inclined to think.”

In other words, as soon as you move beyond hard data and facts that can be rigorously verified, you are entering into a realm where you, and like-minded people around you, can talk yourselves into believing almost anything you like to believe. And precisely because you’ve arrived at those conclusions by spelling out what seems like a rational argument, and because you’re surrounded by trustworthy-seeming people nodding their heads and signalling agreement, you feel confident that you’ve fixed beliefs solid enough to act on. It’s a human failing that Peirce identified as long ago as the 1870s, but I think that social media amplifies it.

People mentioned in this article, as well as (I suspect) the journalist who wrote it, many people who work at the New York Times, and almost everyone who chimed in on the comment thread, all seem absolutely certain that even doing research on SRM is literally unthinkable—not in the sense that one can’t think about it but in the sense that one should never think about it.

As I already mentioned, that’s a position that makes no sense to me at all. But I don’t have to understand it. I just have to note that it exists. My next question would be, what if this position is wrong?

In that case, we’ve unilaterally disarmed ourselves in the face of a threat that could end up being more dangerous than any military invasion.

If I’m wrong, then, somewhere along the line, I think we’ll say “oh, SRM isn’t a good way to do this, so let’s not design, build, and fly that huge fleet of special airplanes.” In other words, I am, to some degree, trusting our civilization not to just do incredibly stupid shit.

Some might see that as naive. But implementing SRM is about the most technocratic, engineering-heavy project you can possibly imagine, and I actually do have some confidence in the ability and willingness of engineers to proceed adaptively and carry out such a program in a way that addresses many of the objections and fears of its detractors.

During COVID I went down something of a rabbit hole on the subject of wrongness, and wrote some essays into a OneDrive folder that I had established on a new PC. Then they disappeared for a couple of years (probably because of operator error) and I couldn’t find them. Fortuitously, they warped back into existence right around the time of the recent election, and I’ve been kicking through them.

In the meantime, of course, I happened to establish this Substack. So I will post them here when they’re decent. This will be the first of those. I don’t know when the others will be ready. Currently I’m heads down writing the second book in the Bomb Light series, and so it’s going to be sporadic.

If you’re wondering how wrongness can even be a topic, here are a couple of examples of widespread, systemic wrongness:

• There are a lot of different religions. They can’t all be right. If you’re non-religious, you believe that all religious people are wrong. If you believe in a specific religion, you believe that all of the non-religious people, as well as all of the people who believe in a different religion from yours, are wrong.

• We didn’t even know about germs until less than 200 years ago. Before then, everyone who had an opinion about infectious disease was wrong.

Or, as Charles Sanders Pierce—the subject of this post—put it: “Every work of science great enough to be well remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written.”

Many more examples of wrongness could be cited, but the point is that nearly everyone is wrong nearly all of the time, including people we love, trust, and respect.

A lot of discourse on social media is devoted to staking out positions that are right and flaming people who are wrong.

After watching that for a while it occurred to me that there’s a split even more fundamental than the one that gets all the attention, namely, left vs. right.

It lies between people who implicitly assume that it’s even possible to arrive at abstract positions that are sturdy enough to act upon, vs. those who are at peace with the fact that the universe is very complicated; that we don't have all of the information we need to make sense of it; that a lot of the information we do have is questionable; and that our intellectual powers are limited. That we are, in short, wrong a lot. A word for this is Fallibilism.

By default, Fallibilists tend to revert to middle-of-the-road positions in the political sphere.

(In a way, this ties into my previous post Idea Having Is Not Art. In that context, I was talking about idea havers in the creative sphere. But politics is full of idea havers too, and Fallibilists tend to take a dim view of political idea havers.)

Pictured at the top of this post is American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, whom I became aware of in mid-2021 when I participated in a Brookings Institution webcast with Anne Applebaum and Jonathan Rauch. The occasion was the launch of Jonathan’s book The Constitution of Knowledge, which talks in some detail about Peirce’s philosophy. As such it’s probably a better source of information than what you’re reading now. But here’s a quick introduction—just in time for Thanksgiving, when many Americans will no doubt find themselves in the company of loved ones who are Wrong.

A lot of Peirce's work is in realms of logic that most people are going to find pretty forbidding, though it did earn him respect from heavy hitters of later generations such as Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Karl Popper. Fortunately, everything we need for our purpoes is contained in a single essay entitled "The Fixation of Belief" which was published in 1877. Though written in a typically Victorian style, it doesn't make use of specialist terminology and is quite approachable for modern readers.

Peirce’s The Fixation of Belief

Preliminaries

Peirce says, “Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief.”

Once we have done so we don’t want to pass back into the state of doubt, or to change what we believe.

“The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle inquiry….The sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion. We may fancy that this is not enough for us, and that we seek, not merely an opinion, but a true opinion. But put this fancy to the test, and it proves groundless; for as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief be true or false.”

Peirce then defines four distinct methods that are used by different people to decide what to believe.

The Method of Tenacity

“…the instinctive dislike of an undecided state of mind, exaggerated into a vague dread of doubt, makes men cling spasmodically to the views they already take.”

We've all known this person: one who can't be swayed by any evidence or logic to alter their position. It's difficult to make out what's going on in their heads, because it's so alien to how evidence-based people think.

My surmise is that they basically perceive differences of opinion as contests of will--struggles to establish dominance. Anyone who changes their mind is perceived as having been defeated and so undergoes a loss of face. This dynamic is intensified when the debate is happening in public. The more eyes are on you, the greater the humiliation attendant on changing your mind. Social media, of course, heightens this by putting every discussion in the public eye. Even if only a few people are following it in real time, there's no telling when it'll get re-linked and go viral to be seen by countless observers.

The Method of Authority

As Peirce explains, the Method of Authority arises directly from the Method of Tenacity. It's hard to improve on Peirce's own words: "The man who adopts [the Method of Tenacity] will find that other men think differently from him, and it will be apt to occur to him, in some saner moment, that their opinions are quite as good as his own, and this will shake his confidence in his belief. This conception, that another man's thought or sentiment may be equivalent to one's own, is a distinctly new step, and a highly important one. It arises from an impulse too strong in man to be suppressed, without danger of destroying the human species. Unless we make ourselves hermits, we shall necessarily influence each other's opinions; so that the problem becomes how to fix belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community."

And that is how we get to the Method of Authority. As the name implies, this boils down to believing what you're told to believe. For some people that authority might be a single charismatic leader. For others it might be an institution or a holy book. While it's associated with religions, it seems to work equally well with non-religious ideologies.

Peirce, after a fairly dispassionate explanation of this Method, lowers the boom: "For the mass of mankind, then, there is perhaps no better method than [the method of authority]. If it is their highest impulse to be intellectual slaves, then slaves they ought to remain...Cruelties always accompany this system; and when it is consistently carried out, they become atrocities of the most horrible kind in the eyes of any rational man."

The A Priori Method

In the same way as the Method of Authority was a natural outgrowth of the Method of Tenacity, the A Priori Method arises from the inherent shortcomings of the Method of Authority--at least in the minds of thoughtful and worldly people.

Let us say that you are a Method of Authority person. Unless you live in complete isolation from the rest of the world, you can't help but notice that the world abounds in authoritative persons and institutions telling people what to believe. These don't all agree with one another. They can't all be right.

If you're fanatically devoted to one authority, everything's easy: you just declare that all of the other authorities are wrong. This puts you firmly in the Method of Authority camp.

For some, though, it's natural to ask "can't we all just get along?" and try to reason things out. According to Peirce's taxonomy, this puts you in the A Priori camp (I don't quite understand his use of the term "a priori" here, but we have to attach labels to these concepts, and we might as well stick with Peirce's).

The specific examples he cites come from the history of astronomy, in which various ancient and medieval thinkers tried to work out the scientific basis for the movements of the planets across the night sky. If you watch the movements of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, etc. for long enough and keep records, you can see patterns hinting at some underlying natural order. But if you don't know about gravity and other basic physics, then your mind is free to roam just about anywhere. Plato tried to explain the positions of the planets in terms of the length of plucked strings, drawing an analogy between their movements and musical harmony. Kepler, before he hit on a better answer, thought that the same phenomena could be explained using a geometric argument having to do with the sizes and shapes of various polyhedra. Both Plato and Kepler were wrong. But the way in which they developed their arguments seemed reasonable. They weren't simply appealing to authority. They were following a kind of thought process that, to learned and intelligent people of their day, seemed "agreeable to reason."

The tricky part, as Peirce points out, is that beliefs that seem "agreeable to reason" don't always agree with each other. Plato and Kepler were intellectual giants who thought deeply about these matters. Both came up with reasonable-sounding explanations of the planets' movements. Highly intelligent and well-informed people all around them nodded their heads sagely and said "that totally makes sense." But they were all wrong.

A more up-do-date example has to do with QAnon and other Internet-based conspiracy theories. Followers of these theories actually think that they are being reasonable. "Do the research" is their mantra. But the "research" that they're doing just consists of clicking on links taking them to bad information. This is what makes these conspiracies so viral and tenacious in our politics: their followers appear to be hunting down leads and connecting the dots in a way that superficially looks like a scientific, investigative process. They can thus claim that they're independent thinkers--not simply following the Method of Authority, not taking anyone's word for it. Though they'd never use this terminology, they are claiming to follow the A Priori Method.

Peirce states: “This method is far more intellectual and respectable from the point of view of reason than either of the others which we have noticed. But its failure has been the most manifest…the very essence of [the A Priori Method] is to think as one is inclined to think"

This is a harsh but inescapable conclusion. It seems harsh because followers of the A Priori Method are making a sincere effort to get out from under the obvious faults of the Method of Tenacity and the Method of Authority. They are evaluating evidence and drawing logical-seeming conclusions. But in the end, you can't get Plato and Kepler to agree. In circles where everyone follows the A Priori Method, you get a lot of people--probably smarter and better educated than most, and proud of being so--agreeing with each other as to what sounds reasonable. But there is no baseline for determining whether their conclusions are valid. It's how we get Internet bubbles, which is to say, groups of like-minded people on social media all vigorously agreeing with each other, certain that they’re right.

Peirce concludes: "A different new method of settling opinions must be adopted, that shall not only produce an impulse to believe, but shall also decide what proposition it is which is to be believed"

The Method of Scientific Investigation

"A method should be found by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency -- by something upon which our thinking has no effect…this is the only one of the four methods which presents any distinction of a right and a wrong way."

Alas, Pierce doesn’t devote much space in The Fixation of Belief to actually describing this last and best method. Instead he sort of kicks the can down the road to other papers in the same series. Those end up delving into the matter in a lot more detail that can be covered here. But the gist of it, I think, is willingness to change one’s opinion in the face of evidence and sound logical arguments. Exactly how this differs from the A Priori Method isn’t crystal clear, since followers of that method are likely to claim that they too are just being scientific and rational. I think that it boils down, in Peirce’s mind, to the degree of rigor that one applies to weighing evidence, combined with a willingness to tolerate “the irritation of doubt” when that is demanded. The overall doctrine of Fallibilism emerges thence.

Anyone who has ever sincerely believed in something, only to look back on it later in the full awareness that they were wrong, is on the path to being a Fallibilist; and when they encounter an idea haver who is sure they’re right, they see a more naive version of themselves.

This is probably enough to get anyone who is actually interested in this material an introduction. It’s easy to find Peirce’s work online, and he’s an engaging writer. So I’ll leave off with the following quote. Readers can decide for themselves how to apply it to whatever transpires around Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow:

Not long after Cryptonomicon was published I received an email from a reader in Iowa, written more in sadness than in anger, letting me know that Cap’n Crunch was produced not by General Mills, as I had implied in the text of the book, but by Quaker Oats. As an extra little twist of the knife this reader mentioned that as a person from Iowa I should have known better.

25 years later I came to Cedar Rapids for reasons that are beyond the scope of this Substack, and as a sort of cosmic penance I was given a hotel room with a view over the Quaker Oats cereal processing complex, which is far more colossal than I can do justice to in the above picture.

So this, readers, is actually where Cap’n Crunch comes from. It is the world’s largest cereal plant. According to a seemingly reliable source (waitress in a restaurant with a direct view of the plant) it is recommended to visit on Crunchberry Days. This isn’t a formal holiday as far as I know, it’s just an event that happens a couple of times a year when the factory switches over to the production of Crunchberries and the whole town smells like them.

As long as I’m on a Cedar Rapids Chamber of Commerce kick, I’ll mention that the city is pervaded by rail lines that bring corn in and Cap’n Crunch out of the manufacturing complex. Here’s one in the middle of town with volunteer corn plants presumably growing where kernels jumped off the train, I guess preferring to germinate in the barren soil of a railway siding than end up in a cereal bowl.

The building in the background is the Cedar Rapids Art Museum which has a great collection of Grant Wood paintings many of which pick up on the same theme.

Polostan releases today. This is a project that has been in the works for over ten years. My science fiction novels have tended to garner more attention than The Baroque Cycle, my foray into historical fiction writing from about twenty years ago. But even the stuff that’s branded as SF tends to contain a lot of history. Snow Crash had connections back to ancient Sumerian mythology. The Diamond Age was set in the future, but in order to write it I had to do a lot of reading about the culture of the Victorians. Cryptonomicon is really two novels interleaved: one’s a science-fictional techno-thriller, the other is a historical novel set during the Second World War. Anathem is set in another universe with strong historial resonances—you can’t really tell if you’re reading about the distant future or the distant past. The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. explicitly sends its characters into historical settings.

Writing The Baroque Cycle left me hungry for more in that vein. After I shipped it, I was always thinking about writing another historical series. In 2013 or so, Seamus Blackley made me aware of some interesting history related to the precursors of the atomic bomb project in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He’s been pursuing his own work on this topic, which I’ll talk about here whenever he’s ready. He and I have been exchanging notes all along. Polostan is dedicated to Seamus. Anyway, once I went down that rabbit hole and began tracing the historical storylines backward and forward in time, it became clear to me that I’d found subject matter that could keep me happily employed for a while, writing a series of comparable scope to The Baroque Cycle. Like The Baroque Cycle, it all pivots around developments in science during an era when science was changing everything, and like The Baroque Cycle it provides all kinds of opportunities to explore connections between scientists and people who live in the worlds of commerce, politics, and the military.

The name of the overall series is Bomb Light. In discussing the project with my agent Liz Darhansoff and my editor Jen Brehl, we considered the same questions that had arisen with the Baroque Cycle: is it better to wait until the whole series is written before publishing the first volume, or bring them out as they’re completed? Should the component novels be bundled together into a smaller number of volumes? The Baroque Cycle really consists of eight component novels, each of fairly typical novel-length (300-ish pages), packaged as three volumes. In that case we waited until the final book existed, at least in first draft form, before pulling the trigger on publishing the first volume. Then we brought out all three volumes in the course of about a year.

While we were considering such matters, other ideas came into my head and we made a collective decision to back-burner Bomb Light so I could work on some other projects, including Seveneves and Termination Shock. I’m confident that the overall Bomb Light series is going to end up being much stronger because of this slow and steady approach, which placed a lot of demands on my publisher’s trust and patience. As far as the series format is concerned, we made a decision last year to bring it out one normal-sized book at a time, and to configure it in such a way that each volume will focus on one of the main characters. Today’s review in the New York Times highlights the pros and cons of that approach: Polostan is a good read that, if you enjoy it, will make you wish that the subsequent volumes were already available. There is, of course, no perfect way around that problem when publishing a series!

Much of the next volume is already written, and when the dust settles from the book tour, which begins today in Seattle, I look forward to turning my attention to finishing it.