08.17.22

Artificial intelligence, string instruments, fish and chips

This one is longer than I intend future dispatches to be, since I was working out the formula. As your welcome email indicated, we’re keeping it casual here.

A great deal of attention has been paid to “Effective Altruism” and “longtermism” in the mainstream press (see the pieces by and about analytic philosopher William MacAskill in the New York Times and New Yorker). The obvious criticism is that it is a strange break with history to see ethical action as reducible to a paternalistic model of charity rather than the effort to change society to bring about a more equal and less destructive world. I was more interested in this essay by Phil Torres at Aeon, which focuses on the movement’s philosophical foundations and the “repugnant conclusions” of utilitarianism. Torres finds that EA does indeed have intentions of restructuring society, and not in a good way. (Some looks at related ideas in Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of the analytic philosopher Derek Parfit and Joshua Rothman’s profile of the “anti-natalist” David Benatar, both at The New Yorker.)

I was amused (and chastened) by this piece by Kate Lindsay at The Atlantic on the unmistakable signs of my generation getting old. “The first generation to grow up with social media in the mobile web era, Millennials are now becoming the first generation to subsequently age out of it, stuck parroting the hallmarks of a bygone digital age.” Scary stuff.

At The Guardian: the world’s greatest sci-fi director on the world’s greatest detective.

Abdul Wadud died last week. He was on a short list of great cellists in the jazz tradition, preceded by moonlighting bass players Oscar Pettiford and Ron Carter and followed by Hank Roberts and Tomeka Reid. In his honor, I put on the 1972 classic Dogon A.D. by Julius Hemphill and a crew of midwestern musicians, including Wadud. It was both more unruly and more accessible—groovy, even funky—than I remembered. It does not appear to be available on standard streaming channels, but can be heard here for now. Read an obituary of Wadud by Kevin Whitehead at NPR.

For dinner one night, because I had some cod in the freezer, I made some impromptu fish and chips. And because I had half a bottle of buttermilk in the fridge but no beer, I went for more of a Southern style than an English one (as much as I love the latter). The battering technique J. Kenji López-Alt outlines at Serious Eats—albeit for fried chicken—is revelatory. A properly craggy surface is the byproduct of frying in bulk, and is achievable at home with One Weird Trick. I use this method for fries, which I first read about in Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay collection The Man Who Ate Everything.

See you next week.