Author: Art Diamond

AI Algorithms Lack Intelligence Since They Are “Just Predicting the Next Word in a Text”

(p. B5) Yann LeCun helped give birth to today’s artificial-intelligence boom. But he thinks many experts are exaggerating its power and peril, and he wants people to know it.

. . .

On social media, in speeches and at debates, the college professor and Meta Platforms AI guru has sparred with the boosters and Cassandras who talk up generative AI’s superhuman potential, from Elon Musk to two of LeCun’s fellow pioneers, who share with him the unofficial title of “godfather” of the field. They include Geoffrey Hinton, a friend of nearly 40 years who on Tuesday was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics, and who has warned repeatedly about AI’s existential threats.

. . .

LeCun thinks AI is a powerful tool.

. . .

At the same time, he is convinced that today’s AIs aren’t, in any meaningful sense, intelligent—and that many others in the field, especially at AI startups, are ready to extrapolate its recent development in ways that he finds ridiculous.

If LeCun’s views are right, it spells trouble for some of today’s hottest startups, not to mention the tech giants pouring tens of billions of dollars into AI. Many of them are banking on the idea that today’s large language model-based AIs, like those from OpenAI, are on the near-term path to creating so-called “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, that broadly exceeds human-level intelligence.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman last month said we could have AGI within “a few thousand days.” Elon Musk has said it could happen by 2026.

LeCun says such talk is likely premature. When a departing OpenAI researcher in May talked up the need to learn how to control ultra-intelligent AI, LeCun pounced. “It seems to me that before ‘urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us’ we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat,” he replied on X.

He likes the cat metaphor. Felines, after all, have a mental model of the physical world, persistent memory, some reasoning ability and a capacity for planning, he says. None of these qualities are present in today’s “frontier” AIs, including those made by Meta itself.

Léon Bottou, who has known LeCun since 1986, says LeCun is “stubborn in a good way”—that is, willing to listen to others’ views, but single-minded in his pursuit of what he believes is the right approach to building artificial intelligence.

Alexander Rives, a former Ph.D. student of LeCun’s who has since founded an AI startup, says his provocations are well thought out. “He has a history of really being able to see gaps in how the field is thinking about a problem, and pointing that out,” Rives says.

. . .

The large language models, or LLMs, used for ChatGPT and other bots might someday have only a small role in systems with common sense and humanlike abilities, built using an array of other techniques and algorithms.

Today’s models are really just predicting the next word in a text, he says. But they’re so good at this that they fool us. And because of their enormous memory capacity, they can seem to be reasoning, when in fact they’re merely regurgitating information they’ve already been trained on.

“We are used to the idea that people or entities that can express themselves, or manipulate language, are smart—but that’s not true,” says LeCun. “You can manipulate language and not be smart, and that’s basically what LLMs are demonstrating.”

For the full commentary see:

Christopher Mims. “Keywords: This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Pet Cat.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 12, 2024): B5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated Oct. 11, 2024, and has the title “Keywords: This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Cat.” The sentence starting with “Léon Bottou” appears in the online, but not the print, version. Where there are small differences between the versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

Florence Nightingale Used Early Infographics to Improve Hospital Hygiene

(p. A15) As she tended soldiers during the Crimean War, a British nurse found herself appalled by the wretched, vermin-infested conditions at the army’s hospital in Istanbul. She began collecting figures showing the devastating effects of the filth and the dramatic benefits of the sanitary improvements she implemented. Her presentation on the need for cleaner care facilities, published in 1858, led to reforms that ultimately saved millions of lives and increased life expectancy in the U.K. Florence Nightingale, it turns out, was a pioneering data scientist.

Data, when used to reveal the value of hospital hygiene or the harm of tobacco smoke, can be a vital force for good, as Tim Harford reminds us in “The Data Detective.”

. . .

Imprecise and inconsistent definitions are one source of confusion.  . . .  . . . “infant mortality,” a key data point for public health, varies depending on the specific time in fetal development when the line is drawn between a miscarriage and a tragically premature birth.

. . .

To learn from data, it’s essential to present it well. For her analysis after the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale created one of the first infographics, using shrewdly designed diagrams to tell a memorable story. From the outset, she regarded visually compelling data displays as indispensable to making her arguments.

. . .

An authentically open mind can make a difference, Mr. Harford says, noting that the top forecasters tend to be not experts but earnest learners who constantly take in new data while challenging and refining their hypotheses. Data, Mr. Harford concludes, can illuminate and inform as well as distract and deceive. It’s often maddeningly hard to know the difference, but it would be unforgivable not to try.

For the full review see:

David A. Shaywitz. “Bookshelf; Broadly Informed, Easily Misled.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Jan. 29, 2021 [sic]): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 28, 2021 [sic], and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘The Data Detective’ Review: Broadly Informed, Easily Misled.”)

The book under review is:

Harford, Tim. The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics. New York: Riverhead Books, 2021.

Trust Ventures Engages in “Trench Warfare” Against Regulations Binding the Firms It Finances

(p. A15) Another “Ghostbusters” movie is in theaters, but what we need are regulation busters. I spoke with Salen Churi and Brooke Fallon from Trust Ventures, a $500 million Texas-based venture-capital firm. It’s almost as if they are wearing plasma proton packs.

. . .

Trust Ventures came together, Mr. Churi said, because no one thinks “ ‘I hate innovation,’ except perhaps for incumbents. We have crises in the most human of industries—energy, healthcare, housing. Everyone thought I was nuts. They’re like, ‘Why would you invest in companies with regulatory problems?’ ” Good question.

Most venture capitalists invest and help startups with new strategies and hiring a team. Mr. Churi describes what he does as “trench warfare,” fighting with regulators and incumbents deal by deal.

. . .

Mr. Churi explains that “when you get a great new technology that’s fundamentally different, regulators just want to shove you in the old box, right? Our challenge is to say, ‘Well, actually, this needs a new box.’ Otherwise, it’s going to sit on the shelf.”

Eye exams are a great example of an old box. The American Optometric Association is powerful, and many states banned online vision tests. “Regulators don’t care about all those single mothers who have to pay three times as much or that people in Central Illinois have to drive three hours,” Mr. Churi says.

The pandemic loosened telehealth rules, providing an opening to test your eyes with your own smartphone. As lockdowns ended, Trust Ventures worked with the startup Visibly in several states to legalize online eye exams permanently. They got help from their investors network—some of their limited partners “are great American families,” Mr. Churi says. Visibly’s Food and Drug Administration-approved online eye tests, now in 36 states, cost as little as $35 instead of three times as much at LensCrafters or box-store-located optometrists.

For the full commentary see:

Andy Kessler. “Inside View; America’s New Regulation Busters.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, April 15, 2024): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 14, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

The Dynamic Renewal of artdiamondblog.com

In my Openness to Creative Destruction book I claim that we flourish through dynamism. But sometimes I do not practice what I preach. I fear that may be true with artdiamondblog.com. So I have spent some time pondering changes in my blog that I hope will on balance make it more useful to readers, and also free some of my time for my current main project, a book on Less Costs, More Cures: Unbinding Medical Entrepreneurs.

The Benefits and Opportunity Cost of My Current Blog:

Sone entries preserve some important examples that otherwise might be hard to find or to document.

Some entries help inform readers (and publishers) about my articles and books.

But time spent editing entries could be spent on my next book, or on writing op-eds, or on researching academic papers.

Conclusion:

I believe that the time I spend on my blog has produced value. But I also believe that the time could produce greater value if I re-directed some of it to my main project, the book Less Costs, More Cures. I also believe that it will have more value if a higher percent of the blog entries are related to the new book. (As Aaron and any other regular readers of the blog know, over the past year or two I have already moved in the direction of a higher percent of blog entries being relevant to Less Costs, More Cures.)

I have spent time preserving and sorting articles that I will now toss. Painful, but I long taught that sunk costs really are sunk, and I should practice what I preached.

In addition to content renewal, I also plan to implement some process renewal. Some of this will be trial and error. The content and process ideas below are not an exhaustive list.

Blog Renewal:

For some entries, instead of the past substantial quotations, I will just provide a citation and a couple of sentence summary. This will take less of my time, and so will have less opportunity cost. For some of the entries this change may also make it clearer to the reader why I think the cited article is important.

For articles related to Less Costs, More Cures, I will sometimes continue the past “readers digest” format for entries, where I explicitly quote particularly apt or important portions of the article. But I will less frequently do so for articles that support contentious points that I made in Openness.

I plan to occasionally add entries that provide meaningful and/or entertaining anecdotes or vignettes from my life as an academic. I hope these will not take much time, and that some may be useful to future historians of thought.

For articles to blog, I will try harder to seek out those that will stand the test of time–not depreciate quickly. These would tend to be meaningful stories, not statistics, or short-term accounts about particular firms or executives.

I will stop blogging so much on issues that are important, but where a strong and growing minority are presenting similar information. Three such issues would be environmental optimism, anti-D.E.I., and anti-Chinese-Communist violation of rights. For example, on the environment, we may be approaching a tipping point. Even The New York Times, sometimes in front page articles, has been explaining the potential of geoengineering (though still with the obligatory politically correct nod to the anti-growth/anti-technology environmentalists). [See: Gelles, David. “Can We Engineer Our Way Out of a Climate Crisis?” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, March 31, 2024): 1 & 12-13; Gelles, David. “Scientist Wants to Block Sunlight to Cool Earth.” The New York Times (Sunday, Aug. 4, 2024): 1 & 18-19; Plumer, Brad, and Raymond Zhong. “Bold Plan Would Turn the World’s Oceans into Carbon Busters.” The New York Times (Monday, Sept. 23, 2024): A1 & A12-A13; and Gelles, David. “Renegades of Silicon Valley Pollute the Sky to Save the Planet.” The New York Times (Monday, Sept. 30, 2024): B1-B2.]

Welcome Your Comments:

Although I hope that my blog has been useful, and I have ideas about how it might have been useful, I rarely have empirical evidence. So I will be grateful if you let me know if any of it has been useful to you. I also will be grateful if you let me know what you think about my plans for renewal, and what suggestions you have for improvement (especially suggestions that do not cost me much time or effort ;).

You can respond within my blog as a comment to this entry or you can email me at amdiamond@cox.net. (Or if you have one of my other email addresses, use what you already have.)

Green Energy Subsidies Do Not Reduce Fossil Fuel Consumption

(p. A13) Regular readers may feel vindicated by a new study this week in the prestigious journal Science. It examines 1,500 “climate” policies adopted around the world and finds only 63—or 4%—produced any emissions reductions. Even so, press accounts strained to muddy the study’s simple lesson so let’s spell it out: Taxing carbon reduces emissions. Subsidizing “green energy” doesn’t.

In fact, this should be old hat. One of the most cited papers in climate economics is 2012’s “Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?” by the University of Oregon’s Richard York. His answer: not “when net effects are considered.”

Mr. York and a colleague returned with a 2019 empirical paper showing that while “renewable energy sources compose a larger share of overall energy production, they are not replacing fossil fuels but are rather expanding the overall amount of energy that is produced.”

. . .

The 2023 data have arrived. Fossil-fuel use, emissions and green energy all have grown right alongside each other, as economics predicted. Global emissions finally broke the 40 gigaton threshold, having doubled since 1984.

For the full commentary see:

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. “Business World; Follow the Science: Biden Climate Policy Is a Fraud.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 24, 2024): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date August 23, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

The recent Science paper mentioned above is:

Stechemesser, Annika, Nicolas Koch, Ebba Mark, Elina Dilger, Patrick Klösel, Laura Menicacci, Daniel Nachtigall, Felix Pretis, Nolan Ritter, Moritz Schwarz, Helena Vossen, and Anna Wenzel. “Climate Policies That Achieved Major Emission Reductions: Global Evidence from Two Decades.” Science 385, no. 6711 (Aug. 22, 2024): 884-92.

York’s 2012 paper mentioned above is:

York, Richard. “Do Alternative Energy Sources Displace Fossil Fuels?” Nature Climate Change 2, no. 6 (June 2012): 441-43.

York’s 2019 paper mentioned above is:

York, Richard, and Shannon Elizabeth Bell. “Energy Transitions or Additions?: Why a Transition from Fossil Fuels Requires More Than the Growth of Renewable Energy.” Energy Research & Social Science 51 (May 2019): 40-43.

People Thinking about the Rules They Have to Obey, Are Not Thinking about the Problems They Have to Solve

(p. A18) . . . I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.

Once you start poking around, the statistics are staggering. Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.” All of us who have been entangled in the medical system know why administrators are there: to wrangle over coverage for the treatments doctors think patients need.

. . .

In every organization I’ve interacted with, the administrators genuinely want to serve the mission of the organization, but the nature of their jobs is to enforce compliance with this or that rule.

Their power is similar to what Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has called the “time tax.” If you’ve ever fought a health care, corporate or university bureaucracy, you quickly realize you don’t have the time for it, so you give up. I don’t know about you, but my health insurer sometimes denies my family coverage for things that seem like obvious necessities, but I let it go unless it’s a major expense. I calculate that my time is more valuable.

As Philip K. Howard has been arguing for years, good organizations give people discretion to do what is right. But the trend in public and private sector organizations has been to write rules that rob people of the power of discretion. These are two different mentalities. As Howard writes, “Studies of cognitive overload suggest that the real problem is that people who are thinking about rules actually have diminished capacity to think about solving problems.”

. . .

. . ., Mark Edmundson teaches literature at the University of Virginia. The annual self-evaluations he had to submit used to be one page. Now he has to fill out about 15 electronic pages of bureaucratese that include demonstrating how his work advances D.E.I., to make sure his every waking moment conforms to the reigning ideology.

In a recent essay in Liberties Journal, he illustrates how administrators control campus life . . .

. . .

Organizations are trying to protect themselves from lawsuits, but the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives. They have to be trained never to take initiative, lest they wander off into activities that are deemed by the authorities to be out of bounds.

The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.” In his Liberties essay, Edmundson writes that this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data. He concludes: “They are using the terms of liberation to bring more and more free people closer to mental serfdom. Some day they will awaken in a cage of their own devising, so harshly confining that even they, drunk on their own virtue, will have to notice how their lives are the lives of snails tucked in their shells.”

Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.

For the full commentary see:

David Brooks. “Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts.” The New York Times (Friday, January 18, 2024): A18.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date January 19, 2024, and has the title “Lessons of the Trump Assassination Attempt.”)

The article by Lowrey mentioned above is:

Lowrey, Annie. “The Time Tax; Why Is So Much American Bureaucracy Left to Average Citizens?” The Atlantic, July 27, 2021. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/how-government-learned-waste-your-time-tax/619568/

The academic paper co-authored by Himmelstein that underlies the Reuters article cited by Brooks above is:

Himmelstein, David, Terry Campbell, and Steffie Woolhandler. “Health Care Administrative Costs in the United States and Canada, 2017.” Annals of Internal Medicine (2020) doi:10.7326/M19-2818.

The article by Howard mentioned above is:

Howard, Philip K. “Bureaucracy Vs. Democracy.” The American Interest (Jan. 31, 2019) Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/18/opinion/american-life-bureaucracy.html?searchResultPosition=1.

The article by Edmundson mentioned above is:

Edmundson, Mark. “Good People: The New Discipline.” Liberties Journal 3, no. 4 (2023) Available at: https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/good-people-the-new-discipline/.

The two Tocqueville quotes are from Book 4, Chapter 6 of:

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 (1st ed. 1835).

Dual-Class Stock Allows Firm Founders to Retain Control

(p. B10) . . . Britain is changing the rules to attract more would-be corporate dictators. Its financial regulator this month [July 2024] is ditching shareholder protections in an effort to attract IPOs back to the venerable London Stock Exchange.

The hope is that owners of companies will like London more if they can maintain control, while management will like London more if they don’t forever have to ask pesky shareholders for permission for things.

. . .

Investors in the U.S. have been all too happy to buy companies where the founders have kept control, or act as if they did. Benign dictators are in fashion.

. . .

The history of corporate success fits this model perfectly. Founders who manage to create, expand and list a company are usually pretty good. It isn’t surprising that shareholders like to give successful founders a free rein, avoiding all the usual corporate-governance restraints designed to prevent flights of fancy by a runaway CEO.

Founders also have skin in the game, in the form of a large part of their fortunes tied up in the stock, unlike the hired help who fill the C-suite at most big companies. Their flights of fancy might not always work out—Alphabet’s “moonshot” ventures have mostly lost money—but are part of the point of investing with a founder promising growth.

. . .

In companies that give extra votes to the founder, it becomes hard or impossible to change the board, let alone kick out the CEO.

. . .

London’s outright ban on dual-class stock has been tested by market forces and failed because companies simply listed elsewhere, usually on the Nasdaq. Britain will now have a corporate-governance regime that puts more onus on shareholders to protect themselves.

For the full commentary see:

James Mackintosh. “Streetwise; There Is a Time for Corporate Despots.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 20, 2024): B10.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed month, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated July 19, 2024, and has the title “Streetwise; There Is a Time for Corporate Despots—but It Isn’t Forever.”)

Sometimes Indigenous People Know More Than Credentialed Scientists

(p. D4) As a group of European botanists prepared to travel across Borneo by motorboat and four-wheel-drive vehicles, they heard about a species of palm with an extremely rare quirk.

It flowers underground.

The palm, Pinanga subterranea, is one of 74 plants that scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London named as new to science last year, thrilling some in the botany world. The botanists who went plant-hunting in Southeast Asia six years ago were not expecting to find it.

But the plant is not hard to find: It grows abundantly on Borneo, the third-largest island in the world, which includes parts of Indonesia and Malaysia.

. . .

. . ., the “discovery” of Pinanga subterranea is an example of conventional science catching up with Indigenous knowledge.

“We have described this as new to science,” said William J. Baker, the most senior scientist on the trip. “But the preexisting knowledge about this palm is layered, and was already there before we even got anywhere near it.”

Over the past 30 years, non-Indigenous scientists have turned more to Indigenous knowledge to expand or test their research, with varying degrees of sensitivity.

. . .

There have been a number of collaborative studies that credit Indigenous communities with having generations of wisdom on topics that include shellfish productivity, grizzly bear management and raptor behavior. In some cases the communities lead or participate in the research.

For the full story see:

Mike Ives and Hasya Nindita. “‘New to Science’ Plant Wasn’t Such a Secret.” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 30, 2024): D4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 20, 2024, and has the title “A Plant That Flowers Underground Is New to Science, but Not to Borneo.”)

Hayflick Said Lifespans Are Limited by Maximum Times Cells Can Divide (the “Hayflick Limit”)

Hayflick thought the “Hayflick limit” was a permanently binding constraint on the maximum lifespans that humans could achieve. But cancer cells provide a proof-of-concept that some cells are able to escape the limit. The challenge is to engineer cells that escape the limit without otherwise killing us. (Hayflick himself died of cancer.)

(p. A20) Leonard Hayflick, a biomedical researcher who discovered that normal cells can divide only a certain number of times — setting a limit on the human life span and frustrating would-be-immortalists everywhere — died on Aug. 1 [2024] at his home in Sea Ranch, Calif. He was 96.

His son, Joel Hayflick, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

Like many great scientific findings, Dr. Hayflick’s came somewhat by accident. As a young scientist in the early 1960s at the Wistar Institute, a research organization at the University of Pennsylvania, he was trying to develop healthy embryonic cell lines in order to study whether viruses can cause certain types of cancer.

He and a colleague, Paul Moorhead, soon noticed that somatic — that is, nonreproductive — cells went through a phase of division, splitting between 40 and 60 times, before lapsing into what he called senescence.

. . .

This finding, which the Nobel-winning virologist Macfarlane Burnet later called the Hayflick limit, ran counter to everything scientists believed about cells and aging — especially the thesis that cells themselves are immortal, and that aging is a result of external causes, like disease, diet and solar radiation.

. . .

Dr. Hayflick made other important contributions to science. He developed a particularly vibrant cell line, WI-38, which has been used for decades to make vaccines.

. . .

The National Institutes of Health had funded the research on his WI-38 cell line but declined to fund its distribution, even as other researchers clamored for samples. Dr. Hayflick established a company to process orders, charged a minimal fee for shipping and set the proceeds aside until ownership was clarified.

But in a private report that was released to the news media, the N.I.H. accused Dr. Hayflick of theft. He sued the institute, charging invasion of privacy and reputational damage, including a forced resignation from his position at Stanford. The litigation took six years and ended in a settlement that allowed him to keep some of the money and cell samples.

During those six years, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which allows scientists to profit off government-funded research. The law, which would have made Dr. Hayflick’s earlier actions unquestionably legal, helped catalyze the biotech industry.

For the full obituary see:

Clay Risen. “Leonard Hayflick, 96, Explorer of Cells Who Showed Why No One Lives Forever.” The New York Times (Tuesday, August 20, 2024): A20.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Aug. 19, 2024, and has the title “Leonard Hayflick, Who Discovered Why No One Lives Forever, Dies at 96.”)

Facing Death in a Seaplane Accident, Bertrand Russell’s Thoughts Were Not Philosophical: “I Thought the Water Was Cold”

For a year or two in grad school at Chicago, I was a member of a Bertrand Russell book club. I didn’t like Russell’s politics, but I did like his down-to-earth clarity, his sense of humor, and his optimistic defense of secular humanism.

(p. 10) “I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me”: The famous line from the Roman playwright Terence, written more than two millenniums ago, is easy to assert but hard to live by, at least with any consistency. The attitude it suggests is adamantly open-minded and resolutely pluralist: Even the most annoying, the most confounding, the most atrocious example of anyone’s behavior is necessarily part of the human experience. There are points of connection between all of us weirdos, no matter how different we are. Michel de Montaigne liked the line so much that he had the Latin original — Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto — inscribed on a ceiling joist in his library.

. . .

Humanism, . . ., has always had to negotiate between noble ideals of humanity and the peculiarities of actual humans. Paradox and ambiguity aren’t to be rejected but embraced. “Dispute and contradiction, not veneration and obedience, are the essence of intellectual life,” Bakewell writes.

. . .

. . ., Bakewell practices what she preaches — or, since preaching would be anathema to a humanist, she does what she suggests. She puts her entire self into this book, linking philosophical reflections with vibrant anecdotes. She delights in the paradoxical and the particular, reminding us that every human being contains multitudes.

This can lead her to some wonderful asides.  . . .  When Bertrand Russell was in a seaplane accident in Norway and a journalist called him afterward to ask whether his brush with death had led him to think about such high-flown concepts as mysticism and logic, he said no, it had not. “I thought the water was cold.”

For the full review see:

Jennifer Szalai. “Oh, the Humanity.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, April 16, 2023 [sic]): 10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 29, 2023 [sic], and has the title “The Tricky Thing With Humanism, This Book Implies, Is Humans.” In the original, the Latin phrase in the first quoted paragraph is in italics.)

The book under review is:

Bakewell, Sarah. Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope. New York: Penguin Press, 2023.

“Fiennes Is Superb” as “Calmly Eccentric Self-Taught Scholar”

(p. A13) Every now and then a film comes along—not a great one, necessarily—that makes you deeply glad. It’s how I feel about “The Dig.”

. . .

The dig in question has come to be called Sutton Hoo, after its site on the banks of a tidal river in Suffolk. The film, directed by Simon Stone and adapted by Moira Buffini from a John Preston novel about the discovery, plunges us into the adventure by following an unassuming gent named Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) as he bicycles his way to the fairly imposing house of Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan), a widow eager to investigate a mysterious group of mounds on her property. The project calls for an archaeologist—not Indiana Jones, necessarily, but someone with more extensive training than Basil, who was, in real life, the man who made the discovery, and who describes himself here with with laconic pride as a lifelong excavator. Yet the nation is preparing for war, no archaeologists are available and Basil will have to do.

Thus does “The Dig” deftly address issues of class—Basil knows more about the history and texture of Suffolk’s soil than any credentialed expert a museum might have sent—while giving us a prime example of an archetype dear to English films, the calmly eccentric self-taught scholar (who of course smokes a pipe). Mr. Fiennes is superb in the role—you’ll be glad to watch him digging away with his shovel, and you’ll be thrilled, as I was, when, after digging for a good while, he shows up at Edith’s door and says, his voice quivering with emotion, “I think you’d better come and see.” (The emotional spectrum of the cinematography, by Mike Eley, ranges from solemn to ecstatic.)

For the full review see:

Joe Morgenstern. “Unearthing a Glittering Tale.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Jan. 29, 2021 [sic]): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 28, 2021 [sic], and has the title “‘The Dig’: Unearthing a Glittering Tale.”)