We All Screen For i-Screens

I'm still finding it hard to get my head around the fact that there are people who think modern life is too easy. 

I mean, I just don't get it. At all. Sure, navigation is easier because you can outsource that to Google Maps, and you can order takeaways online, yes... and that's what's shutting down your critical thinking skills ? You don't have five hundred thousand other things demanding your attention instead ?

Wow. Must be nice. I only wish I had that problem.

Some have it that technology itself is the issue, and that we should claw back a more manual existence, both mentally and physically. I'm not entirely without sympathy here : as I've said before, I do think single-purpose "devices" like books are inherently better for developing focus and deep thought than devices which are designed to be multi-functional. Of course, in practise we need both sorts, but I think this maximal focus is particularly important for children. Reducing reliance on tech in schools is perfectly sensible, not least because kids will find their own ways to distract themselves regardless.

A good learning trajectory, I think is to first learn the fundamentals, do enough of the really hard basics yourself such that you develop a solid intuition for it, then gradually move up to dealing with the higher-level stuff, outsourcing the low-level aspects to dedicated tools. Do at least some addition and multiplication yourself before handing it over to a calculator; do at least a few Fourier transforms and differential equations the hard way before letting a computer handle it; look through an eyepiece before relying on a telescope's CCD*. Even if you forget the details later – and you will – you'll still be far better equipped to spot when things go wrong and figure out solutions. You'll also learn critical and analytical thinking along the way, and maybe even a little wisdom. Those kinds of skills have much broader applicability.

* Though there is no case whatever to be made for going back to an era in which you needed an acoustic coupler to send emails. Sometimes simplifying things is just good.

Then, so my pedagogical theory goes, you can start to ease off on the low-level stuff. To keep doing everything from first principles, solving every equation by hand, doing every task the hard way, is largely counter-productive, or even self-destructive, and futile. No, the point is that by having earned these core skills, you can free up your cerebral burden to concentrate on the bigger picture : deciding what problems to solve, how you want to solve them, and of course why. Your mind is still fully engaged, it's just doing less of the slog-through stuff (though it should probably also keep doing at least some of this) and more of the philosophy. 

This is likely true in general, it's just much more important when you're young because you have so much more to learn anyway. So yes, reduce tech even to zero for the youngest, then gradually introduce it at later stages of children's development. 

In that sense, I completely agree with Wes Streeting* that we should both reduce screen time for the youngest children and also more carefully monitor and regulate it for older children. That's common sense. Children need more sources of stimulation, and need to learn how to interact with each other far more than they need to learn how to use computers. Plenty of time for that later. 

* I had a lot of respect for the man until he decided he secretly loathed working for Keir Starmer for so many years despite being one of the most prominent faces of the refurbished Labour Party. Nevertheless, he's right about this. 

But for adults, I think "screens" as a being the, or even a, cause of society's ills doesn't have much merit to it. Multi-functionality is probably a bigger contribution, just because it's innately easier to get distracted and lose focus with a device that can do essentially unlimited things : if your main means of working is also your entertainment system, then it would be a rare person indeed who never got distracted by anything. 

Still, I think most people learn to overcome this. Most people are not so lacking in self-control that they find the mere presence of a shiny object irresistible.

No, I think the real problem is exactly as set out in this Aeon piece : it's a deliberate design problem. It's the way apps and social media have been constructed to form addictive, habit-forming, compulsive behaviours. It's not that they're just easy to use in a way which makes you want to continue out of a sense of progression and accomplishment – these kinds of apps aren't the pinnacle of productive user experience. It's more like they feed a constant low-level stream of dopamine, a sense that if I keep going just a bit longer, I'll get to the good stuff... which never arrives. We keep going out of a compulsion that's much harder to override than a genuine desire to continue in a task we actually enjoy.

Or, worse, they continuously enrage rather than engage. The brain seems to relish in arguing and it's addictive. Culture wars and Karens seem to strike at something deep in the subconscious.

To digress slightly, as this other article points out, unchecked complaining wires us to see the world differently, to insist that absolutely everything is awful and sink into a pit of doing nothing but whining. Complaints become a reflex action which overrides real thinking. It's such a common problem, and kudos to the article for noting this as a major symptom of the "these days" fallacy. That one in particular winds me up the wrong way (so I guess this is the wrong time to rant about it).

I think this sort of attitude is exactly what the press feed on : the tabloids in particular, but not exclusively. They present everything in the worst possible light. They make us believe, as the ancients did, that progress is impossible. They cultivate the death of hope for the sake of immediate profit. They seek out a deeply (small-c) conservative mindset, so common in the pre-modern era, the same one* which kept social change and improvement at bay for thousands of years. Both progress and conservatism tend to be self-reinforcing : progress by immediately normalising every development such that progressive voices always have something to complain about, and conservatism by insisting that nothing ever really changes so it isn't worth trying. Mix them together and it's all too easy to degenerate into nothing except perpetual whining**.

* I recommend making the time to watch this video as well as the one in the previous link. They're both more nuanced than the somewhat hyperbolic rhetoric I've adopted here, which should not be taken literally.
** PLEASE, for the love of sanity, just shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes about Donald Fucking Trump. 

And with digital devices this is ramped up to eleven. Which swings me nicely back to the Aeon piece I want to concentrate on. Because, it's not the devices themselves that are responsible for this. They just make this much, much easier to do. No, the problem lies with the human beings designing the algorithms, deliberately keeping everyone pissed off so they can't think rationally and see through this endless stream of utter garbage.

Consider a simple observation. The same person who cannot get through a novel can watch a three-hour video essay on the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The same teenager who supposedly lacks attention span can maintain game focus for hours while parsing a complex narrative across multiple storylines, coordinating with teammates, adapting strategy in real time. That’s not inferior cognition. It’s different cognition. And the difference isn’t the screen. It’s the environment.

...The fragmentation correlates not with screens in general but with specific design patterns: notification systems, variable reward schedules, infinite scroll. These are choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons. They are not inherent properties of the medium.

Though I would interject to point out that this doesn't mean there isn't a real problem with declining attention spans, it's just that the cause is not the digital or screen-based nature of the entertainment. And spending hours on a complex game, where things are constantly changing, isn't really the same as spending hours on a single difficult problem. But I take the point that not all forms of modern approaches are by any means bad, especially the tendency towards multi-hour YouTube videos.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, novel-reading itself was the existential threat. The terms used were identical to today’s moral panic: ‘reading epidemic’, ‘reading mania’, ‘reading rage’, ‘reading fever’, ‘reading lust’, ‘insidious contagion’. The journal Sylph worried in 1796 that women ‘of every age, of every condition, contract and retain a taste for novels … the depravity is universal.’

The predicted disasters were apocalyptic. J W Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) was blamed for triggering copycat suicides across Europe. Johann Peter Frank’s six-volume A System of Complete Medical Police (1779-1819) listed ‘reading of poisonous novels’ among the causes of suicide. Arthur Schopenhauer in 1851 described ‘bad books’ as ‘intellectual poison’. If the manipulative potential of novels were truly that great, as one historian dryly notes, women would have been eloping in hordes.

They didn’t. The disaster never materialised. But the panic served its purpose.

The expansion of literacy from a tiny elite to the general population scared a lot of conservatives. The panic wasn’t really about literacy declining. It was about literacy escaping elite control.

The historical pattern is well described, but I don't think much of the modern panic is really all about "elite control". There might be that aspect to it, a sort of snobbery : "you shouldn't be doing this largely harmless thing you enjoy because I never did that, or I just don't like it", rather than much in the way of "you plebs shouldn't learn anything". And to be fair, the author does go on to note that some of the panic arises from people enjoying themselves in the "wrong way" rather than learning the wrong things. 

But the main concern is that the new ways of learning will be genuinely harmful, both in terms of the effects on attention, memory, cognitive skills, and the actual information conveyed. Nobody is now concerned that women will overheat their brains by learning, but people do worry they will be misinformed : this is not the same moral panic as in earlier eras. Still, while digital media is different on all fronts from printed materials... the article is right that this doesn't make it necessarily better or worse. Merely talking to your friends is no more likely to give you the correct information than reading a book or watching a YouTube video is.

Indeed, for all the problems of echo chambers, the internet still gives you vastly better access to genuine expertise than in previous eras. People only remember the classics of literature and forget the trashy novels, the crappy magazines, the stupid TV series of yesteryear, the misinformation and delusions of past ages. We have a survivorship bias, remembering the geniuses but forgetting the contemptible fuckwits of earlier eras (largely because we have out own to deal with).

I would accept that this is all part of the continuous pattern the author describes, and if anything I might say the similarities are actually stronger. Then as now, the concern wasn't (all) about control, but conservatism : the tendency to see anything different as bad... but stemming from legitimate observations that some things the next generation do really are indeed just bad. The mistake is to think the previous generation never did anything equivalent, just because the mistakes they made were different.

What demonstrates that these panics were exaggerated? The predicted disasters never arrive. Adolescent aggression continued after comic book restrictions – because comics weren’t the cause. Novels didn’t trigger mass elopements. Radio didn’t destroy children’s capacity for thought. Each panic uses identical rhetoric: addiction metaphors, moral corruption, passive victimhood, apocalyptic predictions. Each time, the research eventually shows complex effects mediated by content, context and individual differences. And, each time, when the disaster fails to materialise, attention simply shifts to the next technology.

Absolutely fair. Which is not to say that there are never any disadvantages to new approaches at all – there absolutely are – but in terms of the apocalyptic rhetoric, I think all of it is nonsense.

These publications and technologies existed alongside serious thought. The penny dreadfuls didn’t prevent Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill or Charles Darwin from flourishing. What’s different now isn’t the existence of shallow content, which has always been abundant. What’s different is the existence of delivery mechanisms actively engineered to prevent the kind of attention that serious thought requires. The penny dreadfuls didn’t follow you into your bedroom at midnight, vibrating with notifications.

This distinction matters because it changes everything about the available responses... if the problem is design, then we need design activism and regulatory intervention. The same screens that fragment attention can support it. The same technologies that extract human attention can cultivate it. The question is who designs them, for what purposes, and under what constraints.

Yes, this ! Far from making life too easy, the modern user experience is far, far too difficult. Every single fucking website requires you to click through a list ten feet long to reject cookies, dismiss the "subscribe" box, actively opt-out of signing up for notifications.... The stream of interruptions is what kills attention and renders impotent any attempt at focus. Having digital access to work and entertainment is not the problem at all : having the experience be equivalent to finding oneself in a rowdy nightclub in order to read a short article about snails is where it's all gone wrong. 

At best, technology is a proxy for the real problems : taking ourselves offline will help only because those same problems don't exist in most other media. But there is absolutely no reason whatever why those problems have to exist in our digital worlds.

These aren’t concessions to declining attention spans. They’re recognitions that human understanding has always been richer than any single medium could contain. We’re not abandoning literacy. We’re discovering what literacy meant all along: not just the ability to decode symbols on a page, but the capacity to move fluently between all the ways humans encode meaning.

Exactly. If the goal is to be able to think deeply, to be able to process, analyse, and evaluate complex information, then insisting that there is only one correct way to do this simply wrong.

The pattern I observe repeatedly: people who ‘can’t focus’ on traditional texts can maintain extraordinary concentration when working across modes. They struggle with philosophy textbooks but thrive when they can listen to lectures while taking visual notes, discuss ideas in study groups, and write while pacing. 

We haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels. Your brain now routinely performs feats that would have seemed impossible to your grandparents. You parse information simultaneously across text, image, sound and motion. You navigate conversations that jump between platforms and formats. You synthesise understanding from fragments scattered across a dozen different sources.

But expansion without architecture is chaos, and that’s where we’ve stumbled. The people who cannot sit through novels aren’t broken. They’re adapted to an environment we built. We hand them infinite information and wonder why they drown. We give them tools designed to fracture attention and blame them when their attention fractures. We built a world that profits from distraction and then pathologise the distracted.

Once again, exactly this. It's the content that matters, not the way it's presented. Those who prefer thinking by discussion should do so (for me, trying this for the low-level stuff is like trying to pee while someone's looking right at me). Those who prefer to read their information alone should be able to, and those who want pre-recorded audio-visual should have it. And deep focus on a complex problem can indeed require multi-modal processing as much as it can solitude and simplicity.

What we need is to prioritise and customise the user experience, facilitating access to the information that's required, when it's required, and in what format. Simply hurling everything at everyone, and making them click away a dozen different unnecessary dialogue boxes to get what they need but then having to organise it themselves, and ejaculating pop-up windows at them at random... this isn't helping anyone. Not in science, not in social media, and not in society.

Not all deep thinking needs to be multimodal though. Clearly, the geniuses of the past were able to manage just fine without any of our modern devices and made the breakthroughs that made our modern world possible. My suspicion is that the process of synthesis, the all-important moment when multiple factors come together to create a new, meaningful statement about the world, is something that happens primarily in the mental domain. The external cognition we use is a necessary precursor to that crucial moment, that threshold when all the collective information we've considered crystallises into a hard, transmissible fact. That moment is a purely mental one.

A genius, then, I might define as someone who can do as much of this process purely in their head as possible. Good for them. But most of us mere mortals need our external supports, and fortunately for us, the impact of any breakthrough depends only on what our discovery is, not how it was made. At least in the terms of knowledge work, rather than insisting that we all refrain from reaching for our digital aids and deliberately make out lives more difficult, what we should be doing is streamlining the experience as much as possible, letting us organise things efficiently, collating and comparing what's relevant while discarding what we find superfluous as we choose. 

Often, this means beginning with a wealth of multi-modal data, sifting and examining in vibrant and unpredictable ways until we eventually reach the key moment of discovery. That the final step usually requires intense focus does not mean the preceding labyrinth should follow the same "everybody fuck off and leave me alone" part of the process. Nor does the fact that the route to discovery is often convoluted and fraught with wrong turns and dead ends mean that we should never try and reduce this as much as possible. 

In both science and society, sometimes we need to struggle and sometimes we need to simplify, and to say it's all just one or the other is just wrong-headed : you want people to think critically about their social media posts, but you don't want them to spend hours selecting the appropriate font; solving a scientific problem should involve some amount of difficulty thought but it shouldn't be debilitating. And simplification is all too often compensated for as we just do more and more of the original activity, or something else comes along that consumes all the time we've saved.

No, I think the road to improving things lies almost entirely in terms of reducing our struggles, not in cultivating them – at least for adults. Maybe one day we'll have to deal with people genuinely getting lazy and stupid because everything is too easy, but that day is probably somewhere – as H. G. Wells predicted – around the year 800,000 AD, not next Tuesday. 

Until then, we should actively work towards more digitisation and more simplification... what we need less of is not technology, but interruptions not of our choosing. We need to minimise unwanted distractions and addiction-forming interfaces. We need designs that respect how people genuinely work, and think in longer timescales : maybe giving everyone dopamine hits is good for quarterly profits, but it's absolutely shit for the economy when, years later, they all forget how to turn their devices on because their brains have been turned to mush by a relentless barrage of doom-scrolling websites that insist they fill in another 300-question survey every twenty minutes.

The Better Angels Of Our Scientific Nature

I've pointed out many times that what seems rational is constantly evolving as evidence changes. If you don't notice things disappearing over the horizon gradually, or the shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse, then a flat Earth is an entirely sensible thing to believe in.

A contrary view from comes from the New Atheist crowd, who are apt to insist that all of humanity's history would have been better if people had just never believed in anything religious. This is a garbage and meritless claim, for many reasons/ For one thing, as Pratchett pointed out :

“The amount of belief in the world must be subject to an upper limit... It follows that if a major focus of belief is removed, there will be spare belief.”

You can't just stop believing in things by choice. Can't be done. And this follows in part from the above, that at one point, the evidence for the now-discarded ideas seemed very good indeed. Supernatural explanations made a lot of sense, because we understand minds and agency at a much more instinctual level than we do the conservation of momentum or the hysteresis curve. 

It follows, then, that at one point we really had very little option but to believe in supernatural agency for a good many things : we literally have to believe in something, and without a rational explanation available, the gap is filled with angels and demons.

Which leads me in to this thoroughly interesting Aeon essay which examines this in a lot more detail. More than that, it shows how philosophical musings on the nature of angels was anything but the proverbially-empty question : how many angels can dance on the head of the pin, it turns out, is a tremendously useful vehicle for exploring the nature of space and matter. Inquiries may have begun from a world view that now seems preposterous, but the full examination of these early ideas, when done with careful rigour and logic, led directly to some of the scientific notions we now find most fundamental of all.

This view of angels as immaterial ‘intelligences’ became pretty standard in medieval philosophy and theology. But the scholastic period saw an increasing desire to systematise, systematise, systematise. The precise nature or essence of angels became a serious cause for debate, and these debates were not mere thought experiments. Rather, because of the real belief in the existence of angels, theologians and philosophers could think through angels as a way of understanding the nature of the physical world and things like place, bodies and motion. 

This was motivated by significant theological concerns. One concern was that, if angels are immaterial intelligences, then what makes them different to God? For us, our bodies are what make us limited, able to exercise force only directly, such as when I throw a ball. Does this mean angels, having no body, could exist everywhere or act at a distance? This was dangerous territory for theologians, potentially challenging God’s omnipresence and omnipotence.

And again, I've gone on enough times about how Christianity isn't really monotheistic, because if you allow other supernatural powers which aren't under god's direct agency, then you've all but conceded paganism. However, the author here has a much more interesting point : that to make sense of angels conceptually, you have to grapple with basic physics. And no, the "it's just magic" explanation was not enough for medieval theologians.

The view was that angels had to be located (i.e., limited) but without a body. The key to understanding the angelic debates of the scholastic period is to understand what conceptual tools the physics of the day provided. For all intents and purposes, this physics was Aristotle. For Aristotle, physics was simply about things that move and, on his account, bodies don’t move because of gravity or kinetic energy or the warping of spacetime but because of their natures. 

Similarly, there was no concept of absolute space, but rather a concept of ‘place’, which, unlike Newtonian absolute space or Albert Einstein’s spacetime, does not exist entirely independent of the bodies that inhabit it. As the philosopher Tiziana Suárez-Nani points out in Angels, Space and Place (2008), ‘space … as an undifferentiated and homogenous receptacle, was alien to the medieval mind.’ For Aristotle, bodies could not exist without place, which served as a kind of container. Likewise, there had to be bodies for there to be place. In other words, a vacuum is not possible in Aristotle’s view.

I think it's worth pausing for a moment to consider just how profoundly different this is from the modern concept of space. For us, space is a container : it consists of nothing in itself, but it's where everything goes. It's the "fabric" of the Universe which can itself expand, warp, contract etc., but it's not really a physical thing. It's more the reference system we have for other objects. It isn't defined by them, though it is intimately connected*. It can, in principle, be absolutely empty (vacuum energy notwithstanding), and indeed that's exactly what we mean by space itself. The kind of vacuum-abhorring "place" that Aristotle espoused was something altogether different from our modern notion.

* And people say dualism is some sort of mysticism ! Don't worry, I'm not going there today.

So, what has that got to do with angels? If you recall, theological concerns at the time required angels to have a specific location – to be limited and bodiless – in order to avoid angels with limitless power, rendering them omnipotent as well as omnipresent. Normally, the material body of something locates it, so how can immaterial angels be located? Aquinas and others solved this problem creatively, locating angels not by their physical dimensionality but by their operations. Aquinas proposed that an angel has a different type of location than a bodily being. An angel is in a place by virtue of applying its power to the physical objects in a given place. This limited both an angel’s operations and their location, locating them by their operations, rather than by a body.

Right, so you can have angels which aren't omnipotent or omnipresent and are still immaterial and supernatural. Hooray ! But :

Importantly, the Condemnations of 1277 forbade believing that angels are located by their operations rather than by their substance, so Aquinas’ solution for angelic location was now off the table. If an angel exists in a place solely by its operations, as Aquinas claimed, then what happens when it’s not operating? Angels had to be rethought.

Here’s what Scotus did: he made ‘place’ more mathematical, less tied to location and more similar to our notion of dimension. When thought about in terms of dimension, the ‘place’ occupied by an object stays the same as the object moves through locations. In this sense, its ‘place’, redefined as dimension, is the same, even though it changes location. In other words, Scotus, as aptly stated by Lang, ‘neutralises’ place radically. On the Aristotelian account, direction or location were part of the definition of ‘place’. When redefined more mathematically as a kind of dimension, direction is no longer a necessary feature of this new kind of ‘place’. You can have an idea much more like that of ‘space’, something that doesn’t inherently contain ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘left’ or ‘right’ in its definition.

Technically, this meant that God could create a rock in no ‘place’, if place referred to Aristotle’s definition of place, which was a location within the outermost rim of the heavenly spheres. Whereas Aristotle had defined place as a necessary defining feature of physical bodies, Scotus did not. Instead, he created a hybrid account in which something can exist inside the outermost rim of the celestial sphere (occupying place in the Aristotelian sense), but it doesn’t have to; it could equally just occupy space by having dimension outside of that sphere.

And to use another Pratchett quote : all places are indeed one place, but that place is very large. 

Ahem. We even get something akin to the Uncertainty Principle cropping up :

The image Lang uses, citing Scotus, is of a surface that must have colour, but whose colour can be anything. Angels can occupy a place however small or large, just not infinitely so, and they must operate in a place, though they themselves exist in the place indeterminately... To posit angels as immaterial external forces was indeed oddly closer to a classical physics that sees an invisible force like gravity working on bodies externally. In fact, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz accused Newton of having introduced occult forces with his theory of gravity, because gravity seemed to be a supernatural force acting on bodies at a distance.

I mean, it just tells you a lot about human psychology when you find scientists accusing each other of being occult because their rigorous, predictable, mathematical theorems are somehow similar to angels... I'm not sure what exactly it's telling us, but it's certainly a lot, whatever it is. It's interesting to consider "angels" as a proxy for "force", though it would seem very strange to suggest that God ordered the world using ultra-obedient angels rather than just making things go round and round. Why didn't planets move directly according to his will ? Perhaps this again points to a seriously profound mismatch between our modern concepts and the medieval mindset. 

The role angels played in such thought experiments was unique: angels transcended the purely physical world but were still ‘creatures’ that abided by the rules and the logic governing the Universe.. .angels, precisely because of their intermediary status, allowed human beings to think about dimensions of created reality that yet transcended our direct human perceptions.

While it is easy enough to ridicule the suggestion that movement is the result of occult forces such as angels, we cannot, having ascended the ladder of knowledge, so easily kick that ladder out from under ourselves... We equate ‘up’ with ‘more’ when we say ‘the stock market rises’ because when we see, for example, rocks piled up, we learn to equate higher with more. We say we ‘grasp’ an idea because we have experienced reaching for a piece of fruit on a tree. In addition, we have a very hard time imagining a nonphysical thing. What we imagine, when we imagine a soul or an angel or a demon, is some kind of insubstantial, but still ghostly, object.

I would say slightly the opposite on this last point. We have no problems at all imagining ghosts in an abstract sense. Ghost ? Sure, it's a person who can walk through walls, wails around a lot waving chains and making woo-woo noises. Easy peasy. But try and explain how this works on the physical level and we come quickly unstuck. How can it be perceived if it doesn't interact with light ? How can we hear its woo-woo noises if it can walk through solid walls : why would its lungs interact with the molecules of the air, and why doesn't it fall through the floor ? Nevertheless, the imaginary concept of a ghost is simplicity itself.

Although occult forces such as angels and demons may be ridiculed in modern culture as ‘hand-wavey’ explanations of quite logical, down-to-earth scientific phenomena, I would suggest the inverse. That what is most down-to-earth might in fact be to think about the invisible forces of nature as angels, agents, immaterial intelligences with certain properties familiar to us, but amplified. Properties like agency and intention. It is only in thinking through, and with, these more familiar concepts that we can then discover a less intuitive set of concepts, like spacetime, which require grounding in concepts like dimension, body, place and movement. These necessary grounding concepts were sharpened, historically, by thinking through the relationship between the material and immaterial world, and angelology played a significant role in their honing.

And I find myself in strong agreement. I presume that the author doesn't mean that we really should think about things as all being imbued with intentionality or anything like that, only that we naturally do. Such a beginning is our jumping-off point, something we can easily understand in order to progress to the next level. Saying that electrons, in suspiciously Aristotleian-fashion, want to reach the lowest energy state, is a very handy lie-to-children. Pretty soon (sometimes immediately) we realise that the electron doesn't necessarily want anything at all, in the literal sense, but the metaphor helps us understand. Only with that basic concept in hand can we get to the hard mathematics, to try and consider – insofar as our observational data permits us – what's really going on.

Right then, time to write to Dan Brown and tell him to write a blockbuster sequel. I'm sure philosophical musings on the nature of immaterial angels and their implications for cosmology is a guaranteed cinema hit.

The Shock Of The Constantly New

I continue to be impressed enough by my reMarkable tablet that I remain subscribed to their newsletter, although not so much that I have any intention of upgrading until mine breaks.

I rarely do more than glance at newsletters unless there's something especially interesting, and this "newsletter fatigue" is probably something the good people at reMarkable want to think about a bit more carefully. Still, they really do seem goal-oriented with their products far more than they are profit-motivated. They genuinely want you to not only like but actually benefit from their pricey yet highly effective digital notebooks.

This rather short but interesting offering* goes into a bit more detail about some of the thinking strategies they suggest employing. While some of their newsletter content is, as to be expected, advertising in the guise of research, this one isn't. The title "Thinking in the Age of AI" is a complete misnomer, as AI doesn't factor into anything here. It's much more focused on thinking in the age of distractions, which has been a problem for a good while longer.

* It's an 18 page PDF that's probably about two pages of actual content, but it is good content, to be fair.

Instead of being a simple article, this is actually an exercise book designed to help concentration (on your trusty digital notebook, of course). I've not tried this, and I honestly don't see the point of writing down how I feel about my innermost mental states for the sake of my own reflection, but the advice seems sensible enough.

Anyway, they say there are three failures of the modern mind :

1 : Cognitive overload. Self-explanatory, really... when there's too much to process and it all comes at once, nothing gets processed well. Nuance is lost and the response is anxiety, tunnel vision, and even a threat-response style of thinking.

2 : Attentional fragmentation. Closely related, a stream of endless novelty. Even if you could process everything in sequence, constantly switching from topic to topic inevitably means a loss of focus. Worse, and I think here is much their most interesting point, is that modern devices train the brain to expect distraction. The unspoken comment here is that we become dependent on it, because that's what we expect our phones to do... if they stop doing it, we go looking for extra simulation. Turn off notifications and we end up scrolling. And this is bloody exhausting and unproductive.

3 : Meaning drift. If we have constant short-term distractions, then on the longer term we're also having to deal with constant, bigger changes. Change outpaces the brain’s ability to build coherence. Which means that even when we do make sense of things and make progress, the ground keeps shifting from under our feet.

A long time ago I remember having a discussion about why the world feels so politically inept, with one of the main proposals being that the pace of technological change is just too rapid for everyone to keep up with. I was rather skeptical at the time, but now I'm not so sure. Is this because I've gotten older and my thinking less flexible, or have the notifications just been ramped up to 11 ?

I'd like to think it's more the latter than the former. I don't feel any less tech-savvy than I did a decade ago; I've always hated techno-socialising so I can appear more backward than I actually am. I hated Facebook then I hate Tik Tok now. I didn't want to constantly check everyone's status in my PhD days and I don't want a single more WhatsApp alert today than is absolutely necessary. I do, however, very much enjoy writing Python code (with and without AI) and getting most of my exercise in VR games. Safe to say I want more technology in my life, not less.

But what I don't want is the unfocused kind of alert swarm that plagues social media like a ravening horde of locusts. I don't want to subscribe to some website's shitty notifications. I don't want to feel compelled to respond to messages instantly instead of within 24–72 hours. I'm trying to get stuff done here : I can't stop for a few minutes without losing my whole train of thought. It does my head in. Sometimes it almost physically hurts.

So maybe this kind of technological "progress" does have a role to play in the explaining the broader political narratives after all. Not through misinformation, but undermining cognitive capabilities in a far more insidious way : overwhelming the brain's capacity for rational thinking by a constant demand for attention, attention, attention. 

In fairness, I can imagine that the larger technological developments may feel like they undermine our basis for how we go about our daily lives, because as we all know...

Lord Vetinari represented stability. It was a cold and clinical kind of stability, but part of his genius was the discovery that stability was what people wanted more than anything else. He’d said it to Vimes once, in this very room, standing at this very window: “They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today.”

... but I think the kind of things which undermine that feeling of desirable, predictable stability is not nearly so much technological as political. And rather than just the clichéd view of childhood as being a golden era and everything went downhill since then, I'll point to the 2008 credit crunch as the point where things started to go very much awry. Then of course we have Brexit, Trump, Covid, Ukraine, the ongoing pointless conflict in the Middle East... it's all of these things, I think, that undermine people's basic world view. 

These are the sorts of things that cause people to lose hope and confidence, not the mere existence of smartphones and virtual reality headsets. The fact that energy supplies are shifting to renewables is not in itself a source of anxiety : if it's a factor at all (except for those who'll need to shift employment) then this comes about only from sensationalised reporting in the fascist side of the press, not because everyone is low-level scared of windmills.

No, the technological aspect does feed into all this but only thanks to its extreme commercialisation. The need to constantly keep aware of pointless developments on a wide variety of topics we're not really interested in from people we've never met... that feeds into the general malaise. And I don't think it even needs to do anything so direct as to decrease out attention spans : being addicted to this kind of crap can simply be fucking depressing.

So what can we do about it ? Well, I don't propose to Put The World To Rights today, and as I said, all this all seems like a second-order effect on the grand scheme of things anyway. But the article does at least offer some good ideas for getting one's shit together. And this doesn't involve shutting everything down completely, but rather in managing things in a more structured way :

1 : Calm down and choose one thing to do next. Breathing and stretching exercises to get your brain to shut up for a minute, and then carefully think about a single thing you could do to meaningfully progress in your task. And then just get on with that for at least ten minutes.

2 : Deep work for 90 minutes. I hear various claims that the human attention span is actually much shorter than this, but I don't believe them. In my experience, when in a good state of flow, 90 minutes does sound about right. This is as much time as it takes to really get to grips with a complex problem and make some useful progress before fatigue begins to sit in. Turn off all distractions during this block, they say, and it's hard to argue with that. The compulsion to check on the latest alert is just too overwhelming.

3 : Decompress for 20 minutes. Take a break to do some housework or whatnot. Change your mental input so that your brain can properly consolidate what it just learned.

4 : Open attention for 30 minutes. Turn on the notifications again, check those messages, allow more free-flowing, unstructured, unfocused attention. Deliberately taking in new input can help in refreshing thinking and even fostering creativity.

5 : Review. Try to keep track of what specifically works for you and what doesn't. How much time do you really need in each block ? Which distractions do you need to take the most care to avoid ? Do you need to work like this every day or maybe just once per week ? Try to schedule this approach ahead of time.

I will add just a few things that help me manage the hellscape that is modernity. First, to-do lists are absolutely essential. I use a combination of simple notepad files (for the more complex descriptions) and the Microsoft ToDo app, which is useful because it allows scheduling, multiple items in lists, lists of lists, and has a very satisfying "ding" sound every time you mark a task for completion. It's also a handy way to jot down all those facts you need semi-frequently (I have a dedicated list "Things to Remember"), for which it has a search function. I also try and be both realistic and flexible here. I try not to schedule more for a day than I can actually do, but if I don't get something done, I just move it to the next day and don't let this become just another thing to worry about.

Second, one aspect where I do record my inner mental state is when I can't avoid having to stop. Writing down the key part of what I was thinking – what I was suspecting might be going on and what I want to try next – helps enormously in getting back into the flow state much faster. If I have to stop for a longer period, like going on holiday, I right a lengthier description, including where all the files are and a short description of what led me to this point in the process (sometimes my "What You're Working On Right Now" file might be a page or two in length). I've long since given up on the fool notion that "I'll just remember it", because I bloody well won't. 

And third, I go for a walk. Sometimes I continue thinking about what I was working on, sometimes I use it as a dedicated break. Either way, the different environment is mentally stimulating without being overwhelming, and even when I think I've had a great idea (Microsoft's app is again good for recording these), the enforced inability to try it out right there and then prevents my brain from over-focusing on the problem. Forcing a temporary shutdown is important, as while it is possible to maintain flow for longer than 90 minutes, I doubt most people can do much longer very often. In my experience, if you try this, you get a sort of false flow : something that can feel like you're making progress but rarely accomplishes anything productive. Forcing myself to stop is by far the best way to avoid this.

Well, that's what mostly works for me, anyway. It doesn't make the world a better place, but it makes my small corner of it a bit more manageable. 

Review : The Making Of The Middle Ages (II)

Welcome back to my review-summary of John Haywood's The Making Of The Middle Ages. Last time we looked at the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, as one does. In this concluding part, we need to look at what happened to a fragmented (and sometimes not so fragmented) Europe in the aftermath of its first superstate, especially Britain because it's my blog and I can if I want to. I'll finish with a look at some of the deeper structural changes that were happening, which are directly relevant to an awful lot more than just Dark Age European history.

3) What happened next ?

Haywood has a somewhat pointless comment that the term "Dark Ages" only really applies to Europe; as a European, I would take it for granted that European studies are first and foremost concerned with, well, Europe.

Across the continent, the complexities of the changes are far too complex to attempt a summary here. Broadly though, Haywood notes that the collapse of the Roman free trade area meant a reversion to a simpler existence; there was just no other way people could get by. But change was enormously inhomogeneous. For those at the top it could be a true catastrophe, with their whole lifestyles depending on the resources of an Empire which was, quite suddenly, not there. For those at the bottom it might not have made much difference : instead of farming on the estate of some local governor, they now found themselves... still farming. 

But it wasn't anything like this simple. Peasants were now without the protection of the army against a series of invasions; they could be both at once the most and least affected by the change (and Haywood needs a better lower-level description to explain this better). The elite didn't suffer in the same way everywhere. In a few places, as we've seen in other books, they could sometimes sustain their lifestyles long after Rome had faded into legend. The organs of administration sometimes survived locally, but not always; political change was extremely rapid, but social change – the basic beliefs and ways in which people ran their own lives – could be much slower and more varied. 

Barbarians might, for instance, find themselves living as pagans surrounded by people who had been Christian* for centuries. Different laws were enacted that gave different rights to different groups. On the short term there was a chaotic mixture of beliefs that led to hatred and massacres; on the longer term, toleration of pagans made them more susceptible to conversion. 

* Or rather, monotheistic. Jewish treatment was highly varied : the Khazar Khanate even had Jewish leadership.

And again, not everywhere, and not all in the same way. In Britain a deliberate decision not to destroy the sacred shrines and holy places of the locals allowed priests to rebrand them for a Christian age. In Scandinavia, with tremendous irony, the supposedly more peaceful and moral Christian religion was enforced by methods of such brutality that even HBO would shirk from depicting them, including forcing live venomous snakes inside the unfortunate pagans by means of red hot pokers. Quite how you manage to do this probably doesn't bear thinking about.

Oddly enough, the "let's be nice to everyone" approach actually worked out far more successfully in the end. Funny that.

Whether we should see the end of Rome as the lights going out or an oppressive chain being lifted is not a question that has a single valid answer. In some case it could be either, in others, not really one or the other. The warrior culture that often replaced it was different, but it could sometimes just be a different kind of nasty. While Rome wiped Carthage from the map, you can't really imagine even the nastiest Roman general just heading out at random and declaring, "Let us go against the people with whom God is angry" as one barbarian warlord did. 

Haywood's presentation of the people who filled the vacuum of Empire is nuanced : their art could be as sophisticated as anything Rome ever produced, their technical skills their equal (or superior, as in the case of the composite bow), but their politics... that could be primitive and shite. They had a sophisticated, highly developed society, but their warrior, honour-based culture all but made peace impossible. They were not the monsters of later Christian legend, but they absolutely could be barbaric.

In the south, maps here again help with understanding the stupendous advance of the Arab invasions. Here was a civilisation as aggressive, imperial, and sophisticated as Rome had been, and it faced all the same problems of monumental scale but at a speed of advance unprecedented in Roman history. Haywood essentially presents this as more a conversion than a conquest, with the early Caliphate fragmenting almost immediately because there was simply no way to sustain an empire this large that had arisen this quickly. 

Nonetheless, the map of Europe dominated by the Caliphate, Carolingian Empire, and Byzantium is fascinating : three centuries after the fall of the West, Europe was already dominated once more by vast power blocs. No simple narrative can be told here. As on the smaller scale of Britain, there is no one story to tell. Sometimes provinces fragmented into a multitude of miniature kingdoms, sometimes they were subsumed once again into massive empires. The end of the Pax Romana led eventually to modern Europe, but not at all in a straightforward way.

One particular instance exemplifies this. I was aware that the Magyar people moved into Hungary sometime during this period, but I had absolutely no idea that they essentially invaded all of Europe. Virtually the entirety of the continent, except Britain, and this is the first I've heard of it ! It's like someone had conspired to hide the existence of the Vikings from me... I find it properly bizarre that we've forgotten this*. Granted, they were raids rather than an invasion proper, and short-lived. It just goes to show the power of simplifying the narrative, I guess.

* Its's not just me, right ?

4) What about Britain ?

There's a second outstanding point where I feel like a owe Haywood a beer. It's incredibly well-known in British popular history that Rome abandoned us due to a lack of resources; the famous letter sent by the Emperor in 410 AD instructing the British to "look to your own defences" is widely touted as categorical proof for this version of events.

So I was very much caught off-guard by Haywood's repeated assertions that it was Britain who left Rome, not the other way around. I felt sure this must be another of his more dubious throwaway claims, because why would so many popular historians insist so strongly, and so clearly, that this is undoubtedly what happened ?

But apparently... it isn't so straightforward as that. The text of the famous letter hasn't survived, only a reference to it in another document which in context doesn't even refer to Britain at all. I consulted ChatGPT about this and (checking the citation links) got somewhat mixed messages. Haywood's blunt assertion that we decided to leave and even expel the Romans looks to be heavily overstating the case, but it's by no means a unique view among historians. It still feels to me more plausible that Roman rule collapsed in Britain rather than being the result of local dissatisfaction; I find this earliest possible Brexit hard to swallow. Even so, learning how unreliable the letter is as evidence is very much like having the rug pulled from under one's feet.

More securely, all these maps of the enormous scale of mass migration and conquest across Europe do help – in another case of "show, don't tell" – why scholars of previous eras were so keen to believe the scant historical records of genocide in Britain by the Anglo-Saxons. Vast migrations really were a thing on the mainland, and when you chart this, when you see all those arrows drawn across the land (other books lack this context), it becomes much more difficult to believe that Britain alone could be such an outlier. Previous scholars might have been biased and had their own agendas, but we do them a disservice to attribute their beliefs solely to their prejudices. They weren't stupid.

Haywood nonetheless favours a mixed model, which I think is by far the most likely set of events. In some cases there may have been local massacres, in others a purely cultural change (essentially ideas spreading as a social contagion), in others an "elite transfer" where only the rulers were replaced. Thomas Williams presents much the most convincing argument for this, with the evolution and development of subsequent British minor kingdoms being so varied that the simplistic "the Saxons killed everybody" or "the Saxons never even showed up" interpretations both now look faintly preposterous.

Here Haywood feels in much better agreement with my other recent reads on Dark Age British history. He favours a somewhat later Christian conversion than others, pushing the final end of native paganism more towards 700 AD than Ronald Hutton thinks likely but still well within error bars. He also treats Ambrosius Aurelianus as a perfectly credible figure behind the myth of Arthur, something that Max Adams mentions but rejects without explanation despite their obvious similarities.

Conclusions : Networks and Hierarchies

Haywood does an excellent job of considering how the multitude of different polities in Dark Age Europe functioned as organisational systems. He considers both the economic forces governing them but also their religious and political ideals : the deliberate choices their leaders made, for good and ill, in a conscious effort to shape their own realities. Nobody here is purely a victim of circumstance nor wholly immune to forces beyond their control. Rulers shape their world just as much as they are shaped by it.

But one important system-level process which emerges repeatedly here is whether a state is a network or a hierarchy. Niall Ferguson considered this in his dedicated but somewhat hit-and-miss book The Square And The Tower, but I think Haywood helps clarify things. Broadly, a centralised state can marshall immense, well-coordinated resources : its military force can be highly destructive and highly targeted. This presumes, of course, that the state is well run (such that it really is a hierarchy, not just the semblance of one) and its ruler(s) intelligent. Depending on the details it can be slow to assemble its forces. A centralised administration can also be vulnerable to decapitation : kill the leader and you get to claim the whole empire.

By contrast, more egalitarian networks tend to be less coordinated. They can respond to local problems extremely rapidly, but find it difficult to assemble organised, large-scale invasion forces. They can be easy for a centralised state to raid but extremely hard to fully conquer, since each individual town and village is essentially an independent unit : there's no single person you can replace as ruler. You have to take them all one at a time.

These are only ever rough guidelines though. Centralised Lombardy, says Haywood, was much easier for Charlemagne to conquer than the more egalitarian Saxony, and similarly decentralised Ireland was a much tougher nut to crack for the Vikings than the poorly-run but centralised kingdoms of England. Conversely, the Viking decentralised network was extraordinarily effective during its invasion phase, but it lost all unity after England was (mostly) conquered. This made it disproportionately vulnerable to the disciplined, centralised, resurgent Wessex.

All this points to Ferguson's claim that networks tend to beat hierarchies as needing a lot of qualification. A group of disconnected villages is not a true network, any more than a centralised state where nobody actually cares what the ruler thinks is really a hierarchy. You don't necessarily need a ruler to be successful, but you do need coordination and communication. Once this is lost, once the network loses common purpose, it collapses into tiny, vulnerable fragments. Restoring unity may be much more difficult than replacing a failed leader in a hierarchy.

What eventually emerged from the wreck of Rome was a compromise : feudalism. This is essentially a decentralised hierarchy, or a sort of coordinated series of hierarchies. Yes, the king supposedly has the last say, but the power of medieval monarchs was very far from absolute. His immediate underlings often had wealth and armies of comparable power to his own, with a power base residing at significant distances from the royal court. And similarly for the dukes and earls and suchlike : centrally concentrated power with a clear sense of who the ruler was, but with their own agents – barons and counts and other lesser nobles – widely dispersed within their own provinces, and each having their own forces.

Which underscores two things. First, it's important to understand the actual structure of a network in practise, as opposed to its theoretical organisation. Second, that the network/hierarchy distinction is subtle, perhaps more subtle than centralised = hierarchy or decentralised = network.  

Max Adams also considered if kingdoms raised their kings or it was kings who raised kingdoms. That is, did a feudal structure emerge by itself, eventually resulting in centralised rulers, or did powerful warlords clobber their opponents and eventually enact feudalism ? This probably can't be satisfactorily answered, though a theoretical, sociological approach to understanding the currents of history sounds like a thoroughly good idea to me.

Two final practical points. There's an interesting parallel between the Merovingian kings, the later stages of the Roman Empire, and the early medieval Welsh. How so ? Well, just as the Romans sought to break into several self-governing units but maintain a single polity, so the Merovingian kings actually managed this for a time. You could point to a map of France and say this ruler controls this part, this one that, but all are Merovingian : again, a sort of decentralised hierarchy. And they in turn had inheritance laws which distributed their wealth somewhat equally among their children, a far more egalitarian approach than most European kings and strikingly similar to that of the Welsh. Understanding how this worked in detail, I think, is another area which requires a thoroughly holistic approach, and probably a purely network-based analysis is doomed to fail.

And this "consider ALL the things !" approach goes further. Last time I mentioned that you really have to consider systems in their entirety before reaching general conclusions. Selecting a single important aspect to say "look, this happened before, so if it repeats, this other thing is likely to happen as well" is a valid starting point, but it can't be the end of the analysis. Factors which can seem extraneous can be anything but, and one of the strangest examples of this is the nature of medieval scholarship. The interesting thing here is that medieval scholars were concerned with cultivating different ways of thought, teaching how to think more than what to think... but paradoxically, this didn't result in many novel ideas. Other authors certainly disagree with this, but still it's worth considering : in progressive circles, we so often take it for granted that teaching how is more important than what, but if we really want more creativity, perhaps there's more to it than that.

Finally, if rulers were both shaped by but also shaped their own environment, then the importance of long-term thinking becomes apparent. The institutional reforms of Heraclius (especially in terms of who could own what) didn't work in the short term, albeit because of the Arabian storm that would sweep away much of the battered Empire in a few short years. But they did save the foundations. His reforms led the way for a comeback : if not to anything like the old Roman state, then to a nation that would be in the top rank of European powers for centuries to come. 

Failure is indeed not fatal... but success is equally not final. Perhaps a greater understanding of the structures of our own age would better help us make sense of the confusing omnishambles in which we find ourselves, but mere data alone is not enough to convey understanding. And in the end, nothing lasts forever.

Review : The Making the Middle Ages (I)

I picked up John Haywood's The Making Of The Middle Ages : An Atlas of Europe as a treat to myself for no particular reason at all. I'm pleased to say that once again, Thames & Hudson do not disappoint. Physically, this is an exceptional product of thick paper, outstanding print quality, more than enough maps that the "Atlas" subtitle is fully earned, and accompanied by insightful, analytical text that attempts to draw out the large-scale trends driving Europe in the period c.400 – 1000 A.D.

I have two small complaints about the text. First, there are a few throwaway comments that appear to be pure bunk. Nothing very substantial*, but it does distract somewhat. Second, the balance is a little off, concentrating a bit more on the Fall of the Roman Empire than in the actual birth of European nations : an extra fifty pages here would have solved this nicely.

* One is that Marcus Aurelius inexplicably broke a tradition of emperors appointing successors meritocratically rather than dynastically, which simply isn't true at all. Another is that Britain in the Dark Ages was indeed a grim, dark place, which is massive oversimplification at best. A third, more serious accusation is that the Vikings were purely piratical, but for that one, wait for the post(s) on Neil Price's PhD thesis.

Against this, the maps are outstanding. They are not just there for eye candy, but significantly enhance the text itself : at a glance, the points that Haywood describes become clear, and trends that are complex to present in text become obvious in map form. A further compensation is that Haywood takes a much more economic, materialistic approach to history than most popular historians. He looks for the reasons driving the shifting demographics and political boundaries beyond the personal choices made by the great and good, without neglecting the importance of individuals during pivotal moments.

The only logistical issue I can raise is that it would have been extremely helpful to have a more detailed contents with a full list of maps. A better epilogue with a more thorough synthesis of the broad narrative and conclusions would also have boosted this from the "excellent" to "truly outstanding" category. As it stands, I'd probably give it... 8.5/10. Not too shabby, that.

I doubt every piece of analysis here will survive the judgement of history, and nor should it. These kinds of theories are offerings, suggestions to be made for examination, not pronouncements about what really happened. Plenty of them, though, seem very good indeed. So let's dive into what makes this such an interesting read.

1) The Non-Decline Of The Roman Empire

Haywood's interpretation of the late stages of the Roman Empire is very different from the classical, "collapsing morality and deplorable loss of manly virtues" of Gibbon and other antiquarians. The Roman state, by the start of the fifth century, would not have been much recognisable to Julius Caesar, but only in the same way that modern Britain wouldn't be familiar to Henry VIII. The original J.C., had he found himself thrown forwards into the worlds of Stilicho and Aetius, would have had a lot of radical unfamiliarity and a monstrous dose of culture shock to deal with... but if he'd persevered, he'd have been able to understand the lineage. He's have been able to say, "yep, this isn't the Empire of my day, but it's still definitely the Roman Empire".

The crucial point here is that, as in earlier times, the organisations and systems of the later Empire fundamentally worked. The structural changes which had occurred were basically sensible, necessary, and beneficial, and the Empire remained an unquestionable superpower; Haywood is excellent at stressing all this in a way that's sometimes obscured in other histories. But this is not to say that things were optimal... far from it. 

The Empire had reached the innate limits of its maximum extent. For one thing, communication delays alone made further expansion hugely impractical, but worse was that the grandeur of the imperial throne – the allure of pretensions to world rule – made it chronically unstable. It might well have been possible to devise a better system of government and succession, but whether one could have actually been implemented is another matter entirely.  

So things were functioning, and showing no obvious signs of collapse : the underlying problems the Empire faced were real but subtle. Past historians were too unkind to say it was all corruption, incompetence and cowardice, but there really was something rotten in the state of Roman Europe. To understand what was going on will take a bit of explaining, so bear with me for a little while.

One of the best cases of "show, don't tell" in the book is the series of maps showing the Third Century Crisis and the Tetrarchy. Something that comes across very quickly in any reading of Roman history is just how unstable the Empire really was : in its ~500 years of development, the heartlands were truly secure for perhaps one century out of that. The rest of the time it was constantly being split apart and reformed by rebellious governors, seceding provinces, and the occasional invader. But what the maps here show is just how similar the temporary fragmentation was in both the Crisis and the Tetrarchy; quite possibly, as though one directly inspired the other. The four political blocs the Empire broke into are not quite the same in each case, but they're of such similar size and number that it's impossible to believe they're unconnected.

On paper, then, the Tetrarchy was a decent plan, aiming to maintain the Empire as a very real polity without making the thing an ungovernable, bloated monster; more a federation of mini-Empires than one gigantic behemoth. It would also, I suppose allow aspiring Emperors a career trajectory which would satisfy their ambitions without burdening them with the superhuman demands of running the whole thing. It might have worked (after all, the Empire had already naturally split along such lines of its own accord), had the system had enough time to make this a cultural norm rather than being immediately undone by the phenomenally energetic and ambitious Constantine.

But there were more basic economic problems which the Empire had to grapple with beyond political management. What Rome was essentially trying to do, post-Hadrian, was essentially a Utopian dream : a stable, self-sufficient system, relying primarily (though not entirely) on its own internal resources. This meant abandoning the idea not only of imperial expansion – it simply couldn't expand any further – but also of economic growth. Indeed, limiting expansion now put the Empire, if anything, on a reduced budget rather than merely on a fixed income. The only real way to increase growth with first millennium technology, says Haywood, was to increase population : without conquest, population growth ceased, and windfalls from ravaging the barbarians dried up completely.

But to give Rome its due, it actually managed to adapt to this remarkably well. Its reorganised army – substantially larger than during its expansionist phase – consisting of border garrisons and mobile field armies behind the lines was able to handle barbarian raids very effectively, for the most part. The larger army demanded higher taxes, but most of these were paid in kind (not cash) so the effect on the economy was significant but not crippling. Even incorporating the migrating barbarians into its own military was generally successful.

There were two other major factors which proved much more difficult to address. One was that the reorganised Empire become essentially a theocracy with extremely strong state control. Your taxes might not be unbearable but you absolutely had to pay them. This was a profoundly illiberal and hierarchical society which was definitely Not A Nice Place To Live. Survival without economic growth meant iron fiscal and social self-discipline. During economic growth, the Empire could reward its citizens; when it flatlined, it became more oppressive, demanding more of its citizens than it gave back in return. For the ordinary person, there was far less of the glory that was Rome and far more of the grudgingly-paid taxes that was Rome. Consequently, they weren't especially likely to rise up in support should some invader come knocking at the gates.

Worse, and related, it was stagnant*. Of technological development, which could have given economic growth, there was naught, nor were there any fiscal innovations beyond "adjust taxes". If the Empire's moral corruption and slide into decay probably owes more to Gibbonish rhetoric than reality, then it seems that it certainly didn't do anything for its own self-improvement either. It may not have been declining, but it certainly wasn't progressing.

* Haywood says several times, without any justification or explanation whatsoever, that it was a period of chronic population decline. This is something of an annoyance because he leans on this quite heavily, but on the face of it it seems unlikely.

My reading of Haywood on this point is that this is a significantly more nuanced version than that of Gibbon. In Gibbon's thundering yet ponderous rhetoric, the Empire became corrupt and decadent because its rule was given over to people who were just worse than their illustrious forebears, out of some tired cliché that everything just entropically decays over time. Haywood's version does away with the stupid fallacy that the rulers were "just worse people", explaining that yes, there was corruption, but the systems were reformed for very good reasons. The rot in the state of Rome was not so much morally decadent leadership as it was economic pressure and a lack of ability to innovate. It was politically and technologically stagnant, and economically on a slow but irresistible decline.

2) The Fall Of Rome

Stagnation played a real role in the Empire's eventual collapse, and in this sense, internal problems were not entirely an invention of Gibbon's fertile imagination. The wealthiest, says Haywood, could indeed escape taxation through bribery and corruption, while the poorest had no choice but to pay up. The economic basis of the empire was attacked to sustain its elite; it was, in a very real sense, eating itself. The topical nature of this particular bit of commentary would seem to be self-evident.

As of course is the stuff on immigration, with Haywood describing here a very interesting feedback loop. The Empire never achieved true self-sufficiency and economic independence, and its reliance on external economies was nowhere more apparent than along its vast borders. The highly developed artisans and workshops of Rome produced luxury goods that were a magnet to external barbarians (even when they weren't being pushed onwards by warring tribes behind them), who in turn supplied the Empire with food. The problem was that this meant the barbarians were increasingly Romanised without being incorporated : the wealth of the border regions encouraged migration there and thus, without allowing them citizenship, the result was inevitably raiding and incursions. Rome was experiencing a serious crisis of short-term thinking, its own economic gains coming at the cost of strengthening its enemies.

Ultimately, Haywood basically agrees with Peter Heather. The final Fall wasn't due to a systemic problem, even if that system was flawed and did need overhaul. It was more a case of being simply overwhelmed : Rome just did not have the resources to deal with the scale of the threats it now faced. Where I think he does need to strengthen his argument, however, is in the statistics... Haywood presents the barbarian forces as so outnumbered by the Romans that it becomes a wonder they ever achieved anything. A fuller, even more economic analysis of where the tax revenues of Rome actually went might not be as enthralling as the the last, desperate victories against the Huns, but it might be more illuminating.

Still, Haywood's maps charting the collapse are an outstanding resource. At a stroke, the scale of the problem becomes obvious. Roughly speaking, the end took about a generation. There isn't really a clear moment you can say "this was the day the western Empire fell", but the classical date of 476 AD isn't a bad one. 

What isn't evident from the maps alone – and perhaps what led to complacency – is why this time things were different. The initial territorial losses are clearly substantial and problematic, but not on a scale the Empire hadn't experienced before. The accompanying data and interpretation help explain what had changed. Rome's vassal kingdoms might not have seemed all that much of a deal in terms of pure territory, but they were kept subservient out of fear and respect. Once that was gone, once they realised that Rome was now a paper tiger, the final institutional collapse came very quickly. It was by no means a total breakdown of society, with some local institutions surviving longer after the central administration was lost, but the idea of Rome as a polity was ended.

Nor could it be revived. Justinian's reconquests were as economically unsustainable as the western Empire itself had become – in fact the situation was very much worse. The damage done to Italy meant that it was held by the east* as a fife by sheer military end economic force. For any armchair generals wondering if Rome could have been restored to its full glory through, say, better support of Belisarius, the answer must be a firm "no". The resources needed for this did not exist, nor could the conquest have become a self-sustaining process.

* Haywood has a nice comment that we probably can point to a clear moment when the eastern Roman Empire truly became the Byzantine Empire : the reign of Heraclius. At this point, sweeping institutional reforms, though much needed, were so radical that it became a genuinely different entity. Up until then, the east survived as very much a direct, natural evolution of its predecessor; it was indeed still the Roman Empire despite the loss of Rome. After this point it was something new, more an heir to Rome rather than its literal continuation.

There's important, much more general lessons in cherry-picking here. Sometimes people decry claims that "this time it'll be different" as a sort of fallacy. And indeed, looked at in some narrow ways, such as purely through maps, situations can appear remarkably similar, such that claiming any real differences can seem foolish. Haywood shows how this is dangerous, that while some data can be a useful guide, you have to consider the situation in its entirety. So if you want to claim that, say technological advancements won't put people out of work (or indeed the opposite), you might be right, but you can't limit your study to how previous changes enfolded – no matter how similar they might appear. You can't draw a correlation without looking at all the extraneous circumstances, examining all of the context in which previous changes happened.

---

Phew ! So Rome did decline, albeit more slowly than sometimes described, and the decline by itself wasn't inevitably leading to collapse. It could have been arrested, but lacked the innovation and boldness needed to do so. The east managed it, reverting from a near-total collapse into a powerful European state that kept going (albeit with varying degrees of success) for another thousand years. In the concluding part, we'll look a bit more into this, as well as how the rest of Europe fared (especially Britain), as well as considering the underlying systems at work in more detail

Navigating the AI Hype And Hysterics

Back in the days when AI development meant working towards something like an artificial human, I had three rules to bear in mind when reading most popular articles on the subject : 

1. AI does not yet have the the same kind of understanding as human intelligence.
2. There is no guarantee rule 1 will always hold true.
3. It is not necessary to violate rule 1 for AI to have a massive impact, positive or otherwise, intentional or otherwise.

These were from the earliest days of LLMs when there were many other types of AI floating around in the popular press. Most AI stories were about whether AI was or could be conscious or not, a position most serious people have moved on from completely (though not quite all). The "rules" made sense as a way to keep perspective, to independently remind myself that the author might well have gotten carried away or missed their own point.

Given the massive developments in the last few years, I think it's time for an update. There's also a nice piece on Clearer Thinking which I think has a sensible take, especially if you want more practical advice.

Personally, I still have more than a little sense of wonder about the whole thing. Regardless of what AI is used for or who controls it, I just think it's an astonishing feat to essentially teach a rock to think. I find it somewhat dismaying, much as with skeptics of the space program, that the realisation of one of mankind's oldest dreams is being treated so often with cynicism and fear more than wonder and enthusiasm. It's as though everyone is focusing on the corrupt capitalism in Jurassic Park more than they are the reincarnation of freakin' dinosaurs. Still, for this very reason, if I might vainly hope to rekindle some sense of fascination in the more cynical reader, I should also try to temper my own admiration.

Here, then, are my offerings. I'll try to keep them neutral-ish, but you've been duly forewarned as to my own bias.

0) LLMs are not human

This should be a default presumption. When I say LLMs are thinking, reasoning, or understanding, I am not saying they do so in an entirely human-like way. While I think it's legitimate to say they do all of these things, the sense in which this is meant must be very carefully defined or else presumed to be linguistic shorthand. But to be direct, LLMs are not conscious, have no will, no desires of their own, no inner awareness, no coherent long-term memory, no personality, function differently according to their current context window, etc. etc. etc. 

In some narrow but important ways, they probably are doing something closely analogous to human thinking. In the right conditions, those similarities are fascinating, and we probably shouldn't dismiss LLMs as a dead-end in intelligence more broadly. But in more general ways, LLMs are absolutely nothing like humans. I get very frustrated when people dismiss LLMs out of hand because of their differences to human cognition when the similarities actually are interesting, but nevertheless, I completely agree with the basic premise that a net of linguistic probabilities doesn't count in any way as "alive".

1) The imperfect nature of AI does not render it useless

And the useful nature of AI does not render it perfect !

Much the most common flawed argument is rotten cherry-picking : focusing entirely on the mistakes that AI makes, especially the silly ones, and thereby extrapolating that it can't do anything at all – or at the very least that it's completely untrustworthy. Less common among my feeds is the opposite view, that because AI is able to do some incredibly complex analysis very well, it can be completely relied upon in all things, or at least that it's silly mistakes in simple problems are just not worth worrying about at all.

Both of these are wrong-headed. A better way to look at it might be for pessimists to say, "just because an AI isn't useful for me, it doesn't follow that it's of no use for anyone else". Conversely, the optimist's take would be, "just because I find AI useful, that doesn't mean that everyone else will necessarily do so as well".

The "jaggedness" of LLM-intelligence seems to cause people no end of strife. Sure, it can't understand some common sense things. So what ? All that should tell you is Rule 0 : that it isn't reasoning like a human. It does not tell you that its answers on more complex topics are therefore wrong. At most, it should act as a reminder to what's best practise in all situations : when something is important, you need to check any proposed solution from any source, rather than assuming blindly that the proffered answer is correct and immediately implementing it into your workflow.

A hilarious example : this case of ChatGPT showing blatant sycophancy in analysing a fart track as a serious musical composition. True, absolutely, it shouldn't do this. But to conclude that "your product sucks" is... I mean, I honestly don't understand this mentality at all*. 

* Although I do understand it as a joke, of course, and I laughed along with the ending. Here I'm criticising people who actually do think like this, of which their numbers appear to be legion. 

A much better, more nuanced take comes from this article on the use of AI in mathematics. Time was when LLMs couldn't even use a calculator, but that time is no more. Used correctly, they can be hella productive. It's worth reading that one in full – it covers the downsides quite nicely as well as the upsides – but the most interesting bit to me was the following :

The LLMs he spoke with inevitably made lots of mistakes, leading some mathematicians to dismiss them outright. Many researchers, he said, decide that if “everything it says is kind of wrong, I will just not talk to it.” But others — he puts himself in this camp — have a higher tolerance for “the pain of talking to this bullshitting model. They say, I can still get something out of this conversation; even if not every idea is good, I can ignore the bad ones and take the good ones.” And the mistakes, Schmitt noted, are weird ones: There is virtually no way that a person with any training in mathematics would make such a plethora of basic errors while also succeeding in coming up with subtle, original, and correct ideas.

Maybe LLMs annoy certain people because they're still thinking that they must be human-like to be useful, or are simply not prepared to accept anything except the smallest error rate : either they have to be fully human, or as perfect as a calculator, and anything in between constitutes an unacceptable uncanny valley. 

I personally have always preferred to use the AI output as inspirational more than authoritative, and with that sort of mindset, even GPT-3.5 could be quite useful. If you're looking for a Truth Engine, go home, but then... why did you ever believe there was any such authority anyway ? Why would you assume that human experts have an error rate of zero ? 

I think there's a lot of double standards being applied here. Apparently, people can accept that other people might sometimes be wrong without dismissing them entirely, but such errors in LLMs seem to render them as useless junk for some reason. I find it weird. I also find the opposite techbro mentality weird, mind you : just because some mistakes seem trivial doesn't mean they don't matter at all, and just because they're very good in some situtations, it doesn't follow they should be shoved into absolutely everything.

2) AI is used by real humans in the real world, including very stupid and very clever people

Following on from that, I think AI-skeptics should approach any AI article from the stance that a vast number of people do find using AI beneficial, and that they're not all deluding themselves. Conversely, those of us who are more optimistic should acknowledge that not every negative study is necessarily flawed, and that some concerns are motivated out of entirely sensible considerations based on human psychology rather than cynical views of the techbro ilk. The scale of AI adoption is vast, and it makes no sense to say that all these hundreds of millions of users aren't seeing any benefit at all, nor to dismiss the possibility of downsides from such a rapid, enormous uptake.

Two contrasting pieces : this one in The Conversation (a usually skeptical website) finds that most students aren't just using AI to do all their homework for them, but actively engage with its output and revise it according to their own needs. This is much my own approach : I almost always reword AI text (on the rare occasions I use it for text, which I dislike doing) to suit my own style, even if the AI version might sound better. Conversely, this piece in Ars Technica gives a detailed description of the problems AI has caused for teachers, with the temptation to simply go to an AI for the answer – even if the student then rewords the thing – being sometimes irresistible.

Quite honestly I don't know what to do about that. In school, we probably want to keep AI and maybe even computer use down to a minimum, with single-use devices like books, pencil and paper etc. being innately better at creating focus. It's always seemed to me that this trajectory is obvious : begin with training on the basics so you have a full, deep understanding of what's going on and can do it on your own, then gradually transition to using more and more learning aids like reference books and calculators and so on. In this way you move slowly into the real world, with a solid grounding in the fundamentals so you can make better use of all the productivity boosters everyone uses when they have to actually get stuff done for real. Keep exams device-free when necessary and that's all there is to it.

The difficulty with this is coursework. In principle, this is the best guide to how to use knowledge and skills in the real world. In the pre-LLM world it was relatively easy to set a task that couldn't be automated, and I personally always preferred this to examinations. Exams carry a weird kind of stress that isn't replicated in real life, whereas coursework can be done more at one's own pace. I preferred it and would have encouraged it to replace examinations as much as possible. But with LLMs in the picture, I honestly don't know what to do.

The only thing I can offer is to acknowledge that coursework is still a chore. I believe quite strongly in a work-life balance, and the need to continue working outside of working hours is something I always found depressing : even when it's something I enjoy doing, I dislike being compelled to do it during what seems like it should be my own personal time, even when I can largely set my own schedule. So I wouldn't want to knee-jerk to "students are cheating" here* : they're doing exactly what the rest of us are doing, a perfectly natural reaction to avoiding things they'd rather not do.

* Indeed, some of my students would probably benefit from using LLMs a lot more to polish their language. 

Maybe the only solution here is, as with multi-functional devices, to take them away. Give students a good working environment where they can go at any time for coursework in which LLM-use is absolutely restricted... I don't know. 

Using AI definitely isn't something we should allow to be complete free-range in all situations for all people, but at the same time, it definitely isn't something we should strangle at birth either. While I think the suicide/murder stories are not something worth taking very seriously – there are hundreds of millions of users, and if AI was a causal factor in this, then violence would already have skyrocketed – there are definite concerns about over-use and the degradation of critical thinking and suchlike. I just think that while it might have negative effects on some, this does not automatically offset the positive benefits for others. Cherry-picking on either side isn't helpful.

3) This is the worst it will ever be

Finally, even quite recently I would have said that AI could never do a whole bunch of things it's now reasonably competent at. How far this is going to progress is a matter of debate, but while I find this video to be largely hyperbole, it has one outstanding point : if we're not good at intuiting exponential progress, we're even worse at understanding S-curve exponentials. That is, development follows an exponential trajectory but only by averages. Sometimes there can be protracted periods – months or more – when development plateaus or increases only slowly, but these are followed by short periods of enormous breakthroughs. 

Thus far the pattern has held every time the nay-sayers have insisted that AI development is hitting a wall. The CEO of Microsoft (for whatever that's worth, which is not much but not nothing) says that there's no sign of this happening in the foreseeable future, while if you follow AI news, you'll know that there are plenty of other avenues under investigation for advancement beyond raw computing power.

The takeaway from this one is simple : to say that "AI can't do this and therefore it's useless to me" is a largely vacuous statement. There is absolutely no guarantee that it won't be able to what you need in the (very) near future. Some things will likely take longer than others, but realistically, nothing is off the cards. Full automation even for the most complex of jobs looks like a real possibility, and some of the seeming hype is worth taking seriously. To pretend that we're still in the era of GPT-3.5 is not at all sensible, and to "hope" that development will somehow just stop here is scarcely any better.

Whether you think that this will be a good thing or not is another matter. If you think that LLMs thus far have been generally positive, presumably you think that further advances will be more of the same. Conversely, if you think they're been detrimental, you probably don't want to see them continue. Neither is correct : if AI use thus far has been generally positive, it does not follow that further developments cannot be problematic; equally, and conversely, if AI has been harmful thus far, it does not follow that future developments must inevitably be more of the same.

My point is that it's so easy to pick and choose whatever set of stories you want to support your position, whereas reality is likely more complex than either. If we can predict how LLMs will advance for at least the next few years, predicting what humans will do with them is another matter entirely : here I would tend to side with the cynics much more than the techbros, even I think they're hardly going in to usher some kind of apocalypse. Reaching for the heuristics of "I dis/like what's happened so far, so we can expect more of the same in the future", is, however, simply not good enough, especially in this most non-linear of development trajectories.

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That's my take then. That LLMs aren't human doesn't mean they're useless, nor are they perfect or their mistakes inconsequential. Neither the benefits nor the downsides can be taken to completely offset the other and cherry-picking from either perspective is a trap which is perilously easy to fall into. Accounting for how people, both those who do and don't understand their operation, actually use them, is already a mixed bag, and predicting what comes next is only going to get harder even though we can actually make quite a reasonable extrapolation as to future LLM performance abilities. Critiquing LLMs for current shortcomings is valid, but it's worth getting some perspective and realising they have already made truly astonishing gains, and insisting that current problems are unsolvable just lacks any common sense. 

The future is coming whether we want it to or not, and to try and force everyone who benefits from it to put it back in the bottle even for those who are genuinely badly affected by it... is just not a realistic expectation of humanity. LLMs are not truth engines, but they are certainly powerful thinking engines of a sort, which can no more be stopped than the rise of steam power. Whether they will have the same degree of impact I don't know, I still tend towards thinking probably not, or at least not yet, but one thing I am confident on is that to dismiss them entirely is just not a sensible thing at all.