May 11, 2025

BLOOD ON THE TRACKS:

May 11, 2025

I Nearly Died Drowning. Here’s What It’s Like to Survive.: On coming to terms with a near-death experience. (Maggie Slepian, April 2, 2024, Longreads)

I didn’t consider whether or not I was comfortable paddling that stretch. Along with the desire to keep up with my peers, my ability to assess risk was skewed after years of narrow backcountry escapes, a well-documented phenomenon where your risk perception shifts after successfully navigating unpredictable situations. From outrunning lightning storms to losing the trail to tackling climbs well above my grade, I’d encountered plenty of tenuous scenarios and always figured it out, scraping by without too much damage.

The Adventure Experience Paradigm describes this well; it uses a simple line graphic to show the interplay of risk and competence. When the risk is low and the skills are high, the person is toward the bottom of the chart in the “realm of exploration and experimentation.” When competence and risk are balanced, the participant is in the middle, and when risk exceeds competence, the outcome can be catastrophic. The more experience someone has with navigating risky situations, the more confident they become, skewing the variables. My boating experience was minimal and that section of river was not for beginners, but I had scraped by enough times that my risk assessment was dangerously off-kilter. It was a really, really bad combination.

Music Robotics/AI

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE/SUBJECTIVE IS UGLY:

May 11, 2025

AI of the beholder: Instead of destroying the arts, artificial intelligence will redeem them (Rina Furano, 11 May, 2025, The Critic)

This hysteria, while common, is by no means universal; some find this social flurry amusing, even exhilarating. Among musical conservatives and the younger generation of composers — groups with considerable overlap — hope is stirring. For decades, many have fruitlessly lamented the state of the classical music business in Europe: politically entrenched institutions, forced adhesion to atonality as the only accepted language of contemporary composition, cronyism, promotion of mediocre-but-concordant talent, systemic suppression of dissent and innovation. It seemed as if no human could ever change this; now it appears that technology will.

To those with traditional leanings, it is sweetly paradoxical that the modern anguish is most palpable in those who, for years, pretended to be the avant-garde: composers who forwent their own humanity by producing serial, aleatoric or fully electronic music. They are now the first in line to be automated away — by an artificial consciousness much more proficient in the creation of such soundscapes than they could ever hope to become. But they are not the only ones for the chop: All composers, living or dead, are up for a reckoning, and many will likely be rationalised away. Contrary to the ubiquitous doomsday predictions, this is good news — especially for aesthetic conservatives.

Books

HOGWARTS 61 REVISITED:

May 11, 2025

Kierkegaarry Potter: Fear and Rowling (Adam Roberts, May 08, 2025, Substack-ships On Fire, Off The Shoulder Of Orion)

It’s the story of Abraham and Isaac from Isaac’s perspective; and it answers the question ‘but why must we die at the hands of the nom-de-la-mort Voldemort?’ with: because there is a little piece of this mort already inside your soul. But it does so in order to twist a surprise existential short-circuit out of the encounter: death ends up destroying not us but the shard of death inside us. Eucatastrophe!

This isn’t what Dumbledore thinks will happen, of course. It’s clear he believed that Harry would die. When his shade meets Harry after the event, he describes himself as a ‘master of Death’. ‘Was I better, ultimately, than Voldemort?’ he asks, and the question is not a rhetorical one. ‘I too sought a way to conquer death, Harry.’

“Hallows, not Horcruxes.”

“Hallows,” murmured Dumbledore, “not Horcruxes. Precisely.” …

“Grindelwald was looking for them too?”

Dumbledore closed his eyes for a moment and nodded.

“It was the thing, above all, that drew us together,” he said quietly. “Two clever, arrogant boys with a shared obsession.”
[Deathly Hallows, ch. 35]

All the twists and turns of the seven novels, all the ‘Snape’s a baddie! no he’s a goodie! wrong, he’s a baddie! oh, final reveal, he’s a goodie!’ back and forth, they all resolve themselves into these three fundamentally Kiekegaardian problems. Is there a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical in the Potterverse? On what grounds might it operate? Voldemort, and Grindelwald, and young Albus all suspended the ethical in search of a particular telos: overcoming death. That led to great suffering: in Kierkegaardian terms, a tragic, rather than Abarahamic, outcome. But to continue with Kierkegaard’s problemata: how does the specific suspension of the ethical provision not to sacrifice Harry Potter merit any more suspension than those earlier experiments? Voldemort dispenses with the ethical for purely selfish reasons: that he himself might not die. Snape is prepared to do the same for less selfish reasons: to save the life of the woman he loves. But Dumbledore’s rebuke to him on this ground carries meaningful ethical force: “You do not care, then, about the deaths of her husband and child? They can die, as long as you have what you want?” Snape is abashed by this, and quite right too. So what about Dumbledore’s reasons for doing what he does? That’s trickier to justify, and trickier even to identify. The answer is to be found in the eucatastrophic survival of Harry himself, just as, in the Genesis story, Abraham’s faith is only retrospectively justified by the intervention of the angel, staying his hand. Could we say: the thing that justifies Dumbledore’s secret scheme literally to send Harry Potter to his death is that he is, in a Kiekegaardian sense, a knight of faith?

End of History

THE OTHER PATH:

May 11, 2025

The Poor Are Richer Than We Think: Unlocking Dead Capital (Vincent Galoso, 5/08/25, Daily Economy)

In 2000, when De Soto produced the first estimate of the scale of this “dead” (i.e., inactive) capital, the total amounted to about $9.3 trillion (9,300,000,000,000 dollars). At the time, this amounted to approximately 28 percent of global individual income. Assuming that proportion holds today, mobilizing this stock of dead capital at a 5 percent annual return (a highly conservative estimate) would generate an additional $1.49 trillion in output per year—equivalent to roughly 1.4 percent of current world GDP.

This may not seem like much. But there are three reasons why it matters a lot. First, the gains would accrue primarily to those at the very bottom of the global income distribution. If all the extra income went to people in Latin America, the Middle East (minus Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Israel) and Africa, this would amount to around $580 per head. In these regions, incomes per head fluctuate from between $500 to $17,000. For them, such an income boost would be significant. Second, the resulting income boost would raise the baseline from which these economies grow—meaning that even if growth rates remain unchanged, the absolute gains compound more quickly year after year. Third, if part of this capital is channeled into research and innovation, it could permanently increase the growth rate itself. Taken together, these effects could help close the gap between rich and poor countries almost overnight, while also accelerating the pace at which that gap narrows over time.

Capitalize.

BLOOD ON THE TRACKS:

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE/SUBJECTIVE IS UGLY:

HOGWARTS 61 REVISITED:

THE OTHER PATH:

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