What am I up to now?
April, 2026
Contents
Updates
I spent the end of March visiting Yosemite and celebrating Passover with my family. Yosemite is a spectacle, one which almost lived up to the image in my head. I’ve had a Bierstadt painting as my desktop for eight years, and when I think of the Sierras, I think of his exaggerated epic vistas.
With my parents in town and the end of the Oxford academic term, I’ve found myself answering the question “How’s your PhD going?” more often than usual. For all of you interested, here are some updates.
- I started my project on tax enforcement and public good provision in Gambia, alongside Victor Pouliquen and Justine Knebelmann, in early 2023. It’s just starting to wrap up. We’ve recently finished the endline survey and other data collections, and we’re working through the pre-analysis plan now. I hope to start writing on this paper over the next two months.
- I’ve wrapped a short and interesting project studying adoption of digital payment systems in Addis Ababa, with Dr Tsega Adego and Abdulrazzak Tamim. We’re writing this paper now.
- GiveWell is thinking a lot about how to update their moral weights, how they compare the good of two different charities. For example, is it better for two kids to not get malaria or one kid to not go blind? One part of this is asking the people who benefit from the charities. Steven Brownstone has brought me and Karan Makkar onto a project surveying people living in northern Nigeria about these questions and tradeoffs.
- I’ve been helping Duncan Webb with a project measuring the rate at which medical treatments fade. Academic papers report their results at the point when they’re measured, and this variation is neglected. Often, the effects of a treatment are highest soon after that treatment, and the fade-out rate matters a lot for the total effect of the treatment. This project also has important implications for comparing charities!
- My project with Johanna Barop studying how Sierra Leoneans are using very cheap LLMs is moving forward as well. We received ethics approval for our study, and Africell has been very helpful sharing access to their tools and team.
In April, I’ll be around San Francisco and Berkeley. Anyone passing through, please say hi!
Reading
The Culture, Iain Banks
I read Iain Banks’ A Few Notes on the Culture in early 2020. This is a 10,000 word blog post he wrote in 1994, after he had published the first four books in his sci-fi series. In his Notes, Banks describes the universe his books exist in: a federation of humanoid species have populated much of our galaxy. He details the politics, society, and economics of his world, and how they originated in his own thought.
Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.No one likes broccoli in The Culture.
I read these notes with interest six years ago, while working in the rocket launch industry. SpaceX’s autonomous, rocket-catching barges were named after spaceships from The Culture, and the names are delightful: the Of Course I Still Love You (Marmac 304) and A Shortfall of Gravitas (Marmac 302) are still in service. But I had never read any of the books set in The Culture until this month, when I read Player of Games (1988) and Use of Weapons (1990).
These are weird books, at times enjoyable, often frustrating. Banks’ universe is now widely known for its presentation of post-scarcity and human disempowerment.The list of tech people inspired by The Culture runs past Musk: Bezos tried to get a tv show going at Amazon Studios, Demis Hassabis of DeepMind and Dario Amodei of Anthropic speak about the books as positive visions for humanity. Robot Minds run The Culture, providing every material need and want to the humans under their care, and also making politics and war moot within The Culture. The Minds have a complete monopoly on governance, and while we often meet people who are outside The Culture, no one ever leaves.
The first hundred pages of Player of Games tries to convince us that human life in The Culture is utopic and slightly boring, at least for super-genius humans who are still out-matched by even low ranking Minds. The main character is a top-ranked game player, among the trillions of full-time game players, and he’s bored of it. He never reflects on how his own disempowerment creates this boredom: no human we meet in The Culture wishes they had work or wishes to be free of the Minds. Even when given a task by the Minds, one which they can’t do, he’s only interested because it involves a novel and interesting game. The usefulness of the game is irrelevant, even a distraction. It really works here, but maybe not how Banks intended. Post-scarcity is water to them (what’s water?).
While giving sufficient praise to the setting, I must say Use of Weapons is a bad book (thematic spoilers onward). The book is from the perspective of someone raised outside The Culture, whom the Minds use in their politics against rival civilizations. He goes on adventures, supported and manipulated by Minds and their human… pets, tamping down planetary wars, promoting peace, whatever. At the end, we get the most unearned, shit-poor characterization twist I’ve ever read. The Minds are made to look either foolish or impotent; Banks doesn’t resolve this so I choose the first. I’ll put my opinion with full spoilers in a quoted footnote.What possessed Elethiomel to do what he did in the first place? What did he hope to accomplish? Presumably, he thought that the death of Darckense would destroy Zakalwe, and precipitate an ill-considered attack which Elethiomel’s forces were likely to win. When we next (or rather, since this is the backwards-facing plot strand, previously) see Elethiomel, however, he is running away. Did his side win the war? If so, how did he manage to slip away? As it turns out, Banks doesn’t provide us with the defining moment of his protagonist’s life. That would be showing us the decision to use Darckense as he did, and more importantly, the moment at which he realized that to do so was a terrible mistake. Without that moment of transformation, Zakalwe ceases to make any sense–we can’t reconcile the monster with the irreparably damaged man.
As an aside, I stumbled upon William Carlos Williams’ short story Use of Force the same day I finished Use of Weapons. Besides his poetry, Williams was a family doctor in New Jersey. In this story, the narrator physician physically restrains a young girl and forces her mouth open to examine her throat for diphtheria. He reflects on his feelings about authority and the virtues of resistance.
The damned little brat must be protected against her own idiocy, one says to one’s self at such times. Others must be protected against her. It is a social necessity. And all these things are true. But a blind fury, a feeling of adult shame, bred of a longing for muscular release are the operatives. One goes on to the end.
It’s really a great story. The physician admires the girl, admires his own virtue in persisting, and hates both himself and his patient for it all.
I have seen at least two children lying dead in bed of neglect in such cases, and feeling that I must get a diagnosis now or never I went at it again. But the worst of it was that I too had got beyond reason. I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to attack her. My face was burning with it.
There’s a neat parallel to Banks’ Use of Weapons, besides the titles. Both characters engage in this socially and politically sanctioned violence, and in both cases it becomes about more than the sanction. It’s personally charged for the wielder. Neither character is likeable, but both are aware that their violence defines them.
As worldbuilding, I really enjoyed The Culture. It’s a serious consideration of post-scarcity and a fine attempt at the sociology and psychology of human disempowerment. I’d rather recommend LeGuin’s Dispossessed for good narrative and characterization in such settings, however, and Banks’ economics are… weak. At least he’s self-aware. He ends his Notes:
I know it’s all nonsense, but you’ve got to admit it’s impressive nonsense. And like I said at the start, none of it exists anyway, does it?
Paleontology
I never had a dinosaur phase when I was a kid; I just liked buses. But I figured it was about time to figure out what’s up with dinosaurs and wow they’re cool. How Fast Did T. rex Run? by David Hone is a very fun and up-to-date pop-science about dinosaurs. I was personally heartened to see Hone give substantial weight to the LIP hypothesis for the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction. American middle schoolers are still being taught that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs! Justice for the asteroids! It was the LIPs!
Besides that hobby-horse, Hone provides an overview of all types of dinosaurs and all types of questions: what they looked like, what they ate, how they socialized and lived. He gets very excited about birds. Of all the open dinosauric questions he considers, the most pressing is finding nearer and nearer Cenozoic relations to present-day birds.
He also spends a lot of time on the epistemology of paleontology. Studying dinosaurs results in lots of annoying selection problems. We’re more likely to get single bones from larger dinosaurs, but complete skeletons of smaller dinosaurs. Lots of evolution happens on islands, but fossils are much less likely to form on islands than inland. Many reptiles today live in rain forests, but rain forests are the least amenable environment for fossilization imaginable. Hone reminds us constantly that everything we know about dinosaurs is constrained by these selection effects.
I followed the dinosaur book with The Earth After Us, an excellent book by paleontologist Jan Zalasiewicz about what traces our civilization would leave to alien paleontologists examining Earth one hundred million years from now. The answer is: the slightest traces, if you squint.
It of course depends how the human story ends. Some of what we’ve done so far will be surprisingly hard to detect. We’ve extirpated half of the world’s large mammal species in the past 10,000 years.
That is a rather minor event, likely to be lost amid the noise of the world’s happenings. It would take a dedicated and patient vertebrate palaeontologist of the future to discern it.
Similarly, cement over 100,000,000 years returns to its component sand and gravel. Glass clouds, plastic returns to simpler hydrocarbons, copper melts and disperses. But our cities contain lots of these, and more, and the middens will be large.
Occasionally, petrified cities will be exhumed back to the surface. Here, there will be metres-thick layers of rubble, of compressed outlines of concrete buildings, some still cemented hard, some now decalcified and crumbly; of softened brick structures; of irregular patches of iron oxides and sulphides representing former iron artefacts, from automobiles to AK-47s; of darkened and opaque remnants of plastics; of white, devitrified fragments of glass jars and bottles; of carbonized structures of shaped wood; of outlines of tunnels and pipes and road foundations; of giant middens of rubble and waste.
I find this heartening, and sad. I’d been reading The Tempest on my way to bed that week, when I finished Zalasiewicz’s book. I love Prospero; he is one of my favorite characters in Shakespeare, moody, peremptory. He would have liked paleontology.
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
Yosemite
Before visiting Yosemite, I read a few of the classics. John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra was better than I expected, but not required reading. Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams is excellent on the history and human-ecology interactions of the valley. She spends chapters tracing the valley’s 5-year transformation “from an indigenous stronghold to a war zone to a tourist attraction.”
There are two characters in the history of Yosemite who are more worthwhile than Muir. The first is Jim Savage, the commander of the first white men to see the Yosemite valley in 1851. He was a charismatic 49er and soldier. He fought in the Mexican-American war, founded several ranches and trading posts in Madera, Mariposa, and Fresno counties, spoke between four and eleven Indian languages, expelled the Ahwahneechee from their native Yosemite valley, ruined their paradise.When the Yosemite expedition surgeon, Lafayette Bunnell, remarked that ‘no doubt to Tenaya, this was a veritable Indian paradise,’ Savage replied: ‘Well, as far as that is concerned, although I have not carried a Bible with me since I became a mountain man, I remember well enough that Satan entered Paradise and did all the mischief he could, but I intend to be a bigger devil in this Indian Paradise than old Satan ever was; and when I leave, I don’t intend to crawl out, either.’
And he died a Major in the army at the age of 29, shot by the Fresno county judge, after accusing that same judge of violence against the Fresno Miwok reservation. Solnit is unastonished by his young death: “his crimes were all young men’s crimes, crimes of exuberant excess.”
The second character is Jean-Nicholas Perlot. Perlot was a Belgian gold miner seeking his fortune, and visited the Ahwahneechee both in and out of their homeland. He comes to Yosemite as even more of an outsider then Savage and his Battalion, “as to a foreign country rather than a manifest destiny”; “less a frontier than a marvelously foreign country.” And Perlot’s perspective provided the most detailed and humanizing descriptions of the Ahwahneechee from the 1850s.
He wasn’t a very good gold miner, although he went on many great adventures with various Indian nations and frontiersmen.Solnit suggests that Perlot was present when Savage was shot and killed, but I can’t get a copy of the Perlot memoir in time to check if that’s right. He eventually moved to Portland, Oregon.
At first he was a market gardener, supplying scarce vegetables to the city, but with no more preparation than boldness and a continental background, he became a landscape architect and gardener for the fine homes being built in the new city. After amassing the wealth he had not found in the gold mines, he moved back to Europe, married, and had children. In the 1890s, he sat down and turned his journals and notes into the eloquent, funny account cited here.
Besides Solnit, the Yosemite chapters in Dispossessing the Wilderness and King Huber’s The Geologic Story of Yosemite National Park are worthwhile before a trip. Beyond the valley, I was far more awed by the giant sequoias at Mariposa Grove. I hope to visit several more groves, and more secluded ones, to the south this summer.
Links
I passed through Hagerstown, conservatively, 6 times a year, from when I was born until I was 18, and another 30 times since, so close to 150 times total. Here’s a post about what it’s like to a Brit passing through.
An interesting and emotional article about Black women who are legally mandated C-sections. There’s a video of a Zoom hearing in the article that’s incredible.
A quote from Mikhail Kalashnikov, who invented the AK-47.
I’m a soldier who was tested by fate in 1941, in the very first months of that war that was so frightening and fateful for our people. […] On the battlefield, my comrades in arms and I were unable to defend ourselves. There was only one of the legendary Mosin rifles for three soldiers.
[…]
After the war, I worked long and very hard, day and night, labored at the lathe until I created a model with better characteristics. […] But I cannot bear my spiritual agony and the question that repeats itself over and over: If my automatic deprived people of life, am I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, ninety-three years of age, son of a peasant woman, a Christian and of Orthodox faith, guilty of the deaths of people, even if of enemies?
For twenty years already, we have been living in a different country. […] But evil is not subsiding. Good and evil live side by side, they conflict, and, what is most frightening, they make peace with each other in people’s hearts.
I’ve seen lots of reviews of the new Macbook, this is the best.
Here’s one great way to use your retirement. There are a few restaurants in here I want to try just once.
On the diplomatic party circuit in Iran.
Last month, eight large UK fast food chains — including KFC, Nando’s, and Burger King — scrapped their pledges to adopt higher-welfare chicken standards under the Better Chicken Commitment. They blamed supply shortages, demand shocks, even the climate impact of the promised reforms.
The musketeers—Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—and their young friend d’Artagnan, the Gascon nobleman who is the book’s hero, are frat boys of a different era.
Previously
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