📚 Thinking With Tinderbox continues to pay dividends, even though I am not learning anything about the app’s mechanics. One of the footnotes led me to About This Particular Outliner and its parent, ATP Macintosh and now I am thinking about the greatness of pre-2016 Internet. Quite the rabbit hole.

📚 Finished reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, which as a — spoiler alert — sucker for escape rooms and weird aliens I very much appreciated. I haven’t gotten to reading or watching The Martian yet, but if it either is half as good as Weir’s second offering it will be worth checking out.

Quoth the Financial Times' How a little-known French literary critic became a bellwether for the US right:

René Girard is best known for his theory of ‘mimetic desire’. Now Peter Thiel and the vice-president are among his fans.

These are the headline and the subheading as seen in the latest issue of FT magazine. As a casual fan of Mr. Girard’s work I read the whole thing and it seems to be a fair description both of his major themes (mimetic desire, scapegoating) and of how they are being interpreted by the dramatis personae above. What the body of the article does not mention again is the word “bellwether”, and for good reason: Rene Girard died in 2015, age 91.

FT headline writers think that a dead person can still be a bellwether. Does ChatGPT?

“Bellwether” literally comes from the practice of putting a bell on the lead wether (castrated ram) of a flock so the other sheep would follow its sound. In modern English it’s a present-tense indicator—something (a region, product, company, demographic group, etc.) whose current behaviour gives an early signal of where things are headed.

Because the word’s sense is tied to leading or pointing ahead, the subject is almost always:

• alive (or at least active) now, and
• capable of exhibiting real-time behaviour that can be watched for clues.

A person who has already died can’t do that, so in everyday usage you won’t hear “the late X is a bellwether of …”. What you might hear instead are words such as harbinger, forerunner, prophetic voice, emblem, icon, or canary in the coal mine. These capture the idea that the person’s life, writing, or death ended up foreshadowing later events, but without implying that we could have looked at their behaviour as it unfolded to predict the future.

That said, in loose or rhetorical writing you could stretch the metaphor—for example:

• “The 1970s novels of Octavia Butler have become a bellwether for 21st-century conversations about race and biotechnology.”

Here the author really means Butler’s work signals themes that would later dominate, not that her actions are a live barometer. It’s creative licence, not standard usage.

Bottom line: Grammatically you can call a dead person a bellwether, but stylistically it feels off because the word implies an ongoing lead role. If you want to emphasise posthumous significance, choose a term like “prophet”, “forerunner”, or “canary in the coal mine” instead.

But “prophet” is overused, including in this article, so could we invent a word to describe a deceased person whose work signals themes that would later dominate? Deadwether is there for the taking, and we already have two examples: Rene Girard and Octavia Butler. Who else?

📚 Finished reading: The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis:

• Out of the Silent Planet: A space travel story that is closer in flavor to Jules Vernes than Isaac Asimov. Had to remember that Martian channels were still a thing back in 1938. More nudity than I expected for a book of that time.
• Perelandra: What if you could be there when the serpent persuaded Eve to take a bite of the apple? With even more nudity, and a tedious end sequence that is more fit for an early Disney cartoon.
• That Hideous Strength: A biting satire of bureaucracy and social striving, with body horror, even more nudity, and a delicious R-rated end sequence that is as far away from Disney as you could possibly imagine even if again animals play a crucial role. It is twice the size of the first two books combined and well worth the time spent savoring it.

In design terms, this means that it is wrong for computer systems to tell people what to do and how to do it. In this view, reliance on artificial intelligence is abhorent because it installs a machine in the empty sky and recognizes that machine as the new authority. Instead, the computer should be a repository, a library in which anyone can find what they seek and to which everyone can add their own contribution. Tinderbox follows this path.

This is from Mark Bernstein’s new book Thinking with Tinderbox and I can only nod along.

📚 Finished reading: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by Ernst F. Schumacher, so enthralled I was by his guide for the perplexed that I quickly jumped to the more well-known of his works. It was good timing: Abundance is becoming the Sapiens of this generation and Small Is Beautiful is the antidote.

Even if the rich are not “idle rich”, even when they work harder than anyone else, they work differently, apply different standards, and are set apart from common humanity. They corrupt themselves by practicing greed, and they corrupt the rest of society by provoking envy.

This is from E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful”, published in 1973. More than fifty years later, don’t you wish we had more of the idle kind of rich?

📚Finished reading: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki.

📚 Finished reading: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg, who lists Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahneman, Benoit Mandelbrodt and Nassim Taleb as his main intellectual influences. It shows. And since Flyvbjerg’s book is lighter than what people on that list tend to publish it can also serve as a gateway for those not initiated in probabilistic thinking.

📚 Finished reading: Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds. Learned much about Wittgenstein and even more about Popper. Both were wrong, as all philosophers are, but I can’t help thinking Wittgenstein was more wrong than Popper, being so obsessed with language which — turns out — is merely the most superficial layer of human intelligence and one that’s fairly easy to emulate. I do wonder what “little Luki” would have made of LLMs.