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  • Filed under: gambling

    How to beat roulette

    A long read from Bloomberg on a Croatian gambler who seemingly cracked roulette, winning millions at casinos across the world apparently without cheating.

    “It wasn’t the amount of money at stake that made the Ritz security team anxious. Customers routinely made several million pounds in an evening and left carrying designer bags bulging with cash. It was the way these three were winning: consistently, over hundreds of rounds. ‘It is practically impossible to predict the number that will come up,’ Stephen Hawking once wrote about roulette. ‘Otherwise physicists would make a fortune at casinos.’ The game was designed to be random; chaos, elegantly rendered in circular motion.

    “When the Croatian left the casino in the early hours of March 16, he’d turned £30,000 worth of chips into a £310,000 check. His Serbian partner did even better, making £684,000 from his initial £60,000. He asked for a half-million in two checks and the rest in cash. That brought the group’s take, including from earlier sessions, to about £1.3 million. And Tosa wasn’t done. He told casino employees he planned to return the next day.”

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  • Filed under: philosophy

    The paradox of Alan Watts

    There’s a P&O advert airing at the moment with a voiceover of Alan Watts spouting platitudes about following your dreams. The choice of Watts for a luxury cruise ad was a decision I found odd, given Watts’s reputation (in my mind) as a schlocky new-age huckster. Gus Carter agrees, in some entertaining detail:

    “Watts’s philosophy is difficult to define. He spoke in aphorisms, linguistically clear but conceptually fragmented reflections on the contradictions of human experience. He rejected the idea of the individual and spoke of the ‘European dissociation’, the feeling of oneself as an outsider in a hostile world. Instead, he argued, we are all the universe and any sense of one’s own desires or exertions are merely an expression of the singular universe unfolding.

    “In one lecture, Watts explains: ‘As you cannot conceive, possibly, of the existence of a living body with no environment, that is the clue that the two are basically one… You are both what you do and what happens to you.’ It is a strange argument: you can easily imagine an environment without humans. How is it then that nature and human experience can be described as one and the same? But his pronouncements aren’t designed to be logically analysed. It’s a philosophy of vibes.”

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  • Filed under: sustainability

    Counterproductive Sustainable Investing

    An interesting paper by Samuel M. Hartzmark and Kelly Shue outlining a counter-intuitive aspect of ESG investing.

    The ESG consensus is that you should invest in companies that do good, and not invest in companies that do bad. If you do that, you’ll make it harder to do business for companies doing bad things (by raising the cost of capital for them). That’s then a good incentive for those companies to behave better (and therefore access more, cheaper investment).

    But Hartzmark and Shue argue that this is counterproductive. If you invest in an already-good business, there’s much less scope for them to improve in absolute terms. And if you don’t invest in bad businesses, you make it hard for them to make big investments (which means they won’t create new technologies to reduce emissions), and you put pressure on them to make money in the short term in order to survive (which means they’ll do bad things like mine more coal or produce more diesel engines).

    ESG investing effectively makes bad companies worse, without making good companies better – because it lacks a mechanism for rewarding companies for absolute reductions in impact. #

  • Filed under: finance

    Why is finance so complex?

    A superb (and apposite) essay from Steve Randy Waldman, writing in 2011, on why finance is necessarily complex and opaque, and why removing that complexity and opacity is impossible and undesirable:

    “This is the business of banking. Opacity is not something that can be reformed away, because it is essential to banks’ economic function of mobilizing the risk-bearing capacity of people who, if fully informed, wouldn’t bear the risk. Societies that lack opaque, faintly fraudulent, financial systems fail to develop and prosper. Insufficient economic risks are taken to sustain growth and development. You can have opacity and an industrial economy, or you can have transparency and herd goats.”

    The “faintly fraudulent” aspect reminds me of Dan Davies’s brilliant book Lying for Money, which I wrote about last year. A certain amount of fraud in a society is desirable; completely eliminating fraud would also completely eliminate all other forms of commerce. #

  • Filed under: architecture

    Crystal Lake Pavilion

    A beautiful building, designed by Marc Thorpe, that appears to float over the surface of Crystal Lake in New York.

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  • Filed under: ai

    Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT and AI

    The great linguist Noam Chomsky outlines his frustrations with the buzz around generative AI: principally, that it might obscure the wonder of humanity and our incredible real intelligence.

    “The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.

    …

    “Indeed, such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution. Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case – that’s description and prediction – but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence.”

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  • Filed under: organisations

    On Relational Infrastructure

    Sam Rye with a fascinating comparison between the informal, emergent relationships that become established in organisations and the mycorrhizal networks that link plants within forests.

    “Much like when we began to understand the web of mycelial connections were fundamental to the health of the forest, illuminating relational infrastructure can help us see why leaving relationship building to happen in the coffee breaks is a terrible idea.”

    (Thanks Flo!) #

  • Filed under: technology

    Can We Trust Search Engines with Generative AI?

    The buzz this week has been about Microsoft’s launch of its AI interface to the Bing search engine. Simon Willison, among others, has documented the frankly insane responses that people have managed to coax out of it; it’s clear that, from a safety perspective, this AI really isn’t ready for prime time.

    But how does it fare on accuracy? Nick Diakopoulos of Northwestern University fact-checked some of Bing’s answers – and the results aren’t pretty:

    “But, when it comes to accuracy it’s a different story. I found factual inaccuracies in 7 of the 15 responses (47%). There were also several responses that provided references for a sentence which did not include evidence of the claim in that sentence. Sometimes the claims were accurate, and other times not accurate, but either way there’s a sort of unwarranted credibility conveyed, where the citations to news outlets give a trust signal, but don’t actually support the claim made.”

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  • Filed under: film

    Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

    A charming new film from Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate, that’s out in cinemas now. From Mark Kermode’s review:

    ”While subjects as dark as separation and death may be faced head-on (a reading from Philip Larkin’s The Trees had me in tears), there’s a comedic quality that reminded me of Aardman’s sublime Creature Comforts animations – a joyous juxtaposition of quotidian, vérité-style dialogue and fancifully inventive visuals that hits a tragicomic sweet spot.”

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  • Filed under: technology

    Introducing the AI Mirror Test, which very smart people keep failing

    James Vincent on why we keep failing to understand the sentience of generative AIs – why, in effect, we keep failing the “mirror test”:

    “The mirror is the latest breed of AI chatbots, of which Microsoft’s Bing is the most prominent example. The reflection is humanity’s wealth of language and writing, which has been strained into these models and is now reflected back to us. We’re convinced these tools might be the superintelligent machines from our stories because, in part, they’re trained on those same tales. Knowing this, we should be able to recognize ourselves in our new machine mirrors, but instead, it seems like more than a few people are convinced they’ve spotted another form of life.”

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  • Filed under: organisations

    Coordination without communication

    Imagine you had to meet someone in New York City. You couldn’t communicate with them in advance; you only knew that you had to meet them somewhere in the city at some point on a particular day. Where and when would you choose to go, in order to maximise the chances of meeting them?

  • Filed under: agility

    The Perils of Prudence

    Abraham Thomas with a well-expressed solution to the apparent contradiction that startups require both stamina and speed:

    “If startups are a marathon, then staying power should count for more than speed. Conversely, if speed is the key, then why worry about stamina and resilience and the long haul?

    “One way to resolve this contradiction is to simply say, this is why startups are hard. You have to do both: go as fast as you can for as long as you can. Sprint the marathon.

    “But I think there’s a deeper resolution, and I found it in events from over a hundred years ago.”

    His examples are from the golden age of Antarctic exploration, and Scott’s and Amundsen’s competing attempts to reach the South Pole. #

  • Filed under: business

    What Companies Still Get Wrong About Layoffs

    As the tech industry in particular fires people in their tens of thousands, Sandra J. Sucher and Marilyn Morgan Westner explain something I’ve always felt intuitively about mass layoffs:

    “I’ve studied layoffs since 2009… the short-term cost savings provided by a layoff are overshadowed by bad publicity, loss of knowledge, weakened engagement, higher voluntary turnover, and lower innovation – all of which hurt profits in the long run.”

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  • Filed under: weird

    I ate 40 rotisserie chickens in 40 days

    A news story that, in true Ronseal fashion, does exactly what it says on the tin:

    “It began as a way to make myself a little uncomfortable, which I think is necessary in life. I wanted to return to simplicity – eat a cooked chicken every day, with no sauces, no condiments. I never imagined it would take off in the way it did. What captured people’s imaginations? A rotisserie chicken is very evocative: with even just the word, you can smell it, taste it, feel the grease beneath your fingertips. I like that it’s a simple, mundane thing.”

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  • Filed under: knowledge

    The Chinese Businessman Paradox

    A great article by Cedric Chin of Commoncog about the stereotype within the Chinese diaspora of the person who just “gets business”. Chin maintains that it has nothing to do with innate talent:

    “But the perception of ‘business savvy’ or ‘not business savvy’ as an inborn trait, unchangeable by circumstance, is hardcoded into our culture; an inalienable part of the ‘traditional Chinese businessman’.

    “I reject this notion almost as strongly as I reject the notion of pre-ordained destiny.”

    …but is rather the result of a particularly earthy and practical sort of knowledge, hard-won from trial and error. There’s a series of articles that explores this education and decision-making, and there’s lots of interesting gems within them. #

  • Filed under: technology

    The Twisted Life of Clippy

    The origin story of Microsoft’s Clippy, the animated mascot we all loved to hate in the ’90s:

    “These days, an annoying Word creature might seem eminently tolerable compared to the ghouls on Twitter. Now that Alexa’s in our bedroom and Siri’s in our hand, Clippy’s a throwback to what seems like a more benign digital age.”

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  • Filed under: celebrity

    What Is a Nepotism Baby, Anyway?

    Nate Jones on the phenomenon of the “nepo baby” – the children of Hollywood stars who fill the current ranks of celebrities:

    “Long before TikTok got ahold of these descendants, scholars had been studying our obsession with multigenerational stars. Austrian academic Eva Maria Schörgenhuber argues that celebrity children function as living links to a shared pop-culture history, connecting us to a nostalgic vision of the past. You can see this keenly in the types of nepo babies the culture does not have a problem with. Stars like Minnelli, Mariska Hargitay, or Freddie Prinze Jr., who all had a parent die in tragic circumstances, garner respect, not scorn, for following in their footsteps. The same way the Kennedys went from nouveau-riche boot-leggers to inhabitants of a fairy-tale castle, so does the passage of time transform a nepo baby into someone ‘from a famous family.’ Few today care that Michael Douglas, Laura Dern, or Tracee Ellis Ross had celebrity parents. The same principle holds true for someone like Dakota Johnson, who reps multiple generations of Hollywood legends and is thus exempt from the tasteless striving that defines celebrity children of a more recent vintage. Paradoxically, the nepo babies we like best are often the ones who are most privileged.”

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  • Filed under: knowledge

    When complexity defuses disruption

    Why do crypto exchanges struggle with basic accounting, or fledgling social networks with content moderation? They’re both examples of what feel like simple, solved problems but are actually devilishly complex – and that complexity is often the incumbents’ best defence.

  • Filed under: photography

    Regarding: London.

    Another bit of self-promotion, if you’ll indulge me. As part of the general mood that’s in the air at the moment, focused on moving away from the internet’s various large walled gardens, I’ve decided that having my photos exist only on Instagram isn’t really much fun. And so I’ve started a little photo blog, focused on my home city of London.

    I’m going to use to it for photo essays about the city, its people, and how it changes over time. There are a few up there already, on London in Lockdown, the Queen’s funeral, the recent Iranian protests, and the final years of Smithfield Market. #

  • Filed under: self-promotion

    Tiller

    I stumble across a lot of interesting oddness on the internet and in books, most of which will never make it into blog posts here on Roblog. So I’ve decided to set up a mini, daily, “Today I Learned”-style blog that captures it. It’s called Tiller.

    Posts will be daily (well, almost), short, and hopefully interesting. So far I’ve got some things about stunts with crocodiles, shockingly filthy blues songs, and trade union blacklisting in the construction industry, so they’ll also be pretty eclectic. #

  • Filed under: transport

    Fighting to save the last trams of India

    A short (8-minute) documentary about the last trams in India: those of the 149-year-old Kolkota tram system. It’s on its last legs, down to 12–15 trams from its height of 300, and there are suggestions that the government of West Bengal will shut the service down.

    Activists are fighting to save it, both as a symbol of Kolkata’s history and heritage and as a cheap, environmentally friendly and low-congestion method of transport in what is an increasingly crowded and polluted city. #

  • Filed under: culture

    Who remembers proper binmen?

    Dan Hancox expertly captures the vibe of Facebook’s boomer nostalgia groups, that yearn for a vague and unspecified time period when men were men, health and safety legislation didn’t exist, and you had to ask your parents for permission to leave the table after your tea. On the face of it, they’re quaint and a little absurd, but they reveal quite a lot of what’s rotten in the English collective psyche:

    “When we talk about the past, we always reveal something about the present. It is hard to imagine a more intriguing or overlooked body of evidence for assessing recent British social history than these Facebook groups: they have given us something like a more chaotic, 21st-century version of Mass Observation. They may not be ‘representative’ in any quantifiable way, but the sample size is vast, and these memes are a canvas for a whole range of contemporary insecurities and collective memories. History is written by the winners, but anyone can share a post on Facebook.”

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  • Filed under: architecture

    Peter Barber: a retrospective

    Architectural Review has a great piece on Peter Barber, the revolutionary architect who has designed and built some of the most forward-thinking social housing in the UK.

    Barber himself is a product of an era in which social housing was prioritised and popular:

    “Barber was a student in 1979, the year when the proportion of the British population living in council housing peaked at 42 per cent (today the figure is approximately 8 per cent). Britain’s first few council houses were built in the 1860s… but it was only in the aftermath of two world wars that central government ramped up funding – first in 1919 and then again in 1945 – for council-house building to gain real momentum. Completions peaked with around 150,000 homes built each year.”

    His work is a direct challenge both to the Thatcherite view that social housing is inevitably unpleasant, shameful, and unliveable, and the modernist view that social housing should be built on a towering scale.

    I particularly like the bright-white, Mediterranean-inspired Donnybrook Quarter in Bow…

    Donnybrook Quarter, Bow, London E3

    …and the stately brick car-lessness of this development on the Becontree Estate in Dagenham, which cleverly built on a cut-through between two roads while maintaining the pedestrian access:

    Burbridge Close, Ilchester Road, Dagenham

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  • Filed under: gaming

    A VR headset that kills you if you die in the game

    Palmer Luckey, inventor of the Oculus Rift VR headset, has designed a headset that will kill its wearer if their character in the video game they’re playing dies:

    ”When an appropriate game-over screen is displayed, the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user…

    “At this point, it is just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design. It is also, as far as I know, the first non-fiction example of a VR device that can actually kill the user. It won’t be the last.”

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  • Filed under: organisations

    Cultural complexity

    There are two different views of how company culture forms: one top-down, and the other bottom-up. But are they as contradictory as they seem? And how do you change a culture once it exists?

  • Filed under: complexity

    Complexity Explained

    Some beautiful explanations, visualisations and animations that form a beginners’ guide to complexity science. So much of what I talk about on this blog touches on these concepts. #