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The Aaron Clift Interview
An Open-Minded Approach to Music —
Deep in the heart of Texas is a growing community of bands and musicians pushing the boundaries of music and rejuvenating progressive rock. Expose is in the forefront in elevating the visibility of these bands to our readership through reviews, sponsoring the now annual Voyager Fest, and band interviews. For this latest installment, I have had the pleasure of interviewing the mastermind behind the Aaron Clift Experiment, Aaron Clift himself in advance of the Holiday Charity Rocktacular on December 3, 2016. I would have preferred to sit down at one of Austin's relaxed outdoor venues for this interview, but work forced me to conduct the interview via email.
by Henry Schneider, Published 2016-11-22
Having reviewed both Lonely Hills and Outer Light, Inner Darkness as well as attending their CD release concert for Outer Light, Inner Darkness I was interested in learning more about the man behind the music.
Hi Aaron, would you please provide a brief overview of your career and the bands you've played with?
My first instrument was viola, which I performed in my middle school and high school orchestras. After high school, I switched to voice and keyboards and studied vocal performance and composition at Tufts University. During this time, I also performed vocals in my first rock band, Attack Plan R.
Following college, I spent a few years pursuing a career as a classical composer, but around 2007, I had a change of heart and started moving back toward rock music. I had always wanted a way to combine my interests in classical and rock music and loved the music of progressive rock bands like Genesis, Rush, and King Crimson, so starting a new project writing and performing progressive rock seemed like a good outlet for my creativity.
I founded The Aaron Clift Experiment (ACE) in late 2011 as a solo outfit to perform my rock songs. But as time went on and the band membership changed, our sound evolved. We became more of an actual band that happens to have my name. Today, I'm proud to be co-writing songs with my very talented band mates.
ACE has played with a wide variety of bands over the years, but we especially enjoy playing with like-minded groups who share our love for progressive rock and boundary-pushing music.
Thank you. That leads into my next question. How did you meet Herd of Instinct and what was it about their music that resonated with you?
My friend Ted Thomas, who's a DJ for the Austin progressive rock radio show Virtual Noise on KOOP, recommended Herd of Instinct to me. I checked out Herd of Instinct's music on their web site and was impressed with their intricate arrangements, intensity, and unusual instrumentation. The Aaron Clift Experiment has now played two shows with them and we have had a blast getting to know them.
What was your earliest musical experience?
When I was little, my parents would play music for me from their record collection. Usually it was children's music from Sesame Street, Tom Glazer, and the like, but sometimes I would hear the occasional Beatles or Elton John song in the mix.
My mom likes to embarrass me by telling people about how, when I was a few months old, she heard me grunting along to song that was playing in the car. At first, she said that she thought were was something wrong with me, but later she realized that I was just trying to sing along with the song!
Here is an off-the-wall question. If the Spanish Inquisition came to your house and demanded that you give them a description of the music you make, what would you say?
The Aaron Clift Experiment creates contemporary progressive rock with influences from classical and jazz music.
Thanks, so what music do you love to listen to?
There are certain genres and artists that I tend to gravitate toward, but more than anything else, I like to listen to music that engages my emotions, intellect, and body. As a vocalist, I also tend to be a sucker for music that has a powerful vocal performance.
If you had to choose from your favorite of all your recordings, what would they be?
It's hard to narrow it down to one because I have three albums that are jockeying for the top spot in my favorite recordings of all time. Those albums are Superunknown by Soundgarden, Selling England by the Pound by Genesis and Hounds of Love by Kate Bush. These albums are pretty different from each other stylistically, but the thing that they have in common for me is an ambitious scope, amazing songwriting, and meticulous production. They are also among the few albums that I've listened to since my teenage years that still stand the test of time for me.
What music do you hate? Why?
I can't really pin down a specific style of music that I can't stand. Rather, the music that I dislike is the kind that bores me because it fails to connect with me on any level – whether that be emotionally, intellectually, or physically.
How have your musical tastes changed over the years?
When I was teenager, I would say things like "pop music sucks!" but as I've gotten older, I've come to realize that it's ridiculous to dismiss entire categories of music because every genre has examples of good art and bad art. I still have my preferences toward certain types of music, but I try to keep an open mind toward new music and judge it more on its merits than by its style.
If you could cover any song, what would that one song be?
It's difficult for me to pick a song to cover because so many of the tunes that have had a profound influence on me are so perfectly-performed by their creators that I wouldn't feel right about covering them unless I could find a way to put a much different musical spin on those songs.
There's an album in my music collection by soul singer, Bettye LaVette, called Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook. On the album, LaVette takes songs by British invasion bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and makes them into soul songs. I especially love her spine-tingling rendition of The Who's "Love Reign o'er Me." I was impressed by how she was faithful to the emotion of the original song while still making the song her own. That's the kind of quality I would want to capture in performing someone else's work.
So, I don't know if I can think of a song off the top of my head that I would want to cover, but who knows – maybe I'll figure something out and ACE will have a cover song in one of our future shows!
Based on your recommendation I looked online and found a video of Bettye LaVette singing "Love Reign o'er Me" at the Kennedy Center with Peter Townsend and Roger Daltrey in attendance. I agree, her cover was spine tingling and you could tell that both Peter and Roger were quite impressed as well.
So, talking about live performances, what was your most memorable experience in a live performance?
I've been performing music for most of my life, so it's hard to pick a most memorable moment, but I can mention one from a fairly recent performance:
This September, The Aaron Clift Experiment performed at the Voyager Festival in Austin. The festival, which focuses on progressive rock and experimental music, was a great experience for us as a band because it featured one of the largest and liveliest crowds we've performed for yet. I especially loved the camaraderie and community that ACE developed with the other bands that performed at the festival.
OK, now for the flip side, what was your most bizarre experience playing in a band?
We once played a show where the venue completely botched ACE's name. The marquee had us listed as "The Jimmy Clifton Experience." The misnaming was so hilariously bizarre, that we just rolled with it as a band and told the audience that evening that this would be our new name.
Ha ha, I remember seeing your Facebook post about this incident! So talking about the unexpected, would you please relate a mishap or triumph when you were recording in the studio?
I love how the final trio of songs on Outer Light, Inner Darkness (ACE's 2015 album) came together. "The Last Oasis" was the first time that I had ever done an extensive collaborative instrumental suite with Eric, and adding in a string quartet was very exciting, especially when it came alive in the studio. "Moonscape" was one of my personal favorites to record because I got to go nuts with the vocal multi-tracking (I think there are six or eight vocal harmony layers in one part of the song). "Bathed in Moonlight" has some of my favorite production tricks on the album – especially the ending of the song.
So that brings up an interesting question for me. Integrating a string quartet into the music for Outer Light, Inner Darkness was a very nice touch. How do you avoid overpowering them when playing live?
We don't perform with a string quartet very often precisely because the logistics are very challenging, particularly when it comes to sound mixing. So, we usually save the quartet for very special performances, such as our album release show in 2015 and our upcoming performance at RosFest 2017.
Here is another question to make you think, if you had a time machine and could travel to any time or place to make music, where would you go and why?
I've always been fascinated by the classical music composed at the end of the 19th century and turn of the 20th century because it combines some of the most interesting features of the music of the past while simultaneously pointing the way to the future. So, if there were a way for me to go back in time and hang out with composers like Debussy, Ravel, and Bartók, I think that would be awesome.
So given that, what keyboard artists do you have the most respect for and why?
My favorite keyboard performers are Tony Banks (Genesis), Jon Lord (Deep Purple), Richard Barbieri (Porcupine Tree), Richard Wright (Pink Floyd), and McCoy Tyner. I like them all because they've brought a unique flavor to the instrument – combining performance and songwriting chops with excellent keyboard tones.
What is the most unusual instrument you either play, wish you could play, or like to listen to?
I would love to learn how to play the Haken Continuum Fingerboard, a synthesizer and performance controller that's played by moving your fingers across an electronic fingerboard. It looks like a fun instrument that produces some really cool sounds that can't be replicated by most keyboard synthesizers.
Where do you draw your inspiration from for your music? Who or what is your muse?
Sometimes books I've read will inspire me or the movies and TV shows that I've watched. Other times, I'll hear a phrase that sounds like a good title for a song. I also get a lot of my ideas spontaneously when I'm going for a walk and when I'm messing around on my keyboard. There's not really a formula for inspiration – I think that it's a matter of letting myself clear my head of distractions and being more aware of my emotions and what's going on in the world around me.
So once you are inspired to create, what happens next? Are you on you own? Or do you involve your band mates?
When I've got a song idea, I'll usually work on the general harmonic, melodic, and lyrical framework of the song on my own and then present my rough ideas to my band mates. We work on the arrangement together in our rehearsals. Sometimes my bandmates will come up with their own song ideas that they send to me so I can add lyrics and the vocal melody before we start arranging the song in rehearsal. Then there are other times where the genesis of the song is collaborative – for "The Last Oasis," I wrote several of the themes, Eric Gutierrez (guitar) wrote several other themes, and Devin North (bass) helped us put together the ideas and acted as a sort of general editor of the song.
How long does it typically take from inspiration to a final song?
It really depends on the song. I've worked on some songs that took me months of on again and off again work to write and other songs that I wrote in less than a week. When my band mates and I get a good rhythm going, we can average several songs a month.
Do you score the music? Can all of your band mates read music? Or do you just play by ear until you and the band are happy?
All of us in the band have classical backgrounds and can read sheet music. However, we usually use chord charts and/or learn by ear and only resort to sheet music for especially difficult parts or for parts assigned to instruments outside of the band (such as the string quartet parts we wrote for several of the songs on Outer Light, Inner Darkness).
One thing that I have been curious for a while is how the Aaron Clift Experiment ended up with a song on the heavy metal Circle Pit Compilation. Your music seems so out of place with the other bands on this compilation.
Regarding the Circle Pit Compilation: they actually contacted us and said that they wanted "Arsonist Games" in the compilation. Since the song has some metal influences (mostly by way of Black Sabbath), we went ahead and included it on the compilation.
The Aaron Clift Experiment has been playing quite a bit around Austin and Texas. And now I see that you will be performing at RosFest in 2017. Is RosFest your first out-of-state gig? How did that happen?
RosFest will be our first of hopefully many out-of-state performances. Last year, I was introduced to George Roldan, the festival founder and owner, through ACE's PR agent. George and I talked back and forth for a while after he told me that he was impressed with ACE's second album, Outer Light, Inner Darkness. He invited me to come out to RosFest this past May, so I took the trip out to Gettysburg and met George plus a lot of other great people. At the festival, George let me know that he was planning to invite ACE to play at RosFest 2017.
It's an incredible honor for ACE to be performing at the festival. Our musical heroes in the Neil Morse band are going to be headlining the same day as us, so we're very psyched!
OK, one final question. You released your last album Outer Light, Inner Darkness in Sept 2015. What are your plans for the next?
Right now, we're writing songs for a third album that we hope to release in late 2017 or early 2018. Without going into too much detail about everything we're working on now, I can say that we're continuing to expand The Aaron Clift Experiment's songwriting and instrumental palette to keep our sound fresh and exciting.
Related artist(s): Herd of Instinct, Aaron Clift
http://www.facebook.com/events/1765577417043787
http:// aaronclift.com
Jadis - Across the Water – If this band sounds familiar to you, it's probably because Jadis are usually touted as the alter-ego of IQ. With half of Jadis also members of IQ concurrently (Martin Orford, keys; John Jowitt,... (1994) » Read more
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Born Again Floozies - Novelties, Addenda & Ephemera – Clever britches with tap steps to replace the skittering of a drum kit flittering. High-spirited hijinx abound throughout. A sideshow demeanor springs forth for busting chuckles to as bobbling neck... (2007) » Read more
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10 years ago Microsoft introduced a customized edition of Windows XP that contained their new media suite, officially dubbed Windows Media Center. Created with televisions in mind, Windows Media Center marked Microsoft's first real attempt to supplant media functions in the living room. All designed around a 10-foot UI and remote control, Windows Media Center handled far more media tasks than any TV component at the time, allowing users to play and timeshift live TV, display slideshows of digital images, play digital video and music, and more.
With so many useful functions wrapped in a well respected UI (there are early hints of Metro in there believe it or not), it's sad to say that Windows Media Center and the concept of a PC in the living room just hasn't taken off. As someone who's operated a Windows based HTPC in the living room for several years, allow me to share with you some of my experiences with using a HTPC, as well as clear up many of the misconceptions that still persist in the market.


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Home › Vinyl › Atala - Labyrinth Of Ashmedai (LP) (BLUE W/ BLACK SPLATTER)
Atala - Labyrinth Of Ashmedai (LP) (BLUE W/ BLACK SPLATTER)
Catalog number: SALT OF THE EARTH RECORDS - 0001
To say an album gets better with volume is one of rock's all-time clichés. It's also usually bullshit. In the case of Labyrinth of Ashmedai, the third full-length from desert-dwelling post-sludge trio Atala, I'll say it doesn't hurt. The Twentynine Palms, California, three-piece make their debut on Salt of the Earth Records with their latest collection, with an early 2018 release following up on 2016's Shaman's Path of the Serpent (review here) and their 2015 self-titled debut (review here), and like its predecessor, the tight, six-song/35-minute outing was produced and engineered by Billy Anderson (Melvins, Neurosis, Sleep, Acid King, etc.) and demonstrates considerable growth from the release before it. One could argue Shaman's Path of the Serpent was a moment in which Atala — now the lineup of guitarist/vocalist Kyle Stratton, bassist Dave Horn (who replaces John Chavarria) and drummer Jeff Tedtaotao — discovered the atmospheric reaches they wanted to cover with their sound, following the initial exploration of their Scott Reeder-helmed first offering.
Even so, Labyrinth of Ashmedai, with its cover art by Stratton, flowing presentation of one piece into the next, more accomplished use of vocal melodies (and harmonies) and offsetting of patient ambience with crushing tonality and crash, stands as a remarkable forward manifestation of the next step in the direction that Shaman's Path of the Serpent laid out. Arranged across two three-song sides, each capping with a track longer than eight minutes — those being "Death's Dark Tomb" (8:35) and the triumphant finale "Infernal" (8:19) — Labyrinth of Ashmedai immerses the listener its in nodding groove and fluidly executes a deceptive precision in building an arc of momentum that carries across the entire span. And though relatively short with its noted, manageable, vinyl-ready runtime, that span remains significant.
A resounding spaciousness is perhaps what Atala take most from the Californian desert, but they have little in common ultimately with "desert rock" as a genre outside of geography (and it's certainly arguable geography is irrelevant in the aesthetic concern), and instead meld influences from Neurosis and YOB together with the rawer impulses of sludge. After an initial sample and a measure-long intro to initiate the stomp, "Grains of Sand" finds Stratton guttural in his railing against mediocrity and contemplating universal mortality atop a chugging riff fervently pushed ahead by Tedtaotao's creative drumming.
They are not a minute into the song before the lumbering hook churns out its furies and takes a twisting route back to the verse, chugging and vaguely hinting at melody to come along the way. The subsequent "Tabernacle of" revives the heavier '90s-derived alt. metal melodicism one heard on cuts like "Gravity" from the last record, but in so doing, shifts with a newfound subtlety from the more scathing "Grains of Sand" via an emerging call and response Stratton sets up between cleaner and harsh vocals. With a more lumbering groove at its foundation, "Tabernacle Of" nonetheless retains the momentum of the opener before it, and feeds directly into "Death's Dark Tomb," which begins with a few seconds of droning noise — which Anderson may or may not have provided — before the guitar, bass and drums kick in to unveil the greatest sense of weight Atala have yet to bring to Labyrinth of Ashmedai, the vocals recalling Crowbar in the first verse as they set up a more spacious chorus that proves to be arguably the most landmark hook the album has to its credit.
Tedtaotao works in some notable double-kick moving back into the second verse and is head-spinning on tom runs throughout, while the low end density provides the foundation from which the band's atmosphere spreads outward in a manner one might call psychedelic were it not so much imbued with the taste of dry dirt. Maybe psych, but for sure bound to the earth as well as its Mike Scheidt-style squibbly guitar lead gives way to a huge slowdown and the song devolves in its last minute-plus into feedback and noise, ending side A with particular and pointed viciousness.
While progressive in how it sees the band willfully pushing themselves stylistically, Labyrinth of Ashmedai is noteworthy as well for what Stratton, Horn and Tedtaotao bring to it in terms of songwriting, and the linear pairing of "Death's Dark Tomb" and side B opener "I am Legion" emphasizes the range they've developed in what seems like just a few short years of working as a group. Heard without the split of sides — that is, on a CD or digital format, rather than flipping a record — "I am Legion" picks up with drums from the silence left behind after "Death's Dark Tomb" and centers almost entirely around its chorus, but in that, the two pieces end up complementing each other with a fluidity that even with the stark divide between them is undeniable.
Further, "I am Legion" works to reestablish and expound on the melodic basis of "Tabernacle Of," and does so effectively, so that immediately Atala seem to be reaching even further out with the second half of the album. Time, then, for a radical redirect away from the expected, and that's just what "Wilted Leaf" brings. At 3:59, it's the shortest inclusion on Labyrinth of Ashmedai, and though awash in echo, it's also the rawest since "Grains of Sand" at the outset, with shouts crawling upward from the depths of the mix barely decipherable in the riff-led torrent surrounding, and even a more fuzz-toned solo in the back half does little to take away from the sense of assault. This also is part of a larger plan, however, and closer "Infernal" — which is neither the catchiest nor the heaviest song here but might be the record's greatest aesthetic accomplishment all the same; also bearing some of the hallmarks of a YOB influence in its initial rollout — takes hold with an immediate shift toward melody. Stratton seems to loosely touch on Electric Wizard in the verse's bounce, but is ultimately headed elsewhere, toward more individualized fare that represents one last considered shove into new territory for Atala.
A final chorus underscores the point as they pass the halfway mark and turn to an instrumental finish that, rather than give itself to an overblown payoff, slows down, gets quieter and eases the listener's way out with a stretch of bass and drone and residual effects, and though they've managed to stave off pretense for the duration, Atala have all the same given their audience a glimpse of the realization of the potential they've shown all along. Does that mean they're finished growing? I don't think so and I hope not, but it does mean that the expansion of their approach pays significant dividends in these tracks already. And yeah, volume doesn't hurt when it comes to the overall listening experience, but at whatever level one might take it on, Labyrinth of Ashmedai successfully leads through the maze it creates. - The Obelisk
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Q: How keep uncommited and untracked files in just specific branch? My problem is:
I was working in a new functionality on branch master, because I forgot to create the branch.
Now, I create the branch e use:
git stash
git checkout new_branch;
git stash apply

But, the uncommit and untrack files, when I back to master branch, stay in master.
Why?
The correct is add files and commit in new branch, or I can keep this uncommited/untracked?

A: Uncommitted/untracked files are not in any branch. They are untracked. What you are seeing is that git tries hard not to destroy anything in your working directory that it cannot recover. So, when you switch branches, it does nothing at all to untracked files - it just leaves them there. They will still show up as untracked in the new branch, just like they did in the old branch.
The caveat to that is when you switch from a branch where a particular file was untracked, to a branch where that file is tracked, and the version of the file in your working directory does not match the one that would be checked out. In that case, git will yell at you and refuse to check out the new branch, because checking out that file would lose your data. You can override this with git checkout -f if you really want to. A similar situation occurs if you switch from a branch where a file is tracked, but you've made changes you haven't committed yet, and the new branch doesn't track that file.

A: The original poster says:

The correct is add files and commit in new branch, or I can keep this uncommited/untracked?

The short answer is, yes, you have to add and commit untracked files to a branch to isolate them to that branch:
git add <file>
git commit

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Does the format of your URL really impact where a site ranks on the search engine result pages?
While opinions vary, ultimately it's most likely a combination of factors where the URL can play a part - although it remains difficult to determine how much.
Couple that with personalized search results and the real-time nature of search (as well as the Web) in general and it's really difficult to know the right way to approach page naming and URL structure for the purpose of search marketing and search engine optimization.
For example a descriptive (keyword-rich) title tag, an informative URL structure and keywords in the actual page name, when combined, has been shown time and again to perform far better on average than by those site not following the best practices. That's reason enough for SEOs to concentrate on their site-wide naming conventions - at least to some degree.
This all leads us to the overwhelming question: what's the best way to structure a URL? To find the answer it is imperative to determine how others are building their URLs.
Today's search results are far different than in years past, and the best way to understand how search engines are using this variable is to head right on over to the search results and determine how others are engaging in the development of this possible variable.
A search for "grow tomatoes in a raised bed", for example, shows a variety of methods employed by those sites that are returned. For example, three of the top ten organic listings used nearly the exact phrase in their page naming and another three had a portion of the search term ("raised bed") within their URL structure. Nearly every site (nine out of ten with the sole exception being YouTube) included keywords somewhere in the complete URL - be it in the domain name itself, a folder or sub-folder, or a variation of the keyword phrase somewhere in the page name.
The quality of the content and the quantity of relevant links of course (and the manner in which other sites provide a citation) is still going to be a stronger signal for the search engines, but if you're looking for an edge, it may very well start with the way in which URLs are structured and what's included within them.


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Q: Proper BASH piping syntax I'd like to do a one line bash command to ping a server, then send an email if it fails.
I was thinking it ought to look something like:
ping whatever.com || echo 'Subject: VPN Failed" | sendmail me@me.com

But my BASH skills are "growing" and I'm apparently missing something.  What would be the proper way of doing that?

A: You mixed single/double quotes.
In addition, if you want to use instruction in case of failure, I recommend using the ! and && operators, which will allow you to perform several instructions.
For instance:
! ping whatever.com && echo "An error occured, system will send an e-mail" >&2 && echo "Subject: VPN Failed" |sendmail me@me.com


Over the next few months Practitioner Lodgment Service (PLS) will replace Electronic Lodgment Service (ELS) as the primary electronic lodgment channel to the ATO. PLS lodgments will need to be made using Standard Business Reporting (SBR)-enabled software.
ELS is an electronic online system that enables registered tax agents to lodge income tax returns and other forms, as well as create reports to assist with managing workloads. It is the current electronic lodgment channel used to deliver information to the ATO.
This technology is over 30 years old and pre-filling is limited to income and BAS forms.
PLS is the new way to lodge information and forms to the ATO. This new electronic lodgment channel will gradually replace the current ELS, and the software you use in your practice will be progressively updated to be PLS ready.
ELS will remain available until 31 March 2017 to ensure you still have access to an online service as many software companies are still transitioning to PLS lodgment.
SBR is an Australian Government initiative designed to simplify business-to-government reporting. It simplifies and reduces the amount of time and cost associated with preparing and filing forms to various government agencies, and allows for pre-filled forms by various government agencies.
The transition to PLS involves making sure your software is SBR-enabled. SBR is built into business and accounting software, and you may already be using SBR-enabled software to lodge activity statements.
report through a single online channel.
access to pre-fill reports with the most up-to-date information.
Your software provider will let you know when they expect to make this software available to you, and what you need to do to make the transition.
What does this mean for tax agents and accountants?
Stability is currently not where it should be, and the ATO is working hard on improving the SBR system. To safeguard against potential issues in 2016, ELS will remain available until 31 March 2017.
However the reality is that ELS will be 'switched off' after 31 March 2017 so it is essential that your accounting practice software is currently lodging using PLS so that they have tested the solution by the switch-off date.
The best way to ensure that your software will be ready is to get in contact with your software company and ask about their PLS roadmap.
A practice and tax software solution such as Software Assistant has a clear roadmap towards PLS. Tax Assistant, a fast and easy way to create, lodge and track tax returns, enables lodgment of tax returns using either ELS or PLS (Software Assistant is SBR-enabled).
This ensures that come 31 March 2017, Software Assistant's PLS solution will have been tried and tested. It means that you don't have to worry about the electronic lodgment technology and you'll have the confidence to know your software is ready for PLS lodgment.


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Origins of Innovation: Bakewell & Breeding
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A review of Russell 1986's 'Like Engend'ring Like: Heredity and Animal Breeding in Early Modern England', describing development of selective breeding and discussing models of the psychology and sociology of innovation.
topics: biology, history, genetics, reviews, sociology, transhumanism
source; created: 28 Oct 2018; modified: 9 Nov 2019; status: finished; confidence: likely; importance: 6
The Invention of Heritability
Early English agriculture & breeding
Robert Bakewell
Bakewell and the Invention of Progress
The Improving Attitude
Social Contagion?
Like anything else, the idea of "breeding" had to be invented. That traits are genetically-influenced broadly equally by both parents subject to considerable randomness and can be selected for over many generations to create large average population-wide increases had to be discovered the hard way, with many wildly wrong theories discarded along the way. Animal breeding is a case in point, as reviewed by an intellectual history of animal breeding, Like Engend'ring Like, which covers mistaken theories of conception & inheritance from the ancient Greeks to perhaps the first truly successful modern animal breeder, Robert Bakewell.
Why did it take thousands of years to begin developing useful animal breeding techniques, a topic of interest to almost all farmers everywhere, a field which has no prerequisites such as advanced mathematics or special chemicals or mechanical tools, and seemingly requires only close observation and patience? This question can be asked of many innovations early in the Industrial Revolution, such as the flying shuttle.
Some veins in economics history and sociology suggest that at least one ingredient is an improving attitude: a detached outsider's attitude which asks whether there is any way to optimize something, in defiance of 'the wisdom of tradition', and looks for improvements. A relevant English example is the English Royal Society of Arts, founded not too distant in time from Bakewell, specifically to spur competition and imitation and new inventions. Psychological barriers may be as important as anything like per capita wealth or peace in innovation.
Like Engend'ring Like: Heredity and Animal Breeding in Early Modern England, Russell 1986, is an intellectual history of the British agricultural revolution, reviewing some of the early English breeding literature, focusing on thoroughbred horses and then sheep. There is not much original research as far as I can tell, it is primarily review of existing primary/secondary sources, but it gives a useful overall arc from the dark ages of English agriculture to Robert Bakewell and the British agricultural revolution to post-Bakewell.
What is most interesting is the intellectual history we can extract from it in terms of inventing heritability and as important, one of the inventions of progress in the gradual realization that selective breeding was even possible.
I was interested primarily in the section on Robert Bakewell, the Moneyball of sheep breeding, about whom information remains difficult to get, but also in the broader question highlighted by "Heredity Before Genetics: A History" , Cobb 2006: given how blatant the general phenomenon (however difficult the actual mathematical analysis of modern quantitative genetics) appear to be—averages or additive effects everywhere, equal parental effects, normal distribution of traits, selection on measured traits produces gradual but cumulatively enormous gains and leading to creation of breeds or even speciation—why were Bakewell and other breeders such an intellectual revolution? Why could they influence Charles Darwin1 and Mendel so much and gradually revolutionize agriculture? Why indeed could British agricultural revolution figures like Thomas Coke, or inventors in general, make such improvements?
People, both ordinary and men of leisure, often intensely interested in agriculture, have been farming animals for millennia and presumably interfering in their reproduction, and had ample opportunity to informally observe many matings, long pedigrees, crosses between breeds, and comparisons with neighboring farmers, and they had great incentive to reach correct beliefs not just for the immediate & compounding returns but also from being able to sell their superior specimens for improving other herds. With particularly intense selection feasible in practice (like using a single sire in a herd), large improvements could've been seen well within a person's working lifetime.
But surviving theoretical scientific discussions of heredity are baffling. Early discussions of breeding which initially seem to make sense, like Plato's Republic, suddenly veer into nonsense when Plato emphasizes the importance of breeding only from those best individuals who are also "in their prime" —should you breed using your prize specimens who have gotten a little too old, well, then, your animals will inevitably "greatly degenerate" 2, as the age of the father was far more important than mere ability, a principle the Spartans also followed in discouraging young or old men from reproducing. (Aristotle explained this as older animals devoting food consumption to creation of fat, rather than creation of blood, and since semen was produced from blood…) Xenophon insisted that dogs be nursed by their original mothers, and not foster mothers, as the milk of the latter would be useless. Roman authors, following Varro, emphasized further the importance of starving female cattle before mating; naturally, cattle were to be chosen solely on the basis of their coat color. Indeed, the circumstances of the mating were at least as important as any qualities of the father. (The belief that circumstance at conception could 'impress' themselves on offspring is an ancient one, examples of which can be found even in the Old Testament, where Jacob places striped branches near mating goats/sheep to make the offspring also striped3; one might also mention the contemporary popularity of epigenetics as a causal explanation of everything.) Matters improved little in the Renaissance and later, as intellectuals lurched between 'only fathers matter' & 'only mothers matter', endlessly elaborating on wildly speculative (and wildly wrong) mechanistic explanations of how exactly sperm & eggs & embryos connected and formed, and in an example of "hard cases make bad law", the focus on 'monsters' and other extreme cases among humans or animals badly misguided their premature attempts to elucidate universal principles comparable to that of astronomy or physics—the examples did not 'prove any rule', but baffled everyone trying to come up with a rule to prove. Other societies held to theories of partible paternity. (Cobb remarks "Réaumur and Bonnet's discovery of aphid parthenogenesis in the 1740s had not helped matters" , to say the least—and parthenogenesis, aside from existing in animals too, is far from the oddest reproductive system or genetics in insects or plants!) We now know that here are an indefinitely long list of ways that development can go wrong with thousands of environmental insults or developmental error or distinct genetic diseases (each with many possible contributing mutations), and that for the most part, each case is its own special case; sometimes 'monsters' can shed light on key aspects of biology like metabolic pathways, but that requires biology centuries more advanced than was available, and that the search for universal principles was futile. There are universal principles but they pertain mostly to populations, must be investigated in the aggregate, statistically, and individual counterexamples can only be shrugged at, as the universal principles can be and often are overridden by many of those special cases.
Why didn't farmers & breeders correct the theoreticians? Any experience with selective breeding or cross-breeding should have strangled "preformationism" in its crib, and it would not have been hard to look over a good pedigree and note that, say, elite mothers had elite offspring about as often as elite fathers had elite offspring, and that it couldn't be true that eggs were passive sustenance for an embryo (or alternatively, that the sperm was a mere spark igniting the egg).
Unfortunately, breeders & farmers were also deeply confused. Rather than carefully preserving & breeding prize animals, the best members of a herd would often be culled for eating or selling at the highest profit, and the worst left to reproduce4 (a "negative breeding strategy" ie. dysgenic), since, after all, heredity didn't matter as much as environment. Rather than a keen focus on the end-goal, whatever that was, farmers would choose for "beauty" or "fancy points" , whatever was in fashion at the moment, and naturally there were fierce disagreements about what a "beautiful" sheep looked like5. Abhorrence of inbreeding (due to human norms or a great fear of inbreeding depression) prevented realizing that inbreeding could be used to create new inbred lines which fixed desirable traits & were man-made breeds, rather than breeds simply being pre-existing natural kinds from time immemorial. The lack of record-keeping or consistent control over reproduction, with catch-as-catch-can matings, culling, environmental shocks, ad hoc introductions from other breeds, and ultimately, tiny average populations controlled by each individual compared to modern farming—all introduced noise. (Bakewell's own experiments required a large herd, and he either did or almost went bankrupt, sources conflict, despite the extremely high sums he was ultimately able to charge for his animals.6) The belief that only fathers mattered led horse breeders astray: they failed to race mares, and then took the ludicrously expensive imported Arabian stallions and crossed them with random mares, and then took the sub-par performance of their offspring as evidence that race performance was critically dependent on the dry Arabian environment and they simply had to keep importing & crossing.7 Many breeders, going back to the Greeks like Xenophon & Plato or Roman writers thereafter, focused on the circumstances of conception, emphasizing the critical importance of breeding a male in his prime rather than an older one, no matter how much better the older one had performed in its prime, breeding females with large temporal gaps if highest quality is necessary, and particularly avoiding any obese animals, as obesity sapped vitality, impeding the production of blood, from which semen & eggs derived—Greeks supposedly would deliberately starve cows to ensure svelteness before impregnation. And Varro held that twinning in goats/sheep was due to the parents, but that the trait could be both inherited by a male but also was communicable ie. might be carried from a female by the impregnating male to successive females, and so a breeder should try to use twin-begetting goat/sheep as much as possible. (I've heard of paternal age effects and epigenetics before, but this is ridiculous!) Considering all of this, I am no longer surprised that selective breeding was invented so late nor that such low-hanging fruit went unplucked for millennia. Under this statistical blizzard of contradictory noise, how was anyone to discern the simple biometric patterns?
Cobb rousingly & convincingly concludes:
It took humanity a remarkably long time to discover that there are consistent relations between parent and offspring, and to develop ways of studying those relations. The raw phenomena of heredity were sufficiently complex to be impervious to 'common-sense' reasoning, to the brilliant but stifling schemas that were developed by the Greek philosophers, and even to the stunning forays of the early scientists. What was required was not a novel piece of apparatus, nor even a new theory; the key thing that was needed was statistically extraordinary data sets. On the one hand, these were composed of many reliable human pedigrees of unusual or pathological characters; on the other, they were the large-scale experimental studies that were carried out consciously by Mendel, or as a by-product of the commercial activity of eighteenth-century livestock breeders.
Like all great truths, heredity seems obvious once it is understood. But the fact that so many people took so long to realize what we take for granted does not mean that our predecessors were stupid. Instead, it indicates that, before the patterns within hereditary phenomena could be detected, society had to develop to a sufficient level for these kinds of data to be collected, examined, compared and interpreted. However, although science, written family records and large-scale agricultural production were the prerequisites for the discovery of heredity, the birth of our science was not simple, and required bold thinkers who were prepared to resolve an issue that had perplexed humanity for thousands of years. The result—the twin fields of genetics and evolution—represents one of the greatest insights in human history.
What of this progress do we see in Russell's trace of history? In an example of The Fable of the Bees, the idle wastrel amusements of the aristocrats & aping by their lessers may have been key: because the development of Thoroughbred racehorses starts Russell's story!
The aristocratic & government interest in racehorses & war horses gradually led to many specialized horses being kept and better record-keeping. The creation of the "stud book" and the classist superstition of "blood" in horses, where even distant ancestry from a famous thoroughbred elevated a horse above common horses, appears to have accidentally backed into success: by creating a reason to track ancestry carefully, and importantly, ensuring that a thoroughbred's offspring with a horse not in 'the book' would be worth much less (regardless of their performance or true genetic potential), a closed breeding population under steady selection was created and ensured that what progress was made was not then immediately undone by careless haphazard matings. Arabian/Turkish stallions were permitted, and now that they were no longer being immediately diluted by outside 100%-non-thoroughbred horses, gradually "graded up" the closed thoroughbred gene pool towards more Arabian/Turkish genes. Further, the mania for racing was not satisfied by the stock of mature stallions so races began expanding to include younger horses (accelerating generational turnover and thus annual gains) and also mares (finally capturing critical performance data and allowing selection on the other half of the equation). Before too long, the import of full-blooded Arabian stallions was no longer particularly necessary as thoroughbred performance had thoroughly outraced them. Russell remarks that thoroughbreds, like cats or dogs, were then (and still are, based on the crudity of the racehorse genetics papers I've read) bred in an unsystematic and inefficient manner, but this seems to have been enough. Other English fashions, like the demand for carriage-horses due to increasing wealth, rapidly molded various breeds of horses larger & smaller as necessary. The sudden sustained progress in racehorses and changes demonstrating malleability probably did not go unnoticed.
Early cattle/sheep productivity was low. Dairy cow yield, for example, appears to have been probably below 300 gallons a year (pg129); for comparison, contemporary dairy cow yield is closer to 2,300 gallons a year & increasing (~1%/annually genetically). Dairy cattle breeding optimized for as few males as possible, since they did not produce milk and were needed essentially only to impregnate the cows, and so calving would happen as simultaneously as possible early in the spring. A village might collectively pay for a single "common bull" to 'tup' the villagers' cows, but wealthier farmers might buy or simply hire individual bulls. If you only need one, and that one will be kept busy impregnating as many cows as possible, you want the best & lustiest one, and it naturally develops into a selective breeding program. (Although having only one male is far from optimal for maximizing the long-term response to selection.) After a few years, the bull slows down, one fattens it for the butcher, and buys a new one. Bakewell, in addition to his more famous sheep, was also involved in steer & horse breeding and would've been familiar with this. By the time Bakewell began in the 1740s, English sheep farmers had been struggling with changing market incentives: small sheep, while tastier, didn't fetch a sufficient premium, and likewise, fine wool wasn't premium enough to compensate for the small amount of fleece on such sheep; they had begun explicitly seeking out and buying large high-meat/wool-yielding sheep.
This perhaps formed the jumping off point for Bakewell. Bakewell began carefully measuring his animals & paying attention to the offspring of any hired-out males to gauge the males' genetic quality, optimizing for fast growth and fattiness, even preserving joints in jars from previous specimens the better to compare with current animals, and perhaps practicing more inbreeding than other contemporary breeders. Russell is critical of the extent to which Bakewell's Dishley sheep was really an economic success or to what extent better measurements were responsible for improvements, calling some of the later prices Bakewell charged "more to do with theatre and the cunning exploitation of fashion than any relationship with the breeding value of stock" and noting that an unknown but possibly large amount of the Dishley sheep's quality was due as much to Bakewell's "superb standards of husbandry" and assiduous investment in environmental improvements like irrigating fields & feeding his animal high-quality pasturage & being extremely kind/gentle to his animals (some of the many visitors, domestic & international, to Dishley would note that the animals were remarkably happy, calm, and good-natured, and that Bakewell was also beloved by his employees). One improvement I particularly liked was Bakewell's construction of a canal for carrying fodder around: a worker would toss some into the canal, which would then carry it to the main house into a pool, washing it along the way. Russell concludes (pg215), after reviewing some later small-scale data from the Annals, that:
It must be doubtful if food conversion or carcass ratio were significantly improved, or that the fundamental form of the carcass was changed either in the Bakewell strain of Longhorn cow or in Lincolnshire Wold sheep. However, the animals looked much better grazier's animals, with their tendency to fat up and round out well. In a sense, all Bakewell had done was to create a new, if somewhat more rational fancy for sheep of a particular shape, rather than merely tinkering with colour or horn form. On the other hand, it would seem that the Lincoln breeders had genuinely succeeded in breeding animals with a greatly increased fleece yield, although the death of the longwool market made their achievement a pointless one. Sensibly they reverted back towards the form of the Wold sheep from which they had started, of which the best surviving examples were the Dishleys. The use of Dishley stock by the Lincoln breeders was, of course, made much of by the Leicestershire men, although it probably did not have the significance the latter ascribed to it. Certainly Bakewell must take considerably credit for publicising the idea of selecting stock for economic performance, but whether his actual achievements in this field were of any significance remains doubtful.
Inasmuch as there do not seem to be any surviving records from Bakewell (!) and Bakewell never wrote up his data or methods, only discussing it with visitors, it is difficult to say either way. Given how many subsequent gains have come from breeding and the low initial level and the fact that response to selection is expected to be greatest at the beginning, I incline towards thinking that Bakewell did cause large genetic gains by simply being thorough and exercising some care, and of course his environmental improvements may also have been critical to his genetic success by allowing each animal to reach its genetic potential, increasing heritability/reducing non-shared-environment effects. (If the Dishley breeds had been maintained to the present day, it might be possible to partition gains from environment and genetics by common-garden experiments or by using polygenic scores, but unfortunately, they appear to have all long since disappeared or merged into other breeds which have undergone intense selection since then, and are no more available for study than the Dishley records.)
In any case, Russell makes an interesting suggestion there. If Bakewell's true contribution was "publicising the idea" (which can be further buttressed by noting that Bakewell was widely praised in the 1700s & 1800s, citing Charles Darwin invoking Bakewell in the context of natural selection as demonstrating what explicit selection can do even to the point of making a new breed, the goal of German sheep breeders to emulate Bakewell's supposed success, etc) what can we draw out of this?
One way would be to say that Bakewell played a part in the invention of Progress or the "improving attitude" .
It is not a universal belief among humans that it is possible to 'progress'; Whiggism must be learned. Isaac Newton, for example, disbelieved that he lived in any kind of 'revolution' or unique event in human history, and regarded contemporary progress as evidence that human history actually consisted cycles of creation & destruction, and believed that his research on gravity or the Philosopher's Stone was merely recovering what the Ancients knew & had been lost. Breeders likewise regarded selection as merely frustrating the inevitable decay of herds under inbreeding & local environments. One imported a Turkish or Spanish or Arabian stallion to try to temporarily elevate one's horses, but that was to try to borrow some of the ancestral power of a born & raised foreign racehorse—no permanent gain was looked for nor, apparently, seen, and one simply kept importing. The idea that it is possible to almost arbitrarily improve a breed's traits, or steer a breed in a direction to the point that it would have to be considered a new and clearly distinct breed for all intents & purposes, appears to have not been in circulation. It would have been deemed absurd, worthy of parody in the Laputa of Gulliver's Travels, to imagine that dairy cows could one day yield >8x more milk. Most merchants & aristocrats dreamed of nothing more than to own a large landed estate with an annual income of several hundred or thousand pounds sterling, and their descendants living off the land-rents for eternity (and land prices reflected this, with prestigious full ownership costing far more than 99-year leases).
The market is a weighing machine, but where do the things weighed come from? What differentiates a complacent society from an innovative society? If chance favors the prepared mind, what is the nature of this mental preparation?
In a recent talk, economic historian Anton Howes8, who studies a similar period of English history, specializing in the Royal Society of Arts (est. 1754), brought up many interesting points about innovation and progress, putting together a circumstantial case for the role of social imitation & elite competition in driving innovation, what you might call the Velvet Underground model of innovation. Rather than innovation & progress just sort of happening on its own or being driven by accumulating assets, progress appears to be caused at least partially simply by an attitude of progress, of people competing to be innovative, and of simply looking at age-old things and going "why do we do it that way? Why not do it this other more sensible way?" This attitude appears to be rare outside of pre-Revolution England/Europe.9
The Royal Society of Arts is a case in point: the RSA was founded to encourage technological and practical innovations by contests, funded by 'subscriptions' from aristocrats & well-to-do bourgeoisie, But it did not have the money to directly fund people to do R&D or pay for getting a patent or buy out existing patents, and instead, based on votes, primarily awarded medals and occasionally substantial but still relatively nominal monetary prizes. (They were not awarded to patented things. This was not as much of a restriction as it might seem because patents, being so expensive in real terms, rarely obtained, often not useful when obtained, and nearly abolished in the early 1800s, seem like a minor player at best. Corporations, likewise—just about anything you might do with a limited-liability corporation could be done with a trust instead.) And this… apparently worked really well? For example, the RSA takes credit for 60 million trees planted by the landed gentry starting in 1758, simply by awarding a gold medal to the Duke of Beaufort followed by "various other dukes, duchesses, earls, viscounts, marquesses, bishops, and members of parliament, not to mention many more untitled members of the minor gentry. Aristocrats and their neighbours engaged in a 'very laudable emulation', each vying to out-do one another in the extent and quality of their plantations." The only payment it could make was prestige, reflected from the English aristocracy, and this was apparently adequate, indeed, perhaps even more motivating than mere wealth. (I've often been baffled by how medals were endlessly awarded before the 1900s, and now I wonder if I over-hastily dismissed the idea that medals could be real motivation for anyone, simply because I can't imagine being motivated by yet another symbolic medal.) In creating his Society, William Shipley, sought to excite an empirics of envy, emulation, and excellence. He was, it is worth noting, was inspired by… horse racing: he had noticed the tremendous efforts invested in it, all out of disproportion to the awarded prizes, and the resulting progress, and sought to harness that energy for more socially-valuable purposes.10
Other observations follow. Some major inventions are so simple as to defy belief they were not invented thousands of years ago—the flying shuttle, for example. Many inventors had little or no training or experience in the field they invented something in, and might be a lawyer or something else entirely (like a small boy irritated at being assigned to a steam engine), and otherwise sometimes seem incompetent; John Kay of the flying shuttle claimed to have spent only a month apprenticed before making the first of his textile inventions. Inventors who lived in a neighborhood with a high per capita patent rate are themselves more likely to file a patent. Future inventors might correspond with their heroes (shades of the 'college of letters') and, if they then meet them in person, they are more likely to go on to innovate, even if it was only a single short meeting and the hero was in an entirely different field and so it is difficult to see what key fact, skill, or wealth/object they could have transmitted which might make any difference. Innovation appears to be contagious: the society of clockmakers was often hired by scientists to make instruments for their needs, and the hired clockmakers started innovating more and this spread to the rest of the guild. Immigrants (not all Scots, France/Germany/America are common origins), and religious Dissenters, such as Scots Presbyterians moving south into English Anglican territory, are constantly overrepresented, as are mentions of The Great Exhibition. For comparison, France appears to have been much less practically innovative and slower to industrialize; why? Howes suggested it reflected different elite priorities: the French aristocracy was much stronger & wealthier than the English, and had an inclination towards purer, more abstract, more universal theorizing. Technology and economic growth and health simply weren't rewarded with prestige from a French RSA. And you get what you incentivize.
Taking Howes's claims at face-value, we could expand on the model a little more. Passing over Girardian claims of mimesis as the most powerful force in society, it's still intriguing to note parallels elsewhere.
Bakewell, it hardly needs to be said, follows the Howes model well: Bakewell had no special training or math or technology to offer, and his breeds have been much criticized for being useless in practice and disappeared, but what he did accomplish was endorse the idea of progress, providing a model to emulate, and a prestigious figure to cite as precedent. Bakewell may have been grossly overrated by acolytes, but from this point of view, that is a feature and not a bug—the more praised the better! His influence then spread and sparked Bakewellites elsewhere and abroad, better equipped to successfully do what (they thought) he did.
"Of the 6 people who started PayPal, 4 had built bombs in high school. 5 were just 23 years old—or younger. 4 of us had been born outside the United States. 3 had escaped here from communist countries: Yu Pan from China, Luke Nosek from Poland, and Max Levchin from Soviet Ukraine. Building bombs was not what kids normally did in those countries at that time. The 6 of us could have been seen as eccentric. My first-ever conversation with Luke was about how he'd just signed up for cryonics, to be frozen upon death in hope of medical resurrection."
Peter Thiel, on the PayPal Mafia (Zero To One)
"One of the things that comes up in the books you're talking about is the existence of a certain kind of out-communities that were weirdly overrepresented among people who created new economic systems, opened up new trade routes, and so on. I'm talking about Huguenots, who were the Protestants in France who suffered a lot of oppression. I'm talking about the Puritans in England, who were not part of the established church and so also came in for a lot of oppression. Armenians, Jews, Parsis, various other minority communities that, precisely because of their outsider minority status, were forced to form long-range networks and go about things in an unconventional, innovative way… it's the circumstances that made it possible for these weird outsider groups to find footholds in various niches and do new things."
Neal Stephenson, July 2019 interview
In my review of The Vaccinators, I noted I was particularly interested in the trick that cracked Japanese smallpox (cowpox) vaccination: it was, apparently, inadequate to offer Japanese people merely a nearly-free silver bullet for saving their children from a fatal crippling disease which killed >10% of all children and had for centuries—but what did work was to convince the great nobles to vaccinate their children, and then with that elite endorsement, the masses quickly imitated. Howes notes an earlier smallpox example of aristocratic endorsement: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu struggled to introduce Turkish variolation into England despite variolating her own son, until she won over Princess Caroline of Ansbach (who had lost her father & step-father to smallpox, and nearly died of it herself), and then, after a successful experiment on condemned prisoners, Caroline had her royal children variolated. (To quote the well-connected Stephen Hales, who helped co-found the RSA, "a king's or Princess's word runneth swiftly" indeed.)
Highly-effective small groups punching far above their weight turn up in the history of technology or science or politics with eerie frequency. Why is half of 20th century psychiatry or physics in one photo? Why do some labs excel in discoveries, and mentors in protege successes? (Selection effects & network effects, of course, but is that really all? Are there no micro-agglomeration effects?) Consider the English Fabian Society and the effort they put into attractive publications, salons & parties & debates, recruiting bourgeoisie or upper-class members; despite appearing ineffective, it turned out positively tentacular (or the Alzheimer lab or Bloomsbury Group or Florentine Camerata or PayPal Mafia…). Startups regularly form around charismatic leaders with intense visions, who occasionally shove something forward by decades. (Case in point, Elon Musk11 & electric cars: I recall pre-Musk electric car forecasts from before 2003. Often they did not involve electric cars at all but hydrogen or fuel-cell cars. When was the last time you heard about those? And electric car time-lines tended to look more like "perhaps by 2020 or 2030 there may be a usable expensive electric car".) When I visited Stanford University in March 2018 to talk & have lunch with some students, I felt weird for a few hours afterwards; I finally put my finger on it when I realized that they took launching startups & other highly ambitious endeavours so for granted that I had begun to feel like a failure & to wonder what I could do to become awesome again. People who take investment from the Y Combinator venture capital firm (some who I know personally) aver that the money is almost beside the point, and it is the community they value and the inspiration from Paul Graham & principals & peers.
Are outsiders and "misfits" and trouble-makers necessary for progress? Why don't identical twins leverage their profound mutual trust & understanding to form dynamic duos regularly dominating society? Why do birth order effects turn up in the West for education, intelligence, & personality (and perhaps also mathematicians, physicists, & weirdos)?12 Why do teachers dislike their most creative students so much? What makes a sober penny-pinching man like John D. Rockefeller suddenly decide to bet his life savings on a dubious gamble like the Pennsylvanian oil fields not being a fad which would run out in a few years, and become the world's richest man? Why do companies & conferences continue to prioritize in-person meetings rather than switching to remote working or online broadcasts/discussions, and why does it seem so important to meet someone briefly in the flesh when you would seem to hardly learn anything from it? Is it necessary to small groups to meet in person, to trust each other, perhaps to have interrogation-criticism sessions like Skull and Bones, to forestall sociopath & MOP invasions, or to create private status hierarchies separate from the world's status hierarchies, to give oneself permission to be an outsider and dangerously stray outside the box?
Perhaps there is some sort of psychological barrier, where the mind flinches at any suggestion bubbling up from the subconscious that conflicts with age-old tradition or with higher-status figures. Should any new ideas still manage to come up, they are suppressed; "don't rock the boat", don't stand out ( "the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions" ). Should they not be suppressed, they are then discarded. One doesn't have permission from oneself. What meeting a mentor does, then, or what a general attitude of progress, or what living on Stanford campus does, or what a trinket from a Royal Society does, or what joining a small startup or research group exploring a exciting but controversial new idea, is it normalizes & allocates prestige to new things.
The Great Man theory of history may not be truly believable and Great Men not real but invented, but it may be true we need to believe the Great Man theory of history and would have to invent them if they were not real.
"Evolutionary Thought Before Darwin" , SEP
"Treasure Hunting" , Sarah Perry
"In Defense of Individualist Culture" , Sarah Constantin
"British agricultural revolution gave us evolution by natural selection" :- "Knitting Community: Human and Social Capital in the Early Transition into Entrepreneurship" , Kim 2018 (quantifying social contagion/peer-effects of innovation: knitting groups & novel knitting designs on Ravelry)
"Taste for Makers" , Paul Graham
"The Social Subsidy of Angel Investing" , Alex Danco
Darwin cited Bakewell as the original example of selective breeding which was brought to such an extreme as all the pigeons which clutter On The Origin of Species, in his 1842 "Sketch on Natural Selection" :
Remember how soon Bakewell on the same principle altered cattle and Western, sheep carefully avoiding a cross (pigeons) with any breed. We cannot suppose that one plant tends to vary in fruit and another in flower, and another in flower and foliage—some have been selected for both fruit and flower: that one animal varies in its covering and another not—another in its milk. Take any organism and ask what is it useful for and on that point it will be found to vary—cabbages in their leaf—corn in size and quality of grain, both in times of year—kidney beans for young pod and cotton for envelope of seeds, etc.: dogs in intellect, courage, fleetness and smell: pigeons in peculiarities approaching to monsters.
and his 1844, "On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection"
Now, can it be doubted, from the struggle each individual has to obtain subsistence, that any minute variation in structure, habits, or instincts, adapting that individual better to the new conditions, would tell upon its vigour and health? In the struggle it would have a better chance of surviving; and those of its offspring which inherited the variation, be it ever so slight, would also have a better chance. Yearly more are bred than can survive; the smallest grain in the balance, in the long run, must tell on which death shall fall, and which shall survive. Let this work of selection on the one hand, and death on the other, go on for a thousand generations, who will pretend to affirm that it would produce no effect, when we remember what, in a few years, Bakewell effected in cattle, and Western in sheep, by this identical principle of selection?
…"They are, indeed," I said; "but next, Glaucon, disorder and promiscuity in these unions or [458e] in anything else they do would be an unhallowed thing in a happy state and the rulers will not suffer it." "It would not be right," he said. "Obviously, then, we must arrange marriages, sacramental so far as may be. And the most sacred marriages would be those that were most beneficial." [459a] "By all means." "How, then, would the greatest benefit result? Tell me this, Glaucon. I see that you have in your house hunting-dogs and a number of pedigree cocks.88 Have you ever considered something about their unions and procreations?" "What?" 89 he said. "In the first place," I said, "among these themselves, although they are a select breed, do not some prove better than the rest?" "They do." "Do you then breed from all indiscriminately, or are you careful to breed from the best 90?" [459b] "From the best." "And, again, do you breed from the youngest or the oldest, or, so far as may be, from those in their prime?" "From those in their prime." "And if they are not thus bred, you expect, do you not, that your birds and hounds will greatly degenerate?" "I do," he said. "And what of horses and other animals?" I said; "is it otherwise with them?" "It would be strange if it were," said he.
"Don't give me anything," Jacob replied [to Laban]. "But if you will do this one thing for me, I will go on tending your flocks and watching over them:32 Let me go through all your flocks today and remove from them every speckled or spotted sheep, every dark-colored lamb and every spotted or speckled goat. They will be my wages"…Jacob, however, took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches.38 Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink,39 they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted.
Such a strategy sounds completely absurd and it's hard to believe the ancients would do it even if Russell tells us they usually did up to the Industrial Revolution, but on the other hand, Richard Dawkins (The Ancestor's Tale, pg46) notes that:
…It was probably more difficult [for people] to work out that it might be a good idea to keep back the best seed for planting, rather than follow the obvious course of eating the best and planting the dross (my father, as a young man fresh out of college, taught agriculture to peasant farmers in central Africa in the 1940s, and he tells me that this was one of the hardest lessons to get across).
The agricultural writer Arthur Young, a main source on Dishley & Bakewell due to his visits, discussed Bakewell's detractors with withering scorn:
No man that is a judge will deny, or question for a single moment, that this breed of sheep, whether intrinsically good or bad, has been improved more than any other in the kingdom. I have conversed with Norfolk, Sussex, Dorset, and Wilts flock masters, but I have never heard any of them pretend that any very great improvements have been made in the last ten years, one or two men in a country excepted; and not every where even one. If then there has been a greater improvement made in this breed than in others, it follows, in all fairness of reasoning, that those maxims, those principles, and that conduct, whatever they may be, which have had this effect, have been more successful and ought ceteris paribus to be acknowledged better and sounder than those principles and maxims which have been applied to other breeds of the kingdom….what has that mode consisted in? In one great leading point—in raising the value, and thereby animating the spirit of exertion.
…It is remarkable, that in these counties, which are each in possession of distinct and much vaunted breeds, rams have not been let [rented]; they are sold, and at such low prices, that 20 guineas must every where be considered as the highest heard of. It surely deserves noting, that these breeds have been either very little, or not at all, improved at low prices, while that of Leicester has been prodigiously improved at very high ones.
It is not that these breeds are incapable of improvement, they are all greatly capable of it, even on the ideas that respectively govern those counties. If a black face, and a black long leg, and a thick long horn, many times curled, are admitted excellencies in Norfolk, why not breed the faces till blacker, and the horns yet longer? If naked bellies, white faces, and horns falling back behind the ear are objects in Wiltshire, why not breed for those excellences, so as to command them to more perfection? If rough heads and horns, flicking out from the head, be the marks of merit in Dorsetshire, why not carry such points further than any one has done yet? And if a patch in a speckled face is a criterion in Sussex, surely a brighter speckle and a thicker patch might be bred?
Now is it not a marvelous system, that amidst all this attention to these points, so utterly non-essential, or rather so ridiculous, these whites, blacks, speckles, horns, and patches—that the carcass should every where seem to be out of all contemplation, except in Leicestershire? It surely is fortunate that men should arise, who rejecting all these fooleries as nothing, have paid attention to the carcass alone!
But supposing Leicester wrong, and all the rest right, then comes the question pointed and apposite; why have not you made as great improvements in your horns, your legs, and your faces, as Leicester has in the barrel? Leicester has not stood still a moment, but most of you have been stationary these 20 years. Why?—Because you have not been pushed forward by high prices. If men could have been found to buy horns at £10 an inch, or colour at £20 a shade, is it to be supposed they could not have been bred?
It's interesting to note that despite the social stigma of being a mere tenant & not a gentleman-farmer who of course owned the property, and occupying it for many decades, and investing enormous long-term efforts in improving it, Bakewell never bought his farm, Dishley, outright. Perhaps the necessary upfront money was always more productively spent improving his animals. It's been noticed that 99-year leases for English property were extraordinarily cheap compared to outright purchase prices in the pre-modern era ( "Pricing the Future in the Seventeenth Century: Calculating Technologies in Competition" , Deringer 2017).↩
For all that people assume that historical people were super-genetic-determinists about anything and everything, a remarkable amount of naive environmentalism was current: for example, the European assumption, criticized by Sir Thomas Browne (among other naturalist debunkings), that Africans were black only because of their sunny environment! Some first-hand experience with their offspring in Europe eventually refuted that, although Russell indicates that even this was not enough to convince environmentalists: "it was thus destined to be discussed interminably in the 18th and 19th centuries, with few able to accept that it was an entirely heritable phenomenon." Also peculiar to the modern eye is the case of George Psalmanazar, a Frenchman who claimed to be born and bred on the hitherto unknown island of Taiwan, despite his "pale skin and honey-colored locks, [and] a member of the audience privately notes to himself that the foreigner seems to 'look like a young Dutch-man'" appearing to reveal the hoax on sight.↩
Homepage; relevant writings:
"The Relevance of Skills to Innovation during the British Industrial Revolution, 1651-1851" , Howes 2016 (working paper; previously titled, "The Improving Mentality: Innovation during the British Industrial Revolution, 1651-1851" )
"The Spread of Improvement: Why Innovation Accelerated in Britain 1547-1851"
"Is Innovation in Human Nature?"
"John Dee and 'The Measurers'"
"If not Britain, where? The case for a French Industrial Revolution"
"How Innovation Accelerated in Britain 1651-1851"
"Immigration and the Industrial Revolution"
"Economic Growth in Ancient Rome"
"Who will watch the Watch-Men?—Celebrating the Watch-Makers of the British Industrial Revolution"
"The Great British (Industrial) Bake-Off"
"Chim-Chim-Cher-ee: When Inventions Stealing Jobs was Popular" : how scandiscopes replaced chimney-sweep boys
"The Ideology of Invention" talk: video (slides)
"Definite optimism as human capital" ; "How Technology Grows (a Restatement of Definite Optimism)" , Dan Wang
Where else might the 'improving attitude' be found?
Sung China is often mentioned as a "proto Industrial Revolution" in discussions of the Great Divergence, but I don't know much about innovation or intellectual climate there.
Another candidate is Rome: I'm struck by the extent to which Greco-Roman philosophy believed in progress—as major figures as Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates were in philosophy, Greco-Roman philosophy did not hold them as founders who said all that could be said about natural or moral philosophy, and believed that major intellectual advances had been made since them. The Academic Skeptics, for example, or even better, the Stoics and Epicureans, who investigated many things and believed they had made discoveries of importance: Lucretius's On The Nature of Things (1417) covers Epicurean theories of everything from atomism to lightning to the rain cycle to the Nile's source to the speed of light, which I am fairly sure Epicureans did not simply copy from a Platonic dialogue.
The general impression of Rome seems to be negative, but how much of this reflects simply the drastic loss of records & bias towards narrow topics like religion? Estimates that 1% of Greco-Roman science survives seem if anything to understate the case. The contents of the famous Herculaneum library would surely astonish us… if the available fragments were not that of a minor poet and further excavation forbidden. What survives of Greco-Roman architectural feats is enough to indicate that they reached a remarkable level of technological & scientific development, and as time passes, we continue to discover more remarkable things which continue to stretch what we thought Romans had done or discovered. On the Nature of Things was rediscovered based on 1 copy (1417) with 3 earlier ones (800s?) eventually uncovered; the Archimedes Palimpsest (1909-2008) could fairly be said to survive in less than 1 copy; the Antikythera mechanism (1902) is unique & not mentioned in any surviving records; the Nemi ships (1929), >70m long pleasure ships using advanced technology like ball-bearings, bilge pumps, indoor plumbing, lead anchor stocks, and hulls indicative of standardized (industrial?) design & production, are briefly mentioned by one historian but their striking technology omitted; the water mills of Barbegal (1940), perhaps only 1 of many such complexes, are of truly industrial scale and served an advanced naval economy but their role must be inferred from some peeled-off lumps of mineral residue; and so on. All of this fed into striking economic growth. It's enough to make one wonder, indeed. (In this context, I'm curious to eventually read Richard Carrier's Science Education in the Early Roman Empire/The Scientist in the Roman Empire to see what he turns up.)↩
"William Shipley And The Royal Society Of Arts: The History of an Idea" , Luckhurst 1949:
The success of Shipley's project, however, is due ultimately not so much to the force of his character as to the Tightness of the idea, simple, indeed naive, though it was, which he conceived and on which he based his Society. It is fortunate, therefore, that we possess, in a pamphlet dated 1763 and entitled "A Concise Account of the Rise, Progress and Present State of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce" , a detailed story of how the project gradually formed in his mind.
It really grew from two ideas, the first of which came to him as he watched the horse fair which was held twice a year at Northampton, where he resided. When he saw all the buying and selling that went on at the fair, involving large sums of money, he began to enquire into the cause of its success. He was told that it was largely due to the institution of horse-racing meetings; and that many of these had recently been promoted by the King and others who had presented plates or prizes for the various races. From this it occurred to Shipley that the gift of a comparatively few prizes had thus stimulated a whole industry; and impressed by this discovery he began to ask himself whether this, same principle could not be applied to stimulate other industries. He decided that it could, and subsequent history proved that he was right, but in the meantime there remained a second question—where was the money for even a few modest prizes to come from?
The 1763 pamphlet appears to be reprinted in William Shipley: Founder of the Royal Society of Arts; A Biography with Documents, Allan 1968.↩
Speaking of Musk, why did I have such a vivid impression in 2014 that Musk endorsing the idea of AI risk & Bostrom's book Superintelligence was a huge turning point in public interest & intellectual respectability of the topic? After all—what does Musk know about AI risk, really?↩
Would we find only-children overrepresented? Left-handers? Does this connect to why LGBT seem to be overrepresented in similar circles? Does childhood emotional abuse or bullying actually spur great achievement by a lingering resentment & unquenchable dissatisfaction? Is there some sort of "outsider" general factor, or increase in variance?↩
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The tourism industry garnered 475 billion yuan (about $75 billion) in revenue from some 386 million trips made, up 12.6 percent from last year's holiday.
China posted a double-digit growth in tourism revenue during the week-long Lunar New Year holiday, official data showed Wednesday.
The tourism industry garnered 475 billion yuan (about USD 75 billion) in revenue, up 12.6 percent from last year's holiday, according to the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA).
Some 386 million trips by tourists were made, up 12.1 percent from last year's holiday, the CNTA said in a statement.
Guangdong, Sichuan and Hunan received the most tourists among all provincial regions. Nearly half of travelers drove instead of taking public transportation.
Overseas travel remained popular, with Chinese tourists from nearly 200 cities visiting 68 countries and regions during the holiday.
Southeast Asia was the top destination, while long-distance tours to countries including Argentina and Mexico were also popular.
Nearly half of overseas travels were independent tours rather than escorted group tours, the CNTA cited data from online tour operator Ctrip.com as saying.


text:
What does the New Biden Administration Mean for Taiwan?
11 December 2020 Editor Cross-Strait, Elections, International relations, Taiwan-US, Taiwan-US-China, Uncategorized Leave a comment
Written by Douglas H. Paal.
Image credit: 12.02 總統由國安會秘書長及外交部長李大維陪同,與美國總統當選人唐納川普(Donald J. Trump)通話 by 總統府/Flickr, license CC BY 2.0
Four years ago, on December 2, 2016, shortly after Donald Trump had become president-elect, Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen placed a phone call to Trump to congratulate him on his recent victory. Reportedly, someone trusted by Taipei with access to Trump had told Ms Tsai that her call would be received and not rejected. It was the first such opportunity for contact at that level since the United States broke diplomatic relations with the Republic of China in 1979, and so politically irresistible for Taiwan's leader.
Trump, indeed, accepted the congratulations and – shortly after – defended it, saying, "Interesting how the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call." Trump is a disruptive figure, and his break with precedent fit with the pattern of rejection he often expressed of the behaviour of his predecessors.
Nevertheless, Trump's willingness to upend established practice did not last long in this case. In fact, buyers' remorse seemed to develop quickly in both Taipei and Washington. In Taipei, this was because the phone call had been portrayed as a breakthrough in relations, but when Trump quickly backed away, it appeared more likely a misjudgement.
In Washington, it was because of the reaction from Trump's own advisers and Beijing. According to informal China policy adviser, Michael Pillsbury, he and Matthew Pottinger – later to become Deputy National Security Advisor to Trump – were asked right after the phone call to come to Trump's New York headquarter and manage unexpected matters related to Taiwan and China for the president-elect.
Beijing subsequently sent China's top diplomat and expert on America, State Councillor Yang Jiechi, to visit Trump's New York offices and deliver a message. He said that unless Trump respected the foundational "one China principle" and ceased official dealings with Taiwan's leaders, future meetings with China's leaders would be impossible. For Trump, this seemed to risk his plans to deliver his voters a major deal on trade relations with China.
As we learned in the memoir of his later National Security Adviser John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened, Trump harbours underlying low regard for Taiwan. He once unfavourably described the country as the equivalent of a felt tip pen point compared with the size of the large desk in the Oval Office. For Trump, apparently, market size matters.
Fast forward to the 2020 election, with Trump loudly contesting his defeat, both Taiwan and president-elect Joseph R. Biden had a small but telling issue. With Biden not formally elected, but widely acknowledged to have won, and Trump denouncing those who congratulated Biden, should President Tsai risk angering one side or the other by offering congratulations?
For the Biden camp, there was a question about how to keep faith with his campaign promises to be "tough" on China and with the many in the U.S. who want to see Taiwan treated well, while not triggering doubts about his capacity to return America's foreign policy leadership to a more competent, less disruptive, track by casually overturning old but still relevant understandings on official contacts between China and the U.S.
In the end, both the Tsai and Biden teams came up with a diplomatically elegant but little-noticed solution: Tsai's congratulations were passed on November 14, by Taiwan's representative to the United States, Bi-khim Hsiao, Director of Taipei's Economic and Cultural Relations Office (TECRO) in Washington, to Biden's foreign policy adviser, soon to be nominated as Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken. A warm message was sent in both directions, but diplomatic red lines were not crossed.
As background, it should be noted that especially in the later phase of the Trump Administration, pro-Taiwan and anti-China elements in the administration sought to step up relations with Taiwan. They established new political and commercial dialogues and also openly raised the level of "virtual" participation in Tsai's second inaugural ceremony. They also sent an Undersecretary of State for economic consultations in Taipei, pushing through arms sales. Furthermore, they allowed press reports of a two-star admiral's visit to Taiwan.
These were not genuinely unprecedented as individual developments. However, the timing, cascade, and publicity for them seemed intended to push the envelope that normally encases U.S.-Taiwan relations and set a new benchmark for the years ahead. Officials were not crossing the redlines for China that Trump avoided overstepping in the interests of trade with mainland China, but they were coming close.
The Trump administration has focused on developing Taiwanese friendship. However, this developing relationship is combined with rising opposition to China from the Taiwanese public, which stems from China's increasingly threatening behaviour. This includes counterproductive harsh rhetoric, the theft of Taiwan's diplomatic relations with small countries around the world, and encroaching military patrols by China's navy and air force. Furthermore, one must not fail to mention the extreme example of Beijing's crackdown on Hong Kong through the imposition of a draconian National Security Law there. Hong Kong's example of "one country, two systems,' originally sold by Beijing as a form of appeal to Taiwan's population, was transformed into a life-and-death threat by China in the eyes of a great many Taiwanese. (The whys and wherefores of China's drift in this direction should be the subject of a separate analysis.)
As the U.S. election proceeded, opinion spread in Taiwan (and Hong Kong) that Trump was, if nothing else, reliably pro-Taiwan and anti-China. Commentators voiced concern that Biden's election might dilute this thrust of American policy. That Biden had spent more time than any U.S. official with China's Communist Party Secretary General Xi Jinping, despite recent campaign rhetoric, reinforced this concern that Biden may be less effective against China. This is a concern which will linger through at least the early months of Biden's term of office.
As Biden and his senior officials continue to select personnel and assign policy priorities and roles in the weeks and months ahead, Taiwan will remain an important, but probably a secondary concern. This is not said to diminish the importance of the issues involved because Taiwan is one of the true potential flashpoints that could trigger a confrontation between China and the U.S.
Biden campaigned consistently and perseveringly on domestic issues primarily: managing the COVID-19 pandemic, recovering the U.S. economy, promoting racial justice, and mitigating climate change. Foreign policy issues like Russia, China, alliances and Taiwan will not be first-order concerns.
Nevertheless, Biden's proudest record as a Senator and Vice President deeply involved him in foreign affairs. It is important to note that any given president's most significant policy autonomy is in foreign policy. If the Senate remains under a Republican majority after January, this will further limit the scope of Biden's domestic agenda, giving him the incentive to score points in foreign affairs.
In this light, Taiwan will be an essential concern primarily for offices below the White House. Decisions important to Taiwan will be made at senior but lower levels, hopefully in the context of a considerable reassessment of the needs the U.S. has in the face of a mighty economic, technological, military and geopolitical challenge from China. Moreover, the fact that Secretary of State-designate Blinken oversaw the elevated treatment of Tsai when she was a candidate but not yet in her 2015 presidential office – and when he was then Deputy Secretary of State for President Obama – should be a sign that Taiwan will be taken seriously in the next four years.
In sum, I believe the transfer of power from Trump to Biden is most likely to be seen as a shift in symbolism rather than substance. Biden promises to restore the proper functioning of the government, which means in part the restoration of deliberative inter-agency processes that Taiwan should rely on to reflect its interests in a coherent fashion. Disruptive practices by the U.S. have left a record of bringing greater pressure on Taiwan without concrete improvements.
If this proves not to be the case, the Biden people, most of whom have considerable experience on Capitol Hill, will hear from the broad bipartisan support in Congress for Taiwan. The congratulatory phone call exchange between Bi-khim Hsiao and Tony Blinken suggests they know how to do these things effectively and differently.
Douglas H. Paal is a Distinguished Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He previously served as Vice President for Studies and Director of the Asia Program of the Carnegie Endowment vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase International (2006–2008) and was the unofficial U.S. representative to Taiwan as director of the American Institute in Taiwan (2002–2006).
This article is part of a special issue on US-Taiwan relations under Biden presidency.
China-USDonald TrumpJoe BidenUS-Taiwan relations
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