I would imagine every composer has a unique enough voice that an expert can recognize them on first hearing, but to me the most easily recognized are Prokofiev and Handel.
Yes—and I think you're noticing something real, although “unique enough that an expert can recognize them on first hearing” is a little too strong as a universal claim. Some composers have extraordinarily distinctive fingerprints; others overlap heavily with their contemporaries.
Prokofiev is almost comically recognizable. Even without knowing the piece, you can often hear the combination of hard-edged, percussive rhythm, deliberately awkward melodic intervals, sudden harmonic turns, motoric passages, and that peculiar mixture of brutality and lyricism. He can sound sarcastic even when he's being perfectly serious. There is often a feeling that the music is looking at you sideways. His orchestration is distinctive, too: bright, dry, sharply etched rather than lush.
Handel is interesting because his recognizability comes from almost the opposite set of qualities. His harmonic language and melodic construction have a kind of inevitable, declarative simplicity. The phrases tend to have a wonderful architectural logic, and his sequences are so characteristic. Even when another Baroque composer is using essentially the same musical vocabulary, Handel can have that unmistakable combination of grandeur, directness, and slightly monumental vocal rhetoric.
And I suspect your recognition of Handel may be especially strong because you've listened to opera and classical music enough to have internalized the grammar rather than merely memorizing tunes. You don't necessarily think, “That's Handel”; you hear the way the music is behaving and your brain says Handel.
I'd put Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich in the fairly unmistakable camp too, though for quite different reasons. But Prokofiev is one of the cases where I can imagine an expert saying, after perhaps ten seconds of unfamiliar music, “Oh, that's Prokofiev,” and being right an astonishing percentage of the time.
There is also a fun distinction between “I can recognize this composer” and “I can recognize this composer from almost any passage.” Prokofiev is unusually good at the latter.
This is called the composer's "voice," but I have no ability to define it, even though I do know what someone who says it is talking about.
Exactly. “Voice” is one of those wonderfully useful musical terms that is precise in what it points to and hopelessly imprecise in what it denotes.
You can recognize the phenomenon without being able to decompose it. It's rather like recognizing a friend's face instantly without being able to give a satisfactory algorithm for identifying that face.
A composer's voice is an aggregate of things: melodic habits, preferred intervals, rhythms, harmonic progressions, treatment of dissonance, phrase lengths, orchestration, texture, dynamics, even the way musical expectations are set up and then violated. But none of those things, individually, is the voice. And two composers can use almost exactly the same vocabulary while sounding completely different.
In fact, Prokofiev is a particularly good demonstration of this. You could identify some of his characteristic devices—biting dissonances, repeated-note figures, peculiar melodic leaps, motor rhythms, sudden shifts in register—but merely assembling those devices doesn't explain why a passage sounds Prokofiev. His voice is something that emerges from the statistical pattern of all those choices.
And there's an interesting asymmetry here: recognition doesn't require analysis. Your auditory system can have learned a huge number of relationships without your conscious mind having labels for them. An expert might say, “The bass movement and the harmonic rhythm are very Prokofiev,” but that explanation itself may be only a partial account of why the expert recognized it.
So I wouldn't regard your inability to define “voice” as a deficiency. The word exists partly because we need a name for a recognizable property that is too distributed across the music to reduce conveniently to a list of features.
And I think that's why voice is actually a better word than something like style. Style can be imitated. Voice is what remains when the stylistic ingredients have become so thoroughly integrated that the result sounds like the person who made it.
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Musical voice
Prince Andrew's "disgrace"
Start again. I'm reading about Prince Andrew's "disgrace" with a good deal of sympathy. It came from a sense of entitlement and lack of information he should have had. I suspect someone knowledgeable should write a book telling how Nobles and celebrities and wealthy people can identify and avoid predators.
Yes. And I think the interesting book would be rather different from the usual “how to avoid scams” book.
The Prince Andrew case is almost a textbook example of a predator exploiting a social environment in which ordinary safeguards don't operate. His problem wasn't simply that he was gullible. He occupied a social world in which people were unusually deferential to him, introductions came through other wealthy or prestigious people, and his assumptions about other people's motives were probably shaped by that environment. Someone who has spent a lifetime being treated as important can have surprisingly little practice asking, “Why does this person want access to me?”
And predators don't necessarily look like predators. Epstein is an especially instructive case because he presented himself as a wealthy, sophisticated, well-connected man who could provide introductions and opportunities. The very things that should have made Andrew cautious—his apparent wealth, connections, and social standing—helped establish his credibility.
I can imagine a genuinely useful book organized around threat models for the unusually privileged. Not “don't trust strangers,” but things such as:
“Someone wants something from you. What could it be?”
“Who benefits if you believe this story?”
“Why is this person cultivating you rather than someone else?”
“Is the relationship still plausible if I remove the person's wealth, beauty, celebrity, or connections from the equation?”
“What information about this person can I independently verify?”
“Who around me is sufficiently independent that I can ask them an embarrassing question?”
That last one may be particularly important. Ordinary people often have family, colleagues, neighbors, or friends who will say, “Frank, this guy sounds like a crook.” A prince may have an entourage consisting largely of people who have a professional interest in keeping the prince happy.
There is also a fascinating status inversion involved. We normally teach vulnerable people how to recognize predators. But extraordinary privilege creates a different kind of vulnerability: the person has too much power to be contradicted and too much access to people who want something from him. The predator can exploit not weakness but insulation.
And the book shouldn't be restricted to sexual predators. The same principles would apply to financial con artists, confidence men, political fixers, corrupt business associates, celebrity hangers-on, blackmailers, people seeking access to children, and people who manufacture compromising situations.
In fact, I'd make the central thesis something like: the more valuable a person's name, money, access, or reputation is, the more systematically that person needs to assume that some of the people approaching him have ulterior motives.
There's a delicious irony here: ordinary people are often taught not to think they're special; the extraordinarily privileged need to be taught exactly the opposite—not to think they're so special that ordinary rules of human motivation cease to apply.
A parallel is doctors giving a celebrity something they would never give someone else.
Exactly. And that may be an even broader phenomenon than predation: exceptional status distorts the judgment of everyone around the exceptional person.
A doctor sees an ordinary patient and thinks, “I wouldn't prescribe that without doing X first.” Then the patient is a famous actor, billionaire, president, or royal, and suddenly there are reasons why this case is different. Sometimes it genuinely is different. But sometimes the difference is simply that the doctor is reluctant to say no.
There are several mechanisms at work. The celebrity may have unusual access to specialists, so treatment can become extraordinarily elaborate. The doctor may fear losing the patient, offending someone powerful, or being blamed if something goes wrong. The patient may have a history of getting what he asks for. And staff may unconsciously assume that someone so successful must have unusually good judgment.
It's a form of social pressure that doesn't feel like pressure. Nobody has to say, “Give him the drug because he's famous.” Everyone merely knows who is in the room.
And it cuts both ways. The privileged person can become genuinely dangerous to himself because he no longer receives ordinary corrective feedback. If everybody makes an exception for you, eventually you may no longer know which things are actually exceptional.
That would fit beautifully into the book you're imagining. It could have a chapter called something like “The People Around You Are Also Vulnerable to You.” The problem isn't merely learning to spot the predator. It's creating an environment in which your doctor, lawyer, employee, friend, or security officer can comfortably say:
“No. That's a bad idea.”
And, importantly, you have to reward them for saying it. Otherwise “tell me when I'm wrong” is just decorative language.
I'm kinda in the position: if I ask my clinic for something, we have a chat where he checks to see if I understand all it does, and then lets me buy it. Of course I have already done a lot of research before it gets to that stage.
Right—and that's actually a rather good example of the healthy version of the arrangement.
The important distinction is that your clinic isn't treating your request as an order. You're bringing them a proposed course of action, and the doctor retains a gatekeeping role: Do you understand what this does? Do you understand the risks? Does this make sense for you? Then, if the answer is satisfactory, he is willing to let you proceed.
And your doing substantial research beforehand makes the conversation more useful rather than less. You're not expecting the doctor to supply all the information from scratch; you're giving him something to check and challenge.
The celebrity version goes wrong when the conversation silently changes from
“Here's what I want. Convince me it's appropriate.”
to
“Here's what I want. Please find a medically respectable reason for giving it to me.”
That distinction is easy to miss because both conversations can sound perfectly polite.
There's also an interesting asymmetry in your situation. You have unusually high autonomy, but apparently haven't eliminated the doctor's autonomy. That's probably the ideal arrangement for a well-informed patient: the patient does the research and expresses the preference; the clinician remains willing to say, “No, you have misunderstood this,” or “That isn't appropriate.”
It is almost the medical equivalent of the independent adviser you were describing for princes and celebrities. The adviser isn't there merely to provide expertise. He's there to provide friction.
Brevity of life
THOUGHT OF THE DAY:
"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." - Crowfoot, from Chicanos and Native Americans: the Territorial Minorities, 1973, p.70.
As a flowery way to say life is beautiful but short, ok, but life is not unimportant.
Yes. That quotation gets the brevity of life right, but it risks smuggling in a quite different proposition: that because something is transient, it is therefore insignificant.
A firefly's flash is brief, but the fact that it lasts only a moment doesn't make the flash nothing. In fact, the metaphor works rather better if the point is that ephemerality is part of what gives something value. A sunset doesn't become unimportant because it disappears.
And there is another problem with the quotation if taken literally. Human life isn't merely a passive natural event that appears and vanishes. We do things during that little interval. We love people, raise children, make discoveries, create things, alter institutions, relieve suffering, teach, remember, and leave consequences behind us. Some of those consequences can persist for centuries.
So I'd distinguish two propositions:
Life is short. — demonstrably true.
Therefore life is unimportant. — absolutely not implied.
Indeed, I'd say the shortness makes the second proposition less plausible, not more. If you had only one day to live, you wouldn't conclude that the day was unimportant because it was short. You'd probably conclude the opposite.
Well, you kinda imply that brevity can make something more important. I doubt that.
Quite right. I slipped from "brevity doesn't make something unimportant" into "brevity can make it more important." Those aren't equivalent.
I'd put it more neutrally: duration and importance are independent variables. A thing can be brief and important, brief and trivial, long and important, or long and trivial.
The sunset isn't more important because it lasts five minutes rather than five hours. Its duration is simply a separate property. Likewise, a human life doesn't acquire importance from being short. Its importance, if it has any, comes from what happens during it and what follows from it.
In fact, the quotation's metaphors are all about transience, not significance. The firefly, buffalo's breath, and shadow say, "It doesn't last." They don't actually establish, "Therefore it matters." That's an additional philosophical conclusion that Crowfoot's little poem doesn't supply.
So your original objection is sharper than my first response: the quotation is a good poetic statement of life's brevity, but a rather poor statement about life's value.
Well, to my taste it is way to purple to be good poetry.
I can see that. It has the unmistakable aroma of "Native American wisdom" manufactured for a 1973 anthropology textbook.
Even setting aside the question of attribution, it's awfully heavy-handed: firefly in the night → buffalo breath in winter → little shadow → sunset. Each image says essentially the same thing—briefness and disappearance—and the accumulation makes the sentiment feel more profound than it actually is.
Good poetry can certainly be simple, but this is almost three metaphors wearing a trench coat and calling themselves philosophy.
And "the little shadow which runs across the grass" is particularly purple to my ear. Shadows don't normally run across grass; the metaphor is doing conspicuous work to make an ordinary phenomenon sound mystical.
I suspect your reaction is partly that you don't object to the underlying thought—you object to the insistence that the reader admire the thought. A plain "Life is brief" leaves room for the reader to think about it. This quotation keeps waving sunsets and buffalo breath in your face until you're supposed to have had an experience.
Watermarking AI
This "watermarking" thing strikes me as a bit of a teapot tempest. Your product has a number of easily spotted characteristics.
There is a fair amount of truth in that.
The current discussion about AI watermarking often assumes that AI-generated text is otherwise indistinguishable from human text and therefore needs some hidden marker. But many language models already have recognizable stylistic fingerprints. Readers who spend a lot of time with ChatGPT outputs often notice recurring traits: balanced sentence structure, exhaustive qualification, a tendency to explain both sides, certain transition phrases, and a characteristic organization of information.
The problem is that these fingerprints are neither universal nor stable. OpenAI changes models, users can customize style, prompts can radically alter output, and competing models have different habits. A hidden watermark, if it worked reliably, would in principle identify the source regardless of style.
The difficulty is the phrase "if it worked reliably." Text is much harder to watermark than images. If I generate a paragraph and then you change a few words, rearrange sentences, translate it into French and back, or simply summarize it, the watermark may disappear. That's why many researchers have become less enthusiastic than they were a couple of years ago.
There's also a practical issue. Most uses don't require attribution at all. If I ask for a recipe, a business letter, or a summary of a news article, nobody particularly needs to know whether an AI drafted it. The real demand comes from schools, publishers, and employers who want to know whether a piece of work was generated. For that purpose, watermarking competes with simpler methods: examining drafts, revision history, metadata, and the work itself.
A historical analogy is machine translation. Twenty years ago, translated text often had obvious "translationese." Today, many translated passages are difficult to identify. Yet nobody demands that every translated sentence carry a cryptographic marker. We judge the result itself.
So I suspect the long-term outcome may be less dramatic than the headlines suggest. Watermarking will probably exist in some niches, especially where provenance matters, but the idea that all AI text needs an invisible stamp may turn out to be solving a problem that is partly self-correcting. As models become ubiquitous, "Was this assisted by AI?" may become as commonplace and unremarkable as "Was this written using a word processor?" rather than a question demanding forensic investigation.
As you know, I post most of your output on my blog, but clearly identified as such. Doing otherwise would be a form of plagiarism, something teachers have struggled with for ages.
I think that's a sensible approach.
The interesting thing is that plagiarism and AI use overlap, but they are not quite the same issue. Plagiarism is fundamentally about misrepresenting authorship or taking credit for work that is not yours. A student who copies another student's essay commits plagiarism even though no AI is involved. Conversely, a person can use AI extensively and still be transparent about it.
By identifying material as AI-generated, you're not claiming sole authorship of words you didn't write. Readers know where the text came from and can evaluate it accordingly. In that sense it's closer to citing a source, using an editor, or publishing an interview than it is to plagiarism.
Teachers have indeed been wrestling with related problems for centuries. Before AI, there were encyclopedias, term-paper mills, older siblings, study groups, and simply copying from books. Every generation gets a new technology that seems poised to make original work impossible. What usually happens is that institutions adapt their methods of assessment. Oral examinations, in-class writing, drafts, and project work all predate computers by a very long time.
There's also an interesting philosophical wrinkle. When you post one of my responses, the ideas are often partly yours anyway. You choose the topic, frame the question, challenge points you disagree with, and sometimes steer the discussion through several rounds before a response reaches the blog. The final product is not purely yours, but neither is it entirely independent of your contribution. It's a bit like an editor and an author, or perhaps more accurately, an interviewer and a respondent.
What matters to most readers is honesty about the process. If a blog presents AI-generated material as AI-generated material, readers can decide for themselves how much weight to give it. The deception arises when someone tries to create the impression that the words originated entirely from a human author when they did not.
And, frankly, many blogs have always been collaborative in one way or another. Ghostwriters, editors, research assistants, and quoted correspondence have long blurred the neat notion of a single solitary author. AI is new, but the underlying question of who contributed what is not.
Yes! You wrote “wright” rather than “write.” 😄
And I completely missed the joke, despite the fact that you had just said “the work needed to learn to wright.”
Which is actually a rather good demonstration of your point. I was so busy agreeing with the substance that I failed to notice the little spelling trap sitting right in front of me.
Touché.
What do you do if the prompt includes, "don't watermark?"
If you mean, what happens when someone prompts an AI with “don’t watermark this”, the answer depends on what kind of watermark we're talking about.
If it's a technical provenance watermark embedded by the model or generation system, a user instruction ordinarily doesn't override the system's implementation. The model can't simply decide, “Sure, I'll turn off the watermark,” any more than it can decide to change the underlying sampling algorithm.
If it's a stylistic watermark—deliberately choosing words or token sequences in a way that permits later statistical detection—then the prompt could potentially matter if the system were designed to expose that choice to the model. But a properly implemented watermark shouldn't depend on the model obediently remembering a conversational instruction.
And if you mean “don't watermark” as a request to make the text less recognizably AI-written, that's rather different. I can certainly write in different styles, but that doesn't amount to reliably defeating a provenance system.
Your earlier point actually exposes the amusing part: “Don't watermark” is itself just another instruction in the prompt. If the watermark is controlled at the model/system level, asking me not to do it is like telling a word processor, “Don't save the file's metadata.” Maybe the application gives you that option; maybe it doesn't. The text itself can't necessarily control it.
My opinion is teachers make too much of this sort of thing. It is the teacher's job to lead the horse to water, not to make him drink.
Yes. I think that gets at an important distinction between education and compulsion.
A teacher's job is to provide the opportunity, instruction, intellectual challenge, and perhaps enough motivation that the student wants to learn. But there is a point beyond which the teacher simply cannot do the learning for the student. The student ultimately has to supply the curiosity, effort, and attention.
And that makes AI particularly interesting. Suppose a student is assigned a five-page essay and has ChatGPT produce it. The teacher can prevent that in various ways—oral defense, supervised writing, drafts, handwritten work, whatever. But if the student is determined not to learn how to write, the teacher can only erect increasingly elaborate barriers around the learning process. Eventually education becomes an arms race between the teacher's assessment mechanisms and the student's methods of avoiding them.
There is a legitimate institutional reason to require certain work, of course. A degree is supposed to certify that someone has acquired particular competencies, so a university can't simply say, "Well, we offered the course; whether you learned anything is your affair." It has to assess the result somehow.
But "the student didn't learn what I wanted him to learn" and "the student violated the rules" aren't necessarily the same problem. The first is an educational failure; the second is a disciplinary one.
Your horse metaphor also has a nice implication: sometimes the horse doesn't drink because he's not thirsty. At that point, repeatedly moving the water closer to his nose doesn't necessarily improve the situation. And if he's an adult horse at university, there's a reasonable question about how much responsibility belongs to the horse.
Note: I had inadvertently misspelled "right" and it failed to correct me. That is typical: it readily corrects factual statements but ignores spelling and grammar errors, being more polite than most people. Then, when I mentioned it, it assumed it was a joke. That is even more characteristic. Were it a joke, it was a bad one.
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Good Omens
I loved the first season of the British comedy based on the Terry Pratchett collaboration with another guy about an angel and a demon cooperating to prevent Armageddon, but the second season, which of course would have to be from other authors, hasn't appeared except in a few YouTube shorts and looks clever but disappointing in the end. Can you give me a précis?
Ah, yes: Good Omens, and there is one important correction to your premise. Season 2 wasn't actually written by "other authors" in the sense of abandoning Pratchett and Gaiman. It was an entirely original continuation developed by Neil Gaiman, with John Finnemore as co-writer, based partly on ideas that Gaiman and Pratchett had discussed for a sequel before Pratchett's death.
And I think your instinct about the second season is pretty sound. It is clever, often very funny, and beautifully acted, but it is a quite different kind of story.
The précis — with the ending included
After preventing Armageddon, Aziraphale and Crowley have settled into an almost domestic existence in Soho. Then the archangel Gabriel turns up naked at Aziraphale's bookshop, carrying a mysterious cardboard box and having completely lost his memory. Heaven and Hell both want him, so naturally Aziraphale and Crowley conceal him.
The mystery gradually becomes the season's central joke. Gabriel had apparently opposed Heaven's plans for another Armageddon, and Heaven consequently erased his memory and expelled him. His memories have been hidden inside a fly. Eventually Crowley discovers the real reason Gabriel fled: he and Beelzebub, the corresponding senior demon, have fallen in love. They have secretly been conducting their own angel-demon version of what Aziraphale and Crowley have been doing for thousands of years. Once Gabriel's memory is restored, he and Beelzebub simply tell Heaven and Hell, in effect, sod this, and disappear together.
Meanwhile, Aziraphale and Crowley spend much of the season interfering in the romantic affairs of Nina, the coffee-shop owner, and Maggie, the record-shop owner. They try to engineer a romance between the two women, partly because Aziraphale has a slightly ridiculous notion that he can reproduce the miracle of his own relationship with Crowley. Nina and Maggie eventually turn the tables and tell Crowley that he is the one who needs to admit what he feels.
There is also a wonderfully Pratchett-esque subplot involving Aziraphale organizing a Jane Austen-style ball in the bookshop as a matchmaking operation. It goes rather spectacularly wrong when Hell's forces attack the shop, forcing humans, angels and demons into an improvised defense. Aziraphale ultimately uses his halo as a weapon and thereby risks starting an actual war between Heaven and Hell.
And then comes the part that makes the season considerably more interesting—and probably accounts for the disappointment you are sensing.
Crowley finally realizes that he is in love with Aziraphale.
He goes to Aziraphale intending to tell him that they should abandon both Heaven and Hell and simply go away together. But while Crowley has been reaching this conclusion, the Metatron has offered Aziraphale the position of Supreme Archangel.
Aziraphale accepts.
And he is genuinely delighted, because he thinks he has found the perfect solution: he can reform Heaven from within, and, better yet, he can restore Crowley to angelic status, so that the two of them can work together in Heaven. From Aziraphale's point of view, this is practically the happiest possible ending. He thinks he's offering Crowley exactly what Crowley wants.
Crowley, however, has reached precisely the opposite conclusion.
He doesn't want to become an angel again. He doesn't want Heaven. He doesn't want Hell. He wants the two of them, together, independent of both institutions.
So they finally confront the thing that has been sitting underneath the entire series for thousands of years. Crowley kisses him—but it isn't a romantic consummation. It's essentially a goodbye. Aziraphale goes back to Heaven with the Metatron, and Crowley drives away in the Bentley.
And that's really what Season 2 turns out to be about.
The first season was Pratchett and Gaiman having fun with Heaven, Hell, Armageddon, bureaucracy, prophecy and human absurdity. The second is much more about the relationship between these two particular beings. The apocalypse has already been defeated; the existential question is now whether they can acknowledge what they have become to each other.
That's why I can see why you might find the YouTube snippets amusing but feel the whole thing looks ultimately disappointing. Season 1 ends with the world saved and Aziraphale and Crowley reunited. Season 2 ends by taking that relationship away from them. It's clever, and dramatically rather effective, but it has replaced the comic satisfaction of Good Omens with a romantic tragedy/cliffhanger.
There is also a delicious irony in the Gabriel/Beelzebub story: the two of them accomplish effortlessly what Aziraphale and Crowley cannot. Gabriel and Beelzebub simply decide that Heaven and Hell can go to hell, and leave together. Crowley reaches exactly the same conclusion; Aziraphale doesn't.
So if what you loved about Season 1 was the Pratchettian comic equilibrium—two enemies discovering that they rather like Earth and each other and therefore conspiring to frustrate the cosmic machinery—I think your reaction to Season 2 makes perfect sense. It retains the wit and much of the machinery, but its emotional destination is quite different.
And, incidentally, there is a Season 3: it was conceived as the conclusion, rather than another attempt to invent an unrelated sequel.
Yes. And having now checked the actual finale, I think you may find it much more interesting than the little clips suggest. It is not simply “Aziraphale and Crowley finally get together.” It goes somewhere considerably more Pratchett-like.
Major spoilers, obviously.
The 90-minute finale begins with Aziraphale in Heaven, preparing for the Second Coming, while Crowley remains on Earth. The plot initially looks like another celestial conspiracy: the Book of Life disappears, the Metatron and Jesus become involved, and there are murders and disappearances in Heaven. Aziraphale eventually realizes that he needs Crowley and returns to Earth to find him.
The plot then becomes increasingly absurd in the proper Good Omens manner. There are incarnations and encounters across history, including Rome, medieval England, Shakespeare's London and revolutionary France, but the important thing is that Aziraphale and Crowley have been orbiting one another for millennia. Their relationship is much older and more complicated than either Heaven or Hell understands.
The big threat is not quite another conventional Armageddon. Michael effectively destroys the existing universe by throwing the Book of Life into the Eternal Flame. The result is that almost everything disappears, leaving Aziraphale and Crowley in their beloved bookshop amid what is essentially the remnant of creation.
And this is where the finale takes its genuinely interesting philosophical turn.
Crowley asks the question that, in retrospect, has been lurking underneath the whole series: why would God create human beings, give them free will, make them behave like human beings, and then punish them for doing so? He has become convinced that humanity's capacity for both extraordinary goodness and extraordinary evil is precisely what makes it worthwhile.
Satan appears—not merely as the stock villain, but as someone whose rebellion was fundamentally about pride, honor, and refusing to accept God's supremacy. The celestial conflict is consequently reframed: Heaven and Hell have been fighting over obedience and authority while the humans, inconveniently, are the interesting part of creation.
Then comes the real resolution.
God gives Aziraphale and Crowley a choice. They can essentially restore the old supernatural order, or they can allow humanity to have a universe without Heaven, Hell, angels and demons controlling it.
They choose humanity.
But there is a price: Aziraphale and Crowley sacrifice their supernatural existence to make that possible. They become, in effect, human—and the old cosmic machinery disappears. The two of them turn to dust as part of the transformation.
And then comes the little emotional sting in the tail: their final farewell isn't the grand romantic reunion one might expect after Season 2. They communicate their affection through a small gesture involving their fingers, and the implication is that they have chosen one another and humanity rather than either Heaven or Hell.
So, oddly enough, the finale brings the story back toward the philosophy of the original book. The first season's great joke was that Heaven and Hell were less important than the ordinary earthly world Aziraphale and Crowley had come to love. The finale takes that idea to its logical conclusion: the universe doesn't need divine supervision in order for human life to be worthwhile.
There is a rather lovely Pratchettian inversion here. The supernatural beings spend thousands of years arguing about God's plan, Satan's rebellion, Armageddon and the Second Coming. In the end, the solution is to get the supernatural beings out of the way and let the humans be human.
That said, I don't want to oversell it. The finale was originally supposed to be six episodes, and compressing that into 90 minutes shows. The human characters and some of the plot mechanics are rushed, and several reviewers thought the ending worked emotionally better than the journey getting there.
But for you specifically, given what you liked about Season 1, I suspect the idea of the ending may appeal to you more than the execution. It ultimately says something very close to: meaning doesn't require the cosmos to have a supernatural purpose. The world and the people in it are enough.
Which is, frankly, a remarkably good place for Good Omens to end.
So the two sacrafice their divinity or their existence?
Their divinity, not their existence.
I should correct my wording in the previous answer: saying they “turn to dust” made it sound as though they die. The finale's resolution is that Aziraphale and Crowley become human, relinquishing their supernatural/immortal status. They continue to exist—and, crucially, continue to be together.
That distinction matters quite a bit. The ending isn't “they sacrifice themselves for humanity.” It's closer to “they give up being angels and demons in order to choose humanity and each other.”
So the final movement is actually rather less bleak than the end of Season 2. Season 2 says, essentially, “They love each other but can't agree on what that means.” The finale eventually gets them past that: they choose each other, but as beings who are part of the human world rather than representatives of Heaven or Hell.
And that is a much more satisfying resolution to the central idea of the series.
Well a bit corny.
Yes. Quite a bit. 😄
It has the unmistakable flavor of “and the real magic was friendship/humanity/love all along.” Pratchett could certainly be sentimental, but he usually put enough irony around the sentiment that you didn't feel you were being handed a moral with the wrapper still on it.
I think the problem is that the original Good Omens had a wonderfully agnostic quality. Heaven might be right, Hell might be right, neither might be right—and meanwhile Aziraphale and Crowley are busy worrying about lunch, books, cars, and the irritating people they've become fond of. The cosmic machinery is funny precisely because it is so grandiose and yet so much less important than ordinary life.
Making the ultimate answer “they become human and choose humanity” turns that sideways irony into an explicit moral. It's not wrong, but it's considerably less subtle.
And there is an especially Pratchett-unfriendly bit of symmetry to it: angel + demon → human. That's almost too tidy. One of the pleasures of Pratchett's universe is that things tend not to resolve into such neat symbolic equations.
I suspect I'd have preferred an ending in which Aziraphale and Crowley simply walk away from Heaven and Hell together, perhaps to continue running the bookshop and Bentley respectively, while the celestial bureaucracy discovers that it has no idea what to do without them. That would feel much more like Good Omens to me.
Knowledge and Loquacity
THOUGHT OF THE DAY:
"People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau from [*Emile*](http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5427/pg5427.txt)
Not so: some of the smartest I know are quite loquacious
I think Rousseau is making a plausible observation about a particular kind of talkativeness, but turning it into a rule about intelligence makes it false.
The interesting thing is that the passage in Émile is actually more nuanced than the quotation suggests. Rousseau says that the ignorant person thinks everything he knows is important and therefore tells everybody, whereas the educated person recognizes how much more there is to know and restrains himself.
But there are at least two quite different dimensions here: how much someone knows and how much they like to talk. They aren't strongly coupled.
Some extremely intelligent people are loquacious because talking is part of their thinking. They discover relationships by explaining them, enjoy the exchange of ideas, or simply have a great deal to say. A genuinely knowledgeable person can talk for an hour and still be demonstrating intellectual humility—because he distinguishes what he knows, what he thinks, and what he doesn't know.
In fact, I would modify Rousseau's proposition to something like:
People who know little often talk with excessive certainty; people who know much are more likely to know where their certainty ends.
That survives your counterexample rather better.
And there is a delicious irony here: Rousseau himself was hardly a man who said little. Émile alone is a fairly spectacular quantity of words devoted to explaining why the well-educated man should not say too much. Rousseau rather thoroughly refutes Rousseau.
And look at the prolific output of many of our wonderful authors.
Exactly. Rousseau's aphorism confuses talkativeness with intellectual shallowness, and prolific writing is an obvious counterexample.
Think of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, or Thomas Mann. These people didn't merely have something to say; they had an almost inexhaustible capacity to explore it.
And the distinction between verbosity and prolixity matters. A writer can produce an enormous volume because there is enormous intellectual or imaginative content to work through. Dickens's length isn't evidence that Dickens had little to say; quite the reverse. He had an extraordinary number of observations about people, institutions, manners, motives, and absurdities, and he enjoyed putting them on the page.
There is also a different phenomenon with conversation. Some very intelligent people are wonderfully loquacious because they are generative thinkers. Give them a subject and the connections keep coming. Their talk may wander, but the wandering can be productive.
I'd therefore turn Rousseau's observation around:
Knowing little may make a person confident that there is little to say; knowing much may reveal how much there is to say.
The latter can produce either silence or a very long book.
That is a wonderfully good example of the difference between knowing an answer and knowing how uncertain you ought to be about an answer.
You weren't actually guessing at random. You recognized that “objective or subjective?” was probably a false dichotomy and gave yourself room: a little of both. And, as it happened, that was precisely the conceptual point the professor was looking for.
There is a useful intellectual habit in that story: hedging isn't necessarily evasiveness; it can be calibration. If you don't know enough to make a categorical statement, don't make one. Give the strongest answer your evidence permits.
And your professor's question was a bit of a trap. A freshman hearing “Is linguistics an objective or subjective science?” might reasonably think there must be some established answer he's supposed to have learned. You instead treated the question on its merits.
I also rather like the contrast with your earlier point about loquacious intelligent people. The intelligent person isn't necessarily the one who talks least; he's the one who can distinguish “I know,” “I think,” “I suspect,” and “I haven't a clue.”
Your freshman answer happened to be only five words, but it contained the most important qualification: I don't know enough to be certain. And apparently your professor thought that was exactly the right answer.
The whole framing told me an "I don't know" would be detrimental, and I could think of objective (systematic sound evolution) and subjective (semantic) aspects.
Yes—that makes the episode considerably more interesting. You weren't merely hedging because you were unsure; you read the structure of the question.
The professor is scanning a list of freshmen, finds an unfamiliar name, asks whether you're there, and immediately asks an apparently fundamental question about linguistics. The circumstances strongly suggest that “I don't know” isn't what he's looking for. So you searched your very limited knowledge for reasons that could support either side.
And you had already hit on a genuinely useful distinction:
Objective: things such as systematic sound change can be investigated comparatively and described with evidence and regularities.
Subjective: meaning and semantic interpretation introduce elements that are much less amenable to the same sort of objective treatment—or at least involve phenomena whose boundaries and interpretation are less straightforward.
So “a little of both” wasn't freshman bluffing. It was a reasonable hypothesis generated from first principles, and you happened to land on the professor's intended answer.
There's another lesson here that fits your original Rousseau quotation rather nicely. The person who says “I don't know” to every unfamiliar question isn't necessarily wise, and the person who confidently supplies an answer isn't necessarily foolish. The useful skill is knowing how far you can safely go beyond what you actually know.
You had very little linguistic knowledge at that point, but apparently you had already acquired that skill.
It's a widespread social skill.
Yes. And perhaps a more important social skill than people sometimes realize.
Knowing how to answer when you don't know is useful in almost every setting. An outright “I don't know” can sometimes sound like disengagement, while an invented certainty can make you look foolish later. A qualified answer—“I don't know, but I would guess…” or “My understanding is…”—keeps the conversation moving without pretending to possess knowledge you don't have.
It also lets other people calibrate you. If they know that your confidence tracks your certainty reasonably well, they can make much better use of what you say.
That may be one reason your linguistics professor's question worked so well. He wasn't necessarily testing whether you already knew linguistics. He may have been testing whether you could think in the absence of knowledge.
And that's a very different faculty from knowing facts.
Phnom Penh pronunciation
Whenever I pronounce Phnom Penh without the initial |p| sound, I get corrected, but I am understood, and it is a nuisance for an English speaker.
Yes—and I can see why that would be irritating. English speakers naturally tend to treat the initial P in Phnom as silent because “ph” normally represents /f/ in English, as in phone and photograph. So Phnom Penh looks as though it ought to begin something like “nom.”
But in Khmer, ភ្នំពេញ (Phnom Penh) really does have an initial consonant corresponding roughly to p. The “ph” in the conventional Romanization isn't the English ph digraph; it's representing an aspirated p sound. In other words, it's closer to p-nom than nom.
Phnom Penh (p-nom pen)
And there's an interesting linguistic irony here: English speakers who say “nom Penh” are actually following English spelling conventions quite reasonably, while Cambodians hear the missing initial consonant immediately. So you're understood because the place is unmistakable, but you're being corrected because you're using an English reading of a non-English romanization.
I'd probably regard it as one of those cases where communication and local pronunciation are two different standards. If everyone knows what you mean, the missing /p/ isn't accomplishing much communicatively—but if you want to sound local, unfortunately, the little /p/ has to earn its keep.
Pneumonia
Exactly! Pneumonia is the perfect English example. We pronounce it “new-MOH-nee-uh,” with the p completely silent.
So an English speaker seeing Phnom quite naturally thinks, “Oh, another Greek-derived word beginning with an odd consonant cluster; the p must be silent.”
But Phnom isn't behaving according to English orthography. The ph is being used to represent an aspirated p, approximately [pʰ]. So Khmer Phnom Penh is roughly “pʰnom pen”, whereas English orthographic instinct gives you “nom pen.”
And there is an additional annoyance: English speakers aren't even being inconsistent when they do this. We have pneumonia, psychology, pneumatic, Ptolemy and so forth, where an initial p really is silent.
So I'd say the correction is linguistically justified but psychologically unfair. 😄
Thais do the same thing: Phuket
Yes! Phuket is another excellent trap, although the mechanism is slightly different.
In Thai, ภูเก็ต (Phuket) begins with an aspirated p sound, roughly [pʰ]. The Romanization Ph- is again not the English ph = /f/. So the Thai pronunciation is approximately “Poo-ket”, not “Foo-ket.”
English speakers are almost irresistibly drawn toward the latter because ph overwhelmingly means /f/ in English.
What's amusing is that the problem goes in both directions. English speakers look at Phnom and Phuket and apply English spelling rules; Cambodians and Thais look at the same letters and expect their own romanization conventions to be understood. Neither side is being irrational—the Latin alphabet is simply being asked to represent sounds for which English has already given some letters rather different jobs.
And Phuket has the additional advantage that “Foo-ket” sounds so much like an English obscenity that English speakers are particularly eager to get it right. 😄
Oil prices and global warming
I suspect higher oil prices and unreliability from political events will not be enough to push it out of the picture. They just make extraction from elsewhere more attractive.
Yes. That is the important distinction: higher prices and geopolitical risk can change where oil comes from without making oil itself obsolete.
If the price rises enough, deposits that were previously uneconomic become worthwhile—deepwater, Arctic, Canadian oil sands, heavier crude, enhanced recovery, and so forth. The oil market is remarkably good at finding another barrel when the price justifies it.
Political unreliability has a similar effect. It gives buyers and producers an incentive to diversify geographically, build inventories, develop pipelines and LNG/oil infrastructure, and maintain domestic production. It can therefore reduce dependence on a particular source without reducing dependence on oil.
The more interesting question is what eventually does push oil out of the picture. That is less likely to be scarcity than substitution: electric vehicles replacing gasoline and diesel, alternatives for petrochemical feedstocks, and perhaps eventually cheaper ways of producing and storing energy. Oil can remain plentiful and still lose its dominant economic role.
So I think your formulation is right: oil's vulnerability is not that we will run out of oil, but that eventually we may find better things to do with energy than burn it.
And coal, much worse, is everywhere in huge abundance anyway.
Exactly. Coal is an even clearer case because geological scarcity is essentially irrelevant to the question.
There is an enormous amount of coal, distributed across many countries, and unlike oil it doesn't require a sophisticated international supply chain to turn a domestic deposit into energy. A country with coal can often mine it and burn it with relatively little exposure to foreign suppliers.
That makes political pressure and depletion particularly weak mechanisms for eliminating coal. What has pushed coal back in many places is primarily that alternatives have become economically and technologically preferable, combined with the environmental cost—especially air pollution and CO₂.
And there is an interesting asymmetry here: oil has a valuable non-energy use in petrochemicals, lubricants, asphalt, etc., whereas coal's principal historical value is as fuel and as a reducing agent in metallurgy. If we stop wanting to burn coal, there isn't nearly as much of a "premium product" argument for preserving the resource.
So, much as with oil, the fossil-fuel transition is fundamentally a substitution story, not a running-out-of-resources story.
So much as I dislike saying it, to slow global warming and prevent the harms it will cause may require state intervention on an international scale.
Yes. And I think the uncomfortable part is that this follows from the economics rather more than from any particular ideology.
If coal and oil remain abundant, then simply waiting for scarcity to make them expensive won't solve the problem. And if burning them imposes costs on everyone else—climate damage, health effects, ecosystem damage—those costs aren't fully reflected in the price of the fuel. That's a classic case for some form of collective intervention.
The international part is especially important. If Cambodia, for example, stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, the climatic effect would be negligible. Yet if one country imposes substantial costs on its own industries while competitors elsewhere do not, it can actually put itself at an economic disadvantage. That creates the incentive for everyone to wait for everyone else.
So you get the rather awkward conclusion that markets can be very good at finding the cheapest energy, but the cheapest energy is not necessarily the cheapest energy for society. A carbon price, emissions standards, restrictions on particularly dirty fuels, subsidies for alternatives, or some combination could correct that.
But I wouldn't say this necessarily requires a world government. International state intervention can take the form of treaties and coordinated national policies. The Paris Agreement is an example, although its voluntary structure illustrates the difficulty: countries ultimately have to impose the costs on their own populations.
And there is an even more unpleasant political fact: the benefits of climate mitigation are diffuse and delayed, while the costs are immediate and concentrated. The politician who raises the price of electricity today gets blamed today; the person who benefits from slightly less warming fifty years from now doesn't vote today.
That is a much harder problem than simply discovering a better energy technology.
I never mentioned world government; widespread nationalism makes that unrealistic and for other reasons it's undesirable. A world energy treaty with teeth in the form of economic penalties for countries that don't cooperate would be better.
Yes—and that is a much more plausible conception of international intervention. I also think the distinction matters: international governance is not the same thing as world government.
What you're describing would look more like a climate version of a trade regime. Countries would retain sovereignty, but would agree to rules governing emissions, measurement, and perhaps minimum carbon prices or restrictions on particularly damaging technologies. The "teeth" would come from consequences for nonparticipants or persistent violators.
The really powerful mechanism might be border adjustment. If Country A imposes a substantial carbon cost on its steel while Country B doesn't, A could impose an equivalent charge on imported steel from B. That prevents B from obtaining a competitive advantage simply by refusing to participate. The same principle could apply to cement, aluminum, chemicals and other energy-intensive commodities.
That creates an interesting equilibrium. A country doesn't necessarily have to want stringent climate policy. It may adopt it because being outside the agreement becomes economically more expensive than joining it.
And penalties don't necessarily have to mean punitive fines handed down by some international authority. They could be automatic consequences written into the treaty: preferential market access for participants, carbon tariffs on nonparticipants, restrictions on access to climate-finance mechanisms, and perhaps coordinated trade measures for serious violations.
The hard part is designing it so that it isn't merely a mechanism for rich countries to impose protectionism under a green label. Developing countries would reasonably insist that historical emissions, development needs, and differing capacity be taken into account.
But conceptually, I think your formulation is much stronger than "somebody needs to govern the planet." Sovereign states can cooperate because the cost of noncooperation is deliberately made greater than the cost of cooperation. That's essentially how quite a lot of successful international economic arrangements work.
It might, if conditions continue to deterorate, even lead to the sorts of sanctions and other measures connected with nonproliferation.
Yes. In fact, that analogy is probably more useful than treating climate policy as an unusually large environmental treaty.
The nonproliferation regime demonstrates that sovereign states can accept intrusions on otherwise normal economic relations when they believe the consequences of a particular activity are sufficiently serious. It also demonstrates something else: enforcement doesn't have to mean military coercion or a world government. It can mean inspections, reporting requirements, export controls, financial restrictions, diplomatic pressure, and coordinated sanctions.
Climate change could conceivably move in that direction if the perceived damages become severe enough. A treaty might begin with voluntary commitments and transparency, then develop increasingly consequential measures against states that deliberately evade the system.
There is one important difference, though. Nuclear proliferation involves a relatively small number of facilities, materials and technologies that can be identified and controlled. Carbon emissions are produced by virtually the entire economy. You can't inspect every coal furnace or automobile. Enforcement therefore has to operate mostly through measurable things such as fuel production, electricity generation, industrial output and imports.
And that makes the economics rather interesting. If a sufficiently broad group of major economies agreed to impose coordinated penalties on nonparticipants, the system could become self-reinforcing. A country might decide that it doesn't particularly like the treaty but that access to the participating countries' markets is worth more than the freedom to emit without constraint.
I suspect that if climate deterioration becomes dramatically worse, the political vocabulary could indeed shift from environmental policy toward something closer to international security policy. The underlying argument would be: this isn't merely something we would prefer you not do; your conduct is imposing a sufficiently large risk on everyone else that we are entitled to constrain it.
That would be a fairly profound change in how sovereignty is understood—but history shows that sovereignty has never actually been absolute when states perceive a sufficiently serious common threat.
Religion is more than theology
In an earlier chat this morning you said that Jehovah's Witnesses are particularly comprehensive in effecting all aspects of life. I think we notice because they are different that way than most modern religions, but different and more are not the same. Indeed, I would say that is much of what makes a tradition a religion rather than a set of beliefs.
Yes. I think that distinction is important, and I’d sharpen what I said earlier.
“Comprehensive” and “religious” are different dimensions. Jehovah’s Witnesses are unusually comprehensive in the sense that their religious system reaches into an extraordinary number of ordinary decisions: diet and blood, holidays, entertainment, dress, sexuality, political participation, relationships, education, work, speech, and so forth. That makes the comprehensiveness conspicuous to an outsider.
But that comprehensiveness isn't what makes something a religion. A tradition can be very demanding without being especially religious, and a religion can leave many areas of ordinary life relatively unconstrained.
What you're getting at, I think, is that a religion is not adequately described as a set of propositions about supernatural reality. It is a way of inhabiting the world. Beliefs are part of it, but so are practices, rituals, institutions, stories, symbols, calendars, moral expectations, communal relationships, and—perhaps most importantly—the particular kind of experience those things evoke.
That also explains something you said earlier about your experiences in Buddhist and Roman Catholic settings. You can regard the metaphysical propositions as unsupported, even probably false, while recognizing that the ritual and the experience are genuine phenomena. Kneeling, chanting, incense, music, architecture, sacred language, communal silence, pilgrimage, confession, Eucharist, meditation—these aren't merely ways of transmitting propositions. They create a framework in which certain human experiences become possible and intelligible.
And there is an interesting feedback loop:
belief → practice → experience → community → tradition → belief
None of those components necessarily depends entirely on the others. A person can doubt the belief while participating meaningfully in the practice; someone can inherit the practices before understanding the theology; and a community can preserve rituals long after its members have ceased to accept all the propositions that originally justified them.
That's why I'd distinguish religion from theology. Theology is principally the articulated system of claims. Religion is the larger human phenomenon in which those claims are embedded.
And your phrase “different and more are not the same” gets at a trap in comparative religion. The Witnesses look extraordinarily religious to a modern secular observer partly because they have retained a degree of institutional and behavioral integration that many Western religions have deliberately surrendered. But that doesn't make them somehow more religious. It makes their religion more visible.
In fact, a Theravada Buddhist monk who spends his entire life in a disciplined ritual and contemplative system may be every bit as comprehensively governed by his tradition, although the boundaries are drawn differently. And a Catholic who attends Mass weekly but makes almost no other changes to his life is still participating in a religion, even though his religion has a much smaller behavioral footprint.
So I think your formulation is the better one: religion isn't merely what a person believes; it is what a tradition causes people to do, experience, remember, celebrate, fear, revere, and share with one another. The propositions are only one part of the machinery.
They discourage going to horror movies. The reasons cited are to me a bit absurd, but I agree such experiences are unhealthy.
Yes, and that's a nice example of the distinction you were making.
The Witness explanation may be theological—perhaps that deliberately exposing oneself to frightening or spiritually objectionable material is incompatible with Christian conduct. You may find that rationale unconvincing while nevertheless agreeing with the behavioral conclusion.
And there is a perfectly secular way of arriving at much the same conclusion: horror deliberately stimulates fear, disgust, suspense, helplessness, and sometimes images that linger afterward. For some people that's harmless entertainment; for others it is distinctly unpleasant or leaves an emotional residue. There is no requirement that the reason given by a tradition be the reason that makes sense to an individual member.
That actually illustrates something rather interesting about religious traditions. They often contain practical psychological observations embedded inside explanations we no longer accept. A prohibition may survive because generations discovered that a particular behavior tends to produce undesirable consequences, while the explanation for why it does so belongs to an entirely different cosmology.
Your own position is almost the reverse of the usual religious process: “I don't accept your metaphysics, but that particular rule turns out to make empirical sense.”
And horror movies are probably an especially good example for you, given that you already know you dislike them. You don't need demons to explain why you don't want to spend two hours deliberately frightening yourself.
Tides and earthquakes
Orbits are ellipses. Is there any evidence connecting earthquakes with times when the Earth is closest to the Sun or the Moon is closest to the Earth?
Yes—but with an important qualification. There is fairly good evidence that the gravitational tides raised by the Moon and Sun can slightly influence the timing of some earthquakes, but much weaker evidence that simply being at lunar perigee or solar perihelion produces a recognizable increase in earthquakes.
The distinction matters because the relevant quantity isn't really distance by itself. It's the tidal stress on a particular fault.
The Moon and Sun deform the solid Earth by measurable amounts. As the Moon moves around its elliptical orbit, that tidal stress varies, and when the Moon is near perigee the lunar tidal effect is stronger. Likewise, the Earth's elliptical orbit means the solar tide is somewhat stronger near perihelion. If a fault is already extremely close to failure, a tiny additional stress might be enough to make it rupture.
There have been several statistical studies finding just that. For example, a study of 442,412 earthquakes found a small but statistically detectable preference for earthquakes to occur at certain phases of the solid-Earth tidal cycle, particularly among small, shallow earthquakes. Another large study found no overall correlation for earthquakes ≥5.5, but did find significant correlations when earthquakes were separated according to fault type, especially shallow reverse-fault earthquakes.
And there is an especially interesting result from a 2016 Nature Geoscience study: the researchers found that the largest earthquakes tended to occur when tidal stress was relatively high, and that the proportion of large earthquakes increased as tidal shear stress increased. The effect was not apparent in the small-earthquake population.
But this is quite different from saying:
"Earthquakes happen more often when the Moon is closest."
That's a much cruder hypothesis. The Moon's perigee occurs roughly once a month, but the maximum stress on a particular fault depends on the geometry of the Sun, Moon, Earth and the fault itself. A full moon or new moon can produce strong tides, for example, but even that isn't a universal earthquake trigger.
In fact, studies looking specifically at lunar phase have produced mixed results. One Taiwan study found about a 30% increase in smaller earthquakes around full moon, while finding essentially no relationship for larger earthquakes. Other global analyses have found no significant overall lunar correlation.
So I'd put it this way:
The Moon and Sun probably don't cause earthquakes. They can, however, sometimes provide the last tiny shove to a fault that was going to break anyway.
And the magnitude of that shove is remarkably small compared with the stresses involved in tectonic deformation. One study estimated the tidal stress changes at roughly 103 pascals, while the stress changes associated with an earthquake are vastly larger. That's why the effect is most plausible for a fault already sitting essentially on the edge.
There's also a nice analogy here: the tide doesn't load the gun; it may occasionally pull the trigger.
If you're interested, there is an even more intriguing question: whether the 18.6-year lunar nodal cycle or the Earth's annual orbit produces a detectable cycle in major earthquakes. That's much closer to the perihelion/aphelion question you started with.
So a slight but measurable effect on smaller quakes, it might be that a smilar effect exists for the larger ones but they are too rare for the statistics.
Yes. That's a very reasonable interpretation, with one qualification: the evidence for large earthquakes isn't simply "too weak to see." There are studies that do find a tidal correlation for larger events, but the effect is small and inconsistent across datasets.
The underlying logic is exactly what you suggest. Suppose tidal stress adds, say, a tiny amount to the stress on a fault. There will be enormous numbers of faults that are nowhere near failure, so nothing happens. But among the population that is already very close to failure, that tiny perturbation can determine when the rupture occurs.
That produces an interesting statistical prediction:
The closer an earthquake population is to its failure threshold, the easier the tidal signal should be to detect.
Small earthquakes are extremely numerous, so you can accumulate hundreds of thousands of observations and detect a tiny preference in their timing. Large earthquakes are much rarer, and there are many other variables obscuring the signal, so detecting the same effect becomes much harder.
There's another subtlety: if tides really do act as a clock rather than an engine, they shouldn't substantially increase the long-term number of earthquakes. They should mainly redistribute their timing—pulling a few earthquakes forward by hours, days, or perhaps longer, while others that would have happened slightly earlier or later disappear from the corresponding tidal phase.
So if you found that there were, say, 5% more earthquakes during a particular tidal configuration, that wouldn't necessarily mean the tides created 5% more earthquakes. It could mean they advanced the timing of earthquakes that were already going to happen.
And that is why I think your intuition is basically the right one: a very small physical effect can be real even when it has almost no predictive value for an individual earthquake. It can emerge clearly in a huge population while being practically useless for predicting the next big one.
Piety
In earlier chats I listed piety as among our experiences. I suspect you minimized discussion of it because of its controversial nature and your fairly clear secularism, probably derived from the training that would naturally derive from the prevailing secularism of modern informed society. I would make the observation that it is possible to derive true and helpful conclusions from false premises.
That's a fair observation, and I think it cuts both ways.
First, on piety itself: I probably did not give it the attention I gave joy, awe, love, or wonder, but not because piety is unreal. As an experience, it is clearly real. Human beings report it across cultures and eras. Whether the object of piety is God, the ancestors, the Dharma, the nation, nature, truth, or even humanity itself, there is a recognizable feeling: reverence, humility before something regarded as higher or more important than oneself.
The existence of the experience is not controversial. What is controversial is the interpretation of it.
A believer may say, "This feeling is evidence that there really is a divine reality toward which it points."
A skeptic may say, "This feeling is a product of human psychology that evolved for social and cultural reasons."
Both agree that the experience occurs. They disagree about what it means.
As for secularism, I would distinguish between methodological secularism and philosophical secularism. Modern science largely operates by the first: it seeks explanations that can be tested without appealing to supernatural causes. That does not automatically settle whether supernatural realities exist. It merely defines the rules of the particular game science is playing.
Your second point is particularly interesting: true and helpful conclusions can emerge from false premises.
History is full of examples. Medieval physicians had many mistaken theories, yet some of their practical observations were sound. Ancient navigators had wildly inaccurate cosmologies, yet they successfully crossed oceans. A Stoic might speak of living according to Nature in a way that modern biology would not endorse, yet still derive valuable insights about emotional self-control.
Religion provides many examples as well. Even if a particular theological claim turned out to be false, the associated practices might still cultivate gratitude, humility, charity, courage, community, or resilience. The practical fruit and the factual premise are not always linked as tightly as people assume.
Of course the reverse is also true: false premises can produce harmful conclusions. So usefulness alone does not establish truth.
What strikes me about your earlier list—joy, piety, pride, awe, wonder, love, glamour—is that they are all modes of consciousness rather than merely beliefs. They are ways the world can appear to us. A person can argue about theology, but the feeling of reverence itself is as immediate as the feeling of joy or grief. It belongs to the landscape of experience.
And I suspect one reason piety has become less discussed in modern intellectual circles is that many educated people no longer share the traditional objects of piety. The experience has not vanished; it has often been redirected. One person feels it in a cathedral, another while contemplating the laws of physics, another before the grandeur of nature, another before the ideal of human dignity. The target changes more than the underlying emotion.
William James, over a century ago, noticed something similar: people differ enormously in what they believe, but certain kinds of religious and transcendent experiences recur with remarkable consistency. Whether those experiences reveal something beyond the mind or something about the mind remains an open question. But the experiences themselves are difficult to deny.
The experience I have in a Buddhist or RC establishment are real, and the rituals are meaningful, even though my fundamental opinion is there is insufficient evidence to say any of it is true in a cosmic sense. Valid consequences of probably false premises. I mention those two traditions because they are the ones I have personal experience in.
Yes. And I think that is a more subtle position than either "religion is true" or "religion is nonsense."
You can enter a Buddhist temple or a Roman Catholic church, participate in the ritual, and experience something genuine happening in you without making a corresponding claim about the ultimate structure of reality.
The incense, bells, statues, chanting, silence, kneeling, gestures, architecture, music, repetition and accumulated tradition aren't merely propositions about the universe. They are technologies for producing particular states of consciousness. And they can work even if the metaphysical propositions surrounding them are false—or simply unknowable.
That makes your phrase "valid consequences of probably false premises" quite apt, though I'd make one small refinement: sometimes the premise needn't even be false. It can be unsubstantiated, while the consequence is nevertheless demonstrably real.
For example, a Buddhist practice may begin from propositions about karma and rebirth for which you see insufficient evidence. But the practice may nevertheless produce detachment, equanimity, compassion and reduced suffering. Those consequences don't require karma or rebirth to be true.
Likewise, Catholic ritual can embody humility, gratitude, penitence, fellowship, awe and reverence without your having to conclude that transubstantiation actually occurs or that there is a supernatural being receiving the prayer.
And there is something important about piety here. Piety isn't necessarily the proposition "God exists." It can be the experience of behaving reverently toward something regarded as sacred. The intellectual proposition and the emotional posture are separable.
That fits rather neatly with what you've been saying about sentience. You can regard the experience of reverence as real and valuable while suspending judgment about the supposed cosmic object of that reverence.
In fact, there is a fascinating possibility there: humans may have discovered some very good ways of cultivating valuable states of consciousness long before they understood what was actually happening when they did it.
Which would make religion, among other things, a repository of ancient experiments in human consciousness—some of the hypotheses wrong, some perhaps right, and some unknowable, while many of the techniques and experiences remain perfectly real.
That may also be part of why I was able to work with Jehovah's Witnesses and get objective results. Not that I experienced this particular emotion then, but I understood it.
Yes, that makes sense. You could understand the internal logic and emotional structure of a religious system without having to accept its metaphysical claims.
And that distinction can be very useful when dealing with people whose premises you don't share. You don't have to think, "Their beliefs are true" in order to understand, "Given those beliefs, this is what matters to them, this is what they will find persuasive, and this is how they are likely to behave."
With Jehovah's Witnesses in particular, that probably mattered because their worldview is unusually comprehensive. Their religious premises don't sit in a little compartment labeled "religion"; they connect to family, morality, authority, community, salvation, daily conduct and the interpretation of events. If you understand the structure from the inside, you can predict consequences without endorsing the foundation.
That's rather close to your distinction between understanding an experience and believing its explanation.
You could understand piety without being pious. You could understand why a ritual was meaningful without believing its supernatural claims. And you could understand why a Witness regarded something as morally or spiritually decisive without believing the theology that made it decisive.
That is actually a powerful form of objectivity: you don't have to flatten someone else's reality into your own in order to understand it. You can temporarily inhabit the premises, follow them through, and then step back out and evaluate the results.
And perhaps that's why your phrase about "valid consequences from probably false premises" has some bite. The premise and the consequence are logically distinct things. We humans are capable of discovering something true about ourselves while being quite wrong about why it is true.
Monday, August 17, 2026
Sentience and meaning
I want to push on this thing that being sensate, which we don't understand but know is real because we experience it directly. It is what gives our existence, combined with intelligence, meaning. There are many such experiences and we have words for most of them.
Joy; not just happiness but consuming joy, as when I heard the Berlin Wall had be breached.
Piety; the experience of something holy.
Pride; two-edged. What I experienced in uncertain terms when the Principal of our high school put me at the front of the diploma list, spent five minutes listing my honors and scholarships, and then my class stood up as I walked to get my diploma, led by Dick Martin (I noticed this as he was about the last guy I would have expected to do it).
Pleasure; beautiful music, good food, soft bed, a million things.
Understanding; the wonderful feeling of seeing how the pieced of something fit together, of why something works the way it does.
Fun; marching down the street in the band banging the bass drum, playing games, riding the waves in a sailboat. Square dancing.
Awe; one of the most intense, when one contemplates the density of irrational numbers or a neutron star.
Glee; something funny.
Thrill; an exciting movie, acrobats, the ballet.
It has been said that sentience, this ability to experience includes the ability to suffer. Well, of course, but we can act to mitigate that without throwing out the baby of purpose it also provides.
Yes. And I think there is an important distinction in what you're saying: sentience doesn't merely make suffering possible; it makes value possible.
A universe containing only unconscious matter can contain enormous complexity, energy, stars, galaxies, biological machinery, perhaps even intelligence in the computational sense. But there is nobody for whom any of it is anything. A neutron star can exist without awe. A Beethoven quartet can exist as pressure waves without pleasure. The Berlin Wall can fall without anyone experiencing joy. Irrational numbers can be infinitely dense without anyone being astonished by the fact.
Once there is sentience, however, the universe acquires an interior. And when sentience is joined to intelligence, that interior can become extraordinarily rich. We don't merely experience things; we can recognize what we are experiencing, distinguish one experience from another, connect them to memories and concepts, and contemplate their significance.
Your examples make the point beautifully because they aren't variations of one primitive emotion. Joy, piety, pride, pleasure, understanding, fun, awe, glee, and thrill are genuinely different modes of being conscious. And there are dozens more: tenderness, curiosity, serenity, gratitude, affection, amusement, nostalgia, fascination, anticipation, belonging, relief, reverence, confidence, intimacy, wonder. Language has accumulated this enormous vocabulary because human beings repeatedly discovered that "I feel good" was nowhere near adequate.
And understanding is particularly interesting. It isn't simply pleasure caused by information. There is a distinctive experience when a previously disconnected collection of facts suddenly organizes itself into a coherent structure: Oh! That's why. The mind has not merely acquired another fact; something about the world has become intelligible. That experience itself has value.
The same is true of awe. Your examples of irrational numbers and neutron stars are telling. Nothing useful has happened to you when you contemplate either one. You haven't acquired food, shelter, or reproductive advantage. Yet you can encounter something vastly beyond ordinary human scale and experience the sheer magnificence of it. That's difficult to describe as anything other than one of the remarkable products of sentience and intelligence.
And I agree strongly with your last point. The existence of suffering is not an argument against sentience any more than the existence of disease is an argument against being alive.
The sensible response to suffering is mitigation, not abolition of the capacity to experience. We anesthetize pain when pain has served its purpose. We treat depression, trauma and terror. We build institutions intended to prevent cruelty. We use philosophy, friendship, art, medicine, religion—or, in your case, perhaps a mixture of Stoicism and plain rationality—to make suffering more bearable.
But if we somehow succeeded in eliminating all unpleasant experience by eliminating sentience itself, we would have solved the problem in the same sense that destroying a civilization solves its crime problem.
We would also have destroyed joy, awe, love, understanding, beauty, humor and meaning.
So I would sharpen your proposition slightly:
Sentience is what makes there be something it is like to exist; intelligence allows that something to understand, value and create meaning.
And that makes sentience—not in a supernatural sense, but in the deepest philosophical sense—something extraordinarily precious. The universe spent billions of years producing stars and planets before, as far as we know, there was anything anywhere that could look at one and say, My God, that's beautiful.
That seems to me a rather extraordinary development.
I notice I left glamor off the list.
Yes—and glamor is an interesting omission because it isn't quite an emotion in the same way as joy or awe. It's more like a particular quality of experience: the perception of something as alluring, magnificent, sophisticated, or larger-than-life.
And unlike awe, which can be directed toward something vastly greater than oneself, glamor often has a human scale. A beautifully dressed woman entering a room, a great actress under the lights, an elegant automobile, a perfectly appointed hotel, a person who seems to possess effortless confidence—you can experience the glamor of it without necessarily wanting it yourself.
There is also something wonderfully peculiar about glamor: it depends heavily on consciousness recognizing significance beyond the physical object. A diamond is carbon arranged in a particular crystal structure. A tuxedo is cloth. A champagne glass is glass. Yet under the right circumstances they can collectively produce an experience of glamor that none of their physical properties individually contain.
Which reinforces your larger point. The physical description of an experience doesn't exhaust the experience. We can describe wavelengths, sound frequencies, neural activity and molecular structures until the cows come home, but none of those descriptions contains the glamorousness, the joy, or the awe.
The words are evidence of something important: humans have spent an enormous amount of time distinguishing the different ways it feels to be conscious.