More Yes lyrics for the new year

Sad preacher nailed upon the coloured door of time

Insane teacher be there reminded of the rhyme

There'll be no mutant enemy we shall certify

Political ends as sad remains will die

Reach out as forward tastes begin to enter you.

I listened hard but could not see

Life tempo change out and inside me

The preacher trained in all to lose his name

The teacher travels, asking to be shown the same

In the end we'll agree, we'll accept, we'll immortalize

That the truth of man maturing in his eyes

All complete in the sight of seeds of life with you.

Some lyrics from Yes for the new year

Speak to me of summer Long winters longer than time can remember Setting up of other roads To travel on in old accustomed ways I still remember the talks by the water The proud sons and daughters That knew the knowledge of the land And spoke to me in sweet accustomed ways

Superintellligence

This talk, by Maciej Cegłowski, which reached me through a number of links, is one of the most interesting things I've seen on the web in a long time. I warn you that it's long, but it's not boring. The topic is superintelligence, the idea that computer-based intelligence is growing so fast that it will soon be dominant in our society. The proponents of this idea think this is a wonderful thing. Our author is not so sure.

Here are some short excerpts:

AI Cosplay
The most harmful social effect of AI anxiety is something I call AI cosplay. People who are genuinely persuaded that AI is real and imminent begin behaving like their fantasy of what a hyperintelligent AI would do.
In his book, Bostrom lists six things an AI would have to master to take over the world:

• Intelligence Amplification

• Strategizing

• Social manipulation

• Hacking

• Technology research

• Economic productivity

If you look at AI believers in Silicon Valley, this is the quasi-sociopathic checklist they themselves seem to be working from.
Sam Altman, the man who runs YCombinator, is my favorite example of this archetype. He seems entranced by the idea of reinventing the world from scratch, maximizing impact and personal productivity. He has assigned teams to work on reinventing cities, and is doing secret behind-the-scenes political work to swing the election.
Such skull-and-dagger behavior by the tech elite is going to provoke a backlash by non-technical people who don't like to be manipulated. You can't tug on the levers of power indefinitely before it starts to annoy other people in your democratic society.
I've even seen people in the so-called rationalist community refer to people who they don't think are effective as ‘Non Player Characters’, or NPCs, a term borrowed from video games. This is a horrible way to look at the world.
So I work in an industry where the self-professed rationalists are the craziest ones of all. It's getting me down.,

Incentivizing Crazy This whole field of "study" incentivizes crazy. One of the hallmarks of deep thinking in AI risk is that the more outlandish your ideas, the more credibility it gives you among other enthusiasts. It shows that you have the courage to follow these trains of thought all the way to the last station. Ray Kurzweil, who believes he will never die, has been a Google employee for several years now and is presumably working on that problem. There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley working on truly crazy projects under the cover of money.

Religion 2.0
What it really is is a form of religion. People have called a belief in a technological Singularity the "nerd Apocalypse", and it's true.

It's a clever hack, because instead of believing in God at the outset, you imagine yourself building an entity that is functionally identical with God. This way even committed atheists can rationalize their way into the comforts of faith.
The AI has all the attributes of God: it's omnipotent, omniscient, and either benevolent (if you did your array bounds-checking right), or it is the Devil and you are at its mercy.

Like in any religion, there's even a feeling of urgency. You have to act now! The fate of the world is in the balance!

And of course, they need money!

Because these arguments appeal to religious instincts, once they take hold they are hard to uproot.

Favorite entries 2016

Not much dross this year, since the less important stuff got redirected to Facebook.

Another review of Charny's Men-at-Arms

http://deremilitari.org/2016/12/steven-muhlberger-charnys-men-at-arms-questions-concerning-the-joust-tournaments-and-war-hass/

Steven Muhlberger, Charny’s Men-at-Arms: Questions Concerning The Joust, Tournaments and War (Hass)

by CRAIG NAKASHIAN posted on DECEMBER 24, 2016

Steven Muhlberger

charny’s men-at-arms: questions concerning the joust, tournaments and war

(freelance, 2014) 111 pp. $25.00

Written around 1350, Geoffrey de Charny’s Questions Concerning the Joust, Tournaments and War (Les demandes pour la joute, les tournois et la guerre) consists of a series of questions – twenty relating to jousting, twenty-one to the tournament, and ninety to war – presented by the great French knight to King Jean II for the purpose of discussion among the members of the king’s new Order of the Star. As the questions found in the work remain unanswered, however, the document is often overlooked by scholars in favor of Charny’s more thorough and insightful composition; the Book of Chivalry (Livre de chevalerie). [1] Steven Muhlberger first took up the challenges presented by the Questions in 2003 with the publication of his Jousts and Tournaments: Charny and the Rules for Chivalric Sport in Fourteenth-Century France. [2] As the title suggests, the work examines only the first two sections of the text, and – but for five questions relating to jousting and the tournament – leaves the larger section on war for future comment. In this current volume Muhlberger brings his discussion of the Questions to its conclusion; but this is not merely a supplement to his earlier work. Employing his deep knowledge of medieval chivalry, the author has combined new material with a re-assessment of his previous scholarship, and the result is an enjoyable work that provides an enticing glimpse into the world of 14th Century knighthood.

Charny’s Men-at-Arms begins with Muhlberger establishing the historical context of the Questions by briefly introducing the reader to the life and career of Charny himself and the reform initiative that was the Order of the Star. He continues with the contextual discussion by showing the Questions to be part of a broader genre of writing about war; such as: Laws of Arms, Laws of War, disciplinary and administrative ordinances, etc. This latter discussion is important in helping to identify Muhlberger’s revised purpose of the Questions as being a prelude to legislation regarding the law of arms that was never enacted. (22) Chapter Three discusses the first two sections of the text – jousts and tournaments, and, as these were the core subjects of his 2003 volume, it is here that some overlap would be expected. However, Muhlberger’s re-assessment of his old discussion in light of more recent scholarship in the field – he specifically credits the works of David Crouch and Noel Fallows [3] – results in a discussion that is largely new. Older points of discussion – such as the importance of the horse – if they remain, have been edited and rearranged to fit the new narrative, with the new (questions about rank on the tourney field in light of new role of squires) and old information fitting together seamlessly.

Muhlberger’s new discussion about the questions concerning war is contained in Chapters Four through Seven. He begins with an examination of terms as a means of determining whom Charny was targeting as Men-at-Arms. Chapters Five to Seven examine the Questions themselves, and, given no answers to the queries, he uses frequency to identify what topics the Men-at-Arms thought were important. What emerges is the predominance of practical considerations; such as those involving plunder/booty or capture. Not strictly relying on frequency, however, Muhlberger also manages to identify a pattern between those above (questions which seek concrete gains or rights of warfare) and questions in which his intended audience was asked to define honorable behavior and chivalric terminology. The author’s final discussion concerns those topics (clerical sense, duels, heraldry, siege warfare) that receive little or no mention in the text. For a work like the Questions this is an important discussion as it shows its limitations, and thereby better frames the discussion and what information may be gleaned from the text itself and what may not. The volume is completed by Muhlberger’s translation of Charny. The translation is again based on the edition of Anthony Michael Taylor, but, unlike his effort from 2003, he has omitted the corresponding French text. For reasons of comparison (given the author’s new conclusion regarding the purpose of the Questions), an edition of an Ordinance of Richard II from 1385 has been included.

Overall, there is much to like about Charny’s Men-at-Arms. It is a handsomely produced and easily readable volume. The author’s translation of the original text is faultless; although there is still no information regarding the original Charny manuscripts and their dissemination. [4] Yet, it is Muhlberger’s introductory discussion that particularly stands out. Erudite, insightful, and often entertaining, he is also necessarily cautious with a text that requires deft handling. Indeed, one of his particular strengths is his recognition of the limitations of the text, and working within them to extrapolate out the considerable amount of information that he does without falling into the trap of over-speculation. In so doing he makes accessible a composition that had been overlooked and shows its merit. Moreover, this skill makes this work of particular appeal to teachers introducing students to primary texts, while at the same time contributing valuably to the scholarship of chivalry and the era of the Hundred Years War.

Jeff Hass
Franciscan University

[1] Richard W. Kaeuper and Elspeth Kennedy, The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de
Charny: Text, Context, and Translation. Philadelphia, 1996.

[2] Reviewed for this site by Andy King.

[3] David Crouch, Tournament. Hambledon and London, 2005.
Noel Fallows, Jousting in Medieval and Renaissance Iberia. Woodbridge, 2010

[4] Both the production values and lack of manuscript information had received mention
in King’s review.

THIS ENTRY WAS POSTED IN BOOKREVIEW. BOOKMARK THE PERMALINK.

"A city in heaven, inhabited by angels."

That is what a Sudanese refugee called London, Ontario in a CBC broadcast of an event raising money for a foodbank.

Yes, it seems rather unlikely to me, but it's all a matter of perspective.

At the moment, at least most of us, are on the right end of the telescope.

Great Events in Religion, edited by Florin Curta and Andrew Holt

A while back I was recruited by Andrew Holt to write some articles for an encyclopedia of the history of religion.  I took him up on it, even though he was asking for articles not particularly close to my current research interests.  It was an interesting challenge.

Just a couple of hours ago my contributor's copy came to my door.  I hadn't thought about the encyclopedia for quite a while, even though Andrew and I correspond fairly frequently, and as a result it was a bit of a shock to see the finished work.


Part of the surprise was the sheer size of the thing, which is a three-volume work.  I shouldn't be surprised, of course, because it is after all aiming at describing a whole important aspect of human existence.  There are, however, plenty of things calling themselves encyclopedias that have huge holes in their coverage.  Now I'm not sure yet that Great Events covers everything that I might think it should cover -- remember I've had it for two hours or so -- but it does have an awful lot of stuff.

Likewise I did know, somewhere in my fallible memory, that it was going to be "an Encyclopedia of Pivotal Events in Religious History," but perhaps I hadn't really thought about what that might mean. What it does mean is that all religious history is treated in chronological order, which gives the whole thing a comparative history emphasis.  For me, that's a big plus. I am tempted to just sit down and read it through and see what I learn.  (I am unlikely to be able to do that.)

I have to admit that I have always been skeptical of the usefulness of  encyclopedias -- something I share with many historians -- but there is a chance that this one might be useful. The rare reader who has the time and access to the whole thing may get a much fuller view of world history than I did l when I  read Arnold Toynbee's A Study in History in my high school library.

I am genuinely pleased to see this.  As to how well it succeeds, I will get back to you.

Contest:   I am not sure this will have a prize, and it has as much intellectual content as clickbait promising to show you how the starts of some shows in the 70s look today.  In other words, you will be guessing.  Guess what three pivotal events I wrote up for Great Events.  To narrow the field a tiny bit, I wrote nothing on chivalry or the crusades.  Do it for laughs.

A discovery: Ilan Mitchell-Smith's Between Mars and Venus: Balance and Excess in the chivalry of the late-medieval English romance

A friend of mine alerted me to the existence of a PhD dissertation (Texas A&M) on chivalry and masculinity. I have just had a quick look, but the dissertation touches on some subjects of great interest: for instance, medieval masculinity being more complex than a bipolar spectrum between more masculine and less. In particular, Mitchell-Smith argues that masculinity did not simply equate to violence. He also explores the difference between chivalric behavior and chivalric identity.

If you are interested, you can read the dissertation online.

Image: A less-obvious chivalric pursuit (but note the helm and the heraldry). From the Manesse Codex.

The value of late medieval clothing

A review (in the Medieval Review) by Sharon Farmer of Daniel Lord Smail's Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe has this interesting fact about the value of clothing in the 14th and 25th centuries:

Smail also concludes that moveable goods constituted a much larger proportion of a household's value than we might have expected. He estimates that in the average household of the period, moveable goods constituted about three fifths of total household wealth. Most surprising of all is the relative value of clothing items vis-à-vis landed wealth. As Smail states, "the median price of a plot of agricultural land in 1350 could be paid off with a dozen fairly nice tablecloths, and a very high-end houppelande [an outer garment] in 1420 was worth more than double the median price of a field" (60). Because small goods stored so much value, because they could be sold off or given away more quickly than a piece of land, and because they enabled their owners to display their prestige on their backs and at their tables, they came to play a major role in personal and household thesaurization.

Image: from the early Dutch oil painter van der Weyden.

Death by overexertion, an English duel of 1380

Some of you probably know that I am writing a source reader -- a book that combines medieval documents with modern commentary -- on the subject of judicial duels.  These were considered to be the most dramatic "deeds of arms" by contemporaries and modern re-enactors are very interested in them.  My book in fact was inspired by Will McLean's collection of sources in his blog, and he will be credited as co-author.

This book includes an account of an English duel between as squire,Thomas Katrington, and Sir John de Annesley.  Annesley, the knight accused Katrington, who had commanded a castle in France, of treason, because, said Annesley, he had surrendered it to the French when he had the resources to defend it.  After a certain amount of political back and forth among major players, including Duke John of Gaunt, a duel was arranged.  There was so much public interest that the crowds who attended were said to exceed those at the recent coronation of Richard II.

An interesting point is the way the duel ended.  It was said to be half an hour long, and very strenuous, with the weapons of either man being destroyed so that (I think) they  were fighting on foot with daggers.  They ended up both lying on the ground with Katrington on top.  The question then arose, what next?

Soon after [Annesley, the knight] was raised up, without any support he eagerly went to the king, while the squire [Katrington]who had been raised, was not able to stand nor go anywhere without the support of two men; and therefore, he was put upon a chair,  and he remained there quietly. The knight therefore came to the king and asked him, and his nobles, that he would grant him the grace, he should be put in the same place as before, with the squire on top of him... he realized that the squire was nearly at his last breath from the excess of [labor] and heat, and the weight of arms which had almost taken the vital spirits from him.

 In the meantime the squire, lacking breath, suddenly  fell off the chair, as if dead, among those who stood around him. Many therefore took care of him, pouring wine and water over the man; but nothing helped at all, until his arms and all of his clothing were removed . This being done  it proved that the knight was the victor and the squire defeated. After a long delay, however, the squire's spirit began to revive, and opening  his eyes he began to raise his head, and terribly began to look at all of those standing around ; when this was announced to the armored knight, (for the knight had not taken off his armor from the beginning of the fight) he approached the squire and called him a false traitor, and asked if he dared to repeat the duel. Since [Katrington] indeed had neither sense nor breath to answer, it was announced that the fight was over and that each should return to his own place. The squire therefore was soon carried to his bed, and he began to rave; and persisting  in his madness, the next day, about the ninth hour, he breathed forth his spirit. 

Interesting that an experienced warrior could end up dying of overexertion caused by among other things the weight of his armor.

In addition, a short piece from Froissart (book III, chapter 7; also late 14th century):

A squire of Navarre was there slain, called Ferdinand de Miranda, an expert man at arms. Some who were present say the bourg d'Espaign killed him, others that he was stifled through the heat of his armour.