A review of The Odyssey I can respect

Emily Wilson has written a review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey! She’s the author of an excellent translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, one that Nolan himself mentioned as an inspiration, so she is one of the best qualified people to judge the movie.

She starts off diplomatically.

Christopher Nolan’s $250 million action movie version of Homer’s ancient Greek poem is an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours. Nolan’s trademark jumps and twists in the narrative structure are relatively easy to follow, and appropriate for The Odyssey, a narrative of tales nested in tales. My teenagers had a good time. Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.

Uh-oh. I think she had mixed feelings about the movie.

As in his previous films, Nolan is interested in the discontinuities of space and time, in magic, tricks, craft, technology, rivalry, substitution, masks, miscommunication, what we remember and what we choose to forget. Yet again, survival is portrayed as a kind of triumph. Yet again, there are long, claustrophobic scenes of drowning and near-drowning, and technically impressive episodes in which buildings are engulfed in flames and vehicles explode. Yet again, we watch a male character’s desperate quest to recover and/or avenge a female love object. I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality. Without a tub of wax for my ears – which Himesh Patel’s ever anxious Eurylochus, Odysseus’s doomed right-hand man, uses to sail safely past the Sirens – I was exposed to the full din of thumping sticks, staffs, swords and clashing armour, thunderbolts, crashing waves, grunts, screams, toppling palaces and burning temples. But unlike Matt Damon, the wax-free Odysseus who is tied to the mast as he is conveyed past the Sirens (naked ladies reclining on some uncomfortable-looking rocks), I gazed at the shipwrecks and bloodbaths without any agony of emotion. My eyes stayed dry, even for Argos the dog – whose adorableness as a puppy is predictably amped up to suit our animal-loving times. If only the human characters had been treated with such serious attention.

It’s been playing at the Morris Theater for going on two weeks, and one thing I’ve noticed while working concessions is how loud this movie is. Thumping, shrieking, clanging at high volume while I’m trying to take a popcorn order — it’s been an epic struggle. But yes, I agree about the flatness of the characters. One of the most notable moments of acting in the film is when Ann Hathaway’s Penelope cuts loose and expresses the complexity of her feelings — anger, resentment, confusion — to Tom Holland’s Telemachus, but mostly she’s seen as a quiet, reserved figure behind a screen.

I also expected more from Argos. In the movie, the suitors toss the old dog onto a dung pile, and when Odysseus returns, the dog notices…and simply dies. Blink and you’ll miss it. It was an opportunity to humanize Matt Damon’s Odysseus, and it was allowed to pass.

Another complaint: the Americanization of the violence.

But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t. The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sack of Troy – which he supposedly organised – Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before.

I just finished reading a translation of The Odyssey last night — Emily Wilson’s, in fact — and that jumped out at me. In the bloody massacre of the suitors, as Odysseus goes on his killing spree, Homer doesn’t dwell on the gore, but instead names each man as they are murdered, and sometimes goes on to talk about their fathers, and maybe some notable feature of their character. Many of them are terrified and beg for mercy. It’s a much more impactful way of dramatizing the slaughter, rather than showing a knife going into Antinous’s throat.

The book also details many events that the movie omitted. I’d forgotten what a compulsive liar Odysseus was. Multiple times he lies to people he encounters, giving his cover story about being from Crete, with elaborate details about his background. When he finally meets Penelope again, the first thing he does is spin a long story about his alias, all of it entirely unnecessary, but “liar” is one of his epithets, so I guess he has to do it.

Also omitted from the movie is his treatment of the female slaves who slept with the suitors. He gets his head household slave to rat them out, puts them to work cleaning out all the dead bodies and gore in his palace, and then pitilessly hangs them so they die kicking and struggling. It’s not a pretty story, but fortunately, Matt Damon did not have to deal with such complications.

Wilson has her gripes, especially with the screenplay, but still ends on an upbeat note.

Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London – where students still study The Odyssey as a first year ‘foundational text’ – is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.

The movie got me to re-read The Odyssey, so I’m an example of that. I’ve always championed the importance of the humanities in education, so nothing new there, and sorry, no, I’m not going to study ancient Greek, but maybe more people will.

It’s a great essay from an expert. If it’s too long for you, Wilson has also posted an abbreviated bullet-point version of her main points on BlueSky. Also do see the movie — your local theaters appreciate it — but I think it would be a good idea to bring earplugs.

The mass extinction of languages

My university offers courses in several languages with a relatively tiny population base, like Anishinaabe, the language of the indigenous peoples of the upper Midwest. I’m sometimes, but not often, asked why we bother, because these languages are so “impractical”, and it’s because they’re good for sharing the culture and history of groups of people, or because someone wants to understand their grandfather’s perspective (or the Teachings of the Seven Grandfathers). We should value the diverse ways of the multitude of different groups that have grown and changed throughout history. Unfortunately, many of these languages are dying out, and being replaced by a small number of “behemoth languages,” and we’re losing world languages at a steady rate — which is why it’s important to preserve as much as we can. This paper, The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene, tries to model the appearance and loss of languages over the last few millennia.

There are ~7500 languages signed and spoken in the world today, and they have a wide range of grammatical structures, vocabularies, speech sounds, signs, and usage rules. The study of language diversity has brought distinctive insights into how human behavior and cognition are shaped by ecological, social, and communicative pressures. The observable limits of linguistic diversity—features that are either universally present or absent in the world’s languages—have been at the core of what makes humans a distinctive species. Insights into language have also been used to understand other dimensions of human variation and homogeneity, including cultural and psychological traits. Over the past 500 years, all evidence points to a large systematic decrease in linguistic diversity, in parallel with the spread of a handful of behemoth languages, such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, and Hindi. Nearly 5 billion people use at least 1 of the 10 most common languages, whereas half of the world’s languages are now endangered, and about four become dormant every year. This results in the loss of cultural and scientific knowledge embedded in minority languages and contributes to the unequal development in science, technology, medicine, and education that predominantly benefits speakers of the world’s largest languages.

I’m sure speakers of Anishinaabe recognize the definite advantages of speaking English, or maybe Mandarin in a few years, but they still want to retain a connection with their ancestors. Something similar happened to my immigrant great-great-grandparents — they spoke Norwegian, lived in communities of fellow Norwegian immigrants, and right up to my great-grandparents generation, were learning Norwegian and speaking it in church and family gatherings, but my generation has completely adopted the dominant English language of my region. We might still occasionally say “uff-da” or have lutefisk and lefse on holidays, but otherwise, we’re totally assimilated.

So about 4 languages a year are disappearing. The authors of that paper have attempted to quantitatively estimate the number of languages spoken over our history, and it’s surprising how much we’ve lost.

Fig. 4. Marginal results of our model aggregated across all conditions.
(A) The number of languages through the Holocene. Lighter shades of the curve correspond to progressively wider intervals comprising 10 to 90% of the predictions. Black lines indicate the interval containing 70% of the predictions.

Whoa. That’s a pretty sharp peak and a rather precipitous decline. The authors propose an explanation of what was going on.

Typically, the total number of languages has been increasing for most of the Holocene, mimicking the global expansion of human populations. This suggests that the rise of large-scale regional powers 4000 years ago did not generally and immediately deter the growth of linguistic diversity. Instead, most trajectories reached a maximum of 1000 to 3000 yr B.P. Although there is wide uncertainty in our estimates, most trajectories display an approximately 10-fold increase in the number of languages between the early Holocene and this point. This period, harboring tens of thousands of languages, has escaped previous theorizing.
In our model, this “golden age” was followed by an extremely rapid decrease in linguistic diversity, especially over the last two millennia. The process unfolded so quickly that the rate of language loss must have been even faster than the current pessimistic forecasts for the year 2100.

As populations grew, the number of languages also grew…until the rise of large empires and increased trade and communication, when a few successful dominant groups swallowed up the smaller populations. This model also makes the evolution of various languages non-adaptationist — some languages thrive, not because they are superior to other languages, but because they are piggy-backing on other properties of their population. Don’t bother trying to argue that English is better than Spanish, because what really matters is the strength and success of the population speaking the language. Languages don’t die because they’re inferior, but because they’re taken over by an expanding population.

It follows that this massive and biased reduction in linguistic diversity has shaped the relative abundance of different language traits. However, functional factors (such as learnability, efficient communication, or computational costs) are typically invoked instead to explain why some language traits are more common than others. But the intensity and recency of the linguistic diversity bottleneck make it a clear nonfunctional null hypothesis for understanding any skewed linguistic distribution.

Cool. I do have to envy linguists because at least they don’t get stupid demands like “Show me an Italian giving birth to a baby speaking Thai.” A lot of the elements of language evolution are similar to the properties of biological evolution, and seem to be equally incomprehensible to the ignorant.

All of Elon Musk’s heroes are frauds

I’ve always thought of Nick Bostrom as a font of bad ideas, but that’s not his self-estimation. He considers himself a genius!

Bostrom considers himself to be a towering intellect of cosmic-historical importance. He is not shy when boasting about his supposed accomplishments, even quoting on his website an article that describes him as the “Swedish superbrain.” For many years, he bragged that — to quote his profile on Edge.org — “his performance as an undergraduate set a national record in Sweden,” though he backed away from this after Simon Knutsson pointed out that there is no evidence to support such a claim. (See the “Potentially Dishonest Self-Promotion” section of this article.)

The kinds of ideas he claims to have come up with are, for instance, the belief that AI represents an existential risk comparable to a nuclear holocaust which must nevertheless be pursued zealously, making him a hero to the capitalists building massive data centers right now. He also promotes the belief that potential people could be so numerous that it’s more valuable to create conditions that enable space flight and virtual people in computers than to actually help the poor and develop an egalitarian politics, again endearing him to the hyper-rich.

In brief, the paper argues that if we colonize space — especially as digital posthumans — the future population could be enormous. Bostrom estimates some 10^38 digital people within the Virgo Supercluster, a cluster of galaxy clusters that includes our own Milky Way. (That’s a 10 followed by 38 zeros, by the way.)

If one accepts a utilitarian perspective, this means the expected value of ensuring the realization of all those future people (assuming they have net-positive lives) far exceeds the value of, e.g., helping poor people today. If you’re a truly altruistic person who aims to maximize your philanthropic impact, then you should focus not on present-day people but those living perhaps millions or billions of years from now. It’s not that future digital people are inherently more valuable. It’s just a numbers-game: there are so many more of them (potentially) than present-day people, they overwhelm the simplistic equations of utilitarianism’s moral mathematics.

Bostrom’s conclusion is that we should colonize the universe as soon as possible, because every single century, decade, and even second of delaying this results in an “astronomical” loss of potential value — i.e., the non-existence of people who could have otherwise been created in some distant galaxy if only we had started colonizing just a bit sooner. However, Bostrom also concludes that “priority number one, two, three and four should … be to reduce existential risk.” Space colonization should therefore be priority number five once we secure our survival. Perhaps you can see why Musk loves this paper.

It’s an incredibly stupid idea — it also has ties to eugenics and natalism and other flawed beliefs — and I have weird feelings about this article. It’s mainly functioning to excuse Bostrom from fault. Bostrom didn’t come up with all these bad ideas! No, he just stole all of them. He doesn’t have original ideas!

Yet, because I’m so conversant with the foundational literature of the TESCREAL movement, I’ve noticed that a large number of the “original,” “novel,” even (supposedly) “groundbreaking” ideas attributed to Bostrom actually originated with other thinkers. As early as 2018, I was posting about this on social media and privately sharing examples with colleagues — some of whom were rather shocked to see Bostrom’s work juxtaposed with that of others (from whom he borrowed without sufficient attribution). I wrote to one colleague that Bostrom’s “genius” seems to be taking ideas from other theorists and repackaging them in his own language such that they’re just different enough for him to avoid being accused of intellectual plagiarism. His oeuvre reminds me of the line, often misattributed to Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”

It’s a long and thorough article, and traces Bostrom’s soft plagiarism back to multiple sources, but one of them is notorious crackpot and self-promoter Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Shouldn’t that be instantly disqualifying?

Oh no, science to get the Trump “gold” treatment

This is not good news. The Trump administration wants to radically change how science is done in this country.

On Tuesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a report entitled “Science: A New Golden Age,” in which it lays out how it has viewed science, found it lacking, and believes the Trump administration is in the perfect position to fix things. It’s a bit unexpected coming from an administration that has been proposing crippling funding cuts to research and trying to enable political appointees to terminate grants awarded based on scientific merit.

The report presents itself as the spiritual successor of “Science, the Endless Frontier,” a policy document that laid out the case for government-funded science in the wake of World War II. The New Golden Age (SNGA) says that, while the concepts promoted by the original remain vital, the circumstances have changed such that we need major revisions to how the government is implementing things.

The result is an odd mix. It completely ignores or glosses over many things that the administration is doing to harm scientific progress. In some cases, it identifies issues that have already been discussed as problems within the scientific community. Elsewhere, it’s a mixture of political grievances, ideas without a solid intellectual foundation, and an injection of Silicon Valley’s perspective on innovation (Michael Kratsios, the director of the OSTP, formerly worked with Peter Thiel). As a result, it’s unlikely to have anything like the impact of “Science, the Endless Frontier.”

“Gold standard”? So he wants to buy some cheap crap from Home Depot, spray paint it gold, and call it science?

Jesus, but he made the oval office kitschy and cheap, and now he’s going to give science the same treatment.

You can’t get a philosophy degree in Wyoming

Wyoming students aren’t allowed to get a degree in philosophy.

Wyoming will become the first state in the US where you cannot receive a B.A. in Philosophy. The University of Wyoming will be the only R1 institution, the only state flagship university, and one of two land-grant universities that do not offer a B.A. in Philosophy.

It is unclear what the justification for this decision is.

It’s not unclear at all. Wyoming is a very Republican state, and the people who run the government there are doofuses who’ve never taken a philosophy course or even thought about philosophy. Ignorance breeds ignorance.

Everything is looking Odyssey now

Apparently, the Odyssey is fully engaged with pop culture now.

I think the threat that a whole civilization will die is kind of like the prophecy that Delphi gave to Croesus. Another phrase associated with Croesus is “Count no man happy until the end is known”, and I’m waiting for the ending.

I’m hoping the end will be something like that of another fabulously wealthy man of the ancient world, Marcus Licinius Crassus.

Grandpa3!

Oh no. I’m getting so old. Now my oldest son, Alaric, and his partner, Katarina, have announced that they are expecting, and that we can expect our third grandchild in November. We’ve been sent a gift registry and have been invited to a baby shower next week. I guess this is real. This will also mean that each of our 3 children have produced one grandchild each.

The baby is a boy, and they’re planning to name him Vittorio, after his mather’s grandfather.

It’s weird how we suddenly start thinking we need more grandkids, because they’re so fun and we don’t have to do any of the work. Three’s enough, and it’s actually four, since this event brings along an additional boy from a previous relationship. I guess I should be calling myself Grandpa4, but I don’t want to encourage an increasing series of exponents.

Also, the baby shower is going to have a Lilo&Stitch theme to explain the illustration above. That’s not a picture of the baby, but I won’t complain if he’s big-eared, furry blue, with big teeth. He’ll fit in perfectly with the rest of us weirdos.