A reintroduction
Hello,
I'm (still) George.
This is my new twice-a-month newsletter, which I am calling "Public Learning."
This is in honour of a tradition from the coding world that I have come to like, and a way of trying to overcome the "collector's fallacy," where we read or learn privately and never share what we're doing, or signpost our progress with outputs.
Public learning, rather than just learning in public, is a conceptualization that's important to me because it positions my purpose more clearly. Yes, I am doing my personal work in the light of day, but more than just doing something in public, I want to learn with, and for the publics I am part of.
Amidst ever the ever-intensifying atomization of our society, I want to underline how important it is to be committed to the public good, and model it as best I can.
And to mark that this is an ongoing, never-ending process on my part, the dating convention is simply an upward count from when I was born.
What to expect
Every two weeks (give or take), I'll share:
- A few things I am taking in with some personal commentary.
- Ideas from a forthcoming essay or other project I am working on that's not quite done yet.
- A piece of music or sound I am in love with at the moment.
I'm sure that will morph and change over time, but for now that feels solid enough to share and commit to.
One last note: the header image is The Scholar, by Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910). He's one of Türkiye's great painters from the modern period and someone I've come to find quite fascinating for the way he tried to navigate the Ottoman and Western worlds.
And so, with all that:
Things I am learning
The fight over "infrasound" exposes our epistemic fragility. YouTuber Benn Jordan and Substacker Andy Masley are in a nasty public debate about whether or not data centres are harmful because of the low-level sound and vibrations ("infrasound") they generate. The episode is, on the one hand, a familiar manifestation of the pro/anti-AI debate, but I think there are some much deeper things going on:
- High-stakes intellectual debates are increasingly de-institutionalized. While Jordan and Masley both have affiliations, their debate is largely built on their own personal platforms. The academy is largely missing in action.
- There's some vague gesturing at government action, but even leaving aside the specific question of data centres and just thinking about the impacts of noise on health, it feels like everyone is dismissive of government's role as an arbitrator and as having the ability to do anything.
- AI is creating entirely new political alignments (much like urbanist issues have and do). It's not about traditional political identities, class, or even education; I see it as something like a humanities-engineering fight. I do think Dan Kagan-Kans is right, though, that the left has not formed a serious understanding of AI (in all its varieties) and what is to be done about it. But to map these debates to simple left-right dichotomy is to misunderstand the fault lines and the political potentialities that underpin them.
Solar is eating the world while fossil fuels eat one another. The Ember's 2026 Global Electricity Review is out and solar fulfilled most of the new electricity demand, eliminating net-new fossil fuel electricity generation, with renewables now overtaking coal's market share. Nicolas Fulgham had a great chat about it with Robinson Meyer, offering some interesting insights: fossil fuels are now fighting each another for market share (especially coal and gas). Despite its smaller growth curve, wind still has an important role to play in grid balancing. India has gotten a lot of press out of the review, with its coal generation falling for the first time ever – as Fulgham says, its energy transition possibly signals the way that other, less developed countries with large populations (especially Indonesia) will decarbonize.
No one likes the "Sovereign Debt Fund." Prime Minister Carney announced Canada is getting a new sovereign wealth fund – kinda. Because the Canada Strong Fund would be made up of borrowed money, it stretches most peoples' definitions of what a SWF fund is. From group chats to social media, it was striking to see it panned widely across the left and right.
I can't wrap my head around what problem it's trying to solve, honestly.
The fund fundamentally sits atop a contradiction: to invest in big-picture, long-term projects, it may not be able to make money right away. And if it's going to take an ownership stake in major projects (especially if they will be immediately profitable), then it's not crowding in private capital, it's actually crowding it out.
Even for people who believe in publicly controlled financial institutions, it's a strange, somewhat sour moment. But it ultimately speaks to Canadian public banking scholar Thomas Marois longstanding point: these institutions are neither inherently good or bad, they're contested, and the public has to fight to make them work for them.
One thing I'm still working out
I'm working on a piece about how I read when there's such an overwhelming amount of information online.
One aspect of it that I am struggling to put words to is how easy – and powerful – it is to "read to the edge" of a field, where new discoveries or live debates are happening. I find for myself that entering a new field when there's a lively debate to be extremely interesting and generative for my learning. I think it's because I'm immediately given a sense of intellectual stakes in a topic and that motivates me to work my way back through the issue and understand why things are contentious.
There's definitely a selection bias that comes with this, since the most important things to know may not always be the most contentious, but I think if you're using the stakes to "read upstream" and understand the discipline and issue's origins, it's probably a useful trick.
I want to better map out that strategy, and find a proper name, if someone's already put one to it.
Easy listening
Miriam Makebe is one of South Africa's greatest singers of the 20th century.
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