Henry Snow

@henrysnow

Labor + economic historian | they/them political economy, ships, and shipbuilders CONTROL SCIENCE out with Verso May 12! currently an adjunct at UConn newsletter/blog: buttondown.com/anotherway

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Henry Snow@henrysnow· 1d

zuckerberg on AI and automation; look I've written and posted a bunch about how I disagree with the neo-Luddite perspective but you can't just downplay the pain of this transition. "At each step" isn't true: early industrialization meant longer workdays and misery for countless people

Before the industrial revolution, 90% of people were farmers growing food to survive. Advances in technology steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose. At each step, people used our newfound productivity to achieve more than was previously possible, as well as spending more time on creativity, culture, relationships, and enjoying life.

Henry Snow@henrysnow· 2d

dustin guastella writes this article every three months and it gets worse each time-- we all know who "x group" is here. it isn't a "throwaway line" to defend trans kids' access to lifesaving healthcare or trans people's right to exist in public life www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

No doubt, the surest way to get a huge cheer at a liberal political rally is to simply mention racism or authoritarianism. Bonus points if you bravely proclaim your unwillingness to “throw X group under the bus”. Such rhetorical gestures have the added benefit of committing candidates to nothing in particular, and thus never threaten potential rich donors.

Henry Snow@henrysnow· 8d

here we go again

the title page of Hayek's book The Sensory Order

Henry Snow@henrysnow· 8d

this is really interesting! reminded of some arguments from ogyu sorai, though he was more specifically focused on denying foundationalism for political theory reasons

Looking for another mode of access, we could thus imagine that some intuitive,
or mystical understanding could allow humans or Sages to fathom what are the
normative requirements of gods, spirits and heaven. But this option is also flatly
rejected by Sorai who intensely disliked subjective knowledge as is shown in his
discussion of the neo-Confucian notion of principle (li 理):
Principle has no form. Therefore, it has no standards. To consider the mean as the principle
that ought to be, however, simply [permits] people to have their own perspective on thing.
Perspectives differ from person to person. Each and every person will use his own mind and
then conclude that his thoughts express the mean, or that they [convey the principles] that
ought to be. (Tucker 157; Bendō § 19, 205)
Subjective intuition, without the objective markers that are rituals, is in fact a
mark of folly.
Apart from rites, discussions of the way of controlling the mind are all far-fetched fabrica-
tions of personal wisdom. Why? The one that controls is the mind, but it is also the mind
that is being controlled. Trying to use our mind to control our mind is like a crazed person
personally trying to control his own craziness thereby. (Tucker 157; Bendō §18, 205

Olivier Ansart, “Gods, Spirits, and Heaven in Ogyū Sorai’s Political Theory,” in Boot and Takayama eds., Tetsugaku Companion to Ogyu Sorai

Henry Snow@henrysnow· 8d

there's a reason EP Thompson is such an influence on my work

But there is a second stage, where the empiricist may
put these fragmentary studies back together again, constructing
a model of the historical process made up from a multiplicity
of interlocking inevitabilities, a piecemeal processional. In
the scrutiny of credit facilities or of the terms of trade, where
each event is explicable and appears also as a self-sufficient
cause of other events, we arrive at a post facto determinism.
The dimension of human agency is lost, and the context of class relations is forgotten.

Henry Snow@henrysnow· 16d

sad montage of stock tickers and kalshi graphs

Henry Snow@henrysnow· 22d

somehow I'm not worried about that actually

Penguin random house banner promising if I give my email address I will never miss a new book by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, who has been dead for nearly 700 years

Henry Snow@henrysnow· 23d

homer simpson telling bart "the worst day of your life so far"

Henry Snow@henrysnow· 29d

you know who else loved middlemarch

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Jul 7

don't let the librarian catch you

The library from The Name of the Rose, a complicated series of rooms labelled with letters arranged through four towers that don't connect the way one would expect them to for convenience

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Jul 1

to reduce xenophobia to an unconquerable and acceptable feature of "human psychology" is a total capitulation. I don't know what Vivek Chibber is thinking, but "until I saw what's unfolding" reads to me as falling for right-wing propaganda

Now, as socialists on the left, when you look out into the crisis in Europe on immigration, or when you look here, just like with everything else, when we tell the Left, “Don’t berate and scold ordinary people for their reactions,” I think for us, it’s an important learning moment to say, well, when we see that it’s mostly workers who are responding negatively, we can either do like the American left and say, “You’re all racists, you’re all nativists, fill out this form, and when you’re ready, when you’re worthy of us, we’ll come to you,” or you can say, well, we’re discovering something here about human psychology.

My own thinking on this has evolved, it’s changed a bit. I was much more of the open-borders ilk a few years ago until I saw what’s unfolding, and I said, “You know, there’s a reality we’re discovering about people’s psychology now, and that has a sociological basis.” And I think it is that identities around citizenship and nationhood are so much more congealed now than they used to be.

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Jun 25

jonathan mayhew would have done great in the era of podcasts and newsletters

Page 129 of Jonathan Mayhew's Observations on the charter and conduct of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1763

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Jun 24

this is profoundly racist and a good example of why I do not trust the kind of leftist who says the word "liberal" like it's an insult

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Jun 23

I'm pretty critical of the Luddites but with critiques like these I see why we've gotten less-than-thoughtful defenses. The Luddites did not have a position on whether machines in general produced long term aggregate job growth, but whether they made their lives immediately worse

Ricardo and the Luddites alike.49 In a very different environment, it was widely feared that the mechanization of agriculture in Asia in the 1970s would lead to widespread rural unemployment; this did not occur (Campbell, 1990, p. 26). Recent studies by labor economists find that the introduction of new technology is on balance associated with positive job growth. One such study flatly declares that "job growth and the introduction of new technology appear to be complements rather than substitutes. The Luddites were wrong"

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Jun 22

one look at this and you can see why i write about these guys

An 1824 image of a shipwright. He's wearing slightly baggy clothes and squinting as he works with a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other, standing on a dock beside a ship

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Jun 19

Yeah most left expression has long been (what we'd now call) cringe! Here's a subversive poem from 1802, for instance. It's calling for an illegal strike at a naval dockyard to demand food relief-- with rhymes about cheese. Very radical and very No Kings sign cringe

Farmers Bakers Butchers likewise
An example there is put before your eyes
It is the pride of your heart to see the poor starving
You that have got a plenty do not care a farthing
As for the horse likewise the Carter
It is high time they were taken the head shorter
In lowering 6d they would sooner rise two
They do it to try the poor what they will do
These Big dons will do just as they please
They would make the poor believe the moon is green cheese
If the yard will all be true and stand to these Rules
We will soon let them know who is the biggest fools

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Jun 18

another highlight from this account: shipbuilders were marked absent in muster books with 3 dots, but present with a line in the same place, which meant they just bribed clerks to cross the former through with the latter in order to take personal days

Job work theoretically also meant pay was based on productivity, but artificers completely subverted it. Navy Board orders put a cap on daily earnings under job work--4s 2d. at Portsmouth, according to Mary—and in at least some cases this maximum within what was meant to be a productivity-encouraging system became the general rule. “By falsifications of various descriptions,” Mary explained, workers managed to bump their pay rates up to this level without increasing their productivity. One such falsification was creative use of extra. “The term Extra,” a special Commission of Naval Enquiry determined in 1805, used to refer only to what we would today call overtime but “since the introduction of task and Job work, it has been taken in a more extensive sense,” and now referred to “any mode of working, though within those hours, by which the wages of the men are increased beyond the established rate of daily pay.” Shipwrights were paid extra to work on Sundays, and further extra and provisions if they had to sleep aboard.
There was a “total want of system and regulation in the accounts of Job Work. . . the employment of the workmen by Job at Plymouth Yard, has been altogether fallacious.” Portsmouth, judging from Mary’s account, was no better. With some help from clerks and supervisors—quartermen, perhaps even principle officers— shipbuilders equalized wages.It was not as if anyone was going through the account books: the Clerk of the Cheque signed them, but, he conceded to the Commission, he was too busy with other duties to actually look at them before doing so. “The most laborious, the best skilled , the idle , the infirm , those employed on regular work at the dock side, or those buffeted about half their time in going out to Spithead,” Mary claimed, were all paid the same rate. Having neutralized task work with open rebellion in 1775, artificers took control of its successor system with quotidian subversion.

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Jun 11

got it

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Jun 4

doing some Learning

a, Abstract (top) and concrete (bottom) examples of a task inducing interference during learning. One stimulus input (seeing the water) triggers two prediction outputs (hearing the water and smelling the salmon). One output is correct (smelling the salmon), whereas the other output is an error (not hearing the water). b,c, Backpropagation produces interference during learning; not hearing the water reduces the expectation of smelling the salmon (b), although the salmon was indeed smelled. Prospective configuration, on the other hand, avoids such interference (c). In backpropagation, negative error propagates from the error output to hidden neurons (b; left). This causes a weakening of some connections, which, on the next trial, improves the incorrect output but also reduces the prediction of the correct output, thus introducing interference (b; middle and right). In prospective configuration, neural activity settles into a new configuration (different intensities of purple) before weight modification (c; left). This configuration corresponds to the activity that should be produced after learning, that is, is ‘prospective’. Hence, it foresees the positive error on the correct output and modifies the connections to improve the incorrect output while maintaining the correct output (c; middle and right).

Henry Snow@henrysnow· May 27

ominous stuff from @quinnslobodian.com and ben tarnoff in light of the literal pull the plug clause Musk apparently has in the Colossus compute deal with Anthropic-- a "kill switch" for if he decides they are "harming humanity," which for Musk could easily mean "Claude is insufficiently racist"

Musk does not just sell cars, rockets, or satellites. He sells the fantasy that, in an increasingly unstable world, both states and individuals can fortify their self-reliance by plugging into /his/ infrastructures. The paradox is that, in doing so, you become reliant on him . . . Trying to unplug from Musk, you realize he owns the socket.

Henry Snow@henrysnow· May 22

comptroller of the navy hugh palliser does in fact look exactly like a guy who would start insane drama with his coworker

Henry Snow@henrysnow· May 22

"IF HYPOTHETICALLY a VERY GOOD MAN were boldly proposing my proposals and anyone should get in my, I mean his, way, that person would be a traitor and a scoundrel and I-- I mean anyone in my position-- would be a national hero" I told you all 18th-cent. timber supply debates could get heated

A bunch of text from Yeoman Lott's 1767 "Important Hints Toward and Amendment of the Royal Dockyards"; he's self-pityingly rambling

Henry Snow@henrysnow· May 6

writing a bit about that Florida knock-off right-wing AP curriculum and wow this is especially revolting

Slavery Uprising in Santo Domingo: Between 1791 and 1804, a slave revolt in Haiti resulted in a race war, cruelty, and bloodshed. Over 100,000 whites and 60,000 blacks were killed. The violence caused American statesmen to realize that an imprudent or rash approach to resolving slavery could result in a similar race war and bloodshed in
America.

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Apr 29

> authored by alito

mr incredible meme where the image is really dark and he looks grim

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Apr 27

incredible poster's energy from this person. i must identify them. i must

proposed making wool export from the colony punishable by death, while allowing tax breaks for widows on their hypothetical slavery tax. But True Son clearly intended the tax to destroy slavery as quickly as possible, and their rhetoric was uncompromising: they exhorted their fellow patriots to “exert yourselves in pursuing a stop to that hellish practice of deluding and enslaving another part of the human.” “How amazing is it!” a True Son asked, that America could cry out “very justly” against only “a distant prospect of slavery” under Britain and “[emphasis in original] at the same time be guilty (as they really are) of enslaving, and promoting the slavery, of thousands and tens of thousands of their fellow creatures!!!”

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Apr 22

he continues to haunt us all (antisocial egoist utopian, 80% right, 20% left in a politically irrelevant way that still shapes discourse)

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Apr 22

NAM Rodger gets a lot wrong about 18th cent naval politics in my view but his narrative talent is undeniable, particularly when covering operations. "this he obligingly did" - excellent, understated, punchline

By this time it was too late. Byng’s squadron, now with thirteen ships of the line, met La Galissonière’s twelve and attacked, but it was handled with notable incompetence and only a few of the British ships, not including the flagship, were seriously engaged. The battle was a disappointment, but the British force was substantially intact and there was still everything to play for. The French position was so precarious that Byng needed only to cruise in the vicinity or let loose his frigates against the unescorted merchantmen bringing Richelieu’s supplies. The only hope for the French was for Byng to withdraw all British ships from the Western Mediterranean, and this he obligingly did. ‘What a scene Byng had open to him, and to throw it all away!’ exclaimed Boscawen when he heard.32 On 28 June, after an heroic resistance, Blakeney was forced to surrender.

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Apr 21

had to double check the notes to remind myself if i cut that bit (i did not) and wow this was a cursed series of footnotes

65. Beff Jezos (@BasedBeffJezos), Twitter, June 16, 2024, 7:28 p.m. ET.
66. “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter,” Future of Life
Institute, March 22, 2023.
67. Keach Hagey, “The Secrets and Misdirection Behind Sam Altman’s
Firing from OpenAI,” Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2025.
68. Jeffrey Dastin et al., “OpenAI Appoints New Boss as Sam Altman
Joins Microsoft,” Reuters, November 21, 2023; Jeffrey Dastin and
Aditya Soni, “Sam Altman to Return as OpenAI CEO After His
Tumultuous Ouster,” Reuters, November 22, 2023; Luciana Lopez,
“Economist Larry Summers Joins the Board of OpenAI as Ousted
CEO Sam Altman Returns,” cnn.com, November 22, 2023.
69. Marc Andreessen, “The Techno- Optimist Manifesto,” Andreessen
Horowitz, October 16, 2023, a16z.com.
70. Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions (William Morrow, 1987)

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Apr 14

"the uneven distribution of the postwar working class in time shaped the stubborn postwar problem of inflation"- while it's different generations we are dealing with now this feels relevant

page 13 of gabriel winant's the next shift

Henry Snow@henrysnow· Apr 13

there is no time like the present, as the international business order is in crisis, to learn more about its architects and architecture www.versobooks.com/products/312...