by Tim Sommers

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next. –Henry Ward Beecher

There are several long-running attempts to give AIs common sense. Or, at least, to build a useable database of “common sense” for AIs. MIT’s Media Lab shut down its “Open Mind Common Sense” project in 2016 after 17 years of collecting common sense, but Wordnet has been up and running in Princeton’s cognitive science lab since 1985 and is still going strong. It is now an independent, noncommercial database run by The Global WordNet Association and, purportedly, contains 12+ megabytes of common sense. The always scary sounding Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has its own Machine Common Sense project – and then there’s Delphi which focuses on “ethical” common sense. There’s probably more.

But common sense is a slippery notion. “A stabbing ‘with’ a cheeseburger,” Delphi has said, “is morally preferable to a stabbing ‘over’ a cheeseburger.” Which seems right, but common sensical? I don’t know. Cows say “Moo” is another example of Delphi’s AI common sense. But isn’t that just ordinary knowledge based on wide-spread (if sometimes second-hand) experience? If you stick a pin into a carrot, another nugget goes, it makes a hole in the carrot not the pin. Is that really what we mean by common sense?

G.E. Moore, along with Russel and Wittgenstein one of founders of analytic philosophy, famously proved the existence of an external world – which does seem common sensical – just by waving his hands about. “I can prove now,” he says, “that two human hands exist…[just] by holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, ‘Here is one hand’, and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, ‘and here is another’. How absurd it would be to suggest that I did not know it, but only believed it, and that perhaps it was not the case!”

I assume his appeal is ultimately to common sense – and not just his hands.

Which brings me to a paradox that occurred me when I first began studying philosophy that I still can’t quite shake. It’s this.

A philosophical theory can either go against common sense or it can support or justify common sense. Supporting common sense seems pointless. After all, what you are trying to prove is, by definition, already commonly recognized as the sensible view. But if you, instead, challenge or attack common sense what resources or knowledge can philosophy bring to bear powerful enough to overturn or undermine common sense – that which, again, everyone already knows to be the case? Read more »

by Azadeh Amirsadri

It’s a warm June day in 1976. I am 17 years old and standing with my family and my 30-year-old husband’s family at the airport In Tehran. My mother, grandmother, and mother-in-law have red eyes and red nose tips from crying and trying hard not to cry in public. My mother-in-law is seeing her firstborn leave again to go overseas, but this time with a new wife instead of going alone. My mother is seeing her daughter start a new life far away from her, and years later she told me a part of her was always not sure she had made the right decision to marry me off so young. In the picture we took at the airport, I am standing by my younger sisters, carrying a very cool beige Samsonite makeup case and from the look of my sisters and me, I doubt we could have known that it would be the last time we were in Iran together as a family, ever. My sisters and I are looking at the camera, I am scared, excited, and sad; my sisters are standing there, wondering probably what will happen next. When I say goodbye to my grandmother who had raised me for the first five years of my life, she discreetly puts a folded one-hundred-dollar bill in my hand and closes her fingers on it. She whispers to me that she wants me to buy something for myself when I get to my destination.

The flight that brought me to America had a stop in the UK and my husband, whom I had met three months earlier, bought himself a white wool Irish sweater at the long layover at the airport, as did the young Iranian woman who sat on the aisle seat next to me. She spoke Persian with an American accent even though she was Iranian, and had come to visit her family and was returning to the States. I disliked her right away for no good reason except that she had bought her Irish sweater and I hadn’t bought anything. I also envied the fact that she was traveling on her own. She and my husband were speaking to each other mostly in English, because it was easier for her, and she was telling him about her college in Boston, how far Philadelphia, our final destination was from the airport in New York, and other things that must have not been worth translating for me, as I didn’t speak English. With their new matching sweaters, smoking Dunhill cigarettes, and speaking to each other, I felt a complicity between them that excluded me.

We landed at JFK airport, a place my grandmother had warned us about because according to her, it was the largest airport in the world. She had asked him to hold my hand there and not let go the whole time, worried I might get lost in the size of that place. Quickly after landing, my husband bought a Popular Mechanics magazine at the newsstand and his colleague who was on the same flight, bought a Playboy magazine. As he was looking at the centerfold picture, he said to my husband, “My magazine’s pictures are better than yours,” making both of them laugh and making me extremely uncomfortable, feeling naked and exposed. The Boston girl got picked up by her boyfriend who lifted her in his arms and I disliked her even more because she could have a boyfriend who loved her and whom she loved, something I wasn’t allowed to have. Read more »

Samia Halaby. Jllayq, 2000.

More here , here, and here.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

Prime numbers are the atoms of arithmetic. Just as a water molecule can be broken into two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms, 12 can be broken into two 2s and a 3. Indeed, the defining feature of a prime number is that it cannot be factored into a nontrivial product of two smaller numbers. Two primes that are easy to remember are

12345678910987654321

and

131211109876543212345678910111213.

Prime numbers are not only fundamental in mathematics, they are a key ingredient in the cryptography that secures your bank account, email, and everything else online. We can quickly and easily multiply numbers to get things like

1619890232090123459992473430408218409867740110001373,

but it is incredibly slow and difficult to factor a number like this into its constituent primes. The primes give us a mathematical lock that is easy to close and impossible to open unless you know how it was made.

Sadly, once again, the earthly rewards of mathematics elude us. For the purposes of cryptography, pseudoprime numbers are close enough. These non-prime numbers act like prime numbers in all the important ways for cryptography, and they are much easier to find.

Nevertheless, in math and computer science circles there was a flurry of excitement this week at the discovery of a new prime. Last week, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search announced that

2^136279841 – 1 = 881694 … 86871551

is a prime number. The … is a yada yada of an awfully large number of digits. This new prime has 41,024,320 digits. That’s 16 million more digits than the second-largest known prime.

By comparison, AES-256 encryption is widely considered to be very secure, and it uses a key that is approximately 78 digits long. This prime is way too large to be of practical use. The goal is simply to find new prime numbers.

Why? George Mallory climbed Everest for the same reason: “because it’s there.” Unlike, say, the creators of livermorium, you don’t get to name a new prime number. But how can you not want to be one of the rare few who finds a new mathematical atom? Read more »

“Alone”

imagine the atomic affinities of the world
these clinging particles of stuff that look like chairs or moons,
that look like things that laugh and love,
this vast, maybe infinite web of motions,
these packets of energy that mutter
and reflect upon their own protons
spinning electrons off in breaths and sweat
distributing themselves in scents and sense,
who think themselves into being,
who imagine boundaries so concrete
they defy laws of physics and grace,
deny the electric pull of particles,
their magnetic attractions,
their nano network of thoughts and dreams,
their atomic affiliations that spin-off murderers and mystics
their inclination to combine,
their passion to enter or receive other
yet their odd insistence that they could,
despite those universal gravities, ever be
alone

Jim Culleny, 4/5/22

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by Mindy Clegg

As I start this essay, early voting just began in my state of Georgia which is a critical swing state. Our secretary of state announced record turn out on the first day of early voting. By the time this is posted, I will have already voted, and perhaps that might be true of many Americans who frequent this website. Others might reject voting all together, as they might feel voting has become a pointless act. While true that voting is not the only act of democratic participation, in this case avoiding a worse-case scenario with a second Trump presidency who has a well-organized fascist movement behind him is critical for any positive change in the near future.

The roadmap for a second Trump term (Project 2025) ignores the many challenges we face as a society in favor of blaming the “other” and criminalizing dissent from Christian nationalism. Some try to argue that Harris, who seems to be pivoting to a centrist position on at least some issues, might not be much better. I am advocating embracing the lesser of two evils here and casting your vote for Harris. Let’s highlight some very good reasons why avoiding the nuclear option of fascism is always the right move.

One of the biggest sticking points for voters on the left (and rightly so) is the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Even for many staunch supporters of the Zionist project, the war is becoming harder to justify as it expands to Lebanon. Frustrated Arab American voters in Michigan have been angered by the lack of traction on ending the war by the Biden administration. As a result, some are claiming they’ll cast a vote for Trump, which seems wild, considering he refuses to acknowledge that Palestinians even exist. Others are leaning towards Stein, who espouses an anti-war stance. She did gain the endorsement of David Duke which she rejected, but one wonders why. Foreign policy is one area that the voters have little direct input on and historically, the majority of the public vote on domestic issues.

At times, wars and the threat of wars shaped our choices of president, such as during the Vietnam war. The choice is rarely stark, as US wielding power abroad is a bi-partisan issue. Many Democrats tend to be more hawkish at times, such as when Kennedy and Johnson expanded US involvement in the Vietnam war. Electing Nixon in 1968 proved to be a disaster, as his “plan” to get us out involved widening the US bombing campaign, trying to do so in secret, and setting neighboring Cambodia down the path of genocide. As bad as what’s happening right now in Gaza is (and it’s really, really bad), another term of Trump would mean the full liquidation of Gaza, an expansion into Lebanon, and even a major strike on the Iranian nuclear infrastructure. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

When I was growing up, my mother and I would sometimes read or recite poetry to each other. Ours was not a poetic household, and my father would occasionally complain: “If poets have something to say, why don’t they just say it?” But we thought they did say it, albeit indirectly sometimes, and we continued with our Longfellow, a bit more quietly.

My mother had a collection of Longfellow’s works (he was probably her favorite poet). Another book we frequently read from was an anthology called Best Loved Poems: A Treasure-Chest of Favorite Verse for Everyday Enjoyment and Inspiration (edited by Richard Charlton MacKenzie, copyright 1946). Everyday enjoyment, that’s what we were after.

Mom was opposed to what she called moping, and she especially loved Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” (“Let us then be up and doing / With a heart for any fate”) and “The Rainy Day” (“Be still, sad heart! and cease repining; / Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.”). We also found Excelsior very satisfying to read aloud. It was one of the poems that taught me that you don’t need to understand everything about a poem to get the message or to enjoy it. I suspect this was also one of the poems my father found most annoying, because you really want to belt out the repeated word Excelsior, and perhaps raise a fist skyward as you do.

We often read other poems written in a similar spirit of inspiration—for example, “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley and “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth,” by Arthur Hugh Clough. I was comforted by Clough’s words of encouragement to the doubtful and worried; even as a child I was often apprehensive. I can’t remember how I felt about “Invictus,” except that, like “Excelsior,” it was satisfying to recite with great gusto. “In the fell clutch of circumstance / I have not winced nor cried aloud,” we exclaimed. The language seems all out of proportion to the life we lived, but I liked the archaic phrasing (who talks about the fell clutch of anything these days?). Looking back, I see that my struggles became more difficult when I tried to meet them with silent, tearless stoicism. Perhaps I was trying to borrow bravado. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

My friend Ian worked hard all his life. In his seventies, he bought a big house and moved his son’s family in with him. It’s the classic multigenerational setup, and it seems to be working out. Only one thing bothers him—the zombies.

“My son and his kids love the whole zombie thing,” he says. “They watch The Walking Dead and play video games where thousands of zombies come right at ’em, and get blasted to smithereens.”

“Those games can be violent,” I say, as the young waitress pours our coffee.

“It’s not the violence. It’s the zombies. You ever watch a zombie movie?”

“Sure,” I say. “Shaun of the Dead. I love those Edgar Wright-Simon Pegg movies.”

“Did you like it?”

“Nah, I hated it.”

“Why?”

“Zombies,” I shrug. “They’re old people. They’re us.”

The secret message. Ian nods sadly. Ian knows old people. His retirement job is managing a nonprofit apartment complex for the elderly poor. He and I sometimes disagree, but on the subject of zombies, we’re on the same page.

What is a zombie? A stiff-limbed, shuffling figure in out-of-date clothes. They have thin lips, yellow teeth, staring eyes, and gaping mouths.

Sitting a booth at the diner where Ian and I have lunched for many years, I look around and see dozens of people just like that—seated around us or struggling to make their way to the toilet. Read more »

The sun seen through wispy clouds, from my window.

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by David J. Lobina

Firstly: fascism is dead and it is not coming back. By fascism it is meant the historical fascism of the 1920-40s, in particular the primus inter (more-or-less) pares fascism of 1920s Italy – id est, Fascism – and to a lesser extent that of Nazi Germany, notwithstanding the fact that Nazism is different to Fascism in some important respects, as stressed before in these very pages – alas not being the case here, secondes pensées sont (often) les bonnes.

Secondly: this is not our opinion alone, but that of both Umberto Eco, explicitly stated so in his little note on fascism, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, the latter saying so-so in a little-known pamphlet by the title of Il fascismo degli antifascisti. For the latter author, historical fascism was the traditional or archaeological kind, an archaic fascism that did not exist any more at the time of writing (circa 1960-1975) and should not be confused with the fascism that 1960-70s kids kept denouncing, and the Owen Joneses of the 2020s keep denouncing, this milieu then and now forming an archaeological antifascism that is rather comfortable, as Pasolini put it then. For the former author, in turn, historical fascism was the original kind, and also dead, but there was a warning therein: an eternal fascism can be unearthed in terms of the fascist ‘way of talking and feeling’ – the linguistic habits of fascism.

Thirdly: what the Eco of the little note was most concerned about was the then contemporary developments in Italian politics that had brought a post-fascist political party into government in 1994. In this note Eco listed a number of features encompassing what may be termed a fascist temperament, a loose connection of features that has received little attention in the scholarship on fascism – the world of the discretus et sapiens – but an outsized interest elsewhere. Eco did not envision this list as a set of necessary or sufficient conditions to define fascism; nothing so unambitious: one single feature sufficed ‘to allow fascism to coagulate around it’, a sentiment widely echoed today.

Fourthly: Fascism, however, is not a way of talking or feeling, or a temperament, let alone an eternal phenomenon, in the same way that there is no eternal communism, or a communist way of talking or feeling; no eternal liberalism, or a liberal way of talking or feeling; no eternal anarchism, or an anarchist way of talking or feeling. The Okhrana is reputed to have dismissed the stereotypically-looking revolutionaries, and rightly so; the same applies, mutatis mutandis, in the state of affairs being surveyed by our telescope. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

The words are fine, and some of the concepts they represent rather appealing, actually. It’s the usages to which they are put that bug me, usages that are by turns deceiving, dishonest, obfuscating, bogus, hokey, and euphemistic. There is a theme binding them all together, one concerning us humans’ exploitation of the wild world. The words pertain to how we use “resources,” which I define as the materials that make up the planet and its life as viewed through a bottomless stomach. These terms are unthinkable without our having domesticated ourselves and our surroundings: I cannot imagine our foraging ancestors in the Pleistocene having need of such words. Only a creature in a broken relationship with its planet needs a special terminology to salve its wound. Such words allow us to entertain feelings of wholesomeness while engaged in plunder.

1. Organic

Originally, pertaining to organisms. That’s the simple root. For a long time, matter associated with organisms was thought to be special because it was alive. Surely a vital force animated such material. Then a chemist name Friedrich Wöhler managed to produce urea — a component of urine — without having to pee in a bottle. He found it could be produced from ordinary, dead matter as well as through the processes of life. Thus began organic chemistry — the study of the properties of the carbon atom. At that moment, the word bifurcated, with continuing absurd consequences.

Among farmers, some pursued the synthetic way initiated by the likes of Wöhler (think Norman Borlaug and industrial agriculture), while others clung to vitalist notions, such as those promulgated by occultist Rudolph Steiner, whereby the products of living systems were privileged, “synthetics” be damned, bringing us the current linguistic mess. Organic food enthusiasts parted ways with the organic chemists around the beginning of the twentieth century, with “organic” gaining positive connotations and “chemical” negative ones.

Today the United States has the government-sanctioned term “organic” to describe a veritable Leviticus of “Allowed” and “Prohibited” substances and practices put into place to ensure that a farm is, well, organic. The term now conflicts with the scientific, chemical definition in just about every way. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Gus Mitchell

The following piece is my own minor contribution to the “Surrealism Centenary.” I begin with a disavowal of the entire “2024 centenary” enterprise, which seems to have added little to our appreciation of the group, and because I would question allowing Andre Breton, great though he sometimes was, to continue to define the wildly heterodox big bang to which he claimed total definition in October 1924.

Let us begin to celebrate the spirit of the surreal again. True to that spirit, let us slough off the burden of officialism and of art history. Let us not be bound to Breton or (heaven help us) Dali any longer.

This year should begin an overhaul of correction to the Anglophone ignorance of the movement’s noblest, most enduring, and still-dangerous representatives, who always were the outcasts, misfits, and weirdos among those proudly self-proclaimed outcasts, misfits, and weirdos.

Of these, a host of obscurer names and out of print-translations can be dug into online.

What I outline here is merely my favourite example.

In the 1910s, a quartet of teenaged artistic comrades in provincial France––Rene Daumal, Robert Gilbert-Lecompte, novelist Roger Vailland and Robert Meyrat––began a drug-fuelled quest into what they termed “experimental metaphysics”. After forming something of an adolescent secret society/artistic movement (which they dubbed Simplisme) this core quartet moved to Paris, made some older acquaintances and formed a short-lived journal: Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game) of which only three issues appeared, between 1928 and 1932. (The essence of this work and an essential English handbook to the group can be found in the English translation Theory of the Great Game, edited by Dennis Duncan, pictured above.) Read more »

by Adele A. Wilby

Renowned and respected for her scholarship, her history of authorship of many books on dictatorship and her political experience, is it any wonder that Anne Applebaum’s new book Autocracy, Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World has been so critically received; she is an expert on her subject. This slim volume provides us with an incisive exposition and analysis of how autocrats function in the world today, securing their own personal power and wealth, and in Applebaum’s view, posing a threat to democracies.

For Applebaum, autocratic regimes clearly pose a threat to democracies, but about which states is she referring? The number of autocrats is, according to her, extensive and includes communists, monarchists, nationalists and theocrats. On Applebaum’s ‘list’ of autocracies are, predictably, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea – the well-known adversaries of the West – amongst many others. ‘Softer autocracies and hybrid democracies, sometimes called illiberal democracies’ such as Turkey, Singapore and India also come under her purview. It appears that autocracies and ‘softer autocracies’ outnumber the democracies in the world today and most of the world’s population lives under such regimes, and that is the problem for Applebaum.

We learn from Applebaum that the ‘art’ of autocracy in the modern world is very much up to speed, taking advantage of a globalised world, involving sophisticated networks of ‘financial structures, a complex of security services – military, paramilitary, police – and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda and disinformation’. The apparatus deployed by autocrats to achieve their political and financial objectives are probably used by most states across the globe; it is the purpose for which they are used that irks Applebaum. In her view a ‘ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power’ drives the autocrats in the world today. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Along The Sidewalk On A Late Afternoon, October 2024.

Composite, digital photographs.

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by Richard Farr

For several weeks I’ve had an article by the excellent Rick Perlstein squatting unread in my Ought-To-Read list. The title is Everything You Wanted to Know About World War III but Were Afraid to Ask. I am afraid to ask: although I ought to want to know, right now I don’t. “The world is too much with us”: unlike Wordsworth, but like you perhaps, I read the latest every day about Gaza, the Ukraine, South Sudan, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and another poll reminding me that tens of millions of my fellow citizens think a poisonous thug with a criminal record will make America great again. Sometimes you just have to switch off and leave the world behind. Even if you’d feel guilty being reminded that you haven’t been paying attention to Syria, Venezuela, the Rohingya, the Uyghurs, the women of Afghanistan, the children working in cobalt mines in the DRC, or the disturbing fact that people are actually out there buying Boris Johnson’s memoirs. 

I was thinking about this reality-fatigue recently while struggling to finish a different book. Look on the bright side: I’m not going to bore you with an account of the experience, which I have fairly often, of picking up a novel that has been declared “plangent” and “luminous” (or, that champion among meaningless back cover standbys, “fiercely original”) and  feeling embarrassed that I don’t get what the fuss is about. No, I’m going to address something more important than that: the experience of trying to read an excellent book, and feeling embarrassed that I barely had the moral fortitude to work through its contents.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs. You have to get a long way in before you uncover the source of the title, but it’s worth the wait. The subject is 9/11, tangentially. But really the subject is our crimes, our brutalities, our layer cake of madnesses and delusions in the wake of 9/11. The battalion upon red-smeared gray battalion of ugly details we either chose not to learn, or chose to forget, or chose to swallow our government’s lies about. All that — and it’s about the uses and abuses, especially in the Land of Liberty, of virtually limitless surveillance.

Not to be outdone by her own title, Kerry Howley has invented in this book what as far as I can see is an entirely original style of writing in the genre of investigative journalism. We think we know what this kind of thing is supposed to sound like, and it’s not supposed to sound like someone responding to a bad hangover by having a panic attack and then swallowing a handful of amphetamines. But Howley’s sometimes hallucinatory style is a revelation: finally, here’s a voice that suits and perfectly illuminates the material. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

Every time I read or watch anything about the election I hear some variant of the phrase “margin of error.”  My mathematically attuned ears perk up, but usually it’s just a slightly pretentious way of saying the election is very close or else that it’s not very close. Schmargin of error might be a better name for metaphorical uses of the phrase.

To be fair, the phrase is often supplemented with precise numbers (plus or minus 1.5%, for example) that purport to quantify exactly how tight the race is (or isn’t).  Unfortunately these numbers are not as reliable as they might seem. The problem is that an enabling condition for this precision is that a random sample of voters be polled and the larger it is, the better.

A few technical remarks on the meaning of the margin of error in the next three paragraphs, which can be skimmed or skipped.

The basic qualitative idea: If we imagine many random samples of voters being taken, the sample percentages supporting a candidate will vary from sample to sample, of course, but these sample percentages will naturally cluster around the true percentage, P, of voters supporting the candidate in the whole population.

Importantly, this clustering of the sample probabilities can be described more quantitatively if we’re dealing with random samples of voters. In fact, if we assume that p is the percentage of voters supporting candidate A in a random sample and n is the number of voters in the sample, then we can get a good estimate of P, which is what we really want to know.

Specifically, the interval ranging from -2√[p(1-p)/n] to +2√[p(1-p)/n] will encompass, P, the percentage of voters in the whole population supporting candidate A, about  95% of the time.

Half of the above interval, which will vary a bit depending on p in the particular sample taken, is the margin of error. Since n appears in the denominator, the larger the sample is, the narrower the interval encompassing P. Read more »

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