by Samuel Dunlap

In 2007, the neuroscientist Sabrina Tom slid volunteers into an fMRI scanner at UCLA and offered them coin-flip gambles. Win twenty dollars or lose twenty. Win thirty or lose ten. Will you take the bet? Most people refused any gamble where the potential loss exceeded about half the potential gain. The scans showed why: as potential losses grew, the brain’s reward regions responded more sharply to what could be lost than to what could be gained. Loss aversion — losing something hurts roughly twice as much as gaining it feels good — was visible in the tissue.

That same year, evolutionary psychologists were calling loss aversion a design feature — a calibrated response to environments where losing a day’s food could mean death but gaining extra food meant only marginally better odds. Meanwhile, behavioral economists were calling it a violation of rational choice theory. A rational agent’s choices shouldn’t depend on how identical information is described — but under loss aversion, they do. Frame a surgery as having a 90% survival rate and patients choose it; frame it as having a 10% mortality rate and they hesitate.

Three traditions, three accounts, all well-evidenced — and not three ways of saying the same thing. The neuroscientist suggests modulating the neural response. The behavioral economist suggests reframing the choice. The evolutionary psychologist suggests understanding the adaptive function before overriding it. Nobody has a principled way of deciding among them, because the field has never settled a prior question: what is a cognitive bias? Read more »

by Derek Neal

Allopathy and homeopathy are two contrasting theories of medicine. Allo, meaning other, and homo, meaning same, indicate how suffering (pathos) is cured in these two approaches. Modern medicine, speaking generally, is based on the principle of allopathy, meaning that sickness is counteracted by healing and therapeutic treatments; homeopathy, often considered alternative medicine or pseudoscience, is based on the idea that “like cures like,” so rather than introducing an antidote to an illness, the medicine used is meant to produce a response similar to the illness itself, stimulating the body’s natural healing mechanisms and curing the underlying ailment.

Some illnesses, however, are incurable. This is what a psychiatrist, Dr. Host, tells 16-year-old Nick in Michael Clune’s recent novel Pan. Nick visits Dr. Host midway through the story to help with panic attacks he has been experiencing for over a year. Early in the novel, Nick is able to calm himself by breathing into a paper bag, which is recommended after a visit to the emergency room, and he has found other temporary reprieves, such as reading (he delays a panic attack by staying up all night reading the 19^th century classic Ivanhoe), not thinking about the panic when it’s happening (he refers to “a gate in [his] mind,” which he can keep mentally closed, preventing a full blown attack), and, most intriguingly, through a sort of pagan ritual that he and his friends conduct on a day they call “Belt Day.” Unlike the first two remedies, which work by acting in opposition to the panic, the Belt Day ritual functions by inducing panic.

The events of Belt Day take place in an abandoned barn that functions as the hang out spot for Nick and his group of friends, which includes Ty (best friend), Sarah (girlfriend), Ian (group leader), Tod (coolest/most mysterious kid in high school), Steph (stoner friend), and Larry (comedic relief). A good portion of the novel takes place in the barn, which revolves around drug consumption (usually marijuana and later, acid) and the adolescent philosophical speculation that follows. The other settings are Nick’s Catholic high school, his father’s anonymous townhouse, and other suburban locations, such as Ace Hardware and 7-Eleven. Part of the pleasure of the novel lies in seeing these soulless and sterile American places imbued with a sense of, not necessarily beauty, but the worthiness of being artistically rendered (“There are mystical places and times of the year in the American suburbs,” thinks Nick). Read more »

Fugitive

Big brown bison walks the white line
of a two-lane, black eyes scanning for a sign.

Regarding asphalt he wonders
what happened to the grass.

How did this black ribbon come to bisect
my meadow between talus and hundred-foot pines,
and where are the columbine?

He asks no one in particular because
not even the alpha male in a herd would know.

A car crawls slowly up behind
capturing the remains of a wilderness,
smart-phones gripped in hands of small
Homo Sapiens snap at the ends of arms
thrust through windows trying to catch
an outlaw bison who broke from a farm,
whose humped shade steps like a rope-walker
down the white line’s length wondering
where the stillness went.

Where are the laurel and clover?

What are these beasts that glide like
murmuring ghosts along this scar
in my pasture clicking like crickets
trailing clouds exuding burnt
Cenozoic scents?

by Jim Culleny
Oct 31, 2010

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by Thomas R. Wells

The world’s richest 1% have more purchasing power, and hence more command over what the economy produces than ordinary people. They can afford a more extravagant lifestyle – at the extreme including multiple yachts, mansions, and private jets. One may reasonably quibble with the way activists like Oxfam produce their numbers, but it is obviously true that the average 1 percenter has a far greater climate impact than the median person in a rich country, let alone the world. What a waste! What a crime against the planet! How can it be allowed to continue?

Oxfam, Guardian readers, an unfortunate number of my academic colleagues, and many others are confusing questions of fairness (whether huge economic inequality can be justified) with questions of harm (whether inequality speeds up climate change). Specifically, it can be true that

Per person, rich people do enormously more harm to the climate than ordinary people, and

Redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor would make the world fairer

Without it being true that

Redistributing rich people’s wealth would result in less harm to the climate

I. A Robin Hood tax on the rich would increase climate change

The reason is quite straightforward. Per dollar, rich people’s spending is far less carbon-intensive than that of ‘ordinary’ (middle-class) people, let alone the world’s poor. If the purchasing power of the rich were transferred to ordinary people, it would be spent on the things we want, which tend to be more carbon-intensive. The result would be an increase in total GHG emissions and an acceleration of global climate change.

Perhaps this needs more explanation.

Rich people — pretty much by definition — already have most of the material things they want. So most of their money is spent on more immaterial things, requiring far less energy and matter in their production and consumption, and far more labour. Because they are so much richer than ordinary people they can afford to directly employ people to serve their needs – cooks, nannies, gardeners and so on. Many of the material objects they do buy are produced in unnecessarily labour intensive — basically artisanal — ways, such as million dollar cars and Louis Vuitton handbags.

Some of this consumption may be because the rich like nice things, just like anyone else, and they can afford to have them. Some of it may be due to a spiritually empty desire to show off their status via conspicuous consumption. The important thing is that although the rich spend a lot of money the way they spend it is not particularly carbon intensive. At least, it is less carbon intensive than the way we middle class people spend our money, and much less than how the world’s poor do. Read more »

by Bonnie McCune

Political discussions and debates leave me cold. That’s because I abhor conflict, and politics always seem to be accompanied by disagreements, fights, raised voices, and anger. When I think about the hot topics in the 60s and 70s, many of them centered on matters of race, I associate those times with images of red-faced individuals confronting one another, not infrequently accompanied by fists, even guns. Sometimes soldiers or militias or mobs.

Fortunate for my peace of mind at the time, I was a mother of young children, and my days were devoted to issues like potty training and memorizing the times table or arranging play dates and stretching my miniscule food budget. But the older I get, the more terrified I become over the idea of violence.

This set me thinking about regulations historically called EEO/AA (Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action) and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). School busing was a primary one that set tempers aflame in parts of the country in days gone by. In my area out West, there wasn’t nearly the violence as, say, in the South, but still public opinion hovered at mild dislike. I thought the idea at least deserved a try. I’d learned by this time that the highfalutin ideals of American democracy often fell far short of what their originators hoped for. Here was an experiment I and my children could be part of.

We didn’t have an option in any case. Our public schools were part of the effort in our area. Having majored in psychology and sociology in college, I thought this the perfect opportunity to see models put into practice. Can theories do any good for society at large?

Life interfered. I became busier and busier, went back to work, became involved with parent groups, politics, writing, travel. Meanwhile my family experienced their lives in what was now an integrated society. Not perfect, but integrated.

Did the sky fall? Were we ostracized by friends and neighbors? Did our property lose value? The short answer? No. The long answer is much different, primarily because it is long. Complicated topics frequently take a great deal of time to develop and work on. Read more »

by Philip Graham

In the first part of our conversation at 3 Quarks Daily, the writer Kipling Knox and I spoke of the parallels of our recent books: dappled with ghosts, in similar Midwestern landscapes, they’re also fictions that are expanding into world-building versions of themselves.

From there our conversation has turned, in Part 2, to how taking the road of independent publishing allows writers to attempt tactics–in the writing, production, presentation and marketing of their work–that would likely not otherwise be available to them. Perform a radio play version (with actors from Second City) of one of your collection’s stories, accompanied by live music? Done. Drive through the country and deposit free copies of your novel in Little Free Libraries? Ditto. Illustrate your books with original photos, or line drawing? Yes. Have readers fan out across the world (the Coliseum in Rome, the Ubud Monkey Sanctuary in Bali, etc) to drop off mysterious cards that link to your novel? You bet.

Philip Graham: So, to continue. We have both, as authors, recently explored our own pathways that veer from traditional publishing models—you, at the beginning of your career, and I near the tail end of mine. Under the Moon in Illinois: Stories from a Haunted Land, your first book, arrived from an independent publishing house you founded, Prairie State Press. The book is beautifully illustrated with your own evocative photos, and there are even eerie videos of two of the stories, both of which feature music by your son. You’ve even created events that seem to rise above the usual book signing appearances. I’d love to hear more of how you gave yourself agency in this project.

Kipling Knox: I think once you decide that you’re not going to try to chase benefactors in traditional publishing, a lot of creative avenues open up. When you become an indie publisher for your work, you own all your intellectual property and you can expand or riff on it however you like. For my first book I just kept adding things to enhance the overall experience of the stories. As you say, there are photos in the book, and audio versions of some of the stories, backed by my son’s music. I made a few videos. And then we put on a really fun show, where I adapted one of the stories into a radio play. We had actors from Chicago’s Second City come down and read with me, and my son’s band played an original score. But I didn’t set out to do all these things at the beginning. It was more that at each turn, we thought about what would make the material more interesting for people.

PG: Actors from Second City! I love this. Please, tell me more.

KK: One of my best friends from high school, Brian Boland, was a regular on the main stage at Second City, which helped define improvisational comedy and produced so many famous comic actors. He’s also an accomplished voice actor and has been in some ads our readers have probably seen (like for Geico). He brought two of his colleagues and they each took on characters in the story, “The Ad Man After Dark.” It was amazing to witness how they brought the characters to life and entertained the audience. Read more »

by Barbara Fischkin

Round about St. Patrick’s Day, in the Spring of 1984, my Jewish mother, Ida Fischkin, learned that within months I would marry Jim Mulvaney.

She offered enthusiastic congratulations, as did my father. They loved Jim. We had been living together for a few years.

“Please tell me the honeymoon is in Aruba,” my mother said, sounding hopeless. She had already guessed where we were headed: Ireland, setting up shop in Dublin then establishing an outpost in Belfast to cover the raging civil war.

Jim and I exchanged vows on June 17, underneath a proper Jewish chuppah on the outdoor deck of an Irish style pub-cum-restaurant on the shores of New York’s Jamaica Bay. In less than two weeks we would move across the Atlantic. Jim and I were both newspaper reporters and this ancient Celtic-versus-Anglo story had raged again in recent years, although it bored most American editors. Jim pitched our bosses at Newsday with a suggestion of a Ireland bureau to appeal to the large number of potential readers who claim Irish ancestry – 6 percent of residents of New York City, double that on Long Island.

During the weeks leading up to our wedding, I realized how fortunate I was to have a mother who, like me, appreciated the value of risk and adventure, particularly if these included happy endings. As a six-year-old, in the midst of an Eastern European pogrom, my mother had saved her own life, astonishing my grandparents, who thought she was dead. A different sort of mother could have made those days of frantic preparations hellish instead of compelling.

There was, though, one small problem. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

It was just a dog.

Another day in Sayulita, Mexico, with my morning coffee on the balcony. Life was good. 

The sun was about to rise. A small surf town was stirring. The big fat iguanas were starting to wake up, too.

I sit on this balcony each morning. 

• Wake up at 6:15
• Make a pot of coffee
• Sit outside and observe

This is how the start of each day goes. There is a house across the street from mine. Usually, what I see is an older woman climbing down her outdoor spiral staircase.

Her routine is just as consistent as mine. There’s a coffee place around the corner. Most mornings, she’ll wake up, head to the cafe, and be walking up the stairs with her to-go cup ten minutes later. By then, I’m sipping too. It’s like a tropical version of Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

But that’s not what happened this time.

There was walking. And it was on the staircase as usual. But this time, the woman was absent. Instead, I was looking at a small white and brown circle of fur. 

My neighbor across the street had been turned into a mini basset hound.

Let’s call him Stanley.

Stanley was probably about 20 pounds, and less than a foot off the ground. 

What was interesting wasn’t that I was looking at a dog. It’s what Stanley was doing:

Taking the steps one-by-one, just like his owner.  Read more »

by David Hoyt 

Do birds have a sense of beauty? Do they, or does any animal, have an aesthetic sense? Do they respond to beauty in ways we might find familiar – with a feeling of awe, suffused with attraction, mixed with joy? Do they seek it out, and perhaps even work to fashion it from their surroundings? Darwin thought so, and made the idea the subject of his second major work, The Descent of Man (1871). In it, he outlined a mechanism by which the sense of beauty might, by shaping mating preferences, work to shape the form of insects, fish, and birds in a manner parallel to the better known process of natural selection. The resulting beauty of form, sound, or movement, Darwin argued, is neither the result of intelligent design, nor a necessary indication of superior fitness. Beauty, as Richard Prum has put it, simply happens – but in an organized, understandable way that leads to the dazzling primary feathers of a Peacock, or the bewitching song of a Wood Thrush.

The idea was, as ornithologist Matt Ridley calls it in the subtitle of his recent book, Darwin’s “strangest idea.” It is probably safe to say that the idea, known as sexual selection, was also his most original, and perhaps even most controversial, even more so than the idea of a blind transformism capable of achieving astounding organic adaptations over time. Though it made steady headway after it was introduced, natural selection was challenging enough for many to accept in the second half of the nineteenth century. Sexual selection, on the other hand, premised as it was on idiosyncratic female preference driving the evolution of ever-more varied and harmonious displays among male suitors, was, in the late Victorian period, simply a step too far. As a number of recent authors on the subject have noted, including Ridley and Prum, by the early twentieth century the idea was ushered out the door like an embarrassing dinner guest.

How this happened is a story that has not been fully told outside the confines of ornithology or the history of biology. Read more »

I have given myself a halo and am now the saint of manholes. Also, my ears are not that big, I am wearing ear muffs. 🙂

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by John Ambrosio

In a recent interview in the New York Times Magazine, Robert Reich, a progressive university teacher and prolific writer, who worked in three presidential administrations, including serving as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, commented that his views of conservatives had changed because of a close friendship with Alan Simpson, a former Republican Senator from Wyoming. After attending a dinner with approximately 20 Republicans at Simpson’s home, including some Trump supporters, Reich wrote that “they were, I think, it’s fair to say, absolutely lovely people. Generous and kind and totally enjoyable. Alan taught me that the humanity of people in Wyoming, and in the center of this country, and many, many Republicans is so much more important than whether they believe in Social Security.”

My experience living in a rural Midwest city for nearly two decades led me to a similar conclusion, that the community where I reside is mostly comprised of very decent people, who care deeply for their families and friends, who are hard-working, responsible, thrifty, and honest, all qualities that I value and admire. There is also a strong and genuine sense of community, of helping neighbors and others in need, which I also find very appealing.

All of this leaves me with a troubling question: How can such genuinely decent people consistently vote for Trump and MAGA Republicans? Part of the answer is simply the inertia of tradition, custom, and habit: voting Republican is an essential part of their identity that is deeply rooted in certain ways of thinking, being, and belonging that do not change easily. It is also due to a kind of complacency, to an ignorance of U.S. history and the structure and functioning of the federal government, and to being embedded in conservative religious and political ideologies that frame how they interpret and understand their lived experience. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

My late father-in-law was an old-school family physician. He didn’t believe a computer would ever be as good a diagnostician as a human being. He understood that – in principle at least – a computer could read all the medical literature in every language and remember everything it read. He understood a computer would never over-weight its recent “experience” the way a person might. He knew a computer would not be subject to confirmation bias or groupthink or the rest of the errors to which the human mind is susceptible. But he still believed a good human doctor would always be a better diagnostician than a machine. He believed his decades of experience gave him a special sense that could not be captured in zeroes and ones.

I don’t know what Old Doc Silk would say now that AI can pass the bar exam and write symphonies, solve complex math problems, read x-rays, and write code. I suspect he would change his mind. Nevertheless, I find myself taking his position with regard to the work I do. I don’t think there will ever be a satisfactory AI labor arbitrator or AI judge.

The distinction turns on what we are trying to accomplish. Let’s start with an easy case. We know what an AI chess player is trying to accomplish. It is trying to win chess games. If it can beat its opponents, it’s a good chess player. And if it can beat all its opponents, it’s a champion chess player. Beating all its opponents just is what a chess champion does. The same is true of an AI that reads radiology scans. We know what a tumor is, and we can tell when a tumor has been correctly identified. If we have an AI that correctly identifies more tumors than all the other tumor detectors available (without falsely identifying things that are not tumors), then it is the best tumor detector. There is nothing else to it.

But what would a champion labor arbitrator or a champion judge do better than its competitors? If the answer is it would dispense justice better, that’s fine. But then we need to know what justice is. And that’s the problem we started with. Identifying justice is what we need judges and arbitrators for in the first place. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

Humans agonize over the inevitability of death. Across a range of philosophical traditions, philosophers advise people to recognize that the present moment is the only time that really exists; the past is over, and the future has not yet come. Meditation on this fact can help us to respond in healthy ways to anxieties about the future and to fear of death in particular. At the same time, we treat non-human animals as if they are less deserving of consideration because we view them as living in a perpetual present. It is common for humans to justify their behavior toward animals by appeal to the claim that animals do not have a sense of past and future. In what follows, I’ll dive into arguments of this type, and I’ll sketch some general responses to them.

We kill non-human animals for all sorts of human purposes: for food, for sport, for research, when they engage in “unacceptable” behaviors or when we view members of their species as inherently “undesirable,” when we want their fur, when we view them to be nuisances, and so on. We kill animals for reasons for which no rational person would ever kill a human being. The evidence provided by our behavior as a species suggests that humans, as a group, do not view the lives of non-human animals as deserving of protection and defense. It is not only that we take non-human animal lives to be lower in comparative worth when compared to the lives of humans; it is also that we tend to treat the lives of many non-human animals as if they are not valuable at all. We feel strongly about our companion animals and grieve them when they die, but don’t extend that concern more broadly. Most people these days readily recognize non-human animals as sentient creatures. They recognize that such creatures can experience pleasure and pain. They may even believe that it is wrong to cause unnecessary suffering to a non-human animal. These same people often stop short of accepting the conclusion that it is wrong or even bad to kill a non-human animal. One potential explanation may be that we think whatever it is that makes death bad for a human being simply does not apply to the death of a non-human animal.

What explains this perception of difference? Anthropocentrism, or human bias, are related explanations. Are there other, more defensible accounts of difference? Read more »

by River Lerner

If one strolled into Lovestruck Books, a floor-level shop that tucked itself into Cambridge’s Brattle Street just over a year ago, one would indeed be struck by the cheery, colorful atmosphere, the warm aroma of coffee from the adjacent cafe, and the giggles of gaggles of women (and odd folks such as myself) leafing through endless volumes and kinds of illicit romance. One might earn a free bookmark, as did this writer, that declares: “In a love triangle with my book boyfriends.” Index card placards line the rows of featured texts adorned by gilded covers of dragons and bloody roses. On the homemade placards are endorsements by the staff for this week’s top literary picks.

Book after book, in different handwritten fonts, these voices join in chorus: “If you’re a fan of ACOTAR…”

Everyone at Lovestruck knows ACOTAR: the beloved, worn acronym for A Court of Thorns and Roses book-turned-series by Sarah J. Maas, penned when she was only twenty-three. This 2015 genre gateway book took contemporary romantasy by storm as a respun tale of Beauty and the Beast… with significantly more magic and make-outs. Here I presume my reader is familiar with the first two books, namely ACOTAR and ACOMAF (A Court of Mist and Fury, the sequel.) I also presume my reader is likewise heartwrenched by not the love story we are initially spoon-fed between Feyre and Tamlin, but rather her verboten dynamic with the night-cloaked, jasmined, infuriatingly cocky and transcendently clever dandy known as Rhysand.

Rhysand is more than, in Feyre’s words, the face of a thousand dreams and nightmares. He is also the subject of many a heated online debate about the morally grey character [1-8]… i.e. what it is (if it exists) and whether Rhys qualifies. The ACOTAR community has polarized views on this matter, with many individuals shifting positions as they receive the revelations offered in ACOMAF. But consider the tense year between their publication dates—May 2015 to May 2016—when the community was left on the cliffhanger of why Rhys takes a special interest in Feyre while he also tortures, torments, and belittles her. Utilizing ACOTAR alone, it takes some real book biopsy and tasseography to get a sense of his true ethical temperature, motivational drivers, and north star.

Moral grey attempts to capture the unflattening of heroes and villains into complex characters who waver, err, and do not always live up to their ideals or our expectations of either pole. I postulate there are three shades to be considered: ambivalent, ambiguous, and neutral. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Blizzard in Fractals. Boston, February, 2026.

Digital photograph.

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by Malcolm Murray

Over the past year, there has been significant movement in AI risk management, with leading providers publishing safety frameworks over the past year that function as AI risk management. However, the problem is that these are not actually proper risk management when you compare them to established practice in other high-risk industries.

In other industries, risk management typically has 5 components. These are all interconnected and important. They are: Risk Identification, Risk Assessment, Risk Evaluation, Risk Treatment and Risk Governance. These go by different names depending on the framework, and are sometimes also grouped differently. For example, in the International AI Safety Report, we call them Identification, Analysis/Evaluation, Mitigation and Governance. In a recently published paper that I worked on, Open Problems in Frontier AI Risk Management, they are instead Risk Planning, Risk Identification, Risk Analysis, Risk Evaluation and Risk Mitigation.

The exact wording and grouping does not matter, what matters is the activity. I have found that a good way to explain what the key activities are can be done using the concept of the map and the territory. Basically, first, we want to understand which territory we are in – this is risk identification. Then we create a map of that territory – that is risk assessment. Third, we determine alternative paths to proceed through the territory. This can be compared to risk evaluation. We then need to choose a path and pursue it. This is risk treatment. And finally, the risk governance equivalent aspect can be expressed as stopping once in a while to get a second pair of eyes on the compass, to determine that we’re still going in the right direction.

However, in what has become the norm in current AI risk management, only a limited subset of these are actually being done. What typically happens is an assessment of capabilities, and then, if the capabilities reach a specific threshold, a corresponding implementation of predetermined safeguards.

This means there are several missing areas where risk management is not happening. Read more »