Over at Reddit:

NOAM CHOMSKY: The first question here is from cocoon56: Do you currently see an elephant room of cognitive science, just like you named one 50 years ago—I guess that's a reference to my critique of radical behaviorism—something that needs addressing that gets too little attention?

Well, one thing that I think gets too little attention in the room of cognitive science is cognitive science. Most of the work that's done just doesn't seem to me to bear on cognitive science. I could pick up a couple of journals here and give examples.

Cognitive science ought to be concerned—should be just a part of biology. It's concerned with the nature, the growth, the development, maybe ultimately the evolution, of a particular subsystem of the organism, namely the cognitive system, which should be treated like the immune system or the digestive system, the visual system, and so on. When we study those systems, there are a number of questions we ask.

One question is of course, you know, what they are: can we characterize them? But that's almost totally missing in cognitive science. I mean, take my own particular area of interest, language. A ton of work in what's called “cognitive science” on what they call “language”, but it's very rare to see some effort to characterize what it is. Well, if you can't do that, it doesn't make much difference what else you do.

The second kind of question you have to ask about any organ, if you like (some use the term loosely), subsystem of the body, is how it gets the way it is. So how does it go from some initial state, which is genetically determined, to whatever state it assumes? And in investigating that topic, there are a number of different factors that you can take apart for analytic purposes. And one is the specific genetic constitution that's related specifically to this system. It doesn't mean that every piece of it is used only for this system, but just whatever combination of genetically determined properties happens to determine that you have a mammalian rather than an insect visual system, for example, or a gut-brain, or whatever it may be. That's one. The second is whatever data are outside that modify the initial state to yield some attained state. And the third is: how do laws of nature enter into the growth and development of the system? Which of course they do, overwhelmingly. I mean, nobody, for example, assumes that you have a particular genetic program to determine that cells split into spheres, not cubes, let's say—that's due to, you know, minimization of energy, other laws of nature. And the same holds throughout the course of development. Of course, the same is true for evolution. Evolution takes place with a specific physical, chemical channel of options and possibilities, and physical laws enter all the time into determining what goes on.

Nate Silver on the Tea Party movement in 538:

Both the Winston and Gallup polls also asked people about their affinity for the tea-party by ideological group:

Although the Tea Party gets pretty decent numbers among independents, support is smaller among self-proclaimed moderates; only about 15 percent of moderates support the tea-party (Gallup) and about 10 percent consider themselves a part of it (Wilson). Liberals, who support the tea-party in the high single digits, are actually pretty close to the moderates.

OK, so what did we learn here? I think the tea-party basically has three broad defining characteristics — to the extent we can define it at all:

1. It is conservative.
2. It is anti-establishment.
3. It has a somewhat amorphous and nonspecific goals.

The first factor explains why the tea-party potentially does well among both Republicans (almost all of whom are conservative these days) as well as conservative independents. But, the second factor introduces some tension. While, on the one hand, Republicans tend to be more conservative than independents, on the other hand they tend to support the two-party establishment while independents — in broad strokes — are fed up with it. I would guess that if you looked at voters who were both independent and conservative, their support for the tea-party would be at least as high as among Republican conservatives.

Although we can infer that support for the tea party is not very high among non-conservative independents or among Democrats and liberals, the movement does get some support (especially among liberal independents as opposed to liberal Democrats). Why? Because the tea-party has many different faces.

Jenny C. Aker and Isaac M. Mbiti in the Boston Review:

There are some good reasons to believe that mobile phones could be the gateway to better lives and livelihoods for poor people. While some of the most fundamental ideas in economics about the virtues of markets assume that information is costless and equally available to all, low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa are very far from that idealization. Prior to the introduction of mobile phones, farmers, traders, and consumers had to travel long distances to markets, often over very poor roads, simply to obtain price (and other) information. Such travel imposed significant costs in time and money.

Mobile phones, by contrast, reduce the cost of information. When mobile phones were introduced in Niger, search costs fell by half. Farmers, consumers, and firms can now obtain more and in many cases “better” information—in other words, information that meets their needs. People can then use this information to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities by selling in different markets at different times of year, migrating to new areas, or offering new products. This should, in theory, lead to more efficient markets and improve welfare.

An emerging body of research suggests that perhaps theory is meeting reality. In many cases, these economic gains from information have occurred without donor investments or interventions from non-governmental organizations. Rather, they are the result of a positive externality from the information technology (IT) sector.

In Niger, millet, a household staple, is sold via traditional markets scattered throughout the country. Some markets are more than a thousand kilometers away from others with which they trade. The rollout of mobile phone coverage reduced grain price differences across markets by 15 percent between 2001 and 2007, with a greater impact on markets isolated by distance and poor-quality roads. Mobile phones allowed traders to better respond to surpluses and shortages, thereby allocating grains more efficiently across markets and dampening price differences. Mobile phone coverage also increased traders’ profits and decreased the volatility of prices over the course of the year.

The benefits of mobile phones are not limited to grain markets or to Africa.

Russell Blackford offers an answer in The Guardian:

At least to some extent, we are a species with an evolved psychology. Like other animals, we have inherited behavioural tendencies from our ancestors, since these were adaptive for them in the sense that they tended to lead to reproductive success in past environments.

But what follows from this? It does not follow that we should now do whatever maximises our ability to reproduce and pass down our genes. For example, evolution may have honed us to desire and enjoy sex, through a process in which creatures that did so reproduced more often than their evolutionary competitors. But evolution has not equipped us with an abstract desire to pass down our genes. Knowing all this, what should we do? Well, we are not evolution’s slaves. All other things being equal, we should act in accordance with the desires that we actually have, in this case the desire for sex. We may also desire to have children, but perhaps only one or two: in that case, we should act in such a way as to have as much sex as possible while also producing children in this small number.

By all means, then, let’s use contraceptive technologies for family planning. This may be “unnatural”, in a sense, but so what?

Generally speaking, it is rational for us to act in ways that accord with our reflectively-endorsed desires or values, rather than in ways that maximise our reproductive chances or in whatever ways we tend to respond without thinking. If we value the benefits of social living, this may require that we support and conform to socially-developed norms of conduct that constrain individuals from acting in ruthless pursuit of self-interest. Admittedly, our evolved nature may affect this, in the sense that any workable system of moral norms must be practical for the needs of beings like us, who are, it seems, naturally inclined to be neither angelically selfless nor utterly uncaring about others. Thus, our evolved psychology may impose limits on what real-world moral systems can realistically demand of human beings, perhaps defeating some of the more extreme ambitions of both conservatives and liberals.

Fifteen years ago, two ten-year-old boys tortured and killed a toddler, James Bulger, in the north of England. There was an outcry of public horror, though why the public found this particular murder especially shocking is not entirely clear. Children, after all, are only semi-socialised creatures who can be expected to behave pretty savagely from time to time. If Freud is to be credited, they have a weaker superego or moral sense than their elders. In this sense, it is surprising that such grisly events do not occur more often. Perhaps children murder each other all the time and are simply keeping quiet about it. William Golding seems to believe, in his novel Lord of the Flies, that a bunch of unsupervised schoolboys on a desert island would slaughter each other before the week was out. Perhaps this is because we are ready to believe all kinds of sinister things about children, since they seem like a half-alien race in our midst. Since they do not work, it is not clear what they are for. They do not have sex, though perhaps they are keeping quiet about this, too. They have the uncanniness of things which resemble us in some ways but not in others. It is not hard to fantasise that they are collectively conspiring against us, in the manner of John Wyndham’s fable The Midwich Cuckoos. Because children are not fully part of the social game, they can be seen as innocent; but for just the same reason, they can be regarded as the spawn of Satan. The Victorians swung constantly between angelic and demonic views of their offspring.

more from Terry Eagelton at The New Statesman here.

We know two things about Pope Benedict XVI this Easter that we didn’t know last Easter. We know that he was implicated in covering up two cases of multiple child rapes and molestations, one in Germany and one in the United States. His record on this makes it hard to distinguish his career from that of many other bishops and cardinals who were indirectly but clearly guilty of ignoring or covering up their underlings’ violation of the bodies and souls of the young and the vulnerable. The Vatican has spent Holy Week fighting back against those facts, but it cannot abolish or undo them. The German case is the most clear-cut — because it was so glaring and so directly connected to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as the Pope was then known. The facts are these: a priest, Peter Hullermann, was found guilty of raping children in at least three families under Ratzinger’s authority in the late 1970s. The local priest indicated that the families would “not file charges under the current circumstances”, and the case went to Ratzinger, who decided not to report the priest to the criminal authorities, nor to strip him of his office, but to send him for therapy and retain him as an active priest, capable of molesting again. The priest subsequently raped many more children; he was found guilty in 1986 and was given a suspended sentence.

more from Andrew Sullivan at The Times here.

The year is 2020 and I have just turned 72. Not far off the California coast, I and several other wobbly-looking people are on a boat, chugging towards a bizarre floating structure. From a distance, it looks like a luxury hotel, or something from a James Bond movie—but it’s an orthopaedic hospital. Beside fond memories of 1968, one thing most people of my generation now share is aching bones and, in the US at least, inadequate health insurance. Hence my decision, and that of my onboard companions, to visit the first purpose-built floating hospital. Its offshore location, and the tax and labour cost advantages that brings, means it can radically undercut its onshore US competitors. It sounds far-fetched, but a small number of influential people are talking up a future in which the high seas will be increasingly commandeered for unconventional purposes. “Seasteading,” as it is called, seems to have been coined as a term by Ken Neumeyer, whose 1981 book Sailing the Farm pioneered the concept. Besides hospitals, there could be casinos, hotels, prisons, aquaculture businesses or simply new homes for communities who want to live in isolation. And new technologies could make seasteading a reality within a decade.

more from Eamonn Fingleton at Prospect Magazine here.

As one who has always disliked and distrusted so-called science fiction (the votaries of this cult disagreeing pointlessly about whether to refer to it as “SF” or “sci-fi”), I was prepared to be unimpressed even after Kingsley Amis praised Ballard as “the most imaginative of H. G. Wells’s successors.” The natural universe is far too complex and frightening and impressive on its own to require the puerile add-ons of space aliens and super-weapons: the interplanetary genre made even C. S. Lewis write more falsely than he normally did. Hearing me drone on in this vein about 30 years ago, Amis fils (who contributes a highly lucid introduction to this collection) wordlessly handed me The Drowned World, The Day of Forever, and, for a shift in pace and rhythm, Crash. Any one of these would have done the trick. For all that, Ballard is arguably best-known to a wide audience because of his relatively “straight” novel, Empire of the Sun, and the resulting movie by Steven Spielberg. Some of his devotees were depressed by the literalness of the subject matter, which is a quasi-autobiographical account of being 13 years old and an inmate in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai. It’s not possible to read that book, however, and fail to see the germinal effect that experience had on Ballard the man. To see a once-thriving city reduced to beggary and emptiness, to live one day at a time in point of food and medicine, to see an old European order brutally and efficiently overturned, to notice the utterly casual way in which human life can be snuffed out, and to see war machines wheeling and diving in the overcast sky: such an education! Don’t forget, either, that young Ballard was ecstatic at the news of the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an emotion that makes him practically unique among postwar literati.

more from The Atlantic here.

From PhysOrg.com:

“Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.” Mother Teresa's words echo throughout the world. They ring particularly true in the biological kingdom among brown anole lizards.

Dartmouth researchers Ryan Calsbeek and Bob Cox study male and female brown anole lizards in the Bahamas. As the researchers point out, one of the most striking features of this species is that the males and females actually look like two entirely different species: the males are two to three times larger than the tiny females, weighing just one to two grams apiece. By measuring the lizards' natural and sexual selection, they learned what traits and, by extension, what genes make a high-quality female–i.e. one with high survival and reproductive success. They also learned the traits and genes of a high-quality male are very different from a high-quality female. This is particularly true for body size.

Calsbeek and Cox report their findings in a paper called “Cryptic sex-ratio bias provides indirect genetic benefits despite sexual conflict.”The research is supported by the National Science Foundation's division of Environmental Biology in its Directorate for Biological Sciences. Natural selection favors large males and small females. As lead author Cox puts it, “In an evolutionary sense, what's good for the goose is not always good for the gander.” In other words, a double standard is alive and well.

More here.

The Name

You should try to hear the name the Holy One has for things.
There is something in the phrase: “The Holy One has taught
…him names.”
We name everything according to the number of legs it has;
the other one names it according to what it has inside.
Moses waved his stick; he thought it was a “rod,”
but inside it's name was “dangerous snake.”
We thought the name of Blake was “agitator against priests,”
but in eternity his name is “the one who believes.”
No one knows our name until our last breath goes out.

by Rumi

version by Robert Bly

John Noble Wilford in The New York Times:

Archaeologists have embarked on excavations in northern Syria expected to widen and deepen understanding of a prehistoric culture in Mesopotamia that set the stage for the rise of the world’s first cities and states and the invention of writing. In two seasons of preliminary surveying and digging at the site known as Tell Zeidan, American and Syrian investigators have already uncovered a tantalizing sampling of artifacts from what had been a robust pre-urban settlement on the upper Euphrates River. People occupied the site for two millenniums, until 4000 B.C. — a little-known but fateful period of human cultural evolution.

Scholars of antiquity say that Zeidan should reveal insights into life in a time called the Ubaid period, 5500 to 4000 B.C. In those poorly studied centuries, irrigation agriculture became widespread, long-distance trade grew in influence socially and economically, powerful political leaders came to the fore and communities gradually divided into social classes of wealthy elites and poorer commoners.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Chiaroscuro On Korangi Road. February, 2010.

Digital photograph.

Peter Singer on Google vs. China, in Project Syndicate:

Perhaps because Google has been all about making information more widely available, its collaboration with China’s official Internet censors has been seen as a deep betrayal. The hope of Internet anarchists was that repressive governments would have only two options: accept the Internet with its limitless possibilities of spreading information, or restrict Internet access to the ruling elite and turn your back on the twenty-first century, as North Korea has done.

Reality is more complex. The Chinese government was never going to cave in to Google’s demand that it abandon Internet censorship. The authorities will no doubt find ways of replacing the services that Google provided – at some cost, and maybe with some loss of efficiency, but the Internet will remain fettered in China.

Nevertheless, the more important point is that Google is no longer lending its imprimatur to political censorship. Predictably, some accuse Google of seeking to impose its own values on a foreign culture. Nonsense. Google is entitled to choose how and with whom it does business. One could just as easily assert that during the period in which Google filtered its results in China, China was imposing its values on Google.

Google’s withdrawal is a decision in accordance with its own values. In my view, those values are more defensible than the values that lead to political censorship – and who knows how many Chinese would endorse the value of open access to information, too, if they had the chance?

[H/t: Stefany Golberg]

Time-lapse films reveal the functions of human genes. Janelle Weaver in Nature:

Working out the functions of individual genes in human cells is now much simpler thanks to a new database of time-lapse movies showing cells in action.

Jan Ellenberg of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and his colleagues across Europe introduced the freely accessible database of 190,000 videos to the scientific community along with a paper published today in Nature1.

Ellenberg and his team set out to observe what happens to cells when each of the 21,000 human protein-coding genes is disrupted. They perturbed gene expression using short interfering RNA molecules (siRNA) and then observed the effects over two days on fluorescently labelled chromosomes using time-lapse imaging. Because this generated huge amounts of data — more than 19 million cell divisions — the researchers developed computational tools to analyse all of the videos. Their technique automatically tracked the position of the nucleus in each cell and classified its appearance into 16 different categories. The method recognized with 87% accuracy changes in the nuclear shape that were related to basic functions such as cell division, proliferation, survival and migration.

“Technically this paper is really a tour de force,” says Jason Swedlow, a cell biologist at the University of Dundee, UK. “The systematic way the group has gone through and knocked down genes and filmed the results is really impressive.”

Stuart Hall in The New Left Review:

The ‘first’ New Left was born in 1956, a conjuncture—not just a year—bounded on one side by the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet tanks and on the other by the British and French invasion of the Suez Canal zone. [1] These two events, whose dramatic impact was heightened by the fact that they occurred within days of each other, unmasked the underlying violence and aggression latent in the two systems that dominated political life at the time—Western imperialism and Stalinism—and sent a shock wave through the political world. In a deeper sense, they defined for people of my generation the boundaries and limits of the tolerable in politics. Socialists after ‘Hungary’, it seemed to us, must carry in their hearts the sense of tragedy which the degeneration of the Russian Revolution into Stalinism represented for the left in the twentieth century. ‘Hungary’ brought to an end a certain kind of socialist innocence. On the other hand, ‘Suez’ underlined the enormity of the error in believing that lowering the Union Jack in a few ex-colonies necessarily signalled the ‘end of imperialism’, or that the real gains of the welfare state and the widening of material affluence meant the end of inequality and exploitation. ‘Hungary’ and ‘Suez’ were thus liminal, boundary-marking experiences. They symbolized the break-up of the political Ice Age.

The New Left came into existence in the aftermath of these two events. It attempted to define a third political space somewhere between these two metaphors. Its rise signified for people on the left in my generation the end of the imposed silences and political impasses of the Cold War, and the possibility of a breakthrough into a new socialist project. It may be useful to begin with genealogy. The term ‘New Left’ is commonly associated with ‘1968’, but to the ‘1956’ New Left generation, ‘1968’ was already a second, even perhaps a third, mutation. We had borrowed the phrase in the 1950s from the movement known as the nouvelle gauche, an independent tendency in French politics associated with the weekly newspaper France Observateur and its editor, Claude Bourdet. A leading figure in the French Resistance, Bourdet personified the attempt, after the war, to open a ‘third way’ in European politics, independent of the two dominant left positions of Stalinism and social democracy, beyond the military power blocs of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and opposed to both the American and the Soviet presences in Europe.

This ‘third position’ paralleled the political aspirations of many of the people who came together to form the early British New Left. Some of us had met Bourdet in Paris, at a conference called to consider setting up an International Socialist Society, across the divisions of Western and Eastern Europe. The main protagonist of the idea in Britain was G. D. H. Cole, an austere and courageous veteran of the independent left, who was at that time still teaching politics at Oxford. Although he was a distinguished historian of European socialism and a student of Marxism, Cole’s socialism was rooted in the cooperative and ‘workers’ control’ traditions of Guild Socialism. His critique of bureaucratic ‘Morrisonian’-style nationalization was enormously influential in shaping the attitude of many socialists of my generation towards statist forms of socialism.

In the New Statesman:

A police officer involved in the case of the murdered toddler declared that the moment he clapped eyes on one of the [teenage] culprits, he knew that he was evil. This is the kind of thing that gives evil a bad name. The point of demonising the boy in this way was to wrong-foot the soft-hearted liberals. It was a pre-emptive strike against those who might appeal to social conditions in seeking to understand why they did what they did. And such under standing can always bring forgiveness in its wake. Calling the action evil meant that it was beyond comprehension. Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.

Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason. An English Evangelical bishop wrote in 1991 that clear signs of Satanic possession included inappropriate laughter, inexplicable knowledge, a false smile, Scottish ancestry, relatives who have been coal miners, and the habitual choice of black for dress or car colour. None of this makes sense, but then that is how it is with evil. The less sense it makes, the more evil it is. Evil has no relations to anything beyond itself, such as a cause.

In fact, the word has come to mean, among other things, “without a cause”. If the child killers did what they did because of boredom or bad housing or parental neglect, then – so the police officer may have feared – what they did was forced upon them by their circumstances; and it followed that they could not be punished for it as severely as he might have wished. This mistakenly implies that an action that has a cause cannot be freely undertaken. Causes in this view are forms of coercion. If our actions have causes, we are not responsible for them. Evil, on the other hand, is thought to be uncaused, or to be its own cause. This is one of its several points of resemblance with good. Apart from evil, only God is said to be the cause of himself.

There is a kind of tautology or circular argument implicit in the policeman's view. People do evil things because they are evil. Some people are evil in the way that some things are coloured indigo. They commit their evil deeds not to achieve some goal, but just because of the sort of people they are. But might this not mean that they can't help doing what they do? For the policeman, the idea of evil is an alternative to such determinism. But it seems that we have thrown out a determinism of environment only to replace it with one of character. It is now your character, not your social conditions, which drives you to unspeakable deeds.

An interview with Marian Schwartz, who most recently translated Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov and Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, in The Boston Globe:

Q. Can one language be faithful to the meaning of another?

A. That question, I think, points to the English speaker’s discomfort with the idea of a translation as two simultaneously existing texts. For readers accustomed to foreign languages, the issue is not as fraught. Of course, a translation is never going to be the same as the original. The idea is to use the tools and strengths of English to re-create the intention and effects of the original. As a simple example, Russian does not have auxiliary verbs like “seem’’ and “would,’’ although it conveys those notions by other means. “Seemingly, he is unhappy’’ is a neutral sentence in Russian but stilted in English. “He seems unhappy’’ is the good English translation. Different languages also have different levels of emotion. English favors understatement. We love subtlety and precision. But what comes across in Russian as neutral can seem histrionic in English. Even today, Russian fiction uses “alas’’ regularly, but I’ve yet to be able to keep the word in a translation because it almost always sounds ridiculous.