Daniel Goleman at Edge.org:

These days I’m reflecting a lot on what a compassionate system would be. People generally know too little about systems, let alone about science. That’s one reason the current government may get away with enormous cuts to science.

I was talking to the dean of science at Columbia, who also runs a program at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia, which is in our backyard. He said research there—it’s a world leader in climate science—may get cut by 80 to 85 percent, which is astounding. It’s a huge crisis. Someone else I was talking to who runs a neuroscience lab says he's expecting a 20 percent cut. Twenty percent itself is crippling.

Why is it that a government can get away with this? Why isn’t there uproar beyond a narrow circle of scientists? Why is it that so few people understand science, per se? Part of it has to do with a general lack of awareness of the systems in which we’re enmeshed. The systems of energy and of technology, the systems of economics and of culture; the systems that would make more clear why science itself is so essential to the betterment of our own lives and of society, and what a researcher in a lab has to do with any of us.

There’s a huge disconnect.

More here.

Jason Smith in Evonomics:

Friedrich Hayek did have some insight into prices having something to do with information, but he got the details wrong and vastly understated the complexity of the system. He saw market prices aggregating information from events: a blueberry crop failure, a population boom, or speculation on crop yields. Price changes purportedly communicated knowledge about the state of the world.

However, Hayek was writing in a time before information theory. (Hayek’s The Use of Knowledge in Society was written in 1945, a just few years before Claude Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Communication in 1948.) Hayek thought a large amount of knowledge about biological or ecological systems, population, and social systems could be communicated by a single number: a price. Can you imagine the number of variables you’d need to describe crop failures, population booms, and market bubbles? Thousands? Millions? How many variables of information do you get from the price of blueberries? One. Hayek dreams of compressing a complex multidimensional space of possibilities that includes the state of the world and the states of mind of thousands or millions of agents into a single dimension (i.e. price), inevitably losing a great deal of information in the process.

Information theory was originally developed by Claude Shannon at Bell Labs to understand communication. His big insight was that you could understand communication over telephone wires mathematically if you focused not on what was being communicated in specific messages but rather on the complex multidimensional distributions of possible messages. A key requirement for a communication system to work in the presence of noise would be that it could faithfully transmit not just a given message, but rather any message drawn from the distribution. If you randomly generated thousands of messages from the distribution of possible messages, the distribution of generated messages would be an approximation to the actual distribution of messages. If you sent these messages over your noisy communication channel that met the requirement for faithful transmission, it would reproduce an informationally equivalent distribution of messages on the other end.

We’ll use Shannon’s insight about matching distributions on either side of a communication channel to match distributions of supply and demand on either side of market transactions.

More here.

Peter Temin in INET Economics:

Mass incarceration in the United States has mushroomed to the point where we look more like the authoritarian regimes of Eastern Europe and the Middle East than the democracies of Western Europe. Yet it vanished from political discussions in campaigns in the 2016 election. In a new INET Working Paper, I describe in detail how the US arrived at this point. Drawing on a new model that synthesizes recent research, I demonstrate how the recent stability in the number of American prisoners indicates that we have settled into a new equilibrium of mass incarceration. I explain why it will hard to dislodge ourselves from this damaging and shameful status quo.

Mass incarceration started from Nixon’s War on Drugs, in a process described vividly by John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, in 1994:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

This was the origin of mass incarceration in the United States, which has been directed at African Americans from Nixon’s time to today, when one third of black men go to prison (Bonczar, 2003; Baum, 2016; Alexander, 2010).

Federal laws were expanded in state laws that ranged from three-strike laws to harsh penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana. The laws also shifted the judicial process from judges to prosecutors, from the courtroom to offices where prosecutors pressure accused people to plea-bargain. The threat of harsh minimum sentences gives prosecutors the option of reducing the charge to a lesser one if the accused is reluctant to languish in jail awaiting trial—if he or she is unable to make bail—and then face the possibility of long years in prison. And the shift of power was eased by the pattern of financing. Prosecutors are paid by localities, while the costs of prisons are borne by states. The trip to the penitentiary does not cost prosecutor at all. “Instead of juries and trial judges deciding whether this or that defendant merits punishing, prosecutors decide who deserves a trip to the nearest penitentiary (Stuntz, 2011, 286; Pfaff, 2017, 127).”

More here.

Adam Kirsch at The Nation:

In Boyhood, Coetzee recalls that his own childhood relationship to Jesus was a combination of disbelief and an odd kind of intimacy. “Though he himself is an atheist and has always been one,” 
Coetzee writes, referring to himself in the third person, “he feels he understands Jesus better” than his religion teacher does. “He does not particularly like Jesus—Jesus flies into rages too easily—but he is prepared to put up with him.” Still, Coetzee finds himself drawn to Jesus, in particular when he comes to the point in the Gospel of Luke when the sepulcher is discovered to be empty: “If he were to unblock his ears and let the words come through to him, he knows, he would have to stand on his seat and shout in triumph. He would have to make a fool of himself forever.”

It is this kind of foolishness—this rejection of worldly wisdom, in the spirit of Jesus’s own exhortation to imitate the lilies of the field—that Coetzee dramatizes in his two Jesus novels. For as Childhood and Schooldays develop, it becomes increasingly clear that the figure of David is meant to illustrate, or incarnate, the scandalous freedom of Jesus’s teachings. Yet Coetzee brings out the parallels with a light, even teasing touch.

For instance, at the outset of Childhood, Simón tells everyone who will listen that he is not David’s father; rather, he met the boy on the ship that brought them to Novilla, and his mission is to reunite the child with his mother, which he is certain he can do, though he doesn’t know her name or what she looks like. Soon enough, Simón decides that he has found her in Inés, a woman with no recollection of David and no obvious qualifications for motherhood.

more here.

Emma Butcher at The Guardian:

We are currently in the middle of Brontë bicentenary mania. This year, on the 200th anniversary of his birth, we are diverting attention away from the famous sisters and focusing on the often-overlooked Brontë brother, Branwell.

We remember him as the failure of the family. Despite being a passionate poet, writer and artist, he failed to hold down conventional jobs, and repeatedly succumbed to vice. Finally, his world fell apart after the end of an affair with a married woman, Lydia Gisborne, which accelerated his dependence on opiates and alcohol. He died at the young age of 31 from the long-term effects of substance abuse.

Branwell’s legacy has been shaped by sensation, such as the story that he once set his own bed on fire, or the suggestion that he died standing up. His erratic, out-of-control behaviour has contributed to his legacy as the family’s black sheep.

This year, however, the Brontë Parsonage is trying to tone down the Branwell bashing, recognising his flaws but celebrating the merits of the brother with the salutary hashtag #TeamBranwell. The poet Simon Armitage is the museum’s creative partner for this bicentenary, curating an exhibition that pairs his own poetry with objects owned by Branwell; inviting us to reflect on the workings of his mind and our relationship with this problematic fellow. At the heart of the exhibition is a letter to the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Branwell, then a earnest 19-year-old, encloses one of his own poems, and expresses his hopes and dreams of building “mansions in the sky”.

more here.

William Howarth at The American Scholar:

Walden is a literary accident. It began as a ragbag of recycled talks, scrapped bits of essays, and a great deal of personal venting. Many passages seem addressed to an invisible companion. Midway through his pond sojourn, Thoreau spent a night in the Concord jail for refusing to pay a poll tax that funded, in his view, a pro-slavery war with Mexico. After someone (possibly an aunt) paid his fine, he went to climb mountains in Maine. Caught in a storm high on Mount Katahdin, he took shelter near a patch of burnt forest, where the sight of regenerating foliage filled him with wonder: “The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense!” Thoreau rarely used italics or exclamations, but in this passage from The Maine Woods, he needed half a dozen to accept loss and seize life. “Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?”

The two experiences, jail and mountain, became fodder for public lectures, but they also transmuted Walden from parochial rant into cosmic encounter. As literary historian J. Lyndon Shanley demonstrated in the early 1970s, that evolution required numerous distinct drafts, over nearly a decade. You can see the book’s outline, rising like a trout to the surface, in other early writings: his Journal entries on hoeing beans and plastering a house; a lecture on “getting a living” that argues for a simple life; a survey map of the pond, hinting at its unseen depths.

more here.

John Williams in The New York Times:

In the ever-raging battle between faith and science, the neurologist Jay Lombard is one of those rare emissaries who communicate in the language of both camps. In his new book, “The Mind of God,” he uses his experience studying the brain to ask some of the largest philosophical questions: Does God exist? Does life have meaning? Are we free? Lombard writes that he is interested in a “large faith,” rather than a specific religion — “a faith invigorated and enlightened by science rather than being at odds with it.” Below he discusses the debates over brain and mind, his editor’s unpromising reaction to an early manuscript, his appreciation for Jerry Garcia and more.

When did you first get the idea to write this book?

When I was in full-time clinical practice, and some of the most unusual cases seemed to find me, these bizarre cases that made Oliver Sacks’s look mundane. The first part of the process as a neurologist is to figure out the anatomy, and structurally where the origins of behaviors come from. That’s the first dive. But from there you ask more fundamental questions about the brain and mind, and where they interface. Trying to find the biological origins of psychiatric disease is much more difficult than for a stroke, hypertension or A.L.S. But it’s there. And you see that no matter how reduced you get, you’re left with sand going through your hands. That took me to a completely opposite place, which was to ask questions about purpose and meaning; about suffering, and about how patients themselves make sense of their suffering; and about how I make sense of it as a clinician. I wrote a screenplay about it, a tragicomedy I still have in my drawer somewhere. It was my first attempt to make sense of it.

What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?

How much we are dependent on our own brains for whatever form of faith we experience in our lives. How reliant we are on the physical aspects of our spiritual being.

…Persuade someone to read “The Mind of God” in less than 50 words.

I believe we are living in a time of huge existential crisis in our society. I want people to ask themselves, first and foremost, if they have a sense of purpose. If they say yes, but they don’t know what it is, they should read the book.

More here.

by Jonathan Kujawa

Invicta by Robert Lang

Last time at 3QD we talked about constructible numbers. We followed in the footsteps of the ancient Greeks and asked what sorts of numbers we can get as the lengths of line segments made using only a compass and straightedge. In the end we found that starting with a line segment of length one, a compass and straightedge, and enough patience, we can make any rational number, the square root of any rational number, and, indeed, any number which can be made by a finite sequences of additions, subtractions, multiplications, divisions, and square roots. Even crazy numbers like √(13/2 +14.3(√7)) are constructible. In short, compass and straightedge constructions are equivalent to being able to solve arbitrary quadratic equations.

On the other hand, that's it. Logarithms, exponentials, π, and even the roots of higher powers are all impossible. No matter how hard we try, the cubed root of 2 is not constructible. The 2000-year-old challenge to double the cube is forever out of reach.

An ellipse (from Wikipedia).

But, of course, this all depends on our initial decision to only allow a compass and straightedge. If you also gave me two pins and a string I could use them to make an ellipse. "So what?", you say. After all, what does the ability to draw an ellipse buy you? Well, it has been known for centuries that you can double the cube and trisect the angle if you are allowed to use parabolas and hyperbolas. In 1997 Carlos Videla determined exactly which numbers are constructible using a straightedge and the conics (circles, ellipses, hyperbolas, and parabolas). In short, the addition of the conics allows you to take cube roots. No more, no less. Remarkably, in 2003 Patrick Hummel proved that the hyperbolas and parabolas are redundant. Every number you can construct using a straightedge and the conics can be constructed with just the compass, straightedge, and ellipses. Give me an ellipse and I'll solve your cubic equation!

Of course, this is all very Euro-centric. We use the compass, straightedge, and conics because we are in the Western tradition and that's what the Greeks used.

But what about those of us who grew up in Japan? There the ancient geometric tradition is origami. We could just as well ask which numbers are constructible using paper folding. We can make a straight line in the form of the crease made when we fold the paper. If two creases intersect, this makes a point. If we've made two points, we can make the straight line which connects them by folding a crease through the points. Since we can make lines and points, we can say a number is origami-constructible if we can start with a one by one sheet of paper and use paper folding to make a line segment of that length; much like we did for the compass and straightedge.

Which numbers are origami-constructible?

Surprisingly, despite the centuries of effort in understanding the mathematics of Greek geometry, the mathematics of origami has only really taken off in the past few decades. Nevertheless, lots of progress has been made!

Read more »

From The Economist:

When Narendra Modi became prime minister of India in 2014, opinion was divided as to whether he was a Hindu zealot disguised as an economic reformer, or the other way round. The past three years appear to have settled the matter. Yes, Mr Modi has pandered to religious sentiment at times, most notably by appointing a rabble-rousing Hindu prelate as chief minister of India’s most-populous state, Uttar Pradesh. But he has also presided over an acceleration in economic growth, from 6.4% in 2013 to a high of 7.9% in 2015—which made India the fastest-growing big economy in the world. He has pushed through reforms that had stalled for years, including an overhaul of bankruptcy law and the adoption of a nationwide sales tax (GST) to replace a confusing array of local and national levies. Foreign investment has soared, albeit from a low base. India, cabinet ministers insist, is at last becoming the tiger Mr Modi promised.

Alas, these appearances are deceiving (see article). The GST, although welcome, is unnecessarily complicated and bureaucratic, greatly reducing its efficiency. The new bankruptcy law is a step in the right direction, but it will take much more to revive the financial system, which is dominated by state-owned banks weighed down by dud loans. The central government’s response to a host of pressing economic problems, from the difficulty of buying land to the reform of rigid labour laws, has been to pass them to the states. And at least one of the big reforms it has undertaken—the overnight cancellation of most of India’s banknotes in an effort to curb the black economy—was counterproductive, hamstringing legitimate businesses without doing much harm to illicit ones. No wonder the economy is starting to drag. In the first three months of the year it grew at an annualised rate of 6.1%, more slowly than when Mr Modi came to power.

More here.

Robert Sapolsky in Nautilus:

As a kid, I saw the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. As a future primatologist, I was mesmerized. Years later I discovered an anecdote about its filming: At lunchtime, the people playing chimps and those playing gorillas ate in separate groups.

It’s been said, “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.” In reality, there’s lots more of the former. And it can be vastly consequential when people are divided into Us and Them, ingroup and outgroup, “the people” (i.e., our kind) and the Others.

Humans universally make Us/Them dichotomies along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, language group, religion, age, socioeconomic status, and so on. And it’s not a pretty picture. We do so with remarkable speed and neurobiological efficiency; have complex taxonomies and classifications of ways in which we denigrate Thems; do so with a versatility that ranges from the minutest of microaggression to bloodbaths of savagery; and regularly decide what is inferior about Them based on pure emotion, followed by primitive rationalizations that we mistake for rationality. Pretty depressing.

But crucially, there is room for optimism. Much of that is grounded in something definedly human, which is that we all carry multiple Us/Them divisions in our heads. A Them in one case can be an Us in another, and it can only take an instant for that identity to flip. Thus, there is hope that, with science’s help, clannishness and xenophobia can lessen, perhaps even so much so that Hollywood-extra chimps and gorillas can break bread together.

More here.

Walter Scheidel in Aeon:

Blame inequality on climate change. Until the end of the last Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago, our ancestors lived in small foraging groups. They moved around a lot, owned very little, and passed on even less to the next generation, sharing any windfalls on the spot. The Holocene changed all that. Rising temperatures allowed humans to settle down to farm the land and domesticate livestock; collective management of resources gave way to private property rights, and new norms made assets hereditary. Over time, the cumulative rewards of brain, brawn and luck came to separate the haves from the have-nots.

This process of stratification was reinforced by the creation of states, as political power and military muscle aided the acquisition and preservation of fortunes and privilege: more than 3,000 years ago, the ancient Babylonians were well aware that ‘the king is the one at whose side wealth walks’. With the emergence of mighty empires, and as slow but steady increases in the stock of knowledge expanded economic output, the concentration of income and wealth reached previously unimaginable heights.

The principal sources of inequality have changed over time. Whereas feudal lords exploited downtrodden peasants by force and fiat, the entrepreneurs of early modern Europe relied on capital investment and market exchange to reap profits from commerce and finance. Yet overall outcomes remained the same: from Pharaonic Egypt to the Industrial Revolution, both state power and economic development generally served to widen the gap between rich and poor: both archaic forms of predation and coercion and modern market economies yielded unequal gains.

Does this mean that history has always moved in the same direction, that inequality has been going up continuously since the dawn of civilisation? A cursory look around us makes it clear that this cannot possibly be true, otherwise there would be no broad middle class or thriving consumer culture, and everything worth having might now be owned by a handful of trillionaires.

More here.

Karl Deutsch somewhere notes that power is the ability not to learn, that is, to be ignorant and suffer no consequences from being so. Jerry Useem in the Atlantic:

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Michael Shermer in The American Scholar:

Have you ever thought about killing someone? I have, and I confess that it brought me peculiar feelings of pleasure to fantasize about putting the hurt on someone who had wronged me. I am not alone. According to the evolutionary psychologist David Buss, who asked thousands of people this same question and reported the data in his 2005 book, The Murderer Next Door, 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women reported having had at least one vivid homicidal fantasy in their life. It turns out that nearly all murders (90 percent by some estimates) are moralistic in nature—not cold-blooded killing for money or assets, but hot-blooded homicide in which perpetrators believe that their victims deserve to die. The murderer is judge, jury, and executioner in a trial that can take only seconds to carry out.

What happens in brains and bodies at the moment humans engage in violence with other humans? That is the subject of Stanford University neurobiologist and primatologist Robert M. Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. The book is Sapolsky’s magnum opus, not just in length, scope (nearly every aspect of the human condition is considered), and depth (thousands of references document decades of research by Sapolsky and many others) but also in importance as the acclaimed scientist integrates numerous disciplines to explain both our inner demons and our better angels. It is a magnificent culmination of integrative thinking, on par with similar authoritative works, such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. Its length and detail are daunting, but Sapolsky’s engaging style—honed through decades of writing editorials, review essays, and columns for The Wall Street Journal, as well as popular science books (Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, A Primate’s Memoir)—carries the reader effortlessly from one subject to the next. The work is a monumental contribution to the scientific understanding of human behavior that belongs on every bookshelf and many a course syllabus.

More here.

Jeffrey St. Clair in Counterpunch:

This year the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico is expected to grow larger than ever. Oceanologists predict the lifeless expanse of water below the Mississippi River Delta will swell to an area bigger than the state of Vermont, an aquatic ecosystem despoiled by industrial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, oil leaks and the lethal effects of a warming climate. But the desolate waters of the Gulf pale next to the electoral dead zone now confronting the Democratic Party, which seems to occupy about two-thirds of the geographical area of the Republic—a political landscape deadened by the Party’s remorseless commitment to neoliberal economics, imperial wars and open hostility toward the working class base which once served as its backbone.

The latest political zombie offered up as a vessel to freight the electoral asperations of the Democrats was a pious former congressional staffer called Jon Ossoff, whose name sounds like one of those creepy Svengali-like characters from a Tod Browning horror film of the 1930s. But the candidate wasn’t as scary as all that. In fact, Ossoff scared no one, which was both his campaign theme and his problem. One of his problems, anyway. Ossoff presented himself as an anodyne candidate, a nowhere man, a quiescent emissary for a return to civility in politics. He was the white Rodney King, who plaintively asked why we couldn’t all just get along. Of course, who really wants civility in politics, when you’re working two jobs, can’t pay the power bill, have a kid with asthma and just had your Ford Focus repossessed. Ossoff proved much more popular outside the sixth congressional district of Georgia, than within it, which is only fitting for a candidate who didn’t even bother to reside in the district he was running to represent. Ossoff was an interloper, a carpetbagger, who refused to promote even the trickle-down benefits of a second Reconstruction for a South that has been ravaged by a 30-year-long exodus of good-paying jobs. In an age crying out for a new kind of politics, Ossoff campaigned directly from the Clinton playbook (Hillary version), apparently hoodwinked into believing that absent Russian interventionism this stale platform was a winning strategy. His main opponent was Trump, not even Trumpism, which might offend some of the Republican voters he was targeting. In what became a kind of daily ritual on the campaign trail, Ossoff repeatedly scrubbed himself clean of any taint of populism or progressive inclinations. Ossoff denounced single-payer health care, kept himself at arm’s length from Bernie Sanders and never uttered even a minor critique of American imperialism. Think of him as a prettified Tim Kaine.

More here.

David Kaye in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In his introduction to Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (1990), Eric Hobsbawm argued that nations are “dual phenomena, constructed essentially from above, but which cannot be understood unless also analysed from below.” We need to pay attention to this view “from below,” he wrote, to the “assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people.”

Hobsbawm would have approved of this new book by Basharat Peer. In A Question of Order: India, Turkey, and the Return of Strongmen, Peer gives us two parallel renderings of the abuse of nationalist symbols by the powerful, sharpened and humanized by the impact this abuse has on real people living their lives in the nations their leaders imagine. Yet Peer does more than merely describe the people of India and Turkey as victims: he shows them to be active agents, sometimes supporting nationalist strongmen but all too often caught up in a maelstrom of repression, stigmatization, and violence. Peer describes how Narendra Modi and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan rose from humble origins to become leaders of their respective countries, and the “terrible human toll” their leadership has had on fragile democracies and their citizens. But he also shows that their messages have found adherents among the people, often the poor but also, sometimes surprisingly, the elite and moneyed classes.

The title promises to address why the “return of strongmen” is “a question of order,” but the book, essentially two conjoined works of reportage, does not really focus on how Modi and Erdoğan were driven by principles of order in the conventional sense (e.g., public order, law and order, economic order). These are not leaders who emerged from an environment of domestic chaos or failed-state strife, despite the economic inequalities and obvious repression and violence they exploited. Instead, according to the evidence Peer presents, Modi and Erdoğan are driven by an immediate hunger for power and an ambition to alter history, to reimagine their nations’ values and place in the world.

More here.