Richard Marshall in 3:16 AM:

Jeremy Avigad  is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Mathematical Sciences and associated with Carnegie Mellon’s interdisciplinary program in Pure and Applied Logic. He is interested in mathematical logic and proof theory,  formal verification and automated reasoning and the history and philosophy of mathematics. Here he discusses the relationship between philosophy and mathematics, philosophy of mathematics and analytic philosophy, early  twentieth century mathematical innovation, Hilbert and Henri Poincare, mathematical logic, the distinction between syntax and semantics, about not being dogmatic about foundations, change in mathematics, the role of computers in mathematical enquiry, the modularity of mathematics, whether mathematics is discovered or designed,  why David Hilbert is important, and formal verification, automated reasoning and AI.

3:16:  What made you become a philosopher?

Jeremy Avigad: My graduate degree is in mathematics, specifically in logic, but I have been thinking about mathematics for almost as long as I have been doing it. It was Carnegie Mellon that turned philosophy into a profession for me. I am eternally grateful to my department for recognizing that the foundational work I was trained to do is philosophically important, and for giving me room to use that background to explore the history and philosophy of mathematics.

More here.

Jørgen Veisdal in Cantor’s Paradise:

It is indeed supremely difficult to effectively refute the claim that John von Neumann is likely the most intelligent person who has ever lived. By the time of his death in 1957 at the modest age of 53, the Hungarian polymath had not only revolutionized several subfields of mathematics and physics but also made foundational contributions to pure economics and statistics and taken key parts in the invention of the atomic bomb, nuclear energy and digital computing.

Known now as “the last representative of the great mathematicians”, von Neumann’s genius was legendary even in his own lifetime. The sheer breadth of stories and anecdotes about his brilliance, from Nobel Prize-winning physicists to world-class mathematicians abound:

”You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can. And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, so you can see how impressive Johnny is” — Enrico Fermi (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1938)

“One had the impression of a perfect instrument whose gears were machined to mesh accurately to a thousandth of an inch.” — Eugene Wigner (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1963)

“I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann’s does not indicate a species superior to that of man” — Hans Bethe (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1967)

And indeed, von Neumann both worked alongside and collaborated with some of the foremost figures of twentieth century science.

More here.

Adam Frankel in Literary Hub:

After the 2008 election, the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza reported that Obama had told his incoming political director, Patrick Gaspard, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

For all the eye-rolling that quotation induced on the speechwriting team—and it induced quite a lot, both at the time and later—I never felt Obama was being unfair or inaccurate. He was a better speechwriter than any of us.

I got a closer look at Obama’s writing in the White House, where he was a short walk away, than I’d had on the campaign, where edits usually came in a quick call or email.

“Something about this draft just doesn’t feel right.” That, or something like it, is probably the most frequent feedback a speechwriter ever receives, and it is typically accompanied by precisely zero suggestions on what to do about it.

I never heard Obama utter those words. In fact, I was always struck by the precision of his edits.

More here.

Kathryn Olmsted in the Washington Post:

President Trump has far surpassed Nixon in his zeal to ignore, jettison or rewrite the nation’s norms. Even his allies in the Republican Party, in which Trump still has 89 percent support, according to Gallup, have denounced his efforts to recruitforeign help in winning elections and to profit from his family business while holding office.

Eventually, when Trump is gone, Congress and his successor may have a chance to pass reforms that stop a future president from repeating his sins. What might the post-Trump legislation look like?

More here.

Nigel Warburton in Aeon:

The hero of Thomas Hardy’s tragic novel Jude the Obscure (1895) is a poor stonemason living in a Victorian village who is desperate to study Latin and Greek at university. He gazes, from the top of a ladder leaning against a rural barn, on the spires of the University of Christminster (a fictional substitute for Oxford). The spires, vanes and domes ‘like the topaz gleamed’ in the distance. The lustrous topaz shares its golden colour with the stone used to build Oxbridge colleges, but it is also one of the hardest minerals in nature. Jude’s fragile psyche and health inevitably collapse when he discovers just how unbreakable are the social barriers that exclude him from elite culture and perpetuate his class position, however lovely the buildings seem that concretely represent them, shimmering on the horizon. By Hardy’s time, the trope of the exclusion of the working class from the classical cultural realm, especially from access to the ancient languages, had become a standard feature of British fiction. Charles Dickens probes the class system with a tragicomic scalpel in David Copperfield (1850). The envious Uriah sees David as a privileged young snob, but he refuses to accept the offer of Latin lessons because he is ‘far too umble. There are people enough to tread upon me in my lowly state, without my doing outrage to their feelings by possessing learning.’

It is with good reason that education in Classics was and still is associated in the British mind with the upper classes. Since the late 17th century, when the discipline of ‘Classics’ as we know it emerged, only parents of substantial means have been able to buy their teenaged children (and, until the late-19th century, only their male children) the leisure and lengthy tuition that a thorough knowledge of the Latin and Greek languages requires. Classics emerged to provide a curriculum that could bestow a shared concept of gentlemanliness on the new ruling order after the Glorious Revolution.

More here.

Genealogy

Outside, it’s cold like the day
my father’s grandpa drowned
while Sigrid salted cod on walls
of stacked antlers. Their sons
and daughter fled to Eden
Prairie. One, my father’s uncle, lost
a claim in Manitoba, another crashed
a Hupmobile. One died ice-fishing.

My father’s mother, pink and vicious, made
him cover the bidet with plywood
when we lived in Tehran. Made me drive
all over Fairfax County in search
of Carnival glass. Told me “Never
marry a woman for her looks.” My mother’s
dad lost his lungs to mustard gas. Her mom

never gambled. Betty lived in Hollywood
working at the studios, roller-skating
with a man who would later play
Tonto. She rented a room
in a house with a victory garden until
the Tamuras were shipped
to Utah, then married Dad, who left
to kill Koreans. On the ship

to Japan to join him in Kobe, my sister
scared me with stories of dwarves. My children’s
mom is small and pale, like the pages
of an appointment book, except when speaking
Spanish. Then, her hands become larakeets, her eyes
marcasite. Her grandfather knew the Franks
before they moved to Holland, and he
to Pasadena, where he never met

my mother who skis like she’s waltzing,
or my father, who came home and built
a barbeque of brick, or my sister the shrink,
or my brother who sells drugs, or my other sister
for that matter. They all live
in California and no one
ever dies. There’s a boy

at the bus stop who dances
in place: knit cap, heavy coat, an extra
chromosome, perhaps. Sometimes he raises
his arms and spins. The world starts with him.

by Jeffrey Bahr
from Rattle #16, Winter 2001

Yoni Appelbaum in The Atlantic:

Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed. “Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage,” Trump told the crowd at his reelection kickoff event in Orlando in June. “They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.” This is the core of the president’s pitch to his supporters: He is all that stands between them and the abyss.

In October, with the specter of impeachment looming, he fumed on Twitter, “What is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!” For good measure, he also quoted a supporter’s dark prediction that impeachment “will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric matches the tenor of the times. The body politic is more fractious than at any time in recent memory. Over the past 25 years, both red and blue areas have become more deeply hued, with Democrats clustering in cities and suburbs and Republicans filling in rural areas and exurbs. In Congress, where the two caucuses once overlapped ideologically, the dividing aisle has turned into a chasm.

More here.

Jedediah Britton-Purdy in New Republic:

A Theory of Justice was both radical and conservative. Yes, it proposed a sweeping reconstruction of “the basic structure” of American life—Rawls’s term for the key institutions of public life, such as government and the economy. At the same time, it described the principles of reconstruction as ones that Americans already held. This strategy of squaring the circle might seem odd: How can a country be committed to principles it routinely and pervasively defies and ignores? Yet it’s also peculiarly American. The American political myth (meaning not a simple fiction but a kind of shared master-story) is “constitutional redemption,” the idea that moral truths are woven deep into the country’s character, imperfectly expressed in the Constitution and existing institutions, but awaiting realization in “a more perfect union.” This was how Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln talked about freedom and equality in the 1860s, and how Martin Luther King and Lyndon Baines Johnson talked about the same values in the mid-1960s. Constitutional redemption was the defining ideal of Cold War liberal patriotism. Its strategies became, by subtle philosophical transformation, the strategy of A Theory of Justice: to say that Americans already are what they have never yet been—and that this ideal is also incipiently universal, if other peoples can make their way to it.

More here.

Erica Chenoweth, Sirianne Dahlum, Sooyeon Kang, Zoe Marks, Christopher Wiley Shay and Tore Wig in The Washington Post:

Around the globe, mass nonviolent protests are demanding that national leaders step down. Evo Morales, Bolivia’s three-term leftist president, is the latest casualty of mass demonstrations, after being abandoned by the military. Beyond Bolivia, people are rising up against their governments in places as varied as Chile, Lebanon, Ecuador, Argentina, Hong Kong, Iraq and Britain. This follows remarkable protests in Sudan and Algeria in the spring, in which protest movements effectively toppled entrenched dictators, and in Puerto Rico, where a mass movement deposed an unpopular governor. Beyond Puerto Rico, the United States has also hosted a steady stream of protest since January 2017 against the Trump administration and its policies.

We may be in the midst of the largest wave of nonviolent mass movements in world history. Social media has made mass protests easier to organize — but, perhaps paradoxically, harder to resolve. As these movements escalate more rapidly around the world, some common challenges may make it harder for them to succeed beyond winning short-term concessions. That’s especially true when they are leaderless or unorganized. Let’s look at why.

1. Disciplined nonviolence is contending with ‘violent flanks.’

While most of these are peaceful, nonviolent protests, some have “violent flanks.” Some research suggests that intermittent street fighting and violent distractions — like molotov cocktails or rock-throwing — can make such movements harder for people and the government to ignore, keeping pressure on elites to resolve the crisis, so long as the movement as a whole is well-organized.

More here.

Adam Tooze in Social Europe:

The unceasing debate on issues of principle points to the unresolved and profoundly political nature of Europe’s monetary union. The set of difficulties is familiar. How to ensure the stability of the system? How to achieve convergence? How to pool risk without encouraging moral hazard? How to avoid a one-way ‘transfer union’?

In part the arguments are defined by structural differences which run along national lines—divisions between creditors and debtors. But they are also a matter of political interpretation. Divisions between left and right and differing visions of Europe are tied up with the representation of interests in a cruder sense.

Seismic shocks

The party-political system within which the crisis was managed has, in the process, suffered a series of seismic shocks. This was true first for the countries worst hit: Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy and Greece, not to mention Hungary and Romania. But political upheaval eventually came to France and to Germany too.

Following the shock election of 2017, which saw the Alternative für Deutschland catapulted into the Bundestag, the effort to form a German government left the French president, Emmanuel Macron—himself a product of the disintegration of the French party system—waiting in vain for an answer to his proposals on European reform. Two years later, the Grosse Koalition in Berlin is again hanging by a thread. And this has implications for the debate about the eurozone.

More here.

Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker:

The question of what Ignatiev accomplished is especially hard to answer because his radicalism took so many forms. He was born in 1940, in Philadelphia, into a family of working-class Russian Jews. By seventeen, he had joined the Communist Party; after dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania, he moved to Chicago to work in the steel mills. He would be a factory laborer for more than two decades, always with an eye toward provoking his fellow-workers into looking at their struggle in new ways. In 1967, he composed a letter to the Progressive Labor Party that outlined his views. “The greatest ideological barrier to the achievement of proletarian class consciousness, solidarity and political action is now, and has been historically, white chauvinism,” Ignatiev wrote. “White chauvinism is the ideological bulwark of the practice of white supremacy, the general oppression of blacks by whites.” He argued that it would be impossible to build true solidarity among the working class without addressing the question of race, because white workers could always be placated by whatever privileges, however meaningless, management dangled in front of them. The only way to change this was for white working-class people to reject whiteness altogether. “In the struggle for socialism,” Ignatiev wrote, white workers “have more to lose than their chains; they have also to ‘lose’ their white-skin privileges, the perquisites that separate them from the rest of the working class, that act as the material base for the split in the ranks of labor.”

Many scholars have cited Ignatiev’s letter as one of the first articulations of the modern idea of “white privilege.” But Ignatiev’s version differs from the one we often use today. In his conception, white privilege wasn’t an accounting tool used to compile inequalities; it was a shunt hammered into the minds of the white working class to make its members side with their masters instead of rising up with their black comrades.

More here.

David Edgerton in New Statesman:

How did the most successful conservative party of the 20th century become the agent for a national humiliation? How could a political party so firmly tied to power, not least economic power, come to disregard its own particular view of the national interest? The Conservative-born Brexit crisis that has tormented the nation since 2016 has multiple causes, the most crucial and under-explored of which is economic. The great financial crisis of 2008 certainly had an impact on the referendum result: it led to economic stagnation, not least in productivity and wages, as well as disastrous cuts to many public services. Local authorities, responsible for social care, were hit especially hard, as were the working poor. But the really significant economic transformations behind the decision to leave the EU have deeper roots. Over the past 40 years the nature of capitalism in the UK has changed in ways that concepts such as “neoliberalism” and “post-industrialism” have failed to grasp. The relationship between capitalism and politics has also changed radically.

Before 1945 the UK operated in a global economy. Imperialists viewed Britain as the political and commercial centre of an empire; liberals saw it as the world’s largest importer. After 1945, however, the UK turned in on itself, transforming both materially and ideologically. It was a country with a national industry. All the main users of coal, as well as the producers of coal, became publicly owned industries, such as the National Coal Board, the British Transport Commission (which included British Railways) and the British Electricity Authority. There was also something resembling a British national capitalism, one closely allied to the Conservative Party and made up of large private firms, including Imperial Chemical Industries and Associated Electrical Industries. This national capitalism produced a radically different economy from anything that had existed before it. In the 1950s and 1960s, the UK was more industrial than ever before. Manufacturing output formed a higher proportion of GDP and manufacturing employment had a greater share of employment than when the UK was considered the “workshop of the world” in the 19th century.

More here.

Lewis Lapham in Lapham’s Quarterly:

The warming of the planet currently spread across seven continents, four oceans, and twenty-four time zones is the product of a fossil-fueled capitalist economy that over the past two hundred years has stuffed the world with riches beyond the wit of man to marvel at or measure. The wealth of nations comes at a steep price—typhoons in the Philippine Sea, Category 5 hurricanes in the Caribbean, massive flooding in Kansas and Uttar Pradesh, forests disappearing in Sumatra and Brazil, unbearable heat in Paris, uncontrollable wildfires in California, unbreathable air in Mexico City and Beijing. The capitalist dynamic is both cause of our prosperous good fortune and means of our probable destruction, the damage in large part the work of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, guided by the belief that money buys the future. Nature doesn’t take checks. Who then pays the piper—does capitalism survive climate change, or does a changed climate put an end to capitalism?

The question informs this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, and in place of an answer, it offers observations that follow along the line of my learning to ask it. Eighty-five percent of the carbon now present in the atmosphere is the value added during the course of my lifetime, 2.5 trillion tons, roughly equivalent to one thousand times the total weight of all the fish in the sea. I was fifty years old before I knew it was there, much less understood it to be a problem. Born and baptized in Rachel Carson’s Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, I grew up in the city of San Francisco in the 1940s, so far apart from nature I assumed most of it located in Africa, picturesque specimens to be seen in Golden Gate Park and the San Francisco Zoo. The streets in my neighborhood bore the names of trees—Walnut and Cherry, Laurel, Chestnut, and Spruce. I didn’t wonder what the trees themselves might look like; nor was I familiar with the birds, plants, insects, and animals living on the far side of the Presidio wall, half a block from my boyhood home. Like most city-bred children of my generation (especially those among us brought up under the protection of money and machines), I thought bread came from the baker, light from a bulb, milk from a bottle. At grammar school during the Second World War, I devoted the free study periods to sketching the silhouette of every fighter plane and bomber in the American, German, and Japanese air forces.

More here.

J. M. Coetzee and others at Public Books:

J. M. Coetzee (JMC): Balzac famously wrote that behind every great fortune lies a crime. One might similarly claim that behind every successful colonial venture lies a crime, a crime of dispossession. Just as in the dynastic novels of the nineteenth century the heirs of great fortunes are haunted by the crimes on which their fortunes were founded, a successful colony like Australia seems to be haunted by a history that will not go away. The question of what to say or do about dispossession of Indigenous Australians is as alive in the Australian imagination as it has ever been.

Could the same be said about Argentina, which has a comparably bloody history behind it?

Fabian Martinez Siccardi (FMS): The bloody history and the dispossession of indigenous peoples in Argentina, which is not only an issue from the past but also a current one, given the conflicts occurring all over the country over land and other rights, does not seem to be at the centre of discussion in Argentina, not even among the politically progressive and socially sensitive sectors of society.

more here.

Dorian Lynskey at The Guardian:

Bowie was a famously insatiable reader. As a teenager in Bromley he was schooled in the Beats by his older brother Terry. Cocaine-crazed in 1970s America, he would stay up all night inhaling books about the occult from his 1,500-volume portable library. In 1998, somewhat more well adjusted, he wrote reviews for Barnes & Noble. Feeling from an early age formless and incomplete, he rebuilt himself from pieces of the things he loved: not just literature and music but cinema, art, people, places. While the similarly well-read Bob Dylan preferred to veil his sources, Bowie made an exhibition of them – literally so at his touring museum show David Bowie Is, where some of his favourite books dangled from the ceiling like mobiles. He was the star-as-fan and his fandom was promiscuous. When LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy admitted that he had pillaged his hero’s back catalogue, Bowie replied graciously: “You can’t steal from a thief, darling.” In an interview in 1972, however, he was less cavalier. “Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all,” he lamented. “I’m just a collection of other people’s voices.”

more here.

Thomas Meaney at the NY Times:

In 1965, the year of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches and the Watts riots, an ancillary skirmish played out across the Atlantic. James Baldwin, then at the height of his international reputation, faced off against William F. Buckley Jr., the “keeper of the tablets” of American conservatism, in the genteel confines of the Cambridge Union. The proposition before the house was: “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” For Baldwin, who would roll his eyes more than once during the debate, the question indicated glaring ignorance. The American dream was a nightmare from which he was trying to wake. For Buckley, the American dream was a giant bootstrap that American blacks refused to employ. “We will fight … on the beaches and on the hills, and on mountains and on landing grounds,” he told the audience of students that evening, channeling Winston Churchill. Only Buckley invoked the imagery of plucky guerrilla resistance not against a Nazi invasion of the British Isles, but against Northern radicals bent on uprooting the Southern way of life.

more here.

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

by Phillip Larkin
from Literary Hub, 2/10/17

Peter Woit in Not Even Wrong:

There’s an excellent new book out about Jim Simons and Renaissance Technologies, The Man Who Solved the Market, by Gregory Zuckerman. I recommend it enthusiastically to anyone interested in the story of how geometer Jim Simons ended up being worth $23 billion. Lots of other mathematicians and physicists have also been involved in this over the years.

I first heard about Simons and his investment operation when I was a postdoc at Stony Brook in the mid-eighties, and have heard bits and pieces of this story from various sources over the years, sometimes clearly distorted in the retelling. It’s very satisfying to finally get a reliable explanation of what Simons and those working with him have been up to all this time. For those with more interest than me in the details of quant strategies, the book provides far and away the most information available about how Simons and RenTech have been making so much money so successfully. The author managed to get some degree of cooperation from Simons, and was thus able to get a lot of those involved with him to talk. As a result, while this isn’t an “authorized” biography, it’s written from a point of view rather sympathetic to Simons.

One question that keeps coming up in the book is that of motivation. Why did Simons abandon a highly successful career doing research mathematics in order to focus on making as much money as possible?

More here.

Rene Ebersole in Undark:

The elderly woman was sprawled on her back in the dirt, head resting to one side, elbows bent as though she was about to prop herself up. Dead three months now, her face was no longer recognizable. Her skin had thinned to a gossamer shroud over bone. She was among more than 150 corpses scattered beneath the trees, rotting in the open air or covered in plastic, on roughly three wooded acres.

To an outsider, the scene might look like a serial killer’s dumping ground, but it was just another day at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Anthropology Research Facility, popularly known as the “body farm,” the first of only a handful of such facilities in the world where researchers study the science of human decay and law enforcement officers train to recover human remains at crime scenes.

The dead woman was there to play her part in a developing frontier in forensic crime solving: analyzing and interrogating the suite of trillions of microorganisms and other creatures that are witness to our deaths.

More here.