Sabine Hossenfelder in Back Reaction:

In recent years many prominent people have expressed worries about artificial intelligence (AI). Elon Musk thinks it’s the “biggest existential threat.” Stephen Hawking said it could “be the worst event in the history of our civilization.” Steve Wozniak believes that AIs will “get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently,” and Bill Gates, too, put himself in “the camp that is concerned about super intelligence.”

In 2015, the Future of Life Institute formulated an open letter calling for caution and formulating a list of research priorities. It was signed by more than 8,000 people.

Such worries are not unfounded. Artificial intelligence, as any new technology, brings risks. While we are far from creating machines even remotely as intelligent as humans, it’s only smart to think about how to handle them sooner rather than later.

However, these worries neglect the more immediate problems that AI will bring.

More here.

Julie David de Lossy at the website of the International Crisis Group:

Iraq has endured decades of sanctions, war, invasion, regime change and dysfunctional government. These span Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, a devastating eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s and crippling UN sanctions throughout the 1990s. Those difficult years gave way to the traumas of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and its chaotic aftermath, which brought the insurgents of the Islamic State to the outskirts of the Iraqi capital Baghdad in 2014.

While governments form and collapse behind the blast walls of Baghdad’s Green Zone, life in the rest of the city has grown resilient to the disruptions of politics. Iraqis are finding individual and civic solutions to collective problems that politicians and state are failing to address.

Crisis Group photographer Julie David de Lossy joined our Senior Iraq Adviser Maria Fantappie in the city in October and November 2018. Her images portray a people whose public spaces – main streets, coffee houses and marketplaces – bear the scars of all its upheavals. But they also communicate Iraqis’ ambition to overcome them and capture moments in their search for normalcy against enormous odds.

More here.  [Thanks to Wolf Böwig.]

Keynote speech by Claudio Borio at the website of the Bank for International Settlements:

Few issues in economics have generated such heated debates as the nature of money and its role in the economy. What is money? How is it related to debt? How does it influence economic activity? The recent mainstream economic literature is an unfortunate exception. Bar a few who have sailed into these waters, money has been allowed to sink by the macroeconomics profession. And with little or no regrets.

Today, I would like to raise it from the seabed. To do so, I will look to an older intellectual tradition in which I grew up. I would thus like to revisit the basics of monetary economics and draw lessons that concern the relationship between money, debt, trust and central banking.

I approach the topic with some trepidation. So much has been written by scholars much better equipped than me, including a number in the audience. Still, I hope to shed some new light on some old questions. A number of the points I will be making are well known and generally accepted; others more speculative and controversial.

My focus will be the on the monetary system, defined technically as money plus the transfer mechanisms to execute payments.2 Logically, it makes little sense to talk about one without the other. But payments have too often been taken for granted in the academic literature, old and new. In the process, we have lost some valuable insights.

Let me highlight three takeaways.

More here.

Peter E. Gordon in The Nation:

It was slightly more than a century ago, in November 1918, that revolution swept through Germany, bringing chaos to a country that, in the final days of World War I, was already in desperate straits and verging on collapse. Although it was obvious to nearly everyone that the war was lost, the fighting staggered on, even as a growing pacifist movement issued the cry for “Peace, Freedom, Bread!” In Kiel on the Baltic Sea, sailors at the docks refused the order for a last battle and went into open mutiny, while soldiers and revolutionary workers in Berlin called for a general strike. Kaiser Wilhelm II, an absurd and incompetent militarist, at last faced the truth that his time was up and abdicated the throne, leaving confusion in his wake. On November 9, Philipp Scheidemann, a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP), seized the moment to declare the founding of a new republic.

Because of the civil unrest in Berlin, the members of the fledgling government gathered to sign the new constitution in Weimar, a town some 300 kilometers to the southwest best known as the birthplace of German classicism. The Weimar Republic might have marked a peaceful transition—the founding of Germany’s first democracy. But the revolution was not finished. Just two hours after Germany had been declared a republic, Karl Liebknecht, leader of the anti-war Spartacus League, declared the founding of the Free Socialist Republic of Germany, a rival government that drew its strength from below and called for a shift in political power to the workers’ councils, following the model of the Russian soviets. The country lurched from monarchy to democracy not once, but twice.

More here.

Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the idealistic class of 64 Democratic House freshmen are armed with a reform agenda.

This includes H.R. 1, a 571-page bill that addresses voting rights, corruption, gerrymandering and campaign finance reform as well as the creation of a Select Committee on the Climate Crisis — a first step toward a “Green New Deal.”

Proponents of this ambitious project face a determined adversary, however — the top ranks of the interest group establishment, skilled in co-opting liberal members of Congress and converting initiatives to square with the interests of corporate America.

The upper stratum of the Washington lobbying community often exercises de facto veto power over the legislative process, dominating congressional policymaking, funneling campaign money to both parties and offering lucrative employment to retiring and defeated members of the House and Senate.

Lobbyists exercise this power across the course of a member’s career. “Whoever is elected is immediately met with a growing lobbying onslaught by the same big players,” write Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State and Tim LaPira, a political scientist at James Madison University, who have contributed a chapter to “Can America Govern Itself?” a book edited by Francis Lee and Nolan McCarty that is coming out in June.

More here.

we have always been

Frenzy deep down, quiet on the out, we were tangle,
caught between woman and man, impossibility and lack,

no gender a tongue knew name, the richness of body
plundered by language, left aching for touch and a place

at the human table. Hysterical, i’d obsess over lip smear,
panic and pull at my hair. But you natured within, lifted

our skin and found the bones holding, gauzy, gossamer,
fanned tender with air, also liver, fascia, spleen, our

heart. Sweet Tangle, i felt you, yet deceived myself
they are nothing, a newborn ghost crawling away where

slur shame and knuckles couldn’t knock. Haunted boy,
some lives come full stop, sputter, jump, dress and go.

We don’t have to tear self apart. Even gender can
change. This isn’t quite a eulogy, you won’t mourn this

body, but lay it down for the other, tap soil, gnaw roots,
swallow jade and shadow your eyes. Intuit our body,

geologic, history pre and post. See them fissure. Watch us
rupture. Understand us, together, if the world allows.

Let me love you the way you loved me, held me when
i sought bourbon erase, against every blade of glass

i could turn back on myself, the flint sparked to burn this
house to cinder, to unintelligible bone. i want us together,

like we’ve always been, mystic and rare as Datura blooming
along Brooklyn sidewalks pocked and cracked, damp earth,

city sweat, bus fumes, rose water, gates ajar, palimpsest.
i want us in sunlight, ready to wash the sky clean.

by Xtian W
from Pank Magazine
13.1 / Spring / Summer 2018

Jack Segelstein in The Atlantic:

In 1889, Achille-Claude Debussy, then in his mid-20s, was one of 30 million people to walk through the iron arches of the newly completed Eiffel Tower. Throughout that year, the arches served as the grand entryway to the Exposition Universelle, a world’s fair celebrating the cultural, technological, and colonial prowess of France a century after the revolution. A stunning variety of sights greeted visitors: a sharpshooting Annie Oakley, some 16,000 ultramodern machines (housed in the largest indoor space ever constructed), and, of course, the Eiffel Tower itself, the world’s tallest and possibly most bizarre building at the time. But Debussy seems to have been most impressed by something he heard—the work of musicians from what was then French Indochina and is now Vietnam. More than 20 years later, he raved about the opera they performed, in which “a furious little clarinet directs the emotion, a gong organizes the terror … and that’s all! … Nothing but an instinctive need for art, needing ingenuity to satisfy; no hint of bad taste!”

As Stephen Walsh shows in Debussy: A Painter in Sound—published in 2018, 100 years after the composer’s death—Debussy craved this simplicity and directness, but he had trouble finding it in his own musical milieu. He admired older French music—its “clarity of expression, that precision and compactness of form”—but felt it had been corrupted by German influences. French color, lightness, and concision were at odds with the drama, severity, and burdensome forms of Bach, Beethoven, and, most recently, Richard Wagner.

More here.

Robert F. Service in Science:

For patients with aggressive kidney and skin cancers, an immune-boosting protein called interleukin-2 (IL-2) can be a lifesaver. But the dose at which it fights cancer can also produce life-threatening side effects. Now, scientists have used computer modeling to design a new protein from scratch that mimics IL-2’s immune-enhancing abilities, while avoiding its dangerous side effects. The protein has so far been tested only in animals, but it may soon enter human trials. IL-2 plays a key role in directing the body’s immune response to outside invaders. The protein, a signaling molecule called a cytokine, ramps up the activity of white blood cells known as T lymphocytes by binding simultaneously to their IL-2β and IL-2γ receptors. In cells where a third type of receptor, IL-2α, is present, IL-2 binds collectively to all three. In other white blood cells, this dampens the body’s immune response. But it can also occur in cells in blood vessels, causing those vessels to leak, a potentially deadly condition.

“People have tried for 30 years to alter IL-2 to make it safer and more effective,” says Daniel Adriano Silva Manzano, a biochemist at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle and first author of the new study. But IL-2 is unstable and stops working when it loses its normal 3D shape, and many mutations destabilize the structure further, Silva Manzano says.

To do better, Silva Manzano teamed up with lab director David Baker, a protein designer at UW, and colleagues in the United States, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom, to remake IL-2 from scratch. They started by studying atomic maps of IL-2 interacting with the desirable β and γ receptors, as well as the undesirable α receptor. IL-2 is a single long chain of amino acids. When it folds up into its active 3D shape, it forms four segments that twist into spirals called alpha helixes that are held together by a series of loops that tie them together in a bundle. At the bottom of this bundle of helixes are two sites that bind to the β and γ receptors. Meanwhile, portions of one of the helixes and two loops at the top of the protein bind to α receptors. Baker, Silva, and their colleagues programmed protein-design software Baker had developed, called Rosetta, to maintain the needed interactions with the β and γ receptors but eliminate the portion that binds to α receptors. Rosetta produced 40 options. After analyzing them, the team synthesized and tested 22, tweaking the best to improve the designer protein’s stability and its effectiveness at binding the desired receptors. Finally, the researchers settled on a version they dubbed Neo-2/15, which shares only 14% of its amino acid sequence with IL-2. Lab studies revealed it bound tightly to β and γ receptors, but not to α receptors. In mouse models of colon cancer and melanoma, the compound reduced side effects associated with α receptors, strongly inhibited tumor growth, and even eliminated tumors in a handful of animals. Regular IL-2 given to other mice didn’t do the latter, they report today in Nature.

More here.

Claudia Verhoeven in Taxis:

The testament Dostoevsky left his children was the parable of the Prodigal Son. He asked that it be read to them the night of the day he knew would be his last, and the late, great Joseph Frank judged that Dostoevsky had probably understood the whole of his life and all of his literature as having existed under the sign of this tale of “transgression, forgiveness, and redemption.”

Anyone who loves Dostoevsky but not the effects of Dostoevshchina — the anger, annoyance, and nausea that come from overexposure to Dostoevsky’s God-peddling, Russo-mania, and digging in the dirt — that sentence will stab straight through the heart. Nine hundred pages into Frank’s Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton University Press, 2009), Dostoevsky suddenly stands there transformed, not absolved of his sins exactly, but somehow free from Dostoevshchina. He stands there as a man, as a father, as a false prophet but a true believer, and above all as an author — and at that moment, you may freely renew your oath of allegiance to his artistic vision of unconditional love, however short of its fulfillment he himself so often fell.

It works in just the same way, in fact, as those moments in Dostoevsky’s texts that can lift even his most hostile readers into believing things forever foresworn. Take Dmitry Pisarev. Of all the literary critics belonging to the so-called “nihilist” camp in Alexander II’s reform-era Russia, this twenty-something was the most caustic and consequential. It was primarily Pisarev’s utilitarian logic that Dostoevsky had stuffed into Raskolnikov’s monomaniacal brain in order to prove that the “rational egoism” of the young generation could only end in cold-blooded murder. And apparently, when this very Pisarev got his hands on Crime and Punishment, he cried.

More here.

Matthew Yglesias in Vox:

Donald Trump campaigned on the absurd lie that the United States could construct a large concrete wall across the entire US-Mexico border and coerce the Mexican government into paying for its construction. The government is currently shut down because Trump refuses to admit that his absurd lie was, in fact, an absurd lie.

Since he won’t own up to it, lie has begun to pile upon lie like a sitcom farce, to the point where Trump on Tuesday night delivered an address on the subject of an entirely fake “crisis” at the southern border. The crisis, supposedly, is the reason that we not only need a wall but need it so badly that it’s worth shutting down the government to get one.

It’s an absurd situation only heightened by the larger absurdity that the fundamentals of Trump-era America are good. Unemployment is low and the economy is growing. Unauthorized immigration is low. Funds are flowing to further enhance border security, and a halfway competent president would be able to secure more without much muss or fuss. But Donald Trump doesn’t do anything without muss or fuss.

More here.

James K. Galbraith at the Institute for New Economic Thinking:

Thomas Piketty and his colleagues[1] have produced a new exposition of their empirical work, entitled the World Inequality Report 2018 (hereafter: WIR). Their purpose is to showcase the exploration of income and wealth inequalities begun with the World Top Incomes Database (Atkinson and Piketty 2010) and theorized in Piketty’s epic Capital in the XXI Century (2014). In particular the WIR concentrates on the presentation of measures and evidence; the stated goal is to inform a “deliberative process” with “more rigorous and transparent information on income and wealth” than has been available to date. In a review article published on-line and open access in Development and Change on December 24, 2018, I initiate this “deliberative process” by examining the WIR data and the claims made for it.

The ground-breaking, systematic and transparent methodology on which the WIR rests is largely the use of tax records–specifically income tax records–mined to show the income shares of tranches of the income-earning population: top one percent, top ten percent, next forty percent, and bottom fifty percent are the usual divisions. These Piketty and his colleagues argue are more complete, comprehensive, and comparable across countries and through time than the generally-used alternative, which is household or person-based surveys.

More here.

Max Harris:

Neoliberalism is a word that can be used a little sloppily, and sometimes as a general cuss-word for policies or practices that are disliked, especially by those on the Left. But just because it is not always used rigorously does not mean it doesn’t exist.

Milton Friedman himself used the word neoliberalism, in a 1951 essay called ‘Neoliberalism and Its Prospects’. In that essay, Friedman argued that it takes twenty years for there to be “a change in the underlying current of opinion and the resultant alteration in public policy.” Friedman claimed that while elections could create a “difference of degree” and an “opportunity to begin a drift in a new direction”, “the direction this drift takes will be determined not by the day-to-day shifts in political power or the slogans of the parties or even their platforms but by the underlying current of opinion which may be already … determining a new direction for the future.” Friedman noted that he sensed the start of a move away from collectivism in 1951. “The stage is set for the growth of a new current of opinion to replace the old,” wrote Friedman, “to provide the philosophy that will guide the legislators of the next generation even though it can hardly affect those of this one.” Friedman said the problem with collectivism was its means, not its ends; in particular, its belief “in the ability of direct action by the state to remedy all evils”. He talked of the need for “a new faith”, which would put “a severe limitation on the power of the state to interfere” with individuals (while recognizing that the State can do some things well).

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica:

In July of 1316, a priest with a hankering for fresh apples sneaked into a walled garden in the Cripplegate area of London to help himself to the fruits therein. The gardener caught him in the act, and the priest brutally stabbed him to death with a knife—hardly godly behavior, but this was the Middle Ages. A religious occupation was no guarantee of moral standing.

That’s just one of the true-crime gems to be found in a new interactive digital “murder map” of London compiled by University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner. Drawing on data catalogued in the city Coroners’ Rolls, the map shows the approximate location of 142 homicide cases in late medieval London. The map launched to the public in late November on the website for the university’s Violence Research Center, and be forewarned—it’s extremely addictive. You could easily lose yourself down the rabbit hole of medieval murder for hours, filtering the killings by year, choice of weapon, and location. (It works best with Google Chrome.)

“The events described in the Coroners’ Rolls show weapons were never very far away, male honor had to be protected, and conflicts easily got out of hand,” said Eisner, who embarked on the project to create an accessible resource for the public to explore the historical records. “They give us a detailed picture of how homicide was embedded in the rhythms of urban medieval life.”

More here.

Poem That Walks From Fact to Wish

I was a skinhead

in look and seem, a balding guy trying out the future
with a shaved head while wearing blue jeans and a white T
and grinding up one of Seattle’s more Everesty hills,
when I was met by the real deal cruising the other way,

five shit-kickered dudes inked in swastikas
and Nazi daggers dripping blood, who nodded deep,
like dipping a bucket in a well, marking me as a brother
in hate, and passed before I could confess my lack of tats
and love of a Mexican Jew, I mean a kikey spic, I mean
there’s never time to get scientific and mushy
on guys trying to act the part of death,
to do what all good parents teach their tots to do
when meeting lives this unmoored, this lost at sea—
you whip out the statistical work of Joseph Chang:

“Our findings suggest a remarkable proposition:
no matter the languages we speak or the color
of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice
on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses
on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths
in the forests of North and South America,
and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.”

I promised myself that next time I’d be Johnny-on-the-spot
with the intellectual nunchucks, that I’d ease their longing
for a homeland by telling them we’ve all got a home
in Africa, where every soul currently huffing and puffing
got its ancient start, and that white isn’t a race,
a cutting apart, so much as an adaptation,
the process of learning to get along
with snow, I would I would I would I would I would I would

I brainchanted to myself while powering up the hill
and channeling the French, who so hiply invented éclairs,
and Paris, and l’esprit de l’escalier, or staircase wit,
when the right thing to say zooms to mind
as you’re walking away and have time to edit the past
to redress your failure to be brilliant, or in this case,
as in most cases, kind.

by Bob Hicock
from Hold
Copper Canyon Press, 2018

Ellen Hendriksen in Scientific American:

Forward-thinking companies strive to be socially responsible. Beer commercials exhort us to drink responsibly. And every parent wants their kid to be more responsible. All in all, responsibility is a good thing, right? It is, until it’s not. What to do when you have too much of a good thing? This week, Savvy Psychologist Dr. Ellen Hendriksen offers four signs of over-responsibility, plus three ways to overcome it. Being a responsible person is usually a good thing—it means you’re committed, dependable, accountable, and care about others. It’s the opposite of shirking responsibility by pointing fingers or making excuses. But it’s easy to go too far. Do you take on everyone’s tasks? If someone you love is grumpy, do you assume it’s something you did? Do you apologize when someone bumps into you? Owning what’s yours—mistakes and blunders included—is a sign of maturity, but owning everybody else’s mistakes and blunders, not to mention tasks, duties, and emotions, is a sign of over-responsibility.

But here’s the twist: being overly responsible isn’t just the realm of control freaks or earnest Eagle Scouts. Over-responsibility can work for you, building trust and even currying favor.

For example, a fascinating joint study out of Harvard Business School and Wharton examined what happens when we apologize in the absence of culpability—that is, when we take responsibility for something that’s clearly not our fault. Specifically, on a rainy day, the researchers hired an actor to approach travelers in a busy train station and ask to use their cell phones. Half the time, the actor led by taking responsibility for the weather: “I’m so sorry about the rain! Can I borrow your cell phone?” The other half of the time, he simply asked “Can I borrow your cell phone?” When he took responsibility for the weather, 47% of the travelers offered their phone. But when he simply asked, only 9% of the travelers acquiesced. The findings lined up with previous research showing that people who express guilt or regret are better liked than those who don’t. Why? Taking responsibility is a show of empathy. The apology isn’t necessarily remorseful; instead, it’s recognition of and concern for someone else’s experience.

More here.

Kelly Servick in Science:

In the animal world, monogamy has some clear perks. Living in pairs can give animals some stability and certainty in the constant struggle to reproduce and protect their young—which may be why it has evolved independently in various species. Now, an analysis of gene activity within the brains of frogs, rodents, fish, and birds suggests there may be a pattern common to monogamous creatures. Despite very different brain structures and evolutionary histories, these animals all seem to have developed monogamy by turning on and off some of the same sets of genes. “It is quite surprising,” says Harvard University evolutionary biologist Hopi Hoekstra, who was not involved in the new work. “It suggests that there’s a sort of genomic strategy to becoming monogamous that evolution has repeatedly tapped into.” Evolutionary biologists have proposed various benefits to so-called social monogamy, where mates pair up for at least a breeding season to care for their young and defend their territory. When potential mates are scarce or widely dispersed, for example, forming a single-pair bond can ensure they get to keep reproducing.

Neuroscientist Hans Hofmann and evolutionary biologist Rebecca Young at the University of Texas in Austin wanted to explore how the regulation of genes in the brain might have changed when a nonmonogamous species evolved to become monogamous. For example, the complex set of genes that underlie the ability to tolerate the presence of another member of one’s species presumably exists in nonmonogamous animals, but might be activated in different patterns to allow prolonged partnerships in monogamous ones.

More here.

Paul Grimstad in The New Yorker:

The science-fiction writer and futurist Stanisław Lem was well acquainted with the way that fictional worlds can sometimes encroach upon reality. In his autobiographical essay “Chance and Order,” which appeared in The New Yorker, in 1984, Lem recalls how as an only child growing up in Lvov, Poland, he amused himself by creating passports, certificates, permits, government memos, and identification papers. Equipped with these eccentric toys, he would then privately access fictional places “not to be found on any map.” Some years later, when his family was fleeing the Nazis, Lem notes that they escaped certain death with the help of false papers. It was as if the child’s innocent game had prophesied a horrific turn in history, and Lem wonders if he’d sensed some calamity looming on the horizon—if his game had sprung “perhaps from some unconscious feeling of danger.”

The idea of a private world spilling over unsettlingly into reality is also at the heart of his novel “Solaris,” from 1961, about a sentient ocean with the power of “seeing into the deepest recesses of human minds and then bringing their dreams to life,” as the Lem fan Salman Rushdie once described it.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Sir Roger Penrose has had a remarkable life. He has contributed an enormous amount to our understanding of general relativity, perhaps more than anyone since Einstein himself — Penrose diagrams, singularity theorems, the Penrose process, cosmic censorship, and the list goes on. He has made important contributions to mathematics, including such fun ideas as the Penrose triangle and aperiodic tilings. He has also made bold conjectures in the notoriously contentious areas of quantum mechanics and the study of consciousness. In his spare time he’s managed to become an extremely successful author, writing such books as The Emperor’s New Mind and The Road to Reality. With far too much that we could have talked about, we decided to concentrate in this discussion on spacetime, black holes, and cosmology, but we made sure to reserve some time to dig into quantum mechanics and the brain by the end.

More here.