Peter DeScioli in Psychology Today:

Laws may seem unlikely to come from evolution. There are so many laws, and they differ so much across societies. This variation shows that natural selection did not install a single code of laws in the human mind. We do not have 10 commandments, or five or 20, etched into our minds, or else we would see the same code of laws repeated in society after society.

But does this mean that human evolution has little to tell us about the origin of laws? Not at all. To see why, just compare laws to tools. Humans make countless tools, and tools vary tremendously across societies. Yet, it is well-understood that humans evolved adaptations to make and use tools. The human mind does not have a fixed set of blueprints for 10 or 20 tools.

More here.

M. Anthony Mills in The New Atlantis:

Last month, President Joe Biden issued an executive order on artificial intelligence. Among the longest in recent decades and encompassing directives to dozens of federal agencies and certain companies, the order is a decidedly mixed bag. It shrinks back from the most aggressive proposals for federal intervention but leaves plenty for proponents of limited government to fret about. For instance, the order invokes the Defense Production Act — a law designed to assist private industry in providing necessary resources during a national security crisis — to regulate an emerging technology. This surely strains the law’s intent, not to mention allowing the executive branch to circumvent Congress.

Setting aside the merits or demerits of the order itself, however, it is worth stepping back to consider what this move by the White House tells us about the politics of AI — and in particular what it leaves out.

More here.

Ayana Mathis in The New York Times:

In the church of my childhood, we believed God’s angels battled demons in a war for our souls. This was not a metaphor. We were Pentecostals, though not strictly and not always. We weren’t picky about denomination; what mattered was belief in the redeeming blood of Christ, in the Bible literally interpreted and in God’s endless love. And evil. We believed in evil.

Sometimes evil was obvious — lies, betrayals, the misfortunes of innocents — but just as often it was camouflaged and seductive. It lurked in the card game, in the pop song and on the movie screen. It was in the allure of those things prohibited by religious or moral standards. The world was sunk in an evil passed down through Adam and Eve’s original sin and their fall from Eden.

I long ago abandoned this version of reality, but the questions it meant to address persist: Are the sensational evils that continue to plague us — murder and torture and its ilk — an expression of a (metaphorically) fallen world? Why these wars and more wars, these repeating atrocities of every stripe? How do we navigate a world beset by dark forces, and what do we do in the face of the suffering they cause?

More here.

Anne Lamott in The Washington Post:

In many of Albert Bierstadt’s Western paintings, there is a darkness on one side, maybe a mountain or its shadow. Then toward the middle, animals graze or drink from a lake or stream. And then at the far right or in the sky, splashes of light lie like shawls across the shoulders of the mountains. The great darkness says to me what I often say to heartbroken friends — “I don’t know.”

Alex Stone in Quanta Magazine:

In mathematics, simple rules can unlock universes of complexity and beauty. Take the famous Fibonacci sequence, which is defined as follows: It begins with 1 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. The first few numbers are:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 …

Simple, yes, but this unassuming recipe gives rise to a pattern of far-reaching significance, one that appears to be woven into the very fabric of the natural world. It’s seen in the whorls of nautilus shells, the bones in our fingers, and the arrangement of leaves on tree branches. Its mathematical reach extends to geometry, algebra and probability, among other areas. Eight centuries since the sequence was introduced to the West — Indian mathematicians studied it long before Fibonacci — the numbers continue to attract the interest of researchers, a testament to how much mathematical depth can underlie even the most elementary number sequence.

More here.

How I was Put to Bed

It was in the small dark apartment,
its long hall leading to a dark
metal door which opened to yet
another hallway, then a corridor

down to the lit stage of a street—
wide noise, a day, the squint of it,
then darkness again, and
I am kissed and lowered onto

a bed with two pillows, boulders
covered by a forest green cotton spread.
Down I go into that field, that river
and green sky. The bed smells good

and quickly I inhale and fall
into sleep, into nothing, then my father,
hours later, carries me limp to
the gray velveteen couch so he and

my mother have somewhere to sleep.
I never woke under transport,
never knew how a day was manufactured—
my arms, legs, and eyes open to the living

room of yet another morning. So must it
have been with Eve waking in that
voluptuous garden, stunned, back
where she never remembered having started.

by Genie Zeiger
from Open Field
Open Field Press, 2011

Jeanette Winterson [and others] in The Guardian:

In my book of essays about life with AI – moving from Mary Shelley’s 1818 vision of a man-made humanoid to the possibilities of the metaverse – I describe AI not as artificial intelligence but alternative intelligence.

I am not thrilled with where Homo sapiens has landed us, and I believe we are at the point where we evolve or wipe out ourselves, and the planet. There is no reason to believe that the last 300,000 years mark us out as a species that is fully evolved. Our behaviour suggests the opposite. I would like to see a transhuman, eventually a post-human, future where intelligence and consciousness are no longer exclusively housed in a substrate made of meat. After all, that has been the promise of every world religion.

I was brought up in a strict religious household, and it intrigues me that for the first time since the Enlightenment, science and religion are asking the same question: is consciousness obliged to materiality? Religion has always said no. Scientific materialism has said yes. And now? It’s getting interesting.

More here.

Roma Agrawal at Literary Hub:

We have been through a radical shift in technology across just three generations of my family, and each step of the way has changed our lives dramatically, just as they did for society as a whole: allowing us to communicate with our loved ones, creating the world of instant news, changing the way we work, and altering the way we entertain and are entertained. But while a video call may seem a far cry from the telegram, all these forms of modern communication are based on the science of signals being sent from one distant point to another, almost instantaneously. And our ability to do that centers around magnets.

More here.

Sam Adler-Bell at Commonweal:

In an essay on the voluble New York intellectual Dwight Macdonald, George Scialabba cites Lionel Trilling’s assessment of Orwell, who, for Trilling, exemplified “the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes to do.”

Much the same could be said of George Scialabba. For forty-four years, he has made a gift of his “direct, undeceived intelligence”—I would not say “simple”—to those fortunate readers who, as Richard Rorty once recommended, “stay on the lookout for [his] byline.”

Scialabba’s new collection, Only a Voice, contains twenty-eight previously published essays, the earliest from 1984, the latest (from this magazine) in 2021. They’re gathered here with a new introduction that takes up a perennial question for Scialabba—“What are intellectuals good for?”—and an apposite epigraph from Auden’s “September 1, 1939.”

More here.

Virginia Postrel at Quillette:

Like printed books, perspective drawing, and double-entry bookkeeping, pockets were heralds of the modern era. In most times and places, people have either carried their money, combs, papers, and other small items in bags separate from their garments or tucked them into belts or sleeves. Integrated pockets are a product of European tailoring, which dates back only to the 14th century. They emerged when men’s breeches ballooned in the mid-1500s.

Early pockets were bags sewn to the inside of the waistband and otherwise hanging loose. They were significantly larger than modern pockets—a rare surviving example from 1567 is a foot deep—and sometimes included drawstrings. Regardless of size, the critical change was that the pocket became part of the clothing and thus a more secure and intimate extension of the wearer.

More here.

Quinn Slobodian in New German Critique:

The 1990s were salad days for All Things German in North America. Scenes of cheerful anarchy as the wall fell were followed by the mass introspection of Schindler’s List (1993) and the wave of Holocaust memory. Weimar lived. The third section of Madonna’s 1992 Girlie Show tour was “Weimar Cabaret.” Sam Mendes directed a remake of Cabaret, starring Alan Cumming as a twee dead ringer for Otto Dix’s portrait of Sylvia von Harden. Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) introduced Caligari aesthetics to a younger generation with the protagonist’s haircut borrowed from the Cure’s Robert Smith, whose Wish went platinum in 1992. My college roommate bought two oversize posters that she adorned our house with, one of the Cure, the other of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. A capstone was placed on the decade with the construction of the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side, a moodier museum facing the Met, begun in 1996 and completed in 2001. Finally, you could LARP fin de siècle Vienna without leaving the New World. Newspapers were on sticks, and George Grosz paintings grimaced, mugged, and drooled from the gallery walls.

But the seeds of the fall were already on late-night television. When I stayed over at my grandmother’s, I could stay up late and watch Saturday Night Live. In a series of skits our Canadian hero, Mike Myers, hit the mystique of Germany with a laser-guided missile. In a recurring segment he was the host of a “West German television” show called Sprockets with a monkey called Klaus, a fake Kandinsky backdrop, and two authentic-looking Wassily chairs. He introduced Woody Harrelson in an asymmetrical haircut as the “irritant-in-residence at the Bremen Gallery of Modern Art.”¹ There was a bit called Germany’s “Most Disturbing Home Videos” and a dream sequence in which Myers was seduced by a leather-clad and Nazi-capped dominatrix named Exclamation Point. At each segment’s end Myers’s barked announcement that it “was the time on Sprockets that we dance” triggered expressionless turtlenecked gyrations in caricature of Egon Schiele—and, by extension, of Iggy Pop and David Bowie.

More here.

E.H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939), has a well-deserved reputation as a classic text that helped launch the academic discipline of International Relations (IR). Not only did Carr identify and dissect what would emerge as the two leading schools of thought in IR—utopianism and realism—he also applied a keen eye to the tumultuous decades after the Great War, when efforts to re-establish a functioning international political system foundered on a fundamental disruption to its most important operating principles. Carr framed these in terms of the relationship between power and morality, arguing that the latter had ultimately to accommodate itself to the changing dynamics of the former. Subsequent IR scholarship has mostly located Carr in the realist tradition of the discipline, concerned primarily with the balance of power and pursuit of national interest.

In what follows, however, I present him as part of a small group of mid-twentieth century intellectuals who tried to understand not so much the political irruptions of their time, but rather deeper disruptions within the world’s political economy. The Twenty Years’ Crisis certainly highlights how the balance of power within the international political system became dysfunctional during the 1920s and 1930s. But Carr did not confine his analysis to the diplomatic maneuvering of states, whether among themselves or at the League of Nations in Geneva. Instead, he drew on a broader tradition of political economy to place such maneuvering into the context of a fundamental disequilibrium in the international economy. It was not simply morality that had to accommodate itself to power during the interwar period; politics were also being recast to take account of new forms of international economic organization. Power, morality, politics, and economics were all in flux during the twenty years’ crisis. Carr reached for a political economy reading of this period across a number of publications before, during, and just after World War II.

More here.

Joann Wypijewski in Sidecar:

‘I don’t think smart people should go to jail’, a young observer who works in crypto remarked outside one of the biggest fraud trials in US history. Samuel Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of the crypto exchange FTX and most famous advance man for the brave new ‘democratic’ alternative to the corrupt old world of cash and wing-tip finance, was the allegedly smart person in question. Three days later, on 2 November, a jury convicted him of wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. For his crimes, Bankman-Fried, 31, faces a maximum sentence of 110 years in prison.

The jury took just a few hours to conclude that he had siphoned off FTX customer funds to its sister hedge fund, Alameda Research, which spent, transferred or gambled that money away. For years he had assured customers that their funds were protected. Even when he knew $8 billion in customer money was gone, and no assets existed to repay it, he tweeted, ‘FTX is fine. Assets are fine’. It was necessary, he’d told his lieutenants, to send out ‘a confident tweet’ as customers frantically tried to withdraw their assets.

My young interlocutor hadn’t thought Bankman-Fried was innocent exactly, but fraud happens all the time, and Think how much good smart people can do in the world! The fallen tycoon’s smarts were much-invoked at trial, by both prosecution and defence.

More here.

John Mullan at The Guardian:

Two years after Charles Dickens’s death in 1870, his closest friend, John Forster, published the first volume of his Life of Charles Dickens. Based on letters Dickens had written to him and stories he had told him, it was, in effect, an authorised biography. For Dickens buffs, it has always been both a matchless source and an untrustworthy narrative. By Helena Kelly’s account, it is more misleading than the most sceptical biographer has supposed. Far from Forster being Dickens’s hagiographer, he was his dupe. We have always known that Dickens aimed to manage his reputation; as Kelly sees it, this led him to deeper deceit than anyone has previously imagined.

So, for instance, Forster was the first to make public what Dickens said was the most crushing experience of his life: being sent, aged 12, to work in a blacking warehouse. It was an experience that he handed on to the young protagonist of David Copperfield. “It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age,” Dickens wrote, in the account Forster quoted. Yet Kelly picks at some inconsistencies about dates to suppose that it was all fiction. Dickens wanted us to believe he had been neglected and mistreated: it made for a great story of triumph over adversity.

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:

In writing her new biography of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, known throughout his long life for his cheerful endorsement of deregulation and free markets, Jennifer Burns certainly had her work cut out for her. Reflecting on how controversial her subject was, she says that one of her goals was “to restore the fullness of Friedman’s thought to his public image.” She depicts Friedman, who died in 2006 at 94, as a victim of a “bipartisan assault,” besieged by radicals on the left and populists on the right who decry the “neoliberalism” that he so ardently promoted. “As he increasingly came to symbolize a political movement,” she writes, “the nuance and complexity of his ideas was lost.”

But even Burns has to admit that this attention to “nuance and complexity” was something that Friedman did a lot to discourage. He spent decades fashioning himself into a public celebrity, issuing confident pronouncements on the miracle of markets, whether in his columns for Newsweek or in his 1980 television series, “Free to Choose.”

more here.