by Claire Chambers

In my last blog post I wrote about starting to learn the Hindi language during the pandemic. I embarked on this linguistic journey partly from a sense I didn’t fit into my own culture – or, equally, that English culture wasn’t the right fit for me. The sociologist Edward Shils wrote in 1961 about pre-Second World War visitors returning to their South Asian lands after a long time in Britain only to feel a ‘lostness at home and homesickness for a foreign country’. This is something I can recognize, albeit in the opposite direction. 

As I became an intermediate learner, it felt as though my progress was glacially slow. In the early stage, every new word is a milestone. Yet once a solid linguistic framework already exists, forward momentum may be hard to discern. The learner can no longer see the yardsticks measuring progress as easily as they could at the outset. 

The beginner may have a blithe innocence about the size of their task. However, the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. I read somewhere, on the Berlitz website perhaps, that it takes five years to learn a language. It depends on what you mean by learn. Almost three years in by now, I would question that cheery five-year prognosis. I am caught in the middle of a process that feels never-ending. Read more »

by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

For the last several years, elected Republicans, full of anti-trans zeal, have challenged their opponents to define the word “woman.” They aren’t really curious. They’re setting a rhetorical trap. They’re taking a word that seems to have a simple meaning, because the majority of people who identify as women resemble each other in some ways, then refusing to consider any of the people who don’t.

Lexicographers—the people who put together the dictionaries—care more about words than most of us. Of late, they’ve noticed how their beloved definitions have been abused by conservatives, and now a few have struck back. On December 13, the Cambridge Dictionary broadened their definitions of “man” and “woman” to include people who identify as either.

The original definition of “woman”: an adult female human being.

The new addition to the definition: an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.

Losing their gotcha question infuriated conservatives. Fox News howled that “this change was met with pushback from many, who argued that redefining society’s categorization of gender and sex is harmful and inaccurate.” Dan McLaughlin, a senior writer at National Review called the change Orwellian: “1984 wasn’t supposed to be a how-to manual,” he tweeted.

Unfortunately for conservatives, they’re wrong. That is precisely how dictionaries are supposed to work. Dictionaries have always been political documents. For that, we have a Founding Father to thank. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

A provocative title, perhaps, but as the sort-of cognitive scientist that I am, I find most of the stuff that is published about Artificial Intelligence (sic) these days, especially in the popular press, enough to make one scream, so perhaps some contrarian views on the matter are not entirely uncalled for. And in any case, what the title of the post conveys is more or less correct, though to be more precise, and certainly less bombastic, the point I want to make is that it is really a moot question whether modern AI algorithms can be sentient or sapient.

So. What sort of coverage can make one scream, then? Anything these days, especially since the release of GPT-3, let alone ChatGPT (and God help us when GPT-4 comes out), the large language models (LLMs) so popular these days, which are ever so often claimed to have matched the linguistic, and even cognitive, skills of human beings. This is not a new claim, of course; in 2019 there were already articles out there arguing that AI had not only surpassed human performance on rule-based games like chess, which at the very highest level of play involve carrying out huge numbers of calculations, thereby constituting the right sort of task for a computer, but also in terms of human understanding.

The situation is much worse now, though. LLMs will spell doom for certain professions, it seems, including university lecturers; or at least it will bring an end to all those dodgy companies that provide essay-writing services to students for a fee, though in the process this might create an industry of AI tools to identify LLM-generated essays, a loop that is clearly vicious (and some scholars have started including ChatGPT as a contributing author in their publications!). LLMs have apparently made passing the Turing Test boring, and challenges from cognitive scientists regarding this or that property of human cognition to be modelled have been progressively met.[i] Indeed, some philosophers have even taken it for granted that the very existence of ChatGPT casts doubt on the validity of Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar hypothesis (Papineau, I’m looking at you in the Comments sections here). We have even been told that ChatGPT can show a more developed moral sense than the current US Supreme Court. And of course the New York Times will publish rather hysterical pieces about LLMs every other week (with saner pieces about AI doom thrown in every so often too; see this a propos of the last point). Read more »

The Hindu image of Anantashayana portrays the god Vishnu
reclining upon a coiled snake upon a raft floating in a sea of milk
dreaming up the universe

Until the Sacred Cows Come Home

Vishnu reclines and sleeps
dreaming up the world
…………………………..
He lounges upon a coiled snake
in the image of ananta shayana
floating on a raft
upon an ocean of milk
pacifying the characters of his dreams,
protecting his turf: his realm of
pleasure and pain; concocting
his improbable dream of a universe,
making it up as he goes

Here and there Vishnu floats
in the logic of dreams
sailing his ship of tales
–at sea but ever in sight of land;
singing, mything, pointing
he goes dreaming on,
sailing and sinking simultaneously;
doing and undoing his work at once
within the same thought,
bobbing on waves of light
while flinging its particles
into black holes

But he is never fickle.
Vishnu can never be fickle
because he’s divine

Any ordinary Joe or Ananda
would be ridiculed for insisting yes
and no in the same breath,
but not Vishnu

All Gods may contradict themselves
without flaw,
say men
(who always give their God
the benefit of a doubt
in any argument)

Faults may never be divine;
not earthquake or plague,
and especially not
the death-rattle of love

So Vishnu will sail on
upon his coiled snake,
upon his raft,
upon his ocean of milk,
with his sidekicks Brahma and Shiva
managing the staysail and jib,
dreaming, thinking, uttering
without pause, forever,
or until the sacred cows come home
and the last man disappears
–whichever comes first

Jim Culleny
2009

by Varun Gauri

When the Federal Reserve Bank raises interest rates to fight inflation, rates rise worldwide, and debts in developing countries become more difficult to service. The consequences for low-income countries can be severe. For instance, When Paul Volcker decided in the early 1980s to push the prime rate over 20%, he triggered a debt crisis in the developing world, causing catastrophic unemployment and poverty. The impact on Latin America exceeded that of the Great Depression, and was by some measures the worst financial disaster the world has ever seen. The ensuing cascade of poverty across Africa coincided with the emerging HIV/AIDS crisis, causing widespread misery. For instance, life expectancy, usually rising in the modern world, went, in Zimbabwe, from 61 years in 1984 to 48 years in 1997 (the interest rate shock was not the only cause). As historians note, a similar dynamic had played out in the 1920s, when the world’s main central banks raised interest rates, causing the price of grains and energy to become unaffordable for millions in colonies and low-income countries.

The practice continues. Recently, the covid pandemic, inflation, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have pushed an estimated 75 million people into poverty. In this context, the Fed has been raising interest rates to bring down a mix of demand-led inflation, rooted in sectoral imbalances following the covid crisis, and supply-shock inflation, arising from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Fed’s aggressiveness is perilous for the poorest people in the world, and the warning signs of developing country debt crises are again flashing. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by David Greer

There’s a bird that weighs no more than an average paper clip and is one of the fiercest fliers on the planet. There once was a bird that weighed around half a ton, the same as an average cow, and laid an egg as large as 150 chicken eggs. The elephant bird is long gone but the bee hummingbird remains fighting fit. The only dinosaurs to survive the last mass extinction sixty-six million years ago, birds have evolved since then to fit into every available ecological niche, and today are the most widely distributed form of life on the planet other than microscopic organisms.

Birds are fascinating for any number of reasons, not least because of the mind-boggling variations in size that evolved through the tens of millions of years before humans stumbled onto the planetary stage. For the most part, the large flightless birds had been driven to extinction as humans spread across the planet, and close to two hundred other bird species are believed to have made their final exit during the last five hundred years as humans have largely converted the natural world to serve their own purposes during the latest geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

There is nothing new in this thought. But it’s worth revisiting now and again.

There’s an unbounded muddy terrain as dark and timeless as night. Drifting slowly over the landscape is a disk of light from an unknown source, like a spotlight. There’s no predictable pattern to its motion, and no place is illuminated for more than two and a half minutes. By then the light has moved on, never to return again.

When the light shines upon a circle of the land, its muddy features are revealed, tangled roots and rocks and mud. Look closer and you will see dull brown pods that stir into motion as soon as the light touches them. The pods break open and human beings climb out. Read more »

Just something I like to eat once in a while: thick slices of lime with salt, cayenne pepper, and a slice of green chili. It is intense.

by Mike Bendzela

And on the pedestal, these words appear: . . . “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. —From “Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley

Prologue from Part One

An investigation into the livelihoods of two great-great grandfathers, both oilfield workers in Ohio, has of necessity become a study in the nature of forgetting.

I have sought one thing–my ancestral grandfathers’ involvement in the history of oil production in Northwest Ohio–only to have it slip through my fingers. In the process I have found something else, a great grandmother both besotted and besieged by the men in her life, someone whom I can scarcely look away from. With the help of my brother’s research and my mother’s endless stories, I will try to draw Grandma Blanche’s tale out of the dust of an extinct oil town. Read more »

In Memoriam

Kasheer
Saleem morukh
Salaam morukh
Habeeb morukh
Heshaam morukh
Ye shahar morukh
Ye ghaam morukh
Kasheer hund
Subh o shaam morukh

Kashmir
They killed Saleem
They killed Salaam
They killed Habeeb
They killed Heshaam
They killed this city
That town they killed —
All of Kashmir’s blood
They spilled

by Abdul Rehman Rahi (6 May 1922 – 9 January 2023)
—“I swear by you O Kashmiri language, my sight and insight . . .”

Translated from the original Kashmiri by Rafiq Kathwari

by Carol A Westbrook

“Describe your family” was the assignment in my high school sociology class. A straightforward exercise, it was meant to show us how families are the basis on which all the other social institutions are modeled.

It was 1966. I lived in a tidy little bungalow with Mom and Dad, my sister and my two brothers. All four grandparents, deceased at the time, were Polish Catholic immigrants, which explains why my father had 11 siblings, while my mother had 4! Most of these uncles and aunts were married with large families of their own, so I had about 50 first cousins. All of these relatives lived nearby, in the Chicago area. I knew every one of them. This was my family.

At the time of the assignment, most families were “traditional.” Mother, father, siblings, uncles, aunts. There were no gay marriages then, with two mothers or two fathers, and there were few “blended” families of divorce. Furthermore, most adopted children didn’t know their birth parents, and thus did not include them in their families. Today things have changed, but families still remain as the basic social unit. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

At the dawn of this new year, I might have chosen to wax hopeful about promising social and technological developments boding well for the future. Or I might have taken a light-hearted detour from my usual concerns, and written about something artistic, literary or otherwise creatively engaging. But no, there will be none of that here. Because this leopard has accepted his spots, and so instead I will be sharing some sobering and morally outrageous tidbits from a 250-page court filing. I really do think grad school broke my brain. Normal people don’t read court filings. Not even all lawyers do (avoid those ones).

The filing in question was submitted to the federal district court in Puerto Rico near the end of November 2022. Entitled “Municipalities of Puerto Rico vs Exxon Mobil et al.”, it is a class action complaint filed by 16 Puerto Rican municipalities on behalf of all municipalities on the island (these being the “class” represented), against the largest investor-owned energy companies (and their collaborators) conducting business in the territory. These defendants include Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, Peabody Energy, and many others besides, along with the network of media, public relations and think-tank enterprises which these energy companies employed for their anthropogenic global warming (AGW) denial campaigns. Puerto Rico is particularly vulnerable to climate change, as a small island territory in the path of “Hurricane Alley”, and surrounded by waters that are experiencing faster-than-average warming. This vulnerability is cited throughout the complaint, characterizing the territory as an “eggshell plaintiff”, analogous to someone with an eggshell-thin skull who suffers great harm from a blow to the head. The defendant may not have known that the victim had such a thin skull, but they ought to have known that hitting people on the head was likely to cause harm, and must suffer the bad luck of being fully liable for the extraordinarily bad consequences. Of course, in the case of the fossil fuel industry and Puerto Rico, the industry’s own data told them that Puerto Rico had the climate-vulnerability equivalent of an eggshell skull. But this is an industry that historically has had no qualms about bashing literal skulls to advance its interests, so figurative skull-bashing ought not to elicit surprise. Read more »

‘Scuze Me for Being Cynical

Media (movies, news, tv), does not mediate,
and often obfuscates, it dilates,
though some do legitimately investigate,
producing news upon which we are left to ruminate,
and so, the public often oscillates and vacillates
—but sly and foxy news, well, just prevaricates,
creates fantasies that stuff its banks, which
some accept while some responsibly repudiate,
or, despairing in ennui, tumble into pits of wine,
beer or other booze, or smokey/pokey stuff like opiates
to vegetate, to hesitate, but dumb as stumps
refuse to cogitate and maybe speculate
that things we see on screen are often
putrid distillates of fucking bucks
that flow to banks where it coagulates,
eventually to seep and ooze and translate
into mansions, yachts, and hidden stakes
in off-shore tax accounts and grand estates
while law, and Justice (being blind), seems
to overlook precipitates of graft monsoons
instead of bringing down her gavel to retaliate for such,
while low-class, low-cash chumps it rushes to incarcerate
and crush for crimes too small by contrast to
unhypocritically, adjudicate.

Jim Culleny
© 4/20/21

by Joseph Shieber

In a recent short post on “ChatGPT and My Career Trajectory,” the prominent blogger, public intellectual, and GMU economist Tyler Cowen sees AI as posing a threat to the future of public intellectuals. (For what it’s worth, Michael Orthofer, the writer of the excellent Complete Review book review website, seems to agree.)

Cowen writes:

For any given output, I suspect fewer people will read my work.  You don’t have to think the GPTs can copy me, but at the very least lots of potential readers will be playing around with GPT in lieu of doing other things, including reading me.  After all, I already would prefer to “read GPT” than to read most of you.  …

Well-known, established writers will be able to “ride it out” for long enough, if they so choose.  There are enough other older people who still care what they think, as named individuals, and that will not change until an entire generational turnover has taken place. …

Today, those who learn how to use GPT and related products will be significantly more productive.  They will lead integrated small teams to produce the next influential “big thing” in learning and also in media.

I share Cowen’s sense that intellectuals (public or not) shouldn’t ignore the rapidly ever-more-sophisticated forms of AI, including ChatGPT. However, I’m not sure that Cowen is right to suggest that AI output will supplant human output – particularly if he’s making the stronger, normative claim that such a development is actually commendable.

There seem to be three reasons to interact with ChatGPT, all of which can be teased out from Cowen’s comments. First, you could treat ChatGPT as a content creator. Second, you could treat ChatGPT as a facilitator for your own content creation. Finally, you could treat ChatGPT as an interlocutor. (Of course, these ways of interacting with ChatGPT are not mutually exclusive.)

Let’s deal with these ways of interacting with ChatGPT in order. Read more »

Flor Garduno. Basket of Light, Sumpango, Guatemala. 1989.

More here and here.

Thanks to Lauren Shaw for showing me this work!

by Rebecca Baumgartner

Parenting is one of the domains where certain people scoff at the idea that reading a book or article could possibly be helpful. “That’s nice and all,” the complaint goes, “but when it comes to real life, all those ideal scenarios fly out the window.” The other group of parents, the ones who gobble up data and theories about child development, feel that any tool or strategy that gets us closer to being the parent we want to be is worth investigating. 

I have fallen into both camps at various times, and I have found it largely depends on the writing skill of the author and the explanatory power of their ideas – but most of all, whether they offer anything genuinely new or perspective-shifting that I couldn’t have figured out on my own amidst the grunt work of being a parent.

A recent NPR article encapsulates the rising industry of telling us what we already know under a trendy label and repackaging common sense as something newsworthy. Starting with the headline of the article – “The 5-minute daily playtime ritual that can get your kids to listen better” – we are already off to a bad start. 

The article discusses the concept of “special time,” which is open-ended playtime where the parent is not telling the child what to do for at least five minutes. This approach is described as a “counterintuitive” concept invented by a specific researcher in the 1970s. It turns out that if you listen to your kid, engage with them as a person, aren’t always barking commands at them, and play with them in a way they find satisfying, they will – wait for it – like you better and be more willing to listen to you. Perhaps shockingly to the researchers, this is solid advice for dealing with pretty much all humans, despite their claim that “the practice often feels awkward for adults at first.” Read more »