by Ahmed Humayun

We are overwhelmed by choices and decisions in our integrated, interdependent, information-rich world. We often find it difficult to identify what is important, to solve or even ameliorate pressing problems. We may live in a time of unsurpassed abundance – at least, in the advanced, industrialized regions of the world – but we are unequipped to deal with the implications of unprecedented choice. Thanks to the Internet and social media, vast rivers of information course through laptops and tablets and smartphones, constantly threatening to drown us. In this type of world, how should we – as individuals, professionals, and nations – focus on the relevant information, attack the right problems, generate creative alternatives, and make effective decisions?

In Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World, Donald Sull, a senior lecturer at MIT, and Kathleen Eisenhardt, a professor at Stanford's School of Engineering, locate the answer in ‘simple rules'. Their starting point is the work of Warren Weaver, an early 20th century leader in the science of complexity who categorized the stages of scientific eras as a progression through simple, uncertain, and complex problems. ‘Simple' problems can be addressed through powerful formulas that relate a few variables, such as force = mass x acceleration, while in ‘uncertain' problems, probability and statistics are used to predict the average behavior of large numbers of things.

This leaves untouched the third and final class of problem – the ‘complex' problem, which dominates the era in which we now live. As Sull and Eisenhardt write: ‘Scientists can predict the path of two billiard balls with precision, and the average behavior of two million gas particles. But what about the messy middle ground, where twenty or thirty components interact with one another in unexpected ways?' It is this middle ground, the terrain of the complex problem, that simple rules can help navigate. Instead of throwing complex solutions at complex problems, the best response is simplicity.

What are ‘simple rules'? You sort of know them when you see them, though Sull and Eisenhardt identify the general principles that appear to apply across many of these cases. Successful simple rules are few in number, customized to a particular context, applied to a well defined activity or decision, and offer just the right mix between guidance and discretion. When it comes to collective behavior, simple rules are easier to remember and implement, especially when we are not at our best. We are most in need of rules to optimize effort when we are weak, not when we are strong.

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Lines

6 July 1956
General Dwight D Eisenhower,
Embassy of the United States
Karachi. Dear Mr. President,
First of all, I wish you good luck

in your bid for re-election.
You’re my president as well
leader of all who seek freedom

from oppression of all hues.
America is a bulwark for liberty,
a terror for tyrants.
We Kashmiris want to be free.
I’m a mother. I hate false lines

rending sisters from brothers.
I wish to bring up all my children
together. Sadly, a Cease-Fire Line

divides my two older children
in Indian-occupied Kashmir,
from their younger four siblings
in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
Children who grow up apart

become strangers later in their lives.
It breaks my heart.
The nuns at Jesus and Mary Convent

in Murree easily cross the Line
to teach at the Presentation Convent
in Srinagar: Why can’t my children?
Is Justice blind?
I urge you, Mr. President, command

one of your generals to bring
his tanks here to at once
re-unite Kashmir.

Our young men and women are prepared
to spill blood on the front line.
We want the world to know our resolve.
Please help us air our determination
by printing this in the New York Times.

I pray for your victory in November.
Faithfully yours, Mrs. Maryam Jan,
“Katrina,” Pindi Point, Murree.

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by Paul Braterman

Good to eat, in traditional Mediterranean and oriental cuisines. Good food for farmed fish, not that they (the fish, I mean) really have much choice in the matter. Good as a source of possible biofuels. And now good for almost a million pounds of research funding. Your sister, the sea squirt, actual species Ciona intestinalis, coming shortly to a fjord near you.

The sea squirt is the ultimate in middle-aged complacency. It starts off looking a little bit like a tadpole, with a brain (of sorts, “cerebral vesicle” in diagram), a tail with a nerve cord and a stiffening rod (the notochord), an eye (ocellus), and a balance organ (statocyst). The reason it looks like a tadpole at this stage is because it is like a tadpole. The notochord is related to the backbone in vertebrates, a spinal cord runs parallel to it along the flexible tail, and at the head end of the spinal cord there primitive brain coordinates sensory inputs.

Anatomy of larval tunicate (John Houseman via Wikimedia)

But when it matures, it sticks its head on a rock, and changes into its adult form, which is not much more than a mouth (branchial siphon), a stomach, and an exit tube (atrial siphon). It is a hermaphrodite, with one testis and one ovary. Both of these ejaculate into the exit tube, and there are rather complicated mechanisms to prevent self-fertilisation. It protects itself by growing an outer coat, or tunic, made of cellulose-like material, hence the scientific name name tunicate. The sea squirt eats, or to more exact reabsorbs, notochord, tail, sense organs and nervous system, since these are no longer needed, while it feeds by wafting water into its mouth cavity, and filtering out suspended particles.

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by Randolyn Zinn

Read Jeffrey Renard Allen’s masterful novel Song of the Shank (published by Greywolf Press) and you'll meet Thomas Greene Wiggins, a 19^th century slave and musical genius who performed as Blind Tom. The book earned rave reviews, was named a New York Times’ Notable Book of 2014, and was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award. This spring Allen was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation award to write a new book and this fall he will become a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virgina. He earned a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has been a Professor of English at Queens College and an Instructor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at The New School.

We met at the Cornelia Street Café in NYC last month where our conversation began with a discussion about the style of Song of the Shank.

Randolyn Zinn: Your narrative stance reaches deeply into the heart of whatever you’re describing, be it place, period, landscape or a character’s interiority.

Jeffrey Renard Allen: That sounds about right. I was having a conversation about this with my editor. I said that I have a thick style. Meaning that in this book, in particular, there are a lot of voices. I am an expansive writer and this density happens at the level of the sentence. Or the paragraph. I’m interested in all the avenues of a character.

RZ: You don’t stand back at a distance describing characters; you write from the center of his or her experience and readers are pulled right in.

JA: Yeah, I’m very much about trying to write through the mind of the character, yet have enough liberty to be elastic to do interesting things with the language.

RZ: You don’t use quotation marks around dialogue.

JA: Maybe I have in some stories. But since I began to write seriously, going back to the 80s, I’ve tended to do away with that.

RZ: Why? Because it feels extraneous? Because it’s obvious, as readers, that we understand when a character is speaking?

JA: I think there are a couple of things. Some of it comes from studying writers I like. Joyce was the first person to do away with quotation marks around dialogue. Other writers don’t use them: John Edgar Wideman, a lot of Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy. When you do away with the quotation marks, t forces the reader to pay attention to what’s happening on the page. The writer makes the narration and the action blend in with the dialogue. It all becomes one voice in a way, even though you still have the distinct voices of the characters, their speech. I like that the language can work in such a way that it all blends together.

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by Charlie Huenemann

“I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” —Woody Allen

Set aside any belief in an afterlife, even the vaguely hopeful “I’ll return to the energy of the universe” sort of view. The realization that your run of life is finite is troubling. At first, when we begin to think about the full extent of our lives, we tend to think of that extent as a short stretch of time found within a very broad scope of time: I exist for several decades within – what? – billions and billions of years. It’s a tiny blip, hardly anything at all. And, automatically, we associate the very short episode called “our lives” with more ordinary episodes, like seeing a movie on a Sunday afternoon. In that case, we enjoy the movie, and after that, we drive home. But then a second realization hits: after this life, there will be no driving home. There will not be anything for us – no recalling of favorite moments, no do-overs, not even a moment of nostalgia. Nothing. That life we just had will be all we ever are, forever. The pit of existential despair opens before us, and boy howdy, does it ever stink.

Both Socrates and Seneca defined philosophy as preparing for death, and there’s no denying that if we haven’t come to terms with this fact – I will die – we have not yet found wisdom. Now I’m as foolish and troubled as anyone else, but I have come across a line of thought that, at least when I manage to remember it, makes that pit of existential despair disappear.

The line of thought comes from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, though it can also be found in the writings of Epicurus. They diagnose our problem as arising from that first view we adopted, the one that sees life as an episode within a larger frame of time. Sometimes that perspective is perfectly accurate: namely, when we look at other people’s lives, and we note how there were things happening both before they lived and after they died. Their lives are rather like Sunday afternoon movies to us in this regard. But – according to the Epicurus/Wittgenstein line of thought – when it comes to our own lives, that same picture does not apply: for of course there will not be, in our lives, any events before we live or after we die. When I try to adopt a perspective that sees my life as a short expanse of time within a larger expanse of time, I am trying to adopt a nonsensical point of view. I am trying to view my life from a life that is both my life and not my life.

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by Carl Pierer

Let us suppose Pegasus does not exist. This simple idea has proven to lead to plenty of philosophical trouble. Because what exactly is the thing that does not exist? Quine puts the “Riddle of Non-being” as: “Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not?” The problematic coin has two sides. First, it seems that in supposing to talk about Pegasus at all, we are simultaneously asserting that something that answers to the name of Pegasus is – in some sense. This is the semantic side: If Pegasus is not, in any sense of the word, what would we be talking about?

In the same essay, Quine states the problem of ontology as: “What is there?” and answers immediately: “Everything”. This approach leads to the same problem, albeit from a different angle: if everything exists, how can we deny the existence of any particular thing, e.g. Pegasus? We may call this the logical side of the problem. For example, if A says Pegasus flies, then A is committed to the claim that something that flies exists. However, if A says Pegasus does not exist, how can the obvious contradiction of asserting that something exists that does not exist be avoided?

Quine proposes the following. The apparent contradiction in stating that something does not exist can be resolved thusly: a statement denying the existence of something, say Pegasus, can be analysed in terms of its logical structure. So, to say that Pegasus does not exist means simply ~∃x (x is Pegasus).

This by itself does not solve the problem, as a further instance of existential generalisation creates the same problem this was set to solve: ~∃x (x is Pegasus) becomes ∃y~∃x (x is y) – meaning again there exists a thing such that it does not exist. To avoid this trouble, Quine suggests – following Russell – that the proper name “Pegasus” can be substituted by a description, e.g. “the winged horse that was captured by Bellerophon”. Hence if F = the winged horse that was captured by Bellerophon, the sentence becomes: ~∃x Fx and no existential generalisation can be made. The logical part of the problem is thus solved.

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by Thomas R. Wells

Judicial punishment is the curious idea that individuals deserve to be punished by the state for breaking its laws. Intellectually this is rather counter-intuitive. If crime is so terrible because it is a social trauma then deliberately hurting more people would seem to amplify that trauma rather than treat it. There are intellectual arguments for retributive punishment of course, many of them rather ingenious, but they have the look of post hoc rationalisations for a brute social fact: we just like the idea of hurting bad people – even if these days their suffering is the mental torture of prison rather than the rack.

The modern criminal justice system – bloated and terroristic – is the product of government expansionism combined with this societal lust for vengeance.

II

In theory there are great advantages to having the state administer criminal justice – i.e. as a prosecutor and punisher rather than merely as a judge – such as ensuring some baseline of fair treatment for less powerful victims and defendants. However, these are not guaranteed. For example, it is a well-studied fact that young African-American men, a minority stereotyped as especially liable to criminality, are more likely to be stopped by government agents, arrested, charged with a higher crime, denied bail, found guilty, and sentenced to a harsher punishment.

This is not the only way that the state's takeover of criminal justice goes awry. By converting crime from a relationship between victim and perpetrator to a relationship between a criminal and the state it has justified a vast expansion of what is criminalised and of the severity of punishment. The problem of crimes such as rape are conceived not primarily as harms to specific people that need to be redressed, but as transgressions of laws that represent the will of society. All crimes are now offenses against the dignity of Society, as represented by the government. The democratic requirement that justice must be seen to be done means that the moral indignation of society as a whole drives the government's punishment decisions, not the interests or wishes of actual victims of crimes.

Locking millions of people into squalid little boxes for years on end doesn't make much sense if you take away its real motivation: the naked desire to make society's enemies suffer. Besides being a very inefficient – socially expensive – means of hurting people (something I've discussed elsewhere), the mental suffering of prison does little to advance the supposed moral goals of criminal justice.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

In the middle of a semester of endless world travel, and a series of screechy deadlines, I gifted myself a three-day weekend to go meander at the Kochi Muziris Biennale of 2014/15. Our survival as, dare I say, members of a sensate world, depends on the idea of a full life, and into every full life, some art must fall is what I told myself as I made plans to visit. Gathering up a friend, and all my depleting stamina, I boarded a plane and then a cab to reach the wonderfully lovely town of Fort Kochi across the breadth of which were strewn the venues for this year's installations enunciating “Whorled Explorations”. 94 artists from 30 countries held court for a hundred and eight days across thirty venues.

Even as I disembarked prepared to be impressed, the superbly humid Kochi weather seeped slowly into my skull, rendering inchoate my cultural ambitions. Kochi is by the sea, the month was February, and we were catching summer in all its ambitious force. Our charming inn-keeper had been pretty certain over the phone when confirming our booking that we would not need an air-conditioned room. It's a good thing he left the choice open. The air-conditioning was all that lay between us and a lifetime vow to never pursue art. Spoilt; I know.

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by Michael Lopresto

When it comes to explaining human cognition and human uniqueness, everyone seems to think that nature and nurture constitute a false dichotomy. Both nature and nurture work together harmoniously to contribute to the cognitive traits that make humans profoundly different to every other animal on the Earth. Unlike every other animal on Earth, humans are uniquely flexible; we have inhabited every kind of environment, engaged in intergenerational social learning, cooperated with those outside of our immediate group, accurately described things we'll never directly observe, and much more. Humans are cognitively flexible, behaviourally flexible, communicatively flexible and representationally flexible. Representational systems employed by humans are open-ended and unprecedented in the animal kingdom: natural languages like English and Chinese, artificial languages like predicate logic, formal languages like those in mathematics, pictures, diagrams, weather maps are all but a few of the representational systems employed by humans (not to mention mental representations, which are likely to be analogues of the aforementioned systems).

One of the central questions of cognitive science is explaining how humans acquire cognitive traits, including ones that contribute to human uniqueness. Is the trait for language innate or learned? Is the trait for mental time travel (the ability to experience one's past or future) innate or learned? Is the trait for moral reasoning innate or learned? And so forth.

Nativists are those who say that lots of cognitive traits are innate, and empiricists are those who say that very few cognitive traits are innate. The nativism/empiricism distinction is not to be confused with the rationalism/empiricism debate of early modern philosophy. That debate was primarily over epistemology, while the contemporary debate is primarily over psychology. However, questions of epistemology and psychology were systematically conflated, as Kant and others pointed out, and we ought to be careful not to conflate the same questions now. Even so, there are fairly clear links between the two questions. The rationalists of early modern philosophy, like Descartes and Leibniz, argued that a great many cognitive traits were innate, and the empiricists of that era, like Locke and Hume, argued that very few cognitive traits were innate. (Although those philosophers spoke in terms of “innate knowledge” and “innate ideas”—phrases that certainly need careful interpretation).

However, the question “Is cognitive trait X innate or learned?” presupposes that the concepts INNATE and LEARNED are somewhat well defined.[*] (I take it for granted that the concept COGNITIVE TRAIT is uncontroversial, i.e. phenotypic traits relating to things like thinking, inference, perception, intelligence, and so forth.) Our question certainly doesn't presuppose that for any cognitive trait it's all or nothing; totally innate or totally learned, or even totally acquired through environmental interaction.

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by Gerald Dworkin

I am finishing the six months a year that I live in California. While here I have been working on the campaign, led by an organization called Compassion and Choices, to get a bill passed by the California legislature–SB128. This is a bill to allow medically-assisted dying in the state of California. It is modeled on the measure passed by referendum in Oregon in 1994 by 51% of the voters. A legal injunction halted implementation of that law until 1997 when the Ninth Circuit lifted the injunction. In 1992 Californians rejected a referendum legalising assisted-dying, and the legislature has rejected similar bills four times.

Some form of medically assisted-dying is now legal in Oregon, Washington, Montana, Vermont , and one county of New Mexico. This latter reminds me of Woody Allen’s view on the existence of God. He exists everywhere except in certain parts of New Jersey.

The methods of legalization differed from state to state. Oregon was by referendum. Montana was a Supreme Court ruling. Vermont was by statute. Washington’s ballot initiative passed by 58% of the voters.

My own interest in these issues has been long-standing. In 1998 I wrote, together with two other philosophers, a book called Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide. Two of us argued for its moral and legal permissibility; one against. I should note that the use of the term “Physician-assisted suicide” is now politically incorrect, for tactical reasons. I understand that the popular prejudice against suicide makes it more difficult to rally support for the bills I favor. And even some potential users of such measures object to their death-certificate reading “suicide.” But to list the cause of death, as many such bills do, as the underlying disease process seems to me simply a lie. What caused the person diagnosed with terminal cancer to die now, rather than somewhat later, is the secobarbital the patient took. But learning to keep silent about such terminological matters was only one of many lessons I had to learn.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

If there were a canonical essay topic for the Hindi classes that I struggled through as a child, “The arrival of the monsoon” would be a leading candidate. So typical a topic that it almost constituted its own form and mode of cultural practice, it was assigned to us several times a year. And we dutifully produced accounts of hot streets and families watching for storm clouds from verandahs and rushing winds and skies flickering with lightning and children playing in the streets and grateful farmers fornicating in suddenly-muddy fields while relieved trees looked on.

But of course this was an entirely fitting essay topic. Much as the coming of winter looms in the imagination of people in further latitudes, the coming of the rains is atavistically woven into the fabric of the subcontinental consciousness, stirring strange rain-fed yearnings in the blood, reflected back at us in art and in politics. The arrival of the monsoon is tracked for weeks, the subject of prayers and village ritual and newspaper op-eds and roadside chatter. Musical forms are dedicated to the first rains; governments fall because of late rains. And, fittingly, the first storms of the season are grand affairs, full of sound and fury, signifying life and fertility. Indeed, for years several friends of mine thought that one got pregnant by dancing around trees in the rain, based on their extensive watching of Hindi movies.

I worked on a farm for half a year after college, through the dry scorching heat of the summer (all fine dust and burnt skin and plants with insufficiently sublimated death drives) and into the coming of the monsoon. My most vivid memories from that year are the monsoon evenings spent sitting on the verandah after a day at work in the fields, drinking rum and watching the rain upon the rice fields and the lightning play through the sky, trees suddenly illuminated by flashes, slightly damp dogs curled up at my feet. And this is to say nothing of other memories of watching the rain fall in the courtyards of old Calcutta houses, which should justifiably be the subject of a novel-cycle about memory and decay (it probably is).

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by Matt McKenna

Not since last December's American Sniper has a simple blockbuster action film generated as much serious discussion as Mad Max: Fury Road. Where American Sniper seemed to tie people in knots about its stance on war, Fury Road has divided moviegoers as to the film's feminist credentials. Is it really a feminist film? Is it merely a film that has non-terrible female characters? Or is it actually an anti-feminist film in feminist film's clothing? Who knows, but what both American Sniper and Fury Road make quite clear is that a straightforward action movie is wide open to interpretation as writers transform its explosions into exegesis, its car chases into consternation, and its body count into boycotts.

The plot of Fury Road is terrifically thin: Max (Tom Hardy) is captured by a violent totalitarian post-apocalyptic dieselpunk gang but has the good fortune of being set free during a calamitous rebellion lead by the gang's once-loyal lieutenant, Furiosa (Charlize Theron). Max and Furiosa eventually team up, blow up a lot of cars/people, and–excuse the spoiler–kill the bad guy. That's all the plot there is, but that's all the plot the movie needs as the attraction of the film has nothing to do with story and everything to do with its wonderfully cinematic action sequences. It may therefore seem odd for so many words to be written about a film whose story can be losslessly compressed into a compound sentence or two, but it turns out this lack of specificity in the film is precisely what is required to generate such high-minded dialogue between interested moviegoers.

There's a segment in the Sophie Fiennes directed, Slavoj Zizek narrated film Pervert's Guide to Ideology in which Zizek describes the first half of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as being a capable vessel for ideology because of its “universal adaptability.” In the film, Zizek explains that the symphony has been used at different times to promote all sorts of conflicting political ideologies such as Nazism, communism, and a host of other -isms. Zizek attributes the symphony's ideological flexibility to its being “an empty container, open to all possible meanings.” He doesn't say it exactly like this, but I think Zizek is calling Beethoven's Ninth the musical equivalent of Murphy's Law. Where Murphy's Law is usually stated something like, “anything that can happen will happen,” Zizek's Law takes the form of “anything that can be read into this thing will be read into this thing.” Doesn't that pretty much describe Fury Road as well?

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