By Grace Boey

Imagine the following scenario. Bob doesn’t have any opinion on whether abortions are okay. Although he could think through the issue for himself, Bob takes another route: he asks his friend Sally what she thinks. Because Bob trusts Sally, he doesn’t hesitate to believe her when she says that abortions are fine. From then on, Bob doesn’t give the question any more thought, and goes about acting as if what Sally says is true.

What, if anything, is weird about Bob? There might not be much of a problem if Bob already has some strong moral views about the permissibility of ending life more generally, and trusts that Sally—who happens to be an expert obstetrician— knows some intricate scientific facts about abortions and foetal development that he isn’t in a position to know or understand. But what if, instead, Bob knows all the scientific information there is to know about abortions, lacks any moral views on the matter, and proceeds to outsource his moral beliefs to Sally? Even more provocatively: what if this scenario is set far in the future, and Bob uses the widely-available and completely reliable ‘Google Morals’ app to look up whether abortions are morally permissible?

There is something off-putting about Bob in the last two scenarios, that isn’t in the first. This has been framed as the ‘puzzle of pure moral deference’ in academic philosophical discussions. The puzzle, in short, concerns the asymmetry in our willingness to defer to others about empirical matters on the one hand, and purely moral matters on the other. Most of us would have no problems with Bob believing what Sally says about the science behind abortions. But the idea of him outsourcing his ethical beliefs to someone else, and the notion of anything like ‘Google Morals’, makes us balk.

Contemporary philosophers have offered solutions to two parts of this puzzle. First, what makes us balk at the prospects of practicing pure moral deference to others? And second, even if something is amiss about the practice, is it still alright for us to do it? In other words, should we be hopeful or doubtful about outsourcing our moral beliefs to others?

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by Paul North

How strange we are! We talk about our friends. We whisper: look, she's doing it again. She acts like that because her mother treated her in such and such a way. And: look at him. He always does this sort of thing. He finally got diagnosed but clearly they have to increase his dosage. Look at us: we're evolutionarily selected to hate our enemies, to choose mates with even finger lengths, to vote republican. We love to talk about psychology, the predilections, ticks, repetitions, drives, the mechanisms that make us do what we do. Along the same lines, we fetishize abnormal psychology and tell ourselves we're well within normal, and we know we are because we watch Dexter and Criminal Minds.

Some of what our friends do we put down to psychology, but TV serial killers are totally psychologized beings. The relationship of psychology to fateful thinking can be seen most clearly in them. What serial killers do is so extreme it can only be explained by reference to a tight internal network of causes controlling their being and activities. Morality doesn't affect them; they have no second thoughts before and no regrets after. All their acts are determined by the internal network, and it's up to the detective—an amateur psychologist, sometimes a professional—to unravel it. Serial killers are totally psychologized. Nothing they do is free. Each gesture can be traced to something in their childhood, some event that caused a twist in their mind, an imbalance in their essence, an association of false ideas, though these ideas are often deeply imaginative. And yet, you would never ask what the bloody act means to a serial killer. You never wonder whether they made a conscious decision to skin their victims; instead, you ask about the pathology that caused the act. Serial killers—on TV and in the movies—are one of the few creatures around whose actions can all be ascribed a cause. The serial killer is the body of fate, and psychology is its mind, its criminal mind.

Cassius laments: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves…" We can't pinpoint exactly when fate became fault, when destiny moved out of the stars and into the psyche, but in 1599 in Julius Caesar Shakespeare noted that it had already happened. How do you predict behavior, understand the world, tell a good person from a bad person when fate is not in the stars but within you? Not Cassius, but a much later literary character tells us: "You try to reconstruct his thinking. You try to find patterns." You find patterns, not in the stars, but in the head. So says Will Graham, the "forensic specialist" in the first Hannibal Lecter novel by Thomas Harris, Red Dragon. Bloodstains darken the walls and the floor. Those traces of the crime are easy to see. The stains that blot out reason in the killer's mind are hidden and have to be uncovered painstakingly and the task is not without risk.

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by Michael Liss

We all have our "desert island" videos. Send me with a couple of John Ford Westerns, perhaps Fort Apache and My Darling Clementine. Download to my notebook the first Godfather and the first Star Wars, and add something serious like The Sorrow and the Pity, Z, or the original Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Make me laugh with The Philadelphia Story or Young Frankenstein or The Producers. Do that, and I can play quietly by myself for a while without disturbing the adults.

Yet, I belong to a secret order, The Society of Hopscotch Fanatics, and would insist on having that movie in my go bag. It's got everything: The CIA, FBI, MI-6, the Russians. Chases in trucks, cars, and airplanes. Gadgets. Appealing women with foreign accents. Exotic disguises. Even some gun-play. And music—fantastic music. It's the kind of film you could watch 20 times (or more, but who's counting?) and you would still be finding things to make you smile.

The storyline is fairly simple. A CIA field agent (Miles Kendig), who, admittedly, is a bit of an antique, is pushed into a desk job by his boss, the quintessentially boorish (and short) Meyerson. Kendig doesn't want to be benched. He shreds his file (literally, as there are apparently no electronic copies in the late 1970's) and walks out. He decides to write a book, Hopscotch, documenting some of the Agency's less glorious moments (and featuring Meyerson) and begins sending juicy chapters to interested, and sometimes horrified, readers. Kendig goes off in search of a publisher and to reunite with Isobel, his old girlfriend. Meyerson goes off (with murderous intent) in search of Kendig, dragging Kendig's protégé, Joe Cutter, and a couple of hapless CIA guys, along for the ride. We have stops in Savannah, London, Bermuda and Salzburg, plus various border-crossings and other points East and West, and do some serious damage to reputations, houses, and ears.

The cast is terrific. Walter Matthau is Kendig, and while he may seem anything but the suave international spy, he's far smarter than anyone chasing him. Beneath that Oscar Madison exterior is someone quite creative with electronic and mechanical equipment, firecrackers, and paperclips.

Glenda Jackson plays Isobel, now retired from the Agency to "marry some old Nazi" who has since departed this mortal coil, leaving her with a very useful "Von" in her last name, an Austrian passport, and sufficient means to join forces with Kendig. This is the second movie the pair co-starred in, and the very offbeat, very adult chemistry they share is not unlike a good glass of wine…complex, but cuts grease. One could say it takes a great actress to make a sex symbol out of Matthau, but she likes the guy, for all his exasperating behavior. If Glenda Jackson likes you, you must be OK.

Rounding out the featured spies, Ned Beatty is Meyerson. He's thoroughly execrable, but doesn't turn the character into a cartoon. Sam Waterston sets intellectual women's hearts aflutter as Cutter (even Eleanor Roosevelt would have liked him), and Herbert Lom is a sly Yaskov, the KGB agent (you will love his omnipresent Boris Badanov hat, trench coat and mustache).

The film has some extraordinary assets beyond its leads.

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by Holly A. Case

The remnants of Andrei Kurkov's cactus collection

Cacti don't exactly grow on trees in Ukraine. They need a great deal of light or they become deformed. In winter the air temperature has to be maintained at ten degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit), which is neither easy nor fun to manage in an apartment. Some cacti require special microclimates with controlled humidity, and most need to be checked almost daily for moth infestation.

I learned all this from the Ukrainian novelist, Andrei Kurkov. A few months ago, a group of us was sitting around a table in the Café Eiles in Vienna when someone pointed out the collection of photographs of famous visitors to the café on an adjacent wall. The conversation turned to collecting: candy canes, baseball cards, chickens… "I had the seventh-largest cactus collection in Soviet Kiev," Andrei submitted.

Many questions spring to mind following such a statement; it's hard to know which to ask first. I opted for "How many did you have?" Hundreds. In his youth, Kurkov's favorite haunt had been the animal market, and especially the cactus section. Since breeding animals and plants was one of the few unregulated economic activities in the Soviet Union, the breeders, growers, and vendors at the market comprised an "oasis" that "did not belong to Soviet reality," he recalled. Soon he joined a local cacti-growers' club and was trading seeds and growing tips with other enthusiasts. "We lived in a small flat," he told us, "only two rooms on the fifth floor and all the windows were covered with shelves of cacti," some from the market, others grown from seed. Hollow plastic building blocks with one side sawed off served as pots, and the young Andrei learned botanical Latin in order to address his protégés by their proper names.

It was during his cactus-collecting phase that Kurkov also discovered the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolay Minski, and other offspring of Russian literature's "silver age." Their poems reached him through volumes smuggled into the country by his elder brother's dissident friends (one of whom later died in prison, probably from a beating). The young Andrei would sit and listen to the older boys talk about poetry and bash the Soviet government in the kitchen of his parents' flat. "They were interested in everything that was not allowed," he later told me. "I think I was both frightened and curious. Maybe more curious than frightened." He remembers the time fondly, as one of "poetry and cacti."

At the growers' club he met some of Kiev's top-ranked cactomaniacs, which included an opera singer and a professor at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, among others.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

A man cloaked in myth, what if I told you that many of the stories we tell ourselves about Galileo are simply untrue? That not only did the great scientist not drop any balls off the top of the Tower of Pisa but he didn't invent the telescope either. And not only was he never excommunicated from the Catholic church but he wasn't imprisoned in a dungeon either. Would you be surprised if I brought up the fact that he had been given permission by the Pope to write on the very topic that people think got him into trouble?

Most people now realize that few believed in a flat earth even in the Middle Ages. But, were you also aware that many of the greatest natural philosophers working in mathematics and astronomy were not only theologians but were no more proponents of the Ptolemaic system than Galileo was? Indeed, the church at the time of Galileo did not have an issue with suppositions, mathematical models or observations–and many of the greatest scientists of the church were exploring the same scientific questions as Galileo.

So, the problem was not science versus religion (that would come later). Rather, it was really an issue of theological interpretation both within the church, which was not a monolith "other" as the trope suggests; and against the backdrop of the Counter-Reformation.

I think it helps to remember that up till the time of Galileo, physicists were really mathematicians, working in mathematical models–only rarely the experimentalists we imagine today. In particular, astronomers sought to describe phenomena and make predictions. They did not engage in discussions about causes or the nature of things as that was the work of theologians. Instead, they created useful astronomical (and astrological) charts and predictions. In the history of science there is much talk about "saving the phenomena" in order to make as accurate predictions as possible (see my post here on how we are seeing this again today with regard to quantum mechanics). And guess what? Before the invention of the telescope, the Copernican understanding did not make much better predictions than the Ptolemaic system. If you think about it, until Kepler's Law of Ellipses were accepted, the Copernican system was the geometric mirror image of the Ptolemaic one –and therefore still required many, many tweaks to it, including epicycles.

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by Dave Maier

I haven’t commented on politics since the election, not least because I have no special expertise. But like lots of people, I spend too much time on the internet. When I fire up my iPad, it gives me several headlines. The Washington Post sends me a daily email with dozens of links. And I have a few blogs and other sites I check every day. All that stuff gets me thinking; so I find myself, as have many here over the past few months, with some opinions to share.

I’ve also been reading a book called What We Do Now: Standing Up For Your Values in Trump’s America (Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians, eds.). Most of the many short selections in this volume seem to have been written (or delivered: some are speeches) in the immediate wake of November’s existential shock to the lefty system, so they have titles like “Thoughts for the Horrified” (Paul Krugman), “Welcome to the Resistance!” (Gloria Steinem), and “How Our Fear Can Be Turned Into a Powerful Movement” (M. Dove Kent, executive director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice). One editor’s introduction sets the tone with decidedly purple prose:

Somehow, the United States has always averted a takeover from the far right. It was something that made our country great. … Americans have always, ultimately, resisted the call to calamity by listening, instead, to what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

It was such a long spell—nearly a century—that we were all perhaps too secure in the idea that “it can’t happen here.”

But now it has. It has happened here.

And so on. Again, I can forgive this sort of heavy breathing coming in November (the book itself was first published in January). But as the months drag on, it seems to me to be getting a bit stale. I should say that not all of the book maintains this apocalyptic tone, and many of the suggestions for action are perfectly sensible (e.g. “recognize we all have a role to play”). Others, not so much (“boycott all Trump products”). In any case, I’d say it’s time for a reset.

So since lists of things to do seem to be a thing, here’s mine. I’m happy to report that nothing here is particularly original and that even many of the writers at the New York Times are saying some of these same things (never thought I’d nod in agreement while reading a Ross Douthat column!), but I think they bear repeating. They are directed mostly at Democrats, but sometimes more narrowly at lefties or more broadly at anyone who does not own a cap that says “MAGA” on it.

1. Chill.

No, it hasn’t “happened here.” If the past five months have shown anything, it’s that President Trump (a phrase it might help to start using) is much more like a typical Republican (cut taxes on rich people domestically, macho bluster abroad) than a fascist or any other ideologue. Bannon’s not the president, Trump is; and Trump clearly cares a lot more about Trump than he does, well, anything else, let alone The Cause. (“La cause, c’est moi.”)

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by Ahmed Humayun

More than 70 years after its demise, the monstrous dictatorship of Adolf Hitler remains a fascinating case study of evil. I have often wondered: Did Hitler have the support of ordinary Germans? If so, how did he gain this support? There is no single or easy answer to these types of questions, but to my mind, the single most incisive guide to Hitler’s regime is "The Meaning of Hitler" (1978) by Sebastian Haffner.

Haffner grew up in Germany but fled to England with his Jewish fiancé in 1938. Originally trained as a lawyer, he became an influential journalist, political analyst, and author. During World War II, Haffner helped the West understand Nazi Germany. In "The Meaning of Hitler", Haffner suggests that most Germans supported Hitler at the height of his popularity, and that Hitler’s achievements helped win much of this support.

Of course, Hitler used force to gain and hold power. Since the 1920s, Nazi paramilitary forces had intimidated and assassinated opponents. After Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the creation of the Gestapo further solidified Nazi control over German society. Hitler elevated the strategic use of terror to an art form. Haffner writes that Hitler and his henchmen would issue unhinged threats, then follow up with terrorist actions that fell short of the fearful expectations created by those threats, and finally, allow some normalcy to return while “keeping a little background terror”. This approach intimidated the general public without generating extreme opposition to Nazi rule.

Recent scholarship tends to confirm that while Nazi terror was immense, it was selective. Eric Johnson argues in "Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and ordinary Germans" (2000) that, in general, Nazi terror focused on political opponents of the regime and members of persecuted and stigmatized groups. If you belonged to these categories, you were systematically killed, tortured, and discriminated against; otherwise, you could probably stay out of the crosshairs of the Gestapo. Nazi repression didn’t necessarily impose a significant cost on the day-to-day lives of many Germans.

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May 29, 2017

Dear Babuly,

Here in America, it is Memorial Day— a day for the honored dead. (Different from Veterans' Day, observed in November, which acknowledges all who have served in the military). Memorial Day is dedicated to the remembrance of those who never came back, who lost their lives in armed conflict. Solemnity and reverence describe its mood. I am glad we have this day. But can a single day suffice? I worry that it signals a poverty of remembrance.

Lately, it feels like more and more remembrance is needed. The scourge of amnesia seems to have fallen upon us. Or, perhaps, we as a race are becoming incrementally more savage. Just this past week, so much blood spilled, I was hesitant to open the newspaper. Afraid to have the breath sucked out of me again. Even before I tell you of these events that hit me, I am conscious there are others I will not mention, that I do not know about, which by a failure of distance, or point of view, did not make the news, or my eye missed the fine print of their announcement. An unjustifiable erasure.

What would you say? I wonder.

It's these erasures, isn't it, these countless erasures that over time build up into a rage so huge it renders the wounded and desperate with a motive force? I sense it, alive and latent. A primal instinct: the will to be heard and seen by fellow humans, to scream out pain in the absence of empathy. In the darkest hour, that distorted impulse rises up and reaches out to inflict the abiding pain from within on to all those smug, laughing faces. The world is an ugly place right now. The pungency of fear sits on many tongues, poisoning the air.

On this Memorial Day, my mind conjures an image: miles of flat land marked by thousands of headstones, the graves of those felled in action. Bone-white headstones, almost translucent, against the canvas of night. The earth is rough, soil upturned beneath a turbulent sky. A vigorous wind blows across this forbidding landscape filled with the bodies of martyrs.

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by Bill Benzon

Some years ago I was reading an article in Krin Gabbard’s anthology, Jazz Among the Discourses (1995), one of a pair of anthologies arguing that “jazz has entered the mainstreams of the American academy”. The general purpose of the anthology is to help ensure that this new discipline is in harmony with the latest developments in postmodern humanities scholarship. One Steven Elworth contributed a paper examining the critical transformation of jazz into an art music: “Jazz in Crisis, 1948—1958: Ideology and Representation.”

In the course of his argument, Elworth observes: “The major paradox of all writing about culture is how to take seriously a culture not one’s own without reducing it to an ineffable Other. I do not wish to argue, of course, that one can only write of one’s own culture. In the contemporary moment of constant cultural transformation and commodification, even the definition of one’s own culture is exceedingly contradictory and problematic.”

My immediate response was “Right on! Brother!” But then I asked myself, “Just what ‘culture not one’s own’ is Elworth talking about?” Since this article is about jazz I assume that jazz culture is what he’s talking about. I further assume that Elworth is White, for I cannot imagine a Black scholar writing that way about jazz.

Cozy Cole, the drummer at the back. New York, N.Y., Sept. 1946. William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.

As we know, the jazz genealogy has strands extending variously to West Africa and Europe, has been and continues to be performed by Blacks and Whites, before audiences both Black and White – though, in the past, these have often been segmented into different venues, or different sections of the same venue – the music is conventionally considered to be Black. That convention is justified by the fact the music’s major creators have been overwhelmingly Black. Thus it follows that jazz culture is, as these conventions go, Black culture.

But, in what sense would jazz be foreign to Elworth, and so NOT his own culture? The fact that he is writing about jazz suggests that he likes it a great deal and knows more than a little about it. It is quite possible that he grew up in a house where folks listened to jazz on a regular basis. If not that, perhaps he discovered jazz while among friends or relatives and came to love it. He likely attends live performances; perhaps he is a weekend warrior, jamming with friends either privately or in public. He may well have been to weddings where a jazz band played the reception. He is comfortable with jazz; he knows something of its history and understands its conventions. It is not exotic music. That is to say, it is unlikely that Elworth discovered jazz in some foreign land where no one speaks English, nor eats and dresses American style, nor knows anything of Mozart or Patsy Cline, among many others. Jazz is a routine and familiar part of Elworth’s life.

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Dilemma

take the dilemma of the moon:
two horns one night, tomorrow
a small coin in a vast thought
simple as circle
things pass
which is small consolation
if they forever return as two horns
mercilessly at opposite corners
of a skewed smile
.

Jim Culleny
3/3/17

by Paul Braterman

Below, R: How not to; "The Scientific Method", as inflicted on Science Fair participants. Click to enlarge

Consider this, from a justly esteemed chemistry text:

Scientists are always on the lookout for patterns.… Once they have detected patterns, scientists develop hypotheses… After formulating a hypotheses, scientists design further experiments [emphasis in original]

Or this, from a very recent post to a popular website:

The scientific method in a nutshell:
1. Ask a question
2. Do background research
3. Construct a hypothesis
4. Test your hypothesis by doing experiments
5. Analyze your data and draw conclusions
6. Communicate your results [emphasis in original]

Then, if you find yourself nodding in agreement, consider this:

Since a scientific theory, by definition, must be testable by repeatable observations and must be capable of being falsified if indeed it were false, a scientific theory can only attempt to explain processes and events that are presently occurring repeatedly within our observations. Theories about history, although interesting and often fruitful, are not scientific theories, even though they may be related to other theories which do fulfill the criteria of a scientific theory.

If you are familiar with the creation-evolution "controversy", you may well suspect that last example of being so much creationist waffle, intended to discredit the whole of present-day geology and evolutionary biology. And you would be right. This quotation is from Duane Gish, a major figure in the twentieth century revival of biblical literalist creationism, writing for the Institute of Creation Research.¹

L: Mike Pence, " [N]ow that we have recognised evolution as a theory… can we also consider teaching other theories of the origin of species?"

Such nonsense isn't funny any more, if it ever was. The man who may very soon find himself President of the United States is an eloquent spokesman for creationism.

And yet Gish's remarks seem to follow from the view of science put forward in the first two excerpts. What has gone wrong here? Practically everything.

R: Kepler's first two laws: elliptical orbit; equal areas in equal times

Consider the first great accomplishment of modern science; working out the laws² of planetary motion, and Newton's explanation of those laws in terms of his theory² of gravity. Copernicus, picking up on an idea that dates back to the ancient Greeks and was also well-known to the astronomers of Islam's Golden Age, treated the Earth as a planet like any other, and had the planets circling the Sun. Kepler showed that the orbits were in fact, to a very good approximation, ellipses, and found out how a planet's speed varied during each rotation, and how the length of a planet's "year" depending on its distance from the Sun. Finally, Newton showed that Kepler's Laws could be explained using his theory of gravity and his laws of motion, and that the same set of laws explained the motion of the Moon, and the downward acceleration of falling bodies on the Earth.

So where are the experiments, said in the first two extracts to play an essential role in testing a hypothesis?

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by Jalees Rehman

Would you rather receive $100 today or wait for a year and then receive $150? The ability to delay immediate gratification for a potentially greater payout in the future is associated with greater wealth. Several studies have shown that the poor tend to opt for immediate rewards even if they are lower, whereas the wealthy are willing to wait for greater rewards. One obvious reason for this difference is the immediate need for money. If food has to be purchased and electricity or water bills have to be paid, then the instant "reward" is a matter of necessity. Wealthier people can easily delay the reward because their basic needs for food, shelter and clothing are already met.

Unfortunately, escaping from poverty often requires the ability to delay gratification for a greater payout in the future. Classic examples are the pursuit of higher education and the acquisition of specialized professional skills which can lead to better-paying jobs in the future. Attending vocational school, trade school or college paves the way for higher future wages, but one has to forego income during the educational period and even incur additional debt by taking out educational loans. Another example is of delayed gratification is to invest capital – whether it is purchasing a farming tool that increases productivity or investing in the stock market – which in turn can yield greater pay-out. However, if the poor are unable to pursue more education or make other investments that will increase their income, they remain stuck in a vicious cycle of increasing poverty.

Understanding the precise reasons for why people living in poverty often make decisions that seem short-sighted, such as foregoing more education or taking on high-interest short-term loans, is the first step to help them escape poverty. The obvious common-sense fix is to ensure that the basic needs of all citizens – food, shelter, clothing, health and personal safety – are met, so that they no longer have to use all new funds for survival. This is obviously easier in the developed world, but it is not a trivial matter considering that the USA – supposedly the richest country in the world – has an alarmingly high poverty rate. It is estimated that more than 40 million people in the US live in poverty, fearing hunger and eviction from their homes. But just taking care of these basic needs may not be enough to help citizens escape poverty. A recent research study by Jon Jachimowicz at Columbia University and his colleagues investigated "myopic" (short-sighted) decision-making of people with lower income and identified an important new factor: community trust.

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by Amanda Beth Peery

In this image produced by Google's DeepDream algorithm, a pattern of archways stretches across the screen in an Escher-esque eye-game, the intricate façade of a building with impossible architecture. This vision is the result of a computer program, a neural net that has been trained to recognize objects and, when looking at an image, amplify any hint or outline of an object it knows. So, in other DeepDream images, two dots might become two dark eyes or a leaf might become a dog's face. Here, DeepDream recognizes arches everywhere, and the original image is lost in arches that nest within and interrupt each other.

But what kind of meaning can we find in this image? Is there something essentially human—or inhuman—about it? In some ways, this image and others produced by DeepDream look like the hallucinations or dreams we know, but do these AI-produced images really mirror human visions? One way to think about this is to see DeepDream's images in the context of dream-art, art that follows the logic of dreams. The logic of human dreams and dream-art is different from the rational logic of our waking lives. Dream logic is what gives dreams a meaning of their own, making them more than a film-reel of leftover, twisted images from the day.

Many great artists, from the Lascaux cave painters to Tarkovsky to Lewis Carroll, created images and stories that follow dream logic. Dream logic is not arbitrary, and it's not an empty absurdity. One thing that makes a work of art like Alice in Wonderland powerful is that we, readers and viewers, recognize the logic of the story as the structure of our own dreams. The symbols, and the connections between them, feel coherent and right. Of course a vial of liquid or a little cake cause Alice to grow or shrink. Of course the Cheshire Cat's smile lingers in the tree. These are recognizable absurdities.

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by Misha Lepetic

"Machines…quell the revolt of specialized labor."
~ Marx

In my previous post, I wrote about alternative ways of viewing the encroaching effects of automation on employment. I suggested that, instead of viewing it as a zero-sum game, with industry hell-bent on automating everyone's jobs out of existence, that it is rather a phenomenon driven by firms' needs to maintain profitability and market share. In this sense, automation – and technology more generally – is an optimization function, but only in a ‘local' sense. The character of employment required by a firm is only commensurate to the needs that it can foresee in the near future. So for all the talk of a ‘post-work' future, we won't get there any time soon.

Nevertheless, this leaves open an important succeeding question: What does the technological substitution of labor actually look like, and what, if anything, can be done about it? The first thing that ought to be made clear is that the process of substitution is neither neat nor obvious. Introducing a single robot into the workplace does not necessarily displace a single human being. Indeed, in the case of industrial manufacturing, it may be more: a factory making cell phone parts in Dongguan, China, recently automated much of its operations and saw its headcount plummet from 650 to 60 workers. In a further blow against humanity, the output of the factory increased nearly threefold, and product defect rates declined from 25% to less than 5%.

It's worth noting that a factory making cellphone parts is an ideal subject for automation. A fully automated factory floor is the final reductio that, one might argue, began with Adam Smith's exposition of the power of the division of labor. But regardless of the factory's output – whether it's Smith's pins or components for mobiles – the fact is that we are making the same thing, thousands of times over. However, while significant, this kind of specialized manufacturing is but a fraction of global economic output.

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

We live in a fractured age when many seem to be convinced that their beliefs are right, and that they can never agree with the other side on anything to any degree. Science has always been the best antidote against this bias, because while political truths are highly subjective and subject to the whims of the majority, most scientific truths are starkly objective. You may try to pass a law by majority vote in Congress saying that two and two equals five, or that DNA is not a double helix, but these falsehoods are not going to stay hidden for too long because the bare facts say otherwise. You may keep on denying global warming, but that will not make the warming stop. What makes science different is that its facts are true irrespective of whether you believe they are true.

But combined with this undeniable nature of scientific facts exists a way of doing things that almost seems paradoxical to proclamations about hard scientific truth. That is the essential, never-ending role of doubt, skepticism and uncertainty in the practice of science. Yes, DNA is a double helix, and yes, it almost seems impossible that this fact will someday be overturned, but even then we should not hold the fact as sacrosanct. “Truth” in science, no matter how convincing, is always regarded as provisional and subject to change. Some scientific facts are now so well documented that they approach the status of “truth”, and yet considering them so literally would mean abandoning the scientific method. Seen this way, truth in science can be considered to be an asymptotic limit, one which we can always get closer to but can never definitively reach.

It’s this seemingly paradoxical and yet crucial yin-and-yang aspect of science that I believe is still quite hard to grasp for non-scientists. Niels Bohr would have appreciated the tension. Bohr bequeathed to the world the concept of complementarity. Complementarity means the existence of seemingly opposite ideas that are still required together to explain the world. In the physical world, complementarity was first glimpsed in the behavior of subatomic particles which can sometimes behave as waves and sometime as particles, depending on the experiment.

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Beginning

I’m thinking
of cartoons
that say
the end is nigh
on a sign
held by a guy
on a corner,
rag coat,
hunched,
forlorn,
whose years
went south,
didn’t pan out as
he thought they would
when he was a boy,
the way
they should’ve but
never made it
over a midlife hump
when the light at a
tunnel’s end
everybody talks about
when things fall apart
went
slowly dim
went
from sun
to lighted pinprick
in a scrim
on a stage
where all are merely
players,
women, men
strong, lame
clowns, crooks
politicians running
showing up
puking
mewling
like a child
in a
mother’s arms
….and I was thinking
of the moment just before
when
in the dark
nothing is
but a
beginning
that is always
coming
.

Jim Culleny
11/1/16
.