by Thomas R. Wells

Collective action problems pit individual selfishness against the collective interest in areas as diverse as pollution, trade, peace, and public roads. The invisible hand of the market can't reach them. Instead we need politics. The European Union used to be good at this. But not any more.

An example. Public goods like roads and schools and police are worth far more than they cost. We would all be better off as individuals if we each donated some portion of our gains from them into a collective fund for providing them. Unfortunately, we would each be even better off if we were able to escape paying our fair share while everyone else paid theirs. Then we would have our cake and be able to eat it too, to drive on the roads that other people paid for. But then only suckers would contribute, and so the roads wouldn't get built and we would all travel very slowly and inconveniently.

Collective action problems are mitigated rather than solved. The main approach is the one recommended by Hobbes in his classic statement of the problem: we call our donations ‘taxes' and appoint someone with a big stick to come along and make sure everyone pays. Introducing an external power ('the government') with the power to punish anti-social behaviour changes the pay-offs attached to our choice of whether to contribute to the public good. Now individual rationality lines up with rational collective choice and the roads get built.

There are however two alternative approaches to the Big Stick. We can institutionalise cooperation, for example by making it easier to make binding promises to each other. Or we can moralise it, by taking up a 'team' perspective and acting on the maxim, 'Act as I would wish others to do'.

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by Carl Pierer

As in any other academic field, outsiders as well as insiders often ask what do pure mathematicians actually do? What do they work on and how do they work? It probably does not help that whether the objects of study actually exist, or rather, what it would mean to say that they exist, is unclear. Who, then are the people who are drawn to this field?

It is notoriously difficult to make a film on intellectual work. Yet, there has recently been a surge in this kind of films: from Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt (2012) and Maria Schrader's Stefan Zweig: A Farewell to Europe (2016) to the more Hollywoodian Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game (2014) and Matt Brown's The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015). The difficulty is really rather trivial: there is not very much to show about intellectual work. Somebody sitting at a desk, tearing her hair out? Typing a couple of words, only to delete three more sentences? Or the theatrical stare into the distance while chewing on her glasses? That hardly makes for a feature-length film. But the protagonists of these films are famous beyond their respective field. As some kind of ‘intellectual celebrity', their lives and characters have a special sort of attraction. There is a natural interest in their persona, maybe because of their work's status in general culture. To tell their story, then, is sure to attract interest, because their names have become a sort of institution. It is quite a different task to shoot a film on current, less glamorous and perhaps more ‘ordinary' research: the ongoing work of academics.

After the very well-received Colors of Math, Ekaterina Eremenko has recently come to Edinburgh to screen her most recent film The Discrete Charm of Geometry. Eremenko graduated with a masters degree in mathematics from Moscow State University in 1990, but later obtained a second masters degree in Film Directing from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. She has directed a few documentaries before turning to films about mathematics.

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by Michael Liss

“Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,' we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”
—John Ellison, Dean of Students, University of Chicago

I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University in the 1970s, a place and a time where the phrase “safe space” referred to the stocked civil-defense structures under the campus, and “trigger warnings” were letters you didn't want to be receiving from people in positions of authority.

I raise this not to launch into a “when men were men” rant, but rather because Dean Ellison's letter reminded me of two lectures I attended at JHU—the first given by Alger Hiss, the second, in connection with the receipt of an honorary LLM awarded by the University, by Princess Ashraf Pahlavi of Iran. Hiss, as people of a certain vintage would know, was a government and State Department official accused, in 1948, of being a spy for the Soviets. in 1950, he was tried and convicted for perjuring himself before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and jailed for three and a half years. He then spent the rest of his life protesting his innocence. Princess Ashraf was the once-exiled twin sister of the Shah.

Hiss's talk was fascinating. Tall, thin, balding, and wispy looking, his cultured voice a little grainy with age, he inhabited the stage—if I recall, he had a stool, but moved about a bit—with the ease of an actor. His memory was like an old library filled with leather-bound books. He would select an event, pull it out, find some passages to share, put it back, and move to the next volume.

He was playing before an easy crowd—liberal college kids and faculty who loathed both Richard Nixon and the McCarthy-Era mindset he sprang from. Watergate was burning up everything in sight, and the yin-yang of Hiss and Nixon seemed to illustrate the obvious innocence of Hiss. A profound injustice had been done—Hiss had been made to pay an enormous price (his career and his freedom) to satisfy the colossal ego, ambition, and paranoia of Nixon and a passel of self-appointed patriots who looked for Commies under every bush.

That is at least what we thought, when going into Shriver Hall. And yet, after hearing him speak, my friends and I left with more questions than we had when we arrived. There was something about Hiss, maybe his affect, maybe just a studied compartmentalization, a reserve that came from living a life too often in shadows and alleyways, that gave us a slightly clammy feeling. We didn't buy Nixon's accusations of Hiss endangering the fiber of American life, but there was the odd sense of not hearing the entire story, of things omitted, choices unrevealed.

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by Akim Reinhardt

Let’s be honest. 3 Quarks Daily isn’t the type of website that attracts many Trump supporters.

But that’s not just a 3QD thing. It turns out that online or off, most Clinton supporters have minimal contact with Trump supporters and visa versa. It’s a national phenomenon that speaks to the profound geographic and social segregation of partisan America.

Indeed, it’s probably a bit pointless for me to post an open letter to Trump supporters here. But honestly, I’m not sure where else to turn. After all, I don’t get to hoist monthly essays onto any Republican-leaning websites, and what follows is bound to be a bit too long for that modern day version of a Letter to the Editor, the beastly maelstrom known as a Comment Section.

So if you happen to be among that slim minority of Clintonistas who has real and meaningful interactions with Trumpatistas, feel free to share this with them, he said, like a pen pal in want of a postman.

Dear Trump Supporter:

I get it. Clinton supporters can be insufferable, condescending elitists.

I understand this on a personal level, just like you do. You see, even though I’m a kind of a lefty and kind of a liberal, I’m not actually a registered Democrat. So if they see you Republicans as the enemy, then they see people like me, who agree with them on many issues but don’t always vote Democrat, as apostates.

In their world view, it’s like we’re all living in that ghastly, disease-infested stink pot that was Medieval Europe. And in their super violent, smelly little fantasy land, they’re the Christians, you’re the Muslims, and I’m part of a tiny schismatic reform group. They’d love nothing more than to permanently take the entire Holy Land back from you and kill or convert every single Mohammadean. But it ain’t gonna happen. And they realize that no matter how much they hate you, and no matter how many murderous crusades they send to massacre your brethren, on some level they simply have to accept you and your ilk as the savage enemies they can never fully vanquish. So they’ll find a purpose for you. They’ll turn you into the permanent villains they can pour their hatred onto, the heathens they can use to define themselves as civilized.

It’s like you’re each other’s Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

We were so young back then.

Maybe that's why the absence of a shared language never seemed to slow us down much.

Arriving in Tokyo on Easter Sunday 1991, I was a recent college graduate and spoke no Japanese at all.

And Tetsuya spoke not a word of English.

In those days before smart phones and the internet (and with neither of us having enough money to buy an electronic device to help), we were stuck with his old student dictionaries to facilitate communication. He said they were from his 10th grade English class in high school. With their red leatherette jackets, one was Japanese to English and the other English to Japanese. We took them everywhere! In the early years, we hauled them in our bags all around Tokyo, placing them right in front of us at the table in restaurants and cafes; almost as if marking off the two worlds: English here and Japanese there.

We were endlessly looking things up. Too hard to read the foreign words out loud; one pointed to a definition, and the other read the translation, smiling and nodding— understanding at last.

Our romance with the red dictionaries lasted for ten years into our marriage; despite the fact that within a few weeks, we came up with our own means of communicating to supplement the dictionary definitions. Speaking a kind of made-up language, we disregarded grammar and often dumped the verbs (preferring to act those out in mime); he avoiding all pronouns, in the style of spoken Japanese, and me (having Italian blood) doing a lot of arm gesturing and pantomiming. We made do communicating in this manner, and the two red dictionaries became colorful accessories to all of our outfits—from formal gear to pajamas. And, although communication between us involved some physical effort, it was rare that one of us would feel frustrated at the inability to communicate something. Onlookers would laugh and shake their heads—perhaps attributing our ability to communicate without a shared language to young love.

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by Brooks Riley

We are born into a noisy world. For most of us, it starts right off with the cries and whimpers of our own Mum as she tries to help us tunnel our way out of the womb. What from inside may have sounded like the couple fighting next door, explodes into the full-blown cacophony of voices and diverse environmental clicks and clacks of the natal experience, once you’ve made it through the birth canal to the outside.

You can’t really see all that well yet, so what you hear is what you get: Voices, ‘Ooh, aah’, ‘it’s a girl,‘ the clatter of instruments the doctor is using, the slap on your bum to get you breathing, your own voice too, adding clarion outrage and high-decibel relief, and then the squeak of rubber-soled shoes as the nurse carries you to your mother’s arms or your first bed ever. I was spared much of the clatter, my mother opting for anesthesia, allowing me to emerge into a deceptively tranquil world.

In the realm of sound, music gets the most attention, deservedly so. Music is nothing short of a human triumph, the bending of sound into methodical systematic arrangements that manage both to please the ear and to give the listener’s brain a rush of emotion that it might otherwise never have experienced. It’s right up there with language as a supreme accomplishment of the species, but its greatest achievement may be its uselessness. Music is an evolutionary luxury, serving no known purpose in the survival of the species no matter how often you hum along to ‘I will survive’.

Noise, belonging to sensual imput without intent, is etymologically compromised, left well behind in the rush to music. As distinct from the word ‘sound‘‘, the word ‘noise’ means that what is being heard is unpleasant or annoying (the word stems from ‘argument ‘and ‘nausea’). As a single word with an article, however, as in ‘a noise’, it is neutral, a sound that may very well be satisfying to the ear after all.

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by Dave Maier

Carolyn Ives Gilman’s 2015 novel Dark Orbit is intensely concerned with the extent to which reality outstrips or transcends our knowledge and/or sense perception. Indeed, the jacket copy tells us that one character’s “most difficult task may lie in persuading the crew that some powers lay [s/b “lie”?] beyond the boundaries of science.” I generally don’t like this sort of talk, which smacks of obscurantism. Naturally if you construe “science” narrowly enough – identifying it with this or that set of procedural or substantive commitments – some aspect of reality will probably remain opaque to “science” so construed; but that doesn’t tell us much.

While some of its characters haven’t quite thought all this through, Dark Orbit itself is quite thought-provoking and well worth reading for this and other more conventional sci-fi reasons (like that it’s a cracking read). I found particularly interesting the conceptual difficulties the characters run into when dealing with the nature of the senses and their relation to the reality beyond our heads. Naturally this discussion may involve some **SPOILERS**, but not, I claim, anything particularly serious.

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by Humera Afridi

I have just finished reading The Morning They Came for Us by Janine Di Giovanni and, in its wake, Dreaming of Baghdad by Haifa Zangana. I can't recall the last time I had such a powerful and visceral reading experience—needing to physically move my body into air and sunlight, taking myself from the quiet of my living room to a bench at a pier in Manhattan where I gained solace in uninterrupted views of the boundless sky and and the oddly comforting presence of insouciant yachts docked in the marina. I looked up from the harrowing accounts on the page to the bustle of the Farmer's Market and the fountain where Uversa, the self-professed Oracle of Union Square, unveils the future in artful tarot cards. I felt dizzy, disoriented, and, at the same time, reassured.

Ensconced in the knowing that the world familiar to me still reliably exists, I wondered, but, for how long? I read first one book and then the other, compulsively. I am acutely aware that my position as a reader of these books is privileged, precarious—vicariously experiencing the trauma of ongoing wars, through the written word, and at a safe distance, on the shores of a country that has its own dubious hand in the strife-riven lands of these magnificent narratives. Here I am, a person in command of her body, with the freedom to move, in safety, to places of her own choosing, needing the assistance of the sky and deep inhalations of fresh air to get through descriptions of unspeakable torture and imprisonment.

I looked at my surroundings with new eyes. Every person bumping past me in the crowded public spaces in which I chose to read these intimate portraits of war—amid chatter and laughter, and freshly harvested bunches of tender dandelion greens—carries within them a hidden world. How many of these hands, these feet, passing me have touched the skein of war? How many harbor memories of trauma, of elsewheres that shadow them here, in the present of this life, in this city, in this square?

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by Sarah Firisen

People are awful. You only need read the daily headlines to realize how awful so many of us are to each other. Intolerance, prejudice, ignorance, sit behind so many of the evils that men (and women) do to each other. But as bad as things are, they are mostly so much better than they ever have been. You don’t need to go back far in history to realize how much more tolerant and open minded we have tended to become as a species. The further back you go, the worse it is. What has made things, relatively speaking better? Well, not surprisingly, exposure and engagement tend to breed tolerance. We fear and suspect the unknown.

The more one knows and thinks about other living things, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over theirs. The empathy escalator may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, in which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the precariousness of one's own lot in life, more palpable—the feeling that “there but for fortune go I.” —Michael Tomasky

And for the most part, what has brought us increasing exposure and engagement with each other has been advances in technology; from better boats, to planes, to computers and the Internet, it seems that while exposure to “the other” often aggravates fears, eventually, the ever adaptable human being learns that other people are far more similar to us than they are different. As we become exposed to people of different religions, cultures, beliefs, sexual orientation, it becomes harder and hard to see them as “the other”. There’s nothing radical or surprising about this. While there were clearly many complex issues at play, there seems to be real evidence that one of the major factors in the radical change in attitudes towards homosexuality in the US can be put down to the TV show Will and Grace, which, if nothing else, exposed gays to be much like the rest of us: self-absorbed, looking for love and acceptance and really in need of best friends who get us no matter how self-absorbed we become.

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by Bill Benzon

Martha Mills came to Mississippi as a young civil rights lawyer, looked racists judges, lawyers, and Ku Kluxers in the eye, and never backed down–in court or out. Small in stature, huge in guts, as far as I was concerned she was the smartest, bravest, and just plain toughest of that corporal’s guard of dedicated lawyers committed to giving life to the law.

—W. Hodding Carter III

The 1960s were tumultuous years in American politics. The nation blundered into a disastrous war in Vietnam that sparked years of protest and deprived Lyndon Johnson of a second full term as president. His boss, John F. Kennedy, and been assassinated in November of 1963, leaving Johnson to pursue that terrible war, but also to work with Kennedy’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. They brought the civil rights movement to fruition with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when Robert was a U.S. Senator. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June, 1968, only two months after Martin Luther King was assassinated. King’s assassination fulminated race riots across the nation.

On February 7, 1969, The New York Times ran a story on page 20:

Woman Lawyer, 27, Jailed on Contempt In Grenada, Miss.

Special to the New York Times

GRENADA, Miss., Feb. 6–A 27-year-old woman lawyer was jailed for three hours here today after being held in contempt of court by Circuit Judge Marshall Perry when she attempted to file a bill of exceptions to a case involving a Negro civil rights worker.

Miss Martha M. Wood, an attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, based in Jackson, was released under $300 bail.

An offense that merits release after only three hours in jail and with bail at $300 can’t have been much of an offense. And it wasn’t. But it involves a kind of
intricate legal obfuscation that defies easy summary and that is characteristic of race relations in the United States, then and alas now. If the prospect of summarizing it brings me to the edge of extreme annoyance you can imagine what it did to those who suffered through and by it, day after day.

Such is the texture of the story that Martha Mills recounts in a memoir of her years as a civil rights attorney, Lawyer, Activist, Judge: Fighting for Civil and Voting Rights in Mississippi and Illinois (2015). In this particular case the obfuscation was also the occasion of a little theatrical detail in the manner of arrest: “The deputy grabbed my arm roughly and hauled me out of the courtroom. As soon as we were out of the courtroom, however, he dropped my arm, apologized, and said he had to do that for the judge” (p. 277). You gotta’ love it, the delicate egos of those racist judges. The Lord does indeed move in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.

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by Matt McKenna

Sully isn't a movie about a pilot’s heroic skill to land a plane on the Hudson river and save the lives of the hundred-fifty-five people onboard. Instead, it is a movie about the decision by a pilot to land the plane on the Hudson River and what it must feel like to be both praised and second guessed for that decision. The movie is therefore an analogy for living in the aftermath of any tough choice made in public, and has there ever been a choice made in public tougher than Apple CEO Tim Cook’s choice to remove the headphone jack from the new iPhone?

Sully is based on the real life story of Captain Chesley Sullenberger who, after having a bunch of birds slam into both engines of the airliner he was flying, lands the aircraft on the Hudson River. Miraculously, everyone on the flight survived. Understandably though tiresomely, the movie repeatedly revisits the moment the birds hit the engines, probably because it's one of the few dramatic events in an otherwise pretty thin story. Not that I mind a short movie, but even after showing a dozen views of the plane splashing into the river, Sully still clocks in at only ninety-six minutes. And outside the water landing, the story that does exist is mostly fictional including the comically evil antagonists of the film, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigating the incident. For unexplained reasons, the NTSB desperately wants to prove that Captain Sullenberger should have turned the plane around to land back at LaGuardia Airport instead of dropping it into the Hudson. In reality, the NTSB didn’t try to prove that at all, but it’s hard to blame screenwriter Todd Komarnicki for adding this twist since it is the film’s only source of drama after the landing itself.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

These days there is a nearly constant clamor among academic philosophers for more public philosophy. We've already expressed puzzlement about what public philosophy is and what public philosophers are trying to achieve. It's likely that our puzzlement has been dismissed among public philosophy enthusiasts as nothing more than the imposition of the norms of academic philosophy on to an alternative vision of philosophical activity. Clarity about public philosophy is apparently not on the public philosopher's agenda. Perhaps the idea is that we can find out what public philosophy is only by publicly philosophizing? Fair enough. But there's still a question about how to we are to publicly philosophize. What are we to begin doing that we're not already doing? Presumably, public philosophy is in part the project of bringing philosophical insight into public discussion. How can this be practically pursued? Two related paradoxes arise.

To begin, consider the fact that so much of what is called public philosophy is politically oriented. Some candidate's pronouncements may come under philosophical scrutiny, a conceptual argument for one policy or another gets given, problematic assumptions are laid bare, hidden premises are challenged, or certain norms are critiqued along some theoretical line or another. That's the philosophical part, and it is nothing new; it is the kind of thing has been done by academic philosophers since the inception of academic philosophy. The distinctively public component emerges as the commitment to philosophizing about public matters in a mode that is accessible to the public itself rather than only to academic philosophers. Public philosophy, then, is philosophy about social and political matters that is for public consumption. Put otherwise, public philosophy is political philosophy intended for uptake by the public.

So far, so good. But notice that the need for philosophical examination, critique, and elucidation is most pronounced when matters are deeply conflicted. Philosophy does its work when intellectual materials stand in need of clarification, when disagreements prevail and there is no clear or obvious way of finding a resolution. In this way, philosophy is driven by conflicts that appear to be intractable. It is the controlled attempt to rationally address conflicts that look like impasses. And the deeper the conflict, the more urgent the need for philosophers to go to work.

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by Misha Lepetic

The Spectacle is not a collection of images,
but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
~ Debord

Now that Pokémon Go has had a few weeks to work its way through our collective psychosocial digestive tract, we can begin considering the effects of this latest, and by far most successful, manifestation of augmented reality (AR). Because it has been so successful, it's worth asking the big questions. Does Pokémon Go really make us more social? Does it make us better as individuals, or as a society? What gets amplified, and what gets obscured? (Hereis a brief overview of how Pokémon Go works.)

It's worth mentioning that augmented reality broke into the national consciousness in the form of a game. Educational tools have a limited audience and their effectiveness is difficult to measure. Workplace applications are either niche or still undercooked – for example, if we're to go by this recent video by AR darling Magic Leap, work seems to entail checking the weather and stock prices, at least until you're interrupted by your kid sharing his school report on Mt. Everest. After buying some spiffy orange boat shoes, there's not much left to do but look up and zone out to the jellyfish languidly passing across the ceiling. Clearly, this is a job that is safe from automation.

Games, on the other hand, are the perfect vessel for distributing a technology such as AR. Software is a contained system; it is built according to specifications and anticipates a gamut of interactions. There are rules – visible or invisible – that tell you what the system may or may not do. And engagement with the system is based on the fact that identity and progress can be established and measured, with performance compared and contrasted with other players.

All of this makes software ideal as the substrate for the gamification of, well, everything. If you've ever used Uber, you can see the available cars trundling along the streets in your vicinity. Once you complete your ride, you rate your driver. What's a rather lesser-known fact is that your driver rates you. Silicon Valley abhors a data vacuum, and a great way to get people to provide data about anything is to make a game out of it. The genius of this is that, consequently, people are really convinced that it's just a game.

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