Time to put my winter boots away. They have served me well.

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by Kevin Lively

In the six weeks since taking office, the Trump administration has moved with an alacrity boarding on mania, pursuing the tactical doctrine of Steve Bannon: flooding the zone. In a head spinning few weeks, the effort to reshape the federal government (i.e. make it small enough to drown in a bathtub), spearheaded by Elon Musk have done the following: stop all federal hiring, put all federal diversity equity and inclusion staff on leave, attempted to freeze trillions of dollars in federal funding, offered two million federal workers the option of being paid without working until September – then being fired, installed Elon loyalists inside the highly sensitive treasury payments system (Clinton’s secretary of labor was unamused), moved to cut 90% of USAID’s budget, moved to shut down the consumer financial protection bureau, et cetera, et cetera.

While many of these moves have been challenged by the courts, the sheer scale of this attempt to effectively destroy broad swathes of the federal government is nonetheless shocking. Surely such a broad based attack can’t really be in the interests of Trump’s voters and financial backers? For example, Veterans Affairs doctors are among the 2 million employees who received the offer to quit, and what is really to be gained by cutting funding for HIV medication for South Africa? If the goal was really to save money to address, say, the debt, then you would want to increase IRS resources not fire 6700 members of its staff. This raises the obvious question: “Whose interest is this actually in?”

As I discussed in my previous column, there is a rich history from which the Trump administration came, and the logic of these actions is no exception. In fact proposals to eliminate or reduce many of the functions of government have been widely discussed with varying degrees of enthusiasm among both conservative and liberal policy planners for decades. Albeit none have been able to act with as much zeal as we are now seeing. Most obviously we can look to Reagan as the first real fruition of this spirit. During the 1980 presidential debates he said quite plainly that he wanted to introduce tax cuts in order to reduce government spending. In his eight years, he reduced the top marginal tax rate from 73% to 28%, and cut the highest personal income tax bracket from 70% to 38.5%. This was an insufficiently enthusiastic attack for Pat Robertson. In Robertson’s 1988 presidential bid he promised to cut the budget by $100 billion while eliminating every single Carter holdover from among the 100,000 federal employees who could be terminated at will.

Clinton, although coming from the less enthusiastic side, still passed a substantial welfare cut in 1996 pushed on him by Newt Gingrich. This reform introduced work requirements and devolved the program down to the states as the scandal wracked TANF program. The effects were a rapid drop off in recipients of welfare and medicare: participation dropped by as much as 53% as early as 1998. Needless to say the Bush tax cuts continued the streak, and despite facing the worst financial and deficit crisis in modern memory, Obama made no moves to plug the massive hole in the federal budget from the previous decades of tax cuts on the wealthy. Biden, a hold over from the waning days of the New Deal, appeared to be a last gasp attempt to reverse this trend. Now Trump has shifted into an unrestrained overdrive of the most conservative elements.

If this argument holds, then it appears that there has been some tacit bipartisan consensus which has predominated over the last 40 years or so. Clearly this is a nuanced phenomena with many disagreements. However in broad strokes it seems clear that both parties seemed mostly content to let the government budget and its social programs erode. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Malcolm Murray

The Paris AI Summit the other week might have been the end of a 10-year run for AI safety as Azeem Azhar, the creator of Exponential View, put it. The concept of AI safety, which can be said to have started in earnest with Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book Superintelligence, had a 10-year run, in which it grew in understanding and acceptance among the public and decisionmakers. Subsequent books, like Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 and Stuart Russell’s Human Compatible, further established the field. High-level AI safety principles were declared in Asilomar in 2017, at that time by all notable AI scientists and leaders.

Further, this was already of course before AI was even actually any good at anything but very narrow tasks. When AI capabilities actually caught up with the hypothetical concerns, with GPT-3 in 2020 and came into the eye of the public in a broad way with ChatGPT in 2022, it led to AI senate hearings, the UK Bletchley Park summit, the Biden Executive Order, the voluntary commitments on the AI labs, the attempted bill SB-1047 in California and the addition of general-purpose models to the EU AI Act.

That 10-year run now seems to be largely over, or at least severely weakened. We had already seen the Trump administration repealing Biden’s Executive Order on AI, removing the ability for the US government to test AI developers’ models for safety. Then, at the Paris AI Action Summit, it became abundantly clear that the world has turned away from AI safety. The main summit had banners stating “Science, not Science Fiction”, the speech from J.D. Vance was very clear that the focus would be only on AI opportunities, Macron focused on investments – the announcement of a new French data center – not mentioning any downsides (“plug, baby, plug”). The voluntary AI developer commitments – the Frontier Safety Frameworks – that had been a focus of earlier UK and Korea summits were glossed over completely. Perhaps most significantly, the formidable State of the Science report led by Yoshua Bengio, the IPCC-style report which was commissioned at the earlier summits and completed for this one, was not mentioned at all in the main event. This report, which was meant to establish a common basis for discussion, was in fact relegated to a side event the week before, at a university two hours outside of Paris. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

Ada sits alone at a table contemplating whether she should drink the liquid from the glass in front of her.  She’s been promised that the result of doing so will be an immediate revision to her set of beliefs.  If she drinks from the glass, she will believe only things that are true.  She won’t become omniscient; she won’t know everything.  The liquid will simply replace all false beliefs she has with corresponding true ones.  Ada likes to think that she is intellectually humble.  She likes to believe that she generally acts in accordance with reliable processes for forming beliefs.  Most importantly, Ada believes that she values truth.  Nevertheless, she can’t shake the feeling that drinking from the glass would be a kind of suicide.

In The Sources of Normativity, philosopher Christine Korsgaard argues that reasons for action spring from what she calls our “practical identities.”  These practical identities are ways of conceiving of ourselves that we value and hold dear. For example, I may view myself as a friend, a mother, a lover, etc., and the reasons I have for behaving in various ways are picked out by what those identities permit or forbid.  The identities that provide us with overriding reasons are those we’d rather die than give up.  As Korsgaard says, “The only thing that could be as bad or worse than death is something that for us amounts to death—not being ourselves anymore.”

Harry Frankfurt makes a similar argument in his book, Reasons of Love. He argues that the things we care about are the sources of our reasons and the things that we love create what he calls “volitional necessities”—they generate reasons for action that can’t fail to motivate us, at least to a degree.  The things we love and care about define who we are and what we’re willing to do.

Ada bonds with her sister over their shared love of music.  They enjoy the work of one particular artist above all others.  In particular, they admire this artist’s skill and creativity.  They also share her values.  If Ada were to learn that this artist actually didn’t write her own music, it would not only impact her perception of the artist, it might also impact her relationship with her sister.  If she were to learn that the artist was actually cruel, manipulative, or abusive, she might find her new assessment of the artist’s character at odds with her sister’s assessment. What would happen then? Read more »

Nandipha Mntambo. (Unknown title) 2008.

Cowhide and resin.

More here, here, and here.

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by Martin Butler

In the UK and USA the gap between the richest and poorest ten percent continues to grow.  Few would argue that inequality resulting from racism, sexism, disablism or any other sort of prejudice is morally acceptable. Wealth inequality, however, being a matter of degree, is far less straightforward. The familiar nightmare vision of totalitarian ‘communism’ hangs over the idea that everyone should have exactly the same level of wealth.  Most accept that some level of wealth inequality is a positive good, in that it incentivises effort and excellence. But if we agree that wealth inequality pe se is not necessarily wrong, at what point does it become unacceptable? And why would going beyond this point be unacceptable?[1]

Many would argue that equal opportunities are what matter. We can imagine a society with excellent equal opportunities that nevertheless has significant levels of wealth inequality. And we assume here that all wealth is acquired legally though legitimate means. A society with excellent equal opportunities would be one where the basics – education, healthcare, housing, a living wage and so on – were readily available right across the board so that the young of the poorest in society would start life not necessarily on a level playing field, but at least on one that was not hopelessly skewed against them. Of course family influences are crucial but these are always going to vary, so perfect equal opportunities – like perfect anything – is for the birds. Once off the starting blocks, those from the poorest background in such a society would have a similar (or at least not too dissimilar) chance to succeed as those from higher wealth groups. No matter what their background, those who failed to take the opportunities on offer, or chose not to take them, would be likely to fall into the lower wealth brackets. There would still be significant wealth inequality but this would result from individual effort and talent or the lack of it, which would mean high levels of upward and downward social mobility. Implicit in the vision of modern liberal democracies is the ideal of meritocracy, allowing for wealth inequality due to differences in talent and effort but finding inequality based on prejudice and discrimination morally abhorrent.

What’s wrong with this vision? One problem is the fact that in most liberal democracies, though upward mobility is not unusual – despite the fact that in recent years it has declined considerably – downward mobility is far less common. This is in terms of wealth rather than income, and the reason for this is inheritance. Societies, despite the move towards individualism, are in the main composed of families. Every individual has a mother and a father who will usually pass on any accumulated wealth to their offspring. This exposes one of the contradictions in the values of the liberal world view. On the one hand we fully endorse equal opportunities, but on the other we regard it as natural that we have a right to hand on accumulated wealth to our offspring. Inheritance taxes are unpopular because they seem to undermine this right. But a society where inherited wealth plays an increasing role in wealth inequality is a society where opportunities are less equal. Inherited wealth – or simply having well-off parents – increases an individual’s opportunities in all sorts of obvious ways that are unrelated to the merits of the offspring who receive these benefits. Inheritance works directly against meritocracy.[2] Read more »

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by David Winner

After  Giselle died, I wanted to define the role that she played in my life, an uncommon relationship, a step-grandmother.

Her existence had been presented to me by my parents as a fait accompli, an addendum to my list of older relatives: Baba and Jeta, my maternal grandparents from Prague who ran a bakery together in Cleveland, my father’s mother Faie, bone thin, friendly but extravagantly self-involved, and her ex-husband, the dour, bald Grandfather Percy who married Giselle in the early 1950s.

Giselle was the only adult that I knew by first name.  Giselle’s last name was Winner like ours, but it would have been ridiculous to call her Mrs. Winner or Grandmother Giselle as no kid had three grandmothers.

Like a breath of perfumed wind, Giselle occasionally blew into Charlottesville where I grew up.  From whence she came and to whence she returned, I don’t think that I thought to ask.

Several decades after her death when I first started visiting Christopher, her son and my uncle, in Rome in what had been Giselle’s apartment, he told me the bare outlines of her story.

There were photographs of an adolescent Giselle in 1930’s Poland, blond, ethereal, standing outside a grand house in the country.  Grace Kelly comes to mind.

When the Germans invaded, Giselle’s family found themselves in their crosshairs.  My mother wondered if they were Jews, but nothing suggested that to be true.

The Germans killed her father, her uncle, her siblings.

But Giselle and her mother escaped.  Her mother went to France, but Giselle took one of the trains that ran between Nazi-friendly territories to Fascist Rome.

In Rome, an illegal alien and perhaps a Jew, Giselle did everything that she could to survive, including, Christopher’s dark speculation, sex work. Read more »

by William Benzon

That’s a highly condensed form of an idea that began with this thought: You have no business making decisions about the deployment of technology if you can’t keep people on the dance floor for three sets on a weekday night. There are a lot of assumptions packed into that statement. The crucial point, however, is the juxtaposition of keeping people dancing (the groove) with making decisions about technology (the machine).

What did I have in mind? I was specifically thinking about the decisions currently being made about the development and deployment of artificial intelligence and the hype driving those decisions. In particular I was thinking about pouring billions of dollars in developing the infrastructure to support AI. The most prominent example is the Stargate project, introduced by President Trump in the presence of executives Larry Ellison, Masayoshi Son and Sam Altman:

Really? Color me skeptical.

What bothers me is that these decisions are being made by a relatively small group of billionaire technology executives, but the resulting technology commitments will affect us all. What do these people know or care about human happiness? How does that figure into their decisions? Is it really true that more wealth for the technology sector, means more wealth and happiness for all of us?

That’s where keeping people on the dance floor comes in. Speaking as a musician with considerable experience, I know that that is not easy. I also know that, when it works, it’s the best feeling in the world. This, or something like it, is a real question. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

When I first traveled to Thailand at age 23, friends warned me that should I ever encounter the police – for any reason, whether I was right or wrong – to quickly offer them 100 baht. One friend I made during my backpacking period got in trouble for smoking a joint on the beach – marijuana being VERY illegal in Thailand at that time.

“They arrested me and I knew I had no longer than the time it would take to get to the police station to bribe my way out,” my friend told a group later. “So I asked to go to the ATM and they took me! They told me 10,000 baht [roughly $230 at that time] would be good. So I gave it to them and they let me go with a warning to never make that mistake again.”

While $230 wasn’t a small sum to a 22-year-old backpacker, it was a very small price to avoid potentially a decade in a Thai jail.

During the year I lived in Thailand, I learned it was common for businesses to pay “protection fees” to the local police. When I subsequently worked in Taiwan, I learned the same basic rules applied. In China, a little money ensured government officials stamped contracts and forms. When I lived in Bali, the police sometimes setup “checkpoints” along key roads where drivers slowed, rolled down their windows and handed cash – usually 20,000 rupiah (roughly $2 USD at that time) to an officer – not a word exchanged.

Corruption has a long history across most Asian societies.

When Singapore became an independent republic in 1965, it was no different. Only its largely British educated founders – many of whom studied at Cambridge and the London School of Economics – hated corruption. Besides the inherent iniquity of it, they understood the drag corruption places on economic development. While none are free from corruption, first world countries generally eschew graft and do their best to minimize it.

“It is sad to see how in many countries, national heroes have let their country slide down the drain to filth and squalor, corruption and degradation, where the kickback and the rake-off has become a way of life, and the whole country sinks in debasement and despair,” said Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.

Unfortunately, corruption is costly to extinguish. Read more »

Reflection selfie in a road mirror of me and my wife, Margit, who is also taking a reflection selfie of herself and me in another road mirror. In Neustift, South Tyrol. The photo she took is below.

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by Rafaël Newman

The National Library of Kosovo is perched above downtown Prishtina. Built in the early 1980s and now with holdings of some two million, the complex resembles a mashup of Moshe Safdie’s Habitat with a flying squadron of geodesic domes, the whole unaccountably draped in chainmail. During the war in Kosovo in the late 1990s, the building served as a command center for the Yugoslav Army, which destroyed or damaged much of its collection of Albanian-language literature; the Library’s refurbishment and maintenance today thus signals the young Republic’s will to preserve and celebrate its culture.

Reverence for that culture—Albanian culture in general, not limited to the borders of contemporary Kosovo—is on egregious display throughout Prishtina. The library looks across at the Cathedral of Saint Mother Teresa, erected in honor of the Skopje-born Albanian nun in the postwar period; her statue and a square bearing her name can also be found further north, on Bulevardi Nënë Tereza.

Mother Teresa Boulevard ends in a broad piazza in which Skanderbeg (or Skënderbeu), the nom de guerre of Gjergj Kastrioti, the 15th-century hero of Albanian resistance to Ottoman rule, faces a statue of Ibrahim Rugova, the Kosovo-Albanian man of letters who served as the Republic’s first president during the 1990s and until his death in 2006. The piazza also features an homage to Adem Jashari, a founding member of the UÇK whose martyrdom at the hands of Serbian police, along with 57 members of his family at their home in Prekaz in 1998, is commemorated with a national memorial site, while his name has been bestowed on Prishtina’s airport and other notable institutions.

Farther down, a large portrait of Hashim Thaçi, the leader of the UÇK (Kosovo Liberation Army) in the war with Serbia, adorns a building facing the boulevard. Prishtina also features public likenesses of Bob Dole and Madeleine Albright, and streets named for Wesley Clark and Tony Blair. And there is of course Bill Clinton, under whose aegis NATO bombs drove Serbian forces out of Kosovo in 1999 and led to the establishment of the Republic. The US President’s statue, positioned slightly outside the downtown core but not far from the Cathedral and the Library, features an outstretched arm à la Lenin that ends, however, with an amicably waving hand rather than an imperious index finger.

Thus, although it has avoided the idolatrous excesses of Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, which is so populated by statues that it is reminiscent of Sleeping Beauty’s petrified court, Prishtina does feel rather like an assembly of Stone Guests—although Prishtina’s tributes to Albanian folk heroes stand alongside American counterparts, rather than the Slavic heroes immortalized in Skopje. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Charles Siegel

The dishonest and cynical way in which RS 5000 was tested and marketed reflected a culture within Celotex stretching back to at least 2009.

That was a key finding of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s “Phase 2” report, released on September 4, 2024. The finding appears at the beginning of a long, meticulous examination into the acts and omissions of Celotex, Ltd., the company that manufactured the insulation used in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower in London, which burned in a catastrophic fire in 2017. The report led to outrage in the press and among victims’ groups, and to terse denials by Celotex.

It was a damning indictment.  But to anyone familiar with Celotex, it was ruefully laughable.  Celotex, Ltd. had begun its corporate life nearly a century earlier, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of an American company of the same name.  And this American Celotex had displayed precisely the same dishonest and cynical attitude toward the users of its products, and indeed toward its own workers, for many decades.  Tens of thousands of them had died as a result of that corporate culture. The horror of Grenfell was but a gruesome, if entirely foreseeable, coda to this ghastly history. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

I know teachers who imagine the tune is what they have on repeat in hell, but I myself am strongly pro-Kahoot. If (like me) you were born too early to have your own school experience center around a large screen, and (unlike me) you have one of those boring non-teaching jobs, a brief explanation is in order. Kahoot is an app that lets you ask multiple-choice questions on your class screen, and have students answer them on their own devices to earn points. With its bright colors and  some other bells and whistles, it hits a sweet spot in the teenage brain that magically makes it care about getting mathematical terminology right. It’s the best thing.

Or perhaps the best thing is actually Blooket. A self-paced quiz app, where getting questions right can give you the edge in a larger game in which you are trying to catch fish or steal crypto from your classmates. To get a genuine sense of what playing a Blooket is like, you will have to wait until Generation Alpha starts producing its own great literature. My own grasp of the different game modes is primarily inductive, based on the yelps and cries of my students rather than on first-person experience. I agree with my colleagues that ‘Café’ works well, but only if you can give enough time. Else, students complain their investments don’t pay off; they get to upgrade different breakfast ingredients to higher levels, you see, in order to make more money.

These apps embrace an important fact about school life, namely that students and teachers don’t want the same things at the same time. Though in the end we are all interested in demonstrating that learning has happened, some teenagers apply a steeper discount function to that outcome than I do. Gamifying ‘kahootable’ skills is one way of harmonizing our short-term aims. Read more »