by Tim Sommers

I usually begin my “Ethics” course by asking, “What is the difference between ethics and morals?” I used to begin by literally asking the students that question, until I realized no one is happy about your very first question being a trick.

So, here’s the difference. “Ethics” comes from Greek, “morals” come from Latin. That’s it. Particular philosophers sometimes make some kind of (potentially) useful distinction between the two words, but the bottom line is, absent some stipulation with a theory behind it, ethics and morals don’t differ in meaning. The same goes for a “democracy” versus a “republic.”

During the recent Washington State Republican Convention, one delegate received a standing ovation for complaining that “We are devolving into a democracy,” and suggesting that “we should repeal the 17^th Amendment” (Senators are to be elected by a popular vote, rather than appointed by state legislatures). Lest you think this a lone voice in the wilderness, the current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, the person holding the second most powerful political position in our system of government, recently said, “We don’t live in a democracy. We live in a constitutional republic.” Utah Senator Mike Lee also says we live in a republic and that “Rank democracy thwarts” human flourishing.

Frankly, this is a worrying line. Read more »

Jaffer Kolb. Untitled, June, 2024.

Digital Photograph.

More here.

With permission from Jaffer Kolb.

by Ed Simon

Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at [email protected]

The shortest lyric in Natalie Diaz’s 2013 collection When My Brother Was an Aztec has two less words than its title does. At only five words, the poem “The Clouds are Buffalo Limping Towards Jesus” is, because of its length, an incongruous entry in the collection, which for the most part combines more conventional quasi-formal and free verse that ranges from a few dozen lines to a few pages. Brevity is, of course, not necessarily a marker of radicalism; after all, the lyric as a form was originally defined not just by a strong individual voice, but also by representing a brief observation or emotion rather than a narrative with epic scope. The traditional Japanese genres of haiku, sijo, and tanka are marked by an economy of precision, but in the West even that most venerable form of the sonnet makes its argument and takes its logical turn in a short fourteen lines. Then there are the poets with a reputation for parsimony, masters of concision such as Emily Dickinson or Edna St. Vincent Millay. Still, a short Millay work such as “First Fig” (“My candle burns at both ends.”) with its four lines and twenty-five words might as well be the Iliad; a Dickinson lyric such as “Poem 260” (“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”) at eight lines and 42 words is a veritable Odyssey when compared to Diaz. When a poem counts in at under a dozen words, or even under half-a-dozen, there is a suspicion that the poet is courting the gimmick more than anything, the purview of the limerick and bawdy lyric, of Strickland Gillian’s “Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes,” which has been claimed as the briefest poem in the language, reading in its entirety “Adam/Had ‘em.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Nils Peterson

I

I was telling a joke the other day on Zoom before a fairly large audience and I was telling it pretty well, Swedish accent and all. It’s a joke I have told before and it’s usually well received. However, it requires the word tailgate for the punchline, and that word never came. I sort of hung there on the hook, on the punchline of my joke, dangling like a participle. Eventually someone figured out the word I was missing, finished my joke and we went on to the next teller.

Mostly the words are there on the end of my tongue when they are bid, but an old man’s memory has a will of its own. It will recall what it wants to recall, no longer a servant to the old man’s will. Once I wrote “…sometimes Memory’s the CEO of a corporation grown too large. The boys in the mailroom can’t keep up. Incoming and Outgoing bins overflow. Mail carts lose their letters as they plod from office to office.” Another image I’ve had is that of the word heroically setting off from a distant country maybe located at the base of the spine, but the journey is a heroic one, it’s riding a slow camel and must stop at oases on the way. No wonder it doesn’t arrive till tomorrow, which, of course, never comes.

I wrote the above paragraph yesterday. This morning I remembered that a few months ago I’d tried to tell the same joke and lost it at the same word. So, is there a reason why tailgate has chosen to remain elusive, declaring its independence, refusing to come when called? Maybe it’s joined some hidden cabal of words that no longer want to be biddable, though they’ll arrive sometimes when they feel like it. If I ever tell the joke again, I’m going to write the word down on paper before I set off. I’m sure it’s quite possible that I’ll know the word when I begin the joke, but by the punchline it might well have gone off on its own. Read more »

Somewhere over southern Germany. When one can see the Austrian alps, I know I am close to home.

by Richard Farr

Historians often ask what led to Trump’s landslide victory back in 2024. All those guilty verdicts in the “PornHush” trial certainly helped — the final proof, for many, that the President was an innocent lamb set upon by crooks. And the November exit polls showed that millions of patriotic Americans found democracy a chore anyway, or were actively Fascism-curious, or simply got a buzz out of the fact that, being disempowered in every other meaningful way, they could at least step up and play a part in destroying their own children’s future. But surely the decisive factor was Trump’s inspired choice of running mate — philosopher and controversialist Thomas Hobbes. 

Sharp as a tack, a hard-bitten political realist, an intellectual heavyweight, and a precise, stylish communicator — he was so different from anyone else Trump could have chosen! The sore losers claimed he had not been born in the United States, or pointed out that he’d died in 1679. None of that mattered when the electorate saw what an ideal ticket it was.

Like the other VP aspirants, Hobbes described Trump as our only hope in dark times. In fact he iced that particular cake by calling him “our very Salvation, our Messiah, in whose Second Coming should we not earnestlie beleeve?” Like them, he also said that modern intellectual fads such as democracy, the separation of church and state, an independent judiciary, a free press and the rule of law were “monstrous and absurd Doctrines, manifest Phantasmes of Satan” and “beleeved in not, save by Idiots.” But he didn’t just say those things because it was the only way to land a lucrative government sinecure from which he he could denounce the evils of government, or because his highest aspiration was to visit Palazzo a Lago and rub shoulders with the shiftless rich. No — he said them because he could prove them.

His election-cycle bestseller Leviathan used rigor and logic to demonstrate two key political facts: 

First, the ideal system of government — indeed the only system of government a rational agent will choose — is absolute monarchy. Argument in a nutshell: (i) it’s not just Trump who’s a vicious, self-interested brute — we all are; (ii) human nature being so dire, safety is more important than liberty; (iii) sorry but you can’t have both. Read more »

Do Top Dogs Care

I place my body — life, in hands of
corporate heads and engineers
I am in my seat perched above a wing
and through this little porthole peer.

I slide my sight along its graceful lines,
to its distant tip, vague among clouds.
We’re far from earth up here.

I know this wing’s shape from books,
a form imagined by the brothers Wright
and other seers; a shape that lifts and
holds us up, aloft, until a runway meets
our landing gear, until all nuts and bolts
designed to be just here, just there,
perfectly in place, set and tightened
to the breadth of a hair are proved in hope
that no other inclination drives the calculus,
trusting that the bottom line of corporate worth
is not the top line for which its top dogs care,

Jim Culleny, 5/31/24

by David J. Lobina

In previous posts on AI [sic], I have argued that contemporary machine learning models, the dominant approach in AI these days, are not sentient or sapient (there is no intelligence on display, only input-output correlations), do not exhibit any of the main features of human cognition (in particular, no systematicity), and in the instantiation of so-called large language models (LLMs), there is no natural language in sight (that is, the models make no use of actual linguistic properties: no phonology or morphology, no syntax or semantics, never you mind about pragmatics).

The claim about LLMs is of course the most counterintuitive, at least at first, given that a chatbot such as ChatGPT seemingly produces language and appears to react to users’ questions as if it were a linguistic agent. I won’t rerun the arguments as to why this claim shouldn’t be surprising at all; instead, I want to reinforce the very arguments to this effect – namely, that LLMs assign mathematical properties to text data, and thus all they do is track the statistical distribution of these data – by considering so-called adversarial attacks on LLMs, which clearly show that no meaning is part of LLMs, and moreover that these models are open to attacks that are not linguistic in nature. It’s numbers all the way down!

An adversarial attack is a technique that attempts to “fool” neural networks by using a defective input. In particular, an adversarial attack is an imperceptible perturbation to the original sample or input data of a machine learning model with the intention to disrupt its operations. Originally devised with machine vision models in mind, in these cases the technique involves adding a small amount of noise to an image, as in the graphic below for an image of a panda, with the effect that the model misclassifies the image as that of a gibbon, and with an extremely high degree of confidence. The perturbation in this case is so small as to have no effect to the visual system of humans – another reason to believe that none of these machine learning models constitute theories of cognition, by the way – but the perturbation is the kind of mathematical datum that a mathematical model such a machine learning model would indeed be sensitive to (all graphics below come from here). Read more »

Vivian Maier. October 29, 1953, NY, NY.

More here and here.

Current show.

by Gus Mitchell

Part 1 of this interview can be found here.

Professor, writer, talk show host, part-time guitarist–Robert Pogue Harrison stands in a category of one among American intellectuals of his generation.

His first book, The Body of Beatrice (1988) a study of the Vita Nuova, lay well within his wheelhouse as a Dante scholar; since then, however, Harrison has charted an increasingly idiosyncratic course as a thinker, a writer, and an educator––in the broadest sense of the word.

Harrison joined the faculty of Stanford in 1986 and became chair of the Department of French and Italian in 2002. He turned 70 this year and announced his retirement. (Andrea Capra’s tribute, part of at a day-long celebration of Harrison’s career at Stanford held on 19^th April, was recently republished by 3 Quarks Daily.)

Harrison has written books at a steady clip, each beautifully written and finely wrought, combining intensely felt thought and erudition with quietly challenging daring. His subjects–the forest, the garden, the dead, our obsession with youth–might appear dauntingly bottomless. Yet Harrison’s style, a graceful inter-flowing of literary, philosophical and (increasingly in his recent work) scientific reference-points, gives the impression that one is both ascending and descending, reaching strange giddy heights while delving deep to the essential mysteries at the core of the matter in hand.

It’s the same style that marks the conversations and monologues of his radio show-cum-podcast, Entitled Opinions. I stumbled across an episode of Entitled Opinions sometime in 2020 on the iTunes Podcast app while looking for something about W.H. Auden. But the show has been broadcasting for almost 20 years, “down in the catacombs of KZSU” (Stanford’s local radio station) where, in Harrison’s phrase, “we practice the persecuted religion of thinking.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mike Bendzela

The week before Memorial Day, I’m back to my old tricks again, poisoning pests in my little orchard. It’s the period after petal fall, when the romance of bloom season gives way to the horrors of war. Commencing in mid-May in Maine, I walk among fruit trees amidst a profusion of blossoms; but by the end of the month, I lie awake at night worrying over a contingent of apple pests — I know I’m going to be busy for a few weeks. I’ve written previously about the trials of raising a species (Malus sieversii) originally from Kazakhstan in the ghastly climate of northern New England. The pests of the northeast — natives such as plum curculio and flatheaded appletree borer, and introduced invaders such as European sawfly and codling moth — have brilliantly adapted themselves to our New World orchards. You have to admire the intrepid little buggers for fulfilling their Darwinian duties so efficiently.

One cannot reach a truce with creatures whose brains are smaller than the tip of a pen. Plant a buffet of fruits that insects like — apples, pears, plums, and peaches — and don’t be surprised if they show up for the feast — in droves. And so, I must strap on a backpack sprayer, or hook a thirty-gallon tank to the back of my riding mower, and start killing. If I want table-quality heritage apples to sell to local markets, I have to resign myself to the equivalent of waging a napalm campaign against my arthropod companions. Does farming have to be like this, even on such a small scale? Must we slaughter our competitors? This question bugs me to no end. Read more »

New growth, even on the evergreen trees, in the woods near Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Bill Murray

A nasty typhoon punished southeast Africa in early 2023. Cyclone Freddy dropped six months of rain in six days, killed 1400 and pounded the poor, overmatched region for thirty-eight long days. From its origins in the Indonesian archipelago, Freddy wound up across the entire breadth of the Indian Ocean before battering the continent, reversing course, then returning to do it again. It was the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded.

Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique almost never get good press. The modest coverage of last year’s hurricane that struck twice paled alongside coverage of a terror attack in 2021 in the northern Mozambican coastal town of Palma. Survivors recount an utterly harrowing siege, an attack so ferocious that French energy giant Total fled from its $20 billion liquified natural gas investment there, and operations have yet to resume.

Around 200 Black locals and 20 expat contractors found themselves holed up inside the Amarula Palma Hotel. Authorities called in South African private military company Dyck Advisory Group and, as Amnesty International described things,

After the majority of the white contractors and a few well-off Black nationals – among them the Administrator for Palma – were rescued, those left behind attempted to flee by ground convoy but were ambushed by ‘Al-Shabaab.’

This isn’t the better known Al-Shabaab, but rather a local and more rag-tag group loosely affiliated with other Islamic insurgents. Theirs is a shaky, patchwork ideology incorporating local grievances, like Total’s control over local mineral wealth.

Several countries, Angola, Botswana, Rwanda, South Africa maintain a peacekeeping presence in northern Mozambique now and low level fighting is still going on, 36 months later. The poor governance and political instability that give rise to insurgencies like these color the rest of our story. Read more »