Sigal Samuel in The Atlantic:

Imagine you’re the president of a European country. You’re slated to take in 50,000 refugees from the Middle East this year. Most of them are very religious, while most of your population is very secular. You want to integrate the newcomers seamlessly, minimizing the risk of economic malaise or violence, but you have limited resources. One of your advisers tells you to invest in the refugees’ education; another says providing jobs is the key; yet another insists the most important thing is giving the youth opportunities to socialize with local kids. What do you do? Well, you make your best guess and hope the policy you chose works out. But it might not. Even a policy that yielded great results in another place or time may fail miserably in your particular country under its present circumstances. If that happens, you might find yourself wishing you could hit a giant reset button and run the whole experiment over again, this time choosing a different policy. But of course, you can’t experiment like that, not with real people.

You can, however, experiment like that with virtual people. And that’s exactly what the Modeling Religion Project does. An international team of computer scientists, philosophers, religion scholars, and others are collaborating to build computer models that they populate with thousands of virtual people, or “agents.” As the agents interact with each other and with shifting conditions in their artificial environment, their attributes and beliefs—levels of economic security, of education, of religiosity, and so on—can change. At the outset, the researchers program the agents to mimic the attributes and beliefs of a real country’s population using survey data from that country. They also “train” the model on a set of empirically validated social-science rules about how humans tend to interact under various pressures.  And then they experiment: Add in 50,000 newcomers, say, and invest heavily in education. How does the artificial society change? The model tells you. Don’t like it? Just hit that reset button and try a different policy.  The goal of the project is to give politicians an empirical tool that will help them assess competing policy options so they can choose the most effective one. It’s a noble idea: If leaders can use artificial intelligence to predict which policy will produce the best outcome, maybe we’ll end up with a healthier and happier world. But it’s also a dangerous idea: What’s “best” is in the eye of the beholder, after all.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

In the largest genetics study ever published in a scientific journal, an international team of scientists on Monday identified more than a thousand variations in human genes that influence how long people stay in school. Educational attainment has attracted great interest from researchers in recent years, because it is linked to many other aspects of people’s lives, including their income as adults, overall health and even life span. The newly discovered gene variants account for just a fraction of the differences in education observed between groups of people. Environmental influences, which may include family wealth or parental education, together play a bigger role. Still, scientists have long known that genetic makeup explains some of the differences in time spent in school. Their hope is that the data can be used to gain a better understanding of what educators must do to keep children in school longer. With a fuller understanding of the influences exerted by genes, scientists think they will be able to better measure what happens when they try to improve a child’s learning environment. The new study, published in the journal Nature Genetics, finds that many of the genetic variations implicated in educational attainment are involved in how neurons communicate in the brain. A striking number are involved in relaying signals out of neurons and into neighboring ones through connections called synapses. The findings are based on genetic sequencing of more than 1.1 million people. But the subjects were all white people of European descent. In order to maximize the odds of discovering genetic links, the scientists say they needed a very large, homogeneous sample.

When the team tried to use these genetic variants to explain differences in schooling time among African-Americans, the predictions failed. The researchers also found that genes don’t have a uniform effect: The influences of the genes varied from country to country. The researchers could not pinpoint the cause of these differences. But if educators in one country emphasize memory over problem-solving in math classes, for example, then some gene variants may provide a bigger benefit to some students than others, the scientists speculated. A truly global understanding of these genetic influences will require similarly huge studies of people of other ancestries, the researchers said.

More here.

Hello Readers and Writers,

We received a large number of submissions of sample essays in our search for new columnists. Most of them were excellent and it was hard deciding whom to accept and whom not to. If you did not get selected, it does not at all mean that we didn’t like what you sent; we just have a limited number of slots and also sometimes we have too many people who want to write about the same subject (for example, a lot of philosophers applied this year). Today we welcome to 3QD the following persons, in alphabetical order by last name:

1. Abigail Akavia
2. Samia Altaf
3. Pranab Bardhan
4. Jeroen Bouterse
5. Nickolas Calabrese
6. Niall Chithelen
7. Shawn Crawford
8. Timothy Don
9. Robert Fay
10. Joan Harvey
11. Mary Hrovat
12. Lexi Lerner
13. Bill Murray
14. Thomas  O’Dwyer
15. Anitra Pavlico
16. Ahmad Saidullah
17. Andrea Scrima
18. Joseph Shieber
19. Tim Sommers
20. Adele Stanislaus
21. Joshua  Wilbur

I will be in touch with all of you in the next days to schedule a start date. The “About Us” page will be updated with short bios and photographs of the new writers no later than the day they start.

Thanks to all of the people who sent samples of writing to us. It was a pleasure to read them all. Congratulations to the new columnists!

Best wishes,

Abbas

John Lanchester in The New Yorker:

What are you doing? I don’t mean what are you doing with your life, or in general, but what are you doing right now? The answer, in one respect, is simple enough: you’re reading this magazine. Obviously. From a certain economic perspective, however, you’re doing something else, something you don’t realize, something with a sneaky motive that you aren’t admitting to yourself: you are signalling. You are sending signals about the kind of person you are, or want to be. What’s that you say—you’re reading this in the bath, or on your phone in bed, or otherwise in private? Well, the same argument applies. You are acquiring the tools for a “fitness display.” This, the economist Robin Hanson and the writer-programmer Kevin Simler argue in their new book, “The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life” (Oxford), is an advertisement of “health, energy, vigor, coordination, and overall fitness.” Fitness displays “can be used to woo mates, of course, but they also serve other purposes like attracting allies or intimidating rivals.” So there you go: that’s what you’re doing, there in the bath with the magazine. Your rivals are right to feel intimidated.

Wait, though—surely signalling doesn’t account for everything? Hanson, in a recent podcast interview with Tyler Cowen, a colleague at George Mason University, was asked to give a “short, quick and dirty” answer to the question of how much human behavior “ultimately can be traced back to some kind of signalling.” His answer: “In a rich society like ours, well over ninety per cent.” He was then asked to cite a few voluntary human activities that “have the least amount to do with signalling.” The example Hanson came up with was “scratching your butt.”

That made me laugh, and also shake my head. Economists often do. I started reading up on economics twelve years ago. I was in the early stages of writing a novel about contemporary London, and had come to the realization that frequently hits you when you are writing fiction, which is that there is a story behind the apparent story.

More here.

Lizzie Wade in Science:

The priest quickly sliced into the captive’s torso and removed his still-beating heart. That sacrifice, one among thousands performed in the sacred city of Tenochtitlan, would feed the gods and ensure the continued existence of the world.

Death, however, was just the start of the victim’s role in the sacrificial ritual, key to the spiritual world of the Mexica people in the 14th to the 16th centuries.

Priests carried the body to another ritual space, where they laid it face-up. Armed with years of practice, detailed anatomical knowledge, and obsidian blades sharper than today’s surgical steel, they made an incision in the thin space between two vertebrae in the neck, expertly decapitating the body. Using their sharp blades, the priests deftly cut away the skin and muscles of the face, reducing it to a skull. Then, they carved large holes in both sides of the skull and slipped it onto a thick wooden post that held other skulls prepared in precisely the same way. The skulls were bound for Tenochtitlan’s tzompantli, an enormous rack of skulls built in front of the Templo Mayor—a pyramid with two temples on top. One was dedicated to the war god, Huitzilopochtli, and the other to the rain god, Tlaloc.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith at his own blog:

Some time back I took a group of students to the Galerie d’Anatomie Comparée at the Jardin des Plantes. This is the famous collection of skeletons laid out according to one version of the order of nature by Georges Cuvier at the turn of the 19th century. We were looking at a display case (added long after Cuvier’s death) that consisted in four rows, one above the other, with five skulls in each row representing five developmental stages of three species of great ape –gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans–, plus Homo sapiens. 

I had asked the students to pay attention to the way in which the different species, particularly the human species, seem to develop away from each other as they move from their more or less similar infant stage through adolescence to adulthood, and how the gorilla in particular develops a huge cranial crest, while the human simply develops a freakishly huge cranium (at least by comparison).

At this point a student interrupted to ask me whether each skull of the same species was from the same individual.

Pardon? I said. The student explained again that she wanted to know whether the baby gorilla skull, for example, was from the same animal as the adolescent gorilla skull and the gorilla skulls at the other three stages of development. How on earth would that be possible? I asked, still confused as to whether I had understood.

Yet, intuitively, I understood, and what she was asking was not at all strange.

More here.

Scotty Hendricks in Big Think:

In 1765, Russian Empress Catherine the Great heard that the philosopher Dennis Diderot was in dire need of money. As a well-known patron of the arts, sciences, and Enlightenment philosophers, she immediately purchased his entire library. She directed him to keep it at his home and hired him as her librarian with 25 years of salary upfront.

Diderot, whose finances had never been sound, proceeded to use some of the money to buy a very lovely scarlet robe.

This is where his troubles began. After he got used to the splendor of his new garment, he noticed that his apartment wasn’t quite as nice as it should be now that he was wearing beautiful clothes.

To fix this, he replaced his old prints with new ones. Then he noticed his armchair was no longer suitable and replaced it with a new leather one. His desk was then suddenly out of place and needed to be updated as well.

Before long, he had replaced nearly every item in his home with a shiny upgrade. In the end, he was in debt and still hungry for more material goods.

More here.

Robert B. Reich in the New York Times:

If climate change, nuclear standoffs, Russian trolls, terrorist threats and Donald Trump in the White House don’t cause you feelings of impending doom, you might think about artificial intelligence. I’m not just referring to big-brained robots taking over civilization from us smaller-brained humans, but the more imminent possibility they’ll take over our jobs.

It’s already happening. Robots and related forms of artificial intelligence are rapidly supplanting what remain of factory workers, call-center operators and clerical staff. Amazon and other online platforms are booting out retail workers. We’ll soon be saying goodbye to truck drivers, warehouse personnel and professionals who do whatever can be replicated, including pharmacists, accountants, attorneys, diagnosticians, translators and financial advisers. Machines may soon do a better job than doctors at scanning for cancer.

This doesn’t mean a future without jobs, as some doomsayers predict. But robots will almost certainly push down wages in all the remaining human-touch jobs (child care, elder care, home health care, personal coaches, sales and so on) that robots can’t do because they’re not, well, human.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwR2kVOcwNI

Leo Mirani in 1843 Magazine:

So it is with organising my life. I have tried paper diaries, Google Calendar and to-do apps. No matter the form, what they all have in common is a rigid structure imposed from above. You have a certain number of lines for each day or a finite number of categories into which your plans must fit, or a small palette of colours to highlight or distinguish between events. It drives me insane. So I made my own system: a Google spreadsheet with columns titled “today”, “tomorrow”, “this week”, “weekend”, “this month” and “three months”, and tabs to keep track of expenses, books I’ve read, travel plans, story ideas, and general note-keeping. It’s messy and entirely manual: there are no shortcuts, no functions, no add-ons.

Which brings me to the Bullet Journal. When my colleagues at 1843 suggested I try this so-called “analogue system for the digital age”, I was sceptical. This “system” was developed by a designer in Brooklyn called Ryder Carroll, and has sparked a thriving sub-culture of “bullet journalists”. There are blogs dedicated to the art. The Instagram hashtag #bulletjournal has 2.2m pictures, many of beautiful, arty journals. The hashtag #bujo has another 1.7m. It appeared to be some sort of cult of productivity.

More here.

Becca Rothfeld in The Hedgehog Review:

Begin, for once, with the ending: the arms at an awful angle, the face blue-lipped above a blot of blood. Only later do we glimpse the woman who corresponds to the corpse. She laughs in a flashback. Or she smiles in the photograph pinned to the board where the police map the murders with thumbtacks, charting tangled speculations with lines of yarn. In light of her death, she comes to life. This is the antiordering typical of the serial killer procedural, a narrative scramble that begins with the answer and ages back toward the question. In the television series Hannibal (NBC, 2013–15), a convicted murderer impales a nurse in prison. He snaps at the officers who come to question him, “I was caught red-handed. There’s no mystery as to who done it. I did it!” Still, the officers insist that they have something to ask.

We know who did it, but the mystery of motive remains. It recurs in the spate of serial killer dramas that have proliferated in recent years, multiplying as fast as the gruesome murders we watch so raptly each week. In Mindhunter (2017–), a Netflix series set in the mid-seventies, a professor of behavioral science at the FBI Academy observes that murder has become inscrutable. In the past, people killed each other for reasons: The culprit was always the jilted lover or the cheated business partner, the cuckolded husband or the scheming heir. To solve the puzzle, we only had to track the reasons back to their sources. But beginning in the seventies, when “Son of Sam” murderer David Berkowitz shot six people “because a dog told him to,” the killer became “a black hole.” “Where do we go,” the professor asks, “when motive becomes elusive?”

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The Globe and Mail:

For four seasons, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates has been hosting the genealogy television show Finding Your Roots. In each episode, Mr. Gates presents celebrities with a book full of research into their ancestry, drawing from genealogical records and genetic tests. On a recent show, Mr. Gates introduced the actor Ted Danson to one of his 18th-century ancestors, Oliver Smith of Connecticut. Mr. Danson learned how Mr. Smith defended his seaside town against the British during the Revolutionary War.

Mr. Danson proudly patted the page that chronicled Mr. Smith’s heroics. “Well done, well done,” he said. “I never imagined a one-of-me’s out there in the revolution.”

But when Mr. Danson turned to another page in his ancestry book, his mood swiftly shifted. Now he discovered that Oliver Smith bought a slave named Venture.

Mr. Danson fell silent. Mr. Gates tried cheering him up by pointing out that Mr. Smith later allowed Venture to purchase his own freedom.

More here.

Vasudevan Mukunth in The Wire:

It isn’t tempting to write about Elon Musk in that it is easy but in that it is an event that few thought we could witness live: a successful businessman letting his true inner recklessness show. All that Musk has done is lose composure – but sadly for him, the window he opened into his mind exposed something unsavoury and disappointing. It is tempting to write about Musk because we can for once stop speculating about how it is that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs cut from the same cloth as Musk and Peter Thiel think, and take a break from amassing piles of secondhand, implicative evidence. Now we have proof – and an opportunity to characterise the psyche of this odiously powerful class of world society.

For the uninitiated: Vern Unsworth was one of the expert divers who helped rescue the young Thai football team and its coach from the cave they had been trapped in. In an interview published over the weekend, he called Musk’s offer to help with a small submarine a “PR stunt”. Musk responded on Twitter with an ad hominem, calling Unsworth a “pedo”, short for pedophile, and following it up with “Bet ya a signed dollar it’s true”. These tweets were deleted shortly after.

From all that he has said and done over the last few months, it is evident that Musk thinks he should be celebrated more than he is and criticised less. But like a big baby, every time Musk does say such things, he is taken less and less seriously – or more by those looking for a spectacle. When someone doesn’t agree, Musk lashes out in abusive ways. His disgusting potshot at Unsworth is just the latest example and isn’t out of line with previous salvos.

More here.