Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality

David Phillips at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

David Edmonds’ Parfit belongs to a burgeoning genre. There are the two recent collective biographies of Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch (by Benjamin Lipscomb and by Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman). There are M.W. Rowe’s J.L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer and Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure. Earlier works include Ray Monk’s Russell and Wittgenstein volumes, Tom Regan’s Bloomsbury’s Prophet, and Bart Schultz’s books on Sidgwick and the other classical utilitarians. And Edmonds himself is inter alia the author of The Murder of Professor Schlick and the coauthor of Wittgenstein’s Poker.

Derek Parfit stands out among the subjects of these various works for being so contemporary. Edmonds could draw on a vast collection of stories conveying Parfit’s legendary eccentricity. But he also took on in a particularly acute form the challenge of writing simultaneously for two quite different audiences. One audience consists of philosophers, some of whom are the sources of the stories and almost all of whom know a good deal about Parfit and his ideas. The other audience consists of general readers who are apt to come to the book knowing little or nothing about either.

I think Edmonds meets this challenge admirably. He is a lively and amusing writer. Readers of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews are unlikely to turn to his book for an introduction to Parfit’s ideas. But it is likely to be the place where some readers with less philosophical training first encounter teletransporter cases, future Tuesday indifference, and the repugnant conclusion. They are in good hands.

More here.

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A transformative month rewrites the capabilities of AI

Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

Llama 3.3, running on my home computer passes the “rhyming poem involving cheese puns” benchmark with only a couple of strained puns.

At the end of last year, there was only one publicly available GPT-4/Gen2 class model, and that was GPT-4. Now there are between six and ten such models, and some of them are open weights, which means they are free for anyone to use or modify. From the US we have OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5, Google’s Gemini 1.5, the open Llama 3.2 from Meta, Elon Musk’s Grok 2, and Amazon’s new Nova. Chinese companies have released three open multi-lingual models that appear to have GPT-4 class performance, notably Alibaba’s Qwen, R1’s DeepSeek, and 01.ai’s Yi. Europe has a lone entrant in the space, France’s Mistral. What this word salad of confusing names means is that building capable AIs did not involve some magical formula only OpenAI had, but was available to companies with computer science talent and the ability to get the chips and power needed to train a model.

In fact, GPT-4 level artificial intelligence, so startling when it was released that it led to considerable anxiety about the future, can now be run on my home computer. Meta’s newest small model, released this month, named Llama 3.3, offers similar performance and can operate entirely offline on my gaming PC. And the new, tiny Phi 4 from Microsoft is GPT-4 level and can almost run on your phone, while its slightly less capable predecessor, Phi 3.5, certainly can. Intelligence, of a sort, is available on demand.

More here.

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Noah Smith on the Rise and Fall of “Neoliberalism”

Yascha Mounk at his Substack:

Yascha Mounk: I’ve been trying to think through the state of economic policy at the moment, and it seems to me that we’re in a strange moment where there was a clear paradigm that economists followed in the ‘90s and perhaps the early 2000s, and that ran aground. Then there was a principled alternative to it that parts of the left tried to put forward, but that seems to have run aground as well.

Do you think there’s a kind of clear structure to how, let’s say, the mainstream of the Democratic Party thinks about economic policy right now?

Noah Smith: Well, in the 2000s, a kind of an intellectual movement among progressives started to crystallize, which I guess for want of a better term you could call anti-neoliberalism. People basically got a short list of things they thought the market got wrong and told this sort of simplified, potted history: In the 1980s, we decided markets could do everything, cut the government, and then this led to rising inequality, falling worker power, environmental degradation, etc.. And they thought that in order to get rid of those, we need to basically reverse the neoliberal changes—to strengthen unions, various kinds of regulations, and the welfare state. And that was the basic progressive program. And you saw some elements of that program get implemented by Biden, but a lot got blocked.

But the neoliberal turn was a lot less dramatic, I think, than people realize.

More here.

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Caroline Blackwood: Muse And More

Negar Azimi at the New Yorker:

In the room devoted to the archives of Lucian Freud in London’s National Portrait Gallery, a strikingly tender painting depicts a young woman with waifish features, blond tresses, and enormous slate-blue eyes. The portrait, “Girl in Bed,” has a delicacy that stands out amid the characteristically mottled, fleshy faces of Freud’s subjects—the slender fingers and crumpled duvet, the high blush on the cheeks. The girl in question is Caroline Blackwood, a twenty-one-year-old heiress of aristocratic extraction, who would soon become the artist’s wife. Freud made ten-odd paintings of Blackwood, charting the zigzag of their relationship, from the sensitive, alluring “Girl Reading” and “Girl in Bed” (both produced in 1952, at the height of their courtship), to the abject “Hotel Bedroom,” from 1954, in which Blackwood appears wizened and withdrawn, while Freud himself stands by the window, lost in shadow.

The artist was hardly alone in his fixation. Walker Evans photographed Blackwood more than a hundred times, capturing her progression from nymphlike youth to haggard middle age. Robert Lowell, her third and final husband, immortalized her in his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection “The Dolphin” as, variously, a dolphin, a baby killer whale, and a mermaid who dines on “her winded lovers’ bones.”

more here.

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A Man Out of Time

Christopher Tayler in Harper’s Magazine:

In 1983, at the height of his international fame as the author of Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), Italo Calvino published an anthology of nineteenth-century tales of the fantastic, featuring stories from France, Poland, Germany, Britain, the United States, and Russia. There was one conspicuous absence: Calvino’s own country. To include Italian writers “merely for patriotic reasons” would have been pointless, Calvino explained. Supernatural tales, and fantasy in general, were “very much a ‘minor’ field as far as nineteenth-century Italian literature is concerned.” By implication, the same was true of twentieth-century Italian literature—at least until the genre’s resurgence “in our time.”

Calvino’s anthology was modeled on similar productions by Jorge Luis Borges and a French admirer of Borges’s named Roger Caillois. Like theirs, it offered an intellectual pedigree for the anthologist’s own work. Calvino had no real need to bolster his or the stories’ credentials; some of the playful fables he had written in the Fifties had become assigned texts in middle schools, and other serious writers, such as Primo Levi, had been publishing science fiction collections since the Sixties. But letting himself be playful had caused Calvino a lot of heartache. His first published stories were based on his experiences as a wartime partisan, and he spent a long time trying and failing to write realistic novels about the social problems of industrialized Turin. To their credit, his circle of left-wing editors and critics were unfazed when he pivoted to writing about aristocrats being split into good and evil halves or living out their lives in the treetops. All the same, he never quite stopped dreading accusations of putting form over content. Couldn’t he have stuck to writing about Italian life in a more direct and political way?

More here.

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Are you what you eat? How food shapes self-image

Lizzie Collingham in Nature:

In seventeenth-century England, people often commented after a meal: “We ourselves have had ourselves upon our trenchers”. This is an early version of today’s well-worn aphorism, ‘you are what you eat’. In Eating and Being, historian Steven Shapin explores this idea and how philosophies of food have shaped the Western sense of self. His central idea is encapsulated in the book’s last lines: “In the past, knowledge about what we eat belonged to knowledge about who we are. It still does.”

The opening chapters recount how ancient Greek Hippocratic ideas about food and medicine laid the foundations for the Western understanding of food and identity. This philosophy of dietetics proved remarkably tenacious, providing the basis for medical thinking into the eighteenth century. Dietetics gave an account of how food formed not only the substance of the body, but also the psyche. A person’s temperament was determined by the balance of the four bodily humours: blood, phlegm and black and yellow bile. The balance of these fluids in individuals determined their personality types — phlegmatic, sanguinary, melancholic and choleric. It also provided a set of principles to live by. An ideal state could be achieved by following a regimen of moderation in all areas of life: habitat, exercise, sleep, bodily excretions, the emotions and, especially, food and drink.

More here.

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Thursday Poem

Song

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

by Seamus Heaney
from To Read a Poem
Harcourt Brace 1992

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Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville

Howard Davies at Literary Review:

Man-Devil is an entertaining exploration of Mandeville’s ideas, which he set out in The Fable of the Bees and other works. Callanan does not pretend that it is a full-scale biography of Mandeville. Indeed his life story, as far as we know it, could be told in a couple of pages. From a relatively prosperous Rotterdam family, educated in medicine at Leiden University, Mandeville was forced into exile in 1693 as a result of the family’s involvement in the Costerman riots, a protest against the activities of tax farmers, private citizens who collected revenue for the government in return for a large cut. He spent the rest of his life in London, working as a kind of psychiatrist with a particular interest in hypochondria. He died there in 1733.

Other than what we can learn from his writings, that is pretty much all we know about him. There is only one personal testimony relating to him, curiously enough written by Benjamin Franklin, who met him in a pub (he was, wrote Franklin, ‘a most facetious, entertaining companion’). But his subsequent reception has been remarkable for a man so obscure.

more here.

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Wednesday, December 18, 2024

On Madonna and “Desperately Seeking Susan”

Brontez Purnell in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

The very first gay bar I regularly attended in San Francisco was this little hole-in-the-wall called Aunt Charlie’s. In 2003 (the literal second I turned 21), I began to attend their Thursday night party (a party that went on for 20 years, mind you). It was all post-disco freestyle, Hi-NRG, urban—the span of music was from about 1978 to 1982. To paint a picture, the songs would be shit like Gwen McCrae’s “Keep the Fire Burning,” Carol Hahn’s “Do Your Best,” Erotic Drum Band’s “Touch Me Where It’s Hot”—you get the idea. One day, the resident DJ pulled out the 1983 single of Madonna’s “Everybody,” with the iconic collage cover done by Lou Beach.  At the time I was in an electroclash band—electroclash being an era of 2000s music that imitated the ’80s. I danced to this Madonna song that I had heard all through my childhood. Now I was an adult, drinking in bars, wondering how a song from 30 years ago felt more like “the future” than anything my friends and I were currently doing. This here is the magic of Madonna. All classics defy time. Every time “Everybody” is played, I come alive on the dance floor.

I will be very clear about how I feel about Madonna at the top of this so we get it from the jump. “Controversial,” “culture vulturey,” “appropriative” are some of the lower-blow critiques thrown at her these days. I mean, sure, what pop star isn’t? Commercial art by very definition is carnivorous: remember that. That said, what you could certainly never call her is boring, and that alone is worthy of celebrating.

More here.

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How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age

Anne Matthews at The American Scholar:

Golden Years, a pellucid, unsparing account of the ends of life, anatomizes why a particular vision of old age was constructed in the 20th century, why it fell apart 40 years ago, and what may come next. Chappel believes that the system is worth repairing, if only for its utopian heart: the argument that we all deserve a life of dignity and public support once we become old or disabled. If not for Social Security, nearly 40 percent of older Americans would be living in poverty. Every part of the aging process is shaped by history, he warns, and as we decide how to handle a hot gray future, “it might help to understand a good deal more about the gray past.”

Histories of pension legislation rarely thrill, but Chappel is excellent on the radical, doomed attempts, in the 1880s and after, to repair lives damaged by war and chattel slavery. The long discourse on old-age support was sophisticated, the politics deadlocked. Social Security offered a moderate New Deal compromise, the least worst solution. “Beginning with the 1935 passage of the Social Security Act,” Chappel writes, “Americans were sold an idea of old age.” Yet millions were sidelined from the start, Black people especially, since agricultural and domestic workers were ineligible.

more here.

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Mass hysteria was the inevitable outcome of the UFO craze

Erik Hoel in The Intrinsic Perspective:

As reported credulously and breathlessly by just about every major media outlet, there are strange lights in the night sky all over the East Coast; particularly, it seems, in areas heavy with air traffic. Residents are going on “drone hunts” to look at the heavens (a direction that humans don’t usually examine for long periods) and suddenly seeing all sorts of things they can’t explain. “Something’s going on,” a New Jersey town mayor says; President-elect Trump says the same. “New Jersey drones” are being spotted as far away as California. ‘“Shoot them down already!” demands a NJ Assemblyman.

In response, locals are shining lasers at drones that turn out to be planes (like poor FedEx flight 3926) because it’s hard to judge distance well in the night sky. The FBI had to release a statement yesterday begging people not to shoot.

In the rare cases where people use flight trackers appropriately, like when New Jersey Senator Andy Kim went out on a drone hunt with local police, he found that what he saw was… just planes. Meanwhile, ABC News aired this picture of what is probably Venus or Jupiter.

More here.

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Anthony Burgess’s Napoleon Complex

John Banville at The New Statesman:

A novelist’s name is writ in water, and come a drought may be reduced to a wisp of spume. In his day Anthony Burgess was a very  big fish in the literary pond, most famous, or infamous, for the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, written in a wonderfully clever Russo-English patois of the author’s invention. The book was adapted for the screen by Stanley Kubrick, who later suppressed the film because of its perceived infatuation with or even encouragement to extreme violence.

A Clockwork Orange was not Burgess’s best work, though it was the one that made his reputation beyond the world of books and bookmen. He was extraordinarily productive. He wrote more than 30 novels, along with short stories, poetry, children’s books, two volumes of autobiography, lives of Shakespeare, Hemingway and DH Lawrence, books on linguistics, on music, two studies of Joyce, translations, scores of introductions to the work of others, and countless reviews, a selection of which were published in book form under the apt title Urgent Copy.

more here.

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2024’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Math & Physics

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Argentina Is Responding to Shock Therapy

Quico Toro at Persuasion:

When Javier Milei was sworn-in as Argentinian president a year ago, the smart money was on a spectacular train wreck. Impulsive, thin-skinned, hyper-ideological and irresistibly drawn to every culture war controversy, no matter how dumb, Milei doesn’t immediately strike you as the kind of leader that gets results. Taking over one of the world’s most notorious economic basketcases at a time of absolute fiscal disarray, Milei’s coming doom seemed all too predictable.

A year on, the naysayers have been, if not quite silenced, then given ample time to reconsider. Argentina’s economy hasn’t imploded—that was the job of the previous administration. It did go through the deep recession the president himself had almost cherished forecasting, but it’s coming out the other side with much lower inflation, and much improved prospects for growth. Yes, poverty spiked during the adjustment, as everyone knew it would. What’s remarkable is that, even so, Milei retains popularity ratings above 50%—an amazing feat in a region where incumbency and single-digit approval ratings increasingly go hand-in-hand.

More here.

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Nate Bargatze wants to be the Walmart of comedy

Travis Andrews in The Washington Post:

Nate Bargatze loves fast food. He loves big-box stores and the suburbs and TNT marathons of Die Hard. He finds felicity in the familiar, comfort in the caloric, originality in the ordinary.

“I had McDonald’s last night,” he says while golfing on a chilly November morning at the Troubadour, an exclusive club and private community where he is building a house for his family. The man with pedestrian tastes has joked his way to a fancy station in life. His rider for arena gigs requires the venue to provide Titleist Pro V1 golf balls. He loves the pit stop around the Troubadour’s fifth hole: a cottage filled with every temptation you can imagine, such as jars of candy, a bar with top-shelf liquor, a drawer of fried chicken sandwiches with pimento cheese. He points to the soft-serve bar and seems slightly disappointed when no one makes a homemade version of a Blizzard, the Dairy Queen treat.

He really loves Blizzards.

“I am,” he says, “the worst.”

More here.

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Understanding Trauma: the Healing Process of Poetry

Annamae Sax in Tufts Poetry Blog:

I’ve often considered poetry as a core piece of therapy for myself. Ever since I was a child, it’s been my biggest way of understanding the world and my own experiences. I see my life through the lens of a poem, and it helps me process and heal whatever I may be going through. I’ve been writing poetry since I was six, and I have always credited it for getting me through traumatic experiences and helping me celebrate the beautiful ones.

The more I grew as a poet, I found that so many others felt the same way. It seemed like such a vast amount of people found solace in poetry, used it as a form of therapy, as well. I’ve quoted Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury” more times than I can count. I wondered what work or research had been done about this, seeing as it’s touched so many. Nicole Bouchard wrote on the healing powers of poetry, saying, “Poetry can take the most extreme emotions and bottle them like tinctures that can be used to heal the reader; it is expression- giving a voice to that which we need as human beings to express, that gives poetry its strong influence.” She describes the Pongo Teen Writing Project, which focuses on “Reaching out to children and young adults in juvenile detention centers, homeless shelters, psychiatric hospitals, and other organizations…  founder Richard Gold and his team of Pongo volunteers use a carefully constructed model to encourage written expression that will target those areas which are most affecting the youths’ circumstances (early childhood trauma, such as abuse, rape, addiction, death and violence).”

More here.

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Wednesday Poem

Contiguity of Soul

I am not always the same in what I say or write.
I change, but not very much.
The color of flowers is not the same in the sun
As beneath a lingering cloud
Or when night falls
And flowers are the color of remembrance.

But anyone who really looks can see they are the same flowers,
And so when I appear not to agree with myself,
Take a good look at me:
If I was facing to the right,
Now I have turned to the left,
But I am always me, standing on the same two feet—
Always the same, thanks to me and to the earth
And to my convinced eyes and ears
And to my clear contiguity of soul . . .

by Fernando Pessoa
from The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro
New Directions Paperbooks, 2020

 

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