Mario Hubert in Aeon:

The Sun rises every day. Water boils at 100°C. Apples fall to the ground. We live in a world in which objects behave the same given the same circumstances. We can imagine living in a different world: a world that constantly changes, a world in which the Sun does not rise every day, a world in which water one day boils at 50°C, and at 120°C another day, a world in which apples sometimes fall from trees and sometimes rise into the sky. Only because we live in a world that displays stable regularities are we able to reliably shape our environment and plan our lives.

We have an intuition that these regularities are due to laws of nature, but we normally do not interrogate what these laws are and how they work in any basic metaphysical sense. Instead, we assume that science not only provides these laws but also elucidates their structure and metaphysical status, even when the answers seem partial at best. In short, we assume that, thanks to science, there is a recipe of sorts for how the laws of nature work. You take the state of the Universe at a given moment – every single fact about every single aspect of it – and combine it with the laws of nature, then assume that these will reveal, or at least determine, the state of the Universe in the moment that comes next.

I refer to this as the layer-cake model of the Universe, which dates back to the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes.

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Gina Kolata in the New York Times:

Dr. Adam Rodman, an expert in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, confidently expected that chatbots built to use artificial intelligence would help doctors diagnose illnesses.

He was wrong.

Instead, in a study Dr. Rodman helped design, doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot. And, to the researchers’ surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors.

“I was shocked,” Dr. Rodman said.

The chatbot, from the company OpenAI, scored an average of 90 percent when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning. Doctors randomly assigned to use the chatbot got an average score of 76 percent. Those randomly assigned not to use it had an average score of 74 percent.

More here.

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Ella Creamer in The Guardian:

Poems written by AI are preferred to those written by humans, according to a new study. The non-expert poetry readers who participated were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as being written by humans than those actually written by humans. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, showed participants poems written by 10 famous English-language poets along with poems generated in the style of those poets by ChatGPT 3.5. Real and imitation poems by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Samuel Butler, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Dorothea Lasky were presented to participants.

Results showed that the odds of a poem written by a human being judged as human-authored were roughly 75% that of an AI-generated poem being judged as human-authored. Contrary to previous research, the study also found that participants ranked AI-generated poems higher in terms of overall quality than human-written poems.

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Traci Watson in Nature:

Even after drastic weight loss, the body’s fat cells carry the ‘memory’ of obesity, research¹ shows — a finding that might help to explain why it can be hard to stay trim after a weight-loss programme. This memory arises because the experience of obesity leads to changes in the epigenome — a set of chemical tags that can be added to or removed from cells’ DNA and proteins that help to dial gene activity up or down. For fat cells, the shift in gene activity seems to render them incapable of their normal function. This impairment, as well as the changes in gene activity, can linger long after weight has dropped to healthy levels, a study published today in Nature reports.

The results suggest that people trying to slim down will often require long-term care to avoid weight regain, says study co-author Laura Hinte, a biologist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “It means that you need more help, potentially,” she says. “It’s not your fault.” Although we’ve long known that the body tends to revert to obesity after weight loss, “how and why this happens was almost like a black box”, says Hyun Cheol Roh, an epigenome specialist at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis who studies metabolism. The new results “show what’s happening at the molecular level, and that’s really cool”.

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Sarah Thankam Mathews at Lux:

On June 14 of this year, Delhi Lieutenant Governor V.K. Saxena authorized the prosecution of author Arundhati Roy and Kashmir-based academic Sheikh Showkat Hussain for speeches they made in 2010 about the disputed territory of Kashmir. Put otherwise, the Indian government charged a world-famous author and activist under a stringent antiterrorism law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).

Roy, known for her fearless provocations and truth-telling on a range of socio-political issues, including Kashmir, tribal rights, and government policies, has often been at odds with the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The use of the UAPA, which allows for lengthy pre-trial detention without the possibility of bail, against activists and organizers is particularly concerning to human rights advocates. Roy has not (at least at the time of writing) been jailed, but the charges against her are an alarming example of a broader trend of shrinking space for dissent and the suppression of civil liberties in contemporary India.

Among those who are quite worried is the Mumbai-based journalist and author Raghu Karnad.  Karnad wrote the award-winning book Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War. He has worked as a reporter and editor for various publications, including The Wire and The Hindu. This summer we got on Zoom and talked it out.

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Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

The Science Museum in Britain holds numerous items associated with the Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose: books on consciousness and the nature of space and time; a set of wooden puzzles made by his physician father; a model of one of the Penroses’ “impossible objects” — a staircase on which a person could ascend or descend forever.

But maybe the most extraordinary item is also the most ordinary: a four-pack of Kleenex Quilted Peach Toilet Tissue. The quilting was based on one of Penrose’s non-repeating tiling patterns in order to avoid “nesting,” which would have risked stuck squares and unsightly bulges in the roll — yet nobody from Kleenex had consulted Penrose. In 1997, Pentaplex, a company set up to develop commercial applications of his work, sued the toilet paper’s manufacturer, Kimberly Clark. As a Pentaplex director announced at the time: “When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a knight of the realm without his permission, then a last stand must be made.”

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Thomas Floyd in The Washington Post:

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Michael A. McCarthy in Sidecar:

Trump’s crushing victory over Harris casts serious doubt on one of the darling concepts of American political science: ‘polarization’. As of the latest count, Trump won the popular vote by over 3.5 million, capturing most swing states and flipping those that went for Biden in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Voters thought to be entrenched in separate camps defied psephologists’ predictions by crossing from one to the other. Dominated by the Democrats for two election cycles, urban counties swung to Trump by 5.8 points, while suburban counties that went blue for Biden shifted red by 4.4 points. Both less-educated and more-educated counties also trended towards Trump (by 5.2 and 4.6 points respectively), as did most non-white groups: Hispanic-majority counties (13.3 points), indigenous counties (10 points) and black-majority counties (2.7 points). Trump even did better among women, who shifted 5 points to the right relative to 2020.

The president-elect now enters the White House enraged by his court battles and emboldened by a significant mandate. His party, having purged most of the Never Trumpers and replaced them with loyalists, is on the verge of controlling all the branches of government: a supermajority on the Supreme Court, a 3-seat majority in the Senate and likely a slim one in the House. The Democrats may still storm back in a few years’ time, as they have done after previous routs. But their fortunes will depend on how they adapt politically. What is the outlook for their particular brand of liberalism in the wake of this defeat?

An unlikely theoretical resource for understanding the American political scene can be found in Tosaka Jun’s The Japanese Ideology: A Marxist Critique of Liberalism and Fascism, first published in 1935 and now available in English thanks to Robert Stolz’s recent translation.

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Hans Kundnani in Dissent:

During the past year, as the reality gradually dawned on them that Donald Trump might be re-elected as U.S. president, European foreign policy analysts coalesced around the conventional wisdom that Europe must unite and “Trump-proof” itself. This new consensus, which essentially repeats arguments for European “strategic autonomy” that took place after Trump was elected the first time, represents an extraordinary collective failure. Europe’s foreign policy experts have proved unable to think clearly about what has changed in Europe in the last eight years or about the relationship between their own security concerns and those of Ukraine.

The election of Trump in 2016 created radical uncertainty about the U.S. security guarantee to Europe, which went back to the creation of NATO in 1949. While some Atlanticists insisted that NATO countries should hug the United States close—and make concessions like increasing defense spending and buying more American weapons to placate Trump—“post-Atlanticists” urged Europeans to end their dependence on the United States for their own security. If the former tendency was embodied by Poland (where the far-right Law and Justice Party was in power), the latter was embodied by France, and Germany was somewhere in the middle.

Post-Atlanticists have responded to the possibility of a second Trump presidency by simply reiterating the need for strategic autonomy, even if they don’t always use that term. But the experience of the first Trump administration suggests that Europeans are unlikely to unite in response to his re-election.

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Iza Ding in The Ideas Letter:

Sometime in the mid-12th century, a Chinese poet named Lin Sheng traveled 365 kilometers from his hometown Pingyang to Lin’an—what is now Hangzhou, a city on the southeast coast, where the tech giant Alibaba is based.

Lin stayed at a B&B and roamed the city for days. He climbed various hills, drifted through Buddhist temples, sampled an assortment of crabs, shrimps, lamb, and sweet rice, all marinated in alcohol—a culinary specialty of the region—and, like today’s tourists, spent a significant amount of time on and around the impossibly beautiful West Lake, the sin and soul of Hangzhou.

Hangzhou is glorious on summer nights. The lake lies sultrily within the warm embrace of the hills, blue as sapphire. When the breezes pick up in the evening, as they always do, the water undulates like dancers’ long, silky sleeves, gleaming with reflections of candles in the boats and pavilions, homes on the hills, and lanterns carried by residents. And there was singing and dancing, lots of singing and dancing, deep into the orange night. Our delicate poet found himself both entranced and uneasy.

One morning, after the merriment had melted into dawn, Lin rose from his bed, inked his brush, and wrote on his chamber wall. This tiny poem, 28 characters light, would be memorized by every schoolchild in China almost a millennium later.

Hills beyond blue hills,
Pavilions beyond pavilions.
When will the singing and dancing on West Lake cease?
Travelers, drunk on a warm breeze,
Have mistaken Hangzhou for Bianzhou.

Bianzhou is today’s Kaifeng city, 900 kilometers southwest of Hangzhou in the inland province of Henan. Kaifeng’s GDP per capita in 2023 was about $7,500, one-third of Hangzhou’s.

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Jack Gross and Dylan Saba interview Lisa Bhungalia in Phenomenal World:

On October 28, the Israeli Knesset voted to shut down the operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and to designate it as a terrorist organization. While this drastic attack on the UN was met with widespread condemnation from the international community, it was not wholly unexpected. For decades, Israel has regarded the number one provider of education and humanitarian services to the Palestinians of Gaza with contempt and suspicion. Just earlier this year, in response to still-unsubstantiated Israeli allegations that UNRWA employees took part in the October 7 attacks, the United States led a series of countries in terminating funding to the UN organization.

The month of October marked a sustained escalation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, with particular brutality inflicted on Palestinians in the northern Strip. Amid scenes of devastation, bound and blindfolded men, and expulsion marches, the sustained deprivation of aid has caused yet more widespread suffering. A letter from the United States issued on October 13 warned of consequences should the Israeli government not increase aid flows into Gaza in the following thirty days. The deadline has passed, with aid at its lowest level in eleven months, and no consequence has been forthcoming.

To understand the relationship of Israel and the US to UNRWA, its place within the broader ecosystem of aid organizations across Palestine, and the weaponization and politicization of aid delivery, we spoke with Lisa Bhungalia, author of the recent book Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine.

More here.

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Ella Creamer in The Guardian:

Orbital, which was published last November and is now available in paperback, was the highest-selling book of the shortlist in the run-up to the winner announcement, with 29,000 copies sold in the UK this year. The book, which follows its characters over the course of a day as they experience 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, is a “finely crafted meditation on the Earth, beauty and human aspiration”, wrote Alexandra Harris in her Guardian review.

At 136 pages long, Orbital is the second-shortest book to win the prize in its history; it is four pages longer than Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, which won in 1979. Asked whether the panel’s choice is a vote in favour of short books, De Waal said “absolutely not”, adding that Orbital is “the right length of book for what it’s trying to achieve”.

Harvey said that she nearly gave up on writing Orbital because she thought: “Why on earth would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it’s like being in space, when people have actually been there? I lost my nerve with it, I thought, I don’t have the authority to write this book.” She said that Tim Peake, an astronaut, has read the book, and was “very nice about it”. He “wanted to know where I’d got my intel”, she said.

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Azeem Azhar at Exponential View:

In the corridors of Silicon Valley’s most secretive AI labs, a quiet revolution is unfolding. Headlines scream of stalled progress, insiders know something the market hasn’t caught up to yet: the $1 trillion bet on AI isn’t failing—it’s transforming.

The real story? AI’s most powerful players are secretly shifting away from purely brute-force scaling that defined the last decade. Instead, they’re also pursuing a breakthrough approach that could continue to deliver.

The strategy of using scale by training ever larger models on greater training data, is yielding some diminishing returns. Here’s The Information

Some researchers at the [OpenAI] believe Orion, [the latest model], isn’t reliably better than its predecessor in handling certain tasks, according to the employees. Orion performs better at language tasks but may not outperform previous models at tasks such as coding.

Google’s upcoming iteration of its Gemini software is said to not meet internal expectations. Even Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, has remarked that scaling has plateaued

The 2010s were the age of scaling; now we’re back in the age of wonder and discovery once again.

If this is true, does this mean the trillon-dollar bet on bigger and bigger AI systems is coming off the rails?

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Andrew Hui at The Public Domain Review:

Sant’Andrea in Percussina lies about ten kilometers south of Florence, nestled in the proverbially beautiful Tuscan landscape, surrounded by vineyards, olive groves, cypress trees, wild rosemary patches, and soft rolling hills. Outside the hustle and bustle of the city, there is peace and quiet, but also a lively cross section of the working class: farmers, millers, innkeepers, hunters, masons, and carpenters.

In the summer of 1513, a disgraced forty-four-year-old man repairs to these sylvan surrounds. A tavern, as well as a few scattered farms, had been in the family’s possession for years, and the modest rent from these properties had supported them for some time. His father, Bernardo, never rich but always eager for learning, owned a modest library, and sent his son to study under the famed pedagogue, Paolo da Ronciglione. At the age of twenty-nine, with no administrative experience and virtually unknown, Bernardo’s son was catapulted to be the second chancellor of the Republic and the secretary to the Council of Ten, Florence’s ministry for diplomatic affairs. For fourteen years, in the upper echelon of society, in the thick of action, he hobnobbed with the great and the good. Now he is alone, in the periphery.

This, of course, is Niccolò Machiavelli.

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Jennifer Szalai at the NY Times:

The Science Museum in Britain holds numerous items associated with the Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose: books on consciousness and the nature of space and time; a set of wooden puzzles made by his physician father; a model of one of the Penroses’ “impossible objects” — a staircase on which a person could ascend or descend forever.

But maybe the most extraordinary item is also the most ordinary: a four-pack of Kleenex Quilted Peach Toilet Tissue. The quilting was based on one of Penrose’s non-repeating tiling patterns in order to avoid “nesting,” which would have risked stuck squares and unsightly bulges in the roll — yet nobody from Kleenex had consulted Penrose. In 1997, Pentaplex, a company set up to develop commercial applications of his work, sued the toilet paper’s manufacturer, Kimberly Clark. As a Pentaplex director announced at the time: “When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a knight of the realm without his permission, then a last stand must be made.”

more here.

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