by Akim Reinhardt

I first heard “The Blundering Generation” in the 1990s when I was taking a course on Civil War history. As my professor explained, the early 20th century saw a new cohort of historians who no longer personally remembered the war and debated anew the nature of its origins. They were trying to move past the earlier, caustic interpretations of Northerners and Southerners who openly blamed each other, the former decrying the Southern “slaveocracy” and the latter bemoaning the “war of Northern aggression.” So instead, these thinkers at the vanguard of historical study decided to blame everyone. Or no one.

One new interpretation was The Irrepressible Conflict: Increasingly divergent economic, social, and cultural differences between the North and South were so profound and so deeply rooted, that the war was essentially unavoidable. Oh well. The other new viewpoint was The Blundering Generation: The Civil War, tragically, had been entirely avoidable, but was brought on by thirty years of missteps and increasing vitriol by a generation of incompetent and extremist political and social leaders.

It’s easy to imagine why these men (these historians were all men), born after the Civil War, raised in its long shadow and the seemingly endless animosity it spawned, would look for a way to move past it. But their groundbreaking debate, inevitability vs. endemic stupidity and extremism, proved to be a false dichotomy. Newer, better, smarter schools of thought eventually followed and displaced them. Yet nowadays I am reminded of this early Civil War historiography when I listen to observers talk of our current divided society. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Santiago Street Color, Chile, November 2017.

Digital photograph.

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Spanning just shy of a thousand years,  al-Andalus or Muslim Spain (711-1492), has a riveting history. To picture the Andalus is to imagine a world that gratifies at once the intellect, the spirit and all the senses; it has drawn critical scholars, poets and musicians alike. Barring cycles of turbulence, it is remembered as an intellectual utopia, a time of unsurpassed plentitude and civilizational advancements, and most significantly, as “la Convivencia” or peaceful coexistence of the three Abrahamic faiths brought together as a milieu. Al-Andalus was a syncretic culture shaped by influences from three continents— Africa, Asia and Europe – under Muslim rule. This civilization came to be known as a golden age for setting standards across all human endeavors, a bridge between Eastern and Western learning, sciences and the fine arts, between the public and private, native and foreign, sacred and secular— a phenomenon hitherto unknown in antiquity. The decline and eventual collapse of al-Andalus is no less of a legend; it is a history of in-fighting and brutal intolerance perpetrated throughout the three centuries of the Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834) with ramifications to witness in our own times. The stark contrast between the Convivencia and the Inquisition makes al-Andalus a poignant story of reversals.

What made al-Andalus great? The flux of travelers from the Muslim world, among them, major intellectual and artistic figures, and the continuous arrival of trends, influence and material culture from societies far ahead of Europe— helped in integrating past learning with innovative technology and ideas. Andalus participated in the great translation movement (8^th/9^th centuries) of the fast-progressing Muslim world centered in Baghdad, and absorbed influences from the rich scholarly environment of places such as Fez. Greek works were translated into Arabic and then Latin, classical ideas were surveyed, amalgamated, built upon and passed on. Al-Andalus created a necessary link that brought together the best of antiquity from various geographical regions and forged what would later be identified as rudiments of the modern world. It was a veritable bridge of books. Located on the cusp of Africa, Asia and Europe, Iberian Muslims built further on Persian and North African architecture, aesthetics, medicine, linguistics, Roman engineering, Greek philosophy, Indian mathematics, so on. The spirit of mutual learning and collaboration, a corollary of the Convivencia, is the distinguishing feature of al-Andalus. Read more »

by Marie Snyder

Some people are arguing that the removal of mask mandates in hospitals is a form of eugenics. Tamara Taggart, President of Down Syndrome BC, said on “This is Vancolour,” 

“This is eugenics, like 100%. So now we don’t care about people. . . . All those people are expensive. I mean, it’s a harsh thing to say, but it is true. . . . My kid with a disability, he’s expensive in the grand scheme of things. A disabled person in the hospital? They’re expensive. So why else would we remove masks? Elderly people at long-term care facilities? They’re expensive!”

In an older Tyee article, currently recirculating, “My Daughter Shouldn’t be Sacrificed to ‘Get Back to Normal,'” Laesa Kim writes,

“Our family has learned more about ableism and eugenics throughout this pandemic than we should have. We have witnessed both individuals and institutions shrug as COVID more heavily affects marginalized communities.  . . . Dr. Rochelle Walensky said on Good Morning America that ‘the overwhelming number of deaths of vaccinated individuals, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.’ This is eugenic. . . . Public health directions are subtly promoting the same thought: It is fine to allow a virus to spread through the population, largely unchecked and unchallenged, because the assumption is that is will only kill certain demographics of people.” 

And I also used that term originally in the title of a recent post, “At What Point is Inaction a Form of Eugenics??,” showing the similarity between our dismissiveness of the disabled and elderly and children now and the experience of gay men with AIDS in the 80s. 

But then I changed it. It’s not quite eugenics as we think of it now. It’s potentially genocide.  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Benzon

By cosmos I mean “the universe as seen as a well-ordered whole.” It thus stands in opposition to chaos. By metaphysical I mean…well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. Wikipedia tells me that it is one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, ethics, and logic and “the first principles of: being or existence, identity and change, space and time, cause and effect, necessity, and possibility.” Well, OK.

Perhaps I’m thinking something like: It is through metaphysics that chaos is ordered into cosmos. I rather like that. I doubt that they’ll buy it in Philosophy 101, but then this isn’t Philosophy 101. It is rather stranger and, perhaps, more interesting.

We’ll see.

Grasping the Cosmos: Powers of Ten, Fantasia

Let’s start with the physical universe. Back in 1977 Charles and Ray Eames toured the known universe in a nine-minute film called Powers of Ten. The film starts with an aerial view of a couple sitting on a blanket in a Chicago park at the shore of Lake Michigan. The field of view measures one meter. Then we zoom out by powers of ten, 10 meters, 100 meters, 1000 meters and so forth. As we zoom out voice-over narration explains what’s we’re seeing until the field of view measures 10^24 meter (100 million light years). We zoom back, very quickly, the voice-over pointing out that some regions are empty while others are populated. Once we reach the point where we started the field of view narrows to the man’s hand, and then every smaller until, at 10^-16 we’re viewing quarks. Note that almost all of the interesting visual action is between 10^9 and 10^-9 meters. Outside that range we see dots. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

Who doesn’t love a three-day weekend? If an extra day to relax isn’t good enough, the following week always seems to go quickly, making a Memorial Day, Labor Day, or a bank holiday in the UK, the gift that keeps on giving. Of course, most of us should consider ourselves lucky only to have to work a 5-day week. No law of the universe says a work week has to be 5 days. In fact, the concept of a 40-hour workweek is relatively new; it was only on June 25, 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which limited the workweek to 44 hours, and two years later, Congress amended that to 40 hours. 

However, there’s now a growing dialog about the efficacy of moving towards a 4-day work week of 32 hours. The idea of a 4-day work week has been gaining momentum in recent years, with more and more companies experimenting with this alternative schedule. The theory is, perhaps counterintuitively,  that reducing the number of workdays can lead to increased productivity and that it definitely leads to better work-life balance and overall employee satisfaction. 

Conversations about the future of work were thrown into a global, real-time social experiment with the COVID-19 lockdowns. Suddenly, every white-collar worker was remote, and every prediction made by skeptical bosses about productivity losses if workers weren’t in the office was mostly proven incorrect. Indeed, companies found that their employees were even more productive while working remotely than in the office. This was partly due to fewer distractions, such as meetings and office chatter, and the ability to work flexible schedules that accommodated their personal needs. In fact, as many of us experienced, when freed from a daily commute and the structure of an office, we often found ourselves working more hours than ever.  Read more »

Photo of a lamp in Vahrn, South Tyrol, taken from a friend’s balcony.

by Rafaël Newman

In the 1960s, when I was a boy growing up on the west side of Montreal, whenever my father needed a hit of soul food — a smoked-meat sandwich, some pickled herring, or a ball of chopped liver with grivenes—he would head east (northeast, really, in my hometown’s skewed-grid street plan) to his old neighborhood on the Plateau. He would make for Schwartz’s, or Waldman’s, to the shops lining boulevard St.-Laurent, once known as “the Main” in memory of its service as a major artery through the Jewish part of town before the district changed hands: or rather, reverted to majority rule. On weekends my father would travel a little farther, in the direction of Mile End, to either of two places, St. Viateur Bagels and Fairmount Bagels, each located on the street from which it took its name and each, as its name candidly proposed, a baker and purveyor of bagels.

My father’s parents were from Eastern Europe, born and raised in territories still administered by the Czar at the time of their births. They emigrated separately to Canada in the 1920s, fleeing economic ruin (in my Zaideh’s case) and Cossacks (in my Bubbi’s). Together with their birth families, and as yet unknown to each other, the two of them made it to Montreal, in those days the largest city in the Dominion and among the international goals of choice for people on the move. Read more »

by Bill Murray

We left last month’s column worried about getting tickets on a train across a swath of Africa’s midsection, from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to Lusaka, Zambia. There’s a funny system for getting on that train. You can reserve tickets over the phone but you can’t buy them online.

You must come to the train station in person, Tanzanian Shillings in hand, and buy your tickets with cash. When we turned up the day before departure, the whole, massive, foreboding station was deserted except for a sprinkle of porters loitering outside for lack of business, and one man behind the ticket window.

We offered our $188 in cash in shillings. He offered a big smile, the fact that he had a son in Missouri, and four tickets, so that the two of us, my wife Mirja and I, claimed an entire four person compartment for our own.

There is a cliché about Africa, about the need to build in extra time for everything. It’s a cutesy, knowing, slightly smug expression of superiority among tourists when they learn it and use it for the first time; it is, in fairness, also true.

Welcome to the Tazara (TA for Tanzania, ZA for Zambia and RA for railroad) railroad. Its timetable led us to expect a forty two hour ride, but we stayed on that train for fifty seven hours and forty minutes, busting through a scheduled Sunday morning arrival time and instead arriving after midnight the next day.

Not that you’d have thought so at the start. Remarkably, even a touch triumphantly, the Tazara pulled out of Dar es Salaam station three minutes late at 3:53 on Friday afternoon. It didn’t take long for its true character to emerge, though; the Tazara was three hours late by its second stop. Read more »

Graduations

I have before me a list of extensions
without names. But it seems not to go on forever,
because of horizon which, with
the slickness of a blade, a knife of
limitation, slashes time in two

I’ve ticked-off the list through many graduations,
sometimes with honors, sometimes
smeared against a wall of dreams since I’m
a creature of their reckless persistence,
their humiliations

But that irresistible incision far off, though closer now,
still draws me regardless of my self-shaped limitations,
my turnings from what is true

Jim Culleny, 4/16/23

by Jonathan Kujawa

In the movies the mathematician is always a lone genius, possibly mad, and uninterested in socializing with other people. Or they are Jeff Goldblum — a category of its own. While it is true that doing mathematics involves a certain amount of thinking alone, I’ve frequently argued here at 3QD that math is a fundamentally social endeavor.

This weekend I was reminded again of this fundamental fact. Now that we are emerging from covid, in-person math conferences have returned in abundance. I am currently in Cincinnati attending one of the American Mathematical Society’s regional math conferences. It has been wonderful to hear many great talks about cutting edge research. The real treat, though, is the chance to see old friends and meet new people, especially the grad students and young researchers who’ve come into the field in the last few years.

In chats between talks, you learn about the problems people are pondering; their private shortcuts to how to think about certain topics; how their universities handle teaching, budgets, and post-covid life; and, of course, the latest professional gossip. It is nice to be reminded that you are part of a community of like-minded folks.

One of the tentpole events of the conference was the Einstein Public Lecture. They are held annually at one of the AMS meetings and were started to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of Albert Einstein’s annus mirabilis. In this case, the speaker was Nathaniel Whitaker, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, professor. While the mathematical topic of his presentation was his work on finding approximate solutions and numerical estimates to the sorts of partial differential equations which arise in the study of fluid flows, the real story he wanted to tell was his journey from the segregated schools of 1950s Virginia to his role in the 2020s as a leader of a large research university [1]. Read more »

by Ethan Seavey

In the growing sector of the contemporary art world which focuses on environmental issues, participants in the art (artists, critics, and the general audience) disagree on the intention of each work of art: does it merit only aesthetic praise, or is it a successful work of climate activism? In my brief internship at Art of Change 21, a French nonprofit association at the intersection of contemporary art and the environment, I frequently encountered this dichotomy. At Art Paris 2022, the association hosted an exhibition centered around artists who deal with environmental themes. My goal is to contextualize some of the artworks present at this exhibition, based on critical theory as well as my own experiences.

When an artist depicts an environmental issue, they want to bring attention to it, and for many in the art world, this attention is enough to be considered powerful activism. In a study for the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Laura Kim Sommer and Christian Andreas Klöckner collected qualitative date based on surveys and cognitive recognition information and determined that art engaging with environmental issues had strong emotional effects upon its audience. This study was conducted at the 2015 UN Climate Conference, for an exhibition of art pertaining to climate issues. (Art of Change 21 was born at this Climate Conference, and had no role in the display of these artworks; the association was present elsewhere in the conference, though, with similar projects.) Read more »

Zaneb Beams. Untitled, 2022.

Digital photograph.

With permission.

by Chris Horner

The illusion of rational autonomy

The world is full of people who think that they think for themselves. Free thinkers and sceptics, they imagine themselves as emancipated from imprisoning beliefs. Yet most of what they, and you, know comes not from direct experience or through figuring it out for oneself, but from unknown others. Take science, for instance. What do you think you actually know? That the moon affects the tides? Something about space-time continuum or the exciting stuff about quantum mechanics? Or maybe the research on viruses and vaccines? Chances are whatever you know you have taken on trust – even, or particularly, if you are a reader of popular science books. This also applies to most scientists, since they usually only know what is going on in their own field of research. The range of things we call ‘science’ is simply too vast for anyone to have knowledge in any other way.

We are confronted by a series of fields of research, experimentation and application:  complex and specialised fields that requires years of study and training to fully understand. As individuals, we cannot be experts in all scientific domains, which is why we typically rely on the knowledge and expertise of the scientific community,  composed of experts from various fields who have the necessary background knowledge, experience, and expertise to evaluate scientific theories and data accurately. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

One thing that Elon Musk and Bill Gates have in common, besides being two of the five richest people in the world, is that they both believe that there is a very serious risk that an AI more intelligent than them – and, so, more intelligent than you and I, obviously – will one day take over, or destroy, the world. This makes sense because in our society how smart you are is well-known to be the best predictor of how successful and powerful you will become. But, you may have noticed, it’s not only the richest people in the world that worry about an AI apocalypse. One of the “Godfathers of AI,” Geoff Hinton recently said “It’s not inconceivable” that AI will wipe out humanity. In a response linked to by 3 Quarks Daily, Gary Marcus, a neuroscientist and founder of a machine learning company, asked whether the advantages of AI were sufficient for us to accept a 1% chance of extinction. This question struck me as eerily familiar.

Do you remember who offered this advice? “Even if there’s a 1% chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as it is a certainty.”

That would be Dick Cheney as quoted by Ron Suskin in “The One Percent Doctrine.” Many regard this as the line of thinking that led to the Iraq invasion. If anything, that’s an insufficiently cynical interpretation of the motives behind an invasion that killed between three hundred thousand and a million people and found no weapons of mass destruction. But there is a lesson there. Besides the fact that “inconceivable” need not mean 1% – but might mean a one following a googolplex of zeroes [.0….01%] – trying to react to every one-percent probable threat may not be a good idea. Therapists have a word for this. It’s called “catastrophizing.” I know, I know, even if you are catastrophizing, we still might be on the brink of catastrophe. “The decline and fall of everything is our daily dread,” Saul Bellow said. So, let’s look at the basic story that AI doomsayers tell. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Robyn Repko Waller

AI has a proclivity for exaggeration. This hallucination is integral to its success and its danger.

Much digital ink has been spilled and computational resources consumed as of late in the too rapidly advancing capacities of AI.

Large language models like GPT-4 heralded as a welcome shortcut for email, writing, and coding. Worried discussion for the implications for pedagogical assessment — how to codify and detect AI plagiarism. Open-AI image generation to rival celebrated artists and photographers. And what of the convincing deep fakes?

The convenience of using AI to innovate and make efficient our social world and health, from Tiktok to medical diagnosis and treatment. Continued calls, though, for algorithmic fairness in the use of algorithmic decision-making in finance, government, health, security, and hiring.

Newfound friends, therapists, lovers, and enemies of an artificial nature. Both triumphant and terrified exclamations and warnings of sentient, genuinely intelligent AI. Serious widespread calls for a pause in development of these AI systems. And, in reply, reports that such exclamations and calls are overblown: Doesn’t intelligence require experience? Embodiment?

These are fascinating and important matters. Still, I don’t intend to add to the much-warranted shouting. Instead, I want to draw attention to a curious, yet serious, corollary of the use of such AI systems, the emergence of artificial or machine hallucinations. By such hallucinations, folks mean the phenomenon by which AI systems, especially those driven by machine learning, generate factual inaccuracies or create new misleading or irrelevant content. I will focus on one kind of hallucination, the inherent propensity of AI to exaggerate and skew. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

‘Wenn möglich, bitte wenden.’

That was the voice of the other woman in the car, ‘If possible, please turn around.’ She was nowhere to be seen in the BMW I was riding in sometime in the early aughts, but her voice was pleasant—neutral, polite, finely modulated and real.  She was the voice of the navigation system, a precursor of the chatbot—without the chat. You couldn’t talk back to her. All she knew about you was the destination you had typed into the system.

‘Wenn möglich, bitte wenden.’

She always said this when we missed a turn, or an exit. Since we hadn’t followed her suggestion the first time, she asked us again to turn around. There were reasons not to take her advice. If we were on the autobahn, turning around might be deadly. More often, we just wanted her to find a new route to our destination.

The silence after her second directive seemed excessive—long enough for us to get the impression that she, the ‘voice’, was sulking. In reality, the silence covered the period of time the navigation system needed to calculate a new route. But to ears that were attuned to silent treatments speaking volumes, it was as if Frau GPS was mightily miffed that we hadn’t turned around.

Recent encounters with the Bing chatbot have jogged my memory of that time of relative innocence, when a bot conveyed a message, nothing more. And yet, even that simple computational interaction generated a reflex anthropomorphic response, provoked by the use of language, or in the case of the pregnant silence, the prolonged absence of it. Read more »