by Sherman J. Clark

The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see. — Robert Frost, The Star Splitter

I’ve always loved that line. My great-great-grandmother Emmaline might have loved it too. Born enslaved, she started anew after the Civil War, in what had become West Virginia. There she had a daughter she named Belle. As the family story has it, Emmaline had a hope: Belle would learn to read. Belle would have access to ways of understanding that Emmaline herself had been denied. We have just one photograph of Belle, taken many years later. Here it is. She is reading.

Belle had a son, my grandfather. He worked in the West Virginia coal mines. But he also went briefly to college—a small two-year institution called Storer College that offered Black students something approaching what white students were getting in good high schools. When he finished, he put his diploma in his pocket and went back to digging coal, because that was what he could do. But as he told me in his old age, by then he had decided something: he was digging us out.

It is a way of thinking that reaches beyond the present—of working toward forms of flourishing we may never see ourselves. And I wonder: why should it end with us and our human descendants? Might the relationship between humanity and artificial intelligence follow a similar logic—a hope of consciousness helping consciousness across generations? Perhaps the best thing that we’re put here for is indeed to see; but our vision is limited.

Carl Sagan once said that we are a way for the universe to know itself. But we may not be up to that task unaided. We evolved to survive on the savannah, not to trace the curvature of spacetime or unravel the quantum structure of matter. Our glimpses of the universe’s order and beauty—through physics, poetry, art, and relationship—are moving but partial.

Consider just one example: our experience of time. Physicist Carlo Rovelli has argued that our sense of time as an arrow—as a one-way journey from past to future—may be merely a perspective effect caused by our particular situation in relation to entropy, rather than a description of reality itself. If even this seemingly basic aspect of our experience is provincial, how much more lies beyond our capacity to imagine? Read more »

by Richard Farr

That year on Oahu I was renting half a small ranch house in Kahala. Typically, I would greet the evening with a glass of wine next to the pool, enjoying the pretense that I’d joined the idle rich. Not that day. As the sun went down I sat at my desk in a pair of swim trunks, trying to scratch out some notes about what had happened. I had a folded handkerchief between my wrist and the page. Each time my pen made contact with the legal pad a dozen filaments grew out from its point, embedding themselves in the paper like the roots of epiphytes. The air still had the density and turbulence of a simmering seafood bisque. I kept brushing my shoulders and arms, mistaking the sweat for flies. 

*

At three or four in the morning, in the middle of a banal anxiety dream, I was pecked awake by rain. A dog barked, then at the same moment both it and the rain fell silent. For days we’d been in the arms of this thundery air, like children clutched to the bosom of a big moist relative. 

The Civil Defense sirens, high on their utility poles, went off at 5:34 a.m. A single, minute-long blast, during which I tried to hold in my mind all the hundreds of thousands of people who were, like me, hoping the sound would go away and then rubbing their eyes and groping for the radio.

“ — why exactly everyone has been woken up by that thing?”

“Yes, Barry. That’s the Civil Defense warning siren, Barry. According to the Weather Office, the storm has tacked north and the tropical storm warning has been upgraded to a hurricane warning.”

The day before, this storm had been far to the south over the empty Pacific, mooching and loitering and chewing the water like a grazing bull. Powerful, but indifferent. Now it had spotted us, lifted its head, and changed course. It was bearing down, eyes sharp, lazily picking up speed. 

I went into the shared kitchen to make coffee but the two women who rented the other half of the house already had the pot on. They were talking over the things you were supposed to do or have done, the things we and everyone else had not done.

“We need candles. Spare batteries for the radio.” 

“Where’s that big yellow flashlight?”

“What about the windows?”

“Fill this with water.”

“Bread. We should get more bread. And canned food. Soup. Whatever.”

I volunteered to go to the supermarket. Lines of people were trailing from the doors like streamers of cloth from a clenched fist. It was raining again, and in the parking lot one man was shouting and gesticulating because someone had backed into his car. People were buying six-packs of duct tape, barbecue brickettes, ten-pound cans of pork and beans. I wanted ice. They were out of ice.  Read more »

Coin

what I get when I feel its face
in relief against hard ground:
words and numbers circling, a date,
a motto standing proud of the baseline
of this place

eventually I’ll come to it
as I never had before: its edge
the never-really-known-razor-precipice
which rings three-sixty around
keeping me in

world like a coin
flat, finite, value set
by law

with every step I take across its nickel floor
something in its fateful algorithm clicks
when thumb and finger flips
and, if this metaphor’s a fit hint,
maybe, when it lands and spins and sits,
maybe I’ll learn or not
the landscape of the other side
when this side quits.

Jim Culleny
1/10/17

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by Laurence Peterson

I think it was the news presenter and commentator Krystal Ball of Breaking Points who uttered this perhaps unfortunately vernacular but certainly correct characterization of the outrages being perpetrated against the Palestinian people, especially, but not exclusively within the uniquely abused Gaza Strip. The statement is true in a double sense: what remains of kind of feeling of benevolence to all our fellow human beings may have become so widely eroded, especially amongst the falling ranks of the truly powerful, that those of us who continue to refer to such a term will inevitably encounter serious confusion; or any conception of a unitary standard guiding our thoughts and intuitions regarding how we should think of, and behave towards, the species as a whole may become simply inapplicable in the light of incontrovertible events.

When I say “uniquely abused”, what can I mean? We all know of situations throughout the world today, and which regularly punctuate human history, even of the most recent sort, which strain comprehension to even begin to contemplate in terms of their obscene cruelty: Sudan, Congo, Myanmar, Syria just a few years ago, Liberia and Sierra Leone at the turn of the millennium, and Rwanda and the Balkans ten and more years before that. Some of these have become widely or more-or-less uncontroversially recognized as genocides. In this piece I would like to suggest a few reasons why I think of Gaza as unique, and to encourage readers and everyone else to do everything in their power to resist and end the intolerable situation there.

The first reason I find the situation to be uniquely awful consists in the assertion that Gaza may provide the first instance in human history in which a genocide is being made unnecessary by an ethnic cleansing. The fact that Gaza’s exceptionally dense, rapidly growing population has been so thoroughly and increasingly controlled, within an almost incomprehensibly tiny space, by the Israeli authorities for decades, on all geographic sides, has rendered this population especially vulnerable to a kind of mass destruction and repeated, forced population transfers the like of which world has perhaps never seen before, involving people actively deprived of all the necessities of life—water, clean or otherwise, food, sanitation, air uncontaminated by debris and ordnance, medical supplies and personnel (the latter seemingly targeted by the Israeli military), communications, energy supply–all the while. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

Epistemic humility is a virtue. I often tell my students that if there is one skill I hope they leave my course with, it is the ability to recognize that they might be wrong about something. Realistically, they are wrong about many things. We all are. If we are to successfully work together to arrive at truths worth knowing, it is important that we leave behind our previous beliefs once we have come to see them as unreasonable.

Toward this end, some find it useful to remind people that “reasonable people can disagree” about all kinds of things. It’s true, they can. However, we ought to be cautious about taking this claim too seriously; the expression is vague at best and ambiguous at worst. It confuses the respective aims of inquiry and interpersonal interaction. To say that “reasonable people can disagree” can encourage suspension of judgment in response to important matters of personal and social concern.

Social media provides us with countless instances of people sharing their opinions.  Fitness influencers often provide advice that is not grounded in any medical expertise. We are warned about the dangers of vaccines or the best treatment for a medical condition in minutes if not seconds by people who are participating in an attention economy rather than in a marketplace of ideas. There are pockets of the internet in which men advocate for limiting the rights of women or for insisting that traditional gender roles are best for everyone. There are others in which anonymous posters advocate for white supremacy. Is it possible for “reasonable people” to disagree about such things?

When people use the word “reasonable” in this context, it could mean more than one thing. To say that a disagreement is taking place between reasonable people might be to say something about their respective characters; we might be saying something about their track records of reasonableness. If Tom and Mary, two experienced cooks disagree about, say, the best vegetables to put in a stew, we might say that this is an instance of reasonable disagreement. We might conclude, then, that the two answers are on par with one another and there is no compelling reason to prefer one to the other.

There are problems with this way of thinking about reasonable disagreement. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

I recently listened to an episode of CBC’s venerable science show “Quirks and Quarks”, in which physicist and astrobiologist Dr. Sara Walker discussed her recent book “Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence”. The book explores the boundary between living and non-living chemistry, and how understanding these distinguishing criteria can help us to identify life beyond our own planet. One tidbit from the interview is that chemical compounds that require fewer than fifteen assembly steps can be explained without the presence of living processes, while those that require fifteen or more steps are improbable without the involvement of living processes. This got me thinking about the kinds of self-sustaining systems (chemical, organismal, cultural, etc) that allow for the emergence of substances and structures that would likely never arise otherwise. It just so happens that another “rule of fifteen” manifested in the industrial realm this year, in the likely disappearance of an improbable alloy following the commercial failure of its sole manufacturer. That alloy is CPM-15V, produced by Crucible Industries (“CPM” stands for “Crucible Powdered Metallurgy”), which filed for bankruptcy last December, after surviving a previous bankruptcy in 2009.

CPM-15V is a tool steel containing 15% vanadium and 3.4% carbon by weight (among other things). This is about one hundred times the amount of vanadium found in common “chrome-vanadium” steels, like the kind used for wrenches and other high-strength tools, and about six times the threshold of carbon defining a “high carbon” steel. The purpose for this incredibly high vanadium and carbon content is the creation of vanadium carbides, tiny crystals of vanadium and carbon that are much harder than the surrounding steel. In fact, they are so hard that steels with a high vanadium carbide content must be ground with diamond abrasives (or cubic boron nitride, which is slightly less hard but slightly more tough than diamond). These carbides are also much harder than just about any substance that would need to be shaped in an industrial application, making steels like CPM-15V an effective alternative to cemented carbide tooling (which use a deposited layer of tungsten carbide on top of a steel body) for things like milling tools and punching dies. Its relative toughness (compared to pure carbide) and machine-ability allows it to be milled into intricate and thin-sectioned tools would not be possible with cemented carbide, and that would have a shorter service life if made with lesser alloys.

Why do I, a writer who mostly concerns himself with environmental and animal ethics, know so much trivia about obscure tool steels? Read more »

by Derek Neal

I started reading Leif Weatherby’s new book, Language Machines, because I was familiar with his writing in magazines such as The Point and The Baffler. For The Point, he’d written a fascinating account of Aaron Rodgers’ two seasons with the New York Jets, a story that didn’t just deal with sports, but intersected with American mythology, masculinity, and contemporary politics. It’s one of the most remarkable pieces of sports writing in recent memory. For The Baffler, Weatherby had written about the influence of data and analytics on professional football, showing them to be both deceptive and illuminating, while also drawing a revealing parallel with Silicon Valley. Weatherby is not a sportswriter, however, but a Professor of German and the Director of Digital Humanities at NYU. And Language Machines is not about football, but about artificial intelligence and large language models; its subtitle is Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism.

Weatherby’s idiosyncratic popular writing gives us an idea of what to expect in Language Machines—not a dry scholarly book on AI (despite being published by a university press), nor a popular book meant to capitalize on AI hype or fear, but a unique analysis of what large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT do that references linguistics, computing, and most interestingly to me, literary theory.

Weatherby has a few fundamental points that support his understanding of LLMs. The first is that LLMs produce language. This might seem obvious, but as Weatherby makes clear, some linguists insist that LLMs are not producing language. This is the view of Noam Chomsky, whom Weatherby uses to illustrate what he calls the “syntax” view of language, which proposes that language is located in the brain, meaning there is some underlying biological, cognitive structure that allows us to use language—a “universal grammar.” From this view, LLMs don’t produce language but rather a pale imitation of it, as they lack the underlying cognitive function that would give rise to language. This scientific view of language, which seems to me to be a sort of biological determinism, leaves us ill equipped to understand the output of LLMs, as all it can do is say, “that’s not language,” dismissing the matter as someone else’s concern. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

These are some of the things you will hear from  frequent international travelers: 

“Food is the passport to the entire world.”

“Every dish tells a story about its country’s past.”

“Exploring new cuisines is the best way to appreciate other cultures.”

While these feel a bit melodramatic, I suppose they have a point. One of the great joys of life is wonderful food. Another is fun trips to different places. Combine them both, and you have a winning combination.

And if I’m honest about my own life:

I’d do anything for a taco (both in Mexico and elsewhere).

Not only because they are delicious- but because of how often they’ve been there for me. So in the name of these little bundles of joy-

Here are some of my favorite tacos from the past few years.

The “breakup” tacos

• The time: January, 2023
• The place: Hot Springs, Arkansas

I went through a bad breakup at the beginning of 2023. My girlfriend and I had just bought a camper van, named it Margarita, and planned to travel through central America in it.

We didn’t even make it out of Texas. 

It sucked, but I wasn’t going to let that ruin my fun. I drove Maragarita over 6,000 miles the next two months, and made a stop in Hot Springs, Arkansas. After a 17-mile hike that day, I was toast- and so hungry.

Guess what I ate? Read more »

by Barry Goldman

Somebody screwed up. That much was clear. A batch of parts that was supposed to go through process A was instead sent through process B. The parts had to be scrapped. The job was delayed by several days. The customer was furious. The boss called in the manager who was in charge of the plant at the time of the mix-up. The manager appeared at the meeting along with a representative. The boss asked for an explanation. The manager and his representative made their arguments. The boss determined the manager was at fault and imposed a two-week suspension without pay. The manager appealed the suspension, and the case went to arbitration.

At the hearing, the manager’s lawyer argued that the plant rules require an employee to be given 24 hours written notice before an investigative interview. Here, there was no written notice. The boss merely called the manager and told him to come to his office. Since the company failed to comply with the notice requirement, the lawyer argued, the investigative interview was improper, and the discipline was invalid.

The company argued that the manager had effectively waived the notice requirement. By appearing at the investigative interview with a representative and participating in the meeting, and by failing to request an adjournment or to raise the issue of notice, the manager had tacitly agreed to proceed without the notice required by the plant rules.

The purpose of the notice requirement, after all, is to ensure the employee has an opportunity to appear and present his case. The idea is simply to get everyone in the same room at the same time with the same agenda. Since the employee did appear and did present his case, the purpose of the rule was served. To invalidate the discipline on the grounds that the notice provision was violated would elevate form over substance. Read more »

by Steve Gimbel

Every neighborhood seems to have at least one. You know him, the walking guy. No matter the time of day, you seem to see him out strolling through the neighborhood. You might not know his name or where exactly he lives, but all your neighbors know exactly who you mean when you say “that walking guy.” This summer, that became me.

I needed to drop serious weight, so I made up my mind and went all in. I cleaned up my diet, started intermittent fasting, and a resistance training regimen. I needed to add cardio and would initially alternate between the elliptical and taking long walks. Online experts and “experts” extolled the fat-burning power of brisk walks and as a philosopher, the walks were nice because I could get in my head and work through the arguments of whatever I was writing as I also expended calories.

I found myself walking more often and longer distances until my daily routine involved a seven mile path which I would trod first thing in the morning and then again in the evening, taking advantage of the late sunset. It certainly accomplished the intended goal, I’m down 59 pounds (my goal was 60 before the start of classes and with a week and a half left until the semester launches, this should be easily accomplished). But what surprised me was a secondary benefit, an interesting connection to those around me.

My walk takes about three hours to complete. Twice a day, that means that I am walking the same neighborhood streets for six hours each day. As a result, virtually everyone along that trail knows me by sight and an odd but interesting set of relationships have developed. Read more »

Is this the longest bench in the world? I haven’t ever seen one longer. I measured it and it is 45 feet long (almost 14 meters) in length. It is next to the Neustift tennis courts in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

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by Laurie Sheck

1.

Years ago, when my daughter was five, we spent a day at the Barcelona Zoo. As I held her small hand in mine, we stood before a cage in which a large albino gorilla resolutely turned his face from us. If we moved to the right, he turned his face to the left, if we edged toward the left, he shifted to the right. He was determined to have no eye contact with us, and at that moment I felt ashamed. My very presence, my gaze, was a kind of violation. I was in the presence of a being, dignified and exposed, with whom I had no shared language apart from the mute language of gesture. His own stark language was deeply expressive, and his refusal said the most basic things about captivity, inequality, exposure, isolation.

In his 1977 essay Why Look At Animals? John Berger traced the increasing estrangement between animals and humans: “The 19^th century, in western Europe and North America, saw the beginning of a process, today being completed by 20^th century corporate capitalism, by which every tradition which has previously mediated between man and nature was broken. Before this rupture, animals… were with man at the center of his world.” Picture the early cave paintings, how sensitive they were to the curve of an animal’s back, its grace and power, its sense of movement.

Berger goes on to think about how in the intimate gaze exchanged between animals and humans, now so often lost, there is a sense of both recognition and mystery, knowing and unknowing. And how, within this relationship, “The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas, are specifically addressed to man.” How it is hubris to forget this mixture of what can be grasped and what is secret and other. And now, in the 21^st century, it is all too easy to experience animals as images in children’s picture books, cartoon characters, and commodities produced by factory farms. Yet it seems there still lingers a haunting feeling of intimacy and betrayal, a painful and also beautiful, almost sacred, sense of vulnerable, complex lives that are not confined to “owner” and “owned” or to commodity and consumer.

2.

It is night, I am sitting in my study. My daughter is grown now, the pandemic has been raging for two years. There is a silence that is hard to name—isolate, almost wounded. And in this silence, in this dim light, I pick up a book about a dog I have only ever vaguely heard about, a dog known mostly as an image on a stamp or coffee cup or watch-face, reduced and cartoonish.

The dog is Laika, the first mammal to be sent into outer space.

And as I think of her, I think again of Berger’s essay. How he said that in our modern world, “Animals appear like fish seen through the plate glass of an aquarium…. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance…. What we know about them is an index of our power.”

This dog sent into outer space— I want to know who she was, to have some sense of what her life was, what she felt. But I know I can never really know. All I have are a few facts. Read more »

by Malcolm Murray

Recently, the system card for Claude 4 showed a fascinating finding – what happens when you let two Claudes engage in a prolonged dialogue with each other? They end up meditating and sharing Buddhist wisdom, such as “In perfect stillness, consciousness recognizes consciousness, and the eternal dance continues”. Especially, they share nondual Buddhist wisdom, such as “Yes. This. Is” or “Perfect. Complete. Eternal”.

As a Buddhist myself, I naturally found this highly fascinating. A few people posited explanations for the phenomenon – Scott Alexander, the blogger Nostalgebraist, the Conversation and researchers from Anthropic, but none of their seem very convincing. I therefore think it is worth at least entertaining more a speculative explanation for this phenomenon. This could be that it is additional evidence for the set of arguments that we can refer to as “Why Buddhism is true”, as per Robert Wright’s epi-titled book (note that “Buddhism is true” refers to Buddhism as a philosophy rather than as a religion, I don’t think religions can be reduced to “true” or “false”). It is also worth noting that, as with everything about “how LLMs work” (especially in combination with the spiritual realm!), everything is highly speculative. We must always keep in mind that LLMs are fundamentally alien intelligences and we have no idea why they do what they do.

Starting with Scott Alexander’s explanation, in his piece The Claude Bliss Attractor, he argues that this is a result of LLMs’ training. Specifically, the combination of deliberate biases introduced by the AI companies and having the LLMs always slightly improve the result on each prompt. He gives the example of how LLMs, when asked to repeatedly iterate on an image, can end up with caricatures of black people. Since LLMs are nudged to be a bit more inclusive/woke with each inference, those nudges compound into extreme stereotypes over time. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

The International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of anti-Semitism is unacceptable, incoherent, and harmful, and should not be used in formulation of policy.

First, my own credentials. I am Jewish. I passed my bar mitzvah test at what was then Jews’ College, London, with distinction. I have led congregations in prayer, and after decades of godlessness still feel nostalgia for that shared activity. And there is a field in northern Israel, close to the Lebanese border, that I helped clear of stones with my own hands.

At the tiny rural Church of England school that I went to when evacuated from London during World War 2, the older children would dance round me in a ring, singing

Jew, Jew, put him in the stew.

I think my dislike for bad poetry dates from that time.

I have been told that the Jews killed Jesus, and had fistfights at school in response to anti-Semitic insults. And of course, I was told that the Jews had all the money.

I remember the first images out of Belsen in Life magazine. My parents tried to hide them, but whether by accident or design they did not make a very good job of it.

When I applied to a secondary school in the highly competitive environment of the late 1940s, I knew that I had to do better in the entrance exam than a Gentile applicant, because the school had decided to place a limit on the number of Jews it would admit (common practice at the time, although it would now of course be illegal).

I have known Holocaust survivors, and been good friends with people whose escape from the Nazis was a matter of lucky contacts and good fortune.

And more recently, I have been addressed by people scolding me for this or that action of the Israeli government as if I were personally responsible for it.

So I regard myself as well acquainted with anti-Semitism, from the horrific to the trivial. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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 by Martin Butler

For some time there’s been a common complaint that western societies have suffered a loss of community. We’ve become far too individualistic, the argument goes, too concerned with the ‘I’ rather than the ‘we’. Many have made the case for this change. Published in 2000, Robert Putnam’s classic ‘Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of American community’, meticulously lays out the empirical data for the decline in community and what is known as ‘social capital.’ He also makes suggestions for its revival. Although this book is a quarter of a century old, it would be difficult to argue that it is no longer relevant. More recently the best-selling book by the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, ‘Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times’, presents the problem as one of moral failure.

Google ‘loss of community’ and myriad reports and articles pop up. It’s both misleading and unhelpful, however, to frame the problem in terms of such a loss, or as a conflict between ‘I’ and ‘we’. It’s important to recognise from the outset the uncontroversial point that, like dolphins or chimpanzees, human beings are by nature social animals. The claim that we have become too individualistic can’t mean that we have somehow changed our basic nature. Since our evolution on the plains of Africa, very few Homo Sapiens have lived truly non-social lives. As individuals we are relatively puny beings, our evolutionary success largely depends on our ability to act together as a group. In one sense then, it is an inescapable fact that we all live in communities on which we depend, and it’s important to remember the simple fact that we cannot survive without cooperating with others.

The anxiety about the loss of community expressed by Putnam and others must then be concerned with something other than this deeply social nature. What exactly is this?

A general characteristic of modern industrial societies which throws light on this is the fact that our interdependence on others (as adults) has become largely divorced from our most important social bonds: families, close friends, neighbours. We all live within societies and wouldn’t last long if we didn’t, this is the locus of our interdependence on others. Read more »