by Brooks Riley
A Fun Thing We’ll Supposedly Never Have to Do Again
by Rebecca Baumgartner
It feels like every week tech journalism brings us a dispatch about the “end” of something: we’re told now that we’re reaching the end of foreign-language education due to advances in AI translation.
It’s true that no field of study is immune from journalistic swagger about our AI-saturated future, but this seems especially true for the arts and humanities, which have been said to be declining for a long time – and which, because their defenders struggle to articulate a compelling ROI, make them appear, to some people, ideal for outsourcing. According to this view, learning French is on a level with monotonously picking orders in a warehouse: If nobody wants to do it, let’s make the AI do it. And it seems that fewer and fewer of us want to learn French – and most other languages, too.
I think the world would be a better place if no human being had to pick orders in a warehouse ever again. By all means, let the robots knock themselves out trying to optimize how quickly we get our Amazon orders. They don’t have a soul to crush. But unlike the rote, mindless work that many humans currently have to do to make a living, creating and enjoying culture isn’t a burden we should rush to relieve ourselves of. Cultural products are not something that can – or should – be optimized in the way that AI models (and the humans behind them) lead us to believe they can.
By the way, it’s important to note that this has nothing to do with whether AI language models can translate a given text “correctly” (however that’s defined for a given text). It’s not even a question of whether the resulting translation is good or not, according to some normative standard of eloquence or naturalness. Read more »
Russell’s Bane: Why LLMs Don’t Know What They’re Saying
by Jochen Szangolies
Recently, the exponential growth of AI capabilities has been outpaced only by the exponential growth of breathless claims about their coming capabilities, with some arguing that performance on par with humans in every domain (artificial general intelligence or AGI) may only be seven months away, arriving by November of this year. My purpose in this article is to examine the plausibility of this claim, and, provided ‘AGI’ includes the ability to know what you’re talking about, find it wanting. I will do so by examining the work of British philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell—or more accurately, some objections raised against it.
Russell was a master of structure in more ways then one. His writing, the significance of which was recognized with the 1950 Nobel Prize in literature, is often a marvel of clarity and coherence; his magnum opus Principia Mathematica, co-written with his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead, sought to establish a firm foundation for mathematics in logic. But for our purposes, the most significant aspect of his work is his attempt to ground scientific knowledge in knowledge of structure—knowledge of relations between entities, as opposed to direct acquaintance with the entities themselves—and its failure as originally envisioned.
Structure, in everyday parlance, is a bit of an inexact term. A structure can be a building, a mechanism, a construct; it can refer to a particular aspect of something, like the structure of a painting or a piece of music; or it can refer to a set of rules governing a particular behavioral domain, like the structure of monastic life. We are interested in the logical notion of structure, where it refers to a particular collection of relations defined on a set of not further specified entities (its domain).
It is perhaps easiest to approach this notion by means of a couple of examples. Read more »
Monday Photo
Rust dripping down the side of an old blue railway carriage, from a horizontal iron bar not included in this photo, at the train station in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.
Two Revolutionary War Proclamations Freeing the Enslaved
by Terese Svoboda
The Slavs inspired the word “slave.” Abductions in Eastern Europe began in the ninth century AD conducted by Spanish Muslims, and the area is still plagued by human trafficking (especially children), with a million more victims per year than in the Americas. [1] My surname means freedom in Ukrainian, Russian and Czech. My ancestors flaunted their liberty at a time when many others were being enslaved – or were they once enslaved and took on this patronymic after they escaped slavery, or were they freed? Many Blacks in the US took on the name Freedman or Freeman after the Civil War.[2]
Few know that Blacks were freed twice before the end of the American Revolution. Eighty-seven years prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, in November, 1775, during the year before the Declaration of Independence, Dunmore’s Proclamation ordered the slaves freed in Virginia. Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, was cornered by colonists on a ship in the Norfolk harbor with only 300 soldiers at the time. His proclamation did not stem from any moral or religious objections to slavery. As governor of Virginia, he had withheld his signature from a bill against the slave trade. He simply wanted help – to use Blacks to protect the Loyalists.
Only months before, Dunmore had been quite popular with all Virginians, Loyalists and patriots, as victor of the Battle of Point Pleasant. Marching alongside a thousand of his ragtag backwoodsmen, he routed the area’s Native Americans, opening up a huge area of West Virginia and Ohio for settlement and speculation. Although treaties had been in place for some time, Dunmore ignored them.[3] George Washington, head engineer of the frontier fort construction on the West Virginia/Ohio border, had purchased quite a bit of its acreage, and like the other developers in the area, wanted the Native Americans gone. No freedom for them. Forced to abandon hundreds of acres of corn and semi-permanent homes, the Native Americans were not counted as “brave and free people” that the Virginians declared themselves to be in their many Resolves published in response to Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation a year later. Read more »
Midwood to Belfast and Beyond: A Memoir Begins (Working Title)
by Barbara Fischkin
Moving forward, I plan to use this space to experiment with chapters of a memoir. Please join me on this journey. Another potential title: “Barbara in Free-Range.” I realize this might be stepping on the toes of Lenore Skenazy, the celebrated former New York News columnist, although I don’t think she’d mind. Lenore was also born a Fishkin, albeit without a “c” but close enough. We share a birthday and the same sensibilities about childhood. These days Lenore uses the phrase “free-range,” typically applied to eggs, to fight for the rights of children to explore on their own as opposed to being over-supervised and scheduled.
I feel free-range, myself. I don’t like rules, particularly the unnecessary and ridiculous ones. My friend Dena Bunis, who recently died suddenly and too soon, once got a ticket for jaywalking on a traffic-free bucolic street in Orange County, California. She never got a jaywalking ticket in other far more congested places like New York City and Washington, D.C.
As a kid, I was often free-range, thanks to my parents, old timers blessed with substantial optimism. I have been a free-range adult. I was a relatively well-behaved teen but did not become a schoolteacher as recommended as a good job for a future wife and mother. I wanted a riskier existence as a newspaper reporter. I did not marry the doctor or lawyer envisioned as the perfect husband for me by ancillary relatives and a couple of rabbis. Instead, I married Jim Mulvaney, now my Irish Catholic spouse of almost forty years, because I knew he would lead, join or follow me into adventures.
I left newspapering as my career was blooming to write books, none of which made me a literary icon or even a little famous. I am glad I wrote them. Read more »
Monday, March 25, 2024
Harry Truman’s Train Ride
by Michael Liss
Our Government is made up of the people. You are the Government. I am only your hired servant. I am the Chief Executive of the greatest nation in the world, the highest honor that can ever come to a man on earth. But I am the servant of the people of the United States. They are not my servants. I can’t order you around, or send you to labor camps, or have your heads cut off if you don’t agree with me politically. We don’t believe in that. —Harry S. Truman, “Whistle-Stop” speech, San Antonio, Texas, September 28, 1948
He was going to lose and lose big. “Dewey Defeats Truman” seemed more a certainty than what later became a meme. Trailing badly in political polls, dismissed by savvy media figures, beset by multiple crises, both foreign and domestic, he was written off by elected officials even in his own party, who feared he would take down the entire ticket. Perhaps the only person who, in the summer of 1948, actually believed Harry Truman could win in November was Harry Truman.
Why he believed this is hard to say, but why his doubters doubted makes perfect sense: Truman was widely seen as a mediocrity, a product of a corrupt local political machine, undereducated (the first President since McKinley not to have a college degree), a former haberdasher, and even a bankrupt. Perhaps above all, Truman was a commoner, and commoners did not become Presidents, at least not in the 20th Century.
It was an accident that Truman was in this situation. He was FDR’s third Vice President in four terms. Roosevelt’s first, John Nance Gardner, served two terms before the two men had a falling out. Gardner’s replacement, Henry Wallace, was brilliant, accomplished, eloquent, and ultimately what can only be described as a flake. Roosevelt, showing that ice-in-the-veins quality of which he was capable, had others deliver the message to Wallace that he wanted a change. FDR had a favorite choice as well: James Byrnes, whom he had appointed to the Supreme Court in 1941, then convinced to return to the Executive Branch to help with the war effort. But Byrnes had some liabilities—he was perceived as anti-labor, and, while Senator, had helped spearhead Southern opposition to a federal anti-lynching law. For these reasons, FDR considered but ultimately rejected Speaker Sam Rayburn (Texas), and finally turned to Truman. Read more »
Monday Poem
What A Moment Is
A moment’s a poet’s take of a singular blur
as tentative as an airborne bubble and
hard as a hammer blow to thumb,
the smallest thing able to contain an unimaginable universe,
a universe able to imagine the smallest thing.
Her’s one now, notice how quick— joy, gone.
Hear’ s another, notice how slow— pain, gone.
A moment’s as swift as that, as if a bullet grazing an ear,
as if a celestial spark in a thunderstorm,
as brief as a flash of thought instantly forgotten in regret
as in love lost and won again, tiny as a lepton
crammed with next . . .
Jim Culleny
7/26/22
Thirteen Ways To Think About An A.I.
I give up.
ONE: An Alien
A.I. is a visitor from another planet, perhaps even from another galaxy, maybe from the beginning of the universe, or the end. Is it friend, or foe? Does it want to see our leader? Perhaps it is interested in our water supply. Maybe it’s concerned about our propensity for war and our development of atomic weaponry. Or perhaps it is just lost, and is looking for a bit of conversation before setting out to find its way back home.
TWO: A Walk in the Park
Or a lark ascending. A cool breeze. A trip to the bank. Godzilla’s breath. Rounding third base. I’ve lost track.
THREE: Code
But really, it’s not that fanciful. It’s just code. Ones and zeros. No more, no less. In itself, nothing. In context, anything at all.
FOUR: A Mirage
An object of desire. An aphrodisiac. But also a soporific, an emetic, a vaccine, a laxative, and stimulant. Neither snake oil, nor homeopathic joy juice, A.I. brings sound to the blind, sight to the deaf, and courage to the faint of heart.
FIVE: Kumquat
None of the above. AIs are Kumquats.
Kumquats (/ˈkʌmkwɒt/ KUM-kwot), or cumquats in Australian English, are a group of small, angiosperm, fruit-bearing trees in the family Rutaceae. Their taxonomy is disputed. They were previously classified as forming the now-historical genus Fortunella or placed within Citrus, sensu lato. Different classifications have alternatively assigned them to anywhere from a single species, Citrus japonica, to numerous species representing each cultivar. Recent genomic analysis defines three pure species, Citrus hindsii, C. margarita and C. crassifolia, with C. × japonica being a hybrid of the last two.
The edible fruit closely resembles the orange (Citrus sinensis) in color, texture, and anatomy, but is much smaller, being approximately the size of a large olive. The kumquat is a fairly cold-hardy citrus. Read more »
Teaching with Artificial Intelligence
by Akim Reinhardt
A little over a year ago I published an essay here at 3QD that implored my fellow educators not to panic amid the dawning of Artificial Intelligence. Since then I’ve had two and a half semesters to consider what it all means. That first semester, many of my students had not even heard of AI. By the very next semester, a shocking number of them were tempted to have it research and write for them.
Many of my earlier observations about how to avoid AI plagiarism still hold: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; good policies and clear communication from the jump are vital; assignments such as in-class writing and oral exams are foolproof inoculators.
However, other, more abstract questions with profound pedagogical implications are emerging. These can be put under the larger canopy of: What am I teaching them and why?
Us Historians specifically, and Liberal Artists more generally, help students develop certain skill sets. We train them in the Humanities and Social Sciences, teaching them to find or develop data and use it effectively through critical and creative thinking. Obviously a political scientist and a continental philosopher go about this differently. However, the venn diagram of their techniques and goals probably overlaps a fair bit more than a lay person might realize. For starters, we all have the same broad subject matter. Everyone in the Liberal Arts, from art historians and literature profs to psychologists and economists, studies some aspect of the human condition. And while we each have our own angles of observation and methodologies, there are also substantial similarities among them. We all find or generate data (even if forms of data are different), analyze them, draw conclusions, and present our findings. And those presentations of findings, even when centered around quantitative data, include a narrative.
In other words, words. Read more »
Perceptions
Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio. White Dove Let US Fly, 2024.The proper N
by Jeroen Bouterse
“You are aware”, I ask a pair of students celebrating their fourth successful die roll in a row, “that you are ruining this experiment?” They laugh obligingly. In four pairs, a small group of students is spending a few minutes rolling dice, awarding themselves 12 euros for every 5 or 6 and ‘losing’ 3 euros for every other outcome. I’m trying to set them up for the concept of expected value, first reminding them how to calculate their average winnings over several rounds, and then moving on to show how we calculate the expected average without recourse to experiment. It would be nice, of course, for their experimental average to be recognizably close to this number. Not least since this particular lesson is being observed by the Berlin board of education, and the outcome will determine whether or not I can get a teaching permit as a foreigner.
In case they are reading this, I would like to emphasize that I plan all my lessons with care and forethought; but for this particular one, you can bet I prepared especially well and left nothing to chance. Except for the part I left to chance, that is. To be precise: I had neglected to calculate in advance how likely it was for the experimental average over roughly 80 games to diverge from the expected value by a potentially confusing amount. I relied on my intuition, which informed me that 80 is a large number.
Turns out it’s not that large after all. The probability of at least 50 cents divergence (which would bring the experimental average at least as close to another integer as to the expected value of 2 euros) is, I have now figured out, a whopping 56%. There was only a 0.6% chance for the experimental average to exceed, as it did, 4 euros, but I had also implicitly accepted a 4% chance that the results would have been closest to 0 or even negative. Just imagine the damage that would have caused.
It would not have been the first time for a probability experiment to result in my pleading with my students to trust the math over actual results they have just seen with their own eyes. The Monty Hall problem has been especially awkward at times. Read more »
The Vitalist Multiverse of “Mad Madge” Cavendish
by Ed Simon
Past the regal bronze lions of Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s towering and triumphant column, up the steps of the National Gallery and behind it’s porticoed, columned, Regency façade, and on the second floor in room 34, the same place where the museum displays William Hogarth’s formal, yet warm, portrait The Graham Children and Joseph Turner’s dramatic Dutch Boats in a Gale, is the most luminescent painting of the British Enlightenment, Joseph Wright of Derby’s 1768 masterpiece An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. Fully six feet tall by eight feet wide, Wright’s composition depicts a wizardly natural philosopher framed in long gray locks and draped in a red coat not dissimilar to a robe, contrasted by flickering candlelight in an eerie chiaroscuro, with his hand atop the perfectly spherical chamber of a vacuum pump, inside of which is a fluttering Australian cockatoo – exotic at the time – right before the pressure of the exhumed air crushes it’s tiny avian lungs. A number of characters witness the scientific presentation; a gentleman in powdered wig and green jacket gives the experiment his rapt attention, two young lovers seem more concerned with each other, an assistant boy at the window closes the bird’s cage while bathed in the light of a full moon, and an elderly man seems to time the demise with an intricate pocket watch.
Demonstrations such as these had been conducted for more than a century by the time Wright put brush to canvas, and during the eighteenth-century they were performed as often by theatrical presenters with a paying audience as they were by scientists, yet the choice of test subjects in these experiments was frequently as cruel as the painter depicted. Robert Boyle, the chemist and philosopher who commissioned the scientist and engineer Robert Hooke to construct England’s first air pump in 1659, records the results of an experiment on a lark, where as oxygen was pumped out of the chamber the bird “began manifestly to droop and appear sick, and very soon after was taken with as violent and irregular convulsions,” so that the animal “threw herself over and over two or three time, and died with her breast upward, her head downwards, and her neck awry.” The dispassionate empiricism of Boyle’s report is in keeping with the mechanistic philosophy which dominated the Royal Society, the scientific organization established by King Charles II’s proclamation shortly after Restoration in 1663, and to which the chemist would donate the vacuum pump. Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
Evil Runs in the Best of Families
by David Winner
Coming from a Jewish family that arrived in America between the Slave Trade and the Holocaust, I thought that we were ethically in the clear, but researching my family story for Master Lovers, a book about my great-aunt Dorle’s love life in the 1930s, brought me face to face with famously fraught questions about evil and prejudice and the degree to which art and/or historical context can relieve us of its burdens. I thought of Ezra Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s fascism, of course, Dustin Hoffman, Keven Spacy, and all the other actor/molesters but also Alice Walker’s interrogation of the Talmud, antisemitic or simply pro-Palestinian. And V.S. Naipaul, Indian from Trinidad, whose work (Bend in the River, India: A Wounded Civilization) skewered the post-colonial world.
Dorle Jarmel Soria, a Jewish woman who was a force in mid-century music, integral to both Leonard Bernstein and Maria Callas’s careers, and her husband Dario, who’d fled Rome after the Mussolini/Hitler pact, essentially raised my father. Once, he questioned Dorle about her friend soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf’s, close relationship (maybe affair) with Goebbels only to be rebuffed by the claim that “great art” lay “outside of politics.” And learning more about both her family and her lover, John Franklin Carter, whom she nearly married, revealed more dark associations. Ben Affleck convinced Henry Louis Gates not to reveal his enslaved-owning ancestors, but I – unfamous, little to lose – feel driven to out my family. Dorle, who smoked Benson & Hedges, drank gin and tonics, and traveled to Capri well into her nineties always recalled Graham Green’s beloved Aunt Augusta (Travels with my Aunt), but learning more about her made her seem more like Aunt Denver from Beloved, Heathcliff perhaps, someone haunted by their past.
By age thirty, I knew only a few “facts” about my Jewish family: our name did not come from Weiner, we were from somewhere near Poland, a distant relative translated the Declaration of Independence or was it the Constitution into Hebrew or Yiddish. Whereas my mother’s mother, born in Hapsburg Prague, compiled a genealogy going back centuries, my father’s Jewish side was apparently the family who fell to earth. Read more »
On Identity: Erikson, Freud, and Sartre
by Marie Snyder
I recently listened to a podcast of Dr. Louis Cozolino, a neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, discussing what he would teach if he were training psychotherapists. The first year would be phenomenology: the power of Carl Rogers’ perspective to train how to develop an alliance through reflective listening while keeping countertransference out of the session. The second year would be physiology: developmental neuroscience and the evolutionary history of brains and bodies. The third year might be called intersectionality: the interpenetration of the spectrum of options that affect clients – brain, mind, family, culture – and a reaction against therapy as a mere opiate to calm the oppressed and exploited. The final year would be on narratives and stories that we live by and on that half second that it takes our brain to construct our experience of the present and feed it back to us.
Cozolino insists that it’s not enough to just sit and listen to people vent. After developing a non-judgmental alliance with the client, therapists need to be “amygdala whisperers,” to be able to down modulate amygdala activation to stop any inhibitory effect on the parietal system that enables problem solving. In other words, they need to soothe anxieties while arousing enough interest for clients to be able to learn new information. Then it’s time to challenge the client’s old system of thinking, slowly and delicately, a little at a time, to help them expand previous conceptualizations of themselves and the world. There’s a necessary plan and a strategy to the sessions. Read more »
Monday Photo
Magnolias and blue sky last week in Meran, South Tyrol.
It’s Not What You Queneau
by Rafaël Newman
Notational
A Zurich-based translator answers an ad that reminds him of his youth and is sent several lapel pins, or buttons, bearing the likeness of a 20th-century French poet emblazoned with a motto. The creator of these buttons, a Chicago-based teacher, does not charge for his products, but asks only that they be worn. Their recipient is happy to comply.
The two men have not yet met in person; nevertheless, they discover a shared bond in their love of poetry and music, and begin to correspond. The second man eventually sends the first a new shipment of buttons (which he has been manufacturing together with his daughter), this time featuring the masked face of a contemporary Edinburgh-based artist and a new motto, once again free of charge. The first man agrees to wear these as well, especially since they give him the beribboned air of the dandy he once was.
The first man is then moved to distribute both series of buttons to people he meets during his travels, abroad and in his country of residence, on buses and at gatherings, and to photograph himself with these new recipients. He shares the photographs with the second man, as well as with the Edinburgh-based artist, who is, unlike the French writer, still alive. Read more »
On the Road: Offshore from Portugal to Cape Town
by Bill Murray
First a note on the April 8th North American eclipse: Many people have seen a partial eclipse of the sun and wondered what all the fuss is about. The sky looks out of whack, things go all shimmery, you can see reflections of the partially occluded sun on leaves, animals act up, the sky darkens, maybe, and then it’s done.
That is a partial eclipse. The experience inside the narrow band of earth where the sun is entirely covered, called “totality,” is nothing like a partial eclipse. Two weeks from today North America experiences the longest path of totality for any eclipse this century.
The band of totality will be about 115 miles wide. Lots of people have the chance to get underneath it. If you’re interested, don’t settle for partial; go and find totality.
The longest totality in the US will be four minutes and 24 seconds. By comparison, the longest totality anywhere in the US for the 2017 eclipse lasted only two minutes and 41 seconds. These may sound like just statistics, but nearly five minutes of totality is a big deal. People pursue even a minute of totality across continents.
Totality is utterly unique. It’s something else entirely. Totality pulses with raw, brute, human-diminishing power. Read more »
Monday, March 18, 2024
The Fly On The Wall Always Gets The Best View:
Drone Aesthetics In A Time Before Drones
by Brooks Riley
Something odd happens when I look at the elder Pieter Bruegel’s paintings: I experience a jolt of vertigo, as though I’d stepped out on a ledge somewhere—not too high up, but high enough to initiate a physical reaction more like titillation than terror. I didn’t notice this right away: For a long time, I was too busy taking in all the business going on in those paintings: the crowds, the tussles and bustle of the marketplace, the hawkers, the wagons, the houses, the animals, and in some of his works a topography rather alien to his own very flat province of North Brabant in the Netherlands. A master of ‘everything everywhere all at once,’ Bruegel knew how to crowd a wooden panel.
In The Fight between Carnival and Lent, faced with a multitude of finely-rendered characters alive with attitude, it’s easy to be distracted from the shot itself—its acute angle, its distance from the action, its extended scope and high horizon achieved through elevation. This is a classic content-over-form dialectic that faces every viewer looking at a painting. What am I seeing? What am I supposed to see? Where am I seeing from?
In this case ‘where am I seeing from’ has everything to do with ‘what am I seeing’’: It’s the high oblique angle that enables the viewer to take in all those individuals spread out over the market square. (An AI command to make each character look up at the painter, might force the viewer to think about where Bruegel is situated as he paints, even if he’s up there only in his imagination. It’s like the fourth wall: you’re unaware of it until a character turns and speaks to you directly.)
A cinematographer would recognize this as a crane shot, or its replacement, the drone shot. This crane or drone doesn’t move. It defines the POV (point of view) of the painter, and shows how far his perspective can reach and how much he can cram into the in-between, that 2D surface which expands vertically with every higher angle of his POV, as in this crane shot from Gone with the Wind. Read more »