by David J. Lobina

This is a question I was considering whilst reading this recent paper by Dorsa Amir and Chaz Firestone on the origins of a well-known visual illusion (a preprint is freely accessible here). It is an issue I have often thought about, and about which I have always wanted to write something. It is a question that attracts the attention of most scholars who study human behaviour, and most scholars will have a particular idea as to what their “first principles” are when it comes to constructing a theory of cognition.

Where does one start from when building up an account of a given cognitive phenomenon, though? Are there any initial assumptions in this kind of theoretical process? I think it is fair to say that in most cases one’s first principles can go some way towards explaining what kind of theory one favours to begin with, though this is not always explicitly stated; an enlightening case in this respect is the study of language acquisition, as I shall show later.

Let’s keep to Amir & Firestone’s study for a start. The paper focuses on the Müller-Lyer Illusion, shown in graphic A below, taken from their paper, an illusion that goes back to 1889 and is named after Franz Müller-Lyer, who devised it. Why is it an illusion? Well, because the two lines are of the same length and yet one typically perceives the top line to be longer than the bottom line, even after being told that they are of the same length – and even after checking this is so with a ruler. The Müller-Lyer Illusion seems to be unaffected by what one knows about it, and thus would be a candidate for a perceptual process that is more or less autonomous – it simply applies because of how our visual system works.

Or does it? A typical rejoinder has been that culture can shape the way we perceive the world in rather significant ways, and as a matter of fact not everyone is as susceptible to the Müller-Lyer Illusion as the western, educated population that is usually tested in cognitive psychology labs (this cohort is sometimes referred to as WEIRD; google it). Indeed, many cross-cultural studies have concluded so, and as a possible explanation it has been argued that the Illusion arises in populations who have been brought up in carpentered environments, shown in graphic B above – lacking this background, the Illusion is not as robust. Thus, the Müller-Lyer Illusion would be a product of experience and its observers might just be the exception rather than the rule. Read more »

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by Eric Schenck

At a Christmas market in Germany, I told my German girlfriend’s mother that I masturbate with my family every December.

Of course (I swear), this was a mistake. What I was trying to say is that my family and I do a gift exchange every year. What I actually said? That we do a fair bit of masturbating together.  

As I learned that snowy evening, the words are practically the same in German:

• “Wechseln”: exchange
• “Wichsen”: masturbate  

Just a few letters off, and an entirely different world of meaning.

My girlfriend Janina knew what I was trying to say. But Gitta? She looked at me like I was a monster, like her daughter had picked the biggest piece of shit in the world. 

Do I masturbate with my family every Christmas? I do not. But the story does make me laugh. And if you’re serious about learning a language, you need to laugh, too.

Over the last 15+ years, I’ve learned four of them:

• Spanish
• Modern Standard Arabic
• Egyptian Arabic
• German

Here are some things about each one that have me laugh (or at least awkwardly smile)… Read more »

by Derek Neal

The File on H is a novel written in 1981 by the Albanian author Ismail Kadare. When a reader finishes the Vintage Classics edition, they turn the page to find a “Translator’s Note” mentioning a five-minute meeting between Kadare and Albert Lord, the researcher and scholar responsible, along with Milman Parry, for settling “The Homeric Question” and proving that The Iliad and The Odyssey are oral poems rather than textual creations. As The File on H retells a fictionalized version of Parry and Lord’s trips to the Balkans to record oral poets in the 1930’s, this meeting from 1979 is characterized as the genesis of the novel, the spark of inspiration that led Kadare to reimagine their journey, replacing primarily Serbo-Croatian singing poets in Yugoslavia with Albanian bards in the mountains of Albania.

This anecdote is repeated in almost every article one finds on the novel, scholarly or popular. Perhaps it is simply too good of a story to pass up—the American meets the Albanian, who, trapped in a communist dictatorship, knows nothing of the research and scholarship going on outside his country’s borders. On one of the few trips when he’s allowed to leave the country, a special privilege granted to culturally important Albanians, he meets an American who enlightens him about the history of his own country, but they’re only given a few minutes before the Albanian has to return to his isolated nation, forced to reconstitute the conversation in novelistic form.

It is ironic that what seems to be a piece of gossip, a possibly apocryphal tale, would attach itself to the story of The File on H, which ultimately deals with the implications of the transition from an oral world to a literate one. These types of tales change each time they get passed on from one person to another, but once they are set down in writing, they become fixed. The official account becomes codified—Kadare wrote this novel because of his conversation with Albert Lord in 1979. And maybe he did. But if this is the case, one wonders how his characterization of Lord and Parry’s findings, how his articulation of the difference in the oral worldview and the literate worldview, are so accurate in his novelization. Surely Lord couldn’t have told him of his in-depth findings on the composition of oral poetry in just a few minutes. What one forgets, however, is that the world Lord and Parry were discovering was already Kadare’s world. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

I am not a cocktail guy. The whole craft cocktail thing strikes me as precious, pretentious and silly. You want to have a drink? Fine, let’s have a drink. I’ll have an IPA or a scotch. Maybe a gin and tonic if it’s a particularly hot day. But stay away from me with your oregano tincture and elderflower liqueur. If I’m drinking wine with one of my wino friends, I like to pay attention to the first few sips. We can talk about the character of the wine for a minute or two. But then I want to talk about something else. I quickly run out of patience with conversation about artisanal anything. Look, I’m a crotchety old Midwesterner. Guys like me just don’t go for that stuff.

On the other hand, I am a big fan of the physicist, author and “natural philosopher” Sean Carroll and his Mindscape Podcast. So when Carroll interviewed Kevin Peterson, author of Cocktail Theory: A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Drinks, I listened. And it was fascinating.

Peterson has an undergraduate background in physics and a PhD in mechanical engineering. He approaches the world of cocktails as a scientist. In Peterson’s view, a statement that one drink is better than another is not a matter of opinion. It can be objectively confirmed. Partly, this is based on his knowledge of the biology of the human sensory apparatus, and partly it is based on his extensive, painstaking accumulation of data. Peterson has digital thermometers and gram scales that allow previously unavailable precision measurement. And he has the kind of obsessive personality that will systematically test a thousand daiquiris. He proceeded methodically, varying only one element at a time and only by tiny increments. Testing ingredient ratios was only the beginning. He also tested small changes in temperature, dilution, and aeration. In the end, he says, he can draw quantitative, objective conclusions.

Peterson claims to have established, for example, that the proper distance to shake a cocktail shaker is 18 inches, and proper length of time to shake it is 12 seconds. His claim is that this is not just his opinion. He says it’s in the data. Read more »

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

In the early 2000s, a curious phenomenon emerged in Japan: some grown men began forming intimate relationships with inanimate pillows bearing images of anime girls, a phenomenon known as “2-D love.” When I first encountered this phenomenon, I wondered if people could grow emotionally attached to two-dimensional printed images, how much deeper might that attachment become when artificial intelligence advanced enough to convincingly simulate companionship? I speculated whether there would come a time when individuals might be tempted to retreat from the real world and instead choose to live alongside an AI companion who also served as a romantic partner. That brave new world has now arrived in 2025. Apps like Replika, Character AI, Romantic AI, Anima, CarynAI , and Eva AI enable users to create AI-powered romantic partners i.e., chatbots designed to simulate conversation, affection, and emotional intimacy. These platforms allow users to personalize their virtual partner’s appearance, personality traits, and the nature of their relationship dynamic.

Unlike the 2-D love phenomenon, today’s AI romantic partners are no longer a fringe community. Today, over half a billion people have interacted with an AI companion in some form. This marks a new frontier in AI and its venture into the deeply human realms of emotion, affection, and intimacy. This technology is poised to take human relationships into uncharted territory. On one hand, it enables people to explore romantic or emotional bonds in ways never before possible. On the other hand, it also opens the door to darker impulses, there have been numerous reports of users creating AI partners for the sole purpose of enacting abusive or perverse fantasies. Companies like Replika and Character.AI promote their offerings as solutions to the loneliness epidemic, framing AI companionship as a therapeutic and accessible remedy for social isolation. As these technologies become more pervasive, they raise urgent questions about the future of intimacy, ethics, and what it means to have a human connection.

Several recent cases offer a sobering glimpse into what the future may hold as AI romantic partners become more pervasive. Read more »

Shadow of the A22 Autobahn (a four lane highway) as it passes over the Stausee (a lake formed by a dam on the river Eisack) in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, on the longest day of the year. I was taking a short pre-lunch walk and shot this photo at noon.

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by Adele A. Wilby

The Paradise, Pandora and Panama Papers, exposing secret offshore accounts in global tax havens, will be familiar to many. They are central to the work of economic sociology professor, Brooke Harrington. She has spent many years researching the ultra-wealthy and several books on the subject have been the result. Her latest book Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism is a continuation of her research; it focuses on ‘the system’, the professional enablers who support and advise the ultra-wealthy and make it possible for them to store and conceal their phenomenal fortunes in secret offshore accounts.

Offshore accounts should be of interest to everyone, particularly because any discussion of offshore finance is inevitably qualified by the word ‘secret’. As Harrington argues, the reasons are clear:  secrecy ‘confers impunity: freedom from accountability, both to social norms and the law. Offshore ‘secrecy havens’ make it possible for some corporations, and a small group of individuals – including the world’s approximately three thousand billionaires – to escape constraints the rest of us take for granted. Freedom from taxation is just the beginning’. Offshore wealth allows the super-rich to live in what some economists refer to as ‘fiscal paradise’, a ‘transcendent plane of existence’, beyond the norms, rules and regulations that govern society.

To convey the staggering scale of offshore finance, Harrington cites the Berkely economist Gabriel Zucman:  an end of 2022 estimate puts the sum of an astounding $12 trillion in private household wealth hidden in offshore accounts, roughly 12 per cent of all the wealth produced in the world that year, an amount, Harrington points out, that is a ‘central feature of the world economy’. To make sense of ‘the economic and political inequality spiralling out of control worldwide’ access to the secretive world of offshore finance was crucial and she went to remarkable lengths to do so. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Malcolm Murray

When it comes to AI, or even worse, “AGI”, we are facing a crisis of language. Different people use the terms to mean drastically different things. This is deeply unhelpful for productive debate. This point was hammered home to me several times this week. On LinkedIn, I debated appropriate risk management techniques for AI with a professor, and it turned out we were talking about very different kinds of AI. In New York, the proposed RAISE act made the A16Z lobbying army, fresh from its bloody victories in the California legislature, reload its weapons, despite the two sides talking about very different kinds of AI.

AI, as the current buzzword, is an extremely big tent and in effect a screen on to which people project their distinct hopes and fears. To make some progress in the AI debate, we should separate AI into its different archetypes. I believe there are at least five: Tool AI, Robot AI, Oracle AI, Golem AI and Agent AI, and they are all distinct, with different lineages and different purposes. Let’s examine each in turn.

First, there is Tool AI. Its lineage can be traced to big data, the buzzword in the business world in the early 2010s. This is the AI we have had for more than a decade, the AI that gets advertised in B2B SaaS solutions. It is AI as a prediction engine, deployed in the Amazon storefront to recommend your next purchase. This is AI in the TikTok feed, optimizing content for your engagement. It is statistics, but statistics on steroids. This is the type of AI for which VC firms like Andreessen Horwitz (A16Z) are techno-optimists and that can lead to large productivity increases for companies. It is a complement to humans, not a substitute.

Second, there is Robot AI. Its lineage includes the first use of the word robot, in the Czech play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in 1920, and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), a buzzword in the business world in the late 2010s. This signifies a machine that can automate and therefore replace a hitherto human-conducted process, whether analog or digital. Since the Industrial Revolution, repetitive factory processes have become automated. Instead of the human, blue-collar worker picking up the product to be manufactured and painted, say, the machine does it. More recently, we are seeing digital processes, on computer systems, also becoming possible to automate. Instead of the human, white-collar worker picking up the piece of data from one database and pasting it in another, the machine does it. This is also an AI that the A16Zs of the world would approve of, that can lead to large-scale productivity enhancements. At the same time, this is a type of AI that politicians worry about, since it will inevitably lead to job losses, as it is a substitute to humans rather than a complement. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Light Tricks, Seattle, March, 2022.

Digital photograph.

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Hello Readers and Writers,

We received a large number of submissions of sample essays in our search for new columnists. Most of them were excellent and it was very hard deciding whom to accept and whom not to. If you did not get selected, it does not at all mean that we didn’t like what you sent; we just have a limited number of slots and also sometimes we have too many people who want to write about the same subject. Today we welcome to 3QD the following persons, in alphabetical order by last name:

1. Dilip D’Souza
2. Thomas Fernandes
3. Philip Graham
4. Herbert W. Harris
5. Bonnie McCune
6. Laurie Sheck
7. Peter Topolewski

I will be in touch with all of you in the next days to schedule a start date. The “3QD Magazine” page will be updated with short bios and photographs of the new writers on or before the day they start.

Thanks to all of the people who sent samples of writing to us. It was a pleasure to read them all. Congratulations to the new writers!

Best wishes,

Abbas

by Rachel Robison-Greene

Earlier this month, “No Kings” protests set records for being among the most well attended political protests in recorded American history.  The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful.  On the same day, a politically motivated killer shot two Democratic politicians and their spouses in Minnesota, killing two and critically wounding the others.  Despite the facts being presented regarding all of these events, conspiracy theories quickly spread.  Reports circulated that cities in which protests were held were on fire.  Politicians took to Twitter to spread conspiracy theories about the shootings.  Before all the details were known, Utah’s senior senator Mike Lee took to Twitter to blame the violence on “Marxists.”

The tendency to believe what one hopes is true rather than what is supported by the evidence is far from a new trend in American politics.  One might even think it has become its most distinguishing feature.  In recent years, conspiracy theories have emerged about the pandemic, vaccines, climate change, and the security of the 2020 election, to name just a few.  All of this flies in the face of our ordinary, idealistic attitudes about how people form beliefs.  The idea that humans form beliefs and come to know truths through reviewing evidence and applying reliable reasoning practices is an enduring post-Enlightenment concept.  Recent events demonstrate that it’s not that helpful for understanding how human beings actually think.  Our everyday reasoning may be more grounded in social connectedness and personal insecurity than we ordinarily like to believe. Read more »

“The best evidence we have suggests that early Earth was completely
covered by oceans… (but) to link two amino acids together to make a
protein, you have to remove water. And that would have been impossible
if the amino acids were immersed in an ocean. Life needed some land—
literally a beachhead—to get started.” —geobiologist, Joseph Kirschvink 

Beachhead

Though landbound we were once tiny ships,
submarines, we understand the sea, it undulates
within-around us. Minds bob on timeswells,
are swept by winds that tear and grind us.

Not flawlessly designed, we have weak
moments in our hulls.

Tempted, we run perilously close to rocky spits,
each of us adrift looking for a beachhead,
longing for a place that’s still while everything
around us shifts.

As with Noah’s searching dove
we scan for an isle of earth

where sea is parted
.  ..where past is dead
….  ..where present sits
……  …where life and love
…..  …….can be restarted

by Jim Culleny
6/19/15-Rev,-6/14/25

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by William Benzon

I have been thinking about artificial intelligence and its implications for most of my adult life. In the mid-1970s I conducted research in computational semantics which I used in analyzing Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 129, “Th’ Expense of Spirit.” In the summer of 1981 I participated in a NASA study investigating ways to incorporate AI in NASA operations and missions. There I learned about an earlier NASA study that had looked into creating self-replicating factories on the moon.

“Wow,” thought I to myself, “does that mean potentially infinite ROI?” How so? “Well, it’s going to cost a lot to develop the initial equipment drop and transport it to the moon, but once that’s been done, and those self-replicating factories and amortized the initial investment, it’s all profit from that point on.” That is, since the factories can replicate themselves without further investment from earth, we can reap the profits from whatever it is that these factories produce, other than more factories.

Now, whether or not that’s actually possible, that’s another question. But it was an interesting fantasy. That’s how AI is, it breeds giddy fantasies in those who catch the bug.

Somewhat later, and in a more sober mood, David Hays and I argued, “Sooner or later we will create a technology capable of doing what, heretofore, only we could.” We also pointed out that “We still do, and forever will, put souls into things we cannot understand, and project onto them our own hostility and sexuality, and so forth.”

There’s plenty of that going around these days. There’s a raft of AI hype that’s been floating around since ChatGPT’s release in late November of 2022. One prominent strain is telling us that we are doomed to be eradicated by an over-ambitious AI. I’m quite sure that that is projective fantasy.

Alas, the threat of massive economic displacement seems far more real to me, and more worrying. Jobs will be lost to AI – it’s already happening, no? – and, while new jobs will be created, it does seem to me that in the long run, job loss will inevitably outpace job creation. That should be a good thing, no? To live among material abundance without the drudgery of soul-destroying work, isn’t that something to be welcomed? In the long run, yes, but in the short and mid-term, no, it is not. We are not ready. We have become addicted to work, at least in the advanced world, and will have trouble adjusting to life without it.

That’s my topic for this column. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

At about 6:30 am, we pulled up to the Labor Ready office in the Central District. My friend – who for the sake of this column will be called Rick – and I were responding to a trespassing call: a woman who was asked to leave the day-labor agency office was refusing.

Now to be clear, I wasn’t a cop – but Rick was and when I would return to Seattle on a break from working in Singapore – the best way to spend time with him was to go on a “ride along”. To make it work better, Rick told people I was a plain clothes officer. To mitigate risk, I spoke little and appeared stoic.

We entered the Labor Ready office, prepared to find an altercation in progress, only to discover a 30ish, short, heavy-set Filipina lady standing in the waiting area talking to herself. The staff told us they had asked her to leave, but she didn’t really seem to understand them.

Rick asked the woman if she could follow him outside and she complied. Through the din of voices in her head, she was able to answer most of Rick’s questions – although not always accurately. We were able to ascertain the woman thought she was Princess Diana, but also had some sense she was reporting for a day-labor assignment. She was aware she wasn’t quite right and articulated that she needed medication – only she had run out and couldn’t afford more.

Protocol said Rick should have issued the woman a Trespassing Card and sent her on her way. That didn’t feel like the right thing to do for this very nice woman clearly struggling with her mental health and trying to make a living. Alternatively, he could have gone heavy and decided to arrest her for trespassing – another path to medication, only through the jail’s healthcare system. But then she would have an arrest on her record and been imprisoned for doing nothing more than talking to herself. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

I have been re-reading Paradise Lost, prompted by the battle between Immortals and demons in the movie Ne Zha 2. The film, if you have not seen it, depicts a ruling party turned into a vehicle for the personal ambitions of its leader. If you ask me, that is; consider yourself warned that I am rather strongly disposed these days to connect everything to contemporary politics.

Paradise Lost provides a temptation in that regard, however you read it. Whether the poem explores forms of resistance after the battle to depose a ruthless dictator has been lost, or whether Satan is an opportunistic agitator, campaigning on draining the swamp but in fact only out to be worshipped himself – or both – modern analogies easily suggest themselves. William Empson compared Milton’s God to Joseph Stalin.[1] If I don’t name names, it is out of respect both for you the reader and for the heroes in Milton’s poem, which are more eloquent, less petty, and show more depth than their present-day authoritarian counterparts.

Still, Milton’s account of the Fall allows us to psychologize. We can indulge in the belief that if people had chosen better, we wouldn’t have been in such a mess right now. I think that should be fun for both of us, or cathartic for me at least. In any case, I am telling you in advance, so that if you continue reading, you don’t “pretend / Surprisal, unadmonished, unforewarned”.[2] Read more »