by Michael Klenk

I live and work in two different cities; on the commute, I continuously ask my phone for advice: When’s the next train? Must I take the bus, or can I afford to walk and still make the day’s first meeting? I let my phone direct me to places to eat and things to see, and I’ll admit that for almost any question, my first impulse is to ask the internet for advice.

My deference to machines puts me in good company. Professionals concerned with mightily important questions are doing it, too, when they listen to machines to determine who is likely to have cancer, pay back their loan, or return to prison. That’s all good insofar as we need to settle clearly defined, factual questions that have computable answers.

Imagine now a wondrous new app. One that tells you whether it is permissible to lie to a friend about their looks, to take the plane in times of global warming, or whether you ought to donate to humanitarian causes and be a vegetarian. An artificial moral advisor to guide you through the moral maze of daily life. With the push of a button, you will competently settle your ethical questions; if many listen to the app, we might well be on our way to a better society.

Concrete efforts to create such artificial moral advisors are already underway. Some scholars herald artificial moral advisors as vast improvements over morally frail humans, as presenting the best opportunity for avoiding the extinction of human life from our own hands. They demand that we should take listen to machines for ethical advice. But should we? Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

Nearly four years ago here at 3QD we talked about how Euler became interested in a trifling little puzzle in 1736. He asked if it was possible to take a walk through the city of Königsberg, Prussia and cross each of its seven bridges once and only once. It seems like a silly thing to spend your time on and is obviously of no use to anyone. My former senator would have an aneurysm at the idea of funding such research. Fortunately for us, Frederick the Great was more of a visionary.

Being no slouch, not only did Euler solve the problem (spoiler: it’s not possible), he invented two major fields of modern mathematics in the process. Four years ago we followed one of those rabbit holes and were led to the field now called topology. It is the study of geometry when you don’t care about angles, distance, and the like. Topology is a rich and exciting area of modern research with all sorts of applications. It leads to subway maps, the use of homology to study the structure of huge data sets, motion planning for robots, and gives us that one easy trick for solving labyrinths like a Theseus.

The second rabbit hole is the one we follow today. It leads to another area of modern mathematics now called graph theory.

In mathematics, a graph is nothing more than a collection of nodes and connections between them (sometimes called vertices and edges, respectively). Graphs can be drawn where each node is a dot and each connection is a line connecting the corresponding dots. Read more »

Dr. Steven T. Rosen is the Provost, Chief Scientific Officer, Director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Beckman Research Institute for the City of Hope. He also holds the Irell & Manella Cancer Center Director’s Distinguished Chair and is the current Chair of the Medical Science Committee of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Dr. Rosen’s laboratory research focuses on experimental therapeutics and hematologic malignancies. With over 400 scientific papers he has been an advisor to more than a dozen NCI Comprehensive Cancer Centers. Dr. Rosen serves on the Board of American Society of Clinical Oncology’s Conquer Cancer Foundation, Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and NCI’s Frederick Advisory Board.

Azra Raza, author of the forthcoming book The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to more than 20 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same five questions listed below. She videotaped the interviews and over the next months we will be posting them here one at a time each Monday. Please keep in mind that Azra and the rest of us at 3QD neither endorse nor oppose any of the answers given by the researchers as part of this project. Their views are their own. One can browse all previous interviews here.

1. We were treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with 7+3 (7 days of the drug cytosine arabinoside and 3 days of daunomycin) in 1977. We are still doing the same in 2019. What is the best way forward to change it by 2028?

2. There are 3.5 million papers on cancer, 135,000 in 2017 alone. There is a staggering disconnect between great scientific insights and translation to improved therapy. What are we doing wrong?

3. The fact that children respond to the same treatment better than adults seems to suggest that the cancer biology is different and also that the host is different. Since most cancers increase with age, even having good therapy may not matter as the host is decrepit. Solution?

4. You have great knowledge and experience in the field. If you were given limitless resources to plan a cure for cancer, what will you do?

5. Offering patients with advanced stage non-curable cancer, palliative but toxic treatments is a service or disservice in the current therapeutic landscape?

by Elizabeth S. Bernstein

To follow the popular discourse about the gender wage gap in the United States is to confront perpetual confusion. It is a confusion created at least in part by pronouncements of the type many of us have heard: “Women are paid only 82 cents for every dollar men earn! It is high time for women to earn equal pay for equal work!” Two sentences, each true standing alone, but in juxtaposition creating the impression that the 82-cent figure was derived by comparing men and women in similar jobs.

The commonly used statistic does not however represent any comparison of men and women doing equal work. It is simply a comparison of the median wages earned by each gender in the whole assortment of jobs they hold. Though the calculation is typically limited to full-time workers, defined as those working at least 35 hours per week, men and women do not work the same number of hours. There are more women than men working between 35 and 39 hours, more men than women working over 40. On any of a number of measures – the dangers inherent in their work, the amount of travel required – the jobs worked by men and women are not the same.

This is not to say that outright wage discrimination doesn’t exist. To tease out that part of the gap, economists control for an assortment of measurable differences between men’s and women’s employment situations. Some portion of the “unexplained” gap that remains is assumed to reflect discrimination. In 2016, Glassdoor compared the earnings of men and women who were not only of similar age, education, and years of experience, but who also worked for the same employer, in the same location, with the same job title. (They did not, however, control for number of hours worked.) The resultant gap was 5.4%. In 2019, Payscale compared the median salaries of men and women with the same jobs and qualifications, and found the gap to be 2%.

Whether that “controlled” gap is two cents or five, whatever part of it is due to gender discrimination is wrong, and illegal. The good news is that that portion of the gap has decreased steadily over the decades. The women who have fought to accomplish that deserve great credit. Read more »

by Adele A. Wilby

On occasions, while meandering the various English countryside and woodland paths, I have been pleasantly surprised to come across anglers. I have met fishermen dangling their lines in either a pond in some remote corner of the low-lying areas, or wading in water and casting a line down through the waters of a gently flowing river.

Brief dialogues with these men, and they have all been men, on how far they have been successful in their catches yield different responses: some are satisfied that they have indeed caught several fish and subsequently returned them to the water, while the response of less successful anglers is to express optimism that by the time they leave at the end of the day, they will most certainly have landed a fish!

However, arguably more interesting than whether or not the hooks have snared a catch is the demeanour of the men involved. Decked out in their layered fishing jackets with pouches containing various equipment adding inches to their already substantial, ageing girths; sturdy boots at various levels on the way up their calves, waterproof trousers well tucked in; hats of different shapes and sizes and colours; tackle boxes splayed open revealing their array of hooks and other stuff I have no knowledge about; standing or sitting, sometimes with the rod in hand, or not infrequently,  just circling the same spot eyeing their rods, they exude more  a sense of enjoyment and ease at the tranquillity of the natural environment in which they are immersed, than the actual fishing; it is their space, and they appear to relish the moment.

Nevertheless, neither a hunter of either animals or fish myself, the fascination over the pleasure these men, and some women, obviously experience in the challenge to catch a fish has frequently perplexed me. Why would anybody want to sit on the edge of a pond in any type of weather, sink a line and hook and wait to catch an innocent fish, or stand deep in water consistently casting a line back and forth down or up a stream, until a hungry fish in the wrong place and at the wrong time is snared on a hook? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Chris Horner

To become mature is to recover that sense of seriousness which one had as a child at play. —Nietzsche

Freud is supposed to have claimed that the two key things for happiness in life are work and love. If he did, he should have added a third: play. It’s this that Nietzsche is referring to in the quotation above. The aphorism states a paradox: we are told that to be ‘mature’ (whatever that is) we must return to playing like we did as a child. And what to make of that ‘sense of seriousness’ in a child’s play? Surely Nietzsche is thinking of the complete absorption and focus that a child is supremely capable of experiencing. If we are lucky we can recall times in our childhood when we were completely lost in the thing we were doing, seeing or hearing: serious play. As adults this can all too often elude us. It can seem a thing belonging to the lost time of childhood. But we should not give up the quest for it: it is a key to joy in life.

But let’s not idealise or sentimentalise the child. Children are in fact often intolerant of frustration, easily bored and keen to get shiny new stuff. And adults really can learn important habits of discipline and perseverance that children find so irksome. But they are also capable, to a degree that many adults find difficult, of the opposite of all that. A distinction needs to be made between childish and childlike. With the former we have all the characteristics associated with immaturity: a tendency to be easily distracted or bored, the urge for immediate gratification, demand for toys, and so on. All characteristics, incidentally, that our society tends to encourage in the adult. One of the key features of our time, surely, is divided attention, distraction and the promotion of multi-tasking. We even have an ‘attention economy’ in which corporations compete to distract us. And we know about the twitchy addiction to the smartphone and to social media. But all this hyperactivity, this constant busyness, can actually block us from attending to what is important. A drifting, distracted attention actually narrows our focus, because it thinks it knows what it wants, that it is looking for ‘something interesting’. It stays one step ahead of boredom – for a while.

To be childlike is quite different. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

It is difficult nowadays not to be mindful of how ubiquitous the mindfulness movement has become. A Fortune article from 2016 described meditation as a “billion-dollar business”: “From Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff to Goldman Sachs traders and Google programmers, Big Business loves meditation.” This is perhaps reason enough to stay away from it, or at least to stay away from anything that charges you money to do something that you can easily do for free–namely, sit and do nothing. But a surprising number of observers have pointed to other shortcomings or even dangers in meditation and mindfulness practices. 

There have been so many articles on the incredible benefits of meditation (which I’ll use interchangeably with mindfulness) that you come to feel you’re putting yourself in harm’s way by not doing it. As Masoumeh Sara Rahmini wrote recently in The Conversation, however, citing a study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, “scientific data on mindfulness is limited . . . Studies on mindfulness are known for their numerous methodological and conceptual problems.” She notes that the journal PLOS ONE retracted a meta-analysis of mindfulness, citing concerns over methodology as well as undeclared financial conflicts of interest. Rahmini also takes issue with the Westernized version of Buddhism that is sold to modern mindfulness practitioners–one that is divorced from centuries of Buddhist tradition. She credits, or blames, Jon Kabat-Zinn, among others. Kabat-Zinn, the founder of the popular Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program offering mindfulness training to help with stress and pain, has argued that the MBSR technique contains the “essence” of Buddhism, which he says is universal and supported by science. 

The trouble is that what used to be a spiritual practice, supported by a framework of teachings and in an organized setting, with spiritual guides, is now a definition-less practice, unmoored from tradition, lacking a scaffolding in case you should trip, devoid of a philosophy. Read more »

Alpine meadow near my house in July, 2019.

by Tim Sommers

Unfortunately, you have a brain tumor. You don’t know it yet. Your doctor doesn’t know it yet. But you are beginning to have symptoms. The tumor is pressing on surrounding brain tissue and causing you develop a number of delusional beliefs. You believe you are the best swimmer in the world. You believe that dogs and cats are aliens. You believe that you invented the apostrophe. You also, as it happens, believe that you have a brain tumor.

So, you have a brain tumor. You believe you have a brain tumor. And the cause of your believing that you have a brain tumor is the brain tumor that you have. So, when the doctor diagnosis you with a brain tumor, are you entitled to say, “I know, right!”?

If the belief that you have a brain tumor is caused by the same thing that causes you to believe you invented the apostrophe, I think most of us would say that you don’t, in fact, know that you have a brain tumor – even if you believe it and it’s true. But it’s difficult to see why. It has something to do, probably, with justification.

Implicitly or explicitly philosophers, epistemologists to be more specific, define knowledge as justified true belief. Knowledge, then, is a kind of belief. What kind? Well, of course, the belief has to be true to count as knowledge. But it also has to be justified. If you correctly guess what the weather will be like tomorrow, we shouldn’t say that you knew it. If you predict the weather accurately using instruments and satellite maps, then you may have had or have knowledge. The brain tumor example raises questions about how justification works. There’s something wrong with the connection the belief has to why you believe it. It echoes an even more famous puzzle – the Gettier problem. Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

“Taxi to Bethlehem, taxi to Jericho!” the man at a tourism kiosk is shouting, as I make my way from the tram to Jaffa Gate, known also as Hebron Gate, to Muslims as “Bab al Khalil,” or “door of the friend,” named after Hebron where the prophet Ibrahim/Abraham (Khalil al Allah “God’s Friend”) is laid to rest. Of significance too, is the association of this gate with King David’s (prophet Dawud’s) chamber, for followers of the three Abrahamic faiths: the crusaders named it “King David’s Gate.” It is one of the seven main stone portals of the walled city of Jerusalem.

To reach the street level at the train station in Jerusalem, one must take four escalators up, three of them vertiginously long. I’m reminded that this is the city of ascensions: miracles associated with Abraham, Jesus and Muhammad. The ancient, sacred expanse, rises up as an invisible, vertical cityscape. Jerusalem’s silhouette is cast in the worshippers’ perception of the heavens— avenues in the air— leading to a divine promise. The tragedy of the spirit agonizing to make peace with God as it barters peace with fellow-humans, is more raw here than anywhere else. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

It’s not every day that a small, unexpected masterpiece shows up in your mailbox, arriving with the same modest ‘ping’ that announces the other electronic missives. This was no ordinary masterpiece. It was the photograph of a detail from Luca Signorelli’s fresco La Fine del Mondo on the entrance wall of La Cappella di San Brizio in Orvieto, the work itself a masterpiece of painterly skill and imagination, dating from ca.1500. It was taken by a good friend who spent several days with the monumental Signorelli frescoes on the interior walls of the cathedral of Orvieto.

The masterpiece I received, one small element of the arched fresco, achieved its rarified aesthetic status from having been isolated by the photographer for the frame, an act of proto-cropping used by anyone who’s ever put his eye to a viewfinder—or for that matter, anyone who’s ever opened his eyes.

We are all born with a cropping tool: It’s called focus. When we wake up in the morning, the eyes flutter open, we leave our cerebral home with its latent, chimerical images and are confronted by a giant canvas with millions of details, fuzzy around the outer edges, stretching out a full 180 degrees. Without a thought, we begin to cut away the dull bits, homing in on the alarm clock, the window, our phones, a doorknob, maybe even our fingernails. This is how we maneuver our way through the day and through life, cropping the big picture to highlight the parts we actually need to see at any given moment. Most of our time and attention are devoted to the details we’ve cropped from our greater field of vision, whether it’s the utensils we use, or the paths we take, or the signs we read.

In photography, cropping occurs before the picture is taken. Read more »

by Joseph D. Martin and Marta Halina

Calls for a Manhattan Project–style crash effort to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technology are thick on the ground these days. Oren Etzioni, the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, recently issued such a call on The Hill. The analogy is commonly used to describe DeepMind’s initiative to build artificial general intelligence (AGI). It is similarly used to describe military initiatives to build AGI. At a conference last year, DARPA announced a $2 billion investment in AI over the next five years. Ron Brachman, former director of DARPA’s cognitive systems initiative, said at this conference that a Manhattan Project is likely needed to “create an AI system that has the competence of a three-year old.”

In one sense, the goals of such analogies are clear. AI, the comparison implies, has the potential to be as transformative for our society as nuclear weapons were in the mid-twentieth century. Whoever masters it first will enjoy a massive head start on the next wave of technological development, economic competition, and, yes, the arms race of the twenty-first century. It’s a project that comes with ethical implications that demand focused and well-resourced attention. These consequences are so important that we should not bat an eye at ploughing limitless resources into its development.

But if this analogy is to sustain such a bold claim, it bears closer scrutiny. First, analogies of this sort are not innocuous. Invocations of historical examples, especially examples so iconic as the Manhattan Project or the Apollo program, aim to borrow the authority—and implications of success—that such historical episodes command. It is prudent to examine analogies to see if that authority is merited, or if it has been unjustly swiped. Read more »

Mohau Modisakeng. Inzilo 2013, still from video.

More here, here, and here.

by Emily Ogden

Fans are the people who know the quotes, the dates of publication, the batting averages, the bassist on this album, the team that general manager coached before. I am not a fan. Don’t get me wrong. I’m full of enthusiasms. But I can’t match you statistic for statistic. I haven’t read the major author’s minor novel. I don’t care who the bassist was. You win. I’m an amateur.

Amateur gets opposed to professional sometimes: the amateur isn’t making money from her skill or her knowledge. Other times, amateurism gets opposed to expertise: amateurs screw it up, experts fix it. These are not the meanings I intend. In French, an amateur is a lover; fan, a nineteenth-century US coinage, comes from fanatic. The amateur leaves some space for ignorance, letting the relationship to the beloved thing—the sports team, the artwork—retain the quality of an affair. The fan, in the particular sense I mean, gets lumbered under facts. There is something of the jealous monogamist about fandom, something of the checker for digital traces of the beloved’s secret life. Who hasn’t been there? But wouldn’t it be better if we hadn’t? When I say I am not a fan, I mean I aspire not to follow out that particular impulse. I aspire not to compete, at the cocktail party, for possession of Herman Melville, as measured in knowledge of his vital statistics.

Ownership of the beloved object is tempting but it’s not the shiniest prize that fandom holds out to you. The greatest temptation is a credential, a badge: you know all these things, so you must not be dumb. I’ve flashed that badge plenty, even if it would have been better not to. Read more »

Azra Raza, author of the forthcoming book The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to 26 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same five questions listed below. She videotaped the interviews and over the next months we will be posting them here one at a time each Monday. Please keep in mind that Azra and the rest of us at 3QD neither endorse nor oppose any of the answers given by the researchers as part of this project. Their views are their own.

1. We were treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with 7+3 (7 days of the drug cytosine arabinoside and 3 days of daunomycin) in 1977. We are still doing the same in 2019. What is the best way forward to change it by 2028?

2. There are 3.5 million papers on cancer, 135,000 in 2017 alone. There is a staggering disconnect between great scientific insights and translation to improved therapy. What are we doing wrong?

3. The fact that children respond to the same treatment better than adults seems to suggest that the cancer biology is different and also that the host is different. Since most cancers increase with age, even having good therapy may not matter as the host is decrepit. Solution?

4. You have great knowledge and experience in the field. If you were given limitless resources to plan a cure for cancer, what will you do?

5. Offering patients with advanced stage non-curable cancer, palliative but toxic treatments is a service or disservice in the current therapeutic landscape?

A nationally-recognized authority on leukemia, Dr. Guido Marcucci has lectured around the world and authored more than 270 scholarly papers on the subject. His ultimate goal is to make leukemia a thing of the past. He has received numerous competitive NCI grants for his clinical and research work focused on the pathogenesis, treatment and prognostic assessment of patients with acute myeloid leukemia. Dr. Marcucci currently serves on the editorial board of three journals, including Blood and the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

by Mary Hrovat

When I watched the 2019 documentary on Apollo 11, it carried me back not to the summer of 1969, when it happened, but to the mid-1980s, when I was an undergrad. I was eight when Apollo 11 launched; of course I was aware of the space program and the moon landings, but I don’t have any memories of everyone gathering around to watch those first steps on another world. My parents weren’t particularly interested, and I don’t remember being caught by the spirit of the times myself.

It wasn’t until shortly before I began an undergraduate program in astrophysics, in the mid-1980s, that I started to take a serious interest in space exploration. I read everything I could find on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs; I was particularly interested in first-hand accounts by the astronauts themselves. Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins, still stands out in my mind as the very best of these.

I was gripped by the idea of being out in space and seeing Earth from space or the moon from orbit. Sometimes when I was out at night under a dark starry sky, I thought about Collins’s descriptions of his solo passes behind the moon, during which he was out of contact with Earth. I imagined seeing the blackness of space and untwinkling stars out one window of the spacecraft and the impenetrable darkness of the moon in shadow out the other. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

Today I ask to what extent it is a positive development that there are no discussions of race and religion in Danny Boyle’s and Richard Curtis’s film Yesterday, whose protagonist Jack Malik is from a South Asian, possibly Muslim, background.

In his essay ‘Airports and Auditions’ for Nikesh Shukla’s The Good Immigrant, the actor Riz Ahmed outlined three stages of cinematic representations of Muslims. Stage One features stereotyped figures (the taxi driver, terrorist, cornershop owner, or oppressed woman). Stage Two involves a portrayal that subverts and challenges those stereotypes. Finally, Stage Three is ‘the Promised Land, where you play a character whose story is not intrinsically linked to his race’. Does Yesterday reach that Promised Land or fall short? I examine the film’s depiction of Jack Malik, whose race and religion are irrelevant to this story about love, fame, the music industry, and the Beatles.

Building on Riz Ahmed’s work, in 2017 two researchers, Sadia Habib and Shaf Choudry, developed the Riz Test for Muslims’ depictions in film and television. Inspired by Ahmed’s speech to the House of Commons about the power and harm of media representations, Habib and Choudry created their own version of the famous Bechdel Test for cinematic portrayals of women. They asked some key questions about the cinematic portrayals of Muslims: 

If the Film/ TV Show stars at least one character who is identifiably Muslim (by ethnicity, language or clothing) – is the character:

• Talking about, the victim of, or the perpetrator of terrorism?
• Presented as irrationally angry?
• Presented as superstitious, culturally backwards or anti-modern?
• Presented as a threat to a Western way of life?
• If the character is male, is he presented as misogynistic? Or if female, is she presented as oppressed by her male counterparts?

If the answer for any of the above is Yes, then the Film/ TV Show fails the test.

This test has already been hugely influential in the world of television, with Channel 4’s new Head of Drama Caroline Hollick (herself of Trinidadian descent, pictured) arguing at 2019’s Bradford Literature Festival that it should be uppermost in the mind of anyone commissioning programmes about Muslims. Read more »

by Brooks Riley