by Barry Goldman

The brilliant and recently departed Jules Feiffer drew a cartoon many years ago called Munro. It was later made into an Academy Award-winning animated short. You can watch it here.

Munro was only four years old, but somehow he got drafted into the army. He went to see his sergeant and said, “I’m only four.” The sergeant said:

It is the official policy of the army not to draft men of four. Ergo you cannot be four.

We see this form of reasoning in many contexts. It is the official policy of the United States that we do not torture prisoners of war. Therefore, waterboarding, which has been used to torture prisoners since the 14^th century, cannot be torture.

Alternatively, the prisoners captured after 9/11, detained at Guantanamo, and waterboarded regularly cannot be “prisoners of war.” Instead, they are “alien enemy combatants” to whom the protections of the Geneva Convention do not apply.

This kind of reasoning can be difficult and complex and may require many years of rigorous training. Only a highly-trained and rigorous thinker like John Yoo, now the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, could produce a document like Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States. Try to read it and you will see.

My point is: This is what lawyers do. As the Devil’s Dictionary put it:

LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.

But there is a larger point that is both more important and less discussed. Even if there were a clear and unambiguous law, duly approved by Congress and signed by the president that said “Torturing prisoners is perfectly fine,” it would not be fine. If anything is wrong, torture is wrong. It doesn’t matter what Mr. Yoo or Congress or the President says. An atrocity enacted into law does not cease to be an atrocity. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

Many people who have thought carefully about AI are anxious about certain uses of it, and for good reason.  Many are concerned that people (young people in particular) are increasingly offloading their critical thinking development and responsibilities to Chat GPT and other large language learning models.  We may fail to flourish as citizens, neighbors, and friends because we allow AI to do so many of the tasks that would otherwise prepare us for the challenges we’ll encounter in our lives.  That said, some applications of AI seem like they offer tremendous benefits.  For example, there is promising research being done into using AI models to understand non-human language.  Doing so will help us to better understand non-human consciousness.  This has the potential to change how we see and treat other animals and how we view ourselves as members of biotic communities.

Some AI companies, such as the Chinese company Baidu are looking to fulfill very human impulses. Their products focus on deciphering the communication of companion animals such as cats and dogs.  What pet caretaker wouldn’t be interested in knowing what their furry friends are trying to communicate?  Other AI applications focus on the communication patterns of big-brained animals such as sperm whales.  These creatures engage in an impressive amount of vocalization and there is good reason to believe that mapping whale sounds can tell us all sorts of important things about the mental and social lives of whales.  These scientific advances have the potential to finally pull us out the philosophical rut we’ve been in with respect to animal minds for the entire history of human philosophical engagement. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

My sister and I have always been close. But for the last few years, something has bonded us like nothing before: trashy television. We love nothing more than to watch reality TV shows and rejoice that we are not these people. 

90 Day Fiancé (hereafter affectionately referred to as 90 Day) is one of those shows. The premise is simple: people find each other (usually an American and non-American, typically online), develop some kind of virtual relationship, and then finally meet up in person. 

The name comes from the “K-1 visa”. This legally gives a foreigner 90 days to get married to a U.S. citizen after they have entered the country if they want to stay. For our delight at home, that’s usually when things go to shit. 

There are different versions of 90 Day, but no matter which one we watch, one truth remains: the show really is a master class in love. Not necessarily what you should do to ensure a healthy relationship – but what you should avoid at all costs.

What follows are 20 lessons in love that 90 Day Fiancé has taught me. I hope you learn as much as I have! Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

The idea that ‘indigenous’ knowledge counts as knowledge in a sense comparable to real i.e. scientific knowledge is absurd but widely held. It appears to be a pernicious product of the combination of the patronising politics of pity and anti-Westernism that characterises the modern political left (dumb, but still preferable to the politics of cruelty that characterises the modern political right!).

My point is simple: knowledge is knowledge. Where it comes from doesn’t matter to its epistemic status. What matters is whether it deserves to be believed. The scientific revolution has provided a general approach – systematic inquiry – together with specialist methodologies appropriate to different domains (such as mathematical modeling, taxonomy, statistical analysis, and experimental manipulation and measurement). It is irrelevant that this approach first appeared in North-Western Europe and that many of the domain specific techniques were first developed and refined by white men from the ‘west’. What is relevant is that modern science allows a degree of confidence in factual and theoretical claims that has never been warranted before, and made this capability equally available to everyone around the world as the new standard for objective knowledge, i.e. knowledge that is reliably true no matter from what perspective you look at it.

If indigenous peoples have observational data and successful technologies to contribute to this kind of systematic inquiry into what makes an ecosystem resilient, or what plants might contain molecules with pain-relieving properties, or the history of climactic events, then that should be welcomed. But the test of whether these are an actual contribution must come from whether they survive scientific scrutiny, not the authenticity of their indigenous origins.

Read more »

Center of a peony in Vahrn, South Tyrol. Happy Spring!

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by Kevin Lively

Introduction

It is a well-worn observation that a sense of fatalism seems to be settling across the peoples of the world. There is a wide-spread feeling that global developments are echoing trends from the 1930s. Economic centers in the USA are gearing up their domestic industrial capacity, while the defense department speaks of Great Power Competition. China does the same, while trenches and mines scar the fields of Ukraine. With the NATO alliance under question, Europe begins to look after its own industrial base while refugees from drought-stricken, strife-torn lands drown in the Mediterranean. Those who manage a safe arrival, both in Italy as in Texas, often struggle to integrate into an aging society despite a desperate need for young workers. Substantial and growing fractions of the US and European populations are of the mind that this influx of hands — ready and eager to work — should not be turned to repairing crumbling bridges or staffing overworked retirement homes. Rather they should be banished and sent away in disgrace, regardless of the final destination.

An unspoken thought seems to be flowing among the currents beneath many people’s minds. More and more often now, it seems to break to the surface at unexpected times. Here’s a drinking game: every time you hear some variation of the phrase “in today’s geopolitical climate”, take a shot. Depending on where you work and what topics your lunch conversations drift towards, it may be unwise to play this game on a weekday. These events increasingly beg for certain pressing questions to be asked.

For example: how do we, as a species, deal with these dislocations of people, and the disruptions to their means of supporting themselves? How do we, as a species, plan for the future dislocations to come, as crop cycles grow increasingly unpredictable and failure-prone, while the ocean’s fish are replaced with plastic as ever more forms of pollution with unknown consequences accumulates? How do we, as a species, allocate this planet’s apparently dwindling resources between ourselves in order support a simple life of dignity and peace, unburdened by the deprivation of extreme poverty and the chaos it brings?

Discussions around such questions are, by necessity, discussions of death, religion, power and land — among the topics best avoided both at Thanksgiving and a bar. Thus there is a tendency to tread carefully around them while in polite company. Yet in today’s geopolitical climate it increasingly behooves us all to address such questions in a sober and critical manner. Ideally we should all have some mutually understood context for the stage on which these events are playing out, whether we’re in the audience, on the gantry or elsewhere, busy prepping the smoking lounge in your bunker. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe. Mine Dancers, Alexandra Township, South Africa, 1977.

More here and here.

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by Malcolm Murray

Aella, a well-known rationalist blogger, famously claimed she no longer saves for retirement since she believes Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will change everything long before retirement would become relevant. I’ve been thinking lately about how one should invest for AGI, and I think it begs a bigger question of how much one should, and actually can, act in accordance with one’s beliefs.

Tyler Cowen wrote a while back about how he doesn’t believe the AGI doomsters actually believe their own story since they’re not shorting the market. When he pushes them on it, it seems to be that their mental model is that the arguments for AGI doom will never get better than they already are. Which, as he points out, is quite unlikely. Yes, the market is not perfect, but for there to be no prior information that could convince anyone more than they currently are seems to suggest a very strong combination of arguments. We need “foom” – the argument, discussed by Yudkowsky and Hanson, that once AGI is reached, there will be so much hardware overhang and things will happen on timescales so beyond human comprehension that we go from AGI to ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) in a matter of days or even hours. We also need extreme levels of deception on the part of the AGI who would hide its intent perfectly. And we would need a very strong insider/outside divide on knowledge, where the outside world has very little comprehension of what is happening inside AI companies.

Rohit Krishnan recently picked up on Cowen’s line of thinking and wrote a great piece expanding this argument. He argues that perhaps it is not a lack of conviction, but rather an inability to express this conviction in the financial markets. Other than rolling over out-of-the-money puts on the whole market until the day you are finally correct, perhaps there is no clean way to position oneself according to an AGI doom argument.

I think there is also an interesting problem of knowing how to act on varying degrees of belief. Outside of doomsday cults where people do sell all their belongings before the promised ascension and actually go all in, very few people have such certainty in their beliefs (or face such social pressure) that they go all in on a bet. Outside of the most extreme voices in the AI safety community, like Eliezer Yudkowsky whose forthcoming book literally has in the title that we will all die, most do not have an >90% probability of AI doom. What makes someone an AI doomer is rather that they considered AI doom at all and given it a non-zero probability. Read more »

A Simple Ontology

maybe flower petals are held to stems by thought
and the wind’s a counter-thought that plucks
and sets them elsewhere in the grass
to grow in contemplative resolution
beside my notion of a grub-pulling crow

maybe the wind itself is a palpable bright idea,
something about motion and the abhorrence of vacuums,
something about coming and going,
about ferocity and stillness,
about war and its absence

maybe the moon’s the concept of fullness,
loss, abatement, regeneration from slivers,
hope at the hour of the wolf, the opposite of
darkness at the break of noon, the
upside of shadow

maybe Descartes had it right
and this from horizon to horizon is
a simple ontology,
an inherent daisy chain of ideas chasing its tale
regardless—

one
idea hatched in this synapse nest
is to harvest thought from thought
under a perception of blue
while the conception of breeze
riffles a hint of hair and I place them
like dreams of plums into the
essence of basket and give them
with the intention of love
to my belief in the naturally
beautiful being of you

by Jim Culleny
February 26, 2011-Rev, 5/23/25

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by Rafaël Newman

On September 29, 1978, Albino Luciani, who had been elected Pope John Paul I just 33 days earlier, on August 26, 1978, was found dead in his bed, his death likely due to a heart attack. Luciani had succeeded Paul VI, who was himself preceded by John XXIII—the two Popes were commemorated in their short-lived successor’s double-barreled appellation—and would be followed on October 16, 1978, by John Paul II.

I was 14 years old at the time and had recently begun studying ancient languages, so the Latin pronouncements from the Vatican press office aroused my exhibitionist adolescent spirit. This, combined with the salience of a solemnly pronounced “Year of Three Popes,” which echoed a similarly multiple interregnum in Roman imperial history; a perverse will to deflate overblown expressions of gravity, my own included; and a natural tendency to pomposity and sententiousness, all inspired me to write a poem:

Paulum sed magnopere
Pro Papa Ioanne Paulo Primo

Now the golden hammer has struck,
The pastor’s ghost is lost.
Oh, his great gain is our bad luck,
Ere the tomb of the VIth is moss’d.

Oh, thou bless’d and humble man
Who in thy bare feet stand:
Cleanse our rude souls and spirits fan
With calm empower’d hand.

Why art thou gone so soon from here?
Why was thy term so small?
And why is one who was so dear
Held tight in heaven’s thrall?

Not long afterwards, my father, himself a published poet and novelist and in those days a professor of creative writing at the University of British Columbia, asked what I had been up to recently. I passed on to him some of the verses I had been setting down in my journal, among them my poem on the death of John Paul I. He responded, along with words of cautious praise for other of my efforts, in surprise at my having found something so admirable in the late Pope that I had been moved to write him this encomium.

I was mortified. Read more »

by David Winner

When Taylor Swift was living in New York about a decade ago, she misused one of our classic expressions. Bodega means more than just corner store.

Tooling around Santo Domingo about the same time Taylor was living in New York, I stopped periodically at its ur-bodegas. Generally lacking what Americans call “amenities,” proprietors in the back dispensed individual cigarettes, candy, beer, rum. In the afternoons and evenings, the bodegas sometimes transformed into makeshift bars, cranked music, customers drinking booze, sometimes dancing.

Seven years ago, Angela, my wife, and I moved to the outer reaches of a Brooklyn neighborhood called Kensington that lies in between two crucial arteries – the car part stores, mosques and Bengali sweet shops of Coney Island Avenue and the grand fifties condos in not very picturesque decline on Ocean Parkway. Our neighborhood, reminiscent of Queens, is home to mélange of ethnic and cultural groups: recent middle-aged white additions like us; old school Irish/Italian/Jewish whites; Uzbeks, Tajiks and other Central Asians; Bangladeshis and Pakistanis; Mexicans; Afro and Indo Caribbeans, and lots of ultra-Orthodox Jews. These ethnic identities are not exactly reflected by our three closest bodegas: spaces that have become part of my landscape, geopolitical bell-weathers, and unfortunate victims of my big mouth.

Up our street past the Nigerian church, whose food pantry feeds thousands, you’ll find yourself at Mian’s corner store, which we refer to as “Donald’s bodega,” in honor of Donald, who spends most of his days hanging out there.

Donald, according to neighborhood lore, had fried his brain on drugs as a young man and somehow landed some lucrative disability. In his early sixties now with a paunch and sparkling white hair, we have never seen him in the company of friends or family. The bodega is his only social outlet. On the very rare days, Eid perhaps, that Donald’s is closed, poor Donald can be found in different less familiar bodegas on Cortelyou Road, looking uncomfortable outside of his native habitat. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

When I tell someone I lived in Singapore, the most common response is some variation of, “Singapore – isn’t that where it’s illegal to chew gum?”

I know a Greek couple who refuses to visit Singapore because they feel the rules are too strict and inhumane.  I don’t think they know what all the rules are – but in a country that still has strong opposition to helmet laws, I suppose restrictions on chewing gum and urinating in public seem fascist.

So, no – it’s not illegal to chew gum in Singapore. It was from 1992 to 2004. Although you do have to show identification and be entered into a log at any store in which you buy gum – and the gum has to be certified to have dental value. So, it’s not exactly a chew-as-you-please policy either.

British journalist Peter Day interviewed Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in 2000 and tackled the chewing gum issue:

Day suggested that chewing gum stuck to the pavements might be a sign that the desired new spirit of creativity Lee sought for his country had arrived.

“Putting chewing gum on our subway train doors so they don’t open, I don’t call that creativity. I call that mischief-making,” Lee replied. “If you can’t think because you can’t chew, try a banana.” Read more »

This, in the video above, is the river Eisack’s heavy flow through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, last week as the snows on the surrounding mountains start to melt. And below is a photo of the river just before it empties into the Stausee, just around the corner from the last part shown in the video, a lake created by a dam on the river. The pedestrian path next to the river is new and very lovely to take a walk on.

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