by Thomas R. Wells

“[B]y directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention….By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, IV.2.9)

Doing right by others is difficult and time-consuming. Hence the attraction of what I call ‘invisible hand ethics’. This is modelled on Adam Smith’s famous account of how the overall outcome of lots of self-interested actions in the economic sphere can be good for society as a whole. Bakers just want to make a buck, but their self-interest produces the bread that feeds the people. Their competition for sales keeps prices down. The customers in turn just want the cheapest best bread, but wind up helping the best bakers make a good living. You get the idea. Smith claimed that in the economic domain this could be a far more reliable mechanism for achieving good outcomes than good intentions.

Invisible hand ethics has long since conquered economics. We no longer worry, as theologians did (they still do – but we don’t listen anymore), about whether it is ethical for businesspeople to make a profit beyond what they deserve for their work; whether prices should be proportionate to people’s ability to pay; whether a life of money making is a good one. The duty of the businessperson – as taught in every business degree, magazine, and TV gameshow – is to help her company win the game and take home the profit prize.

The idea of moral desert is still there. But now merit is decided by economic outcomes (price and demand), not by the moral inputs (the character or intentions of those concerned). Economic ethics has been outsourced to the markets. It is now a property of the system rather than of individuals.

Invisible hand ethics has spread. It can now be found far beyond the economic domain, especially in the professions organised around antagonistic competition, such as politics, science, sport, academia, law, and journalism. Lawyers strive to tell the story that best suits their client’s interest; scientists race to make discoveries first; politicians compete for votes so as to gain power; etc. The invisible hand is supposed to transmute this aggressive pursuit of self-interest by individual players into values like truth and justice and prosperity. For example, competition between politicians keeps them subservient to the people and encourages a vigorous public debate about where our society should go. Thus, democracy.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

Just as the distribution of wealth exhibits dramatic skews – a small percent owns a disproportionate share of the total wealth – so too does the distribution of healthcare expenditures. When individuals in the US population are ranked based on their healthcare expenditures in a particular year, then it turns out that:

1. The top 1% of individuals account for 22.8% of the total healthcare expenditures

2. The top 5% of individuals account for 50.4 % of the total healthcare expenditures

3. The bottom 50% account for only 2.8% of total healthcare expenditures

https://meps.ahrq.gov/data_files/publications/st497/stat497.pdf

(Healthcare expenditures refer to all payments made related to health events – either by insurer or out-of-pocket.)

The estimates are from 2014, but the trends remain quite consistent from year to year. It is true that older individuals are more likely to have higher expenditures. But even if we look only at those over 65, we will still find that a small percent has an outsize impact. There is a fractal-like consistency to the pattern: if we narrowed our search down to the top 1% in a population of 10,000, then among these 100, the top 1-5 individuals will still account for a large percent of the total.

A similar trend emerges when we look instead at the prevalence of health conditions. If we were to plot the percent of individuals in a population (y-axis) who had no health conditions (count=0 on the x axis), exactly 1 health condition (count=1), exactly 2 health conditions (count=2) and so on, we would get something like the graph to the right. About 45% of the population has no apparent health conditions; about 25% has exactly one health condition; 12% has exactly two health conditions. The percentages start to decline as the count of conditions increases, indicative of the few who have 6, 7, 8, 9 or more conditions. We are now at the tail of the distribution where healthcare costs are most likely to be concentrated.

Because most of us in any particular year are healthy, the challenges faced by this small segment of the population can remain somewhat distant. Yet at some point in our lives – hopefully later than earlier or even better not at all: who can say – there is always a chance that we might join their ranks.

In this column, I will present visualizations of healthcare use by individuals at the tails of the cost and health condition count distributions. I started creating these visualizations while researching a publicly available dataset called the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey – MEPS for short. This is the same dataset that was used to characterize the expenditure distribution above. Aggregate trends are valuable, but it is by looking closely at individual cases that one can begin to sense what is going on. Each year MEPS collects granular data on health events for members of thousands of households across the United States. Households are chosen in the survey to represent the national demographic; each household is compensated for the time spent filling out questionnaires. To protect the identities of those surveyed, the data is anonymized before it is released to the public.

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by Emrys Westacott

This Christmas millions of people will no doubt watch Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. In many cases this will be their umpteenth viewing. The film is a popular Christmas entertainment for many reasons. The main action takes place on Christmas Eve. The final scene is of family and friends singing carols and making merry round a Christmas tree. The story is uplifting since love triumphs over despair and virtue is rewarded. Like Christmas itself, part of its appeal is nostalgic: fairy lights, tinsel and turkey are indelibly associated with an enjoyable time in childhood; and Bedford Falls, the small town where the action takes place, is presented as a friendly, spirited, cohesive (albeit almost entirely white) community where everyone knows their neighbors and whose center hasn’t yet been hollowed out by highways and suburban malls. Last but not least, there are angels. True, the angels are portrayed humorously, tongue in cheek. But the plot does hinge on their intervention. So the singing of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” at the end can be understood as expressing a kind of gratitude for and faith in benevolent supernatural powers that are watching over us and looking out for us.

Given all that, cynics and skeptics, especially those who have not seen the film for a long time, are often inclined to dismiss the film as so much sentimental slush. This is a mistake. For the film is not primarily about Christmas or angels. It’s about money. And it’s about the danger to society if avarice, greed, and egotism come to rule the roost. Just possibly, this is a morality tale that might still have relevance in Donald Trump’s America.

The central conflict in the drama is between George Bailey (James Stewart), who runs a small, struggling Building and Loan company, and Henry F. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), a rich banker and slumlord. Potter, we are told at the outset, is “the meanest and richest man in the county.” His guiding passions are for making money and wielding power. He is contemptuous of people like George who, since they care for things other than the bottom line–e.g.helping ordinary people to become homeowners–are not true businessmen, but “losers.” As for the hardworking, ordinary folk, Potter dismisses them as “rabble,” or “suckers,” and with a glancing ethnic slur against immigrants, "garlic eaters.” His limited, self-centered outlook is underscored by the closed carriage in which he travels, by the wheelchair to which he is confined, and by his only ever appearing inside the confines of paneled offices.

Potter’s callousness toward others is explained as the actions of “a frustrated old man who is lacking something.” That something seems to be friends. His lack of friends is mentioned several times and is linked to his extreme egotism. When asked to show concern for the children of people who have been dispossessed, he coldly replies, “they’re not my children.” To him, other people are simply a means to his own mercenary ends. In one angry exchange, George nails what seems to be Potter’s essence: “You think the whole world revolves round you and your money.” In short, Potter is a greedy, callous, self-centered egotist without any real friends. Remind you of anyone?

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by Samir Chopra

Like every human being on this planet, I speak with an accent. In my case, I speak the English language with a hybrid, mongrelized Indian variant that bears the impress of thirty years spent on the US East Coast—in New York City and New Jersey—with a two year stint in Australia in between. It is distinct and unmistakable and clear in its lilt and inflection; no American, listening to me, will think I have grown up in the US. My ‘looks’—perhaps vaguely Hispanic, Middle-Eastern, or Southern European—might confuse some Americans about my ethnic and national origins; they receive instant confirmation, once I begin speaking, that I’m some kind of ‘foreigner.’ The way I speak makes clear I’m from ‘elsewhere:’ I mix up my ‘W’s and ‘V’s, occasionally inducing double takes in bartenders when I specified vodka-based cocktails during my drinking days; I do not always pronounce vowels in the clipped and muddied style so distinctive of American English; I emphasize syllables in my own idiosyncratic way. Sometimes, when I travel in Europe, locals peg me as ‘American’ because they have picked up on an Americanism or an acquired American twang in my speech—they, for their part, seem to think I have an ‘American accent.’ Because the Indian accent has intonation patterns similar to that of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh accents, I’ve sometimes been asked—in the US—why as a brown man, I’m speaking in a brogue. (In the opening scenes of the 1990s British crime film, Twin Town, the Lewis brothers, from Swansea, Wales, are shown talking to their mother; their conversation is only partially audible but from the up-and-down sing-song intonations, I could have sworn I was listening to Indians.) Sometimes American listeners will insist I have a ‘British’ accent because I’m Indian, because India was an English colony and I attended so-called ‘English medium public schools,’ the Indian equivalent to the English or American private school. And so it goes.

The partial Americanization of my accent has been a subtle process; I have not been conscious of it being molded and shaped as I spoke English in the US. Instead, as I have participated in conversations, my spoken English has, in a kind of sympathetic dance, aligned itself with that of the speaker’s. My wife points out that when I converse with a good French friend, I start throwing around Gallic shrugs by the dozen; and when I lived in Australia, I picked up, quite quickly, many distinct Australianisms, and delighted in deploying them in my speech to my Australian friends (especially when it came to matters of shared interest like cricket). When I speak to Indians visiting the US from India, they make note of how impressed they are by the fact that I still comfortably trade in street-level colloquialisms in my conversations in Hindi/Urdu. I have, in a way, retained my Indian accent in my Indian languages; some Indians tell me I speak Hindi/Urdu with a Delhi accent; some Pakistanis assure me I speak Punjabi with a Pakistani accent. I do not belong anywhere; my accents give me away. My accent reflects my mixed-up nature, part Indian, part American, part migrant, part itinerant wanderer, part stable resident.

Because I speak English with an accent, it is a common enough suggestion—often made to my face, in all kinds of social settings, professional or personal, formal or informal—that English is not my ‘first language’, that rather, it is my ‘second language.’ But English is my first language in every relevant dimension; I speak, read, think, and write better in English than any other language.

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by Richard King

The Harvey Weinstein affair cannot be brushed aside as the culture of the casting couch. It is not one more story from the Hollywood fiction factory. It must not be allowed to be another tawdry milestone. It must be the watershed.

Reading these lines in The Guardian one week after the New York Times published the first explosive allegations about the former co-chairman of The Weinstein Company, I have to say I was sceptical, not to say dismissive. The Weinstein affair, a watershed? Really? The allegations came on the back of stories about Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes, both exposed in 2016 as sexual harassers and workplace bullies, and just four months after the Bill Cosby saga had reached the trial stage in Pennsylvania. Notwithstanding that the Weinstein allegations had expanded in the course of that week from claims of sexual harassment/shakedowns to claims of sexual assault and rape, it was difficult to see why this particular controversy should be regarded as a tipping point.

Well, that's a win for The Guardian, I guess. For whatever else the Weinstein scandal tells us about our culture, there is no denying that it is "a watershed" of sorts – that the reaction to it has catalysed a particular way of doing politics (and, I would argue, further marginalised others). I still can't envisage a future tome entitled, oh, The Women's March: A History of the Struggle for Female Equality from Mary Wollstonecraft to the Harvey Weinstein Scandal. But I am beginning to see this moment as a significant one on the liberal/progressive side of the aisle.

Why has l'affaire Weinstein so captured the progressive mood? The answer, surely, can be given in three words: "Donald", "J.", and "Trump". Trump, the Pussy-Grabber in Chief, was not supposed to win the election, not least because of his taped admission to a busload of media boofheads and hangers-on that his fame afforded him pussy-grabbing privileges. But not only did he win the election, he won it against a very "qualified" woman, whose success was supposed to blaze a trail for women and girls the world over. The Women's March was in many ways an expression of profound frustration that a man with such regressive attitudes could win an election in 2016, and much of the commentary of the past ten months – from the characterisation of Bernie Sanders and his followers as "brogressives" and "brocialists" to the remarkable reaction to an adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale – betrays a comparable exasperation. That is the essential difference between the Weinstein scandal and its analogues. It has come to light in the year of the Donald.

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by Michael Liss

I have a problem. Each December I write a political New Year’s ditty to send to friends and family. I’ve had a good time with them, even when the news (at least from my perspective) is less than cheery. I get to crib shamelessly from great authors of the past, ruin perfectly good metre with my tuneless ear, and throw in some real groaners. My “Mitchie at the Bat” is considered a classic of the genre, and even last year’s dirge-y “Wreck of the Hillary C” induced a small avalanche of comments from the similarly agonized.

But I’m blocked. Eleven months of government by cattle-prod has depleted my mirth supply, so, in a last-minute Hail Mary, I am going to recharge by pivoting to a dispassionate discourse about something we are all passionate about—money. Not Bitcoin, or something esoteric that’s way above my humble understanding, but plain old cash—the real stuff, actual specie, as in old coins.

I happen to have a few. Not many, and they don’t have much in the way of numismatic value, but they are a treasure trove of history, and history cheers me up. About a dozen assorted coins dating from the late 18th Century to 1892, all from a worn-out purse my grandmother found in her basement catacombs. Among them were some two-cent pieces from the 1860s, a half-dime, an 1803 large penny, a commemorative coin from the Columbian Exposition, and an absolutely exquisite 1826 Capped Bust half-dollar.

To a junkie like me (for history, not necessarily for coins) they are all wonderful. Collectively, they tell a story that starts with 16 states and ends with 44, of powdered wigs and multi-hour speechifying, several wars, horses and stagecoaches, cotton pickers and cotton merchants, the creation of whole new cities out of swamp, and the building of an empire (by whatever means necessary) that stretched across the continent.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Einstein was adamant. He did not want a large public funeral.

He wanted to be immediately cremated with his ashes scattered before anyone had time to make a fuss.

Fair enough, right?

Einstein biographer Walter Isaacson reminds us of the 1727 funeral of Sir Isaac Newton. Like Einstein, Newton was a superstar of his day. And so not surprisingly, Newton was buried with the highest honors at Westminster Abbey in London. Pallbearers included not only the lord high chancellor, but two dukes and three earls. Most of the fellows of the Royal Society were there as well to honor one of the greatest scientists the world had ever known. Einstein, says Isaacson, could have easily commanded such a large-scale state funeral. For Einstein was held in similarly high esteem by the people of his time. President Eisenhower famously declared that no other man has contributed more to the expansion of knowledge in the 20th century than Einstein. Many felt he was the greatest man of the twentieth century and a state funeral would have been not only appropriate –but expected.

Einstein, however, had other ideas. And immediately after his death on April 18, 1955, he was quietly cremated in Trenton, New Jersey. This took place on the afternoon he died before most people had even heard the news. The cremation was attended by all of twelve people; after which his ashes were scattered in the nearby Delaware River, as his great friend and Princeton colleague Otto Nathan read a few lines from Goethe's poetry.

This quiet funeral, for me, perfectly captures the man that was Einstein. He had wanted to be quickly cremated with no fanfare because, he said, he did not want his final resting place to become an object of morbid fascination.

But, alas, this was not to be. In what is an absolutely outrageous story, Einstein's brain was stolen. It then took on a life of its own as kind traveling relic around the country.

How is this possible?

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by Akim "Hot Cha Cha" Reinhardt

*Omg, so excited about Prince Harry announcing he's getting hitched to the absolutely fabulous Meghan Markle. Way to go, royal family!

*The Trump presidency continues shifting Foucualtian microtechnologies power, including the reinforcement select biopower apparatuses around immigration and race but, despite this, has thoroughly betrayed earlier promises to disrupt capitalism!

*Yes, it is a major bummer that the Magnificent Markle won't be going by the title "Princess Meghan," thereby ruining the theme of many a birthday party, but at least the Windsor Castle clan can finally begin weeding out the hemophilia and polydactylism.

*The funny man from frigid Minnesota is in some serious hot water. And we're not talking about Lou Grant! Serial molester/groper/tongue-down-your-mouther/sleep-therapist-from-Hell Al Franken resigned from the Senate last week after a cohort of his peers pressured him to step down. Sadly, frothing, myopic Dems who value scoring political points and cocktail party Suart Smalley impersonations more than challenging America's ingrained misogyny could not be consoled by the great equalizer: Minnesota's Democratic governor is filling Franken's seat, which won't even be contested for nearly a year, so there's plenty of time to install and establish a new incumbent. No matter . . . the party's Kardashian wing values appearances over everything else, and is working fervently to remind each and every last American that so long as Franken didn't rape and murder toddler cancer patients, he's way, way better than Roy Moore!

*Hot Hollywood Rumor: Quentin Tarrantino is pitching an R-rated Start Trek film to franchise impresario J.J. Abrams, who's excited about the idea, according to early reports. And fans think the long running series of futuristic, interstellar morality plays is the prefect setting for Tarrantino to update his white boy gender and racial revenge fantasies while having actors casually toss around the word "nigger." Early casting possibilities include Samuel L. Jackson as a potty mouthed, hyper emotional Mr. Spock and Uma Thurman as a sword-wielding, heroin snorting, track suit bedecked Klingon warlord. Hell yeah!

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by Bill Benzon

Franco Moretti and his colleagues at the Stanford Literary Lab have collected a number of their pamphlets into a book:

Canon/Archive: Studies in Quantitative Formalism by Franco Moretti (Author, Editor), Mark Algee-Hewitt, Sarah Allison, Marissa Gemma, Ryan Heuser, Matthew Jockers, Holst Katsma, Long Le-Khac, Dominique Pestre, Erik Steiner, Amir Tevel, Hannah Walser, Michael Witmore, Irena Yamboliev, published by n+1.

That book is the occasion of this essay, which thus resembles a review in some, but only some, respects.

If it’s only a review that interests you, then perhaps I can save you the trouble of a rather long read.

Canon/Archive is an important book of literary criticism, likely as important as any published this year. It is also rather technical in places. But you can skate over those spots if you’re determined to read the whole book. Look at the charts and diagrams, they’re the heart of the book.

That in itself is important to note; the book is full of charts and diagrams. That is unheard of in standard literary criticism. It’s a sign of the fact that Canon/Archive embodies a new mode of thought, perhaps the first since the advent of the so-called New Criticism before World War II (though mostly after the war).

A new mode of thought! Heavens to Betsy!

As Moretti notes in his preface, “Images come first … because – by visualizing empirical findings – they constitute the specific object of study of computational criticism” (xi). Think of it, visually, of course. You run the programs, visualize the results, and then write the text to support, explicate, and reflect on the implications of those visualizations.

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

For those who decide to brave the whole essay, here's a piece of advice: If you find something boring or a bit picky, do what I always do, skip over it. You can always come back.

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by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

When President Trump took the office of President in the year 2017, few Americans could have predicted the huge changes to come under the rulers that would follow him — changes inspired by his unprecedented example.

And few could have predicted that this man, who started with an approval rating lower than any president before him, down in the toilet, would end up with an approval rating so high up to heaven's ceiling, it even satisfied him, a man who loved to be adored. His ego feasted on his people's approval like bees feast on nectar, like kids feast on Big Macs with fries on the side, like flies feast on feces.

In fact, nothing much might have happened in the Trump years were it not for three events that came to pass late during his tenure, events that came to be known as the Unholy Trifecta.

The first event was the drowning of Miami in a hurricane much worse than any preceding one, which hit that city with spectacular results, undoubtedly occasioned by accelerated climate change.

President Trump called in the Army to install order when roaming bands of brigands began to rob and kill to survive in the chaos (or so the official line from the White House averred) which set the template for other take-overs by the Army of other cities in various states of trouble, mostly financial, brought about by Republican Governors who had slashed taxes to such a degree that there was no money left for schools, which led to massive protests, which led to the President sending in the Army to install order, and which normalized the military occupation of more and more cities.

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by Dave Maier

It’s that time of year again already – time to remind everyone that it’s that time of year again! I must admit I didn’t listen to a whole lot of new music this year, but I have definitely rounded up a good selection for you, even if there’s probably a whole lot out there that we won’t find out about until later. Such is life in the abundant times in which we live. The names here will be mostly familiar to regular listeners, but I’ve included a couple of oddities as well. Here’s to a happy and healthy 2018 for all!

[direct link if widget fails]

Yagya – The Great Attractor [Stars and Dust]

Yagya is Aðalsteinn Guðmundsson from Iceland. His latest release is very much in the vein of his earlier ones, e.g. 2009’s Rigning, which is probably my favorite. Ambient listeners might have to get used to the dance-floor pulse of Yagya’s music, as inherited from his major influence, Wolfgang Voigt (a.k.a. Gas), but that’s easily done, given his exquisite spacial and melodic sensibilities.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Although the word "democracy" is commonly used to denote all that is good in politics, democracy is a dubious proposal. It is the thesis that you may be required to live according to rules that you reject, simply because those rules are favored by others. What's more, democracy is the proposal that you may be rightfully forced to live according to rules that are supported only by others who are ignorant, misinformed, deluded, corrupt, irrational, or worse. Further still, under democracy, you may be rightfully forced to live according to the rules favored by a majority of your fellow citizens even though you are able to demonstrate their ignorance and irrationality, and despite the fact that you can debunk the rationales they offer in support the rules that you oppose. Democracy apportions political power to citizens as such rather than according to their ability to wield it responsibly.

The aspiration of democracy is that with its freedoms, we allow reasons to be exchanged so that the best will come to be recognized. Note that this is true of democracy at its best. And we know that real-world democracy is far from the ideal. We are in fact forced to live according to rules that are favored by ignorant, misinformed, and irrational citizens; and many of the rules we are forced to live by are defensible only by way of the flawed rationales embraced by the ignorant. In real-world democracy, we are indeed at the mercy of our irrational and ignorant fellow citizens. Knowing this, politicians and officials cater to majority irrationality, and, once in power, they govern for the sake of gaining reelection.

It's difficult to see what could justify democracy. Maybe this is as it should be? Even under ideal conditions, political orders are always coercive, and so the task of justifying any mode of politics should be onerous. And the difficulty of justifying democracy should increase under non-ideal conditions such as those we currently face. Part of the task of democracy, even in its most ideal versions, is to critically assess the prevailing democratic order. And one way to assess a democracy is to envision alternative arrangements that might be superior.

In a recent book, provocatively titled Against Democracy, Jason Brennan takes up the chore of assessing existing democracy. His central contention is appropriately modest. He claims that if there is a workable nondemocratic political arrangement that can reasonably be expected to more reliably produce morally better policy decisions than existing democratic arrangements, we ought to try that alternative arrangement. Ultimately, he identifies a range of alternatives that he alleges will outperform democracy, all of which instantiate a political form he calls (borrowing a term coined by David Estlund) epistocracy, the rule of the knowers.

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by Misha Lepetic

As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart.
~ The Wizard of Oz

There is an old joke that deserves to be made popular again. A CEO is touring the company's newest factory. The manager, with a great deal of pride, points out how everything is automated. As the tour reaches the final room, the CEO notices a man sitting sullenly in the corner, with a leashed dog sitting next to him. Somewhat surprised, the CEO asks why the man is there, to which the manager responds, "It's his job to feed the dog." Stumped, the CEO asks why the factory would need a dog. The manager responds, quite matter-of-factly, "Why, to keep the man from touching the equipment."

At least one telling of the joke can be attributed to Warren G. Bennis, a scholar of organizational psychology and more-or-less originator of the field of leadership studies. But what is more interesting to me is the fact that Bennis's version of the joke goes back to 1991—an indication that we have been thinking about technological unemployment for a long time. When I originally heard the joke, probably sometime in the mid-90s, I savored it for its absurdist connotations: man and dog, locked in an eternal, Monty Python-esque loop of feeding and guarding, so as to guarantee no interference in the well-tempered functioning of the machine that has almost entirely replaced them both.

But these days what resonates for me more profoundly is the notion that these two still have jobs, regardless of how marginal such jobs may be; someone still has to feed the dog, and someone still has to keep the man from messing up the machinery that does the actual work. The real subtlety in the joke is that any presence should be needed at all, and yet it is somehow still required. The jobs—for both man and dog—are a fig leaf, but ostensibly the owners of the factory have decided that such a fig leaf is necessary, or at least desirable. Why is this?

I was reminded of this joke when recently contemplating the ubiquitous headlines that sensationalize the wholesale replacement of human labor by non-human capital. Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media prefers the drama of entire sectors of labor being sidelined. For example, an evergreen topic is the imminent wipe-out of heavy truck driving, which accounts for 1.8 million jobs in the United States, or nearly doubling to 3.5 million jobs, if you include taxis, delivery vans and the like. But paradigms are rarely overturned quite so rapidly, and the story that is already unfolding before us is much trickier to unravel, and more interesting.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

At the University of Oklahoma last week.

While considering topics for this month's 3QD essay, the US Senate voted to approve a tax bill which not only dramatically reshapes US tax law, but says a great deal about our society's values. We're in an era where research and education are dramatically underfunded and underappreciated, to be knowledgeable about a subject is an automatic disqualification, and where what things which should be a question of fact and evidence are being dragged down into the political muck. I thought about writing about the Dark Ages and how the advancement of knowledge is not guaranteed. About the danger of eating our seed corn. About how it feels like we are truly living in the darkest timeline [1]. But here at 3QD this is preaching to the choir. I'd rather light a candle which can be shared with others. I'd rather talk about Exploding Dots.

In math even the most innocuous ideas can lead to undiscovered worlds. All we need is equal doses of creativity and bravery. The creativity to ask crazy questions and the bravery to try crazy things. As I tell my students, bravery in math should be easy to come by. There is no harm in trying. After all, this isn't brain surgery or nuclear engineering — nobody will die if we screw up! — just erase and try again.

The really scarce commodity is creativity. After 18+ years of schools drilling the creativity right out of your skull, it's awfully hard to let your mathematical freak flag fly. As David Hilbert said when he heard one of his students had dropped out to study poetry, "Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician". But, with some practice, we can undo the damage of our early years and start to see the wonders of the mathematical universe. Sometimes all it takes is a new perspective.

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by Jalees Rehman

Can neuroscience help identify individuals who are most prone to engage in violent criminal behavior? Will it help the legal system make decisions about sentencing, probation, parole or even court-mandated treatments? A panel of researchers lead by Dr. Russell Poldrack from Stanford University recently reviewed the current state of research and outlined the challenges that need to be addressed for "neuroprediction" to gain traction. The use of scientific knowledge to predict violent behavior is not new. Social factors such as poverty and unemployment increase the risk for engaging in violent behavior. Twin and family studies suggest that genetic factors also significantly contribute to antisocial and violent behavior but the precise genetic mechanisms remain unclear. A substantial amount of research has focused on genetic variants of the MAOA gene (monoamine oxidase A, an enzyme involved in the metabolism of neurotransmitters). Variants of MAOA have been linked to increased violent behavior but these variants are quite common – up to 40% of the US population may express this variant! As pointed out by John Horgan in Scientific American, it is impossible to derive meaningful predictions of individual behavior based on the presence of such common gene variants.

One fundamental problem of using social and genetic predictors of criminal violent behavior in the legal setting is the group-to-individual problem. Carrying a gene or having been exposed to poverty as a child may increase the group risk for future criminal behavior but it tells us little about an individual who is part of the group. Most people who grow up in poverty or carry the above-mentioned MAOA gene variant do not engage in criminal violent behavior. Since the legal system is concerned with an individual's guilt and his/her likelihood to commit future violent crimes, group characteristics are of little help. This is where brain imaging may represent an advancement because it can assess individual brains. Imaging individual brains might provide much better insights into a person's brain function and potential for violent crimes than more generic assessments of behavior or genetic risk factors.

Poldrack and colleagues cite a landmark study published in 2013 by Eyal Aharoni and colleagues in which 96 adult offenders underwent brain imaging with a mobile MRI scanner before being released from one of two New Mexico state correctional facilities. The prisoners were followed for up to four years after their release and the rate of being arrested again was monitored.

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by Dwight Furrow

Contemporary discussions of wine quality tend to oscillate unhelpfully between subjectivism and objectivism. One side argues that wine quality is thoroughly subjective because individual differences among tasters preclude agreement on the nature or quality of what is being tasted. The other side points to objective, scientific analyses of chemical components detected through taste and smell, but such analyses cannot explain what makes a wine distinctive or aesthetically valuable. Thus, neither side can explain our tasting practices and the attention we pay to wine quality. If you're a subjectivist there is no such thing as wine quality. But within objective, scientific analysis, aesthetic quality never shows up. To extricate ourselves from this interminable dialectic we need a clearer understanding of what wine is–an ontology of wine if you will. This might seem like a strange question. Don't we know what wine is? Wine is a thing, a liquid containing alcohol that we drink for pleasure or consume with food. But herein lies the problem. We tend to think of objects in the world, including wine grapes and bottles of wine, as inert substances just sitting there until we decide to do something with them. If the grapes or the wine are of interest, it's because we confer value on them. This is a mistake because it reinforces the unhelpful subject/object dualism just mentioned. But what's the alternative?

I want to sketch the alternative by invoking some recent work in ontology articulated by the political philosopher Jane Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter. Bennett does not discuss wine but her way of linking the ontology of things to an aesthetic appreciation of them can help make sense of our love of wine and expose the limits of these notions of subjectivity and objectivity that persist in our discourse.

Bennett argues that all matter including the inorganic is pulsing with life. Obviously the word ‘life' has a special meaning for Bennett since we don't normally think of inorganic objects as alive. Essentially, by "life", she means the ability to act and be acted upon. When thinking of objects as stable, largely passive objects until acted upon by something else, the most important actors are human beings, fulsome subjects actively manipulating the world to serve human ends. With regard to wine such a picture seems on the surface quite defensible. After all, we make the wine and enjoy the wine, and wine is as deeply a part of human culture as blue jeans and automobiles. But Bennett argues this picture of the relationship between human beings and things is misleading and incomplete. She shows how worms, a dead rat, or gun powder residue have the capacity to act, influencing their environment in ways not intended and often not comprehended by human beings. Worms, it turns out, make vegetable mold and thus seedlings possible and protect buried artifacts from decay, thus helping both to enable and preserve human culture. A bit of detritus, gunpowder residue, can catalyze a jury to judgment. A dead rat surprisingly sparks an aesthetic response.

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by Brooks Riley

For most of us, the act of looking at a painting is, and should be, subjective. The baggage we bring to the confrontation–how we see, what we notice, what we know, how we feel, what we like or don’t like—is as individual as a finger print, and often highly idiosyncratic. Like the proverbial horse, we can be led to a painting, but we cannot be made to like it—if we’re honest. We may well like it, or appreciate it (divorcing ‘like’ from ‘value’), even if we’ve been led to it. But we can also be cajoled, or conned, into liking it or appreciating it because we’ve been told it’s a masterpiece.

Sometimes I feel I’m being stalked by Leonardo da Vinci. He tiptoes in and out of my life at irregular intervals, calling attention to himself and exhorting me to believe in his painterly genius. It’s aesthetic harassment, and he’s had plenty of enablers over the centuries, telling me I should give in to him.

The first time I saw the Mona Lisa, at 14, the first thing I noticed were her eyebrows, or rather the lack of them. Like a homing pigeon, my attention swiftly bypassed the painting as gestalt and zoomed directly into a detail that delivered a personal shock of recognition. I didn’t see the smile, I didn’t try to read her expression, I didn’t try to see where she was looking, I didn’t notice the landscape outside the window behind her. I was fixated on that delicate bone along which her eyebrows might have stretched like a delicate punctuation mark on an expression.

In spite of my dark brown hair, I was born with almost no eyebrows, only a few beige weeds scattered helter-skelter in a landscape of pale skin, invisible even from a short distance. At 14, when all my friends had lovely, well-defined brows, my lack of them was a source of adolescent insecurity that eventually faded when the teasing stopped.

By the time I saw the Mona Lisa for the second time, at 22, I’d found out that Lisa shaved off her eyebrows according to Renaissance fashion–I was born too late. This may be what led bandleader Mitch Miller to tell me, when we met, that I looked like a few Madonnas he’d seen at the Frick. It had to be the eyebrows, or the lack of them.

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Primitive science began when mankind looked upward at the sky and downward at the earth and asked why. Modern science began when Galileo and Kepler and Newton answered these questions using the language of mathematics and started codifying them into general scientific laws. Since then scientific discovery has been constantly driven by curiosity, and many of the most important answers have come from questions of the kind asked by a child: Why is the sky blue? Why is grass green? Why do monkeys look similar to us? How does a hummingbird flap its wings? With the powerful tool of curiosity came the even more powerful fulcrum of creativity around which all of science hinged. Einstein’s imagining himself on a light beam was a thoroughly creative act; so were Ada Lovelace’s thoughts about a calculating machine as doing something beyond mere calculation, James Watson and Francis Crick’s DNA model-building exercise, Enrico Fermi’s sudden decision to put a block of paraffin wax in the path of neutrons.

What is common to all these flights of fancy is that they were spontaneous, often spur-of-the-moment, informed at best by meager data and mostly by intuition. If Einstein, Lovelace and Fermi had paused to reconsider their thoughts because of the absence of hard evidence or statistical data, they might at the very least been discouraged from exploring these creative ideas further. And yet that is what I think the future Einsteins and Lovelaces of our day are in danger of doing. They are in danger of doing this because they are increasingly living in a world where statistics and data-driven decisions are becoming the beginning and end of everything, where young minds are constantly cautioned to not speculate before they have enough data.

We live in an age where Big Data, More Data and Still More Data seem to be all consuming, looming over decisions both big and mundane; from driving to ordering pet food to getting a mammogram. We are being told that we should not make any decision pending its substantiation through statistics and large-scale data analysis. Now, I will be the first one to advocate making decisions based on data and statistics, especially in an era where sloppy thinking and speculation based on incomplete or non-existent data seems to have turned into the very air which the media and large segments of the population breathe. Statistics has especially been found to be both paramount and sorely lacking in making decisions, and books like Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” and Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise” have stressed how humans are intrinsically bad at probabilistic and statistical thinking and how this disadvantage leads to them consistently making wrong decisions. It seems that a restructuring of our collective thinking process that is grounded in data would be a good thing for everyone.

But there are inherent problems with implementing this principle, quite apart from the severe limitations on creative speculation that an excess of data-based thinking imposes.

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by Paul Braterman

EVOLUTION: What the Fossils Say and why it Matters, Donald R. Prothero (2^nd edition)

If you are interested in evolution, get this book. And make sure that your library gets it. And your children's high school library. Incidentally, it's incredible value; list price $35.00/£27.95 from Columbia University Press, with over 400 lavishly illustrated pages.

The book is a comprehensive survey of the fossil record, supplemented at times with other evidence, and framed as one long argument against creationism. It opens with a general discussion of the ideas behind current evolutionary thinking, moves on to a survey of specific topics in (mainly animal) evolution, from the origins of life to the emergence of humanity, and concludes with a brief discussion of the threat that creationism poses to rational thinking. The argument is laid out clearly in the seemingly artless prose of an accomplished writer in love with his subject matter, with plain language explanations that presume no prior knowledge, while the detailed discussions of specific topics give enough detail to be of value, I would imagine, even to a professional in the field. The author is an experienced educator and researcher, with thirty books ranging from the highly technical to the popular, some 300 research papers, and numerous public appearances to his credit, and the work is copiously illustrated with photos, diagrams, and drawings by the author's colleague, Carl Buell. These illustrations are an integral part of the work, graphically displaying the richness of the data at the heart of the argument.

The first edition of this book appeared in 2007, when it was the year's American Association of Publishers outstanding book in earth science, and while progress in the past decade has been less dramatic than in the two decades preceding, nonetheless this update is most timely.

The author's Prologue lays out the agenda: "Instead of the embarrassingly poor [fossil] record that Darwin faced in 1859, we now have an embarrassment of riches." To which one might now also add the records in molecular biology, embryology, and historical biogeography. The final paragraphs of the book summarise the motivation: "Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the pre-eminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going."

As an integral part of the author's strategy, we have quotations from creationist writers that show their arguments to be at best uninformed, at worst consciously dishonest. To a UK audience, this may seem excessive. In a US context, I fear it is not. In any case, the creationists' errors serve to clarify the logic of the genuine science. There is an extensive bibliography at the end, and additional reading suggestions at the end of each chapter, although I would have welcomed some way of relating these to specifics in the text.

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