by Lee Basham and Matthew R. X. Dentith

Theories about conspiracy theories are rife, with historians, cultural studies scholars, psychologists and sociologists all contributing to the ongoing debate as to whether belief in conspiracy theories is, in fact, irrational, what kind of people believe conspiracy theories, and what, if anything, should we do about the prevalence of belief in them. So, what say the philosophers? In the last two decades philosophers like Charles Pigden, Brian L. Keeley, David Coady and, yes, ourselves, have taken a close look at conspiracy theories, and the news is in: belief in conspiracy theories is not irrational and the conspiracy theorist, despite the opprobrium expressed towards her, has emerged as good a thinker as you or us. Their theories are intriguing, and often constructed with a careful eye to the standards of both logic and evidence that we all share. “They” are just like us. In fact, “they” are us. Charles Pigden's simple observation, well-summarized by David Coady, ably demonstrates this.

1) Unless you believe that the reports of history books and the nightly news are largely false, you are a conspiracy theorist.

2) If you do believe that the reports of history books and the nightly news are largely false, you are a conspiracy theorist.

Conclusion: We're all conspiracy theorists.

This conclusion, however, flies in the face of a recent article published in Aeon, “Bad thinkers”, by the University of Warwick's Quassim Cassam. Cassam wants us to accept the common wisdom that belief in conspiracy theories is problematic. Like Richard Hofstadter and Karl Popper before him, Cassam takes it that the problem with conspiracy theories lies not so much to do with the theories themselves but, rather, in the intellectual character of those who would believe them. Which is to say that rather than judging conspiracy theories on the evidence, our suspicion of them comes out of worries about the kind of people who turn out to be conspiracy theorists. After all, most of us have been in a situation where, when presented with a long list of reasons to believe some conspiracy theory, our immediate response has been to focus our attention on the character of our conspiratorial companion. However, Cassam's argument for why this is the right move for us to make doesn't just mistake political piety for intellectual virtue, but treats a willingness to challenge political beliefs as mere gullibility.

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by Yohan J. John

This is the era of metrics: it seems that if we are to hack a path through the information jungle of the 21st century, we must be armed with an arsenal of scores, quantities, indices, factors, grades, and ratings. Our corporate and governmental overlords seem most comfortable parlaying in the seemingly objective language of numbers.

But can complex social and biological conditions be boiled down to scores? To GDP-per-capita, or a happiness index, or a body mass index? Social and biological metrics are attempt to quantify things that often seem unquantifiable: the overall health of a country or of a person, the ability of a school to educate its pupils, the quality of a consumer product, and even the aesthetic value of a movie, TV show, or musical album.

I've always been uncomfortable with this process of quantification: on the one hand reducing any phenomenon to a single number seems like a major oversimplification, and on the other, the procedures for generating such numbers are often opaque. How exactly is inflation calculated? Or the cost of living? How do Nielson ratings work? Or the Netflix recommendation system? My discomfort with metrics began to crystallize and expand when I was introduced to a somewhat obscure “law” that should perhaps be more widely known outside of the dismal science that originated it.

Goodhart's Law was originally formulated as follows: “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” The word 'statistical' probably doesn't excite most people. But if we cut to the essence of what is being said, we find a rule of thumb (it's not a real law of nature) that might have implications well beyond the world of economics:

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Let's unpack this idea with a few examples. We can start with academic testing. Written examinations are a time-honored way to assess whether a student has learned something. But when tests scores become the metric by which to judge the performance of schools and teachers, then the connection between the test score and the quality of education often breaks down. This is because teachers “teach to the test“, or even cheat in order to raise scores. By making test scores the target, rather than one among many factors that go into the assessment process, the people involved are incentivized to find the path of least resistance that leads to the highly specific targeted outcome. This drive to find the easiest route to higher test scores is what breaks the correlation between test scores and the more general goal of quality education. You can do well on a test because you have a degree of mastery of the subject, or because you were trained in a mechanical fashion to do the specific test, with no care given to your ability to apply what is learned in other potentially important contexts. [1]

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The computer revolution has transformed education over the past quarter century. PowerPoint, greatly improved graphical and multi-media capabilities, e-books, Wikis, online student collaboration, flipped classrooms, clicker quizzes, open-access online courses (MOOCs), and the inexhaustible wealth of material available on the internet have opened up all sorts of interesting possibilities. (At the same time, discretely hidden smart phones, college-essay mills, and the inexhaustible wealth of material available on the internet have raised new challenges to teachers worried about academic dishonesty.)

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I translate, from the Urdu, Mother’s dream for Harry the shrink

Naked,
except for my nikab,

roped to a round pillar
on a sand dune

the sun’s anvil,
my feet dancing.

The turbaned Bedouin,
henna-dyed beard,

Champion Lovemaker
peace be upon Him

raked His fingers at me.
Quicksand rose to my thighs.

My heart sank.
I awoke.

Harry the shrink turns towards me,
and says, “Repressed sexual fantasy,

need for intimacy.
Nakedness: vulnerability;

nikab veiling her face
below the eyes: anonymity.

Bondage suggests either
a desire to be submissive, or

a yearning to be free.
Sinking into quicksand:

reversion into the subconscious.
Guilt about her desires

drives her to religion—
the Champion Lovemaker—

to rekindle her self esteem,
and make her feel better.”

“What is he saying to you?” Mother
asks. It’s my dream, after all.”

I resort to diplomacy. “Mother,
doctor sahib says I should help you

write down or tape record your dreams.
They are windows to your soul.”

By Rafiq Kathwari, whose debut collection, ‘In Another Country,’ is forthcoming in September from Doire Press.

by Usha Alexander

Why Harper Lee’s second novel, Go Set a Watchman, is more profound and important than her first

Even before its publication, Go Set a Watchman had become controversial, acquiring a whiff of conspiracy, inauthenticity, and foul play. It seemed unbelievable that Harper Lee would publish again after more than half a century of quiescence—and that too a novel written long ago and thematically near to her first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Published in 1960, Mockingbird has become an American classic and standard reading in every American high school. It is revered for its poignant telling of a thoughtful and courageous white man who does his best to hold up the candle of racial justice in the Jim Crow South. How could anything new live up to that? Why would Lee imperil her own legacy?

Since the release of Watchman, many readers have indeed announced their heartbreak over the revelations and struggles contained within. This new story takes place in the same small Alabama town we came to know in Mockingbird, where the endearingly wild little Scout grew up learning from her father, Atticus Finch, to recognize the humanity of those who seemed different from herself. But it’s now twenty years later and we meet the young woman Scout has grown into. On a visit from New York to her hometown in the mid-50s, the twenty-six year old Jean Louise Finch—who no longer goes by her childhood nickname—finds it transformed by time, the postwar economy, and the emergent Civil Rights movement. Much of the story centers around Jean Louise’s sense of unbelonging in the place where her roots remain yet deeply felt, and the cognitive dissonance she suffers as she discovers the people she most loved and trusted to be unapologetic racists:

Why doesn’t their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up? … Everything I have ever taken for right and wrong these people have taught me—these same, these very people. So it’s me, it’s not them. Something has happened to me.

They are all trying to tell me in some weird, echoing way that it’s all on account of the Negroes… but it’s no more the Negroes than I can fly and God knows, I might fly out of the window any time, now.

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by Thomas R. Wells

Every week or so a literature professor publishes an eloquent essay about what literature is good for. Here's a nice example. The backdrop is the decades long decline of literature degree programmes in the Anglophone world. This is why you need us!, they argue, somewhat plaintively.

These essays tend to circle around the same handful of arguments. An especially prominent theme, most frequently associated with Martha Nussbaum's defence of the humanities, is that literature is good for us because it promotes empathy, and the practice of empathy is the heart of liberal ethics and the functioning of civilised society.

Unfortunately, defending literature in this way multiplies rather than reduces philistinism. By mistaking means and ends it excludes the very heart of the matter from consideration. The joy of literature is transmuted into duty. This is in line with how professional academics understand literature – as their daily work, albeit work that they love. But if this is how the people who claim to love literature talk about it, no wonder reading is in decline.

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Struck With Rust
.

from a chair close by the hydrangea in white,
and a wheelbarrow old and purely struck with rust,

the hydrangea’s lace planets in close galaxies of
three-petal poems,

the barrow’s hard, black tire and load of pulled weeds
which, until the other day, into life were thrust

now busted, heaped in a dry, foot-deep dome
in the barrow’s bed—

soon this pile of past-life will go, returning home
to nowhere in particular, but home nonetheless

to be (in quantum parts, by chance) reassigned
a place in the eternal ring

to bloom again, to be particles
in the Unknown’s newest thing
.

by Jim Culleny
8/2/15

by Charlie Huenemann

Philosophy students are typically taught the wrong lesson from the great Scottish skeptic David Hume. The standard story goes something like this. British empiricists like Locke and Berkeley wanted to connect everything we know to what we experience through the senses. The welcome consequence of this strategy is that all the stuff we see and interact with stays known – but the spooky invisible stuff, ranging from magical spirits to substantial forms and other metaphysical clutter, all goes by the wayside. But (the story continues) Hume pointed out that this strategy ends up far more corrosive than anyone expected: for, if we hold our beliefs to what we actually experience, we shall have no knowledge of causality. We see one event, and another; but never do we experience the metaphysical glue that connects the two, and forces the second event to follow the first.

The take-away lesson is that, according to Hume, we really have no knowledge of causality, and – if we are rational – we should be completely surprised every time we strike a match. This of course seems utterly loony, and it leads to spirited classroom arguments (which by itself, I’ll allow, is a good reason to teach Hume this way). How could it possibly be right that the fully rational person would not see causality at work in the world?

Well, it isn’t; and in truth, Hume never thought it was. As he defended himself to an incredulous correspondent,

… I never asserted so absurd a Proposition as that any thing might arise without a Cause: I only maintain’d, that our Certainty of the Falsehood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition [sense experience] nor Demonstration; but from another Source.

Hume wasn’t a skeptic about causality. He only maintained that the causal knowledge we have does not arise from our sense experience or from our reasoning.

What’s the difference? It turns out to be an interesting one. In the first (wrong) story, the lesson is that there is no such thing as causality. That’s certainly a bold claim, but it’s not in the least compelling. No one can take it seriously except as some kind of trivial philosophical nut to crack. In the second (correct) story, the lesson is that human knowledge is not as straightforward as philosophers would like. What we know does not boil down to rational inferences from observations and arguments. It’s more natural, more organic, than that.

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by Carl Pierer

Fig. 1: a Ceilidh as Braid

This column last month, here, provided a first glimpse at the fascinating field of braids. Beneath their obvious beauty – to which their widespread aesthetic use bears testimony – lies a deep complexity. They allow for explorations of many beautiful areas of mathematics. They branch into topology, group theory, and geometry, to give some examples. The previous essay explored the theoretical side of braids, the most important results of which were:

• A mathematical concept of braids: Consisting of a certain number of strands n, say, together with a specification of how and where these strands cross each other. Furthermore, these strands (if they are not crossing) run parallel and we may adopt the convention that they are running from top to bottom. To avoid ambiguity, we require further that there are no two crossings at the same horizontal level. It is clear that for the braid to have any crossings at all, it must have at least two strands. If a braid does not have any crossings, it is called the trivial braid.
• The word problem: Thus defined, a braid can be represented with a description of how the strands cross each other. Let σ­_I mean the i^th strand is crossing over the i+1^th strand and a negative power, σ­_i^-1 (read: sigma i inverse), mean the i^th strand crosses under the i+1^th strand. Then, a description of a braid using σ­_I's is called a braid word. The problem is: given two braids, how can we decide whether they are the same? More particularly, given a braid, how do we determine whether it is trivial?
• A solution to the word problem: The method of handle reduction. If a braid contains handles, it can be reduced. If the braid is the same as the trivial braid, this algorithm will return the trivial braid. If the braid is not trivial, this algorithm will return an equivalent braid that does not contain any handles.

It ended there with a very cursory glance at the connection between braids and dances. This idea deserves to be dealt with in greater depth, for it is not only in the abstract spheres of pure mathematics that braids demonstrate a fascinating depth. Rather surprisingly, their mathematical properties find unexpected applications to the more practical problems of motion planning for robots.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

Decisions under demand uncertainty – the so called newsvendor problem.

In October 2007, my father and I took a day train from Bangalore to Chennai. About halfway into the 7-hour journey is a station called Jolarpet, where the train stops for ten minutes. As at other stations, there were dozens of vendors – each with a simple wheeled stall or a wooden basket or a steel container – engaged in a frenzy of small scale entrepreneurship. All sorts of items were being sold: snacks, tea, coffee, water, bananas, flowers, cheap Chinese goods – toys, combs, and, in what became a curiosity and a topic of detailed conversation among our fellow travelers, pens that doubled as flashlights.

But my father was most interested in those who sold vadas, a South Indian specialty, a round, deep-fried snack with a hole in middle – like a donut but not sweet at all – made from a batter of lentils (I've described just one variety). My father felt the vadas sold by vendors at the Jolarpet station were better than those made in the train's pantry. They were hot, had just the right texture, and the timing – late afternoon – was just right to have them with coffee. Three fairly busy trains – including the Bangalore-Chennai Brindavan Express on which we were traveling that day – arrive at Jolarpet station at roughly the same time. “How many vadas get sold?” my father wondered. “Maybe a thousand of them, maybe even more.”

That comment got me thinking. If you are a vendor, the critical question is how many vadas should I make? The vadas have to be fried right before the train arrives so that they are hot and ready to sell during the ten minutes that the train stops. If I fry too many and not enough passengers buy them then what I am left with is wasted, since a vada that is not freshly made is unappetizing. On the other hand, if I fry too few, then I lose the opportunity to sell to passengers who need them. So what is the right number to make given this uncertainty in demand?

The technical name for this dilemma is the newsvendor problem. Replace vadas with newspapers and you have an identical situation. If a newsvendor on the street doesn't sell enough newspapers, what's left is wasted since today's newspaper won't sell tomorrow. If the vendor has too few newspapers and runs out of them, then potential customers are lost.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

In Japan, I knew a gentleman who ran a 200 year old miso shop. K san was also a bon vivant par excellance! Studying Samurai-style (Enshu school) tea ceremony, he wore stylish kimono by day and organized French film festivals for our town on the weekends. He also spent a fortune on tea bowls and art, which he often would show to his friends.

Everyone in town knew him and his miso shop was a gathering place of local luminaries.

Of all the interesting things he was involved in, my favorite was his gramophone club. Once a month like-minded collectors would show up with a favorite record (or not) and sit around listening to old records while drinking sake. Need I say more? The man had endless curiosity and tremendous style. He was my kinda guy!

Speaking of which, I recently finished the most unusual book by Normon Cantor, called Inventing the Middle Ages. The book is about twenty prominent 20th century Medievalists and their impact on the study of the history of the Middle Ages. When I first heard that this book was not just a best seller but was so popular it was even available on Audible, I could hardly believe it! Really? I love anything related to the Middle Ages and so would have read the book no matter what, but I must admit that I was utterly fascinated by the popularity– as well as the controversy surrounding this book, which after all was on such an obscure topic.

So, I picked up the book immediately.

I wasn't disappointed either.

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by Bill Benzon

There can be little doubt that President Obama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney was an extraordinary performance and a powerful statement about the state of race relations in the United States of America. But it is also a bit puzzling, for that statement took the form of a sermon. As such, it was religious discourse and not secular political discourse.

That’s what I want to talk about, not to reach any specific conclusions, but to raise questions, to call for a conversation about and an examination of the role of religious discourse in civic life.

Rather than develop those questions directly, I want to place Obama’s eulogy on the table to a moment and consider a recent conversation between Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University, and John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia. That will establish the context in which I offer a few remarks about Obama’s performance. Then I want to place in evidence a statement that Robert Mann made about Laudato Si’, the recent and quite remarkable encyclical by Pope Francis.

The ‘Cult’ of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Loury and McWhorter had this conversation at Bloggingheads.tv on July 21, 2015. After opening pleasantries and some remarks about Obama, they move on to discuss the ascendancy of Ta-Nehisi Coates as a commentator on race relations in America. Starting at somewhat after nine minutes in McWhorter argues that Coates has become somewhat like the priest of a religion:

There is now what a Martian anthropologist would call a religion. Which is that one is to understand the role of racism in America’s past and present.

And Coates has reached a point, and this is not anything that I ever predicted, where he is the priest of it. Because, and this is the crucial point, James Baldwin […] his point was often that race IS America, that the race problem is the essence of America and where it needs to go. And people read that and they quoted it but it wasn’t something that ordinary white readers really felt at the time.

Whereas today, really, that is something that whites feel such that Coates is revered. He is not considered somebody where you actually assess whether what he’s saying is true, you’re only supposed to criticize him in the gentlest of terms. He’s a priest of a religion.

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by Eric Byrd

As a teenager who just wanted battles, I tried to read The Face of Battle and was baffled by the historiographic argument of Keegan's introduction, a long essay that, I now see, echoes Virginia Woolf's manifesto “Modern Fiction” and applies its prescriptions to historical prose. Keegan called to writers of military history as Woolf called to the novelists of her time – “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected or incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” Keegan urged historians to turn away from tidy narratives of battle and acknowledge the horizonless confusion experienced by even the best-positioned participants of those battles; urged them to understand that most soldiers don't even know when they are engaged in battle, or at least “battle” as it was understood by the Victorians: a national apotheosis or histrionic downfall; the Hinge of Destiny; and he recommended the historian read and take to heart the chaotic combat scenes in Tolstoy's War and Peace, just as Woolf prescribed Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov to the fiction writer tempted by pat characterization, superficial psychology, all-too-conclusive action, and purely material relations.

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by Brooks Riley

‘I can sleep when I’m dead.’

That’s how Rainer Werner Fassbinder justified his hell-bent, frenetic, productive/destructive dervish whirl through a short existence, trailing an oeuvre of 45 films, 21 plays and countless screenplays. He was 37 when he died.

He’s been sleeping now for 33 years—a well-earned rest he wasn’t quite ready for but did nothing to prevent. He died of an overdose, of life and of every substance that helped fuel his march through it. This year he would have turned 70.

Walking past the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Technical College last week, I found myself doing what I often do with the dead: I imagined his ghost, the Tatar warrior of grunge, clad in filthy Levis and an old leather vest, striding out the door, coming over to me and giving me that bear hug of his.

Was machst Du den hier? he asks, stunned to find me living in his home town of Munich.

What am I doing here? It’s a good question for which I have no easy answer, other than the chain of unrelated circumstances that has brought me here, over and over again, at various times in my life. Now I’ve been here longer than I’ve been anywhere else.

Fassbinder’s Munich is not my Munich. We never had that much in common, except a love of film and a breezy friendship. Now he lies in a pricey part of town, far from the bars he frequented or the studio where he made many of his films. He’s been honored with his very own Platz, the Rainer-Werner-Fassbinder Platz, in a new residential area near the train station. And a technical college, of all things.

We weren’t always friends. The first time I met him, when a colleague and I were the first to interview him on his first trip to New York, he was restless and impatient, fulfilling an obligation with intelligence but without enthusiasm. Fassbinder could be rude and intimidating, with a bad-boy reputation that served him well against intruders, a category that included nearly everyone outside his inner circle of cast and crew, his only friends. He had many admirers out there in the world, myself included, but none could break through that barrier he put up to all those who would befriend him or wish him well. He had no time.

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by Misha Lepetic

“We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity.
And we create flexibility, in situations where it is required.”
~Neuromancer

Consider a few hastily conceived scenarios from the near future. An android charged with performing elder care must deal with an uncooperative patient. A driverless car carrying passengers must decide between suddenly stopping, and causing a pile-up behind it. A robot responding to a collapsed building must choose between two people to save. The question that unifies these scenarios is not just about how to make the correct decision, but more fundamentally, how to treat the entities involved. Is it possible for a machine to be treated as an ethical subject – and, by extension, that an artifical entity may possess “robot rights”?

Of course, “robot rights” is a crude phrase that shoots us straight into a brambly thicket of anthropomorphisms; let's not quite go there yet. Perhaps it's more accurate to ask if a machine – something that people have designed, manufactured and deployed into the world – can have some sort of moral or ethical standing, whether as an agent or as a recipient of some action. What's really at stake here is the contention that a machine can act sufficiently independently in the world that it can be held responsible for its actions and, conversely, if a machine has any sort of standing such that, if it were harmed in any way, this standing would serve to protect its ongoing place and function in society.

You could, of course, dismiss all this as a bunch of nonsense: that machines are made by us exclusively for our use, and anything a robot or computer or AI does or does not do is the responsibility of its human owners. You don't sue the scalpel, rather you sue the surgeon. You don't take a database to court, but the corporation that built it – and in any case you are probably not concerned with the database itself, but with the consequence of how it was used, or maintained, or what have you. As far as the technology goes, if it's behaving badly you shut it off, wipe the drive, or throw it in the garbage, and that's the end of the story.

This is not an unreasonable point of departure, and is rooted in what's known as the instrumentalist view of technology. For an instrumentalist, technology is still only an extension of ourselves and does not possess any autonomy. But how do you control for the sort of complexity for which we are now designing our machines? Our instrumentalist proclivities whisper to us that there must be an elegant way of doing so. So let's begin with a first attempt to do so: Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

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