by Jalees Rehman

The Affordable Care Act, also known as the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act", "Obamacare" or the ACA, is a comprehensive healthcare reform law enacted in March 2010 which profoundly changed healthcare in the United States. This reform allowed millions of previously uninsured Americans to gain health insurance by establishing several new measures, including the expansion of the federal Medicaid health insurance coverage program, introducing the rule that patients with pre-existing illnesses could no longer be rejected or overcharged by health insurance companies, and by allowing dependents to remain on their parents' health insurance plan until the age of 26. The widespread increase in health insurance coverage – especially for vulnerable Americans who were unemployed, underemployed or worked for employers that did not provide health insurance benefits – was also accompanied by new regulations targeting the healthcare system itself. Healthcare providers and hospitals were provided with financial incentives to introduce electronic medical records and healthcare quality metrics.

As someone who grew up in Germany where health insurance coverage is guaranteed for everyone, I assumed that over time, the vast majority of Americans would appreciate the benefits of universal coverage. One no longer has to fear financial bankruptcy as a consequence of a major illness and a government-back health insurance also provides for peace of mind when changing jobs. Instead of accepting employment primarily because it offers health benefits, one can instead choose a job based on the nature of the work. But I was surprised to see the profound antipathy towards this new law, especially among Americans who identified themselves as conservatives or Republicans, even if they were potential beneficiaries of the reform. Was the hatred of progressive-liberal views, the Democrats and President Obama who had passed the ACA so intense among Republicans that they were willing to relinquish the benefits of universal health coverage for the sake of their political ideology? Or were they simply not aware of the actual content of the law and opposed it simply for political reasons?

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by Brooks Riley

To paraphrase Heinrich Heine, I dream of Weimar in the night—not the era, but the town of Weimar, a lovely word on its own, one steeped in intellectual significance, historical resonance, cultural audacity, political and artistic enlightenment, philosophical bravura–and in modern times monstrous atrocity.

I remember the first time I heard the word Weimar. It wasn’t that small town in Germany where Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, Liszt, Luther, Cranach, Bach, Wagner, Gropius, Klee, Kandinsky, Strauss, Schopenhauer and countless other thinkers and artists once lived–or even where Kafka on a visit fell in love with the daughter of the caretaker of Goethe’s house.

It wasn’t the birthplace of the Bauhaus movement. It wasn’t the place where the new German constitution was signed in 1919 launching the legendary Weimar Republic, that glittering era of promise before the darkness fell. And it wasn’t the town closest to the murderous concentration camp at Buchenwald.

It was our Weimaraner, a hunting dog my father acquired to quell his thirst for a canine to tip the balance in a feline household. But Tonndorf, named for the castle a few miles from Weimar where my father, Artillery Commander of the 6^th Armored Division had quartered with his regiment at the end of World War 2, wasn’t allowed in our household, and was banished to the stable with the horses, where he spent hours hoping to catch a rat coming out of a hole in the earthen floor of a stall, successful only once in all his years, when an emerging rat took a wrong turn and landed in his maw.

Weimaraners were exotic in the mid-Fifties. They hadn’t been discovered by William Wegman or immortalized in the Museum of Modern Art. What I remember best about Tonndorf was the color of his coat, my favorite color, taupe. Taupe is the color gray with a smile, a hint of warmth that seeps through the sober neutrality of lightened black. I never think of Weimar without somehow seeing taupe, and when I look at Goethe’s color wheel, I can’t help wishing he had added that smile.

It would be many years before I actually went to Weimar, years before I began to understand the subterranean currents that would lead me there. So many interests of mine had their genesis in Weimar or were inextricably entwined with it. In college, a term paper of mine dealt with Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy, which was written and premiered there. In it, I posited that Schiller might have foreseen the dangers of Napoleon, and had written Wallenstein as a parable. Ironically, Weimar later briefly fell to Napoleon.

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by Katalin Balog

"As he died to make man holy, let us die to make things cheap." –Leonard Cohen, "Steer your way"

In this article I use a distinction borrowed from philosophy, between objectivity and subjectivity, to look at the nature of the Trump presidency. I explicated that distinction in more detail in some earlier posts here, here and here.

For all the ridiculousness of our president there is a whiff of the devil about him – by monumental bad luck, America has managed to elect a person embodying the worst of human nature. He combines thoughtlessness and utter disregard for standards of objectivity and reason with the soullessness and banality of reality TV run amok. Despite real parallels with 1930s Europe and more recent autocratic regimes across the world, the Trump era also offers novelty; it is its own, unique brand of awfulness, made in America.

In trying to grasp Trump's uniqueness, many commentators resort to psychology. In this essay, I want to propose a more philosophical perspective, a sort of psycho-philosophical approach that, in my view, allows one to appreciate better the psychic vortex that sucks up and annihilates anything of value around Trump. He is the inverse Midas: everything he touches turns immediately into junk. Business, entertainment, social media and now our national politics – very little is safe from his seeping menace. Kierkegaard's philosophy offers some clues to understanding this situation.

Kierkegaard suggested that the mind oscillates between two primary perspectives on the world: objective and subjective – and that the relationship between these approaches determines what kind of a person we are going to be. Objectivity is an orientation towards reality based on abstracting away, in various degrees, from subjective experience, and from individual points of view. An objective approach is based on concepts and modes of thinking about the world that is accessible from many different points of view. A subjective orientation, on the other hand, is based on an attunement and direct reflection on the inner experience of feeling, sensing, thinking and valuing that unfolds in our day-to-day living. It is the difference between an abstract, objective conception of water as a potable liquid that is also found in lakes, rivers and oceans, and the subjective concept of it based on what it is like to drink it or swim in it on this particular day in this particular place. Objective and subjective, of course, comes in degrees. Scientific concepts are the most objective but many of our everyday concepts are also of the more objective variety. The most subjective conceptions are those that arise in direct reflection on experience.

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by Amanda Beth Peery

In Pliny the Elder's Natural History, he describes a fourth-century BC painter, Apelles of Kos, as superior to all other painters. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Apelles "continues to be regarded as the greatest painter of antiquity even though none of his work survives." How is it possible that the artist seen as the greatest painter of all of antiquity is one who left no surviving works? One possibility is that his fame has been expanded by myth and time, and with no works left to show the truth, his skills have been inflated beyond their due. That's probably true, but I believe there's another, more legitimate reason for Apelles' reputation. Apelles' art—often conveyed through the descriptions of ancient writers like Pliny—has engendered other art. One way of measuring the greatness of a work of art is to ask whether it gives rise to other works, or to say it differently, whether or not it inspires.

Apelles of Kos was the court painter of Macedon under Alexander the Great. Pliny recounts various stories about him, many of them gems. In one, Apelles comes to Egypt, then ruled by one of the Ptolemies (the first Ptolemy, I think) whom Apelles once knew. A court jester invites Apelles to a feast at the royal palace, but unbeknownst to Apelles, Ptolemy has long harbored a hatred for the artist and the pharaoh is enraged to see him at the feast. Ptolemy commands Apelles to tell him who invited him. Apelles, who never knew or doesn't remember the jester's name, picks up a piece of charcoal from the cold hearth and begins to draw the jester's face on the palace wall. Within just a stroke (or two), Ptolemy recognizes his jester. Apelles has captured the jester with just a single line.

Apelles is famed not only for his superior skill but also for his dedication to his art. Pliny attributes to Apelles the phrase "nulla dies sine linea," or "not a day without a line," because the artist worked every day. Apelles exemplified the artist's lifestyle and was so respectable and respected that he could speak out against Alexander the Great himself. In one story, Alexander is sitting for a portrait expounding his theories on art, going on at length, until the artist quietly begs him to stop because the boys grinding the colors will laugh at him. We don't know what Alexander was saying, but by stopping him, Apelles—in his innocence—asserted the artist's superior knowledge of the craft and maybe even the way of seeing and ways of creating that artists are able to access. Alexander, who had been tutored by Aristotle (who was tutored in turn by Plato, who was tutored by Socrates) cannot rival Apelles'—or the color-grinding boys'—intimate knowledge and experience of art. In this story Apelles rejects the very sources of knowledge in the West. He is insisting that there is another type of knowledge. Or he is insisting, at least, that there are other things to know.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The ghost that lurks around the old Bombay Company bookshelf is the ghost of an elliptical future, trailing the past like a spectacular, burning, comet-tail. It is the wispy energy of my own half-dreamed, half-written book that hovers over the rows of books I use for research, mostly works of history and poetry. After a night of writing, I have finally met my deadline. The life-size mirror leaning in the corner shows a pale face, preoccupied with time; my work is to not forget the past, and to call to poetry what may be forgotten. I am now searching for a book for remembrance, a book by the American Sufi poet Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore. I want to honor this poet whose work I consider a beacon and who is now saying his goodbyes, dying of cancer. I am flailing for time, mine, his, and ours as poets, especially as Muslim poets living through times of brutal daily deaths. Weeks from now, earthly time will stop for him, moments from now, time will slow down for me, indefinitely.

The bookshelf phantom is poised to make projectiles of treasured objects— a miniature Chinese cabinet and framed Turkish calligraphic art on an easel— heavy objects that will slide down and cause multiple concussions and head/neck trauma. I am stunned but remain conscious, not bleeding but suddenly fatigued. It is ironic that one of the objects is Turkish— I had met Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore and his wife Malika at the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival where he and I were both awarded the Hikmet Poetry Prize, where I recognized kindred souls in both Daniel and Malika and found a reservoir of inspiration and made lifelong friends at the Turkish House in Cary, NC. Despite the shock of the accident, I feel the surge of a promise, a kind of reassurance.

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by Misha Lepetic

There's a certain kind of conversation in which I find myself every so often, which can roughly be summarized as "What's the big deal about DJing"? As someone who was a quasi-professional DJ in a former life, and is currently what one friend terms a 'monastic DJ', I've sensed a substantial gap in lay understanding of not just what a DJ does while engaged in the act of mixing, but also the place occupied by DJs in the contemporary musical ecosystem. This attitude — not unlike looking at a Jackson Pollock while muttering to yourself that you could do just as well — has received further support from the rise and fall of the spectacularly excessive (and, to my ears, creatively bankrupt) EDM scene; the unholy marriage of superstar DJs, casino-based clubs and overpriced bottle service; and the fact that watching someone DJ is fundamentally uninteresting.

Is there any value in mixing other people's music? When viewed from the most reductive position, the answer is clearly not. As critic David Hepworth noted in a now-deleted blog post, "You must surely realise that you make your living by putting on records, which is only a tiny bit removed in degree of difficulty from switching on the radio." If that's all that DJs are good for, then I suppose it's a relief that streaming services and software-driven playlists have come along to put this particular horse-and-buggy paradigm out of its misery.

Instead, it's more helpful to look at the larger role that DJs play in parsing the ocean of music in which we swim in these post-Napster days. Just as we turn to critics in other fields to understand what we should be reading or watching, we also turn to DJs for clarity on what to listen to. In this sense, the appropriate metaphor is one of the DJ as tastemaker.

In order to talk about how a DJ guides others' taste in music, we have to address the DJ's own, internal process. Over time, a DJ is a collector, a curator and an editor. Of course, being a DJ involves inhabiting all three of these roles at the same time, all the time, but there is also a progression here. I'll go over each of these and then return to what it means to be a tastemaker at the end of this post.

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by Katrin Trüstedt

Fundamental questions of migration and asylum that determine contemporary political debates also take center stage in some contemporary theaters. On the German speaking stage, Asylum seekers have made a lasting impact that gave rise to recent controversial discussions. Announcing his latest book, professor at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch Bernd Stegemann claimed that the impact of the "refugees on stage" marks a problematic turn towards authenticity. It implies, according to him, a form of banishing mimetic art from the stage on which no fictive world is emerging anymore. In line with several "new realisms" and a dominance of documentary forms, refugees are put on the stage as "real human beings" that are supposedly just "being themselves." Stegemann understands this as a takeover by a performative art form that not only expels mimetic art from the theater, but in his view also furthers a new populism with its claim for authenticity.

This diagnosis underestimates the complex conditions and reflective potential of the contemporary stage. A play like Elfriede Jelinek's The Charges (the Supplicants) does not take the appearance of "real people" for granted. Rather, it explores the question what it means to enter a stage, to make an appearance, and to take on or receive a role, even "as oneself." And it highlights especially what it means to appear as a "stateless," in the double sense of being without state and being without status. Not only any claim for authenticity is very much up for debate here, but the very foundations of mimetic as well as of performative art is being explored. In Jelinek's text, the question of asylum on the one hand, and the very nature of the theater on the other are fundamentally linked.

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Things We Learn

Things come to us
out of nowhere

they come

Surfers riding waves
we learn the nuances of gravity
its center-of, its bonding property,
its Gs, its fatal promise, we learn
how to stand erect and,
for the most part, stay that way
learn how to take a fall
how to shuck and jive
through sticky moments
through disequilibrium to stoop
or, chest out, stand tall
falling even into the troughs of its waves
we ride, we glide skulls full of juice
snapping, crackling through calculations
needed to adjust, adjust
we learn to know the force of the wave
behind, its feel, learn to fear and not to,
to not let its immensity in terror lock us,
to knock us off our board, we learn
immediately where our feet should be,
the optimal pose, how to shift without thought,
to enter the exhilaration of a barrel
and ride despite threat of a lethal dive
to surface sane, with soul intact, alive

Jim Culleny
2/18/17

by Paul Braterman

Evolution has nothing to do with progress. Most evolution doesn't even have anything to do with adaptation, and it is perfectly possible for a change that is worse than useless to spread through a population. Paradoxically, however, such non-adaptive change may be a necessary prelude for major adaptations.

This post was inspired by a recent opinion piece (open access here¹) in BMC Biology, entitled "Splendor and misery of adaptation, or the importance of neutral null for understanding evolution" (I will explain what "neutral null" means later). The paper itself is in parts highly technical, with 86 references to the original scientific literature, but I will try here to give a general overview of some of the main conclusions, and to place them in context.

Darwin and Wallace both thought that evolution was driven by selection. If so, then whenever we find a feature in an organism, it makes sense to ask what function it serves. The function may for example be help in survival (natural selection, in the narrowest sense of the term), or help in obtaining mating opportunities (sexual selection).

L: The recurrent laryngeal nerve passing under the aortic arch. Illustration by Jkwchui after Truthseeker-2004, via Wikipedia

Because the evolution of a species is constrained by its history, there will be features that are themselves non-adaptive, but come about as side-effects of more important adaptive changes. Such incidental maladaptions include the tortuous paths of major nerves and arteries, which have arisen as the unwanted by-product of changes in body plan since our fish-like ancestors. One well-known example is the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which loops under the aorta near the heart and back up again on its way from the cranium to the larynx and oesophagus. In a fish, its path is more or less a straight line, but as the heart has moved down in the body, and the aorta with it, the nerve has been forced into this contorted pathway.

Likewise, we can expect to find vestigial organs, which once had a function, and are now redundant, but have not yet completely disappeared. An example is the pelvis of the whale, inherited from its four-legged ancestors. Such vestigial organs often acquire secondary functions, in the phenomenon known as exaptation. The bones in the mammalian ear, related to bones in a reptile's flexible jaw, illustrate this. [Insert diagrams: whale pelvis; jaw-to-ear] And indeed whales use their pelvis and femur relics in sexual embraces.

R: Sperm whale with drawing of skeleton, NOAA via Wikipedia

Adaptationism is the view that all aspects of an organism are, directly or indirectly, the result of selection. So every feature needs to be explained, either in terms of its own function, or as an incidental relic or side-effect of more directly functional features. This is a natural enough assumption, but like all assumptions it requires justification. Otherwise it is merely a "Just So" story.

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by Yohan J. John

As a neuroscientist, I am frequently asked about consciousness. In academic discourse, the celebrated problem of consciousness is often divided into two parts: the "Easy Problem" involves identifying the processes in the brain that correlate with particular conscious experiences. The "Hard Problem" involves murkier questions: what are conscious experiences, and why do they exist at all? This neat separation into Easy and Hard problems, which comes courtesy the Australian philosopher David Chalmers, seems to indicate a division of labor. The neuroscientists, neurologists and psychologists can, at least in principle, systematically uncover the neural correlates of consciousness. Most of them agree that calling this the "Easy Problem" somewhat underestimates the theoretical and experimental challenges involved. It may not be the Hard Problem, but at the very least it's A Rather Hard Problem. And many philosophers and scientists think that the Hard Problem may well be a non-problem, or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein might have said, the kind of problem that philosophers typically devise in order to maximize unsolvability.

One might assume that as a neuroscientist, I should be gung-ho to prove the imperious philosophers wrong, and to defend the belief that science can solve any sort of problem one might throw at it: hard, soft, or half-baked. But I have become increasingly convinced that science is severely limited in what it can say about consciousness. In a very important sense, consciousness is invisible to science.

The word "consciousness" means different things to different people, so it might help to cover some of the typical ways its used. The most objective notion of consciousness arises in the world of medicine. We don't usually require a degree in philosophy to tell when a person is conscious and when they are unconscious. The conscious/unconscious distinction is only loosely related to subjective experience: we say a person is unconscious if they are unresponsive to stimuli. These stimuli may come from outside the body, or from the still-mysterious wellspring of dreams.

But the interesting thing about any "medical" definition of consciousness is that it evolves with technology.

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OLD FLAME

So, I took off her blouse as she raised her arms
A trumpeter blared outside my window
She ran her fingers through my hair
I unclasped her bra

Trumpeter boomed a tune I’d heard before
“My husband will be angry if I stay”
Tip of my tongue touched her nipple
She unzipped my fly

“I should go back to my husband”
She sipped my scotch neat
Unzipped, the flame leapt
I kissed her nipples red

We savored the scotch as our lips met
My tongue trailed south from her nipples
No bush by the door bloomed
She straddled me on the king bed

My tongue brushed the door where no bush bloomed
She sighed as the epicenter shook
“Hey Hey Ho Ho: Trumpeter Must Go”
Arms raised, her hands waved double O

By Rafiq Kathwari/ @brownpundit/ rafiqkathwari.com

by Elise Hempel

I admit that Obama sometimes bored me. Not when he was fired up, almost singing, gospel-style, at a rally. Not when he was broadly smiling, affectionately joking with Joe Biden or being teased by Michelle. Not even when he was doing a serious interview with Steve Kroft, leaning forward with his hands together, deep-voiced. But during a press conference, fielding a random question – the long pauses for thought, the even longer, deliberate responses…. That's when I'd change the channel or walk out of the room for a snack. But no matter. I always knew that behind his ability to bore was a solid president, a decent man.

One afternoon last year, standing at the kitchen sink, I heard a low, almost-monotone, almost-mumbling voice that kept drifting here and there as it spoke, a voice that seemed to have no direction. I thought the radio was on in my partner's office, tuned to some daytime talk show, a soft-voiced FM deejay meandering, filling the air-space. But when I walked out of the kitchen I saw that what I'd been hearing was really the TV, a Trump rally my partner, Ray, had paused on in his channel-surfing. What I'd been hearing was really Donald Trump going on and on about something, changing from one thing to the next without transition, filling time and somehow having filled the venue with a crowd. How could anyone possibly stay awake at his rallies? (And, standing now in the living-room with the dish towel in my hand, staring at the television screen, is it possible that I noticed the possibly-paid spectators directly behind Trump turning their heads in distraction, shifting in boredom, laughing with each other about something, anything, besides what Trump was rambling on about?)

Steve Bannon has called Donald Trump "probably the greatest orator since William Jennings Bryan." (Huh?) And I've read a handful of articles that say that people like me just don't get it: Trump speaks in a language, with a style understood by only his fervent supporters. Might it really be that, as Donald Trump rambles, his supporters are hearing, through the static and "white noise," only the bits that catch their ear, that serve their needs and wants, as I do when I'm "wool-gathering" while my partner talks, my head finally turning when he says he'll watch tonight's real-life murder show with me, or as my dog does when, somewhere in the endless jumble of my baby-talk, I speak the word "bone" or "kitty" or "walkies"?

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by Max Sirak

Happy Presidents Day, ‘Murica!!!

Ah, nothing like a made-up holiday to honor the CEO of our oligarchy.

Mmmm…drink it in. It goes down jagged with a bitter and retching aftertaste. Which is good. It means we're of a like mind and among friends.

3QD is a bastion of thought. It's a place where words still mean things and facts still matter. It's a digital, international safe space for liberal sisters and brothers. It's a place to exchange ideas, gather, and garner support.

This last point is important. It's easy to look around today, become discouraged, and feel alone.

But we are not alone. We all have friends and loved ones who are fighting or flighting. I know I've spent a good amount of time recently trying to figure out what I can do to make things better. My quest has led to me to travel in time and look back. Today I'd like to share some of what I've found.

So – whether you're running away or ‘rastling to make the world a better place – here are some things I've learned over the last month.

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by Christopher Bacas

I left a Texas college somewhere between my Sophomore and Junior years. My body and saxophone continued to attend for another year and half. Degree requirements unfulfilled, I eventually packed and left with some South Carolina buddies, padding my stereo and lps with tangled knots of dirty laundry. High on speed, we drove sleepless; taking a stealthy moonlight swim in a motel pool en route. After dumping stuff at my parents' house, we rolled on to New York City, then in its' early 80's menacing, funky glory. Greatness poured out of musicians everywhere, as Steve Wonder says "Jus' like I pitchered it". I was only visiting, though. It was all too scary.

Back home in Pennsylvania, I practiced for the big leagues. A new local eatery, with a Vonnegut-inspired name, featured fine local musicians. I went by to sit in. A trumpet player, mostly legit guy,played as well; having fun after his lawyer day-gig. He noticed the shaggy tenor player blasting away with schoolboy enthusiasm. After talking down our city (as if I didn't know it was backwards), he encouraged me to join the Musician's Union and take advantage of their bookings. They could swear me in at the next meeting.

The Union office sat between a hat shop and barber on the town's western-running main drag.

Its' interior, one large room with beat-up office furniture and framed band photos. Our local hung tough as gigs, dues, and membership declined. Its' crown jewel, a community band, once led by Music Man-monikered Elwood Sprigle, remained strong. I introduced myself to the secretary, who smiled sweetly when told I attended the city high school. As the folding chairs around me filled, I barely looked up. The men, my father's age or older, ignored me. Roberts' Rules brought the meeting to order. After sad, monotone reporting on finances and the many bars and clubs using non-Union bands, the floor went to the business agent.

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by Holly A. Case

Suzi Dada. Budapest, 2014 “plus or minus 8 years”

A few years ago someone took a photograph in Budapest of a slight young woman blowing on a street sign that appears to bend under the superhuman force. From a passing car an astonished driver looks on. The woman is Suzi Dada. She's funny, but her superhuman strength is real, and it's serious.

Dada is forever getting into the right kind of trouble. She's been confronted by police, the Hungarian secret service, and members of the extreme right party Jobbik. Unable to rely on her parents for support since starting college around the turn of the millennium, she has long been independent and self-reliant, not to mention a free radical. It took her nearly ten years to finish her university degree in history and education, but during that time she started an underground art group called Szub-Art Club for the Support of Contemporary Artistic and Subcultures, and co-founded a prankster street art group known as the Two-Tailed Dog that has since become a locus of opposition to the nationalist, anti-pluralist government of Viktor Orbán. Her attitude about almost always being the only woman who's doing what she's doing is, “I don't do it as a woman. I just do it.”

Suzi went to university in Szeged, a quiet college town near the Serbian border with a good cinema, very good ice cream, and a lot of students. Back in the 1990s, many of them were looking outward while reflecting inward: devouring literature, learning languages, hosting concerts and dance parties, and traveling the world every chance they got. In the 2000s, Dada's generation got into electronic music, extreme sports, and street art. These subcultures were little known and barely tolerated in Szeged, so Suzi organized a demonstration of skateboarders' skills for local retirees who had hitherto viewed the youngsters as “street kids with baggy pants,” rather than the winners of international skating competitions that many of them were.

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On particle “action at a distance”: “…if particles have definite states even when
no one is looking (a concept known as realism) and if indeed no signal
travels faster than light (locality)… (and, as has) recently been
discovered … you can keep locality and realism by giving up just a little
bit of freedom.” This is known as the “freedom-of-choice” loophole.
……………………………………………………………………….. —per physicist John Bell

Action at a Distance
.

He was not looking but

she really was not an apparition
standing at the center of the room
loving him

She was standing but

being there in that spot
precisely where she was,
not on the moon, say,
nor in the wind gathering speed
toward eternity (though
that wind always blew) he knew she
loved him

They were free but

things are not always what they seem.
The world’s a funny place.
Even Einstein said parts of it are spooky,
yet we love and hate
in the places we stand
practicing all in freedom, or not

Yet he knew
.

Jim Culleny
2/8/17

by Hari Balasubramanian

Thoughts on the differences in math applied to the physical and social sciences.

The quote in the title is attributed to the statistician George Box. The term ‘model' could refer to a single equation, a set of equations, or an algorithm that takes an input and carries out some calculations. Box's point is that you can never capture a physical or biological or social system entirely within a mathematical or algorithmic framework; you always have to leave something out. Put another way, reality yields itself to varying degrees but never completely; something always remains unknown that is not easily describable.

And in any case, for the practical matter of achieving a certain outcome that extra effort may not be necessary. If the goal is to put a satellite into orbit, the equations that define Newton's laws of motion and gravity, though not 100% correct, are more than sufficient; you don't need Einstein's theories of relativity though they would provide a more accurate description. But if the goal is to determine a GPS device's location on earth you do need relativity. This is because for an observer on earth a clock on an orbiting satellite ticks at a different speed than a clock on earth and if the necessary adjustments are not made, your phone's location estimate will be inaccurate.

So there is this art in modeling, this choosing of some aspects and ignoring others, trying to create the the right approximations. As Box notes: "there is no need to ask the question 'Is the model true?'. If 'truth' is to be the 'whole truth' the answer must be 'No'. The only question of interest is 'Is the model illuminating and useful?'"

Models vary widely in the amount of truth they capture. In the engineering disciplines that exploit physical laws – mechanical, chemical, civil, electronics and communications engineering – the test of a model is whether the mathematical answers match empirical observations to the degree of precision needed and whether the results can be reproduced again and again.

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