by Thomas R. Wells

The internet has made it easier than ever to speak to others. It has empowered individuals, allowing us to publish our opinions without convincing a publishing company of their commercial value; to find and share others' views on matters we concern ourselves with without the fuss of photocopying and mailing newspaper clippings; and to respond to those views without the limitations of a newspaper letter page. In this sense the internet has been a great boon to the freedom of speech.

Yet that very ease of communication has brought problems of its own that may actually limit the freedom part of free speech, the ability to speak our mind to those we wish without fear of reprisal.

I

The first problem is that what was once a difficult endeavour – to bring our words to the attention of others – is becoming difficult to avoid. An increasing amount of speech and its proxies, such as the expression of preferences, is subject to automatic publication to the world. If not by us, if we are very careful with all our privacy settings, then by the devices and apps of those we talk to. It is becoming hard to guarantee a private conversation.

That matters because the way one expresses oneself in conversation, to specific people, is not how one sets out one's thoughts to the world, when one is trying to reach and impress strangers with one's ideas. The old difference between speech and publication, and all the pains publication required, respected that distinction.

Speech is extemporary. It is often part of an ongoing relationship in which the parties know each other and have a common knowledge and context to relate to. It may be experimental in style and content, especially between people who know each other well, reflecting not your settled views but ideas you are curious about and phrasings your want to try out. There are often bad jokes and failed lines of reasoning and backtrackings, and this is normal and forgivable because everyone understands that conversation is dialectical, an attempt to make progress together. In persuading another it is normal to reach for the ad hominem approach, to adapt your arguments to the capacities, inclinations, and beliefs of those one is talking to.

Publication in contrast is – or was – a distinct and daunting undertaking, requiring much diligence and prudence in framing a particular expression of your ideas that may stand the test of the scrutiny of all sorts of readers without your being able to step in to explain what you meant.

Read more »

by Leanne Ogasawara

Friends have been talking about Michael J. Lewis' recent article, How Art Became Irrelevant. An art historian at Williams College, Lewis is basically stating what we all have come to suspect: that museums have become the bread and circuses of our day.

Arguing that that there has been a collective disengagement with the fine arts in our society, he says that young people no longer care or have an emotional response to the art works themselves. And that is a worry.

Like many people, I have wondered about the pretty significant changes seen in art museums over the past twenty years. I'm pretty sure that no one passing the mob in the room where the Mona Lisa is hanging in the Louvre could fail to wonder if the picture itself is in any real way relevant to the experience of “seeing the Mona Lisa.” Especially fresh in my mind was something that recently happened to me at the Uffizi. Standing in front of Botticelli's Venus on a very crowded summer weekend, an American family of five stepped up right in front of the painting and posed while someone else took multiple versions of their picture. It was a rather long process involving corralling the kids and then the posed shots. It was bizarre.

In LA, it is said that people go to the Getty but they don't look at the art. The Getty is putting on more photography exhibitions and flashy blockbuster shows now, maybe to address the financial implications of this (though you would think of all museums the Getty with its massive budget could do its own thing as directed by its own particular history and the endowment).It's actually not at all clear whether it is the commodification and privatization of museums (museums' disturbing transformation) that has affected these changes in museum-goers that Lewis describes or whether their lack of care is what is driving the transformation of museums into entertainment hubs. I have no idea.

Read more »

by Matt McKenna

There’s a scene in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation in which CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) describes to a Senate oversight committee just how insane the IMF’s counter-terrorism practices are why the department should be shut down immediately. To provide context for readers unfamiliar with the Mission Impossible show or series, the IMF (Impossible Mission Force) is the franchise's super-secret government agency that tracks down bad guys–specifically those with violent, existential issues–and eradicates them. As you can imagine, over the course of each of their missions, the IMF explodes a goodly number of cars, helicopters, buildings, etc. Anyway, Hunley lands some great points about how the IMF is more of a liability than an asset because it has no accountability for the mayhem it causes. To drive home his claim about the recklessness of the IMF, Hunley shows footage from the previous Mission Impossible film in which, as a result of the IMF’s attempts to stop some such bad guy, a nuclear warhead grazes the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco and falls into the Bay, narrowly avoiding detonation. If the best the IMF can do is just barely avoid world-ending calamities via last-second heroics that nonetheless cause millions/billions/trillions in damage, Hunley suggests, perhaps it’s time to put our faith in a different form of international relations.

Read more »

by William L. Benzon

The first time I heard the phrase – “white black man” – Zola Kobas was talking about me. He paid me that compliment after hearing me play the trumpet at a July 4th party hosted by a mutual friend, Ade Knowles. When, three-quarters of a life ago, I had originally become interested in jazz, I was simply pursuing music which moved me. That Zola, a political fugitive from South African apartheid, should see me as a white black man affirmed the African spirit, the joy, the freedom and dignity, I cultivated in the heart of jazz.

When I was a young boy learning to play the trumpet I looked for musical heroes. Rafael Mendez, a Mexican-American who made his living playing in Hollywood studios, was my first. I admired his virtuosity and expressiveness. I was particularly attracted by the Hispanic part of his repertoire, with its tone colors and rhythms which sounded so exotic, and sensual. Then I discovered jazz.

By William Gottlieb, Carnegie Hall, New York, NY, April 1947.

My first jazz record was A Rare Batch of Satch, which I had urged my parents to get through their record club. I had heard that this Louis Armstrong was an important trumpet player and thought I should check him out. At first I didn't quite understand why this man was so important. For one thing, this was an old recording and the sound quality was thin. I had to hear through that. For another, I’d never heard anything quite like it.

But I listened and listened and, gradually, I learned to hear Armstong’s music. There was his tone – by turns jubilant, plaintive, tightly-coiled, tender – his ability to bend notes, to worry them. And his rhythm, his amazing ability to stretch or compress time, to float phrases over the beat. This rhythmic freedom was quite unlike anything I knew in the military band music which was the staple of my instructional and playing experience, the latter mostly in middle school and high school marching and concert bands. It was exciting.

Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

Big news: millions of married people, mainly men, are using the Internet to try to cheat on their spouses. The Ashley Madison hack scandal, the data dump of records of 32 million would-be adulterers, is apparently a surprise to some people. Not to me. Ever since I started online dating after my divorce, I’ve been blown away by the realization of just how many people, not all men, but probably primarily men, are in some way or another looking to cheat on a spouse. Based on the interactions I had over a few years, I’d break down these men (and I was only interacting with men) into a few categories:

1. Saying they’re in open marriages – maybe they are, maybe they’re not.
2. Feeling out the waters, maybe indulging in some online flirtation for titillation but probably wouldn’t go through with anything in person – probably
3. Making their status as married men looking for an affair very clear upfront – not many of these
4. Pretending to be single and actively cheating on spouses

I was a big Googler of men I was considering dating. Call me paranoid, suspicious, closed minded, whatever you want. The fact is, what I used to find by pretty simple Google searches of these men was pretty horrifying. There was the guy whose Tinder profile photo turned out to be his wedding photo up on Facebook, except with his wife cropped out for his dating profile. When I called him on his marital status, he of course initially tried to pretend otherwise. When I told him his wife’s name and where she lived (people, secure your Facebook pages for heaven’s sake), he finally spiraled through a bunch of lies: they were separated – I pointed out that in a Facebook post the week before she called him the love of her life and said that these 3 months of marriage – yes, they were newlyweds – had been the happiest of her life. Then he told me that he was planning on leaving her, she just didn’t know yet. Then, he told me she was pregnant.

Read more »

by Eric Byrd

Angelo Maria Ripellino (1923 – 1978) was a poet, Slavicist, translator of the great Russian Symbolists and Silver Agers (Bely's Petersburg into Italian, a transmutation as arduous and heroic as any of Ulysses, from what I've heard Nabokov say), and, most memorably, a servant of Czech letters whose devotion extended, in one instance, to the patient chaperoning of Věra Linhartová in her cognac-confused dipsomaniacal descent on Rome. Shortly after the Second War, Ripellino went to study in Prague, married a Czech woman, and lived in Prague for some years. He became a student of the city's hauntings and urban demonology, its “lugubrious aura of decay” and “smirk of eternal disillusionment.” Denied visas after the Soviet invasion in 1968, he joined the émigrés in a sympathetic semi-exile. Shut out of Prague, “perhaps forever,” Ripellino caught himself “wondering whether Prague exists or if she is an imaginary land,” and under an exilic gloom compounded of ill-health and nostalgia, “despair and second thoughts,” he composed – gathered – dreamt – Magic Prague (1973). Mournful anatomy, elegiac bricolage, rarefied and classless as the best books are; a civic enchantment (as St. Petersburg and Dublin had been enchanted), an ark of motifs, an “itinerary of the wondrous”:

How then can I write an exhaustive, well-ordered treatise like a detached and haughty scholar, suppressing my uneasiness, my restlessness with a rigor mortis of methodology and the fruitless discussions of disheartened formalists? No, I will weave a capricious book, an agglomeration of wonders, anecdotes, eccentric acts, brief intermezzos and mad encores, and I will be gratified if, in contrast to so much of the printed flotsam and jetsam surrounding us, it is not dominated by boredom…I will fill these pages with scraps of pictures and daguerreotypes, old etchings, prints purloined from the bottoms of chests, réclames, illustrations out of old periodicals, horoscopes, passages from books on alchemy and travel books printed in Gothic script, undated ghost stories, album leaves and keys to dreams: curios of a vanished culture.

Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Textbook discussions of logic often proceed as if reasoning were a relatively simple, albeit challenging, process. One simply begins from one's evidence, articulates one's premises, and then, by means of the application of rules of induction or deduction, one draws one's conclusion. On this common picture, the assessment of reasoning fixes on two main elements: (1) the quality of one's premises given one's evidence; and (2) the quality of the inference by which one's conclusion is drawn. From this perspective, there has emerged a wealth of important theorizing about the various logical properties that reasoning can embody, including validity, soundness, cogency, and supportiveness.

Yet we all know that in real-time contexts, reasoning is a far more complicated affair. For one thing, real-time reasoning occurs under conditions where one must draw one's conclusion on the basis of partial or conflicted evidence. We often must reason while relevant evidence is still being gathered and evaluated. Reasoning, under these conditions, inevitably involves the drawing of provisional conclusions based on premises rooted in incomplete evidence. Consequently, reasoning in real-time is largely a matter of coordinating and calibrating one's conclusion with an unsteady and still-developing evidential environment. Moreover, much of the reasoning we do as issues develop is reason in light of the fact that we often already have a view on the matter. We've drawn a conclusion earlier, and now we are revisiting the question of whether we must revise it. That is, we must not only reason critically before we form beliefs, but we also must reason critically after we form them, too. To employ a philosopher's distinction: textbook treatments emphasize the role reasoning plays in the acquisition and justification of beliefs, whereas in real-world contexts reasoning has mainly to do with the maintenance and revision of beliefs.

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

To say math is about numbers is like saying writing is about words. You can use words well or badly, but in the end it is the things and ideas they represent which are important. Just so with numbers.

I have a clear memory of learning in middle school that the plots of Shakespeare's plays were nothing but retreads of older tales. With the certainty of youth I wrote off Shakespeare as nothing but an over-glorified plagiarist. It took a few years to come around to the realization you don't read Shakespeare after all these years for the plots, but for his deep study of human nature and unmatched skill with words. Will could put the right words in the right order and really zing: “How well he's read, to reason against reading!” or “Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing”.

But, as every logophile knows, words as words are fun, too. Every language has a rich vocabulary. It can be great fun to flip through a dictionary and find words which are unexpected, funny sounding, intriguing, insightful, etc. I am terrible at foreign languages. Not only am I tone deaf to pronunciation, but my memory always locks onto the words which are interesting, obscure, and utterly useless in everyday communication. Twenty years after studying Hungarian I remember hepehupás is the word for bumpy. Why? For the singularly silly reason that saying it makes you sound like you're bumping along a rutted country road.

In just the same way there are numberphiles who enjoy curious numbers. They have raging internet arguments over the great Pi vs. Tau controversy. They know why 1729 is called a “taxi cab” number. Or why Google is called Google.

Here be giants.

I myself have a fondness for what I call Brobdingnagian Numbers. Brobdingnag is the land of giants in Gulliver's Travels. When doing math you find yourself using such staggeringly large numbers that you become numb to how big they really are. But it's worth taking note of them and it can be quite fun to collect the ridiculously large numbers you come across in your travels.

My snarky middle school self wouldn't have cared about such things since you can always add one to get a bigger number. But we've already established that he was an idiot who didn't know how to appreciate the finer things in life and we choose to ignore him.

Read more »

Bidding Adieu
.

gimme a new piece of
the big Mysterium
—the words had barely left his lips
when he died again in cognate delirium
choking on the language of things

clues

science is a big Imperium
religion is too
but one (at least) gives credit to
what the other calls g-o-d
for having offered to all: experience
and the capacity to question
—to cogitate and guess at what is and what’s not,
what’s coming and what is, as we speak, bidding

adieu

Jim Culleny
8/15/15

by Kathleen Goodwin

Education is arguably the most interesting lens by which one is able to view the race issue at the core of American society. I would venture that there are many white Americans who pay lip service to the value of diversity but wouldn't dream of sending their children to a school that isn't predominantly white. It's a complex hypocrisy, however, considering that schools with a white minority are underfunded, overcrowded, and underperforming with very few exceptions.

The two most recent episodes of the Chicago Public Media produced “This American Life” perform a deep dive into racial desegregation of public schools in American cities. Over the course of two hours, the podcast's creators explore a tactic that few districts are willing to tackle in modern America—actively dismantling the structures that allow white kids to go to school with mostly other white kids in good schools and for black and Latino kids to go to segregated subpar schools. One of the contributors to the podcast, Nikole Hannah-Jones, herself a product of an integration program in a small Iowa town, summarizes the argument for desegregation:

“I think it's important to point out that it is not that something magical happens when black kids sit in a classroom next to white kids…What integration does is it gets black kids in the same facilities as white kids. And therefore, it gets them access to the same things that those kids get– quality teachers and quality instruction.”

The most successful method of ensuring that black and Latino children receive a quality education is by integrating school systems because “separate but equal”, in addition to being morally repugnant, has never been a legitimate reality in the U.S. However when school desegregation is implemented white parents oppose it—to the point of rioting as the 1970s in Boston revealed. By the late 1980s most school districts decided that integration wasn't worth the trouble it caused. The first episode makes this point apparent with clip after clip of angry white parents at a town meeting after it is announced that their affluent Missouri school district must absorb the students from a poor, predominantly black district that has lost accreditation, coincidentally the same district that Michael Brown attended.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“Dear Cecil! I have no secrets from you.”
~ Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost

Remember Cecil the Lion? It wasn't that long ago, but given the half-life of outrage on the Internet, I will forgive you a moment of head-scratching. Let me summarize that Cecil was lured from his protected home in Zimbabwe to an adjoining game reserve only to be shot, tracked for 40 hours, finished off, and finally decapitated by a dentist from Minnesota and his co-conspirators, all of whom, the Internet has resoundingly agreed, are cowards. Said dentist, a certain Walter Palmer, has since seen his business vandalized, and has gone into hiding after receiving death threats against himself and his family. He has generally been subjected to enough unpleasantries that would rival the most botched root canal. Such is the nature of Internet justice today.

You may cry, He deserves it! Killing such a magnificent beast, etc etc. I don't dispute the obviously reprehensible barbarism of this act. But the anachronistic nature of big game hunting has been followed up by the equally anachronistic resurgence of public shaming and mob justice. So let's take a closer look at how – or better yet, why – the citizenry of the Internet fearlessly takes up the mantle of vigilantism, and to what effect. I've decided to divide this post into two parts: this first part will discuss a few concrete examples of public shaming, and the second will look at some theoretical frameworks that may help us make sense of it all.

*

Before Cecil the Lion, there was Justine Sacco. For those of you with exceptionally long Internet memories – and to be clear, I'm not sure why having a long memory for things Internet-related is that useful, as it's just depressing to see the same things repeated in ever-quickening cycles – Sacco was the senior director of corporate communications for IAC, a billion-dollar media corporation. Jetting off to South Africa for family holidays in winter 2013, she tweeted a few poorly considered thoughts to her 170 followers but struck outrage gold with the one that said “Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!”

We could try to parse what she actually meant by that. For example, a generous interpretation would be that she was sarcastically musing on the conditions of white privilege. It's more likely that she wasn't thinking very much at all. What is certain is that, by the time her plane landed, her career was effectively over.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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]

Read more »

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.)

Read more »