by Mike O’Brien

I recently read a post by Agnes Callard discussing a philosophical novel (how dreadful) entitled “The Man Without Qualities”. The titular character is an essayist, a figure standing in stark contrast to philosophers. The essayist seeks novelty and surprise, the ephemeral glitters of new and interesting “perspectives”. He lacks the courage for the philosopher’s burdensome and risky enterprise of seeking long and hard for answers that may never reveal themselves. “Thinking long and hard”, writes Callard, “makes sense if you want answers; it makes less sense if the highest reward you anticipate from your intellectual efforts is surprise”.

I was already conscious of the distinction between the writing that I do, and what is done by the philosophers whose work I discuss. But it stings a little more when someone else points it out. Thanks, Agnes.

Casting “The Man Without Qualities” as a cautionary tale of stunted intellectual life, Callard writes that “[t]he book … shows us what it is like to be a thinker without a quest; perpetually idle in spite of all one’s ceaseless, restless intellectual activity.”

Such a description could find no more unfitting targets than Jonathan Birch and his latest book, “The Edge of Sentience”. This publication, like the rest of Birch’s voluminous output, exemplifies the ethic of philosophy as productive work, rather than some kind of divine communion, or clever puzzle-building, or sly apologetics. Birch clearly explains his project to the reader, and frequently re-iterates the book’s key principles and criteria to keep that project firmly in view. He is not trying to surprise or dazzle, or hide gems for only the most insightful and subtle readers to discover through exegetical pilgrimage. This book is not trying to showcase Birch’s talents or seduce the reader into sharing Birch’s prejudices, but rather seeks to clearly convey relevant information and to articulate a consistent set of proposals with reasonable chances of implementation in public institutions. “The Edge Of Sentience” is a book with a public agenda, and Birch executes it well. A recent review in Nature called it “a masterclass in public-facing philosophy”, in case my opinion isn’t authoritative enough for you. Read more »

by Hari Balasubramanian

Ecology is quite distant from my academic work in engineering, but I’ve developed a great love for it in recent years. To learn the basics, I’ve tried many books and articles, but I often turn to the college-level biology textbook Principles of Life. Like many academic texts, this one is not suited for cover-to-cover reading – at over 1000 pages, it is too heavy even to hold comfortably! Still, every time I’ve flipped through its pages, there’s been something interesting to reflect on.

My favorite figure (below) is from the book’s ecology section, and it leads us to the biodiversity theme of this essay. The biological diversity of a region can be quantified in many ways. One intuitive measure is the number of distinct species of a taxonomic group in the region — for instance, the number of species of birds, mammals, or primates found there.

The bar graph on the right shows how the number of butterfly species in the swallowtail family (x-axis) varies by latitude in the Americas (y-axis). In the formal taxonomic system, the family is called Papilionidae and it contains over 550 species. The graph tells us that the number of swallowtail species in the Americas – and hence swallowtail diversity – increases as we move from the higher latitudes in the north and south toward the equator, where it peaks. It’s fascinating that the species count distribution follows a bell curve centered around the equator, but it’s skewed towards the north, perhaps because North America contains more land area. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

Because I serve as an arbitrator for FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, I have a Disclosure Report posted on the FINRA website. That 11-page document shows my employment history, education and training, and it lists every place I’ve had an investment account, every agency where I’ve served as an arbitrator, every professional organization I belong to, and it provides a link to each of my FINRA decisions.

Parties who have cases with FINRA can review that report when they are selecting their arbitration panel. If I am selected to serve on a panel, I am required to complete a more case-specific Arbitrator Disclosure Checklist. That 14-page document requires me to disclose:

1. any direct or indirect financial or personal interest in the outcome of the arbitration;
2. any existing or past financial, business, professional, family, social, or other relationships or circumstances with any party, any party’s representative, or anyone who the arbitrator is told may be a witness in the proceeding, that are likely to affect impartiality or might reasonably create an appearance of partiality or bias;
3. any such relationship or circumstances involving members of the arbitrator’s family or the arbitrator’s current employers, partners, or business associates; and
4. any existing or past service as a mediator for any of the parties in the case for which the arbitrator was selected.

There’s more. The duty to disclose is ongoing. We could be four days into a hearing when a witness appears who I recognize from a previous case. I have a duty to disclose that fact when it occurs. FINRA arbitrators are required to complete training programs periodically, and the organization produces several publications. The thrust of those training programs and many of the publications is the importance of disclosure. The rule is to disclose anything that may appear to present a conflict of interest. The threshold is low: if the potential for the appearance of a conflict occurs to us, we are required to disclose it.

There are two reasons for this. Read more »

by Derek Neal

What do swimming, running, bicycling, dancing, pole jumping, tying shoelaces, and reading all have in common? According to John Guillory’s new book On Close Reading, they are all cultural techniques; in other words, skills or arts involving the use of the body that are widespread throughout a society and can be improved through practice. The inclusion of reading (and perhaps, tying shoelaces) may come as a surprise, but it is Guillory’s goal in this slim volume to convince us that reading, and in particular, the practice of “close reading,” is a technique just like the others he mentions. This is his explanation for the questions he explores throughout the book—namely, why the practice of “close reading” has resisted precise definition, and why the term itself was so seldom used by the New Critics, the group of theorists most associated with it.

Guillory’s own proposal for a definition of close reading is “showing the work of reading.” If this definition seems slight and unsatisfactory, it should. Guillory wants to avoid endlessly theorizing close reading because like all techniques, he says, it is better understood via demonstration and imitation. I agree with Guillory. If one wants to learn how to dance, one does not read a book on dancing; instead, they watch others dance and then mimic the movements they see until they can do it on their own. Close reading is the same, writes Guillory—“cultural techniques…cannot be specified verbally in such a way as to permit their transmission by verbal means alone.” If we want to learn how to close read, we might watch a teacher model close reading—perhaps they project a poem or a paragraph from a novel onto a screen (the standard objects for a close reading), analyze the language in it by identifying various poetic devices, such as symbolism or imagery, reveal an interpretation of the text in this way, then write an essay explaining their reading of the text. This is “showing the work of reading,” and after students observe the teacher doing it, they can try it and refine their technique through repeated practice. One could, of course, attempt a close reading of a text from the example I’ve outlined here, but it would be a bit like showing up to a dance having read about dancing but never having seen it practiced: demonstration and imitation are much more effective than theorizing.

Most readers will have their own experiences of close reading; I have two that I remember well. Read more »

by Laurence Peterson

When I started as a Monday columnist at 3 Quarks Daily in July of last year, my debut piece consisted of an updated and revised version of a longer, never published essay I had written pretty much at the time the late Princeton Professor Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit appeared in book form in 2005. Back then, literary references to bullshit almost always took on a still cheeky, irreverent undertone at the very least, and I adopted the sentiment in the beginning and conclusion of my 3QD contribution. But now, I will suggest, bullshit is serious business.

Before I elaborate on that claim, allow me to, as concisely as I can, summarize the argument I put forth in the July article. Frankfurt made the case that the essence of bullshit involved, more than anything else, a distinction between bullshit and lying: that the bullshitter, unlike the liar, does not misrepresent the truth; s/he merely adopts an attitude of indifference towards it. Clearly, this definition allows us to appreciate the vast latitude that allows the bullshitter to, if you will allow me to use a word that has become fashionable in certain circles recently, “weave” between layers of reality (and, of course unreality) in a far less restricted way than is generally afforded the potential liar. But from the moment I read Frankfurt’s essay, I thought his definition left something utterly essential out of a proper conception of bullshit, something whose incorporation into discussions of the notion of bullshit would go a long way towards accounting for the visceral emotional states that tend to accompany its appearance in ordinary usage. And it would confront something Frankfurt didn’t even seem to believe constituted a problem, namely, what the phenomenon of bullshit revealed about social relations in which employing bullshit often made so much sense.

What I thought Frankfurt was missing was, going beyond the mere intention of the bullshitter, a place for a sentiment on the part of those subjected to bullshit that no effective means exist to challenge the statement, implied proposition or even deed being expressed, put forward, implied, relied upon, or whatever by the bullshitter. Inclusion of this place in the account would, in turn, shed light on the social relations in which lack of means to such challenges can be enforced in the first place. It would also account for the unique sense of frustration, and even rage that characterizes the experience of being, or at least feeling, bullshitted. Frankfurt’s definition didn’t seem to me to imply or address any of these things in an important way. Yet it remained, as far as I could see, the sole, almost canonical reference in literary and philosophical discussions of bullshit, even after twenty years. Read more »

Not sure what has caused this river-like pattern in the greenish growth on this vertical concrete wall near where I live. It looks like a path water might take through a flattish landscape but this is a vertical wall. Any guesses?

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

Public philosophy isn’t new. The image that many people conjure up when they picture a quintessential philosopher—the image of Socrates—is the image of a public philosopher. Socrates didn’t write articles. He didn’t publish in peer reviewed journals. He had conversations with members of his community about subjects that matter. The practice of public philosophy is thriving today in a surprising number of forms. Different approaches give rise to meta-level questions about the nature of philosophy in general and the nature of public philosophy in particular. I’ll provide a non-exhaustive discussion of some of these approaches and then I’ll discuss perks and pitfalls of one approach in particular.

One of the most common forms that public philosophy takes is work written for a broad audience rather than an academic one. Public philosophers of this type write articles for media outlets and blogs as well as books intended for consumption by non-specialists. This work relays information or offers arguments. One advantage of such an approach is that experts can (ideally) summarize a critical mass of information succinctly, making it possible for the community to get at the heart of a philosophical issue quickly. 1,000 Word Philosophy, for instance, presents enduring philosophical questions along with summaries of some of the most compelling answers on offer in easily digestible articles.

Another form that public philosophy can take is facilitating active engagement with the history of philosophy. Public philosophers of this type might host open talks and panel discussions with experts. They might put together community reading groups. In Italy, a group of public philosophers has put together a philosophy museum that is open to the public. This form of public philosophy emphasizes the enterprise as a great conversation taking place across the duration of human history.

The third type of public philosophy and the type that I’ll discuss at length here is the approach that brings communities together to facilitate important conversations. This occurs in many settings: street corners, libraries, coffee houses, pizza parlors, and this approach acknowledges the philosophical spirit in everyone: the ability to give and respond to reasons, the capacity to develop and react with apt emotions in particular circumstances, the potential to weigh evidence and evaluate the trustworthiness of sources, and so on. Community members are actively participating in crafting and critiquing arguments. My husband, Dr. Richard Greene and I have put on many such events. We call them “Ethics Slams.” We’ve discussed issues such as climate change, gun control reform, and cancel culture. We begin by presenting a list of philosophical goals and commitments and then proceed to moderate open mic public conversations. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

“Think you can beat me today?”

I don’t have to think about my answer.

“100 percent. Might even break the course record.”

It’s three weeks before Christmas. Overly happy music is everywhere and everybody is out shopping. In this time of jolly tidings, my older sister and I have decided to have the ultimate showdown:

18 holes of mini golf.

Hannah has dubbed herself Princess Putt-Putt, but I’m not impressed.

It’s time to win.

*

Hannah is the closest to me in age. In a family of four brothers, she’s the only girl. And, as luck would have it, the middle child.

Surrounded by sibling relationships built on farts and sex jokes, the relationship I have with my sister is different. A little classier. A bit more refined. In a loud family, Hannah is a breath of fresh air, and she’s been there for me more than just about anyone.

But today none of that matters, because I have one goal and one goal only:

To destroy her.

*

Hidden Valley Miniature Golf is where it’s happening. The place is extra charming because it’s the same name as our hometown.

When we get there, though, it’s locked up.

We are about to drive away when our salvation arrives. An old man is shouting at us, walking down the steps of the motel next door. He drags his foot when he walks and has a lazy eye.

“Glad I caught ya. Don’t get many folks out here this time of year.”

I reach inside the car and give Hannah a thumbs up. Apparently an old guy sits on a motel balcony and just waits for people to show up. This has serial killer written all over it.

It’s all very weird, but somehow, for a place specializing in putt-putt, it’s exactly what I’d expect.

We don’t ask questions. All that matters is that he’s letting us in, because we’ve got ten bucks on the line. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Rebecca Baumgartner

I’m trying to read Walden. I also own a phone that gives me instantaneous access to the internet. These two things seem fundamentally at odds.

Whether our phone usage is a literal addiction that operates on the brain in the same way that alcohol and other addictive substances do, or whether the term “addiction” in this case is merely a metaphor, reasonable people agree that there is a problem with the way we use our phones. 

To own a smartphone is to look at a smartphone – a lot, often to the detriment of our happiness, productivity, relationships, social skills, and awareness of the world around us (both in the mundane yet potentially deadly “Hey, the light turned green” sort of way and the abstract “Look at that beautiful cloud” sort of way).

Most of us are worried about, frustrated about, and/or ashamed of who we become when our phones are in our hands. Obviously, this is not true of all smartphone users, but it is true enough, for enough people, that we should take heed of the insight underlying the generalization. 

While I haven’t fallen into the pit of Devil’s Snare that is Instagram or TikTok (or whatever the coolest data harvesting app is right now), I don’t consider myself at all virtuous when it comes to how I use my phone. This is because I let it consistently keep me from doing the things I truly love – first and foremost among them, reading. 

It’s not just that having a phone always at hand ruins my concentration and makes reading more difficult. It does that, for sure. But it’s also that having a tiny portal to the internet a few inches away makes particular types of reading even more difficult. If a book demands a level of engagement that seems deliberately calculated to drive a 2025 reader insane – as Walden does – it comes to seem philosophically impossible, or at least unreasonably hard, to make your way through it when your phone remains a viable option for your attention. As it always is. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Approaching Washington, November 2024.

Digital photograph.

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by Martin Butler

Behind many debates in contemporary culture lie two opposed perspectives on the human world. One argues that ordinary life consists largely of ‘social constructs’ in a sense ‘made up’ by human beings. They have no fixed reality beyond the human cultures and institutions in which they exist. Obvious examples are marriage, money and national borders. Others are more controversial: gender, standards of beauty, ethnicity, patriarchy, religious belief, adolescence, and so on. On the other side of the argument is the view that at least some of these concepts have a factual reality, whether based in biology, human nature, genetics, human evolution or some other deeper reality, an essential nature which is not merely the product of human culture. The term ‘essentialism’ is often used to describe this approach.

Social constructivism is a theory that has its home within the social sciences, it is not meant as a philosophical theory on a par with idealism, for example, which provides a global account of the nature of reality. Presumably describing something as a social construction contrasts it with what is not constructed. Few would want to argue that the atomic mass of carbon is a social construction. So social constructivism is a theory that sits within a broadly naturalistic account of reality. Despite appearances it has this much in common with at least the more scientific (usually biological) forms of essentialism. The debate, then, is presented as being about where to place the divide between the natural and the specifically human. We might say that money is uncontroversially a social construction and the atomic mass of carbon is uncontroversially not a human construction. The controversy exists in the middle ground.

I think this opposition distorts the issue. The language of ‘constructions’ obscures the fact that the human world is composed for the most part of normative practices. Normative practices are about what we do and say as we interact with each other and the world around us. A simple example is how we greet each other, something which shows considerable cultural variation. Crucially there is an appropriate and inappropriate way to greet someone, depending on relationship and context, and this is what makes such a practice normative. A construction of any sort suggests a static entity in the way that a chair is a physical construction, but it is these practices that matter and there is no sense in which they are static, nor do they ‘construct’ entities.

More importantly, the language of ‘constructions’ suggests artificiality in some sense, as if these constructions lack the reality of the natural world. Surely this is an empty comparison. To claim that national borders or marriage are only ‘constructions’ suggests a level of deception in cultures that treat these things seriously. To look reality squarely in the face, it is implied, is to recognise that they are not ‘real’. However, we may represent borders as lines on a map and regard these lines as in some sense fictional, but in no way does this get to the core of what a national border actually is. Read more »

by Malcolm Murray

Oops. During most of 2024, all the talk was of deep learning hitting a wall. There were secret rumors coming out of OpenAI and Anthropic that their latest training runs were disappointing. People were confidently stating that AI progress had now hit a plateau. Importantly, this was not just a few pundits that have bet their career on the current AI path being the wrong one, such as the Gary Marcuses of the world. It was all of tech and even mass media jumping on AI-hitting-a-wall meme.

And then what happened just at the end of the year? OpenAI announced its o3 model. A new model, with an unknown architecture, that achieves benchmark scores hitherto unimaginable. o3 achieves 88% on the ARC-AGI challenge, a benchmark designed to measure the efficiency of AI on novel tasks. o3 gets past 2,700 on Codeforces, making it comparable to the best developers in the world. Maybe most impressively, o3 gets 25% on FrontierMath, a benchmark created by Epoch AI just months earlier with the most fiendishly difficult math questions, where other AI models have literally had 0% correct (except o1, which had 2%).

The point of this post is not to argue that these are mind-blowing scores and that AGI has been achieved, as some were quick to do. There are always question marks in how the scores were achieved. For example, some people question whether having the model trained on some of the public ARC-AGI training set unduly influenced the results. Or perhaps, it only solved the easier questions in FrontierMath. But that is beside the point. The bigger point here is that, when it comes to AI evolution, prediction seems dead. As noted by Zvi Mowshowitz in his post on o3, no one saw this coming. Outside of OpenAI, the whole tech industry seemed all bought in on the AI has hit a wall meme. So what this means is that we need to stop focusing on trying to predict AI capabilities and instead focus on building resilience to AI risk. Rather than try to determine exactly when we will get specific AI capabilities, we need to start preparing society for its effects, so that the impact can be mitigated. Read more »

Crystal-Bison

out of coolblue
a bison

out of bitter cold
out of stratospheric skyblue
a crystal bison

from stillness, sheer,
mute as speech in utter space
from deadstill blueice
steps a crystal, a bison
apparition

a bison frozen in veneer of chilled time
cloven hooves to heaped hump
its mere eyes, its cryo-olfactory nose
smelldeaf due to rime

a crystalized bison steps forth
deliberate articulating jewel
hung round the neck of stilled rhyme
speechless

a graceful parentheses of horns
frames a frozen skull
each as sharp as the point of
breathingeverything
………… —intent: survive

Jim Culleny
1/29/19

Photograph by Tom Murphy

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by Jeroen Bouterse

In 2023, I wrote what I reckon was a calm, analytical column for this website, about how my country had talked itself into giving the xenophobic, far-right ‘Freedom Party’ a strong plurality of seats in Parliament. An equally level-headed update seems warranted, as its leader Geert Wilders has since maneuvered his party into leading the Netherlands’ coalition government, which we have now been able to observe in action for six months.

I spent a healthy share of that time, possibly even more than that, yelling at the daily news. Here we see the beauty of the written word, however: the process of creating a text provides an excellent opportunity to take a step back and find a broader, more generous perspective on things. Thanks to the alchemy of prose composition, my temperament and my primary emotional responses do not need to prevent me from giving you, the deserving reader, a balanced and distilled account of the state of politics in the Netherlands, and of the nihilistic bastards that currently dominate it. Indeed, I would hate for this to be just a longer version of the rants I post on unfashionable social media platforms, for the benefit of fewer and fewer friends. Be assured, then, that sublimated ideas and broadly applicable wisdom lie ahead, and not just expressions of rage and frustration. I am almost certain of it.

The phenomenon this essay will examine is that of the reluctant enabler. Like a group of youthful arsonists, the political burn-it-all-down faction tends to consist not only of Steve Bannon-level pyromaniacs, but also of impressionable, frightened, or calculating joiners. Usually, they at least pretend to be on board with the whole ‘setting fire to democratic institutions’ project. Rare is the teenager-slash-politician that actively carries kindling and matches to the target structure, all the while professing loudly that open fires are very dangerous and should be avoided at all times; adding, moreover, that they have never liked their friends, and cannot wait for the fire department to put a stop to this ill-fated enterprise. But that’s coalition government for you. Read more »

by David Winner

Angela, my wife, and I are over-educated middle-class white New Yorkers of a certain age.

My six months on Avenue D gave me a leg up in my search for further teaching positions around New York.  I was now deemed capable of teaching non-white students because I had taught non-white students before as if the teaching of non-white students were a skill unto itself.

I don’t know how cynical to be about such a formulation, but given the rowdy students of color depicted in so many movies and TV shows, it’s hard not to imagine that non-white students are somehow considered more difficult, their white instructors more trainers than teachers.  For the record – please forgive the invidious comparison – my biggest classroom struggles have been with white students, the kid at NYU who wrote “David Winner is an asshole” on his student evaluations.

Non-white classrooms have often been identified in job descriptions by peculiar racial dog-whistling, terms such as “population” (as if white people somehow aren’t that), “community” (same thing), “inner city,” “urban,” as if no white people live in cities.  “Diverse” and “multicultural” often just mean non-white rather than a confluence of different cultures.

Are all non-white students the same?  Can I be a “Black expert” and say, Judy, my fellow white person, be a “Latinx expert” and, Frank, an “Asian and Pacific Islander expert?” Graduate education in both the fields of ESL (English as a Second Language) and Social Work has sometimes answered these questions by the encouraging of stereotypes. On a hiring committee for an ESL professorship, I once listened to recently minted job candidates explaining to us about Chinese, Egyptian, Dominican people using hair-raisingly broad labels whereas a friend (white non-Hispanic like myself) “learned” in NYU’s Masters in Social Work program that she needed to be careful while working with Latinas because they might have an attack of “ataque,” a sort of loud hysterical fit that women from all over Latin America were deemed to be prone to. Read more »

by Terese Svoboda

My brother would roll his eyes back, shout applesauce or give me your hair, and fall to the ground in front of, say, the cheerleading squad, only to return to normal, dazed and confused, pale and clammy, with a big blank in his brain five minutes later. One in a hundred Americans suffer from incurable epilepsy, one-third of those untreatable. None of the many drugs prescribed for my brother’s epilepsy consistently prevented his seizures. The medication was never quite right; he was growing and his chemistry constantly changing, along with the pharmacology. Despite the disease’s very public manifestations, my parents’ approach wasn’t very helpful: if you don’t acknowledge the problem, it doesn’t exist. While my father wrestled my brother away before he fell to the floor and “things got out of hand,” we were supposed to act both surprised and unconcerned.

We tried. In high school, my tack was to pretend he didn’t exist. My sister, twenty months younger, remembers me ignoring her in high school too, so maybe it wasn’t so personal. My brother had only one friend, a fellow acne-pocked boy who barrel-raced with him in rodeos, and wasn’t too cruel. Suga, my brother’s quarter horse, wound around the obstacles with equine annoyance, and frequently tried to toss my brother from the saddle. Even Sugar knew. By not acknowledging my brother’s disease, or at least telling his siblings what to do when he was thrashing around and foaming at the mouth, my parents left us terrorized by the possibility of his collapse, afraid of him and for him. We weren’t even told to prevent him from swallowing his tongue, although now I think that doesn’t happen, it’s just another old wives tale people like to tell witnesses in the helplessness of a seizure. That we pretended he was just fine branded us as collaborators in our small town – he might as well have been contagious. The cost of epilepsy in a family is always more than just the patient’s suffering. I, for one, felt angry not being able to do anything, guilty that I avoided him, embarrassed that he behaved so weirdly, and perversely envious that he received so much attention from my parents. Read more »