by TJ Price

It’s a few days before Christmas, but it doesn’t feel like it. The weather app I use has subtitled the forecast for the holiday with a cheeky “feels more like Spring than Christmas,” and the temperature is hovering around seventy degrees Fahrenheit. I’m visiting family down in Cape Fear, and my nephew, all of four years old, sits rapt and silent for approximately ten minutes before abruptly transforming into a firecracker of noise, babbling and shrieking, a whirligig that hurls itself at the legs of whoever happens to first verify his existence. I’m probably reading into it, but it looks for all the world to me like a sudden paroxysm of solipsistic terror—as if he has been seized by the irrational and intrusive thought that (despite the empirical evidence of nearby voices and bodies moving to and fro in the kitchen) he is feeling a kind of doubt in his own ability to adequately integrate with the rest of us. 

I understand this feeling, I think. As a child, my family would bring me over to my grandmother’s house and conduct conversations that floated austerely over my head. Sometimes that height was intentional, positioned as such because they wanted it out of my reach, like the medicine they kept on the top shelf of the bathroom cabinet. Sometimes it was because they wanted to abstract complexity to the extent that it would befuddle me and discourage any continued questioning. (The joke was on them—more often than not, such behavior would only deepen my urge to decode those encryptions, even if it often led to frustratingly reductionist statements in the form of tautology like “because that’s just how it is.”) I felt the terror of being excluded then not because something secret held any kind of promise or hope, but rather signified the coming of a threat against which I was unable to prepare. If I could not have defenses mounted to face obvious menaces, how could I be on guard against proverbial Greeks bearing gifts?

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by John Allen Paulos

Oy. Where to start? Let me begin with a recent abuse involving percentages. Trump’s absurd claims about price declines of more than 100% have elicited a lot of well-deserved derision. How could someone with an undergraduate degree in business from Wharton make these mathematically impossible claims?

And why would the billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick attempt to show that Trump’s claims might be made to look rational. That’s an easier question. Toadyism.

Lutnick’s effort is a laughable, but perhaps superficially appealing “explanation” for claims about percentage declines of more than 100%

Here’s a cleaned up account of the mistake: Say an item sells for $100 at a given point, but for whatever reason after some time it sells for $20. Consumers at the later time, would be right to note that for the $20 price to rise to its earlier price of $100 it would have to rise by 400%.

Now an innumerate politician who might be supported by a rich yes man would be quite wrong to claim that at the later time the price had declined by 400%. That, of course, remains nonsensical (it declined by 80%), but it is perhaps a compelling conclusion for those whose knowledge of basic math is on a par with their fluency in Kazakh. Read more »

I am Hawk

I ride a thermal, wind-lifted under sun
which I think must be eternal, I fly!
I’m on my breakfast glide, I am beauty,
but infernal to who in open fields might run

I’m soaring on the wind
I’m searching like a drone
I’m laser-eyed, I hunger.

You watch me glide alone in sky
You watch me slide and circle
You watch me take a sudden dive
You watch me pull in wings and hurtle
like a spear to kill; only though, to keep
myself alive. In that I’m not like humans
who also so kill for power,
and gold, and, pride.

Jim Culleny 4/17/22

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by Amir Zadnemat

In almost every medical school in the world, there is a cupboard—or a quiet back room—full of bones. The skulls are numbered, the femurs stacked like firewood, the ribs threaded onto metal wire. Officially, they are “teaching aids”. Unofficially, they are the remains of actual lives, reduced to objects that can be ordered from a catalogue.

We are used to this sight in photographs and films. The skeleton in the anatomy lab is so familiar that it has become a cliché. But if you pause for a moment, a much more disturbing question emerges: how did those bones get there, and what does their journey say about the way we value—or fail to value—human bodies?

The answer is not only a matter of medical history. It is a window onto something larger: the politics of who is allowed dignity, who becomes “material” for science, and whose remains can be moved, displayed, or even sold without much public concern. To look closely at the skeleton is to see, beneath the neat language of progress, a long story of power.

From memento mori to medical specimen

For most of human history, bones were not neutral. They were sacred relics, moral warnings, or traces of the dead who still had a claim on the living. Medieval European churches were filled with skulls and femurs carefully arranged into chapels of bones. Their purpose was not scientific. They were there to remind the living of their own mortality—memento mori—and to keep the dead within the orbit of the community. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

2025 was a good year for books. 

One of my New Year’s Resolutions in 2025 was to read a classic novel each month of the year. And I’m happy to say I succeeded.

While I’ve learned quite a bit from these books, one of my “meta goals” with the resolution was to become a better writer. And I think I have. Below you will see each of the 12 books I read, and the main lesson that each book taught me.

Want to get better at writing? Curious what some of the best novels ever written can teach you about it? This article is for you.

A few notes before I start:

• I tried to include a mix of nationalities, genders, and “era written” in my picks. Are these the 12 best books of all time? I don’t know. But they are a good mix. You might disagree. And that’s alright.
• My interpretation of these books (and the lessons I took from them) are mine alone.
• I’ve tried not to include any spoilers. 

With that out of the way-

Let’s get better at writing. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

We spend much of our lives—perhaps more time than we realize—interacting with non-persons online. We ask for help from artificial customer service representatives. Some of us accept friend requests from bots and are, thereafter, influenced by the content they post. This is a momentous change to the nature of the public square. For most of human existence, discourse occurred between persons. That is no longer true. Philosophers spend much of their time thinking about whether it will ever be possible for artificial intelligence to be conscious. For many purposes, however, the question of whether artificial intelligence exhibits or could ever exhibit personhood is a much more important question.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt has much to say about what it is to be a person. Persons are beings who use their second order volitions to guide their first order desires. To see how this works, consider the case of a woman who desires a slice of cake. Suppose that she is avoiding sugar. Accordingly, she has a second order desire to refrain from eating the cake. When she is successful in getting her second order, reflective desires and volitions to guide her first order desires, she exhibits personhood. That is, when she does what she wants to do because the wants to want to do it, her will is free and she acts as a person. A being that never used second order desires to guide first order desires would be what Frankfurt calls a wanton. Frankfurt imagines a wanton as a being who merely acts as their impulses dictate, never reflective on whether they’d like those impulses to be different or whether they should attempt to modify their impulses. He says,

I shall use the term “wanton” to refer to agents who have first-order desires but who are not persons because, whether or not they have desires of the second order, they have no second-order volitions. The essential characteristic of a wanton is that he does not care about his will. His desires move him to do certain things, without its being true of him either that he wants to be moved by those desires or that he prefers to be moved by other desires. (Frankfurt 1988, 16)

Frankfurt offers non-human animals and very young children as examples of wantons, acknowledging that there may be others. This new virtual type of wanton isn’t a being swept away by impulse. The “first order impulses” of an algorithm are simply to do what it is programmed to do. There is nothing seductive or addictive about these impulses that make them irresistible. The impulses simply must be unreflectively followed. This makes the virtual wanton a special kind of hazard in the public square. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

In a world in which anyone can create fake sexually explicit images of anyone else, we should not be surprised when it happens, and we should not get especially upset if it happens to us.

Synopsis of my argument

Premise 1: It is now trivially easy to use a generative AI image apps to produce realistic looking deepfake nudes and explicit pornographic videos of anyone without their consent

Premise 2: P1 is, or should be, common knowledge (everyone knows it, and that everyone knows that everyone knows it)

Conclusion 1: Therefore, everyone knows that everyone knows that sexually explicit pictures of non-porn stars are almost certainly deepfakes created without that person’s consent

Premise 3: Privacy is the right to be mysterious to others: to determine for yourself what different people know, or think they know, about you.

Premise 4: If the deepfake images circulated of you were considered real by those friends and strangers who might find them then that would be a grave violation of your privacy and it would be reasonable to feel very upset about it

Premise 5: However, by C1, everyone knows that everyone knows that these sexualised images are not real

Conclusion 2: Therefore, it is not reasonable to get upset about finding deepfake nudes of ourselves circulating on the internet. The correct response is more of a shrug. Read more »

by Sauleha Kamal

“This is the mentality of our society. If someone is speaking English, he or she is really good, he or she is from a very good background,” one subaltern English learner tells the researchers in this study. “When someone speaks good English, Shah says, people assume that person is educated, knows how to carry himself, and is, crucially, ‘a good person’,” notes another.

The Identity Reconstruction of Subaltern English Learners by Aamir Hasan and Nadeem Hussain is an ambitious book that draws on a qualitative study of language learners in South Asia to make connections between social mobility, leadership development and English acquisition. Through this data, and a detailed theoretical and historical analysis of the position of English in South Asia, it endeavors to fill a crucial gap in the area of English studies.

English occupies a distinctive place in former British colonies, and in South Asia in particular. Its significance extends to everything from communication to shaping access, credibility, and self-perception in ways that are difficult to disentangle from class. This book takes that relationship seriously, treating English as a social determinant whose effects are felt across education, leadership, and everyday dignity. In doing so, it offers a careful and largely persuasive account of how this language mediates power in the region. Read more »

Leaves pressed into a dirt road by passing vehicles and/or people in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more »” below…

NEW POSTS BELOW THIS ONE

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by Barry Goldman

Two books came out recently in the field of decision-making. Baruch Fischhoff published Decisions: Studying and Supporting People Facing Hard Choices, and Barry Schwartz and Richard Schuldenfrei published Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making. The two books take very different approaches. In a word, Fischhoff represents the science of decision-making. Schwartz represents the art.

We are all in favor of rational decision-making. We want public policy decisions to be made by reasonable people following orderly procedures designed to give appropriate consideration to relevant factors and to maximize the probability of success. How could we possibly not want that? And the same is true of personal decisions. We may not have the patience or the attention span to work through the literature and pick the best health insurance plan for our family. But we have to agree it would be better if that choice were made on some rational basis rather than randomly or on the basis of the relative attractiveness of the models in the company brochures. We may conclude that any improvement in health insurance coverage is not worth the effort required to identify it. That’s fine. Some decisions are not worth thinking about. But even the decision that something is not worth thinking about is better if it is made according to some rational process.

At the same time, there is a false precision conveyed by the matrix of factors, weights and probabilities involved in rational choice theory. And there is something missing. If you’re trying to decide whether to uproot your family and move across the country or whether to start a war with, say, Venezuela, an algorithm and a spreadsheet are not what you need. As the saying goes, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

Baruch Fischhoff was present at the inception. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman jointly advised his dissertation. He was at Hebrew University in Jerusalem with Kahneman and Tversky when they began creating the universe of judgment and decision-making, biases and heuristics, and what became behavioral economics. His name is most closely associated with hindsight bias, our tendency to think we knew it all along and to be “insufficiently surprised” by events. For the past 50 years Fischhoff has been applying Bayesian inference, game theory, measure theory and signal detection theory to an extraordinary array of real-world decision problems. Read more »

by Derek Neal

The town had only one grocery store, and Steve wondered where the locals did their shopping. Certainly not here, but perhaps in a supermarket outside of town, one that required a car. Along with Julia, he picked up some Italian cheese, prosciutto, grapes, and a bottle of local wine, and they made their way up the hill to the house they’d rented for the week.

The two friends from college were proud of themselves. They weren’t staying next to the sea with the rest of the tourists, but in a different village altogether, one that required a short bus ride and where no other passengers got off. In the village, the few streets that existed were carved into the hillside, each one so narrow that they were forced to walk behind one another, instead of side by side.

It had been a long day, and they felt they deserved to indulge. They’d gone hiking high above the town, starting early and rising with the sun. The trail followed the curve of the hills, the open sea to one side, vineyards to the other. What lay before them not visible beyond a few yards. They heard fellow hikers before seeing them, but rarely was any Italian heard. When two groups passed each other, each group always smiled and let out a garbled “Buongiorno,” before reverting to their respective languages. Steve complied and mumbled “Ciao” a few times, but soon he began to feel like an imposter, playing at being Italian, or playing at being whatever it was people thought being Italian meant, and he resigned himself to nodding politely in response to the other travelers. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Malcolm Murray

Back when I worked for large corporations, people would often talk of being in “period of change” or how they could “see the light at the end of the tunnel” after a period of heavy restructuring or similar. These days, you might be forgiven for wondering where the tunnel went. Change is incessant and showing no signs of slowing down. In fact, it is quite the opposite. We are entering a period when change might in fact actually be speeding up, even from its currently historically high levels. While not the majority view, nor the most likely scenario in my estimation, there is still a nonzero likelihood that we are in fact in the last few years of an era. Through the development of AGI – artificial general intelligence – the world could become unrecognizable in just a few years.

In a recent Astral Codex Ten piece, Scott Alexander referenced several examples of people seeing the clock as ticking down to a near-term singularity-level change, which would leave permanent patterns locked in. In one of the most talked-about AI forecasts from last year – AI 2027 – 2026 is not far from where the hockey stick starts to get seriously steep. This scenario, of humanity facing a potential precipice in our near future, makes for an interesting exercise in examining the varying levels of comfort people have in entertaining this possibility. We can name it “Future Comfort”. The degree to which people accept this possibility, fight against it, deny it, or even embrace it. Especially now at the turning of the year, with everyone making predictions, this seems like a useful lens for examining the world right now.

Let’s first look at the varying schools on the Future Comfort spectrum. On one far end, we have people who are deeply uncomfortable with this notion. They are actively fighting against the future and are actively and quixotically trying to bring back the past. We have seen this in some of the main political strands over the past years, driving everything from Brexit to MAGA to Soviet nostalgia. A little bit towards the center of the spectrum, instead of active resistance, you could place the groups exercising passive resistance. This would include people choosing to go “off the grid” or “back to nature” or other variants of the Amish lifestyle.

On the other far end of the spectrum, we have those who are deeply comfortable with a radically different future. Here, we find groups such as transhumanists and effective accelerationists. They are looking to bring the future closer, not further and long to merge with the machine, becoming cyborgs. Moving slightly toward the center, we find the libertarian techno-optimists such as Marc Andreesen, who want to let technology rip loose, in a wild Schumpeterian dance of creative destruction. It would be easy to dismiss these end points as fringe fanatics, were it not for the fact that they win elections in major Western democracies and have their own Super PACs with millions of funding. Read more »

Marco A Castillo. Mangle I, 2025.

Bronze.

More here, here and here.

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Dear Readers and Writers,

Five years ago, I wrote a note here to acknowledge and appreciate Akim Reinhardt for his amazing consistency in having written an excellent essay every four weeks for 3QD for 10 years, without missing his turn even once. Well, this week Akim has how completed 15 years at 3QD and has still maintained his record of solid dependability! He has now written 208 essays for us in a row and is still going strong.

But there is another contributor with an equally impressive record of reliability: Brooks Riley published her first “Catspeak” cartoon at 3QD in the first week of October, 2013, and has never missed a single week in the more than 12 years since then. This week, somewhat unbelievably, she will contribute her 624th “Catspeak” in a row on Wednesday! You can see them all here.

Please join me in applauding Akim and Brooks!

With very best wishes for the new year,

Abbas

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