by Rachel Robison-Greene

When people think about what it is to live a successful life, they often think about finding a good job that pays a respectable salary, meeting and making a commitment to a life partner, having children, buying a house, and affording the luxuries that financial success makes possible.  Some view success as a zero-sum game; I can only have more if you have less.  Success, on this model, is not just keeping up with, but surpassing the Joneses.  The Effective Altruism movement has encouraged people to think about success differently.  Instead of measuring it by the wealth one accrues, we should instead measure the success of a person’s life by looking at how much good they do.

The Effective Altruist (EA) movement was motivated in no small part by Peter Singer’s 1971 paper, Famine, Affluence, and Morality in which he argues that each of us ought to be doing very much more for the global poor than we are currently doing.  The premises of his argument remain true today—most of us do not give a substantial amount of our income to the world’s most impactful charities.

Since its inception in the early 2000’s, the EA movement has energized young people searching for a source of meaning in their lives.  To many, it was clear that a life spent in pursuit of a larger and larger bank account balance would always be full of things but lacking in substance.  It was equally clear that some problems cause more suffering than others, suffering matters, and that the most meaningful life would involve eradicating as much suffering as possible.

In the intervening years, EA has graduated from college classrooms to Silicon Valley and the pages of top newspapers.  If money is needed to solve the globe’s most serious problems, converting top earners to the movement is a promising strategy.  In 2023, billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was convicted of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering.  News coverage surrounding the issue revealed that Bankman-Fried was an Effective Altruist and gave large amounts of money to charity.

Since this news became widely known, attitudes toward EA have shifted, even in academic departments.  Read more »

by Malcolm Murray

The battle lines are drawn. AI safety is fighting a battle on three fronts.

The figure shows how the AI safety viewpoint is opposed to three others, on two dimensions. First, let’s define the axes. The debate over advanced AI and its risks and benefits has many dimensions, but here we focus on two of the most important: timeframe – short-term vs long-term and risk appetite – high vs low. Timeframe is self-explanatory, but we should note that long-term here doesn’t mean the very long term measured in decades and centuries, just anything beyond the short cycles elsewhere – the quarterly earnings cycles of corporations, the valuation cycles of startups and the election cycles of politicians. Risk appetite means the level of risk one is willing to take to receive benefits. A high risk appetite means one is willing to take a large amount of risk to receive rewards, while a low risk appetite means a more risk-balanced approach, where one is willing to take a moderate amount of risk to receive the same level of rewards.

Using these two axes, we can distinguish four distinct AI viewpoints. I call these viewpoints rather than camps or groups, since several quadrants have multiple groups which may not fully agree with each other, and there is also overlap between the quadrants. The figure also contains just one prominent example for each quadrant, there are many others that could be plotted.

Let’s then turn to AI safety and the three battle lines. The AI safety viewpoint is in the top right corner, with a long time horizon and a low risk appetite. This can be loosely defined as the view that advanced AI, while bringing significant benefits to society, also poses significant new, and enhanced risks. It does not hold that all risk is bad and society should not make any progress, but rather that progress should be risk-balanced, taking into account the benefits, and weighing them against the risks. The three battle lines are with the opposing viewpoints in the other three quadrants.

The battle lines vary in their level of conflict. A year or two ago, the temperature ran highest in the battle over timeframe between the risk-cautious viewpoints. Read more »

Getting to Know You

I’m getting to know you. You who came
with the first Archaeon’s spark

Everything was new then, even you, you
parenthetical tail of vital events, you
old telegraphic protoplasmic stop, you
callous caboose bringing up the ends of trains
of eloquent clauses, small words, grunts
and final remains, you little, but lethal,
punctuational dot.

You came on the scene with the first cell-knots waiting,
you loomed in the dark as first hearts began beating,
in celebrations of birth you took orchestra seating,
at wakes you confirmed your ruthless deleting.

Never kind to lovers you bathed the earth in shade
two-stepping with light —its dissembling side:
what it made you unmade
…………………………………….. It Comes!
—alarms went out when your hacking heralds came through
making it clear you’d come to snuff anything new:

alone in your shadow lovers wept
…… embracing only the smoke they’d kept
………… of the flame you’d smothered before you left

by Jim Culleny
10/7/13

by David Winner

Is it like that first moment when you touch certain parts of yourself as a child and find pleasure in it?  Or that first drink, that first cigarette?

Now that I’d determined that the shooting was staged, what other realities could I question? All my life I could have rejected political outcomes that bothered me—Reagan in 1980, Trump in 2016, and both Bushes in between.  Cowardly Vice Presidents had certified those results.  The Republicans had brought out their dead to vote along with the help of their Ukrainian/Russian/Venezuelan/Cuban allies.  They’d fucked with voting machines.

Like the opiate epidemic but maybe even more free ranging, conspiraboids are lighting up in people’s brains all over the world.  Ukrainians are really Nazis. Rohingya are recent invaders of Myanmar.  Moslems aren’t really Indians.  Illegal alien rapists and murderers are descending upon the southern border of the United States. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

I noticed around the time I turned 30, conversations at parties and get-togethers inevitably turned toward real estate: how much homes cost in which neighborhood, who people know who had bought a house – and how. There was an innate understanding that financial success was tied into owning a home and in a city like Los Angeles where I live, getting into a house is no easy feat.

The house with a white picket fence has always been the symbol of the American Dream. Especially in the postwar era, Americans prided themselves on an upwardly mobile middle class who could own at least a small piece of their country.

American homeownership peaked in 2004 at 69.4 percent and today hovers at around 65 percent which is still favorable to the entire 1960s when homeownership was around 63 percent.

Imagine a country with 90 percent homeownership. Imagine what it would mean to have a society with that rate of homeownership – with that high a level of security and wealth accumulation.

That’s exactly what Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding Prime Minister did. Although educated in economics and law at University, Lee Kuan Yew noticed as a child the differences between neighborhoods dominated by homeownership versus those that were mostly rented. Cleanliness, stability and low crime rates were among the benefits of an owned neighborhood.

In 1965 when Singapore declared its independence both from the Malaysian Federation from which it was ejected and from the United Kingdom from which it was being decolonized, Singapore had a roughly 27 percent homeownership rate. Shockingly low.

Why? Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

Around ten years ago—before the physical and cognitive decline that began during the pandemic; before his removal from autonomy to a care home in the north end of Montreal; before his death there at the beginning of this month—my father entrusted me with his personal collection of jokes.

As he approached his eighties, the decade of their lives in which both of his parents had died, dad had begun to feel increasingly elegiac, a mode not easily compatible with his professional role as a raconteur. Indeed, by his own account, his narrative powers generally—upon which he had relied, during his career as a novelist, poet, and professor of creative writing—were on the wane. “I feel like I no longer have a story to tell,” he said during a visit I made to his apartment in 2013: and thus, a fortiori, he must also no longer be a teller of jokes.

The Word file my father mailed me, ten years ago, from his PC in Montreal’s Mile End to my MacBook in Zurich’s sixth district, is some 250 pages long and counts almost 122,000 words. It comprises between 700 and 900 jokes—it’s difficult to give a precise tally, since some of the entries are of shaggy-dog length, while others are multipart variations on a theme: spoof ad campaigns for Viagra, mock letters to Dear Abby, ostensibly alien words that turn out simply to be the phonetic rendering of “redneck” pronunciations. There are cameos by all the types familiar from the commedia dell’arte of Golden Age American stand-up: St. Peter; various “blondes” and Mothers Superior; talking parrots; bartenders; “Irishmen”; and, of course, The Lord Almighty Himself, in His aspect as begrudging distributor of attributes to tardy recipients.

What is notably absent from my dad’s jokes, however, is anything that might properly be termed a dad joke. This may be because “dad jokes” typically arise ad hoc, out of a particular real-world context, and are thus less suitable for isolated transcription and transmission than more generic, self-enclosed, typologically defined anecdotes. Or perhaps it is due to the fact that, according to my own observations, the typical dad joke is not sexist, not racist, not violent—and therefore not conventionally funny, since humor derives its explosive force, in psychoanalytic interpretation, from its ability to release otherwise shameful aggression in a socially acceptable fashion. Dad jokes also often feature—indeed, are often centrally built around—puns, which are likelier to elicit groans than laughter; and my dad, for all his professional attention to the concrete effects and semantic vagaries of language, typically grew impatient at what seemed a fetishistic dwelling on the phonemic or even lexical surface of words. What interested him, when telling a joke, was getting a laugh. Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

Here’s what a bubble looks like.

I walk into the local convenience store, and next to the two ATMs is a third machine selling Bitcoin. You can slide a bank card into the ATMs and get cash. You can slide your credit or debit card into the third machine and buy a Bitcoin, or a percentage of one if you can’t afford to shell out roughly $65,000 for a whole one.

But you know what you can’t do? Turnaround and use your brand new bitcoin to buy anything in the convenience store where you purchased the bitcoin.

There’s a machine in the store that will sell you money that you can’t use to buy anything in the store.

I’m tempted to say this is my Bernard Baruch moment. The famous apocryphal story is that Baruch realized it was time to get out of the stock market, just ahead of the 1929 crash, when a shoeshine boy tried to give him a hot stock tip. When everyone wants to get in, it’s time to get out.

But this can’t be my Bernard Baruch moment because Baruch made a fortune on the market before it crashed, while I’ve always steered clear of Bitcoin, never having had faith that it, or other block chain currencies, would prove to be anything but a game of musical chairs speculation. I can’t get out if I never got in. Instead, the convenience store Bitcoin machine was just a moment of confirmation. Perhaps something like, it’s been years since you believed in Santa Claus, and then one Christmas Eve you happen to catch daddy drinking the milk and eating the cookies.

Recently, we may have seen less Baruchian sign that yet another bubble is near popping: Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality. It certainly feels like something has changed over the last month. Read more »

Wall with trees painted on it with a window showing real trees in Klausen, South Tyrol.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Monte Davis

Climate change first came to many Americans’ attention in June, 1988. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that the signal of long-term warming from increasing CO2 in the atmosphere had emerged unmistakably from the noise of year-to-year variation in weather.

Four of the warmest years on record had come earlier in the 1980s, and 1988 would be another. One wildfire after another had begun to spread in Yellowstone Park. As that summer advanced, what would be a historically severe and costly three-year-drought took hold in most of the United States.

How long had this moment been coming?  The unmatched resource for answers is Spenser R. Weart’s superb 2003 book The Discovery of Global Warming, and its greatly expanded, steadily updated, richly linked hypertext version online.

In 1824, Joseph Fourier reasoned quialitatively that the atmosphere must let the sun’s visible light in more readily to warm the earth than it lets that warmth out as infrared radiation.

In 1859, Joseph Tyndall identified water vapor and carbon dioxide, CO₂, as the most important components that absorbed — “trapped” — and re-radiated downward some of the infrared energy.

In 1896, a century into the industrial revolution and its hunger for fossil fuels, Svante Arrhenius calculated very roughly that a 50% increase in CO₂ would warm the planet on average by 5° to 6° C. The good news is that his estimate was almost four times too high.  The bad news is that the next century of the Industrial Revolution – and more coal and more oil and gas, and population growth – blew out all expectations. Arrhenius speculated such an increase would take many centuries, but we will reach it in 2026. And keep going. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Sughra Raza. M – Through The Honeycomb. Oolloo House, August 2024.

Digital photograph.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by  Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

Jokes about JD Vance’s romantic entanglements with living room furniture have been ubiquitous for about two weeks now. Professional comedians like Chelsea Handler and John Oliver have leaned into them. Friends on social media have traded quips about Vance’s “one nightstand” and his illegitimate “love seat.” Kamala Harris’ own PR team even joined in on the fun.

The parade of puns all stemmed from one satirical tweet that was never meant to be taken seriously or believed literally. The fact that Democrats nonetheless embraced the idea, couching their attacks on Vance in sofa jokes, signals a fascinating shift in psychology that merits a closer look.

When we say that something is true, we generally mean one of two different things. The first is that whatever claim we are making is factually accurate. “Kamala Harris attended Howard University” is true because she did, in fact, graduate from that institution.

The second is a bit more slippery. Think of the way in which a great work of fiction like Heart of Darkness or The Color Purple can express profound truths about the human condition. Novels aren’t factual, but what they reveal can still be true in a deep way. That’s what we call narrative truth, rather than factual truth.

19th-century philosopher William Whewell wrote that facts are like pearls, valuable in their own right, but that in order to make a necklace out of them, we need a string: a coherent story that connects all the facts together in order to give us a deeper understanding. The narrative that allows us to make sense of the world is as important as the facts it connects.

Democrats have long been obsessed with factuality, with the pearls. “Find the Falsehood” is practically an Olympic sport on the left. Steve Bannon knew this, and he encouraged Donald Trump to “flood the zone” by telling as many whoppers as he could, turning Democrats’ fact-checking obsession into something akin to the last level of Space Invaders, when there were so many alien ships you could barely shoot them all down.

The GOP, on the other hand, has built its entire platform out of “alternative facts” that are thoroughly derided by “the reality-based community.” In the last few days, Trump has tried to disallow live fact-checking during his interview at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention, and he’s refusing to allow fact-checking during any future debate he might have with Kamala Harris. Republicans love narrative truth, accessorizing their campaign outfits with one faux pearl necklace after another. Read more »

by David Greer

A group of island neighbours were enjoying a glass of wine in the old wooden boathouse when our quiet conversation was interrupted by an explosive Whupf! from the direction of the sea. We turned to look just in time to see the black-and-white hulk of a six-ton orca, curving gracefully into the water after a deep breath, its six-foot-high dorsal fin marking it as a mature male.

Where there is one orca, others are sure to follow. Loud blasts of spray echoed through the evening air as other members of the pod appeared, mothers with calves, juvenile males, a couple more large mature males. Some close to shore, others a half a mile out at sea. The whales’ appearance hadn’t been a complete surprise, one of our group having received a text alert from a fellow sighter in the Southern Gulf Islands Whale Sighting Network that the orcas had been seen heading west from Saturna Island towards our vantage point by Brooks Point on South Pender Island, the southernmost of the Canadian Gulf Islands, in the heart of the Salish Sea and smack in the middle of southern resident orca critical habitat.

As suddenly as they had arrived, the orcas were gone, continuing west towards Vancouver Island. Then, moments later, a much louder explosion of breath took us by surprise. This we were not expecting. Gazing seaward again, we watched as a far larger black body edged silently above the surface, like a nascent island arising from a seafloor volcano, a high cloud of fine mist dissipating above its pair of blowholes (orcas have only one). The adult humpback, forty tons give or take, perhaps more easily imagined as the size of a school bus, had passed less than a hundred metres from the point, heading northeast. Unlike the orcas, the humpback travelled alone, and there was no apparent interaction between the two species. To watch both in the space of ten minutes at relatively close range left us awestruck. Leviathan tends to have that impression on puny human observers.

Humpbacks and Orcas–Gentle Giants and Dolphins with Attitude

The contrasts between orcas and humpbacks are striking. Both are cetaceans, the animal group whose name derives from the ancient Greek word for sea monster. Cetaceans comprise two groups: whales with teeth (toothed whales) and whales without (baleen whales, including the humpback). Toothed whales include narwhals, belugas, sperm whales, beaked whales, porpoises, and dolphins. All dolphins are whales but not all whales are dolphins. The largest of the dolphins is the orca (Orcinus orca), commonly known as the killer whale, an apt descriptor for a meticulous and cunning predator with very specific tastes: chinook salmon for southern resident orcas, marine mammals for transit orcas otherwise known as Biggs orcas. Orca pods have been known to attack humpbacks on occasion, but generally only when an adult is accompanied by a juvenile, a potential meal for mammal-eating orcas. Read more »