Looking pretty sitting on my office wall: Distoleon tetragrammicus

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by Jeroen Bouterse

Even after discussing Daniel Chandler’s inspiring application of John Rawls in my previous column, I remain on the lookout for a book that delivers a sweeping, original and sound vision for the future of the liberal and democratic world, saves it from its social problems through policy proposals that are simultaneously transformative and unthreatening (enough for all interested parties to accept and implement them immediately), and provides a sure and painless path to undercutting popular support for illiberal and authoritarian politics. Ideally, it also solves climate change and ends factory farming, and does not require me personally to change too much. Disappointingly, Alexandre Lefebvre’s new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, only achieves some of these things.

Lefebvre’s argument is that it is possible to be a ‘liberal all the way down’. This possibility is not obvious. First of all, we may think of our society as liberal, but it is more accurate to think of it in terms of ‘liberaldom’, in the same way European societies used to be part of Christendom: dominant cultural expressions revolve around liberal tropes and sensibilities, but that doesn’t mean our society is unfailingly producing genuine liberals who strive to produce genuinely liberal social arrangements.

Second, it is commonly claimed that a liberal society doesn’t require its citizens to have a specifically liberal conception of the good. People with diverse conceptions of the good can (and rationally ought to) support liberalism precisely because it guarantees them the freedom and resources to pursue their own conception of the good life. Lefebvre does not object to this, but he thinks something is missing. A liberal conception of the good life does in fact exist, and it is both possible and desirable for people to pursue it.

A liberal view of what is good and valuable in life is not separated from liberal political values, but integrated in it. “The right is our good”, Lefebvre writes. In so far as liberalism as a political framework seeks to organize society along the lines of fairness, liberals are people who derive meaning from bringing a fair society closer. Again, there are other legitimate conceptions of the good life that can be in harmony with liberalism; but being ‘just’ a liberal does not mean trivial conformity to the status quo. It is a full way of life, in analogy to being a committed Christian or Stoic. Read more »

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by Brooks Riley

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by Monte Davis

If you know more about fallout shelters than a dark TV comedy based on a video game, you probably know that people are still finding relics in basements and storerooms of old schools, hospitals, and factories: olive-drab drums of water, cartons of high-nutrition crackers, first-aid and sanitary supplies, even bicycle-driven fans to bring in filtered air through a vinyl hose. Boomers have a few snapshot memories, their children and grandchildren just the memes: “duck and cover” exercises, CONELRAD emergency warnings (their loud hum surviving in weather warning and AMBER alerts), and the yellow-and-black trefoil signs.

For me, the snapshots are frames in a private documentary: Nine Hot Weeks, with Misgivings. In 1967, I spent the summer after my first year of college in a thousand or so basements, surveying potential sites for those shelters in El Barrio, aka East Harlem, Manhattan, New York City. Two-man teams were dispatched in pairs with computer printouts listing every building in our assigned area, as other teams covered other neighborhoods. We also carried a letter of introduction in several languages, which asked building owners, superintendents, and ground-floor businesses to cooperate. Because the Big Apple was well connected, the letter was machine-signed by President Johnson as well as Mayor Lindsay. Because the Army was well connected — and 1967 was yet another long, hot urban summer — the NYPD supplied a patrol officer to accompany us and radiate yes, please cooperate vibes at the front door. (That chickenshit assignment must have gone to the least popular rookies in the precinct.) But we appreciated their presence, as neither I nor my partner Vytautas Jankauskas – an immigrants’ son a few years from Kaunas, Lithuania, with silver-blond Baltic Targaryen hair – could pass for a homie.

How did the survey come about? FDR had created an Office of Civil Defense in 1941, but it took the USSR’s first atomic bomb test to prompt Truman to reboot it in 1950 as the Federal Civil Defense Administration. In 1958 the FCDA begat Eisenhower’s Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization; in 1961 the OCDMA, moved by Kennedy from the executive into the Defense Department, became the Office of Civil Defense (tradition!), which soon launched its National Fallout Shelter Survey Program. Including those designated earlier, by 1963 the government had identified shelter spaces for 121 million people, and stocked enough of them for 24 million. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

Several years ago the Nobel committee selected two economists, Thomas Schelling of the University of Maryland and Robert Aumann of Hebrew University, to receive the prize for their stellar work on game theory. Aumann has contributed many seminal ideas with real-world applications, one in particular that is especially relevant today. It concerns the notion of “common knowledge,” which is crucial in understanding many phenomena from the stock market, family dynamics, and, most topically, to the present situation with President Joe Biden.

First the terms. A bit of information is deemed “common knowledge” among a group of people if all parties know it, know that the others know it, know that the others know they know it, and so on. It is much more than “mutual knowledge,” which requires only that the parties know the particular bit of information, not that they be aware of the others’ knowledge of it

Consider now the dynamic and often mysterious relations among extended families, networks of  friends, and business colleagues, the open secrets that people know while remaining ignorant of others’ knowledge of the same. This is a nice illustration, among many, of the difference between mutual knowledge and common knowledge.

Once a bit of mutual knowledge becomes common knowledge, however this transition comes about, the revelation often leads to a drastic re-evaluation of the situation and a desire for some sort of action. This is certainly true with families, friends. and colleagues who finally share a common knowledge about some previously shadowy suspicions.

The relevance of this to Joe Biden and the Democrats’ situation is clear. Many people who have met the President in recent months have come away with private doubts and concerns about his future candidacy but remained unaware that many others had a similar uneasiness. Biden’s abysmal debate performance ended that, as millions of viewers became aware of his likely vulnerability during the upcoming campaign and possible further decline over the next four years. The result of this transition from mutual knowledge to common knowledge is the widespread call for the president to bow out and allow an arguably stronger candidate to take over with a presumed better chance to defeat Donald Trump. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self Portrait at Oolloo House, June 2024.

Digital photograph.

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by Mark R. DeLong

“This guy nails it IMO.” That was the message below a Youtube link. Normally, I’d be wary of a link accompanied by such a cryptic gloss, but it came from a friend and colleague so I clicked. Destination: Rick Beato’s YouTube video posted June 25 on his “Everything Music” channel. Beato launched into his talk, his white hair combed back, hands waving like a modest conductor as he stood in what might be a 1970s living room. I could easily imagine that his jazz studies students at Ithaca College came to love his New York accent and his urgent wit.

“The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse,” the video’s title, could signal a revelation of a conspiracy—the “Real Reason”—or offer another Old Man Yells At Cloud variety of crotchetiness. But by the time I finished watching, I had to agree with my guitar-playing, guitar-collecting friend: Yes, Rick Beato “nailed it.”

Beato thinks AI is corroding today’s music, lulling the human spirit and inventiveness by making it too easy to make music and too easy to consume it—of course, doing all this while stealing from musicians, too. In many ways, the story has already been told, as the replacement of skills by machine has long been a feature of the transformations of life and work over the past century and more. Beato’s complaint, however, may be more urgent than before. Maybe, as they say, this time is different.

Beato balances two aspects of today’s rapidly transforming music technology, drawing his argument into two “acts”: “Music is too easy to make” and “Music is too easy to consume”—both headings essentially framed as judgments, not as observations. Technology lies at the core of both. Read more »

Dear Reader,

For a couple of days, some things at 3QD may not work exactly as expected. We will be updating some of the pages at the site in the next few days. We appreciate your patience!

This is the most important change already in effect: We have decided to give more prominence to our own writers who used to be limited to Mondays. From now, when you come to our home page, you will only see what used to be the “Mondays posts” of original writing. And new original 3QD essays will appear a few at a time throughout the week. There is now a “Recommended Reading” link in the menu just under the banner that will take you to the curated links (what used to be the normal posts linking to articles at other websites from Tuesday through Sunday). Try it now!

We apologize for any inconvenience while we work out any kinks.

All the best,

Abbas                      NEW POSTS BELOW

by Tim Sommers

Suppose a small group of people are stranded together on a desert island. They have no fresh water or food – until they come across a stash of coconuts. They can drink the milk and eat the coconut meat to survive. But how do they divide up the coconuts fairly between them?

The coconuts are not the product of anyone’s hard work or ingenuity. They are manna-from-heaven. In such circumstances, in a sense, no one deserves anything. So, the question is how to distribute something valuable, even essential, but which no one has any prior claim upon, in an ethical way. In other words, what is the appropriate principle of distributive fairness in such a case?

The most obvious suggestion is that the coconuts should be distributed equally. And that may well be the right answer. Many people consider equality the presumptive fair distribution, especially in manna-from-heaven situations like this. Distributions that depart from strict equality, many believe, must be justified, but equality requires no justification. For example, suppose we also find buried treasure on the island. Various arguments could be made that one person made a decisive contribution to the discovery that others didn’t, but isn’t the starting place an equal distribution?

But suppose after most of the coconuts are distributed equally there is one coconut left. For the sake of argument, imagine single coconuts are not divisible or fungible for some reason and so one coconut cannot be shared. What do we do with the extra coconut?

Strict equality seems to imply that you should just throw it away to avoid making the distribution unequal. This is called the leveling-down problem. You can almost always increase the amount of equality in an unequal distribution by taking stuff from the better-off and simply throwing it away. If equality is valuable in and of itself, then any situation can be made fairer (at least in one way) by leveling down how much the better-off have so that there is less inequality – even if this makes no one better-off in absolute terms.

Maybe, for this reason, we shouldn’t care about equality in and of itself, after all. Why do we? Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

Nearly two years ago we talked at 3QD about the Busy Beaver problem [1]. Since then, the beavers have been busy.

As discussed in that essay, the Busy Beaver problem measures how complicated a computation might be.  It does so by measuring how long a Turing might run before stopping.

A Turing machine is a theoretical model for a computer. It has a set of states that tell the machine what to do next. The states are the “software” of the Turing machine.

In a real computer, the more complicated your software, the more you can do. The same goes for a Turing machine. The more states, the more the machine can do. If you allow me to use a Turing machine with 744 states, I can build a machine that can determine the validity of the Riemann hypothesis. Since resolving the Riemann hypothesis is arguably the most famous problem in mathematics and worth a cool $1,000,000, there must be some reason nobody has tried this approach. Indeed, there is a small problem. A Turing machine with 744 states can run a long time.

That brings us to the Busy Beaver. The Busy Beaver of 744 is the number of steps a Turing machine with 744 states might run before it finally stops. For example, it is known that — at worst — a Turing machine with two states might take six steps before halting. For short, we’ll write this as BB(2)=6. Somewhat worse, BB(4)=107, but that’s still not too bad.  Never mind BB(744), how big could BB(5) be?  Pretty darn big, it turns out!

After 40 years, there was a breakthrough in computing Busy Beavers. On July 2nd the Busy Beaver Challenge (BBC) announced that they had computed BB(5). We now know how long a five-state Turing machine might run before halting:

BB(5)=47,176,870.

In 1990, Heiner Marxen and Jürgen Buntrock found a five-state Turing machine that took that many steps. The problem, though, is that there might be a five-state Turing machine that takes even longer. There are millions and millions and millions of five-state Turing machines. It is a massive task to test them all. Worse, many of those Turing machines will never halt. To compute BB(5), you must correctly identify the ones that halt and correctly compute the number of steps they take before they halt. Read more »

by Ed Simon

“But then again, what has the whale to say?” wondered Ishmael in Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, “therefore the whale has no voice,” but this isn’t accurate. Sperm whales – of which Melville’s titular white whale is one – have an intricate series of clicks and bellows that if not language per se, certainly seem like communication, albeit in a manner foreign to human experience. Furthermore, not only do sperm whales, humpback whales, blue whales, dolphins and other members of the cetacean family make noise, they are capable of imitative sounds, of repeating complex strings of noises – songs and clicks of varying pitch and duration – back to each other. That’s an ability that, to varying degrees, is not just the purview of whales, but of seals and birds, bats and humans (but notably not some of our closest primate cousins, who though capable of understanding us are unable to vocally repeat what we’ve said). Now, a landmark study written by research teams at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California at Berkely have been able to deploy complex machine learning technologies for the first time in untangling the genetic basis for language acquisition across tremendously varied types of animals.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Center at CMU doesn’t much feel like Ishmael’s ship The Pequod, but it turns out to be the perfect place to, if not discuss what the whale has to say, at least how the whale is saying it (and how bats, seals, and people are saying what they have to as well). Appearing more like a tech campus in Palo Alto than Pittsburgh, with an impressive central spiraling staircase whose shape is equal parts Frank Lloyd Wright and DNA’s double helix, the Gates Center is where I met team leader and professor of computational biology Dr. Andreas Pfenning who is the lead author on the study published in Science, the flagship journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Pfenning explained to me how beyond traditional anatomical and behavioral approaches, the CMU and Berkey study “opens up studying animal communication from a genetic perspective.” Read more »

by Jeroen van Baar

Jonathan Haidt knows how to be a contrarian. In 2015, the NYU Stern social psychology professor founded Heterodox Academy, an organization that aims to bring viewpoint diversity to college campuses. He wrote an Atlantic article and book entitled The coddling of the American mind, in which he claimed that trigger warnings and safe spaces at colleges are making liberal students weaker rather than preparing them for the real world. With this work he gave words, authority, and attention to commonsense intuitions about oversensitive leftist youth that appeared to be widespread in the population. This was not his original expertise (he rose to fame studying moral psychology) but he skillfully took up the mantle.

When I was a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University, often considered the wokest Ivy, Haidt was kind enough to drop by and tell us what we were doing wrong. He gave a talk (to a full house, of course) about how universities had to choose between Truth and Social Justice as their ultimate goal. In Haidt’s view, universities cannot do both, as the two goals fundamentally contradict each other. And he was very happy to push the point that universities like Brown were, in fact, claiming to do both. (When I joined Haidt’s lunch group after the event, I found him amiable and brilliant, if aloof; a professor to look up to.)

All this made many in the academy very uncomfortable. Haidt publicly denounced the world he came from—he’s been a professor since the early 1990s—and scrutinized universities at a time when Truth and Expert Knowledge were already under attack. What’s more, Haidt actively exposed weaknesses that academics did not want to think about just yet. Haidt is like the friend who tells you you’re overreacting before you’re ready to hear it. And he fulfils that role with the glee of the kid who always wins in debate class. Read more »

by O. Del Fabbro

Bürgenstock, near lake Lucerne, June 15-16, 2024. Switzerland has organized a peace summit to address the war in Ukraine. Many countries participate, but the aggressor, Russia, was not invited. The main topics of discussion that Switzerland and Ukraine have listed are nuclear and food safety, as well as humanitarian aspects. In regard to the latter, still today, thousands of Ukrainian Prisoners of War (POWs) and civilians are imprisoned in modern Russian concentration camps, thousands of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and brought to Russian territory. Russia is violating the Geneva Conventions in many ways.

In the shadow of the summit and the high profile visitors from around the world, a group of mostly women has traveled from Ukraine to Lucerne to raise awareness to their issue: the unlawful and unrightful conviction of members of the Azov Brigade, the defenders of Mariupol in the steel plant, Azovstal. These women form one body and together they defend their cause: to bring their loved ones back home. “We are here to tell the whole world what Russia is doing with Ukraine, our husbands and sons,” Anna says.[1]

Anna is the fiancé of a 26 year old POW, Bohdan. For more than 80 days, without any supplies or medical help, Bohdan helped defend Azovstal, until his unit was ordered to surrender to the Russians in May 2022. Ever since, Anna has not heard from Bohdan. In Russia, Ukrainian POWs are deprived of communication with the outside world – a violation of the Geneva Conventions. The only way to get information about their fiancés, husbands, and sons is to scroll endlessly through official Russian Telegram channels. That’s how Anna found out that her husband has been sentenced two times: in November 2023, he was sentenced to 24 years for the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and in March 2024, he was sentenced to 28 years for murdering a civilian. These sentences are a violation of the Geneva Conventions, because Bohdan is a POW, and cannot be put on trial as a civilian. Moreover, Bohdan’s health is deteriorating. While defending Azovstal, his left hand was injured, and ever since being captured, he has not received medical help – yet another violation of the Geneva Conventions. All this is brought to Anna’s attention, because one of Bohdan’s friends was freed in a prisoner exchange in May 2023. The friend told Anna that Bohdan’s hand is still ulcerating and completely dysfunctional. “That’s why it is important to not just talk about POWs in general, but also the unjustly convicted of the Azov Brigade”, Anna concludes. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Laurence Peterson

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with. —Richard Rorty

Truth is nothing but a bad excuse for a poor imagination. —Unknown

Some things in life are very hard to give up. For me, I hope in a most singular manner, it is bullshit. I have spent nearly twenty years reading whatever literature I can find on what bullshit might be.  Since the publication of Professor Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005) as a book, his view, in a way almost unknown in philosophy, has generated absolutely no strongly dissenting accounts in the score of years that have elapsed since its publication.

As I write these lines, I have before me a Wired piece from June 19th, 2024, “Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine”, which itself links to another piece, published a mere 11 days earlier in Ethics and Information Technology, called “ChatGPT Is Bullshit”. Both articles pretty much ratify Frankfurt’s view of bullshit in a wholesale manner, which suggests to me that Frankfurt’s original position maintains its utter dominance in discussions of bullshit, and retains a vigorous wider relevance up to the present day. In my mind, there is something unusual, something exaggerated about the bullshit phenomenon that says something unique about the way we all live today.  In this piece, I would like to attempt to subject Frankfurt’s view to a more fundamental critique than any I have seen in the last twenty years. Read more »