by Adele A. Wilby

Renowned and respected for her scholarship, her history of authorship of many books on dictatorship and her political experience, is it any wonder that Anne Applebaum’s new book Autocracy, Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World has been so critically received; she is an expert on her subject. This slim volume provides us with an incisive exposition and analysis of how autocrats function in the world today, securing their own personal power and wealth, and in Applebaum’s view, posing a threat to democracies.

For Applebaum, autocratic regimes clearly pose a threat to democracies, but about which states is she referring? The number of autocrats is, according to her, extensive and includes communists, monarchists, nationalists and theocrats. On Applebaum’s ‘list’ of autocracies are, predictably, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea – the well-known adversaries of the West – amongst many others. ‘Softer autocracies and hybrid democracies, sometimes called illiberal democracies’ such as Turkey, Singapore and India also come under her purview. It appears that autocracies and ‘softer autocracies’ outnumber the democracies in the world today and most of the world’s population lives under such regimes, and that is the problem for Applebaum.

We learn from Applebaum that the ‘art’ of autocracy in the modern world is very much up to speed, taking advantage of a globalised world, involving sophisticated networks of ‘financial structures, a complex of security services – military, paramilitary, police – and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda and disinformation’. The apparatus deployed by autocrats to achieve their political and financial objectives are probably used by most states across the globe; it is the purpose for which they are used that irks Applebaum. In her view a ‘ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power’ drives the autocrats in the world today. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Along The Sidewalk On A Late Afternoon, October 2024.

Composite, digital photographs.

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by Richard Farr

For several weeks I’ve had an article by the excellent Rick Perlstein squatting unread in my Ought-To-Read list. The title is Everything You Wanted to Know About World War III but Were Afraid to Ask. I am afraid to ask: although I ought to want to know, right now I don’t. “The world is too much with us”: unlike Wordsworth, but like you perhaps, I read the latest every day about Gaza, the Ukraine, South Sudan, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and another poll reminding me that tens of millions of my fellow citizens think a poisonous thug with a criminal record will make America great again. Sometimes you just have to switch off and leave the world behind. Even if you’d feel guilty being reminded that you haven’t been paying attention to Syria, Venezuela, the Rohingya, the Uyghurs, the women of Afghanistan, the children working in cobalt mines in the DRC, or the disturbing fact that people are actually out there buying Boris Johnson’s memoirs. 

I was thinking about this reality-fatigue recently while struggling to finish a different book. Look on the bright side: I’m not going to bore you with an account of the experience, which I have fairly often, of picking up a novel that has been declared “plangent” and “luminous” (or, that champion among meaningless back cover standbys, “fiercely original”) and  feeling embarrassed that I don’t get what the fuss is about. No, I’m going to address something more important than that: the experience of trying to read an excellent book, and feeling embarrassed that I barely had the moral fortitude to work through its contents.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs. You have to get a long way in before you uncover the source of the title, but it’s worth the wait. The subject is 9/11, tangentially. But really the subject is our crimes, our brutalities, our layer cake of madnesses and delusions in the wake of 9/11. The battalion upon red-smeared gray battalion of ugly details we either chose not to learn, or chose to forget, or chose to swallow our government’s lies about. All that — and it’s about the uses and abuses, especially in the Land of Liberty, of virtually limitless surveillance.

Not to be outdone by her own title, Kerry Howley has invented in this book what as far as I can see is an entirely original style of writing in the genre of investigative journalism. We think we know what this kind of thing is supposed to sound like, and it’s not supposed to sound like someone responding to a bad hangover by having a panic attack and then swallowing a handful of amphetamines. But Howley’s sometimes hallucinatory style is a revelation: finally, here’s a voice that suits and perfectly illuminates the material. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

Every time I read or watch anything about the election I hear some variant of the phrase “margin of error.”  My mathematically attuned ears perk up, but usually it’s just a slightly pretentious way of saying the election is very close or else that it’s not very close. Schmargin of error might be a better name for metaphorical uses of the phrase.

To be fair, the phrase is often supplemented with precise numbers (plus or minus 1.5%, for example) that purport to quantify exactly how tight the race is (or isn’t).  Unfortunately these numbers are not as reliable as they might seem. The problem is that an enabling condition for this precision is that a random sample of voters be polled and the larger it is, the better.

A few technical remarks on the meaning of the margin of error in the next three paragraphs, which can be skimmed or skipped.

The basic qualitative idea: If we imagine many random samples of voters being taken, the sample percentages supporting a candidate will vary from sample to sample, of course, but these sample percentages will naturally cluster around the true percentage, P, of voters supporting the candidate in the whole population.

Importantly, this clustering of the sample probabilities can be described more quantitatively if we’re dealing with random samples of voters. In fact, if we assume that p is the percentage of voters supporting candidate A in a random sample and n is the number of voters in the sample, then we can get a good estimate of P, which is what we really want to know.

Specifically, the interval ranging from -2√[p(1-p)/n] to +2√[p(1-p)/n] will encompass, P, the percentage of voters in the whole population supporting candidate A, about  95% of the time.

Half of the above interval, which will vary a bit depending on p in the particular sample taken, is the margin of error. Since n appears in the denominator, the larger the sample is, the narrower the interval encompassing P. Read more »

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by Alexandre Gefen and Philippe Huneman

Philosophical reflection on artificial intelligence (AI) has been a feature of the early days of cybernetics, with Alan Turing’s famous proposals on the notion of intelligence in the 1950s rearming old philosophical debates on the man-system or man-machine and the possibly mechanistic nature of cognition. However, AI raises questions on spheres of philosophy with the contemporary advent of connectionist artificial intelligence based on deep learning through artificial neural networks and the prodigies of generative foundation models. One of the most prominent examples is the philosophy of mind, which seeks to reflect on the benefits and limits of a computational approach to mind and consciousness. Other spheres of affected philosophies are ethics, which is confronted with original questions on agency and responsibility; political philosophy, which is obliged to think afresh about augmented action and algorithmic governance; the philosophy of language; the notion of aesthetics, which has to take an interest in artistic productions emerging from the latent spaces of AIs and where its traditional categories malfunction; and metaphysics, which has to think afresh about the supposed human exception or the question of finitude.

In this text we want to indicate what are the new frontiers of philosophical speculation about artificial intelligence, now that GPT and other kinds of LLMs went public.

Knowing and Thinking: What Do AIs Tell Us?

If the currently established link between AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind is new, then philosophically questioning artificial intelligence requires us to place many questions in the long term. The project to improve human life by automating cognitive tasks, as radically original as it seems to us since the arrival of ChatGPT, develops one of Aristotle’s old intuitions about automata that would solve our routine tasks and replace our slaves. The milestones are famous automata such as Vaucanson’s duck and the mechanical Turk, right up to the exuberant robots of Boston Dynamics. To take just two examples, the congruences between the pragmatic philosophy of language proposed by Wittgenstein and how Large Language Models (LLMs) synthesize usages to generate thought probabilistically is patent, as is the link between modern cybernetics, which separates software and hardware, and the idea that thought is realizable in multiple ways, a notion formulated in the 1950s by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor (sometimes called functionalism). One of these realizations would be human thought, often located “inside of” the brain, while the other would be a machine-implemented thought. Modern artificial intelligence has its roots in a long history of formalizing thought and logic. Read more »

by Derek Neal

The opening credits of Affliction (1997) feature small, rectangular images that fill only half the screen. You wonder if something is wrong with the aspect ratio, or if the settings have been changed on your television. A succession of images is placed before the viewer: a farmhouse in a snowy field, a trailer with a police cruiser parked in front, the main street of a small, sleepy town, the schoolhouse, the town hall. The last image is a dark, rural road, with a mountain in the distance. Finally the edges of the image expand, fill the screen, and a voice begins to narrate:

This is the story of my older brother’s strange criminal behavior and disappearance. We who loved him no longer speak of Wade. It’s as if he never existed. By telling his story like this, by breaking the silence about him, I tell my own story as well. Everything of importance, that is, everything that gives rise to the telling of this story occurred during a single deer hunting season in a small town in upstate New Hampshire where Wade was raised, and so was I. One night, something changed and my relation to Wade’s story was different from what it had been since childhood. I marked this change by Wade’s tone of voice during a phone call two nights after Halloween. Something I had not heard before. Let us imagine that around eight o’clock on Halloween Eve…

Then the narrator’s voice disappears, and we are in the car with Wade, played by Nick Nolte, and his daughter. We are in the story, we are ready to be swept away, or in the case of this movie, submerged into the depths, but we have been prepared in such a way—starting from outside the story, outside the narrative—that we are aware of the artificiality of what we are seeing. Affliction tells us that it is a movie. The small images, which look like postcards, are presented to us as miniature models of different sets. The farmhouse becomes “THE HOUSE.” The main street becomes “MAIN STREET.” While they will take on specific characteristics within the movie, we know from the prologue that they are eternal, and we will be reminded of this at the end as well.

The voiceover achieves a similar effect. The narrator, played by Willem Defoe, removes tension and drama from the plot by spoiling the ending: Wade becomes a criminal and disappears. He does not even attempt to convince us that the story is real, that it actually happened, because he says, “Let us imagine.” Is this not bad storytelling? It may be appropriate for a children’s story, a fairy tale, but for a mature film like Affliction, a film dealing with murder, paranoia, and male violence?  Shouldn’t a story like this try to convince its audience that it’s real, by building up a wealth of detail and creating realistic, lifelike characters? Perhaps a certain type of story, but not this one. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

You need to take Ken Ham seriously. This entrepreneurial Brisbane high school teacher has put together the world’s largest Young Earth creationist organization, Answers in Genesis (AiG). This has a worldwide presence, publishes its own magazine, Answers, and emails a constant stream of highly repetitive messages to its followers. It has built the Creation Museum in Kentucky, as well as the Ark Encounter, featuring a (very unbiblical) so-called replica of Noah’s Ark, and now plans a replica of the Tower of Babel. Its annual income (June 2022 filing) was over $60 million, its YouTube channel has 667,000 subscribers, and its website claims over a million visits each month.

So what? Bible Belt lunatic fringe? Unfortunately no. AiG has allies who are close to the center portion of power, and who will be even closer to the center of power should Donald Trump once again become President.

Ken Ham has among his friends Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, whose law firm represented AiG pro bono in a successful attempt to ensure Kentucky State funding for its activities, despite its fundamentally religious nature, which goes so far as to require all employees accept its six-day creationist Statement of Faith. And among the contributors to its magazine is Calvin Beisner, director of the Cornwall Alliance, whose entire purpose is to deny the importance of human-caused climate change. Cornwall in turn has direct links to the Heartland Institute and to the Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025.

If you have not studied modern creationism, you may well think that it is a curious aberration, like flat-earthism, regrettable in its denial of whole areas of science, but otherwise (!) harmless. Not so. Read more »

by Rebecca Baumgartner

For a while now, the slogan “Trust the experts” has been a liberal shibboleth meant to imply endorsement of scientific consensus. Despite agreeing, in principle, with what the phrase is meant to signal, I’ve always been bothered by this slogan. Part of it is that as I get older, I realize more and more clearly that everyone is just winging it – even experts. Nobody really knows what they’re doing, at least not to the degree they want you to think they do. Another part of my cynicism about trusting experts is that I’ve personally been let down by them, as we all have to one degree or another. These experiences start to pile up in the course of life, especially if you’ve been unlucky enough to need the services of experts like doctors on a regular basis.

But alongside this cynicism, I recognize that the opposite stance – “Don’t trust the experts” – isn’t tenable either. We have to trust experts if we want to live as active members of society rather than in a bunker full of canned beans wearing tinfoil hats. 

I was finally able to understand my way around this dilemma when I came across “The Trouble with Expertise” in The Philosophers’ Magazine. In it, clinical ethicist Jamie Watson says:

“Medical researchers have exploited people of colour, obstetricians have ignored medical decisions from women in labour, pharmaceutical corporations have conspired to increase addiction, and trans patients are routinely stigmatised or refused care. There are lots of reasons to be sceptical about experts. But it’s important to note that those reasons have nothing to do with expertise. The trouble comes because of the power experts have to put people in compromising positions and to use their positions in ways that harm others.”

This sums up why I find it more helpful to think of trust in terms of the system that an expert operates within rather than in terms of any individual expert. I trust the scientific method and the peer-review process, because while neither is perfect, they have internal rules and norms about finding and correcting errors. An individual expert is only trustworthy to the extent that they live up to the standards imposed on them by their system of expertise. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

The longer you’re in a new country the more it becomes a relationship. It starts out wonderful. You never knew a place could understand you like this. Everything is fun and exciting and “Oh my God just so different!” But then reality sets in. And, with enough time, the things that start out oddly charming begin to irritate you. That’s happened to me twice. I lived in Egypt for three years and Germany for five.

Moving to both countries are the two best decisions I’ve ever made. Bar none. It’s undeniable what they’ve given me. It’s also undeniable that they really pissed me off. Here are ten things about Egypt and Germany, compared side-to-side. Written, of course, with all the love in my heart.

1) The People

Egypt

They never show up on time. That’s clear straight from the beginning. 

This isn’t just me being closed-minded as a Westerner. Egyptians admit to their tardiness with glee. 

Khamis duh-ay bess.

“Only 5 minutes.”

I will hear this thousands of times the three years I live there. I swear I notice the smile in an Egyptians’ voice every time they say it. I know it’s a lie and so do they.

Egyptians also laugh at everything.

Their insistence that everything is probably just fine will charm me to no end. 

Germany

If a German tells you they’re going to do something, they’re going to do it. It’s as simple as that. 

Never have I met a nation as unfailingly trustworthy.

They’re also so punctual that it can get slightly creepy.

“Oh, you need help moving apartments at 7:30 AM on a Tuesday six months from now? It’s in my schedule.”

Six months later, you look out your window on a Tuesday morning, and Hans is waiting there at 7:25. 

Delightful. Read more »

My (almost) daily walk in my neighborhood becomes quite colorful this time of year.

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

Last weekend in Northern Utah, the fall colors in the mountains were at their peak. The days were still hot, but the mornings and evenings were cool. The sun was beginning to set a little earlier and most of the doorsteps in our quiet town were peppered with multicolored autumn gourds. An old movie theater downtown, built in 1924 in art deco style, was showing Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. My husband and I decided to go.

Before the film, the theater featured “previews” of older Halloween movies: trailers for the original Halloween, Pet Sematary, and both of the original Ghostbusters films. The evening kicked off with a screening of the Michael Jackson music video Thriller. Clutching my cheap, overly salted popcorn and my flat Diet Coke, I sank into a comfortable nostalgia.

One straightforward way in which nostalgia is pleasant is that it involves memories of things that we once enjoyed but perhaps have not kept present before our minds. I don’t think this is all there is to it. I noticed that nostalgia, on this occasion, was not only comfortable—it felt like a relief. An escape. Being present in the current moment is hard work. One of the reasons that nostalgia is pleasant is that it presents us with all of the desirable parts of having an identity without any of the unpleasant responsibilities of crafting it. We can take advantage of the asymmetrical relation in which we stand to our past selves on one hand and our future selves on the other.

When I look to the future I wonder: will I have an identity that I recognize and endorse? In philosopher Bernard Williams’ famous paper “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” he tells the story of an opera by the same name in which Elina Makropulos, a woman born in the 16^th century was given an elixir of life by her court physician father. So long as she goes on taking the elixir, she goes on living. The opera is set in the contemporary era, and Elina has become desperately bored. “It is all the same” she laments, “singing and silence.”

Williams uses Elina’s case to argue that immortality would be undesirable. Inevitably, we would all either become suicidally bored or we would change so much that we wouldn’t recognize ourselves—we’d turn into people our past selves wouldn’t relate to or endorse. In the worst case, we might even turn into people who we’d rather die than become. In the end, Elina gives up on the prospect of immortality, stops taking the elixir, and dies. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Barry Goldman

The New York Times had a piece recently about a clever hustle called station flipping. It involves Citi Bikes, the blue rental bikes you see all over New York City. It seems the natural movement of people and bikes around the city results in periodic imbalances. Sometimes there are too many bikes in a docking station, other times there are too few. So Lyft, the company that owns Citi Bike, implemented a program that rewarded people for moving bikes from one station to another to correct those imbalances. The miracle of modern information technology enabled the company to track the location of its bikes with precision and to tweak the reward structure in real time. The system awarded points, and the points could be redeemed for cash. Moving a bike from a full docking station to an empty one could earn a “Bike Angel” up to $4.80.

People respond to incentives. They also, in every system everywhere, “work the points.” As a direct and inevitable result, people figured out how to game the Bike Angel system. They realized they didn’t have to wait for the natural movement of bikes and people to create shortages and surpluses, they could manufacture them.

The algorithm updated every 15 minutes. Some docking stations are only a block apart. That means a group of aerobically fit Angels can empty one docking station and fill another by riding bikes to the empty station and running back to the full station until the conditions are reversed. If they can do this before the system updates, they can earn the maximum for each ride. Then, when the full station is empty and the empty station is full, they can reverse the process and do it again. Before too long some enterprising Bike Angels were earning up to $6,000 a month.

The company, predictably, was not amused. It says station flipping distorts the market and games the system. That’s pretty rich coming from Lyft, since its whole business model depends on gaming the system and distorting the market by fudging the distinction between employees and independent contractors. But that’s a different article. In this article I want to point out how station flipping maps the essential features of our financial sector. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

In her provocative, genre-defying book, Funeral Diva (2020), Pamela Sneed declares her intention to write ‘a story about being trapped in a story’. This is Sneed’s metafictional idea that main storylines can fail to capture the full reality. To counter dominant narratives, the author creates a turbulent churn of memoir, poetry, essays, criticism, and commentary about marginalized identities. She includes a prose poem entitled ‘A New Story’ which closes with the hopeful resolution: ‘I am going to write a new story’. Funeral Diva seems to belong to an entirely fresh genre, making readers wonder whether there are other ways to tell stories that haven’t yet been thought of.

To push back against received ideas regarding gay liberation and the AIDS crisis, Sneed highlights whose voices are often left out. She brings together the personal and political, recent history and the contemporary, to explore HIV/AIDS, health inequalities, racial injustice, and the broader struggles of being African American in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. At the heart of Sneed’s narrative is a critical examination of stories – who tells them, how they are told, and the power relations that shape them.

Funeral Diva wasn’t released until late 2020, emerging out of at least ‘fifteen years’ of quiet germination. The volume’s completion was tied to trips Sneed made to Ghana and South Africa, which proved pivotal to her thinking. Also ‘pushing [her] across the finish line’ was the resurfacing of trauma during the Covid-19 pandemic, which echoed the devastation of the AIDS crisis. Read more »

Conway Ginger. Donkey and Man, Standing and Walking. 2023.

Acrylic paint and ink.

More here, and here.

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by Malcolm Murray

There is a strawman factory smack in the middle of the AI risk debate. Given the complexity of AI risk, we are seeing a lot of weak arguments, focusing only on one aspect of AI risk or AI risk management. In fact, AI risk has become a bit of a “strawman factory”, since it is so complex that it is very easy to only zero in on one aspect and knock that down, while neglecting the rest.

The debate over the California AI bill SB-1047 showed how easily these strawmen take over. Andreessen Horowitz was particularly effective at churning out strawmen, such as the idea that the benefits of AI are so great (correct) so that we have a moral reason to ignore the risks (incorrect).

In order to fend off all these strawmen walking around, we can make use of three underappreciated aspects of AI risk and risk management – “the Spectrum”, “the System” and “the Stack”. Let me explain what I mean by those.

The “Spectrum”

Given the complexity of AI risk, it is easy to zero in on one aspect and point out that an AI risk assessment technique would not work there. But this neglects the wide spectrum of AI risks.

The risks to society from AI fall along a wide spectrum and people tend to underestimate how wide it is. The spectrum can be visualized in terms of levels of velocity and uncertainty, i.e. how long it will take a risk to materialize and how uncertain we are about its effects. On one hand, we have risks for which we have high certainty and that are already here, such as bias and discrimination. We know that by default, since AI has been trained on the sum total of human knowledge, and that human knowledge is inherently biased, that the AI models have biased data in their training set.

On the other hand, we have risks such as loss of control risks. Read more »