by Jeroen Bouterse

I’m not sold on longtermism myself, but its proponents sure have my sympathy for the eagerness with which its opponents mine their arguments for repugnant conclusions. The basic idea, that we ought to do more for the benefit of future lives than we are doing now, is often seen as either ridiculous or dangerous.

Usually, this takes the form of thought-experiments in which longtermists are supposed to accept major harm to humanity now in the hope of some huge potential benefit later. Physicist and YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder, after boasting that she couldn’t be bothered to read William MacAskill’s book What We Owe the Future (“because if the future thinks I owe it, I’ll wait until it sends an invoice”), goes on to interpret a paper by MacAskill and his colleague Hilary Greaves in this way: “a few million deaths are acceptable, so long as we don’t go extinct.”[1] Phil Torres takes aim at an updated version of the same paper, in which Greaves and MacAskill argue that possible futures with huge numbers of people, even if they are unlikely, represent an expected value that outweighs that of the near future. He reads it as implying that MacAskill and Greaves might well press a button that lets 1 million people die now, to increase the chance that 100 trillion people will be born later.

That does sound inhumane, though luckily it seems unlikely that these two Oxford professors would get their hands on such a button, and that they would have a sufficiently strong credence in its reliability. Even aside from that, however, I have learned to stop worrying about what longtermists would do when presented with mega-trolley problems: every time some hostile rendition of a longtermist argument has shocked me into checking out the source, the original text turned out to be orders of magnitude less scary than I was led to believe. If you want to make the case that MacAskill and Greaves would support mass slaughter now for a tiny chance to benefit the future, you have to be willing to stretch specific parts of their argument and ignore the part where they, for instance, explicitly factor in a no-harm criterion (p. 5; p. 30). The idea that longtermist thinkers are making the world safe for cold-hearted utilitarianism, in which faraway ends justify any means, only gets off the ground if you are willing to believe that they are dishonest about where their arguments are taking them. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Valparaiso Expressions. Chile, November 2017.

Digital photograph.

by Rafaël Newman

Last month, after a three-year hiatus imposed by the pandemic, I was again able to participate in a once regular study-abroad junket, assisting a professor at the Swiss university where I serve as adjunct. The professor, to whom I happen to be married, was leading a group of 22 students on so-called Academic Travel, our university’s bi-annual USP: a ten-day sojourn in a country relevant to the topic of a course conducted otherwise in regular classes on the university’s campus in Lugano. The last time I went along on one of these trips, in 2019, the topic was commemoration of the Holocaust, and our destination was Poland, including the Auschwitz memorial site and the Jewish Cemetery in Łódź. This time, during the 2022 fall semester, the course was entitled “Writing and Re-Writing the Classics”; the primary texts were by Homer and Aeschylus and their respective modern interpreters; and we were bound for Greece.

Academic Travel traditionally follows midterms, so by the time we arrived in Athens the students had already read and discussed the Odyssey, in a new translation by Emily Wilson, as well as Circe (2018), Madeline Miller’s Stoppard-esque, “novelized” revision from the POV of a minor character. The syllabus called for them to turn now to the Oresteia, Aeschylus’s three-play account of the curse on the house of Atreus and our only extant tragic trilogy. On return to regular classes in Lugano in November, the class would then begin reading and discussing House of Names (2017), Colm Tóibín’s polyphonic re-writing of the tragedy, and consider the Irish author’s reframing of the ancient myth with a modern sensibility, his contemporary take on the psychological and, indeed, legal matters at stake in Aeschylus’s drama. Read more »

by Marie Snyder

Climate change and covid are revealing an ongoing inability for our society to make wise decisions in the face of calamity, which may be leading us to a collapse of our civilization. Perhaps if we accept (or just believe) that we’re nearing the end, we can shift our priorities enough to usher in a more peaceful and equitable denouement.

Some recent climate change articles are painting a bleak picture. At the Paris Agreement in 2015, countries around the world signed on to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs) in order to cap warming at 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2030. It’s become clear that we won’t be able to make it.

Current pledges for action by 2030, if delivered in full, would mean a rise in global heating of about 2.5°C and catastrophic extreme weather around the world. . . . Global emissions must fall by almost 50% by that date to keep the 1.5°C target alive. . . . We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over.

The climate crisis has been a test of our ability to put long term collective needs over individual desires, and we failed miserably. It’s no wonder we’re not sufficiently mitigating SARS-CoV-2. Despite all our knowledge and technology and ability, we just don’t want to be inconvenienced. This attitude dates at least as far back as Plato’s Protagoras, as Socrates argues that “our salvation would lie in the art of measurement,” specifically the ability to measure long term benefits against short term when measuring pleasures and pains. It appears that no amount of ingenuity can foist us out of our short-sightedness. We’re horrible at measuring current pleasures against distant pains, but even if we could, we also enjoy doing wrong too much for knowledge alone to lead us down the right path. Thousands of years after it was explained in writing, we still value unfettered lives that lead to unspeakable tragedies over some measure of restraint in current inconveniences could lead to greater pleasures later. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Sarah Firisen

For a long time, an accepted principle of corporate life has been that to take advantage of spontaneous ideation to drive innovation, people need to be in the same physical space. To encourage innovation, Apple, the accepted exemplar of an innovative company, built its headquarters in such a way as to try to spark these innovative interactions;  “It’s hoped that by housing so many employees in one facility, workers will be more likely to build relationships with those outside of their team, share ideas with co-workers with different specialties and learn about opportunities to collaborate.”

Another principle, as this McKinsey piece claims, is that “Innovation is a team sport….when it comes to innovation, it is rare to see individuals who possess the full range of skills needed to lead an initiative.” And, at least until March 2020, the assumption was that the only successful way to collaborate creatively was in person. The brainstorming workshop, or team whiteboarding off-site, was something that most of us in white-collar jobs have been part of in some form or at some time. 

At this point, it’s not news that many, maybe even most, of the white-collar workers who have been able to work remotely throughout the pandemic don’t want to return to the office. I’ve written about the, perhaps surprising, results of the unforeseen work-from-home mass experiment: productivity and worker satisfaction are up. And while some companies, particularly financial institutions, are starting to demand that people come in for at least 2-3 days a week, other companies are beginning to accept the reality that they may never be able to force everyone to be in the office regularly.  Read more »

by Andrew Bard Schmookler

Our contemporary secular worldview, though filled with knowledge and insights, is inadequately developed. It fails to provide the means for comprehending some important realities that religious perspectives — from which the secular culture has departed — were able, in their way, to provide.

It is not surprising that the secular worldview would have some such deficiencies.

• For one thing, it is of relatively recent origin: religious traditions had millennia to develop their systems to provide people the means to understand and cope with the various realities that human life and history compel people to deal with.
• For another, the religious traditions operated with an epistemology that enabled people to “make stuff up,” drawing on a mythological imagination, whereas the predominant epistemology of the secular worldview – to arrive at truth through applying reason to evidence – is far more constraining.

Which just means that there’s more work to be done by us who give our allegiance to that approach to the truth: we need to develop our secular worldview further so that it provides us with more of the understandings that are required to deal with the realities of the human world. Read more »

My friend Ruchira Paul showed me a little trick to cook blue rice using tea made from the dried flowers of Blue Butterfly Pea plants. Shown here: a small appetizer plate with some greens, the blue rice (which smells and tastes like normal basmati rice), masoor daal (lentils), and some cheese and tomatoes.

by William Benzon

Here’s the scene: A middle school auditorium in suburban New Jersey early in the Fall. It’s late Saturday afternoon on the second day of a dance competition. The auditorium is filled—but only loosely—with young dancers and their parents, other family, and friends. They’re all waiting for the final performance of the competition.

Some hip hop comes up on the sound system and a few of the dancers begin moving to the music. Some of them are standing up from their positions in the audience and are dancing in place. A couple others, at the far-left and far-right down front, are dancing in the outside aisles. More start joining in.

Down front, in the center, the action photographer—the guy who’s there to shoot photos of each dance number so they can then be sold to parents—is sitting down front on his high swivel chair. He’s smiling, swiveling in the chair to survey the scene, and he starts clapping on the back-beat.

That’s me.

Now another hip hop number comes up and, in a whooshhh! dancers get up out of their seats, rush to the aisles, and the aisles are jammed with kids joyously dancing. Five, six, eight, eleven, fifteen years old, a few older. Even the dancers waiting in the wings on stage for the final number, they danced too.

All dancing. 100, 200, maybe more. Dancing.

It was wonderful. Read more »

by Jim Britell

The roots of the epic transfer of wealth from the middle and lower classes to the rich which began with Reagan and peaked with the recent billionaire explosion can be traced to a series of events between March and November 1968.

July 1967 – Thousands converge in San Francisco for the Summer of Love

March 1968 – Robert Kennedy enters the Democratic Primary for President

April 1968 – Martin Luther King assassinated

June 1968 – Robert Kennedy assassinated

August 1968 – 75 million watch 5000 protesters clubbed and beaten on national television at the democratic convention in Chicago

January 1969 – Nixon sworn in as president

August 1969 – Woodstock

These events estranged a whole generation of young people who concluded that working within the political process was definitely not hip. They abandoned the political process. Many radicals, progressives, liberals and populists have avoided “hands on” electoral politics ever since. Read more »

What Are You Best At?

“So, after all these millennia,
what are you best at, my man?
What rocks your boat,
what stokes your passion,
what makes your day?” God asks
His creature

His creature replies,
“What I love most is conflict.
It’s what I do most reflexively
(not counting ruts of lust), and in
serial manner I might add,
down bloody centuries.
What I do best, my specialty,
is war —if I must say so myself,”

“And why do you think
this is so?” asks God.

“Isn’t that something only
you would know?” replies
His creature, paraphrasing
Dylan

Jim Culleny
10/10/22

by Jonathan Kujawa

Some years ago we discussed Brobdingnagian numbers. You can find the 3QD essay here. These are numbers that are so mind-bogglingly large they defy human imagination. Perhaps the most famous is Graham’s number. It’s so large I can’t write it down for you. It’s not that I refuse to write it down; I can’t. If I used one Planck volume per digit, Graham’s number would take up more than the observable universe [1]. Still, we would like to use and study such numbers and other hard-to-contemplate mathematical objects.

With the advent of computers and computer science, one reasonable way to describe a mathematical object is via a computer algorithm. That is, a step-by-step recipe that describes the number or question we are interested in and that could (at least in principle) be implemented on a computer. This is a pretty reasonable way to ringfence the parts of mathematics on which we might claim our minds can handle (maybe with help from computers).

For example, computable numbers are real numbers that are knowable in this sense. If we want to know the number’s nth digit, we can write down an algorithm that computes that nth digit for us. Even though the digits of π go on forever and have no discernable pattern, we have such algorithms for the digits of π, so it is computable. Likewise, there is a recursive formula for Graham’s number. It, too, is computable.

We aren’t limited to numbers. In a pair of 3QD essays last year (here and here), we saw that mathematicians have made significant progress in turning mathematics and mathematical thinking into things a computer can work with. There we saw machine learning help mathematicians make new connections and insights, and theorem verification software can help check the validity of results.

Before getting too cocky, it is worth remembering that we learned that most real numbers aren’t computable. Things that are computable go far beyond our everyday experience, but we shouldn’t forget there are vast seas beyond computable’s shores.

With this in mind, it is perhaps worth trying to understand the limits of what is computable. Read more »

Benny Andrews. Portrait of The Portrait Painter, 1987.

More here, here, and here.

by Tim Sommers

“Mankind was first taught to stammer the proposition of equality” – “Everyone is equal to everyone else” – “In a religious context, and only later was it made into morality,” Nietzsche wrote. Elsewhere, he called “human equality,” or “moral equality,” a specifically “Christian concept, no less crazy [than the soul],” moral equality “has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity…[it] furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.”

There is some evidence for this view.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” says America’s Declaration of Independence, “that all men [sic] are created equal…” “Self-evident” is not in the first draft.  It appears in Benjamin Franklin’s, not Jefferson’s, handwriting. Franklin apparently struck out what Jefferson had written and replaced it with “self-evident” – a philosopher’s word. Jefferson had written “sacred & undeniable.” His first draft also specified that people weren’t just created as equals, but that it was  “from that equal creation [that] they derive their rights inherent & unalienable.” (We should also note that, ironically, though quite typically, Jefferson equates human equality with equality between men, in fact, he implicitly presupposes that only white, property-owning men or equals. Equality has excluded as well as included.)

Nietzsche isn’t the only one who thinks that moral equality is a Christian idea. The “Judeo-Christian idea of equality,” that “All humans are of equal and positive worth because of some intrinsic property,” Louis Pojman has argued, “must be grounded in a transcendent reality, one that is not discoverable apart from religious authority.” Read more »

by Robyn Repko Waller

Cringy. Real. Surreal. Socially Suspect. A lot can (and has been) said about Nathan Fielder’s HBO docu-comedy The Rehearsal. Are the clients actors? Are the actors acting? Is Fielder an actor or  client? Script becomes life and life becomes script in a recursive dream (nightmare?) of which one cannot help but be an onlooker. [Season 1 spoilers ahead.]

The initial premise seems wholesome if it was not so intrusive. Help folks live out their fraught future endeavors with a host of trained actors, replica sets, and practically limitless rewinds. ‘Immersive’ doesn’t do The Rehearsal justice. Fielder, the former magician, spins realism. Fielder and HBO seem to spare little expense to engineer clients’ test scenarios — the full-scale bustling bar down to the torn chairs and spices and patrons, an Oregon farmhouse homestead with the dream garden and steady supply of child actors. Creator of worlds of possibility. Worlds of possibility for action and transformation.

But can being embedded in a rich social simulation transform us? Prepare us for a changed future self? Plenty of shows and movies exploit the intrigue of transformation to capture viewers, but few are philosophical enough to explore the conditions for transformation, for shaping the self. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Clay tennis courts in Neustift in South Tyrol.