by Thomas Wilk and Steven Gimbel

Last month’s open mic night at New College of Florida revealed more than just the comedic ineptitude of its administrators; it exposed the underbelly of a culture clash at the heart of the academic institution. Amidst the cultural war that has engulfed New College, following a takeover by figures appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis, the event was meant to be a light-hearted affair. Instead, it turned into a public spectacle with calls for a dean’s ouster and New College claiming a victory over cancel culture.

Hosted as part of a comedy course, the night featured a routine by Dean of Students David Rancourt that included jokes about a 7-year old boy exposing himself to a girl at the bus stop, violation by a drill sergeant’s baton, and a forced choice between death and “bunga bunga.” The jokes elicited a mix of reactions from the audience. Even New College President Richard Corcoran, who followed Rancourt’s performance, noted the abundance of gay jokes in the set. Corcoran jokingly called Rancourt his “former” dean of students, but, after his homophobic routine, some in the community wish that it wasn’t a joke.

In response to outrage from students and the media, the university gave a statement to The Sarasota Herald-Tribune: “Cancel culture is over at New College. Comedy is a work of art, one that is reliant on our society’s tenets of free speech and free expression. New College supports its students, faculty and staff’s right to participate in artistic endeavors like a comedy performance, or any other civil exercising of free speech and free expression.”

The College is making a common mistake about the ethics of humor. We’d know because we wrote the book on it. The mistake is to think that just because an act is intended to be humorous it must be beyond the scope of moral judgment. Read more »

Rose-ringed parakeets at a children’s zoo in Brixen, South Tyrol.

by Richard Farr

At first, the countless violations of the law by our new rulers still caused a degree of disquiet. But among the incomprehensible features of those months, my father later recalled, was the fact that soon life went on as if such crimes were the most natural thing in the world. —Joachim Fest, Not I – Berlin, early 1930s

[Y]ou have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. —Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Book II, Chapter VI

The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. —Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

Sometimes it’s hard to stay on top of things. While trying to rank-order Nuclear War Over Taiwan, Deforestation in the Amazon, Child Slavery Linked to my own Spending Habits, The Latest Data from the Thwaites Glacier, and What’s Being Done Right Now to the Uighurs the Rohingya the Palestinians the Hazara the Yazidis the Kurds and the Tigrayans, I keep being distracted by trivia, like How Irritated I am to Have Received Yet Another Cloyingly Chummy Fund-Raising Email from the Biden-Harris Campaign. 

Sometimes you have to put Now aside and get the cool perspective of ancient sources. So this week I dug around in my shelves and dusted off a book from a distant era. Written by Al Gore, and entitled The Assault on Reason, it’s an eyewitness account of the decline of more or less everything back when the American throne was occupied by the Kennebunkport Dauphin, George II. 

Preoccupied with our current traumas, how quickly we forget! Gore is not a neutral observer, but his account is stolidly factual. And the fact is, George II’s reign at the great White Palace in Washington was astonishingly awful. Vandalizing, reckless, arrogant and ignorant; cruel and authoritarian; chaotic and incompetent beyond all previous measure; contemptuous of the law, of democracy, of transparency, of innocent life, of any “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” In sum, what strikes the modern reader most forcibly perhaps is that the era, half lost in the mists of history, was so strikingly Trumpian.  Read more »

Making Way

—Narragansett Bay —1960, first time out

We part from pier
slow as disengaging lovers
one landlocked, the other a
floater who won’t be kept at bay

The diminishing dock slides back,
its bollards and planks deploy
to some other place not here
—to a distancing otherworld

The tether breaks
as stern-first we pass the
channel buoy

     Quarter back, the OD says.
     Quarter back, aye sir,

and we slip away

    Steer two one zero, half ahead.
Two one zero, half ahead, aye sir

and we slow-slide down
the gleaming bay

The sun’s so bright it indicates
a tern on the roof of a big estate
a half mile away atop its
long lawn hill off the starboard bow
which slopes down clear
through the wind-wove air
to a point where jades meet blues
……… —which passes now as we part the sea while
making way

Further south the sea’s first chops
begin to unsettle our sheltered
adolescent cruise

Near the harbor mouth all decks
rise then make their first
supplicating bows to whatever
god it is who intervenes
to call-off wrecks

…… —we’re juggled gently first in
Neptune’s law as
pitches rolls & heaves
meet yaws

Grey diesel billows from our raked stacks
Halyards snap against the mast’s steel
Gulls abundantly rise & reel
over the white chaos of our wake’s track

Sunlight splinters
into rippled trillions
upon each breaker’s
sequined breast
before it folds
in a white rush, falling
to the soul percussion
of our bow-wave’s

shush
…………. shush
……………………
by Jim Culleny
November, 2009

by Mike Bendzela

We never travel, mainly because working a farm is a career, even a small one like ours, and also because my spouse’s Type 1 diabetes is better managed in a sedentary, predictable existence. I realized in marriage that I would never become “worldly” and didn’t care. I would have to learn whatever I could about the world on this “postage stamp of soil” (1), in William Faulkner’s memorable phrase. This existence has certainly turned us into “foodies” (scare quotes indicating how much I detest the term), even bad-ass foodies in our case, foodies such as our grandparents were. No, strike that–our great grandparents. How many people can say they grow their own stew?

During my twenties and thirties, when we first embarked on this course of Do It Yourself food production, I aspired to be “Green,” “Sustainable,” and “Self-sufficient”–even “Organic”! These are lofty ideals that died directly during their attempted implementation. All these decades later, I’ve settled for home food production and preservation that is cheap, fun, delicious, and humane. Much of it now depends on one big green secret ingredient of farming that I shall reveal at the end. Read more »

Amy Sherald. They Call me Redbone but I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake, 2009.

Oil on canvas.

More here, here, and here.

by Brooks Riley

To Javed My Son

 — on receiving his first hand-written letter in London

by Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938)

Create your own place in the world of love
New time new morning new evening

Listen to the divine within you
Like a hawk searching for live prey

Learn the language of a rose — Inshallah —
For its silence veils Nature’s secret

Shun glazed pottery made in the West
Mold your own cup using India’s clay

Harvest my ghazals like grapes
Ferment them to make sacred wine

Renounce the material
Be like me — a Sufi

***

Transcreated from the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari.

by David J. Lobina

Well, first post of the year, and a new-year-resolution unkept. Unsurprising, really.

In my last entry of 2023, I drew attention to the various series of posts I have written at 3 Quarks Daily since 2021, many of which did not proceed in order, creating a bit of confusion along the way. Indeed, the last post of the year was supposed to be the final section of a two-parter, but instead I wrote about how I intended to organise my writing better in 2024. What’s more, I promised I would start 2024 with the anticipated second part of my take on why Machine Learning (ML) does not model or exhibit human intelligence, and yet in my first post of 2024 I published a piece on the psychological study of inner speech (or the interior monologue, as is known in literature), a fascinating topic in its own right, though I am not sure it got much traction, but it really has little to do with ML.

In my last substantial post of 2023, then, I set up an approach to discuss the supposedly human-like abilities of contemporary Artificial Intelligence (AI [sic]™, as I like to put it), and I now intend to follow up on it and complete the series. It is an approach I have employed when discussing AI before, and to good effect: first I provide a proper characterisation of a specific property of human cognition – in the past, I concentrated on natural language, given all the buzz around large language models; this time around was the turn of thought and thinking abilities – and then I show how AI – actually, ML models – don’t learn or exhibit mastery of such a property of cognition, in any shape or form. Read more »

Walking above the village of Schalders in the South Tyrol on Saturday morning.

by Barry Goldman

Reading about corporate greed and depredation over the past few years, I keep getting stuck on the same question: Don’t these people have grandchildren? How can corporate decision-makers spend their days actively working to destroy the environment, pollute the water, kill off the animals, melt the glaciers, and incinerate the biosphere? Even if what they care about the most is making more money no matter how much money they already have, don’t they care at all about the world they’re leaving for their kids?

I’ve arrived at a theory. But first I need to back up a few steps.

Readers of 3QD may be familiar with the brain fungus that causes “zombie ants” to leave the safety of the forest floor and climb up the stalks of plants to die. Or the parasite that causes mice to lose their fear of cats. In both cases, the parasite has evolved to hijack the brain of the host and cause it to behave in ways that are suicidal to the host but beneficial to the parasite. The behaviors the parasite causes are often exquisitely complex and particular. It seems impossible that something as primitive as a fungus could be the explanation. But evolution has come up with lots of similar strategies. She is very clever. She doesn’t have a sense of fair play or sportsmanship. If a behavior increases the chances of getting the genes of one generation reproduced in the next, it succeeds. Nothing else matters. And she has lots and lots of time to experiment.

So that’s the first idea we need – the fungus that hijacks the brain of one species to improve the reproductive success of another.

Then we need the idea of cultural evolution. Human beings don’t have to wait for genetic evolution. We have evolved the ability to get information from one generation to the next without having to wait for it first to be encoded in the DNA. We don’t have to start from scratch with each generation, and we don’t have to proceed by trial and error. We have culture, language, and traditional practices. Read more »

by Martin Butler

My favourite lesson in secondary school played no part in my future career but nevertheless enriched my life immeasurably. Despite being a sleepy rural school very low down the pecking order it had fully equipped woodwork and metalwork workshops. Woodwork was my favourite subject by far. This was in the days when there was a gender split – girls doing something called ‘domestic science’ while the boys did woodwork and metalwork. Woodwork lessons were very straightforward. The teacher – Mr Carpenter (can you believe!) – would demonstrate standard joints, starting with a simple halving joint, and then we would each go to our benches and have a go at producing something as near as possible to what he had produced. By the end of the first year we were making half-blind dovetails which require considerable care and precision. All done with hand tools alone. Once we had mastered the basic joints, we were free to make whatever we wanted. Along with art and sport it was one of the few subjects in which it was possible to excel without having to write anything down, which for me was a blessing. Of course, we would sketch out plans, but these were always very provisional and often bore little resemblance to the final product. You were judged on the product alone, not on your workings.

Mr Carpenter told us that in maths if you got 9 out of 10 it was pretty good, but in woodwork if 9 out of ten joints were good and the 10^th bad, your creation was likely to fall to pieces. The laws of physics ruled. As with other crafts, woodwork requires patience and practice. Wood makes demands that have to be met if you are going to produce anything worthwhile, imposing a kind of natural discipline that comes not from some authority figure but from the physical world itself. The digital world is binary, you either know the right clicks to make, the right options to pick on a drop-down menu, or you don’t. In contrast, hand-crafts are essentially qualitative. Read more »

A Sprawl of Cemeteries

Blood for blood is in our bones,
the bass line of a ceaseless requiem.

Justice screams carpe diem,
but none of the dead are soothed
as the living gloat and hoot, or wail
Why did it have to be her, or him?

Satisfaction’s not been found
in the pages of our “Good Books”.
Why blood and honor have been spun
into semantical squalls of scriptures
torn by the cyclone of our double helix
to supersede love— why is anybody’s guess.

Why is left to be lived by those who simply believe
that death for death, or death for turf, or death for wealth
yields no more than a sprawl of cemeteries.

by Jim Culleny, 5/2/11
Rev: 3/9/22, Rev:2/4/24; ad infinitum

by Joseph Shieber

Suppose that you’re sitting at a pristine, white desk and are presented with the following scene (graciously rendered by Google Bard from a description by me):

How would you describe what you see? Maybe something like, On the desk in front of me there’s a medium-sized, shiny green sphere in front of a large, matte red cube. 

The process by which you see, however, doesn’t involve the wholesale transmission of information about discrete objects from the environment to your consciousness. Rather, that process involves the decomposition of information into constituent components. Very roughly, the rods and cones in your eyes encode light reflectances from surfaces in your immediate environment into biochemical signals and communicate them, by way of your optic nerve, to your visual cortex, where those signals undergo further processing. Some parts of this process involve distinguishing between light and dark, other parts involve the detection of edges, lines, and orientations, while still other parts involve encoding for color, motion, depth, and object-hood.

The way that this process occurs seems to present a problem. How is it that the discrete pieces of information — shiny, matte, red, green, sphere, cube, in front, behind, etc. — get put back together in the right way when that information eventually makes its way to your consciousness? Given the scene on your desk and the process by which your sense organs and brain process that visual information of the scene, why do you become aware of the right collection of properties – the green, shininess, and spherical shape belonging to the object in front, and the red, matte surface, and cubic shape belonging to the object behind? In fact, why are the properties even connected at all in your consciousness, rather than appearing as separate impressions of color, shape, surface, etc.?

This puzzle of how it is that the visual properties that we sense are “bound” together into experiences of objects is one version of the “binding problem” in neuroscience. Merely one version, because we can easily imagine others. To take just one further example, when you then reach out your hand to grasp the object in front on your desk, why do you register your tactile experiences as belonging to the same green, spherical object that you see?

Though the binding problem is still a live problem in 21st century neuroscience, it was actually anticipated more than 2000 years ago, in the Nyāya Sutras (Sutras 3.3.1-14). There, the author of the Sutras uses what is basically the binding problem to argue against the idea that the self might consist in nothing more than a collection of all of the component parts of the living human body. This latter, materialist, view was defended by the Cārvāka school, one of the rival schools of the Nyāya. Read more »

Amar Kanwar. The Sovereign Forest, 2011- …

“The Sovereign Forest is an ongoing multimedia installation that is a creative response to crime, politics, human rights, and ecological crisis. It evolved out of the political and environmental conflict in the resource-rich, and largely tribal Indian state of Odisha. Kanwar has been observing and documenting the industrial interventions that have irrevocably altered Odisha’s landscape for more than a decade.”

More here and here.

Current show here.