by Tim Sommers

Does ignorance always excuse someone’s actions no matter how much harm they cause? If so, doesn’t that imply that the less I know about the problems of the world the less I can be blamed for them? Paradoxically, can I be a better person by remaining more ignorant? Or can I be morally culpable despite being factually wrong or ignorant about something? Either possibility seems unsettling.

Suppose malevolent aliens philosophically dedicated to chaos and destruction invade the Earth just for the sake of creating havoc and killing as many humans as they can before they move on to the next planet. As part of the struggle for survival, governments create and distribute an “alien repulsive device” (ARP). About the size and shape of a wristwatch, the ARP emits a frequency of electromagnetic radiation that discourages, but does not totally prevent, alien attacks. During the first ten months after the ARP device is distributed the authorities estimate that 200,000 lives are saved in the US alone, and a million and a half hospitalizations due to alien injuries are prevented.

Nonetheless, there is a group of people who oppose the use of ARPs. Some argue it is just a way for governments to track your movements. Others argue that the device does more harm to the wearer than is justified given that the risk of an alien assault is quite low – and the results are usually not that bad. Others deny the existence of the aliens altogether.

As a result of these views, ARP/alien-deniers spread the word to the world. Do not wear ARPs! They blog, they podcase, they protest, they try to prevent the government from handing them out by threatening or harassing public health officials. Some harass total strangers in public settings for wearing ARPs. Doctors and demographers estimate that a third of a million additional people die as a result of the alien-denialist movement, people who otherwise could have been saved.

Since this is a hypothetical, let’s just stipulate that no reasonable person could deny that there was an alien invasion, that on-balance ARPs saved lives and seriously mitigated harms, and that ARPs cannot be used as trackers. Given this, are deniers morally culpable for any of these excessive deaths? Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

The State of Georgia has a lottery guaranteed to turn an enterprising 3QD reader into a millionaire [1].

Playing the lottery can be fun. It is a tradition for Anne and me to buy lottery tickets when stopping for gas on long road trips. Imagining what you’d do with our new wealth is a fine way to pass the long hours it takes to cross the panhandle of Texas. Occasionally, we win back the cost of the ticket. Once or twice, we even doubled our money.

The lottery is often said to be a tax on the mathematically challenged. That saying is certainly nonsense. Pretty much nobody thinks the odds are in their favor. People who buy lottery tickets do so in hope, desperation, or with a “hey, somebody has to win; why not me?” attitude.

After all, the odds of winning the grand prize in the Powerball is 1 in 292,201,338. Every adult in the European Union could buy a ticket, and they might still miss the winning ticket. I could spend $1,000,000 on each of the twice-weekly Powerball drawings, and it would take me more than five years to get through all the possible combinations.

There are a few things with worse odds. A decade ago here at 3QD we talked about how a well-shuffled deck of playing cards is virtually certain to be in an order never before seen in the history of the universe. I wouldn’t bet on guessing that order. But among everyday things, the odds of winning a big lottery are about as bad as it gets.

Gambling odds favor the house. After all, they wouldn’t offer the game if they didn’t expect to make money over the long run. The odds are ever in their favor. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

I loved chemistry so deeply that I automatically now respond when people want to know how to interest people in science by saying, “Teach them elementary chemistry”. Compared to physics it starts right in the heart of things. —Robert Oppenheimer

How much science can you teach very young children? I have been exploring this question for the past one year or so as I experiment with teaching various kinds of scientific topics to my 3-year-old daughter. She has been generally quite receptive and curious about everything I tell her, and whatever I have failed to teach her is largely a reflection on either the intrinsic difficulties of explaining certain kinds of ideas or my own communication skills.

Chemistry has always been more accessible than physics to laymen, largely because of its colors and explosions and smells and relevance to everyday life; it “starts right in the heart of things”, as Oppenheimer put it. But even at an elemental level it seems easier because of the architectural nature of the subject – atoms which are the building blocks assemble into larger molecules. The basic idea to communicate was to think of atoms as balls that can attach to different numbers of other balls based on what element they represent – one for hydrogen, two for oxygen, three for nitrogen, four for carbon and so on. The combination of atoms into molecules then becomes a simple exercise — just count whether each atom attaches to its right number of neighbors. To make it friendlier, I asked my daughter to see if each atom has the right number of “friends” it holds hands with. Read more »

Sughra Raza. New Wing. November 2023

Digital photograph.

by Ethan Seavey

I heard: 

Why don’t you stop moving around so much? Why do you always bounce your leg/twirl your hair/sit with your legs folded under you/tap your fingers/tap your pen/touch your mustache/hold water in your mouth? Settle down! Why do you play soccer better when you’re rubbing your thumb and forefinger? Why do you sip water out of the side of your mouth so you can still focus on what’s in front of your eyes? Can’t you take a break? Why are you into things (green t-shirts, a long conversation, a movie, a board game) and then suddenly become disinterested? Why are you so frustrated all the time and why can’t you control yourself? Why can’t you focus on what I’m saying? Are you listening, or are you thinking of something else? 

And so I thought: 

Why am I like this? Why can’t I stop myself from moving? Why am I busted, how am I broken, why doesn’t my brain work?

My energy’s like a wriggling snake and my attention is just one hand. When I grab the head and hold it still, the rattle starts flailing. So I grab the rattle and the head moves again. Your sister hates seeing the head moving (it stresses them out to see the motion of the fangs) and your mother hates the sound of the rattle shaking. 

Why am I like this? The snake is a good example but it is inaccurate because it would be more like a bunch of snakes tied in a knot, all wriggling, all needing my attention to stifle their motion. Or a bunch of holes in a field that shoot water and when I cover one hole, the water only flows stronger through the others. 

I tried to fix my behavior. At the same time I wanted to stop twirling my hair and bouncing my leg and checking my phone so much. The frustration of not being able to control my body was unbearable (like most frustration to me). I believed that if I tried harder, if I was more disciplined, I could sit still.  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by O. Del Fabbro

In September 2022, Fiona Hill claimed that with the war in Ukraine, World War III had begun. The statements of the American expert on Russia were clear: World War I and World War II should not be regarded as static and singular moments in history. Even though they were separated by a peaceful period, the latter is part of a whole process leading from one World War to the next. The peaceful period following the Cold War would then be comparable to the interwar period in the 1920’s and the 1930’s. From Hill’s processual point of view peaceful periods are as much part of major conflicts as the actual war periods themselves: from the Cold War via a peaceful period to WW III.

Using the concept of World War adequately depends on its definition. When is a World War a World War? If World War means that all or most of the world’s major powers are involved in a conflict, then, yes, it might be that the state of the world is steering towards WW III. Economically, this is already true for the war in Ukraine. Most of the major powers are involved in this conflict, either by supplying Ukraine or Russia: the USA, the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia are supporting Ukraine, while Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Chechnya, and China ally with Russia. But, to be economically involved does not mean to have “boots on the ground”. Even current events in the Middle East show that major world powers avoid full scale involvement.

In fact, what we have so far been observing are rather operations in the gray zone. Read more »

People, and a pigeon, are always walking around in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Nils Peterson

I

End of a strange day. Sitting with a drink, listening to jazz vocals, old songs, talking slow, the way one does at such an hour. Particularly if one’s companion is one’s self. Melancholic but mellow. Sipping a vintage of old age at l’heure bleue. 

And from Tony Bennett

Someday, when I’m awfully low
When the world is cold
I will feel a glow just thinking of you
And the way you look tonight

But it’s an old Bennett making a quick grab at the high notes and almost getting there – though still comfortable and easy with the sway of word and music. The Someday here for us both. One knows about the dementia. No Lady Gaga in this version to help. Just old age dealing as well as it can with pitch and memory and vision – and singing, and yes, singing, and yes, one thinks of Yeats:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…

For his 75th birthday, Dave Brubeck invited a bunch of “Young Tigers and Old Lions” to a recording studio and composed and recorded an original celebration of each. The only unoriginal melody was the second track, “How High the Moon,” sung by Jon Hendricks – bringing his now old man’s voice – all the bassness out of it, but not soprano – thin, quavery, black. He sings “Somewhere there’s heaven, it’s where you are” – and yes we believe it – that there is one and it’s where she, whoever she might be, is – Dave Brubeck rumbles beneath in sweet elegiac support. The more Hendricks’ voice lost, the more beautiful it became – is there a blessing then in loss, a wisdom? A young critic says it’s too slow, takes too long, but young critics are too impatient to hear well.  Read more »

by Paul Bloomfield

Marcus Aurelius wrote, “The best revenge is to not be like your enemy”. All ought to heed this wisdom: the right and the left, across classes, races, religions, and cultures, in personal life, politics, and war. Don’t be like the people you despise. Sounds easy, right?

One thing everyone has in common is that we all look down on our enemy: we think we are better than “them”. But if so, why do we so often see people react to their enemy by doing exactly what their enemy has done to them? Unsurprisingly, this is easiest to spot when others do it!

Examples are myriad. Counterexamples are rare: Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama. Perhaps the most ignored verse of the New Testament advises us to “turn the other cheek” when slapped by our enemy.

We (whoever the “we” are) have been dehumanized, disempowered, and oppressed by others. We have been treated in ways which are nakedly unjust and plain wrong. But as soon as we get sufficient power, once we get control, we go onto dehumanize, disempower, oppress those who have done so to us, convincing ourselves this is justice. It is all too easy to stoop to the level of our enemy.

If we defeat our enemy by acting like them, if they succeed in bringing us down to their level, then we have lost regardless of the outcome. Maybe we survive, but we survive through degradation: we become as bad as those we revile. We cut off our nose to spite our face.

For instance, humans often respond to their enemy’s anger with anger, when any fool can see that getting angry only makes everything worse for everyone. Who doesn’t say and do stupid things when angry? It is the nature of anger. But we do not learn. Read more »

by Hirsch Perlman

Instagram: ecce_cattus
Sales: paxfeles.com

Ten months ago Artificial Intelligence helped lift me out of a stubborn pandemic depression. Specifically, an AI image generator’s results from the prompt Schrodinger’s Cat; the name of the physicist’s thought experiment in which, under quantum conditions, a cat in a box could theoretically be both dead and alive at the same time—that is until the box is opened and an observation is made.

I wondered if and how AI would render a cat both dead and alive, or if it would just depict the box. And what other elements of the thought experiment it might create.

The results from the prompt were scribbles in need of completion, hallucinations of cats shimmering in and out of being. Tentative half formed felines hovering like sentence fragments lacking syntax and punctuation.

Sometimes it looked like the AI was capturing itself the nanosecond before I pressed the return key. It was as if I’d stumbled on AI picturing its own quantum state.

Starting with the AI scribbles, I redraw, combine, add to, and regurgitate never ending variations of cats in ambiguous spaces, ambiguous boxes. Boxes become cats or cats become boxes. What’s cat and what’s space is fluid, confused and melded- the cat deformed, carrying a bemused, malcontent, or often indifferent affect.

They’re allegorical mirrors: cat/cat and cat/box could be artwork/viewer, left brain/right brain, self/not-self, conscious/unconscious, tame/feral, or adaptive/maladaptive. Cats can mime any manner of relationship.

I’d found a deep digital rabbit hole. Read more »

by Oliver Waters

In last month’s column I criticised the ‘degrowth’ movement, which essentially proposes that we should produce and consume less stuff. This notion has some merit of course – we should always strive to ‘do more with less’ – if that simply means making our technologies more efficient.

But the degrowth ideology also tends to be motivated by the following claim:

‘Rich countries already have enough resources to secure good lives for everyone.’

CNBC Explains video – ‘Degrowth: Is it time to live better lives with less?’

The idea here is that if all the wealth in a rich country, like the US, was divided equally, everyone could live comfortable, dignified lives. This is a highly intuitive claim, given the visceral displays of opulence by billionaires. Nonetheless, it is both false and harmful if taken too seriously.

To unpack why, we need to first clarify what we mean by the term ‘wealth’. It’s a strange word, since it seems to apply to radically different kinds of things. Jewellery, real estate, intellectual property – these all obviously count as wealth. But what do an idea and a townhouse have in common? Read more »

Two young men greeted a new crew member on a ship’s quarterdeck 60 years ago and, in a matter of weeks, by simple challenge, introduced this then 18 year-old who’d never really read a book through to the lives that can be found in them.… —Thank you Anthony Gaeta and Edmund Budde for your life-altering input.

Narragansett Evening Walk to Base Library

Bay to my right (my rite of road and sea):
I hold to its shoulder, I sail, I walk the line.

The bay moved as I moved, though retrograde
as if the way I moved had something to do
with the way the black bay moved, how it tracked,
how it perfectly matched my pace, but
slipping behind, opposed, relative
(Albert would have a formula or two
to spin about this if he were here),
behind too, over shoulder, my steel grey ship at pier
transfigured in cloud of cool white light
sprayed from lamps on tall poles ashore and,
aboard, from lamps on masts and yards
lit needles of antennae which gleamed
above its raked stack in electric cloud enmeshed
in photon aura, its edges feathered into night,
enveloped as it lay upon the shimmering skin of bay.

From here, she’s as still as the thought from which she came:
steel upheld on water arrayed in light, heavy as weight,
light as a bubble, line of pier behind etched clean,
keen as a horizon knife,

library ahead, behind
a ship at night.

The bay to my right (as I said) slid dark
at this confluence of all nights,
lights of low barracks and high offices,
those ahead that faced west, skipped off bay,
each of its trillion tribulations jittering at lightspeed
fractured by bay’s breeze-moiled black surface in
splintered sight,

ahead the books I aimed to read,
books I’d come to love since Tony & Ed
in the generosity of their own fresh enlightenment
had teamed to bring new tools to this greenhorn’s
stymied brain to spring its self-locked latch
to let some fresh air in crisp as this breeze
blowing ‘cross the bay from here to everywhere,
troubling Narragansett from then to

me here now

Jim Culleny
12/16/19

by Mary Hrovat

I recently read the wonderfully ambiguous sentence, “The love of stone is often unrequited” in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s book Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. It inspired me to write love letters to stones.

To the mysterious front-yard stone

For a couple of years, when I was a very small child, you were part of my everyday life in southern California. I remember you as gray and white, granular, maybe a little sparkly. You rose unexpectedly from the front lawn, a small, more or less rectilinear interruption of order. You seemed to be made for children to sit on or around, a little stony chair or small narrow table.

We were lucky; no one else had a stone in their lawn. I don’t know why you were there; I assumed that you were too big to be moved. At the time, you were an everyday part of my world, like the trellised back porch permanently enveloped in gentle green shade or the peach and plum trees growing in the back yard.

I see from street view on Google Maps that you’re not there any more. The house has also lost that porch and those fruit trees, which were replaced with a swimming pool surrounded by concrete. Well, we moved out of that house more than 50 years ago; it’s bound to have changed. Still, I would have guessed that you would outlast the house and everything else on that lot. I suppose you weren’t as large or immoveable as I thought you were, and someone got tired of mowing around you. I wonder now how you came to be there and where you went. I hope you’re still yourself, whatever and wherever you are. Read more »

Nabil Anani. Life in The Village.

“Nabil Anani is one of the founders of the contemporary Palestinian art movement, working with paint, sculpture and ceramics. His work often summons folklore and rich colors to weave a tapestry of Palestinian life and character, expressing nostalgia for lost villages and olive groves, but the pieces I have chosen are slightly different: they were all painted during the second Intifada, when in 2002-3 Anani was in Ramallah under seige, and they are haunting depictions of destruction and dreams of return. He was born in 1943 in Latroun, a Palestinian hilltop village 25km west of Jerusalem. In 1948 there was fierce fighting there, and since 1967 it has been controlled by Israel. The Palestinian village now sits empty. Anani lives in Ramallah: like so many Palestinians, a refugee. He has been arrested and interrogated by Israel for his art, especially for promoting the imagery and colors of the Palestinian flag.”

More here and here.

by David J. Lobina

—Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?

Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?

So Joyce imagines in the interior monologue of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, as I discussed in What Joyce Got Wrong. Is it a psychologically plausible rendering of Stephen’s thoughts, I asked at the time, and answered in the negative because of linguistic reasons – in this occasion I would like to discuss some recent psychological investigations of the matter. But how can a private event such as inner speech be scientifically studied at all?

Imagine the following situation. You are about to cross the street and see a car coming; you stop on your tracks and realise there’s some space between the incoming car and the next one, enough in fact for you to rush to the other side safely once the first car has passed you. But as you start crossing the road something you are carrying emits a sound, a beep, you may even feel a vibration. It’s not your phone. It’s a device you are carrying as part of a experiment you have agreed to take part in. As soon as you hear the beep you need to stop what you are doing and write down your (subjective) experience immediately prior to the beep. You have to describe what you were experiencing at the time, whatever it was.

The idea is for participants such as yourself to take notes of their experiences at random intervals – typically 6 times within 24 hours – and then undertake a detailed interview with researchers soon after in order to produce a faithful description of the reported experiences.

Known as Descriptive Experience Sampling, this methodology requires a fair amount of training of both participants and interviewers in order to avoid possible preconceptions and confabulations and thus focus exclusively on the experiences themselves. The reported experiences are certainly varied, from inner speech and visual imagery to the sensation of having experienced thoughts that did not manifest in any particular medium, but the methodology is supposed to get to the bottom of things in any case. Read more »

by Brooks Riley