by Tim Sommers

(The butter robot realizing the sole purpose of its existence is to pass the butter.)

In the halcyon days of “self-driving cars are six months away,” you probably encountered this argument. “If self-driving cars work, they will be safer than cars driven by humans.” Sure. If, by “they work,” you mean that, among other things, they are safer than cars driven by humans, then, it follows, that they will be safer than cars driven by humans, if they work. That’s called begging the question. Unfortunately, the tech world has more than it’s share of such sophistries. AI, especially.

Exhibit #1

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, in an article linked to on 3 Quarks Daily, Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” tells Joshua Rothman:

“‘People say, [of Large Language Models like ChatGPT that] It’s just glorified autocomplete…Now, let’s analyze that…Suppose you want to be really good at predicting the next word. If you want to be really good, you have to understand what’s being said. That’s the only way. So, by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it’s ‘autocomplete’—but you didn’t think through what it means to have a really good autocomplete.’ Hinton thinks that ‘large language models,’ such as GPT, which powers OpenAI’s chatbots, can comprehend the meanings of words and ideas.”

This is a morass of terrible reasoning. But before we even get into it, I have to say that thinking that an algorithm that works by calculating the odds of what the next word in a sentence will be “can comprehend the meanings of words and ideas” is a reductio ad absurdum of the rest. (In fairness, Rothman attributes that view to Hinton, but doesn’t quote him as saying that, so maybe that’s not really Rothman’s position. But it seems to be.)

Hinton says “training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand.” There’s no support for the claim that the only way to be good at predicting the next word in a sentence is to understand what is being said. LMMs prove that, they don’t undermine it. Further, if anything, prior experience suggests the opposite. Calculators are not better at math than most people because they “understand” numbers. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self Portrait in Praise of Shadows. Shalimar Bagh, Lahore, December 10, 2023.

Digital photograph.

by Ethan Seavey

I like the typewriter. 

A gift from a friend. A manual 1963 Smith Corona Silent Super in sandalwood carrying case with keys I understand (letters and the space bar) and even keys I will never understand (SET and CLR). Yes it is the Super Silent but no it is not silent and in fact it is quite loud (when in use) which is fun for me. Tapping keys to be loud and writing to think out loud. 

Here are some snippets from the free flowing thoughts which come out of typewriter therapy:

_____

December the Fourth

most of us would have to agree, yes, that looking at people from very far away (through binoculars) is a creepy habit. but what is so wrong? seeing people without their knowledge, i suppose, but i do that all the time as a peer and it’s only wrong when i am a peer-er

i don’t see anything private because they are in public, after all, walking through the park or parking their cars

but still it’s wrong to spy on that man with a rounded chin and bright eyes, wearing camouflage swoveralls and approaching a parked car to let his dog out. a big black lab and manic pink tongue. 

it is wrong to watch the smile grow on the man’s face as he runs off with the lab

towards the patch of grass

such unforbidden unrestricted emotion, allowed by his solitude, complicated by me, a witness.  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

Andrew Torba, Christian Nationalist founder of the rightwing social media site Gab, recently argued on his podcast that the fact that many of the most beloved Christmas songs were written by Jewish composers was part of a conspiracy to take Christ out of Christmas: to secularize one of the holiest Christian holidays and allow Jews to subtly infiltrate Christian-American culture with their own agenda. He might just be right.

There is, for example, a way of thinking about the 1964 stop-motion animated special Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer as a challenge to the White supremacist, Christian nationalist worldview that Torba champions. What if we thought of Rudolph as a progressive, inclusive retelling of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle?

Rudolph’s Jewish Roots

We all know Dasher and Dancer, Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid, and Donder and Blitzen, but can you recall the origin story of the most famous reindeer of all? Rudolph was created in 1939 by Jewish author Robert L. May, who was working as a copywriter for department store chain Montgomery Ward, which wanted to give holiday shoppers a Christmas-themed children’s book. In writing a seasonal twist on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Ugly Duckling, May dreamed up a new member of Santa’s team, and young Rudolph quickly became an indelible part of the American yuletide mythology.

May’s brother-in-law was a Jewish composer. Johnny Marks made his career creating some of the most iconic Christmas songs of all time, including “Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree,” “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” and “Have a Holly-Jolly Christmas.” In 1949, he put May’s story to music, and Gene Autry’s recording of Marks’ “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” became both a chart-topping hit and a timeless American standard memorized by children across the country for generations. Read more »

Karachi.

A Remembering by Nils Peterson

Christmas Eve began with a carol sing at the big Presbyterian Church on Crescent Avenue which many of the rich town people attended. More cathedral than church. My brother and I went to Sunday school there when we were old enough because the small Lutheran church of our parents was not large enough to have one. My father was a chauffeur for one of the rich families.

The caroling was held in a large, handsome meeting room where, in the spring, the flower show would be held. A lot of chairs were set out and there’d be a big tree beautifully decorated and boxes of candy for the children to suck on when it was all over. I remember a particularly revolting lime-green ball sour enough and bitter enough to make even the greediest child spit it out. Some of the gathered Presbyterians had begun their celebrating before the sing, because after about the third carol, some wag would start calling for the “Hallelujah Chorus,” the last song in the songbook, and the calls, catcalls almost for the calls for it increased as the carols went on, grew until at last the leader with a sigh gave up and we hallelujahed our way out of there.

At home, the chauffeur’s apartment above the garage, there would be a supper of Swedish meatballs and boiled potatoes and lingonberry and sardines and cheeses and cookies At the right moment, we’d go down the stairs and, across the driveway to the path leading to the big house – crunch of gravel, full moon shining between tree branches, feel of tended grass – to the kitchen door where Marie, the cook, my father’s cousin and my godmother, waited to let us in. Anet is there, the downstairs maid, and Martha, the upstairs maid. They are “the girls,” the three live-in Swedish servants. Marie, the cook, was my father’s cousin, my godmother, and the one responsible for getting my father the chauffeur job in 1932 in the heart of the depression. He had been out of work since he and mother came back from visiting their parents in Sweden to show off how well they were doing in America. Shortly before their return, the stock market crashed. The year, of course, 1929.  Read more »

by Philippe Huneman

You’re a railway worker, a teacher, an intern. You’re at a dinner somewhere and someone asks: “Why are you on strike? You reply that this project the government wants to impose on us is unfair, and another person replies: “But why isn’t it fair? Why shouldn’t we have an equal system for all, as they say?” And then we talk about hardship, life expectancy, fairness, etc.

This little word, “why“ punctuates our discussions – how many times a day do we use it? Far from being restricted to politics, it cuts across all fields, from the everyday talk – “why is the baker closed today?” – to the most obviously metaphysical – “Why is there something rather than nothing?” asked Leibniz – to the most intimate – “Why didn’t she come?” It is the question of the scientist – “why does the straight stick plunged into the water appear bent to me?” – as well as the private investigator’s phrase – “Why did the butler put on his gloves on a Sunday?“

Few questions are so common that they characterize at the same time insignificant everyday discussions, technically worded scientific questions and deep philosophical interrogations. This mere constatation should direct us to question the very possibility of asking why, the meaning it can have for so many distinct populations in various contexts, and its connection to general features of human cultures. Here, many philosophers of the past have shown the way, by raising in their own manner similar issues. I propose to directly address the meaning of ‘asking why’, by introducing a set of concepts likely to frame this questioning. Read more »

by Oliver Waters

In the final moments of the film Don’t Look Up (2021), a group of family and friends sit around a dinner table laughing together while enjoying some delicious organic produce. Leonardo DeCaprio looks up from his heirloom tomatoes with nostalgic despair.

‘We really did have everything, didn’t we?’ he laments, just before the meteor hits Earth, killing billions of its ungrateful, arrogant human guests. The same fate awaits the audience – so the cinematic metaphor goes – if we keep destroying the global ecosystem.

Many promote economic ‘degrowth’ as a way of avoiding such a calamity, notably anthropologist Jason Hickel and climate activist Naomi Klein. In his book Less is More (2020), Hickel asserts that for approximately 97% of our 300,000 years as the human species, ‘our ancestors lived in relative harmony with the Earth’s ecosystems,’ before there was any such thing as economic growth.

In This Changes Everything (2015), Klein diagnoses our existential climate crisis as starting with Sir Francis Bacon back in the 16th century, when he kicked off all that nonsense about systematically controlling natural forces for our own material wellbeing. This was apparently the beginning of a toxic, ‘extractive’ relationship with the Earth, which we need grow out of immediately.

Such critics of growth tend to believe we have collectively amassed more than enough wealth at this stage in history, and that any future growth in wealth via technological innovation will be optional and decadent by comparison. Space travel, for instance, is just a plaything for the rich. And we certainly don’t need any more energy here on Earth: we can just be more efficient with the energy we have.

In The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016), the economist Robert Gordon lends credence to this view with the historical claim that the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of technological breakthroughs have already been picked:

“In America growth slowed down after 1970 not because inventors had lost their spark or were devoid of new ideas, but because the basic elements of a modern standard of living had by then already been achieved along so many dimensions, including food, clothing, housing, transportation, entertainment, communication, health, and working conditions.”

But this supposedly empirical statement is actually a profoundly pessimistic theory of human potential in disguise. Consider first how arbitrary it is to hold this perspective at any given moment in history. A 19th century British labourer, for instance, could not have been aware that they were desperately poor by our standards today. On the contrary, many thought they were much better off than their ancestors. After all, for the first time in history, they were able to work in a lively metropolis at a coal-powered factory producing textiles, instead of toiling in the fields under the beating sun or pouring rain.

As David Deutch has compellingly argued, there are no fundamental natural plateaus or barriers on the upward journey of technological progress. Rather it’s an eternal adventure that we can simply either choose to embrace or reject. This leads one to the ‘techno-optimist’ vision: one of indefinitely and exponentially improving and expanding human civilisation. Read more »

Fundamental Disunderstanding

….—thoughts on Oct. 7^th and Gaza

everything ever written or said
everything drawn or played or sung
every headline that cried or bled
every fresco, every poem
everything wrung from our cranial sponge
every inky insult flung
every bomb that leveled a home
….and left a child to fend alone
every instrument ever made
every expletive blasted from lungs
every face on a canvas hung
every righteous canto prayed
…. that pounded the planks of heaven’s floor
every school Kalashnikov-sprayed
every smartass quote with bite
every thought of rich or poor
every Icarus grasping at height
….whose waxy wings soon came apart
every joke and laugh and snort
every misbegotten poison dart
every sentiment or thing
….that burst from brain’s well-tensioned spring
every sura, gospel or verse
every prayer that followed a hearse
every love, lost or won
every song and every hum
every murmuring merciful must
that reached the sky or bit the dust
are not of a glad or angry God
…………………..but of life that thrusts,
inside to out, evil or good, the stuff of us

 Jim Culleny

by Richard Farr

This is the second part of a three-part essay, My Drug Problem. Part one, A mere analogy, is here.

Your life is not going according to plan and you’ve started to wonder what the gods are playing at. Still, the decision to consult the Oracle at Delphi is not one you took lightly. First you tried all the usual remedies: drinking too much, blaming other people, listening to soothsayers in the agora. Only when none of this helped did you undertake weeks of travel to reach bucolic Phocis, finishing with an arduous climb to this shoulder of rock a thousand feet above a valley in the middle of nowhere. 

At least the views are nice. On a goat track that will one day be a narrow street clogged with over-fed barbarians in tour buses, you stop to ease your blisters and gaze down towards the Gulf of Corinth. Lovely — you’d take a picture if you could. Mount Parnassus looms behind you. Five minutes later you’re at your destination.

The Temple of Apollo is an important religious center, so you’re surprised to find it painted all over with self-help graffiti: Wherever you go, there you are. If life hands you lemons, make lemonade. The journey is the destination. Life is uncertain; eat dessert first. Over the main entrance, the message spray-painted on the lintel is marginally more enigmatic than the rest: Gnothi s’auton, anthro — Get to know yourself, man.*

(* Shortly after your visit, part of the lintel will fall off in an earthquake and the “man” will be lost to history.) Read more »

Sughra Raza. Fire Painting at Takht-e-Lahore, December 9, 2023.

Digital photograph.

by Mike Bendzela

I am a sort of “coincidence theorist”: I think most shit just happens, and our human duty is to be simultaneously appalled and amused by it all. The first gay man I ever met, who died of AIDS in 1985, was of the opposite temperament. He often told me “there are no coincidences” (his attempt, I think, to unnerve naive, Midwestern me). “The universe has a sway to it,” he used to say. He was a mystic who read Tarot cards and cast horoscopes for people, but I wanted nothing to do with any of that. Such a mindset suggests my friend must have died of AIDS “for a reason.” This view is repugnant to me, with its constant, cosmic vigilance bordering on paranoia.

The fact that the deaths I am about to describe all transpired during the covid years (2020-2022) is just that, coincidence. One of the benefits of writing nonfiction is you get to indulge the “you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried” trope. It sometimes seems the more implausible events are, the more likely they are to be true. As Tim O’Brien puts it in his fictional accounting of the “true war story”:

In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often, the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.

At the outset of the pandemic in early 2020, people my husband and I knew suddenly began to die. Shortly after, I began to notice that I was losing my sense of smell. The first casualty, a favorite neighbor, was in his late 80s and had succumbed to a longtime struggle with cancer. I would bury his ashes that summer in the neighborhood cemetery I take care of. It was like burying a family member; I had known him for 35 years. As the pandemic was still pretty new and mysterious, those of us gathered at the cemetery stood around in the broad daylight crying behind surgical masks. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by David J. Lobina

Having written for 3 Quarks Daily since July 2021, with the first entry coming out around the time of my birthday (two anniversaries to celebrate in July since then for me!), it has recently dawned on me that I have tended to write long “series” of articles here at 3QD Tower – but also, that I have made quite a mess of it at times.

Depending on how you gather up the posts, two series out of seven have not been completed at all, despite assurances given and promises made, and not every series has been posted in chronological order, which doesn’t make for a very uniform reading experience (but who reads this stuff anyway?!).

Given that this is the last entry of the year, I thought it would be a good idea to bring some order to my Monday Column, tie up some loose ends, and in addition anticipate some of the topics and arguments I want to run in 2024 – a New Year’s resolution of sorts, though as I will mention below, I had already announced in the past that I would tackle some of the very issues I shall list in this post. In my defence, some of these topics can be quite controversial, so perhaps I can be forgiven for the broken promise. Read more »

At the Abu Dhabi airport.