by Richard Farr

We called my English teacher Scab for no particular reason except that it took the edge off our terror. A big man in a double breasted jacket, he wore tinted glasses that hid his expression. His head looked as if it had been carved rather carelessly from a boiled ham. “You are not going to like me,” he said to us in our first class, when I was 13. “I am the iron fist inside this institution’s velvet glove.” 

It was a front, mainly. He did not suffer fools, including his pupils and most of his colleagues, at all gladly. He probably dreamed of teaching at a university, where he could have discussed Chaucer’s prosody without first getting people to stop making farting noises.

By the time I turned 17 he had softened a little, as if he could see that some of us might one day turn into bona fide human beings. And that year the national syllabus gods gifted us what was (as I gradually came to see) an absolute corker. Among other succulent morsels there were chunks of The Canterbury Tales, all of both Othello and Lear, Gulliver’s Travels, Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings, Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. 

The most intimidating item by far was Paradise Lost Books IX and X — a hundred-score lines of theology that we found impenetrable, as if we were trying to hack our way back into an overgrown Eden long after its attendants’ banishment. Our feet tangled in the archaic vocabulary. Classical allusions stung our ignorant faces at every turn. (“Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous’d”? “Not sedulous to indite”? Both of these gems were on the first page of Book IX.) Scab spent a couple of weeks trying to make sense of it all for us but we were illiterate adolescents, lost and flailing inside an erudite adult’s poem. One day he sighed melodramatically and changed tactics. “I’ll read it to you,” he said. “Don’t think. Don’t even try to think. Just listen.” 

What happened next I can’t articulate with any clarity, except to say that the words melted onto his tongue like expensive chocolates, rendering his voice thick and smooth, and it was as if he had become Milton; it was as if I was present at the creation and was witnessing the poem erupt for the first time from the dark materials of the blind freedom-fighter’s imagination. 

“Don’t think. Just listen.”  Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

An Ape meets a Holy Man who is visiting a zoo. The Holy Man has made a career of debasing such animals as the Ape, and now the Ape sees an opportunity to preempt him. She is a fabulist and must act quickly.

“The animals are trying to tell you something.”

“I don’t speak animal,” the Holy Man sneers.

The Ape ignores him and continues: “Once upon a time–”

Some monitor lizards–opposed to the increasing presence of cobras in their midst–held a public meeting to air their concerns. “Fellow Lizards!” one outspoken lizard said to those gathered. “The cobras intend to surround us, defeat us, and take our land. But they won’t stop there; we all know how snakes are. If we don’t do something quickly, they will swallow all our young!” Inflamed by this speech, the lizards quickly mobilized. They sought out the snakes, surrounded them, and defeated them. But, for reasons no one has been able to fathom, the triumphant lizards then devoured every snake egg they could find.

“Indeed,” the Holy Man says, “someone is always plotting against you.”

“Would you like to hear the moral?”

“I’m all ears.”

The most depraved acts may be committed in the name of preventing depravity.

“In other words,” the Holy Man says, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” Read more »

Shilpa Gupta. Untitled 2009.

MS Mobile Gate which swings side to side and breaks the walls, 300x130x340 cm.

More here, here, and here.

by David J. Lobina

Artificial General Intelligence, however this concept is to be defined exactly, is upon us, say two prominent AI experts. Not exactly an original statement, as this sort of claim has come up multiple times in the last year or so, often followed by various qualifications and the inevitable dismissals (Gary Marcus has already pointed out that this last iteration involves not a little post-shifting, and it doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny, anyway).

I’m very sceptical too, for the simple reason that modern Machine/Deep Learning models are huge correlation machines and that’s not the sort of process that underlies whatever we might want to call an intelligent system. It is certainly not the way we know humans “think”, and the point carries yet more force when it comes to Language Models, those guess-next-token-based-on-statistical-distribution-of-huge-amounts-of-data systems.[1]

This is not to say that a clear definition of intelligence is in place, but we are on firmer ground when discussing what sort of abilities and mental representations are involved when a person has a thought or engages in some thinking. I would argue, in fact, that the account some philosophers and cognitive scientists have put together over the last 40 or so years on this very question ought to be regarded as the yardstick against which any artificial system needs to be evaluated if we are to make sense of all these claims regarding the sapience of computers calculating huge numbers of correlations. That’s what I’ll do in this post, and in the following I shall show how most AI models out there happen to be pretty hopeless in this regard (there is a preview in the photo above). Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Oliver Waters

If you were a medieval peasant in the year 1323 AD, would you have believed that slavery was morally permissible?

The odds are that you would have. After all, most people at the time saw slavery as a permanent fact of life, not an abomination that ought to be abolished. But it’s very tempting to assume that you, as a rational, thoughtful individual, could have transcended your historical setting to grasp its transcendent wrongness.

To do so however, you would have needed to reject the mainstream beliefs of your society. You would have had to think through the issue via first principles. This would include developing a coherent theory that accounted for human moral equality – a tall order, given the bulk of humanity didn’t manage this feat for another few hundred years.

It can be fun to pass judgment on the silliness of past generations, but the real work of moral philosophy is figuring out which ideas we take for granted today that future generations will look back on with the same contempt as we do for slavery.

After all, as Mark Twain warned:

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

With that in mind, here’s a moral claim that’s obviously true, according to most people alive today:

It is always morally wrong to kill an innocent human being.

When we look at this claim more closely however, from first principles, it appears to be not only false, but a dogma responsible for a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering. Read more »

Learning and Love

by Mohammad Iqbal (1887-1935)

“Love is madness,” Learning said.
“Learning is suspicion and doubt,” Love said.

O Learning, do not a bookworm be, you are veiled
Love is radiant, steadfast, a pageant of life and death

Learning displays the divine essence logically; love illogically
“Question everything,” says Learning. “I am the answer,” says Love

Love is a king as well as an ascetic, dweller, and a dwelling, enslaves
Even royalty, champions life with certainty, throws open the gate of love

Laws of love forbid rest, allow tumult of storms, the joy of reaching a shore;
Forbid love’s harvest after all. Learning is Son of the Book; Love, the Mother.

***

Translated From the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari

Mountain huts next to a stream running through a meadow near Meransen, South Tyrol, yesterday.

by S. Abbas Raza

“Martti Ahtisaari, ex-Finland president and Nobel peace laureate, dies aged 86” runs the headline of his obituary in The Guardian today. But he was much more than that. First of all, he was the father of one of my closest friends, Marko Ahtisaari, who was with me in graduate school in the philosophy department at Columbia in the 1990s and was instrumental in my starting 3 Quarks Daily almost 20 years ago.

I first met Martti in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in NYC. I had written a couple of paragraphs about what it felt like to be a New Yorker on the day after 9/11, and must have sent what I’d written to Marko who forwarded it to Martti, who then asked if he could read what I had written at some important emergency political meeting in Europe (I forget what it was, exactly), and then he did. A couple of weeks later he came to New York to (among other things) meet with Kofi Annan who was Secretary-General of the United Nations at the time. Martti invited me to have breakfast with him, which I did with my sister Sughra, and he turned out to be an exceptionally lovely and modest man.

I met Martti on many occasions after that and was always deeply impressed by his cheerful optimism. He was always full of ideas on how to solve political as well as other problems and was obviously a man of great intelligence but what I loved about him most was his (often self-deprecating) sense of humor, such as the time he told me about the message of congratulations he received when he was first elected President of Finland from a Pakistani friend who had been his roommate in Karachi at the beginning of Martti’s diplomatic career. After congratulating him, the message went on to say, “You weren’t that smart. How did you do it?” This was a typical Martti story. By the way, by a complete coincidence, the man who sent him that message is now buried in a grave next to my mother’s grave in a cemetery in Karachi.

Let me quickly relate one last memory of him which made a lasting impression on me: My wife, Margit, and I were once staying with Martti and his wife, Eeva, in their apartment in Helsinki and the four of us had dinner together. Afterwards, Margit got up and started picking up the dirty plates but she was immediately stopped by Eeva who said, “No, please sit down, that has always been Martti’s job.” And then this wonderful, funny, powerful man, who had recently stepped down as President of Finland and who was still deeply involved in international peace efforts that would eventually win him a Nobel Peace Prize, picked up and washed all our dishes.

NOTE: Several of the editors of 3QD knew Martti Ahtisaari and we all wish to extend our deepest sympathies to Eeva and Marko: Your grief is also our grief.

Other Obituaries: New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Official Memorial Page

by Martin Butler

I was listening recently to some teenagers on the radio talking about how they saw their future lives and was struck by how many expressed the desire to be internet ‘influencers’. Why did I feel distaste? Was it my age, my generation? My problem is not with the internet itself but with the very expression ‘influencer’, and the fact that there was no reference at all to the nature of the influencing. That was almost an afterthought, as if the key to being a successful influencer amounted to mere popularity, chalking up the followers. Presumably though, there are good and bad influencers, and I don’t mean good here in the sense of being able to influence lots of people, but good in the sense of having a positive rather than a negative influence.

It’s the age-old problem of the relationship between the good and the popular. Plato saw the popular as the enemy of the good, but then he is at one end of the scale, famously arguing that democracy was bad because it confused the good with the popular. Societies, he believed, need good government while democracy merely delivers popular government, which is quite a different thing. (Plato uses his simile of the ship to describe democracy, which gave rise to Sebastian Brant’s 15th allegory of the Ship of Fools.) Similarly, with regard to the arts, the unashamed elitist might argue that good art is by its very nature difficult, requiring education, intellect, and effort. Popularity requires less. In line with Plato, Mill argued that there are two qualitatively distinct pleasures, the lower and the higher, the lower pandering to popularity, the higher more difficult to access. According to this way of thinking, the artist, writer or musician who follows high artistic ideals better not give up the day job, and it’s folly to expect the general paying public to appreciate such ideals even if the work produced is of the highest calibre. Rembrandt died in poverty, Van Gogh only sold one picture in his lifetime, and Moby Dick was a flop and out of print for many years. The list goes on and on.

At the other end of the spectrum are those who deny that there is any intrinsic distinction between the good and the less so, and that the only way to make a meaningful distinction is simply to count the ‘likes’, so to speak. Everything is simply a matter of opinion, so if we want to identify something as good, popularity is the only ‘objective’ means by which we can do it. As in the commercial world, ‘the customer is always right’, and the popular is the good. It is mere snobbery to pretend otherwise, a snobbery I could be accused of with my distaste for the aspiration to be an influencer. For according to this view there is only one kind of good influencer, and that is a successful one.

Both these extremes are unsatisfactory. Surely there can be some kind of relationship between the good and the popular? Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

Oh, he’s wrong. So are many of the people coming at him.

One of the most-cited passages of Michael Lewis’s new Sam Bankman-Fried book, Going Infinite, is a quote from a blog post from 2012. In that post, a twenty year old Bankman-Fried expresses contempt for the consensus view that Shakespeare is a literary genius.

Bankman-Fried offers two arguments against the consensus view.

The first argument involves an argument on the literary merits: that Shakespeare’s plots rely “on simultaneously one-dimensional and unrealistic characters, illogical plots, and obvious endings.”

The second argument – and the one that raced across the internet after the release of Going Infinite – is a probabilistic one. Given the much smaller population of English speakers in the 16th century, and given the much lower prevalence of education, what are the chances that the best writer in the history of the English language would have been born then? As Bankman-Fried put it:

… the Bayesian priors are pretty damning.  About half of the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that.  When Shakespeare wrote almost all of Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate–probably as low as about ten million people.  By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere.  What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564?  The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable.

The problem with this, says the 20 year old Bankman-Fried, is that “We like old plays and old movies and old wines and old instruments and old laws and old people and old records and old music.  We like them because they’re old and come with stories but we convince ourselves that there’s more: we convince ourselves that they really were better.  … We don’t just respect the old; we think that the old is right and that those who prefer the new to the old are wrong.” Read more »

Sughra Raza. Pale Sunday Morning, April 2021.

Digital Photograph.