Spring in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, three days ago.
Post-pandemic Predictions
by Carol A Westbrook
I pulled my mask up, making sure to cover my nose and mouth as we walked into the supermarket.
My husband looked at me quizzically.
“Why are you putting on your mask?”
I pulled off my mask and gave him a sheepish grin.
I forgot that the mask mandate had been lifted because the Covid-19 case rate is now so low that the chance of infection was almost negligible. But I know that this is temporary, as we will probably have another spike in the fall with the emergence of yet another Omicron variant. But for now we have a temporary reprieve, and we could get back to “normal.” But what is normal? Two years under the threat of Covid-19 has changed the way we do things. The post-pandemic normal will be different than it was before Covid, and here is how I think things will look.
We have changed the way we shop. For me, and for many other people, this is the first time I’ve actually shopped for groceries in person instead of ordering online. As I walked in, the store felt like a wonderland, so full of good things to buy that I couldn’t make up my mind. Yes, they even had toilet paper! Every brand and any size! (Remember the first few weeks of the lockdown, when one of our biggest fears was to be caught with our pants down, with nothing to wipe our rear ends?) Still, some products were in short supply, with their empty spots glaringly obvious, like a mouth with a missing tooth. Supply chain problems, they said. Read more »
Poem
At My Mother’s Grave in the Putnam Valley —
7000 Miles from Where She Was Born
Mother, I thought I heard an echo
of your rousing words —
“My Life Is Ahead of Me”—
Wrinkles mapped your face
after you flew
from the Kashmir Valley where—
long as I remember—
you raged for a life of dignity —
again losing your mind . . .
Seventy-three is the same age you were
when you spoke those words, yet
mapping my life ahead, I wonder
how stirring now must be
your echo across eternity!
Maryam Kathwari, March 5, 1924 ‑— March 31, 2020
Charaiveti: Journey From India To The Two Cambridges And Berkeley And Beyond, Part 39
by Pranab Bardhan
All of the articles in this series can be found here.
In the Berkeley hills there is a campus bus but the nearest bus stop is about a one-mile walk from my home, if you take a short cut through a meadow, but it gets quite muddy in the rainy season. Still, after some years I opted for taking the campus bus rather than my car on weekdays. One regular passenger I used to meet in the bus was a distinguished nonagenarian, Charles Townes, who had won the 1964 Physics Nobel Prize for inventing the laser (later he was also involved in the team that discovered the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy). In a campus lecture that I once gave on Globalization I was thrilled to see him at the front in the audience. He was active in the campus even in his 100th year, shortly before his death.
I also came to know that he was a deeply religious man. He claimed that his invention of the laser came to him like a ‘flash’ akin to religious revelation. When he got the 2005 Templeton Prize that celebrates scientific and spiritual curiosity, he said that “Science and Religion are quite parallel…..Science tries to understand what our universe is like and how it works, including us humans. Religion is aimed at understanding the purpose and meaning of our universe, including our own lives”. This reminded me of what Tagore said to Einstein on the relation between Science and Religion when they met at the latter’s home in Berlin in 1930: “Science… is the impersonal human world of Truths. Religion realizes these Truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of Truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to Truth.” Einstein did not fully agree with Tagore, nor do I with either Townes or Tagore. But no one can deny that in interpreting facts scientists cannot be independent of values (this is an important issue in some debates in life sciences now), and I also understand a bit about the possible appeal of deep spirituality even for atheists. Read more »
Monday, April 4, 2022
Politics and Original Sin
by Martin Butler
Beliefs about the essential goodness or badness of human beings have been at the heart of much political theory.[1] A recent book by the political philosopher Lea Ypi succinctly expresses the conflicting approaches. Speaking of her mother she’s says:
“Everyone, she believed, fought as a matter of course, men and women, young and old, current generations and future ones. Unlike my father, who thought people were naturally good, she thought they were naturally evil. There was no point in trying to make them good; one simply has to channel that evil so as to limit the harm. That’s why she was convinced socialism could never work even under the best circumstances. It was against human nature.”[2]
This negative view of human nature is associated with philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the more positive view with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Whether this is entirely justified is an open question, and I do not want to challenge the idea of human nature as such. Human beings like sweet things, they are sexual beings, they are on the whole social, seeking the approval of their fellows, and so on. The idea of human nature seems perfectly reasonable. I do, however, want to examine how the idea that human beings are naturally bad should affect our political beliefs, if indeed it should affect them at all. Read more »
Did Kurt Gödel Predict the January 6th Capitol Attack?
by Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan
Kurt Gödel, one of the most important logicians of the 20th century, is best known for his incompleteness theorem, which proves that any attempt to formulate a logical basis for arithmetic will either be unsound or incomplete. He was also famous for being a strange egg: walking around in a heavy coat in the summer, attending an occasional séance, and living in fear that someone was trying to poison him. There are lots of odd anecdotes about Gödel, but one happens to be a particular favorite among historians of logic: the story of his becoming an American citizen.
Gödel taught at the University of Vienna. After Hitler’s invasion of Austria, the Anschluss, Gödel would frequently be accosted by Nazi hoodlums in the street who assumed that because he was a skinny nerd with glasses, he must be Jewish. He wasn’t. Eventually, he had enough. He relocated to America, settling in Princeton, where he took up residence at the Institute for Advanced Study.
He became friendly with the Institute’s most famous scholar, Albert Einstein. Gödel had done some mathematical work exposing some of the stranger possibilities of the general theory of relativity, including the possibility of time travel, where a fast-moving electron could collide with itself if there was a bizarre enough distribution of matter and energy throughout space and time. Einstein and Gödel had plenty to discuss as they took walks together in their adopted homeland.
Before long, Einstein and economist Oskar Morgenstern convinced Gödel that he should become an American citizen. Looking into the process, Gödel learned that he would have to swear an oath to obey and defend the Constitution of the United States. Read more »
Perceptions
Sughra Raza. Self Portrait at Gas Station, April 3, 2022.
Why aren’t people paid according to their social contribution?
by Emrys Westacott
What should we do with our leisure? In his Politics, Aristotle identifies this as a fundamental philosophical question. Leisure, here, means freedom from necessary labor. If we have to spend much of our time working, or recuperating in order to work more, the question hardly arises. But if we are free from the yoke of necessity, how we answer the question will say much about our conception of the good life for a human being.
It is to be hoped that the question will one day become the primary question confronting humanity. This hope rests on the prospect of a world in which technological progress has advanced to such a degree that no one needs to work more than a few hours per week in order to enjoy a reasonably comfortable and secure existence. Before the industrial revolution such an idea was a mere fantasy; but given the rate of technological progress over the past two hundred years–and particularly in light of the recent digital revolution and the advent of what has been called “the second machine age”–the prospect of a much more leisurely life for those who want it is at least conceivable.
The fifteen-hour work week envisaged by John Maynard Keynes in “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930) is hardly just around the corner, though. One problem, of course, is that there are some kinds of work that are not easily automated. Consider home care for the disabled, sick, and elderly. Machines are capable of cognitive tasks far beyond the ability of humans, yet many of the basic manual tasks caregivers perform are still very difficult for robots to replicate. Beyond that, though, caregivers also provide human contact and companionship. For machines to offer an adequate substitute for this takes us well into the realm of science fiction (which is not say into the realm of impossibility).
The deeper problem, though, is political rather than technological. Read more »
The Shame Machine: Author Cathy O’Neil Interviewed by Danielle Spencer
by Danielle Spencer
Cathy O’Neil’s The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation (Crown) was released on March 22, 2022. O’Neil is the author of the bestselling Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Crown 2016) which won the Euler Book Prize and was longlisted for the National Book Award. She received her PhD in mathematics from Harvard and has worked in finance, tech, and academia. She launched the Lede Program for data journalism at Columbia University and recently founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company. O’Neil is a regular contributor to Bloomberg Opinion.
Danielle Spencer: Can you speak a bit about your background and what led you to write this book?
Cathy O’Neil: I’m a mathematician and a child of two mathematicians. Very nerd-centered childhood, where science was the religion of the household. They were otherwise atheists. I became a data scientist at some point, also a hedge fund analyst.
And then I started trying to warn people about the dangers of algorithms when we trust them blindly. I wrote a book called Weapons of Math Destruction, and in doing so I interviewed a series of teachers and principals who were being tested by this new-fangled algorithm called the value-added model for teachers. And it was high stakes. They were being denied tenure or even fired based on low scores, but nobody could explain their scores. Or shall I say, when I asked them, “Did you ask for an explanation of the score you got?” They often said, “Well, I asked, but they told me it was math and I wouldn’t understand it.”
That was the first moment I thought, “Oh my God, shame is so powerful.” That was math shame, evidently, because it wouldn’t have worked on me. [laughs] I’m a mathematician. You’re not going to shame me on math. If you tell me I wouldn’t understand something because it’s math, I’d say, “Dude, buster, if you can’t explain it to me, that’s your problem—not mine.” I would just be bulletproof to math-shaming. Read more »
Review of How To Be Perfect
by Joseph Shieber
One of the best television comedies of the last decade was The Good Place. Over the course of four seasons, its creator, Michael Schur, and a phenomenal ensemble cast tackled topics that I had thought to be too arcane for network television. The so-called “trolley problem”? Kantian deontology? Utilitarianism? All in the series, served up with Schur’s finely honed comedic chops.
Despite having already had countless opportunities to explore the moral philosophical underpinnings of the show – on Vox alone Schur had a 100-minute interview with Ezra Klein on the moral philosophy of The Good Place and Dylan Matthews wrote an extended piece on “How the Good Place Taught Moral Philosophy to its Characters – And Its Creators” – Schur revisits this territory in his new book, How To Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question.
To which my first reaction was: Really, Michael Schur? You didn’t have enough to do creating and writing sitcoms for NBC? You just had to sell a philosophy book project to Simon & Schuster? I was almost enraged enough about his amateurish poaching on my professional bailiwick to sit down and craft an unputdownable pitch that would land me an exclusive, even more impressive deal with Universal Television than the one he signed. (Suck it, Schur!)
After I realized that I didn’t know the first thing about pitching a television series, I decided that my fall-back plan would be to read How To Be Perfect and then mock it with haughty disdain – not only at faculty cocktail receptions but also to my immediate friends and family … and here, at 3QD. So I read the book and I can now tell you it’s … really quite good, actually. Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
The Talented Mr. Ripley and the American in Fiction
by Derek Neal
The character of the American abroad is an archetype in American fiction. By placing the American outside of his native country (usually in Europe), writers such as Henry James and James Baldwin were able to explore what constitutes American identity. More often than not, this identity is revealed in their novels not through what the identity contains, but in what it lacks.
Indeed, the American in Europe is an empty vessel. Like the negative of an image, his surroundings are filled in, and the empty space where a person should be appears in outline. Thus, the American has the task of creating his own identity, of forging his own personality without the aid of history or culture but through sheer willpower alone. Whether this is a true representation of what it means to be American is irrelevant; this is the conception that writers have created in literature, giving rise to the myth of the American in Europe. Every time an American character enters Europe, they enter into this legacy, intentionally or not. It is a sort of self-orientalizing, as one can stereotype and mythologize oneself just as one can others.
Henry James and James Baldwin are two progenitors of this genre. For both, the American is a prodigal character and the return to Europe is a return home, to where his real roots lie. The trip to Europe, or the permanent move in some cases, is a search for self-knowledge, and similarly to the biblical Garden of Eden, Europe is often cast as a place of sin and danger, a place one might never escape from if one isn’t careful. Read more »
Yes, New Materials
by Mike O’Brien
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” —Ecclesiastes 1:9
“Bullshit.” —Mike O’Brien 04-04-2022
It is a strange enough thing to collect knives. It is a step stranger still to collect sharpening stones; a further abstraction from reality, an auxiliary activity supporting a hobby which is itself a pantomime of preparedness and practicality. No matter. Once one is lodged firmly enough down a rabbit hole, the only options available are to hope for rescue, or to keep crawling deeper. I have clearly chosen the latter.
The two collection are, in principle, complimentary. Or they would be, if my knife collection served any use that would engender a need for resharpening. As it is, they remain pristinely polished and razor sharp, to no wordly end. The fact that their polished edges are also sharp is almost incidental; the added challenge of making them both polished and sharp is an undertaking of curiosity, contemplative time-wasting, and vain self-overcoming. Still, it’s cheaper than collecting cars, with far less surface area over which to preen.
Of course, function is a factor in this appreciation. The marvel of an alloy hard enough to cut glass is that it can cut glass, in addition to the marvel of our ability to produce such an alloy. Diamonds can cut glass, but you can’t make a reasonably priced pocket knife out of diamonds (actually… well, it’s complicated). But an alloy that can cut glass, while being transformable into a shape of our choosing, and while also being re-sharpenable after God-know-what manner of use managed to dull it, is something more special still. It is an example of human ingenuity’s power to manipulate natural substances to suit whatever specialized application we may devise. It is awe-inspiring, both in the sense of wonderment and dread. Read more »
All the Glamour in Bein’ Sad
by Michael Abraham
I am leaving, and I am taking nothing.
I am leaving, and I am taking nothing, and there is a void inside me—a round, black sphere, like a planet, or like the absence of a planet where a planet should be. I am coming apart in the stress of it. I am borrowing money and time, bleeding my pride out my feet as I run from this bar to that bar to be anywhere, to be out. It is not only that I am sad. It is that I am depleted, that I have given all I can give, and, now, there is no gift left. There is no gift, as in, there is no special sense of possibility glimmering, of the impossible becoming possible through me. There was once this gift, this special sense, and now there is only its having been there, its having flown off to someone somewhere else.
***
I walk circles around this place that I am leaving, and I note all the little, special things, the daily clutter of being alive. I do not think about the time that I have spent here. I think only of leaving, of fluttering off like a moth—not like a butterfly, for I am not going off in a gay manner. I am somber like a moth. To be somber is not to be destitute; it is not to despair. There is a certain resignedness to being somber, a certain goodnaturedness. One who is somber is like falling water, carried forward irrepressibly, tinkling and shimmering as the onward pull of gravity does what it will always do, which is to draw on and downward—that is to say, to be somber is to face inevitability. One who is somber has an air about him, is better-off than other sad folks. One who is somber is like a moth. This is the best that I can explain it, the allure of the feeling that I am feeling. It is not enough to say that everything in my life is ending and starting again. That is true. But it is better to say that I am a small and fragile thing, a small and fragile thing with a certain gravitas, a certain solemnity, moving into the broader world to see what the broader world has in store, moving into the broader world because there is no choice, because it is in my nature to move. Fluttering, fluttering.
***
I don’t want to get into specifics because specifics muddy the water; they make complication where there might be the simplicity of feeling and all its affordances. Read more »
Monday Photo
The literary critic Hugh Kenner (whom I got to know a bit when I was an undergrad at Johns Hopkins) once wrote about the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) that he “…tired of flowers, and indulged in artificial flowers, and then tired of those and sought out real flowers so exotic they could pass for artificial.” This flower, in a restaurant I was in recently, reminded me of that. It was a real flower that could pass for artificial.
Mindful Murmurations II: Two Views From Nowhere
by Jochen Szangolies
In the previous essay, we saw the power of common knowledge to orchestrate collective action. We also saw that, generally, common knowledge is difficult to attain without a shared source of truth. This poses a problem for collective action: if we can’t be certain of whether others act alongside ourselves, taking action may be ill-advised; but then, it seems, we ought to conclude that the others will follow the same reasoning, and fail to act, when in fact, acting together would have been in everyone’s best interest.
I argued that, in such cases, the replacement for a common source of truth is to be found in the notion of faith: following William James, faith in a position is justified when evidence for the truth of that position is only available consequent to adopting it. For collective action, we each must have faith in the other’s actions; only then will we act ourselves, as will the others, and only by this will our faith be justified. Hence, having faith in other’s actions opens up a path to collective action where rational considerations might make it seem safer to abstain from action.
But the above glosses over an often underappreciated problem: facts, knowledge, or faith on its own doesn’t have any power to compel action. Just because things are this way or that doesn’t force me to do anything about it. Read more »
A Sputnik Education: Part 2
by Dick Edelstein
In Barcelona the daily scramble to deliver children to school results in terrible congestion in the upper part of the city, where the more economically privileged send their children. Watching this phenomenon brings back my own school days, when the most embarrassing thing any of us could imagine was being dropped off by parents. If such a thing were necessary for some unavoidable reason, the kids urged their parents to drop them a short distance away from the school so their peers wouldn’t see them getting out of the car. To be seen being coddled in this way was unimaginably embarrassing, almost as bad as having your mother show up to deliver a forgotten lunch box. Everything about parents tended to be embarrassing and much of the time we pretended not to have any. But there was a single exception to the drop-off rule. If the parents happened to own a 1956 Chevrolet, with its futuristic swept-wing design, then it was obligatory to be dropped off at school on some occasion, even if the ride was for only for a couple of blocks, so the other kids could look with sheer envy on this most prestigious possession. Read more »
Charaiveti: Journey From India To The Two Cambridges And Berkeley And Beyond, Part 38
by Pranab Bardhan
All of the articles in this series can be found here.
Since my Chair was in International Trade, most of my teaching in Berkeley was in that field of Economics, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels. The undergraduate classes in Berkeley are large, and mine had sometimes more than 200 students, even though this course was meant mostly for later-year undergraduates. Large classes bring you in close touch (particularly in office hours) with a refreshing diversity of young people. But they also bring other kinds of experience.
In large crowded classrooms the borderlines were always a bit fuzzy–sometimes nearby pedestrians will saunter in just out of curiosity, to hear a funny-looking man speaking in a funny accent; some others were from the aimlessly-loitering often mentally-disabled street people. One day as I was teaching, one woman belonging probably to the latter group seated in a backbench suddenly stood up, looked at the ceiling for a minute and then gave out a piercing wail. As I was pondering how to handle this, fortunately for me she slowly walked out of the auditorium. Read more »
Monday, March 28, 2022
Your Rights: Disappearing
by Michael Liss
Judge [Ketanji Brown] Jackson is an extraordinary person with an extraordinary American story[,] … [as well as] impeccable credentials and a deep knowledge of the law…, but I am unable to consent to the nomination. —Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE)
At least Ben was polite about it. The rest of Judge Jackson’s hearing was absolutely awful. If you watched or read or otherwise dared approach the seething caldron of toxicity created by the law firm of Cotton, Cruz, Graham & Hawley (no fee unless a Democrat is smeared) you’ve probably had more than enough, so I’ll try to be brief before getting to more substantive matters.
First, as to KBJ’s chances, the jury is still out. Sasse’s fan dance means the Judiciary Committee will split 11-11, so a parliamentary maneuver will be required to move her nomination to a vote by the Senate as a whole. She just got Joe Manchin on board (leaving Sinema as the only possible Democratic holdout), and she might, maybe, get a vote or two from a Republican.
We should acknowledge that standing up and out of the latrine that Cotton & Co. just dug is a little difficult for many Republicans, even the ones who are about to retire. I mean, who could possibly say yes to a smut-peddling, criminal-coddling, CRT hugger who doesn’t even have a grasp of basic anatomy? The country should be grateful that Republicans finally were able to unearth the truth (having erroneously aided in confirming her to the federal bench twice before). Good grief. It wasn’t always like this. Read more »
Rethinking Scholarship
by Eric J. Weiner
Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career. –C. Wright Mills
In 2001, I felt lucky to get a tenure-track job in the College of Education and Human Services (CEHS) at Montclair State University (MSU) in New Jersey. Not only was the university a short jaunt from New York City, but the leadership in CEHS, in partnership with the University’s Office of the President, had instituted a faculty reward system for tenure and promotion that used Ernest Boyer’s four-pronged system of scholarship to guide its evaluation of faculty work. The Center of Pedagogy (CoP) oversaw all aspects of Boyer’s progressive model of faculty development across departments, schools and colleges as well as provided support for matters concerning pedagogy, curriculum, community-university partnerships, and learning. The move to adopt Boyer’s faculty reward system showed the University’s commitment to support the diversification of its faculty and student-body by broadening how it defined and evaluated scholarship. Given the University’s history as a normal school and the College’s deepening relationship to the work of John Goodlad, the move to embrace and build upon Boyer’s model had both intellectual as well as ideological coherence.
Writing for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Boyer’s work arises out of a frustration with the narrow way scholarship is traditionally conceptualized and rewarded within the modern university. In Scholarship Reconsidered (1990) he writes, “We believe the time has come to move beyond the tired old ‘teaching versus research’ debate and give the familiar and honorable term ‘scholarship’ a broader more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full range of academic work.” He argues for a faculty reward system that considers the scholarship of the professoriate as having four overlapping functions: Scholarship of Discovery; Scholarship of Integration; Scholarship of Application; and Scholarship of Teaching. He rejects the idea that there should be a hierarchy of scholarship in the academy while acknowledging that Discovery and Integration–when produced for publication in peer review academic journals–have historically been recognized as the most legitimate forms of intellectual work. Read more »