by Ada Bronowski

One of the amusing things about academic conferences – for a European – is to meet with American scholars. Five minutes into an amicable conversation with an American scholar and they will inevitably confide in a European one of two complaints: either how all their fellow American colleagues are ‘philistines’ (a favourite term) or (but sometimes and) how taxing it is to be always called out as an ‘erudite’ by said fellow countrymen. As Arthur Schnitzler demonstrated in his 1897 play Reigen (better known through Max Ophühls film version La Ronde from 1950), social circles are quickly closed in a confined space; and so, soon enough, by the end of day two of the conference, by pure mathematical calculation, as Justin Timberlake sings, ‘what goes around, comes around’, all the Americans in the room turn out to be both philistines and erudite.

A contradiction in terms? Not so fast and not so sure. Firstly, such confidences are made to the European in the room, identified as anyone from the old continent whose mother-tongue is not English and who is thereby draped with the aura of natural bilingualism – the key to culture. Like Theseus’ ship, the European is both up-to-date and very very old and therefore, involuntary tingling from the direct contact with centuries of history and civilisation. A position which, from the point of view of the American colleague, is not without its own contradictions: for if the oceanic separation awakes a nagging complex of inferiority from the erudite philistine, who fills the distance with fantasies of the old world and the riches of Culture, which (white) America has been lusting over from the Bostonians to Indiana Jones, it is a distance which also buttresses the sense of self-satisfaction suffused within the American psyche, and which, in the world of academia, has evolved into the self-made scholar. Yet another oxymoronic formula which brings us back to ‘the enigma wrapped up in a mystery’ that is the erudite philistine.

Two fundamental principles lie at the heart of this strange bird, the first, that you are always secretly guilty of what you blame others; the second, that you are always somebody else’s philistine. Read more »

Sa’dia Rehman. Allegiance To The Flag on Picture Day, 2018.

Canvas, charcoal fiberglass screen, velvet, carbon paper, oil pastels, chalkboard paint, white pencil and ink

More here, here, and here.

by Jochen Szangolies

The ubiquity of a phenomenon sometimes causes its mystery to grow stale. Consider the strange lines along which a magnet orients iron filings in its vicinity: what we take in stride would, if experienced afresh, seem like the purest magic. Indeed, humble iron is probably the closest we get to genuine sci-fi ‘unobtainium’. Not only can the right treatment increase its durability by a multiple, enabling technologies unthinkable without it, but if you take a rod of iron, and hit it hard with a hammer, it suddenly acquires the ability to attract other bits of iron—as if the imparted force is transformed and stored in a mysterious field surrounding it. Moreover, if you then take that empowered core, and pass it through loops of very thinly wrought iron, you find that you can suddenly draw tiny bolts of lightning from the wire—or use the energy to power a light, or a motor, or, indeed, our civilization.

So, what is it that imbues iron with these near-magical capabilities? What yields it the power to attract or repel? Or, in the immortal words of the Insane Clown Posse, fucking magnets, how do they work?

Pace Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, the answer to this question is well known—in that particular sense of ‘well known’ that physicists use when they mean ‘don’t worry about it, the math says it works’. But even among physicists, the answer isn’t usually spelled out all that clearly—which is a bit of a shame: as we will see, it’s a cardinal example of how quantum mechanics, far from being just a ‘theory of the small’, is directly responsible for many everyday phenomena. Ultimately, the key to the question ‘why do magnets attract things’ lies in the phenomenon of quantum interference—though we’ll have to plot a bit of a roundabout course to get there. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

It is ironic that one of the primary obstacles to meritocracy in science, the oversupply of talent, is simultaneously a key contributor to the myth that merit reigns in science.

To explain, I’ll proceed in three steps. First, I’ll devote most of my efforts to provide reason for thinking that there IS an oversupply of talent in science. Second, I’ll briefly explain why the oversupply of talent is problematic for meritocratic conceptions of science. Third, I’ll suggest a reason why such oversupplies of talent paradoxically fuel the myth of meritocracy.

Is there a surplus of talent in science? In 2019 alone, there were roughly 23,000 Ph.D.s awarded in the natural sciences, computer science, and mathematics – and an additional 10,000 or so Ph.D.s awarded in engineering. This vastly dwarfs the number of research positions – particularly academic research positions – available.

Indeed, as a 2021 article in Areo magazine notes, “between 1982 and 2011 in the US, around 800,000 science and engineering PhDs were awarded, but only about 100,000 new tenure-track faculty positions were created in those fields.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rebecca Baumgartner

I don’t want to write this and you don’t want to read it. But this is the world we live in. As I write this, it’s been three weeks since a man without a criminal record legally purchased a trunk-full of guns, opened fire at the Allen Premium Outlets mall and killed eight people, including three children, and wounded seven others, all in the space of about three minutes. A place that previously had been known mostly for its contribution to traffic jams on Stacy Rd. will now be linked forever to white-shrouded bodies and blood splatters on the concrete outside the H&M store.

***

Because I live in a very conservative state, I’ve often had to swallow my true self, my beliefs, my reason, my outrage, my sadness, and my intelligence when listening to those around me speak about current events. A few years back, a conservative I know told me he was disturbed by the decision of his family’s school district to allow a trans person to serve as a substitute teacher for his daughter’s third-grade class. “I wasn’t prepared to talk to her about…all that yet,” he said, gesturing vaguely to indicate the existence of trans people. “I mean, she’s only eight.”

For complex reasons that any liberal living and working alongside conservatives in the Bible Belt will understand, I kept my response to a minimum. There was no point in telling him that talking about trans people with his daughter didn’t need to be a fraught conversation; it was really just about accepting people as they are and recognizing that difference exists. Eight-year-olds can understand that. In fact, it’s important that they understand that, because otherwise they will struggle to develop the empathy and emotional intelligence they need to connect with others who don’t see the world exactly as they do.

I had cause to recall that particular conversation when my son and niece asked me about the mall shooting. Read more »

Lilac in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Derek Neal

In the first round of this year’s NBA playoffs, Austin Reaves, an undrafted and little-known guard who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers, held the ball outside the three-point line. With under two minutes remaining, the score stood at 118-112 in the Lakers’ favor against the Memphis Grizzlies. Lebron James waited for the ball to his right. Instead of deferring to the star player, Reaves ignored James, drove into the lane, and hit a floating shot for his fifth field goal of the fourth quarter. He then turned around and yelled, “I’m him!”. The initial reaction one might have to this statement—“I’m him”—is a question: who are you? The phrase sounds strange to our ears. Who could you be but yourself? And if you are someone else, shouldn’t we know who this other person is? Who is the referent of the pronoun “him”? Perhaps because of its cryptic nature, “I’m him” is an evocative statement, and it has quickly spread throughout sports and gaming culture. In a 2022 episode of “The Shop,” Lebron James himself declared “I’m him.” On YouTube, there are numerous compilations with titles such as “NFL ‘I’m Him’ Moments.” If you search the phrase on Twitter, people use it in relation to sports, music, video games, and themselves. But what does it mean, and where did it come from?

An internet search turns up a few articles explaining the history of this statement. Apparently, a rapper named Kevin Gates was the first to popularize the phrase when he titled his 2019 album, I’m Him. In this instance, “Him” acted as an acronym for “His Imperial Majesty.” We could then understand people saying, “I’m Him” to be saying something along the lines of “I’m the king.” This expression would function much like another sports saying, “the GOAT,” meaning “the greatest of all time.” But I think there is more to it than this. Since Gates used the term, no other examples have used “him” as an acronym. Read more »

by William Benzon

I’m stumped. I’ve hit a wall. More than one most likely.

I don’t know how to think about artificial intelligence. Well, that’s a rather broad statement. After all, I’ve done quite a bit of thinking about it. Six of my most recent articles here at 3QD about been about it, and who know how many blog posts, working papers, and formal academic papers going back for decades. I’ve thought a lot about it. And yet I’ve hit a wall.

First I should say that it’s only relatively recently that I’ve given a great deal of focal attention to artificial intelligence as such. What I’ve been interested in all these years has been the human mind, which I’ve often approached from a computational point of view, as I explained in From “Kubla Khan” through GPT and beyond. In pursuing that interest I read widely in the cognitive sciences, including A.I. My objective was always to understand the human mind and never to create an artificial human being.

It’s the prospect creating of an artificial human being that has me stumped. Of course, an artificial intelligence isn’t necessarily an artificial human being. Computer systems that plays chess or Jeopardy at a championship level are artificial intelligences, but they certainly aren’t artificial human beings. ChatGPT or any of recent large language models (LLMs) are artificial intelligences, but they aren’t artificial human beings.

But the capability of these recent systems, certainly the LLMs, but other systems as well, are so startling that, it seems to me, that they have changed the valence, for lack of a better word, of inquiry into the computational view of the human mind. What do I mean by that, by valence? My dictionary links the term with chemistry and with linguistics. In both contexts the term is about capacity for combination, the ability of one element to join with others in forming chemical compounds, the ability of a word to combine with others in a sentence. Something like that. Read more »

Aqui Thami. Resisters, 2018.

Poster.

More here, and here.

by Brooks Riley

by Rafaël Newman

My father’s mother—Annie Newman, my grandmother or Bubbi—was born Hannah Dubin in a shtetl in what is now Ukraine a few years before the Great War. One of her earliest recollections—in addition to the image of her own grandmother hiding in a baby carriage to escape marauding Cossacks—was of being able to see troop movements from the roof of her house, presumably during the Russian Imperial Army’s advance against Austria-Hungary, an engagement that occurred in Galicia, farther to the west, in 1914. Much later, in the aftermath of the nuclear accident in Chernobyl in 1986, when that obscure place was suddenly on everyone’s lips, she began recalling that her village, which she called Priut, in a region she referred to by its Russian name as Екатеринославская губернія, or Yekaterinoslavskaya guberniya—the Yekaterinoslav Governorate, a province of the Russian Empire—was not far from that site, which had now become infamous for a catastrophic meltdown. Read more »