by Richard Farr

I’m on a trip to London and Spain. In Trafalgar Square with a spare half hour, I plunge into the National Gallery because I want to see the Arnolfini portrait again. Alas, van Eyck’s cadaverous old merchant and his heavily pregnant (or not pregnant) young wife (or betrothed, or recently dead ex-wife — pick you theory) are being attacked by a hundred-strong mob. I can’t even get close enough to see the annoying little dog, never mind the details.

But my consolation prize waits nearby, all but ignored: a lovely double portrait by Robert Campin from about 1435. Also, Rogier van der Weyden’s Mary Magdalene Enjoying Her Morning Latte.

I’ve never seen a painting by either Campin or van der Weyden of which I didn’t think “this deserves to be better known.”

Days later I’m in València. Near the entrance to the Museo de Bellas Artes some anonymous genius from the fourteenth century has gifted us a brilliantly expressive carving of John the Evangelist. Those eyes; that exact position of the head and neck; that subtle tension in the right hand. I don’t know what to say. What I want to say “Thank you! Thank you! How did you do that?” 

Behind him there’s a grand gallery of altarpieces from the same era or a little later. Some are more than 20 feet high; they all look as if they were painted yesterday in a color-mad frenzy of devotion. I most harbor some inchoate prejudice about the late Medieval world because I’m amazed by the psychological acuity and wit and sheer individuality in the rendition of the faces.

The next day, wanting something Modern, I go to the Centre del Carme, which has an enormous show that might be called, though it isn’t, Margins of the Unendurable. Some thousand or so dimly-lit square meters are devoted to a well-known video artist. There are, the blurb explains: “nine large-scale installations conceived as immersive stage sets that envelop the viewer and prompt reflection on issues such as emigration, violence, identity, and philosophical concepts like eremitism and the infinite seriality of life.” 

I am not making this up. Read more »

by John Ambrosio 

In a recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, drew on a paper written by the renowned Czech dissident, and later president, Václav Havel that discussed how totalitarian regimes, like the former Soviet Union, seek to control the population by providing individuals with an “ideological excuse” that enables them to conceal from themselves their silent capitulation, in the face of real and threatened state repression, in order to avoid the shame and indignity of having their obedience to the regime exposed.

In The Power of the Powerless, Havel used the example of a greengrocer who put a sign with an official slogan in his shop window to illustrate how totalitarian regimes seek to control and manipulate the population. Havel wrote that “the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the façade of something high. And that something high is ideology. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo,” an “excuse that everyone can use” to maintain an “illusory identity, dignity, and morality,”  to “live within a lie.”

As the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci argued, in capitalist systems with highly developed civil societies the ruling class exercises power through a combination of force and consent. That is, it achieves hegemony through coercion and state violence, and by obtaining the passive or active consent of the masses of people by exercising moral and intellectual leadership. Hegemony is never complete or final and must be continually reproduced, which is why authoritarian regimes strenuously repress criticism of their ideological excuses, of the official stories people tell themselves about themselves, one another, and the nation that enable them to conceal from themselves their obedience to the regime. For most people, avoiding the shame of having their accommodation to the regime exposed is a powerful motivational force. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

A few weeks ago, Québec’s official housing tribunal (TAL) ruled on a case about no-pet clauses in residential leases. The case involved a tenant, M. Desjardins, who had lived in the same apartment since 2011, having taken over a lease from the previous tenant (this is a very common situation in Montréal, where transferring existing leases is one of the few ways tenants can avoid the staggering rise in rents over the last decade). At that time, all tenants in the building were subject to leases that forbade pets, but most or all of them kept pets regardless, and the landlord at the time tolerated this situation with no apparent issues arising from the animals living there. The ownership of the building changed hands twice since 2011, and the new landlords continued to include a no-pets clause in their leases. The current landlord, fed up with Desjardins’ disregard of the no-pets clause, applied to the housing tribunal for permission to end the lease.

Some context: Québec, and Montréal particularly, has a very strong regime of tenant rights. Montréal is largely a city of renters, and has a robust culture of community organizing and public protest that is quick to attack any perceived threat to housing security. It is also in the grips of a homelessness and housing affordability crisis, not as bad as in Vancouver or Toronto but still desperate. As the only major city (not counting Laval, which one shouldn’t) in North America’s only officially francophone territory, Montréal is the natural destination for people leaving their communities all over Québec, concentrating the effects of province-wide affordability issues. The recent explosion of longer-simmering housing problems is particularly shocking to a place that, for decades, was considered a haven of affordability and “livability”, where working class people could live comfortably (if modestly) within a world-class city. Montréal’s reputation as an artistic incubator stems largely from the fact that young artists could split their time between making art and earning wages, and still be fed and housed. Many Montréalers now wish, half-joking, half-not, that the recent uptick in separatist rhetoric from the Parti Québecois (which hopes to unseat the floundering Coalition Avenir Québec government in this year’s provincial elections) will scare away foreign real estate investment and depress rents, repeating the effects of the 1980 and 1995 separation referenda. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

Let’s start with a simple case. You want to know if the tires on your bike are properly inflated. You give them a squeeze. They feel fine. But you want to be sure. So you get out your handy tire pressure gauge. It says they’re at 68 psi. The tires say they want to be at 72. So you give them another shot of air. You trust the tool more than you trust your own senses. Why?

I think there are three reasons. You trust the gauge because you believe it has more reliability and more validity than your squeeze. Reliability means the gauge will give the same measurement whenever the tire pressure is the same and a higher or lower measurement when the pressure is higher or lower. Validity means the gauge is measuring what you want to measure – tire pressure – and not some other variable. It may be that if your fingers are hot or cold or if you are hungry, angry, lonely or tired it affects the accuracy of your tire-squeezing. A pressure gauge doesn’t make those mistakes.

The third reason you trust the gauge, logically prior to the other two, is that you believe tire pressure is the kind of thing that it makes sense to measure with a tool. You believe you’re not making a category mistake. We’ll come back to that.

Now suppose you’re buying a new pair of shoes. The shoe store has a machine that tells you what size you need. You place your feet on the black box and the robot brings you a pair of shoes. You put them on and they squash your toes. You complain to the robot. “These shoes squash my toes,” you say. The robot says you’re mistaken. It says it was trained by the finest experts using millions of data points and it has access to vast troves of information you can’t possibly be aware of and it knows more about shoes and toes than you will ever know and you are just wrong.

Is there anything the robot could say that would convince you to trust the machine instead of your own senses? You were willing to do it with the tire gauge. What is the difference between tire pressure and toe pressure? Read more »

by Derek Neal

I find myself increasingly unable to read anything resembling AI text, that is, anything seemingly preformed, readymade, or mass produced, like an IKEA chair; but even as I write this, I think to myself—why an IKEA chair? Why does this object, or rather, this unit of language—IKEA chair—come to me unbidden? “IKEA” as signifier of anonymous, impersonal and practical furniture, and “chair” as typical illustrative example—Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblances as shown by how the concept of “chair” functions in language, for example—combining to form the perfect analogy: IKEA chair is to furniture as AI text is to human writing; and yet, when I visualize an IKEA chair, or rather, when I see myself walking through the showroom in Burlington, Ontario, I see many chairs of all shapes and sizes, some hard and made of wood, some soft and upholstered, some big and roomy, some ergonomic and sleek, and I realize that, in fact, IKEA makes a wide variety of chairs, and perhaps my analogy is flawed.

Maybe I should go further and say that I find myself increasingly unable to read any writing, especially fictional prose, that is written in short, declarative sentences, the purpose of which is to transmit information in a clear and succinct way. Instead, I’m reading W.G. Sebald. I drifted away from his novel Austerlitz after 100 pages last summer, but I’ve come back to it now, and although I initially had no idea what was happening, something about the prose and the long sentences has possessed me—I feel ensnared by the text, trapped in a twisting and turning labyrinth through which I must continue walking—and I’m deeply intrigued by the way a character will be narrating something, much like I’m doing here, but then, all of a sudden, there will be a pause in the text and the inclusion of “Austerlitz said,” before the narration picks up again, reminding us that we are not reading the thoughts of the narrator, but the words of another character relayed to us via the narrator. It’s as if, right now, in the middle of this essay, I included something like, “Sebastian said,” which would suggest that the previous words were not mine but were those of someone I was in conversation with, someone named Sebastian…

Do you know how in IKEA, Sebastian continued, they have those arrows on the floor, flowing you from one area to the next, until you end up at the warehouse section and then the checkout lanes? It’s a bit like that, AI text, in that the direction you’re supposed to go is so clearly defined, and you can’t move off in a different direction because behind you are more people, all going the same way, and they will crush you if you stop; you will be like a rock that has been ground down to a pebble and washed ashore, powerless to resist the strong current, as you end up at the self-checkout scanning a stainless steel spatula, wondering to yourself if you should purchase a $1 hot dog on the way back to the car. Read more »

by Laurence Peterson

History is not rhyming; it is not repeating itself; it is being ignored, dismissed as an inconvenience, perhaps on a uniquely vast scale. Events that have already affected all of us deeply, or will almost certainly do so in the very near future are being passively wished away, perhaps in the hope that we, in a society addicted to convenience, can turn customary inertia into a vital historical force. Markets worth trillions seem to be avoiding collapse on the mere assumption that developments with of the most dramatic import, initiated at an exceptionally rapid rate, in an atmosphere of unprecedented unaccountability, will somehow, against perhaps all indications, work out in the lazily pliable manner we have been conditioned to expect.

I have never been a supporter of what can be called the American-led order. As a socialist, I have worked in the hope of a transition to a radically different society almost all my adult life. I have been impressed, however, by the durability of American institutions, good or bad, to the point that, until rather recently, I have expected the changes I look forward to to originate in other societies. Now all that seems to be up for grabs.

One of my closest friends has a cousin who was snatched up and sent to one of the far-away ICE concentration camps in California, leaving her husband to take care of their three-year old child alone; she faces deportation to a neighboring country in the middle of a mass gang-war (whose misfortunes are to a great extent due to US policies). My relationship with a very close cousin is deteriorating due to disagreements that only remotely touch on politics, like planning a trip abroad; I cannot speak of the apprehensions I have about flights getting cancelled and so on, without mentioning the occasioning factor of obscenely unjust and illegal military actions. A dear friend and I are finding ourselves increasingly negotiating a similarly dicey interpersonal space over much the same thing. And then there are the inevitable economic and financial ramifications that will, very soon, take a severe toll on just about all of us, perhaps resulting in severe recession. A depression or market meltdown of some sort cannot be dismissed on intellectual grounds. Climate disaster nears at a palpably quickening pace. Even the use of atmospheric nuclear tests or employment of a limited nuclear weapon in the Iran conflict is mentioned as a distinct possibility more and more, even amongst mainstream press showing the most lapdog-type tendencies. Which, of course, makes the prospect of a full nuclear one more likely on its own. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

People all over the country wake in the morning and instantly dread the news headlines awaiting them on their phones. Have Americans bombed another school? Gutted one more procedural safeguard? Facilitated the reemergence of some long controlled infectious disease? Too often, we realize that one of these things has indeed happened. We carry on with our absurd lives anyway. We do dishes and pay bills. We run in place on treadmills and wash our hair. As Camus beautifully puts it in The Myth of Sisyphus,

Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

It’s difficult to manage the cognitive dissonance. Bad things happen every day, but we must carry on as if they don’t. How can we react to that without feeling crushed by the tragic absurdity of it all?

One proposal is that we could follow the advice of the Ancient Stoics. Thinkers like Epictetus and Seneca reflect on the human tendency to tie happiness to external goods and events. We want other human beings to make reasonable decisions. We want good things to happen in the world rather than bad things. We want to see others exhibit love and empathy rather than hatred and fear. These are reasonable preferences, but, as the Stoics point out, none of this is fundamentally up to us. Those of us with good intentions can each do our part, and it still might not be enough. What we can do instead is focus on what is under our control. We’ll never be able to fully control our fortune, the actions of other people, or the way global politics operate. What is up to us is what we are doing internally. Our own individual virtue is up to us, and that is what fundamentally matters anyway. Read more »

On the road. In front of my house. Very mysterious.

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by David Hoyt

It’s hard to love the prairie. If you love it, you tend to be loving a memory of something you’ve hardly known, or a vision of something you dream might return some day, like the American Bison. Or maybe your love is more profound, in that you love it for what is beneath the surface – the oceanic swell of the ground, the large simplicity of the horizon, or the wild solitude of its winters. Here and there it pulses with a latent sense of life, thrumming beneath the emptiness of regimented fields, giant grain elevators, and wind turbines – like a flooded spring field that attracts a thousand ducks from out of nowhere.

It’s hard to love the prairie because there’s almost nothing left of it. Few landscapes of continental scale have been so quickly and comprehensively dismantled. In European colonial settler imaginations, hardly had the prairie appeared before them than it was plowed under. Some of those who were fortunate enough to encounter it in its wild state, such as Audubon, reported a sort of ecological Stendhal syndrome, a prairie-induced aesthetic exhaustion from exposure to boundless forbs, grasses, and wildlife. Despite this powerful effect, there simply wasn’t sufficient time for the landscape to seep into the collective settler consciousness before it was harnessed to agriculture, taking any passing familiarity with its flora and fauna and rhythms of life away with it. Within little more than a generation of settlement came the plow, then barbed wire, and little more than a generation after that, the Dust Bowl. There really is little sense of what it was like before all the corn.

What remains, at least in the Corn Belt states, are remnants. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Malcolm Murray

In forecasting the evolution of AI, we are rapidly losing the middle. The outcomes are diverging to the extent that it no longer makes sense to think about “an average timeline” or “average outcomes”. Many people are now tracking prediction markets for when “AGI” will arrive. The current Metaculus prediction is for July 2032. But nothing will happen in July 2032 specifically. The median is irrelevant. Similarly, the average outcome on the economy from advanced AI might be an increase in GDP growth by 8%. But it is looking much more likely that we will either have unprecedented 15% annual growth or continue on the long-term trajectory of 2%. Averaging across two worlds that cannot exist does not create a realistic world. It is like the old joke of how the average income changes when Bill Gates walks into the bar. The average income might have gone to a billion each, but that does not mean that any one specific person in the bar has one billion.

What matters is the distribution, not point estimates. Toby Ord recently took a step in this direction and discussed using broad timelines for transformative AI (instead of short or long ones), and plan for all potential outcomes across those timelines. We should probably go even further. It might not even be enough to look at one probability distribution for advanced AI, even one that is very bimodal. The outcomes might be distinct enough that we should be looking at several, completely different distributions. When one of the possible worlds includes hitherto-unimaginable characteristics such as the world economy doubling every few years, it has very little in common with other worlds.

World forecasts and object forecasts

This means we should stop looking only at median forecasts, such as the AI 2027 scenario from last year. Its authors have been at pains lately to try to explain that 2027 was the median, not the key prediction. There is no median AGI. What we should do instead is to start forecasting on two distinct levels. First, we need to forecast which world we are in, and only then, conditional on that, we forecast within each world. We can call these world forecasts and object forecasts.

This is something that LEAP does very well. This is a longitudinal AI forecasting study that I am part of. It is run by the Forecasting Research Institute. They often start with positioning different worlds (e.g. slow, medium or rapid AI evolution) and only then, conditional on that being the world we are in, we do forecasts on the relevant characteristics of that world. For example, in a rapid AI evolution world, what share of total income will go to labor vs capital, a hotly debated question. Read more »

by Laurie Sheck

1.

In his 1980 essay Walking in the City, Michel de Certeau describes looking out at Manhattan from the 110^th floor of the World Trade Center. Viewed from above, the city is “a wave of verticals. Its agitation momentarily arrested…The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes.” From that vantage point, the city lies still, unimpeded, its extremes of wealth and poverty coinciding in the vast landscape below. “To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp. One’s body is no longer clasped by the streets.” The viewer becomes Icarus in flight or a solar Eye, in thrall of “this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.”

But the walker in the city is subject to all sorts of contradictions and surprises. Immersed and vulnerable, they move through seemingly-endless inversions, displacements, accumulations. Footsteps unfold within time, making possible new meanings and directions.

This immersion is a form of love.

2.

Walter Benjamin put it this way: “The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane….The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands.”

3.

In 1980, de Certeau could not have known the crumbled ruin the World Trade Center would become. How what seemed a place of safety and remove would become its exact opposite. In the hours after the towers were hit, I watched from my window as hundreds of people, their clothes covered in white ash, walked in a ragged line on the sidewalk below, heading to whatever home they were trying to get back to. Even now in my mind’s eye they are like sleepwalkers, everything happening in silence, as if, as I watched them, I had lost my sense of hearing. As if my senses no longer knew how to be in the world; what to do with the world. They walked holding their useless cell phones, their briefcases, their ashen coats.

In the days and weeks that followed, the air smelled of a mixture of blood and burning computers. Office papers drifted weirdly down like delicate white wings, unhurt, otherworldly. There were no cars on the streets, no mail delivery, no airplanes overhead. Each day, walking my daughter to school, we passed the checkpoint at 14^th street where at that boundary the world of cars and daily life would suddenly reappear, though tentative, furtive, estranged.

Xeroxed faces of the missing and the dead stared from lampposts and graffitied walls. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Esplanade Walks As Days Get Longer. Boston, March 2022.

Digital photograph.

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by Martin Butler

In contemporary political debate, particularly with regard to economic relations, the idea of ‘individual responsibility’ has come to encapsulate the standard critique of state regulation or state intervention. The argument goes that citizens should not be overly protected from their lack of responsibility, and that however humane a society becomes, as individuals we should live with the consequences of our actions, good or bad. According to this argument, an overly generous welfare system undermines individual responsibility: human beings have agency and should not be insulated from the real consequences of their lack of ambition, laziness or bad choices. Those that do show individual responsibility and do the right thing should be rewarded.

On the other side is the argument that individual responsibility, although real, plays a minor part in an individual’s success or failure, at least in modern western societies. Other factors, none of which are chosen, such as family background, inherited wealth, social class, upbringing, educational opportunities, generational factors, innate abilities or disabilities, luck, and so on also play their parts. According to this side of the debate it is up to society to level up an intrinsically unlevel playing field. Kant’s categorical imperative can cast light on this debate, pointing to the minimum requirements a society should work towards that would allow us to invoke the notion of individual responsibility in good faith.

Kant’s categorical imperative (first formulation) is a principle which he claims captures the essence of what it is to act ethically. It states that you should “act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law”. A ‘maxim’ here is simply a personal principle of action. For my action to be ethical I must accept that anyone else could also chose to perform this action. This outlaws what we intuitively think of as the epitome of unfair or unethical behaviour, i.e. making an exception for yourself. It cannot be one rule for you and a different rule for everyone else. An action is wrong if it cannot be universalised. A thief’s maxim of action might be ‘whenever something is needed, I steal it.’ If this was universalised, the very notion of theft itself would dissolve, since theft depends on a notion of property and ownership. If theft was universal, property rights would become meaningless, so there is something deeply self-contradictory in the idea of theft. This is the essence of its immorality. According to Kant immorality is just irrationality.

The categorical imperative is normally thought of exclusively in terms of individual moral decisions, but it can be applied to the wider issue of political and social policy. How does it relate to the question of individual responsibility? Read more »

by Azra Raza

I recently read about a man who arrived in the United States from India with just thirty dollars in his pocket and, three decades later, had become a billionaire. When asked about the most important lesson of his journey, he answered without hesitation: money matters.

Tara, the protagonist of A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna, learns that lesson early, though under far harsher conditions. She grows up in the soul-destroying poverty of a lower middle class family of four sisters and a brother somewhere in a remote Pakistani village, surrounded by brutality, superstition, ignorance, and a rigid patriarchal social order that consigns girls to early marriages and lives of numbing domestic repetition. Cleaning, cooking, washing, bearing children—these are not choices but destinies.

Her mother, one of the novel’s most striking figures, senses something different in Tara and insists on educating her, sparing her from household labor. It is an act of quiet rebellion. But Tara, sharp and observant, has her own ambitions. Education, for her, is not enlightenment or self-empowerment. It is escape.

With it, she secures a proposal from a middle-class urban family and seizes the opportunity. The village, with its suffocation and grime, is left behind. In the city, Tara learns quickly; watching television, studying the women around her, absorbing codes of behavior and aspiration. She adapts with startling ease.

Though she finds neither intellectual companionship nor emotional fulfillment in her husband, she builds the life she had envisioned: two children, financial stability, independence from her in-laws. She has her ugly, protruding teeth fixed, gets her tubes tied, learns to drive, finds a job and moves her nuclear family to a home of their own.

The village girl, it seems, has arrived.

I am not giving away any of the plot as all this is essentially told within the first three pages and this is where the novel truly begins. Read more »

Current Tally:

I’m out here stacking days as if it were a sport,
I’m up to twenty thousand six hundred eight.
I sweat memory. I’ve taken off my shirt,
I’m feeling great, but as I stack them up
time is growing short.

I tally what till now I’ve done.

Not far from a stack of stones
I eye the spot where I’d begun
near an arbor vitae hedge
in a shade of catalpa.

I’m looking for bona fide antiques
scented and yellow as old books.

On spines of days my curate hands
feel to find the ones with bliss-laced hours
stitched with epiphanic seams.
I come upon a few, they’re few
and far between.

The sun’s past high. The pallid moon’s
a perfect ghost of round, sentinel-still
upon a mountain ridge. I think
it might roll down.

I breathe honeysuckle and see wisteria
clutch its pole twist up and round.

I’d placed the pile with care
so as never to occlude the sun
yet carelessly have thrown
some days upon a previous one
then, too late, gone back to
square them up trying
to undo the done

by Jim Culleny
January 2010

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