Tuesday, November 08, 2016
It's time for women to run for office: the story of another election
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 01:11 PM | Permalink
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How to Begin the Healing
Frank Luntz in the New York Times:
Let us hope that the leader we choose will have the courage and wisdom to heal a wounded nation and declare “enough is enough.” It’s time to govern.
For decades, that healing has begun on election night with a concession speech. The vanquished candidate, usually surrounded by family and friends, accepts defeat with remarkable grace and dignity, and asks supporters to accept the will of the people: “We’ve been around for 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections. We’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them, and that is what must be expected of anyone.”
I know that language works because it came from Mrs. Clinton in the third presidential debate, and it was her best debate moment, according to the focus-group session for CBS News. The concession speech is a trademark of our democracy, and we are stronger for it. Let us hope we don’t have to wait hours or days to hear it.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 11:10 AM | Permalink
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Islamophobia killed my brother. Let's end the hate
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 11:05 AM | Permalink
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The Supermanagerial Reich
Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Raphaële Chappe in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
Popular culture is replete with cartoonish depictions of Nazism. Hitler seems to emerge suddenly, as if he had been waiting in the wings as a fait accompli. One moment it’s Weimar decadence, really good art, and Stormtroopers and communists fighting in the streets. The next, Hindenburg is handing Adolf the keys to the kingdom and it’s all torchlight parades, Triumph of the Will, and plaintive Itzhak Perlman violins. Hitler rises above a reborn Reich as a kind of totalitarian god. All aspects of life come under his control through the Nazi party’s complete domination of German life. Of course, this is not really how it worked.
Before Hitler achieved his genocidal powers, there were years of what we would now call “intense partisan bickering,” decreasing prosperity, and violence in the streets. In the end, Hitler cobbled together a rickety coalition of business-minded technocrats, traditional conservatives, military interests, and his own radical ethno-nationalists into a plausible government. As the new government consolidated its power, thousands of communists and trade unionists were subjected to harsh suppression and were among the first to be shipped away to what would eventually become the concentration camps. And yet for a time, life for the overwhelming majority of Germans — even briefly for German Jews — went on largely as it had in the Weimar era. There was clearly a new regime in town, but most Germans got up in the mornings in the mid-to-late 1930s and went to work, just as they had in the 1920s. January through March of 1933 was not 1776, 1789, 1791, 1917, or even 1979. Far from the world turning upside down, things were strangely continuous for many Germans as though nothing much had happened at all. For a few Germans, things were astoundingly better.
With the global rise of demagogues of the far-right like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, “fascism” is on the tip of everyone’s tongues.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 10:51 AM | Permalink
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Please vote!
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 10:42 AM | Permalink
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Writing in the Age of the Ultra-Unreal
Ning Ken at the New England Review:
What are we to make of contemporary Chinese reality? Political scientists have their way of looking at things, as do economists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers. Make no mistake, we fiction writers have our way of looking at the world too. Only the fiction writer’s way of looking at the world is not just one more to add to our list. The fiction writer incorporates all ways of looking at the world into one. It is a compound eye. If Magic Realism was the way in which Latin American authors presented their view of their reality, then Ultra-Unreal Realism should be our name for the literature through which the Chinese regard their reality. The Chinese word “chaohuan” (ultra-unreal) is something of a play on the word “mohuan” (magic), as in “mohuan xianshizhuyi” (magic realism)— “mohuan” is “magical unreal,” and “chaohuan” is “surpassing the unreal.” In the 1980s, when China was starting to open up to the world, Latin American literature, with Gabriel García Márquez as the representative, poured into China. When we read “magic realism,” it seemed familiar, it seemed close to us, and that is because in their suffering and their difficult, incredible histories, Chinese people and Latin Americans have a lot in common. Indeed, in the 1980s we often spoke of China as a place of “magic realism.” But since the 1990s, and especially in the past dozen years or so, China is no longer that place; it is now a place of the “ultra-unreal.”
Or maybe in China this has always been the case.
more here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:27 AM | Permalink
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The ruse that gave rise to the spiritualist movement
Edward White at The Paris Review:
With entrepreneurial sharpness, Leah moved herself, Maggie, and Kate into a house in Rochester where, for a dollar each, visitors could attend a séance with them. It was an instant hit. The Fox sisters’ fame as spirit mediums spread so quickly that they soon performed to packed theaters in New York, New England, and beyond. It marked a shift in popular attitudes toward the paranormal. Two hundred years earlier, a couple of adolescent females who claimed to be in conversation with the dead may well have been burned alive as witches; in the mid-nineteenth century they became show-business celebrities. Most who came to see them were happy to believe the Fox girls were the real deal, though Maggie in particular was subject to some terrifying abuse from those who thought her either a fraud or a heretic. In Troy, New York, she was even the victim of an attempted kidnapping by a group of men who seemed offended by the sisters’ show. For Maggie and Kate, children who had started this as a prank to enliven the dullness of their daily routine, it was too much. As early as November 1849 they tried to bring the circus to an end, spelling out “we will now bid you farewell” with their toe joints during a séance. For two weeks the spirits remained silent; their reappearance was testament to Leah’s unshakable belief that the show must go on, and her formidable skill at ensuring that it would.
Even had they stopped, it wouldn’t have slowed the juggernaut they had set in motion. By 1850, “rapping” had become a nationwide craze. That October, the New Haven Journal reported that there were forty families in upstate New York who claimed to have the same gifts as the Foxes, and hundreds more ranging from Virginia to Ohio.
more here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:22 AM | Permalink
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no matter what happens, I had fun
It’s been quite a campaign, hasn’t it? Just think of all that has happened over the past 16 months. I’ve traveled all over the country, spoken to millions of people, and my campaign has gotten the entire nation talking about illegal immigrants, radical Islamic terror, violent crime, and so much more. Obviously, nothing would make me happier than for Americans to go to the polls and choose me as their next president. But regardless of what our nation decides tomorrow, at least I can say that I had fun.
Whether I win or lose, the bottom line is that this whole thing has been a really, really good time for me. Honestly, I enjoyed every minute of it.
Right from the beginning, when I announced my candidacy, I stirred up all kinds of deep-seated passions with my remarks about Mexican Americans, and I still can’t help but smile every time I think back on it. That was fun.
more here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:17 AM | Permalink
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She's Ready
Emma Green in The Atlantic:
She’s ready.
Hillary Clinton stood before a crowd of tens of thousands of people in Philadelphia on Monday night, sounding hoarse from her days of campaigning, wearing a bright red pantsuit as if to dare anyone to make fun it, the night before her historic election. She did not declare the race over, but the whole event felt breathtakingly close to a victory party. Clinton is ready to be off the campaign trail, and to be president of the United States. It should have been a perfect event—a dignified pep rally for Democrats, featuring all party’s greatest hits. Bill and Chelsea where there, sweetly debating who was more excited about voting on Election Day. Barack Obama used his speech as an opportunity to run through his accomplishments and pitch Clinton as a continuation of his legacy. Michelle Obama arguably stole the show, just as she did at this summer’s convention, arguing that “we deserve a leader who sees our diversity not as a threat, but a blessing.” Like many others in the evening’s line-up, she observed that “we are one day away from once again making history.”
But beneath the speakers’ sangfroid, behind their swagger about Trump and confidence in Hillary and total conviction that she will win on Tuesday, there were hints that this has not, in fact, been eight years of unmitigated success in Washington, and that many Americans do not, in fact, see this election primarily as a historic moment for women. A lot of people, including many of those in Pennsylvania, do not see this as day to be celebrated and relished, but a relief to be done with. Clinton clearly has fans. They came out en mass on Monday night. But if she does, in fact, become president—which looks likely, but is by no means assured—she will take on a country that is right now not “together,” but terribly sundered.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:27 AM | Permalink
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When It Comes to Success, Age Really Is Just a Number
Benedict Carey in The New York Times:
The question hangs over the career of every ambitious soul: Is there still time to make a mark? Charles Darwin was 29 when he came up with his theory of natural selection. Einstein had his annus mirabilis at age 26; Marie Curie made big discoveries about radiation in her late 20s. Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in E flat: 8 years old. For years, scientists who study achievement have noted that in many fields the most electrifying work comes earlier in life rather than later. After all, younger people can devote their life to a project in a way that more senior people cannot, and young stars attract support, mentors and prestigious appointments.
Now, a big-data analysis of scientific careers appearing in the journal Science finds a host of factors that have nothing to do with age or early stardom. It is, they suggest, a combination of personality, persistence and pure luck, as well as intelligence, that leads to high-impact success — at any age. “The bottom line is: Brother, never give up. When you give up, that’s when your creativity ends,” said Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who with Roberta Sinatra led a team of researchers who conducted the analysis. Both were physicists at Northeastern University in Boston. Dr. Sinatra has since moved to Central European University in Budapest. Previous work had found that a similar combination of elements lay behind the success of very top performers in a variety of fields. The new study illustrates that the same forces are at play at all levels of a discipline: the student, the young professional, the midcareer striver and beyond, to those old enough to wonder if their hand is played out.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:11 AM | Permalink
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Tuesday Poem
The Children of the Poor
What shall I give my children? Who are poor,
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and no velvety velour;
But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
Crying out that they are quasi, contraband
Because unfinished, graven by a hand
Less than angelic, admirable or sure.
My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device,
But I lack access to my proper stone.
And plentitude of plan shall not suffice
Nor grief, nor love shall be enough alone
To ratify my little halves who bear
Across an autumn freezing everywhere.
.
Gwendolyn Brooks
from Poet’s Choice
Time Life Books, 1962
.
Posted by Jim Culleny at 05:39 AM | Permalink
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Monday, November 07, 2016
Democratic Rehab
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
When we tell people that we write about logic and politics, we let our interlocutors make the big joke. There is no logic in politics! It's a funny joke, for sure. But it's also tragic. And the tragedy is double-barreled. First, good reasons should be behind decision making. Without good reasoning, policy will likely be an irrational hash. There may be no logic in politics, but there ought to be. Second, the politics referred to in the quip is the politics of our democracy. And in a democracy what's true of the politics is often true of the participants. This includes not only the candidates, politicians, lobbyists, and media personalities, but the citizens as well. And it's hard to deny that we, the democratic citizens, are not users of logic when it comes to politics. The joke's on us.
As the current election cycle grinds to its finish, we easily see the toll it has taken on us. As a democratic nation, we are fatigued. We are so exhausted by our politics that it has become a common theme on the news channels and the late night comedy shows. Keeping up with the latest scandal, press release, spin, poll, and decision from governmental investigative institutions has worn us down. Moreover, the months of daily demands for outrage, disgust, and indignation have left the nation drained. Were such a thing conceptually possible, a clever politician would mandate a moratorium on politics beginning on November 9.
There is good news and bad news about our weariness. The bad news is that many of the items that have consumed the citizenry's attention of late have sapped us in a way that has diluted our trust in democracy itself. It is a common observation among democracy's enthusiasts that democracy is, even at its best, hard to love. But it really shouldn't be this easy to despise. The country has spent months feeding on a forced diet of doomsday politics, with each candidate and nearly every political officeholder given an abundance of reasons for thinking that November 8, 2016 marks the beginning of the End Times for democracy. When this message is accompanied by an "unless" clause that conveniently identifies the speaker, his Party, of his favored candidate as the country's only savior, the nausea is only exacerbated. The full-tilt political season, now arguably in its fourteenth consecutive month, has been not only something difficult to endure. It has provided good reason to wonder whether self-government is worth all the psychological trauma.
The good news comes on a few fronts, but is in no case untarnished. The first is that things are almost over. The country votes tomorrow. That brings an end to the phone calls and the advertisements and all of the unbelievably hostile discussions on television news channels.
Continue reading "Democratic Rehab "
Posted by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse at 12:55 AM | Permalink
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Letter to my Children on the Eve of Elections
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
One point six miles from the Pacific, the house with the terra cotta fountain and the carob tree, on Crescent Point Road.
You all came home in rear-facing car seats, swaddled in blankets and matching caps, different colors, different years, but from the same hospital, about ten miles away from here. Each of you was less than a week old at circumcision; Babay looked away at that unbearable moment when you were clamped down for the operation while I learned to cradle your head with one hand and dip your pacifier in sugar water with the other; if you rejected the pacifier, I dipped my finger in sugar water and let you suck on it—all the while speaking to you and praying the Qul in your ear. In those few minutes of excruciating pain for us all, I discovered the emboldening surge of what they call the maternal instinct; I discovered my power to protect and soothe, my voice and touch suddenly transformed by some visceral spell—an empowerment like no other.
Since then, I’ve learned that “rahm” or “womb” is the root of “ArRahmaan,” the most exalted of the ninety-nine names of God; Divine compassion is exemplified in the mother’s instinct to protect and nurture. All the years I’ve been raising you, I’ve trusted this love to guide me. I’ve taught you Islamic values, I’ve taught you American values. I’ve taught you that, contrary to the dominant picture, these values are aligned with each other: respect for divergent beliefs, a strong work ethic, a sense of egalitarianism and justice, cultivating independent thought while engaging in meaningful dialogue, stewardship of the planet, are part of both the Islamic and the American ethos. The world you have grown up in has been savage in acute ways, ways that history will eventually dissect and explain, but you, young Muslims, may arguably be the primary target of the war-terrorism binary which has resulted in a chilling polarization. Against this rising and brutal divide, I’ve taught you that your Muslim-American identity is inherently harmonious and that you must develop an immunity to the poisons of ignorance, politically motivated prejudice and manufactured fear of the other. And that there is no better anti-poison than reading; read widely, read deeply— remember the first Quranic word: “Iqra!” or “Read!”
Continue reading "Letter to my Children on the Eve of Elections"
Posted by Shadab Zeest Hashmi at 12:50 AM | Permalink
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Truth in the Age of Trump
by Patrick Lee Miller
Trump is contemptuous of truth. It is not so much that he lies, although obviously he does a lot of that. His contempt of truth goes deeper than that of the liar, who knows what's true and deliberately says the opposite. Trump simply doesn't care whether what he says is true or false. A Princeton philosopher, Harry Frankfurt, called this attitude bullshit in an essay he wrote under that title decades ago. A canny publisher recognized an audience for the distinction between lying and bullshitting during the junior Bush years and put out the same essay as a little book.[1] Frankfurt had his fifteen minutes of fame on Jon Stewart's show and then faded from public awareness. His distinction lives on, but it was never really his in the first place. Plato first drew it to alert his countrymen to the dangers of the Sophists.
These were famous men who traveled the Greek world selling their power with words. Words are always potent tools, but more so in democratic societies such as classical Athens, where political office can be acquired by making speeches. When you can manipulate words, you can sway crowds. The Sophists became rich, and in a few cases powerful, by promising to make their customers masters of words. As Plato shows, their expertise was an ability to bullshit, in Frankfurt's sense. The Sophist knows how to say what it takes to win—a court case, a business deal, a democratic election. He doesn't care whether what he says is true or false; it's irrelevant. After a while, in fact, he stops paying any attention to the truth. Thinking about it becomes a distraction from his purpose. Life is a contest, whether for money, fame, or power—and words are the tools for winning.
Plato's analysis of bullshit goes deeper than Frankfurt's because it marries a discussion of truth with an understanding of tyranny that helps us understand, among other things, the candidacy of Trump for president.
Continue reading "Truth in the Age of Trump"
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:45 AM | Permalink
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Perceptions: Of summer sunsets
Sughra Raza. Swatches of Summer Sunsets, 2016. Or: "The Sky Isn't Blue!"
From digital photos.
Posted by Sughra Raza at 12:40 AM | Permalink
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A Question of Counting
by Jonathan Kujawa
On November 8th everyone will be counting. Counting can be hard. Especially in messy real world situations like elections. But in pure mathematics we get to decide the questions in which we are interested. We can choose to count countable things. The secret to math is the art of asking "good" questions. A good question is one in which you can make progress and learn something you didn't know before.
Like Goldilocks, a mathematician looks for questions which are neither too easy nor too hard. An easy problem is boring, unenlightening, and not much fun -- a 2x2x2 Rubik's cube of mathematics. But, like a 7x7x7 cube, a too difficult problem is also boring, unenlightening, and not much fun. The secret is to land somewhere in the middle.
If we want to count, we should start by picking something easy to count, but with the promise of mystery. When I was in elementary school we spent hours and hours playing Dots and Boxes. This is the game in which you draw a grid of dots on a sheet of paper. The players take turns drawing horizontal and vertical line segments between dots trying to enclose boxes while blocking your friend from doing the same. The person with the most boxes at the end, wins. You can play it against a computer here.
If I had played less Dots and Boxes and paid more attention in my math classes, I would have learned that our initial dots were nothing but lattice points. These are the points in the xy-plane where both coordinates are an integer. So (1,3), (0,-6), and (2,127) are lattice points, but (1, 3/2) and (1.6, π) are not. Lattice points are easy to count in any geometric shape we may draw. For example, here is a 3x3 square with lattice points for corners:
Counting we see there are 12 lattice points on the sides of the square and 4 in the interior. Stuck in a boring math class for long enough, we might even notice that the area of the square, 9, is also what we get from 12/2 + 4 - 1. And that a 1x1 square has area 4/2 + 0 - 1 and that 2x2 square has area 8/2 + 1 - 1. In fact, it seems like for any square we draw if it has S lattice points on the sides and M lattice points on the interior, then the area always works out to exactly equal S/2 + M - 1. A strange coincidence, indeed! This is when our mathematical sense starts tingling. Coincidences are rare in math.
Continue reading "A Question of Counting"
Posted by Jon Kujawa at 12:35 AM | Permalink
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Chiyo-ni, Issa, and Their Children
by Olivia Zhu
Not too long ago, I was struck by a haiku. It’s a form I know very little about, aside from what most students are taught in school about its five-seven-five syllabic structure. Moreover, I don’t read or understand Japanese, and feel very much at a loss to understand the paragons of the form in their original language—essential, I think, given their length.
But I’ll venture a clumsy stab at explaining why this haiku might be so striking, and then dare to do the same for another, because I do think there’s something here that transcends translation. I’ve taken the liberty of picking the translations I thought sounded nice, but versions abound.
First, the Japanese poet Fukuda Chiyo-ni wrote:
Dragonfly catcher,
How far have you gone today
In your wandering?
She wrote it after the death of her son, when she had already been widowed. It is, perhaps, a simple work—for her child, who loved dragonflies and died young, the same flavor of thought for a living boy and one no longer. It makes me imagine a mother wondering where her son is playing, only to remember with a sharp breath that he has died. Yet this haiku is at once the moment before that breath, and the one after. What a sweet thought, to then picture your child continuing to do what he liked best in life, no matter that he has wandered far beyond where a mother might find him and care for him.
Here, it is the brevity of the haiku that makes me feel as if it is a passing thought, but perhaps a thought that Chiyo-ni might have had every day, multiple times a day, before committing it to paper.
Continue reading "Chiyo-ni, Issa, and Their Children"
Posted by Olivia Zhu at 12:30 AM | Permalink
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Indifference Engine
"On the way from mythology to logistics…
machinery disables men even as it nurtures them."
~ Adorno & Horkheimer
A few years ago I heard the Seattle Symphony play Carnegie Hall here in New York. There were three pieces on the program. The first two - Claude Debussy's La Mer and John Luther Adams's Become Ocean - are clearly of a type. They share the subject matter of the sea and its sonic representation. More importantly, Become Ocean is a clear stylistic descendant of Debussy's seminal, impressionistic work. Written a hundred years apart, both pieces nevertheless explore shimmering textures and slowly shifting planes of sound. The emphasis is not on seafaring - a human activity - but rather on the elemental qualities of the ocean. So far, so good.
The third selection, however, was Edgar Varèse's Déserts. As the title implies, Déserts is possessed of its own vastness, but this is an expanse that is jagged and abrasive. Written in the early 1950s, that is at about half-way between La Mer and Become Ocean, its exploration of timbre is arid and dissonant, and is an early example of a score that calls for interweaving the ensemble's playing with pre-recorded electronic music. Some listeners may be reminded of avant-garde movie music where the scene calls for danger and uncertainty; one YouTube commentator wrote that "parts of this remind me of the music on Star Trek, when Kirk is facing some Alien on a barren world, kind of thing".
Varèse has always been a favorite of mine when it comes to the canon of twentieth-century "new" music. Prickly and uncompromising, he was a passionate and broad-ranging thinker. After meeting him for a possible collaboration, Henry Miller mused that "Some men, and Varèse is one of them, are like dynamite." Indeed, Varèse envisioned Déserts to be accompanied by a film montage - what we would casually characterize today as a multimedia experience. While the pitch to Walt Disney never went anywhere, the music is still with us today. But be that as it may, what is Déserts doing, sharing the stage with the marine masterpieces of Debussy and Adams?
Continue reading "Indifference Engine"
Posted by Misha Lepetic at 12:25 AM | Permalink
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CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Posted by Brooks Riley at 12:20 AM | Permalink
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Creativity and Art
by Dwight Furrow
Philosophical definitions of art are not only controversial but tend to be unhelpful in understanding the nature of art. While trying to accommodate new, sometimes radically unfamiliar, developments in the art world, philosophical definitions typically do not explain why art is something about which we care, arguably something a definition should do. Institutional theories that treat art as any work intended to be displayed for the art world, or historical theories that view art as having some intended relationship to prior artworks, leave out any reference to why art is worth making and appreciating.
Aesthetic theories get closer to bringing the value of art into the picture. They privilege an artist's intention to imbue objects with aesthetic character, which when successful produces aesthetic pleasure, surely a primary reason for valuing art. But embodying an intention to produce aesthetic pleasure is not sufficient for something to be an artwork. An attractive, mass produced set of dishes or a potted plant might be intended to have aesthetic properties but are not works of art. Furthermore, the appeal of some works of art such as the ready-mades (e.g. Duchamp's shovel) is not primarily aesthetic at all. Clearly aesthetic pleasure is an important goal of art and one reason why we value it. But considering other reasons to value art might get us closer to a definition that clarifies art's nature.
It seems to me that in addition to art's ability to produce aesthetic pleasure we value works of art because they are accomplishments. We admire and appreciate the skill, effort, depth of insight and conceptual dexterity required to produce art. But more importantly we appreciate works of art because they exemplify creativity. Above all, works of art are works of imagination that constitute a departure from the everyday and the mundane. They surprise us and move us because of their unfamiliarity. I would argue that creativity constitutes the distinctive kind of accomplishment that is a work of art. Thus, it is puzzling that most philosophical definitions of art do not include creativity among their conditions.
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Posted by Dwight Furrow at 12:15 AM | Permalink
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Spying Jokes in the DDR: Cold War Humor and Political Resistance
by Jalees Rehman
Political jokes were no laughing matter for the East German state security service., The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS, more commonly known as the "Stasi") viewed humorous quips about the political leadership as a form of political resistance during the Cold War years. The culture of repression enforced by the Stasi in the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the official name of East Germany) outlawed anti-government propaganda and sedition, and these anti-sedition laws enabled the Stasi to arrest citizens who shared political jokes.
Just a few months after the Berlin Wall was constructed, the Stasi arrested a 32-year old building painter at his workplace in the town of Sassnitz, hand-cuffed him and drove him to an undisclosed location. The Stasi agents provided no explanation for his arrest until late at night when he was lay down on a plank bed in a prison cell, trying to make sense of what crime he had committed. Exhausted and befuddled, he was just about to fall asleep when Stasi prison guards dragged him out of his cell into an interrogation room and informed him that he had been arrested for sedition. A Stasi interrogator wanted to know exactly what his opinions were about the party leadership, the relationship between the DDR and the Soviet Union and which Western radio channels he listened to. The painter provided all the details in a reasonably honest manner, without hiding his critical views.
The interrogator then asked him to write down every political joke he had ever heard or shared. He knew of nine jokes that he had told and wrote them all out for the Stasi. Here is one of the nine jokes:
Three DDR citizens are sitting in a prison cell and talking about why they have been arrested. The first says, "My watch always went ahead, and I would arrive too early to work so they said I was spying." The second says, "My watch was always behind, I always came too late so they said I was engaged in sabotage. The third said, "My watch always worked perfectly, I always arrived on time, so they said my watch must have come from the West."
After spending several months in Stasi custody where he underwent repeated interrogations, he was sentenced to three years in prison for engaging in anti-government propaganda and sedition by a penal court. The summary report by his Stasi interrogators was a central piece of evidence in the mock trial and it specifically listed the political jokes as well as the names of fellow citizens who heard him tell the jokes.
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Posted by Jalees Rehman at 12:10 AM | Permalink
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Do the Right Thing and leave Judgment to Algorithms
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad
In Islamic theology it is stated that for each human being God has appointed two angels (Kiraman Katibin) that record the good and the bad deeds that a person commits over the course of lifetime. Regardless of one’s belief or disbelief in this theology, a world where our deeds are recorded is in our near future. Instead of angels there will be algorithms that will be processing our deeds and it won't be God who would be judging but rather corporations and governments. Welcome to the strange world of scoring citizens. This phenomenon is not something out of a science fiction dystopia, some governments have already laid the groundwork to make it a reality, the most ambitious among them being China. The Chinese government has already instituted a plan where data from a person’s credit history, publically available information and most importantly their online activities will be aggregated and form the basis of a social scoring system.
Credit scoring systems like FICO, VantageScore, CE Score etc. have been around for a while. Such systems were initially meant as just another aid in helping companies make financial decisions about their customers. However these credit scores have evolved into definitive authorities on the financial liability of a person to the extent that the human involvement in decision making has become minimal. The same fate may befall social scoring systems but the difference being that anything that you post on online social networks like Facebook, microblogging website like Twitter, search and browsing behaviors on Google or their Chinese equivalents RenRen, Sina Weibo and Baidu respectively is being recorded and can potentially be fed into a social scoring model. As an example of how things can go wrong lets consider the case of the biggest country in the world – China. In that country the government has mandated that social scoring system will become mandatory by 2020. The Chinese government has also blocked access to non-Chinese social networks which leaves just two companies, Alibaba and Tencent, to literally run all the social networks in the country. This makes it all the more intriguing that the Social Credit Scoring system in China is being built by the help of these two companies. To this end the Chinese government has given the green light to eight companies to have their own pilots of citizen scoring systems.
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Posted by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad at 12:05 AM | Permalink
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Sunday, November 06, 2016
Scientists and philosophers might have made consciousness far more mysterious than it needs to be
Anil K Seth in Aeon:
What is the best way to understand consciousness? In philosophy, centuries-old debates continue to rage over whether the Universe is divided, following René Descartes, into ‘mind stuff’ and ‘matter stuff’. But the rise of modern neuroscience has seen a more pragmatic approach gain ground: an approach that is guided by philosophy but doesn’t rely on philosophical research to provide the answers. Its key is to recognise that explaining why consciousness exists at all is not necessary in order to make progress in revealing its material basis – to start building explanatory bridges from the subjective and phenomenal to the objective and measurable.
In my work at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex in Brighton, I collaborate with cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, brain imagers, virtual reality wizards and mathematicians – and philosophers too – trying to do just this. And together with other laboratories, we are gaining exciting new insights into consciousness – insights that are making real differences in medicine, and that in turn raise new intellectual and ethical challenges. In my own research, a new picture is taking shape in which conscious experience is seen as deeply grounded in how brains and bodies work together to maintain physiological integrity – to stay alive. In this story, we are conscious ‘beast-machines’, and I hope to show you why.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 11:45 PM | Permalink
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What Makes Horror Movie Music So Scary?
From The Sync Project:
Let’s start by looking at a certain musical arrangement: the tritone. Defined in the simplest possible terms, a tritone is “a musical interval of three whole steps.” For those who can read and understand music, the definition of a tritone can get a lot more detailed than that, so it’s best illustrated with an actual audio sample.
We immediately recognize the tritone from its use to create tension in film, or even to act as a marker between scenes in a play. It’s not that the tritone arrangement is particularly scary per se, it’s that it’s lacking in harmony (it’s dissonant) and is somehow incomplete, throwing the listener off balance and leaving you expecting more (or rather fearing the worst) as it’s played over and over again…
In the Middle Ages the tritone was named “diabolus in musica” (devil in music) and the church in fact banned it from being played. It was seen as the very antithesis of God, which the church believed would be represented by beautiful angelic harmonies rather than incomplete sonic dissonance.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 11:33 PM | Permalink
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The Simple Logical Puzzle That Shows How Illogical We Are
Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:
In the 1960s, the English psychologist Peter Wason devised an experiment that would revolutionize his field. This clever puzzle, known as the “Wason selection task,” is often claimed to be “the single most investigated experimental paradigm in the psychology of reasoning,” in the words of one textbook author.
Wason was a funny and clever man and an idiosyncratic thinker. His great insight was to treat reasoning as an enigma, something to scrutinize both critically and playfully. He told his colleagues, for instance, that he would familiarize himself with their work only after doing his own experiments, so as not to bias his own mind. He also said that before running experiments, researchers—quixotically—should never really know exactly why they were doing them. “The purpose of his experiments was not usually to test a hypothesis or theory, but rather to explore the nature of thinking,” a pair of his students wrote in Wason’s obituary. (He died in 2003.) “His aim was to reveal a surprising phenomenon—to show that thinking was not what psychologists including himself had taken it to be.”
The groundbreaking nature of Wason’s selection task may have been a result of his unconventional style. In one version of the task, one subject (always one—he spurned testing subjects in groups) is presented with four cards lying flat on a table, each with a single-digit number on one face and one of two colors on the other. Let’s imagine that you’re Wason’s subject. The first and second cards you see are a five and an eight; the third and fourth cards are blue and green, respectively. Wason liked to chat with his subjects, but he probably didn’t tell them that this logical puzzle was “deceptively easy,” which was how he described it in the paper he would later write, in 1968.
Wason tells you that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is blue. Which cards must you turn over in order to test the truth of his proposition, without turning over any unnecessary cards?
More here.