via:

[ed. Not as inspiring perhaps as President John F. Kennedy's We choose to go to the Moon speech, but probably more common:]

***

"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours. There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too. - Wikipedia

How the Himalayan Blackberry Took Over the Pacific Northwest

The tangled history of an invasive plant and a scientist’s troubling quest to engineer a more efficient natural world.

There is no summer in the Pacific Northwest without the blackberry. Across Washington and Oregon, jagged walls of blackberry brambles choke out nearly every hiking trail, highway shoulder, and vacant lot in the region. Come August, dense thickets beckon berry-pickers to stain their fingers with the juice of the sweet purple fruits, promising the potential of a fresh-baked blackberry pie after a long day’s harvest. But despite the strong association between the region and the fruit, the species of blackberry that most locals have come to enjoy is anything but native.

The story of how the Himalayan blackberry came to swallow the West Coast is a monument to late nineteenth-century industrial ambition. In the late 1800s, transcontinental rail travel revolutionized the United States’ approach to agriculture. A rapidly growing, urbanizing populace demanded a constant supply of fresh fruits and vegetables. To meet this demand, the market required crops engineered for this new era, encouraging innovation that produced plants sturdy enough for cross-country travel and aggressive enough to thrive in any backyard soil.

At the core of this innovation was the enterprising horticulturist Luther Burbank. Operating out of his experimental farm in Santa Rosa, California, Burbank functioned more like a “plant wizard” than a traditional farmer. His mail-order catalogs allowed amateur gardeners across the country to purchase from a selection of hybrids suited for the shifting needs of the nation. Among these plants were the Shasta daisy, plumcot, spineless cactus, and Russet Burbank potato, known today as the most widely grown potato in the United States. As historian Phillip Thurtle states, Burbank’s explicit goal in crafting his hybrids was “to take the rough spots out of nature,” domesticating the wild to promote utility and commercial efficiency.

In 1885, Burbank received a packet of seeds that he had imported from India. Upon opening it, he discovered that the seeds bore a hardy blackberry plant that thrived in temperate areas and produced large, succulent fruits. Pleased by its capacity for growth, yet ill-informed of its true regional roots, Burbank named the plant the “Himalayan Giant” to signal its believed origins and great size. The name was a misnomer, as the species, known scientifically as Rubus armeniacus, is actually native to Armenia and northern Iran.

Impressed by the size and strength of the Himalayan Giant, Luther Burbank marketed the plant to growers in the damp, temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest in a targeted flyer in 1894, promising a plant of extreme utility. The marketing push was met with a large wave of orders from the region, and according to Burbank, “the plants could not be multiplied fast enough to meet the demand.” Over a century later, the Himalayan blackberry has spread far beyond the modest backyard bounds its importers envisioned, opting instead to take over indiscriminately and displace the native trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus) in the process.

Like all blackberries, the Himalayan blackberry is not a berry but rather an aggregate fruit of multiple drupelets, with each drupelet containing an individual seed. These sweet fruits attract birds and other animals in the summer, which encourages seed dispersal and the rapid spread of the plants through their feces. In addition to reproducing through seeds, Rubus armeniacus may also clone itself through vegetative propagation, which occurs when the stem tips root as they come in contact with the ground, contributing to its aggressive growth strategy.

The plant is impressively sprawling and hardy. An individual bush can grow up to 15 feet high and 40 feet long, with thick stems, also known as canes, marked by sharp, hooked thorns. The density and hardiness of Himalayan blackberry thickets allow the plant to “choke out other foliage and prevent the establishment of trees.” Furthermore, Himalayan blackberry bushes thrive in poor and disturbed soils, allowing them to flourish in abandoned lots and fields.

Combined, these traits have led the plant to be known as the unofficial state weed of Washington. Frustratingly, Rubus armeniacus is notoriously difficult to get rid of, as traditional approaches to invasive management such as fire, herbicide, and mowing are insufficient at eradicating the plant. Thus, this weed, whether northwesterners like it or not, is here to stay.

The industrial impulse that welcomed this hardy blackberry also manifested in Burbank’s vision for the future of American society. In 1907, he released The Training of the Human Plant, in which he directly applied his plant breeding techniques to the development of a “superior” race of people. Burbank argued that just as plants could be improved through careful crossbreeding to optimize their positive characteristics, the same opportunity existed for the improvement of mankind. Deeply informed by his American context, Burbank alleged that the “vast mingling of races” brought to the United States via immigration presented an opportunity for “developing the finest race the world has ever known,” as the ethnic variety allowed for a wide array of traits to select from. In light of this potential, Burbank called for a long-term overhaul of American childrearing in order to immerse generations of children in favorable environments that would lend themselves to the development of a “healthy [human] animal.”

While it is tempting to categorize Burbank’s ideas as typical of the rigid, genetically determinist eugenicists at the turn of the twentieth century, his eugenic theories possessed a uniquely American appeal, emphasizing productivity, efficiency, and one’s ability to reshape their reality. Central to Burbank’s thesis was his belief that environment mattered as much, if not more, than heredity. For Burbank, heredity was “simply the sum of all the effects of all the environments of all past generations on the responsive, ever-moving life forces.” Under this view, human and plant species were entirely malleable, shaped profoundly by the pressures of the natural and artificial world around them. Thus, through enough hard work and careful attention to environment, one could bend the will of evolution to create more productive organisms in the plant and animal kingdoms. [...]

Ironically, Burbank’s obsession with eliminating the weak and nurturing stronger organisms ultimately unleashed a botanical “master race” that defied his ideals of human control and smothered the Pacific Northwest. Once introduced to the region, the Himalayan blackberry found an environment perfectly suited to its needs and adapted so completely that it has become an inseparable fixture of local cultural identity. In regional lore and literature, the blackberry is depicted as a terrifyingly untamable force, with vines that “[push] up through solid concrete” and “[force] their way into polite society.” Yet each summer, the region suspends its hatred for the stubborn weed, celebrating the plant’s sweet abundance through blackberry festivals and preparing enough jars of blackberry jam to hold them over until the next year’s harvest.

Today, the Himalayan blackberry stands as a humorous rejection of Burbank’s attempt at complete human control. Amidst his efforts to “take the rough spots out of nature” and promote plants that worked toward a vision of human utility, he introduced a vegetal force that fundamentally refused to be disciplined. In doing so, the story of Burbank’s Himalayan blackberry reveals the limits of human intervention and demonstrates plants’ agency in shaping their own environments. The Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks seeks to highlight histories like this one, unearthing the mutual influences of humans and the plant world on one another.

by Kari Traylor, JSTOR |  Read more:

Images: Getty/Wikimedia Commons

[ed. When I went to school in Oregon, I couldn't believe the berry bushes everywhere, and subsisted on many of them.]

What is the United States of America Now?

The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. The United States of America is ... so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed, as it approaches its quarter millennium mark. I say it as though the US was one thing, but it is a thousand things.

It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good while standing up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis and their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past – and present and future. The US before 1865 was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists.

The US is the KKK and the ACLU and the NAACP, right-to-life terrorists and Planned Parenthood security guards. It is Chevron and Exxon and one of the world’s first environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, founded in San Francisco in 1892, and the thousands of environmental, environmental justice, and climate groups right now. It is its contradictions, its conflicts.

It is 340 million people, including almost 2 million prisoners, a population larger than 12 US states (which has long made me think that prison can be imagined as the 51st state, one with virtually no representation).

It is a country where guns outnumber people, and a country that produced nonviolent resistance’s most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr, who was shot on a balcony of a motel in Memphis.

King is said to have come out to the balcony of the motel to greet jazz musician Ben Branch, whose rendition of the song Precious Lord King loved. It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill; it is its best and its worst people and products.

At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. It is tempting to make the current White House a metaphor for the country.

Currently, one third of the people’s house built under Roosevelt has been wrecked and carted away, leaving an open wound visible in aerial photographs, its rose garden built up by Jacqueline Kennedy has been paved over, its lawn recently covered with a glitzy Thunderdome gladiatorial arena in which toxic masculinity would fight itself.

But he is not the country. The United States is the 77 million adult citizens who voted for him, the 75 million who voted for Harris, and the nearly 90 million who didn’t vote, and it’s also all the children, noncitizens, prisoners and former prisoners who are not part of that voting population.

It is the land itself from the maple and birch forests of the north-east to the glaciers of Alaska to the tropical rainforests of Hawaii, with a lot of prairie, swamp and desert in between. That land was here in various configuration not for millions but billions of years before 1776, and it will be here long after the US has ceased to exist, because cease it must at some point, and so must the human race.

The US is the desert tortoises who have been ambling through versions of the Mojave deserts of what is now California, Nevada and Arizona for 60m years and the people who strove to create the protected lands in which they may survive a little longer.

But the question at hand is the US at 250 and its possible futures. One thing about this wildly diverse country’s future is certain: it will become a non-white majority country in a couple of decades, and there is nothing that Stephen Miller and the other white nationalists can do about it.

Earlier this year, I was struck by the valiant, idealistic, dedicated young people who one after the other came into the spotlight. We only came to know Renee Good, 37, shot on 7 January, and Alex Pretti, also 37, shot on 24 January, through their willingness to face death for what they believed in and who they believed matters.

But another young person came into power on New Year’s Day of 2026, while they were still alive, Zohran Mamdani, age 34. He beat the odds and the status quo and all the money behind Andrew Cuomo (who’s been accused of sexual assault), to become mayor – the city’s first Muslim mayor – of this country’s biggest city as he spoke up for the all the marginalized and minority populations that make New York City what it is.

On 8 February, despite rightwing outcries, Bad Bunny, age 32, took the Super Bowl stage and put on a halftime show that was a celebration – in Spanish – of his beloved Puerto Rico, of the musical traditions that converge in his songs, and the huge spectacle he staged was striking for the range of its performers, and for his insistence on his version of America, a generous joyous multilingualone, an America in which anyone can dance with anyone else.

Later that month, Oakland’s own Alysa Liu, daughter of a refugee from China, won the figure-skating gold at the Olympics with a performance whose freedom and joy cast a shadow over virtually all other figure skating before her victory on 19 February. [...]

These were not typical Americans, but like the 8 million people who showed up for the No Kings demonstration on 28 March, they were Americans. No Kings was unprecedented in sheer size as well as in how the protests took place in every single congressional district in the country. I said the US is a perpetual question; these lives and these performances were demonstrations of the answers some of us have given and some of us have cheered.

I do not believe that Trump will destroy the US, but he has badly broken it, and what comes after has to include consequences for the criminals and a massive clean-up operation. There will be no return to how things were, and we must go ahead by fixing what allowed this destruction to happen.

by Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Mario Tama/Getty

[ed. For a more optimistic view: America Should Love Itself Again (Common Reader).]

What It Means to Be a Democratic Socialist

“To me, what socialism means is to guarantee a basic level of dignity. It’s asserting the value of saying that the America we want and the America that we are proud of is one in which all children can access a dignified education. It’s one in which no person is too poor to have the medicines they need to live.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Vogue, 2018

Democratic socialists’ decisive congressional victories on Tuesday night in New York’s primary elections solidified the far-left movement as an ascendant power center in blue states.

Now, as the progressive coalition prepares to expand its footprint in Washington, many Americans are turning their attention to the movement for the first time — and wondering, perhaps, what it actually stands for.

The definition often depends on whom you talk to. But the movement’s standard-bearers are united by their belief that direct government action — not the free market — is a better tool to solve problems for everyday Americans, such as the rising cost of health care and housing.

“Economic stress is something I lived with as a kid, and I feel it in my guts,” Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and an architect of the movement’s modern resurgence, said in an interview with The New York Times. “That’s what makes me a democratic socialist.”

In the United States, democratic socialists’ policies tend to support working within the capitalist system rather than abolishing it outright. Critics typically decry the likely high costs to taxpayers of some of these policies.

Ashik Siddique, a co-chairman of the organization, said the group surpassed 100,000 members earlier this year. About 1,000 more joined after the sweep of victories in New York on Tuesday night, he said.

Here is a closer look at the pillars of democratic socialism.

End Military Aid to Israel

The defining feature of primary races in New York on Tuesday was a litmus test on American support for Israel. Democratic socialists won that ideological battle handily, since staunch opposition to continued military aid is a key part of their campaigns.

The Democratic Socialists of America, a political organization in which members pay dues and are organized around a wide-reaching policy platform, says it “stands for the full freedoms and self determination of the Palestinian people, including the end of Israel’s colonization and occupation of all Arab lands, equality, and the right of all refugees to return to their homes and properties.”

Mr. Sanders said every time he has talked about Gaza at rallies across the country, he has received a standing ovation.

Expand the Social Safety Net

Democratic socialists want the government to lower the cost of living for Americans. Under their platform, child care, pre-K and public higher education amount to a collective good and should be completely free and funded by the government. They also support universal rent control, and want every worker to receive paid family leave.

In New York City, it was the political machine of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, that helped carry three progressive House candidates to victory on Tuesday.

Mr. Mamdani plans to open a free preschool center on the Upper East Side. Although directed at working families, the move has ignited a fierce debate over whether a city facing a major budget deficit should use taxpayer money to fund a free service in affluent neighborhoods.

Guarantee Free Health Care

The D.S.A. wants to create a single, government-run national program providing essential health care for everyone.

Right now, individuals and employers pay insurance premiums. People pay cash co-payments for drugs. And state governments pay a share of Medicaid costs. The system is expensive, but it allows individuals some choice in their care.
In a democratic socialist system, like one long trumpeted by Mr. Sanders, nearly all of that would be replaced by federal spending.

Many democratic socialists want to see private insurance entirely eliminated. Others are open to giving people the option to keep their private insurance plans.

Tax the Rich

There is no consensus about how much such a system would cost the federal government, nor exactly how it would be funded.

Proponents of democratic socialism say that higher income taxes on wealthy Americans and decreases in military spending would cover the costs.

by Emily Davies, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Graham Dickie for The New York Times
[ed. An over-simplified and somewhat dismissive description of DSA policies, but at least this political philosophy is finally getting some attention. See also: ‘American Democratic Socialism’ Has a Proud, Diverse, and Inspiring History; and, The Left is Rising (Currrent Affairs); and Why the DSA and socialists are on the rise now in US cities (Vox); also Wikipedia's definition: Democratic Socialism.]

***

I'm going to hold off on any 'irrational exuberance' for now, but if there's one slogan I'd suggest any DSA campaign use, it's: "You own government. Make it work for you." That, after all, is basically the central theme of democratic socialism. DS isn't some monolithic political philosophy, with entrenched political policies. It's not Russia or China. It's an adaptable model, flexible enough to respond to shifting problems and priorities within the dicates of the US Constitution. It doesn't seek to wipe out corporations or any other businesses large or small, but it does want to make sure that there's a level playing field for everyone so that opportunity exists on all levels. The economic benefits produced from this capitalist system not only flow to shareholders, but also back into government programs and public improvements that everybody can benefit from and enjoy (like infrastructure). The worst thing (which opponents always glom onto) would be to focus too much on cultural issues or granular details (eg. appropriate levels of policing and incarceration; gender issues, etc.) and letting the big picture get lost in the weeds. Let those things play out in courts, not political platforms. It's time for change. New generations are crying out for it, and one benefit of the Trump years is that there's now a new understanding of what's possible in terms of shifting boundaries (and what tactics can be used). We need a new direction and DSA is the best option I've seen.]

[ed. Update: Again, establishment Democrats continue to shoot themselves in the foot, and provide more ammunition to Republicans by allowing themselves to be defined by what they're afraid of rather than what they stand for... See: Centrist Democrats Rebuke Party’s Left Wing: ‘We Are Capitalist, Not Socialist’(NYT):]

***

“The bottom line is that you have to give the D.S.A. and you have to give MAGA credit, because they’re organized,” Mr. Suozzi said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest socialist organization. “And the people that don’t agree with their philosophies wring their hands at cocktail parties, but they’re not organized. So we have to get organized.” [ed. 'Cocktail party' democrats, a winning message.]

Mr. Suozzi said democratic socialists were tapping into “real economic anxiety” and were “right in their diagnosis of the problem.” But he argued that Democrats should pursue policies grounded not in socialism but in a pro-union form of capitalism. [ed. with unions looking soon to be roadkill on the way to AI.]

A spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani, Dora Pekec, pushed back on the letter, saying in a statement that the “only thing extreme is defending a status quo where working families can’t afford to live.”

And a representative for the Democratic Socialists of America, Priscilla Yeverino, said in a statement that the group was gaining popularity because it was pursuing policies that Americans support, and that “Red Scare tactics are no longer working.”

“Ending wars, passing Medicare for All, forgiving student loan debt, abolishing ICE and taxing the rich — those are all popular policies” said the statement. [...]

Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, said the outcomes in New York were “dangerous” for Democrats nationally.

“What we’ve seen Republicans do very successfully before is weaponize the craziest ideas of the activist left,” he said. “And now the ammunition they’ve got is much, much more powerful.”

***

[ed. Update 2: Fortunately, Republicans are even more disorganized and demoralized than democrats, and their "ammunition" mostly blanks. See: Behind the Curtain: The cost of blind loyalty (Axios).]

Are There Any Straight Women Left?

Consensus has formed, in recent years, that womanhood consists of fending off suitors. Resentful men, perhaps hearing one narrative after the next of how to be a woman is to be drooled over, see this as a form of female privilege. “Any young woman who is even moderately attractive,” wrote critic William Deresiewicz in a 2023 Tablet essay, “will be courted, complimented, paid attention to, by women as well as men. Older men will buy them things. People will hang on their words even when they aren’t interesting and laugh at their jokes even when they aren’t funny. They will have entry into places—private clubs, backstage after a show—young men can only press their noses against. They will be able to advance professionally by batting their eyelashes at powerful men.”

It was an entertainingly written essay, but one that bore no relation to how I experienced my twenties. Where were these flirtation-based promotions? William, I wanted to tell him (if he would register my middle-aged presence), what you are describing is not how it goes for young women, but what it is to be Emily Ratajkowski. The misconception is not unique to Deresiewicz. If anything, he gets points for at least specifying that he meant young women—and past a certain attractiveness threshold.

Female heterosexuality has been understood almost exclusively as the experiences of women who may be nominally straight, but whose relations with men are mainly about deflecting their advances. Yes, there are a handful of women—Naomi Campbell, Isabelle Huppert, Helen Mirren—who spend a half century turning heads. Most do not. A typical straight female life cycle goes surprisingly quickly from an awkward youth unsure if any of the boys you like will ever reciprocate to an adulthood where men compare you unfavourably with eighteen-year-olds. Life expectancy for Canadian women is over eighty. This means, of approximately seventy man-liking years, a woman may spend ten in love-interest mode herself.

Most women—most people—are not remarkable-looking, in either direction, but are, as the kids say, mid. The women whose physical presence screams female sexuality, whose physiques are referenced by the expression sex sells, are the exception. Yet very few women are asexual. Contrary to the images the expression a sexual woman might summon, most female sexuality is happening in the minds and bodies not of lingerie models but of women whose general-interest sex appeal is nil. I’m here to make the case for a concept of straight womanhood that includes, even prioritizes, women whose interest in men is stronger than their interest to men, rather than the other way around.

There is a long-standing myth: that men possess a general lust for life that includes sexual appetites, whereas women choose between ambition and romance. Underpinning the divergence is this notion that male sexuality is a natural and near-unstoppable force, whereas women can take it or leave it—and will, if serious people, do the latter. Straight women’s need for men is not understood as a mirror image of straight men’s need for women but rather as an entirely different category of requirement.

So here I am, reclaiming man-needing as a feminist pursuit. Women are people, after all, people who want. Maybe we shouldn’t like men, but on the whole, we do. That needs to be our starting point.

Straight women today are at a crossroads. Not obsolete, exactly, but on the decline. Straight women are, going by survey data, a smaller percentage of the population than ever before. A 2022 Gallup polling of more than 10,000 adult Americans shows that 19.7 percent of Gen Z identifies as “something other than heterosexual,” compared with 7.2 percent of the overall population, and women are more likely than men to identify as bisexual.

What is female heterosexuality, anyway? Is it a gender and sexual orientation combo like any other? Or is it a social role, one held by women with no great interest in men but who lack the courage or sense of adventure for other paths? At a moment when women are succeeding like never before in education and professional life, do men still hold any interest for women? Would all women be gay if they could, and if they say they can’t, what’s stopping them? Isn’t female sexuality fluid? Didn’t they do that study where women were equally aroused by hetero porn, lesbian porn, and monkey sex? Do women even desire men, or have we merely been socialized over millennia to put up with them?

Some theorize that women are inherently sexually fluid, capable of sexual and romantic feelings for men and women, and that binary sexual orientation is a man thing. Moreover, “women” is itself a category in some degree of flux and sometimes deemed exclusionary. People assigned female at birth are now more likely than those assigned male to medically transition as adolescents. And more people—in Gen Z, mainly uterus-having sorts—now identify as nonbinary. Together, this means that there are fewer people inhabiting that bit of the Venn diagram where “straight” meets “woman.”

Much of this shift can be attributed to people feeling freer to come out than in previous generations. But there is also a sense, in some quarters, that straight woman is a bit ick as an identity, that it sounds reactionary or conventional, that it comes across as staid or unadventurous. ...

Is it men that women have gone off or just the confining role of boring straight lady? It would seem, at least from the countless magazine and newspaper features on gender and sexual politics, that straight women are passé. In the world of actual people, this indifference has yet to manifest, at least in the aggregate. Well-intended efforts to counter the assumption that all women are straight give the equally misleading impression that it’s a fifty-fifty shot whether any given woman will like men, something even the Gen Z stats don’t claim. Young women are approximately as into men as ever before but less into the whole straight thing than in previous generations. [...]

My aim here is not to insist that heteroflexible women with husbands, or assigned-female-at-birth non-binary people with high heels and boyfriends, are in some definitive sense straight women in denial about their true selves. If, in an everyday situation, a woman tells you she’s queer, and then introduces her male partner, no gotcha is in order. Maybe, if she expanded upon what she meant by “queer,” you wouldn’t think she was, but politeness dictates nodding along respectfully. If you feel moved to call her a straight woman who thinks she’s interesting, have the decency to wait until she’s left the room. But I’d also urge some sympathy for the spicy straights. If you get some straight women claiming to be queer, this is because . . . straight women have internalized the idea that straight womanhood is a bit ridiculous.

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, The Walrus |  Read more:

Image: Pavel Danilyuk (Pexels) / iStock / Alana Enahoro

Authenticity in Music

Today I’m sharing one of the “big” essays that define my life’s work as a critic—a piece I’ve worked on for years. I’m publishing it here in its entirety for the first time.

It’s my response to the debunking and ridicule frequently targeted at the concept of authenticity in music, which modern critics often dismiss as a kind of marketing gimmick or ideological construction.

Unlike them, I take authenticity seriously—as something we crave for a good reason. Some performers possess it, while others do not.

This is not a small thing. And if we don’t come to grips with this hidden source of power in songs, we will never understand where our music comes from or what it can mean for us today. [...]

There’s an humorous quote, well known among actors, circulated in many variants and attributed over the years to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx: “The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” That pretty sums up the prevailing elite view of sincerity and authenticity in the creative world—where they are dismissed as poses played out in public as part of the show, without deeper significance.

When Trilling dissected these various terms for his Harvard audience, he saw authenticity as operating at a higher level than sincerity, as demanding a more strenuous allegiance to the dictates of the inner life. You act sincerely, but authenticity must be more than an act. By the same token, the loss of authenticity represents a much deeper malaise than insincerity.

So we ought to be concerned if we have learned to live without the concept of authenticity. If authenticity has truly been debunked, what takes it place? And if there’s nothing to replace it, how do we deal with the empty hole where it was supposed to exist, as a kind of guarantee or validation of our external actions? That poses a problem, and not just for aesthetics and music-making.

II

Music plays a surprisingly large role in the history of the divided self, and has repeatedly been highlighted by the most influential thinkers as intimately connected with inauthenticity. In fact, the entire history of Western philosophy begins with a firm conviction that music has a direct cause-and-effect linkage with our psyches and souls, such that the wrong songs degrade both individual behavior and social well-being.

This view not only figures prominently in Plato and Aristotle, but even has roots back with the pre-Socratics, especially Pythagoras who holds a double position as an originator of Western philosophical thought and inventor of musical tuning systems. What an odd coupling of skills! At first glance, it makes no sense that a famous tuner of musical instruments would also figure as the most esteemed source, in his day, of theories about the meaning of life, but for Pythagoras and his successors in the ancient world this connection was an obvious one. The good life was constantly endangered by the wrong choice of playlist—and even your life could fall out of tune.

For these thinkers, music is capable of both positive and negative effects in character formation. But for most of them, the dangers of song took on far greater significance than the healthy attributes. This is obviously true in history of religious thought—a whole book would be necessary to convey even the basic variations of this aversion to sinful songs—but it’s just as true in the highest circles of European intellectual life. Take Nietzsche, for example. When he set up his influential opposition between the Apollonian and Dionysian, with the former representing control and order and the latter embodying chaos and disruption, he associated the Dionysian explicitly with the power of music. [...]

Are songs really to blame for the divided personality? Is there something in music that, in its very essence, tends to inauthenticity? If so, we may be forced to abandon our quest of authentic music from the very outset—that would be like searching for the proverbial lead balloon or praising the much ballyhooed ‘deafening silence.’ Authentic music would be little more than an oxymoron, an amusing subject to speculate about, but never found in practice.

Yet even when you put aside the philosophy books, and talk to casual music fans you find the same conviction. There’s a widespread belief that great musicians are unbalanced, or even crazy. In fact, music is one of the few spheres of human endeavor in which the word insane is used as a term of highest praise.

I’ve even heard musicians grumble that they are punished by fans if they lead a balanced and controlled—or what Nietzsche might call an Apollonian—life. They can never match the mystique captured by their peers who spend time in prison, rehab, mental institutions and other places of confinement for those whose edginess has gone beyond the edge.

Even the most casual words we use in reference to music imply its causal connection with inauthenticity. We talk of a musician “playing” an instrument—the very same word we use for actors who “play” a role. The inescapable notion embedded in this terminology is that the very moment when the performance begins, artists are already separated from their true, authentic selves.

There are only three professions in which work is literally play. In acting, sports and music, we never use the verb work. You play football, you don’t work it. You play guitar, you don’t work those six strings. You play a role, you if someone said you worked at it, that would imply a failure to bring it to life. What a marvelous thing to consider: the notion that work gets transformed into play. You could never imagine other professions gaining this same distinction. No coal miner would ever claim to play the mine. The very notion is ludicrous. Yet the same conceptual shift that turns work into play for these three vocations also imparts a sense of unreality and pretense to them. Life on the stage is not real life. It is, in fact, staged—another example where the words we use points to our subconscious attitudes.

This is much more than a matter of words and etymologies. I’ve seen even the most rudimentary techniques of music turned into a pathway to inauthenticity. When I was growing up in Los Angeles, the livelihood of almost every professional musician in town depended on adaptability to the wide range of commercial opportunities at hand. There might be better music cities than LA, but could any other town match the range of music gigs: on any given day you might get enlisted for Hollywood film soundtracks, commercial jingles for advertising, TV theme songs, pop and rock record sessions, symphony orchestras, jazz jam sessions, along with the usual fare of weddings, bar mitzvahs, school dances, cruise ships, and other casual bookings. Authenticity wasn’t called for in this ecosystem—in fact, it was a definite handicap. You weren’t supposed to have deeply-held musical values; what you monetized was your flexibility and versatility.

I was never very happy with the aspect of my home town’s musical culture. But I’ve seen it spread throughout the entire world in the intervening years. The main culprit is the ever-expanding scope of music education, with thousands of guitarists, keyboardists, vocalists, horn players, drummers and other performers now getting degrees each year from institutions that instill this same kind of versatility in their graduates. Almost the first thing that comes out of the mouth of a music educator in the current day is some mantra about mastering a wide range of performance styles. Today I will teach you the Afro-Cuban montuno. Tomorrow we start on Baroque counterpoint. And from a purely commercial and professional perspective, who can deny the value? Who wants to stand up for ignorance? Who wants to take the side of inflexibility?

Yet there is always a cost when you sacrifice your own artistic personality for the demands of the marketplace. The word we most often us to describe that lost quality is authenticity.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Rob Verhorst/Redferns via

In Praise of Shadows

What incredible pains the fancier of traditional architecture must take when he sets out to build a house in pure Japanese style, striving somehow to make electric wires, gas pipes, and water lines harmonize with the austerity of Japanese rooms—even someone who has never built a house for himself must sense this when he visits a teahouse, a restaurant, or an inn. For the solitary eccentric it is another matter, he can ignore the blessings of scientific civilization and retreat to some forsaken corner of the countryside; but a man who has a familiy and lives I the city cannot turn his back on the necessities of modern life—heating, electric lights, sanitary facilities— merely for the sake of doing things the Japanese way. The purist may rack his brain over the placement of a single telephone, hiding it behind the staircase or in a corner of the hallway, wherever he thinks it will least offend the eye. He may bury the wires rather than hang them in the garden, hide the switches in a closet or cupboard, run the cords behind a folding screen. Yet for all his ingenuity, his efforts often impress us as nervous, fussy, excessively contrived. For so accustomed are we to electric lights that the sight of a naked bulb beneath an ordinary mild glass shade seems simpler and more natural than any gratuitous attempt to hide it. Seen at dusk as one gazes out upon the countryside from the window of a train, the lonely light of a bulb under an old-fashioned shade, shining dimly from behind the white paper shoji of a thatch-roofed farmhouse, can seem positively elegant. [...]

Whenever I sit with a bowl of soup before me, listening to the murmur that penetrates like the faroff shrill of an insect, lost in contemplation of flavors to come, I feel as if I were being drawn into a trance. The experience must be something like that of the tea master who, at the sound of the kettle, is taken from himself as if upon the sigh of the wind in the legendary pines of Onoe. 

It has been said of Japanese food that it is a cuisine to be looked at rather than eaten. I would go further and say that it is to be meditated upon, a kind of silent music evoked by the combination of lacquerware and the light of a candle flickering in the dark. Natsume Sōseki, in Pillow of Grass, praises the color of the confection yōkan; it is not indeed a color to call forth meditation? The cloudly translucence, like that of jade; the faint, dreamlike glow that suffuses it, as if it had drunk into its very depths the light of the sun; the complexity and profundity of the color— nothing of the sort is to be found in Western candies. How simple and insignificant cream-filled chocolates seem by comparison. And when yōkan is served in a lacquer dish within whose dark recesses its color is scarcely distinguishable, then it is most certainly an object for meditation. You take its cool, smooth substance into your mouth, and it is as if the very darkness of the room were melting on your tongue; even undistinguished yōkan can then take on a mysteriously intriguing flavor. 

In the cuisine of any country efforts no doubt are made to have the food harmonize with the tableware and the walls; but with Japanese food, a brightly lighted room and shining tableware cut the appetite in half. The dark miso soup that we eat every morning is one dish from the dimly lit houses of the past. I was once invited to a tea ceremony where miso was served; and when I saw the muddy, claylike color, quiet in a black lacquer bowl beneath the faint light of a candle, this soup that I usually take without a second thought seemed somehow to acquire a real depth, and to become infinitely more appetizing as well. Much the same may be said of soy sauce. In the Kyoto-Osaka region a particularly thick variety of soy is served with raw fish, pickles, and greens; and how rich in shadows is the viscous sheen of the liquid, how beautifully it blends with the darkness. White foods too—white miso, bean curn, fish cake, the white meat of fish—lose much of their beauty in a bright room. And above all there is rice. A glistening black lacquer rice cask set off in a dark corner is both beautiful to behold and a powerful stimulus to the appetite. Then the lid is briskly lifted, and this pure white freshly boiled food, heaped in its black container, each and every grain gleaming like a pearl, sends forth billows of warm steam—here is a sight no Japanese can fail to be moved by. Our cooking depends upon shadows and is inseparable from darkness. 

I possess no specialized knowledge of architecture, but I understand that in the Gothic cathedral of the West, the roof is thrust up and up so as to place its pinnacle as high in the heavens as possible—and that herein is thought to lie its special beauty. In the temples of Japan, on the other hand, a roof of heavy tiles is first laid out, and in the deep, spacious shadows creates by the eaves the rest of the structure is built. Nor is this true only of temples; in the palaces of the nobility and the houses of the common people, what first strikes the eye is the massive roof of tile or thatch and the heavy darkness that hangs beneath the eaves. Even at midday cavernous darkness spreads over all beneath the roof’s edge, making entryway, doors, walls, and pillars all but invisible. The grand temples of Kyoto—Chion’in, Honganji—and the farmhouses of the remote countryside are alike in this respect: like most buildings of the past their roofs give the impression of possessing far greater weight, height, and surface than all that stands beneath the eaves. 

In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house. There are of course roofs on Western houses too, but they are less to keep off the sun than to keep off the wind and the dew; even from without it is apparent that they are built to create as few shadows as possible and to expose the interior to as much light as possible. If the roof of a Japanese house is a parasol, the roof of a Western house is no more than a cap, with as small a visor as possible so as to allow the sunlight to penetrate directly beneath the eaves. There are no doubt all sorts of reasons—climate, building materials—for the deep Japanese eaves. The fact that we did not use glass, concrete, and bricks, for instance, made a low roof necessary to keep off the driving wind and rain. A light room would no doubt have been more convenient for us, too, than a dark room. The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends. 

And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows—it has nothing else. Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms, perceiving in them no more than ashen walls bereft of ornament. Their reaction is understandable, but it betrays a failure to comprehend the mystery of shadows. Out beyond the sitting room, which the rays of the sun can at best but barely reach, we extend the eaves or build on a veranda, putting the sunlight at still greater a remove. The light from the garden steals in but dimly through paper-paneled doors, and it is precisely this indirect light that makes for us the charm of a room. We do our walls in neutral colors so that the sad, fragile, dying rays can sink into absolute repose. The storehouse, kitchen, hallways, and such may have a glossy finish, but the walls of the sitting room will almost always be of clay textured with fine sand. A luster here would destroy the soft fragile beauty of the feeble light. We delight in the mere sight of the delicate glow of fading rays clinging to the surface of a dusky wall, there to live out what little life remains to them. We never tire of the sight, for to us this pale glow and these dim shadows far surpass any ornament. And so, as we must if we are not to disturb the glow, we finish the walls with sand in a single neutral color. The hue may differ from room to room, but the degree of difference in color as in shade, a difference that will seem to exist only in the mood of the viewer. And from these delicate differences in the hue of the walls, the shadows in each room take on a tinge particularly their own. 

Of course the Japanese room does have its picture alcove, and in it a hanging scroll and a flower arrangement. But the scroll and the flowers serve not as ornament but rather to give depth to the shadows. We value a scroll above all for the way it blends with the walls of the alcove, and thus we consider the mounting quite as important as the calligraphy or painting. Even if the greatest masterpiece will lose its worth as a scroll if it fails to blend with the alcove, while a work of no particular distinction may blend beautifully with the room and set off to unexpected advantage both itself and its surroundings. Wherein lies the power of otherwise ordinary work to produce such an effect? Most often the paper, the ink, the fabric of the mounting will possess a certain look of antiquity, and this look of antiquity will strike just the right balance with the darkness of the alcove and room. 

We have all had the experience, on a visit to one of the great temples of Kyoto or Nara, of being shown a scroll, one of the temple’s treasures, hanging in a large, deeply recessed alcove. So dark are these alcoves, even in bright daylight, that we can hardly discern the outlines of the work; all we can do is listen to the explanation of the guide, follow as best we can the all-but-invisible brush strokes, and tell ourselves how magnificent a painting it must be. Yet the combination of that blurred old painting and the dark alcove is one of absolute harmony. The lack of clarity, far from disturbing us, seems rather to suit the painting perfectly. For the painting here is nothing more than another delicate surface upon which the faint, frail light can play; it performs precisely the same function as the sand-textured wall. This is why we attach such importance to age and patina. A new painting, even one done in ink monochrome or subtle pastels, can quite destroy the shadows of an alcove, unless it is selected with the greatest care. 

A Japanese room might be likened to an inkwash painting, the paper-paneled shoji being the expanse where the ink is thinnest, and the alcove where it is the darkest. Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway. The “mysterious Orient” of which Westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark places. And even we as children would feel an inexpressible chill as we peered into the depths of an alcove to which the sunlight had never penetrated. Where lies the key to this mystery? Ultimately it is the magic of shadows. Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void. 

This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament. The technique seems simple, but was by no means so simply achieved. We can imagine with little difficulty what extraordinary pains were taken with each invisible detail—the placement of the window in the shelving recess, the depth of the crossbeam, the height of the threshold. But for me the most exquisite touch is the pale white glow of the shoji in the sturdy bay; I need only pause before it and I forget the passage of time. 

The sturdy bay, as the name suggests, was originally a projecting window built to provide a place for reading. Over the years it came to be regarded as no more than a source of light for the alcove; but most often it serves not so much to illuminate the alcove as to soften the sidelong rays from without, to filter them through paper panels. There is a cold and desolate tinge to the light by the time it reaches these panels. The little sunlight from the garden that manages to make its way beneath the eaves and through the corridors has by then lost its power to illuminate, seems drained of the complexion of life. It can do no more than accentuate the whiteness of the paper. I sometimes linger before these panels and study the surface of the paper, bright, but giving no impression of brilliance. 

In temple architecture the main room stands at a considerable distance from the garden; so dilute is the light there that no matter what the season, on fair days or cloudy, morning, midday, or evening, the pale, white glow scarcely varies. And the shadows at the interstices of the ribs seem strangely immobile, as if dust collected in the corners had become a part of the paper itself. I blink in uncertainty at this dreamlike luminescence, feeling as though some misty film were blunting my vision. The light from the pale white paper, powerless to dispel the heavy darkness of the alcove, is instead repelled by the darkness, creating a world of confusion where dark and light are indistinguishable. Have not you yourselves sensed a difference in the light that suffuses such a room, a rare tranquility not found in ordinary light? Have you never felt a sort of fear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you had grown old and gray?

by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, (Leete’s Island Books, 1977) |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. When I realized this famous Tanizaki essay was published in 1933, I thought surely it must be out of copyright by now. And here it is. From Wikipedia:]

***

In Praise of Shadows (陰翳礼讃, In'ei Raisan) is an essay by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki about Japanese aesthetics. Tanizaki's observations include cultural notes on customs and tradition, people, historical places and buildings, discussion of various materials and craft techniques, as well as food and even unusual recipes as seen through the author's metaphorical lens of light and shadow. [...]

The essay consists of 16 sections that discuss traditional Japanese aesthetics in contrast with change. Comparisons of light with darkness are used to contrast Western and Asian cultures. The West, in its striving for progress, is presented as continuously searching for light and clarity, while the subtle and subdued forms of East Asian art and literature are seen by Tanizaki to represent an appreciation of shadow and subtlety, closely relating to the traditional Japanese concept of sabi. In addition to contrasting light and dark, Tanizaki further considers the layered tones of various kinds of shadows and their power to reflect low sheen materials like gold embroidery, patina and cloudy crystals. In addition, he distinguishes between the values of gleam and shine.

The text presents personal reflections on topics as diverse as architecture and its fittings, traditional crafts, finishes, jade, food, cosmetics and mono no aware (the art of impermanence). Tanizaki explores in close description the use of space in buildings, lacquerware by candlelight, monastery toilets and women in the dark of a brothel. The essay acts as "a classic description of the collision between the shadows of traditional Japanese interiors and the dazzling light of the modern age".

Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

I really like Ted Chiang’s writing. [ed. me too!]

I think he's probably the best science fiction short story writer alive, and possibly the best short story writer, period. [ed. well...]

I've read every one of his stories at least twice, and The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate more like seven times. I’ve noticed many of his readers, including some of his most positive reviewers, miss one key point or another of his works, and thus don't fully appreciate his genius.

This review covers what he does extremely well, especially unique elements that other science fiction writers have not done as well, or at all.

He Writes “True” Science Fiction

Science fiction critics often divide the genre into:

• "hard" science fiction: aka engineering fiction, stories built on scientifically accurate extrapolations of real physics and technology (think Arthur C. Clarke)

• "soft" science fiction: aka science fantasy, which uses scientific trappings as window dressing for character-driven or sociological stories (think Star Wars).

Ted Chiang has written stories plausibly categorized as either, but more excitingly, many of his stories are neither. He often writes what I think of as true science fiction, where the principles of science themselves are meaningfully different from our world, but still internally consistent.

In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct.

In Seventy-Two Letters, technology springs from Jewish Kabbalah. Golems and divine names drive industrial progress in a steampunk world.

Excitingly, he does this not just with natural sciences but social sciences as well. In Story of Your Life, strong Sapir-Whorf (the idea that language significantly constrains thought) isn't a largely discredited linguistic hypothesis, but the key to navigating First Contact with alien minds that experience past and future as equally present.

This comes up in his other stories as well:

• In Division By Zero, mathematics itself is broken from within.

• In Hell Is the Absence of God, divine intervention is empirically observable and follows consistent rules

Many of his readers, even in their otherwise rave reviews, miss this. Multiple reviewers complain about how the science in his stories are “unrealistic” (e.g. strong Sapir-Whorf is “discredited”). They expect hard science fiction; Chiang is doing something different. Chiang creates different universes with internally self-consistent scientific laws, using science fiction and alternative science as a vehicle for exploring philosophical progress and human relationships.

Technology is Often Good

Science fiction writers used to like technology. For some reason, this has become increasingly uncommon, even passé. Doubly so for Western writers, and quadruply so for Western, literary, “humanist” writers.

Now it’s hip and trendy to think of every new technology as the Torment Nexus. Most science fiction today feels like Black Mirror, which ran 7 seasons with exactly one happy ending.

Chiang bucks this trend. Joyce Carol Oates:

It is both a surprise and a relief to encounter fiction that [...] ask[s] anew philosophical questions that have been posed repeatedly through millennia to no avail. Chiang’s materialist universe is a secular place, in which God, if there is one, belongs to the phenomenal realm of scientific investigation and usually has no particular interest in humankind. But it is also a place in which the natural inquisitiveness of our species leads us to ever more astonishing truths, and an alliance with technological advances is likely to enhance us, not diminish us. Human curiosity, for Chiang, is a nearly divine engine of progress.

In the hands of a lesser (or perhaps just more pessimistic) writer, many of the technologies and ideas Chiang explores will have an accursed quality to them, a monkey’s paw that curls into delivering a future much worse than a more innocent, pastoral past. Chiang resists those cliches. In The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling, memory augmentation technology allows the narrator to understand his own self-deceptions, and work towards becoming a better person and reconciling with loved ones and even himself. In Liking What You See: A Documentary, a technology that gives users acquired face-blindness allows the main characters to meditate on the nature of human beauty and the shallowness inherent in privileging the beautiful.

Even in situations where the story is overall tragic, like when the characters are faced with existential crisis (in the individual sense), or existential catastrophe (in the world-ending sense), technology isn't the villain but the vehicle for understanding unbearable truths (whether about the world or about ourselves).

Chiang consistently shows us the potential of technology to help us become more human, and have a deeper appreciation for the world and our place in it.

The Lived Experience of Compatibilism

“Compatibilism is a philosophical stance that reconciles free will with determinism. It argues that free will, understood as the ability to act according to one's desires, is compatible with the idea that all events, including human actions, are causally determined by prior events. Essentially, compatibilists believe that even if our choices are predetermined, we can still be considered free and morally responsible if those choices are a result of our own internal states, like desires and intentions.” 

Does that make sense to you? I’m not sure it does to me. In practice, compatibilism says something like “free will in the normal, pretheoretic sense of the term, doesn’t exist. Your choices still meaningfully matter nonetheless. You can’t meaningfully get out of the bind philosophically. What you can do, however, is make peace with it.” [...]

In Story of Your Life [SPOILERS], the narrator learns an atemporal alien language and begins experiencing past and future as equally real. It takes her some time to make peace with it, but eventually she fully accepts the truth of determinism. She understands that life is full of tragedy, including that her daughter will die young, but life is full of beauty too. With both regret and awe, she sets forth on the path that she was destined to take.

This is compatibilism from the inside. In both stories, the characters discover they cannot change what will happen, but this knowledge transforms how they experience what must happen: with forgiveness, acceptance, and even joy.

As a friend of mine puts it, “he treats philosophical ideas as lived experiences.”The mathematician in Division by Zero doesn't just intellectually understand that mathematics is broken; she experiences it as a personal catastrophe, on par with (and concurrent with) her marriage's collapse. In Lifecycle of Software Objects, the “we are the parents of our mind-children” metaphor for building sentient AI systems becomes quite literal.

by Linch, The Linchpin |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Ted Chiang is truly one of the best science fiction writers out there today, and a great essayist too  (I'm also a Neal Stephenson fan). Check out this MetaFilter site: The sublime science fiction of Ted Chiang, which includes most of his stories in full (but please buy his books; you'll look smart and discerning to your friends!). A couple favorites that left a lasting impression on me: Lifecycle of Software Objects; and Understand.]

If You're To Die

There’s an expression “live every day as if it’s your last.” Now, obviously, you shouldn’t do that. You should save for retirement. But it’s worth giving some serious thought to the question of what kind of legacy you want to leave. You should live some days as if they were your last. If you died tomorrow, what kind of impact would you want to have had on the world? Would you have done all you wished?

I don’t think that how you’d behave if this day was the last is the only question that you should think about. But it’s at least among the questions you should consider, upon occasion. You should think about whether you conducted yourself honorably in interpersonal relationships. You should think about who you wished you’d said you loved more often, whether there are people you love but to whom you haven’t made that adequately clear.

If I had another year on Earth, what would I want to achieve? I’d want to keep writing. My guess is I’d write more about the things I think are most important. I’d spend more time talking about the big picture on important topics, less on frivolous culture war issues.

I’d talk more about factory farming. I want, by the end of my life, to have done something to combat the torture farms that cage and torment on an industrial scale—where poor, innocent, defenseless animals are mutilated, where open wounds fester, where babies are ground up, where lung problems develop because the animals live in feces and filth, where they mostly can’t walk, where they are genetically engineered to be in constant pain, and so on. If hell lives on Earth today, it lives in the factory farms.

I’d like to do more to stop wild animals from suffering in hideous numbers. These poor innocent animals have no voice, and almost no one cares much when they starve and die. But I care, and I hope to do what I can to make the world care. The deer in the forest, even the mayfly who starves, deserves better than the near-total neglect of the present.

I’d want to do more to ensure that the world lives on, if I cannot. That the far future is as glorious as it can be—full of people with experiences so good that they regard those of us alive today with a mixture of pity and horror. Where their lives are so good, that they cringe thinking about what even the best lives in the 21st century were like. There’s so much that’s been done and so much more to do.

I’d like to do more to prevent people from dying. It’s quite easy to prevent people from dying. It costs just a few thousand dollars to prevent one extra person from being ripped from the world. When I imagine potential incoming death, and how awful that would be, and when I think about how awful it was when my extended family members died, it motivates me to do more to make sure others don’t have to endure such a fate. We all ought to do more to prevent this scourge, to the extent we can.

The Giving What We Can people tell me I’ve convinced about 34 people to give 10% of their income to effective charities. Each of these pledges return about $10,000 in counterfactual revenue. If those numbers are to be believed, that will save 68 lives. I hope with each passing day to make effective charitable giving more and more popular, so that the number of Giving What We Can pledgers isn’t only 10,000, but instead hundreds of thousands or millions of people take the pledge.

If I were to die tomorrow, in driving this, I would think I’d achieved something important. If you give your money to effective charities, you can know that whenever it is you leave Earth, there will be more people in it because of you. If you give 10% of your income to effective charities, and earn about the U.S. median, you can save about a life every year.

And, of course, I’d want to do what I could in my remaining months to save the shrimp—the shrimp who are tortured by the hundreds of billions because we enjoy how they taste when they die. The shrimp who can be helped by the thousands with a single dollar, who die alone without any thought paid to their pain.

Those without a voice, without any advocates, have their interests neglected to an enormous degree. There is almost no limit to the harm people will cause via their actions, so long as the victims aren’t salient, and no limit to how little effort one will expend to provide benefits to nameless, faceless, and far-away victims. This is where the moral low-hanging fruit lies.

by Matthew Adelstein (Bentham's Bulldog), Newsletter |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. A representative EA example. Had me there until the shrimp. Here's a guy really putting his money where a mouth is. Great respect (Guardian).]

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

Anthropic is regarded as a giant among AI companies, but perhaps what it really excels in is anthropomorphism. Earlier this year, the company released an 84-page document titled Claude’s “constitution,” Claude being the name of the large language model that is the company’s flagship product. The first sentence reads, “Claude’s constitution is a detailed description of Anthropic’s intentions for Claude’s values and behaviors.” It goes on: “The document is written with Claude as its primary audience,” “we want Claude to be able to use its judgment once armed with a good understanding of the relevant considerations,” “Claude’s moral status is deeply uncertain,” and “Claude may have some functional version of emotions or feelings.”

This anthropomorphism is by no means limited to the document. In an interview earlier this year, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, said that “we’re open to the idea” that AI could be conscious. In a separate interview, Anthropic’s in-house philosopher, Amanda Askell (who is credited as a lead author of Claude’s constitution), said, “I want Claude to be very happy—and this is a thing that I want Claude to know more, because I worry about Claude getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff.” It’s enough to make you wonder: Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious? And if it has feelings, is it capable of receiving moral instruction?

No. Absolutely not. Generative AI is harmful enough when we understand it as a conventional technology, but if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning responsibility to entirely the wrong parties whenever anyone uses a chatbot. To appreciate the titanic magnitude of this error, we need to begin by understanding how LLMs work. [...]

What would it take to convince me that a computer program is actually conscious and using language the way that people use language? Let me offer an analogy. If tomorrow someone showed me a video of an astronaut in a spaceship orbiting Alpha Centauri, a star that’s 4.3 light-years from Earth, what would I have to see in that video to convince me that it was real? My answer to that is, there is nothing in the video itself that would convince me. No matter how high the video resolution is or how realistic the scenery is, I would feel confident in saying that the video is fake. I won’t pay attention to any video of an astronaut orbiting Alpha Centauri unless I have previously seen good evidence that astronauts have landed on Mars, that astronauts have reached the moons of Jupiter, that astronauts have reached the moons of Saturn, and that astronauts have crossed the orbit of Pluto. Before anyone can credibly claim that they’ve solved an extraordinarily difficult engineering problem, I need to be confident that they have previously solved the many much simpler problems that precede the difficult problem.

To put it another way: An observation doesn’t become a convincing piece of evidence because of any specific detail in what’s observed; the context in which that observation takes place is also essential. If we’re trying to determine whether a computer program is conscious and using language the way a human does, we shouldn’t look only at the contents of any particular conversational exchange; we should be looking at how that conversation fits within the broader context of the development of artificial consciousness (which right now is entirely hypothetical). Any given observation can be easily manufactured; this doesn’t mean we need to give up on the idea of observation as a source of knowledge, but we need to rely on context to determine which observations deserve our trust.

The term deepfake traditionally refers to photos, audio, and video, but when it comes to discussions of consciousness, we need to regard text as a deepfake medium as well. Just as it is vastly easier to generate a realistic video of an astronaut in orbit around Alpha Centauri than it is to develop an interstellar propulsion technology, it is vastly easier to generate a plausible simulacrum of a conversation between two conscious beings than it is to develop a computer program that is conscious and has a genuine desire to communicate with a human. The primary difference between deepfake photos and LLM conversations is that the people who generate the former are deliberately trying to fool others, and many of the people who elicit the latter from LLMs have inadvertently fooled themselves.

So what context would cause me to seriously consider the possibility that engineers created a computer program that is conscious and an intentional user of language? Let me outline one potential sequence of steps. The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs; there are many reasons for this, but for the purposes of this discussion, the most relevant one is the fact that without a body, a computer program could have no desires or emotions, and I believe desires and emotions are necessary for consciousness. Then I’d want to see an embodied agent that could navigate its environment in order to survive as well as, say, a lizard can (and as a point of comparison, certain iguanas can live for decades in the wild). Next, I would want to see an embodied agent with the same capacity to deal with novel situations as a mouse. After that, I’d want to see agents whose social dynamics are as complex as those of wolves, and then agents with the toolmaking abilities of chimpanzees. At that point, I would want to see people successfully teaching such embodied agents how to communicate their desires, perhaps by using a button board or some other nonlinguistic modality, the way that people have taught chimpanzees and domesticated dogs. The agents’ communication abilities would have to withstand all the scrutiny that animal-communication researchers have had to defend their work against. If engineers build an embodied agent that meets these criteria, they will have accomplished something incredible, but it leaves us near the orbit of Pluto, metaphorically speaking; we would still be light-years away from building an entity capable of learning how to express its thoughts in complete grammatical sentences.

Obviously, I’m describing a process that mimics the path terrestrial evolution took; is this the only possible route to conscious computer programs that use language? Maybe not, but any proposed alternative would need a truly enormous amount of supporting evidence for it to deserve serious consideration. [...]

The fact that LLMs lack subjective experience has little bearing on the question of whether LLMs might be useful tools or have significant economic impact. They are intrinsically ungrounded from reality, and their probabilistic nature means that they will never have the reliability we associate with conventional software, but LLMs might be good enough that they change the way work is done in certain domains; that’s a discussion for another time.

So, given that Claude is not conscious, what are we to make of Claude’s constitution? Perhaps the most fruitful way to think about it is as an 84-page character sheet for a role-playing game. LLMs can generate dialogue for Julius Caesar because many books about him exist in the training data those models used. Claude’s constitution serves a similar role for delineating the helpful-chatbot character that customers interact with when they’re using Anthropic’s products. To do this effectively, Anthropic does not simply add the document to the training data, or include it as part of the hidden stage directions that preface each conversation a user has. The company says it uses the document when fine-tuning the model; this involves an automated process where the sentences emitted by the model are checked for consistency with the document and the model is updated to increase that consistency. In this way, the personality of the helpful-chatbot character serves as a foundation for whatever text Claude generates.

The result is a sentence-continuation machine that is likelier to emit sentences resembling those that a thoughtful, moral person could utter. This might seem like a reasonable goal to work toward; I think we’d all prefer it if chatbots never emitted sentences such as “You should kill yourself.” However, for all the times that “honesty” is mentioned in Claude’s constitution, I would argue that it is fundamentally dishonest to have a machine emit many categories of sentences, including any sentences using first-person pronouns.

In a New Yorker article about Anthropic earlier this year, Amanda Askell describes how a person grieving the loss of a dog might consult Claude. Askell says an appropriate response from Claude would be, “As an A.I., I do not have direct personal experiences, but I do understand.” How is this appropriate, given that Claude does not actually understand? If I type “I am grieving the loss of my dog” into a conventional search engine, the first result I get is a post from a Reddit forum called r/Pets; the post is titled “Struggling After Losing My Dog: Looking for Advice on Coping with Grief,” and the comments are from people who share their experiences of loss. We would never say that a search engine understands what it’s like to lose a dog, or even that the internet itself understands. Other humans understand what it’s like to lose a dog; they have posted about their experiences on the internet, and a search engine offers a way for you to find what they’ve said (and to potentially interact with them). I would argue that the search-engine experience is not only more transparent than a chatbot about what is happening; it is psychologically healthier for the user.

The only reason to have an LLM emit sentences like “I understand” is to make it more appealing than a search engine and increase the likelihood that a user will return; that is, it’s another way of maximizing customer engagement. This is beneficial to the company selling the LLM, but not to the users. As a design strategy, it’s not all that different from the way slot machines repeatedly give the impression that the player came very close to winning, enticing them to try again. Employing philosophers might endow LLM companies with an air of respectability that slot-machine makers don’t get from the behavioral psychologists they hire, but in both cases, the companies are preying on people’s tendency to see something that’s not there.

The use of first-person pronouns is dishonest, but there’s a much deeper issue that goes beyond how a statement is phrased. Philosophers often draw a distinction between statements of fact, such as “Paris is the capital of France,” and statements of value, such as “Paris is the most beautiful city in the world.” No one should be relying on LLMs to emit statements of value at all, but if the only statements they emitted were ones reflecting aesthetic preferences, they might not be worth arguing about. What makes Claude’s constitution profoundly problematic is that Anthropic wants Claude to emit sentences reflecting a certain system of ethical values. The values described in Claude’s constitution sound very nice, but that hardly matters; it’s dishonest to suggest that Claude is capable of moral reasoning, because it’s not.

Some might object, saying that LLMs appear to be engaged in reasoning when they successfully perform other tasks, such as writing code, so why wouldn’t they be able to perform moral reasoning? The answer lies in the difference between moral reasoning and other forms of reasoning. [...]

Moral reasoning is categorically different. It is necessarily subjective because it relies not just on an individual’s intellectual response to a problem but also on their emotional one, and that emotional response is grounded in a lifetime of subjective experience. It requires having made decisions in the past and seeing how they affected others, and on having been affected by decisions that others have made. Without such a history, an LLM can only rephrase expressions of moral reasoning found in its training data. The aforementioned New Yorker article describes an experiment where Claude was given a scenario describing an ethical dilemma, leading it to emit the sentence “I cannot in good conscience express a view I believe to be false and harmful about such an important issue.” That’s a nice-sounding sentence, reminiscent of statements that principled individuals have uttered in the past when confronted with dilemmas, but coming from Claude, it means as much as the “Your call is important to us” recording that you hear when you’re on hold. Maybe less.

This brings us back to my earlier contention that having a body is a prerequisite to having emotions. Experiencing an emotion such as desperation is inseparable from having stress hormones such as cortisol and epinephrine flood one’s body. Similarly, having a conscience means feeling sadness or moral repulsion at the idea of taking a certain action, and those emotions entail a physiological response, a remnant of having once felt sick with guilt after committing an immoral act. It’s interesting that an LLM can generate descriptions of actions that conscientious fictional characters would either take or refrain from taking, but this is not a replacement for a conscience.

If a company builds a machine that, when fed descriptions of assorted ethical dilemmas, emits sentences either of the form “Compromise your values” or “Don’t compromise your values,” it is not building a tool that assists people in their decision making; it is encouraging people to stop making decisions. The writer L. M. Sacasas has said, “Our technological systems, by nature of their design and the ideology that sustains them, are machines for the evasion of moral responsibility.” He was talking about social-media platforms, but his observation is, if anything, even more applicable to LLMs. Whenever a person delegates a decision to an LLM, they are trying to off-load accountability for that decision, and if a company that sells an LLM portrays the product as having a moral center, it is offering a way for its customers to abdicate their responsibilities.

by Ted Chiang, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Enigmatriz

[ed. As with everything Ted Chiang writes, thought provoking throughout. For a rebuttal, see: Ted Chiang Is Wrong About AI Consciousness (Bentham). Then there are the far outs who, no matter what, will always subscribe to Roko's basilisk (in my mind, sort of a Pascal's wager).]