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).]

A Quiet Refusal to Compromise

Over the past decade, with amazement and dismay, I have watched former friends and acquaintances make radical turns toward a conservatism that I no longer recognize. This story is well known by now: beginning in 2015, conservatives began to divide into pro- and never-Trump factions. Some visited or moved to Hungary. National conservatism and integralism and “Common Good Conservatism” emerged as new options for disaffected traditionalists, and of course, liberalism “failed.”

All of this is chronicled in Laura Field’s new book, Furious Minds (reviewed earlier for Law & Liberty by John Grove). The volume is basically a book of highbrow gossip, and it has its faults. But it also provides a fairly accurate account of the past ten years. Field completed her PhD in (Straussian) political philosophy at the University of Texas in 2011. During her student years and afterward, she existed on the margins of intellectual conservatism. She watched many of the movement’s major players as they engaged in activism, wrote provocative essays, and instigated revolution on the Right. [...]

The problem in 2026 is that many of the most prominent intellectual conservatives have sold their birthrights for the fleeting fame promised by social media, podcasts, and coverage in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other prestige outlets. They appear more interested in making names for themselves or “blowing up the system” than in doing the quiet, unobserved, humble work of renewing the institutions that are so vital to civil society. They are, at root, interested in winning the culture wars, and winning requires fighting. It’s what a friend has called “punch-in-the-face conservatism.” In borrowing methods from the cultural Left, many of them have become right-wing Gramscians. These men (and they are nearly all men) sense that America has arrived at an eschatological moment, and they definitely want everyone else to know it too.

I also think they find it exciting and invigorating. At last we have come to a crisis point that demands strategy and action! Enough with all the subsidiarity, little platoons, and institutional reform. Conservatives should be bold enough to grasp the levers of power and use them against the Left, just as the Left has used them against us. As one Claremont Institute commentator has written, breathlessly, “Practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve. What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding of America.” Helen Andrews has imagined a parallel crisis in the relations between the sexes. Her “great feminization” thesis lays the blame for “wokeness” on all those overachieving and schoolmarmish women who now dominate the white-collar professions. In her words, they are a “potential threat to civilization.” And on and on. It’s easy to adduce multiple examples of this overheated rhetoric.

To be fair, there are (of course) elements of truth in many of the scathing critiques leveled by the New Right. Andrews is correct that, in the aggregate, there are differences between men’s and women’s leadership styles. Christopher Rufo and others aren’t wrong that advocates of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” greatly overplayed their hands. And much of the extreme reaction on the Right is undoubtedly a response to the provocations of the Left, whose activists haven’t exactly been models of self-restraint over the past few decades.

Unlike those on the New Right, though, I’m not sure that we’re at an eschatological moment in Western culture. We might be. But whether or not we’ve arrived at a civilizational crisis, there are alternative ways of responding to this moment, ways far more authentically conservative than what is now playing out in so many contemporary institutions.

In thinking about what conservatism means, and about how to respond to our cultural moment, two courses of action come to mind. The first is to recalibrate our view of the world; the second, to engage in practices that don’t incite battles but preserve and rejuvenate culture. Work like this is not likely to be praised or even recognized, and it asks for quiet self-assurance, not loud declarations on social media. Cultivating a positive and hopeful vision in the midst of disorder simply is the primary obligation of conservatives, especially if we’re Christians, whose hopes lie not in the rise or fall of any particular worldly power.

Why is it so difficult, and so unpopular, to embrace this hopeful, alternative vision, and why are conflict and battle so enduringly attractive? William Hazlitt offers an answer in his shrewd essay from 1826 entitled “On the Pleasure of Hating.” There is a “secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind,” he writes, which “takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction.” Life would “turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible.”

Most of us will recognize this universal human tendency to take perverse pleasure in hating, and in dwelling on ugly and disordered things. The desire to see awfulness helps to explain the market for polemics and declension narratives rather than subtle and qualified arguments. Who has not felt, in a moment of crisis, a sudden sharpening of the will, a vision of exactly the path forward?

The pleasure of critique also provides a sense of superiority, both intellectually—because we have seen things as they truly are—and morally. Deny it though we do, it is pleasant to think oneself smarter than others and to imagine that we, not they, stand on a solid foundation of truth. Similarly, in the moral sphere, if we are part of an unappreciated or persecuted minority, there is solace in knowing that our way of life is simply better than that of our opponents, even if the world at large does not agree.

And then there is the boredom factor. Temperance, civility, politeness, and all the other virtues that accompany political moderation can seem boring and mundane. Even if we mostly depend on norms of civility and respect in daily life, it is exciting to have a firebrand in the room—someone who will stir things up and throw rhetorical bombs. This is as true in a seminar room as in a board meeting. We admire and emulate the provocateur, the celebrity, and the radical, and are drawn to those with outrageous and “cutting-edge” views.

Yet these moral and intellectual eccentrics depend for their existence on an unseen foundation of equanimity, careful argument, civility, and self-control. They themselves may neglect or disparage this foundation, but it is nevertheless vital that somebody shore it up. Traditionally, this has been a job for conservatives.

So should conservatives be warriors or maintainers? Part of the answer will undoubtedly depend on temperament. Everyone knows people who are thoroughly pacific and disengaged or, on the other hand, full of spirit and always ready to argue. The latter disposition is what one sees far more often in the new conservatives I have been identifying, those who clamor to fight and win the culture wars with snark, meanness, and irony.

The tenor of the alternative—of a more gracious conservatism—is not adversarial but generative. It looks toward the present and the future, though not in the way that progressivism does, with its hopes of constant political improvement. Instead, this conservatism focuses on the things that are being conserved by living them fully, and by engaging in practices delivered from the past. It asks us to act within our own small spheres of influence, doing good where it is real, tangible, and visible, at levels much less national and much less public. While most of us aren’t prodigies, we all possess talents, aptitudes, and loves, which we would do well to use and develop. And this will make some difference, or all the difference, to those who live around us.

by Elizabeth Corey, Law & Liberty |  Read more:

Image: Agostino Masucci; Artcurial Worldwide/Wikimedia Commons
[ed. This is a conservative perspective I can get behind, but one that glosses over the 'tactics' the fighting contingent employ. Tactics that are frequently dishonest, threatening, sleazy and/or outright illegal. No valor in that, whatever rationalizations conservatives use for the ends justifying the means. By the way, the Hazlitt link (Pleasure of Hating) is well worth a read.]

A Conservative Not Afraid to Be a ‘Beautiful Loser’

What does it mean to be conservative in the Trump era? How is that changing? Has the term — and the philosophy behind it — lost all meaning?

Elizabeth Corey, a political scientist at Baylor, is a conservative — though what she sees being called “conservatism” today has left her dismayed.

She explained what she thinks about conservatism’s present, and potential future, in a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion. It has been edited for length and clarity.

John Guida: What is the state of conservatism today, and how confusing has it been to call yourself one in the Trump era?

Elizabeth Corey: The state of conservatism is quite varied, as anyone who follows politics knows. There are post-liberals, common-good conservatives, national conservatives and so on. One thing I see in all these camps is a certain adversarial posture toward American culture — or toward certain aspects of that culture that they dislike. I sympathize with some of that.

But my own understanding of conservatism is different — it’s grounded in culture and tradition, and in some sense, religion. It’s the idea that we should “conserve” the many goods that we have received from the past: philosophy, art, poetry, music, family life, etc. We can’t have any of these things without a stable political order. But political action is not at the very heart of things. [...]

Guida: Conservatives traditionally looked on government action skeptically. There’s the quote from Ronald Reagan: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ” The current administration has shifted that posture. Is that one area of conservatism you no longer recognize?

Corey: It is. And it worries me, because if anything we’ve seen conservatives seize state power with a force that I wouldn’t have imagined possible before Trump. This troubles me not just because it hasn’t been a traditional conservative view, but because the degree of moral righteousness is often unquestioned.

Guida: You explored this adversarial political posture through an 1826 essay by William Hazlitt, “On the Pleasure of Hating,” in which he describes hating as “a never-failing source of satisfaction.” The pleasure of hating, he writes, transforms religion, patriotism and virtue into pretexts for destruction. You sympathized, to an extent, with the energizing aspects of tribalism.

Corey: Hazlitt was on to something in that essay — many of us don’t want to admit it, but we like to see bad and awful things because, frankly, they make us feel better about ourselves. To hate something gives us clarity about what we don’t hate, but also because hating the right things, with the right people, gives us a sense of camaraderie and of being together with a tribe of like-minded others.

Perhaps the most damning thing Hazlitt says in that essay is that we hate because “we cannot bear a state of indifference and ennui: the mind seems to abhor a vacuum.” A lot of us are bored and distracted right now, and politics as war is entertaining.

Guida: Do you think a minority of super-engaged Americans are driving this cycle?

Corey: This is a tremendous problem at present. Many people who don’t have radical and activist views have checked out of politics because they think they are the weird ones. I don’t live online as much as some people do, so I’m often talking to people who say that they are politically homeless — that they would gladly vote for any reasonable person of any party, but they don’t see such people in politics. So they check out altogether.

Part of the reason I wrote the recent pieces was simply to say that there is probably a quiet majority out there of more-or-less sensible people. Why should the loudest voices be the only ones we hear?

Guida: You contrast the space that adversarial politics takes place in with a more “generative” space. You wrote, “Our modern frenzy and constant, anxious busyness push us away from the very sources of cultural conservatism that I and so many others want to rejuvenate.” How do you balance the demands of citizenship — which includes, at least to some extent, politics — with that generative attitude?

Corey: One thing I’d say here is that the obligations of citizenship are very important, and I would like to shore up our notion of what it means to be a citizen. That’s what all the schools of civic leadership around the country are doing. But I would also say that citizenship is, for most of us, a local activity, which is mostly lost in the contemporary debate. Writing essays and being on social media is a kind of political activity, undoubtedly, but I’m not sure it’s the most important part of citizenship.

Far more important are the things we do that have real impacts on real people, like serving on juries and school boards and taking part in the communities where we actually live. That kind of activity is vital for human flourishing, and it requires us to interact with people who are not like us. We can’t be tribal on a jury.

Guida: You suggest that those who are “unrelentingly angry and critical” nevertheless draw from “an unseen foundation of equanimity, careful argument, civility and self-control” — a foundation, as you put it, traditionally maintained by conservatives. What is that foundation? What is in it? Books, music?

Corey: As a college professor, I’m always tempted to say it has something to do with education. When you read and converse and learn how to think philosophically, or “disinterestedly,” you are forced to see yourself in different ways — not as the center of the world, but almost as a character in a play.

That sounds a little bit strange, I realize; but when you read literature or philosophy you gain a certain distance that allows you not only to consider the complexities of the characters in the books, but yourself as well. You may be inclined to be a bit more humble, a bit more charitable, about what you know, and about your judgments of other people. This leads, often, to a kind of “moral calm” that can lead to equanimity and self-control.

It’s not just books and learning: We also learn these things in families — perhaps nowhere better do we come to terms with our emotions (their good and bad outcomes). Ideally, we learn how to be human — how to compromise and consider others’ feelings — through family. It’s a deeply Christian vision of what social life could be. Humility and charity aren’t easy virtues, after all — especially when you’re attacked.

Guida: Another quality that conservatives have traditionally stressed is character, including or even in particular in political leaders. Has the shift away from character as a concern — among politicians like President Trump or even, in Texas, Ken Paxton, who just won the Republican Senate runoff — surprised you?

Corey: This is where I see the arguments about power coming to the fore. Yes, some people say, character matters, but this is our one chance to do something big! Even if we’re a little squeamish about someone’s character, that matters less than what that person can do to advance our cause. And again, it’s about power, winning and losing: If winning is what matters, and it seems in many places to be the most important thing, then the way we win is less important. Warriors, I think, would say that we can’t be afraid to dirty our hands in the process. While I recognize that arguments about moral purity can be taken too far, I still think character matters.

Also on this question: I can’t tell you how many people in my circles have commented on the recent Ross Douthat-Ben Sasse interview. That great “sensible middle” that I’ve been talking about is simply dying to see people like Sasse in positions of authority; but there are very few of him in public life.

Guida: You mentioned the phrase, “Politics is downstream from culture.” How do you think about the direction of travel, so to speak, in that phrase. President Trump has now been elected twice to the presidency. There is clearly a part of the electorate that clamors for “warriors.” Is that coming from a new type of culture, one that is the antithesis of the type of culture that you describe?

Corey: I don’t have a way of knowing what a vast majority of Americans think — and yet I do have my own experience to go by. Just last week I visited several national parks in Utah, and had the opportunity to listen in on people’s conversations — on the shuttles, in the hotel breakfasts and elsewhere. I was struck by the genuine goodness of so many of these people. What did they want? They wanted their families to flourish, they wanted to be proud of their country (as they were, in Zion National Park) and they talked about neighbors, pets and sometimes politics. I guess what I took from this is that most people really aren’t invested in the kind of politics we often see in the media. That’s what makes me think that there is a quiet majority of people who, like me, want to move away from political warfare.

Because here’s the problem with warfare among citizens: What is the end game? What do we do with the opponents whom we’ve supposedly vanquished? They’re all still here, and we must live with them. It’s a little like a marital fight: You don’t think about “defeating” your “enemy”; you must somehow still live together in peace after the fight is over.

Guida: So is it fair to say that your hope is that somehow — through better leaders, institutions, some persistent mechanism — the quiet majority begins to reshape our politics and national future?

Corey: I do hope so. Perhaps that’s idealistic. It’s hard to say anything these days without worrying that you’ll be pilloried for it. But we really can’t let the loud and bellicose voices drown us out.

by Elizabeth Corey and John Guida, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Daniel Ribar for The New York Times

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

This is the edited transcript of an intewiew with Feynman made for the BBC television program Horizon in 1981, shown in the United States as an episode of Nova. Feynman had most of his I$ behind him by this time (3e died in 1988), so he could reflect on his experiences and accomplishments with the perspective not often attainable by a younger person. The result is a candid, relaxed, and very personal discussion on many topics close to Feynman's heart: why knowing merely the name of something is the same as not knowing anything at all about it; how he and his fellow atomic scientists of the Manhattan Project could drink and revel in the success of the terrible weapon they had created while on the other side of the world in Hiroshima thousands of their fellow human beings were dead or dying from it; and why Feynman could just as well have gotten along without a Nobel Prize.

The Beauty of a Flower 

I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree, I think. And he says - “you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. Also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting - it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which shows that a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don’t understind how it subtracts. 

Avoiding Humanities 

I’ve always been very one-sided about science and when I was younger I concentrated almost all my effort on it. I didn’t have time to learn and I didn’t have much patience with what’s called the humanities, even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take. I tried my best to avoid somehow learning anything and working at it. It was only afterwards, when I got older, that I got more relaxed, that I’ve spread out a little bit. I’ve learned to draw and I read a little bit, but I’m really still a very one-sided person and I don’t know a great deal. I have a limited intelligence and I use it in a particular direction.

Tyrannosaurus in the Window 

We had the Encyclopaedia Britannica at home and even when I was a small boy [my father] used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and we would read, say, about dinosaurs and maybe it would be talking about the brontosaurus or something, or the tyrannosaurus rex, and it would say something like, “This thing is twenty five feet high and the head is six feet across,” you see, and so he’d stop all this and say, “Let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard he would be high enough to put his head through the window but not quite because the head is a little bit too wide and it would break the window as it came by.” 

Everything we’d read would be translated as best we could into some reality and so I learned to do that - everything that I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying by translating and so (LAUGHS) I used to read the Encyclopaedia when I was a boy but with translation, you see, so it was very exciting and interesting to think there were animals of such magnitude - I wasn’t frightened that there would be one coming in my window as a consequence of this, I don’t think, but I thought that it was very, very interesting, that they all died out and at that time nobody knew why. 

We used to go to the Catskill Mountains. We lived in New York and the Catskill Mountains was the place where people went in the summer; and the fathers - there was a big group of people there but the fathers would all go back to New York to work during the week and only come back on the weekends. When my father came he would take me for walks in the woods and tell me various interesting things that were going on in the woods - which I’ll explain in a minute - but the other mothers seeing this, of course, thought this was wonderful and that the other fathers should take their sons for walks, and they tried to work on them but they didn’t get anywhere at first and they wanted my father to take all the kids, but he didn’t want to because he had a special relationship with me - we had a personal thing together - so it ended up that the other fathers had to take their children for walks the next weekend, and the next Monday when they were all back to work, all the kids were playing in the field and one kid said to me, “See that bird, what kind of a bird is that?” And I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown throated thrush,” or something, “Your father doesn’t tell you anything.” But it was the opposite: my father had taught me. Looking at a bird he says, “Do you know what that bird is? It’s a brown throated thrush; but in Portuguese it’s a . . . in Italian a . . . ,” he says “in Chinese it’s a . . . , in Japanese a . . . ,” etcetera. “Now,” he says, “you know in all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is and when you’ve finished with all that,” he says, “you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. Now,” he says, “let’s look at the bird.”

He had taught me to notice things and one day when I was playing with what we call an express wagon, which is a little wagon which has a railing around it for children to play with that they can pull around. It had a ball in it - I remember this - it had a ball in it, and I pulled the wagon and I noticed something about the way the ball moved, so I went to my father and I said, “Say, Pop, I noticed something: When I pull the wagon the ball rolls to the back of the wagon, and when I’m pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon,” and I says, “why is that?” And he said, “That nobody knows,” he said. “The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving and things that are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them hard.” And he says, “This tendency is called inertia but nobody knows why it’s true.” Now that’s a deep understanding - he doesn’t give me a name, he knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something, which I learnt very early. He went on to say, “If you look close you’ll find the ball does not rush to the back of the wagon, but it’s the back of the wagon that you’re pulling against the ball; that the ball stands still or as a matter of fact from the friction starts to move forward really and doesn’t move back.” So I ran back to the little wagon and set the ball up again and pulled the wagon from under it and looking sideways and seeing indeed he was right - the ball never moved backwards in the wagon when I pulled the wagon forward. It moved backward relative to the wagon, but relative to the sidewalk it was moved forward a little bit, it’s just [that] the wagon caught up with it. So that’s the way I was educated by my father, with those kinds of examples and discussions, no pressure, just lovely interesting discussions.

by Richard Feynman, Learning Media MIT.edu |  Read more: (pdf)
Image: uncredited

What the Pope Said About A.I.

Leo XIV’s new encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” presents a remarkable case for placing moral concerns, and not profit, or competitive advantage, or efficiency, at the center of any discussion of artificial intelligence.

Last year, only months into his papacy, Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope, called on developers of artificial intelligence “to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work.” In response, the Silicon Valley billionaire and troll-in-chief Marc Andreessen began mocking the pontiff by tweeting an idiotic meme at him. The Pope raised the grave concern that artificial-intelligence companies were “totally ignoring the value of human beings and of humanity”; the venture capitalist Peter Thiel reportedly wondered whether the Pope might be in league with the Antichrist. The merchant princes of Silicon Valley appeared concerned that the new Pope would usurp their authority and diminish their power. And now, arguably, he has, in a long-awaited encyclical on artificial intelligence.

For years—for decades—tech leaders have described their investments and inventions, their corporations, and even themselves in religious terms, and specifically in messianic terms. They claimed to be driven by a mission to make the world a better place; they were faithful to the misbegotten gospel of disruptive innovation. A “mission” is, historically, the Christian work of spreading the word of the Gospel; disruptive innovation is a theory of change that participates in the rhetoric of salvation. For a time, Facebook’s stated mission was “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” which is what most clergy of any faith might say is their mission, too, alongside caring for the poor and comforting the suffering. Tech executives, dressed in the ritualized vestments of hoodies, jeans, designer sneakers, and black T-shirts, have acted as if their companies were churches, their TED talks so many homilies, and their products—apps, platforms, and video games—temples, mosques, and chapels. More recently, these same people—men, really—have heralded the arrival of artificial intelligence as ushering in what Mark Zuckerberg calls a “new era for humanity.” This week, the Pope offered his own understanding of that new era in his encyclical, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” It could hardly be more different from the preachings of the priests of Silicon Valley. They like to say they are saving the world. The Pope fears they are destroying it. [...]

The new encyclical, at nearly forty thousand words, bears reading. It is addressed “to all the Catholic faithful, to all Christians and to all men and women of goodwill”—that is, to everyone. In advance of its release, and leery of the inevitable TL;DR reaction, one Texas bishop warned parishioners not to ask a chatbot to summarize it for them. (Earlier this year, the Pope urged priests against using ChatGPT to write their sermons and to instead “use your brains more.”) It is not a beautiful document. It’s often maddeningly, boringly wonky (“this entails establishing norms so that the decision-making behind content selection and its development becomes more transparent and protects personal data”), and it gives every evidence of being written by a committee (“psychological and psychiatric literature has documented with growing insistence how early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media can negatively impact sleep, attention span, control of emotions and relationships”). Some of it reads like a Silicon Valley press release (“Today, the convergence of automation, robotics and AI is rapidly transforming the very structure of work”). Nevertheless, “Magnifica Humanitas” presents a remarkable case for placing moral concerns, and not profit, or competitive advantage, or efficiency, at the center of any discussion of artificial intelligence.

If those of us Americans who are Catholic are proud of this Pope, many of us are even prouder that the first American pontiff has taken on this vital matter, and at such a crucial moment. In much of American culture—and especially in the business and tech press—challenging the economic power and oligarchic rule of U.S.-based artificial-intelligence companies is an act tantamount to heresy. Pope Leo is not only willing but eager to dissent. Bless him.

Much of the encyclical involves defending the proposition that the Vatican ought to be—and has always been—engaged in making statements about new and very worldly things like artificial intelligence. “The Church is present in history and engages in dialogue with the world,” Leo argues. He agrees with the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the world that humanity stands at a crossroads. But at this crossroads, he argues, three questions must be asked: “Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?” Invoking a Biblical story about hubris, the building of the Tower of Babel, he warns of what he calls the “Babel syndrome”: “namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language—even a digital one—can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”

Beginning with the fundamental dignity of the human, Leo traces the inalienable, universal equality of persons and their inviolable rights. He establishes, within the Church’s Social Doctrine (traceable to “Rerum Novarum”), principles that include the commitment to the common good, which he defines as “the social expression of the dignity recognized in every person.” [...]

The problem is not the technology, the Pope maintains in “Magnifica Humanitas”; it’s the anthropology. Algorithms, forms of automation, and artificial intelligence sort the worthy from the unworthy; they manipulate information and undermine trust; they violate privacy; they enhance the power of the already powerful and reduce the capabilities of the already vulnerable; they make war more ruthless; they undermine democratic governance; they take away the dignity of work, possibly for the mass of humanity. He presses for forms of regulation and especially for democratic control of artificial intelligence, but above all he calls for “disarming” A.I. “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” he writes. “It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.” He worries that the culture around artificial intelligence undermines the search for truth that is necessary for both democratic life and any possibility for a genuine spiritual existence. [...]

That the concerns the Pope has raised in “Magnifica Humanitas” are not even remotely new does not make them any less urgent. Yet this history does suggest that calls to slow down the development of artificial intelligence and, as Arendt put it, to “think what we are doing” have not been heeded. Then again, before this week, they’ve never been sounded by the Pope, the spiritual leader of nearly a fifth of the world’s population.

“Magnifica Humanitas” is in many ways a religious analogue to Claude’s Constitution, released by Anthropic this past January (and on which at least two delegates to the Vatican were consulted). In a move freighted with symbolism, Anthropic’s co-founder Christopher Olah appeared on the dais alongside Leo at the release of the encyclical, which the Pope, in a first for the Church, presented in person, at the Vatican’s Synod Hall. “I am grateful to His Holiness and to the Church for taking up this work of discernment,” Olah said in his remarks. Executives of other A.I. companies are not likely to express that kind of gratitude. Nor are they likely to cede political power willingly, any more than they are likely to become philanthropists, or volunteer to pay more in taxes, or stop tweeting daft things or selling you tools that you don’t need and that you never asked for and that make you miserable, angrier, and stupider.

by Jill Lepore, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Yara Nardi/Reuters
[ed. Maybe tl;dr for most folks, but AIs will certainly read it. Sort of my intent with ARIA: The Great Pause. Every little bit helps.]

Childhood And Education: Letting Kids Be Kids

I cannot emphasize enough the need to let kids be kids. In Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids be Kids, I went over exactly how insane we have gotten about destroying the lives of children and along with them the lives of parents and others forced to devote endless hours to actively destructive supervision.

I’ll go over a refresher of that, some related new anecdotes, and then some other related questions.

People Don’t Let Kids Do Things

As a refresher, here are some quotes and statistics from last time, because I really do think exposure to this type of thing needs to involve spaced repetition to sink in:

1. A third of people, both parents and non-parents, responded in a survey that it is not appropriate to leave a 13 year old at home for an hour or two, as opposed to when we used to be 11 year olds babysitting for other neighborhood kids.

2. A third of people said in that same survey that if a 10-year-old is allowed to play alone in the park, there needs to be an investigation by CPS.

Harris Poll: More than half of the kids surveyed have not experienced many real-life experiences on their own. According to the kids surveyed aged 8 to 12 years old:

• 45% have not walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store

• 56% have not talked with a neighbor without their parents

• 61% have not made plans with friends without adults helping them

• 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult

• 63% have not built a structure outside (for example, a fort or treehouse)

• 67% have not done work that they’ve been paid for (e.g., mowing lawns, shoveling snow, babysitting)

• 71% have not used a sharp knife

Lenore Skenazy: During that visit, I was told that children could never be left alone, inside or outside the home—EVEN IN THEIR OWN BEDROOMS—until they were 13 years old. Social Services said specifically that I had to be in each room with them at all times until they were 13. That investigation ended without incident. …

When I asked what constitutes supervision, she said that I had to be visible to my neighbors when the kids were outside, regardless of whether or not I could see the children. I asked where that was found in the Virginia law. She replied that it isn’t in the Virginia law, but that Social Services has its own set of rules.

Bethany: I just sent my 12 year old in to go get a dozen donuts while I waited in the car.

“Mom they will wonder why I’m alone.”

Polimath: My kids used to love walking to Target until the local Target changed their policy to “no unaccompanied kids under 18”

There are 72,000,000 kids in America and about 100 non-governmental kidnappings by strangers a year. If you left your child unattended, the original claim is that they would get kidnapped once every 750,000 years.

Maxwell Tabarrok: 37% of all American children are investigated by CPS. 2 million investigations, 530k substantiated cases, and 200k family separations every year. [...]

Let Your Children Play

Yes, it is actively good for children to learn to entertain themselves, at the earliest age possible. As a bonus, it is also excellent for you the parent, but it’s great for them too.

We used to know this. Now we need to be reminded. Last time I emphasized the general argument, here I will follow up with an example of the paranoia we instill about how this might somehow be bad, actually.

Girl about something: Is it ACTUALLY true that it’s good for me to let my baby entertain himself, or is it just selfishness because I can be doing something else while he plays? Tell the truth.

Based Sipper Wife | Mrs. Tomasone | Already sipped: It’s good for him! You know how people suffer from short attention spans and always needing to be entertained? Every time you let him play uninterrupted, you’re holding off that problem and helping him sustain focus

shiloh.: it’s so good, please teach your baby to play independently. if he were unhappy or lonely he’d cry & come to you. development of independent play is SO good for them (or course balanced with showing / talking / engaging)

is for baby whisperer: actually, seriously, a fantastic gift you can offer your child.

The problem, of course, is not any threat other than CPS.

Don’t Fear The CPS

And yet, somehow, even with direct observation many people think you shouldn’t be able to go two doors down.

And by shouldn’t, some of them say (I hope she means only if they actually do it, not because they simply think it was okay in theory, but I’m not sure):

MNBonnie: Over 54% of you need a visit from CPS. Holy shit.

Romy: wow yeah the logical conclusion here is that over half of all parents should have their kids taken away.

This behavior is obviously fine except insofar as someone might call CPS, but even if it wasn’t fine, it’s crazy to think about what that call implies.

Kelsey Piper: I don’t think that it’s a good idea to take peoples’ children away because they do a completely safe thing that is slightly different than the completely safe thing you do.

It is a bad outcome when CPS conducts an inspection of a family that is doing a great job raising kids in a lovely home but doing something slightly unusual. It is a way to terrorize those parents into compliance with standards that would never be the law and make no sense.

… I have had friends who have had their homes inspected because of stuff on the scale of ‘toddler fell at the playground and got a bruise’, yes. It was super stressful and probably made them inclined to be more safetyist and terrified of normal childhood falls!

Andrew Rettek: Yep. It sucks.

Romy: the number of people invoking cps every time they hear about a parenting choice that they wouldn’t make is really disturbing.

do you understand what claim you’re making when you say someone should have cps called on them? you’re saying that you believe their child would be better off ripped from the only home they’ve ever known and put in the care of strangers. moreover, you’re saying you believe the median foster parent is a better parent than their current parents.

you’re also saying you think we should dedicate state resources to carrying out this process. social workers already have caseloads too big to manage dealing with kids in homes with serious drug addiction, abuse, neglect and often fail to successfully intervene when it’s desperately needed.

you want these same social workers to spend time taking kids away from parents who leave them in a locked and air conditioned car for 2 minutes while they run into the store, or who watch them on the baby monitor while they catch up with the neighbors? really? if you were in charge of society this is what you’d do?

yep, in every case i’ve ever seen this raised for on twitter it would be infinitely worse than the home the kid is already in, even without accounting for the trauma of the kid being taken from their parents.

Mason: We also don’t actually want a society of traumatized and cowed parents

One function of CPS is to serve as a “wake up call” for bad parents. But you do not want a huge % of good parents making all of their parenting decisions under some abject terror that they may look negligent.

One problem with allowing any idiot to use the state as their cudgel is that a lot of people lack the imagination to anticipate the immediate consequences of their actions for other people, asking them to consider second-order effects is a total lost cause.

This is why a lot of older story arcs involve a “nosy neighbor” character who comes to embody something like the banality of evil or malicious ignorance. There used to be very strong norms against even *suggesting* that you might report people to the state for minor infractions.

Romy: the vast majority of babies ever born were raised by parents who would consider live video monitoring of a sleeping baby so excessive they’d be confused by the concept.

having a baby is hard in a bunch of ways, but a whole lot of parents are making it much harder than it needs to be. they’re doing their best to shame everyone else into having a harder time than necessary too.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase |  Read more:

Image: X

The Desert Safety Net

Every winter, tens of thousands of Americans migrate to public lands in the Arizona desert. For a growing number, it's not a vacation—it’s the only housing they can afford.

Every autumn across North America, migration begins.

And across the continent’s highways and desert roads, another migration gathers – this one made not of birds or fish, but of humans.

They go by many names: nomads, drifters, snowbirds, boondockers, van dwellers. Some travel in search of warmth, others for freedom and community. And for a growing number, the migration is not simply seasonal but economic.

Among those is 55-year-old Derek Hansler, a chef by trade.

Known to friends as D Rock, he spends the summer in New Hampshire visiting his children and grandchildren, parking his 2003 Van Terra shuttle bus in driveways along the way. He picks up gigs when he needs cash or a place to park, but the season is less work than service, volunteering in the communities he revisits every year.

“New Hampshire tells me when it’s time to roll,” he jokes. He likes to stay until the leaves turn crimson, then leave before they fall. When that moment arrives, he says goodbye to his family and points his bus 3,300 miles (5,310km) to the south-west.

In Seattle, as the rainy maritime chill brings out jackets, Stephanie Scruggs and Gustavo Costo prepare to head south. After three years on the road, they recently decided to move in together – a milestone in their nomadic life that meant trading their two vans for a half-finished bus they named Magpie, a weathered 1999 International Thomas.

It’s been more than five years since Scruggs, then 35, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain cancer known as a grade three anaplastic astrocytoma. After surgery, six weeks of radiation, and a year of chemo, doctors told her she might have two to five years to live.

Retiree Theresa Webster makes a final pass through the Oregon campground where she volunteers each year as a summer host. Fire rings are doused. Bathrooms are scrubbed. Trash is gathered and hauled away.

In return for the work, she has been given what has become increasingly rare: a legal place to park.

With the season over, she packs up Old Yeller, the mustard yellow 1977 Dodge van she bought for $3,000. Her dog, Miles, rides shotgun as she takes the long way south, first turning east toward her son’s driveway in Iowa, folding briefly back into the family rhythms of grandkids and shared meals. When winter presses in, she points Old Yeller down the interstate.

In driveways, campgrounds, and borrowed corners of parking lots, autumn departures like these unfold across North America. Soon these migrants will spill on to back roads, highways and interstates, license plates tracing faint lines south from Alaska, Quebec, Maine and everywhere in between, navigating by a kind of winter constellation – an invisible beacon in the American southwest that most maps barely notice, a place they return to year after year.

A small desert outpost called Quartzsite, Arizona.

*****

For many road trippers speeding along Interstate 10, Quartzsite, or “Q-town” as it is affectionately known, appears little more than a gas station and fast-food stopover halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix. It sits in the northern reaches of the Sonoran Desert, 20 miles east of the Colorado River.

Summertime temperatures hover in the triple digits, sending the valley’s human residents indoors to air-conditioned rooms and its wild inhabitants – including desert tortoises, cottontails and kangaroo rats – into underground lairs.

According to the 2020 census, the population is 2,413.

But as winter approaches and temperatures fall to something more forgiving, the great migration of motorhomes, RVs, buses, trailers, vans, cars and trucks begins to pour into Quartzsite – and more precisely, into the vast stretches of open desert that surround it.

But not everyone keeps moving.

Tens of thousands instead gather inside BLM-designated long-term visitor areas, or LTVAs, seasonal enclaves established in 1983 to accommodate the growing number of people wintering in the desert. Seven LTVAs stretch across Arizona and California. But the largest of these and the center of gravity is La Posa – Spanish for “the resting place” – an 11,400-acre stretch of land on the outskirts of Quartzsite.

Each winter, a vibrant social world takes hold. Clubs form and dissolve – singles groups, quilters, metal-detecting hobbyists – while daily gatherings emerge at sunrise and continue late into the night. Around them, infrastructure hums into being: laundromats that double as showers, RVs converted into hair salons, swap meets, mail-forwarding counters for lives without fixed addresses, mechanics coaxing life from failing engines.

Theresa remembers arriving in Old Yeller for the first time in 2018. She had kept her apartment in Oregon just in case van life didn’t work out. But as the desert opened around her, the contingency plan dissolved.

“This is it,” she remembers thinking. “This is the life.” She had grown tired of paying rent and bills and having nothing left over – a treadmill she could never step off. Out here, there were no landlords to answer to. Eight years later, the desert around Quartzsite still carries that weight for her. “It has a magical feeling,” she said.

Community and infrastructure move in tandem here, creating a seasonal metropolis layered on to the existing town. But what allows it to function year after year is something more fundamental: affordability.

For $180, a permit allows camping from 15 September through 15 April. At La Posa, that price includes trash collection, vault toilets and a dump station. It’s worth pausing on the math. For less than the cost of a single night in many American hotels, a person can legally live on public lands in the desert for seven months.

Many LTVA visitors are traditional snowbirds: retirees who maintain homes elsewhere and migrate seasonally for warmth. But for a growing number of others, the permit functions differently: as a legal foothold in a housing system that has increasingly shut them out. [...]

Dr Graham Pruss, executive director of the National Vehicle Residency Coalition – a network that advocates for the rights of people living in vehicles – spends part of each winter moving between desert camps as he connects with vehicle residents across the country. He sees many of them as part of what he calls an “economic refugee class.” They are people displaced not by conflict or famine, he said, but by rents, wages and the shrinking availability of stable housing.

He describes what he calls “settlement bias” – our tendency to treat familiar forms of dwelling as legitimate and unfamiliar ones as suspect.

“If you park an RV on to a private space and you pay for rent, that’s called a mobile home park,” he said. “But if you move that RV 100 feet onto the street, we call that homelessness.

“These are people who are using their private property to solve a housing crisis that we all see around us,” he added. “That adaptive strategy is innovative. It creates solutions where they don’t exist.”

For many vehicle residents, public lands have become one of the few legal geographies where long-term habitation remains possible.

“Public lands are the lifeline for a lot of us,” said Mary Feuer, a longtime public land resident. “When the money runs out, they literally support us.”

by Joshua Jackson, Re:Public |  Read more:

Image: Joshua Jackson

Something Big Is Happening on Campus

I get to visit about two dozen campuses every year, and I meet at least a few teachers like Montás at each of them. I can generally spot the ones with the pure disease, the ones with that raw teacher-fire. Usually, they had some experience early in life when they fell in love with learning. This love then became a ruling passion, and now they fervently seek to share it with their students in the classroom. You can find them at Ivies and at community colleges, at big state schools and small liberal-arts colleges. They are a part of what’s going right in American higher education, the part that critics (like me) don’t write about enough.

These teachers talk of their vocation in lofty terms. They are not there merely to download information into students’ brains, or to steer them toward that job at McKinsey. True humanistic study, they believe, has the power to change lives. They want to walk with students through the biggest questions: Who am I? What might I become? What is this world I find myself in? If you don’t ask yourself these questions, these teachers say, you risk wasting your life on trivial pursuits, following the conventional path, doing what others want you to do instead of what is truly in your nature. If society doesn’t offer this kind of deep humanistic education, where people learn to seek truth and cultivate a capacity for citizenship, then democracy begins to crumble. “What I’m giving the students is tools for a life of freedom,” Montás says.

These great teachers are the latest inheritors of the humanist tradition. Humanism is a worldview based on an accurate conception of human nature—that we are both deeply broken and wonderfully made. At our worst, humans are capable of cruelty, fascism, and barbarism that no other mammal can match. On the other hand, deep inside of us we possess fundamental longings for beauty, justice, love, and truth, which, when cultivated, can produce spiritual values and human accomplishments breathtaking in their scope.

Life is essentially a battle between our noblest aspirations and our natural egotism. Humanistic education prepares people for this struggle. Yes, schooling also has a practical purpose—to help students make a living and contribute to the economy. But that practical training works best when it is enmeshed within the larger process of forming a fully functioning grown-up—a person armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, force of character, and a thorough familiarity with the spiritual heritage of our civilization. Preprofessional education treats people solely as economic animals; humanistic education also treats them as social and moral animals.

Humanistic teachers do this by ushering students into the Great Conversation—the debate, stretching back centuries, that constitutes the best of what wise people have thought and expressed. These teachers help students encounter real human beings facing the vital challenges of life: Socrates confronting death, Sun Tzu on how to manage conflict, Dante in love, Zadie Smith on living in the boundary between different identities. The Great Conversation represents each generation’s attempt to navigate the dialectics of life, the tension between autonomy and belonging, freedom and order, intimacy and solitude, diversity and cohesion, achievement and equality. The Great Conversation never ends, because there are no final answers to these tensions, just a temporary balance that works for a particular person or culture in a particular context.

By introducing students to rival traditions of thought—Stoicism, Catholic social teaching, conservatism, critical race theory—colleges help students cultivate the beliefs, worldviews, and philosophies that will help them answer the elemental question of adulthood: What should I do next? By introducing them to history and literature, colleges arm students with wisdom about how humans operate, which is handy knowledge to have. They offer them not only life options but also, more importantly, the ability to choose among them. “Any serious human problem is a hard problem,” Andrew Delbanco, who teaches at Columbia, told me. “The fundamental obligation of a humanities teacher is to try to develop in students an allergy to ideology and certainty. To acknowledge self-doubt.”

But humanistic education is no mere intellectual enterprise. Its primary purpose is not to produce learned people but good people. When teachers do their job, they arouse in their students not only a passion for learning but also a passion to lead a life of generosity and purpose. “The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting—no more—and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth,” Plutarch observed many centuries ago.

Teachers do this by making excellence attractive to the young—excellent lives, excellent ideas, excellent works of art, commerce, and science, and, above all, excellent ideals. The students who are captivated by these ideals find some cause to advance, some social problem to address, some business to start. When confronted by inspiring ideals, many students say: I care intensely about this, I want to orient my life around this. It’s not only their minds that have been refined but also their desires and ambitions. In a true humanistic education, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote, “the shaping of the will is thoroughly more important to man than the shaping of the intellect.”

Preprofessional education is individualistic and selfish. Such students learn to ask: How can I outcompete my peers and beat them up the ladder to success? In a humanistic program, by contrast, groups of people gather to form communities of truth, to reason together, to explore life together, to pool their desires and seek the common good.

I find that students flock to humanistic teachers who radiate a sense of urgency. They tell students: We are doing something important here. College is not just frat parties and internships; it’s potentially the most important four years of your life. You can emerge either an anesthetized drone or a person fully curious, fully committed, and fully alive.

I know this kind of education can have this effect because it is the education I got decades ago at the University of Chicago. I knew I could never be as learned as the professors I encountered, but their passion for large topics and great books seemed so impressive to me. I yearned with all my soul to understand the world as best I could, to embark on a lifelong journey of growth. Whatever my ample failings, that yearning, kindled in those classrooms with those books and those teachers, has never gone away. I stumbled unknowingly into a humanistic education, because it was the only college I got into, but I can tell you, it totally worked on me.

Today, the teachers I’m talking about tend to feel like dissidents within the academy, like they are doing something countercultural. That’s because at most schools, humanistic education has been pushed into the remote corners of academic life. It’s not that people woke up one morning and decided to renounce the humanistic ideal, it’s just that other goals popped up. It was easier to fundraise for them, easier to sell them to tuition-paying parents. The idea of forming students into the best version of themselves sort of got left behind. [...]

Mark Edmundson also grew up in a working-class family, in Medford, Massachusetts. He got into college, something no one else in his family had done, and told his father that he might study prelaw, because you could make a decent living as a lawyer. His father, who had barely graduated high school, “detonated,” Edmundson later recalled. You only go to college once, his father roared, you better study what genuinely interests you. The rich kids get to study what they want, and you are just as good as any rich kids.

Edmundson soon encountered Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson. “They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself,” he wrote in his book, Why Teach? “They shone a light onto the world, and what they saw, suddenly I saw, too.” Edmundson now teaches poetry and literature at the University of Virginia.

“To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it might be,” Edmundson once told an audience of students. “In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.”

The forces arrayed against humanistic learning are many:

by David Brooks, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: The Atlantic: Source: Laurie Michaels/Bridgeman Images
[ed. Contrast this with someone (below), who believes that colleges should be modeled after OnlyFans, and that hyper-specialization ("edge" degrees where AI will supposedly be less adept) are the future. I know which curriculum I'd choose.]