Image: Beeple, Everydays — The First 5000 Days
[ed. Rich people and their money. See also: 'Beeple Mania' (Duck Soup).]
Thursday, March 11, 2021
JPG File Sells for $69 Million, as ‘NFT Mania’ Gathers Pace
The Philosophy of the Midlife Crisis
When he was thirty-five, Kieran Setiya had a midlife crisis. Objectively, he was a successful philosophy professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who had written the books “Practical Knowledge” and “Knowing Right from Wrong.” But suddenly his existence seemed unsatisfying. Looking inward, he felt “a disconcerting mixture of nostalgia, regret, claustrophobia, emptiness, and fear”; looking forward, he saw only “a projected sequence of accomplishments stretching through the future to retirement, decline, and death.” What was the point of life? How would it all end? The answers appeared newly obvious. Life was pointless, and would end badly.
Unlike some people—an acquaintance of mine, for example, left his wife and children to move to Jamaica and marry his pot dealer—Setiya responded to his midlife crisis productively. In “Midlife: A Philosophical Guide” (Princeton), he examines his own freakout. “Midlife” has a self-soothing quality: it is, Setiya writes, “a self-help book in that it is an attempt to help myself.” By methodically analyzing his own unease, he hopes to lessen its hold on him.
Setiya finds that the history of the midlife crisis is both very long and very short. On the one hand, he identifies a text from Twelfth Dynasty Egypt, circa 2000 B.C., as the earliest description of a midlife crisis and suggests that Dante might have had one at the age of thirty-five. (“Midway on life’s journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.”) On the other, he learns that the term itself wasn’t coined until 1965, when a psychologist named Elliott Jaques wrote an essay called “Death and the Mid-life Crisis.” (Jaques quotes a patient’s eloquent lament: “Up till now, life has seemed an endless upward slope, with nothing but the distant horizon in view. Now suddenly I seem to have reached the crest of the hill, and there stretching ahead is the downward slope with the end of the road in sight.”) John Updike published “Rabbit Redux” in 1971. (“What you haven’t done by thirty you’re not likely to do.”) Richard Ford published “The Sportswriter” in 1986. (“You can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up.”) In between, Gail Sheehy’s book “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life,” published in 1977, explored the midlife crisis from a psychological point of view. Sheehy, an accomplished investigative journalist—she also wrote “The Secret of Grey Gardens”—became an anthropologist of middle age. After interviewing many midlifers, she concluded that women, too, experienced midlife crises; they just had them earlier than men. “The years 35 to 39 are the infidelity years for women,” she told People, in 1976. Having “packed their last child off to school,” middle-aged women “want to restore illusions of youthful appearance, romantic love.”
After Sheehy’s book was published, everybody seemed to be having a midlife crisis. Perhaps, Setiya writes, people married too early during the conservative postwar decades, then reëvaluated their lives as the counterculture flowered. On the whole, though, research on the frequency of midlife crises tends to be equivocal. Many long-term studies of well-being show that people actually get happier as they age. (This lends credence, Setiya suggests, to Aristotle’s view that we grow into a “prime of life,” with the body achieving its fullest development at thirty-five and the mind at forty-nine.) Other studies show that there is a “U-shaped curve” to life satisfaction, such that we’re happiest when we’re young and old and unhappiest in between. (There are even studies of great apes, conducted by zoologists, which show that they get sad in middle age.) “Shit happens in midlife,” Setiya writes, “with kids and parents, work and health.” He is drawn to the work of the German economist Hannes Schwandt, which shows that “younger people tend to overestimate how satisfied they will be, while midlifers underestimate old age.” According to this theory, we could avoid midlife crises by calibrating our expectations.
If you’re a jerk, it’s useful to have a midlife crisis; it gives your irresponsible behavior an existential sheen. Almost certainly, the term is overused. Still, having experienced a midlife crisis himself, Setiya ends up convinced that they are an ordinary part of a well-lived life. He identifies a number of intellectual traps into which even the most levelheaded people can fall. Many have to do with the way we think about freedom and choice. Because the lives of middle-aged people have settled into more or less permanent shapes, for instance, people in midlife often become nostalgic for the feeling of choosing: they think, I want to do my job because I want to do my job, not because I need to pay the bills. With philosophical exactitude, Setiya explains the flaws in this kind of thinking. Suppose, he writes, that you can have just one of three desirable things—A, B, or C, in order of preference. Because there’s value in having a choice, there are situations in which a choice between B and C is actually preferable to A. Even so, the satisfaction offered by choice has a limit. Most of the time, the value of B or C plus the value of choosing won’t actually add up to the value of A. It’s exciting to choose a new career, but you’ll probably end up with an inferior job; it’s fun to date again, but your new spouse probably won’t be better than your current one.
Some middle-aged people wonder if they shoulda, coulda, woulda, or spend time wishing they could undo their worst mistakes; Setiya, for instance, wonders if he should’ve become a doctor rather than a philosophy professor. He urges the middle-aged to think in detail about what the alternative realities they contemplate would actually entail. Thanks to the “butterfly effect,” he argues, the alternative world in which you hadn’t made those mistakes would almost certainly exclude many of the things you currently value. (Had you chosen a different career, your children might not exist.) Setiya points out that the decisions that vex us most in retrospect also tend to be choices between “incommensurable goods.” Should you have worked on your novel or spent time with your family? Become a musician or an engineer? In Setiya’s view, regrets over such choices are good signs, since they reflect a healthy, multidimensional appreciation of life. “To wish for a life without loss is to wish for a profound impoverishment in the world or in your capacity to engage with it,” he writes. (Someone with a darker sensibility might have put it differently: there is no escaping loss, no matter how rich your life is.)
To many people, the increasing proximity of death is the worst thing about middle age. It doesn’t seem to bother Setiya very much: he points out that immortality would probably get frustrating after a while, and suggests getting over your own death in advance by imagining yourself coming to terms with the death of a friend. Instead, what really unnerves him is midlife ennui—the creeping sense of aimlessness and exhaustion that sometimes overtakes people as they age. The problem, Setiya finds, is that there’s something intrinsically self-defeating about getting things done. Once you’ve done them, you can’t do them anymore. “Having a child, writing a book, saving a life—the completion of your project may be of value, but it means that the project can no longer be your guide,” he writes. There’s a sense in which all goal-directed behavior is ironic: “In pursuing a goal, you are trying to exhaust your interaction with something good, as if you were to make friends for the sake of saying goodbye.” Setiya quotes Arthur Schopenhauer, who argued that life “swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom”; according to Schopenhauer’s rather grim view of existence, we spend our days struggling, then are rewarded for struggle with emptiness. “This is the problem with being consumed by plans,” Setiya concludes. “They are schemes for which success can only mean cessation.”
In an effort to evade this conundrum, Setiya brings out the philosophical heavy artillery. He draws on an Aristotelian distinction between “incomplete” and “complete” activities. Building yourself a house is an incomplete activity, because its end goal—living in the finished house—is not something you can experience while you are building it. Building a house and living in it are fundamentally different things. By contrast, taking a walk in the woods is a complete activity: by walking, you are doing the very thing you wish to do. The first kind of activity is “telic”—that is, directed toward an end, or telos. The second kind is “atelic”: something you do for its own sake.
Unlike some people—an acquaintance of mine, for example, left his wife and children to move to Jamaica and marry his pot dealer—Setiya responded to his midlife crisis productively. In “Midlife: A Philosophical Guide” (Princeton), he examines his own freakout. “Midlife” has a self-soothing quality: it is, Setiya writes, “a self-help book in that it is an attempt to help myself.” By methodically analyzing his own unease, he hopes to lessen its hold on him.
Setiya finds that the history of the midlife crisis is both very long and very short. On the one hand, he identifies a text from Twelfth Dynasty Egypt, circa 2000 B.C., as the earliest description of a midlife crisis and suggests that Dante might have had one at the age of thirty-five. (“Midway on life’s journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.”) On the other, he learns that the term itself wasn’t coined until 1965, when a psychologist named Elliott Jaques wrote an essay called “Death and the Mid-life Crisis.” (Jaques quotes a patient’s eloquent lament: “Up till now, life has seemed an endless upward slope, with nothing but the distant horizon in view. Now suddenly I seem to have reached the crest of the hill, and there stretching ahead is the downward slope with the end of the road in sight.”) John Updike published “Rabbit Redux” in 1971. (“What you haven’t done by thirty you’re not likely to do.”) Richard Ford published “The Sportswriter” in 1986. (“You can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up.”) In between, Gail Sheehy’s book “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life,” published in 1977, explored the midlife crisis from a psychological point of view. Sheehy, an accomplished investigative journalist—she also wrote “The Secret of Grey Gardens”—became an anthropologist of middle age. After interviewing many midlifers, she concluded that women, too, experienced midlife crises; they just had them earlier than men. “The years 35 to 39 are the infidelity years for women,” she told People, in 1976. Having “packed their last child off to school,” middle-aged women “want to restore illusions of youthful appearance, romantic love.”
If you’re a jerk, it’s useful to have a midlife crisis; it gives your irresponsible behavior an existential sheen. Almost certainly, the term is overused. Still, having experienced a midlife crisis himself, Setiya ends up convinced that they are an ordinary part of a well-lived life. He identifies a number of intellectual traps into which even the most levelheaded people can fall. Many have to do with the way we think about freedom and choice. Because the lives of middle-aged people have settled into more or less permanent shapes, for instance, people in midlife often become nostalgic for the feeling of choosing: they think, I want to do my job because I want to do my job, not because I need to pay the bills. With philosophical exactitude, Setiya explains the flaws in this kind of thinking. Suppose, he writes, that you can have just one of three desirable things—A, B, or C, in order of preference. Because there’s value in having a choice, there are situations in which a choice between B and C is actually preferable to A. Even so, the satisfaction offered by choice has a limit. Most of the time, the value of B or C plus the value of choosing won’t actually add up to the value of A. It’s exciting to choose a new career, but you’ll probably end up with an inferior job; it’s fun to date again, but your new spouse probably won’t be better than your current one.
Some middle-aged people wonder if they shoulda, coulda, woulda, or spend time wishing they could undo their worst mistakes; Setiya, for instance, wonders if he should’ve become a doctor rather than a philosophy professor. He urges the middle-aged to think in detail about what the alternative realities they contemplate would actually entail. Thanks to the “butterfly effect,” he argues, the alternative world in which you hadn’t made those mistakes would almost certainly exclude many of the things you currently value. (Had you chosen a different career, your children might not exist.) Setiya points out that the decisions that vex us most in retrospect also tend to be choices between “incommensurable goods.” Should you have worked on your novel or spent time with your family? Become a musician or an engineer? In Setiya’s view, regrets over such choices are good signs, since they reflect a healthy, multidimensional appreciation of life. “To wish for a life without loss is to wish for a profound impoverishment in the world or in your capacity to engage with it,” he writes. (Someone with a darker sensibility might have put it differently: there is no escaping loss, no matter how rich your life is.)
To many people, the increasing proximity of death is the worst thing about middle age. It doesn’t seem to bother Setiya very much: he points out that immortality would probably get frustrating after a while, and suggests getting over your own death in advance by imagining yourself coming to terms with the death of a friend. Instead, what really unnerves him is midlife ennui—the creeping sense of aimlessness and exhaustion that sometimes overtakes people as they age. The problem, Setiya finds, is that there’s something intrinsically self-defeating about getting things done. Once you’ve done them, you can’t do them anymore. “Having a child, writing a book, saving a life—the completion of your project may be of value, but it means that the project can no longer be your guide,” he writes. There’s a sense in which all goal-directed behavior is ironic: “In pursuing a goal, you are trying to exhaust your interaction with something good, as if you were to make friends for the sake of saying goodbye.” Setiya quotes Arthur Schopenhauer, who argued that life “swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom”; according to Schopenhauer’s rather grim view of existence, we spend our days struggling, then are rewarded for struggle with emptiness. “This is the problem with being consumed by plans,” Setiya concludes. “They are schemes for which success can only mean cessation.”
In an effort to evade this conundrum, Setiya brings out the philosophical heavy artillery. He draws on an Aristotelian distinction between “incomplete” and “complete” activities. Building yourself a house is an incomplete activity, because its end goal—living in the finished house—is not something you can experience while you are building it. Building a house and living in it are fundamentally different things. By contrast, taking a walk in the woods is a complete activity: by walking, you are doing the very thing you wish to do. The first kind of activity is “telic”—that is, directed toward an end, or telos. The second kind is “atelic”: something you do for its own sake.
by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Bernd Vogel / Getty
The Senate’s F-Bomb
Wow, stuff is … happening.
Joe Biden’s big virus relief plan is about to become law. And the Senate has confirmed Merrick Garland as attorney general.
“The president and his team must be thrilled that Senate Republicans are proving to be more fair and more principled on personnel matters than the Democratic minority’s behavior just four years ago,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just before the Garland vote.
We will stop here for one second to recall that Garland would probably be on the Supreme Court now if McConnell had not refused to bring his nomination up for a vote when he was Senate majority leader. Along with blocking Barack Obama from filling 105 other judicial vacancies.
But hey, who’s bitter?
Not Biden, who’s ready to move on to the rest of his agenda: immigration, climate change, education, infrastructure …
Think about it, people. Spring is just around the corner. Soon you’ll be vaccinated, going out for dinner or the theater, or having a drink with friends. You can talk about the issues of the day, down to highway construction policy. Or the Biden German shepherds. When you want to keep things moving, just try bringing up pets, even the biters.
Or you can worry about filibusters. The only thing standing between Biden and real White House happiness is Republicans’ ability to demand 60 votes for passage of important legislation in a body that has 50 Democrats.
The coronavirus bill made it through because of something called budget reconciliation. We will say only that it just requires a majority, it doesn’t work for most bills and it’s not necessary for you to think about it any more right now. Really, contemplating filibusters is enough.
When it comes to something like the rules of the Senate, filibustering is a superstar. In our mind’s eye, we have a vision of an exhausting marathon in which a brave senator has the gumption to stand up and keep orating until his or her colleagues see the point.
That was a version that worked better in movies than in real life. In the hands of Southern racists, filibusters were a prime tool to stop change. And even now in the Senate, they’re mainly a threat to legislation aimed at helping minorities or the poor.
Alexander Hamilton certainly wasn’t a fan. He wrote that the point of demanding a supermajority to pass a bill is to “destroy the energy of government and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent or corrupt junto to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”
When all else fails, it always helps to quote Alexander Hamilton. And if you’re trying to imagine a corrupt junto, picture McConnell hanging out with Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, with Lindsey Graham for a mascot.
We also tend to think of a filibusterer as somebody who has a way with words. But in the real world, oration is to filibuster as essay writing is to texting. Imagine somebody who waits to be recognized, says “pretend I’m talking,” and closes down the process for everybody else.
“It’s way too easy,” says Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who’s been a long-running opponent of the filibuster as it stands today. His solution, which makes perfect sense, is that anybody who wants to stall the Senate by staging a filibuster should actually have to keep talking.
Maybe they could also require everybody to listen to the debate. That’d certainly be the end of the game.
The bottom line on the filibuster is that it’s really, really hard to get anything ambitious through the U.S. Senate. There are exceptions — like nominations. And, as we just saw, some money bills. And, the Republicans insist, tax cuts. But once we get past celebrating Biden’s big coronavirus victory, all those proposals on immigration, voting rights, the environment and protecting union organizers are going to run into a Republican demand that the 50 Democrats produce a 60-vote majority or throw in the towel.
Joe Biden’s big virus relief plan is about to become law. And the Senate has confirmed Merrick Garland as attorney general.
“The president and his team must be thrilled that Senate Republicans are proving to be more fair and more principled on personnel matters than the Democratic minority’s behavior just four years ago,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just before the Garland vote.
But hey, who’s bitter?
Not Biden, who’s ready to move on to the rest of his agenda: immigration, climate change, education, infrastructure …
Think about it, people. Spring is just around the corner. Soon you’ll be vaccinated, going out for dinner or the theater, or having a drink with friends. You can talk about the issues of the day, down to highway construction policy. Or the Biden German shepherds. When you want to keep things moving, just try bringing up pets, even the biters.
Or you can worry about filibusters. The only thing standing between Biden and real White House happiness is Republicans’ ability to demand 60 votes for passage of important legislation in a body that has 50 Democrats.
The coronavirus bill made it through because of something called budget reconciliation. We will say only that it just requires a majority, it doesn’t work for most bills and it’s not necessary for you to think about it any more right now. Really, contemplating filibusters is enough.
When it comes to something like the rules of the Senate, filibustering is a superstar. In our mind’s eye, we have a vision of an exhausting marathon in which a brave senator has the gumption to stand up and keep orating until his or her colleagues see the point.
That was a version that worked better in movies than in real life. In the hands of Southern racists, filibusters were a prime tool to stop change. And even now in the Senate, they’re mainly a threat to legislation aimed at helping minorities or the poor.
Alexander Hamilton certainly wasn’t a fan. He wrote that the point of demanding a supermajority to pass a bill is to “destroy the energy of government and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent or corrupt junto to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”
When all else fails, it always helps to quote Alexander Hamilton. And if you’re trying to imagine a corrupt junto, picture McConnell hanging out with Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, with Lindsey Graham for a mascot.
We also tend to think of a filibusterer as somebody who has a way with words. But in the real world, oration is to filibuster as essay writing is to texting. Imagine somebody who waits to be recognized, says “pretend I’m talking,” and closes down the process for everybody else.
“It’s way too easy,” says Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who’s been a long-running opponent of the filibuster as it stands today. His solution, which makes perfect sense, is that anybody who wants to stall the Senate by staging a filibuster should actually have to keep talking.
Maybe they could also require everybody to listen to the debate. That’d certainly be the end of the game.
The bottom line on the filibuster is that it’s really, really hard to get anything ambitious through the U.S. Senate. There are exceptions — like nominations. And, as we just saw, some money bills. And, the Republicans insist, tax cuts. But once we get past celebrating Biden’s big coronavirus victory, all those proposals on immigration, voting rights, the environment and protecting union organizers are going to run into a Republican demand that the 50 Democrats produce a 60-vote majority or throw in the towel.
by Gail Collins, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Damon Winter[ed. See also: For Democracy to Stay, the Filibuster Must Go; and, Joe Biden Is a Transformational President (NYT). Biden (and especially the team he's assembled) have learned from Obama's big mistake of being overly cautious and trying to work with Republicans (the party of NO). Go big or go home, that's a progressive position, and the popularity of this bill should make moderate Dems reevaluate their usual reflexive timidity. Plus, it never hurts to give people money in politics (in this case, poor and middle class Americans who've never seen anyone but the 1 percent benefit).]
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
RC Airbus A380 Second Flight
RC AIRBUS A380 SECOND FLIGHT
Rainer Kamitz was at the sticks and did an impressive flight.
Rainer Kamitz was at the sticks and did an impressive flight.
Builder and owner: Christopher Ferkl from Austria
Scale 1/13
Span: 6.13m / 20 feet
Length: 5.60 m / 18.5 feet
Weight: 102.7 kg / 226 pounds
Turbine: 4 x JetsMunt 166 (here)
Fuel capaticy: 12 liters / 2.2 gallons (UK)
Time to build 3 years / 1700 hours
Time to build 3 years / 1700 hours
Tuesday, March 9, 2021
Gary Player: On Shooting His Age
When Gary Player is invited to reflect on the fact he is now the oldest living Champion Golfer, he instantly raises a smile.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing,” he asks, before bursting into laughter.
In the course of a lengthy interview with Player to mark his 85th birthday on November 1, it soon becomes clear the statistic is one that understandably provokes feelings of great pride for the three-time Open winner.
“I think the word that comes to mind is gratitude,” says Player. “A lot of my golfing friends have passed away, so every day I’m aware of this and fortunately I’m very fit at the moment. (...)
Player’s extraordinary commitment to a healthy and active lifestyle is well-known, and he remains remarkably fit as he enters his 86th year. Such is his enduring energy, it is hard to believe 65 years have passed since he first travelled to The Open. (...)
The South African cannot recall the last time he completed 18 holes in a score higher than his age, and he continues to set new golfing goals for the years to come.
“The highest score I can think that I’ve shot in the last I don’t know how many years, I’m taking a guess, maybe 10 years, is 77,” he states emphatically. “On a normal golf course I average 72. I smash my age. I don’t beat it, I smash it.
“I’d like to beat it 3,000 times in a row. I don’t think anyone’s ever done that. And my other dream is to beat my age by 18 shots, a shot a hole.
“So the older I get, the easier it is, as long as I stay well. I work out hard, I rest well, I laugh a lot and I try to do the things to lead to longevity, but we cannot take health for granted.”
Player’s current fitness regime includes the “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sit-ups” he has sworn by for decades, and he insists he feels much younger than his actual age.
“I try and exercise four times a week,” he says. “The things that I’m doing are showing that it’s right and leading to longevity.
“I still run the treadmill at max (speed) and I can run, I can swim, I can ride a horse. All these things at 85.
“Today it’s astounding when you hear that and it shouldn’t be. Because actually at 85 I feel like a young man.”
by The Open | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I saw something on Golf Channel about Gary shooting his age over 3000 times. I thought that couldn't be right, too crazy. Hardly anyone does that even once. Well...]
Definitely more! Hard to hit the ball off-line with today’s equipment. I have broken my age well over 2000 times and with the old equipment I couldn’t have done that. Don’t forget traveling without jets played a large part, plus perfect greens and bunkers that are exactly the same all over the world today.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing,” he asks, before bursting into laughter.
In the course of a lengthy interview with Player to mark his 85th birthday on November 1, it soon becomes clear the statistic is one that understandably provokes feelings of great pride for the three-time Open winner.
“I think the word that comes to mind is gratitude,” says Player. “A lot of my golfing friends have passed away, so every day I’m aware of this and fortunately I’m very fit at the moment. (...)
The South African cannot recall the last time he completed 18 holes in a score higher than his age, and he continues to set new golfing goals for the years to come.
“The highest score I can think that I’ve shot in the last I don’t know how many years, I’m taking a guess, maybe 10 years, is 77,” he states emphatically. “On a normal golf course I average 72. I smash my age. I don’t beat it, I smash it.
“I’d like to beat it 3,000 times in a row. I don’t think anyone’s ever done that. And my other dream is to beat my age by 18 shots, a shot a hole.
“So the older I get, the easier it is, as long as I stay well. I work out hard, I rest well, I laugh a lot and I try to do the things to lead to longevity, but we cannot take health for granted.”
Player’s current fitness regime includes the “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sit-ups” he has sworn by for decades, and he insists he feels much younger than his actual age.
“I try and exercise four times a week,” he says. “The things that I’m doing are showing that it’s right and leading to longevity.
“I still run the treadmill at max (speed) and I can run, I can swim, I can ride a horse. All these things at 85.
“Today it’s astounding when you hear that and it shouldn’t be. Because actually at 85 I feel like a young man.”
by The Open | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I saw something on Golf Channel about Gary shooting his age over 3000 times. I thought that couldn't be right, too crazy. Hardly anyone does that even once. Well...]
***
If you were playing in this era and having the benefit in using today’s equipment would your total number of majors and PGA TOUR wins be the same or even greater?Definitely more! Hard to hit the ball off-line with today’s equipment. I have broken my age well over 2000 times and with the old equipment I couldn’t have done that. Don’t forget traveling without jets played a large part, plus perfect greens and bunkers that are exactly the same all over the world today.
Moby
[ed. See also: Ahab's Arithmetic: The Mathematics of Moby-Dick (Journal of Humanist Mathematics - pdf); also One Drawing for Every Page of Moby Dick (Matt Kish).]
Melville spent almost four years at sea on several different ships, at one point spending a month in the South Pacific with a Polynesian tribe called the Typee. There was also time in Tahiti, Honolulu and elsewhere, finally returning to Boston on October 3rd 1844. On his return, after encouragement from friends and family, he began writing a fictionalised account of his experiences with the Typee tribe. The book, Typee, was submitted in the summer of 1845 to Harper Brothers, who immediately rejected it on the grounds that it was “impossible it could be true”. The manuscript was eventually accepted by Wiley and Putnam, and appeared in February 1846. He followed it up with Omoo (the title is the transliteration of a Polynesian word meaning “wanderer”).
Melville spent almost four years at sea on several different ships, at one point spending a month in the South Pacific with a Polynesian tribe called the Typee. There was also time in Tahiti, Honolulu and elsewhere, finally returning to Boston on October 3rd 1844. On his return, after encouragement from friends and family, he began writing a fictionalised account of his experiences with the Typee tribe. The book, Typee, was submitted in the summer of 1845 to Harper Brothers, who immediately rejected it on the grounds that it was “impossible it could be true”. The manuscript was eventually accepted by Wiley and Putnam, and appeared in February 1846. He followed it up with Omoo (the title is the transliteration of a Polynesian word meaning “wanderer”).
Omoo appeared in the spring of 1847. Melville was married in August 1847, to Elizabeth Shaw, and they moved to New York with Herman’s younger brother Allan and his new wife. From 1847 to 1849, Herman was very productive, writing most of Mardi, all of Redburn and White-Jacket, and in the first weeks of 1850 the first few chapters of a new book that would eventually metamorphose into Moby-Dick. Seafaring tales were popular at that time, and Melville’s books, especially the first two, were well received as part of that type. However with each succeeding book the reception was less positive, and indeed Melville himself was rather scathing about his own work. About Redburn he said “I, the author, know [it] to be trash, and wrote it to buy some tobacco with”. However, this was a fertile time creatively for Melville. As well as writing three novels, Melville was reading voraciously: “I have swam through libraries”, he said. He read Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Mary Shelley, Dante, Schiller, Thackeray and many others. It was also around this time that he met and became close friends with the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who supplied one of the few descriptive remarks we have about Melville as a man: he was apparently, though a gentleman, “a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen”.
Melville moved out of New York in the summer of 1850 and completed Moby Dick over the next year. It was published on November 14th 1851. Reviews were, to say the least, mixed. It was completely different from, and hugely more ambitious than, anything he had produced before. Readers hoping for a standard seafaring yarn would have been sorely disappointed. It almost sunk without trace in his lifetime — his lifetime earnings from it were a grand total of $556.37. Things got worse: his next novel Pierre was universally panned as was the vast majority of his subsequent work. He wrote almost no prose after 1853, the memorable exceptions being the compelling but strange novella Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) and the late work Billy Budd (1889), which remained unpublished until 1924. He spent most of the last two decades of his life working for the United States Customs Service. He died on September 28, 1891, largely forgotten.
Dr. B: Standby Site Wants to Help
Here in the U.S., the COVID-19 vaccination picture looks far rosier than it did even a few weeks ago. Nearly one in five Americans have received at least one dose, according to TIME’s vaccine tracker, the authorization of Johnson & Johnson’s shot brings a third vaccine onto the public health battlefield, and President Joe Biden recently moved up his vaccination timetable, saying on March 2 that the U.S. will have enough doses to cover all American adults by the end of May.
Yet spend any amount of time in one of the many ad-hoc Facebook groups where volunteers are helping eligible vaccine recipients book appointments, and it becomes clear that actually getting a shot remains a challenge for many—especially people who are less tech-savvy, less connected, or simply less able to spend hours on end refreshing websites in the hunt for a slot. Meanwhile, no-shows are a problem for vaccine providers: if somebody books a vaccine appointment but doesn’t show up—perhaps because they booked multiple appointments and forgot to cancel their extras—a dose could go to waste (since all doses in a vial must be administered within a certain amount of time after the vial is punctured), or at least be given to someone who doesn’t yet qualify.
Dr. B, an online vaccine standby list that quietly launched in January, aims to help solve both problems. Users enter their name, contact information and other details related to their vaccination priority ranking, like their occupation and medical risk factors. If a vaccine provider partnering with Dr. B has an extra dose, the platform sends a text message to nearby users based on their prioritization as set by their state or other jurisdiction. Users then have a limited window of time to claim that dose and get to the provider for their shot.
“We thought there needed to be a nationwide standby system where any vaccine provider who has excess doses indicates how many vaccines are available, and immediately it goes out to the appropriately-prioritized people based on local government priority criteria,” says Dr. B founder Cyrus Massoumi, a technology executive and investor best known as the founder and former CEO of medical appointment-booking site Zocdoc. Massoumi says he’s self-funding Dr. B, which is free for both vaccine recipients and providers.
At the moment, demand for Dr. B’s offering is clearly outstripping supply. More than half a million people have signed up for the service, but only two pilot providers are currently on board: one in New York and another in Arkansas. However, Massoumi says more than 200 other providers across 30 states have expressed interest. “They range everywhere from individual pharmacies in rural settings to homeless shelters, academic medical centers, you name it—it’s a pretty representative set of who’s actually giving the vaccine,” says Massoumi, though he declined to say how many people have been vaccinated so far via Dr. B. “It’s still early innings…we’re just trying to get every site up and running as quickly as we can.” While vaccination sites often have their own manually-run standby lists, there are obvious advantages to having a more universal tool, with more automated processes—Massoumi’s team is working on a way to occasionally ask registrants if they have already gotten their shot through other means, so they can trim the list and improve efficiency, for instance.
by Alex Fitzpatrick, Time | Read more:
Yet spend any amount of time in one of the many ad-hoc Facebook groups where volunteers are helping eligible vaccine recipients book appointments, and it becomes clear that actually getting a shot remains a challenge for many—especially people who are less tech-savvy, less connected, or simply less able to spend hours on end refreshing websites in the hunt for a slot. Meanwhile, no-shows are a problem for vaccine providers: if somebody books a vaccine appointment but doesn’t show up—perhaps because they booked multiple appointments and forgot to cancel their extras—a dose could go to waste (since all doses in a vial must be administered within a certain amount of time after the vial is punctured), or at least be given to someone who doesn’t yet qualify.
Dr. B, an online vaccine standby list that quietly launched in January, aims to help solve both problems. Users enter their name, contact information and other details related to their vaccination priority ranking, like their occupation and medical risk factors. If a vaccine provider partnering with Dr. B has an extra dose, the platform sends a text message to nearby users based on their prioritization as set by their state or other jurisdiction. Users then have a limited window of time to claim that dose and get to the provider for their shot.
“We thought there needed to be a nationwide standby system where any vaccine provider who has excess doses indicates how many vaccines are available, and immediately it goes out to the appropriately-prioritized people based on local government priority criteria,” says Dr. B founder Cyrus Massoumi, a technology executive and investor best known as the founder and former CEO of medical appointment-booking site Zocdoc. Massoumi says he’s self-funding Dr. B, which is free for both vaccine recipients and providers.
At the moment, demand for Dr. B’s offering is clearly outstripping supply. More than half a million people have signed up for the service, but only two pilot providers are currently on board: one in New York and another in Arkansas. However, Massoumi says more than 200 other providers across 30 states have expressed interest. “They range everywhere from individual pharmacies in rural settings to homeless shelters, academic medical centers, you name it—it’s a pretty representative set of who’s actually giving the vaccine,” says Massoumi, though he declined to say how many people have been vaccinated so far via Dr. B. “It’s still early innings…we’re just trying to get every site up and running as quickly as we can.” While vaccination sites often have their own manually-run standby lists, there are obvious advantages to having a more universal tool, with more automated processes—Massoumi’s team is working on a way to occasionally ask registrants if they have already gotten their shot through other means, so they can trim the list and improve efficiency, for instance.
by Alex Fitzpatrick, Time | Read more:
Image: Dr B
[ed. Worth a try. More providers soon, so get on the list as early as possible. Dr B site here.]
Building the Big One
On January 5, as results came in from the Senate runoff election in Georgia, the texts between President-elect Joe Biden's senior staff went late into the night and into the next morning. With the Senate majority on the line, and full control of Washington in their grasp, the outcome of the two Georgia races would determine the fate of what they all agreed was their top priority for the new administration — passing a massive Covid relief package in the opening weeks.
They'd been working on it for nearly two months, identifying needs and, at Biden's direction, crafting the plan around them, regardless of cost. But if the Democrats won in Georgia, the plan would suddenly go from an aspiration they would have to bargain with Republicans over, to a reality as long as they kept their party unified.
With no war room to report to that night, no headquarters or even a transition office to gather in, the Biden staffers were all glued to the TVs in their homes around Washington, or, in the case of incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain, in Delaware with Biden, firing off texts to one another as each Georgia county reported results.
"Everybody understood for weeks what the impact of winning the two Georgia races might be," Steve Ricchetti, the long-time Biden adviser who would become counselor to the president, told CNN in an interview. "We invested a lot of time and effort in it in the weeks leading up to it because we obviously understood what it could mean for our agenda."
By late morning the next day, it was clear that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock had done the improbable, sweeping both races in Georgia and delivering the Senate back to the Democrats less than a month before Biden took office.
The twin victories marked a political earthquake for the incoming president and opened the door to one of the largest public health and economic relief proposals in US history.
For all of Biden's talk of bipartisanship, Democrats now had the power to move their top priority without a single Republican vote. It was the same situation as 2009, when the Obama administration rushed to pass a relief package during his first month in office. Back then Democrats lowered the size of the plan to garner some Republican support, a decision many of them came to regret during the slow recovery that followed.
This time would be different. From the outset, the common goal among Biden's team was to go big -- even if that meant going it alone.
At $1.9 trillion, the American Rescue Plan is second only in size to last year's $2.2 trillion CARES Act. When it was first unveiled to the public on January 14, the assumption among Republicans and even some Democrats was that Biden's nearly $2 trillion moonshot was an opening offer, a place to start negotiations that would inevitably lead to a smaller price tag.
But there would be no negotiating from Biden's team. That was the number, and while there was room to bargain over marginal side items, the topline wasn't moving.
This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen officials from the White House, Capitol Hill and outside interest groups who worked directly with the campaign and transition on Biden's cornerstone legislative proposal. CNN also spoke to Republican lawmakers and aides who remain agog at the size of the package and the speed with which Biden has pushed it along. (...)
Building the bill
The meetings began in November, not long after the election was called for Biden. Even before the President-elect's transition officially kicked into gear, Biden's top advisers, many of whom would get jobs in the White House, gathered daily -- and always virtually -- to hash out what they knew would become the single most prominent marker of their accomplishments in their first 100 days in office.
From the start, they took a unique approach.
Often, when spending bills are crafted, the topline number is settled on first as lawmakers and officials figure out what is possible and work down from there. But Biden's team says it started at the bottom and built up. The $1.9 trillion figure wasn't nailed down until the days before its public release, advisers say.
As they went, the goal was two-fold -- fund everything needed to end the pandemic, while also doling out enough money to float struggling Americans until things got back to normal. The proposal includes $160 billion for vaccine distribution and testing, $130 billion for K-12 schools, and $350 billion for state and local governments. It also contains hundreds of billions more in aid to families, including $1,400 in direct monthly payments, expanded nutrition assistance programs, extensions of emergency unemployment programs, and big expansions of the Child Tax and Earned income Tax Credits, boosting the benefits to a level some economists project could cut child poverty in half.
As the plan came together, administration officials said one priority remained clear: Biden didn't want just a short-term infusion of stimulus, with patches and temporary extensions to various aid provisions to keep the economy afloat for a few months -- he wanted to lock in long-term aid and investment. Enough money not just to pull the US out of the pandemic, but to give it the fuel for a massive future expansion.
by Phil Mattingly, CNN | Read more:
Image: Uncredited
They'd been working on it for nearly two months, identifying needs and, at Biden's direction, crafting the plan around them, regardless of cost. But if the Democrats won in Georgia, the plan would suddenly go from an aspiration they would have to bargain with Republicans over, to a reality as long as they kept their party unified.
With no war room to report to that night, no headquarters or even a transition office to gather in, the Biden staffers were all glued to the TVs in their homes around Washington, or, in the case of incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain, in Delaware with Biden, firing off texts to one another as each Georgia county reported results.
By late morning the next day, it was clear that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock had done the improbable, sweeping both races in Georgia and delivering the Senate back to the Democrats less than a month before Biden took office.
The twin victories marked a political earthquake for the incoming president and opened the door to one of the largest public health and economic relief proposals in US history.
For all of Biden's talk of bipartisanship, Democrats now had the power to move their top priority without a single Republican vote. It was the same situation as 2009, when the Obama administration rushed to pass a relief package during his first month in office. Back then Democrats lowered the size of the plan to garner some Republican support, a decision many of them came to regret during the slow recovery that followed.
This time would be different. From the outset, the common goal among Biden's team was to go big -- even if that meant going it alone.
At $1.9 trillion, the American Rescue Plan is second only in size to last year's $2.2 trillion CARES Act. When it was first unveiled to the public on January 14, the assumption among Republicans and even some Democrats was that Biden's nearly $2 trillion moonshot was an opening offer, a place to start negotiations that would inevitably lead to a smaller price tag.
But there would be no negotiating from Biden's team. That was the number, and while there was room to bargain over marginal side items, the topline wasn't moving.
This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen officials from the White House, Capitol Hill and outside interest groups who worked directly with the campaign and transition on Biden's cornerstone legislative proposal. CNN also spoke to Republican lawmakers and aides who remain agog at the size of the package and the speed with which Biden has pushed it along. (...)
Building the bill
The meetings began in November, not long after the election was called for Biden. Even before the President-elect's transition officially kicked into gear, Biden's top advisers, many of whom would get jobs in the White House, gathered daily -- and always virtually -- to hash out what they knew would become the single most prominent marker of their accomplishments in their first 100 days in office.
From the start, they took a unique approach.
Often, when spending bills are crafted, the topline number is settled on first as lawmakers and officials figure out what is possible and work down from there. But Biden's team says it started at the bottom and built up. The $1.9 trillion figure wasn't nailed down until the days before its public release, advisers say.
As they went, the goal was two-fold -- fund everything needed to end the pandemic, while also doling out enough money to float struggling Americans until things got back to normal. The proposal includes $160 billion for vaccine distribution and testing, $130 billion for K-12 schools, and $350 billion for state and local governments. It also contains hundreds of billions more in aid to families, including $1,400 in direct monthly payments, expanded nutrition assistance programs, extensions of emergency unemployment programs, and big expansions of the Child Tax and Earned income Tax Credits, boosting the benefits to a level some economists project could cut child poverty in half.
As the plan came together, administration officials said one priority remained clear: Biden didn't want just a short-term infusion of stimulus, with patches and temporary extensions to various aid provisions to keep the economy afloat for a few months -- he wanted to lock in long-term aid and investment. Enough money not just to pull the US out of the pandemic, but to give it the fuel for a massive future expansion.
by Phil Mattingly, CNN | Read more:
Image: Uncredited
[ed. About time the Dems starting acting with some backbone. Does anyone seriously think Republicans would give one second's damn about bipartisan cooperation if they were in charge? See also: The Senate Passed a $1.9 Trillion COVID-19 Relief Bill. Here's What's In It (Time).]
A Better Way to Parent: Less Yelling, Less Praise
At one point in her new book, the NPR journalist Michaeleen Doucleff suggests that parents consider throwing out most of the toys they’ve bought for their kids. It’s an extreme piece of advice, but the way Doucleff frames it, it seems entirely sensible: “Kids spent two hundred thousand years without these items,” she writes.
Her deeply researched book, Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, contains many moments like this, in which an American child-rearing strategy comes away looking at best bizarre and at worst counterproductive. “Our culture often has things backward when it comes to kids,” she writes.
Doucleff arrives at this conclusion while traveling, with her then-3-year-old daughter, to meet and learn from parents in a Maya village on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico; in an Inuit town in a northern Canadian territory; and in a community of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. During her outings, she witnesses well-adjusted, drama-free kids share generously with their siblings and do chores without being asked.
She takes care to portray her subjects not as curiosities “frozen in time,” but instead as modern-day families who have held on to invaluable child-rearing techniques that likely date back tens of thousands of years. I recently spoke with Doucleff about these techniques, and our conversation, below, has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Joe Pinsker: Many American parenting strategies, you estimate, are only about 100 years old, and some of them arose more recently than that. What about American parenting sticks out to you as distinctive and particularly strange?
Michaeleen Doucleff: One of the craziest things we do is praise children constantly. When I was first working on the book, I recorded myself to see how frequently I praised my little girl, Rosy, and I noticed that I would exaggeratedly react to even her smallest accomplishments, like drawing a flower or writing a letter, with a comment like “Good job!” or “Wow! What a beautiful flower!”
This is insane if you look around the world and throughout human history. Everywhere I went, I don’t know if I ever heard a parent praise a child. Yet these kids are incredibly self-sufficient, confident, and respectful—everything we want praise to do, these kids already have it, without the praise.
It’s hard to cut back on praise, because it’s so baked in, but later on, I decided to try. It’s not that there’s no feedback, but it’s much gentler feedback—parents will smile or nod if a child is doing something they want. I started doing that, and Rosy’s behavior really improved. A lot of the attention-seeking behavior went away.
Pinsker: You visited an Inuit town in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, and spent time in households where children were almost mysteriously immune to tantrums. How did the parents you met respond when kids misbehaved?
Doucleff: One night while I was there, Rosy and I were staying with a woman named Sally who was watching three of her grandchildren—so, four kids under 6 years old in this house. Sally just approached everything they did with the most calmness and composure I have ever seen. At one point, a little toddler, maybe 18 months at the time, I think he was pulling the dog's tail or something. Sally picked him up and, when she did, he scratched her face so hard that it was bleeding. I would have been irate, but Sally, I saw her kind of clench her teeth, and just say, in the calmest voice, “We don’t do this.” Then she took him and flipped him around with this playful helicopter move, and they both started laughing. Then it was over—there was no conflict around it.
If the child's energy goes high—if they get very upset—the parent’s energy goes so low. Another time on our trip, in the grocery store, Rosy started having a tantrum, and I was getting ready to yell at her to stop. But Elizabeth, our interpreter, came over to her and addressed her in the calmest voice. Immediately, Rosy just stopped—when she was around that calmness, her whole body relaxed. I was like, Okay, I’m just doing this tantrum thing completely wrong.
Pinsker: You write about how when Sally and Elizabeth see behavior like that, they think about the causes of it differently than many American parents do. What is the narrative they have for why young kids act out?
Doucleff: Yeah, this is huge—it single-handedly changed my life, and it’s something you hear in other parts of the Arctic. In the U.S., when a child calls you a name or smacks you, many parents think that the child is pushing your buttons, that they’re testing boundaries and want to manipulate you.
The Inuit parents and elders I interviewed almost laughed when I said that. One woman said something like, “She’s a kid—she doesn’t know how to manipulate like that.” Instead, what they told me is that young children are just these illogical, irrational beings who haven’t matured enough and haven’t acquired understanding or reason yet. So there’s no reason to get upset or argue back—if you do, you’re being just like the child.
This has totally shifted the way I interact with Rosy—I have so much less anger. She’s trying her best. Maybe she’s clumsy and illogical and irrational, but in her heart, she loves me, she wants to do well, and she wants to help.
Her deeply researched book, Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, contains many moments like this, in which an American child-rearing strategy comes away looking at best bizarre and at worst counterproductive. “Our culture often has things backward when it comes to kids,” she writes.
She takes care to portray her subjects not as curiosities “frozen in time,” but instead as modern-day families who have held on to invaluable child-rearing techniques that likely date back tens of thousands of years. I recently spoke with Doucleff about these techniques, and our conversation, below, has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Joe Pinsker: Many American parenting strategies, you estimate, are only about 100 years old, and some of them arose more recently than that. What about American parenting sticks out to you as distinctive and particularly strange?
Michaeleen Doucleff: One of the craziest things we do is praise children constantly. When I was first working on the book, I recorded myself to see how frequently I praised my little girl, Rosy, and I noticed that I would exaggeratedly react to even her smallest accomplishments, like drawing a flower or writing a letter, with a comment like “Good job!” or “Wow! What a beautiful flower!”
This is insane if you look around the world and throughout human history. Everywhere I went, I don’t know if I ever heard a parent praise a child. Yet these kids are incredibly self-sufficient, confident, and respectful—everything we want praise to do, these kids already have it, without the praise.
It’s hard to cut back on praise, because it’s so baked in, but later on, I decided to try. It’s not that there’s no feedback, but it’s much gentler feedback—parents will smile or nod if a child is doing something they want. I started doing that, and Rosy’s behavior really improved. A lot of the attention-seeking behavior went away.
Pinsker: You visited an Inuit town in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, and spent time in households where children were almost mysteriously immune to tantrums. How did the parents you met respond when kids misbehaved?
Doucleff: One night while I was there, Rosy and I were staying with a woman named Sally who was watching three of her grandchildren—so, four kids under 6 years old in this house. Sally just approached everything they did with the most calmness and composure I have ever seen. At one point, a little toddler, maybe 18 months at the time, I think he was pulling the dog's tail or something. Sally picked him up and, when she did, he scratched her face so hard that it was bleeding. I would have been irate, but Sally, I saw her kind of clench her teeth, and just say, in the calmest voice, “We don’t do this.” Then she took him and flipped him around with this playful helicopter move, and they both started laughing. Then it was over—there was no conflict around it.
If the child's energy goes high—if they get very upset—the parent’s energy goes so low. Another time on our trip, in the grocery store, Rosy started having a tantrum, and I was getting ready to yell at her to stop. But Elizabeth, our interpreter, came over to her and addressed her in the calmest voice. Immediately, Rosy just stopped—when she was around that calmness, her whole body relaxed. I was like, Okay, I’m just doing this tantrum thing completely wrong.
Pinsker: You write about how when Sally and Elizabeth see behavior like that, they think about the causes of it differently than many American parents do. What is the narrative they have for why young kids act out?
Doucleff: Yeah, this is huge—it single-handedly changed my life, and it’s something you hear in other parts of the Arctic. In the U.S., when a child calls you a name or smacks you, many parents think that the child is pushing your buttons, that they’re testing boundaries and want to manipulate you.
The Inuit parents and elders I interviewed almost laughed when I said that. One woman said something like, “She’s a kid—she doesn’t know how to manipulate like that.” Instead, what they told me is that young children are just these illogical, irrational beings who haven’t matured enough and haven’t acquired understanding or reason yet. So there’s no reason to get upset or argue back—if you do, you’re being just like the child.
This has totally shifted the way I interact with Rosy—I have so much less anger. She’s trying her best. Maybe she’s clumsy and illogical and irrational, but in her heart, she loves me, she wants to do well, and she wants to help.
by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Classicstock/Getty
The Singleton Hypothesis
Does history have a goal? Is it possible that all the human societies that existed are ultimately a prelude to establishing a system where one entity will govern everything the world over? The Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom proposes the "singleton hypothesis," maintaining that intelligent life on Earth will at some point organize itself into a so-called "singleton" – one organization that will take the form of either a world government, a super-intelligent machine (an AI) or, regrettably, a dictatorship that would control all affairs.
Other forms of a singleton may exist, and, ultimately, Bostrom believes one of them will come into existence. The philosopher argues that historically there's been a trend for our societies to converge in "higher levels of social organization". We went from bands of hunter gatherers to chiefdoms, city-states, nation states and now multi-national corporations, the United Nations and so forth, all the way to globalization – one of President Donald Trump's favorite targets for attack. One view of that trend sees increased power going to multi-national businesses and world government bodies, making globalization somewhat of a punching bag concept, often seen not as a needed re-organization of societies around the world, leading to increased cooperation and a peaceful international order, but rather for its potential to bring about the loss of jobs and undermine the sovereignties of individual countries, making citizens beholden to faceless totalitarian bureaucrats from foreign lands.
While some aspects of such technologies could certainly be unwanted and infringe upon individual freedoms, Bostrom thinks that there are situations in which there could be broad support for either a technological solution or a single government agency to take control of the society. As the world grows more complex, it's harder to achieve efficient coordination between countries and individuals within them. Tech solutions in conjunction with converging moral values and a democratic worldwide government could facilitate that. (...)
Before you get set for your life to be dominated by a single agency, Bostrom's classic paper on the subject lays out some specific pros and cons of a singleton. (...)
by Paul Ratner, Big Think | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Read Nick Bostrom's paper "What is a Singleton?" here.]
Monday, March 8, 2021
Macmuffin: A Tragedy
McDonald’s will test a meat-free burger in several markets . . . which it has dubbed “McPlant.”SCENE 1. The S’moors.
—CNBC.
SHAKES: Bubble, bubble, rat hair and stubble
Cellulose churn, diglycerides bubble.
(Enter Macmuffin.)
Who is morning taste treat now, Mayor of Arches soon.
MAC: Thy speakest vanilla falsehood, though ’tis true:
I am now morning taste treat; but Mayor of Arches?
I knowest not of what you speak.
In menu marquee
Macmuffin shall appear above all:
Above McNuggets, ’bove McCheese.
MAC: Above McCheese? But this cannot be! The Mayor lives.
Are you sure ’tis I who shall reign?
3 SHAKE: Fear not, Macmuffin. No burger born of beef
Shall e’er have power upon thee.
(Exeunt.)MAC: This strange news hath poached double my yolk.
Could it be true the news from paper cups parted?
Just as milkshakes boast o’ no dairy
And factory farm is a phrase contrary
A muffin testing destiny must be wary.
SCENE 2: Macmuffin’s Castle.
(Enter Lady Filet-O-Fish and Mac.)
MAC: Lady Filet!
How fares my tender fish sandwich?
LADY: Golden brown, my lord, with the news of late:
The forecast of those triple thick hath reached my ears. And hast thou heard? With Mayor McCheese have we for lunch together been order’d.
MAC: ’Tis true then the prophecy!
But dar’st I yank
The sweating patty from its limp bun?
LADY: Hear me now: for with my plan
Greasy arches we shall quickly span.
When McCheese comes, greet him with the smile of Ronald,
But with the heart of Hamburglar.
Mayor Macmuffin you shall be
And no burger born of beef
Shall have the power to stop thee.
This sauce offer, laced it is with drug.
Strike first and never worry
Your heart as cold as a McFlurry.
(Exit. Enter McCheese, Lords, Fries.)MAYOR: Hail noble Macmuffin of Egg
Fulfiller of that most important meal.
MAC: Hail Mayor McCheese!
Yet I see thy patty hath grown dry.
A special sauce will surely greasen thy extremities, making thee juicy anew.
MAYOR: Spread on, then, McMuffin!
My beefy Cheddar awaits.
MAC (aside): Special it is, in both intent and effect.
MAYOR: Yet I feel a sudden fatigue. Go forth, and I will join thee of late.
To my chamber I’ll retire for twenty winks to take. (Exeunt.)
MAC: More than twenty winks into this night he’ll fit—
A sleep of no waking: I’m lovin’ it.
by Jay Martel, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Luci Gutiérrez
Art is a Game
Here’s my suggestion: The struggle is actually the point. We don’t study art and have long conversations about it just in order to understand the art. It’s actually the other way around. We take on the task of trying to understand art so that we may have those delightful conversations and be propelled into those wonderful studies. We have shaped our practice of art appreciation for the joys of the process. We engage with art for the satisfactions of the struggle—for the pleasures of careful attention, interpretation, and evaluation. In this way, art appreciation is like a game. In a game, the goals and restrictions shape the gaming activity, fine-tuning it into just the kind of struggle we wish to be absorbed in.
And thinking of art appreciation as a kind of game will help us to understand some of the oddly Byzantine ‘rules’ of art appreciation. It will help us resolve a long-running debate about the value of independent judgement in art appreciation. Consider: There are two norms of art appreciation that seem deeply in tension. On the one hand, we seem to care about making correct judgements. We want our beliefs and judgements to match the fine details of the artworks. On the other hand, we seem to also value a radical independence of mind. We are supposed to judge the Van Gogh for ourselves, to experience its strange twisting bubbling life for ourselves. We are supposed to decide for ourselves whether Kanye’s new album is a tragic overreach, a misunderstood masterpiece, or a lazy sell-out. We seem to think that an we should not declare that an artwork is beautiful or failed, based simply on the testimony of another. We are supposed to judge art for ourselves.
But these two demands seem deeply at odds. Elsewhere in intellectual life, our interest in correctness usually trumps the demand for independence. When we want to get it right, we usually defer to experts. I defer to my doctor about what medicines to take; I defer to my mechanic about which repairs my car needs. Even the scientific experts need to depend on thousands of other experts. So: if we really care about getting things right with art, shouldn’t we also defer to experts there, too? After all, Beethoven may give me all kinds of rich, shimmering feelings and responses, but I know so little of the music theory that is apparently required to understand much of what Beethoven is doing. If I wanted to have the right judgements about Beethoven, shouldn’t I just defer to some classical music expert? But such deference seems to miss something crucial about the whole activity of art appreciation. Here’s one traditional explanation: such deferences misses the essential subjectivity of aesthetic judgement. It would be absurd defer to others in our aesthetic judgements, if those judgements were just expressions of our own subjective responses.
I wish, here, to offer a very different explanation. It could very well be that some aesthetic judgements are objective. But the reason we pursue those right answers are different with art appreciation than with many other objective domains. In science, we care about actually getting the right answers. But with art appreciation, we care most about engaging in the activity of trying to get it right—about going through the whole process of looking and searching and imagining and interpreting. This is why we don’t defer to experts. Correct judgements are the goal, but not the purpose, of art appreciation. The value of art appreciation lies in the activity of trying to get correct judgements, rather than actually having made correct judgements.
The games analogy is quite useful here. With a puzzle game, we don’t just look up the answers online. We avoid deferring to the experts who have already solved the puzzles. But the reason we don’t defer to experts here is not because the solutions are subjective. For many puzzles, there is, indeed, a single objectively correct solution. And if the whole point of the exercise was simply to have the correct solution, then we should proceed to that solution by the most efficient means possible, which often will be looking it up online. But often we don’t just look it up online, because the whole point of the activity is to try and figure it out for ourselves.
To understand this point better, we need to distinguish between goals and purposes. The local goal of an activity is what you aim at and pursue during the activity. The purpose of an activity is your reason for taking it up in the first place; it is the real value you find in the activity. For some players, goal and purpose can be identical, or close to it: like the Olympic athlete trying to win because they really just want to win; or the professional poker player trying to win because they want the money that follows from winning. But for many other players, goal and purpose sharply diverge. A lot of the time, my purpose in going rock climbing is to relax and shut up the endless, nattering voice in my head. But in order to relax, I have to throw myself into the local goal of getting to the top of the rock. I need local dedication in order to fully absorb myself in the climb—and that absorption is exactly what I need to clear my head. But in the larger scheme of things, I don’t really care if I get to the top. If I spend the day failing and failing, but go home mentally and spiritually refreshed, then it is a day well spent.
There are, then, two very different motivational structures that can be involved with playing games. First, one could be engaged in ‘achievement play’—playing a game for the value of winning itself (or something that follows from the win, like money). Second, one could be engaged in ‘striving play’—playing a game for the value of the struggle (or something that follows from that struggle, like fitness or relaxation). Notice that, for a striving player to have that desirable struggle, they have to actually try to win. But winning isn’t the point for them; playing is.
by C. Thi Nguyen, Forum For Philosophy | Read more:
Image: Katrien Vanderlinden
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