Category: History

Vaguely Effective Altruism

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In “Killing John Galt” in my new collection, Entanglements, the first-person narrator muses that:

Reaching the moon was easy but conquering poverty was impossible. Watching Sonya’s animated hopefulness—perfection!—almost made me want to call Winborn and recommend that he just pay more taxes with the same money. Let the organizations and bureaucrats build institutions that could chisel away at the edifice, slowly and steadily; look at giant statistical outcomes to guide changes in policy over time. It would convert the problem from individual heroism into a technocratic game. I could play that game, running regression models and factor analytic comparisons to tease out what was and what was not working effectively. Social change then became policy management.

With the plunge of Effective Altruism (EA) from its hubristic trajectory across the sun of cryptocurrency, how and why to do good by wealthy people has become a renewed topic for discussion. At the New York Times, for instance, we have the regularly vague Ross Douthat complaining that if every oil magnate wants their money applied to just saving kids from malaria we would have fewer quaint state parks. Perhaps more interesting at the same publication is Ezra Klein’s discussion of the goals and limits of EA as well as the philosophical underpinnings of the movement. There is plenty of room for a spectrum of responses to the basic problem of how to give away money, but the key concept of “effectiveness” is what forces EA and EA-adjacent proponents to analyze their approaches and goals towards making the world a better place. Historically, much large-scale giving was intended to create a legacy for the industrialist families (Carnegie-Mellon University, Rockefeller Foundation, … ahem, Sackler Institute and related organizations).… Read the rest

Entanglements: Collected Short Works

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Now available in Kindle, softcover, and hardcover versions, Entanglements assembles a decade of short works by author, scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor Mark William Davis.

The fiction includes an intimate experimental triptych on the evolution of sexual identities. A genre-defying poetic meditation on creativity and environmental holocaust competes with conventional science fiction about quantum consciousness and virtual worlds. A postmodern interrogation of the intersection of storytelling and film rounds out the collected works as a counterpoint to an introductory dive into the ethics of altruism.

The nonfiction is divided into topics ranging from literary theory to philosophical concerns of religion, science, and artificial intelligence. Legal theories are magnified to examine the meaning of liberty and autonomy. A qualitative mathematics of free will is developed over the course of two essays and contextualized as part of the algorithm of evolution. What meaning really amounts to is always a central concern, whether discussing politics, culture, or ideas.

The works show the author’s own evolution in his thinking of our entanglement with reality as driven by underlying metaphors that transect science, reason, and society. For Davis, metaphors and the constellations of words that help frame them are the raw materials of thought, and their evolution and refinement is the central narrative of our growth as individuals in a webwork of societies and systems.

Entanglements is for readers who are in love with ideas and the networks of language that support and enervate them. It is a metalinguistic swim along a polychromatic reef of thought where fiction and nonfictional analysis coexist like coral and fish in a greater ecosystem.

Mark William Davis is the author of three dozen scientific papers and patents in cognitive science, search, machine translation, and even the structure of art.… Read the rest

A Mammoth Undertaking: Interviewing the Future of Art

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The following is my interview of DeepAI and Stable Diffusion running on an AMD Ryzen with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090.

Thank you for taking the time to discuss this important and interesting topic. Why are mammoths so important to the art world?

That the mammoths were domesticated before the start of the human era seems implausible from a historical perspective. In fact the majority of mammoths that people find in museums, libraries, and other collections are not domesticated mammoths. This suggests there might have been a greater need for mammoths within culture than before. This would make sense, considering that Neanderthals likely hunted other types of other species before settling in our world more than 400 years ago. Because they were not domesticated, they were only adapted to hunting rodents and other plant and animal species that were less domesticated in their wild form such as rabbits, snakes, etc.

Starting at the earliest part of your collection, the mammoth is an unusual theme for Rembrandt, isn’t it?

It’s hard to believe that after all the success of their latest work, The Lord’s Prayer doesn’t want to let their “biggest hit yet”, the classic The Lord’s Prayer, disappear. The actor’s latest film, The Wrestler (via Warner Bros., which produces on their own, and in the U.K.), has garnered more than 15 million views on Amazon Instant Video (the company’s preferred store for Netflix-wielding subscribers, not the usual suspects Google Video), and has become so popular that when the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, it was deemed the top film at the fest. The star-studded line-up has included the likes of Peter Lorre, Michael J Freberg, Colin Farrell, and Peter Sellers (both of whom made it to a Hollywood winery).… Read the rest

Making Everything Awesome Again

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Yeah, everything is boring. Streaming video, books, art—everything. It is the opposite of “everything is awesome” and, once again, it came about as a result of the internet attention economy. Or at least that is what Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times tells us, rounding up some thoughts from a literary critic as a first step and then jumping into some new social criticism that suggests the internet has ruined snobbery.

I was thinking back to the 1990s after I read the piece. I was a working computational linguist who dabbled in simulated evolution and spent time at Santa Fe Institute studying dreamy artificial life concepts. In my downtime I was in an experimental performance art group that detonated televisions and projected their explosions on dozens of televisions in a theater. I did algorithmic music composition using edge-of-chaos self-assembling systems. I read transgressive fiction and Behavioral and Brain Sciences for pleasure. I listened to Brian Eno and Jane Sibbery and Hole while reading Mondo 2000. My girlfriend and I danced until our necks ached at industrial/pop-crossover clubs and house parties. An early “tech nomad” visited us at one of our desert parties. Both in my Peace Corps service in Fiji and then traveling in Europe and Japan, I was without a cell phone, tablet, and only occasionally was able to touch email when at academic conferences where the hosts had kindly considered our unique culture. There was little on the internet—just a few pre-memes struggling for viability on USENET.

Everything was awesome.

But there was always a lingering doubt about the other cultural worlds that we were missing, from the rise of grunge to its plateau into industrial, and of the cultural behemoth cities on the coasts.… Read the rest

Ancient Conceptual Code-Switching

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I’ve been reading Hesiod as part of background research for a new book project I’m working on, tentatively titled Talos. In Talos, vulcanologists enter a strange artifact that floats to the surface of a lava dyke during a catastrophic eruption of Santorini. Inside is some kind of antique computing machine that operates using a strange fluid. The device is capable of manipulating people and time, in fact, and is used by the protagonists to harass one another, to explore history, and to change the future of the planet itself. And then it is gone again.

Hesiod represents some of the earliest works of the archaic period of ancient Greece. His Theogony is the early catalog of the Greek myths of Olympians and Titans. His Works and Days is perhaps the earliest discussion of Pandora, and it is not what most people know from Laura Croft and common parlance. In the Pandora myth, she is created by the “lame god” and blacksmith Hephaestus as a mechanism for avenging the release of the knowledge of fire to humankind by Prometheus. Why was fire a bad idea? Well, if humankind learned the ways of the gods they would just hang out and play video games, it seems:

The gods had hidden away the true means of livelihood for humankind, and they still keep it that way. If it were otherwise, it would be easy for you to do in just one day all the work you need to do, and have enough to last you a year, idle though you would be.

Perhaps we would have done a lot of sailing on the wine-dark seas. So people need punishing for the sympathetic crimes of Prometheus.… Read the rest

Kalam the Incorrigible as a Moral Good

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I’ve previously complained that the Kalam Cosmological Argument is drivel, but a recent video reminded me that intellectual sophistication can arise from confronting drivel, because it helps expose more people to the tenuous, changing, and incomplete journey of modern science and philosophical interpretation/translation. I knew I was largely in alignment with modern science when I wrote that particular post (and others), but the video, considering the figures involved, provides additional compelling insights to push the viewer into thinking more carefully about the challenges and limits of our collective understanding of who we are, where we came from, and what it means to be here now.

I highly recommend it:

And what I think is most worth emphasizing and that may not be understood by laypeople and religious supplicants, or may not be internalized as deeply as it should be, includes:

  1. Our everyday experience and intuitions about similarly-sized matter are simply not applicable to quantum and relativistic scales, or to the implications of cosmological theories. “Causality” is one of those concepts. We see this in everything from the simple case of radioactive decay to contra-causal quantum experiments, and ultimately in the question of causation as applied to the universe itself.
  2. Science operates by applying metaphors, finding the limitations of those metaphors, filtering by empirical results, and then using the refined science as a new metaphor. Most of those metaphors are incompatible with everyday experience. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be so vexingly difficult to understand.
  3. Many philosophical worries about logical inconsistency are abstractly derived from everyday reasoning and may not apply to modern understandings of causality, space, and time.
  4. Humility about what we don’t know and effort to unravel it remains the best approach to our mysterious selves and the world.
… Read the rest

Intellectual Capital, Religion, Audiofools, and Irrational Poynting Vectors

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Twin New York-associated articles of note today. First, we have the New York Times with Ilana Horwitz of Tulane University on the topic of how religion helps working-class young people—especially boys—to better achieve after high school. This is part of the ongoing saga of better understanding the sagging social support network (“social capital”) that has been suggested to explain high rates of despair, opioid addiction, alcohol abuse, suicide, and even white supremacist ideation and Trumpism among working-class Americans. What is particularly interesting to me is that the same religious enhancement of educational attainment doesn’t apply to the children of college-educated professionals and the author notes that strong religious belief systems—especially among young women—may interfere with future decision-making by directing them towards traditional female careers and roles.

Meanwhile, Cornel West has a wide-ranging interview in The New Yorker where he repeatedly decries Harvard for becoming a spiritual wasteland of sorts, dedicated to the education of a professional-managerial class that lacks some elemental soul needed to translate ideas into public intellectual and social engagement:

That’s not just brother Trump, even though he’s a neo-Fascist one. He’s on the continuum with so much of the professional-managerial class in terms of their lack of accountability to working people and poor people. Once you have that kind of spiritual decay and moral decrepitude, man, then it’s just gangsterization on steroids, man. That’s where America’s headed.

So it seems many of the religious working-class college achievers are just working towards some kind of soulless professionalism. Without converting their intellectual achievements into activism, and by just focusing on jobs and further achievement, they are content to let the backslide towards authoritarianism continue apace. West sees a neoliberal hypocrisy at every turn, as well, and almost as toxic as the fascist urge.… Read the rest

The Art of War

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I was moved today by images and video of Ukrainian citizens taking up arms against Russian aggression. I contrasted those images with a drier, intellectualized stream of essays and opinion pieces from WaPo, NY Times, CNN, BBC, Atlantic, and others. I now know the history and conflicted consequences of NATO expansion, as well as how it was blocked in Georgia and now Ukraine by corrupted roadmaps for implementation. I expanded my understanding of Taiwan and colonial states’ self-determination after World War II. I read up on how Javelin missile systems work. I dipped into Honoré de Balzac’s “The Girl with the Golden Eyes” because, well, it was waiting for me. I bought Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H and watched half of it because Sally Kellerman died recently. It was all war, security, brutality, hopelessness, idealizations and global order, plus a layer cake of 19th-century Parisian capitalist critique wrapped up in interminable verbiage to resemble a short story (I stumbled along in French, truly, as well. It didn’t make it better.)

What was left to do?

Music, clearly. There must be perfect pieces and composers for this moment. First, we start with Ukraine itself, and Lysenko. Qobuz gives us Solmia Soroka and Arthur Greene’s Mykola Lysenko: Complete Music for Violin and Piano. Lysenko was an ethnomusicologist who specialized in Ukrainian folk music and represents the Romantic trends of his time, doing for Ukrainian fiddling what Brahms did for Hungary (cultural appropriation much?) or Dvořák and Smetana for Czech sensibilities.

But what of war, invasion, and resistance? We can start with Sibelius’s Finlandia because a day with Sibelius is always an epic adventure, and winter ups the ante. Finlandia served as an artistic attack on Russian censorship and russification, performed using alternative titles and lyrics.… Read the rest

The Evolution of Theological Commitments

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My wife studies pagan mythology, among other pursuits, and she recently undertook some of the Norse background in a far deeper way than my own shallow assemblage of role-playing references, fictional mentions, and Marvel movies. She happened to mention the other day that Christian chroniclers like Snorri Sturluson likely adapted the pre-existing mythos in order to achieve a syncretic outcome. Loki was demonized to create a dualist conflict. Ragnarök may have been created out of whole, fresh cloth in order to extinguish the pantheon and make way for the new religion.

John McKinnell studies the narratives that the Norse proselytizers used to achieve the conversion of the pagans, as well as the influence and outcomes of those people. There is a theological problem for them in terms of explaining the existence of the pagan deities that is largely solved by simply describing them as devils or as personifications of natural phenomena. They transmogrify from real to a netherworld nestled somewhere between mythic, poetic, and literal evils.

I had nearly simultaneously joined the Bart Ehrman Blog because of a post that got repeated in one of his podcasts I happened to catch. The post is from a guest contributor who uses scholarship from Mark Smith and others to detail a model of the transformation into monotheism from earlier Canaanite pantheons. In this model, during the Second Temple Period, the success of the god Marduk’s people over Yahweh’s tribes requires a theological reinterpretation in order to explain Yahweh’s defeat. How can YHWH be the greatest god under such circumstances? The answer is easy, though. Marduk is just a puppet of YHWH and the literal military victory is a divine punishment. YHWH remains supreme.… Read the rest

Gimmicky Nonfictional Fictional Futures

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Salman Rushdie’s new collection of essays, The Language of Truth, begins with an ecstatic celebration of the magical tales of old worlds—wonder tales as he would have it. As the foremost magical realist of the East in the West, Rushdie has thrived on collecting his own dreams against the literary trends of the times (realism/formalism/transgressivism/whateverism). Sage advice from a master: “Don’t write what you know unless it is really interesting” or just dream better dreams. Having myself drifted away from reading fiction in recent years (a known trend in the publishing industry) and towards more and more detailed nonfiction, from the mind-control capabilities of cat shit to the mathematical learning algorithms embedded in the universe, I am certainly guilty of exactly what Rushdie rails against (a damned philistine of sorts), though I am equally skeptical of the Knausgård-style auto-fiction that is recently idealized as a contemporary answer to the vexing question of what new literary hell we deserve.

Still, magical realism or Rushdie-an wonder tales are essentially gimmicks for conveying sometimes lofty (say the shaping of thinking by modernity in Gabriel García Márquez or the effects of colonialism in Rushdie’s own works; Devapriya Roy suggests all “global novels,” which is code for New York/American, are idealizations of liberalism that work towards world peace in some suffused sensibility), but also often trivial observations about ancient human traditions. Calling this a cornerstone of truth begs a deeper question about what truths are being exposed. Is it this universality of the desire for power or the vanity of men and women? Is it the threat imposed by female eroticism to the stability of society? Rushdie likes to think these are answered by these olden forms but a most modern mind begs for explanations of a different sort when trying to map them to our most modern experience of society.… Read the rest