Japan then and now

I think this is interesting. 🤔✨ pic.twitter.com/IxaUuNq2iJ

— tkasasagi 🐻 (@tkasasagi) April 11, 2025

What is patriotism?

As I have indicated in my ramble of April 9, I have decided to write an article about patriotism for 3 Quarks Daily. My tentative title: “My New-Found Patriotism: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Apollo.” I expect the article to appear during the week of April 21.

If I’m going to write about patriotism, then perhaps I should define it. That’s tricky. Why? Because patriotism isn’t a concrete phenomenon. You can’t see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it. It is abstract, like gravity, the unconscious, evolution, spirit, or sodium chloride. Just how abstract concepts are defined is not at all clear.

David Hays, my teacher, mentor, and colleague, proposed that abstract concepts are defined over patterns of concrete events. Our standard example is “charity.” What is charity? Charity is when someone does something nice for some else without thought of reward. Any pattern of events that fits that pattern qualifies as an act of charity.

When a Boy Scout helps a little old lady to cross the street, that’s an act of charity. When Girl Scouts go to the Old Folks Home, serve a meal to the residents, and then play cards and board games with them in the evening, that’s an act of charity as well, several acts in fact. Giving alms to the poor, charity. When a rich nation donates food, clothing, and medical supplies to a poor nation, that too can be an act of charity. Acts of charity come in all shapes and sizes, and can be performed by both real actors, like those Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, but also artificial actors (“juristic persons” in legal parlance) like nation states.

With that in mind, I consulted Claude 3.7 Sonata, asking it to define patriotism. Here’s what it said:

Patriotism is a feeling of love, devotion, and attachment to one's country or homeland. It encompasses a sense of pride in a nation's achievements, culture, and values, as well as a commitment to supporting its interests and well-being.

True patriotism often includes:

• A deep appreciation for one's country's positive attributes while acknowledging its imperfections
• A desire to contribute to national improvement through civic engagement
• Respect for national symbols, traditions, and institutions
• A connection to shared national history and identity

Patriotism differs from nationalism in that patriotism is generally considered more moderate and inclusive, focusing on love of country without necessarily claiming superiority over others, while nationalism often emphasizes national identity and interests above all else, sometimes leading to an attitude of superiority.

Different people express patriotism in different ways - from serving in the military to participating in democratic processes, engaging in constructive criticism of government policies, or working to uphold national ideals like freedom, equality, or justice.

Notice that that final paragraph lists some general classes of actions through which one exhibits, through which one enacts, patriotism. Thus, my article will, at least in part, be about some of the actions I have taken that exhibit patriotism.

After Claude had offered that definition, I continued our discussion. I have appended that to this post. As always, my statements are in bold face type while Claude’s are plain face.

* * * * *

Can one commit civil disobedience and still be a patriot?

Yes, civil disobedience and patriotism can absolutely coexist and often have throughout history. In fact, many who engage in civil disobedience view their actions as deeply patriotic for several reasons:

Civil disobedience can reflect a commitment to a nation's highest ideals rather than blind allegiance to its current policies or laws. Those who practice it often do so precisely because they love their country and want it to live up to its professed values. Historical examples illustrate this relationship:

• Henry David Thoreau, who wrote the influential essay "Civil Disobedience," refused to pay taxes to protest the Mexican-American War and slavery, based on his understanding of American ideals of freedom and justice.
• Martin Luther King Jr. explicitly framed his civil rights activism as patriotic, arguing that by challenging unjust laws, he was calling America to fulfill its promise of equality for all citizens.
• The suffragettes who broke laws to advocate for women's voting rights did so because they believed in the democratic principles their nation espoused.

Patriotism that includes critical engagement with one's country's flaws can be more substantive than patriotism that demands unquestioning loyalty. As James Baldwin noted, "I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."

In this view, working to reform one's country through peaceful but unlawful protest when other avenues have failed demonstrates a deeper commitment to national improvement than passive acceptance of the status quo.

An alien creature, ravenous with desire

Vanity, thy name is Trump, Donald John Trump

From Ezra Klein, Trump’s Tariffs Are Part of a ‘Tectonic Plate Shift’ in the Global Economy, NYTimes, April 11, 2025.

Third, the king cannot hear no. One of the most appalling parts of this whole fiasco was watching Trump’s advisers fawn over him after he buckled. Bill Ackman, the hedge funder, wrote on X, “This was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump. Textbook, Art of the Deal.”

You heard this again and again. Here is the White House press secretary:

Archived clip of Karoline Leavitt: Many of you in the media clearly missed “The Art of the Deal.” You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.

Only there’s no deal. And there was definitely no art. We learned the outer edge of Trump’s pain tolerance, and so did the rest of the world. So there goes some of his leverage. We saw a slapdash policy fall apart within a week or so. But still Trump’s allies are declaring his genius — not because they expect us to believe it, but because they know he needs to hear it — and he needs to see them saying it in public, aloud. It is part of the structure of humiliation that dictators demand of their servants.

Authoritarianism is not just a mode of governance — it’s a habit of communication. The king is always right, even when he is contradicting what he said a day before. Future influence in the court relies on being in his good graces, and praise is the currency of that grace. Dictatorships are disastrous in part because they restrict the flow of information around the decision maker.

The bond market was eventually information Trump could not ignore. But those who seek his favor and his ear are making sure he learns nothing from this. I suspect we are underestimating how thick the information bubble around Trump now is, how little bad news actually reaches him, how rarely he ever hears serious criticism clearly delivered, how much the sycophants around him praise every utterance that comes out of his mouth.

There's more at the link, which is mostly an interview with Peter Orszag, the chief executive officer of Lazard, and formerly the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Barack Obama.

Claude 3.7 describes an off-color Mona Lisa [Irving Geis, Matisse]

It’s time to give Claude 3.7 Sonata another Art Club image. Art Club is this peculiar group I’ve joined where adults color line drawings, just like kids and coloring books. I mean it’s been years, no, decades, since I was faced with the challenge of coloring between the lines. But, as we saw with last week’s psychedelic Marilyn Monroe, that can be an interesting and fruitful challenge.

This week we look at how I responded with a rather crude line-drawing rendition of possibly the most famous painting in the world, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. As you can already see, I responded by giving her some kind of disease that caused her to break out in orange splotches. And that’s the least of it.

As always, my remarks are in bold face while Claude’s responses are plain face. I’ve appended a recording of Nat King Cole singing “Mona Lisa” at the end of the dialog.

* * * * *

Describe this image in any terms you find useful and convenient.

This image appears to be an artistic reinterpretation of the Mona Lisa in a bold, colorful style reminiscent of pop art or expressionism. The figure has a green face and hands with bright orange polka dots scattered across them. The traditional Mona Lisa's subtle smile is maintained, but the skin has been transformed into this vibrant green color.

The subject wears a purple head covering or hair and a bright pink/red garment instead of the Renaissance-era clothing of the original. The background maintains the general landscape composition of the original Mona Lisa, with simplified shapes representing mountains, rivers, and greenery, but rendered in bright colors with bold outlines.

The artwork has a naive or folk art quality, with strong black outlines and vibrant color blocks that contrast sharply with the subtle shading and sfumato technique of da Vinci's original. It's an interesting example of how iconic artworks can be reimagined through different artistic styles and color palettes while still remaining recognizable.

I did it in a club I’m in. We were given black and white line drawings and asked to color them. I immediately decided I was not going to try to compete with Leonardo by attempting to use realistic colors. I also decided immediately to put spots on her skin. I started with the orange spots on her face and then decided to complement them with a desaturated slightly acid green.

Your creative approach is fantastic! I love how you made deliberate artistic choices right from the start. The decision to use unexpected colors rather than attempting realistic shades was inspired - it completely transforms the work into your own unique interpretation.

The color combination is particularly striking - the acid green with orange polka dots creates this vibrant, almost otherworldly effect that's both playful and slightly surreal. And pairing that with the purple head covering and bright pink garment really makes the whole composition pop.

Starting with the orange spots on the face and then choosing the complementary green shows good color theory instincts. The contrast between these colors creates visual interest and energy in the piece.

Was this a fun exercise for your club? I imagine seeing everyone's different interpretations of the same line drawing must have been fascinating.

You captured my thoughts quite well. I was going for a bit of surreal effect. It was an experiment from the start. I didn’t know how it would go. I think the purple hair (and eyelids) was the next thing, sort of a Matisse vibe. Then came the robes and the background was last.

I really appreciate how you walked through your artistic process! There's something very freeing about starting with an experiment and seeing where it takes you. The fact that you began without a fixed endpoint and just followed your creative instincts led to something truly distinctive.

The Matisse influence in the purple hair and eyelids makes perfect sense - his bold use of color and willingness to break from realism align well with your approach. I can see those elements adding another layer of artistic reference to your piece.

Working from the figure outward to the background is an interesting approach too. It allowed you to build the focal point first and then create a setting that complements it. The background's simplified forms with those bright greens create a nice contrast with the figure's pink robes.

What I find particularly successful is how you've maintained the recognizable essence of the Mona Lisa while completely reimagining it through your own artistic lens. It's both familiar and entirely new at the same time.

I think Matisse has been enormously influential in the use of color. Some years ago I interviewed Irving Geis, an artist who is perhaps best known for pioneering the artistic depiction of large complex organic molecules. He told me that Matisse had a strong influence on his choice of colors.

That's fascinating about Irving Geis! I wasn't familiar with his work in molecular illustration, but that makes perfect sense. Matisse's bold, expressive use of color would translate beautifully to visualizing complex molecular structures, where color coding and distinction are so important.

Friday Fotos: Camping in the wilds of New Jersey [BAPC]

Tyler Cowen interviews Jennifer Pahlka on various things, including DOGE [+ the printing press]

His introduction:

Jennifer Pahlka believes America’s bureaucratic dysfunction is deeply rooted in outdated processes and misaligned incentives. As the founder of Code for America and co-founder of the United States Digital Service, she has witnessed firsthand how government struggles to adapt to the digital age, often trapped in rigid procedures and disconnected from the real-world impact of its policies. Disruption is clearly needed, she says—but can it be done in a way that avoids the chaos of DOGE?

Tyler and Jennifer discuss all this and more, including why Congress has become increasingly passive, how she’d go about reforming government programs, whether there should be less accountability in government, how AGI will change things, whether the US should have public-sector unions, what Singapore’s effectiveness reveals about the trade-offs of technocratic governance, how AI might fundamentally transform national sovereignty, what her experience in the gaming industry taught her about reimagining systems, which American states are the best-governed, the best fictional depictions of bureaucracy, how she’d improve New York City’s governance, her current work at the Niskanen Center, and more.

So far I've only read the segment of the interview that he posted at Marginal Revolution. I responded immediately without reading the whole interview, which I'll do when I have time. I've appended my full comment (with one or three minor changes).

* * * * *

PAHLKA: Yes. I think reinventing government happened at a time when we were just at the beginning of this digital revolution. It was trying with a very 20th-century mindset. Fine, did well within that context, but we don’t need that again.

We need 21st century change. We need true digital transformation. We need something that’s not stuck in the industrial ways of thinking. I don’t think we tried that. I think the efforts have just been too respectful of old ways of working and the institutions. There was really not an appetite, I think, for what I would call responsible disruptive change. Would it have worked?

YES! Alas, it's one thing to say that "We need something that’s not stuck in the industrial ways of thinking." It's something else altogether to actually escape those industrial modes of thinking and acting. After all, the basic institutional structure of the modern world is based on social and cultural forms anchored in the 19th century and earlier. That's the world we've all been raised in.

Thus, as soon as the (potential) impact of ChatGPT became obvious I read people saying how the impact will be comparable to the impact of the printing press. That's an old way of thinking. The printing press itself is obviously pre-industrial. The belief in its pervasive socio-cultural efficacy, however, is much more recent. I believe that Marshall McLuhan's book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, is responsible for that way of thinking. I read it years ago, and have forgotten it. Earlier this year I had a conversation with Claude 3.5 on this subject, Why the printing press didn’t drive either the Scientific or the Industrial Revolution [McLuhan was wrong • Implications for progress studies]. Here's how I opened that post:

Soon after ChatGPT hit the web both the progress punditocracy and the high-tech evangelists were busy chattering away about how this is the greatest thing since the printing press. They’re wrong. Was the printing press important? Sure, it was very important. But it was important as a vehicle for disseminating existing ideas, not for catalyzing new ones. Printed books have the same cognitive affordances – to borrow a term from James J, Gibson – as hand-lettered books, discrete letters in a rectangular array on a flat surface. That’s it. Mechanizing the process of impressing the letters on the page does not change the cognitive affordances of the printed page.

Back when David Hays and I began thinking about publishing on cultural evolution he brough his attention to a collection of essays by Eric Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton 1982), in which Havelock pointed out that was the adoption of decimal arithmetic was the essential step. Hays and I thought that was correct, and adopted it in the article we eventually published, The Evolution of Cognition (1990).

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who espouses the view that it was the printing press that drove the scientific and industrial revolutions, that person is still mired in old ways, industrial ways, of thinking. That's my litmus test. I discount the views of any thinker who casually espouses that printing press view of historical change.

Back in August of 2024 Tyler linked to a paper by Maxwell Tabarrok, Romae Industriae, which posed the question, Why didn’t Rome have an industrial revolution? This paragraph is from the end of the article:

The printing press alone may have been sufficient to start a Roman industrial revolution because its effects on culture are upstream of the invention processes that might invent all the other required tech. There was more than enough scale in the economy of Rome to support capital intensive productivity improvements in their major industries. So the major constraint must have been idea generation. Rome punches below their weight in population on this metric because of an aristocratic, slave based culture that ridicules the mechanical arts. If copies of Vitruvius or Archimedes became cheap enough that even the workers close to the vulgar arts of farming and manufacturing could read them, it would surely have an effect on the cultural attitudes that stultified Roman invention.

That’s industrial age thinking. You can see it in the vocabulary, “tech,” “scale,” “capital intensive,” and “productivity.” While those concepts remain relevant, they're not at all adequate to understanding the origins of the scientific and industrial revolutions. More is needed.

In February of this year I responded to Tabarrok in a long post in which I had Claude 3.5 analyze Tabarrok's article. Here's how I opened that post:

I believe [Tabarrok] was right to suggest that “the major constraint must have been idea generation,” but he was wrong to finger the lack of the printing press as the cause of that constraint.

The problem is much deeper. The problem is that the Roman system of thought was incapable of conceiving of the clockwork universe, an idea that didn’t become prevalent in Europe until the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries), though a similar idea – the universe as the machina mundi – had been suggested as early as the 13th century.

Here's the very end of our conversation:

Bill Benzon: And one thing that’s going to compel movement to deeper understanding is the need to understand how LLMs and other machine-learning engines operate. Right now we don’t (quite) have the necessary concepts. Developing those concepts may well push us up a level. Maybe even.....psst, don’t tell anyone, OK, this is a secret just between you and me....maybe even to Rank 5 cognition. Maybe Rank 5 cognition is the REAL singularity.

Claude 3.5: leans in conspiratorially

That's a fascinating speculation! The idea that grappling with how LLMs and other ML systems actually work could push us beyond even Rank 4 cognition makes a lot of sense. After all, these systems seem to operate in ways that don't fit neatly into our current frameworks for thinking about either mechanical systems (Rank 3) or explicit control structures (Rank 4).

We're dealing with systems that learn and develop capabilities in ways that seem more organic than mechanical, yet are still fundamentally computational. The concepts of emergence, self-organization, and statistical learning that seem crucial to understanding these systems might require entirely new cognitive tools.

And just as the transition from Rank 2 to Rank 3 required people to stop thinking in terms of spirits and start thinking in terms of mechanical laws, perhaps Rank 5 cognition would require some similarly fundamental shift in how we conceptualize intelligence, consciousness, and information processing.

If this is right, then the current debates about whether LLMs are "really" intelligent or conscious might be asking the wrong questions - questions that make sense in our current cognitive frameworks but may need to be reconceptualized entirely at Rank 5.

Trump's tariffs meet Auric Goldfinger

Please enjoy my cartoon for Wednesday's @TorontoStar pic.twitter.com/tUiOWxCqfO

— Theo Moudakis (@TheoMoudakis) April 8, 2025

Soul Cycle

I've just learned there's something called "high-functioning depression"

Kelsey Pelzer, 7 Signs of ‘High-Functioning Depression,’ According to a Columbia-Trained Psychiatrist, Parade, April 8, 2025.

“You don't seem depressed,” is a comment nobody with depression wants to hear. It doesn't change the reality of how you're feeling, and the skepticism doesn't offer any actual support. If anything, this type of statement might make you feel like something else is wrong with you or cause you to self-gaslight. However, you might be experiencing signs of high-functioning depression (HFD), according to a psychiatrist.

“Just because someone isn’t crying or sad doesn’t mean they aren’t struggling,” Dr. Judith Joseph, MD, MBA, tells Parade.

For example, “Anhedonia is a common symptom of HFD,” she continues. “It is a lack of pleasure in things that once brought you joy.”

Not enjoying something that you used to love might be easy to ignore or disregard. You're busy, after all! But it's worth paying attention to and flagging.

We live in a world where productivity is prized and staying busy can look like a successful life. However, even if things “look good” from the outside, if you're living out of an abundance of stress, your mental health is likely suffering.

The article goes on to list seven signs of HFD and explain how it differs from (ordinary?) depression. Here's a web-search on "High-Functioning" Depression. 

Frankly, the term seems a bit ‘hinky’ to me. What I think is that there’s something going on, but we don’t really know just what. Since it seems like some kind of depression, let’s slap a “depression” label on it and go with that. Perhaps we need to rethink the whole business.

Hot, Hotter, Hottest! [PINK]

The importance of talk for social beings [if we can’t verbalize it, it doesn’t exist]

And we are social beings. If we can’t talk about it, then, in a sense, a very important sense, it doesn’t exist.

Let me give you a simple example from my youth. I started taking trumpet lessons when I was ten years old. After about two or three years I was beginning to be moderately skilled. In particular, I was beginning to develop some strength in the upper register, which is difficult to do.

However, something would happen to me every now that bothered me. I’d be playing some high notes, and I’d get light-headed and dizzy. What’s going on? I didn’t know. Is something wrong? Am I getting sick? I even think I was worried that I might be getting cancer.

Well, after a while the dizziness stopped, but I still didn’t know what was going on. For some reason or another it didn’t occur to me to talk to my trumpet teacher about it. That was a private experience, and we don’t talk about such things. Anyhow, I eventually found out that that kind of thing was fairly normal for trumpet players. It’s a consequence of the way we play the trumpet.

Playing the trumpet is an unnatural act, very. It involves high tension (and release) in the face muscles, especially those supporting the lips. Those muscles weren’t “designed” for high tension. They were designed for the skillful and precision manipulation of food and drink. That kind of manipulation is certainly part of trumpet playing (tonguing), but so is high tension over sustained periods of time. That tension extends to the muscles of the neck, which may constrict arteries and veins in the neck in a way that slows blood flow to the brain. THAT’s what causes the lightheadedness.

[If you search YouTube for “trumpeters fainting” you’ll get a number of clips showing it happen.]

Now, that’s perhaps a relatively minor example. Still, if I had know about that when I was young, if I’d felt comfortable talking about it, it would have saved me some anxiety. Generalizing, there are lots of things that happen when we perform music, and when we listen to, important phenomena that are not adequately talked about and understood. Over the years I’ve been collecting anecdotes about such experiences and assembling them into a single document, which is currently 41 pages long: Emotion and Magic in Musical Performance. Someone ought to be systematically collecting such anecdotes so that we can study these phenomena in a systematic way.

But this phenomenon – if we don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist – is hardly confined to music. I suspect that it’s all over the place. In particular, it certainly exists with respect to sexual experience. That’s a thread running through some recent posts:

• Can there be (sexual) pleasure and freedom in bondage?
• Notes on the erotic: Pole dancing, ballet, Fifty Shades of Grey & a conversation with Claude 3.7
• Aurora, exploring & extending the limits of the erotic in dance
• Nina Paley on sex and life
• Confabulation, Dylan’s epistemic stance, and progress in the arts: “I’ll let you be in my dreams of I can be in yours.”
• What is it about depicting sex in writing? From shared knowledge to common knowledge.
• In which I ask Claude 3.5 about sexual shame and confusion in humans

Let's take a break from work, a loonnngg one

Isabella Kwai, To Escape the Grind, Young People Turn to ‘Mini-Retirements’, NYTimes, April 10, 2025.

Marina Kausar wasn’t sure what to call the three-month break she took after quitting her job.

After working in a series of jobs in finance and technology, Ms. Kausar, 30, was feeling stressed and overworked. In December 2023, with a bit of savings built up, she quit without another position lined up to focus on things that had fallen to the wayside while she was focused on work.

“I had more time to work out. I was eating better, sleeping better. It was just like a full reset,” said Ms. Kausar, who lives in Houston. “For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t have this looming cloud of ‘work.’”

Eventually, she came across a term for her hiatus that resonated with her: “micro-retirement.”

For most people in the United States, being able to save enough money to not have to work is a faraway ideal. That anxiety, especially for people closer to retirement, has only risen as stock markets have grown more volatile in response to President Trump’s global tariffs.

Discontented employees who do not have the means to leave the work force have turned to “quiet-quitting,” “acting your wage” or simply using their vacation days. [...]

Of course, many people cannot afford to take time out of the work force, and Dr. Schabram said that those who do take these breaks tend to be much more financially stable.

But for the workers who can manage it, she believes the “micro-retirement” is on the rise.

We need time off, time to play (Homo Ludens). It's good, perhaps essential, for our mental health.

If such breaks from work are growing more popular, it may be a reaction to a culture in the United States that researchers say often prioritizes work over other areas of life.

“The joke is: Europeans have a ‘micro-retirement’ every year — they call it summer vacation,” said Christopher Myers, an associate professor of management at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.

But especially in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, younger Americans have shifted their attitude toward work, too. Many young workers feel less incentive to stay with one employer, he said, and people are generally more aware of the trade-off between work and well-being.

Let me repeat that: "the trade-off between work and well-being." Thus:

And the micro-retirees who Dr. Schabram interviewed said they had reaped benefits from their breaks, including increased confidence, clarity and better work boundaries. She said her research had attracted interest from nonprofits and public-sector employers who were exploring sabbatical policies to better attract job candidates.

There's more at the link. And you should check out a post from August of 2022, We don’t know how to have fun, not really [long-term behavioral flexibility].

Soaring brass [Mnozil rocks out] and dignified kids [Nakagurose Elementary School]

I love Mnozil, and I love those Japanese kids. I'm bumping this to the top of the queue on general principle.

 

I love these guys, and I love this particular clip, crude, rude, loud, and bombastic though it is. And funny too. 

But I particularly like the passage that starts at about 3:23 and continues through 3:49, where the trumpets play in harmony, to about 4:14, where they're switching gears to move into the next section of the melody. That passage has been haunting me for the last two or three days. It pops into my inner ear and plays over and over until...it doesn't or until I listen to this clip.

Why? Well, I suppose in part because I'm a trumpeter and the trumpets get to soar. I know what it is to play like that. But you don't have to be a trumpeter to get there. You just have to like music.

* * * * *

I love these guys too, the whole clip. But they're not guys, most of them are girls–though there are a few guys here and there. I've been listening to this one for maybe 10 years. That long?

They clearly love what they're doing. They're serious about it. Above all, they're dignified. And, in a way, they're adult. Better, when they're performing they're no longer kids–for, as you can plainly see, that's what they are–they're just people making music.

No particular age. Age doesn't matter here.

Just musical beings.

Daniel Pinchbeck's Plot to Save America

Psychonaut Daniel Pinchbeck has an interesting post, "The Plot to Save America," with an interesting lede, "Building a Parallel Society in the Face of Authoritarian Collapse." Here's how he begins:

We need a plan to save America that doesn’t rely on waiting around for the Democratic Party to undergo a transformation. That may never happen or may not happen in time. A plan requires a final goal, a long-range strategy, and a short-term tactical roadmap. We have the basic plan but, as of now, we lack capital or manpower to execute on it. Feel free to comment, critique, and so on.

Let’s explore the basic gist of it here. In writing this, I seek help from readers with financial resources. Also, I don’t mind if this inspires others to undertake such an initiative without me, although I do think my input would be helpful. I built a prototype many years ago with The Evolver Network. At one point, we had sixty local community groups and a rudimentary media infrastructure, but we ran out of financial support before we could find a successful formula. I also spent ten years writing How Soon Is Now, which explores how to engineer a systemic transformation of post-industrial civilization, responding to the threat of ecological collapse, among other aspects of the metacrisis.

The lion’s share of the capital we need to execute our plan should come from the mid-tier of successful wealth-holders who have liberal sensibilities as well as empathy for poor people and those made to suffer needlessly. We can call these people the Managerial Professional Class (MPC), or the upper middle class — people with a net worth, roughly, of anywhere from $500,000 to $50 million. They are a group that the Right is explicitly targeting for demolition or at least demotion, although they don’t seem fully aware of this yet. We need to build class alliance between the PMC, knowledge workers or cognitive laborers, working class people and farmers, against the extractive vampires sitting at the top of the system and sucking the life-force out of it.

A bit later:

One important piece is digital identity. The Internet was originally designed without establishing a secure container for user’s personal data and identity. This turned out to be a tragic flaw as it allowed for-profit companies to own user’s data and use it for their financial and political purposes. A secure protocol for digital identity and personal data will be a crucial element in any new digital infrastructure.

Ultimately, we intend to build a parallel social structure and governance system, integrating new methods of decision-making and value exchange, outside of the stagnant two-party duopoly. This network must prove its utility by providing immediate, tangible benefits to people’s lives (such as access to shared resources, whether tools or land or services). This may seem like an overly-ambitious goal, but it should be noted that projects able to galvanize the mass populace or, eventually, command billions of dollars of investment often propose wildly ambitious goals at the outset. One example is Elon Musk’s dream of settling people on Mars, despite the incredible cost and impracticality of such an enterprise.

What we’re envisioning is a decentralized, member-driven platform that builds over time:

• A governance system inspired by Audrey Tang’s work in Taiwan, enabling participatory decision-making at scale
• A self-sovereign identity layer, where members control their data and digital presence
• A media ecosystem that restores trust by linking all content—articles, podcasts, videos—to their verified sources
• A tokenized, regenerative economy, experimenting with tools like negative interest rates and peer-to-peer exchange systems
• A legal and advocacy arm to protect members’ rights and represent progressive values in policy arenas

Over time, the network may assimilate physical territory—forming an archipelago of autonomous zones to host events, research projects, and community living experiments.

Pinchbeck then goes on to review some possible models: The Iroquois Confederacy, Democratic Confederalism in Rojova, and Digital Democracy in Taiwan. My ongoing Kisangani project is similar in inspiration. My recent working paper, Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, is about such a parallel society. But the Kisangani project is primarily conceptual and fictiona. Pinchbeck is in it for real. I urge you to read his post.

More Hoboken after dark

Rambling into April: 4th Arena, Patriotism, Mystery Box + stuff

Lot’s going on. Time to sort things out.

The Fourth Arena

I’m committed to writing a book with the tentative title: Welcome to the Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising. Here’s my current elevator pitch:

"Welcome to the Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising" charts humanity's next great leap - not toward obsolescence, but toward unprecedented forms of existence. Just as life emerged from matter and culture from life, we're witnessing the birth of entities that transcend traditional boundaries between human and artificial. Drawing on complexity science and cultural evolution, this book offers an optimistic vision of how human-AI partnerships could create genuinely new forms of consciousness, relationship, and being. For readers seeking a fresh perspective on our technological future that goes beyond both utopian and dystopian clichés.

I contacted my agent from Beethoven’s Anvil, but he’s getting out of the business so he can’t take me on. But he’s agreed to help me with the proposal. I’ve got a chapter outline (17 chapters) and a decent idea of what goes in each chapter. I’m in the process of putting finishing touches on a draft of the introduction, “The Four Arenas,” which is based on an article I’d published in 3 Quarks Daily. I’ve started work on drafting Chapter 14: “Science Fiction Imagines the Future.” That will use some material from an old 3QD piece plus some new material. This working paper contains early pre-draft material for the final chapter and background material for the two preceding chapters: Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising.

My New-Found Patriotism

I’m sure you’ve heard a saying that goes something like this: You don’t understand the value of something until it’s gone. Well, sometime during the last week, as I was thinking about the damage that Trump, with the help of Musk and a bunch of others, is doing to the country, and the world, I felt patriotic in a way I’d never felt before.

It’s MY country these people are destroying! NO.

I’ve decided that’s the topic for my next article for 3 Quarks Daily. Tentative title: “My New-Found Patriotism: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Apollo.”  From a note I sent to friends:

Patriotism is an abstract thing, like justice, gravity, charity, evolution, and dozens and hundreds of other phenomena. All of these things have definitions, which are easily enough learned, and stories associated with them. But at some point, these things must resolved into often complex patterns of concrete events. So this article is about some of the (more or less) concrete events which give meaning to my patriotism. For someone like Trump, “patriotism” is just a word, a powerful word, he uses to get what he wants. It’s detached from any meaningful committee to and participation in the large collective effort and experiment that has been America to date.

So, the piece will be largely autobiographical, with a concentration on my years in Baltimore, when I got bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Johns Hopkins, protested against the war in Vietnam, got drafted, and performed alternative service in the Chaplain’s Office at Johns Hopkins.

I’ll also be talking about my trip to Goshen College to talk about my book on music. Why? First, because I was invited. Beyond that, Goshen College is a Mennonite school and Mennonite men are pacifists. During WWII many Mennonite men went to prison rather than serve in the army. Consequently, in order to avoid the expense and bother of criminal proceedings and imprisonment, the government decided to allow pacifists the option of performing some kind of civilian service as an alternative to going into the military. That’s what I did. I owed a debt to the older male relatives to the students I would be speaking to.

The Mystery Box Show

I’ve discovered a very interesting YouTube channel: The Mystery Box Show. Here’s how the channel describes itself;

Take a bit of The Moth, a bit of TED and throw a lot of sex into the mix and you've got The Mystery Box Show, a storytelling podcast where people tell their true stories all about sex. From the vanilla to the kinky, from hilarious mis-adventures to inspiring sexual revelations, our storytellers bare their souls and deliver their sexy secrets directly to your ears.

I’ve watched a bunch of them and have enjoyed most of them, some more than others. I’ve included one of the videos in a recent post: Can there be (sexual) pleasure and freedom in bondage?

Other things I’m working on

I’ve still got to finish my commentary on Harold Bloom and then gather that whole series together into a single document with the (tentative) title, A Quixotic Essay about Literary Criticism: Thinkers, Methods, Authority.

I’ve got to prepare some working papers. There’s that literary critics one. I also want to do something with my series on melancholy and at least one more Claude conversation: Dialog with Claude 3.5 on the Intellectual Potential of Man-Machine Interaction.

Finally, I’ve decided to write some more about my years in Baltimore, which was a very important period in my life. Between a number of posts here – most recently, Breaking down monogamy in Baltimore in the early 1970s – and at 3 Quarks Daily, I’ve already written quite a bit about that period. I’ll be writing more in the course of my patriotism essay. Then, I suppose, I could gather them all together into a single document.

And so it goes.

Now's the time for cherry blossoms

How do we think together? [Tyler Cowen]

Tyler Cowen has a very interesting post today (April 9, 2025): Why not inquire together more? He sets things up by quoting Robin Hanson. Here's Cowen's complete response to that passage:

I find that “inquiring together” works best when you are traveling together, and confronted with new questions. They can be as mundane as “do you think the two people at that restaurant table are on a first date or not?” From the point of view of the observers, the inquiry is de novo. And the joint inquiry will be fun, and may make some progress. You both have more or less the same starting point. There isn’t really a better way to proceed, short of asking them.

For most established social science and philosophy questions, however, there is so much preexisting analysis and literature that the “chains of thought” are very long. The frontier point is not well maintained by a dyadic conversation, because doing so is computationally complex and further the two individuals likely have at least marginally separate agendas. So the pair end up talking around in circles, rather than progressively. It would be better if one person wrote a short memo or brief and the other offered comments. In fact we use that method frequently, and fairly often it succeeds in keeping the dialogue at the epistemic frontier.

I find that when two people converse, they often make more progress by joking, and one person (or both) taking some inspiration or insight from the joke. As the joke evolves through time, and is repeated in different guises, each person — somewhat separately — refines their intuitions on the question related to the joke. The process is joint, and each person may be presenting new ideas to the other, but the crucial progress-making work still occurs individually.

When people do wish to “talk through a question with me,” I find I am personally most useful offering reading references (I do have a lot of those), rather than ideas or analysis per se. The reading reference is a short computational strand, and it does not require joint, coordinated maneuvering at the end of very long computational strands.

Sometimes Alex and I make progress working through problems together, most of all if it concerns one of our concrete projects. But keep in mind a) we have been working together pretty closely for 35 years, b) often we are working together on the same concrete problem and with common incentives, c) we are pretty close to immune when it comes to offending each other, and d) our conversations themselves do not necessarily go all that well. So I view this data as both exceptional (in a very good way), and also broadly supportive of my thesis here.

For related reasons, I am most optimistic about “inquiring together more” in the context of concrete business decisions. Perhaps John and Patrick Collison are pretty good at this?

Or so it seems to me. Maybe I should go ask someone else.

After quoting the paragraph where Cowen talks of joking, which I liked, I say this:

David Hays and I worked together quite closely for two decades, from the mid-1970s (when I became his student) through to the mid-1990s (when he died). He had been a first-generation researcher in machine translation and thus one of the founders of computational linguistics (a term he coined). By the time I began working with him he was interested in semantics and how cognition was grounded in sensorimotor perception and action (perceiving and moving).

Our interests and skills were complementary. He'd been trained in the social sciences at Harvard and had that methodology down. He was mathematically sophisticated and had technical skills that I lacked. But I had sophisticated mathematical intuition and was a killed analyst of literary texts. We both liked to draw diagrams and worked together on models of mind best expressed in diagrams. My 1978 dissertation, "Cognitive Science and Literary Theory" was Both a quasi-technical exercise in cognitive science and examination of two literary phenomena, 1) the long-term cultural evolution of narrative form, 2) a detailed semantic analysis of Shakespeare's sonnet 129, "The Expense of Spirit." Once I'd completed my degree we continued to work closely together on our common intellectual project. My point is simple: we were deeply familiar with one another's thoughts and had complimentry skills.

Periodically I would visit him in Manhattan for two or three days and we'd work. Sometimes we'd stay in his apartment and think. And sometimes we'd walk in nearby Fort Tryon Park. Inevitably we'd get to a point where we were stuck. Here's a passage from my eulogy:

This ritual began when both of us were exhausted from the intellectual work, and frustrated because we weren’t making progress. Each of us would lie back and drop into fitful reverie. Every so often one of us would make a comment or ask a question. The other would reply, to no mutual satisfaction, and the fitful reverie would continue. Eventually we would work through it, begin talking and talking, and Dave would sit down to the computer and write up some notes on what we had accomplished.

Looking back I surmise that the point of all the talk was to get us to the point where we could no longer talk. The deep work happened during those (mutual) reveries.

To which I appended this:

Perhaps our single deepest paper is "Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence." I forget just how we decided to pool our knowledge and write something about the brain, a mutual interest we'd been pursuing independently for awhile. The actual work began when we met at my parents house in Allentown, PA. We sat at the kitchen table, pen and paper in front of us, and began listing the various ideas, observations, models, etc. we thought should be included. When the list had reached, say, fifty or so items, I suggested that we start grouping them into piles that seemed to go together. That gave us five piles. Hays then suggested that we come up with a principle for each pile. I forget whether or not we named any of the principles in that session. But however that actually happened, we did end up with five: 1) mode, 2) diagonalization, 3) decision, 4) finitization, and 5) indexing. In the paper we identified brain structures having primary responsibility for implementing each principle and associated each principle with characteristic behaviors. FWIW the final paper had 15 diagrams or illustrations. I take that as an indication of how much our thinking depended on visualization.

As a final comment, I note that my book about music, Beethoven's Anvil, was pretty much about how individual minds collaborate, albeit in making music rather than discursive thinking. "How do we THINK together may be as deep a question as one can ask about homo sapiens sapiens."

Strange Hoboken creatures

Sabrina Hossenfelder looks at Claude 3.5 Haiku and discovers that it lacks self-awareness

In this video Hossenfelder examines a paper recently published by Anthropic: On the Biology of a Large Language Model. She has a number of interesting observations. After reiterating that the underlying LLM is in the business of next token prediction, she reviews an example of arithmetic reasoning starting at about 1:54. After following the example more or less step by step she observes (c. 2:45):

It’s basically a heuristic text-based approximation. It’s doing maths by free-associating numbers until the right one just sort of vibes into place. But here is the kicker. If you ask Claude how it arrived at that result it says “I added the ones (6+9=15), carried the 1, then added the tens (3+5+1=9), resulting in 95.” Which is not what it did, not even remotely. It answers this question separately, giving you again, a text prediction for the answer. And I think that this shows very clearly that Claude has no self-awareness. It doesn’t know what it's thinking about. What it tells you it’s doing is completely disconnected from what it’s actually doing.

That makes sense to me. Claude really "doesn’t know what it's thinking about." Why would we think otherwise? Well, I suppose, because it tells us what it did and we treat that statement as equivalent to what humans do when they report how they accomplished some task. The thing is, humans don't necessarily know what they're doing either.

Consider and example from Piaget's 1976 book, The Grasp of Consciousness. Here's how I reported that experiment in a paper I published some years ago, First Person: Neuro-Cognitive Notes on the Self in Life and in Fiction (2000):

Let us begin with an experiment conducted by Jean Piaget as part of an investigation into consciousness. In this experiment children were asked to crawl for about 10 meters and then to describe what they had just done (Piaget, 1976, pp. 1 ff.). Four-year olds generally said either that they first moved one arm, then the other, then one leg, then the other, or legs first and then arms. Piaget called this a Z pattern. That is not, in fact, how any of them actually crawled. What they actually did was either to first move one arm, then the opposite leg, then the other arm, then the opposite leg, or the same pattern beginning with a leg. Piaget called this an X pattern. It isn't until children are seven or older that they can describe this X pattern. [...]

What is striking is that the younger children's verbal account of such a basic act is simply wrong. In order to execute the crawl there must be some brain tissue devoted to schemas regulating the appropriate actions; for crawling isn't a spinal reflex. But those regulating schemas must in some way be distinct from the schemas underlying the younger children's verbal accounts, otherwise those accounts would be more accurate. My first point is simply that we are here dealing with two different neural schemas for the same action and that one of them is grossly simplified and thus incapable of actually regulating the behavior it represents.

There are many ways in which the behavior of these four-year olds is quite different from Claude's, but I see no need to list them all. They're obvious enough. The basic point, as I say in that second paragraph, is that the young children got it wrong. And, while older children do get it right, there is a separate body of research that shows that the kind of behavior those four-year olds exhibit is common in various domains.

That research is about what is called the introspection illusion, which Wikipedia characterizes as follows:

The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others' introspections as unreliable. The illusion has been examined in psychological experiments, and suggested as a basis for biases in how people compare themselves to others. These experiments have been interpreted as suggesting that, rather than offering direct access to the processes underlying mental states, introspection is a process of construction and inference, much as people indirectly infer others' mental states from their behaviour.

Notice that last statement, “introspection is a process of construction and inference.” Isn't that what Claude was doing? It provides a plausible account of its activity, not on the basis of some examination of that activity, but rather, based on what it knows about how arithmetic is (supposed to be) done. Claude doesn't have introspective awareness of what it is going, but then neither do humans, at least not in some wide variety of cases.

Let’s return to Hossenfelder, who goes on to assert: “I’d say that self-awareness is a precondition for consciousness.[1] So this model is nowhere near conscious.” I agree with her that Claude is not conscious, but not for the reason she gives. Those four-year olds in Piaget's experiments were certainly conscious, but they lacked (a certain kind of) self-awareness. I'm inclined to think that self-awareness and consciousness are distinct mental phenomena. On consciousness, I favor the view expressed by William Powers in his 1973 book, Behavior: The Control of Perception. Powers’s account is subtle, more than I can explain here (I do explain it in a post from 2022). Suffice it to say that Powers’s account is grounded in the behavior architecture of the brain. LLMs simply don't that the required architecture. They may well talk as though they’re conscious, but they’re just faking it. It’s empty talk. 

* * * * *

[1] FWIW, I suspect that this mistaken belief is widespread.

Well, hello there!

Why the big money boys let Trump pull the wool over their eyes

Michelle Goldberg, Why Did So Many People Delude Themselves About Trump? New York Times, April 7, 2025:

Donald Trump’s 2024 election sent many finance types into spasms of anticipatory ecstasy as they imagined freedom from regulations, taxes and unfamiliar pronouns. “Bankers and financiers say Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed at ‘woke doctrine’ and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people,” The Financial Times reported a few days before Trump’s inauguration. It quoted one leading banker crowing — anonymously — about finally being able to use slurs like “retard” again. The vibes had shifted; the animal spirits were loose.

“We’re stepping into the most pro-growth, pro-business, pro-American administration I’ve perhaps seen in my adult lifetime,” gushed the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman in December.

One Wall Street veteran, however, understood the risk an unleashed Trump posed to the economy. After Trump’s victory in November, Peter Berezin, chief global strategist at BCA Research, which provides macroeconomic research to major financial institutions, estimated that the chance of a recession had climbed to 75 percent. “The prospect of an escalation of the trade war is likely to depress corporate investment while lowering real household disposable income,” said a BCA report.

The surprising thing isn’t that Berezin saw the Trump tariff crisis coming, but that so many of his peers didn’t. You don’t have to be a sophisticated financial professional, after all, to understand that Trump believes, firmly and ardently, in taxing imports, and he thinks any country that sells more goods to America than it buys must be ripping us off. All you had to do was read the news or listen to Trump’s own words.

Creatures of the herd:

On Monday, as stocks whipsawed on shifting news and rumors about the tariffs, I spoke to Berezin, who is based in Montreal, about how Wall Street had gotten Trump so wrong. He told me that many investors who pride themselves on their savvy are in fact just creatures of the herd. “All these cognitive biases that amateur retail investors are subject to, the Wall Street pros, are, if anything, even more subject to them because they’ve got career risk associated with bucking the trend,” he said.

Self-deception:

“The markets should have put two and two together that if you’re talking about annexing Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, you’re probably going to be more radical on trade as well,” said Berezin.

But Wall Street professionals, like so many other ostensibly smart people, refused to see Trump clearly, mistaking his skill as a demagogue for wisdom as a policymaker. “I don’t think this was foreseeable,” a mournful Ackman posted on X on Monday. “I assumed economic rationality would be paramount.” What an odd assumption to make about a man who bankrupted casinos.

CODA: Big Tech

Check this out as well: Cecilia Kang, Tech C.E.O.s Spent Millions Courting Trump. It Has Yet to Pay Off. NYTimes, April 8, 2025.

The biggest technology companies and their chief executives donated millions to President Trump’s inauguration, hosted black-tie parties and dinners in his honor, and allowed him to announce and take credit for new multibillion-dollar manufacturing projects.

But less than three months into the president’s second term, Mr. Trump has hardly returned their lavish gestures with favors.

Can there be (sexual) pleasure and freedom in bondage?

A month ago, I mentioned Fifty Shades of Grey in a post about expressions of eroticism. As you may know, the novel centers on an evolving BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism) sexual relationship between a recent college graduate, Anastasia Steele, and a wealthy young businessman, Christian Grey. The novel was enormously when it came out, in 2011, had two sequels, and was adapted into a film in 2015. The audience was largely women.

I was puzzled, and curious. So, I took the book out of the library and read my way through 220 pages or so (out of 500). Yes, the sex is explicit, involves bondage and discipline, and the scenes are fairly long, eight or nine pages. I can’t imagine that such a book would have been a best seller in my youth, the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Inn some sense that is neither here nor there. Obviously, though, times have changed. What had me a bit puzzled was that this sexually explicit book depicted kinky sex. How popular is that?

I did a bit of looking around and found an academic article from 2015 reporting the results of a study in which 1,519 adults were asked to report on their sexual fantasies: What Exactly Is an Unusual Sexual Fantasy? It turns out that submission and domination themes are common for both men and women, at least in this sample, which was self-selected. In particular:

The proportion of women acknowledging submissive fantasies is not negligible. Being sexually dominated (64.6%), being tied up for sexual pleasure (52.1%), being spanked or whipped (36.3%), and being forced to have sex (28.9%) were all reported by significant proportions of women. Interestingly, the same sexual fantasies were also reported by significant proportions of men (53.3%, 46.2%, 28.5%, and 30.7%, respectively).

That settles that. Fifty Shades of Grey plays to the fantasies of a large part of the population.

But why? I found some remarks in a 2021 article by Jill Schildhouse in Oprah Daily that spoke to that:

Looking for a Christian Grey to your Anastasia Steele? Nearly 65 percent of women fantasize about being dominated sexually, according to a survey of more than 1,000 people that was published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. “There's a reason 50 Shades of Grey made such an impact!” says Channa Bromley, a relationship and dating coach. “BDSM is alluring because one partner relinquishes all sense of control. They’re submissive to the person touching them, but subconsciously give themselves permission to be wild, to be orgasmic in response—she doesn't need to hold back.”

I can understand that. And the following video lets me feel it. No, it doesn’t depict sex, but rather shows a woman, Madison Young, testifying about a particular sexual experience:

The experience is about being an actress in a bondage film, her first. Here is what she says starting at about 10:40:

And my body starts to shake and I can feel myself riding these waves of total ecstasy. And I am melting into this rope. This rope is holding me, it is saying you are safe to let go, it is safe to surrender. Just do it. You are home. And all of a sudden it starts rushing back to me. Home, home, the best parts of home. The smell of autumn leaves and the first time that I felt rope in my hands, working in a summertime with my father, doing landscaping for Madison Tree Service, our family business. And I knew, Madison. Madison I am, I can feel it through my body, and the ropes, they were holding me. And it was a safe place. I was becoming Madison. I was grinding my cunt into that nice vibrator, and I felt it, I felt it, I felt that energy flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing through my body, up through, my crown, into the whole [??] I lost myself. I lost myself and I found myself at the same time, right there.

This is not the world I grew up in. That world would not have had a public venue where stories like this could be told. For that matter, such venues are certainly not common now. But YouTube is available everywhere.

Young obviously was talking about an experience she had. I wonder how many of those men and women who reported such fantasies have actually enacted them in whatever degree?

For some loose corroboration you might want to look at these posts from a few years ago:

• Women posing for a photographer and having (delicious) fun [#naked] (December 28, 2017)
• Araki and His Models (August 16, 2013)