On the value of literary fiction

New research suggests that reading literary fiction rather than popular fiction can make you better at analysing other people and their behaviours, reports @PsyPost. https://t.co/kuwXq03FmO

— The Folio Society (@foliosociety) November 9, 2020

Alexander Graham Bell's fractal kite

Alexander Graham Bell created physical fractals, years before the term "fractal" was coined. (Fractal kite, 1909) https://t.co/9YCLQku5Io pic.twitter.com/6OdKHi5DM4

— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) November 7, 2020

Artist at work [Bergen Arches]

"Hope lies in *understanding* reality" [Zeynep Tufekci]

There'll be a push to make this appear as a big triumph, some version of "our national nightmare is over" because the tweeter-in-chief is gone. The situation is exactly the opposite; unless countered effectively, this week is the most worrisome development of the last four years.

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) November 6, 2020

I'm sorry. I really thought about that and it sucks to say all this now. But the way these things work, once the narrative sets in, it becomes harder. The triumphalism that is already all over the place is dangerous. Hope lies in *understanding* reality. https://t.co/RoqPVUvdGW

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) November 6, 2020

Does the brain easily become over-fitted to reality and fiction a way of making creating slack?

While *extremely* speculative, I think this is a really important takeaway that I want people to be intrigued by from the Overfitted Brain Hypothesis. I'd love to see an extended cognitive science or even philosophical take on this.https://t.co/rN2K7uOLVq pic.twitter.com/iGs8EcGAxa

— Erik Hoel (@erikphoel) November 6, 2020

Friday Fotos: Longwood Gardes

If he accomplishes nothing else, Biden should be able to rebuild the executive branch. [stop the craziness]

Assuming Biden manages to eke out a victory, there's still the Senate. Even if the Democates manage a majority, which doesn't seem likely, it would be the narrowest possible majority, and so getting things done will be difficult. Still and all, the underlying constitution of the electorate seems to have remained unchanged.

But the final moments of this post-election discussion are worth listening to, as is much of the rest of it.

Ben Wittes, starting very near the end:

To everyone who thinks, like if the last four years stand for anything, it stands for the proposition that it really matters who's President. It really really matters who's President. And so if Joe Biden does nothing more than stop the craziness, he will be in the top few percentiles of Presidents in the history of the country. If all he does is rebuild the executive branch in a sane fashion.

Can he work with Mitch McConnell? I don't know. Will they work together on the things that have to get done? Yes, because they're both pros. Don't underestimate that. Mitch Connell is a nasty fellow, but he's a professional. I just what to say, it matters who's President. What Donald Trump has shown is in a negative sense how much a President can do. All of that can be undone.

I don't want to underestimate at all the importance of lancing this particular boil. I wish we'd lanced a couple of others along the way. At the end of the day, this country is in much better shape today than it was 24 hours ago. ... Be optimistic, be of good cheer. And, yes, I'm dissatisfied with the results. But do not ever wonder if this result is a galactically good thing or not. It is.

Writing on the wall

Tim Burke's reflections on the fragility of left-liberalism and of the nation-state

Tim Burke, There's Got to Be a Morning After, Easily Distracted, Nov. 4, 2020.

His opening shot: "The liberal-left coalition is not just weak in the United States, it is weak globally (in various different local meanings and configurations of left-liberal)." It is up against a largely working class movement that "visible everywhere around the planet in various forms" and

is socially coherent because it is territorially contiguous (whereas the left-liberal alliance is dispersed, even in its centers of power, and has no sense of material proximity except in sites of consumption and in evanescent public gatherings) and because its resentments are well-founded. I do not say just or fair or morally right. But I can agree that people in deindustrialized cities, materially decomposing suburbs, in lower-managerial positions bossed or owned by pedigreed professionals, running small businesses that depend on the culturally protean consuming largesse of educated elites, in rural communities that produce food and boredom in equal measure, have some coherently connected reasons to resent their situation. And hence, even if they are not a clear majority of the inhabitants of a given national territory, are often able to mobilize a political response that either lets them capture the nation-state or lets them block the political will of the much more socially and ideologically fractured opposing alliance. And this reaction has no devotion to democracy, equality or liberalism. It will, if it seizes any system or structure that allows the use of violence and domination, gladly deploy them with little concern even for collateral damage to its own social redoubts.

Scholars have known for a long time that nations and nationalism are much less distinct from empires than it might seem. To some extent, they are empires that performed a level of political and cultural integration in the 19th and 20th Centuries that concealed their remaining, continuously reproduced forms of territorial difference and divergence. Western intellectuals in the late 20th Century liked to talk high-handedly of postcolonial states as divided by ethnic or religious rivalries that were a result of badly constructed boundaries drawn by colonial rulers and uncorrected by postcolonial inheritors. But I think now we are seeing those nation-states were not a defective variant of the main form: we are seeing that everywhere the nation is not what it seems and nowhere does loyalty to the nation create a fellowship that transcends other forms of territorial, economic and cultural affinity and alliance. And contrary to some of the sentimental weepiness in American public life this morning, it never really did. This is not a world we have lost, it is an illusion that has been popped like the soap bubble it has always been.

What a left-liberal alliance needs to go forward into some form of reproducible command over territorial sovereignty is a coherent foundational politics that does not depend upon viewing “explainers” on social media or does not require paternalizing sermons by the woke. It needs a politics that is felt in the bone and arises out of persistent affinities, that is made manifest and visible in every moment of our daily lives–a politics that can be spoken out of experience by anyone who subscribes to it and that has some hope even of circulating into some of the spaces of resentment that make our enemies, that fracture some of their coherence, perhaps by addressing at least some of what they resent or fear about the futures that the rest of us stand (often uneasily) with.

To rebuild the country [alienation and hopelessness], start at the local level

Yuval Levin, Either Trump or Biden Will Win. But Our Deepest Problems Will Remain. NYTimes, Nov. 3, 2020.

Yuval observes that, for the most part, "our deepest problems aren’t really amenable to resolution by a president" and goes on to suggest, "we now need to ask ourselves how to deal with hopelessness and hostility, because they undermine the preconditions for a functional politics." Those can be dealt with locally.

At the heart of our pervasive crisis of alienation are widespread failures of responsibility, deep-seated cultural divisions and a deadly dearth of solidarity. Such challenges can seem impossibly immense when we look at our country from the top down. No president could resolve them, no Congress could address them. But from the bottom up, there are more opportunities to take them on.

That’s not because there is some magic to local action. It’s because what has broken down is fundamentally communal and institutional, so that a recovery of the ethos required for our national politics to function is likely to happen closer to the interpersonal level.

It can begin with a simple question, asked in little moments of decision: “Given my role here, what should I be doing?” As a parent or a neighbor, a pastor or a congregant, an employer or an employee, a teacher or a student, a legislator or a citizen, how should I act in this situation? We ask that question to recover relational responsibility.

A failure to ask that question — and so to accept the obligations that come with whatever positions and privileges we have in our lives — is behind many of the most significant problems we face. It’s why so many of our fellow Americans have been left feeling that our institutions have failed to treat them like human beings.

And:

We tend to look at forms of breakdown in our society in terms of what they produce: anger, cynicism, a rejection of tradition. But we would be wise to also consider what they implicitly demand and yearn for: responsibility, integrity and, above all, solidarity.

Two photos for election day, one patriotic and one partisan

Regardless of who wins the election, Trump “has attacked the independent, nonpartisan nature of the modern bureaucratic state” and we’re in for a long struggle

Thomas Edsall has an excellent, and fairly long, opinion piece in the NYTimes today, Be Ready for a Lengthy, Vicious Struggle (Nov. 3, 2020). The deck: “The Trump-Biden matchup has ramifications far beyond those of an ordinary presidential election.” It is mostly a survey of what various experts, mostly journalists, academics, and think-tankers, have to say.

Here’s a sample:

I asked a number of experts the question, “What is at stake this year?”

Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow at Brookings, replied by email:

This is an election less about policy and more about the character of the candidates and the character of the country, with one being a reflection of the other. Should Trump win, it would be a signal that our cultural divisions have gone past the point of no return, that demographic and cultural change has come too fast for many people to handle, that a backlash has reached hurricane proportions.

Politics “is now close to a religion,” Sawhill continued:

In short, people are no longer voting based on economic self-interest or the policies they favor as much as on the basis of their cultural values, the kind of society in which they want to live, and the kind of person they believe they are.

Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, also expressed a sense that we are in an Armageddon-like battle: “Our democracy as we know it is at stake.” Trump, Enos argues, has

ruled in the exact way of leaders in other countries who dismantled democracies. In addition, he has attacked the independent, nonpartisan nature of the modern bureaucratic state — the kind of people who allow us to know if our water is clean, fairly administer our elections, and decide whether to prosecute criminals — in other words, the people who ensure stability and quality of life in a modern state.

Enos makes the case that the threat to democracy lies not only in Trump but in the willingness of the Republican Party to ratify his actions:

Trump has stoked partisan and racial animus, deepening divisions and raising tensions to a dangerous level. That a leader might do these things is not what puts our democracy at stake but that, once his party fell in line with him, the capacity of other leaders to check him through means like impeachment proved so futile.

It’s the attack on “the independent, nonpartisan nature of the modern bureaucratic state” that got my attention. For that is akin to making a strict distinction between ones personal preferences and obligations and one’s duty to an organization. I’ve commented on that distinction in a number of posts:

• Preserving Democracy: The Crown, S3 E5 Coup [Media Notes 23], New Savanna, December 2, 2019
• Trump, Gibbs & NCIS, and the Queen @3QD, New Savanna, September 18, 2017
• Donald Trump is no Leroy Jethro Gibbs, 3 Quarks Daily, September 18, 2017
• Tillerson's folly and the distinction between personal and public interests and duties, New Savanna, November 30, 2017
• Trump, the person (DJT) versus the role (POTUS), New Savanna, June 3, 2017
• Trump: The Man, the Oath, the Presidency, New Savanna, March 6, 2017
• The Crown and the Presidency, 2016, New Savanna, November 15, 2016

There’s much more in Edsall’s piece. His final paragraphs:

Over the next 24 to 36 hours, we will learn whether Trump goes beyond rhetoric to formally initiate an assault on election results, the infrastructure underpinning American democracy.

That would go beyond politics as normal, approaching electoral Armageddon. No one knows to what lengths Trump will go — we can only see that all the pieces are in place for a lengthy, vicious struggle.

The country has never before had a president in the Trump mold and the endgame scenarios are many, including the possibility that Trump would try to bargain a frictionless departure from the White House in return for a pass on state criminal liabilities, on the assumption that he takes care of any potential federal liability by pardoning himself, itself a questionable move. In the end, if Biden wins big, perhaps Trump’s evident fear of humiliation will play a role in the transition. After all, he won’t want to be frog-marched out of the White House.

Glenn Loury has an excellent discussion about Obama Democrats who went for Trump in 2016

The good stuff, about honor culture, starts at about 19:16 and continues to the end.

Glenn Loury talks with Jon Shields, co-author, with Stephanie Muravchik, of Trump's Democrats, Brookings Institute Press, 2020. From the publisher's blurb:

Looking for answers, Muravchik and Shields lived in three such “flipped” blue communities, finding that these voters still like the Democratic Party, but it’s not the party many of this book’s readers will recognize.

In these communities, some of the most beloved and longest-serving Democratic leaders are themselves Trumpian—grandiose, combative, thin-skinned, nepotistic. Indifferent to ideology, they promise to take care of “their people” by cutting deals—and corners if needed. Stressing loyalty, they often turn to family to fill critical political roles. Trump strikes a familiar figure to these communities, resembling an old-style Democratic boss.

Although Trump’s Democrats have often been pictured as racists, Muravchik and Shields find that their primary political allegiances are to their town or county—not racial identity. They will spend an extra dollar to patronize local businesses, and they think local jobs should go to their neighbors, not “foreigners” from neighboring counties—who are just as likely to be white and native-born.

When these citizens turn their attention to the nation and their place in it, their thinking is informed by their sense of belonging in their town. Thus, “America first” nationalism is largely localism writ large.

For another look at this kind of culture, see the Netflix series The Ranch, which I recently blogged about. In terms of the ranks-theory of long-term cultural evolution that David Hays and I have developed, honor culture is basically a Rank 2 formation. It's not something specifically discussed in anything I've posted here at New Savanna or in anything we've published, either individually or jointly, but this post on political organization and legitimacy should give you a feel; note, in particular, the early remarks on  corruption.

Lost door

GPT-3 is not the beginning of artificial general intelligence

There has been much talking about GPT-3 and the remarkable texts it can produce automatically. With @massimochi we analyse it in this OA article
"GPT-3: its Nature, Scope, Limits and Consequences"https://t.co/iH1cMMZIls @oiioxford @oxfordethicslab @EthicsInAI pic.twitter.com/UUj1Z17Jfl

— Luciano Floridi (@Floridi) November 2, 2020