MEMBER MONDAY

The optimist, as they say, thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

Any self-respecting pessimist, however, would reframe the whole matter to be one of “realist,” thereby taking the literal high ground in parsing the distinction. It’s a short step from there to conclude that pessimism confers the one final unmistakable advantage in that it purports to make people sound smarter i.e. those who so soberly, wisely, and prudently stick to the known and the proven must inevitably be pessimistic (Why Pessimism Sounds Smart, though not our focus piece).

Or, as Woody Allen famously quipped: “More than any time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” To that point, the offer of a free dessert still stands for the first person to describe a “realistic” way for us to extricate ourselves from this living, breathing, exponentially compounding national debt (something beyond “then a miracle happens”).

Our focus piece talks us off the ledge with a certain ironic detachment (click: The Seven Laws of Pessimism) with the suggestion that, while there may be no known solutions to solve our hardest problems – that’s why they’re the hardest – the way forward is powered with a mindset that can see through those cognitive fallacies he labels the seven Seven Laws of Societal Pessimism. After all, people throughout history had taken such leaps of faith where progress was not inevitable. Something beyond mere luck must be in play…

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You armchair historians undoubtedly know that on April 21, 1836 the Texan Army under Sam Houston attacked Santa Anna's army on the banks of the San Jacinto River with cries of "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad! God and Texas!" The battle, which lasted a mere eighteen minutes, marked a resounding victory for the avenging Texans.

The Alamo reference was captured in that classic “documentary” Davy Crockett: King Of the Wild Frontier which highlighted the back story. Accept no substitutes for that 1955 account as it captured the important details of how that that coonskin-capped, bear out-grinning frontiersman and his trusty sidekick, James “Jim” Bowie, made their last stand along with those other 180 selfless patriots as they faced Santa Anna's 6,000 troops marching north near the Rio Grande. It is with the deepest gratitude, of course, that we mark how they sacrificed their very lives for the sake of a noble ending: a revolution was won; a Republic was born.

Okay, we might skip over the next 188 years – how this slave-holding Republic was finally annexed by the U.S. in 1845 which triggered the Mexican-American War – and get to the good part, itself worthy of a Disney epilogue: Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his state militia up against a different set of federales, our U.S. Government…

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Even our own weekly MM forum might be too infrequent to keep up with fast-moving subjects like AI that we first addressed during our inaugural year seven years ago. It was back then we featured Nick Bostrom the Oxford philosopher who maintained that artificial intelligence could take over the universe and push humans into second place if they have any place at all.

Nonsense, sniffed Noam Chomsky, as we discussed less than a year ago MM 3/27/23 Rethinking Intelligence where he maintained AI, by its very nature, would remain relegated to relatively narrow domains. So maybe it’s time to place our bets. Perhaps the difference in views comes down to parsing the difference between human intelligence and its replication. That difference had become vanishingly small in certain areas such as language as we discussed last May in MM 5/22/23 Life After Language.

And, now, that difference seems to be going, going gone: just take a look now at the jaw-dropping demonstration last week of an AI-powered simultaneous translation of Javier Milei’s address in Davos. His words, delivered in Spanish, were flawlessly translated into English in real time using voice cloning technology that dubbed his actual voice with perfectly synced mouth movements (https://twitter.com/BitcoinNewsCom/status/1747953722943033455).

If “heygen” and “ez dubs” can make child’s play out of simultaneous translation – typically one of the most challenging tasks faced by the human interpreter – where might be the stopping point for AI’s potential to “push humans into second place?” Let’s hear the argument against the proposition that anything currently in digital form i.e. any task mediated through the internet and/or by the computer is fair game for human replacement…

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Back when the term was first coined, “nostalgia” (pseudo-Greek, literally meaning longing for home) was considered a kind of sickness, perhaps curable with opium, leeches, and a journey to the Swiss Alps. Per the hypothesis presented in our discussion piece (Nostalgia and Its Discontents), nostalgia features a kind of romance with one’s own fantasy, a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images: the overlay of one’s dream life, whether it be of place or time or some other fantasy, onto one’s everyday who-let-the-dogs-out existence.

Take, for example, the refrain sometimes spoken in tones of wistfulness about the state of excellence in modern America, imagining that our present reality as squalid and diminished compared to the good old days when household appliances lasted, and workers worked, and manners were exquisite, and mariages endured, and wars were just, and honor mattered, and you could buys a decent tomato.

Reconciliation of the two versions may be a corollary of what F. Scott Fitzgerald described as the mark of first-rate intelligence i.e. the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. Yes, but the fantasy version often beckons…

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Maybe just start with the national debt, nearing $34 trillion. You’re tired of hearing about it. It comes across as somehow abstract – after all, million, billion, and trillion all sound alike – making it hard to get your head around the enormity of the number until you realize the cost of just servicing it rivals the entire military budget. Triple that number to account for the country’s additional but uncounted financial commitments e.g. Social Security and Medicare.

Then, of course, it’s subject to what Einstein described as the most powerful force in the universe i.e. compounding interest. Anyone with a pocket calculator can readily see there is absolutely no chance of our growing out of this black hole. Free dessert to anyone who can come up with a credible scenario outside of outright default, whether it be literally or in some other guise e.g. reset (CBDC), debt jubilee, or hyperinflation.

Our discussion, though, is not even about the national debt per se. It’s something bigger – it’s about a mindset that’s been seduced by decades of magical thinking about debt in a hyper-financialized world. No one can even describe what money even means anymore. The financial system has long become detached from the real world. Start with that massive amount of money that’s “printed” by the central bank, far in excess of what’s needed to support normal economic activity.

That financial excess works its way through so many intellectual abstractions – derivatives, tranche packaging, off balance sheet financing, special purpose entities – that the very idea of risk is lost. It has given birth to perverse incentives. Those outside the money-creation system can only stare in blank incomprehension as debt levels have continued to pile up at every level, in every sector.

Our focus piece, a documentary well worth its roughly one hour duration (The Great Taking), punctures the illusion. We are invited to see the world through a different lens. View the piece as a working hypothesis delivered by someone who has served and survived the hardest edges of the financial world i.e. hedge funds, M&A, and private equity. He is now on the outside looking in, with nothing left to prove other than to deliver a message. Be aware…

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A signature element of Member Monday is the avoidance of cross-talk. There’s something about the flow that arises from the process of actively listening to a speaker’s uninterrupted point and, only then, offering a thoughtful response. The speaker, once confident of a secure platform, accepts greater responsibility for the forum and thus rarely lapses into filibuster mode. It is this flow that has distinguished the better sessions over the past eight years. They'd achieved a certain . . . rhythm.

Our focus article (The Extraordinary Ways Rhythm Shapes Our Lives) suggests the underlying scientific (neurolinguistic) explanation for the phenomenon. Speech, you see, consists of a temporal hierarchy of (four) different-sized rhythmic units, each unfolding at their own rate i.e. at one extreme are the so-called phonemes, measured in microseconds, reflecting the sounds of letters while those at the other extreme reflect full sentences/thoughts.

The rhythm of these respective entwined elements must be sorted out by the brain. The simultaneous focus on the entire spectrum of phonemes is nearly impossible and rarely desirable. That interference, reduced to its essence (refer to article for the critical expanded explanation), is the crux of this “speechus interruptus” problem…

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Snippets of snobbism are part and parcel of my memory growing up in the Main Line area of Philadelphia fifty years ago. Those recollections include the occasional wine snobs. You know the breed. Gazing upward, they’d ape and fawn and presume a gentility that was not native to them; looking downward, they’d snub and sniff and sneer at those who didn’t share their pretensions.

A similar feeling came back reading our focus article On Taste asking how do we know whether art is any good? The concept of taste in art, we are told, originates in an individual’s unique, physical sense of taste. Yet we still mediate the idea of “good taste” through collective filters: what is in vogue, what received opinion dictates, and what experts say. Maybe the answer is simply to privately admit that some encounters with art are more meaningful than others. “Either you have experienced the power of art or you haven’t.”

My standards back in the day were somewhat lacking at least as defined by the “tyranny of experts.” Perhaps it had been schooled out of me, as in “now look, that chiaroscuro is important” meant it would be on the test. Art to me is meaningful mainly to the extent it truly speaks to me, perhaps in the way that one painting, the one depicting an old man – hands together, eyes lowered, whether in prayer or contemplation, over a single loaf of bread and a bowl of soup on a wooden table – so powerfully evokes a sense of simplicity, humility, and gratitude…

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“Thanatopsis,” the title of William Cullen Bryant’s 1817 poem centered on a meditation on death, is applied in the focus article The Long Thanatopsis (and our discussion) as an invitation to reinvent the way a generation chooses to age as it faces that final curtain call.

That GenX author is looking – surprise! – to the baby boomer generation for inspiration and guidance on how to blunt the sharp edges of old age. Yes, those members of the original me-generation, have now been called upon to show the way to these youngsters. How do you, of any age, assess the situation in the nine years since this self-proclaimed futurist first published his predictions?

Among the many “challenges” of the elderly that we had discussed almost a year ago MM 1/30/23 Aged is the existential question: why do we (i.e. those not-yet-old) neglect and disdain the one vulnerable group we will all eventually join? After all, old age is not contagious. The shame of it all is that the already-olds become the “Other.”

If the answer is that it amounts to an attempt to flee our own aging and mortality, do you share the author’s optimism that American culture over the next thirty years will be less obsessed with youth or is it simply that the ideal “me” in the me-generation is itself aging?…

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A weekly reading group in Venice, California just completed a twenty-eight year cycle discussing Finnegans Wake (Finnegans Wake Discussion Group) , a span longer than the seventeen years it took James Joyce to write the novel in the first place . . . but, wait, there’s more – given that the last line of the novel loops back to the very first, the group just decided to embark on a brand new cycle starting on page three. Such an inspiration for Member Monday but, more to the point, a way to introduce our next topic, a critical look at academia through our focus piece The Ends Of Knowledge.

What came to mind while reading the piece were the lives of certain grad student friends of mine “back in the day” in their pursuit of academic specialization as they studied more and more about less and less, leading to that holy grail: knowing everything about nothing. One five-year post-grad ended up working for the post office.

Our discussion topic is the question that was served up: what could learning look like “if it were reoriented around emergent ends rather than inherited structures?” More pointedly, were we to accept that needs evolve with new areas of study opening up with others diminishing, at what point do we start closing departments?

While you may choose to skip over the article's historic accounting for those “inherent structures” – served up in that somewhat annoying self-important academic style – the underlying question remains quite relevant today i.e. how does one optimize those four (or more) years in academia and that $100k student tab. How would you advise others?…

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What do you mean I might not have free will? Look here, I just decided what I wanted to write. See there, I just changed my mind. I might do so again. Or I might forget the whole thing and go for a walk. So, you see, it’s me, it’s mine, it’s free – the will to do as I decide.

That’s a myth, maintains Free Will NYT Robert Sapolski, reflecting determinism, which postulates that all our decisions and behaviors are invariably determined by previous events and by natural law. Free will advocates, on the other hand, point to the human capacity to make uncoerced choices.

Libertarianism holds that individuals have complete free will and is thus incompatible with determinism, while compatibilism attempts to reconcile free will and determinism, arguing that they are not mutually exclusive (though suggesting our underlying desires and preferences may be influenced by previous events and experiences).

The Western world seems tangled up in its own underwear over this debate given the difficulty in establishing causation with any sort of scientific certainty. While specific studies have been hyper-focused on select causal links e.g. the role of genetics as a factor, the application of determinism to predict future states with any degree of certainty beggars the imagination given the menu of deterministic factors: physical (physical laws); biological (genetic factors and physiological conditions); psychological (past experiences, memories, and learned behaviors); and social (social environment and cultural norms)…

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Knock. Knock. Who’s there? Ukraine. Ukraine who? You know, the Ukraine that has been the subject of the three MM sessions since the Russian invasion. So why now? Because maybe it’s always prudent to reassess foreign entanglements, given so many over the past seventy years have been like lobster traps: easy to enter; hard to live in; nearly impossible to exit.

How do you spell collateral damage? One of the most sinister terms in the language of geopolitics has to be Proxy War. It makes warfare sound like some sort of video game. Just feed it money and weapons so long as no American blood is shed. An exaggeration? Here are the exact words of Mitch McConnell last week:

“If you look at Ukraine assistance, let’s talk about where the money is really going. A significant portion of it is being spent in the United States, in 28 different states. We’re replacing the weapons that we sent to Ukraine with more modern weapons. So, we're rebuilding our industrial base. No Americans are getting killed in Ukraine. The Ukrainians are destroying the army of our biggest rivals. I have a hard time finding anything wrong with that. I think it’s wonderful that they’re defending themselves.”

That’s it, throw money and weapons into the killing fields, bolster our industrial might (with plenty of pork to the states), all the while upgrading our military. Pax Armamana. Okay, the preceding might be a stretch but it does raise topics for legitimate debate…

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Lance Morrow sets the stage on the subject of evil with his essay "Your Periodic Reminder That Evil Is Real" (click: Morrow, Evil Is Real), a subject we first discussed in our book club session some seventeen years ago with reference to his then-published “Evil: An Investigation.” Our discussion back then was but a dress rehearsal for the glimpse of the skull on display today.

Yet it seems like yesterday we struggled with such questions as: Can we even define evil or is it a case of we know it when we see it? How do we even know we can see it? Is it understandable only in terms of its duality with good? Lance Morrow offered a shortcut, maintaining it’s something (any) decent conscience, uncontaminated by ideology, knows what it’s looking at.

That ideological contamination qualification opens the way to a deeper analysis where a view of evil is refracted through the lens of a fundamentalist religion with its ideological celebration of death over life. The Middle East then begins to  look like a sanctioned murder-suicide situation – the only wrinkle being people not agreeing who is the murderer and who is the suicide…

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Melancholia, as it was known in Ancient Greece, was thought to be due to an imbalance of the four basic bodily fluids, or humors. This condition, now afflicting roughly twenty percent of adults and the leading cause of disability, is better known today as Depression.

A dizzying array of hypotheses, whether based in science, medicine, neuroplasticity, psychology, physiology, or even philosophy, have now overtaken that ancient theory such that the layperson might be tempted to default back to the humors explanation. Nevertheless we shall identify a couple of the more modern approaches in hopes of deriving something worth discussing.

Even the basic science behind Depression remains provisional with the current research now citing the lack of any clear evidence behind the once-established belief that Depression is caused by a "chemical imbalance," a lack of the neurotransmitter serotonin, in the brain. The focus article cites two books that offer alternative explanations i.e. the "stress response run awry" theory leading to this "total-body" illness felt in the mind or, the second book, the result of a malfunctioning immune system (Breaking Through Depression).

Both books thus suggest antidepressant drugs would be better directed at altering the fundamental cognitive bias behind one’s perception of the world i.e. seeing this “doom-laden” thinking more in terms of a neurodegenerative disease. Reframe the brain. Gee, the layperson might think, this sounds like a restatement of existing cognitive behavior therapy. Maybe, but there’s more…

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The originally-scheduled session has been deferred one week for us to perhaps regain some sort of equilibrium after the recent nightmare disorientation playing out right now in the Middle East. Let us first set expectations by saying it would be presumptuous for us to suggest the goal of the session is to arrive at some sort of definitive answer. We’d be taking a big step simply to pose the right questions.

Highland member Matt Query has provided a very readable historical reference point, citing the rhetorical question posed by Sam Harris (i.e. what would the adversarial parties do if they had the absolute enabling power) as context for the parade of horribles we are now witnessing and is the subject of our discussion.

Let us first stipulate that, at least until the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel was the heroic and democratic underdog struggling for its very existence in the vast and hostile Arab wilderness. For a couple of thousand years, Jewish morality presupposed a kind of victim's righteousness, the special blamelessness of those without great collective power.

That basic sentiment seems to have somehow morphed over the decades with the growth of Israel’s relative military strength. Some of the vitriol recently expressed against her by certain segments of the world comes across as anti-semitism dressed up to look like righteous indignation. It is certainly not for the rest of the world, meaning, implicitly, the historical tormentors of Jews, to presume to give moral instructions to the Jewish people…

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Somewhere in the deep recesses of your soul you must have imagined what your life would have been like – call it a temporary release from the life sentence of the mirror, an anti self – but for certain life decisions you’d made. Perhaps it was an early career choice. Maybe it was whether and whom to marry.

It is sometimes said that big decisions are emotionally made and intellectually justified. Ben Franklin, on the other hand, advised the best course of decision-making was to rely on explicit, conscious thinking i.e. divide a sheet of paper into two columns, writing over one “Pro” and the other “Con,” wait three days, put down hints, and after a day or two of no additional considerations decide accordingly (focus article (What Science Says About Decision Making). Spock surveying the universe.

The article, in support of what Franklin had labeled “prudential algebra,” makes the central argument: “There is no free lunch when it comes to tricky decisions; you have to do the thinking. The alternative, delegating decisions to the lower reaches of the iceberg and hoping that the unconscious will decide fate for us, is misguided.” The remainder of the article addresses and ultimately discounts evidence that some “ghost in the machine” is there to guide us…

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The reason the term kafkaesque is often overused and misunderstood is that it had been introduced to many of us sophomores (i.e. wise fools) by means of difficult allegory in those bizarre stories -- you mean Gregor Samsa wasn't a real cockroach?

That eponymous term came from the dark recesses of Franz Kafka's soul after a life defined by struggle, whether against time (early 20th century), place (dark Prague), religion (Jewish), citizenship status (immigrant), occupation (insurance clerk), and family (especially father).

That's too bad as we tend to experience its underlying themes – the fear, isolation, and bewilderment of a nightmarish dehumanized world -- only in our post-puberty real world. In a sense, the term has become the "representative adjective of our times" NYT 12/29/91 The Essence of "Kafkaesque".

Any of you Kafka scholars out there (didn’t think so) might like to dive into his life and writings, which came to light after his best friend chose to ignore the dying man’s final request to burn his works Kafka Agonistas. The rest of us may share any of our possible experiences of anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness, often in the context of an administrative setting, where we have felt somehow powerless in the face of the nonsensical…

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Some time ago a book was published destined to sell more copies over the ensuing two centuries than any book bar the Bible. That time ago was 1486. The book was Malleus Maleficarum (latin: Hammer of Witches), explaining how to identify, capture, torture confessions from – and eventually kill – Satan’s handmaidens.

It was during such time and context that the pope issued an edict known as the "Doctrine of Discovery" (only recently rescinded by the Vatican after 500 years) asserting that European civilization and Western Christianity were superior to all other cultures, races, and religions (Doctrine of Discovery).

Our focus article (The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy) sees that doctrine as the root of the belief this country was divinely ordained to be the promised land for European (and, by extension, all) Christians. It further maintains this matter continues to play out today and will likely be a determining factor in the 2024 elections.

James Baldwin, ranked as one of the top African American writers, may have had that in mind when he labeled “white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.” History, you see, rather than a series of discrete events, is all part of an overriding narrative, animating our previous MM discussions surrounding Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project…

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The notion that memory is but a weird elastic was captured by Lance Morrow in this portion of his essay The Fire Hose Of History:

“Robert Frost wrote a poem called ‘Out, Out —-’ in which a boy using a buzz saw to cut stove wood is momentarily careless and cuts his own hand off, and then dies of shock. The others in the farmyard are stunned. But Frost ends the poem with an interesting chill:

And they, since they

were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”

Such it is when it comes to so much of history as even that so-called “a day that will live in infamy” eventually faded into little more than a factoid as we, not being the ones dead, so quickly turned to our own affairs. To the young, Vietnam today might just as well be the Punic Wars. So it is when it comes to the grand sweep of history. So it is when it comes to individual lives.

So, then, whence comes this vague sense of one’s importance, of significance, of permanence? Maybe think in terms of life as a kind of performance art – believing other people are watching you, judging you, thinking about you. They aren’t. They’ve long turned to their own affairs. I probably wasted three decades thinking otherwise…

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Anthropologists tell us the instinct for group identity is rooted in some tribal need for the mutual survival and preservation of a common culture. Maybe. But such seems somewhat anachronistic outside, perhaps, biker gangs preserving their outlaw existence.

We’d once discussed an expanded view of “tribalism” from The Tipping Point with its take that human brains are simply not adapted to working with large populations and thus the need for some combination of hierarchical schemes, stereotypes and other simplified models to understand so many people.

Thus born, synthetic affinity groups. How else to explain the ridiculous, sometimes rabid, loyalty demonstrated when it comes to a professional sports team where the players are simply readily replaceable corporate piece-parts and the only constant is the uniform (“How ‘bout them Broncos”)….

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"Barbie" as a litmus test: women were advised by one film reviewer to dump their partner if he fails to "get" the Barbie message; to that, men might be advised to preemptively head for the exits if that take-away message is to simply reassign some asserted historical patriarchal role to women. Move over, Ken, it’s retribution time for the years, the centuries, of male domination and oppression. After all, revenge is a dish best served cold.

What can leave the movie-goer somewhat off balance is the way the film conflates two issues. On the one hand, it might be viewed as an indictment of any exploitative social structure. Retribution would thus be seen in the same way that, say, the bourgeoisie deserved every bashing it took under Soviet communism as the Zhivago family retreated to a corner of their Moscow mansion where the proletariat abused their former masters and broke up the furniture for firewood.

The film’s literal coloring (ubiquitous pink), however, would suggest something more targeted i.e. the deconstruction of masculinity itself. People come in two models: women, good, nice; men, the heavier, hairier life-form. The “manly” virtues (bravery, strength, discipline, and, egad, the very idea of machismo) remain admirable only by being quietly reassigned to women. The best a man can say for himself is that he is harmless.

Like Ken…

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