Reviews and News:
Stephen Hawking has died.
There is such a thing as too much winning, as Napoleon found out: “It probably makes little sense to try to distinguish between wars of security and wars of aggression with a man like Bonaparte; but whether it was manifest destiny or a grimmer necessity that drove him on, the fact was that every humiliation he inflicted on Europe’s royal houses, every crippling indemnity he slapped on a defeated nation, every tax and conscript he extorted from reluctant allies, every annexation and victorious march that took him closer to Alexander I’s Russia, was inviting its own inevitable backlash.”
How not to defend the humanities: Radical professors may have killed the humanities by making it subordinate to politics, but neither claiming the humanities improve thinking or touting the advances of digital scholarship will save it.
What’s the problem with modern banking? The FICO score: “Relying on generic, bureau-provided FICO scores (rather than customized scoring models) and limiting discretionary overrides reduces investors’ concerns about the quality and diligence of front-line lending agents, model-developers, and issuers. And issuers who restrict the information they secure about borrowers can credibly tell investors almost every bit of the little they know. In other words, fair-lending rules that encourage strict reliance on FICO scores also provide reassurance to buyers of securitized consumer loans that they aren’t being sold ‘lemons.’ In this way, the evolution of both mortgage lending and consumer credit pushed the financial system toward securitized credit and away from traditional loans that banks hold to maturity.:
Wilfred M. McClay lambasts the increasing use of “curate”: “When, and why, did break-ins become ‘home invasions’? When, and why, did the weatherman begin referring to rain and snow as ‘precipitation events’? When and how did hotel rooms come to be described as ‘breakout’? (And should one take extra care to secure one’s possessions if one stays in such a room?) To live in this century is to be asking such questions all the time… But ‘curate’ is a little different. It is not a word imposed, but one adopted eagerly, even anxiously, by those who use it, because it bestows the prestige of cultivation, learning, and esprit de finesse upon activities that might otherwise seem plain and unexceptional, even vulgar.”
New Russian law recognizes contemporary art as art: “Previously, valuable works of art created fewer than 50 years ago were officially treated as ‘luxury goods’ and subject to 30% import dues.”
Has Amelia Earhart been found after all?
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Review of Books, Galen Strawson calls out deniers—consciousness deniers, that is:
“The Denial began in the twentieth century and continues today in a few pockets of philosophy and psychology and, now, information technology. It had two main causes: the rise of the behaviorist approach in psychology, and the naturalistic approach in philosophy. These were good things in their way, but they spiraled out of control and gave birth to the Great Silliness. I want to consider these main causes first, and then say something rather gloomy about a third, deeper, darker cause. But before that, I need to comment on what is being denied—consciousness, conscious experience, experience for short.
“What is it? Anyone who has ever seen or heard or smelled anything knows what it is; anyone who has ever been in pain, or felt hungry or hot or cold or remorseful, dismayed, uncertain, or sleepy, or has suddenly remembered a missed appointment. All these things involve what are sometimes called ‘qualia’—that is to say, different types or qualities of conscious experience. What I am calling the Denial is the denial that anyone has ever really had any of these experiences.
“Perhaps it’s not surprising that most Deniers deny that they’re Deniers. ‘Of course, we agree that consciousness or experience exists,’ they say—but when they say this they mean something that specifically excludes qualia.
“Who are the Deniers? I have in mind—at least—those who fully subscribe to something called ‘philosophical behaviorism’ as well as those who fully subscribe to something called ‘functionalism’ in the philosophy of mind. Few have been fully explicit in their denial, but among those who have been, we find Brian Farrell, Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, and the generally admirable Daniel Dennett. Ned Block once remarked that Dennett’s attempt to fit consciousness or ‘qualia’ into his theory of reality ‘has the relation to qualia that the US Air Force had to so many Vietnamese villages: he destroys qualia in order to save them.’”
Photos: Wonder Lake
Poem: Amit Majmudar, “Escape Artist”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
