Posts Tagged ‘revolution’
“It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.”*…
The Chimp-Pig Hypothesis is, to put it mildly, a revolutionary proposition. Uri Bram suggests that we use it– whether we believe it or not– to stretch ourselves…
In this post I’m going to explain, as best I can, an idea about evolution that many of my friends find (to say the least) outlandish.
I’m not very knowledgeable about genetics, and I can’t really vouch for how plausible the hypothesis is. (But note: on the same grounds, I can’t really vouch for how plausible Darwinian evolution is).
My interest is actually in something else: what does it feel like to have your beliefs overturned? You know the story: as was true for every previous generation, some of the things we believe today must be entirely wrong, and yet very few of us ever make a 180 on anything. It’s easier to accept we must be wrong about something than to actually admit we are wrong about anything. Which ought to worry us.
I’m frankly more interested in moral wrongs than scientific one. But the tricky thing is that successful moral revolutions are so complete that once they’re over we struggle to imagine how anyone ever believed X. (Kazuo Ishiguro is the only person I know to have actually captured what this probably feels like, but my co-blogger and I also made an attempt in this piece for WIRED).
Fear not: I’m coming back to the chimps and pigs. To me, the Chimp-Pig hypothesis is a rare theory that is 1) internally consistent and coherent enough not to be ridiculous, 2) overturns everything we think we know about a major area of knowledge, and 3) doesn’t have any meaningful implications for our current lives, so it won’t really hurt anyone if you give it some credence and it turns out to be false.
Which is all to say: to me, the most interesting interaction you can have with the Chimp-Pig hypothesis is to let yourself believe it, at least briefly, and then observe what it feels like to have your world overturned. The Chimp-Pig hypothesis may not be one of the great revolutions of your lifetime, but I think it’s one of the best practice cases I’ve ever seen. And when your real moment of truth comes, it’d be good to have some practice…
Fascinating– and challenging: “The Chimp-Pig Hypothesis,” from @UriBram.
* Konrad Lorenz
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As we rehearse, we might spare a thought for Rube Goldberg; he died on this date in 1970. A cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor, he is best remembered as a satirist of the American obsession with technology; his series of “Invention” cartoons used a string of outlandish tools, people, plants, and steps to accomplish simple, everyday tasks in the most complicated possible way. (His work has inspired a number of “Rube Goldberg competitions,” the best-known of which, readers may recall, has been profiled here.)
Goldberg was a founder and the first president of the National Cartoonists Society, and he is the namesake of the Reuben Award, which the organization awards to the Cartoonist of the Year.
“The law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective”*…
Catherine Merridale with the cautionary tale of of a Ukrainian millionaire businessman, lauded for his business acumen, who made an enormous contribution to the twentieth-century’s dark history of violence – he was instrumental in supporting Lenin’s return to Russia to foment revolution…
Who has not dreamed, this year at least, of watching Putin’s fall from power? Who has not hoped to see the day the Russians get to organise and push him out themselves? And which spy team, in thinking that, has not looked for some Russian they might sponsor for that job, some active oppositionist who has coherent plans?
If any spy is reading this, I have a message now. The whole trick has been tried before, and it did not go well. A century ago, indeed, in the midst of another deadlocked war, the German Foreign Service backed a whole string of assorted anti-Tsarist nationalists, Marxists, adventurers, and crooks. The most successful of these was Lenin (a warning in itself, of course). But the most colourful was another Bolshevik, a millionaire businessman and bon viveur called Alexander Helphand. Both mastermind and sad buffoon — well-read, unscrupulous, and vastly fat — this man helped shape his century. He died forgotten all the same, his many fortunes spent. To picture him — he deserves that — imagine Orson Welles…
The remarkable tale: “Alexander Helphand — impresario of revolutionary disaster who smoothed Lenin’s return to Russia.”
* Richard Schickel
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As we tread with care, we might recall that it was on this date in 1918 that Moisei Uritsky was assassinated. A Bolshevik leader and head of the Cheka (the first in the string of Soviet secret police organizations), he was shot by a military cadet, Leonid Kannegisser (who was executed soon after).
Uritsky’s death, followed closely (on August 30) by an attempt on Lenin by Fanny Kaplan, led the Bolsheviks to begin a wave of repression and persecution known as the Red Terror.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”*…
It is often observed that the French Revolution was a revolution of scientists. Nourished by airy abstractions and heartfelt cries to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, its leaders sought a society grounded, not in God or tradition, but in what Edmund Burke decried as “the conquering empire of light and reason”. To be sure, if we tallied the professional affiliations of the members of the first National Assembly, we would find it overwhelmingly populated by lawyers. But the revolution’s symbols and motifs were not derived from legal practices and traditions, and it was not as men of law that Maximilien Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat called for the death of their king and the creation of a democratic republic. Rather, they did so as scientists—middle class intellectuals who saw in government a field ripe for experimentation, innovation, and improvement.
Nowhere was this as clear as their approach to “the will of the people”. Of the many puzzles to which revolutionaries applied themselves as scientists, few seemed so pressing and so intractable. It is obvious what a king’s will looks like, or so we like to think. Kings are individuals, they have bodies, and they can tell us what to do. However they choose to communicate their will — through voice, a gesture, a written pronouncement — it is relatively clear when such acts belong to them. But “the people” enjoy no such obvious body and no evident means of self-expression. What does the will of the people actually look like? And how do we hear their voice if they don’t have a mouth with which to speak? As French revolutionaries enthroned the will of the people, they stepped into uncharted terrain. Democratic revolution, it turned out, required men capable of visualizing the invisible and making appear what escaped our immediate senses. Indeed, it seemed to require the labor of scientific inquiry applied to the people themselves. Like the invisible composition of air, the secret patterns of a magnetic field, or the stratifications of the earth’s soil, democratic politics was governed by a hidden law which the scientist-statesman had to uncover…
Kevin Duong explores how leading French revolutionaries, in need of an image to represent the all important “will of the people”, turned to the thunderbolt — a natural symbol of power and illumination that also signaled the scientific ideals so key to their project: “Flash Mob: Revolution, Lightning, and the People’s Will.”
* John F. Kennedy
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As we agree with Ursula LeGuin that “You cannot buy the revolution; you cannot make the revolution; you can only be the revolution,” we might send provocative birthday greetings to poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, inventor, and environmental activist Margaret Eleanor Atwood; she was born on this date in 1939. Currently enjoying wide celebrity via the television adaptations of her novels The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, her wide body of work has earned her the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Prince of Asturias Award for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade; she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Canadian Governor General’s Award several times, winning twice. In addition to her fourteen novels, she has published she has also published fifteen books of poetry, ten non-fiction books, seven children’s books, four collections of stories, three collections of unclassifiable short prose works, three opera libretti, and a graphic novel.
Atwood is also the inventor and developer of the LongPen and associated technologies that facilitate the remote robotic writing of documents, for which she holds several patents.
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