Science

Scientists have detected the most distant supernova ever seen, exploding when the universe was less than a billion years old. The event was first signaled by a gamma-ray burst and later confirmed using the James Webb Space Telescope, which was able to isolate the blast from its faint host galaxy. Surprisingly, the explosion closely resembles supernovae linked to gamma-ray bursts in the modern universe.

I can’t resist calling your attention to a 2016 article on free will, mainly because it appeared in The Atlantic—a magazine many here (including me) admire. And as I’m reading Matthew Cobb’s terrific new biography of Francis Crick, I see that Crick was a determinist like me, though he realized that different phenomena require different levels of analysis. Crick didn’t think that free will was even worth considering, and avoided it like the plague though he was deeply concerned with consciousness. His research program for understanding the brain is deeply deterministic and pretty reductionist. But read Matthew’s book for yourself.

In view of Crick’s ideas that I’ve just learned about, and a reader calling my attention to this article, which I haven’t seen, it’s worth seeing how author Stephen Cave deals with determinism.  You can read the article by clicking below, but since it’s likely to be paywalled you can find it archived here.

The article’s main points are these, two of which are summarized in the title and subtitle (my take):

1.)  We have no such thing as free will in the libertarian sense of “you could have done other than what you did”

2.) But studies show that if you reject free will, you are likely to cheat, be lazy and fatalistic, and reject the idea of moral responsibility

3.)  To avoid these injurious social effects, we must confect a new take on free will, encouraging others to behave better. This can enhance “autonomy” (not “agency” or “autonomy in the sense of ‘ability to govern oneself'”, neither of which we have) but “autonomy” in the sense of “adhering to behaviors that help our selves and society”.

Now #3 may look like a bogus solution, and author Steven Cave sort of admits that, but we can clearly improve our behaviors with the right carrots and sticks.  It’s a misconception about determinism that people’s behavior can’t be changed. Clearly, the influence of others, blaming and praising people for actions they consider respectively injurious and admirable, can, over time, change your neurons in such a way that you begin behaving in ways better for you and for society.  The fly in this ointment is the infinite regression of determinism: whether and how we even try to change people’s minds is itself determined by people’s genes and environments. But I won’t go down that rabbit hole here.

Cave’s solution is at least better than that of compatibilists like Dan Dennett, who simply redefined free will so that we could tell people they had it. Since Dan adhered to point #2, thinking that belief in strict determinism was bad for everyone, he wrote two books designed to convince people that they had free will in a meaningful way. I found his arguments unconvincing.  Dan later stressed that he was not making this “little people’s” argument, one similar to making the “belief in belief” claim that even though there’s no God, it’s good for society to be religious. But in Dan’s own writings I did find him making the Little People’s argument, which I quoted in a post here in 2022:

Here, for example, are two statements by the doyen of compatibilism, my pal Dan Dennett (sorry, Dan!):

There is—and has always been—an arms race between persuaders and their targets or intended victims, and folklore is full of tales of innocents being taken in by the blandishments of sharp talkers. This folklore is part of the defense we pass on to our children, so they will become adept at guarding against it. We don’t want our children to become puppets! If neuroscientists are saying that it is no use—we are already puppets, controlled by the environment, they are making a big, and potentially harmful mistake. . . . we [Dennett and Erasmus] both share the doctrine that free will is an illusion is likely to have profoundly unfortunate consequences if not rebutted forcefully.

—Dan Dennett, “Erasmus: Sometimes a Spin Doctor is Right” (Erasmus Prize Essay).

and

If nobody is responsible, not really, then not only should the prisons be emptied, but no contract is valid, mortgages should be abolished, and we can never hold anybody to account for anything they do.  Preserving “law and order” without a concept of real responsibility is a daunting task.

—Dan Dennett, “Reflections on Free Will” (naturalism.org)

But you can be a “hard determinist” and still believe in responsibility!

Dan is no longer with us, but I did post these when he was alive, so I’m not beating a dead philosopher.

I will try to be brief, discussing the three points above. Quotes from the Atlantic article are indented, while my own take is flush left:

1.)  We have no such thing as free will in the libertarian sense of “you could have done other than what you did.” To his credit, Cave admits this straight off, noting that science supports determinism.

In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

. . . . The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. But it left some room, at least in the popular imagination, for the possibility that we could overcome our circumstances or our genes to become the author of our own destiny. The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

This is what I believe, and also what Crick believed.  Now we’ll never know enough to be able to predict people’s behavior, but if quantum effects don’t manifest themselves in behavior (making you choose a salad rather than french fries, for example), then yes, determinism could lead to absolute predictability. But that will never happen, because we’d have to know enough to predict environmental factors like the weather. Besides, scientists have not decided that quantum phenomena affect behavior. Crick himself rejected that as “woo”, and I’m awaiting evidence for such influences. (We have none.) Finally, even if quantum effects do scupper determinism for some behaviors, they are not effects that we can control by “will.”

I won’t add here the many experiments showing that you can largely predict people’s (simple) decisions before they’re made, beginning with the study of Libet.  As these studies continue, we can, by monitoring brain activity, predict what people will do in simple binary tasks farther and farther ahead of the time they’re aware of making such decisions (up to ten seconds, I believe). Free willies, however, always find ways to reject these studies, since that work suggests that our feeling of agency is a post facto phenomenon occurring only after the brain’s neurons have made a “decision”. 

2.) But studies show that if you reject free will, you are likely to cheat, be lazy and fatalistic, and reject the idea of moral responsibility.  Much of this is based on an early study of Vohs and Schooler showing that college students who are “primed” by reading passages on determinism are more likely to act badly and to cheat than students primed by reading about free will.  But that was just over a very short time, was a highly artificial study on college students, and a later meta-analysis showed no deleterious effect of rejecting free will on “prosocial” behaviors. (Note that most of the studies tested behaviors lasting at most a week or so after “priming”.  Cave does, however, mention one study suggesting inimical effects of belief in determinism, though:

In another study, for instance, Vohs and colleagues measured the extent to which a group of day laborers believed in free will, then examined their performance on the job by looking at their supervisor’s ratings. Those who believed more strongly that they were in control of their own actions showed up on time for work more frequently and were rated by supervisors as more capable. In fact, belief in free will turned out to be a better predictor of job performance than established measures such as self-professed work ethic. I suggest you look at that study (it appears to be Stillman et al. 2020, “study 2”), as it doesn’t contain a multifactorial analysis using all the cross-correlated factors. Furthere, the p values are low, yet the authors did not correct for multiple tests of significance using something like the Bonferroni correction.

But even if the evidence did show small deleterious effects on behavior stemming from determinism, are we supposed to pretend to believe we have agency so we can behave better? How can you pretend to believe something you don’t? It would be like asking atheists to believe in God because that belief has salubrious effects. It can’t be done—at least not for rational people. It’s like asking a lion to stop chasing gazelles and start eating salads. It’s not in us!

Two other points.  We always feel like we have free will, so I doubt that the scientific truth will make people fatalistic. Whether this belief evolved by natural selection or is merely an epiphenomenon of our evolved brain structure is not clear, and I doubt we’ll ever know.  So I don’t take point #2 seriously in most circumstances. Where it IS important to recognize the truth of determinism is in our system or rewards and punishment, most notably in the legal system.  If people who act badly are simply people with “broken brains,” then how we treat them depends crucially on recognizing this.  A society in which we realize, for instance, that a thief had no choice about whether or not he stole, or a killer about whether or not he pulled the trigger, we would have a very different system of punishment than a society in which we think people had a choice of how they behaved. (Yes, I know that some people say that belief in libertarian free will wouldn’t change how we dispense justice, but I reject that view.)

This does not mean that we should do away with the idea of responsibility and punishment. Far from it. While I don’t consider people morally responsible in the sense that they could have done something “moral” rather than “immoral”, that doesn’t mean that every criminal obtains a get-out-of-jail-free card. People are responsible for their acts in the sense that they are the people who do the acts, and that leads to the idea that those people need, for their own sake and society’s, to be punished or rewarded. Punishment is still justified under determinism to keep criminals out of society, to give them a chance to be rehabilitated, and (to most) as a form of deterrence. What is not justified is retributive punishment like the death penalty, as that implicitly assumes the criminal made a choice (the death penalty isn’t a deterrent, anyway, and can’t be revoked if someone is later found to be innocent).

Finally, praise is as justified as punishment, for praising people for some actions, even if they had no choice, will almost always lead them to perform more good actions, because we’re evolved to appreciate praise, which raises our status. In the end, though none of us have choices about how we behave, we go about our lives feeling as if we did, and that’s enough for me. When the rubber hits the road, as when determinism really matters (as in punishment), we can still revert to what science tells us.

3.)  To avoid this injurious social effects, we must confect a new take on free will, encouraging others to behave better, which can enhance “autonomy” (not “agency” or “autonomy” in the sense of “ability to govern oneself”, neither of which we have, but “autonomy” in the sense of adhering to behaviors that help our selves and society.  Author Cave is wise enough to accept the science and the determinism it suggests, but he still thinks we need a solution to the problem that belief in determinism leads to bad behavior.  I am not convinced that this is true, as different studies show different things. And I don’t think we need to do what Dennett did, writing big books confecting new definitions of a “free will worth wanting.”  It is this last part of the article that most disappointed me, for Cave suggest a tepid solution: we all need to behave better. (He cites Bruce Waller, a philosophy professor at Youngstown State University):

Yet Waller’s account of free will still leads to a very different view of justice and responsibility than most people hold today. No one has caused himself: No one chose his genes or the environment into which he was born. Therefore no one bears ultimate responsibility for who he is and what he does. Waller told me he supported the sentiment of Barack Obama’s 2012 “You didn’t build that” speech, in which the president called attention to the external factors that help bring about success. He was also not surprised that it drew such a sharp reaction from those who want to believe that they were the sole architects of their achievements. But he argues that we must accept that life outcomes are determined by disparities in nature and nurture, “so we can take practical measures to remedy misfortune and help everyone to fulfill their potential.”

Of course Obama was determined to say this via the laws of physics, but his words may still have had a good effect on society. Poor people don’t choose to be poor, nor homeless people to be homeless. We need to realize this, for that form of determinism is good for everyone (except perhaps for some Republicans).  Cave admits that accepting determinism but trying to be good is somewhat bogus, but at least it’s nor harmful—not in the way I think Dennett’s views were.

Cave:

Understanding how will be the work of decades, as we slowly unravel the nature of our own minds. In many areas, that work will likely yield more compassion: offering more (and more precise) help to those who find themselves in a bad place. And when the threat of punishment is necessary as a deterrent, it will in many cases be balanced with efforts to strengthen, rather than undermine, the capacities for autonomy that are essential for anyone to lead a decent life. The kind of will that leads to success—seeing positive options for oneself, making good decisions and sticking to them—can be cultivated, and those at the bottom of society are most in need of that cultivation.

To some people, this may sound like a gratuitous attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too. And in a way it is. It is an attempt to retain the best parts of the free-will belief system while ditching the worst. President Obama—who has both defended “a faith in free will” and argued that we are not the sole architects of our fortune—has had to learn what a fine line this is to tread. Yet it might be what we need to rescue the American dream—and indeed, many of our ideas about civilization, the world over—in the scientific age.

Well, that’s a bit dramatic, but we do need to reform our notions of praise and—especially—blame. I’ve outlined some of the changes in the justice system we should make in light of determinism, and Gregg Caruso (e.g., here) has done so far more extensively.  But I don’t think we should go around telling people that the classical notion of free will is true.  Although I’ve been kicked out of a friend’s house and also threatened by a jazz musician for defending determinism (in the latter case by telling him that his saxophone solos were determined rather than improvised under free will, so that he could not have played a different solo), I’m still a diehard determinist.

Yes, the Atlantic article is nine years old, but the field hasn’t moved very far since it was written. Do people even need to think and write about free will, then?  Certainly Francis Crick didn’t think so: he completely ignored the problem in his late-life work on the brain, dismissing free will as a nonstarter. But because notions of free will still permeate our justice system in a bad way, yes, I think everyone needs to think about determinism and accept the science buttressing it. Then we can go about our everyday lives acting as though we have choices.

h/t: Reese

At the end of their lives, most satellites fall to their death. Many of the smaller ones, including most of those going up as part of the “mega-constellations” currently under construction, are intended to burn up in the atmosphere. This Design for Demise (D4D) principle has unintended consequences, according to a paper by Antoinette Ott and Christophe Bonnal, both of whom work for MaiaSpace, a company designing reusable launch vehicles for the small satellite market.

And to complete the wildlife today, reader Rodger Atkin sent in some flowers. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

This flowered last night in our garden in Thailand. From Wikipedia:

“Dracaena fragrans (cornstalk dracaena), is a flowering plant species that is native to tropical Africa, from Sudan south to Mozambique, west to Côte d’Ivoire and southwest to Angola, growing in upland regions at 600–2,250 m (1,970–7,380 ft) altitude.”

Wikipedia does not mention it but ours flowers only at night, giving off a very heady perfume. I have never seen anything to pollinate it and have never seen fruit on the plant.

The second two pictures were from the next morning:all finished, and and we’ll wait for next year.

We now have 1.4 sets of photos besides this one, but that is not going to last long. However, yesterday Greg Mayer sent in two of his own animals, a ball python and a common snapping turtle (cleverly named “Snappy”), both decked out for the holidays.

by Greg Mayer

Having been treated to a a feline parade for the inauguration of Coynezaa, here, for day three, are some Holiday Herps, Vivian and Snappy.

Vivian the Ball Python (Python regius) in her Christmas scarf.

 

Snappy the Snapping Turtle (Chelydra serpentina) in a Winter Wonderland.

These photos were entered in a “Whisker Wonderland” photo contest for holiday pet pictures. WEIT readers will be glad to know that cat photos won all the actual prizes (People’s Choice and Jury)–as the award announcement said, “…it was a cat sweep!” However, among the reptiles entered, Vivian got the most People’s Choice votes. Plus, a couple of non-domestic species gives at least a hint of wildlife for today.

Researchers say fusion reactors might do more than generate clean energy—they could also create particles linked to dark matter. A new theoretical study shows how neutrons inside future fusion reactors could spark rare reactions that produce axions, particles long suspected to exist but never observed. The work revisits an idea teased years ago on The Big Bang Theory, where fictional physicists couldn’t solve the puzzle. This time, real scientists think they’ve found a way.

Launched in March, NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope has completed its first infrared map of the entire sky in 102 colors. This map will enable 3D distance measurements to other galaxies and allow astronomers to measure the influence of Cosmic Inflation on the large-scale structure of the Universe.

In collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, hotter than the Sun’s core by a staggering margin, scientists have finally solved a long-standing mystery: how delicate particles like deuterons and their antimatter twins can exist at all. Instead of forming in the initial chaos, these fragile nuclei are born later, when the fireball cools, from the decay of ultra-short-lived, high-energy particles.

Well, at least we still have Caturday felids, as there is never any end to cats appearing on the Internet.  But the dearth of comments always makes me think about dispensing with this feature, too.

The last Caturday Felid post featured the legend of the murderous Icelandic Yule Cat, called the Jólakötturinn, described by Wikipedia as

. . . . . a huge and vicious cat from Icelandic folklore that is said to lurk in the snowy countryside during the Yule season and eat people who do not receive new clothing. In other versions of the story, the cat only eats the food of the people who had not received new clothing.

Here’s a short holiday ad for Icelandair featuring an interview with Jólakötturinn. He is not a crook! Sadly, Yule cat resents the lack of credit he gets for looming so large in the Icelandic psyche and for ensuring that many Icelandic children get new clothes.

. . . and one more, also from Icelandair. Here Yule cat, at first rejected by a family, is finally accepted—and allowed to go on a trip with them—after he gets cleaned up and has a shrimp dinner.

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Here is a happy Christmas tail that appeared in the Torygraph on Christmas Day. I’ve linked the screenshot below to an archived site, so click below to read about the reappearing Bindi.

The story:

Bindi the cat has been reunited with its family for Christmas, five years after it went missing.

The black feline “vanished into thin air” from its home in Haddenham, Cambridgeshire in August 2020.

Jilly Fretwell, Bindi’s owner, had moved house since the disappearance but thanks to microchip technology, vets were able to pull off “a real Christmas miracle”.

Ms Fretwell, 29, said: “She used to go out for a couple of hours and then come straight back, so it was really odd for her to be missing for more than a day.”

Despite posting appeals on social media and searching local walking routes for several months, the software project manager was unable to find her pet.

She had become convinced Bindi would never come home until a phone call from vets on Dec 18 brought welcome news.

Ms Fretwell said there were “no clues” about where Bindi may have been over the last five years, but that she had clearly been “looked after by someone” as she was in “great shape”.

She described her cat as “the most cuddly”, adding that it will “put her paws on either of your shoulders to give you a real cuddle”

Ms Fretwell said: “I think she’s been looked after by someone, she looks in great shape.”

Describing the moment they got the phone call, she said: “We were just in complete disbelief. It wasn’t really until we saw her that we believed it was her.

“We’re just so glad we had her microchipped and that she was alive and well. I’ve never heard of anyone’s cat going missing for so long and turning up absolutely fine.”

Here’s Bindi in a FB post from the Manchester Evening News:

Some info added by The Daily Fail:

The cat, now 10, was in good health and had been ‘well looked after’ and ‘instantly’ recognised her family.

Jilly told the BBC: ‘She’s been missing for five years and we got a call on Thursday from the lovely vets in Witchford to say they had scanned her microchip and she was coming back home to us.

‘She had a couple of little scratches on her that the vet wanted to see to, but other than that, she looks great. She’s lovely and glossy, well-fed and has been looked after somewhere. But we have absolutely no idea where she has been the last five years.’

Bindi disappeared during the Covid pandemic and Jilly spent her daily walks searching for her, sharing appeals on social media and asking people across Haddenham to keep an eye out.

Despite being 10 years old and having spent so long away from her family, Bindi remains affectionate, happily cuddling up to Jilly and settling on her lap.

Other stories frequently use the word “miracle” to refer to Bindi’s reappearance. What tails she could tell, but nobody will ever know. (I suppose the vet could reveal who turned her in, but that may be unethical for vets.).  We send Bindi and her staff thoughts and prayers for the holiday season.

Be sure to get your cat chipped, even if it’s an indoor cat.

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Finally, we have a story from the Guardian about Sylvia Townsend Warner (1973-1978), a lesbian writer described by Wikipedia as:

. . . .an English novelist, poet and musicologist, known for works such as Lolly Willowes, The Corner That Held Them, and Kingdoms of Elfin. She spent most of her adult life in partnership with the poet Valentine Ackland.

And here’s Valentine Ackland:

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Warner was a bit of a polymath, and you can read about her accomplishments in several fields here, or in her biography at the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (with more pictures).

But today we’re featuring her role as an ailurophile, and of a new and wonderful statue of Warner—avec chatte—that has just been produced and unveiled.

Click headline to read:

An excerpt:

The thing all women hate is to be thought dull,” says the title character of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel, Lolly Willowes, an early feminist classic about a middle-aged woman who moves to the countryside, sells her soul to the devil and becomes a witch.

Although women’s lives are so limited by society, Lolly observes, they “know they are dynamite … know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are”.

Warner herself was anything but dull: a writer, translator, musicologist and political activist who wrote seven novels, extensive poetry and contributed more than 150 short stories to the New Yorker, more than any other female writer. She was also a communist who volunteered for the Red Cross during the Spanish civil war and an LGBTQ+ pioneer, living with the poet Valentine Ackland for decades in a quiet Dorset village, in a partnership they described as a marriage.

In the 1930s, Warner was described as “famous in two continents for numerous and brilliant contributions to literature”, but though many of her works remain in print, her name has faded from widespread recognition, even in the county where she lived.

The Guardian article was written on December 12. More about the statue, which is a big megillah. It was controversial because the cat was modeled on a local cat named Susie and people argued that the cat statue (see below) didn’t look much like Susie. Oy!

That is due to change this weekend, when a statue of Warner will be unveiled in Dorchester. The sculpture by Denise Dutton shows Warner sitting on a bench accompanied by a cat, in a nod to the creatures she loved and the witch’s companion in her best-known novel.

Anya Pearson, who led the campaign to erect the statue, said that by placing the lifesize figure in the town’s main shopping area, “we are saying very clearly that women’s stories and queer women’s stories belong in our public spaces”. “Sylvia pushed boundaries, wrote without fear and lived authentically. This statue finally allows us to celebrate her as her authentic self, proudly and openly, in the town she called home.”

Pearson is a veteran of this kind of thing, having previously been the force behind a statue of the Victorian fossil hunter and palaeontologist Mary Anning in nearby Lyme Regis. After that statue was unveiled to great local enthusiasm in 2022, Pearson set her sights on her home town of Dorchester, where statues commemorate the writers Thomas Hardy and William Barnes – but until now, no non-royal women.

The campaign, which asked for nominations of overlooked women, received more than 50 names that were shortlisted then put to a vote. Warner “won by a landslide”, says Pearson, who works at Arts University Bournemouth. The £60,000 cost was raised through crowdsourcing and a number of significant international donations.

Here’s a video of the appeal for funds for the statue, and gives more photos  (a couple with cats) and info about Townsend:

Warner apparently loved cats, and had several. Like many artists, she tended to favor Siamese cats (some day I’ll figure out this correlation), and you can see two photos of her with her felids at the gallery section of her society.

It was hard to find a good picture of the statue that doesn’t appear to be copyrighted, and here is one, from Discover Dorchester., which has no photographer attribution. It’s a great statue, with Townsend sitting on a bench with books at her feet and a cat rubbing against her leg:

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Lagniappe:  Four lion cubs and mom. It appears that there are more, but they are being taken care of by other lionesses in the pride (it’s not clear whether that mother had nine cubs, which would be a LOT for a single mother). This was shot at Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, adjacent to the Serengeti.

h/t: Robert, Ginger K.

Neutrinos may be nearly invisible, but they play a starring role in the Universe. Long-standing anomalies had hinted at a mysterious fourth “sterile” neutrino, potentially rewriting the laws of physics. Using exquisitely precise measurements of tritium decay, the KATRIN experiment found no evidence for such a particle, sharply contradicting earlier claims. With more data and upgrades ahead, the hunt is far from over.

This is very sad, as there will be no photos on the third day of Koynezaa. We are at rock bottom, kaput, tan muerto como una roca, mort et bien mort. I have none in the queue save a few singletons, and that bodes ill for the future of the feature.

BUT, if you have good wildlife photos, send them in pronto.

Here are a few penguin and landscape pictures I took in Antarctica in 2022, just so you’ll have something:

A chick:

 

Solar sails have some major advantages over traditional propulsion methods - most notably they don’t use any propellant. But, how exactly do they turn? In traditional sailing, a ship’s captain can simply adjust the angle of the sail itself to catch the wind at a different angle. But they also have the added advantage of a rudder, which doesn’t work when sailing on light. This has been a long-standing challenge, but a new paper available in pre-print from arXiv, by Gulzhan Aldan and Igor Bargatin at the University of Pennsylvania describes a new technique to turn solar sails - kirigami.

A newly identified region on Mars may hold the key to future human landings. Researchers found evidence of water ice less than a meter beneath the surface, close enough to be harvested for water, oxygen, and fuel. The location strikes a rare balance between sunlight and cold, helping preserve the ice. It could also offer clues about whether Mars once supported life.

New observations reveal that the relationship between ultraviolet and X-ray light in quasars has changed over billions of years. This unexpected shift suggests the structure around supermassive black holes may evolve with time, challenging a decades-old assumption.

Here is a specimen of the well-known podcast “Ask Haviv Anything”, with the moderator being Haviv Rettig Gur, described in a Sam Harris podcast as “a veteran Israeli journalist who serves as the senior analyst at The Times of Israel. He has covered Israel’s politics, foreign policy, and relationship with the U.S. and Jewish diaspora since 2005, reporting from over 20 countries. Since October 7, he has been touring the English-speaking world — the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K. — to discuss the war in Gaza, resilience, and antisemitism.” In this 70-minute video, Haviv interviews Ashley Rindsberg “an American writer and a senior editor at Pirate Wires, an American online media company. He is the author of Tel Aviv Stories and The Gray Lady Winked: How The New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions & Fabrications Radically Alter History.”

The subject is how Wikipedia, as well as reddit, have distorted the facts about Zionism and Israel by adopting a progressive, left-wing, and, yes, antisemitic stance. As I wrote a few days ago:

Wikipedia’s main “Israel” entry now declares that “following the October 7 attacks… Israel began committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” placing a blatant lie in the lead section meant for basic, non-contentious context.

As evidence, I heard from a reader who, upon sending me the video, added this:

As an example, a friend of mine noted that the Wikipedia article on Israel states that Israel started a genocide on Oct 7, 2023. She decided to try and edit it. She jumped through several hoops and I will share a quote from what Wikiedia sent her:

In short, you are not permitted to edit any page on Wikipedia related to the Arab-Israeli conflict until your account is 30 days old with 500 substantive edits (not edits made simply to reach 500). I will tell you that the current wording of the article was reached after extensive discussion and deliberation amongst Wikipedia contributors; you are free to review that discussion yourself, it may be accessed from Talk:Israel (see the FAQ at the top). 331dot (talk) 19:38, 23 December 2025 (UTC)

Edit requests are permitted if they are wholly uncontroversial (something that no reasonable person could possibly disagree with) and do not require extensive discussion to reach a consensus. 331dot (talk) 19:48, 23 December 2025 (UTC)

But this kind of redaction is only the tip of the iceberg. In this discussion you’ll learn about the “Gang of 40”, a group of ideologues who seem to spend nearly all their time as lay editors of Wikipedia articles about Israel, Palestine, and Zionism.  (There is even an article on “Gaza genocide recognition.”) You’ll learn that Wikipedia either has no response to this kind of bigoted malfeasance or doesn’t seem to want to fix it. Yet Wikipedia was, at the outset, dedicated to giving just the facts and documenting them.

And it’s not just Judaica.  Rindsberg notes that Wikipedia is also determined to ensure that the “lab leak theory” for the origin of covid remains a “conspiracy theory” (I myself am agnostic about the issue), and to the denigration of Trump.

The lesson: crowdsourcing does not ensure neutrality, and there is no chance to defeating a dedicated group of ideologue editors who dominate some topics. Rindsberg does discuss how to fix the problem of bias in Wikipedia, which is really a serious problem for some topics since Wikipedia is automatically given a #1 search rating by Google, making it the go-to source for people seeking information. The fixing begins with the kind of outing of sites instantiated in this discussion.

I am averse to long podcasts, but the eloquence of the discussants and my own interest in the topic kept me listening to the end. Even if you think Israel is committing genocide (and Ceiling Cat help you if you do), you will at least learn some things about the biases promulgated by one of the world’s most important sources of information. (Note the shorter discussion near the end arguing that reddit does the same thing.)

The piece ends with criticism of AI. Bogus AI writing and its bogus claims have apparently made their way into the scientific literature. Then these claims make their way back into popular culture when people cite “scientific information” that was actually written by AI in the first place.  That doesn’t mean that we should stop using AI and ChatGPT, but that we have to carefully check any of their factual assertions.

Somewhere at the edge of mathematics lurks a number so large that it breaks the very foundations of our understanding - and in 2025 we came a step closer to finding it

A shiny gray crystal called platinum-bismuth-two hides an electronic world unlike anything scientists have seen before. Researchers discovered that only the crystal’s outer surfaces become superconducting—allowing electrons to flow with zero resistance—while the interior remains ordinary metal. Even stranger, the electrons on the surface pair up in a highly unusual pattern that breaks all known rules of superconductivity.

A new microchip-sized device could dramatically accelerate the future of quantum computing. It controls laser frequencies with extreme precision while using far less power than today’s bulky systems. Crucially, it’s made with standard chip manufacturing, meaning it can be mass-produced instead of custom-built. This opens the door to quantum machines far larger and more powerful than anything possible today.

Scientists in Japan have confirmed that ultra-thin films of ruthenium dioxide belong to a newly recognized and powerful class of magnetic materials called altermagnets. These materials combine the best of two magnetic worlds: they’re stable against interference yet still allow fast, electrical readout—an ideal mix for future memory technology.

Even most rocket scientists would rather avoid hard math when they don’t have to do it. So when it comes to figuring out orbits in complex three-body systems, like those in Cis-lunar space, which is between the Earth and the Moon, they’d rather someone else do the work for them. Luckily, some scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory seems to have a masochistic streak - or enough of an altruistic one that it overwhelmed the unpleasantness of doing the hard math - to come up with an open-source dataset and software package that maps out 1,000,000 cis-lunar orbits.