High Watch Mentor in The Prosperos School of Ontology
Author of Drawing as a Sacred Activity
Pen and Ink Drawing by Heather C. Williams
Today we all are fascinated with technology. Our eyes are almost constantly glued on the latest social media posts, texts, emails, youtube videos, not to mention television news, streaming services like Netflix, Disney, Hulu, Peacock, Spotify, to name a few. I agree with Vandana Shiva: “What’s being mined now (by technology and mechanical thinking) is our MIND.” Watch a 12 min video: https://youtu.be/f9lq-uBdxg8
MIND MATTERS!
Your MIND is your innate, essential potential SELF! We know innately that we are connected with all life, but we’ve been programmed to think we are separate forms in time and space. Nikola Tesla said this: “Though free to think and act, we are held together like stars in the firmament with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. We are all ONE.”
MIND is our essential potential SELF and we all are individualized expressions of ONE INFINITE MIND. The way we each design the world is the way we individually relate to it. When we design our world mechanically – we separate ourselves and stand – above or below others – in order to exploit them. As we design our world with a deep, mindful recognition of connectedness of everything – we nurture our relationship with things (including other human beings).
Come to The Prosperos Advance Seminar Class and activate your sense of connectedness! Learn how your MIND guides your body; how your unconscious MIND can imprison you in the ancient, animal-like fear/aggression reactive pattern. And how, with dedicated, impassioned disciplined work – you can free yourself from the old prison of being a mechanical thing and begin to activate a connection with your INNATE CREATIVE POTENTIAL!
Today it is urgent that we mindfully activate our sense of connectedness with all life! Let us make our interrelated ONENESS the project of our time!
The Prosperos School of Ontology presents
The Advance Seminar
Monitor Class with THANE and Heather C. Williams, HWM
Saturday and Sunday – June 12 & 13
4 hours each day with hourly breaks
Beginning time: 8:00 am Pacific/9:00 am Mtn/10:00 am Central/11:00 /Eastern
“All of you will realize that everything your senses are aware of is a THOUGHT, in your point of view. You have one destination in your life now and that is TO KNOW YOURSELF!” ~ Thane
I remember sitting in my grandfather’s car a few years ago in a gray car park. I was in the second year of my undergraduate philosophy degree, and we were discussing careers. As an engineer and a thoroughly practical man, he wasn’t convinced of the merits of my degree choice.
“But what can you do with philosophy, Gem?” he asked me. “What has philosophy ever achieved?”
I doubt meeting Professor Markus Gabriel would do much to change his impression of the subject.
Professor Gabriel is a philosopher who accepts the existence of unicorns, but sincerely refutes the existence of the world. He is a leading figure of the New Realism school of thought, which seeks to reconcile a common sense understanding of the world as it appears with the somewhat unintuitive ‘many realities’ claims of the anti-realists. That’s my understanding, anyway.
“In this book I will develop the outlines of a new philosophy, which follows from a simple, basic thought, namely the idea that the world does not exist. As you will see, this does not mean that nothing exists at all. There are planets, my dreams, evolution, the toilet flush, hair loss, hopes, elementary particles, and even unicorns on the far side of the moon, to mention only a few examples. The principle that the world does not exist entails that everything else exists. For this reason, I can already announce that I will claim, as my first principle, that everything exists except one thing: the world.”
‘Why The World Does Not Exist’ is Gabriel’s bold attempt to build something from first principles. It is his attempt to build a new metaphysics for the twenty-first century.
As someone interested in philosophy, I couldn’t possibly resist such a title. Unsurprisingly, I do not believe Gabriel is successful in his central claim (did anyone really expect otherwise?). However, in laying out his position he makes some powerful and persuasive arguments for how we should and should not make sense of the world around us.
The Argument: Why the World Does Not Exist
Professor Gabriel makes the argument for his outlandish claim in the first half of the book. As we live in an age of abundant free media where content is king, there is also a TEDx Talk where he summarizes the main tenets of his position. In the second half, he addresses the implications of his conclusion.
To understand why the world does not exist, says Gabriel, we must understand what it means for something to exist. It is not sufficient to equate existence with material presence in the universe. To do so would leave only an anemic fraction of what we understand the world to be.
Facts, for instance, have no material existence. It is true that the Earth is bigger than the moon, but the fact that the Earth is bigger than the moon cannot be located anywhere in particular. Facts don’t have weight or color or smell or taste. The same is true of numbers, names, and all manner of intangibles.
So it is that Gabriel defines existence in terms of fields of sense. A thing exists in so far as it makes sense in relation to something else. Physical objects exist in relation to each other. The fact of the Earth’s comparative size compared to the moon exists in relation to those objects.
In this way, all sorts of things take on existence. Witches exist in relation to Macbeth, Faust, and thousands of Halloween costumes. Democracy exists in relation to the organization of hundreds of governments.
Having settled the nature of existence, Gabriel moves on to defining the world. An initial distinction made is between what he terms the world and the universe. The universe is the Spatio-temporal domain investigated by the natural sciences. It is a place of stellar objects, phylum, and sub-atomic particles. It is not the realm of mundane facts and relationships. The universe contains Saturn and its moons, but it does not contain my love of Nick Cave.
The world, by contrast, is the maximal container of all facts; our widest possible intellectual container, which we abstractly fill with everything that is and has been in all senses. The world, argues Gabriel, contains all the fields of sense that in any way meaningfully exist. In this, he is resting Heidegger’s formulation of the world as “the domain of all domains” (p45).
The thrust of Gabriel’s argument is found in a section enticingly titled ‘the super-thought’, demonstrating that if nothing else, he has an acute knack for philosophical marketing. It’s a dizzying exercise in mental-gymnastics encompassing, amongst other things, Hegel, set-theory, and Seinfel.
I will attempt a summary of the main point. Consider there exists a super-thought. A thought that encompasses, at once, all things that exist, including itself. In his TEDx lecture, Gabriel likens this Hegelian concept to a list of all facts that exist and therefore all of existence. For this list to be complete, it should also contain itself. If that is the case, there pops into existence another fact, that the super-thought list contains itself. Unfortunately, this necessarily leads to a further fact, that it is a fact that the super-thought list contains itself. This then leads to… well, hopefully, you can see where this is going.
Gabriel’s argument will be familiar to anyone with a passable knowledge of Hilbert’s Hotel. It is a reductio ad absurdem argument that aims to succeed by showing the absurdity entailed by its denial. If the world exists, suggests Gabriel, you must accept the absurdity of this infinite regress.
All this leads us back to Gabriel’s initial claim. Everything we can think of has some kind of meaningful existence, if only in a particular field of sense. Yet the object-container for all things that do exist, the world, cannot itself exist without leading to a breakdown of logic.
“Everything exists except one thing: the world.”
Why Gabriel is Wrong, but We Shouldn’t Mind
Let’s be clear. The world exists. Well, insofar as I was ever sure it existed, this book hasn’t changed my mind on the issue. But I didn’t really expect it to, and I don’t think Professor Gabriel did either.
There’s a lot to be taken from the first half of the book. The discussion of fields of sense is interesting and creates both an epistemological and ontological framework that feels worth exploring. Similarly, Gabriel’s bona fides as an academic and a ‘public thinker’ are well demonstrated as he effortlessly synthesizes the scholarly ideas of Derrida, Kant and Spinoza with cultural touchstones ranging from The Matrix to Faust to Black Mirror.
Yet, this isn’t just a smart polemic. It’s an academic argument, steeped in the language of technical philosophy (‘mereology’, ‘a fortiori’…) It seems only appropriate to ask, therefore, why is Gabriel’s argument not convincing?
Ultimately, it comes down to Gabriel making unsurprising use of linguistic sophistry in the first half of his book. His stated aim is to convince us that the world does not exist, only in order to do so, he spends significant effort shifting the definition of world. The reason his title, ‘Why The World Does Not Exist’ is so compelling is that most ordinary people’s understanding of world largely refers to either the planet Earth or our immediate surroundings. In that sense, suggesting the world does not exist is akin to arguing that we may be trapped in the Matrix or we may be no more than a brain in a vat.
Instead, Gabriel’s project could better be understood as an attempt to more fully define the word ‘reality’ or ‘totality of existence’. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood his argument. I’m open to this suggestion as my copy of the book was marred by a significant number of blank pages in place of the proper copy (come on Polity, seriously?) Yet even if every page were present and correct, I suspect the argument would remain unsatisfying.
Not least because many of the central claims are not especially novel. Much time is spent dismissing a definition of the world as simply the totality of objects, before introducing the concept of fields of sense. This isn’t a widely held definition, which Gabriel must appreciate as he quotes the opening parts of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to prove his point (see section 1.1 on p27) That definition of the world as the totality of facts, not objects, is therefore at least a century old.
Heck, when Gabriel riffs on the existence of intangible ideas, I couldn’t help but feel the late, great fantasy writer Terry Pratchett did it better.
“Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy.” — (Death, speaking in The Hogfather)
However, once the book kicks into the second half, it really starts to shine. Gabriel presents a robust defense of a pluralistic approach when investigating the world. He doggedly rejects the scientific reductionism so popular in the age of STEM.
“Thus, the failure of the scientific worldview lies not in science per se but in an unscientific conception that deifies science and brings it into the suspicious neighbourhood of poorly understood religion. This is why contemporary scientistic neo-atheism is a sect: it has faith in a vaguely defined concept, “science,” or “the scientific method,” with a super-object (the universe) answering all questions (if asked in the language of mathematics).”
I can’t help but see a parallel with fellow German philosopher Wittgenstein. In 1927, Wittgenstein accepted an invitation from the Vienna Circle to meet. Wittgenstein, the ultra-reductivist author of the Tractatus, which ends with the immortal line “Whereof one may not speak, thereof one must remain silent”, was to meet his protégés.
The Vienna Circle were logical positivists, inspired by Wittgenstein and determined to replace nonsensical pseudo-religious gibberish with hard science and logic. At the meeting, Wittgenstein faced the wall and read passages from Tagore, a Bengali mystical poet (Edmunds & Eidinow, p121). One interpretation is that Wittgenstein was suggesting that there are areas of investigation other than the material universe, and when venturing into those realms, a language other than mathematics and logic is needed. Those familiar with Wittgenstein’s later work may recognize the direction of travel here.
This ultimately, I suggest, is Gabriel’s point. Unwrapping the hyperbolic language, we are left with a straightforward argument: there are many domains of existence, each with its own language of investigation. To narrow our understanding of existence to a single domain is to put on blinders and to seek a ‘domain of domains’ with unified language of inquisition is fruitless.
Instead, we ought to adopt something like Stephen J. Gould’s concept of NOMA — Non-Overlapping Magisteria — and acknowledge that examination of the world demands more than just the scientific method. Mathematics, philosophy, heuristics, poetry; they all have something to contribute when it comes to understanding the full range of things that exist in the world.
This is a wholly worthwhile position and Gabriel provides an eloquent, thoughtful, and imaginative philosophical argument to support it, so that by the end of the book I was persuaded. Maybe not that the world didn’t exist, but of the flawed position of scientific reductionism and the value in embracing a broader understanding of what it is to exist.
‘Why The World Does Not Exist’ is a strange book. It’s almost (but not quite) misleading in how it draws you in. It’s equal parts frustrating and satisfying, though thankfully ends on the latter. It’s a demanding read that challenges you to think about the content while equipping the reader with all the necessary tools to do so.
In the end, isn’t that what we want from philosophy? To take us from the mundanities of everyday life, really drill down into our fundamental ideas and concepts, and to leave us with a richer, fuller appreciation of our place in the world?
A world that I’m afraid to say, Professor Gabriel, probably does still exist.
The Apeiron Blog — Big Questions, Made Simple.
We know that Philosophy can seem complicated at times. To make things simple, we compile together the best articles, news, reading lists — and other free resources to guide you on your journey. To continue with us, follow us on Medium and sign up to our free mailing list.The Apeiron Blog
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In this continuing series, you are invited to find insights that awake from conversations with interesting and fun guests. In this conversation, our topic is “The Future is moved by your advocacy for Life.”
Behind
every strong person
is a story that gave them no choice
My Guest this time will be Craig Cooley, a radio host, who is currently a Community Advocate for Cultural enrichment through a theater development project; Who works and supports gender and aging community issues; whose vocation in life has covered a great many years in Hotel Travel Branding E-Marketing and Sales.
Join Me on Sunday, May 30, 2021
For this free, one-hour event beginning at 11: 00 a.m. Pacific time- Sunday, May 30, 2021, on Zoom.
Physics displays an uncanny alignment at its very deepest levels. Is a grand theory of everything finally within reach?
Scientists during the refurbishment of the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory, 1,000 metres below Mount Ikeno in Japan. Photo courtesy of Kamioka Observatory, Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo
When trying to explain what motivates me as a physicist, the film A Passage to India (1984) comes to mind. Based on the play by Santha Rama Rau, adapted from the novel by E M Forster, it describes the fallout from a rape case in the fictional city of Chandrapore, during the British Raj in India in the 1920s. What keeps the viewer’s attention is the subtlety of the relationships between the characters – particularly the fragile friendship between the man accused of the rape, Dr Aziz, and an Englishman, Mr Fielding. Data about identity alone, such as race, class, gender or educational status, can never reveal these dynamics nor capture why they fascinate us. When the case arrives in court, ostensibly similar people behave very differently in relation to the defendant. The dynamics of individual behaviour trump any immutable labels we might apply; yet these static labels also impose constraints on just how far any individual can go. We watch, we theorise, and we update our knowledge of the characters and the forces at work. By the end, we find that Fielding and Aziz are more alike than we’d thought, having created a new bond on the basis of a more complete understanding of one another.
The curiosity that drives many particle physicists isn’t so different from what keeps us watching A Passage to India. The obvious and immutable data about the identity of elementary particles include their spins, their electric charges and their masses. From muons to charms, we can learn such information pretty quickly. But it takes years, even lifetimes, to reveal both the nature and degree of their relationships. The neutrino, for example, was introduced in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli, who needed to account for the fact that energy was conserved when a nucleus broke apart. But he would never have guessed how deep the relationship is between a left-handed spinning electron and the neutrino. It took more than 40 years of careful observations and ingenious theoretical work to reveal the deeper unified relationship they have together: via the fundamental force we now know as the ‘weak force’. That’s where the deepest and most satisfying learning in particle physics is to be found: through painstaking observations and the sifting of evidence comes a creative willingness to allow for multiple possibilities.
With the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, every elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model of physics has now been found. Yet the field is far from ‘done’. Among the continuing work, physicists are still looking for a grand unified theory that explains the forces that operate at the subatomic level – a common understanding that accounts for the disparate phenomena we observe among the particles we have in hand. Not everyone agrees that this is worthwhile or even possible; some think we finished learning new things about elementary particles in 2012, and we must accept the cacophony of unrelated details in our physics tables. But I believe that to understand nature at its foundations, it’s necessary to push further, to unearth more subtle and surprising relationships beneath the surface of what we see. Our observations to date support the idea that a unified theory of subatomic forces can be achieved. If true, it would revolutionise our understanding of nature far beyond any discovery of particle physics in the past half century – akin to theological transitions from polytheistic religion (many deities, many fundamental forces) to a monotheistic religion (one unified God, one unified force).
Unification revelations – ‘they are more like each other than we thought’ – have been remarkably productive throughout science. We now know that nature is often simpler and more cohesive than it seems. For most of human history, our theories for why planets move was disconnected from beliefs about why boulders tumble down mountains and apples fall off trees. But in 1687, Isaac Newton revealed that gravity offered a single, unifying explanation. All the explanations that had one ‘force’ for planets wandering in the sky, and another for apples being pulled to the ground, were brought together in one economical framework.
Other odd forces revealed themselves to us, but good explanations were slow to arrive. Between his duties attending to the medical needs of Queen Elizabeth I and her court, the physician and physicist William Gilbert wrote his magnum opus De Magnete at the start of the 17th century on the forces and attractions of electric charges that explained the workings of a compass. But the challenge of how to reconcile electrical charges with magnetic attraction and repulsion fascinated and confused natural philosophers for centuries thereafter. The crowning achievement came in 1861, when James Clerk Maxwell unveiled a set of equations that put electricity and magnetism on equal footing. The theory of electromagnetism showed that they were ‘more alike than you think’.
What led Einstein to general relativity were thoughts of unifying disparate objects
However, a conundrum remained in Newton’s theory of gravity and his laws of motion. The mass of a particle that’s used in equations to predict the particle’s acceleration when subject to any force (electromagnetic force, gravitational force, force due to a spring, etc) is mysteriously exactly the same mass that’s used in different equations to determine what gravitational force exists between the particle and some other body. The first kind of mass is called the ‘inertial mass’ and the second kind ‘gravitational mass’. Newton had to arbitrarily assume their exact equivalence to get the correct answers, even though there was no compelling reason why it had to be so.
However, Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity solved this mystery by theorising that there’s a single unified origin for both types of masses. Einstein recognised that the feeling of total weightlessness when you’re in freefall, even in the presence of gravity, is because of the equivalence of your inertial and gravitational masses. He elevated this observation to the principle of equivalence. In an acclaimed review article on relativity in 1907, he concluded that any new gravitational theory that included his new concepts had to conform with the principle of equivalence. It was this idea that ultimately helped him complete the formulation of the general theory of relativity in 1915.
What’s so interesting about the principle of equivalence, from our point of view, is that it could just as easily be called the principle of mass unification. What led Einstein to general relativity were thoughts of unifying disparate objects (these masses are ‘more alike than you think’), which in the old theory had no reason to be connected to each other. Newton unified planetary orbits and apple falls; Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism; and Einstein unified inertial mass and gravitational mass.
What new frontier can we identify in nature that calls out for deeper understanding of the relationships between particles – a new principle in the tradition of unifying planetary orbits with falling apples, electricity with magnetism, and inertial mass with gravitation? A good answer is a tighter relationship between elementary particles through the unification of certain forces that determine their interactions, known as the gauge forces. These three forces are electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force.
With these three forces come many gauge bosons – a fancy way of describing the particles that are exchanged in order to activate the forces. There are a total of 12 such gauge bosons, or force carriers, in the Standard Model. There is one electromagnetic gauge boson (the photon) associated with the electromagnetic gauge force, three weak gauge bosons (W+, W-, Z) associated with the weak gauge force, and eight strong-force gauge bosons (the gluons) associated with the strong gauge force.
The electromagnetic force is mediated by photons, which get exchanged between particles that feel electric attractions and repulsions. The weak gauge force is what causes many particles to decay into others. For example, a neutron will spontaneously fall apart into three new particles: a proton, an electron and an antineutrino. We didn’t understand exactly how this decay could happen. After all, neither the neutron nor the neutrino have an electric charge, so they can’t talk to each other via photon exchange of the electromagnetic force. So if not via photons and electromagnetism, what force could enable the decay? We subsequently learned that something happened between the existence of the neutron and the appearance of the other three particles that explained the decay: a very brief, quantum mechanical, split-second existence of a W boson particle that’s exchanged between the particles, acting as a vehicle for the weak force. Just like the photon allows charged particles to interact with each other, the W boson allowed the proton, neutron, electron and neutrino to interact with each other, enabling the neutron to decay. Radioactive nuclear ‘beta decays’ proceed by the same weak-force exchange of W bosons. Meanwhile, the strong force is what keeps quarks together inside the proton and neutron.
Our observations to date push us in the direction of entertaining the existence of an Ur-theory of nature
Now, what if all three of the gauge forces were to be unified into a grand unified force – a single Ur-force? What would the observational consequences of such a reality be? For one, the relative charges of each particle under all three gauge forces would have to follow a very particular pattern consistent with what a grand unified force would require. Secondly, the strength of each of the three forces would need to converge to a unified strength as we go to higher energies. Third, there would be new particles beyond those we have already seen. And finally, there would be decays and interactions among known particles that are forced on us, even at low energies, by the grand unified theory.
Our observations to date push us in the direction of entertaining the existence of an Ur-theory of nature. Consider the fact that a left-handed electron has an electric charge of -1 under the electromagnetic force, a charge of 2 (a ‘spin charge’) under the weak gauge force, and a charge of 0 under the strong force. At the same time, the right-handed down quark has an electric charge of -1/3, a weak force charge of 0, and a strong force charge of 3 (a ‘3-dimensional unitary group charge’, though the mathematical details don’t need to be understood here). So, between these two particles, we have charges of 0, -1/3, -1, 2 and 3, etc for the different forces arranged in a particular manner. It’s a motley crew of jumbled-up numbers, which doesn’t seem to have much rhyme or reason to it. However, a school of mathematics known as group theory tells us that this is exactly the collection of charges that are needed to form a new grand unified particle: let’s call it P, which can be represented as P=(left-handed electron, left-handed neutrino, right-handed down quark).
Likewise, we can analyse more particles in the Standard Model, such as right-handed electrons, right-handed up quarks and left-handed up and down quarks. After many measurements, we find another set of willy-nilly values for the charges they display under all three gauge forces. But upon closer inspection using group theory mathematics, we find that those numbers also magically fit exactly into a single grand unified particle: W=(right-handed electron, left-handed down quark, right-handed and left-handed up quarks). It’s as though 10 very raggedy puzzle pieces scattered on the floor were pieced together to make a perfect circle.
It didn’t have to be this way. The charges of the elementary particles in our Universe could have been such that there was no way to unify any two or more of them into a single unified particle. It’s the combination of observational data and mathematics that offers us strong hints that the charges for elementary particles in the standard model aren’t arbitrary, but rather arise by virtue of being embedded into a grand unified theory framework.
There’s a second set of observational data hinting that the unification of the gauge forces is nature’s choice. This comes from measuring the strengths of the forces. When we measure the strength of the electromagnetic interaction and compare it with, say, the strong interaction, we get a very different answer. For particles colliding with energies about 100 times that of the proton mass, the weak-force interaction strength is aweak=0.033, which contrasts with a strong-force interaction strength of about astrong=0.118. We see that αaweak is much less than αastrong, which is hardly what we’d expect if the forces are unified. Rather, we’d normally think that they should be the same if they were truly ‘unified’.
The resolution of this conundrum is that the strength of the forces depends on the energy scale at which they are evaluated. That is, the forces should unify at the energy scale where the grand unified theory is valid, and not at lower energies where the grand unified force might spontaneously split itself into a multitude of other forces (electromagnetic, weak and strong forces). So the question isn’t whether the strength of the forces is all the same at some randomly chosen energy scale, but rather if there is any energy scale where the couplings correspond.
They could be cruel coincidences of nature that have led us astray
Fortunately, a set of techniques known as the renormalisation group flow of coupling strengths – first pioneered by Kenneth Wilson in the early 1970s – enable us to test the energies required for the unification of forces. First, we input the values of the force strengths measured at any scale, and then we ‘run the couplings’ using the mathematical methods to see if the couplings converge at some higher scale. Incredibly, we find that the strongest force (the strong force) decreases its strength between particles when the particles smash into each other at very high energies, while the weakest force (the hypercharge force, derived from electromagnetism) increases its strength. All three force strengths (hypercharge, weak, and strong) therefore come very close together, as a grand unification of forces requires, at an energy that is about 15 or 16 orders of magnitude (1015 or 1016) higher than a proton’s mass. Imagine three soccer players at different points on the field kicking their soccer balls and all three colliding at one point over midfield. You’d be forgiven for thinking they did it on purpose in an attempt to make a viral YouTube video. Analogously, many physicists don’t think it was an accident that all three force couplings converge at high energies, and therefore we have a very tantalising picture of grand unification of the forces – nature did it ‘on purpose’.
Again, it didn’t have to be like this. One of the force strengths could have moved away from the pack as we moved up the energy scale. This would have immediately made the project of grand unification look impossible or highly suspect. Furthermore, the scale of putative unification adds to the positive view of this picture. Its value is neither too low to run up against the problem of proton decay (to be discussed below), nor is it too high (1017 or higher) to collude with the inscrutable dynamics of strong gravity that spoils all calculations and interpretations. We see again that observational data (force strength measurements) and theoretical work (group theory and renormalisation group techniques) have led us toward grand unification.
Is there any way to obtain direct proof of unification? What I’ve described so far count as strong hints, but by no means are they proof. They could be cruel coincidences of nature that have led us astray. To obtain ‘proof for all practical purposes’ would require us to do experiments at the unification scale and observe the production of new particles and new interactions directly through collisions. For example, many grand unified theory ideas require the existence of an additional grand unified gauge boson that could be directly produced in collisions, seen, and measured. Unfortunately, it’s out of the question to build a high-energy collider that could reach the energies where we think the grand unified theory resides. It took us many decades to reach energies of only a few thousand times the proton mass – and it might never be the case that experiments could reach energies of 15 orders of magnitude higher, which is what it would take to convince the most ardent sceptics.
The search for a grand theory isn’t over, though. One of the most sought-after hints is the data connected to the search for proton decay. Along with the neutron, the proton makes up the nuclei within our bodies. If the proton were to decay quickly, it would disrupt our cells and give us cancer and we could never have reliable life. Fortunately, the proton lives a very long time: as far as we know, it lives for at least 1034 years. That’s about 24 orders of magnitude longer than the lifetime of the Universe. The prediction of grand unified theories for the lifetime of the proton generally falls in the range of 1030 to 1036 years.
Any theories that predict a proton lifetime of less than 1034 years can be ruled out. The simplest grand unified theory is sometimes called the Georgi-Glashow minimal SU(5) theory, proposed in 1974. In its infancy, researchers thought that it predicted the proton lifetime to be less than 1030 years. At the time, confidence was so high that proponents believed they would quickly observe proton decay in experiments. Instead, the result came back negative in 1983 from the IMB (Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven) experiment. The lifetime of a proton had to be greater than 1031 years, which appeared to rule out the minimal Georgi-Glashow theory.
However, the computations that seemed so rigorous back in the early 1980s look like approximations on top of simplifications today. Taking into account high-scale quantum corrections leads to a perfectly acceptable grand unification with proton decay lifetime prediction greater than 1034 years. This means that proton decay remains a promising frontier in the search for a grand unified theory.
The story of nature is all the more woven with an infinite number of patterns, most as yet unseen
Two experiments are now being built that will increase our ability to find out if the proton decays at lifetimes even greater than the current limits. The DUNE experiment in the United States and the Hyper-Kamiokande experiment in Japan are both attempting to find evidence. These experiments involve filling vessels with 40 kilotons of liquid argon and 260 kilotons of ultrapure water, respectively, and surrounding them with detection equipment to see the tiny flashes of electricity or light that would be the telltale signs of a proton decaying in the midst of all that material. The two main modes of decay they’re looking for are the proton decaying to positron and pion particles (the standard decay that almost all grand unified theories predict) and the proton disintegrating into kaon and neutrino particles (which is particularly important for unification that incorporates an idea known as supersymmetry).
If there really is a grand unified theory that explains the Universe beyond the standard model, it’s likely we should see both or either of these decays. For example, proton decay relies on the fact that the up quark, down quark and positron can all join together in a unified way to convert two up quarks in the proton into an anti-down quark in the pion and a positron – all made possible by the exchange of a very heavy X gauge boson present in the grand unified gauge force. Also, Hyper-Kamiokande expects to be able to find evidence for the proton decaying this way if its lifetime is less than 1035 years. This is an order of magnitude more sensitive than current experiments, but it’s still unclear if it gives us enough to see actual decay. We should know in about 15 to 20 years, when the new generation of experiments, such as DUNE and Hyper-Kamiokande, have been built and have taken enough data to make a good test of the ideas.
It’s vital for us to find and catalogue the particles that serve as nature’s raw material. But if we stop there, we’re like impatient school children who merely read the Wikipedia synopsis of A Passage to India and then get on with writing their term papers. There’s so much more to learn and to synthesise about this complex narrative than the basic facts reveal. The story of nature is all the more woven with an infinite number of patterns, most as yet unseen. The subtle relationships between particles – the interactions between themselves in many different environments – is what lends our understanding its richness. The revelations of unification in science in general, and especially in physics, have been incredibly fruitful in the deepening of our knowledge and in lighting the way to future discoveries.
Among the many possibilities for unification, nature seems to have dropped us irresistible hints that our particles and our gauge forces are indeed unified into a grand unified theory of some kind. These hints are based on observational data along with the advanced theoretical tools of relativistic quantum field theory and group theory mathematics. However, the limitations of our technology have also made it extremely hard for us to get more direct proof. Seeing a proton decay is one of our few hopes for more direct corroboration – and that’s why so much effort is going into watching protons with an eagle eye to see if one disintegrates. Data will determine whether unified theories will continue to pay off as they have for so many centuries. If history is our guide, we have every reason to believe they will.
An estimated 40 million adults receive therapy treatment every year, but those considering therapy or even in therapy may encounter some common myths and misconceptions about what it can accomplish. The Onion debunks the most enduring myths about therapy.
MYTH: You need something wrong with you to go to therapy. FACT: Therapists will happily take your money regardless of where you are in your mental health journey.
MYTH: There are healthy alternatives to therapy, such as exercise or meditation. FACT: You don’t do those either, though.
MYTH: I’m too old—therapy won’t help me. FACT: It’s never too late to realize how thoroughly screwed up your life is.
MYTH: Going to therapy is a sign of weakness. FACT: Going to therapy is a sign of health insurance.
MYTH: Once I start, I’ll have to go to therapy forever. FACT: At some point, your therapist will get sick of you and tell you to stop.
MYTH: Therapy is inaccessible. FACT: Therapy is inaccessible for the people who need it most.
MYTH: I can talk to friends instead of seeing a therapist. FACT: Your friends are at this very moment making an effort to distance themselves from you.
MYTH: Therapists will judge me for what I say. FACT: With the amount of wildly interesting stuff they’ve heard, you’ll likely come off as pretty boring.
MYTH: Therapists sit behind desks taking notes while I lie on a couch. FACT: Therapists prefer to shake your shoulders, slap you in the face, and yell “Snap out of it, you’re talking crazy!”
Mitch McConnell, who is delivering on his pledge to focus on blocking Joe Biden’s agenda, claimed that an investigation into the Capitol insurrection was pointless.Photograph by Craig Hudson / Bloomberg / Getty
When Joe Biden was a Presidential candidate, he carried around a wonkish book of international comparative politics by two Harvard professors, “How Democracies Die,” from 2018, to explain the urgency of his campaign against Donald Trump. He touted the book in an interview with my colleague Evan Osnos, marked up passages with notes and observations, and even, one of the book’s authors told me this week, recommended it to a random stranger he met while riding his beloved Amtrak. Now that he is President, Biden has characterized his efforts to restore American democracy as part of a global struggle with resurgent autocracies, in places such as China and Russia. “This generation is going to be marked by the competition between democracies and autocracies,” Biden said, in April, as he lobbied Republicans to support his sweeping, multitrillion-dollar infrastructure bill. “The autocrats are betting on democracy not being able to generate the kind of unity needed to make decisions to get in that race. We can’t afford to prove them right. We have to show the world—and, much more importantly, we have to show ourselves—that democracy works, that we can come together on the big things.” He ended with a typical Biden flourish: “It’s the United States of America, for God’s sake.”
United we are not. A month later, prospects for Biden’s ambitious legislative agenda remain uncertain, G.O.P.-controlled state legislatures are passing measures that will make it harder for many Americans to vote, and the White House may be only days away from giving up on bipartisan talks over the infrastructure bill, which have come nowhere close to a deal. Far from embracing Biden’s call for unity, Republicans remain in thrall to the divisive rants and election conspiracy theories of their defeated former President. As a result, Congress is at such a partisan impasse that it cannot even agree on a commission to investigate the January 6th attack by a pro-Trump mob on its own building.
Before leaving town for their Memorial Day recess, in fact, Senate Republicans successfully used the legislative filibuster for the first time this session to block the proposed bipartisan panel. Their stated arguments against a commission range from the implausible to the insulting; the real explanation is political cynicism in the extreme. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is so far delivering on his pledge to focus a “hundred per cent” on blocking Biden’s agenda, even claimed that an investigation was pointless because it would result in “no new fact.” John Cornyn, a close McConnell ally, from Texas, was more honest, at least, in admitting, to Politico, that the vote was all about denying Democrats “a political platform” from which to make the 2022 midterm elections a “referendum on President Trump.” For his part, Trump has been putting out the word that he plans to run for reëlection in 2024—and exulting in polls showing that a majority of Republicans continue to believe both his false claims of a fraudulent election and that nothing untoward happened on January 6th. Needless to say, these are not the signs of a healthy democracy ready to combat the autocratic tyrants of the world.
“Turns out, things are much worse than we expected,” Daniel Ziblatt, one of the “How Democracies Die” authors, told me this week. He said he had never envisioned a scenario like the one that has played itself out among Republicans on Capitol Hill during the past few months. How could he have? It’s hard to imagine anyone in America, even when “How Democracies Die” was published, a year into Trump’s term, seriously contemplating an American President who would unleash an insurrection in order to steal an election that he clearly lost—and then still commanding the support of his party after doing so.
Three years ago, it was still conceivable, if not likely, that Trump and Trumpism could be expunged by an overwhelming result at the ballot box or a clear-cut impeachment and expulsion from public life. But Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, his co-author, never thought that would happen. Instead, they highlighted a more realistic possibility: that Trump’s electoral defeat would not stop the continued polarization, flouting of political norms, and increased “institutional warfare” in America—leaving the country a battered “democracy without solid guardrails” that would be “hovering constantly on the brink of crisis.” The crisis, however, turned out to be even more existential than they had predicted; the present is “much more worrisome,” Ziblatt told me. In contemporary Germany, he pointed out, an incitement to violence of the kind deployed by Trump and some of his backers might be enough to get a political party banned. But, in America’s two-party system, you can’t just ban one of the two parties, even if it takes a terrifying detour into anti-democratic extremism.
This is the worrisome essence of the matter. In one alarming survey released this week, nearly thirty per cent of Republicans endorsed the idea that the country is so far “off track” that “American patriots may have to resort to violence” against their political opponents. You don’t need two Harvard professors to tell you that sort of reasoning is just what could lead to the death of a democracy. The implications? Consider the blunt words of Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in a ruling on a case involving one of the January 6th rioters at the Capitol, issued even as it became clear that Republican senators would move to block the January 6th commission from investigating what had caused the riot:
The steady drumbeat that inspired defendant to take up arms has not faded away; six months later, the canard that the election was stolen is being repeated daily on major news outlets and from the corridors of power in state and federal government, not to mention in the near daily fulminations of the former President.
It’s worth noting that Jackson released this ruling this week, the same week that Trump issued statements calling the 2020 vote “the most corrupt Election in the history of our Country,” touting himself as “the true President,” and warning that American elections are “rigged, corrupt, and stolen.”
As bad as this is, it’s too early to say that Biden’s approach has failed. To start, there’s the argument, from Ziblatt and others, that dialling down the rhetoric might actually work. Biden, almost certainly for this reason, does not talk much about either January 6th or Republican obstructionism. The words “Donald Trump” rarely, if ever, cross his lips. “He’s deëscalating,” Ziblatt told me, and trying to take some of the “anger and animosity,” heat and rage, out of American politics. This is more or less the course recommended by “How Democracies Die,” although it’s infuriating to Democrats who wish for stronger pushback to daily outrages generated by a Republican Party that has gone all in on outrage as a strategy.
Politically, Republicans seem increasingly frustrated that they have not managed to attack Biden yet in a way that sticks. The new President, a lifelong centrist with decades of votes to prove it, does not seem to be a “radical socialist” or a cancel-culture warrior. Even the G.O.P.’s not-at-all-subtle efforts to demean him as an old man being pushed into extremism by his staff or by leftists in Congress have not really stuck. Indeed, Biden’s approval rating, like Trump’s before him, has remained remarkably consistent, a virtual straight line, regardless of the attacks lobbed at him: the FiveThirtyEight polling average had Biden at fifty-four per cent this week, which was exactly the same as a month ago, two months ago, and three months ago. That average is not only consistent in a way that suggests the ebb and flow of the Washington news cycle makes little difference with voters—it is also a significantly higher baseline for Biden than for Trump and slightly better than George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Biden came into office vowing to focus on the pandemic and the economy. Both are going well. Thanks to a successful government mobilization, more than half of the U.S. adult population has now been vaccinated; in many states, more than seventy per cent of adults have had at least one shot. Coronavirus infections and deaths have sharply dropped. The country is reopening. “We’ve turned the tide on a once-in-a-century pandemic,” Biden said in a speech on Thursday, in Cleveland—at a site where a campaign rally was supposed to take place last March, before it became the first to be cancelled owing to the coronavirus; he never did another rally. “Put it simply: America’s coming back. America’s on the move.”
Biden, as expected, said nothing about Trump or the political furor over the January 6th commission. He did not accuse his opponents of trying to ruin the country or call them names. But there was a shift—a noticeable one—from the Biden of previous months. He no longer talked of unity. There were no gauzy paeans to bipartisanship. Instead, there was a list that Biden pulled out from his papers and waved in the middle of his speech, an early salvo, perhaps, in the years-long blame game to come. The list, Biden said, was of congressional Republicans who have bragged about the benefits to their constituents from Biden’s $1.9-trillion covid-relief bill, which passed without a single Republican vote. “Some people have no shame,” Biden said, and then both the President and his audience laughed. Before he returned to Air Force One for his trip back to the White House, Biden was asked to comment on the news of the day, which was not his speech in Ohio but the dysfunction back in Washington. “I can’t imagine anyone voting against the establishment of a commission on the greatest assault since the Civil War on the Capitol,” the President told reporters. “But, at any rate . . .”
It all brought to mind a scene from my time as a correspondent in Moscow. I was at a conference where Grigory Yavlinsky, a leading democratic opposition figure, was asked about the parlous state of Russian democracy under its then new President, Vladimir Putin. He responded with an old Soviet joke about an ambulance driver who picks up a critically ill patient and decides to drive him straight to the morgue. The patient protests that he’s not dead, to which the ambulance driver responds, “We’re not there yet.” Hopefully, we are not witnessing the slow-motion death of American democracy. At least, not yet.
This article has been updated to include news developments.
Susan B. Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington. She co-wrote, with Peter Baker, “The Man Who Ran Washington.”
Alexander Hirschis associate professor of political science, director of the Honors College and director of the Climate Scholar Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Edited by Sam Dresser
1 JULY 2020 (psyche.co)
The contemporary English poet Denise Riley frames mourning as a response to ‘implacable stillness’. In mourning, she writes, one is ‘in arrested time’. For Riley, mourning is about how loss, when it is sufficiently devastating, suspends time. In her poem ‘A Part Song’ (2012), she vividly describes the freeze-frame engendered by mourning:
Suspended in unsparing light The sloping gull arrests its curl The glassy sea is hardened waves Its waters lean through shining air Yet never crash but hold their arc Hung rigidly in glaucous ropes Muscled and gleaming. All that Should flow is sealed, is poised In implacable stillness. Joined in Non-time and halted in free fall.
In Riley’s poem, nature doesn’t merely witness and empathise, as it does in John Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ (1638), in which ‘daffadillies fill their cups with tears’. Rather, with Riley, the whole of nature is seized up by the deferral of time – the gull’s curl arrests, the glassy sea freezes, and all that should flow is made motionless, as if the entire world were paralysed in stop-motion.
As a response to loss, however, mourning includes more than the impasse that Riley describes. In its most trenchant form, it might induce stuckness, but mourning is also an attempt to interrupt arrested time. It is driven by an animating desire to be unsuspended, to be recast into life after loss. In this sense, mourning seeks a way forward when the structural conditions surrounding and upholding life are damaged or broken. It acts to substitute arrested time for a capacious and worldly absorption in a time when newness is again conceivable. Mourning constitutes an act of founding, an attempt to foreground a new beginning after loss, one that miraculously sets the whole world rotating again.
With this dream of living again, mourning offers an occasion for freedom. This connection might surprise readers as mourning often signifies a private course undertaken by individuals bedevilled by loss, whereas freedom tends to underscore a collective effort galvanised in the public sphere. But freedom is hardly a self-explanatory or unitary category. Its inflections include both social forms and subjective experiences. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin presents one of the most influential modern theories of freedom. In 1958, he argued that freedom (Berlin’s term was ‘liberty’) comes in two forms, ‘negative’ and ‘positive’. Negative freedom, on the one hand, focuses on emancipation from a set of restrictive obstacles, and is therefore experienced in the absence of interference or constraint. By contrast, positive freedom emphasises the presence of a desired state.
Mourning gives loss a creative form, restoring life to a shattered world
Of course, the poles of negative and positive freedom are crass caricatures, but Berlin nonetheless points to an important distinction in the way that freedom is often invoked. Either it is conceptualised as ‘free reign’ – thus the wider the arena of non-interference, the more robust that freedom becomes – or it is framed as the index of one’s self-determination. Either it is about escape from a world of obstacles, in which case freedom is about being able to do something, or it is a capacity that we have to realise, in which case freedom is about the experience of self-actualisation that comes from exercising mastery over fate.
Mourning presents a felicitous blend of negative and positive freedom. It discloses a feeling of freedom from loss, but also inheres in the freedom to engage again in a new project of investment. Interrupting arrested time (negative freedom), mourning also seeks a way forward (positive freedom), and the opportunity to pursue this forward direction is itself foregrounded by the interruption of arrested time.
The psychoanalyst Hanna Segal acknowledged this interanimation in her work on mourning:
It is when the world within us is destroyed, when it is dead and loveless, when our loved ones are in fragments, and we ourselves in helpless despair – it is then that we must recreate our world anew, reassemble the pieces, infuse life into dead fragments, recreate life.
Mourning is the first step toward such recreation. Mourning gives loss a creative form, restoring life to a shattered world. Because of this, mourning is about more than the loss of loss. If arrested time follows when one’s horizon of meaning has collapsed, mourning is what yields ‘the mixed blessing of more life’, as the American critic Harold Bloom once put it. It unlocks the present by enlarging the realm of the possible. In this, mourning offers an occasion for freedom.
Our great public articulations of mourning make this vivid. An example can be seen in the Gettysburg Address of 1863. A wartime funeral elegy that is also celebrated as one of the most resonant expressions of freedom, the US president Abraham Lincoln’s requiem not only mourned the sacrifice of the dead during the American Civil War, it simultaneously exhorted the living on their behalf, by sublimating the experience of violent death into the rebirth of the Republic. Those who gave their lives at the Battle of Gettysburg shall not have done so in vain, Lincoln argued, so long as the living dedicate themselves to a ‘new birth of freedom’. In framing their loss this way, Lincoln explicitly connected mourning with freedom. He invoked positive freedom in arguing that self-rule ‘by the people, for the people’ was at stake in mourning the loss of life in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Lincoln also invoked negative freedom in arguing that ‘a new nation, conceived in liberty’ must escape from a past afflicted by slavery. The summoning hail embedded within this expression of freedom, and the baptism of new beginning it promised, cannot be distinguished from the way that Lincoln mourned those who gave the ‘last full measure of devotion’.
Under tragic circumstances, such as those captured by the Gettysburg Address, the past can be unforgettable and unforgiveable, and for this very reason redemption might remain an unassumable responsibility. But despite and because of this, mourning invites us to dream of living again. There can be no guarantees that this new life will not itself be fraught, for a new project of investment might itself bear losses in the future. Mourning could animate a new birth, but this doesn’t guarantee a future without vulnerability. Mourning might be a leap in the dark, but it is not a leap into darkness. It is a leap to freedom.
Japanese people have a reputation for being unfailingly polite, pragmatic, honorable, and so on.
That reputation is partially based in Japan’s guest culture. However, it also has to do with racist stereotypes of Japan and Japanese people that have been given free reign in newspapers, movies and other cultural institutions in Europe and America for decades.
Because of these preconceptions, it might be hard to imagine Japanese people being sarcastic or mean-spirited.
Indeed, people on the Internet can commonly be found saying things like “Japanese people are too polite to understand sarcasm. It just doesn’t exist in their culture.”
You might also see people ask “Why don’t Japanese people understand sarcasm?” or “Why doesn’t sarcasm exist in Japan?”
Let’s bust those myths right now. Sarcasm is definitely a thing in Japan, and being on the receiving end of it can really hurt.
Does sarcasm exist in Japanese?
Yes, sarcasm exists in Japan. Japanese has two words for sarcasm: 皮肉 (hiniku) and 嫌味 (iyami). That alone should show it exists. In Japanese, like in English, sarcasm can be expressed by a mean tone of voice to show that a compliment is actually insincere.
However, Japanese people also use sarcasm by using inappropriate honorifics or being overly polite in an apparently sincere manner. Should you use Japanese-style sarcasm yourself? Probably not. Unless you’re really sure it will go over well, it can be incredibly rude and get you in serious trouble.
皮肉 (hiniku) and 嫌味 (iyami): two Japanese words for sarcasm
There are two words in Japanese which can be used to mean sarcasm.
The first, 皮肉 (hiniku), uses thekanji for “skin” and the kanji for “meat.” All the same, the meaning of the word is “sarcasm” or, in some cases, “satire” or “irony.”
Interestingly, the English word “sarcasm” also has its root in a word meaning “flesh.”
The word comes to us from the Greek “sark,” meaning flesh, and more directly from the Greek word “sarkazein,” meaning “to tear flesh.”
For 皮肉, it helps to realize that another meaning is “surface level.”
Because sarcasm operates in Japanese chiefly by the surface-level meaning of a word differing from your actual meaning, this word makes total sense as “sarcasm.”
The second word, 嫌味 (iyami), is the kanji for “hate” and the kanji for “flavor.”
This one is more straightforward. If the flavor of your words is “hate,” then they are pretty sarcastic.
Aptly, 嫌味 is also used for other types of hateful words, like when someone is being snide or just generally nasty.
皮肉 (hiniku) and sarcasm
皮肉 is used for run-of-the-mill sarcasm, and can also be used to refer to irony and general cynicism, as well as satirical literature.
There is a long tradition of sarcasm in Japanese culture, dating at least as far back as Sho Shonagon’s Pillow Book, a book about the foibles of the imperial court around the year 1000 CE.
Even during the Edo period, which is often described as a time of static social movement and reverence for the samurai classes, immensely popular comedic books like Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige (called “Shank’s Mare” in English) ruthlessly tears apart the self-important nature of just about everyone in a very sarcastic way.
There is also a whole class of poetry which is essentially sarcastic haiku, called senryu after their creator Karai Senryu.
Here’s one of Senryu’s own poems:
泥棒を 捕えてみれば 我が子なり
the thief finally apprehended… it’s my own son
How’s that for sarcasm?
As noted above, this word can also mean that something is only on the surface.
嫌味 (iyami): cuttingly sarcastic
Unlike 皮肉, the word 嫌味 refers to truly brutal takedowns delivered in a sarcastic manner.
If you were to ask a teacher about a math question you didn’t understand, and he replies with “I can see why you don’t understand it, since we covered it three times in class already,” that would be a great use of 嫌味.
In short, while 皮肉 can be used for irony, and is the generally agreed-upon translation for “sarcasm,” 嫌味 represents a harsher, more cruel type of sarcasm.
Some other phrases you might use in English to describe 嫌味 include “cutting remarks,” “snide comments,” “mean-spirited” or even “put-down.”
We’ll take a look at some examples of both types of sarcasm, but first let’s take a little digression.
The differences in American-style and Japanese-style sarcasm
A common sentiment expressed by Americans who have tried using sarcasm with Japanese people is that it just doesn’t work.
This is the most likely culprit of questions like “Why don’t Japanese people understand sarcasm?” and “Why don’t they have sarcasm in Japan?”
The reason American-style sarcasm misses the mark in Japanese is not because sarcasm doesn’t exist in Japanese. Rather, it’s because sarcasm in Japanese culture is used for a different purpose.
For example, a consulting firm which deals with Japanese to English interpreting mentions a casewhere an American man called his Japanese co-worker a troublemaker in a joking tone and the Japanese man was deeply insulted.
A post on Bored Panda, likewise, shows how people’s sarcastic responses to a Japanese artistposting their work on Twitter led that artist to delete their account and start a new one.
Even though the sarcasm was meant in a way to mean something similar to “this is so good!”, that didn’t come through at all.
As those posts say, the reason has more to do with cultural differences than the lack of sarcasm in Japan.
In American culture, sarcasm (and its close cousin irony) can be used to give people a compliment without seeming overly sincere. It can also be used to try and lighten the mood by saying things like “Well, this will be fun” in bad situations.
American sarcasm (and English sarcasm too) serve to build a connection between two people.
Neither of those uses of sarcasm is standard in Japanese, where sarcasm is accomplished in almost the opposite manner: to insult people and show them you think little of them, you shower them with praise in the most formal, polite way imaginable or you use very formal language to sarcastically place them higher than you on the social ladder when the opposite might be true.
These two key differences are a double-whammy when it comes to trying out American-style sarcasm on Japanese people.
Because the cultural experience they have with sarcasm is that it is always used as an insult, they don’t think to look for any meaning other than the surface-level meaning.
Since on the surface the words are insulting or negative, a person only used to Japanese culture is going to assume they are actually intended to convey insult or hostility.
Just to reiterate, though, Japanese people and Japan definitely use sarcasm. Let’s look at some examples.
False praise and sarcasm
The most common way sarcasm is used in Japanese is by giving surface-level praise that is actually insulting.
This is very similar to how sarcasm is used by some women in the southern United States, where “Well, bless your heart,” “Aren’t you just the sweetest?” and other similar apparent praise, delivered in a seemingly polite way, actually means something closer to “I am embarrassed on your behalf that you thought this was a good idea and you are an idiot” or “What is wrong with you?”
In Japanese, you might seem to praise someone by calling them smart (偉い人, erai hito) when you think they are a ridiculous fool, or you might say something is amazing (凄い, sugoi) when you really think it is anything but.
This kind of sarcasm can be delivered in a way that makes it obviously sarcastic by changing your tone of voice, just as in English.
Alternatively, it can be delivered deadpan, especially if you are trying to really show your disdain of someone in a group setting or want plausible deniability.
You will often see this kind of sarcasm used in anime, especially when a character’s thoughts about someone are being used to show a contrast with what they are saying out loud.
Examples
「夫はぱくり屋だって。」
「まあ、偉い人ですね。」
“She said her husband is a con artist.”
“Wow, he must be smart.”
「こんなバカなことを見に行った信じられない。」
「素晴らしいですよね。」
“I can’t believe we came here to see something this stupid.”
“Isn’t it wonderful?”
In these examples, it’s pretty clear that the responses are sarcastic, and not sincere.
These are pretty low-stakes, but it’s easy to imagine a case where the sarcasm might be used to seriously hurt someone’s feelings or otherwise make fun of them. In a formal setting, sarcasm might even have a serious effect on someone’s livelihood.
「あの、先生、すみませんですが実験に5点を持ってきたけど。。。」
「そうですね、田中君。じゃあ、一生懸命頑張ったから０点はどう？」
“Um, teacher, excuse me. You only gave me five points on this test…”
“You’re right, Tanaka. Since you worked so hard, how about I give you a zero instead?”
Unlike the other examples, which might be termed 皮肉, this is probably 嫌味 instead. Ouch!
Another way to indicate sarcasm is to add humble or formal keigo in situations that don’t warrant it.
For example, calling someone 先生 (“teacher,” sensei) or 様 (sama) in a mocking tone might suggest you think they’re full of themselves.
Breaking out the super-formal 「申し訳ございません。」 (moushiwake gozaimasen) instead of 「ごめん。」 (gomen) when apologizing can do the trick.
In fact, you can also refer to yourself in a sarcastically polite way if you someone makes fun of something without realizing you’re the one responsible for it.
Examples
「うわあ！この絵の画家はまずいよ！」
「はい、私様です。。。」
“Woah! The artist for this painting is awful!”
“Yes, that would be me…”
「何だよ先輩、この質問を間違った。」
「じゃあ、正しい仕方を教えて、先生。」
“What the… Upper-classman, you got this question wrong.”
“Oh? Then show me how to do it properly, teacher.”
Sarcasm used this way doesn’t have to be insulting. In the second example, it might be light-hearted banter between friends.
But be careful and don’t do this unless you’re really close with someone and know they will expect and appreciate it.
Wait, so is this sarcasm or…?
So how can you tell if someone is trying to be sarcastic?
Just like in English, it’s sometimes hard. Also just like English, there are a couple of hints.
First, check someone’s tone of voice. Studies have shown that people use a lower pitchwhen they’re being sarcastic and may use other cues like elongated vowels or sighing.
Facial expressions are another good indicator that someone is being sarcastic.
When you get right down to it, though, part of the point of sarcasm can sometimes be that it provides a safe way for people to hide what they really think beneath a veneer of politeness.
If that’s the case, you may never know if someone was being sarcastic or sincere when they said “Good job!”
Why you shouldn’t try to be sarcastic in Japan
To recap, sarcasm in Japanese can be funny, especially in literary contexts like a book or manga.
More often, though, sarcasm is used to put people in their place.
This is why you shouldn’t try to use Japanese-style sarcasm when speaking to people in Japan unless you’re really sure it will be appreciated. Likewise, American-style sarcasm is almost guaranteed to fail.
Think of it like this: In an English conversation with a coworker you don’t know, would you jokingly call them a thief for using the company’s coffee maker twice in one day?
Probably not. That could lead to a huge misunderstanding and even get you in trouble.
Among close friends who all have a shared style of humor, though, it might be interpreted in a humorous way (although it’s still pretty messed up, to be honest).
Sarcasm in Japanese is a lot like that. Unless you really want to signal that you think your coworker is an absolute idiot who you can’t stand, you wouldn’t want to (for example) use extremely polite language while giving them an insincere compliment.
Of course, just like with English uses of mean-spirited phrases, it might be that you have a group of Japanese friends who appreciate this kind of humor.
Unless you know that for sure, though, it’s best to err on the side of caution and show your good humor in other, more culturally acceptable ways.
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7 August 2020 (aeon.co)
The ignorant pundit is absolutely certain; the true expert understands their own limits and how to ask the right questions
Ivanka Trump, daughter and adviser of U.S. President Donald Trump, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, from left, attend a panel at the W20 Summit in Berlin Tuesday, April 25, 2017. The conference aims at building support for investment in women’s economic empowerment programs. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
Andrew Little is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Matthew Backus is the Philip H Geier Jr Associate Professor at the Graduate Business School of Columbia University in New York City. His work has appeared in Bloomberg News, Slate and The Wall Street Journal, among others. Listen here
Does imposing the death penalty lower rates of violent crime? What economic policies will lead to broad prosperity? Which medical treatments should we allow and encourage to treat novel diseases? These questions have a few things in common. They bear important consequences for us all, and so policymakers and the public would like to know the answers – if good answers even exist. Fortunately, there are entire communities of experts who produce closely regulated scientific literatures dedicated to answering them. Unfortunately, they are also difficult questions, which require causal knowledge that’s not easy to come by.
The rise of social media means that experts willing to share their hard-won knowledge have never been more accessible to the public. So, one might think that communication between experts and decision-makers should be as good as, or better than, ever. But this is not the case. As anyone who has spent time on Twitter or watching cable news can attest, these outlets are also flooded with self-appointed ‘experts’ whose lack of actual expertise doesn’t stop them from sharing their views widely.
There is nothing new about ersatz experts, or even outright charlatans, and they aren’t limited to questions of policy. In every domain where decision-makers need the specialised knowledge of experts, those who don’t have the relevant knowledge – whether they realise it or not – will compete with actual experts for money and attention. Pundits want airtime, scholars want to draw attention to their work, and consultants want future business. Often, these experts are rightly confident in their claims. In the private market for expertise, the opposite can be more common. Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team, described his time as a consultant as largely about trying to feign complete certainty about uncertain things; a kind of theatre of expertise. In The Undoing Project (2016) by Michael Lewis, Morey elaborates by describing a job interview with the management consultancy McKinsey, where he was chided for admitting uncertainty. ‘I said it was because I wasn’t certain. And they said, “We’re billing clients 500 grand a year, so you have to be sure of what you are saying.”’
With genuine expertise at a premium, the presence of experts who overstate their conclusions adds noise to the information environment, making it harder for decision-makers to know what to do. The challenge is to filter the signal from the noise.
When considering important questions in challenging domains such as economic forecasting and public health crises, there are many times that experts don’t have the answers. Less often, they admit it.
Must we accept that any expert assessment could be hot air or, at best, a competent expert stretching beyond his or her competence? Or can we do better?
To better understand the problem of communicating scientific knowledge to the policymakers and the public, it helps to divide the difficulty of questions into three levels. Level-one questions are those that anyone with even modest expertise or access to a search engine can answer. Some political economy questions in this category include, for example, ‘Will price controls cause shortages?’ or ‘Are incumbent governments likely to do better in elections when the economy is performing well?’
Level-two questions are those where only the most qualified experts have something to say. Some political and economic questions that we believe fall into this category are ‘Can we design algorithms to assign medical residents to programmes in an effective way?’ (yes) and ‘Do term limits improve governing performance?’ (no). These are questions for which substantial peer-reviewed scientific literature provides answers, and they can be addressed by what the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn in 1962 called ‘normal science’: that is, within existing paradigms of scholarly knowledge.
Level-three questions are those where even the best experts don’t know the answers, such as whether the death penalty lowers violent crime, or what interest rates will be in two years. Such questions are either not answerable given current research paradigms, or just more fundamentally unanswerable. Much of the scientific enterprise itself consists of distinguishing between when further research or information will make questions answerable or not. Importantly, for the purposes of policymaking, it doesn’t necessarily matter why we can’t know the answer. So, for communicating about science with the public, the distinction between level two (questions that require true knowledge) and level three (ones that truly aren’t, at least at present, answerable) is most important.
Politicians and executives are rarely experts in the domains in which they make decisions
If you’re unsure whether our classification of these questions into level two vs level three is correct, in a sense that’s the point. Knowing which questions fall into which category requires expertise. (Which, to be clear, we ourselves lack for some of the questions referenced, but we consulted with recent reviews of the literature from top experts.) In fact, the experts themselves might sometimes get this distinction wrong. Sovietologists thought that ‘Is the USSR a stable country with minimal risk of collapsing?’ was a well-answered question (incorrectly believing ‘yes’), and many experts thought that there was no way such a divisive political outsider as Donald Trump could win the Republican Party nomination, let alone the presidency (incorrectly believing ‘no’).
Still, experts are certainly more likely to know which questions are answerable than the relevant decision-maker. Politicians and executives might be experts in the domain of decision-making, but they are rarely experts in the domains in which they make decisions.
We need not concern ourselves much with the level-one questions. Of course, some people might be too lazy to Google, and can mouth off about easily settled science. We don’t mean to dismiss the potential danger of experts (or politicians) themselves making obviously false claims, but this danger shouldn’t pose a consistent problem to a decision-maker with an honest interest in the truth.
Things become tricky when distinguishing between the second and third levels, the questions that can be answered now and those that cannot. The key difference between these kinds of questions is ‘Would a competent expert well-versed in the relevant scientific literature be reasonably confident in the answer?’ Note that the question is about both the competence of the expert and the answerability of the question.
This means that, when making decisions that require expert perspective, it might be a mark of a true expert to admit that he or she doesn’t know, at least not yet. And, if we aren’t sure what questions are answerable, we are vulnerable to uninformed experts convincing us they have the answers. Even worse, good experts, when posed an unanswerable question, might do the same. From the expert perspective, they know that admitting uncertainty can harm their reputation, because bad experts are more likely to be uninformed than good ones. More concretely, saying ‘I don’t know’ makes for bad punditry, and unenviable terrain for ambitious analysts or consultants hoping to justify their hourly rate.
When experts and pundits can’t or won’t say ‘I don’t know’, the consequences can be dire. In the short term, bad advice leads to bad decisions. In the context of admitting uncertainty about challenging questions, there are two ways this can happen. These are particularly clear and salient in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
First, when faced with a level-two problem, the advice of qualified experts can get lost in the noise, or decision-makers might just ask the wrong experts. Among a general audience, it took a long time for many to get the message that increased handwashing would save lives, that social distancing was necessary, and that large gatherings should be cancelled.
Probably more common for major policy choices, decision-makers can be persuaded to take risky actions or find justifications for actions they would take no matter what, based on false confidence projected by experts. This can happen when other, more qualified experts are giving the advice. For example, a pair of articles in mid- to late-March 2020 by the American legal scholar Richard Epstein that downplayed the threat from COVID-19 were said to have been influential among some in the Trump administration. To put it gently, Epstein’s arguments were not sound.
If we don’t know what questions are unanswered, we won’t know where to best direct our efforts
Bad policy can also come about when the research frontier doesn’t offer definitive answers, or gives the wrong answers. The history of medicine is littered with examples of treatments that we now know did more harm than good, such as bloodletting, tobacco and opium. All of these techniques had ‘evidence’ that they were in fact healthy, from vague theories about ‘humours’ (bloodletting) to real evidence that they reduced pain, but without sufficient consideration of side effects (opium). Many lives would have been saved if doctors realised that they didn’t know whether these treatments worked well enough to outweigh the side-effects, and were able to admit this.
While it’s hard to turn away from the short-term costs in a time of crisis, there are important long-term consequences if we fail to properly consider and address uncertainty. Grappling with uncertainty is central to the scientific enterprise, and there ought to be a place for acknowledging that. If we don’t know what important questions are unanswered, we won’t know where to best direct our efforts. Having a false confidence in understanding important questions will delay the discovery of actual improvements. As the American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman put it in a lecture in 1963:
It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.
Too much trust in the false or exaggerated precision of experts discourages investing in resources for methodical attempts to tackle hard questions. On the other side, there is at least as much risk in discounting expert advice altogether.
Understanding the market for experts, and when experts are more or less willing to admit uncertainty, is a challenge worthy of our time. To get a bit of a grasp on these questions, we developed a simple mathematical model (published in the American Political Science Review) to study when experts are willing to admit uncertainty. As models do, it makes some simplifying assumptions and abstracts away from important features of reality. For example, a simulation of disease contagion by the graphics reporter Harry Stevens in The Washington Post on 14 March 2020 treated people as balls floating around, bouncing off each other, and quarantine as a physical wall separating them. On the plus side, this graphic simplicity clearly illustrated how quarantines and other policies such as social distancing can ‘flatten the curve’ of infections. Of course, people’s lives are more complex than to be truly represented by bouncing balls but so many people found this model insightful that it became the most viewed article in the history of the newspaper’s website.
Models are meant to simplify (and we simplify further here; see the paper for more detail); in our model of the market, for experts there is a single expert (‘he’) and a single decision-maker (‘she’). To build on our opening example, suppose the policy in question is whether or not to allow the use of a new drug to treat a disease. We consider a ‘one-shot’ interaction where the decision-maker is faced with this choice, and asks a medical expert for advice. In the terminology introduced above, the question is either a level-two or a level-three question, but the decision-maker is not sure which. That is, there might or might not be solid evidence about whether the drug will work.
The expert might be competent, in which case he will know if the evidence collected so far indicates that the drug is safe and effective (a level-two question, but not if there isn’t good-enough evidence to confidently state whether the drug is safe and effective, which is a level-three question). If the expert is incompetent, or the question is outside of the domain of his expertise, he won’t have useful advice to give, regardless of what the medical literature says. (Of course, ‘incompetent expert’ might seem like an oxymoron; think of this as a generally qualified person asked a question outside of the domain of his real expertise.)
If the drug is effective, the policymaker will want to allow use, and if the drug is not effective she will want to ban use. If the evidence is not yet strong in either direction, let’s suppose for simplicity that the optimal choice for the policymaker is to pick an ‘intermediate’ policy, perhaps allowing use for severe cases or allowing limited pilot studies. A key (and realistic) implication is that the policymaker will be able to make the best possible choice given the available evidence only if the expert communicates honestly, including in the cases where he is uncertain. Of course, the policymaker certainly wants to know when the drug is effective or not. And when the evidence is weak, she also wants to know this, as taking the more decisive action is worse than the hedging choice. Optimal decision-making requires experts to admit it when they don’t know the answers.
Alas, the punishment for guessing wrong never seems to be that high
But will the expert ever say ‘I don’t know’? If he cares only about good policy being made, yes. However, the way in which experts care about their reputation for competence can create problems. Even though some good experts will be uncertain about the truth when faced with a level-three problem, incompetent experts will be uncertain no matter what. Policymakers probably do not know how hard the problem is. As a result, competence and knowledge are correlated, and so admitting uncertainty will make an expert look less competent even if he is qualified but facing a question genuinely at or beyond the borders of the knowledge in the field. Experts who care about their reputation more than the truth have an incentive to ‘guess’ when and if the drug is safe or not.
When the expert is uninformed, the policymaker can end up allowing or banning a drug when the opposite choice would be better. Also, since she knows the expert will sometimes guess, she can never be absolutely certain if the drug is safe or not.
What can we do about this problem? A seemingly obvious solution would be to check whether expert claims are correct. If experts who make strong claims that are then refuted are chastised and not hired in the future, this might deter them from overclaiming. Alas, the punishment for guessing wrong never seems to be that high: the architects of the Iraq War and those responsible for decisions that led to the 2008 financial crises are generally doing quite well, professionally. And our model gives a theoretical justification for why. Just as some experts who don’t have a good answer to questions really are competent but face an unanswerable question, those who guess and end up being incorrect might be competent too. In fact, if all uninformed experts guess at the truth, then guessing and being wrong is no worse than just admitting uncertainty outright. So the uninformed might as well roll the dice and guess: if they are right, they look competent; if not, they look no worse than if they had been honest about their uncertainty.
This state of affairs is particularly frustrating for the competent experts faced with a tough question: precisely because they are competent, they know that they are faced with a tough question, and are no more likely to guess at the correct policy than a charlatan. Where they do always know more than the charlatan is in realising whether they are faced with an unanswerable question. True expertise requires knowing the limits of one’s knowledge.
Recognising where real experts have a definitive advantage also suggests how institutions can be designed to encourage them to admit uncertainty: rather than validating whether their predictions are correct, the key is to verify whether the question was answerable in the first place. This way, good experts will be willing to say: ‘I don’t know because this is an unanswerable question,’ confident that the latter part will be validated. And once the competent experts are saying ‘I don’t know,’ incompetent experts might do so as well, if guessing that the problem is impossible is more likely to work out for them than guessing any particular solution.
The core lesson of the model is that, while the fact-checking of experts is useful for some purposes, it isn’t effective for getting experts to admit uncertainty. On the other hand, ‘difficulty validation’, or finding a way to check whether the question was answerable in the first place, can motivate good experts to say ‘I don’t know’ – and sometimes bad experts, too.
Moreover, we think that there are real-world institutions that are already taking this approach.
For example, scholarly publishing relies on peer review, where other experts read drafts of papers and provide critical input about whether the findings are credible and interesting enough for publication. Importantly, peer reviewers are not typically checking whether the claims in a paper are correct, but whether the authors have come up with a method to render the paper’s question answerable.
Some practical ideas for how to improve expert communication in other settings follow.
First, it is not only useful to ask different experts, but to ask different experts different things (and little differences in the questions asked can make big differences in the answer). Rather than asking experts: ‘Will the drug work?’, ask some of them: ‘Is there good evidence about whether the drug will work?’ Qualified experts won’t always know the answer to the first question, but they will always know the answer to the second.
Even real experts might have an incentive to bluff when posed with unanswerable questions
Second, don’t just broadcast the most extreme and confident views. The most confident out there might be the most informed, or the most susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger effect: not knowledgeable enough to realise they shouldn’t be confident. In our experience, when grappling with really important and challenging questions, the latter might be more common.
Third, listen to conversations among experts. Since experts know that hammed-up claims won’t fly with their peers, they might be more honest about their level of confidence in this context than when speaking on TV. This might be the real benefit of social media: conversations among experts no longer just happen at lab meetings or conferences. They often occur in the open where anyone can hear them.
In one of our favourite bits on the Jimmy Kimmel TV show – ‘Lie Witness News’ – interviewers troll the streets of New York asking impossible questions such as ‘Is it time to bring US troops home from Wakanda?’ Interviewees inevitably rise to the challenge, answering confidently and in (imaginary) detail. Our work suggests that, in the presence of reputational incentives, the market for expert advice might not be much better and that, still worse, even real experts might have an incentive to bluff when posed with unanswerable questions.
So, how do we foster trust and integrity in discourse on science? A small but real part of the problem is that reputational incentives to appear qualified and knowledgeable drive experts to overstate their certainty. One way to counter this tendency is to ask better questions, and that usually means questions about the nature of the evidence and what it allows. We can also change the way that we relate to experts, not just listening to the loudest and most confident voices, but to those with a track record of only claiming as far as the evidence will take them, and a willingness to say ‘I don’t know.’
13 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 And if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body [a]to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing.
–American Standard Version (ASV)
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