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At around midday on 19 August 1949, wreathed in thick mist, a British European Airways DC-3 going from Belfast to Manchester flew into a hillside on Saddleworth Moor in the Peak District, near Oldham. All the crew and 21 of the 29 passengers died on impact or soon afterwards. Eight passengers survived, including a young boy and his parents, although, devastatingly, their younger child was one of the fatalities. That surviving boy became my friend and statistical colleague, Prof Stephen Evans.
I think we would agree that Stephen was lucky. But what do we mean by “luck”? We might say that someone has been lucky, or unlucky, if they have benefited or been harmed by something that was unpredictable and beyond their control. Luck has been called “the operation of chance, taken personally”.
Luck comes in three main flavours. Philosophers have identified “circumstantial luck”, meaning being in the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time – such as Stephen’s family taking that particular flight. Then there’s “resultant or outcome luck”, where in a particular situation some people have good and some have bad outcomes due to factors beyond their control. Stephen had the good resultant luck of surviving.
But perhaps the most important is “constitutive luck”, which covers all the fortunate or unfortunate circumstances of your very existence; the period of history in which you were born, your parents, background, genes and character traits. So where was Stephen’s constitutive luck? He told me that his father’s experiences in the RAF led him to insist that the family sat at the back of the plane – and the only survivors were seated at the back. He had the right parents.
In another remarkable example, on Christmas Eve 1971, 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke had the bad circumstantial luck of being on Lansa flight 508 when it was struck by lightning over the Amazon jungle. She was thrown out, still strapped into her seat, and fell 3,000 metres (9,800ft). She had, however, amazing resultant luck when the thick jungle canopy broke her fall and she survived, although 90 other people, including her mother, died. And, just like Stephen, Juliane had constitutive luck. Her parents, who were ornithological researchers, had brought her up in the Amazon, and she had the necessary skills not only to look after her wounds, but also to journey for 11 days in the jungle until she found an encampment.
In the political arena, leaders feel the need to express complete confidence in the effects of their actions, but if they recognised the major role of chance in what happens, they might try to nurture more resilience to the unexpected. Such humility can also be valuable at a personal level. When attributing reasons for any success they have, people tend to overestimate the role of their efforts and acquired skills, whereas they should mainly be grateful for their constitutive luck.
Read the rest of this article at: The Guardian
WHEN I WAS 20, I believed dogmatically in mass transit, dense urbanization, and a nine percent tax rate. These were not political beliefs. They were gameplay beliefs that I had picked up—through online strategy guides and in-game experimentation—to build the metropolis of my dreams in SimCity.
For many years, the popular imagination has equated video games with competition and violence, thanks to game franchises like the first-person shooter Call of Duty series, or the open-world criminal adventures of Grand Theft Auto. But other genres have always existed, including hero’s journeys through the Japanese countryside to collect anthropomorphic flora and fauna (Pokémon), or multiplayer spacefaring games that publish monthly in-game economic reports (EVE Online). For gamers who eschewed direct combat and explicit goals for more self-directed play, though, one genre stood out: simulation games. And one of the oldest and most influential simulation games is Will Wright’s SimCity, where players act as a city’s mayor and make decisions about the city’s infrastructure, zoning, budget, and public services. First released in 1989, the game found unexpected success, showing that there was a market for open-ended games that turned real-life professions into play.
Chaim Gingold spent several years working as a game designer under Will Wright before he turned his attention from building games to writing about them. In his new book Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine, Gingold meticulously describes the history of the people and ideas that shaped simulation games. Unlike other stories of software development, which rely on “tropes of larger than life personalities and Silicon Valley success porn,” as the digital media scholar Janet H. Murray notes in the foreword, Gingold’s book recognizes that games are rarely the result of a single person’s efforts. Building SimCity includes the collaborators—programmers, artists, interface designers, writers, and business partners—who helped make the game an unlikely commercial success. It also situates SimCity in the wider context of 20th-century computing, design, and education.
This approach makes Building SimCity a compelling example of “software criticism”: a close interrogation of a single work that attends to its form, function, and sociohistorical context. Art, literary, and architectural criticism are well-established disciplines. Yet in an article for WIRED last year, writer and programmer Sheon Han bemoaned how software, “a defining artifact of our time,” is “under-theorized,” despite its influence on our lives. Software critics, Han proposes, need to marry aesthetic sensitivity with technical literacy—and avoid the perils of both techno-optimism and reflexive Luddism. Gingold skillfully accomplishes this in his book.
Taking software criticism seriously might also require taking software—including games like SimCity—more seriously as an art form. In Games: Agency as Art (2020), the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen observes that proponents of games-as-art often try to “assimilate games into some other, more respectable category of human practice.” Nguyen argues that comparing games to the more “legitimate” narrative forms of novels and films obscures what is distinctive about gameplay: “Games […] engage with human practicality—with our ability to decide and to do. […] In ordinary life, we have to struggle to deal with whatever the world throws at us […] In games, we can engineer the world of the game, and the agency we will occupy, to fit us and our desires.”
Enacting one’s agency in a game can produce an aesthetic experience. It can also be a political act. SimCity players must make decisions about key urban political dilemmas: What businesses and residents should the government try to attract? What taxation policy encourages growth? What transit and zoning policies will improve cultural diversity? What defines an ideal city—or a city gone awry?
Read the rest of this article at: Los Angeles Review Of Books
As the first blue hues crept into the otherwise lightless black sky, I carefully continued down the slippery ladder. Donning full scuba gear and tank—with a clipboard, fins, and underwater camera somehow all wedged, clipped, or balanced around my body—I sank into the inky, inscrutable water. Earthly burden lifted, I joined the weightless and serene world of the coral reef at dawn.
Crossing the Indonesian reef crest, with the sun rising behind me, I dropped down the coral wall, still in blackness save for a school of bioluminescent flashlight fish, whose symbiotic bacteria emitted an incongruous glow from specialized sacs beneath their eyes. My presence scared off these skittish biological lanterns, leaving the reef uncharacteristically quiet as I descended into the dark.
My goal at this unsociable hour was to become one of the privileged few humans to ever witness the birth of a pygmy seahorse. Enigmatic, charismatic, and poorly known, these miniature fish had been reluctant to give up their secrets, until now.
Embarking on the doctoral research that culminated in my thesis, “The Biology and Conservation of Gorgonian-Associated Pygmy Seahorses,” I could never have foreseen what fascinating subjects they would make. In this first research into the biology of pygmy seahorses, I set out to explore their private lives.
Read the rest of this article at: Nautilus
Lori and Avery Schott wondered about the right age for their three children to have smartphones. For their youngest, Annalee, they settled on thirteen. They’d held her back in school a year, because she was small for her age and struggled academically. She’d been adopted from a Russian orphanage when she was two, and they thought that she might possibly have mild fetal alcohol syndrome. “Anna was very literal,” Lori told me when I visited the family home. “If you said, ‘Go jump in a lake,’ she’d go, ‘Why would he jump in the lake?’ ”
When Anna was starting high school, the family moved from Minnesota to a ranch in eastern Colorado, and she seemed to thrive. She won prizes on the rodeo circuit, making friends easily. In her journal, she wrote that freshman year was “the best ever.” But in her sophomore year, Lori said, Anna became “distant and snarly and a little isolated from us.” She was constantly on her phone, which became a point of conflict. “I would make her put it upstairs at night,” Lori said. “She’d get angry at me.” Lori eventually peeked at Anna’s journal and was shocked by what she read. “It was like, ‘I’m not pretty. Nobody likes me. I don’t fit in,’ ” she recalled. Though Lori knew Anna would be furious at her for snooping, she confronted her. “We’re going to get you to talk to a counsellor,” she said. Lori searched in ever-widening circles to find a therapist with availability until she landed on someone in Boulder, more than two hours away. Anna resisted the idea, but once she started she was eager to keep going.
Nonetheless, the conflicts between Anna and her parents continued. “A lot of it had to do with our fights over that stupid phone,” Lori said. Anna’s phone access became contingent on chores or homework, and Lori sometimes even took the phone to work with her. “I mean, she couldn’t walk the horse to the barn without it,” Lori said. Lori understood that the phone had become a place where her daughter sought validation and community. “She’d post something, and she’d chirp, ‘Oh, I got ten likes,’ ” she recalled. Lori asked her daughters-in-law to keep an eye on Anna’s Instagram, but Anna must have realized, because she set up four secret accounts. And, though Lori forbade TikTok, Anna had figured out how to hide the app behind a misleading icon.
As Anna grew older, she became somewhat isolated socially. At school, jocks reigned and some kids had started drinking, but Anna was straitlaced and not involved in team sports. Still, there was good news. Early in her senior year, in the fall of 2020, she landed the lead in the school play and was offered a college rodeo scholarship. “But anxiety and depression were just engulfing her,” Lori said. Like many teen-age girls using social media, she had become convinced that she was ugly—to the point where she discounted visual evidence to the contrary. “When she saw proofs of her senior pictures, she goes, ‘Oh, my gosh, this isn’t me. I’m not this pretty.’ ” In her journal, she wrote, “Nobody is going to love me unless I ‘look the part.’ I look at other girls’ profiles and it makes me feel worse. Nobody will love someone who’s as ugly and as broken as me.”
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
Academic philosophers—people for whom philosophy is a profession—like to joke about their discomfort on airplanes. As you make light conversation with your neighbor, the question of what you do for a living tends to come up, and then you have to cope with other people’s ideas about what it is to “do philosophy.” A friend from graduate school confessed that he hated these conversations so much he would pretend to be a mathematician. (Why not a financial adviser or a travel agent?) A colleague from my first job at Johns Hopkins would head things off by saying “I teach philosophy” rather than “I am a philosopher.” It definitely sounds more approachable. But when I still felt the novelty of being a professional philosopher—and pride at having survived the rigors of graduate school—I was not about to dumb it down. I was even eager to tell people I was a philosopher. Follow-up questions fell within a range: Who are your favorite philosophers? Does anyone listen to you? Isn’t that a job from the olden days?
Then on a flight from New York to Los Angeles I was asked, What are your philosophical sayings? A colleague later drew my attention to a piece in the Guardian about prominent philosophers being asked this question, and to subsequent discussion in the blogosphere. I was not aware of these reports when I received the question, and I was by no means a prominent figure. I heard myself explaining to the person next to me that philosophers write journal articles and books and contribute to existing debates. I spoke of training graduate students, and the American Philosophical Association. Eventually I bluntly said that we don’t have sayings anymore. I got the impression he thought I must not be very good; and somehow I did feel a surge of embarrassment, which I buried in a rush to be congenial. When I had a chance to think it over, I wondered if I had felt embarrassed for the guy because he was innocent about professional philosophy or embarrassed for myself because I do something as banal as contribute to existing debates. Had I cringed at a boyish fantasy about academic life? Or was I cringing at myself for devoting my life to something whose ways, whose point, would not reward this or any other fantasy? Maybe I should have some sayings. If my professional self regarded this prospect with bemusement, maybe I had missed something vital about my own undertaking.
When I think of sayings, I think first of the early Greek philosophers—the so-called pre-Socratics—whose ideas, if they wrote them down at all, survive as elusive fragments of text. Fortunately for us, it was considered important for educated people to know who said what. So we have summaries of the opinions—or sayings—of the pre-Socratics by their successors. Widely attested are the pronouncements of the Seven Sages—nothing in excess and know thyself—thought so divine that they were inscribed on the temple for Apollo in Delphi.
I took the bus to Delphi from Athens on a trip to Greece in 2018. I was traveling with my parents who, as they live in Australia, I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. My mum sat next to me and we caught up on everyone as I looked out the large window. She said that in the light my neck and cheeks were covered in a surprising amount of downy hair. I snatched my hand to my face, but she assured me that it was quite nice (in the British rather than the American sense of “quite”—not “very” but “somewhat” or “more than you might think”). We stayed in a simple hotel and went early the next morning to see the ruins of the temple. I tried to imagine the fancy people, heads of state, coming here to consult the oracle for thousands of years. It was not so difficult to conjure with the mountains rising all around. It was a grand place but also hushed and contemplative because the beauty was not a ravishing distraction. (By contrast, I experienced no inner life whatsoever in the Cinque Terre.) Later that afternoon, my dad and I went for a hike in the hills behind the hotel. I recounted the story of the Iliad, which I happened to be reading. He remembered from his boyhood that nearly every scene ends with blood soaking the earth.
Read the rest of this article at: The Point
