PJAS Issue 2 (Research): Reaching Higher Dimensions by PJAS Magazine

Research

Cover art by Amirthesh Prasad

ABOUT

PJAS, established in 2024, is an arts magazine founded by students at the University of Pennsylvania. Recognized for its unique fusion of creative and scholarly works, PJAS oﬀers a blend of print and digital content that celebrates diverse artistic expressions from Penn and beyond. Our digital home, pjasmag.org, is where we publish an eclectic mix of visual art, poetry, creative writing, and thought-provoking articles year-round. Additionally, PJAS releases four print issues annually, each showcasing a curated selection of works that reﬂect the vibrant creativity of our contributors.

Reaching Higher Dimensions The Art of Research:

Featured Content

Section 1: Mathematics and Engineering

Approaching the Proof of Bound Secrecy in Higher Dimensions

A Cost-Effective Functional Transradial Prosthetic That Does Not Require Electricity to Use

Section 2: Psychology and Humanities

Literary Criticisms and Systems Theory

How You Think Will Shape What You Think

Section 3: Op-Ed Articles and Essays

On Being Interesting

The Concerning Lack of Courage in Art

"Dadream" b Kath Saad Zatari

Section 1:

Mathematics and Engineering

ApproachingtheProofofBoundSecrecyinHigherDimensions

AnishkaJannu

August28,2024

Abstract

Thispaperexplorestheconceptofboundsecrecywithinquantumcomputingandcryptography,acrucialprotocolforensuringinformationcansafelybeconcealed fromattackers.The studyprovidesananalysisofthecomputationalmethodthatcanbeenusedtoderivean optimalalgorithmfordeterminingthevalueof τ inhigherdimensions.Thegoaloftheresearchistoidentifyanalgorithmtocalculate τ inhigherdimensions,whichhasbeendefined toquantifytheinformationsharedbetweentwopartieswhenanexternalentityispresent. Thisresearchoffersvaluableinsightsforadvancingsecurecommunicationinthequantum computingandcryptographyfield.

Introduction

Mostcryptographicprotocolstodayrelyonthecomputationaldiﬃcultyof solvingcomplex problemsandtheextensiveamountoftimeitwouldtaketofactorlargenumbers.However, theseprotocolsmayeventuallybedestroyedwithnewdevelopmentsinquantumcomputing, whichallowlargenumberstobefactoredintotheirprimefactorizationmuchquickerthan classicalcomputers.Therefore,thistypeofsecurityiscompromisedsinceitassumesthat theopponentisincapableofsolvingtheprotocol[1].Boundsecrecywouldallowthesecrecy betweentwopartiestobeindependentofanopponent’sskills.

Entropyisameasureoftheexpectedsurpriseassociatedwithrandomness.Arandom variableisaquantitythattakesvariousvalueswithcertainprobabilities.Considerthe exampleofacoin,whichcanresultinheads(H)ortails(T)withequalprobabilities, 1 2 .

Shannonentropy H(P )ismathematicallydeﬁnedas

H(p)= i pi log2 (pi ).

Weaimtominimizethismeasureofsurpriseor H(p).

JointandConditionalEntropy

ConsiderthescenariowhereAliceandBobeachﬂipanindependentcoin.Eve’scoinshows headsifAliceandBobhavethesameresultandtailsotherwise.

Wedeﬁne H(A|B)tobetheconditionalentropy,ortheentropyof A conditionedon B [1].

Weﬁnd H(A|B)= H(A,B) H(B)=1= H(B|A).Therefore,theintrinsicinfocanbe expressedas

I(X; Y )= H(X) H(X|Y )= H(X)+ H(Y ) H(X,Y )

I(X; Y ↓ Z):=min XY →Z→Z I(X; Y |Z).

Thedeﬁnitionofthedoubledownwardarrowcanfurtherbeexpressed usingthesingle downwardarrow: I(X : Y ↓↓ Z)=inf U I(X : Y ↓ ZU )+ H(U ).

Wehave I(X : Y ↓↓ Z) ≤ I(X : Y ↓ Z).Wemustshowthat:

I(X : Y ↓ Z)=0 ⇔ I(X : Y ↓↓ Z)=0

where U isarandomvariable.Thisindicatesthatif ↓↓=0,then ↓=0[2].

Mutualinformation,representedas I(X; Y )= H(X) H(X|Y ),measurestheamountof informationthatonerandomvariablecontainsaboutanother.Conditionalmutual informationincorporatesathirdvariablewhichcorrelateswithbothvariables.Evecanmanipulate hervariableto Z,ensuringAliceandBobgainminimalinformationabouteachother’svariablesinordertominimizetheirmutuallearning[1].

Evecanprocessorchangehervariablefrom Z to Z.Shecanannounce Z,andtheinﬁmumconsidersallpossiblewaystotransform Z into Z.Eve’sobjectiveistoensureno surpriseremains[2].

Deﬁnition. Givenaprobabilitydistribution PXYZ , I(X : Y ↓↓↓ Z)isdeﬁnedas: I(X : Y ↓↓↓ Z)=inf PU |XYZ I(X : Y ↓↓

Proof. Givenaprobabilitydistribution

Fromthedeﬁnition,itisevidentthatthedouble-downarrowisanupperboundtothe triple-downarrow.Todemonstratethatthetriple-downarrowequalsthedouble-downarrow,wemustestablishthatthedouble-downarrowalsoservesasthe lowerboundforthe triple-downarrow.

Webeginwith:

Ourobjectiveistoshowthat:

Let W = UV ,then:

Priorresearchin2023hasalreadydiscoveredafunctiontocalculatethe valueof τ in one-dimensionalsituationsthatconvenientlyﬁtsbetweenthetwoboundsonthevalueof τ .Thefunctioninvolvescomputingthreevalues

andusingthe medianvaluefor τ [2].

However,thefunctioncreateddoesnothaveastraightforwardwayforexpandeditto higherdimensionsbecauseofitsuseofthemedian.Forexample,inatwo-dimensionalcase, itisunfitandunnaturaltotakeamedianof9values.Inthispaper,weexplorethedifferent waysofidentifyingahigher-dimensionalfunctionfor τ thatwillfitwithintheestablished bounds.

Methods

Testingamulti-dimensionalaveragefunctionpresentschallenges duetothemassivenumber ofpossibleconﬁgurations.Previously,weconsideredthreeparametersinaone-dimensional set, {0,x, 1}.

Weseekamethodtodeterminethe τ ofmulti-dimensionalsampleswithoutdirectly computingthemean.DependingonthevaluesBobreceives,Aliceislikelytoreceivecertain valuesmorefrequently.Whilewecancomputetheaverageofanygroupofthreeindividual cubesusingtheone-dimensional τ [2],ourgoalistoaveragetheentirecube.Testingthe multi-dimensionalaveragefunctionpresentschallengesandinvolvestheapplicationoflinear programmingtechniques.Previously,weconsideredthreenumbersinaone-dimensionalset, {0,x, 1}.Extendingthistoatwo-dimensionalgridresultsina3 × 3array,analogoustoa faceofaRubik’scube.Forthreedimensions,wehavea3 × 3 × 3array,encompassing27 numbers.

ComputationalApproach

Theelementarydeﬁnitionofa τ functioncanbeconsideredasaconvergingfunctionthat averagesvaluesfromahorizontalonamatrix,andtakingthemaximumofvaluesfroma vertical.Then,theexistingmatrixvaluesarescaleddownbythesenewvalues.Inorder toimplementthis,wecanwriteanalgorithminPython.Thefollowing codewasusedto generatevaluesthatconvergeaftermultipleiterations:

importnumpyasnp

deftau(x): a=[(2*x[0]+x[1])/3,(2*x[1]+x[2])/3,(2*x[2]+x[0])/3] returnnp.median(a)

defscaling(matrix,s,func): nmatrix=np.copy(matrix) foriinrange(len(matrix)): function_on_row=func(matrix[i]) forjinrange(len(matrix[i])):

nmatrix[i][j]+=(function_on_row-matrix[i][j])*(s-1)/s returnnmatrix

defbound(matrix,s,bound_value,func1,func2): count=0 while(np.amax(matrix)-np.amin(matrix)>bound_value): matrix=matrix.transpose() matrix=scaling(matrix,s,func1) matrix=matrix.transpose() matrix=scaling(matrix,s,func2) count+=1

return((np.amax(matrix)+np.amin(matrix))/2)

defoutput_tau(matrix,bound_value,func1,func2):

bound1=2*bound_value

bound2=0 i=0

while(abs(bound1-bound2)>bound_value):

m1=matrix.copy()

m2=matrix.copy().transpose()

bound1=bound(m1,1+(1/(2**i)),bound_value,func1,func2)

bound2=bound(m2,1+(1/(2**i)),bound_value,func2,func1) i+=1 return((bound1+bound2)/2)

matrix2=np.array([ [0.0,0.0,0.0], [0.0,1.0,0.0], [0.0,0.0,0.0] ]) foriinrange(0,200): matrix2[0][0]=-0.025*i print(output_tau(matrix2,0.000000001,tau,tau))

Then,wecanusethiscodetogenerateplotsofthedataalongsystematic intervals.

Initially,weassumethattheseplotsofdatawillbeformedfrommultipleintersecting parabolas.However,testingconsecutivepointslyingonthecurvedemonstratesthatthe plotisactuallymadeupofmultiplelinesegmentsthatareconnectedto formtheplot. Furthermore,wenoticethatthegraphliesontheredlineplotted, x 9

Conclusion

Byexaminingthepossibilitiesofcomputingamulti-dimensional τ ,weintroducenewobservationsinthebehaviorof τ .Wealsointroducemethodstodemonstratetheexistenceofbound secrecythroughtheprocessofbinarizationandconvergingfunctions. Wealsointroducethe possibilityof τ demonstratinglinearpiece-wisecharacterratherthanparabolic.

References

[1]-Maurer,Ueli.“TheRoleofInformationTheoryinCryptography.”In Cryptography andCoding’93,editedbyP.Farrell,49–71.Southend-on-Sea,England:TheInstituteof MathematicsanditsApplications,1993.

[2]-Khesin,Andrey,AnthonyTung,andKarthikVedula.”NewPropertiesof IntrinsicInformationandTheirRelationtoBoundSecrecy.” arXiv,2023.https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09031.

"Hell" by Wong Kwan Ho

A Cost-Effective Functional Transradial Prosthetic That Does Not Require Electricity for Use

CriterionA

CurrentSituation:AccesstoandCostofTransradialProsthetics

Anupper-extremityamputationcancostover$500,000(MacKenzieetal.,2015).Thecostof long-termamputeecareisexpectedtoincreaseincomingyears,andafterthecostsofsurgery, therapies,andotherrelatedtreatments,manyamputeepatientsneedareplacementprosthetic arm,anadditionalcost(Edwardsetal.,2007).Transradialprosthetics,thosethatattachtothe bodyatorbelowtheforearm,aremadeinmultiplevarieties,dependingupontheiruse:passive, conventional,ormyoelectric(Semasingheetal.,2016).

Transradialpassiveprostheticsareconsideredcosmeticanddonothaveanybuilt-inmobility, usedfortaskssuchasholdingdownpaperwhenwritingorcarryingbags(Flaubertetal.,2017). Sincepassiveprostheticshavenoelectricalcomponents,theyarecheapestyetstillcostupto $5,000(“HowMuchDoesaProstheticArmCost?”).Conventionalprostheticsusewhatisleftof thebodypost-amputationtocreatemovementbutcostupto$10,000("GuidetoArm&Hand AmputationsandProsthetics").Myoelectricprostheticsareconsideredmostadvanced,using electricalinputfrommusclestomove,andcostapproximately$20,000(Chadwell,2016).The highcostoftransradialprostheticsisaglobalproblem,butthisdesignandprototypefocuseson theUnitedStates.

Problem&DesignOpportunity:AConventionalTransradialProsthetic

Nearly50%ofAmericanamputees(over25million)livebelowthepovertyline,meaningmany cannotaffordprosthetics(“PeoplewithAmputationSpeakOut”).Currently,noaffordable prostheticofanytypeexiststhatstillallowsuserstoretainfunctionaluseoftheiramputated arms,thuscreatingadesignopportunity.ThisIAseekstodesign,prototypeandtesta conventionaltransradialprostheticthatiscost-effectiveformanufacturers,affordableforusers, anddoesnotrequireelectricityforuse.

PrimaryResearch&TargetAudience

Tobetterunderstandthetargetaudience,ananonymousonlinesurveywasconductedwith transradialamputeesintheUnitedStates,findingtwothirdsofrespondentspaidmorethan $20,000forprosthetics.Evaluatingtheircurrentprosthetics,allparticipantsprioritizedfunctional elementslike“grips,”“functionality,”and“mobility.”However,somediscussedthattheir prostheticsweretoobulkyanduncomfortable.Therespondents’residuallimbdiametersvaried bymorethan7cm.

Giventhis,designspecificationswillconsidercomfort,function,adjustabilityandcost.

Figure1:Locationofatransradialamputation(AbilityOttobock.Care)

Figure2:Sampleresiduallimb(MacknetandTaylor)

CompetitorAnalysisofProstheticTypes

Tablecreatedusingsources#5through#8.

Canitgraspitems?

Isitcustom-made?

Doesitneedtobecharged?

DesignBrief

TargetGroup:

Americanadultmaletransradialamputees(whohavehadasectionoftheirarmatorbelowthe elbowremoved)ofanysizewhocannotaffordcustomprostheticoptionsavailable.Thiscanalso expandtoincludethemilitaryorhospitalssotheycankeepasupplyofprostheticstofita multitudeofindividuals.

DesignGoal:

Aconventionaltransradialprostheticthatfitsoradjuststofitthe50thpercentileofmalehuman armsandprovidesminimaltomoderatefunction.Theproductmust:

-Bemadeofnon-toxicmaterials

-Costunder$100tomake

-Involveminimalhuman-aidedassembly

-Beaestheticallyappealingtoconsumers

-Includeagrabbingmechanismtoaidfunction

DesiredOutcome:

-Consumerswillbeabletoadjustthesizingtotheirarmsandusetheprosthetictograsp items,thusregainingsomeofthecosmetic&functionalusesofhavinganarm

-Consumerswillfeelcomfortableinthefinalprosthetic

-Intendedscaleofproduction:Mechanizedbatchproductionusinginjectionmoldingwith potentialprogressiontomassautomatedproduction.

DesignSpecifications

Note:Requirementsareinorderofpriority.

1.1Diameter aroundthe residuallimb isadjustable

Tofittheprosthetictoresidual limbs,theopeningmustadapt toawiderangeofresiduallimb sizes.

PrimaryResearchwithtarget Audience

1.0Size

2.0Function

1.2The prosthetic willbe48.28 cmlongand 29.08cmin circumferenc e

Mostupper-extremity amputeesaremale,andthe 50thpercentileofmale forearm-handlengthsis48.28 cmwhilethe50thpercentileof maleforearmcircumferencesis 29.08cm.

ZarqaUniversityCollege/ Al-Balqa’aApplied University2

Figshare3

2.1Willbe abletofulfill thefunctions ofacosmetic prosthetic

Cosmeticprostheticsaremade tolookmorevisuallyappealing thanaresiduallimbonitsown. Mydesignmustsatisfyusersin termsofaesthetics,whichwill betestedduringtrialswitha prototype.

Cosmeticprosthetics’functions includestabilizingthingslike paperwhenwritingand grocerybags;thisdesignmust beabletocompletebothof thoseactivities.

ArmDynamics4

2.2Willbe abletograsp items

Prostheticsimproveamputees’ qualityoflifebyaiding independencebyallowing MedlinePlus5

1(“AnthropometricData”)

2 (Al-Adwanetal.)

3 (“50thPercentileU.S.MaleData”)

4 (“AnIntroductiontoPassiveSiliconeRestorations”)

NCSU

3.0Target Audience

2.3Willbe comfortable &wearable forlong periodsof time

individualstocarryout everydaytaskslikedressing themselvesandeating,bothof whichinvolvetheneedfora graspingmechanism(toholda fork,forinstance).

Cosmeticprosthetics’functions includestabilizingobjectslike paperwhenwritingand grocerybags;thisdesignmust beabletocompletebothof thoseactivities.

5 (“ArtificialLimbs”)

3.1Adult transradial amputees

Amputeeshighlyvaluecomfort intheirprosthetics,asitisa significantpartofbeingableto functionmorenormally.

NCBI6

Every18to24months,kids needtoreplacetheir prosthetics.Inordertoproperly prototype,itsdesignmustbe testedalongthecourseofmany months(todeterminequality). Thoughfuturedesignsmaybe createdforkids,adultsare moreconsistentinsize,making thembettercandidatesforthe initialdesign.

NCBI7

3.2Fitmale transradial amputees’ general dimensions

6 (KluteandCzerniecki)

7 (Raizada,etal.)

8 (FanandWu)

Over70%ofamputeesare male.

PLOS8

4.0Aesthetics

4.1Will resemblethe shapeofa humanarm

4.2Willbe blackincolor

Thoughnotallprostheticslook realistic,manyamputeesprefer touserealisticprostheticsto takesocialemphasisaway fromtheirmissinglimbs. FastCompany9

Prostheticsareusuallymadeto matchapatient’sskincolor. However,sincethegoalofthis projectistomass-produce models,personalizingtheir colorwouldbe counterproductivetothegoal. Blackiscommonlyusedin clothingbecauseitenables whateveritcoversto“hide,” drawingattentionawayfromit. Thiswouldbeusefulinmaking theprostheticlessofafocal point,anaestheticfeature amputeesprefer.Producingin onlyonecoloralsoreduces cost.

DigitalResourceFoundation fortheOrthotics&Prosthetics Community10 Colorbux11

5.1Mustbe assembled

5.0Production constraints

5.2Willbe mostlymade from injection molding(IM)

9 (Vlachaki,2020)

(“ColorPsychology”) 10(ApplegateandAsbelle,1973)

Inordertocompletethe functionslistedin2.1and2.2, thearmmustbe constructed/assembledfrom varioussegments,whichwill involveadditionalstepsinthe manufacturingprocess. PTC12

Injectionmoldingenables manufacturerstocreate intricatedesignswith consistentlyhighquality, makingittheideal manufacturingprocessfor

TheRodonGroup13 13(Worth,2018) 12(“AboutAssemblyProcessSteps”)

6.0Material selection

5.3Mustbe madeina safe environment

prostheticarms,whichrequire strengthandreliable, precisely-sizedparts. Additionally,injectionmolding createssignificantlyless materialwastethantechniques likesubtractivemanufacturing, makingitmoreeco-friendly.

Duringthemanufacturing process,safetyconstraintslike notusingpotentiallydangerous chemicals,havingadequate ventilation,andproviding workerswithsafetyequipment likegogglesandglovesmust bemet.

CleanClothes14

6.1Mustbe madeof non-toxic materials

Thematerial(s)usedwillbein directcontactwithskinfor extendedperiods.Materials withtoxicchemicalscanenter thebloodstreamthroughpores orotheropeningsintheskin, exposingthebodytoaplethora ofdiseases. ATSDR15

6.2Mustbe madeof materials compatible withIM techniques

6.3Mustbe madeof comfortable materialsfor consumers

14(“UnsafeWorkspaces”)

Manymaterialshavelow compatibilitywithIM.Suitable materialsincludeplasticslike acrylicandpolyvinylchloride. Fictiv16

Dependingonthefinaldesign, eitherpaddingoradditional plasticshouldbeaddedtothe armtohelpusersfeel comfortableinit.Comfort promoteshappinessandallows InsightSuccess17

15 (“HowUnsafeChemicalExposuresHappen:WhatYouNeedtoKnow”)

16 (Melito,2023)

peopletofocusontasksat handinsteadofsomethingthat iscausingmalaise.

7.1Begin withone-off production for prototypes

7.0Quantity

7.2Batch sizecanbe adjusted dependingon pre-orders

One-offproductionwillallow metotesttheproductwith amputeesbeforemakingfinal accordingadjustments STEM18

Thoughsmallerbatchsizes correlatedirectlywithafaster productiontimeperbatch,they alsotendtocreatemore congestioninafactorybecause ofhowoftentheyneedtobe transportedwithinthefacility. Whenthereislittledemandfor theseprosthetics,especiallyat thebeginningofproduction, batchsizesshouldbesmallso asnottocreatetoomany modelsandhavehighholding costs.However,asdemand increases,thebatchsizewill alsoincreasetomake large-scaleproductionsaferby limitingtrafficwithin manufacturingfacilities. Dummies19

17 (“ImportanceofComfort,”2017)

18 (“One-offProduction,”2019)

19 (Anderson,et.al)

CriterionB

20totaldesignswerecreatedbycombiningdifferentassembliesofthecomponents:Attachment, claw,andforearm.Belowarediagramsofthecomponentsandassemblies.

Sketches

1:AttachmentSitestoResidualLimb

Furtherimprovement:Canthisopeningbemadewidertofitthelengthofanarm?

Furtherimprovement:Wouldtheshellcrackorbreakwithlong-termuse?

Furtherimprovement:Howwouldthepiecesbeheldinplace,andhowcomfortablewouldthis designbe?

Furtherimprovement:Howcantheexcessfabricfromthestrapsbesecuredtothedevice?

Furtherimprovement:Howcanthehandlebemadetostayinplace?

2:Forearmdesigns

Furtherimprovement:Howcanthisbemadeadjustableforvariousarmlengths?

Furtherimprovement:Howcantheinnercylinderbekeptinplacemoresecurely?

3:GrabberIdeas

Furtherimprovements:Howcanthisbemadeuser-friendyforpeoplewith2amputatedlimbs?

Furtherimprovements:Howcanthegrabbeditemsbetakenout?

Furtherimprovements:Howcanthisfunctionwithoutelectricity?

4:SketchestoCADcomprisedofcomponentsabove

CADModels

DesignSpecificationAnalysis

Key

DesignSpecificationAnalysis

*Criteriainorderofprioritization

Requirement

1.1Diameter aroundthe residuallimb isadjustable

1.0Size

2.0Function

1.2The prostheticwill be48.28cm longand 29.08cmin circumference

2.1Willbe abletofulfill thefunctions ofacosmetic prosthetic

2.2Willbe abletograsp items

2.3Willbe comfortable& wearablefor longperiods

3.0Target Audience

oftime

3.1Adult transradial amputees

3.2Male transradial amputees

4.0Aesthetics

4.1Will resemblethe shapeofa humanarm

4.2Willbe blackincolor

5.1Mustbe assembled

5.0 Production constraints

6.0Material selection

5.2Willbe mostlymade frominjection molding(IM)

5.3Mustbe madeinasafe environment

6.1Mustbe madeof non-toxic materials

6.2Mustbe madeof materials compatible withIM techniques

6.3Mustbe madeof comfortable

7.0Quantity

materialsfor consumers

7.1Begin withone-off productionfor prototypes

7.2Batchsize canbe adjusted dependingon pre-orders

JustificationParagraph

Design4Awasselected,astheadjustmentresiduallimbportiondoesnotrelyuponbending(and thereforewearingdown)thePLAmaterialoftheresiduallimbholder,likein4B.4A’sarm portionoffersmoreadjustmentthan4B,andtheclawportionhasfewerjoints(andtherefore fewersourcesofpotentialerror)than4E.

Thisdesignalsomeetsallbutoneofthedesignspecifications.AscanbeseenintheDesign SpecificationAnalysisabove,Design4Areceivedan“Excellent”ratingfor12ofthe17criteria 1.1,1.2,2.1,2.2,3.1,3.2,4.2,5.1,5.3,6.1,6.2,and7.1.Italsoreceived“Fair”ratingsfor4of the16criteria,2.3,4.1,6.3,and7.2.Design4Adesignonlyreceivedone“Poor”rating,for criteria5.2.Eachcriterionisdefinedinthefigureabove.Therefore,4Aisthestrongestdesign.

Thisdesignwillnowbeprototyped,andaconclusionwillbedrawnregardingitsfunctionality basedonusertesting.

CriterionC

KeyandNumberValues

Criteriaaboveareinorderofprioritization.PLAhasthehighestcomparisonpointage,soitwill beusedtoconstructtheprototype.Asclientswillbewearingacompressionsockunderthe prosthetic,comfortofthematerialisnotahighpriority.However,viscoelasticpolyurethane foamwilllinetheinteriorofthedevicetomakeitmorecomfortable,asthefoamwillmold aroundtheuser’sresiduallimb.Thestrapswillbemadeoutofnylonstretchfabric.

Evaluatively,forthisprototype,thematerialwasaccordingtoitsoverallpointagesumoverall listspecifications.However,inthefuture,certaincriteria(likeweight)couldbeprioritized accordingtospecificusers’preferences.

ManufacturingTechniques&Justifications

Technique Justification

3DPrinting

Craftproductionandhandassembly

DesignProposal

3Dprintingresultsinhigh-qualityend productswithprecisedimensions.Itisalso highlyaccessibleinthestudent’scurrent environmentand,asitfallsintothecategory ofadditivemanufacturing,resultsinlimited waste.

Thisflexiblemanufacturingtechniqueallows forerrorstobeidentifiedandcorrectedduring thecreationofthedesign,makingita commonchoiceforprototypeproduction.

Note:Shapesweretiltedwhentakingimagestobetterportraydifferentaspectsandangles.Asa result,someelementsappearslantedorwarped,thoughtheyarenotintheCADsoftware.

*The2clawpiecesare printedtogetherasone joinedpieceattachedbya print-in-placehinge

Note:Theoriginalsketchforthisdesigninvolvestheuseofvelcrotoholdthearminplace. However,onlineresearchrevealedabucklewouldbemoresecureandeasiertoimplement,so thedesignwasalteredaccordingly.

11 10cm2

ArmbandStrap

12.7mmthick memoryfoam internallining

Polyurethane foam Bought

Thesearethestepspotentialmanufacturerswouldfollowtocreateonearm.Theywouldreceive theSTLs(CADfiles)before-handandthereforebeabletocreatethedevice(s)independentlyof location.

1 ReceiveCAD designs Computer, e-mail,& CAD software 10minutes Review designsfor accuracy Cool computerto prevent overheating

2 PrintCAD designs Computer, 3DPrinter, blackPLA filament 72hours Use “supports” function whento mitigate prevent printing errors Firehazard dueto potential printer overheating

3 Remove “supports” createdin previousstep fromprinted designs 3D-printed pieces,PLA cutters 5minutes Remove supports thoroughly, notleaving anyremnants protruding Weargloves toprevent accidental stabbing/cutti ngofskin

4 Attach hook-and-pile fastenerto residuallimb holder 3D-printed residuallimb holder, hook-and-pile strips,hot glue 5minutes Letgluedry fullypriorto proceeding withnextstep Wear appropriate PPEand avoidburns when handlingglue

5 Securefoam intoresidual limbholder 3D-printed residuallimb holder, memory 5minutes Letgluedry fullypriorto proceeding withnextstep Wear appropriate PPEand avoidburns

foamcut-out, hotglue when handlingglue

6 Form8glue dotsonboth halvesof “grabbing” claw 3D-printed claw,hotglue 10minutes Letgluefully drypriorto proceeding withnextstep Wear appropriate PPEand avoidburns when handlingglue

7 Attachrubber bandto centerof claw 3D-printed claw,hot glue,rubber band 5minutes Addample amountsof glueto prevent detachment duringuse Wear appropriate PPEand avoidburns when handlingglue

8 Clean-up space Garbagebin, scrapsfrom previous steps 5minutes Checkfor remaining scrapsor shardsafter cleaning Wear appropriate PPEto prevent scrapesfrom PLAshards

9 Printbox designonnet 16"x10"x 10" cardboard box,printer, ink 20minutes Reviewprint jobfor accuracy Stayaway from machinery whilein operation

10 Foldnetinto boxshape 16"x10"x 10" cardboard box 5minutes Checkfold jobfor structural integrity Wear appropriate PPEto prevent lacerations frombox

11 Print instructions andassembly guide Printer,5.98 x0.16x9.02 inpaper 20minutes Reviewprint jobfor accuracy Stayaway from machinery whilein

12 Place instructions andassembly guideinbox Printed instructions andassembly guide,box 5minutes Avoid creasingthe paper Wear appropriate PPEto prevent lacerations fromboxor paper

13 Place protective packagingin box Expanded Polystyrene (EPS),box, 3D-printed pieces 5minutes Ensure 3D-printed piecesare appropriately protected within packaging Wear appropriate PPEto prevent lacerations fromboxor paper

14 Closebox Filledbox, packingtape 5minutes Ensureboxis fullysealed Wear appropriate PPEto prevent lacerations fromboxor paper

CriterionD

TestingStrategy

1.Contactoneoftheeligiblerespondentstoprevioussurveyswhovoluntarilyprovided contactinformation

2.Mailpiecestoformone3D-printedprototypearmandinstructionsforassembly

3.Participantusesprostheticfor1week

4.Createanewsurveyduringthistimeforpost-usefeedbackwithdesignspecifications

5.Interview(ifpossible)orsurveytocheckuser’sexperiencewithdesignspecifications

6.Participanttakesasurveywheretheyrateoverallexperienceandpreviously-used prosthetics

○ Throughquestionsthatareopen-ended,multiplechoice,andinvolveratingsonan ordinalscale

7.Participantsuggestspricepointthattheywouldwillinglypayfortheprosthetic

8.Thisprocessisrepeatedwithatleast3,butnomorethan20,participants(depending uponavailability)

9.Actualminimalpricepoint(calculatedusingmaterialandmanufacturingcosts)compared toparticipant’ssuggestedpricepointtoevaluatetheprosthetic’spotentialonthemarket

TestingStrategyJustification

-Itisvitaltoincludethevoicesandexperiencesofthosewithdisabilitieswhendeveloping productsforthem.Thestepsabovewerechosenbecausetheyofferastreamlined testing-feedbackprocessthatfocusesonreceivinguserfeedbackandutilizingthatinput forfuturesteps.Thesurveycollectsquantitativeandqualitativefeedbackwhilethe interviewcollectsqualitativefeedback.

-Thesetestingstepsbestmeasuretheprototype’ssuccessbyconsideringbothqualitative andquantitativedatagleanedfromtheusers’experiencewiththeprototypeoveran extendedperiodoftime.

-Finally,specificallycomparingcostsandusers’preferredpricingenablesarealistic evaluationofeconomicviability.

PrototypeImprovementsMadeDuringFirstMeetingWithUser

Duetoamputeeavailability,theuserwhotestedthisprosthetichadahandlimb-differenceand couldonlytesttheclawgrip.Usingfoampadsandcablehook-and-pilestraps,theclawwas adaptedforincreasedusability.Uponmeetingwiththeuser,thefollowingadjustmentswere madetoimprovefunctionalitygiventheuser’scircumstances:

● Newmannerofgraspingitems;gripaddedtobottomforleverage

● Hotglue“lip”onuppersideofclaw

● Strapshookovereachotherforeasierindependentattachment

Figure3:Userattachingprostheticduringfirstmeeting

Figure4:Userwearingadaptedprosthetic

End-of-UseSurvey

ConversationWithUser

● Enjoyedsharingitwithcoworkers

● Couldonlygraspverylightitems

● Wouldliketoholdheavieritems(Ex:Instrumentcases)

● Worksatadesk,solowfunctionality(becauseshetypeswithhercurrenthand)

○ Hadtotaketheprostheticoffduringwork

● Prostheticattachedbelowhand,soitgotinherway

○ Limitationofnotusingthefullprosthetic

● Favoriteelementaspersurvey:“Possibilitiescouldbeendless”

○ Askedtoelaborateuponresponse:Variousapplicationsindifferentcareers

● Wouldliketoswivel,soshedoesnothavetolifthershouldertoorienttoobjects

○ Anotherlimitationofnotusingfullprosthetic

● Didnotwearveryoftenbecausefunctionsdidnotfitherlifestyleofdeskwork&yoga teaching

● Wouldliketoseenewadapters/handsatgrip

● Couldpictureusingclawasa“tool”thattheyuseforonespecificpurpose

● Easytoputonandclean

● Price

○ Wouldbewillingtopayover$200;put$200becauseitwasthehighestoption (thiswasaweaknessofthesurvey)

Survey&PrototypeEvaluation

-StrengthsofPrototype

-Comfort

-Affordability

-Abilitytogriplightobjects

-Easeof“puttingon”

-Easeofcleaning

-StrengthsofSurvey

-Providedageneralideaofuse

-Considereduser’sfrequencyofuse

-Weaknesses

-Onlywomenrepliedtosurvey

-Struggledtofindtestvolunteers(hospitalswereunabletoassistduetoHIPAA rulesand2non-healthcareorganizationsdidnotrespond),sotheindividualwho testedtheprostheticwasafemalewithalimb-differenceatthewristwhocould onlyevaluatethe“claw”element.

-Didnotfituser’slifestyle

-Surveyhadlimitedpricerange(andquestionbelowthataskedaboutaprice outsideofthatrange),buttherangeinfluenceduser’sresponse

-Surveydidnotaskusertoelaborateafterratings

PrototypeImprovements

Improvementsfordesignandimplementation:

● Enhancedconnectionpointsbetweensegmentstoenableeasierassemblyfortheuser.

● Increased“infill”settingin3Dprintingprocessfordurability

● Useofasofterfoaminsideresiduallimbholderforenhancedusercomfortwhilewearing prosthetic

● Useofmoredurablematerialsfornon-3D-printeddetails(e.g.replacingtherubberband usedinthe“hand”withsteelspring)

Edwards,DafyddS.,etal.“WhatIstheMagnitudeandLong-termEconomicCostofCareofthe BritishMilitaryAfghanistanAmputeeCohort?” ClinicalOrthopaedicsandRelated Research,vol.473,no.9,2015, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276110457_What_Is_the_Magnitude_and_Lon g-term_Economic_Cost_of_Care_of_the_British_Military_Afghanistan_Amputee_Cohor t.

MacKenzie,EllenJ.,etal.“Health-carecostsassociatedwithamputationorreconstructionofa limb-threateninginjury.” TheJournalofBoneandJointSurgery,vol.89,no.8,2007,pp. 1685-92. NationalLibraryofMedicine,https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17671005/.

Semasinghe,C.L.,etal.“Transradialprostheses:Currentstatusandfuturedirections.”

Manufacturing&IndustrialEngineeringSymposium(MIES),2016,pp.1-7, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7780255.

NationalAcademiesofSciences,Engineering,andMedicine;HealthandMedicineDivision; BoardonHealthCareServices;CommitteeontheUseofSelectedAssistiveProductsand TechnologiesinEliminatingorReducingtheEffectsofImpairments;FlaubertJL,Spicer CM,JetteAM,editors.ThePromiseofAssistiveTechnologytoEnhanceActivityand WorkParticipation.Washington(DC):NationalAcademiesPress(US);2017May9.4, Upper-ExtremityProstheses.Availablefrom: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK453290/

“HowMuchDoesaProstheticArmCost?”CostHelper, https://health.costhelper.com/prosthetic-arms.html.

“TheCompleteGuideToArm&HandAmputationsandProsthetics|MCOP.” MCOP Prosthetics,https://mcopro.com/blog/resources/arm-hand-prosthetics/. ChadwellA,KenneyL,ThiesS,GalpinA,HeadJ.TheRealityofMyoelectricProstheses:

UnderstandingWhatMakesTheseDevicesDifficultforSomeUserstoControl.Front Neurorobot.2016Aug22;10:7.doi:10.3389/fnbot.2016.00007.Erratumin:Front Neurorobot.2018Apr03;12:15.PMID:27597823;PMCID:PMC4992705.

PeoplewithAmputationSpeakOut.LimbLossResearchandStatisticsProgram,pp.1–14, https://www.amputee-coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/lsp_people-speak-out_12 0115-113243.pdf.

AbilityOttobock.Care.https://spa-prod.care.ottobock.com/en-us/ability.Accessed1July2024.

Macknet,David,andBenjaminTaylor.“Amputations-Trauma-Orthobullets.” Orthobullets,21 Aug.2023,https://www.orthobullets.com/trauma/1052/amputations.

AnthropometricData.21Apr.2006, https://multisite.eos.ncsu.edu/www-ergocenter-ncsu-edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/20 16/06/Anthropometric-Detailed-Data-Tables.pdf.

Al-Adwan,Mezyed,etal. VariablesAffectingtheAmputees’ReactionsArtificialLimbsinthe KingdomofJordan.2017,https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1164690.pdf.

50thPercentileU.S.MaleData.figshare,16Apr.2018. figshare.com, https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6143423.v1.

AnIntroductiontoPassiveSiliconeRestorations. https://www.armdynamics.com/upper-limb-library/an-introduction-to-cosmetic-prosthese s.Accessed1July2024.

ArtificialLimbs.https://medlineplus.gov/artificiallimbs.html.Accessed1July2024.

KluteGK,KallfelzCF,CzernieckiJM.Mechanicalpropertiesofprostheticlimbs:adapting tothepatient.JRehabilResDev.2001May-Jun;38(3):299-307.PMID:11440261.

RaizadaD,RaizadaK,NaikM,MurthyR,BhaduriA,HonavarSG.Customocularprosthesisin children:howoftenisachangerequired?Orbit.2011Oct;30(5):208-13.doi: 10.3109/01676830.2011.580035.PMID:21957949.

Fan,Lei,andXue-JianWu.“SexDifferencefortheRiskofAmputationinDiabeticPatients:A SystematicReviewandMeta-Analysis.” PLOSONE,vol.16,no.3,Mar.2021,p. e0243797. PLoSJournals,https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243797.

Vlachaki,Anna.“WhyPeopleShouldStopDesigningProstheticsThatLookRealistic—and Start

DesigningOnesThatWork.” FastCompany,1Aug.2020, https://www.fastcompany.com/90532319/why-people-should-stop-designing-prosthetics-t hat-look-realistic-and-start-designing-ones-that-work.

Applegate,William,andCharlesAsbelle.“ColorStandardizationForLaminatedPlastic ProstheticComponents|O&PVirtualLibrary.” DigitalResourceFoundationforthe Orthotics&ProstheticsCommunity,vol.27,no.3,1973, https://www.oandplibrary.org/op/1973_03_027.asp.

“WhatDoesBlackClothingSymbolize?[ColorPsychology].” COLORBUX, https://www.colorbux.com/color-psychology/black-clothing-symbolism.Accessed1July 2024.

AboutAssemblyProcessSteps https://support.ptc.com/help/creo/creo_pma/usascii/index.html#page/assembly/processa ssembly/About_Assembly_Process_Steps.html.

Worth,Jill. 6MajorAdvantagesofPlasticInjectionMolding.TheRodonGroup,23Feb.2018, https://www.rodongroup.com/blog/6-major-advantages-of-plastic-injection-molding.

“UnsafeWorkplaces.” CleanClothesCampaign,https://cleanclothes.org/unsafe-workplaces.

HowChemicalExposuresHappen:WhatYouNeedtoKnow.

https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/emes/public/docs/How%20Chemical%20Exposures%20Happe

n%20FS.pdf.AgencyforToxicSubstancesandDiseaseRegistry,DivisionofHealth AssessmentandConsultation.

Melito,Steve.“PlasticMaterialsforInjectionMolding|TenCommonTypes.” Fictiv,24May 2023, https://www.fictiv.com/articles/the-ten-most-common-plastic-injection-molding-materials .

ImportanceofComfortandGreatWorkCultureInAnOrganization|InsightsSuccess2022.12 July2017, https://insightssuccess.com/importance-of-comfort-and-great-work-culture-in-an-organiz ation/.

One-offProduction.Design&Technology,2019, https://www.stem.org.uk/resources/elibrary/resource/443806/one-production.

Anderson,MaryAnn,etal.“HowtoOptimizeTransferBatchSizeinOperationsManagement.” OperationsManagementForDummies,10Apr.2017, https://www.dummies.com/article/business-careers-money/business/operations/how-to-op timize-transfer-batch-size-in-operations-management-163001/.

"Space Abstract" b Amirthesh Prasad

"Self Portrait" b Shenghan Gao

"An

Psychology and Humanities Section 2:

Literary Criticism and the Systems Theory.

1.Introduction

Let me start by acknowledging that there exists inside the literary community a strong resistance against the mathematization of their field of interest. Take the rejected master's thesis of Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Chicago between 1945 and 1947about the six basic plots in literature whereinhe stated that“stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads”.

As far as many bookworms are concerned, advanced equations and graphs are the last things which would hold their interest, but there is no escape from the math.

Physicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow, Poland, performed a detailed statistical analysis of more than one hundred famous works of world literature, written in several languages and representing various literary genres.

To convert the texts to numerical sequences, sentence length was measured by the number of words … and discovered that fractals are everywhere; Joyce, Proust, Cort·zar, Woolf, Dos Passos, BolaÒo—fractals. Some of the world’s greatest writers appear to be, in some respects, constructing fractals.

However, more than a dozen works revealed a very clear multifractal structure, and almost all of these proved to be representative of one genre, that of stream of consciousness. The only exception was the Bible, specifically the Old Testament, which has so far never been associated with this literary genre.

"It is not entirely clear whether stream of consciousness writing actually reveals the deeper qualities of our consciousness, or rather the imagination of the writers. It is hardly surprising that ascribing a work to a particular genre is, for whatever reason, sometimes subjective. We see, moreover, the possibility of an interesting application of our methodology: it may someday help in a more objective assignment of books to one genre or another," notes Prof. Drozdz .

The most common mathematical approach of literature is of a statistical nature and is used to quantify the different aspectsofaworkofliterature.Thatway somelinearmodelscouldbedistilledtoreproducecertainliteraryphenomena. Binongo & Smith wrote on this subject “The availability of computing devices and the proliferation of electronic texts (the so-called 'e-texts') in centers for literary and linguistic computing in major universities have encouraged nontraditional applications of statistics. With the drudgery of computation and text encoding diminished, research in the field of computational stylistics is accelerating. In it is shown how projections onto the Cartesian plane of 25dimensional vectors related to the frequency of occurrence of 25 prepositions can distinguish between Oscar Wilde's plays and essays. Such an application illustrates that it is possible to find unusual and intriguing examples of how statistics can impinge on unexpected territory”.[1]

The second approach to literature is the structuralism approach that was defined by Simon as “the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture"[2]. Structuralisms believe that everything that is written has to be governed by specific rules, or a "grammar of literature", that one learns in educational institutions and that has to be unmasked.

Both approaches fail to provide a clear conception of the interdependence of the parts of the literary system where all parts are connected and react to each other. It seems, therefore, as if, for a complete and rigorous solution of the problems relative to some parts of the literary system, it was indispensable to take the entire system into consideration.

I defend the concept that no general method for the solution of questions can be established which does not explicitly recognize, not only the special numerical bases of the science, but also those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning, and which, whatever they may be as to their essence, are at least mathematical as to their form.

2.1.

2.2.

2.3.

6.4.

2. Trend-lines in US literature.

2.1. Methodology

I started a tentative approach to achieve a mathematical model based upon the previous assumptions with an analysis of the bestseller book lists in the USA with the help of Fourier’s theorem.

If there are cycles in the bestseller lists of literary works, the low degree of the observed correlation might be due to the data ofincomplete cycles; in the second place, therecord is only drawn from thefirst book on the yearly bestselling list and might give an accidental, low degree of correlation between content and time. In the third place; the data for the period in American novels from before 1895 are mostly derived from the literary research of James D. Hart whose conclusions, as by himself admitted, were based on less solid historical records (for some years there is even not a given assumption of what might have been the most popular book).

The bestselling data for the nonfiction books are taken from a list drafted by Nathan Bransford. No relevant data could be retrieved for the period prior to 1917.

Before starting to analyze the literary data of the best seller lists, it was unknown whether there are many cycles or only one cycle or, indeed, whether there were any cycles at all. The author admits that the mathematical purists may have objections to the use of quantitative mathematical processes to calculate qualitative data, but the results indicate that it produces a workable transitional outcome indicating some cyclical trend-lines among the literary equilibriums. The here proposed literary mathematical model as whole may be in need of some additional feedback by running it through a more powerful data processor than my laptop.

2.2. Trend-lines in US fiction between 1863 -2019.

In the illustration at the bottom of this page are the results detailed of a laborious examination of the annual themes in American bestselling novels, presented in graphic form by using their Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) numbers. On the axis are measured, within assigned limits, the possible lengths of cycles in the 157 years of literary bestsellers.

The period before 1863 was dismissed for analytical data analysis because of its unreliable and incomplete nature that was also considered non-representative for a study of bestselling novels in America. We discover very soon that the period between 1863 and 2019 consists of two different subject cycles with a cleavage between 1964 and 1966.

From 1965 on the subject cycle of the novel is almost “flat-lining”, with some feeble irregular oscillations between social and spiritual issues, suggesting that other information carriers have taken over some aspects of the social function of the printed novel.

The closest corresponding arithmetical cycle approximating the Nr. 1 US bestseller fiction subject data from 1863 till 1964 is represented by the equation (figure 2, marked in red);

It’s not unlikely that the same fictional subject cycle from the period between 1863 -1963 still continues but includes nowadays a more diverse collection of information carriers. However, it’s not to deny that the subject list of literary fiction passed a bifurcation point in 1965. Consequently, 1965 has been ignored in the mathematically calculated trend-line and its value set on 0, which accidentally nearly coincides with the subject DDC of the 1965 bestseller (archeology 07). The best approximate trend-line for the period 1966 – 2019, is based upon succeeding cycles of 18 years for which the formula is;

Figure 1: real and mathematical trend-line of subjects in the novels between 1863 - 2019

Protagonist fluctuation in American bestselling Novels between 1863 and 2019.

Figure 2: Table showing the fluctuation of main protagonists and its trend-line in novels over 100 years. The types of main protagonists in the Nr. 1 bestselling novels 1863 – 1963 are classified by their OCLC number. We remark that during the period between 1863 and 1890 there is a bigger fluctuation of main protagonist types than in the following 73 years. I have no explanation for this phenomenon and can only conclude that for this timeframe the mathematical approximation consists of two synergetic equations;

For the period between 1863 – 1890;

For the period between 1891 – 1963;

I haven’t been able to calculate an approximate for the protagonist trend-line after the bestselling fiction passed its bifurcation point in 1965. It’s mostly flat-lining with some irregular outbursts.

protagonist fluctuation between 1965 -2019

Figure 3: protagonist fluctuation 1965 - 2019

2.3. Subject periodogram of the American bestselling nonfiction between 1917 -2017.

After analysis of the records that were available during the composition of this essay, no apparent discontinuity in rhythm - or amplitude change can be detected over a period of 100 years. It appears that the subject cycle of the nonfiction literature is ruled by a different set of mechanisms than those of the novel.

Figure 4: Table showing the subjects of nonfictional works over time The closest corresponding arithmetical cycle derived from the Nr. 1 US bestseller data for nonfiction from 1917 till 2017 is represented by the equation:

4. The Multivariate Mathematical Model of North American Literature.

After having constructed a simple algorithmic model, we can now proceed to a quantitative analysis of the literary system. This model can provide new insights into the structure of the system and increases our understanding of the system itself. Modeling can also reveal some logical errors of simple literary concepts.

For the sake of clarity and logical consistency, I’ve drawn the literary model as if it would be executed by a computer program, indicating from what stage on a human writer takes it usually over from the research algorithm. It details the process that produced the fiction and nonfiction in North American literature since 1863.

The literary mathematical model uses the collection of the US Library of Congress to build a semantic linked network through FCM (Fuzzy Cognitive Map). First, the system creates a list of keywords for the required story, then save it on a database and search any word from a keyword list. For this purpose, it uses a SLN (Semantic Link Network) to create an outline with its preferences, determined by the prevailing subject trend. I’ve indicated the place where a human writer usually takes it over from the research algorithm. When the outline of the story is available in plain text form, it is saved on another template and patched up to become a readable text.

KB, KE, KI is the set of reserve words taken only from the Bible or European - and Indigenous values. KC is the set of common reserve words; those are taken from the whole collection of the US library of Congress. KD is the set of different reserve words that are not common in the collection of the US Library of Congress.

Afterdefining/extractingreservewords,thesystemfindsthefrequencyofthosereservewords.Numberofoccurrences of particular reserve words in a given database is called the frequency of that word, then it finds the state value of reserve word automatically.

First, the trend calculator makes a list of keywords for the required story, then save it on a database and search any word from a keyword list. IQSB built an SLN automatically and helps user to create a story with those preferences. Now the story is available in plain text form, which is saved on another database automatically, is ready for readers as one of the possible outcomes of related searches.

Reserve wordsbasically belong to a main story that the literary system wants to build. First, the system finds the words relevant in the Bible. Or combine relevant sources namely the US corpus (Bible, Indigenous -, and European values). Words are represented by K = {k1, k2. . ., kn}. This set of reserve words is further divided into five subsets given as follows:

Where KB, KE, KI is the set of reserve words is taken only from the Bible, European values or Indigenous values respectively. KC is the set of common reserve words; those are taken from this corpus.

KD is the set of different reserve words; those are not common in the US corpus. After defining/extracting reserve words, find the frequency of those reserve words. The number of occurrences of a particular reserve words in a given database is called the frequency of that word, then find the state value of reserve word automatically. Every reserve word has its own state value], S = {s1, s2, . . . , sn} the meaning of state value is own worth of reserve word.

After finding this co-occurrence is required as completion of FCM [1,2] C = {C1, C2, . . . , Cn} where Ci = {Ci1, Ci2, . . . , Cin} and in a combined fashion, C can be represented as:

(1)

weighting that co-occurrence of the reserve words required

W = {W1, W2, . . . , Wn}, where Wj = {wj1, wj2, . . . , wjn}, and in matrix form can be seen as:

(2)

Now, all the material is ready for calculation, according to the FCM formula [1,2] for automatic building of an SLN with thrash-holding function:

Calculate Vc,j (t + 1) = threshold_func

(3)

Patchescanbeappliedforbuildingastrongstoryaccordingtothewriter’swishduringtheprocess.Thesystemcollects all related information from different resources by building a semantic network through fuzzy logic. Now the system has collected all related information from different resources by building a semantic network through fuzzy logic for a concept for which the trend calculator needs a story. In the second step, a story is generated by the writer based on collected information. Proposed system is semi-automatic because first step is automatic, and second step involves a writer.

In this development, Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) data mining techniques for extracting the data are implemented. The main source of this research is the US library of Congress, that is an inactive dataset and in plain-text form. Following steps are carried out to build the proposed system. – Enlisting the concept (keywords) – Finding the frequency on element basis – Finding the frequency on section basis – Finding the frequency on document basis –Finding the concept value of each concept using the fuzzy formula – Finding the co-occurrence/s – Finding the weight of each link using Fuzzy formula – Building SLN from the library collection – Compilation of the results in the form of a story .

This essay choose not to take into account the evolution of the linguistically aspect of literature and the same goes for variations in writing style during the different episodes of American Literature; we will go out from the supposition that the time follows a linear pattern and that the language remained unchanged. Both forces are treated as a constant although in reality they have been the subject of fluctuations. This has been done to scale down the complexity of this mathematical model of literature.

It is important to realize that this literary model doesn’t provide a qualitative description or an answer to questions about ”how”, whereas this quantitative description answers questions about ” how much”.

The mathematical model itself is the synthesis of the qualitative and quantitative assumptions.

The average length of a contemporary bestseller is 375 pages, set inside the USA and the protagonist is a female lawyer or detective. Romance is an upcoming segment: from 5 % of the sales in 1994 to 40 % on Amazon today. The average amount of words that a sentence contains is slowly declining: from 15 in 1863 to 10 in 2020 while the use of question marks increased from 6 to 11 over 1,000 words.

I heard people argue that Dickens was a bestseller, so were Balzac and many others. Commercial literature back then still had some thought-provoking thematic elements, and those two novels in particular were more imaginative products. Sure enough, therewas also plenty of pulp-fiction throughout history like those western dime-novels written last century.

The model’s trend-line indicates that this year’s subject for the bestselling fiction will most likely fall into the DDC interval between 000 – 060. Based upon past results this either indicates archeology, the antichrist or extraterrestrial life as a central theme for the 2020 bestselling novel.

Commercial fiction is meant to entertain and not to provoke thought or leave a particularly lasting impression while literary fiction is thematically deep, challenges conventional notions, leaves us with something to think about, has characters that aren't cardboard, and basically has aesthetic merit. Bestselling contemporary novels reflect the predisposition of the 21st century’s homo ludens and their multitasking attention span.

5. Indications of unexplored fields in US literary criticism.

The whole idea of the possibility to create a forecasting mathematical model of literary trends is putting fundamental questions to the nature of this field, its origins and significance for society that we don’t want to discuss into this essay We just satisfy ourselves by observing that literary history, - contend and – development are governed by a law of nature that pursues its own purpose.

Also, the introduction of new technologies is influencing the ways that trends and ideas are propagated and should retain the attention of the literary community. We refer especially to the abrupt change of the subject cycle in novels in 1965.

The phenomenon that the non-fiction subject cycle remained unaffected by this sudden change indicates that this fraction of literature is governed by different mechanisms and deserves a closer look than it received up to now, with the tendency of literary criticism to focus on fictional literature or non-fiction works in its own field of experience and interest.

A minor issue of academically interest is the question why the protagonist function in novels fluctuated much more in the period 1863 -1890 than in the period 1891 -1964 and is almost flat lining since then.

The model also doesn’t consider the e-books, mainly sold by Amazon, another field that needs a closer look. Several thousands of newly publications hit the market every week through this channel and their relative success depends mostly on the marketing skills of their author. Some undiscovered literary pearls must be lying rotting there.

An adaptation of the proposed literary model to the system theory would greatly improve its forecasting function and enlarge our insights into the functioning of the literary system as a whole, but was also omitted in this essay that only wants to introduce a basic methodology for the creation of a mathematical literary model.

Bibliography;

Herman Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton University Press, 1957)

Herman Northrop Frye. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Jose Nilo, G. Binongo & M. W. A. Smith, A bridge between statistics and literature: The graphs of Oscar Wilde's literary genres, , pp. 781-787

Barry, P. (2002), 'Structuralism', Beginning theory: an introduction to literary and cultural theory, Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 39–60.

Selden,Raman/Widdowson,Peter/Brooker,Peter:AReader'sGuidetoContemporaryLiteraryTheoryFifthEdition. Harlow: 2005. p. 76.

James D. Hart, The Popular Book, A history of America’s literary taste, Oxford University Press, 1950

Robert Finkelstein, A MEMETICS COMPENDIUM, Robotic Technology Inc., University of Maryland University College BobF@RoboticTechnologyInc.com www.RoboticTechnologyInc.com May 2008

6. Literature and Social Entropy inside the USA.

6.1 Introduction

We live in a time where conspiracy theories are rampant and slowly start to realize how this disinformation is contributing to a logarithmic growing degree of social entropy. There is a whole section of literature dedicated to it and I like to call it the paranoid history books.

The mother of all conspiracy theories is the myth of the existence of some secret overlords, called the Illuminati, operating secretly on establishing a NewWorldOrder.Withsomeresearch,youcantracetheoriginsofthismyth back to 17th century Bavaria, where some German intellectuals founded a private group in which they discussed and questioned the power grip upon society byreligious leaders and thenobility. Notvery surprisingly,verysoon afterwards the group’s activities were forbidden, and its members prosecuted. The group dissolved quietly when its activities were gradually outlawed.

Till in the sixties some hippie revolutionaries undusted the concept to propagate civil disobedience, practical jokes and hoaxes. They were organized in a group that called themselves Discordianists and worshiped Eris, the goddess of chaos. One of their main grudges was that the world was becoming too authoritarian, too tight, too closed, too controlled. So they decided to shake up things a little by disseminating misinformation through all portals – through counter culture, through the mainstream media, through whatever means. And they decided they would do that initially by telling stories about the Illuminati.

But the group missed its target. Instead of getting people to wake up to the prejudices they inhabited, conspiracy theories started to bloom. One of the first examples was the ‘cover-up’ of who shot John F Kennedy – by attributing it to the Illuminati. This theory would inspire The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a book that was presented by its authors as an epic fantasy, but soon acquired a cult status among conspiracy believers as the ultimate revelation in disguise of a work of fiction.

And now we live in a world that is full of conspiracy theories and, more importantly, conspiracy theory believers. From the Obama ‘birther’ conspiracy, the widely held belief that 9/11 was an inside job carried out by US intelligence services or that the Covid 19 epidemic has been orchestrated to achieve some major sociological shift.

Conspiracy theories have become a mechanism for the government to control the people. Politicians, like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, are starting to use conspiracies to mobilize support. They encourage people to become disengaged with mainstream politics and instead to engage with fringe politics with racist, xenophobic and extremist views.

Humankind’s generally uninhibited capacity for imagination makes it difficult for today’s truth-finders and fact checkers to debunk the Illuminati myth. The conspiracy literature just contributes to that but is sadly enough a huge money generating engine.

The political landscape is unraveling at an alarming speed and instead of rules becoming too tight, they’re becoming too loose. Hence you have an increasing degree of social entropy inside a country with the most over armed citizens of the world. Debunking conspiracy theories and their propagators is a primary task for all those interested in slowing down the increasingly rising social entropy.

6.2. Systems Approach of the Social Entropy 1

According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the entropy of a naturally occurring system always increases. In social systems, the degree of disorder is a manifestation of the social dissatisfaction within the limits of the system Formulating the Relationship to Calculate Social Entropy

We postulate the existence of two types of contributions to the SE. First, what we name individual contribution (DSb) and second, the group contribution (DSg). Consequently, we may write:

where SE=∆SS , ∆Sb may be considered as a typical value, which characterizes base contribution. Strictly speaking DSb will depend on such different contributions as the geographical location, racial prejudices, religion, etc.

For practical purposes, being DSb a relative value, we may consider it as a constant for each particular human community at a particular moment of history.

where ; N: total number of inhabitants in a chosen system (country), n: number of people in a determined state (degree of dissatisfaction). Consequently, n=iN; where i represent a fraction of N. Observe that W is the characteristic probability of the state of the system as we stated earlier, that is to say the probability of the system (people of a country) to be in a particular mode of agreement or disagreement with the current political situation.

In order to simplify the application of (2) we use the Stirling formula and find; (3)

In order to apply the relationship given above, eq. (3), to the USA case, we made use of public information relative to the degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. This information was relatively easy to be obtained through the internet by entering web sites of specialized poll agencies. In fact, we found even more interesting to show the increase of social entropy with increase of social dissatisfaction in a rather broad range, instead of restricting ourselves to a

1Alfredo Palomino Infante&James H.L.Lawler, SOCIAL ENTROPY: A PARADIGMATIC APPROACHOF THE SECOND LAW OF THERMO-DYNAMICS TO AN UNUSUAL DOMAIN, The Nexial Institute, 2002.

particular moment of history. Thus by straightforward calculation using (3) we managed to produce a plot of social entropy vs. degree of social dissatisfaction, see diagram below.

Social entropy increases with social degree of dissatisfaction

6.3 Discussion and Analysis

Any political system that permanently violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, contributes itself to increase its Social Entropy. In other words, it forces itself to its end.

Human society has coined several sayings which is a sophisticated way of stating the second law of thermodynamics: remember for example: “There is no political malady which will last 100 years, and there is nobody who will go along with it”(simply because social entropy increases).

Apparently, there are two ways for a political system to force to an apparent social order, which is by being honest and open, giving voluntary compliance with rules, or by making use of the force, which is characteristic of dictatorial regimes; but the last one works only for a very short period of time; because DSb will start increasing leading undoubtedly to the social dissatisfaction.

6.4. Concluding Remarks

Social Entropy is very high in the USA and may be approximated using a Boltzmann type equation. Political, economic, cultural and social rules are breached on a massive scale. Consumer confidence is low, joblessness rates are high and police officers are waging an uphill battle against the street gangs and terrorists. The gangs are terrorizing whole neighborhoods with their territorial fights for drugs distribution; the mood on the street is sour.

The US citizens losttheirconfidence into thepolitical elite oftheir country who is pursuing its own personal goals rather than the interest of the population they pretend to represent. The sale of guns is sky rocking and

so do public shootings. Its citizens are increasingly caving in for an implosion of the system and congress is dead locked by bipartisan issues.

7. The Hermeneutically Aspects of Contemporary Literature.

There really are no such things as Art or Science. There are only artists and scientists. Take as an example all those discussions about Leonardo; his art and science. For Leonardo, art was a skill, a know-how applied both to his scientific experiments and to painting. I go back deliberately to the old meaning of the term "art," when art was identified with skill or mastery - the art of war, the art of love, or whatever else. Art is something with a skill. There's no disembodied skill as such; skill is always applied to a particular task.

Art has to do with the embodiment of our value systems: we value elegance and tenderness; love and other such emotions are ingredients in our value system. I do think that the intellectual level of discourse of, say, a number of great scientists and Nobel Prize winners, is much higher than the level of discourse in most art criticism. Much of the activity of art historians has been wedded to whatever is fashionable in the art market at a given time. There is a constant temptation for artists to be sensationalists - not to make great works of art or even minor works of art but merely talking points - and to achieve notoriety for a time.

Artistry can be defined as having mastered a skill sufficiently enough so that you don’t have to think about it; you live it. Artistry is the bridge betweenconcept and craft. Onceyouhave mastered a skill you can transcend technicalities and focus on creating, inventing and innovating. Artists and scientists constantly work their crafts by developing their skills. In order to take on more challenge and stay in the flow, you constantly need to learn new skills. Mastery is what separates the virtuoso from the technician; in science, art and living.

A contemporary illustration is the work of Alexander Rodin. I stumbled upon his paintings in 2011, during an exposition called East Meets West in Kunsthaus Tacheles, Berlin, Germany. Rodin currently lives and works in Berlin, because (as he describes it himself in an interview with website n-europe.eu) 'Berlin is a place interested in art. [...] I am an artist and exhibitions are my life. And when I suggest a concept of an exhibition or an event and see that it fascinates Germans – why not to organize it there? Why not to hold an exhibition in Berlin when it acknowledges my creativity? Rodin’s most inspiring works are rarely for sale, but the artist gladly sells signed posters with reproductions of his works or puts them up for expositions. That’s how he distillates a living from his art.

Alexander Rodin's paintings are an event quite unexpected for Belarusian art with its ideological taboos and conventional norms. The art composition in his paintings is based upon the multifaceted reflections of infinite spaces. The latter undergo constant changes of urban, geological, technocratic and biological nature. And in order to take them to a single image-bearing system Alexander chooses a high panoramic point of view and uses practical monochrome colors of various tonalities. Alexander paints the universe with microscopic precision. The longer one peers at those silver-black abysses the deeper they become...

He describes his works as follow, “I work in a manner that’s unfortunately moved to the background now; it has been substituted for coloring and graphics. I combine avant-garde forms and introduce constructivism and cosmogony and through the plasticity of the rhythms and color structures I try to juxtapose the micro and macro cosmos of mental, physical and astral being”.

Art and science are the results of actionsby people who're living while paying attention

It connects with my own research about literary criticism that I’ve called “Synthetic Literary Criticism”. This method is intended to indicate a concrete, positive description of moving equilibriums, oscillations, and secular change, by a method which presents all of the interrelated literary quantities in a synthesis of simultaneous, real equations.

From Euclid of Alexandria till the late 19th century was it a quite common phenomenon for philosophers to be also practicing mathematicians. The split-

brain only occurred when the modernist thinking founded itself, sometime in December 1910, upon the inherent instability of the new relativist worldviews. Recently there is a renewed interest in some artistic circles to restore the unity between the different disciplines of knowledge; to create a new holistic worldview.

Some celebrated writers did resort to hidden or explicit mathematical structures to construct novels that are now widely regarded as literary masterpieces. The first example includes Georges Perec who, in his novel “Life– a User’s Manual”, takes us on a tour, chapter by chapter of the apartments (stages of the lives) of the tenants of an entire Parisian building in a sequence purely determined by graph theory.Another instance of such approach is that of the influential novel “Hopscotch” (Rayuela), where Julio Cortazar invites the reader to navigate through his complex puzzle of 155 chapters by choosing either a linear or a non-linear mode of reading, each route yielding of course vastly different perspectives.

Jan Potocki’s superb "Manuscript Found in Saragossa", also known as "The Saragossa Manuscript" where the chapters are devoted to the geometer's adventures contain some real mathematical problems, usually associated with Pascal.

Jorge Luis Borges, a dedicated amateur-mathematician, was much intrigued by Zeno’s paradox and the concept of infinity which inspired a number of his stories, like the wellknown “Library of Babel” or the “Book of Sand”.

The Italian writer Italo Calvino, in particular the "Cosmicomics" and the "Ti zero" uses mathematical theories or scientific facts as the starting point to create a complete world of characters that are "entities" which interact following the law of the universe. A noteworthy newcomer is code poetry; literature that mixes notions of classical poetry and computer code. Unlike digital poetry, which prominently uses physical computers, code poems may or may not run through executable binaries. "Black Perl" is a code poem written using the Perl programming language. It was posted anonymously to Usenet on April 1, 1990 and is popular among Perl programmers as a piece of Perl poetry. Written in Perl 3, the poem can be executed as a program.

BEFOREHAND: close door, each window & exit; wait until time. open spellbook, study, read (scan, select, tell us); write it, print the hex while each watches, reverse its length, write again; kill spiders, pop them, chop, split, kill them.

unlink arms, shift, wait & listen (listening, wait), sort the flock (then, warn the "goats" & kill the "sheep"); kill them, dump qualms, shift moralities, values aside, each one; die sheep! die to reverse the system you accept (reject, respect); next step,

kill the next sacrifice, each sacrifice, wait, redo ritual until "all the spirits are pleased"; do it ("as they say"). do it(*everyone***must***participate***in***fo rbidden**s*e*x*).

return last victim; package body; exit crypt (time, times & "half a time") & close it, select (quickly) & warn your next victim; AFTERWORDS: tell nobody. wait, wait until time; wait until next year, next decade; sleep, sleep, die yourself, die at last

Code can speak literature, logic, mathematics. It contains different layers of abstraction, and it links them to the physical world of processors and memory chips. All these resources can contribute in expanding the boundaries of contemporary poetry by using code as a new language. Code to speak about life or death, love or hate.

It has its own rules (syntax) and meaning (semantics). Like literature writers or poets, coders also have their own style that include - strategies for optimizing the code being read by a computer and facilitating its understanding through visual organization and comments for other coders.

The new information technology added extra dimensions to the literary field. Social media networks, especially Twitter and Tumblr, have proven to be hospitable environments for functional and artistic bots because they operate as publishing and development platforms that encourage automation and produce massive data streams.

Social bot accounts (Sybils) have become more sophisticated and deceptive in their efforts to replicate the behaviors of normal accounts. The term “Sybil” comes from the subject of the book Sybil (a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder).

Bots can be designed for good intentions. They can be used to protect anonymity of members as mentioned in related work or automate and perform tasks much faster than humans, like automatically pushing news, weather updates or adding a template in Wikipedia to all pages in a specific category, or sending a thank-you message to your new followers out of courtesy.

They can also be extremely sophisticated such as (i) generating pseudo posts which look like human generated to interact with humans on a social network, (ii) reposting post, photographs or status of the others, and (iii) adding comments or likes to posts, (iv) building connections with other accounts.

But as many technological inventions, they also have darker applications. Some of the malicious functionalities of social bots are: the power of dissemination of misinformation, they are convenient way of propaganda or can be leveraged for getting fake ratings and reviews.

There are influence bots that serve this purpose. Also, it is possible to find many web pages that serve fake followers and likes even for free by simply searching on any search engine.

Social networks are powerful tools that connect the millions of people over the world. Therefore, they are attractive for social bots as well. The possible harm caused by social bots such as identity theft, astroturfing, content polluter, follower fraud, misinformation dissemination etc… may not be underestimated.

Is there greater cause to worry further up the literary food chain since the rumor circulates that GPT-4 bots can also write books?

No doubt Amazon would jump at the prospect of being able to sell completely computer-generated books since they would not need to pay royalties to an algorithm.

Up to now, these are just giant automated plagiarism machines that mash together bits of stories written by human beings rendered invisible by AI rhetoric. The major GPT-4 glitch consists of the fact that it can be sometimes prone

Figure 5: An industrial robot writes out the Bible. Picture by Amy Cicconi

to what its developers call “world-modeling failures”, “eg the model sometimes writes about fires happening underwater”. Also all contemporary open AI system are heavily censoring all contend that is, even marginally, linked to whatever form of sexuality, violence, religion, politics, or racial issues.

A more realistic hope for a text-only program such as GPT4, meanwhile, is simply as a kind of automated amanuensis to generate the elusive raw material that human writers can then edit and polish. But until robots have rich inner lives and understand the world around them, they will not be able to tell their own stories. And even then. Maybe there is no better way to conclude this introduction than by quoting Wittgenstein: “If a lion could speak, we would not understand him”.

Wong Kwan

How You Think Will Shape What You Think

Animosity and disgust in many of our social and political interactions have all but replaced openminded decency in recent years. Family reunions devolve into outbursts about who is or isn’t woke, local council and school meetings turn into screaming matches, librarians are blamed for both lending and banning books, news networks and entire states are viewed as hot red or true blue, and social media increasingly reinforce extreme or conspiratorial opinions. Americans are besieged by destructive inclinations too often manifest as disrespect, hatred, or violence.

Let’s step back. Imagine suddenly realizing you are wrong: not just mistaken about a trivial opinion but fundamentally in error in the way you think about a controversial issue. Then fancy reversing your viewpoint about a trigger topic such as guns, abortion, prisons, religion, sexual identity, or voting rights. Why is it difficult for Americans and many others even to imagine changing their minds about certain issues?

Every few years, I return in physical and mental space to reconnect with my Midwestern origins in a rural county south of Lake Erie. During a recent trip, I visited a Mennonite store valued for home-grown products packaged with environmental sensitivity. Inside, I overheard a woman explaining to her young daughter how to select garden vegetables. At the back of the store, a brawny fellow in a camouflage jacket appeared to be on patrol. Holsters on his waist supported a handgun and hunting knife, and leather belts across his back secured an assault rifle.

I knew open carry was legal here, and the woods can be dark and deep, but the scene in the store felt surreal. Here was a small business with organic products on the shelves and embroidery on walls sewn by children of the church to celebrate the Anabaptist values of peace and nonviolence. A mother was setting an example for her daughter while Camo Guy who likely fancied himself the embodiment of protective security appeared to be staging an imaginary,

one-man, live-shooter drill with camping and assault weapons. The scene conjured what many these days lament as the American divide.

For decades in the United States, the elected and electorate alike have sequestered themselves into ideological camps so polarized by now that civil dialogue across political lines and lines of faith feels like a vanishing art. Through an implicit pact of no-forgiveness (and because those people are crazy), the country has become two nations instead of one with a sense of shared humanity.

I left the store thinking about experts who for a living do serious thinking about thinking, that is, about how we humans think. How is it possible for two people to think about the same social, political, spiritual, or economic issue guns for example and arrive at opinions that are not only disparate but so incompatible that civil compromise is often perceived as betrayal? One explanation for the dichotomy and for how information processing in general can lead to expressions of full-blown hyper-partisanship so much in evidence today has its origins not in what people think about a particular issue, but in how they think.

It's fair to say Camo Guy in the Mennonite store elicited an emotional reaction from me. The man reminded me of my uncle who worked nightshifts as a security guard, kept a pistol on his car seat, and wanted to teach me how to shoot straight and “walk like an Indian” in the woods.

At the tender age of nine, I judged him a danger to himself and others, a bias I think about to this day when tempted to appraise some gun-loving Americans as small-brained dudes with oversize toys.

What to do about such thoughts, if anything: nurture them as warranted or stifle them as contentious? At least one family member says I am confrontational on certain topics; whereas I sometimes think in the heat of an exchange that I am simply correct and entitled to my opinion.

Taking a step back, the larger issue has to do with bias in general, yours and mine, and whether removing subjective, emotional responses or at least recognizing and minimizing them can allow for a more constructive and informed interpretation of the world around us.

Types of Thinking

When I was in grad school, A Study of Thinking published way back in the 50s by Jerome Bruner1 prompted leading psychologists like Benjamin Bloom to identify six types of thinking skills.2 From simple to complex, the types are knowledge (remembering), comprehension (understanding), application (using learning), analysis (examining and deducing), synthesis (putting things together), and evaluation (assessing conclusions). About 40 years later, Lorin Anderson and his colleagues updated the classification to include the common-sense ideas of remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.3

Philosophers, psychologists, and even entire nations have since redefined the components of thinking to address various objectives. Even language itself affects thinking. The Australian Kuuk Thaayorre culture uses the cardinal directions (east, west, north, and south) rather than right and left for orientation and to greet someone and specify time.4 Language also plays a role in how we all self-identify, often politically. A man might see himself as a middle-age, evangelical Christian male, whereas a woman might self-describe as a feminist, African American professor, emphasizing politics, racial heritage, and vocation/education. Some theorists offer simpler schemes to classify thinking, such as (1) analytical or convergent, (2) divergent (the opposite of analytical), (3) creative, and (4) critical thinking. Critical thinking, historically considered part of problem solving, makes use of deducing conclusions from the information at hand, generalizing from what’s known, and using inference, which involves making the most likely and logical conclusion from limited information.

As far back as 1910, the American psychologist John Dewey described “reflective thinking” that entails careful consideration of any knowledge or belief by assessing both its supporting information and conclusions.5 Many people do not differentiate between their beliefs and knowledge, but Dewey saw the distinction as foundational. In bringing the abstract term “knowledge” back down to earth, Dewey considered it not mere thought (a mental process or belief) or a unique aspect of the self but, rather, the “name for the product of competent inquiries,” for example, a consensual fact in the empirical sciences. Dewey’s idea of what we now call critical thinking is in good company with prior expressions by Francis Bacon, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, among others who advocated a careful, sometimes scientific, attitude directed to a goal of discovering the most supportable and reasonable conclusion.

Shopper Mom vs Camo Man

Rather than having a debate with myself in the store about the presence or absence of rational thinking in Shopper Mom and Camo Guy, I wanted to ask some of my friends what they made of the scene. For transparency, it’s relevant to say that I grew up during the turbulent 60s sympathetic to African American, women’s, Native American, and gay causes. Spending a dozen student years on midwestern college and university campuses, especially at that time, undoubtedly shaped my views about such topics as Vietnam and civil rights in ways quite different from those of many Dakota ranchers, New Jersey truck drivers, or Texas businessmen. Back to the Camo Guy scene: of the people I know well in the region today and whose opinions I value, four topped the list. One was an astute female I’d known since elementary school. The second was a neuropsychologist and friend from graduate school. Another was a psychiatrist who’d moved to rustbelt country to set up her practice and had never left. The fourth was the most politically conservative and gun-adoring relative in my diverse clan.

I put the same question to all four. How did they interpret the scene in the store, which from my point of view juxtaposed parental values against vigilantism in a setting where violence seemed remote?

My grade-school friend, who had literally lived in the local woods all her adult life though in a designer house offered a terse reply. “It’s mostly anxiety.”

From the psychologist. “Terror. I think the man is terrified.”

From the psychiatrist. “He feels like a victim.”

From my relative. “It’s fear. ”

Anxiety, terror, victimhood, fear: but afraid of what? My classmate reminded me about how the media report nearly every day another mass murder in the U.S., sometimes more than one a day so that Camo Guy likely feared some bozo with a grudge shooting things up. My psychologist friend emphasized not just emotional thinking, but the power of overwhelming negative emotion. The psychiatrist talked about fear in the context of defense mechanisms and feelings of victimhood. My relative with the gun collection became emotional while describing his own fear of deep, dark Washington DC bureaucrats stealing personal rights and personal identity, especially the right to own whatever type and quantity of firearms a person pleased.

In short, the local consensus for what drove Camo Guy’s thinking and behavior seemed to center on emotion, especially the potent emotion of fear along with feelings of violation and victimhood. Is it fair to say Camo Guy was responding to the world and his place in it by emotional thinking rather than critical thinking, as did I during our brief encounter?

More broadly, could a distinction between two types of thinking at least partly explain how animosity and disgust in social and political interactions have come to override open-minded

decency in the U.S. and elsewhere? To answer the question, two behavioral pathways are worthy of consideration. One leads from critical thinking to feelings of empathy and expressions of compassion, while another leads from defensive (i.e., self-protective) emotions to feelings of victimhood and possible violence. The two paths are not mutually exclusive and are hardly new, but it’s worth exploring how they are reinforced in some new ways in society today until they operate in overdrive.

Critical Thinking and the Attitude of Science

When I raised the idea of the two pathways of critical versus emotional thinking with my psychiatrist friend, she responded with a question. “Is emotional thinking even thinking at all?” Some concepts basic to the science of thinking and how scientists themselves think about science help provide an answer.

Nothing invented by mankind has had more beneficial results for human welfare than science. Science is the reason we boil drinking water, why surgeons wash hands to minimize infection, and why we carry supercomputers in our pockets. Yet few developments in history so fundamental to human welfare are so poorly understood or willfully misunderstood.

Why do so many reject science as an approach to understand objective reality? One possibility is that people don’t reject science for what it is; rather, they don’t know what science really is.

About 70% of Americans do not understand the word “science” or the scientific process according to a contemporary expert in human beliefs, Michael Shermer.6 I can personally vouch for Shermer’s estimate after teaching science methodology classes at the college level.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, folks like my gun-adoring relative took to posting on the internet how scientists were contradicting themselves repeatedly. Don’t wear a mask, then

do. Herd immunity will kick in with 70% vaccinated or 80%, or maybe never. Vaccines are safe and effective, or maybe not so effective against newer strains. It’s safe to put kids back into school, or not safe at all. What my relative did not appreciate is that science itself is not a thing called The Truth. Instead, the scientific method is a process (an organon) to get at truth just as practice is not a skill in the usual sense but a way to become skillful at something sought.

Confusion about COVID followed inconsistent messaging, especially from people in positions of authority and political power. In fact, however, scientists had been following scientific methodology all along, but many people simply don’t understand how science works. What those who reject science do not appreciate is that science itself is not always right or wrong, but some of the tentative hypotheses proposed and tested by scientists may ultimately prove to be correct or incorrect.

Science, which relies on critical thinking, is best conceptualized as a process or method rather than a single thing or static outcome. The scientific method does not generate sudden, definitive answers to new questions. Rather, it’s a way to converge on objective truth after evaluating mistaken assumptions and ruling them out one at a time. More generally, the scientific method does not teach anybody what to think about anything, but rather how to think about everything, at least in the natural world. Rather than trying to prove something, science often attempts to disprove or reject what is not true.

When I taught classes on the scientific method, it was helpful to explain it as a set of five or six steps. (1) Make observations by collecting information that either involves numbers or qualitative evidence. (2) Form a tentative and testable question (hypothesis) about the observations and make predictions from the hypothesis. (3) Design experiments to test the validity of the hypothesis and its predictions. (4) Observe experimental outcomes, analyze the

data, and compare the results to either accept or modify the hypothesis. (5) Repeat the process until reaching a consensus about the consistency and reproducibility of observed outcomes

How sure is sure when it comes to science? To answer the question, scientists have developed the ideas of validity and reliability. Reliability is a measure of how consistent and repeatable findings are. Validity is the extent to which procedures measure what they claim to measure, and the results can be generalized.

A fact in science is generally thought of as an objective observation that is both reliable and verifiable (confirmed so many times that it is commonly accepted as “true”7) and meets an agreed-on level of statistical confidence, universally accepted as a probability value (p-value) of at least 95% (or better) confidence or certainty. Facts follow theories and hypotheses, which can include matters of interpretation. Facts are not derived from, and do not change according to emotion or belief. To the extent that an idea or conclusion is affected by emotion, it is not a fact.

Critical thinking need not rely exclusively on the scientific method but usually incorporates observations rather than expectations, applies objective measures rather than subjective, and uses logic and deduction rather than beliefs, opinions, emotions, or dogma. Dewey and others recognized several components shared between critical thinking and the scientific method, including the clear statement of a problem, hypothesis formation to guide observations, and collection of factual material through observation, careful reasoning, and testing.8

Viewed this way, critical thinking can lead to sound conclusions, whereas its opposite uncritical thinking or what might be termed “emotional thinking” if there really is such a thing is driven by feelings. With respect to the foregoing logic, emotional thinking or reasoning, as described by some cognitive therapists in the 70s, is not really thinking, but largely feeling. So

instead of using the loaded concept of emotional thinking, let’s explore the more useful idea of biased thinking, and a sub-form we can call defensive triggering

Biased and Intuitive Thinking

No reasonable person enjoys being mistaken. Yet a common tendency is to take mental shortcuts entailing less effort than is required in science and then to focus on support for what we already think is true. The problem with shortcuts is that uncritical thinking is often profoundly biased, yet on a subjective and personal level, bias feels great. I know I am right about assault weapons and border walls, about homophobia and global warming, about my nice clothes and your stupid hair. I like thinking and feeling the way I do, and know you are wrong, so why fight the feeling?

At the very least, biased interactions often escalate into confrontations that elicit sweaty palms, racing hearts, hurt feelings, anger, alienation, and regret. Then consider how pervasive and insidious bias really is. Here are a few examples of overlapping bias, starting with a type most eloquently described centuries ago by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum (New Method), a system of then-new thinking or logic offered to remedy the ills of inadequate education, now known as the Baconian method.9

• Confirmation bias. In 1960, the English psychologist, Peter Wason, first showed experimentally that when seeking out information or sorting through data, adults pay attention to and select what they already think is true and ignore or dismiss what they don’t believe.10 Wason coined the expression, confirmation bias, for the type of biased thinking Bacon had called pernicious predetermination.

• Belief bias. When the believability of a conclusion conflicts with its logical validity, belief bias akin to confirmation bias can hamper logical reasoning according to prior knowledge

and experience. Rather than considering the actual merits or complexities of a proposition, belief bias prompts individuals to rationalize information to support a pre-existing belief. 11

• Backfire effect. When confronted with unsought information and we reject it, the process strengthens what we already believe.

• Anchoring bias. People are influenced by the first amount or value they encounter, such as an estimate of financial losses and gains.12

• Biased assimilation. In essence, the belief that I am right and you are wrong13 results in a tendency to assimilate information consistent with a belief more than information inconsistent with a belief.

• Blind spot bias. This meta-bias is the idea that you are more likely to make thinking errors than I am, and it applies to almost all the other biases. We see the bias of others from the outside, which lets us spot their thinking errors more easily than introspection does into our own thinking.

A tactic much like biased thinking has been described by University of Chicago researchers, Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood. After assessing different thinking styles, they concluded people fall on a spectrum, from magical or what they called intuitive at one end to rational at the other. An intuitionist tends to think in terms of unobservable or magical forces, relying more on emotions and gut feelings or religious beliefs, and then making judgmental shortcuts while rejecting what is observable to explain an event. A rationalist tends to favor logic, deduction, and facts, while relying on analytical thinking and transparency. Oliver and Wood found that about 60% of people are somewhere in the middle, with intuitionists outnumbering rationalists about 2 to 1 in the remaining 40% of people.14 If the estimates are fairly accurate, then a large segment of the

human population, which includes many intuitionists, is susceptible to social or political manipulation, including conspiracy beliefs.15

On the Oliver–Wood spectrum, I am a determined rationalist with a strong background in science. It might even be fair to say I’m on a mission. The mission is education, but keep my predisposition in mind when considering arguments that follow, along with a reserve of healthy skepticism about the possibility that the arguments themselves might be slanted. If we are aware of our biases and intuitive tendencies, we might then assume awareness solves the problem of biased thinking. However, awareness is only the first step of many to combat biased thinking, as suggested by the numerous measures required to avoid bias in medical or scientific research.16

Defensive Triggering

As defined here, defensive triggering is in most ways the opposite of scientific or critical thinking. It has little to do with methodical and logical assessment and much to do with reflexive and self-protective gut reactions or feelings of social affiliation. Critical thinking is an active process whereas defensive triggering is more automatic; one process is deliberate and deliberative whereas the other can overpower or sidetrack rational thinking.

Defensive triggering means (1) processing input at a visceral, hormonal level often in response to a threat or trauma, which takes precedence over cerebral responses and concerns, or (2) processing information according to powerful social-affiliative and hormonal influences, which often trump conscious thought. An important corollary of defensive triggering is to realize how often people operate in a relative intellectual vacuum and are not thinking much at all.

Just as the trauma arising from threat can be overwhelming, so too are the potencies of social influences shaping what we believe. Most would agree children tend to believe what trusted

adults tell them, especially regarding fantasies such as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. A child becomes emotionally invested in such beliefs for reasons often centered on personal reward. At some point though, a child learns to differentiate reality from metaphor, but the distinction is not always clear-cut on a gut level. Adolescents and adults sometimes cling to interpretations instilled at a younger age passively through an ongoing suspension of disbelief or by social or other mental processes. Americans of a certain age for example were once taught Columbus discovered America, Native American savages heartlessly slaughtered blameless whites, and Confederate generals are patriotic heroes of U.S. history. Even when facts contradict biased or simplistic mythologies, many individuals stick with older, childish beliefs reinforced by a social unit or an entire culture while rejecting or dismissing new information.

Exploiting Emotion Through Defensive Triggering

Whether the mechanism at work is reflexive arousal as a defense against a threat, social activation in defense of us versus them, or hormonal triggering of another sort, the exploitation of defensive targeting through rhetoric is hardly new. Back in 1971, Ronald Reagan referred to welfare as “a cancer eating at our vitals.” He couched the suggestion of threat in social and emotional rhetoric as a political tool by introducing the story of the “Welfare Queen” described as a “woman from Chicago.” The idea then, as now, was that black people too lazy to work for a living rob hard-working taxpayers by living extravagantly on public benefits and boosting their own child-welfare payments through mindless promiscuity and outright theft. The stereotype persists today that public programs discourage people from working for a living. However, the historical record of the real-life woman accused of being the original queen paints a different picture of an outsider and daughter of itinerant sharecroppers who was expelled from an allwhite school after a second-grade education, faced employment discrimination because of

racism, did indeed perpetrate fraud in the amount of some $7,000 or $8,000 (rather than Reagan’s six-figure estimate), but likely also suffered from mental illness according to psychiatrists and others. The story of the welfare queen is complex, as documented in the book, The Queen by Josh Levin.17

Though exploiting defensive triggers and strong social affiliations for political and other purposes is as old as recorded history, recent advances in human connectivity, especially pervasive broadcast networks and social media, add an ominous element to the problem of basing opinions or decisions on gut feelings rather than objective information. If neither defensive triggering nor critical thinking are new, why is the disconnect between them so apparent in the 21st century and so extreme in the United States? One possible answer relates to another dichotomy, namely between those who incorporate empathy in their evaluations verses those who are inclined toward feelings of self-victimization. There is perhaps no more visible forum to observe appeals to empathy versus victimhood than in broadcast media.

If an individual is defensively or socially triggered and inclined to feel victimized, then their view of the world will be quite different from an individual who is a critical thinker and inclined toward empathy. To find evidence for how the distinction is manipulated, mass media provide a useful starting point.

For the record, I’m a fan of public television. I like watching tree-hugging nature shows, political and investigative documentaries, and classical literary dramas. Are such personal viewing preferences relevant to a discussion about ways of thinking? They are.

Public television and radio are generally regarded as sources of social, political, and sometimes scientific information featuring analyses by acknowledged authorities, although often rated as left-leaning in political coverage. People across the political spectrum are likely to agree that

public broadcast networks also feature “snowflake” stories on issues such as direct and indirect discrimination, human and environmental exploitation, and avoidance of suffering likely to interest empathetic audiences.

At the opposite extreme, Fox News often exploits fear, mostly on politicized topics and often seasoned generously with misinformation and disinformation to manipulate people’s anger and fuel polarization. The coverage is also tailored to clearly defined social and political groups. According to research by the Pew Research Center in 2020, two-thirds to three-quarters of conservatives trust Fox News more than any other outlet. Devotees of Fox News are so propagandized that they are likely to believe all sources of information other than their own are propaganda. As George Packer explains in Last Best Hope, “… media organizations of all kinds have been sucked into the vortex of polarization, and in many cases, they do all they can to further it. They’re under pressures that are political, financial, and technological, all pushing media to be faster, louder, simpler, and more partisan.”18 Worse still, most politics and news sources are now nationalized.

Am I a sucker too? Should I be watching right-slanted shows as often as left-slanted ones to balance two polar and potentially partisan halves of my social–political–emotional brain? Or should I watch neither forum and mind my own business? More than once I’ve found myself bragging about exposing myself to an oppositional talking head on Fox News if only for a couple of minutes to bolster a given position as balanced and informed. And so down the rabbit hole. Or is there something inherently worrisome and potentially destructive about media in any form broadcast, social, printed, or otherwise that promote defensive triggering? I believe the answer is a resounding yes, and here’s why

If an individual is defensively activated and watches Fox News, then feelings of victimhood seem a possible if not probable outcome and are increasingly likely to be exacerbated to the extent an individual watches that source exclusively. Empathy, regarded as a trait rather than a response, is reinforced by mass media as well. Some analysts have gone so far as to suggest the Grand Old Party has become a cult of victimization, self-pity, and resentment whereas liberals are dupes or pushovers for social causes. This is not to suggest conservative, defensive thinkers cannot be empathetic or that liberal, critical thinkers are immune to victimhood. It is quite possible to think defensively and feel empathetic or to think critically and be a real victim. However, the left-leaning political identity of an empathetic activist dedicated to social justice is as predictable as the conservative affiliation of someone who feels victimized by and deplores welfare handouts.

Empirical evidence regarding an emotional cult of victimization is especially straightforward. During a December 2020 rally in Georgia for example, Donald Trump claimed, “We’re all victims. Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight, they’re all victims, every one of you.”

Victims of what or whom? The emotionally triggered, high on the rush of media jargon and political incitement, see themselves as victims of the poor who are too lazy to work, immigrants who take honest citizens’ jobs, voters who steal elections, the LGBT cohort threatening family values, academics preaching socialism, and people of color who burn cities and make them unsafe, to name some obvious examples. In short, those who perceive themselves as being victimized, are conceptual victims of the very people who empathetic individuals see as the real victims of society. Of course, there are plenty of genuine victims in the world: among them, the

mentally ill wandering city streets, political prisoners, targets of brutal regimes, the underfed and malnourished, and the physically and emotionally abused.

Empathy versus Victimhood

When distinguishing between empathy and feelings of victimization, it’s important to appreciate empathy is not a simple concept. Cognitive empathy is characterized by psychologists as a trait or skill in recognizing and understanding another person’s feelings or thoughts. Emotional or affective empathy involves feeling the same emotion as another, experiencing distress because of another’s plight, or actively helping others through compassion, which is the type often investigated by sociologists and psychologists Research published in 2018 by a team of investigators at Cambridge suggests empathy as self-reported through the well-validated Empathy Quotient (EQ) and evaluated in the largest study to date of 46,800 people who were 23andMe customers has a genetic component, with women generally more empathetic than men.19 Other estimates on the heritability of empathy depend on the type measured, and are reported between 0% and 70%, with a range of 52% to 57% for affective empathy in one recent study.20

The term victimization generally refers to the act of treating someone unjustly, with cruelty or harm, whereas the word victimhood is a form of identity based on perceived or actual harm.

Victimhood, while often ignored in empirical social science research, can be manifest in at least three ways:21 legally because of criminal injustice, egocentrically as a self-defined perception of one’s own sense of victimization regardless of the truth, and socio-culturally by blaming some external entity such as “the system.” Feelings of victimhood are by no means confined to people who are actual victims.

From a set of eight studies published in 2020, including clinical observations and research, Rahav Gabay and her colleagues describe four components of a “victimhood mindset ”22 They are the need for recognition, moral elitism, lack of empathy, and frequent thoughts about past victimization. The mindset is a stable personality tendency that can arise without experiencing actual victimization, and, conversely, someone experiencing trauma or victimization will not necessarily develop the mindset. People preoccupied with victimhood are oblivious to, or no longer feel obligated to care about, the pain and suffering of others. In other words, a victimhood mindset is largely the opposite of empathy. Increased focus on an in-group’s feelings of victimization also reduces empathy toward an out-group and can lead to an inability to see things from the perspective of others. How is a victimhood mindset developed? Research shows that socialization plays a role through a variety of channels, including television and social media.

Beyond public television, public radio, talk radio, and Fox News, the roles of the internet and of social media in bolstering victimhood culture are on full view to anyone with a computer or smartphone, though not everyone is inclined to acknowledge the impact on themselves or others. Social media serve not only as echo chambers for sharing perceptions of personal victimization but also for victimhood as a central theme that has emerged to be “among the most important identity positions in American politics,” according to Robert Horowitz.23

Many reports claim neurotransmitters such as dopamine and oxytocin spike in response to likes and tweets,24 and such chemical releases might even underly attraction or addiction to prosocial (e.g., empathy) or possibly antisocial (e.g., victimhood) content on social media. However, such conjecture is in a sense having it both ways, and any cause-and-effect relation as well as the scientific rigor behind such claims is not always clear.25 Still, social media play such a huge role in exacerbating social and political animosity in the U.S. as well as loss of faith in the existence

of facts that proposals for limiting their influence as avenues for “affective polarization” (partisanship leading to hatred and precluding compromise) have taken on some urgency by social scientists and others.26, 27

Recent social and political science studies reveal that in judging the political views of others, individuals perceive more polarization of other-party members than exists in fact, or at least according to measures of self-stated personal policy preferences.28 Such biased perception increases animus, including seeing one’s opponents as abhorrent and dangerous. In addition, the rhetoric and messaging of political candidates can make supporters feel like victims regardless of political predispositions or demography.21

If most would agree being a victim is undesirable, why do so many invite the feeling on social media and elsewhere? Potential answers include social and psychological benefits ranging from a sense of belonging to a special group, social status, and moral superiority, to the idea that social deference is due a victim. Moreover, because victims require someone or something to blame, “others” must be the cause of their problems or failures. In short, victimhood can be highly reinforcing by allowing people to feel empowered rather than diminished.

Compassion and Hatred

Whereas empathy is a trait and victimhood is roughly the opposite of empathy, compassion is a response to empathy, and at least one demonstrable response to victimhood is hatred. In this context, compassion and hatred refer to behaviors with measurable response components. The dichotomy of compassion in action and hatred as reaction parallels in many ways the dichotomy of empathy and victimhood as predecessors of the two very different responses, respectively.

What exactly is compassion, and how are empathy and compassion related? Compassion has played an important and often pivotal role in the philosophies of key entities ranging from the world’s religious traditions to justice, healthcare, and educational systems. Charles Darwin wrote about the possible evolutionary significance of natural selection favoring compassion, “for those communities which include the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”29 The idea has been referred to as survival of the kindest.30

Despite its importance, scientific consensus has been lacking on a definition of compassion, and sometimes empathy and compassion are used to define each other. Research at the University of Sussex, Oxford, and the Solomons Centre for Applied Psychology has suggested an operational definition for compassion that centers on suffering and includes not just recognizing and understanding the suffering of others but feeling emotionally connected, tolerating the associated discomfort, and then being motivated to act to alleviate the suffering.31

One study on 200 subjects shows that of the types of empathy evaluated (including cognitive and emotional), cognitive empathy is the best mediator between gratitude and compassion. Such findings support other research showing compassion is in fact derived from empathy.32

Hatred, in contrast to compassion, is often described as an outcome of fear. Although being fearful is often aversive, hatred can be strongly reinforcing as an expression of victimhood. Who exactly do Trump’s suggested victims fear and love to hate? The list includes the press, broadcast media, most universities, Hollywood, big corporations especially in Silicon Valley, big government, liberal elites, progressives, wokeness, social security, Medicare, government regulation, feminism, “illegal aliens,” transgenders, political correctness, data on climate change, socialism, taxation, gun control, abortion, welfare, the minimum wage, evolution, animal rights,

environmental protection, endangered species, cancel culture, freeloaders, unions, activists, black lives, foreigners but especially “radical” Muslims, gay men, lesbians, and many others.

With so much to fear and hate, it is not surprising that sometimes victimhood is expressed as a denial of hatred toward the hated and even of the very existence of hate crimes. A series of studies led by Pontus Leander suggests that members of prejudiced and disempowered groups, including supremacists framing themselves as victims, tend to rationalize hate crimes, such as mass shootings in the U.S., New Zealand, and the Netherlands. In particular, the aggrieved members failed even to acknowledge the obvious victimization of other minority groups and instead expressed self-serving, purposeful, and biased denial of demonstrable hate crimes.33

Whereas hatred is often an outcome of defensive triggering gone awry, it is fortunate that one expression of empathy is compassion, and compassion can arise from either critical thinking or emotional triggering. A positive correlation between empathetic concern and a willingness to help others has even found its way into the definition of the word compassion, a human response sometimes pivotal to successful human interactions and communication.

Neural Polarization and Nudges

A team of researchers at UC Berkeley has recently assessed the neurological basis for partisan bias in people who had previously stated either liberal-leaning or conservative-leaning political opinions.34 After watching videos containing political trigger words invoking morality, human emotions, or threats related to immigration, neurons in the prefrontal cortex responded differently in the two groups. “Neural polarization” between groups, as the researchers called their finding, suggests political attitudes bias information processing in the brain, language drives polarization, and partisan language in particular causes our brains to process and interpret messages in different ways, though the effects are not necessarily hardwired in the brain.

If our brains can become politically polarized, our decisions are often biased or irrational, and people don’t always recognize what is in their best interest owing to misinformation or misperceptions, what can be done? That is, what can help optimize rational decision-making and minimize destructive partisanship? You might even ask yourself, as I have done while writing this essay, to what extent the arguments you are reading this very moment are inherently biased, and how would you know if they were?

First and foremost, an answer dating back to John Dewey has to do with education in general and educational reform in particular. A more contemporary treatise on the pitfalls of biased thinking and benefits of education is Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World, an eloquent defense of reason and science in a time of false advertising, pseudoscientific irrationality, and political fakery. Education in this context can take the form of formal or self-directed training on many topics including decision making and logic, fair argumentation and debate, inference and problem solving, strategic and analytic skills, science and scientific methodology, deductive and inductive reasoning, active listening and effective communication, and many others.

Two Cornell University psychologists have shown the benefits of education and positive feedback. Cognitive bias in low-performance students (the lowest-scoring 25%) who mistakenly overestimate their cognitive ability can be improved through social, critical, and quantitative feedback.35 The improvements depend on a participant’s desire for education, which is generally assumed in university students.

Aside from the benefits of education in promoting critical thinking, Richard Thaler, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Harvard Law co-author Cass Sunstein have developed the concept of unobtrusive “nudges.”36 As applied to government and economics, a nudge does not force, but structures human choices considered better, healthier, or sounder, at least according to

presumed experts. An example is automatically opting new employees into a 401(k) plan but allowing workers to opt out. Nudging is characterized by Thaler and Sunstein as “libertarian paternalism” rather than coercive democracy because to gives people choice in matters of money, health, and freedom by providing a guiding hand by a skilled choice-architect relying on sound data. Such an approach clearly depends on the validity and value of options provided.

Two thinking mechanisms that often facilitate premature decision-making are cognitive bias (which overvalues initial impressions, as previously discussed) and heuristics, which are mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and with less effort than required by weighing alternatives. Possible negative consequences of both approaches, depending on context, include erroneous conclusions, stereotyping, prejudice, and partisanship. Heuristic errors can be reduced by “cognitive forcing,” which includes tools sometimes taught to medical clinicians specifically to counter the pitfalls of diagnostic errors. Cognitive forcing strategies include the intentional use of analytical thinking rather than reliance on rote memory.37

Last Words

An enormous range of factors shapes partisanship. Among them are the defense mechanisms of denial, projection, rationalization, and splitting; kindness and altruism; envy and resentment; honesty and courage; ambition and greed. The six topics addressed in the foregoing discussion (critical thinking and defensive triggering, empathy and victimhood, compassion and hatred) are complex and carry implications beyond the scope of one article. Nonetheless, when trying to understand today’s partisanship, it is useful to consider an important distinction: critical thinkers as well as some defensive responders motivated by empathy are inclined to compassion whereas the defensively triggered who are aroused by feelings of victimhood often respond with hatred.

There are other routes to compassion or hatred, but the two described here represent contrasting paths with important personal and societal consequences.

It’s reasonable to ask after recognizing the pitfalls of emotional triggering and plusses of critical thinking whether I, despite a background in science and psychology, still fall victim to biases. Indeed, I battle bias with mixed success as many of us do. Few things in life are as challenging as thinking in a consistently fair and honest way about how and why others think as they do, especially when viewpoints clash. But regardless of individual successes or vulnerabilities, one conclusion is apparent. Our thoughts affect more than what we do and say. The things we do are our own actions, and what we say are mere words, but how we think or fail to think can bring people together or tear us apart.

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End

Section 3:

Op-Ed Essays and Articles

"Blackout" by Ann Tarantino

On Being Interesting1

We have to first consider ‘being interesting’ in terms of enticement, what strikes us first, short-term gain. For the word ‘interesting’ is from the Latin present infinitive interesse, of the verb intersum, meaning ‘I am present, attend, take part’. In the sense corresponding to the etymology what is interesting coincides with what is immediately experienced; what is most interesting is what is most accessible, i.e. oneself, one’s own conscious states. The self-interested person, then, can never appear to themselves as an abstraction; the interested self/person, can. Consider the dreamless sleep that nearly always follows some completely absorbing task. With no more to give, the dreamer sinks back into the depths of his divan, his fogged night, thoughts elapsing before his eyes close reveal that not only is interestedness beholden to consciousness, but that attentiveness is a sort of finite store rejuvenated each day, which is why the extreme of boredom is tiredness, a state verging on falling asleep.

The artificial means by which to extricate one’s conscious self (drugs, etc.), thereby making interest possible again, serves to prove its point, to show that what might seem interesting in the moment, isn’t. Even further, they seem to suggest (unless they themselves are sadly the object of interest) that a component of interest is: a desire to return to, or what causes a desire to return to, a conception of the interesting as mysterious and poetic. Mysterious, as we would like to freed from the irritations of doubt (or to have been the originators of the interesting, already thereby freed) masquerading behind the veil of enthusiasm; poetic because embracing at least some uncertainty at one extreme it points towards to ‘the intriguing’ gap in our knowledge, at the other it suggests a transcendental limit upon all human knowledge, e.g. the way we might feel after listening to a quantum physics lecture.

1 Though he may not share the same degree of interest in the subject matter, parts of this essay benefited from conversation with Silas Mullins.

The interesting point is one that deserves a follow up at a conference it arises; the interesting observation might be the one you set aside in your journal, to be elaborated when you know more; the interesting poem you return to, share with friends as it seeks an interpretation. Philosophers would say the predicate is like other relativized ones: ‘simultaneous’, ‘tall’, perhaps ‘good’, requiring a parameter which must in specified in ensure the meaningfulness of claims involving the predicate, a reference frame for claims about simultaneity, a class of people who average a certain height for claims about tall people, perhaps a moral system for claims about value. In the case of ‘interesting’, the parameter must provide an answer to the question ‘to whom’, for nothing is interesting simpliciter, tout court. Let’s leave open whether such and such can be interesting to so and so, and for no particular reason.

[There are also some idiosyncratic uses of the term ‘interesting’ which can be safely set aside. For instance I was taught in high school that the word shouldn’t be used as it could nearly always be replaced by some more specific expression. Along these lines an apparent usage of ‘interest’ in the mid 1700s was in ‘interesting condition’, a euphemism for ‘pregnant’. Others might use the term to virtue signal, as when a short-changed clerk says to the demanding customer, ‘that’s interesting’. The uses under present discussion are more basic than that, and intended to account for something of the interest remaining in using the term, why it has survived till the present day, although admittedly it is used less often than at its height of popularity, which was in the 1950s, judging from frequency of use.]

Special support for this idea derives from the fact that it is difficult to be interested in what you do not (or cease to) care about, and what you care about is plainly relative to your practical goals and what you find worthwhile—but aren’t these in turn dependent on your interests, so that this argument for a relativity of ‘interest’ is unassuming, albeit ultimately circular? Yet circularity isn’t cause for abandonment. What would it mean to be an objectivist about ‘interest’ except to sincerely abandon part of the essence of ‘humanity’, namely human beings’ ability to self-legislate, to make decisions according to their own value systems, part of which includes distinctive interests? But while

individual natures may simply admit too much difference in order to say something systematic about the ‘to whom’ parameter of being interesting, perhaps we can say something about those paradigmatic objects which elicit interest for our species.

Among the most intensely perceived ‘objects’ of interest within the immense array of those available to perception belong to people: they are faces. As our own minds key into three dots we notice in an abstract wall painting, to form the perception of a face, an infant’s eyes tracking the soft contours of her mother’s mouth, delighting in her delight as sympathetic neurons fire, we can call the earliest expressive beginnings of interest. It is the interest with which the infant confronts the mobile above his crib, faintly illuminated by midnight moonlight, long after his parents have gone to bed, waking intermittently to wiggle, gurgle at the shifting form, in their shadow puppetry following them, reaching with his curled fingers, to try to find a face. Might it not be like the mobile forms of the world and solar systems hanging in the endless vacuum of space, which when seen by the divine who bore creation in his play, is curious enough to gaze upon its structure, to find some spark of his kindred, everlasting spirit?

Paradoxically, the cosmic sense of disinterestedness is the human sense of interestedness, of preoccupation one extreme of which is obsession. The infant’s mobile, the dots of the abstract work incomplete w/o a curved line beneath them, the constellations apparently ‘fixed points’ beneath which brevity wonders of its worldly standing, occupy (each for some respective subject/perceiver) the distal poles of the phenomenon of interest

Yet as with ‘love’ which Spinoza sought in vain to characterize in terms of its objects, is there anything which might unite such ‘interesting’ objects, when the respective natures of their subjects so differ? We should not forget the lesson from Spinoza. That on account of the variety of its objects, love’s kernel was reduced to a pale, positive feeling (which then, or the implication of which, the will has the capacity to steer). Can we not admit the mildest, or the strangest degrees of ‘interest’ without belying its nature or compromising its conception?

Let’s briefly switch analogies.

In one way ‘being interested’ esp. to point of obsession, is reminiscent of scholastic theories of explanation of change, whereby in order for a given change of state to occur, it would be brought about by ‘causation’ understood as transference of universal properties (e.g. ‘hotness’, ‘coldness’) that inhere in the objects which are said to cause the change. So the fan believes the mere presence of the pop idol they are interested in will, by virtue of proximity, transfer some of the more interesting, arresting features: attractiveness, youth, social adroitness, prestige, perceived vulnerabilities, success, wealth, incommunicable charisma the Oxfordian notion of the disinterested play of ideas would not be amused.

The presumptive basis for the scholastic conception of causation could only have rested on naïve observation, without recourse to the hidden, mechanistic, to the explanatory theoretical apparatus that came centuries later. Then, if we pursue the analogy in an exacting way, ‘interestedness’, while it rests largely and has its origin in observational evidence, must be susceptible of underlying theory. Yet imagine if the theoretical basis for ‘being interesting’ were availed to us in the same way epidemiological theories of bodily health came to supplant the humors’ scholastic underpinning, how could conscious effort overcome its impersonal objectivity, to reinvigorate itself? In moments of interest, conscious acts, we forget the body, e.g. forklift drivers picking up quarters, as easily as we forget our theories. Or is it as lovers well aware of the neurochemistry of love who nonetheless experience love—is there a ‘manifest image’ of ‘being interesting’ which is threatened on the condition we are supposing?2 Is it enough to say that if there is an underlying theory of being interesting, it needn’t be the case that any sensible person finds the theory interesting?

2 Or is it more like this, a theory is a representation of the same reality the manifest image represents, it’s just that we are most adept at maneuvering in and thinking in terms of the manifest image of reality; comp. a bird as we see it and a bird as we would attempt to draw it. Perhaps a knowledge of whatever ultimately explains ‘interest’ could for some knower become second-nature and be reflected in judgments about which things are interesting, as artists whose knowledge of the rules of shadow and perspective on longer appear as rules when they are put into practice.

Though it becomes a bit mysterious what an essay like this one is doing, intellectually speaking, perhaps we are like the lovers of knowledge who decide for purposes of a good romp, to set aside their theory of the neurochemical basis for love. A question arises whether to pursue the relation between ‘interest’ and ‘love’ merely as an analogy, or as a partial definition. In favor of the latter idea, if we suppose (perhaps following Harry Frankfurt) that love is a form of caring, and caring or being concerned about such and such implies an interest in such and such, it follows that loving such and such implies an interest in it. Put differently, something’s being interesting to someone might flow from its being loved by that someone, even though not all interesting items rise to the level of being a potential target for cupid’s arrows. Still, the idea of wanting to return to what is interesting, isn’t it because we have been struck by what is interesting?

If there is a definitional relationship between the concept of love and the concept of interest, it could explain some curious features of ‘interest’. Consider that you might be interested in something no one else gives a damn about, and yet you might fail to appreciate why they don’t see what you find so compelling about it. I personally don’t see why anyone would be interested in pop music, that’s just me. But we might describe this situation in terms of there being certain forms of valuation, whereby the object valued inherits some of its value purely on account of the subject’s act of valuing it; while other forms of valuation are understood in terms of the subject’s responding to something of antecedent value belonging to the object. These two forms of valuation have, in connection to theories of love, been called ‘bestowal’ vs. ‘appraisal’ love, and if interest is partly understood in terms of love then we might expect there to be a similar divide between ‘bestowal’ and ‘appraisal’ forms of interest; in the case at hand the interest you might be bestowing upon the object you might be assuming others should bestow as well; though there might be phenomenological differences between how bestowal love vs. bestowal interest manifest, e.g. ‘bestowal’ interestedness might be described as more dependent upon valuations that accord to conscious acts of attention than ‘bestowal’ love, which as in the cases of separated friendships can lose sight of its object for years on end, perhaps indefinitely.

Consider also a practically mutually exclusive relationship between interest and boredom. Now one could hold that this relationship is a surd fact, but why, when it is arguably implied if we see ‘interest’ in light of ‘love’. For most cases of boredom result from distractedness or indecision. In the former case, there are too many objects of interest. In the case of the boredom of indecision, the objects of interest are not well-demarcated. In the boredom resulting from habit, it is the repetitiousness of habit that implies the lack of novel objects of interest. When it is said that love, albeit not single-handedly, destroys boredom, enthusing the lover, it could be on account of satisfying each of these facets of interest, as the beloved is unique, singularly distinctive, and fresh to the lover’s experience. There is nothing special about the loved object having a human nature, cases of human beings who sincerely claim to love inanimate objects are covered as well; indeed, to dangerously turn things around, perhaps a theory of love described in terms of being interested would be the most general theory of all.

Then what of this puzzle, speaking of forms of love. Agapic love is one sort of bestowal love; agapic love for each other is supposed to be modeled on the sort of unyielding creative force, the love God has for the world. And yet how can this be reconciled with the apparent disinterestedness of God, the lack of intervention, the dispassionate tranquility that is everything we are not?

We then imagine the body of the divine, spread before us into the galactic clusters whose same dust makes ourselves, and relating thusly suppose that such a God might have no interests of his own in the sense that those interest seem to flow from the divine person, nonetheless he knows of what it means to have interests, precisely by means of such intimate access to beings which, while finite, do enjoy interests, namely us. In line with agapic love, the poison of interest is negative emotion (this might be partly definitional of ‘negative emotion’). Where there is fear the only interest is to eradicate fear, where there is hatred the only interest is to eradicate hatred, etc. The signs we are left with in traces of material culture are replete with the evidence of interests’ time-defeated aims. A ceramic cup, displayed in the museum case under the unerring spotlight, reads in letters

concentrically spiraling its base: ‘Let Dairon be damned, let all fail’, so profound the interests of just one obscure heart of antiquity that this particular interest (petty as it was) had pushed through all else, so that its impulse was in fact the sole descendent of Dairon’s nemesis, and his only claim to posterity.

Time’s passage, not material remains, is indifferent between such curiosities as the Dairon cup, and the great pyramids at Giza, the Sphinx with its nose shot off by some flustered Frenchman. The truism that we cannot, though occupying some godlike position (relative to our own conscious interests) surmise at what fine-grained level of description ‘interests’ might occur, does not mean that in the material artifact of my own body and its impulses there can be no such similar trace energies. What is most interesting in the worn Cycladic ‘face’—is the possibility of making recognizable, discernibility and its correlate, knowledge (comp. in a purely tactile way the tediousness described by Beckett’s character in his short story depicting hell, precisely because his sensorial realm of experience is so myopic is he disinterested, is his own experience flattened, his failure to empathize is to perceive only with the skin). The envisioned reductio: there is no such conception of my parts’ interests, so God must be disinterested (if god exists as cosmically embodied) fails mostly as a failure to imagine. Indeed, those already accepting of a theological framework in which God is embodied in the physical universe ought to be open to the possibility of bearing interests at the cellular level and below, while obviously being wary of the fallacy of composition running in either direction.3

3 The difficulty with the fallacy of composition so-called is really its reliability. Depending on the choice of property, sometimes one does arrive at a sound conclusion; for instance if I stipulate ‘is heavy’ to mean ‘weighs at least 30 pounds’, then if each member of a collection of 30 pound weights is heavy it will follow that the entire collection is heavy. Whatever else we say about the fallacy of composition it ought to be noticed that if there are certain properties which are universal, possessed invariably by everything, then these properties are not subject to the fallacy of composition. So if one holds, for instance, a version of panpsychism according to which there is some primitive ‘mental’ property or aspect ‘all the way down’, perhaps like the ‘appetite’ Leibniz described for his monads, then perhaps the property of being interested is among such basic mental properties, the quanta of experience, after all it is quite challenging to analyze in terms of some more basic features, at least when we set aside the conditioned reflex to analyze ‘interest’ in evolutionary biological terms. There are also questions about how much weight should be given to the immediacy of introspective experiences indeed the analysis of ‘experience’ itself, whether any given experience always immediately appears to us as interesting or not, and whether this is on account of experiences being interesting or not (as there may appear some shadow of a more interesting experience), that is to say the property of being interesting may be a feature of experience itself rather than a reflection of a subsequent judgment about a given experience. Exercise for the reader: if panpsychism is true, how

Consider a further similarity, that the person who claims (his heart equal to his boastfulness) to love everyone, loves no one; the person who feigns interest in everything demonstrates his interest in nothing. Reality’s nesting dolls become landing pads of his graceless expression, collapse in his tactless hands, of no use to anyone; the insufferable counsel of such a youth (or sometimes a dogmatic ‘jack of all trades) made up of equal parts ignorance and interest, in a better world, a more just possible world than this, would be sufficient to temporarily release us from what we take ourselves to know.

Yet at best it seems we can, in certain circumstances, remember what we did not know at a certain point in our life, and hence create a semblance of interestedness, a false enthusiasm viz. a strained appearance of novelty, as we try our best to conjure our past selves, not Zorba’s sense of novelty which does experience at each moment the world anew. The worn pastel of reality’s outermost nesting doll may seem again vibrant; but the state of self-delusion for some its own moral compass fails to take hold in the same fashion as the famous lover’s boughs cast into Stendhal’s salt mines, where in a few months they are encrusted, unrecognizable as a bough to the lover whose ideations grew and nourished their crystals…

With one difference, that special parcel of reality that one is –there are no crystals, yet one lies for all seasons in the motionless body print of one’s own snow angel. For while misanthropy and self-loathing are possibilities open to all of us (haven’t you experienced a sharp desire to depopulate generic pueblo art in restaurants?), some modicum of selfinterest will always resist being excluded by self-hatred; and note by ‘self interest’ we don’t mean the incessant appeals to the ‘dear self’ (a selfish motive), which may have plagued Kant as a possible obstacle to the erection of a universal moral system we mean the humdrum way the contents of diverse bar room conversations coincide, the reams of paper it would consume to print every instance of self-absorption unfit to print the sparkling garland, the cheapening tinsels of passion reflective of each mundane might ‘being interested’ be understood—as a state a given experience can occupy, as a ‘part of’ experience?

pretense of self-knowledge, as though the immediacy of the latter entailed anything besides itself.

In this way it might be claimed (this will sound trivial) that it is on account of selfinterest narrowly confining itself, though ironically subjecting others to its pressure, that the resistance to expanding the boundaries of ‘self’ is due, i.e. into other spheres of knowledge (the disinterested). Hence, for sake of knowledge, generally for reasons of epistemic virtue, the necessity to defamiliarize oneself. Browse a random bookshelf. Detourne a city. Strike up a conversation on the subway. Tilt an ear to a Mormon missionary. Attempt to hear your own voice and language as sourced from without.

Consider some of the broad possibilities offered by philosophy, which Bertrand Russell so eloquently urged as both a path toward knowledge and an enlargement of the self.

Such defamiliarization might be considered a form of play, in its original instance, divine playfulness. The altruistic nature naively (on analogy w/ourselves) imputed to the divine energies as a necessary condition for anything whatsoever to exist seems more appropriate to the social order than its cosmogony imagine a deity preoccupied only with itself, who would not destroy with creation its fragile state, identical to itself. The openness characterizing such play might indeed at a human level be expressed as wonder. Existence itself, being, possibility, seem suited to wonder on account of their disinterested vastness. Given that any question is a kind of imperative (e.g ‘will my team win the game?= ‘let it be known by me whether my team will win the game’), then the imperative from Genesis ‘Let there be light’ might be interpreted as born of a divine wonder about whether existence is possible, which in turn could only be resolved by the act of creation.4

4 Why should questions, expressions of wonder (at least sometimes) take these two different forms, interrogatives and imperatives, whose reception elicits such a different feeling: a difference between want and demandingness, decisiveness and willfulness, on the one hand, and on the other openness, play, wonder and uncertainty? Is it a distinction between the finite vs. infinite capacity to understand, that design facts account of the effectiveness of the received form? The question as disguised imperative allows this: a quick translation from the most global and reaching of wondering, into the definiteness of an act, what displays the configuration of the divine will at conception in a similar way that a prospective father’s will might lie in the sonogram’s tenuous perception. But, you will say, an omniscient deity knows without so much as scratching the solar system’s Kuiper belt, what is possible and what is not, that there then must already

Yet it is important not to overreach, a tremendous waterfall such as inspires the Lorelei, whose flowing locks we attend, accidentally dropping a plastic water bottle on deck; the lightning branches that appear amid the sudden scent of petrichor, stretching their flash beyond the overgrown pylons, or the sheer drop manifesting at the ‘knife’s edge’ of the mountain, these phenomena (really, events) depending on one’s situation can be jawdropping, wonderful, awesome, or as terrifying as Krishna’s gaping maw was to Arjuna as we beheld his divine charioteer in this true form. To describe them as ‘interesting’ conceals a very special lie, for what is interesting to someone presupposes that they are the same such stable person or perceiver who has ‘interests’, or is ‘interested in’, which is to say, a being who has not been transfigured by experiences such as these. Perhaps there is some God beyond God who truly finds creation interesting.

The Gricean utility 5 in the sense of ‘interesting’ lies precisely in its flexibility in describing experiences which to some might seem trivial, to others impactful, even momentous, as it is understood that conversation is a game, in real time, of mutual adjustments and concession; it follows that even though ‘interest’ is on the wane in natural language, we would have to invent a new predicate serving much the same role if this one were summarily dismissed for philosophical reasons such as ‘vagueness’. Then at midnight in the quiet moments talking to ourselves we should pause before making any

have been some positive valuation attached to the universe in order to bring it into being (another instance of the divine will being constrained by his goodness, perhaps needed anyways to circumvent the Euthyphro objection). Yet as a father might know in anticipation the positive value of being a father, the nurturing fracturing of his stable identity into being rather than stagnation’s samenesses, yet the definite shape, the variety and particularity whatever comes to populate creation, perhaps these lasting questions of determinables piled upon determinables (will he have your nose or hers?) were in the distant past sufficient to be unknowable, to not militate a will already (as from afar) driven by its own goodly purpose. Given that if I perceive myself to know x, I can’t wonder whether x, it may be partly on account of the indefiniteness of not knowing which makes uncertainty somewhat exciting. One must allow in light of the knowability paradox, that not all facts are even in principle knowable. Perhaps facts about the contours of actuality’s soft smile could not then have been known, even by an otherwise omniscient being, until they were.

5 Much of what is said here pertains to Gricean relevance; but notice also that livening up a conversation by saying something ‘interesting’, or throwing out as the fabulous Chuang-Tzu often does, some non-sequitor in a text, can function as a way to redirect a given conversation when the other conversational norms have failed to properly govern (or in Chuang Tzu’s case where rationality itself, as evinced in Mohist and Confucian philosophies, had dominated the conversation for too long); one might view it in this sense a ‘create new thread’ function which steps outside of a given conversation but in a broader sense falls under the norms of public discourse.

observations to ourselves, lacking a way of describing the very act we are about to perform.

The Concerning lack of Courage in Art

In a great show of heroism, artist Jacob Lawrence painted Confrontation on the Bridge to depict the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, which later enabled African American citizens to register to vote without harassment (Lawrence, 1975). On this 5-day, 54-mile trench hundreds gathered to ensure that black citizens would retain their constitutional rights despite the violence and hatred thrown at colored people of the time (Combs, 2013). Creating impactful art requires an immense amount of courage as only artists can reach the hearts and minds of people. In the past artists were considered geniuses, while now only 22% of people believe artist contribute a great deal to society as per The American Academy of Art & Science (What we Value, 2021). While disheartening, this isn't without reason. Art was previously driven by courage, purpose, and a desire to create. However, a lack of courage to create social strife has pushed today's artists to make less meaningful art. Thus, we have seen a loss in innovation and the expression of new ideas. This cumulated to the research question “Has a lack of courage in today’s artists diminished artistic progress?”. To analyze how a lack of courage has created less meaningful art we must consider different conceptions of courage through history, question today’s lack of courage and its causes, and how it has impacted art and society today.

Connections Between Courage and Art

Great minds such as Socrates first considered the topics of courage and art thousands of years ago during the time of the ancient Greeks. On the topic of art, Socrates believed that art was a mere imitation of reality which couldn’t provide any knowledge or understanding of the world (Collingwood, 1925). However, as ideas of secularism and rationalism gained popularity, new conceptions of courage which emphasized art began to gain popularity. For instance, ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius believed art and poetry were powerful tools for moral education.

Confucian philosophy addresses the issue by first stressing the development that artists must undergo to acquire artistic talent, emphasizing the process of self-cultivating one's own morals (Mullis, 2007). Creating art is necessarily an affair of courage as it requires transforming oneself to create. As ancient philosophies such as this gained traction, emphasis on art grew, and artistic expression became a powerful means used to promote social reforms, raise awareness about important issues, and spark dialogue and debate.

Pieces such as Paris which depicted the French Revolution, traditional Japanese paintings of samurais, and Native American basket weaving all evoked emotion, pride, and depicted aspects of society at the time for a greater purpose. This gave way to new art movements such as social realism during the Great Depression which embodied injustice, and the 90’s Romero Britto movement which sought to spread happiness through vibrant colors and graphics (Atkins, 2013). All these feats were only possible as people took courageous action through art to bring about a greater sense of existentialism. However, as time passes, we are seeing fewer creative revolutions in the fields of writing, painting, poetry, and music in the 21st century.

Issues Harming Art

As described by Michel Rooks, art in the 20th century is no longer characterized by meaning or knowledge (Rooks, 2021). Instead, the arts have become repetitions of the same works that often have the same underlying themes and characteristics. This is because modern arts are confined by a common culture otherwise known as cancel culture that limits courage in artists. Cancel culture is the practice of denouncing something which conflicts with one's own personal beliefs as a way of expressing disapproval and exerting social pressure. In the paper

Contextualizing the Art and The Artist by Katie Whipple, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, it was found that journalists feared cancel culture’s ability to create

discourse, forcing journalists to create unnecessary boundaries for themselves and avoid perspectives of which people may disagree with (Whipple, 2022). Due to this, many are forced to suppress their views and passions for art, as they lack the courage to face mobs of hatred.

This has fueled art censorship, limiting artists in their pursuits even more. A report done by Free muse, a free speech advocacy group, indicates that global art and book censorship has increased in the 21st century, hitting a high since 2020 (The State of Artistic Freedom, 2022). Censorship of art has drawn the line between protection from the government limiting freedoms multiple times. For instance, one famous case of censorship included the government removing Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc sculpture from a New York Park, destroying it in the process. This occurred due to the hatred it was receiving for its message on disrupting society and the role of authority figures in daily life (Dorn, 2014). Thus, Serra’s art was taken down without his consent, and his voice was silenced due to unnecessary censorship. This isn’t to say that censorship is bad in all cases, but when used to rip down art for no reason other than controversy, it becomes clear that censorship is no longer serving society as it should.

Effects of Cancel Culture and Censorship

Cancel culture and unnecessary censorship has made it challenging to make art that makes a real impact on people, especially those whose work is based on progressing various issues. Pakistani artist Shahzia Sikander recently received backlash in her college campus of Texas university for creating sculpture promoting pro-choice ideas on the topic of abortion. Although she was scheduled to give a speech on pro-choice ideology’s, it was postponed by the university due to its controversy and backlash from conservative students (Schrader & Carrigan, 2024). Since then, Sikander has expressed fear of being a victim to verbal hatred or even attacks on campus. In contrast, a piece called Onement VI which featured a blue canvas with a single

white stripe was sold for a whopping $43.8 million dollars during a famous bidding war in New York, and is still celebrated today (Vogel, 2013). As stated in the peper Moral Courage and Intelligent Disobedience, moral courage is often lonely as it risks being isolated and singled out with painful consequences (Thomas & Chaleff, 2017). This isolation is exactly what happened to artists such as Sikander, and will continue to happen if we allow this culture to persist and suppress art.

This lack of braveness has effects far beyond depriving art of its meaning. In politics, art has historically allowed voters a medium to form independent ideas on political groups (Hall, 1969). For instance, during WWII art was used to spread political protest as seen in John Heartfiel’s work which included anti-fascist posters labeled by the Nazi regime as “Degeneration Art” (Erdemli, 2022). As political art and journalism has dissipated, voters are now at risk of making political decisions based purely on popular opinion. Mike Farjam, a social scientist at Linnaeus University, conducted a study consisting of 1,113 U.S. residents who were asked to vote between proxies for political parties. The results found that after seeing pre-election polls, the majority option received an additional 7% average of votes (Farjam, 2020). Instead of being able to form independent ideas based on literature and political art, people’s primary resource for information has become their peers. This has led to the destruction of democracy in politics as votes are no longer based on people’s real opinion, and an even broader destruction of individualism.

As stated by Howard Goldstein, a social sciences professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, we are currently progressing our sciences more than ever before, yet people are still suffering the harms of issues such as climate change because we are not using art

to spread information and failing to think creatively though art to further our existing knowledge (Howard, n.d.). The article goes on to state how for the last century, financial and institutional technologies have been at an all-time high for addressing society’s challenges, but it is only by leveraging support from people, society, and creativity through art that we will make any kind of progress. While science and data may inform us, only art can reach the hearts and souls of people. Thus, until art is fully utilized, we will make no real impacts on society.

Counterclaim

Despite this, critics still claim that art has no value or impact on society. On the topic of art the philosopher Aristotle claimed that art was harmful as it is a mere imitation of reality (Simpson, 1988). A famous quote by author Oscar Wilde states “work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy … That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers” (Lesjak, 2020). Essentially, critics of art state that simply painting something or writing literature isn’t enough to create social change. Rather, it is people that must lead change. However, this take grossly ignores how art leads to social change. By using art to spread education and information, we can help people consciously shift their choices for the betterment of society. While it is true that simply painting a picture or writing poetry won’t solve the world’s problems, demonstrating these issues through art can inform and inspire people to take actions towards reform. For instance, Pablo Picassos famous painting Guernica (1937), which depicted the 1936 bombing of Guernica Spain by German air forces, couldn’t re-build the homes destroyed or resurrect those who lost their lives. However, it was able to spread awareness in France on the bombing and raise funds for Spanish refugees that left the country (Wheeler, 2020). This further proves the importance of artists creating and sharing their work freely as if they fail to, arts full potential will never be utilized.

Summation

It is evident that reduced courage in artistic fields harms both creative minds and society. Thus, knowledge on how art is benefited by courage, and how courage affects artists' ability to create is imperative. After reviewing a great deal of evidence, it is clear a fear of social strife is causing artists to create fewer inspiring works, hindering our ability to develop in fields such as politics and activist issues. By containing the amount of hatred artists receive, we may terminate this issue and regain the benefits of artistic variety. Only when we stifle this hatred, will art be allowed to prosper, granting a voice to those whose hearts create as fast as their minds yearn to educate.

Word Count: 1746

References

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Collingwood, R. G. (1925). Plato's philosophy of art. Mind, 34(134), 154-172.

Collins.Thomas, T., & Chaleff, I. (2017). Moral Courage and Intelligent Disobedience.

Interagency Journal, 8(1). The Simons Center. https://thesimonscenter.org/wpcontent/uploads/2017/03/IAJ-8-1-Winter2017-pg58-66.pdf

Combs, B. H. (with Com Casc bs, B. H.). (2013). From Selma to Montgomery. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203081440

Dorn, E. (2014). Shifts in public art : disruptions and affirmations in Richard Serra's Tilted Arc and Fulcrum. University of California, Davis.

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ym8veaYHLY3VN-uqwo6aspMXRj-

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Perceive the Impact of Cancel Culture Practices and Discourses. Journalism Practice, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2023.2180653

COVER ART BY ANGELA ZHOU

PJAS Issue 2 (Research): Reaching Higher Dimensions

Research

ABOUT

Reaching Higher Dimensions The Art of Research:

Featured Content

"Dadream" b Kath Saad Zatari

Section 1:

Mathematics and Engineering

ApproachingtheProofofBoundSecrecyinHigherDimensions

Methods

ComputationalApproach

Conclusion

"Hell" by Wong Kwan Ho

A Cost-Effective Functional Transradial Prosthetic That Does Not Require Electricity for Use

CriterionA

Problem&DesignOpportunity:AConventionalTransradialProsthetic

PrimaryResearch&TargetAudience

CompetitorAnalysisofProstheticTypes

CriterionB

2:Forearmdesigns

3:GrabberIdeas

CADModels

JustificationParagraph

ArmbandStrap

CriterionD

TestingStrategyJustification

PrototypeImprovementsMadeDuringFirstMeetingWithUser

End-of-UseSurvey

ConversationWithUser

Survey&PrototypeEvaluation

PrototypeImprovements

"Space Abstract" b Amirthesh Prasad

Psychology and Humanities Section 2:

Literary Criticism and the Systems Theory.

1.Introduction

Contents

2. Trend-lines in US literature.

2.1. Methodology

2.2. Trend-lines in US fiction between 1863 -2019.

protagonist fluctuation between 1965 -2019

4. The Multivariate Mathematical Model of North American Literature.

5. Indications of unexplored fields in US literary criticism.

Bibliography;

6. Literature and Social Entropy inside the USA.

6.1 Introduction

6.2. Systems Approach of the Social Entropy 1

6.3 Discussion and Analysis

6.4. Concluding Remarks

7. The Hermeneutically Aspects of Contemporary Literature.

How You Think Will Shape What You Think

Types of Thinking

Critical Thinking and the Attitude of Science

Biased and Intuitive Thinking

Defensive Triggering

Exploiting Emotion Through Defensive Triggering

Empathy versus Victimhood

Compassion and Hatred

Neural Polarization and Nudges

Last Words

Section 3:

Op-Ed Essays and Articles

On Being Interesting1

The Concerning lack of Courage in Art

Connections Between Courage and Art

Issues Harming Art

Effects of Cancel Culture and Censorship

Counterclaim

Summation

References

"Dadream" b Kath Saad Zatari

"Space Abstract" b Amirthesh Prasad