Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
What a week. The state parliament of Saxony Anhalt, a German state with plenty of angry white men, just elected a member of the the rightwing-extremist party AfD as their President of the parliament. Meanwhile, the conservative party CDU continues to crumble and many fear the party will split over the question of whether the party should cooperate with the AfD or not. Apparently, many people have misplaced their history books and can’t remember how it went with Adolf Nazi a century ago. Also, they seem not to understand how the GOP came undone and turned into the MAGA movement.
So I guess we will now experience what it’s like to have to fight for democracy. Maybe some people in politics will start to remember why they joined politic in the first place: to change the lifes of people for the better. Yes, I know, I am a romantic.
Now it’s high time to fight the Nazis again and defend our liberal democracy!
The Myth of Military Victory
Yet those who invoke the term rarely define it. “Victory” means achieving the political aims for which one went to war. But “military victory” implies more. The adjective signals that those aims are secured through combat rather than at the bargaining table. Negotiation requires compromise and invites stalling that can exhaust political will. Battlefield victory, by contrast, promises a prostrate enemy with no meaningful choice but to accept the victor’s terms on the victor’s timetable. That promise is what makes the idea so attractive and so ubiquitous.
But the notion of military victory is a dangerous myth. All modern wars end in negotiated settlements; talks are not a second-best fallback. To end a war, both sides must choose to stop fighting, and those choices always require nontrivial bargaining. Destruction matters, of course. It is what distinguishes war from peacetime politics. But its role is to shape the bargain, not to annihilate the enemy, which almost never happens.
Somebody should give this article to Putin and the other idiots who try war all the time.
Is AI the End of Math As We Know It?
AI models skip to the end. At the moment, their proofs are nearly impossible to read. They elide salient details and waste pages on irrelevant concepts. They fail to demonstrate how the new work builds on or connects to other results in the mathematical literature. Mathematicians know that the proofs are true — they’re verified by a system that checks their logic(opens a new tab) — but have no idea why. What’s missing is understanding, the currency that mathematicians trade in. If there is a journey, humans are not invited along for the ride.
Lots of high school students will be happy about this. Just think about how this changes everything, as math really is the foundation for so much in science.
The empty brain
We become more effective in our lives if we change in ways that are consistent with these experiences – if we can now recite a poem or sing a song, if we are able to follow the instructions we are given, if we respond to the unimportant stimuli more like we do to the important stimuli, if we refrain from behaving in ways that were punished, if we behave more frequently in ways that were rewarded.
Misleading headlines notwithstanding, no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.
The brain really is a marvelous thing. Mostly, sometimes it also gets in the way.
The Bizarre, Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris
The irony was great. The United States was boasting that it had just won the Cold War. A major instrument of that victory had been the spread of Western culture throughout the Eastern bloc through films, television, popular music, and other media. Yet the video game that had made it aboard the First Lady’s plane, and into a vast number of U.S. and Western-European households, was not an American product, but a Soviet one. What’s more, it had been designed and coded in a state artificial-intelligence research lab tightly controlled by the KGB, the dreaded secret police of the Russian dictatorship, at a time when U.S. President Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” The story of the commercial success of Tetris is the poster child for two systems radically opposed in history, culture, economics, and politics. In fact, it arises out of this opposition.
Every time I load the dishwasher, I get reminded of Tetris, the wonderful game I played on my gameboy a long time ago. I’m sure my wife played a different version, because we load the dishwasher differently. Do you remember what a cultural phenomenon Tetris was back then?
Forgive the Bad Texters
I’m not proud of leaving people hanging. Every text I owe is a tiny siren in the back of my mind, blaring intermittent pulses of guilt. Unless I forget about it entirely, in which case I’ll remember it with a shameful jolt some days or weeks later. I’m not one of those modern hermits who thinks you don’t owe anyone anything, who likes every Instagram post she sees about boundaries and thinks that flaking on plans is self-care. I write about relationships for a living, and I believe that showing up for one another is the purpose of our existence. That’s, like, my whole brand. And so this is my greatest shame: I am a Bad Texter. I am slow to respond. I am forgetful. I get overwhelmed. My own mother has said I’m “probably worse than 90 percent of the other people that I text with.”
I really hate people who do not respond. It can’t be that hard and there is no excuse, really. We have the year 2026, people should have gotten used to smartphones and alerts and all that.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico