Venezuela was already a failed state. How much worse could it get? — frank

A lot more worse.

Civil war. Hundreds of thousands of dead. Widespread famine. Failed state with competing regime that have divided the country. Or become like Haiti with criminal gangs running the country without any much if any operating government. — ssu

Criminal gangs and armed groups already control large swathes of Venezuela, and they actually seem to do a better job of it than the central government.

But yeah, it could get a lot worse.

It looks like "adults in the room" are betting on VP Rodriguez being more pliant and reasonable than her (former) boss. So, to them, "running the country" is basically keeping Rodriguez as a technical president and trying to work with (strong-arm) her. From what I have picked up about Rodriguez, she seems like a competent technocrat. But how secure her position in the hierarchy is an open question.

Glad you liked it. I thought that Chirimuuta's account handles the problem of divergent perceptions well - dependence on viewing conditions, interspecies differences, errors and abnormalities. My concern with her naturalizing approach is that it may be answering the wrong question. It is like explaining love by appealing to its biological procreative function. The answer could be perfectly valid in its way, but is this what we wanted to know? Perhaps the thrust of the original question was misguided, but that needs to be argued (and perhaps it is - I haven't read the book).

Sorry, I probably won't wade into this discussion, but I just so happened to have been listening to a New Books in Philosophy podcast on a related topic and thought that you and others might want to check it out (and/or the book itself):

M. Chirimuuta, Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy

What is color? On the one hand it seems obvious that it is a property of objects - roses are red, violets are blue, and so on. On the other hand, even the red of a single petal of a rose differs in different lighting conditions or when seen from different angles, and the basic physical elements that make up the rose don't have colors. So is color instead a property of a mental state, or a relation between a perceiving mind and an object? In Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (MIT Press, 2015), M. Chirimuuta defends an ontology of color that aims to capture the ontology implicit in contemporary perceptual science. Chirimuuta, an assistant professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, argues for color adverbialism, in which color is a property of an action-guiding interaction between an organism with the appropriate visual system and the environment. On her view, color vision is not for perceiving colors; it provides chromatic information that helps us perceive things.

The question of the OP invites a kind of view from nowhere, unconditioned by any framing or assumptions. Is there anything necessary tout court?

My contention is that such a question is meaningless. There is no view from nowhere. All meaningful questions about possibility and necessity are "small" questions, as puts it. In other words, they are asked within the context of a particular framing and grounding assumptions. A first-person account implies the existence of the first person. Newtonian physics unfolds against the background of an immutable Euclidean space and an independent time dimension. In these examples, as in all meaningful examples, necessity is contingent, as it were, on how the question is framed.

Is there one ultimate, unconditional, necessary frame that would ground all inquiry? Only in the most general, Kantian sense in which our cognitive faculties are constituted in a certain way, and the way they are constituted conditions how we see and reason about the world. But there is a curious circularity here: we are embedded in and are shaped by that same world, which in turn conditions how we see and reason about it. We are not entirely free to choose our frame of reasoning, because we have always already been framed by the very subject of our inquiry.

I would tentatively answer "yes", and argue that contingency means dependency on conditions. Dependency implies ordered explanatory relations. A structure of ordered explanatory relations ultimately requires an unconditioned (ungrounded) ground. — Esse Quam Videri

I agree with this, with the proviso that the ground is implicit in and contingent on the explanatory structure.

But I think the subsequent discussion of "intelligibility" goes astray, perhaps confusing the map with the territory. I don't know what it would mean for the reality to be intelligible (or necessary, or contingent, for that matter), except in the obvious sense that making the reality intelligible to us is what we as intelligent creatures do. This framing already implies that a world in which intelligent creatures thrive exists, and is perforce intelligible to those creatures. Fair enough. But if we go on to ask whether it is necessary that such a world exists, the question loses its meaning. Necessary in relation to what? What is the framing theory and whence it came from?

I did not love Jane Eyre, but I liked it well enough. I suppose that when it comes to this sort of literature, you need to calibrate your expectations and approach it with a bit of an anthropological spirit in order to appreciate it.

I liked her sister's signature work a lot more, for all that it is more than a little unhinged.

The Great Gatsby

I first read this book a long time ago, when I was just coming to grips with the English language. I had only a vague recollection of the plot, but when I started reading Gatsby again all these years later, I immediately recognized Fitzgerald's cadences, as if I read it only yesterday.

Though I suppose on some exceedingly remote metaphysical and unreal "ultimate" level we still are observing objects seemingly regularly repeating things, but is it really very insightful to say that as long as we will remain human that there will be room for doubt? — hwyl

Hume was an austere kind of empiricist (not unlike Logical Positivists in the 20th century, who valorized him). He accepted that we could, albeit fallibly, discover laws of nature through observation, but he rejected theorizing about ultimate natures ("hypotheses non fingo," as Newton put it and Hume agreed). Along the same lines, he was an anti-realist about unobservable theoretical entities like force and energy, accepting them only as a theoretical convenience.

None of this is in serious tension with modern science - indeed, there are contemporary philosophers who are Humean to some extent. And besides, Hume lived right smack in the middle of the Newtonian revolution. I can think of few examples from the history of science that had as much intellectual impact as that. Darwin comes to mind; Einstein and quantum mechanics - probably not as much.

Yeah, I agree, bitmasks are a holdover from the early days of computing. Nowadays, you probably won't see them much outside of C. But C is so deeply ingrained in IT infrastructure that it's not going away any time soon, and even modern languages like Rust have to at least accommodate bit flags, if nothing else then to be able to interface with C APIs.

Most thinking has been at least partially about math, long before numbers were discovered. Consider the calculus needed to throw a spear accurately. — noAxioms

That's not thinking about math. Nobody does calculus when throwing a spear, any more than the spear itself does calculus when it flies through the air, even though one could use calculus to model both (in many different ways).

Pretty much nobody uses binary directly. — Mijin

You would be surprised

H'm. Did he, by any chance, suggest a better term? — Ludwig V

Yes, Kripke suggested "possible states (or histories) of the world" or "possible situations." The latter may seem most vague, but that's for the better, in my opinion. In a model, we consider only relevant possibilities, whereas a metaphysical world is intractably rich in possibilities. A model does not aspire to completeness - only to pragmatic relevance. We stipulate what the model-theoretical "worlds" should be, based on what we expect from the model.

Consider dice, for example. In a 2d6 dice game, there are 11 possible scores in any round (2 - 12). So, if we only care about the score, then there are 11 possible worlds to consider. (Of course, these scores are not all equally likely. One shortcoming of modal logic is that it has nothing to say about probabilities.) If, in addition, we care about combinations, but consider individual dies to be indistinguishable for practical purposes, then the number of possible worlds increases to 18 (36 / 2). If we want to know the outcome on each individual die, then we are stipulating 36 distinct worlds.

But what if the die throw never occurs? Or a die is lost? Or it balances on its corner instead of landing on a side? And what of all the "extraneous" possibilities - the weather conditions, the configurations of air molecules in the room, the possible ways the Battle of Waterloo could have played out, the possible alternative endings to the Game of Thrones series? None of these real (or imaginary) world possibilities need be taken into account. We stipulate what goes into the model and what stays out. And although we cannot effectively control the outcome of a die throw, it will be up to us to translate it into the "actual world" in our model - and that is not always as straightforward as in this toy example.

@Ludwig V

In modal logic, “the actual world” is a designated element of a model, usually called w₀. It is not the metaphysical world, not the planet, not the territory. — Banno

Kripke himself regretted his choice of "worlds" terminology for that very reason: he acknowledged that it invited a conflation of metaphysical worlds with model-theoretical worlds. He blamed this misleading terminology for inspiring modal realism, i.e., thinking of possible worlds as "foreign countries" or "distant planets," which he rejected.

Just finished Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels (My Brilliant Friend, etc.)
Fantastic.

If it is possible that p is true, then this means that either p is true or p is false. So this gives us (p or ~p). But we have asserted that p is true. Therefore (p or ~p) is also true. — EricH

If this is supposed to be an argument for p -> ◇p (if p then possibly p), then it does not work.

Notice that (p or ~p) is a tautology: it is true regardless of the value of p. So, you might think that you could make a parallel argument for ~p -> ◇p (if p is false, then it is possible that p is true). But that is, obviously, not the case, since p could be necessarily false, and therefore not possibly true.

You can't reduce modality to classical non-modal logic. If you want a formal proof of p -> ◇p - well, this is considered to be such a basic modal intuition that it (or an equivalent principle □p -> p) is usually taken as an axiom.

I agree with most of that. I can see that we need to say that the actual is possible - even if that is a bit awkward in some ways. — Ludwig V

Well, I did select a rather awkward quotation for my example - this is Kant, after all, so of course, of all the ways he could have expressed his thought, he did it in the awkwardest way possible (see what I did here?)

There's something wrong with saying that the actual world is possible and something wrong with saying that it is not possible. I am trying to express that by saying that the actual world is not merely possible and that it is different from all the other possible worlds in that respect — Ludwig V

I think that the difficulty here is that in ordinary speech, we are expected to make the strongest warranted assertions. There is even a word in English for failing to do that: understatement. Sometimes, understatement is used intentionally to convey more than what is being literally said, such as sarcasm or playfulness. But when an understatement is unwarranted, it can lead to misunderstanding and even offense. If, when asked what I thought about Ludwig V, I said: "well, he is not a hopeless fool," that would surely be rude and unfair, even if true in a literal sense. But if in a different context I said "Ludwig V is no fool," such an understatement would carry the opposite meaning. Ah, the vicissitudes of language!

All that is to say that the reason we don't usually say that the actual is possible (except as in my examples above) is that it goes without saying - and so it goes unsaid.

That seems to me a bit confusing, because it suggests that the actual world is merely a possible world. Surely one needs to say something to the effect that the actual world is different from all the possible worlds. — Ludwig V

Well, the actual world is either possible or impossible (necessarily not actual) - this is the equivalent of the law of excluded middle in standard modal logic. It would be absurd to maintain that the actual world is impossible, so you are left with the actual world being possible (indeed, this is a theorem in all but the weakest modal logics). And yes, the actual world is different from all the other possible worlds - it is actual!

In informal speech, we sometimes want to put possibility on one side and actuality on the other, as you suggest, but not always. For example: "things, as phenomena, determine space; that is to say, they render it possible that, of all the possible predicates of space (size and relation), certain may belong to reality" (CPR).

Do you think we'll see a true survival show by 2035? Like deathmatches or frantic races?
The participants could be death row inmates, debtors, or the terminally ill, and the action could take place in third-world countries. The technical details aren't so important; what matters is whether modern society is ready for such a show. — Astorre

We already have motorsport, don't we? The incidence of fatal crashes actually used to be much higher than it is now, after safety improvements were implemented (in contradiction to the usual world going to hell in a handbasket sentiment).

There's a fine line here. Rogues are people who break the rules and thus evoke sympathy (something like Jack Sparrow). They remain within the rules themselves. The current conversation isn't about morally black (bad) people, but about morally gray people. That is, those who live entirely outside the good/bad paradigm. The phenomenon I'm talking about has a somewhat different nature. These heroes seem bad, but they are a reflection of us—they're just like us, with everyday problems. And we no longer know whether they're bad or not, or whether we can justify them (because we're all a bit like Walter White). — Astorre

I wasn't talking about black and white characters, either. "Morally gray" characters are nothing new, nor is the critics' hand-wringing over the "moral decline". Again, classic epics are a prime example, but if you want something more recognizable and relatable, look no further than nineteenth century literature - plenty of examples there: Thackeray, Maupassant, etc.

Well, the issue is not new. Homer's heros are no angels, by anyone's measure. Even the otherwise rather prissy Aeneas did a bad thing with Dido, and didn't even get the obligatory Hollywood reckoning for it. Milton could be (and has been!) faulted for the aestheticization of Satan, no less, in his Paradise Lost. On a lighter side, the picaresque genre, which has us delight at roguery, has always been among the most popular, going all the way back to The Golden Ass or Odysseus even. Even the word rogue ("a dishonest, untrustworthy person; scoundrel") has long since acquired the connotation of irresistible attraction.

"Free will" as such doesn't have much of an ordinary use, though, outside of legal contexts. — Pierre-Normand

These exact words may not be used all that commonly in ordinary language, but I think that cognate concepts of freedom and responsibility pervade all our interactions. After all, what does freedom imply? Freedom to act as you will. And how can there be responsibility without freedom?

Anthony Kenny does a very good job in his little book "Freewill and Responsibility" of clarifying the concept in its relations to various categories of mens rea (from strict liabilities, through negligence or recklessness, to specific intent.) This yields a sort of thick compatibilist notion that goes beyond mere freedom from "external" circumstances and extends outside of legal contexts to those of warranted reactive attitudes like praise and blame. In those more ordinary contexts, the question seldom arise of one having acted "of their own free will." We rather ask more ordinary questions like, "could they have done better?" or "is their action excusable?" Something like the Kantian dictum "must implies can" finds its ordinary applications. — Pierre-Normand

Interesting, thanks.

Let me be clear: there are plenty of things we don't understand, or even are entirely speculative, but are perfectly valid concepts.
Free will has not even attained that level yet though. It's self inconsistent, at least in the formulations that I've seen. A reasoned choice that can't be traced to reasons. — Mijin

I don't really understand why you think that. Let me be clear in turn that I think that this is a tenable position (that free will may not be a valid concept, or at least that it has serious problems), but it needs to be supported with honest work. You cannot come to this conclusion simply by picking on some clearly untenable conceptualizations (see, for instance, post above). "Free will" is a thing, so to say - the concept has been in use for a long time, not only in exalted domains of philosophy and theology, but also in common parlance and in specialized secular domains, such as law. Do philosophical accounts of free will that you criticize accurately capture the concept of free will? This question needs to be answered before making sweeping conclusions.

Is that at me? WTH? — Mijin

Sorry, my reference to derailment was, of course, with respect to the OP. You are as guilty of it as I am, but I am not blaming you in this case (just don't do that to my topics :joke:)

In time for COP30, New York Times published some nice charts that show 10 big things that have happened on the climate front in the last decade:

10 Years After a Breakthrough Climate Pact, Here’s Where We Are

1. Emissions are still rising, but not as fast as they were.
2. The last 10 years were the hottest on record.
3. Solar is spreading faster than we thought it would.
4. Electric vehicles are now normal.
5. Rich countries have put relatively little money on the table. (@unenlightened Meanwhile, some of the poorest countries are getting clobbered by extreme weather. They’re falling deeper into debt as they try to recover.)
6. Coal is in a weird place.
7. Natural gas, a planet-warming fossil fuel, is ascendant thanks to America.
8. Forests are losing their climate superpower.
9. Corals are bleaching more often.
10. U.S. electricity demand is soaring, in part because of A.I.

#7 is somewhat misleading. The chart shows LNG production, with USA leading the pack. LNG currently accounts for about 11% of gas production worldwide, although its share is projected to increase to 18% by 2030, mainly thanks to the US.

The core of the disagreement seems to be whether straightening up the popular and intuitive concept of free will amounts to a minor revision (which I think it does, like Dennett,) or to a wholesale replacement (like Harris thinks it does). — Pierre-Normand

I am not even certain that we should be talking about revision here. That Harris's concept of free will is out of touch with its common meaning is obvious. It is less obvious in the case of Dennett. The trouble is that when people are confronted head-on with the question of what free will is, their conceptualizations may not align with how they actually understand and use the concept. I think the project should begin with the study of the meaning or meanings (qua use), and only then can we proceed to critique and revision.

1. The concept usually gets framed first around Determinism. The reasoning is that, if the universe is Deterministic I might think I chose coffee or tea, but actually that choice was predictable from the big bang. I only had the illusion of choice.
Fine.

2. Then, when it's pointed out that the universe may well not be determinstic, thanks to quantum indeterminancy, this is usually handwaved away. How can randomness be called choice?

3. But to me, (1) and (2) combined leave a bad smell. In (1) it seemed that the issue was with our decisions being predictable, being integrated in the causal chain of events. When the suggestion (2) arrives that this may not be the case, apparently it's still insufficient to have free will.
So, to me, at this point we should be asking What exactly do we mean by free will, and is it something which could even potentially exist? — Mijin

I rather think you should begin by asking the bolded question. You may even find that the question of determinism vs indeterminism isn't as relevant to free will as all that, belying your first and second points. In any case, these first two points prompt the conclusion that free will is impossible, not that it is meaningless.

The popular "Could have chosen differently" is quite a woolly definition. Every reasoned action I've made in my life I did for reasons, that I could have told you at the time. And some of those reasons were more important to me than others. When we talk about "could have chosen differently" what do we mean in this picture -- that I could have been aware of different things, or would value different things more highly? But these things can also be traced to events / properties external to me. — Mijin

You seem to be conflating the two main criteria of free will: alternative possibilities and agency (ownership of decisions). In any case, I think you are right to question the meaning of at least the first of these (you should also question the second). They aren't necessarily as straightforward and literal as they may first appear.


NB: I wouldn't normally derail a thread like this, but seeing that this is yet another pathetic attempt at self-promotion by one of our resident crackpots, I have no regrets.

A reasoned choice is the product of reasoning: the product of (knowledge of) past events and individual predilections: both of which can be traced to causes outside of the self. — Mijin

Is this why you think that the concept of free will is incoherent? Why?

I noticed that the term "Law (of Nature)" is misleading in your otherwise logically sound post. The term itself comes from 17th-century theology and jurisprudence (Descartes, Newton), when the world was seen as a divine code. But nature doesn't prescribe—it occurs. The term "Law (of Nature)" seems like a linguistic artifact. A more accurate expression would be "stable regularities of the physical world" or simply "physical invariants." — Astorre

The OP is not worth commenting on, but I just want to note that to this day, the existence and the nature, as it were, of the laws of nature are debated. Humean regularity view is not universally accepted; there are also essentialist and dispositional views. Metaphysics aside, even more basic questions, such as what is lawful vs. accidental, are frustratingly hard to settle.

Do we need to analyze thoughts in terms of causation? — SophistiCat


To this, I'd say no, we don't. I'm quite open to other hypotheses about the "relations," "affinities," "influences," "associations," et al. among thoughts. The only line I'd draw in the sand would be: We mustn't talk as if we already understand this issue, or as if there is no issue. — J

To clarify, my question was not rhetorical. Where I was going with this is that causal analysis is a choice that we make, and so is the form that it takes. We shouldn't presuppose that causation is there, and we just need to elucidate it, or if it turns out that causation is absent, then we are in trouble (epiphenomenalism!)

That said, we need a proper motivation to look for causation. The place to start would probably be the field of psychology (less so philosophy of mind, for that is where idle and wrongheaded questions often originate...) Does mental-to-mental causation figure in psychology - as distinct from reason or explanation (informally, those words are often used interchangeably)?

As for the type of causation, perhaps inferential causation would be more promising in this context, since it is quite loose (being a spiritual descendant of Humean regularity theory) and does not rely on any physicalist ontology, such as energy.

I think the topic should be:
How Does a Thought Cause Another Thought? — Patterner

Before asking this question, or @J's original question (Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?), I think we should ask ourselves: Do we need to analyze thoughts in terms of causation? Because so far, this discussion looks to me like a solution in search of a problem.

Ned Rorem's violin concerto is a recent discovery for me. It is featured on this recording with Gidon Kremer and Leonard Bernstein, together with Philip Glass violin concerto and Bernstein's Symposium:



Rorem is better known for his songs. Here is a beautiful selection sung by Susan Graham:

How about this?

Here is one that has an actual philosophical background. Serenade after Plato's Symposium is probably my favorite of Leonard Bernstein's works. Though the composer himself said that the work did not have a literal program, its structure does follow Plato, and its themes can be tied back to its source material:

• I. Phaedrus; Pausanias
• II. Aristophanes
• III. Eryximachus
• IV. Agathon (the most beautiful and moving part, in my opinion)
• V. Socrates; Alcibiades

Young Hilary Hahn plays like an angel in a recording that also includes Beethoven's violin concerto:


Another recording with the fiery Janine Jansen and the LSO:

Welcome to the forum!

I’m concerned about the paradox of perpetual economic growth. Boosting economic growth is central to government policy (both this government and the last one) but on the face of it, economic growth at any percentage per year is an exponential function and must eventually result in an infinitely large economy. — Peter Gray

It is only exponential if the rate remains constant, and even then it will never become infinite. Anyway, if your point is that perpetual growth is unsustainable in the long term, Maltus beat you to that insight by 200 years.

I’m not the first person to have noticed this. If you Google for “Is perpetual economic growth possible?” the new AI Overview function says — Peter Gray

That's not a good way to do research.

So I was wondering, does philosophy and mathematics have anything to say about the possibility, or otherwise, of perpetual economic growth?" — Peter Gray

Mathematics has little to do with this - except inasmuch as researchers use mathematics, of course, but that is mostly textbook calculus and statistics. Most of the innovation in this area has been in demographic and economic metrics and modeling, and to a lesser degree in computational methods.

Naturally, a simpleminded mathematical projection pointing to unbounded growth is not going to give you the right answer, just like you cannot predict the height of an adult person by extrapolating their rate of growth at a young age. Even your AI overview is right on this point: it is a complex issue with varied perspectives that has been studied and debated for literally centuries.

Apologies, slowly replying to comments. — tom111

No problem, and thank you for your response (I am not usually so impatient...). I have listened to some of Emerson's podcasts before, even though I am not sympathetic to panpsychism (not all of them are about panpsychism). This one does clarify the question somewhat. He is apparently referring to this recent paper by Cutter and Crummett: Psychophysical Harmony: A New Argument for Theism. The paper has a fairly detailed section on the concept of psychophysical harmony, which apparently has a bit of a pedigree in panpsychist literature. I will have a closer look and reply later (if I have anything worth saying).

The word "artificial" is a relative term. Rhetorical question: If artificial things are not natural, then what are they? Supernatural? — punos

'Artificial' is not the same as 'unnatural' or 'supernatural', even though all of these words are contrasted to 'natural'. Artificial means made by human art, often, but not necessarily, imitating something that is not (that's the meaning that is most relevant to this discussion - there are others, of course). It denotes a perfectly coherent distinction, useful in its place.

Yet it seems highly implausible that the qualities of experience would so precisely mirror a system’s physical and functional organization.

Why should neural activity for detecting 650 nm light feel like red, so well-suited to signalling urgency? Why should the mechanisms of tissue damage produce the feeling of pain, which drives protection? Or why should patterns of motion perception yield the vivid sense of fluid, continuous movement, matching the body’s need to predict trajectories? — tom111

Since the OP won't answer my question, can anyone else explain what he is talking about? @Count Timothy von Icarus? What does it mean for an experience to "mirror" or "match" physical and functional organization? This seems to be somewhat similar to Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness," which asks why there should be any subjective experience at all, but in a way, it's almost in direct contradiction to it. The whole premise of the "hard problem" is that subjective experience is purportedly of a different nature than physical and functional organization, and thus the two are entirely incommensurate. So, in what sense can one mirror/align/match the other?

And this "Notturno" is just impossibly gorgeous...

Huh, I was just listening to Chopin's nocturnes in Sokolov's rendition the other day:

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, a form of epiphenomenalist dualism, in which there are two distinct kinds of things: physical processes occurring in the brain and an associated array of conscious experiences. On this view, every physical event in the brain produces a corresponding mental event, a subjective experience, but these mental events have no causal influence on the physical. Consciousness is a passive byproduct, a kind of “ride-along” to the real causal story that takes place in the material world. — tom111

You ask us to assume this for the sake of an argument, but the rest of your post proceeds as if this was the only live option, save for "two unsatisfying possibilities." Is this indeed your position, or did I misunderstand you?

What I find bizarre about epiphenomenalism is its assumption that there can be only one "real causal story." Any other causal story is not merely subordinate or approximate (as a reductionist would posit), but altogether false (because if there was anything true about other causal stories, then they would be causal to some extent - and the epiphenomenalist flatly denies that possibility). That just goes against every causal intuition and practice, and I don't understand why we would want to consider this position, even for the sake of an argument.

Once we grant this setup, we immediately encounter the problem of psychophysical harmony. Why is it that our conscious experiences are so perfectly aligned with our physical and behavioral states? — tom111

I don't understand what you mean by this "perfect alignment." What aligns with what? You say, for example:

Why does seeing a red apple correspond to the experience of redness rather than the feeling of pain or a random hallucination?

But seeing a red apple does not correspond to an experience - it is an experience. It cannot be any other experience, on pain of contradiction.

I am not seeing your point, but whatever. You are entitled to your prejudices.

I would think handing your half-formed prose to a bot for it to improve it is plagiarism, regardless of the number of words changed or inserted. — bongo fury

Unlike handing it to a human editor, which is what authors have been doing for yonks?