yale-university-faculty

"Americans have always been especially prone to regard all things as resulting from the free choice of a free will. Probably no people have so little determinism in their philosophy, and as individuals we have regarded our economic status, our matrimonial happiness, and even our eternal salvation as things of our own making. Why should we not then regard our political felicity, likewise, as a virtue which is also virtue's reward?"

"Here, for the last time together, appeared a triumvirate of old men, relics of a golden age, who still towered like giants above creatures of a later time: Webster, the kind of senator that Richard Wagner might have created at the height of his powers; Calhoun, the most majestic champion of error since Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost; and Clay, the old Conciliator, who had already saved the Union twice and now came out of retirement to save it with his silver voice and his master touch once again before he died."

"Democracy is clearly most appropriate for countries which enjoy an economic surplus and least appropriate for countries where there is an economic insufficiency."

"Perhaps it is symbolic that Brook Farm, initially the most American of our Utopian communities, perished in a holocaust and was never fully rebuilt. A parallel destiny has pursued not only the other attempts to implement Utopian vision in this country, but the Utopian spirit in American life as a whole. As thinkers, Americans rarely if ever now attempt to construct an imaginary society better than that in which they live; and at the same time, the faith that our society is in some sense a Utopia has surely disappeared....But if we define Utopia as any attempt to make imaginatively concrete the possibilities of the future, Utopias have not in our own day ceased to exist, but have merely been transvalued....Our visions of the future have shifted from images of hope to vistas of despair; Utopias have become warnings, not beacons. Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy, and ironically even Skinner's Walden Two—the vast majority of our serious visions of the future are negative visions, extensions of the most pernicious trends of the present."

"With the age-old goal of universal prosperity within sight, we must question whether the methods—technological values and virtues, the instrumental goals of our affluent society—that help us approach this goal will serve to take us beyond it."

"We should heap skepticism on any group launching a small war or brief attack claiming that they possess workable mechanisms for keeping small wars small."

"She has made a uniquely powerful case that the history of international law must take into account not simply the arguments of prominent legal theorists but also the actions and arguments of a host of actors from all over the world, what she has called "vernacular forms of political theory.""

"Lauren Benton has done more than any other scholar in recent generations to reintegrate global history with legal history. With archival tenacity and broad conceptual sweep, she has used fine-grained microhistory in the service of world-spanning arguments about the tentative distribution of imperial power, the informal elaboration of international law, and the paradoxes of sovereignty in a world unevenly colonized and incompletely decolonized."

"Historical actors on all sides were engaging in what I call “legal politics”—that is, they were using and citing law strategically while enmeshed in multi-sided conflicts and relationships. In the process, they were creating and reinforcing regimes of limited violence with very specific openings to extreme violence."

"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy"

"The machine like the djinnee, which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us.” —Norbert Wiener, mathematician and philosopher"

"Framing the government interest, or interests, this way has several advantages. First, it descriptively maps on to existing laws: These laws either help individuals manage their desired level of disclosure by requiring notice, or prevent individuals from resorting to undesirable behavioral shifts by banning surveillance. Second, the framework helps us assess the strength and legitimacy of the legislative interest in these laws. Third, it allows courts to understand how First Amendment interests are in fact internalized in privacy laws. And fourth, it provides guidance to legislators for the enactment of new laws governing a range of new surveillance technologies — from automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to robots to drones."

"This Article identifies the government interest in enacting laws governing surveillance by private parties. Using social psychologist Irwin Altman’s framework of “boundary management” as a jumping-off point, I conceptualize privacy harm as interference in an individual’s ability to dynamically manage disclosure and social boundaries. Stemming from this understanding of privacy, the government has two related interests in enacting laws prohibiting surveillance: an interest in providing notice so that an individual can adjust her behavior; and an interest in prohibiting surveillance to prevent undesirable behavioral shifts."

"Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, is a powerful illumination of how we really behave toward animals."

"Maybe any entity significantly smarter than a human being would be crippled by existential despair."

"I sometimes think that, in the desperate straits of humanity today, we would be grateful to have nonhuman friends, even if they are only the friends we build ourselves." —Isaac Asimov, Robot Visions"

"Regulators should broaden their regulatory toolkit and move away from, or at least add to, the current narrow focus on AI impact assessments. If regulators want to truly address the harms caused by AI systems, they are going to have to do better than light-touch risk regulation."

"The newly developing “law of AI” has come to focus on risk regulation, and in many ways risk regulation seems like a good fit for regulating the development and growing uses of AI systems. AI harms tend to be systemic, occur at scale, raise causality challenges for potential litigators, and may not yet be vested (that is, they may constitute risks of future harm rather than current harm)—all challenges for traditional liability regimes."

"It may seem preposterous today to hold a robot morally accountable for its actions, but there are already glimpses of this in how we talk about robot-caused harm—in ways that risk assigning them more agency than appropriate."

"The military wasn’t equipped to deal with people’s demand for information about their beloved pups."

"But as I argue in this paper, risk regulation also comes with what I call “policy baggage”: known problems that have emerged in other fields. Choosing to use risk regulation itself entails making a significant normative choice: to develop and use AI systems in the first place rather than adopt more precautionary approaches to AI. Risk regulation thus embodies what Jessica Eaglin has called a “techno-correctionist” tendency prevalent in scholarship on AI systems: the tendency to try to make technology “better” rather than to question the politics and appropriateness of its usage and to explore more systematically whether, given its harms, it should be used at all."

"Where my beasts of their own wrong without my will and knowledge break into another’s close, I shall be punished, for I am the trespasser with my beasts.” —Anonymous case during the reign of Henry VII"

"While there may be similarities here and there, my child doesn’t sense, act, or learn the way a machine does."

"... Let me start with the top mistakes that teachers make. Some of these mistakes are forced on teachers by a badly designed education system, and some are ones that teachers make no matter what they are teaching or which system they are teaching in. Some of these are less than obvious, so let's consider them one-by-one."

"intelligence comes about in part from real focus (goal-directed behavior); (this is why you have the absent minded professor caricature[.] it is a rare woman who is not first and foremost focussed on what others are thinking and feeling about her[.] hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you or why you dont own a kelly bag[.]"

"Certain things need to be done again and again in life, but those things can be learned only in context, not as an abstraction. Different contexts must be provided in order to motivate students and to provide real world skills that will be remembered, not because they were studied and tested but because they were practicied again and again."

"I'm not suggesting that teachers never tell the truth, only that it isn't necessary to do it all the time. Since coming to one's own conclusions is mostly how we learn, the real job of a teacher is to force students to come to sensible conclusions by confronting what they already believe with stuff that is antithetical to those beliefs. A confused person has only 2 choices. Admit he is confused and doesn't care, or resolve the confusion. Resolving the confusion invloves thinking. Teachers can encourage thinking by making sure students have something confusing to think about."

"There are endless books about what every third grader must know that use the idea that factual knowledge is the basis of the ability to read as their justification. Unfortunately, the writers of these tracts have misunderstood the cognitive science behind those statements. It is difficult to read things when you don't understand what they are about, but it does not follow from that thatthe solution is to ram that knowledge down kids' throats and then have them read. It is much more clever to have them read about what they know and to gradually increase their knowledge through stories that cause them to have to learn more in order to make the stories understandable to them"

"Еvery intellectual in emigration, without exception, is damaged."

"Novelty, originality, and creativity have no value if their products do not correspond to truth, to the contrary, they are harmful when they lead to false assertions.... We must separate our valid knowledge, that is documentable and objective from our religious, political and ideological preferences."

"Ideas can only be met by ideas, and force by force."

"In my view, the task of the scholar is to learn, to criticize, and, wherever possible, to add to the store of valid knowledge."

"...Even in the most intimate forms of writing, people still followed established conventions and wrote what they felt was expected of them. They could lie to their friends and family, even to themselves."

"Ideas do not have force outside specific social contexts. The same ideas may have enormous force in one context and look bizarre or repulsive in another."

"“As defined by Dyen (1956), a homeland is a continuous area and a migration is any movement causing that area to become non-continuous (while a movement that simply changes its shape or area is an expansion or expansive intrusion). The linguistic population of the homeland is a set of intermediate protolanguages, the first-order daughters of the original protolanguage (in Dyen’s terms, a chain of coordinate languages). The homeland is the same as (or overlaps) the area of the largest chain of such co-ordinates, i.e. the area where the greatest number of highest-level branches occur. Homelands are to be reconstructed in such a way as to minimize the number of migrations, and the number of migrating daughter branches, required to get from them to attested distributions (Dyen 1956: 613).”109"

"The first American scholar to study in Greece was , now the distinguished and historian, of the , and an honored member of the , who passed a year in Greece just half a century ago, in 1851-52,—attending lectures in the University, and travelling through the country. Four or five years later, in 1856, he published his work on "Modern Greece," which remains the fullest account of that country ever written by an American, and contains, as we might expect from Dr. Baird, much information with regard to the monuments of antiquity."

"Only a bold man half a century ago dared to hold that a substantial basis of fact underlay the stories of the battles before Troy,—not to speak of the wanderings of ; and archaeologists believed that had not simply idealized but also exaggerated freely the wonders of the works of art and craft to which he refers. When, little more than a third of a century ago, Dr. Schliemann began to dig for indications of early settlements on the chief Homeric sites,—first at on the shore of the , which had been held by the ancients to be the site on which Homeric Troy had stood, and then in , at and ,—many mocked just as they would have done if the enthusiastic German had sought to determine the sites of the exploits of ."

"The political significance of Indonesian Islam, including Javanese Islam, stems in no small measure from the fact that in Islam the borderline between religion and politics is, at best very thin. Islam is a way of life as much as a religion…. Islam does not recognize the existence of independent, secular realms of life…. Separation of religion and politics, in other words, was, at best a temporary phenomenon of Islam in decline. In an era of Islamic awakening, it could not survive for long, either in independent Muslim lands or in Islamic areas ruled by non-Muslims…."

"Homer, like Milton, could not think of an army in motion without thinking of its resemblance to something else. Just before the Catalogue of the Ships, the movements of the armies are described by six detailed comparisons, B 455-483 : the brightness of their armor is compared with the gleam of fire upon the mountains ; their noisy tumult, with the clamor of s or swans on the Asian plain ; in multitude, they are as the innumerable leaves and flowers of spring-time; they are impetuous and bold as the eager flies around the farm buildings; they are marshalled by their leaders as flocks of goats by their herds; their leader () is like to Zeus, to Ares, to ,—he is preeminent among the heroes as a bull in a herd of cattle."

"Like other Muslims, Indonesian Islamic leaders—reformists, hardly less than orthodox—were thus by Western standards not only lacking in political experience, but were, by the nature of their orientation and training, ill-equipped to formulate political goals as such. The santri {Javanese practitioners of a more orthodox Islam} civilization, in other words, is not a political ideal so much as the idealization of a religious community—the ummah—which would subsume within its all-embracing confines all walks of life, subordinating the state to the dictates of the Islamic ethic…. If given political expression in Darul Islam—the so-called “Islamic State”—the political program of Islam is limited to postulating a state which, irrespective of its constitutional form, economic organization, and social composition, is to be ruled by Muslims in accordance with Islamic Law."

"His earliest ode which has come down to us is the tenth Pythian ode in honor of the victory in the long footrace of Hippocles, one of the powerful . This ode was composed when was only twenty years old, and shows that he already had some prominence, else that family would not have invited him to celebrate the victory. His earliest Olympian ode which has been preserved is the eleventh, of 484"

"A teacher seldom receives full recognition for his services during his lifetime, unless he lives to extreme old age. While the physician is often cheered by the gratitude of those to whom his skill has restored to health, and the clergyman receives the affectionate thanks of those whom he has guided and comforted, and the successful lawyer is supposed to be burdened with plaudits and fees,—the teacher has to do mainly with those who are too immature to understand the services which he renders and to appreciate the self-denial which is manifested in much of his care. His pupils are too little acquainted with the world to compare his acumen and his learning with those of others; they cannot sympathize with him in his ambitions and difficulties and task; they may not feel his strong desire to go on to the acquisition of new knowledge."

"P Smith ... ... the dredgings have very greatly extended the bathymetrical range of this species. It had previously been taken in 250 to 640 s. This increased range in depth is apparently accompanied by a change in the kind of carcinœcia inhabited. All the earlier specimens, over four hundred in number, were found in carcinœcia of Epizoanthus paguriphilus Verrill, while the deep-water specimens were either in a very different species of ', in naked shells, or in an n closely resembling, if not identical with, Urticina consors Verrill, which often serves for the carcinœcium of the next species. S Smith."

"Although Professor Smith's systematic work on the freshwater and marine entitles him to a position in the front rank of American systematic zoologists, his studies on the life histories of the crustaceae proved of more general interest. He was the first to interpret correctly the successive stages in the larval life of the (1872, 1873); and his descriptions of the early life of other crustaceans, particulary of (1873), (1877), Pinnixa (1880), and (1883), have found a wide application in interpretation of the relationships of the various groups. For several years prior to 1874 he assisted Professor Verrill in the preparation of the classic "Report on the Invertebrate Animals of Vineyard Sound"; an ecological study that had no parallel in America for more than forty years. Professor Smith prepared all the material relating to the crustaceae and revised other parts of this widely used book."

"On the first trip of the from , which was made July 16 to 19, four successful hauls were made with a large trawl, in 1,346 to 1,735 s, on the 17th and 18th of July, two each day, besides the soundings and temperature determinations, including series of temperatures at various distances from the surface. On this trip about one hundred and five species of s were obtained, not including the and other minute forms. There were among them fourteen species of ; two of s; twenty-two of s; thirty-eight of ; fifteen of ; one of ; ten of ; one of ; two of s."

"Among these pioneer zoologists the name of Verrill stands out prominently because of the amount and accuracy of his contributions to our knowledge of s. More than a thousand species, including , were discovered and described by him, and their relationships to previously known forms were diagnosed with almost unerring accuracy and with a facility that amounted almost to genius. He was much more than systematic zoologist, however; he was a real naturalist in that he was always interested in the of the animals which he studied as well as the morphological characters which distinguished the species new to science. His work on the natural history of he marine invertebrates of southern New England was the first extensive ecological study of its kind in America, and his Vineyard Sound report (published in 1871) was the standard reference book for all students of the seashore life of the region for more than thirty years."

"... ... The structure of the female appendages is beautifully adapted to a remarkable habit in the manner of depositing the eggs, which seems not to have been noticed before among . The eggs are deposited in old logs, in the undersides of boards, or in any soft wood lying among the grass which these s inhabit. By the means of the anal appendages the female excavates in the wood a smooth round hole about an eighth of an in diameter. This hole is almost perpendicular at first but is turned rapidly off in the direction of the , and runs nearly parallel with and about three-eighths of an inch from the surface; the whole length of the hole being an inch or an inch and a fourth. A single hole noticed in the end of a log was straight. The eggs, which are about a fourth of an inch in length, quite slender and light brownish yellow, are placed in two rows, one on each side, and inclined so that, beginning at the end of the hole, each egg overlies the next in the same row by about half an inch. The aperture is closed by a little disk of a hard gummy substance."

"The following catalogue is intended to include all the now known to inhabit the that are not included in 's edition of 's Invertebrata of Massachusetts, published in 1870. In the "New England Region" I include, on the north, the coasts of Nova Scotia and , and their outlying banks; while on the south, I include the entire region, about 100 to 120 miles wide, between the shore and the , off the southern coast of New England, and embracing all depths down to 600 s. ... I have also included the free-swimming and floating forms, ordinarily inhabiting the same region, which may be considered as meeting and including the innermost edge of the Gulf Stream in summer, but most of these surface forms are usually to be found, in summer, far inside the actual limits of the Gulf Stream. The and the northern parts of the I have considered as extra-limital, for my present purposes. Those localities are inhabited by an extremely , including many species of mollusca that have not yet been found farther south. Among these are several species of ' and allied genera."

"The early literature of has, from very remote times, contained allusions to huge species of s, often accompanied by more or less fabulous and usually exaggerated descriptions of the creatures ... In a few instances figures were attempted which were largely indebted to the imagination of their authors for their more striking peculiarities. In recent times, many more accurate observers have confirmed the existence of such monsters, and several fragments have found their way into European museums. To and to , however, belongs the credit of first describing and figuring, in a scientific manner, a number of fragments sufficient to give some idea of the real character and affinities of these colossal species."

"It is as though we had to reconstruct for ourselves a mountain range from its distorted reflections in the bosom of a lake."