Category: Religion

What should I ask Kim Bowes?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her.  Here is Wikipedia:

Kimberly D. Bowes (born 1970) is an American archaeologist who is a professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in archeology, material culture and economics of the Roman and the later Roman world. She was the Director of the American Academy in Rome from 2014–2017.[2] She is the author of three monographs…

While she is continuously focused on the archaeology and material culture of the Roman and later Roman worlds, her research interests have shifted from late antiquity and the archeologies of religion and elite space to historical economies with a distinct focus on poverty and the lived experience of the poor. Her forthcoming study on Roman peasants in Italy reflects a greater attention to non-elites in the studies of Roman archaeology and economic history and a shift in  her methodology, integrating archaeological and scientific data, anthropological theory and  historical economics become.

I am a big fan of her new book Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent.  So what should I ask her?

My Conversation with Alison Gopnik

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and Alison cover how children systematically experiment on the world and what study she’d run with $100 million, why babies are more conscious than adults and what consciousness even means, episodic memory and aphantasia, whether Freud got anything right about childhood and what’s held up best from Piaget, how we should teach young children versus school-age kids, how AI should change K-12 education and Gopnik’s case that it’s a cultural technology rather than intelligence, whether the enterprise of twin studies makes sense and why she sees nature versus nurture as the wrong framework entirely, autism and ADHD as diagnostic categories, whether the success of her siblings belies her skepticism about genetic inheritance, her new project on the economics and philosophy of caregiving, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: If it’s something like height, where there is clearly an environmental component, especially if the child is not well-fed, but it seems perfectly fine to say above a certain dietary level, it’s mostly genetic, right? No one says that’s ambiguous, and more and more traits will become like that.

GOPNIK: Well, first of all, I’m not sure that’s true. To a striking degree, the traits that people have looked at, like educational attainment, for example — we haven’t found consistent relationships to genetics. I think the reason for that is exactly because there’s this very complicated developmental process that goes from the genetics to the outcome.

Even if you think about fruit flies, for example. I have some geneticist colleagues who work on this — fruit fly sex determination. You’d think, “Well, that has to be just the result of genes.” It turns out that there’s this long developmental — long by fruit fly standards — developmental process that goes from the genetics to the proteins to the morphology, and there’s lots of possibility of variation throughout that. I think that hasn’t turned out to be a scientifically helpful way of understanding what’s going on in development.

The other thing, of course, is, from my perspective, the common features of, say, what kids are doing are much more interesting than the variations. What I really want to know is how is it that anyone could have a brain that enables them to accomplish these amazing capacities? Thinking about, is this child smarter than the other one, given how unbelievably smart all of them are to begin with, I just think it’s not an interesting question.

COWEN: But say, what you would call the lay belief that smarter parents give birth to smarter children, at least above subsistence — surely you would accept that, right?

GOPNIK: Again, what does smarter mean?

COWEN: How you would do on an IQ test.

GOPNIK: What does genetics mean? It’s interesting, Tyler, that IQ tests, for example — they have their own scholarly and scientific universe, but they’re not something that we would teach about or think about in a developmental psychology class, and there’s a good principled reason for that. The good principled reason — this has come up a lot in AI recently. There’s this idea in AI of artificial general intelligence, and that is assuming that there’s something called general intelligence.

Again, I think, a lot like consciousness or life, it’s one of these lay ideas about how people work. When you actually look at children, for example, what you see is not just that there isn’t a single thing that’s general intelligence. You actually see different cognitive capacities that are in tension with one another. You mentioned one about the scientist who’s trying to think of some new idea versus the scientist who’s looking at a more specific idea, right? A classic example of this tension that I’ve talked about and studied is in computer sciences: exploration versus exploitation.

What do you count as IQ? In fact, most of what IQ is about is how well do you do in school? How well do you do on school tests? That’s actually, in many respects, in tension with how good are you at exploring the world around you? The kinds of things that you need to do to have particular goals, to accomplish them, the kinds of things that we emphasize a lot, say, in a school context, are actually in tension. This gets back to the point about babies being more conscious than we are — are actually in tension with the kinds of things that will let you explore.

Think about the Bayesian example. If you have a flatter prior, and you pay more attention to evidence, you are probably not going to do as well on an IQ test…

COWEN: There’s you — you’re tenured at Berkeley, you’re famous. There’s Blake, The Definitive Warhol Biography, and Adam, who’s amazing, writes for the New Yorker, and you don’t believe inheritability and IQ being very concrete things? I just don’t get it. I think you’re in denial.

GOPNIK: Actually, I think that example is maybe partly why I don’t believe in that. In fact, what I do believe is that the effect of caregiving is to increase variability, is to increase variation. Our family, our care — there were six of us in 11 years. My parents were graduate students, and even before they were graduate students, they were that great generation of immigrant kids.

We had this combination of a great deal of warmth, a great deal of love, an enormous amount of stuff that was around us — books and ideas. We got taken to the Guggenheim, when Adam was three and I was four, for the opening of the Guggenheim. We both remember this vividly. But we were also completely free. We were just in regular public schools. As was true in those days, in general, we came home after school, and we basically did whatever it was that we wanted. I was involved. The kids were taking care of each other a lot of the time.

The result is that you get a lot of variation. It’s an interesting example in our family where we have six kids who presumably all have somewhat similar genetics, all in that 11 years grow up in the same context, and they come out completely differently. They come out with really different strengths, really different weaknesses, things that they’re good at, things that they’re not good at. Even if you think about what Blake and Adam and I are like as thinkers, we’re all foxes instead of hedgehogs. We’re all people who have done lots of different things and thought about lots of different things.

So, my view is that what nurture will do is let you have variability. That’s the thing that, in a sense, is heritable. That’s contradictory, the idea that what’s heritable is the standard deviation instead of the mean, but that’s my view about that. I think my childhood did have the effect of making me suspicious of those simple nature-nurture oppositions.

Here are the books of Alison Gopnik.

What should I ask Joanne Paul?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her.  From the Google internet:

Joanne Paul is a writer, broadcaster, consultant, and Honorary Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex. A BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, her research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods…

She has a new book out Thomas More: A Life.

Here is her home page.  Here is Joanne on Twitter.  She has many videos on the Tudor period, some with over one million views.

So what should I ask her?

Why are Mormons so Libertarian?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Connor Hansen has a very good essay on Why Are Latter-day Saints So Libertarian? It serves both as an introduction to LDS theology and as an explanation for why that theology resonates with classical liberal ideas. I’ll summarize, with the caveat that I may get a few theological details wrong.

LDS metaphysics posits a universe governed by eternal law. God works with and within the laws of the universe–the same laws that humans can discover with reason and science.

This puts Latter-day Saint cosmology in conversation with the Enlightenment conviction that nature operates predictably and can be studied systematically. A theology where God organizes matter according to eternal law opens space for both scientific inquiry and mystical experience—the careful observation of natural law and the direct encounter with divine love operating through that law.

LDS epistemology is strikingly pro-reason. Even Ayn Rand would approve:

Latter-day Saint theology holds that human beings possess eternal “intelligence”—a term meaning something like personhood, consciousness, or rational capacity—that exists independent of creation. This intelligence is inherent, not granted, and it survives death.

Paired with this is the doctrine of agency: humans are genuinely free moral agents, not puppets or broken remnants after a fall. We’re capable of reason, judgment, and meaningful choice.

This creates an unusually optimistic anthropology. Human reason isn’t fundamentally corrupted or unreliable. It’s a divine gift and a core feature of identity. That lines up neatly with the Enlightenment belief that people can use reason to understand the world, improve their lives, and govern themselves effectively.

In ethics, agency is arguably the most libertarian strand in LDS theology. Free to choose is literally at the center of both divine nature and moral responsibility.

According to Latter-day Saint belief, God proposed a plan for human existence in which individuals would receive genuine agency—the ability to choose, make mistakes, learn, change, and ultimately progress toward becoming like God.

One figure, identified as Satan, rejected that plan and proposed an alternative: eliminate agency, guarantee universal salvation through compulsion, and claim God’s glory in the process.

The disagreement escalated into conflict. In Latter-day Saint scripture, Satan and those who followed him were cast out. The ones who chose agency—who chose freedom with its attendant risks—became mortal humans.

This matters politically because it means that in Latter-day Saint theology, coercion is not merely misguided policy or poor governance. It is literally Satanic. The negation of agency, forced conformity, compulsory salvation—these align with the devil’s rebellion against God’s plan.

Now add to this a 19th century belief in progress and abundance amped up by theology:

Humanity isn’t hopelessly corrupt. Instead, individuals are expected to learn, improve, innovate, and help build better societies.

But here’s where it gets radical: Latter-day Saints believe in the doctrine of eternal progression—the teaching that human beings can, over infinite time and through divine grace, become as God is. Not metaphorically. Actually.

If you believe humans possess infinite potential to rise, become, and progress eternally—literally without bound—then political systems that constrain, manage, or limit human aspiration start to feel spiritually suspect.

Finally, the actually history of the LDS church–expulsions from Missouri and Illinois, Joseph Smith’s violent death, the migration to the Great Basin, the creation of a quasi-independent society–is one of resistance to centralized government power. Limited government and local autonomy come to feel like lessons learned through lived experience. Likewise, the modern LDS welfare system is a working demonstration of how voluntary, covenant-based mutual aid can deliver real social support without coercion. This real-world model strengthens the intuition that social goods need not rely on compulsory state systems, and that voluntary institutions can often be more humane and effective.

To which I say, amen brother! Read the whole essay for more.

See also the book, Latter-day Liberty: A Gospel Approach to Government and Politics, with an introduction by the excellent Mark Skousen.

Hat tip: Gale.

*God’s Grandeur*

by  Tyler Cowen in
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

 

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Will the most important pop stars of the future be religious pop stars?

by  Tyler Cowen in

The personally irreligious (last I checked) economist Tyler Cowen has long been fond of proposing that the most important thinkers of the future will be religious thinkers—counter to everything we heard growing up in the age of the New Atheists, and yet, the evidence seems to keep amassing. After the recent release of LUX, the Spanish polymath Rosalía’s fourth studio album, I want to propose a corollary: the most important pop stars of the future may indeed be religious pop stars.

Critics and listeners already seem to agree that LUX represents a titanic accomplishment by the classically-trained, genre-bending singer. Urbane reviewers and YouTube-savvy opera conductors alike have spent the last two weeks obsessively unpacking Rosalía’s 4-movement, 18-track opus, whose symphonic trilingual cathedral piece and Mexican-inflected post-breakup diss track have already charted worldwide. Closer to home, it’s a striking accomplishment to get me to pay serious attention to Top 40 (it helps, of course, to make a hyperpolyglot album with Iberian duende at its core)…

At the beginning of the decade, metamodern types (myself included, in my interview for a PhD position at the Spirituality and Psychology Lab) were given to asking the question: “What can we do to reenchant the world?”

The great stagnation is over. In the age of spiritual machines, enchantment may soon become too cheap to meter. What’s left to ask is: “How are we to make sense of it?” We’ll need artists who can hold the tension—between the earthly and the divine, the ironic and the sincere, the rational and the numinous. Rosalía, to her credit and our great benefit, is already living the question with her full body.

Here is the full post from Josh Lipson at Whitmanic.

My Conversation with the excellent Donald S. Lopez Jr.

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and Donald discuss the Buddha’s 32 bodily marks, whether he died of dysentery, what sets the limits of the Buddha’s omniscience, the theological puzzle of sacred power in an atheistic religion, Buddhism’s elaborate system of hells and hungry ghosts, how 19th-century European atheists invented the “peaceful” Buddhism we know today, whether the axial age theory holds up, what happened to the Buddha’s son Rahula, Buddhism’s global decline, the evidently effective succession process for Dalai Lamas, how a guy from New Jersey created the Tibetan Book of the Dead, what makes Zen Buddhism theologically unique, why Thailand is the wealthiest Buddhist country, where to go on a three-week Buddhist pilgrimage, how Donald became a scholar of Buddhism after abandoning his plans to study Shakespeare, his dream of translating Buddhist stories into new dramatic forms, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: Fire is a central theme in Buddhism, right?

LOPEZ: Well, there are hot hells, and there are also cold hells. Fire comes up, really, in the idea of nirvana. Where we see the fire, I think most importantly, philosophically, is the idea of where did the Buddha go when he died? He was not reborn again. They say it’s really just like a flame going out, that is, the flame ends. Where did the fire go? Nowhere, that is, the wood that was producing the flame is all burned up, and you just end. Nirvana is not a place. It’s a state of extinction or what the Buddhists call cessation.

COWEN: What role does blood sacrifice play in Buddhism?

LOPEZ: Well, it’s not supposed to perform any role. There’s no blood sacrifice in Buddhism.

COWEN: No blood sacrifice. How about wrathful deities?

LOPEZ: Wrathful deities — there’re a lot, yes.

COWEN: Then we’re back to supernatural. Again, this gets to my central confusion. It’s atheistic, but there’s some other set of principles in the universe that generate wrathful deities, right?

LOPEZ: Wrathful deities are beings who were humans in one lifetime, animals in another, and born as wrathful deities in another lifetime. Everyone is in the cycle of rebirth. We’ve all been wrathful deities in the past. We’ll be wrathful deities in the future unless we get out soon. It’s this universe of strange beings, all taking turns, shape-shifting from one lifetime to the next, and it goes on forever until we find the way out.

COWEN: Are they like ghosts at all — the wrathful deities?

LOPEZ: There’s a whole separate category of ghosts. The ghosts are often called — if we look at the Chinese translation — hungry ghosts. The ghosts are beings who suffer from hunger and thirst. They are depicted as having distended bellies. They have these horrible sufferings that when they drink water, it turns into molten lead. They’ll eat solid food — it turns into an arrow or a spear. Constantly seeking food, constantly being frustrated, and they appear a lot in Buddhist text. One of the jobs of Buddhist monks and nuns is to feed the hungry ghosts.

COWEN: Is it a fundamental misconception to think of Buddhism as a peaceful religion?

And:

COWEN: …If one goes to Borobudur in Java — spectacular, one of the most amazing places to see in the world.

LOPEZ: Absolutely.

COWEN: We read that it was abandoned. It wasn’t even converted into a tourist site or a place where you would sell things. Why would you just toss away so much capital structure?

LOPEZ: I think it just got overgrown by the jungle. I think that people were not going there. There were no Buddhist pilgrims coming. The populace converted to Islam mostly, and it just fell into decline, just to be revived in the 19th, 20th century.

COWEN: Turn it into a candy store or something! It just seems capital maintenance occurs across other margins. The best-looking building you have — one of the best-looking in the world — is forgotten. Don’t you find that paradoxical?

Definitely recommended, interesting throughout and I learned a great deal doing the prep.  One of my favorite episodes of this year.  And I am happy to recommend all of Donald’s books on Buddhism.

We Turned the Light On—and the AI Looked Back

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Jack Clark, Co-founder of Anthropic, has written a remarkable essay about his fears and hopes. It’s not the usual kind of thing one reads from a tech leader:

I remember being a child and after the lights turned out I would look around my bedroom and I would see shapes in the darkness and I would become afraid – afraid these shapes were creatures I did not understand that wanted to do me harm. And so I’d turn my light on. And when I turned the light on I would be relieved because the creatures turned out to be a pile of clothes on a chair, or a bookshelf, or a lampshade.

Now, in the year of 2025, we are the child from that story and the room is our planet. But when we turn the light on we find ourselves gazing upon true creatures, in the form of the powerful and somewhat unpredictable AI systems of today and those that are to come. And there are many people who desperately want to believe that these creatures are nothing but a pile of clothes on a chair, or a bookshelf, or a lampshade. And they want to get us to turn the light off and go back to sleep.

…We are growing extremely powerful systems that we do not fully understand. Each time we grow a larger system, we run tests on it. The tests show the system is much more capable at things which are economically useful. And the bigger and more complicated you make these systems, the more they seem to display awareness that they are things.

It is as if you are making hammers in a hammer factory and one day the hammer that comes off the line says, “I am a hammer, how interesting!” This is very unusual!

…I am also deeply afraid. It would be extraordinarily arrogant to think working with a technology like this would be easy or simple.

My own experience is that as these AI systems get smarter and smarter, they develop more and more complicated goals. When these goals aren’t absolutely aligned with both our preferences and the right context, the AI systems will behave strangely.

…we are not yet at “self-improving AI”, but we are at the stage of “AI that improves bits of the next AI, with increasing autonomy and agency”. And a couple of years ago we were at “AI that marginally speeds up coders”, and a couple of years before that we were at “AI is useless for AI development”. Where will we be one or two years from now?

And let me remind us all that the system which is now beginning to design its successor is also increasingly self-aware and therefore will surely eventually be prone to thinking, independently of us, about how it might want to be designed.

…In closing, I should state clearly that I love the world and I love humanity. I feel a lot of responsibility for the role of myself and my company here. And though I am a little frightened, I experience joy and optimism at the attention of so many people to this problem, and the earnestness with which I believe we will work together to get to a solution. I believe we have turned the light on and we can demand it be kept on, and that we have the courage to see things as they are.

Clark is clear that we are growing intelligent systems that are more complex than we can understand. Moreover, these systems are becoming self-aware–that is a fact, even if you think they are not sentient (but beware hubris on the latter question).

Those new service sector jobs

by  Tyler Cowen in

At least there is a religious revival for somebody:

When her Old English bulldog Lucy contracted lymphoma and died unexpectedly last year, Ingrid Nelson was rocked by grief. The dog was a deep source of support for Nelson, a sometimes overwhelmed single mom. “She was just my soul dog.”

Nelson’s grief was compounded by responses she got to her sadness: Animals don’t even have souls, a neighbor said. A colleague told her animals don’t go to heaven and she’d never see Lucy again.

Nelson wanted answers to these theological and spiritual questions from her Christian faith, but she was wary of mentioning them at the Congregational church she attends in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Even though the denomination is liberal, she worried someone at the church would repeat the same unsympathetic doctrine. Instead, she said, “I internalized and prayed on it.”

And she went to see an animal chaplain…

The spiritual counsel from Mikita helped lift the “horrible gray cloud” of Lucy’s death. It led Nelson to delve into scriptural references to animals: In Genesis, God calls the creation of animals “good.” In the story of Noah, God makes a covenant with “every living creature.” God personally feeds animals in the Book of Psalms.

“Ultimately, what was my relationship with Lucy? It was love. There was a love, there was a bond. And what is God? God is love,” Nelson said. “What I choose to believe is we’re all part of God’s creation. And in some way, shape or form we will all be reunited again.”

It is considered to be a growing sector, here is the Washington Post article.

My excellent Conversation with David Commins

by  Tyler Cowen in

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf are the topics, here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

David Commins, author of the new book Saudi Arabia: A Modern History, brings decades of scholarship and firsthand experience to explain the kingdom’s unlikely rise. Tyler and David discuss why Wahhabism was essential for Saudi state-building, the treatment of Shiites in the Eastern Province and whether discrimination has truly ended, why the Saudi state emerged from its poorer and least cosmopolitan regions, the lasting significance of the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure by millenarian extremists, what’s kept Gulf states stable, the differing motivations behind Saudi sports investments, the disappointing performance of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology despite its $10 billion endowment, the main barrier to improving its k-12 education, how Yemen became the region’s outlier of instability and whether Saudi Arabia learned from its mistakes there, the Houthis’ unclear strategic goals, the prospects for the kingdom’s post-oil future, the topic of David’s next book, and more.

And an excerpt:

COWEN: Now, as you know, the senior religious establishment is largely Nejd, right? Why does that matter? What’s the historical significance of that?

COMMINS: Right. Nejd is the region of central Arabia. Riyadh is currently the capital. The first Saudi empire had a capital nearby, called Diriyah. Nejd is really the territory that gave birth to the Wahhabi movement, it’s the homeland of the Saud dynasty, and it is the region of Arabia that was most thoroughly purged of the older Sunni tradition that had persisted in Nejd for centuries.

Consequently, by the time that the Saudi government developed bureaucratic agencies in the 1950s and ’60s, the religious institution was going to recruit from that region of Arabia primarily. Now, it certainly attracted loyalists from other parts of Arabia, but the Wahhabi mission, as I call it — their calling to what they considered true belief — began in Nejd and was very strongly identified with the towns of Nejd ever since the late 1700s.

COWEN: Would I be correct in inferring that some of the least cosmopolitan parts of Saudi Arabia built the Saudi state?

COMMINS: Yes, that is correct. That is correct. If you think of the 1700s and 1800s, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf coast of Arabia were the most cosmopolitan parts of Arabia.

COWEN: They’re richer, too, right? Jeddah is a much more advanced city than Riyadh at the time.

COMMINS: Somewhat more advanced. Yes, it is more advanced, it is more cosmopolitan than Nejd. There is the regional identity in Hejaz, that is the Red Sea coast where the holy cities and Jeddah are located. The townspeople there tended to look upon Nejd as a less advanced part of Arabia. But again, that’s a very recent historical development.

COWEN: How is it that the coastal regions just dropped the ball? You could imagine some alternate history where they become the center of Saudi power and religious thought, but they’re not.

COMMINS: Right. If you take Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina — that region of Arabia, known as Hejaz, had always been under the rule of other Muslim empires. They were under the rule of other Muslim powers because of the religious value of possessing, if you will, the holy cities, Mecca and Medina. From the time of the first Muslim dynasty that was based in Damascus in the seventh and early eighth centuries, all the way until the Ottoman Empire, Muslim dynasties outside Arabia coveted control of that region. They were just more powerful than local resources could generate.

Hejaz was always, if you were, to dependency on outside Muslim powers. If you look at the east coast of Arabia — what’s now the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf — it was richer than central Arabia. It’s the largest oasis in Arabia. It is in proximity to pearling banks, which were an important source for income for residents there. It was part of the Indian Ocean trade between Iraq and India. The population there was always — well, always — for the last thousand years has been dominated by Bedouin tribesmen.

There was a brief Ismaili Shia republic, you might say, in that part of Arabia in medieval times. It just didn’t have, it seems, the cohesion to conquer other parts of Arabia. That’s what makes the Saudi story really remarkable, is that they were able to muster and sustain the cohesion to carry out a conquest like that over the course of 50 years.

COWEN: Physically, how did they manage that? Water is a problem, a lot of transport is by camel, there’s no real rail system, right?

Recommended, full of historical information about a generally neglected region, neglected from the point of view of history at least rather than current affairs.

Celebrate Vishvakarma: A Holiday for Machines, Robots, and AI

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Most holidays celebrate people, gods or military victories. Today is India’s Vishvakarma Puja, a celebration of machines. In India on this day, workers clean and honor their equipment and engineers pay tribute to Vishvakarma, the god of architecture, engineering and manufacturing.

Call it a celebration of Solow and a reminder that capital, not just labor, drives growth.

Capital today isn’t just looms and tractors—it’s robots, software, and AI. These are the new force multipliers, the machines that extend not only our muscles but our minds. To celebrate Vishvakarma is to celebrate tools, tool makers and the capital that makes us productive.

We have Labor Day for workers and Earth Day for nature. Viskvakarma Day is for the machines. So today don’t thank Mother Earth, thank the machines, reflect on their power and productivity and be grateful for all that they make possible. Capital is the true source of abundance.

Vishvakarma Day should be our national holiday for abundance and progress.

Hat tip: Nimai Mehta.