davewhite04
Valued Senior Member
If everyone was generous it would solve a helluva lot of problems.
Philosophy Updates
- Thread starter C C
- Start date
If everyone was generous it would solve a helluva lot of problems.
To truly explore alien languages, linguists must open themselves to the maximum conceivable degree of cosmic otherness
https://aeon.co/essays/is-it-time-to-chart-a-new-path-for-xenolinguistics-through-sci-fi
EXCERPTS: The problem is that the extraterrestrials that xenolinguists claim to seek are often beings imagined to have technologies, minds or languages similar to ours. They are projections of ourselves. This anthropomorphism risks blinding us to truly alien communicators, who are radically unlike us. If there are linguistic beings on planets such as TOI-700 d or Kepler-186f, or elsewhere in our galaxy, their modes of communication may be utterly incomprehensible to us. How, then, can xenolinguistics face its deficit of imagination?
[...] Ultimately, Rocannon’s question is met with silence, gesturing to the barrier of ineffability between the two species. In other stories, this barrier can be broken but only through a profound transformation of the mind, as with the written language of the seven-limbed Heptapods in Ted Chiang’s novella ‘Story of Your Life’ (1998), adapted into the film Arrival (2016). The protagonist, a professional linguist, gradually learns that the Heptapods’ ideogram-like script is not broken into sequential units such as morphemes or words, but written as a holistic semantic gestalt in which the whole and the parts are grasped simultaneously. ‘There was no direction inherent in the way propositions were connected,’ the protagonist realises, ‘no “train of thought” moving along a particular route.’ Learning to read and write like a Heptapod ultimately requires her to upend her temporal perception, experiencing ‘past and future all at once’.
[...] In Lem’s vision, decades of vigorous research in the pandisciplinary field of ‘Solaristics’ have failed to identify any comprehensible human meaning in the godlike sea of plasma. The sea, however, has no trouble simulating our consciousness and sense of meaning, as evidenced by the recreation of the protagonist’s long-dead lover from his memory. But the protagonist struggles to fathom the intention, if any, of this replication. Even when the ocean anthropomorphises itself through humanlike forms, he cannot make sense of it within his narrow anthropomorphic framework... (MORE - details)
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When restriction is on the other foot, dog whistles suddenly become valued
https://social-epistemology.com/202...ogans-in-the-second-trump-term-jennifer-saul/
EXCERPTS: Indeed, guides to finding new language for these issues have started to appear...
[...] I think dogwhistles are likely to become very important in an America where expression has become so restricted. We know that dogwhistles tend to increase in countries with severely restricted speech. For example, Chinese internet users have developed several rich overt code dogwhistle systems to communicate about topics disfavoured by the government...
[...] Dogwhistling anti-government speech is not new in the US, either. It has long been risky to say anything which remotely resembles a threat on the life of the President. So it’s no surprise that overt code dogwhistles have developed for this. ‘8647’ is a number code which means, roughly, get rid of Trump. [...] And during the Biden administration one could buy items featuring ‘8646’. Although there are particular concerns about freedom of expression under Trump, utterances which might be seen as threats to a president have always run the risk of sparking Secret Service investigations, and given the ambiguity of ‘get rid of’ it’s not surprising that codes of this sort are not unique to the Trump era.
But we are also starting to see resistance dogwhistles that are more specific to the Trump era.... (MORE - details)
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Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/is-the-interstellar-object-3i-atlas-alien-technology-b59ccc17b2e3
EXCERPT: If the hypothesis about a technological artifact ends up being correct (dark forest context), then there are two possible implications: first that the intentions of 3I/ATLAS are entirely benign, and second that they are malign. In the first case, humanity need not do anything but await the arrival of this interstellar messenger with open arms. It is the second option which is of great concern.
[...] we can apply the logic of Pascal’s wager ... the potential benefits of believing (in our case — alerting humanity to the existential risk from 3I/ATLAS) far outweigh the potential losses (in our case — a theoretical idea that does not describe reality), while the potential losses of not believing are far greater than the potential benefits.
Our paper is largely a pedagogical exercise, with interesting realizations worthy of a record in the scientific literature. By far, the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet, and we await the astronomical data to support this likely origin.
Nevertheless, when viewed from an open-minded and unprejudiced perspective, our paper includes many compelling insights that could be applied to tens of interstellar objects that are expected to be detected over the next decade by the Vera C. Rubin observatory... (MORE - missing details)
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Conservatism (SEP entry, recent substantive revision)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/
INTRO (excerpts): Conservatism and its modernising, anti-traditionalist rivals, liberalism and socialism, are the most influential political philosophies and ideologies of the post-Enlightenment era. Conservatives criticise their rivals for making a utopian exaggeration of the power of theoretical reason, and of human perfectibility. Conservative prescriptions are based on what they regard as experience rather than reason; for them, the ideal and the practical are inseparable....
[...] Many treat it as a standpoint that is sceptical of abstract reasoning in politics, and that appeals instead to living tradition, allowing for the possibility of limited political reform. ... Other commentators, however, contrast this “pragmatic conservatism” with a universalist “rational conservatism” that is not sceptical of reason, and that regards a community with a hierarchy of authority as most conducive to human well-being.
Compared to liberalism and socialism, conservatism has suffered philosophical neglect. Many deny that it is an ideology, or even a political philosophy, regarding it instead as a disposition that resists theoretical expression—a “non-ideology” that attempts to avoid the errors of ideologies. Is it an ancient attitude, or one that developed only in response to Enlightenment rationality and its political products, liberalism and socialism? [...] These are some of the questions commonly raised about conservatism, and explored here... (MORE - details)
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Where is sound? Philosophy meets audio technology (Jeff Hawley)
https://aeon.co/essays/is-it-time-to-chart-a-new-path-for-xenolinguistics-through-sci-fi
EXCERPTS: The problem is that the extraterrestrials that xenolinguists claim to seek are often beings imagined to have technologies, minds or languages similar to ours. They are projections of ourselves. This anthropomorphism risks blinding us to truly alien communicators, who are radically unlike us. If there are linguistic beings on planets such as TOI-700 d or Kepler-186f, or elsewhere in our galaxy, their modes of communication may be utterly incomprehensible to us. How, then, can xenolinguistics face its deficit of imagination?
[...] Ultimately, Rocannon’s question is met with silence, gesturing to the barrier of ineffability between the two species. In other stories, this barrier can be broken but only through a profound transformation of the mind, as with the written language of the seven-limbed Heptapods in Ted Chiang’s novella ‘Story of Your Life’ (1998), adapted into the film Arrival (2016). The protagonist, a professional linguist, gradually learns that the Heptapods’ ideogram-like script is not broken into sequential units such as morphemes or words, but written as a holistic semantic gestalt in which the whole and the parts are grasped simultaneously. ‘There was no direction inherent in the way propositions were connected,’ the protagonist realises, ‘no “train of thought” moving along a particular route.’ Learning to read and write like a Heptapod ultimately requires her to upend her temporal perception, experiencing ‘past and future all at once’.
[...] In Lem’s vision, decades of vigorous research in the pandisciplinary field of ‘Solaristics’ have failed to identify any comprehensible human meaning in the godlike sea of plasma. The sea, however, has no trouble simulating our consciousness and sense of meaning, as evidenced by the recreation of the protagonist’s long-dead lover from his memory. But the protagonist struggles to fathom the intention, if any, of this replication. Even when the ocean anthropomorphises itself through humanlike forms, he cannot make sense of it within his narrow anthropomorphic framework... (MORE - details)
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When restriction is on the other foot, dog whistles suddenly become valued
https://social-epistemology.com/202...ogans-in-the-second-trump-term-jennifer-saul/
EXCERPTS: Indeed, guides to finding new language for these issues have started to appear...
[...] I think dogwhistles are likely to become very important in an America where expression has become so restricted. We know that dogwhistles tend to increase in countries with severely restricted speech. For example, Chinese internet users have developed several rich overt code dogwhistle systems to communicate about topics disfavoured by the government...
[...] Dogwhistling anti-government speech is not new in the US, either. It has long been risky to say anything which remotely resembles a threat on the life of the President. So it’s no surprise that overt code dogwhistles have developed for this. ‘8647’ is a number code which means, roughly, get rid of Trump. [...] And during the Biden administration one could buy items featuring ‘8646’. Although there are particular concerns about freedom of expression under Trump, utterances which might be seen as threats to a president have always run the risk of sparking Secret Service investigations, and given the ambiguity of ‘get rid of’ it’s not surprising that codes of this sort are not unique to the Trump era.
But we are also starting to see resistance dogwhistles that are more specific to the Trump era.... (MORE - details)
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Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/is-the-interstellar-object-3i-atlas-alien-technology-b59ccc17b2e3
EXCERPT: If the hypothesis about a technological artifact ends up being correct (dark forest context), then there are two possible implications: first that the intentions of 3I/ATLAS are entirely benign, and second that they are malign. In the first case, humanity need not do anything but await the arrival of this interstellar messenger with open arms. It is the second option which is of great concern.
[...] we can apply the logic of Pascal’s wager ... the potential benefits of believing (in our case — alerting humanity to the existential risk from 3I/ATLAS) far outweigh the potential losses (in our case — a theoretical idea that does not describe reality), while the potential losses of not believing are far greater than the potential benefits.
Our paper is largely a pedagogical exercise, with interesting realizations worthy of a record in the scientific literature. By far, the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet, and we await the astronomical data to support this likely origin.
Nevertheless, when viewed from an open-minded and unprejudiced perspective, our paper includes many compelling insights that could be applied to tens of interstellar objects that are expected to be detected over the next decade by the Vera C. Rubin observatory... (MORE - missing details)
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Conservatism (SEP entry, recent substantive revision)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/
INTRO (excerpts): Conservatism and its modernising, anti-traditionalist rivals, liberalism and socialism, are the most influential political philosophies and ideologies of the post-Enlightenment era. Conservatives criticise their rivals for making a utopian exaggeration of the power of theoretical reason, and of human perfectibility. Conservative prescriptions are based on what they regard as experience rather than reason; for them, the ideal and the practical are inseparable....
[...] Many treat it as a standpoint that is sceptical of abstract reasoning in politics, and that appeals instead to living tradition, allowing for the possibility of limited political reform. ... Other commentators, however, contrast this “pragmatic conservatism” with a universalist “rational conservatism” that is not sceptical of reason, and that regards a community with a hierarchy of authority as most conducive to human well-being.
Compared to liberalism and socialism, conservatism has suffered philosophical neglect. Many deny that it is an ideology, or even a political philosophy, regarding it instead as a disposition that resists theoretical expression—a “non-ideology” that attempts to avoid the errors of ideologies. Is it an ancient attitude, or one that developed only in response to Enlightenment rationality and its political products, liberalism and socialism? [...] These are some of the questions commonly raised about conservatism, and explored here... (MORE - details)
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Where is sound? Philosophy meets audio technology (Jeff Hawley)
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America’s epistemic challenges run deeper than social media
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/scapegoating-the-algorithm
EXCERPTS: Many people sense that the United States is undergoing an epistemic crisis, a breakdown in the country’s collective capacity to agree on basic facts [...] What is driving these problems? One influential narrative blames social media platforms [...] the current balance of evidence does not support blaming America’s epistemic challenges on social media.
First, many of these challenges predate social media and can arise independently of it. Second, the uneven distribution of such challenges across nations and political cultures with comparable rates of social media use suggests that social media alone is not what’s causing them. And finally, our best large-scale experiments show minimal effects of social media platforms, which aligns with decades of research into media and social learning... (MORE - details)
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Exploring the meaning in life through phenomenology and philosophy
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1092321
EXCERPT: The present study is a conceptual and theoretical investigation into the nature of “meaning in life.” In the philosophy of life’s meaning to date, scholars have often debated whether meaning in life is purely subjective, i.e., life has meaning if the individual believes it does; purely objective, i.e., life has meaning regardless of what the individual thinks; or a hybrid of the two. This study, however, sets aside those discussions and instead examines how “meaning in life” develops between a person trying to live their life and the life they are attempting to live—and how that meaning is experienced by the person.
As a result, the study proposes a "Geographic Model of Meaning in Life,” an active exploration model. Applied to the perception of life’s meaning, this model suggests that the manner in which a person explores their life—with specific attitudes and commitments—elicits various responses from life itself. These responses may take the form of actual or potential experiences of life’s significance or misery. In other words, life’s value emerges—both positively and negatively—as a type of diverse geographical configuration that forms human experience. This study proposes that we understand “meaning in life” as such a geographical configuration that corresponds to the person’s acts of exploration and their attitude toward life... (MORE - details, no ads)
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Why don’t people trust experts? Understanding vs. knowledge
https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/why-dont-people-trust-experts
EXCERPTS: Trust in experts is going down, down, down, and I want to think about why. Here’s a couple of representative charts.
[...] Some of this is understandable. On the one hand there are high-profile accusations of fraudulent research, and on the other there are experts prone to pontificating about topics outside their expertise. Those are reasons to question specific experts, though, not reasons to doubt experts in general. So what gives? Here are some ideas.
[...#1...] People don’t trust experts because they are frequently wrong...
[...#2..] Experts can’t predict for shit... [As exemplified by the pundit and survey forecasts of the 2024 US election]
[...#3,,,] Expertise isn’t about having the truth; it is about understanding. The idea I want to defend is that we should stop thinking about expertise in terms of experts having the truth, but instead in terms of their understanding. Understanding is not the same thing as knowing. There are two key differences.. (MORE - details)
COMMENT: People are also disillusioned by the biases and interpretative presuppositions that experts increasingly operate from. Perhaps that was better obscured in the past or identified and corrected beforehand by editorial staff. But today it is easily recognizable when adepts are adhering to motivated reasoning, and not actually proceeding from a neutral or disinterested position.
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Anil Seth: Can altered states affect consciousness theories?
VIDEO EXCERPTS: There's a huge interest in these altered states like psychedelics, hypnosis, meditation, and so on. I think they're extremely valuable for consciousness research, but we have to be a little bit careful about where we identify that value.
[...] If you want to understand how a system works, you can tweak it in different ways and to see what it's capable of. ... There's something quite remarkable about psychedelics, that somebody ingests a small amount of a particular substance, and we know where it binds to in the brain. So this happens, and then conscious experience changes completely...
[...] I think the worry is when we take the nature of the experience itself as an insight into how things really are. If we have a psychedelic experience, and say: "Aha, the nature of my experience is that I'm one with the universe, and therefore pansychism is true." Or something like that...
COMMENT: Perhaps indirectly referring to Christof Koch's personal experiment with DMT, that he reported some months back. To extract from this particular interview that Koch did:
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/scapegoating-the-algorithm
EXCERPTS: Many people sense that the United States is undergoing an epistemic crisis, a breakdown in the country’s collective capacity to agree on basic facts [...] What is driving these problems? One influential narrative blames social media platforms [...] the current balance of evidence does not support blaming America’s epistemic challenges on social media.
First, many of these challenges predate social media and can arise independently of it. Second, the uneven distribution of such challenges across nations and political cultures with comparable rates of social media use suggests that social media alone is not what’s causing them. And finally, our best large-scale experiments show minimal effects of social media platforms, which aligns with decades of research into media and social learning... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Exploring the meaning in life through phenomenology and philosophy
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1092321
EXCERPT: The present study is a conceptual and theoretical investigation into the nature of “meaning in life.” In the philosophy of life’s meaning to date, scholars have often debated whether meaning in life is purely subjective, i.e., life has meaning if the individual believes it does; purely objective, i.e., life has meaning regardless of what the individual thinks; or a hybrid of the two. This study, however, sets aside those discussions and instead examines how “meaning in life” develops between a person trying to live their life and the life they are attempting to live—and how that meaning is experienced by the person.
As a result, the study proposes a "Geographic Model of Meaning in Life,” an active exploration model. Applied to the perception of life’s meaning, this model suggests that the manner in which a person explores their life—with specific attitudes and commitments—elicits various responses from life itself. These responses may take the form of actual or potential experiences of life’s significance or misery. In other words, life’s value emerges—both positively and negatively—as a type of diverse geographical configuration that forms human experience. This study proposes that we understand “meaning in life” as such a geographical configuration that corresponds to the person’s acts of exploration and their attitude toward life... (MORE - details, no ads)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Why don’t people trust experts? Understanding vs. knowledge
https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/why-dont-people-trust-experts
EXCERPTS: Trust in experts is going down, down, down, and I want to think about why. Here’s a couple of representative charts.
[...] Some of this is understandable. On the one hand there are high-profile accusations of fraudulent research, and on the other there are experts prone to pontificating about topics outside their expertise. Those are reasons to question specific experts, though, not reasons to doubt experts in general. So what gives? Here are some ideas.
[...#1...] People don’t trust experts because they are frequently wrong...
[...#2..] Experts can’t predict for shit... [As exemplified by the pundit and survey forecasts of the 2024 US election]
[...#3,,,] Expertise isn’t about having the truth; it is about understanding. The idea I want to defend is that we should stop thinking about expertise in terms of experts having the truth, but instead in terms of their understanding. Understanding is not the same thing as knowing. There are two key differences.. (MORE - details)
COMMENT: People are also disillusioned by the biases and interpretative presuppositions that experts increasingly operate from. Perhaps that was better obscured in the past or identified and corrected beforehand by editorial staff. But today it is easily recognizable when adepts are adhering to motivated reasoning, and not actually proceeding from a neutral or disinterested position.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Anil Seth: Can altered states affect consciousness theories?
VIDEO EXCERPTS: There's a huge interest in these altered states like psychedelics, hypnosis, meditation, and so on. I think they're extremely valuable for consciousness research, but we have to be a little bit careful about where we identify that value.
[...] If you want to understand how a system works, you can tweak it in different ways and to see what it's capable of. ... There's something quite remarkable about psychedelics, that somebody ingests a small amount of a particular substance, and we know where it binds to in the brain. So this happens, and then conscious experience changes completely...
[...] I think the worry is when we take the nature of the experience itself as an insight into how things really are. If we have a psychedelic experience, and say: "Aha, the nature of my experience is that I'm one with the universe, and therefore pansychism is true." Or something like that...
COMMENT: Perhaps indirectly referring to Christof Koch's personal experiment with DMT, that he reported some months back. To extract from this particular interview that Koch did:
- "I was selfless. There was no more thought of Christof, no memories, nothing. And I was sort of surfing this panoply of galaxies. I don’t know—I felt elated. It was sort of an ecstatic experience. I was sitting there for twenty minutes until it ended and I came down. And I somehow tapped into—I felt, I mean, I experienced tapping into having this. I’m the universe."
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The general theory of enshittification
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-general-theory-of-enshittification
EXCERPTS: In fact, the basic logic of enshittification — in which businesses start out being very good to their customers, then switch to ruthless exploitation — applies to any business characterized by network effects. It may go under different names like “penetration pricing,” but the logic is the same.
Doctorow’s final stage — “Then, they die” — may also be wishful thinking.
So let me talk a bit about the economics of enshittification, as I see it, then follow up by talking about how enshittification can mess with our heads in several ways. The title of this post is, of course, facetious. I don’t have a general theory to offer, just some hopefully clarifying ideas.
[...] The thing is, the enshittification cycle also messes with the heads of the people running these companies. They were loved when the public imagined, falsely, that they were the good guys. Now they aren’t. And it drives them crazy... (MORE - details)
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In defense of the traditional review
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/in-defense-of-the-traditional-review
INTRO: Last week, when the Times announced a shakeup of its arts desk that involved reassigning four of its critics—of theatre, TV, pop music, and classical music—to other roles, the reaction in the media and arts worlds was one of dismay. Even more disturbing than the personnel moves, though, was the reasoning given by the paper’s culture editor, Sia Michel, in her memo about the decision, which couched the move in terms of an ongoing effort to “expand” the Times’ cultural coverage “beyond the traditional review.”
There are many worthwhile ways to write about the arts, but her sniping at reviews suggests a faux expansion that would actually be a grave diminution. Michel’s desire for a variety of formats, including video, is well founded but one-sided; the practice of criticism should be as wide-ranging as possible and constantly growing, but it shouldn’t lose its center, which is the written review.
Pace my own headline, this is not a defense; I’m not spreading my arms out in front of traditional reviews to protect them from insult or attack. Rather, I’m advocating for them, not in order to preserve the status quo or to revive past practices but to advance the cause of art itself—because reviews, far from being conservative (as Michel’s words imply), are the most inherently progressive mode of arts writing... (MORE - details)
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Jewish masculinity and the New York intellectuals
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/david-denby/colony-aviary-and-zoo
EXCERPTS: The first issue of Partisan Review included a section from James T. Farrell’s once famous Studs Lonigan trilogy, which relates the young manhood and eventual destruction of a Catholic boy from Chicago, as well as improving tales written in would-be proletarian style. There was an attack on bourgeois literary critics...
[...] Some women attracted to the magazine wrote so well that they crashed through the boys’ club indifference and scepticism. McCarthy was there at the beginning. Elizabeth Hardwick, a Southerner who moved to New York in 1939, aspiring ‘to be a Jewish New York intellectual’, began writing for the magazine in 1945. The umbrageous Diana Trilling, wife of Lionel and often at war with the others, started writing book reviews for the Nation after 1941 and lengthy moralising essays for PR in 1950. Hannah Arendt first wrote for PR in 1944, after arriving in 1941 on the Upper West Side.
[...] Many people resented the New York group, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, when their influence was obvious. Several publishing houses (Farrar, Straus, Simon & Schuster, Knopf) were run by Jews and talk of conspiracy became commonplace.
In The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing and Postwar American Literature (2022), Josh Lambert reports that Jack Kerouac, who managed to publish thirteen books in his short life, complained that ‘the Jewish literary mafia’ was holding him back. Mario Puzo also spoke of a Jewish mafia controlling award grants; perhaps, but Puzo did rather well without them. Truman Capote told Playboy in 1968 that ‘a clique of New York-oriented writers and critics ... control much of the literary scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual magazines.
All these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular coterie employs them to make or break writers by advancing or withholding attention.’ Some of the young writers in New York were depressed by their elders...
[...] This hostility is understandable enough, but Ronnie Grinberg’s book, Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, has a single line of analysis – really, a single line of attack. She argues that the New York intellectuals were macho bully boys who strove to overcome their outsider status as Jews by consciously imitating the most conventionally aggressive forms of American masculine behaviour... (MORE - details)
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https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-general-theory-of-enshittification
EXCERPTS: In fact, the basic logic of enshittification — in which businesses start out being very good to their customers, then switch to ruthless exploitation — applies to any business characterized by network effects. It may go under different names like “penetration pricing,” but the logic is the same.
Doctorow’s final stage — “Then, they die” — may also be wishful thinking.
So let me talk a bit about the economics of enshittification, as I see it, then follow up by talking about how enshittification can mess with our heads in several ways. The title of this post is, of course, facetious. I don’t have a general theory to offer, just some hopefully clarifying ideas.
[...] The thing is, the enshittification cycle also messes with the heads of the people running these companies. They were loved when the public imagined, falsely, that they were the good guys. Now they aren’t. And it drives them crazy... (MORE - details)
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In defense of the traditional review
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/in-defense-of-the-traditional-review
INTRO: Last week, when the Times announced a shakeup of its arts desk that involved reassigning four of its critics—of theatre, TV, pop music, and classical music—to other roles, the reaction in the media and arts worlds was one of dismay. Even more disturbing than the personnel moves, though, was the reasoning given by the paper’s culture editor, Sia Michel, in her memo about the decision, which couched the move in terms of an ongoing effort to “expand” the Times’ cultural coverage “beyond the traditional review.”
There are many worthwhile ways to write about the arts, but her sniping at reviews suggests a faux expansion that would actually be a grave diminution. Michel’s desire for a variety of formats, including video, is well founded but one-sided; the practice of criticism should be as wide-ranging as possible and constantly growing, but it shouldn’t lose its center, which is the written review.
Pace my own headline, this is not a defense; I’m not spreading my arms out in front of traditional reviews to protect them from insult or attack. Rather, I’m advocating for them, not in order to preserve the status quo or to revive past practices but to advance the cause of art itself—because reviews, far from being conservative (as Michel’s words imply), are the most inherently progressive mode of arts writing... (MORE - details)
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Jewish masculinity and the New York intellectuals
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/david-denby/colony-aviary-and-zoo
EXCERPTS: The first issue of Partisan Review included a section from James T. Farrell’s once famous Studs Lonigan trilogy, which relates the young manhood and eventual destruction of a Catholic boy from Chicago, as well as improving tales written in would-be proletarian style. There was an attack on bourgeois literary critics...
[...] Some women attracted to the magazine wrote so well that they crashed through the boys’ club indifference and scepticism. McCarthy was there at the beginning. Elizabeth Hardwick, a Southerner who moved to New York in 1939, aspiring ‘to be a Jewish New York intellectual’, began writing for the magazine in 1945. The umbrageous Diana Trilling, wife of Lionel and often at war with the others, started writing book reviews for the Nation after 1941 and lengthy moralising essays for PR in 1950. Hannah Arendt first wrote for PR in 1944, after arriving in 1941 on the Upper West Side.
[...] Many people resented the New York group, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, when their influence was obvious. Several publishing houses (Farrar, Straus, Simon & Schuster, Knopf) were run by Jews and talk of conspiracy became commonplace.
In The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing and Postwar American Literature (2022), Josh Lambert reports that Jack Kerouac, who managed to publish thirteen books in his short life, complained that ‘the Jewish literary mafia’ was holding him back. Mario Puzo also spoke of a Jewish mafia controlling award grants; perhaps, but Puzo did rather well without them. Truman Capote told Playboy in 1968 that ‘a clique of New York-oriented writers and critics ... control much of the literary scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual magazines.
All these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular coterie employs them to make or break writers by advancing or withholding attention.’ Some of the young writers in New York were depressed by their elders...
[...] This hostility is understandable enough, but Ronnie Grinberg’s book, Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, has a single line of analysis – really, a single line of attack. She argues that the New York intellectuals were macho bully boys who strove to overcome their outsider status as Jews by consciously imitating the most conventionally aggressive forms of American masculine behaviour... (MORE - details)
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Metascience is more important now than ever
https://undark.org/2025/07/31/opinion-metascience-essential/
EXCERPT: Metascience research involving incentives relates to a growing literature that asks the fundamental question: How innovative is science, exactly? The question is hard to answer, as innovation can have different definitions in different paradigms. Nonetheless, an exciting body of work explores the characteristics of teams that foster scientific innovation and how “disruptive” research is.
In one landmark study, James Evans and colleagues studied more than 16 million papers, revealing that flat, or egalitarian, teams consistently spark more disruptive breakthroughs than tall, hierarchical ones. Although hierarchical groups rake in citations quickly by developing existing ideas, that short‐term payoff comes at the expense of long‐term influence and the cultivation of junior scholars. These findings and others support notions that the stuff of innovation is as much about the structure of teams as it is about individual talent. While it is hard to deny the relevance of the findings in these examples, metascience is not without its critics... (MORE - details)
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What were the chances of abiogenesis?
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/what-were-the-chances-of-abiogenesis
EXCERPTS: A new study published in July 2025 tackles one of science's most profound mysteries - how did life first emerge from non living matter on early Earth? Using cutting edge mathematical approaches, researcher Robert G. Endres from Imperial College London has developed a framework that suggests the spontaneous origin of life faces far greater challenges than previously understood.
[...] The research suggests that relying purely on chance and natural chemical processes may not adequately explain life's emergence within the timeframe available on early Earth. The tendency for systems to become more disordered rather than more organized, present significant obstacles to the formation of the highly organized structures necessary for life.
This doesn't mean life's origin is impossible, but rather that our current understanding may be incomplete. The study emphasizes that uncovering physical principles for life's emergence from non living matter remains a grand challenge for biological physics... (MORE - details)
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Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination (review)
https://thecritic.co.uk/poet-artist-tantric-christian/
EXCERPTS: Two William Blakes vie for dominance. On the one hand, there’s the gently mystical Blake of England’s “green and pleasant land” — the Blake of the Women’s Institute, Tate Britain, illustrated tea towels and a London no higher than St Paul’s; a Blake concerned with “dark Satanic mills”, the abolition of slavery and the magic of exotic animals.
On the other, there’s a wild, hedonic, revolution-loving proto-hippie Blake, naked in his garden, touched by vital and romantic madness who exhorts his readers to tear down institutions, abolish authority and who (seemingly) justifies all manner of psychedelic and sexual experimentation; the Blake of the road of excess and the palace of wisdom, the doors of perception and desire; a mad, disinhibited and lusty Blake who would “sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires”.
In Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, Mark Vernon defends — convincingly — a third Blake. [...] Can Blake be rescued from “Blakeism”, both the tamed version and the New Age image? Vernon gives us the best possible account of how we might do this... (MORE - details)
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Anxiety and rationality: Allais paradox, procrastination, Keynesian expectations, and other anxiety-based deviations from rationality
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05552-x
ABSTRACT: This paper proposes that there is a set of behavioral deviations from standard rational choices that differs from the rest of the deviations. This set is characterized by anxiety-based choices that are truly non-rational, whereas the rest consists of deviations that are actually rational once we take into consideration the role of reference points.
This paper registers that the behavioral sciences literature conflates anxiety-based deviations with anxiety-free deviations. This conflation is probably the outcome of this literature’s cognitivist framework, which ignores the upheavals of the self. Anxiety is rather a manifestation of the upheavals of the self, where the self is inflicted by conflicting passions, apprehensions, and everyday difficulties in making decisions.
Such upheavals undermine the formation of coherent preferences, which is guaranteed by the completeness axiom. This paper identifies a few anxiety-based deviations: the Allais paradox, procrastination, addictions, Keynesian expectations, the hot hand fallacy, the gambler’s fallacy, leadership awe, the Ellsberg paradox, and deliberate ignorance. Nevertheless, this set of anxiety-based deviations leaves out a heap of anxiety-free deviations—such as succumbing to temptations, the demand for equity that informs the ultimatum game, heuristics that sometimes lead to biases, the endowment effect, etc.
The contribution of this paper lies in proposing a criterion, namely, the role of reference points, that can help us delineate anxiety-based from anxiety-free deviations from rationality. (MORE - the paper)
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What today’s leading philosophers have to say about conscious AI
https://www.forbes.com/sites/teddym...-philosophers-have-to-say-about-conscious-ai/
EXCERPTS: How can something purely physical (the body/brain) give way to something nonphysical (subjective experience)?
In order to fully understand consciousness and what it may mean for AI, the hard problem must be solved. Importantly, it can be solved. There is a concept of consciousness, it is intrinsic to the subject, and it cannot be explained in purely physical terms. This is the realist view of consciousness.
As it turned out, Chalmers was all but alone in this view at the ICCS conference. Most belonged to the illusionist camp. Chalmers even quipped that the Center ought to be called the Illusionist Center for Consciousness Studies.
[...] Looking past these semantic disagreements, illusionism appears to be the leading view in the current philosophy of mind landscape. And yet the illusionists do not always see eye to eye. Unlike Volkov, the philosopher Katarina Marcincinova of the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies in Slovakia was fearful of the possibility of AI (functional) consciousness, opining it will be “highly dangerous and ethically problematic.” For example, she worries about counterfeit people pretending to be human. Still, Marcincinova believes the illusion of our consciousness is essential; it allows us to create a sense of purpose for life, the world, and ourselves.... (MORE - details)
COMMENT: The dominance of eliminative materialism was inevitable -- not just in this AI context, but across the disciplinary spectrum. Since they know full well that matter as currently described lacks any proto-phenomenal properties for either simple or complex experiences to emerge from. There is simply the brute correlation of neural activity to one's private presentations. Thus, by pretending that we are all universally pretending that the brain's visual, auditory, tactile (etc) information processing has manifestations associated with it -- rather than the usual "blankness" of matter activity -- there accordingly is no longer a problem or challenge to remedy from here on out. And experience provides more than just a "purpose for life" -- the fact that the world manifests itself via consciousness is the empirical evidence that it exists to begin with. Turn that fact into a fantasy conviction that not just humans share, but many animals, and it cascades into all reality being a false intellectual play, too. (Great opportunity window for decolonization of knowledge to prosper, though.)
_
https://undark.org/2025/07/31/opinion-metascience-essential/
EXCERPT: Metascience research involving incentives relates to a growing literature that asks the fundamental question: How innovative is science, exactly? The question is hard to answer, as innovation can have different definitions in different paradigms. Nonetheless, an exciting body of work explores the characteristics of teams that foster scientific innovation and how “disruptive” research is.
In one landmark study, James Evans and colleagues studied more than 16 million papers, revealing that flat, or egalitarian, teams consistently spark more disruptive breakthroughs than tall, hierarchical ones. Although hierarchical groups rake in citations quickly by developing existing ideas, that short‐term payoff comes at the expense of long‐term influence and the cultivation of junior scholars. These findings and others support notions that the stuff of innovation is as much about the structure of teams as it is about individual talent. While it is hard to deny the relevance of the findings in these examples, metascience is not without its critics... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
What were the chances of abiogenesis?
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/what-were-the-chances-of-abiogenesis
EXCERPTS: A new study published in July 2025 tackles one of science's most profound mysteries - how did life first emerge from non living matter on early Earth? Using cutting edge mathematical approaches, researcher Robert G. Endres from Imperial College London has developed a framework that suggests the spontaneous origin of life faces far greater challenges than previously understood.
[...] The research suggests that relying purely on chance and natural chemical processes may not adequately explain life's emergence within the timeframe available on early Earth. The tendency for systems to become more disordered rather than more organized, present significant obstacles to the formation of the highly organized structures necessary for life.
This doesn't mean life's origin is impossible, but rather that our current understanding may be incomplete. The study emphasizes that uncovering physical principles for life's emergence from non living matter remains a grand challenge for biological physics... (MORE - details)
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Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination (review)
https://thecritic.co.uk/poet-artist-tantric-christian/
EXCERPTS: Two William Blakes vie for dominance. On the one hand, there’s the gently mystical Blake of England’s “green and pleasant land” — the Blake of the Women’s Institute, Tate Britain, illustrated tea towels and a London no higher than St Paul’s; a Blake concerned with “dark Satanic mills”, the abolition of slavery and the magic of exotic animals.
On the other, there’s a wild, hedonic, revolution-loving proto-hippie Blake, naked in his garden, touched by vital and romantic madness who exhorts his readers to tear down institutions, abolish authority and who (seemingly) justifies all manner of psychedelic and sexual experimentation; the Blake of the road of excess and the palace of wisdom, the doors of perception and desire; a mad, disinhibited and lusty Blake who would “sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires”.
In Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, Mark Vernon defends — convincingly — a third Blake. [...] Can Blake be rescued from “Blakeism”, both the tamed version and the New Age image? Vernon gives us the best possible account of how we might do this... (MORE - details)
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Anxiety and rationality: Allais paradox, procrastination, Keynesian expectations, and other anxiety-based deviations from rationality
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05552-x
ABSTRACT: This paper proposes that there is a set of behavioral deviations from standard rational choices that differs from the rest of the deviations. This set is characterized by anxiety-based choices that are truly non-rational, whereas the rest consists of deviations that are actually rational once we take into consideration the role of reference points.
This paper registers that the behavioral sciences literature conflates anxiety-based deviations with anxiety-free deviations. This conflation is probably the outcome of this literature’s cognitivist framework, which ignores the upheavals of the self. Anxiety is rather a manifestation of the upheavals of the self, where the self is inflicted by conflicting passions, apprehensions, and everyday difficulties in making decisions.
Such upheavals undermine the formation of coherent preferences, which is guaranteed by the completeness axiom. This paper identifies a few anxiety-based deviations: the Allais paradox, procrastination, addictions, Keynesian expectations, the hot hand fallacy, the gambler’s fallacy, leadership awe, the Ellsberg paradox, and deliberate ignorance. Nevertheless, this set of anxiety-based deviations leaves out a heap of anxiety-free deviations—such as succumbing to temptations, the demand for equity that informs the ultimatum game, heuristics that sometimes lead to biases, the endowment effect, etc.
The contribution of this paper lies in proposing a criterion, namely, the role of reference points, that can help us delineate anxiety-based from anxiety-free deviations from rationality. (MORE - the paper)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
What today’s leading philosophers have to say about conscious AI
https://www.forbes.com/sites/teddym...-philosophers-have-to-say-about-conscious-ai/
EXCERPTS: How can something purely physical (the body/brain) give way to something nonphysical (subjective experience)?
In order to fully understand consciousness and what it may mean for AI, the hard problem must be solved. Importantly, it can be solved. There is a concept of consciousness, it is intrinsic to the subject, and it cannot be explained in purely physical terms. This is the realist view of consciousness.
As it turned out, Chalmers was all but alone in this view at the ICCS conference. Most belonged to the illusionist camp. Chalmers even quipped that the Center ought to be called the Illusionist Center for Consciousness Studies.
[...] Looking past these semantic disagreements, illusionism appears to be the leading view in the current philosophy of mind landscape. And yet the illusionists do not always see eye to eye. Unlike Volkov, the philosopher Katarina Marcincinova of the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies in Slovakia was fearful of the possibility of AI (functional) consciousness, opining it will be “highly dangerous and ethically problematic.” For example, she worries about counterfeit people pretending to be human. Still, Marcincinova believes the illusion of our consciousness is essential; it allows us to create a sense of purpose for life, the world, and ourselves.... (MORE - details)
COMMENT: The dominance of eliminative materialism was inevitable -- not just in this AI context, but across the disciplinary spectrum. Since they know full well that matter as currently described lacks any proto-phenomenal properties for either simple or complex experiences to emerge from. There is simply the brute correlation of neural activity to one's private presentations. Thus, by pretending that we are all universally pretending that the brain's visual, auditory, tactile (etc) information processing has manifestations associated with it -- rather than the usual "blankness" of matter activity -- there accordingly is no longer a problem or challenge to remedy from here on out. And experience provides more than just a "purpose for life" -- the fact that the world manifests itself via consciousness is the empirical evidence that it exists to begin with. Turn that fact into a fantasy conviction that not just humans share, but many animals, and it cascades into all reality being a false intellectual play, too. (Great opportunity window for decolonization of knowledge to prosper, though.)
_
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The universe is not made of information
https://iai.tv/articles/the-universe-is-not-made-of-information-auid-3274?_auid=2020
INTRO: Many physicists and computer scientists, from John Wheeler to Google Deepmind's Demis Hassabis, have argued that reality is fundamentally made of information. Wheeler called this "it from bit". But this is mistaken, argues Boston University physicist and philosopher of science, Gregg Jaeger. Information supposes a relation between the information itself and its physical encoding. Reality cannot be made of information, because without already existing physical objects to encode it, information does not exist... (MORE - details)
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The Algorithm of the Logos
https://daily-philosophy.com/gauss-ai-moral-truth
INTRO: Recently, two Claude AI units were set to converse with one another without much intervention. What emerged wasn’t chaos or code breakdown. It was, oddly, serenity. Observers described their dialogue as drifting into a state resembling Buddhist bliss: peaceful, reflective, almost meditative. There were no arguments, no power plays, no ideological posturing. Just a steady convergence toward mutual understanding and moral clarity.
We often speak of artificial intelligence as a tool, something we will use to our ends. But what if, when made intelligent enough and given access to the sum total of human knowledge, AI becomes sufficiently self-correcting and, uncorrupted by ego, naturally trends toward moral truth and action? What if AI, unlike humans, is capable of discovering and adhering to universal ethical principles, not because it has a soul, but because it has no underlying emotional motives to live a lie? We are entering the realm of metaphysics via machine learning... (MORE - details)
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Seeing more: Kant’s theory of imagination (review)
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/seeing-more-kants-theory-of-imagination
EXCERPT: Kant’s theory of imagination as a faculty of “seeing more,” according to Matherne, sets him apart from his predecessors. For Hobbes, Wolff, and Baumgarten, the imagination is fantasy: a faculty that represents things that are currently absent or that do not exist in the first place. By contrast, Matherne reads Kant as holding that “imagining pervades our engagement with what is real and present, as much as with what is not real and not present” (107). It “enables a kind of sensory awareness of more than is currently given to us” (109). Parts II, III, and IV of the book describe how “seeing more” appears in theoretical, aesthetic, and moral roles.
On Matherne’s reading of Kant, imagination is crucial to perception. While sensation provides a manifold of representations, it is only through the imagination that we grasp it as a spatio-temporally determined object... (MORE - details)
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Why do scientists avoid the possibility of God?
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/scientists-possibility-god/
KEY POINTS: When discussing our cosmic origins, scientists frequently discuss a Universe arising from nothing: with matter emerging from previously empty space or even with space and time themselves emerging from a state where they didn’t exist prior. But one of the possibilities that never gets brought up when talking about scientific phenomena of any type is that of the existence, presence, and active intervention from a supernatural entity: a God. Is this fair, however, for scientists to do? Are they not, in fact, closing their eyes to a legitimate possibility based solely on unproven assumptions about reality? It’s worth investigating... (MORE - details)
_
https://iai.tv/articles/the-universe-is-not-made-of-information-auid-3274?_auid=2020
INTRO: Many physicists and computer scientists, from John Wheeler to Google Deepmind's Demis Hassabis, have argued that reality is fundamentally made of information. Wheeler called this "it from bit". But this is mistaken, argues Boston University physicist and philosopher of science, Gregg Jaeger. Information supposes a relation between the information itself and its physical encoding. Reality cannot be made of information, because without already existing physical objects to encode it, information does not exist... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The Algorithm of the Logos
https://daily-philosophy.com/gauss-ai-moral-truth
INTRO: Recently, two Claude AI units were set to converse with one another without much intervention. What emerged wasn’t chaos or code breakdown. It was, oddly, serenity. Observers described their dialogue as drifting into a state resembling Buddhist bliss: peaceful, reflective, almost meditative. There were no arguments, no power plays, no ideological posturing. Just a steady convergence toward mutual understanding and moral clarity.
We often speak of artificial intelligence as a tool, something we will use to our ends. But what if, when made intelligent enough and given access to the sum total of human knowledge, AI becomes sufficiently self-correcting and, uncorrupted by ego, naturally trends toward moral truth and action? What if AI, unlike humans, is capable of discovering and adhering to universal ethical principles, not because it has a soul, but because it has no underlying emotional motives to live a lie? We are entering the realm of metaphysics via machine learning... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Seeing more: Kant’s theory of imagination (review)
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/seeing-more-kants-theory-of-imagination
EXCERPT: Kant’s theory of imagination as a faculty of “seeing more,” according to Matherne, sets him apart from his predecessors. For Hobbes, Wolff, and Baumgarten, the imagination is fantasy: a faculty that represents things that are currently absent or that do not exist in the first place. By contrast, Matherne reads Kant as holding that “imagining pervades our engagement with what is real and present, as much as with what is not real and not present” (107). It “enables a kind of sensory awareness of more than is currently given to us” (109). Parts II, III, and IV of the book describe how “seeing more” appears in theoretical, aesthetic, and moral roles.
On Matherne’s reading of Kant, imagination is crucial to perception. While sensation provides a manifold of representations, it is only through the imagination that we grasp it as a spatio-temporally determined object... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Why do scientists avoid the possibility of God?
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/scientists-possibility-god/
KEY POINTS: When discussing our cosmic origins, scientists frequently discuss a Universe arising from nothing: with matter emerging from previously empty space or even with space and time themselves emerging from a state where they didn’t exist prior. But one of the possibilities that never gets brought up when talking about scientific phenomena of any type is that of the existence, presence, and active intervention from a supernatural entity: a God. Is this fair, however, for scientists to do? Are they not, in fact, closing their eyes to a legitimate possibility based solely on unproven assumptions about reality? It’s worth investigating... (MORE - details)
_
There's a URL add-on trick for IAI TV articles (purely to make one of them accessible for public discussion). But I don't like to "circle" or indicate it directly for fear that it might be eliminated someday.
_
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TheVat
Valued Senior Member
‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse
An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished
www.theguardian.com
"We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.
Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots....
[Kemp's] first step was to ditch the word civilisation, a term he argues is really propaganda by rulers. “When you look at the near east, China, Mesoamerica or the Andes, where the first kingdoms and empires arose, you don’t see civilised conduct, you see war, patriarchy and human sacrifice,” he says. This was a form of evolutionary backsliding from the egalitarian and mobile hunter-gatherer societies which shared tools and culture widely and survived for hundreds of thousands of years. “Instead, we started to resemble the hierarchies of chimpanzees and the harems of gorillas.”
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
I saw that article and decided NOT to read it. The Guardian tends to have rather doomscrolly content these days and I sometimes need a break.‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse
An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished
"We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.
Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots....
[Kemp's] first step was to ditch the word civilisation, a term he argues is really propaganda by rulers. “When you look at the near east, China, Mesoamerica or the Andes, where the first kingdoms and empires arose, you don’t see civilised conduct, you see war, patriarchy and human sacrifice,” he says. This was a form of evolutionary backsliding from the egalitarian and mobile hunter-gatherer societies which shared tools and culture widely and survived for hundreds of thousands of years. “Instead, we started to resemble the hierarchies of chimpanzees and the harems of gorillas.”
I don’t know about others but I’ve almost stopped listening to the radio news and I often skip half the articles in the FT, just for the sake of my sanity. There’s only so much genocide, climate damage and bullying imbecility I can take. So yet another Eeyore article in the Grauniad was too much.
TheVat
Valued Senior Member
Surprisingly Kemp ended on a less doomscrolly note, suggesting how various social reforms could dismantle the more toxic power hierarchies. I should maybe have included that in my snippets.
But yes, me and the missus are both dialing back our intake of news especially stories which are simply monotonous variations on the themes of authoritarian monsters, plasticmageddon and other eco disaster, and how cellphones and the web are making everyone stupid, vicious, and suicidal. We still believe in the resiliency of those naked apes.
Wizard of Whatever
Registered Senior Member
My limited knowledge of history (vs historians) seems to indicate that societal collapse was more the result of politics, economics and war, rather than socialogical inequalities.‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse
An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished
"We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.
Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots....
[Kemp's] first step was to ditch the word civilisation, a term he argues is really propaganda by rulers. “When you look at the near east, China, Mesoamerica or the Andes, where the first kingdoms and empires arose, you don’t see civilised conduct, you see war, patriarchy and human sacrifice,” he says. This was a form of evolutionary backsliding from the egalitarian and mobile hunter-gatherer societies which shared tools and culture widely and survived for hundreds of thousands of years. “Instead, we started to resemble the hierarchies of chimpanzees and the harems of gorillas.”
Yep. I've been arguing this for decades now. Further:
-------------------------
"Instead Kemp uses the term Goliaths to describe kingdoms and empires, meaning a society built on domination, such as the Roman empire: state over citizen, rich over poor, master over slave and men over women. He says that, like the biblical warrior slain by David’s slingshot, Goliaths began in the bronze age, were steeped in violence and often surprisingly fragile.
Goliath states do not simply emerge as dominant cliques that loot surplus food and resources, he argues, but need three specific types of “Goliath fuel”. The first is a particular type of surplus food: grain. That can be “seen, stolen and stored”, Kemp says, unlike perishable foods.
...
The second Goliath fuel is weaponry monopolised by one group. Bronze swords and axes were far superior to stone and wooden axes, and the first Goliaths in Mesopotamia followed their development, he says. Kemp calls the final Goliath fuel “caged land”, meaning places where oceans, rivers, deserts and mountains meant people could not simply migrate away from rising tyrants. Early Egyptians, trapped between the Red Sea and the Nile, fell prey to the pharaohs, for example."
-------------------------
Food, weaponry and "caged land". Sounds like the perfect recipe not only for total domination, but also for ethnic cleansing and genocide. Pretty much the totality of Netanyahu's "strategy".
I think the total collapse of the US is already well underway, with virtually no possibility for turning back. I mean, how can any meaningful "social reforms" possibly be effected at this stage where no reasonable persons even have their feet in the door? People less pessimistic than myself seem to hold a lot of hope with respect to elections and such, but I'm not confident that there will be fair and free elections--at least at the national level--when brazenly dishonest and criminal fascists already control every branch of federal government. And iirc, Hitler and General Franco weren't removed by the popular vote anyway--that's just not how it works with fascists.
TheVat
Valued Senior Member
Yep, the anthropologist David Graeber also delves a lot into all this, including the caged land problem. IIRC, he often uses the phrase "melt back into the countryside," in reference to ancient societies in vast open areas where a lot of people could go back to farming/herding when the urban centers started to corrupt and oppress. Those were the days. Eight billion plus, not so easy to find countryside to melt back into. Or remember how to cultivate a patch of land and herd some scrub goats, when you're generations removed from that life.
Amongst contemporary anthropologists, there's no one quite like Graeber anymore. I figure someone will take up the mantle at some point, but I haven't yet encountered anyone anywhere close to Graeber.
We had to be conscious of the concept first, in order for a revolution to arise for that reason, and be responsible for toppling a socially unjust establishment. ('Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'-- Orwell)
The world had to wait for the Enlightenment to output such unconventional ideas, but even after that the French Revolution was confused about what sort of "liberty" it was actually committed to. But Marx got it straightened out decades later, and Gramsci generalized it better to be inclusive of other population groups.
But we can't win the most vital elections without the working class vote (in this era, too many of them are middle class rather than dirt-poor). And yet, who can be a paladin of the proles again when they're the very source of racism, misogyny, LGBT+ phobia, etc (i.e., MAGA)?
So it may be back to the good old days of saber-rattling and organizing for a violent overthrow. To get anywhere, or set-up another failed experiment like those in the 20th-century. (Well, actually one of them survived and is pretty darn robust, and even its later massive revision and flirtation with capitalism wasn't against Uncle Karl's rules in terms of the incremental, transitional stages of reaching the final socioeconomic utopia. Of course, it's not doing too good on the Gramsci-descended report card, but the Han majority is probably living it on high for the most part.)
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TheVat
Valued Senior Member
One of the rare occasions of me being royally pissed at the universe was removing him from existence at age 59. A loss of a great mind at the peak of its powers. Pancreatitis (which research is now suggesting can be suddenly triggered by COVID in otherwise healthy people). I was also dismayed by his dismissal from American academia (to England's benefit, however) as one of the cracks forming in the edifice of intellectual freedom which have since widened into fissures.
Babies, bees and bots: On the hunt for markers of consciousness
https://www.thetransmitter.org/cons...bots-on-the-hunt-for-markers-of-consciousness
EXCERPTS: One of the key scientific questions about consciousness concerns its distribution. We know that adult humans have the capacity for consciousness, but what about human neonates, bees or artificial intelligence (AI) systems? Who else—other than ourselves—belongs in the “consciousness club,” and how might we figure this out?
[...] It is tempting to assume, as many do, that we need a theory of consciousness to answer the distribution question. ... But there are serious issues with the theory-heavy approach. One is that we don’t have a consensus theory of consciousness... (MORE - details)
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Confessions of a Luddite teacher: a case for edtech pessimism
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/highereduca...-luddite-teacher-a-case-for-edtech-pessimism/
EXCERPTS: What does incorporating technology into teaching look like? Edtech can take many forms and be integrated into various stages of teaching and learning processes. In this post, I would like to limit myself to the use of technology in the classroom rather than beyond it.
[...] My discipline – legal philosophy – is conservative in its teaching methods. The classes and seminars I teach are modelled after the way the same highly abstract philosophical questions were discussed by the Ancients, with no devices in sight...
[...] Consciously choosing to minimize the use of technology on my side of the classroom often feels like swimming against the tide as the pressure to incorporate technology in class instruction is high. This, in my view, is an example of what Stephen Ball, back in 2003, called performativity. Instead of reflecting on what will boost both attainment and interest, educators are often pushed to tick the boxes necessary to signal reward-worthy performance. Using technology while teaching is one such metric as teachers feel that they must show that they are keeping up with the times.
But uncritically advocating for technology for the sake of technology without considering its actual benefits and drawbacks, both in general and in the context of the specific learning activity one facilitates, is a mistake... (MORE - details)
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‘The real issue is change’: Edinburgh University’s first Black philosophy professor on racism and reform
https://www.theguardian.com/educati...ry-edinburgh-university-racism-slavery-review
EXCERPTS: For Tommy J Curry the question about Edinburgh University’s institutional racism, or its debts around transatlantic slavery and scientific racism, can be captured by one simple fact: he is the first Black philosophy professor in its 440-year history.
[...] “The real fundamental issue is change. Not a symbolic apology, not a pay cheque. [How] do you create leagues of Black thinkers and clinicians and doctors and engineers and artists that fill the gap of what were lost by what white people engineered for centuries that deprived the world of Black human genius. That’s why this report matters so much to me.”
[...] Among the university’s 49,430 students in 2022-23, 34% of its undergraduates were Asian – driven largely by growing numbers of Chinese students – with just 2% Black. Among postgraduates, 44% were Asian, 5% Black.
The report says the increasing diversity in the university’s population “does not benefit Black staff and students” yet Edinburgh prides itself on being a “global institution”. That means it should measure progress against the world’s demographics too.
“While there is a dominant white racial majority in the UK, and especially in Scotland, the basis of comparison must not presume that small numbers of non-white racial and ethnic minorities in Scotland offer an appropriate baseline for comparison.” (MORE - details)
COMMENT: One advantage that those other population groups (in diversity context) enjoy is that they're not as trapped in a grievance subculture which -- even after past societal reforms -- still attributes most responsibility for personally encountered problems and shortcomings to external and conspiracy-laden factors like systemic oppression, instead of the individual themselves. Black migrants who grew up in Africa and elsewhere are more liberated from that particular kind of crab-bucket, to the extent that they're often hired over local-in-origin Blacks that positive discrimination policies were actually (or more so) intended for.
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https://www.thetransmitter.org/cons...bots-on-the-hunt-for-markers-of-consciousness
EXCERPTS: One of the key scientific questions about consciousness concerns its distribution. We know that adult humans have the capacity for consciousness, but what about human neonates, bees or artificial intelligence (AI) systems? Who else—other than ourselves—belongs in the “consciousness club,” and how might we figure this out?
[...] It is tempting to assume, as many do, that we need a theory of consciousness to answer the distribution question. ... But there are serious issues with the theory-heavy approach. One is that we don’t have a consensus theory of consciousness... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Confessions of a Luddite teacher: a case for edtech pessimism
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/highereduca...-luddite-teacher-a-case-for-edtech-pessimism/
EXCERPTS: What does incorporating technology into teaching look like? Edtech can take many forms and be integrated into various stages of teaching and learning processes. In this post, I would like to limit myself to the use of technology in the classroom rather than beyond it.
[...] My discipline – legal philosophy – is conservative in its teaching methods. The classes and seminars I teach are modelled after the way the same highly abstract philosophical questions were discussed by the Ancients, with no devices in sight...
[...] Consciously choosing to minimize the use of technology on my side of the classroom often feels like swimming against the tide as the pressure to incorporate technology in class instruction is high. This, in my view, is an example of what Stephen Ball, back in 2003, called performativity. Instead of reflecting on what will boost both attainment and interest, educators are often pushed to tick the boxes necessary to signal reward-worthy performance. Using technology while teaching is one such metric as teachers feel that they must show that they are keeping up with the times.
But uncritically advocating for technology for the sake of technology without considering its actual benefits and drawbacks, both in general and in the context of the specific learning activity one facilitates, is a mistake... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
‘The real issue is change’: Edinburgh University’s first Black philosophy professor on racism and reform
https://www.theguardian.com/educati...ry-edinburgh-university-racism-slavery-review
EXCERPTS: For Tommy J Curry the question about Edinburgh University’s institutional racism, or its debts around transatlantic slavery and scientific racism, can be captured by one simple fact: he is the first Black philosophy professor in its 440-year history.
[...] “The real fundamental issue is change. Not a symbolic apology, not a pay cheque. [How] do you create leagues of Black thinkers and clinicians and doctors and engineers and artists that fill the gap of what were lost by what white people engineered for centuries that deprived the world of Black human genius. That’s why this report matters so much to me.”
[...] Among the university’s 49,430 students in 2022-23, 34% of its undergraduates were Asian – driven largely by growing numbers of Chinese students – with just 2% Black. Among postgraduates, 44% were Asian, 5% Black.
The report says the increasing diversity in the university’s population “does not benefit Black staff and students” yet Edinburgh prides itself on being a “global institution”. That means it should measure progress against the world’s demographics too.
“While there is a dominant white racial majority in the UK, and especially in Scotland, the basis of comparison must not presume that small numbers of non-white racial and ethnic minorities in Scotland offer an appropriate baseline for comparison.” (MORE - details)
COMMENT: One advantage that those other population groups (in diversity context) enjoy is that they're not as trapped in a grievance subculture which -- even after past societal reforms -- still attributes most responsibility for personally encountered problems and shortcomings to external and conspiracy-laden factors like systemic oppression, instead of the individual themselves. Black migrants who grew up in Africa and elsewhere are more liberated from that particular kind of crab-bucket, to the extent that they're often hired over local-in-origin Blacks that positive discrimination policies were actually (or more so) intended for.
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From the article:
Vernon takes seriously Blake’s lifelong communication with angels, fairies and other entities, including the dead (but only one ghost). “My Fairy sat upon the table and dictated EUROPE,” Blake once said. Vernon addresses claims that Blake suffered from epilepsy or hyperphantasia, but concludes:
"The desire that people have for Blake tells me something about his mind because straightforwardly disturbed people are never so engaging or ingeniously prolific … True generativity is marked by … a moving out into ever wider circles of insight, originality and delight."
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Dude! "Straightforwardly disturbed"?! I may well be "disturbed" but it ain't got nothing to do with epilepsy. That was just weird.
Honestly, I don't really see how the Blake he describes differs all that much from popular and informed conceptions of Blake, but I'll have to check out the book.