When I look at the choices offered to Americans by their two chief political parties, I always remember a line from Woody Allen’s “My Speech to the Graduates”: “One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
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I understand that this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I find Alec Goldfarb’s Indian classical music on guitar fascinating. ♫
My chatbot gives me
The gift my unsoul longs for:
Freedom from knowledge.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto:
Regardless of which path we choose, the future of computing will be hyper-personalized. The question is whether that personalization will be in service of keeping us passively glued to screens—wading around in the shallows, stripped of agen...
Ars Technica: “Meta is building an artificial intelligence version of Mark Zuckerberg that can engage with employees in his stead.” I wonder if anyone will be able to tell the difference.
After decades of business email, many people still default to Reply All when they’re talking only to the person who sent the original message. (I am also grieved by how many original senders fail to use BCC to deter the reply-allers.) You’d think people would have this sorted by now.
What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens - The Atlantic:
Education, Kane knows, is profoundly and stubbornly social. “There are a lot of students who need accountability,” he said. The answer is not more surveillance, but more companionship in the struggle. “Students b...
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, in a superb essay:
The Effective Altruist mode of understanding the “good” served by philanthropy relies on quantifiable metrics focusing on, for instance, the numbers of lives saved in selecting causes to be supported. This appears at first a noble no...
My ST:TNG posts continue with a reflection on powers of Q.
Currently reading: An Army at Dawn The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 by Rick Atkinson. A brilliantly pitiless account — pitiless in that Atkinson makes no attempt to disguise how radically incompetent the Allies were at this early stage of the war. Tactical planners who couldn’t plan, logisticians who couldn’t organize, officers who were reckless when circumstances called for caution and timid when they called for boldness, navigators who couldn’t navigate, helmsmen who couldn’t steer, drivers who couldn’t drive, communications officers who couldn’t communicate, artillerymen who couldn’t aim, infantrymen who ran brainlessly in any and all directions or went to sleep under hedges. If it weren’t so tragic it would be farcical. And if, as some wanted, the bosses had ignored North Africa and headed straight for France, I’d be writing this in German. 📚
Though I have abandoned reading McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things, I’m still noting how many people who know nothing about the hemispheres of the brain nevertheless see our internal divides. For insistence, here’s Kołakowski from The Presence of Myth:
Metaphysical questi...
The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.
I’ve added a highly selective bibliography to Cosmos Malick.
The chatbot hopes for
Right-brain wisdom, but gets only
Hallucinations.
A point about the rise of LLMs that doesn’t get enough play: Millions of people turn to them because Google searches are so much worse than they used to be. I wonder how many people would never have bothered to try chatbots if their Google searches had turned up the most relevant results.
I’m starting a new website project — powered by micro.blog! I explain that decision to my Buy Me a Coffee supporters here. If you want to go straight to the website, here it is.
A brief post on redistributing your media portfolio.
One more photo from Jimmy Dorrell’s last service at Church Under the Bridge: Michael Dionne rejoices at his Easter Sunday baptism in the waters of the Bosque River. (Photo by Justin Hamel.)
My neighbor, a young mother, walking around the block either with her dog or by herself, staring at her phone
Me: Come on, friend! Look at the world around you! See the trees leafing out! Listen to the birds!
Same neighbor, walking around the block this afternoon, staring at the book in her hands
Me: You go, girl!!
It would be difficult to overstress how much Jimmy Dorrell has meant, and will continue to mean, to Waco. May the Lord bless Jimmy in his retirement — though I doubt that he’ll be very retiring.
I've been reading too much on Instapaper. Saving articles for later is a powerful way to manage my time, but it produces a huge pile of content that I then feel obligated to work my way through.
Instapaper has the opposite effect on me. I save many articles there, and when I visit the site the first thing I do is delete the articles I am no longer interested in reading. Usually that’s more than half of the articles I’ve saved. (“Why did I think I wanted to read that?”) Very liberating. The key is not to visit Instapaper too often — twice a week is about right.
Abandoned reading: The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist. What an infuriating endeavor. McGilchrist seems to think that he he makes a claim stronger by giving, not three, not five, but forty-seven supportive examples — and that he can’t say what he wants to say about the hemispheres of the brain without pausing to articulate a Theory of Truth. I began as an exceptionally sympathetic reader and now want to throw these volumes as far from me as possible. 📚
I've had a number of people ask me about this: A 12-Month Immersive Course in Humanities - by Ted Gioia. I’ll just say that my version would be, not 52 assignments in a year, but one assignment in a year. Pick one vital book and read it slowly. Pause to think. Re-read difficult passages. Take your time, and be willing to set it aside for a while. And remember what Auden said: “When one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day with one. Masterpieces should be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit.”