Happy days

It's been a great Memorial weekend already, about to get better: our first return to the "new" Busch Stadium since '06.

We had a fun literary bike tour of the Central West End on Saturday, followed by lunch at Taste of Lebanon and a visit to Left Bank Books.

Yesterday we enjoyed strolling old Main Street in St. Charles, hanging out at Salt & Smoke (I recommend the hush puppies and the Four Hands Incarnation IPA), and dining with the step-sisters at Savor.

I've been enjoying long morning strolls along the old Missouri River, and in the neighborhood where I happened upon free art in a Little Free Library, captioned by ill-fated Jazz Age icon Zelda Fitzgerald.

And tomorrow is our Pearl Anniversary. 

Emerson was right: the days are gods.

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Succession’s iffy American grip

The Great Genius of 'Succession' Was Hovering Two Inches Above Reality

The show captured the terrifying, mesmerizing interplay between fact and fiction — and turned it into great television.

"...the blurring of reality and fantasy isn't merely fascinating. Americans' knack and weakness for these mixtures amount to a founding national predisposition — what made America the global center of show business, from P.T. Barnum to Hollywood to televangelism to reality TV. Our wise forebears also built walls between important reality over here and entertainment and make-believe over there and installed useful establishment gatekeepers to decide what belonged where.

During the past half-century, those barriers crumbled gradually, then suddenly. America's iffy grip on reality turned from a chronic condition to acute and pathological, metastasizing beyond entertainment and spreading throughout the real world, most disastrously into our information and political systems, a phenomenon for which no single individual and enterprise has been more responsible than the real-life inspirations for Logan Roy and ATN. Early this season, Logan told his children, "I love you, but you are not serious people." He could have been talking to America, where people now feel entitled to their own facts as well as their own opinions..." Kurt Andersen

Mortal happiness

(Posted from the dental chair, as numbness descends…)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CsqukGHsnpR/?igshid=NzJjY2FjNWJiZg==

What College Students Need

...Dr. Peña-Guzmán dismissed the idea that a course like his is only suitable for students who don’t have to worry about holding down jobs or paying off student debt. “I’m worried by this assumption that certain experiences that are important for the development of personality, for a certain kind of humanistic and spiritual growth, should be reserved for the elite — especially when we know those experiences are also sources of cultural capital,” he said. Courses like The Reading Experiment are practical too, he added: “I can’t imagine a field that wouldn’t require some version of the skill of focused attention.”

The point is not to reject new technology but to help students retain the upper hand in their relationship with it. Ms. Rodriguez, the economics major who took Living Deliberately and Existential Despair, said that before those classes she “didn’t distinguish technology from education; I didn’t think education ever went without technology. I think that’s really weird now. You don’t need to adapt every piece of technology to be able to learn better or more,” she said. “It can form this dependency.”

The point of college is to help students become independent humans who can choose the gods they serve and the rules they follow, rather than allowing someone else to choose for them. The first step is dethroning the small silicon idol in their pocket — and making space for the uncomfortable silence and questions that follow. The experience stuck with Ms. Ouyang, the nursing major: “I didn’t look forward to getting my phone back,” she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/opinion/college-students-monks-mental-health-smart-phones.html?smid=em-share

Cheerfulness

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Rousseau's peripatetic reveries

"...thus I learned, by my own experience that the source of true happiness is in ourselves, and that it is beyond the power of man to render those truly miserable, who determine to be otherwise..."

 

In the two years before his death in 1778, Jean-Jacques Rousseau composed the ten meditations of Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Combining philosophical argument with amusing anecdotes and lyrical desriptive passages, they record the great French writer's sense of isolation and alienation from a world which he felt had rejected his work. As he wanders around Paris, gazing at plants and day-dreaming, Rousseau looks back over his life in order to justify his actions and to elaborate on his ideal of a well-structured society fit for the noble and solitary natural man. g'r

Fifth Walk

OF all the places I have inhabited (and I have been in some that were delightful) none ever rendered me so truly happy, or left such pleasing impressions on my memory, as the Island of Saint Pierre, in the Lake of Bienne. This little island, which is called at Neufchâtel the Isle of La Motte, is little known, even in Switzerland, no traveller, that I recollect, having mentioned it; notwithstanding it is very agreeable, and peculiarly calculated for the happiness of a man who loves to circumscribe his steps: for though I am, perhaps, the only one in the world to whom Fate has given law in that particular, I cannot believe I am the only person who possesses so natural a taste, though, to the present moment, I have never happened to meet with anyone of that disposition... (continues)

Diversity the key to human survival

Study Offers New Twist in How the First Humans Evolved

A new genetic analysis of 290 people suggests that humans emerged at various times and places in Africa.

...Dr. Scerri speculated that living in a network of mingling populations across Africa might have allowed modern humans to survive while Neanderthals became extinct. In that arrangement, our ancestors could hold onto more genetic diversity, which in turn might have helped them endure shifts in the climate, or even evolve new adaptations.

“This diversity at the root of our species may have been ultimately the key to our success,” Dr. Scerri said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/17/science/human-origins-africa.html?smid=em-share

How to Quit Cars

"… Progressive urban planners genuinely believed, in a period of panic about the death of cities, that their renewal depended on up-to-date infrastructure. The sensibilities that, in the nineteen-seventies, tore down beautiful old Shibe Park, in North Philadelphia, and moved the Phillies to the soulless Veterans Stadium considered the move an obvious improvement. That the electric trolleys being abandoned in Philadelphia were greener and more efficient was not an insight available to that time. We need not find cloaked and sinister reasons for our ancestors' bad decisions, when ignorance and shortsightedness—the kind we, too, suffer from, invisible to us—will do just fine..."

—Adam Gopnik

Holmes & Dewey, experience as culture

"…In 1925, John Dewey published his most wide-ranging philosophical book, Experience and Nature. Dewey used the term "experience" in that book exactly as Holmes had used it forty years earlier in the famous opening paragraph of The Common Law—as a name for culture. (Dewey later said that he wished he had called the book Culture and Nature.) And in the final chapter, he praised Holmes as "one of our greatest American philosophers," 6 and went on to quote a long passage from Holmes's essay on "Natural Law." Holmes read the book several times, with growing pleasure. He thought he had found in Dewey a philosopher whose conception of existence seemed to match his own. "[ A] lthough Dewey's book is incredibly ill written," he told Pollock, "it seemed to me … to have a feeling of intimacy with the universe that I found unequaled. So methought God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was." 

Holmes sat on the Supreme Court for thirty years. He was finally persuaded to retire in 1932, and he died, in Washington, D.C., in 1935, two days before his ninety-fourth birthday. After his death, two Civil War uniforms were found hanging in his closet with a note pinned to them. It read: "These uniforms were worn by me in the Civil War and the stains upon them are my blood."

Dewey was sixty-six when he wrote Experience and Nature, and he was by no means finished. He retired from Columbia in 1930, but he continued to write and lecture; and in 1937, when he was seventy-eight, he traveled to Mexico to head a committee to investigate Joseph Stalin's charges against Leon Trotsky. Dewey admired Trotsky's courage and the dialectical sophistication of his mind; but, as he told one of the Americans traveling with him, he thought him "tragic. To see such brilliant native intelligence locked up in absolutes," 9 he said. Alice Dewey died in 1927, and in 1946, Dewey, now eighty-seven, married Roberta Lowitz Grant, who was forty-two. They adopted two Belgian war orphans, and Dewey enjoyed having them around while he did his work. In late 1951, while he was playing with them, he fell and broke a hip, and he never fully recovered. The following spring, he contracted pneumonia, and he died on June 1, 1952…"

— The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand

Thinking is a social activity

 No individual alone, exclusively, can have the one and only right idea. Justice Holmes was expressing the pragmatic view,* in spite of himself. 

"He thought James had made scientific uncertainty an excuse for believing in the existence of a unseen world." 

         ...

"We do not (on Holmes's reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. No individual alone can have the right one. We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity. I tolerate your thought because it is part of my thought—even when my thought defines itself in opposition to yours." --The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand 

* "Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands." WJ, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings 

Oliver Sacks on AI

Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30 Years Before ChatGPT

...Much of our lust for artificial intelligence stems from what Sacks calls "our almost irresistible desire to see ourselves as being somehow above nature, above the body" — a desire channeled throughout the long history of our damaging dualism, from Plato to Descartes to the very notion of artificial intelligence. Spinoza threw down the first great gauntlet at it with his insistence that our entire conscious experience requires we be understood as embodied beings, for "the body can, by the sole laws of its nature, do many things which the mind wonders at." The sum total of those things is what we might call experience, and it becomes the lens through which we comprehend — which is different from compute — the world...

...Consciousness thus emerges not as an operation of the mind but as an embodied interaction between mind and world — a dynamic flow of exchanges in which the whole organism, not just the brain, participates and, in the act of participation, creates itself...

The Marginalian

A philosophy club?

Microsoft Says New A.I. Shows Signs of Human Reasoning

A provocative paper from researchers at Microsoft claims A.I. technology shows the ability to understand the way people do. Critics say those scientists are kidding themselves.

...And it could also be nonsense. Making A.G.I. claims can be a reputation killer for computer scientists. What one researcher believes is a sign of intelligence can easily be explained away by another, and the debate often sounds more appropriate to a philosophy club than a computer lab...

PROMPT

Plato’s Gorgias is a critique of rhetoric and sophistic oratory, where he makes the point that not only is it not a proper form of art, but the use of rhetoric and oratory can often be harmful and malicious. Can you write a dialogue by Plato where instead he criticizes the use of autoregressive language models?

GPT-4

Socrates: My friend, I am troubled by the recent rise of these so-called autoregressive language models.

Aristotle: What do you mean, Socrates?

Socrates: I mean that these models are being used to generate text that appears to be written by humans, but is in fact produced by machines.

Aristotle: And what is the problem with that?

Socrates: The problem is that these models are being used to deceive people, to manipulate them, and to control them...

nyt

Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health

"...they find a consistent pattern: the younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health that the young adult reports today. This is true in all the regions studied (the survey is offered in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, and Swahili), and the relationships are consistently stronger for women..." Jon Haidt

And, they don't pay attention when the bus driver blacks out...

What We Lose When We Push Our Kids to ‘Achieve’

The sense of happiness that comes from absorption in a thing we are truly drawn to

...surely many of the things that our kids are asked to achieve can lead to self-discovery; taught well, they may learn to love new and unexpected things for their own sake. The trick may lie in the teaching. My sister Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist and author, puts this well: If we taught our kids softball the way we teach them science, they would hate softball as much as they hate science; but if we taught them science as we teach them softball, by practice and absorption, they might love both...

Adam Gopnik 

Against Despair: An Open Letter to Graduates

My generation has wrecked so much that is precious. How could I dare to offer you advice?

...You are children of the 21st century, and yours is the first generation to recognize the inescapable urgency of climate change, the first not to deny the undeniable loss of biodiversity. You have grown up in an age permeated by the noise of a 24-hour news cycle, by needless political polarization, by devastating gun violence, by the isolating effects of “social” media. You have seen hard-won civil rights rolled back. You have come of age at a time of existential threat — to the planet, to democracy, to the arc of the moral universe itself — and none of it is your fault.

I wouldn’t blame you if you’re wondering how somebody of my generation, which wrecked so much that is precious, could dare to offer you advice. My only response is that age has exactly one advantage over the energy and brilliance of youth: Age teaches a person how to survive despair...

Margaret Renkl

RWE, ahead of schedule

Rereading Louis Menand...

"Emerson was a genuine moralist whose mistrust of moralism led him continually to complicate and deflect his own formulations. He was a preacher whose message was: Don’t listen to preachers. “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching,”33 as he put it in the essay on “Self-Reliance.”

We are still going to church, in other words, but we’re no longer there to hear someone else tell us what to do. Emerson represented the tradition of the New England churchman, which is one reason he became an honored and respected figure despite his anti-institutionalism; and, at the same time, he represented that tradition’s final displacement. Unitarianism had rescued the integrity of the individual conscience from Calvinism. Emerson rescued it from Unitarianism—which is why after his famous address to the Harvard Divinity School in 1838, in which he scandalized the Unitarians by renouncing organized Christianity in favor of personal revelation, he was not invited to speak at Harvard again for thirty years.34

By the time he returned, religion was no longer an issue most people in Cambridge cared to fight about; the last of the anti-Darwinists were just going under. “I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of Redemption absolutely incredible,” Emerson announced in 1832, in a sermon in which he also announced his disbelief in a supernatural Jesus.35 He had, as usual, gotten there about a generation ahead of schedule."

"The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America": https://a.co/9b9ayvq

Degraded personhood

LISTEN (includes previous posts). "The Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?"

Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto [2010]

Go boldly

I'm reading "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations" again.

Dipped into the section of quotes from people my age, didn't take long to finish that... and then this from NdT, the perfect response to students (disturbingly many) who say there are things we're just not supposed to understand or wonder at. (Hi Joseph)

"Neil deGrasse Tyson 1958– I don’t want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don’t understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don’t understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before. The Perimeter of Ignorance [2005]"

https://a.co/du6cYv2

Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty’s Lifelong Argument

"… Contra MacIntyre, moral judgments incorporate both reason and emotion. Hume formulated that truth provocatively, saying that reason is always the servant of emotion. It's what pragmatists like James and Dewey meant by identifying the imagination as our key moral faculty; and it's why Rorty wrote that we should expect moral progress chiefly from the work of novelists, journalists, ethnographers, and other purveyors of thick descriptions rather than from philosophy..."
George Scialabba, The Nation

Simon Winchester on ‘Knowing What We Know’ from ancient times to AI

Another one for the Fall MALA Knowledge course:

"… What will be the fate of humankind in a world where, increasingly, machines do our remembering, thinking and creating for us? Winchester worries "that today's all-too-readily available stockpile of information will lead to a lowered need for the retention of knowledge, a lessening of thoughtfulness, and a consequent reduction in the appearance of wisdom in society..." WaPo

A real education

LISTEN. That's what Henry Adams should have got, if he was paying attention, from William James's late-life "magnificent outburst" on behalf of the human spirit and against reductively, fashionably unwise popular science pessimism... truly a reflection of WJ's own "incandescent spirit," as his best biographer has written.

"Adams had, in his Education, drawn attention to a leading feature of the new American world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—its love affair with energy—and he had proposed the dynamo or generator as the symbol of that energy. William James’s life work was the discovery, retrieval, and harnessing of previously unused energies that lie dormant within us. So James was stirred, in June 1910, to rise in protest against the urbane and learned pessimism of his friend Adams’s book-length funk. Finishing Adams’s “Letter” in mid-June, James fired off a riposte. The beginning was jolly enough. Referring to the “Letter,” James said, “To tell the truth it doesn’t impress me at all, save by its wit and erudition, and I ask you whether an old man soon about to meet his maker can hope to save himself from the consequences of his life by pointing to the wit and learning he has shown in treating a tragic subject. No, sir, you can’t do it,—can’t impress God in that way.”20

He then got down to cases. “I protest against your interpretation of some of the specifications of the great statistical drift downwards of the original high-level energy.” Adams had neglected to remember, and James now reminded him, that history is “the course of things before that terminus,” and in the course of things it was a question of what use was made of any given spoonful of energy.

Physically a dinosaur’s brain may show as much intensity of energy-exchange as a man’s, but it can do infinitely fewer things, because as a force of detent it can only unlock the dinosaur’s muscles, while the man’s brain, by unlocking far feebler muscles, indirectly can by their means issue proclamations, write books, describe Chartres Cathedral etc. and guide the energies of the shrinking sun into channels which never would have been entered otherwise—in short make history. Therefore the man’s brain and muscles are from the point of view of the historian, the more important place of energy-exchange, small as this may be, when measured in absolute physical units.

For this reason, James concluded, sweeping his hand across Adams’s chessboard, “the ‘second law’ is wholly irrelevant to ‘history.’”

It is impossible, after reading James for any length of time, to refrain from using italics oneself. But even italics fail to do justice to this magnificent outburst, the last stand of William James for the spirit of man. What can one say about the philosophical bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? It is a scene fit to set alongside the death of Socrates. The matchless incandescent spirit of the man!" --William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson

My current projects revolve around questions about the real meaning of education, and what sort of knowledge matters most. WJ remains the most reliable guide I've found, in exploring such questions. John Dewey is right there with him. 

There's a looming submission deadline for a conference concerning the latter's legacy for education. Does that legacy also bask in Jamesian incandescence? Might also be a question worth exploring.

Deep and shallow

A deepity, as Daniel Dennett defined it, is a profound-seeming triviality that may in fact be devoid of meaning. Non-philosophers expect philosophers to deliver deep thoughts on command, much as non-comics expect comedians to make them laugh at will. It's not that easy. But it's much easier to be profound in writing than in casual conversation, since that's the implicit bargain writers and readers strike with one another. 

So says Agnes Callard, and I'm inclined to agree. Plenty of writers (whether they call themselves philosophers or not) are capable of writing sentences and paragraphs and sometimes whole essays or books that strike readers as deep. The same writers, encountered conversationally, are equally capable of presenting themselves in person as consistently banal and shallow. That's not surprising, and it shouldn't be disappointing. Good conversation is a prolonged series of volleys that clear the net. Profundities tend to stop play, like a blazing unreturnable serve. We should want our philosophers to be sustained conversationalists when we speak with them, and aces when they write. 

Socrates didn't write, so who knows how profound he really was? Maybe he had a lot to be humble about. 

...Recently, a New Yorker profile of me by Rachel Aviv drew more on her conversations with me than on my written work. While many readers said they loved the profile’s intimacy and directness, those same features seemed to outrage others—although the critics were split on the question of what exactly was wrong with the profile, and with me. Some were struck by how ordinary and boring I sounded—Steven Pinker reported finding it “disappointing” to learn how “shallow” I was, and Joyce Carol Oates called my concerns “banal-stereotypical”—whereas others found me strange: a “weirdo,” a “freak,” a “monster.” The two sides of the opposition couldn’t come together on whether I was “embarrassingly familiar”or bizarrely unrelatable, but one thing they did agree on, and complain about, was that I had failed to come across as someone possessed of great profundity. And they’re right: Deep down, I am not deep.

What is profundity? The first thing to note is that it belongs more to writing than to speech. Imagine that you and I are talking, engaged in a rapid and animated back-and-forth, and all of a sudden, I say something incredibly, unbelievably profound. What do you do? No response can possibly count as an adequate rejoinder to the bottomless well of insight I’ve just placed between us. Maybe you catch your breath in awe. Maybe you just say, “Wow, that was so profound.” Eventually, after a long pause, we move on, and maybe change the topic...

 Profundity should be the residue of deep post-conversational reflection. When we converse, we just want to keep the ball above the net and in motion. A good philosopher knows when to wade in and when to hang back in the shallows.

But that doesn't mean philosophers who occasionally pen a profound statement or two (or many) aren't also still capable of screwing up their personal lives in ways that might strike some as indicating shallowness. Socrates was mortal and fallible, so are we all.

But philosophers should still have some "sayings" on tap. My favorites are in Latin. Solvitur ambulando. Sapere Aude. Carpe Diem. Errare Humanum Est. Like that. 

How Much Can Duolingo Teach Us?

This guy thinks bots should replace teachers. Maybe that'll work for language-learning, but surely not in general. Or is that just special-pleading? Protecting our turf?

...The company’s founder, Luis von Ahn, believes that artificial intelligence is going to make computers better teachers than humans.

“Ultimately, the reason I decided to work on teaching is because I really think that, net-net, humanity benefits more from having a really good way to teach everybody.” If this leads to fewer human teachers, that struck him as an acceptable trade-off. “I’m, like, O.K., well, a small number of people are out of a job, but suddenly we can teach everybody better. It’s not like I feel great about this, but I think it’s better to be able to teach all of humanity cheaply, right?”

Norma [his mom] told me that, after Luis left for college, she found a note on his desk on which he’d written, “I promise to help the world.”

... Carina Chocano, continues

Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea

Something to consider in MALA's tag-team course on Knowledge, next semester.

Our minds haven’t evolved to deal with machines we believe have consciousness.

"...Future language models won’t be so easy to catch out. Before long, they may give us the seamless and impenetrable impression of understanding and knowing things, regardless of whether they do. As this happens, we may also become unable to avoid attributing consciousness to them too, suckered in by our anthropomorphic bias and our inbuilt inclination to associate intelligence with awareness..." Anil Seth

https://nautil.us/why-conscious-ai-is-a-bad-bad-idea-302937/

Red State Gun Reform?

"...I wish you could have seen the human chain that reached from Vanderbilt's Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital, where the children killed at Covenant were taken after they were shot, to the statehouse, where Republican legislators repeatedly refused to consider any gun-reform measure. Wearing red in support of Covenant School, some 8,500 Nashvillians gathered arm-in-arm in a chain stretching three miles to make legislators see that voters are united on this issue, Republicans and Democrats alike.

People still stop me on the street to thank me for the open letter to Gov. Bill Lee that I wrote the week of the shooting. These are my friends and my neighbors, the parents whose children grew up with mine, the adults my husband taught when they were teenagers, and I know them. Many are deeply conservative. Many have never agreed with another word I've written for this newspaper. But no one, right or left, wants to keep seeing innocent people slaughtered with guns that never should have been in the hands of civilians in the first place..."

Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/opinion/tennessee-gov-lee-gun-reform.html

George Berkeley’s Name Removed from Trinity College Dublin Library

Trinity College Dublin has decided to seek a new name for its central library, the Berkeley, after concluding that the alumnus it honors, the 18th-century philosopher George Berkeley, owned slaves in colonial Rhode Island and wrote pamphlets supportive of slavery...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/world/europe/george-berkeley-trinity-college-dublin.html

Hash

I never tire of revisiting WJ's philosophical self-reproach. All truth-seekers should reflect on it, continually,

"I am convinced that the desire to formulate truths is a virulent disease. It has contracted an alliance lately in me with a feverish personal ambition, which I never had before, and which I recognize as an unholy thing in such a connexion. I actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe's hash in one more book, which shall be epoch-machend at last, and a title of honor to my children! Childish idiot—as if formulas about the Universe could ruffle its majesty, and as if the common-sense world and its duties were not eternally the really real!"

— The Letters of William James, Vol. II by William James
https://a.co/6o4BA3Q

Sound advice to a troubled daughter

LISTEN. William James wrote a remarkable letter to his troubled pre-adolescent schoolgirl daughter Peggy, in May 1900.

...Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; and dissatisfaction with one's self, and irritation at others, and anger at circumstances and stony insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it rightly. [From margin.] (For instance, you learn how good a thing your home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the blood; and we mustn't submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling. When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we did before. And we must try to make it last as short a time as possible. The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't want to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it—that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make ourselves do something different, go with people, speak cheerfully, set ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of yourself all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of things and of other people—no matter what's the matter with our self.

This sound advice is a good foundation-stone for a solid education. Whether the comic genius Clemens actually said it or not, every schoolgirl and boy needs to heed the spirit of this wisdom: never let schooling interfere with your education. 

 

Michael Palin: Write it down.

My favorite Python turned 80 yesterday. His wife of 57 years, Helen, died Tuesday. Comedy is one of life's great compensations, but there are times when the laughter must pause. Times for serious reflection. Michael is a noted diarist, bucking the modern impatience with pen and paper. I'll bet he's found consolation in his notebooks these past days. Writing things down really is a comfort. In Helen's and Michael's honor, I'm resolving today (again) to pay more attention to my Moleskines.

 

The Ethics of Belief

The Great English Mathematician and Philosopher William Kingdon Clifford on the Discipline of Doubt and How We Can Trust a Truth – The Marginalian
BY MARIA POPOVA

"The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct," Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman observed in summarizing his pioneering behavioral psychology studies of how and why our minds mislead us. And yet our beliefs are the compass by which we navigate the landscape of reality, steering our actions and thus shaping our impact on that very reality. The great physicist David Bohm captured this inescapable dependency memorably: "Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe… What we believe determines what we take to be true."

How, then, do we align our beliefs with truth rather than illusion, so that we may perceive the most accurate representation of reality of which the human mind is capable, in turn guiding our actions toward noble and constructive ends?

That's what the English mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford (May 4, 1845–March 3, 1879) explored with uncommon insight and rhetorical elegance nearly a century and a half before the golden age of "alternative facts."
...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/04/14/the-ethics-of-belief-william-kingdon-clifford/

The Last Word

The End is coming, in maybe 100 billion years. Is it too soon to start freaking out?

"There will be a last sentient being, there will be a last thought," declared Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College, near the end of "A Trip to Infinity," a new Neflix documentary directed by Jonathan Halperin and Drew Takahashi.

When I heard that statement during a showing of the film recently, it broke my heart. It was the saddest, loneliest idea I had ever contemplated. I thought I was aware and knowledgeable about our shared cosmic predicament — namely, that if what we think we know about physics and cosmology is true, life and intelligence are doomed. I thought I had made some kind of intellectual peace with that.

But this was an angle that I hadn't thought of before. At some point in the future there will be somewhere in the universe where there will be a last sentient being. And a last thought. And that last word, no matter how profound or mundane, will vanish into silence along with the memory of Einstein and Elvis, Jesus, Buddha, Aretha and Eve, while the remaining bits of the physical universe go on sailing apart for billions upon billions upon billions of lonely, silent years...

Dennis Overbye

The Future Is Going to Be Weird. Are We Ready?

Hard to know if we should be terrified or exhilarated. There's no going back, though. Might as well try to embrace and manage change rather than merely resent it. The past was pretty weird too.

Erik Davis discusses the "high weirdness" that has shaped California and the development of A.I.

In recent months, we've witnessed the rise of chatbots that can pass law and business school exams, artificial companions who've become best friends and lovers and music generators that produce remarkably humanlike songs. It's hard to know how to process it all. But if there's one thing that's certain, it's this: The future — shaped by technologies like artificial intelligence — is going to be profoundly weird. It's going to look, feel and function differently from the world we have grown to recognize.

How do we learn to navigate — even embrace — the weirdness of the world we're entering into? Ezra Klein

‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead

… His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will "not be able to know what is true anymore."

He is also worried that A.I. technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. "It takes away the drudge work," he said. "It might take away more than that."

Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-engineer-quits-hinton.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
'The Godfather of A.I.' Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead