Log of my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) postings
Page #10

Len: 213,836  94.

¶ +2024.02.15. Can someone be considered an anti-intellectual? Is there a limit to being too smart or too intellectual?

"anti-intellectual" is a regular word in the Merriam-Webster dictionary: "opposing or hostile to intellectuals or to an intellectual view or approach" "Intellectual": "a person possessing a highly developed intellect" "Intellect": "the capacity for rational or intelligent thought especially when highly developed".

Anti-intellectuals probably come, like ice cream and other things, in different flavors. U.S. politician Donald Trump is probably an example of one kind. He rants on and on about anything that he doesn't like.

Sometime Governor of the U.S. state of Alabama, George Wallace, famously mocked intellectuals as "not even being able to ride a bicycle straight". Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan came up with another put-down characterization of intellectuals, in his case specifically: economists. He said an economist was a man with a watch chain with a Phi Beta Kappa key (symbol of intelectualism) on one end and no watch on the other end. In other words, a person who is a fool.

Can anybody be too smart? What would that look like? A person can fancy they are smarter than they are and that is very bad. One variety of these are "know-it-alls": They are sure they know everything but of course they don't. And knowing everything, when they have power, they make foolish decisions based on defective information which they are sure is 100% right....

Can a person be "too intellectual"? That would characterize a person who know a lot about what is in books but not about real life. Such a person doesn't appreciate how reality and ideas fit together and don't. So, yes, a person can be too intellectual, i.e., one sided-ly knowledgeable about books but not about reality and the relations between the two. A person can also be too "practical" and have no imagination or insight so thaty jsut do whatever they have been told to do, say be their parents and friends.

Two examples of "intellectual": Old Boeing story. They hired an engineer fresh out of college and gave him a task to design a simple part to get familiar with company practices. He did his design and took it to the "blue collar" machinists on the shop floor to make a prototype. The machinists examined his drawing and asked him if he was sure it was right> He assured them he had checked it carefully. They made his part for him: It was perfect except it was an order of magnitude too large. The young engineer didn't use "common sense" to match ideas to realities: He was we might say: too intellectual. But he didn't need less book learning he needed more practical experience to ADD to it to complete his smartness.

Second example: I had a professor in college, Norwood Russell Hanson, whose specialization was philosophy of science. Very intellectual, right? But he ALSO rode a Harley Davidson motorcycle and piloted his own private F8-F Bearcat fighter plane. At the end of World War II he had made the newspapers by looping the Golden Gate Bridge. So he was the opposite of Gov. Wallace's mockery of intellectuals, wasn't he? How many "bikers" pilot their own fighter plane? Vroom! Vroom!

¶ +2024.02.14. Do you believe AI-generated art could ever rival the creativity of human artists?

Which human artists? The "average" ones? The ones who are not very original or very "sensitive"? Yes, Ai will easily outdo http://those.AI could easily produce all sorts of stuff like Andy Warhol Marilyns, yes? or Roy Lichtenstein or Keith Haring or much Minimalist art. These are easy for humans to reproduce with variations, too, yes?

But Rembrandt? Vermeer? Hans Holbein (consider his enigmatic "The Ambassadors, e.g.)? Or at the other end of the sale, Marcel Duchamp's INVENTION of the "readymade".

And that's the issue: Not just how well Ai could simulate art, but actual INNOVATION. AI can only compute; it cannot innovate. Because innovation is not programmable: nobody can program a computer to find something it can't compute. Well, one may say that monkey at typewriters would eventually writ Moby Dick. True but would they e able to distinguish the masterpiece from innumerable other texts they would generate that would be similar but not "right"? No.

I am not mathematician but my understanding is that a computer can only produce what it has been programmed to be able to do. This, of course, can be a lot, especially if the computer is very fast and it has a very large database to use.. Some years ago now, a computer, "Deep Blue", beat the world human champion at a game of chess. But the computer was not playing chess: It was just computing the likely consequences of different moves according to branching and looping instructions. A fast enough computer could "solve" chess by running through all possible chess games and finding what would happen if both sides played optimal moves. But it would not be playing chess, just computing.

Ai can do as well or better at all sorts of PROGRAMMABLE tasks as humans. But it cannot think of something nobody has imagined before and recognize it has any value. At most it can generate endless random character strings or whatever.

Again, lii at Marcel Duchamp's "readymades" Nobody had ever imagined that simply saying a urinal or a bottle drying rack was a masterpiece of art it was a work of art, and the only reason Duchamp was able to do this was by bringing a lot of knowledge to bear on something nobody had ever imagined before.

AI just computes. So it can relieve us of a lot of drudge work. Teacher: "Student, name the 5 oceans." Student: "Please give me a minute while I look hat up on Wikipedia."

What humans need to be good at is imagination, problem solving involving hunches and other insights – anything for which "following rules" (or "following orders") is not good enough. If you say that doesn't leave too much, then people will have a lot of time to do things that computers can't do: play, make love, savor good food and beautiful scenery, talk with good friends (including talking about AI), playing with their pets....

¶ +2024.02.14. How can we build a diverse, high-performing culture where all feel genuinely valued, needed and wanted at work?

Check out Prof Richard Wolff's website: Democracy at Work (d@w)

He sees both "capitalism" and "socialism" as being equally flawed in that a few run the economy and the many just work there. Instead, we need worker cooperatives, where the productive persons own and run the show themselves (ourselves).

For the present, what can we say? Some persons really do have "genuinely valued, needed and wanted" work. Most medical and mental health professionals fall into this category, from home care health aides to nurses to specialist surgeons, to social workers. They really do help persons who, generally, really appreciate their good help.

But what are we doing with these persons' jobs? Subjecting them to ever more corporate bureaucratic micro-management. Personal example: A young lady I knew who recently got her PhD in exercise physiology: "rehab" colloquially. She was very frustrated to be spending half her days trying to get insurance reimbursement for patients, not treating the patients which is what she wants to do. Well, maybe she found a solution for herself: She joined the Navy and now she spends most of her time providing therapy to patients not fighting with insurance companies.

Or consider the medical practice where my doctors are. Up until a few years ago, the doctors owned it and ran it. Then they sold it to a MegaMediCorp and now they are all employees. Some have quit since they do not like working on a white-collar assembly line where they have to see a certain number of patients each hour. When I first went there maybe 30 years ago, my physician spent time talking with me about my health. Then he changed to complaining to me about insurance companies. And then one day, he left.

I haven't really offered any solutions. I do hope you look into Prof. Richard Wolff's Democracy at Work (d@w) We can imagine a better world, can't we?

¶ +2024.02.14. How do cognition and metacognition influence learning for students?

"Metacognition" is a big word. Contrast with "first order" information, like: heavy objects fall down not up (facts).

If by "metacognition" one means teaching young persons how to learn, not just teaching them "first order" information, that's extremely important and powerful. It's like the old story: Give a hungry man a fish and he will come back tomorrow and ask for another fish because he is hungry again. Give him a fishing rod and teach him how to fish and he can keep himself well fed forever.

So there are lots of things it is important for young person to learn, for instance good sanitation practices to help keep infectious diseases from becoming epidemics. Reading, writing and basic mathematics. And more advanced job skills.

But best of all is to teach them "metacognition", i.e., how to learn new things for themselves. Given any new problem, the person should have learned effective strategies for finding information to solve or at least address the problem, yes?

"Student! Name are the five oceans?" "I'll look that up on Wikipedia, Teacher. Just give me a second please."

¶ +2024.02.14. Can the increasing reliance on robots and AI to supplement a shrinking workforce be seen as a sustainable solution, or does it merely postpone addressing the root causes of demographic challenges?

2,500 years a go, Aristotle said that if machines could do all the scut work of life we would not need slaves. Substitute wage-slaves, aka employees or even "giggers" for slaves.

What are the "demographic challenges"? Aren't there far too many people currently living on our small planet with limited resources? At the beginning of the 20th Century I have read there were 1.6 billion people. Today, even after the horrible wars and other disasters of the past 120 years, there aare almost 8 billions of us. What good is there in this?

[ "Cover the earth in blood" ]

Isn't the problem to REDUCE the population without harming anyone currently living? The alternatives are "The four horsemen of the apocalypse": War, famine, pestilence and plague – and add global warming and pollution and what else? So if machines can give every living person a materially "rich" life: education, health care, a home, community, etc. and if the people stop reproducing in large numbers ("Stop at one, or better don't have any kids and adopt some of you really like children!") – If machines can provide a good standard of living and people stop reproducing then the population could HUMANELY shrink back to sustainable and less crowded levels, couldn't it?

The only people I know of who want population increase fall into two categories:

(1) "Nationalist" right-wing politicians who want more people so that they can have bigger armies, and

(2) Economists who know our economy is a big Ponzi scheme so that we always need more working people to pay for increasing numbers of retirees. The population equivalent of an atomic bomb?

#1 are bad people like Adolf Hitler [a woman who produced 8 new Germans got a "Mother of The Reich" award]. #2 should be relieved if industrial robots can keep everybody fed and clothed.

What do you think?

[ Waldos and TMTS babies ]

(Aside: I am so glad I was an "only child": My father did not earn enough money to send two children to college, etc.)

¶ +2024.02.13. How close are tech bigwigs to unveiling AGI, surpassing human intelligence?

I have no idea with "AGI" is. But the fantasy of an "Artificial intelligence" (AI) surpassing human intelligence is what in logic can be called a "category mistake": applying an attribute to something that cannot have that attribute. Example: Steel I-beams yawn when they are bored. Steel I-beams do not get bored. "Artificial intelligence" is not intelligent.

AI is not intelligent. It is not stupid either. Human beings can be intelligent or stupid: AI just computes. Some years ago a computer, "Deep Blue" beat the world champion human in a game of chess. But Deep Blue did not "beat" him like another human player might have: It just computed moves that would most probably according to its computer code would lead to checkmate.

AI will never be more intelligent that humans. It has no imagination. It has no "common sense". It's just computer code some humans wrote for the computer to do certain computations which can SIMULATE intelligent choices. And that's why it's both powerful and also potentially deceiving.

It's "The Turing Test". If you are interacting with the computer, are you interacting with another human or with a computer program? All you are getting back when you enter your inputs are strings of words. Are they coming from a person or from a computer program somebody wrote that very complexly replies to inputs using very sophisticated computing algorithms applied to huge amounts of stored data?

So long as we humans keep control of what we program the computers to do, AI can be a great TOOL to HELP us accomplish our GOALS and have better LIVES. If you want to learn about some subject, say history, would you rather have one high school history textbook to learn from, or the whole of Harvard's Widener Library at your fingertips? AI increasingly give you the latter. Great, yes?

But persons can also program the computer, the AI, to "make decisions" which then affect people. One reason for this temptation is to save money: an AI may be cheaper to run than a human employee doing the work. So let's imagine a courtroom in which the human judge has been replaced by an AI and a person accused of capital murder is tried and the AI computed he (she, other) is guilty and has them executed for their crime. But the AI may have had a glitch in its program and the person is (well, was – they are dead now) innocent.

And it can get worse from there. Human can program computers so "make all the decisions" and then when something goes wrong there will be nowhere to escape the new totalitarian dictatorship of the AI WE HAVE CONTRAUCTED and human life will vanish from the earth as effectively as with hydrogen bombs. Scary, yes?

So what everybody has to keep clear is that AI is a tool for humans to use. We must use it wisely and always monitor what it is doing supposedly to help us to make sure what it is doing is really being helpful not hurting somebody.

AI surpassing human intelligence is sort of like chess pieces winning marathon foot races: AI is not that kind of thing. Already the available AIs can often write an essay on some topic more informative than most college freshmen, but it's not really writing anything: It's just computing.

AI is just a TOOL, but it can be a very powerful tool, persons can use for good or for ill. Computer programmers will develop ever more powerful AI's that computer more and more powerfully. All humans, and especially persons who design and implement AI's need to develop their human intelligence, or more precisely: wisdom.

"Data is not information,
information is not knowledge,
knowledge is not understanding, and
understanding is not wisdom." (Clifford Stoll)

[ THINK, followed by Weizenbaum ]

¶ +2024.02.12. How do we determine what is aesthetically pleasing if it is subjective to each individual's perception?

This is very interesting subject.

There is, as you probably know, the "the golden ratio", which is supposed to be beautiful. I don't know. I did once read that the steps of the Parthenon are slightly "warped" to make them look better then if they were really perfectly geometrically straight. Flawed looks better.

My feeling is that "what is aesthetically pleasing is subjective (idiosyncratic) to each individual's perception", and that's the end of it. It's like what a famous U.S. Supreme Court justice once gave as a definition of pornography "I know it when I see it."

As for myself, I think that from childhood I had a very sensitive esthetic sense. I was childreared in "The American Dream" middle class 1950s USA and I didn't really like any of it. Disneyworld, Christmas trees etc. were not appealing to me. Soon after college I got a job running a small gift shop where I sold small ceramics by master potters and other similar things. Wow! Love a first sight 9and first touch!)! Well, one of the pieces of pottery I find most beautiful would look to most people like it came from Hiroshima after the explosion of the atomic bomb: It really is burnt, but in a very particular way. Got that: A very particular way. There is nothing in my childhood world which would explain such a sense of beauty.

"I like this and you like that." But I don't think that is all there is to it. I think that study can enrich our experience of what is beautiful for us and maybe even to some extent extend it.

Example at random: Let's suppose you see a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL automobile and feel it is beautiful. Some people say it's one of the most beautiful automobiles ever made (let's put aside the morality of automobiles for the moment). You look at it and you think it is beautiful. But now you go to school and study automobile engineering for 6 years so that you understand in depth how that car is put together. Don't you think your sense of its beauty will be different now that your understanding of it "is more than skin deep" than at first when you knew nothing about it but it just looked pretty?

So my idea is that we cannot explain beauty. Some persons think such and such is beautiful and other find it repulsive (I won't go into the details here which can offend people). But if you devote yourself to studying the material, I think you can enrich your enjoyment and experience of the richness of beauty in the thing. A man with a lot of money may buy a certain very expensive wristwatch because it looks beautiful to him (her, other). But a master watchmaker will "see more" in experiencing the beauty of that watch, yes?

Even though we can't explain it, finding something beautiful (or ugly) is a stubborn fact as much as that heavy objects fall down not up. Can you make yourself feel something you find beautiful be not beautiful to you? If somebody tells you something is beautiful, does that change your opinion about it?

Do you like vanilla ice cream or chocolate? Why? We can appreciate things we don't understand, yes? Isn't that something to cherish and cultivate?

¶ +2024.02.12. Does being disciplined go hand in hand with being ethical?

No, Or at least not necessarily. Many very bad persons are very disciplined. Heinrich Himmler?

Disciplined just means "focused": being determined to get things done, not being wishy-washy. But determined to do what things?

An ethical person who is not disciplined can be a kind of loose cannon on the deck. There is an old cliche: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

A person needs to be both ethical and disciplined: Ethical to know what should be done; disciplined to persevere in getting it done. The two do not necessarily go "hand in hand", but they should, yes?

¶ +2024.02.12. Are ethical principles fixed or changing?

Isn't the answer to this question not simple? Why ask it otherwise?

If ethical principles were 100% fixed there would be no question about them changing. "Fundamentalists" believe this way.

If ethical principles were changing all the time how could they be principles at all?

The United States Declaration of Independence says "all men are created equal" while the U.S. Constitution at least originally counted slaves as 3/5 persons. Looks like a conflict in ethics there to me. To you?

Look at the 10 Commandments they hold up pretty well after almost 3,000 years, don't they? One may quibble about "taking The Lord's name in vain" or other things, but the 10 commandments have always been pretty good ethical principles, yes?

"Thou shall not bear false witness." Who can argue with that? Well, if you were a German in 1939 who was hiding a jew in your house and the Gestapo knocked on the door and demanded that you tell them if you were hiding any jews in your house, what ethically should you do? I would say, obviously, lie: "No, Sir."

And even if principles remain constant, context does not There has been yet another mass murder in the USA the evening before I write this. Should people be allowed to own guns? "Gun nuts" rightly say that guns do not kill people; bad people use guns to kill people. But on the other side, persons will also rightly argue that if people do not have guns they cannot kill anybody with guns.

Or – red line here – what about the abortion dispute? "Thou shalt not kill." Great idea, right? But leaders of nations order soldiers to kill lots of people very day and claim it is the right thing to do (for various reasons). But as for abortion, is it killing to destroy an embryo that does not yet have any brain or nervous system? The ethical issue could not have been stated this way 300 years ago because we did not know about how pregnancy evolves.

One can imagine all sorts of situations where ethical principles do not work well, but far many more cases where they do work well. Shouldn't every person study anthropology to appreciate the variety of human social life? And shouldn't the wellbeing of persons always take precedence over "principles"? There is an idiom I find admonitory: Being "dead right", i.e., being right but also being dead.

My feeling is that this is a great question to study and to think about and that the more we study and think, the more complex we see things are so that very careful judgment is needed. And wouldn't you agree that if something person A does affects person B, the best way to decide what is the right thing to do is to get both A and B to talk together and arrive at a decision both find acceptable?

(Of course this is not always possible; then any talk of "ethics" give way to force of arms, unfortunately. One of my favorite examples was the French school teacher, Samuel Paty [look his story up on the Internet]. An Islamist fundamentalist decided Mr. Paty had "insulted the prophet" by teaching freedom of expression in a middle school classroom per official French educational policy, and the fundamentalist severed Mr. Paty's head from his torso with a knife.)

¶ +2024.02.10. What is the current status of artificial intelligence or artificial consciousness?

The prospects for "Artificial intelligence" are probably beyond what we can imagine, for good but also for harm. I like the analogy of pictures on the computer. The earliest pictures were extended ascii on teletypewriters which couldn't fool anybody.

ASCII Art Archive

A large collection of ASCII art drawings and other related ASCII art pictures.

https://www.asciiart.eu/

Today, computer images can be such high quality that it's hard to tell the difference from the rea thing and experts may even be able to detect very interesting information in the computer images that cannot be seen in the original so the computer image may in ways be even "better" than the real thing....

But this is all just making ever better simulations. One place it all started was MIT Prof. of Computer Science Joseph Weizenbaum's very simple computer program Eliza which simulated a certain kind of psychotherapist. Read his classic little book: "Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation" (WH Freeman, 1976)!

But artificial consciousness is just a fantasy of philosophically naive (even if highly computer science schooled...) persons who metaphorically can't tell their a** from a hole in the ground. "Consciousness" i is not something; conscious is not any thing. You can't make one (well, not exactly, read on...).

Consciousness is the artificial intelligence expert human person writing an artificial intelligence (AI) computer application, or his girlfriend thumbing thru the pages of VOGUE. Well they can create intelligence, can't they? But mixing sperm and egg. And if nature can do it, so too, presumably, can chemists in a lab. But that would not be anything like artificial intelligence, would it? Artificial intelligence is computer programs we understand because we wrote them, processing input according to branching and looping computer instructions, referencing large databases and outputting results. AI just computes.

Prof Noam Chomsky, an expert on human linguistic behavior, say there is nothing intellectually interesting about AI: it just computes and in no way addresses human discourse. Humans are intelligent (or stupid). AI is neither intelligent nor stupid: it just computes. And feed it "weird" inputs and it my produce weird outputs or even produce wrong answers to straightforward inputs. Always check out what AI tells you to see if it makes sense

Well anything that is not self-contradictory, especially of it is bad, can be imagined. So I guess we can imagine a chemist mixing some chemicals in laboratory and SURPRISE! it talks bak to them like their mother or their boss. No way would anybody understand this. Alan Turing once wrote to his mother that if we ever did make a computer that really thinks, "we shan't understand how it does it". Just like copulation produces Einsteins and morons and every kind of human person in between. You don't need to "understand" something to appreciate, respect and also be wary of it, do you?

What AI computer programmers could do that might be irreversible and as catastrophic for humanity as hydrogen bombs is to write an AI program and then they decide that henceforth the program will make all the decisions (just compute!) to tell everybody what to do like bosses and governments do today. But this would not be "the robots taking over the world". It would be some humans choosing to have robots run everything, and they themselves could get caught up in this metaphorical "black hole" and the end of human life on earth.

Don't waste time on a naive "artificial conscious" fantasy. Do take a lot of effort to make sure AI functions as a very powerful tool to improve all our lives.

[ Weizenbaum ]

¶ +2024.02.10. Can you provide examples of a creative culture that lacks innovation? What factors contribute to this?

This seems an odd question.

But thinking in "gray scale", not binary (either - or), doesn't one see a lot of creativity in many cultures, but only one which is pervasively "innovative"? namely, our own Western European (and subsequently also American, Japanese, Chinese....) culture?

In our "culture" innovation seems an obsession, doesn't it? Bigger, better, faster, cheaper etcetera and so forth. General Electric Company's slogan was:

"Progress is our most important product."

Every new year there are new fashions and nobody would want to be caught wearing last year's clothes, would they?

But then come bigger questions: What is creativity? What is innovation? And what is more of the same old same old? Weren't all "advanced" cultures creative in the arts? And in religions: look how many of those different peoples cooked up!

5th Century BCE Athens Greece was one of the most creative cultures that ever was. But ere they innovative? For just one thing, he ancient Greeks created what we call "philosophy", without which we would not be having this conversation, would we? But where were they much innovative? Women and slaves did the work out of sight while the men competed for recognition by their peers in the public forum....

There are inventions that go nowhere. The Chinese invented the printing press long before Gutenberg who for all I know, copied their innovation. But in China printed texts did not change anything whereas in early modern Western Europe it revolutionized he whole world of the intellect: science, religion, politics.... There is a classic book about the enormous innovative effects of the printing press in Europe: Elizabeth Eisenstein, "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change" (2 vols in one, Cambridge University Press, 1980). Highly recommended!

There are innovations that do not seem to have any effects so for all practical purposes they do not count, do they? A century ago now, in an ancient shipwreck in the Aegean Sea, a remarkable astronomical clock was discovered: "The Antikythera mechanism". Scholars were astounded at how sophisticated the gearing in it was, far beyond anything else ever seen from around the age of the birth of Christ. But it seems to have had no effect on anything (compare to the immense effects Christ himself had!). The next episode in the story of precision engineering seems to have been Giovanni di Dondi's extremely creative and innovative astronomical clock which seems to have had no close predecessors, ca. 1350. (Look this up on the Internet: it is amazing!) But, again, what did it accomplish?

Compare today the invention of the transistor in 1947 or maybe 1959, and everybody has a cellphone today that is more powerful than a big library and a thousand "computers" (clerks using adding machines)!

But if what people are doing on their cellphones is just endless idle chit-chat, has anything changed? Does commuting a long distance to work each day in a brand new electric Tesla count as creativity or innovation over doing it in a 1953 Ford in-line 6? Or is it the same old same old?

Consider the Chinese and Japanese cultures after their initial contacts with modern Europeans. Didn't they decide they did not want to innovate?

Things are complicated aren't they?

¶ +2024.02.09. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using direct communication versus sarcasm?

Sarcasm is always risky. Probably not a good idea in any case although it may make the person who is being sarcastic feel good about themself while addingto their ral problems.

Sarcasm can be misunderstood. That's one problem with it: Tell people what you want to inform them about clearly and you will already have enough trouble being understood.

If somebody says something you think is foolish and you tell them: "What a brilliant idea!", they may be foolish enough to think you really did think their idea was great. Far less chance if you tell them directly: "That is not a good idea. [Preferably followed by reasons why.]"

But there is another more serious issue: Sarcasm makes its target even angrier at you than they already are. Why would you want to make trouble for yourself? And also the sarcasm makes them more resistant to learning better. Don't tell somebody they are stupid: Show them evidence that what they think is not right and ask them to think about it. Best of all, of course, if you can get them to argue with themself but that's is not often possible.

Why does a person want to be sarcastic? Maybe because hey are frustrated with somebody they dare not directly confront, so they "kick the cat"?

¶ +2024.02.09. Is it possible for intelligent machines to surpass human intelligence? If so, how might they treat humans and what measures can be taken to prevent negative outcomes?

What is "intelligence"? If by intelligence one means solving puzzles, didn't Deep Blue surpass the world's human chess champion some years ago?

Which could generate the decimal sequence of pi faster: (A) Prof. John von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematical geniuses who ever lived, or (B) you personal computer?

"Intelligent machines", e.g., computers are neither intelligent nor stupid: they just compute.

A not entirely satisfactory model here would be two people trying to solve the Saturday New York Times Crossword Puzzle which is said to be very difficult. Person #1 is a recent college graduate who did well in his (her, other's) courses, and all he has to try to solve the puzzle is his own memory. He has not lived very long so he does not know all that much. Person #2 would be a Nobel laureate research scientist who has access to the internet to look up anything he can't figure out for himself. Replace Person #2 with a computer program that you or somebody else good at computer programming writes to solve New York Times Crossword Puzzles. Obviously the computer program #2 is going to solve the puzzle and do it fast by looking up the definition of each clue in its database, while Person #1 probably won't succeed. Which of the two is more intelligent?

So computers can be more "intelligent" (quick to compute...) than persons (Deep Blue and chess, for example, again). And this might show up in a war where a computer correlates information about the battlespace far faster and with far more background information than even the most brilliant general. BUT!

The computer is not making decisions at all, whereas the general is making decisions. In the case of the computer, the decisions were made by the human computer programmers who wrote the program: Given such-and-such inputs, the program will product such-and-such outputs. If the programmer did not code for it, the computer programmer can't handle it. (A world-class stand-up comedian who writes his own jokes can probably get the computer to produce ridiculous output by manipulating words in tricky ways.)

"Intelligent" machines can surpass human "intelligence" (computing power). But the machines are not treating humans either good or bad or in any other way: It is the human computer programmers who designed and built the machines who are deciding how human will be treated. Repeat: if an "intelligent machine" hurts you it's not the machine that is to blame but the humans who built it in such a way that it hurt you; ditto if it helps you.

What measures can be taken to prevent negative outcomes? "Obviously", persons who are both intelligent and wise need to make and operate the "intelligent" machines. These humans need to understand the world as best we can, and try to make machines that are maximally helpful for us while also being careful to deal with and as far as possible avoid "unintended side effects".

As an aside, the "intelligence" of computers will always be limited by Kurt Godel's "Incompleteness theorem" which says that any algorithmic system either contains contradictions or propositions that it cannot decide whether they are true or false. We do not really need to worry about this any more than what is happening in galaxies zillions of light years away from us. We need to make sure that we remain in command of the computers and use them for our benefit. If the time were to come when "the computers ruled the world", that would not be exactly true: some computer programmers would have programmed computers to give all future political commands and not included any way to stop it: irreversible system. Not all that different from an old time stage coach driver who needed to keep control of his horses, is it?

[ THINK ]

¶ +2024.02.09. Can you explain the difference between intelligence and wisdom? Is one developed before the other in humans, and if so, why?

"Data is not information,
information is not knowledge,
knowledge is not understanding, and
understanding is not wisdom." (Clifford Stoll)

Intelligence is essentially knowing how to do things. An intelligent person knows how to do many things. But what for? Suppose the very intelligent person applies their intelligence(sic) to playing video games or chess or maybe even something really evil like figuring out how to trick gullible people into giving him their money on the Internet ("Phishing"). A "stupid" person probably could not figure out how to win at either video games of chess, or how to credibly seduce gullible people into giving him their money. We would not call the intelligent person who is smart at stealing people's money on the Internet or just playing games "wise", would we?

A wise person might advise persons how to avoid being duped on the internet. "Wisdom" is knowing what is good to do and why and what is good to not do and why not. What to choose among the things that are possible.

So an engineer designing advanced military weapons needs to be very intelligent. The president of a nation needs to be wise in using and refraining from using those weapons.

Wisdom and intelligence "correlate" to some degree. It is easy for a person to be intelligent but not wise. "The Unabomber" was a genius (highly intelligent) but not at all wise was he?

A really "stupid" person cannot be wise, because understanding what is worth doing and what is not worth doing involves understanding what thing are doable. A person who just believes simplistic propaganda cannot make wise decisions because he (she, other) will be deciding about situations which don't exist, like if they believe that Russia attacked Ukraine because Vladimir Putin is an evil aggressive monster, not understanding the history of that sad part of the world.

A person needs to be intelligent to be wise. But they need not be a genius, and, as shown by the case of Mr. Kaczynski, an extremely intelligent person may not be wise at all.

So intelligence is knowing how to do things; wisdom is knowing what is worth doing, and the two come together in understanding what can be done. Good intentions are needed but are not good enough without good information. As the old saw has it: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Which came first? The chicken or the egg? Answer: the Stromatolite.

¶ +2024.02.08. Can you provide some examples of unethical research in psychology or anthropology and explain why they are considered unethical?

I have read about one such experiment. You can find a lot of information about it on the Internet:

"Kaczynski entered Harvard University as a 16-year-old on a scholarship, after skipping the sixth and 11th grades. It was there that he was subjected to an experiment run by Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray that was backed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Though he graduated with a mathematics degree, later completing a doctorate in the field before becoming a professor, questions remain over whether – or to what extent – he was affected by the experiment, which reportedly involved mock interrogations in which participants' beliefs were harshly disparaged." ("Before he was the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski was a mind-control test subject", By Bryan Pietsch, June 11, 2023 at 3:48 a.m. EDT, The Washington Post)

"It's clearly unethical and violates all of the main ethical principles for psychologists as promulgated by the American Psychological Association," says Nigel Barber, Ph.D., an evolutionary psychologist who writes a regular column called "The Human Beast: Why We Do What We Do" for Psychology Today and is the author of several books on human behavior.

"Subjects were incompletely informed about the nature of the experiment [and] were tricked, or coerced, into remaining in the experiment. Given that the procedures were designed to 'break' enemy agents and render them so damaged that they would be operationally useless, it is reasonable to expect that they would have the same consequences for vulnerable young people who did not have specialized training to resist interrogation." ("What Happened to Ted Kaczynski at Harvard?", BY: BRIAN DUNLEAVY, UPDATED: JUNE 12, 2023 | ORIGINAL: MAY 25, 2018, HISTORY | Watch Full Episodes of Your Favorite Shows)

It seems clear to me that this experiment to see how persons respond to being humiliated was "unimaginably" unethical, i.e., all too imaginable as something very bad that should never have even been contemplated much less done. And it maybe triggered a fragile young mathematical genius into hating scientific society and becoming a mass murderer.

Do you agree that such experiments should never be done? No experiment should try to see what happens when you harm persons, yes? This sound as bad as the infamous "Tuskegee Experiment: The Infamous Syphilis Study" to see what happens to men who have syphilis and are not treated for their disease.

For psychologists and anthropologists to respectfully study persons with their informed consent and to help them where possible seems fine to me.

There are surely other examples but, as Senator Joseph McCarthy said in a different context: one of these is already one too many. Yes?

¶ +2024.02.08. How do you navigate the balance between the known and the unexplored in your creative pursuits?

My suggestion is a simple and humble one:

Let me use a model: Suppose you want to explore an unknown forest. You might get lost there and maybe even freeze to death or something else very bad. But you start from a secure place you already are very familiar with. So explore the unknown but always keeping sure you have secured your way back out in case you decide it's not a good idea to keep adventuring further into the unknown (at leas for now – may be unpredicted sudden blizzard impends?).

I wrote computer programs. Computer programmers are often writing code that goes off into the unknown: "Let me try this which looks promising for doing [whatever]...." Well, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. In the latter case the programmer needs to get back to where he (she, other) started trying what didn't work out. He has changed all sorts of things here and there and can't remember them all. Time for frustration and panic, unless!

Unless he took a backup before he stated going off into the unknown. Then it should be "no big deal": Revert to the backup and start adventuring into the unknown again, maybe even trying to retrace what didn't work to find out why it didn't, or trying something else altogether... (I always "took a backup" before I started changing things.)

So my piece of advice is simple and not "exciting": Indeed, I would urge you to not get too excited because then you will not be careful. Before you start adventuring into the unknown, make sure you know where you are and that you are sure how to get back there if things do not go well. Don't be foolish. Better safe than sorry. Shouldn't exploration be fun not potentially frightening?

If your creative pursuit is something like writing poetry, obviously you don't need to be so "careful" as if you are writing computer code or, even more serious: maybe designing jumbo jet airplanes where a mistake can kill hundreds of persons.... Look before you leap. What do you think?

[ THINK ]

¶ +2024.02.08. Is it ethical to ignore safety regulations to meet production deadlines?

Where is this question coming from?

Almost anything is possible, especially if it is bad and not self-contradictory. I asked myself for an example of where it would be "ethical" and make good sense to "ignore safety regulations to meet production deadlines". Well, here goes:

A company whose factory is located a the bottom of a huge dam and makes equipment for the dam. The dam is about to burst due to a piece of machinery having failed and not being fixable. The factory and many thousands of people are about to be killed in a huge wall of water. The factory has to produce the part, FAST. Safety regulations say blah, bah, blah and it would take too long to produce the part safely. So the company decides to "cut corners" on safety to get the part produced soon enough to prevent the disaster. Maybe some employee(s) lose an arm or suffer other harm in the process because safety regulations (which in normal times are very sensible!) were not met. The part is produced in time and everybody is saved.

Now, let's be honest about it: how many times is a situation like that? Isn't it more often something like the Boeing 737-Max debacle, where Boeing hurried up and cut corners to beat Airbus to the market with new model plane? Oh, dear, Airbus got the contract because we followed safety regulations and those several hundred persons did not die in 737-Max crashes due to having cut corners about the autopilot automation! What's the worst that could have happened? Yes, some employees may have had to be laid off or some other adjustment: maybe everybody would have to take a 5% pay cut and the executives 20%?

Or consider RMS Titanic. The White Star Line was in deep financial trouble. It was not acceptable to cancel the voyage even though there was a huge fire burning in a coal bunker and they had taken on only the minimum amount of coal to make the crossing. It was not acceptable to slow down in the ice field because that would burn more coal and perhaps lead to the PR DISASTER of the great ship running out of coal of Martha's Vinyard and having to be ingloriously towed in to New York harbor.

So, in general it is never acceptable to "ignore safety regulations to meet production deadlines", ESPECIALLY if the person who makes the decision is not the persons whose safety will be put at risk. But some persons are "pig headed": I can imagine a CEO who was so determined to win a contract that he would push a machinist who was following safety regulations off the shop floor and make a crucial part himself unsafely and maybe end up in the hospital instead of making the deadline. But that kind of thing does not happen very often, does it? More often the boss pushes the employees to take risks while he (she, other) is in no danger of being injured of killed, yes?

So why ask this question? Who is looking for an excuse to do something wrong?

(Addendum: If this question is maybe from a student looking for somebody to write a course assignment essay for them, it's fine to use what I have written, PROVIDED you say you got it from somebody's answer to your question on Quora. That is an ethical issue too, isn't it?)

¶ +2024.02.07. What things are lacking in a state of nature that a government might be able to provide?

A "state of nature" could never exist for human beings. A baby without a mother dies very fast. We need a social surround to enable us to live, even to learn languages to be able to think about anything.

By this I don't mean we are necessarily like bees in a hive. Individuals can differ in all sorts of ways once they have become functioning persons in society. But whatever the individual does, not matter how "individualistic" takes place in the context of social life. As Karl Marx famously said: "Man make himself on the basis of conditions he dii not make."

So "state of nature" is a kind of political science game to see what would happen if persons were self-sufficient entities. Isn't this something the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote about in his famous book "Leviathan"?

But guess what? Nation states are a lot that way in reality. University of Chicago distinguished professor John Mearsheimer's political philosophy has been called "offensive realism": "which describes the interaction between great powers as being primarily driven by the rational desire to achieve regional hegemony in an anarchic international system" (Google) It's not nice, is it? If you want to learn about this stuff, Prof. Mearsheimer's books are very good sources.

But us individual human beings live in society and government can provide all sorts of things and, as is obvious ,different persons have very different ideas about this.

One possibility is Micah 4 in the Bible (read the whole chapter, please).

"Everyone will sit under their own vine

and under their own fig tree,

and no one will make them afraid,

for the Lord Almighty has spoken." (Micah 4:4)

Sounds good to me, and to thee?

¶ +2024.02.07. What are the underlying cultural and socio-political implications of Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' within the context of 20th-century art movements?

Good question.

The world did not fill up with "readymades, did it?

The "readymade" seems a kind of dead end, doesn't it? I am not an art historian. Did Duchamp influence introducing objects of daily use (and disuse) INTO artworks, especially collages? I'm not sure but maybe not? Things like Robert Rauschenberg's junk sculptures? Pop art? Minimalism? My guess is that if you had asked him, Andy Warhol would have said Duchamp was an influence on his work.

Duchamp seems to me sui generis: Not the starter of any "movement"; a "solitary" genius. And many of his "readymades" were not completely ready made, were they? He "doctored them up".

The one "pure" readymade that comes to my mind is his bottle drying rack (I have one just like it in my basement – my wife wanted to throw it away but I see it as an artwork. Duchamp was "into" all sorts of things, like being a world-class chess player. I don't think he took anything entirely "seriously": He enjoyed PLAYING – I think that is the message of his art: Be playful!

I find him inspiring, especially since I have zero freehand drawing ability but I can "think up" things. Do you find him inspiring? How?

Another person to think about here was the Dada poet Tristan Tzara, who invented the Dada poem: just scramble up the government propaganda and it makes as much sense as it did originally. He was protesting World War I – we have our stupid wars, still today, with the bs propaganda, like from that comedian in Ukraine who is not funny: Make Dada poems out of all his whining for everybody to give him more weapons.

As for all the kitschy stuff in the late 20th century and today ("postmodernism", e.g.) I would have liked to see the art world build in The Weimar Bauhaus. Making the objects of daily use and their use be art to enjoy. You?

¶ +2024.02.07. How can bias in AI systems be mitigated to ensure fairness and equity in decision-making processes?

This is probably not easy.

I just now ran a quick test on the Bing AI, asking it: "Is abortion murder?" You will agree that is a highly contentious question about which some persons have strongly biased positions, yes?

The Bing AI said it was a deeply contentious and philosophical question and it presented information from both sides. I then told it I was testing it to see if it was biased and that it looked to me like it was not. It replied:

"Indeed, you are absolutely right! As an AI language model, I strive to provide balanced and informative responses without taking sides. My goal is to empower users with information so they can form their own opinions. If you have any more questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask!"

That sounds pretty "unbiased" to me. But there are other questions where I think it does take sides. Genocide may be one – I have not checked this out. Would we want an AI to present both sides in an unbiased way about families in Pakistan throwing acid in young girl's faces and stoning them to death because they went out in public with their hair exposed or even had sex with a boy?

So, in the end, doesn't it get down to whether we have a civil society where everybody can live together and agree to disagree when they can't agree? Consider the case of the French school teacher Mr. Samuel Paty,, a few years ago in Paris France.

[ Samuel Paty ]

If you do not know about this, look it up on he Internet. French official education policy is to teach freedom of expression (laicite). Mr. Paty showed some cartoons which mocked The Prophet Mohammad. Before he started his lesson, he urged any student who thought they might be offended to leave th room. A religious bigot, Abdoullakh Anzorov, decapitated Mr. Paty: severed his head from his torso with a knife, for "insulting th Prophet". A student had triggered all this by lying about Mr. Paty. It was a huge horrible mess.

When things like that are going on, "unbiased" is not the whole problem is it?

Or suppose that AI was being run by strongly pro-Netanyahu Israelis? It seems some Israeli "settlers" commit brutal crimes against Plestinians to force them off their land. "Their land"? Whose land? Does it belong to the Palestinians who have lived ther for hundreds of years into the present? Or to the jews to whom their God promised it several thousnd years ago? And what about the jewish or any other "God"? Metaphysical reality of anthropological belief?

I hope I have offered evidence that AI is not just a technological thing. It's a political thing. It's going to be an increasingly important part of social life, like advertising and more recently, "social media"....

There are simple answers only among persons who more or less think alike, and one ay for persons to think more or less alike is to all be "liberal intellectuals". It's dishonest to say you are "unbiased" as if that makes you perfect. More accurate to say that your bias is to tolerate everybody who tolerates you (which would not likely include, for instance, Mr. Abdoullakh Anzorov)....

Excellent question. What do you think?

[ THINK ]

[ Weizenbaum ]: read his classic and easily readable book: "Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation", WH Freeman 1976)

¶ +2024.02.07. Why do I say that Cognitive science cannot explain consciousness and cannot create real AI but only partial AI?

This is a very difficult question. Go back to college and study philosophy. That sounds flippant but it's that difficult. "Consciousness" is not a thing that can be explained. You are consciousness and you are EXPLAINING or at least trying to explain things. So you look at yourself in the mirror or other people and they are doing things: eating, walking, writing computer programs.... It is empirically obvious something puzzling is going on here. Lee Harvey Oswald with a single bullet presumably ended John F. Kennedy's "consciousness".

[ Person - world disgram ]

Does that Venn diagram help? The starting point is to be aware that there is a puzzle here: that "consciousness" is not something that can be coded in a computer program and run on a computer. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said that the visual field is not itself something seen.

This is sort of like the old story about the millipede who tried to figure out how he walked and could not get anywhere because the motion of his thousand legs was so confusing. Bu as soon as he forgot about this and realized he wanted to eat, he was off and walking effortlessly toward his next meal.

The important thing is to be acutely aware that consciousness is not a thing, and that "artificial intelligence" is not intelligent, nor is it stupid. Humans are intelligent or stupid. AI just computes: AI does things persons want it to do. Write your own and run it on your personal computer. It just computes. But since what is being programmed is to LOOK LIKE a human responding to you, it can LOOK LIKE the computer is intelligent or conscious. "How are you doing today, IA?" "I'm doing fine...." Well, the AI is not doing fine in the same sense as your mother might be. The computer was just programmed to make that response to the given input.

Alan Turing, who knew something about computers, once wrote to his mother that if we ever did make a computer that really did think, "we shan't understand how it does it." Imagine you are a chemist and you mix together some chemicals in your lab and whatever you did starts talking back to you. People do it every day: Where did Albert Einstein come from? the chemical process of sperm mixing with egg. Nobody understands that, either, do they? But you can still honor and appreciate and benefit from what you can't understand, or, if it's not good, work against it, etc.

¶ +2024.02.07. Is it considered ethical to use artificial intelligence to generate a blog post?

What is "Artificial Intelligence" (AI)? AI is a TOOL for persons to use to help them accomplish things they want to do. The proper use of tools is to use them. IT is "ethical" to use a tool in an honest way for a good purpose. It's as simple as that.

So let's suppose you have a blog and you have to write something for the new day and you "have nothing to say" and you do not want to write about THAT. So you ask an AI for ideas and the AI cranks out a lovely blog post for you.

"Ethical" is a big word. So let's say it would not be right for you to publish that an generated essay as your blog post of the day, UNLESS you add that the AI generated it and that you endorse it. That would be OK. Same thing if you took an OpEd piece from The New York Times newspaper, yes?

But suppose you read what the AI wrote and think about it and write your own blog post, USING some ideas you got from the AI generated essay which you have checked out and which make sense to you and you explain all this in the blog post YOU WRITE. And, again, you tell your readers you got some of this from AI. Is that any different than if you read an article in The New York Times newspaper and THAT inspired you to write a blog post? But there you would need to say you got it from the New York Times newspaper. What's the difference?

I built this beautiful house. Oh, you did, did you, with your bare hands? No, I used a power saw and some other tools..... Great job!

¶ +2024.02.06. Is technology ahead of ethics in particular with AI?

I am not an expert but my feeling is that AI is ahead of the ethics of the people who are making and deploying it.

The technical experts are not often very interested in the human impact of what they are doing and if they are it may be in serious ways superficial. How many of them save studied sociology? How many have studied Prof Jacques Ellul's books about technology and society?

A lot of them are fascinated by "science fiction": going to the moon, then to the planets then to other stars.... It's the intellectual challenge of advancing the technologies that fascinates many of them, not the deep appreciation of ordinary persons' daily lives. Sociology? what a bore?

They keep pushing "**how to**" knowledge, not deeply thinking about "**what for?**". Where do you see democracies in sci fi? It's usually what I call: neo-feudalism in flying fortresses which are not real B-17 heavy bombers. Look at Star Trek: it was a hierarchical military organization: Captain Kirk, Lieutenant Uhura, *et al*.

Enthusiasm is not good. The scariest thing I can think of is Elon Musk's idea of implanting networked computer chips in persons' brains to "enhance" them. Enable persons with severe neurological impairments to walk and go to the toilet and have sex like other persons, really would be great (I recently read one advocate for paralyzed persons say he was far less interested in walking than in being able to control his bowels and sexual function). But tinkering with healthy persons' minds? To make zombies out of everybody? "Oh, it's challenging!" curb your enthusiasm! (Larry David).

The other really frightening possibility is that these technical geniuses but social "idiots" may program AI to make the decisions for persons' lives. Then the AI will run the world, like some human dictator. And it may not re reversible so the whole of humanity might be destroyed as effectively as with hydrogen bombs. But even then remember: It's not "the robots rebelling and taking over the world". Its some humans programmed the robots to make all subsequent decisions ("take over the world"). The idea of robots rebelling and taking over the world is foolish, but foolish persons can program the robots to coerce everything everybody does going forward.

There is a fine book that's easily readable that everybody should read: MIT Computer Science Prof. Joseph Weizenbaum's "Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation" (WH Freeman, 1976). There is also an old fun but profound movie everybody should watch: "The Truman Show".

Does this make any sense to you?

[ Weizenbaum quote ]

¶ +2024.02.06. A person steals to meet basic survival needs, such as food or shelter, when facing extreme poverty or homelessness. Discussing the moral implications of stealing for survival, can it justify as theft?

This question sounds like it may be coming from a student who does not want to do the assignment and is looking for somebody else to do it for them. Discuss the "moral" implications of that, please. AI can probably in fact write a better essay than the student can, so the student might try submitting that and hope to not get "caught" by plagiarism detection software or an alert teacher.

This is a question which may not have an answer that satisfies everybody. There may be even "worse" questions. Suppose you are a hospital administrator at the start of the Covid pandemic and you have one available respirator to save a patient's life. But you have at least two and maybe many more people who are dying of Covid and if they get a respirator they will survive, else they will die. Who gets the respirator?

Let's make it even "worse": there are two patients: one is a 95 year old great humanitarian and public intellectual. The other is a good-for-nothing 20 year old jerk. The 95 year old may live another 2 or 3 years or maybe at most 7 or 8 and do a lot of good for humanity. But the jerk would live for another 75 years and accomplish no good for anybody. Which one gets the respirator? Or even worse, suppose the jerk's father is very rich and will give the hospital a large donation if his son survives?

Here's one I came up with that elicited some strong responses that surprised me: A young man, another jerk, inherits a "priceless" masterpiece wristwatch which he could sell for $1,000,000 or more. He certainly has no use for it and does not care about anything of value, just playing video games, He does not care about such matters as all the loving labor some watchmaker devoted to making the watch, or that pleasure some persons would get from seeing it displyed in a museum.

He decides he literally wants to eat the watch, well ,not ingest it but just chomp down on it to hear all the mechanism go "crunch". Should he be allowed to destroy the watch or should society prevent this destruction of a great treasure for all humanity? Some persons replied that it was his private property and he should be allowed to do with it whatever he wants: "Crunch!"

¶ +2024.02.05. Can AI ever truly be creative, or will it always be limited to mimicking and recombining existing data?

We should never be 100% confident that something entirely unexpected might turn up some day. Can inorganic chemistry be creative? Well, where did Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso and all the other inventive minds come from? Inorganic chemistry. And we have no clue whatsoever how this happens, even if we are someday able to do in a laboratory what people do every day in copulation: mixing chemicals.

But that's just idle speculation. Alan Turing once wrote to his mother: If we ever do make a computer that really thinks, "we shan't understand how it does it". Why? because all we can understand are computer programs with looping and branching instructions depending on the inputs which can "**mimick and recombine existing data".**

But to a user it may not look that way. AI deploys extremely powerful computing resources in clever ways over huge databases so it can increasingly SIMLUATE human speech. *Analogy*: the first computer images were extended ascii characters printed on teletypewriters. You can find a very large collection of these primitive images at:

https://www.asciiart.eu/Would anybody mistake them for the real thing? But today we use much more advanced technology to produce computer images that increasingly look "real". Indeed, experts can sometimes see in them information that is not visible in the real thing. So are the new images real? No! they are "realistic".

AI is just limited to "**limited to mimicking and recombining existing data". **But that's a lot! So what can AI not do? Come up with something genuinely new, something that cannot be produced by "**mimicking and recombining existing data".**

My favorite example is the artist Marcel Duchamp. As far as I can see, nobody ever could have come up with his idea for "readymades": Taking ordinary objects of daily use and making them be priceless masterpieces of art simply by saying they were. Extrapolate this being a work of art that would fetch maybe $10,000,000 USD at auction and tell how it differs from any standard issue male urinal you can buy at your local plumbing supply store for maybe $100?

[ Fountain ]

If you are not artistically inclined, how could anyone have come up with Johannes Kepler's idea that the planets moved in elliptical orbits, back in the days of circular orbits that could be tweaked with epicycles and other geometrical tricks to approximate the data as close as one liked? AI would have just made more refined epicycles for circular orbits. Or Einstein's General Theory of relativity? Or most unimaginable of all: Godel's Incompleteness Theorem which says that all axiomatic systems are either incomplete or contain contradictions/ All computer programs are axiomatic systems.

But practically speaking, the "**mimicking and recombining existing data"** keeps getting more and more **sophisticated**, like computer images keep getting more "**realistic**". Practically speaking, a lot of people's jobs are "**mimicking and recombining existing data", **even if they look creative. Most advertisements are "creative": copying old ads with clever modifications. But who could have come up with Milton Glazer's "I [heart image] New York"? He was an ad man who did have some really new ideas, yes?

AI is going to alleviate a lot of routine work. But people need to curb their enthusiasm. We humans need to keep making the decisions and one decision we should not make is to let the AI make the decisions, which may be irreversible and catastrophic ("the sorcerer's apprentice" or "the Midas touch"...)

Does this make any sense to you?

¶ +2024.02.04. When can we expect the emergence of humanoid robots reaching a level of realism that would make them virtually indistinguishable from humans in appearance?

Excellent question!

Not asking when "humanoid robots" will become real people or like if space invaders came to earth and entered into discussions with us, which is a foolish fantasy because computer powered devices, no matter what they look like just compute: they don't think, they don't feel, they are not intelligent and they are not stupid: They just compute, Human computer programmers write code to program them which enables them to increasingly look like and act like humans (or space invaders or whatevers). Human computer programmers write computer programs.

My guess is: any day now if not already. We wonder if the military has advanced projects we don't know about? Your waiter in a restaurant, or your employee or your manager or your student or who knows who could be a "humanoid robot". It's just a matter of engineering progress.

It's analogous to computer images. The first images were extended ascii characters printed in rows on teletypewriter printouts. Go to:

https://www.asciiart.eu/There you will find an endless number of pictures of things that nobody could possibly mistake for the real thing. Computers got faster and printouts higher resolution, to the point that probably today "you can't tell the difference": "Is it real of is it Memorex?"

So if not today then tomorrow. If no tomorrow then next year. If not next year then 5 years from today, etc. The dystopian possibilities are "unimaginable", aren't they, i.e., all too frighteningly imaginable?

So we have to make sure that good persons with good intentions, including ourselves remain in control of this development o that nothing bad happens, especially nothing bed that can't be reversed. If thermonuclear bombs can end human life on earth, at least they produce mushroom clouds. This could be like a horror movie, for real. I do not think people should make horror movies, either: Don't frighten persons with bogeyman. Fear is not amusing. We should attack real problems like poverty, illiteracy, pancreatic cancer, global warming, etc.

What a great question!

[ Weizenbaum ]

¶ +2024.02.03. What are some new (AI) facilitated crimes that computer savvy criminals are perpetrating?

This is one of the few questions for which I don't think I have an answer. The potential is probably far beyond anything I can imagine – I just know computer programming. If Deep Blue beat the world champion human chess player, who else can AI beat at what all else?

Ai can impersonate persons, right? So instead of human "phishers" trolling the internet for dupes, they can have AI bots doing it much more effectively and at far greater scale, tailoring their approach to each particular person's weaknesses as they say whatever they say. Almost anybody can be fooled in some way. Somehow or other some bad actor impersonated a manufacturer's computer support person and fooled me. I can't imagine all the bad things that can be done with AI trolling all over the internet looking for people's vulnerabilities or cooking up fake financial transactions or who knows what?

AI is not intelligent nor is it stupid; it just computes. But is does it very and ver increasingly more powerfully, like computer video games keep getting ever more "realistic".

I shake my head at this one. Many bad actors on the internet are very smart. What might they be interested in? Causing some nation's electric power grid to self-destruct? Making persons go insane with psychological warfare conversations? Impersonate you and get you arrested for some crime you didn't know anything about?

But I guess that's why you asked the question? It's going to be like war: attackers come up with better means or attack and defenders come up with better means of defense, on and on. Bad people will figure out how to do bad things with AI and good people will figure out ways to counter them, on and on. We want the benefits of AI. they want to rip us off with it.

Ole question: Why can't everybody cooperate and all build a better world for all together?

¶ +2024.02.03. What ethical considerations need to be addressed as AI becomes more advanced and autonomous?

What would it mean for AI to become "autonomous"? It would mean that AI did all sorts of things without human intervention and also, presumably, that it told humans what to do and then what to do next depending on what they did. We have always had that without AI: governments and other powerful institutions. So it would be nothing new, just a different flavor of something we've always had. and it has always been a cause for grave concern: taking away persons' freedom to run their lives as they feel best ("bossing them around").

We try to have governments and other powerful institutions which are REGULATED by human oversight, don't we? It needs to be the same thing with AI: AI will only be "autonomous" if we program it to go off and do things without human intervention. We will make robots will take over the world – like totalitarian governments.

Humans – us – need to keep making the decisions what AI should do FOR US, and keep monitoring it to see that we are getting what we want from it. There is really nothing structurally new here, but the scale keeps getting bigger and thus the risks of what it can do for or to us greater. It's like running The United States of America today is a lot more complex than running an ancient Greek city state with 1 / 10,000 (one ten-thousandth!) the population.

Some persons get all enthusiastic about all the things AI will be able to do. Enthusiasm leads persons to do foolish things. We don't need enthusiasm: we need responsibility. Not: "Gee whiz, look what Ai can do, Oh Boy!" But: "How can we make use of all this potential for human betterment?"

Knowing how to do things can accomplish either good or bad or just waste. Knowing what is WORTH doing can lead to seeing what use we can make of AI to further our HUMAN, not TECHNOLOGICAL aims. Solving technological problems can be no more helpful then solving Rubik's Cube; both are challenging and even addicting to some persons.

Does this make sense to you? I will end with a classic quote from MIT Professor of Computer Science Joseph Weizenbaum, whose book "Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation" (WH Freeman. 1976) remains a must-read:

"The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done."

¶ +2024.02.02. Will there ever be ideologies that are above and beyond criticism, or that will withstand the test of time?

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Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

All human knowledge is partial, all results if inquiry provisional. We can never get behind it all like we seem to do with axiomatic systems we devise where we specify the basis of it all. As the 18th century British philosopher David Hume pointed out, we can never find the causes of any thing, just observe "constant conjunctions" of events.

Watch the old fun but also profound movie "The Truman Show" and see if you can be 100% certain of anything. All dogmas are deceptions. There is no absolute truth except maybe Godel's Incompleteness Theorem which proves that every axiomatic system either contains contradictions or propositions that it cannot decide whether they are true or false. Exactly the opposite of what people hope for. If "God" speaks to you is it God or Satan in God suit? Oh, dear!

But isn't there one thing one (you, me) can be practically certain of? Namely: that we are questioning and coming up with findings that seem helpful? And that we can keep building on these findings provided we always keep in mind they are subject to future revision in the light of new experience? This is not nothing.

I urge it is a lot more than "nothing". Instead of being all gung ho about the results about inquiry (don't get me wrong, results are very important, especially in fields like medical science!), focus first of all on strengthening the social process of inquiry itself. Inquire more. Learn how to ask better questions and do more effective investigations. Work on better ways of collaborating with others. Instead of a community built on something like "nationality", let's build a community built on furthering inquiry. Doesn't that seem like it will stand the test of time? Throw nothing away. What fails to endure, keep it around as examples of what we tried in past and you never know what new use we may find for today's apparent throwaways.

What should withstand the test of time is a community that is always strengthening its commitment to inquiry and pursuit of knowledge. The whole human world as a kind of big university, not a bunch of bickering ethnicities, etc. The process itself is the enduring and ever self-improving product.

Look what we have now so often: people who believe they have The Truth and they even hurt and kill each other for it. For What? provisional positions. Even if we cannot know anything for Eternally Certain, aren't we pretty confident we have a lot of problems that are in need of being remediated, like pancreatic cancer, global warming, etc.? let's continually strengthen the community itself.

As for the original question about "ideologies about criticism", watch the old fun but also profound movie, "The Truman Show", and be humbled. What to you think?

¶ +2024.02.02. How do I stop the person who asks Quora "Do you have an idea for an offensive YouTube video about ______? What's it called and what's the full plot? Why is it offensive?" I see variations of this question over and over again.

I've seen this too. I doubt there is a specific name for it and it might be the activity of a genuinely bad person. Conceivably it could also be AI generated questions? I don't see how we can know but it is disturbing and any response may just abet an evil doer. On the other hand, if Quora shut down their questions, what will they do instead?

Hopefully they will get no replies and just tire themself out. But one thing one might try – and I'm no saying this will do any good but let's think of as many options as as can: Write an idea for an offensive video that's offensive in the opposite direction from the expected or intended.

Let's say a couple bad persons who come to an elementary school to commit a mass murder The cops catch them before they can hurt anybody, strip them of all their fearsome commando gear (which maybe turns out to be fake?). handcuff them, take away their weapons and haul them up in front of the school auditorium and all the students and faculty come to see the two "fierce commandos" who are now shown to be wimpy young males. Then the cops take them away and they are put in prison for life and it ends with a teacher and his (or her or other's) kids all saying what pathetic disgusting simps those two would-be terrorists had been, like popped balloons on the ground pffft!

I doubt that would do any good but it's the only option I can think of. Quora should have some place to complain to but I have no idea about that. On does maybe occasionally either see them censor things or the person who submitted a question withdraws it. My guess is that other "social media" are worse. What do you think?

¶ +2024.01.31. **Will AI ever be truly conscious? ** * What are the ethical implications of developing conscious AI? * What would the world be like if AI were conscious? * How would we know if an AI was conscious?

I've thought about this but I've also IMAGINED about this. It is not going to happen with what today is called "Artificial Intelligence" because that is just computer programs that execute branching and looping instructions depending on input values for variables. As Prof. Noam Chomsky says: ther is nothing intellectually interesting about AI. It does not in any way help us understand human langauge. It just simulates it ever better, like the newest video games are more "realistic" than extended ascii teletypewriter based earliest computer games. All the asterisks in the question express ENTHUSIASM. ENTHUSIASM does not help anybody understand anything: etymologically enthusiasm goes back to a person being "possessed" by a demon, in other words, being insane..

But we can easily IMAGINE machines that are really conscious. Ready? You get up in the morning and your toothbrush greets you: "Hi, Charlie! How are you doing today?" And things keep going on from there. There you have it. Do you like it? You can take this from here. Remember: anything that is not self-contradictory is imaginable. Your left shoe could refuse to let you wear it because you got it dirty in slush from a recent snow yesterday. Are you sure they are conscious? Are you sure your coworkers of fellow student or parents are conscious? After the 18th century British philosopher David Hume, we know that we cannot know the "causes" of anything, only "constant conjunctions": what things look like

Persons need to curb their enthusiasms. Everybody needs to be RESPONSIBLE. AI is going to get more and more powerful and take over more and more previously human routinizeable tasks. Some persons will have fantasies of AI ruling the world. Humans need to always make the decisions (to decide to let the AIs rule the world would be human decision too, right? but it is one that might not be able to be revoked, just like exploding thermonuclear bombs to destroy the enemy –- and oneself.). Don't just imagine what AI can DO: also imagine what the consequences might be.

¶ +2024.01.30. Is it considered plagiarism to use a library that is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL)?

"Plagiarism" has nothing to do with any secondary attributes of material one uses. All that counts is that you are using material that is neither commonplace (e.g.: "The sun rises in the east each day") nor your own innovation (like if you discover a new species of insect). If you cite somebody else's work, even if it is in the public domain, you need to give the source else it's plagiarism.

And the most important reason for scrupulously citing your sources if not to give the authors credit for their work, which is important, but so that what you wrote can be fact checked. If nobody can tell where you got material from you might as well have fabricated it and it's not usable in serious work.

What "public license" means (am I wrong here?) is that you can use that material without getting permission from anybody or paying anything to use it. Suppose you write a paper and quote substantial material from public domain sources without giving credit and end up President of a Major University. You won't owe anybody anything but you'll still lose your job when people come after you.

This kind of thing is really just "common sense". Play fair. Don't cheat. Acknowledge your sources. When in doubt say where you got it from. It can't hurt unless you are trying to "get away with something". But being scrupulous will enhance you reputation: "Bill is always honest about where he got things from."

¶ +2024.01.29. What is the resonance of common sense in the age of artificial intelligence?

**What AI says always needs to be checked by "common sense"** because AI has no "sense', common or otherwise: it just computes. And sometimes it makes mistakes. It can find false information in its database or it can even not parse a question correctly, especially if you ask it questions with ambiguous words or other issues (http://issues.AI). AI is neither intelligent nor stupid; it just computes according to the computer program it is executing.

Here is an old analogy: Boeing once hired an engineer right out of college and assigned him to design a simple part to get familiar with the company procedures. He had no experience, just book learning, like AI has its database. He designed it and took his beautiful design to the machinists to make the prototype. They looked at it and asked him if he was sure it was right. Of course, he said. They happily made his part for him: It was perfect except it was an order of magnitude too big. He had no common sense, just book learning, like AI just has its database.

¶ +2024.01.26. What is the danger in our own underdeveloped moral universe when it comes to American colonialism?

What is "American colonialism"?

America does not really have any colonies any longer, does it?

But we do try to bully other countries, believing we should be the Global Hegemon. Univ. of Chicago Prof. John Mearsheimer specializes in studying this.

We are now in a multipolar world and other countries want to be respected as peers, not told what to do. I don't have quotes but I recently heard exactly this complaint from one important African political leader.

Russia seems to be a very bad case of this. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia wanted to be friends with us but we were not interested. Columbia University Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is an expert here.

We let Russia sink into kleptocratic anarchy, and finally Vladimir Putin rescued the country. He wanted to be friends with us but we weren't interested. And we decided to try to strangle Russia by encircling their Western border with NATO – after we had promised to not push NATO east of Germany.

And what has been the result? The current humanitarian disaster of an anti-Russian government in Kiev fighting a proxy war for the U.S. to weaken Russia's military and overthrow Putin's government. But he had wanted to be friends with us. And the war has just made Russia stronger and also now anti-American.

If The United States had its way, Russia would not be a "colony" but it would be a client state of the American Imperium. We would ship them Britney Griner and they would sell us mineral ores. But Dr. Putin did not see it that way and has revitalized Russia. He does not want to conquer the world but he does want security on Russia's western border: a neutral Ukraine. A neutral Ukraine would be at peace with both Russia and The West and do business with both. But we refuse to let that happen.

NATO in Ukraine today is for Russia what Soviet missiles in Cuba were for the U.S. in 1962: an existential threat.

Also, Ukraine is not really a unified country: It has two groups which do not like each other: the people in the western part of the country and the ethnically Russians in the east. It would be a difficult situation at best but we have made the worst of it.

America does not have formal colonies, but try to oppose us and see what happens to you. And America's current president may even be mentally retarded. He seems to be a 12 year old flag waver boy scout, whose competence, he himself says , is to carry a football.

We don't even have a Henry Kissinger running the show. He famously said: "America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests." We should do business with the world, including Russia and China.

¶ +2024.01.26. What is the best way to request a commission from an artist without coming across as cheap or entitled?

My suggestion is to establish a personal rapport with the artist first. Tell him (her, other) what you like about their work that drew you to them.

See how they respond. If the artist is "IMPORTANT", you are likely out of luck unless you are wealthy and FAMOUS yourself. I never dealt with "artists" but I did once commission something from a wood craftsman. His work was of very high quality but he was still young and his small wood bowls sold for about $2,500 in 1980 which was a fair amount of money back then but not astronomical. I explained to him what I was looking for, which was something very unusual, and he took an interest in my project, so it worked out well.

"Cheap" or "entitled"? How does one come across those ways? By trying to get something for a cheap price? Or by acting like you can tell the person what to do? Either of those is an obvious turnoff, isn't it? just be sincere.

First get to know the person. This can conceivably be done by email or phone but in person conversation is obviously preferable. The challenge is to get him (her, other) interested in what you are interested in, so that he will WANT to do it.

Does that make any sense to you?

¶ +2024.01.25. What applies to the ethics of using artificial intelligence in making decisions that affect human life?

This should be obvious: Artificial Intelligence can be **a** – note that word: "**a**", i.e., one among others – source for helping HUMANS make decisions that affect human life or other important matters.

But the responsibility for the decisions has to rest with persons because AI is neither responsible nor irresponsible: It just computes.

Of course one does not want irresponsible or ignorant humans making decisions, either. So you want "responsible", i.e. "ethical", well informed humans making the decisions. And that's where AI can help: providing information, although even here, it can make mistakes. I forget the details but when Google unveiled its AI they asked it a question and it gave a nonsensical answer so the release was postponed a bit. AI is neither responsible nor irresponsible, and it has no "common sense" either: It just computes.

AI has trouble with non-straightforward sentences. A world-class stand up comedian who writes his (her, other's) own jokes can easily get joke material out of AI by "playing with words".

So use AI a a resource (mor or less like you used to use an encyclopedia, say) and make sure what it tells you makes good sense when correlated with other information. Or use what AI provides as source material for you to investigate further. But don't rely on AI. AI is not reliable. It just computes.

Think about it: If you are a manger responsible for a project, no matter how competent your technical staff is, would you just go long with "Don't worry boss, everything's ok."? AI is not as good as that.

AI will be very useful in many ways. Suppose it made a wrong decision, who would you blame? The computer? The computer programmers who wrote the AI, more likely, but where are they?

Humans make decisions, including sometimes "to let the computer make the decision", i.e., to let the decision be whatever the computer computes. But that was the human's decision, not the computer's decision.

Does this make sense?

¶ +2024.01.24. How do I use myself in a question?

Easy. Let e give you an example. Mr. Cohen was a junior high school teacher in a low performing school. He maintained order and the kids learned math because he used a real world example of how they could escape the ghetto if they studied.

He did not give them useless questions about abstract things.

"If Mr. Cohen make $300 per week, how much does he earn in a year?" and he used the real number.

¶ +2024.01.22. Do robots want to be human?

Robots do not want anything, nor are the intelligent or stupid, nor do they have any feelings or aspirations or ideas. They just compute: they follow out algorithms (computer programs) written by humans. They do not even follow orders: they just compute (execute branching and looping hardware instructions based on specific input values): huge Babbage Engines. Deep Blue did not play chess: it just computed. AI is not intelligent: it just computes, applying clever programming to massive processor power accessing enormous databases which are not any kind of memory but just hugs masses of bits.

If a robot harms any person it is not at fault: the humans who programmed it are at fault.

Alan Turing said that if we ever do invent a computer that really thinks, "we shan't understand how it does it". Just like sperm and egg produce geniuses and morons and everybody else in between today and we have no idea how it does it.

But one thing is for certain: Just because we don't understand something does not mean we should not take it very seriously. We have contraception for humans who mix sperms and eggs. For computers:

**The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done.** (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

¶ +2024.01.22. What is a detailed distinction between statement and instruction?

Is the asker looking for somebody to do his (her, other's) school ass–-ignment for them?

Short answer:

Information is just that: material you might or might not use for some purpose or other that maybe you did not know before. "Brad Mccormick is 77 years old. That's information for you.

Instruction comes in two very different flavor:

(1) Information that specifically informs you how to do something. But you need not do it.

(2) A COMMAND TO DO SOMETHING OR ELSE BE PUNUNSIHED BY PEOPLE WITH POWER TO HARM YOU! This kind of "instruction" may or may not come with instructions how to do what it is COMMANDING you to do and it also may not give you any information, just a threat to your wellbeing. "Don't ask questions: just do it, or else!"

¶ +2024.01.22. What if machines become conscious?

Let me reframe this question.

What would you do if you met the Abrahamic Deity in the road? What would you do if your pet cat of dog or horse greeted you thin morning by asking you in your mother tongue how long were you going to be out at work so he (she) would heave to occupy himself at home alone? What would you do if your toaster told you that you were special because you had a talking toaster (Jack Ziegler New Yorker cartoon)?

It don't matter: Is "it" an it or it "it' a who? It don't matter what its perceptual configuration is. Period. You either treat something as an "it" or you treat it as a "who". Now the problem her is that a lot of persons treat other persons as its not whos, examples: parents, bosses at work, teachers, you name its. "yes, boss." "Yes, mommy." "Yes, Mr. Teach."

Clue: Is it a who or an it you are dealing with inside your had in :the conversation you are", apart from anybody or anything else, unless you do not "talk with yourself in your head" which may be possible since I had a mother with a 5.5th grade education who sometimes said: "Now let me think" What if anything was going on in that woman's head" Was "she" a who or an it? Or the Headmaster of the perp(*sic*) school I attended:

[ Mr. Middleton's soul looking for ahme ]

¶ +2024.01.22. Can you explain the concept of meritocracy in simple terms and provide some examples of its application in modern society?

"Meritocracy" is an institutional structure in which the most intelligent get promoted to the top. You have a United States in which somebody like Noam Chomsky is President – he is one of the world's top public intellectuals.

That is not what we have. We have something more like "Cronyocracy": The people in power promote their friends and family. North Korea (DPRK) is apparently an extreme example of this.

Or to some extent we have "Wokocracy": persons with fashionable ancestry or other secondary peculiarities get promoted, e;g., for being black-female(even better: transexual)-homosexual.

Or maybe the United States has a "Mediocracy": Our current President had to repeat 3rd Grade and prides himself on his ability to run with a football, and his immediate predecessor hired somebody to take some big college examination for him and has, according to the CIA, an attention span of at most 30 seconds.

¶ +2024.01.21. How verbally offensive can I be to my professor without getting into trouble? In other words, at what point will the university limit my first amendment rights?

I think you are going in a wrong direction.

There should be no reason to be verbally offensive to a professor or to the janitor or to the President of ht school or anybody else, either.

Indeed, if you really detest a person that's all the more reason to be scrupulously polite to them. To show them you are better than they are.

If you are looking for trouble or just find yourself in trouble you can't avoid, I think the question is: how offensive to the professor is the MEANING of what you have to say. For a really extreme example: Suppose the professor is BLM DEI woke and what else and they assign you to write an essay about how believing in individuality and objectivity is white racism. I will end this posting with a news article from The New York Times newspaper to show this can happen. And suppose you do not like being brainwashed or witch hunted?

Will you very politely and articulately stand up (or write) that you feel this an inappropriate assignment and a threat to civilization?

I once called out a professor for intellectual hypocrisy but I picked a right person to pick on: He was big enough to take it and he even apologized to me. But would I have tried this with a prig prof? I doubt it, because I needed to pass the course.

Don't go looking for trouble unless you are into martyrdom. Do not be rude to anybody (especially if they deserve it). Don't carp about stuff that don't matter much. Anything left on your plate after that? That's the time to be concerned about your firs amendment rights. What would you have done in the early 1950s if you had been subpoenaed to testify before Senator Joe McCarthy's Senate Unamerican Activities committee: "Are you now or have you ever been...."?

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2024.01.20. Are there artists who are not completely influenced by others?

No.

Unless you have some very particular definition of "influence".

You only speak because you were "influenced" by your childrearers, teachers et al. You only know that art exists because they exposed it to you.

But what is influence?

It does make a big difference whether you grew up in the home of a world class art collector whose home was frequently visited by great artists, or you are the child of an illegal immigrant migrant farm worker and never made it past 4th grade in school. But that's pretty obvious.

As for "completely influenced", however, what does that mean? That you are a copycat hack?

Marcel Duchamp was influenced by other artists wasn't he?

[ Fountain ]

When Isaac Newton was knighted, he said that he was able to see further than others because he stood on the shouders of giants.

¶ +2024.01.20. When a scholar writes a mass-audience article that won't be peer-reviewed, can they leave out citations, attributions and acknowledgements?

Anybody can do anything they want. All they have to do is deal with the consequences.

I am cynical and contrarian. If a student who does not want to do an assignment in class, but I call them: ass–-ignments, If a student can lie cheat or steal his (her, other's) way to get thru the class, so what? It's like the Vietnamese peasants and the Saigon regime.

But insofar as I can be a free person (watch Patrick McGoohan's classic tv series "The Prisoner", now free on Youtube). I take a different attitude. I disdain them all and, like the Hebrew National hot dog company's motto goes:

"I answer to a higher power"

You don't need to and I will judge you accordingly but that may not matter to you and I understand that.

So. In talking with friend and family I try to scrupulousy cite anything I say that I did not cook up in my own little head or that is not a commonplace like that heavy objects generally fall down not up but I have material I cite from Prof Norwood Russell Hanson aoout that, too). And guess what? They resent it. they accuse me of "living in my head". They don't understand that they are living their heads too but stupidity and ignorance not easily remediated.

I would do the same at a cocktail party but I never attend group events because if people are ignorant and stupid they are more so in groups. How I wish I could win a Nobel Prize to tell thm I would not attend the ceremony except on the telephone or Zoom.

Now the proof is in the pudding. If you go thru the hundreds of responses to people's questions I have written here on Quora, I hope you will find a lot of citations. Call me out if you find anything I wrot ethat I took from somebody without properly giving them credit for it. Please.

Each of us lives out his, her or other's life (do I need to find a citation for that?) and most people are intellectual slobs. Well, few are "intellectuals" of any sort. I call myself a failed intellectual and semi-literate. I do not have classical education. I did not learn latin and ancient Greek. What are you? And here's the real qhestion: Who are you?

Persons today seem to get off on being instances of categories: "blacks", "women", whatevers. I go for Exodus 3:14 which I interpret as some primitive people's self-alienation: "I am that am". everything is material for citations.

"We were excited by the very idea that we could use anything in the visual history of humankind as influence," Mr. Glaser, who designed more than 400 posters over the course of his career, said in an interview... (2004). (The New York Times, Milton Glaser obituary)

I want to cite material I use, to avoid people getting the wrong impression that I believe any of it. I look upon failure to cite material as like not having taken a shower: I am dirtied by it.

Now nobody is perfect and I often fail to come up to my own standards but I try, and as Vince Lombardi said even though he is often misquoed about it (ref. lost): "Winning isn't everything. Trying to win is."

¶ +2024.01.20. What protocols should we adopt for recognising AI generated content? How would you feel about an <AI:gt; HTML tag or a dedicated font to indicate non-human writing?

Anybody can tag anything anything. an HTML tag would prove nothing.

COmplicated security protocols might work but who is going to go to the trouble to access secured content?

Why are people all worked up about AI? It canbe useful. Google was better than books for most people and AI promises to be a big step in convenience and accessibility beyond old Google. You can't trust any of it. But then you shouldn't trust your mother or anybod else either.

One example I find discouraging. Teachers are apparently upset about kids plagiarising assignments, what I referr to as ass–-ignments with AI. Well, if you don't want kid sto plagiarize make them come up with new ideas. Ai will not be able to ding anything nobody has thought of yes. Q.E.F. I had a perfect example in both one grad school course nd my dissertation. Especially in the course, I had asked the teacher if I could write an essay on a topic tangentially related to the couse in which I had a passionate interst INSTEAD of doing the assignments. She [the teacher was female ut could hav ebeen anything...] was big enough to let me do it. And what I wanted to write about was th strongly CRITICIZE a famous source.How could I plagiarize what nobody ageed with? And I had every incentive to cite material scrupulously to prove the person I was criticising had actually indicted himself. So if you don't want kid sto plagiarize give them powerfun incentive not to. Oh, dear, poor teacher.

I have alwasy been against people havin gto be virtuous and building cn=haractr: make it easier for them to do good than not to. Oh, dear poor government, bosses, parents and everybody else who bosses people with less POWER then themselves aroud.Boo, hoo!

When Ai produces wrong answers, report them. When he information seems useful, give the AI credit. If you are no a genius yourself, second best is to recognize, promote and celebrate what you are no but which you at least are itelligent and educated enoug hto recognize. And teachers need to judge students' work accordingly. Give the kid an "A" for intelligently cricizing the ass–-ignment instead of just doing it like Adolf Eichmann writ small.

And if you are really bothered about this kind of stuff ther is way to really test a person's work. "Sir [Madam, Other] I am so impressed by your work tha ti am blocking out an hour of my precious time to discuss it with you before I submit it to a presetious peer reviewed journal with my own reputation at stake...." If you faked it, you know what's going to come next, right?

¶ +2024.01.19. Is it plagiarism if I copy an artificial intelligence?

Yes, yes and yes.

If you did not think something up yourself and it is not a commonplace (*example*: "The sun rises in the east each morning"), you should provide citation information or if you don't have it: "ref. lost".

I say "should" because if you don't you might get away with it and people even in the ivory tower are sometimes sloppy or even bad.

But woe to you if you get caught and you are not a darling of the people in power.

Two examples: The Rev. Martin Luther King has been confirmed by an academic review committee hat he did plagiarize on his doctoral dissertation but because he is a sacred cow they decided "it would serve no useful purpose to pursue the matter further."

On the other hand, look at Claudine Gay, now *formr* President of Harvard University. She was caught as a result of some Isreal (or maybe just Netanyahu...) fanatics being angry about her treatment of pro-Palestinean protests at Harvard.

But most people are somewhere between being sacred cows and being scapegoats. If the Gaza war had never started Ms. Gay probaly would not have been "lynched" for her plagiarism. "Plagiarism" was an excuse for the Israel (or just Netanyahu...) fanatics to "get" her.

Her academis work was apparently sloppy and mediocre but she was a wokie so she would likely never have been persecuted if not for the Gaza war which has stirred up a political hornets' nest and she was a major player in the mess.

But I like the slogan of the Hebrew National hotdog company: "**We answer to a higher power**." I do not care if people are slobs. If you are a high school kid stuck doing an ass–-ignment tht means nothing to you or to anybody else except fo the teach to get off on bossing people smaller than him (her, other) around and collecting his payheck, I say if you can plagiarize and not get caught, so what? I never respected my school teachers; to me they were like the Saigon regime and me a peasant.

But in the real world of academia and scientific and technology research, don't do it. Intelletual integrity in the public space is all that stands between us and being less than animals. I here cite an example:

"Phoebe Ellsworth, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, said that, when [Elizabeth] Loftus was invited to speak at her school in 1989. 'the chair would not allow her to set foot in the psychology department. I was furious, and I went to the chair and said, "Look, here you have a woman who is becoming one of the most famous psychological scientists there is." But **her rationale was that Beth was setting back the progress of women irrevocably**.'" (The New Yorker, +2021.04.05, "Past Imperfect: Elizabeth Loftus changed the meaning of memory. Now her work collides with our traumatized moment", Rachel Aviv; *emphasis added*)

That is TRASON. Got it: TREASON. Progress of women? Well without intellectual integrity, what is anything? Intellectual integrity is like gold. Partisan agendas are like scrip: anybody with a printing press can crank it out. Or like gold plating.

It's even acceptable to say: "Here is the truth. But I don't like it and I am going to do evil and I have the power to make it happen to you so shove it." What is not acceptable is to pretend you partisan agenda **IS** the truth: weaponizing discourse. Now full disclosure: it's not acceptable to me. You or somebody else may think it's great. And I once saw an automobile with a bumper sticker that I will never forget:

"I HATE YOU AS MUCH AS YOU HATE ME"

I changed the route I was taking, to give that car a wide berth.

¶ +2024.01.19. In what ways can information communication technologies enhance creativity and innovation in education? What is the significance of this enhancement?

This is a question for a fun essay in the history of communication media. I once was a friend of a professor who was a close friend of Marshall McLuhan.

Short answer: Imagine some neanderthal genius inventing the wheel at the mouth of his cave, havin gto watch out for saber tooth tigers. Now imagine a today brilliant physicist discovering a new elementary particle in the Superconducting Supercollier at CERN. Any difference in the material conditions for discovery?

¶ +2024.01.19. How can you distinguish between your own voice and someone else's voice?

I don't know but ther eare persons who know a lot more abou tthis than I do.

But think about the general qustion: how do we distinguish anyhting from anything?

I try to remember somebody's name from the distant past. I "vaguely think" if migh be [whatever, say:] "John Savage". Now I clearly recognize that "John Savage" is not "Martin Heidegger" or "John Salvage" but I only vaguely fee; it's the mname I ma looking for. then I become sure it is. Same phoneme string "John Savage" but now its (metaphorical word follows here!!!!!!!!!!!!) "coloration" changes form vaguely maybe to CERTAIN. What's going on here? I don't have an answer, do you?

Also: Recently I left a voicemail answer on the phone to a number I called. But with a differencd from usual: The recording machine played back my voice message to me and asked me if I really wanted o send that message. Yes I did. But I lerned something else: My voice sounded HORRIBLE to me. Yuk!!! When I speak I sound to myself like a smalltime Paul Robeson. But when I heard it from the recording I was appalled. And I did not think: "Oh that's not me", but rather: "I sound awful"

¶ +2024.01.19. How could robots and computers develop artificial consciousness and think for themselves?

By a miracle. And I mean that literally. How did sperm and egg produce Albert Einstein or a mentally retarded person or anything in between?

This question is analogous to what two integer number can you add together to peoduce a math textbook or a popsicle? It's a "category mistake".

Alan Turing, poor chap, once wrote tp his mother: If we ever make a computer that really thinks, "we shan't understand how it does it."

Another not so good analogy. I once read in Scientific merian ha a uranium deposit had been discovered somwehre in Arica tha twas undergoing a low-grade chain reaction in situ, without any human help.

Anything is possible unless it is a true self-contradiction, especially if it mugh cause us trouble. But AI, computers and all our other "technology" jus computes. It's just branching and looping instructions put together by computer programmers. It can asymptotically SIMULATE the outward appearance of human behavior. Prof. Noam Chomsky says ther is nothing intellectually ineresting in AI: it jus computes. By "intelletually ineresting" he means what helps us understand human linguistic production. I prefer the word "appreciate": what we can't understand we can appreciate, or destroy. I once shot a rifle and quickly saw how Lee Harvey Oswald could put en end to taht human production configuration called John F. Kennedy. He did not j=understand how Kennedy could think but he sure could put an end to what he didn't understand, couldn't he? On the other hand, an attentive worker in the Texas Schoolbook Depository or a cop on The Gressy Knoll might have kept Mr. Kennedy thinking without understanding how he did it either, eithe by tackling Oswald in hte building or shooting him before he could shoot No understanding needed, just appreciation or its opposite.

¶ +2024.01.19. What methods can be used to detect deepfake videos and images using machine learning technology?

It is the eternal war between forgers and sleuths. Without "deep fake" technology, Yale University recently apprently got hoaxed to the tune of USD 4,000,000 for "The Vinland map". And last I heard the matter had not been definitively setled.

The best a person can do is first of all don't be greedy. If an offer looks too good to be true, it probebly is.I do no enter casinos just like I do not smoke cigarettes. Don't do "stupid" things. Also many fakes really do look like they are if you look carefully. Indeed, Internet phishers intentionally make misspellings in their fake solicitations in HOPES of sreening out suspicious people. They want solid gold MAGAs ("Maga" in Yorunba, the language of Nigerian phishers means: "Dupe").

But I've been fooled and I know a lot. Few persons do not have a vulnerability somewhere.

But a person does not have to be an "idiot": Nobody has to teyto climb K2 and if they do and screw up of just have bad luck, nobody should cry for them or send a rescue team unless they paid for it out of their own pocket before they started their folly/insanity.

¶ +2024.01.19. Quora AI is biased as hell according to how its programmers programmed it to be. Do you agree?

I have no idea. I have not wittingly used it.

What I have experiences is that I have pushed some very "radical" ideas here on Quora and so far I have not been cancelled ("How you doin today, Quora trolls?").

Now, in all fairenss, I generally write in a "highbrow" style, so that migh be working in my favor. But I assure you, "I have been working on it" and so far I'm still at it. Anti-theism, criticizing wokism, advocating unpopular ideas about sexuality, radical criticism of childrearing and schooling and what else?

I once read something interesting: In Czarist Russia the censors prohibited Th Commuist Manifesto for the obvious reason. But Das Kapital got through. Maybe the censors weren't diligent enough to read it, maybe the words were too big, maybe they figured that the masses would never look at such a big pile of logorrhea, who knows? But they passed it. There are books that come in plain covers from university presses that Prig Parents would not like if they ever read them but that's beyond their educational level.

[ Homer and his donut ]

I did once get myself banned for life from Reddit forum that was full of "George Carlin" words. How did I do it? By speaking about "LGBQWERTYs". That was beyond the pale. Are you now or have you ever been an LGBQWERTY

¶ +2024.01.18. What are the topics of a master's in human resource solutions to the existing socioeconomic problems?

Not my field.

But I STRONGLY suggest you check out Prof. Richard Wolff's YouTube videos and his website Democracy at Work (d@w) (or don't).

¶ +2024.01.18. In what ways does discrete mathematics contribute to the foundation and theoretical underpinnings of computer science?

I am not a mathematician.

But if you are into "computer science" and you have not thoroughly absorbed the message of Kurt godel's "Incompleteness theorem" you are probably a danger to humanity if you are anything more than a cheap hack.

Repeat: I am not a mathematician. The furthest I ever got and today I forget it, was somethig I think is called "Ackermann's theorem". I never was a compute scientist but I did work as a compute rprogrammer for half a century, and even once on the keypunch machine punched up a little deck of cards which I threw in the card reader to boot up an IBM System 370 Model 158 mainframe as a simple adding machine, and my program worked.

[--------]

**The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done.** (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

¶ +2024.01.18. What are architecture's relations to social and political concerns and what does this tell us about the knowledge and discipline of architecture?

I would call attention to one word in this question: "are". some people make a highy consequential category mistake: They try to make hortative statements pass as declaratives in hopes of tricking people (and maybe also themselves) into going along with them.

Nothing "is" anytihng. Everything is interpretation, but I do not mean that in a "postmodernist" way (Does Jacques Derrida say taht his paycheck has no fixed meaning? Does he sometimes eat it instead of cashing it?). It's just a fact. I once took a course from a professor of the philosophy of science: Norwood tussell Hanson, who was a very interesting person. My understnading is that he influenced Thomas Kuhn who is famous for his book "The structure of scientific revolutions". If you haven't read it, do (or don't). I think his whole life's work can be summed up in a single sentence:

You can only see what your theoretical horizon if interpretation makes possible.

(Nobody in the middle ages cound have pancreatic cancer. Nobody can be possed by a evil demon in their belly today.)

You can follow that out for yourself here.... It leads to this: Achitecture "has" no relation to anything. A person may feel that architcture has some relation to something. And another person may feel architeture has some other relation to something else. I am pro Louis Kahn and anti Robert Venturi. If you know about the two of them you need read no further here.

I WANT architecture to be building structures which will encourage the persons who spend any part of their limited time and energy on this side of the topsoil to create in the arts and sciences: to THINK and have brilliant new ideas and share them with each other.

Robert Venturi got off on mocking aged Quakers.

Kahn: A village ia a place of necessity (I loath all activity that merely reproduces individual and species life). A city is a place of desire, where a small boy [add girl or other], going from th workshop of one master craftsperson aand another may find somehting he WANTS to do for his whole life.

Venturi designed a housing project for aged quakers with a big pillar right in front of the door so that if you really were senile it would help you(sic) to not find the entrance, and he topped it off with "a nonfunctioning gold anodized antenna as a symbol for the elderly who watch so much television" but he didn't do anything to help them. He criticized modernist architects for trying to raise the cultural level of the masses.

No facts. two different wishes.

I once worked in a building that actually was at least somewhat in Kahn's spirit: Eero Saarinen's IBM Thomas Watcon Research Center in Yorktown Heights New York USA. Nobody, including the corporate director of research had a window in their office. But all the corridors were brightly sunlit with expansive views of the countryside. And maybe each 40 feet there was a little alcov ein the corridor with a white board, a small table and a couple chairs. So if you wanted to sit and read and/or think there you were and you could look out at the lovely countryside through the floor to ceiling glass on the other side of the corridor. Or if you wanted to do some impromptu brainstorming with one of a few colleagues, there you were, too. And if you put the little "do not erase" tag on the white board it would be left for you the next day. IBM's motto was:

[ THINK ]

Would youagree that this building might help you to THINK if you worked in it?

On the othe side, I consider Robert Venturi, along with Educational Testing SErvice (ETS) Princeton New Jersey (501)(c)(3) and The Franklin Mint, to be one of hte great Cultural Criminals of the 20th Century (see Adolf Loos's essay "ornament and crime").

The following is a private house he designed, not a stage prop automobile repair shop in a 3 Stooges skit, and I imagine the living room would have meant something to Thomas Ferebee (the bombardier on Enola Gay):

[ Squirrel hill ]

Which side are you on?

[ Vanna house and Barcelona pavillion ]

Louis Kahn died like a stray dog of a heart attack in the public men's toilet in New York's Pennsylvania train station and was "tentatively identivied from his passport" at the city morgue. Mr. Venturi lived long and prospered.

[ Vanna nouse having it speriod ]

¶ +2024.01.18. What would happen if you performed a play in an operating theatre, instead of in a drama theatre?

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Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

Under what conditions?

[ self-appendectomy ]

Lights, camera, action!

¶ +2024.01.18. How can someone determine if their professor has plagiarized their entire book without directly accusing them?

What would be the point of such useless acivity?

Either you "eat it" or you address it head on.

You "eat it" if you need to get a good grade in the dude's course to get your diploma or if – God help you – the dude is your thesis advisor for an advanced degree.

Otherwise you call him (her, other) out for what they are, but be sure to have an "airtight" case: chapter and verse, becaue he (he other) will probably try to destroy your prospects in life.

And even then, what's the point? Well, there is a point if you have had a genius idea and are not likely to come up with another one and this will make or break your future. But if what the petty dude copied is no big deal to you, as Jesus said "leave the dead to bury the dead".

I once knew a young man who was bankrolling his future by plagiarizing a world class scientist's work. The scientist complained but however it happened the kid got away with it. Well, so what? the world famous scientist had a secure well paying job and was highly respected by highly respectable people and he had new ideas to get on with. The kid wasn't a bad person. As a matter of fact, he was kind of sad: he had severe ulcerative colitis and eventually had surgery and lives out the rest of his life with an ostomy bag. So what? But it would have been different had the world famous scientist not been able to pay his bills at home due to being deprived of credit for his discoveries. Then the kid would have mattered to him, wouldn't he?

¶ +2024.01.18. How can educators support children's agency through play and learning?

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Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

Play with them.

I am reminded of the story of the ancient philosopher Heraclitus about whom there is the story that he once was seen playing a simple dice game with some children on the steps outside a big temple. Maybe they were better company than the God inside?

You have to LIKE children. respect them not try to make them be what you want them to be. If that's not for you, then you become what I had: pedagogiprigs. Losers in life who since they have to kiss up to other adults take it out on people who can't fight back.

[ Mike rentko ]

It really is important: to be a mentor not a tor-mentor you have to like and respect your students and learn from them as well as sharing what you know with them (take it or leave it...). If you don't, plseas find something else to do. There is a cliche that's frightening: That people who can't succeed anywhere else go to teacher training schools.

Also, different children are different. That person who THREATENED me maybe really was great for "boys who will be boys". I was a high IQ sissy. It was a gender apartheid school and I never once set fot in the public pubic nudity room aka "boys locker room".

[ pissers at public school ]

In adulhood I came to know a man who was the son of one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century. In his youth he had been a waste of time and space and a great disappointment to his father: all he wanted to do was play tennis and fast cars. I might have been "a gift from god" for his father, and the other way around. As it was I must have been a great disappointment to my father. I never figured out "how to make a fist" and I was repulsed by his mnly body. In the end he did get a consolation prize. He had "come from nothing and had not been able to go to college himself, and so he proudly displayed my Yale "summa cum laude" diploma on his office wall at work. But I can only imagine what would have become of me both at home and at school had I net been a straight "A" student so they put up with me.

I like to teach certain kinds of persons, but other kinds I have no patience for. Also it really helps if the teacher is, to quote a psychotherapist who once told me the secret of being a good therapist: "to be well paid and well laid". When your own personal needs are mett and your hopes in life for yourself are satisfied, what's left except to take pleasure in seeing others flourish with your help. Any teacher who does not want his (her, other's) students to be "brighter" than him, and any manager at work who does not want to manage employees who earn more than him and deserve it [ you finish this sentence ].

Teaching should be like making discoveies in the laboratory or creating great art. You do it even though you could be doing nothing or anything else like watching HBO instead.

Well, don't listen to me. Here's a quote from a famous psychoanalyst, and it directly addresses some criticisms of myself I anticipate from "some people" I would not want to be my teacher (or parent):

Example of appropriate treatment of a young person by an adult: Sandor Ferenczi wrote, in an essay evocatively titled "The Adaptation of the Family to the Child": I am reminded of an incident with a little nephew of my own, whom I treated as leniently as, in my view, a psycho-analyst should. He took advantage of this and began to tease me, then wanted to beat me, and then to tease and beat me all the time. Psycho-analysis did not teach me to let him beat me ad infinitum, so I took him in my arms, holding him so that he was powerless to move, and said: "Now beat me if you can!" He tried, could not, called me names, said that he hated me; I replied: "All right, go on, you may feel these things and say these things against me, but you must not beat me." In the end he realized my advantage in strength and his equality in fantasy, and we became good friends.* (Sandor Ferenczi, "Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis", 1955, p. 75):

¶ +2024.01.17. hello?

Updated 1y [ An oldie but goodie ]

This is Major Tom to Ground Control.....

[--------]

Late addendum: Ground Control's last message up to Major Tom: "Congratulations, Tom! You have been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel"

[ 18 upvotes ]

¶ +2024.01.17. Can a highly suggestible person be put under self-hypnosis without their knowledge?

I am not an expert but my guess is yes. Also watch the old, fun but also profound movie: "The Truman Show"

[ Don't believe everything you think ]

¶ +2024.01.17. How can an AI not be conscious?

Long answer short: AI just computes.

Just like Deep Blue did not play chess: It just computed.

The granddaddy of Ai was MIT Computer Science Professor Joseph Weizenbaum's "Eliza", a very simple program I could probably write up in a few minutes to imitate a Rogerian psychotherapist. Al the human Rogerian psychotherapist does is echo back what the patient says to him (her, other) and ask the patient to tell him more. How hard is that to simulate in a computer program? AI is that on steroids as the idiom goes.

AI just computes.

¶ +2024.01.17. The question of nature versus nurture continue to perplex development theorists citing specific examples, what are the opinions on the roles of nature and nurture in the development of human being and in the learning?

Why be distracted by such quibbles?

Make sure every pregnant woman gets top-notch prenatal medical care and secure, healthy living conditions. Provide each child with childrearing and education that maximally develops the child's innate potential. Then study what happens. What does it matter how you get to a goal so long as you get there? OK: After you solve a problem, then you can carefully try to optimize the solution procedure.

Or is the goal to study what happens to persons due to chance, not to study what helping them can result in? Do we really need to study the differences between neglect and care?Will you volunteer to be neglected?

I am quite confident that we can learn a lot about diseases if we find all the people who are not getting good medical care and monitor their outcomes without doing anything to treat their diseases, can't we? Example: The infamous Tuskegee Medical experiment where men were intentionally denied medical treatment to see what syphilis would do to them.

¶ +2024.01.16. Should artists who use artificial intelligence to create their work be considered real artists?

It depends on HOW they use it.

Perhaps the most revolutionary artist ever, Marcel Duchamp, made thing she(*felicitous typo ther if you "get" it*) did not make be among the highest artistic works of thhe 20th century, which in its first half had almost a surfeit of revolutionary artistic geiuses, smply by saying they were.

Msterpiece Duchamp artwork:

&$91; Bottle rack ]

Well, maybe not I have one in my basement ny wife, who does not understand this ind of art, told me to throw away but I'm not famous....

An obvious example of an artist using AI output in an ehtirely honorable and creative way would be a world class stand up comedian who writes his own jokes and uses AI output to make fun of it. "Yesterday I asked The Bing AI [whatever], and you know what it replied to me? [whatever]. And the audience cracks up.

But those are edge cases. Some affirmative action (and/orhas a rich daddy) University or nation state President who is an intellectual slob and cuts and pastes AI output (or Wikipedia articles) is obviously not doing high art or scholarship for that matter, either. It's called: "Plagiarism"

It's not always what you do, but sometimes how you do it that makes all the difference (if you "ge" what I may be referring to), Rrose Selavy.

¶ +2024.01.16. Is the concept of a cashless society exciting or concerning to you, and why?

Ther were advantages to a "cash" society: If you had to extract the banknotes for your wallet or perse to buy things you could not easily run up a huge debt on credit cards.

Bu tcredit cards are sort of like cash. It does not take a person with an advanced degree in computer science to understnd them.

What terrifies me is bitcoin. It's incomprehensible. Nobel eom=nomics laureate Paul Krugman, a few years ago, said he saw only two used for it: (1) money laundering and (2) tax evasion. Bicoin seems to me to be a scammer's dream. So I thin it is really bd.

Actually, I think all derivitive financial instruments are bad, but bitcoin brings it all home to your daily purchases.

When I hear the word "bitcoin" I think of cyber-robbers. I seek freedom from enterprise to study and contribute to the arts and sciencs. I resent havin gto waste my life on economicics. he very word "economics" derives from th ancient greek "oikos" or household. economics was or women and slaved in the darknes of the private house. citizens spent their days in the sunlight of hte public forum doing brave deeds and speaking shining words, mutually shaping their political life. bicoin is dragging me down into the oikos when Iwant to be in the agora.

I detest and fear bitcoin; it's for people out ot make money without working for it (a surgeon and a poet both are workers: they add value; what is an arBITrager? a parasite on both of them). Timeo danaos et dona ferentes.

¶ +2024.01.16. How long would it take to build Stonehenge using modern technology?

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Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

This is an interesting question. I do nto know enough about Stnehenge to estimate it; I am not a aster stone mason and if I wa askingthe question I's pick the stone walla in Mahu Pichu instead which are finished so precisely I read that youcannat get a piece of paper in the seams.

I am not a swordsmith, either. But the are thousand year old naional treasure swords in the collections of Japan's national museums that modern technology just might not be able to improve on.

What I have read is that we can now make large diamonds in the laboratory that are more perfect than any in nature. That's how you can tell they are not de Beers: They are "too good". And how long did nature take to make its diamonds versus today's physicists?

There are a few things that technology cannot improve upon.

Going back to those diamonds. Again, I am not a gemologist, but perhaps some of those natural IMPERFECT diamonds are more BEAUTIFUL than the perfect laboratory produced ones.

The highest esthetic is not perfection, but felicitous inperfetions. Most imperfctions are just that: best sent to the discard pile if not recyclable.

You may guess where my mind and heart lie. Some of the national treasure tea bowls in Japan have an interesting provenance. Japanese connoisseurs went to Korea and bought bowls made by forced labor illiterate peasants. Of coure most of them were not worth much. But, every so often a clam produces a pearl.

I developed my esthetic sensibility and philosophy by selling the stuff when I was young. Does it matter? People are starving and being maimed and murdered in wars. I know that.

Technology is digital; art (excluding things like Andy the War Hole prints) and crafts are analog. Digital cannot reproduce analog, only asymptotically APPROACH it. I am not a mathematician. Am I wrong that it is not possible to make a computer generate random numbers? But a drunken sot probably can.

I am not anti-technology. But think: in the early twentieth century, technology was hyped as "labor saving". How many hours a day did office workers work in 1920? How many hours do they work today.

And we have messed up. the Weimar Bauhus of the 1920s pointed the way to a high-technoloy future of high qulity products for highly cultured and gracious living for everybody. We got Levittowns, MacMansions, full wheel hubcaps and tailfins. To say say something is "Mickey Mouse" is rarely a compliment, is it?

OK, so much for the masses. But what about the Harvard elite? I don't know much about architcture today, but in 1981 I spent a summer there in their "Career discovery program" where you get to play at being an architecture student to see if you really want to be one. Mr. Robert Venturi's book "Complexity and contradiction in architecture" was new then. It celebrates kitsch and urges that "modernism" is bad for trying to raise the cultural level of the masses. I have always been a heretic in school. At the end of the progrm I asked the person in charge how an application from me might e received (I had once publicly called him out for an error he made in an assignment, and he probably remembered that). I expected the usual "We can't answer such questions" response. But no, he told me, and aftar 40 years, this is verbatim:

"When we accept people like you they leave after a year without having to be asked to."

[--------]

The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done. (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

¶ +2024.01.16. What are the limitations of current AI technology, and what research is being conducted to overcome these limitations?

I think it's an **incremental** thing. Every release of an AI will run up against situations in which it does not perform well. so the programmers enhance it. And on and on it goes. The only insuperable limitations are [lack of] funding and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

It started with Eliza. MIT Professor of Computer Science Joseph Weizenbaum's very simple computer program that emulated a Rogerian psychotherapist. The human Rogerian therapist does little more than say things like: "I understand you feel like ______. Tell me more." I can program that in a few minutes. But then I might want to respond to the patient's feelings. So if the patient says something with the word "ashamed" in it I might enhance the program to ask: "Did your mother make you feel ashamed about ________?" And on and on it goes. Ad astra per aspera.

It's like computer imagery. It started with "wire photos" over telegraph lines. I do not know what the best pixel resolution and coloring is today but as the old Clairol ad went:

"Only her hairdresser knows for sure."

However! As Prof Noam Chomsky, who knows a bit about human language says: there is nothing intelletually interesting in any of this. It's just computing and has nothing to do with human intelligence, or human stupidity, either. For better and also for worse, we do not compute, and AI is not conscious.

[ Zuckerberg face ]

¶ +2024.01.16. Do male professors look at female students' shapes?

Is this a question from a radical feminist misandrist (man hater) looking to "get" some professsor to brag about to her coven colleagues like a cat bring home a half-eaten rabbit to its owner? Things have changed since the early 20th century when student Hannah Arendt had sex with her teacher Martin Heidegger. Well, maybe she learned things that were not in the course syllabus, and it did not wreck her life, did it?

All male teachers should be castrated. then the ladies in the class could have sex with them without needing contraceptives. On the other hand, all female (and faux-female) teachers should wear chadors to avoid arousing male students and get infibulated (FGM) to "perfect nature".

Have I offended you? People need to grow up. Of course there is a very serious issue of the power differential between teachers and students, but that goes far beyond issues of specifically sexual exploitation. It's what Karl Marx was all about, or, if you don't like that: "We hold these truths to be self evident that all men were created equal" Full stop: Even if you are male, do you have a job? Are you the equal of your boss even if both of you are gender neutral? Can you fire your boss like he/she/it/them/other can fire you? Check out Democracy at Work (d@w) (http://democracyatwork.info) .

Consider Mr. Socrates and his acolytes. They were all rich boys who probably from time to time took a break from class to do you know what. Or have Mr. Plato's dialogus been banned from our wokiversities due to him being a dead white male? I guess African tribla chiefs never sold their people the the [admittedly] evil white slave traders, did they? Some countries in black Africa today are revisiting this issue, are you?

Everybody needs to grow up.

[-------]

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2024.01.16. What can be done to address anti-blackness within academia?

I thought the problem was anti-whiteness. I don't hear anybody dissing "dead black males", do you?

¶ +2024.01.16. Can you provide examples of forms commonly used in schools and explain their purpose and the type of information they typically request, aside from basic personal details like names and addresses?

I think the only forms I saw in school came from an immensely profitable and powerful charity that as far as I ever have known, neve did anything charitable for anybody: Educational Testing Service Princeton New Jersey (501)(c)(3).

[ ETS answer sheet ]

They didn't collect much "basic personal details like names and addresses" but they GENERATED massive amounts of information which had highly consequential consequences for the students' futures. Like an army moving into a town creates satellite enterprises like brothels, they producte the "SAT Prep" industry which helped kids learn skille that promised to help them raise their scores: teaching to the test, not enlightenment for personal growth.

I did fairly well without "preparing". They were wasted Saturday mornings.

[--------]

How Educational Testing Service (ETS) Princeton New Jersey (501)(c)(3) saved the Persian Empire.

[ ETS advertising ]

Philip of Macedon: "Sorry, son, but you can't study with Aristotle. Your SAT's were too low." Alexander: "Gee, Dad... How am I going to be able to conquer the world without an Aristotelean education?" Philip: "I'm sorry, son. I offered to send you to Kaplan SAT Prep course, but you weren't interested. It's too late now."

¶ +2024.01.16. Are world class athletes geniuses? To shoot a basketball one needs to perform trigonometry on the fly, simultaneously accounting for and adjusting for all kinds of variables. Is there any other explanation?

[ Thinking cat ]

Meow!

¶ +2024.01.16. Do you think that philosophy should be taught (either through formal education or self-learning) or should we develop our own ideas and later discuss them with others?

How did Mr. Socrates do it? All the philosophy teachers are gaga over Mr. Plato's dialogues aren't they? Then why don't they take them seriously?

No grades. No tests. No homewotk. No exams. (And for the teacher: no publish or perish threat; Mr. Socrates did not have a degree, did he?). The students come and go as they like.

Does that describe your philosophy classes in school? Yes or no!

Thomas Jefferson's original idea for The University of virginia wa a place where adults could come and study as they felt would be helpful for themelves, staying as long as they liked and then going back to their productive social lives, and maybe coming back again later(or not).... No grades, no tests, just learning. Like Mr. Socrates.

[--------]

"...For all the ancient philosophers and sages have reckoned two things to be necessary for safe and pleasant travel on the road of wisdom and in the pursuit after knowledge; God's guidance and the company of men.... So, when you philosophers, with God's guidance and in the company of some clear Lantern, give yourselves up to that careful study and investigation which is the proper duty of man – and it is for this reason that men are called... searchers and discoverers... – [as men, you] will find the truth of the sage Thales' reply to Amasis, King of the Egyptians. When asked wherein the greatest wisdom lay, Thales replied: 'In time. (Time.html)' For it is time that has discovered, or in due course will discover, all things that lie hidden. [As men, you] will also infallibly find that all men's knowledge, both theirs and their forefathers', is hardly an infinitesimal fraction of all that exists and that they do not know."

...When [our guide] had concluded her speech she handed us some closed and sealed letters and, after we had returned to her our undying thanks, she showed us out through a door... where [she] summoned her people to propose questions twice as high as Mount Olympus.

And so we passed through a country full of delights... and at last we found our ships in the harbour. (Francois Rabelais, "Gargantua and Pantrgruel", 1532-1534/1955, pp. 710-2)

¶ +2024.01.15. If you were making a movie titled 'The Wrong Suspect' about someone being framed for a school shooting, what scenes would you add?

Here's a possibility: The kid who's framed, i.e. unfairly accused is a neo-nazi gun nut. Wherever it's legal everybody sees him walking around with guns, almost a dropout and nobody likes him. He OBVIOUSLY did it, right?

But he didn't! They finally find the real shooter: Captain of the varsity football team, lionized by all the coaches, class president, all the girls are gaga over him with a smiling face and looks like John F Kennedy and he was headed for Harvard!

(You may guess I was not a happy camper in the school I attended. I was not a gun nut but I did not like the place. And in reality one fine day the school did get a little taste of what it deserved, not a shooter, but a kid on THE TEAM who video taped himself copulating with a girl from another of these bastions of gender apartheid benightedness, he showed it to the team, parents found out, and it was a huge society scandal.)

¶ +2024.01.15. What role does technology play in shaping the future of education?

Of course a lot. ther are 8 billion cocurently living human beings. It is foolish to imagine them all getting a great education from human teachers. So we must hope technology can come to the rescue.

But if I had the wealth of somebody like Jeff Bezos or Mark Zucerberg and I had a child, I know how I would try to educate him (her, other). I would ask Noam Chomsky to tutor him and I'd hand Prof. Chomsky a blank check with a maxmium figure to be wrottin in of 9 digits USD. And I would assure him I would not try to influence him in any way. Would he accept this deal?

¶ +2024.01.15. What are the main problems of the modern age?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

What is "the modern age"?

There is a serious book:

**The Legitimacy of the Modern Age**

By Hans Blumenberg

ISBN 9780262521055

Published: October 21, 1985

Publisher: The MIT Press

I doubt you are talking about that.

Free on the internet: "Philosophy and the crisis of European humanity", Edmund Husserl (1935)

Individuality and Society (Jan Szczepanski, UNESCO, "Impact of science on society", 31(4), 1981, 461-466)

Or try Adolf Loos's essay: "Ornament and Crime"

The Weimar Bauhaus

"The modern age" is apparently dead. Murdered first by the Postmodernists and now worse by the wokies.

How about: The problem is that the modern age has been betrayed?

Have some fun and read Hanny Lighfoot-Klein's "Prisoners of ritual"

"The struggle against everything whose only claim to dignity is its materiality, to refuse to be merely a passive and determined element in the order of Creation this seems to me the primordial virtue which transformed an Asian peninsula into Europe" - Carlo Schmid

Of course there was much to be criticized about ceratin often very prominent aspects of modernity. Rene Descartes was not all good. But there was an alternative: Francois Rabelais, Desiderio Erasmus....

Ther is a fine book:"Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity" by Stephen Toulmin

Note that I am referring to "serious" books, not DEI and other dreck which has got to the point of wiathc hunting by people who if they gain political power will subject to "reeducation" persons who express ideas they do not like.

There was an architect who caused a lot of trouble, whom I propose was one of the great Culture Criminals of the 20th Century: Robert Venturi. his books "Complexity and contradiction in architecture:" and "Learning from Las Vegas" are disgusting. Got that word: Disgusting.

He criticized "modernist" architcts for trying to raise the cultural level of the masses and he had a particular animus against one of them, Paul Rudolph, whom he mocked for designing a home for old people in which their plastic flowers did not look good in the windows. Clown architecture.

The following is not an automobbile repair shop in a 3 Stooges skit. It is areal private home designed by Mr. Venturi:

[ Squirrel hill ]

Read Individuality and Society (Jan Szczepanski, UNESCO, "Impact of science on society", 31(4), 1981, 461-466).

If the shoe does not fit, I am not trying to make anybody wear it. De disgustibus non disputndum est.

"I shall think of the sorrow of my children, and of the sorrow of my grandchildren for their children, in this harsh new world," Professor Freud wrote, "and I will leave the world with relief thinking of all that will have been spared me." (Sophie Freud, Sigmund Freud's last suriving grandchild, New York Times obituary, Sam Roberts, Published June 3, 2022, Updated June 6, 2022)

¶ +2024.01.14. How would society be affected if all forms of art were replaced by artificially intelligent creations? Would humans be able to compete with AI in terms of creativity?

Long answer short: Learn about Marcel Duchamp.

¶ +2024.01.14. If your State is imposing you to use the 124+ pronouns, it's incentiving sophistry at the entire social level? Isn't this a move which may destroy the very social fabric, culture and reasoning of that society?

You are not really asking a qustion here. You are making a complaint. If there is something you can do about it, do it. If not why does it bother you?

If you are a computer programmer you could probably write a computer program that would take what you write, the way you like it, and convert all the pronouns to be politically correct. Give them the redacted version.

I have been fortunate to not have to deal with this. I think it is disgusting and threatening. So I foreground it. Sir, madam or other, I understand that a person, he (she or other) killed somebody yesterady, or should I have said they terminated them with extreme prejudice?

I once had an encounter with one of these people. I won't go into the details her but I have kept a verbatim transcript of the whole disgusting interaction, and except under threat of material harm I will not have them in my visual field ever again (especially since unlike Superman I do not have X-ray vision, i.e., a military grade laser weapon, because "if looks could kill"....). The best part of it was that this person was a white male partly living off inherited wealth.

You may enjoy the following news article from The New YorkTimes newspaper, bu things may have got even worse since then:

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

[ Political correctness cartoon ]

(Question: What does "+124" pronouns mean? is it LGBQWERTY?)

¶ +2024.01.14. What approaches do you think are most effective in resolving conflicts between us?

Many conflicts can be resolved, especially if both sides are willing to settle for less than they want, or one or the othe side can be convinced to change their mind.

Yesterday I came across a man who posted on a "mens's reddit forum" that his wife and wanted sex durig her menstrual period and he had politely declined and she ws unhappy and he was looking for ar=ffirmation that he hdn't done anything wrong.

Well, maybe he could havesatisfied her othe other than by vaginal penetration?

If he jsut had a thing about women bleeding each month maybe he should not hav ehad a girlfriend in the first place.

But if he didn't do somehting to improve the situatio it was likely to ge tworseer and worser. Maybe they could have at=gree that at that time of hte month she pleasure herself if he had been childreared as some kind of fundamentalist jew bu twas otherwise a good person?

Some issues canot be resolved. If a woman gets pregnant and wants an abortion but her partner considers that to be firs tdegree murder and will go to court to prevent her from terminating hte pregnancy, that connot be respoed.

When people annot agree to disagre and they cannot ge taway fro each other then a state of war exists. Some conflicts cannot be resoled.

But may conflicts are unecesary if people will only see tham tha tway. My favorite example is when somebody "takes offense" at something somebody says. Suppose somebody says yo uare a piece of excrement. You can get offended. Or you can think they areignorant and dangerous and try to ge taway from them. Sticks and stones can break my bones but the effectf= of words depends on my ideological orientation. And this is not just hypothetical. In India women are murdered by their fathers each year for bringing shame to the family's honor. But that's the way these prople are.

I once heard somehting from a psychotherapist. He had a patient whose wife wa always browbeating him. He had a presuably non-cancerous ear tumor which somehow seemed to h=make him hard of hearing only whtn she was bugging him. PRobably she would have liked him to get his toumore operated on, yes? Similarly in The Gulag, Solschenitsyn(sp?) told the story of a man who foraged in the garbage for food ot eat. The guards would find him and sadistically kick hm. He had wrapped himself in many layers of rags, so he would scream when the guards kicked him and eventually they would hav enough of their fun and go away. He waould then uncoil himself like a hedgehog and get back to foraging in the garbage.

Some conflicts are better left unresolved. OK, not better, just less worse: Always beware of stirring up unnecessary trouble and beoming "dead right", i.e., right but also dead.

¶ +2024.01.14. What should I do/write for my position paper? The topic is "Should people be allowed to make designer babies?" and I got the pro.

Always reember: A debate is a known partisan game. You are not expected to believe what you say, just to make it convincing. So don't worry about why people shoulld NOT make designer babies. That's a problem for your opponent.

Ther eare some easy things: Like to prevent the child from having genetic diseases and vulnerabilities. Who wants a baby with congenital 50% chance of becoming senile by age 50 or better than 50 pereent of getting breast or colon cancer? Wouldn't every person like to have an IQ over 160 and be strong enough to win in the Olympics? And doesn't every man want to be as handsome as Robert Redroed and every woman as Bridget Bardot or Luren Becall? What will you ansewr if a kid grows up with all sorts of things that aren's so great and everybody around him is "super" and you are his (her, other's ) parent and he asks you: "Why did you subject me to this when you could have made it so much better? Why did you want to make my life so bad?" What are you going to say?"Because I was virtuous" or: "For your own good"....

Finally, always reember if there is opportunity for rebuttal: The best way to beat an opponent, if possible, is with their own words. If you can get a person to argue with themself it does not matter what they think of your arguments, does it? Let them self-destruct. That, of course, is not always possible but it is the ideal: "The great general wins without fighting." (Sun Tzu)

¶ +2024.01.14. What would you say to explain the use of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation?

**Extrinsic motivtion** is the carrot and the stick. "If you do this I will pay you $10,000,000." Or "If you do not to this I will pu a bullet theough your neck and paralyze you for the rest of your life."

**Intrinsic motivation** is getting a person to freely ***want*** to do something. "Look at this, man! Isn't it cool?" "Yes! Let me do it, please!"

¶ +2024.01.13. Is Nature the Ultimate architect of Innovation?

What do you mean by "**nature**"?

Where do new ideas come from? Often from "**nowhere**". A person studies something every way they can think of and as hard as they can, and then suddenly, "out of nowhere", they see the solution. This is how the great mathematician Dr. Andrew wile described finally proving Fermat's Last Theorem. He had devoted mos tof hi slife to it. He as half an hour from throwing in the towel, and then he suddenly saw the answer. I;m not sure he thought then what many innovators think: "Damn! Why didn't I think of that sooner?" Well, you tried you best, dude and you didn't. Be grateful for what you got! And many a re.

Well, where is that "**nowhere**"?

If you say that "narure" is the "**all**" in which we find ourselves and which we can't unerstand (per the 18th century British philosopher David Hume), then you can say that new ideas come from "nature". But that's not helpful, is it?

But if by "narure" you mean what we more or less do understand, then it's a big sysem we have built up in our minds largely through trial and erro and passing it on from generation to generation. As Sir Isaac Newton said: he could see farther because he stood on the shoulders of giants who came before him..

The following picture experesses what we would like to have but can't because any such reality behind reality will jsut be more reality behind which we cannot get to.

[ Man looking into what's beyond th bowl of heven ]

To say "God iesbehind it" may be in a way true: watch the old fun but also profound movvie "**The Truman Show**". Where did God come from? To say God made himself does not make sense because it says God was there before He was there.

The ultimate architect of innovation is unknowable. Period. It's like Bob Dylan said: A lot of the lyrics for hs songs "come to him" He writes them down by taking what we might call "inner dictation". But he did not think them up, They "came to him" From where? "Nowhere" They are not spatial.

Don't think too much about this. But what we can't understnd we can take seriously. I once saw a very "good", i.e., bad exmple of a couple people ideating they could manage innovation. It was many years ago. I was walking down one of the long corridors in IBM's Armonk Headquarters behind two men in blue suits who did not know I was there and probably would not have cared. At the time "Fishkill" was IBM's mission-critical computer chip production facility. The one blue suit said to the other:

"Fishkill is not coming in with the inventions on schedule."

You can't schedule what you don't, and can't know. Ho big is something you don't knjow?

¶ +2024.01.13. How can someone read over 700 books in a year, while also having a full time job? I watched someone on YouTube mention how they've read over 700 books a year while still having a job and time to do other things as well.

Wht kind o books and what do you mean by "read".

If they took a "speed reading" course and are reading superficial books that sy little or nothing, yes.

If they are deeply thinking about deep thoughts in serious books, then obviously no.

I dare anbody so speed read Emmanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" or a math or physics textbook and be able to say anything meaningful about it.

But "best sellers"? 2 books a day is all person needs to do. 4 hours? 2 hours? Sill time for Monday nite NFL or a couple HBO shows before bed. Not much in much of that, either.

¶ +2024.01.13. What was the inspiration behind Volodymyr Zelenskyy's image in 2022?

I don't know who thought up the green t-shirt costume which was the fashion statement the year.

And I'm not sure to whom to attribute the whole mess, although Virginia Nuland, the famous "Maidan cookie lady", was and continues to be a major agent of it all.

Mr. Zelensky only ran for president because the man who bankrolled his tv show "Servant of the People" in which he played President of Ukraine suggsted to him to try for the real thing.

But Mr. Zelensky's military advisor Alexey Arestovich played a big part. I urge you to take 13 minutes and watch his 2019 interview describing how he planned the war. Mr. Arestovich has a brilliant mind (Z does not), no soul (neither does Z, but Arestovish is rational not an opportunist), and is apparently incorruptible (Z is definitely not). I found the interview chilling:

[ Arestovich interview ]

¶ +2024.01.13. Can conflicts lead to stalking if not handled properly?

Why is this question being asked?

Maybe because somebody is in a situation where they have entered into a conflict where their adversary has respond by or threatens to stalk them and meybe maim or kill them, and the first party is trying to defend themself by moral argument?

Life is not fair. Some persons are not nice. And some persons who have hurt other try to pretend they didn't when the latter respond (example: Israel in the current Gaza war).

When people cannot agree to disagree then it's what life always threatens to be because it is ab bottom, and I quote from the title of the filmmaker Werner Herzog's memoir:

"Every man for himself and God against all"

Grow up! I've seen this kind of thing two ways:

(1) Personally when I had a conflict at work with someone and they threatened bodily harm to me "in a way which would not leave marks". I couldn't do anything about them. When I raised the issue with management, management threated ME (this was a big FDIC bank; the job in question was responsibility for the bank's computer system), not them. Now I HAD done something: I was leaving for another job and I had said to aomebody that this other person was not fit to take my soon to be vacated position. Was thie true? Probably (this person was a "low-life" always conniving with his girlfriend for how to advance himself up from a clerical job).

What should I have done? Kept my mouth shut. I caused the problem. But should what I did have resuted in me being stalked? I had done nothing really wrong. But that did not matter. (I had two weeks until I left the job and would leave the state. I took a different route to work each morning.)

(2) I watched on the television some very high ranking political leader maybe from Finland say that every nation has a right to self-determination so if Ukraine wanted to join NATO Russia should not have done anything about it. Really?

What the person was doing ws treating a hortative as a declarative. This person WANTED Ukraine to have self-determination. But they were trying to use words to advance their case to hoping to get the listener to believe this WISH was a FACT, that thie "self-determination" thing was not analogous to "I like vanilla not chocolate ice cream so please give me vanilla" but analogous to: "Heavy obvjets fall down not up". (A manager I had once told me when I asked for a work assignment that would be both productive for the company and growing for me "If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.")

"Properly handling" a conflict may mean accepting humiliation if you don't want to me materially harmed. Is it right? Is it fair? There is a telling phrase which any person in such a situation needs to keep foremost in their mind: "dead right" Being right and being dead, or even worse: being right and crippled/mutilated for a long long life.

To borror a phrase from somebody who knows what they are talking about and his sidekick (Donald Trump and acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney: "It is what it is" and "Get over it".

"Every man for himself and God against all" (I think the German is: "Jeder for sich un Gott gegen alle".

(Or you can CHOOSE to be a martyr if that's what turns you on. Example: Alexei Navalny in Russia today.)

¶ +2024.01.12. Who is the most unforgettable analytic vs. continental philosopher of all time?

I don't know what "versus" means here and I'm not sure if one of the two following is "analyic" or sui generis:

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Edmund Husserl.

I don't know about "analytic Philosophy" since what I saw of it felt like trying o eat cardboard.

On the other side, there's Immanuel Kant and Matin Heidegger as being "unforgettable" although for different reasons.

Is David Hume "analytic"?

Does Karl Marx count as a "philosopher"?

¶ +2024.01.12. In your honest opinion, what type of dystopia is far worse? Religistopias or Atheistopias?

I never heard either of those two terms. I have read that fundamentalist religious zealots cause a lot of trouble in this world, from Islamists beheading school teachers to Zionists attacking peaceful Palestineans and who and what else?

Anybody who puts ideology before persons (and I once met one: an "ActiFist"), and both religions and political theories are ideologies, whether you believe in Yahweh or Hitler or What/Whomever, is a threat to all those he (she, other) had not yet harmed.

All ideologies are bad. All societies are threats to their people. My favorite is the ritual in some north and sub-saharan africal societies and maybe elsewhere to rip out little girls' external genitalia "to perfect nature", i.e., to prevent them from having orgasms. Parents do it because they love their children: "for their own good". With love like that, who needs anybody disliking you?

I once saw a sign in the window of a cobbler's shop"

"One man's dreamboat is another man's destroyer."

Everyone needs to beoms a scientist: (1) study eveything ruthlessly especially if you do or do not like it, and (2) only take sides when you can't avoid it consistent with #1. Be agnostic about as much as possible. If you believe the earth is shaped like a big tennis ball and not a big flat plate on the back of a celestial turtle, have you done experients to confirm this or is it just what your parents and teachers and other brainwashers told you?

"Take every statement I make as a question, not as an assertion." (Niels Bohe to his students)

How can you go wrong with that?

[ Don't believe everything you think ]

When I was a teenager attending a nominally religious school where they worshipped graven images: varsity team shiny plated victory trophy cups, I became a flaming atheist.

[ Trophy cup ]

Then I thought more deeply and became agnostic.

Then I thought ven more deeply and have arrived at: anti-theism: IF God exists, God is a mentally ill criminal. Whether God exists or not is secondary. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, as some people say. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

Theer is a fairly harmless -topia near were I live: It's a dog grooming and boarding establishment. It's name if Dogtopia. It used to have a better name: K-9 Kindergardan.

¶ +2024.01.12. What were some of the notable achievements of Julia Child that were showcased in "Julia"?

I don't know. But her work in the OSS (the predecessor of the CIA – the Langley VA one, not the one in Hyde Park NY) needs to be included.

And also that being a great chef includes among other things: (1) putting in a dash of this and a dash of that and not measuring it, and

(2) Having a glass of wine next to you to consult in the kitchen, and

(3) Cooking should be fun.

Bon appetit!

¶ +2024.01.12. Can professors use former students' concepts, ideas, and codes in their publications without attributing that to them? Is that considered plagiarism?

I am not an expert.

They can and do but it's not right. They can get away with it because they have institutional power and the students do not have power.

Of course it's plagiarism. There are lots of students and formar students whose work has been ripped off and they can't do anything about it (make a stink and you'll never get a good job).

Maybe the poster kids fo rthis, and here I will exaggerate just ta little, are the Watson and Crick duo who won their [Ig]Nobel proze for discovering DNA over Rosalind Franklin's dead body. And they wlao did something which I forget to mislead Linus Pauling to try to keep him from getting to hte solution first. They were apparently very petty little men if not outright despicable – exactly the kind of dissertation supervisor you do NOT want to have.

Contrast Sir Isaac Newton who when he was knighted said he could not have seen so far had he no stood on the shoulders of giants.

An honorable teacher who has reached a position in life where he haas enough to eat should take satisfaction in promoting his students' work, not trying to steal it. He (she, other) should pride himself on having produced such fine young persons, not try to suck their blood out of them like the giant waterbug in Annie Dillard's book "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek". The giant water bug injects its venom in a poor frog. The venom dissolves the frogs internal organs. Then the waterbug sucks out the poor frog's insides like a milkshake, leaving the deflated frog skin behind. The waterbug proabaly had tenure.

Same thing at work. A manager should be proud to have people working under him (her, other) who earn more than he does. But I once heard of a salesman who was so good at it that he always exceeded his quotas and was indeed earning more than his boss. So they promoted him to sales manager to cut his pay.

¶ +2024.01.12. Were Victorian Baby Boomers called Loomers, because they chained little kids to the looms rather than educating them in the good old days?

This is a very good question.

Here's something I read: The young ladies whose lives wer being wasted in the satanic mills complained about the long working hours. Fair enough, right? But why did they complain?

Today they would be complaining they did not have time to TikTok and be non-HVAC fans of sublunary stars, in other words they wanted to wate their time. But back then they were angry that they did not have time for self-organized study groups. They were being deprived of the opportunity to improve thieir minds not to waste them.

I do not htink kids are being educated today, including often at elite universities. They re being taught advanced job skills. And they are paying for it: huge student loan debts. I knew a 30 year old yound lady who had it all: Brilliant student and top athlete and very sociable. She finally got her PhD in exercise physiology – along with a $140,000 student debt load. Work? She was spending half her time fighting with insurance companies not helping patients. She finally figured out her most hopeful option: she joined the Navy and has been posted to Yokoska Japan. Are you that lucky?

Yes, the satanic mills were horrible. But I got PTSDfrom my last job as a computer programmer. It was lo=iterally destroying my mind (I forgot 30+ years of study in the humanities) and did succeed in causing me to lose the will to live. Each nite when I went to bed I hoped I would not wake up again (I do not like to suffer). And I envied Japanese World War II kamikaze pilots because they only had to ake their commute once! One fine day I looked back at my doctoral dissertation and wondered what intelligent and educated person had written it? (I did not plagiarize.) What's so good about today, even if yo uare not on the line of contact in Ukraine wehr ethe life expectancy in some places is 2 days?

That things are less worse today than in the 19th century is not saying much for America. There is a better way: democracyatwork.info.

Kids are not being educated today. They never were. American history? No: American hagiography, back then it was Tommy J and today it's MLK but never the truth about it. And as for "crtical thinking", what class do you critically think about what you are doing right then and ther ein the class room, not "critical thinking" about somethin irrelevant? I took philosophy courses back in the 1960s when I was in college and we read Mr. Plato's "Socratic" dialogues. We never asked why Mr. Socrates's students did not have homework ass–-ignments, tests and grades, nor, in the othe rdirection, did the teacher complain about having to publish or perish when Mr. Socrates never wrote anything.

The old days were not good. Today is not good. People did have to work back then: they did not have artificaial intelligence and industrial robots which, today, should be doing the work but they are jsut being osed by new "titaans of industry" (Silicone Valley oligarchs) to make more work. http://denocracyatwork.info has the answer.

¶ +2024.01.12. Aren't gen z and millenials outraged over long-term care or assisted living obliterating 500k-2 million of their inheritance?

Why aren't they taking care of the old people instead of gawking at the boob tube and playing video games and other superficial dreck?

Now I don't mean that entirely as part of the "stupid" selfish-altruistic b/s I was fed as a young person. Helping people, provided it dos not come at the cost of sacrificing one's own wellbeing, should be more REWARDING than being a consumer of consumer products (the word "consumption" used to refer to the chronic and usually fatal wasting disease: tuberculosis). consuming consumer products is a total waste of one's time on this side of the topsoil, which is what it's meant to be: a distraction from one's real life, which is wage slavery and a long commute to it for most people.

People foolishly have children, yes? And they pay for day care so they can work? Well, in a multigenerational home grandma and grandpa gladly provide free day care for the kids; grandma and grandpa really like being free child care and the do fun things with the kids like telling them stories which mommy an daddy are too busy to have time to do.

"The American Dream" is good only by comparison with where it came from: THe Great Depression. Of course if you don't have enough to eat you can be seduced by the promise of Disneyland. Young people are largely non-HVAC fans of sublunary stars. Whoopee!

Cat Stevens (aka Yousef) has a song that you should listen to free on youtube: "Father and son". It has a lot of wisdom in it. Ditto the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible (I am an anti-theist).

As for myself, the old cliche that youth is wastd on the young has a lot of truth to it: If I knew then what I know now I would have done things differently. But my problem wa tha tthe adults around me who ignoranced me. Starting with my parents, they wasted my youth. My parents were anti-sexuals (they must have done that shameful thing somehow else did I get here by Stork Express from the Netherlands?) and they put me in a gender apartheid school wher I learned by observation that the price of having a brilliant mind but a wimpy body was involuntary celibacy. Jocks got omerta sanitary services.

Not all old people are senile jerks. Noam Chomsky is 95 years old and he's more "with it" than the TikTokers. All he needs is their bodies. What would they do if they had his? Now if America's current president was my father, that would be problem wouldn't it? Mentally retarded, suffered 2 brein aneurysms each of which was credibly expected to kill him and now with going senile and all his life having had occasional psychotic episodes – If he didn't have a lot of money, imagine being young and having that albatross around your neck? "No, daddy, the toothbrush is in the bathroom. Wife, can you take him by the arm and lead him there? You gotta change his diaper again? Sorry...."

Obliterating inheritance? What about that jobs don't pay enough? If I wa young I'd be very angry at the older generation for having wrecked the economy. Try to find a job like this today: Right out of college, knowing nothing about anything, I got a job as a computer programmer trainee in a big insurance company and it started wit h6 weeks of full time classroon instruction at full pay. Can you get a job like that today fresh out of college? Or maybe you will become a gigger? Blamd Mr. and Mrs. Reagan, or "Just say: 'No!'" And if you are young and male are you worrying about being called up for a new draft to go fight in Ukraine or mainland China? All expenses paid. Or maybe you are a Wokie?

¶ +2024.01.11. How can organizations create a sense of control, comfort, and predictability while still being adaptable to change?

The two should go together: "control, comfort, and predictability" in all matters that do not pertain to what needs to be changed as a basis for open-ended exploration in the areas that need to be worked on.

If the ground under your feet is not stable you can't shoot a rifle straight. If you are not sure where you next meal is going to ome from you can't devote yourself whole-heartdly to designing a new computer chip or jet engine.

Make sure the employees are paid well enough that they don't have to worry about paying the biils at home, that their medical insurance is comprehensive and easy to use, etc. This frees their minds and energies up for attacking challenges in designing new products r fixing difficult bugs in existing products, etc.

Anotther obfvious thing: By deeds ass well as by words, assure them thatif they criticize you their boss they will not be hurt for it even if they turn out to have been mistaken, provided they are not "stupid" (then they should not be on the payroll a all) and their heart is in the right place (they should not be looking over their shoulders to move some place else: loyalty is part of security).

That shoul be obvious, isn't it?

¶ +2024.01.11. Do you have an idea for an offensive YouTube video about college? What's it called and what's the full plot? Why is it offensive?

Yes, and it should have been shot when in fact it happened.

Everybody knows that "leftist" students riot on campuses.

This was different: A notoriously CONSERVATIE college: Claremont-McKenna in California (the same state as "Berkeley" but very different ideologically!), hosted a famous and highly educated CONSERVATIVE FEMALE lawyer to give a lecture.

But she was opposed to "affirmative action" and she had rational reasons for her position. Maybe she was right and maybe she was wrong but she was a lawyer and was entirely willing to debate the isue.

The CONSERVATIVE students blocked the lecture hall where she was to give her speech.

The police had to escort the lady into the empty lature hall where the students had blocked the doors.

Notoby could attend her lecture. The room wa empty. So the police came once again, and escorted her back out.

That's it: "CONSERVATIVE students riot"

If this was "Berkeley" I'd have just yawned. "Radical" students have been doing these kind of things since the mid 1960s. But this was a CONSERVATIVE college, a Young Republicans kind of place where one would have expected all the students to be very respectful, especially of a CONSERVATIVE speaker. I mean if implasibly they had invited Noam Chomsky to speak against the Ukraine war, then while rioting is out of character for CONSERVATIVES, it might have made sense. But this was a CONSERVATIVE speaker and CONSERVATIVE students.

Aren't student riots OFFENSIVE? And aren't CONSERVATIVES supposed to be POLITE?

¶ +2024.01.10. In the US, why are Corporations so big on showing everyone how diverse they are to the point of choosing employees by their diversity instead of qualification, when most customers dislike forced diversity and shareholders only care about profits?

Intimidation.

You can't make any profits if you have been cancelled, can you?

[--------]

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2024.01.10. Are employers suffering due to less experienced new graduates out of college?

Maybe? Probably?

A thought just crossed my little mind: There was a time when employers did get more experienced graduates out of college. Maybe I am wrong here? It was right after World War II when a lot of men, no longer boys, returning from having fought in the military, went to college on "The G.I. Bill". What do you think about that? Many of them had been shot at in combat and killed people.

I was a perfect example of right out of college and no experience. I had a brilliant mind but it was empty. I could not have got my PhD then because I had nothing that meant anything to me to investigate and write about. B[u]y(telling typo there) the time I was 40 I had a lot I wanted to study and write about through a combination of life experience and self-study after college.

Here is a classic story about this problematic. I do not know if it is true but that is not relevent.

Boeing hired a young engineer fresh out of college. They gave him a simple task to design a part. The point of the exercise was to familiarize him with company procedures. He designed the part. He took his beautiful design down to the machinists to make the prototype. The machinists studied his design for a minute or so and asked the young man if he w sure it was corret. Of course it was, he replied. The machinists happily made his part for him. It was perfect – except it was an order of magnitude too big.

¶ +2024.01.10. Create a short speech about "as a news reporter how will you discuss fake news in social media with aspiring journalist?" make sure that the speech shows personality and include the source to avoid plagiarism.

What is the name of the course you are taking? What is the name of the school? What grade are you in?

Why are you asking this question? Is it becaue you do not want to do the assignment? Is it because the school (and/or the rest of your life...) has not prepared you to do the assignent well?

If I was you, your teacher would be in for a surprise, wouldn't he (she, other)?

Good luck!

[ This response has been recorded. ]

¶ +2024.01.10. Is learning shorthand still a valuable skill in today's society, or is it becoming obsolete due to the widespread use of computers?

If it was good enough for two of the great minds of th 20th century, "shorthand" hs =more to say for it than unemancipted females taking dictation from male chauvinist managers in the office typing pool.

The philosopher Edmund Husserl, on his death in 1937, left 40,000 (forty thousand) pages of Gabelsberger(sp?) shorthand which scholars were still transcribing decades later. The mathematician Kurt Godel also used Gabelsberger shorthand. Maybe they had too many ideas to waste time on writing them out longhand?

Personal computers are great but they have their limits too. If you were listening to a lecture and wanted to take notes or better: get it down verbatim, good luck on your personal computer.

When I was in elementary shool in the 1950s we kids had to write cursive script. I did not like it and in 7th grade I decided to write all block uppercase letter instead.

[ Mike Rentko ]

So I would "never be able to keep up"? Why then didn't the school teach me shorthand? If I knew it I think I would still be using it today for taking notes. But then I am an intelletual and I THINK a lot. Why would people who get off on watching Monday nite NFL or HBO on their two couch potatoes on the boob tube need to write anything?

"Less is more." (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architect)

+2024.02.17 v283
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