Log of my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) postings
Page #4

Len: 222,466  86.

¶ +2023.10.16. I want to pursue computer science/artificial intelligence from an economics background. Can I be too stupid for it?

"[n]o matter how indispensable the expert may become in a rationalized society, his own [narrowly functionalist (https://technologicalidea.quora.com/w/images/b/bb/Tesla-robot.jpg)] perspective (which originated within the world of crafts and agriculture, and then moved on to prosper in that of industry) is of no ultimate significance. (Arnold Gehlen, "Man in the age of technology", 1957/1980, p. 161)

As an economist you are dealing with public policy: human lives. The real deal. i hope you pursue your work intelligently and empathically. Maybe you should have done a practicum in your education as a toilet cleaner on 3rd shift in a big office building.

Now, are you "intelligent" enough to **DO** "computer science/artificial intelligence".. Maybe you are and maybe you are not. But let's say you are not. As an economist, you can always hire a techie to do the technical work implementing your policy ideas. The techie, even if he (she, other), unlike me, can run the proof of Godel's Incompeteness Theorem, which I am not sure all of them can do, may just have a "narrowly functional perspective". No matter how "intelligent" (high IQ) the dude is, he (she, other) may not have a clue about running an economy, *i.e*., the organizaton of labor and the distribution of goods like to feed people, etc.

So! Stick to economics as what matters. Learn what you can about computer science and artificial intelligence. It just might be enough for you to read one book, MIT Prof. of Computer Science's clasic: "Computre power and human reason: from judgment to calculation" (W.H. Freeman, 1976). It's not rocket science; it's fun reading (at least if you like to think).

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)

¶ +2023.10.16. In what ways can comedy provide a sense of unity and shared humanity during times of conflict and tragedy?

Sometimes a comedian can say something a person does not want to hear in a way that gets thru their thick head, thrugh their pre–-judices (judgments before evidence) and ta–-boos (too hot to handle) when the person will not listen to reason and face reality.

In the middle ages, kings had court fools: men who dressed up in clown suits. The court fool could tell the king that the king was going to do something ill adised and keep his head on his shoulders when a high ranking minister would not dare tell it to the king because he knew he might indeed have his head severed from his torso for it.

The king could laugh it off because obviously a fool is a fool, but on the other hand the king might take the fool's wise advice without feeling he was looking himself like a fool for not haing thought it up himself because no rational person would ever have come up with such a wierd idea.

Some comedians are probably just brown-nosers (Mr. Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy, for example?). But the comedians who do honor to their profession are not just funny. Prof Marshall McLuhan said:

"Every joke exresses a grievance. The funny man is a man with a grudge."

Better a killer joke than a bullet thru your heart or head, right?

[ Court fool picture]

¶ +2023.10.16. Is artificial intelligence the future of the IT help desk?

Somewhat.

AI can answer routine questions.

AI can help expert human help desk workers answer non-routine questions.

But AI will never be able tfully replace expert help desk workers because it is algorithmic and ther will always be quetsion that the people who cooked up the AI did nt imagine and therfore could not have eivisioned the Ai answerng. And also because the AI because it just computes does ntreally undertn lanuage and sometimes its algoritmic processing of phoneme (or character) strings is not just wrong but wrong-headed.

So there will probably be increasingly fewer human help desk workers as AI continues to replace rooutinizable labor. But "when push comes to shove" AI cannot be relied upon because it is in a profound sense: stupid.

The person the AI can't deal with will be ones who have "edge case" and other wierd problems and also a few who just plain want to talk with a human, "dammit!~"

AI is a tool. Humans use tools to accomplish desired results. Ai does not have aims. It jsut computes. But so too did abacuses and obviously a netsork suercomputer array can do a lot more computing than an abacus.

AI can mor or less replace all routinizable jobs but it cannot perform final quality control or field engineering, especially when it comes to who is going to fix the AI itself when it bearks or cannot handle something?

If Mr. Bezos was going to negotiate a huge conract with the Chinese government and presuming he does not know Mandarin nor has immersed himelf in Chineseculture, would he take advice from an AI, or from an expert Sinologist who, in his (her, other's) turn would have ai along with a lifetime of experience at his disposal to advise? Ditto of Mr.. Bezos's child had cancer, would he use AI or lowest bid RFP to select he child's treatmen, or would he choose the world's top human oncologist, who, in doing surgery might use a robotic machne to to the incusion.

There was an old Wausau Insurance Company cmmercial showing a businessman who absolutely positively had to make a flight for a mission-critical meeting. He hired an *el cheapo* taxi to get to the airport. It's rural Cuba in midday in August or some other godforsaken place like that. We see the taxi driver frantically tryng to fix his car's engine with steam spewing out of the radiator on the side of the road. The man, sweating profusely standing beside the broken taxi looks up in the sky and sees his flight heading for the stratosphere. Voiceover:

"The cheapest alternative is not always the least expensive."

¶ +2023.10.16. Is it true that Physicists don't really respect Philosophers of Physics?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

Interesting question.

I once took a course (of which I understood little except for duck-rabbits)

[ duck-rabbit]

from one of the greats: Norwood Russell Hanson (read hs book: "Patterns of Discovery"). I seem to have read that he influenced Thoma Kuhn whose book "The structure of seientific revolutions" is a classic.

Then we have Edmund Husserl who did highly important philosophical work on the foundations of the Galilean exact natural sciences of nature along with all the rest of "the lifeworld". Well, are any of these persons familiar names among physicists? And there are more controversial figures, e.g., Paul Feyerabend.

My guess is that most physicists don't think about what they are doing. And there are some who have simpleminded ideas about human beings being just specks of the physical world whereas in a more consequential sense the whole physical world is just part of the physicist's living.

Here is a little Venn diagram for you to think about (or not):

[ Self-world Venn diagram]

¶ +2023.10.16. Can you give an example of a company that adapted well and was able to successfully navigate change? Why did it work out so well for them and not others?

Not exatcly the same, but look at IBM between the 1940s and the 1970s. They went from "tab machines" where I do not know how innovative they were or were not, to navigating in the sense of steering change in the computer world in the 1960s with System 360 which was ravolutionary.

I hae read that Thomas Watson Jr. spent sleepless nights because he wa literally betting the company on a very risky project. But a highly competent and highly committed IBM work force made it happen. Bedore System 360, big compuers were incompatible with little computers; if you wanted to upgrade your company's computer your existing investment in programs (what make the computer useful) would have to be rewritten. With System 360 you could write a program for a small bank and run it at NASA (wih some caveats).

There was the cliche: "The sun never sets on IBM". But then in the 1980s, it did, under the not-exactly-leadership of John Akers. I have no idea how it happened. A few years ago a retired cardiologist told me th the had had a patient who worked in IBM Research. When Mr. Akars became CEO he told everybody to tke the little "THINK" signe off their desks.

[ THNNK ]

"Everybody complied and stopped thinking."

In their devolution I finally got fired after my last manager evaluated me:

[ Dog kennel ]

after having managed to get my tuition for my doctorate paid in two years of unpaid leave of absence but with medical insurance and access to the corporate computers. Is it correct to say that Mr. Akers made Bill Gates the richest man in the world?

¶ +2023.10.15. Do you know any interesting research on childishness?

This sounds to me like an exciting and probably revolutionary (i.e., dangerous to pursue) topic.

It has been 40 years since I studie this but here is a URL that looks good for a starter:

Childhood and Child Rearing - The Historicity Of Childhood I did not write he folowing paragraph; Quora must have inserted it]

Centuries of Childhood presents the thesis that the "concept of childhood" itself is modern: a creation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This thesis has been disputed and defended by later scholars. As a product of that controversy, the historicity of childhood has been established indisputably. The concept of childhood, along with childhood itself, is subject to change in changing historical circumstances. In earlier times, Ariès argued, children were perceived as participants in adult society. They shared the same amusements as adults and did not have distinctive occupations or adornments. Even at school, children, adolescents, and adults intermingled, without distinction of age. The important boundary was not between child and elder, but dependent and master. Sentimental relations between parents and children were weakened, moreover, by the frequency of child death. Attitudes began to shift in the seventeenth century as smaller, coherent family groups supported the experience of individual children. Literary works evinced a newfound affection for children, while families willingly invested in child accessories and education and grieved at child deaths. Ariès based his arguments mainly on literary texts and artistic representations, mostly from France and England between 1500 and 1750. Ari&egrae;s's work evoked responses that critiqued and confirmed his hypotheses. In 1965 the British historian Peter Laslett published The World We Have Lost echoing some of Ariès's conclusions. Laslett was reporting on the project of empirical research on the history of the family centered at Cambridge University, which studied such archival sources as baptismal records for evidence of family structure, ages of baptism, marriage, and death. Using different sources, Laslett, like Ariès, concluded that the experience of past childhood was unlike that in the modern age: such children lived in a world we have lost. Also affirming Ariès's hypothesis, Lawrence Stone's massive Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977) focused on elite households and utilized literary evidence such as diaries, autobiographies, and letters. Over three stages of development ranging from large, authoritarian households to smaller, more egalitarian ones, the family became increasingly "affective," Stone argued, characterized by strong sentimental ties and abundant investment in child welfare. The American psychohistorian Lloyd de Mause, agreeing with Ariès and Stone on the greater importance of the child in modern times, proposed a model of the history of childhood that unfolded in five stages from the horrors of antiquity to the enlightened childrearing practices of the present day. Declaring in his seminal 1973 essay "The Evolution of Childhood" that the history of childhood was a "nightmare from which we have just begun to awaken," de Mause credited modern psychoanalytic theory with persuading adults to abandon age-old practices of abuse and consciously to further the

https://science.jrank.org/pages/8597/Childhood-Child-Rearing-Historicity-Childhood.html

One of these scholars eloquently called childhood: "a dark continent".

In reflecting on my own childrearing which was highly detructive of me, it was a totalitarian dictatorship of parents and teachers who, to play with a word coined by Karl Marx, were a lumpenparenariat and a lumpenfacultariat. I was their goose for foie gras.

[ foie gras image ]

Consider this idea from a man who is no comsymp or other deviant:

"Kids retain 5 percent of what they hear and 10 percent of what they read but 80 percent of what they do and 90 percent of what they teach." (Robert Ballard, discoverer of the wreck of RMS Titanic)

Need I say more? Well, if you are interested, I have a 60+ page lavishly illusrated and thoroughly documented case study of one victim of childrearing in middle class 1950s USA: me; warning, it's not for the faint hearted or for prigs:

Nullius in verba | Huang

–– Addendum: Sorry, I forgot to write about adults who behave in childish ways, such as recent British PM Boris Johnson

[ Boris Johnson on bicycle handlebars ]

The school did not like that in the Yearbook we captioned the class brown-noser's picture: " If a man has no character he must have a method " [55] [They replaced this with: "I will fight the good fight"]. But " notes by rote " still got thru, perhaps because they thought it was a compliment? We had captioned a picture of the football team charging forward on their playing field ( above ): " We are the hollow men ." [28] [29] [57] The faculty inquisitorial tribunal had not given the Editor-in-Chief and myself any time to prepare for our interrogation.Were they hoping to catch us telling different stories so they could nail us for lying? I had no problem with this, because I was only telling the truth → about them. ( Maybe they would have burned my fragile body at the stake for steak [ élève bourguignon ? ~ They held this Inquisitorial Proceeding at lunch time], had I not promised to be good PR by being going to Yale? [30] ) Faculty advisor, Mr. Thomas Longstreth (M.A., U. Penn., left ), had told the Yearbook staff he was too busy to review Yearbook pages and I had told him something – I have by now forgotten my specific words but I remembered them clearly then – that we would do what we would do. He had been put on notice and failed to take appropriate measures, so he got what he asked for. I was confident that I was right and the faculty were wrong and, under interrogation, I stood my ground. They backed off and only punished me by barring me from attending graduation ("Commencement") ceremony. [ Aside: I also did not attend "my" Yale graduation: In my "cap and gown", I collected over $130 USD for Quaker Vietnam war relief at the gate to the "Old Campus" nearest to the Yale Post Office.] I was not taught about The Holocaust at StP. When I did study The Holocaust, I immediately recognized where I had seen the showers before: in the boarding students' dormitory (just sans the gas). Because I never engaged in public nudity, I do not know what the showers were like in the " boys' locker room ". Two things I was not taught by St. Paul's School: ( 1 ) That the experiential dimension of value existed nor, a fortiori , that there could be things or persons of value. By "of value", I mean that I could have felt about them that they deserved to exist and they would have enriched my experience of and especially joy in living. ( 2 ) The experiential dimension of nuance and context , that not all things in the world have to be one dimensional: (a) approved by adults who wielded power over me, or (b) not approved by them. In 11th grade, classmate Allen Moulton made me aware of two books which influenced me: ( 1 ) Albert Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus". My engagement with this book illustrates how my spirit was impoverished: I assiduously tried to reduce to a one page deductive outline Camus' argument why not to kill oneself , instead of elucidating nuance(s) of the problematic of being mortal. This crippling of my soul has vitiated / corroded my whole life, bot

https://www.bmccedd.org/Huang.html

I cannot speak for others. I did not have a childhood, but I would not have wanted or benefitted from what apparently is the pollyanna fantasy of little boys play fighting with wooden swords or whatever. Maybe a lot of boys really do benefit from proto-fascist organizations like the Boy Scouts (I can only write that in a depersonalized place like Quora because when I say it to somebody in person I risk being ostracized or worse). I also feel that public same gender nudity like in "locker rooms" is very sick. And a for brutalizing activities like varsity football and lacrosse (which I deal with at length in my document, above), Well:

[ Minotaurs get to copulat image ]

And that is not just "sour grapes" from a kid who had a brilliant mind and a winpy body so he got none. In 2001, one of the budding young minotaurs in tht perp(spelling intended) school I attended videotaped himself doing it wiith a female from another such bastion of single-gender pedagogy but the other normative gender, showed it to the team, parents found out and it wa HUGE society scandal in Baltimore Mryland that reverberated across the country, in part becaue the school's team that year apparently had been ranked #1 in the counry. Well that kid, who must have been reaaly stupid fo break the code of omerta, got expelled (it is a Christian Shool, after all, so they should know about lambs of God that take away the sins of....) and they cancelled the rest of the season, but they were back at it the next year: It is an "honor code" scool, after all, so the solution so structural social problems is individual discipline ("Don't put you hand in the cookie jar when it's sitting in front of your face and nobody is watching; but if you do, report yourself so we can you for your own good." BTW: 3 great books on childrearing by Alice Miller, one of which is tited: "For your own good").

Back to Robet Ballard. I was psychologically really messed up with a mother who belonged in a mental hospital but my father could not afford to both send her to the insane asylum and send me to Yale. The Head master of the school (yes, this was after 1863 in USA and I had masters) wanted to socially adjust me, i.e., to reduce me to being like the other kids:

[ social adjustment cartoon]

Why didn;t he have me in say the 10th grade teach 7th graders to "adjust" to rise to being a faculty member instead of being subjeted to ass–-ignments? They could even have saved money by a reduction in force among themselves.

It is said and perhaps with truth that youth is often wasted on the young; the adults wasted mine.

Well, even if you don't read my document, which I think you might find more interesting than Charles paid-on-the-installment-plan Dickens which I was sentenced to read.... I will end with:

[ Mike Rentko ]

¶ +2023.10.15. What have you learn about ethics 150 words?

I hope never to have to be ethical. Ethics generally entails suffering and sacrifice, and I hope to have some joy in living before I die.

Student: "Happy the land tha breeds a hero."

Galileo: "No. Unhappy th land tht needs a hero." (Bertolt Brecht)

Signed: Rrose Sélavy (look this up on Wikipedia if you don't "get it")

(approximately 60 words)

--------

I once knew a person who was AN ETHICAL GIANT. He suffered much in his life. I greatly honor him but in no way envied him. He once said of himself:

"They put me off at the wrong stop when I was born."

(I had an intrusive mother. And with a brilliant mind but a wimpy body I earned involuntary celibacy in school.)

[ Sacrifice image here ]

¶ +2023.10.15. What is more important for preserving knowledge: writing systems or spoken languages?

Verba olent scripta manent (Spoken words fly away; writing endures)

Before writing your friendly local bard was your New York Public Library, Libary of Congress, Widener Library, Alexandrian Library, Google, you name it, it was him (her, other). How much knowledge could he preserve?

Fast forward to uniform editions of printed books (1600CE). Burn down New York Public Library, Libary of Congress, Widener Library, Alexandrian Library, Google, you name it and what would we have left? lots of books to painfully restore pretty much of what was lost.

There is a classic book (actually 2 volumes in one) by Prof> Elizabeth Eisenstein about the effects of printed books on civilization (the human spirit), "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change" (Cambridge University Press).

There is a large scholarly literature about the present question with authors such as Eric Havelock. There is a book with a telling title by Bruno Snell "the disovery of the mind". Without writing you would not have a self, at least as thoughtful persons have one today. Maybe people like die-hard soccer fans still don't? You would proabably not know you existed. But you would still be different from a dog or a cat or a horse who are intelligent but do not even appear to have spoken language – well, maybe elephants and some cetaceans have bards?

Moral of this story: Humanity in an honorific sense (of course I am making a dead white male judgment here!), like in The Alexandrian Library or Newtonian physics, etc. is very fragile and we can easily woke ourselves back into the stone age or less "evolved" (of course I am making another dead white male judgment here!), but maybe that's what we (not me, how about thee?) want?

"The lamps are going out all over over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time" (British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, August 1914) Maybe just skip everything after the comma?

¶ +2023.10.15. What interests you the most in AI?

Me?

Several things.

(1) Obviously it does better at **finding information on the internet**, good, bad or indifferent, than a simple Google search. I hare very obscure topics I am very interested in and the Bing AI finds obscure liformaton I had no idea was out there for me to follow up on. But note that: I use the results of the Ai for my own further endeavors, not just consume it like eating a Big Mac.

(2) **Trying to break it**. I worked for a half century as a computer programmer and got PTSD from it, so I'm always up for getting revenge.

(3) **Companionship** (albeit not real). This is very important in our aging and depersonalized social world: Ineracting with the Ai is more "rewarding" than either flat out social isolation or talking with some humans such as at least one manager I had in a multinatial corporation whom I call "a Mickey Mouse" because he [not homosexual!] came to work wearing socks with machine stitched images of Mickey and Minnie Mouse but was either incapable or unwilling to engage in serious discourse with ma about small rodents. Tht Bing AI, on the other hand, would "inelligently" (*i.e.*, informingly) interact with me about mouses. Squeek!

There are a lot of lonely old people in this world (probably especially in Japan), whose days would be less depressing talking with an AI than "having nobody to talk to". In Japan they also now have robopets. Meow!

¶ +2023.10.15. Will many office jobs that employ repetitive tasks be replaced by automation?

This has been going on since probably the 1920s.

I forget the details: Back in the erly days of telephones, calls were routedby human "switchboard operators" – office job workers. Somebody figured out that as the number of phone calls increased eventually there would not be enough living human beings to man (or woman, as the case may have been...) all the switchboards that would have been needed. Some sort of electromechanical relay circuits came along in the nick of time to save the day. All those switchoard operator office jobs (or at least many of them) were replaced by litttle electromechanical gadgets.

In the early 1950s the amount of clerk work record keeping for all the ever growing bureaucracies was reaching the same self-defeating point and Western countries were faced with breakthru or breakdown. The economies could have collapsed under the eaight of all the data for things like social security and income tax etcetera and so forth. Or there could have been some kind of social revolution that eliminated the bureaucracies or at least radically changed them. But no, along came the computer as Superclerk to save the day for monopoly capitalism (and probalby for state socialism, too).

If your job is routine it either has already been replaced or soon will be, by AI and industrial robots.

The good news could be that most people would no longer need to work but receive bounteous "guaranteed annual income" just for being alive. This likely will not happen in our capitalist or what is not being called by some "cloud capitalist" economy where make-work is expanding to fill the personpower availabe to do it, while others will become homeless.

The other good news if the silicone valley oligarchs are smart selfish not penny wise and pound foolish and think they can get away with eliminating wage-slaves altogether is that all the automation needs to be overseen by quality control experts and field engineers. Why?

Because AI aka "artificial intelligence" is not intelligent: it just computes, and while often it produces results better than most human workers, occasionally it goes off on some totally rediculous path to a boondoggle because something in the input is not being handled intelligently(sic) by the computer programming behind it. AI is probably especially vulnerable to tricksters: humans who sit there and try to figure out how to f*ck it up. These would include CIA agents trying to sabotage Iranian uranium centrifuges and Iranian agents trying to sabotage the U.S. power grid, etc., Gameboys who just like to get off on screwing things up, High-tech luddites who hate the machine, Stand up comedians looking for material for tonite's stage show and Who knows who else. I personally would like to figure out a question to ask the Bing AI that would cause it to go into an infinite feedback loop and incinerate the whole Microsoft server farm but I know I'm not that clever. It says: "Ask me anything", and I take it up on that.

So the automation will always need quality contol inspectors. It will also need field engineers: fix it dudes. Because everything breaks sooner or later and sometimes in ways nobody could anticipate, i.e., ways that cannot be [pre-]programmed into the automation.

So! If you are a young person looking for job security, become a quality control inspector or a fix it dude (or find something non-routinizable to do). But you had better be good at it, because the automation is always getting "better", i.e., able to handle more "edge case" and to self-repair more problems. You have to be smarter than the automation to keep your job, and:

rust never sleeps

[ Pinkerton logo ]

But YOU do need to sleep, right? So the cloud capitalism corporations need to hire for 3 shifts every day of the year.

¶ +2023.10.14. Which fantastic creative people are on your radar?

Me? Marcel Duchamp.

"Why not sneeze, Rrose Sélavy"

[ LHOOQ ]

Graham C Lindsay

¶ +2023.10.14. I am in charge of creating and awareness presentation for an upcoming assembly primarily based on raising awareness about the irael-palestine conflict.besides a speech what other things can I add to make the presentation more engaging and intersting?

This topic is too hot to handle.

Prof. Noam Chomsky has video discusions on YouTube that are relevant but probably not welcome.

Read about the Balfour Declaration and its consequences if you dare. Following is an excerpt from a video I watched this morning (14 Oct 2023):

Zionism is one of the greatest public relations success stories of the 20th century.... I believe that the Balfour Declaration was one of the most serious mistakes in British imperial history. it committed Britain to support of jewish nationalism in Palestine after [World War I], and it did not produce any immediate benefits for Britain.... The most serious consequnces of British policy during [World War I] were the encouragement of Arab nationalism and jewish nationalism, and in the aftermath of the First World War, Britain was left with this legacy of double-dealing and of betrayals which was to haunt her for a long, long time. (Avi Shlaim, Professor of International Relations, St. Anthony's College, Oxford; Ed. note: Essentially, in World War I, in pursuit of beating the Germans, Britain had promised both the Arabs and the Zionists a single prize that could not be divided in two, to get both of them to fight against the German side of the war.)

¶ +2023.10.14. If you had the power to change the world once, what would you do? What would be your stake in it?

Well, this is one of those questions that can have many different answers for many different reasons.

Here's one:

I'd take away all the toys from all the boys. I'd take away all the weapons from every government: United States, Great Britain, Ukraine, Russia, China, Iran, Israel, Hamas, you name it.. I'd take away their ability to conscript soldiers.

Then if the leaders of governments who are generally just superannuated selfish ignorant spiteful fat dumb and happy toddlers with coercive power to harm a lot of other people wanted to fight, they'd have to do it with their bare hands and only themselves with volunteers. Let them go at it but no weapons and no conscripts. Consider Ukraine: Joe Biden and Virginia Nuland and Vlodymyr Zelensky and his lovely wife Dragon Lady could fight with Vladimir Pusin and Sergey Lavrov and Olga Skabeyeva. Rumble!

I once saw a painting that captures what I fantasize. The painting is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo Japan. It as a large paintlng maybe 6 feet or more wide. It shows what looks like a small tornado whirling in midair. The tornado is made up of house cats each attacking the next, all of them attacking each other with their sharp claws like in a Cuisiniart, chasing each other around and around in the air.

Governments have to stop killing their citizens.

My stake in it? I want to live in peace and study the humanities without being bothered by belligerents (I like the wisdom in the Book of Ecclesiates in the Bible, or Micah 4:4). I had an intrusive mother and, as Joe McCarthy said in a different context: one of them is one too many.

When I was 18 years old it was "Vietnam". I was subjected to the humiliation of having my body examined naked by a bunch of sicko middle aged males to see if I was tasty enough for them to eat. (Now don't' get me wrong; When I have died and am certified dead by two physicians, then I invite anybody who is humgry to enjoy my corpse, raw or cooked any way htey like. But plese have the decency to wait until then. Thank you.)

[ Fit or service]

¶ +2023.10.14. Do you think it is important for athletes to use their platform to address social issues? Why or why not?

I go with the ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes who said that professional athletes do nothing of value for the polity. They just provide entertainment for the masses (and so they should not be paid).

That said, it's obvious things are not that way. The masses worship CELEBRITIES, and probably some professional athletes are a lot better than some other CELEBRITIES.

If they believe something, why shouldn't they push it? All other CELEBRITIES do. Let's look at football. America's current President has himself said that he alwys had trouble with words but he prides himself on always having been a kid who could CARRY a football. Well, I'd rather have a President can call the plays (a quarterbback) than one who can just run with the ball, wouldn't you? I'm an old man, so Johnny Unitas for President!

Does Arnold Schwartzeneggar count as an athlete? He seems a sincere and caring actor on the political stage these days, doesn't he?

And while I'm at it, there is one athlete whom I really respect: Abebe Bikila. He won two Olympic marathons honestly on his two godgiven bare feet instead of cheating with high tech prostheses ("running shoes"). They're all wimps!

¶ +2023.10.14. As a researcher, where do you position yourself between epistemology and ontology? And what make you say that?

I am not a fan of jargon. I've stuied philosophy (existential phenomenology, primarily) for halfe acentury but might fail a freshman philosophy test on definition of terms. I read Heidegger's Being and Time when I wa a freshman in college in 1964–65. Been there, done that.

I took courses from John Wild, whom I was too young to fully appreciate but he liked me because my interest in philosophy wa sfor living, not, like he said for some of his graduate students, "neo-scholastic jargon". Prof. Wild's philosophy has been summed up in a vrey simple sentnce: "We are a conversation." All the contents of conversation pass away and are replaced by others, but nobody can ever get "behind" or "under" or anywhere wlse from the event of conversing itself. Everything tht is is objects of "the conversation we are". So if you want some terminology, there is "the ontological difference", which I seem to recall Ludwig Wittgenstein also said in a different way: the visual field is not itself something seen. IU disagree with Heidegger who seems to me to worship Being (like he also at one point worshipped Adolf Hitler). I say that each person (and that word "person" is very difficult) is not just an obbject in the world but a perspective on and judge of the world, including Being not just beings. Emmanuel Levinas has a philosophy which should terrify anybody who studies it (ther is even a book about his philosophu: "Is it righteous to be?"); he says that "the Good is beyond Being". I would also say: "Creativity is beyond Being". Here is a Venn diagram for you:

[ Me worls me disgram nere ]

And also some wisdom from a non-philosopher:

[ Yogi Berra here ]

"Epistemology", "ontology" gobbledygook. I once heard somebody say in a TED talk that if you can't expalin your doctoral dissertation to somebody at a cocktail party in 2 sentences (or maybe just ne sentence, I forget), you don't know what you are doing. This posting is self-reflective: we are a conversation (unless, of course, and this is a mystery, one of us puts buller thru the other's head or something similar in Ukraine or Israel or elsewhre.

¶ +2023.10.14. AI detector is detecting my work as 100% AI generated. Because I ignorantly used it as an editing and grammar tool at the request of an academic advisor. The words, concept & life experience in the already published piece is my own. What do I do?

I don't know what you should do. You are obviously naive. Naive people are victims of their social conditioning, schooling, advertising, peer pressure and so forth.

You yourself say: "I ignorantly used [AI] as an editing and grammar tool **at the request of an academic advisor**". So you were like Laika the dog. Remember Laika? She was the dog that the Soviets launched into space with no way of return. She trusted her handlers and even spent her last night on earth in their loving care, Then she was shot up into the exosphere to die. (The Soviets later named a brand of cigarettes in her honor)

Apparently you used too much of the AI's advice without "covering it up". Now you kjnow better, right?

As to what to do, What maerial harm are you at riskto suffer? Be honest with yourelf. Don't worry about "face" or anything sentimental. **How can this harm your future peo$pect$ in life?** If zero then just forget it and learn to never trust anybody including your parents and yourself (remember: your were socially conditioned as as child so "your" thoughts are not always your own).

If you do face the prospectof material harm, get clear to yourself extely what that harm is and do your best to deal with it. It sounds to me like that "academic advisor" gave you bad advice. Maybe you can do nothing about him (her, other), or maybe this person is not evil and if you go tell him what happened he might help you? Or maybe he is an a**hole so don't give him any more ammunition to harm you.

You were naive. But you were not guilty of any crime, were you? Did you plagiarize your ideas? Did you conscientiusly cite anytihng you wrote that was neither a commonplace nor your own invention? If you did nothing wrong then in future if sombody brings this up against you just be honest: "I did what I believed was right but I didn't undertand what was going on. I have learned now."

Don't hurt yourself. Alwasys be scrupulously polite and respectful to people who don't desere it to both set an example for them to do better and also to not give them any ammuntion to further harm you.

Good luck!

¶ +2023.10.13. Are there any disadvantages to female executives being too feminine as leaders?

What is being asked about here?

I have not worked since June 2018 and then I worked in an environment of all perosns who were at least collge educated and many with masters degrees. In almost a half century I never encountered any kind of "discrimination" that I became aware of. I did become aware of some foolish things but nothing in the areas of gender or racial or religious or other discrimination.

In all that time I had really only one direct female manager, Alas, she soon enough got promoed and replaced by a white male who –- well –- he sat on his two couch poatoes and was a New York Yankees fan even though he had a PhD (computer scienc) from a first rank uniersity and had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and he sat on his two couch potatoes....

The lady was young and had just had her firt child (who had gastroinestinal problems)

She was highly intelligent and technically competent (computer programming).

All I did was fix problems in our product. One morning after I had fixed a problem I asked her if I could spend some time unnecessarily looking around in that component of our product. She immediately replied:

"We ALWAYS have time to look into a matter more deeply." Give her an "A" for technical leadership.

On the personal side. One normally busy morning at about 10AM I offhandedly said I had never driven a stick shift BMW but would like to one day. She immediately threw me her key ring and told me to for a spin. Give her an "A" for employee relations.

I hate meetings. She held very few and very short meetings. Often managers (male) would like to hear themselves speak and held interminable meetings where they apparently thought eveybody was a dog: they brought in dog treats to bribe the team into putting up with their logorrhea: Dunkin Donuts. Everybody apparently liked them, except me. I wondered if double arm amputees had to attend "all hands" meetings and if there could be a way to faint that would get me out of the meeting but not have my health permanently impacted. When will this goddamned thing end?

One morning this young lady brought in almond croissants from La Petite Patisseris Larhmont New York for us. Anothet "A"

But, as said, she got promoted and replaced by the white male who sat on his two couch potatoes and was Yankee fan even though he ha a PhD from a first rank university.

I almost worked for another lady manager who would rather have been ballet dancing. But twice she did something: Once she called one of her reports into her office. The other time she dialed one up on the phone. She securely shut her solid wood office door. My cubicle wa maybe 15 feet away. She SCREAMED at the person for maybe 5 or more minutes so loudly that I could clearly hear it all. I wondered if the guy had done something so bad why hadn't she just asked for m=his badge and called security to escort him out of the building never to return. I hypothesize she wa just throwing a nasty temper tantrum maybe becaus she couldn't be dancing.

So there ar my experiences with female leaders. They were both physically attractive and maybe in their early 30s. Different persons are sometimes different from one another, yes?

But there emay be a specific reason why the person asked this question? (What does "feminine" mean? What does "masculine" mean? Ophelia and minotaur?)

¶ +2023.10.13. How can augmented reality enhance our emotional connection to memories and places?

If you are a genuniely empathic psychotherapist or neurologist, "augmented reality" may be able to help with some mentally or neurologically impaired persons. Other than that I think it's very dangerous.

Watch the fun but also profound old movie "The Truman Show"

Now for something very foolish I did. It's a true story:

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror – no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.

¶ +2023.10.13. Can you name some philosophers from around the world whose work deserves more attention than it currently gets?

I think that postmodernism is [worse than] terrible. rof. Noam Chomsky says it's all either nonsense or platitudes for 12 year olds dressed up on oscurantist jargon. I do not know much about postmodern philosophy. Read "Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul De Man", by David Lehman. I call him: Paul das Man. But i hae studied postmodern architecture theory: Robert Venturi's foundational texts: "Complesity and contradiction in architecture" and "Learning from Las Vegas". If you are interestd I wrote an essay on thie disgusting person: Nullius in verba | 1983 – I quote his own words to damn him.

I think western academia made a wrong turn in two ways, not just postmodermism but also Heidegger. Edmund Husserl's work is constructive, or to use one of his own words: "constitutive". Husserl + The Bauhaus would have led to a bright future for "The West", not the Woke Darkness which seems to be descending upon us along with the destruction of Ukraine in America's anti-Russia war there. which may lead to thermonuclear apocalyse thus making postmoderniasm moot because there will be no more men or higher animals on the planet ("Meow!").

...a progressive transformation that ultimately draws into its orbit all ideas proper to finitude [i.e., pre-reflective immersion in any given pattern of life] and with them the entire spiritual culture of mankind... [--] a revolutionizing of all culture... that affects man's whole manner of being as a creator of culture.... This takes place in the form of a new kind of practical outlook, a universal critique of all life and of its goals.... whose aim is to elevate mankind through universal... reason... on the basis of... constant reflectiveness... and thus to transform it into a radically new humanity made capable of an absolute responsibility to itself. (Husserl, 1965, pp. 163, 164, 169, 181)

"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

I am hoping that sub-Sahara Africa will build on this heritage which we in The West are throwing away, leaving us indeed fair game for woke criticism. Europe as an ethnicity is no better than any other ethnicity. But Europe as the idea of universal self-accounble humanity appears to have occurred only once on earth and may be disappearing (murdered by people who are sawing off the branch they are sitting on).

If you are interested start with Husserl's lecture "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity" (which is available free o nth Internet), and Julien Benda's essay "The treason of the intellectuals" (also free on th Internet). or a very short but lovely essay, again free on The Internet: Individuality and Society (Jan Szczepanski, UNESCO, "Impact of science on society",

"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 surviving grandchild, New York Times obituary, Sam Roberts, Published June 3, 2022, Updated June 6, 2022)

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."

"The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time" (British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, August 1914)

¶ +2023.10.13. What are some unique ways to celebrate diversity and promote inclusion in your lifestyle?

Rise above it. Learn about all cultures (including whatever one you by chance happened to be born int) and take what you find desirable in each and leave the rest, but identify with none because they all are partisan and bicker with one another over petty differences.

Tolerate every person who is tolerant but also be aware that some persons do not want to be nice and cannot be tolerated because they are not tolerant. Study the Islamist extremists in France who beheaded a school tteacher for teaching freedom of expression in a classroom: Samuel Paty. Study all the other Islamist fundamentalists who murder people in many places. Study how African tribal chiefs sold their own people to evil white European slave traders. "Celebrate" the diversity of African tribes that rip out the external genitalia of young girls (FGM) and the lesser crime of jews circucmsizing helpless infant males. One does not have to like other people to respect them in civil society.

[ Pictures of islamists ]

And as for diversity, does that really mean respecting persons with divergent views or just people who are all the same: all sheep are the same color in the dark, aren't they?

Celebrate huanistic learning, the liberation of each unique individual person from subsuption in tribal life, including such tribalisms as "The Ameican Dream", not jus saveages dancing around totem poles but also multinational corporation middle managers dancing around their CEO's desk.

...a progressive transformation that ultimately draws into its orbit all ideas proper to finitude [i.e., pre-reflective immersion in any given pattern of life] and with them the entire spiritual culture of mankind... [--] a revolutionizing of all culture... that affects man's whole manner of being as a creator of culture.... This takes place in the form of a new kind of practical outlook, a universal critique of all life and of its goals.... whose aim is to elevate mankind through universal... reason... on the basis of... constant reflectiveness... and thus to transform it into a radically new humanity made capable of an absolute responsibility to itself. (Husserl, 1965, pp. 163, 164, 169, 181)

"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 nobody should be discriminated against due to secondary charaistics such as the accidents of gender and ancestry, But that's just "negative freedom": freedom from bad things. Persons need to learn ther are better things to be free for than mowing a lawn or being a 2-legged sheep in a mass march for one partisan agenda or another: creating in the art and sciences and cntributing to universal civilization..

¶ +2023.10.13. How do students who have never studied manage to handle so many courses at once?

At least two possibiities:

(1) Some dogs learn new trick faster than others.

(2) Maybe they take "easy" courses.

Some persons really are geniuses, and can graduate Harvard with body a bachelors and Masters degree in 3 years. There are a few J. Robert Oppenheimers in this world. I jus vaguely knew one of this kind of person. Apparently in France each year they have an exam to determine who gets into the mot elite schools. Most of hte kids study very hard. This person didnt study at all and came in either #2 or #3 in the whole country.

I myself wasn't eithe stupid or "stupid". I did fairly well in somehow managing to give teaches what they wanted. I was a more trainable dog (or seal, whichever you like) than most kids. I also avoided "hard" courses. In High School ("prep" school) I was number 1 academically but I was not stupid.They had an "Advanced Placement" American History course. I had zero interest in Amreican History. But more to the point, the teacher struck me as combination of having less wmpathy than the concrete block walls of hte classroom building and also probably incipient senile dementia. So I took smerian History for idiots, i.e., for jocks and got my easy "A". Nobody can trick me with a "challenge". I want to survive, not "man up". Now, ironically, 30 years later by accident I made a real discovery in American Huistory, which probably no othe student in the whole history the school I attended ever did. "Sorry kid, the dealine for submitting your term paper was May 1, 1964. You get an "F" for missing the deadline."

And in college, one term I had the cholce between a "D" in introdctory drawing class or an "A" in a philosophy professor's graduate seminar. A no brainer. And that's a very interesting story: The most important teacher I had was such an "easy grader" tht in that graduate seminar he literally implored the students to to the reading for the next class session. And how as a sophomore did I get into his graduate seminar? This was a philosophy professor (John Wild) and he gave us kids a lecture on "human freedom". After the class I went up to him and very respectfully told him that I did not see how I had any freedom since I was going to ha to take an exam at hte d=eod of hte course – in otherwords I very politely called him a hypocrite. He responded by apologizing to me and telling me he meant no harm. So I got the most for my life out of an "easy grader". By that time I knew very well that I was not the most trainable dog in the kennel. No way would I have taken a physics course.

But ther are students who really are "that smart". I seem to hvare read tha the artis Wassily Kandinsky started out as a law student. He had an "eidetic memory". Can you imagine the frusration of teachers who believe in "no pain no gain" at a student who could look up information in law books "in his head" instead of having to take notes by rote and burn the midnite ol before the final exam?

Especially today where a college degree and $7.50 will buy you a venti pumpkin spice latte in Starbucks until they raise the price again, I don't know what kids should do. A neighbor's daugher finally got her PhD in physical therapy at age 30 and had $140,000 in student debt. She just now enlisted in the Navy. One of the local blue collar workers who mainains the municipal water supply by opening fire hydrants each morning CHOSE to not go to college. His daddy is a big exrcutive so he could have gone to college but he didn't see the point in it and he also still lives at home so he's not spending his paycheck on rent. No student debt. No being stifled in a "cubicle" in an office in a job that might be offshored tomorrow.... Yes, he has to work outdoors in rain and snow....

Have I written anything her that you can make any use of? Take what you like and leave the rest. Here and everywhere, as best you can.

¶ +2023.10.13. Why does everyone want to join Facebook or LinkedIn?

Facebook? To schmooze around the virtual watercooler?

LinkedIn is related to employment: to paying hte bills.

Facebook?

[ Zuckerberg picture here ]

Facebook does serve for people to share small talk (not to be confused with th computer programming language Smalltalk!) and pictures of the kids, which is harmless. The problem is ith "influencers" and bad political actors and people stirring up simple people's hormones and cynical people rying to get themselves a free lunch....

I liked the old Internet "interest groups" where person with a shared interest in some very narrow topic got together on a mailing list AS INDIVIDUALS, with no advvertising, just with simple software to distribute emails to each other. They are still around. An example might be persons who are all interested in Breguet wrstwatches, or, yes, neo-Nazis and probably other fanatics. But it's on a small scale and peer-with-peer. Words have meaning. On Facebook what do you do if you are interested in what somebody says? You FOLLOW them, like sheep FOLLOW a jodas goat to alaughter.

[ Judas goat piccture here ]

One SUBSCRIBES to a mailing list (I am aware that "subscribe" is a double-meaning word, bot "follow" pretty much has only one meaning unless you work for a detective agency or are stalking simebody).

Social media seem to me to be great for producing 2-legged sheep. And when the influencers (aka government) decides to go to war with somebody, they are not just wooly. Baaaaanzai!

Replying to persons' Quora questions is as far as I go with social media. I don't post questions. I do occasionally do guerilla warfare on the othe social media when I see somebody post something I feel is bad and I find I can make a response to it, especially concerning America's anti-Russia war in Ukraine.

So what would I replace social media with (leaving aside e-commerce)? I would have each person have a personal website and teach them basic HTML I believe I could teach grandmothers to put together simple wesies sharing pictures of heir grandchildren just using Notepad in a couple of hours. The only way anybody would know aobut anybody's website would be by personal invitation. NO INFLUENCERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No leaders and no followers.

But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it. (Micah 4:4)

Shut down your computer. Restart a friendship. The conversation is waiting. Go there. (Grand Marnier (liqueur, aka cordial))

Let the Silicone Valley onigarchs just go the way of all flesh. As Mrs. Reagan famously said, albeit in a different context: "Just say: 'No!'" an you sayhonesly that you an't remember the last time you watched anything on the television?

¶ +2023.10.12. I have to do a presentation in front of 50 students. I am so stressed. How do I prepare for it and how do I keep my voice loud? It's really hard. I don't even know how to breathe.

You will get lots of good advice. Advice is cheap. Take what you like and leave the rest.

My thoughts:

Don't worry about it.

I think you should do one very iportant thing: MASTER YOUR SUBJECT MATTER. If you can't do that, then just give up. Suppose you don't know what you are talking about and somebody in the audience who is an expert decides to attack you? Not even the greatest orator in the world could win that one.

Second, make sure you have something to present that you sincerely believe will be helpful to your audience. If not, then just keep your mought shut and don't waste your or their time.

OK. So you have tsomething to say that you sincerely believe will hep your audience andyou know what you are tlking about.

What then? Get a good nite's sleep. Before your presentation, take a piss even if you don't need to and splash your face with cold waer to wake up.

Now just do it. I would start by respectfully bowing to my andience and expectin them to indicate their respect for me in return. But that's just me.

So what are you afraid of? That you will ture red as a beet? That you will vomit all over yourself. that you will wet your pants? What else?

Just do your best. Let's say you really have trouble. Remember: You are ther efor only one purpose: To help your audience. If you get in trouble and nobody in the audience comes to your rescue what does that say about THEM (not about YOU!): It says they don't care to learn. So why should you have botered about them in the first place.

You audience should "cut you a lot of slack". Not becaue they are altruist. But becaue they should be inelligently selfish: They shoulld try to get as much enlightenment out of you as they can, and that means they should help you give your presentation.

I had an intrusive mother who always made me feel that if I messed up "something bad would happen" (when I wa bout 5 years old she did credibly threaten to abandon me and when I wa about 9 she once tried to wash my hair so thoroughly that she credibly threatened to break my neck and paralyze me) That's my problem. Do you have a problem?

Master your subbject matter. Have somthing of value to say. And just do your best.

"Non carborundum legitimi" (Don't let the duly appointed authorities grind you down.)

¶ +2023.10.12. Why is it useful to work at improving my writing rather than relying on AI to write for me?

Well, that depends.

If you just want to get through life and have others do everything, including your thinking, for you, then if you can get them to do it, "improving my writing rather than relying on AI to write for me" will not be useful for you, and guess what? AI can be one of those others who does things for you, namely, your writing. You don't have to rich to have an AI servant to do a lot of thinking for you.

But if you want to think and question things and understand things and maybe play with ideas and things like that, then why would you want to let AI have all the fun?

OK. Even if you are Sir Isaac Newton redux, you might like to have AI write all the thank you notes for birthday presents for you. Fair enough.

But would you want the AI to discover the calculus and you not have a clue about it? Or have the AI discover the laws of motion and you not have a clue about it?

I am not a master potter. I have collected a very small number of really masterful small pieces of pottery. I love them. I greatly enjoy them. but would rather also have made them? You bettcha!

I like to write. OK, again, not thank you cards for birthday preents. Siri, please write all thoe stupid thank you notes. But I am enjoying writing this reply to you. If I didn't enjoy it I wouldn't be doing it. I like to write. Do you?

What DO you like to do? Anything? Watch Monday nite NFL on the televisoin? Would you rather the AI watch it for you and tell you in the morning what the game was about?

¶ +2023.10.12. The first supervisor of my thesis asked me yesterday at 5:15 pm spontaneously for a Zoom meeting for today at 9 am. I was working yesterday evening and therefore only just saw the mail (around 9:30 am). Have I made a mistake?

Maybe you have made a mistake: Having a supervisor who is completely thoughtless and disrespectful of you. He (she, other) expects you to step and fetch it whenever he whims to want to jerk you around?

Respectfully, very respectfully and very politely, explain to him that you have to work in the evenings. You did your best. He was thoughtless. But, of course all this is irrelevant since you are a subordinat life form and he has power over you so, since apparently he is not a decent human being, he can hurt you for not being his servant 24/7/365.25. You may just have to "eat it".

Yes, you may have made a mistake: him. (Addendum: but don't let him know if you think that since he then may hurt you more. He is the greatest supervsor who ever lived → until you get your degree and then remember Lot's wife in the Bible.)

¶ +2023.10.12. Why do humans do hard work too much now these days?

Curious question.

First, I think I have read that Americans work more hours than the French and some Americans disdain the French for not working hard enough and want to see their economy collapse so that the social welfare programs will go away and they will have to work harder. A lot of Americans, it seems, live to work, whereas French persons would rather work to live.

"H.L. Mencken's definition of Puritanism[:] the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.'" (Paul Krugman, NYT OpEd, 19 Mar 2021)

I, for one, want freedom from enterprise (to study the arts and sciences), not freedom of enerprise.

And "the work ethic" is not the only vision of The Amerian Dream. Here's a luttle secret from America's 2nd President:

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." (John Adams)

Clearly, this isn't the aspiration of persons like Mr. Bezos (not to speak of Mr. Trump), is it?

The present question cannot be answerd fully in a Quora posting. It's complicated. Did Medieval peasants work as much as contemporary Americans?

Here's one I have read, from the great professor Elizabeth Eisenstein: In early modern Europe, the master printers – the guys who owned the printing presses – spent their mornings working, and their afternoons in scholarly communication with other educated persons throughout Europe in a kind of snail mail Inernet. And for schlars ther ewere often "sinecure" jobs like being a librarian in a library that was not open for many people to use.

Industrial robots and massive computing power (AI) should free everybody from the Abrahamic Deity's curse on Sdam for havingeaten a piece of fruit, but instead it seems that the following principle is being applied: Make-work expands to fill the time and resources available to do it. More advertising. More junk computer apps. More managers. More more.

One needs to read "annals history", like Philippe Aries, "The structures of everyday life" to learn about these things from before the advent of the steam engine and "satanic mills".

"Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.... in our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture – and ourselves." (Josef Pieper, 20th century Roman Catholic philosopher)

Are you having fun today? Is your job enriching your mind / your soul? There wa a watchword of Medieval monsticism. Monks liked labor saving machines because they had better thing sto do, like praying. But as to the work itself: "Laborare est orare" (To work is to pray. Is your work a prayer to your "God" of whatever flavor that may be? Or would you quit tomorrow if you got the same pay for doing nothing?)

¶ +2023.10.12. How would banning social media improve people's quality of life?

"Shut down your computer. Restart a friendship. The conversation is waiting. Go there." (Grand Marnier (liqueur, aka cordial) advertising slogal))

Or to try this another way, study the Book of Ecclesiastes in your Bible even if you are an atheist or whatever.

¶ +2023.10.12. What are some problems which seem inaccessible but actually aren't as hard as they appear at first glance?

I worked as a computer programmer, for some time in a position where my job was to solve the problems the other programers couldn't solve for themeselves.

I very quickly figured out something that is relevant here:

**The problem as stated is not always the problem.**

So somebody would come to me and tell me: "This is wrong...." What they said was just part of the data that needed to be collected to figure out what the problem was. They might as well had barked or meowed.

Some problems look like "no brainers", pushovers, "no big deal" etc. but turn out to be "horror scenes".

Some problems look very difficult but they turn out to be trivial except perhaps in the complainant's perception of them, which, of course, can be a very big problem if they persist in not "listening to reason".

Also you can often judge a book by its cover: after you've read the book.

"Sometimes you go looking for one thing and you find something else." (source lost)

One thing that is never helpful is time pressure. There are some jobs where there really is time pressure: EMT workers and ICU staff. But more often it's some executive's ego that's on the line, so we launch the Space Shuttle Challenger when the engineers say it's not good because we are terrified that if we don't we might not get a promotion. Or we keep RMS Titanic going at top speed thru an ice field because if we slow down we might suffer the catastrophic PR disaster of running out of coal off Martha's Vinyard and having to be ignomineously towed into New York harbor (bad for the stock price).

Dead-lines kill. People's lives should not unnecessarily be put at risk. Also, if you are under deadline pressure, you will literally "try anythig" and you just might succeed in fixiig the prolem by making a big mess.

Whenever possible: "When in doubt, wait it out." (Michael Eigen, psychoanalyst, NYU)

Student: "Happy the land tha breeds a hero."

Galileo: "No. Unhappy the land that needs a hero." (Bertolt Brecht)

¶ +2023.10.12. What is the best way to give CPR if you are refused by another member of the team?

I am just an ignorant by stander. But this question does not make sense.

It might mean that there is a person who is dying and a member of "the team" (what team?) says they are not going to help. Such a person needs to be shown the door never to return ("fired").

Or it may mean – sorry, the sentence just does not make sense. It sounds like somebody is doing somethuing very bad.

Maybe the person asking the question is not fluent in English?

I mean, I could not give omebody CPR because I don't know how to do it.

My wife 4 times in the past 3 years needed help from the local EMS people and each time they were really wonderful. one of them was even an EMS worker who was voluneering on her off time. These people are "the greatest".

Maybe the question means that you want to give CPR to somebody who needs it and somebody on "the team" prevents you from doing it? If you are strong enough, just push them out of the way and maybe they will hit their head on something, and ask for help and find themselves on the other side of a refusal?

¶ +2023.10.11. What are the advantages of using small groups during focus groups?

The larger a group one studies, the less refined and interpretively deep can one understnd the persons as opposed to impersonal forces. If you are triaging victims of an infectious disease, studying a large group is probably quite enough. But you will not that way find out anything about what's going on the individual persons' minds. Maybe one person is not wearing a mask because they are pissed off at being told what to do, whereas another is not waering a mask because they are buying a gun and the gun store owner refuses to do business with masked men and yet a third went to the store and they were all sold out of masks....

And there is always the madness of crowds (e.g., Elias Canetti's book, "Crowds and power"). But if one wants to affect the cultural self-formation of individual persons, one needs to appreciate in depth that goes on in each unique individual's mind, not just aggregate behavior. Similarly, small groups are less "mindless" than large groups. If a picture is worth a thousand words, consider:

[ he one and the many pictures ]

What are you interested in?

¶ +2023.10.11. What is your general impression on the art of Pablo Picasso?

I am contrarian.

Obviously Mr. Picasso was a genius. He was also a misogynst, uncouth, sociopathic, and maybe neurologically damaged. He differs from Salvedor Dali in being far more talented but not nearly as honest: Mr. Dali made no secret of being a con artist.

Of course you can't easiy judge a book by its cover but some of the photographs of Mr. Picasso look like a "Neanderthal". He was photographed without even a shirt on, showing off his manly boobs and chest hair; how grosos. You may guess I do not particularly like him or his work. Of course I would buy it if I could get it cheap and flip it.

My proposed alternatives? Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp.

Rrose Sélavy.

¶ +2023.10.11. Why is science said to be collaborative and they are so competitive?

Excellent question!

I am a "fan" of collaboration: I discover something and I share it with you which helps you discover something which you share with me and onward and upward forever! Escelsior!

But it doesn't always work that way. There are $$$$$$$ and "ego" considerations. I read (ref. lost) that Watson and Crick intentionally misled Linus Pauling to try to prevent him figuring out the structure of DNA before them. How collaborative, right? But there was a Nobel Prize at stake.

I feel that there should be no competitiions for anything. Intelligent failures should be rewarded as much as successes because knowledge advances both by finding out what works and also what doesn't work

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion." (Niels Bohr)

There is a book which says something about all this, Robert Musil's "The man without qualities". The protagonist has enough money that he doesn't need to do anything. He goes to work in an engineering office becaue he imagines that engineers live the spirit of precision (not fashion and social custom) – the nobility of learning for its own sake. He finds they wear tie tacks with little horses' heads on them and leaves in disgust becaue the engineers do not carry the spirit of preciuon into their "personal" lives.

I strongly feel that all competition is bad. The structural condition for anybody being a "winner" is that others become losers. Do you want to be a loser if you have put your heart into your work? And what does it mean to b a winner besides making other people be losers? Being a winner just means you were less worse than everybody else who showed up that morning.

Quality is not a comparative. Work is either quality or it isn't. Everything that anybody does that is high quality is a winner in the competition against the 2nd law of thermodynamics and esophageal cancer, hurricanes,etc. The only losers should be toadies and other people who don't measure up. There is a lovely essay available free on the Internet by a person far more worthy to listen to than me:

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

¶ +2023.10.11. Is artificial intelligence intelligent or really just following a script?

Yes, AI is just following a script but that "script" is mora specifically called computer code, written by highly instructed computer programmers using computer programming languages that you, if you are just a lay person, probably could not understand, like I couldn't understand it after having done computer programming for almost half a century, myself. The stuff used to be simple logic, now it's layer upon layer of undocumented mumbo-jumbo like some new kind of astrology or something.

Prof. Noam Chomsky, who knows more about this than me has said there is nothing intellectually interesting in the current "artificial intelligence" which has no lntelligence but you computes very fast, like other computers can beat the world champion chess and even go players.. They jsut compute but they are so powerful that they can produce output that looks more intelligent than people. If they haven't done it yet they'll soon enough make robiots that look more intelligent and mre real than most people but still just compute very fast.

But if by "inelligence" you mean calculating, then, yes, the AI is intelligent: it can compute faster than you can.

[ SAT answer sheet with #2 pencil ]

**How human wisdom was finally saved from Artificial Intelligence (AI)**

[*Warning:* Long read.] One day, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) computer science Ph.D. researcher decided to follow the noble precedent of many medical researchers and do the ultimate experiment in his field: he (or was it she?) would be his own guinea pig. He would connect his own brain to his super-computer array. He got himself all wired up and hit "Start" on his application. In real time, he saw his experiential field appear veridically/

verbatim on his computer monitor before he experienced it (all experience is retrospective, *per*, I believe, Alfred Schutz's "The Phenomenology of the Social World").

Like Moiré patterns in the visual field, his whole mind became one big interference pattern. But since this was his whole experience not just a visual perception, he was completely self-cancelled out. He lost consciousness, collapsed, and was taken off in an ambulance to the mental hospital. There, given a little Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), and his mind fortunately not being irrevocably fried by either his experiment or the therapy, he recovered. He read Edmund Husserl's "The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology", and learned that the domain of scientific objects is something inside each infividual person's lived experience, not the other way around, which latter was the objectivistic fantasy that had previously [mis-]guided his and his fellow AI'ers aspirations and experiemtations.

He published an article in a peer reviewed journal (but how could anybody review his work since surely nobody in their right mind would be willing to repeat his experriment?), which he concluded by adducing Clifford Stoll's maxim:

>Data is not information,

Information is not knowledge,

Knowledge is not understanding, and

Understanding is not wisdom.

He ceased Artificial Intelligence (AI) researching and took up fishing, and opened a small bookstore, with the sign out front: "Wise men fish here". Other Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers, whether or not they became wise like him, at least in future kept their distance from the psycho-computational black hole, and scrupulously took care only to experiment on persons other than themselves.

*However:* The Democratic Party won The White House and both chambers of Congress, and, despite rowdy, disruptive protestations from the opposition Republican Party, regulations were reintroduced into the Federal Government. An Office of Technology Oversight was instituted and they prohibited experiments which manipulated human beings' minds. Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers were left with only the objective world to manipulate. They showed honor, and programmed robots that eliminated necessary labor from society. Humankind was at last freed from G-d's Curse on Adam and Eve! The AI researchers were duly rewarded with a collective Nobel Peace Prize.

***Excursus:***** My (BMcC) real life virtual reality experiment**

Some years ago, I conducted a virtual reality experiment that could have killed me. This is a true story. It did not require a computer.

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror – no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.

End of story. That's how I learned about virtual reality.

*Aside:* I have read that if a person wears inverting glasses, i.e., if you see everything upside down, if you do this for some time, while you are still wearing the inverting glasses, your visual field will flip to look upright again.

I'm still "here", despite my experiment.

¶ +2023.10.10. How do you navigate the cultural and locational differences when creating or writing a blog that caters to audiences from diverse regions like the USA and Africa? What challenges have you encountered, and what strategies have you employed to ensure your content resonates across these varied geographical landscapes while maintaining a coherent and engaging narrative?

I am a white male and European (American). I have not tried this.

I would not even try to engage with an American audience because feel it would e pointless since "everybody" is trying to woke here today (neo-tribalism).

Bu I might try to engage with sub-Sahara Africans about issues some of which they themselves seem to be engaging with, such as th role African tribal chiefs played in selling their own people to the evil white slave traders. And all aspects of traditional trible life, including in at least some tribes rituals of genital mutilation of girls. Also challengesof economic development, including resentment of how the United States looks down on them and just wanats to tell them what to do, compared with Russia and China. Or any other question concerning whether they may be receptive to the constructive intellectual achievements of European civilizatuon, in other words, whether the future of universalizing culture may be moving from "The West" which seems to be sinking into woke darkness, to wh previously called "The Dark Continent" but which may be the light for the future for humanity.

¶ +2023.10.10. If you could learn any new skill or hobby instantly, what would it be and why?

Me? I'd really like to do freehand drawing but that would not be good for me since I would make scandalous drawings about controversial subjects.

So number 2 would be pottery: To be able to make really high quality coffee cups and small vases because of all the things Ihae ever been ble to own in my life a few very special small ceramic pieces by master potters hae given me the most pleaisure. There is a great Japanese film "Ugetsu" by Kenji Mizoguch (1953) about this. I like thtings that are small in size but of "timeless" quality. Rrose Sélavy

¶ +2023.10.10. What do you think of Stephen Hawking's warning that AI could threaten the future of humanity?

I have no idea what Dr. Hawking's particular concern about AI is.

But certainly a consern is that human beings do not undertand their place in the world and the place of computers in the world. The world is something in us (as well as the obvious that we are also parts of the world, as is shown by people who put bullets thru persons skulls). The whole world is merely raw material for us to deploy to shape our lives. computers, including "AI" (which has no intelligence but just computes). Computers, including "AI" are just tools like drills and pencils and all other tools.

Humans did not create the world but it is just there for us to make use of. Make wise of it, of course, not just waste it. But not for its good because it has no good (or bad), but for our own good: It is foolish to defectae on your dinner.

Computers are just tools but a lot of people have wrong headed fantasies about comptuer being electronic "brains" that might rule the world or other superficial fantasies. When in doubt, pull the electric chord out of the wall outlet. Here's what to be concerned about:

**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)

¶ +2023.10.10. Neil Tyson disagrees with Elon Musk on the dangers of AI. "Kick the plug from the wall" he has quipped. His theory is that we can control and contain it. How can we possibly build something smarter than us, and then expect it not to outsmart us?

This is all simpleminded category confusion.

Computers compute.

Humans experience.

Computers are objects in experience.

Computers do not experience.

Well, of course, hypothetically they could but nobody seems to think aout wha tthat would mean. It would mean creating in a laboratory in silocin (germanium, etc.) when happens in copulation with carbon. That's not what computers are about: they are abbout algorthms. They are subject to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

Now let's get stupid, i.e., colloquial, or like the people at Eductional Testing Service Princeton New Jersey (501)(c)(3) et al. We alrady have computers that are "smarter" than any human in terms of computing power. Suppoedly the inventor of Game theory and one of the inventors of computers (note that man invented computers, not the other way around!), John von Neumann, supposedly cold compute incredibly fast. I am not a mathematician but he could do numerical inttegration and other people at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies would look in awe at himas he looked up in the air for afew seconds and then outputted results of very complex calculation. But not even he, surely could comput in computing speed with Deep Blue or whateve IBM's lastest PR mchine is. I hav eread that ne of those computers has bet the world GO champion, and GO is computaionally far harder than chess. But this is like saying that the Apollo Space Rocket's first stage had more lifting opwer than Sandy Koufax's throwing arm. Duh!

The issue is t=sructural: Human beings have the whole world as objets of judgment and creative elaboration. Cimputers are jsut algotithmic processes running in the world of objects ov consciousness. If thatis beyond you then don't worry about it. Just ask yourself if you want to be bossed around. If yes, then obey a computer. If no, maybe program one or jus tuse it.

I don't know much about either Dr. Tyson – got that: PhD in astrophisics Tyson – and BS Musk who is a bunch of BS. He is bipolar and a loose cannon on the deck. Dr. tyson is a science educator.who seems to be sane.

Take away Mr. – got that: Mr. – Musk's money and what would h=you have? a raving lunatic. Take away Dr. Tyson's money and whta would you have a scientist and science educator.

Anybody who believes what anybody sys is naive. But anyody who believes what an obviousf= fool says as opposede to a rational scientist is well....

Now what does ont mean by "smarter"? Being able to fill in mor corrcect little circles on a ETS Standardized test answer sheet in a given period of thime than somebody else?

Quantity is not quality. More is not necessarily better. Take the sum total of all the thoughts of all the middle class merian suburban hmeownes combined and you won't even come co=lose to one John von Neumann, will you?

And as for computing power, You probably have a cellphone, yes? It had var more computing power than the three roomsize IBM System 370/168 mainframe computers that ran most of the work in al of the IBM Watson Research Laboratory when Iws there in the early 1980s. Between them they hadd I think 24 megabytes of main mrmory and ran at simething like 1 mip each. your cellphone is morepowerfum than IBM Research in the early 1980s. Is it producing more advvancement for science and technology? Yes or no.

Here is a sort of edge case as I understnd, i.e., don't fully understand it. Somebody a few years solved th 4-color map coloring problem. A human did it. But his solution is too comptationally "big" for any human to run all the numbers. So the man needed a computer to actually do the proof. The computer did not itself prove anyting. But the human needed to use the computer to get hte job done. So computers may become necessary for further human achievements. But they cannot replace the huans because the humans experience the world and the computes are jsut things in the world, like cindrblocks only they compute fster. When you savvor a leisured dinner with afew good friends tonite and discuss this kind of stuff, imgine you are aall jsut computing. Have fun. or maybe you prefer:

[ Ghost Whopper here ]

Either way, no compuer enjoys or gete=s indigestion from anything. And one last word from Alan Turing, about that theoretical possibility of scientists in white coats doing in test tubes in the lab what they do with their genitals in bed at home (or in the office with the door locked): Turing said

If ever we do make a computter that really thinks, "we shan't nderstand how it does it"

Just like our flesh and blood babies. Be careful what you wish for, because, like King Midas in the myth, you just might get it. But you'be probably stopped reading this long since, Sir. "Why no sneeze, Rrose Sélavy?" (Marcel Duchamp) Enjoy all he typographical errors I've probaly made here, to.

¶ +2023.10.10. How to create a positive teaching and learning environment by providing a multicultural and inclusive classroom?

[After a professor told his class some idea he believed that is not generally acceptable to say: A]cademic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like.... / [T]he number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance. (Stanley Fish, Prof. of Law, Florida International Univ., "Conspiracy Theories 101", Op-Ed Piece, NYT, 23Jul06, p.WK13)

Respect persons, and students are persons. If I was a teacher, I would bow respetfully to my class before starting my spiel of the day and await them to respedtfully bow to me in return.

Present all sides of each issue, as Prof. Fish urges: offering all, including the teacher's own ideology *du jour*: religion, partioticity, taboos, etc. as objects for study not candidates for belief.

Then encouarge the stuedents to each self-accountably shape his (her or other's life according to the light of each his own mind, not what anybody says. If you are a jew do not try to make them be jews. If you are a Muslim do not ty to make them be Muslims. If you are an atheist do not try to make them be atheists. Etc. The watchword of the British Royal Society, which I think perhaps wrongly was founded by Sir Isaac Newton, is: Nullius in verba, i.e,: Take nobody's word for it (including the teacher's and the person's parents, et al). Or:

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion." (Neils Bohr)

"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." (1 Thes 5:21)

¶ +2023.10.09. How would you diminish difficulties in decision making?

One size does not fit all.

One thing that almost always helps: Study the situation. Study it from all sides. MASTER YOUR SUBJECT MATTER. Act on the best and most comprehensive information you can collect, especially information you do not want to hear or face up to. Don't act on prejudices. The word "prejudice" means: pre judice, i.e., judging before studying and anslyzing the situation. that is always foolish but persons are often foolish for reasons suchas wanting to be "polite", etc.

Another thing that can help is "Don't sweat the small stuff". What are the really materially important issues? "Possibly hurting somebody's feelings", for instance, is NOT materially important unless they wield power over you and will harm you if your don't kowtow to them in which case your sutvival intact is an important desideratum unless you do not care much about that.

Some decicions are time sensitive, especially for something liKe if you ar in a burning building and need to decide how to get out before your body is incinerated. But few decisionas are like that. So in many cases one of the best things to do is to evaluate the situation and go to bed and get a good nite's sleep and when you awaken in the moring, evaluate the situation again and then make your decidion.

Haste makes waste. (anonymous)

Measure twice, cut once. (anonymous from the carpentry craft)

"When in doubt, wait it out " (Michael Eigen, psychoanalyst, NYU)

¶ +2023.10.09. What are the social benefits of the hospitality industry? How does it contribute to society's well-being, economic development and quality of life?

This should be a "no brainer".

What does the word "hospitality" mean? Providing help to others – not like an EMT who helps perons in severe distress but helping persons who are doing OK to have a better day and going forward. So what else should one be doing in the hospitality industry than "contribute to society's well-being, economic development and quality of life" – but with one "catch" not helping masses but one individual person at a time.

I think a lot about two hospitality stories: One is an old American Express credit card ad where a CELEBRITY walks into a 6-star hotel and expects to be worshipped because he (she, other) is a CELEBRITY, but the desk clerk just looks desultorily at the dude and asks: "**Who?**" The CELEBRITY is terribly distressed that he is not being kowtowed to, Then he pulls out his American Express credit card and the clerk immediately snaps to attention to deliver superior personalized service to the cardholder.

Moral of this story: guests should be respectful of service staff.

The other story is more serious and it's from the Bible: Sodom and Gomorrah. God sends two of his angels disguised as men to test the people of "the cities on hte plain". The people do NOT show them hospitality but instead want to brutalize them. Not a good idea. God destroys the cities for not showing hospitality.

God spares the family of a man who did try to show hospitality to his secret agents. He tells them to leave before he destroys the cities. But the mans's wife makes a mistake: after being safely out, she looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. This story has an exact parapllel today in Ukraine: The ethincally Russian Ukrainians are God's angels. The Zelensky regime is Sodom and Gomorrah. And Russia's "special military operation" is God's destruction of the people who showed no hospitality.

Moral of this story: treat ethnic minorities in your country with respect not try to "ethnically cleanse" them.

Once there was a piece of jewelry I STUPIDLY did not buy. I was a wmoan's pin (brooch). It was in the shape of an open hand with a fish in the palm: a symbol of hospitality: A person offering another a meal.

¶ +2023.10.09. Why do I always function and work slow and what is wrong with me because I can barely even move and is there anytime I have ever been like this and actually been like this and why?

Well, there are numerous possibilities.

First let's look at a positive one: Suppose you ponder things and when you get an idea you think again that maybe it's something else –––– instead of being a shoot-from-the-hip hothead wh makes snap decisions without looking to see what's really going on?

Now, on the other hand you could have a neurological disabbility.

On yet another hand you may have had a judgmenal mother who was always criticizing anything you decided to do so you were beaten down, and you have to make an effort to try to do anyting because you aren't hopeful you will get anywhere?

Who says you are slow? A turtle or a humnigbird?

Look into yourself. But also look into your surround.

Etc.

¶ +2023.10.09. How will new technologies help solve cold cases? Will the statutes of limitations be changed due to the ability of new technologies being

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

New technologie ARE solving cold cases. I don't keep up with "crime", unlike many middle class white people (thaat's my SES) who seem to get off on newspaper voyeurism and telecrime shows. Nor have I thought deeply about statutes of lmitations. Why do we have them? Do we want them? Who benefits from them and how?

I remember a tv show from the 1950s when I was a young child, about statute of limitations.Really.

It was superman. There was this mafia boss-style criminal who had sealed himself inside a super-stainless steel cube that was impenetrable. The FBI couldn't get into it. Superman couldn't get into it. The criminal was sitting in there, fat dumb and happy, awaiting th expiration of the statue of limitations on his crimes. He was monitoring the U.S. Naval Observatory time signal, the world standard for accurate time. He was waiting for the clock to run out on his crimes.

Evil was about to go unpunished. Oh, horrors! Then, in the nick of time, Superman had an idea! He flew in his fight for justice cape to the USNO. Ther he convinced the timekeeper to speed up his clock in the serice of justice.

Now back to the criminal and his cube. The criminal waited until 5 minutes past the expiration of the statute of limittions on his crimes → into handcuffs. Superman had saved the day, for truth, justice and The Amerian Way: BY COOKING THE CLOCK.

That's how I lerned about truth, justice and The American Way, although it was nly as a young adult that I clearly connected the dots. (I attended an "honor code" school and did not have 5th amendment rights – they subjected me to 2 Inquisitorial Proceedings a la Galileo, just sans the mechanical torture engines.)

[ Superman logo here ]

¶ +2023.10.09. Is workplace rivalry destructive or beneficial?

I strongly feel, supported by rational arguments, that ALL "rivalry" (competition, etc.) is destructive. Not all persons see things that way, of course.

Co operate! ~ Cooperate! Nature gives us more than enough things to compete against without fighting against each other, including: pancreatic cancer, glaucoma, alzheimer's dementia, Lou Gehrig's disease, deformed babies, tornados, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, need I list more?

I had a professor in school who was a close student of human communication; he was the person who introduced Marshall McLuhan to American academia. He had done something quite remarkable in his youth: at the time before antibotics he had survived tuberculosis; He still carried encysted clumps of tuberculosis germs in his lungs, he was no longer infectious and he was cured. He told me a number of stories. Here's one:

Before World War II he was dating a girl who was studying at Black Mounain Art College. During the summer he went to visit her. One sunny Saturday afternoon the students got together with beer and had an impromptu softball game. But not a real softball game, but everybody goofing around and having fun, pretending to be playing softball. nobody was keeping score or anything. Everybody was justu having a good time.

Then one of the students decided totake it seriously and try to win. I quote Pofessor Louis Forsdale: "And then things got ugly."

No man (woman, other) rises so high that he cannot give another person a hand up, or, alternatively, try to beat him.

Make love not war. or make war if that's what turns you on, but if you do, please keep it to yoruself because I, and maybe some others too, want no part of it. Rrose Sélavy (look that up in Wikipedia if you don't "get it").

¶ +2023.10.09. Why do half of CEOs experience loneliness on the job?

I don't know but I have an at least partial guess: They don't want to hear the truth.

I once read something somebody wrote, alas I did not write down the cictaion information, about the biggest CEO that ever was: the Abrahamic Deity.

He had had a paranoid hissy fit about a bunch of master structural engineers building what amounted to a low-tech radio transmission tower like we had all over the place in the early 20th century: They wanted to make a name for themselves (like he had). You know maybe "WBBL, radio from Babelon"

Well, for some reason or lack of same, He got jealous of these master structural engineers who were mere mortals (like emloyes in a corporation), and he messed up their heads so they could no longer engage in peer rational discourse. That was the end of their little Jenga game.

So what? "God reigns in sorrow." Since He messed up the minds of the master structural engineers with whom He might have had mutually respectful peer discoure / friendship, all He was left with were toadies: worshippers. He probably at some point figured out that the adulation of people beneth him was not going to be very satisfying, like any celebrity who get off on having a lot of fans (as opposed to just calculating their effect on his, her or other's balance sheet) has a problem with their self-respect.

At least some CEOs are probably lonely because they have made it clear to their subordinates that critisism will not be welcome. The payoff? When the company starts heading for trouble, all the intelligent employees have leraned to not say anything to keep their jobs and start looking for employment elsewhere if they are not close to the finish line (retirement).

I've never been anybody's boss (well, I was once and I treated my people very well in part because I liked them and in other part because I am selfish). If somebody criticizes me I may not like it but/and I will think about it. But if they compliment me I look very carefully to see what they are trying to get out of me without paying for it. One would think an Omnipotent Deity, sorry, typo: CEO would see things that way, yes?

¶ +2023.10.08. Which direction is more in line with current trends?

[ Woke sheep ]

¶ +2023.10.08. Is it true that information needs to be purchased?

A lot of information is free, especially on the Internet.

But some is not free. Sometimes thie is just money grubbers of various flavors. But other times somebody has expended time and effort discovering things not previously known, and everybody has to pay their bills each month because there is rarely a free lunch except for CXOs.

A lot of pay-for information is highly specialized so that should not bother ordinary persons. Farmore than ever was in The Encyclopedia Britannica is easly available free on the Internet.

And th new AIs are making even more information even moreaccessible. I've been playing with te Bing AI and it often does much better than most Freshmen (women, others) in college. It's no wonder kids are trying to pass off AI output as ass–ignments they wish they didn't have to do to get the grade they need to get a degree to be able to get a job better than minimum wage.

But the Internet is a kind of "wild west". A lot of information on the Internet is wrong. Wikipedia seems to me reliable enough for daily use. Also, I do not look at "popular" things so I don't really know how bad it is. I stick to sources I think are conscientious work by serious persons but never trust anybody, including your parents, teachers, religious and political leaders, and even yourself, since you were childreared, i.e., brainwashed with some people's beliefs.

If I had more money I'd buy more stuff off the internet. If I had more motivation I could also get things thru the university I graduated from 30 years ago; I did once want a journal article desperately enough to do that but I find it confusing. Yes, if you have access to a univereity library you can get alot of really serious material that's not free. (Scholarly journals are enormously expensive in many cases.)

And the material tht is free on the Internet, you pay for it: by having to put up with all the advertisements. I accept that so long as the ads do not become mor eintrusive than the information is worth to me. I accept that I can't ge ta free lunch, but I'm not going to eat Wonder Bread all day.

But the asker of hte present question may have some particular reason for asking the question that is not addressed by generalized information? The more one focuses the question, the more likely to get highy relevant information, yes?

¶ +2023.10.08. What ethical considerations should be taken into account when designing AI systems that make decisions affecting human lives?

The answer to this should be obvious:

Whatever the AI system does needs to be input to informed empathic humans **USING** it to affect human lives. There should never be an unmediated connection between machinery that just computes and living persons' living (and suffering and dying).

Let's imagine a hospital in whith ther were only patients and machines (and probably financial employees) but no medical staff. Does that sound like a place YOU would like to be sick in?

¶ +2023.10.07. How do I build an effective team culture that promotes employee collaboration and innovation?

Get highly skilled, self-starter persons who really want to do the work, and they will do it for you. Just get out of their way. If they come to work late don't bug them about it so long as they get the work done.

I once heard of a computer programmer team in a Federal Government agency. Everyone on the team was highly skilled and self starter and they liked wht they were doing.

Well, they had a manager. Everybody, including him, admitted he didn't knw what he was doing, technically, But that was not a problem, especially since he did not pretend to know what he didn;t.

So what did he do? His main responsibility was to run interference with upper management. Management would tell him, not his team!, what they wanted. He would tell the team. The team would tell him if it was a good idea to do it or not. He would go back to upper manangement with the good or bad news. This was extreely valuable work beause it freed the technical people from having to waste their time on managerial inanities: the manager absorbed it all for them. But he also had other roles, like signing purchase orders for capital expenses.

Everybody was happy and they did good work for the agency.

So once you've got that all doen, then you can put icing on your cake: Pay them well. Make sure they have really good tools to do their work. Don't waste their time in unnecessary meetings.

Where I worked I had one manager who must have thought we were all dogs (he was a fop). He held endless meetings and to make it palatable he brought in dog treats: Dunkin Donuts. Everybody seemed to like Dunkin Donuts (except me). Previously I had had a young lady manger who held very few and then very short mtteings.But one morning she brought in for us almond croissants from La Petite Patisserie Larchmont New York. Not dog food.

She was both good for the company and good for the team. For the company:

One day I had fixed a bug. All we did was fix bugs and there was no end of bugs to fix. I asked hee if I could unnecessarily spend some additional time reearching that part of our project more deeply. She replied:

"We **ALWAYS** have time to look into something more deeply."

And personally: One normally busy morening at about 10am I offhandedly said to her I had never driven a stick-shift BMW. She threw me her key ring an dtold me to go for a spin.

¶ +2023.10.07. Why are there lights on top of tall buildings?

Is this not obvious?

AIRPLANES

The lights r there primarily so pilots won't descend uintentionally into the buildings in the dark.

But, of coure, there is also a second reason: Glitz. Some of hte tal buildings like to show off how tall they are with their lights at night. This is useless waste.

Now, what is a tall building? In past there were lighthouses which were tall buildings for thier time, and their lights were there to tell ships' captains where they were and to let them see wher the land was so they wouldn't crash into it and shipwreck. Ther are atill lighthoues around even though we have GPS today.

[ Lighthouswe image ]

I once lived in a building where one could look out at night and see the red lights on lot of tall buildings in the city. I thought that was "pretty cool". I currently live near a water tower on top of a small hill. I wish it had lights on top but apparently the reason it doesn't is that hte trees near it are taller than it is. But I would really like it. the neighbors probably would not agree.

¶ +2023.10.07. What is the most crazy bizarre thing you have ever seen a co worker at your workplace say about or do to another co-worker?

I did not see it myself and it 's not crazy, just politically incorrect, from before1972. I know a man who was a highy competent computer prograimer and a person of impeccable integrity as well as having numerous disabilities and no college education. Legally blind, he had been a machinist and then a quality control inspector. He must have criticized somebody's work so they slammed him into an industrial lathe which landed him in hosiptal for several months with severe back injury and he became a computer programmer by rehab. Hire the handicapped. . So you see this was a highly unusual person.

One day a secretary must have said something that he didn't like. He told her: "If I want any more mouth out you, lady, I'll squeeze your head."

Another highly skilled and highly ethical computer programmer without a college education. One Easter morning he was working in "the computer room" (this was back when computers were roomisize and a whole company would have only one of them, in a secure locked room with a raised floor and special air conditioning.... So this man was working in the computer room on an Easter Sundey morning when nobody else was in the building but a black employee showed up showing his girlfriend around. My person exclaimed: "A chocalate Easter egg!"The black person took it in good humor.

Back to the person in the first paragraph. He got a job in a different company that had contracted with one of its competitors to do an important computer application, sort of like the USA contracting the USSR for military radar. So there was a liaison person in his company who interfaced with the other company's people. Concerning this person, my person once said perhaps the most eloquent sentence I have ever heard:

"If I am ever in-line with him and above him I will fire him because he is a traitor."

Those were the last days of the computer programming "wild west" when all you needed to get a good computer programmer job was to be able to think logically, and a college degree helped but was not always required.

Now this is not in the workplace but it was a coworker, again back around 1980. This person had a modest job rank but was another exceptional computer programmer with less than one year of college. He was thrifty and bought himself a 300D Mercedes Benz automobile. He was a perfectionist. At work ihe parked his car at the far end of a parking lot nobody else used, to help keep people from banging into it.

One day he had to attend a family gathering and had to park his car near another. So the owner of the other car, a relative, opened his car door and lightly tapped into my person's car. Probably no dent but who knows. Anyway, when my person called him out for it, the person replied that it was no big deal. So my person responded to that by smashing the man in the jaw and telling him: "It's no big deal".

Things were different back then. Probably the most** appalling** thing I ever heard was two business planners in IBM in the early 1980s. They were not talking about people but about business. They probably did not know I could overhear them but I doubt they would have cared. Background information: "Fishkill" was IBM's mission-critical computer chip production facility at the time. The one business planner said to the other business planner:

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

[--------]

I don't know if this counts. In the mid 1980s I was working at NASA Headquarters on the DC Mall., launching payroll not spaceships. One Sunday morning I came in and parked my car a few blocks from the office. I saw a car parked on my way that caused me to change my route. It had a bumper sticker that read:

"I HATE YOU A MUCH AS YOU HATE ME"

¶ +2023.10.07. Do you have a problem not saying "no" enough?

Yes.

My childrearers tried to make me be "normal", which means the opposite of what an oncologist does: The oncologist destroys a lekemia paient's diseased immiune system and reinjects healthy immune cells and hopefully the patient, now cancer free, lives long and prospers with robust defenses against infection

Parents try to destroy the child's innate faculty of judgment and replace it with their social conditioning: "Now you don't ***really*** mean you hate your grandmother, your granny, do you? You l**ove** your grandmother and she loves you...." "Yes, Mommy."

Well, in my case they did not completely succeed. I ended up walking wounded. They made me ashamed of myself, which was convenient for them because then I would not shame them. A good offense is often the best defense." I quickly learned to not protest because then they would hurt me more. When I was 5 years old, My mother credibly threatened to abandon me because I did not love her. I got the message (the technical term for it is: they won a Pyrrhic victory)

Part of the damage is that when somebody says something hurtful to me or tries to tell me what to do otherwise does not show me appropriate respect, my reflexes are shot. If I reply I may snap beck something that just gives them more ammunition to hurt me even more, instead of "nailing them". I am extremely intelligent, so by all rights I should be a verbal sharpshooter. But instead i have "esprit d'escalier": I figure out what I should have responded only when I am out of hte building and it is too late.

(*Caption*: "Beware man thy grievous fall"

In old age I am trying to forgive myself for having been hurt by them. (Yes, the preceding sentence is correct as written.) It was not my fault that they wasted my life.

But I try. I try to say "no". Even harder: Sometimes I try to ask for help. (Also, I find that while I meet nobody who would be my true peer, including a recend interaction with a university professor, I find that if I keep to subjescts that interest them I can get more satisfaction to talking to some blue collar people than some with masters degrees. (U.S. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, whatever one may think of him, said that he would rather deal with an honest racist then a hypocritical liberal.)

But let me end on a lighter note about "no", or at least the mot famous user of that word in history that I know of:

Letter from the front:

"Dear Mrs Reagan, This is private John Doe, writing to you from the zero line. Thank you for your very wise advice. We are winning the war on drugs. They really help us get through each day. Would you and Mr. Reagan like toke? Sorry, gotta go now: Incoming!"

¶ +2023.10.07. Does diversity have an effect on performance in an organization? How does it affect organizations?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

Maybe people work with uncouth people? For half a century I worked as a computer programmer, among persons all of whom had 4 year colllege degrees and many had masters degrees. They had many problems. They were mostly superficial. But one thing that was not a problem wa "diversity". Everybody respeted everybody else and got along in civil discoure. White middle class American males. Females. Blacks. India Indians. Chinese. Orhodox jewish. Muslim. Hindu. What's the problem?

But had I been subected to "diversity" brainwashing semiotic ECT sessions, I;m not sure I could have kept my job because I don't want anybody messing with my mind, specially since almost certainly they would be far less educated and intelligent than me but that is not really relevant since all persons, insofar as they are able to give a rational linguisticc accounting for their social actions should be treated with mutual repect as peers in public space. You dont have to want to have sex with somebody to treat them respect in public sodcial life (please keep socisal distance from me even if you do not currently have an infectious disease!). Why all the → well, let me not rant on here but just reproduce, slightly abridged, a news article from The New York Times newspaper which, when I read it, I felt as if I had picked up an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) and it had exploded in my face [fortunateoly this was only a fantasy]:

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 picture here ]

¶ +2023.10.07. Do you believe that jobs that rely on copy-pasting are a thing of the past because of AI?

If "copy-pasting" is just hack work, anything that's not highly creative can probably be done by AI. But:

(1) Responsible, knowledgeable human oversight is always needed since AI has no intelligence but just computes.

(2) Anything AI produces can be copy-pasted in its turn for a human to make something else from it.

¶ +2023.10.06. What are some of the biggest changes you've experienced since graduating from college? How do they compare to your expectations beforehand?

Well, you asked the quetion.

I graduated from college in 1968, which is a long tim ago now. I didn't have much in the way of expectations because I ha been childreared and schooled before college by people about whom the very best thing that might be said of them and this only a few of them is that the rod to hell is paved with good intentions. Early on I lerned that I could be hurt.

So one answer I hav eto this question may sould frivolous. I was terrified of the long steel needles medical technicians use back then to draw blood for routine physical exminations. I wa a wimp. I was terrified of those long steel needles biolating my body in a vulnerable place, the inside of my arm.

Well times changed. Today the phlebotomits have "bbutterfly needles", very small needles thatwhen they stab me with it yes it is not pleasant but I am no longer TERRIFIED of it. That for me is a very big change, and for the better.

As for the rest of life I've seen a lot of things but not many changes becaue I didn't havve a clue about anything to start with. I was probably in 11th grade when President Kennedy wa assassinaed. I was in math class at the time. Everybody else in the school rushed to the auditorium to watch on the television. I stayed back in the classroom. I had no interest in it and it was good tht everbody else was elsewhere I remember looking at the walls of the room and the blackborad. the walls were concrete bolck painted white. The room was peaceful with everybody elsewhere. Nobody was telling me what to do.

At some point i read "Waiting for Godot." I really liked it. Just think: Godot wasn't likely ever to turn up, unlike my parents nd teachers.

In college I sarted learning about things I never knew existed, things that I liked (I liked almost onthing and nobody in my childhood social surround). The first may hav e been my freshman roommate in college. They had sent us a housing qusitonairre and I said I did not like public nudity and was fragile. So I got 3 rooms for 2 people and the otherperson – now this wa 1968, when every middle class boy who graduated from a prep school went to college and all the freshmen in collge were 18 years old. I got a roommate who wa a 26 year old European aristocrat. Change? I had never before seen a person I could feel had any positive value or interest forme. So yes, a big change: I discovered that persons existed somewher ein the world who I might like to be like. He at lest said he had grown up underfoot with persons like Albert Camus, and he did chain smoke Gaulois cigarettes and I verified that his best friend wa a sone of the last president of the Spanish Republic. I didn't know what The Spanish Republic was but these people were not lawnmowers. I started to at leat learn what I didn't hav e in my life then.

So what hav I seen change in te outside workld since I was young? Before Covid, not much, ther than butterfly needlse. Middle class males commuted to work in automobiles then and they still did in 2018. Americans wantted to live in suburban housing developments then and they still did in 2018. People wer professional sorts fans then and they still wer in 2018. Now: full wheel hubcaps got replaced by alloy wheels, and the tail fins went away. Is tha change? Black-and-white TV with only 3channels bacame cable on HD. Is that a change?

Ah! Cellphones! That' a change. When I was young ther were telephones that were connected by a wire to the wall in the house and usually only ond of them in the whole houe and ther wer pay phone phone booths and if you wanted to talk with somebody in a diferent state, you paid by the minute so your didn't endlessly chatter on the phone. I actually in the 1980s had reason to phone Japan and that went by transpacific cable and on non-peak time I think it was 90 cents per minute.

As a small child I actualy flew (as a passenger obviously), on DC-3s and I recall one night in terrible rain, somehow hte pilot mamaged to get us safely down on the ground in I think it was Wheeling West Virginia.

Now this is interesting: I spent some time in Japan in the 1980s (my wife had an IBM posting in Tokyo). Whata modern place with te bullet rain and everything clean and new. The is nothing like saturation bombing to clean up a big city. I', sure it would be very different there today but maybe also not any different. Everything was eithe really old or shiny new.Fashions change but"design" has made little if any improaement since the german Bauhaus of the late 1920s. Indeed things have often gone backward. But there's the problem: If the "avnt garde" design of the 1920s was as "modern" as anything today, it was for an eilte, so it doesn't really count. Levittown is far newer than The Bauhaus. I have a now 50 year old Danese wall calendar, which to us a cliche, i a timeless design. You date this:

[ Danese wall calendar ]

1970 or 2023, But I bet you can do better with this:

[ Chevrolet full wheel hubcap ]

(One fine day maybe 30 years ago, was waiting for the light to turn and noticed this old hubcap in the median and quick got out of my car and snatched it up.)

"The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice but that some things stay the same only by changing." (Heraclitus)

I suspect if I were to meet Mr. Heraclitus or Mr. Sun-Tzu (ca. 500 BCE) I'd find him more "contemporary" than George W. Bush. And speaking of Sun-Tzu, the late 20th century military genius USAF Col. John R. Boyd, father of the F-16 Fighting Falcon, was a self-professed student of Sun-Tzu.

I hope you find some value in what I wrote here. Take what you like and leave the rest and create something your own.

¶ +2023.10.06. Is it considered plagiarism using "AI" to paraphrasing and summarizing text of an author in research papers?

This kind of question shows lack of undertanding of what research and scholarship are.

If you personally did not think up the idea, however you may wish to phrase or rephrase it, and it's not a commonplace (Like: "The sun shines on sunny days") PROVIDE CITATION INFORMATION OR IT'S PLAGIARISM. End of discussion.

And I have an imagination. I think there are persons in academia who I call "footnote sniffing truffle pigs". When they get home at night, FOR FUN, instead of watching HBO or NFL, they pour thru journal articles looking for plagiariasms and if they find one, you may not get a chance to try that trick a second time unless you already have tenure and more, and then you still can't count on getting away with it.

Do the right thing. It should be obvious: When in doubt, cite it. I try to do this even in chattng with family, which is not appreciated but, like the ad slogan for Hebrew National Hotdogs: "I answer to a higher power" → intellectual integrity. Do you?

¶ +2023.10.06. How do I stop embarrassment after public speaking in another language?

I have a contrarian suggestion for you. Advice is cheap, so take it or leave it.

DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT. So you tur n red as a beet, wet your pants and whatelse? What's the problem? Did you say what you had to say? Did you accomplish the misison?

Oh, so some a**hole in the audience shouts: "Look, the di=ude has wet hiis pantsand his face is beet red! What a jerk!" What woould that say about that person? What would it say about the whole audience if nobody called him out for it?

Now, let's say your trouble started even before you opened you mouth to begin your presentation. You incerely wanted to help you audience by giving them information you did not think they alrady knew that would b helpful for them, right? Well you're doing your best, right? Do they laugh at you? Again, what would that say about them? Or does somebody ask if they can help you? Now I'm not saying they would need to care abut YOU. I's saying they would be selfish but h=not stupid. They would want to help you no for your good but for theirs, to get that information you desparantely want to give them.

I ws childreared by parents who made me so ashamed of my self that I have to get up my gumption to talk with a store clerk (I have an earned doctorate, t=so if smebody wants to insult me they should please address me appropriatedly in doing so). But I was childreared to be ashemed of myself and I've never really got over it now at age 77 years.

Here's me:

I do my best. But one thing. I have no trouble with public speaking on one condition: THAT I HAVE MASTERED THE SUBJECT MATTER. Mastery of the material is my sword and shield and I go forth with confidence. If I have not matered the material I will do like asmall dog when faced with a very aggressive big dog: roll over on my belly and let to bully kill me if that's hos "small" he is. But if I know the material, even if I would wet my pants, so what? They'd dry eventually. I try to not be impressed by wht people "think" of me but that does not help me deal with a store clerk or something like that bbecause my parents made me ashamed of myself.

.If YOU are embarrassed, tha tshould be the problem of the people who made you feel embarrassed: YOu are the victim not the executioner. Don't cut youself with a knife (I did once and payed for it with 3 surgeries).

¶ +2023.10.06. How can companies build an environment where it's clear that employers are investing in people's growth through reskilling and retraining?

Why is this even a question? The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

A person knows if they are being encouraged to grow in skills and even braoder intellectual self-formation or not. They know if the company cares about them or if they are just "human resources" like iron ore is for a steel mill just carbon not some other mineral.

I worked for IBM as the sun was setting on one of if not the greatest corporation that ever was.

But first an insurance company which has now apparently been eaten by a bigger one. The company even had a name to put you in your place: "United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company". I started there in 1972 as a computer programmer trainee in a class or about a dozen of us. the only requirement was a college degree and demonstrated ability to think logically (the "Programmer Aptitude Test"). So there were a couple housewives in the class andassorted others. So how did we start? Six weeks of full time classroom instruction at full pay. Do you think they were making it "clear that [they were] investing in people's growth through reskilling and retraining"?

I attended numerous IBM customer education classes all over the country: Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, New York, and I was a low level employee. Any mesage there?

I wa too young to really appreciate it. But that story is not relevant here. I will end about USF&G with something the senior manager in the comuter department told me. He just looked like anybody but quietly he was some kind of jewish mystic although he never spoke about his personal beliefs. But once did he did tell me something. He said his God's commandment to humans was: "Be kind to one another." I never believed in anything but that sounds like my kind of Deity. What about you?

Fast forward to the 2010s and I was still paying the bills by doing computer programming. Times changed. No more 3rd shift work to get computer time on a room sized machine that was in a secure room where programmers were not allowed to enter. But no more documentation of the programming language I was stuck working with, either. I was expected to make freeware undocumented apis do undocumented tricks. I got PTSD from it. And I was reprimanded for asking coworkers for help. Different from 1972?

I won't go much into my experience in IBM here except for one thing that I once heard and I will never forget until I to too enfeebled to remember anything any more. I was walking down one of the long corridors in the Armonk Headquarters building, a few feet behind two men in blue suits who surely did not know I could overhear what they were saying and I doubt they would havve cared anyway. I presume they were two business planners. A quick piece of background information: "Fishkill" was IBM's mission-critical computer chip production facility at the time; I called it "Purgatory". Anyway, the one blue suit said to the other blue suit, and this is verbatim after almost 40 years:

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

¶ +2023.10.05. What makes a villain's actions considered wrong if he has a point in his argument?

What a time to ask this question!

everybody here in "the West" ideates that the President of The Russian Federation, Dr. Vladimir Putin, is a horrile villain.

But he has excellent reasone ("points"P for what he is doing. The U.S. Promised Russia in 1991 that they would not push NATO East of Germany. NATO in Ukraine is an exact analogy, with the roles revered, of the Soviet Union having placed nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. And on and on it goes.

The billain's actions in this case are largely (albeit not 100%) right, but"we" don't even want to hear it. I can only cite the example of a highly erudite and otherwise "libberal" university professor I know of, who is ignorant about Ukraine but has bought the Zelensky sales pitch an dwhen I urged this person th listen to Columbia University Professor Sachs, they snapped back at me: "I don't feel the need for guidance by Sachs or Pozner or others."

Dr. Putin is considered wrong because we here in The West hae been brainwashed about the situation, but since wartime censorship has not yet been imposed nor dissenters incarcerated, you can still listen to the points for hte other side, e.g.:

[ Link to Sachs lecture here ]

"Villain" is generally used as a semiotic equivalent of lynching its referent. It provides no empirical evidence about anything, just about the feelings of the person who emits the word from their oral orifice.

¶ +2023.10.05. These days, can people think of hard work?

Sure: How to not just avoid but prevent it. With industrial robots and massive computing power we should be able at last to put behind us the Abrahamic Deity's curse on all humanity for one man eating a piece of fruit, and artifiial wombs should free the ladies from His curse on them too. Shame on Him!

And what should replace hard work? Playful creativity in ever further advancing the arts and sciences and in enjoying life: goood friends, good bread and wine, good sex, good pets, good leisuere....

[ Picture of Puritns praying ]

Signed: Rrose Sélavy (If you don't understand that there is a fine Wikipedia article which explains it)

1 viewAnswer

¶ +2023.10.05. What is the best way to get something done quickly or efficiently if we need to bypass our bosses and go straight to upper management?

Are you sure?

The best way to get something done is to have a boss who is doing his (her, other's) job, part of which is to run interference for you with upper management. I once had a manager who was a good guy, not an obstacle. I once needed approval from upper managment for something. I went to him. He asked me one question: "Are you sure?" My response: "Yes" And he was on the elevaor up to get it done.

If you don't have that kind of trust maybe you should be looking for a different job. If you have to "bypass" your boss, maybe you will succeed or maybe not but maybe he (she, other) is a petty mean-spirited person who will get revenge on you no matter how long it takes unless the two of you disconnect before that.

There is a time to bypass anybody: When literally there is not time to do it. If you are on a submarine and the damned thing is sinking you may not have time to ask your superior officer if you can take control and keep the damned thing from imploding at crush depth. But such situations rarely occur in business where deadlines are often fantasies cooked up by people in offices with windows who just lust for bigger office with windows on two sides. Watch Stanley Kubrick's classic movie "Paths of Glory"

¶ +2023.10.05. What are some strategies for fostering innovation and creative problem-solving in a corporate or professional lifestyle?

It helps to be financially secure and have leisure time and energy to devote to such higher aspirations.

It helps to remember that there but for the grace of God (or Fate) you would be on th night shift cleaning crew and not in an intellectually challenging job solving semiotic not metabolic problems.

It helps to not try to be "normal" or angling to get a raise but to be genuinely interestd in the work. If they gave you the same money to do nothing or to do the work, which would you choose?

It's good to be "ethical"; it helps if you can afford to be.

Instruction is not education. Learn what you don't want to learn. I recently had an extremely disappointing interaction with a very highly placed academician who knows almost everytihng about everying except the Ukraine war so he believes the Zelensky schtick. When I urged this person to listen to Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who is an expert both in book learning and also having been a principal in the whole mess, this otherwise open-minded and intellectually adventurous person snapped back at me: "I don't feel the need for guidance by Sachs or Pozner or others." Would they have earned tenure for telling the faculty committee that about writers in their academic field who disagreed with them or whose ideas they didn't even have a clue whether they disagred or anything else? Have the courage to empathazie (not necessarly sympathize but sometimes empathy breeds symathy) with your opponents.

Play. Be a Richard Feynman not an Edward Teller. or don't.

Let me end with a little true story. I met a retired cardiolgist who had had a patient who worked in IBM Research. If you know IBM, you know the little THINK signs you could order from Mechanicsburg as a litttle desk accessory:

[ THINK sign ]

(Yup, mine's still there 6 feet behind me on a bookshelf as I write this). The patient told the doctor: When John Akers became CEO, "an order came down for everybody to take their little THINK signs off their desks. Everybody complied and stopped thinking."

And why not one more. One fine probably August day back then I was walking down one of the long aisles in Armonk Headquarters, a few steps behind two men in blue suits whom I presume were business planners. They did not know I was there and surely would not have cared. Background for hte following: "Fishkill" was IBM's mission-critical computer chip production facility at the time and I called it "Purgatory" – you didn't want to work there if you had a choice. So the one blue suit says to the other blue suit:

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

¶ +2023.10.05. In your opinion, what holds greater significance for achieving success as a professional athlete: innate talent or unwavering dedication?

I am going to tell you a little secret. Read George Leonard's book "The Ultimate Athlete".

¶ +2023.10.05. What does the future hold for Meta's AR glasses in the wake of the company's planned layoffs?

Bigger question: What does the future hold for Virtual Reality, or rather: what does Virtual Reality hold for the future? Watch the old fun but profound movie "The Truman Show" to find the answer.

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror – no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.

¶ +2023.10.05. Is a discussion debate on success more important than happiness?

People have all sorts of ideas that are not helpful.

What do you or they mean by "success"? What do you or they mean by "happiness"?

Does success meaning having more money than Donald Trump even if you have to earn it bby tax fraud? Does happiness mean vacationing ind Disneyworld? Or does success mean having enough money to pay the bill snd time for scholarly study in the arts and sciencs, and happiness mean good health, good sex, a few really good friends and leisure to write poetry?

Isn't it obvious that the mure successful you are the happier you should be and the other way aroound that being unsucessful is nothing to be happy about? rO do you suscribe to some kind of macho, masochistic, heroic or other immiserating vision of life? "Paths of glory lead but to the grave" (Thomas Gray)

Are you in some kind of "traditional" family where the parents burden their children with "carrying on the family honor"? I know of a young India Indian lady who wanted to become a lawyer or journalist. Her family read her the riot act: She must become a physician so that the will not shame them. (Selfish creeps!) So she went to medical schol and with a lot of psychotherapeutic support got thru it. She chose anesthesiology becaue the does not like working with patients. (I would not want her for my anesthesiologit, would you?) She was so happy with her life that as soon as she had anough money to buy herself an automobile she immediately crashed it inti a tree. Not because she was suicidal or anything, just happy with and succeeding in her life.

Altruism versus selfishness is a false dichotomy for superficial peole. You should find joy in activity which also benefits others unless you are too poor or uneducatd to be able to do so. A psychoanalyst once told me a secret of the trade: "To be a good therapist you need to be well peid and well laid." Win-win.

It's your life. Nothing is perfect but i find a lot of wisdom in The Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible (I do not like the Abrahamic Deity)

¶ +2023.10.04. What are your thoughts on non-consensual AI replications of celebrities?

I strongly feel that the very category of "celebrity" is bad, whoever fits into that category. Celebrities have followers, like a judas goat has sheep following it. And what do most of them produce of lasting value like polio vaccine or solving Fermat's last theorem or negotiating an end to the current horrific war in Ukraine? They just get a lot of adulation from people beneath them.

But everybody has to pay the bills, even clebrities. So if their schtick is being stolen by sleazealls, they should see an intellectual property lawyer which I am sure they do not need to be told to do. If you are The Madonna who is not a Virgin and somebody was AI replicating your image to sell Big Macs you certainly should sue for punitive damages. Even celebrities need to pay their rent and cash on the barrelhead for their next Bughatti Veyron. Vroom! Vroom!

There once was an Ameican Express Credid Card ad I havev always loved. It's a 6-star hotel. this CELEBRITY comes in the door like God or something. He is not altogether pleaed that the whole hotel staff is not bowing down on the ground and worshipping him but that's ok. He goes up to hte desk and the desk clerk who doesn't give a ****, sort of looks at him and asks: "Who?" The CELEBRITY is now very unhappy. But he takes his American Express card out of his wallet and the clerk immeditely snaps to attention to deliver superior personalized service to the cardholder.

If I encounttered a CELEBRITY in the street I might ask them for their autograph for my daughter. If they were appropriately respectful of me we might get along. If not I would leave them to find their adulation elseqhere. If I saw them fall down with a heart attack I would call 911 for them if I had my cellphone with me which I rarely do because I do not like people jerking me around which is what they do with my celphone since I am not a CELEBRITY and therefore thay can disturb me at will because I do not matter. As a matter of fact, my given name "Bradford" means essentially: doormat.

I do not care about celebirities but everybody gotta pay their bills each month.

"Who?"

¶ +2023.10.04. What if someone says that they don't have any talent or skill? Can we say that everyone has some special talents or skills which can be discovered with time?

Are you a bleeding heart liberal or a mean-spirited conservative?

Some persons, including Associate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy COney Barrett say that having a mentally retarded chld is a "blessing". I would find it insufferable. I have a highly intelligent [adopted] daughter and it's painful enough for me that she likes to play volleyball instead of studying Sophocles.

Then there are some persons who say that every child is special, and maybe they are. Surely many children could be far more intelligent if the adolts did not treat them as "children".

"Kids retain 5 percent of what they hear and 10 percent of what they read but 80 percent of what they do and 90 percent of what they teach." (Robert Ballard) The schools could educate better this way and save a lot of money too.

I knew a man who was pretty much an ordinary Joe. Bright enough; he was an engineer without a college degree. He was also highly honorable: As a union shop steward he treated black persons equal with whites before civil rights. He judged everybody on performance not secondary characteristics. But in his whole life he had one genius idea and it saved lives in World War II. One genius idea in a whole lifeftime. But it was "a home run". Now for the punch line: nobody gave him any credit because he was just an ordinary Joe not an officer; I don't think his wife and children knew about it but if they did they probaly just yawned.. (Often it takes one to know one.) As a atter of fact, one of this man's superiors (this was the U.S. Navy in 1943) reprimanded him for what he did and told him he had disobeyed orders. The order came from Adm. John S. McCain (Sr., I presume). My person replied to the officer, entirely respectfully: "No, Sir. He asked the question wrong." Well an honorable life with one genius idea in it. you never know.

I was exremely intelligent but largely in ways my parents and teacher could not understand. All they knew was that i was more trainable dog than mostkids, i.e., I got more litle circles on standardized tests right than most other students. Arf! Arf! They retarded me and wrecked my life. Selfish? you bet: I wanted to live and I knew it wasn't gonna happen. But also their mediocricy lost the contribution I might have made had I been raised not rear-end-ed. Lose-lose.

I find it pathetic when parents praise little Tommy or Sally or other for every childish drawing they do. If everything is praiseworthy nothing is worth more than anything else. If the kid can't draw, tell him it's good for him to expresss himself but it does not show any talent, that he is not Pablo Picasso. People need to learn to respect their betters!

Now! Of coure there are some kids who are "no brainers" (pun intended). 4 year old Mazart obviously had musical talent. Even an adolt could probably see that. Since you can't be sure about anybody except the retarded (and be careful to not confuse autism with retardation!!!), it makes good sense to trat every child as a fragile orchid not a sturdy weed, doesn' it? Unless, that is, you want to mak "men" our of boys and "ladies" out of girls etcetera and so forth.

But don't be romantic about it. Teach children to judge everything "ruthlessly". I don't like St. Paul but he wrote one thing I strongly concur with:

"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thes 5:21)

I recently read that one of the greatest physicists of hte 20th century, Richard Feynman, who had an amazingly creative mind, supposedly had an IQ of 125. Lots of people are that "bright" but not nearly as bright as him. He had two things going for him: He studied hard, and even more important he had a father who encouraged him to oquestion things. If you tell your child to respect you, not to judge you and to please tell you when he sees anything you are doing that doesn't make good sense to him, you are destroying his potential. One scholar who studies the history of childrearing (name forgotten) called childhood "a dark continent".

Yes, every child is special, but so too is every adult. But that's a matter of caring and love which would apply to Ms. Barrett's "blessings" as well as to the "gifted" of whatever kinds, and everybody in between (my Selective Service identification number in the Vietnam era was 18–11–46–503; if you are as old as me, what was yours?).

People say that youth is often wasted on the young. Not in my case, my youth was wasted by the adolts. That was 60 yeas ago now, but I conclude with one piece of objective evidence:

[ Mike Rentko ]

Rrose Sélavy (look it up on Wikipedia if you don't "get it").

¶ +2023.10.04. How might oversharing at work lead to lower productivity for individuals and teams?

There is a classic book about "productivity" by Fred Brooks: "The Mythical Man-Month".

¶ +2023.10.04. Is anyone else annoyed by the claims of "diversity and inclusion" that every U.S. business with a website has? There is no monetary punishment for not having diversity or inclusion. If you're disabled, have you gotten job offers due to this?

I am not a fan of "diversity and inclusion". I think it should just be obvious that everybody should be treated with mutual respect in civil society whether you like them or not, and that each person should get the help they need to overcome adversities of fate, like if you were born into poverty and are intelligent enough to go to collge if they can just get funding to do it. But the obsession with wokist and political correctness seems to me to be largely opportunism. I once met an "activist" – I now refer to ths person as an: "ActiFist" – who was a white make partly living off inherited wealth, and he EXCORIATED me for using "insensitive" words. Cool, eh?

I recently heard a video interview on Youtube of two "conservatives". CONSERVATIVES. One ff them was a prominent FEMALE (yes, she was white, alas) CONSERVATIVE lawyer. She described something that happened to her. She was sinvited to lecture at a notioriously CONSERVATIVE college (not some loony leftie place like UC Berkeley!). The students rioted because she had seid she was against affirmative action. CONSERVATIVE students. She has rational rasons for being againt affirmative action. Maybe she's right or wrong but she had rational reasons with which people could rationally argue. When she came to lecture at the CONSERVATIVE college, the CONSERVATIVE students blocked the door to the building so nobody could enter. The police escorted her into the building. There she faced an empty lecture hall because the CONSERVATIVE students had blocked the door. So then the police escorted her back out of the building. This wa all a notoriously CONSERVATIVE college. She is a known CONSERVATIVE. But bcaue she opposed affirmative action the CONSERVATIVE students rioted againt her.

Reading yourquetion brought to my mind an image from the Bible. Maybe I have the details wrong. When Moses was trying to get Pharoah to let the jews go free, God kept vising Egypt with plagues. Remember the plague where God killed all the first born of each family but told the jews to paint a mark of sheep's blood on their doors and He would pass over them (PAssover)? Well, aren't DEI marks on corporate websites sheep's blood over their doors in hopes the wokies / political correctnessers will not cancel them?

[ Political correctivee cartoon here ]

¶ +2023.10.04. Can you tell that an audiobook was narrated by an AI rather than a human?

This should be fairly easy, depending on how knowledgeable and "sensitive" you are.

But "the writing is on the wall". As computers get ever more powerful at computing, the output of hteir computations can become ever more difficult to distinguish from what human beings produce.

A simple analogy: Comsider a master painting, pick what you like, say a Rembrandt. Now consider an old "wire photo" reproduction of it like in 1940s newspapers. Easy, right? Now move up to a 35mm Camera and compare the two images from maybe 20 feet away. Harder, right? Now really highend current computerized equipment that copies the image down to high quality microscope level "in 3d". Now compare an image printed that way to the Rembrandt. Oh his brush strokes! Well, the scanner was working in 3 dimensions not 2, at a level you can't see even with a jeweler's loupe....

The more powerful the computer, the harder it becomes to tell if it's real or if it's Memorex. The U.S. Departmeng of The Treasury Bureau of Printing and Engraving surely would have som things to say to you about counterfeit currency today, right?

You, and even an expert, may not be able to tell the difference. So wher edoes the human fit in> Again an analogy. The graphic artist Milton Glaser invented, repeat: invented the famous "I [heart] New York" sign. I seriously doubt any compuer could have done that for two reasons: (1) It's new and computers can only compute, but (2) even if te computer came up with it, it would be like the famous monkeys on typewriters producing "Moby Dick": the computer would not be able to tell "close but on soap" from a true "winner". Of course, on the other hand, ther is probaly no expert who is so "good" that you couldn't change jst one commonplace word or two here and there in the book and he (she, other) would catch it or maybe they would think it was a printing error.

In the end, if somebody is determined enough to fool you, they probaly can. Watch the old fun but also profound movie: "The Truman Show"

¶ +2023.10.04. How can management interview workers to get their sense of new technologies such as AI?

The answer to this question, it seems to me, is very simple but not palatable:

The managers need to ask the emloyees in one-with-one, leisured conversation (and during bussiness hours, "when the taxi meter is running"), what they think and feel about things, here focussing on "new technologies such as AI".

But why do I think this is not palatable, because the managers need to assure the workers by track recod of accomplished deeds not just pious platitides that anything they say will not be held against them, including if they think they the manager him, her or other self who is talking with them is a fool or worse. Can you handle that?

¶ +2023.10.04. If everyone in the world was eccentric or crazy, would they ever be described as that? E.g if everyone in the world was funny then the word funny would still exist since it is a word that denotes jokemaking people?

This is an ancient question. Some people ideate that suffering is good for you, and even on occasion but by no means always, for themselves, too.

I strongly disagree: Quality is not a comparative, and Rrose Sélavy (look that up on Wikipedia if you don't "get it".

But I know a lot of persons (I call them, denigratingly: "people" since they seem more like 2-legged sheep than self-acconuntable indivuaded persons creatively shaping their own form of life) –many people don't appreciate what they have .

My childrearing was so destructive that since I have survived it, albeit as walking wounded, I try t appreciate anything good I find in life and I do find a little of it. People are always wanting more like a bigger house, or if they collect things, new items for their collection. halr a century ago I was in a position to purchase a very few small ceramics by master potters. I find hours of pleasure in each of them today and if I live to 120 which I surely won't I am pretty confident I still will. I do not want more. I want what I have to not be taken away from me. For me, variety is not the spice of life: scholarly study is. (I did buy another used ook yesterday.)

Quality is not a comparitive. I could run my mouth off here long past time for me to go to bed again (I just now awakened for the day). Long story short: I am an anti-theist, i.e., I believe that if God exists He is a criminal, but I highly recommend the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. It's not perfect, but it has a lot of wisdom in it, IMO.

¶ +2023.10.04. What are your thoughts on an app that could help you visualize your thoughts and ideas into beautiful animations using artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Been there, done that. I'll use any tool anybody will give me, especially if I find it congenial to use and leverages my creatie "play" with, to borrow a line frm The New York Times obituary for the graphic artist Milton Glaser: "We were excited by the very idea that we could use anything in the visual history of humankind as influence,"

But, in the end, I write web pages in Notepad and code up all my own html tagging and run it all thru the W3C HTML Validator. Gedgets and gizmos are welcome: "Everything is grist for the mill"

My thought?

[--------]

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror – no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.

[--------]

"Spoilsports" save lives. Have fun!

¶ +2023.10.03. Hey everyone! What do you think about multiculturalism in a society? Do you believe It brings people together, creates unity, and celebrates diversity? Or do you think it leads to division and social fragmentation?

All this is a false dicotomy of superficial thinking and beliefs. But it's the way superfiial people are and it csuses a lot of unnecessary trouble starting with ethnic wars.

All known cultures have in one way or another depersonalized as well as personalized, so that no human culture has been worth preserving the way it was – although all have been worth improving. (Walter Ong, "Fighting for life", p. 201, Note the implicit value judgment here: that a person has velue as an individual, not only as a member of a group, a worker bee in a hive.)

Everybody needs to be educated in comparative ethnography, to view all cultures, including the one in which they happened to have been born as raw material for analysis not candidates for belief. Then each person should creatively and self-accountably shape their own form of life, picking and choosing from a universal smorga bord of all the world's social customs and beliefs and reworking and adding to them to make something better for themself, always respecting others' freedom to do the same for themselves.

My biological ancestry is half Christitan Polish peasants and half white trash I don't really know wher it came from. But my "culture" is in scholarly books from such provenances as Northwestern University and University of Chicago Press. And I don't take even what's in those books on faith but reflect on it for myself to creative use to construct a vision of life better than any that ever was, although, alas, the culture I was childreared in, "The Amarican [middle class] Dream" was and remains worse than some other place (cultures, forms of life)s that have actually existed i=on this earth.

"Ethncities" should not be repressed. They need to be studied. And if you are enthusiastic about tribalism, I urge you to read a classic book, especially if you are of the female gender or some reasonable facsimile thereof: Hanny Lightfoot-Klein's "Prisoners of Ritual".

Thi shoud extend to the classroom:

[After a professor told his class some idea he believed that is not generally acceptable to say: A]cademic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like.... / [T]he number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance.

(Stanley Fish, Prof. of Law, Florida International Univ., "Conspiracy Theories 101", Op-Ed Piece, NYT, 23Jul06, p.WK13)

¶ +2023.10.03. What are your thoughts on free speech? Should it be limited if it creates offense for others? If yes, then what kind of limits do you feel are justified?

Speech is not free unless persons are permitted to respectully say things others may not like to hear. People need to grow up in America and stop being petty and prickly, and stop rioting or cancelling persons when somebody they don't like wants to speak.

I have read of an incident I "could not believe": a notoriously conservative college wher the students blocked a lecture hall where a highly credentialled conservative lawyer was sscheduled to spean because she opposed "affirmative action" (she had rational arguments against it). She was a Yale Law Schol graduate, well published and conservative. She had to be escorted into the lecture hall by police. Since the doors were blocked by the rioting students, nobody could attend to listen to her. So finally she was escorted back out by the police. This was not "Berkeley" (you know, black panthers and other people like that whom Ronald Reagan had a thing against). This was a hghly respected CONSERVATIVE college and a conservative speaker.

And it's not just restricted to kids who have not yet learned to manage their hormones or to post George Floyd. Note the date in the following quote:

"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)

If people don't like communists, communists need to have freedom of speech. If people do not like nazis, nazis need to have freedom of speech. ("Hurting persons' feelings" is not causing them material harm.)

What needs to be protceted against is bad actions. A poster child here may be the French school teacher Samuel Paty. While all America was competing to see who could be most incensed about a rogue cop murdering George Floyd with a knee to the neck, in Paris France people were enraged that a public school teacher, Mr. Paty, was decapitated: his head entirely sevvered from his neck by an Islamist wielding a knife, for teaching freedom of expression in a public school class. The class was entirely in line with official French laicite policy and Mr. Paty had even asked any person who thought they might be offended to leave the room before he began his presentation.

Bad ACTION or credible advocacy of bad action needs to be prevented, be it a Nazi telling people to burn the synagogue nextdoor or America's President telling the world that the President of the Russian Federation must be removed from office.

There are probably edge case where it's dificult to distinguish adocacy of commission of evil acts from theoretical defense of them. The world is complex but propaganda is simple. Where should one draw the like on anti-abortionists trying to prevent women from managing their own bodies? How many feet from a medical service clinic should they be allowed to mass protest and at how high a decibel level? Surely they should not be allowed to block the entrance or shout their free speech in young ladies' faces close enough to give them an infectious disease. But if they chant at a low enough decibel level to let people sleep, 100 feet from the clinic and not blocking either vehicle or pedestrian traffic, that should be legal.

I am not old enough to remember the details but back in the 1950s George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party was allowed to speak in public. The Junior Senator from Wisconsin (Joseph R McCarthy) tried to silence law abiding Ameicans for voicing or even thinking marxist ideas. Fortunately, his reign of terror was finally ended from a perhaps unexpected source: a lawyer for the U.S. Army (Joseph Welsh).

If some people do not like hearing anti-semitic speech as opposed to anti-jew VIOLENCE they should think that some other people do not like hearing them advocate what some others, often with substantive evidence, call America's imperialist wars of aggression.

Maybe here's a litmus test: Speech should be free to the extent that people who don't like it can walk away from it if they choose personally to not want to hear it. Always remember: Nobody can offend anybody who is not so petty as to take offense (Call my mother an obscenity and I may respectvully suggest you please be more precise in your accusations, and I will offer you evidenc to help you do better). Sticks and stones can break my bones but the effect of words depends on my ideological orientation.

Or consider this: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is "black" says he would rather deal with an honest racist than a hypocritical liberal. (Listen on Youtube, free, to the great old soul song which is a favorite both of Justice Thomas and myself although we would probably disagree on a lot of other things: "Smiling faces sometimes" by The Undisputed Truth)

So if you like Mr .Zelensky, then let Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs and USMC Major Scott Ritter be heard on the Evening News and in feature articles in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. They should also let Mr. Zelensky speak to Congress.

Even in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, everybody was compleely free to spout the Party Line, weren't they?

[ Politial Correctness cartoon here ]

¶ +2023.10.02. Who are some examples of female inventors who were not properly recognized for their work? Why did it happen?

I know of one: Rosalind Franklin whose contribution to Watson and Crick getting their Nobel Prize for DNA was not acknowledged by them. But if I have read properly they were a shameful duo for more than that: They intentionally misled Linus Pauling to try to keep him from winning the prize. Verily; bad white males (I am anti-woke).

¶ +2023.10.02. Why is impromptu speaking easier than planned speeches? (a few details that may help you decode this mystery, 1. I watch debates often 2. I am bad with analogies during impromptu but good when planned which is the opposite of the first point)

One size does not fit all.

Some persons do well reading from a prepared script. They can add value by tone of voice and gestures, so that it's not jut a human tape recorder playing back the text, or thay can even deviate from the script on occasion but still keep to it.

Some persons if they don't hav ea crript may "put their foot in their mouth", ie., say things that are ill advised.

Other persons are good at "thinking on their feet".

And sme persons have stage fright.

Neither way is better or worse, just differnt. If anybody tells you differently, ask tham wha thteir angle is, what are they tryig to accomplish. They you will see how good they are at impromptu, won't you?

My preferred way is to MASTER THE SUBJECT MATTER and then ad lib it, with maybe a few noes of what I think I will want ot say but maybe not. But that's jus tmy style.

I think the one thing that is overridingly important, however you want to speak, to MASTER YOUR SUBJECT MATTER. And don't try to fake it. If somebbody in teh audience asks you a question and you are not competent to and=ser it, say that flat out. Maybe it's something worth you investigating and getting back to them later. But it can also be somebody trying to make fool of you and waiting for you to trip up so they can destroy you.

Another thing. I have not spoken to audience much but if I ever had the chance again, I would start by respectfully bowing to them and if they don't deserve respect I would be setting an example for them to become what they are not but should be expected to be.

¶ +2023.10.02. Since most people do work on their computers, why do they still need to go to the office?

Excellent question!

First, some persons need more coordination with others in their jobs than others. Maybe the Boeing 747 coud have been designed on Zoom?

But a lot of work requires little or on coordination. Then one very important factor is that micro-managers need to find some way to jsutify their paychecks and they just plain like to stick their noses in their reports' business. What fun is it to micro-manage people who are free to do anytihng so long as they get their assigned tasks done and even go so far as to foresee problems and call them to everybody's attention? What fun is there in employees having fun?

Please put up with my two stories: (1) When I worked in the office I envied Japanese WWII kamikaze pilot because they only had to make their commute once (they also took outr the office if they accomplished their mission). (2) Ther was one thing I liked about the office: When the vending machine rstock man came around he discarded snack packs past their eat-by date in a trash can. He did not object to me foraging in the garbage for: FREE EXPIRED DORITOS! Yum!

¶ +2023.10.02. What is the future of face scanning technology? Will we still be able to wear sunglasses and other items that cover our faces when using this technology?

I am not an expert.

But I think you have asked a question that falls into the category of what can "progress" accomplish?

Maybe we can already do it today. But if not today then tomorrow. Let's say we need a full face for recognition today. When computers become 100 times more powerful than today (and they probably wll, since your cellphone today is far more powerful than the 3 room sized computers that ran all of IBM Research in teh early 1980s) – as the computers become more powerful, they will be able to look closer. So next step may be to recognize you not by your whole face but by your lips. Next step, not your whole lips but jsut a few little microfissures in one snippet of the skin. Crescit eundo ("It grows as it goes").

Detecting people behind burqas will be much harder if the ladies have meshes even covering their eyes, but if they can see out at all the eye of the computer will be able to see in unless they are seeing thru an optical setup that completely detaches what they see from what can be seen so only the appartus is visible to the outside. Body odor? Gestures?

Just yesterday I read something: The extremely famous at the time German right-wing writer Ernst Junger, in the 1920s, envisaged the cellphone. What can you imagine today?

[--------]

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)

¶ +2023.10.02. What are the gifts and abilities needed to be a cardinal?

Which kind? The bird or the prelate?

If the prelate, my guess (I am ignorant) is there are many possibilities, from being a sycophant of the people above you in the hierarchy to being a sincere, intelligent, caring parish priest who has some lucky breaks.

I know nothing about the Catholic Church but from the outside it looks – repeat: from the outside it looks like the current Pope Francis was a sincere priest who cared about the people and tried to minister to them, was intelligent and lucky to get some breaks along the way. Why didn't he end up serving all his life in obscurity in a parish church in podunk or teaching in a seminary somewhere? I don't know. How did he get to be Pope? Was any of it "affirmative action", i.e., some people in the hierarchy wanting to have a Pope who was one of them?

Analogy: I've always wondered how, in the military, anybody could live long enough to rise through the ranks to become a general before they died of old age. Consider: There was a man, John R. Boyd, who was a military genius: the undisputed master of aerial combat. To this day, probably every U.S., Russian, Israeli, Chinese and other "top gun", knows his work and probalby his name. But guess what? He almost did not make full Colonel. So you ask what gifts are needed to be a cardinal? I don't know, but if there is an analogy with the secular church of the U.S. Department of Defense, it's beyond me.

¶ +2023.10.01. Do you think it is ever appropriate to give an "applause" to your own speech? If so, when would you do it and why?

I can think of one.

I'm running my mouth off with my prepared spiel and I make a what do they call them? gaff, i.e, I meant to say one word but despite myself I said a different word that makes very intelligent , or maybe very stupid sense that I did not intend. Or I'm saying exactly what I meant to say and suddenly it dawns on me in vivo that my prepared sentence has a consequential "double meaning" i did not intend.

In other words I applaud for somebody I was a minute ago but no longer am. I become part of my audience to myself.

¶ +2023.10.01. How do companies stop employees from stealing their ideas?

I can only think of two ways:

(1) Threaten them with severe **harm** if they do it. If the penlty for treason is being tortured and thrown into solitary confinement to starve to death and you see it happen to somebody you know, you just might decide it's not worth the risk.

(2) Have conditions so favorable for them that they won't even want to do such a thing. If you have poured your **heart** into making the thing you will not want to spoil your fun and sense of pride in accomplishment.

I guess there's a third consideration: being "stupid". I may be totally "off" here on the facts but if what I read in the newspapers was as I seem to have read it, earlier this year there was a pimple-face part-time army reserve soldier who was exposing enormous qualtities of top secret information to show off to his game boy buddies how cute he was. I got the impression that he was not a master KGB agent but that his superiors were not doing **due diligence**. If people leave classified material on their desks when they go home at night the night shift cleaning crew who can't even speak English will clean their offices and maybe take home scrap paper for their kids to draw on or for toilet paper or who knows what.Don't count on them understanding "plain English" wven though they may absolutely mean no harm.

The possibilities are endless. You can make your computer system so secure that people dan't remember their mumbojumbo passwords and so they write thtem down on scrpas of paper in their wallets and even the most conscientious persons have occasionally lost their wallets, etc.

Here's one for you. I used to come to work at 4am because I don't like being around people. One morning my badge was broken. I gave a sob story on the phone to the security people who could have been on another continent and they let me in. Did they do the right thing?

Or suppose you are entering the building and somebody you know well says he forgot his badge so will you let him in after you. Nobody told you he was fired at 5:30pm the day before.

Ultimately the best security depends on** earned trust among intelligent people** and **nothing can be 100% certain** in this world which we did not create so you should try to be prepared for the unexpected as best you can. Like maybe President Gorbachev should not have taken a vacation in 1989 or whenever it was that he wa away from the kremiln for several weeks and "things happened".

Security first may mean missing your kid's football game .

¶ +2023.10.01. What are some practical steps a leader can take to create an innovative culture within an organization?

Here's some:

Make it dear by both word and action that honest criticism of the organization and also yourself will always be welcomed and that your door (and private cellphone) is always open for whistleblowers).

Reward honest, intelligent mistakes just like successes.

Publicly expose and immediately terminate the employment of toadies, yes-men and other bad actors. Make it clear that anybody who tries to cover up anything will not get a second chance to harm the organization.

Do not micro-manage. Judge each contributor solely on the basis of performance, not secondary characteristics, and do not "play favorites". If somebody shows up late every day but does excellent work, don't bother them. If they work overtime but accomplish little gently tell them that will not earn them any points. Somebody said: "If you are working overtime, your manager is not doing his (her, other's) job."

Obviously, cash rewards are always welcome but your best contributors do do not come to work to make more money but to do quality work.

Provide tools that will help your people be productive. Counterexample: In a big tech company I had a workstation that did not have enough memory for me to keep a backup of my work so that if I made a mistake and had to backtrack I wasted time and energy. This was a PC manufacturer: I never saw one of their high-end products.

I have persoally seen: In IBM, the two very top development engineers whose job it was to fix the problems everybody else created and were not able to fix themselves had to be coerced by management to take promotions; the people who produced the problems wanted to get promoted.

Now this was back in 1980, again in IBM. I once met a programmer who came to work SOMETIMES, wore jeans, grew house plants in his basement and probably had never been to college. But he was highly valued by the company. Why? Because he took chip design programs that ran for days and cut them down to run in a few hours.

In a bank I saw a person who was both an ethical giant and a master of his craft fired (f-i-r-e-d) for doing too good a job because the 3rd line manager's 2nd line toadies told the third line it was him or them and the third line made a chioce.

I myself, back in the days of "Improved Programming Technologies" (1980) had amanager, a "straight" male, who wore socks with machine stitched images of Mickey and Minnie Mouse on them but either could not or would not enter into serious discussion with me about small rodents He told me they were going to have a "walkthru" of some very risky code I had written, and I knew what that meant and I told him point-blank that I would not be "ground up"; he cancelled the walkthru and my very risky code shipped unreviewed. Don't be a Mickey Mouse.

I saw a lot. Once in another bank I had a good manager. He too proably never went to college but was a master of his skill: He worked on Burroughs mid-size computers. He did not report problems to the manufacturer. He told them how to fix the problems he found and they applied his fixes. He was not politically correct – one Easter Sunday morning he was working in the computer room and a black employee came in to show his girlfriend around and he exalaimed: "A chocolate easter egg!" The guy took it in good humor. One fine day I needed upper management approval for something. He asked me one short question: "Are you sure?" My equally short answer: "Yes", and he was off up the elevator to get it done. That's the kind of trust you need to develop and it comes from deeds not words.

Then there is "fun". Of course it's nice for the boss to take the team out for lunch at an expensive restaurant. But not every employee is a dog. I had managers who liked to hear themselves speak and hold long boring meetings when they could havejust sent out an email, and to try to show how great they were brought in: Dunkin Donuts. Contrast, a young lady manager who rarely held meetings and when she did they were short. One morning she brought in for the team almond croissants from La Petite Patisserie (Larchmont New York). Now that was a treat, not a dog treat.

To finish on that lady. She was a very good manager for the company. My job was to fix bugs. We had no end of bugs to fix. One morning I had fixed a bug (done!) but I asked her if I could spend some time investigating that area of the project a little deeper. This was entirely unnecessary. She replied:

"We always have to=ime to investigate a matter more deeply."

And from the human angle. One normally busy morning at about 10am I offhandedly remarked to her that I had never driven a stick shift BMW but would like to one day. She threw me her key ring an told me to go for a spin.

Do unto your employees as you would like your boss to do unto you, and you probably won't go too far wrong, do you think?

¶ +2023.09.30. Can you imagine a future where many of the objects and people in our homes are holograms?

I do not need to imagine. Been there done that, albeit without needing holograms. Learn from my folly. You are asking for trouble; Don't be "stupid" (unless you want to harm yourself):

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror – no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.

¶ +2023.09.30. In the future if AI replaces all human workers and employees in every field how would they survive being unemployed is it possible for the government to start paying everyone in the future since they will all be out of work?

The goal needs to be to free all persons from the Abrahamic Deity's curse on Adam for eating a piece of fruit. Not everybody agrees with that opinion.

Then comes the present question: when people no longer need to waste their lives in what Karl Marx eloquently called "the reproduction of individual and species life" (I call it: "pragmatic agenda") what will they do with themselves?

The options are many. Here are a few:

They coud kill each other in bickering about petty things like professional soccer teams and ethnicities.

They could kill themselves with fentenyl overdoses.

They could waste their lives watching pro sports events and / or HBO on the boob tube.

They could enjoy simple pleaseure of long meals with close friends with artisan bread and good wine, play with loving pets, take walks in the open air, and have gentle sex with a loving partner.

They could create great works of art and /.or make contributes to the advancement of the sciences.

They could teach young persons what they have learned themselves.

This is just a beginning of the possibilities.

I have my opinions. I am an anti-theist (that means that if God exists I think He is a criminal), but I very much like the advice in The Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible.

Different strokes for different folks.

¶ +2023.09.29. Who's the funniest person in your family?

Nobody funny in my family.

I do not know my paternal grandfather becaus he tried to blackmail (b-l-a-c-k-m-a-i-l)my father to get part of his paycheck and then sued him in court to try to get part of his paycheck and that failed too. My father tor the best of my knowlege had nohing to do with that man or the rest of his family with one exception: a brother whom at maybe age 12 years he may have saved from death who, needlesss to say, almpst worshipped my father. I met him a few times. He was not funny.

On my mother' side there was only one bad person. All the rest were very hard working working class persons who did well in life. But there was one uncle about whom I knew nothing a that time. He made an invention during World Wa rII which was important and even saved lives. Now here's th punch line: nobody in the family seemed to know nytihng about it i ncluding his wife and chldren.

In my 40s I went looking for dirt on my maternal relatives before they died. Somehow this uncle mentioned his WWII achievement to me. I immediately snapped to attention. Had I known about this when I was young I would have sung his priases far and wide and told the family what an amazing thing he did and why weren't they in awe of him for it?

I am a very foolish person. I cannot tolerate eing just a consumer of onsumer products. If I dan't do anything about it I still don't like it. If I can't be a genius and I find genius idea that's not being appropriately honored I'm selfish: I want to raise up my position in the world for bringing this achievment to the world's attention. If I can't be a genius I can respet one. That' a way I rise above all the zonks who don't care about any thing except mowing their lawns and having their backyard barbecues.

So there is nbody funny in my family but there was one man who did something important. nd I've been trying for 30 years on and off to try to get him recognition for it in places like The Department of Defense. Silly me. Am I funny?

¶ +2023.09.29. What is your raison d'etre in your profession?

I did not have a profession but I did have a skill: computer programming.

What was its reaison d'etre? in the 1950s the amount of paperwork was getting too big to be handled by human clerks. Sort of like in hte 1920s the number of phone calls we getting too many to be handled by human switchboard operators. Back then somebody ran the m=numbers and figured out that at some point there would be more phone calls than human beings to be switchboard operators.

In the 1950 the U.S. economy faced a credible possiility of collapsing under its own bureaucratic weight. Something had to change. One possibbility would have beeen major social change which, of course, the people who ran the place did not want.

Along came the computer as Superclerk just in the nick of time to handle almost unlimited quantities of paperwork and even to create lots more of it without being overwelmed by it. Bureaucracy forever!

So sociail change wss averted. And things got even better! The computer ended up REPLACING many human workers! The computer was cost effetive too! Wow!

Oh, even more: computer programers generally do not think about the social meaning of what they do. they jsut follow orders. Let's go back to the 1930s in Germany for wher ethis came from.

[ Dehomag images here ]

The computer just follows orders. The computer programmers jsut follow orders too. I saw a lot of folly but fortunately I never was knowingly asked to do anything illegal or destructive:

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)

+2024.01.15 v253
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