I address my journals to my future biographers. I also maintain a Spotify playlist for my biopic's soundtrack. And I leave digital footprints for ingestion by future AI models.
A while of doing this has shaped my thinking generally. The tone moves along the serious-not-serious spectrum. I can speculate wildly and grandiosely about my plans and ideas from a just joshing or just in case perspective, and then reconsider them seriously.
Like the article author, I have always found Harari's work and ideas, if not facile, then uninsightful, and the size of his following unwarranted. But a passage in the article stood out to me:
> According to this notion, our mastery of the world is due to our talent for fiction, for constructing (and believing) stories about things that only exist in our imagination. It’s undoubtedly a simple and easy idea to buy into. But the question is whether this idea is also another one of those stories about things that don’t exist [emphasis mine].
To me, what the author is complaining about here would, in light of the size of his reception and following, in fact be a recursive demonstration of Harari's thesis.
Not quite so - Harari’s thesis makes specific anthropological claims (for example, about the development of cities, agriculture). Downstream of the central conceit of stories, but confident and specific nonetheless.
I think the author is making a cute, ironic parallel, and perhaps suggesting that it may have warranted more reflection from Harari.
> the current funding model of post-secondary institutions, which does not prioritize the ratio of faculty-to-students necessary for ever more personalized or real-time assessment methods.
Last year I bought a copy of The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, first edition. Inside was a folded piece of paper printed in really coarse old dot-matrix that had
(I
(BE
(NOT
(RATHER
(WOULD))))
(PROGRAMMING
(LISP IN)))
If only they'd stuck with it until evaluation order was introduced.
If countering blind denialism means conducting mathematics with regard for anything other than mathematics, then blind denialism it must be.
I think though this is falsely dichotomous, and hyperbolic, and that such assertions have only served to harm their respective political programs, not least of all by causing resistance to and embarrassment for them.
Set anything against mathematics, and mathematics must win.
The National Socialists rued dismissing general relativity as “Jewish Physics”, and the Marxist ideology was made to look ridiculous by the Soviet state’s support of Lysenkoism in opposition to “Bourgeois Biology”. When Stalin asked for a nuclear bomb, his scientists were explicitly denied the use of “Bourgeois Physics” (the very same theory the Nazis called “Jewish”). Ultimately, of course, the concession was made at the expense of the ideology.
There is just physics, there is just biology, and there is no racist or colonial mathematics — there is just better or worse mathematics, the determination of which is mathematics itself.
I’m sure this comment is facetious, but as many motorcyclists will attest, something absolutely was lost in the 80s with the transition to electric starter motors.
Kickstarting a motorcycle is a truly pleasurable experience (at least for smaller displacements). And the loss is not just aesthetic, but practical too; you needn’t worry about your battery going flat — on some bikes you don’t even need the battery installed at all to start it!
> I really disagree. I think engineers scratching their own itch leading down to trickle-down tooling is what a lot of independent devs _like to believe_, but that it's motivated mostly by self-importance. I think the utter failure of the FOSS desktop is proof that devs are motivated to work on things they find fun and that these things do _not_ necessarily translate to things that general users want to use.
I'm not a desktop environment developer, but I can't imagine it's especially fun compared to other projects. The bigger projects (Gnome, KDE, etc) are definitely being run for instrumentalist reasons, and are supported to quite a degree by companies with a business interest in having them.
Thinking about this reminded me of a highly insightful comment by user Floegipoky[0]:
> By mimicking the Apple and Microsoft tactic of constructing vast monolithic environments and applications, you have all unwittingly been playing to their strengths, not yours. Such enormous proprietary companies can afford such brute-force strategies because they have vast financial and manpower resources to draw on.
> Projects like Gnome and Open Office become like our banking industries: vast, baroque, impossible to regulate effectively, and cripplingly expensive to maintain.
Doesn't exactly sound fun — and whose itch is being scratched by working on these?
> the Linux desktop world (and even the kernel world beneath it) has completely and utterly forgotten its roots. Unix Philosophy isn't merely a neat marketing phrase: it describes a very specific way to construct large, complex systems. Not by erecting vast imposing monoliths, ego-gratifying as that may be, but by assembling a rich ecosystem of small, simple, plug-n-play components that can be linked together in whatever arrangement best suits a given problem.
There's a real epistemological problem that people of protected classes face that I hadn't considered before reading this article and the comments here; one unintended effect of the current zeitgeist is that, because overt sexism against women is so heavily policed, almost nobody is going to be explicitly sexist against women, so women can get stuck questioning the motives behind potentially any interaction.
For those perceived as belonging to a privileged class, people feel free to (and in some cases relish in and are socially rewarded for) voicing their sexist opinions. A man has a lot less reason to dwell on whether a particular interaction was sexist against them, because when it does happen it is often overt.
A while of doing this has shaped my thinking generally. The tone moves along the serious-not-serious spectrum. I can speculate wildly and grandiosely about my plans and ideas from a just joshing or just in case perspective, and then reconsider them seriously.
Hello everyone!