Philosophy

One person helping another because they have a relationship and the work needs doing. Sean frames these as workarounds. Necessary but awkward and illegible. But what if they’re not workarounds? What if they’re the actual thing?

one can go through a full cycle of the “write code” loop faster than one would go through “suffering the consequences of your own architecture” loop

A revealing account of how using LLMs to do the thinking for you is not actual thinking but a sub-cognitive shortcut.

He is a Marxist who understands the importance of money and markets; without Marx, you cannot understand the movement of history, but without money, you can’t do anything about it.

Cal Newport has a quick list of his philosophy for busy people. Saves you from reading his books.

Krasse Links looks like yet another collection of links but the German wall of text notwithstanding, it’s a remarkable act of curation and contextualisation. Remarkable and unique for sure in Germany.

Cosplay believing in the singularity long enough and at some point you won’t be able to stop anymore whether you really believe in it or not.

“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

Looking back on 2023 I can say that we made lemonade out of an overall pretty shit year.

A strong analysis of the AI concept by Emily Bender who proposes we just call it “automation”instead. Which is fair because if you use these systems, it becomes incredibly obvious how they work and what their limitations are.

Finally got around to reading Elizabeth Sandifer’s essay and if there was any doubt, this makes it clear how much of an unserious and malicious person Scott Alexander/Siskind is. Siskind’s writing deliberately pretends to be respectable to provide ideological cover to some real evil.

“Success in knowledge isn’t about the facts we know, but by how good we are at judging the truth of uncertain things.”

https://sozialtheoristen.de/2023/02/05/ungleichheit-und-systemtheorie-die-blinden-flecken-in-luhmanns-theorie-der-gesellschaft/

“Can I be held responsible for the actions which this technology empowers? Would I feel better if I couldn’t?”

Even a cursory dip into the subreddits and other social media posts, whitepapers, and other documentation and community discussions surrounding generative AI, makes it hard to miss the spite and negativity directed at human creativity. They are almost necessary preconditions to be part of the development community. Ironically, of course, the developers celebrate their own creativity in building these software tools, despite the fact that they implicitly rebuke the work and lives of everyone who creates or thinks meaning is confined to living things.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/the-dangerous-populist-science-of-yuval-noah-harari

An in-depth study of the links between Nazism and Anthroposophy by Peter Staudenmaier at the Institute for Social Ecology with a lot of interesting bits in there.

‘Whomsoever is possessed of magisterial strength is courted; while whomsoever has inferior strength pays court to others. It is for this reason that the shrewd ruler strives for might.’

We improve at this process by becoming more creative, having more slack, being more equanimous, and pruning more efficiently.

Drastically lowering the voting age as Germany is considering here would solve a huge amount of problems (which is why it will of course not happen).

An excellent overview of the issues around Slate Star Codex without having to read a single word of the blog yourself. That’s an excellent service.

“This gets at the heart of what’s deeply wrong with this perspective: it prioritizes currently non-existent, possibly never-existent, hypothetical future possible people over living, breathing people today, because the former could possibly, maybe, perhaps far outnumber the latter.”

This summary of Robert Kegan is more than a bit illuminating. And maybe I’m only aspiring when I say this, but come join me at Stage 5. It’s nice here.

I was arguing against Systems Theory today (a necessary evil when you live in Germany) which prompted the thought of searching for the conjunction of Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhmann. That led me to this gem.

To speak thus is to use the aesthetic as an anesthetic.

As of right now I’m frightfully behind on my Latour MOOC. What I have been doing instead is reading up old articles in my Instapaper. One such is this interview with Dutch sociologist/philosopher Willem Schinkel in Vrij Nederland. It’s good to read a fresh Dutch thinker who seems to understand things (and who also is in with Latour). Calling Geert Wilders a proto-fascist and the Netherlands a museum are only a couple of the ringers in there.

I finished Aramis (PDF) a couple of weeks ago and this is absolutely essential reading for anybody involved with technology in a wider sense than just technology. It is also quite funny. I look forward to reading more by Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence is high on my list 1 and I’ve registered to join his MOOC on the Scientific Humanities.

Last Monday I heard Graham Harman give the International Flusser Lecture in Berlin. The lecture was in German and for me as a non-native speaker somewhat hard to follow, but the present Germans loved it. ‘The English dominated academia’ seems to be problematic for them 1.

A nice and quiet week in which I got a lot of stuff done that needed doing for a while.

Last weekend I finished the Prince of Networks (which is in fact available for free online and I recommend you read it, though Alien Phenomenology may be a more concise and lighter introduction into speculative realism) by Graham Harman.

This interview with Graham Harman is filled with valuable tidbits, some of which I wanted to collect and share for your reading pleasure as much as mine:

You’ve got to love John Stuart Mill:

Last week I finished the book[^1] “In the Bubble” by John Thackara (my summary).

This week I read the book “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki.

I am currently reading the book “The Internet and Society” by James Slevin which went off to a rough start but which I am getting into more and more.

Today I finally finished my notes on the paper “Group, Community or Social Network” by Lois Ann Scheidt.

Just finished reading “Persuasive Technology” by Fogg. I dumped my notes on the wiki page.

So finally this feels like real work. I read one of the papers I had copied from the proceedings of the Conference of Computer Ethics by Introna called:

I wrote about the lecture by John Thackara I was going to attend. I went there and it was pretty interesting. My impressions:

In our gathering about identities, ethics and philosophy some interesting points were discussed.