Both about technology, about AI.
The Sapiens author has a new book out next week: Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. This is an excerpt.
NY Times, Yuval Noah Harari, 4 Sep 2024: Yuval Noah Harari: What Happens When the Bots Compete for Your Love? [gift link]
As always, Harari does 30,000-foot overviews really well. The excerpt begins:
Today’s thought piece.
OnlySky, Adam Lee, 3 Sep 2024: When we abolished borders, subtitled “After a while, it was hard to remember why we’d drawn the lines to begin with.”
Offhand, I’d say borders, especially between nations, were created and became established as those nations grew from town to cities and eventually nations derived from different ‘tribes’ started bumping into one another. And so clear boundaries were necessary to establish territory. Similarly, formal passports were only established in 1920.
Let’s see what Adam Lee says. It quickly becomes clear (though I’m only quoting excerpts) that this is a fictional scenario.
I read Cory Doctorow’s latest column for Locus Magazine last week, when I browsed through my advance PDF copy of the September issue. It’s a fascinating piece that considers the difference between the political left and the political right in terms of a classic experiment in child psychology. The column has now been posted on the Locus website, so I can link to it, and discuss it.
(photo copyright Julia Galdo & Cody Cloud)
Locus Magazine, Cory Doctorow, September issue, posted 2 Sep 2024: Cory Doctorow: Marshmallow Longtermism
The classic experience is the Stanford marshmallow experiment, and is about delayed gratification.
Here’s a book that was published six years ago this month, and which I read one year ago last month.
Subtitle: “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure”
(Penguin Press, Sept. 2018, 338pp, including 70p of acknowledgements, appendices, notes, references, and index.)
In a structure similar to Robert Reich’s book just discussed, this one identifies a problem, explores how we got here, then provides suggested correctives.
By “coddling” the author mean that Americans, students in particular, are over-protected. The problem, especially on college campuses, consists of three Great Untruths. These are discussed in the first three chapters.
1, The Untruth of Fragility: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker;
2, The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings;
3, The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People.
Here’s a great story that challenges the presumptions of the growing economy.
Slate, David Zipper, 28 Aug 2024: How America Can Break Its Highway Addiction, subtitled “In the 1980s, an unlikely alliance slowed the construction of nature-destroying dams. We just might be able to pull it off again.”
This is about America’s propensity for building new highways. Continue reading
Here’s another shortish book I read recently, not a memoir but a book at the intersection of politics, morality, and human nature, which is itself another theme of my reading the past two or three years. It’s by Robert Reich, about whom I’ve written before, e.g. here. I read this one on the plane during our last trip to Austin, in early June, and revisited it yesterday to write up these notes.
By “common good” Reich means the set of shared values of society, what we owe together as citizens of the same society, the norms we voluntarily abide by. Reich is quick to caution that this has nothing to do with communism or socialism, or about political parties. It’s something that seems to have been lost, he says, so in this book he explains what it is, what happened to erode it, and what might be done to restore it.
I think the title here is the name for the broad category of my interests. They all blend together. They connect.
For today:
Can we change our ways based on experience? Or are we forever stuck with the wisdom of the ‘ancients’ (in this case the Founders)?
LA Times, Erwin Chemerinsky, 23 Aug 2024: Opinion: We’re living under a flawed Constitution. Let’s start fresh and rewrite it
How is it flawed? For example:
A subject which never ends. My fascination with this, yet again, isn’t about politics per se, so much as trying to understand why people believe what they do, and how humanity struggles with the balance of survival vs understanding.
/>
Media Matters, Gideon Taaffe, 23 Aug 2024: Fox News is pushing data from a former Trump official to incorrectly suggest violent crime is rising during the Biden administration
Two items today on this topic, first an essay in NY Times, then a letters column today responding to it.
I addressed a similar piece Saturday. Here’s the NYT essay.
NY Times, Victor Kumar, a philosophy professor at Boston University, 5 Aug 2024: Population Growth Isn’t a Progressive Issue. It Should Be.
The next big science tome I’ve begun reading is THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY, by David Deutsch, his only other book following THE FABRIC OF REALITY in 1997, which I reviewed here. This second book was published in 2011. (There’s no clue he might be writing another; presumably these two books constitute his personal theory of reality, and he has nothing more to say without being repetitious.) He continues to be a professor at Oxford.
Let’s try writing up my notes here as I go, instead of waiting until I finish the whole book, then spending another week or more posted chapter summaries. These posts will be indicated by the abbreviated title format; a final summary post will have the book photo in the middle.
His first book, recall, Continue reading
