lo_zamoyski

The primary reason you shouldn't surrender cognitively is that the truth matters. That's it.

Of course, when you're working on a system of high complexity - and one that is constantly changing to boot - with all sorts of historical reasons and what not that inform the why and so forth, you can't reasonably be expected to understand everything. This is what bracketing is for. When I acknowledge "this is the way X works", it doesn't mean I have to accept the proposition "this is the right way/best way to do X" or "X must be this way". A teacher or mentor may say it is, but in a theoretical context, unless it has been justified, you cannot claim that you know that what has been said is true. However, you can accept it as a provisional working hypothesis. And practically, it may work out and perhaps experience will lend some feeling of substance to the hypothesis, but you needn't make it doctrine.

Empirical science often has the same spirit. Perhaps the model isn't a true account of reality, but it puts handles on reality so that it can be instrumentalized.

There is an occupational danger here. If we focus exclusively on the instrumental, if we reduce all of human attitudes toward the world to use and utility, we not only vulgarize ourselves and our orientation toward the world and even others, but we risk trampling the truth and the good underfoot. We risk developing an indifference to the truth, because all that will matter is some measure of effectiveness. This is what one might call the textbook[0] definition of bullshit.

[0] https://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on...

A fragment of Śródmieście (the downtown center of Warsaw). The Old Town and most of the right bank (including Praga) are missing.

In any case, very fun. Hope it improves.

I would tend to agree with this. A combination between low-info fluff and childish presentation. It feels like being bombarded with a technicolor fireworks display of obfuscation and mystification. Maybe it's the gimmick of "edutainment" and the goofy idea that you need to inject fanfare and folderol into education to appeal to students that created this mess.

If you look at older textbooks, before education publishing became the extortionist big business it is today (like, say, Pauling's book on general chemistry[0] - which you can still get from Dover - to name one), you will find many that are lucid and intellectually satisfying. Heck, look at scholastic pedagogic texts (like the Summa[1]) and you can follow exactly what's being said. Even if you don't grasp something, or grasp it correctly, it isn't because the writing or presentation are shit. It's because you need to keep going, but you know how to keep going. You have handles on the content and not just some huge, impenetrable, and slippery orb looming over you.

It's eye-opening, because our entire media regime, and the sensibilities it entrenches, seems to suggest that education used to be dull, mindless, and joyless before the great "progressive" innovators blessed us with their wisdom, forgetting the origins of the artes liberales and some of the 19th and 20th century turns[2] that did actually debase education into something vulgar by comparison, something convenient for industry and the state.

[0] https://archive.org/details/generalchemistry00paulrich

[1] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I.Q1

[2] I am not claiming everything was perfect centuries ago, or that there were no good pedagogical developments since then.

> What customer would seriously want something this a month earlier that barely works?

Andy's quote is made even more absurd when you consider how long it takes Proton to deliver even industry baseline features.

Maybe get to baseline before you start talking about "speed", Andy.

Leadership is service, not dominance. Today, some people throw around terms like "servant leadership" as if this is something new, as if something like the New Testament had never been compiled.

Plain old vanity (specifically, intellectual pride), pedantry, a lack of neighborly love, a wish to dominate others (libido dominandi), pettiness, pusillanimity, and insecurity. Magnanimous people do not feel the need to flaunt, certainly not in the faces of beginners. They are generous, patient, and gentle with those who know less. They desire the good of the other in sharing what they know.

I am reminded of the most common reading at wedding masses, 1 Cor 13 [0].

[0] https://www.bible.com/bible/59/1CO.13.ESV

There are distinctions and comments to be made.

The first is the difference between the practical and the theoretical. Economic activity is generally practical and productive in the sense that we don't do these things for themselves, but for something else. However, an infinite regress of practicality is impossible, because the practical cannot justify itself. It is always for the sake of something else, so you must ultimately arrive at something done for its own sake.

The second is the distinction between the internal and external effects of work. When people talk about AI taking jobs, they focus almost exclusively on the external effects (the actual resulting products and services). They rarely touch on the effect of work on the worker. Properly dignified work[0] directed toward proper ends is an act of love and service that also develops and perfects the worker as a human being.

A third is the distinction between the pathological condition by which a person seeks vacuous simulacra and stimulation and in a manner that causes them to fail to develop socially, and the claim that such stimulation and simulacra can actually replace healthy social relationships. The latter is not true, the former already exists to some extent.

I would also reject "economist" framing of human relationships as such and of human persons.

And finally, the Singularity as bona fide intelligence is nonsense, but one might argue that, at least in principle, some kind of hyper-developed and virtually unbounded instrumentation of computation ("AI") is possible. But AI lacks inherent ends and could not possibly possess its own ends (because it is not a true integral whole and thus lacks immanent causality), and so it would be an instrument of human will. Whose will is the question.

[0] Hence, why I think that while using AI to replace human reason is bad, the reduction of tedious and mind-numbing work is not.

We have time/energy/money in amounts heretofore not available to us. It's a question of motivation and the culture that produces it. If society's highest common good and life's highest aspirations are materialistic and consumerist, then where does something like this fit in? What for? It becomes a nice curiosity and a tourist stop at best and that's not much much of a motive.

No, we prefer to spend all our time/energy/money on lesser things.

That's not true at all. You can clearly see vacillation between more elaborate and simpler architectural forms throughout history.

This just sounds like some whiggish defense of modernism.

Sorites doesn't actually refute the OP. The paradox is rooted in a failure to distinguish between aggregates and integral wholes. A heap is not really a natural kind or an integral whole. It is just a convenient label to describe a vague range of collections for practical purposes, but it is not what you a "thing" in its own right. There is no intrinsic tendency of a heap to be a heap, whereas in integral wholes there are. You cannot draw a line between a heap and a non-heap, because there is no such thing as a heap in any objective sense. There is no essential difference, only an accidental one.

Computers and computer programs are much more like heaps than integral wholes. There is no essential difference between what we conventionally call "AI" and any other computer program. The manner in which we have cordoned off "AI" from "non-AI" has more to do with human purposes and perspectives rather than any objective facts on the ground.

This is just a consequence of the philosophically liberal metaphysics, anthropology, and resulting moral views and political orders they produce. Once you accept those premises, they act as a corrosive agent that can be deployed to dissolve all sorts of truths opposed to someone's conception of "autonomy" and "freedom" and you really have no defense as long as your thinking is subject to them. It's why the Right has consistently lost all sorts of cultural battles. They, too, are liberals - because we're all liberals, culturally - and as long as they remain so, their "reactionary" behavior will largely remain rooted in mere sentimental attachment to an imagined past rather than something intellectually substantive. Hence, why what falls under the label of "postliberalism" has a much stronger shot. It is an intellectual rejection of liberalism with intellectual substance that often draws on robust metaphysical and anthropological "alternatives" to liberalism, as it were.

Oh, but they did reach those lands under Marcus Aurelius and indeed occupied them. Prior to his death, he intended to create two new provinces, Marcomannia and Sarmatia. There was even a Roman expedition that reached the Baltic in modern day Poland. (In the case of Poland, it would’ve been a terrible idea to try to conquer those lands, not least of all because they are situated on the indefensible Northern European Plain.)

Music is not "pure abstraction" detached from concrete reality. Music has objective properties communicated via audible medium, and what's more, of a quantitative nature. It expresses order. The more beautiful music is, the more integrity, proportion, and clarity it has.

Indeed, we might say music moves our senses and through them shifts our passions; our intellects through expressed order and pattern which we abstract from it; and our wills by appealing to our desire for beauty. Accordingly, we can rank music based on where the effect is greatest. Does it appeal more to the carnal or to the higher faculties?

That neurons play a role is not at odds with the above. It is fallacious to lump the existence of neurons and their role in human apprehension of reality with some kind of intellectually poor metaphysical stance like materialism.

> for religious people there is only the single factor, and it let's them do what op did by positioning actual expertise under their personal beliefs.

It's difficult to discern precisely the claim you're making, but it is suggestive, something to the effect that all religious people reduce all good events to miraculous acts. If that is the case, then you are misinformed and - it would seem - painting all "religious" people with the same broad brush. I would strongly recommend looking at something like JPII's encyclical "Fides et Ratio" [0].

As the OP would appear to be a Christian, I will say that according to a robust and mature Christian understanding of the world and its relation to God, there is a distinction between what are called primary causality and secondary causality. While all that exists is granted its existence and causal power by God (primary causality), within the created order and thus within the domain of secondary causes, things operate as genuine causes. This is not some kind of occasionalism where the world is more or less a kind of cosmic puppet theater. So there is no contradiction between gratitude for, say, a doctor's successful intervention and the divine cause that enables it, even when nothing miraculous has occurred (whether quoad substantiam, quoad subjectum, or quoad modum et ordinem).

> i agree that this type of cope may actually be useful, though, it's just insulting at the same time.

I suppose understanding this latter sentence presupposes understanding the first, but I would point back to the division of causal orders above, and perhaps be mindful of superbia vitae.

[0] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...

It would do no such thing. LLMs are neither living nor sentient nor intelligent. The fallacy of computationalism is a failure to read a coarse metaphor as merely analogical. Any correspondence is superficial and limited, and even then, merely correspondence, not identity.

So, the use of human brain cells is different territory. Bioethically speaking, it is illicit to press human body parts (which includes cells) into service for technological ends. They can only licitly enter into service of the integral human whole (such a life-saving transplants). Using them in technology also commoditizes the human body. (The reverse is not the case: it can be licit to use cybernetic devices to restore native function within a human body.)

> The same ideas were used to argue against stem cell research, IVF, and many other treatments and ideas that have saved and helped lives.

You write as if objections to (certain kinds of) stem cell research, IVF, etc. have been roundly defeated in some way simply because they've "saved and helped lives". This is naked utilitarianism and I hope I don't have to rehearse the reasons why utilitarianism fails utterly as moral theory.

The transition from communism to capitalism was hardly as rosy as people in the West like to think.

Of course, how this unfolded varied. For example, unlike the chaotic Russian privatization that created a class of oligarchs, the transition in places like Poland favored a network of well-placed insiders, a highly structured network of intelligence officers (military, civilian), state managers, and flexible communist party elites, who - by controlling information, intelligence networks, and the liquidation apparatus - effectively laundered their authoritarian political privileges into financial dominance.

It really is a sign of the times that people are totally unable to define what education is for. And when they attempt answers, they usually fall flat on their faces. Perhaps this is because we have suppressed the habit - or fail to develop one - of asking what the ends of things are. Because if there are ends, then there are norms, and when there are norms, there is a right and a wrong, a better way and a worse way. It means there is an objective end written into human nature, and one’s actions and choices either align with that end or deviate from it. These are not something a hyperindividualist liberal[0] culture wants to hear. After all, telos was thrown out centuries ago, an intellectual process we can trace at least to Ockham’s nominalism. Telos makes a moral demand of us and we moderns and postmoderns chafe under moral demands (though we predictably reach for strong men, leviathans, and mortal gods to save us from the inevitable chaos). We would sooner declare life meaningless and plunge ourselves into the void of nihilism and its thrashing violence and nauseating malaise than submit to some objective moral order.

In any case, what falls under the label of “education” today is a disconnected assortment of vague aims and promises. The first on the list is “job training”. Oh, how far we have fallen. Classically, education is perhaps best exemplified by the liberal arts [1], the artes liberales, which were oriented toward producing intellectually free people and contrasted with the so-called “servile arts” (artes serviles) which are precisely what job training is concerned with. Freedom, classically, is not absence of restraint, but the ability to be the kind of thing you are. Thus, if human beings are rational[2] animals - if our telos is to be agents of truth - then the more rational we are, the more obedient we are to reason, the more human we are, and therefore the most free we are. It should be obvious. A drug user says he is free, because he takes drugs whenever he wants. But the drugs blunt his humanity and frustrate his rationality, and they enslave him over time. This example may be extrapolated accordingly.

So, education is fundamentally about enabling people to become competent human beings as rational beings and agents of truth. You can’t mechanize or automate that away as the end is the actualization of the human himself as human, not the production of goods or services. And because we’re social animals - our social nature following from the rational - we learn through speech and through communication with each other. A school is - when run properly - a community of learning.

[0] Inevitably, some uninformed person will latch onto “liberal” thinking I mean this in the partisan sense. I don’t. I mean it in the philosophical sense. We are all liberals today. In the US, both major parties are firmly planted in liberal soil.

[1] When I say “liberal arts”, I don’t mean what we call today the liberal arts. Recall that the classical liberal arts existed before the whole “Two Cultures” nonsense, after which they became a kind of stenography for power and an apologetics of the hyperindividualist liberal culture.

[2] “Rationality” in the classical sense is not confined to just inference and calculation (which would fall under ratio).

People love to take extreme positions, because they’re easy and satisfies an emotional itch they have, not because they’re correct. The same can be said about government regulation which is analogically similar. You have those who fallaciously infer that, because government regulation can go wrong, it is therefore bad (contra abusus non tollit usum). Others take opposing socialist views.

People should instead think in terms of ends. Human beings are social animals. We have obligations toward others (here, the community). That includes obligations that concern the environment that the community occupies. So the fruitful focus of energy and debate should be what this means for the community (what are these obligations, and why) and if and how to regulate them.

One of the most offensive beliefs in this context, one that has been normalized, is that a house is an investment.

That really depends. Some research benefits more from solitary study and work. Saturating everything with "collaboration" is not always the best way. It an be an impediment.

(Of course, when we use technology and read books, there is a remote participation in the social as these are cultural and thus social products, but that's not what is meant here.)

Who cares? You seem to be putting the cart before the horse. Collaboration is something you do if there is a reason and a benefit for doing so, not something you do for it's own sake.

And look, he found something interesting working alone. Now he can share it with NASA.

It's nice to be able to freely explore topics.

I have to agree that the screen narrative is often overly simplistic and perhaps functions as a convenient scapegoat for the other failures (family instability, an absent father, etc.). People are always trying to look for ways to absolve themselves of their responsibility. I think the author makes a good point here. For instance, if your father is uninvolved and your family life is unhealthy (pathological, absent, or smothering), social media on phones are an obvious escape that's within easy reach. With the disintegration of all sorts of social common places (look at the emptiness of playgrounds today), the snowball effect of social media use, and the shift of incentives the existence of social media introduce, social media become increasingly entrenched.

That being said, we cannot discount the manner in which social media do affect people once they've been pulled in. I think most people who have left social media have noticed the reduction of what you might call psychological turbulence. Social media companies are for-profit and morally nihilistic, and like drug dealers, they have an interest in keeping people hooked, often through harmful means. Social media companies are not acting in the best interest of their users. They are acting in the financial interest of their clients and their own pockets. And the software architecture of phones can act as an enabler, like a pocket slot machine, by design.

So it's not either/or. It's more of a question of where you ought to assign responsibility for which observed facts.

"Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts."

I don't know how impressive these statistics are. What needs to be considered are the causes. Like, sure, fewer teen pregnancies and less drug use sounds good on paper, but why are these the case? Is it because teens are more virtuous and responsible today? Is it because they've become more selective about who they hang out with, avoiding contact with bad influences? Is it because family life is healthy and models healthy relations? Or is the reason simply a lack of opportunity, because of total social isolation, social underdevelopment, lack of access, or pornography use? The murder rate might drop if you cut off everyone's hands, but I would hardly consider that a victory.

Indeed, and that's an important distinction.

Just war [0] proponents will argue both. For instance, targeting civilians/civilian infrastructure is gravely immoral (the decimation part), but also any armed conflict is unlikely to be successful and thus would be immoral on the grounds that there is no reasonable chance of success (the conquer part). But frankly, in this case, we don't even meet most jus ad bellum criteria, let along jus in bello.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/

> You need to persuade the court you can have divorce.

What makes you think no-fault divorce is desirable? Stable marriages are integral not only to the individual well-being of those who are married, but to a healthy society in general. No-fault divorce is one of the worst developments in the West, because it feeds mediocrity, selfishness, convenience, and self-indulgence. Requiring a grave reason seems utterly sensible. Do vows mean nothing? Are they just nice little lies to tell each other?

So, making civil divorce more difficult to obtain is beneficial, because individuals are weak, and indeed one of the purposes of the law in general is to teach and to help guide people toward a good life. So, here, by making divorce more difficult, it assists in getting couples to work their issues out. Speaking from experience, I know marriage forces a kind of ultimatum: either ship up as a human being—either keep chiseling away at becoming a better person by becoming a better spouse—or prepare for a miserable marriage. And let's not flatter ourselves: many people choose the latter and reach for the easy way out with divorce.

Appealing to Western hyper-individualism falls on deaf ears, because we've seen the effects of hyper-individualism. Collectivism is bad, but the extreme of hyper-individualism isn't good, either. Why would you want to replicate the tangible failures of the West in your country?

It's not so surprising. When cultures slide into decadence, they seldomly do so abruptly. It often occurs thin slice by thin slice. Once you accept one seemingly thin moral concession, it is easier to accept the next because you've shortened the distance. Not only that, but with each moral concession, you become more willing to accept still greater concessions as you become increasingly detached from reality. And we shouldn't forget the role of cognitive dissonance. The notion that the consensus about what is normal can be wrong is very uncomfortable for many.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Perhaps it makes some people uncomfortable about their own jobs. In any case, it's not uncommon for people to moralize about something they're not doing, but given the opportunity to do that thing for some handsome reward (good pay, prestige, technically interesting work, etc), they easily rationalize their choice to participate in that thing.

I would say the research university is getting comeuppance.

Pedagogy is the primary purpose of educational institutions. That includes universities. However, when research is placed first, you are often left with mediocre teachers, because "who cares?" They were hired to do research and lend the university that kind of prestige; teaching is an afterthought squeezed into the spaces that remain.

And frankly, we haven't the faintest clue today what education is even for. That doesn't bode well.

Add to this the other troubles facing the university, like declining attendance, skyrocketing costs, and AI cheating and we're in for a very interesting transition indeed.

What I find interesting is how the tone seems to have changed in swathes of tech industry. Until LLMs were a thing, techno-optimism and sola technologia fundamentalism seems to have been a more prominent fetish. When LLMs began having a practical and tangible effect, much of the same cohort seems to have pivoted toward aversion. If this is true—and this perception could be an artifact of selection bias driven by those with the loudest voices, though I strongly suspect it is not that entirely—then it cannot be denied how self-serving it is. Sure, we can automate away all sorts of jobs, confident that our own is the only constant and the one thing that would survive automation. But then, the cunning of reality cut down that hubris.

Of course, I do think technology ought to be adopted with prudence and wisdom. We must always remember the purpose of technology which is serving the objective human good, but to be able to do that requires more than narrow technical savvy. You need a wise and substantive grasp of the broader context within which technology is located.

> It's a pejorative removed from it's historical context.

It utterly depends on historical context. Intelligent people understand antonomasia and eponymy.

> Actual Luddites and Pharisees would have not agreed that they were against technology or legalistic hypocrites

That's neither here nor there.