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Complexity + Stupidity

Sam Harris chats with David Krakauer head of the complexity mecca — Santa Fe Institute. SFI offers some free programmes of real substance and difficulty well worth signing up for in an attempt to offset the illiteracy of philosophers on unavoidable matters of complexity. complexitycomputational intelligencecomputational modelingDavid KrakauerethicsneurosciencePhilosophyPhilosophy of mindPhysicssam harrissanta fe institutescience

Does science have all the answers?

The eminently sensible and intellectually honest Susan Haack — an  evidence-based philosopher who rightly rejects the epistemic immodesty characteristic of the prevailing rationalistic arrogance of philosophers and scientists. Philosophy for such folk is about what to think and not about how to think: whatever else might be attributed to liberalism, it has primarily embodied the idea that conceptions…

Economics in the Era of Natural Computationalism and Big Data

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of John von Neumann’s the “Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata”. Here is the C+T panel and some background to Neumann: Unleashing the Power ‘Turing’s Cathedral. And Von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as…

The Soldier

IF I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is forever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England’s, breathing…

Skin in the Game

In light of the election result I’m amazed by the intelligentsia’s profound tone deafness in the run up to what has just occurred. As I’ve said umpteen times before (deploying surfing analogy), they superficially look at the swell and not the undercurrents. One can’t help feeling a little schadenfreude (I made a few bob at the…

Walker Percy Wednesday 109

Don’t forget Frank Macon, old hunting pal, once a complex old-style sardonic black man, as compact of friendship and ironies as Prince Hamlet, as faithful and abusive as a Russian peasant. Now as distant and ironed out as a bank teller: Have a nice day. ***** We inmates, or rather detainees—assorted con men, politicians, ex-Presidential…