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.
Leon Russell — a truly class act.
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 of the good and goals of action are irreducibly plural. Witness these castrati bleating about dealing with their students who have gone off-reservation — an unambiguous sign of disrespect not only to their students but to their “profession”. With shrinking tenure most are climbing the greasy pole and have no compunction to compromise their ostensible existential commitment to TRUTH. Their so-called “progressivism” is no more than a “grand narrative” notion which on closer scrutiny is subject to all the weaknesses of such constructions. They just can’t (will not) wrap their heads around the stochastic nature of sociality and then are frustrated by trying to shoehorn reality into their favored mono-maniacal outlook. It is reassuring that computer scientists, applied mathematicians and other complexity theorists at a recent conference, do by contrast, get this fundamental aspect to reality (H/T Jakub Ryszard Matyja).
[Progress] . . . I’m not sure you measure it at all, and I’m not sure you measure it in science either.
Images linked to original sources.
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 a result of Von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. But it was Von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility.
— Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman
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 English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
— Rupert Brooke
Fabulous rendition of this Doris Day classic.
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 bookies, my bets placed some 6 weeks ago). Had they taken the time to dig deeper and by-pass the traditional complicitous media gatekeepers and their own smug echo chambers, the outcome could have been otherwise. I again refer people to Taleb’s post of March this year and Eric Weinstein’s graphic below.
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 aides, white-collar crooks, impaired physicians pushing pills, mercy killers, EPA inspectors on the take from lumber and oil barons—criminals all, but on the whole engaging and nonmurderous. And next door, Hope Haven, a community of impaired priests, burned-out ministers and rabbis, none criminal, none detained, but all depressed, nutty, or alcoholic, generally all three, who had not run afoul of the law as we had but had just conked out, and so had great sympathy for us and made themselves available.
*****
This pair and I were sitting in the prison library one afternoon, the Birmingham dentist reading Stars and Bars, a new New Right magazine published at Fort Sumter, South Carolina; the New York lawyer reading The New York Review of Books. I was reading a new history of the Battle of the Somme, a battle which, with the concurrent Battle of Verdun, seemed to me to be events marking the beginning of a new age, an age not yet named. In the course of these two battles, two million young men were killed toward no discernible end. As Dr. Freud might have said, the age of thanatos had begun.
These two fellows had argued violently at table about racism in the South and the crypto-communism of Northern liberals.
An appropriately dissonant rendition.
