“The Art of Not-Having-to-Ask” review by Maria Popova
Originally published as a postscript of Amanda Palmer’a The “Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help”
Below an excerpt – read full post at brain pickings.
“We are embodied spirits who need raw material, both physical and spiritual, to create. But we forget that we are also social beasts who need not slash through the bramble of those needs alone.
In Buddhism and other ancient Eastern traditions, there is a beautiful concept connoted by the Pali word dana (pronounced DAH-nah), often translated as the virtue of generosity. But at its heart is something far more expansive — a certain quality of open-handedness in dynamic dialogue with need and organically responsive to it. The practice ofdana has sustained the Buddhist tradition for two and a half millennia — monks give their teachings freely, and the lay people who benefit from them give back to the monks by making sure their sustenance needs are met.Continue reading
“Future reading” by Craig Mod
Craig Mod’s tale of rise and fall of his enchantment over digital books. A critical view on how current closed ebooks platforms controlled by Amazon and Apple contributes to stagnating digital books development. Article from aeon magazine.
“From 2009 to 2013, every book I read, I read on a screen. And then I stopped. (…)
By 2009, it was impossible to ignore the Kindle. (…)
The Kindle was all of that and more. Neatly bundled up. I was in love.
(…) Granite, wood, wax, silk, paper, metal type, the Gutenberg press, Manutius’s octavo editions, Penguin paperbacks, desktop publishing software, digital type, on‑demand printing, .epub: the evolutionary path of ‘books’ has been punctuated by technological changes large and small. And so, too, with the Kindle.
(…) Containers matter. They shape stories and the experience of stories. Choose the right binding, cloth, trim size, texture of paper, margins and ink, and you will strengthen the bond between reader and text. Choose badly and the object becomes a wedge between reader and text.
(…) I was critical of Kindle typography and layouts from day one, but I assumed that these errors would be remedied quickly. My book notes felt locked away in Amazon’s ecosystem, but I assumed they would eventually produce better interfaces or export options for more rigorous readers.
(…) But in the past two years, something unexpected happened: I lost the faith. Continue reading
Interledger connectors protocol
Interledger is an open protocol suite for sending payments across different ledgers. Like routers on the Internet, connectors route packets of money across independent payment networks. The open architecture and minimal protocol enable interoperability for any value transfer system. Interledger is not tied to any one company, blockchain, or currency.
“A Protocol for Interledger Payments
Stefan Thomas & Evan SchwartzContinue reading
“How We Shape What We Call Reality” by Maria Popova
Posted on brain pickings:
“David Bohm: Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.
Matthieu Ricard: No matter how complex our instruments may be, no matter how sophisticated and subtle our theories and calculations, it’s still our consciousness that finally interprets our observations. And it does so according to its knowledge and conception of the event under consideration. It’s impossible to separate the way consciousness works from the conclusions it makes about an observation. The various aspects that we make out in a phenomenon are determined not only by how we observe, but also by the concepts that we project onto the phenomenon in question.”
Jobless future
If you’re worried about your kids and the fact that More than half of students chasing dying careers you are probably right. If you think that electing a career that is not dying will help them you are probably wrong. Of course this and other Odradeks will outlive parents, but the dismissal is not a kafkan one. Problem is it is likely the case that the problem is not which careers, but more likely ‘careers’ itself is becoming an obsolete term.
Colleagues seem to be there for a while, though we might have to be Ready for a Robot Colleague.
In a broader view on workmate, A.I. may give us a ride in preparation for a new time occupation future. Perhaps it’s better for us to Don’t Worry, Smart Machines Will Take Us With Them. remember those kids chasing dying careers? That’s only part time – the rest of it they are drooling obsessively at smart phones as much as we let them. It may well be that the case that this is their robot education in the making.
Intelligence Design – natural selection and technology
Starting from a no-fun that more people have died from selfies than shark attacks this year as a anecdotal case for interaction between natural selection and technology. It’s too far a shot, since anyone may well ponder that shark killing were never a key driver of human selection to begin with.
Having sex, tho, have always been a key driver. And looking good to potential mates does have a play in this. In this light the selfie-selection link start being not so naive. Even then, selfie is too short a fling to make an impact in the big picture. As a further analogy, though, it is arguable that selfie is the current mode of a mediated relation that has for a long time being around in human kind reproduction.
If we consider the big impact some fundamental technological innovations such as tool making, language, and culture have had in human survival and reproduction abilities, then the evidence turns around; it is very hard to deny technology has not been one of the key drivers of evolution even before homo sapiens.
A few short, recent articles on this discuss Is Technology Unnatural—Or Is It ‘What Makes Us Human’? makign the point that technology is part of us. Looking forward, A Genomics Revolution: Evolution by Natural Selection to Evolution by Intelligent Direction points to the fact that if in the role of technology in human evolution was rather passive, genomics can shift that into a very active designing. But then if Science Says the Internet Is Turning Us into Shallow Thinkers, what sort of evolution would technology-driven world lead us to?
What Happens Next Will Amaze you – speech by Maciej Cegłowski
Transcript of IdleWords.com’s Maciej Cegłowski talk at FREMTIDENS INTERNET conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
This is a very good speech but not too short – brevity is for the weak in top of Idle Words page goes as a reminder. Topics covered:
- The corporate side of our culture of total surveillance – The odd story of how advertisers destoyed our online privacy and then found themselves swindled by robots.
- Six fixes Maciej Cegłowski thinks could restore Internet privacy.
- Capitalists who act like central planners, and an industry that insists on changing the world without even being able to change San Francisco:
“The Struggle to Define What Artificial Intelligence Actually Means” by Gary Lea
“When we talk about artificial intelligence (AI) – (…) – what do we actually mean?
(…) having a usable definition of AI – and soon – is vital for regulation and governance because laws and policies simply will not operate without one.
(…) Defining the terms: artificial and intelligence
For regulatory purposes, “artificial” is, hopefully, the easy bit. (…) , leaves the knottier problem of “intelligence”.
From a philosophical perspective, “intelligence” is a vast minefield, especially if treated as including one or more of “consciousness”, “thought”, “free will” and “mind”. (…)
Let’s take a step back and ask what a regulator’s immediate interest is here?
I would say that it is the work products of AI scientists and engineers, and any public welfare or safety risks that might arise from those products.
Logically, then, it is the way that the majority of AI scientists and engineers treat intelligence” that is of most immediate concern.(…) read full post
“The Case for Teaching Ignorance” By JAMIE HOLMES
From NY Times Op-Ed
“In the mid-1980s, a University of Arizona surgery professor, Marlys H. Witte, proposed teaching a class entitled “Introduction to Medical and Other Ignorance.” (…)
(…) She wanted her students to recognize the limits of knowledge and to appreciate that questions often deserve as much attention as answers. Eventually, the American Medical Association funded the class, which students would fondly remember as “Ignorance 101.”
Classes like hers remain rare, but in recent years scholars have made a convincing case that focusing on uncertainty can foster latent curiosity, while emphasizing clarity can convey a warped understanding of knowledge.
(…) By inviting scientists of various specialties to teach his students about what truly excited them — not cold hard facts but intriguing ambiguities — Dr. Firestein sought to rebalance the scales.
Presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.
(…) Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.
(…) The resulting state of uncertainty, psychologists have shown, intensifies our emotions: not only exhilaration and surprise, but also confusion and frustration.
The borderland between known and unknown is also where we strive against our preconceptions to acknowledge and investigate anomalous data, a struggle Thomas S. Kuhn described in his 1962 classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” (…)
The study of ignorance — or agnotology, a term popularized by Robert N. Proctor, a historian of science at Stanford — is in its infancy. (…)
Our students will be more curious — and more intelligently so — if, in addition to facts, they were equipped with theories of ignorance as well as theories of knowledge.” Read full story
Plurality of the self
Seth R. Bordenstein and Kevin R. Theis’s “Host Biology in Light of the Microbiome: Ten Principles of Holobionts and Hologenomes” combines impressive qualities. It suggests no less than a holistic redefinition of zoology, botany, and biology. And they are careful to re-state historical achievements of Darwin, Mendel and modern scientists in this new framework; animals and plants are more appropriately understood as a mutli-species association than autonomous individuals. Both at biologic and genetic level.
As a sense of justice welcome the new status of our former ‘junior’ associates, I wonder how the implosion of the self into a multitude of beings fits well in a society that may overvalue individuality. Instead of a dissolution of the self into a common spirituality, we see the multiplication of ‘I’ into multiple individuals. The untold story of mitochondria et alii paints egocentric narrative in a more altruist light.
This does not take the great service such reconstruction may do to science. Excerpts below: