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The Cult of DINK
Sadhika Pant
 January 19 2025 at 07:23 am
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In the culture I grew up in, children were seen as blessings, not burdens. My grandmother would often remark that a full house—however chaotic—was a happy house. It’s a mindset that feels increasingly foreign in today’s world, where we trade the fullness of life for the sterile comforts of control. Among the social circles in which I find myself, a new fad has caught on with surprising fervour — the DINK lifestyle. Dual Income, No Kids. The acronym alone carries an air of smugness, a badge of honour that suggests its practitioners have outwitted the drudgery of parenthood. These are typically people employed in white collar professions that, while demanding are not unreasonably so, granting them both a respectable income and a lifestyle of conspicuous ease within India's most developed and cosmopolitan enclaves. In an era that genuflects at the altar of self-fulfillment, this trend is seen by its acolytes as a mark of contemporary enlightenment and a rebellion against the tyranny of tradition and biology. Two incomes, unfettered by the grubby demands of infants, represent freedom, self-actualization, and an unencumbered pursuit of personal pleasure. To me, however, it represents a hollow triumph, a short-sighted pursuit of comfort at the expense of meaning and legacy. Of course, the appeal of the DINK arrangement is obvious. The modern DINK couple, unburdened by the inconvenient cries of an infant or the looming spectre of college tuition fees, can indulge in what marketers euphemistically call “experiences.” They can tour the vineyards of Bordeaux or lounge on the beaches of Bali — all without interruption from a toddler tugging at their sleeves. But at what cost does this freedom come? To dismiss children as mere impediments to personal pleasure is to misunderstand the very nature of fulfillment. True satisfaction does not lie in the accumulation of experiences or possessions; it lies in the assumption of responsibility, and in the knowledge that one’s life contributes to something greater than oneself. DINK adherents often frame their choice as a rational decision, the product of self-awareness and a refusal to conform to outdated societal expectations. But beneath this veneer of sophistication lies a deeper malaise—one that reflects not just a rejection of parenthood but a rejection of responsibility itself. The modern ethos insists that individuals owe nothing to anyone beyond themselves. At its core, the DINK philosophy sees life not as a duty but as a buffet, from which one is entitled to take only the choicest morsels. In this worldview, children are not a continuation of the human story, nor a source of joy, growth, and meaning, but rather obstacles to a lifestyle of comfort. This hedonistic calculus — where the value of an action is determined solely by the inconvenience it might impose — betrays an impoverished understanding of what it means to live a fulfilling life. The Infantilization of Adulthood Among the more disquieting consequences of the DINK lifestyle is its perpetuation of what might be called the infantilization of adulthood. In eschewing parenthood, many DINKs remain arrested in adolescence, their lives revolving around self-indulgence and immediate gratification. Parenthood, whatever its tribulations, compels one to reckon with the unrelenting reality of sacrifice. In avoiding parenthood, the DINK couple often avoids the moral and emotional growth that comes with it. They may delight in their freedom to flit between exotic locales or attend late-night concerts, but this freedom comes at the cost of an engagement with life’s most pressing questions: What do we owe to the future? How do we find meaning in the face of inevitable mortality? In renouncing parenthood, DINK followers leave behind not just the cries of infants but the echoes of posterity. As someone raised in the frugality of a middle-class household, the DINK philosophy appears to me not only shallow, but impoverished in its understanding of fulfillment. I think of my father, who wore shoes so worn that their soles were patched with glue, yet ensured that I had the indulgence of choosing footwear to match my outfits. My mother would recount the 'hard years' with a mixture of nostalgia and pride, describing how they saved up to acquire one luxury at a time: first a refrigerator, then a washing machine, then a television, piece by piece transforming their modest house into a home. I remember my father’s old scooter, its rattling engine carrying him to work through the sweltering summers and biting winters. On Saturdays, he would stop by a kebab shop near his office, the aroma of grilled meat marking his early return home to share lunch with us. Yes, for all their sacrifices, my parents’ lives were well-lived and my childhood, happy. A False Sense of Virtue What makes the DINK phenomenon particularly galling is the self-righteousness with which it is often promoted. Its adherents frame their choice not merely as a personal preference but as an ethical stance. They claim, for example, that forgoing children is an altruistic act, reducing their carbon footprint in an overpopulated world. This argument, while superficially appealing, collapses under scrutiny. First, it assumes that the world is better off without their hypothetical offspring, a curiously self-loathing position. Second, it ignores the reality that the most sustainable societies are often those with stable populations, not declining ones. A world filled with DINKs would soon face the grim consequences of demographic collapse: aging populations, economic stagnation, and a cultural void where once there was vitality. Moreover, the notion that one’s contribution to humanity ends with paying taxes and living a "low-impact" life is a starkly reductive view of human potential. Human beings are not merely economic units or environmental burdens; they are creators, thinkers, and contributors to a collective legacy. The childless DINK may plant a tree or adopt a dog, but these acts, however admirable, cannot replace the immense, intangible contribution of raising a child who might grow to cure diseases, compose symphonies, or simply bring joy to others. In rejecting parenthood, the DINK couple unwittingly undermines the very social structures that allow their own lifestyle to exist. Who will care for them in their old age if not the children of others? Who will sustain the institutions, economies, and communities they now take for granted? The irony is stark: DINKs depend on the sacrifices of parents who choose to raise the next generation even as they disavow the necessity of such sacrifices themselves. The Meaning of Life A few months ago, I attended a wedding where many of the guests were DINKs. The event was luxurious—an open bar, gourmet food, a live band. But what struck me was the absence of the familiar chaos that comes with bringing children to Indian weddings: no running around, no whiny voices, no spilled juice. In criticizing the DINK phenomenon, I do not mean to suggest that all couples must have children or that parenthood is the only path to a meaningful life. There are, of course, many ways to contribute to the human story. Yet the celebration of the DINK lifestyle as an aspirational ideal reveals a troubling impoverishment of our collective imagination. It reveals a society that has lost sight of what it means to live well, mistaking convenience for contentment and individualism for fulfillment. The issue is not simply one of demographics or economics but of existential significance. To live for oneself alone is to live a diminished existence, one that denies the richness and complexity of the human experience. Parenthood, for all its challenges, offers a glimpse of transcendence—a chance to participate in something greater than oneself, to leave a legacy that endures beyond one’s brief time on Earth. A society of DINKs may be rich in comfort and leisure, but it will be poor in purpose, and eventually, it will be poor in people. Image source: Gilmore Girls (2000-2007)
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Individualism without Individuality
Sadhika Pant
 January 25 2025 at 11:46 am
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We are told that man is freer than ever before. Free from the constraints of tradition, from the exacting expectations of church and community, even from the obligations of family responsibilities. To a large extent, that is. He is now the master of his own destiny. He stands, or so he believes, a triumphant individual, unshackled and self-made. Yet, is this purported individualism is largely illusory? We are drowning in individualism, and still, true individuality has never been rarer. This is not merely a contradiction; it is a triumph of superficiality. The great promise of individualism—the cultivation of a rich, distinctive self—has been reduced to an empty performance, a parade of interchangeable personas cobbled together from mass-produced cultural fragments. Take the contemporary obsession with self-expression. Never before have we had so many tools to broadcast our identities to the world, and never before have these identities been so depressingly alike. The modern individual asserts his uniqueness through slogans printed on t-shirts, hashtags appended to selfies, and consumer goods carefully selected to signal membership in a particular tribe. Beneath this clamorous insistence on "being oneself," there is a certain sameness. This is individualism without individuality: a society in which people mistake choice for character and novelty for depth. It is a world in which the self is not something to be discovered or cultivated but something to be assembled from a menu of pre-approved options. The result is a kind of paradoxical collectivism, in which the pursuit of uniqueness leads not to the creation of truly distinctive individuals but to the proliferation of shallow "types". Even those who pride themselves on being “different” often do so in ways that are predictable and derivative, their rebellion little more than a mirror image of the conformity they claim to reject. This is precisely why social media algorithms are so adept at "hacking" our attention—offering us what we think we desire, when in fact, they only serve to amplify our own conformity, masked as individualism. This is embarrassing, given that we live in an age of endless self-definition. Identity has come to mean little more than a series of banal declarations. Is it to be found in what kind of music you like, whether you are an early bird or a night owl, a cat person or a dog person, whether you like to wear pink or black, what you do in the bedroom and whom you do it with, what your pronouns are, whether you like the Harry Potter books more or the movies? Is identity truly the sum of our preferences only? Whatever else the modern individual may be, he is a consumer, endlessly manipulated by advertising, algorithms, and the tyranny of trends. His sense of self is not the product of deep reflection or hard-won experience but the sum of his possessions, his online personas, and his slavish adherence to the dictates of fashion and ideology. He is, in the words of Kierkegaard, “levelled,” stripped of true individuality and reduced to a mere cipher in the great leveling machine of modernity. This hollowing out of the self has consequences, not only for the individual but for society as a whole. To fixate on the superficial markers of who we are is to neglect the deeper question of what we ought to become. It is not about what we like or what we do but about what we find worth striving for, how we respond to the trials of life and how others see us. While the modern individual seldom acknowledges any authority beyond his own ego, it must be remembered that it is the family and the community who hold the ultimate authority in determining who one is. They decide if we are a skilled craftsman or a poor one, a devoted father or a neglectful one, a dutiful son or an ungrateful one. Identity, therefore, must be found beyond trivia, in the active pursuit of character. If we are to reclaim the promise of individualism, we must begin by rejecting the counterfeit version that masquerades as the real thing. We must resist the temptation to define ourselves by what we consume or how we are perceived and instead turn our attention inward, to the arduous but rewarding work of self-cultivation. For individualism without individuality is not freedom but enslavement—a shallow mimicry of the self, destined to collapse under the weight of its own emptiness.
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Reasons to do Research and Development: Index
Octaveoctave
 January 21 2025 at 04:27 pm
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What follows is the first of a series of essays discussing research and development. I focus in these essays particularly on how why anyone should do R&D, and why anyone should fund R&D. This first essay is just the index for the entire series of essays. Reasons to do Research and Development Part I Abstract Introduction to R&D Preface Questions about R&D R&D History R&D Currently in the US Analysis of R&D Reasons To Do Research And Development Part II Why Do We as a Society Do Research and Development Types of research and development 1. short term R&D 2. long term R&D Purposes of R&D Purposes of Short Term R&D Purposes of Long Term R&D Notes Reasons To Do Research And Development Part III Reasons Not to Do Research and Development Notes Reasons To Do Research And Development Part IV Design of Organizations For Research and Development History of Organizations for Research and Development Current R&D Organizations in the US Cursory Thoughts About R&D and R&D Organizations Notes Reasons To Do Research And Development Part V Justification of Spending on Research and Development Short Term, Definite Research Long Term, Open Ended, Blue Sky Research Comparison of Results of Short and Long Term R&D Some Instructive Quotes on the Topic Down to Brass Tacks: Funding The size of effort devoted to Long Term Research compared to Short Term Research Who Decides The Topics of Long Term Research? How Can We Justify Blue Sky Research? Notes Reasons to do Research and Development Part VI Conclusions Summary
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The Sin of Prosperity
Sadhika Pant
 February 01 2025 at 07:05 am
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There is something deeply comforting, one might almost say delicious, in despising the rich. They make, after all, the perfect villains in so many narratives: the champagne-swillers, art-collectors, the degenerates whose very existence serves as an affront to our collective sense of virtue. The stage for this indignation is not some bleak Dickensian street corner, but the gaping maw of social media. This is where hatred finds its fullest expression. A casual scroll through the comments on social media posts of celebrities, public figures, or otherwise rich people in our own lives reveals a great deal of outrage. This contempt, however, is rarely self-reflective. People in my own circle, most of whom would be in the top 5% in the country — a fact they often overlook — are the loudest in condemning those richer than themselves. Indeed, to judge the rich, one need not be poor; one need only be sufficiently hypocritical. This is quite funny to someone who periodically zones out of such situations: the affluent decrying the affluent, the middle class deriding the upper class, and so on down the socio-economic ladder, until one reaches the poorest of the poor—who, perhaps mercifully, are too busy surviving to engage in such petty jealousies. A big, fat wedding (which is quite common in India) invites comments like “Why waste so much money? Give it to charity.” The venom reserved for the rich has undertones of socialist righteousness — an unspoken belief that wealth, any wealth, is inherently ill-gotten, and thereby immoral, while poverty is a badge of honour and moral purity. It is almost as if we long for a world in which we were all equally miserable, huddled together in the egalitarian squalor of scarcity. The irony of the fact that such anti-capitalist posturing is greatest in societies that have benefitted the most from capitalism, is glaring. But I ask a simple question: If wealth is so contemptible, why do we all pursue it? Why do we rise early, endure the tedium of work, and strive for promotions? Why do we invest, save, and dream of a better tomorrow? What is the plan when we, someday, become what we now scorn? Are we going to suddenly find ourselves loathing the trajectory we’ve worked for all these years? The answer, of course, is that we do not truly despise wealth; we despise its absence. The world has managed the remarkable feat of elevating one of the basest human emotions—envy—into a virtue. The hatred of the rich is often nothing more than the envy of the not-yet-rich. It is easy to scorn the destination when one has not yet arrived. This hypocrisy manifests in the smallest of interactions. Not long ago, I was rebuked by an acquaintance for being "too invested in first-world problems." This from someone who spends his days debating gender-neutral washrooms in the workplace and agonizing over the carbon footprint of his coffee. The truth is, if you’re in the upper middle class, if work at a corporate office and/ or live in a metropolitan city in India, chances are you live in the so-called first world for most of your day. You’re surrounded by calls for political correctness in your workplace, debates over pronouns among your colleagues, and climate-change pressures from your circle of friends. It is fashionable, of course, to profess concern for the downtrodden—the villager in Bihar who cannot feed his children, the labourer in Delhi who toils in the shadow of prosperity. Yet this concern is, more often than not, a way to signal virtue while living comfortably insulated from the realities one claims to lament. I grew up in a middle-class household in which people worried about fuel prices, the spike in onion costs after a bad crop season, or how to stretch a bar of soap just a little longer. Today, my conversations are different. Now, I talk about the rising cost of airfare, the impossibility of affording a home, or the political correctness in my office. Am I to feel guilty that I no longer have to worry about onions or soap? Should I pretend I can’t afford these things to placate the morally indignant ones? Should I apologise for the world I inhabit? Another experience comes to mind, one that fits perfectly into this theme of moral guilt-tripping. Just last week, a woman appeared at my door with a clipboard, demanding a donation for her NGO that, supposedly, feeds poor children. The month before, it was someone else, pushing for donations to save koala bears. And before that, it was a man insisting I contribute to a fund for autistic children. It seems that every few weeks, a new cause materialises at my doorstep, clipboard and all, demanding my charity. Now, don’t get me wrong—asking for donations isn’t what I have a problem with. It’s the manner in which they do it. These people weren’t remotely polite. From the moment they knocked, they were rude, as if my refusal to donate was some kind of personal affront. The moment I said "no," they attempted to guilt me. One lady even pointed to my apartment and sneered, "You live in such a nice neighbourhood, can’t you spare something for hungry children?" As if the price of my rent made me morally obligated to hand over my wallet on command to whoever asked. And when I did agree to donate? That wasn’t enough either. They’d then shame me for the amount, pointing to other names on their clipboard with larger contributions, implying that my donation wasn’t worthy unless it matched the most generous. I once offered to donate clothes and rice, instead of cash for the homeless—something tangible, something I could be sure would go to those in need. But that, too, was beneath them. They turned up their noses as if I’d insulted them by suggesting an alternative. And when I asked how I could even be certain that my donation was reaching the intended cause, they didn’t even bother with an answer. Instead, they shrugged and said, "You’re rich enough to not worry about a few thousand rupees." It’s astonishing, really—the audacity to not only demand my money but also to judge my level of compassion based on the square footage of my home, by the visible trappings of ‘privilege’. And the worst part is, that while I am disagreeable enough to refuse, I know there are many people who are agreeable and shame-sensitive who would relent unwillingly. But what, one might ask, is the purpose of this relentless guilt-mongering? It is not to alleviate poverty or to redress injustice; rather, it is to enforce a new form of social control. The wealthy must not only give but also grovel, not only donate but also atone. They must apologise for their air conditioning, their vacations, their apartment, their car, their soap and onions. And so, the wheel turns. The man who walks dreams of a bicycle, the man on a bicycle dreams of a car, and the man in a car dreams of a chauffeur-driven ride. But let a man reach his destination, and suddenly, the road itself is suspect—crooked, unfair, paved at the expense of those who still walk. It is not equality that people long for, but mobility. Equality is not the natural state of things; it never has been. It is a wish, a longing, a dream. But mobility is real. It exists in the sweat of the worker, in the gamble of the merchant, in the silent, desperate prayers of those who wish their children to have more than they did. And if there is resentment, it is for the unbearable knowledge that the ladder exists and must be climbed. There is nothing more bitter than the sight of another man ascending. Image source: Gossip Girl (2007-2012)
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The Taxation Bait and Switch
Nancy Churchill
 January 13 2025 at 07:51 pm
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Recent reports reveal that Washington state Democrats are considering a range of tax hikes to address a projected $12 billion budget shortfall over the next four years. A leaked email from State Senator Noel Frame (D-Seattle), a member of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, outlined several potential revenue options. The Washington State Standard report includes Frame’s slides and graphics, showcasing the marketing pitch lawmakers will use to justify taking more of your hard-earned money. Here are some of the key proposals currently under consideration: Taxes on Businesses: An employer payroll tax has been proposed to implement a tax on total compensation, including wages, salaries, and stock options. This tax increase could potentially affect ALL businesses, not just large corporations. Also proposed is an additional 1% B&O surcharge on the “largest” corporations. Of course, it would be easy during this session or another year to broaden the scope of this surcharge to include many more than the “largest” corporations. Taxes on the Wealthy: A wealth tax of 1% tax on financial intangible assets exceeding $50 million. Some examples of “intangible assets” would include stocks and bonds, mutual funds, cryptocurrency, certificates of deposit or money market funds. You may not hold these financial instruments, but your company’s pension fund probably does, so this isn’t just a “wealth tax.” Also under consideration, raising the existing capital gains tax to 9.9%. Capital gains usually apply to sales of stock or real estate. For example, this tax increase would likely reduce the income you might receive from the sale of your home, because nearly 10% of any profit will go straight to the government. Again, this isn’t just a “wealth tax.” Taxes on the Working Class: Worst tax idea of the session is a Property Tax Levy Cap Increase. The proposal would raise the cap on annual property tax increases from 1% to 3%. There’s also a proposed firearms and ammunition tax, which would Imposing an 11% tax on firearms, ammunition, and related parts. Then, there’s a Sales Tax on Storage Units: Reclassifying storage unit rentals as retail transactions, subjecting them to sales tax. These proposals aim to generate additional revenue to address the state's budget deficit and fund public services. However, they have sparked heated debate among lawmakers and constituents. Republicans argue the state has a spending problem, not a revenue problem, and warn of the economic fallout these taxes could bring. Villainizing "The Wealthy Few" Senator Frame has advised fellow Democrats to cast "The Wealthy Few" as the villains in this push for higher taxes. But the reality is that higher taxes on wealthier earners often incentivize them to leave the state entirely. Case in point: Jeff Bezos reportedly saved $1 billion in taxes by moving to Florida. When wealthy individuals leave, they take their tax dollars with them, leaving the rest of us to foot the bill for Olympia’s reckless spending. Meanwhile, taxes on businesses may sound appealing, but they’re a classic bait-and-switch. Business taxes are just hidden taxes on consumers. To stay afloat, businesses must pass tax costs onto customers through higher prices. If they don’t, they risk bankruptcy. Don’t let Democrats demonize business owners—large or small—as the villains. At the end of the day, you pay these taxes when prices go up. The Push for Higher Property Taxes Why would junior taxing districts want higher property taxes? Junior taxing districts—such as hospitals, fire departments, schools and libraries—rely heavily on property taxes for funding. With record-high inflation, employees in these sectors understandably expect wage increases to keep up with rising costs. Many public employers already include cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) of 3% or more. However, with property tax revenues capped at 1% annual growth, districts are struggling to meet payroll demands. That’s why they’re lobbying the Legislature to raise the levy cap from 1% to 3%. Property Taxes Have Already Increased Despite the levy cap, property taxes have already risen for two reasons: higher home values and Inflation. Home values are higher because a tight housing market has driven up home prices, leading to higher assessed values and, consequently, higher taxes. The next reason is inflation in construction costs. Skyrocketing costs for building materials, appliances, labor and other inputs have made new homes more expensive, which also raises property values (and taxes) across the board. In short, taxing districts are already collecting more revenue as property values climb. For example, in Pierce County, residential property values have increased 6%, which will impact the assessed taxes. A levy cap increase isn’t about fairness—it’s about squeezing even more from property owners. The Case Against Property Taxes Not only should the property tax levy cap remain at 1%, but I would argue property taxes should be abolished altogether. These districts should be funded in entirely different ways—not on the backs of property owners. Here are some key constitutional arguments against property taxes. Violation of Property Rights: Property taxes undermine private property rights. If taxes must be paid indefinitely, property is never fully owned by the individual. “Taking” Without Compensation: Property taxes can be seen as a form of government “taking” under the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits taking private property for public use without just compensation. Unequal Application: Property taxes disproportionately burden property owners compared to renters or those without property, potentially violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Don’t Fall for the Taxation Bait and Switch Washington Democrats are gearing up to push these tax increases in the upcoming legislative session. Don’t be fooled by their arguments that these taxes will only affect “the wealthy” or “big corporations.” The truth is, these costs impact to all of us—everyday consumers and property owners who already face the burden of rising prices and inflation. The problem in Olympia isn’t a lack of revenue; it’s a spending problem. Fortunately, you can “vote” against new tax proposals to raise taxes by submitting comments on new legislation and also by giving testimony in public hearings. Let’s hold our leaders accountable and demand responsible budgeting—not endless tax increases. Nancy Churchill is a writer and educator in rural eastern Washington State, and the state committeewoman for the Ferry County Republican Party. She may be reached at DangerousRhetoric@pm.me. The opinions expressed in Dangerous Rhetoric are her own. Dangerous Rhetoric is available on thinkspot, Rumble and Substack. Support Dangerous Rhetoric SOURCES: 1) Democratic state senator’s email reveals tax ideas WA lawmakers may debate, 12-23-24, Washington State Standard. https://bit.ly/3DF4I2S This source includes a powerpoint with talking points, and a graphic of the potential increases in taxes. 2) Rantz: After accidental leak of Democrat tax plans, will voters fall for the scheme?, 1-2-25, Jason Rantz, https://bit.ly/403S6d4 3) Bezos saves $1 billion in taxes after moving out of WA, 12-23-24, Jason Rantz on YouTube, https://bit.ly/4h5Ov5g 4) Washington Democrats leak $15 billion tax increase plans, 12-23-24, The Center Square, https://bit.ly/3PnGsVq 5) Residential property values increase six percent, 6-26-24, Pierce County WA, https://bit.ly/4j5LIdP
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Jordan Peterson Interviews Marc Andreesen
Octaveoctave
 January 18 2025 at 10:21 pm
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A few days ago, Jordan Peterson interviewed venture capitalist Marc Andreesen. I found the interview quite fascinating and I include a link below, along with my notes. I provide the notes so you can scan them quickly to see what they talked about. You can decide if you want to spend the time listening to the whole thing yourself, or not. And you do not have to take notes yourself, or you can use my notes as a starting point if you like. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen https://x.com/JBPpod/status/1880020968342712493 -authored Mosaic and Netscape -AIs are training on Reddit but not 4Chan -Reddit is far left and 4Chan is far right -Can one train AIs on copyrighted data? This is in court right now -if they can't train on copyrighted material, then they can only train on books published before 1923 [JBP says that should be an improvement] -Reinforcement Learning by Human Feedback = RLHF, socializes the AI so it can interact with humans and be polite -many of the people fired from trust and safety groups are now socializing the AIs; they are completely woke and corrupted with the woke mind virus -hyperpowerful avatars of our own flaws -AI safety movement -Marek health: evidence based protocols, individualized, 4.9/5 on trustpilot, code Peterson at checkout to get 10% off -closed government corporate cartel to regulate AI systems, so only 2 or 3 would be allowed to exist -same people and ethic behind social media censorship -society is built on self-sacrifice: an ARC principle -F-U money does not really exist, in practice, because as you get wealthier, you are responsible for more things -original definition of hate speech was anything that makes people uncomfortable -Macedonian bot farms led to censorship efforts because they would create click bait, like fake stories about the Pope dying; engine was built for spam but then applied to politics -everything became "misinformation" including objections to 3 years of covid lockdowns -Andreesen wrote a manifesto -Andreesen got into tech in 1994 -everyone in tech was a liberal progressivism, but that broke down in 2012 (-2017?) -philanthropy is no longer a way to wash your sins -demoralization campaign (including degrowth, woke ideology, etc) has been active in the West for at least 6 decades, against technology and capitalism -James Demoore was fired at Google for giving them feedback they asked for, because they thought their staff would burn the place to the ground -JBP Peterson Academy has an internal website for the 40K students, and they had to throw 4 students out, out of 40K users, to make a huge difference because they were behaving badly online -JBP had several best-sellers with Penguin Random House, and then there was a near revolt with his next book. They just moved JBP's book to a different division and everything was fine, but JBP wonders why they did not just fire the troublemakers -companies are now firing activists -antisocial women use reputation saving and exclusion whereas antisocial men use physical aggression -problems in tech were not just the employees, also the executive team, and also that boards of directors were involved and shareholders were involved and even BlackRock was involved and the Biden administration and the press core and so on -new technologies have enabled reputation savagers in all kinds of ways, while allowing them to be anonymous -when woke arrived, disparate impact regulations and laws became very intensified -illegal in Canada to discriminate not just on the basis of gender identity but also gender expression (fashion) -apply the Rooney Rule for applicants, but then into hiring and promotion and layoffs -Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are formed and are segregated employee groups -tokenization: anyone of a victimhood group is assumed to be incompetent and hired only on that basis -now have ironically have illegal quotas -Spacex required to only hire US citizens but also to hire lots of illegal aliens, but these are incompatible and Spacex would be sued and guilty and at fault either way -same problem with legal requirements to hire the best performing employees but that is also illegal -a Kafka trap
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🚨🚨 Bug Alert 🐜🐜🐜
ts.Support
 January 09 2025 at 05:16 pm
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Update Friday Jan 10, 5:15 pm Pacific 🚨 Bug Fix Update! 🐛✔️Good news! A bug fix was implemented earlier today, and after testing, the thinkspot team believes that pesky bug is officially squashed! 🥳 🙏 We truly appreciate your patience as we worked through this. If you’re still experiencing any issues, please don’t hesitate to email us at support@thinkspot.com 💌 Thank you for being part of our community! ❤️ Update: Thurs. Jan 9, noon Pacific. Some accounts fixed. Still working on a complete fix. Thurs. Jan 9, 9 am Pacific. Ts Support is aware that the "WRITE" button is not working correctly. "Reply" button is also apparently not working correctly (It's displaying the subscription pop-up). Hang in there, we're working on it and will update you asap.
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Reasons To Do Research And Development Part II
Octaveoctave
 January 21 2025 at 04:32 pm
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Why Do We as a Society Do Research and Development People want more. They always want more, and have always wanted more. For example, people want to live longer, healthier lives. They want to be safe and comfortable. They want to enjoy themselves more. They seek personal fulfillment. One of the ways that humans satisfy these desires is through research and development. Types of research and development There are numerous varieties of R&D, but for our purposes, let us distinguish between two major categories: (1) short term, goal-oriented research and development (2) longer term, less-focused research and development [1] Purposes of Short Term R&D Few would dispute that short term R and D to improve products, or to test for safety issues, is worthwhile. Among the direct and immediate benefits of short term R&D are of course innovation, improved military prowess, economic competitiveness and advancement. However, the difficulties start to emerge with projects that are less closely connected with immediate, obvious needs. What about long term efforts, which are not expected to provide fruit for years, decades, centuries or longer? Why should anyone pursue or fund those? Purposes of Long Term R&D There are several reasons why there are benefits to doing longer term research and development. First, it should be noted that it is almost impossible to predict what the results of R&D will be. It is very difficult to forecast exactly how something will be of use in the future. For example, the laser was invented by Theodore Maiman in 1960 at Hughes Aircraft Corporation. The laser, and its predecessor, the maser, had been predicted by Einstein decades earlier. But no one knew quite what to do with this technology when it arrived. As one physicist said at the time, "This is a solution looking for a problem to solve." Maiman could not even get a short report describing his device published since the editors at the journal rejected it. There were early classified projects that relied on using the laser. And in the first couple of years, there were some surgical experiments done with lasers. But it really took at least 10 or 15 years or even more before "bar code readers" (i.e. devices for scanning UPC codes) and laser disks and laser signals sent down fiber optic cables for communications purposes started to emerge. And then the laser started to become an important tool for lots of tasks. If the laser had not been pursued, then we would not have it available for these tasks. But no one could have foreseen any of this. A similar thing happened with the detection of the neutrino at Los Alamos in 1956 by Cowan and Reines. The neutrino's existence had been predicted years before. It took many attempts by Cowan and Reines to detect the neutrino A lot of clever experiments and technologies were invented and designed for this purpose. Once their efforts were successful, their bosses were sneeringly unimpressed and dismissive. Cowan and Reines' managers thought they should do something "useful" for a change instead of playing around with nonsense like morons. In retrospect, the mundane tasks their managers had in mind were completely uninteresting and would make no contribution whatsoever to the future or the people paying for the work, the public. These tasks were a waste of time; basically "busy work". The techniques and technologies Cowan and Reines developed, on the other hand, are still in use today, decades later. The managers making these decisions were failed technical people who were completely unproductive during their careers and were singularly unqualified to make such judgments. This is a very common state of affairs in R&D. In addition, there are a number of vague and indirect potential benefits to R&D. The vaguer indirect benefits include things like a. ennoblement of the human spirit b. inspiration c. aesthetics But even work that initially appears to have only aesthetic value often turns out to be very valuable for assorted applications. A prominent example would be work in number theory which is of foundational use in lots of security and cryptographic systems. No one could have predicted this, decades before. Investigations which appear to only have indirect benefits can produce incredibly important knowledge leading to exotic applications that we cannot envision yet. One of the most important ways that long term research can lead to future applications is the development of new tools in the course of these investigations. The neutrino example demonstrates this, as does the work in number theory, but there are many others. Some fields (like parts of the earth sciences or psychology) make the mistake of attempting to discourage tool development. Then they are invariably surprised when they do not get as richly funded as other areas which are more tool-focused, like many of those in mainstream physics.[2] Another perspective might be provided by comparing research and development to ecosystem management. When one blindly culls out one or more elements of an ecosystem, like the wolves at Yellowstone Park, there are all kinds of unforeseen consequences, and "knock-on" effects, of a secondary, tertiary, quaternary and higher order nature. If one ejects people who are classified as "useless" or worse (often only by one arbitrary failed scientist who has crawled into management and accorded themselves unquestionable infinite power), one can easily upset the entire balance and create a less productive environment. And who are most often targeted as "useless"? Those who are pursuing longer term objectives.[3] Another reason that is frequently stated as a motivating factor behind funding research, particularly of a long term nature, is to "avoid surprises".[4] It should be obvious in both the economic sphere and the military and intelligence domains, an unexpected advance or even a paradigm shift can completely obliterate an organization. This has happened over and over in history.[5] Another reason that people do R&D is that they are exploring. They are amusing themselves. They are playing. They are following their curiosity, and so on. Here are a couple of relevant quotes that bolster this perspective: "What am I to come back for?" -- Eliza Doolittle "For the fun of it! That's why I took you on!"-- Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, Lyrics: Alan Jay Lerner, Book: Alan Jay Lerner, Film: 1964 "Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." -- Richard Feynman "It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending." -- Robert R. Wilson, the first director of Fermilab Notes [1] It is not completely clear what to call this category of research and development activity. Some call it "open-ended research" or "blue sky research". In US military terminology, this area might be classified as 6.1 research. However, since 6.1 research is 'basic research', and 6.2 is 'applied research', how does one categorize applied research, i.e., research which is stimulated by or intended for some practical use, but is of a longer term, more fundamental nature? It is akin to a hybrid of 6.1 and 6.2 activities, from a certain perspective. It could also be called fundamental research, exploratory research, curiosity-driven research, unfettered research, visionary research, pure scientific research, or research without a clear goal. Of course, in the case where the investigators have a suite of applications in mind, which might or might not come to fruition, it might be research with unclear goal, or "impure" research. There is no set agreed-upon terminology that can be drawn upon as we attempt to describe all the nuances. As an example of what is being described, what goes on at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study is long term basic research, also known as 6.1 research, or blue sky research, for the most part. The research that went on at Bell Labs in area 11 was long term research, but instead was a hybrid of 6.1 and 6.2 research. It was blue sky research that still had some connection to applications, or some orientation in that direction, in most cases. Some have speculated that long term R&D that is directed towards creating tools, of potential use in both pure research (6.1 R&D) and applied research (6.2 R&D) should be called "6.0 research". This long term tool creation underlies both 6.1 and 6.2 research, as well as other categories like 6.3 and 6.4 research. Long term research can include both pure and applied R&D projects. For example, the creation of the Weber Space Telescope was a long term endeavor that was part of a pure R&D project. And lots of useful tools were produced along the way. The invention of the bipolar transistor at Bell Labs was a long term applied R&D project. Almost all long term R&D efforts involve a plethora of short term R&D tasks, embedded in the work. [2] As brutal as this reality is, if your field does not have some intrinsic appeal, by being associated with science fiction or characterizable in some other almost "romantic" way, it better provide good fodder for future applications through tool building. There is a lot of sneering in some areas directed towards those who design and create tools, but this in fact is a very healthy activity for an R&D field. [3] Although it is "only" a line in a screenplay, I found that this quote really resonated with me; "Sometimes it's the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine." -- Christopher Morcom (played by Jack Bannon) in The Imitation Game (2014). [4] However, this is contrary to the advice given to all young people starting out in the working world. One of the most fundamental precepts, which is repeated, over and over and over is, "never surprise your boss". But doing R&D is all about creating surprises, that even are unexpected by the innovators themselves. And these surprises are frequently not recognized as beneficial, and can therefore often be attacked by those in power. So, this makes doing research and development tricky, and somewhat problematic. And this is more true of long term R&D than other forms. [5] But even performing R&D to avoid surprises can go wrong, as in the case of the Xerox Corporation. Xerox funded the creation of the technology which was behind its own demise, and then never took advantage of it. Xerox even gave it away free of charge to their competitors. This situation is so common that it has a name; the "Inventor's Dilemma".
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Reasons to Do Research and Development Part III
Octaveoctave
 January 21 2025 at 04:34 pm
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Reasons Not to Do Research and Development There is a small but significant and loud fraction of any population that is dead set against research and development of many kinds. In some cases, they oppose all research and development in any area. are sort of akin to the Luddites of the Industrial Revolution. But these groups now include 'degrowthers' and radical vegans and extreme environmentalists and anti-humanists, members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and people dedicated to an organic and natural lifestyle. One can see them protesting across Europe, disrupting traffic and athletic matches, in a quest to stop the use of fossil fuels, or in extreme cases, even electricity. They want to destroy public artwork, even of historic value, and prevent people from seeking medical care. They are angry and they are vocal and they are well-funded. Some of them are stridently anti-intellectual. That is, they are angry at educated people, somewhat like China's Red Guard and Cambodia's Khmer Rouge. This ideology appeals at least somewhat to a large fraction of the population. They see their jobs and incomes being threatened by unfettered immigration and massive technological advances. They observe their standard of living collapsing, or at least being put at risk. They are afraid. The elites have kept up a steady drumbeat, warning of looming disaster on multiple fronts, for years and years, without offering much in the way of preparation or mitigation. In addition, a lot of people are basically staggering under the weight of adapting to new technologies. Things change incredibly rapidly. New software and hardware and methods and procedures are incompatible with the previous generations of hardware and software. There are all kinds of problems with malware and hacking. So understandably, people feel overwhelmed and confused. Also, new technology is always a double-edged sword. It can be used for good, but it can also be used for ill. It is almost impossible to predict how a certain technology will evolve, what it will be used for and what effect it will have on the culture. There are often foreseen potentially disastrous side-effects from any technological advance. Is it possible to stop all scientific and technological progress? This might appear at first glance to be an attractive option. However, it is even worse when one segment of the human population does not adapt to evolving emerging knowledge and methods, and another segment does. If one does not keep up, they will be at the mercy of others. We can see examples of this throughout human history, and even now. In the wise words of one of my colleagues, perhaps the best one can do is to prepare and participate in the creation of new scientific knowledge and the technical spin-offs that often result. One can either "surf" the onrushing Tsunami of technological change (and hopefully control it a little) or be drowned by it.
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Reasons to do Research and Development Part IV
Octaveoctave
 January 21 2025 at 04:38 pm
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Design of Organizations For Research and Development The design of organizations to do research and development is a large topic, that cannot be covered adequately in this short essay. However, some salient points can be touched upon. History of Organizations for Research and Development The annals of R&D organizations extend back into pre-history. But notable early examples might include the Library at Alexandria, and similar institutions in India and China. The Pythagorean Cult of Greece also was deeply involved in quantitative investigations. While Europe went through its Dark Ages, the Islamic World nurtured science and mathematics for a few centuries, before the arrival of noted scholar Al Ghazali (1057-1111). Al Ghazali is said to be the second most influential figure in Islam. After Al Ghazali was appointed to a position at the Al-Nizamiyya of Baghdad (a prominent institution of higher education) in 1091, he published his opus 'The Incoherence of the Philosophers'. There were basically two main points Al Ghazali made in this work. First, Al Ghazali said there are no such things as scientific laws, because they would tie the hands of Allah to perform miracles. And second, Al Ghazali claimed that mathematics was the work of the devil. Not long after the publication of this work, all scientific and mathematical progress ground to a halt in the Islamic Empire. Libraries were repeatedly burned and scholars were put to death. Laboratories and observatories were destroyed. Islamic culture has never recovered, even now, almost 1000 years later. A couple of centuries later, Europe began to awaken from its slumber. Europe entered into a period which we now call the Enlightenment. Universities were started in Northern Italy and in other places in Europe. Oxford, and later Cambridge, were founded in the UK. Universities provided somewhat sheltered locations for doing R&D. But a lot of research and development was still pursued by "gentlemen scientists" and "gentlelady scientists" and the like. Basically, these were people who had inherited wealth, or possibly had a rich patron like a member of a royal family. Therefore, they could pursue research and development in a beneficial moderately-protected unhindered environment. There have been numerous attempts over the last couple of centuries to create new kinds of institutions for performing R&D, or new mechanisms for supporting R&D. For example, the patent system was intended to be a way for innovators to support themselves. This has not really worked out very well, over the long run. The patent system is now just a mechanism for large organizations to maintain their dominance. Research prizes of various sorts such as the Nobel Prizes were also intended to provide support for researchers as well. However, these prize systems have not really worked out as intended, particularly, either. I might also mention other organizations and efforts in the US, like the Franklin Institute, the Smithsonian Institute, the Thomas Edison Labs, the Alexander Graham Bell Labs (like the Volta Lab, the Volta Bureau and the Bell Carriage House) and the Tesla Laboratories. Edison organized large groups to do R&D, mostly of a short term nature. Tesla was more of an individual investigator. The Research Corporation of America attempted to get inventors to pool their patents and the resulting proceeds for the benefit of young investigators. Other early efforts were the Tuxedo Park Labs of Alfred Lee Loomis. There were assorted organizations that undertook investigations to benefit the military such as the US Naval Labs and the US Army Aberdeen Proving Grounds. There were shadowy R&D organizations that supported the nascent US intelligence community. There were other government labs as well doing R&D such as the NIH precursor, the Marine Hospital Service. Some corporations like IBM and AT&T and 3M undertook R&D efforts and established R&D Labs. However, after World War II, everything changed in scale in US R&D, drastically. There were huge US R&D efforts associated with the war effort such as the Manhattan Project and the MIT and Harvard Radiation Labs. In the aftermath of the war, the US, with guidance from Vannevar Bush of MIT and others, set US R&D on a new path. Current R&D Organizations in the US Presently, R&D is pursued in the US by roughly 4 or 5 types of entities, for the most part. First, there are the Research Colleges and Universities. Then, there are a suite of government labs like the DOE and NASA labs. In addition, some large corporate labs remain, although their character has evolved somewhat, as has the corporations that are participating in R&D.[1] There are also some nonprofit organizations that engage in R&D, including some foundations that both fund R&D and engage in it themselves. The current systems for performing R&D in the US are exhibiting some deficiencies and problems, at least in some cases, anyway. They might not be as productive as they used to be, arguably. Therefore, perhaps some thought about what R&D organizations require to perform better is in order. We should maybe think about ways to resolve issues that exist in current R&D organizations. Possibly, we could design new models for R&D. Cursory Thoughts About R&D and R&D Organizations [2] Here is an incomplete list of what is needed for a productive research organization: a. tolerance of neurodiversity b. flexibility c. variety of work environments to accommodate different work styles d. tolerance of behaviors and situations that are conducive to productivity and innovation e. access to the tools of R&D, including research assistants and administrative support f. shielding from irritations and distractions g. security h. stability of support i. some balance of collaboration, cooperation and competition, with coordination as required j. inclusive environments k. access to mentorship and instruction programs l. freedom in the choice of problems and approaches m. supportive environment n. exposure to new problems and new ideas o. some level of recognition from colleagues and community for contributions I will address each of these in a bit more detail in the following paragraphs. To be productive in research and development requires basically three main attributes: (1) Obviously, the people participating in it should have some basic level of intelligence. Being able to absorb information quickly and to retrieve it as needed is valuable.[3] (2) However, even more important than intelligence and knowledge, is imagination. One needs to be able to think "outside the box" to make progress in really difficult situations.[4] (3) The most important characteristic that is necessary for success in R&D is diligence, also known as perseverance or grit.[5] Innovative and creative people are sort of special, and a bit different or unusual. They are not all identical to each other, but there are some generalizations we can make. They have some similar traits. A large fraction of the highest performing STEM innovators are "neurodivergent". In previous years, we would have said they have Asperger's Syndrome.[6] Anyone spending an extended period among the top students and faculty at MIT and Caltech, or the top scoring finalists on mathematics prize exams, would immediately notice this, if they were familiar with neurodivergence. Neurodivergent people are sometimes, but not always, perceived as slightly socially awkward. They can become intensely focused on areas of interest to them. They are often hyper-rational and take things quite literally. "Normal" people, or "neurotypical" people can find them very difficult and frustrating to deal with, or even annoying to a certain extent. If you look at the history of R and D, this is invariably true, or at least pretty accurate in most cases, of figures like Newton and Galois and Einstein and Noethe and Ramanujan and many others. Those who make serious advances march to the beat of a different drummer, and are ridiculed and despised by most. And this has always been true, going back centuries or even millennia.[7] Almost always, the people who were on the "right path" and primed to make substantial advances in a field, were not recognized by their colleagues, and particularly not by the managers. This is where the expression comes from, that science advances one tombstone at a time. People resist new ideas until the older generation dies off, and then the resistance eases. Because of this, R&D organizations must be able to accommodate a diversity of personalities, particularly neurodivergent personality types. Behaviors that might not be particularly conventional have to be tolerated to a certain extent. Therefore, there should be a certain amount of flexibility in the design of these organizations. Also, different creative individuals find different environments more suitable for their work. Some like a group setting. Some like a shared office. Some like an individual office. Some like cubicles. Some like a social atmosphere. Some need isolation.[8] In addition, various innovators have different "triggers" for their creativity. If they are working on difficult problems, certain conditions can help stimulate their problem-solving abilities. For example, one person I know typically saturates themselves with a variety of information about the problem, and then goes out for long walks or bike rides to think. They carry paper and writing instruments along with them to record thoughts. Others find gardening conducive to creativity. I know someone who gets his best ideas while listening to classical music at concerts, and often scribbles notes on the programs. I have heard of someone who gets inspiration while watching horror movies during the middle of the day. And so on and so forth. Every person has their own "creativity triggers". And it helps each person to know what those are, or to figure them out. And any organization focused on creative thought has to be able to allow for this, somehow. Research and Development organizations need to provide access to the necessary tools of research and development. For example, it is common and sometimes necessary for STEM practitioners to be able to use libraries and computers and conference rooms and lecture halls and laboratories of various kinds. Lectures and classes are frequently useful and stimulating. Discussions and meetings can be helpful, but only if they are of a technical nature and not particularly frequent or mandatory. Sometimes support services are helpful, like administrative assistance and research assistance. The technical denizens of these institutions might require a certain amount of "shielding" from the media or other irritations, on some occasions. If they are involved in sensitive work, then security also starts to become important. Some research is more expensive to conduct, and requires expensive equipment. Other research is very inexpensive, and requires minimal facilities. Funding is a constant concern, and stability of funding is almost more important than practically anything else. Since a modern research enterprise requires so many different specialized skills, it is increasingly rare that a single individual will be able to perform all the necessary tasks themselves. So there must be some allowance for collaborative teams to form, and for their work to be coordinated to a certain extent. If we want our research efforts to be inclusive of diverse teams of researchers, including disabled people, women, married people, parents of children, and other special categories, we have to take this into account. Previous R&D organizations have not always been designed to be able to welcome such a diverse population to their endeavors. However, we must start making efforts to experiment with models of R&D organizations that allow this. It can be beneficial for researchers to engage in mentorship or instruction of the next generation of researchers. Basically initiation into the R&D 'guild' operates on a sort of apprenticeship model, and has done so for many generations. Not only does the student or mentee benefit, but the mentor or instructor or teacher does as well. As the saying goes, to really learn something, it helps to teach it. By forcing oneself to make a subject understandable to a neophyte or an outsider, the investigator often gains new insights. So a relationship with a nearby or online university can be beneficial, as can other arrangements. The R&D process can be grueling, with long hours and long weeks and long months of unceasing toil. Twenty hour days are not uncommon. One hundred and twenty hour weeks are not uncommon. The overall R&D effort can also incorporate long fallow periods as well. An investigator can hit a temporary dead end, or be slightly burned out and need to recharge and get re-invigorated and motivated. Sometimes sabbaticals are called for. Sometimes conference and lecture tours are stimulating. Sometimes discussions with colleagues help. Another useful technique for an innovator who is "stalled" is to rotate from one project to another, and to keep at least a couple of projects active at any particular time. One can "bounce" between the projects, in that case. Creating breakthroughs cannot really be done on a schedule. This is frustrating for outsiders, but that is just the nature of the process. Researchers also need a degree of freedom, in their choice of projects and approaches. Many current models fail in this, in that failed researchers who have moved into management dictate the projects and how they should be attacked. It is beneficial to have a lack of distractions in the research environment. Too many distractions can stall progress. Administrivia and irrelevant meetings and assorted yak-shaving tasks are all distractions. The research environment should not be excessively harsh or demanding or cruel. It should be pleasant and at least minimally supportive. Some competition is good in the research environment. And some cooperation is also good. There needs to be some balance between cooperation and competition. Exposure to new ideas and new problems is also useful. These can be very stimulating for the research staff. It is nice that successful researchers receive some measure of recognition for their contributions from their colleagues and community. Attacks, which are all too common, are not particularly beneficial. These are just some preliminary thoughts about those who perform R&D, and what they need to do their jobs, and what the organizations they are associated with need to provide. Of course, much more detailed analyses are possible and called for. All of these requirements apply to organizations that are involved in short term research and development, long term research and development, or organizations that are involved in a mixture of both. Notes [1] It is not always easy for a corporation or even a government entity to justify engaging in R&D. Many R&D facilities have fallen victim to cost-cutting and efficiency efforts. This topic is explored a bit more in other sections of this document. [2] I do not have the space here to address various advanced ideas and proposals for how to redesign our research and development institutions. These can be found in other documents. I also will not spend a lot of effort describing the faults and problems that I have observed in many of our existing R&D organizations. Instead, what I want to do is to provide a couple of observations that might be useful to keep in mind about R&D and the people who perform it. So this is not meant to be a complete and exhaustive analysis in any way. But it might be illustrative. [3] "I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There are no miracle people." -- Richard Feynman [4] "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research." -- Albert Einstein [5] "I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have." -- Coleman Cox “Genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.” -- Thomas Edison "If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away." -- Linus Pauling [6] The original French term for Asperger's is roughly translated as 'idiot savant'. I asked a former girlfriend if she thought the term 'idiot savant' suited me. She said, "Well, I can believe the idiot part..." Although I found this humorous, and her comment is somewhat amusing (and possibly was meant as a joke; you would have to ask her), there is a grain of truth here as well. Asperger people can sometimes seem quirky, and a bit "odd". [7] Although it is "only" a line in a screenplay, I found that this quote really resonated with me; "Sometimes it's the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine." -- Christopher Morcom (played by Jack Bannon) in The Imitation Game (2014). [8] The question of whether it is more beneficial to be alone or in a group setting to perform research and development is a complicated one. I suspect that the answer is either "both" or "it depends". There is a sort of unstated benefit associated with a push to encourage people to return to the office, after the pandemic. It is to facilitate more unplanned contacts in the hallways and in the lunchroom. This is not to say that this is a good universally-applicable motivation for "return to work edicts", since solitude can also be very beneficial. Here are three quotes from Nikola Tesla that reinforce this viewpoint: 1. "Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born." 2. "The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude." 3. "Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind." -- Nikola Tesla This is echoed in the practice of Siberian tribes: "In Siberian tribes, shamans were often isolated from the rest of the community, meaning they lived somewhat apart from the everyday life of the tribe, and this isolation was considered crucial to their role as spiritual mediators who could access the spirit world through deep trance states during rituals; this practice allowed them to focus on their spiritual duties without distractions and was a key aspect of traditional Siberian shamanism." [9] Apparently, young men who were going to be trained as shamans were separated from the rest of the tribe and isolated from an early age. [9] For more information, consult sources like: A Bridge Between Worlds in Siberia: Tatyana Vassilievna Kobezhikova https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/bridge-between-worlds-siberia-tatyana-vassilievna Shamanism in Russia - Ancient Rituals & Traditions, written by Alicja Pietrasz https://www.56thparallel.com/shamanism-in-siberia/
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Jordan Peterson’s Dangerous Misunderstanding...
ShipInDistress
 January 23 2025 at 08:09 am
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In a lecture delivered in Sydney, Dr. Jordan Peterson tries to answer the frequently asked question about his faith. At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be a wrong answer to this question — you will probably know, what you believe in… Nevertheless, as a believer, I disagree with his answer. To understand this criticism, we must first gain clarity about the concept of the Christian faith.Faith — an Attempt at a Personal Explanation Do I believe or do I just imagine? The question of my faith often brought me to the point of despair. Testing my faith for vitality in the way of a pulse measurement never led to good results. Faith cannot be measured nor derived. You cannot force faith. I realized only recently that the difficulties I had in answering the question, have their root cause in my lack of understanding of what faith constitutes. What do I mean when I speak of faith? A look at the lexicon reveals that the Middle High German origin of the word believe is the word gelouben. Among other things, the word pledge is a direct derivation of this old verb. So the meaning seems to be associated with a bond that one enters actively and deliberately. But what do we bind ourselves to and, above all, why?The Two Sides of Faith John 20, 29 — Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. Unfortunately, my life does not consist of a series of experiences of God. But experiences have to be experienced. They exist only for the moment. The memory of an experience is not the same as the experience itself. For the faith, this means that even the most intense experience of God’s closeness fades in memory and the doubt whether it is nothing but wishful thinking, can gain the upper hand. The experience of God is central to my faith. However, it cannot fully describe it. I want to hold on to this experience, but I’m no more able to do this than Mary Magdalene could hold on to Jesus: John 20, 17 — Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father A little side note: Is it enough for you to know that a loved person (in and of itself) exists or would you like to see him or her more often? One of my best friends asked me more than once the question of what distinguishes the Bible from any other exciting, good book. He did not doubt that the Bible has to tell us a lot and is the source of countless valuable ethical rules. But there are some good books of this kind out there. In the pursuit of understanding my faith, an answer has emerged. The ethical guidelines of the Bible give us orientation in the seemingly God-forsaken world when we lack the experience of God. However, the center of the biblical texts is God. Without God, the rules are no longer valuable, but worthless in the deepest sense. Without God, the Bible is indeed replaceable by any other ethical book. The Bible is not a founding work of an ideology. Their texts are not universally valid but must be reconsidered for each situation individually. Deriving a direct guide to action for all possible situations from the rules of the Bible in a kind of mental exercise is not feasible for the believer. Rather, the believer hopes that in the concrete situation, a sentence of the Bible will have a concrete meaning and thus contributes to decision- making. So the believer hopes for God’s (holy) spirit and not that his life will be regulated by the words of a book. The Bible is not God’s Word, but it can become God’s Word. When we read the Bible, we open the door for God. That’s why the bible demands to be studied. From us Christians, it demands that we take it more seriously than any other book — also and especially if we do not experience God’s nearness. That’s our part of the faith. The meaning of the word faith is thus divided into two parts. On the one hand, it is justified trust, which comes from the experience of the nearness of God. On the other hand, faith also means the naivety that small children bring to their parents — whom they absolutize, as we should do only with God: If Dad says so, then it is true! We have God’s promise that this childlike trust will not be in vain.You Will Seek Me and Find Me Jeremiah 29, 13 — when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you True faith does not come out of us but into us. A Believer is called the one who experienced this and has made a conscious decision for God. Seeking God, if we do not see him, trusting in God, if he does not seem to be there, reading the Bible, even though we doubt that it has to tell us more then certain psychological findings — that is the active part of the faith. But without the experience of the nearness of God, this so important part will soon degenerate into pure superstition and preoccupation with ourselves. The experience of God — the passive part of faith — is the foundation and goal of the active part. This answers the initial question of the why of the faith. I believe because I have experienced God’s closeness. But faith itself includes my response to God: Lord, I vow to you loyalty! This includes the realization that the times of absence of experiences are not times of unbelief. I have learned that neither side of faith is viable alone in the long term. Only in this duality does faith become truly sustainable. Markus 9, 24 — I believe; help my unbelief! The final answer which I gave my friend on his question about the Bible, is the following: Imagine that we Christians were right.The Freedom of Faith For centuries, the Church has misunderstood and abused faith. The notion of achievement that exists in every society, has been extended to the faith. "I can earn God’s love" was the fundamental precept. In the Middle Ages, you could even be freed from all your sins by paying money. God was the almighty judge, who then let himself be appeased if one did what the church leaders wanted. The relationship between God and man was that of a judge to a defendant. Does a mother love one of her children more if he follows her well-intentioned advice more than the other? Or does she just suffer more because the naughty child will have a harder time in life? Martin Luther has recognized that the relationship between God and man is a love affair. I recognize two things. For one thing, I faintly realize that I can’t come to God. I cannot earn his recognition. Secondly, I recognize thankfully that God loves me. He comes to me. Opening the door for him and letting him enter is the only requirement to be fulfilled. Luke 15, 20 — But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. The unmodern word sin is a relational word. Sin is everything that separates two who live in a relationship. The Easter message is God’s promise that, no matter how much we hurt him, how much he suffers from us, he will always be there for us. The forgiveness of all sins through the crucified Jesus is nothing less than the greatest declaration of love in the world. The lover cannot come any closer to the loved one without pushing him. This promise of God is the foundation for the liberation of the believer. It frees him from the idea of achievement. The believer does not have to earn God's love through good deeds. And he does not pose as a saint above others. Completely freed from the fear: What will the great judge say at the end? the believer can devote himself entirely to life in the world. In the struggle for truth, he is therefore not blocked by thoughts of the consequences, this or that decision will have for him eventually. With the knowledge that wrong decisions, sins, are already forgiven, he can use his full potential to make as many right ones as possible. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter to Eberhard Bethge, 21.7.1944 One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a churchman (the priestly type, so-called!) a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. This is what I mean by worldliness — taking life in one’s stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness. It is in such a life that we throw ourselves utterly in the arms of God and participate in his sufferings in the world…Experiences of God It is intentional that I have not written anything about my experiences of God at any point in the text. Experiences are very subjective. I can not even say if, that which my brain makes out of the nerve signal from my eyes when they see the color red, is the same thing that any other human brain makes out of it. How much more difficult is it to convey a God experience? My experiences of God are not a template for others. I can not claim: This is what experiencing God looks like and nothing else. Nevertheless, I don’t want to remain completely silent on the matter. There is a basic trust in God, which is not of the same nature, as the active faith described above. It should be clear from the context that basic trust does not mean, that it is permanently there in the same intensity. And then there are situations in which I have a sort of perspective that conveys a clarity which is neither rational nor otherwise justifiable. I then know what is right and wrong. It is important to note that the distinction between right and wrong is different from the distinction between good and bad in that it is contextual in the narrowest sense. To prevent greater suffering, it may be right to kill a human being. Yet no one would speak here of a good deed! The struggle of the Hitler assassins around Dietrich Bonhoeffer with the fifth commandment is cited here as an example.Peterson’s Statements Let us go back to Peterson’s lecture in Sydney. In the beginning, he pointed out the problems involved in asking the question about one’s personal belief. What is the intention behind asking: Do you believe in God? Moreover, what are the implications of the statement: I do believe! Some people, Peterson criticized, would state I do believe and actually mean I am good. Then he arrives at a point, where he states, that it is almost impossible for a man to say the words: I do believe. By citing Nietzsche: …there was only one Christ, and he died at the cross. he eventually follows the wrong route of the philosopher and the medieval church. They believed that you have to earn God's approval by doing good. As a Christian, I disagree! I say I do believe and I know very well, that this does not mean I am thoroughly good (in the sense that everything I do is good). In fact, both statements cannot be said simultaneously. To say it with Martin Luther: Martin Luther, The Freedom of the Christian Good righteous works never make a good righteous person, but a good righteous person does good righteous works. Bad works never make a bad person, but a bad person does bad works. Close to the end of the lecture, Peterson explains the benefits of confessing to faith. From a psychologist’s perspective there seem to be some good arguments for the lifestyle of a believer. But again, I have to disagree! We can not convince ourselves to believe. We don’t come to God —God comes to us. This does not mean that we are completely left out of the process. It is our task to actively decide in favor of the coming God. However, we do not make that decision based on weighing alternatives. The only reason for the faith — and that distinguishes the believer from one who follows ethical guidelines — is God.The Wrong Direction — Again I grew up in the GDR and was brought up as an atheist. The teachers in my school tried to explain faith and how we will overcome it: “In the past, people could not explain the physical world and have assigned gods to the inexplicable phenomena. So, e. g. the god Thor was the reason for lightning and thunder. But mankind grew up. These days we have science. Some people — the Christians — still struggle with the world and need to imagine their god. But science and socialism will make heaven on earth possible so that no one has to imagine a God any longer.” Here we see the same wrong direction (man imagines God) as in the essence of Peterson’s explanations. Surely, he does not make a statement about the pure existence of God. But, at the end of the day, to him, it doesn’t seem to make any difference whether God exists or not. You just have to live your life as if he did exist.The Most Dangerous God — Me Peterson’s statements are in opposition to the Christian faith. I do not become a Christian by performing good deeds and thus approaching a Christian ideal (however it is defined - and whoever it defines!). Rather, I acknowledge God, allow him into my life and can then hope that he will guide me and tell me how I should act. And I am well aware of my mistakes. The highest wisdom at which a Christian can arrive is to know that he is (and will be) a sinner. There is a wonderful German poem by Wolfgang Borchert. This is the best translation into English I have found: I’d be a light in stormy night for boats and cods and smelties – but I’m a skiff against the odds myself in difficulties! The efforts to become better than we are, to burn the dead wood, are admirable. But, in the long run, this endeavor far exceeds our power. To say it with Paul: 2. Corinthians 12, 9 — But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. In other words, it is not our power, our conviction or dedication that will bring god to our life. On the contrary, we should realize that the divine word comes into us and not out of us. This can only happen if we do not see our own convictions and actions as the decisive factor, but instead seek God again and again. Ask Him and trust in Him. We must become weak so that He can work strongly in us. Peterson says that the statement of the believer must have strong implications in his life. As a Christian, I say that the statement “I believe” will have strong implications if it is said honestly and with the whole soul. Peterson rightly points out that we have to take responsibility. Not society or anyone in particular is to blame for our misery — at least not in the first place. And trying to get better should be the goal for all of us. Still, this won’t bring us any closer to God. There is no way, in which we can come to the lord. Establishing the connection is his part. On the other hand, turning ourselves into gods (which for this part means that you are sure you know what is good and bad) is one of the most dangerous things for ourselves and society. It is as destructive as absolutizing an ideology. No one is to absolutize but God alone! This is a fundamental part of the first commandment. It is highly probable that the reason for most of the suffering in history is that people tried to be God. In fact, from a biblical perspective, it is the reason we do not live in paradise. The original sin of Adam and Eve will be the topic of a whole article. It is possible, that Peterson’s thoughts are much closer to mine than it appears. Human communication is a complicated and more than ambiguous issue. In the pursuit of truth, however, I have to assume the worst interpretation of his words. Nevertheless, I do not doubt the good intentions in his statement: I try to live as if God exists. And those who agree with it may argue, that this is all we can do. Otherwise, we are fully helpless. But involving God in the sentence includes a dangerous solution to our helplessness. Reformulated, the statement reads as: I know what is right or wrong! I do not need God for this. (And I am a little afraid he really exists.) And here it is again — the original sin. And it is even worse. Adam and Eve still believed in God. They still listened to God. But, the statement "as if God exists" does not even care about God. The question of the faith is thus reduced to a purely philosophical question about the existence of a transcendent being (and the possible consequences). Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Akt und Sein, postdoctoral thesis 1929 God does not exist — in and for itself! God is a personal counterpart for every single person. As a Christian, I believe in the living Jesus. I believe that a word of the bible — a book thousands of years old — can come to life in a concrete situation. So, the question Do you believe? is not a question about the personal opinion on an undecidable issue. In the first place, it means Did you experience the personal God?Peterson’s Daemon I do not know if Socrates’ famous Daimonion is the same as the inner voice of which Peterson speaks. However, I know the latter very well. As an almost objective observer, my inner voice looks underneath the surface of my words. It confronts me with the real reasons for my actions. It is a part, if not the center of myself. On the other hand, the Holy Ghost is the way God communicates with us. Thus it is no part of us and should strongly be distinguished from the inner voice. And it is far from being permanently present. Not for nothing, is the Holy Ghost compared to the wind. I felt the need to make an explicit distinction between these two terms in order to clarify once again the difference between Peterson's idea of faith (which essentially comes out of us) and the Christian belief in the living God.My Answer My answer to the question of faith is momentous. I feel like someone walking through a forest in the twilight during a thunderstorm. Now and then there is a flash and I recognize my surroundings in a clear light. Most of the time, however, I have to choose between two different interpretations of my impressions of the world around me. Is this an attacker who is standing right in front of me or someone who, like me, is largely helpless in this storm? These two views represent two sides of myself. One driven by fear and anger and one that recognizes the other person as a child of God — just as I am. In this way, Shoulder Angel and Shoulder Devil (in the Bible: Diabolus — the Slanderer) are playing their game with me and I have to decide whom I believe, over and over again. I have experienced how much my life gets mixed up when I let myself be guided by fear and anger. And I have experienced the peace that settles in me when I look at others with a loving eye. I want to recognize my fellow humans as often as possible in the latter way. Due to my inner resistances, this is extremely exhausting. In the long term, it only seems possible when I experience the nearness of God. That’s why I pray: I believe; help my unbelief!
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The Eighth Deadly Sin
neoplatonist2
 January 29 2025 at 05:03 pm
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A venomous spider creeps carefully along the inner webs of your brain. When you opened your mouth to speak what your media told you, it crept into the back of your throat, up one of your Eustachian tubes, into your ear, and from there found that proverbial “hole in your head” by which to make its way into your brainpan. It is a sedulous, black-and-green little mother spider, cousins to the Black Widow, which has built a nidus in there, filled with spiderlings eager to pierce their silken veil and crawl throughout your thought processes unopposed, feasting. The spider’s name is Despair. It’s quite popular these days, but not often talked about. People succumb to its diseases, committing suicide, drug abuse, and apathy by turns. Some even turn to hating God Himself, and curdle into seeking the destruction of all Being through whatever paltry powers and associate balls they can muster. There are, according to tradition, seven Deadly Sins: namely, Sloth, Wrath, Pride, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, and Greed. There is some debate, not as hot as it was in the Middle Ages’ intellectual ferment perhaps, but still there, as to which Sin is the capital of them all. Augustine said Lust. Aquinas said Pride. I have a different answer, an eighth Deadly Sin which has only now come into the fullness of its being as we oscillate nauseatingly between nihilist and totalitarian impulses in the fading days of our democracy, our home, our West. This Sin is the crowning sin, the plinth of all the other sins, but only in the modern times. In ages past it lived implicitly in the hearts of men, but was never identified publicly because it so easily conflates with matters of honor, or enlightened self-interest, or the rage of the wounded. Rather, this Sin is a creature of modern conditions of political-economy and its (properly) associated classical humanist culture. Without the current, six hundred-year-old advance into lucidity about the nature of mankind’s role in the Galaxy, anteriority, no matter how wise or well-meaning, could not have appreciated the fullness of the Sin, and so folded it into other concerns. This is not to say they were congenitally incapable of understanding. Were such ancients alive today, this Sin could be explained to them, and they would agree to it and to its priority ranking. This Sin is, of course, nothing other than Contempt of Mission. In order to see it as it is in all its ugliness, one must grasp, through proper educative channels, work, and insight, the mission of mankind as a species both absolutely above the beasts and the rest of Creation, and as a species comprising a single, substantial unity of all its individual members past, present, and future. Mankind exists to serve and glorify God, Who created him for His own good pleasure and, being the Good of all goods, provided for man’s felicity should he conform to the divine Will. Specifically, this means man, who is made imago viva Dei or in the living image of God, is inherently creative, carrying a spark of the divinity, and as such a divine similitude possesses in potentia not only the image but the capax Dei (the capacity of God) to reorder the fallen universe and expand his fruitful dominion for the benefit of the general welfare. Thus, man is creative by nature, and therefore good by nature. A flawed goodness, as he labors under the Original Sin which disordered his soul and caused the honorable part or the appetitive part to usurp the proper kingship of reason. The origins of this disorder flow back to mankind’s rebelliousness against God in eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil prematurely, before God could form and solidify his character by educating his emotions. The tree would not have been planted in the Garden were it to forever bear its fruit in vain. In evolutionary terms, man faced the uplift of the Entelechy, that “fourth domain” of the divine associated with the three “domains” described by Russian biogeochemist V.I. Vernadsky in the early half of the twentieth century. They comport with the traditional philosophical ontic division of Creation into things that exist, things that live, and things that think. In Vernadskian terms, this is the abiotic domain, the biosphere, and what he calls the noösphere, the latter being the transformative extension of human cognitive and technological modifications of the biospheric and abiotic domains. Thus, proto-man became man, moving from exclusively beastly perceptual consciousness which knows only that which its senses relay, to a new kind of mind, a conceptual consciousness capable of speaking of the angels and other things estranged from all sense-perception. In so doing, however, his expanded mind became aware of new pleasures of power, and saw both new opportunities for doing good, and new opportunities, no longer merely for doing bad, but for doing outright evil, and the satisfactions offered therein. This new awareness, uncultivated by any sane culture—for, like Romulus and Remus, Adam and Eve were suckled by a she-wolf—their first act of touching the obsidian Monolith plunged their unprepared emotions into the Stygian abyss of History. We find ourselves embedded in the slaughterhouse of one hundred millennia of human existence on this planet, chafing against the manacles bolting us to the floor of our bestiality, with the rare genius or saint transcending custom to ascend to the third heaven, from which cloudly vantage they can see a way forward, in love, towards even a tiny amelioration of ignorance and want. We feel it in our guts, in that ache of our hearts when it is wounded by the speartip of a revelation of the truthfulness of human nature. Without that sickening dread, without those tears, we wouldn’t be human at all, but exist in the dream-paradise of paranoid joy that is the lot of subordinate Nature. We know that life is out of joint, what the Buddhists call dukkha, and, if we have any love in us at all, we dislike it. We hate it, in fact. We decry it. We deny it. We sometimes even allow our hatred to metastasize into malice towards God, Being, and humanity itself. Man is the creative species, the beautiful species, capable of discovering, transmitting, and introducing into play in the universe universal principles of physical action, and related principles as of statecraft, economics, and art or morality. Mankind being indivisible, a “fat moment” of simultaneity in his secret eternal soul collecting past, present, and future generations into a single entity, he has a single destiny, which is to create unprecedented beautiful applications of his science, art, and technology so as to turn the wastelands of the universe into a sustaining garden for his own felicity and for the glory of the God in whose image he is made. Fostering creativity in man is therefore what society is for. To do this requires massive investments in thought and praxis. We can and ought to move heaven and earth to solve the problems of famine, plague, war, and despair besetting us from time immemorial. And, increasingly, we do do so. But, countervailing this noble and necessary use of ourselves as freely willed agents is the impulse of the ravenous wolf, the pessimist, and the epicure. In order to be creative, man requires freedom. Freedom requires life and opportunity, and these in turn require an emotion-regulating classical humanist education, and a political-economy shorn of barbarism. The mound-building termite of South America, Africa, and Australia is one of the evolutionary wonders of the world. Soft-bodied and vulnerable to dehydration, these miniscule little white ants build homes a mile high to their scale, digging wells a hundred feet deep, installing air conditioning architecture, engaging in fungus agriculture, and even building aboveground transport tunnels and elevated highways along the forest floor. They have taken an environment inhospitable to them, and changed it into a safe haven for their productive activities in the service of survival. Man is, haltingly, doing the same thing to the Earth. He alone is capable of greening the deserts, draining the swamps, creating food where no food naturally would ever grow, and organizing his social practice to facilitate these applications of the technological fruits of his principled scientific discoveries. Man is cyborging the Earth, altering it from a state of nature to a state of super-nature, guided by the Godly agape and cognition that he was born to manifest. This is man’s mission: to conquer the Galaxy and change it into a Garden of Eden, under the mandate of Genesis 1:26, which is sound economic advice for the ages, if one wishes to have a living economy forever expanding in knowledge and forever grappling with life, that he may improve his children’s lot and defeat the perennial enemies both without and within his own divided heart. All human societies from the start have been effectively totalitarian. One’s surroundings, thought-processes, and actions mould a man day by day, washing his brain in custom and accident that channel his will, hindering him from being free. There is no escaping brainwashing, one may, at best, merely choose which liquid one wishes to wash one’s brain with. Years ago I read a short story set in a future where everyone consumed manufactured pharmaceuticals and foods in great quantity and variety every day of their lives. The drugs had warning labels on them describing all manner of horrible possible side-effects, but, the people took them anyway, accepting their necessity. The protagonist was a man whose late mother bequeathed her old house to him. She left him a letter telling him that there were supplies in the basement that would allow him to grow plants. The letter told him that he must stop taking his pills, and he must plant the little things she had left for him in the dirt in the basement and water them and keep them lit with the furnished lamps until they sprouted, grew, and bore objects. He must, she wrote, eat these objects, and eat them to the exclusion of all other foods. He must drink only tapwater. The man was nonplussed, but loved his mother and so obeyed her instructions. He grew these objects, these vegetables, and ate of them, neglecting his medications. Initially he felt sick and disoriented, but he persisted, and after several months his mind began to change. He felt bigger, fitter, stronger, clearer...happier. He began to notice all the warning labels on the popular food, drink, and drugs. He found himself alienated from others because they were so unthinking. He began to question the popular stories these people believed. He felt a thirst for knowledge for the first time in his life, and couldn’t stomach the banal and salacious programs on the television. He realized he wanted to live and though he didn’t know how, he knew that he must try. Classical humanist culture, such as the music of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Schubert, Schumann, Telemann, Brahms, Felix Mendelson, Handel, Dvorak, and the African-American spirituals; the sculpture of Myron and Michelangelo, the poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Schiller; the science of Leibniz, Gauss, Riemann, Cantor, Einstein, Gödel, and LaRouche; the painting of Rembrandt and Da Vinci; the literature of Cervantes, and accompanying historical sweep of globally extended European civilization amalgamating discoveries of scientific and artistic principles from all cultures, comprise the “vegetables” of the human soul. Many people dislike their vegetables. The ones that hate them and spew them, Dante in his Commedia consigned to the depths of Inferno. The ones who eat them dutifully, with a grimace, he placed on mount Purgatory. And, the ones who “became loving vegetarians” he elevated to Paradise. These things grow on one. They are culture, human culture. The dominant rock-drug-sex counterculture we have today offers incredible levels of sweetness spiked with spider’s eggs. I remember when I was three years old and was eating my first apple. I admired the red skin and the white flesh. A boy told me that the white, microgranular flesh of the apple were spider’s eggs. I believed him, accepted this new fact, and kept on eating the delicious apple. The apples we have been given by the manufactured and deployed counterculture are as this, delicious and filled with potential to enter into our brains...and feast. Hence, the sin of Contempt of Mission: our supersaturation in the counterculture has drugged us to the point of insensibility. The thought-courses needed to comprehend the great ideas lying dormant within the great books, and the science that they abet, have withered and been replaced by irrational circuits of hedonism, rage, and distortions of morality. Even the idea of a soul is merely a cartoon. God is an enemy. Christ is a figure of fun. And, the populace, in whose hands ultimate political-economy power has always rested, has become small. The smallest of the small is the phenomenon of the Internet troll or his non-virtual analogs. These people epitomize Contempt of Mission. They are far from alone. Most people have those spiders of Despair within them, clinging and crawling and nibbling, telling them that humanity is hopeless, humanity is wretchedly unimprovable, or that we must resign ourselves to doing at best “a little good” and let the devil take the hindmost when it comes to “things outside my control”. Such a humanity, composed of such people, has effectively lost the moral fitness to survive. The universe has no need of societies which violate the natural law that demands man must be creative in order to survive. Such societies collapse from within, and are then devoured from without. And the collapse is never a pretty one, from the vantage of those still capable of agape. Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray supplies, we might say, a fitting picture of the condition of the Western world. It remains prosperous, gay, and obsessed with status and appearance, but, its inner parts are rotten. Not wholly rotten, but in dire need of excision. This is the source of the sickness that drives so many into the diseases of despair, namely addiction and suicide, and which fills many others with impotent, directionless anger. Such people have either forgotten or have never been given an optimistic view of life. They have been taught they are beasts, lacking God, intellect, and cosmic destiny, even though some may be very logical in how they pursue their chosen petty pleasures, whether of flesh or ideology. Contempt of Mission is the capital sin because it decorticates the mind of man. It is the trunk of sin that grows from the root of all evil: wanting something for nothing. The mission of mankind, to conquer the universe with his science and his art, sounds hard and tiresome and painful. One would rather modern fruit drop easily into one’s languid hand that one may enjoy a few juicy, momentary thrills before sliding into a cozy grave. From Contempt of Mission comes all other sins, because the Mission of mankind is the Heideggerrian “background” or “atmosphere” that fills our lungs with powerful oxygen molecules. Mission--responsibility for the biggest burden one can lift, that will always intersect in the long run with the needs of mankind as a whole—quenches our thirst for knowledge, and heals our broken heart. Mission is the salvation of the human enterprise and the path of what Nicolaus of Cusa called “the sweetest joy.” Wash your brain in classical culture. Flush out those spiders of Despair. We have made it this far, we have made it to the Moon, we have cured Polio and eradicated Smallpox, we have built New York City and plan to colonize Mars. We have lifted more people out of extreme poverty than any iteration of civilization in history. We have the tools, we have the nourishing art, and we still have a big reservoir of good faith, however momentarily frustrated. Become a spiritual vegetarian and your life will become meatier than you may at the moment be able to imagine.
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Reasons To Do Research And Development Part I
Octaveoctave
 January 21 2025 at 04:30 pm
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Abstract Research and development (R&D) is a common activity in a modern economy. We pursue R&D for profit, to protect ourselves, for pure enjoyment and the seeking of truth. These reasons are discussed, along with other aspects of R&D. Introduction to R&D Preface Research and development is an important human occupation. Humans are always trying to improve their tools and their environment. In general humans want to make things faster, better and cheaper. Questions about R&D Let's consider a few questions about research and development. For example, why do humans do this? What drives them to pursue this activity? On the other hand, there are some who do not like the idea of progress and advancement. Why do they feel the way they do? Do their arguments have any validity? Do they hold water? How should humanity organize research and development activities? How can we make them more efficient and more productive? How can we reduce the potential harmful consequences of R&D? Finally, if we decide to pursue some research and development project, sometimes it requires a collective effort that can be expensive. In that case, how do we justify the expenditure of resources on this sort of endeavor? These are the sorts of questions I want to touch on in this series of essays. R&D History Humans have been around for a few hundred thousand years or more, as near as we can tell, depending on the definition of what a "human" is. Their lives have changed and evolved over this period. For example, most humans are no longer hunter-gatherers, living in caves. What is striking is that humans tend to be very heavy users of a variety of tools. Sometimes humans notice recurrent patterns in their environment. With their ingenuity, humans can sometimes then exploit these patterns or regularities to create useful tools to manipulate aspects of their environment for their benefit. The information about these tools is communicated to other humans. It is passed on down through the generations as collective knowledge. Language and writing are special types of tools which facilitate this technology documentation, retention and transfer. R & D Currently We seem to be entering an era of ever-accelerating research and development progress. Ideas and procedures become obsolete very rapidly now, even within a short span of years. Analysis of R&D Since R&D is an activity that is important to us, we should understand it better. Perhaps it is worthwhile to examine the nature of research and development, including its benefits and drawbacks. In addition, maybe we should think about how to get more out of research and development. I would suggest that we should try to improve the efficiency of the R&D process, if at all possible. Finally, how should spending resources on research and development be justified? How can we measure progress towards what we might agree on as worthwhile goals?
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Can AI Produce Literature?
Sadhika Pant
 January 10 2025 at 10:41 am
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The question of whether artificial intelligence might one day produce literature worthy of comparison to the masterpieces of the literary canon has, begrudgingly, become one worth asking. There is no denying that tools like ChatGPT, whose facility for mimicry and adherence to the formal mechanics of prose are nothing short of extraordinary. Yet, these tools—ingenious as they are—suffer from an incapacity: a detachment from the human condition. Their limitation is rooted in their immunity to privation, which, as I shall argue, is essential to the creation of literary works. Privation as a Prerequisite for Creativity Great literature emerges not merely from a mastery of language but from the writer’s engagement with the elemental struggles of existence. Privation—whether it be material, emotional, or existential—infuses literature with its vitality. It is the aching solitude of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, the moral torment of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or the quiet yearning for redemption in Steinbeck’s East of Eden tragedies that transforms ink on paper into a mirror held up to human suffering. This privation is not incidental to the creative process but intrinsic to it. An AI, by contrast, is untouched by the vicissitudes of existence. It has no childhood to recall with nostalgia or regret, no love to pine for or lose, no fear of death to brood upon in the quiet watches of the night. It does not grapple with the indignities of aging or the pangs of conscience. These are not minor inconveniences of human life but its very marrow that informs our art. To write, as the greats have written, is to impose order on chaos, to distill meaning from the welter of lived experience. What meaning can an AI distill, when it has no experience to speak of, no chaos to confront? This is not to say that AI cannot produce prose of technical quality. It can mimic the rhythms of Shakespearean verse or the cadences of Hemingway's spare prose. It can analyse patterns in a corpus of literary works and generate passages that superficially resemble their inspirations. But such mimicry is mere ventriloquy. When one encounters, for example, the works of Tolstoy, one is not merely reading a narrative but entering a moral universe, one wrought from Tolstoy's own agonizing struggle with questions of faith, morality, and human purpose. Can a machine that knows nothing of moral failure or spiritual longing recreate that universe? The Contribution of the Reader Consider, too, the act of reading. Literature is a dialogue between author and reader, a transaction in which the reader brings their own sensibility, formed by privation and experience, to meet the author's. The works of the canon endure because they resonate with truths that transcend their time and place. To read Jane Austen is to recognize the social ironies that persist in any human interaction; to read Orwell is to confront the timeless tension between power and liberty. Can an AI, which neither laughs nor weeps, apprehend such truths deeply enough to encode them in its creations? It can only approximate, never embody, the human insight required. It is tempting to imagine that, with sufficient data and computational power, an AI could achieve parity with human creativity. But this presupposes that art is merely a problem of input and output, a matter of arranging words in the most effective pattern. It ignores the reality that great literature is not a product but a process—a process shaped by suffering, reflection, and transcendence. AI, for all its technical prowess, is incapable of participating in this process. Creation as a Means of Confronting Chaos Creation, in the literary sense, is an act of rebellion against the void, a defiant assertion of meaning in the face of chaos. An AI does not rebel because it has no void to confront. It does not defy because it has nothing to assert. It operates within parameters, executing its programming without error or hesitation. It is, in this sense, the antithesis of the artist, who is defined not by perfection but by their flawed and striving humanity. The modern impulse is to reduce everything to a problem of efficiency—whether it’s the body, the mind, or the art of writing. We have learned to regard complexity as something to be avoided, something that hinders progress. This is where AI excels. It can mimic, replicate, and optimize, but it can never understand the subtlety, the nuance, or the dark complexity of human experience. To reduce literature to a formula is to strip it of its soul. Literature is an exploration, not an exercise in optimization. It is the product of an author’s wrestle with the ineffable, with the chaos of the human condition. The Unpredictability of Genius If genius could be systematized, if it could be reduced to a series of algorithms, then all we would need to do is input the right data, and a new Shakespeare would emerge. Yet, we know that genius is not so predictable. It is an accident of nature, culture, and personal history. Who, for instance, could have foreseen the thunderous grandeur of Paradise Lost or or the raw, brutal honesty of The Brothers Karamazov? Genius often bursts forth from a collision of conflicting ideas and experiences that no machine can predict. Machines can mimic style, but they cannot predict the moment of insight, the leap of thought, or the crack in the human spirit that makes literature great. They cannot take us to those dark places where we encounter the raw truths of our existence. The Dangers of Artistic Homogenization AI operates within parameters, and it can only write within the limits of the data it has been fed. In this way, it risks homogenizing literature, flattening the diversity of human thought and creativity into a uniform product. Real literature, on the other hand, thrives on innovation and subversion. Consider how Dante’s Divine Comedy reshaped the boundaries of epic poetry. Such authors did not simply follow established patterns; they created new ways of seeing the world. AI may imitate, but it cannot innovate. The danger is that we might begin to mistake its perfectly constructed sentences for true artistry, and in doing so, we would lose the very thing that makes literature a living, evolving art form. To entrust creative endeavours to AI is to plant the seeds of their eventual sterility, for AI is an inherently parasitic entity, feeding upon what has already been written, which, though vast, is ultimately finite. True creativity emerges from the chaos of human experience and imposes a fragile order upon it, transforming confusion into meaning. AI, however, operates only within pre-existing patterns, rearranging the orderly fragments it has been given into permutations that may dazzle but cannot transcend. It does not transform chaos into order; it merely rearranges order into another order. In surrendering our creative efforts to such a mechanism, we risk reducing art to a sterile exercise in imitation, a shallow echo of past glories, until the endeavour itself withers into irrelevance. No, literature is best left to those who have walked through the fire of privation, emerged scarred but resolute, and dared to set their vision of the human condition to paper. For it is only through privation that one may glimpse the sublime, and only through suffering that one may truly create. Image Source: Troy (2004)
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America's Premier Center-Left Think Tank...
Taminad.Crittenden
 January 11 2025 at 11:59 pm
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This publication has a history of calling out disinformation and lies from one of the USA’s biggest think tanks: the center-left Brookings Institution and in particular its affiliated “Lawfare” Institute. Apparently, the center left pundits there are still hallucinating about violence on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters protested all the ways that the Democratic Party has weakened America’s voting & election systems in ways both real (eradicating the secret ballot through mail-in voting) and also their own rightwing hallucinations (hacked election systems). America’s progressive left continues to try to label the January 6 protestors’ actions a so-called “insurrection” despite the fact that those protestors are a bunch of gun rights 2nd Amendment supporters who did not bring any…ZERO…firearms to their protest. America’s progressive left is under such deep hallucination about the equally hallucinatory rightwing January 6 protests that perhaps the most important center left think tank in the nation’s capital city of Washington D.C., the Brookings Institution, to this day continues to repeat disinformation lies about the January 6 protests. “After January 6, some pundits were confused. How could a group of people who claim to Back the Blue also kill and maim law enforcement officers?” — Jessica Pishko, Lawfare Institute guest She said this as if it were a fact, when in reality no officers were killed or maimed. Not a single one! just a nice image for this article The one officer who died on January 6, died of natural causes, not because of any protestor actions! Some officers suffered traumatic brain injuries, but that is not maiming.Lawfare Institute Refuses to Ask: Who Started the Jan 6 Violence? The American progressive left’s insistence on ignoring their own history of supporting violence while exaggerating their political opponents’ violence, especially on January 6, 2021, is reflected in how the Lawfare Institute reacted to the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report about how the FBI handled January 6. In that whole podcast episode, none of the Lawfare Institute commentators ask the critical question: Who started it? Who started the violence? Who started illegal activities? Did any of the FBI’s 26 Confidential Human Sources (CHSs) start any of the violence or illegal actions? What about the potential for CHSs from other agencies or departments potentially having been in the crowd, and potentially having started any of the violence or illegal activity? The Lawfare Institute pundits completely ignore these questions, which are the most important questions. The fact that these are the most important questions is illustrated by the dispute between Ray Epps and Fox News over Tucker Carlson’s allegations that Ray Epps might have been a fed in some way. Democratic nations should not want their government using undercover operatives (whether official agents, or unofficial informants) escalating violence. Democratic nations should not want their governments to behave like the Algerian government, whose undercover operatives in Islamic jihadist groups allegedly escalated those groups’ violence. One could suppose that the Lawfare Institute does not want to bring further discredit upon the Department of Justice (which the FBI is under) should it be discovered that any undercover operatives, whether agents or confidential human sources, did in fact initiate violence or illegal actions. just another nice image for this article One could also suppose that the Lawfare Institute, as a leftwing institution, does not want to bring further discredit upon other leftwing organizations should it be discovered that anyone who initiated violence on January 6 was a false flag plant like theoretically from Antifa. Undercover Operatives Should Not Start Violence No evidence has surfaced that progressive leftwing organizations may have leveraged their extensive experience committing violence to initiate more of it as fake right-wing activists. However, America’s progressive left is very open about how they are infiltrating rightwing organizations as undercover agents. “But recently, anti-fascist vigilantes have been going undercover to become members of white nationalist groups in order to conduct surveillance and gather information. They don’t inform the FBI or other law enforcement officers about potential threats. They leak the information.” — National Public Radio This Non-Violence publication applauds anyone for exposing and weakening organizations that actually are racist in reality.* There have been no signs that undercover operatives, whether federal agents, federal informants, or unofficial vigilantes, have started violence. As a democracy, however, we should continuously hold such undercover operations to account in order to ensure that they are not initiating violence. Even if they did not start any violence, reporters and pundits such as those at the Lawfare Institute have a democratic responsibility to ask whether they did in order to ensure that they did not. Rather than fulfill its democratic responsibility, the Lawfare Institute instead is not asking the hard questions, and is instead spreading false lying disinformation about the violence that did happen on January 6. For previous articles about disinformation lies from the Brookings Institution’s Lawfare Institute, see this article about the same January 6 lies, Lawfare bringing on serial liar Rachel Maddow spreading more lies, another famous Lawfare guest Lawrence Lessig lying about the 2000 Bush/Gore election, another guest lying about Israel, and this article about a European activist’s hypocritical hatred for America. _______________ Support Non-Violence writing by tipping me at Ko-Fi.com or by donating some Ethereum digital currency to this public address! 0x5ffe3e60a7f85a70147e800c37116b3ad97afd5e *Also, there is nothing wrong with joining another organization as an unofficial undercover vigilante at all, regardless of whether the targeted organizations are in reality racist or not. Such activists need to be willing to face the risks, though, whether legal or reputational.
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On Being in the Middle
Sadhika Pant
 January 13 2025 at 05:17 pm
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One often hears of the virtues of moderation, that golden mean Aristotle so elegantly extolled and which common sense appears to confirm. To be neither excessive nor deficient, neither too daring nor too timid, seems to promise a harmonious existence—a life guided by reason rather than passion, by balance rather than frenzy. Yet, as is often the case with principles so universally praised, the closer one scrutinises this idea of “the middle,” the more elusive it becomes. An even stranger can of worms is opened when we attempt to elevate the middle as the ideal. For what is an ideal, if not an extreme? And if the middle is the highest goal, does it not cease to be the middle? If one were to strive for moderation with all one’s might, would one even be striving for moderation? Can one fanatically strive to be moderate? The question then becomes: Is there a middle way to being in the middle? This conundrum reveals much about the human condition. We are drawn to simplicity, to principles that can be neatly packaged into aphorisms or rules of thumb. "Be moderate in all things," we are told, as if moderation itself were a universal solution for the chaos of life. Not to mention, the middle is assumed to be a place of peace and calm, not unlike the eye of a storm. But it is not a place of rest; it is a place of tension, requiring constant vigilance and adjustment. One does not stand still in the middle; one balances, teetering between competing forces. Take, for instance, the realm of politics. To occupy the middle ground in an age of polarised extremes is too often hailed as a virtue. The centrist, we are told, avoids the dogmatism of the far right and the reactionary fervour of the radical left. I would like to believe that this is generally achieved. At least as long as the middle ground represents a genuine synthesis of opposing truths, and not a mere refuge of the cowardly and the indecisive. In the case of the latter, or if the middle shifts too much with the extremes, what once seemed a stable centre can become, over time, a position of quiet complicity in absurdity. The same can be said of personal virtues. Take courage, for example, which Aristotle famously located between the extremes of recklessness and cowardice. It is easy to admire courage in the abstract, but in practice, the boundary between courage and recklessness is not all that easy to draw, especially at the outset. A soldier who charges into battle may later be lauded as courageous or dismissed as foolhardy, depending not on the purity of his intention but on the outcome of his action. Perhaps, this is why parents usually teach young children virtues of courage, honesty or selflessness as abstract ideals rather than context-specific values. Nuance is learned through life-experience, not instruction, and parents hope that teaching only the blacks and whites to their children will help them, over time, to lean more towards the white in a world destined to gradually fade into greys. To attempt to teach the greys too soon is not only futile but denies the child the opportunity to establish a relationship with the ideal, to strive for progress, if not perfection. Perhaps this is why the middle, while rhetorically appealing, often fails to satisfy us emotionally. We admire the hero who charges headlong into danger, the ascetic who renounces all earthly pleasures, the rebel who defies convention—not because we believe their choices are necessarily wise, but because they embody a clarity and conviction that the middle rarely permits. The middle, by its nature, is ambivalent, nuanced, conditional. It resists the siren call of absolutes and therefore rarely inspires. And yet, the middle is indispensable. Civilisation itself can be seen as a collective endeavour to impose balance on the extremes of human nature. Without the middle, the pendulum of history would swing wildly from tyranny to anarchy, from asceticism to hedonism, from zealotry to nihilism. The middle may lack the glamour of extremes, but it is the ground upon which stability and progress are built. The challenge, then, is to embrace the middle without fetishizing it, to recognize its value without falling into the trap of treating it as an ideal. For the moment we declare the middle to be the ideal, we elevate it above the extremes, thereby rendering it an extreme in its own right. To live in the middle is to accept that there is no final resting place, no formula that will resolve all tensions. It is to engage perpetually in the art of adjustment, the practice of discernment, the pursuit of wisdom that can never be fully attained. In this sense, the middle is not a destination but a discipline. It requires humility, for one must admit that no extreme—whether of thought, action, or belief—can encompass the whole of truth. It requires courage, for to stand in the middle is to risk being misunderstood by those who prefer the clarity of extremes. And it requires patience, for the middle offers no easy answers, only the ongoing work of holding opposing forces in creative tension. Perhaps, then, the true virtue of the middle lies not in its being a point between extremes but in its refusal to be pinned down at all. The middle is not the absence of conviction but the presence of discernment; not the rejection of ideals but the recognition that all ideals, taken to their limits, become distorted. To live in the middle is to inhabit a paradox: to seek the ideal while understanding that the ideal is never static. And if this seems unsatisfying, even maddening—well, perhaps that is the point. The middle, like life itself, resists simplification. It demands that we engage with its complexities, not in the hope of resolving them but in the belief that the struggle itself is worthwhile. For in the end, the virtue of being in the middle is not that it is easy or comforting or even ideal. It is that it is often necessary.

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