Category: Intellect Run Amok

  • The Price of an Impoverished Philosophy

    I have and continue to avoid doctors not because of the drugs they prescribe but because of the mentality & mindset with which they look at me. First, this video in which Jordan Peterson (a renowned psychologist, researched, teacher who disappeared for almost a year) describes what he went through because of psychiatric medication: Then…

  • AlphaGo

    I enjoyed this documentary about AlphaGo – the AI that cracked the game of Go. However, I felt that there was another player at the table, an overlooked player: the qualitative outcome. Despite the potential complexity of the game of Go, its outcome is still a simplistic quantity: area conquered. I have a feeling that…

  • Richard Feynman on How Computers Work

    A beautiful explanation of how computers work for non-technical people that can be as useful today as it was almost 35 years ago. As the talk unfolded and approached the subject of intelligence in computers I began to wonder how his ideas have held up in light of AI … and (spoiler alert) damn did…

  • The Isolation of Science

    This is a good example of intellect-run-amok … how to heal science from its isolation and to bring it back into context? is there a more pertinent and fascinating science question? how deeply has this systemic flaw held us back from developing as individuals and societies? how much effort will it take to repair the…

  • Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 6: Good Shape

    Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 6: Good Shape

    good shape … comes about when the whole is made of parts that are themselves whole in this rather simple geometric sense … is not only making things more beautiful; it also makes them work more profoundly, more effectively.

  • Christopher Alexander – Mechanistic: A Mental Toy

    “The mechanistic idea of order can be traced to Descartes, around 1640. His idea was: if you want to know how something works, you can find out by pretending that it is a machine. You completely isolate the thing you are interested in … from everything else, and you invent a mechanistic model, a mental…

  • 3 Sources of Bias in AI

    ” … Math really is pure, has certain truth, it’s eternal, it would be the same without any particular sentient species looking at it. That’s because math is an abstraction that doesn’t exist in the real world. Computation is a physical process. … the first source of AI bias:  unintentionally uploading the implicit human biases…

  • Being a part of … nothing

    I started this video in a tech-mindset. I had already known about most of what is displayed in it, but the conclusions drawn in the last seconds gave me chills. Yes feeling a part of something, community, sharing, etc … are precious experiences that we are drawn to. But does it not matter what underlies…

  • Stuart Kauffman on the Hegemony of Mechanistic Thinking: Must There be Laws of Nature?

    this comes on the heels of Daniel’s Shmachtenberger’s talk about Emergence:

  • Google now listening in ALWAYS

    First this as context: “Today some Google Home owners reported hearing something extra when they asked for a summary of the day ahead from the smart speaker: an advertisement for the opening of Beauty and the Beast … The ad was delivered using the regular Google Assistant voice, so it blended in seamlessly with the…

  • Revisiting Trust in Bitcoin and Blockchain

    I have mentioned before that I do not believe in bitcoin and blockchain technologies because of their attempt to circumvent trust. I believe in using technology to nourish trust relationships. This article (via the P2PFoundation) does a good job of demonsrating the issue of trust and how it has already manifested and challenged ongoing blockchain…

  • Has the IMF realized austerity doesn’t work?

    “Sometimes an ideology is so brilliantly propagated that observers might not even notice it’s an ideology. In the corridors of power and in mainstream discussion, it ceases to be questioned. Then it goes catastrophically wrong. And it begins to seen again for the ideology it is. It becomes questioned again. And, if they are smart,…

  • Why Aaron Died

    “I believe Aaron’s death was caused by exhaustion, by fear, and by uncertainty. I believe that Aaron’s death was caused by a persecution and a prosecution that had already wound on for 2 years (what happened to our right to a speedy trial?) and had already drained all of his financial resources. I believe that Aaron’s death…

  • On Intelligence – Human and Artificial

    In some ways I feel that we have barely tapped into human intelligence (an experience that can go way beyond the narrow field of intellectual comprehension), yet it seems that the progress we have made, as expressed in AI, may undermine the possibility for many people to continue to evolve their human intelligence. “… artificial…

  • Vata in Software

    Though I have moved away from the more hard-core environment of software development I still enjoyed this talk very much. It talks about something which can look inconsequential – software versions and its effect on software creation. The subject, though technical, is framed in this talk as a matter of relationship amongst developers. There are…

  • The American Dream!?

    This powerful piece about the Unnecessariat describing an out-of-view America and explaining how Trump happened. I was surprised, given that I come from a different background and reality to find that I resonated with this part: “To know that nothing more is expected of you, or your children, or of your children’s children, than to…

  • Soylent customers keep getting sick

    sigh … “Liquid meal maker Soylent is stopping sales of its flagship powder, warning that a handful of customers reported stomach sickness after consuming it … customer complaints of diarrhea, vomiting and upset stomachs. Backed by more than $20 million in venture capital, Soylent has emerged as one of several popular start-ups hoping to change…

  • Trust Disrupted: Bitcoin and the Blockchain

    A good overview of some of the fascinating issues that the bitcoin and blockchain spaces are experiencing. An underlying assumption in this field, that is not explicitly mentioned, is that technology and mathematics can be used to generate trust where people (for different reasons) cannot. That is one of the main reasons I am a…

  • We are getting exhausted at maintaining an ugly world

    It’s been a while since I’ve heard Charles Eisenstein talking … in The Fertile Ground of Bewilderment it feels like a fresh wave of crystallization is passing through him: “… the core is changing … interbeing is the truth. We can only surpress it at great and growing effort, until we become exhausted. It’s like…

  • Paul Romer: The Trouble With Macroeconomics

    “… Macroeconomics, he argues, is like a science that has not only stalled for three decades, but has actually gone backwards in its ability to understand reality. In the late 1970s, as the old certainties of Keynesianism collapsed, a new generation of economists moved the discipline on to the terrain of super-abstract equations. Their assumption…