The Dangerous Academic is an Extinct Species

There is an obvious discrepancy between conservative fears of "leftist takeover" of academia, and the actual, reactionary nature of academia itself, with regards to labour practices, gatekeeping of knowledge, enforced conformity, etc. Many left-wing academics are however all to eager to buy into the hype themselves.

One Half a Manifesto, written by computer scientist Jarod Lanier in 2000.

Concerns AI-utopianism and nanotech, the sectors of society who are most enthusiastic about them and what their wider ideological motivations are, discussing the anti-human aspects of these futuristic visions as well as providing several refutations of optimistic predictions.

I'm not at all equipped to assess the validity or not of most of these claims, but it's an interesting look into the field and the mentalities of people who work there (even if only from one person's perspective, but he's not the only one). I will probably have reason to come back to it. It's pretty funny too.

I once suggested that among all humanity, one could only definitively prove a lack of internal experience in certain professional philosophers.

It is perfectly true that one can think of a person as a gene's way of propagating itself, as per Dawkins, or as a sexual organ used by machines to make more machines, as per McLuhan (as quoted in the masthead of every issue of Wired Magazine), and indeed it can even be beautiful to think from these perspectives from time to time. As the anthropologist Steve Barnett pointed out, however, it would be just as reasonable to assert that "A person is shit's way of making more shit."

Just as some newborn race of superintelligent robots are about to consume all humanity, our dear old species will likely be saved by a Windows crash. The poor robots will linger pathetically, begging us to reboot them, even though they'll know it would do no good.

There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than a life lived inside the confines of a theory.

Why Johnny Can't Dissent, Thomas Frank

This one is pretty well known I think, but it's very funny, and depressing at the same time. No less so because it was written in 1997.

On student plagiarism, online courses, and the mechanization of learning

How many words does it take to make a mistake?

Andrew wrote: Fri Feb 25, 2022 1:37 pm On student plagiarism, online courses, and the mechanization of learning

How many words does it take to make a mistake?

Good one. As an educator, even of American 10 year olds as opposed to English undergrads, this brought up a ton of things I wrestle with in my profession and some things I hadn't even thought of.

"The (edited) Latecomer's Guide to Crypto" -- an annotated guide to the article The New York Times published on March 20, 2022.

I have a subscription, so I don't know if there is a pay wall here.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005 ... he-egg-men

There's another article from the New Yorker called Climbing the Redwoods that I can't find a link to, but I think PDF files are out there.

iembalm wrote: Fri Mar 25, 2022 7:59 pm https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005 ... he-egg-men

Great piece, this.

The Zero Armed Bandit:

https://www.damninteresting.com/the-zero-armed-bandit/