theologian, philosopher, logician, Eastern Catholic--not a generalist, a universalist
Connecticut
Joined July 2023
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What are the most pressing problems in the intellectual life of the 21st century?
First, there are theoretical and practical questions that we need research to address, from cancer research to the Big Bang. That's what most professors spend their time on. But the real questions are much deeper.
What if you could read in Latin or Greek right now with ease and pleasure?
--Real sources that you care about and want to read:
Gospels, Psalms, Aesop, Sallust, Herodotus, Sophocles, and more
"With ease and pleasure" : fluidly, without puase, like a book.
--LECTIO--
11/10
New take on the future of AI--hear me out:
The more a scholar or scientist learns, the more hesitant and circumspect he becomes. The aged do not make great discoveries; they only validate them.
Part of the problem is their massive context window.
So, for AI . . .
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What if it faces the same problem but 100x more since it draws on so much more?
What if future AIs will be weak, hesitant, full of context, and doing constant reviews and re-evaluations?
That would mean, if true, that even exponential compute growth would not save us . . .
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Looked at my Grok @bot usage and it says I suddenly started using Cursor a couple days before I ran out early.
I remember that: Bot started talking about Cloud agents. I remember thinking about why this new tool is being introduced; I am only doing the same things I was doing.
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The book Lexis by Gareth Morgan is a classic in the learning of Greek.
Study it intensively for about a month and come out, blinking, to read ancient Greek.
I actually found the book!
jamesfpatterson.com/gml/
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There is nothing better for learning the forms than this.
NOTHING. I have used it with students since it launched.
. . . Well, nothing better yet!
This is a wonderful Ancient Greek morphology tool from Eton College:
etoncollege.com/eton-greek/
A bookworm, desiring to learn to swim, nearly drowned; so he swore never to touch water again, until he had learned to swim. - Hierocles
σχολαστικός κολυμβᾶν βουλόμενος, παρὰ μικρὸν ἐπνίγη· ὤμοσεν οὖν μὴἅψασθαι ὕδατος, ἐὰν μὴ πρῶτον μάθῃ κολυμβᾶν.
Grant it all, and deny that the conclusion follows. Everything in the objection is true, and none of it bears on the thesis, which was about birds, not about flying things. So everything is granted, but the conclusion does not follow. This is the move the schools call conceding the matter and denying the consequence, and it is the answer when every premise stands and the conclusion still does not follow, since the matter is sound but the form is not.
Dialectic reasons from what is probable (what seems so to everyone, or to most, or to the wise) and reaches a reasoned opinion, not a proof. Its instrument is the topic, a standing relation, such as genus to species or whole to part, from which an argument may be drawn. Its practice is the disputation, where one puts a case and another answers.
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