You say that the times are bad. Be better yourselves, and the times will be better: You are the times. Technology must multiply human agency. DMs closed.
New York, USA
Joined October 2018
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"the nagging question was why Kepler’s astronomy worked so well although his pre-Newtonian physics was so ineffective. Though his instinct for physical problems was sound, his tools were not, and the success of his astronomy depended on his ability to shift to (frankly, metaphysical presuppositions) when his physical ones gave out."
I wonder if ADHD is just a different ecology of computation: a relationship between their cognition and the environment in which environmental randomness is used to offload computation. Think of hunters.
Nothing makes me cringe more than hearing physicists say that nature obeys Newton's laws or something like that.
Not liking sci-fi is turning out to be a competitive advantage.
Also, if you're a technologist and you don't have a rich world of imagined technologies in your head, then what are you doing?
"You read the sci-fi corpus and you quickly learn..."
This phrasing caught my attention. It continues to freak me out that some AI folks seem to treat sci-fi as prophetic texts. Mortals wrote them. Mortals with no more ability to actually see into the future than you or me. You can write one too! It's really hard, it turns out (I have two drafts rn), but you can.
New rule: if you use Turing computability to make an argument about the universe being a simulation, it's an instant block.
Only recently did I come to understand how reading Rilke in my late teens influenced my frontier technology work.
“You must understand the concept of the ‘Open,’ which I have tried to propose in the elegy, in such a way that the animal’s degree of consciousness sets it into the world without the animal’s placing the world over against itself at every moment (as we do); the animal is in the world; we stand before it by virtue of what peculiar turn and intensification which our consciousness has taken.
By the ‘Open,’ therefore, I do not mean sky, air, and space; they, too, are ‘object’ and thus ‘opaque’ and closed to the man who observes and judges. The animal, the flower, presumably is all that, without accounting to itself, and therefore has before itself and above itself that indescribably open freedom which perhaps has its (extremely fleeting) equivalents among us only in those first moments of love when one human being sees his own vastness in another, his beloved, and in man’s elevation toward God.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to a Russian Reader
