Exotic Botany… (1804), by James Edward Smith
I wrote a post for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters on the importance of redundancy in one’s stupidity-prevention system.
I’ll be offline for the next week or so as I try to finish a complete draft of my Sayers biography, but as I ride into the sunset I’ll share the news that Dan Wang’s annual letter is back, after a year’s hiatus during which he published an excellent book. Ciao for now!
Dictating a passage of my Sayers bio to my computer, I uttered the name “Bertie Wooster.” The computer rendered that as “Birdy Worcester.” I now want a canary I can name Birdy Worcester.
I wrote about design amnesia.
Happy 90th birthday to Sandy Koufax, who became my favorite baseball player when I was eight years old. And that never changed.
Let this give you hope in the New Year: No matter how powerful AI becomes, it will never quench the primal human desire to tell total strangers on the internet that they’re stupid and wicked.
Listening with pleasure to this conversation between Sam Harris and Ross Douthat, I felt that they were often talking past each other and thus failing to identify the true nature of their disagreement. I can help with that!
Re: what human life might be like in a post-scarcity society, I’d recommend my essay on Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. (I’d also recommend Banks’s novels, of course, but first things first.)
Re: demons, I’d recommend my outline of a demonology.