hypocrisy
If there were a Nobel prize for hypocrisy, then its first recipient ought to be Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook boss. On 23 August, all his 1.7 billion users were greeted by this message: ‘Celebrating 25 years of connecting people. The web opened up to the world 25 years ago today! We thank Sir Tim Berners-Lee and other internet pioneers for making the world more open and connected.' Aw, isn’t that nice? From one 'pioneer’ to another. What a pity, then, that it is a combination of bullshit and hypocrisy….It’s not the inaccuracy that grates, however, but the hypocrisy. Zuckerberg thanks Berners-Lee for ‘making the world more open and connected’. So do I. What Zuck conveniently omits to mention, though, is that he is embarked upon a commercial project whose sole aim is to make the world more ‘connected’ but less open. Facebook is what we used to call a ‘walled garden’ and now call a silo: a controlled space in which people are allowed to do things that will amuse them while enabling Facebook to monetise their data trails. One network to rule them all. If you wanted a vision of the opposite of the open web, then Facebook is it.
But when you divide the brain into bitty bits and make millions of calculations according to a bunch of inferences, there are abundant opportunities for error, particularly when you are relying on software to do much of the work. This was made glaringly apparent back in 2009, when a graduate student conducted an fM.R.I. scan of a dead salmon and found neural activity in its brain when it was shown photographs of humans in social situations. Again, it was a salmon. And it was dead.
There’s a nesting doll quality to many of the game’s recipes. Early on, for example, I had to build and charge my ship’s Hyperdrive. That required me to scour planetary surfaces for heridium, in addition to obtaining or crafting some antimatter. The recipe for antimatter calls for another craftable ingredient, electron vapor, whose recipe calls for yet another craftable ingredient, suspension fluid. It’s crafting all the way down. The reward for gathering and combining all of this interstellar stuff is a trip to another star system … where you can begin the process of exploring and crafting all over again, before moving on to the next sun and its planets to do the same. In some cases, you can obtain ingredients through trading, or via the whims of inscrutable aliens, but the objective, always, is to craft more so you can explore more, in an endless, monotonous loop of non-achievement.
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“Picturization”
What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists
My clients know so little about current research in physics, they aren’t even aware they’re in a foreign country. They have no clue how far they are from making themselves understood. Their ideas aren’t bad; they are raw versions of ideas that underlie established research programmes. But those who seek my advice lack the mathematical background to build anything interesting on their intuitions. I try to help them by making connections to existing research. During our conversations, I point them towards relevant literature and name the important keywords. I give recommendations on what to do next, what they need to learn, or what problem lies in the way. And I make clear that if they want to be taken seriously by physicists, there’s no way around mathematics, lots of mathematics. Images and videos will not do.
— What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists
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Malcolm wishes you all a happy National Dog Day
Jacobs’s effort is thoughtful and well worth engaging. But I am not sure we have a shortage of Christian intellectuals (although I may be biased because some of my best friends might be counted as part of this group). Rather, we live in a world where (1) religion has been subsumed by politics; (2) many liberals have accepted the view that religion now lives almost entirely on the right end of politics; (3) the popular media tend to focus on the most extreme and outlandish examples of religion rather than the more thoughtful kind; which means that (4) the quieter forms of religious expression — left, right and center — rarely win notice on the covers of magazines or anywhere else. Put another way: Even Reinhold Niebuhr could not be Reinhold Niebuhr in 2016.
E. J. Dionne. Which was one of the chief points of my essay: “At some point in the past sixty years or so a perverse and destructive feedback loop engaged, and I cannot see how to disengage it.” Also, I never say in the essay that there is “a shortage of Christian intellectuals”: I say that we don’t currently have “serious Christian intellectuals who [occupy] a prominent place on the national stage.”
I don’t know how to account for it, but in all my years of writing I have never published anything that has received as many misunderstandings as this essay. Every day I hear from people complaining “Your essay would have been better if you had said X” when I did in fact say X, or “I think you’re wrong about Z” when Z is something I neither said nor think.
