Dak
mentat
https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1003276176045961216
Interesting bit on Chinese transnationals.
Interesting bit on Chinese transnationals.
Seems pretty useless until that Hyatt et al comes out and shows how they define psychopathy.
The paper uses this state-level data on personality in conjunction with Hyatt et al. (Forthcoming), who translate the Big Five personality traits into psychopathy. These latter authors argue counter to Patrick et al. (2009), who previously described psychopathy as a constellation of disinhibition, boldness, and meanness. Hyatt et al. demonstrate that these traits are superfluous, as they are already nested within 3 the Big Five personality traits. Boldness corresponds to low neuroticism and high extraversion, meanness corresponds to low agreeableness, and disinhibition corresponds to low conscientiousness. The findings of Rentfrow et al (2013) and Hyatt et al. (Forthcoming) can thereby be combined into a method of estimating the level of psychopathy for each U.S. state.
That underlined portion describes the earlier definition they don't use, right? Simply listing the use of those "Big Five" doesn't say much without knowing precisely how the combined term of those five inputs is calculated.
At one of the series of roundtables Sidewalk Toronto has held, Doctoroff responded to a question about data management by saying, “There are cameras everywhere anyway. There’s chaos out there. Together we can bring order.” Whose “order” will it be? That’s what worries people.
Aggarwala says that over time Sidewalk has come to appreciate “how deeply different” the Canadian view of privacy is compared with that in the United States. Canadians tend to see privacy as a fundamental human right; Americans have historically been more willing to see it as something that should be protected, with abuses punished after the fact, but which can be traded away in exchange for some benefits, like free Gmail.
This is absurd. The average American almost certainly views privacy as a fundamental right, they simply don't understand how participating in online social media and other virtual platforms is at odds with nose-length notions of privacy. The average Canadian probably doesn't understand this either; in fact, the average human with access to modern technology probably doesn't understand this. I'm perpetually vexed by those who advocate the idea of the virtual, information-based society, yet insist that such a society must protect the privacy of individual citizens. Privacy is not compatible with the freedom of information.
cash transfers cannot solve a problem that the absence of cash didn’t cause. Herein lies one of the many issues with reparations: it would not address the root causes of black underachievement. Fans of the concept should ask themselves: what will happen the day after reparations are paid, when black students still spend less time on homework than their white peers, blacks are still making poor financial decisions, and two out of every three black kids are still living in single-parent homes? On that day, I’d hope to see progressive scholars acknowledge that they had been asking the wrong question for 50 years. But I would not be shocked to hear them insist that, if only the reparations checks had been a bit larger, black America’s problems would have been solved.
So long as the residue of traditional humanistic philosophy persists, so long as we presume meaning exceptional, this prospect cannot even be conceived, let alone explored. The “evacuation of interiority,” as Scranton calls it, is always the other guy’s—metacognitive neglect assures experience cannot but appear fathomless, immovable. Therein lies the heartbreaking genius of our cognitive predicament: given the intractability of our biomechanical nature, our sociocognitive and metacognitive systems behave as though no such nature exists. We just… are—the deliverance of something inexplicable.
I think he still has some work to do though if he really wants to combat the meaninglessness of meaning. It'll be fun to watch him try to crack that nut, if he tries.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/29/google-city-technology-toronto-canada-218841
If there's enough diversity among cities, this issue would theoretically resolve itself......but then my hunch is that the cities populated by people I adamantly disagree with would struggle in a variety of ways, either economically or "morally".
I think to some degree, on this issue, one either takes the Nietzschean or the Schopenhaurian route.
This is fucking mindblowing!
This is fucking mindblowing!
I'm skeptical of two of the author's claims:
1) "AI will destroy human society by destroying meaning": While I appreciate the exploration of this as a possibility, the author strikes me as overly certain that AI will develop this capability, and therefore overly certain of this destructive outcome. If his argument is that this is already happening, my anecdotal experience suggests that so far we're not necessarily more mired in cognitive dissonance/conflict today than at other points in time since the Enlightenment, if you factor out other developments like globalization, industrialization, and runaway depletion of natural resources.
2) "Civilization was doomed from the start due to the intractability of our biomechanical nature": It's easy to make this claim today in the context of environmental destruction and natural resource depletion, but I think this oversimplifies things unless we look at individual nations/cultures, as there are some (i.e. the Germanic ones, if we focus on the easier-to-evaluate developed nations) which have a much better track record for sustainability than others.