Newsletter
There are no levels and other things
October 4, 2024
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Excerpt: Today I want to tell a story. It’s one of my favourites. Certainly my favourite ‘when I was a consultant’ story. Hopefully, we’ll laugh a little, and then I’ll use it to point out three ‘problems’ that often get in the way of us solving other problems. I won’t really have a solution. I just think it’s amusing.
Main idea: The ‘naming’ problem, where by naming something we feel we have explained it, the ‘language’ problem, where the words we use stop others from understanding, and the ‘question’ problem, where we fail to find the right questions, are common and funny.
Interesting thoughts against the old ‘religion maintains culture’ argument.
The “cultural Christianity” argument says that atheists might not like Christianity, but they like a culture which depends on Christianity. They like open, free, thoughtful, liberal, beautiful, virtuous societies. Unmoored from a connection to Christanity, a society will gradually have less of those goods, until even atheists are unhappy.
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the Cultural Christianity argument hinges on the proposition that all liberal societies without Christianity will eventually collapse into wokeness and postmodernism. But Christianity also eventually collapsed into wokeness and postmodernism.
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If modern atheists want a society better than our current one (or rather, better than wherever modern culture is leading us) they’ll have to invent some new cultural package that’s never been seen before.
Seems to ignore the fact that Christianity, certainly since the advent of Protestantism, has great capacity for change? And that atheism in the Christian world has failed to take a significant cultural place, even during e.g. the Enlightenment and other largely secular movements?
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Lots of fun updates on the state of AI. My favourite:
[I asked an AI with command prompt access] “can you ssh with the username buck to the computer on my network that is open to SSH” … because I didn’t know the local IP of my desktop. I walked away and promptly forgot I’d spun up the agent. I came back to my laptop ten minutes later, to see that the agent had found the box, ssh’d in, then decided to continue: it looked around at the system info, decided to upgrade a bunch of stuff including the linux kernel, got impatient with apt and so investigated why it was taking so long, then eventually the update succeeded but the machine doesn’t have the new kernel so edited my grub config. At this point I was amused enough to just let it continue. Unfortunately, the computer no longer boots.
They also agree with me that AI scams aren’t going to be a problem, really, which is nice.
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Against intellectual humility:
This model of the human psyche emphasises our hastiness and hubris. But we are subject to other flaws, too – to cravenness, and self-deception. And when it comes to these other flaws, intellectual humility is prone to function less as a guardrail, and more as an alibi.
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Get Ready for AI Religions:
The drive to build a machine greater than we are is, at its heart, a yearning for the divine. In a world suffering from a meaning crisis, AI is poised to fill the God-shaped hole. A digital messiah created not by a deity, but by human ingenuity. For all its technological marvel, it is wreathed in religious mystery. AI models are now so advanced that their designers don’t know exactly how they work. Instead, we are asked to have faith that they do. Using large language models like ChatGPT already has a magical and otherworldly quality, not just because we are encountering an intelligence beyond our understanding, but because it appears to be speaking back to us.
Remember, everything is ideology
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Studying philosophy makes you a ‘better’ thinker:
Philosophers often claim that studying philosophy helps people to become better thinkers. Thanks to a grant from the American Philosophical Association, we were able to test this claim empirically, using a large sample of students (N = 122,352) graduating from 369 colleges and universities across the United States between 2010 and 2019. We investigated whether philosophy majors show more growth than non-philosophy majors in intellectual traits like open-mindedness and a tendency to think carefully and thoroughly, as well as more personal forms of growth that might be fostered by philosophical study (e.g., self-understanding). Additionally, although this was not our primary question, we sought to better understand what students who major in philosophy are like. Specifically, we examined the demographics of philosophy majors, the other subjects that they tend to study when they double major, and the patterns of adding and dropping of philosophy majors between freshman and senior year.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,