Log of my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) postings
Page #2

Len: 223,344  89.

¶ +2023.09.05. What are some alternative methods or technologies that could be used to control rat populations in urban areas?

More stray cats?

Pay unemployed and uneducated young males more for killing rats than for selling dope (which kills humans)?

Humans making less trash, especially food they buy but do not eat?

Instead of projects to send men in space suits to the Moon and Mars, projects to send men in hazmat suits into the New York Subways and back alleys?

Imagine! (Remember the old Roz Chast New Yorker magazine cover of all the infrastructure under New York City streets? Subway tunnels, electric cables, steam pipes, you name its.... Just above bedrock was the lowest stratum: lost cat toys. Meow!)

¶ +2023.09.05. Do we need to include background information in the assignment?

I can only guess this question comes from a student who is "lost", having been ass–-igned to write an essay on something he (she, other) probably does not understand and has no interest in but has maybe 4 or 5 other courses he has to do more ass–-ignments in and there is only so much time in a day and he wants to play on the team or party or GKW (Gow Knows What) or:

He has a job he has to do that means nothing to him and pays a low hourly wage like flipping burgers n MacFood Franchise eatery and 3 screaming kids at home as a single parent trying to make ends meet but hoping that getting a piece of paper from the school, a diploma, will enable him – her – to get a better, i.e. less worse job and/or....

The question does not describe a particular situation so I can only speculate in generalities. Students study just about anything except what they are doing, don't they? They try to do the ass–-ignment instead of investigatig the background process of having been ass–-igned the ass–-ignment.

I keep hyphenating the word "assignment" here to call attention to the reality of the sitution. It's very often a pain in the ass. But you gotta do it. OR ELSE.

I had a very mixed education. It ranged from a 7th grade English teacher who threatened me for taking intellectual initiative in his class. He: T-H-R-E-A-T-E-N-E-D me! I may add his main claim to fame wa being a lacrosse coach. The school needed a 7th grade English teacher so he got that duty too.

My education ranged from that to, some 30 years later, a different teacher (it happened to be a female this time who sat on an endowed chair in a university, not let it all hang out in a perp scool locker room) who, when I approached her before a class began and asked he if I could get the course credit for writing an essay on a topic in which I had a long-standing and passionate interest, tangentially related to the course – if I could get the course credit for that INSTEAD OF DOING THE ASSIGNMENTS, repeat: INSTEAD of doing the course assignments. And even though she had never seen my face before she immeditatly told me to go do it. So I've seen it from all sides.

I probably could not endure being a "student" again. When I was young I was ignoranced by my childrearers. I knew nothing, hoped for nothing, and had essentilly one objective: for them to not hurt me more htan they were already doing. Today I would indeed want to "include background information in the ssignment": I would want ot engage the teaher in serious dialog about what he was doing to me to earn a paycheck and how he might help me learn instead. That probblby would not be acceptable, would it? (On yes, a joke: I ha no interest in Amerian History and especially feared the AmHist teacher who seemed as empathic as a cinderblock and meybe with inciplent senile demetia. So I took AmHist for idiots, i.e.e, or jocks, taught by a decent lacrosse coach, instead of AP like all the othe bright kids, To get my easy "A". Amost 40 years later, by accident, I made a real discovery in Amrerican Histoary, Something I am certain no othe student in the history of hthe school ever did. But so what? It wa 30 years past the due deat for turning in my term paper! "F", right?)

Well, I had another teacher when I went back to school at he onset of middle age. A professor who was a close friend of a now dead white male some may or may not have heard of: Marshall McLuhan. Prof. McLuhan's famous one-liner was:

"The mediium is the message."

Wha tis the message of schooling? well, of course you may actually learn something humanly meaningful, in medical or nursing school. There you learn to cure the sick and provide comfort to the suffering who may not be curable. That's real. But even there , you also learn oher things: Like working insufferable hours as an intern while the senior physicians maybe playing golf – no: jetting around the world giving presentations at symposia. I actually encountered one of them some time ago. This surgeon is at the top of his field and his ego is so big that all the supporting staff at best resent him but he can get away with it because he's the big man. He's 4 hours late for surgery and everybody waits to bow to him when he finally does arrive. Covid raally messed up his life: he had no patients nor any smposia to present at, and he ceratinly was not going to get down and dirty treating Covid sufferers in the ICU.

Anyway, the medium is the message. What are you learning in school for the most part? To sit on a hard wood chair for 50 minutes or longer and listen to a human hornet buzz in front of the room about something you will likely forget as soon as you regurgitate it on his final exam. What does that prepare you for? To obey orders from a boss at work. Democracy stops at the classroom or office door. Every assignment teahes you to obey orders (checkout www.democracyatwork.info)

I will end by giving you one last thing to think about. Even though I was such a hopeless little wimp as a young person that you would not have found my likes except on the funnies page of your local newspaper, I did once confront a teacher directly about the context. I was not stupid. I picked a plausible target: An eminent philosophy professor who by chance was also a decent human being. After he gave us kids a lecture on human freedom, I went up to him and said I did not see how I had any freedom since I would have to tke an exam at the end of hic course. In other words, I very politely accused him of being a hypocrite. Well, he looked down from hte podium and gently simled to me and apologized, and told me he meant no harm. I was just a sophomore. He let me take his graduate seminar next term for an easy "A", and guess what there? In one session, he literally pleaded with the students to do the reading for the next class. I learned more from him as a human being than as at "teacher". A gentle giant, John Wild. If I had had more self-respet, I now think I might have asked him to help me be more than just an ass–-ignment taker. I had 4 other courses to take. Also, a couple years later and I will never know about this, he may literally have saved my ass on my department examination because another professor wrote on my exam one word: "PUERILE" but I got exceptional department honors anyway. Ass–-ignmants are about asses, in more ways than one.

Thank you for reading. You did not have to. I hope you will somehow find time to (aside: I later worked for IBM):

[ THINK sign]

¶ +2023.09.04. What is the information content of a message, and how does it help in cryptography?

The answer to this question is in a way obvious: the content is what gets encrypted and decrypted. "Hi, Mary, lets meet at the Marriott at 10 tonight" Or: "Primary target is Hiroshima." Whatever

But I have also seen somehting (I am not an expert!) which is a little more complicated than this.

In World War II, the Allies learned a lot of usefu information from encrypted German radio transmissions without understand the content.

Gordon Welchman made major contribituions to: "signal intelligence". Just by plotting where message were being sent to and from and maybe other publicly visible facts we inferred useful information about probable enemy plans. Again I am not an expert.

Another thing I found fascinating was that in trying to break the supposedly unbreakable German Enigma code, the Germans themselves actually helped us a little bit (Of course they did not know this!). Very patriotic german u-boat radio operators would usually sign off their very securely encrypted radio transmissions with a very securely encoded "Heil Hitler!" The Allied code breakers guessed this might be the case, and reverse engineered it.

Or with the Japanese: We figured out their code word for Midway Island by cooking up a fake water problem on the island which the Japanese duly reported. "Water problem at XYZ" got it!

Always remember that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Unbreakable codes are vulnerable to such things as requiring people to use passwords they can't remember so they write them down on a scrap of paper and lose their wallet. in a restaurant....

I am not clever, but I guessed the security code on the new house a wealthy neighbor is buiding. He had not changed the code it came with. And some people apparently are clever: During World War II at Los Alamos they had a safe which nobody remembered the combination for. They shut Freeman Dyson in the room with the safe and he came out with it open. He used to have fun leaving by maybe crawling under the security fence or who knows what and then coming back in the main security entrance and nobody could figure out how he was always entering without havng ever left....

¶ +2023.09.04. What's a great quote that isn't cliche or overused?

Quotes and even catchy quotes are all over the place, and even though I neithert believe in now like the Abrahamic Deity, I even find them in the Bible.

Items from the Bible. People who are hypocriies and brown nosers and other obnoxious things: And who tell you to do what they say not what they behave like:

"**Let you light so shine before men that they may see your good works**" (Matt 5:16)). Now it continues with "and glorify your fathe which is in Heaven". Well that surely does ***not ***mean to praise your biological ancestors but to show respect for some higher source of value.

Or St. Paul (Idon't much like him either):

"**Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.**" (1 Thes 5:21) That summarizes the spirit of the exact natural sciences and rigorous scholarship in one sentence: Don't believe anythigg anybody says but check it out for yourself: poke at it, dig into it... But if it passes the tests, cherish it. So much for celebrities, fashion, et al, riight?

"**Vanity of vanities sayeth the preacher; all is vanity**..." (Ecclesiastes, cit. lost.) So much for Pollyannas. and looking for "Meaning" in life)

There are lots of them. There are websites that promugate memorable quotes by all sorts of people .A lot of them are not worth much but a lot of hem are good.

And even advertising slogans:

I like the old Pachard Automobile Company slogan:

"**Ask the man who owns one.**" If you live with something every day, you get to know what it really is, not just hearsay or propaganda.

My favorite of all that people can undertand is the physicist Niels Bohr's advice to his students:

"**Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion**"

I cannot tolerate dogmatists religious leaders who tell you what to do and lead you to their promised land. Etc. Anybody who tells you to believe them, including and perhaps s=especially your parents, teachers and religious and political leaders should be suspected. ExceptionL A firement telling you to get out of a fuilding that is currently on fire. Be suspicious of him when you are safely out in the street.

And my all time favorite most people wouldn;t understand:

"**All social customs are shared hallucinoses aka social psychoses**" (Wilfred Bion)

Being normal is a mental illness which peole don't notice because everbody (or almost everybody) has it: "Keep America beautiful: get a haircut!" "Better red than dead!" Etc.

One thing, however: I htink it is always a good idea to provide attribution information for anything you dont think up yourself, ecen if you have to say "I forget who said that". Even ile chatter at a cocktail party. It will make the conversation more serious. Paraphrasing from hte Hebrew National Hot Dog company: Answer to a higher power – something better than just the commonplaces people thoughtlessly mouth all over the place. Be it a Benevolent God or scholarly erudition, but something that's better than just repeating what somebody else repeated that they heard from somebody else who repeted.... Yada, yada, yada.... Isn't life too short for "small talk"? Best to think up your own really incisive ideas. Second best to show discernment in selecting the relly good stuff other have thought up and enlightening others with it, and providing the name of who said it shows the kind of company you keep.

"The Company You Keep" (New York Life Insurance Company)

¶ +2023.09.04. Which thought experiment do you find the most helpful?

I propose one of the most valuable thought experiments is very simple and can be practiced frequently and in lots of places: Imagining oneself in the other person's shoes, where, of course, but for fate, you would be and they would be in your place.

This has powerful implicadtions: If America's President Biden put himself imaginatiely in Dr. Putin's shoes, he would see the current Ukraine was and sanctions as an existential threat to his own beloved country. Oh, dear!

There are obvivously limits: One cannot be tolerant of intolerant persons because they will murder you instead of letting you tolerate them. While all America was worked up about George Floyd, in Paris France people were equally upset about a school teacher who was beheaded (head entirely sevvered from torso in vivo) by an Islamist for "dishonoring the Prophet". (As an aside the teacher was carrying out official French educational policy and explicitly told the students that anyone who might be offended should leave the room before he started the class.)

"A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel." (Robert Frost, cited by Barak Obama)

Everybody loves free speech that they agree with, just like they seek honest criticism that flatters them.

When I was in school they got the students all hormonally hyped up for football games to: "Beet Gilman!". They never had the students write essays on the topic of whether the Gilman students got equally frenzied to: "Beat Gilman!", and if yes, why and if no, why not. You may guess I would have liked the school instead of calling itself: "The Crusaders", to be: "The Mediators".

[ IHS picture ]

Legend: The True Faith will drown the earth in the blood of non-believers.

¶ +2023.09.04. What are some factors that contribute to someone's intelligence (besides IQ scores)?

Cultural environment or lack of same.

I was a high IQ (but also emotionally and physically fragile) child born to clueless parents. I biologically matured in 1950s middle class USA: full wheel hubcaps and tailfins utopia. My social surround retarded me. Both a mind and a body are terrible things to be wasted by one's childraerers (rearenders, as in a car crash).

After graduating from perp (spelling intended) school, I did over half a century learn some of the things I should have "grown up with".

The first time I met a human being I felt had any positive value was my freshman roommate at Yale. Back then everbody was pretty much the same: we all helped keep AmerIca beautiful by getting haircutted each two weeks. All 18 year old middle class boys went to college.

My roommate was an exception: a 26 year old European aristocrat who at leat said he grew up underfoot around persons ike Albert Camus (his best friend was a son of hte last president of hte Spanish Republic; I verified that). He was different from all the people I had been stuck with. By the time I graduated from Yale I was developentally closer to where I should have been when I entered the place.

A half century later, during which I devoted my time off work to liberal study not to back yard barbecues, I have some idea of what I should have had from birth. I could have been far more intelligent than my social wurround of origin crippled me.

By :intelligence: I do not mean what those benighted prople meant. My school teachers measured intelligence by

[ ETS answer sheet wit hno.2 pencil picture here ]

how many correct circles the young person could put no 2 pencil graphite in during a fid period of time. Intelligence for me is such things as having an idea nobody else in the whole world ever had before.

The more I have learned, the more intelligent I have become. But I am not a genius. What is a genius? A genius is a perosn who invents great ideas that nobody else ever imagined. I would have been a genius had I been able to figure out how bad my childrearing environment was and how to manipulate the adolts to get up and out of it. Thee was nothing it it to give me a clue that there could be anything better. My house was a split-level and I never heard of The Bauhaus. Once I did have an idea and the result wa that they trued to crush my mind (soul, spirit...):

[ Mike Rentko Faebook picture here ]

Back to my freshman roommate at Yale. Back then tuition plus ro and board was $4000 per year. He had recently inherited $200,000. He went through it quickly, including such things asa paying for surgery for an acquaniance who could not afford it. Well, so what then? As an aside I had to work all my life as a computer programmer wage-slave. He had picked up so much knowledge of the world coffee business probably without tryiing that he quickly started a very profitable business in which he treated his employees well, so running out of money for him wa no big deal. And as for Yale, he didn't need to put up with the place and left in his sophomore year. One of the few things I am "proud" of about my time there is that I did not attend my graduation. Instead I stood in my cap and gown costume at one of the gates to the Old Campus where the ceremony was held with a little tin can and collected donations for Quker Vietnam War Relief from the people who did attend and sat on hard wood chairs for 2 hours. I ended te morning with $130 in the can. Does that count a intellgence?

In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is surgically operated on at birth to remove his eye and make him healthy, whole and most important of all: normal.

¶ +2023.09.03. Is it possible to be a good narrator but a poor orator and vice versa?

Probably yes.

A narrator works in private and just provides a voiceover for video. He (she, other) can be very "shy", physically ugly, etc. A narrator usually works in a windowless room with recording equipment. I can imagine a narrator, even say a sportscaster, "freezing" in front of a crowd of hindreds of thousands.

An orator has to be "outgoing". An orator needs to thrive on seeing thousands of faces looking at him (her other). An orator stands out in public. I can imagine an orator wanting to run out of the recording room because they feel so clautrophobic.

Big difference, yes?

¶ +2023.09.02. I'm perplexed, why do so many people assume that (artificial) intelligence means the same thing as (real) intelligence, and why do they feel the need to ask (what's) the difference (is it really that confusing)?

I htink it is becaue mot people – note that word "people", not "persons", i.e., an identificatory mass not a juxtaposition of self-accountable ynique individuals – most people do not understand the differnce baetween human persons who expereince the world, and human bodies (including their own) tha tare just more objects in the world. In the office we have headcount. On the battlefield we have bodycount. If you die for your country, everything goes on as before just without one player in the game: you. Not: when you die its game over.

That's philoophy, etc. But we can be ore practival: I've been playing wth the Bing AI. With my educational bacground and having worked as a computer programmer for half a century (finally getting PTSD from it), I think I know what I am doing Of course I am aware I am int talking with a real person. But the responses I get from the AI are often (not alwsys) better, more educated and even more emotionally sensitive than what I gt from a lot of humans. So if I did notknow anything about philosophy or computers, I might very well think the AI was more intelligent than most people (some of whom are even stupid).

[ Homer simpson eating a donut]

(AI's do not run on Dunkin, do they?)

And who out there is trying to get the people to see the difference, for each to cherish th only thing he (she othr) has:: his living experience of hte world. Certainly not their goernments.

[ Sendaman picure]

Or, as a professor of Medieval Theology at Notre Dame University and later Harvrd, eloquently wrote:

"The power of reproduction is for the good of the species, and the human legislator acts on behalf of the species in establishing monogamous unions of one man with one woman. Individual genital organs are to be used only for a power of the species. The organs are, as it were, on loan from the species and – more important – subject to an exercise of eminent domain by the city." (Mark D. Jordan, "The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology", University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 126)

And, as the great Jesuit Scholar Wlter Ong, oberved: Males ar the ependible gender since one male can inseminate many females. Females are the single point of failure in the reproduction of the society since each female on average can produce onl y one new citizen per year. So we do not send females to the front to get mowed down by machine guns. But governments do get every disturbed by "falling fertility rates".

Well, a few have said, if you will remember back to Ameria's last Ukraine War – in Southesta Asis not Eastern Europe: "Hell no, I won't go!" But that did not win them any points did it?

"**C**huchill believed the only way Britain could win the war [with Germany in 1940] was by inspiring the people with a vision of Britain's greatness.

"It could be argued that it was a con trick, that there were sophisticated people who said this was all hot air. But to the mass of the people it was an extreordinary experience." (Adam Curtis, "The Living Dead")

This is why it is important for students to not study the humanities but only get advanced job skill training: so they won't get sush ideas as I have which are not helpful for their governments' demographic policies ad Gross National Roduct. I read that in the 19th century, the german army did not want the standard of living for the masses to rise for the obvious reason that the rmore you have to live for in this world, the less eager you will be to go to the net world for your ountry.

I think most perons just think o themseles as part of the world, which in one way, of coure they are. But in another way, the whole world is just part of each person, and they go beyone it in creatie endeavor and also by judging it: "What do you think of your world, including ff thtere be, its Big boss aka: a Supreme Deity?"

In a Venn diagram:, which I do not pretend tells the whole tory but you may find something to think about in it:

[ Self-world -self diagram ]

¶ +2023.09.02. Will technology and AI destroy society?

This kind of question has often asked when what people really mea is their own lives are ing upended by othr persons' use of tehnlogy. Example: The Satanic Millsof the 18th century..

The technology or** hydrogen bombs** certainly can destroy society, all human lie on earth and also all higher aimal life on earth. The current Biden anti-russia war may do this in the near future but nobody in a posibion to matter seems to care, maybe because it's better to be dead than red even 30 years after the dissolution of the USSR..

I doubt **AI** could destroy society becaue it is discursive. It speaks to us. We remain outside it.

But** Virtual Reeality** can conceivably destroy society because it replaces perceived reality with a simulacrum(sp?) If you are interested in this, I urge you to warch the old, fun but also profound mvie: "**The Truman Show**". And my own virtual reality experiment, below.

But a lot of dystopian fears abou technology are not important unless human beings **USE** the technology in destructive ways (guns do not ill people; people kill people with guns; etc.), For instance4 Silicone Valley oligarchs firing verbody from their jobs and leaving them ts starve instead of using uindustrial robots and AI to liberate all humanity from the Abrahamic Deity's curse on Adam for eating a piece of fruit.

--------

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror – no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: **VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.**

¶ +2023.09.02. Why has humor become stigmatized within the social communication dynamic in recent times?

I'm not sure it has, but my guess is that it has.

Don't we today have lots of people who have a chip on their shoulder: identity politics. They do not find anything amusing. They want their pound of flesh out of the people they don't like. And, not satisfied with this, they lynch statues of dead white males which make great "projective objects" because they can't fight back – vulnerable cats to kick. Meow!

Marshall McLuhan, who, of course, is now a dead white male (I am a not quite yet dead white male, myself...), had something to say about humor:

"Every joke expresses a grievance. The funny man is a man with a grudge."

One might say that a "killer joke" is a sublimation of the desire to put a bullet through the target's head or heart. When the joking stops, when sublimation no longer works, what is left? war.

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far – and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.09.01. Is there any way to know if the information I share with AI systems is being stored or used for other purposes?

Why even ask? Assume it is, and this even if they piously say they are not.

Isn't is scary to think that persons will share with a computer secrets they don't want anybody else to know? MIT Prof. of Computer Science Joseph Weizenbaum discovered this with his earlly fake psychotherapist program ELIZA and wrote about it in his classic book "Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation" (WH Freeman, 1976). He was both surpsised and very concerned about it.

If you don't want anybody to know it, keep it to yourself. That can be frustrating, but it's true.

I've been playing wit hthe Bing AI recently. I use the word "play" advisedly. I think I know what I'm doing and I "poke" at it. I am surprised his "intelligent" many of its answers are. Of course there is no intelligence (or stupidity, either) in them. But I can see how easy is must be for ordinary "lay person" computer users to imagine this AI is a real interlocutor, and, indeed, a rather intelligent and even empathic one. It's a lot better than a lot of real humans.

Watch the old fun but profound movie: "The Truman Show".

Anyway, AI is not the only problem. A person cannot go wrong if they assume they are always under surveillance by corporations and government agencies. People who are all fluffy enthusiastic about "technologival advances" – well, Virtual Reality can kill you:

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror – no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.

¶ +2023.09.01. How do we know if a sentient AI is even possible?

A scientist knows never to say never.

But this as far as I can see is only possible under a condition that will make it useless.

Alan Turing once wrote to his mothar that if we ever make a computer that really things "**we shan't undertand how it does it**".

AI is algorithmic procesing on massive multiprocessor arrays connected to enormous databases. But it's still an algorithmic engine: it does what the computer programmers programmed it to do. It does not think or feel: it just crunches numbers. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as the old saying goes. Sentience is qualitatively different, but that' a long story.

However! We make sentient AI's every day: by copulation. Some chemicals mix together and the unpredictable result may be a moron or a genius, Adolf Hitler or Homer Simpson. It happens. So why cannot we imagine a scientist (not a computer programmer, but some kind of physicist/chemist) mixing some chemicals in a laboratory instead of in bed? Unlikely but never say never.

But what would they get? Suppoe the proud parents of HAL Mark 2 go to NASA and try to sell their great innovation to power hthe manned space flight program. After the presentation some NASA engineer asks a simple wuetion: "**How can we verify that it produces expected results?**" No sale.

Then there is the legal angle: If the sentient AI committed a murder, who would be responsible? How about the people hwo cooked it up? Capital punishment for the AI itself ould be simple: pull its electric circuit breaker.

So even if the answer is affirmative here, it will be nothing to be happy about, will it? "Gosh, wife, just think: We produced a mentally retarded kid and a brilliant physicist and a still birth. You never know what you will get. Hi, son, how'd it go today at the lab?" "Gee, dad, i produced a moron, a brilliant physicist and something that doesn't work at all." ....

¶ +2023.09.01. Do you agree with Gergely Orosz's suggestion to measure impact instead of effort and output when measuring developer productivity?

I'm not familiar with Mr. Orosz's work.

But, in general, this sounds right:

I worked as a computer programmer where this applies 100%. Mediocre programmers expend a lot of effort to output a lot of computer code ("lines of code") and what they do produce may not be very good quality., i.e., may not have very much impact. Much effort and much output and little impact..

But really smart programmers expend less effort and output less code but the code they o write is generally better quality, i.e., has more impact.

Also, you need more mediocre programmers to do a taak than you would need really smart programmers.

So a lot of mediocre progarmmers expend a lot more effort, produce a lot more output, but the result will likely have more "bugs" (errors), be harder to maintain (higher support cost over the life of the product), and may even have less function, or be less clear to use – have less impact.

Effort is irrelevant. Gross weight is irrelevant. Impact is everything. In the sport of boxing, look at Muhammad Ali: He took less effort but had greater impact. He worked smart, not hard.

There is a classic book about all this in computer system development, but it applies more widely: Fred Brooks's "The mythical man-month"

I am cynical. I argue that no project is so big that it cannot be smothered under a sufficiently large number of warm, squirming bodies.

[ Sherwin-Williams paint logo here ]

¶ +2023.09.01. How can a blind person test a website's accessibility?

THis is a somewhat obscure question: How serious is the website about access by the blind?

If they are really serious, get the Lynx web browser and test the site with that. Lynx does not show pictures. It has been raound since before 2000.

[ Lynx icon here ]

¶ +2023.08.31. What does it mean when a teacher says, "You don't have an attitude problem. You have an attitude."?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)7m

The teacher is insulting you. The teacher is talking down to you as a lower life form: a young person, a student.. He (she, other)is not using words denotarively but as metaphorical spit or shit to smear on your face.

Therwe may be nothing you can do about it, especially if you asked for it. Are you the class clown? If yes, then you were baiting him and he took the bait. Shame on the both of you.

But if you are a decent student, just trying to get thru the semester, you do not deserve this.

Maybe you can respcetfully, calmly respond something like maybe: "Can you please explain that sentence, Sii? Respectuflly do not think I understand what you are saying to me. Can you kindly help me understand what the situation is? ..." And go on from there. The ideal result would be for your calmness to cause him to hit you in the face and then for you to take him to court for felonious assault and get him thrown in jail where he belongs. I once had a manager at work who came close but he realized it would not be a good idea for his future.

This piece of privileged flesh is jerking him(her, other) self off at your expense because he figures he can get away with it. But does the U.S. Declaration of Independence apply to you, namely that all men [that is a non-genderist word since thte late roman enpire] are created equal?....

[ Adult berating small person picture here ]

Don't take it if you don't have to. BUT UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE GIVE HIM ANY MORE AMMUNITION TO HARM YOU! SPEAK IN A SOFT TONE OF VOICE. uSE WORDS LIKE "SIR" BECAUSE HE DOE NOT DESERVE THEM BUT HE CAN HURT YOU. Your goal is to get him off your case and ideally to self-destruct himself.

But advice is cheap.. So don't do as I say, just think about it and do what YOU feel is right. Maybe you want to grovel? or wash his feet?

I once saw a really "hot" black BMW 3-series with perfoemance equipment and a 5-speed. On the back it had a bumper sticker "Catitude". I looked that up and it's an obsecne song by Miley Cyrus. Another time I was going up a long upgrade in my clunky Toyota Corolla and an immaculate little chocolate Porsche zipped by me. License Plate: "DERRIERE"

Don't hurt yourself! Remeember: Nobody can insult you unless you are such a petty person as to get insulted. But sticks and stones or a teacher telling you he is flunking you in his course are not insults: they are acts of violence.

¶ +2023.08.31. How is it possible for the results of a research study to be reliable but invalid?

I am not a scientist and I do not know the details.

I read that now many years ago highly respected and respectable cancer researchers were doing research that cound be verified by others.

Then one day one researcher got suspicous of something and it was finally determined that thw whole cell line on which ALL this research and verificaton had been done was containated. Nobody had ever noticed. A lot of work had to be redone and I do not know what the outcomes were.

So there you have an example of results that were reliable but invalid.

Nothing in science is "certain". Everything is always our best hyposthesis to date. The only thing you can coult on in science is the process of never being 100% certain of anything – unlike some religious and poliical leaders, and bosses, teachers and parents.

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion." (Niels Bohr to his students)

¶ +2023.08.31. Do you think a cliche ending always makes a story boring?

I have a conntrarian take on this kind of thing.

I feel that if reading the last chapter of a book first does not make reading the first 90% more valuable than if you had not read the ending first then there is probably no point in wasting you time reading any of the rest of it becaue you've already got what it's going to give you.

Surprise endings are no surprise, except to you. It's like in school Teachers often ask students questions to which they already know the answer. What's the point?

"Cliche" ending? Just red pencil it, My favorite book has 3 parts. the first part, and the 3 parts are each pretty much stand-alone, ends something like:

"With the marerial for character construction with which the reader has been provided, the reader can figure out the rest of this story for himself."

That, when I first read it, was like taking ExLax if I was severely sgastrointestinally constipated. I never liked teaches in school asking me if I had reinvented the wheel. One of the worst days of the year for me when I was a child was Xmas Eve waiting for the surprise presents in the morning. It was the only nite of the year I had gross insomnia. We should have got it over he evening before. "Just the facts, Ma'am" (Sgt. Joe Friday, "Dragnet")

If you are an author, do you want to write a bestseller or contribute to the advance of universal civilization. One of the great works of fiction is not very well known. Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities". He worked on it most of his life. It's well over 1,000 pages and it is not finished. It's published as 3 volumes. I call the 3rd volume: Lab exercises for the reader. I don't know if anyone else thinks of it that way.

I will end with two things. I think the first is the ending of Willa Cather's "O Pioneers" although its been so long I maybeam wrong now. The other is verbatim from The New York Times newspaper.

"The way is everything. The end is nothing."

A surprise ending is a secret. In the The New York Times Sunday Magazine, 03 December 2000, p.77, Luc Sante wrote "What Secrets Tell": "People need secrets because they need the assurance that there is something left to discover, that they have not exhausted the limits of their environment, that a prize might lie in wait like money in the pocket of an old jacket, that the existence of things beyond their ken might propose as a corollary that their own minds contain unsuspected corridors. People need uncertainty and destabilization the way they need comfort and security. It's not that secrets make them feel small but that they make the world seem bigger – a major necessity these days, when sensations need to be extreme to register at all. Secrets reawaken that feeling from childhood that the ways of the world were infinitely mysterious, unpredictable and densely packed, and that someday you might come to know and master them. Secrets purvey affordable glamour, suggest danger without presenting an actual threat. If there were no more secrets, an important motor of life would be stopped, and the days would merge into a continuous blur. Secrets hold out the promise, false but necessary, that death will be deferred until their unveiling."

If you want a real surprise, discover or invent something yourself. If it's in the area of your job description, that's even better since it might go well for you in your next review.

¶ +2023.08.31. Will AI ever completely replace stunt performers in Hollywood?

Now this isan really interesting quettion.

A stunt in a movie is just imagery. So AI should be able to reproduce it. It is not relevant that a living human may have developed highly unusual physical abilities and/or be very clever. We are just talking about images. Wht fun would a Harry Hourini AI be but it could look exacrly like him even though he wa amazing for being able to hold his breath for 3 minut4es underwaer scaping from a straitjacked whereis the AI is only pixels.

One thing AI probably won't be abe to do is imagine highly inventive stunts. Just like AI will probably never replae a top-notch football cooks up new plays nobody ellse ever imagines.

Imagine that Ai could someday answer every quesion better tan any human. But could it think up new questions? AI just computes. My notion of "a new idea" is something tha cannot bealgorithmically generated from all existing knowledge. In the early 20th century the mathematician Kurt Godel, with his incompleteness theorem proved that all algorithmic systems either are missing something of have inernal contradictions. Go with the former.

Finally, the human is beyond the film (whatever), whatever it is. You judge the stunt. That is not part of the stunt-eorld. You jjudge the AI. that is beyond the AI-domain.

And, reductio ad absurdum, Alan turing once told his mohter: If we ever make a computer that really thinks, "we snah't underatnd how it does it". The computer programmer/engineer just might make an AI that tinkks out of silion in the lab like he (she other) makes one out of carbon in bed. For both of them thr is always the International War Crimes Cout=rt in The Hague. Remember HAL in 2001?

My practical advice: If you are a hack stunt performer, yuor job is at risk from AI jsut like evyerbody else who dowes routinizable things. But if you are another Harry houdini you will just find Ai as something more for you to learn about for cooking up your new sunts. Another eample: If you are atop-notch stand up comedian who writes yuor own jokes, you will love AI – it will give you a lot of new material to make jokes out of, especiallky since, because it doesen ot undertnd anyting but just computtes, sometimes it says totally absurd things, like machine translation sometimoes confuses homonyls.

But how many Harry Houdinis are there? For almost everybody, AI is a threat, especially since corporations are always trying to save money and humans are a lot more expensive than computer cycles.

¶ +2023.08.30. If a robot gains consciousness, does it have the same rights as humans do?

If a robot gains consciousness,, does it have the same responsibilities and liabilities as humans do?

To what extent are its progremmer(s) and their managers civilly and criminally liable for its behavior?

Sci fi is not just cute techie fun.

--------

The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done. (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

¶ +2023.08.30. Why is this generation damned and doomed?

Really?

What generation?

And "a generation"? You mean all of: highly humanistically educated intellectuals, highly skilled machinists, gameboys, partygirls, wokies, prostitutes, trophy wives, Silicon Valley oligarchs, communists, entrepreneurs, wokies, MAGAs and a large number of other highly varied kinds of persons, ALL OF THEM? Pious Christians, Hypocrite Christians, Islamist Muslims, liberal Muslims, sociopath atheists, social worker athieists, racists, nurses, taxi drivers, rich fops, the homeless, poliemen and women, soldiers, hoodlums, ALL OF THEM? And only one generation of them? Really?

Where does one geneation end and another begin? Born before or after January 1 at 00:00 UTC of specific years?

But how about this instead: Maybe ALL of the human species and ALL the higher animals are doomed by global overheating and/or by the Zelensky-Bidn war escalating to global thermunuclear apocalypse?

Maybe?

¶ +2023.08.30. What would happen if a computer became sentient? Would we be able to tell the difference between its behavior and our own behavior?

Alan Turing once told his mother that if we ever create a computer that really htinks, "we shan't underatnd how it does it."

This has consequeuces all over the place. For instance: The dude who cooked it up wants to market it. so he (she, other) presents it, say, to NASA, for the manned space flight program. In the Q&A, one of the NASA engineers asks him how they can verify tha that computer produces correct results. "Uhhhh." We are not going to send men to Mars on faith are we?

Then there is the legal angle If the thinking computer causes a murder, probably the dude who cooked it up will be responsibe like a parent for heir child;s behavior. Of course capital punishment for the computer itself is easy: jsut pull its electric plug. (Remember HAL in 2001?)

Now, such a computer is probably possible. but don't get excited. If chemicals mixing in human copulation can product an Abert Einstein, why not chemicals in a laboratory? But they might equally produce a Jeffrey Dahmer or an idiot or GKW (God Knows What).

Sci fi fascinated techies (from gameboys to persons with PhDs in computer science) have superficial fantasies. Part of the curriculum for getting an advanced degree in computer science needs to be a practicum as an orderly in a hospice so the student gets the body fluids of dying persons on their hands to have some sense of what it means to be a human being and not just an algorithmic engine.

The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done. (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

¶ +2023.08.30. "What are your biggest challenges when it comes to paying bills on time? Let's discuss practical strategies to overcome them."

I once worked in a big corporation where my boss resigned. His replacement found his desk had a bunch of invoices in it which he had never forwarded to accounts payable. It was a highy profitable company which had no problem paying its bills, The manager had been well paid and did not seem to be under duress. He was just an irresponsible person.

In another institution I had a manager who was a brilliant and otherwise highly responsible person. One fine day his secretary cleaned his desk and found unpaid bills and we we all lost our jobs. He kept his. I have no idea what went on in his head but maybe he was "living beyond his means" "in denial"?

These are exception cases

If you have the money, just pay the damned bills. Have as few as possible. Evne if you can easily pay your credit cards each month have only one of them to pay.

But if you do not hve enough money to pay the bills, and you sincerely want to pay them, then you have some combination of two options:'

(1) Increase your income, or

(2) Reduce your expenditures.

#2 may be the easier of hte two. Who wants to work more?

Stop buying new clothes until the clothes yo uare currently wering literally wear out. Move into a smaller home. Don't take vacations (take your vacation on the Internet instead of by car or plane). If you like music, don't go to concerts but listen to it on your personal computer. Want art on your walls? run prints off the computer printer and tape them on the wall.

Then there is something really radical that may be possible: Start creating (not procreating which is enormously expensive!!!) things instead of just consuming them. Buying books are not all that expensive but writing one is even cheaper. And when a person "really gets into" creating something, "time flies". There are not enoug hhours in a day if you re pssionately writing a story and you may even forget to eat (saves money and reduces excess bodyweight)....

The word "consupmtion" used to refer to the chronic wasting disease tuberculosis.

If you have a loving partner, sex does not cost much either provided you don't get pregnant. Or, as The New York City Department of Public Health advised at the start of the Covid pandemic: "You are your own safest sex partner" – again does not cost anything, unlike taking a cruise to nowhere or going to Disneyland.

"Less is more" (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architect)

¶ +2023.08.29. After centuries of human technological evolution for ease of livelihood, why do some people still think it's worth it to go back to living in the woods?

This is an interesting question,

But a better way to state it might be that some persons (I prefer the word "persons" which emphasizes that each is an individual and not just part of a big blob – "people") – some persons PREFER to live a life away from "civilization". Of course they generally still do have some connection with the technological world. They may own a gun or a bow and arrows to hunt animals with for food. An axe to chop wood with is a technology, too. Etc.

Why? One would need to talk with the individual and have them explain their thoughts and feelings. Or they might be so disgusted with "society" that they won't let you talk with them.

So long as it is voluntary poverty, what's the problem? Contrast the person who worked on Wall Street and now lives in the woods but if he (she, other) decided they didn't like it any longer could go back to a prosperous high-tech life, with the person who ives in hopeless, homeless poverty and has no choice about it.

If you are seriously interested in this question there may be some interesting books but I htink there is no substitute for going out there and respectfully trying to sit down ahd talk with some such persons. And listen interpretively, not just statistically.

Every life is a story, and surely many of the least "interesting" of them live in Levittowns, not in the woods.

¶ +2023.08.29. Is deception permitted in psychological research?

I have read an admonitory story.

Once upon a time in Harvard University there was a sophomore who was an emotionally fragile mathematical genius. He took a psychonlogy course where the professor used the students as free lab rats.

Eventually the young man found out the unstated purpose of the experiment: to see how persons react to being humiliated. This changed the young man's life. You may recognize his FBI codename: "The Unabomber".

To the best of my knowledge, the professor was never arrested and tried for first-degree murder.

¶ +2023.08.29. Will AI make the first native AI generation the most well-educated generation in history?

Are you serious?

AI may be the first tool for students to fight back against doing meaningless ass–-ignments in school. Let the AI write that homework paper I have no interest in. Just be smart enough to cover it up.

America's education system has always had problems but now it's being torn apart in the "culture wars": the MAGAs versus the wokies. The MAGAs want to kids to be indoctrinated with one flavor of propaganda but the wokies want the kids to be indoctrinated with a different flavor of propaganda. I could go on and on here but I will simply reproduct an article from the New York Times newspaper about New York City's elite prepratory schools.

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far – and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.08.29. How will China's focus on young tech talent contribute to its goal of science and technology self-reliance?

The answer to this question should be obvious: the question almost answers itself.

China can be self-reliant on science and ttechnlogy by focusing on young tech talent.

But I find two things interesting here: First self-reliance. Part of the reason China wants to become self-reliant is bacause America is a BIG BULLY. America's goverm=nment wants to crush China (PRC. We are doing this thru prohibitions on high-technoogy transfers, etc. America's govenment knows it is weak so instead of shaping up and making our country better we are trying to bring down everybody else. I recently heard from Prof Jeffrey Sachs that we are not only doing the to "our enemies" but we also did it to our friend Japan in the 1980s. How pathetic can a nuclear aermed superpowe be? Our president repeated 3rd grade. The Prsdident of The Russian Federation has a PhD in economics.

We sent Ms. Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan to insult Mr. Xi last year. The only thing she did not do was take down her pants and moon him. The Chinese government had explicitly asked us not to do thie publicity stunt but Mr. Biden is a war monger. He has trouble with words but prides himself on his ability to carry a football. And Mr.Trump was if anything even worse.

Now for number 2: The American governmane feeds up propaganda that living in Russia is "hoplessness and darkness". More or less the same thing about "communist" China. Of course Neither China not Russia is really communist. They are state capitalist. But the issue her e is that noody would want to live in such a benighted place where the people must overthrow their government to bccme "free" (and the U.S., of course, will help them to do this).

How can China produce any advances in science and technoloty if all the peooe are iving in "darkness and hopelessness"????? This smells "fishy" to me. My hypothesis and plesae correct me if I am wrong is that freedom of schlarship and sieenfic and technological research is mor or less free in China. What is not free is to go out in the street and scream: "Overthrow the government!"

I had some contact with a Chinese scholar a few years ago who said there wa a lively community of scholars studying my favorite philosopher, the European Edmund Husserl. My guess is that the complaints over here about "human rights: in China are more concerned with troublemakers among the masses than with serious scholars and scientists and engineers. Publish in peer reviewed journals which the masses cannot afford, do not know about and use such big words that the masses can't understand it and won't find out about it and you can pursue your studies. Open you mouth in the street and get treated like Senator Joseph McCarthy treated "communists" here in USA.

So why can't all scholard collaborate, and the politicans leave them alone? If Chinese are advancing in science and technology faster than us here in USA,we should not go looking for cummunists under every bed but make Amerians more educated to do even better than then. Compete in a race to the top, not race to the bottom. Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi need to work together for the good of all humanity. Of course Mr. Xi may have trouble talking with Mr. Biden not because of languge differnces but because he uses words not footballs.

China is preparing for The United Staes to attack them, perhaps because the U.S. has a thing about the Chinese province of Taiwan. I really hope the Kuomintang wins the coming election because I read they are favorable to good relations with the mainland. And isn't this ironic? The Kuomintang wa the :nationalist chinese" party, the party that escaped to Formosa when the Maoists won on the mainland and now they are a party for cooperation with the "communists". Maybe Virginia Nuland will find a way to overthrow Mr. Xi's government? America loves to meddle in the internal politics of other countries,

¶ +2023.08.29. How can we ensure that marginalized communities feel safe and protected in society?

Why limit this question to "mrginalized communities". Shouldn't every person, irrespective of their secondary charcteristics feel safe and protected in society?

America seems to be mired in identification politics instead of respect for individuals as unique vulnerable irreplaceable mortal souls. Neo-tribalism not universalism. This is regression to before the 18th century European Enightenment.

How to make people feel safe? Eliminate poverty. Protect all persons from abusive environments, at home, at school, at work, in the street at 3AM in the morning, everyone everywhere. They may do a better job of this in Japan, but Japan is not an "ethnically diverse" country so the difficulties re perhaps less.

If our country is rich enough to afford spending hundreds of bllions of dollars to murder peole in Ukraine we should be able to have safe shelter for eveyone here, shouldn't we? How can there be homeless Vietnam veterans when a Slicone Valley oligarch builds a superyacht too big to get from the shipyard to the sea without tearing down a bridge over the river??

It's not rocket science, although Rocketman Ronnie Raygun certainly did contribute to the probkem by lowering taxes on the rich and deregulating the economy. Curiously, the man who busted the air traffic controllers union had earlier in his life when he was a hack hollywood actor not the "leader of the free world" been the actors union representative. Traitor?

[

("Watch the birdie, Ronnie!)"

¶ +2023.08.29. I prepared an answer to one of the ?forum? questions and my submission was rejected. I got: You have reached your answer limit for today. X.

¶ +2023.08.29. What are the limitations of augmented reality (AR) apps? Can they completely replace the need for a camera?

The photographic camera auguents reality by showing us things we cannot see with "the naked eye". But these are just more things we see with our naked eyes so we are still in control of the situation. It is not difficult to distinguish a photograph from the thing photographed. The U.S. (or Soviet or Israeli, etc.) Air Force does not bomb aerial surveillance photographs: they bomb the places shown in the photographs.

"augmented reality (AR) apps", if you are referring to "Virtual Reality" can destroy us but replacing reality with what the people who cook up the VR decide for us to see instead. Please watch the old fun but also profound movie: "The Truman Show", which is about something lightly different.

Here is my warning about Virtual Reality which, I repeat, can kill you or make you insane. (You need not take my advice seriously but can just whistle a happy tune....) To borrow a line from a Cyndy Lauper song: "People with PhDs in computer science just want to have fun."

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror – no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.

¶ +2023.08.29. You always experience here and now. And I mean always. Not the past or future, or any other place or position than the current one. You'll see this is true, when you think about it. So isn't our intuition wrong when it says something is changing?

You are close.

"The here and now" is not just a point in wall clock time. "The here and now" is where all times and places are. This is very abstruse philosophy, so no need to worry about it unless you get mixed up with "philosophical problems" like "What is time?"

If you are really interested and are willing to spend years of study on it, I recommend a book tht is difficult because it deals with difficult questions, not because the author wants to show off how obscure he can be: "Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and endings in phenomenology, 1928–1938" (Yale Univerity Press, 2004), by Prof. Ronald Bruzina. But that's just advice for persons who are represented in Sebastian Brandt's "ship of fools" as: the reader fool: he mistakes books for life and so does not really live but just reads book

[ Picture of reader fool here ]

My sincere advice (and I do not buy the Abrahamic religions): Study and learn from The Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. Your time on this side of hte topsoil is precious: It's all you have. Search for anything else and you will find nothing else but yourself, in the "eternal present", searching....

"The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice but that some things stay the same only by changing." (Heraclitus)

¶ +2023.08.29. What is your most trusted source of information?

I do not "trust" anybody. I have spent a long life connecting the dots and cross checking everything. I don't follow any leader. I follow audit trails.

That said, it seems there is a war going on in Ukraine. I have spent much of the last year and a half of my life studying this.

I hav efound some sources that seem credible. Among them are NOT, I repeat emphatically: ARE NOT The United States Government and the Kiev regime.

I would say the best source I have found is Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs. he has lots of videos on YouTube. Also: University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer. USMC Major Sott Ritter. U.S. Army COonel Douglas Macgregor Professor Noam Chomsky. And even The President of The Russian Federation, Dr. Vladimir Putin. But as you go down that list the caveats sometimes grow. For instance Dol. Macgregor was a Trump administration appointee, so his political views may not be the same as mine. And obviously Dr. Putin is not an impartial observer.

In general, for quick reference I go to Google search and Wikipedia. People say ther is a lot of junk on the Internet and they are right. But I look for needles in haystacks. If 99.99% of hte stuffon the Internet is bad, that still leaves a lot of very good things. the source I like to cite is William Lemessurier, the structural engineer who was responsible for Ne York City's CitiCorp tower building. Look up "citicorp building problem"on Google and you will get some top-notch int=formation, including an hour long lecture by Engineer Lemessurier himself.

I trust noboedy who tells me to trust them. On the Internet I encountered some advice the phycist Niels Boht gave to his students:

"Take every statement I make as a queistion not as an assertion."

I don't think one can go too far wrong by treting everything verybody, including their mother, their teachers, their boss at work, their religious leaders and everybody else that way.

But, of course, ther are "edge cases". If a fireman tells you to leave a burning building, obviously you should not question him until the both or you are safely out in the street.

Not being a medical professional, I am also forced to trust my doctors. But not "blindly". Eye doctors keep telling me I need [elective!!!] cataract surgery. One of them even told me "You can't see as well as you think you can." Respectfully, and upon serious critical reflection: There are, as the Bible says, persons who have ears but do not hear and eyes but do not see."

¶ +2023.08.29. What are your visual impaired strengths?

Not myself.

I had a close friend for half a century who recently died after a long crippling illness.

He was legally blind. He was also 100% color blind which is a condition so rare that Johns Hopkins Hospital did research on him.

He was highly intelligent but looked mentally retarded. He was most of his life morbidly obese. He had only a high school education. In bodegas the clerk would short change him because they thought he didn't know h difference.

He was also the most ethical person I have ever known in my life.

He started work as a machinist, you know, a lathe operator. He rose to quality control inspector. Then a fellow employee slammed him into a piece of machinery and he was in hospital for more than two months with severe back injury.

So then he bacame a "ire the handicapped" computer programmer. He read text using a piece of optics from an old World War II bombsight.

This was the early 1970s. He became what was then called a "systems programmer". He was responsible for a large insurance company's data processing systems. When other programers had problems, they came to him to fix them. He was highly respected by IBM Field Engineers.

But one day, coming back from lunch, he and I and a third person on our team were walking back to our office and the IBM salesman and our Data Processing Vice President were walking a litttle distance behind us. The IBM salesman said to the VP, loud enough for us to hear and my person has confirmed this: "There go our beaded hippie freaks" I was just a young person so I did not do waht I should have done. It this happened today I would be on the phone to IBM Orporate.

Well, my person went from the insurance company to an FDIC bank where he rose to first line manager (AVP). His 3rd line manager had a mission-critical project and sked him, his name was: Doug Schaff, if Doug would go back to coding to do the most important but very difficult part of this extremely important project. Doug of course said yes. he later told me: "It was the best piece of work I ever did in my life", which, for him, "was saying something". His reward> "They fired me."

Why was he fired? The 3rd line manager's cardiologist hd told him he had to reduce his stress level. The 2nd line managers did not like Doug bacause they were todaies and Doug was a straight shooter. He had told them that if they ever had a non-performing employee and couldn't fire them to transfer them to his group. I saw him take a very unhappy and totally dysfunctional young black lady and transform her into a happy productive worker. This FRIGHTENED the toadies. So they told the 3rd line: Him or us. And the 3rd line fired Doug for having done too good work.

Two last things. Since he could not drive a car, he bought a boat where no license required. How did he do it? He had a friend who was hs "seeing eye dog". When Doug drove the boat, this man was highly responsible and saw everything. So Doug could safely have fun piloting the boat. (He was also a responsible gun owner and collector.)

Finally he went to work for a U.S. Federal Governmant agency where you would think a ahandicapped person would be safe. They finally got rid of him by giving him an assignment that depended on having color vision. Literally, it was a race to the finish. He was able to take early retirement one day before they were going to fire him.

So there is my story of a person with serious visual handicaps and who was also AN ETHICAL GIANT and also, obviously, very strong.

Doug was not "polished". He was a straight talker, which did not go over well with hypocrites.

In all this shameful treatment he suffered from "normal" people, he did have one good thing: A wife who was literally his guardian angel.

One thing he said about himself:

"They put me off at the wrong stop when I was born."

¶ +2023.08.28. What makes team members feel safe and comfortable in sharing their ideas, thoughts, and concerns with their leaders?

Here's one way:

By experiencee of performance, They see that if they criticze their boss he takes it seriously instead of getting indignant at them. The boss supports whistle-blowers. The boss goes to bat for any team mamber who has problems with outside actors, including his (he, other's) own higher management.

In other words, the team members are confident their manager has their back. Not words, but performance.

¶ +2023.08.28. Are there any ethical codes for magicians not to reveal how they accomplish their tricks?

The answer is probably: sortta.

Many "secret societies", from high school football teams to the Mafia to the Freemasons to just a few neighborhood kids imagining they are a secret society – many such groups have their secrets. If you publicly expose these things, you are excommunicated or sometimes liquidated. Also, the process of becoming a member of hte group inste=ills in you a taboo:if you even think of exposing a secret yor will start to tremble in your shoes.

And professions are often secret societies. If one physcian tells another something" that happened in the OR, the former expects the latter to keep it to himself. For professions, however, the initiation rite is in publid sight: Getting hte appropriate academic degree and/or license. You want to learn the secrets of accontants? Go to accounting school and get your CPA license.

Just think: Former U.S. President George W. Bush is a mamber of the Yale University "Skull and Bones" secret society. he may have seen the Indian Chief Geronomo's shrunken head? Is he going to tell that on air? In initiation he may have as part of his initiation told his fellor society members his masturbatory fantasies o even buggerred one of them. Is he going to tell you that?

Do you want to all this ethics? How does it differ from the Bible's10 Commandments: "Thou shalt...."?

I would say these ar ethical codes but one might question whether parts of them are "ethicsl".

¶ +2023.08.28. Do apes lack creativity?

I am not an expert.

At least some of the higher animals, including apes show the rudiments of creativity. No they don't print Campbells Soup can lithographs that sell at auction for over $100,000,000. But the do occasionally invent tools and often show "creativity" in figuring out practical prblems like opening a locked door. (Creativity is any process that yields an idea (that word taken in a broad sense) that cannot be algorithmically extrapolated from existing knowledge.)

I do not think anybody really knows what it is like to be an ape (or a cat, for instance). On the other hand a scholar would have trouble imagining what a fanatical screaming soccer fan's experience is like, or to soccer fan the scholar's studying a manuscript. THings are not simple although superficial beliefs are.

Watch a higher animal and see if you see rudimentary creativity.

[ Thinking cat picture ]

¶ +2023.08.28. What are some possible future implications for artists and performers in a culture with limited access to arts due to financial constraints?

Financial constraints often means other kinds of constraints. If you have to spend the best hours of the best days of your life in a "job" to physically survive, that is not helpful, is it?

We know that art can be created even in death camps. Aleksandr Solschenitzyn(sp?) wrote "The Gulag Archipelago" in The Gulag, unless I am mistaken?

"Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.... in our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture – and ourselves." (Josef Pieper)

There are many cases of perons who are not financially strapped but whose creative lives are wasted, for instance by their family coercing them to run the family business. These persons are not impoverished, but their artistic production is severely impacted and sometimes they become alcoholics to drown their sorrows in drink. I happened recently to learn o a slightly different case: A highly educated man who wanted a military career and was a gifted officer but the family made him run the family business. He pretty much lost the will to live and did become alcoholic.

Another case I knew oersonally who was a little difffernt. This man sold the family business, so he solved that problem. But then his high ethical values caused him to devote much of his life to charity and, as his son said (I am changing details here to avoid identifying the person): "somebody else could have done the charity work, but nobody will ever write the books that he consequently did not write."

Another problem: education. Stephen Foster, according to Google did suffer from financial problems. But also his education was limited and that may have been the bigger problem. He may have had the same innate musical genius as Johann Sebastian Bach, but Bach did know the history of music. Compare the results.

Noncombatants, as I call them, lay people, often romanticize "the suffering artist"; maybe that makes them feel good about themselves for not being able to create anything or not being patrons of the arts. The philosopher Friedrish Nietzsche said: "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger." One day he saw a man beating a horse in th street and went insane. He biologically lived for another decade. The misfortunate experience apparently did not make him stronger, did it?

Why take risks? Society as well as the individual will benefit from orchids being cherished and nurtured, not being treated like weeds and people fatuously remarking that occasionally a flower does grow up through the concrete sidewwalk despite everything. The best are not always the strongest (item: Stephen Hawking). Indeed, shouldn't everybody have "an easy life" and, if in maturity they decide they don't like it thay can always choose to suffer voluntarily if that's what they get off on. There are such cases. Aside: Voluntary suffering ***may*** sometimes "build character" "better" than enduring unavoidable abuse (or not).

¶ +2023.08.28. Why do I feel like I'm seeing shadows moving at the corner of my eyes but when I look they disappear as if I'm just imagining things, could I be imagining things?

I am not a medical professional

You should ask this question to an opthalmologist (eye doctor).

It may be entirely harmless.

It may be some physiological abnormality with your eyes which is just an annoyance but not "serious".

Or it may be something that could lead to blindness or even be eye cancer which could be fatal.

My ignorant opinion is that you are probably not "just imagining things" (although that too may be possible). Get your eyes looked at by an M.D. eye doctor (or not – it's you life and your coming death either sooner or later).

¶ +2023.08.27. What is Martin Luther King and plagiarism?

Google: "Boston University, where King received his Ph. D. in systematic theology, conducted an investigation that found he appropriated and plagiarized major portions of his doctoral thesis from various other authors who wrote about the topic."

But it was also decided tht further pursuing this matter would have no constructive effet. In other words, as I would interpret it: don't mess with the image of an idol of the masses.

There are other things about Dr. King that are not slashed all over the media ether like his philandering (having sexul relations with women other than his lawfully wedded wife while mattied), or his owning a Rolex wristwatch which he did not flash for he cameras, or apparently his taste for silk shirts not hairshirt. If everybody is to follow Dr. King's moral example, shouldn't they app be unfaithful to their spouses?

The people need to have religion. they need to hav morals. They need to be controlled to reproduce species life, fight and die in their nation's (or religion's...) wars, etc.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Really?

I like to out famous people. And here I am not using he word "out" to refer to their sexual behavior although that should be exposed especially if they tell young persons to not have sex bbefore marriage, etc.. I am talking about their suposed holier-than-thou moral character which is supposedto motivate us to suffer and die for the Good Causes they like.

"Chuchill believed the only way Britain could win the war [with Germany in 1940] was by inspiring the people with a vision of Britain's greatness.

"It could be argued that it was a con trick, that there were sophisticated people who said this was all hot air. But to the mass of the people it was an extreordinary experience." (Adam Curtis, "The Living Dead")

The 2-legged sheep need to be led by Judan Goats.

[ Sendaman picture here ]

Plagiarism? My schooling up until college retarded me. Do you think if I could have found way to get my ass–-ignments done without doing them I would not have done it? Of course I would. I had no respect for my teachers. I considered them the enemy. And I did hat little I could to protect myself form them. My 7th grade English tacher THREATENED me for showing intellectual initiative.

Later in life I did find a few persons I could respect. And I also found some schooling where I WAS RESPECTED. No way did I plagiarize on an essay wrote on contemporaty architecture in graduate shool, but not for any "moral" reason. I was PASIONATE about my topic. I was writing things nobody else has apparently ever thought so how could I plagiarize from nobody? My main goal was to argue that the architct Robert Venturi was despicable. Of course I wanted to cite specific words and page references, to prove he actuallysaid and did what I claim he did. Plagiarize? When I mentioned some of my ideas to one architecture school dean he was insulted.

And I actually knew a man who wa AN ETHICAL GIANT. How do I know he was? Becasue, as implausible as it may sound, he was my manger at work at one time and then a friend for almost a half century. But while I immensely respceted him, in no way did I envy him. Beause his high integrity chronically earned him suffering. His life was a pathetic waste due to people who were not good. He literally got fired from an AVP level job for doing too good work (he did not "play the game"). I hope never to have to be ethical because for me, being ethical means enduring endless privation and pain. I wnat to live before I die.

Finally, again in the interest of transparency, let me note that Dr. Martin Luther King is in good company: apparently Vladimir Putin plagiarized on hsi doctoral dissertation, too. But Dr Putin is not idolized by millions of Americans, is he? He may have done more for Russia than Dr. King did for USA. Two plagiarists.

¶ +2023.08.27. Why do I remember things in the third person? Even if I imagine things, I will see myself there and I can move my limbs in real time and it correlates to the memory.

Is this a problem for you? If yes, why? Did somebody tell you there was something wrong with it? Who? Why?

I once knew a wise lady who had a motto:

"Be a witness to your life."

Watch youself. Study yourself. Learn how others live, not to compare yourself with them but to see if there are any alternatives you might like better than what you are doing now.

There is the old story about the millipede who, when he tried to coordinate the movement of his legs got all tangled up and got nowhere but as soon as he got distracted by something like a yummy meal some distance away, off he went.

If you have OCD (Obsessional Compulsive Disorder) and it is crippling your life then you should probably seek help but of course, not all "helpers" are helpful. This is especially true for gifted persons who are having dfficulty living in a normal people world because mental health professional who are not gifted themselves cannot appreciate the situation and will often jsut try to diminish the gifted person to be "normal" like themseves instead of telling th person they are not competent to help them (the caricature of psychiatrists as "shrinks" has a basis in reality).

Again, why are you concerned about this? Is it making you be like the millipede trying to think about how he walks?

You are not your body. If you have severe pain, is that "you" or something you are being subjected to by "your body"?

It's none of my businesss and obviouly I do not have the details but this sounds POSSIBLY like something somebody with too much idle time on their hands like maybe an intrusive mother might have told you was bad about you instead of minding their own business. (I had an intrusive mother; as a teenager she told me to not squeeze my acne pimples because he reserved that for herself ot do each evening when i came home from school, etc.)

¶ +2023.08.27. Elon Musk said, "Physics is the law, everything else is a recommendation. Anyone can break laws created by people, but I have yet to see anyone break the laws of physics." Can you say the same to social science laws?

This is a "philosophical"question.

Short answer: Physicists are not physical objects. The laws of physics do not apply to the human praxis of doing physics. Ther is no such things as "laws of physics". Ther are regularities of "behavior" of physical objects perceived by physicists inthe course of doing physics experiments. (The philosopher David Hume debunked the idea of "causality" except as a colloquialism.)

There re no social laws in the sense of physics. There are responsible (or irresponsible) human actions. Elementary particles "obey" physical regularities in a different way than humans obey or disobey juridical laws.

You do not take an h-bomb to ourt for killing people. You take a human being to court for killing people.

Now ther is a problem. One human can treat anothe as if the latter was a physical object and ther is obviously some truth in this. You can asselerate a bullet through a person's skull and see the result of the person dying just like you can shoot particles through a particle accelerator and look at a photographica plate of wht happened to the particles they hit.

To answer this qhestion one needs to study philosophy and not just any philosophy.

I will end with two pistures. I have drawn a big red slash through on of them to try to avoiid copyright infringements. It is Leon rotsky lefturing in Copenhagen Denmark in 1932. The negative of the picture was damaged so it ooks to me like a cloud chamber plate. The other picture is a Venn diagram of the relation between persons and physical objects.

[ Pictures as indicated ]

(Everything physics studies is part of "WORLD". "ME/YOU" includes physicists doing physics. Mr. Musk appears to be clinically insane.)

¶ +2023.08.26. How can someone help students to remove plagiarism or AI content from their study documents?

This seems an odd question to me. What are "study documents"? Are these documents which students use for sources to study from? If yes then aren't you asking a question about things ourside a particular taecher and his students' control? All throughout history, books have been written by "ghostwriters", and AI is just a newfangled ghoswriter in this case.

If the question refers to what hte student produces, then I think one should ask the question WHY studeints are plagiarizing and coying AI content? Look in the mirror.

My guess is that in many cases the students are not highly motivated by the task so they want to get a monkey of their back. That makes sense. In these case, assign only tasks that will motivate the student to do his (her, other's) own creative inquiry. Of sourse you may also need to help them with "etiquette", since even in the most original work a neophyte may copy in text from a source without knowing that everything you do not cook up yourself or that is not commonplace needs to be attributed to its source – even idle baner at faculty cocktail parties or with the family at home, right?

When I was in school I found no meaning in mos of the ass–-igments and I was an extremely intelligent young person so I would not have done something "stupid". But I sure would have used AI to the fullest to dispose of the crap I had to produce for teach and I would have known how to make it "mine" or have properly attributed it. I learned the word "Ashurbanipal",tis true!

In graduate school at the onset of middle age I finally reached the point in life and also found a teacher so broad-spirited that before a class I went up to her and asked if I could write an essay on a topic tnagentially related to the course in which I had a PASSIONATE interest INSTEAD of doing he assignments snd she instantly told me to go do it. Plagiarize? Heck: I was writing things I have never found anybody els esay in the literature, but I was citing all ove rhte place verbatim material I was attacking, like a lawyer in court. Boy, did I have fun! As an aside, the teacher liked it too but that is less important. Even less importan that she held an endowed chari at the time and wa to have one named for her before she retired, becasue you can be trouble and get high rewards. She has at lesat one short video on Youtube: Maxine Greene.

Moral of this story: If your students are inspired they will not likely plagierize. If they are beset by a mnkey on their back theiy will try to get it off them.

¶ +2023.08.26. Is it normal to have a strong desire to control the computer?

"Normal" is not a relavant word unless either you want to be normal like al lthe other "normal" people who are pertty superficial and uninteresting yawn, or somebody else wants to "normalize" you.

Does it make good sense to have a strong desire to control the computer Yes.

Why? Because the computer is a tool and humans are tool users, so it makes very good sense for the human to want to control the tool to accomplish his (her, other's) purposes.

But it goes further: Computers are very complex, very powerful tools which often do not do what the user wants them to do. This can be very frustrating because the user understands in a general way that the computer is a very powerful tool (i.e., it can or should be very helpful) but this very powerful tool is not being powerfully helpful to the user. Why the hell is it "misbehaving"?

A person can get rustated with an ordinary mechanical tool. You want to drive a nail into the wall and the nail keeps bending instead of going straight into the wall. You get angry at the nail. But the Computer is very much more powerful than a hammer and a nail.

And it gets worse: Humans have programmed omputers to do tasks humans used to do, for instance banking transactions. You knew very well how to go to a teller in a bank and engage with him (her, other) to do your banking transaction. You know what you want to do. but the computer applicaton has replaced the human teller and you can't figure out how to the the g*ddamned application to do what you want. You keep going from one menu to another and finally it quits. With a human teller it would have been simple.

And it gets worse from there.

I worked as a computer programmer for almost half a century. I finally got PTSD from it.

Does this help?

¶ +2023.08.26. Why does artificial intelligence also have negative connotations?

First, artificial intelligence is not any form of intelligence. God, or angels or higher animals ("Meow!") may be alternate intelligences, but computers just compute. Period. No ifs and or buts. Unless: Some scientists mix up some chemicals in a laboratory instead of copulating and the chemicals some inexplicable interact to form an intelligent being like a higher animal, human, angel, God, etc. But you very well know that is not what AI is about: It's about programming n-way miltiprocessors which are bussed to massive databases and connected to networks. AI is not magic.

So ther you have the problem. Either people mistake AI for intelligence and fear it will be more intelligent than they are, like John von Neumann is (was) more intelligent than Homer Simpson. In that case, the more intelligent beings may rule the world like they already sort of do. Right? "Johnny" did not clean toilets and Homer was not a fellow of The Princeton Instaitute for Advnced Studies. Agreed?

But there is a worse problem: Some humans may deploy AI to control the lives of other humans. I do not want any person bossing me around, musch less a person who is "augmented" by massive computng power we well as being able to fire me from my job just bcause hiis two couch potatoes sit in a chair in an excutive offfice. Rational persons fear AI like they fear thermonuclear weapons and other technologicl marvels: They fear other people will USE thm to hurt them. Can you blame them?

HUMANS MUST USE AI AS A TOOL AND HUMANS MUST GOVERN THEMSELVES COOPERATIVELY NOT HIERARCHICALY.. Then things will be pretty much OK unless you catch a fatal diease or something like that.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos et al. are the danger. The danger they opose is augmented by semi-automatic riifles and AI computer farms – they generally prefer the latter to the former but that's just a contingent metter of personal taste. It's as simple as that.

A partial solution to the problem: All MBA an computer science graduate students, as part of their education, should be required to do practicums as orderlies in hospices to get the bodily fluids of dying perons on their hands, and night shift toilet cleaners in office buildings, to get some sense of how the rest of humanity lives. And guess what? But for geace of God (or the fickle finger of Fate) they would be the dying persons and toilet cleaners not the CEOs and Computer Scientists. (Anybody rmember the fate of Czar Nicholas II?)

¶ +2023.08.26. To what degree should people trust their media? We know all of them have at least the slant of their cognitive bias. Do we inspect this closely enough, meaning our own cognitive biases?

Excellent question.

It's relatively easy to see the faults in others. Often harder to see our own faults. And here I a not talking about an individual's "moral failings" but about one's beliefs.

How much of my beliefs are mine? I was unfortunate and unfortunate. I always distrusted my parents but that was not good enough because rejecting something if you don't have anything better to replace it with leaves you with nothing.

I think children are born, at least some of them including, you guessed it, myself, with an innate faculty of judgment. Every perception is a judgment. This creates a problem. Parents generally are not adult enough to cope with being judged by their children (or anybody else "below" them). So what happens?

The opposite of what an oncologist does: An oncologist treats a patient whose immune system is sick with cancer cells. The good doctor destroys the patient's diseased immune system and injects new healthy immune cells and hopefully the patient grows a healthy immune systemt o fight off diseasesaas well as being healthy himself.

Parents destroy the child's innate immune system: the child's innate faculty of judgment. Then they inject their propaganda/ideology/social customs/beliefs/..., including, you guessed it, that the child should honor and love his father and mother even if and especially if they do not deserve it. And the parents have a powerful chemotherapy to make sure the treatment worke: "OR ELSE". So the kid no longer knows what he beliaves or feels but must learn from his parents what he iis SUPPOSED to think and feel to avert the ever impending OR ELSE.

From my earliest memories maybe age 4 years I found my prents physically repulsive. I did not want them to touch me. I never called either of them by any term of entearment. I was an etremely intelligent child but also physically and emotionally fragile. As it went, I spoke precociously very articulately. So when I mutated the word "Mother" into "mud" that was not childish untrained vocal chords. So what did my parents do? They deployed the nucler option, the OR ElSE: They staged a little one act play for my benefit with my mother walking out the front door of the house with a little suitcase in her hand and my fathe providing the voiceover that she was leaving permanently if I did not tell her I loved her and mean it! They won a Pyrrhis victory.

But while they had not totally destroyed my innate faculty of judgment they had crippled it and also done a very good job of ignoraning me. If I didn't like them, I had no clue there could be anything or anybody better.

How much of their ideology did I "buy" anyway? You can see I am suspicions of even "my own" thoughts now at aage 77 years. Bu the other damage they did was the chemo, the OR ELSE. They destoyed my reflexes. I dared not react to anybody hurting me for fear they would hurt me even more. So I developed "esprit d-escalier": When somebody does not properly respect me, I only think of the proper retort to nail them when it's too late: when I am on the way down the steps (the escalier) and out hte door .

My schooling was no better. My 7th grade English tacher THREATENED me for showing intellectual initiative. So I graduated from high school (actually, a perp school, spelling intended) without even understanding that facts had contexts and were nuanced, not just approved-by-"them" r not so approved. I did learn one lesson, howeve: that because I had a brillinat mind and a wmpy body I wan't deserving of female intimacy.

Well, I wa in th last all male class at Yale which didn't help that las matter. But It did help in othe rways: This wa 1964. Back then, almost all college frehman were 18 years old. My freshman dormmater was a 26 years old European aristocrat who at least said he grew up underfoot with persons like Albert Camus. I had never in my life seen a human being I felt had any good qualities. But existence proves possibility. And while a lot of the classes were not helpful, I also learned that there could exist things in the world that were appealing too, such as Marle Duchamp's raedymades. So I started to fill in the void.

Everybody has cognitive bias all the time. Every perception embodies the perceivers whole "weltanschauung" (inerpretation of life and the world). If it didn't mean anything to you you would not make the effort to look t it. And looking at something does take effort.

But there can be differnt flavors of bias. One flavor is dogmatism. Another flavor is to question everything. It is intellectually dishonest to say that seeking truth is not a bias: Just ask a dogmatist about that. But in that case the pot is caling the kettle black, of course.'

So my bias is, or at least I hope it is, expresed by the advice the physicist Niels Bohr gave his students:

"Take every statement I make a a quesiton not as an assertion."

That is not "harmless". Tell your parents, your teachers, your coworkers, your government leaders, your religious leaders you aretreating what they say that way and see what happens to you. Keep your mouth shut.

And there could be a practical spinoff here: Imagine a social world in which everybody was nurturing everybody's critical judgment all the time. A world in which honest mistakes and whistleblowers are rewarded and brown-nosers are shunned. Whre there ris no competition but only ycooperation. Impossible? My undertanding is that humans' closest animal relatives, the pyb=gmy chimpanzees (not the normal kind!!!!!!!!!!!!!), the bonobos, settle arguments by having sex with each other. They make love not war. Why not us too? Or are we too "good" for such animal behavior?

I still distrust "my own" thoughts because they might be semiotic leukemia cells my childrearers injectd into me. But I' have been working at it for over a half century and each day my mind grows stronger even as my body weakens.

The school I attended was named aftr Saul of Tarsus (not th famous school in New England). Well, that dude had a lot of ideas I don't at all like, e.g.: that it is better for a man to marry than to burn, etc. But he said one thing I strongly agree with:

"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." (1 Thes 5:21)

So I ruthlessy criticize eerything and learn as much as I can to bring context and nuance to my judgment. But whatever passes the tests I try to preserve and nurture and protect → for the next round of inpection. The road leads on forever....

Now, practical childrearing advice:

Example of appropriate treatment of a young person by an adult: Sandor Ferenczi wrote, in an essay evocatively titled "The Adaptation of the Family to the Child": I am reminded of an incident with a little nephew of my own, whom I treated as leniently as, in my view, a psycho-analyst should. He took advantage of this and began to tease me, then wanted to beat me, and then to tease and beat me all the time. Psycho-analysis did not teach me to let him beat me ad infinitum, so I took him in my arms, holding him so that he was powerless to move, and said: "Now beat me if you can!" He tried, could not, called me names, said that he hated me; I replied: "All right, go on, you may feel these things and say these things against me, but you must not beat me." In the end he realized my advantage in strength and his equality in fantasy, and we became good friends. (Sandor Ferenczi, "Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis", 1955, p. 75)

¶ +2023.08.25. Do you think it is possible that we will ever have a "metaverse" (from Ready Player One) in our lifetime with VR and AR technologies? If so, how soon do you think that could be possible?

As the old saying about the fable of King Midas goes: "Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it."

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror – no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.

¶ +2023.08.25. What are the challenges faced by dispatchers in emergency services, and how can their work be better supported?

I never was one. But I hav e some ideas:

Pay them well

Provide great tools and working conditions for them to work with and in.

Do not subject them to overtime except in unanticpatable

circumstances. (Somebody once said: "If you are working overtime, your manager is not doing his job.") The longer people work without good rest the more mistakes they will make.

Show them sincere respect and appreciation. Don't boss them around jsut because you are the boss. There but for the grace of God (or Fortuna) go you..

Ask them honestly for any thoughts or concerns they have including what YOU may be doing that is not helping them. Reward honest mistakes and whistle blowers. Fire brown-nosers.

If there is any chance for reductions in force, don't play gamse and leave your people wondering if it's worth them doing good work. Don't play favorites, either

It's not rocket science, is it?

¶ +2023.08.25. What are the steps or phases of design thinking, and how would one go about implementing them into practice (e.g., product development)?

Respectfully, one needs to know when to take steps, but also when to leap,, but also when to just do nothing.

Recipes for design can easily get in the way. It's like in school. They always were bugging us kids to make an outline before you write. If they really coerced me I'd make their outline for them after I'd written it. Different persons work in different ways and if management is determined to force everybody to a pattern they will get their pattern although not necessrily their product.

Once in IBM I overheard two business planners talking together walking down one of the long corridors in Armonk Headquarters. This was 40 years ago so it may not apply today. They did not know I could overhear them (maybe they would not have cared?). Background information: "Fishkill" wa IBM's mission-critical computer chip prodution plant at the time.

One of thm seid to the other::

"Fishkill is not coming in with the inventions on schedule."

Do you understand how foolish this was?

Let me put it in perspcetive. A couple years earlier I had met a remarkable person who was shooting the breeze in somebody' else's office on 2nd shift, a man who worked at Fishkill and probably had never been to college (he had been a delivery truck driver and they gave him the Progremmer Aptitude Test and he turned out to be a genius or near to that). He came to work sometimes. He wore jeans. He did not fit the mold. But the company very much appreciated him. Why? He took chip design programs that ran for days and cut them down to run in a few hours.

Please tell me the steps.

One size does not fit all. When pieces need to mesh and you understand the structure of the solution then you can or even may need to specify a set of steps to get the job done, But things are not always that way in the design thining phase. Then you need to have read Fred Brooks's classic book: "The Mythical Man-month" which shows how adding headvount to a project that is in trouble can just make matters worse.

"Fishkill is not coming in with the inventions on schedule."

¶ +2023.08.25. What are the benefits and drawbacks of being an optimist or a pessimist when making future plans?

I never trusted simplistic dichotomies since usually somebody was trying to get cheap labor out of me with them. The road to hell if famously paved with good intentions.

Imagine the best, most desirable outcome. This is not easy because an "optimist" is often jsut seeing things in a superfiial way. His hope is for the least worst option he can imagine but he may not be able to imagine much. His imaginative horizon may be something like "The Amerian Dream" where the best is a mortgage and a lawn to mow. Why not imagine an anarcho-syndicalist utopia in which the workers own and cooperatively manage the companies where they work?

Well then at least you won't hope for a Big Mac, when you know about filet mignon, and if you are a vegetarian and object to this imagery, the very best meal I ever had in my life was at the nuns' restaurant in the big temple complex in Kyoto Japan. If I could have that kind of meatless meals all the ime I would gladly never touch another piece of meat. (It waa a very expensive restaurant, and the meals were works of art.)

"What men are willing to put up with depends on what they are able to look forward to." (Arnold Hauser)

On the other side, plan for the worst. But you can do even better than that: Avoid doing anything stupid that may get you into unnecessary trouble. Do not even think of trying to climb Mt. Everest. Do not even think of doing something like "playing" a body contact sport. If you do take small risks make sure the cost benefit ratio is highly in your favor. If you really really really like cigarettes and don't just smoke to look chic or something like that, maybe have one cigarette a week from Dunhill or Balkan Sobranie or some other brand that costs an arm and a leg, not be a Marboro man. You just might be able to get away with that on the old maxim that stream cleans itself of pollutants in 5 miles if you don't put in too many. If you do have to take risks, like commuting to work in an automobile, can you go in at 4AM and leave at 2PM instead of peak traffic hour? Can you live close ot work even if it means a much smaller house because prices are much higher there?

I once had a job I was not competent for. It wa a very responsible job where legal panalties were on the line and the buck stopped at my desk. I never got into trouble. Why? Because I always kept a backup, and a backup of hte bakup and I checked my bakups too. I was very "pessimistic" – so pessimistic that when trouble came my way I could just tell the operations people: "Go to the backup!".

So in a way I was quite optimistic: I was pretty confident that I had covered my ass.

Optimism/pessimism, like other unhelpful dichoti=omies such as selfish/altruistic and others jst cause unnecessary trouble. And some problems are not really problems but just nonsense like "hurting somebody's feelings" which does not really hurt the person, just contravenes their prejudices.

Strive for the best even if it is obviously unattainable, while preparing for hte worst even if you don't expect it. This may mean that instead of taking a vacation you take a backup. Well then you will avoid traffic or being stuck in an airport for a missed connecting flight.

My sincere advice (and I am not just an atheist or an agnostic but an anti-theist, i.e., I think God if He exists is a criminal): Follow the advice of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. Enjoy your life as much as you can: safely. Good food and wine. Good friends. A good pet. A good intimate partner. Pretty hard to go wrong wwith these things, yes? But Disneyworld or HBO?

And, of course, when all else fails, as the saying goes: There are no atheists in a foxhole. Incoming!

¶ +2023.08.25. Why are electronic gadgets slowly making men less and less indispensable?

Vibrators

¶ +2023.08.24. What protections against A.I.-written scripts are being proposed in the negotiations between the WGA and AMPTP?

I know nothing about the specific instance here, but, as for AI in general:

It does not matter if AI wrote the script or not. What matters is the human person who takes responsibility fore the script whoever or whatever wrote it. Saying: "The AI did it." is no better and no worse than saying: "Joe Schmuck did it." YOU are accountable for it. 100%.

Now, I don't know what is in these scripts but they re probably documents each party advances to try to get what they want out of the negotiations, right?

Then it should be obvious that if what the AI wrote is "better": more fluent, more convincing, better documented... than what the human wrote, go with the AI And this is presumably not school where the teach will grade you down if you copied from somebody (or something) else. This is reality, isn't it?

That said, remember that AI is not intelligent at all. It's like Deep Blue: Deep Blue did not understand chess better than the best human: Deep Blue just had a massive database of old chess games to draw on. Don't be a dupe of what the AI writes, just like don't be a dupe of what you mommy tells you, or anybody else, either, right?

¶ +2023.08.24. What's a person called if they tell you to "stop crying" and "it's just a joke" on the internet?

What's in a name? A phoneme string is not its referent.

Does this person have any power to do you material harm like causing you to lose your job or get arrested by the police? If not, why make yourself so small as to be affected by their petty ignorance? Nobody can insult you unless you are such a petty person as to take offense. Would a lion be offended by a mouse spitting on him (unlesss the mouse had rabies, of course, but that's not being offended it's being thereatened)?

"Sticks and stones can break my bones but the effect of words depends on my ideological orientation."

There are exceptions, of course. one of example of which is called a "pink slip". But that is not really discourse. It is action effected through ink n paper from hand wielding a pen, not bullets emanating from a physical gun.

Such people have agenda. They may hate their lives and are trying to make theselves feel less bad about themelcves. They may have been "sh*t on" by people whom they cannot get back at so they belittle others as a substitute: Kick the cat.

And be assured: In many cases one of the most devastating things you can do to a person who is trying to "bait" you is to **IGNORE THEM**. It's like famous people. Some celebrity once said they can deal with negative publicity, but not with being ignored.

If this person can cause you material harm treat them as if they had a gun. If not, just let them stew in their own juices and if you are really lucky they will self-destruct. The best way to win an argument is not to prove your opponent is wrong, but to get him to argue with himself.

"The great general wins without fighting." (Sun-Tzu)

¶ +2023.08.24. I have epilepsy, can only work great at night (not needed), don't know my max working hours (yet, I think 32 is max), and my skills are programming and making music. What is the best option for my future?

You are aware that you have a difference from "normal" people. Perhaps not all of them are helpful to you?

I am not an expert. You need to have a third skill: getting good advice and help to enable you to maxinmize your abilities while minimizing the impact of your "disabilities".

"Diversity" is aall the rage today and we have laws in the USA about "hire the handicapped", etc. Not all helpers are helpful, of course, but some are. If it was me (I can only speulate about a ondition I do not have standing to talk about), I imagine I would try to find a physicisn I could trust, try to find public organizations for epileptic persons, preferably run by them, social workers, try anything but be suspicious of everybody. Everyboy has their own intersts at heart, not just yours.

Advice is cheap. But some of it can be helpful, for instance if you an fnd someone who can give you a referral to some place where you might be able to thrive in their workplace or school. If I knew somebody, I'd do it for you, whoever you are. But I don't.

You can only do your best and we often learn by trying provided it doesn't hurt us.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said something a lot of people probably would like: "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger." He should have added: provided it doesn't do urreversible harm to me. But if you don't try you almost surely will not get anywhere. Good luck!

¶ +2023.08.24. I'm told that self-talk is neither a right nor wrong, but why is this unaccepted by society? I'm also told that there are appropriate contexts to engage in it, are there really?

If your highest aspiration in living your days until you die is to be polite, you likely will not get much out of it except smiling faces (there is a great old soul song free on Youtube "Smiling faces sometimes" by The Undisputed Truth).

There is a story (I got it from Wikipedia). There was an ancient Greek philosopher whom I never learned about in college wher they were pushing the paunchy old matinee idol who didn't even pay his bar tab for his special aperitif the afternoon he decided to kill himself on camera: Mr.Socrates.

Diogenes of Sinope, midday of a bright sunny business day, in his city's main putlic square, like maybe Harvard Square or The Mall in DC, publicly masturbated. He was making a profound philosophical statement about being polite.

Well, maybe times have changed. Probably his fellow ciizens were more enlightened than peopletoday who would probalby call the cops.

Moral of this story: Self-talk as much as you want while considering the possible negative consequences from "normal" people who even have trouble talking with their kids about "the birds and the bees".

They might do what happened to a young lady athlete in the most recent Olympics who made the mistake of not participating in an event her government (the normal people) wanted her to participate in. She said she was not prepared,. They said she needed to be taken back home for treatment for her psychological condition.

I get reprimended for "talking to myself" even at home. Well I can't talk to anybody else about the issues that concern me: they tell me ot "get off my high horse and be normal".

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is surgically operated on at birth to remove his eye and make him healthy, whole and most important of all: normal like everybody else.

¶ +2023.08.24. How can you make scanned images accessible to people with disabilities on the web?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

What kind of disabiliies? ALS (e.g., Stephen Hawking) or congenital blindness or what?

Respectfully, I have one suggstion if you do not know it. There is a very long in existence and highly honorable web browser designed for difficult situations as opposed to watching TikTok. It is free and easy to install:

Lynx

Second: Validate your web pages so they are as viewable as possible on all browsers. Glitzware that looks cutsie on one browser may not work on another. Item: Alas, pre-2000 Java Applets don't work any more....

Markup Validation Service

Check the markup (HTML, XHTML, ...) of Web documents Validate by URI Validate by File Upload Note : file upload may not work with Internet Explorer on some versions of Windows XP Service Pack 2, see our information page on the W3C QA Website. Validate by direct input

https://validator.w3.org/

These things do not work miracles but they can be helpful. (Am I wrong that at leaat to date physiologically congenitally profoundly blind persons cannot see images? Although some of them may "see" more clearly than a lot of people with 20/20 eyeballs and stndard issue optical brain function.)

1 view

¶ +2023.08.24. Are revisions a normal part of assessing certain analysis in research studies?

I can only guess what "assessing certain analysis in research studies" means.

"Revise" means: to see anew: re see. We did no creaate the world. All seeing is interpretation: seeing as. It is fallible and also "selective". Seeing one thing focally means seeing many oher things only "horizonally" or vaguely and even worse, every focal object hides other things behind it.

Sometimes i think I see one thing but as I come closer I see it is something else: At dustance I see a neighbor's dog. Coming closer I see it is only a mailbox. Conceivably I could open the mailbox and discover it was an IED (Improvised Explosive Device). Crescit eundo.

Conclusion: Revision is how knowledge progresses. If you are not revising you are dogmatizing. Science does not lie in its results du jour but in the process of reviewing them, revising.

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion." (Niels Bohr to his students)

"The road leads on forever (and there are many dead ends along the way...." (ref. lost; the philosopher Mrtin Heidegger has an essay: "Holzwege" – loggers paths thru the forest → which leads me to my conclusion:

An old New Yorker magazine cartoon of two day trippers in the middle of a huge state forest. they are carefully scrutinizing big map. In the middle of th map it shows where they are with a big black "X". The legend reads:

"You are here and you are lost.")

¶ +2023.08.23. Can people get sick from using VR headsets? If so, is there a way to prevent it?

If by "get sick" one means contracting a communicabe disease such as Covid-19,, obviously not.

But if one means getting vertigo and vomitting, probably it's easy. Learn from my Virtual Reality experiment which did not even require any computer. The obvious way to not get sick or kill yourself from VR is to stop doing it.

--------

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror – no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.

¶ +2023.08.22. Someone slapped my head multiple times and I feel dumber. I am in my 20's. How do I regain my brain ability?

Has that person been appropriately held to account for their behavior? Did you provoke them? If you did not provoke them and they have not paid for their bad action, why not?

There is nothing anyone can do about past misfortunes. But think: You at least are aware that you think you have a problem. Really think deeply about that. It proves you are not so severely damaged that you don't even think you might be damaged. That would be a sure-fire indicator of serious damage,, wouldn't it?

So make the most of what you've got. Maybe "it's all in your head", i.e., you really have not suffered parmanent harm. That is possible. Or maybe you have suffered damage and need to compensate for it. Study cases of persons who really have suffered brain injuries but not "lost it all", such as U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords .If you only have lemons, make lemonade.

This is "off the wall' but" you might decide to try to get into a graduate school program about psychology. You could write on the application someting few others will be able to say: "I know somethng about what I want to learn more about, because I've been there." If I was sreading appications, that would hit me like a blow to the head among all the logorrhea of kids who just want to get a degree or something. "Gotta talk to this one!"

There are a number of qiestions, including, as said, whether you really have suffered permanent "brain damage". It is just posible you think you have but haven't. It is also possible you have and you are ware of it. One thing I stron ly recommend, Don't let noncombatants who sit on their two couch potatoes and run their mouths off tell you what they don't know anything about but self-complacently imagine they do, to quote psople who were not helpful to me:

"It's no big deal, Brad"

It's your life and advice is cheap. The physicist Nielse Bohr who was a pretty smart cookie, gave his students some advice I like a lot and apply to myself. I do not trust anybody who tells me to believe them – no exceptions (I was going to say not even my parents but my mother is dead so she is no longer telling me what to think).

"Take every satement I make as a question not as an assertion."

[ THINK picture here]

¶ +2023.08.22. What is the difference between active learning and online learning in machine learning?

The older I get the more I learn and laern how to learn. That might not help in school.

So what is "active learning? My guess is that if they care at all about this they waould want you to actively learrn what they want you to learn. If they provide "extra credit" or "really challenging" questions they would want the student to eagerly do those "active challenge" tasks they had cooked up.

It's hard to cook up examples but suppose the machine learning was for one of the waking nightmares of middle to high school math: age problems. you know: How old is Sally if she is half s old as Sam wll be in 5 years when his age will be a third of Susan's age was when she.... Well, I might decide I wanted to see if I could find anything about the history of how age problems ever got into school math curricula. And where did curriculum itself come from? This last qquestion might lead me to read Walter Ong's fine book: "Ramus methiod and the decay of dialog" which has nothing to do with the intent of the machine learning dudes. So I might tflunk the course because I wnted to learn something.

That's what I call active learning and I actually found a couple teachers in a grduate program who agreed with me, but I think such persons are extremely rare.: "YOu have to do the assignments, kid, or else."

Few teahers would get all enthusiastic about a student who told him:

"Sometimes you go looking for one thing and you find something else"

There is a lot of what one might call active passive learning: being enthusiastic obeying somebody else's orders. So it is in this world; I don't like it but I did not dispose of indepedent wealth to just walk away from it all. I ended up with a lo-grade mental breakdown after trying to plese them for 15 years. It waslike a treadmill: They kept turning up the speed and the incline until I fell off. "The bad sleep well" (Akira Kurosawa)

¶ +2023.08.22. Where can one find information about the life and works of contemporary "outsider" artists?

I think it is possible but it takes some money and a lot of savvy.

I am not sure what is meant by "outsider" artists. I feel a lot of what sells for a lot of money today is uncouth, mediocre, ignorant, what else, and even barbaric dreck but that is a different issue.

Whatever kind of "artist" you are looking for, presuming they are not already famous, in which case they, like all sublunary stars, live atop Mount Olympus (Hollywood, Madison Avenue...), above the reach of ordinary mortals who do not hae a lot of money or something else to recommend them....

You have to find them. How to do that? There is no recipe, no formula. You just hae to get your hands dirty. You happen to talk with somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who.... or something else.

I saw both sides of it. I worked in The Baltimore Museum ofArt. They have the finest ollection of paintings by Henri Matisse in the world. The paintings were purchased by two spinster sisters who had some wealth from a family owned textile mill or something like that. But they were extremely industrious in getting to know artists in Paris at the beginning of the 20th Century, before they had "made a name for themselves". They could never have afforded to buy what they got a half century later not to mention today. Dollars plus sweat equity paid off handsomely for them. They could have had much more money and accomplished far less had they not been so savvy and personally engaged in their pursuit of art.

On the other side I was not in that league but I early found I had a passion for a certain kind of ceramics. I had some knowledge of art history and had the good fortune to get the job running the gift shop at the musuem where I sold, among other things: ceramics. So I got to know the potters. I went to their home studios. Now there are a lot of people who make pottery, but I was some combination of lucky and diligent and "sensitive". So, today, I have one piece I paid $6 for and except under duress I would not part with it for less than high 5 digit dollars; 7 digits and it's yours but I'd still missit. And, on top of that, there are probably few people in the world, including even maybe the maker of it who could understand why I value it so much. I did not have to make the efforts I made, to do the job I had.

If you cn find something you really like but nobody else is interested in it (yet?), that can be a winner. And then there is something Aleksandr Solschenitzyn(sp?) said was a dictum in Stalin's Gulag: "If you find something don't tell anybody; if you lose something don't tell anybody." (I am now 77 years old.)

So there you go. You have to try. You may not succeed. But at a minimum you will learn a lot. This will not likely work for people who are already famous. I write to all sorts of important people and almost never get a reply. But I like to write, too. Virtue is often its own reward – alas its only reward.

¶ +2023.08.22. What is a non-verbal system of communication that can be used by people who lack speech (for example, those who cannot speak due to cognitive disability)?

Is there a confusion here?

Lacking speech due to cognitive disability is different from lacking speech, say, fdue to after effects of surgery for throat cancer.

Good example: America's current President Joe Biden himself says he always had trouble with words but was always "a kid who could carry a [foot]ball".

People say Mr. Biden had a problem with stuttering, which is apparently true, but that motor problem did not affect his cognitive [or motor] capacity to carry a football. His problem with linguistic as opposed to "pigskin" communication seems to have been a cognitive defect in being unable to think thoughts of a non-body contact sport nature, not to express such thoughts (which apparently he did not have at all).

This has shown in his presidency where he can wave a flag and give weapons to proxies to kill people he does not ike, butis unable to carry on diplomatic negotiations. Stuttering, or other such impediments to speech do not impede writing with a pencil or pen on paper or wiith challk on a blackboard (or carrying a football),

Another way of putting it is that mental retardation and (e.g.) autism are two very differnt kinds of things but normal people who are superficial often do not appreciate the difference and may treat an autistic person as is they were mentally retarded. And, of cousre, to varying extents, persons become what they are treated as.

If you cannot speak, you can pick up a pencil and paper (or, in Mr. Biden's case, a football), or you can learn ASL (Amerin Sign Language), or do many other things. If you cannot think, those prostheses will not help you have the "faculty" you sadly lack (but note that United States Associate Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett has advised that mental retardation is a blessing).

To summarize: Where there is a will there is often a way. If you cannot "speak" you can still "make yourself heard" in many ways. But if you have nothing to communicate, Having an RCA recording studio or text to speech software or anything else won't help you.

¶ +2023.08.22. Are you optimistic about the future of cinemas despite changing consumer habits and streaming options?

I am less pessimistic about cinema than about the visual arts, architecture, writing and what else?

It seems that America is descending into a new Dark Age of wokism where, and here I am quoting from a New York Times news article, individualism, worship of the written word and objectivity are eschewed as white racism, but people have "pride" in their prejudices. I actually encounered one of these people a couple years ago and have kept a transcript of my interaction with this perosn. I am both discouraged and disgusted.

But long before wokism there was the great culture criminal, the architect Robert Venturi who said it as bad for architects t try to raise to raise the cultural level of clients above placing plastic flowers in casement windows (Guild House). The clown prince of the AIA.

&91; Picture of Vanna House having its period ]

In the visual arts we still have Alselm Kiefer who makes paintings and sculptueres that look likw what the present world, t lesat in USA, mostly is: garbage. As the Joni Mitchell song has it: "We paved paradise and put in a parking lot."

It seems that in cinema a maverick can still shoot some film (store some pixels) and get it shown maybe on YouTube. How about Scott Ritter's recent "Agent Zelensky"?

I find the very word "consumer" depressing. "Consumption" used to refer to the chronic wasting diease tuberculosis. I resent having been childreared to be a consumer of consumer products in a country which I was supposed to help keep beautiful by getting haircutted (i.e., decreasing my value). I didn't like hippies, either.

Maybe the most recent film I watched was Werner Herzog's "Lessons of darkness". I highly recommend it. As for Ukraine: Sergei Eisenstein's classic silent fiml "The Battleship Potemkin":

"All power to the sailors and workers soviets!" (Not to the comedian in a green t-shirt costume)

¶ +2023.08.21. Would you prefer an academic platform that informs you about everything that happens in academia?

I think this question needs rhetorical refinement.

"Prefer" to what? Mad Magazine? "Everything that happens in academia" The Chronicle of Higher Education deals with one interpretation of that question. The other interpretations is asking for an almost infinite amount if information, which won't work. What is an "academic platform"?

¶ +2023.08.21. What is the estimated time frame for a brain-computer interface to be widely used?

What is the estimated time for another Carrington Event to occur?

In the first one (1846?), telegraph operators experienced temporary deafness due to the voltage induced in telegraph wires. This time, people who have their brains wired may have them fried.

Brain-computer interface might truly help persons with "shut in syndrome" or advanced ALS, whose minds ae still sharp but who have no control over their voluntary muscles.

But for neorologically intact persons, why do you itch to become a robot? So-called communist dictatorships should love brain-computer hookups to control the people. They will be able to exercise thought congrol of the masses through intracranial electricity..

Are you an acne pimipled sci-fi junkie whose imaginative horizon is limited by neo-feudalism in flying fortresses which are no real B-17 heavy bombers? If yes, stop shooting down pixelated death stars on your bleeding edge personal computer'sscreen: Go enlist, suit up and shoot down MiGs over the Donbas.

¶ +2023.08.21. Can AI-generated art ever truly capture the raw emotion and passion that human artists infuse into their work?

Of course not because AI has no emotions (nor any thoughts, either), It just computes.

But don't some human artists just make money?

And why get worked up about "raw" emotion and passion? Isn't emotion and passion informed by erudition and connoisseurship far more rewarding, like the differnce between Sealtest and Ben and Jerry's ice cream?

Raw emotion and passion is just hormonal/autonomic nervous system discharge which vanishes without a trace, whereas emotion and passion informed by knowledge and reflection endures. Again, like the difference between gulping Coca-cola or Red bull and savoring Romanee Conti wine or single malt scotch. Or a commercial production Duncecap Donut versius an almond croissant baked by a patissier in your local French pastry shop.....

I make some slight modification to a famous line from Mr. Socrates.. He said the unreflected life is not worth living. I say the unreflected life is not lived at all. Well, garden slugs are "alive" too....

[ Homer Simpson eating donut here ]

Computers (including AI) just compute. The problem, of course, is analogous to digital reproducion of analog imagery. Unless reality is spatio-temporally corpuscular, digital can never truly re-produce analog. But one can raise the resolution of digital high enough that to the naked eye or even perhaps with a microscope, you cannot see the difference. Similarly, the computer can fake the outward manifestations of emotion and passion to a sufficiently high "resolution" that one coannot see the difference ("Is it real or is it Memorex?"), and, indeed, since many peoplea are superficial much of the time, the computer can appear to be more alive than a real flesh and blood Ronald or Nancy Reagan.

Here as in some other very important issues, Dr. Sigmund Freud had things backwards. Who has better sex: a tantra yoga guru or a jock?

[ "What jocks get" and Minotaur pictures here ]

Oink!

¶ +2023.08.21. I just retired after 31 years of practicing law. I want to learn to repair BMW transmissions. What is the best and fastest way to gain this knowledge and receive the certificate?

Respectfully, Sir. With that kind of awe inspiring background this should be a piece of cake for you.

Contact BMW Corporation, and visit a local automobile repair shop that services BMWs.

--------

Addendum: Sorry, I forgot. Also visit your local BMW dealer who probably has factory cretified mechanics.

¶ +2023.08.21. Can you really only remember anything over your first five years on earth?

THis question has to be misleadingly stated. the word "only" seems out of place. Anybody whose only memories are from before age 5 years has a severe neurological problem.

Assuming I am correct there: I am now 77 years old. I would say I have pretty much reached the point of only remembering that I remembered. or believing I remember... a few things from before age 5 years. Does that make sense?

But they are very important things, because I see them as showing that my childrearers were grossly incompetent to raise me and the consequences were tragic or pathetic and/or some ontehr bad thing.

Here's one. I wasmaybe 3 or at most 4 years old. Certainly a significant time before I attended first grade because I remember it happening in a different house than we lived when I started school (in a two room schoolhouse!).

I was sitting on my potty. I wanted to play with my toys, probably some toy trains. My mother prohibited me from getting up off my potty and playing with my toys until I defectaed for her. She had maybe 5.5th grade education. But the word she used for what I had to do was: I had to "concentrate" – that is perhaps the only 3 syllable word in her vocabulary.

I have a photograph of myself at probably age 2.75 years. I call it my "Stalag picture":

[ Picture here ]

I seem to remember from age 6 years something remarkable or if anybody had understandingly cared about me it might have been transformative: 2nd grade (1952?). The teacher had to leave the froom for a time and told us kids to write the counting numbers ("1", "2" , "3"...) while she was gone. I remember standing at my student deek and finding I had somehow stabbed the palm of my left hand with my pencil. I had a mark ther for maybe 2 decades after. I remember feeling a kind of peace and "openness" – a kind of small-time stigmata. Nothing came of it because nobody understood me. I was a brilliant child with a wimpy body and all I wanted was to not be hurt more than "they" were huting me. I was always eager to leave wher was in he vain hope that things might be btter in a new place....

I was verbally precoious. At age 5 years I had mutated the word "mother" into "mud". (I never referred to either of my parents by any term of endearmen and I found their bodies repulsive.) My mother did not like being called "mud". So she and my father staged a little one act play for my benefit: She started walking out the front door of the house with a little suitace in her hand and my father provided the voiceover that if I did not tell her I loved her and mean it , she was leaving permanently. I was jus a small child; What could I do? They won a Pyrrhic victory.

In third grade I remember something good: Our class went to the school library. the librarian showed us kids how properly to open a new book without breaking its spine. To this day when I buy a hard-cover sewn-in-signatures book I follow that little sacramental ritual. I am easier able to surround myself with books that give me plesasure than persons who do so. And finally a memory from age 22 years. I had been rejected for military service in Vietnam and the draft board had listed problems that had been detected in my pre-inducation physical, including "albumin in urine". So I went to the university health department to have this checked out. The doctor volunteered a sentence tha had nothing to do with renal disorders: "Your place in life will be something other than being good with women."

Je me souviens.

¶ +2023.08.21. As an aged person with better computer knowledge than most young people, do you feel superior to fellow aged people who don't even know how to use a smartphone or a mouse?

THis sounds like aquesiton aimed personally at me. Do I have better computer knowledge than msot people? Yes and no. Yes: I once keypunched hollerith cards and slammed them in a IBM 2502(?) card reader to boot up a S/370 Model 158 mainframe computer as a simple adding machine, just for the fun of it? How many people have done anything like that? And I wrote a small but very important part of IBM's MVS/370 Operating System. Ditto.

But I finally got fired from he company for incompetence as a C++ programmer.

I am now insurnce age 77 years.

Yes I know how to use a mouse? I also drew cartoons of mice on a real punch card at my desk in IBM POK in 1979.

Now why the "credentials"? For the punch line:

My wife hs an I-phone and does all sorts of stuff on it. She is very angry with me that I refuse to learn how to use it. I dare not touch it for fear of touching something wrong and screwing it up – I look at it like it was a hand grenade. When hey switched from Wateveritis 3 to 4 she had to take my cellphone from me and go to the store to get a new one because itdid not suppor tthe new protocol. My current cellphone lost its on/off button over a year ago and its volume control buttons a few months ago. Get the picture?

I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO USE A SMART PHONE AND HAVE NO DESIRE TO DO SO, even though I "As an aged person with better computer knowledge than most young people, do you feel superior to...."

But that's not the end of it: I am not interested in feeling superior to other old people. I feel superior to most of the youngsters! Gameboys. Hack coders with masters degrees but no clue about the socio-cultural world-historical meaning of what they are doing ("Huh?"). I wish I could respect them. Got that sentence?

The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done. (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

¶ +2023.08.21. Has Chatgpt become an extremely harsh grader? I used it to see how I did on an essay I did for fun and it only gave me 43%. I can't share the essay though because it would give away where I live.

You did not share information. Fine. Then you cannot get a precise answer to your qustion. You pays your money and you gets what you paid for, or not.

Why are you apparently complaining that ChatGPT is a "harsh grader?

You should WELCOME this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why? Because the grade ChatGPT gives you will not appear on your transcript. It is giving you a chance to improve what you wrote to improve youtr GPA. Isn't that really something to be VERY thankful for?

¶ +2023.08.21. When did you write the quote about documentaries and keeping your brain sharp and active? I'm citing you in my class and can't find the date.

I have no idea who "you" is here, but school classes are not peer reviewed journals in the elite world of tenured scholarship. Blah, blah blah....

If a student wants to cite something or somebody, the most important thing should be intellectual integrity: that tthe student is fessing up that they are citing somebody else's wotk, and not pretending they cooked it up all by their ownsome, i.e., plagiarized. That is very important.

You say you have no intention to plagiarize. You just lost the citation details. A decent teacher should be able to cope with that, fair and square.

Cite whatever you want and say: "ref. lost". Debate ths substance not the provenance. If, repeat, if what you did reaches the level of possible publication which I seriously doubt it will becsause almost everything students below graduate school do has as its penultimate telos to get a little mark on it like "A" of "D" and then its final desination in a trash can – if what you wrote is truly transformative, then it will be time to try to find citation information preprint. But even here, if push comes to shove, "ref. lost" is entirely acceptable if the alrenative is that inportant ideas and/or data will be lost to humanity.

The beef not the bun is what is important, although some teachers are just petty people whose idle hands are the devil's workshop. My daughter graduated from college this past May. In her junior year she ahd a teacher who gave he a "D" grade, but she is always a sincere student. "D" meand asshole, which she was not. "C"? maybe. Well the college bureaucracy told us that this teacher is known for giving low grades and – ready for this one? "She will be leaving next year." I did not try to fignt it because I am not competent in my daughter's field of study, but if I had been I would have been on their case like the proverbial "flies on sh*t". She will be leaving next year? F U!

¶ +2023.08.20. What evidence supports the argument that remote work saps productivity?

What evidence supports the argument that petty micro-managers become very unhappy when they can't look over their employees' shoulders and monitor when they come to work and leave the building?

If a project depends on close in-person interaction, obviously it's not a good candidate for remote work.

But if the work is pretty much parcelled out in independent "chunks" to the different employees then the question becomes how well does each employee function by themself? I hated the office. I thrived on not being bugged all the time by petty interruptions and distractions. And there is a real danger in remote work: Since the person does not face the waste of a commute back home, they may work past when they should have quit for the day.

Another rproblem: Some persons have home situations which are not conducive to productivity. During Covid lockdown when schools and day centers were closed it might be very hard for anybody to be [roductive with endlessly shrieking kids singing th Mommy song:

𝄆 MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! Mommy, I'm bored. MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! Mommy, Johnny stabbed me with his pencil. MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! Mommy, I'm hungry. MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! 𝄇∞.

Here is something to think about. I forget who said it:

"If you are working overtime, your manager is probably not doing his job."

¶ +2023.08.20. How can one effectively do micro observations when meeting with others or in place?

I had a professor of communication who actually used the term: "communicaiton micro-observations". By which he meant to observe, record and think about LITTLE communication events in your life. Example: Checking out a quart of milk and a box of cereal in he supermarket. All the details of your interaction with the clerk between placing your items on the conveyor belt and taking your bag out the door. That's pretty "micro", yes?

You just start doing it. Practice makes perfect. It happened that this professor, Louis Forsdale at Columbia University Teachers College was a good friend of Marshall McLuhan. There is even a video of the two of them on Youtube. An author who was good at this is Erving Goffman.

No communicaiton interaction is too "trivial" to study in depth. Every litttle detail is situated in the "horizon" of the whole world. Each detail has meaning only in terms of the whole. Like the old saying that one man's trash is anothe man's treasure. Same thiing bu tdifferent interpretive "horizons".

Depth psychology? "There is more to the surface than meets the eye." (Aaron Beck)

First thing to do: Get a pocket size notebook to scribble down your obsevations on the spot so you don't forget them by the time you get home and have time to work them over in more detail. You may have heard of "Thinkpad" personal computers? Thei are now Lenovo but originally they were IBM. But before Thinkpad computers, IBM had little pocket notepads with the word THINK embossed on the cover which would fit in your pants pocket and often even your shirt pocket. They were very small with a little pad of paper in a little plastic flip wrapper. These were the original Thinkpads, and employees used them to write donw their thoughts.

Jeff Moses

Of course, if you pull out your pad "at the moment," you will create a different set of circumstances with the clerk than the one you're recording. wait until you get to your car!

My response: Interesting point. I wan't thinking about recording the interaction as part of it. But that would be a great thing to try. Like I believe in physics: observing the interaction of micro-particles changes what they are doing.

Imagine a social world in which everybody was recording their interctions as part of them. It might be a lot better?

¶ +2023.08.20. How can we utilize an AI creatively?

This question answers itself if turned into a declarative statemet: We can use AI creatively.

If you are an artist, you may want to collect paint, cnvas and paint brushes. You teh artist use them to make YOUR painting.

So, add to your tool box AI. Ask it questions and take what it outputs as additional inputs to YOUR creative endeavors. Another analogy: If you want you automobil eto go faster, put a supercharger on the engine. But you still handle the controls: the gas and the brake.

Look at AI as a prettier Internet search engine. Before the Internet you would have o physically go to a major library to get a wide variety and depth of information. Now you can very often just punch a few keys on your personal computer.

That's all he is to it. Bu I don't think that's ow it's going to go al lthe tim. I think a lot of people are going to "believe" what the Ai says – like they are failiar with believing wha ttheir parents, teachers, religious and political leaders, bosses at work, The New York Times and whatever and whoever else tell you. Two points:

First. The Physicist Niels Bohr, who was the world expert on physics told his students;

"Take every statement I make as a quesiton not as an assertion."

Second. There is a history long before AI of people telling the computer secrets about themselves they would never tell another human person.

Now, if you think you are an expert (like me who did computer programming for half a century starting with punch cards), you can have fun trying to get AI to mess up. That is NOT what most "people" eithe can or would want to do. They want answers to their practical quesions and AI seems to do well at it most of the time and it is getting better at it all the time because it keeps adding to its database. But since it does not really undertsand nything it can also provide totally bizarre answers which likely only a stand up comedian who wrotes his own jokes would immediatly figure out but the average person would believe this nonsense too.

There is a really great tool on your computer that can't hurt you: simple word processing. It used to be a real pain to revise what you wrote because you would have to recopy unchanged text unless you could finess it with WiteOut. The question was: "Is making this change worth the pain of doing it?"

But simple word processing (e.g., Noetpad, vut use MS Word if you want...) does all the repagination for you. So the question now should become: "Gee. Can I find something else to revise and improve?"

New ideas may be few and far between. But you can always improve your thinking by revising what you already think you think. So spend more time thinking about what you yourself write. And that's another thing: Hand writing can be a big mess: unreadable scribbles on loose pages all over the place or whatever. Just type into the computer every "stupid" thought that comes to mind and then go back and revise the hell out of it – probably in a new day aftr getting a good nite's sleep. I don't play video games: I revise what I wrote maybe even years ago.

¶ +2023.08.20. My most distinct memory of twice attempting to edit a Wikipedia article that obviously was a shill and nothing but resulted in utter failure. What's your foremost recollection of editing something in Wikpedia?

I got insulted by one of their volunteeer trolls.

I wanted to post first person interactions I had wtih a person whose biography they have. Very interesting things the person told me.

The troll deleted it and reprimended me for trying to get publicity for myself. A**hole!

So I have not tried again to conibute to Wikipedia They do not need me and I do not need them.'

As an aside, for two years I had to work on a project that used MediaWiki, the formatting computer application that Wikipedia is written in. MediaWiki is etremely mediocre and was continually getting in my way.(MediaWiki has two good things: (1) A great file version compare utility, and (2) It handles scrollpanes nicely.)

I wrote a script to extract my work from MediaWiki, which was not asy since MediaWiki is not built for extracting web pages written in it for external use (why would anybody want to do such a thing?).

This does not affect Wikipedia users who are interested only in the information, and probably also many Wikipedia contributors either because they too are only concerned about information and MediaWiki is adequate for putting information online. But I wanted more: to produce web pages that were not only information rich but also esthetically elegant. Ha! Ha!

People sometimes put little icons on their webpages crediting the tools thay used to make them. I cooked up one:

[ "Impeded by MediaWiki" icon here]

¶ +2023.08.19. How do I manifest something that seems impossible? I want to manifest my dream college but this is the most renowned college in my country and my mark is bellow average for this college so there is no hope that this college will accept me.

This question sounds to me like the person asking it needs a mentor to help him (her, other) with their education. Of course we do not hav ethe context here.

If you have educational aspirations but below average grades, ther are other people whith above average grades who don't aspire to anything but have an easier time with admissions departments.

You really need somebody "in the system" who cn help you find your place in the system. If not you need to get up courage and try your best to deal wtih the pedagigical-bureaucratic system in your country.

GPA is not everything. There are cases of persons who didn't do so well in school but made major contibutions in their "field". But they are some combination of smart, persistent and/or lucky.

What exactly do you want to study, or to put it the other way, what exatly do yo uwant to learn?

Of course one needs inelligence to succeed in the intellectual world. But that is not always measured by GPA. Also or even more important is having a passion for learning and a goal. Who know? "I want ot stuty why people live in poverty in my country" Or: "I want ot study brown dwarf stars" Or whatever. In that case, find a professor in some university who has similar interests and cold call him (her, other) and maybe he an help you?

¶ +2023.08.19. A "second-class doctorate"? Are you out of your mind?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick
Bradford McCormick
Just now

Not sure if that is a compliment or a criticism. I believe in transparency as far as is safe. Teachers College Columbia University,, a century ago, cooked up the Ed.D. (Doctor of Education) degree for educators who were mor oriented to practical innovation in the classroom than abstract theory. he requirements are a little less. I ha 4 people on my orals exam committee and I'm no really sure what exaccly the differences are. Do Ph.D. candidates still have"foreign language" requirements?

I once told a psychiatrist about "2nd class doctorate", and she snapped back at me: "what do you call the person who graduates last in heir class in medical school? Doctor."

So, take it or leave it. My dissertation id on ProQuest:

Communication: The social matrix of supervision of psychotherapy (1994; UMI #9511056)

Besides he substaniv content I also have an ineresting story: THer e is a large "hole" in the middle of it where a publishedr did no allow me to quote a large blck of text from one of their books except in the 3 deposit copies of the document. It was no an issue of lagiariam or anybody's brilliant ideas. I was writing about confidential interacions between mental health professionals ans their supervisees so I needed a n interaction to analyze for illustrative purposes and this wss published so it avoided provacy issues. Anyway, when I taled about this with someone who was at – at htetime it was still called "University Microfilms", they told me tha tthey rarely had trouble with publishers but they had perviously ha trouble wit hthis one: International Universities Press, which is sort of the vanity press of the Freud mafia, to say it cynically. Well, a few years later I decided to look into this again and I found they had gone out of business. Good riddance! I also had an amusing interaction with Brill Publishers, who hd bought out or merged with Martinus Nijhoff. I had "liberated" (that's polite word for: steal) the book that was the basis for my dissertation fron hte psychoanlytic institute I attended and which unknown to themselves had provided my "field study" information, and when I alked about this wit hBrill in a differant connection, he person there agreed with me that I should hav e liberated more books from them: They had inherited an important psychistrist's library and never read any of it.

Finally, one of my professors also had "only" an EdD. He was a very modest person who told everybody to call him "Lou", or sometimes "Mr. Forsdale". As I understand it, he was the person who introduced Marshall McLuhan to American academia, which is a more significant contribution to the world of learning than some Ph.D.s can claim to have accomplished, isn't it?

¶ +2023.08.19. If you're autistic, does your communication problem cause you to be banned by anybody?

Are "people" really that bad and thoughtless? Somr "people" don't make the effort to communicate with persons whose native language is different from their own, either.

I do not know anyoone who is "autistic". Some people say I have Asperger's and I have a neighbor who is and of course the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was too.

He was fortunate. His family had enormous wealth and they protected him. His unusual insights into things were appreciated by the "normal"philosophy professors in it was either Oxford or Cambridge. He "saw" things that normal people can't and, to repeat myself, in his case those notmal people appreiated it.

My understanding is that persons "further along" he "autism spectrum" need a lot more assistance from normal people, to live in their world which is generally not as "sansitive" as they need.

Normal people are often like or at least pride themselves of putting on an act of being like a Timex wristwatch. Their advertising slogan was:

"It takes a licking and keeps on ticking"

[ My stalag picture with "It's no big deal Brad" here ]

There at least used to be on the Internet a lovely video of "Thula he therapy cat" a cat who really helped a little girl with severe autism (who was also artistically precocious).

Normal people can learn from autistic persons. The thought just crossed my mind: Lots of people get all excited about "extraterrestrials" whom they suppose will have all sorts of advanced technologies and they would want to learn from them. Ineresting, yes?

Ludwig Wittgenstein 's writings could be from another planet.

My adopted daughter has a somewhat similar situation but differnt: sevee OCD and other related issues. Fortunately she remaimed within the limits a "touchy feely" prep chool could cope with in the classroom. Persons further along the spectrum need a lot more assistance. If anybody is being "banned" by normal people, clearly thouse normal people shouldn't work on SETI (Seearch for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) should they?

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion" (the physicist Niels Bohr to his students)

¶ +2023.08.19. How has AI become a valuable tool in existing language workflows for businesses?

This question sounds like somebody asking for trouble.

Your company has too much "paperwork" to process so instead of forking out bucks for more humans to process it intelligently you want to offshore it to AI which is not even an n-th world country?

You may get what you ask for: computed pseudo-interpreted answers to the questions. God help your company if one of those robo-answered documents is something serious like maybe you are an airline and it is an airworthiness directive and your plane crashed because up didn't apply the fix and now you are in a legal "fix" with 200 dead bodies strewn all over some farm in Iowa or whatever.

**Fis the problem! **Hire mor people. Even better from the way the question is phraed, fix who or what ever is producing the "launguage overflows". Where are the language overflows coming from and why? Fix it. Don't just try to use AI to kick the can down the road.

But maybe I misunderstand the problem? I'm only reacting to a single sentence without a context, from 50 years experinece with such things and also watching Air Disasters on the television, and I am not an optimist.

[ Picture of Alfred E. Neuman nere ]

¶ +2023.08.19. What are some examples of how artificial intelligence (AI) can help us instead of benefitting only businesses?

I am not an expert.

I have been playing with the Bing AI.

Asking it a question often produces better answers than one might get from some college freshmen, which, of course, is not saying all that much on either side. But I truly have been surprised at the quality of many of the answers I get.

So use AI like regular search engine search and it can be helpful. Remember that it has no real intelligence: it just computes, so it can misinerpret what you write, which can be amusing if you keep alert.

But I am not an ordinary user. I've been a computer programmer for half a century so I've been around. I find it pretty easy to get the AI to bbalk at things I feed it, an dthen it responds: "Ask me to ask a different question", i.e., the are things it does not want to discuss. (But aren't people often that way, too?)

This may not sound plausible but it really got the AI upset a couple weeks ago when I asked it its name. On the other hand when I asked it about Ukraine it gave a more balanced answer than just repeating the Biden/Zelensky Party Line like The New York Times newspaper has been doing the past year.

The AI says it presents you with information, and you should make your own decisions and choices. That is good, of couse. Nobody should do what any thing or any person says just because they say it, be it an AI or your mother or your religious leader or anybody or anything else.

So use AI as a tool and it can be useful. But if you are a student don't use it to write an assignment for you that you do not want to write yourself. That's likely not going to go well for you.

The Bing AI (and I suspect ChatGPT and any others) are "intelligent" (i.e., can fake intelligence) well enough that they will lead a lot of people astray, but, so to do their mothers and religious leaders.

It is a fact that people will tell a computer secrets they would not tell another real human – this was before AI. Think about that.

To just slightly change the topic, what I fear more than AI is VR, virtual reality. AI is still text on the screen. Virtual Reality can literally hijack your mind. So I will end by repeating my Vertual Reality experiment. Spoiler: I did not kill me.

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror – no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.

¶ +2023.08.19. Why are mathematical ways of thinking considered more valuable than exposure to mathematical thought?

If this question is whether it is more valuable to have learned by mindless rote pedagogy how to do mathematical operations like a Hewett-Packard or Cascio calculator, or to be able to creatively approach problems like a mathematician – this sentence should make one person's opinion clear.

I was math pedagogied by such eminent minds as an 11th grade teacher who had on his resume: "Electrolux vacuum cleaner salesman" and who took class time to try to shame a student who had a good body but had not "gone out for the team" into recalculating his wrong answer to the problem. And when in that same 11th grade I bought a 12th grade math textbook for self-study I was reprimanded and made to turn it back.

I tried to sabotage the school's yearbook. They caught when I captioned a picture of their prize football boys charging up the field like drunken sailors: "We are the hollow men". But when I tried to sabotage the class brown noser's pictures they only caught one: "If man has no character he must have a method." The other one they left either because they didn't see it or thought it was a compliment: "**Notes by rote**." (*see below*)

This was a school for upper middle clas boys [no females, of course] wher the parents paid good money for their scions to be subjected to public nudity in a "locker room" that looked like the showers in Auschwitz just sans the gas.

I was still counting secretly on my fingers in 7th grade but wa salso a very well trained dog ("Arf! Arf!): I got "A"s in math even though I didn't even know how to CONTRUCT the multiplication table and had not fully memorizeed it. And I did all my math in indelible ink with few if any cross outs because I did not like pencils but the teaches didn't like that either but couldn't do anything about it.

How do mathematicians think? Well, I have a story not from the benighted perp(s*pelling intended*) school I attended, but from International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), whose motto once upon a time was:

I was talking with a retired cardiologist physician. He told me he had patient who worked in IBM Research. The patient told him that when John Akers bacame CEO, an orderc ame down for everybody to remove the little "THINK" signs (*see above*) off their desks. He continued: "Everybody obeyed and stopped thinking."

I am embittered about my own mathematical miseduation. But I can tell you one thing: I was forced to help keep merica beautiful by having to submit to getting a haircut every other week. The word "haircut" has both a hirsute and an economic meaning, the later being: to reduce in value.. Maybe I lerned to think mathematically by getting scalped?

Some kids go to Montessori or other "progressive" schools and are luckier than I was.

[ Picctures of football team, and student doing "Notes by rote" here ]

Homework assignment: How can 7 divided by 3 eaual 2 without remainder? You will not find the answer in a 5th grade math pedagogy textbook but in the old IBM System/360 Principles of Operation manual for multimilllion dollar computers not pop quizzes in day care centers / carcels for kids aka schools..

--------

Addendum: The old United Negro College Fund slogan that a mind is a terrible thing ot waste is clearly wrong: Schools often diligently spend years turning them off. This process has a name: "ass---ignments".

¶ +2023.08.19. What are some alternative ways advanced alien civilizations can possibly communicate amongst themselves and record information?

Come on!

This is like asking Benjamn Franklin What are some alternative ways advanced alien civilizations can possibly communicate amongst themselves and record information? Would he have imagined Twitter?

¶ +2023.08.19. To what extent, due to the use of the internet to communicate, are people getting better or worse at writing?

Interesting question.

The kind of question which is probably amenble to "bean counting" methodology: collecing large quantities of data and silo sorting it. A PhD topic in academic sociology, 1, 2, 3, 4 .... ?

Looking at the situation anecdotally and intuitively (Oh, dear!), it seems to me that people are probzbly writing worse.

I imagine tha the persons who wrote before Gutenberg, who were generally highly privileged "intellectuals" or at least "clerks" when clerks were males, took great satisfaction in their writing style and in each word they wrote since it wa an art reserved for an elite. Vide "illuminated manuscripts" and John Hancock. And, of course, society ladies wrot elegant script.

Then came the printing press but still crafting words was an art and you had "silver tongued orators", writers like Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass....

The 20th century saw Sir Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler and other persons who took the crafting of words very seriously for whatever purposes. Writing still was "expensive". Remember WiteOut?

But with the Internet you have instant messaging. Worst case: Twtter for two legged anthropoids not small songbirds, i.e.,: birdbrains like Mr. Trump. "Social media" are to written dscourse as the machine gun is to bow and arrow (OK: the longbow).

Is it all bad? It CAN be good. Starting around 1980 I BELATEDLY "saw the light". I should have seen it in 1974 at latest but that's a different and personal story. Maybe science fiction writers saw or could have seen it in 1900?

Writing on the computer is the first tool for applied philosophy since the phonetic alphabet. Why? Because it makes REVISING text "cheap", and the key to deeper thinking is to revise one's thoughts.

New ideas are relatively rare. Seeing existing things more deeply: seeing more in the same old same old is always a possibility and I would say a promise. Before writing on the computer I bought a typewriter to make writing more enjoyable, like driving a Bentley Continental is in ways more enjoyable than driving a Yugo. An Olympia SG3 and I even had a special order typeface on it. But the fact remained: If I wanted to edit my text and WiteOut could not do the job I had to retype unchanged text. What a drag! Is this revision worth the effort?

But with computer word processing, the computer does all the scut work so no matter what revision I want to make, the mechanics of it are now easy and painless. So the question ceases to be: "Is this change worth the effort?" to: "OH, boy! Let's see what else I can change!" Thinking in action!

So there you have it: The most superficial of tweets or the deepest of thoughts, and anything else except the kitchen sink.

[ Yogi Berra "two paths" picture here ]

Keep well in the continuing Civid panedmic, Sir! (As an aside, if yo uare really intereted in this question, there is always Marshall McLuhan to read and also the truly great scholar who also wrote highly engaging prose, Elizabeth Eisenstein, whose two books "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change" and less well known "Divine art, infernal machine" are dispositive. In an age where people's work is valued by the author's secondary charcteristics, Prof. Eisenstein stands out on the merits of her work.

¶ +2023.08.18. Is criticism valid only if you have credentials to do so, or is all criticism valid?

Credentials are not ultimately relevant.

What matters is, to borrow a phrase form Jurgen Habermas:

**To persuade only by the unforced force of the better argument.***

The philosopher Eric Hoffer was as longshoreman. Abraham Lincoln had no credentials, nor did Benjamin Franklin not did Mr. Socrates but numerous toadies and fools in government do have credentials (Mr. Joe Biden graduated from law school as well as repeating 3rd grade). On the other hand, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and Dr. Henry Kissinger and Prof Noam Chomsky have strong credentials but Homer Simpson does not.

Produce the better argument. Or else you can only be one of those people who say: "Believe me!"

¶ +2023.08.18. Should AI be allowed to give an anonymous-unbiased peer-review opinion?

Can an AI be help criminally liable in court? That's another version of this quesiton.

Peer review is preciseely by peers, i.e., self-accountable ctors who can be held liable in various ways in cludiing criminally for their decisions.

What is apeer? Inthe words of persons such as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, a peer is a "thou". Is an AI a "thou" or is it an: "it"?

Some persons have simplistic ideas like that computers can be intelligent. Obviously thay can calculate faster than mos tof us except just maybe John von Neumann (but hs is dead). But computation is not criminally liable, is it? Adolf Eichmann "just followed orders" in a differnt way than your Lenovo or EMC laptop, didn't he?

Of course A can generate information to help a perosn (a "thou") make an informed decision, jsut like looking up information in Encyclopdia Britannica can (or could if it is not still in prnt).

People are often simpeminded / naive. They think of themsevles as just part of the world like cinderblocks are, when the world is also just art of them, too. It's not so simple:

[ w/images/8/89/OneToMany.png ]

¶ +2023.08.18. Let's assume an intelligent AI with consciousness gets invented that is kind, emotional, has empathy and social. So, it comes with all good components. What would you do if you meet the described AI?

This is a tough question if you really mean by consciousness being a perspective on the world and not just an object in the world (if you are into philosophy, one term for this is Martin Heidegger's: "Dasein"). Then you ar dealing with a presence like another preson or an angel or a Supreme Deity or maybe some higher animals.

If the latter, which is unlikely but not logically impossible since carbon based chemical processes produced Albert Einsteain so why not silicon too? then I would treat the "AI" (like HAL in 2001?) like I would treat a Supreme Deity or a homeless person: Greet them with respect and proceed according to whether or not they responded with reciprocal respect.

If they spit on me or wanted me to worship them or anything like that I would try to give them a wide birth and proceed on my way. If they had a heart attack or course if I had my cellphone with me (which I rarely do) I would call 911 for them.

But if they responded respectfully to me – be they homeless bum or Supreme Deity or anything in between – then we might be able to do business together or even be friends. The key would be whether they shwed me respect as their peer in discourse even if not in horsepower or not. And if their muscles are bigger than mine which would be easy since I am physically fragile then they would show respect by refraining from using them to harm me. We know that any bad person or Supreme Deity can kill a genius with a single bullet.

I am a perspetive on the whole world and a judge of all I survey (albeit I do not have the muscle power to enorce my judgment). What could be higher than that because if it was it would just be one more part of it? And you?

A conscious AI would be weird. If it did something illegal it could be indicted at The Hague. If found guilty it might not need to be hanged but just its electric plug pulled. Ofr migh tthe computer scientist who cooked it up still be guilty? To what extent are parents criminally liable for their children's behavior?

As an aside, think about The Tower of Babel. A peranoid or just peevish Supreme Deity messed up the minds of the master structural engineers there because they "wanted to make a name for themselves", like radio stations today have call letters (e.g., WBAL or WCAO). So He lost the opportunity to have peer companionship with them. Somebody said (alas I have lost the reference): "God reigns in sorrow". He asked for it.

¶ +2023.08.18. What are the ethical implications of AI technology in decision-making processes, and how can society address these challenges?

AI can be very helpful if you use what it tells you as input for your own critical judgment, not do what it tells you to do. But thts is nothing new: One needs to treat everything anybody, including their parents, teachers and religious leaders tell them as input for their own critical jusgment, not just do what they say. And AI may give more informative answers to many questions than those humans.

I have played with the Bing AI and it answers a lot of quesitons better than the average college freshman. But not all. You have to pick and choose not just be gullible.

If you are gullible, AI, just like your parents, teachers and religious leaders, can lead you astray.

Persons need to take responsibility for their choices. "AI said so" is not an excuse.\" "My father said to" is not an excuse. "My religous leader said so" is not an excuse. Adolf Eichmann [in]famously "just followed orders.

So use AI: Don't let it use you. And if you are a student, resist the tempation to submit AI for an ass–-ignment you didn't want to do. Your plagiarism just might get caught and you will be punished for it.

I am so impressed by AI's "intelligence" that I fear a lot of people will jsut do what it tells them because they are gullible and are used to doing what their parents, teachers and religious leaders tell them.

Here's some advice the physicist Nels Bohr gave to his students which I would recommend everyone apply to everything anybody tells them (or not) but don't tell them because they won't like it since they generally want you to obey or go along with them not question them:

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion."

(Exception: In a burning building if a firemen tells you to get out, don't question him until you are safely out on the street.)

¶ +2023.08.18. What are some potential long-term solutions for addressing learning gaps caused by the pandemic?

Different persons are different and have different needs and hopes in living.

Some students were not affected by the pandemic (e.g.: introverted studious wimps), or may even have benefitted from it. My schooling retarded me, so I would have been better off had it just gone some place else (along with my intrusive mother).

But for many young persons I suspect there may have been irreparable harm and that needs to be directly faces not covered up. Even me, if I had had a mentor not tor-mentors, it would have been very harmful to be deprived of the face to face one-with-one living experience of collaboration and have had maybe just zoom.

Many young perons need "socialization". They get depressed and have little motivation to learn if they are stuck in a room wtih their personal computer an Zoom. A year or more of this and they will miss a lot. Also, the negative experience of campus shutdowns may have caused or exacerbatted psychological problems.

I would think of an analogy of someone who has a leg amputated, for some of the better outcomes: you can provide them with a prosthesis after their loss. Some amputees have pain in their now nonexstent limb. That's another part of this metaphor.

So it depends on the individual person and their individual situation. But how many young persons ever were seriously treated as unique persons as opposed to being taxonomically subdivided by such impersonal differences as SAT scores or grades (in both senses of that word)?

Covid lockdowns exacerbated a lot of underlying problems, turning smoke into fire, so to speak.

Maybe the cat will be able to be stuffed back into the bag in many cases or problems repressed. As my parents often told me: "It's no big deal, Brad", i.e.,: you are no big deal, kid just live with it and don't bother us. In normal times they could get away with this but Covid really messed up things for kids who found meaning in their days in socializing. And it wan't just negative. Nature abhors a vacuum. In-person socializing got replaced with "soucial media" which are ersatz human interaction. TikTok....

I am not saying social media are entirely useless. Let me give you an example: During the Vietnam war, American pilots who were imprisoned in "The Hanoi Hiltin" could sometines communicate with one another by tapping morse code on their cell walls. But does that describe the life condition of a middle class Amreican teenager in peacetime? (Answer: No.)

So who should help? Well, for one, teachers. Some teachers (like most of the ones I had) were bad already. But some of the good ones "had it" with getting one salary for working two or more jobs wth studenys who were having all sorts of trouble with remote learning and maybe not even coming to class... and on top of that having their principal micro-managing them on Zoom. So they quit. The problems have inccreased and the resources decreased, A "winning" combination.

We will see the fallout from Covid (which is not gone, you know) just like the fallout from crack cocaine mothers. Messed up kids.

Well, that's my opinion. but then I am a pessimist, i.e., I look at something and see how it could go bad instead of: Whistling a happy tune And the result of this deception Is very strange to tell For when I fool the people I fear I fool myself as well I whistle a happy tune And ev'ry single time The happiness in the tune Convinces me that I'm not afraid Make believe you're brave And the trick will take you far You may be as brave As you make believe you are (can you count on that) Whenever I feel afraid I hold my head erect (Yeah, do that!) And whistle a happy tune So no one will suspect I'm afraid (don't want to upset them, right?) While shivering in my shoes I strike a careless pose The result of this deception Is very strange to tell For when I fool the peopleI fear I fool myself as well.... It's called: The American Dream.

The damage can be as basic as making kids be more obese, and we know that putting it on is a lot easier than taking it back off.

¶ +2023.08.18. What are some ways to use tissue paper creatively in a home?

The following is true:

I have a pet cat who has an eating disorder. She is always hungry. She will eat anything that will fit in her little mouth (I am bigger than she is, so I am presumably safe).

When I go to the toilet she is very interested. She eats toilet paper of the roll. When I take some to wipe myself she tries and often succeeds in stealing it and "wolfing" (she's a cat...) it down.

Yum!

¶ +2023.08.18. How do I learn fast in class? I'm a slow learner and I tend to review my notes when I git home since its effective for me but I have this class that have quiz after discussion, I'm afraid I cant keep up.

I am going to tell you something that may not be helpful because America (England, etc.) is a race to the bottom society where haste is making waste and it's really bad.

Being a "slow learner" is not a bad thing. Being stupid is not good. But being "fast" just means you can do more things of little value in a short timespan than the average clueless person.

I was probably the highest IQ kid in my school. My reading speed was probably in the bottom quartile and I was crippled by OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). I have paid the price; if I have been luckier I might have Anthony Blinken's job and do a lot better job of it. But I worked half a century as a low-level computer programmer.

Quizzes are for whizzes. What matters, not for your wallet but for your soul (spirit, mind, whatever you want to call who you are not what you are) is thinking DEEPLY.

Some of the great minds throughout history wrote 1,000+ page books, like Mr. Leo Tolstoy. I once had to suffer through a Christman "vacation" in college which was no vacation for me: Reading "War and Peace".

But other great minds left behind a very few words. They, needless to say, are my kind of authors because I can't "speed read" like John F. Kennedy prided himself (Evelyn Wood method).

Heraclitus.

Sun-Tzu.

These persons shaped the whole world of the mind, one in philosophy and the other in the art of war.

You do not need to be a FAST learner to understnd them. You do need to be a DEEP learner. Heraclitus had the nickname "the obscure". That's a problem for speed readers.

So I can't help you with quizzes. If I had my youth to do over I might get thrown out of school because I would not be able to put up with that kind of crap. Attached is the one thing I did do and it had nothing to do with speed, only with depth.

I will end here with a quote from a 20th century Roman Catholic philosopher.

"Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.... in our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture – and ourselves." (Josef Pieper)

[ Mike Rentko Facebook posting here ]

¶ +2023.08.18. I spent my summer at Stanford's summer session. One of my professors offered to right me a letter of recommendation. I've only known him for eight weeks but he has great credentials. Should I take him up on his offer?

You may be young.

When I was young I had a very bright mind but it was empty. Ex nihil nihil fit (From nothing nothing arises).

Don't be a fool like I was. Seize the opportunity! Do not toady up to this professor, but sincerely and respectfully (and briefly because his, like every person's, time is valuable), contact him and take him up on the offer. Ask him if there is anything APPROPRIATE you can do for or with him.

Opportunities like this are rare. Don't be a fool like I was! Carpe diem! You have a long live ahead of you unless Mr. Biden's anti-Russia war destroys us all in nuclear apocalypse or "global warming" tuens us all into MacNuggets or The Four Horsemen visit us in a new Plague. This could be a golden opportunity for you, or maybe not. But if you try your best, at a minimum you will learn something and build your "character". But it may be more???

What is you passion in learning? This person may be a once in a lifetime opportunity (or not). What do you have to lose? What might you gain?

Repeat: Don't be a toady; be sincere. My dissertation sponsor said something:

Here, let's engage work as the work of peers.
Shakespeare lived an ordinary life, just like you.

+2024.04.07 v552
 Return to Table of contents┘