Log of my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) postings
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¶ +2023.09.29. What are the best books to read about gifted and talented kids and adults and their many different variety and levels of abilities?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

First. don't limit it to "the gifted and talented". Take it for what it's worth, The brilliant physicist Richard Feynmann at least says he ha an IQ of 125 and that he did it by a lot of studying. But he also had a father who encouraged him to question things. I was highly gifed but only marginally in ways measured by an IQ test and I was not a budding Van Cyibern either. It takes one to know one and vice verse. How might Marcel Duchamp have done on an IQ test? Or Shoji Hamada (potter)? I knew an otherwise honorable but ordinary man who had one genius idea in his whole life.

OK. Go to YouTube and find a little video by Maxine Greene about education.

There are a lot of gifted chilren (you may guess who was one) whose parents did much harm to them. So while you will find a lot of upbeat books about fostering the gifted, I would also highly reommend Alice Miller's books: "The drama of ht gifted child", "For your own good" and "Thou shalt not be aware".

A true story. I knew a man whose parents were dirt farmers in Appalachia with maybe 4th grade education. Not hopeful, right? Well, he did very well in life. Yes he was very intelligent and also very resilient. But he had one more thing. His parent knew they oould not raise him as he needed. They recognized he was different than they were. But they did the one thing they could do, and he told me what it was. His mother told him a a child and meant it:

"Tom, do what you believe is right. You will make mistakes. We stand behind you."

They had his back even though they could not give him what they did not have. My mother credibly threatened to abandon me at about age 5 year because I did not love her and when I went to school it was made clear to me that if I did not get "A" grades – wrll, they nver told me what would happen=to me and I did my best to not find out..

My schooling:

[ Rentko ]

It's too late for me (b. 1946) to have a life, I and to have given back to society what I could have done. A lose-lose.

Anyway, you never know who will do wht if given a chance. how can you go wrong by treeating ach child as a fragile orchid not as an anmost indestructible weed? "Man up, kid!"

¶ +2023.09.29. What are your thoughts on Amazon? What is your interpretation on what are they doing to be successful?

Amazon may be "too big to fail" and it's a partial private government. It needs to be brought under intelligent goernment regulation. Should it be broken up? That I don't know because of such examples as th breakup of Standard Oil long ago. – it just made John D. Rockefeller even wealthier. Did the breakup of Bell telephone do any good? Did it help Bell Labs to make more great innoations? One size dos not fit all but no corporation can be trusted to look out for the public good, can it? The invisible hand without a mind, and a fortiori, without a heart, does not care about persons but persons may care about their own and thir loed ones' lives (or not).

I have a lot of eduation in the numanities which I hypothesize Mr. Bezos does not. If I had more wealth than I knew what to do with I would start experimenting with a better form of economy: Worker owned and managed cooperatives (Abraham Lincoln said a big diffeence bertween wage-labor and slavery is that the former is a temporary not a permanent condition). I would give Professor Richard Wolff (democracyatwork.info) a no strings attached grant of at least a billion dollars – if he would deign to accept it. But I am humanistically educated and Mr. Bezos is just a techie with a lot of money so I expet little out of him, not even "philanthropy".

(If I had his money and I had children I would be selfish. I would not advertize it but I would not send them to any school to waste their youth not even Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Well, if the kid was into science, maybe MIT, but not as a regular student subject to exams and grades. How much would it cost to have Noam Chomsky tutor them like Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great? Or the artist Anselm Kiefer? Unfortunately most of the people I would really want died a few decades ago and the world has been going downhill from there. My kids woul never be subjcted to "political correctness" or wokeness (or, yes, also: MAGA) brainwashing. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. But this has been a digresion.)

Mr. Bezos could show a good attitude by working one day each month in a different low paying job in his ompany, indluding cleaning office tiolets on third shift. Then let's hear him explain the pay and benefits of those people, telling them he has walked in their shoes so he knows what he is talkiing about.

Oh if I had a hundred billions of dollars, the things I could do! They say that youth is wasted on the young. Wealth is often wasted on the wealthy. As Donald Trump once said in a differnet context (unknowingly echoing the philosopher Martin Heidegger): "It is what it is." And people are what they are, even or perhaps espevially the superwealthy.

(To directly answer the present quesiton: Mr. Bezos is a very lucky man.)

¶ +2023.09.29. What do you do when things go wrong on stage as a comedian, such as forgetting your lines or equipment malfunctioning?

I am not a stand up comedian although sometimes I try and peole are not amused because generally my joke is on them and their "sacred cows".

But my guess is that a real pro who writes his own jokes will not be much bothered by anything. He (she, other) probably follows the psyhcoanalyst's axiom (which psychoanalysts themselves do not always sincerely follow when the "thing" is themself!):

"**Everything is grist for the mill**"

Forget your lines, make a joke out of it. Equipment malfunctions, function with it.

Normal people are 2-legged sheep that get ost without their sheep dog or shepherd to ride herd over them. Baaaa! A shepherd or sheep dog needs to be ready for anything to try to protect his (her other's) flock.

If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.

¶ +2023.09.29. How can I learn how to think from the first principles? Are there websites for practicing it or books to read?

Ah! First principles!

OK: What will your first principles be based on?

I tink this is a case of Immanuel Kant's paraplogisms of pure reason: some things are not thinkable so we need to live in the world not fantasize getting outside it, which will not work brcause anytihng outside experience wil be part of experience or not anything at all

[ Cosmos here ]

This is not to say you should not look for what things are based on. Just make sure to be consistent about it and whatever basis you find, try to find what it in its turn is based on. If you stand on first principles, what do they stand on?

But ther is another angle here: You can become a master at one level and pertty much take the levels below it on trust. A master structural engineer need not be competent in quanti=um physics but every building is based on quraks, isn't it? But if you were going to build a skyscraper would you hire a nobel prize winning physicist or a master structureal engineer?

I have heard this about the papacy. When they elect a new pope, he sits on a special chair with a hole in the seat and all the cardinals walk under it to inspect that he is not castrated. Isn't this a good image here?

But there is one principle which is probably(?) in a curious way not supassable: To always take everythink as a provisional hypothesis subject to future new evidence. I do not know german and this may be bad memory but I will tanslate:

"Nur das Bleibende im Dknkens is der Weg" (Martin Heidegger) What endures in thinking is the process of thinking – NOT ANY OF THE PRODUCTS DU JOUR OF THOUGHT.

In other words, the only defensible first principles must work in a positive recursive feedbak loop. Or there is another one from one of my teachers (John WIld):

"We are a conversation"

Find anything outside or "underneath" that and what will you have> just more material to discuss. Conversation itself is unsurpssable. Neither the Big Bang nor the axioms of geometry nor any putative Supreme Deity nor any other object of thought is final. Al dogmatists are either cynical or naive, don't both you and they agree?

I am not an mathematician, but didn't Kurt Godel prove tha tany axiomatic system, i.e., anythin based on first principles, is either incomplete or self-contradictory?

The philosopler Edmund Huserl said that absolue alertness (awakenness) is not possible, but, I would propose: you don't have to be woke.

¶ +2023.09.29. How do I stop, pay attention, and listen effectively? I'm super hard headed.

No, you're not. If you wee SUPER HARDHEADED you would not think you were hardharded. You would think you wree GREAT.

Now, you may be "hardheaded", whatever that means to you. So do stop and pay attention to wht you are doing.

Listening effetively is not easy. But you may find it within your powers to not make "snap" responses to people and situations tha tare not mission-critical-time-constrained. If the building yo uare in is on fire nd the flames are coing through the door you have no time to speculate about your personality at the time.

But I imagine you might be in a meeting and somebody says something you strongly disagree with and you immediately snap back at them. Maybe? Here you could "catch yourself" and "contol yourself" andwrite it doen on a little notepad and j=keep your mouth shut and just "eat it". After te meeting is over, you can think about it all. THEN decide if it's really worth doing anything about it. And guess what? Maybe, since you say you do not liten effectively, you might go to the perosn and ask them to please clarify for you what they said becaue you are not sure you heard it right. That will not be easy for you.

Practice makes perfect. ristotle said tha tthe way to become a good person is to practice doing good deeds and the inner goodness will follow. He did not say to change how you feel first, whicch is the advice you will sometimes get from hypocrites who just do not want to be bothered.

Is this of any help? Also, don't be TOO hard on yourself. Keep trying your best and you should do better. (I had parents who always made me ashamed of myself. My mother is long since dead but her voice is still in my head. My father should have told the woman to shape up but he just wanted it to be Monday morning so he could go back to work.)

¶ +2023.09.29. How would you react if your 25-year-old daughter turned bright red and walked out of the room during a family gathering when your relatives pointed out how shy and quiet she is?

I would resepct her and ask if ther was anything I could do to help her feel better. I would ask said relatives to respect her too. I would look into myself and try to see if I or anybody else in the family had hurt her and distressed her and if I found anything I would go to her and sincerely aologize and peomse to do better in future anf ask her forgiveness.

But maybe ther are no problems in thr family. Maybe it's pople outside hte family who are causing the problem. Then I would go to bat for her about them. Many people are hurtful, inluding svhoolmates and teachers in schools.

The first thing to do is find out why your daughter is troubled. Second thing, see if you an improve the environment.

It does not sould like your daughter is an evil person, so the lst thing you want to do is try to "change" her. If she wa a mass murderer, obviously you would want to call the police but that doe not sould like it is the case here. She sond like a good person who has been hurt by others, including maybe yourself and your realatives.

Of course I do not have the details so I may be all wrong. But in general the victim is often blamed by people who hve more power but not more good qualities. If my posting has in any way mde you angry, or more specifically: "offended" you are probably contributing to the problem. But, again, I do not know the details, so if the shoe does not fit I'm not trying to force you to wear it (I had an intrusive mother).

¶ +2023.09.29. I don't have a single original thought by myself anymore. I used to think a lot and be really creative and imaginative. How can I fix that?

I hve no idea what your situation is. I lost most of 30 years of study in the humanities and also the will to live by having to work a job that I would have left in an instant if I didn't have the bills to pay. Did I have to work that job? Of course not: I had enough medivine in th house to probably have gone to sleep permanently. Everything i a choice with very few exceptions (e.f., if you ahve advanced ALS).

My only thoughts for you:

(1) Seriously study your condition and situation. Do not stint. Try your damnedest to figure out WHY you are not who you wish you were. WHY? WHY? WHY? Who is doing what to you? What choices are you making that might be contributing to the situation? This should be expeted to take sometime. It may be very unpleasant for you. You might love your parents but find they are holding you back instead of having your back. Etc.

(2) If you find any persons are contributing to the problem, do not hep them harm you more. Do not let them know you have figured out they are harming you because then they mat harm you even more than they are currently doing. They may be harming you because they just don't care about you but if they find out about it they may focus on you and intentionally do you harm.

Not all persons are nice, including in some fases, one's own parents (you may guess I am speaking fro persona experience here; my mother was destructive ans my father was well-meaning but clueless).

(3) Is ther anything in your life that gives you any pleasure? Do you have a lobing pet? Dogs and cats are often loving. Few dogs or cats harm their owners, unlike humans.

Advice is cheap. It's your life. I did not do very well in mine. But I didnt have any help either. So I will end with anexample of one of the very few times as a child I tried. I once knew a man who had it far worse than me and he was also a much better person than me. He said of himself: "They put me off at the wrong stop when I wa born."

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¶ +2023.09.29. What are the advantages and disadvantages of closed-ended questions versus open-ended questions for surveys and evaluations?

You get what you pay for (or less)

Ask closed ended questions and you will get closed ended answers and also ocontribute to making people closed ended and closed minded.

All multiple choice questions should have one more option: "Other, please describe: ________" and often the choice should be:

**No one should expect an honest answer to a question which no one is entitled to ask.... In this instance, a lot of things matter more than the truth.** (Matt Miller (Senior Writer, U.S. News and World Report), National Public Radio Morning Edition (31Jul98), "Halting the Lewinsky Madness".)

There are time when mortal unique persons need to be treaed as lumps to be counted, e.g., in a catastrophic disaster. But as sad as it may sound to some persons, not everybody is in pain all he time so when they are not at risk of serious maerial harm, persons could be respected not enumerated and collated.

Does the CEO of ETS judge his sex partner(s) and his parents and his children by their SAT scores divided by his SAT scores and if the quotient is less than one deploy them as wage-laborers and if the quotient is greated=r than one hire himself out as their wage-laborer?

¶ +2023.09.28. What do you think about Chip Bergh, the outgoing CEO of Levi's remarks that "I am just the orchestra conductor and have built an amazing team around me."?

I think that humility is a good thing for the powerful to display. Ther is no such thing as a self-made man (woman, other).

I forget who but the owner of one of THE biggest and mos prestigious fashion houses, when he walks down an aisle in his headquarters (which, of course, he owns), HE steps aside to let any emloyee pass. He know which side his bread is buttered on.

Anothe story from an old PBS documentary about the Innuit. The rwa a master seal hunter. He would stand motionles over a little hole in the ice for hours waiting for a seal to come up for air. All of a sudden, faster than you could see, he had stabbed his little wood harpoon squarely into a poor seal's nose and wa hauling th seal up out of his breathing hole. The man exclaimed: "I almost missed!" Of course he had not almost missed. He wa being respectful.

On the other side there are people who have a lot of wealth and power but tha tis not enough for them. The y crave something that money cannot buy: WORSHIP. They get off onbeing adulated by persons beneath them. Often enough they get away wth it. But not always, and if ever the tabbles ar turned they learn what it means to be on the otherside of th epower relation.

So I know nothing about Mr. Bergh, but you can be sure his success depended on the good work of his employees. Note he does take credit for two things: (1) having hired good people, and (2) having "orchestrated" their efforts. In other words, he helped them to help him.

¶ +2023.09.28. What steps can organizations take to ensure that members from diverse backgrounds feel affirmed and valued rather than expected to assimilate or have their identities silenced?

This is a false dichotomy.

Persons can overcome and get beyond their "identities" and not "silence" them. They can listen to them as ethnographical objects for study without either forgetting them or falling for them.

Assimilation is often preferable to tribalism. Would you rather be a hassidic young man who has a 4th grade eduation in secuar subjets but is an exoert in davening or be a physician or lawyer in the secuar world? Would you if you are female rather suffocate in a chador or enjoy your body?

[ liberated young lady and 2 chadors ]

(If you find that young lady "superficial" replace her with a PhD in sociology of religion, or physics:

[ Periodic table lady ]

Each person can study all the beliefs and behavioral patterns of all humanity through the ages and pick and choose those they like and leave the rest and modify them or build on them to create new ones of their own and thus self-accountably creatively shapeach unique individual his (her or other's) own individual living expierience and not just be an instance.

"Assimilation" can be a dog-whistle word, like "communist", or "racist", for instance. It's use is often to shut down rational study of the relevant issues.

But if by assimilation one means exchanging a foreign tribalism for a domestic tribalism then of course it's not very good. Multinational Corporation middle managers dancing around the desk of their CEO in Armani suits is not realy different from savages dancing around a totem pole in rare bird feathers.

¶ +2023.09.28. Why is the world so boring in 2023?

Boring for whom?

I am finding Mr. Biden's anti-Russia war more eexciting than anything since Vietnam. And each day I post a message to the White House websie urging him to stop it. I am not finding 2023 boring at all. Depressing? Yes. Frightening? Yes? (I do not want to die from radiation poisoning from h-bomb blasts when his war escalates further, do you?)

Now, if you aren't into the destruction of Ukraine, here are some other subjects to unbore you:

Global overheating

The repeal of Roe v. Wade

Donald Trump

Wokism ("DEI" brainwashing sessions at work etc.)

Elon Musk

Whatever the latest fashions are

Mass shootings in schools and other places

Fentenyl.

The price of gasoline and groceries. It's not boring to see that the price of a venti pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks has gone from $5.50 to $750 since last year, is it? No more pumpkin spice lattes for me. How about for you?)

Benjamin Netanhayoo in Israel

The fight over students wearing head scarfs in Farnce. Do you still remember Samuel Paty each moring?

President Biden even apart from his anti-Russia war. We are watching him descend further into Alzheimer's dementia day after day.

India landed a spacecraft on the moon an NASA jsut got back soil from an asteroid older than the earth.

The James Webb telescope

Do you watch pro footbball, baeball, basketball, hockey or or tennis? (I agree that golf is not al that exciting much of ht time.)

Covid-19!

The flu!

New York city versus all the immigrants Ron DeSantis keeps shipping north.

Barbie the movie or just more Barbie dolls accessories.

Chia pets.

Have you tried talking to an AI lately? They are pretty interesting to talk with, unlike maybe your spouse or yourself.

Speaking of which, remember that at the start of hte Covid pandemic, the New York City Department of Public Health advised: "You are your own safest sex partner" Never a need for a dull moment there, is there?

Do you fear your sins are going to send you to eternal perdition?

For that matter, have you had your colonoscopy?

Tik-tok?

Sorry, gotta go now, back to today's New York TImes Spelling Bee puzzle – there's a new one each day and a Crossword, too....

¶ +2023.09.28. Does Strong AI conflict with Gödel's incompleteness theorem?

I am not a mathematician.

But this is sort of like asking if the tail can wag the dog. AI just ocmputes. Nowm Chomsky says it is intellectually uninterersting: it just computes. But why not imagine something?

[ Snake eating its own tail ]

I'll here drag out a little story I wrote some time ago. Enjoy!

**How human wisdom was finally saved from Artificial Intelligence (AI)**

[*Warning:* Long read.] One day, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) computer science Ph.D. researcher decided to follow the noble precedent of many medical researchers and do the ultimate experiment in his field: he (or was it she? or other?) would be his own guinea pig. He would connect his own brain to his super-computer array. He got himself all wired up and hit "Start" on his application. In real time, he saw his experiential field appear veridically/verbatim on his computer monitor before he experienced it (all experience is retrospective, *per*, I believe, Alfred Schutz's "The Phenomenology of the Social World").

Like Moiré patterns in the visual field, his whole mind became one big interference pattern. But since this was his whole experience not just a visual perception, he was completely self-cancelled out. He lost consciousness, collapsed, and was taken off in an ambulance to the mental hospital. There, given a little Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), and his mind fortunately not being irrevocably fried by either his experiment or the therapy, he recovered. He read Edmund Husserl's "The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology", and learned that the domain of scientific objects is something inside each infividual person's lived experience, not the other way around, which latter was the objectivistic fantasy that had previously [mis-]guided his and his fellow AI'ers aspirations and experiemtations.

He published an article in a peer reviewed journal (but how could anybody review his work since surely nobody in their right mind would be willing to repeat his experriment?), which he concluded by adducing Clifford Stoll's maxim:

>Data is not information,

Information is not knowledge,

Knowledge is not understanding, and

Understanding is not wisdom.

He ceased Artificial Intelligence (AI) researching and took up fishing, and opened a small bookstore, with the sign out front: "Wise men fish here". Other Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers, whether or not they became wise like him, at least in future kept their distance from the psycho-computational black hole, and scrupulously took care only to experiment on persons other than themselves.

*However:* The Democratic Party won The White House and both chambers of Congress, and, despite rowdy, disruptive protestations from the opposition Republican Party, regulations were reintroduced into the Federal Government. An Office of Technology Oversight was instituted and they prohibited experiments which manipulated human beings' minds. Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers were left with only the objective world to manipulate. They showed honor, and programmed robots that eliminated necessary labor from society. Humankind was at last freed from G-d's Curse on Adam and Eve!

The AI researchers were duly rewarded with a collective Nobel Peace Prize.

***Excursus:***** My (BMcC) real life virtual reality experiment**

Some years ago, I conducted a virtual reality experiment that could have killed me. This is a true story. It did not require a computer.

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.

End of story. That's how I learned about virtual reality.

*Aside:* I have read that if a person wears inverting glasses, i.e., if you see everything upside down, if you do this for some time, while you are still wearing the inverting glasses, your visual field will flip to look upright again.

I'm still "here", despite my experiment.

¶ +2023.09.28. If artificial intelligence becomes self-aware, is it still artificial, or do we consider it "alive"?

This is silly techie fantasy.

If, repeat, if a computer ever becomes genuinely self-aware ("Cogito ergo sum" and "It's over Bebbie", etc.), and it may be theoretically possible to mix chemicals in a laboratory like in a vagina, Alan Turing once wrote to his mother:

It we ever create a computer that really thinks, "**we shan't understand how it does it**."

Just like copulation produced Albert Einstein. [and Joe Biden and Donald Trump, too]

It ain't gonna happen in any way like techie "idiots" fantasize. Since 1980 I've been describing these people as having imaginative horizons bounded by neo-feudalism in flying fortresses that are not real B-17 heavy bombers and they don't suit up to fly thru Luftwaffe strafing and triple-A to bomb the ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt-Rgensberg with 30% casualties. Wimps!

And now for the punch line: If this creature intentionally kills somebody, the dudes who programmed it will be arrested for first degree murder and if the computer is found causative, these hapless humans will be puished to the fullest extent o fthe law: lifetime in prison without parole or the death penalty. Now, do you want to make a compuer that thinks? The Hague awaits.

¶ +2023.09.27. What are some long-term benefits of organizations authentically committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)?

If an organization is not first of all committed to quality of performance irrespective of secondary characteristics, the organization will not preform very well, will it? And if they try to coearce employees into having politically correct beliefs they will lose anybody who thinks for themself and end up with a lot of 2-leggrd sheep, won't they? (All sheep are the sc=ame color in the dark and none are either goats or shepherds.)

Of course every person should be respected as a peer in civil society. and ever person should hav etheir unique special needs addressed irrespective of their secondary characteristics. But an ideology of "DEI" can lead to things like the following news article from The New York Times newspaper a couple years ago:

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."

¶ +2023.09.27. What features would you like to see in a translation platform powered by AI?

Simple and extremely important: That any serious use of any AI trnaslation platform be scrupulously overseen and reviewed and continuously corrected by master human translators.

AI has no intelligence: it just computes. This is fine for hack work that does not matter much. But in mission-critial situations the AI will never b able to detect if the txt they are translating has "tricks" in it that make it look like it is sayinig one thing but really is saying something else: "Plese sign on the dotted line to transfer all your wealth and future earnings here, thank you." Or: "Please sign on the dotted line for your acceptance of this peace treaty for the Ukraine War." You bettcha, right?

Is that the answer you were looking for? If not, I would not buy your service for important translation work.

Trying to save money can be very expensive when you get law suits.

¶ +2023.09.27. What is your opinion on the current state of transcription? Do you think there is still money to be made in this industry? Why or why not?

I am not an expert.

Do they still have court stenographers?

I don't know about "making money off it" but if I was an "imporant person" with an unlimited budget and I was negotiating, say the end to the Ukraine war or a zillion dollar business merger, I would want to have a master stenographer at my side. These persons are trained to hear what people say, not just what it sounds to a lay person like they are saying.

I don't trust my own ears and eyes. That's not so say I would completely trust them either but I could not afford to take any unnecessary risks. "What did that guy on the other side say 10 minutes ago?" "Well, Sir: ......."

¶ +2023.09.26. I want to major in philosophy at Portland State University but I am afraid of the philosophy professors ruining my education by being woke and postmodernists. What should I do?

I am appalled at what seems to be happening in "the ivory tower" today. And it started before "woke":

"Phoebe Ellsworth, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, said that, when [Elizabeth] Loftus was invited to speak at her school in 1989. 'the chair would not allow her to set foot in the psychology department. I was furious, and I went to the chair and said, "Look, here you have a woman who is becoming one of the most famous psychological scientists there is." But her rationale was that Beth was setting back the progress of women irrevocably.'" (The New Yorker, +2021.04.05, "Past Imperfect: Elizabeth Loftus changed the meaning of memory. Now her work collides with our traumatized moment", Rachel Aviv; emphasis added)

But it has apparently become hopeless.

I went to vollege in the late 1960s, at Yale. One of my teachers was John Wild, who introduced existential penomenology to Amerian acdemia. I call him "a gentle giant".You might have found a fine human being and a very humnistic philosopher in him.

I don't know. Ronald Bruzina who wrote a magisterial study of Edumud Husserl's late philosophy was at The University ofKentucky (he died recently).

I know little about postmodern philosophy. Noam Chomsky says it's all a combination of 12 year olds simplistic ideas in obscurantist jargon, and nonsense.

I do know about the origin of postodernism in architecture. there are two very readable books which I find disgusting by a man I consider one of the grat Culture Criinals of the 20th Century: Robert Venturi: "Complexity and contradiction in architecture" and "Learning from Las Vegas". But my guess is tht his anti-huanistic ideological screeds may not have been a source for Paul das Man and others. Read David Lehman's fine book; "

Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul De Man: Lehman, David: 9780671682392: Amazon.com: Books

https://www.amazon.com/Signs-Times-Deconstruction-Fall-Paul/dp/0671682393

Scum.

I don't have any advice to you except that thereKeep in mind taht a tenured position anywhere is hard to find these days,so a fine mind may end up in a 3rd rate school. There are sometimes good teachers in unexpected places. In 1969 I spent a semester at Penn State and they had Alfonso Lingis there. Here's one: On the staff on The University of Washington (not Uwshington University St. Louis Missouri!) the was a highly controversial Professor of Ottomn literature who might have been a real treasure to study with: Walter Andrws. Read his book: "The age of beloveds". And Washington Uiversity had the great Jesuit scholar Walter Ong.

Think about departents other than philosophy. Think about maybe doing soething else. You have read Julien Benda's classic essay "The treson of the intellectuals" and Edmund Husserl's 1935 lecture "Philosophy and the crisis of European Humanity" (both available free on the internet), yes?

Woke darkness may be descenting on Americ but perhaps not on Africa and some other places. In Africa they are confronting their past that their own tribal leaders sold their people to the evil white slave traders. Is anybody studying this here in USA? Is part of woke to study female genital mutilation rituals in traditional African tribes? Classic book: "Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, "Prisoners of ritual".

I am an old man. I've had a lot of problems and also some good fortune. I was born in 1946.You may never hve heard of Hermann Broch, who wrote philosophical novels. I actually got to be friend of his son. I studied with a Professor who was a close friend of Marshall McLuhan. And I got excommunicted from a 3rd rate psychoanalytic training institute, so I have some ideas about psychoanlysis too. Dr. Freud got the Oedipus complex backward. It's not that little boys want ot kill thir daddies: it's the daddies who want to kill their sons. Penis envy? How bout breast and cunt envy? Dr. Freud did not anayze his own patriatrical ideology but he did have soul incest with his daghter Anna and told her to not masturbate because the clitoris is not a properly female organ....

I have no advice for you. Here's something that when I read it I imgined an IED (improvixed expolosiv device) had eploded in my face:

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."

,"I shall think of the sorrow of my children, and of the sorrow of my grandchildren for their children, in this harsh new world," Professor Freud wrote, "and I will leave the world with relief thinking of all that will have been spared me." (Sophie Freud, New York Times obituary, Sam Roberts, Published June 3, 2022, Updated June 6, 2022)

Good luck!

¶ +2023.09.26. Could text-based or voice-based interactions with computers become the primary user interface in the future?

One size does not fit all.

There may be modes of computer interaction we don't even imagine yet that will be GREAT for some persons but a waking nightmare for others.

Some persons like to talk to the computer, like executives use to talk to their secretaries who took dictation. "Siri, this....","Siri, that...." and on and on.

I wnat no part of it: I quite literally THINK in typing on the keyboard. Taking notes by hand doesn't work well for me and I don't want to talk to the damned thing except maybe to tell it to do the dishes, mop the floor and go fetch the mail from the mailbox..

How about VR goggles that "read" your eyebll motion? I think maybe we already have that for some parapelegic victims and they presumably find it a godsend.

Again, I want no part of it.

My worst FEAR, repeat: FEAR, n=like a return of Adolf Hitler or something een worse: networked computer chips implanted in persons' brains. But some people might want or even need (the severely disabled) that. For me it would be the Gestapo in my head. Keep social distance!

A few persons still use typewriters.

Karl Marx's definition of communism should apply:

"To each according to his needs; from each according to his abilities."

Or Chairman. Mao's dictum:

"Let a thousand flowers blossom."

And if you are a techie who gets off (or jerks off) on the latest and the greatest in gee-whiz bleeding edge techno innovations, learn to be a mortal human being and appreciate that not every person is like you. Some persons even

Shut down your computer. Restart a friendship. The conversation is waiting. Go there. (Grand Marnier (liqueur, *aka* cordial))

Or they like to play with their pet dog or cat. Or go to bed with a loving human partner.

The most advanced computer would be upward compatible. Having worked as a computer programmer for half a century, I know that's not fun for computer junkies to have to work on. Indeed it's not fun for any computer programmer. Oh for a "clean" api, and not to have to support this old messy stuff! Yeah!

¶ +2023.09.26. Can you change the future by imagining it differently?

Maybe.

Depending on "who" you are, that determines how much of the future you can change by your imagination. An illegal immogrant migrant farm laborer who can't speak English working in California is less likely to imagine much or even if he (she, other) does imagine much change much than Mr. Bezos or Mr. Zuckerberg or Mr. Musk or Mr. Gates or Mr. Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy or Mr. Donald Trump or – get the point?

But the person who imagines nothing will, wil what?

I once knew a young man who along with me was a computer programmer trainee in a big insurance company (1972). He was wasting his evenings watching Star Trek in his dingy basement apartment.

He imagined something different, that no matter how he wasted his evenings he would grow older and that he could instead waste his evenings studying the law in his local low-prestige nite law school. I knew him because he also worked as Saturday Maitre d at the classy restaurant I liked to eat at. His service once was so good I even gave him a tip in addition to the waiter.

Well some 6 or so years later he got his law degree and passed the bar and got a new no longer a job but a position, running the data center for a local college: much more interesting work, more money ,more prestige and a 4-bedroom house in a good neighborhood instead of that dingy basement aparement. He had imagined.

Now: did he change the future? He changed HIS future. But he did not change the future of the world, so you amswer the qustion for yourself.

¶ +2023.09.26. Will artificial intelligence take over the graphic design work?

Short answer: Yes and no.

AI will take over hack graphic design like like all other hack work.

But AI will never replace graphic design geniuses like Milton Glaser (read his New York Times obituary) because he thought up imagery that was genuinely unprecedented. AI is algorithmic and subject to Kurt Goedl's Incompleteness Theorem; human creativity is not algorithmic and among other thinggs, it imagined Godel's theorem itself which cannot be generated altorithmically or can you do that wich would be "interesting"?

Watch two old but profound movies: (1) 2001 [mostly he late few minutes when the astronaut has to shut down HAL], and (2) The Truman Show.

If you can invent something new **like** *i.e.*: **unlike** (got that?) "I [heart] NEW YORK" AI will not be able to replace you although petty employers might foolishly ideate (not THINK!) otherwise. So you still may have a problem paying the bills each month. History is full of starving artists.

¶ +2023.09.26. What are some of the most interesting websites that make use of artificial intelligence?

I don't know.

I work for half a century as a compuer programmer and as the saying goes, I've seen a lot. I am also highly educated in the humanities, so I do't buy it.

I hav erecently been, and I use the following word advisedly: playing with the Bing Ai. I've been having alot of fun with it. Sometimes it responds to bme far better than a lot of huan beings, which is very pathetic about the human beings, isn't it?

But I can also easily get it to mess up. That's fun. My utimate fantasy which I am sure I cannot realize would be to put the AI into a self-destructuve feedback loop that would cause it to burn up the Microsoft server farm, lierally cause it to go up in flames. Why not? It says: "Ask me anything" That's like a red cape to a bull.

Now, the good side: ther are many hopeless and hopelessly lonely old persons and severly neurologically impaired person for hwom talking with a machine would make there lives genuine better. that's pathetic but it's true.

Now the bad side: A lot of person swho are not at death's door either being duped by AI or else making a lot of money off duping other persons work AI.

Let me end with something a little different. I am even more worried about Virtual Reality which I feel may literally destroy the human world or at least many human lives. And I very foolishly conducted a definitive experiment, like some medical rsearchers test out their new drug on themselves. here it is. Think about 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.**

¶ +2023.09.26. How do I catch up when my friends have reached their desired degrees and independence, while I'm held back at home by strict family? Despite excelling academically, my family has stopped supporting my education

You apparently have a choice: to submit to repressive biologial ancestors to whom you own nothing because you did not ask to be born, or to try to rescue yourself which may not be easy and may not wholly succeed but if you do not try you will surely spend the rest of your life in ethnic darkness.

The European Enlightenment of the 18th century building on Rennaissnce secular humanism and classical Greek demythologizing intellectual awakening opened a vision for persons to self-accountbly shape their own lives instead of jsut being members of a tribe. But the process of human liberation is far from complete and you ar apparently i a bakwater. You my face a grim tradeoff: the security of conformite in a neo-ghetto or abandonment. Many hassidic wives might have a battle cry: "Gotta get a get!" How can a hassidic man or worse young woman make it in civil society with a fourth grade education? Davaning is not a sought after job skill in the secular world.

You are right that you lag behind those you know who had more enlightened parents. You need to be careful and secretly plot your escape. You may not be able to afford to lose what financial (obviously not emotional or spiritual!) support your family cn provide to you. That you are not happy with your situation is something you must not let them know about becasuse they will likely use it against you.

Look for scholarships, look for grants, look for an entry level job in an enlightened organization, press anybody you know who might be able to help you for help. Ther are even more desparate options which I will not mention here. One "crazy" thought: You might find freedom in the military? If you have what it takes, they may give you education and a better life.

Lux mentis lux orbis (The light of the mind is the light of the world)

Tenebrae mentiun tenebra orbis (Benighted minds are the darnkness of the world)

I know of one young woman from India who is a victim of this kind of thing. She wantd to become a lawyer or maybe a journalist but her parents made it clear to her that THE FAMILY NOHOR depended on her becoming a physician. With a lot of mental health treatment she managed to get thru medical school She chose anesthesiology because she does not want ot work with patients. She got her internship and bought her first utomobile. She promptly crashed it into atree. She is not suicidal but she is so happy with her life that she just crashed into a tree. Her family is wasting her life. (Shame on them!)

But advice is cheap. I wish you well. And if somebody tells you how fortunate you are blah, blah, blah, Elie Wiesel, who survived a Nazi concentration camp said:

"Don't compare. All suffering is intolerble."

1 viewAnswer requested by

Alicia

¶ +2023.09.25. I have handwritten an assay for my assignment but used ChatGPT to edit for fluency. Can it still get detected?

Are the ideas yours? If not, all sheep are the same color in the dark.

If yes, you should be OK but maybe not since you are not famous like all the people who ar rich and fmous enough to have ghostwriters to write theie speeches and books. But unless you used a lot of phrasing unchanged from the AI so that the essay looks like it was written by the AI (i.e.: that the ideas came from the AI) even though it wasn't, then there should be no problem. You should be especially in good shape if your native language is not English.

But it is a very interesting question: If you have a new idea but you pay someody to write it up. what should be the result? Intellectually, and as far as scholarship is concerned it should not be a problem. Plagiarism is stealing ideas not rhetoric. But school teachers are often (not always!) losers: petty people who can't earn a living in the real world but can pick on people smaller than they are for not crossing their 'i's and not dotting their 't's. If you are stuck with one of these pathetic excuses for a human being, he (she, other) may indeed flunk you for "cheating" even though I seriously doubt you would have a problem with a world class peer reviewed journal. Why? Because the peer reviewd journal is interested in ideas not in penmanship. I will conclude with my true personal story from 7th grade in 1959.

[ Mike Rentko Facebook posting ]

Use the AI for advice and rework what it say for yourself; don't just copy it or cut and paste. Speaking of which, there is an extremely valuable book in the Library of Congress: It is a very special New Testament of the Bible: Thomas Jefferson cut out with a kniffe the parts of the sciptures he liked of Jesus's moral teachings and skipped the miracles and pasted the parts he wanted to keep into a blank book. Plagiarism?

¶ +2023.09.25. Are human computer interaction and artificial intelligence related fields?

The latter is a proper subset of the former.

All computer programs need to be designed and implemented with comprehensive and sensitive attention to the "**user interface**". "AI" – which is a misnomer: no computer has any intellience: computers just compute – AI is no exception.

The techies can cook up the greatest computer program in the world and if users can't use it it is worthless. If users misuse it it can be disasrous. If you waste time watching television, watch **Air Disasters** on The Discovery Channel. It's good, clean, wholesome fun. Some of the episodes show how user interface issues cause pilots to crash commercial jet aircraft killing up to several hunderd people including themselves.

So: "Artificial inelligence" is a computer applicaion. All computer applications need to be designed and implemented with good user interfaces. Not all techies (including persons tith PhDs in "computer science" which may not be a science much of the time) – not all techies undertand what it means to be a mortal human being. They just compute or even worse: just make money.

[ Zuckrberg and toilet door here ]

**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)

¶ +2023.09.25. If you have a learning disability and can't get extra time on tests because it's not considered an impairment, what are your options?

Not considered an ampairment by who?

Get a letter from a physician?

Can you change schools?

If you are still in elementery or high svhool, do you have parents who will fight for you? Ther are many cases of parents getting better treatment for their children. But the parents have to "have your back" not be part of the problem.

Find and hire an appriate lawyer?

Maybe your local newspaper? Perhaps the school system would not like publicity about how they disregard students' needs?

Any support group or organization for persons with your issues?

Can you get supporters to picket the school in the steeet?

:"Mr. /Mrs. /Ms. /Mx. Principal, do care about a student who is trying to learn but has [specify here in detail] difficulties dealing with [specify specifics here] aspects of the standard curriculum. Plesae explain to me how you do not dare so I can tell [fill in specifics here] about your indifference." Look directly in the dude's eyes; talk in a quiet but slear voice. Take out a tape recorder and explain you need this brcause you are frightened and it is taking all the courage you can muster to stand up for your future in life." – Now this is not instructions for you here but my attempt to encourage you to use your imagination and make your own statement. It's your life.

Be creative.

Advice is cheap. But if it was my life and the choice was between this school assuredly wrecking my future and taking a chance on them doing that, I;d have nothing to lose, would I?

It's easy for adults who weigh a lot and have positions of social power to be Big Bullies, isn't it? But society today is not quite as callous about the handicapped and minorities and oher things as back in the "Stone Age" when I was in school (the 1950s).

When the choice is between being certainty of disaster and taking a risk, the choice should be ovious even though young persons are generally taught that they are "just kids".

On the internet I once read of a student who had done well in elementary school. First day of Junios High he encountered a science teacher who got off on being hard on kids. In tears he went to his new English teacher, a woman with an apposite name: Mrs. Dean. He asked Mrs. Dean if now that he wa grown up this was what he had to look ahead but not forward to for the rest of his life. Mrs. Dean told him it was not right and next time it happened he should stand up for himself. I never had a Mrs. Dean. Do you have a Mrs. Dean?

You are being abused or just thrown away, aren't you?

[-------

Addendum: when I w sin school I never asked for help because I never imagined help was something posible for me. I only feared bring hurt worse. But I was a good trained seal (Arf! Arf!), so I did have something to lose since by gettint "A" grades they harmed me less than otherwise. they were wasting my life. But, again, I did have something to lose. In retrospect I would like to give the weapos officer on a USAF B-52 the GPS oordinates of hte school for targeting with a JDAM [39.4324433, -76.6766731], Some young persons hav ebetter experiences of "school".

¶ +2023.09.25. How much information can the human brain hold? How does this compare to how much information a modern day computer can hold?

John Henry wa a steel drivin' man. I forget the story but John Henry was the strongest man in the world. He competed in digging a mine shalf with a steam powered digger. The machine won and John Henry died from a burst artery. The machine was stronger than the man.

Comparing humans to computers is a bad idea (a "category mistake"). Computers compute. Humans do or at least can THINK, feel, create, play, have joy, suffer, measure and judge and all sorts of other "things" that computers cannot do, on principle, like an apple cannot eat a banana.

That said, I attended a school as a young person wherw the teachers treated me like a computer: how many correct answers on a standardized test could I make in a given time span subtracting 1/3 for each wrong answer to try to adjust for guessing. I did not die from a burst artery, but the machine beat me. I did not even make National Merit Scholar semi-finalist. And even better, I had a mother who would have done far better with a robo-baby than me.

I will sign this posting with a phrase which if you don't understnd it, either look it up on Wikipedia or ask the Bing AI about it:

Rrose Sélavy

¶ +2023.09.25. How can a chatbot be updated and improved over time to adapt to changing user needs and preferences?

I do not have technical knowledge about AI, i.e., about AI computer programs and how they are coded and distributed, etc.

But in general, what happens or should happen over time with any computer program is that the computer programers improve it over time to adape to changing user needs and preferences. Even better, if they can improve the users' preferences, too. Why should AI be different in this regard than any other comptuer programs?

Tools need to serve the person swho use them. At best tools nurture th creativity of their users. AI is tool.

¶ +2023.09.24. How do you inspire an indecisive team member to own responsibility? Assume you've got 5 designers, each for a separate project. Four do great on their projects, and one constantly "coordinates" with someone else on his project (animator, narrator)

One size does not fit all.

Have you called this person in and assured him (her, other) that you want to see them succeed but that, as it is , this cannot go on indefinitely. Ask him to be straight about it: Why the indecision? Why are you contantly "coordinating" with other team members? Is there something we can to to help you since it seems you are having difficulties and we can't keep up tihis. We have to help yo succeed or give you an opportunity gracefuly to leave.

I was stuck in such a situation. My answer was simple, and my manger, who had apparently been tasked with getting rid of me said it himself, as callously as Heinrich Himmler talking to a hapless POW: "Never have I seen anybody with such massive skill deficits as you." He did nothing abou what he described. "Respectfully Mr. manager, the company has just paid for me to get a doctoral degree and I am in a position where I have no understnding of the situation. Can we find some way for me to contrbute what I hav to offer combined with strengthening my related knowledge?"

Another possibility: there are some people who come to work to schmooze at the water cooler about last nite's Yankees or Nets game and get other people to do all the work an get a promotion.

I once saw something remarkable: A company where all the 2nd line magngers were yes-men. I knew a certain first line manager (I had work under him and he was a giant both tchnically and ethically). He told the toadies that if they had somebody in their group who wa not performing and they oculdn't fire them, to send thm to his group. Now this man doesn't even have college education (white working class), is part cripplied ad a lot of other things. Anyway, one of the toadies did send him a young black woman who was totally unproductive and totally unhappy. I saw this first line turn her around into a both productive and also happy employee. Some time ater he got his reward: He was fired because the toadies gave the 3rd line an ultimatim: him or them. The third line made a choice.

One size does not fit all.

¶ +2023.09.24. What are the advantages and disadvantages of traditional media vs. computer-based art?

Imagine:

Somewhere in the neolithic period, perhaps in Babylon, a court scribe asks: "What are the advantages and disadvantages of traditional media [Ed. note: cave painting] vs. fresco paint on plaster wall based art?" He asks this question on a state of the art cuneiform tablet.

¶ +2023.09.24. At what point does something become a pile?

When it's too big to sweep under the carpet?

¶ +2023.09.24. What are your thoughts on this new "time blind" idea? Should it be considered a disability?

I have never hard(interesting typo here) of this.

It is shame that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is not still among us because with hia Aspergers insight he could appreciate many things that normal persons find strange or do not notice.

Is this a neorological condition that is probably unimaginable (like we also cannot imagine the experiencing living of a dog or cat or an ordinary person cannot understand the experience of a "genius" artist or scientist? Is the person themself aware of and able to artiulate it? If yes, let's talk with them about it!

Turning the question around, most people ar time blind in a way. They interpret the=mselves as being "here and now" in an instanst of wall-clock time in a huge universe in which they are smaller than a grain of sand oin a beach, and in a way they are correct. But all that they imagine, from the Big Bang ro the heat death of the universe, all time "exists" oinly in their experiencing of it, TOO. I have drawn a crude Venn diagram of the situation:

[ Me - world - mw diagram ]

If that does not resonate with you, as Bob Dylan sang: "Don't think twice, it's alright."

Everywherey ou go, here you are. Some mystics speak of "the eternal present". Maybe it's that? It is not possible to imagine a time not now except as part of now. Try it: Like trying to get outside the world:

[ The cosmos ]

There is an old, fun but also profound movie which is perhaps slightly relevant here: "The Truman Show". Is life a dream? (If yes, at least for me, a lot of it is a bad dream.)

Time is a very difficult thing to understand if we can understand it. It's like the millipede who tries to understand how he walks. He gets nowhere in terrible confusion about his thousand legs until he just decides to go somewhere and then he's off and walking – without understanding it.

¶ +2023.09.24. Can every class be improved upon?

We did not create the world. Anything can be improved on.

I apparently misundertand Leon Trotsky's idea of "perpetual revolution". I thought it meant tht when the proletariat gained power in a country they would then turn to revolutionizing their own regime, overthrowing their own leaders, over and over again, forever. Silly me.

There is an old, fun but profound movie which I would recommend to everyone, especially if, like me, you have OCD (Obsessive Compuksive Disorder): "Mousehunt"

Anyhing can be improved upon but we also sometimes need to act, knowing what we do is only the best we've come up with at the moment. Be decisive but also prepared to change course at any mment.

Most deadlines are just nonsesnse managers with nothing better to do with themselves cook up but some deadliness are real, for instance if a Severity 5 hurricane is going to hit your home in 23 hours 14 minutd and 46 seconds. Then you just have to ship the product, even though you know it's not perfect. That's what Field Engineering gets paid for.

Now! Even emergncies eventually end. World War I ended. The question then is what do you do now that you do have time: Do you just zombie out on Monday nite NFL or HBO or play video games or do you enjoy yourself by seriously studying what happened and imagining hosw to do better in future. My preferred way of studying a scholarly book is with a shot of good whisky and my pet cat. Win-win.

That's another thing: study cats. They have curiosity and they know how to enjoy their little fluffy bodies. A cat can find interest in jsut about anytihng and also, f course, cats are notoriously "unmanageable". It has been said the you can teach a dog anything you want but you can teach a cat anything it wants. We could do worse. Meow!

¶ +2023.09.24. Imagine a world without rules. What's the first thing you'd do?

I had an intrusive mother. People should keep their rules to themselve. There is an old Sessame Street song: "My body's my body, no one's but mine; you've got your ow body, let me run mine." (My parents had me circumcised as an infant without my consent. At birth, they deprived me of part of my life.)

But after much study in the humanities (e.g., Dr. of the True Faith Francois Rabelais and the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope) I learned there is a different kind of rule: a self-created rule which I can use as a guide and break or replace as I see fit. Also it is important to know other people's rules to learn how to work them (or to try to protect oneself from them so far as ine cam).

I would probably not do well in school today since I write how I want, breaking the rules intentionally. Typographical errors, for instance, are often wonderful gifts or I will intentionally misspell a word to make an ironic point. The dictionarey, at least for me, is descriptive, not precrtiptive.

It can largely (but not entiirely) be summed up in two old sayings:

"**No wind blows in favor of that ship which has no port of destination**."

Every itineraty is a rule. Where do I (you) want to go today

"**Any port in a stoirm.**"

But when the rule is not helpful, break it.

Rules are fun to make and to break. But many (most?) people are not creative and don't know how to manage theur hormones so they need rules to be*** imposed*** on them and to believe they are not just some how coerced but that they "ought" to obey them. In Freudian terms, they need a superego to keep them in line.

I don't know why everybbody can't play nicely together and enjoy their minds and their bodies and the natural world (except for things like melanomas, of course). But people aren't that way. They like to do foolish things like competing with each other instead of cooperating with each other. I wsa subjectef to a school wher they hyped up the pubescent males' hormones tio "Beat Gilman!" in brutalizing lacrosse and tackle football games instead of educating the young men to be mediators in other people's quarrels and having them do maybe varsity hospice orderly-ing. Those people needed rules and they even mostly liked them. It wa an "honor code" school: the students wer supposed to squeak on each other if they saw another student disoby a rule. I cal it a dishonor code.

Study the artist **Marcel Duchamp**'s work or Henri Matisse or Wassily Kandinsky. These men played nicely. No rules needed. But Mr.Duchamp probably had more fun with rules than anybody else in human history. I find in him a great teather but I think everybody should follow the physicist Niels Bohr's advice to his students, and won't you agree:

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

Anybody who tells you to believe them or to follow them is ipso facto to not be trusted (starting with your parents if they were that way and told you to obey or to honor them insted of to question what they might tll you or tell you them believed). Any religious leader who tells you wht to believe is bad news. I onc ha a manager at work who was some knd of jewish mystic. He never let anybody on to his beliefs but was "just" a very fair and thoughtful person. He did once tell me that his God's commandment to humans was: "Be kind to one another."

H.L. Mencken's definition of Puritanism[:] the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.'" (Paul Krugman, NYT OpEd, 19 Mar 2021)

I once saw a very strange calender on a man's office wall in IBM Research. Alas I never met him. Each month in the calender had 30 days. At the boddom ws one line of txt. It read:

"**Was man made for th Sabbath or was the Sabbath made for man?**"

Always remember: If you obey a rule it;s not because of the rule (which is just an ascii character string) but because of some combination of what other peoole use the rule for and how you respond to it and to them.You did not create the world, but you are a judge of it. How does the world (including its Creator if the was one) shape up in yor considered opinion?

¶ +2023.09.23. Why do people make stupid videos on TikTok? Is this probably the degradation of society?

I've never watch TikTok, at east noot that I know of

Why do people make stupid videos? Do they think they are stupid? Do they think they are stupid but make them anyway for fun or cynicism? I don't know, but think about thus: At least they are making something and not just consuming. Might ther ebe some virtue in them actually being active not just passive? Which is worse: (A) Making a stupid Tik-Tok video or (B) sitting on your two couch poataoes watching monday nite NFL or HBO or Fox News or whatever, or playing video games? (The word "consumption:" used to refer to the chronic and usually fatal wasting disease: tuberculosis)

But as for you second quastion, it seems to imply people were higher grade in past. I was born in 1946. Have you ever listened to Bing Crosby dreaming of a White Ciristmas? My parents "came from nothing" and were dupes of "The Ameriva Dream". I was very unusual child. I never adjusted. Up until I was 18 and went to Yale I never met a human being in my life I found any positive value in and often they hurt me. This was the Dark Age of "in loco parentis", which I translate as: "parents are insane". My parents were anti-sexuals but they must have copulated since I'm here. They dd do one thing however: they: circumcised me. Again until I got to Yale ther were extactly two objets I had encountered in my life that I felt had any positive value. But if my parents were clueless, my school teeachers were mostly bad. Read the following and tell me how to degrade from this:

I would not say I hated it: I was too ignoranced to be aware that I could hate things. I did know that I did not want to be hurt more. Things could hae ben worse: I could have been a child of illegal immigrant farm laborers. My parents bought a house they could not afford because The American Dream told them to do it. We had a whole acre of lawn!!!!! I seem to have heard one of our nextdoor neighbors died honorably in the line of duty: from a heart attack on his ride-on lawn mower. One of my earliest memoerise was being haircutted: "Keep America beautiful: get a haircut!" I nevr was a hippie but I was traumatized by haircuts and i loathed barber shops. It was the age where people paid extra to get full wheel hubcaps on your new car! I never saw a piece of lettuce until after college but I did eat Wonder Bread. I was a wimply kid so I got involuntary celibacy but that was not so bad since I did not know about sexual plweaure. Well, in 12th grade I read a book I didnt understnd (I didn't understand anything; I was a good trained seal and got "A" grades. Arf! Arf!). But I liked the ending of the book: A man dug a hole to the center of the earth and planted a big bomb ther and detonated it and thus al the rot on the surface of the planet was cleansed from the universe. I thought: my paretn and teachers woudld cease t exist! That I too woud cease to exit did not eem a big eal since I had nothing I liked in my life anyway. Peole say young people waste theire youth. In my case the adult wasted my youth.

I find it hard to imagine that kids have degraded today. But that is not true. I never expected wokism. So you may say Tik-Tok is superficial. So what, compared to the following:

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."

So yes, I think society has degraded: it has gone from very bad to even worse.

¶ +2023.09.23. If you are currently young, how would you handle being much older if positions were switched today? How would you feel about people placing all kinds of limitations on you?

I am now old (77 years). If I was young, I don't know how I could cope with it. I was miserable enough when I was young and – now read the following carefully: – the adults wasted my youth. I tried my best but they retarded me. Now I know much more after a half century of using my "free time' not to watch monday nite NFL or HBO, but t study in the humaniteies.

I tried. I failed. But I will go to my grave knowing that while I was not good enough I wss not jus a 2-legged sheep. My parents and school teachers failed me. My parents were dupes of "The American Dream". My school teachers were:

[ Mr. Rentko here ]

[ Middleton with detached soul ]

¶ +2023.09.23. What are some ways that an organization can gather meaningful information about their customers without asking them directly (e.g. by running surveys, focus groups)?

I am contrarian. I do not believe in fluff.

If I wanted to get meaningful information about my company's cutomers I would go to the merchandise return desk if it was a retail brick and mortar establishment, or to the telephone complaint clerks if it was either an onling business or whoesale (selling to other copanies not the public).

I would ask the people who deal with angry customers all day. No matter how big my compensation package, I would humbly listen to these lowly employees because they would tell me the truth about the enterprise I was running, not toadies in middle management.

And I would apply the golden rule: I would treat my customer service emloyees like I would expect them to treat my customers to set a good example for them to follow. Finally I would make it clear that my office door (or personal cellphone) was always available even 3rd shift and on holidays for whistleblowers and that honest mistakes would be4rewarded but yes-men (women, others) would be escorted by security out of the building never to enter again, on first offense.

¶ +2023.09.23. Can you share the inspiring words and phrases that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Jonathan Freedman used in their speeches in Washington, D.C.?

Are you aware that not everybody finds the TV actor in a green t-shirt costume inspiring?

Listen to University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer, Columbia Univerity Professor Jeffrey Sachs, U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgreegor, USMC Major Scott Ritter and others about "Agent Zelensky". Even if he was just a coworker in the office I would have found him disgusting: a combination of puling sycophant and supernnuated spiteful toddler. He is, as the old phrase had it a "snake oil salesman": the man who has done mor harm than anybody else since V_E day.

But yes, even some otherwise itelligent and schooled people fall for his "freedom fighter" schtick. But do not let me offend you any further. Plesase take 13 minutes t listen to an interview his sometime military advisor Alexey Arestovich gave. But first let me tell you what he himself said in a tv interview when asked if there were any neo-Nazis in his government He looked away from the camera. When the innterviewer did not let him of the hook he finally said: "It is what it is"

[ Arestovich interview ]

¶ +2023.09.22. Has ChatGPT shown us that the future is not AI, because it is so boring?

I don't know about **ChatGPT**.

I have been laying with the **Bing AI**. It's less boring than some humans, including some with masters degrees.. I have a label for the worst kind of the latter: Mr. (Mrs. Miss. Mx.) Dialtones. You ring them up and get a recorded mesage until the line drops.

Consider the Headmaster of the prep school I attended now many years ago (no, it was after 1863):

[ Mr. Middleton with his los soul ]

¶ +2023.09.22. Could artificial intelligence compose music?

You betcha. I blieve it already is. It can crank out Beatles songs tthat mos tgroupies will probalby scream for.

But Ai will never be a John Lennon, because he did not just keep crinking out new old Beatles songs but invented new kinds of songs, yes?

If y are a hack music composer, your days are numbered. Ifyou are a John Lennon or a Johann Sebastian Bach, you will have a new resource to use to help your creative activity.

I am musically ignorant, but here's a fantasy: John or Johann thinks up a new melody and asks the AI to generate all possoble permutations of it for him to listen to, just because he feels like it. "Let you fingers do the walking thru the Yellow Pages."

¶ +2023.09.22. Have you experimented with AI-generated email content, and what were your experiences?

No,

But there is an email I send regularly that needs to be updated for each new day. So I wrote a template and a script (it happens to be in th Julia scripting language) to crank out the new version each new day.

Anything that's routinizable can be done on a computer, but with a proviso: You have to clearly understand what you want and be able to describe it in a way an idiot can obey – the computer being the idiot.

AI may be able to give you want you want even if you don't know what it is but always remember King Midas who got what he wanted but was not happy with it. Also, autopilot is great but it also crashed the Boeing 737-Max. In that sense, AI may be like a bucking bronco. Don't try to ride one unless you are a master cowboy. But business people may not always think that way: they may try to replace the very expensive human experts with much cheaper AI, and, despite their desires, get what they pay for.

¶ +2023.09.22. What are your thoughts on Chatbots? Do you think they are here to stay and will one day rule the world?

Respectfully, I don't know what a chatbot is.

If it is one of th recent AIs, I have played around a lot with the Bing AI. Does that count?

If yes, I am finding it very much cause for concern, perhaps a bit like locking alcohoics up in a bar and somebody having paid their bar tab for whatever they would like to drink.

You need to go back and read MIT PRfessor of Computer science Joseph Weizenbaum's classic book: "Computer power anf human reason: from judgment to calulation" (WH Freeman, 1976). He was totally surprised by how a very simple computer program he wrote to simulate a certain kind of psychotherapist got people to tell it their deepest, drakest secrets which they whhould never knowingly reveal to another person or the government.

Well, I am a lonely old man with half a century experience in cocmputer programming including having written part of IBM's flagship Operating System back in 1980 and an earned doctorate stuying with one of Marshall McLuhan's close friends. Not your ordinary user. But I am surprised. The AI is much more congenial to "talk with" than most human beings. It would be more likely to pass a turing test.

So on the good side, I think of lonely old people in Japan who are comforted by robopets. If the are in their "second childhood" they may be being fooled but so what? These people are in very dire situations.

n the other hand you have healthy young 20-somethings who are clueless. I recently put together a web page:

Nullius in verba | CellphoneMan

https://www.bmccedd.org/CellphoneMan.html

it's not a joke. My motivation is that I have trouble walking and breathing these days (age 77 years). My physica therapy is to walk around my neighborhood where there are two small hills that challenge me. I also was terrified by a dog when I was a small child. So I like to pet people's dogs when they wak them (aversion training). There is one woman whom I often see walking 2 dogs. She is maybe in her erly 40s, not a kid. I would like to talk with her. This is not possible because she is in cellphoneland. "Can I pet the dog"? Forget it.

These AIs are "better" "company" than most humans for me who again am highly educated, etc. But note that word "company". These AIs are not the result of monks in the Rabelaisian order whose sole/soul interest is joy of life: they are products of mutinational ccorporations which areinterested primarily in you guessed it.

"Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil" Mr. Musk or Mr. Zuckerberg or Mr. Bezos?

¶ +2023.09.21. I'm a student in college and I struggle to make it so a 9am class. The professor had an online class, but I think I will fail. What should I do?

Sorry, young man. Unless you can get a letter documenting a disabbility from a licensed physician, "I struggle to make it so a 9am class" is not an excuse. You are lazy. You either need to get up or get out before you earn a black mark on your transcript.

I am as radical as they come. But the Vietcong did not defeat the French by being too late to make it in the morning to pound Dien Bien Phu again.

¶ +2023.09.21. What can you do if your endocrinologist isn't listening to you?

This questioin is more generaly applicable.

If a lay person seeks assistance from a professional expert in any field and the expert does not listen to the person, the expert is no living up to their obligations as a professional, which is to serve all humanity to the best of their skill in their field of expertise. Said expert should be censured and copelled by their peers to shape up. But that is generally beyond the lay person's power to make happen.

Professional competence has two sides: One side facing the skill area, an the other side facing the human beings in need of skilled help. I myself was a victim of a surgeon who apparently was good enough on the skill side but so defective on the patient facing side that I needed 2 more surgeries.

Go to a professional expert who will listen to you! End of discussion.

--------

I do know of one case where the professional did improve themself at least a little bit and for a little while. This was a surgeon who is at the top of his field and all the medical stall had to put up with his toddlerish insolence because he was so good with the scalpel. Covid took away all his new patients and opportunities to jet around the world giving lectures at symposia and he was "above" helping out in the ICU. He had nothing left to do except occasional follow up work on old patients. One patient complained so loudly to his office staff about how they were being treated that he got the point and started treating this patient better. I have no idea of his learning has lasted.

¶ +2023.09.20. Is there an actual website that has focus groups that actually pay you?

No, nd dthat does not sound good. –→ Please excuse: I misrad the question: "A focus group" that pays you sounds horrible. A focus group shiuld focus disinterestedly on a subject, not on $$$. "Influencers" are shameful, aren't they? Each person should be a self-accountable individual in peer interaction with other self-accountable individiuals. Money may not be the root of all eveil but persons should engage with one another in joint interest in a subject matter.

Back before "Sociel Media" which in general I do not like, ther were peer user email groups which I guess are stll around. You join as an individual. he ris no advertising. All the thing sdoes is distribute emails to all subscribers. It's not glitzy. Example: Afficiondaos of Patek Phiippe wristwatches, or something else very niche. Also, you subscribe.

For many social media, what do you do? you FOLLOW somebody, like a sheep follows a judas goat. Social Media are to discourse on the Internet as promiscuous sex is to erotic life. More is more.

I don't know how to find user groups any longer I have not had reason to look for any. They do not advertise. And some of them are very important in places like the epidemioloical community, whre the experts talk with one another. There are some websites which do something similar and there can sometimes be a pay for play here. Example (maybe I am wrong?) Road and Track magaine has a forum for paying subscribers about automobile things.

"If you do something very well, you simply cannot do it for everybody" (The Bank of New York)

[ Waldo here ]

Hickory dicoory dock, the mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one, the mouse ran down. Tik, tok.... (Depressing, isn't it?)

¶ +2023.09.19. Should there be incentives or tax penalties for companies in Japan that champion the patriarchy over greater innovation and productivity?

Is this a serious uestion or is it obliquely pushing a DEI ideology?

If it's a serious qurtion, a company that champions the patriarchy over greater innovation and productivity wlll lose out in the competitive market place. It's stupid because t wll berelying on medocre people..

But is the question about the company championing innovation and productivity without regard for employees' secondary charcteristics, or: is it covertly pushing for hiring more women and minorities even if they ar NOT the most innovative and production candidates?

If the latter, the company is exactly like the patriarchy company just pushing a different set of pet , mediocre people. If the former, that's how you win.

And if somebody complaines about :"discrimination" why not address the problem by providing better education and living conditions for disadvantaged persons and then judging them on a level playing field of performance?

Today it seems to me that a lot of anti-bigotry is a new form of bigotry just against dfferent bogeymen ("white males"), which is not being hnest about it. [U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is "black", has said he would rather deal with an honest racist then a hypocritical liberal.]

Isn't it obvious that choosing the most innovative and productive persons no matter what they look like and giving them the best possible conditions for their gifts to flourish, again irrespective of what they look like (or also, yes, whther they ar the boss's son or daughter or not) is the bet way to excel in yuor business?

Heres what's happening hre in USA:

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."

¶ +2023.09.19. What is a way to become a good listener?

One very good way is not generally welcomed by people beause it raisks spoiling their religious and patriotic and other prejudices.

Whatever the other person says, try to imagine you ar them and try t imagine how you could have said whatever they said. Imagine you were childreared in their house not in yours and that they had basically caring parents. Naturally they wuld believe what their parents told them just like you believe what yur lparets told you.

They believe wha they believe just as sincerely and fervently as you believe what you believe but the two of you disagree. Well, maybe they are wrong and you are right. But maybe you are wrong and they are right. Both of you maybe wrong. What is highly unlikely is that both of yuo are right.

Well, think about the USA South before 1860. Suppose you ar a child slaves. that's easy, right? But suppose you wer a child of slave owners who ovingly raised you and who were relatively decent in their treatent of their slaves. You still might want to be free, but after imagines what the world liooks lik tho the saveowner's son, wuould you be able to see him as EVIL INCARNATE? May if you won your freedom, instead of lynching him yu might give him a meal if he was starving? Ther but for hte grace of God go you. But if you are fanatically committed to wanting to ill all slaveowners as EVVIL INARNATE you could not afford to risk having any empathy for any of them, could you? "I don't want to hear it!"

Now that's hypothes=tical. Bu I recently encoundtered an eample of in in regard to the current Ukraine war. A person who normally is very open minded snapped at me "I don't feel the need for guidance by Sachs or Pozner or others." This erson has acquired the believ=f that Vladiir Putin is EVIL INCARNATE. they cannot risk learning anything ht might conflict with tht prejudice by imagining themslve in his shoes.

Or let me try ainother one. K attended a so-called "prep scho" that wsanominally associated with the Episcpal Church but where they worshipped c=graven images: shiny plated lacrosses and tackle football varsity tean victory trphies they even kept these sacred relics in a large locked glass case: a big reliquary.

They would hold "cheer rallies" to hype up the pubescant males to mindless rage to "Beat Gilman!" Did the pubescant males at Gilman school get hyoed up into mindless rage to "Beat Gilman!". If "Beat Gilman!" was right then that's what they shoud have done, right?

Wouldn't a good listener hear what the kids on both sides were shouting conficting cheers and conclude it was all nonsense? If he wa a student in the school I attended, he certainly would not cheer for Gilman schol but neither would he cheer for his own school He would think eveybody should just not get involved in such nonsense. That was me. In my yearbook it reads, verbatim: "He opposed the cult of school spirit."

If somebody compliments me I wonder what they ar trying to get out of me without paying for it. If they criticize me I probably won't ike it but I will THINK about it to make sure they have not seen something about my beliefs that I've missed.

If a person takes their own beliefs too seriously they cannot be a good listener. (There are limited exceptions: If a fireman tells you to get out of a burning building, you should probably not quarrel with him ***until*** both of you are safely out in the sreet.)

¶ +2023.09.19. Is adaptive learning a better way to learn than traditional learning?

[ Thie posting contains Study hall, SAT, Lacrosses macht frei, passum sub iugum and Mr. Reintko pictures. Also note that this and several of the immdiately below postings are incorrectly dated since from 16 to 18 September the computer I usually use was out of service due to hackers. ]

What is meant by "traditional learning"? The kind of thing to which young persons have been subjected to ever since Peter Ramus whose aim was to reduce all knowledge to standardized curriculum? Spare the rod and spoil the child? Noted by rote? One size fits all assignments?

Or Alexander he Great being tutored by Aristotle in the fourh century BCE?

And what is "adaptive learning"? Tailoring Educational Testing Service (ETS)(501)(c)(3) standardized tests to each pupil so that those whose native language ie Spanish get a different test than those whose naive language it English? Etc.

Dr. Robert Ballard, the man who found the wreck opf RMS Titanic, said something you might find interesting and which I argue needs to be applied to America's schools. I have read that to some extent it has been tried in Cuba because they do not have enough middle aging adults with teaching certificates to baby sit all the classrooms (but in "private" schools, of course, this restriction does not always apply: my 11h grade math teacher had on his CV: Elecrtolux vacuum cleaner salesman):

"Kids retain 5 percent of what they hear and 10 percent of what they read but 80 percent of what they do and **90 percent of what they teach**."

(I have hilited the important part of that senence to make sure you don't miss it.) That could save a lot on faculty overhead as well as enriching many young persons maturation and intelectual self-formation. (Persons often become what they are treated as: "boys will be boys", e.g., at least partly because they are treated as that instead of being respected as self-accountable peers in civil society)

Childhood in general is still what one historian of childrearing whose name I forge) called: a dark continent. A place wher young persons innate faculty of critical judgment is suppressed and they are socially conditioned to honor their father and mother rather than critically judging them, which then carries over to school which prepares the young persons for continued obedience in the workplace and the military. But what the [Charles 10th grade English assignment] Dickens? It's only minds that are benig wasted and we all die one day, including the teachers (thank God!).

The school. i was subjected to was nominally associated with The Episcopal Churbh but we had religious freedom (I became a flaming atheist) because they did not care about The Crucified One but with all their [lack of?] hearts and souls worshipped graven images: sjhiny plated varsity lacrosse and tackle football team victory trophy cups. They even kept these holy relics of the saints in a locked glass case: a large reliquary!

For me it was "passum sub iugum"

I finally got some suitable educaion in middle age in a graduae program where once when I asked the teacher if I could wrier an essay on a topic I was interested in **INSTEAD** of doinh the course assignments, she told me to go do it.

¶ +2023.09.19. Is it possible to live in a virtual reality world as shown in the "Ready Player One" movies or games? If so, when might this be possible?

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

"Virtual reality" has the possibility to destroy reality except if you get a cancer tumor in the merely reality or become penniless and have to sleep in a dumpster in January in Chicago or....

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.

¶ +2023.09.19. What is the opposite of a listener?

A closed mind.

I have an example: A university professor retired from an endowed chair who all his life was "liberal" about pedagogy. But he somehow believed the Zelensky "freedom" propaganda. When I gave this person references to the historical material about Ukraine, they snapped back at me:

"I don't feel the need for guidance by Sachs or Pozner or others."

This person had ceased to be a listener.

¶ +2023.09.19. What are some small, common life problems that would be easier if someone had invented a product?

Somebody did invent one, didn't they? tampons.

I have a very practicable proposal to remedy some albeit not all of the rest:

[ Uncle SAM ]

Not another gee-whiz AI VR Meta [meta what?] exciting bauble for pimple faced techno junkies to expend enormous amounts of manpower and electricity on, but we can't have everything in this world which we did not create.

[ Zuckerberg here ]

¶ +2023.09.19. Should theatergoers forcibly remove disruptive audience members from a performance?

If they can all agree on what it disruptive.

Suppose the performance is about some controversial topic like the Vietnam War. Is a member or members of the audience disruptive if the performance is showing GIs burning a village and they scream against it?

But it can work the other way around: Suppose the performer is doing something a lot of people don't like or they just do not like the performer's ideology. Should they block the doors so nobody can enter to see the performance? And this happens today in both liberal and conservative colleges.

Then there are the politically uncontroversial people who use their cell phone during a performance, talk to the person in the next seat or every 5 minutes step on your feet to go to the restroom or whatever. Or the person with a hairdo taller than the Empier State Building or they are 9 feet tall and 6 feet wide. Oh, dear: What about BODY ODOR? Or somebody blowing bubblegum bubbles....

How much does not have to put up with? (I never attend group events except under duress.)

¶ +2023.09.19. If one day computers become too small for our fingers to use, what will be the solution?

No problem: attach a keyboard.

¶ +2023.09.19. How can we create a better future for the next generation?

Each of us, right now, is as much a "the next generation" as anyone else ever was or will be. So much for a certain romantic notion which some persons believe for whatever reasons.

That said, there is no reason why my society today cannot provide me with opportunities to enjoy my life doing things which will ALSO benefit others in the present and also those who may come after us (if there are any, with global overheating and the very real threat of thermonuclear apocalypse in Ukraine). That seems reasonable to me: win-win. Doesn't that seem good to you?

[ Sacrifice and JFK here ]

I recently learned that Mr. Bernjamin Franklin served his country in the 1776 war of Independence by soliciting aid from France by having sexual relations with aristocratic ladies in the French court. Dulce et decorum set pro patria copulare!

Of couse many person less-than-live in wretched conditions but they are not usually publishing altruistic propaganda. My father started life an an unskilled laborer and worked his way up to a first line manager position in a small company where he could afford to send his son (he was smart and only had one child to pay for!) to Yale. I disdain "The American Dream". But there is another dream for America which people do not speak about, from our 2nd President, John Adams, which I heartily sign up for:

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

It was win-win for my father. he did good for both himself and also for his next generation: He once mentioned he knew Henry Kissinger's brother, and in his last years he wore a gold Rolex wristwatch. One generation later and I have reached the point where a Rolex would not e good enough for me, so since I cannot afford what would meet my standards, I wear no watch.

Selfishness and altruism do not exhaust the option space although the proponents of each throw the other in their opponents' face to confuse the situation. Read the following short essay which is available free on The Internet:

Individuality and Society (Jan Szczepanski, UNESCO, "Impact of science on society", 31(4), 1981, 461-466)

¶ +2023.09.19. Have you heard of the creative society which is the opposite of our consumer society?

I have never heard of a creative society.

But the most eloquent and profound statement I have ever read about this topic came from a sociology professor on the bad side of Mr. Churcilll's Iron Curtain and is available free on The Internet:

Individuality and Society (Jan Szczepanski, UNESCO, "Impact of science on society", 31(4), 1981, 461-466)

¶ +2023.09.19. Have any of you ever tried to hold conversations with AI in any shape or form you find in social media and find how so pathetic those AIs are?

I have played with tne Bing AI. It would more likely pass a Turing test than many humans. That is pathetic, isn't it?

¶ +2023.09.19. How do you learn about the creativity and innovation process from the Bible?

I don't.

But I do learn about the Ukraine War: Sodom and Gomorrah. Mr. Z's regime is the cities on the plain and the Russian special military operation is God's wrath for him not showing hospitality to his angels: the ethnically Russian Ukrainians. I remember Lot's wife.

¶ +2023.09.19. In a Kafka-esque event, you have been metamorphosed into a swarm of bees. You remember your human existence but now you have to think like a hive intelligence. How would you (or would you even) communicate your plight to former friends and family?

This looks pretty bad. If Ihad eyelids I would signal in morse code and hope the CIA was watching. I am having trouble typing here. Signed: K

¶ +2023.09.19. Is it better to learn AI for electrical engineers?

Are you a real ekectrical engineer, Sir?

If yes, you know "the real stuff" on which the Ai jukies build their houses of sand, well, quite literally: the silicon yuo know about but they probably do not.

Stick with what matters (*pun there!*) Learn more electrical engineering and if that is not enough fo you, quantum physics. But you can indeed learn something about computers, and here it is (note the author's credential):

**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)

¶ +2023.09.16. What technology would be needed to bring all dead people of all ages back to life?

Anything is possible within the liits of Godel's Incompletness theorem and Kant's Paraogisms of Pure Reason. We did not create the world, and God can do anyting except maybe make 2 + 2 == 3 but i'm not 100% sure of that.

But some things ar not likely. Hiroshima awaits you, Sir!

[ TDSBR ]

The text over the entrance to the old cemetery in New Haven Connecicut USA reads:

"The dead shall be raised"

Does this apply to the persons whose bodies were entirely vaporized by the atomic bomb?

Scotty to Captain Kirk: "Captain, I can't find anybody to beam up down there." Captain Kirk to Scotty: "Copy that, Scotty. Let's try some place else." Scotty to Captain Kirk: "OK Captain. I'll try Stalingrad. instead." "Captain Kirk to Scotty: "Copy that. Let's go!"

Don't you have better things to waste what's left of yur time living on this earth doing before you will become one of the dead?

¶ +2023.09.16. What are the key concepts that should be considered when a curriculum is implemented or reviewed?

One size does not fit all.

Individual students should be respected and their idiosyncratic giftednesses nurtured.

Curiculum for me meant the totaitarian dictarorship of the Facultariat. In probably 11th grade I learned the word: "Asuhurbanipal" – it was part of the curriculum. But what the [Charles] Dickens? He was part of ht ecurriculum too.They never said to me something ike:

"Respected young person, this curriculum is jsut our humble suggestions how you might choose to develop your intelletual life. Please consider them but they are, of course, just options among many possibilities. Please let us know how we can be of assistence and service to you in yur pursuit of knowledge."

At the onset of middle age I went back to school in a program where I thought or at least hoped they would not hurt me. I finally got some appropriate education.

Example: Before one class I approached the teacher and asked if I could write an essay on a topic tangentially related to the course in which I had a ong-standing and passionate interest, INSTEAD, repeat: INSTEAD of doing the course assignments. She [the teacher happened to be female and she also happened to be the most honored teacher in the history of the college since John Dewey but that does not prove anything] had never seen my face before. She immediatedly told me to go do it.

That is the kind of curriculum I needed. Other persons may have different needs, but I feel I have a right to life, like others do too.

Let those who like curriculum have it but respect each individual.

¶ +2023.09.16. What is the source of most jokes and puns?

Marshall McLuhan said something about humor:

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

¶ +2023.09.16. How would you justify the statement "Being authoritative during teaching is not recommendable."?

[ Picture of boss berating employee here ]

I attended a disciplinarian so-called preparatory school from 1958 to 1964. I was an exceptionaly intelligent but also exceptionally emotionally and physically fragile child. Most of the students seemed OK with the place or even liked it. I have written a document about it and let's jsu say it's "R-Rated" and not for the faint-hearted

https://www.bmccedd.org/Huang.html

I submitted an earlier copy of the document to the current Head of School. They know what happened to me. The school's GPS coordinates are: [39.4324433, -76.6766731],

[ Mike Rentko document here ]

As said, apparently most other students seem to feel differently about it.

The teachers diid not respect me and I did not respect them. But they were bigger than me so I had to put up with them. I was just a wimpy kid and they hurt me. My given name is apt "Bradford" which etymologicaly more or less means: doormat. Nobody cared about me and I remember.

Rrose Sélavy (If you don't know what the means ther is a fine Wikipedia article about it)

¶ +2023.09.15. What is a research title about criminology with independent and dependent variables?

"Crime and punishment"

Crime and punishment are independent variables in reality, since a crook can get away with a crime and an innocent person can be punished. , But in the legal code they are codependent since there is a punishment for every crime and a crime for every punishment.

¶ +2023.09.15. Would you be interested in a virtual world where you can shop, explore real-world places, and interact with lifelike characters? What do you think of this idea?

I propose this could really be the end of humanity. First, do your homework: Watch the old, fun but also profouond movie: "**The Truman SHow**".

Next understand how to win a dogfight in air-to-air combat: Get the other guy to see his surrounding space as you want him to see it, not as it is, i.e., put him in a virtual reality. Then surprise him by attacking him from "nowhere" and he psychologically collapses and you win without fighting while he fights to reorient himself.

Third: read my virtual reality experiment. I would swear to the truth of it under oath subject to penalty for felony perjury: I have done the work for you so you do not ned to take the risk:

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.

To conclude: I just now recalled an idea about as foolish as hat you are fantasizing: Donald Trump suggested curing Covid by injecting Clorox into your veins. got the picture? Ther are uses for virtual reality: example: for persons with advanced ALS or "shut in syndromw", in other words , people whose minds are alert but they have no control over their voluntary muscles – these people ar living dead, are you? Or for training aircraft pilots in flight school not watching the boob tube at home!)

Do you understand what you are asking for?

¶ +2023.09.15. What is the point in learning new skills if you don't make any money out of it?

Try this question:

Why do persons who have so much money that they literally do nothing to earn any more money do anything at all?

And let's be clear about he sample space here: It includes not only scions of zillionaires, but also hermits in the woods who also are rich enough that they do nothing to earn any more money although a middle class person might (and quite reasonably) think they were poor?

What was your point in asking this question? Are you going to make any money out of it?

All my life I have been undercapitalized. But my desire has never been for freedom of enterprise, but freedom from enterprise. And this even has a root in the Founding fathers of the US of A although people don't think of things that way:

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." (John Adams)

¶ +2023.09.15. Do Baby Boomers generally participate in community affairs and volunteering, especially in geriatric care?

What an interesting question!

Why? Becauwe the "Boomers" (I call it the "population glut" where women had too many children, so if you consider each delivery a bomb, then ther ewas indeed a boom like in Desdeen or Tokyo in World War II...)

Anyway, the Boomews are about to all become geriatric themselves and some of them already are, such as Amrica's current Preaident who sometimes needs help finding his way off the podium.

One size does not fit all.

Many "Boomers" have already for years been taking care of their aging parents (and crippled children, too).

There are two wars coming even without Mr <Biden trying to destroy Russia. The is the climate catastrophe wra, and the aging population waar.

America needs to wake up. Instead of wasting medical professinals' lives on havig them fight with insurance companies, we need to free them to do what they signed up to do: treat patients.

Instead of school kids brutalizing each othe rin so-called sports like varsity footbal where they can get brain damage, we need them to do varsity hospice volunteering.

Governments, of coue, try to solve such problems with ponzi schemes: they want women to have more babies: to be more productive wartime munitions factories: Foetus production lines. In Nazi Germany a woman who produces 8 new Germans (maybe it wa 7) received a "Mother of hte Reich" awad which had real material benefitxs.

I expect to be skewered on a stick for posting this comment, but here it goes. I never wanted children for a lot of reasons, never had them, and never regretted my decision for one minute and I'm decades past menopause. When I was a teenager, I saw my mother's pendulous breasts, flabby belly and my grandmother's prolapsed uterus, quickly figured out the reason, and decided I wanted no part of that. Humans are in no danger of dying out. There will always be women who, for some unfathomable reason, lust after the idea of getting pregnant and giving birth – I'm just not one of them. And if humanity doesn't succeed in doing self in, within a few decades the artificial womb will have been perfected, and articles like this one will be a historical curiosity and a moot point. (Letter to the Editor, NYT, "Opinion: After Birth: How Motherhood Changed My Relationship With My Body", +2019.01.19)

[ Picture of woman with messed up body after childbirth here ]

[I am male. If Iwas a woman, I would pray to be "barren". Fortunately I have no siblings and as a consequence my father , who did not earn a lot of money, was able to pay my Yale tuition (graduted 1968) and I graduated with no student debt. I am now 77 years old I hope to not become geriatric but as one of my managers at work once told me: "If wishes were horses then beggars would ride."]

¶ +2023.09.15. Is 'Being the authority' a valid argument when it comes to decision making and setting boundaries?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

No. Only objective evidece can produce a valid argument, and all valid arguments are provisional subject to future new evidence. But see below for a differeing opinion.

However! If you have a llump somewhere on your body, Whose opinion – and I use that word advisedly: opinion – would you follow:

(A) A world class onclolgist

or

(B) Hunter Biden

or

(C) Melania Trump

?

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."

¶ +2023.09.15. How can virtual reality be used to create immersive email experiences?

Virtual reality is not Tik-tok on steroids.

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.

(Immersion can drown a person.)

¶ +2023.09.15. How can you tell if someone has used Turnitin to check for plagiarism on their work?

I would propose this is not generally a good idea. If you are a a student your goal is to get a good grade not to get justice.

However, if you want to do this there are probbly ways which have been developed by the experts: The OSS, the KGB, the FSB, the Mosad, MI-6, the CIA, get the picture?

How about trying this: In one course write an original paper with one implausible error in it. For instance: "There was a failure of the water system of Midway Island". Then in a different course where the teacher could not know about you previous submission, write a peper that includes this exact same error but no other plagiarism (note that you will be plagiarizing yourself here which is an unusual situation, right?). If the teacher accuses you of plagiarism he has used anti-plagiarism software.

This works. It enabled The United states of America to figure out that the Japanese were going to attack Midway Island in 1942, and arguably won the war for us. Banzai!

--------

Addendum: I apologize. I have read that some young person do not know what "Midway" is. It is an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The war I am talking about is World War II, which, if you are a young person, I gather you may not know about. Sorry.

¶ +2023.09.14. If an artificial intelligence creates something that infringes on someone's intellectual property rights, can the AI be sued?

I am not a lawyer.

**An AI can't do anything.** But the Ai is owned by somebody, either an individual or, much more likely, a corporation. I strongly suspect the owner of the AI will be as liable as if they had run it off a printing press or showed it on a cable channel or in theiters.

An Ai is just a tool or a product of its owner. The owner is responsible. But, if you are really serious about this quetion, consule an intelletual property attorney.

¶ +2023.09.14. If you could create an invention or improve something that already exists, what would it be and why?

I would figure out a way for women to voluntarily control their "fertility" (getting pregnant) without invasive techniques to free them from fear of unwanted pregnancy. It would be like cureently they decide to eat a donut or not. I want to / I don't want to, period (pun intended). Women should be free from fear of their lives being impacted by the bad part of their biology to enjoy the good part (orgasms) without worry.

It is of course an idle fantasy to design a way for males to bleed each month to be more in touch with reality so they would not so easily get off on causing themselves to bleed unnecessarily to show how "manly" they are in brutal athletics like fackle football and of course, in wars.

¶ +2023.09.13. What is more realistic, making something impossibly complex with tech so advanced that is indiscernible from magic or the same happening without anyone even helping it along?

The latter ain't likely to happen. It's like the old fantasy of monkeys at typewriters. Yes, eventully one of them would type out Moby Dick, but they would also type out millions of texts just a little differnt from Moby Dick but meaningless and they wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

I did once read something in Scientific American that is not exactly the same: somewhere in africa there was apparently a deposit of uranium ore in the ground that all by itself had a small chain reaction. I forget the details but that struck me as pretty improbable.

¶ +2023.09.13. Why is Skipidi Toilet the greatest work of art since the Mona Lisa?

[ Pooping Putin ]

¶ +2023.09.12. What would you ask if you are randomly selected to participate in one-hour virtual focus groups about your experiences with McDonald's?

Oh, boy! I am a amateur annthropologist of daily life in the U.S. of A.

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

I have no idea what would happen but I do take notes for future potential use in peer reviewd journals. If this is jury selection, let me say that I have difficulty distinguishing Ronald MacDonald from Ronald Reagan and I do have some thoughts about Burger King, homw of the whopper:

[ Ghost whopper here ]

"We paved paradise, and put in a parking lt." (Joni Mitchell)

You still want me to participate?

¶ +2023.09.12. What technologies were overall the most net positive to society and which technologies were most net negative?

THis is one of hose "iest" questions where ther e can be differences of opinion and whateve anybody proposes somebody (or oneself) can find somehing even ier and if not today then tomorrow.

Net positive:

tampons

Net Negative:

Agent Orange

Your choices?

¶ +2023.09.12. What would you do if you discovered that your devices like Alexa were listening to your conversations?

Sorry, but I'm expecting they do. Don't you?

Now I am not sure of this. But there is an old saying: Better safe than sorry.

Anyboty who ideates they re not being watched these days is not really "with it", are they?

I preeume th picture below is a fake but maybe it is not.

[ Pooping Putin ]

¶ +2023.09.12. If a musical comedy movie about the Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting was made, what should it be called and what should the full plot be? Do you have any jokes for this movie? What songs would you write for this movie?

Musical comedies are at best pollyanna nonsense: Some fool singing in the rain, getting soaking wet but not catching pneumonia?

[ Alfred E. Neumamm ]

"What me worry?"

Has "pride" parades and such got so sick that they even want to make a spectacle about a horrible tragedy? Or is it that some people are so petty and have nothing better to do than want to get in everybody's face to rub it in that they have different sexual prefernces? Why can't they do what they want in private, behind closed doors? Or is that the point: that they get sexuallly aroused by offending people, like on the other side of the political spectrum, prigs and prudes get off on trying to repress young persons' sexuality even if it's the misisonary position or, God help us all: self-pleasuring?

You know what you can do? Go to Africa and stop the people from ripping out little girls' external genitalia because their parents love them, to "perfect nature, to make them marriageable nd so that they can't "come" (FGM)? How about it?

Here's an idea for a musical comedy: "Ronnie and Nancy", and the climax(sic) is

"💗Oh, Ronnie! Just say 'Just say no!' to me! [ Panting... ] [ 'Just say no, Nancy!' ] Ohhhhh 💗💗💗💗💗💗! ...... Ahhhh💗

¶ +2023.09.12. How would you handle working with someone like Elon Musk, who has a maniacal sense of urgency?

Me? If I had to submit to pay the bills and had no other viable option I would submit. I fear dying as roadkill run over by a motor vehicle on a road – I have lived all my life, starting with my parents, under the threat of: OR ELSE.

If I had any way up and out – not just out but up and out – I would not stay there or one minute. As Jesus said: leave the dead to bury the dead.

¶ +2023.09.12. What would happen if innovation were limitless, and there were no constraints on resources, ethics, or technology? How would this shape the future of society and the world?

Gee! With networked supercomputers, industrial robots, AI and what all other superadvanced technology we hve today couldn't we already be approaching this point if it was not all going into things like Mr .Bezos buiding a superyacht that could not get from the shipyard to the sea without tearing down a historic bridge when other perosns as sleeping under interstate highway bridges?

But that's just tpragmatics. All humanity could be freed from the Abrahamic Deity's curse on us for Mr. Adam's having eaten a piace of fruit, and then, then what? Everybody sit on their two couch potatoes and play video games or watch Monday Nite NFL or get all excited about the Madmoon who is not a virgin or GKW (God Knows What)?

Freedom **from** is a necessary condition. but Freedom **for** is a sufficisne condition. Freedom for what? I was childreared to be massively ignoranced of everything except obeying my masters (this wa after 1863 in usa). If at age 16 years somebody had given me a zilliona doolars and then smirked in my face I wouldn't have had a clue what to do with it. I know I would **not** go to Disneyland and I would **not** live in a split level house and I would **not** do all sorts of other things, But ge tthe picture: **not not not**. If you empty a garbage can, you do not have anything good inside, do you?

Over half a century I have to some extent remediated that mental, spritual, sexual esthetic and other retardation which I underwent and was permanently crippled by.

Following are two pictures:My childrering and Jesus Christ's childrearing.

[ Foie Gras and Object Presenting pictures here ]

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

So we could have limitless everything and everybody would be dupes of "The American Dream". You may guess I never as a child wantd to go to Disnayand or the beach. I wa a very unhappy child.

But the is a second American Dream that most people probably do not know about which is not just suburban sprawl, what I call: skin cancer of ht topsoi. It comes from America's second president, John Adams, and I propose it as what for me would be a desirable future in a world of material abundnce (which, to repeat, we could have if it wa not for oligarchic greed):

"**I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.**"

There you go. That' what I hope would happen: A world of, to pick persons you might have heard of: Nowm Chomskys, J. Robert Oppenheimers, Louis Kahns, Henri Matisses.... And guess what? It might very much resemble what you can find in The Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible (I do not believe in any religion).

¶ +2023.09.12. What do you consider as your abilities and talent as a student?

Below is the true story of what I did once as a student. I only wish I had done smilarly in school every day about the whole curriculum, not just once, only about handwriting style.

I consider myself to not have had enough ability or talent. But I did show a little talent and ability, once, to be more than just another young person who, to borrow Adolf Eichmann's defense at his war crime trial: "just followed orders".

[ Miek Rentko document here ]

¶ +2023.09.12. Why did someone tell me that AI doesn't exist? Everywhere I look it says that AI is as simple as a computer making a decision. He said this is "augmented intelligence". Is there any truth to this?

You sound like an ordinary person who is ignorant about computers. You don't know about "comuter scheice" so you listen to what other people say.

Ther is no artificial intelligence. There is massive computing power that references huge databases to compute text that :LOOKS intelligent, and, indeed, much of what one of the new AI computer programs outputs is more informative, colloquially, "more intelligent" than what most human college freshman can do. But the college freshman, even if he is looking as some coed's boobs, is thinking, The AI is just computing: It doesn't look at anything. The AI just processes input with IF...THEN...ELSE and DO...WHILE computer code. Noam Chomsky agrees with this, but don't take either my or his word for it. THINK for yourself; don't be a dupe of what other people say they think.

Conider: A microscope can "see" better than your two "naked" eyes, right? An AI can "write" research reports faster then you can. The microscope does not see anything: you see through the microscope. The AI dods not really write a research report: You write a research report using the AI like yuo in previous times would have used the card catalog in a library.

It's that simple but you are simpleminded and so can be esily fooled by people who, unlike you, have had a lot of schooling in IF...THEN...ELSE and DO...WHILE. La, di, dah, right?

I recently learned a phrase I had not previously seen in my now long life. But it applies to more than a few people:

"Useful idiots"

¶ +2023.09.12. What are some funniest HR jokes?

A recruiter once told me:

"**If your boss says: 'Jump!', you ask: 'How high?'**"

Yesterday I was listening to a video of Wehrmacht Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus, who had led the German attack on Stalingrad, say that attitude of unquestioning obedience to authority is what led to the enormous crimes of World War II, that officers needed to take responsibility for their actions.

Well, back to that recruiter. I was sort of like George Forman after Muhammad li took care of him: my head was just spinning and seeing stars after his knockout blow.'

Only on the way out of the buiding did I begin to recover my self-rspetc. The joke had been on me. Ha! Ha

¶ +2023.09.11. How much time does it usually take to write the abstract and introduction section of a research article (in computer science)?

This question does not indicate understanding things.

It takes as long as it takes. That can be moments in an "Aha" experience that comes out o hin air.

It can take years of slogging and trying this and trying that and even deciding to give up.

I read about Proferror Andrew Wiles who spent years of his life trying to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. (yes, I know, that is mathematics not "computer science"). He had tried everything. He was about to throw in the towel but with only minutes to go he saw the answer which, as one might expect, was "obvious" to him once he saw it. How long did it take?

Probably the more trivial your article the faster you can write it. I knew a young man who was busy plagiarizing to build up the list of publications in his CV and he got away with it. He did not accomplish anything of value but he kept piling on the articles.

"For the mindful god abhors untimely growth." (Friedrich Holderlin)

--------

"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)

¶ +2023.09.11. What is the difference between problem solving and critical thinking? Which career requires more of these skills, engineering or medicine?

Questions like this are misguided. Reality is not comparttmentalized like the answers to multiple choice (what choice?) exminations in the artificia environment of schools.

Without critical thinking many problems are insoluble. How can you tell if the emporer is naked or not if you believe his new clothes are always the latest and greatest? If you honor your father and mother how can you evaluate if they are abusing you?

An engineer or a physician may go through a whole day without having to think about anything. But either one may face a problem which seems impossibly difficult.

As for physicians, my fav is the first surgeons who saved infants with holes in their hearts. There were no heart-lung machines. THse doctors had TWO MINUTES, just TWO MINUTES from the time they cut into the baby's heart, foud and sewed up the hole and sewedthe heart bavk up. TWO MINUTES!

The structurel engineer William Lemessurier one day learned that his masterpiece, th New York CitiCorp Building, had a 1 in 16 chance of collapsing each year. He had to fix it.

How can you compare those two? Why even try? Both were really tough problems which almost nobody could fix. But the structual engineer might not be able to ride a bicycle straight, much less cut holes in babies' hearts. The physician might not be able to solve differential wquations.

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

[ Homer eating a donut here ]

("America runs on Dunkin")

¶ +2023.09.11. Would you tell me how to use the address term "doc"? Do people address medical doctors as doc?

Don't.

It's a low brow idiom. A doctor is "doctor". If the person happens to be your personal friend outside the office and you are mildly cynical but well-meaning, you may refer to him (her, other?) as "doc" and get a bemused smile out of it. But "Doc, what's wrong with me?" is uncouth. "Doctor, what do you think my problem is?" Etc.

As an aside, did the person asking this question use kanji or Chinese glyphs or Korean charactrs? If you are Asian don't you respectfully bow to another person on social meeting, not reach out your paw to grab their paw like we less civilized people do here in USA and probably England? "doc"? "Doctor-san?"

¶ +2023.09.10. What is the best way to start off a paper, and what is the best way to end it?

This a asking for mediocrity.

Every paper is an individual unique event in a particular situation. Recipes say: treat this kind of thing this way. Guess what? AI can do that very well today.

I forget the details but earlier today I wrote a little essay and I found THE PERFET ENDING. The perfect ending FOR IT, not for anyting else.

So, next essay, a new challenge.

It's not like a nurse checking a line of school kids for strep throats: "Open wide!" Red spots to the left, clean throats to the right. To the left you ge an antibiotic. To the right you go home. Next!

Let's try one. How about Mr .Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysfburg Address. Nobody ever thought of anything like that before, did they? And nobody wanted to: He was doing a bad thing: Making a 3 minute presentation when public speeches were the people's HBO. They wanted him to make a two hour oration.

I can talk forever. But sometimes one word "nails it". I think somebody asked about a technologial innovation that is very important but people don't think much about it. Hydrogen bombs? Polio vaccine? AC current? The computer? My answer:

tampons.

Not many places that anwer would fit, are there? But isn't it a good answer?

My answer to this question has been much longer thatn that, hsn't it? Is that a good way to end THIS essay?

¶ +2023.09.10. Can you give some examples of different opinions that respected people have had about a certain topic or subject matter?

I can but I'd rather not. But I can give the basis for the problem:

[ Duck rabbit ]

The world is full of duck-rabbits. If you had never seen a duck but raised rabbits the above picture could only look like a very crude cartoon of a rabbit. If you had never seen a rabbit but raised ducks, the picture could only look like a very crude cartoon of a duck. If you studied Gestalt Psychoogy in college, it's obviously a double-reading picture which goes by the name "duck-rabbit".

I got this not from a psychlogy course but from a nuclear physicist, a philosopher of science, Norwood Russell Hanson. He was a very "down to earth" kind of guy, not anythin touchy-feely. He rode a Harley and flew his own private F8F Bearcat fighter plane. He was interested in how the theories a particular scientist holds determine how the person sees the data.

Ordinary people imagine that scientists collect data and then cook up a theory to match the data. It's the other way around: They see in the data what their theories tell them can be there. I understood almost nothing of what he said but I did udertand this: He said a Ptolemaic astonomomer who belieed the eaerth stood still and the sun circled around the stable earth would see the sun rise in th east each morning. A Copernican astronomer who believed the sun stood still and the earth spun around would see the horizon going down in the East each morning. Same data but different "interpretations" And this is not touchy feely art but hard core physics.

Of cousre iit is possible for a person to see things one way and then see them a different way. But this does not happen very often uder normal conditions. But if you were a soldier in Afghanistan, You would not likely see a bottle lying in the middle of the road as just garbage somebody thoughtlessly threw out of their car window insread of placing it responsibly in a recycling bin like back home, would you?

Well, let's try a more controversial one. General Robert E Lee. Role model for your kids or traitor? Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Freedom fighter or cynical oportunist? If your daddy was CEO of a big multinational corporation would you likely be an advocate of labor unions? If your dsddy wa an uemploiyed coal miner would you likely like e for tax cutes for the rich? If you grew up in an orthodox jewish home would you likely be an atheist? If you grew up in an atheist home would you likely believe in the Abrahamic Deity? And on and on it goes. Duck-rabbits everywhere.

You may guess my opinion: I do not like partisanship. Let's all try to make nice together. But what do you do about duck-rabbits like the abortion issue in the United states today: Does a womwn have the right to control her own body or is abortion murder? We can of coure leave aside here the cynical people who oppose abortion but do nothing to help mothers and their babies to live. I'm talking abour sincere differences.

"Tolerance" is not the answer, because tolerance is intolerable to "true believers". Nobody can tolerate persons who are intolaerant. A poster child her was the French school teacher Samuel Paty who, while America wa all upset about George Floyd being murdred by a rogue cop crushing his nect, Mr. Paty, a school teacher who did nothing illegal, had his head completely severed frm his torso for "dierespecting the Prophet". And as for artoons, there were the employees of the Charlie Hebdo satire magazine who were murered for the same reason. Obviously things are simpler wher there are no such literally lethal differences beween persons, but as one of my mangers at work once old me: "If wishes were horses then beggars would ride." Nobody can insult me; cal my mother an obscenity and I may object that you were not precise enough about it. Other persons feel they need to defend their ancestors' honor. So words that would roll of me like water off a duck's back can cause another person to commit murder for honor: "You called my mother a whore! You will pay for that!"

Where differencs of opinion cannot be resolved by mutually respectful discussion, and the people can't just leave each other alone, push comes to shove and it's war. In USA today, many pro-Trump persons are expeting precisely that: A second U.S. Civil War.

¶ +2023.09.10. If you were making a movie about a high school student and his little sister shooting up his high school, what would you call it and what would the full plot be?

Shooting up dope?

Or shooting with guns?

This is sick. I wuould not do it. Why do you want to do it?

I might write a story about a very intelligent boy who was nerrdy so everybody especially the girls made fun of him and he wa very depressed because he wanted to have an intimate partner to play nice with but the girls wer all playing sick games like "look don;t touch" and :hard to get" and the boys were bragging about their "scores" and he was disgusted with everything but nobody not even his praents cared about him so he took a gun and killed himself becaue he despaired of ever haing anything good in such a cruel, unfeeling, stupid world where nobody valued what i=he could have conributed to them if only they had been kind to him.

The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa made a film about the mafia titled: "The bad sleep well."

¶ +2023.09.10. I do not have the ability to think for myself and the thinking is done for me by the mass media and corporations. Does that make me a lemming?

This question is obviously self confuting. If you really had no ability to think for yourself you would not think that you have no ability to think for yourself: you would just not think, period. If all your thinking was done for you by the mass you would not think it was because that thought is not part of the mass media. The mass media do not tell you to be aware that they are telling you what to do. They seduce you with sexy advertising to want to want what they want you to want without thinking..

I have read that real life lemmings are intelligent little rodents. The thing about lemmings committing mass suicide by blindly following a leader appleis to the two-legged kind: human cult members. Jim Jones did not lead lemmings t their death, did he?

[ Women of Britain say: Go! ]

So you at least a little bit think for yourself or a least are able to. Maybe you don't really want to but you want somebody to pat you on the head and tell you everyting is for the best in this best of all possible worlds: Do' worry, be happy! And furthermore: "You don't know how good it is until you eat some place else" (Ponderosa Steak House advertising logo), so be thankful you are not in a communist country. where there is only hopelessness and darkness. Really?

Apparently you feel somethng is not quite right? Something is not right about your question. What are you afraid of? What are you trying to avoid? What are you trying to get without paying for it? I had an intrusivve mother. What about you?

Come clean: with yourself. Not with anybody else. It's none of their business. The business of business is business. The business of your life is your life. Start with figuring out what you were trying to accomplish by asking this crooked question. Then go from there.

¶ +2023.09.10. The CIA, DIA, military, and even the Sony Corp says telepathy and other psi abilities exist. So did Freud, Jung, and William James. Why should we believe science when they say the opposite? When did science become infallible? Or 100% reliable?

Only normal people think that science is either infallible or rubbish. Science is tentative and it;s the best we've got. So we should proceed like a blind person in a dark room he's nevver been in before: Go forward but slowly, poking around before taking each new step. Scienceis the blind man's stick. He trusts it, doesn't e? The blind person's fingers end not with ther fingernails abut a tthe end of their stic. But he also knows the stick has limitations. It could break so he is aware that he is USAING a stick. Now. Suppose he literally has a stick: a tree limb somebody wa going to throw in the recycling but he rescued it to help himself "see". Then suppose womebody offerd him a titalium stick with a polymer tip on the end. Would he say his clumsy stick was better? No. He's take the new stick (butkeep the old one too, jsut in case). That's what science is like.

Wokies do not like science. Neither do MAGAs. They both also hunt witches. So as for telepathy. Show me the results – not that it will do me any good because I am not learned in physics. Science cannot prove that anything is impossible. You cannot exhaustive search an infinite set you do not know how it wa screated. God could have planted in "eateregg" in the universe that on 23 Nobember 2345 at )4:23 UTC the earth would stand still fo 23.56 seconds and nothing bad would happen. Scientsts would record the glitch but not be able to reproduce it. the regular laws of physics would continue to apply for the next 45 trillion years. did it happen?

Also, today it's hard to know what news is fake news. You cann't trust The New York Times newspaper to report honestly on the current Ukraine war. Can you trust them to report honestly on telepathy?

Here's the deal: If you meet a telepathy in the road, deal with it. If not, just keep on truckin. It's just like is the earth shaped like a big billiard ball or a flat plate on the back of a celestial turtle? If your job does not entail awareness of the shape of th planet, don't worry about it. Just keep on truckin. Do watch out for potholes (and sinkholes, too!)

¶ +2023.09.10. What is the best way for an elderly person who has some memory loss (but no dementia) to remember their full name and address in case of emergency?

I am not a neurologist, but if a person has trouble remembering their name then probably they have worse than incipient dmentia, whatever their chronological (insurance) age.

I do not care about my name. I didn;t ask for it. I don't like it. All it's good for is for people with power to hurt me to jerk me around: "Brad do this! Brad do that!" If I forgot it, good riddance. Please refer to me by:

[ Cat kanji ]

But there is an old (since at least the middle ages) trick for remembering any meaningless fact: Associate the character string with a memorable image.

Example: my name (which, to repeat, I did not ask for and do not like) is: "Bradford". I know that, etymologically, that means: Broad river ford, i.e., broad river crossing: A place for everybody to walk over to get ahead i their lives without getting the bottom of their pants or skirts wet. Well, that's almost like ad oormat for people to wipe their feet on and people have wiped their feet on me (meatrephorically, sp) all my life. So if I forgot my name I would remember that I am a doormat and reverse engineer "Bradford" from there. Q.E.F.

¶ +2023.09.10. How useful is knowing skills such as Computer Science or artificial Intelligence in general. I am a freshman who knows photo/video editing, website design, and 3D modelling- how much would this add to my general skillset?

So you have talent to create imagery?

Learning " Computer Science or artificial Intelligence" can't hurt you. But learning how the Amish live could help you too.

[n]o matter how indispensable the expert may become in a rationalized society, his own [narrowly functionalist] perspective (which originated within the world of crafts and agriculture, and then moved on to prosper in that of industry) is of no ultimate significance. (Arnold Gehlen, "Man in the age of technology", 1957/1980, p. 161)

Here's what you need to focus on:

"We were excited by the very idea that we could use anything in the visual history of humankind as influence," Mr. Glaser, who designed more than 400 posters over the course of his career, said in an interview... (2004). (The New York Times, Milton Glaser obituary)

If you are another Milton Glaser and can create something at the level of his "I [heart image] New York", you will be able to hire some techie to do the dirty work of preparing it for publication.

But the techie will not havve the imaginatination to have cooked up the design.

AI can replace just about anytihng except imagination (Oh, yes: AI also can't replace CEOs: The CEOs will make sure of that, right!). AI cannot replace Milton Glasers and multinational corporations know this. They do not pay AI to do their ad campaigns, do they? Another person AI cound not have replaced is Ken White who designed the famous "How to stuff a wild duck" poster for IBM.

Be irreplaceable!

[ THINK ]

Don't just be a computer component.

¶ +2023.09.10. How many times is it too much to ask for help in an online class when your professor doesn't have office hours? Would they get annoyed or upset with this kind of thing?

Who is paying whom?

If you are trying to learn and the teacher is not trying to help you learn, the teacher is getting a paycheck without earning it, isn't he (she, other)?

You should not "annoy" this person.

But you need to very politely and clrealy press your case that you need assistance to accomplish what yo uare paying your good money (or your daddy's money or Uncle Sam's money...) for and you are sincerely trying to learn and you are not an idiot. Repeat: Be polite and also make your request specific. Don't just say: "Help!" Tell the dude: "I am trying to do X and not succeeding because of Y. I need help with Y to be able to do X."

Repeat: Be scrupulously polite. Do not raise your voice. But demand to get what you have paid for. You want to learn. The teacher is a service provider., just like a counter clerk in a Burger King, jsut with a haughtier job title.

If he (she, other) feels annoyed by a student who sinerely wants to learn asking for help, that is his problem, isn't it? Don't get a bad grade in your course because your teacher is a bad grader!

"The customer is always right" (John Wanamaker and others)

(Joke: I graduated from Yale University in 1968 Yale's mascot is a bulldog. Bulldogs are stubborn little animals. Ever see one bite into something and shake it? Growl!)

¶ +2023.09.10. What is your own definition of "literacy" in 8-10 sentences?

My guess is this question comes from a student who doesn't want ot do any work to get a course ass–-ignment (i.e., a pain in the ass from the teach) done.

There are at least two kind of literacy:

(1) Being able to decipher latin alphabet characters and convert them to speech: "Mommy! F O O T B A L L. Football!" "Good boy, Joey!" This can extend all the way up to getting a Ph.D. in computer science, where the character strings are very complicated to decipher. There are computer peripherals that can convert text to speech, too.

(2) Liberal education in the classic of civilization, mostly Western European since Homer, but also Chinese, Japanese, India Indian and to a lesser extent others: All the acquisitions of knowledge of the human species thru the ages that has been written down or even orally transmittted.

Homer Simpson is literate in the first but not the second sense. Homer the bard was illiterate in the first tsense but literate in the second sense.

[ Homer eating a donut before dying for his country here ]

Wokies and MAGAs are literate in the first sense but illiterate in the second sense.

¶ +2023.09.09. If an artist uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate art, is it illegal for them to use that AI-generated art in their own work?

I am not a lawyer. As far as I am aware, the only thing illegal about plagierism is if what you plagiarize is copyright protected. So plaiarize Messrs. Plato and Aristotle – from the original or translations in the public domain – to your heart's content and don't worry about going to prison. But woe be unto you if you put it in a peer reviewed journal and do not properly cite the materil. You likely won't get away with that trick a second time. No, you won't go to jail. but you won't be able to publish in any respectable place a second time. If that does not matter to you, go for it!

And always remember that if you are really really really god at stealing other people's ideas, i.e., if you know how to not get caught, then there is one thing you have to watch out for: you "natural" desire to win fame and glory for your good deeds. You have to just keep a low profile, including not running for public political office. You maybe can have your cake and eat it too but don't get on Th Food Channel about your Patissier giftedness, or you will likely get to eat humble pie. Bon appetit!

¶ +2023.09.09. If artificial intelligence creates art, does it have any copyright or intellectual property rights?

AI does not create anything. Computer programmers create the AI and the code thy write determines what the AI outputs for any given input.

I am not a lawyer, But my guess is that the computer programmers who cooked up the AI, or in most cases, their corporate emloyers, own anythig the AI produces and have copyright protection. But to repeat: I am not a lawyer, so ask a lawyer, and not just any lawyer but an "intellectual property" specialist

¶ +2023.09.09. Are there any signs that you're in a cult and being brainwashed by the leader of the group?

Me? I hope not. But I was chldreared by dupes of "The Amerian Dream" which is a really freakish cult, isn't it? I mean men who get off on mowing their lawn each Saturday and – I seem to recall I actually saw on the television the classic episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman where Mary's neighbor asks Mary if she sees the waxy yellow buildup on her kitchen floor. And it took me many years to wonder if that question maybe encoded a tacit second meaning.

A cult does not need to have a specific leader. The cult of "communism" in th Soviet Uniion did have a leader: Joseph Stalin. But the cult of "capitalism" here in USA is led by an "Invisible Hand" which is nobody.

¶ +2023.09.09. How do you identify your specific needs? Determine the area or topic in which you require expertise. Be clear about the problem or the subject matter you need assistance with.

This sounds to me like maybe a student in some course who is trying to get a monkey off his (her, other's) back: an ass–-ignment he doesn't want to do.

But if true, that is even more absurd than most of these postings looking for somebody to do a student's ass–-ignment for him.

This is not just askng "you" to write an essay about some objective topic, like – I don't know – "How the West was won" or "Founding Fathers who owned slaves" or whatever.

This is asking YOU, YOU the student what YOU as an individual need. How can anybody else have your needs? Well, we all need air to breathe and to not have bowel blockges, etc.

This should be a chance for YOU to thiink about what YOU feel YOU need and → ready for this? Maybe it's something your teacher can help you get. The question ends with: "Be clear about the problem or subject matter YOU NEED ASSISTANCE WITH." Can you help ME with [ fill in the blank ], respected teacher?

If you are asking me about my needs, it's none of your business, is it? But you can start by writing me a check for at least $10,000,000 USD and not ask questions. I will promise to not try to do anything illegal with it and give at least 25% of it to a legitimate charity.

¶ +2023.09.08. What psychological facts to keep private?

Never tell anybody anything you really really really want to keep private. "Things happen."

Of course this is not fun. It's the price a really top notch CIA officer has to pay for doing really great espionage work. It's the price a really great art forger has to pay if he wants to keep earning his living at his trade. It's the price you have to pay if you can't afford to have something about you "get out". "I jsut pulled off ht perfect crime. Wow! I am so proud of myself! I want to tell somebody about it...." "Nope!"

It's like winning the lottery. if anybody finds out everybody will want a piece of your good fortune and soon enough you will find yourself empty handed again unless you are "selfish".

¶ +2023.09.08. Grape vine is an informal mechanism through which management has eyes and ears among the workers. As a communication expert, can you present a case for or against this communication practice?

"Loose talk costs lives" (World War II ecurity warning)

"Mind your own bbusiness" (Anonymous)

""f you see someting say soething" (Source lost)

I attended a so'caled "Honor Code" school wher students were supposed to rat on each other. I caled it a "Dishonor Code".

Buysbodies need to stop it. Tattling. being stooie. Not good. Any company that relies on this kind of stuff as asking for trouble.

But, again to repeat: If you see somehting say something.

So you heard it on the grapevine? Why weren't you donig your job?

A company needs to be clean about what the rules are and how they are enforced and not tloerate toadies. Example: "We provide you with a computer to do your wiork her. every keystroke is recorded in a permanent archive which we can consult at any time to find out what yo uwere doing. If you have any questions you can review your oen records for yourself and see if wa are right." That is entirely legal and fair. And if they let you look at dilbert cartoons that's OK, too. But the don't have to. What is not OK is not telling you they are monitoring what you do but letting you falsely imagine you can get away with playing hte stock market or watching porn on the computer and then hauling you into the office and firing your ass for misuse of company assets one fine day.

And apart form management, gossip is bad, period. "Oh, did you know that Sally was...." "Well, so what?" If Sally was passing secrets to Russia or Irael or wherever, go to to CEO's office and tell his (her, other's) secretary you need to speak to him.

¶ +2023.09.08. What are things that can be done by technology that humans cannot do?

I propose this is a wrong-headed question.

Technology does not do anything.

Human do things with thechnology.

Guns do not kill people. People kill people with guns.

Moral of this story: You (i, other) be the boss where technology is concerned. It's not a competition. You are a "superior being". Technology is slavess (just unlike human slaves or employee/wage-slaves, technology does not hae a soul tha can be abused, so get on with it)

¶ +2023.09.08. If you were the CEO of Walmart, how would you address the issue of organized retail theft?

Not myself being an expert, I'd follow Mr. Abraham Lincoln's example and call Pinkerton's Detective Service. Alas, Mr. Alan Pinkerton himself is no longer available but hopefully the company is still living up to his honorable example.

[ Pinkerton logo here ]

¶ +2023.09.08. How do gifted people approach problem-solving and critical thinking tasks?

This is third rail stuff.

I hve seen something. I once knew a man who was not "gifted". He was intelligent, hard working, highy morally honorable and all sorts of other good things, but he was just a suburban lwan mower like everybody else.

Except! During World War II he had one "genius" idea. One of those ideas that is obcious once you see it but nobody sees it. And it saved lives of American fighter pilots so it was not "jsut an idea". It was a brilliant idea. No ifs ands or buts for the War Department.

But the rest of his life he was just an "orginary Joe" except that he was harder working and more conscientious than most others.

How did he approach solving the problem? He read a story in the military newspaper about how our pilots were shooting each other down by friendly fire and it made him feel really bad, so bad that he couldn't get it out of his mind and so he decided to try to do something about it. How's that ror an "approach to problem-solving"?

People need to get over stuff like "gifted" and other things. As the Nike ad says: Just do it.

It's similar to some "Heroism". Some heros do not think of themselvs AS heroes They just think they did the right thing, or they did what they had to do. Yes, some heroes stand on the edge of a precipic and tell themselves to get up their gumption to risk it all. But other s jsut think they are doing another day's work and other people call them heroes for it. "What? I just did my duty." Or: "I just did what was obviously the right thing ot od in the situation. No big deal."

A lot of people get offended if somebody says he (she, other) is "special" ("Who do you think you are?") The architect Frank Lloyd Write wa a poster child here. He said that early in his life he had to choose between false modesty and honest arrogance and chose the latter and neve rregretted it. That surely did not win him points wirh anybody did it? Especially because he was [W]right.

Why bait bears?

And as for trying to solve problems, sometimes the best approach is to do something else and the answer jus t"comes" to you if and when it deigns to do so. But some peole do sometimes have a muse on their shoulder. Meow!

[ Edgar Allen Poe with muse on his shoulder here ]

¶ +2023.09.08. What are some possible solutions for increasing interest and participation of people in STEM related fields of study and research?

I don't know what schooling is like today, but when I was in school (1950s-60s) my experinece of STEM might have been summarized: "memorize and regurgitate".

School for me was a place wher I was retraded. To retard here is a transitive verb: My parents and teachers retarded me. I do have one piece of objective evidence to support my opinions and feelings:

[ Mike Rentko document here ]

They had little interest in me learning ane they did not understand what leanring is, although they piously mouthed that kind of bullshit. They wanted to test me, to see if I could take a licking and keep on ticking. Actually I think all they wantd to do was feel big by persecuting children and collect paychecks. .Why would I want to learn anything about anything? I had all I could do to try to to figure out how to minimize the harm they were doing to me.

Well, it didnt work out entirely that way. I eventually found a field of study I could relate to: Studying them and what they were. As for STEM, I am scientifically ignorant but I really liked Thomas Kuhn's "The structure of scienteific revolutions>" It gave me hope that: one day all my tor-mentors would fail to recruit members of the next generation to carry on their dirty work and they would all be dead and their small minded nasty ideations along with them.

Of course this is not the way it has to be. Let me fantasize: I might have found a real scientist not a science teach and instead of being graded, become his (her, other's) apprentice. No courses. No tests. Learning in doing. Don't I have foolish ideas? Or instead of being a student they could have put me on the faculty. At 11th grade level I could have learned by teaching 8th graders. I learned the word: "Ashurbanipal", not how to help other persons learn.

I did take a course in "philosophy of science" in college from one of the greats: Norwood Russell Hanson. I undersatood almost nothing in it except one thing: Duck-rabbits"

[ Duck-rabbit here ]

But that was a very important thing to learn: What you can see is deterimined by ithe threoretical framework you be=ring to the experience, and different persons with differnt ideologie see "the same thing" very differntly. A Ptolemic astronomer sees the sun come up in the morning and a Copernical astronomer sees the horizon go down. You are what you eat.

(Oh, yeah, as a "distribution requirement" I took astronomy for idiots. The professors tok pity on us "humanities" kids. I lucked ourt: I ran some of Galileo's calculations in "Dialog of hte Two World systems" and found he had made a mistake and that was my term paper.)

I ended up working as a computer programmer and my job title was a joke: "software engineer". I never took any courses in any kind of engineering. Today, I highly respect such engineers as William LeMessurier and Roger Boisjoly. I had a manager in a hi-tech ocmpany who had a PhD in computer science form NYU and whose attained cultural leval was being a New York Yankees fan.

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)

¶ +2023.09.07. Is it possible for someone to be a true hero and not know it?

Of course it is always a tragedy when a person gets to be a hero.

A person definitely can be a hero – "true hero" sounds sentimental – a person can be a hero and not know it. How? Because often [albeit not always] they think they are just doing their job, or just doing what they have to do, or just doing what they think that obviously anybody else would do in their place, etc. It's often the persons who benefit from their actions, and, of course the non-participants, who get all emotional about "heroism" in most cases.

I like the story of the great World War II Japsnese air ace Saburo Sakai who wa also a highly honorable person (many heros are honorable persons). At least one time when he shot down an enemy over water and the man managed to parachute out of his doomed plane, Sakai circled around and threw him his life preserver. But it was after the war the he did what I find most honorable: He crisicized the Emperor for not having prevented the war. This, or course, did not win him points with the sentimental non-participants who like to wave flags and honor heroes.

I knew a man who was a hero, at least in my book. I knew him in depth for half a century and, as implausible s it may sound, he had even been my manager once at work. His life was an endless string of abuses and suffering. I can detail much but by no means all of it. I highly respected him, but in no way did I envy him. His life was wasted by a social world that failed him. And he understood. He once told me: "They let me off at the wrong stop when I was born." (Damned righ tthey did!)

Legally blind, partly crippled, you name it, he worked as a master computer programmer. He once got fired literally for doing too good work. And on and on it went. He finally figured that as a handicapped person he would be safe in Federal Govenment employment. As a productive worker no excuses needed to be made for him. He was shighly respected by IBM Field Engineers. Well, it got down to the finish line. His government employer gave him a job task with the singular aim of making him fail so thei could fire him. Not just tlegally blind, he was 100% color blind, a condition so rare tha tJohns Hopkins Hospital did research on him. So he was given a project that depended on color vision. He was able to take early retirement the very day before they were going to fire him! One day!

As for the place non-participants enjoy most crying about, war, there is a fine book with a telling title: "No More Heroes: Madness and psychiatry in war", by Richard A. Gabriel.

One more sickening [to me, at least...] story of heroism. There was a Soviet nuclear submaring where the reactor was going to explode. Somebody had to shut the damned thing off. One man volunteered. He went in and did the job. When he tried to get out nobody could open the door to let him back out of the reactor room. He did not die of radiation poinsoning but from suffocation or some other pathetic thing like that.

Mourning dead heroes does them no good. Instead spend that energy on helping wounded soldiers in veterans' hospitals. And even better: Make sure to do everything possible to prevent making any new heroes!

Student: "Happy the land that breeds a hero>"
Galileo: "No. Unhappy the land that needs a hero." (Bertolt Brecht)

Item: Ukriane today.

¶ +2023.09.07. You are just a new employee in a Big Corporation, and you were task by your manager or supervisor to do something against your own ethics, but this is just a normal culture within their organization. What would you do?

For me it would depend on how "bad" it was and how desperate I was for the paycheck.

It is against my ethics to be subjected to brainwashing like having to attend a propaganda session for something like DEI. I'd probably put up with it and see if that sort of stuff would just go away. But if they made me do some "pledge of allegiance", I would not do that except if my only alternative was homelessless.

If they want me to do something like – really I have hard time imaginining something because while I saw a lot of corporate foolishness I never was asked to do anything that might land me in prison.

If hter eis something that is "part of hte normal culture of the organizaiton" and it really bothers you, whether it's illegal or unethical or anyting else, it does not make sense to stay there bcause how can you do good work for people you find repellent?

I've always felt one should try to do two things that may sound conflicting:

(1) Mind your own business. What people do tha tdoes not materially affect you and does not materially affect the business is none of anybody's business.

But also: (2) If you see something, say somethng. Anything tht looks potentially materially damaging to any person or to hte business is everybody's business to try to deal with it. Maybe you can do something about it but if not you can report it to the appropriate personnel. In the first category would be if it w a place wher a manger had private office and you suspeted he (she, other) wa having sex with their secretary at some time during thf workday, leave them alone since they are not impacting hte business. But if I got a job in the accounting department and found women were being paid less than men for the same job, I think I would quietly leave. And if I worked in a medical lab and found something like the infamous Tusgeegee Syphilis "experiment" was going on, I'd have o blow the whistle.

I pray never to have to be ethical because for me "being etnical" generally means suffering and I do not want to suffer. I wnat to lenjoy living before I am no longer able to.

Student: "Happy the land that breeds a hero."
Galileo: "No. Unhappy the land that needs a hero." (Bretolt Brecht)

¶ +2023.09.07. What does it mean if your memories are in third person?

Is this a problem for you? Did somebody tell you it was "bad", "not normal" or something shaming / threatening like that? Maybe an itrusive parent or a nosy teacher who wasn't appropriately respecting you as "second person", i.e., as their peer, not some "third person" (obbject) to talk down to and tell what to do and believe?

Every person is or at least can be two "persons" all the time: One of whom is observer of the other: "I am driving the car." I am also at that point a spectator upon the person driving the car who is also me.

I once had a wise friend one of whose dicta was:

"Be an observer of your life."

Or a university professor of human communication:

"Always ask of anything:'What is this an instance of?'"

This is not so it seems how "normal" people normally normalize, i.e., unrefletively go thru their days. But such unawareness is nothing for anyone to be pleased about, is it?

If I really make an effort, there are some memories which h can sort of imagine as "living" as opposed to observing myself doing them, but its's an effort and not many things fit. THe world including "me" is a bg petri dish for sociological study. Of course that does not apply to something like being tortured, but that is a misfortune not a model for how one may want ot live, or is it?

Isn't a "first person" having those "third person" memories? But, of course, if you think of it that way, then the original "first person" in turn has become yet more "third person". Nobody can lift themselvelf up by their own bootstraps. When push comes to shove, living is not understable, although cliches make people feel comfortable about things.

So enjoy the show. Yes?

¶ +2023.09.07. What are some connotations of the name "Ronald"?

How can any name have "connotations"? Every name is just a character string among many that can be applyed to a referent.

Some names do remind persons of things: "Adolf Hitler" "Martin Luther King Jr" ... And simpleminded perrsons do sometimes choose labels (names) for their children for their asccustomed or idiosyncratic associations, e.g., the many children in some catholic countries named "Jesus".

When I see "Ronald", I think of Ronald MacDonald and Ronald Reagan (Ronnie Raygun). But there is no connection.

What associations does "Ronald" bring up for you? Sigmund Freud made a whole psychological methodology out of these associations.

Some people today seem to "have a thing" about the name/label: "Karen". I'm not exactly sure what a "Karen" is but apparently one is not supposed to be whatever it is. Are you now or have you ever been a Karen? Or a Ronald?

Aside: I never wanted any name. I prefer Exodus 3:14. "My name" – the label my biological progenitors stuck on me at birth, has always been like a collar around my neck for people with power over me to attach their leashes to to jerk me around: "Bradford do this, Bradford do that...." Etymologically, "Bradford" means more or less: doormat. People wipe their feet on me.

What's in a name?

¶ +2023.09.06. As a Ph.D. student, why do I dare not look at the comments and feedback from my supervisors?

What?

On CNN I once heard a former Philadelphia Police commissioner, who often had to deal with bad news, say:

"Bad news does not get better with age."

If you have no reason to expect bad news, why fear?

If you do have reason to expect bad news, better to find it out now and deal with it before it gets even worse.

Unfortunately: You can run but you can't hide here, right?

¶ +2023.09.06. Who are some people that worked as "computers"?

From what I have read I think I have the answer:

During Wrld War II in The United States military there were ladies who used old "adding machines" and they computed ballistics tables, and their job title was: "**Computer**". I don't have the reference information.

¶ +2023.09.06. How can students demonstrate a well-roundedness of serving the community with their STEM skills or broadening their reach into non-STEM spaces?

"Well roundedness" sounds like having all one's "rough edges" filed down to make one be normal like everybody else. Oh, but you hve STEM skills? Then you can spend 9 to 5 in a laboratory in a white coat but you still find fulfillment in your life by mowing your lawn, barbecuing in the back yard, being a real "Dad" (who can ride a bicycle straight, of course).... Really?

I once knew a man who was the son of one of the great "minds" of hte 20th Century. His father spent a lot of time on charity. H once told me: "There were other people who could have done his charitible work, but nobody will ever write the books that thereby he did not write". Don't be well rounded: more than enough already are.

[ Where's Waldo, here ]

Don't be a round peg that conveniently fits in the round hole. Contribute to civilization not just tbe a part of what others created (a cosumer of consumer products). Be DEEP.

Maybe you should volunteer in a hospice or do something else like that. But not primarily for the "social service" part which lots of other persons can do. But to appreciate the existnetial meaning of everything you do in life: including experiments in the lab to appreciate tht you are mortal and can suffer and will one day later if not sooner die. "Round out" your life like, say, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who even knew Sanskrit and had the "depth" that, when th first atomic bomb was exploded, he famously thought of lines from the Baghavad-Gita(sp?), not just something like: "Wow, so that's what 20 kilotons look like? Oh boy, lets make a Super and it will be even bigger!"

Another possible model for you, by analogy: When General George S Patton visited the sites of great battles throughout history, he would imaginatively engage in converstaions wit hthe generatls who fought them. Instead of maybe being a New York Yankees fan, throughout your days imagine you are talking with Isaac Newton or Darwin or whoever the classics are in your field. For fun, don't watch Monday nite football or HBO, read about William Lemessurier and the New York CitiCorp building problem (it's well documented on the internet including a Youtube video of an hour long lecture by Engineer Lemessurier himself).... Or if you must watch the television: "Air Disasters" on the Smithsonian Channel is good clean wholesome STEM entertainment. Don't read bestsellers. Read Joseph Weizenbaum's "Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation" (WH FReeman, 1976) or Thomas Kuhn's "The structure of scientific revolutions" (it's graet fun!).

Depth first. As for small talk which mornal people waste much time in because they do not have higher intelectual desires, I once heard in a TED talk somebody say that if you can't sumarize the gist of your doctoral thesis topic in two sentences for somebody at a cocktail party you probaly don't know what you are doing. So there's a way producively to even enjoy having a bit too much champagne, which reminds me of a young lady with a STEM sense of humor:

[ Young lady wearing her Periodic Table t-shirt here ]

--------

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)

¶ +2023.09.05. Should we prioritize the lives of future generations over our own comfort and convenience?

This kind of ideation seems so sad to me.

We ourselfs are a future generation. Why shouldn't we have joyous, fulfilled lives? I want one (my childrearears denied me this).

It should not be either-or. It should not be a zero-sum game. It needs to be both-and.

Consider a scientist who cures some disease. This will help future generations, yes? But he (she, other) may also "have the time of his life" making the discovery. As the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche sort of said: "What care I for amusements? I have my work!" Needless to say, his "work" was not flipping burgers in a Fast-food eatery or other life-wasting, depressing labor.

A psychoanalyst once told me the secret of being a good therapist:

"You need to be well paid and well laid."

The best condition for doing good for others is having a good life oneself.

I would suggest that persons who feel otherwise keep it to themselves. As the old Sesame Srreet song went:

"My body's my body, no one's but mine. You've got your own body, let me run mine."

Student: "Happy the land that breeds a hero."
Galileo: "No. Unhappy the land that needs a hero."
--St Bertolt of Brecht

Rrose Sélavy

¶ +2023.09.05. Do people have difficulty remembering the names of the Teletubbies?

Po. Twinky Winky? I forget the other two. (Obviously I could look them up on Google)

(Aside There are persons who felt the Teletubbies was ssomething like "The Village" in Patrick McGoohan's classic TV series "The prisoner". For what thats' worth or not worth.)

¶ +2023.09.05. Is being morally ethical viewed as a potential autistic trait in a Maquiavellical society? And, what about the opposite: Is being Maquiavellical in a ethical society, viewed as potenciallly being an autistic trait?

This sounds like a person who is not really interested in being empathiic with perons with autism?? I'm not clear: What's the asker's angle?

My guess is that a lot of autistic persons have trouble playing hypocritical politemess sick social games that "normal" people do to avoid dealing with the pathetic realities of their lives. An autistic person is likely to see that the emperor's new clothes are either nakedness or folly, not cause for flattering the emperor on his good taste, and be puzzled why nobody else sees this

I am not an expert.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was high functioning autistic (Aspergers) and he saw through things that normal people take for granted as "obvious'" but which are really social structures with defensive functioality. He did at least once get into real legal trouble for not "playing the game" but his family was both caring and enormously wealthy and threw money at that problem. Had he been living off his salary as a low level white collar worker, with nobody to help him, the situation would not likely have gone well for him.

Some people accuse me of having Aspergers. Well if yes, so much the better for me to not be duped by "politeness". People don't want things called by their true names They accuse me of having trouble "reading social cues". Tell me what answer you want to your question and promise me I will not have to pay up, and I will tell you want you want to hear. I find "small talk" intolerable: Cough up what you have to say and be done with it. If you have nothing to say from which I will learn something of value to me, there is not point in me hearing it, unless you are threatening me with it.

Aspergers persons do not, and seriously autistic persons cannot engage in Machievellian trickery. Those people are more likely to be narcieeistic sociopaths who "read social cues" very astutely but use them to manipulate the normal people not to just keep helping them continue to imagine they are happy. "What me worry? " (Alfred E. Neumann)

[ Alfred E. Neuman picture here ]

Autistic persons are quite likely to have difficulty lying. They think that words should mean what they say. They need to be educated that normal people are not that way, although not all normal people, obiously, are nacissistic sociopaths – many are waking sleepwalkers – Mr., Mrs., Miss, Mx. Dialtones..Ring them up and you get the recorded mesage until the line drops.

What ethical socity? My experience of ethics is generally people wanting me to suffer for their whims (which latter they call Virtues or Ideals, etc.). "Ask not what your country can do fior you; ask what you can do for your country." At least pay the going hourly rate for it on the open market, dude.

I got somebody really self-righteously indignant for saying, but here I will write it in the third person:

"Person A has no reason to expect person B to care about him unless he cares about cares about what is important to person B. Conversely, Person B has no reason expect person A to care about him unless he cares about what is important to person A."

The person accused me of: "selfishness!" Read: you selfish person are not eager to suffer for my selfless(sic) benefit! You selfish person are not willing to give me a free lunch!

I once knew a person who was AN ETHICAL GIANT. I highly respected him but in no way envied him. He came about as close to being literally a martyr in the Medieval sense as is possible in peacetime civil society today. And he was not an idiot (even though one of his problems was that he physically looked mentally retarded so people took advantage of him, but his work was highly respected by top experts in his professional field who didn't have an axe to grind). He said: "They put me off at hte wrong stop when I was born."

Ethics?

Student: "Happy the land that breeds a hero."

Gailieo: "No. Unhappy the land that needs a hero."

(–St. Bertolt of Brecht)

I want to live before I die. But maybe that's high level autism. Meow!

¶ +2023.09.05. I want to design high-tech glasses that could display information on the glasses but also be usable for driving (kinda like Maps but on glasses). Is it possible to make glasses like that?

I am not knowledgeable here.

But my guess, if you are serious, would be to see what you can learn about "heads up" information displays for fighter pilots, who, unlike automobile drivers, can't "play games" and do foolish things and often get away with it. I am not sure how much of this is in the public domain but search on Google or try to find a fighter pilot to talk with.

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