If we were to survey the journalists whose work is respected for being great, we’d find – in general – that it’s the “investigative journalists” and the crisis reporters that dominate the landscape. The historians-as-reporters, such as Herodotus, and SLA Marshall, are also obviously important, even when we factor in later information revealing SLA Marshall as a phoney.
An AI doesn’t matter, right? It’s just garbage in/garbage out, there’s no moral value to it except what I choose to define. Right?
There is not much to say.
Back in the mid 90s I had an unusual experience, in which I was caught in the blast-corona of Operation Sundevil – the Secret Service’s attempt to gain relevance in cybersecurity [wik]. My role was small but it made me realize that the government, at that time, was ignorant enough that they could easily be stampeded into doing stupid things, a form of “terrorism by stupid cop” which I later re-framed as “a denial of clue attack.”
I’ve been struggling with a problem: “what happens if someone tells an AI to ‘code a better version of yourself?’ and – whoosh – the singularity happens?
There is a book that I have returned to over and over again, for years. It fascinates me, because it exposes a lot of philosophical problems that I had never considered.
This is brilliant. It distills philosophical enquiry down to its essentials: fuck it.
This is a very “on point” meme for me.
I have really been going to town on the Tides of History podcast. Wow, it’s interesting.
One of the most influential books in my life has been Robert Paul Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism [stderr] [wc]. It clarified my politics, to me, and made me able to understand why it was that I was so suspicious of politicians of all stripes. Taken along with Popkin’s History of Skepticism from Savanarola to Bayle [stderr] [wc] it made me feel as though I suddenly understood some things differently and in a more powerful way: skepticism, nihilism, and anarchism are all an alternative to politics or philosophy as usually practiced. That’s a dramatic claim but please let me try to justify it.