There is so much going on in this realm. Beyond the more common ranting there are a lot of very intelligent, thoughtful talks and conversations going. The problem with putting much here is that these become dated fairly fast, so the most recent will beat the top.
250311 Mo Gawdat’s AI Knows What’s wrong WithHumanity This ntalk is a brilliant wise and compassionate talk by a real expert in the field. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43ivaC5SuKE
250310 Why Intelligent People Avoid Small Talk (And What They do Instead) Excerpts from the beginning of the discussion of Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique in the link below. This reinforced what I’ve always found to be true for me. I have often been thought to be anti-social, which in this context, I am. I have a home with common social gatherings, during much of which I spend upstairs in my room alone, with occasional sallies down into the random noise.
Friedrich Nietzsche once walked out of a dinner party while someone was discussing the weather. Not because he was rude, though many thought him so, but because he believed something profound. That every moment spent in shallow conversation was a moment stolen from true living. In 1879, he wrote to a friend, I am sick of these empty exchanges where people’s mouths move but their souls remain silent. Today, over 140 years later, we spend an average of 2.5 hours per week engaged in small talk about the weather, about weekend plans, about the mundane details that fill our daily lives. (Note – ChatGPT says that while it varies widely, adding up workplace and social environments, the average American spends from 8-16 hours a week in small talk. This seems more likely to me, but then I’m a person who can’t deal with much small talk.) The kind of talk that would have made Nietzsche walk out of not just one dinner party but a thousand. But here’s what’s fascinating. Modern psychology is beginning to suggest that Nietzsche wasn’t just being a difficult philosopher. Research shows that individuals with higher emotional intelligence and cognitive complexity tend to avoid small talk, not because they’re antisocial, but because they’re hungry for something deeper. Think about the last time you left a social interaction feeling energized rather than drained. Chances are it wasn’t after discussing the weekend forecast or commiserating about Monday mornings. It was likely after a conversation that made you think, that challenged you, that revealed something real about the person across from you. The truth is, what we call being social today might be exactly what’s keeping us from genuine human connection. And in an age where loneliness has become an epidemic, perhaps it’s time to revisit what this 19th-century philosopher knew. That the path to meaningful relationships isn’t paved with pleasant nothings but with the courage to dive deeper. But before you dismiss this as the ramblings of a long dead philosopher who didn’t understand modern social necessities, consider that some of the most successful leaders and innovators of our time are known for skipping the small talk. They’ve discovered what Nietzsche knew. That time is too precious for conversations that neither challenge nor change us. The problem with polite conversation in the summer of 1869, Nietzsche penned a remarkable letter to his sister Elizabeth that revealed his growing disdain for what society deemed polite conversation. The irony of 19th-century salon culture wasn’t lost on him. These gatherings, ostensibly designed to foster intellectual exchange, had become breeding grounds for what he called the great emptiness conversations so devoid of substance that they actually prevented genuine human connection. During one particularly tedious evening, he observed to a friend, we have invented hundreds of ways to avoid saying anything at all. This observation finds striking parallels in our modern world. Today’s office, kitchen conversations, networking events and social media exchanges often follow the same patterns. Nietzsche criticized. Studies have shown that the average professional spends up to 40% of their workday engaged in what researchers call empty speech acts, conversations that serve no purpose beyond maintaining a facade of sociability. The cognitive toll of these interactions is measurable. Research from the University of California has found that engaging in superficial conversations activates stress responses in the brain, similar to those triggered by mild social anxiety. In contrast, deeper conversations stimulate areas associated with reward and pleasure, the same areas that light up when we eat good food or experience genuine joy. Nietzsche’s critique went beyond mere complaint. He saw these polite exchanges as symptoms of a deeper cultural malaise, our fear of authentic human connection. People would rather speak forever about nothing, he wrote, than risk a moment of genuine revelation. This observation eerily prefigures our modern condition, where we’ve developed increasingly sophisticated ways to stay perpetually connected while avoiding genuine connection. The cost of this social pattern isn’t just philosophical, it’s practical. Modern workplace studies show that teams who engage in more substantive communications. The question then becomes it, one that modern psychologists are only now beginning to understand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZfESQaBw2c&t=390s
250302 This is the recent Sam Harris Making Sense podcast with historian Niall Ferguson on Trump, Ukraine, and the Future of Geopolitics. Those of you who are familiar with Sam Harris may be surprised by the positive things Niall says about some of Trump’s actions. Note: the YT versions are only part of the show. For the complete episode you need to subscribe. Sam needs subscribers to keep putting these out and has the policy of offering free access to anyone who contacts his site and asks for that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGFjDdN_tm4
250212 Did Trump Lose? Shocking Proof Trump Rigged 2024 Election w/ Greg Palast. Greg is a serious forensic investigator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LN65qFUDDo
Excerpt from Bright Morning Star by scientist and sci-fi author Simon Morden (I really enjoyed his The Samuil Petrovitch Trilogy), This is a piece of fun fiction.
This novella is an allegorical tale about an alien probe being sent down to the Earth from the mothership. It is intelligent and programmed to seek, collect, and transmit back all the information it finds. It has no knowledge whatsoever about what it will find. It lands in a war zone where one side of a civil war is being sponsored by a nearby powerful state. It sees partisans being murdered by the invaders. It has no idea what to think about any of this. It meets and makes a few human ‘friends.’ Via the internet, it quickly learns many languages and much else as it scans the vast cyberspace of humanity. When the news of its arrival becomes public it turns into a massive media event and the inevitable conspiracy theories quickly multiply. About halfway through the book, in talking about our robots to he it states the following: “Their makers-you-and my makers-who I couldn’t tell you a great deal about- seem to be very similar in some ways. You both had the urge to explore beyond the limits of your biological lives, to examine and weigh and measure, to compare and contrast, to record and preserve, to expand knowledge and understanding. My makers found you before you found them. That was all. You wouldn’t have sent one of your primitive, barely capable robots to learn about them. You would have sent something like me. I was different from you. Clearly, very different. But I wasn’t different from the things that you made. I was comprehensible. My mission too. If I had landed some hundred years earlier, I would have been most probably attacked by everyone I might meet (look up, War of the Worlds, look up Orson Wells, look up H. G. Wells). NASA and the USSR and Hollywood had normalized me in the century between. I was, to some – most – people, something you took video of, rather than try to shoot. Why, then, would some still try to destroy me? They had the same information as everyone else – a new friend had told me that this was part of the global information sharing system, and that claim appeared to be accurate. I wondered what would happen if I typed in her name. Then I did type in her name and discovered the media. I found video and pictures of me standing with my friend in front of a hospital. That at least was true. But many of the words, the words written about me and the words spoken about me were false. Some of the things I categorically denied were being promoted as true. I was the advance party of an alien race bent on world domination. I was going to steal your air, your water, your women. Why would anyone claim I was going to steal your women? Women were free agents. They were not ‘your’ women in any proprietary way. I didn’t understand. I tried to find out what role the media was supposed to play in your society. They were purportedly to disseminate factual information in a concise and timely manner. But as I read and watched more, their secondary function, to provide opinion – and I was unable to ascertain whose opinion or how it was derived, over a nebulous and ill-defined proposition of a position – appeared to dominate. The media were both presenting distorted facts and then telling people what to believe based on incomplete or inaccurate data, while maintaining that they were doing the opposite. I have found this extraordinary. I couldn’t comprehend how such a situation had arisen, yet it was clear that the media, had a central responsibility for information distribution. They were allowed extra rights to gather information. They had a special position within society. Many of the people who appeared on the broadcast media were high-status individuals. That I couldn’t quite work out what they actually did had to be down to my lack of awareness. And that was where I started to understand. You were not rational beings. I had assumed that given the same information, each of you would reach the same conclusion. This was not so….. Some people prefer to believe the fictions rather than the facts. Yet they manage to function within the broader society, interacting with each other and acknowledging that most people they met didn’t share their basis of reality. I was a logical creature. I believe my inputs. You were not, and you didn’t. Or rather, you mitigated your inputs through a filter of your beliefs, and the more divergent or contradictory a particular fact was, the more likely you were to distort, misinterpret or disregard it. And some went further: seemingly widely accepted and uncontroversial facts were deemed part of a program of deliberate misinformation if they had the potential to undermine a rigid belief system. You had landed on your moon, taken photographs, recorded short movies, collected samples of rock and left equipment there. Some of the men who left their footprints in the lunar dust were still alive. The rocks they had retrieved were still available for examination. Yet some insisted that none of these events had happened, that it was impossible for them to have happened, and for everyone involved – tens of thousands of people – were engaged in a conspiracy to prevent the truth from becoming known. This was just an unimportant and relatively trivial example. Far more serious ones existed, where genuine existential threats were being ignored or argued against, simply due to primacy of opinion over fact. If you continue this way, you will inevitably do serious and possibly irreparable harm to your civilization, your biosphere, and your planet. That there were a great many of you multiplied the damage that you could do. But you had made it this far, despite everything. Your constant wars, your lack of knowledge, your inadequate capacity to reason, your violent tribalism and your perverse individualism. Soon, you would be heading for the stars, if only you survive that long. I tried to calculate some probabilities of that, but none of my predictions showed any substantial chance for your species. Perhaps I was missing some factors that would improve the odds. I would have to talk to more of you, and not just those who appeared to benignly tolerate my presence. I would have to talk to those who saw me as an enemy. That would be interesting. It goes on as he comes to understand his own processes and role in our world. He figures out how to manipulate the media and political systems for our own good. Like I said, a fun allegorical novel. He wonders if he himself was programmed by his makers.