apparently today is the 25th anniversary of the release of The Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin. Could be wrong. But anyway, putting it on, strikes me that they ahve mcuh more cogent thoughts about AI safety than any of the rationalists/techbros #ai#flaminglips#techbros#rationalists#rationalism
Apparently within Hinduism, some consider eclipses to be pretty terrible events and take great pains to not see them. I learned this from a student, who was worried because I had given an extra credit assignment to observe the lunar eclipse and the upcoming solar eclipse.
I'm not religious myself, but I teach at a Catholic school, so I feel like if we're talking about one religion, we should talk about all of them. I"ll have to think about how to deal with this respectfully in the future...
@sundogplanets Yep and it is getting worse owing to popular Gurus peddling pseudoscience and superstitions. During Solar eclipse many people choose to stay indoors and don't consume food!
Indian rationalists have long struggled against it.
Apparently in Delhi's siege during 1857 mutiny against Raj some soldiers gave up fighting during solar eclipse of 18 September considering it bad omen..
First, the #categorization of #political views along a single left-right #axis is almost #useless. This has long been known, and alternatives exist that present a much more accurate picture, but the traditional #media is #addicted to "#left this" and "#right that" and is lazy, so they'll probably never get better.
In a Pournelle chart, those three are more easily distinguished because they each have different values on both of the axes of the chart. They form a trajectory from the chart center towards the upper-right extremity.
The #labels for the axes are "#statism" (horizontal) and "#rationalism" (vertical). These aren't as trivializable as "liberal" and "conservative", so again the lazy media are unlikely to pay attention.
Those labels sound strange, but their meanings are clearer.
If you think we can solve every problem, if only we had the correct government program, or civilian association supporting it, or work hard enough, or if we #redistribute#resources#logically, etc, then you fall at the top end of this scale.
If you are #skeptical that these sorts of large-scale, centrally-planned #interventions can solve social problems that have existed in #human#societies for hundreds or thousands of years, then you fall towards the bottom end of the #rationalism axis.
If you think about your #beliefs in these two areas, you might find yourself #surprised at where you fit on the chart, and what other belief systems fall near you. It's a lot more #insightful than the #meaningless left-right single axis.
An anonymous letter-writer is targeting progressive Kannada writers and liberals
While many of the writers are accustomed to getting threats, this time the person/s writing the letters, who signs off as ‘Sahishna Hindu’, seems more tenacious than others, persisting with it for months on end.
"I Should Not Allow Myself to be Scared": Narendra Dabholkar on Facing Threats from Religious Organisations
In this extract from the first volume of the translation, titled 'The Case for Reason: Understanding the Anti-superstition Movement', Dabholkar recounts the pressures he faced from religious organisations, such as the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti and Sanatan Sanstha as well as by members of the BJP and Shiv Sena. (From August 2018)
I listened to your fascinating interview (1) with #ThomasZimmer. (1)
Also, I had a brief look at your #Wikipedia entry.
When I read in the shownotes that this was about your book, which I haven't read, "What Tech Calls Thinking" is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual..
(1)
Is This Democracy:
25. The Ideology of #SiliconValley vs the Idea of Democracy – with #AdrianDaub
For about five years, I was swept up into a cult-like ideology called “Rationalism”, via the writings of cult leader Eliezer Yudkowsky on his website Less Wrong. I’m ready to talk about it.
"If you study philosophy at a British or American #university, your #education in the history of the subject will likely be modest. Most universities teach #Plato and #Aristotle, skip about two millennia to #Descartes, zip through the highlights of #Empiricism and #Rationalism to #Kant, and then drop things again until the 20th Century, where #Frege and #Russell arise from the mists of the previous centuries’ Idealism ...”