InstaPunk Returns

  Michael Smith He has about 10,000 more FB friends than I do. Just posted this on his Facebook page: You posted recently about the problem of what we can really do as individuals to deal with problems you describe capably and suggested a two-part format for addressing this hole in the communication challenge. I replied with this: “There’s an alternate universe to be built out there. For all of us who care about the ones who will come later, the ones who are kids now and the ones who may only be a gleam in your children’s eyes. A deliberate linkage of all that we consider best and inspirational, both intellectually and creatively, including pure entertainments. We have all been taught (programmed?) to regard ourselves as vectors, pushed by economic (egononomic?) needs, working alone with friends, acquaintances, acolytes as support for our labors. But we are limiting ourselves by an engrained habit of clinging to customary means of attracting notice to ourselves. I know there are pr...

Exhibit 1. The Myth of Scientific Omniscience Where to start. There are so many places to start, all with consistently alarming intimations of one deep problem. The inference is seditious of rationality as we have deified it in science. I’m going to show you some of the more accessibly evocative starting points, not to drag you into the weeds of higher mathematics, but to stress some elements of simplicity that overthrow the fallacy called Artificial Intelligence. Bear with me. Just look for now. I’ll make connections as we proceed after viewing the items below. Exhibit 2. Turing Test Fallacy Exhibit 3. The Proof of Digital Inferiority (It works. Click where indicated on screen.) Exhibit 4. The Implementation Overreach Exhibit 5. The Implicatuons of “Sensitive Dependence” Exhibit 6. The Measurement Problem Exhibit 7. The Illusion of Control Exhibit 8. The Hammer/Nail Delusion Exhibit 9. The Impossibility of Artificial Intelligence Exhibit 10. The Oversimplification Problem Exhibit 11. ...

  Our own Queen Iris Stairway to Heaven A Whiter Shade of Pale (Procol Harum) You Don’t Own Me (Leslie Gore) All I Knead (The Hollies) Take on Me (Aha!) Grand Prize Winner: Bohemian Catsody Got your mind right, yet? Good. Happy Hump Day .

  This was going to be a Facebook joke, playing on the contrast between the haughty New Yorker grand dame and the plainspoken Trump 2.0 disdain for reflexive mass media TDS. When I looked Jane Mayer up in Wikipedia I discovered the need to write this post. The woman is an archetype of the particular kind of box highly influential lefties in the nation’s press come from. They are by no means representative of the nation they purport to understand and cover objectively in their reporting and opinionating. Back in April of this year, I wrote a post called “ TDS is a coalition not a monolith .” It described criteria that define various ways in which Trump haters are limited in their knowledge of American life despite  levels of education, power, and prosperity that might seem guaranteed to give them broad insight into their countrymen as a whole. Limiting factors include the isolating effects of being among the overpaid and over-indulged, the vertical siloing effects of geography...