The Consequence of Matters

  Milan Kundera died this week. He was a Czech writer who was prominent back in the Cold War and seems to have been slotted permanently into that increasingly antiquated niche. He's most famous for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but my favorite of his works is The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It begins with a meditation on a photograph of a party apparatchik as he is slowly erased from history. That's certainly a Cold War image, but it hides a deeper concern. Kundera was deeply concerned with the relationship between culture, history, memory and identity. He believed nations, especially small ones, needed to preserve their culture and language. The identity of a people and a civilization is reflected and concentrated in what has been created by the mind, and that is culture. But, as with everything Kundera wrote about, there are ambiguities. Kundera was also deeply hostile to the idea of cultures being confined by national boundaries. The nations of central Europe, unde...

I watched "I'm Not There" yesterday, a film about the many sides and lives of Bob Dylan, played by 6 actors (it's art). It isn't a biopic, it's an abstract Dylan. Childhood Dylan is a small black child who tells everyone his name is Woody Guthrie and sings songs about unions and racism but in 1959. He's Dylan the faker. Outlaw Dylan is Richard Gere playing Billy the Kid. Rock and Role Dylan is played by Cate Blanchett in a stunning performance. The origin story of Cate Blanchett Dylan is Dylan going electric. It is explained by the notion that Dylan turned jaded and skeptical on protest, it is useless to try to change things because you can't change things. I think Cate Blanchett Dylan has a point. In the early 19th century, it was Catholics instead of Muslims who were going to force Papal rule on us rather than Sharia law. An influx of Irish, Italian and German Catholics changed the demographics in Protestant America and Protestant America didn't ...

Aristotle believed the heart was all important and the brain was simply a radiator to keep the heart cool. Descartes, impressed by the hydraulic action of fountains in the royal gardens, developed a hydraulic analogy for the action of the brain. Thomas Henry Huxley thought of the brain as analogous to a steam engine. Now we think brains are computers and so, therefore, computers are brains. However, leaving aside the fact that if an argument is true, the converse argument does not have to be true, the fact is that there is exactly zero evidence and exactly zero theoretical reason to believe that computers can be what brains are. To believe it nonetheless is an article of faith, not an article of science. There are, in fact, some reasons to believe that they are not. The computer/brain analogy is compelling because computers are able to do some things we find extremely difficult and to which we attribute high intelligence to people who can do those things. Playing chess, for example. Mo...

  A brief list of Republicans who do not favor cutting Social Security. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Johnson denies President Biden’s claim that Republicans want to cut Social Security. But after saying this he then called Social Security a “legalized Ponzi scheme” and says that Congress should no longer automatically pay Social Security benefits each year but rather decide each year whether to pay them and how much the benefit should be. “That doesn’t mean putting on the chopping block,” Johnson told local radio. “That doesn’t mean cutting Social Security. But it does mean prioritizing lower priority spending.” Senator Mike Lee (R-UT): Mike Lee also denies President Biden’s claim that Republicans want to cut Social Security. But running for Senate in 2010 he told supporters: “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.” Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA): Steve Scalise also denies President Biden’s claims that Republicans want ...

  The New York Times Magazine has a long piece on the development of Tesla's "full self driving" software. It is pretty interesting, but one thing stood out to me. Musk said straight up that he is deliberately using his customers as test subjects in the development process. It stood out because as far as I can see, it is blatantly illegal. Because of the Nuremberg trials, the Tuskegee experiments, and quite a few other events where dangerous experiments were performed on people against their will or even without their knowledge, human subjects research is strictly regulated by the Department of Health and Human Services under the Common Rule. The rule is a little vague about how you insure the rules are being obeyed, it simply mandates that you will. Most universities and research labs comply using something called an Institutional Review Board. All research proposals must be submitted to the IRB and it will conduct oversight throughout the project. An IRB can force signi...

  "Why would Meta do this? The company seems to understand that Trump’s attacks undermine democracy and can destabilize the country." Because Mark Zuckerberg has made it abundantly clear for years that he believes nothing whatsoever should stand in the way of monetizing the users of Facebook for advertising purposes. He does not believe in privacy. In 2010, he said the idea of privacy is no longer a social norm, and that we no longer have an expectation of privacy. That was to justify a change of Facebook's privacy settings that dramatically increased the amount of personal information exposed to the world on Facebook. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group, said at the time that "...the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data." Facebook has not changed since then. There has been one scandal after another stemming directly from this cavalier approach to your privacy. Each ti...

  At this point, the secret documents scandal leads me to two observations. 1. This has been said ad nauseum but bears repeating because information dies if it isn't. What Biden and Pence did is in no way comparable to what Trump did. Both Biden and Pence appear to have mistakenly packed some classified documents at the end of their time in office. In both cases, it was their people who found the documents, and their lawyers who immediately contacted the National Archives and the Department of Justice to return them. Both are cooperating with the investigations. I could believe that Trump deliberately took them (he has a fetish for souvenirs) or that he was waiting for the election to be overthrown until the last possible moment and they just got swept up in the rush of mad packing when he left. I lean a bit toward deliberate simply because in the Trump hotel bar in New York, there is an empty folder marked secret and a document marked confidential publicly displayed along with a t...