Whither flies the free bird?

The Watercooler
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:thinking: hm. I don’t think we have to worry, Lacan is dead and Zizek is in a terrible state.

Speaking of space opera, desolate futures, Russians, things in outer space and the Void …

I feel that I should give an explanation for what I am about to share, but let me just boil it down to this. I tossed this to my peers in a seminar and generated the question of, Does Buddhism have a void? Does Deleuze have a void?, because in the Mahayana world, nirvana ends up being translated often as “the Void,” and this was causing me a lot of trouble. There was an “empty space there” in my peers’ minds, OK?

Now, I mostly deal with ideas flowing across cultures through the medium (s) of visual art and “moving image media,” so this is grounded in film. I was called upon to defend my choice of a reading, and I could only say, “well I like it. It’s very masculine prose.” Fortunately, ‘the boss’ liked it too, and said, “yes, he gives us the phallus. Myself, I enjoyed seeing Zizek takes the p*** out of Tarkovsky.”

We laughed. It was a roomful of girls. That’s all I can say. Normally, we wouldn’t reduce ourselves, but when probably still 99% of everything we read comes from men, we have to have a sense of humour about this.

As for Musk, I don’t pay attention to him. I’d much rather spend time thinking about Ad Reinhart and his sense of space.

His Abstract Painting no. 4, owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc. 1961, is still my favourite.

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I found Dr. Autry, the speaker from the Thunderbird School of Global Management ( :face_with_spiral_eyes:), quite fascinating to listen to, though he absolutely creeped me out. He seems like a collage of all the villains in Stark, Ben Elton’s 1989 futurist novel.

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Fun book, written in Fremantle at a time I was hanging out there. He was dating a girl from a local band. I never met him though.

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“Factor that into the benefit equation and things get a lot more balanced. I mean, I’m assuming this is discussed in these communities (…)”

It is, the main issue being that the more factors one includes to make it balanced, the less usable it becomes due to the increased complexity and the incommensurability of the factors involved. For some idea of the weirdness in trying to do this, see (already) W. D. Ross’ Foundations of Morality, 1939. In that particular case better off sticking to Aristotle scholarship methinks. :smiley:

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Yes, makes sense. But that also shows up the whole “mathematics” angle as useless.

In physical modelling, you test the models by running them backwards and forwards, checking your ability to predict the future by comparing the model with the known facts of the past. If the model can “predict” the past then we assume it can predict the future. But even with large models with lots of data and parameters, the ability to see the future gets fuzzy very quickly. We can predict the climate for the next hundred years or so with some confidence, but soon it gets wildly sensitive to all kinds of unknown randomness.

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Lol :joy:
First Dog on the Moon has some quotable quotes on this matter.

“…and is twitter in the room with you right now?” :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Screenshot_2022-10-31-14-47-48-17
Screenshot_2022-10-31-14-47-48-171080×6510 571 KB

Source: Could Twitter actually get any worse? Hold Elon’s beer | First Dog on the Moon | The Guardian

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The free bird has flown towards silencing unfavorable criticism. Nazis and hate speech is fine I guess :face_with_open_eyes_and_hand_over_mouth:.

Hmm… private corporations start behaving like totalitarian regimes…so much for believing there is no need for government :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:. Maybe despotic kings will do.

(Well, the East India company for one perfected this behaviour, but this is the 21st century, so :-1:t4::-1:t4: please read up on their antics and you’ll see many many parallels to modern day big business)

Time to start treating these companies and their demogogue CEOs like we do with totalitarian regimes ( well, sometimes anyway, business interests permitting)

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Indeed yes. The people I used to follow on twitter are closing their accounts one by one. The unique value it had—where experts in different fields could discuss with each other—is all but gone.

Years ago when I was in Bodhinyana, there was a train crash in England on a privatized train line. Ajahn Brahm told the story of the why the trains in England were nationalized in the first place. They used to be in the private realm, then there was accident, and they realized that safety and public benefit were more important than profits. So they nationalized them. Then they privatized them again when they forgot the lesson.

There is a reason why fundamental infrastructure is held and managed in the public domain, by elected representatives of the public, on behalf of the people. Phone networks used to be public infrastructure, then we sold them for pennies on the pound in the name of “efficiency”. Turns out, “efficiency” is a word for “untrammeled profits and wages for executives”.

Now that we know how unhinged our tech overlords really are—and let’s not pretend Elon is alone—it underlines how important it is to build socially responsible tech.

Governments should all have their own Mastadon server, paid by taxes, and used as the primary means of making public service announcements—weather, traffic, fires, policies, and the like. Moderate them properly in house. Encourage all government departments, scientists, academics, and the like to post there. Make it the ABC of the web. (For non-Aussies, the ABC is like the BBC, a beloved national TV service.) Cross-post to twitter, FB, whatever, but make sure there is a responsibly-managed primary source of truth in the public domain. Public can use the service, but subject to strict moderation policies—no hate speech, no disinfo, no NSFW.

To me this is a no-brainer and it begs the question: why don’t governments do this? Why have they let themselves been bewitched by the starry promises of the Valley tech gurus? The simple answer, having met bunches of politicians in my life: they are old and don’t understand technology.

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Other countries may not have this issue, but in the United States it’s not possible for the government to be involved in moderating political speech. It’s called “freedom of speech.” Most Americans don’t really understand what that means (they often think it means they can’t be moderated by anyone), but legally it means the government is severely limited in what it can regulate in terms of speech. It’s much better if it’s a private platform. They can make all sorts of arbitrary decisions about moderation that the government can’t do. Hence, we now have a privatized censorship system that has developed to try to combat the conspiracy theories lunacy.

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Oh yes. Well, the details would have to be worked out per-country, but one of the main reasons I propose this is so that we, as non-Americans, have some independence from decisions made by Americans for Americans.

Another set of cases that would be problematic would be where the government is deeply corrupt and incompetent. In Australia, though, the government is, by and large, reasonably trusted and competent and could easily take on such a task.

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If Russian warplanes started dropping propaganda leaflets over Iowa, the US government wouldn’t hesitate to step in and stop it, yet this is exactly what’s happening on Twitter, Facebook, etc. When I worked for Facebook, I saw the volume of astroturfing and propaganda and fake news… and we were totally on our own to fight the Russian government… and Chinese hackers, and… far from helping us, the NSA was only interested in further compromising our security so that they could spy on our users!

There are lots of ways that governments can (and should) defend their “public squares” short of nationalizing social media. As cyber warfare professionalizes, it’s increasingly unreasonable to expect private companies to be able to defend themselves.

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Yes, it really is.

Hol up, tell us more!

exactly. We’ve been dominated by a motif of business vs government for so long that we forget that we are all one country and one people and should be on the same side.

To be clear, no-one said anything about nationalizing anything. I proposed that governments set up their own social media. This has many precedents, be it in radio, public TV, libraries, and the like; it is really just making official the idea of a digital “town hall”. I honestly believe the real reason most governments haven’t done it is just because they are so far behind the eight ball, they have little understanding or capacity to operate in the tech sphere. Same why they haven’t regulated crypto.

Indeed, it’s a urgent matter of national interest. Citizens should be demanding better. One of the benefits of running their own social media would be that governments would develop the in-house capacity to understand the challenges and threats, and would not have to depend solely on the obviously misleading narratives of the social media giants.

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What would you like to know? I was an engineer on Public Content and Privacy from 2012–2015.

Yeah, I was setting up a spectrum with laissez-faire antagonism on one end and nationalizing the industry on the other end, because I think most reasonable people will agree that the ideal policy should fall somewhere in the middle.

Yeah, absolutely.

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We wont tho, because capitaliam is an illusion, and as soon as it becomes clear that the system actually works the US or the UN or whoever will arrest Musk for “hate speach” or “tax fraud” or whatever and take the keys without so much as a thank you for your service.

Whether this is any better than letting the son of south african emerald mine owners run things is of course open to question, but believe me, its the people with the nukes and the armies who have the actual power, not the people with the money.

You can have all the robux in the world but when roblox changes the api your still a broke fool like the rest of us.

Metta

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I stuggle to imagine anything more horrifying.

“Sorry jo, the computers assure us that in all thier models you being dead is better for the species in a thousand years.”

“Oh… no, sorry, the computers say that painless euthanasia in this case is actually not the optimal solution, apperantly by brutally torturing you on live simulcast we bring more joy to the millions of viewers than your agonising death pains you, so…”

Fingers crossed the AI’s stay safely on the internet writing affirmations and drawing astronauts on horses and whatnot and morals and ethics remain the sphere of the individual conscience.

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There is no “in space”, anyone who understands basic physics knows we’re not leaving this planet.

  • The speed of light is roughly 1 billion km/h, and even at that speed it would take about 5 hours to get to pluto, to get to the nearest star Proxima Centauri, it would take 4,200 light years. Humans can’t even travel 1 percent of the speed of light, let alone leave our neighborhood that is our solar system. We can’t even leave our solar system, our own backyard, how do you expect us to even leave our own galaxy? Impossible. It’s like trying to crawl on your hands from your home in America to China, times a billion. You’re stuck on the Island that is Earth.
  • This video and site visualizes why we’re handicapped in our ability to go anywhere - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-speed-of-light-fast-but-slow/
  • For the reasons above, it doesn’t matter if there’s aliens or life in the universe, no one is visiting us because it’s biologically impossible, maybe AI androids will replace us and visit other planets, but not the Homo genus. Maybe AI from other parts of the universe will visit us, but not biological beings.
  • People bring up the Alcubierre drive, but it’s wishful science fiction thinking, and not based in science
  • Nasa/CSA recently figured out that humans in space get red blood cell destruction and mutation. Scientists Find Increased Red Blood Cell Destruction During Spaceflight - NASA.

In conclusion: Humans (homo genus to be specific) have evolved and adapted to Earth over hundreds of millions of years. There’s absolutely no way we’re going to survive in space, we’re not going to “live” on other planets. We have only one planet to call home, take care of, and save, and that’s Earth. Imho money spent on space is wasted, it should be redirected to saving Earth.

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This is a perfect example of how utilitarianism is absurd, and routinely leads to absurd circumstances, for example, what if in the future the hundreds of billions of galactic humans lead miserable lives enslaved to the galactic emperor, and nuking the planet today would actually reduce the amount of future suffering more than it would reduce the amou t of future happines?

Placed in very narrow boundaries, utilising very broadly accepted measure and relying on undeniably reliable predictikns and statistics, it is possible to take utilitarian principles and apply them in sensible ways to inform public policy.

As a wierd hybridizatiin with speculative science fiction it is what it has always been as a moral philosophy of the individual: absurd, and most often advocated by privileged white men with poor social skills and what is politley referd to these days as “spectrum-y” dispositions.

The fact is that applying math to even simple physical systems is notoriously difficult, and the idea that there might be some way of applying arithmatic to solve the moral problems of the species was niave (and unconsciously imperialist and colonial) when Bentham and Mill proposed it in the 19th century and it remains so today.

Thankfully for those of us living in fedralised liberal democracies under the rule of law this is not in fact the way moral, ethical and political descisions are made and arbitrated. Thank the gods.

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Oh I know. But that’s how he sees it.

I should have added neuralink to the above list of Musk’s investments. The goal is I believe to upload consciousness to a computer, than that will colonize the galaxy.

Our minds will live on Musk’s servers. Better not think bad thoughts about Elon!

Of course this also won’t happen, for even deeper reasons than living in space (at least we know what space is.)

Great point, and I think the astonishing success of physics makes us overlook how hard it has been to get to this point.

(I just made a Mastodon account, not really for posting, just checking it out.)

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He’s late to the game, a Russian billionaire along with the famous Raymond Kurzweil (MIT, IBM & Google) have been working on Project 2045 for a few decades already.

milestones_small_en

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