Persuasion

When it comes to literature’s place in education, the debate will always be fierce and political, but those works that lack some element of universality that gives them resonance beyond the time and place of their creation won’t stay in the curriculum for long, because students simply won’t read them.

think it through

Knowledge of logic and probability wasn’t important for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. But when it comes to writing about rationality and intuition we must remember that readers are going to jump to conclusions about how people jump to conclusions. The popular literature on cognitive biases is enlightening, but let’s not be irrational about irrationality; exposure to X is not knowledge and control of X. Reading about cognitive biases, after all, does not free anybody from their nasty epistemological pitfalls.

Darwinian algorithm

Intentionality doesn’t come from up high; it percolates up from below, from the initially mindless and pointless algorithmic processes that gradually acquire meaning and intelligence as they develop.

Dubito

'Alan Turing was the first to foresee this possibility in 1950, when he published the seminal essay on artificial intelligence, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which proposed a typewritten test to answer the question "Can machines think?" According to Jaron Lanier, the right way to understand the famous "Turing Test" is to understand that it "began in the mind of somebody who was very close to suicide." In other words, Alan Turing, who was born 100 years ago today, is the very embodiment of the philosophical issue we face as we integrate technology into every aspect of our lives, and the distinction

Misnomer

'Even if you look at values only one standard variation away from the mean, you are generally looking at some fairly diverse values.'

Individual worthiness

...'it is very difficult to ascertain the Faustian character of the explorers, extract its essential nature, and apprehend it for itself. I want to suggest, even so, that the history of exploration during and after the Enlightenment era offers us an opportunity to apprehend clearly this soul. For it is the case that, from about the 1700s onward, explorers come to be increasingly driven by a will to discover irrespective of the pursuit of trade, religious conversion, or even scientific curiosity. My point is not that the unadulterated desire to explore exhibits the Faustian soul as such. The urge to accumulate wealth and advance knowledge may exhibit this Faustian will just as intensively.

Utopian thinking

Lives in a fluid, not on solid rock.
The solid was an age, a period
With appropriate, largely English Furniture
Policed by a hope of Christmas.

Unethical category

'...happiness is a conformist category. And moreover, none of us really want it. Which is a good thing, since the pursuit of happiness is an Enlightenment value that gets at only one aspect of what it means to live a good life. "Let’s be serious: when you are in a creative endeavor, in that wonderful fever

-'My God, I’m onto something!' and so on  -happiness doesn't enter it..'