30 November 2023

Hello!

Here is some stuff:

Panic > Discipline

I nearly didn’t write this. I get used to depending on the sense of urgency building until I feel like I have to do something.

I don’t run in the morning until it’s very nearly too late to run. I hold off on ordering groceries until the obsoletion of all other options. I won’t tidy up until the threat of visitors looms near.

In lieu of routine, where timing leads the activity, I think many of us will depend on nearby pressure to do. And if it doesn’t occur naturally, we concoct it artificially.

And now it’s at the point where this system has proven reliable enough to have confidence in. I totally believe that failing to be disciplined creates the necessary pressure to achieve what the discipline was required for.

It has taken a while to be okay with this, but okay with it I now am. Not being disciplined is so much better than not being disciplined and despising my not being disciplined.

(I can’t vouch for how discipline compares to pressure dependency. I’m sure it’s probably lovely)

Kids, AI. AI, kids.

The most fun I had this week was using DALL-E, the ChatGPT image creator, to do the bidding of children. I think the best result was that of “an explosive fart with a tornado and dynamite in the style of Pixar” (see above).

Based on this, I think AI and kids will be best friends. And now there is a call from the British Computer Society to mandate young pupils learning how to use AI tools.

I am supportive of this, and indeed AI in general. There is something quite wonderful about humans surrendering the USP that has seen them sit atop the food chain for so long. Not only that, we are going to force its usage.

The internet held the knowledge that we could use our brains to apply. But AI will soon be better at applying that knowledge than us. And we are just happily assuming that there will be place for us in all of this as middle men.

Truly, our ego knows no bounds.

This is the man who took our free will

Imagine touring a book you wrote that argues for an idea that 99% of the world will hate. And where for every interview you do to promote this book, you have to explain yourself to the point of apology.

This will be Robert Sapolsky’s life for the next few months as he sells Determined, his controversial new book that very convincingly argues that free will doesn’t exist.

That said, this New Scientist interview with the man himself is a good read, and definitely a quicker one than the book itself.

Don’t trust your brain

Awful news for people who wholly depend on objective facts to win arguments – according to Dr. Heather Berlin, neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, it is impossible for the brain to absorb everything that comes its way, so it depends on personalised  schema to effectively filter and process reality.

So everyone sees things differently based on their own perception, and their perception is shaped through their own life experiences. Reality is literally different for everyone.

Not only that, it seems even how you are feeling in a given moment will affect how your brain processes the environment. Listening to sad music while hiking? The hills will seem steeper.

All of this and more is featured in this terrific Big Think article.

What’s the matter with me? What’s Amaterasu?

There are loads of energy particles hitting Earth all the time. Occasionally one will come along that’s bigger and better than the others. But never does that happen without it being explicable. Until now.

An extremely high energy particle – millions of times more energetic than that produced by our now seemingly poxy Large Hadron Collider – is currently smashing Earth but from an apparently empty area of space.

Named Amaterasu, after the Japanese sun goddess, the particle is arriving from the local void, just outside our galaxy. This has left astronomers scratching their heads as normally a particle like this can be traced back to some mega space event.

It’s fun to be reminded of how much we don’t understand.

Murderer questioned on the whereabouts of his soul

A once-loved lawyer killed his wife and kid and defrauded others to the tune of $9 million. It’s all awful and his back-to-back-to-back life sentences are deserved.

I was struck though by what one of this financial victims asked him in court – “Do you not have a soul?”

Of all the things to ask. So fixed is religion’s place in society, so accepted as real, that even when harmed in such tangible terms, a victim will confront their offender about the intangible and unprovable.

They of course have my sympathy, and I hope to never be in a position of such stress that my own rationality is tested to such an extent, but one can’t help but think there were more useful questions that could have been asked, such as “where is my money?”