54 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. Dr Minor would read a text not for its meaning but for its words. It wasa novel approach to the task – the equivalent of cutting up a book word byword, and then placing each in an alphabetical list which helped the editorsquickly find quotations. Just as Google today ‘reads’ text as a series of wordsor symbols that are searchable and discoverable, so with Dr Minor. A manualundertaking of this kind was laborious – he was basically working as acomputer would work – but it probably resulted in a higher percentage of hisquotations making it to the Dictionary page than those of other contributors.
  2. Dec 2023
    1. I think part and you see this kind of delicate dance that when things are going uh uh too slow so people vote in a more 00:25:29 liberal Administration that will speed things up and will be more creative Bolder in its social experiments and when things go too fast then you say okay liberals you had your chance now 00:25:41 let's bring the conservatives to slow down a little and and have a bit of of a breath
      • for: insight - conservative vs liberal - speed of sdopting social norm

      • insight

        • liberals are voted in to speed up adoption of a new social -
        • conservatives are voted in to slow down the acceptance of a social norm
        • paradoxically, humans have both a conservative and a liberal nature. We naturally have a tendency to both conserve and to try new things.
    2. the Catholics are much more straightforward about these things they to everything so you know chimpanzees for instance according to Catholic dogma chimpanzees don't have souls when they die they 00:06:36 don't go to chimpanzee heaven or chimpanzee hell they just disappear now where are Neals in this scheme and if you think about this kid whose mother is a sapiens but whose father is a 00:06:49 neandertal so only his mother has a soul but his father doesn't have a soul and what does it mean about the kid does the kid have half a soul and if you say okay okay okay okay neander had Souls then 00:07:02 you go back a couple of million years and you have the same problem with the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees again you have a family a mother one child is the ancestor of 00:07:16 chimpanzees the other child is the an is our ancestor so one child has a soul and the other child doesn't have a soul
      • for: question - Catholic church claim - humans have a souls but other creatures do not

      • comment

      • question: Do only humans have souls?
        • Harari explores this question about the Catholic church's claim that humans have a soul and shows how messy it is
        • Where does "having a soul" begin or end, if we go down the evolutionary rabbit hole?
    3. we need to understand this deep inheritance within us in order to to to understand our emotions our fears our behavior in 00:04:50 the 21st century
      • for: quote - deep inheritance of evolutionary adaptations

      • quote

        • we need to understand the deep inheritance within us in order to understand our emotions, our fears and our behaviors in the 21st century.
      • author: Yval Noah Harari
    4. we are certainly special I mean 00:02:57 no other animal rich the moon or know how to build atom bombs so we are definitely quite different from chimpanzees and elephants and and all the rest of the animals but we are still 00:03:09 animals you know many of our most basic emotions much of our society is still run on Stone Age code
      • for: stone age code, similar to - Ronald Wright - computer metaphor, evolutionary psychology - examples, evolutionary paradox of modernity, evolution - last mile link, major evolutionary transition - full spectrum in modern humans, example - MET - full spectrum embedded in modern humans

      • comment

      • insights

        • evolutionary paradox of modernity
          • modern humans , like all the living species we share the world with, are the last mile link of the evolution of life we've made it to the present, so all species of the present are, in an evolutionary sense, winners of their respective evolutionary game
          • this means that all our present behaviors contain the full spectrum of the evolutionary history of 4 billion years of life
          • the modern human embodies all major evolutionary transitions of the past
          • so our behavior, at all levels of our being is a complex and heterogenous mixture of evolutionary adaptations from different time periods of the 4 billion years that life has taken to evolve.
          • Some behaviors may have originated billions of years ago, and others hundred thousand years ago.
      • Examples: humans embody full spectrum of METs in our evolutionary past

        • fight and flight response
          • early hominids on African Savannah hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago when hominids were predated upon by wild predators
        • cancer
          • normative intercell communication breaks down and reverts to individual cell behavior from billions of years ago
            • see Michael Levin's research on how to make metastatic cancer cells return to normative collective, cooperative behavior
        • children afraid to sleep in the dark
          • evolutionary adaptation against dangerous animals that might have hid in the dark - dangerous insiects, snakes, etc, which in the past may have resulted in human fatalities
        • obesity
          • hunter gatherer hominid attraction to rich sources of fruit. Eating as much of it as we can and maybe harvesting as much as we can and carrying that with us.
            • like squirrels storing away for the winter.
  3. Nov 2023
    1. the increasing number of tourists is starting to make them feel like exhibits in a zoo
      • for: human exploitation, treating humans like animals in a zoo

      • example - human exploitation - Jawara

        • These images parading the Jawara like curiosity items remind one of centuries earlier when European colonizers treated the people they enslaved as curiosity items - like animals in a zoo
        • Zoo's are themselves an icon that represents the distorted anthropogenic perspective and relationship of modern humans to the rest of the biome.
    1. foragers hunter-gatherers being less parochial basically than

      [[David Wingrow]] doesn't reply on religiosity of ancient humans but on the scale of their reach.

  4. Oct 2023
    1. Envisioning the next wave of emergent AI

      Are we stretching too far by saying that AI are currently emergent? Isn't this like saying that card indexes of the early 20th century are computers. In reality they were data storage and the "computing" took place when humans did the actual data processing/thinking to come up with new results.

      Emergence would seem to actually be the point which comes about when the AI takes its own output and continues processing (successfully) on it.

  5. Sep 2023
    1. In terms of evolution, animals adapt to their ecological conditions, but as humans, we have been able to control our ecological conditions.
      • for: humans vs other animals, personal experience, personal experience - pets, control vs adaptation, human features, quote, quote - Ruth Gates, quote - humans vs animals, quote - control vs adaptation
      • quote
        • . In terms of evolution, animals adapt to their ecological conditions, but as humans, we have been able to control our ecological conditions.
      • author: Ruth Gates
      • source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJV0Kx7oGxU&t=496s
      • comment
        • personal experience
          • her remark made me think about how often I feel this difference with our pets. They adapt to whatever we do. We control our environment by building something. They just adapt to whatever we build.
            • Our pets never build anything, but simply adapt to what we build.
    1. ‘There is no such thing as a baby … if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone.’
      • for: Donald Winnicott, quote, quote - Donald Winnicott, quote - human INTERbeing, human INTERbeing, human INTERbeCOMing, white - humans INTERbeCOMing, DH, Deep Humanity, altricial, mOTHER, non-duality

      • quote: Donald Winnicott

        • There is no such thing as a baby … if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone.
      • comment

        • what Winnicott says here is the essence of:
          • the Deep Humanity concepts of
            • the individual / collective gestalt and
            • human INTERbeCOMing,
          • the Buddhist concepts of:
            • emptiness,
            • non-duality in the human realm,
            • Indra's net of jewels in the human realm and
            • Thich Nhat Hahn's INTERbeing
          • complexity
  6. Aug 2023
    1. Being Model Humans
      • for: model human
      • comment
        • a misunderstanding of emptiness, especially the entanglement of the individual and collective allows the typical imbalance of focusing only on the individual and ignoring the collective
        • there are actually many religious intentional communities that have existed for long periods of time, but this is for lifelong practitioners of a religion, such as Buddhist or other monasteries. It's not for the faint of heart!.
  7. Jul 2023
  8. Jun 2023
    1. what I'm asking people to do is to start considering what that means to your life what I'm asking 00:38:53 governments to do by if like I'm screaming is don't wait until the first patient you know start doing something about we're about to see Mass job losses we're about to see you know Replacements 00:39:07 of of categories of jobs at large
    2. it could be a few months away
      • claim
      • AI can become more intelligent than humans in a few months (in 2023?)
    3. AI could manipulate or figure out a way to kill humans your 10 years time will be hiding from the machines if you don't have kids maybe wait a number of years 00:01:43 just so that we have a bit of certainty
      • claim
        • AI could find a way to kill humans in the next few years
  9. Jan 2023
    1. Our species faces two great tasks in the next few centuries. Our first task is to make human brotherhood effective and permanent. Our second task is to preserve and enhance the rich diversity of Nature in the world around us. Our new understanding of biological and cultural evolution may help us to see more clearly what we have to do.

      !- modern humans : face two challenge - universalising Humanity - preserving the rich diversity found in nature

    2. Wells saw that we happen to live soon after a massive shift in the history of the planet, caused by the emergence of our own species. The shift was completed about ten thousand years ago, when we invented agriculture and started to domesticate animals. Before the shift, evolution was mostly biological. After the shift, evolution was mostly cultural. Biological evolution is usually slow, when big populations endure for thousands or millions of generations before changes become noticeable. Cultural evolution can be a thousand times faster, with major changes occurring in two or three generations. It has taken about two hundred thousand years for our species to evolve biologically from its or

      !- modern humans : unique species adept at cultural evolution

    1. social, political and institutional mechanisms.

      !- Comment : Bruce Jennings - Jennings addresses precisely these mechanisms in his essay "Entangling Humanism - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhumansandnature.org%2Fentangling-humanism%2F&group=world

    2. eading evolutionary theorist David Sloan Wilson and influential economist Dennis Snower have long advocated for an improved understanding of economics as a complex system. Across a recent series of major articles, they argue for a paradigm shift away from the orthodox, neoclassical model of economics, which focuses on individual challenges to be tackled through decisions by individual decision-makers and views ‘externalities’ as a phenomenon to be ‘corrected’ through government intervention, in favour of a new multilevel paradigm, based on insights from evolutionary science.

      !- Comment : similar aims to - This goal of shifting away from "individualism" to mutuality is also aligned with a number of other perspectives including: - Bruce Jennings - Entangling Humanism - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhumansandnature.org%2Fentangling-humanism%2F&group=world - David Loy - https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F1Gq4HhUIDDk%2F&group=world

  10. Sep 2022
    1. Writing Code for Humans — A Language-Agnostic Guide…because code which people can’t read and understand is easy to break and hard to maintain.
    1. Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
    2. To see if you are writing good code, you can question yourself. how long it will take to fully transfer this project to another person? If the answer is uff, I don’t know… a few months… your code is like a magic scroll. most people can run it, but no body understand how it works. Strangely, I’ve seen several places where the IT department consist in dark wizards that craft scrolls to magically do things. The less people that understand your scroll, the more powerfully it is. Just like if life were a video game.
    3. This is so clear that you don’t even need comments to explain it.
    4. Another type of comments are the ones trying to explain a spell.
    5. The rule of thumbs is, never use code that you do not understand.
  11. Aug 2022
    1. I recall being told by a distinguishedanthropological linguist, in 1953, that he had no intention of working througha vast collection of materials that he had assembled because within a few yearsit would surely be possible to program a computer to construct a grammar froma large corpus of data by the use of techniques that were already fairly wellformalized.

      rose colored glasses...

  12. Apr 2022
    1. Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.

      The Firehose versus the Algorithmic Feed

      See related from The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning, except with more depth here.

    2. Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people.

      Algorithms creating the divide

    1. Algospeak refers to code words or turns of phrase users have adopted in an effort to create a brand-safe lexicon that will avoid getting their posts removed or down-ranked by content moderation systems. For instance, in many online videos, it’s common to say “unalive” rather than “dead,” “SA” instead of “sexual assault,” or “spicy eggplant” instead of “vibrator.”

      Definition of "Algospeak"

      In order to get around algorithms that demote content in social media feeds, communities have coined new words or new meanings to existing words to communicate their sentiment.

      This is affecting TikTok in particular because its algorithm is more heavy-handed in what users see. This is also causing people who want to be seen to tailor their content—their speech—to meet the algorithms needs. It is like search engine optimization for speech.

      Article discovered via Cory Doctorow at The "algospeak" dialect

  13. Feb 2022
    1. At the back of Dr Duncan's book on the topic, Index, A History Of The, he includes not one but two indexes, in order to make a point.

      Dennis Duncan includes two indices in his book Index, A History of The, one by a professional human indexer and the second generated by artificial intelligence. He indicates that the human version is far better.

  14. Aug 2021
  15. Apr 2021
  16. Mar 2021
    1. Just as we've become super-human thanks to telephones, calendars and socks, we can continue our evolution into cyborgs in a concrete jungle with socially curated bars and mathematically incorruptible governance.
    2. we should eagerly anticipate granting ourselves the extra abilities afforded to us by Turing machines
    3. Stop thinking of the ideal user as some sort of honorable, frontier pilgrim; a first-class citizen who carries precedence over the lowly bot. Bots need to be granted the same permission as human users and it’s counter-productive to even think of them as separate users. Your blind human users with screen-readers need to behave as “robots” sometimes and your robots sending you English status alerts need to behave as humans sometimes.
  17. Feb 2021
    1. It turns out that, given a set of constraints defining a particular problem, deriving an efficient algorithm to solve it is a very difficult problem in itself. This crucial step cannot yet be automated and still requires the insight of a human programmer.
  18. Apr 2020
  19. Mar 2020
    1. Imagine an associate with a photographic memory and excellent pattern recognition who digested and analyzed millions of cases. Would you want that associate working for you for less than the price of one typical billable hour every month?
    1. we have anxious salarymen asking about the theft of their jobs, in the same way that’s apparently done by immigrants
    2. We long ago admitted that we’re poor at scheduling, so we have roosters; sundials; calendars; clocks; sand timers; and those restaurant staff who question my integrity, interrupting me with a phone call under the premise of “confirming” that I’ll stick to my word regarding my reservation.
    3. A closely-related failing to scheduling is our failure to remember, so humans are very willing to save information on their computers for later.
    1. Robots are currently suffering extreme discrimination due to a few false assumptions, mainly that they’re distinctly separate actors from humans. My point of view is that robots and humans often need to behave in the same way, so it’s a fruitless and pointless endeavour to try distinguishing them.
    2. As technology improves, humans keep integrating these extra abilities into our cyborg selves
  20. Aug 2018
    1. <small> <table bgcolor="gold" width="100%"> <tbody><tr><td align="left">  #absence_explorer </td> <td align="right">   ABOUT   </td> </tr></tbody></table> </small>

      <table bgcolor="#c7dfe6" width="100%"> <tbody><tr><td align="center"> <br> Your search for "ideas are not humans" yielded:

      No results

      <br> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> _BTN_Books.png </td> <td> _BTN_News.png </td> </tr><tr> <td> _BTN_Scholar.png </td> <td> _BTN_everything.png </td> </tr> </tbody></table><table align="center" bgcolor="#c4c4c4" width="100%"> <tbody><tr> <td> _BTN_duckduckgo.png </td> <td> _BTN_infospace.png </td> </tr><tr> <td> _BTN_webcrawler.png </td> <td> _BTN_dogpile.png </td> </tr> </tbody></table><table bgcolor="#f3f3f3" width="100%"> <tbody><tr><td align="center"> click buttons for archived results <br> ◁ Search Again for changes on the materials that <br> directly make out the "world" presented before us <br> </td> </tr></tbody></table>
  21. Dec 2015
    1. The appearance of the cyborg has engendered a newwaveof fear and trepidation towards the invasion of the body by strange technologiesthat threaten to eliminate or overwhelm the human subject

      It sounds like we're creating our own aliens and then essentially putting them inside of a subject/form that we recognize and are quite familiar with so our initial response to the subject will be favourable.. but we're being tricked.. overpowered.. Has anyone read The Host by Stephanie Meyer? Similar concept...