One of the most common examples was in thefield of criminal justice, where recent revelations have shown that an algorithm used by the UnitedStates criminal justice system had falsely predicted future criminality among African-Americans attwice the rate as it predicted for white people

automated decisions

The idea that AI algorithms are free from biases is wrong since the assumptionthat the data injected into the models are unbiased is wrong

In undergrad I had zero sleep before several major tests; also before quals in grad school. Basically wouldn’t sleep before things I really considered important (this included morning meetings I didn’t want to miss!). On such occasions I would feel: miserable, then absurd and in a good humor, weirdly elated, then Super PumpedTM, and really sharp when the test (or whatever) actually started.

Convincing a million 20-year-olds to sleep an unnecessary hour a day is equivalent, in terms of their hours of wakefulness, to killing 62,500 of them.

But it has been reported that near total REM sleep deprivation for a period of 14 to 40 days by administration of the monoamine oxidase inhibitor phenelzine has no apparent effect on cognitive function in humans

It was shown that a quiet waking period or a meditative waking state in which the environment is being ignored, produces a gain in recall similar to that seen in sleep, relative to an active waking state or a sleep-deprived state

To summarize

exactly one pre-registered experiment of the impact of prolonged sleep deprivation on cognition. It was published by economists from Harvard and MIT in 2020 and its pre-registered analysis found null effects of sleep on all variables of interest, Bessone P, Rao G, Schilbach F, Schofield H, Toma M. The economic consequences of increasing sleep among the urban poor. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 2021 Aug;136(3):1887-941. (the authors changed analysis post-hoc and fished out some significant effects, without mentioning the switch in the abstract 😑).

Do they perform better or worse in the long-term on cognitive tests? Do they have more or less inflammation? Do they need less recovery sleep over time?

consensus seems to be that dizziness due to a lack of oxygen during the run, muscle pain and muscle damage, and decreased physical performance after the run, are not just not bad, but are in fact necessary for the organism to train to run longer distances by increasing the amount of muscle, muscle efficiency, and lung capacity.

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is associated with synapse growth. Sleep deprivation appears to increase BDNF [and therefore neurogenesis?].

Why does the lack of sleep promote manic states while long sleep promotes depression?

DO NOT TRY THIS IF YOU ARE BIPOLAR, YOU MIGHT GET A MANIC EPISODE.

Someone in r/BipolarReddit asked: How many do you sleep when stable vs (hypo)manic? Depressed?

Think about sleep 10,000 ago.

Modern sleep, in its infinite comfort, is an unnatural superstimulus that overwhelms our brains with pleasure

Most of us (including myself) eat a lot of junk food and candy if we don’t restrict ourselves. Does this mean that lots of junk food and candy is the “natural” or the “optimal” amount for health?

Moralistic political culture evolved out of New England and is characterized by an emphasis of community and civic virtue over individualism. Individualistic political culture arose from Dutch influence in the Mid-Atlantic region; it regards multiculturalism as a practicality and government as a utilitarian necessity. Traditionalistic political culture arose in the South, which elevates social order and family structure to a prominent role. It accepts a natural hierarchy in society and where necessary to protect society, authoritarian leadership in the political and religious realms

In , power is the governing principle as rooted in of private ownership. Private ownership is wholly and only an act of institutionalized , and institutionalized exclusion is a matter of organized power

Karl Marx considered the Single Tax platform as a regression from the transition to communism and referred to Georgism as "Capitalism’s last ditch".[99] Marx argued that, "The whole thing is ... simply an attempt, decked out with socialism, to save capitalist domination and indeed to establish it afresh on an even wider basis than its present one."[100] Marx also criticized the way land value tax theory emphasizes the value of land, arguing that, "His fundamental dogma is that everything would be all right if ground rent were paid to the state."[100] Georgists such as Fred Harrison (2003) replied to these Marxist objections.[101]

Using roll call analysis of voting patterns in the House of Representatives, they found that issues of desegregation and race were less important than issues of economics and social class when it came to the transformation of partisanship in the South.

Goldwater took positions on such issues as privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority, abolishing Social Security and ending farm price supports that outraged many white Southerners who strongly supported these programs.

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

ow [Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 [...] and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Nixon ran his 1968 campaign on states' rights and "law and order". Liberal Northern Democrats accused Nixon of pandering to Southern whites, especially with regard to his "states' rights" and "law and order" positions, which were widely understood by black leaders to symbolize Southern resistance to civil rights.[49] This tactic was described in 2007 by David Greenberg in Slate as "dog-whistle politics"

Journalists reporting about the demonstrations against the Vietnam War often featured young people engaging in violence or burning draft cards and American flags.[47] Conservatives were also dismayed about the many young adults engaged in the drug culture and "free love" (sexual promiscuity), in what was called the "hippie" counter-culture. These actions scandalized many Americans and created a concern about law and order.

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.— Lyndon Johnson

Democrat George Wallace was elected as Governor of Alabama, he emphasized the connection between states' rights and segregation, both in speeches and by creating crises to provoke federal intervention. He opposed integration at the University of Alabama and collaborated with the Ku Klux Klan in 1963 in disrupting court-ordered integration of public schools in Birmingham

The main plank of the States' Rights Democratic Party was maintaining segregation and Jim Crow in the South.

Republicans regularly supported anti-lynching bills, but these were filibustered by Southern Democrats in the Senate.

Although the Fourteenth Amendment has a provision to reduce the Congressional representation of states that denied votes to their adult male citizens, this provision was never enforced

In the 1880s, they began to pass legislation making election processes more complicated and in some cases requiring payment of poll taxes, which created a barrier for poor people of both races.

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats

Bell Labs, the legendary R&D lab that invented revolutionary new technologies like the transistor and the photovoltaic cell, was designed so that everyone would at some point bump into everyone else for this reason

Amie Thomasson (2021) contends that we should reject a widespread descriptivist picture of modality. According to descriptivism, the primary function of modal discourse is to track and describe modal facts and properties, which supposedly exist independently of our expressive capacities and make true our modal statements. Instead, according to Thomasson’s Modal Normativism (MN), modal discourse is distinctively normative, in that it serves the function of expressing, teaching, conveying, or (re-) negotiating semantic rules (or their consequences) in particularly advantageous ways. (2021: S2087)

But revolutionary fictionalism suggests a complication: even if, in some sense, quantification over mathematical entities is indispensable to our best theory of the world, perhaps it is not literal quantification over mathematical entities that is thus indispensable.

Thomasson (2013) is a recent extended discussion of the relation between fictionalism and her own preferred ontological view, which is argued for by what she calls “easy arguments”, a kind of ordinary language arguments. Thomasson’s ontological deflationism says, roughly, that all manners of philosophically controversial entities exist, and do so in some sense trivially

Necessarily, for all x and all artifactual kinds K, x is a K only if x is the product of a largely successful intention that (Kx), where one intends (Kx) only if one has a substantive concept of the nature of Ks that largely matches that of some group of prior makers of Ks (if there are any) and intends to realize that concept by imposing K-relevant features on the object. (Thomasson 2003: 600)

How high are prices relative to traditional measures?Are prices discounting unsustainable conditions?How many new buyers (i.e., those who weren’t previously in the market) have entered the market?How broadly bullish is sentiment?Are purchases being financed by high leverage?Have buyers made exceptionally extended forward purchases (e.g., built inventory, contracted forward purchases, etc.) to speculate or protect themselves against future price gains?

the US has entered an era of MP3 policy, which we expect to stay with us.

a massive transformation in both sides of the household balance sheet (record-high wealth and very low debt service), more widely shared prosperity, the tightest labor market in decades, higher inflation (even excluding base effects), and the easiest monetary and fiscal policy ever, let alone into a booming economy

Historically, the combination of 20% growth and similar margin expansion has occurred in fewer than 0.5% of companies.

Of particular importance is the fact that this increase in wealth has accumulated in the middle- and lower-income groups which were previously getting squeezed. Because MP3 policies directed money to the middle- and lower-income deciles through the fiscal pipe, these groups have received a lot of the printed money and have either paid down debt or accumulated cash in the bank.

We see a coming clash between what is about to transpire and what is now being discounted. The inevitability of this clash is due to the mechanical influence of MP3 policies on nominal incomes, spending, asset prices, and inflation

A research programme can be scientific at one stage, less scientific (or non-scientific) at another (if it ceases to generate novel predictions and cannot digest its anomalies) but can subsequently stage a comeback, recovering its scientific status.

Lakatos rejects the Hegelian thesis that there are contradictions in reality. “If science aims at truth, it must aim at consistency; if it resigns consistency, it resigns truth.”

In which case there could not be a genuinely progressive programme which foretold the fate of capitalism

What Lakatos seems to be suggesting in the passage quoted above, is that it is rationally permissible—perhaps even obligatory—to give up on Marxism even if it has no progressive rival, that is, if there is currently no alternative research programme with a set of hard core theses about the fundamental character of capitalism and its ultimate fate

So how does he distinguish between “a scientific or progressive programme” and a “pseudoscientific or degenerating one”? (S&P: 4–5.)

Instead of an individual falsifiable theory which ought to be rejected as soon as it is refuted, we have a sequence of falsifiable theories characterized by shared a hard core of central theses that are deemed irrefutable—or, at least, refutation-resistant—by methodological fiat. This sequence of theories constitutes a research programme

we additionally make use of recursive task decomposition: we procedurally break up a difficult task into easier one

. With global liner cargo growing 10 percent annually during the 25-year period beginning in 1980, port infrastructure was on the edge of faltering, bailed out only by the economic constriction of the financial crisis

the top three ports—L.A., Long Beach, and New York/New Jersey—brought in nearly half of all containerized imports, and the top 11 brought in over 85 percent

Please, please keep reminding yourself who you are and what you’re fighting for. Or else you might grow at supernatural speed into a beautiful tree, and everyone will admire your flowers and your fruits, but you will know that in growing so quickly you have become ungrounded, have lost any real driving principle, have lost your roots.

How could I have come so close to harming myself in this way, to offloading my thinking to templates and playbooks? How could I have not allowed myself time to think? How did I get so close to executing other people’s algorithms without judgement, taste, or real pleasure?

      The skyscraper of justifications and counterarguments fall all at once, cleaving possible futures in its wake

 “Big sister, you don’t sound so well. I worked on this company with you because I wanted you to be free, in order to be well. That was the whole point. I love you. I trust you to do whatever you think is right.”

We have dinner somewhere in Tribeca, somewhere where the menu doesn’t have prices,

He speaks of airdropping teddy bears all over the African continent that carry essential nutrients inside their bellies and can simulate real human hugs.

   I grew up telling stories, and I am in my element as I tell stories over and over again. Stories about myself and my upbringing. Stories about the company’s metrics, and stories about where the company is going. Past, present, and future layered on top of each other in a complex wheel, births and deaths and reincarnations and re-imaginings.

If one must imagine Sisyphus happy, then one must imagine entrepreneurs happy, these glistening heroes of the American imaginary.

In Mandarin, we call them “happy nuts.” I crack open pistachios between calls, and shells of happiness pile up to the left of my webcam.

I leave my suitcases just inside the door to my Airbnb and find a $3 burrito a few minutes away. I scarf it down so quickly that I still feel the warmth of it in my throat when I fall asleep.

I have become unnecessarily paranoid about infosecurity, all too aware of how information is treated as currency in fundraising.

   The email contains a PDF file with delicate letterhead that says the company I started three months ago was worth more than eighteen million dollars.

Our analysis starts with power, both technological and political. First, we analyze technology in the context of the institutions and ideologies it shapes and is shaped b

Upsolve became the largest bankruptcy nonprofit in the U.S. in three years, empowering millions of people who couldn’t afford lawyers to file for bankruptcy for free online

The government can play a major role in funding transformative technology research. The famed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a federal agency granted wide latitude to fund moonshot-style R&D on defense-related technologies, an approach that has led to historic breakthroughs like the laser and the internet.

We can draw inspiration from Afrofuturism, the cultural movement that tells alternate histories and speculative futures by and for Black people

technologists can use their skills to identify abuses of power and build defensive infrastructures in their place

While campaigns often react to particular ethical oversights, each builds workers’ collective capacity to assert decision-making power over their working conditions and the outputs they produce.

“utopian demand” as defined by feminist theorist Kathi Weeks. She describes it as “a political demand that takes the form not of a narrowly pragmatic reform but of a more substantial transformation of the present configuration of social relations; it is a demand that raises eyebrows, one for which we would probably not expect immediate success.”

When prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba describes hope as a “discipline” and philosopher Ernst Bloch calls for “militant optimism,” both emphasize the centrality of ongoing, conscious effort in bringing about justice.

Many technologists seem to fear history, instead pursuing escapist visions — seasteading, charter cities, Mars colonization — that offer them blank slates to design from

By the time conversations about diversity, ethics, and access enter the conversation, large corporations will have already locked in their technological dominance and naturalized their harms.

Nietzsche has no equivalent to Hegel’s concept of recognition, and it would seem he has no affirmative conception of intersubjectivity. For Nietzsche all community is herd community. How then can noble values or tragic experience be properly and authentically communicated or shared?

the logical significance of reconciliation in Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie. Dudley passes over it completely in his discussion of the concept of the will in Philosophy of Right §§5-7, and presents an apparently individualist account of the will. He ignores Hegel’s example of friendship as the will’s being at home with itself in its other.

The superabundant Nietzschean substitute for a non-existent truth was the will to imagine anything and everything that the human spirit needed to survive the dismal and chaotic nature of existence: ‘True falsehoods’ were required, and created

Two aspects of Kantian philosophy made this later move possible and acted as its foundation. The first was the overwhelming emphasis on the subjective mind in creating the world as it is ‘for us’. The second was the way Kant lifted the restrictions on the subject’s activity in the imaginative sphere, as covered in his third critique.

follows Kant in dividing philosophical inquiry into three areas: rational understanding, moral evaluation and aesthetic appreciation

Nietzsche expresses his dialectic in terms of the free creative imagination. In both cases, the world is unfinished. It has to be completed by the thinking subject, whose existence is heavy with the need for fulfilment.

reading of Nietzsche which says that “we provide [the world] with the determinateness its fundamentally indeterminate or poly-determinate structure calls for.

Hegel’s solution to Kant’s problem of the reality-isolated subject is false. There is no law in history which says that the growth of the subject and the growth of the world coalesce, and the world might have been spared a great deal of hopeful anguish if Hegel had not tried to make his speculations part of reality.

The story of German Idealism’s metamorphosis from the critical philosophy of Kant, through Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, to Nietzsche’s science of joy, is well-known to historians of ideas.

I put down his book a few years ago to work on something else, so I haven't gotten to this chapter yet, but he presents an interpretation of Nietzsche through Hegel in Nietzsche: Philosophy, Philologist, Antichrist on pages 236-24

"Let us remember that Wagner was young at the time Hegel and Schelling seduced men’s spirits; that he guessed, that he grasped with his very hands the only thing the Germans take seriously—“the idea,” which is to say, something that is obscure, uncertain, full of intimations; that among Germans clarity is an objection, logic a refutation. Harshly, Schopenhauer accused the epoch of Hegel and Schelling of dishonesty—harshly, also wrongly: he himself, the old pessimistic counterfeiter, was not a whit more “honest” than his more famous contemporaries. Let us keep morals out of this: Hegel is a taste.— And not merely a German but a European taste.—A taste Wagner comprehended—to which he felt equal—which he immortalized.—He merely applied it to music—he invented a style for himself charged with “infinite meaning”—he became the heir of Hegel—Music as “idea.”— And how Wagner was understood!—The same human type that raved about Hegel, today raves about Wagner; in his school they even write Hegelian.

Unlike Hegel, Nietzsche thinks that we must do far more than simply locate the values to which our practices aspire, and assess their conformity to these values. We need to uncover a standard that can be used to ealuate the basic aspirations of these institutions. This marks a profound difference between the Hegelian and Nietzschean accounts of normative authority -- and it brings Nietzsche somewhat closer to the Kantian perspective.

Given Hegel's desire to show citizens the way to identify with the polity, gaining thereby freedom and reconciliation,

two schools of Hegelian philosophy faced each other: the right-Hegelians in the guise of the fascists, and the left-Hegelians in the guise of the Marxists and communists.

Lenin’s proposition on the difference between federal relations among the Soviet republics based on autonomy, and federal relations among independent republics. In a letter to Lenin, dated June 12, 1920, he declared that in reality “there is no difference between these two types of federal relations, or else it is so small as to be negligible”

if it proves impossible to reach economic agreement with the leading national groups, the latter will inevitably be suppressed by force and economically important regions will be compelled to join a union of European Republics.” Lenin decisively objected to this remark: “. . . it goes too far. It cannot be proved, and it is wrong to say that suppression by force is “inevitable”. That is radically wrong”

The despicable betrayal of socialism by the majority of the official leaders of this proletariat in 1914-19, when “defence of country” was used as a social-chauvinist cloak to conceal the defence of the “right” of their “own” bourgeoisie to oppress colonies and fleece financially dependent countries

Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations

The urgency of the struggle against this evil, against the most deep-rooted petty-bourgeois national prejudices, looms ever larger with the mounting exigency of the task of converting the dictatorship of the proletariat from a national dictatorship (i.e., existing in a single country and incapable of determining world politics) into an international one (i.e., a dictatorship of the proletariat involving at least several advanced countries, and capable of exercising a decisive influence upon world politics as a whole)

that there is a tendency towards the creation of a single world economy, regulated by the proletariat of all nations as an integral whole and according to a common plan.

Federation is a transitional form to the complete unity of the working people of different nations

policy must be pursued that will achieve the closest alliance, with Soviet Russia, of all the national and colonial liberation movements. The form of this alliance should be determined by the degree of development of the communist movement in the proletariat of each country

It makes sense: If you don't have a strong domain model, you have no map that guides your scan, so you have to read it all top to bottom … like a computer.

The infamous hallucinogen Salvia Divinorum appears to work through KOR agonism as its’ main mechanism

If you spend 15+ years logging your expenses every night, checking your portfolio twenty times a day, and making decisions based on their fiscal impact, how plausible is it that you will stop thinking about money after you’ve reached your goalpost? If you’ve been treating money like the ultimate collectors’ item for decades, can you stop identifying with that collection once you’ve accumulated enough?

The Nothingness of Money is only possible through deep reflection, and this is largely enabled by viscerally facing your mortality.

But why should we expect all people to use moral judgments like "Stealing is wrong" to express the same thing?

Albert and Barry are not arguing about facts, but about definitions:

If you have any substantive issue whatsoever at stake, do you really think dictionary editors have access to ultimate wisdom that settles the argument?

you asked the two soon-to-be arguers whether they thought a "sound" should be defined as "acoustic vibrations" or "auditory experiences", they'd probably tell you to flip a coin

You try to establish any sort of empirical proposition as being true "by definition". 

most arguments are rapid-fire debate-club style

.

And does using genetic engineering to cure diseases kill millions of people, or ruin anyone's life?" "Well...not really." "Then what's wrong with it?" "It's eugenics!"

lost the argument

But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber.

Therefore, every time that an animal suffers, what is actually happening is that some moments of experience get to have their whole existence in pain and suffering

You need to define what the identity carrier is, and after doing so one can identify situations in which identity is not well-defined given that identity carrier

The Christian state knows only privileges.

if we can reverse-engineer these core principles and use what tools we have to validate these bottom-up models, we can both understand the internal logic of the brain’s algorithm

Those who prolong other people's lives should have more value placed on their time than others (b/c they increase the amount of time OTHER people have).

Being able to have a mental module for things one knows is important but doesn't have enough time to learn

knows how to access information that they don't know

pareto-efficient improvements to kindness (total kindness may not be possible

phasic dopamine pause

thought-emitting" part of your brain (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex etc.), and there's a "thought-assessing" part of your brain (medial prefrontal cortex, hypothalamus, brainstem, etc

e dynamic of depression and anxiety,

Depression is what happens when every possible thought you can think and plan you can make is judged by the plan-assessing part of your brain as unacceptably terrible, and this dynamic remains true for an extended period.”

advocates a version of exposure therapy for stressful thoughts!!

good that I feel that way, and I want to keep feeling that way, I just don’t want to feel that way quite so strongly and often

She said 15% would be plenty of depression, so she recorded this as a goal in the second column of her Daily Mood Journal, as you can see. She also decided to dial her anxiety down from 80% to 20%, so on and so forth.

negative thoughts and feelings might also be an expression of her most beautiful and awesome qualities

I suspected there might be some real advantages, or benefits, of thinking and feeling the way she did

imagine that we had a magic button and that if she pushed it, all of her negative thoughts and feelings would instantly disappear, with no effort at all, and she’d immediately feel joyous, even euphoric

If a miracle happened in today’s session, what miracle would she be hoping for?

He says that he can now reliably have his patients walk out of their very first extended (~2-hour) therapy sessions feeling dramatically happier, maybe even dancing-on-the-sidewalk happy,

reduction to body: the treatment of a person as identified with their body, or body parts; reduction to appearance: the treatment of a person primarily in terms of how they look, or how they appear to the senses; silencing: the treatment of a person as if they are silent, lacking the capacity to speak.

Martha Nussbaum (1995, 257) has identified seven features that are involved in the idea of treating a person as an object: instrumentality: the treatment of a person as a tool for the objectifier’s purposes; denial of autonomy: the treatment of a person as lacking in autonomy and self-determination; inertness: the treatment of a person as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity; fungibility: the treatment of a person as interchangeable with other objects; violability: the treatment of a person as lacking in boundary-integrity; ownership: the treatment of a person as something that is owned by another (can be bought or sold); denial of subjectivity: the treatment of a person as something whose experiences and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account.

Consequently, every hook-up is an uphill battle against nature—a conscious attempt to detach ourselves from emotions like care, trust, affection, and love by doing the very act which amplifies them

“name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word friend (amica), or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore

The price of women’s admission to this privileged class, however, is that they must train and live like men.

But the production of sexual pleasure is not necessary because many acts do not produce such pleasure; and this criterion conceptually rules out non-pleasurable sex

necessary one (achieving orgasm during a phone-sex chat

This faces obvious counter-examples, such as same-sex sexual activities and heterosexual oral and anal sex

Sexual pleasure is … a valuable thing in its own right, something to be cherished and promoted because it has intrinsic and not merely instrumental value

according to which in sexually desiring Y, X is attracted to the bodily, physical attributes of Y

“I make myself flesh in the presence of the Other in order to appropriate the Other’s flesh” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 506]

The issue, then, between the pessimists and the optimists concerns not whether sexual desire can be morally problematic, but whether it is so by its nature (Soble, with Halwani 2017: 5–8)

People’s intentions for nonsexual goals in a sex act cannot wave away the desire for pleasure; sexual desire has an independence that cannot be (metaphysically) wiped away by intentions or nonsexual motives

I look forward to enjoying the sensations of rubbing my clitoris with my favorite vibrator as I fantasize about having sex with my neighbor

dictating its aim (e.g., towards love), atop a descriptive one as an interpersonal attitude,

X desires Y, desires that Y desire X, desires to be aroused by Y’s desire of X, and so on

sexual desire is no mere appetite but thoroughly infused with meaning

if X feels sexual desire, then X desires the touch of another person’s (Y) body and the sexual pleasure derived through that touch

whether it admits of perverted forms

Men and women seem to exhibit, desire, and experience sex differently (e.g., men, much more than women, consume pornography, have sex with prostitutes, frequent strip clubs, and have fetishes

he unfolding of any given life is beyond prediction. The final fate of any given life is a foregone conclusion

Thus we talk of being in a mood rather than a mood being in us,

twelve of “the most influential conceptions of imagination”

Today our God is abstract, distant, formless, and silent — in other words, merely conceptual. This is what happens when a god becomes neurologically weak.

If our whole culture comes to agree that software is a form of "art," for example, then you'll automatically start to conceptualize software differently, and perhaps change your relationship to it.

If a child hallucinated one of his voices with particular strength at the temple of Osiris, while bathing in the imagery, mythology, and personality of Osiris — well, it only makes sense for that voice to 'be' Osiris.

As he grew up, he would internalize other voices, such as those of his bosses, priests, or political leaders.

We don't need neuroscience to reason about these agents because we can 'feel' them, through introspection, pulling at our psyches

higher-order brain systems don't need to create agency 'from scratch' out of mindless robotic slaves. They inherit agency pretty much for free.

Von Neumann computer architecture, whose parts never have to worry about where their energy is coming from.

Well, they're out of work. They're unemployed

of the "selfish" neuron

Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect

if moral equality is an obstacle to human excellence, then so much the worse for moral equality

“I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods.”

The first difficulty is that the robot’s utility function did not quite match our utility function. Our utility function is 1 if the cauldron is full, 0 if the cauldron is empty, −10 points to whatever the outcome was if the workshop has flooded, +0.2 points if it’s funny, −1,000 points (probably a bit more than that on this scale) if someone gets killed … and it just goes on and on and on.

Wherever Germany extends her sway, she ruins culture

the extent to which a spirit is sui generis, the limits of that which he can allow himself—in other words, the limits of that which is beneficial to him—become more and more confined

without even a thought of what I was squandering and how its place might be filled.

enough to discourage the strongest and most heroically disposed intestines.

Thanatos is the irrational urge to destroy the source of all sexual energy in the annihilation of the self

Eros (the life instinct), which covers all the self-preserving and erotic instincts, and Thanatos (the death instinct), which covers all the instincts towards aggression, self-destruction, and cruelty.

virtue of his possession of an immortal soul, he was now seen as being part of the natural order, different from non-human animals only in degree of structural complexity

originated in the emotional crisis which he suffered on the death of his father and the series of dreams to which this gave rise.

many neuroses (phobias, hysterical paralysis and pains, some forms of paranoia, and so forth) had their origins in deeply traumatic experiences which had occurred in the patient’s past but which were now forgotten–hidden from consciousness.

semiotics

“Hiking through the Grand Canyon is the closest to hell that I expect to come before I get there when I die,” Fedarko told Outside in August, after pulling out of 105-degree weather to rest. He wrapped up the hike on November 18. “There’s no exaggeration. That’s not hyperbole. It’s absolutely the most physical challenge that Pete and I have endured in our lives.”

nt colonies teach us self-organization stems from an adaptation that compresses information about the environment. Our economy and political system are similar forms of information compression

The problem is that political competition can also falter. When it does, politicians have less incentive to promise fair outcomes.

Preferential attachment is a type of positive feedback loop.

Most of us are unaware of how our actions lead to self-organizing behavior.

these producers need only a small set of information to figure out what to do: market prices.

offers a whole new way of understanding the world.

Venter can tell you almost nothing about the species he found.

Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough."

we don't know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.

With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

That's why Google can translate languages without actually "knowing" them

Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud.

Wisdom isn’t correlated with knowledge, it’s correlated with being in touch with reality—it’s not how far to the right you are on the graph, it’s how close you are to the orange line

This is particularly plausible for moral judgments in favour of inclusionary moral commitments, which are typically beyond the scope of evolutionary explanations

The fact that on our planet this capacity has evolved only in one species suggests as much

Instead, we tend to regard fitness-enhancing judgments as true, because this tendency increased the reproductive success of our ancestors.

more constrained scope

invoke historical considerations

serve the evolutionary debunker’s purposes just as well

scientifically informed historical explanations of our moral endorsements do not involve an appeal to mind-independent truths

orthogonal to empirical issues.