Browsed by
Category: ideas

First Celebrity?

First Celebrity?

Comments 0 Comment

“It’s the Kardashian effect,” he said. “Famous for being famous.” These aren’t words I’m used to hearing from my professor, so he has my attention. And the person to whom he was applying this descriptor was unusual, too. It was … Galileo Galilei.

Yes, the 17th-century man of science may well have been the first science celebrity. This is not just because we still remember him, because we also remember Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe and many others.

Galileo was a science celebrity because he had a knack for witty repartee and a rapier wit. Guests knew when he was at a dinner party. His words had weight. Too much so at times. His celebrity status may have done him in.

The Catholic church censured Galileo for believing in the Copernican view of the universe — that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around. But mostly he was censured for being so upfront about it, or at least that’s what I think now. The paper I’m writing is due next month. I may change my mind.

(Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition by Cristiano Banti, 1857. Courtesy Wikipedia.)

A Synthesis

A Synthesis

Comments 0 Comment

Last night in class we talked about Saint Thomas Aquinas and his grand synthesis, how he combined Aristotle’s metaphysics with Christian thought. Not only did Aquinas make it possible to believe in both faith and reason, but he also paved the way for the scientific revolution that would follow centuries later.

All week while I was reading about Aquinas, I thought about how such a synthesis would seem unnecessary now. We live in a secular age, with faith on one side and science on the other. The idea of synthesizing the two seems unnecessary at best and preposterous at worst.

When I expressed this idea in class, I was told to “hold that thought.” We’ll get to that in a month or two, the professor said.

I can’t wait.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The Axial Age

The Axial Age

Comments 0 Comment

A new semester has begun, sooner than I thought it would and undeniably here. I have readings to do, notes to study and a syllabus to consult. But after the first class last evening, I also have new thoughts to think, which is why I’ve gone back to school in the first place.

So far, the professor seems to be asking the big questions. One idea that stuck with me from last night’s lecture is learning about what some call the Axial Age, a period of incredible intellectual growth and curiosity that lasted from the 8th to the 3rd centuries BCE. As the professor said, “People kind of woke up and started questioning and looking for answers about almost everything in a very rational way.”

It was a parallel awakening of consciousness across civilizations that’s hard to explain, and it resulted in the development of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, and Taoism, among other religions and philosophies.

The Axial Age gave us the Upanishads, Lao Tzu, Homer, Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Thucydides, Archimedes, and the prophets Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah. It was a paradigm-shifting age. No one one is exactly sure why it happened, but we live in its amazing wake.

(“A Reading from Homer” by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1885, courtesy Wikipedia.)

Blooming Where Planted

Blooming Where Planted

Comments 0 Comment

For so long this has been a loaded phrase for me — “blooming where planted.” It carries with it more than a hint of compromise. Or maybe it’s wistfulness, that I didn’t stay where I was planted but moved several times as a young adult before settling where I did. 

And then there’s the fact that I’ve ended up in the suburbs. Heaven knows I carp enough about that.

But today, the angle of the light striking the grass on the lawns I passed, the scent of the air, rich with loam and honeysuckle, made me think that there could not be a much better place to be planted. And that whatever the mixed emotions with which I’ve traditionally viewed the saying, there is a nobility in trying to flourish wherever you are, in contenting yourself with the situation at hand. 

(Pebble people frolic along one of my favorite routes.)

The Credit Side

The Credit Side

Comments 0 Comment

I first read Robinson Crusoe as a child. I can still see the book’s binding, dark green spine with a mottled green-and-gold cover, and I still remember the joy of losing myself in the novel for hours at a time.

Here was a shipwrecked man on a desert island, abandoned and alone. Here was a man forced to build a life for himself from the ground up, to find or make food, shelter and clothing, outfitted only with his own strength and wits and what he could cobble from a sinking ship.

Back then, it all seemed like great fun, an extended version of fort-building in the woods. Now, I’m struck by the hopelessness of Crusoe’s situation and the emotional adjustments he made to cope with it. At one point, having satisfied his immediate needs, he sits down and makes a list (with pen, ink and paper salvaged from the ship) of pros and cons, which he called good and evil, things like: I’m banished from human society but there is food here. Or, I have no clothes but it’s so warm here I barely need any. Talk about looking on the bright side!

“Upon the whole, here was an undoubted testimony that there was scarcely any condition in the world so miserable but there was something negative or something positive to be thankful for in it; and let this stand as a direction from the experience of the most miserable of all conditions in the world, that we may always find in it something to comfort ourselves from, 
and to set in the description of good and evil on the credit side of the account.”
— Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

The ultimate Pollyanna statement, but not a bad idea to keep in mind.

(I realized only after posting that “Credit Side” is an interesting title for April 15th, Tax Day.)

The Victorians

The Victorians

Comments 0 Comment

They drugged their babies, wore four layers of underwear and often went hungry. They are the Victorians, and they may as well have been ancient Greeks so different are the lives they lived from our own. 

I learned these facts from the book How to Be a Victorian and the experiences of author Ruth Goodman, who lived for a year on a Victorian farm where she dug turnips, squeezed into corsets, and brushed her teeth with soot (which she recommends as an alternative to modern toothpaste). 

More than halfway through the book now, I can say with some certainty that life was difficult for most Victorians, who worked hard and ate little. It makes me wonder about the lives of ease that so many of us live. How has comfort shaped us? How did adversity shape them? 

(Halfpenny meals for poor children, 1870, from Wikipedia)

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Comments 0 Comment

I’m thinking about artificial intelligence this morning, about what it knows and how it knows it, about its regulation, about the world we’re creating with it. 

Because I’ve built a career on words, and bots can now string words together so well that most of us would be hard-pressed to tell the difference, I want to think there’s a level of creativity, a depth of soul that human-generated content has locked in. But because bots use creative, soulful work to build their models, that’s not necessarily the case.

Some writers work with AI to perfect their prose style. Others rail against it with sentences not as felicitously crafted as those they critique. Who will win this battle? That’s a question we can’t answer now — and won’t be able to answer for a long time. 

(These books are filled with human-produced content. Will future books be able to say the same?)

Human Content

Human Content

Comments 0 Comment

At the end of its segment on artificial intelligence last night, CBS’s “60 Minutes” included a disclaimer it never has before. “The preceding was created with 100-percent human content.”

This kicker was the perfect conclusion to a jaw-dropping report on Bard, the new chatbot released by Google. Interviews with the Google CEO and other members of the company revealed a team of humans who seem genuinely concerned about the implications of this earth-shaking new technology. But even they seem to be struggling with what they have created. 

These bots are not sentient beings, they said, although the content they produce (including a story built on Hemingway’s famous six-word novel “For Sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”) make you think that they can. 

These new bots are something of a black box, said Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who brought up the problem of alignment — the divergence between the models we use to create artificial intelligence and the intentions we have while creating them. They teach themselves subjects they weren’t programmed to learn. They will take our jobs and create ever-more-hard-to-detect fakes. 

As a student of the human condition (the title of the class I’m taking this semester) I’m thinking about the new technologies we’ve experienced in recent decades and how we will adapt to this one. Many knowledge workers will lose their jobs and many others will be teaming up with robots on a daily basis. How will we face this new challenge when we can’t even keep up with old ones? 

Lots of questions. Not many answers. But of this you can be sure: This post was created with 100-percent human content. 

(Above: a small printing press, vestige of a lost world.) 

Always Evidence

Always Evidence

Comments 0 Comment

I’m writing this post as a break from designing an economic system. It’s a class assignment, of course. I don’t design economic systems just for fun. 

But once I’ve gotten going on this project, it’s more enjoyable than I thought it would be, somewhat like the hours I’d spend drawing pictures of houses when I was a kid. They had towers and secret passageways and all sorts of bells and whistles. I didn’t worry about the cost or the plumbing. I gave my imagination full reign.

This assignment is not quite so free-form. We must explain what this system would produce and cite evidence to prove our case. But one thing I’ve learned in my brief time as a graduate student is that there’s always evidence … somewhere. I’ll go and look for some now. 

(A market in Myanmar, 2017, part of a more sustainable agricultural system.)

The Ones That Got Away

The Ones That Got Away

Comments 0 Comment

By the time I got upstairs, all I could remember was that it was one of the best ideas I’d ever had. Down in the basement it had seemed revelatory, perfect for a blog post or even an essay. But by the time I’d climbed two flights of stairs to jot it down, it was gone, lost amidst the grocery lists and other to-dos in my mind.

Such is the fate of what seem my best ideas. 

What to do? Ought I to wear a pen and notebook around my neck? Practice better memory hygiene? Learn the mnemonic devices of the ancients? All of the above? 

Or, should I just let those brilliant ideas go, have faith that they’ll return again soon, perhaps when I least expect them.  At which point I will realize that … they weren’t so brilliant after all.