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The princes of the Catholic Church listened intently as Pope Leo XIV laid out his priorities for the first time, revealing that he had chosen his papal name because of the tech revolution. As he explained, his namesake Leo XIII stood up for the rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age, when industrial robber barons presided over rapid change and extreme inequality.

“Today, the church offers its trove of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity, justice and labor,” Leo XIV told the College of Cardinals, who stood and cheered for their new pontiff and his unlikely cause.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/pope-leo-ai-tech-771cca48


This is quite unexpected, although it seems quite logical in the context of Harari's Nexus
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On the suggestion of my AI assistant, I'm reading Yuval Harari's "Nexus". Here's its summary of how the author defines information:
In "Nexus," Yuval Noah Harari defines information as something that creates new realities by connecting different points into a network. Unlike the naive view, which sees information primarily as an attempt to represent reality, Harari emphasizes that information's defining feature is connection rather than representation. Information can take many forms, such as music, DNA, or stories, and its primary role is to connect and form networks, rather than merely represent preexisting realities.


Essentially, he says that information is a graph or more precisely, it comprises edges of a graph. Therefore, we can represent it as a homset of all arrows in the graph and apply the Yoneda Lemma to understand the power structure of information.
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The map of government spending also helps explain the rise of Donald Trump. He not only has promised to revive America’s economically stagnating communities, but to protect Social Security or Medicare from “even a single penny’’ of cuts.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/americans-government-aid-social-security-medicare-unemployment-34e92b19
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Recent philosophy of technology examines the way that our technologies form the background, context, and medium for our lives, shaping our culture and the environment, altering patterns of human activity, and influencing who we are and how we live. If there is a single, over-arching theme to recent philosophy of technology, it is the attempt to find a balance between the technical and social aspects of technology. If the narrowly construed “instrumental” meaning of technology understands it only terms of technical properties, techniques, and precise knowledge, the broader (and more accurate) understanding of technology includes the full range of cultural, economic, political, and legal dimensions – in addition to technical factors – that form the technological character of a society.

--- David M. Kaplan, Paul Ricoeur and the Philosophy of Technology. Journal of French Philosophy
Volume 16, Numbers 1 and 2, Spring-Fall 2006.
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He[Ricoeur] derives this initial ethical understanding of institution from Arendt’s concept of “power in common” that is contrasted with domination (“power over”) and that is realised by a plurality of people acting in concert. ...

Because acting in concert with unknown third parties needs time to unfold, institutions are needed. Institutions thereby provide the neces- sary temporal dimension for the power in common to endure, which lies at the basis of any political community. Read more... )

--- Reijers, Coeckelbergh. Narrative and Technology Ethics.

In this respect, good institutions bridge time, i.e. form social infrastructure the same water reservoirs form physical infrastructure. Need to find a related quote from Hegel that good judges/courts represent infinity.
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a YouGov/The Economist survey from Oct. 14-17 found that only 18 percent of Americans thought the Israeli government’s response has been too harsh; 32 percent thought it was about right, and 22 percent thought it was not harsh enough.

https://abcnews.go.com/538/americans-war-israel/story?id=104150059


In the meantime, 78% of Republicans have a favorable view of the covfefe, compared to 36% among Independents.
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Reason is feminine in nature; it can only give after it has received. Of itself it has nothing but the empty forms of its operation.

--- Arthur Schopenhauer.


Over millennia, the unique ability of women to conceive and bear children got interpreted as their only ability.
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Дакоты предполагают существование четырех душ. Есть душа тела, которая умирает вместе с ним. Далее есть дух, кото- рый всегда остается при теле или пребывает в его близости. Далее есть душа, ответственная за поступки тела и отправляющаяся по одним, — на юг, по другим — на запад. И, наконец, четвертая всегда остается в пучке волос мертвеца, который родственники сохраняют, пока не представится случай бросить его в страну врага, где эта душа начинает бродить в качестве привидения, насылающего смерть и болезнь (Levy-Bruhl 65).

...душа или одна из душ, вышедшая из мертвеца, сама становится причиной смерти других. Другими словами, одна из душ объективируется, становится самостоятельным страшным существом, теряет связь со своим хозяином, и она-то и вызывает смерть.
...
...душа мыслится как самостоятельное существо, могущее жить вне человека. Для этого даже не всегда нужно умереть. И живой человек может иметь душу или одну из душ вне себя. Это так называемая внешняя душа, bush soul. Обладателем такой души является Кощей.

Умершим, существовавшим в силу объективистического момента. визации души как самостоятельные существа, приписывались два сильнейших инстинкта: голод и половой голод. На первых порах на первом месте стоит голод. Смерть-пожирательница древнее других видов смерти.

В. Пропп. Исторические корни волшебной сказки.
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We argue here that people’s limited knowledge and their misleading intuitive epistemology combine to create an illusion of explanatory depth (IOED). Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do. The illusion for ex- planatory knowledge–knowledge that involves complex causal patterns—is separate from, and additive with, people’s general overconfidence about their knowledge and skills. We therefore propose that knowledge of complex causal relations is particularly susceptible to illusions of understanding.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-18942-001


Is the growth of conspiracy theories an inevitable consequence of the growing complexity of technology/society?
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1060586X.2022.2062657
Maria Snegovaya & Kirill Petrov (2022) Long Soviet shadows: the nomenklatura ties of Putin elites, Post-Soviet Affairs, 38:4, 329-348, DOI: 10.1080/1060586X.2022.2062657

We find that the percentage of elite descendants from the Soviet nomenklatura, which during the Soviet times comprised only 1–3% of the population, remained quite stable between 2010 and 2020, constituting approximately 60% of Russia’s top ruling class. These findings, 30 years after the transition, signal a pronounced continuity between elites in the Soviet and Putin regimes.

Ironically, where elite change does occur in Putin’s system, it primarily happens through the influx of elite members with siloviki backgrounds. The nomenklatura and siloviki samples only partially intersect, and those with strictly nomenklatura ties significantly exceed the share of siloviki. In other words, Putin-era elites may be conceptualized as a mix of individuals with nomenklatura ties and siloviki backgrounds.
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DER SPIEGEL: The war itself isn’t being questioned.

Gudkov: No, the attacks on Ukraine and the massacres play no role. The Russians have little compassion for the Ukrainians. Almost no one here talks about the fact that people are being killed in Ukraine.

DER SPIEGEL: Can you quantify that?

Gudkov: The share is just 1.5 to 2 percent of respondents. And only an average of 10 percent of the population feels guilt and shows empathy – Russian society is amoral. Of course, they don’t want war, but people behave submissively, passively and don’t want to engage in open conflict with the state.
....

Despite all the fear, the Homo Putinus hopes that Putin will protect the country from the West and lead it out of the economic crisis, as he did during the first years of his presidency.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/opinion-researcher-lev-gudkov-russians-have-little-compassion-for-the-ukrainians-a-066c08c6-60f4-48e1-853a-d2b3d67bd6b8
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Turned against reason, this understanding behaves in the manner of ordinary common sense, giving credence to the latter’s view that truth rests on sensuous reality, that thoughts are only thoughts, that is, that only sense perception gives filling and reality to them; that reason, in so far as it abides in and for itself, generates only mental figments.

In this self-renunciation
of reason,
the concept of truth is lost,
is restricted
to the knowledge of mere
subjective truth,
of mere appearances,
of only something to which the nature of the fact
does not correspond;
knowledge has lapsed into opinion.

GWH Hegel, The Science of Logic.


Hegel was extremely successful in his project to rediscover truth and put on a solid foundation of new logic. I wonder whether something like that would be even possible in today's world. What would it take to overcome the post-truth attitude in our society?
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“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”

--- Atwood, Margaret. “The handmaid's tale.”
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В субботу встречался с приятелем, говорили, как обычно, об американской жизни, и он мне посоветовал почитать The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. (THT). Я начал читать, и узнал привычные детали жизни тоталитарного общества. Одна идея показалась очень знакомой: в новелле женщины, в зависимости от положения в государственной иеарархии, носят платья разного цвета. Сама героиня работает служанкой, поэтому ей положено ходить в строго красном платье.

Я вспомнил, что давным-давно был советский фильм Кин-дзад-за, где в обществе будущего тоже была строгая дифференциация цвета одежды. Кто у кого взял идею? Атвуд опубликовала свою книгу в 1985-м, а фильм вышел в 1986-м, поэтому подозреваю, что цветные штаны в фильме появились неспроста.

С приятелем мы договорились читать эту книгу одновременно и обсуждать ее при встречах. Мне, наверное, это будет немного трудно делать, потому что для него общество из THT – экзотический кошмар, а я там жил. Он же не поверит, что Атвуд, скорее, приуменьшает нормальность тоталитаризма, чем его преувеличивает.
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Сегодня слушал Льва Гудкова на Живом Гвозде по поводу протестных настроений в России. Настроения есть, протестов нет и не будет.

Зато узнал важную вещь, почему в стране за 30 лет так и не выросло "непоротое поколение." Оказывается, перелом к конформизму в России происходит в возрасте 25-28 лет, когда молодежь начинает встраиваться в систему. Из этого я делаю вывод, что оттуда надо уезжать сразу после получения образования. Если не уехал(а), то стал циником и путинистом; в лучшем случае - с фигой в кармане.

Putin delenda est.
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The exact sciences elude social analysis not because they are distant or separated from society, but because they revolutionize the very conception of society and of what it comprises. Pasteurism is an admirable example.

--- Bruno Latour. The Pasteurization of France, 1993. p 38.


AI seems to be moving in the same direction.
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“Aristotle made these points clear:
"But the virtues are not in this point analogous to the arts. The products of art have their excellence in themselves, and so it is enough if when produced they are of a certain quality; but in the case of the virtues, a man is not said to act justly or temperately (or like a just or temperate man) if what he does merely be of a certain sort—he must also be in a certain state of mind when he does it: i.e., first of all, he must know what he is doing; secondly, he must choose it, and choose it for itself; and, thirdly, his act must be the expression of a formed and stable character.”

--- John Dewey. “Ethics.”


We might be experiencing a one-in-two-thousand years shift where the product of art and the artist are being judged by a converging set of criteria.

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