timelets

“I came to realize the inadequacy of twentieth-century labels like capitalist, socialist, or, worst of all, neoliberal. They are no longer up to the task of helping us understand the world, if they ever were. Capitalist America intrudes upon the free market with a dense program of regulation and taxation while providing substantial (albeit imperfect) redistributive policies.

Socialist China detains union organizers, levies light taxes, and provides a threadbare social safety net. The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist. While Xi Jinping and the rest of the Politburo mouth Marxist pieties, the state is enacting a right-wing agenda that Western conservatives would salivate over: administering limited welfare, erecting enormous barriers to immigration, and enforcing traditional gender roles—where men have to be macho and women have to bear their children.”

-- Daniel Wang. “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”

...influential group of social and cognitive scientists say can help us better understand artificial intelligence. Today’s AI models are not, in their view, akin to a human mind. Rather, they’re a form of “cultural or social” technology that aggregates and passes on human knowledge — more like a printing press or even a bureaucracy or a market. If we want to understand how to manage AI, they say, we should study how we’ve handled new social technologies in the past.

Last year, Science published a version of this argument by Henry Farrell (a political scientist), Alison Gopnik (a psychologist), Cosma Shalizi (a statistician) and James Evans (a sociologist). “Beginning with language itself, human beings have had distinctive capacities to learn from the experiences of other humans and these capacities are arguably the secret of human evolutionary success,” the authors write. They go on to identify key ideas — from print to television to representative democracy — that transformed the nature of social learning by changing how societies process information.

The Science authors think we should view large language models along these lines — not as intelligence, but as a new form of cultural communication.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-09/what-s-the-best-way-to-think-of-ai-look-to-democracy-marketplaces

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

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.

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

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.

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.