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Category: communication

Atlas Hugged

Atlas Hugged

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The renowned evolutionary biologist DS Wilson discusses his novel Atlas Hugged refuting Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I have an e-copy if anyone wants a copy. An excerpt: “My sequel to Atlas Shrugged is titled Atlas Hugged and its protagonist is John Galt’s grandson. Ayn Rand was not a character in her novel, but since anything goes in fiction, I could transport her into mine as Ayn Rant, John I’s lover and John III’s grandmother. Rant’s son, John II, parlays her Objectivist philosophy into a world-destroying libertarian media empire….

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Human large-scale cooperation as a product of competition between cultural groups

Human large-scale cooperation as a product of competition between cultural groups

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Article in Nature Communications, February 2020. Since this topic repeatedly comes up in our discussions. The abstract: “A fundamental puzzle of human evolution is how we evolved to cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers in transient interactions. Group-level selection on culturally differentiated populations is one proposed explanation. We evaluate a central untested prediction of Cultural Group Selection theory, by assessing whether readiness to cooperate between individuals from different groups corresponds to the degree of cultural similarity between those groups. We documented…

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Sapience by Walden Hanes

Sapience by Walden Hanes

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Here is his Facebook post discussing some of the AI research used in his book. “The opening scenes of my novel 𝗦𝗔𝗣𝗜𝗘𝗡𝗖𝗘 take place at the 𝗦𝗶𝗺𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗯, a research facility in 2036 that seeks to create 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀, a theoretical form of Artificial Intelligence possessing human-like intuition and self-awareness.   “Early in the novel, the 𝗦𝗶𝗺𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗯 pursues its goal using methods I imagined based on current 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 theory. I merged this probabilistic approach with aspects of the 𝗙𝗿𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗻 𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗲…

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On balance

On balance

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False equivalence. The cartoon below highlights the difference. Add to that democracy and fascism, love and hate, truth and lies, humanity and selfishness, right and wrong, health and sickness and so on. There is no middle ground between them where some mythical compromise or balance lies.   I’ve long studied kung fu, where the philosophy and practice emphasize the shifting and dynamic balance of yin and yang, empty and full, left and right, body and mind and so on. Those…

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Learning and teaching resources for children

Learning and teaching resources for children

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Jonathan Warner, of ThinkerFit, contacted me after discovering our site. He wrote My kids inspire me and are the reason behind this passion project. I thought that the potential benefit would be yours and to the people who will read the site’s content. It is my sincere hope that the information gets out there for people to learn from. Among my personal acquaintances, several have children at home now due to COVID-19. Even in less challenging times, parents, children, and educators…

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Ideological purity

Ideological purity

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I recently appreciated this Facecrook comment on the topic, copied below for those not on the crooked media platform: “Purity, as an idea, as a practice, is inherently violent. Nature isn’t pure. Beings are born amid blood and piss and shit, and when we die, our bodies rot and feed the lives of countless souls. Dirt is dirty and its what we’re born from and what we become. Pick up a handful of dirt and you are holding, literally, your…

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Civilization requires virtue signaling

Civilization requires virtue signaling

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This is a frequent topic of interest to us. So here‘s an article by Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychology professor at UNM. A few excerpts follow: “We all virtue signal. […] Let’s not pretend otherwise.” “There’s virtue signaling, and then there’s virtue signaling. […] On the one hand, there’s what economists call ‘cheap talk’: signals that are cheap, quick and easy to fake, and that aren’t accurate cues of underlying traits or values. […] On the other hand, there’s virtue…

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Hanzi Freinacht on effective value memes

Hanzi Freinacht on effective value memes

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The author of the metamodern treatise Nordic Ideology. From this interview: “I’d like to say then about effective value meme that a lot of people are familiar with something quite similar, namely value memes from the spiral dynamics thinking. And it’s not just in the spiral dynamics framework, it’s all over adult development psychology really, that people have noticed, and it’s not just actually in adult development psychology, it’s also in anthropology. Those anthropologists that still or again start believing…

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The story of our reality

The story of our reality

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Interesting article on how what we perceive isn’t always the reality. We make up stories that shape our perceptions. “‘It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,’ says neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor at Dartmouth College and a senior fellow at Glendon College in Canada. ‘We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.’ Most of the time, the story our brains generate matches the real, physical world — but not always. Our brains also unconsciously bend our…

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Rushkoff: We humans are things to the IoT

Rushkoff: We humans are things to the IoT

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Meaning the Internet of Things. From Rushkoff: “The algorithms directing these bots and chips patiently try one technique after another to manipulate our behavior until they get the results they have been programmed to deliver. These techniques haven’t all been prewritten by coders. Rather, the algorithms randomly try new combinations of colors, pitches, tones, and phraseology until one works. They then share this information with the other bots on the network for them to try on other humans. Each one…

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