Welcome to the world of human contradiction!

Kevin Spacey at Georgetown

do Capital e da guerra

Contre courant - 23 Janvier 2017 - La Commune

Da narrativa fascista. Segundo Maurizio Lazzarato, Fórum do Futuro, ontem: Quem são os racistas (fascistas)? São aqueles que não possuem nada, mas que são assombrados por um fantasma que lhes roubou aquilo que poderiam ter tido. O racista tem medo de ser roubado. (definição inspirada em Sartre). O Capital não precisa da democracia para sobreviver. O racismo actual não é um racismo no sentido colonialista ('conquistador'). É um racismo defensivo, angustiado.

Life after death?

Is There Life After Death? moderated by John Cleese - 2018 Tom Tom Founders Festival

Spot the biased wanker

Female Sexuality

Aqui

Fórum of the Future 2017

da fragilidade / dealing with failure

"If you are not exposed to stressers you are going to be weakened. We have a society that is obsessed by eliminating small stressers, small risk, at the expense of large risk. [...] We are made for variability."
Nassim Taleb

Ou seja, errar muitas vezes faz bem! :)

"We are made to hate randomness. The environment gives us randomness and it prevented us from dying, prevented us from encountering the big large scale event. So we are made to hate randomness because we are not fine tuned for such subtlety that some randomness in small amounts is good for us."
Nassim Taleb

"The psychology of it is that we are actually relatively more sensitive to small losses than to big losses, to small harms than to big harms. We have a limited ability, actually, to feel pain, and we feel a lot of pain for very little harm and then it doesn't get worse proportionately. So in a very real sense we're designed against what you want. [...] When you have achieved anti-fragility, you really don't need to predict. You don't need to predict the detail."
Daniel Kahneman

"Trial and error isn't really trial and error. Trial and error is trial with small error. What is anti-fragile? It's small losses and big gains. To out perform trial and error intellectually, you need at least 1000 IQ points. What I mean is that you'd rather be anti-fragile than intelligent any time. You look at the data and you realize that all the big gains we have had, in any field, except the nuclear, and even in medicine except for AZT drugs, came from trial and error by people who didn't have much of a clue about the process. It's trying."
Nassim Taleb

Link: Fat Tony [+/– min 54]

"Fat Tony doesn't believe in knowledge. He believes in tricks and no theory. He believes in doing and you keep trying till something works. And then you get rich and then you go and have lunch and that is why he is called Fat Tony. So Fat Tony is arguing with Socrates and he was able to express that sentence that Nietzsche really understood, he said: 'The mistake people tend to make is to think that whenever you don't understand it's stupid. The unintelligible is not necessarily unintelligent. And anti-fragility is harvesting the unintelligible. It's harvesting what we don't understand. And this is what was done. Take the industrial revolution, take the Silicon Valley, take the discoveries in medicine... It's harvesting the unintelligible with small errors and big gains, and doing it in an industrial scale. So the industrial revolution happened with people who weren't really academics."
Nassim Taleb
 
"And that is why I don't like academia. If you had put Bill Gates through a whole college experience, you wouldn't have had Microsoft."
Nassim Taleb
 
"Many of the concepts we really admire are questioned in the book. And if you don't completely buy the argument (I think the argument is quite extreme). But you even don't completely buy it, it is bound to lead you to questions. To questions about the relative value of theory and practice. To questions about the value of planning, just as trial and error. We normally favor theory, we favor general understanding, we favor deductive reasoning or induction. That's the way our values are. These are questions in this book. [...] All of these issues that we normally consider, fairly obviously, the way to go in the modern world, all of these are really questioned in Anti-Fragile, so that makes it worth taking a look, even of sometimes the book is going to make you quite uncomfortable."
Daniel Kahneman
 
"Thinking probabilistically, in a proper way is extremely difficult for people. People do have a sense of propensity. That is, that a system has a tendency to do something or other, but that's quite different from thinking about probability, where you do have to think about two possibilities and weigh their relative chances of happening."
Daniel Kahneman
 
"I'm a firm believer in intuition. I have done a lot of research in explaining where intuition leads us astray, but intuition works most of the time extremely well for us. Basically it's system one that keeps us moving and it's intuitive and mostly it's fine. Occasionally it leads us into amusing errors and I spent my life time studying those amusing errors."
Daniel Kahneman
 
"Try to avoid a non narrative form of life by, opportunistically, taking advantage of things in a structured way. So you need a huge amount of reason but at the same time you don't need a narrative. It's much harder to live that way but it's much more rewarding and much safer. [...] You have to allow the people to fail. Encourage the risk takers. You should bail out the individuals, not the corporations, by giving them a backup to take more risks in life."
Nassim Taleb

Beyond the machine — Metaphors of the body

XELENTE !!

Slavoj Zizek
Mona Eltahawy
Kate Adie
Jon Ronson
Greg Sheridan

da realidade

on the invisible forces / the placebo effect

"Biological research is revealing that inheritance works in different ways from the standard DNA in inheritance pattern [epigenetics]."

Sobre Bruce Lipton


Darwinian medecine Richard Dawkins and Nicholas Humphreys:

The Human mind frame / Playing God

Diz Rosalind Picard (que afirma ter sido ateia, agnóstica e agora diz ser cristã):

"I build computers, software agents and I collaborate on building robots. If I were to build some robots, that were like my children, and they would go off to another planet and be autonomous and have agency and have a little bit of experience, so that they don't hurt themselves, right? So you would want them to experience pain so that they don't get injured. I think I would want them to know that they were made by humans. I would think I might want to put something inside them so that, even though they maybe didn't need to communicate with us, they might actually want to communicate with us. I think I might put inside them, maybe, some little program that causes them to want to show an acknowledgement toward what we did into bringing them into being. Why would I want that? I don't know, It's just part of the pleasure of making them and, in a sense, we've kind of made them in our image. So there's an interesting role reversal here. And we think as if why we have this in us. Is this a feeling we can't trust? It is not real. Or maybe it's real, actually, maybe there's something there... And just because we can't explain it with material stuff now, it doesn't mean that there isn't going to be a future explanation that is completely satisfactory as is our scientific explanation now."

Argumentos a favor da importância das artes na educação

1) The arts are a way of understanding the world just like the sciences are. They are two very different ways of understanding the world, and if we only teach the scientific way of understanding the world, we are leaving out half of what humans have done for centuries [Ellen Winner]
2) Look at all the kids that have some kind of artistic talent that could be put to use in the economy. Think of all the visual spatial things going on in the digital world now. And if these kids never discover they have visual spatial talents because they never have visual arts education, then they won't grow in that area. This is a very pragmatic kind of argument [Ellen Winner]

3) Where people with talent want to be now, are in interesting places. And if there isn't tolerance there and if there aren't art museums there, they don't want to be there [Howard Gardner, citando Richard Florida]
4) What kind of planet do we want to have, what kind of workers do we want to have, what kind of citizens do we want to have, what kind of persons do we want to have? And when we say 'competition', why don't we compete in terms of good workers and citizens and good persons, rather than some kind of will-o'-the-wisps of test scores. We should compete on things that are not zero sum. E [Howrd Gardner] refere o exemplo de Reggio Emilia.

Há vida depois da morte?

"It will happen to all of us that at some point you will get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party is over but, slightly worse, the party is going on but you have to leave. And it's going on without you. That's the reflection that most upsets people about their demise.

All right then, because it might make us feel better, let's pretend the opposite. Instead, you will get tapped on the shoulder and told, great news! This party is going on forever and you can't leave. You've got to stay. The boss says so and he also insists that you have a good time."
Christopher Hitchens

Can Science Tell Us Right From Wrong?

Diz Simon Blackburn:
I also agree that our values can be tempered by science. I think, for example, that the further understanding, for example, of the similarities between the male brain and the female brain march alongside other cultural causes to assist in the equality of women and I hope it very much does so. I think that measurements of identity of intelligence, identity of skill, identity of other cognitive functions will be scientific measurements. They could also insist in breaking down racial barriers and in breaking down gender barriers. So, of course, science can inform our values and should inform our values, and I think we all put our hands up to that.

As to whether you need nothing but science, which I think was the first message we heard, I think I'm afraid I don't agree with Sam (Harris) about that. And neither do the other three speakers we've heard so far. And the reason, I think it's an important reason, it's philosophical, I'll just spend a couple of minutes saying why I think it so.

Virtually all philosophies of mind recognize two different kinds of mental state. There are mental states whose business is to reflect the world as it is, to represent the world to, in other words, inform you about the environment in which you are to act. Those go by the name of beliefs. For if a belief is sufficiently certain and sufficiently well tested you might call it knowledge. So there are beliefs about the world, knowledge about the world, and their business is to reflect the world as it is.

But then there are mental states like desires or intentions, or concerns. Now they have a slightly different, the usual metaphor that philosophers use is 'direction of fit'. They're the things that you care about. And their function is to motivate you to get the world to conform to the content of the desire. If you desire to go to the fridge and get a beer, your business is to, you're set, you're poised, you're disposed to change the world so that first of all you will become nearer to the fridge than you were and secondly that you get a beer. That's changing the world. And the function of the desire is to change the world to conform to whatever is the content of the desire.

Now, many, many moral philosophers, myself included, put values on the 'desire' side of those mental states. The job of values is to orientate you towards the world, to orientate the way you behave, to, as it were, to reflect what you care about, what you desire. It's not just what you desire, it's what you're concerned about in much more important ways. A value is like a desire that you are prepared to make public, that you want coordination on, that you're prepared to insist upon from other people. At it's limit it will define things that you think you must do, not just things you want to do and things that other people must do in relationship to you. So, those are values.

So it's going to be inevitable that there's a gap between fact and value because your two mental states, the ones that represent the way of the world and the ones that motivate you to act in the world as you understand it to be, have this different function.

So, it's one thing to know the world and what the world is like, and it's another thing to care about it in any particular way.

Now Sam [Harris] said that you could just chuck away all the writings of moral philosophers because science had discovered that ethics is about promoting welfare and avoiding suffering. Well, I don't know which science discovered that. It was certainly a major theme of Aristotle, it was a major theme of the Buddha, it's a major theme of Christianity, it's a major theme of any moral philosopher that's ever lived.

Where the moral philosophers find the going difficulty is in having an adequate conception of human flourishing, so let me give you a couple of examples. Some people think that flourishing is just a matter of contented, happy kind of dreamlike mental states. A bit like after you take a spliff or two or you got that beer out of the fridge. This was the target of, for example, 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley. He created, he wrote about a world of, sort of, zombies. Happy zombies kept in a kind of dreamlike contented state by a combination of drugs and lies. Another way you can be happy, you can flourish, is by living in a fool's paradise. By turning your face away from the things that might make you unhappy or just be an ignorant of them. So you can take two people in identical apparent mental states. Each of them believes they're living the American dream but one of them is in a complete illusion. He believes that his wife loves him and that his children love him and that the job is going well and that his colleagues respect him, and none of that is true. He's living in a fool's paradise, and according to Aristotle and many moral philosophers following him, that man is not flourishing because he is living under an illusion. However happy he may say he is, however happy he might appear to be by some neurological measure, since it's not a life of achievement and of real truth and attainment to a way of being in the actual world, he's living in a fool's paradise.

Again, other people have had conceptions of flourishing which included suppressing desires rather than satisfying them. The Buddha did this. Stoicism does this. The idea is that you can easily become a kind of utility gobbler, a utility monster. You want to gobble up experiences, you want to gobble up goods. You want to buy bigger houses, you want to satisfy more and more desires, and that that isn't a flourishing way of life, even if you managed to satisfy them. The real life consists in self mastery and wisdom and understanding that a desire satisfaction doesn't necessarily bring the most flourishing kind of life.

Now all those are moral ideas which throw around the conception of well-being and problematize it. Sam [Harris] thinks we can do without all that. That you can go to a scientist and say, was Buddha right about flourishing? I don't think you can. I think you have to work out for yourself what you care about in your life and the way you care to live it. And, actually, the same comes when it is a question of the utility of others. Peter  [Singer] talks about the expanding circles of reason by itself. Means that you, as it were expand from being concerned just for yourself and for your family, to be concerned for more and  more and more sentient things until, eventually, you become a servant of the world. Giving away all your money to other people and so forth.

I don't think reason tells you such thing. I think it's an excellent thing if you expand your sentiments and I very much hope, as it were, that we all do become more charitable. But I don't think that you are under any obligation to become a servant of the world. And one of the hardest things in ethics is to decide in how to prioritize your own well-being the well-being of your family, the well-being of those to whom you owe debts of gratitude, your loyalty to particular groups amongst whom you live, versus a more impersonal duty to those who lie outside that immediate circle. I think prioritizing one over the other is a very hard decision many of us have to make. All of us have to make. Every time you take your children on holiday, you could be saving three children in Africa, their death or their eyesight or whatever. And yet people do go on taking their children on holiday. And I'm glad they do. I think that they have to.

So, prioritizing these things is very hard, it's very difficult, it's not solved just by saying, oh it would be awful if everybody was be miserable and it would be wonderful if everyone was happy. You can't live simply with that as a guide. It's no guide at all. So I'm afraid ethics is and remains a very difficult subject, and it's a complete illusion to suppose that science will give us all the answers.

Eu também quero acreditar

"I believe that we can recover the lost connection between Athens and Jerusalem. We could get back a world where philosophy was valued. Where the beauty of science was considered worth studying, worth revering even. Where literature would be the key to the study of ethics and morality. And if you wanted the transcendente, you would have love and sex and music. And you wouldn't need any supernatural permission for any of this nonsense. I miss it terribly. I feel like something was torn away from me when I was born."
Christopher Hitchens

What's So Great About God

"What we risk if we take the supernatural route is the idea of an unchangeable, unalterable authority. One apparently benign, one apparently wicked. Both of them eternal, both of them unchanging and unchangeable, and ourselves as their play things and their objects and their raw material. This is where the idea of tyranny begins. With the eternal unchanging tyrannical authority. Where we must try with our poor power to guess what's wanted of us and to spend our lives on our knees."
Christopher Hitchens

Deus existe?

Um debate muito interessante e muito politicamente correcto, salpicado com aquele humor inteligente que nos faz sorrir. Apesar da minha simpatia pender mais para um dos oradores, e achando este tipo de debates pertinentes e até úteis, não deixo de achar que continuamos a discutir o sexo dos anjos. Paradoxal? Provavelmente. Gostaria de ter ouvido alguém a referir a obra de Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Saliento a questão colocada por CH a WLG: "How many religions in the world do you believe to be false?", respondida por WLG: "I don't know how many religions there are."

A propósito da vida fazer sentido ou ter um sentido, CH afirma: "What is meaningful to me is trying to be free and trying to help others to be free too. Emancipate yourself from the idea of a celestial dictatorship and you will have taken the first step to becoming free." e acrescenta, "one obstacle to liberty is the poisonous role played by fellow primates of mine who think they can tell me what to do, in the name of God, because God has told them that they have this power."

At the end of the day, a minha opinião é que quando se 'acredita' numa coisa, é irrelevante provar que ela existe ou não existe. Acreditar tem pouco a ver com objectividade científica, com raciocínio lógico. É emocional. É cultural.

"seek and you will find. If you can't get good evidence you will get junk evidence [the human pattern seeking brain]". Até porque Deus escreve direito por linhas tortas. 

The war on drugs? Or not?

Attacking the drug supply will never work. In the United States we spend over 20 billion dollars a year on the War on Drugs, and it's wasted money. This is because the drug supply is like a water balloon: if you push it down in one location, it comes up somewhere else. The better strategy is not to address _supply_, but _demand_. Drug demand is rooted in the brain of the addict. We know quite a bit about the circuitry and pharmacology of drug addiction, and there are many fruitful new approaches to addressing the ills of drug addiction in a cooperative, evidence-based, neurally-compatible manner. Dealing with drug addiction through rehabilitation is a more humane and cost effective idea than mass incarceration of the addicted.