John L. Taylor @johnnylogic@qoto.org

Here are my #7Books to get to know me, post-college nonfiction edition:

• The Search for the Perfect Language by Umberto Eco
• The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
• Machine Learning and Data Mining by Igor Kononenko and Matjaz Kukar
• The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Clifford Stoll
• The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation by Thich Nhat Hanh
• The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being by Daniel M. Haybron
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

#Books, #Bookstodon, #NonFiction

Here are my #7Books to get to know me, post-college fiction edition:

• Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology by James Patrick Kelly (Editor) and John Kessel (Editor)
• The Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett (I know, this is cheating)
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
• Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
• Exhalation by Ted Chiang
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut (This is borderline non-fiction)

#Books, #Bookstodon, #fiction

Here are my #7Books to get to know me, college nonfiction edition:

• Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
• The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation by Gary William Flake
• Men of Mathematics by Eric Temple Bell
• The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul by Daniel C. Dennett and Douglas R. Hofstadter
• Engines of Logic: Mathematicians & the Origin of the Computer by Martin D. Davis
• Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
• The Logic of Reliable Inquiry by Kevin T. Kelly

#Books, #Bookstodon, #Nonfiction

Here are my #7Books to get to know me, college fiction edition:

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
• The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

#Books, #Bookstodon, #Fiction

Here are my #7Books to get to know me, elementary to high school nonfiction edition:

• Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings by Paul Reps (Editor), Nyogen Senzaki (Editor)
• The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neal Postman
• The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch Jr., Joseph F. Kett, James S. Trefil
• If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him: The Pilgrimage Of Psychotherapy Patients by Sheldon B. Kopp
• Letter from the Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr.
• Dictionary of Theories by Jennifer Bothamley

Boy, I was a weird kid.

#Books, #Bookstodon, #Nonfiction

Here are #7Books to get to know me, elementary to high school fiction edition:

1. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
2. The Complete Stories and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
3. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
4. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
5. Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
6. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
7. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

#Books, #Bookstodon, #Fiction

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

– Herbert Simon, ‘Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World’ in Martin Greenberger (ed.) Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (1971)

#AttentionEconomy, #Economics, #Information, #Quote, #Quotes

Two more things to keep in mind in addition to the above:

• Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it.” Also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle.
• The Gish Gallop: A rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments.

#Denialism, #Fallacy, #Science, #Skepticism

I ran across the FLICC model of science denial a while ago while reading How to Talk to a Science Denier by Lee McIntyre. I can say that throughout the years of engaging flat-earthers, stop-the-stealers, creationists, Covid deniers, vaccine skeptics, QAnon believers, and the like, I have faced every one of the techniques outlined. (Image Source)

#Denialism, #Fallacy, #Science, #Skepticism

Her website, Web3 is Going Just Great, is worth following if you are interested in stories related to Web3 and have a healthy skepticism of it.

Molly White bravely presented her talk, Is Web3 bullshit?, at Web Summit 2022 in front of a crowd with what are likely many people deeply invested in Web3. She calls out the ubiquity of vaporware, the numerous grifts, and the entrenchment power behind the rhetoric while acknowledging the importance of the lofty goals which should inspire technologists.

#Skepticism, #Technology, #Video, #Web3

Political scientist and philosopher, Eric Schliesser offers further critique of MacAskill’s longtermism:

“I offer two (kinds of) criticisms of What We Owe the Future. First, I discuss its cavalier attitude toward injustice. This criticism will be extrinsic to MacAskill’s own project. Second, I argue it treats a whole number of existential risks as uncorrelated which are, almost certainly correlated. (This I consider an intrinsic problem.) And this exhibits two kinds of lacunae at the heart of his approach: (a) his lack of theoretical interest in political institutions and the nature of international political coordination; (b) the absence of a disciplining social theory (or models) that can help evaluate the empirical data and integrate them.”

Part two is forthcoming.

#EffectiveAltruism, #Ethics, #Longtermism, #Philosophy, #PoliticalScience

Small Kindnesses
By Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

#Kindness, #Poetry

Efforts to save the endangered Fender’s blue butterfly have resulted in quadrupling the population as well as helping save its host plant, the Kincaid’s lupine, from a similar fate!

“[T]he species is slated to be downlisted from endangered to threatened. If this status change is finalized, as is expected to happen this year, Fender’s blue will become only the second insect to have recovered in the history of the Endangered Species Act.” (Story Source, Image Source)

#Conservation, #Biology, #Butterfly, #Flower, #GoodNews, #Oregon