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How to Train Your AI
Artificial intelligence is no longer the stuff of science fiction. It answers our questions, writes our emails, and holds conversations that feel startlingly human. But how does it actually work? How is an AI built, taught, and kept from going off the rails? The answer is more fascinating, and more human, than most people realize. […]
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Language, Mind Control, and 9/11
An example that shows the radical devaluation of thought is the transformation of words in propaganda; there, language, the instrument of the mind, become ‘pure sound,’ a symbol directly evoking feelings and reflexes. – Jacques Ellul, Propaganda A leader or an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is the master of the […]
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The Brutalization of Education and the Closing of the American Mind
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. ― Aeschylus, Agamemnon One of the most disturbing trends I have witnessed over the course of my forty-nine years is the hijacking of American […]
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The Numbing Election
Before radio waves vibrated in Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 campaign, voters had scarce knowledge of candidates in presidential elections. Despite the limited communications, only a few presidents of the United States (POTUS) were disasters and most were more acceptable. The rapid growth of communications brought the faces and words of candidates into everyone’s living rooms; it […]
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Absolutist, Relativist and Cynical Thinking Styles
Orientation The mismatch between the complexity of the world and the simplistic manner in which we think about it The social, economic and political world in which we live is extremely complex, but most of the Yankee population does not have the thinking skills that can make intelligent decisions about this world and what to […]
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Years of Living Deniably
The summer of discontent is upon us. Whether we will find ourselves witness to direct exchange of fire or targets of another global counter-insurgency sweep is anyone’s guess. This time in 2020 the most massive abrogation of human and civil rights (temporary privileges granted to selective populations at different levels) in recorded history was accelerating […]
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Pedagogical Panopticon
At my relatively old age or state of maturity there are many things about which to dream. As a youth much of this nocturnal secretion necessarily extends beyond conscious experience. Hence we can easily believe that dreams are fantasy, in the sense of words describing what we could not have witnessed or done, at the […]
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Why Do We Love Consumerism?
De-linking from the dominant ideological themes of capitalist society is a difficult task. The globalization of capital under the regime of neoliberal deregulation has allowed consumerism to establish a pervasive presence throughout the world. Even if we get to know harrowing information about the inequalities and injustices of the reining consumption model, we don’t enact […]
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The Priesthood of Expertise
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. — Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, 1935 In The Death of Expertise, national security expert Tom Nichols warns that knowledge is under attack by an ill-informed public determined to replace […]
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