Category: Uncategorized

Writing Your Book, with Jamie Bartlett

Bookmarked this Twitter thread back in February, but was reminded of it again over the weekend, so I thought I’d capture the content once and for all here:

Think this is true of all creative writing, even code and databases. In fact what you need is a flexibly linked system, where random and structured stuff hangs together. (eg see Scrivener link below, but anything with extensible mark-up and content searching.) That point about remembering old deleted lines in new contexts is something that happens to me ten times a day!

Everyone needs a schema, even a stream of consciousness where the characters lead the narrative. (Your schema can be minimalist of course, or just a seed if you have no preconceived story or message, see Lee Child as described by Andy Martin in “And Reacher Said Nothing”. For the other extreme see J K Rowling. Most of us will need something in between.)

See also first comment on flexible, extensible mark-up process. Need a low-tech way of capturing (and finding) thoughts that “feel” relevant in the moment at any time – and crash on with drafting when the muse strikes.

Copyright acknowledged.
If and when Jamie collates and publishes, I will delete and link.

I think here the message is variety and horses for courses. As Jamie says there are in fact many different tasks besides “writing” you need to make space(s) for all of them.

And as Jamie notes, plenty of side-branches with additional thoughts from others – that’s extensible mark-up 😉

Science is Only Human

Few days without any posting thanks to several glorious days in the mountains of UK Lake District (Facebook album here.) Never seen such conditions for hiking and views in dozen or more trips over 40 years. As usual I’m using down time to read, two books this time.

I mentioned Martin Robinson’s Trivium 21c already, but I also started on David Deutsch’s Beginning of Infinity.

Loved Deutsch’s Fabric of Reality some years ago, but despite a common Information Quanta thread, I largely lost contact with his Quantum Computing and Constructor Theory work, except for brief interest in his colleague Chiara Marletto. [Links]

I’m reading Beginning of Infinity primarily for a single chapter referred to in a Twitter thread about the evolution of culture, but in fact from the off, it is a fascinating book. Several threads right on my own agenda, as well as more of what I liked in Fabric of Reality on the power of explanation as the core (if not the distinguishing feature) of scientific enlightenment. His Infinity refers to the basic principle that good explanation covers not just a rationalisation of experience in a falsifiable form and open to critique, but a potential infinity of not yet even conceived future experiences.

How else could we know what is really happening in stars? This statement comes very close to where I’m at on the anthropic significance of humanity in the grand scheme of reality:

Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars,
and by intelligent beings who [unlike the alchemists]
understand the processes that power stars
and by nothing else in the universe.

And more generally:

In this book [he argues] that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what [he calls] good explanations. Though this quest is uniquely human, its effectiveness is also a fundamental fact about reality at the most impersonal cosmic level – namely that it conforms to universal laws that are indeed good explanations. This simple relationship between the cosmic and the human is a hint of a central role of people in the cosmic scheme of things.

Levels of Ethical, Social, and Cognitive Competencies

Another holding post – simply to capture this Buddhistic David Chapman piece on Robert Kegan and Lawrence Kohlberg’s models of developing (evolving) intellectual competencies. (Hat tip to @MimeticValue for the link.)

They look very much related to sorting out the missing aspects of Pirsig’s Social-Intellectual levels as I’ve tried to do here. (Three aspects within what Pirsig characterised as only two, and left many confused.) Foucault-Pirsig related versions here. And more generic triads here. And of course Trivium 21c.

And “fluid” identity of subjects and objects at the most enlightened level, reminds me of this – my take on Rayner.

Love the dismissal of Trolleyology – they were of course only ever thought experiments to show how ridiculous objective treatment of ethics can get.

Transposing view – Objects > Relations > Systematically-Meta and of course that Eastern (Buddhist) perspective of Western blind-spots. Excellent.

Don’t Shoot the Messenger

This is just a placeholder / outline / draft post.

#IdentityPolitics are everywhere this morning.

Labour on Windrush, Kanye on slavery and his #takedown, and his clarification, Peterson on Kanye, David Boston offensive posts as Tory candidate.

Each is struggling to articulate an identity politics point which I “suspect” is valid but which is hard to tell on the surface, because the communication is offensive and the reactions invariably pile on the (presumed) bad intent, bad thinking and/or bad character of the individual and their (actual) bad communication. Communicating about identity politics is a PC problem in terms that get attributed to Peterson.

Inevitably such communications get totally polarised, (a) because there is an identity politics at issue where people might tend to take sides anyway, and (b) the “risk” of giving any credibility to (any valid point in) the offensive position is so great that everyone chooses to dissociate themselves from it, often by way of mocking humour or by supporting the rhetorical “takedowns”, and (c) these are all public parties, so the “power” in the misconstrued and inadequately-conceived messages is enormous, further multiplying the (a) and (b) effects. [And (d) as I keep saying all these effects are ramped-up even further by the immediacy of social media speed and access.]

We have a communication problem-to-the-power-of-four.

To some extent the takedown of Kanye is making the same (valid) point that the problem is in the power of communication, but still nevertheless attributes thoughtless intent to Kanye himself. It leaves no crack for there being any valid point, it’s a total takedown, armed explicitly by objective history, especially in the form edited / circulated.

Reality is complex, and despite best efforts of some analysts and historians, that complexity includes subjective positions as well as objective facts. Articulating specific points within that extended issue is tough because of the complexity, requiring careful nuance AND because – even if ultimately reducible to objective facts – the complexity includes subjectivity, the rules of communication are more than the logical grammar of dialectic and must include rhetorical skills. The rules of fact, thought and speech are different. As well as avoiding conflation in nuanced content, the communications (channels) need to be kept distinct too.

We are free to choose what to say, but choosing how much of what to say when and how and in which context is at least as important as the objective truth of anything thought or said. We really do need space for thinking out loud in dialogue. Transparency of public debate crowds this out. Transparency is ultimately opaque to nuanced reality.

There is (needs to be) a crack in everything, it’s how the light gets in.

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Post note: Even intelligent comics (Romesh retweeted by Baddiel) …

… and the whole thread – Gervais etc – oh how we laughed. Funny how these (genuinely) enlightened comedians were only last week applying nuanced thinking to free-speech in the #dankula case, jump straight to one-line mockery in the Kanye case.]

[And Scott Adams agrees it’s about the rhetorical use of metaphor.]

 

Trivium 21c – First Thoughts

I’m reading Martin Robinson’s “Trivium 21c” – apparently propounding adoption of the classical Trivium for the 21st century, so far anyway.

As is my wont, after a scan of contents and a read of introductory chapters I’m posting my early thoughts, so I can more honestly talk about new learning vs existing reinforcement later.

First impression is the parallel to Pirsig’s journey again. A schoolteacher who despite early obvious intellect was a misfit in their own schooling and early career, before becoming a teacher – Drama in Robinson’s case, Rhetoric in Pirsig’s – went on to deploy methods considered radical in their approach to teaching. In both cases they went back to school and wrote an archeology of their journey involving going back to basics with the ancient Greeks.

In fact the subtitle of Trivium 21c is “Preparing young people for the future with lessons from the past”. Very personal lessons.

The second aspect I like is the content-process split in thinking, and the emphasis on the process and action side of the balance. How we think, learn, know and do being more significant than what. What I learned here is the split of the classical “seven liberal arts” constitutes a quadrivium of what and a trivium of how.

  • Liberal Arts 7
  • Quadrivium – 4 kinds of content
    (originally arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy)
  • Trivium – 3 ways of using content
    (originally grammar, dialectic and rhetoric)

Now in terms of definition and understanding these classical liberal arts are already evolved from – not the same as – ancient Greek equivalents, and clearly we need to update what we mean now in the 21st century. Presumably that’s what the rest of the book is about, certainly as far as the process Trivium is concerned. We can take it as read that the content Quadrivium of human knowledge has evolved..

I’m already pushing rehabilitation of the value of rhetoric and dialogue to offset the destructive effect of dialectic and argument. Nothing metaphysical so far in terms of how this ontology of “the arts” relates to fundamentals, but early days. The “rt” in art and in craft is another fundamental aspect of Pirsig. Any way, for now, interesting to scan the references and index:

The bibliography is huge and full of many usual suspects.

Love the fact that Douglas (DNA) Adams features very early on. Despite the Pirsig parallels, no reference to Pirsig but Mortimer Adler, Pirsig’s nemesis, and Matt Crawford, one who picked-up Pirsig’s baton are intriguing. David Deutsch but no Dan Dennett. Dawkins but no Pinker. Toulmin but no McIntyre. McGilchrist, McLuhan, Haidt, (Allan) Bloom, fascinating, though no sense of positive or negative references yet.

I’m looking forward to this.

ID Cards & Voting – Enlighten Me Someone?

There are some Proof-of-ID trials happening in the upcoming local elections in the UK. Naturally the system is “flawed”.

All the usual responses of course, to the infringement if individual freedoms aspects. If freedom is worth anything, it’s worth protecting IMHO. But I say:

Cock-ups like Windrush happen
because of a public attitude
to (things like) ID cards.

We should all have an ID Record. Discuss.

This can be an extended record across multiple institutional databases, as we have with cars – MoT, Tax, Insurance, Registration, Ownership – are linked electronically these days, and very effective in my experience – good example of where state gets computer systems right. Even NHS, general practice / hospital / consultant records are pretty well joined-up these days and identity is crucial to safety and confidentiality here. Cock-ups will happen of course, but things are generally pretty good compared to earlier shambolic non-integrated record-keeping.

Of course once the information has a rights and politics angle the stakes are raised and everyone has an opinion about public records. Windrush is  classic example, sure there are plenty of policy debates to be had about unintended consequences of non-benefit-of-the-doubt default positions on status and rights, the Home-office “climate” created by such choice, and the wisdom of destroying old paper heritage, and so on, but we need to be careful not to conflate issues.

I still find it amazing that individuals who have been successfully living in the UK since the 50’s and 60’s, who must have had an NI number, must have some health record, must have registered for some public services along the way, can successfully apply for a passport without their citizenship and residence status being validated! They’d really have to be some strange exceptions to “normal” life? How could anyone discover for the first time that they don’t have formal UK citizenship or residency after getting a passport and going abroad?

Everywhere else we’ve lived, US and Norway, it has been perfectly normal to need to know and show state registration or ID, with (say) a driving license or a credit card being a surrogate record, for practically any transaction in life. How hard can it be?

Sure people who are “marginal” for any circumstantial or choice reason, may not have the flexibility of a highly populated record, to correlate at multiple points, but a certain minimum of validated data as members of “society”. Surely, even the discovery that the system doesn’t consider you a member is a benefit over ignorance. Especially if you’re planning to participate in a vote.

Say you turn up to vote without any evidence of ID? You are allowed to vote, but the vote is routed or tagged to an “ID to be validated” pile, like any marginally spoiled or doubtful (hanging chads anyone) votes cast. If the poll is in any way marginal in relation to the sizeof the doubtful pile, these are unravelled by scrutineers, after the first count, etc. It’s not hard. The doubtful ID doesn’t even have to be linked to the individual vote cast, simply to the polling station record.

I think I know most of the confidentiality and abuse downside risk arguments, and certainly care is needed when benefit of the doubt issues arise, or temporary uncertainty when not having any evidence of identity on one’s person. But I am baffled why not being able to prove one’s ID remains such a cause celebre in the UK, especially when participating in elections. Isn’t being registered to vote already saying you’ve been through some ID and rights validation before the day you turn up to vote?

What am I missing, I’m all questions.
Enlighten me someone?

Cultural Evolution – Fidelity and Fecundity

I repeatedly use the evolutionary concepts of fidelity and fecundity when talking about (small c) conservatism in political and social change.

Freedom to change things, anything, anytime, is a kind of dogma of free-thought and individual freedoms generally. A principle to be defended at all costs, to the death. Because we can, and have a right to be different, we always should … apparently.

Why would a defender of individual freedoms including free-thought also defend conservatism?

If you take the memetic analogy (*) of biological genetics in cultural evolution, it’s quite simple. Evolution, of new species of anything worth naming, relies on many (hi-fecundity) replications of mostly (hi-fidelity) copies with relatively few changes – engineered or mutated – in each generation. High conservation of the existing patterns with few enough changes not to destroy the replicating patterns. Too much creatively engineered mutation not only reduces the replication of copies of the old-guard – which may be your progressive, revolutionary aim – it also inhibits the development of the new. It’s degenerate chaos.

“Creativity suppresses innovation.”

I picked up that expression to day from this exchange with David Deutsch.

Anyway since then David suggested a chapter from his 2012 book The Beginning of Infinity, entitled The Evolution of Creativity. (Just ordered a copy. Previously loved his 1998 Fabric of Reality.)

Both his books received some negative reviews in terms of readability and naivety of their historical philosophical content – he is a physicist after all 😉 – but I’ve found more than a germ of truth in what he’s trying to say, not just in his books.

And, “Giggs Boson” suggested this 2016/17? paper “The Creative Process of Cultural Evolution” by Liane Gabora. (Just downloaded and started to read. Fascinating and a fascination with “omissions” from the reference list – no Dennett or Hofstadter, not even Deutsch(!) – suggests some new sources and directions.)

I’m guessing as an academic source the latter may have more “evidence” to back-up the natural analogy. Here’s hoping.

I may be some time.

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Notes:

(*) People who reject the “objectifying” nature of memes in a cultural context, should note that genes are often too objective in biological contexts too. Identifying and naming objects is done for linguistic purposes, and it is “scientism” to take the next mis-step of presuming the distinct physical reality of those same objects.  Genes or memes, or atoms for that matter.

Getting to Grips with Jordan Peterson

Time to get down to detail with Peterson. As I’ve said before I don’t know enough of his actual work to be a fan, but I do like his conversations. Constructive dialogue is my main agenda right now, especially when the alternative is people engaging in objective criticism invariably talking past each other.

An exchange this morning prompted the reading around, and this post:

The article is in American Conservative – which sounds scary – but Tim Rogers is a consultant psychiatrist in Edinburgh (also published in both Quillette and Areo). Martin Robinson is author of Trivium21C, which I have just started reading.

And as the first comment says:

This is one of the most thoughtful (and thought-provoking) articles about Jordan Peterson that I have read ….

Jordan Peterson is getting kids to read The Gulag Archipelago, and reminds them that (as Solzhenitsyn states) the line between good and evil lies in every human heart. It is a battle worth fighting, and Jordan Peterson is giving the “heroes and seekers” the tools with which to do it.

A previous balanced and thoughtful piece in The Guardian, designed to educate passing readers who’ve heard the fuss but maybe not understood yet what it is about, also prompted polarised war-like responses. I wrote there that Peterson’s public rhetoric does appear “kooky” – but he responds defensively to that accusation. Also had this exchange recently

So, particularly interesting in the AmCon piece is that the foil is a critical piece by Julian Baggini from January in the FT, (which I had bookmarked, but not yet read, and I have a limited subscription to FT’s paywall anyway). I’m a big fan of Baggini’s work so it had caught my attention. It gets off to a great start:

“In the Balkanised age of the internet, bands that most people have never heard of can fill arenas, and TV series on platforms most people don’t use can have audiences of millions. Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto, shows that intellectuals can play that game too.”

Precisely. And what we really need to understand is why that game needs to be played, because it will always be a game, a game that has been ramped-up in the internet age. Baggini describes how Peterson’s putative 12 Rules exploded via a Quora Q&A, which explains the online male nerd dominated phenomenon and its feminazi reaction. The game many misunderstand, undervalue or reject is rhetoric.

However when it comes to actual content, as per one of my crack’d record mantras – “plus ça change ’twas ever thus” – much of it is at least 6000 years, as old as recorded history anyway. In Baggini’s words:

“In headline form, most of his rules
are simply timeless good sense.”

So obviously, this I can believe. And “more flab than flesh” as a book, which underlines why I chose not to actually read it, so far anyway.

Being old news expressed rhetorically, without the benefit of sophisticated comparative philosophical scholarship – philosophology – casts Peterson for me as a Robert Pirsig for the internet generation. Which doesn’t make him wrong, quite the opposite in fact. Kulturbären maybe?

Like Pirsig as a real human teacher, Peterson the individual clinical psychologist does have significant first-hand expertise and life experience in their own field. And like Pirsig, there is a deliberate choice to downplay the grammar and dialectic of established philosophy in order to focus on the rhetoric of human communication (see Trivium21c) where interhuman dialogue beats the technical dialectic aspect of “critical thinking”.

The rest of the review is a good read, and technically, Baggini’s analysis is excellent – by example, exposing Peterson’s logical inconsistencies that devalue the standalone specifics of what he has to say. He’s right of course and what this suggests to me is category errors; Peterson is hoping to communicate something on a different meta-level. All adages and aphorisms, like old-wives tales, invariably conflict if considered alongside each other in a single context.

It’s hard to articulate, but Peterson’s conservative espousal of certain kinds of order in tradition and myth is not necessarily hypocritical whilst encouraging the chaos of individual – gender-neutral – personal freedom and will. The conservatism is at a different (species*) level from the everyday real world (individual) level. (* species of information patterns and argument that is, nothing to do with humans or lobsters, male or female!) It’s a conservatism I share. The nature of human interactions is a different kind of thing from the specific actions. However liberal we are in the latter, the former is worth conserving.

[Post Note: And chaos vs order balance, and the redressing of out-of-kilter balance? Seems I got that right, listen to this excellent BBC R4 Start the Week with Tom Sutcliffe. All five participants work well. Louise O’Neill makes one spectacular “gender is a social construct” gaff, but just like the Cathy Newman exchange, I’d love this conversation to continue. A real source of progress.]

The real lesson is the danger in mixing the levels, and the need to keep the dialogues separate. Having a right to say “non-PC” things is fine, but there is a responsibility to follow-up in honest dialogue with an understanding of the multiple ways of communicating and knowing. That is one thing over which I’d defend Peterson. As I’ve said before, two things Peterson seems to understand as a clinical psychologist are identity politics and meaning.

Tim Rogers in the AmCon review that started this post is effectively saying that mainstream philosophers like Baggini are missing Peterson’s point. In that sense I might be agreeing with him. Early on he says:

“Inside an aphorism, it is minds that collide, and what spins out is that most slippery of things, wisdom.”

I can identify with that. Wisdom is indeed a slippery concept, but nevertheless a valuable one. Being slippery it is indeed extremely difficult to get a grip on it, to articulate it satisfactorily using conventionally accepted grammar and dialectic. Rhetoric conquers all it seems.

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[Coincidentally, the first time I encountered Julian Baggini was in his interviewing of Robert Pirsig back in 2006, but that’s another story.]

[Given that Peterson is cast as a modern day Stoic, be interesting also to know Massimo Pigliucci’s take, but understandable why mainstream philosophy is keeping things at arm’s length. “Professional philosophical engagement would involve very careful handling.”]

[Post Note: And another analysis, recommended by the man himself:

And it is indeed very good.

“Many of Peterson’s seemingly grandiose pronouncements are, in fact, quite modest. He is often derided for repackaging banal common sense in a vague and pretentious idiom, and there is something to this. Peterson is an apologist for a set of beliefs that we once took for granted but now require an articulate defense … How such traditional values came to be portrayed as a danger adjacent to Nazism is one of the puzzles of our time.”

That is indeed the puzzle. Being “required to articulate defence” of received wisdom is the new received wisdom, and that is the problem. The dialectic of binary debate has taken-over from common sense; crowded-out the grammar of rhetoric, the dialogue of proper communication. The tool has become the master, to quote McGilchrist, quoting Einstein.]

[And whilst we’re collecting JBP post-notes, The Forward Fiasco.]

A Little Holiday Reading – Robinson, Rovelli and Carroll

Just received three books in time for some holiday reading, all ordered locally via The Guisborough Bookshop.

Mentioned all three in passing already.

Trivium 21c by Martin Robinson is focussed on the Trivium of three complementary ways of knowing, called here Grammar, Dialectic & Rhetoric. The point being that a complete worldview needs all three. I’m betting this epistemology will turn out to be a node<>edge transformation of the three ontologies here, that is fully equivalent and simply and alternative expression. Robinson however is new to me.

Carlo Rovelli I’m already a big fan of, not so much his Brief Lessons as his Reality is Not What it Seems. His latest The Order of Time seems to be a continuation looking at time and causation not being what they seem either. I appear to share Rovelli’s fundamental information ontology, and I’m forever pointing out that causation and hence time are weirder that our common intuitions so I’m expecting to find more reinforcement. Given the recent celebrations of the life of another physicist who authored a very famous book about time, intriguing and reassuring to find no Hawking in the index, but plenty of Democritus, Bach, Gödel and Boltzmann.

Sean Carroll I’ve not read before, but have observed his sci-comms and observations on others. As I mentioned in the immediately previous post, I’m pretty sure Carroll has a misguided anthropic blind-spot at the root of his worldview but, that aside, both his physics and his communications seem intelligible and in good faith. Especially looking forward to his “poetic naturalism” which rings of at least two components of the trivium / triad. I have high hopes for The Big Picture, despite the cover endorsement from Brian Cox, because the index does include Dan Dennett and further endorsements from Rovelli and Sabine Hossenfelder and he does seem to understand – like Dennett – where Sam Harris gets it wrong.

Regarding Carroll’s blind-spot, Rick Ryals characterised the problem, and I would apply it to both Carroll and Harris:

“your personal cosmology
is your worldview
is your ideology”

People who strongly espouse free-thought and science often have this ideological blind-spot imho. Even the freest thinkers have ideologies.

I may be some time.

Sam Harris & Sean Carroll – Raw Notes

Harris Podcast with Sean Carroll

[Aside – Identity Politics topic – previously talking past each other with Ezra. Apart from better management of conversations with specific Q’s requiring A’s, main Harris lesson is to avoid agendas of extremists left or right. Convincing an extremist that they may be wrong is a counterproductive waste of effort.

Cannot be branded a racist bigot for wanting to talk honestly about race or any other identity politics issue.]

Today’s topic – primarily with Sean Carroll on the “The Big Picture – the origins of life, meaning and the universe itself.”

Poetic Naturalism he calls it.

Naturalism – OK (ie not super-natural, whatever there is, there is a natural explanation)

Poetic – multiple ways of talking – Good.
Very, very good in fact (see trivium & rhetoric).

A unity, no disjunction of levels, even though some levels emergent and meaningless to talk about in terms of lower levels. But not (literally) downward causation. Non-reductionist element – compatibility through emergence even if no simple & meaningful direct causation.

Laplace Demon – everything determined by total knowledge of a state – is a thought experiment.

The snowflake example. so he really is a total reductionist? Otherwise it’s really a consciousness agenda

So why has it evolved / emerged? And how is it “effective” on physical states – clearly it is, question is how via fundamental levels. Panpsychic physical mental dualism description? Proto-psychism in fact, and now Zombie argument. Expressing feelings felt is a behaviour, even if you’re a zombie.

We don’t know at what level (subjective) consciousness arises, but we know it does?

Mapping many (possible) worlds onto naturalism? He really sees many worlds as many simultaneous physical realities – so long as they’re all possible and compatible with physics.

We can do with less information … Not just probabilistic (approximate) but wholly true. Temperature of a gas IS independent of where each individual molecule is – 100% certain true fact despite large uncertainty at detail level.

OK many worlds is a perfect info concept (thought experiment). Not – what is possible state given our knowledge of rules and another state – that’s physics. Therefore many worlds is not physics.

Copenhagen > Everett

Should accept counterintuitive nature of what the maths says. Believe maths not intuition.

Sorry, wrong mixing or cream and coffee is NOT reversible! (Except in theory). There are chemical de-naturing processes involved. But do like the entropic explanations of why? and how? This is the fundamental information model (much alignment with Rovelli?)

Reversible and perfectly (reductively) deterministically predictable only in theory (demon). Consciousness (effectiveness and predictability) is in the ignorance. OK, I’m with him.

So free will is real. No Sam it’s not a matter of chance in the unpredictability – it’s the conscious opportunity in the ignorance!

Free-will choice tests – suicide / listening

Sensible people are compatibilist – inc Dennett – the type of free will worth having – as opposed to free-will simply the name for our argument.

The ethical choices of having been able to do other … the hot stove … narrow vs broad views of science – chestnuts all.

Sam really is a determinist-plus-randomness subscriber. He really didn’t learn anything from Dennett (or Carroll yet).

Recurring use of the free-puppet analogy. (Recently after Gray). Carroll does seem to get Harris “mere-puppet” misunderstanding -level / category errors. (Clue – Laplace’s Demon is imaginary!) “Best” note. Not a question of objectively determined fact at all levels. Sam still questions whether good and bad even mean anything – other than post-hoc rationalised value judgements.

AI (Smartphone) “playing” with you – finishing your sentences – sure, but once it did, it would spook you, and you would game it better. We’re more highly evolved than electronic AI’s.

Time and causation are more fundamentally weird, across levels. Hume is the good guy – and mischievous.

Signing off. The more I hear of Carroll, despite his apparent cosmic-anthropic blind spot, the more he seems to talk sense. Harris continues to sound “chastened” by having had conversations with more experts than himself, but is only very slowly changing his actual world view. An interesting case study – and all credit to Harris for exposing himself to all these shared dialogues.

[Shall be interested to hear Carroll’s take on time. It is the root problem with (simple deterministic) causation as I’ve been saying for decades.]

Take-away:
“100% certain true fact despite large uncertainty at detail level” Ignorance – less information – is a feature, not a problem.

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[Post Note: This is from 4 years ago, but I’m not the only one thinking Harris hasn’t learned much yet despite apparent honest efforts.]