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in title, tags, annotations or urlBut What Would the End of Humanity Mean for Me? - James Hamblin - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Tegmark is more worried about much more immediate threats, which he calls existential risks. That’s a term borrowed from physicist Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, a research collective modeling the potential range of human expansion into the cosmos
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"I am finding it increasingly plausible that existential risk is the biggest moral issue in the world, even if it hasn’t gone mainstream yet,"
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Existential risks, as Tegmark describes them, are things that are “not just a little bit bad, like a parking ticket, but really bad. Things that could really mess up or wipe out human civilization.”
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Drones, Ethics and the Armchair Soldier - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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the difference between humans and robots is precisely the ability to think and reflect, in Immanuel Kant’s words, to set and pursue ends for themselves. And these ends cannot be set beforehand in some hard and fast way
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Working one’s way through the complexities of “just war” and moral theory makes it perfectly clear that ethics is not about arriving easily at a single right answer, but rather coming to understand the profound difficulty of doing so. Experiencing this difficulty is what philosophers call existential responsibility.
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One of the jobs of philosophy, at least as I understand it, is neither to help people to avoid these difficulties nor to exaggerate them, but rather to face them in resolute and creative ways.
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Michael Chwe, Author, Sees Jane Austen as Game Theorist - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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It’s not every day that someone stumbles upon a major new strategic thinker during family movie night. But that’s what happened to Michael Chwe, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, when he sat down with his children some eight years ago to watch “Clueless,” the 1995 romantic comedy based on Jane Austen’s “Emma.”
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In 230 diagram-heavy pages, Mr. Chwe argues that Austen isn’t merely fodder for game-theoretical analysis, but an unacknowledged founder of the discipline itself: a kind of Empire-waisted version of the mathematician and cold war thinker John von Neumann, ruthlessly breaking down the stratagems of 18th-century social warfare.
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Or, as Mr. Chwe puts it in the book, “Anyone interested in human behavior should read Austen because her research program has results.”
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What Was Reddit Troll Violentacrez Thinking? - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic - 0 views
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What goes on inside the head of Michael Brutsch or other people like him that leads to this kind of behavior? What did he think about those who were on the receiving end of his trolling?It seems he did not think about them at all. They were completely removed from him physically, and as sociologists have shown, the greater the distance between us and our victims, the easier it may be to cause pain. This is one proposed explanation for an escalation in intensity in warfare, or an eagerness to go pursue war, as weapons technology has increased the distance between fighting parties.
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"I told them of how I'd become so paranoid that I genuinely didn't know who to trust anymore," Traynor writes. "I told them of nights when I'd walked the rooms, jumping at shadows and crying over the sleeping forms of my family for fear that they would suffer because of me. Then it happened ... The Troll burst into tears. His dad gently restraining him from leaving the table." What Traynor did was to force his troll to *think* about his actions, not just perform them because of the norms of a subculture.
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"Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention which all events and facts arouse by virtue of their existence."
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Meeting 'the Other' Face to Face - The New York Times - 0 views
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Sitting in a conference room at a hotel near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here, I slip on large headphones and an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and wriggle into the straps of a backpack, weighed down with a computer and a battery.
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when I stand, I quickly find myself in a featureless all-white room, a kind of Platonic vestibule. On the walls at either end are striking poster-size black-and-white portraits taken by the noted Belgian-Tunisian photographer Karim Ben Khelifa, one showing a young Israeli soldier and another a Palestinian fighter about the same age, whose face is almost completely hidden by a black hood.
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Then the portraits disappear, replaced by doors, which open. In walk the two combatants — Abu Khaled, a fighter for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Gilad Peled, an Israeli soldier — seeming, except for a little pixelation and rigid body movement, like flesh-and-blood people who are actually in the room with me.
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Does the digital era herald the end of history? - BBC News - 0 views
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2013 the world contained about 4.4 zettabytes (4.4 trillion gigabytes) of data. By 2020, it expects this to have risen tenfold.
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History, in other words, has gone online
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But anyone who's seen their photo or music collections wiped out, knows how easily digital files can be lost.
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In Syria, Doctors Risk Life and Juggle Ethics - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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“Doctors are notoriously poor evaluators of chemical warfare injuries if they have never seen them before,”
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Those reports, he said, were later “cynically manipulated” by American intelligence officials to assert that Iran — not Iraq — was using cyanide. In fact, he continued, there is no evidence that either side was.
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It’s not our role to collect samples for any government or investigative agency.
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The Widening World of Hand-Picked Truths - The New York Times - 0 views
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it’s not just organized religions that are insisting on their own alternate truths. On one front after another, the hard-won consensus of science is also expected to accommodate personal beliefs, religious or otherwise, about the safety of vaccines, G.M.O. crops, fluoridation or cellphone radio waves, along with the validity of global climate change.
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But presenting people with the best available science doesn’t seem to change many minds. In a kind of psychological immune response, they reject ideas they consider harmful.
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Viewed from afar, the world seems almost on the brink of conceding that there are no truths, only competing ideologies — narratives fighting narratives. In this epistemological warfare, those with the most power are accused of imposing their version of reality — the “dominant paradigm” — on the rest, leaving the weaker to fight back with formulations of their own. Everything becomes a version.
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How the Internet Gets Inside Us : The New Yorker - 0 views
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It isn’t just that we’ve lived one technological revolution among many; it’s that our technological revolution is the big social revolution that we live with
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The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare.
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Robert K. Logan’s “The Sixth Language,” begins with the claim that cognition is not a little processing program that takes place inside your head, Robby the Robot style. It is a constant flow of information, memory, plans, and physical movements, in which as much thinking goes on out there as in here. If television produced the global village, the Internet produces the global psyche: everyone keyed in like a neuron, so that to the eyes of a watching Martian we are really part of a single planetary brain. Contraptions don’t change consciousness; contraptions are part of consciousness.
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Technology Imperialism, the Californian Ideology, and the Future of Higher Education - 2 views
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What I hope to make explicit today is how much California – the place, the concept, “the dream machine” – shapes (wants to shape) the future of technology and the future of education.
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In an announcement on Facebook – of course – Zuckerberg argued that “connectivity is a human right.”
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As Zuckerberg frames it at least, the “human right” in this case is participation in the global economy
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Why 1.2 billion people in China share the same 100 surnames - CNN - 0 views
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five most common surnames in China -- shared by more than 433 million people, or 30% of the population
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With 1.37 billion citizens, China has the world's largest population, but has one of the smallest surname pools. Only about 6,000 surnames are in use, according to the Ministry of Public Security. And the vast majority of the population -- almost 86% -- share just 100 of those surnames.
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To put that in perspective, the United States -- with less than a quarter of China's population -- reported 6.3 million surnames in its 2010 census
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Why the US needs Russia and China to help change Iran's behavior | TheHill - 0 views
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Predicting the future behavior of any country in the Middle East is a dangerous undertaking. Some might suggest it’s a lot cheaper and more effective to rely on a pack of tarot cards than a report from the U.S. intelligence community.
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Unfortunately, in America, we seem to have little memory of this region’s history, and the misplaced illation made by many over Iranian General Qassem Soleimani’s death soon will fade.
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In the process of deciding how they will exact this price, Iran will weigh its options against our domestic condition, whether these are set by the U.S. election cycle or Iranian perceptions of who, exactly, should pay the highest price. What Iran’s leadership does know is that a majority of Americans do not want war, nor do most Americans support the seemingly unarticulated reason for keeping U.S. troops in the region.
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Dan Hoffman: US will stay in Iraq to fight ISIS - Trump's order to kill Soleimani benefits both countries | Fox News - 0 views
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Iraqi critics of the killings denounced the U.S. strikes as a violation of their nation’s sovereignty. And in the heat of the moment, Iraqi nationalist Muqtada al Sadr – who holds the most seats in Iraq’s Parliament – demanded that the remaining 5,000 U.S. troops in the country withdraw.
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While the U.S. media have shifted their focus to the impeachment trial of President Trump, you may have missed the fact that cooler heads now seem to be prevailing in Iraq. That’s very good news.The caretaker prime minister of Iraq – Adil Abdul-Mahdi – has left it to his successor to deal with the issue of the U.S. troop presence in Iraq.And after a 10-day hiatus, joint U.S.-Iraqi operations against ISIS have resumed. This is a positive development benefiting both our nations.The bottom line: right now it doesn’t look like U.S. troops are exiting Iraq any time soon.
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Trump’s strategic goal in taking out Soleimani – a mass murderer responsible for the deaths of more than 600 Americans and thousands of others – was to restore strategic deterrence in the U.S.-Iran relationship. The president made a calculated risk that Iran would not respond with a significant retaliatory attack.Going forward, Iran’s leaders know they will be in our crosshairs if they plan attacks against the U.S., including our embassy in Baghdad. Soleimani was responsible for an attack in which Iranian proxy militia forces penetrated the U.S. Embassy compound in the Iraqi capital shortly before his death.
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He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? - The New York Times - 0 views
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Padilla laid out an indictment of his field. “If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of color,” he said, “one could not do better than what classics has done.”
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Padilla believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it. “Far from being extrinsic to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity,” he has written, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.”
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Rather than kowtowing to criticism, Williams said, “maybe we should start defending our discipline.” She protested that it was imperative to stand up for the classics as the political, literary and philosophical foundation of European and American culture: “It’s Western civilization. It matters because it’s the West.” Hadn’t classics given us the concepts of liberty, equality and democracy?
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The Cancel Culture Checklist - Persuasion - 0 views
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a third of Americans say that they are personally worried about losing their jobs or missing out on career opportunities if they express their real political opinions.
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Cancel culture now poses a real threat to intellectual freedom in the United States.
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Americans in all walks of life have been publicly shamed, pressured into ritualistic apologies or summarily fired
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The Constitution of Knowledge - Persuasion - 0 views
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But ideas in the marketplace do not talk directly to each other, and for the most part neither do individuals.
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It is a good metaphor as far as it goes, yet woefully incomplete. It conjures up an image of ideas being traded by individuals in a kind of flea market, or of disembodied ideas clashing and competing in some ethereal realm of their own
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When Americans think about how we find truth amid a world full of discordant viewpoints, we usually turn to a metaphor, that of the marketplace of ideas
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