Part 2 of my essay “The Return of Good and Evil” at the Pipeline. Suppose AI should regard humanity evil or worthless and worthy of extermination like HG Wells’ Martians? To what principle, deity or moral precept would us inferiors appeal for mercy? There being no principles.
Leaving the Garden for the Second Time
Chomsky
Allies Are Essential
My latest at PJMedia VIP. Beating the establishment means building a coalition against it.
Numb
Beware the Singleton
And You Thought It Was Infallible
My new article at the Pipeline. You’ve gotta tell them. You’ve gotta tell them! AI governance is made out of people. They’re making our rules out of orders from people!
Historical Score Settling
Deception
Crimes Against Humanity
School’s Out Forever
Showin’ Them Who’s the Boss
Who Goes There?
The Reasons for ‘Lookism’
There is apparently an evolutionary reason behind ‘lookism’, the aversion to ugly people. Christoph Klebl, Professor Brock Bastian, Dr Katie Greenaway and Joshua Ju-suk Rhee of the University of Melbourne write: “We found that our psychological bias against people and things we consider ugly is tied up in a built-in human response that’s designed to alert us to objects that may contain potentially harmful diseases. This is not to say that unattractive people are actually more likely to have diseases, but that an instinct kicks-in that overrides logic.”
There is a “physiological immune system … serving as a first line of defence against disease”, though Western moderns forgot that it exists.
Infamy is a Kind of Fame
Has the West Got What it Takes?
Knowledge is Pow-ah
The war vs carbon in the 3rd world
Planners want to replace the legacy Philippine jeepney vehicle fleet with “environmentally friendly models”. But the drivers are up in arms at the new units, “that operate through electricity or more environment-friendly fuel” at 2.4 to 2.6 million pesos each which are much more expensive than current vehicles costing from 200 to 600 K pesos.
My Name Was Bond
Dialectics 101
DEI is coming to medical schools. “Increasingly, medical schools and schools of public health are enthusiastically embracing the values of DEI and instituting far-reaching policies to demonstrate their commitments to the cause. … That ideology is exemplified by a research methodology called “public health critical race praxis” (PHCRP)—designed, as the name suggests, to apply critical race theory to the field of public health.