Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"A normal baby can tell very early - so early that this ability must be innate - when someone is looking at him" - facilitated no doubt by the perculiar shape of human eyes, and their permanantly visible whites.

"The Kellogs had tried to train an ape to be human. Instead, it seemed that Gua was training their son to be an ape" - like Mowgli, and Tarzan, and all the real feral children: her account of language acquisition should consider feral children.

"There have been more books written about how to read Scripture than about all aspects of the art of reading all together."

"The discovery you come to on your own will be much more valuable than someone else's ideas" - this evaluation of autodidactism is one of the 'controlling principles'' of "How to read a book", and it is not properly explored.

"If we could build a telescope or microscope to examine the properties of existence, we should so, of course. But no such instruments are possible." - historically, science has pushed back the scope of philosophical inquiry, it will continue to do so.

"The orphan had learnt to call the fourth citizen 'I' or 'me' rather 'Yatima', but that was just grammar, not selfawareness." - pretty sure self awareness precedes the first person singular, is Egan trying to say something about the development of citizens differing from that of fleshers?

Wow, a whole new level philosophical sophistication - van Doren, not Adler?

"The trouble [about applying logic outside of mathematics] is that there really are animals and men; we are assuming something that may or may not be true" ...hence the slipperiness of philosophical as opposed to mathematical problems.

"Since mathematics is a language, it has its own vocabulary, grammar, and syntax and these have to be learned...the problem is different, because the language is different, but it is no more difficult, theoretically than learning to read English or French or German." - learning the limited and refined language of a science, or mathematics is easier than learning an unlimited and unrefinef foreign language.

"...And as ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science without at the same time improving the science itself: neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it." - and learning science is learning the language of science?

"What is "unnatural" about our own birthing practices is not the treatment of the baby, which varies widely from one time and place to another, but the presence of the father at the delivery." - no kidding!

"The guilty conscience, which accuses us of not paying attention to the interests of the child, and which nowadays so plagues parents and caregivers, is in fact a very new and rather unique feeling in our modern epoch."

"There was something foreign-looking about the parents - I wasn't sure if it was their clothing, their gestures, their facial expressions, or what. But the children didn't look foreign: they looked like ordinary American kids." - do I look foreign in Hungary? Do my kids look foreign in the UK?

"Unless you read quickly, you will fail to see the unity of the story. Unless you read intensely you will fail to see the details" - not convinced, you need to step back to see the wood from the trees.

"A work of fine art is 'fine' not because it is 'refined' or 'finished', but because it is an end (FINIS, Latin, means end) in itself"

"They talked Yiddish to their children and their children answered in English" - I speak English with my children and they have never answered in Hungarian, it seems media trumps peer group.

"Nature - the DNA we get from our parents - has been shown to have effects, but it can't be the whole story. Nurture - all the other things our parents do - has not been shown to have effects despite heroic efforts on it's behalf" - well, all the other things our parents say they do; once again questionnaires seem a very dubious source of information.

"To expose children to this content is abuse....it's not about intention, but about a kind a violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives" - it's actually about thrill seeking adolescents and inattentive parents.

If you're searching for support for your views online, you find it. And moreover, you will fed a constant stream of validation...this is algorithmic radicalisaton" - yes, but its an unintended consequence of the algorithm. It is hard to think of any technology that didn't have unintended consequences.

"One of the first symptoms of clinical paranoia is the belief that somebody is watching you; but this belief is now a reasonable one. Every email we send..." - at best we can say someone can access our digital footprint, not that someone is doing it in realtime.

"It is a nightmarish scene, yet one that seems to embody the conditons of a new dark age. Our vision is increasingly universal, but our agency is ever more reduced." - our agency is not reduced, our increased vision enables us to see how limited our agency always was.

"It is a nightmarish scene, yet one that seems to embody the conditons of a new dark age. Our vision is increasingly universal, but our agency is ever more reduced." - our agency is not reduced, our increased vision enables us to see how limited our agency always was.

"It became clear that the international nature of the internet that there was no possible restriction on its surveillance, no objection to governments spying upon their own citizens, everyone was a foreigner to someone, and once the data was collected it went into the pot" - hence the popularity of Huawei with the Hungarian and British government.

"Cooperation between human and machine turns out to be a more potent strategy than the most powerful computer alone." - and needless to say at this point, more potent than the most powerful human player alone. Cooperation then is the future?

"every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recogniser goes up." - they were probably Chomskyites.

"Examples of encoded biases are easy to come by..." - it's the unencoded biases that worry me. But this compedium of techno-anxiety approach weakens the impact of these arguments.

"Despite increasingly sophisticated systems of both computation and visualisation, we are no closer today to understanding exactly how machine learning does what it does; we can only adjudicate the results.' - ok, if true, this is quite scary.

"We called these three groups of rules structural, interpretive and critical." - I had thought that when he switched away his 'Great Books' the wheels would come off, but I actually prefer this looser approach.

"[The intelligent reader of a practical book dealing the principles underlying rules of behaviour] tries to see the rules that may not be expressed but can nevertheless, be derived from the principles...he tries to figure out how the rules should be applied in practice" - no, sorry, still not convinced that the Critique of Practical Reason is practical book.

"Finally, although dictionaries usually agree in their accounts of words, often do not agree in their accounts of facts." - I see dictionaries as lists of facts about words and they do vary significantly, as a language teacher I pick and choose the definitions I use in class.