ZeV > Recent Status Updates

Note that it’s a bad idea for an engineer to have a day job other than as
an independent consultant. There are few Silicon Valley companies that
don’t require signing away your intellectual property rights while working
for them.

"The current technological and scientific revolution implies not that authentic individuals and authentic realities can be manipulated by algorithms and TV cameras but rather that authenticity is a myth. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don't realize that they are already trapped inside a box--their brain--which is locked within the bigger box of human society with its myriad fictions."

"perhaps the worst sin of present-day science fiction is that it tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness. As a result, it is overly concerned about a potential war between robots and humans, when in fact we need to fear a conflict between a small superhuman elite empowered by algorithms and a vast underclass of disempowered Homo sapiens."

"In the early twenty-first century, perhaps the most important artistic genre is science fiction. (They) shape how people understand the most important technological, social, and economic developments of our time. This also means that science fiction needs to be far more responsible in the way it depicts scientific realities"

Two rules of thumb for post-truth era: (1) If you want reliable information, pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product. (2) If some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature.

"As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it--and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it. Therefore, if you dream of a society in which truth reigns supreme and myths are ignored, you have little to expect from Homo sapiens."

"Scholars throughout history have faced this dilemma: Do they serve power or truth? Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same story, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity? The most powerful scholarly establishments--whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins, or Communist ideologues--placed unity above truth. That's why they were so powerful."

"Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power."

"In fact, false stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth. ... If they are willing to believe only accredited facts, what does that prove?"

"The truth is that truth was never high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. Many people assume that if a particular religion or ideology misrepresents reality, its adherents are bound to discover it sooner or later, because they will not be able to compete with clearer-sighted rivals. ... In practice, the power of human cooperation depends on a delicate balance between truth and fiction."

"Ancient religions have not been the only ones to use fiction to cement cooperation. In more recent times, each nation has created its own national mythology, while movements such as communism, fascism, and liberalism fashioned elaborate self-reinforcing credos."

"If you are a scientifically minded Christian, you might explain away all the errors, myths, and contradictions in the Bible by arguing that the holy book was never meant to be read as a factual account, but rather as a metaphorical story containing deep wisdom. But isn't that true of the Harry Potter stories too?"

"When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that's fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that's a religion, and we are admonished not to call it "fake news" in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath."

"In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. ... As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively."

"What should we do? Should we adopt the liberal dogma and trust the aggregate of individual voters and customers? Or perhaps we should reject the individualist approach and, like many previous cultures in history, empower communities to make sense of the world together? Such a solution, however, only takes us from the frying pan of individual ignorance into the fire of biased groupthink."

"today major global debates about things such as climate change and artificial intelligence have an impact on everybody--whether in Tasmania, Hangzhou, or Baltimore--so we need to take into account all viewpoints. Yet how can anyone do that? How can anyone understand the web of relations among thousands of intersecting groups across the world?"

"Most of the injustices in the contemporary world result from large-scale structural biases rather than from individual prejudices, and our hunter-gatherer brains did not evolve to detect structural biases. We are all complicit in at least some such biases, and we just don't have the time and energy to discover them all."

"The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed but even more so from ignorance and indifference."

"Justice demands not just a set of abstract values, but also an understanding of concrete cause-and-effect relations. ... Unfortunately, an inherent feature of our modern global world is that its causal relations are highly ramified and complex."

"if you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, explore dead ends, make space for doubts and boredom, and allow little seeds of insight to slowly grow and blossom. If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth."

(Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach's "knowlege illusion") "We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own."

"Not only rationality, but individuality too is a myth. Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups. ... What gave *Homo sapiens" an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups."