A constant work-in-progress, and part of my effort to synthesize all the content I come across (purposefully and not) into actual points-of-view, and to avoid the "I believe the last thing I read" pattern it's so easy to fall into.
Anyway, feel free to change my mind.
We can't "hoard life."
- (WIP)
- I'm guilty of trying in vain to do this (athazagoraphobia?)
Statistics can be harmdful to the pursuit of knowledge.
- Experimental History article
- That method of testing all parameter combos — specification curves
All discretization is a human construct.
- All discretization/classification is a human construct, a heuristic to organize the world
- Not sure how this vibes with quantum mechanics but… maybe everything at scales larger than that?
- Not a bad thing! Very helpful. But even more powerful when recognized this as a process and framework, in the context of assumptions, because can then be harnessed and applied appropriately— e.g. classifying proteins into different categories is obviously helpful because it allows us to extrapolate about shared properties, but knowing that an equally valid approach could be classifying by, say, direct interactions, allows us to determine orthogonal principles
- "Paradox of the binary" from The Best Minds: "The paradox of binaries is that they don't mean there is no spectrum, just as a spectrum doesn't mean there are no essential differences. A murky border is still a border. The problem was knowing who had the authority to establish it."
- "The word category comes from Greek for 'accusation,'" from High Conflict
A bigger + better bureaucracy can save America.
- How a bigger, better bureaucracy can save America
Climate change is violence.
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(2020-11-27) From Rebecca Solnit's Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness:
"That's a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth, but translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field- and then multiply that a few million times. Or just picture the tiny bivalves: scallops, oysters, Arctic sea snails, that can't form sells in acidifying oceans right now. Or another superstorm tearing apart another city. Climate change is global-scale violence against places and species, as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides brutality."
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(2020-05-08) I still stand by this. It's easy to dismiss or ignore the cruelty of our choices, because we are so often many steps removed from the consequences. I suppose it's similar to Peter Singer's proposition that the moral obligation we have to save a drowning child we walk past is the same as our obligation to donate any nonessential income to save lives. It's a dangerous thing, I think, how our world is getting more and more connected, yet the effects of our actions are more and more depersonalized.
Reality is interaction.
- (2020-05-08) From Carlo Rovelli's Reality Is Not What It Seems… If physically, fundamental particles can only be observed via their interactions with other particles, why should the concept not apply at the macro-scale? Are we humans really individuals, or a manifestation of a "distributed ecosystem"?
- Alternatively, from the point of view of Miguel Nicolelis in The True Creator of Everything, reality arises from the interaction of our brains with sensory world. For example, as he quotes Marcelo Gleiser in The Island of Knowledge, "Mass and charge do not exist, per se: they only exist as a part of a narrative we humans construct to describe the natural world."
- (2020-11-27) Revisiting this idea, and thinking about how it manifests on many different scales. Of course, as above, the quantum/physical interpretation seems legitimate; but also through a neurobiological & psychosocial lens: our sensory perceptions create our cognitive reality, which may or may not reflect the absolute "truth," but it is all we have to go by. Our reality is the culmination of the physical world around us, the signal transduction of our sensory nervous system, and entire history of our development and experiences that molded the neuronal networks that process these signals. This also suggests that reality and truth are not one and the same, which is another interesting semantic idea. Finally, humans are social beings. Our lives and existence are meaningless in isolation- "No man is an island," and all.
Plants behave ethically.
- (2020-05-11) From Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees, Richard Powers' Overstory, various other articles:
- Facilitated by extensive mycorrhizal networks, sometimes referred to as the wood wide web, trees have been shown to exchange and divert nutrients to struggling community members. This behavior appears to meet the definition of "ethical" as to conforming to an accepted standard of conduct.
- As Hua Hsu reports in the New Yorker, computer scientist Andrew Adamatzky compares myocorrhizal networks to a "living circuit board, while Merlin Sheldrake ponders, "Are we dealing with a superorganism? A metropolis? A living Internet? Nursery school for trees? Socialism in the soil? Deregulated markets of late capitalism, with fungi jostling on the trading floor of a forest stock exchange? Or maybe it's fungal feudalism…" Even without a definite model for how nutrient exhange is regulated, there appears to be space for governing factors beyond mere reflexive response to environmental cues. In other words, ethics.
- Maria Gagliano on plant intelligence, the possibility of “vegetal consciousness” - the bit about plants talking to us is a little out there, but I'm not gonna deny it. Regardless, more evidence for the information processing power of plants, which is foundational to behavior, and thus to ethical behavior.
"To explore is to travel without a hypothesis."
- (2020-05-23) Quoted, apparently, from Don Walsh, descender of the Mariana Trench. I buy it.
- Speaks metaphorically, as well, to the hypothesis-generating approach to science, as opposed to conventional hypothesis testing. In our world of near infinite data, where it is so easy to accidentally (or not) find "significance," approaching an experiment with no expectations is so critical. I liked what Jeff Lichtman had to say about this a few months ago.