Extra
5 years ago in Meta Collection
everything matters, nothing counts
These men were able to give the counsel they gave because they were operating at an enormous psychological distance from the people who would be maimed and killed by the weapons systems that would result from the ideas they communicated to their sponsors. The lesson, therefore, is that the scientist and technologist must, by acts of will and of the imagination, actively strive to reduce such psychological distances, to counter the forces that tend to remove him from the consequences of his actions. He must -- it is as simple as this -- think of what he is actually doing. He must learn to listen to his own inner voice. He must learn to say "No!"
Finally, it is the act itself that matters. When instrumental reason is the sole guide to action, the acts it justifies are robbed of their inherent meanings and thus exist in an ethical vacuum. I recently heard an officer of a great university publicly defend an important policy decision he had made, one that many of the university's students and faculty opposed on moral grounds, with the words: "We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?" But the moral good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility."Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation" (1976)
The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
[..]
She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had anything to sing about.
[..]
He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk."Nineteen-Eightyfour"
5 years ago in Quotes
Suffering is not the source of creativity. The desire to escape suffering is.
5 years ago in Quotes
Emperor G built a beautiful walled city, inviting everyone in, encouraging them to paint their houses whatever color they like. A year later, Big G banned blue houses. If you didn't like the rules, you were more than welcome to build your house outside the city and paint it whatever color you like.
Only most people don't leave - blue is just one color and they weren't very interested in it anyway. Besides, the city is so beautiful and provides for their every need. In the coming years, people who want to paint their house blue badly enough to leave paradise are heavily scrutinized and eventually considered outcasts.
Over the years, more and more colors are slowly banned, one by one. People start to notice and complain once their favorite color is outlawed. But decades have passed since Emperor G's generous invitation. Entire generations have lived, died, and raised children inside the city. No one knows how to navigate the wilderness anymore. And even if they could, why would they want to? Thorns and weeds have overgrown the wasteland; it's much safer to stay inside the city walls. Besides, it's cozy and we have everything we need in here.
5 years ago in Quotes
Your silence and self-censorship won't matter in the end. The Soviets often just targeted random people because it chilled dissent overall.
Silent or not, party member or not, you will be dragged from your home in the night and never seen again. This is the reality of what it was like.
So you might as well be brave and speak out against it because that's the only actual defense you have.
5 years ago in Quotes
People have a series of rationalizations. People say for example that science and technology have their own logic, that they are in fact autonomous. This particular rationalization is profoundly false. It is not true that science marches on in defiance of human will, independent of human will, that just is not the case. But it is comfortable, as I said: it leads to the position that "if I don't do it, someone else will."
Of course if one takes that as an ethical principle then obviously it can serve as a license to do anything at all. "People will be murdered; if I don't do it, someone else will." "Women will be raped; if I don't do it, someone else will." That is just a license for violence.
Other people say, and I think this is a widely used rationalization, that fundamentally the tools we work on are "mere" tools; This means that whether they get use for good or evil depends on the person who ultimately buys them and so on.
There's nothing bad about working in computer vision, for example. Computer vision may very well some day be used to heal people who would otherwise die. Of course, it could also be used to guide missiles, cruise missiles for example, to their destination, and all that. You see, the technology itself is neutral and value-free and it just depends how one uses it. And besides -- consistent with that -- we can't know, we scientists cannot know how it is going to be used. So therefore we have no responsibility.
Well, that is false. It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know.
But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.
If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.
5 years ago in Quotes
Recipe for getting things done:
1. Place every new & cool technology into mental quarantine for 3-5 years. 2. If, after that: a) the tech is still widely used, and doesn't seem to be getting overtaken by something else b) you're about to start a NEW project where the tech would help c) you're not in a rush and feel like trying something new
...then go for it.
Learning complex tech that just arrived is a waste of your life, if you want to accomplish things. It's only useful if your aim is to appear knowledgeable and "in the loop" to your developer peers.
5 years ago in Quotes
God Bless the Grass
God bless the grass that grows thru the crack
They roll the concrete over it to try and keep it back
The concrete gets tired of what it has to do
It breaks and it buckles and the grass grows thru
And God bless the grass
God bless the truth that fights toward the sun
They roll the lies over it and think that it is done
It moves through the ground and reaches for the air
And after a while it is growing everywhere
And God bless the grass
God bless the grass that grows through cement
It's green and it's tender and it's easily bent
But after a while it lifts up its head
For the grass is living and the stone is dead
And God bless the grass
God bless the grass that's gentle and low
Its roots they are deep and its will is to grow
And God bless the truth, the friend of the poor
And the wild grass growing at the poor man's door
And God bless the grass
5 years ago in Quotes
The driving idea behind denialism was always to delay action for a few decades. Well that worked perfectly. Now they will move on to saying it's all too late for gradual mitigation, and they can swoop in with highly expensive adaptation measures, publicly funded in perpetuity. This stage of rentier/disaster capitalism could be what pushes our global civilisation off the cliff.
5 years ago in Quotes
Most of the technology we like was created in the second half of the 20th century. We have been standing on the shoulders of giant and eventually the giants got old and were replaced by self-serving large tech companies. But since most people are making money, or get things for free, we don't want to recognize that we are their servants. There is no longer any urgency to create something different, because being different means missing out.
The reason you have to go to esoteric solutions when talking about something like decentralization is because the Internet is no longer built for it. From authentication, to networks and even the state of ip addresses is less than great. That you can avoid these problem by going to the fringe likely comes from the idea that hackers still have influence. We think that if something doesn't work it can't be our own fault, it most be some conspiracy or inherent limitation, rather a lack in our own understanding and ability to organize.
5 years ago in Quotes
I don't follow gaming message boards, because, at its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can't win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior.
5 years ago in Quotes
To me, it feels like Google's entire strategy behind reCaptcha is to make it harder to protect your privacy. We've basically given up on the idea that there are tasks only humans can do, and to me V3 feels like Google openly saying, "You know how we can prove you're not a robot? Because we literally know exactly who you are." I don't even know if it should be called a captcha -- it feels like it's just identity verification.
I don't think this is an acceptable tradeoff. I know that when reCaptcha shows up on HN there's often a crowd that says, "but how else can we block bots?" I'm gonna draw a personal line in the sand and say that I think protecting privacy is more important than stopping bots. If your website can't stop bots without violating my privacy, then I'm starting to feel like I might be on the bots' side.
5 years ago in Quotes
Everywhere I look, I see compounding dysfunction. I see the gears within the dysfunction. I see the people turning the thumbscrews of the people fixing the gears so that the machine becomes the thumbscrew crushing the world.
5 years ago in Quotes
The relatively new trouble with mass society is perhaps even more serious, but not because of the masses themselves, but because this society is essentially a consumersâ society where leisure time is used no longer for self-perfection or acquisition of more social status, but for more and more consumption and more and more entertainment⊠To believe that such a society will become more âculturedâ as time goes on and education has done its work, is, I think, a fatal mistake. The point is that a consumersâ society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches."Between Past and Future"
5 years ago in Quotes
[..] we must defend not only our own right to freedom, but also other peopleâs rights. This is because when other peopleâs right to freedom is violated, our freedom exists only in name. [..] Freedom is the embodiment of independent will and thought. [..] If we are to oppose tyranny and respect independence, then the oppression embedded within and between cultures should all be destroyed. [..] even in researching and learning, our thoughts are not as free as we think they are. Under the impact of complicated thoughts, shameless suppression and temptation, defending your freedom of thought has become very difficult. We usually believe that learning can make you powerful, but in the process, our independent will or freedom of thought is often hijacked, wittingly or unwittingly. Everyone thinks that learning is a good thing, but if we lose our independent will or freedom of thought, the outcome might be even worse than not learning. Schopenhauer once said in his essay On Reading and Books: âThey have read themselves stupid. If you are eager to learn, it is important that you understand this idea.â [..] Anyone who reads only one type of book or answers to one authority is essentially using books to build a jail that imprisons their thoughts. Maybe itâs not a coincidence that our ancestors invented books in the shape of bricks? [..] the concept of âfreedom and the pursuit of non-material goalsâ is incredibly important, but also incredibly fragile. Not only does it allow us to pursue our own lives, it also prevents us from becoming tools of crime. It is humanityâs first line of defense, or we should say the last. Actually, itâs the sole line of defense. [..] Freedom is not a handout, we need to earn it with our efforts. You can lock up my body but you can never imprison my will. [..] Towards the end, as always, Iâd like to share with you my life motto, a famous saying by Edward Everett Hale: âI am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.â
5 years ago in Quotes
Basically, what's happened is, somewhere along the line, as a society, we confused the notion of home with the possibility of an investment opportunity. What kind of creature wants to live in an investment opportunity? Only man. The fox has his den, the bee has his hive, the stoat has a a stoat hole. But only man, ladies and gentlemen, the worst animal of all, chooses to make his nest in an investment opportunity. Mmm, snuggle down in the lovely credit. All warm in the mortgage payment.
Mmm! But home is not the same thing as an investment opportunity. Home is a basic requirement of life, like food.
When a hamster hides hamster food in his hamster cheeks, he doesn't keep it there in the hope that it will rise in value. And when a squirrel hides a nut, he's not trying to play the acorn market. And having eaten the nut, he doesn't keep the shell in the hope of setting up a lucrative sideline making tiny hats for elves. And when a dog buries a bone, he doesn't keep that bone buried until the point where it's reached its maximum market value. He digs it up when he's hungry.
And if estate agents were dogs burying bones, not only would they leave those bones buried until they'd reached their maximum market value, but they'd run around starting rumours about imminent increases in the price of bones in the hope of driving up the market, and they'd invite loads of boneless dogs to all view the bone at the same time in the hope of giving the impression there was a massive demand for bones. And they would photograph the bone in such a way as to make it look much more juicy than it really was, airbrushing out the maggots and cropping the rotten meat.
5 years ago in Quotes
Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. Itâs produced by humans who canât stand looking at other humans.
5 years ago in Zitate
Wie unterschwellig solche Mechanismen funktionieren, zeigt folgendes Beispiel (vgl. Tages-Anzeiger, T.A., ZĂŒrich vom 11.2.1994). Beim Aussteigen aus einer StraĂenbahn fĂŒhlt sich ein siebenundsiebzigjĂ€hriger Mann von einem anderen Mann behindert, weil dieser, da er mit dem Fahrer spricht, den Ausstieg blockiert. Der Ă€ltere Mann zieht einen Revolver, gibt aus einer Distanz von zwei bis drei Metern vier SchĂŒsse auf den anderen ab und verschwindet. ZufĂ€llig wird der SchĂŒtze vier Wochen spĂ€ter in einem Restaurant wiedererkannt und verhaftet. Er streitet ab, geschossen zu haben, trĂ€gt aber eine Waffe ohne Waffenschein bei sich. Bei der Durchsuchung seines Hauses entdeckt die Polizei ein Waffenlager. SchlieĂlich gesteht der Mann die Tat. Er macht jedoch geltend, "im Affekt" gehandelt zu haben, vom anderen "erschreckt" worden zu sein.
Eine gerichtliche Untersuchung wird eingeleitet und dann eingestellt. Laut Stellungnahme der StaatsanwĂ€ltin habe sich der SiebenundsiebzigjĂ€hrige in einem "Sachverhaltsirrtum" befunden. Er habe irrtĂŒmlich angenommen, er befinde sich in einer Notwehrsituation und sei deshalb berechtigt gewesen, sich zu wehren. Es sei verstĂ€ndlich, so die StaatsanwĂ€ltin, daĂ er "ĂŒbersensibel auf aggressive Spannungen und ĂuĂerungen" reagiere.
"Was habe ich getan", fragte das Opfer einen Journalisten, "daĂ er auf mich schieĂen durfte?"
Wie sollen wir das "MitgefĂŒhl" dieser StaatsanwĂ€ltin verstehen? Warum stellt sie sich auf die Seite des TĂ€ters und schĂŒtzt andere BĂŒrger nicht vor ihm? Gibt ihre Haltung nicht jedem die Erlaubnis, zu morden? Was ist das fĂŒr ein MitgefĂŒhl, das uns gegen unsere eigenen BedĂŒrfnisse und Interessen verstoĂen, das uns den Schmerz des Opfers beiseiteschieben lĂ€Ăt und die tödliche Gefahr, die vom TĂ€ter ausgeht, verneint?"Der Verlust des MitgefĂŒhls"
5 years ago in Quotes
Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, 'There is no "I" in team.' What you should tell them is, 'Maybe not. But there is an "I" in independence, individuality and integrity.