Eric

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Don’t sleep on Ken’s work in philosophy and AI. He is probably the most qualified person out there. youtube.com/live/syvwebCDN…

@JohannesAchill Mere lack of education on the different ideologies and political hermeneutic traditions of the world. They only see things through the American liberal dichotomy lens of late 20th century conservative or "liberal"(which they ignorantly use instead of progressive).

Why do Americans view everything as Republican vs. Democrats?

Permanent war. Politics as spectacle.

You have to kind of bracket your opinions of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore. Think of the problem in the full general sense without these particular associations. "Death of the Liberal Class begins with a sympathetic profile of an impoverished Libertarian Party activist, Ernest Logan Bell. Bell articulates a plethora of injustices related to widespread corporate dominance of American life, and mixes left- and right-wing positions in his criticism of liberal politicians. Hedges then discusses how Bell and the interests of many working Americans like him have been abandoned by a liberal class that championed deindustrialization, financial deregulation, and unmitigated outsourcing. The liberal class is described as a body of people employed in privileged, largely managerial positions in liberal institutions; including churches, media, the Democratic Party, labor unions, and academia. Hedges argues that political theater and moral posturing has replaced meaningful agitation for reform, and charges that the liberal class has turned into a class of apologists for the corporate interests that killed them." (The book was published in 2010. When many of you poasters were either children or were still in grad school.)

This analysis by Chris Hedges is and was severely underrated. I think we live in an era characterized by a zombie liberal class. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_…

@RyanHaecker At the Diogenes Club.

In London, a long time ago

Most of all, I think we need to heed Eva Brann’s advice that colleges should be “temporally cosmopolitan and spatially parochial,” that is, embracing all that’s been written but making choices based on the particular intellectual community’s needs, not national trends.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: this is too optimistic. USC, for instance, always a rich kids school, just announced a planned integration of AI with their curriculum.

@jennfrey @TerenceJSweeney You mean Canvas. Canva is actually fun and useful.

We never needed blackboard or canva. And we could just stop using them and everything would be fine.

@zenahitz *Canvas! Canva, on the other hand, is a fun graphic design app.

Amen sister

Yes. We have two choices: reconcile ourselves to zombie institutions that credential without meaning, or re-scale our educational endeavors. The latter was always worth doing -- the crisis is an opportunity.

Camille Pissarro's picture from the early 1870s, is a nod to his abiding friendship with Paul Cézanne - they had known each other since the 1860s and would often paint side-by-side in both Pontoise (seen here) and Auvers-sur-Oise, drawing inspiration from one another. Pissarro’s style in his Pontoise period can be thought of as derived from the combination of the influences of Claude Monet and JMW Turner, who had both widely contributed to the redefinition of landscape painting. The small-scale patches visible in the paint handling are characteristic of Monet, whilst the earthy colour palette recalls Turner’s late paintings.

@AdamFrank4 @MGleiser @AlexLerchner 6/6 AI is powerful precisely because it carries forward human cognitive structure - but it remains dependent on it. Curious to hear thoughts from others working across AI and philosophy.

@AdamFrank4 @MGleiser @AlexLerchner 4/6 This shift in perspective, which draws on the phenomenology of Husserl, helps unify several observations: - why LLMs are fluent yet hallucinate - why scaling improves recall but not compositional reasoning - why VLMs struggle with object persistence & whole-part relations

1/6 I’m excited to share a new paper: “The Origins of Artificial Intelligence in Natural Intelligence” microsoft.com/en-us/research… A persistent puzzle: Why do AI systems exhibit fluency & coherence- yet struggle with reasoning, truth reliability, and object-level intuitive physics?

Milosz was truly one of the great poets of the 20th century. Just read this new volume on a time of transition (fleeing the aftermath of WW2 into diplomatic service) and contains two gut punch meditations on wickedness & survival in war: "Child of Europe" & "Treatise on Morals"

Amid declining liberalism & multiple political crises, we need to retrieve Thomas More’s playful invention of Utopia as a guide for a politics of hope. New book with my friend David Albertson out July 21 with Yale UP—preorder here: tinyurl.com/y8drpjve

Following our discussion of Erik Peterson's 1935 essay 'Monotheism as a Political Problem', I will begin to share Ai generated summaries of our discussions. 🧵 drive.google.com/file/d/1Mnp_uT…

@AimeTim These prices just seem so unjust and downright criminal. Hopefully an affordable paperback will come out in two years or less...

New publication: “Edith Stein and Max Scheler in Dialogue” bloomsbury.com/uk/edith-stein…

@MethexisATX I don't see the text at the link. It just opens a Google Meet.

@MethexisATX This sounds really worthwhile. Would love to join. Is it open to anyone? Second question, what other texts are going to be read in the series? Thanks

At 1 pm CST on Sunday 3 May, we start a series of readings in political theology. The Methexis Institute Forbidden Books reading group will host a discussion of Erik Peterson's essay 'Monotheism as a Political Problem' (1935). Link to join: meet.google.com/roo-wesv-mye