Sabitlenmiş Tweet
My new book is 'Media and the Power of Knowledge'. It is partly based on lectures I've given over the last 15 years. It updates McLuhan for the age of @X: futurespodcast.net/events/media-p…
English
Steve Fuller
44.7K posts
Steve Fuller
@ProfSteveFuller
Prof of Sociology, @warwickuni. Founder of Social Epistemology and Author of Humanity 2.0 and Post Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game
University of Warwick Katılım Temmuz 2011
36 Takip Edilen6.7K Takipçiler
What? Social media should be treated like tobacco? I can see the tagline: 'Big Brother saves youth from Big Tech'...
Wes Streeting@wesstreeting
Big Tech has learned from the Big Tobacco playbook. It’s extremely addictive, bad for our health, and causing real harm to our children. It’s time for action. theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/m…
English
Imagine a teacher who says a lot of provocative things, but whose concrete implications are unclear or ambiguous, which a student then successfully focuses in a quite specific way. This characterizes Aristotle's relationship to Plato.
English
@ProfSteveFuller Unfortunately, many people don't think like you either.
English
The Sociology of Knowledge wouldn't be needed if people didn't think that Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler are important philosophers.
English
@digitaldang Unfortunately, many people don't think like you, and so a sociology of knowledge is needed.
English
@TonySiewert The problem is that many other people do believe it; hence, the need for a sociology of knowledge.
English
@ProfSteveFuller Does that mean I'm fine since I don't believe them to be important philosophers?
English
@BillyRubin1974 I don't deny that Zizek and Butler are good at what they do. It's just that the appeal of what they do is easily explained.
English
@ProfSteveFuller I saw Zizek with Yanis Varoufakis (& Julian Assange by video link), and I saw Judith Butler... all were excellent, I thought.
English
If you've been striving to achieve a goal all your life, why do you stick around once it's happened. Who says experiencing achievement for a longer time makes you happier?
English
This episode with @briankeating is one of his best:
Prof. Brian Keating@Briankeating
The Cognitive Scientist Who Says You Don't Exist | Joscha Bach (@Plinz) Timestamps: 00:00 You Don't Live in the World — It Lives in You 10:05 Why Scientists Refuse to Explain Reality 14:50 Where Joscha Disagrees with David Deutsch 21:10 What Would a Truly Intelligent Machine Actually Do? 25:00 Why Chess Destroys Good Minds 30:40 Can You Upload a Brain? What Neuroscience Gets Wrong 38:45 Why Einstein Needed a Body to Discover Relativity 46:00 AI Companies as Prophets of the New Religion 50:10 You Don't Die Because You Were Never Really Alive 57:50 Religion as a Civilizational Operating System 1:04:00 What the Torah Knew That Sam Harris Doesn't 1:12:00 What Is God, Actually? 1:18:00 What Bach University Would Teach 1:27:50 Confronting Your Own Death
English
I have always found this very distinction (progress vs hope) very interesting. Rorty did too, and it explains a lot about Pragmatism's attachment to American thought.
Dead Wrong History@deadwronghist
Christopher Lasch thought the idea of progress was a delusion. In 1991, an interviewer asked: then why write at all?
English
@LukeRobertMason Yes, especially since the idea of the 'Big Bang' was invented by a Jesuit physicist.
English
@ProfSteveFuller I always assumed he was talking about artists, but it easily applies to God.
English
They don't call it the 'Big Bang' for nothing...
Luke Robert Mason@LukeRobertMason
“It is the job of the creator to explode. It is the task of the academic to walk around the bomb site, gathering up the shrapnel, to figure out what kind of an explosion it was, who was killed, how much damage it was meant to do and how close it came to actually achieving that.” - Neil Gaiman
English
I bet this goes up in the next Voyager probe to represent humanity's current self-understanding...
GIDI@Gidi_Traffic
Wait For Einstein 😅
English
A good way to think about advances in AI is as providing versions of humanity that we know all too well. They're the sort of people who might well say some useful things when you ask them, but you'd never want to hang out with them.
English
@DarrinADurant You're the one promoting the idea of tacit knowledge, so it's up to you to tell me what you're talking about. I'm just helping you.
English
@ProfSteveFuller Well ‘spirit’ as geist is I think immaterial, not material?
Or do you mean spirit as Hegel might have it, a kind of collective biography? Sorry cannot recall his German terms for it.
English
If you want either people or AI to exercise #judgement, force them to rank order their proposed solutions to a problem and explain the ordering.
English
@DarrinADurant Maybe. I've never seen the appeal of the idea, except as a self-censoring surrogate for 'spirit', in which case it should be discussed more openly in those terms. And then we can talk about spiritual media, etc.
English
@ProfSteveFuller We can be poor calculators and yet survive because we’re not fundamentally just calculating machines.
That one was a bit too easy.
If you think tacit knowledge is a phlogiston move, are you saying you think claims about tacit knowledge are claims about a material substrate?
English
When things don't go to expectations, they may still be going to plan. This part of what William James called 'the will to believe'. You may be heading in the right direction but you're making mistakes along the way. And that's fine.
English
@DarrinADurant We're 'so poor' that we've managed to survive. There is such a thing as 'bounded rationality' (my PhD was on it). The idea that tacit knowledge exists in collectives is a phlogiston move. Explain the 'betweenness' that this view implies.
English
@ProfSteveFuller The typical answer is that tacit knowledge exists within collectives, within relations between collectives, and/or within bodies and brains.
If we were just probabilistic blobs of flesh, why are humans so routinely poor calculators? Are you “captive to [Cartesian] Dogma”?
🤪🤓
English
@DarrinADurant I don't believe in any literal sense of 'tacit knowledge'. (Where does it exist?) I believe that we too are making probabilistic judgements, just like the machines. They just operate with different hardware and software.
English
@ProfSteveFuller Are you sure it’s just me stuck in Dreyfusian Dogma?
AI is incapable of possessing or exercising tacit knowledge, but that’s how you’ve just explained why humans know judgement when we see it.
English