robert darwen

@gmiller @christiandean_ You have revealed that you have not encountered the epistemology of David Deutsch. We are all running the same creative software in our brains (a little variation in memory and processing speed notwithstanding) and differ only in our interests and readiness to engage with them.

@Leigh_Phillips AGIs will be people just like us in the way that really matters, in their creativity. We should welcome them - the more the merrier.

I wonder whether the answer to the Fermi Paradox is simply that once a civilization approaches AGI, everyone gives up due to the disappearance of meaning and then just—let me euphemize to avoid algo censorship—“goes away”. Music without musicians, novels without novelists, mathematics without mathematicians, science without scientists, philosophy without philosophers. Even, eventually, after the robots arrive, labour without labourers. And if we banned AI in order to preserve all this human endeavour and meaning, we would still know deep down, that we were just pretending, that the ban was only there so that we humans could still feel like we were doing the art, making the discoveries, wrestling with the ideas. The output would no longer matter; only the experience of the activity. It was the following harrowing, humanist howl from a young mathematician, Kirwin Hampshire, about developments in his field in recent days that, well, prompted such bleak thoughts.

The welcome return of the protest song! Who knew that bloke i rubbed shoulders with once at the bar in the Wag Club in the 80s would have such b***** @BoyGeorge

@DavidDeutschOxf @BoyGeorge Another Pontius washes his hands.

@BoyGeorge Ends in Hebrew with כשבאים להרוג אותך a nod to the Talmudic endorsement of self-defence.

In Buddhism we understand that every action comes with a consequence. Due to my decision to stand up for my Jewish friends I am losing a few people from my life. Today I parted company with Tony Pontius who has run my record label BGP for a number of years. I wanted to release 'We Will Dance Again' but he was unequivocal and said 'I want nothing to do with this song' and I responded 'ok, we are done'. When someone is gutless it really does not hurt to say goodbye. My faith in humanity will not diminish and the truth will always win. I will release it!

Terrible nouvelle… Bar Asraf, 30 ans, survivant du massacre du Festival Nova, a mis fin à ses jours hier soir sur la tombe de sa petite amie. Depuis le pogrom du 7 octobre 2023, au cours duquel sa compagne, Liron Barda, a été assassinée par le Hamas, Bar luttait contre une douleur insoutenable et un deuil particulièrement difficile. Tout au long de cette période, il était resté très proche des parents de Liron, leur rendant régulièrement visite. Mercredi dernier encore, Bar célébrait le mariage de son frère. Mais hier, la douleur a fini par l’emporter… 💔 L’horreur du 7 octobre, c’est aussi cela. Ne l’oublions jamais. Que sa mémoire soit une bénédiction. 🕯️

I know, personally, two women, both from disadvantaged backgrounds, who lost out to jobs because of Arday. He was promoted over one, and got the job over the other. Both are great in their field, and WAY better than him. In my view, he is not the innocent victim in this.

Left-wing opinions are about signalling status, and socially desirable characteristics of the opinion-holder - NOT about establishing what's true or false. Thus, the fact that Jason Arday is hard to defend is precisely the point. If it were easy, it wouldn't be much of a signal.

@IonaItalia Love an inadvertent euphemism!

Embrace the reversion to the mean!

@TweeterReynolds Time will prove you @DUALIPA and so many other wrong. Trust me. Things are going to change and your eyes will be opened. It could be embarrassing for some. Not me though!

@aljhlester You should be sorry for that. It's done a lot of damage.

1/2 I’m not sorry for siding on principle with a man being hunted by a lynch mob, led by an outright racist. I am sorry though, for suggesting that the extent of Arday’s uncited duplication of other scholars’ work is widespread among peers or “appropriate”. It isn’t.

@aljhlester Deftly inserted recognition of the real issue - rather cowardly. And you have let down institutions whose academic and political neutrality you ought to be bolstering.

2/2 Arday has been let down by institutions supposed to guide him & seems prone to making dubious claims. The errors of successful Black scholars will always be rooted out & amplified while those of white counterparts may not be, …

This is unbearable. The Iran tyrants are hanging teenagers from cranes. But first this boy made a heart sign and said: "Don't be afraid. I'm okay. I have you." 🫶🏼

@TheSimonEvansX Your writing and your mother do justice to each other. Thanks for sharing.

A new substack post, sharing some news that I have been sitting on for a month. I sincerely hope, the last such post that I will be writing for some time. In Memoriam, Mum. Link below.

Public hangings in Iran last night. Why on earth is the US still negotiating with the murderers?

He will be executed tomorrow he will be hanged. He’s just a child. Please help me to get the leaders to call the Islamic Republic to stop the execution. My heart broke when I just watched the forced confession of this young boy on Iran’s state TV. They tell him: “You are Mohareb.” He asks: “What does that mean?” He was so young, he didn’t understand that it means one thing in Islamic Republic: execution A 17-year-old boy, Shervin Bagherian, was arrested in Iran’s recent protest. Now in the middle of a war they are preparing to execute him. His only crime was wanting a normal life. There is still time to speak up. Will you stand with me and be his voice before it’s too late? #StopExecutionsInIran

🔴Urgent: Sagher Gholami is only 19 years old, and her death sentence has been confirmed. Her mother has asked us to be her voice. Please help and share her photo and her name. #saghargholami #ساغرغلامی

So many people have written mendacious memoirs and CVs who should have just written novels instead.

@aljhlester Yes, doing it all at once (say on a day in October) seems crassly obvious by comparison.

Yes this is indeed how settler colonialism works. See the Australian frontier massacres map produced by the indomitable Lyndall Ryan for the British precedent: c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassac…

@George_Davison1 @Dyna_Morph @DanielPriestley Ah, ok, I get it. It's a wind up. Well done.

@Dyna_Morph @mathdancer1 @DanielPriestley Why don’t we just give everyone a government job? Good pension, flexible working hours and no greedy businessmen making themselves big profits!

A business owner wants to buy some sunglasses for £120… Step 1. Make a £1,320 sale Step 2. Pay the £1,056 of operating costs Step 3. You have £264 of pre-tax profit (20% margin) Step 4. Pay £66 corporation tax Step 5. Pay the £198 dividend Step 6. Now pay £78 dividend tax Step 7. £120 in your bank account to buy sunglasses of which £20 is VAT and £100 is the actual goods So for a business owner with 20% margins to buy £100 of goods they had to deliver £1320 of value and pay £164 of tax. … And then they call you greedy for not wanting to be taxed more.

@CptAllenHistory @DavidDeutschOxf Not a remotely plausible alternative. He would know he would called be out and excoriated by Israeli historians for any historical whitewashing.

@DavidDeutschOxf That is the most charitable reading, and probably the correct one. The alternative is that he and those around him knew the history and the scale of local collaboration, yet still chose to present the sanitized version to the Knesset. And that is just really dark.

On This Day — July 26, 1944 The Red Army entered Lwow, Poland (today’s Lviv, Ukraine) and found a Jewish city wiped off the map. Before the war, more than 100,000 Jews lived there (1/3 of the population; one of the three largest Jewish communities in Poland). The city pulsed with Yiddish, synagogues, schools, trade, and centuries of Galician Jewish life. That world was destroyed in three years. When the Germans seized the city in June 1941, Ukrainian nationalists and local collaborators, encouraged by the Germans, launched immediate pogroms. Thousands were murdered in the streets. The ghetto followed. Tens of thousands were deported to Belzec. Others were marched to the Janowska camp and shot in the sand pits known as “the Sands.” In June 1943, the ghetto was liquidated with systematic fury. Buildings were burned with people still inside. Bunkers were blown up. The remaining Jews were hunted by SS, German police, and Ukrainian auxiliaries. By the time Soviet forces arrived on July 26–27, 1944, the work was complete. Only a few hundred Jews remained alive (less than 1% of the pre-war community). Most had survived only by living for more than a year in the sewers. The Soviets found a ghost city. More than 40 synagogues stood empty or destroyed. The homes, the schools, and the shops were all gone. The Jewish third of Lwow had been erased. The Red Army ended the German occupation, but the Soviets were no liberators of Jewish life. During their earlier occupation (1939–1941), they had already deported thousands of Jewish refugees. After 1944, the tiny remnant faced hostility, an attempted pogrom in 1945, pressure to leave, and later anti-“cosmopolitan” campaigns. Most survivors eventually departed. Today, the world knows Lviv mainly through the current war with Russia. Almost nothing remains of the vibrant Jewish city that once stood there. One functioning synagogue (Tsori Gilod) survives after decades as a warehouse. The ruins of the Golden Rose, once the city’s oldest synagogue, serve as a fragile memorial. Scattered plaques and faded Hebrew lettering on old buildings are all that hint at what was lost. The living Jewish community numbers only in the low hundreds. A major center of East European Jewish civilization was reduced, in three years, to silence.

@George_Davison1 @Dyna_Morph @DanielPriestley Absolute hogwash, to be polite.

Well it’s the surplus from the hardworking masses. That capitalist has already paid himself a salary so they’re just getting a pair of free sunglasses and complaining about a few pounds of tax This is whilst our next attempt at communism must be global otherwise these people just take their money to countries that incentivise innovation and development