Claude summary: > This article argues that the only enduring justification for space exploration is its potential to fundamentally transform human civilization and our understanding of ourselves. The author traces the history of space exploration, from the mystical beliefs of early rocket pioneers to the geopolitical motivations of the Space Race, highlighting how current economic, scientific, and military rationales fall short of sustaining long-term commitment. The author contends that achieving interstellar civilization will require unprecedented organizational efforts and societal commitment, likely necessitating institutions akin to governments or religions. Ultimately, the piece suggests that only a society that embraces the pursuit of interstellar civilization as its central legitimating project may succeed in this monumental endeavor, framing space exploration not as an inevitable outcome of progress, but as a deliberate choice to follow a "golden path to a destiny among the stars."
The Only Reason to Explore Space
The Vogue Archive - Google Arts & Culture
Niche InternetTools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects
Summary: Throughout human history, innovations like written language, drawing, maps, the scientific method, and data visualization have profoundly expanded the kinds of thoughts humans can think. Most of these "tools for thought" significantly predate digital computers. The modern usage of the phrase is heavily influenced by the work of computer scientists and technologists in the 20th century who envisioned how computers could become tools to extend human reasoning and help solve complex problems. While computers are powerful "meta-mediums", the current focus on building note-taking apps is quite narrow. To truly expand human cognition, we should explore a wider range of tools and practices, both digital and non-digital.
Taken at face value, the phrase tool for thought doesn't have the word 'computer' or 'digital' anywhere in it. It suggests nothing about software systems or interfaces. It's simply meant to refer to tools that help humans think thoughts; potentially new, different, and better kinds of thoughts than we currently think.
Most of the examples I listed above are cultural practices and techniques. They are primary ways of doing; specific ways of thinking and acting that result in greater cognitive abilities. Ones that people pass down from generation to generation through culture.
Every one of these also pre-dates digital computers by at least a few hundred years, if not thousands or tens of thousands. Given that framing, it's time to return to the question of how computation, software objects, and note-taking apps fit into this narrative.
If you look around at the commonly cited “major thinkers” in this space, you get a list of computer programmers: Kenneth Iverson, J.C.R. Licklider, Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay, Bob Taylor, Douglas Englebart, Seymour Papert, Bret Victor, and Howard Rheingold, among others.
This is relevant because it means these men share a lot of the same beliefs, values, and context. They know the same sorts of people, learned the same historical stories in school and were taught to see the world in particular kinds of ways. Most of them worked together, or are at most one personal connection away from the next. Tools for thought is a community scene as much as it's a concept.
This gives tools for thought a distinctly computer-oriented, male, American, middle-class flavour. The term has always been used in relation to a dream that is deeply intertwined with digital machines, white-collar knowledge work, and bold American optimism.
Englebart was specifically concerned with our ability to deal with complex problems, rather than simply “amplifying intelligence.” Being able to win a chess match is perceived as intelligent, but it isn't helping us tackle systemic racism or inequality. Englebart argued we should instead focus on “augmenting human intellect” in ways that help us find solutions to wicked problems. While he painted visions of how computers could facilitate this, he also pointed to organisational structures, system dynamics, and effective training as part of this puzzle.
There is a rich literature of research and insight into how we might expand human thought that sometimes feels entirely detached from the history we just covered. Cognitive scientists and philosophers have been tackling questions about the relationship between cognition, our tools, and our physical environments for centuries. Well before microprocessors and hypertext showed up. Oddly, they're rarely cited by the computer scientists.
This alternate intellectual lineage is still asking the question “how can we develop better tools for thinking?” But they don't presume the answer revolves around computers.
Proponents of embodied cognition argue that our perceptions, concepts, and cognitive processes are shaped by the physical structures of our body and the sensory experiences it provides, and that cognition cannot be fully understood without considering the bodily basis of our experiences.
Philosopher Andy Clark has spent his career exploring how external tools transform and expand human cognition. His 2003 book Natural-born Cyborgs argues humans have “always been cyborgs.” Not in the sense of embedding wires into our flesh, but in the sense we enter “into deep and complex relationships with nonbiological constructs, props, and aids”. Our ability to think with external objects is precisely what makes us intelligent.
Clark argues “the mind” isn't simply a set of functions within the brain, but a process that happens between our bodies and the physical environment. Intelligence emerges at the intersection of humans and tools. He expanded on this idea in a follow-on book called Supersizing the Mind. It became known as the extended mind hypothesis. It's the strong version of theories like embodied cognition, situated cognition, and enacted cognition that are all the rage in cognitive science departments.
There's a scramble to make sense of all these new releases and the differences between them. YouTube and Medium explode with DIY guides, walkthrough tours, and comparison videos. The productivity and knowledge management influencer is born.[ giant wall of productivity youtube nonsense ]The strange thing is, many of these guides are only superficially about the application they're presented in. Most are teaching specific cultural techniques
Zettelkasten, spaced repetition, critical thinking.These techniques are only focused on a narrow band of human activity. Specifically, activity that white-collar knowledge workers engage in.I previously suggested we should rename TFT to CMFT (computational mediums for thought), but that doesn't go far enough. If we're being honest about our current interpretation of TFT's, we should actually rename it to CMFWCKW – computational mediums for white-collar knowledge work.
By now it should be clear that this question of developing better tools for thought can and should cover a much wider scope than developing novel note-taking software.
I do think there's a meaningful distinction between tools and mediums: Mediums are a means of communicating a thought or expressing an idea. Tools are a means of working in a medium. Tools enable specific tasks and workflows within a medium. Cameras are a tool that let people express ideas through photography. Blogs are a tool that lets people express ideas through written language. JavaScript is a tool that let people express ideas through programming. Tools and mediums require each other. This makes lines between them fuzzy.
Western Music Isn't What You Think
Western culture and music have been heavily influenced by outside, non-Western sources, contrary to common perceptions. The author argues that diversity and cross-cultural exchange are key strengths of Western culture.
Hate is the New Sex
These days hate has roughly the same role in popular culture that original sin has in traditional Christian theology. If you want to slap the worst imaginable label on an organization, you call it a hate group. If you want to push a category of discourse straight into the realm of the utterly unacceptable, you call it hate speech. If you’re speaking in public and you want to be sure that everyone in the crowd will beam approval at you, all you have to do is denounce hate.
At the far end of this sort of rhetoric, you get the meretricious slogan used by Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign last year: LOVE TRUMPS HATE. I hope that none of my readers are under the illusion that Clinton’s partisans were primarily motivated by love, except in the sense of Clinton’s love for power and the Democrats’ love for the privileges and payouts they could expect from four more years of control of the White House; and of course Trump and the Republicans were head over heels in love with the same things. The fact that Clinton’s marketing flacks and focus groups thought that the slogan just quoted would have an impact on the election, though, shows just how pervasive the assumption I’m discussing has become in our culture.
what happens when people decide that some common human emotion is evil and harmful and wrong, and decide that the way to make a better world is to get rid of it?
The example I have in mind is the attitude, prevalent in the English-speaking world from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, that sex was the root of all evil.
I know that comparing current attitudes toward hate with Victorian attitudes toward sex will inspire instant pushback from a good many of my readers. After all, sexual desire is natural and normal and healthy, while hate is evil and harmful and wrong, right? Here again, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that people a century and a quarter ago—most likely including your ancestors, dear reader, if they happened to live in the English-speaking world—saw things the other way around. To them, hate was an ordinary emotion that most people had under certain circumstances, but sexual desire was beyond the pale: beastly, horrid, filthy, and so on through an impressive litany of unpleasant adjectives.
Make something forbidden and you make it desirable. Take a normal human emotional state, one that everyone experiences, and make it forbidden, and you guarantee that the desire to violate the taboo will take on overwhelming power. That’s why, after spending their days subject to the pervasive tone policing of contemporary life, in which every utterance gets scrutinized for the least trace of anything that anyone anywhere could conceivably interpret as hateful, so many people in today’s world don internet aliases and go to online forums where they can blurt out absolutely anything
The opposite of one bad idea, after all, is usually another bad idea; the fact that dying of thirst is bad for you doesn’t make drowning good for you; whether we’re talking about sex or anything else, there’s a space somewhere between “not enough” and “too much,” between pathological repression and equally pathological expression, that’s considerably healthier than either of the extremes. I’m going to risk causing my more sensitive readers to clutch their smelling salts and faint on the nearest sofa, in true Victorian style, by suggesting that the same thing’s true of hate.
Hate is like sex; there are certain times, places, and contexts where it’s appropriate, but there are many, many others where it’s not. You can recognize its place in life without having to act it out on every occasion—and in fact, the more conscious you are of its place in life, the more completely you acknowledge it and give it its due, the less likely you are to get blindsided by it. That’s true of sex, and it’s true of hate: what you refuse to acknowledge controls you; what you acknowledge, you can learn to control.
the blind faith that goodness requires amputation is so unquestioned in our time.
Human beings are never going to be perfect, not if perfection means the amputation of some part of human experience, whether the limb that’s being hacked off is our sexual instincts, our aggressive instincts, or any other part of who and what we are.
We can accept our sexuality, whatever that happens to be, and weave it into the pattern of our individual lives and our relationships with other people in ways that uphold the values we cherish and yield as much joy and as little unnecessary pain for as many people as possible. That doesn’t mean always acting out our desires—in some cases, it can mean never acting them out at all
Fandom's Great Divide
The 1970s sitcom "All in the Family" sparked debates with its bigoted-yet-lovable Archie Bunker character, leaving audiences divided over whether the show was satirizing prejudice or inadvertently promoting it, and reflecting TV's power to shape societal attitudes.
This sort of audience divide, not between those who love a show and those who hate it but between those who love it in very different ways, has become a familiar schism in the past fifteen years, during the rise of—oh, God, that phrase again—Golden Age television. This is particularly true of the much lauded stream of cable “dark dramas,” whose protagonists shimmer between the repulsive and the magnetic. As anyone who has ever read the comments on a recap can tell you, there has always been a less ambivalent way of regarding an antihero: as a hero
a subset of viewers cheered for Walter White on “Breaking Bad,” growling threats at anyone who nagged him to stop selling meth. In a blog post about that brilliant series, I labelled these viewers “bad fans,” and the responses I got made me feel as if I’d poured a bucket of oil onto a flame war from the parapets of my snobby critical castle. Truthfully, my haters had a point: who wants to hear that they’re watching something wrong?
Goodbye to all that harassment
Before Elon, Twitter was an idealist’s workplace
What I learned getting acquired by Google
While there were undoubtedly people who came in for the food, worked 3 hours a day, and enjoyed their early retirements, all the people I met were earnest, hard-working, and wanted to do great work.
What beat them down were the gauntlet of reviews, the frequent re-orgs, the institutional scar tissue from past failures, and the complexity of doing even simple things on the world stage. Startups can afford to ignore many concerns, Googlers rarely can.
What also got in the way were the people themselves - all the smart people who could argue against anything but not for something, all the leaders who lacked the courage to speak the uncomfortable truth, and all the people that were hired without a clear project to work on, but must still be retained through promotion-worthy made-up work.
Another blocker to progress that I saw up close was the imbalance of a top heavy team. A team with multiple successful co-founders and 10-20 year Google veterans might sound like a recipe for great things, but it’s also a recipe for gridlock.
This structure might work if there are multiple areas to explore, clear goals, and strong autonomy to pursue those paths.
Good teams regularly pay down debt by cleaning things up on quieter days.
Just as real is process debt. A review added because of a launch gone wrong. A new legal check to guard against possible litigation. A section added to a document template. Layers accumulate over the years until you end up unable to release a new feature for months after it's ready because it's stuck between reviews, with an unclear path out.
The Meaning of the Super Bowl - The American Interest
Games—sports—are a form of mass entertainment. They differ from the other principal form of mass entertainment, scripted drama, in three ways that help to account for their appeal. They are spontaneous. Unlike in films and theatrical productions, the outcome is not known in advance: No one bets on the outcome of a play or movie. They are authentic: Unlike film stars, athletes really are doing what audiences see them doing. And games are coherent. Unlike so much of life they have a beginning, middle, and end, with a plot line and a conclusion that can be easily understood.
Pizza rolls and the meaning of midcentury food
The success of frozen pizza, in general, and Minnesota’s Totino’s company, in particular, caught his eye and he wanted to move quickly into that arena. He would, of course, develop his own frozen pizza, but Paulucci had another idea. Chun King churned out thousands of mini egg rolls per day and Jeno figured that an egg roll wrapper could be filled with just about anything. He told his vice president of research and development to turn this idea into reality. The VP, in turn, assigned the task to Beatrice (Luoma) Ojakangas, by coincidence, the older sister of the engineer who had developed the egg roll machine for Chun King.
If the general feeling toward pizza rolls in the 2020s is that they’re for busy kids or stoned adults (as is the consensus in those Reddit discussions explaining the food to non-Americans, which I think tracks with the broader cultural understanding of who eats them today), in the 1960s, they were something different: a new and nifty treat you could serve as a canapé.
In many ways, then, pizza rolls are the perfect American food: a slightly ridiculous and nontraditional dish that pulls from multiple cultural sources outside this country. Their very existence, and the way in which they’re sold, symbolizes the abundance of the USA—its richness of cultures, its excess of resources, its delight in just kinda making things up and seeing if they work.
American food, as a broad-brush concept, is defined not by a specific set of dishes or flavors but by its incredible variety. Obviously—obviously—you can find lots of tasty food in the USA and plenty of regional specialties. But many of those local delicacies have faded away over the years, and as a nation, our signature thing is that you can get, for example, dozens of kinds of orange juice at any time of the year and hundreds of yogurt flavors, and seemingly every grocery store and strip mall has foods that originated in various far-off corners of the world.
Why education is so difficult and contentious
This article proposes to explain why education is
so difficult and contentious by arguing that educational thinking
draws on only three fundamental ideas&emdash;that of socializing the
young, shaping the mind by a disciplined academic curriculum, and
facilitating the development of students' potential. All educational
positions are made up of various mixes of these ideas. The problems
we face in education are due to the fact that each of these ideas is
significantly flawed and also that each is incompatible in basic ways
with the other two. Until we recognize these basic incompatibilities
we will be unable adequately to respond to the problems we
face.
Culture Wars are Long Wars
Introducing metalabel | Metalabel
Record and fashion labels use the actual word “label,” but publishing houses, art galleries, filmmakers, and other collectives are all examples of a category we might call “culture labels” — entities that exist to fund, distribute, and promote culture of one kind or another.Most culture labels exist to promote a specific aesthetic, region, or point of view. A punk label flies the flag for punk rock with every record it puts out. A postcolonial fiction publisher creates space for marginalized voices in wider culture. These labels establish this perspective incrementally, release by release.
Labels provide seed funding to new ideas. Labels find, sign, and support talent. Labels signal to the rest of their ecosystem what matters. Taken all together, we can better appreciate what labels are. Labels are startups and institutions for culture.
It’s no coincidence that the push against labels coincided with the rise of the so-called “Creator Economy” and its new heroic myth of the independent creator who out-hustles and out-competes their way to millions of subs and riches. But the truth of the Creator Economy myth has become clear: billion-dollar platforms turning people into content factories and offering little in the way of creative support, financial security, or context in return.
Storytelling — The American Tradition
America arguably lacks a folklore proper, in the old-world sense of a body of narratives that explore the philosophical themes of the everyday life of commoners with significant mythological license
Unlike traditional folklore, American industrial folklore is a realist, literal tradition, with the presumption of factuality, and a preference for first-person telling of recent or contemporary events over retellings and handed-down lore
the cowboy western went straight from epic to commercial theater without spending any time simmering as a folklore.
The American hero of folklore, then, is a grifter who tells the tale of his own redemption. Only, he (it is nearly always a he) is a grifter with a heart of gold who might pull little cons to get ahead, but stays true-hearted and noble where it actually matters.
Finding Sooyoung Park and the Asian Americans in Indie Rock’s Pre-Internet Heyday
How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America - The New York Times
My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s · Gwern.net
New York's hipster wars