The end/beginning
“Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else."
(Fred Rogers)
Archives of Radical Philosophy
A quick one to note that the entire archive (1972-2018) of Radical Philosophy is now online. It describes itself as a “UK-based journal of socialist and feminist philosophy” and there’s articles in there from Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Richard Rorty.
If nothing else, these essays and many others should upend facile notions of leftist academic philosophy as dominated by “postmodern” denials of truth, morality, freedom, and Enlightenment thought, as doctrinaire Stalinism, or little more than thought policing through dogmatic political correctness. For every argument in the pages of Radical Philosophy that might confirm certain readers' biases, there are dozens more that will challenge their assumptions, bearing out Foucault’s observation that “philosophy cannot be an endless scrutiny of its own propositions.”That's my bedtime reading sorted for the foreseeable, then...
Source: Open Culture
Do the tools you use matter?
An interesting post from Austin Kleon on whether tools matter. It was prompted by the image accompanying this post, which met with some objections when he shared it with others:
On my Instagram, a follower was very upset with the above cartoon, saying it was “mean” and “hurtful” and not smart and ungrateful to my fans, and that I should try to “remember what it was like to be a beginner.”He defends his position, partly by telling stories, but also by stating:
There are actually very good reasons for not wanting to teach young artists. There are good reasons for not answering a question like, “What brand of pen do you use?” or questions about process at all.It’s been interesting seeing Bryan Mathers' journey over the last five years. I’ve seen him go from using basic apps which work ‘just fine’ to reaching the limits of those and having to upgrade to more powerful stuff. That’s a voyage of discovery, but along the way it’s absolutely useful to find out what other people use.If you are just starting off and I tell you exactly how I work, right down to the brand of pen and notebook, I am, in a some small sense, robbing you of the experience of finding your own materials and your own way of working.
Kleon points out that we can do better than tool-related questions:
So, yes, the tools matter, but again, it’s all about what you are trying to achieve. So a question like, “What brand of pen do you use?” is not as good as “How do you get that thick line quality?” or “How do you dodge Writer’s Block?”I'm a fan of a great site called Uses This (formerly 'The Setup') which asks a range of people the hardware and software they use to get stuff done. The interviews are always structured around the same four questions, but the best responses are ones that take the idea and run with it a bit.
Note to self: update the version of this I did back in 2011.
Source: Austin Kleon
Is your smartphone a very real part of who you are?
I really enjoy Aeon’s articles, and probably should think about becoming a paying subscriber. They make me think.
This one is about your identity and how much of it is bound up with your smartphone:
After all, your smartphone is much more than just a phone. It can tell a more intimate story about you than your best friend. No other piece of hardware in history, not even your brain, contains the quality or quantity of information held on your phone: it ‘knows’ whom you speak to, when you speak to them, what you said, where you have been, your purchases, photos, biometric data, even your notes to yourself – and all this dating back years.I did some work on mind, brain, and personal identity as part of my undergraduate studies in Philosophy. I'm certainly sympathetic to the argument that things outside our body can become part of who we are:
Andy Clark and David Chalmers... argued in ‘The Extended Mind’ (1998) that technology is actually part of us. According to traditional cognitive science, ‘thinking’ is a process of symbol manipulation or neural computation, which gets carried out by the brain. Clark and Chalmers broadly accept this computational theory of mind, but claim that tools can become seamlessly integrated into how we think. Objects such as smartphones or notepads are often just as functionally essential to our cognition as the synapses firing in our heads. They augment and extend our minds by increasing our cognitive power and freeing up internal resources.So if you've always got your smartphone with you, it's possible to outsource things to it. For example, you don't have to remember so many things, you just need to know how to retrieve them. In the age of voice assistants, that becomes ever-easier.
This is known as the ‘extended mind thesis’.
This line of reasoning leads to some potentially radical conclusions. Some philosophers have argued that when we die, our digital devices should be handled as remains: if your smartphone is a part of who you are, then perhaps it should be treated more like your corpse than your couch. Similarly, one might argue that trashing someone’s smartphone should be seen as a form of ‘extended’ assault, equivalent to a blow to the head, rather than just destruction of property. If your memories are erased because someone attacks you with a club, a court would have no trouble characterising the episode as a violent incident. So if someone breaks your smartphone and wipes its contents, perhaps the perpetrator should be punished as they would be if they had caused a head trauma.These are certainly questions I'm interested in. I've seen some predictions that Philosphy graduates are going to be earning more than Computer Science graduates in a decade's time. I can see why (and I certainly hope so!)
Source: Aeon
Microcast #004
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Is it really a ‘skills gap’ that we should be talking about? What’s the real problem here?
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Masterpieces
“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
(Virginia Woolf)
Microcast #003
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What technologies are going to be used with Project MoodleNet?
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30,000 hours of sleep
“Those who research world-class performance focus only on what students do in the gym or track or practice room. Everyone focuses on the most obvious, measurable forms of work and tries to make these more effective and more productive. They don’t ask whether there are other ways to improve performance, and improve your life.
This is how we’ve come to believe that world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of practice. But that’s wrong. It comes after 10,000 hours of practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.”
(Alex Soojung-Kim Pang)
Teaching kids about computers and coding
Not only is Hacker News a great place to find the latest news about tech-related stuff, it’s also got some interesting ‘Ask HN’ threads sourcing recommendations from the community.
This particular one starts with a user posing the question:
Ask HN: How do you teach you kids about computers and coding?Like sites such as Reddit and Stack Overflow, responses are voted up based on their usefulness. The most-upvoted response was this one:Please share what tools & approaches you use - it may Scratch, Python, any kids specific like Linux distros, Raspberry Pi or recent products like Lego Boost… Or your experiences with them.. thanks.
My daughter is almost 5 and she picked up Scratch Jr in ten minutes. I am writing my suggestions mostly from the context of a younger child.But I think my favourite response is this one:I approached it this way, I bought a book on Scratch Jr so I could get up to speed on it. I walked her through a few of the basics, and then I just let her take over after that.
One other programming related activity we have done is the Learning Resources Code & Go Robot Mouse Activity. She has a lot of fun with this as you have a small mouse you program with simple directions to navigate a maze to find the cheese. It uses a set of cards to help then grasp the steps needed. I switch to not using the cards after a while. We now just step the mouse through the maze manually adding steps as we go.
One other activity to consider is the robot turtles board game. This teaches some basic logic concepts needed in programming.
For an older child, I did help my nephew to learn programming in Python when he was a freshman in high school. I took the approach of having him type in games from the free Python book. I have always though this was a good approach for older kids to get the familiar with the syntax.
Something else I would consider would be a robot that can be programmer with Scratch. While I have not done this yet, I think for kid seeing the physical results of programming via a robot is a powerful way to capture interest.
What age range are we talking about? For most kids aged 6-12 writing code is too abstract to start with. For my kids, I started making really simple projects with a Makey Makey. After that, I taught them the basics with Scratch, since there are tons of fun tutorials for kids. Right now, I'm building a Raspberry Pi-powered robot with my 10yo (basically it's a poor man's Lego Mindstorm).My son is sailing through his Computer Science classes at school because of some webmaking and ‘coding’ stuff we did when he was younger. He’s seldom interested, however, if I want to break out the Raspberry Pi and have a play.The key is fun. The focus is much more on ‘building something together’ than ‘I’ll learn you how to code’. I’m pretty sure that if I were to press them into learning how to code it will only put them off. Sometimes we go for weeks without building on the robot, and all of the sudden she will ask me to work on it with her again.
At the end of the day, it’s meeting them where they’re at. If they show an interest, run with it!
Source: Hacker News
Microcast #002
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What’s Doug working on this week?
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Building a bridge
“I learned that a long walk and calm conversation are an incredible combination if you want to build a bridge.”
(Seth Godin)
The three things you need to make friends over the age of 30
This article from 2012 was referenced in something I was reading last week:
As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added.I've never particularly had wide group of friends, even a child. Acquaintances, absolutely. I was on the football team and reasonably popular, it's just that I can be what some people would term 'emotionally distant'.
But making friends in your thirties seems to be something that’s difficult for many people. Not that I’m overly-concerned about it, to be honest. A good Stoic should be self-contained.
The article makes a good point about differences that don’t seem to matter when people are younger. For example, coming from a wealthy family (or having a job that pays well) seems to somehow play a bigger role.
And then…
Adding children to the mix muddles things further. Suddenly, you are surrounded by a new circle of parent friends — but the emotional ties can be tenuous at best, as the comedian Louis C. K. related in one stand-up routine: “I spend whole days with people, I’m like, I never would have hung out with you, I didn’t choose you. Our children chose each other. Based on no criteria, by the way. They’re the same size.”Indeed, although there's some really interesting people I've met through my children. I wouldn't particularly call those people friends, though. Perhaps I set the bar too high?
Ultimately, though, there’s more at work here than just life changes happening to us.
External factors are not the only hurdle. After 30, people often experience internal shifts in how they approach friendship. Self-discovery gives way to self-knowledge, so you become pickier about whom you surround yourself with, said Marla Paul, the author of the 2004 book The Friendship Crisis: Finding, Making, and Keeping Friends When You’re Not a Kid Anymore. “The bar is higher than when we were younger and were willing to meet almost anyone for a margarita,” she said.Well, exactly. And I think things are different for men and women (as well as, I guess, those who don’t strongly identify as either).Manipulators, drama queens, egomaniacs: a lot of them just no longer make the cut.
Source: The New York Times
Microcast #001
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What is microcasting? Why has it suddenly appeared on Thought Shrapnel? Whose voice will you hear? How often will one of these appear in the stream? How are these produced?
Links:
Microcast #000
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Just setting this thing up with the assistance of my two children…
Geek social fallacies
I came across this via a chain of links that took me down a rabbithole. I’m pretty sure it started with an article referenced on Hacker News, but I’m not sure.
In any case, I thought it was pretty interesting. Basically someone who self-identifies as a geek giving other geeks some advice. Having said that, it’s probably applicable more widely than that, particularly among men.
Here’s a taste:
Within the constellation of allied hobbies and subcultures collectively known as geekdom, one finds many social groups bent under a crushing burden of dysfunction, social drama, and general interpersonal wack-ness. It is my opinion that many of these never-ending crises are sparked off by an assortment of pernicious social fallacies -- ideas about human interaction which spur their holders to do terrible and stupid things to themselves and to each other.There's a list of five such fallacies, my favourite being:
Hilarious and insightful at the same time.Geek Social Fallacy #4: Friendship Is Transitive
Every carrier of GSF4 has, at some point, said:“Wouldn’t it be great to get all my groups of friends into one place for one big happy party?!”
If you groaned at that last paragraph, you may be a recovering GSF4 carrier.
GSF4 is the belief that any two of your friends ought to be friends with each other, and if they’re not, something is Very Wrong.
The milder form of GSF4 merely prevents the carrier from perceiving evidence to contradict it; a carrier will refuse to comprehend that two of their friends (or two groups of friends) don’t much care for each other, and will continue to try to bring them together at social events. They may even maintain that a full-scale vendetta is just a misunderstanding between friends that could easily be resolved if the principals would just sit down to talk it out.
A more serious form of GSF4 becomes another “friendship test” fallacy: if you have a friend A, and a friend B, but A & B are not friends, then one of them must not really be your friend at all. It is surprisingly common for a carrier, when faced with two friends who don’t get along, to simply drop one of them.
On the other side of the equation, a carrier who doesn’t like a friend of a friend will often get very passive-aggressive and covertly hostile to the friend of a friend, while vigorously maintaining that we’re one big happy family and everyone is friends.
GSF4 can also lead carriers to make inappropriate requests of people they barely know – asking a friend’s roommate’s ex if they can crash on their couch, asking a college acquaintance from eight years ago for a letter of recommendation at their workplace, and so on. If something is appropriate to ask of a friend, it’s appropriate to ask of a friend of a friend.
Arguably, Friendster was designed by a GSF4 carrier.
Source: Plausibly Deniable
Google's new Slack competitor
How many failed ‘social’ and ‘chat’ products has Google racked up now? Despite that, their new Slack competitor, Hangouts Chat looks promising:
WordsTo be clear, Hangouts Chat is a totally separate and distinct service from Hangouts proper, which still lives in your Google mail inbox. And while we’ll forgive you for rolling your eyes at yet another chat service from Google (the number of different apps the company has built is legendary at the point), Hangouts Chat does offer something potentially valuable to companies using G Suite – assuming they’re not on Slack already.
Given Google's focus on AI across basically all of its products, it's no surprise that Hangouts Chat will use machine learning to try and figure out what users might need. Specifically, Google says AI will help book meeting rooms, find files "and more." Specifically, a link between Chat and Calendar will learn how to suggest locations to book by analyzing attendees' "building and floor location, previous booking history, audio/video equipment needs and room capacity requirements." It's hard to say how well this will work — but anyone working in a semi-large company also knows that booking a meeting room likely can't get any worse than it is right now.I'm looking forward to giving this a try, particularly if they've learned from some of the problems that come with Slack. Also, with GDPR being enforced soon, I'm more OK with sharing more of my data with Google. I even bought a Chromebox this week...
Source: Engadget
10 breakthrough technologies for 2018
I do like MIT’s Technology Review. It gives a glimpse of cool future uses of technology, while retaining a critical lens.
Every year since 2001 we’ve picked what we call the 10 Breakthrough Technologies. People often ask, what exactly do you mean by “breakthrough”? It’s a reasonable question—some of our picks haven’t yet reached widespread use, while others may be on the cusp of becoming commercially available. What we’re really looking for is a technology, or perhaps even a collection of technologies, that will have a profound effect on our lives.Here's the list of their 'breakthrough technologies' for 2018:
- 3D metal printing
- Artificial embryos
- Sensing city
- AI for everybody
- Dueling neural networks
- Babel-fish earbuds
- Zero-carbon natural gas
- Perfect online privacy
- Genetic fortune-telling
- Materials' quantum leap
Source: MIT Technology Review