Highlights from Miscellaneous Quotes by Various Authors Last read on December 31, 1998
Highlights from this book
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The things we remember are moments like any other, only later do they make themselves known by their scars - La Jetee
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The reduction of things to raw numbers becomes a form of control that allows complete abdication of responsibility.
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Artists don't 'make' classics. Artists leave classics unfinished. Time does the rest of the work.
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Machine learning is metal-beating. Brilliant people have done remarkable things with it. But the idea that if we just get better at statistical inference, consciousness will fall out of it is wishful thinking. It's premise for a science fiction novel, not a plan for the future. I don't see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) 'machine learning' field that leads to a general AI any more than I can see a path from continuous improvements in horse-breeding that leads to an internal combustion engine.
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The problem with the marketplace of ideas, as with the commercial marketplace of classical and neoclassical economics on which it is modelled, is that it treats each participant in the marketplace as de facto engaging in exchange on equal terms. There is a dangerous childlikeness in its insistence that anyone can come and argue, and everything will be considered from scratch, treating everyone as equals.
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Activists need to appreciate that resistance in periods of reaction is perhaps even more difficult and important than participating in the high points, the moments when revolution seems just around the corner... the struggle is going to take all of our lives, not just a few exciting, hectic years.
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Any array of objects is always an extremely fragmentary presentation of the true life of a people. For this reason, any attempt to present ecological data or a systematic classification of specimens will not only be artificial, but will be entirely misleading.
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Radical politics is about the abstract because it's trying to draft a world that's not yet quite real - a future world, a fairer world, a better world, a different world.
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No one is going to save this stuff but all of us. There is no path in the capitalist system to preserve games in a way that will please the legal fetishists.