"Nature is a language." writer: The Dispatch, Real Clear Books, The Critic, First Things https://xitter.cf/t.co/rKNBltDQNR
Chicago, IL
Joined August 2011
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sam buntz retweeted
It’s sort of remarkable that Jane Austen has become probably the central figure in English literature after Shakespeare, and arguably the most beloved. All the more so because she never traveled far from home; her life was largely lacking in drama. Early critics accused her of leading an insular existence, ignoring the great issues of the day and limiting the scope of her stories to the home. And yet, as Eudora Welty has noted, “The interesting situations of life can take place, and notably do, at home.” Such was Austen’s genius that within her limited sphere she saw the whole of human nature. All of life is contained within her six novels. She remains our greatest psychologist and one of our wisest philosophers. To read her books is a first step towards acquiring wisdom.
Interesting and not at all surprising that neither side gives a rat's ass about service. All the JFK "ask not what you're country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" stuff is gone with the wind.
New Gallup poll asks "which values the country most needs today?"
Out of a list of 12 values, Republicans put "patriotism" #1, for Dems it ranks dead last - by a lot.
Dems say "equality" is most needed, Republicans rank it 11th out of 12.
sam buntz retweeted
'There is a current fashion in Anglo-American criticism of the materialist and New Historicist varieties— odd mixtures of Marx and Foucault—to condemn Wordsworth for not having remained political enough, once he had given up his early support for the French Revolution. By 1797 Wordsworth had surmounted a long political and psychic crisis, and his poems ceased to urge political solutions for social distress. “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” The Ruined Cottage, “Michael,” and Wordsworth’s other poems that depict the sufferings of the English lower classes are masterpieces of compassion and profound feeling, and only shallow ideologues could reject them on political grounds. Our new breed of academic moralists should reflect upon the reception of Wordsworth’s poems by Shelley, politically the Leon Trotsky of his day, or by radicals like Hazlitt and Keats. What Shelley, Hazlitt, and Keats marvelously realized was that Wordsworth had a miraculous genius for teaching one how to feel sympathy for those in all manner of distress. If our academic commissars knew how to read, Wordsworth might humanize them, which is the great program of his poems like The Ruined Cottage.'
Harold Bloom,
The Western Canon
sam buntz retweeted
Lol, why?
If your AI agents can do everything advertised, why not keep the voice fairly robotic? What is the reason to trying so hard to make these “voices” sound as human as possible?
Deception.
Any why would you want that?
So you can trick people into lowering their guard and letting you further into their lives that they otherwise would.
So you can cheat them.
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
block.xyz/dessa
sam buntz retweeted
Ask yourself why these people want you to be unable to distinguished the fake from the real.
The answer will have nothing to do with your flourishing or well being, I can promise you that. Great for manipulation or control, tho. Big congrats, jack!
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
block.xyz/dessa
Schopenhauer speaks of this:
'Another thing that was striking about him was his extraordinary sensitivity to noise, which he often referred to as his 'noise psychosis.' It really could disturb him. Once he wrote me: 'Do other people manage to have peace and quiet? I'd like to know the answer to that.''
Gershom Scholem on Walter Benjamin
I agree. The real problem with contemporary "auto-fiction" is that people try to write about themselves without writing about anyone else. But we can only get at the self through its awareness of other people and of the world.
sam buntz retweeted
Telling the Zoomer couple at the bar that life can be compared to a sparrow briefly seeking refuge within a warm and lit mead-hall between two unimaginable intervals of rain and cold and chaos as they edge away from me
sam buntz retweeted
There is no such thing as AI being “in control” of us, because AI doesn’t know or decide anything. But there could be such a thing as a technocratic elite which, looking at AI through an ideological lens, interprets its outputs in a certain way and demands that the rest of us submit to this interpretation. The proposal that “AI should be in control” is really the proposal that this technocratic elite should be in control, albeit some are so lost in ideological delusion that they don’t see this.
sam buntz retweeted
Humanists should be snobby about the fact that they are stewarding a tradition that stretches back thousands of years rather than doing busy work involving little technical puzzles. Instead they find dumb “research” niches to fill because STEM gave them an inferiority complex.
I wrote a new post on "Caring about Animals without Losing Your Mind," responding to the recent discussion about insect suffering provoked by @Benthamsbulldog. I draw on Elizabeth's Anscombe's "On Modern Moral Philosophy" to argue against utilitarianism. Link is below👇
