Occasional Musings

The desire for certainty is often foolish and sometimes dangerous. Scepticism undermines it, both in oneself and in others.. An interesting article from aeon.

An interesting passage: “…The sceptical way of life, on Sextus’ presentation, follows a certain rhythm. You feel puzzlement about something. You search for knowledge about it. You arrive at two equally weighty considerations about what is happening. You let go trying to find an answer. And once you recognise that you might not find a solution, it brings some mental tranquility.”

More of this here: [The Link]
Also of interest:

• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sextus-empiricus/
• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-ancient/

There’s a general sense that it’s bad for society—which may be right. But studies offer surprisingly few easy answers. A recent article from New Yorker on a complexities of getting data to show the effects of social media. Also a serves as a good launching pad to dig further into this. Points to quite a few studies and researchers in this field.

More of this here: [The Link]

xkcd link

An interesting article from inference-review.com on the growth of science of art. What can we learn from digitizing, coding and using algorithmic tools on database of items and paintings and other art.

Few tools and methods taken from different fields of science: probabilities, evolutionary principle, genealogy trees, networks and others. Interesting lis t of projects are also mentioned in the article.

“…For now, as always, it is humans who find meanings in the world and science is just a way of testing their truth. All that is required for the use of science, or any other rational method of investigation, is a consensus that those interpretations not be solipsistic and equivocal, but public and falsifiable.” 

“…The prospect of a science of art is, to me, dazzling. When I consider it I feel as Aristotle must have felt when he stood upon an Aegean shore and saw, for the first time, that living things might be the objects of science. A small shift of perspective and virgin vistas appear.” Art as objects of science…

More of this article here: [The Link]

[DOI: 10.37282/991819.22.16]

Is success achieved only through hard work? It is not so straight forward. Environment, luck, systemic biases all play a role to some extent. Interesting discussions around meritocratic systems and their moral implications..

• A More Perfect Meritocracy, Boston Review. Review of two books (1)The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik deBoer and  The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael Sandel
• Morally Naked, sydney review of books. Review of Michael Sandel’s book
• The Woke Meritocracy, Tabletmag. How telling the right stories about overcoming oppression in the right way became a requirement for entering the elite credentialing system
• The Death Cult of Smart, americanaffairsjournal. Review of Fredrik deBoer’s book
• Earning Our Stripes, literary review UK. Review of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World By Adrian Wooldridge
• Equality and the elites, newstatesman. How political ideas such as “levelling up” draw on centuries of meritocratic thinking.
• In defence of meritocracy, newstatesman. Why an idea dismissed as an excuse for elitism offers Labour’s only path to victory. (by Adrian Wooldridge)

Came across this interesting review of book on human history – The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity by Graeber and Wengrow. Recently had read the books from Y. Harari on this topic, which was refreshing. Looks like this could be an interesting book to check on.

Brief summary: “Nevertheless, The Dawn of Everything is a thoroughly mesmerizing book. Its new story about human history is provocative, if not necessarily comprehensive. The book’s great value is that it provides a much better point of departure for future explorations of what was actually happening in the past. There are almost unlimited possibilities here to build upon, and a much more fruitful critical perspective from which to think about human history.”

Also has a passage, which summarize the current thinking of human history, a teleological model. ” … Human societies varied a lot. Now they don’t vary as much, but the technology they employ is wildly more complex. People live longer, but they aren’t necessarily healthier or happier during their long lives. The overall average levels of violence may have decreased (although the massive variability in early human societies suggests that “average levels” is not a particularly useful way to think about violence, or really anything else in the archaeological record), but the violence that does happen is more spectacularly destructive. Most importantly: We can now fail on a global scale, and we seem to be in the process of failing.

More of this article from LARB here: [The Link]