[salmagundi] What is art?

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Published on: February 4, 2024

A recurring question that keeps popping up again and again. Came across this interesting article, which covers and few

  • Art is useless
  • Art is truth
  • Art is (social) justice
  • Art is good for us
  • Art is for bildung, self development
  • Art is for consituting the tribe, especially in modernity
  • Art is for connecting us as individuals outside borders of the group
  • Art is for cultural capital
  • Art is for equipping us for modern life
  • Art is for civilizing us
  • Art is for artists
  • Art is for increasing life
  • Art is a fountain of spirit

Art can be many things at once…

More of this here: [The Link]

[aeon] The ends of knowledge

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Published on: October 4, 2023

Interesting article about what are the ends/goals of any our work, especially about activities around building knowledge.

“… revealed four key ways in which to understand ‘ends’, which emerged collectively: end as telos, end as terminus, end as termination and end as apocalypse. “

“… four groupings – unification, access, utopia/dystopia and conceptualisation – synthesise many of the ways that knowledge workers respond when asked to consider their discipline’s ends, from seeking a point of convergence for knowledge to articulating the central project of their field. “

More of this in article here: [The Link]

Also interesting to checkout their book: The ends of knowledge; outcomes and endpoints across the arts & sciences

reason.com: pirate preservationists

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Published on: September 14, 2023

Many interesting items are becoming (have become) non-physical (books, art, music streaming…) and meaning of ownership has changed significantly. Often I wonder what I should do with all the books I have in my shelf and all the old music CDs I still own (haven’t got around to relinquishing them). Just came across an interesting article that talks more about this phenomena and specifically about keeping some certain cultural archives safe and what it means w.r.t the laws.

An interesting snippet towards the end of the article: ”
The good news is that so many people have now joined the preservation fight, either deliberately or accidentally: The more distributed the effort, the less brittle and more resilient it will be. Like those music-swapping networks of the ’90s, this web of preservationists is neither entirely online nor entirely offline. That’s good too: If physical copies let you hang onto something when a stream is altered or removed, digital copies let you almost costlessly save and transmit items that otherwise would be scarce. I don’t know the best way to keep our collective cultural archive alive, but I’m pretty sure it will involve an intricate interplay between the physical and the digital, not just one or the other.

More of this here: [The Link]

[plough] What is time for?

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Published on: August 20, 2023

Many articles and books have been written about: doing things slowly, being idle, importance of being bored (to be creative) and other virtues of spending quality time. Came across another interesting article around this theme. Talks about the question “What is time for? How would we spend our time if we weren’t busy?”

Few snippets from the article

“The leisure that is necessary for human beings is not just a break from real life, a place where we rest and restore ourselves in order to go back to work. What we are after is a state that looks like the culmination of a life.”

“Leisure requires cultivation – cultivation of habits and of communities that help to form habits. The pursuit of leisure requires this effort because we resist it. “

“Leisure turns out to be an interior discipline. It is not enough to simply choose a central life activity that is intrinsically leisurely. One must recognize the good of leisure and seek it out. “

Read more about the examples of contemplative leisure and how we sometimes fear pursuing being in such states: [The link]

Timeline of world history

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Published on: February 12, 2023

Disruptive science in decline

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Published on: January 6, 2023

An interesting article and study about decline in disruptive science in most research fields.

Few excerpts from the article:

Disruptiveness is not inherently good, and incremental science is not necessarily bad, says Wang.”

Finding an explanation for the decline won’t be easy, Walsh says. Although the proportion of disruptive research dropped significantly between 1945 and 2010, the number of highly disruptive studies has remained about the same. The rate of decline is also puzzling: CD indices fell steeply from 1945 to 1970, then more gradually from the late 1990s to 2010. “Whatever explanation you have for disruptiveness dropping off, you need to also make sense of it levelling off” in the 2000s, he says.

More of this here @nature: [The link]

DISRUPTIVE SCIENCE DWINDLES. Chart shows disruptiveness of papers has fallen over time in all analysed fields.

Generative AI: is this something new?

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Published on: October 29, 2022

A nice summary of the recent trends in AI, where we get these cool new images or art generated by AI. See more of this in the article from Techcrunch: [The Link]

 

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TC: There’s a lot of confusion about generative AI, including how new exactly it is, or whether it’s just become the latest buzzword.

JC: I think what happened to the AI world in general is that we had a sense that we could have deterministic AI, which would help us identify the truth of something. For example, is that a broken piece on the manufacturing line? Is that an appropriate meeting to have? It’s where you’re determining something using AI in the same way that a human determines something. That’s largely what AI has been for the last 10 to 15 years.

The other sets of algorithms in AI were more these diffusion algorithms, which were intended to look at huge corpuses of content and then generate something new from them, saying, ‘Here are 10,000 examples. Can we create the 10,001st example that is similar?’

Those were pretty fragile, pretty brittle, up until about a year and a half ago. [Now] the algorithms have gotten better. But more importantly, the corpuses of content we’ve been looking at have gotten bigger because we just have more processing power. So what’s happened is, these algorithms are riding Moore’s law — [with vastly improved] storage, bandwidth, speed of computation — and have suddenly become able to produce something that looks very much like what a human would produce. That means the face value of the text that it will write, and the face value of the drawing it will draw, looks very similar to what a human will do. And that’s all taken place in the last two years. So it’s not a new idea, but it’s newly at that threshold. That’s why everyone looks at this and says, ‘Wow, that’s magic.’

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[2022] Status of AI based image generation

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Published on: August 3, 2022

Interesting article on the status of automated generation of images using AI. Some snippets from the article

“..Lots of labs and companies are working on similar technologies that turn text into imagery. Google has Imagen, OpenAI has DALL-E, and there are a handful of smaller projects like Craiyon. “

“..AI-generated artwork is quietly beginning to reshape culture. Over the last few years, the ability of machine learning systems to generate imagery from text prompts has increased dramatically in quality, accuracy, and expression. Now, these tools are moving out of research labs and into the hands of everyday users, where they’re creating new visual languages of expression and — most likely — new types of trouble.”

 

More of this here from Verge: [The Link]

[aeon] Scepticism as a way of life

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Published on: July 31, 2022

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:

Studies on effects of social media [NewYorker]

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Published on: June 13, 2022

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]

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