Reg the Fronkey Farmer

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

An interesting opinion piece on ethics and moral identity.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

We could solve the charging-time problem by sending the fully charged battery backwards in time to before it was plugged in? No engineering deadlines required. Why is the patent office always closed when I go there?

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

The quantum batteries that upend the rules of charging.…..The important thing is that “bigger” means more coherently participating quantum units, not simply a physically larger battery. Adding more cells appears to reduce the charging time. But remember that nuclear fusion is still only 10 years away, since we began waiting for it 60 years ago 🙂

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Echoes gets a regular airing in my house 🙂 Remastered….

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Strega….If the rain becomes persistent and you discover you’ve been staring through the same window for twenty minutes……..

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Have a great week!

Some nights I sneak around the Campus, spray-painting ‘QUALIA’ on the walls of the Psychology Dept block then strike it through.

RTFF

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

*Governments and legal systems still tend to conceptualize atheism and humanism merely as an absence of religion rather than positive philosophical convictions entitled to equal respect. Freedom of religion or belief doesn’t mean religion plus an exemption for everyone else. The State doesn’t get to decide that theological convictions are substantive while secular convictions amount to an empty box.

** Darwin didn’t merely give us an alternative explanation to creation. He gave us a general-purpose way of thinking about complex systems that acquire apparent design without a designer.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

“Disproportionate”? Sorry, I should have specified ‘relative to what’.

Yes, Israel is disproportionately represented in scientific and technological innovation relative to its population and size. I would say that Israel produces more high-level scientific and technological output than you would expect from its population, land area, or even its domestic market size.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

I would have liked to have been in the meeting when that idea was first floated. I think Israel’s longstanding advantage has been disproportionately dense networks connecting universities, engineering, medicine, entrepreneurship and venture capital. That produces a cultural environment in which somebody can plausibly say “Can I have some money to grow cow’s milk proteins in a plant?” and someone says “Yes, that sounds interesting”.

Ireland has enough scale to have serious universities, multinationals, engineering, pharma, finance and tech, but it is still socially compact enough that network distance is often tiny. You mention a problem over coffee, somebody says, “I know a person in Galway who did exactly that,” and suddenly you have an introduction rather than a cold approach. I only discovered today that 14 of the world top 15 Phama companies have a presence in Ireland.

I am in Dublin 15. I can drive to any of these companies front door in under 20 minutes: Paypal, eBay, Symantec / Broadcom, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Synopsys, IBM, Meta datacentres,……and several more.

FYI….https://www.idaireland.com/explore-your-sector/business-sectors/biopharma

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Have a great week!

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Thanks Jake, I appreciate that. Yesterday a friend of mine said “Reg, I am so glad you are an atheist!” I looked a bit bemused as we know each other a long time and both of us are ‘militant anti-theists’. She caught my look and continued…..”I mean, even as an atheist, you would be able to convince certain people that God is real”. I replied “But I would have to give up my full time role of making them understand that it is all smoke and mirrors. I want them to learn how to think for themselves”.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Let’s take the ‘Kafka Intifada’  a little further. However, I will coin it the “The Samsa Effect”.

Gregor does know that something has happened to him. What he fails to grasp initially is the significance of his transformation. His world has changed beyond recognition, but his inherited routine of thought continues running as though nothing fundamental has happened. One of his first concerns is about missing the train to work.

But with the impact of Social Media ideology spread and\or religious upbringing, people are transformed into ‘useful idiots’ and\or unable to reason correctly.  There is no ‘freethinking’ available to them. Their mental framework is fixed and any reasoning abilities they believe they have are only recruited to defend the ideas already instilled. The tragedy of indoctrination is not merely that someone wakes transformed. It is that they may spend the rest of their life learning how to live intelligently inside the transformation, without ever asking what transformed them. Their machinery for the critical examination of ideas is never fully developed.

There is another Kafkaesque aspect to it. Gregor gradually learns to live wtih the absurdity. He learns how to move, hide, eat and behave within his transformed condition. He does not spend the story scientifically investigating why he became what he became. Likewise, a person can become extraordinarily sophisticated inside an inherited belief system without ever seriously examining the premises beneath it. Theology and ideology become the intellectual equivalent of Gregor learning to crawl efficiently across the walls.

Gregor still thinks ‘I am Gregor’, therefore his situation initially seems like an inconvenience to be managed. The believer thinks ‘I am simply me’, and consequently beliefs learned at ages four, five or six can feel like observations about reality rather than cultural information acquired from adults in a particular place.

So many University students have become victims of ideological capture. Universities are supposed to be places where ideas are tested by exposure to criticism. If students come to believe that hearing an argument is itself a form of harm, or that permitting a speaker to appear constitutes endorsement, then the institution quietly changes function. It is no longer a place where claims are contested but a place where certain claims must be prevented from even entering the room and given any air.

They, unlike Gregor, are not aware that they have metamorphized. Yesterday’s liberal who said “bad ideas must be defeated by argument” can become tomorrow’s activist saying “this idea must not be allowed a platform” while experiencing no contradiction at all, because the surrounding conceptual vocabulary has changed underneath them. They are now part of the herd. They have disabled any epistemic curiosity with moral certainty. All their arguments become ‘allegiance signalling’ to their group.

The ‘Samsa Effect’ is what happens when an ideology becomes the environment through which a person thinks rather than an object about which they think.

Metamorphosis.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

I don’t get why anyone would believe in stuff because they want to, rather than because they think it’s true.

We need to make a distinction between belief and inquiry. You can choose to examine a claim, expose yourself to arguments for it, avoid contrary evidence, join a community that reinforces it, or repeatedly rehearse certain ideas. Those choices can influence what you eventually believe. But you cannot simply perform the mental act: “I hereby believe X” while still regarding X as false or unsupported.

We can choose what evidence to examine and how critically to examine it, but we cannot directly choose what convinces us. Belief is the consequence of being convinced, not the decision to become convinced.

Jon Cohen is ‘Unconvinced’. (His videos are very good).

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Here is another post regarding the Sunday Book above.

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