Musings
A weekly collection of interesting things
Happy Thursday!
Here’s some of what I’ve been musing on this week…
What makes a person a person? This article has an intriguing discussion of what defines personhood, and that the status of being a person should not be based on the requirement that the person be human, so that it could be applied to elephants, and possibly other species.
https://aeon.co/essays/if-elephants-arent-persons-yet-could-they-be-one-day
Finnish people don’t do small talk. In this article the author’s opinion seems to be that Finns should be more “open”, and chat with strangers more; I think the rest of the world should be more like the Finns. I’ve never liked or been good at small talk, though, so perhaps I’m biased.
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181016-how-the-finnish-survive-without-small-talk
This is something that should be said more often — technology companies should start hiring more psychology and philosophy majors. Either that, or STEM programs need to incorporate more social sciences and ethics courses into their list of required courses. The head of the Mozilla foundation is appropriately blunt in this article.
The development of self-driving cars has brought to the forefront a philosophical problem we didn’t know we had — the preferred solution to a moral dilemma varies with culture. We have a tendency to think that our own moral compass is the only one, the one that all “right-thinking” people will have, but we’re discovering more and more that that isn’t the case. This article expands on how self-driving car developers are running into this problem.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07135-0
I make comics about philosophy; here’s someone who makes comics about practicing medicine in a small town. They’re funny and absurd, and I deeply appreciate it when people work through experiences in this medium. Check the site out, the comics are worth reading.
What I’m reading:
Fiction:
Cold Welcome by Elizabeth Moon
This is book one in a series that builds off a previous series. I haven’t read the prequel series, but I was still able to follow and enjoy this book, which I appreciated. I also liked that Moon obviously did her research carefully; a large chunk of the book sees the main character stranded in very cold and inhospitable conditions, and I could go on for some time about how too many people from fairly southern climes try to write stories set in cold conditions and simply show off their ignorance (I’m looking at you, Lucas). Moon, fortunately, doesn’t do this, but offers a story about trusting and depending on the people around you amid political intrigue and people with hidden agendas. I wasn’t entirely happy about how the biggest questions in the book weren’t really resolved, but obviously used as a hook to get people to read the next book. I might do that, I haven’t decided, yet.
Non-fiction:
The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly
Kelly is one of the best writers on science and technology working today, and this book is one of the ones that proves it. He looks carefully at the major technological trends that are occurring right now, and have occurred over the last couple of decades, and makes some insightful comments and projections about where we’re headed, and how that will change our lives. He’s not talking about specific predictions about specific products or timelines, but about the large-scale trends in technology. Some of those predictions are exciting, some I found just a bit disturbing, but I couldn’t argue the point that they are likely, even if I didn’t like the idea very much. One of the points he keeps coming back to is that more is different — when you’re talking about trillions of something (dollars, data points, connections, etc) versus hundreds or thousands, the difference is not just in quantity, it’s also in quality. We’re going to be facing that difference more and more over the next decades, and this book is a glimpse into that future.
You made it to the end, congratulations!
Be well, and thanks for reading
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