History
08:42 Saturday, 4 May 2024
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Words: 296
We made something of a "civil rights tour" yesterday. We visited The Legacy Museum first. It was a powerful experience. It was very much akin to the experience I had when I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
It's very large, very well done, and profoundly affecting.
I think it's going to be a little while before I can write anything about it that makes sense.
I will say that it brought to mind Governor Ron DeSantis' use of police to go to the homes of Black people suspected of having voted "illegally" (despite being registered by their county supervisor of elections), in the middle of the night to arrest them. History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes and that act was clearly, extremely and deliberately resonant with the history of white supremacy in the south. And anger was one of the complex mix of emotions I felt as I toured that museum.
We also visited the Rosa Parks Museum and Library, a more modest museum though it has a very thorough exhibit on the Montgomery bus boycott. That was a more positive experience, because you get to see the courage and the ingenuity of an oppressed minority (who happened to be the majority of the population) frustrate and infuriate their oppressors.
Our final stop was the Greyhound Bus Terminal where we learned about the Freedom Riders. I learned a lot there, and learned that I didn't know nearly enough about that effort and the courage it took for people to make it.
There is little in "southern heritage" to celebrate. It is largely a heritage of hate. I can understand why many people would rather not recall it, but it needs a light shining on it all the brighter to keep the darkness away.
✍️ Reply by emailCritical Thinking
06:50 Monday, 4 May 2026
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Words: 850
One of the knocks against AI is that it may erode critical thinking.
Really? Like, more than social media? More than conservative talk radio? More than an attention-based economy? More than popular media saturated with marketing messages?
And how much "critical thinking" does anyone do?
What is "critical thinking?"
What good is it?
Is it essential for living in today's society? And by "living" I mean "getting by," not in the context of a "good life."
Isn't "critical thinking" an élite concept? Something only those people who think they're better than you can do?
"If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"
Mark Andreeson is rich, and he doesn't believe in introspection. Is introspection an element of critical thinking?
Maybe not, I guess.
Most forms of "thinking" are exercises in rationalizing our feelings. Something comes to our attention and evokes an emotional response. To the degree that it may be an uncomfortable response, we summon a "chain of reasoning" that is little more than an habituated recitation of talking points.
Thinking is hard. It's resource intensive. We have evolved to conserve resources. We will not naturally do something that compels the expenditure of energy without some compelling reason or desire. Most of what goes on our heads isn't "thinking" per se. It's the experience of the idling circuits that can be recruited to perform thinking, if trained to do so, given sufficient stimulus to do so.
Even people who have highly developed critical thinking skills will rely on habits of thought, heuristics, emotional "gut" reactions, when considering a question that might seem to require the application of critical thinking skills. Because it's hard work, and experienced "critical thinkers" have come to an appreciation of which questions really deserve critical thought. And we often have other things we'd rather expend that energy on. ("Upon which we'd rather expend that energy." Mrs. Peretta is always in my head when I end a sentence with a preposition. Especially when I'm writing about "critical thinking." I'm being colloquial, teach.)
I used to write >1K word posts. Not so much anymore, or for now anyway. Maybe it'll be different when we're in the new house and the "Dave Cave" will be a windowless room in the basement where there will be fewer distractions, much like the loft was in my condo.
We don't teach "critical thinking" as a core element of primary and secondary education. We make gestures toward doing so in things like geometry, literature and composition and maybe "computer programming." I don't think you really encounter it until college or university, and even then, only in certain disciplines.
Critical thinking is a skill. It can be taught, but it can also be acquired through experience. In either case, it may be a perishable skill. There must be some desire to practice it, or some stimulus that compels it. I have to say, it can be quite unrewarding.
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is called an élitist.
Not that critical thinking can't lead you astray. It most assuredly can.
In yesterday's Tinderbox meetup, I got rather exercised about this topic. I called Mark Andreeson an idiot.
Mark Andreeson is not an idiot. He's either a fool, or a poser, possibly both. But he's not an idiot.
Many intelligent people are fools. The practice that guards against foolishness is critical thinking. Which, as I've mentioned, is hard so we're often disinclined to do it, especially when we're offered large sums of money, or positions of power and prestige that a wise person would reject.
We supposedly value "freedom" in America, but who really knows what that means? Free from what? Free to do what?
Anything I want, man!
Yes, I suppose so.
I can't recapitulate everything I thought about back in the days of Groundhog Day, when I wanted to understand how my life came to be at the place that it was, which was not where I'd intended it to be.
Critical thinking is a skill that can be acquired. Wanting, no, needing to understand something is a powerful stimulus for acquiring that skill. A teacher is very helpful, not essential.
All they can do is "show you the door."
The only "power" that exists in your life is the power to choose. It's a very weak power. Gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces of the universe. (Five, if you count irony. Which would be the most powerful.) But gravity holds the whole show together, so don't discount the value of a weak force.
Will AI erode critical thinking? I don't think so. If it can be made more reliable, less prone to hallucination, less sycophantic, it may even facilitate critical thinking. It may help develop the skill in those who are seeking it.
But it's no more a threat to critical thinking than the society, culture and economic system that has intentionally devalued it.
Back in the day I'd close with, "I"m an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. You're strongly encouraged to do your own thinking."
That still holds.
✍️ Reply by emailI'm tryin' ta think, but nuttin' happens
16:42 Monday, 4 May 2026
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Words: 294
I have the beginnings of a rather efficient process for capturing information I wish to save for future reference. Information that is of some immediate or long-term relevance in my life, if not of profound philosophical value.
We also have this new house project that we're trying to get our arms around; and as I've mentioned before, it involves a lot of details.
I've been capturing many of those details in Captain's Log, but Captain's Log contains a lot of other stuff, unrelated to the house project. I can create an agent to sort out the house stuff and work exclusively in Captain's Log; but it occurred to me that it would be useful to create a document exclusively for the project. To "document the house," so to speak.
Now I'm grappling with how to do that efficiently. I started creating some new AppleScripts for the New House Project Tinderbox document. To keep things simple, I route everything to an Inbox container in the NHP document. Soon I'll add some action code to then file new information in the relevant container within the house, depending on Tags.
But I wonder if it might not be of more value to capture everything in Captain's Log, and then, upon daily review, copy the entries related to NHP to that document. It's possible that I could use Keyboard Maestro and AppleScript to automate that process as well. Reduce it to a couple of keystrokes anyway. Then the information would be in both documents. In Captain's Log it would retain its chronological context, which may be of some value at some point.
What was I doing that day?
I'm undecided, but I'm leaning toward routing everything through Captain's Log. Fewer AppleScripts to create.
I'll sleep on it.
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