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Education: Informing or Forming?

[Back to Regulating Society]
(This is a draft work in progress...)

Introduction

The starting point for this article is a 'modern classic', 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' by Paulo Freire.

Freire argues that 'education is freedom'. As the Amazon summary s

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Understanding Science

People who don't understand science often think that science is about 'facts' and 'numbers', reliable things which can be proved, in contrast to religion which is about believing in things which cannot be proved.  But science is about seeking to unde

Is AI about to take over the world?

Let's stop worrying about absurdly unlikely risks, and concentrate on the actual problems we face.  No AI is going to take over the world any time soon.  But they will be used to make incredibly rich and powerful people and corporations even more ric

Comparing Religions

It is sometimes claimed that religion is all about rejecting reason and choosing instead 'blind faith' or irrationality. But, when you actually examine most religions, and most of the people who follow them, it is hard to reconcile such claims with

Voting Systems

There is no perfect voting system. Whatever system you use, there can be situations where the system delivers the wrong result, according to some fairly obvious criteria for a fair system – and this has been mathematically demonstrated. But thi

Being Realistic

There is an inevitable tension here: we need hopes and dreams, but we also need to keep our feet on the ground; we need to aim high, but also have realistic expectations. The challenge here is not to achieve a balance between these two opposing prin

CFAR and its Cousins

The ‘Center for Applied Rationality’, or ‘CFAR’ is one of a group of organizations, run by a fairly small group of individuals, in the fields of artificial intelligence, rationality and global philanthropy. This is an attempt to identify some of the

The Future of AI

there is not going to be just one market winner in the field of Artificial Intelligence, because there is not just one form of intelligence - and the different forms of intelligence are, to some extent at least, incompatible with each other

Middle East

[Back to World Affairs]

In our conversations, we keep circulating around the topic of the Middle East, Israel and Gaza, but never addressing it in any substantial way, largely because nobody can think of anything productive to say.  'We are against g

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AI - Social Justice

AI - a big subject - my un-artificial intelligence has serious problems even understanding what it is!
 
In my lifetime the JCB did away with many jobs that have never been replaced, same happened when the coal mines were closed, I could go on and on.
 

AI - Social Justice

AI - a big subject - my un-artificial intelligence has serious problems even understanding what it is!
 
In my lifetime the JCB did away with many jobs that have never been replaced, same happened when the coal mines were closed, I could go on and on.
 

Effective Beliefs

We need to find beliefs which work - beliefs which work sufficiently well and sufficiently often, without any need to pretend that they are 100% effective in all situations. We need beliefs which we can engage with as beliefs rather than proven trut

Emergent Properties

An emergent property is a property which is present implicitly in the components, but which can only be seen when it emerges in the larger system; once you see the emergent property, you understand how the interaction of the components produces it.

The Language of Morality

One difficulty when we try to talk about morality is the language: there are various terms we can use, but they are all ambiguous and problematic in various ways. It seems there is a difference between 'moral' and 'ethical', but the difference is no

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