Who controls technology? The topic of whether and how societies can exercise control over technology has been discussed for many decades. From Martin Heidegger’s 1954 essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” McLuhan’s 1964 “Understanding Media” and Jacques Ellul’s “The Technological Society” of the same year, to today’s Technoscience theorists, we have thinking about technology for over half a century now. Still, we were all surprised, once again, by the generative AI explosion at the end of last year, which again put the question into sharp focus: Who controls technology? Do we all have a say? Is technology inherently democratic? Or is our technological society steered along by the priests serving the AI gods of our machine age? … (Daily Philosophy)
The discipline of assent. Philosophy can be conceived as an inquiry into the nature of the world (metaphysics), the nature of knowledge (epistemology), and the nature of a number of other things (aesthetic experience, ethics, mind, science, and so forth). Alternatively, we can see philosophy as a way of life. This is the approach I adopt in this column. One powerful example of philosophy as a way of life is presented in the so-called three disciplines of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus of Hierapolis (50-135 CE), which we’ve briefly examined in the past three columns. We studied the discipline of desire and aversion, which teaches us to rethink our values and our disgusts; we then moved on to the discipline of action, which is concerned with identifying the most appropriate way to act toward other people. We’ll conclude here with the discipline of assent. … (Philosophy Now)
What are we so afraid of? Here’s the expert to ask. Christopher Bader is a sociologist at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., where he has three times been the principal investigator on the annual Chapman Survey of American Fears. The survey asks adults about dozens of topics, such as nuclear war, pollution, volcanic eruptions and zombies, and then ranks the terrors in order of prevalence. Dr. Bader also studies religion and conspiracy theories, and he finds these big issues often intersect. The most recent survey was published in October 2023. In an interview that has been edited and condensed for clarity, he discussed the latest findings.
As we head into 2024, what does your latest research say we’re most afraid of right now? Government corruption. Sixty percent of Americans are afraid of corrupt government officials. … (New York Times)
Pseudoscience: an ancient problem. Remember CSICOP? The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal was the forerunner of the current CSI, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, that publishes the very magazine you are reading. CSICOP was launched by Paul Kurtz, Marcello Truzzi, and others on April 30, 1976. And the rest, as they say, is history. Just the year before that momentous event, Kurtz spearheaded a public campaign against astrology by publishing a manifesto cowritten with Bart Bok and Lawrence E. Jerome, endorsed by 186 scientists (including nineteen Nobel laureates), and published in The Humanist, the organ of the American Humanist Association. The very first target of the new skeptic movement was, in other words, the broad practice of predicting the future by nonscientific means. And the approach deployed by the signatories of the manifesto was to spell out several criteria that demarcate science from pseudoscience. … (Skeptical Inquirer)
Who kissed first? Archaeology has an answer. This is a love story: During the spring of 2008, long before they produced evidence of humanity’s first recorded kiss, Sophie Lund Rasmussen and Troels Pank Arboll clasped lips in their first good-night snog. They met a week earlier at a pub near the University of Copenhagen, where both were undergraduates. “I had asked my cousin if he knew any nice single guys with long hair and long beards,” Dr. Rasmussen said. “And he said, ‘Sure, I’ll introduce you to one.’” Dr. Arboll, in turn, had been looking for a partner that shared his interest in Assyriology, the study of Mesopotamian languages and the sources written in them. “Not many people know what an Assyriologist actually does,” he told her. … (New York Times)
One of the persistent pseudosicences is homeopathy. It really aggrivates me to see homeopathic "remedies" in the local pharmacy. I am glad that this is one of the things that is a major issue in the Skeptical Inquirer.