Enjoying the view from Limbo
Beware the biographer who presumes to imply that he understands his subject’s mind and thought, or can explain to us how his subject’s private life affected his work. Such a biographer, in an act of the worst sort of egalitarian envy, is daring to place himself on the same level as his subject…
Self-refuting bromide.– “Everyone does it.” Even if that were true in principle in some circumstance, it would become false the moment an intelligent person heard it, since he would immediately and instinctively commit himself to being a counterexample. For by definition, “what everyone does” is either a trivial material necessity (and therefore beyond the purview of such a moral declaration) or a mindless...
Of war and worms.– I have taught a Russian girl whose serious beau, whom she hoped to marry, was a Ukrainian fighting on the front lines to defend his homeland against Vladimir Putin’s — not “Russia’s,” so let us please put that lie away for good, but Putin’s — brutal and unprovoked assault on her boyfriend’s country. He had already been wounded and...
In a recent essay, “The Ultimate Labor-Saving Device,” I recounted my response to a student’s questions about artificial intelligence, related to my previous piece, “The Intellectual Welfare State.” A central theme of that earlier discussion was the likely, or perhaps inevitable, retarding effects of increasing AI dependency on human intellectual development. This time, prodded by the same thoughtful student’s subsequent correspondence, we cut...
Two days ago, I was sitting down to lunch at a restaurant with a student whose parents had flown to Thailand for a short vacation a few days earlier. Before our food arrived, my wife phoned to ask, pointedly, when our young friend’s parents were due to fly home, and to inform me that a Korean passenger jet traveling to Korea from Thailand...
The past century of human civilization has increasingly defined itself as the age of the labor-saving device; that is, of endlessly-developing technological advances aimed at reducing human effort and freeing up our time and energy for “more important things.” But what happens when the labor being saved by our technology is specifically the kind of labor that was previously dedicated to those very...
Artificial intelligence is to the realm of learning and knowledge what the welfare state is to the realm of practical motivation and productivity. Reducing the sense of lack, need, and concern in practical life makes people not only less likely to want to work hard, less willing to devote their lives to some kind of meaningful productive activity, but also, at the highest...
Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 15, 2024
Here in the land that calls itself The Republic of Korea, daily life carries on as usual. The end of the fall semester is upon us, with its typical stress-inducing round of exams that prove nothing, resulting in grades that serve no rational purpose, followed by days of bureaucratic hoop-jumping from the instructors as we satisfy the artificial requirements of a worldwide educational...
What would it be like to have chosen only the most difficult paths? No safe routes, no comfort zones, no relaxing pastimes, no settling for the familiar, for what is “good enough,” or for “what works.” What would it be like to do, each day, only what seems most compelling, without regard for how it affects one’s daily tasks and practical goals? That...
Private property.– Beware the man who suspects or critiques private property. It is not your material possessions he has in mind, at least primarily. For what is personal property in the ordinary (though artificially limited) sense? It is nothing but the outward manifestation of your life — your time, your thought, and your effort. The tangible results of the time, thought, and effort...
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