Useful distinctions from Erich Fromm’s book On Disobedience

From Erich Fromm, On Disobedience (nearly every line of this book so far is worth quoting):

In order to disobey, one must have the courage to be alone, to err and to sin. But courage is not enough. The capacity for courage depends on a person’s state of development. Only if a person has emerged from mother’s lap and father’s commands, only if he has emerged as a fully developed individual and thus has acquired the capacity to think and feel for himself, only then can he have the courage to say “no” to power, to disobey.

A person can become free through acts of disobedience by learning to say no to power. But not only is the capacity for disobedience the condition for freedom; freedom is also the condition for disobedience. If I am afraid of freedom, I cannot dare to say “no,” I cannot have the courage to be disobedient. Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.

Fascinating piece by Nicholas Carr on GPT-3, an AI tool for generating text. It has been fed mountains of human-written text and, in turn, has generated some startling text of its own. Carr:

It is drawing on a vast corpus of human expression and, through a quasi-mystical statistical procedure (no one can explain exactly what it is doing), synthesizing all those old words into something new, something intelligible to and requiring interpretation by its interlocutor. When we talk to GPT-3, we are, in a way, communing with the dead.

When it comes to crypto assets, I lean skeptical but I hold that opinion loosely - since I won’t be investing in them I don’t have sufficient motivation to spend time learning more. I’m a CPA so I have some professional interest in it as a financial instrument. On the other hand, I have basically zero understanding of the technology. In any case, Stephen Diehl has written some good, skeptical commentary. I find this argument particularly compelling:

If there is any innovation in crypto assets it’s not in software engineering, but in financial engineering. We’ve created a new financial product like an option contract on a startup potentially building something real, but in case they don’t you can always exercise it early by simply dumping the stock on the public to cash out completely untethered to the company’s success. You don’t need to file a S-1 or have a coherent prospectus about attracting customers or business or revenue. Hell, the company doesn’t even have to have a business model at all, and in fact the best performing crypto assets are the ones that literally don’t do anything at all. They just need to tell a good story.

John Halstead has written an thoughtful post on prayer from a non-theistic perspective. (John believes that the threat of climate change is going to lead to civilizational collapse but you don’t need to have any opinion on that subject to read this.) I had similar negative feelings about petitionary prayer for a long time after leaving Christianity. I’m still not a person who prays - because, thankfully, I’ve not had any great personal upheavals in the past few years - but I’ve developed an attitude toward prayer similar to John’s. The post is also interesting for its incorporation of the thought of SF writer Octavia Butler.

The HBO Max documentary “Beanie Mania” is worth watching. Beanie Babies seem to be one of those things that hit at exactly the right time. Also a good example of mass psychology and the “greater fool” theory of investing.

In process: my first attempt at a zine, which will contain a few of my winter haiku. I was inspired to give it a try after seeing Austin Kleon’s.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wilderness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wilderness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

• G.M. Hopkins
  Final stanza of “Inversnaid”

I noticed my feet this morning….