Tag: society

Math Hermit

This guy is so AWESOMELY insane!!

We LOVE it!!

A reclusive genius, Dr. Grigori Perelman, famously solved one of the world’s most complicated math problems, the 100-year-old Poincaré conjecture, and is now refusing to accept a $1M prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute for doing so!

a rare moment where celeb worship meets an actual worthwhile human being. cognitive dissonance.

Exodus to the virtual world

Virtual worlds have exploded out of online game culture and now capture the attention of millions of ordinary people: husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, workers, retirees. Devoting dozens of hours each week to massively multiplayer virtual reality environments (like World of Warcraft and Second Life), these millions are the start of an exodus into the refuge of fantasy, where they experience life under a new social, political, and economic order built around fun. Given the choice between a fantasy world and the real world, how many of us would choose reality? Exodus to the Virtual World explains the growing migration into virtual reality, and how it will change the way we live–both in fantasy worlds and in the real one.

Interesting read. Argues that as more people experience virtual worlds, they will demand the apt policy design in games to be applied to the real world. Result: a fun maximizing society.

What is transhumanism?

Transhumanism is definitely more of a philosophy than an objective, though it is a political philosophy like feminism or libertarianism. There are specific goals, like extending life span, creating true A.I., and animal uplift, and then broad ethical goals, like ending suffering. If I had to come up with specific criteria, however, I’d suggest the following 3: 1. Medical modifications that permanently alter or replace a function of the human body become prolific. LASIK eye surgery, internal defibrillators, and prosthetic limbs are all examples. The key difference is that these modifications would either result in a return to initial quality (as in LASIK) or enhance/augment the original condition. Landmark moment: When a runner with prosthetic cheetah blades competes in the traditional Olympics and wins a medal. 2. Our social understanding of aging loses the “virtue of necessity” aspect and society begins to treat aging as a disease. Concepts like “aging well” and “golden years” would be as counter-intuitive as describing someone with cancer or MS as “diseasing well.” I have no idea what the consequences would be socially, but you can bet things like “midlife crises” and “adult learning” would take on entirely new meanings or become meaningless. When we have a generation of people expected to live to 150, that’ll be a good sign this is on the way to happening. 3. The recognition of an individual with citizenship and/or personhood and the criteria for that recognition would change dramatically from the status quo. Rights discourse would shift from who we include (i.e., should homosexuals have marriage rights?) to a system flexible enough to easily bring in sentient non-humans. A good litmus test for flexibility is: how would we incorporate an intelligent alien race into our rights/ethics system?

Concepts like “aging well” and “golden years” are as counter-intuitive as describing someone with cancer or MS as “diseasing well”.

Absurd Time Covers

From William Randolph Hearst’s ginned up hysterical stories about marijuana to the “10-cent plague” comic book scare of the 1950s to The New York Times warning of “cocaine-crazed Negroes” raping white women across the Southern countryside, the media has always whipped up anxiety and increased readership via thinly sourced exposes of the next great threat to the American way of life. No publication has done a better job of scaring the crap out of post-baby boomer America than Time, the top-selling newsweekly that’s dropping subscribers like the mythical meth mouth drops teeth.