Knowledge Work:

"Knowledge workers think for a living. They live by their wits - any heavy lifting on the job is intellectual, not physical. They solve problems, they understand and meet the needs of customers, they make decisions, and they collaborate and communicate with other people in the course of doing their own work.

It's easy to point to examples of knowledge workers: physicians and physicists, scientists and scifi writers, airplane pilots and airplane designers. We know them when we see them. They don't necessarily have to work in knowledge-intensive industries - managers of any company are knowledge workers, applying knowledge to make decisions in the best interests of their enterprises. Even the most industrial company has engineers, researchers, marketers, and planners. Knowledge workers work in small start-ups and large global corporations. Outside of work, they reside in tony, cool areas of cities and in middle-class or wealthy suburbs; some have moved to resort locations and do their work virtually. For many of you reading this book, virtually everyone you deal with in your job and your social life could be another knowledge worker.

What's difficult is pointing to people who clearly and definitively are not knowledge workers. Most jobs require some degree of knowledge to perform them successfully, and it's probably also true that the number of jobs requiring no knowledge whatsoever has decreased over time. Even if I drive a taxi, I need to get some geographical knowledge to get by (London taxi drivers, in particular, have to possess 'The Knowledge' of its streets before getting their licenses). Even if I take tickets at a movie theater, I need both customer service knowledge and the ability to recognize when someone's trying to sneak in. Even ditch diggers need some knowledge of soil conditions and how to lift shovels full of dirt without hurting their backs. I'm sympathetic to the idea that increasing numbers of workers need knowledge to do their jobs. However, that doesn't necessarily make them knowledge workers."

Thomas Davenport

Liebhaberei:

Duden:

An activity—usually artistic or scientific—that someone pursues as a self-taught enthusiast with pleasure and dedication (in their spare time), without intending to earn money from it.

Pride:

It is also to stand up

for one’s own form of awareness

(for one’s own consciousness),

to take its side—

especially in the face of its temporal limitation.

For one day it will come to an end,

will find its end.

Death meets everyone, sooner or later,

and thus one’s own mode

of awareness fades again from the world.

Yet here and there

it does leave behind

one trace or another.

Envy:

The envious person “wants to see the other stripped, dispossessed, exposed, humiliated, harmed …”

“And when envy concerns the personal qualities, the abilities, or the standing of another person, theft would in any case be impossible. But the wish that the other might lose his voice, his virtuosity, his good looks, or his virtue can easily be harbored.”

— Helmut Schoeck

Pure beauty:

https://meinnaturwissenschaftsblog.blogspot.com/2023/11/das-rein-schone.html

Pure immersion leads us into a world far removed from scheming and strife.

This is the deepest longing:
To be able to lose oneself for hours in a chosen pursuit.

The chatter:

Human beings can produce an immense amount of verbal noise—more than any other animal.

Chatter — the production of noise without anything useful to say.

The Mating Wars:

I really like the article “The Mating Wars” by David Buss, published in Edge.

https://meinnaturwissenschaftsblog.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-mating-wars.html

The Safe Ground:

(A)

The circle of objects,
topics, and people
with which one is familiar.

(B)

Unfamiliar, new, and possibly
unpredictable aspects
of the world.

-----  

People who can quickly
build a sense of familiarity.

Who can quickly
feel at home
or safe.

-----

A person experiencing psychosis may feel
fundamentally unfamiliar with the world
and unsafe within it.

Thinking as Decision Making:

Thinking can be understood as a continuous process of deciding how to categorize something and how the train of thought should proceed. That is, pauses occur within the flow of thought, and what one is confronted with is first integrated into a unified whole and classified before moving on to the next object.

The Temporal Imperative:

Don’t waste your time!

Depth:

Those evenings when you can take a deep dive.

I love the idea that with almost anything, you can skim the surface — or you can use a few hooks to go deeper.

Depth is at the core of any good philosophy.

[Some quotes.]

The Glimmering Side of Hedonism:

For example: How many of my readers have read Brave New World? How many have read Amusing Ourselves to Death?

I read Brave New World about 15 years ago.

(There is also a good film version of 1984, and a good adaptation of Fahrenheit 451.)

Bums:

Hickman:

"Just as our towns get gentrified, our country homogenized, and our culture turned into one gigantic blaring, blinking, flashing, globalized techno-culture — we find that even our bums have gotten gentrified, standardized, and busted down into bureaucratized form. Or, where they cannot be induced to play by the myriad rules of the welfare office, we find they lately drift to the extremest margins of psychosis, addiction, and madness of the worst variety."

"Or — there is another type, far less often seen in public; often unidentifiable even in public for the fact that they’ve blended in completely. These ‘bums’ dress like normal working people and behave like them too; except where working people work, these others seem to subsist on various social welfare programs as a matter of profession. They are tragic in another kind of way as compared to their strung-out cousins in the wide world of bum-hood — for most often, these layabouts vegetate in their public housing apartments, endlessly scrolling through social media or playing on their Xboxes and iPhones. No longer tinkerers and mumblers; far from the old wisecrackers and town tipplers — they die not the bodily death of overdose but the psychic death imparted on them by a suite of pacifying government programs and digital technologies."

"These two burgeoning archetypes of people who evade all manner of participation in the wide world of work now compose the supermajority of America’s ‘bums’. They are either mired in the lifestyle of the dope-fiend and the psychotic — or they are withdrawn into a digitized, bureauractized world of professional poverty. Gone are the genteel old characters; they’ve fled from our towns like the hermit thrush. They’ve disappeared from the country just the minute that the country seems to have lost not only its characters but its character, too. And I rather wonder if we’re in the grim situation we’re in these days in part because they’re gone — for those old drunks and fools and bums occupied a niche in the collective soul that we didn’t know we needed filled."

"Where once a fellow who didn’t want to work naturally gravitated toward the practices of both survival and its incumbent activities, and towards character, or some sort of social role as a kind of public jester, clown, prophet, or good-time fella — now, our ‘men of lumpen leisure’ seem to be sorted either into addiction and mental illness, or into welfare bureaucracy. There is no longer much of any in-between."

"Yet the few who are still living in this manner are now old. They appear not to have passed the mantle on to subsequent generations of layabouts and terminally unemployed gentlemen. Or — the young fellas just never picked up the mantle to begin with. Perhaps a life of Vicodin, ‘ObamaPhones’, and EBT cards was even easier than the life of a respectable bum. The unholy trinity of the smartphone’s brightly-lit infinite scroll, the soma-like buzz of opioid pills or fentanyl, and the caloric sufficiency of welfare hit all the notes with mechanical precision that cannot be rivaled by the self-starting ne’er-do-well. No amount of regular, natural, organic human effort can produce what they together offer — for while bums of former eras indeed escaped work, they were nevertheless unable to escape reality."

"For many have rightly said that the man who won’t work usually winds up “working more at not working” than a man who accepts regular employment labors. This has always been true — until now. Now, the New World Order has come for this country’s bums; they no longer work at not working — they have escaped every measure of effort, and therefore are not edified by the labors of men who have ever toiled toward the avoidance of labor.

In their supreme idleness (which is really an unprecedented idleness the likes of which men through all of history until now have never known), the glimmering smartphone or video game console captures their gaze; and experiments with “better living through chemistry” seem to divert them further, until years pass during which our society’s bums have not interfaced with anything like reality at all."

"Those who’ve been paying attention, of course, might’ve seen all of this coming. I think of Yuval Noah Harari who, in 2017, wrote a haunting essay entitled The Rise of the Useless Class for the TED Talk online news outlet. In the piece, he said this:

“The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support people even without any effort from their side. But what will keep them occupied and content? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences?” 

...the operative phrase in Harari’s question here is “devouring artificial experiences.” Indeed — the one who “devours” and does not produce something meaningful really is worthless in at least some dimension; and his worthlessness is not only external in nature, but personal to his own sense of self-worth. To be a ‘devourer’ alone is to arc toward nihilism and ultimately — towards death."

"Yet amongst those who, like Harari, make it their ambition to morally tinker with the value of human life after AI — virtually none of them have any personal experience with extreme idleness, chronic indefinite unemployment, homelessness, or addiction. They have not surveyed the landscape of the “useless bum” in any but the most cursory and removed sort of way ..."

"That is to say — they become characters. This term is almost an honorific when applied to any vagrant, dropout, or bum; it is an aspirational title, and it is because the role of the “character” is genuinely literary. I say this without a hint of irony, I am completely serious: the more “useless” one is in terms of real physical labor or productive capacity, the more crucial it becomes that a fellow figures out how to alchemize his uselessness into something of durable literary value."

"For, in the starkest and most dismal economic terms, literature is actually a useless thing. There is no great need for it to exist, at least insofar as caloric needs, GDP, and human reproduction are concerned. Mythopoeic aura, great tales and stories, and the thoughtful (and delightful) refraction of human experience through the lens of a unique perspective are literally worthless things in purely theoretical material and economic terms — and yet they are indeed the thing that is, to the thinking man, of the very greatest value of them all. A proper reader, an art appreciator, one who feels and dreams and could rightfully be considered to be a complete human being knows for a fact that there are circumstances in which the value of a good story exceeds the value of the material trappings of life."

"Were it not for high-tech agricultural machinery and production methods that have granted humanity caloric post-scarcity, these people would have no choice but to engage in useful human labor, likely as farmworkers! But because of the Green Revolution, John Deere, and the US Department of Agriculture’s (frequently bizarre and distressing) advances — they are now redundant in the supply chain, and are consequently on the cutting edge of “human uselessness.” "

"Unless I am gravely mistaken about the nature of these technologies, I have to point out that if one makes a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox, ad infinitum — which is, to my mind, essentially what LLM’s do — something will be lost if the fire that formed the first copy goes out. That fire is the human race — the collective and individual souls of the human species; real (though intangible) things at the center of all human action and artistic impulse. It is a thing that is the source of all that AI “creates.” "

"If you’re going to be “useless,” you had better be a character — there’s no question about it, and frankly, it’s a matter of life and death."

A Thousand Minds:

What if one day just a few thousand super-minds do all the research?

When Beauty Cuts Corners:

What if we introduced some beautiful shortcuts into our thinking?

The ability to learn:

https://meinnaturwissenschaftsblog.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-ability-to-learn.html

Diana Fleischman:

"The ability to focus and learn is the most valuable skill in life, especially in a world of constant distraction."

Seeing the Demands of Reality:

Some people are almost blind to the demands of a situation.
From time to time, you truly perceive those demands —
you recognize the challenge and you feel the tension.

Dumbed-Down Curricula:

"A “dumbed-down curriculum” means a course of study that has been oversimplified to the point where it no longer challenges students intellectually.

Usually it implies:

• Lower academic standards
  Content is made easier so more students can pass.

• Less depth, less rigor
  Complex concepts are removed, nuance disappears, and everything is reduced to bite-sized, superficial points.

• More focus on memorization than thinking
  Students learn what to think, not how to think.

• Avoidance of difficult topics
  Anything requiring sustained attention or critical reasoning is minimized.

• Teaching to the lowest common denominator
  The curriculum is shaped so that no student struggles, but the capable students are underchallenged."

Reading for Sheer Pleasure:

What was the last book you truly enjoyed — one you didn’t read for information, but purely for pleasure?

Value:

You want to create something of real value. But doing so is hard — it’s a complicated and demanding task.

Most people don’t end up making significant or outstanding contributions to their field of work or to any other area of human endeavor.

The middle range is where most real life happens — work that is useful, competent, and socially valuable. It keeps the world running, even if it rarely becomes historically remarkable.

Just to mention a few commonplaces here ...

Some people invent machines, others build and repair them, and others use and operate them.

Hard-To-Impress Women:

Twitter: "me visiting places with notoriously hard-to-impress women" (My hyper-observant nature leads me to conclude that she is likely both a nasty and a pretty lady.)

Mother Nature's Handiwork:

There’s a certain charm in thinking that Mother Nature, not ‘selection,’ created sex differences. From an emotional point of view, ‘Mother Nature’ is simply a more appealing label.

Compare that to saying your soul makes you do things versus saying some (not-so-)sophisticated brain mechanism makes you do things.

So this is almost poetry.

(As a rule of thumb, poetry pursues beauty, not truth.)


via Steve Stewart-Williams:

PMS:

Steve Stewart-Williams

@SteveStuWill

·

1 Std.

Why do women get PMS? Evolutionary biologist Michael Gillings offers a provocative suggestion: The condition nudged ancestral women to ditch infertile partners. [Link below.]

Call me Bob:

i/o

@avidseries

·

1 Std.

Years ago I'd spend Saturday evenings with a group of friends watching DVDs and eating Middle Eastern and Indian food. There were six of us. One of the guys was a young professor at a local university. He never talked about his job or his research. One day I was in the waiting area of a corporate headquarters and started leafing through the magazines they had laid out on a table, and saw his face on the cover of Forbes. That's when I discovered he was widely regarded as one of the leading virtual reality researchers in the world. When I got back to my office, I googled his name. There were dozens of pages of relevant search results. At about the same time, I had established a business relationship with a woman running a poorly-managed organization nearing bankruptcy. I was advised by my boss and the woman's associates that she would not respond to anyone not addressing her as "doctor". I googled her name and discovered she had an EdD in education from a fifth-tier HBCU.

Zitat

Wesley Yang

@wesyang

·

10 Std.

x.com/DavidAstinWals…