Intellectuals

Worthwhile Reading and Watching

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Rearming warships at sea. In an intensive conflict, missiles can be expended very quickly. And reloading presently requires a trip back to a base, requiring weeks or months.  Reload-at-sea is challenging but development is being pursued.

It could make a major difference in ship/fleet effectiveness..it’s good that this is now being pursued, but…couldn’t this work have been started 10 years ago and now be operationally deployed or at least ready to go?

The electric air taxi company Joby Aviation has received FAA approval for a flight school to train pilots for its own aircraft and those of other companies.  See also plans for air taxi service in the UAE.

Why the symbolic professions tend to be highly unrepresentative of the societies that they purportedly serve.

David Brooks asserts that Ivy League admissions broke America. Here’s a transcript.  He doesn’t seem to even consider the possibility that elite-schools-as-a-gateway to key positions in a society is a really bad idea, as Peter Drucker argued 50+ years ago.

Alexander Hamilton tried to warn us about people like Obama, out of office and ‘wandering among the people like discontented ghosts.’

Real science:  Hacksawing your hypothesis.

There’s a report that OpenAI’s new model reacted to the threat of being shut down and replaced by a new model by copying itself into the new model.  Reminded me of the story Burning Bright in the collection of SF stories that I reviewed here.

Interesting comments at the X link for the story..not totally clear to what extent the model’s actions are reflective of truly emergent behavior versus ‘nudging’ in that direction.

Nice views of the restored Notre Dame cathedral, featuring the stained glass windows.

Volitional causation versus systemic analysis

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Neither in his theory of economics nor in his theory of history did Marx make end results simply the carrying out of individual volition, even the volition of elites. As his collaborator Friedrich Engels put it, “what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.” Economics is about the pattern that emerges. Historian Charles A. Beard could seek to explain the Constitution of the United States by the economic interests of those who wrote it but that volitional approach was not the approach used by Marx and Engels, despite how often Beard’s theory of history has been confused with the Marxian theory of history. Marx dismissed a similar theory in his own day as “facile anecdote-mongering and the attribution of all great events to petty and mean causes.”
 
The question here is not whether most intellectuals agree with systemic analysis, either in economics or elsewhere. Many have never even considered, much less confronted, that kind of analysis. Those who reason in terms of volitional causation see chaos from conflicting individual decisions as the alternative to central control of economic processes. John Dewey said, “comprehensive plans” are required “if the problem of social organization is to be met.” Otherwise, there will be “a continuation of a regime of accident, waste and distress.” To Dewey, “dependence upon intelligence” is an alternative to “drift and casual improvisation” – that is, chaos – and those who are “hostile to intentional social planning” are in favor of “atomistic individualism.”

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society