#Reason

Danny Boling ā˜®ļøIAmDannyBoling@mstdn.social
2025-12-14

#fyi
Use this amazingly understandable post when they ask "why is AI so bad? explain it like I was a 5 year old" for the umpteenth time.

"Don’t trust AI to offer you #facts. When it doesn’t know something, it will frequently offer you confidently-stated incorrect #information, because it’s a statistical engine, not a #fact checker."

#AI : A Dedicated Fact-Failing Machine, or, Yet Another #Reason Not to #Trust It For Anything
whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/13

#tech #LLM #FuckAI #FactsMatter #IAmDB

Big Blu GnuBig_Blue_Gnu
2025-12-14

Some people just can't be reasoned with...

A doctored photo of a man with a mug in his hand sitting in front of a stand with a sign that reads: "Critical thinking leads to idiocy. Change my mind."
Big Blu GnuBig_Blue_Gnu
2025-12-13

I grew up in a community full of traditional evangelicals all around me, and have been that way since, what with core tenets and middle-of-the-road biblical hermeneutics. The only thing that has changed over the past few years is my politics, for which I credit my discovering . That puts me at odds with my clan politically, but I tell you, nothing is more liberating than becoming enlightened. Everyone is invited.

Sojourner00Sojourner00
2025-12-11
Don Curren šŸ‡ØšŸ‡¦šŸ‡ŗšŸ‡¦dbcurren.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy
2025-12-10

ā€œ #Voters are basically lazy … #Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back … impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demandā€¦ā€ open.substack.com/pub/heatherc...

December 9, 2025

2025-12-10

ā€œOne Nixon media advisor explained… ā€œVoters are basically lazy,ā€ … ā€œReason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back,…it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can…invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are…closer to the surface, more malleable.ā€ā€
—Heather Cox Richardson, Dec 9, 2025
heathercoxrichardson.substack.
#reason #impression

Rage Rumbles šŸ“ā€ā˜ ļø šŸ³ļøā€šŸŒˆ šŸ«‚šŸ”žBlack_Flag@beige.party
2025-12-09

POLITICAL REALITY

"Rationalism, Reason, Enlightenment... never lead to the abolition of genocidal and bloodthirsty practices. Rather, these ideologies only lead to the institutionalization and increased technological sophistication of violence. These ideologies end up serving as justification for brutality against the irrational Other. There is no linear progress out of this brutality. While the good subjects are may be encouraged to infinitely reproduce, the actual children of the racial or colonized Other will often by slaughtered with impunity. Even while promoting the ideology of the Child, the state is constantly and discreetly acting to impose a scientific campaign of eugenics, extermination and forced sterilization upon those it deems to be a racial outside."

(Baedan - A Queer Journal of Heresy)

#Politics #fascism #racism #colonialism #reason #tech #violence #anarchy

Microglyphicsmicroglyphics
2025-12-05

Finally finished A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, this post is about my philosophical influences. If you follow me, they'll be obvious, almost self-evident. I've likely forgotten some. I also reveal the ones I have little use for.
philosophics.blog/2025/12/05/p

treemap
WIST Quotationswist@my-place.social
2025-12-01

A quotation from Henry Commager

When a people are confronted with problems that are both incomprehensible and unbearable, they lash out not at those who contrived the problems but at those who expose them. When they are confronted by moral problems that they find insoluble, or perhaps intolerable, they blame the moralists. The anxieties, tensions, revulsions of our day create an atmosphere in which it is almost impossible to think clearly and dispassionately about just those problems which most imperatively require reason and objectivity — problems of adjustment to fundamental change.

Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) American historian, writer, activist
Speech (1971-04-10), ā€œThe University and the Community of Learning,ā€ Kent State University, Ohio

More about this quote: wist.info/commager-henry-steel…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #henrycommager #anxiety #backlash #blame #change #clarity #messenger #objectivity #problems #rationality #reaction #reason #tension #thoughtfulness #shootthemessenger

Pseudonymous :antiverified:VictimOfSimony@infosec.exchange
2025-12-01

Nice privacy article from #Reason today. Like Antonin Scalia their politics are wonky then unexpectedly wrap back around just on their privacy concerns.

#TechnologyNews #Privacy

reason.com/2025/12/01/the-free

Ingrid Hoeben ā“‹ šŸ‡§šŸ‡ŖIngridHbn@mastodon.online
2025-11-29
Brewminatebrewminate
2025-11-29

TODAY IN HISTORY: November 28, 1660 - The Royal Society Is Founded in London

Scholars at Gresham College sparked the Royal Society, freeing science from theological gatekeeping and giving reason room to grow. ✨

Its legacy still matters for modern freethinkers and non-Christian communities navigating cultural bias.

Steve Dustcircle 🌹dustcircle
2025-11-26

10 Reasons Makes No Sense

Hinduism is one of the oldest in the world, but when we examine its , stories, and practices through , many and problems appear.

youtube.com/watch?v=tD0ktsLjqNk

2025-11-24

ā€œNo man is an island, / Entire of itself; / Every man is a piece of the continent, / A part of the main.ā€*…

Individualism has been been a growing force in cultures around the world since the Enlightenment; it picked up momentum in the 20th century (c.f., e.g., Adam Curtis’ masterful Century of Self [and here]); and has become a– if not the— foundational concept in liberalism. But, Nils Gilman argues, the biological discovery of the holobiont gives the lie to ā€œthe autonomous individualā€ in a way that has massive implications not only for how we think about, but also how we govern ourselves…

We like to believe we end at our skin. This is the primary hallucination of modern political philosophy in the West, the foundational axiom upon which we have erected our laws, our economics, and our sense of self-worth. Philosophical liberalism imagines human individuals as discrete, bounded entities — monads moving through space, contained entirely within a fleshy envelope that separates ā€œselfā€ from ā€œother.ā€ This architectural model of the human being underpins the political concept of the autonomous liberal subject, just as it grounds the social scientific commitment to methodological individualism. It asserts that the basic unit of human reality is the singular actor, the ā€œIā€ that thinks, chooses, and owns.

However, this model is a biological fiction. It is a map that corresponds to no territory found in nature. Over the last three decades the life sciences have undergone a quiet revolution that renders the classical liberal view of the subject not merely philosophical debatable, yet factually incorrect. The concept of the holobiont, coined by Adolf Meyer-Abich in 1943 but popularized in the anglophone world by Lynn Margulis in the 1990s, has shattered the idea of the unitary organism. We now know that every macro-organism is actually a dynamic ecosystem, a chimera composed of a host and billions of symbiotic microbes that function as a distinct, integrated biological unit. You are not a single entity. You are a walking coral reef, a plural assemblage of human and non-human cells negotiating a fragile, continuous existence. Roughly half the cells in your body are not human; they are bacterial, fungal, and viral. They do not merely hitch a ride. They digest your food, regulate your immune system, modulate your mood, and structure the development of your brain.

The implications of this biological reality for political theory are cataclysmic. The entire edifice of Liberalism, from Hobbes and Locke to modern libertarianism, rests on the assumption of the ā€œatomic individualā€ — a sovereign state of one. This core concept of liberal political theory posits a world of separate, self-governing agents who enter into contracts and demand rights to protect their private sphere from intrusion. The liberal subject claims (and demands) to be walled off, protected, and kept clean of the influence of others.

Biology exposes this desire for total autonomy as not just false, but a death wish. In the logic of the holobiont, absolute immunity is not health; it is starvation. A body hermetically sealed against the ā€œotherā€ dies. Our physical existence requires constant contamination and collaboration with foreign agents. We cannot be ā€œself-madeā€ because we are constitutively ā€œmade-with.ā€ Donna Haraway describes this shift as moving from autopoiesis (self-making) to sympoiesis (making-with). We do not precede our relationships; our relationships constitute us. If the political subject is physically constituted by ā€œothers,ā€ the concept of self-sovereignty collapses. One cannot be the sole monarch of a kingdom occupied by foreign powers that provide the essential infrastructure for the kingdom’s survival…

[Gilman elaborates on the implications both for our political and management systems and for the social sciences that study them. And he explores why this new perspective is hard to internalize and embrace…]

The resistance to this holobiontic perspective is fierce because it is terrifying. As Rudyard Kipling observed (in a quote often misattributed to Nietzsche), ā€œThe individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.ā€ The autonomous liberal subject offers psychological safety. It promises control. It tells us that we are captains of our souls. Embracing the holobiont requires admitting that we are porous, vulnerable, and inextricably entangled with things we cannot control. It demands that we surrender the fantasy of the impermeable border. The skin is not a wall; it is a heavily trafficked interface. The state is not a fortress; it is a metabolic node in a planetary flow.

We are living through the friction between our laws and our biology. We legislate for individuals, yet we live as assemblages. We worship independence while our bodies are grounded in interdependence. The future of political theory cannot simply be an adjustment of liberal categories. It requires a fundamental ontological revision that starts with relation rather than separation. We must stop trying to protect the self from the world and begin understanding the self as a spatially intensified instantiation of the world.

Clinging to the myth of the autonomous subject is a massive act of collective denial. It represents a refusal to look at the microscope and see the legions teeming inside us. We construct our societies around a myth of being that does not correspond to biogeochemical reality. The cost of this error is everywhere apparent — in the degradation of our ecology, the polarization of our politics, and the isolation of our private lives. We try to seal ourselves off, creating sterile environments that make us sick, physically and politically. The holobiont offers a different path, one that acknowledges that to be one is always to be many. We are not solitary thinkers looking out at nature. We are nature looking at itself, through a lens made of billions of other lives. The sovereign is dead. Long live the swarm…

ā€œThe Sovereign Individual Does Not Exist,ā€ from @nilsgilman.bsky.social.

Further complicating the issue: ā€œExternalities, Rights, and the Problem of Knowledge,ā€ from Cyril HĆ©doin

Very short summary: This essay explains how the knowledge problem [the challenge of a central authority having the information needed to make rational decisions for a complex system like a society] applies to the definition of jurisdictional rights. Jurisdictional rights define spheres of individual sovereignty. Rights are appropriately defined if they internalize all potential externalities. However, individuals may disagree about what counts as an externality. This disagreement stems from individuals’ preferences, which are typically dispersed and local. I discuss various solutions to this problem, including the use of polycentricity...

[Image above: source]

* John Donne

###

As we incorporate the interconnected, we might recall that it was on this date in 1859 that our perspective was shifted in a different kind of way: Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species.  Actually, on that day he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; the title was shortened to the one we know with the sixth edition in 1872.

Title page of the 1859 edition

source

#charlesDarwin #culture #darwin #externalities #history #holobiont #individualism #individuality #interconnection #interdependence #philosophy #politics #reason #rights #society #theOriginOfTheSpecies

An abstract illustration featuring multicolored arms reaching upward from a layered base, with a vibrant blue cloud and red circles above, symbolizing unity and collective strength.Title page of Charles Darwin's book 'On the Origin of Species', published in 1859, detailing natural selection and the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.
2025-11-20

@arstechnica
What is the "truth" depends on who is in control of the information. Different admins, different "truths." That is why we need educators, people who empower other people form their OWN reasoned opinions, not just indoctrinate them with dogma. We should always remember that the powers that be silenced even Galileo and that claims of mis/dis-information (heresy) can also be used to silence dissent and good science.

#misinformation #disinformation #dogma #ideology #control #science #reason #truth #biology #chemistry #immunology #psychology

2025-11-20

Truly one more for a .

Sings '' At Mar-A-Lago: VIDEO - Comic Sands

comicsands.com/keith-urban-tru

Client Info

Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.07
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst