Paean to FSD, Tesla Automatic Driving
I drive a Tesla Model 3 that has "FSD," full self driving. It is a safer driver than me or anyone else I know. I never touch the accelerator or brake pedals, and I never use the steering wheel. It has avoided two accident accidents in the last week. One of those near-misses was dramatic. I had merged onto w/b Clayton Road in Ballwin. I was in the right lane. All of a sudden, my car lurked to the right (toward the shoulder) and I was thinking "what's going on?" The car reacted like a cat before I even knew what was happening. Just then, a car driven by a crazed maniac came within 2 inches of smashing the left side of my car. My car immediately moved 2 to 3 feet to the right upon seeing that car approaching with its left side and rear cameras.
The car's reaction time is instant, whereas human reaction time would be one and a half seconds. It is is able to see things that I cannot see, and this is also often critically important. In this case, I was looking ahead. If you review postings on X you will see dozens of these cases of near accidents that were recorded by the dash cam of the Tesla owner involved. In some of them, lives were saved without doubt. My passenger was amazed when this happened (as was I) and we both concluded that in five years, all new cars will be self driving.
This was two days after the car drove my co-counsel and I all the way to Jefferson City for a court hearing and back (about 250 miles) without any human intervention except where a traffic light was burned out. I nudged it through the intersection although it actually would have eventually figured that out too if I had just given it a chance (based on prior situations). It drives through construction zones without any hesitation, ignoring the road, signs and road markings and, instead, follows the construction zone signs. This technology is truly something to behold and the FSD software is continually being updated, just like with an iPhone.
Steve Stewart-Williams explains his aversion to the term “Gender.”
Steve Stewart-Williams explains "Why I'm not a Fan of Gender." Excerpt from his upcoming bok, "A Billion Years of Sex Differences":
Many social scientists draw a distinction between sex and gender where, roughly speaking, sex refers to biological aspects of female and male, and gender refers to social aspects. ... I’m not a fan of the concept of gender, which I think confuses more than it enlightens.There are several reasons for this. The first is that the term has multiple meanings. Sometimes gender refers to female–male differences that are (supposedly) shaped by nurture rather than nature; sometimes it refers to masculinity and femininity; sometimes it refers to psychological profiles that are more common in one sex than the other; sometimes it refers to widely held stereotypes of the sexes; sometimes it refers to the roles that society provides for females and males; sometimes it refers to people’s gender identity (their sense of themselves as a boy or a girl or a man or a woman); and sometimes it’s just a polite synonym for sex: a term that makes it clear that you’re talking about biological sex rather than the fun kind of sex. The profusion of partially overlapping meanings makes it difficult to know what people using the term are actually talking about. It’s like trying to juggle jelly.
A second reason I prefer not to partake of gender is that, even if we could agree on a definition, most of those on offer are profoundly flawed. Take, for example, the idea that gender refers to female–male differences due to nurture rather than nature. An initial problem is that this is invariably assumed rather than demonstrated; indeed, describing a female–male difference as a gender difference often seems to be a way to settle the nature–nurture issue by definitional stipulation rather than arguments and evidence. . . .
Other definitions of gender face similar problems. Consider, for example, the idea that gender refers to psychological profiles loosely linked to sex: Men tend to be stoic and assertive, for instance, whereas women tend to be caring and emotional. This definition is assumed by people who argue that there are multiple distinct genders, rather than just the two vanilla options of man and woman. Again, this doesn’t strike me as a useful way to construe things. The problem is that it involves imposing categories – even if more than just two – on what is actually continuous psychological variation. No two human beings have exactly the same psychological profiles, so the logical endpoint of this approach is that there are as many genders as there are human beings – and we’re really just talking about personality.
I've subscribed to Steve's excellent Substack for the past year and highly recommend it.
Jordan Peterson and Glenn Greenwald Discuss Censorship and Meaning
a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3h7pmhyIwg">
I've listened to this podcast several times. It's long, but it is extremely thoughtful, engaging, disturbing, but also hopeful and celebratory of the human spirit. It involves Jordan Peterson and Glenn Greenwald. These are two of my most cherished thinkers. I am inspired and provoked by many of the topics that they explore here. Topics include censorship, propaganda, the history of these things in the United States. Also, the relationship between religion and politics, and what goes wrong when religion is absorbed into politics. And there's even some meaning of life moments. I took the time to transcribe a large chunk of this discussion, and I am sharing it with the hope that those of you who listen to it or read it will also find it worthwhile.
I asked Grok to crank out a basic table of contents to this interview:
Min 21:30
1. Censorship of RFK Jr. by Google and the tactic of starting with hated figures like Alex Jones
2. Expansion of censorship to mainstream voices, including Devin Nunes and Rand Paul
3. Reasons for increasing censorship: Generational shifts in values among Millennials and Gen Z, and the impact of Trump's election
4. Depiction of Trump as an existential evil justifying extreme measures, including the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and Sam Harris's views
5. Connection to post-9/11 clampdown on civil liberties, transformation of airports into authoritarian spaces
Min 27:35
6. Reflections on 9/11 trauma, the war on terror, and how airport security conditioned obedience to authority
7. Threats to liberty from fear rather than greed; free speech as equivalent to free thought and essential for adaptation
8. George Orwell on tyranny through mind control; the internet's shift from liberation to control, Snowden revelations
9. Biblical phrase "render unto Caesar"; collapse of religious domain into politics leading to unsophisticated good vs. evil wars
10. Personal background on religion; hubris in censorship; human need for spirituality, politics as a substitute for religion
11. Discussions with Douglas Murray on humanism needing a religious framework; Carl Jung on rationality bounded by the dream
12. Grappling with ethics and morality without religion; necessity of spirituality to avoid nihilism
13. Response to materialist atheists; human relationship with the larger whole; introduction to the story of Abraham
These excerpts start at Minute 21:30 of the above video. Glenn Greenwald 20% of Democratic Party voters say they intend to vote for RFK, Jr. for president. And the most powerful corporations, or one of the richest and most powerful corporations ever to exist, Google sweeps in and says, This is something that you are not permitted to be heard. Glenn Greenwald And what happened was, what always is the tactic of sensors is they always pick a test case in the beginning that they believe is someone who is sufficiently hated or disliked so that everybody will acquiesce to the precedent, simply because their emotions for that person are so high. So the first person to really be deplatformed in this collusive effort by Silicon Valley was Alex Jones. And Peter Thiel was on the board of Facebook at the time. Mark Andreessen in Silicon Valley, and a few other people stood up at the time and said, no matter how much you hate Alex Jones, this precedent is going to work its way slowly, or maybe not even so slowly, to expand into the kinds of voices that you probably think shouldn't be censored. And by the point that you cheer the precedent in the first instance, because you allow your emotional dislike for this person to outweigh your rational capacities, it will be too late the precedent is already implemented, and then you're left to just bicker about its application, rather than the principle itself. Glenn Greenwald And that's precisely what has happened. They began quickly censoring mainstream conservative voices. Devin Nunes went to rumble in part to escape from Google censorship, and then a huge stream of people did as well. One of the most shocking things that happened along those lines, Rand Paul questioned a couple of epidemiologists, scientists who were testifying before the US Senate about the possible efficacy of ivermectin and other alternative medication for covid. It was a Senate hearing, a hearing in the United States Senate. Rand Paul put it on his YouTube channel as a excerpt of this hearing, and Google decided that was something that ought not to be heard as well.