Fooling One’s Self by Clinging to Corporate News

"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled." [attributed to Mark Twain]

After seeing this quote by Richard Feynman, I posted the following on FB, where it seems like the great majority of people on my feed get aggravated with I post information that does not comport with mainstream news:

Many people on Facebook get their information primarily from corporate news (and from their friends who get their information primarily from corporate news). It is impossible to be a person with meaningful thoughts and opinions when all of one's information is pre-filtered by entities walking in lockstep. That is why many people on this site could not see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears that Joe Biden was mentally incompetent to run for president in 2024, at least not until corporate news and prominent Democrats did a sudden 180. This situation was long obvious to the rest of us, as was the fact that the DNC completely threw out its rulebook in anointing Kamala Harris (refusing to allow any democratic input). I could give hundreds of other shocking examples of these 180s over the past 5 years.

There is only one solution to this danger, this blindness: One needs to read and listen carefully to people with whom one disagrees, giving these "disagreeable" people their best foot forward. When you do this for awhile, your entire perspective will loosened up and you will understand that minority viewpoints are often worthwhile to inputs to understanding of the world. Only then will you be in charge of your own thoughts and beliefs. And only then will you see the extent to which earnestly expressing opinions against the grain requires some courage.

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Steven Pinker: What Colleges Should Teach

What should Colleges teach? Steven Pinker offers this approach:

I don't think it's that difficult to outline a positive vision for higher education, something that neither legacy universities nor UATX have been able to do. Here's my own attempt (from my New Republic essay "The Trouble with Harvard https://newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests):

"It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.

On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery."

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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.

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