THE GREATEST DELUSION IS BELIEVING YOU ESCAPED THE CAVE:

The Hidden Meaning of Plato’s Cave Allegory (Viktoriya Sus, 12/11/24, The Collector)

Plato’s cave allegory is a metaphor that examines human perception, knowledge, and enlightenment within his book The Republic. It depicts prisoners in a dark cave who have been there since birth. They are chained, facing a wall with no view behind them.

A fire burns behind the prisoners, while a walkway is between the fire and the captives’ backs. On this raised platform, hidden handlers carry cut-out figures who cast shadows onto the wall opposite the prisoners. For these captives, the shadows seem real—they do not realize their existence consists only of flickering forms—and thus take up all their attention.

This allegory illustrates a world of ignorance (the cave) and how our perceptions can limit us (being shackled inside from birth so we can only look at one wall). Without philosophy or critical thinking, we’re like prisoners with chains here.

THE WAGES OF DARWINISM:

The Incoherence of Secular Messiahs: Why the New Paganists Cannot Fill the Void of Nihilism (Faraz Khan, 3/21/24, Renovatio)

Yet European messianic secularism would prove catastrophic; history attests to a tragic lethality that was not incidental to the surrogate doctrines. Marx and Freud, for example, have entries in a compelling account of ideologues who were, as the book is titled, Architects of the Culture of Death.3 The authors demonstrate that it is precisely the messianic and totalizing nature of Marxism and of Freudian philosophy, based on their radically reductionist humanisms, that engendered “death cultures.” With his paradigm of “scientific” materialism, Freud reduced the human being to a mere biological being, devoid of any spirit or soul, and he significantly minimized the centrality of reason and judgment in the motives behind human action, thereby dismissing the ethical imperative altogether. But to eliminate the soul and the moral life is to inaugurate a culture antagonistic to life. And given his immense influence in the modern history of Western civilization, the pernicious effects of Freud’s surrogate faith had a widespread and lasting impact. As for Marx, his program combined rage against class exploitation and injustice, dialectical materialism, “rational” atheism, and a summons to violent revolution, while his salvific promise included liberation, a cure for man’s alienation, and ultimately a utopian earthly paradise of societal cooperation without the hierarchy of classes.

…AND CHEAPER…:

Researchers took the key weakness of renewable energy and made it a superpower: When they analyzed renewable energy supply and power demand at an ultra fine scale, the team discovered tremendous new opportunities for a low-cost, reliable green grid. (Sarah DeWeerdt, December 10, 2024, Anthropocene))

Skeptics of renewable energy development often point out that the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. True enough, but when the sun isn’t shining in one place, the wind is often blowing there, or somewhere else that’s not too far away.

These patterns open up the possibility of complementarity: using different renewable energy sources to balance each other out across time and space.

CONSERVATISM SEEKS TO CONSERVE LIBERALISM:

When Scottish Sages Christened “Liberal” (Daniel Klein, 12/10/24, Law & Liberty)

Several Scotsmen, including George Turnbull, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson, had made pregnant remarks using “liberal”—remarks that may have suggested using the adjective to describe a political attitude. But the “liberal” christening was really kicked off by William Robertson in 1769, and in 1776, Adam Smith went all-in, in The Wealth of Nations. The political meaning was, essentially, a policy posture, premised on a stable, functional system of governmental authority. The policy posture is one of leaving people be, of “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way,” within the bounds of commutative justice. The “liberal” christening took.

Hayek Was Right

In 1960, Hayek questioned the consensus view that “liberal” first obtained a political meaning after 1800 on the Continent, from which Britain then imported the term. Hayek suggested otherwise:

I am more inclined to believe that it derives from the use of the term by Adam Smith in such passages as W.o.N., II, 41: “the liberal system of free exportation and free importation” and p. 216: “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.”

Hayek’s view had had little hope of overturning the consensus. Before the digitization of millions of texts, mounting a case for Hayek’s view would mean spending years gathering a few score quotations. Tedious quotations, cherry-picked by one of those Hayek votaries with an axe to grind, from the vast uncharted forests of innumerable texts, could not get far. Such curiosa could easily be ignored and dismissed.

But, around 2012, the data came readily to hand, thanks to the Google Books Ngram Viewer.

FRUIT OF THE OTHER TREE:

A Supercomputer Just Created the Largest Universe Simulation Ever (Isaac Schultz, December 7, 2024, Gizmodo)

The supercomputer is called Frontier; recently, a team of researchers recently used it to run the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe yet. The supercomputer’s simulation size corresponds to surveys taken by large telescope observatories, which to this point had not been possible. The calculations undergirding the simulations provide a new foundation for cosmological simulations of the universe’s matter content, from everything we see to the invisible stuff that only interacts with ordinary matter gravitationally.

We are all designist.

COVID RESTRICTIONS WERE TOO LAX:

Estimating the population-level effects of nonpharmaceutical interventions when transmission rates of COVID-19 vary by orders of magnitude from one contact to another (Richard P. Sear, 12/03/24, Phys. Rev. E )

Statistical physicists have long studied systems where the variable of interest spans many orders of magnitude, the classic example is the relaxation times of glassy materials, which are often found to follow power laws. A power-law dependence has been found for the probability of transmission of COVID-19, as a function of length of time a susceptible person is in contact with an infected person. This is in data from the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 app. The amount of virus in infected people spans many orders of magnitude. Inspired by this, I assume that the power-law behavior found in COVID-19 transmission is due to the effective transmission rate varying over orders of magnitude from one contact to another. I then use a model from statistical physics to estimate that if a population all wear FFP2/N95 masks, this reduces the effective reproduction number for COVID-19 transmission by a factor of approximately nine.

NO ONE HATES JUST KOREAN GROCERS:

Capitalism’s Hidden Heroes: “Middleman minorities” reveal the free market’s strengths—along with their own. (Rinzen Widjaja, December 6, 2024, Modern Age)

Jews are not alone in this unenviable position. In an article titled “Is Antisemitism Generic?” the economist Thomas Sowell argues that such anti-Jewish attitudes reflect a broader pattern of persecution toward “middleman minorities.” Other groups that fall into this category include the Chinese overseas, Indians in Southeast Asia, and the Igbo people in Nigeria.

The rise of globalized trade and digital economies has only expanded the role of middleman minorities as they have moved beyond traditional industries like retail and exerted influence in global tech and e-commerce. After its forced expulsion from Malaysia, for example, Singapore transformed from a small island into Southeast Asia’s financial center and one of the world’s most developed countries in just thirty years. And in the United States, Silicon Valley’s South Asian diaspora has significantly contributed to advances in technology.

And yet the middleman minority, and his role in the economy, is as poorly understood as ever. In fact, this success comes in part from the suspicion with which they are often viewed. In his book Migrations and Cultures, Sowell argues that the “middleman minorities” were united by society’s reaction to them, as many individuals within these minorities may not hold middleman jobs but are nonetheless treated similarly by the majority population. While middleman minorities are not confined to a single race or culture, all have been persecuted for having something in common: what Sowell describes as the human capital of “experience and knowledge used in economic activity.”

So why are they seen as suspect if their contributions are so useful? Sowell notes that fewer people reach the upper echelons of middleman professions, which require greater education or sophistication, than the lower levels. Yet, what he calls “modest prosperity” among middleman minorities provokes more societal animosity than the wealth enjoyed by other groups, such as the nobility or entertainers. There is a common perception of middleman minorities as parasitic because the occupations they are associated with don’t produce goods directly, a view further intensified by their “racial or cultural differences” from the majority group.

During periods of heightened intergroup tensions, this can lead to mob violence. The Holocaust is an example of a culmination of centuries of resentment toward the Jewish people in Europe. In the May 1998 riots in Indonesia, anti-Chinese sentiment at the end of the New Order regime fueled mass lootings and fires targeting Chinese Indonesians, and during the 1966 anti-Igbo pogrom, mobs killed 8,000 to 30,000 Igbos en masse.

LIBERALISM IS UNDEFEATED:

Milei Has Tamed Inflation, but Argentina Still Isn’t Out of the Woods (Bruno Binetti, Dec 6, 2024, World Politics Review)

From the moment he took office last December, Milei wasted no time wielding his proverbial chainsaw, slashing public spending by nearly a third and erasing a fiscal deficit that had exceeded 5 percent of GDP. His reforms included halting budget transfers to provincial governments, dismissing over 30,000 public sector employees, cutting subsidies for public utilities, canceling most public works projects and reducing pensions by around 7 percent.

These drastic measures were effective at cutting public spending, but they came at a cost. A steep devaluation of the peso triggered short-term inflation, with prices surging by 25 percent in December 2023 alone. The economic fallout was severe: In the first six months of Milei’s presidency, an already deep recession worsened; wages lost significant purchasing power; funding for national universities plummeted by 30 percent; and poverty rose to 53 percent, up from 42 percent.

Despite these challenges, Milei’s approval rating remained remarkably stable, reflecting both the public’s disillusionment with traditional political elites and the gravity of the economic crisis he inherited. The chaotic Peronist administration of Milei’s predecessor, former President Alberto Fernandez, left the country teetering on the brink of hyperinflation and economic collapse. Many Argentines viewed Milei as their best hope for salvation, accepting the pain of his adjustment policies as a necessary cost to avoid catastrophe, even as they doubted his assurances that the burden would fall solely on the “political caste.”

In the end, their resilience appears to have been rewarded. Monthly inflation steadily fell from 20 percent in January to just 2.7 percent in October, a remarkable achievement for a nation long haunted by runaway prices. This newfound stability has fueled a modest recovery in real incomes and restored some ability for households and businesses to plan for the future. The gap between official and black-market exchange rates has also narrowed dramatically, from over 200 percent to less than 10 percent. With GDP projected to grow by 5 percent in 2025, Argentina is poised to rank among Latin America’s top-performing economies. Meanwhile, the government expects forthcoming data to confirm a significant drop in poverty, potentially bringing the rate well below 50 percent.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

If You Can’t Tell the Difference, There Is No Difference
(Shelly Palmer, December 1, 2024)

Our clients’ tests confirm this, if the audience isn’t told what it’s listening to, they have no idea how it was created, don’t notice, and don’t care.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

Despite Creative Hubris, Artists Are Quietly Embracing A.I. in Their Work (Aaron Mok • 12/05/24, Observer)

Artists across the entertainment, art and design industries are biting their nails over the rise of generative A.I. Many argue the technology violates intellectual property, devalues creative labor and flattens creativity. But as A.I. image and video generators advance, a growing minority of artists are embracing the tools with open arms. Creative professionals ranging from art directors to filmmakers say using A.I. saves time, boosts creativity and leads to new opportunities.