🦉✨The Nexialist #0150

philosophy of bullshit | hallucinate | alternative intelligence | animals and ai? | sex mindset change | fracking eyeballs | lana’s sweetness

Dec 07, 2023

welcome to another week of hyperlinked delights, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message encounters your eyeballs (but in a totally cozy non-surveillancy way, more on that later). last saturday, i had the pleasure of watching madonna’s celebration tour and i had a blast (mixed with tears). it is so impressive to be celebrating her 40-year career, as there have been so many great moments. something i was deeply touched by was how vocal she has been throughout her career about the aids crisis. last week, december 1st, was world aids day. i always think about how many great minds have been lost, and how many beautiful things the world didn’t get to see. also, it is so important to fight the stigma and remind people that hiv is not a death sentence and that today’s treatments let people live a normal healthy life, . undetectable = untransmittable. ♥️

this is the time of year that the retrospectives are coming, and i love those (now duolingo has it and i’m the top 1% of dutch learners, oké? 🇳🇱 also the 2024 trend reports are starting to come about. you won’t see them here, at least for now. however, keep reading for links on a.i.s, lies/bullshit/hallucinations, animals, attention sex and sweetness. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

💩philosophy of bullshit

i saw this on the syllabus a couple of weeks ago and had to click, and what an experience it was. this text by thorian r. harris was challenging to read because of the more academic language i’m not used to, but on that sweet spot that made me interested in keep pushing through. after all, aren’t we living in a post-truth society?

who would know there is so much to consider about bullshit: what is the difference between a liar and a bullshitter? what is the goal behind the bullshit? is it done intentionally or unintentionally? what about the person accepting/believe the bullshit, what is their/our role in all of this?

Abstract: It may be hard to imagine how bullshit, or being strategically indifferent to the veracity of one’s assertions, might ever be morally permissible. Yet to categorically denounce it is to find oneself burdened with defending the impossibility of justifiable bullshit, the indefeasibility of truthfulness and the inculpability of inveterate bullshitters. A much more tenable position is to expand one’s notion of bullshit to include unintentional indifference to veracity while also characterizing bullshit (whether strategic or unintentional) as wrong only when it constitutes negligence. Once bullshit is redefined in this fashion it becomes apparent that its preponderance in contemporary society is the work not of those who bullshit intentionally, but of those who uncritically consume and transmit the bullshit of others. Any attempt to disrupt the spread of negligent bullshit thus does well to consider our epistemic obligations not only as perceived experts, but as listeners. It is in this respect that the early Indian Buddhist critique of testimony proves quite helpful in reducing gullibility and, thereby, the likelihood of unintentional, yet negligent, bullshit.

brainsparks: naked truth (tn#13), the basic laws of human stupidity (tn#62)

🍄hallucinate

thank you, gust, for this link. cambridge dictionary’s word of the year is hallucinate, which, to me, represents the year better than merriam webster’s authenticity, still great to see them side by side, or counterparts in a way. also, their navigation and analysis are fun and informative, so i would recommend visiting. there are also other ai jargons to learn.

while putting together this nexialist it made me think that another word for ai’s hallucination could also be bullshitting, but let’s just with the more whimsical term, i guess.

The Cambridge Dictionary team chose hallucinate as its Word of the Year 2023 as it recognized that the new meaning gets to the heart of why people are talking about AI. Generative AI is a powerful tool but one we’re all still learning how to interact with safely and effectively — this means being aware of both its potential strengths and its current weaknesses.

brainsparks: retrieval augmented generation (tn#149), the ultimate gaslighting (tn#22), critic of technology (tn#121)

🤖alternative intelligence

a murder at the end of the world is my favorite series at the moment. using the murder-mystery agatha christie formula of strangers locked in a remote place, this series is also embedded with emerging technologies, many of which you see here in the nexialist. the billionaire who invited them to this workshop/immersion in iceland prefers to use the term alternative intelligence instead of artificial intelligence, which was quite a statement for me. (also, it is produced by brit marling from the oa, another favorite one of mine).

A Murder at the End of the World is a mystery series featuring a Gen Z amateur sleuth and tech-savvy hacker “Darby Hart.” Darby and eight other guests are invited by a reclusive billionaire to participate in a retreat at a remote location. When one of the other guests is found dead, Darby must use her skills to prove it was murder before the killer takes another life.

🦉animals and ai?

thank you, raquel, for sharing this link with me. peter singer brings some great considerations about ai and animals. are we considering all sentient life in our ai systems? will ai innovations come with regulation about all kinds of life? and then he ends with a great fable.

The Oxford philosopher, Nick Bostrom, has a fable about a group of sparrows who think that it would be terrific if they had an owl to help them with some labor tasks; owls are much bigger and stronger than they are. And so, they think about getting an owl egg and hatching the owl, and then training the owl to do what they want. And there's one wise old sparrow who says,"Well, before we actually hatch this egg, shouldn't we make sure that we can train the owl to do what we want?"And the other sparrows say,"Oh, no, it's gonna be so wonderful, so let's keep going." The point of the fable, of course, is that owls eat sparrows, and once you have hatched an owl, the sparrows are not gonna be able to control it. So, is a super intelligent AI going to be like the owl would've been to the sparrows?

brainsparks: centaur mindset (tn#106), non-human perceptions (tn#86), low tech zones (tn#135), accelerate sustainability with ai (tn#149)

🌶️sex mindset change

thank you, juan, for this link. cindy gallop (makelovenotporn) is such a heroine, and it’s the first time i see her in this more intimate conversation/format. she is so articulate. connecting it with ai, i don’t think we anticipated the impact of a highly technological and easily available pornographic industry in our minds and in our society.

I date younger men, they tend to be in their twenties. And about 15, 16 years ago now, I began realizing that I was experiencing very personally and intimately what happens when today's total freedom of access to hardcore porn online meets our society's equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex. It's when those two factors converge that porn becomes sex education by default, in not a good way.
I have seen up close the enormous human misery and unhappiness, occasioned by the guilt, shame and embarrassment that we imbue sex with. We are talking about the single universal area of human experience that we are all most engaged with, most fascinated by, and most ****** up about. We all get vulnerable when we get naked. Sexual ego's very fragile.

brainsparks: the porn conversation (tn#95), masturbation data is beautiful (tn#139), naked education (tn#115)

👁️fracking eyeballs

last edition i talked a lot about the surveillance-based tech industry (and surveillance capitalism). then this article by d. graham burnett appeared on the syllabus, which just shows this attention fetish of the industry goes back a long time. “Fracking Eyeballs: How an alliance between psychologists and advertisers at the turn of the 20th century taught us how to measure (and monetize) human attention.” it is fascinating to think that we now carry the very technology that captures and measures our attention, and how this started long before smartphones.

Nixon ran a series of tests to investigate this outstanding issue, on which there was disagreement within the community of active ad-copy writers and graphic designers. If you were advertising a car, was it better to show a picture of a car, or of a pretty woman? If one was selling shirt collars, was it better to do so under the headline “Murder!” or the headline “Quality Shirt Collars”? To make a long story short (and to skip over the protopataphysical techniques by which Nixon established what we might call a “science of irrelevancy”), Nixon found that “irrelevant illustrations do attract more attention and hold interest longer than do relevant ones.” Which is to say: systematically doing violence to sense raised revenue. This could be proven in his laboratory. Would it be wrong to say that we live, in many respects, in the world evolved from that finding?

brainsparks: superindustry of the imaginary (tn#28), ai: hype or the real deal? (tn#149)

🥤lana’s sweetness

so lana’s a&w (aka american whore) was voted the best song of the year by pitchfork and nme. it was also one of my most listened-to songs of the year, according to my spotify wrapped. then juan sent me this interview, and it is so nice to see her being so sweet, staying true to herself and cheering other women in the industry.

brainsparks: american whore (tn#108), lana’s beauty in sadness (tn#124)

see you next week, hallucinators 🍄✨

🫀✨thank you for reading The Nexialist. This post is public, so feel free to share these brainsparks 🧠✨

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist.

I offer inspiration sessions called Brainsparks, creative desk research (Zeitgeist Boost), Plug’n’Play deals for workshops and sprints, and other bespoke formats. If you want to know more about this, send me an e-mail with your challenge(s) and we can figure something out together. Check out my website and some work I’ve done below:

thenexialist.xyz

The Nexialist