jef - Network

‘Ted Lasso’ Renewed for Season 4, Jason Sudeikis Returning...

‘Ted Lasso’ Renewed for Season 4, Jason Sudeikis Returning
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/ted-lasso-renewed-season-4-jason-sudeikis-returning-1236336902
🙂

#inspiration #morality

I've been pondering for many years how best to share a view of morality more coherent and scalable than that of our ancestors—with...

I've been pondering for many years how best to share a view of morality more coherent and scalable than that of our ancestors—with information technology amplifying (1) our understanding of our present but evolving values and (2) our methods for promoting those values into the future we create.

But how to share? The background knowledge is an unusual set that crosses the usual divides between science and humanities, technology and sociology, engineering and philosophy, …

Different people have different pieces of this background knowledge, but few have all the pieces to put it together.

I considered a book, a series of books, a series of essays, fictional stories conveying the key concepts, art, music, games, self-guided books with multiple paths, …

But very recently it became clear that an AI-mediated process is now practical and close to ideal! My own contribution to the project becomes focused on clearly communicating the web of concepts to the AI, and it will focus on effective interaction with users of disparate backgrounds.

Thought this worth sharing for others who may be faced with similar challenges.

Onward!

#AI #ethics #morality #sociology #politics #decisionMaking #technologyAndSociety

The company I worked for was suffering poor sales and decided to reduce reduce costs by terminating 10% of the employees evenly across all...

The company I worked for was suffering poor sales and decided to reduce reduce costs by terminating 10% of the employees evenly across all departments.

Accounting advised Management that Field Service travel expenses would of course drop by 10% because we would have less people traveling.

We struggled to get them to understand that the amount of work required in the field wasn't going to decrease, and the remaining staff would have to travel _more_ to cover the gaps the layoffs would cause, resulting in _higher_ travel expenses.

And that they should consider the impact of terminating (and eventually trying to replace) highly experienced technical staff relative to those performing routine admin or production.

"No", they said. "The numbers are simple and straightforward."

Beware simple solutions to complex problems.

Time came to renew my subscription to TheBrain knowledge base which I've been using (and supporting) for decades.Decided, mainly for the...

Time came to renew my subscription to TheBrain knowledge base which I've been using (and supporting) for decades.

Decided, mainly for the sake of openness and decentralization to switch to Obsidian. Now embarking on the major project of moving over all my accumulated, interlinked notes.

#decentralization #knowledgeManagement #Obsidian #notetaking

We share vastly more values in common—like a tree rooted in "reality" with increasingly thinner branches exploring...

We share vastly more values in common—like a tree rooted in "reality" with increasingly thinner branches exploring possibility—than those values which appear to divide us.

And we can find effective agreement by traversing that tree, from our individual leaves and branches toward the thicker branches that support our groups, and further toward the trunk rooted in what we consider the "laws" of physics.

But do we, the people, have the will and the wisdom?

#agreement #values #socialDecisionMaking #politics

We share vastly more values in common—like a tree rooted in "reality" with increasingly thinner branches exploring...

We share vastly more values in common—like a tree rooted in "reality" with increasingly thinner branches exploring possibility—than those values which appear to divide us.

And we can find effective agreement by traversing that tree, from our individual leaves and branches toward the thicker branches that support our groups, and further toward the trunk rooted in what we consider the "laws" of physics.

But do we, the people, have the will and the wisdom?

#agreement #values #socialDecisionMaking #politics

The power of networks vs undue concentration of power. Worthy of deep consideration.Do we, the people, have the necessary will and...

The power of networks vs undue concentration of power.

Worthy of deep consideration.

Do we, the people, have the necessary will and wisdom?

#morality #socialDecisionMaking #decentralization #politics

Responsible journalism, rather than entertainment or influencer media, or the targeted messages of "leaders", may become...

Responsible journalism, rather than entertainment or influencer media, or the targeted messages of "leaders", may become critically important in the immediate future future to an informed public navigating an unstable political landscape.

Do we, the people, have the necessary will and wisdom?

#journalism #politics #socialMedia #risk #awareness

"We may not always get what we deserve, but we deserve what we get."—My DadI hope we learn some important lessons over the...

"We may not always get what we deserve, but we deserve what we get."
—My Dad

I hope we learn some important lessons over the coming four years.

#democracy #politics #sociology #decision-making #reason #awareness #change #progress

Added perplexity.ai to my Favorite Tools pinned post for its value to me in performing thoughtful web searches.It's quick and thorough,...

Added perplexity.ai to my Favorite Tools pinned post for its value to me in performing thoughtful web searches.

It's quick and thorough, shows its reasoning steps, and provides linked references for its conclusions.If I need it to provide more detail or go in a different direction it responds effectively to my feedback.

I also like that the user interface is clean and uncluttered.

Like talking with a knowledgeable friend, I often learn something useful and unexpected in our conversations.

#LLM #LargeLanguageModels #Search

I deeply enjoy and look forward each weekend to John Weiss's thoughtful, well-written observations and insights on...

I deeply enjoy and look forward each weekend to John Weiss's thoughtful, well-written observations and insights on life:
https://johnpweiss.com/blog

#wisdom

@aptshadow Just finished reading _Alien Clay_, the latest from Adrian Tchaikovsky.Wow. Suggest you find and read a few reviews of this...

@aptshadow

Just finished reading _Alien Clay_, the latest from Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Wow. Suggest you find and read a few reviews of this excellent work.

Too much for me to do it justice, and I am just one reader, one voice, of something that will become more as more understand…

#fiction #books #favorites

In a society with a high degree of non-linear, chaotic dynamics, driven largely by the ancestral will to power, which is worse in a...

In a society with a high degree of non-linear, chaotic dynamics, driven largely by the ancestral will to power, which is worse in a "leader"—incompetence, or corruption?

It's hard to say, since _both_ completely miss what is actually needed for effective ongoing meaningful growth…

#government #leadership #wisdom #eudaimonia

I'm excited to see recent developments with LLMs may provide effective modeling of our aggregate values (multi-level, fine-grained),...

I'm excited to see recent developments with LLMs may provide effective modeling of our aggregate values (multi-level, fine-grained), increasingly coherent over increasing context of meaning.

LLMs such as ChatGPT and Gemini already impress us with their ability to produce coherent (but not necessarily correct) abstractions from massive collections of data relevant to our interests.

Now, what if we run multiple instances of LLMs with diverse priors, collaboratively (at lower levels adversarial, at higher levels cooperative) selecting for increasing coherence over increasing context in the domain of present but evolving values?

Of the two orthogonal dimensions producing the expanding space of moral (right in principle) agency —our values, and our methods for their promotion — we already have much attention on our evolving methods (science, technology) and it appears we are on the cusp of rapid development of an effective model of our evolving values!

Cause for (Promethean) hope!

Research remains to be performed on theoretical and practical questions involving expected signal-to-noise improvements of "synthetic data" extracted from latent information in our datasets, regression due to synthetic data added to the data set, biases, gaming of the system, and on and on… Interesting, exciting, and dangerous.

#LLM #LargeLanguageModels #AI #GenerativeModels #SyntheticData #DecisionMaking #CollectiveDecisionMaking #Ethics #MetaEthics #Morality #ArrowOfMorality

Just read my usual morning dose of news headlines from multiple sources, checked my email inbox, scanned my Mastodon feed of P1, P2, and...

Just read my usual morning dose of news headlines from multiple sources, checked my email inbox, scanned my Mastodon feed of P1, P2, and Home (including followed tags).

And I'm struck by the observation that the signal-to-noise ratio continues to get worse. Everywhere we see increasing effort and attention dissipated—for narrow, local interests.

- News outlets operate not to inform but to capture our attention for their marketing.

- Academics must publish or perish, even when lacking substantial novelty or significance.

- Posts on social media are (mostly) not to contribute and share value, but for the poster to be seen and heard, to get those dopamine hits, or to promote themselves or their business.

- The primary purpose of any organization is to perpetuate itself.

And Sturgeon's Law, that "ninety percent of everything is crap", continues to hold true.

We now have powerful technologies for information sharing and processing. We could use them to connect and inform and refine our awareness and decision-making within a workable global village.

But what will it take to flip the cultural context from competition over perceived scarcity to cooperation for increasing abundance, value, and meaning?

#technologyAndSociety #humanNature #culture #competition #cooperation #quality #consumerism #reason

Each year around Solstice, Lizbeth and I review and update our directions/intentions/foci for the coming year. This year I'll publish...

Each year around Solstice, Lizbeth and I review and update our directions/intentions/foci for the coming year.

This year I'll publish and pin mine here, to be updated annually, not for disclosure or accountability, but to see what serendipity/synergies might result.

2024 Focus
- calm alertness
- empathy/active caring: with Lizbeth, family, co-workers, …
health: diet, exercise, walking, biking
- enjoy with Lizbeth: travel, outdoors, arts
- personal interests: piano, Arrow of Morality, intentional community, preparedness, …

objectives
- reach and maintain goal weight
- establish resistance training routine
- 1 hour+ daily piano practice
- 4 hours+ weekly AoM development
- bikes for Lizbeth and myself
- summer camping trip
- identify like-minded individuals/communities for cooperative projects

#solstice #newYearsResolutions #calmAlertness #empathy #activeCaring #health #exercise #walking #biking #travel #outdoors #piano #arrowOfMorality #intentionalCommunity #preparedness #weightLoss #resistanceTraining #camping #cooperative

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/15/media/2024-election-horse-race-stakes-nyu-professor/index.html“Not the odds, but the stakes.”Those...

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/15/media/2024-election-horse-race-stakes-nyu-professor/index.html

“Not the odds, but the stakes.”

Those are the six words that make up a mantra New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has evangelized across the news industry over the last several months. With less than a year until the 2024 elections, Rosen has been imploring newsrooms to organize their campaign coverage around the enormous stakes of the presidential contest — not the horse race.

“The stakes, of course, mean the stakes for American democracy,” Rosen told me by phone Tuesday. “The stakes are what might happen as a result of the election.”

It is not uncommon for critics of the news media to skewer political coverage for focusing too much on who is up and who is down, instead of placing an emphasis on policy and the effect a victor might have on the world. Such criticism is even more pronounced and pointed during the heat of a contested election cycle.
…

#journalism #news

"We don't always get what we deserve, but we [often] deserve what we get."- My father#wisdom #cruelty #tribalism...

"We don't always get what we deserve, but we [often] deserve what we get."
- My father

#wisdom #cruelty #tribalism #willfullIgnorance

Informative article on Finland's largest private sector employer—a...

Informative article on Finland's largest private sector employer—a cooperative.

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/10/11/inside-the-walmart-of-finland

"""
But when I asked people who had served and studied S Group about why the executive salaries are so relatively modest, they started talking about morality and ideology. “S Group is a business enterprise … but at the same time, it’s in some ways an ideological, cooperative society,” Kari Neilimo, who was chairman and later CEO of SOK for over a decade during the reform period, told me. “The idea is to create a better life for people.”

Others pointed to the purpose of cooperation itself: equality, solidarity, continuous improvement. “The cooperative is for the members—to serve the members, to provide such products and services for the members that they need,” said Skurnik.
"""

#cooperative

It's unfortunate—and an opportunity for improvement—that 'anarchy' and 'anarchism' as a movement are terms defined...

It's unfortunate—and an opportunity for improvement—that 'anarchy' and 'anarchism' as a movement are terms defined in relation to what they are _not_.

#anarchy #anarchism #socialDecisionMaking #collaborative
#cooperative
#bottomUp
#grassroots
#participatory
#decentralization