William Vallicella: ‘Catholic Integralism In Three Sentences‘-

A nice piece:

‘Government by its very nature is coercive. Angels we are not, and so we need the necessary evil of government. I stand for limited government and limited coercion. My position, call it American conservatism, is a balanced one, avoiding as it does the extremes of anarchism, libertarianism, socialism, communism and ‘wokeism’ as well as the various form of reaction whether of the alternative right or the throne-an-altar variety.‘

Integralism has some authority issues baked-in.

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On that note, speaking of authority, and the kind of ‘latest moral cause’ movements much liberal thinking coalesces around.

Denis Dutton on climate-change skepticism (oh how the true-believers will hate you), some psychological reasons for making art, and bad academic writing.

R.I.P.

Please check out denisdutton.com for the late thinker’s more popular pieces.

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As for technology, I’ve worked on the fringes for a little while. I suspect AI modeling, within the next decade certainly, will continue to advance non-code UI modules for web design and application (you won’t need to know how to code to interact with complex systems).

Imagine instead of having four HR employees, you just have one or two, and maybe contract with a health-care consultant for one month out of the year. A bot is doing some of the employee interaction. One of the HR employees knows the most about data extraction and storage, but she/he doesn’t need to know too terribly much beyond a course or two. That’s coming within sight, now. Start to extrapolate across industries, and all the entry-level jobs out there into different professions.

All kinds of social and political consequences will result.

For quite a while, vast quantities of data have been gathered around you (an avatar of ‘you’). This has created many perverse incentives for the companies doing the gathering, as well as for the kinds of government creatures responsible for drafting policy and law. It’s also created important pattern recognition insights about your own desires, interests, behavior and possible intentions regarding many subjects. It’s a bit like a cage around you.

Is this actually ‘you’? A representation much like a profile? What might it say about you and all the social science theories about you?