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Joseph ~ JT

Dec 12, 2012

The othering of nature: “a time when technology did not create an alternative to nature”

  • Ivan Illich: the corruption of the best  is the worst [re enclosure of the commons]
  • Claiming bad kin: Alexis Shotwell
    • People who benefit from social relations of harm frequently try to claim kin relations with the people who are targeted by racism or to reject kin connections with wrongdoers.
    • It seems to me clear that, indeed, it does not only matter what we claim about who we are; it matters who claims us as kin.
  • Saint Guinefort: 13th-century French greyhound that received local veneration as a folk saint
  • Being taught math in a way that was  “an affront to my dignity”
  • “Renegotiating the relationship”
  • Relational v transactional
  • Personalized learning; with a PERSON; the value is in the relationship, not the information
  • Reality
    • Newton: mechanistic
    • Descarted:what of God?
      • Kant sought to split the difference  (KF: atom article)

Nov 21, 2024

Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity
https://sproutsschools.com/bonhoeffers-theory-of-stupidity/

  • …stupid people are more dangerous than evil ones. This is because while we can protest against or fight evil people, against stupid ones we are defenseless — reasons fall on deaf ears
    • [we are defenceless against stupid people; reason falls on deaf ears]
  • Stupidity as a moral defect, rather than an intellectual one
  • People are made, or allow themselves to be made, stupid
  • Individual v group: stupidity is less a psychological problem and more a psychological problem
  • The power of the one is based on the stupidity of the many
  • Internal liberation requires external liberation
    • Abandon all attempts until then

“Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness from responsibility. The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”

Stephen Jay Gould: Kindess
https://www.joannaseibert.com/daily/2020/8/8/stephen-jay-gould-kindess

“Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus, in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoticed and invisible as the ‘ordinary’ efforts of a vast majority.”

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.

Steven Weinberg
  • Freedom
    • as a SPACE for people to be(come) themselves
    • Question-framing as expression of power
    • “how we are allowed to think”
    • “Foucault as long-winded Nietzsche”
    • Capacity to puncture the illusion of the stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel good
      • …while acknowledging that there is power in love and compassion
  • Productivity of scholarship
    • “If all the philosophy departments in the world disappeared tomorrow, nobody would notice. That’s a fucking crime”
  • Professionalism
    • Working within the boundaries and constraints of a role, in service to the institutional goals and priorities
      • How to find / use autonomy
  • EDI
    • Considerations of class (beagàn)
      • White privilege ~ kapos

Nov 6, 2024: Conversations in Pedagogy

Event Reminder: Conversations in Pedagogy: Why Think Deeply About Pedagogy? – November 6, 2024

Adaptive v Routine experience

  • Routine experience is becoming valuable again, as emerging technologies bring reliability of knowledge sources into question [what when the power goes: the whole thing rests on an infinite supply of clean energy]
  • Routine experience requires “less work” cognitively
  • Neutrality hands the decision power to someone else
  • “givens” are what we tech with (not about)

Cooking

  • Routine experience
  • Adaptive experience; XX – what to do when there ae no eggs (what do eggs do?!)

JT on AI; goals of education

  1. Students who can give most to society
  2. “life in the mud” – personal development

The goal of these conversations?

  • Allows us to make judgements
    • KF: not to suspend judgement?
  • Allows us to (eventually) make judgements rather than follow someone else’s judgements
  • Planting forests v monoculture

Colleges = collegiality