Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Without getting fancy, here are some key dates: 1996: Larry Page and Sergey Brin experiment with a new type of search engine.  In those ancient days search engines simply ranked results by how often a searched-for term appears on a web page.  But Page and Brin are after something a bit more sophisticated, a range of metrics that cumulatively determine how important the searched items are on a particular page. They literally used a friend's garage as an office while working on this idea. A cliche is born, the garage-born web business.  1998: The new business is formally created when Page and Brin persuade a co-founder of Sun Microsystems to pony up $100,000 so they can incorporate, set up shop in Menlo Park and hire their first employee.  2002: Yahoo offers to buy out Google for $3 billion.  Google holds to a valuation of $5 billion, and the talks end without result. Also this year, in a display of the mainstreaming of the verb form of their name, an episode of t...

  I believe at some point I have mentioned in this blog that David O'Brien authored a book about an unpublished opinion written by Justice Robert H. Jackson that would have served as a concurrence to the court's opinion in the famous 1954 case, BROWN v. BOARD. The court's opinion was expressed in a unanimous vote and a single opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren, declaring that the old rule that allowed "separate but equal" treatment in education facilities, i.e. segregation by race in schools, was a rule no longer. A follow-up decision the next year addressed the issue of remedy: it ordered states to desegregate their schools with all "deliberate speed." (Jackson was dead by that time.) Jackson never published his concurrence because the Chief Justice lobbied hard to dissuade him from doing so. It was Warren's considered view that on a matter so pressing the Court must speak with one voice. I bring it up again because I would like to offer a quota...

 There is a new book out about the Greek philosopher Parmenides, the central figure of the Eleatic school. Well, it is listed as a 2025 publication.  I, for one, will call that "new" given the antiquity of the subject matter.  It is an anthology titled simply, Parmenides: New Perspectives , edited by A.G. Long and Barbara M. Sattler. The Eleatics may have made their greatest impact on subsequent philosophy through Parmenides' disciple Zeno. The simplistic view (my view) is that Parmenides took a position that seemed, simply, nuts. There is no change, no motion, and no division in the word, there is only Being.     Zeno provided arguments for that position that made it seem less nutso, by making the common sensical world of change, gaps, and differences itself seem oddly paradoxical. That conventional understanding makes Zeno seem the more interesting figure in that dyad.  But the Long/Sattler book offers "new perspectives". One of them is that Parmenid...

People are looking for "tells".  What is a quick way to tell when I am reading AI slop, rather than something some real human has composed?  One of the better tells is the frequent use of the adverb "quietly" in metaphorical contexts. LLMs have received a level of publicity out of proportion to their role within the AI world (see the above Venn diagram) in part because they impact and indeed may threaten the livelihood of people like me. So we, because loquacious folk, talk about it. LLMs, large language models, have quietly developed the tick of using the word "quietly" a lot. You may recently have read about how a certain individual has "quietly" become important in deliberations of Congress, or how Stephen King has "quietly" amassed some large number of acreage of Maine real estate, or some whatever. "Quietly" does a lot of work for these models. It sounds as if it is saying something about something conspiratorial or trick...

Prelude: for those who were paying close attention to my haiku last week: yes, I did have the procedure done and, yes, things turned out well.  There is nothing nasty growing inside my butt. Prelude complete.  Anyway: I don't want to say much here about the ROYAL CARRIBEAN case issued by the US Supreme Court last week, in part because I may have something to say about it two months from now, as part of my annual round-up of  all things SCOTUS.  I'll only for today note that the case has Justice Thomas writing for the court, as one of an eight-member majority thereof, with Justice Kagan the sole standout.    And my only point is to ask a question. Does anyone know of another decision within the last couple of years that came down just that way?  In many politically sensitive cases, one gets a 6-3 lineup.  Sometimes the split consists of appointees of Presidents of the Republican Party versus those of Presidents of the Democratic Party, as in LOUISI...

Next time I do this  Really short poem thing for you, I'll use limericks.