Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I haven't seen either of the recent WICKED pics.  I don't plan to see them. Years ago I had some interest in the OZ fantasy world.  Back when it meant the Frank Baum books on the one hand and the 1939 movie on the other.  The Baum books were written as an allegorical take on the monetary debates of Baum's day. The word "Oz" itself suggests ounces, the standard measurement for gold. The notion of a "yellow brick road" suggests gold bricks, and perhaps that an insistence on a gold standard was leading the farmers of the US, the Kansans, toward danger. And so forth.  Of course the Garland movie didn't do much with the allegory -- It could have, since the '39 movie came out between FDR's abandonment of the gold standard (1933) and his partial reinvention of it by way of Bretton Woods (1944) -- but it didn't.  Personally, I have never asked myself prequel-producing questions like "how did the monkeys learn to fly" or "why does ...

  . Mid-2020, the firm (ticker symbol still GOOG) performed a stock split. In July 2021, Alphabet announced Intrinsic, a new robotics software company.  In November 2021, the formation of a new company, Isomorphic Labss, to promite the use of artificial intelligence in the pharmaceutical world.  August 2024, a US district court found Google guilty of violating antitrust law by using unlawful tie-ins to maintain its dominance in what remains its signature product, the search engine. No drastic remedy will be attempted, because the courts notices that the market has been taken over by AI/LLMs of late, and Google has no dominance there.  April 2025, another US district court finds Google guilty of illegally monopolizing parts of what is called the adtech stack, I.e. online advertising technology.  November 2025, the parties to the adtech case made their final arguments to the court in the eastern district of Virginia as to the proper remedies it should order. ...

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...