for - AI - progress trap - interview Eric Schmidt - meme - AI progress trap - high intelligence + low compassion = existential threat

Summary - After watching the interview, I would sum it up this way. Humanity faces an existential threat from AI due to: - AI is extreme concentration of power and intelligence (NOT wisdom!) - Humanity still have many traumatized people who want to harm others - low compassion - The deadly combination is: - proliferation of tools that give anyone extreme concentration of power and intelligence combined with - a sufficiently high percentage of traumatized people with - low levels of compassion and - high levels of unlimited aggression - All it takes is ONE bad actor with the right combination of circumstances and conditions to wreak harm on a global scale, and that will not be prevented by millions of good applications of the same technology

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/15/we-should-have-better-answers-by-now-climate-scientists-baffled-by-unexpected-pace-of-heating

( ~19:15 )

Johannes Schmidt calls Luhmann: "Without a doubt the most important German sociologist of the 20th century."

( ~ 9:36)

Luhmann got his doctoral and habilitation thesis in one year, in 1966; but the books he used for this had been written in 1964, according to Dr. Schmidt.

( ~9:15 )

I am quite similar to Luhmann in the sense that we both prefer theoretical research over practical research. However, I think Schmidt here refers to the overall conception of a Grand Theory, seeming to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. This is where I depart with Luhmann as my whole goal rests on the practicality of optimizing education.

So while I prefer theoretical research, the end is to improve something in a practical sense.

Zum 10. Mal in Folge war im März die globale Durchschnittstemperatur höher als in allen früheren Vergleichsmonaten. Sie lag 0,1° über dem letzten Rekord und 1,68° über dem vorindustriellen Wert. Jonathan Watts geht im Guardian auf die Befürchtungen von Klimaforschenden ein, das Klimasystem könne sich bereits in einer bisher nicht vorausgesagten Weise verändert haben. Im März hat der Saudi Aramco-Chef unter Applaus von Industrie-Vertretern den Ausstieg aus Öl und Gas als Illusion bezeichnet. https://www.theguardian.com/global/2024/apr/09/tenth-consecutive-monthly-heat-record-alarms-confounds-climate-scientists

Copernicus Climate Bulletin: https://climate.copernicus.eu/climate-bulletins#55c9d9ab-fb45-4667-94b0-084c3423879b

Der Bericht des Copernikus Climate Change Service über 2023 ist lact Direktor Carlo Buontempo "ein dramatisches Zeugnis dafür, wie weit weil wir uns von dem Klima entfernt haben, in dem sich die menschliche Zivilisation entwickelt hat". Viele Kimaforschende waren davon überrascht, wie deutlich die Temperaturrekorde des Jahres 2023 über denen der vorangegangenen Jahre lagen.Auch Zahl und Ausmaß von Extremwetterereignissen übertrafen die Erwartungen. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/09/2023-record-world-hottest-climate-fossil-fuel

Mehr zu den Copernicus-Daten für 2023: https://hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3A%22Global%20Climate%20Highlights%202023%22

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/climate/ocean-heat-records.html

Zusammenfassender Bericht der EU über die Folgen der globalen Erhitzung in Europa im vergangenen Jahr. Europa erwärmt sich von allen Kontinenten am schnellsten. Die Menschen in Südeuropa waren über 100 Tage extender gute ausgesetzt. 2022 war das trockenste Jahr der ausgezeichneten Wettergeschichte, und es hatte den mit Abstand heißesten Sommer. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/20/frightening-record-busting-heat-and-drought-hit-europe-in-2022

Bei der CERAWeek energy conference in Houston hat Aramco-Chef Amin Nasser unter Applaus dazu aufgerufen, die „Phantasie des Ausstiegs aus Öl und Gas“ aufzugeben. Die Energeiwende versage offensichtlich an den meisten Fronten. Das editoral board der Financial Times hält ihm die Temeperatur-Anomalien von 2023 entgegegen und verweist auf die Vermutung des NASA-Klimwissenschaftlers Gavin Schmidt, dass die Temeperaturentwicklungen seit 2023 auf eine nie dagewesenen Wissenslücke verweise und möglicherweise eine noch schnellere Erwärmung als bisher angenommen drohe. https://www.ft.com/content/6f858196-0a9c-4f0f-9720-a0a81849a998?accessToken=zwAAAY5x7Qlrkc9vhYGWCpxPD9OXIKCoGEmpmA.MEYCIQD3Tlyt5FrtHJnm7VkPQE0XYlj70r33jdeNBKWwre8I6AIhAP4kgVxDwXt_B_DxPSCCh_SLm696XOrWhri3AqJc8ZQG&segmentId=e95a9ae7-622c-6235-5f87-51e412b47e97&shareType=enterprise

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-is-the-sea-so-hot

Vor der Küste Chiles hat eine Expedition über 100 bisher unbekannte Arten entdeckt. Die Libération interviewt den Biologen Thierry Perez zur marinen Biodiversität und ihrer Bedrohung. Er spricht von der nicht rückgängig zu machenden Zerstörung des natürlichen Erbes z.B. durch Ereignisse wie marine Hitzewellen. Das Zusammenwirken von Arten, das z.B. die Regulierung des Klimas durch die Ozeane mitermöglicht, ist zu großen Teilen noch nicht verstanden. https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/biodiversite/decrire-la-vegetation-marine-dans-les-endroits-recules-de-locean-cest-travailler-sur-son-potentiel-a-reguler-le-climat-20240228_NKVK6IURABBFFMT6RYH3T4RUSU/

for - climate crisis - interview - Neil degrasse Tyson - Gavin Schmidt - 2023 record heat - NASA explanation

podcast details - title: How 2023 broke our climate models - host: Neil degrasse Tyson & Paul Mercurio - guest: NASA director, Gavin Schmidt - date: Jan 2024

summary - Neil degrasse and his cohost Paul Mercurio interview NASA director Gavin Schmidt to discuss the record-breaking global heating in 2023 and 2024. - Neil and Paul cover a lot in this short interview including: - NASA models can't explain the large jump in temperature in 2023 / 2024. Yes, they predicted incremental increases, but not such large jumps. Gavin finds this worrying. - PACE satellite launches this month, to gather important data on the state of aerosols around the planet. This infomration can help characterize more precisely the role aerosols are playing in global heating. - geoengineering with aerosols is not considered a good idea by Gavin, as it essentially means once started, and if it works to cool the planet, we would be dependent on them for centuries. - Gavin stresses the need for a cohesive collective solution, but that it's beyond him how we achieve that given all the denailsim and misinformation that influeces policy out there.

Die Autor:innen des Projekts "Net Zero 2040" erläutern in einem Blogpost auf der Standard-Website ihre Ergebnisse. Modellierungen zeigen, dass in Österreich eine vollständige Dekarbonisierung im Energiesektor bis 2040 möglich ist, wenn sie politisch entschlossen vorangetrieben wird. Der Projekt Bericht enthält vier unterschiedliche, realistischeSzenarien zum Erreichen von Net Zero. https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000205443/wie-oesterreich-klimaneutral-werden-kann

Ergebnisse der Szenarien: https://www.netzero2040.at/

With rough German to English translation here:

Zettelkasten as the second brain of Niklas Luhmann

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Roy Scholten</span> in "@ChrisAldrich For a somewhat in depth look at Luhmann's zettelkasten , I made a rough translation of this talk: https://t.co/ik7VTOGMV8 here: https://t.co/nAAb7aXXtC" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>11/01/2021 11:39:57</time>)</cite></small>

Watched 2021-11-01

https://www.reddit.com/r/Arno_Schmidt/comments/1267heb/arno_schmidt_compulsively_wrote_and_hoarded/

Lots of great anecdotal mentions here which should be tracked down for more authority.

Hitzewellen bedrohen durch ihre zunehmende Zahl und Intensität das globale Ernährungssystem. Der Guardian hat Experten zu den Folgen von Hitzewellen am Land und in den Ozeanen für die Ernährungssicherheit befragt. Hitzewellen haben dramatische Auswirkungen etwa auf die Erträge von Nutzpflanzen und auf Lebensbedingungen von Fischen. Die Folgen sind im Detail oft nur unzureichend erforscht. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/21/rampant-heatwaves-threaten-food-security-of-entire-planet-scientists-warn

• Title
  • The landscape of biomedical research
• Authors
  • Rita González-Márquez,
  • Luca Schmidt,
  • Benjamin M. Schmidt,
  • Philipp Berens
  • Dmitry Kobak
• Date
  • April 11, 2023
• Source
  • https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.10.536208v1.full
• Abstract
  • The number of publications in biomedicine and life sciences
  • has rapidly grown over the last decades,
  • with over 1.5 million papers now published every year.
  • This makes it difficult to
    • keep track of new scientific works and
    • to have an overview of the evolution of the field as a whole.
  • Here we
    • present a 2D atlas of the entire corpus of biomedical literature, and
    • argue that it provides
      • a unique and
      • useful overview
    • of the life sciences research.
  • We base our atlas on the abstract texts of
  • 21 million English articles from the PubMed database.
  • To embed the abstracts into 2D, we use
    • a large language model PubMedBERT, combined with
    • t-SNE tailored to handle samples of our size.
  • We use our atlas to study
    • the emergence of the Covid-19 literature,
    • the evolution of the neuroscience discipline,
    • the uptake of machine learning, and
    • the distribution of gender imbalance in academic authorship.
  • Furthermore, we present an interactive web version of our atlas that
    • allows easy exploration and
    • will enable further insights and facilitate future research.

Die Temperaturen des Atlantik zwischen Island und Afrika liegen im Augenblick bis zu 5 Grad über dem Normalwert. Eine marine Hitzewelle dieses Ausmaßes wurde in dieser Region noch nie beobachtet. Sie wird gravierende Konsequenzen für die Biodiversität haben. Eine vergleichbare Hitzewelle im Mittelmeer führte 2022 zu einem Massensterben bei ca 50 Tier und Pflanzenarten in den oberen 50 Metern des Meeres.

https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/climat/vagues-de-chaleur-dans-locean-pourquoi-parle-t-on-de-canicule-marine-20230622_SF42MLHQGZECZEVI2LADP5QB5A/vari

https://www.wellappointeddesk.com/2014/06/epic-refill-guide-rollerball-gel-and-ballpoints/

A solid list of pen refills and compatible options.

https://www.wellappointeddesk.com/2015/10/ask-the-desk-retro-51-refills/

The Schmidt P8126 capless rollerball refill is compatible with the Retro 51 Tornado standard pens.

https://www.arno-schmidt-stiftung.de/home.html

https://www.arno-schmidt-stiftung.de/Archiv/Zettelarchiv.html

The »notes of the day« shown so far from Arno Schmidt's note box for »Zettel's Traum« can be downloaded here:

reply to https://www.reddit.com/r/Arno_Schmidt/comments/1267heb/arno_schmidt_compulsively_wrote_and_hoarded/

Schmidt's zettelkasten (the direct English translation would be slip box thought card index is more appropriate) (or most likely only portions of it) was featured in the 2013 "Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie" exhibition in Marbach: https://www.dla-marbach.de/presse/presse-details/news/pm-11-2013/. For the interested, the exhibition did publish a book which will likely have more details, but when I looked about a year ago, it was only available in German.

There is a lot of research on zettelkasten methods, which are most often variations of the commonplace book method transferred into the index card or slip form rather than books/notebooks. I've not looked intensively at Schmidt's practice (yet), but it was likely similar to that of Victor Margolin outlined here, though in Margolin's case it was non-fiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI. Vladimir Nabokov and Michael Ende are other writers who used similar methods.

There's some more examples/detail about the idea of zettelkasten (aka card indexes) in general on Wikipedia.

Coincidence that Schmidt shows a journalist Luhmann's zettelkasten in 2015 and asks if they're disappointed?

It's reasonably likely that he'd already read ZKII 9/8,3.

see: https://hypothes.is/a/GFj15IcbEe21OIMwT2TOJA

in the article which follows below, there's an explicit mention of this specific zettel, so the question on priority here is closed.

google translate:

It's a pity that Schmidt shouldn't be interested in such private matters. Because the aim of his research project, which is funded by the NRW Academy of Sciences and Arts, is to prepare Niklas Luhmann's scientific estate for his scientific descendants.

When everything is scanned, note by note must be transferred from handwriting to typescript. Then all cross-references with which Luhmann has networked his slips of paper should also be linked digitally. "And in the end, individual sections of the box could perhaps also be published in book form," explains Schmidt. Duration of the project: 16 years.

Schmidt's work on Niklas Luhmann's scientific estate is funded by the NRW Academy of Sciences and Arts, and the project is expected to last 16 years. The careful observer will notice that this duration is over half of Luhmann's own expected project length of 30 years. The cost of which is also significantly more than the "cost: none" that Luhmann projected at the time.

link to https://hypothes.is/a/zUjEIvfWEeykOiO1E8YAYw

Researchers ought to account for the non-insignificant archival cost of their work once it's done.

Schmidt estimated in 2015 that it would take at least a year to scan in the entire corpus of Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten, imaging 50 cards at a time.

http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

Digital version similar to WTFEngine.

https://www.oblique-strategies.com/

A web-based version similar to WTFEngine.

https://www.enoshop.co.uk/product/oblique-strategies?filter=Oblique%20Strategies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRc7MUybCsE

Interview with BBC in which Brian Eno discusses the origin of his Oblique Strategies with Peter Schmidt.

http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/OSintro.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

So much to unpack here.

Similar to experiments I've seen by Henry James Korn (esp. The Pontoon Manifesto), John Irwin, etc.

Similarities to means of forcing Llullan combinatorial creativity, but in alternate form.

I've not looked directly at Wittgenstein's note collection before, but it could be an interesting historical example.

Might be worth collecting examples of what has happened to note collections after author's lives. Some obviously have been influential in scholarship, but generally they're subsumed by the broader category of a person's "papers" which are often archived at libraries, museums, and other institutions.

Examples: - Vincentius Placcius' collection used by his students - Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten which is being heavily studied by Johannes F.K. Schmidt - Mortimer J. Adler - was his kept? where is it stored?

Posthumously published note card collections - Ludwig Wittgenstein - Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project - Ronald Reagan's collection at his presidential library, though it is more of an commonplace book collection of quotes which was later published - Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary - Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura - others...

Just as note collections serve an autobiographical function, perhaps they may also serve as an intellectual autobiographical function? Wittgenstein never managed to complete his 'big book', but in some sense, doesn't his collection of note cards serve this function for those willing to explore it all?

I'd previously suggested that Scott P. Scheper publish not only his book on note taking, but to actually publish his note cards as a stand-alone zettelkasten example to go with them. What if this sort of publishing practice were more commonplace? The modern day equivalent is more likely a person's blog or their wiki. Not enough people are publicly publishing their notes to see what this practice might look like for future generations.

Niklas Luhmann thought of the zettelkasten as a cybernetic system.

He considers a precondition of its creation is that it ought to waive any "fixed order", allow for search, and the asking of questions.

There are only the outlines of brief and scant thoughts here however, which would have required significant amounts of additional context not contained on the card. As a result one would require additional underpinning to understand what Luhmann means here as the card definitively couldn't have been directly or easily reused for future writing beyond the basic sketch outline he provides. What proportion of cards have brief thought sketches like this versus more fully thought out and directly reusable ideas within his system? Does Schmidt provide any guidance here without reading portions of the larger corpus? How does this differ from the guidance of Ahrens?

(Translation from German to English via Google)

Schmidt, J. F. (2018). Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: The Fabrication of Serendipity. Sociologica, 12(1), 53–60. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/8350

Annotating with Hypothes.is? https://docdrop.org/pdf/Niklas-Luhmanns-Card-Index_-Th---Schmidt-Johannes-F.K_-0rcv9.pdf/

Note that this article is a revised and shortened form of a chapter in Cevolini's Forgetting Machines. I'm tempted to just read that instead...

Some interesting examples here. Hadn't known about Nabokov. I knew of Schmidt, but not the title or subject of this particular book.