Velcro City Tourist Board

Month: October 2019

  • Equinoctial

  • A more humane and generous account

    Eugene McCarraher at Aeon: If it’s long past time to deny that ‘there is no alternative’ to capitalism, the time has come to renounce the parochial secular dogma of ‘the disenchantment of the world’. The pre-modern belief in the enchantment of the world – modernised in Romanticism, blending scientific rationality with Hopkins’s conviction of God’s…

  • Staring down Roko’s basilisk

    Pete Wolfendale: We have consistently overestimated what computation is capable of throughout history, whether computation was seen as an algorithmic method executed by humans, or a process of automated deduction realised by a machine. The fictional record is crystal clear on this point. Instead of imagining machines that can do a task better than we can, we imagine machines…

  • Exile sickness

    Asylum officers aren’t professionals at anything. They believe themselves to be experts at rooting out lies. They’re not. They routinely ignore the advice of medical and legal professionals, replacing their own biased judgment. They’re incentivized not to save lives but to dig for inconsistencies, some of which are everyday human error, and to reject. The…

  • Utrecht