No. 15: Pro/con lists, AI Prometheus, and virtue

Aeschylus/Cato/Cicero/Curie/Dostoevsky/Darwin/Franklin/Homer/Juvenal/Smith

Here's some things people have been writing:

Homer’s Odyssey monsters Charybdis and Scylla embody two ways fight online harassment. On one of the strait is letting firms limit free speech, on the other is state surveillance. wired

Darwin and Franklin were keen on pro/con lists when it came to life’s big choices. Lately folks have been saying that its the best way to make decisions is to listen to our gust. That’s wrong. mitpress

Juvenal, Cato, Cicero, and lots of American founders said self-government only works if people are virtuous. Today’s political movements—notably those concerned with abortion—aim at marginal victories in, for example, the Supreme Court. That’s not enough. thefederalist

Curie’s words, “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood,” Soothe Peter Hotez. Peter is a physician-researcher who spoke out about COVID misinformation and has been harassed by people who loathe what he has to say. nature

Smith’s feared monotonous factory work spilling over into people’s personal lives. My job is to backup an AI chatbot and I too feel as if I’m becoming more like a machine, impersonating it in my work. Is this the way our tech-driven world is headed? Is it good? wired

Homer’s Iliad is the namesake of a labyrinthine cancellation process for Amazon Prime. [chris: seems like the Odyssey or something Cretan would have better] theregister

Aeschylus wrote a trilogy about Prometheus, but only the first play survived. ChatGPT helped write a the final installment based off a few fragments. vulture

Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov sees its protagonist join a monastery. His father disapproves, saying he’ll “burn and burn out”. In fact, a monastic life—or at least the work-life balance that comes with it—may be the cure, not the cause, of burnout. theatlantic