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All Wet like a River

Heraclitus exists only in fragments.  That’s unfortunate because aphorisms are not the best way to tackle the hubris of the technocrat.  He was on to something though.  We all know his well-worn saying about stepping into rivers.  He tells us that they’re never the same twice.  And yet they stay the same.  Beware, then, the […]

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Symbiotic Machines and Our Ignorance

Well, what are we to make of all this? Here’s something I came across in Diane Coyle’s recent book, “Cogs and Monsters”: “A large range of factual subjects, evidently part of science and duly explainable (in principle) by empirical methods operating under natural laws, treats different kinds of inordinately complex and historically contingent systems — […]

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Democracy? Surely Not!

Let’s stir things up for the New Year by continuing with one of my recent themes. A quote from an opinion piece in the NYT this morning [January 3rd]: “James Madison boasted that the Constitution achieved “the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity.” Its elaborate political mechanics reflect the elite dislike and […]

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