[FRIAM] genai and critical thinking
steve smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Tue Feb 11 16:16:24 EST 2025
On 2/11/25 10:15 AM, glen wrote:
> There's a Nurse Anesthetist I sometimes drink with who is dyslexic. He
> once described how difficult it was for him to get through his
> schooling and how it seems to compare to his wife's experience getting
> through her Nurse Practitioner schooling. I waffle between wondering
> if this guy's actually 100x smarter than the people around him, which
> is what allowed him to grit his way through that; versus the
> perspective that we *all* have persnickety little details about how
> our bodies work that somehow evens out the struggle. Maybe we're all
> equivalently sized tensors, but the weights are differently distributed?
This is how I read Vonnegut's _/Harrison Bergeron/_ (short story) when I
first read it:
<begin GPT 4o offering of a summary>
/In this dystopian tale, society enforces strict equality by using
*handicaps* to suppress any form of advantage—whether physical,
intellectual, or artistic. Strong people wear weights, intelligent
people have distracting earpieces, and beautiful people wear masks.
The story follows Harrison Bergeron, an exceptionally gifted
individual who rebels against this oppressive system./
/It’s a satirical critique of forced equality and government
control, with Vonnegut exploring themes of individualism, freedom,
and the dangers of extreme egalitarianism./
/</end AI provided text>
Vonnegut, true to form was caricaturing something and I (also true to
one of my forms) was seeking the counter-example/argument and wanted to
notice that *everyone* is (dis)advantaged across a spectrum of (Assembly
Theoretic) composition of nature/nurture precursors to the imminent
next-state.
The conclusion in HB was in the spirit of Ghandi's "An eye for an eye
will make the whole world blind." Pretty much what MAGA seems to be
lining up on? And perhaps what they percieve "wokism" to be leaning
toward as well?
> If the latter is the case (which I tend to believe - maybe
> confirmation of my rejection of the Great Man theory and meritocracy),
> then the appreciation for a well-timed meme or a pithy/profound tweet
> (neither of which I have) is on par with an appreciation for, say,
> Paradise Lost or whatever book allows one to virtue signal to one's
> MENSA buddies.
>
> But even if the latter is the case, my perspective on it still seems
> individualistic. The appreciation for snark and sick memes still
> resides deep in one's psyche. It's centralized. The compute isn't on
> the leaves as it is with something like mob mentality or that
> exhilaration you feel at a rave or a protest.
I think this is a deep (and possibly fundamental?) observation but I'll
be damned if I can un-pack/tangle/fold it effectively.
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