Nice to discover Judea Pearl ask a fundamental question. What's an 'inductive bias'?

Conscious and conscience are two words that share the same origin but mean two different things. The bias against explanations of consciousness comes from the conflation of these two words.

In addition, the question of free will is also adjacent to the notion of both consciousness and conscience. The ideas of consciousness, conscience, and free will serve as the foundation of justice in our civilization. (care to add another?)

So when we see people fail to condemn an act that is morally repugnant, we wonder if they have a conscience. But we don't wonder if they are conscious. When we incarcerate a person, we ask if they had "free will" but we inquire if they were 'conscious' during the crime.

The presence of consciousness and free will imply sentience. Which is the same as conscious and sounds just like a conscience. Our biases have muddled all the words together to likely mean the same thing.

The words that we use today continue to evolve. The same word can have a different meaning in the past. The word empathy is a recent word invented in the early 1900s. Originally it meant to place oneself from the viewpoint of a thing. Today we don't use it in this way.

"Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love." - C.S. Peirce 1893

These words were spoken prior to the discovery of quantum mechanics and computation. What if Peirce knew of these discoveries? If so, how would he have conceptualized these evolutionary modes differently?

I believe there is an extreme benefit in revisiting the writings of great minds in the past and refining them based on scientific discoveries that occurred only in their futures.

wrote the book "A New Kind of Science" that speculated how science would be different if computers existed prior to calculus.

In the same way, let me explore C.S.Peirce ideas of evolutionary philosophy from the vantage point of knowing of the discoveries of quantum physics and universal computation.

This is an insightful article about what's wrong with Google as compared to Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook.

Which actually reminds me of the difference between organic and engineered designs:

Organic or biological designs are reusable designs from the ground up. They accommodate the needs of the environment because of the generality of the architecture. They don't pretend to solve just a narrow problem.

Architectures like biology that lead to general intelligence (i.e. like you) are from the ground up built from reusable components that encourage combinatorial mixing opportunities. One can never correctly guess the needs of the environment (i.e. market).

The opposite of generalization is pre-mature optimization. A company that has is genesis as a one-product company has a bias toward optimizing the entire stack. As a consequence, it compromises reusability and thus shuts of future opportunities of evolution.

So, here's my contrarian take on Why Trunk-Based Development Is Great But Probably Won't Work For You. Buckle up, it's a long one.

From time to time I talk about, or boost someone else's discussion of, "classical" continuous integration/trunk-based development/push-to-master/whatever. I do this because I've personally worked like this and I genuinely think it's a marvelous way to write software.

I've also, at this point in my career, failed—a bunch of times!—to bring this technique into practical use on the teams and organizations I've worked with. As a result, while I still do it myself, I don't focus as much on encouraging it in others.

The technoculture that's presently in vogue is what I think of as async/individual—optimize for the individual, performance-manage the individual, decouple the individual from others so they can be their best, most productive, most heroic selves.

This is in contrast to what I think of as sync/team—a culture that leans into interdependence and collaboration. If you've never worked on a team that collaborates very closely every day for months or years on end (and likes it) you've likely not experienced a team like this.

@jeffreyatucker In the end, it is all a natural consequence of a very human foible, namely that we all do everything we can to blame anybody or anything else for our problems, if we can get away with it. It's the reason why rulers start wars to squelch domestic dissent - macro and micro the same

The very notion of the germ theory of disease revolves around this and while it is good for selling medical interventions, treatments and pharmaceuticals, it is no good for either personal health, or public health in any way. We need to start looking at health on a holistic level

More of a systems approach to health would get us to see that the whole instinct to stamp out viruses, like the very counter-factual notion of "zero Covid," and other nonsense, are driven by this need to blame somebody or something else for our problems, so we can have our cake

and eat it too, i.e. we can pass the blame to others and go and kill them, be they bugs or other people (lockdowns???). The results are disastrous for health on both a personal and a public level, and we continue on a path of assured self-destruction. But times are changing, now.

Lifestyle Medicine @aclifemed provides the new paradigm, more of a systems approach to health, in which personal responsibility for our habits comes first, starting with nutrition. Immune systems become depressed by fatigue, stress, inner conflict, malnutrition and so on. Change

With Myanmar, it seems that some are raising questions about the efficacy of sanctions and concerns about unintended consequences. It’s time for a “Myth and Realities” guide. THREAD. #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar

Myth: Human rights groups are calling for blanket sanctions on Myanmar.
 
Reality: This is false. Most human rights groups are calling for targeted measures directed solely at the military of Myanmar and companies it owns and which give revenue directly to it.

We are talking about the conglomerates and corporations that control the country’s natural resources, including the concessions for extractive sectors (oil and gas, timber, and mining of gemstones, jade, and valuable metals).

We’re calling on governments to focus on revenues and block transactions or seize government or state assets only where there is credible information that the military or its leaders are looting or acquiring state revenues or redirecting it to them.

Myth: Even if tailored narrowly, targeted sanctions will have major negative impacts on the people of Myanmar.
 
Reality: There are all kinds of ways to prevent unintended consequences on the broader Myanmar economy.