Review: How America Lost Its Mind: The Assault on Reason That’s Crippling Our Democracy (Volume 15)

How America Lost Its Mind: The Assault on Reason That’s Crippling Our Democracy (Volume 15) by Thomas E. Patterson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[I read Audilble version with narrator Peter Lerman.]

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Review: Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty

Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

From the standpoint of the search for truths, it is noteworthy that Ptolemy, like Eudoxus, fully realized that his theory was just a convenient mathematical description which fit the observations and was not necessarily the true design of nature. For some planets he had a choice of alternative schemes and he chose the mathematically simpler one. Ptolemy says in Book XIII of his Almagest that in astronomy one ought to seek as simple a mathematical model as possible. But Ptolemy's mathematical model was received as the truth by the Christian world.

....

There are mathematicians who believe that the differing views on what can be accepted as sound mathematics will some day be reconciled. Prominent among these is a group of leading French mathematicians who write under the pseudonym of Nicholas Bourbaki:

Since the earliest times, all critical revisions of the principles of mathematics as a whole, or of any branch of it, have almost invariably followed periods of uncertainty, where contradictions did appear and had to be resolved.. There are now twenty-five centuries during which the mathematicians have had the practice of correcting their errors and thereby seeing their science enriched, not impoverished; this gives them the right to view the future with serenity.

However, many more mathematicians are pessimistic. Hermann Weyl, one of the greatest mathematicians of this century, said in 1944:

The question of the foundations and the ultimate meaning of mathematics remains open; we do not know in what direction it will find its final solution or even whether a final objective answer can be expected at all. "Mathematizing" may well be a creative activity of man, like language or music, of primary originality, whose historical decisions defy complete objective rationalization.

----
Faith


fact that these theorems use the axioms. However, they must be used to derive a large part of classical mathematics. In the second edi. tion of his Principles (1937), Russell backtracked still more. He said that "The whole question of what are logical principles becomes to a very considerable extent arbitrary." The axioms of infinity and choice "can only be proved or disproved by empirical evidence." Nevertheless, he insisted that logic and mathematics are a unity.

However, the critics could not be stilled. In his Philosophy of Mathemat- ics and Natural Science (1949), Hermann Weyl said the Principia based mathematics

not on logic alone, but on a sort of logician's paradise, a universe en- dowed with an "ultimate furniture" of rather complex structure. Would any realistically-minded man dare say he believes in this tran- scendental world?... This complex structure taxes the strength of our faith hardly less than the doctrines of the early Fathers of the Church or of the Scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages.

Still another criticism has been directed against logicism. Though ge- ometry was not developed in the three volumes of the Principia, it seemed clear, as previously noted, that by using analytic geometry, one

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Review: Ultimate Lost and Philosophy: Think Together, Die Alone - Library Edition

Ultimate Lost and Philosophy: Think Together, Die Alone - Library Edition by Sharon M. Kaye
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

[I read Audilble version with narrator John McCormick.]


eternalism vs presentism - Google Search

https://www.google.com/search?q=etern...

Branching
Many-worlds interpretation

Many-worlds is also called the relative state formulation or the Everett interpretation, after physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed it in 1957.

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Review: From Democracy To Democrazy: A Warning To All Americans

From Democracy To Democrazy: A Warning To All Americans by Elizabeth Graham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



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Review: Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood

Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"“We devolve to the individual so often because the structural and
systemic feels so daunting, and how are we going to actually shift
and change that? Also, because it feels so good to enact vengeance
on people who’ve harmed us."

Kyra Jones is, among other things, a prison abolitionist. Jones, a filmmaker who has acted on The Chi and has written for shows like Queens and Woke, told me she does not believe calling the police and putting people in prison meaningfully alters communities experiencing harm and violence for the better. For that reason, after she was raped, she agreed to go through a process called restorative justice (or transformative justice); it was led by author and activist Mariame Kaba, the author of We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice.

Whatever you think of prison abolition, Kaba’s work and writings on this and related topics are thought-provoking. She and other activists have explored ways to rethink and rebuild systems of
justice, violence prevention, and community care, all areas of American life that are certainly in need of enlightened change. And her work is relevant because Hollywood, like many communities in the United States, would often rather focus on the “one bad apple” theory of wrongdoing instead of get to the bottom of the whole troubling barrel.

In a 2021 interview, when discussing the trial of Derek Chauvin, who murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Kaba said, “We devolve to the individual so often because the structural and
systemic feels so daunting, and how are we going to actually shift and change that? Also, because it feels so good to enact vengeance on people who’ve harmed us. Part of the conversation we don’t have is just how much liminal pleasure people get out of vengeance, which is a big part of why it’s so hard to uproot that feeling and that desire within us as human beings.”

During my years of hearing about the actions of people in the entertainment industry who have harmed others—and I know of far more instances of abuse, damage, and violence than I’ve been able to publicly write about—I’ve felt those emotions. I have fantasized about going John Wick on a few individuals. I never would do that, of course (damn you, Buddhist nonviolence). But I’ve felt rage when I hear about what survivors have endured at the hands of nightmare people whose reigns of terror were barely a secret. On top of all that, Hollywood itself has trained many of us to think we’re entitled to vengeance, under the right circumstances. Or under almost any circumstances, really. The final act of every superhero or action film is, after all, usually just a whole bunch of punching, shooting, and killing.

But there is a difference between vengeance and justice, and there’s a big difference between exposing the abuse of one person and changing an entire social, cultural, and corporate apparatus for the better. I care about both, but I’m writing this book because I (and others) desperately long for the latter.

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Review: American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains by Dan Flores
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women's Lives Forever

The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women's Lives Forever by Lydia Reeder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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