His interview with Ray Kurzweil the other day was interesting. Kurzweil came across as a dithering idiot
Jonathan Haidt still has a lot of important things to say but there's been something going on with him in the last couple of years.
The part of the conversation linked to here was to do with individual intelligence and cultural intelligence, I think it's a significant observation. What sort of cultural intelligence will be inculcated into AI? Will it be factional or civic? It seems that Google went factional in this effort.
In his main argument about the bounding youth, I think he misses the change in community structure brought about by fragmentation.
Children don't have siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles and families that have known each other for generations so it's a different landscape they're in. Mutual conscientiousness is more atomised now. The idea of sending an eleven year out in Manhattan in 2020, as if it was the 1950 mosaic, seems a bit odd and foolhardy. The mosaic may have had different communities but the point is that there were communities rather than a wasteland.
His point about flashers and perverts is another off-centre point of view, one that ignores drag queen story hour and school tour burlesque dancing etc. I think these have been mainstreamed as the protective pickets around society were dismantled by mass commodification.
We tend to think of culture as something associated with Lady Gregory and The Dubliners (so consider it of high worth) but there are some subcultures that organise their mores around sinister abusive goals. The decay of village perimeters and an active defense have allowed such ghouls to slip in.
In fact, if you actually observe many of the foreigners that have come to live in Ireland you can see that their obedience to the sort of patterns that we associate with a strong family and work ethic are often more firmly held than our own. That's not to say there aren't brigands amongst them but to despise someone simply because of their provenance is a foolish habit. No villain should be permitted to evade punishment by way of an appeal to race or religion or locality be it theirs or our own.
I think his idea about phone-free schools is an excellent one and wonder at the fact that it isn't already in force. They would never have been allowed "in my day" - it'd be a whooping.
