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OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Apr 06, 2017
How French “Intellectuals†Ruined the West:
Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained
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I am more or less a post-modernist, though I arrived at my
understanding of the core ideas independently of the
authors cited in this article (though on reading them find
myself nodding in agreement). So I appreciate this clear
and articulate description of postmodernism, and the
argument offered against it. And I am sympathetic with the
observation that the postmodernists did not exactly make
their position clear. To me, it is clear, but you have to
step through a rhetorical mess to get to it. It's a bit
hard to do in one paragraph, but let me try:
Let's take the criticism offered by Erazim Kohak to the
effect that "tennis balls do not fit into wine bottles".
How is this not a fact? he asks. On observation, it is easy
to see that tennis balls do fit into wine bottles, but the
context here is of trying to squeeze it into the bottle
through the opening. Now what has happened here is that the
problem has been framed in such a way as to allow only one
way for a tennis ball to 'fit' into a wine bottle. But why
would we frame it that way? Why do we privilege Kohak's
description of tennis balls and wine bottles and how one
fits into the other? Once you ask that question, you become
a postmodernist.
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Why we never think alone
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This short post is a restatement of something from
Steven Sloman
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that has appeared numerous times in these pages over the
years: "Humans have built hugely complex societies and
technologies, but most of us don't even know how a pen or a
toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite
understanding so little? Because whilst individuals know
very little, the collective or ‘hive' mind knows a
lot." To make this work, though, is to walk a fine line.
Yes, there is the "fundamentally communal nature of
intelligence and knowledge," but we can create it only if
we interoperate as autonomous individuals.
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Getting Web Services Up and Running on Amazon Web Services
(AWS) Using Vagrant and the AWS CLI
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This is the sort of stuff I've been working on recently.
This is a particularly useful project: "here’s an
example of how to get a browser based application up and
running on EC2 using vagrant from the command line." The
description is pretty detailed and is probably not for
everyone. But the main point here is that this type of
server virtualization is the wave of the future - and (more
importantly) is what will enable the next wave of personal
web presences (I'm not really sure what to call them - more
than sites, less than applications).
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes
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