The first citation given concerns the “uniqueness problem,” which emphasizes a result long known by those of us who worked on IIT: that in systems that have mathematically perfectly symmetric interactions (the specifics are complicated, but just imagine this like a geometric shape), IIT gives conflicting answers as to the boundaries of the... See more
We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.
Although late to the party, this year Universal, through Virgin Music Group, acquired Downtown Music Holdings for $775 million in cash in December 2024. Downtown Music Holdings includes a number of companies, most notably CD Baby, Fuga, AdRev, SongTrust, and Downtown. Through these companies, Universal now owns independent music recordings,... See more
To me, what’s happening with teaching reading looks very much like what has happened with teaching writing, namely that we reduce something complex, human, and necessarily messy, to something smaller, discrete and oversimplified so it can be tested and measured, in order to provide comfort that we’re making “progress.”
That is, of course, more or less the rub: if the Xerox machine is somewhat of a troubling invention, everything about our modern-day computer-rich ecosystem is a thousand times worse. My phone syncs to my tablet syncs to my laptop; the value proposition of every device on my person is that it instantaneously and unquestioningly shares copies — of... See more