One of the defining moments in the legal fight with the tobacco manufacturers came when smoking was deemed an addiction. This was a shift that the cigarette industry had fiercely contested and that even the public was slow to accept.
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“so many people were shocked and upset when, in 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing system defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov. This event so stunned Kasparov that he accused the IBM team of cheating; he assumed that for the machine to play so well, it must have received help from human experts.2 (In a nice bit of irony, during the 2006 World Chess Championship matches the tables were turned, with one player accusing the other of cheating by receiving help from a computer chess program.3) Our collective human angst over Deep Blue quickly receded. We accepted that chess could yield to brute-force machinery; playing chess well, we allowed, didn’t require general intelligence after all. This seems to be a common response when computers surpass humans on a particular task; we conclude that the task doesn’t actually require intelligence. As John McCarthy lamented, ‘As soon as it works, no one calls it AI any more.’4”
― Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
― Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
“We cannot navigate, without something to aim at and, while we are in this world, we must always navigate.”
― 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
― 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There are no miracle people. It happens they get interested in this thing and they learn all this stuff, but they’re just people.”
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“The Marxist constituency has remained as narrow as the conception behind it. The Communist Manifesto, written by two bright and articulate young men without responsibility even for their own livelihoods—much less for the social consequences of their vision—has had a special appeal for successive generations of the same kinds of people. The offspring of privilege have dominated the leadership of Marxist movements from the days of Marx and Engels through Lenin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and their lesser counterparts around the world and down through history. The sheer reiteration of the "working class" theme in Marxism has drowned out this plain fact.”
― Marxism: Philosophy and Economics
― Marxism: Philosophy and Economics
“Reading is the ultimate meta-skill that can be traded for anything else.”
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Arun ’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Arun ’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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