Rex > Recent Status Updates

…liked to act the fool and assume all sorts of surprising roles; he would do so even when he had nothing to gain, indeed, even when it could be positively to his disadvantage…This is a quirk found in many people, even very clever ones…

In most cases, people, even the most vicious, are much more naive and simple-minded than we assume them to be. And this is true of ourselves too.

Divine justice pales before the enormity of earthly injustice and loss.

For an eccentric is not necessarily an exception or an isolated phenomenon; indeed it often happens that it is he who embodies the very essence of his time while his contemporaries somehow seem to have been cut loose from it by gusts of an alien wind.

Yet, if the The Brothers Karamazov is about the way in which grace travels through the world, what does plagiarism mean in this context?

How Memory occupies such a pivotal theme in Dostoevsky’s works, is something that always fascinates me.

Form and content become inseparable. Dostoevsky’s idea here, is that a precious memory of love can exert a unique, sustaining, and unexpected power over people.

If parents fail to turn the family into a school of love, sacrifice, and patient endeavor, the family becomes the place of judgements, violence, and crime.

— Vladimir Golstein

"Most novelists reproduce all the external appearances—tricks of manner, landscape, dress….—but very rarely, and only for an instant, penetrate to the tumult of thought which rages within his own mind. But the whole fabric of a book by Dostoevsky is made out of such material….We have to get rid of the old tune….to realize how little of our humanity is expressed in that old tune." — Virginia Woolf

The characters in this novel have attained the status of myth. Moreover, Dostoevsky, in this, as in all his other novels, indirectly has encouraged his readers to duplicate in the act of reading the dilemmas of the characters. Dostoevsky’s reader is an implicated reader.

Despite our love of or at least infatuation with the easy stimulations of the virtual, we can never make a true home there, at least not without sacrificing the qualities of sense and sensibility that make us most ourselves. Live in a simulation long enough, and you begin to think and talk like a chatbot. Your thoughts and words become the outputs of a prediction algorithm.

People routinely say they worry about how the internet distracts them from their surroundings. But their behavior suggests the reverse is probably closer to the truth…. Reality has become a distraction from media.

If you're good with words, people will understand you. They'll understand you even if you don't know what you're talking about.

It is prudent to consider the existential risks associated with AI, particularly now that, after decades of disappointment, the technology is advancing at a pace far beyond what most experts were predicting just a few years ago. That we don't understand exactly what's going on inside an LLM's neural network, just as we don't understand how our own neurons produce thoughts, is disconcerting, to say the least.

But what the phenomenon makes clear is that the transmission of messages can be metamorphic, altering physical and mental states at a deep level. Through its emphasis on repetition and imitation, social media does more than influence people's opinions. It shapes and sometimes shakes the very foundations of their being.

Familiarity may breed contempt when it comes to judging people, but when it comes to judging information, it breeds gullibility. If social media has an intellectual creed, it is a creed of repetition - the creed of the mob, the huckster and the tyrant.

"(Several studies) reveal how ill-suited the human psyche is to our new media environment. As connections multiply and messages proliferate, relationships get stretched thin. Mistrust spreads. Antipathies mount. That's the tragedy of communication."

"…Media efficiency, when pushed to an extreme, so accelerates the flow of information that people no longer have the luxury of careful reading, methodical evaluation, and contemplative inquiry. The breezes of influence combine into a whirlwind. Attention splinters, understanding grows thin. Rather than leveling barriers to knowledge and sympathy, communication itself becomes a barrier."

"If, as William Wordsworth suggested, "the origin of poetry lies in emotion recollected in tranquility," then the writing of a letter brought at least a little of the poetic sensibility into people's otherwise busy days…The writing of letters gave them a means of constructing a distinct experiential self. Letters served as testaments as well as sacraments."

"The slowness of the mail removed letter writing from lives everyday toing-and-froing. The delay between writing and reading cleared a space for introspection, for organizing one's thoughts without regard to society's demands for immediate reaction and response."

“letters of friendship, love, and affection, are sacred things, and should be so imbued with the spirit of the writer, as to render them worthy of the devoted attention they call for.”

“Social media is not successful because it goes against our instincts and desires. It's successful because it gives us what we want. As a machine for harvesting attention,its productivity is unmatched. As a machine for bending the will, it is a triumph of efficiency. In engineering what we pay attention to,it also engineers much else about us — how we talk, how we see other people, how we experience the world.”

"The public-interest standard is more than a legal principle. It's an ethical principle. It ensures the people's right to have a say in the workings of the institutions and systems that shape their lives, a right fundamental to a true democracy and a just society. The vagueness of the standard is necessary for a simple reason: in a pluralistic society, the public interest changes as the public mind changes."

"Innis put it bluntly:"Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult." Despite the thrilling, relentless expansion of people's ability to exchange information…despite the unprecedented opportunities for friendly intercourse between nations, the 20th century turned out to be the bloodiest in history. We have been telling ourselves lies about communication—and about ourselves."

In this parable, what saved the younger son is his comprehension that he is his Father's son.

“A true encounter is rarely experienced. People’s paths cross,they come up against one another—how many pass by in the course of a single day without seeing us?And how many are those at whom we look with unseeing eyes,to whom we address, neither a look, nor word,nor smile?We must learn to look and to see—to look attentively, thoughtfully…We must start on a real pilgrimage! How difficult it is to be just!”