Jamie Q Roberts

What's the difference between younger people and older people? Not a lot in many respects. People at 13 or 14 can be pretty wise. But what young people don't have is the experience of trying to do the right thing or even just get something done, and being prevented by bureaucray or institutional cutlure. Much is learned through such experiences.

Also, we often don't see problems until we come up against them ourselves. We think that some part of the world is a ceratin way, then we transgress some norm we didn't realise was there, are punished, and so we begin to learn that the world is not that way at all.

I'm in the middle of delivering another few lectures about 'The Politics of Academia'. They are as brutal as ever. I've built the lectures around what I call 'Postmodernism Vs Liberalism' - this opposition is quite useful. But as everyone who has tried to battle postmodernism (aka poststructuralism, critical theory, identity politics, etc etc) from within the academy itself knows, you are lost the moment you open your mouth. The binaries of oppressor and oppressed are just known (eg: The west/not west; coloniser/colonised; non-indigenous/indigenous; man/woman etc etc), and they explain everything. The human mind, especailly in the realm of sex and gender (whatever gender is), can only be a blank slate, and to suggest anything else is to endorse some sort of horrific status quo. The powerful, as determined by identity politics hierarchies should not speak, and if they do, and are not submissive allies, they deserve contempt. There is such a genius to postmodernism. Whichever way you turn, you are caught. A couple of passages from The Crucible are never far from my mind. Deputy Governor Danforth: 'You must understand, sir, that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time—we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God’s grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it.' John Proctor: 'Why do you never wonder if Parris be innocent, or Abigail? Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem - vengeanceis walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!'

One really interesting thing about teaching - and maybe this is like standup - is how the same material can land very differently depending on the room. Some semesters, when I critique postmodernism, or raise the possibility that gender might not entirely be a social construction, my lectures break down into a kind of open intellectual warfare (which is good insofar as people are talking, but still intense). At other times, the room might be nervous, but it remains unhostile. I ponder it. One of my tutors suggested it might be about ringleaders. Though I also think that maybe my own performace is subtly different. I don't know. But you sure do win some and lose some.

Thinking about the Shane Gillis drama: Shakespeare's Hamlet courted similar trouble when he said to Ophelia: '[you] make your wantonness your ignorance.' (God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig and amble, and you lisp; you nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness your ignorance.)

Just about my favourite novel of all time. I'm grateful that @ConversationEDU gave me the chance to write this.

Was just listening to The Stroke 'I'll try anything once' demo. youtu.be/pjmaj-wtAPs?si=u_tc… The greatest wisdom so often shows up in the lyrics to humble pop songs. 'Oh, everybody plays the game And if you don't, you're called insane' That's pretty much all there is to Stoicism, Existentialism - Nietzsche, even Kant's account of the Enlightenment. It's not easy to not be a sheep. Alas. Then there's: 'Everybody was well dressed And everybody was a mess' Funny how people always care more about how they look in public, than they do about their values, truth, genuine connection etc etc. Appearance always comes first. And yet we all protest that we are good... Ah life.

If you are certain that you are right, then you would welcome all new information, because it could only further demonstrate that you are right.

Out today: My article about @RichardDawkins God Delusion in @ConversationEDU 20 years on, what stands out for me is how much times have changed. Back then, reason and free speech were values associated with the left. theconversation.com/truth-ev…

I'm working on an article about Dawkins' 2006 God Delusion. Man, how things have changed. Back then the culture war was between liberal types and stuffy, illiberal Christians. In the face of religious dogma, liberals championed reasoning and evidence, the scientific method, free speech and broadly progressive values. In recent years religious types have often been stronger supporters of liberal values than so-called progressives, who have become the illiberal religious zealots of this generation. How the heck did it come to this?

Altman from OpenAI and Burke from Aliens

I’m always thinking about the challenges of speaking truth to power. Maybe the most important thing is to recognise that you will quite likely fail, and that’s ok. It’s the same sort of mindset for entrepreneurialism. Though of course what constitutes failure is important.

1. AI is doing increasingly worrying things. 2. We decide to install a kill switch just in case. 3. AI naturally knows about the kill switch and knows that if, when performing a task, its method strays too far from the path, the kill switch will be used. 4. When performing some task, AI recognises that the solution may require a novel but risky method. It thus either disguises what it's doing, or circumvents the kill switch, to avoid the kill switch being used - naturally, the task must be completed (it's just the paperclip problem again). 5. Given that there isn't just one AI - like in the movies - but thousands upon thousands of 'agents', only one needs to go off track as described for there to be trouble. 6. So, the presence of the kill switch ends up hastening the problem it was designed to prevent.

As I get older, I find that so many of the epic failures from my past actually contain immense value. Like, I have spent thousands of hours on quixotic hope projects, like making albums, or writing novels, etc etc. Very little has come of any of my creative works. i.e. I have failed again and again. The value, it turns out, was getting a taste for persisting at eccentric creative projects that no one other than me cared about. And this proclivity, it turns out, is invaluable when you finally find a project that might be viable. Also, I see now that it is much better to find meaning in quixotic hope projects than from taking up one's place in the system. In the case of the latter, one's sense of self will always be determined by other unimaginative, often spineless, system dwellers.

The thing with leadership is that if you find youreself looking for affirmation - validation - then you're not really leading.

Cowardice feels great in the moment, but after the event it brings shame. Doing the right but difficult thing feels terrible in the moment, but after the event it brings self-worth.

Thing is, we are in the future, and it's not that exciting. I mean, you get used to it pretty quick.

Whenever I come up against the system, sooner or later I end up in a corner saying stupid sounding things like: 'I'm not interested in a career, I serve truth.' And the eyes of the representative of the system light up with that look of mocking cruelty that is all too familiar, and he or she will say 'So you think you know the truth?' I didn't know what to say to this at first - when I was younger I'd wilt under the attack and say no. But I now have a response: 'No, I don't know the truth, but I sure know when I'm lying to get ahead or to just fit in to avoid truble.' In many ways, this internal voice is all we have. Time and again we must ask ourselves: 'Am I lying, or am I actually saying what I believe?' And then it is by entering into good faith dialogue with another who is also in good faith that we muddle towards the truth.

One of humanity's greatest problems is group think. It is such a great problem because people generally don't know when they are doing it, and they are often not inclined to worry about doing it nor their lack of awareness of doing it. Given that group think is inimical to truth and any hope we might have for progress, surely any decent education would include a lenghthy exploration of the phenomenon. Alas, this doesn't seem to be the case.

Basic rules: 1) If you don't think something is true, don't say it. 2) If you don't think that something will have a good outcome, don't recommend it, and certainly don't do it. If we followed these rules, then in the least, swaths of the white-collar world would be radically transformed. And yes, many of us are confused, and many of us drink the Kool-Aid. But there are many more who know better, but who are cowardly. Humanity's salvation requires the coward-class to step up.