Josh Habgood-Coote

@impractknow

Philosopher | practical knowledge, collective inquiry, philosophy of technology | spends too much time running (picture eliot.ely)

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Bluesky

¿Es tu perfil?Reclámalo y impractknow.dirty.social es tuyo.Reclamar perfil

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· 12d

Italians! I'm translating a pesto recipe from the 1890s (for reasons). Can I get a check of whether this is rightish? I have extremely little Italian, and recipe nuance is difficult to get right!

Mettete in un mortaio tre o quattro spicchi d'aglio mondati, alcune foglie di basilico fresco 0 | conservato nell'olio (N° 5), un poco di formaggio di
Olanda e parmigiano, grattugiati e mescolati in-
sieme, e pestate il tutto finchè l’abbiate ridotto ad
una pasta, la quale scioglierete poi con ottimo olio
in abbondanza. Con questo pesto si condiscono al
magro le lasagne, i tagliatelli ed i gnocchi, unen| dovì prima qualche cucchiaiata di acqua bollente, di quella in cui si sarà fatto cuocere la pasta, a fine di renderlo più liquido.

Place into a mortar three or four cloves of garlic peeled, some fresh basil leaves or basil conserved in oil (No 5), some Dutch cheese and parmesan grated and mixed together, and pound everything until it is a paste that you will then loosen with abundant excellent oil. (25)

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· 15d

Oh great, British education policy since 1944 has been organised around the Myth of the Metals.

This harks back to some of the worst chapters in British education policy. I’m reminded of what Toby Weaver, who was a senior civil servant at the Department of Education from 1946 until 1973, said disparagingly of the 1944 Act (which created grammar schools, secondary moderns and technical colleges) and the thinking that pervaded the DfE at the time:

There was a general belief, I believe totally false, that children were divided into three kinds. It was sort of Platonic. There were golden children, and silver children, and iron children. The golden children were capable of going to a grammar school, they had minds, they could have abstract thinking. The technical children, the silver children so to speak, were technically orientated, and all the rest, they couldn’t handle ideas, they had to have concrete notions.

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· 17d

Map of Western Europe covered with active fires especially in southern France and spain

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· 19d

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· 20d

Reading John Ruskin is weird because one minute you're reading about flying buttresses, and then about how the laws of nature are compatible with divine omnipotence because reality is God's self-imposed game and what if Elephants had bones made of diamond???

Lastly, before leaving the subject of structural deceits, I would remind the architect who thinks that I am unnecessarily and narrowly limiting his resources or his art, that the highest greatness and the highest wisdom are shown, the first by a noble submission to, the second by a thoughtful providence for, certain voluntarily admitted restraints. Nothing is more evident than this, in that supreme government which is the example, as it is the centre, of all others. The Divine Wisdom is, and can be, shown to us only in its meeting and contending with the difficulties which are voluntarily, and for the sake of that contest, admitted by the Divine Omnipotence : and these difficulties, observe, occur in the form of natural laws or ordinances.

which might, at many times and in countless ways, be infringed with apparent advantage, but which are never infringed, whatever costly arrangements or adaptations their observance may necessitate for the accomplishment of given purposes. The example most apposite to our present subject is the structure of the bones of animals. No reason can be given, I believe, why the system of the higher animals should not have been made capable, as that of the Infusoria is, of secreting flint, instead of phosphate of lime, or, more naturally still, carbon ; so framing the bones of adamant at once. The elephant or rhinoceros, had the earthy part of their bones been made of diamond, might have been as agile and light as grasshoppers, and other animals might have been framed, far more magnificently colossal than any that walk the earth

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· 23d

Existential dread has a new face

Picture of Tadej Pogacar smiling in yellow

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· 27d

Nasts are loving life this year!

Overflowing yellow and orange nasturtiums

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· 28d

Ep Thompson with long hair looking thoughtful

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· Jul 8

Visma-Lease a bike cycling team has a new mascot (squints) who seems to be sexy gritty?

Screenshot of video of bee mascot lying in a field fanning themselves

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· Jul 6

And I got waay too into scrolling c1800 maps of east London where everything beyond Bethnal Green is allotments (you can literally see garden designs if you scroll in!) digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/887443...

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· Jul 6

I also went down a whole rabbit hole trying to find out exactly what flowers Spitalfields silk weavers grew and trying to match them to their cloth designs. which was how I found out about the self-taught designer Anna Maria Garthwaite www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-p...

silk pattern with peonies, fancy daffodils and unidentified blue flowers.

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· Jul 6

A couple of years ago I started wondering why I was spending so much time on hobbies cosplaying obsolete jobs. This is a go at an answer: I'm in the grips of *skill nostalgia*, and the problem is to avoid it becoming reactionary. It turns out John Ruskin (??) has the answer aeon.co/essays/the-r...

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· Jul 6

My dahlias (which I bought after reading about the gardens of Spitalfields) have not quite budded after being brutalised by slugs for months

Picture of a dahlia, many leaves about to be a flower bud

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· Jul 6

I wrote about 19th century silk weavers growing flowers, hobby obsessions, and the choice between revolutionary and reactionary nostalgia in Aeon aeon.co/essays/the-r...

Background picture of tools, text: Skill nostalgia
Is all the beekeeping, baking and leatherwork just escapist fantasy or the start of a radically human approach to work?

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· Jul 1

It's worse than that!

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· Jun 30

This is just the quiet part out loud; this is what google want readers to take seriously. But nowhere is this pushed back on. It's all 'google is struggling with the pressure to compete for profitability', not 'this company is causing environmental damage and rolling out unsafe products.

At one point my Google minder told me that she hoped I would come away from my visit to DeepMind with a sense of how seriously people at the company take their ethical obligations. That much seemed clear. The questions Gabriel and his colleagues have raised about the design and deployment of AI are unquestionably good ones, and I got no sense that anyone I met was insincere about their feelings of moral responsibility.

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· Jun 30

The choice of experts is also *interesting*. We get a little bit of AI ethics, with Gebru, Boulamwini, and Mitchell shouted out, but no quotes from anyone in what I'd think of as critical technology studies. All of the quotes are from Oxford people tied to the OII or Institute for Ethics in Ai.

DeepMind’s initial distrust of LLMs was not uncommon. In 2020, Timnit Gebru, a Google Research engineer who had worked with Buolamwini on Gender Shades, co-authored a broadside against the nascent technology titled On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots. The paper, which eventually became a cornerstone of anti-AI advocacy, made the controversial claim that LLMs could only ever produce technically meaningless text and possessed no more understanding of human language than a parrot does. It also accused the models of wanton energy consumption, rampant and unaccountable bias, and “amplification of a hegemonic worldview”. Stochastic Parrots came to wide notice when Google tried to block its release, an event that led to Gebru’s departure from the company and, ultimately, the firing of Margaret Mitchell, one of her co-authors. (Gebru and the company disagree whether she resigned or was fired.)

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· Jun 30

The position taken up in both of these passages is that technologies don't have values, because they get swamped by the values of their users. This is a WILD position in the philosophy of technology. There's no sensible defence of it.

Yet Gabriel also told me that he has softened his earlier stance somewhat. “The strange thing about being an ethicist is that you have some measure of personal responsibility for these outcomes. Your natural inclination is to always want to build the safest technology that takes no risks with people. But in a way that isn’t giving people credit for the risks they want to take themselves.” He recalled the hostile reaction he got from the audience at a tech conference after making the case against anthropomorphic AI. “They were like: ‘If I want to have [AI] friends, why can’t I? Who are you to stop me?’”

But she also insisted that some risks had to be managed by users themselves. “It’s like having a knife. A knife producer can’t guarantee how someone is going to use that knife. But they can put a cover on it so that it’s as safe as possible when it’s in a drawer. And make people really aware: this blade is sharp, do not use it in certain settings. That kind of thing.”

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· Jun 29

The sentences are my non-Irish speaking attempt to get all of the persons of the imperative mood in one place

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow· Jun 29

Ok! First and third person imperative: how would you describe the speech act (the thing the speaker is doing) most naturally associated with these sentences? (I've cut off the grammar information). The exact sentence doesn't matter, 'shops' might be clearer than 'protest'