My CMS The View from a New City

During my lifetime I have heard many financial advisors counseling people to set aside for retirement. Contrary to that advice, I spent every available penny from my often uncertain income getting six children into the world then feeding them and educating them and promoting their well being.

In my case, at least, I now count a group of at least twenty-something people–and growing–who take an interest in seeing that my wife and I are well housed, entertained, fed and cared for. A pretty good return on investment, I would say. Luckily, we don’t have to call on them for too much at present, but our chances of starving to death seem pretty small.

Between 2012 and 2014, my wife and I were public affairs missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Manhattan, New York. Our office had a couple of twenty-something interns. the Broadway Musical, Wicked was very popular. To improve our interns’ chances of getting tickets in the ticket lottery offered by the Musical’s office, we would go with them and stand in line.

One day, while standing in the Wicked lottery line a middle aged couple noticed our missionary name tags and came over to talk to us. They said they were not members of the Church but wanted to tell us about their friend who was. They told us that as a young person this woman had been very wild. “there wasn’t anything she didn’t do, tats (tattoos) and all,” they said. They lost close contact with her, over the years, but somewhere along the line she joined the Church. Recently they received an invitation from her to attend the church talks her twin sons were giving upon returning from their church missions to South America.

The couple said when they first saw their friend they hardly recognized her, or her husband who they had also known as a wild young man. Then the couple said, “their two boys were two of the finest young men you could ever meet.”

Matthew 7:16 “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”

I am an old man. All my life so called scientists have claimed that they are on the verge of discovering the Grand Unified Theory of everything. They predicted science could produce life as in Frankenstein. They claimed that DNA, would completely explain birth and death. Cosmologists such as Stephen Hawking predicted that GUT would soon be ours. And now the tech bros are predicting that AI will soon be the solution to all mankind’s problems. But during my life these boasts have turned out to be false promises. DNA is not the sufficient explanation of life and genetics that its proponents had claimed and evolutionists have had to resort to punctuated equilibrium. Cosmologist’s claims have been exposed as inadequate by 90% by dark matter and dark energy, and AI has been hallucinating. The existence of human life and civilization on this round little oasis in the void of space is still as miraculous and unaccountable as ever.

On the off chance that anyone should care, I offer my list of favorite books other than the scriptures:

The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, an Egyptian Endowment, by Hugh Nibley

One Eternal Round, by Hugh Nibley

Hamlet’s Mill,by De Santillana and Von Dechend

The Hero with a Thousand Faces , by Joseph Campbell

Anyone who reads these books will understand why my favorite movie is Joe vs. the Volcano.

To quote Hamlet: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” 

We learned in church today from a medical doctor that dosing is a critical skill. Even water is a poison in too high a dose.

consider this from President Dallin H. Oaks:

https://www.byutv.org/5afa02c6-de82-4699-85e1-a110e061ec42/elder-dallin-h-oaks–our-strengths-can-become-our-downfall?player-open=true&content-id=5afa02c6-de82-4699-85e1-a110e061ec42

I read a Youtube post suggesting that we thwart the AI companies by inserting corrupt data into the internet so that when they scrape our data without our permission it will corrupt the AI output. I think there is no real need to go to all that trouble. Human creation is inherently unreliable, contradictory, chaotic and fluid. Getting truth by scraping human made data is a hopeless undertaking. Humans can’t even agree on what truth is, much less on what data is true.

My current understanding is that AI is not thinking and never can think. During training, AI is creating a very long list of possible responses from which it chooses when something appears in the prompt. The fact that the response is coded in an intelligent sounding sentence gives the impression that the response is reasoned rather than just selected. The fact that a response is sometimes composed from several selected items adds to the illusion of thought. Choosing from a list is nothing new to computer programming.

Today I had an inspiration while reading about the almost universal rejection of imperialism in society. So I now prophesy though I may not live to see its fulfillment.

Over the last few years I have fretted about the rise of Donald J. Trump and everything he stands for: racism, sexism, immorality, corruption, pathological dishonesty, vulgarity, shamelessness, hypocrisy, etc. I now see that my anxiety was misplaced. The world is waking up to the stench of Trump-ism and will reject it everywhere and forcefully. Vice and arrogance will still exist, but the Trumpian manifestation of it will be almost universally abhorred.

At a reception yesterday, Dr. (call him Doe) told us how he told God to intervene in his daughter’s life and that God responded something like, “Hold on there! She is my daughter too and I know what I am doing.”

The Book of Mormon uses the phrase “dwindle in unbelief” to characterize the decline and disintegration of both the Nephites and the Lamanites. As the angel prophesied in 1 Nephi 12:22,23 And the angel said unto me: Behold these shall dwindle in unbelief. And it came to pass that I beheld, after they had dwindled in unbelief they became a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations.

An 18th century writer named Giambattista Vico, perhaps the first anthropologist, summarized the trajectory of civilizations as follows:

“Vico saw mankind–nations, civilizations, cultures–as going through progressive stages from bestiality to high civilization and then sinking back into barbarism [the later worse than the first]…The original barbarians possess rude virtues; the later have none left…Crowded city life produces men who are unbelievers, who regard money as the measure of all things, and who lack moral qualities, particularly modesty, duty to the family, and virile courage. Emancipated from ethics generally,they live by mutual spying and deceit.”

Jacques Barzun; From Dawn to Decadence; page 315