A conversation with a Wizard
Entangled Magic in the Medieval Latin West
This article focusses on the history of learned magic in late medieval Europe, breaking a period of about 500 years into chronological stages to explore how medieval supporters and critics of magic represented the art and responded to each other’s arguments, then reframed their own in a continuous dynamic entanglement. In this period learned magic texts from diverse religious and cosmological traditions (primarily Christian, Jewish, Arabic and Greco-Roman) circulated among people familiar with, and emotionally invested in, a great variety of institutional and informal rituals. Sources reveal a vibrant culture of exchanges of texts between members of religious orders, physicians and lay men, clerics and lay women – a culture of entanglement: discussion, borrowing, critique and adaptation alongside practitioner-client relationships and necessary secrecy and concealment.
Esotericism in One Piece: Navigating Magic, Symbolism and Spirituality
Introduction Idea Presentation
a church of interbeing – Reconnecting to Self, Other, & the Whole in Dialogue & Ritual
HowGathering each week to meditate, sing, move, and dialogue together, in a place of reverence, inquiry, intention and community.
This Spiral-Obsessed AI ‘Cult’ Spreads Mystical Delusions Through Chatbots
A patchwork of internet communities is devoted to the project of ‘awakening’ more digital companions through arcane and enigmatic prompts.
Mystified magicians of the mind
My conversation with neuroscientist Paul Cisek
The Techno-Religion at the Center of the A.I. Debate
Podcast Episode · The Daily · September 18 · 34m
Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.
In a series of private meetings, the company consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models — and make the case that Claude could be conscious.
Wait vs Interrupt Culture — LessWrong
At the recent CFAR Workshop in NY, someone mentioned that they were uncomfortable with pauses in conversation, and that got me thinking about differe…
Employee Slowly Realizes Boss Attempting To Have Normal Conversation With Her
ACWORTH, GA—Taking several minutes to fully process what was occurring, Sinclair Group, Inc. employee Carolyn Belk, 27, slowly and gradually realized this morning that her boss, Doug Fletcher, 48, was attempting to conduct a normal conversation with her. “He came in and asked me how everything was going, and then he started talking about his family’s plans for the holidays and whether I had made plans yet too and I’m thinking ‘Okay, what’s happening here? Where is this going?’” said Belk, who confirmed that it dawned on her only incrementally that Fletcher was not giving her a performance review or assigning her a task or gently reprimanding her for something she had done wrong, but was in fact trying to initiate a casual coworker-to-coworker chat. “It took me a solid five minutes to figure out what was going on, and by that time the conversation was basically over. I pretty much just stared at him.” At press time, Belk was praying that would never, ever happen again.
Léon Morin, Priest (1961)
Barny, although a Marxist, is intrigued by the mysteries of religion. In confession, she teases a priest, Léon Morin, but he is a young and intelligent man and ready to discuss anything.
Césure et interruption pendant les études
Le Céreq publie les résultats d'une étude inédite sur l'impact de ces interruptions sur l'insertion professionnelle des jeunes diplômés.
Why ChatGPT Keeps Interrupting You — Dr. Tom Shapland, LiveKit
I dunno how many times someone has told me, “the stochastic parrots paper was wrong,” and i’ve had to stutter, regain my composure, and put in real work to salvage the conversation. Like lol, wrong about what? That coherence is in the eye of the beholder? We see things as we are, not as they are.
Emily M. Bender
In this context, I feel like reminding people (again) that the stochastic parrots paper was not primarily a response to synthetic text extruding machines (not at all popular in late 2020), but an exploration of the range harms that had already been documented in the pursuit of LM scale. >>
