Christopher Daradics

Conversation Sparks: How has AI caused you to reconsider “the work” of language teaching and learning? Thanks to @getoverhear for this philosophical response. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in a comment or ✨ a conversation with colleagues IRL.

UK Festival of Commoning, 2024 A simple website, an acorn from which a movement might grow. This will hopefully enable lots of Commoning projects in the UK to connect, and - more urgently - will- CROWDFUND THE SEED OF THE FESTIVAL! Please share widely! festival-of-commoning.org/

We will rise or fall to the level of our cultural affordances. And nowhere have we created more pathological affordances...

Not sure it is possible to find the adjacent possible before losing faith in existing systems. This is heavy going and its the way of all transformative processes. Reorientation is the wobbly 1st steps after disorientation--It's hard to let go & unsafe- also its unsafe not to.

In evolutionary biology there is no such thing as a universally well-adapted or optimal organism...but you can still examine organism-environment dynamics and make claims about relative fitness of an organism in a given environment (which is largely composed of other organisms). The most useful frame I can use for technology is this kind of ecological/evolutionary frame. A knife is only functionally "a knife" in a very small subset of the possible environments a knife can exist in, because cutting things with it is only going to occur to a very few of the species that have ever lived. A knife is neutral if averaged over all possible scenarios in which it can exist. But not all possible scenarios DO exist. The actual moral valence of a knife is something like "[the number of prosocial instances of knife-wielding] - [the number of antisocial instances of knife-wielding]", where "prosocial" and "antisocial" are defined by the best available data and modeling at a given time, averaging tradeoff costs across as many timescales as computationally possible. None of us are omniscient...but some of us are indisputably better at inferring nth-order causal interactions and thus predicting what are to others "unintended consequences". We call these people "wise". They are just as likely to choose what seems the "lowest hanging fruit" but they can reach farther with their models and are more likely to pick options that seem contrary to utility calculations that are narrower in scope. (This is basic Bayesianism: what seems logical to someone with one set of prior experiences may seem illogical to someone else with a different set, *even if their values systems and decision-making heuristics are the same*. Incidentally, this is why great villains in fiction always have a compelling rationale for their evil deeds...) So is all tech, or any given tech, morally neutral? Sure, from a God's eye POV that no one has or ever will. For the rest of us, which is all of us, technologies can be evaluated on the basis of what most users are likely to do with them, given that people will always choose the "easiest" option according to their own understanding. Since the ability to weigh costs and benefits across multiple scales is contingent on information access and cognitive ability, among other things, and we all start out relatively clueless, a first approximation requires us to skew tech morality evaluations toward the lowest common denominator.

All Creatures Great and Small might be the climate intervention we need, more than electric cars. Media to valorize lower consumption living! theguardian.com/environment/…

Links we like: A Multicultural Fairy Tales and Folktales Booklist, New York Public Library Check out this list for: Ideas for using folktales Translations and adaptations of folktales Audio and visual retellings of traditional folktales Link to list: nypl.org/blog/2020/09/08/mul…