Sean Carney

Author: Sean Carney

  • Norbert Wiener on Education and Originality

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    Sean Carney
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    I speak here with feeling which is more intense as far as concerns the scientific artist than the conventional artist, because it is in science that I have first chosen to say something. What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as…

  • Norbert Wiener on Doctorate Studies

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    Sean Carney
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    Some of my friends have even asserted that a Ph.D. thesis should be the greatest scientific work a man has ever done and perhaps ever will do, and should wait until he is thoroughly able to state his life work. I do not go along with this. I mean merely that if the thesis is…

  • Norbert Wiener on the Exchange of Knowledge and Secrecy

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    Sean Carney
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    To be alive is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and acts on the outer world, in which we are merely the transitional stage. In the figurative sense, to be alive to what is happening in the world, means to participate in a continual development of knowledge and its…

  • Norbert Wiener on Modernizing Industry

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    Sean Carney
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    What is true of England is true of New England, which has discovered that it is often a far more expensive matter to modernize an industry than to scrap it and start somewhere else. Quite apart from the difficulties of having a relatively strict industrial law and an advanced labour policy, one of the chief…

  • Norbert Wiener on Information as a Commodity

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    Sean Carney
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    I am writing this book primarily for Americans in whose environment questions of information will be evaluated according to a standard American crierion: a thing is valuable as a commodity for what it will bring in the open market. This is the official doctrine of an orthodoxy which it is becoming more and more perilous…

  • Norbert Wiener on Information and the Scientific Approach

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    Sean Carney
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    When we consider a problem of nature such as that of atomic reactions and atomic explosives, the largest single item of information which we can make public is that they exist. Once a scientist attacks a problem which he knows to have an answer, his entire attitude is changed. He is already some fifty percent…

  • Monotrail Tech Talks

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    Sean Carney
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    My favourite source for modular synthesizer patching ideas is Monotrail Tech Talks. This channel consistently provides inspiration for new techniques to try, illustrated by easy to follow block diagrams.

  • Norbert Wiener on Power and Presence

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    Sean Carney
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    Where a man’s word goes, and where his power of perception goes, to that point his control and in a sense his physical existence is extended. To see and to give commands to the whole world is almost the same as being everywhere. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

  • N.T. Wright on Personal Purity

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    Sean Carney
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    We in our modern world have many ways of dealing with personal impurity. Contemporary hygiene and chemicals mean we don’t need to worry about it nearly as much as people in the ancient world … there are still other types of pollution as well: the pollution which gets into our minds and hearts, into our…

  • Thoughts on Hiring

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    Sean Carney
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    Thinking about hiring, the typical process for screening candidates using written applications is likely to become far less effective as it becomes a game of adversarial bots both creating applications for positions and evaluating them. In light of this I see one possibility being less emphasis on written applications going forward, resulting in more emphasis…