The Holocrons of Darth Grampus

Socrates is credited with saying, "I know only that I don't know." Socratic ignorance, it's called. Now I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but Darth Grampus considers that claim, to know only that you don't know, to be about the most honest self-reflection ever made. Today, there seems to be little to no value found in that kind of honesty.  Perhaps the purpose of this dichotomy is to keep one from straddling a fence. Consider: the algorithms we all work for? The ones that provide suggestions to our YouTube, Insta and other social media feeds? There is a definite bias against the "middle of the road" content in these algorithms.  For example, if one is, say, super Pro-Trump, the algorithm loves their content. If one is super anti-Trump, the algorithm loves their content. But the middle riders? Pssh... you're not likely to see their content on your feed. That's just a 1s and 0s example of what I'm talking about, but it mirrors the broa...

What does it mean to be human? Its actually a very uncomfortable question, in my opinion. In as little as ten minutes we can easily find and view evidence of human cruelty and kindness, of human hatred and love, of our despair and our hope. We can watch hubris unfold and gather pearls of deep wisdom. We can marvel at just how smart our ancestors were. Whether we're looking at marvels of engineering like the pyramids in Egypt, or the Socratic dialogues, the evidence of our ancestors' intelligence is abundant. It seems only fitting that we'd still find so many examples of human ignorance today.  Positive Negatives With little effort we can discover the seeming paradox of being meat bags with powerful biological imperatives, but also with the capacity (at least) for deep moral conviction. We read stories of people who cannibalized fellow humans in order to survive (The Donner Party, or the true story of airplane crash survivors covered in the film "Alive"). Neuroscie...