As you note, writing about professional issues requires balancing candor and discretion. But in my view, worth trying–with the recognition that information and knowledge asymmetry may not always be recognized by all those with whom we engage. Thanks for your work here and elsewhere online.

That said, my wife makes fun of me for, as she says, “listening to all the words.” The content of arguments is so rarely all or even most of what’s going on. Oh not again he’s going to tell us it’s a complex system is a good joke but it’s also right, and I wonder what it would look like if we embraced this as an analytical baseline rather than torturing ourselves with the failures of discourse to settle into tidy linearities.

I also think all the time about your quote from Lessing, about the activist who commits suicide when she finds her ideals in the hands of human beings. That’s a game urgently worth changing.

And as a young-ish proto-academic, one of the most valuable parts of this blog is precisely your struggle to get all the competing considerations you mention right. It’s both educational and remarkably affirming to see someone thoughtfully and conscientiously grappling with all the sorts of problems I find myself facing (grad students and young faculty in my discipline are quite susceptible to the fast-moving probably-bad-faith pile-ons you worry about) and contemplate facing (right now I’m not quite “the man,” but I might be very soon – how do I inhabit that position without becoming everything I hate about it). And from where I, the relatively uninformed reader, sit, you seem to do very well at all this.

Of course, the fact that your hours of labor have such value to me shouldn’t persuade you to write or refrain from writing. But I thought you deserved to know.

I’m not entirely convinced by Lanier’s theory but it’s interesting that, while being skeptical of some of the choices that have been made in technology and social media, he gives an answer which could serve as a defense of an idealized California techno-optimism.

I know lately I’ve disagreed with a good chunk of what you’ve said here. Not a majority of it, but a good chunk. I have been pretty confrontational, especially in my most recent comment on this blog, on your last post.

I still believe what I do and therefore don’t apologize for what I’ve said, although I could have and should have probably reserved those thoughts for my own blog. Suffice it to say, though, I value your contributions here and like Maria above, you’ve prompted me to think about a lot of things from a different angle. At the same time, I realize the constraints you’re under (from what you’ve said here…..I don’t know you personally) and I further have a default respect for anyone who, unlike me, blogs under their own name.

“Public debate, per se, is dead.” I don’t think it was ever alive. The tyranni of the world are delighted when the democrati of the world want to debate. When Huxley debated Wilberforce, I doubt any minds were changed, they may have been clarified and their arguments strengthened, but not changed.

Debate in Congress is a joke, unless there is someone looking on who holds some sort of hammer–which almost never happens.

When LBJ saw the horror in Alabama when the Selma to Montgomery marchers were brutally attacked, he addressed Congress and gave a wonderful speech. His audience was mostly white and government workers so they were not going to do anything, but LBJ knew they were scared. They had witnessed the outing of white supremacy and white bigotry and nobody knew what would happen next.It may well have been that Lyndon Johnson was the only white man in the room who knew what to do—and it was even more likely that he was the only white man in the room who was determined to do it. But it was certain that he was the only white man in the room who had the power of office and the force of personality to command others to do his bidding.

The marchers in Alabama had finally sold their cause to someone who would take it up and work to make it happen.

The moral of this story is that nothing happens this world until someone sells to someone else. I know what I want to sell, and I am selling it. What would you like to sell?

I think one’s time is best spent trying to force changes. Not just point out that change is needed but trying to get the change made. Even if everything you are shooting for is not accomplished, here and there, from time to time, you will get something done, And in the combat you may draw an onlooker or two into the fray.

Decide what you want to tear down, or build up, and then hit it hard and often.

You are a great writer and thinker, don’t worry about reaction (of course that is easy for me to say, I am not a professor in a university that probably is very wary of public attention of what it judges to be the wrong kind.)

Just this morning I read an essay by a guy named Avent about the future of AI. I wonder what you think that future is. I developed robots back in 1991, and they ran a telephone company. They did all the back office processing and led the customer service and marketing department workers through their conversations with the outside world.

This Avent guy was talking about putting people out of work. I put my first people out of work in 1967 with some computer programs. I have been worried about AI for more than fifty years. I think what I think, and I write about what I think should be done, but I wonder what you think. What kind of society do we need and when will we need it?

I have an opinion of what it would look like, what it would take to get in implemented, and what benefits it would provide. But when I bring it up in all kinds of places I get insults on a good day. I get banned on a bad day. So, I found out the hard way that having a good idea, which naturally I think I have, is not enough. Nobody on the Internet gives a damn about anybody’s ideas but their own.

So, I realized that to get my ideas into action I have to do the hard work of selling them. They will never be approved by acclamation.

But I am interested in what you think, but from your gut. No tiptoeing. I came here years ago in hopes of hearing it.