Boethius was a Christian. He wrote a book explaining the Trinity, for example (De Trinitate). The work for which he is most famous today, the Consolation of Philosophy, does not mention Christ by name, which have led some to speculate that he lost his faith later in life. There is an absence of direct evidence for that claim.
One feature I would love is the ability to automatically generate the table of contents / “outline” metadata for a pdf. I run across a lot of old book pdfs without that metadata, which makes navigation annoying. Kybook3 has a version of this that doesn’t quite work. Maybe in the age of LLMs, this is now feasible.
Islamic fundamentalism and cult rationalism are both involved in a “total commitment”, “all or nothing” type of thinking. The former is totally committed to a particular literal reading of scripture, the latter, to logical deduction from a set of chosen premises. Both modes of thinking have produced violent outcomes in the past.
Skepticism, in which no premise or truth claim is regarded as above dispute (or, that it is always permissible and even praiseworthy to suspend one’s judgment on a matter), is the better comparison with rationalism-fundamentalism. It is interesting that skepticism today is often associated with agnostic or atheist religious beliefs, but I consider many religious thinkers in history to have been skeptics par excellence when judged by the standard of their own time. E.g. William Ockham (of Ockham’s razor) was a 14C Franciscan friar (and a fascinating figure) who denied papal infallibility. I count Martin Luther as belonging to the history of skepticism as well, for example, as well as much of the humanist movement that returned to the original Greek sources for the Bible, from the Latin Vulgate translation by Jerome.
The history of ideas is fun to read about. I am hardly an expert, but you may be interested by the history of Aristotelian rationalism, which gained prominence in the medieval west largely through the works of Averroes, a 12C Muslim philosopher who heavily favored Aristotle. In 13C, Thomas Aquinus wrote a definitive Catholic systematic theology, rejecting Averroes but embracing Aristotle. To this day, Catholic theology is still essentially Aristotelian.
And despite the huge size of 52!, it is possible with basic motor skills to produce a random deck. For those with the background and interest, there is a great book: The Mathematics of Shuffling Cards by Diaconis and Fulman, published 2023.
For an example of this, I recall reading a proposal that acts of Congress be strictly limited to be at most (say) 5 pages in length. This would be a natural form of regularization of the legislative power.
If you're interested in things like this, you might like to read the paper of Diaconis, Holmes, and Shashahani on sampling from a manifold. https://arxiv.org/abs/1206.6913
A far more practical idea is to internalize the practice of 'metacognition' so you can apply it to the vast corpus of books that already exist.
It is also interesting to consider previous attempts to wrap a cognitive model around the physical medium of the book, like the monastic 'lectio divina' of the middle ages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectio_Divina
The thrust of this article is its final sentence: "that's why I think you should always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas."
Be careful of non-approved thinking!
Also strange is how caring about the future is dastardly 'longtermism', but caring enough about this generation to work on longevity is 'insane'. Really the only acceptable goals are averting climate catastrophe (presumably by stopping oil and gas consumption) and helping the global poor. It would be interesting to know whether the author thinks the global poor should be prevented from using fossil fuels to better their immediate economic situation at the expense of our long-term climate.
I'm not sure we would be any more advanced. Anyone to whom binary conversion is relevant has sufficient intelligence to not need the convenience of base 8. For practical needs, convenient representation of repeated doubling and halving are of limited use. Much more relevant to the daily needs of actual people for most of history was the ability to reckon measurements using common objects such as the human body, hence the bewildering diversity of different measurement systems across different peoples, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_weights_and_measures. The base of the number system was a non-factor.
I use Dvorak, although I regret the choice to learn it instead of Qwerty. If you don’t remap, and I don’t, then you need to use two hands instead of one to navigate. Not a dealbreaker for me though, since by coincidence the places hjkl ended up on Dvorak that makes navigating with them tolerable.
It would mean, however, that the state should not be explicitly backing the 'religion' in e.g. public universities, even though that's not the immediate issue at hand in the article.
In fact, Postman went to great lengths to detail the ways in which "print culture" (including books, newspapers, and even public oration) with its great commitment to complex argumentation shaped society in ways consonant with the sustaining of a democratic republic, while warning that the modern replacement of this older culture was perhaps not so well suited to maintaining a self-governing people.
(edit) Social media / the internet more generally enables 2-way communication in a way that was not possible in either print nor TV culture. Conceptually it lowers barriers to entry to near-zero for communicating one's ideas & learning from others. Earlier forms depended much more heavily on gatekeepers. Is a more nominally democratic form of media culture than this even possible?