Category: Speaker

Brad Onishi

11 a.m., November 5, 2023

Join the Humanist Forum at the Mountain View Senior Center, where Brad Onishi will present to us, OR join us on Zoom.

This Sunday Brad Onishi will join us in person to discuss and answer questions about white Christian nationalism. This is a joint event with the Atheist Community of San Jose.

Brad Onishi is a social commentator, scholar, writer, teacher, coach, and co-host of the Straight White American Jesus (SWAJ) podcast. Brad seeks to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange by providing insight into life’s most fundamental questions. His show, SWAJ, ranks in the top 50 of Politics shows on Apple’s podcast charts – ahead of programs from NPR, the NYT, and other national outlets.

After growing up in a non-religious home in Southern California, Brad converted to evangelicalism at a local megachurch at age fourteen. By twenty, he was in charge of a two-hundred-student youth group. After seven years in ministry, he decided to pursue a master’s in theology at Oxford. Soon after arriving in Oxford, he deconstructed his faith and began to study religion historically and philosophically.

In 2018 he started the Straight White American Jesus podcast with his former Oxford colleague Dan Miller. SWAJ is a religion and politics podcast that focuses on Christian nationalism in the United States. Both Dan and Brad are former insiders within the movement. As scholars of religion, they have the training and tools to add layers to these experiences and to interview scholars and journalists who provide a critical lens to some of the most pressing issues of our day.

Brad’s most recent book is Preparing for War: the Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism – And What Comes Next (Broadleaf Books 2023).

Brad is an adjunct professor in the University of San Francisco College of Arts and Sciences. He is co-chair of the Secularism and Secularity Group of the American Academy of Religion, a faculty research associate of UC Berkeley Committee on the Study of Religion, and on the editorial board of Oxford Religion Encyclopedia.

11/5/23 Brad Onishi from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

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You can attend our forums in person with fellow humanists at the Mountain View Senior Center at 266 Escuela Ave, Mountain View, CA 94040. Lunch will be served after the forum. We request a $10 donation for lunch.

Also, we will continue to present our forums on Zoom. To join and be able to ask questions and make comments, click here.
No password is needed — our host will admit you from the waiting room. Joining the meeting via the link will download and install the Zoom app on your desktop computer (if it’s not already installed), and then take you to the meeting. You can also install the Zoom app on your computer or smartphone, and then enter:
Meeting ID: 816 5389 0712
Passcode: 250634

You can also call any of the following phone numbers and then enter the above Meeting ID and the Passcode in order to join the meeting by phone.
+1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)
+1 408 638 0968 US (San Jose)
+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)
+1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma)
+1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC)
+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)
+1 646 876 9923 US (New York)
You can find international phone numbers to call here.

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The slides Brad shared with us are here.
RSVP on Meetup here.
Like us on Facebook here.
Share to your Linkedin account here.
Check out the Humanist Community web site here.
Retweet our announcement on the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter here.
See videos of our past Forums here.
Add this event to your Google Calendar

Ben Wade

11 a.m., October 29, 2023

Join the Humanist Forum at the Mountain View Senior Center, where Ben Wade will present to us, OR join us on Zoom.

Ben will briefly overview the definition of critical thinking and some of its skills, attitudes, and dispositions. He will examine, in some detail, the disposition of flexibility, especially concerning older persons. Finally, Ben will suggest actions that Humanists can take to support and encourage critical thinking in the general populace.

Ben Wade has been a student and practitioner of critical thinking for many years. He holds a Masters Degree in Critical Thinking from the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

10/29/2023 Ben Wade from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

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Also, we will continue to present our forums on Zoom. To join and be able to ask questions and make comments, click here.
No password is needed — our host will admit you from the waiting room. Joining the meeting via the link will download and install the Zoom app on your desktop computer (if it’s not already installed), and then take you to the meeting. You can also install the Zoom app on your computer or smartphone, and then enter:
Meeting ID: 816 5389 0712
Passcode: 250634

You can also call any of the following phone numbers and then enter the above Meeting ID and the Passcode in order to join the meeting by phone.
+1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)
+1 408 638 0968 US (San Jose)
+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)
+1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma)
+1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC)
+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)
+1 646 876 9923 US (New York)
You can find international phone numbers to call here.

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RSVP on Meetup here.
Like us on Facebook here.
Share to your Linkedin account here.
Check out the Humanist Community web site here.
Retweet our announcement on the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter here.
See videos of our past Forums here.
Add this event to your Google Calendar

David Friedman

11 a.m., September 24, 2023

Join the Humanist Forum, in person OR on Zoom.

This Sunday we are happy to have David Friedman joining us in person to talk about the economics of climate change.

Most criticism of the current climate orthodoxy questions either whether climate change is happening or whether it is anthropogenic. In my view the real question is neither of those. It is what the net consequences are. Climate change has large negative consequences, large positive consequences, both spread through a long and uncertain future; I do not believe we know whether the net effect is positive or negative. The widespread belief that it is predictably negative is based in part on ignoring the positive consequences, which get very little public mention, and in part on a biased, in some cases dishonest, presentation of the evidence.

Prof. Friedman is an American economist, physicist, legal scholar, author and anarcho-capitalist theorist. He was a professor of law at Santa Clara University from 2005 to 2017, and is currently Professor Emeritus. His is a contributing editor to the libertarian journal, Liberty.
Prof. Friedman is a longtime member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, where he’s known as Duke Cariodoc of the Bow. He is a science fiction fan and has written two fantasy novels, Harald and Salamander.
This should be a very interesting forum.

9/24/2023 David Friedman from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.

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Also, we will continue to present our forums on Zoom. To join and be able to ask questions and make comments, click here.
No password is needed — our host will admit you from the waiting room. Joining the meeting via the link will download and install the Zoom app on your desktop computer (if it’s not already installed), and then take you to the meeting. You can also install the Zoom app on your computer or smartphone, and then enter:
Meeting ID: 816 5389 0712
Passcode: 250634

You can also call any of the following phone numbers and then enter the above Meeting ID and the Passcode in order to join the meeting by phone.
+1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)
+1 408 638 0968 US (San Jose)
+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)
+1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma)
+1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC)
+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)
+1 646 876 9923 US (New York)
You can find international phone numbers to call here.

———-

RSVP on Meetup here.
Like us on Facebook here.
Retweet our Twitter announcement here.
See videos of our past Forums here.
Add this event to your Google Calendar

Martin Squibbs

11 a.m., September 17, 2023

Join the Humanist Forum, in person OR on Zoom. Martin Squibbs will present to us in person.

I have long held the theory that time may not be a real physical 4th dimension as it is commonly believed to be, and modeled in the sciences. Instead, perhaps reality is simply the motion of physical things in only 3 dimensions, absent of time. And within this reality, our brains are creating virtual, abstracted “forms” of physical reality beyond them, and storing these forms as memories. These forms being our perceptions, and these memories being their past. And you and I, ourselves, exist here in our brains, and experience these perceptions and observe these past memories as our objective world in mind. In this case, I believe time, or more accurately time bases, may be just particular types of these objective past memories; regular repeating ones. We, ourselves, remember and count these different times, and use them to order and measure the relative duration of our other past memories. And we also use these times to order and measure the duration of futures we imagine and predict in our minds; these futures being our projections of yet-to-be-perceived, experienced and observed past objective memories. So between our self and our brain, we create our future objective memories here in our brain.

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Also, we will continue to present our forums on Zoom. To join and be able to ask questions and make comments, click here.
No password is needed — our host will admit you from the waiting room. Joining the meeting via the link will download and install the Zoom app on your desktop computer (if it’s not already installed), and then take you to the meeting. You can also install the Zoom app on your computer or smartphone, and then enter:
Meeting ID: 816 5389 0712
Passcode: 250634

You can also call any of the following phone numbers and then enter the above Meeting ID and the Passcode in order to join the meeting by phone.
+1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)
+1 408 638 0968 US (San Jose)
+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)
+1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma)
+1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC)
+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)
+1 646 876 9923 US (New York)
You can find international phone numbers to call here.

———-

RSVP on Meetup here.
Like us on Facebook here.
Retweet our Twitter announcement here.
See videos of our past Forums here.
Add this event to your Google Calendar

Presenters: Richard Duda & Michael Abramson

When: Saturday, August 12^th , 2023

Pre-meeting for in-person participants:
6:00 pm – 6:45 pm: (potluck)

Pre-meeting for Zoom participants:
6:30 pm – 6:45 pm: connect to Zoom

Meeting:
6:45 pm – 7:00 pm: check-in for everybody
7:00 pm – 7:45 pm: each presentation is 20 minutes
7:45 pm – 8:40 pm: all-peer discussion

Potluck:
The in-person meeting includes a potluck at the beginning.

Where:
Fireside Room at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto (for potluck and in-person meeting)
Directions to the meeting: https://www.uucpa.org/connection/visiting-us/

Our next Humanists at UUCPA potluck meeting is on Artificial intelligence. It’s a hot topic, so this meeting has two presenters: Richard Duda & Michael Abramson, to be followed by a group discussion.

Dick wrote the following for his presentation:

In November last year, OpenAI, a small company in San Francisco, caused a sensation by making publicly available its AI chatbot — called ChatGPT3. ChatGPT’s breadth of knowledge, fluent use of English, and fast response was quite astonishing.

OpenAI and several other companies have used the same general technology — called “generative AI” — to translate languages, write computer code, create images, compose music, and even command robots.

However, if these programs do not know the answer to a question, they simply make something up — in the jargon, they “hallucinate”. Although engineers are working on this problem, it is not easy to solve, which limits their usefulness. In his presentation, Dick will give a basic explanation of how ChaptGPT works, speculate on its possible applications,
and point out the problems with its use.

The following is mostly written by Michael to describe his presentation.

Instead of focusing on chatbots, Michael will look at the bigger picture.
The “landscape of intelligence” includes
– Human Intelligence (HI). Most familiar to us, but not well understood.
– Programmed Intelligence (PI). Drives most of automation around us.
– The specialized Artificial Intelligence (AI). rapidly progressing
– Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The most powerful, controversial, and dangerous of all.

You will learn that ChatGPT is not an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), not even close, but it shows what could be an impact of AI having unrestricted access to all knowledge from the Internet.

AGI could be created using ideas borrowed from HI and PI, and can be developed surprisingly fast.

AGI can become an existential threat to humans almost immediately if it gets access to the Internet of Things (IoT). Using less advanced specialized forms of AI as the guardrails against the runaway AGI may or may not work.

Come join us.
For our potluck, please bring a dish of your choice:  vegetarian, salad, meat or dessert. Our meetings usually have 15 attendees.

More:
We usually meet on the second Saturday of each month.

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https://www.uucpa.org/connection/affinity-groups/humanists-uucpa/