Cure-alls and Remedies
My friend Peter Levine wrote recently about how much of the public unease about AI consciousness comes from something surprisingly mundane: the interface says “I.” When Google’s Gemini delivers information in the third person, it’s just a tool; when ChatGPT says “I can help you,” some users start composing rescue missions for the trapped digital…
Apparently context is scarce. Here’s some: “Democratic party politics is urban machine politics, scaled up” from Noah Smith A variety of activists and special interests — collectively known as “The Groups” — can basically persuade Democratic staffers and politicians of their ideas in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, well out of the public eye. Democrats’ focus…
I am teaching this course again. Every year it changes, and this year I hope it changes a lot. Here’s what I said about this today, our first day of classes: Any story about crime and punishment is bound to start with a few stylized facts. Until this year, I’ve started with the same number:…
The University of Toronto’s Sociology Department posts the reading lists for its PhD comprehensive exams.
For my money the notion of self-estrangement is the fundamental insight of psychology.
I wrote this little primer at the bottom of a long discussion of the Schocken Books editions of Arendt’s work, and then reposted it a while back on Facebook. It’s been popular, so I’m reposting it again here so I can easily link to it without feeding social media. Race-thinking precedes racism. Arendt’s analysis of…
Propublica thinks so: What Can Mayors Do When the Police Stop Doing Their Jobs? Rises and falls in crime rates are notoriously hard to explain definitively. Scholars still don’t agree on the causes of a decades long nationwide decline in crime. Still, some academics who have studied the phenomenon in recent years see evidence that rising rates of…
It’s been twenty years since Ansolabehere and Iyengar published Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink & Polarize the Electorate.
We need trust to know–even if we’ll also be misled into error by that trust.
This is a part of a series on terms and concepts that I find particularly resonant. We usually say that the fundamental rule of economics is scarcity : there are never enough widgets (food, housing, gadgets) to meet all the demand And even where we seem to be endowed with wealth, we still face opportunity…
We often say that colleges and universities deserve some sort of freedom from political interference. But for Arendt, freedom just is politics. The idea of freedom from politics is largely oxymoronic for her, and involves fundamental misunderstandings of the component terms “freedom” and “politics.”
Consider the collective horror, shame, and disgust we philosophers have at the abusive behavior of our fellow philosophers: think of what it means to be compared to Colin McGinn or Thomas Pogge. Why isn’t there that kind of horror, shame, and disgust among police officers at the drumbeat of police shootings?
Barbara Ehrenriech’s book Bright-sided starts with an interesting dilemma in breast cancer treatment. On the one hand, your odds of surviving–say–stage 4 breast cancer is quite low (22%). On the other hand, there is evidence that optimism and hopefulness will increase your chances. Being optimistic won’t increase your chances above 50%, but it will help….
Futures Thinking: The Basics Asking The Question Scanning the World Mapping Possibilities (Part 1, Part 2) Writing Scenarios Three Possible Economic Scenarios (Part 1, Part 2) A Bibliography
Eric Schwitzgebel does the math, interprets the lessons: (This past Hannukah, my daughter Kate and I spun a sample of dreidels 40 times each. One in particular landed on shin an incredible 27/40 spins. [Yes, p < .001, highly significant, even with a Bonferroni correction.]) [….] You can, if you want, always push things to…
Shawn Gude at Jacobin discusses The Bad Kind of Unionism : “It’s easy to focus on the individual over the institution. Not a few police officers are drawn to the profession out of a desire to “serve the public.” Many genuinely want to serve, and take great pride in their chosen occupation. Police don’t have…
Robin Wright reviews the three manifestos: The statements set tough preconditions for a political truce: resignation of the current leadership, introduction of broad democratic freedoms, prosecution of security forces engaged in violence against the opposition and an end to politics in the military, universities and the clergy. The proposed reforms would amount to a total…
Going to graduate school in the humanities, especially in philosophy, should be similar to converting to Judaism . Like rabbis, a student’s undergraduate professors should serve as a formal (but slightly secretive) part of the graduate school admissions process, situated as an obstacle or test for the student’s commitment. They should bend their efforts to…
Apologies for Heidegger’s Nazism take a few different forms. As I mentioned yesterday , some apologists, call them the Orthodox Apologists, try to show that Heidegger himself simply forgot the lessons of his own early work, or retreated into errancy. At worst, his later Nazi pronouncements betrayed that early work by appropriating fundamental ontology for…
Inspired by Sir Ian McKellan’s reflections on Richard III here and here , and this excellent resource on the historical Richard III, I’ve been thinking about designing a course around villains, moral monstrosity, and evil. Perhaps I’m just a nerd, but this is something I like to sit around doing: arranging texts and problems around…
After all the hype, and the promise of a powerfully political sci-fi movie, of course I had to see District 9 . In many ways it’s an enjoyable film, and if it had been set on Mars or in another galaxy far, far away, I think it would have deserved the laudatory treatment it’s receiving….
What role does the critic play? Why do we need someone to stand between us and the art, analyzing, recommending, and denouncing? Why can’t we just have our own experience, unmediated by someone elses taste? In my last post , I managed to grab the attention of some folks in the sci-fi publishing world who…
Amor Mundi is Improv Everywhere’s stock-in-trade, but in their latest installment they’ve really put it on display. Service Changes cites the frequent delays and frustrations of metropolitan commuting, but in this case it denotes that joyful creativity for its own sake the Improv Everywhere likes to showcase. Perhaps my favorite thing about this group…
Let’s talk about accounting. I’m a political philosopher, not an accountant, but philosophers engage with values and pricing in at least two ways: 1. ARBITRAGE: Philosophy is a kind of arbitrage. 2. THE GOOD: Normative theories like those discussed in the study of ethics, aesthetics, and politics depend on an account of value, i.e. the…
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When Antoinette and I got engaged, I purchased a cultured (i.e. synthetic) diamond , concerned about the role that the diamond trade plays in provoking conflict. Here’s what it looks like . At the time, I seriously considered using a saphire, since I believed the trade in saphires was child-labor free and less tainted by…
Preparations are now almost complete for the wedding next Saturday. Antoinette’s amazing powers of organization have really made the process manageable and calm, although now we’re starting to see people worrying that they ought to be doing something: anxiety at the lack of anxiety, I guess. In just under a week, we’ll be married! Some…
I’ve not seen much mention of one of the most important complaints about the FISA reauthorization: the claim made by Joseph P. Nacchio and Qwest Communication International that the Bush administration sought the power to engage in warrantless wiretapping in February of 2001 , seven months before the events of Semptember 11th and the Authorization…
Wendell Berry’s article in the May Harper’s is out from behind the paywall. It’s a really interesting attempt to take moderns to task for their conflation of freedom with limitlessness and infinite progress. (My Metafilter post on Wendell Berry is the most popular thing I’ve ever done there, so go check it out if you…