Veritas Pulchritudo Est
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it? Jeremiah 17:9 I. Introduction Traditional cybersecurity has the goal of protecting computers from running unwanted code. Its central concepts like memory safety, sandboxing, and cryptography exploit the transparent and deterministic architecture of classical computers to ensure that the computer follows [ ]
Some years ago, a pair of political compasses circulated around policy Twitter. The milquetoast centrist, on the left, had safe and orthodox opinions represented by points clustered at the center of the compass. The radical centrist, on the right, had opinions arrayed on all edges of the compass. Centrism, it implied, is not necessarily moderation; [ ]
This paper argues that a rule, to have normative force, must provide for its own persistence, and shows that the axiomatic-universalist approach of modern moral philosophy cannot do so. If this is the case, evolutionary stability logic limits the space of valid moral norms, and demands at least enough parochiality in moral obligations to maintain the assortativity of moral communities. Influential…
In 1957, a proprietor of a movie theater claimed he could increase sales of Coca Cola by flashing the text Drink Coca Cola! too quickly for moviegoers to be consciously aware of the text, but subconsciously implanting the suggestion. Despite the marketing potential, this was later revealed to be false. In the early 2010s, decades [ ]
Agent-based modeling tools commonly trade off usability against power and vice versa. On the one hand, full development environments like NetLogo feature a shallow learning curve, but have a relatively limited proprietary language. Others written in Python or Matlab, for example, have the advantage of a full-featured language with a robust community of third-party libraries, but are typically more…