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When I first discussed effective altruism with an economist years back, I was shocked to hear her hostility. How could anyone oppose efforts to make the world a better place? So much aid money is wasted on upper management, so many charities are big on theory and short on results, and so often interventions fail. It strikes me, even now, that it is a good thing for people to give more, and to give…
Ignore the haters: Bluesky is great for all the reasons the X crowd rejects it.
In a recent piece, Joshua Rothman suggests that the internet is transforming political speech . He contends that the spontaneous,...
Ruby Bridges being escorted to school Can Hegel provide us with the keys to happiness? Is his call for situating ourselves in a moral...
In a recent article, Jonathan Chait argues that Democrats failed in the last election despite they aggressive populist economic...
There is nothing particularly surprising about DeepSeek's success, but it certainly surprised a lot of people. China's newest large...
Can ChatGPT reason? What the heck does that even mean?!
Ted Chiang's pieces tend to cause a stir whenever they come out, mostly because he is such a fantastic writer and thinker. But the pieces...
The recent wave of cases concerning generative AI, such as Silverman v OpenAI, have not gone well. From a legal perspective, this isn't...
There is an increasing anxiety about underpopulation, one that mirrors the anxiety about overpopulation in decades past. But debates...
The Psychology of Misinformation, by Roozenbeek and van der Linden, is an excellent book. Short, balanced, readable. The authors are also...
Philosophy has something called the "symbol grounding" problem. The basic question is whether the words and sentences of language need to...
Every once in awhile, someone reinvents a wheel. This is especially common in academia, since there is just so many papers in so many...
In Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem, it is discovered that an alien civilization is on its way to Earth, intent on conquering the...
Tourists on a guided program in Europe often come up with a simple complaint about the area, summed up as ABC: Another Bloody Church....
If there has been a constant trope since GPT-2 it is that large language models (LLM) will soon flood the internet with misinformation....
The current proliferation of Twitter-wannabes--and their failure--suggests people learned the wrong lessons from the rise of first-gen...
Jake Quilty-Dunn, Nicolas Porot, and Eric Mandelbaum recently published a robust defense of the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LoTH) ....
A strange response to integrated information theory (IIT) being labeled a pseudoscience is the claim that "scientists only know Karl...
Now that the dust has settled and the hype has died down (except on Twitter), we can give a verdict: generative AI is boring. We already...