Essays by Matthew Eric Bassett
Life in the West in the 21st Century could be characterized by a decline in friendship, a rise in isolation, and a crisis of mental health. Yet instead of fixing this, we are continually creating new economic transactions to replace friendship or to solve the problems that the lack of friendship might create.
If you decide to be a loving and kind person then you necessarily decide to act in a loving and kind way; how do you do that? More specifically, what does that even mean when we are living in such globally "unkind" times, where, for instance, your energy consumption habits indirectly cause people in other parts of the globe to have to leave their homes after they've become uninhabitable due to…
Partisans are failing to see that the would-be assassin fits into a well-established trend in modern American culture - a trend not of political violence but of gun violence.
The 14th Amendment is not about restricting States' power.
Generative AI gives intellectual property right holders an excuse to grab control of your devices.
Advertisers, cults, terrorists, and American megachurches know how to target people at the right time to get them to "convert". The last of these has evolved an entire liturgy for that purpose. Through a couple of personal anecdotes, we trace the history and purpose of that liturgy and draw a parallels with a less "American" cults.
AI is finally useful for business, and everyone is likely underestimating its impact. But unless AI is open-source and truly owned by the end users the future for everyone but the software providers looks grim.
Optimization is a mathematical languages that we’re using to describe our societal interactions, how learning happens, and how fundamental physics works. Let’s count some of the ways.
Some days I can barely get out of my front door without tripping over my own contradictions and hypocrisies.
We explore the implications of attention becoming a commodity, not in the colloquial sense, but the technical, fungible sense of a Marxist commodity, and what that has to do with our ethics and how economic forces shape society.
Russia’s impunity and the lack of action from the West could make nuclear weapons more attractive to regimes of all sorts.
When Tolkien first published the Lord of the Rings some critics mocked it by asking why any sensible adult would read a book about elves and orcs. They doubted whether it had any themes beyond the comprehension of a seven-year-old. 1 Yet one theme that runs through much of Tolkien's work — including the Lord of the Rings — is the relationship between language and power.
Politicians on the Left and Right are betting on new theories about money to bring about the change they seek, but both are neglecting ideas from classical economics that could help us prepare for economic disruptions ranging from the current pandemic to the coming AI revolution. .
There's an algorithm for product discovery, at least for business-to-business products. If you combine that algorithm with decent technical execution and a SaaS business model then you have a recipe for a company. And if your market is big enough then you may even be looking at a billion-dollar startup.
AI research has structural problems that limit how much it can impact business. But understanding why gives a way to determine what will work and what won't, as well as reveal new business opportunities.
The past few weeks have seen multiple protests against lockdown measures across the US together with governors defying experts to start re-opening their economies. This could be politics-as-usual, or it could be the expression of underlying economic shifts affecting the balance of political power in the US.
Does a global response to the pandemic threaten our civil liberties?
Everyone knows that health care is expensive in America. But what if the rest of its economy was just as inefficient? We expand Purchasing Power Parity to consider health care outcomes so we can create an exchange rate that makes visible the amount of waste therein. The results show that the US wasted $18 trillion over ten years. .
It's rare throughout history that any people would have an opportunity to reshape their government without war or the threat of violence. Brexit is such an opportunity and should be treated as such.
This is a meandering discussion about empathy's role in public policy debates and popular culture's role in affecting empathy. So can popular culture help to nurture or destroy empathy in politics? I try to set up a framework for exploring this, but raise more questions than I answer.