Socio-political philosophical musings
I posted this article on Substack: The Philosophers Are Here. Which Philosophers? Some companies are making a big deal about hiring philosophers and ethicists to help then with AI, especially AI companies. Isn t that grand? My point is that companies only make decisions that they think will support rather than undermine their positions, so they Continue reading The Philosophers Are Here. Which…
I discovered a WordPress widget and decided to share my reading progress, but it appears to show the last few books I ve finished rather than my active list. Click on My Bookshelf to view more. I read several books at once. I tend to read a fiction and several non-fiction books. The fiction books happens Continue reading What am I reading?
NB: I have been drafting an essay on understanding understanding , so the IAI article this is based on was perfectly salient. These are my reflections, expedited by ChatGPT. Elan Barenholtz has written an intriguing piece for the Institute of Art and Ideas, LLMs show language does not describe reality. It is well worth reading, though Continue reading Language, Grounding, and the Myth of…
Job, Finland, and the Invention of the Good Life Every year, apparently, somebody wins happiness. Recently it has often been Finland. The headlines arrive with the confidence of a football result: Finland is the happiest country in the world. One imagines the Finns receiving a small trophy, perhaps in a sauna. The claim sounds empirical. Continue reading The Pathology of Happiness
Salience, attention, valence and the construction of disposition Today I live about 90 minutes out of Boston by car on a good day – and 2 hours on a return trip because I live in Cape Cod, a tourist area, so I tend to have to compete with traffic. Today, it took over 2 and Continue reading Salience and the Miles That Count
I have been developing my French, so I rely on several primary resources. Myself This includes grammar books, novels and the rest of the traditional fare, some of which I have listed below. Books remain useful, despite their regrettable inability to generate notifications, harvest engagement or insist that one more chapter will transform your life. Continue reading Anki Meets ChatGPT for Snacks in…
I don t often respond to blog articles directly, but I read this and couldn t seem to leave a comment locally, so here we are. Being a former educator, I think I can bring a certain perspective to the issue – or at least share my biases. Mainly, I have found that educational institutions earn their Continue reading Education, Schooling, and the Price of Admission
I ve shared another article on Substack about how the AI-authorship debate is bollox. The LLM-versus-human debate has been raging for several years now, and there seem to be two principal camps: human exceptionalists and agnostics. I suppose there may also be a small, misanthropic faction, but its members are either remarkably quiet or indistinguishable from Continue reading Human Factors in…
A toy model of why purification is the wrong verb – offered for dissent. Addendum: Please note that I have added an endnote to this post to explain the maths a bit better. Preamble I continue to press on colonialism, but this time I look at possibilities and probabilities of extricating colonial influences. I suggest Continue reading Unmixing the Steel
I shared another Substack post, but I want to expand it a bit here. On the Substack version, I conspicuously didn t name certain obvious names, but here, I shall. I also left out a reference to Plato s Republic. Meritocracy, and the men who would not deny it The current American regime is built on meritocracy, Continue reading The Merits of Meritocracy