Let’s be up front: the notion that the earth is flat is ludicrous. Anyone who believes this either is ignorant of the evidence, or simply wants to believe it more strongly than they care about evidence. A lot of people seem to think it has more to do with the former, but it almost certainly has more to do with the latter. This is because humans crave meaning-making mythologies, and the conspiracy cult of the flat earth offers just that.
Many people will attest to their dislike of math. Yet, it is difficult to navigate the modern world without it. We routinely mentally count and calculate distances, times, speeds, weights, volumes, money, various objects we come across, and other everyday things. When talking about numbers that are associated with units (meters, minutes, grams, liters, dollars, etc.) it seems fairly straightforward what the numbers are referring to out there in the real world**, but what do the numbers themselves actually refer to?
Consciousness is one of the biggest philosophical questions we know of. David Chalmers says that consciousness has two issues: the easy question of consciousness and the hard question of consciousness. The former, while not easy per se, is much easier than the latter. The easy question has to do with everything that neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and so on, all pay attention to with questions such as: what are the neural correlates of perception, memory, belief, cognition, emotion, intuition, behavior, etc. and how can they be manipulated? How does thought/perception occur and how does it go wrong (e.g., cognitive biases, perceptual illusions)? How do thoughts/perceptions influence behavior? How are thoughts and behaviors shaped by biology and culture? Is the brain like a computer? And so on. These are all questions that we are relatively certain can be answered within the purview of these fields. Even if it is difficult to find the answers, we can be confident they have answers that will eventually be discovered. The hard question, however, is essentially this: how is it that non-conscious physical matter can give rise to conscious experience?
What is the first animal to come to your mind when I ask this question? I bet at least one animal comes to mind. But why did the animal you chose come to mind? Why did, say, a blue spotted salamander or box turtle or naked mole rat come to mind when I asked the question? You might reply that it is because it was the animal you chose to think about, using your own free will. But was it, though?
If there is one sort of consensual sexual relationship that remains stigmatized in our more “open” and “sex positive” and “no kink-shaming” society, it is that between closely related family members (siblings, parent-child, cousins, and even second or third cousins). Interracial relationships are normal (which is a surprisingly recent development), gay relationships have become (relatively speaking) normalized, asexuality is not all that looked down upon (or, if we’re honest, even thought about very often), and so on. But consensual incestual relationships are not. Is there a good reason for continued disapproval of consensual incestual relationships?
To the delight of many Christians and the chagrin of many atheists, the activist and (former) atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali has declared herself for Christianity. Some atheists and Christians seem quick to point out that her article does not explicitly say she accepts Christian doctrine about Christ dying for our sins, resurrecting, the hypostatic union of the trinitarian God, and so on. Her article is more about politics and resisting Islamism than spreading the Good News. She does say, in the last paragraph, that she attends church, which is likely a good sign that she does accept (or is coming to accept) the Christian doctrine. But is she right to convert to Christianity?
Intelligence Quotient, or IQ, is supposed to be a measure of a person’s ability to reason, see patterns, and make predictions. Yet IQ is quite controversial – a controversy ranging anywhere from IQ tests being inaccurate or biased and all the way to IQ tests (and anything concerning IQ) being immoral. Yet, even if there is no test that can accurately and reliably gauge an individual’s intelligence in some quantitative way, most people are aware of some ineffable sense in which some individuals are just smarter than the average individual (and vice versa with some people just being less smart in some ways than other people).
I am born and raised in the United States, and so this post is going to take a U.S.-centric view, but the same ideas could be applied in other countries as well, especially if those countries are facing similar issues. The issues I speak of are the growing sense of political divisions and loss of trust in the government, leading to a loss of trust in the very ideas of democracy, liberalism, enlightenment values, free market economics, and civil liberties. Popular responses to this discontent takes one of two forms: the position that we need to overhaul the entire system (e.g., with a revolution), or the position that we ought to double down on what we are already doing. In this post, I would like to propose perhaps a sort of middle ground.
I’m no expert on international relations, and I’m even less qualified to speak on the hornet’s nest of the century-long issues pertaining to Israel-Palestine. Lack of knowledge or expertise rarely prevents anyone from forming strong convictions about something now days, though. So, why not give this particular hornet’s nest a shake?
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Briant Christian, W. W. Norton & Company (October 6, 2020), 496 pages
See Part 1 of the review here.
See Part 2 of the review here.
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Briant Christian, W. W. Norton & Company (October 6, 2020), 496 pages
See Part 1 of the review here.
See Part 3 of the review here.
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Briant Christian, W. W. Norton & Company (October 6, 2020), 496 pages
See Part 2 of the review here.
See Part 3 of the review here.
I’ve made a post on the question of what equality is, but what is its opposite? The obvious answer would be: the opposite of everything in the equality post. But there are more nuances to it than that.
Does morality exist? What would it even mean to say that morality exists? And if morality does not exist, then how can there be moral progress (e.g., how can we say that it was moral progress to end slavery)? These are meta-ethical questions, in other words, not questions describing or prescribing what one ought to do, but questions concerning whether describing or prescribing what one ought to do is even coherent. I will examine these questions, and more, in this post.
Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, known as the Communications Decency Act, contains the famous Section 230(c)(1), which consists of the 26 words that created the internet:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
You can see the full text of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 here (Section 230(c)(1) is on page 101). Why this is in the news lately is that a case before the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) may be deciding whether Section 230(c)(1) ought to be upheld or disposed (namely, in the cases Gonzalez v. Google, LLC and Taamneh v. Twitter, Inc.).
It’s been about a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine commenced. I wrote an article about the mounting tensions literally the day before Russian forces crossed the border (or, at least, the border as it was at the beginning of 2022). I made some predictions in that post, and a lot of digital ink has been spilled as people balkanized into pro-war and anti-war positions in the world outside Ukraine. Here is a bit of a retrospective on this unfortunate conflict.
The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education by James Lindsay, independently published, (December 6, 2022), 210 pages
Since early November of 2022, when the cryptocurrency exchange FTX went bankrupt, there has been growing criticism of a movement for which Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), founder and CEO of FTX, was a sort of mascot: effective altruism. Broadly speaking, this is the idea that people should take a rational approach to charitable efforts, rather than a sentimental approach. Empathy can lead us astray, appealing to our cognitive biases, like the availability heuristic, recency illusion, mere-exposure effect, the streetlight effect, and others. A touching story about a single person can move us to act better than any statistics about the suffering of millions. As such, instead of following our emotions, we should seek to get the most bang for our buck with our charitable efforts, i.e., save the most lives and do the most good with our donations of time, money, and resources. This means that the problems we address, and the means of addressing those problems, should be considered rationally and scientifically, going based on what the numbers tell us will do the most good, even if it doesn’t immediately give us that fuzzy feeling we achieve from helping the single person with the touching story. Since the downfall of SBF, this philosophy has garnered some criticism, often with what seems like more than a hint of schadenfreude.
Want to know how quantum computers really work? And why they can crack our best encryption systems? And how we might combat this? In this post, which is from a paper I wrote for a cybersecurity class where I went a bit above and beyond the assignment, I will go over these things. This post is long, but if you are interested in this, you might find it rewarding.
Objectivity, also known as value neutrality or impartiality, is one of the highest ideals of science. The principle behind it is that science studies mind-independent reality, i.e., that which continues to exist even if no consciousness is there to perceive or think about it. This mind-independent reality is devoid of all values – there is no such thing as “good and bad” or “useful” or “beautiful” when it comes to, say, galaxy formation or evolution by natural selection. A major criticism of science levied by critical theory is that value neutrality is impossible, even if we are to take the assumption that mind-independent reality exists and that mind-independent reality is value neutral. As such, instead of blinding ourselves to the values and biases that are inextricable from science, we ought to import the “correct” values into science (e.g., feminist science).
