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48763.014269
The stereotypical drug user is a life-long addict. While stereotypes are usually good statistical approximations of the truth, I’ve long had the sense that this particular stereotype is false. The infamous heroin study, for example, found that the vast majority of U.S. soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam quit when they came home. …
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284484.014436
Many scientists and philosophers characterize aging as a disease. In this article, I argue against doing so. Characterizing aging as a disease would likely exacerbate age-based discrimination, perpetuate beliefs that undermine our health, and embolden medical professionals to treat their patients unjustly. It would risk these harms without promising any benefits that would be substantial enough to make up for them. If we aim to avoid risking harms unnecessarily, we should not characterize aging as a disease.
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310443.014449
A recent exchange in the New Left Review asks an unusual question: Why is there the amount of art that there is? More specifically, provoked by the $6.2 million sale of Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian—a banana duct-taped to a wall—Malcolm Bull wants to know why there aren’t more “readymades,” a seeming font of money from nothing. …
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368470.014458
This paper draws an analogy between the value-free ideal (VFI) found in the domains of science and law, and argues that appreciating the similarities between these misplaced ideals mutually reinforces the arguments against the VFI in each domain, and can open up new conceptual space within debates about the proper role(s) of values within the practices of science and law alike. Although a jurisprudential philosophy of science is not mutually exclusive with the development of a political philosophy of science, we believe philosophers of science would do well to consider drawing on law and jurisprudence, as opposed to moral and political philosophy, in thinking about ways forward within these debates.
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456973.014476
This article claims that the salient ethical risk of generative AI is not machine consciousness but the social efficacy of its simulation—what we call pseudo-consciousness. Read through Heidegger’s Gestell, Jonas’s anticipatory responsibility, and Floridi’s information ethics, we relocate appraisal from putative inner states to interactional effects in the infosphere. We formalize a two-part mechanism/uptake frame: functional introspection (fi)—first-person, reason-giving, self-repair, and local cross-turn stability—and ethical illusion (ei)—shifts in trust, respect, compliance, and moral ratings that attenuate on disclosure. Building on this, we propose simulated presence literacy (spl) as a domain-specific facet of AI literacy that teaches users to perceive fi, appraise ei, and respond with counter-uptake practices. We then advance an ethics of appearance in design: four levers (semio-transparency, attenuation of reciprocity illusion, calibrated trust, and constraints on first-person density), two KPIs (fi Score, ei Index), a minimal 2×2 to test mechanism → uptake and disclosure attenuation, and a five-step audit loop for governance. The result is a humanistic response—reconfiguration, not reinvention—that keeps fluency from passing for presence by making simulation legible, bounded, and accountable, with heightened precautions for vulnerable populations. In humanities research, teaching, and curation, treating LLMs as semantic artifacts, rather than as subjects, preserves interpretive agency while retaining the benefits of fluent assistance.
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483816.014488
How, exactly, can category theory help modeling in public health? I wrote a paper about this with two people who helped run Canada’s COVID modeling, together with a software engineer and a mathematician at the Topos Institute:
• John Baez, Xiaoyan Li, Sophie Libkind, Nathaniel D. Osgood and Eric Redekopp, A categorical framework for modeling with stock and flow diagrams, in Mathematics of Public Health: Mathematical Modelling from the Next Generation, eds. …
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483817.014497
Very short summary: In this essay, I discuss an objection to my claim that Hayek’s argument against progressive taxation doesn’t apply to the progressive consumption tax. I concede that under a steady state where growth has stalled, the claim falls. …
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553396.014505
This Target Article has been accepted for publication and has not yet been copyedited and proofread. The article may be cited using its doi (About doi), but it must be made clear that it is not the final version.
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567128.014516
An anonymous reader sent me this critique of my “Dynamic Case for Non-Compete,” featured in Pro-Market and Pro-Business: Essays on Laissez-Faire. Enjoy! You argue that non-competes can be beneficial since they make companies willing to share sensitive IP to employees. …
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720053.014524
This paper explores whether people are more likely to recognize inconsistency in others’ judgments than in their own, and if so, why. It reports two pre-registered online experiments with samples representative of the UK population (N = 814 and N = 1,623). In Study 1, people are more likely to recognize inconsistency in others’ moral (and non-moral) judgments than in their own. Study 2 replicates this finding and tests three explanations: (i) motivated reasoning, (ii) selective cognitive effort, and (iii) limited insight into others’ reasoning. Ad (i), because people’s susceptibility to motivated reasoning is said to diminish when people must account for their judgments, the presence of motivated reasoning was examined by manipulating social accountability. No effect was found. Ad (ii), while people spent significantly more time (a proxy for cognitive effort) on reviewing others’ consistency than their own, this explained only a fraction of the greater rate at which inconsistencies in others’ reasoning were recognized. Ad (iii), using low confidence in consistency evaluations as a proxy for limited insight, the study did not find support for the limited insight hypothesis. The finding that people are better at recognizing inconsistency in others’ moral judgments aligns with the idea that moral consistency reasoning is a social device that operates best when we interact with others, but more research is needed to uncover the psychological mechanisms behind this effect.
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913217.014531
Comp. by: Sivanthiraj Stage: Revises1 Chapter No.: FrontMatter Title Name: Chakravartty Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York, , USA Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India Penang Road, #-/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
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992331.014539
The Nazi leaders were evil men; they have become paradigms of evil. But after the war, in prison and on trial at Nuremberg, they became something else: pathetic, all-to-human. They minimized responsibility for what they had done, and lied to themselves and the world about how bad those deeds had been. …
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1063103.014547
Democratic theorists and social epistemologists often celebrate the epistemic benefits of diversity. One of the cornerstones is the ‘diversity trumps ability’ result by Hong and Page (2004). Ironically, the interplay between diversity and ability is rarely studied in radically different frameworks. Although diversity has been studied in prediction and search problems, the diversity-expertise tradeoff has not been studied systematically for small, deliberative groups facing binary classification problems. To fill this gap, I will introduce a new evidential sources framework and study whether, when, and (if so) why diversity trumps expertise in binary classification problems.
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1153149.014555
This chapter presents and critically evaluates the main aspects of the ethical system of Mary Whiton Calkins. Some of these aspects include the claims that to be a good person is to will what is conceived by that person to be the good and that what each of us is morally obligated to do is to will the Good. According to Calkins, there are no objective, mind-independent criteria for being the Good, but nonetheless some conceptions of the Good are better than others; this chapter assesses whether Calkins has an adequate account of how one conception of the Good can be superior to another. Finally, this chapter explores Calkins’s theory of virtues and vices. Among those discussed are the vice of cruelty, and the virtues of thoughtfulness and justice, with a focus on distributive justice. With respect to the latter, Calkins argues for a minimal safety net to ensure an adequate standard of living for all people.
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1159329.014563
In this paper we argue that radically embodied approaches to cognition can be expanded to show that: (a) our sensorimotor engagements with technical objects can be normatively shaped in a direct manner (i.e. not necessarily involving symbolic processes), and that (b) this normativity is not only anchored in the agent but also partially supported by technical objects themselves. We depart from the enactive reinterpretation of Piagetian sensorimotor schemes and his theory of equilibration to establish how both agent-sided and environment-sided support structures (including artefacts) contribute to the autonomous self-maintenance of sensorimotor networks. We will then introduce technical behaviour as a regulatory transformation of the environment enacted to equilibrate certain sensorimotor structures. We will defend that technical objects, as products of technical behaviour, sediment these normative constraints in their material structure. Then, through the dynamics of assimilation and accommodation, we schematize how different scenarios give rise to canonical or alternative uses in the encounter of agents with artefacts. Finally, we will offer a complexification of the normative entanglement of objects and agents by introducing the sociohistorical notion of activity as developed within Activity Theory approaches as collectively articulating individual actions. Based on all of this, we will have offered a picture of technical objects as also radically embodying normative layers, without submitting to an overly-deterministic picture of artefacts as rigidly prescribing behaviour, or to the purely symbolic or culturalist interpretation of them.
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1174942.01457
In my last post, I wrote about all the hate mail I’ve received these past few days. I even shared a Der-Stürmer-like image of a bloodthirsty, hook-nosed Orthodox Jew that some troll emailed me, after he’d repeatedly promised to send me a “diagram” that would improve my understanding of the Middle East. …
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1409651.014578
Hardly for the first time in my life, this weekend I got floridly denounced every five minutes—on SneerClub, on the blog of Peter Woit, and in my own inbox. The charge this time was that I’m a genocidal Zionist who wants to kill all Palestinian children purely because of his mental illness and raging persecution complex. …
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1514187.014586
The definition of tool use has long been debated, especially when applied beyond humans. Recent work argues that the phenomena included within tool use are so broad and varied that there is little hope of using the category for scientific generalizations, explanations, and predictions about the evolution, ecology, and psychology of tool users. One response to this argument has been the development of tooling as a replacement for tool use. In this article, we analyze the tool use and tooling frameworks. Identifying advantages and limitations in each, we offer a synthetic approach that suggests promising avenues for future research.
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1517551.014596
Today I gave $10,000 to Doctors Without Borders, since they’re doing a lot of good work in Gaza. I made this gift in memory of Mariam Abu Dagga, a freelance photographer who was killed in the Nasser Hospital in the Gaza Strip on August 25th this year. …
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1583757.014608
[An excerpt from Beyond Right and Wrong.] Some rights can be expected to promote overall well-being. Utilitarianism endorses these. Other rights lack this utilitarian property: they protect people against harmful interventions, but at greater cost to others who miss out on helpful interventions as a result. …
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1606934.014616
Suppose a man has already murdered most of your family, including several of your children, for no other reason than that he believes your kind doesn’t deserve to exist on earth. The murderer was never seriously punished for this, because most of your hometown actually shared his feelings about your family. …
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1690345.014623
I specialize in trillion-dollar ideas: policy reforms which, if implemented, would generate trillions of dollars of net social benefits. Ideas like open borders, educational austerity, and by-right construction. …
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1776737.014632
In 2015, Amy Finkelstein, Nathaniel Hendren, and Erzo Luttmer released an NBER working paper called “The Value of Medicaid: Interpreting Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment.” The paper’s results were a slap in the face of Social Desirability Bias — and the authors boldly advertised them right in the abstract:
Our baseline estimates of Medicaid's welfare benefit to recipients per dollar of government spending range from about $0.2 to $0.4, depending on the framework, with at least two-fifths – and as much as four-fifths – of the value of Medicaid coming from a transfer component, as opposed to its ability to move resources across states of the world. …
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1780733.014639
Interactions between agents are supported through a continuous process of detecting and responding to behaviors that are contingent upon the other agent’s behavior. Here, we explore the temporal dependence of these mechanisms, focusing on the role of timescale compatibility in inter-agent interactions. Using continuous-time recurrent neural networks (CTRNNs) to control embodied agents in a minimal social interaction task, we demonstrate that effective interactions require agents to operate on compatible timescales. Our results indicate that time scale mismatches disrupt agents’ ability to distinguish other agents from non-social entities, revealing a timescale threshold beyond which agents begin mis-classifying slower agents as static objects and faster agents as non-social animate objects.
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1948230.014647
Economists have long scoffed at know-it-all business and financial gurus with the rhetorical question, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” And sometimes the gurus use the same question to scoff at know-it-all economists. …
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1951307.014654
When thinking about big social problems like climate change or factory farming, there are two especially common failure modes worth avoiding:
Neglecting small numbers that incrementally contribute to significant aggregate harms. …
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1951308.014662
As part of the summer break, I’m publishing old essays that may be of interest for new subscribers. This post has been originally published January 13, 2023. If not already the case, do not hesitate to subscribe to receive free essays on economics, philosophy, and liberal politics in your mailbox! …
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2023451.01467
An important feature of theoretical projects that aim to promote social justice is their commitment to empowering those in oppressive circumstances so that they can solve their own problems. There are two reasons to take this approach. First, the oppressed have situated knowledge of the circumstances that others lack. But situated knowledge may not be enough to prompt critique. The second is that because both knowledge and values are shaped by social practices, a collective engagement with historically and materially grounded practices can provide a new frame for agency that enables a creative and potentially emancipatory restructuring of social relations. I argue that such path dependency of values is compatible with social justice being objective, but not to be discovered by theory alone.
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2038867.014682
Reminder: everyone is welcome here, but paid subscriptions are what enable me to devote the necessary time to researching and writing this newsletter, including pieces like this one on Katie Johnson, the woman who alleged Trump sexually assaulted her at the age of thirteen at a party of Jeffrey Epstein’s. …
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2124158.01469
This paper critically analyses the “attention economy” within the framework of cognitive science and techno-political economics, as applied to both human and machine interactions. We explore how current business models, particularly in digital platform capitalism, harness user engagement by strategically shaping attentional patterns. These platforms utilize advanced AI and massive data analytics to enhance user engagement, creating a cycle of attention capture and data extraction. We review contemporary (neuro)cognitive theories of attention and platform engagement design techniques and criticize classical cognitivist and behaviourist theories for their inadequacies in addressing the potential harms of such engagement on user autonomy and wellbeing. 4E approaches to cognitive science, instead, emphasizing the embodied, extended, enactive, and ecological aspects of cognition, offer us an intrinsic normative standpoint and a more integrated understanding of how attentional patterns are actively constituted by adaptive digital environments. By examining the precarious nature of habit formation in digital contexts, we reveal the techno-economic underpinnings that threaten personal autonomy by disaggregating habits away from the individual, into an AI managed collection of behavioural patterns. Our current predicament suggests the necessity of a paradigm shift towards an ecology of attention. This shift aims to foster environments that respect and preserve human cognitive and social capacities, countering the exploitative tendencies of cognitive capitalism.