I recently spoke to a trained economist who argued that racism was bad, but only because it was bad for the economy. What can we say...

Arguments are powerful tools for seeing how commitments hang together. Take the classic reductio ad absurdum, where I try to show that my...

For the past month, I’ve been running an experiment. I started going to two therapists so we can form a consensus. Weirdly, this is kind...

As finals approach, I’ve been hired as a grader for my advisor’s Intro Philosophy class. I love these classes, where we’re trying to give...

It starts, like all psychology papers, with a competitor for the most boringest sentence ever: One of the essential insights from...

Last week, I got to hear Wycliffe Gordon play Amazing Grace live. It was awesome. And then, he pulled out his mute. No recording’s gonna...

Last week, I was sick as a dog and downright loopy. What a perfect time to be invited to an APA Panel on AI ethics! Fortunately, I...

I had a really interesting conversation about art criticism this week. So here we go: What does it mean to be great at jazz? Look, I know...

Now that I’m back in Bloomington for a while, everyone has a ton of advice on how to present myself on the academic job market so that...

I got to play Twilight Imperium last weekend and I was so powerful I didn’t know what to do. I like to describe Twilight Imperium as 8...

My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature... It’s not that there can’t be...

I don’t love talk of ‘smart’ or ‘high IQ’ basketball. I got to coach a youth basketball team recently, and it was awesome. For a lot of...

Here's a bad question: How many people should there be? Uh oh. That's renowned Oxford moral philosopher Derek Parfit, by the way. I shall...

I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between puzzles and problems and I need your help to figure it out. Say you’re solving a...

Let's talk about games. Do you know the difference between purposes and goals? The goal of a game is the target we aim at during the...

There are 255,168 possible games of tic-tac-toe and they’re all boring. If both sides play perfectly, tic-tac-toe is a draw. And playing...

Like most bestsellers, Antifragile takes one interesting idea and stretches it like taffy. As Taleb admits, “I’ve had only one master...

A serious and good philosophical work could be written that consisted of nothing but jokes. —Ludwig Wittgenstein[1] This week I went to...

Quick—name a living philosopher. (Don’t say Ricky Mouser just because you’re on my website.) Unless you already have a degree in...