Rapid Fire

Basically a blog where I try to do philosophy outside.

What Experts Don’t Know

(Now that I have a PhD, here’s a follow-up to last week’s article on the value of expert opinion.) As you become an expert in a field,...

DEEP DIVE: Simplicity and Complexity

Hi I’m a four-year-old child learning 8 new words every day. So help me out: What’s a chef? Uhh…a chef is someone who cooks food. Oh...

Jazz bends Music like a Gaudí Building

I recently got to listen to a jazz concert on the roof of Antoni Gaudí’s magnificent La Pedrera. Meet the building that teaches you how...

What makes You think you’re so Special? (a reluctant defense of X-Risk)

I spent this past week at The Midwest Ethics Symposium on AI presenting my research and meeting lots of great folks from academia and...

Fake Experts

Recently I’ve started thinking more about the political role of experts in society. Who counts as an expert anyway? We expect a lot from...

Getting Better at Criticism

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...

Game Values vs. Real-Life Values

My friend Kjell and I noticed there just aren’t enough podcasts, so we decided to help. Our first episode takes an early look at some of...

The Politics of Age of Empires II

I’ve been playing a lot of Stellaris lately, but as a kid, the only computer game I really played much was Age of Empires II (AoE2, as in...

I got Published

Neat! You can check out a free version of my paper “Mutual Aid as Effective Altruism” here. (The final, professionally edited and typeset...

Twilight Imperium and Instrumental Convergence

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...

Why do (some) scientists hate philosophy?

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

Complexity versus Richness

Here’s some chess jargon: pawns aren’t pieces. Your king, queen, rooks, bishops, and knights are all pieces. But your pawns are just...

Ricky Mouser