top of page
Rapid Fire
Basically a blog where I try to do philosophy outside.
Search
Oct 18, 2024
Pleasantly Simple Myths
“When pleasantly simple myths are discarded, the result is a mess. Endless problems need to be addressed.” —Ian Hacking, The Social...
Jul 12, 2024
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,...
Jun 21, 2024
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...
May 24, 2024
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...
Apr 19, 2024
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...
Apr 5, 2024
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...
Nov 17, 2023
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...
Sep 8, 2023
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...
Aug 25, 2023
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...
Aug 18, 2023
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...
Jul 14, 2023
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...
Jul 7, 2023
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...
Jun 23, 2023
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...
bottom of page