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Rapid Fire
Basically a blog where I try to do philosophy outside.
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Better On Average™
I went to an incredible talk this week by a renowned optimizer in AI spaces. He’s worked on everything from power grids to e-commerce...
Nov 8, 2024


If you say “Black Box” again I’m escaping to the Cloud
Just a short one—I’m in Orono, Maine today at a conference on Agency and Reasoning in Games . Tomorrow, I’ll be giving a talk on board...
Sep 27, 2024


Trusting the Process
Here’s a reasonably sophisticated argument. (I’m not saying that it’s right.) Trust the Process means, care about process over actual...
Aug 23, 2024


The books Elon pretends he’s read
“I read a lot of books,” says Elon Musk. Apparently one of them is Superintelligence, the highly-influential book that AI moguls from Sam...
Jun 14, 2024


I’m shining the Bat-Signal
Maybe you’ve seen my Work-in-Progress talk on AI and the Future of Work. Maybe you even liked it! If so, I have good news: In less than a...
Jun 7, 2024


Debate Mode
philosophy is not just about questions, concepts, and arguments, but is also about idioms —Raymond Geuss I’ve been meaning to write some...
Apr 26, 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 19, 2024


How to Tell Better Narratives of Character (ft. Canceling)
Our discourse around canceling seems a bit too simplistic. But how can we do better? We’ve all done bad things we wish we could take...
Apr 12, 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...
Apr 5, 2024


My talk on Superintelligence and Suicide
This week I gave a Zoom talk as part of the AI Futures Work-in-Progress Series at Indiana University (a thing I totally started but it’s...
Mar 29, 2024


What the hell is Wellness?
The first “fun” feature I ever put on my website was Well-Being in the Wild. Since I was writing a dissertation on well-being anyway, I...
Mar 22, 2024


Let a thousand flowers bloom
Last week, we saw Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry square off head-to-head. (I’ll try not to get too technical, but I wanna lay out...
Mar 15, 2024


Sports as Politics?
If politics were more like sports, would that be an unmitigated disaster? Or could the comparison be helpful, in at least some ways? We...
Feb 9, 2024


So there’s this psychology paper I keep thinking about
It starts, like all psychology papers, with a competitor for the most boringest sentence ever: One of the essential insights from...
Nov 24, 2023


How to Read a Riot
So recently, Marcus Arvan invited me to pitch my forthcoming paper “How to Read a Riot” to a public-facing audience of about 2,000...
Nov 10, 2023


We’ve confused Intrinsic & Ultimate value and it’s been a Disaster
If you’ve happened to take a course in intro ethics, you might have heard of a classic distinction between instrumental and intrinsic...
Oct 27, 2023


Look at me I’m on a Panel
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...
Oct 20, 2023


Someone could get it Wrong
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...
Oct 13, 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...
Sep 8, 2023


A sneak peek of our upcoming APA Talk
It all started with a question: What the hell is Andrew Tate doing? Hello @GretaThunberg I have 33 cars. My Bugatti has a w16 8.0L quad...
Sep 1, 2023
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