Rapid Fire

Basically a blog where I try to do philosophy outside.

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...

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...

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...

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...

Protagonists aren’t always Good Guys

i was hoping that the oppenheimer movie would inspire a generation of kids to be physicists but it really missed the mark on that. let's...

I had to write a research statement about what I’m working on. Here’s my first draft.

Let me know what you think! I'm still figuring out how to summarize my research program and instill confidence I’ll be a “productive”...

Efficient and Effective

Just a quick dive into a useful distinction, because these aren’t the same: Effectiveness is all about outcomes. (You know, effects.)...

Justice for Assholes (and why we need Utopias)

I’ve been putting together a syllabus called Utopias that draws from a bunch of fields (philosophy, literature, anthropology…) to try to...

I'm on Twitch now

So here's an argument: In Utopia, our practical problems would be solved. (There'd be nothing we had to do.) But if we sat around all...

"More good is better than less good"

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...

Ricky Mouser