It’s great that Americans will now have to pay five (rather than one) co-pays to prevent their children from catching awful diseases.
Philosophers should get free meals for life in the Prytaneion for writing on Substack.
I agree with this, and it raises a fundamental worry for me. What if the net result of the ways in which LLMs increase productivity (the movement of dollars in the economy) actually be leads to a decline in the economic activity that increases human wellbeing?
Chris Hayes@chrislhayes.bsky.social · 2w agoRapidly becoming convinced that one major immediate impact of AI diffusion is a massive uptick in the sophistication and scale of scams and hacks. Seeing it everywhere.
If Christopher Nolan's version of The Odyssey isn't historically accurate, why did the Muse tell him to present it that way?
I’m surprised that the democrats didn’t heavily invest in their own America250 show as counter-programming. Simply reading from the declaration, the first, the 13-15th, and 19th amendment and then having some music/fireworks would be very moving in this moment.
If nominative determinism were true, I would be soaked in vinegar.
I would suggest that, rather than adapting to AI, we should make AI adapt to us and our needs.
In the name of efficiency, we've added a delay to any human being who wants to access a website so that we can verify that they are human.
To describe a phenomenon as a cancer is an incitement to violence. [... ] But it could be argued that the cancer metaphors are in themselves implicitly genocidal. —Susan Sontag
Timothy Snyder@timothysnyder.bsky.social · 4mo agoThis is simply genocidal language and is a horror in itself.
I'm very happy this paper (A Semantic Vacuity Theory of Truth) came out: doi.org/10.1093/mind...
A Semantic Vacuity Theory of Truth
Abstract. The redundancy theory says that truth predicates make no descriptive contribution to sentences that contain them. The theory has strong initial p
doi.org
I tend to be partial to mid-century abstract and minimalist book covers but some books these days do have beautiful covers.
My basic mental model for this now is: the US is at war with Syracuse in addition to its other commitments.
Bryan Pickel@bryanpickel.bsky.social · 5mo agoThe Trump administration keeps comparing themselves to the Athenians in the Peloponnesian war, the weak suffer what they must and all. If only there were an example from that war of an Athenian war of choice on a power halfway across the world so that we could learn from that experience.
The Trump administration keeps comparing themselves to the Athenians in the Peloponnesian war, the weak suffer what they must and all. If only there were an example from that war of an Athenian war of choice on a power halfway across the world so that we could learn from that experience.
Wars should be entered into only at last resort, only with a just cause, and only with as clear an objective as can be formulated at the time.
'And I'm gonna tell you workers, 'fore you cash in your checks: They say "America First," but they mean "America Next!"'.
This morning I had a student I taught 17 years ago email to ask me a logic question and a student I taught last semester email me that they liked my courses and want to pursue philosophy of language further.
It's already really weird to me morally that realists parrot the Athenian speeches to the Melians and on the Mytilenean debate in Thucydides. But, have they not read the rest of the book? Do they think the war and their conduct in it works out well for the Athenians?
So based on the DOJ’s recent record with regard to political prosecutions, what happens when Maduro is acquitted?
I thought at least some of the lessons of the Iraq war had been learned.
What fraction of the rest of my life will be spent turning off AI Assistants? (I'm not even a person who thinks these are utterly useless.)
Alexis de Tocqueville just absolutely rinses Andrew Jackson.
Students using contemporary Scots poetry to illustrate principles of Classical Indian Philosophy of Language in their essays is an interesting cross-pollination.
Similarly, he notes that the senate is a dangerous mess but that nothing bad has happened because less populous states hadn’t ganged up.
Bryan Pickel@bryanpickel.bsky.social · 8mo agoTocqueville points out how dangerous it is to have a president who can stay in office without an effective majority in the legislature, but the notes that it’s not a big deal there wasn’t much for the president to do at the time.
Tocqueville points out how dangerous it is to have a president who can stay in office without an effective majority in the legislature, but the notes that it’s not a big deal there wasn’t much for the president to do at the time.
I've been listening to Locke's Two Treatises (which I hadn't read in a long time), and some of the passages feel like the most damning criticisms of Trump I've ever heard.
"Yeah, but what is truth? If you follow me." -- Lionel Hutz