Category: Philosophy
Can they reconstitute Philosphy & Public Affairs?
Here is a recent announcement of note:
We are unanimously resigning from our editorial roles at Philosophy & Public Affairs, published by Wiley, and launching a new diamond open-access journal published by Open Library of Humanities (OLH). All of us will play the same editorial roles in the new journal and will retain the aim of publishing the best philosophical work touching on matters of public importance.
Do read the whole text, but you can imagine how the arguments run. Lots of big names are behind this, including Sen, Scheffler, Srinivasan, Waldron, and others. I am rooting for them, but can this succeed?
How sticky are reputations anyway? Nine months from now, what percentage of people on a university-wide tenure committee will know about this change? Three years from now?
Or consider the new journal itself. Without the long history of famous articles behind it, might it, with the same set of editors, have a lower reputation? Talk about mood affiliation!
Or might the existence of a “naming squabble” itself lower the reputations of both the old journal and the new venture? “Well, if they can’t get along, both outlets will have trouble managing their future reputations…”
Or might some of the highly prestigious editors, over time, be more willing to leave than would have been the case under the old moniker? Perhaps the newly reconstituted board will not be able to get along with itself, not without the final backstop of “the company” (Wiley) to enforce a core on all the bargaining.
If I am in the second year of my tenure clock in a philosophy department, and I have a great paper, do I send it to the new journal? In its old manifestation it was a top top outlet, but is it still? What risks am I running? Or do I send it to the thing still named Philosophy & Public Affairs, which presumably still has some very good new editors.
I will be watching.
The Generalist interviews me
I was happy with how this turned out, here is one excerpt:
I think we’re overestimating the risks to American democracy. The intellectual class is way too pessimistic. They’re not used to it being rough and tumble, but it’s been that way for most of the country’s history. It’s correct to think that’s unpleasant. But by being polarized and shouting at each other, we actually resolve things and eventually move forward. Not always the right way. I don’t always like the decisions it makes. But I think American democracy is going to be fine.
Polarization has its benefits. In most cases, you say what you think, and sooner or later, someone wins. Abortion is very polarized, for example. I’m not saying which side you should think is correct, but states are re-examining it. Kansas recently voted to allow abortion, and Arizona is in the midst of a debate. Over time, it will be settled—one way or another. Slugging things out is underrated.
Meanwhile, being reasonable with your constituents is overrated. Look at Germany, which has non-ideological, non-polarized politics. They’ve gotten every decision wrong. Their whole strategy of buying cheap energy from Russia to sell to China was a huge blunder. They bet most of their economy on it, and neither of those two things will work out. They also have no military whatsoever. It’s not like, “Ok, they don’t spend enough.” They literally had troops that didn’t have rifles to train with and were forced to use broomsticks.
Germany is truly screwed and won’t face up to it. But when you listen to their politicians speak – and I do understand German – they always sound intelligent and reasonable. They could use a dose of polarization, but they’re afraid because of their history, which I get. But the more you look at their politics, the more you end up liking ours, I would say.
I would note that Germany’s various “centrist” or “coalition of the middle” regimes have brought us AfD, which is polarizing in the worst way and considered to be an extremist party worthy of being spied upon.
And this:
What craft are you spending a lifetime honing?
Shooting a basketball. I’ve done that for the longest, outside of eating and breathing. I’m just not very good at it.
I started doing it when I was about eight. We moved close to a house with a hoop, and all the other kids would gather there and play. It was a social thing, and I started doing it. I kept it going in all the different places I’ve lived. The only country I couldn’t keep the habit going was Germany. But when I was living in New Zealand, I made a special point of it. It’s good exercise, it’s relaxing, you get to be outside. It’s a little cold today, but I did it yesterday, and I’ll do it tomorrow.
It’s important to repeatedly do something you’re not that good at. Most successful people are good at what they do, but if that’s all they do, they lose humility. They find it harder to understand a big chunk of the world that doesn’t have their talent or is simply mediocre. It helps you keep things in perspective.
I’m not terrible at it. I have gotten better, even recently. But no one would say I’m really good.
Interesting throughout, as they like to say.
My Conversation with the excellent Coleman Hughes
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Coleman and Tyler explore the implications of colorblindness, including whether jazz would’ve been created in a color-blind society, how easy it is to disentangle race and culture, whether we should also try to be ‘autism-blind’, and Coleman’s personal experience with lookism and ageism. They also discuss what Coleman’s learned from J.J. Johnson, the hardest thing about performing the trombone, playing sets in the Charles Mingus Big Band as a teenager, whether Billy Joel is any good, what reservations he has about his conservative fans, why the Beastie Boys are overrated, what he’s learned from Noam Dworman, why Interstellar is Chris Nolan’s masterpiece, the Coleman Hughes production function, why political debate is so toxic, what he’ll do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How was it you ended up playing trombone in Charles Mingus Big Band?
HUGHES: I participated in the Charles Mingus high school jazz festival, which they still do every year. It was new at the time. They invite bands from all around to audition, and they identify a handful of good soloists and let them sit in for one night with the band. I sat in with the band, and the band leader knew that I lived close by in New Jersey, and so essentially invited me to start playing with the band on Monday nights.
I was probably 16 or 17 at this point, so I would take the NJ Transit into New York City on a Monday night, play two sets with the Mingus Band sitting next to people that had been my idols and were now my mentors — people like Ku-umba Frank Lacy, who is a fantastic trombone player; played with Art Blakey and D’Angelo and so forth. Then I would go home at midnight and go to school on Tuesday morning.
COWEN: Why is the music of Charles Mingus special in jazz? Because it is to me, but how would you articulate what it is for you?
Here is another:
COWEN: If I understand you correctly, you’re also suggesting in our private lives we should be color-blind.
HUGHES: Yes. Broadly, yes. Or we should try to be.
COWEN: We should try to be. This is where I might not agree with you. So I find if I look at media, I look at social media, I see a dispute — I think 100 percent of the time I agree with Coleman, pretty much, on these race-related matters. In private lives, I’m less sure.
Let me ask you a question.
HUGHES: Sure.
COWEN: Could jazz music have been created in a color-blind America?
HUGHES: Could it have been created in a color-blind America — in what sense do you mean that question?
COWEN: It seems there’s a lot of cultural creativity. One issue is it may have required some hardship, but that’s not my point. It requires some sense of a cultural identity to motivate it — that the people making it want to express something about their lives, their history, their communities. And to them it’s not color-blind.
HUGHES: Interesting. My counterargument to that would be, insofar as I understand the early history of jazz, it was heavily more racially integrated than American society was at that time. In the sense that the culture of jazz music as it existed in, say, New Orleans and New York City was many, many decades ahead of the curve in terms of its attitudes towards how people should live racially: interracial friendship, interracial relationship, etc. Yes, I’d argue the ethos of jazz was more color-blind, in my sense, than the American average at the time.
COWEN: But maybe there’s some portfolio effect here. So yes, Benny Goodman hires Teddy Wilson to play for him. Teddy Wilson was black, as I’m sure you know. And that works marvelously well. It’s just good for the world that Benny Goodman does this.
Can it still not be the case that Teddy Wilson is pulling from something deep in his being, in his soul — about his racial experience, his upbringing, the people he’s known — and that that’s where a lot of the expression in the music comes from? That is most decidedly not color-blind, even though we would all endorse the fact that Benny Goodman was willing to hire Teddy Wilson.
HUGHES: Yes. Maybe — I’d argue it may not be culture-blind, though it probably is color-blind, in the sense that black Americans don’t just represent a race. That’s what a black American would have in common — that’s what I would have in common with someone from Ethiopia, is that we’re broadly of the same “race.” We are not at all of the same culture.
To the extent that there is something called “African American culture,” which I believe that there is, which has had many wonderful products, including jazz and hip-hop — yes, then I’m perfectly willing to concede that that’s a cultural product in the same way that, say, country music is like a product of broadly Southern culture.
COWEN: But then here’s my worry a bit. You’re going to have people privately putting out cultural visions in the public sphere through music, television, novels — a thousand ways — and those will inevitably be somewhat political once they’re cultural visions. So these other visions will be out there, and a lot of them you’re going to disagree with. It might be fine to say, “It would be better if we were all much more color-blind.” But given these other non-color-blind visions are out there, do you not have to, in some sense, counter them by not being so color-blind yourself and say, “Well, here’s a better way to think about the black or African American or Ethiopian or whatever identity”?
Interesting throughout.
What should I ask Paul Bloom?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is Wikipedia:
Paul Bloom…is a Canadian American psychologist. He is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, and art.
Here is Paul’s own home page. Here are Paul’s books on Amazon. Here is Paul on Twitter. Here is Paul’s new Substack. Here is Paul’s post on how to be a good podcast guest.
My excellent Conversation with Peter Thiel
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, along with almost thirty minutes of audience questions, filmed in Miami. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler and Peter Thiel dive deep into the complexities of political theology, including why it’s a concept we still need today, why Peter’s against Calvinism (and rationalism), whether the Old Testament should lead us to be woke, why Carl Schmitt is enjoying a resurgence, whether we’re entering a new age of millenarian thought, the one existential risk Peter thinks we’re overlooking, why everyone just muddling through leads to disaster, the role of the katechon, the political vision in Shakespeare, how AI will affect the influence of wordcels, Straussian messages in the Bible, what worries Peter about Miami, and more.
Here is an excerpt:
COWEN: Let’s say you’re trying to track the probability that the Western world and its allies somehow muddle through, and just keep on muddling through. What variable or variables do you look at to try to track or estimate that? What do you watch?
THIEL: Well, I don’t think it’s a really empirical question. If you could convince me that it was empirical, and you’d say, “These are the variables we should pay attention to” — if I agreed with that frame, you’ve already won half the argument. It’d be like variables . . . Well, the sun has risen and set every day, so it’ll probably keep doing that, so we shouldn’t worry. Or the planet has always muddled through, so Greta’s wrong, and we shouldn’t really pay attention to her. I’m sympathetic to not paying attention to her, but I don’t think this is a great argument.
Of course, if we think about the globalization project of the post–Cold War period where, in some sense, globalization just happens, there’s going to be more movement of goods and people and ideas and money, and we’re going to become this more peaceful, better-integrated world. You don’t need to sweat the details. We’re just going to muddle through.
Then, in my telling, there were a lot of things around that story that went very haywire. One simple version is, the US-China thing hasn’t quite worked the way Fukuyama and all these people envisioned it back in 1989. I think one could have figured this out much earlier if we had not been told, “You’re just going to muddle through.” The alarm bells would’ve gone off much sooner.
Maybe globalization is leading towards a neoliberal paradise. Maybe it’s leading to the totalitarian state of the Antichrist. Let’s say it’s not a very empirical argument, but if someone like you didn’t ask questions about muddling through, I’d be so much — like an optimistic boomer libertarian like you stop asking questions about muddling through, I’d be so much more assured, so much more hopeful.
COWEN: Are you saying it’s ultimately a metaphysical question rather than an empirical question?
THIEL: I don’t think it’s metaphysical, but it’s somewhat analytic.
COWEN: And moral, even. You’re laying down some duty by talking about muddling through.
THIEL: Well, it does tie into all these bigger questions. I don’t think that if we had a one-world state, this would automatically be for the best. I’m not sure that if we do a classical liberal or libertarian intuition on this, it would be maybe the absolute power that a one-world state would corrupt absolutely. I don’t think the libertarians were critical enough of it the last 20 or 30 years, so there was some way they didn’t believe their own theories. They didn’t connect things enough. I don’t know if I’d say that’s a moral failure, but there was some failure of the imagination.
COWEN: This multi-pronged skepticism about muddling through — would you say that’s your actual real political theology if we got into the bottom of this now?
THIEL: Whenever people think you can just muddle through, you’re probably set up for some kind of disaster. That’s fair. It’s not as positive as an agenda, but I always think . . .
One of my chapters in the Zero to One book was, “You are not a lottery ticket.” The basic advice is, if you’re an investor and you can just think, “Okay, I’m just muddling through as an investor here. I have no idea what to invest in. There are all these people. I can’t pay attention to any of them. I’m just going to write checks to everyone, make them go away. I’m just going to set up a desk somewhere here on South Beach, and I’m going to give a check to everyone who comes up to the desk, or not everybody. It’s just some writing lottery tickets.”
That’s just a formula for losing all your money. The place where I react so violently to the muddling through — again, we’re just not thinking. It can be Calvinist. It can be rationalist. It’s anti-intellectual. It’s not thinking about things.
Interesting throughout, definitely recommended. You may recall that the very first CWT episode (2015!) was with Peter, that is here.
The progress in Progress Studies
Here is a very good article by Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine. Excerpt:
The contours of the new progress movement stretch from the Human Progress project at the libertarian Cato Institute to the “eco-modernist” initiatives at the Breakthrough Institute and the Pritzker Innovation Fund. Four relatively new groups at the forefront of the pro-progress forces are The Roots of Progress, the Institute for Progress, The Progress Network, and Works in Progress. Together, they are—as The Progress Network puts it—”building an idea movement that speaks to a better future in a world dominated by voices that suggest a worse one.”
And:
The heads of all four organizations cite the animating influence of the July 2019 Atlantic article “We Need a New Science of Progress,” written by Cowen and Patrick Collison, the billionaire founder of the internet payments company Stripe. “The success of Progress Studies will come from its ability to identify effective progress-increasing interventions and the extent to which they are adopted by universities, funding agencies, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other institutions,” Cowen and Collison argued. “In that sense, Progress Studies is closer to medicine than biology: The goal is to treat, not merely to understand.”
Cowen and Collison are involved in the movements in other ways too. Both The Roots of Progress and Works in Progress have received grants from the Emergent Ventures project, administered by Cowen. Works in Progress became part of Stripe Press in 2022.
Recommended, interesting throughout.
Cultivating Minds: The Psychological Consequences of Rice versus Wheat Farming
It’s long been argued that the means of production influence social, cultural and psychological processes. Rice farming, for example, requires complex irrigation systems under communal management and intense, coordinated labor. Thus, it has been argued that successful rice farming communities tend to develop people with collectivist orientations, and cultural ways of thinking that emphasize group harmony and interdependence. In contrast, wheat farming, which requires less labor and coordination is associated with more individualistic cultures that value independence and personal autonomy. Implicit in Turner’s Frontier hypothesis, for example, is the idea that not only could a young man say ‘take this job and shove it’ and go west but once there they could establish a small, viable wheat farm (or other dry crop).
There is plenty of evidence for these theories. Rice cultures around the world do tend to exhibit similar cultural characteristics, including less focus on self, more relational or holistic thinking and greater in-group favoritism than wheat cultures. Similar differences exist between the rice and dry crop areas of China. The differences exist but is the explanation rice and wheat farming or are there are other genetic, historical or random factors at play?
A new paper by Talhelm and Dong in Nature Communications uses the craziness of China’s Cultural Revolution to provide causal evidence in favor of the rice and wheat farming theory of culture. After World War II ended, the communist government in China turned soldiers into farmers arbitrarily assigning them to newly created farms around the country–including two farms in Northern Ningxia province that were nearly identical in temperature, rainfall and acreage but one of the firms lay slightly above the river and one slightly below the river making the latter more suitable for rice farming and the former for wheat. During the Cultural Revolution, youth were shipped off to the farms “with very little preparation or forethought”. Thus, the two farms ended up in similar environments with similar people but different modes of production.
Talhelm and Dong measure thought style with a variety of simple experiments which have been shown in earlier work to be associated with collectivist and individualist thinking. When asked to draw circles representing themselves and friends or family, for example, people tend to self-inflate their own circle but they self-inflate more in individualist cultures.
The authors find that consistent with the differences across East and West and across rice and wheat areas in China, the people on the rice farm in Ningxia are more collectivistic in their thinking than the people on the wheat farm.
The differences are all in the same direction but somewhat moderated suggesting that the effects can be created quite quickly (a few generations) but become stronger the longer and more embedded they are in the wider culture.
I am reminded of an another great paper, this one by Leibbrandt, Gneezy, and List (LGL) that I wrote about in Learning to Compete and Cooperate. LGL look at two types of fishing villages in Brazil. The villages are close to one another but some of them are on the lake and some of them are on the sea coast. Lake fishing is individualistic but sea fishing requires a collective effort. LGL find that the lake fishermen are much more willing to engage in competition–perhaps having seen that individual effort pays off–than the sea fishermen for whom individual effort is much less efficacious. Unlike Talhelm and Dong, LGL don’t have random assignment, although I see no reason why the lake and sea fishermen should otherwise be different, but they do find that women, who neither lake nor sea fish, do not show the same differences. Thus, the differences seem to be tied quite closely to production learning rather than to broader culture.
How long does it take to imprint these styles of thinking? How long does it last? Is imprinting during child or young adulthood more effective than later imprinting? Can one find the same sorts of differences between athletes of different sports–e.g. rowing versus running? It’s telling, for example, that the only famous rowers I can think are the Winklevoss twins. Are attempts to inculcate these types of thinking successful on a more than surface level. I have difficulty believing that “you didn’t build that,” changes say relational versus holistic thinking but would styles of thinking change during a war?
What should I ask Slavoj Žižek?
Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with him. Here is the first one, in Norway with a live audience. I am very much enjoying his new book
So what should I ask him?
My contentious Conversation with Jonathan Haidt
Here is the transcript, audio, and video. Here is the episode summary:
But might technological advances and good old human resilience allow kids to adapt more easily than he thinks?
Jonathan joined Tyler to discuss this question and more, including whether left-wingers or right-wingers make for better parents, the wisest person Jonathan has interacted with, psychological traits as a source of identitarianism, whether AI will solve the screen time problem, why school closures didn’t seem to affect the well-being of young people, whether the mood shift since 2012 is not just about social media use, the benefits of the broader internet vs. social media, the four norms to solve the biggest collective action problems with smartphone use, the feasibility of age-gating social media, and more.
It is a very different tone than most CWTs, most of all when we get to social media. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: There are two pieces of evidence — when I look at them, they don’t seem to support your story out of sample.
HAIDT: Okay, great. Let’s have it.
COWEN: First, across countries, it’s mostly the Anglosphere and the Nordic countries, which are more or less part of the Anglosphere. Most of the world is immune to this, and smartphones for them seem fine. Why isn’t it just that a negative mood came upon the Anglosphere for reasons we mostly don’t understand, and it didn’t come upon most of the rest of the world? If we’re differentiating my hypothesis from yours, doesn’t that favor my view?
HAIDT: Well, once you look into the connections and the timing, I would say no. I think I see what you’re saying now, but I think your view would say, “Just for some reason we don’t know, things changed around 2012.” Whereas I’m going to say, “Okay, things changed around 2012 in all these countries. We see it in the mental illness rates, especially of the girls.” I’m going to say it’s not just some mood thing. It’s like (a), why is it especially the girls? (b) —
COWEN: They’re more mimetic, right?
HAIDT: Yes, that’s true.
COWEN: Girls are more mimetic in general.
HAIDT: That’s right. That’s part of it. You’re right, that’s part of it. They’re just much more open to connection. They’re more influenced. They’re more subject to contagion. That is a big part of it, you’re right. What Zach Rausch and I have found — he’s my lead researcher at the After Babel Substack. I hope people will sign up. It’s free. We’ve been putting out tons of research. Zach has really tracked down what happened internationally, and I can lay it out.
Now I know the answer. I didn’t know it two months ago. The answer is, within countries, as I said, it’s the people who are conservative and religious who are protected, and the others, the kids get washed out to sea. Psychologically, they feel their life has no meaning. They get more depressed. Zach has looked across countries, and what you find in Europe is that, overall, the kids are getting a little worse off psychologically.
But that hides the fact that in Eastern Europe, which is getting more religious, the kids are actually healthier now than they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Whereas in Catholic Europe, they’re a little worse, and in Protestant Europe, they’re much worse.
It doesn’t seem to me like, oh, New Zealand and Iceland were talking to each other, and the kids were sharing memes. It’s rather, everyone in the developed world, even in Eastern Europe, everyone — their kids are on phones, but the penetration, the intensity, was faster in the richest countries, the Anglos and the Scandinavians. That’s where people had the most independence and individualism, which was pretty conducive to happiness before the smartphone. But it now meant that these are the kids who get washed away when you get that rapid conversion to the phone-based childhood around 2012. What’s wrong with that explanation?
COWEN: Old Americans also seem grumpier to me. Maybe that’s cable TV, but it’s not that they’re on their phones all the time. And you know all these studies. If you try to assess what percentage of the variation in happiness of young people is caused by smartphone usage — Sabine Hossenfelder had a recent video on this — those numbers are very, very, very small. That’s another measurement that seems to discriminate in favor of my theory, exogenous mood shifts, rather than your theory. Why not?
Very interesting throughout, recommended. And do not forget that Jon’s argument is outlined in detail in his new book, titled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
Be careful what you announce about your expected value maximization
Judge Kaplan: A man willing to flip a coin as to the continued existence of life on earth. Mr. Bankman-Fried knew that Alameda was spending customer funds on risky investments, political contributions and Bahamas real estate. The funds were not his to use
— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) March 28, 2024
That is via Shiraz. Here is my CWT with Sam Bankman-Fried, here is the key passage:
COWEN: Should a Benthamite be risk-neutral with regard to social welfare?
BANKMAN-FRIED: Yes, that I feel very strongly about.
COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing?
BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, which is, I’m assuming these are noninteracting universes. Is that right? Because to the extent they’re in the same universe, then maybe duplicating doesn’t actually double the value because maybe they would have colonized the other one anyway, eventually.
COWEN: But holding all that constant, you’re actually getting two Earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing.
BANKMAN-FRIED: Again, I feel compelled to say caveats here, like, “How do you really know that’s what’s happening?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But that aside, take the pure hypothetical.
COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence?
BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.
COWEN: Are there implications of Benthamite utilitarianism where you yourself feel like that can’t be right; you’re not willing to accept them? What are those limits, if any?
There are other gems, including this one:
COWEN: In which respects have you brought a legal mind to your endeavors?
BANKMAN-FRIED: It’s becoming increasingly important over time…
Recommended.
*Who’s Afraid of Gender?*
That is the title of the new Judith Butler book, focusing mostly on trans issues. To be clear, on most practical issues concerning trans, I side with the social conservatives. For instance, I don’t think trans women have a right to compete in women’s weightlifting contests. And I have not been happy with how many schools have been teaching about trans issues, due to social contagion effects that are larger than I would have expected. And yet — when it comes to the grounds of theory I think Butler is more right than wrong. This is a very good book, and in some critical ways a very libertarian book (again to be clear I think Butler is wrong about most other things). But on this issue — why so insist on such a rigid male-female set of binary categories? Why be so afraid of alternative, more flexible approaches? Why restrict our conceptual freedoms and ultimately our life practical freedoms in such a manner? Especially when a minority of people — admittedly a small minority but also much larger than the mere category of “trans” — will suffer greatly from such attitudes and such practices?
So I am happy to recommend this book, noting that not everyone will like it, to say the least. My main criticism is that Butler spends too much time with what I consider to be weaker views (e.g., the Pope), and not enough time with the more difficult problems concerning real and potential harms to children. Her neglect of the latter verges on the intellectually criminally negligent. And yet the key is to see that it is still a good and interesting book.
*Star Maker*, by Olaf Stapledon
Now though it was generally assumed in intellectual circles that the best was yet to be, Bvalltu and his friends were convinced that the crest of the wave had already occurred many centuries ago. To most men, if course, the decade before the war had seemed better and more civilized than any earlier age. In their view civilization and mechanization were almost identical, and never before had there been such a triumph of mechanization. The benefits of a scientific civilization were obvious. For the fortunate class there was more comfort, better health, increased stature, a prolongation of youth, and a system of technical knowledge so vast and intricate that no man coul dknow more than its outline or some tiny corner of its detail. Moreoever, increased communications had brought all the peoples into contact. Local idiosyncrasies were fading out before the radio, the cinema, and the gramophone. In comparison with these hopeful signs it was easily overlooked that the human constitution, through strengthened by improved conditions, was intrinsically less stable than formerly. Certain disintegrative diseases were slowly but surely increasing. In particular, diseases of the nervous system were becoming more common and more pernicious. Cynics used to say that the mental hospitals would soon outnumber even the churches.
Here is a recent short essay on Starmaker, first published in 1937.
Who are currently the most influential thinkers/intellectuals on the Right?
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Here is my corresponding (and much longer and more complicated) post about the Left. Model this difference!
Claude 3 Opus and AGI
As many MR readers will know, I don’t think the concept of AGI is especially well-defined. Can the thing dribble a basketball “with smarts”? Probably not. Then its intelligence isn’t general. You might think that kind of intelligence “doesn’t matter,” and maybe I agree, but that is begging the question. It is easier and cleaner to just push the notion of “general” out of the center of the argument. God aside, if such a being exists, intelligence never is general.
In the structure of current debates, the concept of “AGI” plays a counterproductive role. You might think the world truly changes once we reach such a thing. That means the doomsters will be reluctant to admit AGI has arrived, because imminent doom is not evident. The Gary Marcus-like skeptics also will be reluctant to admit AGI has arrived, because they have been crapping on the capabilities for years. In both cases, the stances on AGI tell you more about the temperaments of the commentators than about any capabilities of the beast itself.
I would say this: there is yet another definition of AGI, a historical one. Five years ago, if people had seen Claude 3 Opus, would they have thought we had AGI? Just as a descriptive matter, I think the answer to that question is yes, and better yet someone on Twitter suggested more or less the same. In that sense we have AGI right now.
Carry on, people! Enjoy your 2019-dated AGI. Canada has to wait.
Concluding remarks: Forget that historical relativism! True AGI never will be built, and that holds for OpenAI as well. Humans in 2019 were unimaginative, super-non-critical morons, impressed by any piddling AI that can explain a joke or understand a non-literal sentence. Licensing can continue and Elon is wrong.
GPT as ethical advisor
This study investigates the efficacy of an AI-based ethical advisor using the GPT-4 model. Drawing from a pool of ethical dilemmas published in the New York Times column “The Ethicist”, we compared the ethical advice given by the human expert and author of the column, Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah, with AI-generated advice. The comparison is done by evaluating the perceived usefulness of the ethical advice across three distinct groups: random subjects recruited from an online platform, Wharton MBA students, and a panel of ethical decision-making experts comprising academics and clergy. Our findings revealed no significant difference in the perceived value of the advice between human generated ethical advice and AI-generated ethical advice. When forced to choose between the two sources of advice, the random subjects recruited online displayed a slight but significant preference for the AI-generated advice, selecting it 60% of the time, while MBA students and the expert panel showed no significant preference.
That is a 2023 piece by Christian Terwiesch and Lennart Meincke, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. And here is my earlier 2019 CWT with Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah.