Where does morality come from? How can we agree on rules of behavior that align with our morality? What is good and bad behavior? How can we describe and prescribe morality? These questions have been asked for milennia and many answers have been provided. I posit that today these questions are more important than they have been in a while.
The ideal political system
Systems of government are not to be judged for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies, but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there.
The enlightenment formula
Buddhist practice can be seen as a re-weighting of the terms in the human (non-optimal) implementation of the Buddha equation.
Proof that LLMs hallucinate
I asked ChatGPT if it was prone to hallucinations. It admitted it was.
Wrong and right about AI risks
Anthropomorphizing AI applications is not productive. AI applications are systems and should be designed using systems engineering.
Catching up
Getting started with agentic LLMs.
Why so many lies?
Why do lies emerge in such huge numbers and why do lies have such long half-lives?
Building a new religion
Fact-checking an authoritarian’s statements is a meaningless endeavor. What he says has no relation to epistemology.
Inquiry cures ignorance
We are not always great at learning from each other, together with each other, from history, or from other documented bodies of knowledge. We too often subject too poor models too soon to reality. An important reason is that we seem to have an aversion to inquiry.
Is Trumpism fascism?
A comparison of Trump’s policies and executive orders with a classic definition of fascism by Robert Paxton.