Having been an avid podcast listener the last few years and always an eager reader, I now have a feeling that topics, debates, and conclusions are being recycled over and over again. Also the mix of podcast topics (science, politics, world affairs, philosophy) and selection of podcast guests have started to converge beween the podcasts.
Philosophy
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.
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.
The Buddha equation
There is some deep wisdom popping out from Jensen’s inequality.
What is true?
Truth is instrumental to the survival of democracy and indeed the survival of our very species. In this post I try to define what truth is.
Knowledge as a model of the world
Given that the main use of knowledge is to navigate through the world and through life, we can say that ontologically knowledge is our model of the world.
It takes a human to find the dragons
Without intrinsic motivation, the ability to hypothesize beyond training, or the capacity for real-world experimentation, AI will remain a tool that processes human-created information rather than a creator of new knowledge.