“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Sounds plausible … but what if you’re a masochist? As a masochist, you would have people beat and humiliate you. So … Or you have a troublesome colleague, and on some days you just wish someone would smack some sense into him. So you […]
The Golden Rule and moral rules of thumb Read More »
Free sample lecture from my Philosophy of Politics course. Starting with why philosophy matters to politics, the French Revolution, and Edmund Burke’s influential interpretation. Full course available here, along with its complementary Part 2. My other courses available here: Logic, Ethics, Metaphysics and Epistemology, Education, and more.
*Philosophy of Politics* introductory lecture free online Read More »
We see variations of this question: What happens when robots can do anything physical better than humans and AI can do anything cognitive better than any humans? What will be left for us? The answer is: Live your life as the human being you are. The better-than-me circumstance already exists. Usain Bolt and a thousand
Life’s purpose after AI? Read More »
Two factors about the long reach of skeptical philosophy and its practical results. Social construction of reality: If influential philosophers teach that “reality” is merely a social construct, then what happens to us in the next, taught generation? We focus primarily on the social — on doing whatever we can to construct social reality according
Arday and downstream postmodernism Read More »
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary, and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and
Innovation stages socially, according to Douglas Adams Read More »
A starter list from the last quarter-century: Some questions: The initial list of scandals is open-ended, as is the list of questions.
Biggest cheating/fraud scandals of our time Read More »
What unites the many who from, say, August 2016 to August 2026, believed the following: The issues range widely — from environmentalism to viruses to law enforcement to sex and gender to economics to Middle Eastern politics to academic sociology. Yet there is an identifiable demographic: Those who believed all of the above propositions, often
True-believers across disparate issues Read More »
“Democracy is a form of bourgeois state championed by all traitors to genuine socialism, who now find themselves at the head of official socialism and who assert that democracy is contrary to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Until the revolution transcended the limits of the bourgeois system, we were for democracy; but as soon as
Democratic Socialism’s usefulness, according to Lenin Read More »