At the beginning of this chat I had with Noah Millman, you’ll note my caveat: I speak as a dedicated but decidedly amateur student of artificial intelligence. Noah makes a similar announcement. I was thrilled to be invited by him to discuss issues of the philosophy and theory of knowledge of AI, and I had […]
Continue reading →The internet, we are all expected to believe, is revolutionary, in several different meanings of the term. In the span of a decade or two, the digitally-connected technologies we refer to as the internet expanded from being populated by a few thousand academics, government officials, and cultish amateurs to a ubiquitous part of contemporary life. […]
Continue reading →As I and others have written about endlessly (and as you’re likely bored of hearing), the curious economics of online politics and culture writing leads to too much and too little at the same time. We produce a huge amount of content because hitting click targets requires endless churn, particularly given the need to stay on […]
Continue reading →Hey guys, ever since my graduation a few weeks ago, people have asked about setting up a tip jar or similar. So I’ve set up another GoFundMe, which will fund a UHaul and some various moving expenses for my upcoming move to parts unknown at the end of June. I’ve been a bit reluctant to […]
Continue reading →I generally find radical transparency kind of creepy, but I think Gawker Media opening up its internal discussion about a union effort is useful, so I encourage you to check it out. [edit: useful to me. Maybe not so useful to individual employees who feel intimidated about it, it occurs to me.] The particulars of […]
Continue reading →I thought that this piece by J.K. Trotter on Tom Hardy’s past partial admission, then sort-of-denial of having sexual encounters with other men was interesting. It simultaneously made me feel a little sad that Hardy (or more likely, his people) would feel the need to be aggressive in defining the story, while also making me […]
Continue reading →In what I truly hope is the nadir of pop fans whining about the mere existence of people who don’t like what they like, Rob Harvilla deploys a tactic I’m seeing more and more of lately: preemptively acknowledging a broader controversy as a way to avoid having to comment on it, when the subject of […]
Continue reading →My discussion with Jay Caspian Kang, about online activism and the future of the left, has drawn to a close. I really want to thank Jay for the invitation and for the spirited pushback. It’s been a great opportunity to flesh out my ideas, and to do so with direct and muscular disagreement, which is always […]
Continue reading →Spoilers ahoy. At the end of writer and director George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road¸ a rebooted continuation of his classic post-apocalyptic series, a quote appears: “Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves?” The quote is attributed to “The First History Man,” a nod to the time […]
Continue reading →Well folks, grad school has come and gone. It’s beautiful on campus. I grew up on a college campus; my earliest memories are of playing under my father’s desk while he met with students. My parents met on campus. My maternal grandfather ran the post office and general store at a college; my paternal grandfather […]
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