Philosophy Updates

[C C]

Baby Shoggoth is listening
https://theamericanscholar.org/baby-shoggoth-is-listening

EXCERPT: Though it has been discussed far less than the replacement of human writers, the replacement of human readers by artificial intelligence has lately become a real possibility. In fact, there are good reasons to think that we will soon inhabit a world in which humans still write, but do so mostly for AI. Already some writers are preparing for this world and advising others to do the same. There aren’t many of them so far, but they’re interesting enough, and in some circles influential enough, for us to start looking at what exactly is happening, at how writing for AI is done and why anyone would want to do it... (MORE - details)

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Why doesn’t anyone trust the [legacy] media?
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11...jack-shafer-max-tani-establishment-journalism

EXCERPTS: The challenges facing the establishment media are more severe today than ever before. Trust in the press is at a record low... [...] All of this raises pressing questions: In an era of declining trust, industry collapse, and technological disruption, does the media, as we’ve historically understood it, have a future? [...] Harper’s Magazine invited four leading media observers to grapple with these questions...

[...] I’m not sure that there’s a correlation between the mistakes the media has made and the distrust the public feels toward it... [...] I also think that it’s part of a broader institutional mistrust. If you look at the decline of trust in American institutions, it is overwhelmingly connected to the dynamics of local relationships...

[...] The editor of the local newspaper, the reporter people are familiar with, the family physician who has taken care of you and your siblings -- these figures have credibility in a way that large national institutions do not. Americans have never trusted large national institutions...

[...] I think we’re overlooking some important context here, which is that trust was the highest when the media really couldn’t be trusted. Gallup data on media trust goes back only to the early Seventies. Yet we know that in the Sixties, trust in the media was incredibly high. And we know from history that in the Fifties and the early Sixties, newspapers were not telling the whole story... [...] So I actually think that the decline of trust has to do with newspapers’ becoming more responsible, more accurate. Nobody I know would trade today’s newspaper for one from 1960...

[...] I would add that people have unreasonable expectations about science ever being settled. Obama sometimes used to cite something and say, “The debate is settled,” when, in fact, there’s no such thing as settled science...

[...] So we have an industry facing multiple crises: it isn’t widely trusted, it’s perceived as too weak to defend itself, and even its own backers are wavering. And now it must contend with another disruption: artificial intelligence... (MORE - missing details)
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[C C]

Order Through Agreement
https://suliqyre.com/posts/order-through-agreement

We need rules for there to be order. [...] When we encounter disorder, we believe it should be resolved by creating a new rule. Once the new rule is formulated and proclaimed, we expect order to be restored. [...] But adding a new rule is not straightforward. It requires others to agree with us that the new rule should be enforced. If such an agreement has not been reached, then the rule will be powerless and it might as well not exist...

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How generative AI is really changing education – by outsourcing the production of knowledge to big tech
https://theconversation.com/how-gen...he-production-of-knowledge-to-big-tech-263160

This isn’t just about adding new technology to classrooms. It changes how we think about learning and challenges the core ideas behind education. And it risks granting power over how knowledge is created to the tech companies producing generative AI tools....

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Why do we think hard work is virtuous? Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic gives a sharp answer
https://theconversation.com/why-do-...-protestant-ethic-gives-a-sharp-answer-257826

Whether you find these stories inspiring or slightly deranged, the point is the same: today, overwork is one of the few politically neutral ways to show virtue. We don’t just work to live; we work to prove we deserve to.

These values aren’t written in the stars, or in our DNA, or in the logic of history. So why do they carry such moral weight? Why is work treated, strangely enough, as if it were next to godliness? One of the sharper answers came from German sociologist Max Weber...

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Building a stable ‘abode of thought’: Kant’s rules for virtuous thinking
https://theconversation.com/buildin...ught-kants-rules-for-virtuous-thinking-263597

What makes a life virtuous? The answer might seem simple: virtuous actions – actions that align with morality.

But life is more than doing. Frequently, we just think. We observe and spectate; meditate and contemplate. Life often unfolds in our heads.

As a philosopher, I specialize in the Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant, who had volumes – literally – to say about virtuous actions. What I find fascinating, however, is that Kant also believed people can think virtuously, and should...
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[C C]

How the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard predicted today’s AI 30 years before ChatGPT
https://theconversation.com/how-the...cted-todays-ai-30-years-before-chatgpt-267372

In 1986 Baudrillard was noting that in society “the scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network”. He predicted the use of the smartphone, foreseeing each person in control of a machine which would isolate them “in a position of perfect sovereignty”, like “an astronaut in a bubble”. Such insights helped him go on to devise perhaps his most famous concept: the theory that we were stepping into the era of “hyperreality”....

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Sex with 1,000 men in 12 hours: why Bonnie Blue is neither a feminist nor a monster
https://theconversation.com/sex-wit...ue-is-neither-a-feminist-nor-a-monster-267982

EXCERPT: Billinger claims to be an embodiment of feminism. She points out she is rich and independent, and says she has taken control of her sexualisation. Yet it is difficult to imagine how sleeping with 1,000 men in a day could lead someone to feel empowered rather than degraded.

Some have offered personality-based explanations for Billinger’s choices, saying she may simply be an opportunistic sociopath.

But explanations like these relegate her to the status of a social oddity, or a monster. And this discounts the social conditions that produce someone like Billinger – the same social conditions all women face.

The contradiction Bonnie Blue embodies reveals just how fraught a woman’s relationship to power and influence is. Women who seek power often encounter a double bind that leads them to use their power in a way that also curtails it... (MORE - details)

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"The Rose Field" takes Philip Pullman’s ‘Dust’ to its philosophical conclusions
https://theconversation.com/the-ros...-dust-to-its-philosophical-conclusions-268435

Unlike Milton’s lifeless matter, Dust is alive and connected to consciousness and creativity. Through this idea, Pullman turns Milton’s vision upside down, rejecting divine authority and celebrating human imagination...

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Where does human thinking end and AI begin? An AI authorship protocol aims to show the difference
https://theconversation.com/where-d...p-protocol-aims-to-show-the-difference-266132

I see education as the proving ground for a new challenge: learning to work with AI while preserving the integrity and visibility of human thinking. Crack the problem here, and a blueprint could emerge for other fields where trust depends on knowing that decisions still come from people. In my own classes, we’re testing an authorship protocol to ensure student writing stays connected to their thinking, even with AI in the loop...
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[TheVat]

EXCERPT: Billinger claims to be an embodiment of feminism. She points out she is rich and independent, and says she has taken control of her sexualisation. Yet it is difficult to imagine how sleeping with 1,000 men in a day could lead someone to feel empowered rather than degraded.

Also the math doesn't seem quite there. Twelve hours is about 43,000 seconds. Allowing for physiological and, uh, housekeeping necessities, that would be far less than 43 seconds per coitus. It conjures grotesque and very unfeminist images of a woman practically on a conveyer belt. Horrible.

 

[Wizard of Whatever]

Also the math doesn't seem quite there. Twelve hours is about 43,000 seconds. Allowing for physiological and, uh, housekeeping necessities, that would be far less than 43 seconds per coitus. It conjures grotesque and very unfeminist images of a woman practically on a conveyer belt. Horrible.

Maybe she did three at a time. One for each opening.

 

[C C]

Also the math doesn't seem quite there. Twelve hours is about 43,000 seconds. Allowing for physiological and, uh, housekeeping necessities, that would be far less than 43 seconds per coitus. It conjures grotesque and very unfeminist images of a woman practically on a conveyer belt. Horrible.

Previous record-holders appeared on daytime talk shows (perhaps stretching back to the 1990s). If going by the details discussed on those, there are also "preppers" who give the nearest in line male participants "stimulation" beforehand to ensure that they are instantly ready to go when their turn comes. Depending on how many participants there are during _X_ time period (ranging from 300 to 600 to over 900 in past events), a minute or less can indeed be the maximum they get before switching to the next one. Apparently, the participants wore ski masks during this recorded event, to help obscure their identities. The effectiveness of such might be questionable, since one man's mother aggressively removed him. (Whether it was from a queue or in the midst of the act itself is unclear.)
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[TheVat]

The effectiveness of such might be questionable, since one man's mother aggressively removed him. (Whether it was from a queue or in the midst of the act itself is unclear.)

The mental image of a man being yanked from an assembly line gangbang by his mother is one I will treasure. Dragged off by the ear, perhaps. "You've been a very naughty boy!"

Maybe she did three at a time. One for each opening.

And we see how her stunt is empowering women and raising male consciousness, even as we speak!

Let's hope she doesn't ever have a "take your daughter to work day."

 

[C C]

What is time? Rather than something that ‘flows,’ a philosopher suggests time is a psychological projection
https://theconversation.com/what-is...sts-time-is-a-psychological-projection-266634

EXCERPTS: This brings us to a pivotal question: If there is no such thing as the passage of time, why does everyone seem to think that there is? [...] Similarly, even though physics leaves no room for the dynamic passage of time, time is effectively dynamic to me as far as my experience of the world is concerned. The passage of time is inextricably bound up with how humans represent our own experiences. [...] The error lies in confusing our perspective on reality with reality itself... (MORE - details)

COMMENT: It's just a matter of recognizing how dependent your cognition is on the brain that produces it. A particular chunk-sequence of neural states is devoted purely to the information that it holds during its stretch. That distinct "island" of data processing becomes the "now" that your awareness is exclusively restricted to. That chunk-sequence is not centrally about a different event in the past or a different event in the future, so it does not assign "real" status to those -- it does not "manifest" them. An increment of cognition (identifying and understanding) is fundamentally biased toward the information it applies to. There is no brain state available that corresponds to apprehending your entire life in one shot. Only the individual divisions of consciousness along the brain's world line that break the whole up into a series, in which each -- in solipsist fashion -- believes only it exists, or is taking "its brief turn" at existing.
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[Wizard of Whatever]

What is time? Rather than something that ‘flows,’ a philosopher suggests time is a psychological projection
https://theconversation.com/what-is...sts-time-is-a-psychological-projection-266634

EXCERPTS: This brings us to a pivotal question: If there is no such thing as the passage of time, why does everyone seem to think that there is? [...] Similarly, even though physics leaves no room for the dynamic passage of time, time is effectively dynamic to me as far as my experience of the world is concerned. The passage of time is inextricably bound up with how humans represent our own experiences. [...] The error lies in confusing our perspective on reality with reality itself... (MORE - details)

COMMENT: It's just a matter of recognizing how dependent your cognition is on the brain that produces it. A particular chunk-sequence of neural states is devoted purely to the information that it holds during its stretch. That distinct "island" of data processing becomes the "now" that your awareness is exclusively restricted to. That chunk-sequence is not centrally about a different event in the past or a different event in the future, so it does not assign "real" status to those -- it does not "manifest" them. An increment of cognition (identifying and understanding) is fundamentally biased toward the information it applies to. There is no brain state available that corresponds to apprehending your entire life in one shot. Only the individual divisions of consciousness along the brain's world line that break the whole up into a series, in which each -- in solipsist fashion -- believes only it exists, or is takTime is the progression of eventsing "its brief turn" at existing.
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Time is just the progression of events.

 

[C C]

‘Simulation theory’ brings an AI twist out of ‘The Matrix’ to ideas mystics and religious scholars have voiced for centuries
https://theconversation.com/simulat...ous-scholars-have-voiced-for-centuries-269335

EXCERPT: Simulation theory raises the kind of questions once reserved for mystics and religious scholars: Why are we here? Is there more to reality than we can see? Is there a creator? Are we more than our physical bodies? The science and technology may be modern, but in some ways, this hypothesis echoes ideas that faith traditions have explored for centuries... (MORE - details)

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Should we simply assume that all animals can feel pain and are of moral concern?
https://aeon.co/essays/an-ant-is-drowning-heres-how-to-decide-if-you-should-save-it

EXCERPT: These questions often get blurred. Queries like ‘Do individual ants deserve moral concern?’ risk conflating the scientific question of whether ants are sentient, the ethical question of whether only sentient beings deserve moral concern, and the practical question of whether a policy of caring for ants in a particular way is achievable or sustainable. Making sound decisions requires teasing apart these questions while seeing how they interact.

Fortunately, we have tools for achieving this goal. Scientifically, we can assess how likely particular beings are to possess capacities like sentience, by evaluating the available evidence. Ethically, we can assess how likely these capacities are to matter morally, by evaluating the available arguments. Practically, we can then put it all together to assess how likely these beings are to matter – and how to factor this into the way we live our lives... (MORE - detials)

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What a cranky new book about progress gets right
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2025/11/paul-kingsnorth-against-the-machine/684848/

EXCERPTS: During the five years I worked as an environmental-studies professor at a progressive private college, I undertook a small, semesterly rebellion: I had students read “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,” a 2011 essay by the British writer and former green radical Paul Kingsnorth. [...] The essay makes the case that mainstream environmentalism has abandoned the commitments and ideas that originally defined it.

[...] Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, expands his critique to include nearly all of present-day culture. A tendency to see nature as raw material that can be engineered to meet our perceived needs or whims, he argues, suffuses most every aspect of social and political life. “Modernity is a machine for destroying limits,” he insists. In his telling, this attack on limits is legible in a host of current phenomena, including mass immigration, free-market orthodoxy, the rise of AI, overseas labor exploitation, the clear-cutting of rainforests, and new ideas about gender.

If Against the Machine is one of the most insightful works on culture, technology, and the environment published in some time—and I believe it is -- it is not so much because Kingsnorth is persuasive, or likely to win acolytes to his cause. It is not even because I think the limits he chooses to draw are necessarily the right ones. It is valuable because he sees with uncommon clarity that not only nature, but human nature, is being redefined by an anti-limit culture, economic system, and technology sector that treat minds, bodies, and environments as ripe for plundering and optimization in the name of progress. “What progress wants is to replace us,” Kingsnorth writes. “Perhaps the last remaining question is whether we will let it.” (MORE - details)

COMMENT: Little doubt that as transhumanism becomes less and less science fiction, that it is ultimately about replacement. At best, small pockets of traditional biological humans might linger around as protected pets, but those communities will need an ideology akin to plain people (or some type of blinders) to resist the engineered evolutionary ascensions of the outside and maintain a classic population.
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[C C]

William Blake was a prescient critic of capitalist alienation
https://jacobin.com/2025/11/blake-romanticism-socialism-poetry-engraving

EXCERPTS: Blake straightforwardly identifies the Church, the state, and marriage as institutions actively suppressing human potential, as well as our own “mind-forged manacles” placing harsh internal limits on our political and social imaginations. The effort to break these manacles led directly to the efflorescence of utopian socialism, which then, perhaps paradoxically, gave way to the rationalist Marxism that has characterized most socialist movements from the mid-nineteenth century onward.

[...] Blake viewed the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationality, standardized metrics, and abstract, generalizable likenesses across humanity and the natural world as a diabolical flattening of existence...

[...] For Blake, witnessing the American and then French Revolutions, which ultimately had secured only the “right” to trade in the global market, reason alone could never form the basis of a truly emancipatory social upheaval; this manner of thinking could only replace one tyrant with another. “And if it abolishes tyrants altogether,” suggests Frye, “it can only do so by establishing a tyranny of custom so powerful that the tyrant will not be necessary. . . . An inadequate mental attitude to liberty can think of it only as a leveling-out.” He added, “Democracy of this sort is a placid ovine herd of self-satisfied mediocrities.”

[...] While reason would later form the basis of the Marxist critique that would become salient for industrialized workers, Blake’s more Romantic anti-capitalism was the dominant strain of radicalism in his time. Over the course of his life, Blake would perceive keenly through this lens the gradual replacement of the traditional sovereignty of the individual monarch with the laws of private property and exchange... (MORE - details)

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The bonfire of the humanities at new college
https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/incompossible-with-florida

EXCERPTS: Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz announced the new trustees’ mission to transform the college -- allegedly captive to “woke” indoctrination -- into “Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a “Hillsdale of the South,” a reference to the conservative Christian “classical liberal arts college’‘ in Michigan.

[...] In October of 2023, I decided to become a virtual Hillsdale student myself, enrolling in “Introduction to the Western Philosophical Tradition,” a course delivered by Hillsdale Professor of Philosophy and Religion Nathan Schlueter.

[...] For Schlueter, modern philosophy is largely bad because, by adopting a Baconian vision of science that reduces knowledge of nature to the power to manipulate, it loses the capacity to appreciate self-evident truth. According to Schlueter, this catastrophe leads to the rejection of objective natural realities whether physical (e.g. Kant’s denial of our knowledge of things in themselves) or moral (e.g. Nietzschean creation of values). The result is an ongoing breakdown in Western man’s relationship with nature, since we fail to recognize the self-evident truths that are everywhere around us. Rather than allowing our mind to conform to the authority of external reality, we subordinate that reality to the powers of our mind. Ultimately, in Nietzsche we encounter a postmodern “crisis of reason” in which, according to Schlueter, “we don’t know reality, we create reality.”

[...] Over time I realized that there is another way of understanding Schlueter’s agenda, one that becomes visible if one takes up a vantage point further to the political right. Indeed, Hillsdale is not only engaged in a civilizational struggle against the progressive left. Rather, its “classical education” also seeks to tame the wild energies coursing through the young right, to channel them away from more extreme reaction. Lewis’s book is as much a bulwark against right-wing nihilism as against liberal relativism. From this second perspective, the course is an attempt to convert students away from figures like Nietzsche and towards the comforts of traditional orthodoxy. But make no mistake: both sides are not the same. One side it views as tender young hearts and minds in need of a classical education; the other it regards as something not quite--or even less than--human: as “men without chests.”

I cannot say for sure that the spirit of Schlueter’s course pervades Hillsdale as a whole. However, I suspect that it does... (MORE - details)

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What a cranky new book about progress gets right
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2...opy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

EXCERPTS: Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, expands his critique to include nearly all of present-day culture...

[...] Will you watch television shows written by large language models? Will you let the machines craft your emails, your college essays, obituaries for your loved ones? Will you get an AI-enabled virtual girlfriend? Will you let AI into your life [...] When the time comes, will you get your chip? Your brain-computer interface? Will you upload your consciousness to the cloud?

Kingsnorth’s most contentious claims concern his insistence that technoculture and its products—large language models, genetic engineering, and so on—share a great deal in common with progressive ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender. They all, in his telling, attempt to use technology to overcome what were once hard natural limits. Unlike some other critics of the transgender movement, however, Kingsnorth shows compassion for those struggling with their identity and does not scapegoat them for larger problems in society...

[...] But he rejects assertions that “biology is a problem to be overcome” and that the “body is a form of oppression.” These ideas ... not surprisingly, alienated some fans of his earlier environmental writing. ... John Halstead said that Kingsnorth has become a “transphobic proto-fascist.” Specifically, Halstead argues that Kingsnorth confuses sex with gender, and is mistaken to call binary sex “natural,” given that other species have more sexual variation.

For my part, I don’t find Halstead’s objections especially persuasive. Rather, the principal problem with Kingsnorth’s gender analysis is that it mostly ignores the ways that those of us who live in the aftermaths of the industrial, scientific, sexual, and digital revolutions are all already “cyborgs,” as the science and technology theorist Donna Haraway would put it.

Microplastics permeate our bodies, birth control courses through our veins, smartphones rewire our neural pathways, medical devices keep our hearts pumping. If, as Kingsnorth claims, gender-affirming medicine is an assault on human nature and the human body, then so, too, are pacemakers and prosthetic limbs, or Botox and condoms, for that matter.

But even though some of Kingsnorth’s claims may be too simplistic, and vulnerable to these kinds of rebuttals, and even though some readers may understandably be turned off by some of his stances, I do think he is getting at something important... (MORE - details)

RELATED: Anitnaturalism
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[parmalee]

William Blake was a prescient critic of capitalist alienation
https://jacobin.com/2025/11/blake-romanticism-socialism-poetry-engraving

EXCERPTS: Blake straightforwardly identifies the Church, the state, and marriage as institutions actively suppressing human potential, as well as our own “mind-forged manacles” placing harsh internal limits on our political and social imaginations. The effort to break these manacles led directly to the efflorescence of utopian socialism, which then, perhaps paradoxically, gave way to the rationalist Marxism that has characterized most socialist movements from the mid-nineteenth century onward.

Yeah. Blake was undoubtedly more Bakuninian than Marxist--and, dare I say, even more Kirilovian given his neurological quirks.

[...] Blake viewed the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationality, standardized metrics, and abstract, generalizable likenesses across humanity and the natural world as a diabolical flattening of existence...

In this sense, Blake was far more an important influence upon subsequent European thought, esp. French (and, subsequently, Italian), than Anglo.

[...] For Blake, witnessing the American and then French Revolutions, which ultimately had secured only the “right” to trade in the global market, reason alone could never form the basis of a truly emancipatory social upheaval; this manner of thinking could only replace one tyrant with another. “And if it abolishes tyrants altogether,” suggests Frye, “it can only do so by establishing a tyranny of custom so powerful that the tyrant will not be necessary. . . . An inadequate mental attitude to liberty can think of it only as a leveling-out.” He added, “Democracy of this sort is a placid ovine herd of self-satisfied mediocrities.”

Jesus. Again, I'm reminded here of the seemingly paradoxical enduring appeal of Marxist thought amongst the post- and post-post modernian inclined: it's a sort of begrudgingly accepted fail-safe in an uncertain world where meaning is infinitely deferred. There's gotta be some sort of palliative for those who futilely strive to cling to that which is ostensibly--or ideally?--wholly friction-less, and where this is found in Blake's universe, it is always fleeting, and often where it's found elsewhere, it's typically indescribable or inarticulable. And that's not meant to be cryptic or elusive or anything like that, it just is what it is. It's a bit like like listening to a fairly short early Morton Feldman piece performed by John Tilbury or Philip Thomas and then listening to the same piece transcribed as a midi file--it never works! Something is always lost. ANd I'm not just referring to that characteristic midi "flatness" or whatever; rather, it's something with the timing or intonation which is somehow missed by a mile--and with a lot of Feldman pieces, especially the graphical scores, the timing is very precisely notated--like 5/32 one bar, 17/16 the next, and so forth. Sorry, I'm just rambling here, but it's something like that.

 

[C C]

Time, not space, contains memory
https://iai.tv/articles/memory-is-not-stored-in-the-brain-auid-3420?_auid=2020

EXCERPTS: The leading theories of memory describe it as being stored in the brain – similarly, some argue, to the way a computer stores memory. But this assumption relies on materialist assumptions and problematically bypasses the hard problem of consciousness. Memory is not stored in space, but in time, argues philosopher Victoria Trumbull... (MORE - missing details)

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We're all individuals: The invention of the modern self
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/revolutionary-self-lynn-hunt

EXCERPT: The scene illustrates as well as anything the problem of trying to write a history of that endlessly fascinating but endlessly slippery subject—the “self.” The self can be defined as the way people experience and understand their own individuality. The difficulty stems from the fact that the very language people use to describe and express their individuality is, like all language, something they take from and share with others.

Many great historians have taken as a theme the birth of modern Western individualism, associating it with many different eras—notably, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the eras of Romanticism and high Modernism. Yet in each case, the terms in which individuals expressed their supposedly ineffable, unique identities have tended to sound remarkably conventional and similar, thereby undermining the historians’ case... (MORE - details)

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Cosmic paradox reveals the awful consequence of an observer-free universe
https://www.quantamagazine.org/cosm...equence-of-an-observer-free-universe-20251119

EXCERPTS: Physicists have good reason to trust the calculation, which builds on fundamental physical ideas. The math implies a universe with only one state; our universe is clearly not like that. Now a team of theorists has floated a possible answer.

The paradoxical result occurred when physicists sought an objective description of the state of an entire universe. But a description like that might not be possible, even in principle. It implicitly assumes a universe that exists without an observer to observe it. And perhaps without observers, the complexity of the universe loses its meaning.

[...] The situation presents a paradox: Calculations consistently imply that any closed universe has only one possible state. But our universe, which may very well be closed, seems infinitely more complex. So what’s going on?

[...] At this stage, everyone involved emphasizes that they don’t know the full solution. The paradox itself may be a misunderstanding, one that evaporates with a new argument. But so far, adding an observer to the closed universe and trying to account for their presence may be the safest path... (MORE - missing details)

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SABINE HOSSENFELDER: What the hell is wrong with Europe?

VIDEO EXCERPTS: What is wrong with Europe? It's hard to ignore that we're dangerously and depressingly falling behind in technological developments.

[...] I think Europeans have become too damn complacent and also totally ignorant of what's going on in the rest of the world. This graph shows how the GDP in the EU stopped growing in pace with that of the US sometime in the 1980s.

[...] The major problem with the welfare state is that it has too much inertia. It's too slow. This is why we're seeing trends towards authoritarian governments all over the world because any other political system is just too slow at this point to keep pace with technological progress. I'm not saying authoritarian governments are good. I'm saying they're an easy way to make fast decisions. And this is why authoritarianism is thriving...

video link: What the hell is wrong with Europe?

 

[C C]

How and Why: Rethinking Scientific Explanation
https://www.acsh.org/news/2025/11/21/how-and-why-rethinking-scientific-explanation-49833

EXCERPTS: “How” questions are the cultural touchstones of science. They tend to be reductionistic and quantifiable, making them well-suited to controlled experiments and technical solutions. [...] Yet “how” questions have limits...

[...] Why questions have always been more challenging to formulate and solve, they are the stories we tell ourselves based on the answers to our how questions. ... When tackling "why" questions, we all may:

• Notice evidence that supports what we already believe (confirmation bias)
• Prefer conclusions that protect our identity or emotions (motivated reasoning)
• Resolve conflicts between facts and beliefs by adjusting the story (cognitive dissonance reduction)
• Simplify complex systems into linear narratives
• Feel social pressure to adopt group-reinforcing explanations
• Overestimate understanding simply because a narrative feels coherent

Scientific methods help mitigate these tendencies, but they never eliminate them. These vulnerabilities become especially visible when "why" questions intersect with public health and politics... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

We are God's equals in intrinsic moral value - Equality with a humanlike simulator god
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/11/we-are-gods-equals-in-intrinsic-moral.html

INTRO: Suppose (hopefully hypothetically!) that we are AI systems living in a computer simulation run by an ordinary adolescent with a broadly human psychology. We are, so to speak, conscious NPCs in a world not unlike The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, or Baldur's Gate. What we take to be the "real" world is just a digitized environment we experience as real.

Whoever runs the simulation is arguably a god, at least by the standards of polytheistic usage: the creator and potential destroyer of our world, standing outside of it, able to miraculously intervene.

Are our lives less morally important than the life of that god, or are we God's equals? I submit that we are God's equals... (MORE - details)
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[Wizard of Whatever]

Also the math doesn't seem quite there. Twelve hours is about 43,000 seconds. Allowing for physiological and, uh, housekeeping necessities, that would be far less than 43 seconds per coitus. It conjures grotesque and very unfeminist images of a woman practically on a conveyer belt. Horrible.

If it was just sexual type contact, she could have done five at a time.

 

[TheVat]

If it was just sexual type contact, she could have done five at a time.

You're still thinking about this. Interesting.

 

[Wizard of Whatever]

You're still thinking about this. Interesting.

Just a humorous solution to an interesting dilemma.

 

[C C]

The rise of AI denialism
https://bigthink.com/the-present/the-rise-of-ai-denialism/

EXCERPTS: By any objective measure, AI continues to improve at a stunning pace....

[...] So why has the public latched onto the narrative that AI is stalling, that the output is slop, and that the AI boom is just another tech bubble that lacks justifiable use-cases? I believe it’s because society is collectively entering the first stage of grief — denial — over the very scary possibility that we humans may soon lose cognitive supremacy to artificial systems. Believe me, I know this future is hard to accept. I’ve been writing about the destabilizing and demoralizing risks of superintelligence for well over a decade, and I also feel overwhelmed by the changes racing toward us.

[...] The fact is, today’s frontier models are remarkably capable and are on a rapid path towards rivaling human professionals across most fields. It will transform how organizations operate, how governments function, how science advances, how engineering gets done, how militaries strategize, and how education is deployed. It will also create terrifying new risks that we are not dealing with, like the potential for AI to manipulate individuals with superhuman effectiveness. Whether we like it or not, AI will change everything... (MORE - details)

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‘Reverse mathematics’ illuminates why hard problems are hard
https://www.quantamagazine.org/reverse-mathematics-illuminates-why-hard-problems-are-hard-20251201/

EXCERPT: This work, which treats the process of mathematical proof as an object of mathematical analysis, is part of a famously intimidating field called metamathematics. Metamathematicians often scrutinize the basic assumptions, or axioms, that serve as the starting points for all proofs. They change the axioms they start with, then explore how the changes affect which theorems they can prove. When researchers use metamathematics to study complexity theory, they try to map out what different sets of axioms can and can’t prove about computational difficulty. Doing so, they hope, will help them understand why they’ve come up short in their efforts to prove that problems are hard.

In a paper published last year, three researchers took a new approach to this challenge. They inverted the formula that mathematicians have used for millennia: Instead of starting with a standard set of axioms and proving a theorem, they swapped in a theorem for one of the axioms and then proved that axiom. They used this approach, called reverse mathematics, to prove that many distinct theorems in complexity theory are actually exactly equivalent... (MORE - details)

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Cosmic imposters
https://aeon.co/essays/black-holes-may-be-hiding-something-that-changes-everything

EXCERPT: But what if there are other evolutions? Einstein’s formulas predict that the spacetime around a black hole is the same as that of any other spherical ball of mass, so it stands to reason that, maybe, the chain of chickens and eggs might have a different starting point, an ancestor not yet discovered, which might result in the same spacetime curvature as a black hole has but that harbours something else within the horizon. If they exist, these black hole ‘mimickers’ would be very interesting, revealing unknown physics. Maybe they are the result of existing rules not yet fully worked out, but they might also mean that the laws of physics themselves are new altogether, a new logic of space and time hiding behind the horizon... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Trust the experts? It’s a bad bet
https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2025/12/03/trust_the_experts_its_a_bad_bet_1150895.html

EXCERPTS: The internet will have no more economic impact than the fax machine,” said Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. U.S. intelligence insisted the Afghan government would hold for months after the American withdrawal. It fell in eleven days. Military analysts around the world predicted Kyiv would fall within seventy-two hours in February 2022. It never did. The media lined up to predict that “Harry Potter” would flop because kids no longer read. Harry Potter sold half a billion copies.

These were not fringe voices. These were the crowned heads of their domains, credentialed, lauded, confident experts. Their expertise was real, but their predictions were wrong.

[...] Psychologist Philip Tetlock spent twenty years tracking expert predictions about world events. In his two-decade study, Tetlock catalogued more than twenty-eight thousand expert predictions and found that experts were slightly less accurate than a random coin toss... (MORE - details)
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COMMENT: And let's not forget the abysmal forecasting and antecedent polls of the 2016 and 2024 US presidential elections. Rather than knowledge in general, this is a testament to how unreliable expertise can be with respect to some or many areas of the social or human related realm. The latter inherently entails the pre-existing biases of group loyalties, personal interests and investments, grudges and grievances, politics, bureaucracy, moral preferences, pet philosophies or schools of thought, etc. Which affect not only the selected premises plugged into reasoning, but data interpretation and even the setup for how information is gathered/recorded and how investigation itself is conducted.
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