Higher education at its best is teaching students how to think, how to feel, how to tell the truth, how to observe the difference between fact and fiction. And then take those skills and apply them wherever their career leads.
Nicholas Urie1
Spring has sprung
By which I mean, grades are turned in for the Spring 2026 semester. Now I have to turn to the work I was putting off because of teaching. 🥸
The tyranny of evil men
TL;DR: Hegseth has been saying this shit for years, and he never gave much thought to what it meant.
Continue reading “The tyranny of evil men”Qs about the queues
With Bluesky’s announcement that they’ve taken another round of money from venture capital, there’s speculation about how enshittification will set in and destroy the platform.
Continue reading “Qs about the queues”The inevitable next level
In bombing Iran, the US has been using AI to pick targets. This is a playbook that was deployed first by Israel in the early attacks on Gaza. As I commented last year, “Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has shown that they are willing to bomb and murder indiscriminately, outstripping even their hyped AI’s alleged ability to identify targets.”
As Israeli forces have attacked Beirut, they’ve ordered the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. There can be no pretense that technology is providing them with pinpoint targeting information.
Continue reading “The inevitable next level”Always a good idea
I am teaching 17th&18th Century Philosophy this semester for the first time in a while. This week was my favorite bit of the course: Berkeley’s argument for idealism.
It’s a short, deductively valid argument from tempting premises, to the conclusion that the whole sensible world is just ideas. It invites a kind of wonder at how thoughts can fit together.
Continue reading “Always a good idea”No war, no ICE
Here’s a thing I wrote to my senators:
It’s important to resist the unprovoked war with Iran, especially on the heels of the unprovoked incursion into Venezuela. Reckless and indiscriminate overthrow of governments is just a recipe for chaos.
It’s also important to resist funding ICE. I mention this in the same e-mail because I’ve seen rhetoric online trying to use our foreign wars as an excuse to fund domestic security. Murder and oppression abroad cannot be an excuse for murder and oppression of our own citizens, however. The archipelago of detainment camps that ICE is attempting to build, the extradition of people that courts have ordered should not be extradited, and untrained officers given financial incentives to sweep in as many people as possible… All these things show that ICE must not be given money to grow.
Singing to the future, singing to the past
Dylan and The Moon’s cover of “Yellow” made me tear up a bit. It’s a capable cover of a pretty song, of course, but it lands harder than that. The artist is trans, and it is edited to be a duet with his pre-transition self.
Continue reading “Singing to the future, singing to the past”Turing cycles
In a short article at Nature, Eddy Keming Chen, Mikhail Belkin, Leon Bergen, and Dave Danks argue that current AI has general intelligence.2 I think that they’re argument goes wrong in some of the details, but they deal with some issues very quickly.3 On reflection, I think my bigger problem is not with their argument but with their question itself.
Continue reading “Turing cycles”Citing “Injustice”
My paper with Emmie Malone, Popular Music and Art-interpretive Injustice, has appeared in a recent issue of Inquiry. Here’s a sentence from the conclusion, which can serve as a pull quote:
Continue reading “Citing “Injustice””We hope the examples we have given make an initial case for adding to the already crowded field of philosophical terms that take the form ‘some adjective injustice.’