P.D. Magnus

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.

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.

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.

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.¹ I think that they’re argument goes wrong in some of the details, but they deal with some issues very quickly.² On reflection, I think my bigger problem is not with their argument but with their question itself.

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:

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.’

I keep having said things

At Daily Nous, my paper with Emmie and Brandon on genre ontology is among the Heap of Links. It’s free to download at the journal.

I said a thing

At Scientific American, Meghan Bartels reflects on Wikipedia at age 25. The story includes some discussion of my research as well as a quote from me.

I took media training a while ago, but this is really the first time I’ve ever been interviewed by someone in the press about my work. It’s a bit ironic, since the work on Wikipedia really didn’t count toward my tenure. It was just this extra thing I did, over and above the research that made the case for my promotion.

A draft and a fragment

Today I posted a new draft, coauthored with Ron McClamrock: Reflections on popular music and collapse phenomena

Vaccinated yesterday

I’m feeling a bit achy today, in part because I got my covid and flu shots yesterday. It’s weird that this rudimentary bit of public health is also deeply political.