My top 3 non-fiction for this year starts with an older book about old tech: David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old. Technology is used and tinkered with more than "innovated" with. Singer sewing machines and condoms over high tech in this use-centric history.

Help I'm in Billions season 4 and I have no one to root for.

Today I learned that Bentham introduced the panopticon in a work called "Pauper Management Improvement" and I think that tells you a lot of what you need to know about utilitarianism.

This. One of my pet peeves in trust is that everyone cites Baier and then many show they haven’t read her. One scholar actually calls all three-part trust “contractual” and Baier’s main point is that trust is not a contract. Way to go, us.

What new norms do we need to cope? I.e., if the author is more capable of producing an authoritative version than the AI “production team,” do we start citing to as-published manuscripts on PhilPapers instead of the faulty published version?

This is an interesting deep dive into an important question. My hot take is that it would be much weirder if they didn’t use ‘I’. Can you imagine a language-user that always referred to itself in 3rd person? I suspect this is both useful and tends toward deceit. Hard to unpack.

These zebra-stripe cookies seem like they worked out! Nice bite and a little salty. Success for my new cookie roller gadget.

Ruth and I are both grappling with arguments that require accepting a lot of Heidegger’s thought. Love this reflection on that problem.

I have on five layers and I’m still not warm. Isn’t DC supposed to be in the south?

'You will be haunted by three spirits.' (The ghost of Christmas future, the ghost of Christmas future, and the ghost of Christmas future in my case.)

Christopher Register argues the body has "depth": some objects are too microphysically specific to count as genuine body parts. This matters for brain-computer interfaces. The software is part of your body, but the implementing hardware isn't. journals.publishing.umich.edu/phimp/articl...

I've been excited about this paper, which considers how brain-computer interfaces increase the urgency of understanding the moral dimensions of extending the body artificially through tools.

This is really exciting!

I’ve gone from a kid who was excited about the prospect of replicators in the future to a grown up who can fret with @peligrietzer.bsky.social about what it means that we might not cook in the AI-dominated future. Disappointing really.

I mean this as a 'what is Being/nature/thought really like' issue rather than a 'what's going to happen' issue. The pure modal fact itself would be reason for nihilism whether we build the machines or not

The danger of pervasive automation leading to WALL-E strikes me as very real. My hopeful take is that humans can pivot to artisanal activities that are meaningful when not maxxed and perfected, but the stakes will be a bit lower. (In with crafting & philosophy, out with medicine & most cooking?)

I'm heading to DC to meet @bergstrombookstore.bsky.social in person!! If you're in the area, you will not want to miss this Central/Eastern/South Europe focused event next week! With @katherineeyoung.bsky.social Turkoslavia's Ena Selimović, Roman Kostovski of Plamen Press and Greg Bernstein?!

"If you are a philosopher, you had better not mess about with machines anyhow." Seems like sound advice! #philtech

A world full of “for you” feeds is flat and boring. What do YOU want? Sari Azout talks with VergeCast about the slow and intentional use of technology. As the creator of Sublime, she thinks about technology as creative and non-deterministic.

This is absolutely not true, for the record, and I do not mean this as a defense of Heidegger but the record is crystal clear—he fucking HATED all the nazi pseudo-intellectuals, and even Oskar Becker (his own students and acolyte) he found intellectually beneath contempt.

Anthropic's approach to responsibility is impressive, great profile of their team. Tim is not wrong below that they generate more papers than distinguishably different outcomes. Most models seem to be getting better at this. Gemini is sometimes quite aggressive about what it can't do now. #aiethics

Simenon’s Un nouveau dans la ville is taking my breath away already. I’ve never been to Maine, but in my head it must be this beautiful. I love the image of snow starting to fall and just getting down to the tops of the maples. Plus snowflakes in French are apparently “flocons”? New favorite word.

I get people's fatigue with philosophy of AI, but Ted's thread underscores why we probably need more rather than less of it. Or we need more robust cross-disciplinary spaces for philosophy to talk about technology generally that don't cannibalize the space within philosophy departments as much.

I am a CFO. I understand the power of measuring things. What I don't understand is the belief that we can only improve what is objectively measurable, to the point that we construct endless low-quality proxies for the things that matter. No numbers are (necessarily) needed to do the right thing.

"Leadership trust is a measurable, manageable business asset." This attitude will almost certainly undermine trust, not foster it. It's Goodhart's Law restated: "Anything that can be measured and rewarded will be gamed." (Jerry Muller's The Tyranny of Metrics)

We really leveled up on lights this year. Please appreciate my Clark Griswold moment.

Sara's work is excellent, looking forward to listening to this podcast on an upcoming commute!

Excellent Sarah Richmond review of Schuringa's recent polemic against analytic philosophy, also in TLS. Those committed to the analytic/continental divide mostly define their "other" through ignorance. As Richmond notes, there's a lot of work that doesn't fit the stereotypes. #philsky

Nice interview with Graham Harman in TLS, covering everything from Latour and Lingis to basketball and a brutal writing session in which he once wrote fifty four pages of manuscript in a day! #philsky

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, will you take a look? It’s based on reporting by a man named Lam And I need a job so I want to be a paperback writer. bookshop.org/p/books/fewe...

Tom Stoppard has died. R&G was the first (and only) play I’ve ever directed. I just reread it earlier this fall. Huge loss.

Introduce yourself with 5 concerts you’ve been to The Shins Magnetic Fields Anonymous 4 Goo Goo Dolls Мумий Тролль

Sitting down to the traditional Thanksgiving meal, Julia Child’s Boeuf bourguignon.

Philosophers stop trying to be economists challenge: failed by the author I am currently reading. Homo economicus is bad enough for economics without importing it back into philosophy as a severely defective cartoon of human beings.

Thoughtful post by Matt on AI and the democratization of skill. I’d add there is a tension between techne as mastery of the world and techne as self-mastery. Both can tend toward either virtue or vice, but AI seems likely to undercut the latter.

Carol Sturka feels like a pretty on-the-nose distillation of what a human being is. (Including me.) I'm not sure it says great things about us. If you're watching Pluribus, would you move heaven & earth to "put things back"? I'm not sure it would make sense to.

I'm fascinating by how many concepts are really markers of our ignorance. Amélie Rorty says here that 'emotion' is one, a grab bag of leftovers from supposedly clearer concepts like will & reason. We also have chance (Darwin's Origin), freedom (Kant's Groundwork), élan vital (Bergson). #philsky

This might be the greatest advertisement for a work of philosophy I have ever seen. (The last sentence even more than the highlighted one!)

My kid dragged me into the kitchen to look east at 6:45 this morning. Ours was more cotton candy pink and light blue in the MD burbs, but definitely a stunner.

Just submitted a thing. It's sobering to look at the statistics in Microsoft Word and realize how long I spent on it. Not to speak of the background reading, the edits on paper, and the time other readers generously took with it. But I'm prouder of it than anything I've ever written.

I love this entire thread. It's a kind of warped naturalistic fallacy: things that are hard about human life must be a) recent devolutions and b) evil. (To be clear, Alex isn't defending anything you don't like -- just pointing out an irritating fallacy.)

Me: After 40+ years, I know exactly what I believe. Also me: Ok, starting draft 7 of this journal article…

Eggnog is now in the fridge, mellowing. It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

We just booked flights and lodging for our vacation next year. So excited to go back to Helsinki and Frankfurt! What other Scandinavian things should we do? We’re likely to use Helsinki as home base and go to Sweden, Norway, or points beyond for at least a few days.

This is a great point. I've definitely written that Roombas seem more "life-like" than LLMs. The total lack of goal or drive makes LLMs a less likely candidate for a (future) "conscious" technology in my view.

The cat on the left (Cookie) is allegedly a stray but has now set up house with our cat Muffen (on the right). She comes in to warm up, eat, snuggle, and then she demands to go back to independent life outside. #caturday

One major issue is that a whole lot of K-12 instruction is terrible and not engaging. Much of it conducted on computers since COVID. Not a recipe for making the most of even “remarkable” opportunities like Yale seminars once a student finally gets there.

Gemini has all of a sudden become the most practically useful model to me, and Nano Banana can do amazing things in corporate comms (infographics, for example). Especially surprised to see how quickly Claude has fallen behind.

Blindingly obvious take, but Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” and Amélie Rorty’s “Explaining Emotions” are really good. In case you were wondering whether classic papers are classic for a reason. #philsky

I ran my current paper draft through an academic "AI detector" out of curiosity. It came up 56% likely to be AI written (a coin flip), labeled in red text, because of analysis like this. The word "trust" all by itself is 53% likely to be AI-written. Hope no one is relying on these things.