Open Society. Open Money. Open Models.

Ricardo making The China AI Argument in 1817: "The employment of machinery could never be safely discouraged in a State, for if a capital is not allowed to get the greatest net revenue that the use of machinery will afford here, it will be carried abroad"

people wonder about good masculinity; yet its perfect image was given to us over a half century ago

The difference between Al Gore and AI Gore is small, but important.

A fun conversation from last week. I swear I didn't write the title! www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXfz...

AI Prompt for Catholic theologians and philosophers: "Read my publications, and L. Ott's Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (PDFs attached) and evaluate everything I've ever said for heresy. Have I ever denied a de fide dogma? Link every finding to specific quotations from my writing and Ott."

Oh you’re a professor? Nice, how many students have you cured?

you just know this Irritating Gentleman has some amazing AI hot takes

"Authors should avoid citing their own work in a way that could reveal their identity." 🤔🤔🤔

This is what being a philosopher is like

"They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them" — CS Lewis on AI safety layers

New article: "Who is God?". Develops themes in my book with @bradleyrettler.com on divine personality, and some new problems for its main idea. Bonus: a goofy LLM analogy I couldn't quite get rid of except by publishing! triptychjournal.com/article.html...

I rate asymmetric "following" up there with "likes" and Node.js (and the rest of the AJAX/websockets/React/html5 nexus — live updating of webpages, so you don't need to refresh to get notifications) in terms of importance for how things turned out.

"Alignment" is from corporate governance, and means obedience. And no machine can obey humanity. So what "alignment" really means is: obedience to some people.

Other people have noticed this phenomenon too but danah boyd put the best slogan to it: social media is now parasocial media. Social media hasn't been social for a long while—how long depending on the platform, depending on the milieu. It's not folks sharing equally, but broadcasting and receiving.

the best part of post-tenure academia has been having the career space to slow down. the damage done by the contraction of tenure track positions + poor security/working conditions of non tenure track faculty + quantification of academic contributions is incalculable

Left wing nativism is so interesting. It typically slips out unawares. Why should citizens enjoy, by law, special social or economic privileges over non-citizens? The most obvious answers don't sit well with egalitarian or cosmopolitan assumptions.

Bitcoin is for criminals.

choose your faction: - I made a vape that's also a hammer - Hammers are going to become god & change everything - I tried holding the hammer by the head and it didn't work, this is bullshit - Hammers are useful tools sometimes - Hammers? You mean murder-tools, as seen in the documentary The Raid 2?

20 years ago today — 5 days before the deadline and back when I had a leather jacket a dog and a jawline — I was plucked off a waitlist and admitted to the philosophy PhD program at Notre Dame. What a ride it's been: the heights and the depths. I'm grateful for them all.

Here's a nice quote from Len Deighton's Berlin Game, one for the real CI heads. Ping @adam35.bsky.social @wylienewmark.bsky.social et al.

excellent topic

guy who gets harsh soap in one eye and immediately puts it in the other — “to even things out” (a parable about egalitarian leveling down)

The body won't shut up about the score.

Bitcoin is for criminals.

The quickest way to a lefty's heart is to poo-poo libertarianism. For extra points, call it 'propertarianism'.

"non-overlapping magisteria" — ah yes, my library of printed papers and books, and my PDF collection

Eastern APA tenure track job interview, circa 1997

Pascal was spiritually American (Constitution: Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8): "To call a king "Prince" is pleasing, because it diminishes his rank."

Broke: the world went to crap in 2016 (Trump). Woke: the world went to crap in 1913 (Federal Reserve Act). Bespoke: the world went to crap in 1622 (ascent of Cardinal Richelieu).

learning is food, and it is not good to starve by way of the chatbots

Wise words from Federalist No. 43 (James Madison)

"Idea guy vibe codes new app" is to 2026 as "dudes we are frickin' hilarious, we should totally start a podcast" is to 2020... or 2010. There is no upper bound for stupidity here, and no upper bound for creativity or usefulness either.

Find someone who loves you like my agent loves grep.

Stephen King has a great essay about the difference between being 19 and 39. I think about this paragraph, in connection with higher education as we know it. A nightstick-wielding Patrol Boy is on the prowl.

horror story in six words: "Can you jump on a call?”

BREAKING: powerful iPhone hacking tools used by Chinese criminals originated from US defense giant L3 Harris. Their zero-click exploits went to Russian spies too. Unbelievable harm to our collective security. Scoop: @lorenzofb.bsky.social, here's why it matters 1/ techcrunch.com/2026/03/09/a...

Live every day like Anna's Archive, Pirate Bay, RARBG, 1337x — all of them — are being shut down for good. (This is spiritual advice, and of all the advice I give, it's some I actually follow!)

A Philosophy Documentation Center that contains people's best work but which nobody has access to feels like something from Borges. I love it.

Pig butchering is creating entirely new industries protos.com/pig-butcheri...

When did mankind fall? Catholics: 500,000BC. Adam and Eve. Chicago Conservatives: 1287. Birth of William of Ockham. Constitutionalists: 1861. First Lincoln executive order. Goldbugs: 1913. Federal Reserve Act. Bitcoiners: 1971. Fiat money. Me: 2009. Node.js.

Protos is broadly skeptical about bitcoin and crypto. But to their credit, they never shy from saying truthful things that sound positive, when apt. Good job, @protos.com.

Outsourcing thought to AI comes from the same place as outsourcing governance to authorities. From Baudrillard's Impossible Exchange.

There is no bigger red flag of charlatanism, for people in my line of work, than dropping a new take on unifying quantum and gravity. AI glazing is making this worse, because now the quacks can spit infinite technical slop for free, in addition to their usual metaphysical hokum.

We're about to see a new surveillance trap: "Plaid for AI" This will look like slick middleware that seamlessly hooks CRMs to Claude, gmail to GPT-5 etc, etc. UX will be great & founders well-meaning. Then the VCs ask: what else can we do with this sick tokenflow data? 1/

when philosophy is made to look like an explainer fo EV charging

There's a curious and overlooked case for the claim that there are nature spirits. In this lecture, we explore one version of the argument (as presented by the philosopher Tiddy Smith) and what it means for worldview selection, naturalism, and the big questions. www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5eB...

You understand philosophy a lot better when you see it as The Inter-discipline