by Joseph Shieber Two of the happy discoveries I’ve made in the last two months or so are Brian Klaas’s and Dan Williams’s Substacks. Klaas is an American political scientist who has made his career in the UK, while Williams is a UK philosopher. Both writers have overlapping interests — chiefly, perhaps, in the role…

by Joseph Shieber Discussions of artificial intelligence are hard to avoid. A recent Pew study, for example, found that 90% of Americans have heard at least something about artificial intelligence – which is astounding, when you consider that only about 70% of Americans likely know who the current Vice President is. Despite this growing awareness…

by Joseph Shieber Suppose that you’re sitting at a pristine, white desk and are presented with the following scene (graciously rendered by Google Bard from a description by me): How would you describe what you see? Maybe something like, On the desk in front of me there’s a medium-sized, shiny green sphere in front of…

by Joseph Shieber The humanities are once again in crisis, as they have been so many times before. What distinguishes this latest crisis from many of the crises preceding it, however, is the extent to which the current crisis in the humanities is exacerbated by the current political climate. Attacks on the humanities fit very…

by Joseph Shieber In a recent talk at the Santa Fe Institute, the software engineer and tech startup founder Jason Crawford, who has in the last few years devoted his time to the Roots of Progress nonprofit, offered suggestions for developing institutions capable of fostering the acceleration of scientific progress. Crawford framed the discussion around three…

by Joseph Shieber In one of those strange cases of synchronicity that occasionally arise in publishing, two books – issued within a year of each other – appeared on the same under-researched topic, a discussion of the lives and intellectual impact of the philosophers G. E. M. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgely.…

by Joseph Shieber Oh, he’s wrong. So are many of the people coming at him. One of the most-cited passages of Michael Lewis’s new Sam Bankman-Fried book, Going Infinite, is a quote from a blog post from 2012. In that post, a twenty year old Bankman-Fried expresses contempt for the consensus view that Shakespeare is…

by Joseph Shieber If you spend enough time around cognitive psychologists, you’re likely to hear at least one of them complain about the notion of individual “learning styles.” Indeed, psychologists consider the concept of learning style — the idea that some students are visual learners, say, as opposed to auditory learners — to be one…

by Joseph Shieber A recent study in Public Understanding of Science found that … Republicans and evangelical-identifying individuals perceive more social threat from scientists. Viewing scientists as a group posing a social threat was associated with having less accurate science beliefs, support for excluding scientists from policymaking, and support for retributive actions toward scientists ……

by Joseph Shieber In “The Bizarre Bad Criticisms of Our Merit Paper,” a recent blog post in defense of the “Defense of Merit in Science” paper, the Rutgers psychology professor Lee Jussim doubles down on the conflation of “merit” with “objective truth.” For example, in highlighting what he takes to be an underlying logical incoherence…

by Joseph Shieber It is ironic that one of the primary obstacles to meritocracy in science, the oversupply of talent, is simultaneously a key contributor to the myth that merit reigns in science. To explain, I’ll proceed in three steps. First, I’ll devote most of my efforts to provide reason for thinking that there IS…

by Joseph Shieber “In Defense of Merit in Science,” a paper published recently in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, suggests that (1) success in science is currently determined by merit, the (2) success of science in discovering significant truths is due to the fact that science is a merit-based system, and (3) the greatest threat…

by Joseph Shieber One of the strange juxtapositions appearing in the past few weeks was the publication of Ibram X. Kendi’s essay, “The Crisis of the Intellectuals” in The Atlantic, followed – a day or so later – by Marty Baron’s essay, “We want objective judges and doctors. Why not journalists too?” in the Washington Post.…

by Joseph Shieber There is something very intuitive about the idea that people should get what they deserve – so intuitive, in fact, that the claim “people should get what they deserve” sounds almost like a tautology. The intuitive plausibility of that idea, however, should not fool us into thinking that we can use the…

by Joseph Shieber I’ve finally gotten around to reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. One aspect of the book that makes it so great is the way that O’Brien makes the challenge of the ineffability of his – and his comrades’ – war experiences part of the book itself. For example, he writes: In…

by Joseph Shieber In a recent short post on “ChatGPT and My Career Trajectory,” the prominent blogger, public intellectual, and GMU economist Tyler Cowen sees AI as posing a threat to the future of public intellectuals. (For what it’s worth, Michael Orthofer, the writer of the excellent Complete Review book review website, seems to agree.)…

by Joseph Shieber Famously, the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead referred to all of philosophy as “footnotes to Plato.” Actually, he wrote that, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars…

by Joseph Shieber Suppose you had a friend whom you knew to be a lover of good coffee. You ask him how he likes his coffee machine and he replies that it’s okay. He emphasizes that one of the best features of the coffee machine is that it’s extremely reliable; each cup of coffee is…

by Joseph Shieber 1. There’s something ironic about the fact that the received wisdom about science is that science teaches us not to trust received wisdom. Or, to paraphrase a recent blog post that seems oblivious to this irony: “Scientific expert opines, ‘Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.’” I should be fair…

by Joseph Shieber In his (1930) essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes suggests that the stage has been set to alleviate the threat of material uncertainty for large portions of the world population. “The course of affairs will simply be,” Keynes writes, “that there will be ever larger and larger classes and…