Thoughts unfit for contemporary survival
A newsletter about philosophy, ethics, science, and whatever else demands a second thought. Subscribe for free to read new posts — full archives are for paid members
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A review of Massimo Pigliucci's How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic: an excellent introduction to Cicero and skeptical Stoicism, with some pushback on where 'human nature' falls short as an ethical foundation.
Technolibertarians want to plug cords into your brain. Christian nationalists want to build a kingdom for Christ. They don't match — and yet, as Erik Davis explains, they are fusing. A conversation about gnosticism, Musk, Thiel, Mars, and the fear of dying.
Everyone agrees the heatwave deaths were preventable. The disagreement is over how: air conditioning, greener cities, emergency plans, or cutting emissions. The answer is all of them. The trap is letting the emergency crowd out the work that determines whether future summers are survivable.
Should you pay people to get vaccinated? Can organ markets be ethical? Is there a drug that could make us morally better? Julian Savulescu doesn't ask these questions to provoke. He asks them because he thinks the answers matter — and because most people are too uncomfortable to try.
Leo XIV's encyclical on AI skips the two great distractions — the conscious machine and the apocalypse — and focuses on the slow, unglamorous damage to information, work, and freedom happening right now.
Karin Jordan has spent decades arguing that managing suffering isn't a soft add-on to cancer treatment — it's the whole point. A conversation about war metaphors, invisible medicine, and why "fighting cancer" may be doing patients a disservice.
Trump probably has mental health problems. But diagnosing him misses the point — and may do more harm than good. The real issue was always visible: not a clinical condition, but a character that was never fit for power.
If a writer uses AI to smooth a clunky sentence, have they betrayed you? What if they used it to draft a headline? Or a whole paragraph? The New York Times freelancer case is the occasion, but the real question is older — and starts with no longer seeing LLMs as alien intelligences.
A new study warns of "epistemia"—the illusion of knowledge in AI. But is this really new? From Plato to Frankfurt's "Bullshit," an exploration of the ancient gap between fluency and truth, asking if a mindless machine can still serve as a tool for understanding the world.
Are AI-generated images false? To answer, we must understand what makes any image true. Images play various roles in different language games—and AI is wiping the slate clean of the codes we used to read them.
