Thoughts unfit for contemporary survival
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.
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.
The usual way of framing journalistic neutrality is wrong. Reporting is never neutral: every choice — what to cover, which words to use, whose voices to include — already takes a side. Objectivity isn’t absence of perspective, but clarity about where that perspective comes from.
