Philosophy Mondays: Reality

In today's installment of Philosophy Mondays I start to tackle reality. My goal is to stake out my own position by contrasting it with what I consider to be the major ways philosophy has run afoul. In last week's post on language I wrote that language is the map. Reality is the territory. There are two big failure modes in thinking about reality. The first is to deny the existence of the territory entirely. The most extreme form of this are speculations that nothing exists outside of consciou...

#pm#philosophy#reality

Philosophy Mondays: Language

A good place to start Philosophy Mondays is language. After all, I will be using, well, language, to write the posts. A huge amount of philosophy is about language because it is so central to the human experience. In my book The World After Capital, I make the argument that written language was the decisive breakthrough which allowed humans to accumulate knowledge, which is the source of our power. Throughout this post I will use language as synonymous with human language (as opposed to say c...

#philosophy#language#pm

Musk, Weidel and the AfD’s Nazi Problem

A few days ago, Elon Musk spoke with Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD (“Alternative fuer Deutschland”). The rise of the AfD has a lot to do with real unaddressed problems in Germany, some going back to mistakes made during reunification and some of them more recent, such as the poor handling of immigration under Merkel. Several of the measures the AfD is calling for make sense and have broad public support. Right after the collapse of the Scholz government, I told several of my German frie...

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Philosophy Mondays

So far on Continuations I have had two big series: Tech Tuesdays and Uncertainty Wednesdays (since I have migrated to Paragraph these have become somewhat buried but I will fix that). Both series ran over several years and I greatly enjoyed writing them. More recently I have been in a writing rut. To get me out of it I will attempt to write regularly again and this time the topic will be philosophy. My plan is to post on Mondays. Let’s see how it goes. These posts will be less an exposition o...

#pm#philosophy

Reasserting the Rule of Law

Last week the CEO of United Healthcare was assassinated in midtown Manhattan. A surprising number of reactions amounted to some variant of “he had it coming.” Why were people defending what appears to be a vigilante killing? Because the rule of law in the US has been undermined by a pervasive sense that the justice system is rigged to protect the rich and powerful and their interests. There appears to be no accountability for them while ordinary citizens find themselves subjected to abuse by ...

#law#politics#democracy

Continuations Now on Paragraph

A little over eight years ago I wrote that I was thinking about leaving Tumblr. More interestingly though, the headline of that post went on to say that I was "Looking for a Decentralized Blog Network"! I even explained what I meant by that:In functionality my ideal system would be quite similar to Tumblr + Disqus but would use something like Onename as its identity system. Every post (and comment) would be signed with an identity and it would be possible to follow content based on identity i...

#continuations#paragraph#crypto#writing
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We Need Actually Open AI Now More than Ever (Or: Why Leopold Aschenbrenner is Dangerously Wrong)

Based on recent meetings it would appear that the national security establishment may share Leopold Aschenbrenner’s view that the US needs to get to ASI first to help protect the world from Chinese hegemony. I believe firmly in protecting individual freedom and democracy. Building a secretive Manhattan project style ASI is, however, not the way to accomplish this. Instead we now need an Actually Open™ AI more than ever. We need ASIs (plural) to be developed in the open. With said development ...

#ai#asi#open

Moderation in Social Networks

First Pavel Durov, the co-founder and CEO of Telegram, was arrested in France, in part due to a failure to comply with moderation requests by the French government. Now we have Brazil banning X/Twitter from the country entirely, also claiming a failure to moderate. How much moderation should there be on social networks? What are the mechanisms for moderation? Who should be liable for what? The dialog on answering these questions about moderation is broken because the most powerful actors are ...

#freedom of speech#social networks#moderation

Changing My Approach to Meetings to Take Back Control of My Attention

I let meetings take over my life. For reasons that I might get into some other time I said yes to way too many meetings. My schedule became ever more packed, often running back-to-back for entire days. It became harder and harder to find time to read, think, and write. I also had virtually no time to deal with emergencies when those came up. My attention was no longer mine to direct. It had been hijacked by meetings. Having had a break from meetings on a six week voyage across the Atlantic, I...

#work#attention#meetings
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Lessons from a Voyage

I have just returned from an exciting voyage: crossing the Atlantic on a sailboat. You can find updates from along the way on the J44 Frolic website, Twitter/X and Instagram accounts. In this post I am gathering up my lessons learned. Some of these are just about sailing, in particular passage making, and some are broadly applicable life lessons.Offshore sailing is intense. I always had great respect for offshore sailors, and in particular solo sailors, and this voyage has only deepened that....

#personal#sailing#adventure#lessons learned