In 1787 when asked by Elizabeth Willing Powel "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" Benjamin Franklin famously replied “A republic, if you can keep it.” That was now nearly 250 years ago, and the United States of America has operated as a republic for longer than any other nation in the world. Many crises have been encountered and overcome during this time period, including most of all a horrifying civil war, exactly the kind of event that has resulted in autocratic gove...

I am an immigrant and I have written about immigration repeatedly before. Today I want to lay out my current views, including how these interact with citizenship requirements. My thinking is likely to be unpopular with some people on both the left and right because of increasingly ideological approaches. The debates on these topics have become tribal instead of examining what our approach should look like when applying first principles thinking to today's issues and technological capabilities...

So just after I wrote about qualia in last week's Philosophy Monday, Sabine Hossenfelder comes out with a video claiming the exact opposite citing a recent study. In the video she says the following about the claim that qualia are a hard limit to science: I’ve always thought this is bullshit. You can measure what’s going on in the brain, therefore you can study what experience means, in scientific terms. You cannot of course yourself experience the same as some other person, or bat, or carrot...

Today's Philosophy Mondays will be an interlude from our exploration of knowledge and values. I just finished reading Erik Hoel's wonderful book "The World Behind the World," which I highly recommend reading (I may write a short review). One of the concepts in the book is that of "scientific incompleteness." This is the idea that while science has proven extremely powerful there are some areas of understanding that will remain forever elusive. We of course have a hint of this already from mat...

A few weeks ago I wrote a post outlining a Star Trek Vision for the US. More broadly speaking, I believe that an agenda like this should be the vision for the world. One of the many inspiring aspects of Star Trek, the original series, was humans collaborating across backgrounds including race, gender and nationality. I am now turning my initial outline into a series of posts that explores each of the bullet points in more detail, starting with "energy too cheap to meter" (to illustrate that a...

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian who has written on of the best books about universal basic income with Utopia for Realists (which I highly recommend reading). He followed this up with Humankind, a strong and much needed push back against the pervasive idea that humans are predominantly selfish and cruel. I highly recommend reading both of these books. I also love that he went to Davos and used that stage to be openly critical of the World Economic Forum. Over the weekend I read his latest...

In the previous Philosophy Monday, I introduced knowledge as an objective basis for values. Today I want to expand on what I mean by knowledge. I had previously in this series written a post about knowledge that in retrospect I realize I should have called "knowing" instead (if I eventually pull these posts together into a book, I will fix that). That post was much more about what it means to know something. In the context of values though I am much more concerned with knowledge as a set exte...

Never let a good crisis go to waste. That is the adage that universities should take to heart as they confront the threats of the Trump administration. Because the reality is that universities have been lost for decades and require dramatic changes if they want to survive at all in the future. Here are a series of major issues that universities urgently need to address:Frontal teaching, high stakes testing, even traditional essays are all outmoded. The rapid progress of AI is making many of t...

In the last two Philosophy Mondays we first defined what values are and then posed the question of a basis for values. The key requirements for such a basis is that it has to be objective so that it can be universal, i.e. apply to all humans. This will be the subject of today's post. Let's first consider some possibilities that fall short of this goal. What about a God? Much as religions would like to make this claim, there is nothing objective about the existence of a God. That could of cour...

Abundance is the bold title for a new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has been receiving a lot of attention. Given my own profound interest in how to get past scarcity thinking I felt compelled to read it rather than rely on the profusion of reviews. In short, while I commend Klein and Thompson on wanting to shift the dialog towards a positive vision, the book falls comically short of its title. A more apt name would have been something like “Awakening” as it does a good job of rep...