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...

This morning I had a surgical procedure to fix an inguinal hernia. This afternoon I am sitting at home writing this post. While not quite “waving a tricorder” this is a massive testament to medical progress. Also right up front: thanks to everyone at Weill Cornell Medical Center for being not just incredibly professional but also super friendly. As it turns out I can judge how much progress this represents from personal experience. Growing up in Germany, I wound up having two such hernias as ...

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...

The last Philosophy Monday was nearly a month ago as I got distracted by the launch of my book in Germany and also current political events. The prior post was on values and today’s post picks up this topic by asking where values should come from. One historic answer has been “from God.” Obviously, unless you have direct conversations with God, this usually means that the values come from a religious tradition in the form of sacred texts and/or some group of religious authority figures (e.g. ...

It is crucially important to have something to fight for instead of just resisting. Having a long term goal is what keeps us motivated and resilient in light of near term setbacks. Sadly American politics is utterly bereft of a bold vision at the moment (the recent book Abundance falls comically short of its title). A great inspiration for a positive vision of the US today can be found in the original Star Trek from the late 1960s. We are still a long way from some of the extreme technologica...

We must resist Trump. The roughly three months of his second term have confirmed what was clear before the election: Trump is unfit to be President. He is governing as a mob boss, on the basis of “might makes right,” tearing down the rule of law. Trump’s model here is clearly Putin in a style of government that Max Weber famously called Patrimonialism. For the avoidance of doubt: the reason to oppose Trump are not his stated policy goals. We need changes in regulation and bureaucracy so that ...

In today's Philosophy Monday we continue with the program set out several weeks ago in the post on judgment. There we concluded that evaluating actions cannot possibly be easy and that we should not attempt to reduce it to a mechanical or categorical approach. The obvious question then is what is an alternative that might be more suitable given the limitations of our knowledge? Today we introduce values as the guides to morality. The word value has a lot of different meanings -- it is an exam...