In the previous Philosophy Monday we took a first stab at supporting a view of humans and advanced artificial intelligences as making choices. Today we will start to dig into the "How" part of the fundamental question: "How should we choose our actions in light of our knowledge of reality and the potential impact of our actions on this reality (which happens to include how we and others are feeling)?" Our point of departure will be a closely related “how” question. How should we evaluate past...

At the end of last week Facebook announced that it would stop having humans write summaries of trending news stories. This follows previous allegations that the selection of trending stories had been changed to remove conservative ones. This is a good time to revisit some foundational questions about the spread of information in a digital world. First, it is too easy for information cascades to occur. It takes much less effort to like, share, retweet than it does to read, think and possibly e...