Continuations

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...

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...

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 ...