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60334.7747
Preliminary Note: The following is very speculative! I’ve been writing occasionally on AI here, especially about how the advent of AI may change our conception of ourselves as agents (here, here, and here). …
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109006.774849
I consider applications of “AI extenders” to dementia care. AI extenders are AI-powered technologies that extend minds in ways interestingly different from old-school tech like notebooks, sketch pads, models, and microscopes. I focus on AI extenders as ambiance: so thoroughly embedded into things and spaces that they fade from view and become part of a subject’s taken-for-granted background. Using dementia care as a case study, I argue that ambient AI extenders are promising because they afford richer and more durable forms of multidimensional integration than do old-school extenders like Otto’s notebook. They can be tailored, in fine-grained ways along multiple timescales, to a user’s particular needs, values, and preferences—and crucially, they can do much of this self-optimizing on their own. I discuss why this is so, why it matters, and its potential impact on affect and agency. I conclude with some worries in need of further discussion.
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129884.774867
A recent interviewer asked Tyler Cowen to explain falling birth rates, and he puckishly responded, “Do you have kids?” His point: Anyone who knows what kids are actually like can instantly understand why adults are reluctant to have them. …
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341993.774881
The range of animal practices potentially classified as medical varies widely both functionally and mechanistically, and there is no agreed upon definition of medicine that can help determine which cases ought to count as such. In this paper, we argue that all available definitions are fatally flawed and defend our own characterisation of medicine, which incorporates both functional and mechanistic constraints. We apply our definition to the available evidence and determine which animal behaviours show a mere difference of degree with paradigmatic medical practices—and should thus be seen as medicine proper—and which should be excluded from this nomenclature.
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550441.774895
This paper is a contribution to a symposium on Herman Cappelen’s 2023 book The Concept of Democracy: An Essay on Conceptual Amelioration and Abandonment. In that book, Cappelen develops a theory of abandonment—a theory of why and how to completely stop using particular linguistic expressions—and then uses that theory to argue for the general abandonment of the words “democracy” and “democratic”. In this paper, I critically discuss Cappelen’s arguments for the abandonment of “democracy” and “democratic” in political theory specifically.
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571478.774909
There’s something deeply wrong with the world, when the median US college graduate’s starting salary is a dozen times higher than the price to save another person’s entire life. The enduring presence of such low-hanging fruit reflects a basic societal failure to allocate resources in a way that reflects valuing those lives appropriately. …
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572721.774922
The article examines the question of priority and simultaneous discovery in the context of the discovery of the periodic system. It is argued that rather than being anomalous, simultaneous discovery is the rule. Moreover, I argue that the discovery of the periodic system by at least six authors in over a period of 7 years represents one of the best examples of a multiple discovery. This notion is supported by a new view of the evolutionary development of science through a mechanism that is dubbed Sci-Gaia by analogy with Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis.
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630474.774946
The most common theoretical approaches to defining mental disorder are naturalism, normativism, and hybridism. Naturalism and normativism are often portrayed as diametrically opposed, with naturalism grounded in objective science and normativism grounded in social convention and values. Hybridism is seen as a way of combining the two. However, all three approaches share a common feature in that they conceive of mental disorders as deviations from norms. Naturalism concerns biological norms; normativism concerns social norms; and hybridism, both biological and social norms. This raises the following two questions: (a) Are biological and social norms the only sorts of norms that are relevant to considerations of mental disorder? (b) Should addressing norm deviations continue to be a major focus of mental healthcare? This paper introduces several norms that are relevant to mental disorder beyond the biological and social. I argue that mental disorders often deviate from individual, well-being, and regulatory norms. I also consider approaches which question mental healthcare’s focus on addressing norm deviations in the first place, including the neurodiversity paradigm, social model of disability, and Mad discourse. Utilizing these critical approaches, I contend that whether mental health intervention is justified depends, in part, on the type of norm deviation being intervened upon.
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630525.774961
I would like to begin this review by stating that this is an absolutely wonderful book that is full of gems about the elements and the periodic table. In my own 2007 book on the periodic table I concluded that we should perhaps think of the variety of tables that have appeared as spanning a spectrum running from the most abstract and ‘perfect’ tables such as Janet’s left-step table representation, to the unruly tables that emphasize the uniqueness of elements. To illustrate the latter category, I featured an image of Rayner-Canham’s table that is also the table shown on the front cover of his new book now under review. Rayner Canham’s book is all about the individuality of elements and how so many of the commonly held trends in the periodic table are far more complicated than we normally acknowledge.
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746025.774976
Prior research has unveiled a pathologization effect where individuals perceived as having bad moral character are more likely to have their conditions labeled as diseases and are less often considered healthy compared to those viewed as having a good moral character. Moreover, these individuals are perceived as less unlucky in their affliction and more deserving of it. This study explores the broader impacts of moral character on such judgments, hypothesizing that these effects reach deeper and extend to both negative and positive moral evaluations. The pathologization effect also raises concerns about potential discrimination and the overmedicalization of normal health variations, so we also examine whether providing more detailed descriptions of conditions mitigates the influence of judgments of moral character. The methodology and broader implications of our findings are discussed, emphasizing the need for a deeper understanding of how moral judgments might influence patient care.
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846311.77499
There is growing concern that inhabitants of wealthy societies are falling into an increasingly lonely condition (Holt-Lunstad et al, 2017). Social scientists have offered a variety of competing explanations for what is often characterized as an epidemic of loneliness (Umberson et. al, 2010; Bianchi and Vohs 2016). By ‘loneliness’ we mean unchosen social isolation and deprivation of subjectively desired goods that would typically result from social contact and close personal relationships. Loneliness is generally regarded as one of the worst misfortunes that can befall us, and it is accompanied by a range of terrible personal and social consequences. As such it would be good if AI technologies could help alleviate our increasingly lonely condition. Given the prevalence and harmfulness of loneliness it is tempting, for Bianchi and Vohs explain that income predicts the nature of social contact. “People with higher incomes spent less time with their families and neighbors and spent more time with their friends. These findings suggest that income is associated with how and with whom people spend their time” (Bianchi and Vohs 2016). Other factors that cause loneliness such as immigration, increased engagement with technology, race, educational level and so on have all been widely discussed. Given this large body of empirical evidence and variety of competing explanations, it is safe to assume that people are lonelier than they used to be decades ago in the United States.
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846331.775006
This article reviews Matthew Liao’s edited volume Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Liao’s volume consists of seventeen essays organized into four sections: Building Ethics into Machines, The Near Future of AI, The Long-Term Impact of Superintelligence, and Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness and Moral Status. The core arguments and issues discussed in Liao’s volume remain philosophically interesting. The book's insights into the theoretical foundations of AI ethics, the potential impact of superintelligence, and the moral status of AI, continue to be valuable contributions. What it is missing from this volume and what we have seen explored in detail in the intervening years is engagement with questions around the broader social impacts of AI. The main topics of recent work have been fairness and algorithmic bias, privacy, and the impacts on human interactions. In this review, I focus on some of the most interesting arguments from the volume and I make some suggestions about the ways that the field has changed in the years following its publication.
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863522.77502
Flannery O’Connor’s stories are, by her own account, “preoccupied with the grotesque.” The reason, some argue, is that the grotesque is fascinating to the southern imagination. And indeed her grotesques have many southern precedents, most notably those of William Faulkner, whose novel The Sound and the Fury is famously narrated in part by an idiot. …
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990990.775033
In Trump's Second Inaugural, he had this to say:
The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. …
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1144269.775047
Many people believe that individual actors should and can respond to social and environmental problems by making ethical or conscientious decisions in the marketplace. They encourage consumers to purchase fair trade coffee, buy locally-grown produce, avoid shopping in stores with union-busting tactics, boycott exploitative soda manufacturers, and so on. In this paper I argue against the idea that demand-side decisions on the part of individual consumers can adequately capture the complicated moral dimensions of any given product. I argue this position by pointing to two intermingled features of consumer choice: value incommensurability and market indeterminacy.
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1303799.775068
In this paper, I argue that facts about an individual’s sexual identity are partially or fully grounded in facts about their sexual orientation, where an individual’s sexual identity (e.g. being queer, being straight) has to do with the social position they occupy, and their sexual orientation (e.g. being homosexual, being heterosexual) has to do with the sexual dispositions they have. The main argument for this orientation-based theory is that it gets the right results in cases in which an individual hasn’t come out yet to themselves or others. I reply to Matthew Andler’s argument against the orientation-based theory, which is that it gets the wrong results in cases having to do with (a) intergenerational gay friendship and (b) “str8 dudes,” men who have sex with men but who present themselves online as straight. I also argue that, at least in the case of being queer, Andler’s own cultural theory is consistent with sexual identity facts being partially grounded in sexual orientation facts.
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1314608.775081
Many factors contribute to whether juries reach right verdicts. Here we focus on the role of diversity. Direct empirical studies of the effect of altering factors in jury deliberation are severely limited for conceptual, practical, and ethical reasons. Using an agent-based model to avoid these difficulties, we argue that diversity can play at least four importantly different roles in affecting jury verdicts. We show that where different subgroups have access to different information, equal representation can strengthen epistemic jury success, and if one subgroup has access to particularly strong evidence, epistemic success may demand participation by that group. Diversity can also reduce the redundancy of the information on which a jury focuses, which can have a positive impact. Finally, and most surprisingly, we show that limiting communication between diverse groups in juries can favor epistemic success as well.
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1317968.775094
This week represents the convergence of so many plotlines that, if it were the season finale of some streaming show, I’d feel like the writers had too many balls in the air. For the benefit of the tiny part of the world that cares what I think, I offer the following comments. …
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1495686.775107
Moral philosophers argue that mechanisms such as reciprocal altruism and indirect reciprocity can result in the evolution of shared interests and a ‘moral sense’ in humans. This article discusses the need to broaden that view when considering the consequences of genetic conflict, in particular, the conflict associated with mate selection. An alternative application of evolutionary arguments to morality has been suggested by biologists such as Richard Alexander, who argue that ethical, moral and legal questions arise purely out of conflicts of interest, and that moral systems (consisting of societal rules or laws) exist to ameliorate those conflicts. Following Alexander, a novel societal rule is proposed that could lessen the negative consequences to men of reproductive conflicts with women.
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1779389.775122
Nathan enjoys spending time on X. He finds discussions on this platform entertaining, though sometimes rude. He thinks that things have changed since Elon Musk took control of the social network to turn it into a political and ideological weapon. …
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1780188.775136
Genecally complete yet authorless artworks seem possible, yet it’s hard to understand how they might really be possible. A natural way to try to resolve this puzzle is by construcng an account of artwork compleon on the model of accounts of artwork meaning that are compable with meaningful yet authorless artworks. I argue, however, that such an account of artwork compleon is implausible. So, I leave the puzzle unresolved.
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1948012.775149
Ever seen this famous OkCupid graph? The quick summary is just: “Men rate women more highly than women rate men.”
But the quick summary is quite an understatement! Men don’t just find women more attractive; men’s ratings closely follow a bell curve, with 6% of women getting the minimum rating and 6% getting the maximum rating. …
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2071058.775163
In the third scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Gavin Elster asks his old college pal Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) to spy on his wife, because, Elster says, in what we later learn is a set-up, he suspects she’s been possessed by a dead woman. …
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2275733.775176
“Sing, Muse, the rage of Achilles,” the Iliad says at its start. And what enraged Achilles? The fact that Agamemnon took from him a young woman he had captured in battle, who was originally given to him as part of his prize. The disputes at the start of the Iliad aren’t about whether you can take goods and people captured in battle—nobody doubts that. The question is who among the victors gets what. The English language still has more than one word for these goods, including “booty” and “spoils.” Then there’s predation, which comes from the Latin word for these spoils: praeda. The Greeks had the verb ἁρπάζω (harpadzo); in German, the noun is Kriegsbeute.
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2283366.775192
Discussion of the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), the hypothesis that an extraterrestrial civilization (ETC) is active on Earth today, is taboo in academia, but the assumptions behind this taboo are faulty. Advances in biology have rendered the notion that complex life is rare in our Galaxy improbable. The objection that no ETC would come to Earth to hide from us does not consider all possible alien motives or means. For an advanced ETC, the convergent instrumental goals of all rational agents – self-preservation and the acquisition of resources – would support the objectives of removing existential threats and gathering strategic and non-strategic information. It could advance these objectives by proactively gathering information about and from inhabited planets, concealing itself while doing so, and terminating potential rivals before they become too d angerous. Other hypotheses of ETC behavior, including the zoo/interdict hypothesis and the dark forest hypothesis also undercut the objection that the ETH is highly improbable. The ETH does not require support from extraordinary evidence because the presence of an ETC on Earth is not highly unlikely and would overturn none of our well-tested scientific knowledge. The fact that most reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) have natural or human explanations does not count against it. Inference to the best explanation offers a way to find evidence for this hypothesis , and some evidence for it exists, some of it taking the form of reliable witness reports. The most plausible alternative explanation for some UAP reports declines in probability over time. A hypothesis that is not highly improbable, does not contradict any well-established facts or theories, and explains otherwise unexplained evidence is a rational hypothesis. Since the ETH is a rational hypothesis, investigation of it should not be taboo.
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2293935.775206
In November, I chided Austrian economists for neglecting the John Haltiwanger’s empirical work on creative destruction:
Around 2000, I discovered that John Haltiwanger, a very mainstream economist, had a pile of empirical evidence vindicating the importance of Schumpeterian creative destruction. …
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2297845.775219
The other day on LinkedIn the following message (written by a political philosopher whose identity is irrelevant here) came into my feed:
It caught my attention because it indirectly relates to a key question that all societies, especially liberal societies, have to answer: up to which point are we not accountable to others for what we do? …
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2300479.775232
Introduction: People admitted to hospital as inpatients following head injury or stroke sometimes form the delusional belief that they are located somewhere else—often, near or in their home. This delusion was first described by Pick (1903), who named it “reduplicative paramnesia”; we argue instead for the term “location delusion”.
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2552958.775249
As promised, here is my reply to Tanmay Khale’s recent guest post. He’s in blockquotes, I’m not. Dear Prof. Caplan,
I have a quick question regarding your arguments in favor of open borders, and particularly the influence of adverse selection. …
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2629474.775262
An often-voiced concern about emancipatory approaches to modelling human kinds is that they are unlikely to reach their goals unless they rely on accurate knowledge of the kinds they target; knowledge, it is assumed, which can only be obtained by representing the kinds as accurately as possible independently of any particular social or political goal. We argue that this argument is problematic for several reasons. We show that even if the pursuit of emancipation should indeed rely on accurate knowledge about kinds, a merely representational approach is neither necessary nor sufficient to obtain such knowledge.