The Mother of All Trolley Problems
Or is it one thought experiment too many?
Philosophy
Open Questions.
Exploring deep questions in philosophy, ethics, and society.
Recent essays
30 of 36If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em
The case for adversarial collaboration
The Take-Home Essay Is Dead
Long live the take-home essay
Woke 2 Will Be About AI
And it's gonna be crazyyyy
Claude Passes Peer Review
In defense of “centaur philosophy”
If AI Slop Falls in the Forest
And Pangram isn’t around to detect it
Can Soccer Be Fixed?
Some guidance from America
After the AI Revolution
Artificial intelligence may create abundance, but will it be shared? An adversarial collaboration between optimists and pessimists.
Philosophy's Alignment Problem
Reflections on an open letter about philosophers funded by the AI industry
Why is Your Talk So Bad?
More of a comment than a question
My Philosophy Lab
A thought experiment
Why Philosophy
What it’s good for, and how it could be better still
How I Read
And how I write (or fail to)
Why Smart People Make Weak Arguments About AI
Tech CEOs aren’t the only ones captive to motivated reasoning
Why the Backlash Against Trans Rights?
And how the movement can recover
Science Has Shattered Our Worldview Again and Again
While philosophy only watched?
Time Bandits
Don’t let them rob you of posterity
It’s a Girl! (Thank God)
Why it’s better to have daughters than sons
Does It Matter if Trans People Are Born That Way?
The answer is more complicated than you might think
Save the Student Essay
Without getting played
How it Started vs. How it’s Going
My first nine months on Substack
Is Affirmative Action in Faculty Hiring Justified?
Why it’s harder to defend than many of us care to admit
Why Aren’t You Using ChatGPT? (Reprise)
It’s already far more useful than Google ever was.
The Fragmentation of America
How we got into this mess and whether there’s a way out
What The Left Misses About Trump's Appeal (Reprise)
It's the culture, stupid
Getting Schooled
What I learned studying philosophy and what I’m still learning
You Don't Need an AI Policy. You Need Two.
One policy to preserve the take-home essay, another to explore the frontiers of education
The Promise of Lab-Grown Meat
Can it free us from factory farming?
Weapon of Mass Plagiarism (Reprise)
Students are outsourcing essays to ChatGPT. What’s a professor to do?
The Fragmentation of Philosophy
After other disciplines have fallen away, what’s left?