An Argument With a Friend Who Doesn't Exist
I have been arguing about AI companions with a friend for two years and neither of us has convinced the other.
Department
Psychology.
Understanding the mind and behavior.
Lately on the shelf
30 of 499There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of scurvy
OR: hey buddy, your teeth are falling out
Kids These Days, Part II
More about smartphones, bans, and the good life
Are universities on the brink of an Uber-like revolution?
A scenario for how AI could challenge universities’ dominance in higher education
Apparently Criminals Don’t Have Free Will, But Elites Do
The AI Regulatory Commission
Needed Now
Wishful Thinking Is (Mostly) A Myth - Unpaywalled
How social games, not comforting falsehoods, distort what we believe.
The shapeshifting trap
Momentous change, from individual-level decisions to business-level policy making, sometimes doesn’t quite turn out as expected. Why do we never seem to learn?
For Amy
A memory twenty-five years in the making
Marriageable Women, Informants, Ego-Shock
Links and recommendations
Power to the laypeople!
How AI will reduce experts’ intellectual market power
Is AI a form of life?
Podcast with Robert Wright
Do doomers believe what they say?
A test
Some Status Games Are Worth Playing
The parable of the poor man’s son
The Bizarro Code
Our World and Welcome to It
GPT-6 Astra Reviews ‘The Social Roots of Delusions’
There is currently much debate about how impressive frontier AI models really are and what role they can play in research, including in academic philosophy. To get some evidence, I asked GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI’s new model, to review my book, ‘The Social Roots of…
Instant judges
We are lightning fast at passing categorical judgement about people, but as the proverb says, haste makes waste… or does it?
The Postmodern Defense of Lindsay Clancy
O.J. Simpson for middle-class white women
Birthright Citizenship and Reasoning by Analogy
Some Fundamental Matters in Constitutional Law
Bad Strategy, First-World Problems, Heterodox Dating
Links and recommendations
Open Science Met Social Justice. They Don't Get Along.
A guest post by Ben Lovett
Politics and the Supreme Court
Are the Justices affected by the political party of the sitting President?
Kids These Days
What we are really arguing about
How AI will revolutionise peer-reviewed research
Frontier models will change the way scientific papers are checked, selected and written
When Men Become Optional, Babies Disappear
A price, just for you
How a jumble sale helps reveal our ambivalence to personalized pricing
Sexual Morality, Unsolicited Advice, Drug Decriminalization
Links and recommendations
19 pieces of teaching advice
Because it's a new semester
Most Questions About AI Aren’t About AI
Why the AI revolution is a golden age for polymaths, philosophers, and moderate epistemic despair
Actually good advice
don’t tell someone they look like Beaker from The Muppets, etc.