"Bullshitters try to deceive us about their *intentions* in speaking, acting like they care about saying true things when they have some other goal."
1000wordphilosophy.com/2026/…
61
"Can major historical events, from the advent of moral religions to the industrial revolution, be explained by changes in life history strategies?"
edge.org/response-detail/275…
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"Socrates, at least to me, seems like a sophisticated troll. He derails ordinary conversation with relentless, abstract questions. I think it's fair for an interlocutor to just refuse to engage and walk away. What, exactly, would be wrong with that?" academic.oup.com/book/63639/…
😼"I support disagreement and dread convergence, so I don’t really want too many converts... broad uptake is nice for me (and the book), though less than ideal for philosophy. Broad resistance is good for philosophy and exactly what my view predicts." academic.oup.com/book/63639
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🔪"A common narrative you see being spun in social psychology is that humans are dumb, humans are irrational... there's no real attention to the fact that in some sense we have to do some things wrong because life is full of trade-offs"
youtube.com/watch?v=SoYnRbM1…
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✨"the deal that separation of church and state offers to the religious [...] can work only because religious credences are psychologically compartmentalised and operate at a different level from factual belief" aeon.co/essays/the-psycholog…
"I teach a course on sexual ethics. Of all the topics we cover, including bestiality, minors, pornography, BDSM, etc. only one topic have I ever had to have multiple meetings with highers up to clear in advance, and complaints from colleagues."
dailynous.com/2026/11/09/maj…
🎠"The juxtaposition of my two arguments might seem paradoxical – I defend thinking about disgusting ideas while arguing that disgust-generated suffering has moral weight. Yet, there is no contradiction."
journalofcontroversialideas.…
"So why do people respond differently to unreliable and volatile environments when learning but reduce their planning effort in both?"
cell.com/trends/cognitive-sc…
🔪"There’s a reason I am writing this comment anonymously, and it’s the same reason I don’t touch the metaphysics or ethics of gender in my own research with a barge pole."
dailynous.com/2026/11/09/maj…
"asking people to evaluate arguments for why they should accept making things worse is useful for finding out how people think about moral questions"
link.springer.com/article/10…
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🔪"The surest way to ruin a youth is by teaching them to respect those who think like them more highly than those who think differently." google.com/books/edition/Daw…
182
"misinformation is a symptom, not the disease" cambridge.org/core/elements/…
The "Reader Picks" among the comments are interesting...
nytimes.com/interactive/2026…
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✨"Humans who seek knowledge must not only love their enemies, they must also be able to hate their friends."
google.com/books/edition/Thu…
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👻"Indeed, far from being backward-looking, superstitious fools, many of these educated theorists of witch hunting integrated their interrogations of accused people into wider scientific investigations that asked good questions of the universe." iai.tv/articles/witch-hunts-…
"In the face of this type of 'nature,' what is appropriate to a human being, if he is otherwise a thinking person, is gravity."
google.com/books/edition/Daw…
🔪"whatever an agentic AI does, that is a human or group of humans acting indirectly on the world, and those humans are responsible for the outcome"
I held out as long as I could, but I've now waded into the debate on AI consciousness, offering in my opinion, a pretty fundamental argument. The paper I wrote is very brief so I've published it as a Conversation article. theconversation.com/do-ai-ag… 🧵1/5
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