Recent additions to the Heap… “Exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies will dominate our historical imagination and make it impossible to understand, and learn from, the past” — Daniel Bessner (Washington) on the decline of the historical profession “The algorithmic lens while giving us affordances has a certain number of blind spots… that we must be precise… that more data is better… that there is a single uniform truth to be found…” — Suresh Venkatasubramanian (Brown) is interviewed about developing the US Government’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights A philosophy course centered around paradoxes — taught by Patrick Greenough at St. Andrews “Contemporary analytical philosophy is in greater part interesting, valuable, and well done” — Crispin Wright (NYU/Stirling) is interviewed about philosophy and his work on objectivity, truth, vagueness, skepticism, and other topics “Like Gandhi, he believed that guarding power was bad for the powerful: segregation harmed the white man’s own soul. But from his other great influence Reinhold Niebuhr… King learned to reject a ‘false optimism’” — Amod Lele (Boston U.) on MLK’s improvement on Gandhi How can we trust science? How does it get at the truth? What about false scientific theories of the past? — a conversation between Peter Vickers and Jana Bacevic (Durham) “What’s odd about doubling down on population ethics is that it both encourages us to take an unhealthy amount of interest in the quality of lives of other people’s children and that it encourages us to make calculations that are without any solid ground” — more from Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on Will MacAskill and “longtermism” Discussion welcome. Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thanks!