Academia

Daniel Ellsberg has died, aged 92. I don’t have anything to add to the standard account of his heroic career, except to observe that Edward Snowden (whose cause Ellsberg championed) would probably have done better to take his chances with the US legal system, as Ellsberg did. In decision theory, the subsection of the economics […]

I’m off to do a talk to mark World Ocean Day, so this is posted in haste. The ocean needs advocates. It’s our biggest ecosystem, probably our biggest carbon sink, a major source of oxygen. It regulates temperatures, and drives weather patterns. Hundreds of millions of people are nutritionally dependent on fish. But the ocean […]

Since the beginning of this millennium, I’ve been writing critiques of the “generation game”, the idea that people can be divided into well-defined groups (Boomers, Millennials and so on), with specific characteristics based on their year of birth. As I said in my first go at this issue, back in 2000 (reproduced here ) Much […]

Malbork Castle, from which the Teutonic knights dominated a swathe of central Europe in the middle ages, is a vast and impressive fortress. It also has some rather stunning interiors.

In general, I think the left focuses too much on national politics, when a lot of the action is happening at the state level.  So I want to discuss politics in Michigan, my home state since 1987.   Ann Arbor is even more blue than Detroit, but overall Michigan is basically a 50-50 state.  Trump won […]

The explosive growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT threatens to disrupt many aspects of society. Geoffrey Hinton, the former head of AI at Google, recently announced his retirement; there is a growing sense of inevitability and a concomitant lack of agency.   An initial humanistic hope might be that people would simply reject […]