Hugo Mercier, Melissa Schwartzberg and I have two closely related publications on what we’ve been calling “No-Bullshit Democracy.” One is aimed at academics – it’s a very short piece that has just been officially published in American Political Science Review. The other just came out in Democracy. It’s aimed at a broader audience, and is […]
Political Theory/Political Philosophy
There is a kind of relentless contrarian that is very smart, has voracious reading habits, is funny, and ends up in race science and eugenics. You are familiar with the type. Luckily, analytic philosophy also generates different contrarians about its own methods and projects that try to develop more promising (new) paths than these. Contemporary classics in […]
Earlier today, after I tweeted out that “Proposals to mint $1tn platinum coin are designed to circumvent the US constitution’s “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts,” I got lectured by Nathan Tankus for “not grasping the most elementary legal issues in the topic […]
After Stagflation during the 1970s, many markets were liberalized and, over time, central banks made a lot more independent in lots of places. In addition, some countries in Europe embraced the EURO (and founded the ECB), and barriers between regulated banking and shadow-banking (including by investment banks) were removed. The intended aim, and in certain […]
Back in the Paleolithic days of blogging, I got interested in the relationship between philosophical thought and political action, particularly in the cases of Hayek and Heidegger and their support for Pinochet and Hitler respectively. I think the evidence is in on Hayek (see here and here), so I won’t discuss it further. In Heidegger’s […]
Like many other academics, it seems, I spent part of Winter break playing around with ChatGPT, a neural network “which interacts in a conversational way.” It has been trained up on a vast database, to recognize and (thereby) predict patterns, and its output is conversational in character. You can try it by signing up. Somewhat […]
[attention conservation notice: I am neither a philosopher nor a cognitive scientist] A quick friendly-critical response to this piece by Liam Kofi Bright, which also plugs some of my own collaborative work with Hugo Mercier and Melissa Schwartzberg. The short version – many arguments against the human capacity for reason rest on shaky empirics, as […]
To illustrate the claims in this book, I rely on three primary metaphors throughout….The second is of history as molten glass. At present, society is still malleable and can be blown into many shapes. But at some point, the glass might cool, set, and become much harder to change. The resulting shape could be beautiful […]