Introduction This will be a long article. I was spurred to write it by this post on the SlateStarCodex subreddit. It rubbed me the wrong way. I worry AI safety folks are risking the same fate of the New Atheists. That is, the vast majority of people who disagreed with them…

Stop me if you’ve heard this: Now with self-driving cars, engineers will be faced with dilemmas. They will have to decide the answers to certain contentious questions in moral philosophy. For example, should a car go straight and hit the child, or divert and hit the man? How should the…

To what extent do you have “fate?” And no, I’m not talking about free will and determinism. I mean the expectation that your experiences are going to follow a certain trajectory. You can experience a bit of existential dread: you are not the character of a movie or novel, and…

The topic of today’s post may seem totally out-of-the blue. I know what you’re thinking: “this is such an original idea!” “12 Rules For Life?”… “No one has ever thought of making a list like that!” Huh? What’s that you say? Someone else has already done something like this? …

Part 1: Free Speech Almost all free-speech-advocates make the argument for free speech in a flawed way. It’s understandable; the complete case for free speech is more complex than even what I will provide in this essay. I think the right case for free speech is from a “political freedom” frame. A good, popular…

How we can incorrectly become suspicious when something is “too good to be true” — the dangers of a virtue (skepticism). There was a year or two in high school when I was aware of ad blocking browser extensions but did not install them. Today, I can’t even imagine the…

I’ve been considering the simplification of language. There is an interesting angle of self-censorship culture-enforced newspeak, but that is not where I’m going with this. I am thinking more about each person’s individual inner dialogue. If how we speak influences how we think, then dumbing down language dumbs down our…

I oppose restrictions outside employment. That is to say, I believe in the policy that a company should not fire or discipline an employee in response to something that the employee did in their personal life. …

Everyone in physics and/or computer science reads XKCD. People in these fields frequently reference and link to it. I’ll admit I have done so. The vast majority of the comic strips (from here on just “comics”) are basically mundane. Some are kind of interesting. A small number are legitimately objectionable. …