As communal life comes screeching to a collective halt for the indefinite future (including not-quite-Italy-but-close bans on movement in San Francisco), and as public health officials go into “more lockdown is better” mode, it seems important to underline at least three things: (1) no one knows what they are doing, hence (2) these measures are…

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We are here on the balcony because of a pan-demic, a terrible pandemic that we have handled perfectly.  More testing for the virus is coming soon.  But also not everybody needs or should get testing.  Also we are going to cap off the petroleum reserve gas tank at a great price.  Many wonderful amazing people…

A week ago, two people were killed in a mass shooting at UNC Charlotte that was only one of several shootings in Charlotte that week. Yesterday, one student was killed and several injured in a mass shooting at a high school in the Denver suburbs. As of now (5/8), there have been 118 mass shootings…

On April 30, a man shot and killed two students in a classroom at my university, UNC Charlotte.  He injured four others. On May 1, the day after the mass shooting at UNC Charlotte, a man was shot and killed in an apartment complex near the university.  On April 30, the day of the mass…

by Eric Schwitzgebel In a series of fascinating recent articles, philosopher Susan Schneider argues that (1.) Most of the intelligent beings in the universe might be Artificial Intelligences rather than biological life forms. (2.) These AIs might entirely lack conscious experiences. Schneider’s argument for (1) is simple and plausible: Once a species develops sufficient intelligence…

by Eric Schwitzgebel As Carolyn Dicey Jennings and I have documented, academic philosophy in the United States is highly gender skewed, with gender ratios more characteristic of engineering and the physical sciences than of the humanities and social sciences. However, unlike engineering and the physical sciences, philosophy appears to have stalled out in its progress…

by Eric Schwitzgebel … and celebrating the death of children? “Does it matter if the story of the escape from Egypt is historically true?” Rabbi Suzanne Singer asked us, her congregants, on Saturday, at the Passover Seder dinner at Temple Beth El in Riverside. We’re a liberal Reform Judaism congregation. Everyone except me seemed to…

by Gordon Hull News this week of a planned asthma inhaler that connects to the Internet of Things. On the one hand, this seems like a pretty good use of the Internet: as you try out different medicines, they can learn precisely how well those medicines work, and work in genomics might even show that…