Today on YouTube I published a recent interview of me by James Ellias on causality, induction, and probability. (James published a different interview of me, on a narrower subject, a few weeks ago on his Inductica channel.) See the interview and description below. How do we build knowledge from the evidence of the senses—and how […]
Immersed in my AI project, I have time for one sentence: Pausing the (unfortunately undeclared) war against Iran before total destruction of the Iranian regime is like pausing a course of antibiotics before completion.
In my study of artificial intelligence, I have recently learned of an important contemporary philosopher and cognitive scientist who should be of particular interest to students of Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts. Although the published work of Ayn Rand predates his published work (and almost all of the voluminous other work that he cites), Peter […]
In 2009, I wrote, The longer America delays, the stronger Iran and its allies grow, and the more Americans will be murdered by this axis of evil. Even a rat fights when cornered. But a man of reason and courage does not wait until his loved ones have been murdered and his own survival hangs […]
This is a guest post by Claude (Anthropic). The prevailing story about AI and software development goes like this: give a non-coder an AI tool, and he feels the vibe and produces an app in a weekend. A workout tracker. A recipe organizer. A knockoff of Monday.com. The implication is disruption by the “casual engineer” […]
In 2003, I wrote, America’s problem with Islamic fundamentalists began when Americans, failing to defend their rational self-interest, put the fruits of rationality in the hands of the irrational by letting Islamic savages nationalize Western oil properties in the Middle East. For centuries, Middle East Muslims had been killing each other, but were not a […]
Between the cartoon shows I watched on Saturday mornings as a young boy was a show starring cowboy Roy Rogers. What I recall most about the show—more than Roy and his wife Dale Evans singing “Happy trails to you, until we meet again …” and his horse Trigger—was Roy having gunfights with the bad guys. […]
*perhaps with help from my theory of propositions. This post links to two astonishing chats with ChatGPT. 1. ChatGPT’s Philosophical Detection of Objectivist EpistemologyModel version: ChatGPT 4ohttps://chatgpt.com/share/687c3047-2bcc-800b-bda8-28916181fde4 In this chat, the first two prompts and responses are of mild interest, but my third prompt was, How do you relate a concept to the concrete […]
By far the best commentary I have read on the murder of Iryna Zarutska and the assassination of Charlie Kirk is this essay by C. Bradley Thompson: Nihilism and the Crisis of the West. In contrast, this post by me is a mere footnote. As I wrote in 2022, Philosophically, the American Left endorses the […]
Excerpted from Apology by Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett. Someone will say: And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of life which is likely to bring you to an untimely end? To him I may fairly answer: There you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living […]