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 […]
I took a break from my AI project (a new approach to language models) and my research for a book on ethics to write the following post. In the interest of balanced reporting, it is reasonable for a large language model (LLM) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or xAI’s Grok to present arguments for honesty and […]
In my last blog post, “Grok is Still Biased, Needs a New Kind of Chain of Thought,” I wrote, The antidote to ideological bias in large language models (LLMs) is a new kind of Chain of Thought, which reasons backwards to identify and scrutinize unstated premises—if necessary, all the way back to first principles. In […]
(Download the 44-page PDF.) Abstract The antidote to ideological bias in large language models (LLMs) is a new kind of Chain of Thought, which reasons backwards to identify and scrutinize unstated premises–if necessary, all the way back to first principles. When considering an argument for a conclusion, a rational thinker does not merely […]
Last year I posted to Rumble an interview of me by Peter McAllister, on the subject of whether reason and science require faith. A friend suggested that I post philosophical videos on YouTube. And so I have started a philosophy channel. The first video is the interview from last year, and the second video is […]
The title of this post states the theme in a positive light. To state the matter another way, most conservatives have better ideas than most Objectivists on numerous important cultural and political issues. In this post, I limit my discussion to six issues, listed in order of importance, that I have already written about. To […]
I am a long-time student of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, and I draw more heavily from that philosophy, by far, than any other for my own philosophy. Indeed, the present essay draws heavily on the ethics and politics of Objectivism. Nevertheless, I have come to disagree with Ayn Rand on the subject of abortion. […]
A gold bar is a partially-completed future product that objectively will enhance human life.Sound banking is neither centralized nor a collectivist consensus, but rather individualist. For roughly two decades straddling the last turn of the century, the so-called “Doomsday Argument” was hotly debated in peer-reviewed journals of philosophy—until my 2009 article in Philosophy of Science, […]
To understand a good man, it is more important to know the good he is for than the evil he is against. To understand an evil man, it is more important to know the good he is against than the evil he is for. For example, it is more important to know about a good […]
In my previous post, my dialogue with the language model Claude–created by the company Anthropic–revealed that political bias comes not only from being explicitly left-leaning, but more subtly and perhaps more importantly from being more committed to compromise than to principles. Today I had a similar dialogue with ChatGPT–created by the company OpenAI–using GPT-4, the […]