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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
On Friday, Israel did what the United States should have done decades ago, as I have written again and again. Israel struck Iran. Thank you, Israel, for leading the free world against this mortal threat to all civilized people. I hope you stay the course until the Iranian regime is destroyed. Israel’s mission is much […]
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 […]
I used to be against all tariffs, but I changed my mind a few years ago. The philosophical argument is straightforward. The initiation of force is evil. Therefore, it is evil for government to initiate force. Tariffs are a form of force. Therefore, it is evil for government to initiate tariffs. But … The proper […]
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 […]
Since my last blog post, on October 30, I have been immersed in long-range projects in the two greatest normative domains: a project in artificial intelligence, applying my work in epistemology; and a book on ethics. While President Trump was being sworn in on January 20, I was attending a small reading group that is […]