The culture war is a veritable bonanza of logical fallacies. There are tons of ad hominems, straw people, slippery slopes, red herrings, and false dilemmas. These fallacies are not confined to one side or the other. This just seems to be how the culture war is fought. Of all the fallacies that get thrown around,…
Liam Kofi Bright wrote a fascinating article called “White Psycodrama”. (Available here: White Psychodrama Final Version (philarchive.org)) In it, he describes three archetypes involved in the culture wars: Repenters, Repressors, and PoC Intelligentsia. He argues that the culture wars make us all worse and that the only way to improve things is to opt out…
The first two posts are here and here. Yesterday I “wrote” a post describing what ChatGPT is. The reason wrote is in quotes is because, in reality, I only wrote the first three sentences. The rest was written by ChatGPT. It was a little experiment. I’m curious how many people who read that post knew…
Everyone seems to be freaking out about Large Language Models lately. These troll the internet and have conversations with users based on the information they find. Basically, for any word, the look at what words typically come after those words and put together grammatically correct sentences in that way. ChatGPT is the most famous of…
When I was in college, shortly after I declared philosophy as my major, I came home for winter break. At Christmas, I was talking to my uncle. I told him I was a philosophy major, and his reaction was, “That’s the tree in the forest thing, right?” I chuckled and said yes. The funny thing…
Nihilism is the idea that life is meaningless. In popular thought, a nihilist is usually a person who does not believe in any higher power, no afterlife. You live and then you die and that’s it. People just naturally assume that nihilism is a pessimistic view. But why does it have to be pessimistic? Life…
Meritocracy seems great. Who could be against the idea of people getting economic benefits, societal benefits, and even government positions based on merit? Plato believed it was the most just political order possible. Who am I to argue against Plato? Well, I’m a nobody and probably have no place arguing against Plato, but I’m going…
I tell my students that winning isn’t the most important thing when they compete. Their goal should be to constantly improve. My thoughts are, if their goal is only to win, then they may seek out weak opponents to ensure victory. If they want to improve, then they’ll seek out stronger opponents who may defeat…
As they have bee for pretty much everyone, the last couple of years have been difficult. Even before the pandemic began, 2020 saw one of my dreams become a nightmare. I’d always imagined myself as a teacher, but when I was put in charge of a classroom for the first time, I realized that I…
