Philosophy
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About ten years ago, I found myself sitting on the floor of my San Francisco Bay Area apartment, hoping that the call I was on wasn’t going to drop yet again. At the other end of the line was a Seattle public radio station, hosting a live debate/conversation between me and computer scientist Bill Joy on the question of whether our technologies were going to kill us; at that point, my main concern was whether our technologies would even work. Joy had recently published his infamous “ Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us ” essay in Wired , and was still charged with the fiery nihilism of his argument that we are less than a generation away from nano-, bio-, and information technologies that would fundamentally transform — in a bad way — human society and the human species. Joy was convinced that these emerging technologies would cause our extinction, and that the only hope for humanity was to give up entirely on these innovations.
Open the Future: Not Giving Up
Nick Bostrom's Home Page
Nick Bostrom is Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University and founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute and of the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology within the Oxford Martin School. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (Routledge, 2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (ed., OUP, 2008), and Human Enhancement (ed., OUP, 2009), and a forthcoming book on Superintelligence. He previously taught at Yale, and he was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the British Academy.
Nassim N. Taleb Home & Professional Page
Why Short Term Fat Tails Means Long Term Fat Tails (debunking illusions of "central limit theorem"; a (technical) reply to Treynor's "What can Taleb Learn From Markowitz?") Errors as counterfactuals Important (only): gamma -at- fooledbyrandomness-dot-com. (I beg journalists & members of the media to leave me alone. Please keep very short.)
Media
[Journalists] seem to feel let down when they discover that the real people aren't anything like the way they so relentlessly portray us; as if, since they've gone to the trouble of inventing extravagant caricatures of us, we should at least have the decency to live up to them in real life.
RichardDawkins.net - The Official Richard Dawkins Website
The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com
....The founding father of modern vibrational medicine was Dr. Albert Abrams (1863-1924), the "dean of twentieth century charlatans." * Abrams called his healing method radionics and claimed that he was able to detect distinct energies or vibrations (radiation) being emitted from healthy and diseased tissue in all living things. He invented devices that allegedly could measure this energy (vibration, radiation) and he created a system for evaluating vibrations as signs of health or disease.>> more
Part 3: Adventures in the Dream Factory In the previous post, we looked at Philip K. Dick’s intellectual and philosophical ties to the early Gnostics . Now, culturally and politically at least, its time to look at the Gnostic in the mirror. Please read on. Philip K.
THE STONE - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com
Should This Be the Last Generation? - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless. Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? If so, what factors entered into your decision? Was it whether having children would be good for you, your partner and others close to the possible child, such as children you may already have, or perhaps your parents? For most people contemplating reproduction, those are the dominant questions. Some may also think about the desirability of adding to the strain that the nearly seven billion people already here are putting on our planet’s environment.
‘Last Generation?’: A Response - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless. The role of philosophers — and I take it, of The Stone — is to stimulate people to think about questions that they might not think about otherwise. That so many people were roused to comment on my piece, “ Should This Be the Last Generation? ” — despite comments being closed at one point — suggests that it achieved this aim. That said, it would have been good if some of those commenting had read the piece with a little more care, and all the way through.
What Is a Philosopher? - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless. There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing. What I’d like to do in the opening column in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher? As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.
Here’s what they are instead: investigations into why, as Ms. Schulz writes, with a Cole Porterish lilt in her voice, “As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up.” Bookstores will shelve these two volumes side by side, and critics like me will think, bingo!