Tech reporter for the Boston Globe, and author of You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves...makes a great gift!

Joined April 2010
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Phil's been busy...
Here's something many people don't know about me - Before I publicly dissected the long list of problems in the 1619 Project, I contacted the New York Times through their official channels to request a series of corrections to unambiguous factual errors in its content. The editor - Jake Silverstein - brushed me off and refused any correction - a pattern he also exhibited toward other critics from across the spectrum. Before I publicly broke the story about Kevin Kruse's plagiarism in Reason, I contacted Princeton's academic integrity officer and alerted him to the problems I had found, giving them a chance to respond and address it internally. They ignored my email and later claimed to have lost my email after I went public. Before I published my findings on Quinn Slobodian's habitual manipulation of source materials to alter its plain meaning through misquotation, I submitted an article to Contemporary European History (the journal where the worst examples appeared), highlighting the problems with the passages and asking for a correction through their official process. They desk-rejected it, brushed me off, and falsely claimed that Slobodian's piece had been thoroughly vetted in peer review. In fact, one of their own referees had flagged the same problems over a year earlier and recommended rejection of the article. Before I published an expose on Nancy MacLean & Sandy Darity's similar manipulation of W.H. Hutt quotations in their article for History of Economics Review, I (along with 2 coauthors) submitted a response comment to this journal asking for a correction through its official processes. The editor gave us a complete runaround where he imposed an arbitrary length limit requiring us to cut the content, sent the trimmed version to a referee, then rejected the piece because the referee said we didn't sufficiently address the very same things we were forced by the editor to cut. When I then asked the editor to issue a simple corrigendum to the most egregious misquotation (one that transformed Hutt's explicit attack on the racism of white Afrikaners into a defense of Apartheid), he refused and tried to pass it off as a difference of "interpretation." Before I published an expose of a leading covid masking model in the Wall Street Journal, I sent a comment to the medical journal that published it alerting them to a math error that changed their entire set of results. The journal acknowledged the error was real but refused to publish my piece on the grounds that the "next release" of the model would be updated to reflect it - even as politicians up to and including Joe Biden were trumpeting the erroneous results all over the news.
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Superbly said.
Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas
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Hiawatha Bray retweeted
I wrote about the Pope and why Christian tech critics often have a more compelling response to the AI crisis than their secular counterparts. Simply, Christian writers aren't afraid of "human nature" talk, and they understand THE question of the AI Age is: what are people for? 🧵
Pope Leo and other Christian thinkers have captured the gravity of the AI revolution in a way that many secular thinkers have not, @Tyler_A_Harper argues. theatlantic.com/culture/2026…
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An excellent point about this horrible tragedy.
Well done, you mouth-breathing cretins. And well done to all the pricks on social media who have done nothing but race-bait over this tragedy. Shameful across the board. As a psychologist, I’ll bet you £100 this is what happened with poor Henry Nowak. Cops suffer from empathy burn out. 90% of the time they deal with nothing but scum. It doesn’t make it right, but that cynicism will have come into play, here. They get a 999 call saying, “A Sikh has been attacked.” They arrive at the scene, there’s a Sikh saying he’s been attacked and someone (Henry) acting strangely. The weapon has been hidden. They will have immediately thought ‘drink or drugs’, and they see no obvious wounds. The murderer laid on exactly the scene the police would have expected to see, had the complaint been genuine. These are pure human confirmation and anchoring biases at play: the cops saw what they expected to see from the info they had going into the situation. They were tricked. Humans make mistakes. Where the cops royally fucked up was not following normal procedures when someone says they have been stabbed, and checking them all over including skin. They should lose their jobs over that negligence alone and for allowing their biases to override their training. I guarantee you “I can’t breathe” inadvertently made things worse as that’s what every single scumbag says when they get arrested, since George Floyd. This absolute tragedy is a sad combination of confirmation and anchoring biases, excessive cynicism, and a criminal failure to follow correct procedures, not to mention a lying, murdering piece of shit and his piece of shit family doing everything they could to confuse the police and muddy the waters. It has nothing to do with diversity. Henry Nowak should not have died at all, but he would have died whatever the police did. However, in these circumstances he should have died with someone holding his hand, trying to save him, and telling him it would be ok, not in handcuffs being read his rights. The police officers who made this dreadful error should lose their jobs and will have to live with that for the rest of their days. Final point: well done to the Hants Police detectives who shredded the murderer’s story and secured a conviction.
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Hiawatha Bray retweeted
Joe is partly correct. I do hype life in China. Is it because everything is amazing in China? Of course not. There are many things that could improve in China. Political pluralism. Air quality. Censorship. Consumption. Work-life balance. I could go on. But the hawkishness about China is a familiar tale. I try to tell positive stories about China because I believe they need to be told. For several reasons. First, I believe China's rise is genuinely good for the world. It's moving us towards more multilateralism, peace, and clean energy. Second, I believe it's important to challenge the narrative that casts China as a tyrannical regime determined to topple the West and subjugate the rest — a narrative that is, in my assessment, more a reflection of Western hegemonic anxiety than of actual reality. Third, I am someone who believes that economic and social development is a good thing. When a poor country becomes less poor, when hundreds of millions of people escape hunger and insecurity and are able to lead longer, healthier, more dignified lives — this is worth celebrating. China isn't paradise on earth, but we should recognise the remarkable transformation that China's rise has entailed. I'm a fan of @TheStalwart's and @tracyalloway's podcast, Odd Lots. If they are interested, I'm happy to come on their show and share why I believe China's rise is good for the world, and take tough questions about it.
This account does nothing but constantly hype life in China. And now says life in the West is just as good.
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A lovely little chat from a liberal online publication that's willing to challenge liberal ideas.
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