On Stupidity Dietrich Bonhoeffer philosophychatter.substack.c…

I recently had an experience with an AI that may be of interest to those who propose that AI could serve as a good fact-checker for many people. "That's exactly what intellectual dishonesty looks like": AI at alter.systems nathannobis.substack.com/p/t…

RT @Svigel: This is going to be extremely hard for some of you to hear, and a certain type will call me an elitist snob for it (even though…

I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.

So what's actually wrong with passing off LLM writing as your own? My newest journal article, out in open access (link in reply), argues that it's not just faked information about competencies. Sometimes it's faked signals of caring, and sometimes it's simply faked identity.

While these polls are interesting, they would be much more interesting if they also asked people what their reasons are. E.g.: 1000wordphilosophy.com/2026/…

My interview with Raja Halwani about sexual racism. Halwani argues that what matters is not necessarily how people got their racial preferences but rather what their current attitude toward their preferences is. Link below.

We support @sapinker 's message of making important, but complex, ideas and arguments accessible to broad audiences. Our essays are motivated by these types of goals. x.com/PerellClips/status/206…

As I frequently tell my own students @uaustinorg, the job market is about to be saturated with people like this: people who have been cheated out of their own minds for the stupidest possible reasons. People whose teachers didn’t want to be a burden or a bad guy or worst of all, an elitist, so they just gave up in advance on literature the old fashioned way. Sure, they made up a cock-and-bull story about how obsolete the classics were, how outmoded the old ways of teaching were, how impractical it was to sit with a pen and paper and run through verb conjugations or just puzzle over words. But the truth is they were scared of being that most valuable of beings, the kindly but stern authority figure. And then when the machines came for the books, they had not a leg to stand on. The result is that maybe no other skill will be more valuable in years to come, or more rare, than the ability to sit alone in a room and follow a train of thought from beginning to end. All those drills and disciplines they told you were “useless”? Reading, rhetoric, contemplation? Poetry, philosophy, fine art? Turns out they’re the only training that can mold you into the scarcest resource on earth, which is a functional adult human being. And to beat it all, that’s now just about the one kind of training that can make you proof against the disruptions of the AI economy. Forget who said it but it’s true: “learn to code” was crap advice. Learn to ode.

So, this is also true of the average poster and commentator on this app too. Right?

Academics write for each other, not for people. Steven Pinker has spent over four decades doing the opposite, and thinks current academic writing is "enormous wasted effort." "There's an awful lot of brilliant work, really smart people in academia. Why are they doing it? Just to entertain each other? Taxpayers pay for it. It should be accessible. Why should I have to read a paragraph five or six times? It gets under my skin when academics devote so much brainpower into the scholarship and then just blow off the essential task of letting the world know what you've done."

The Ethics of Homosexuality: Is It Morally Wrong? ". . This essay reviews some of the most influential arguments on the ethics of homosexuality." #homosexuality #homosexual #ethics #philosophy #sexualethics #PhilosophyOfLove #love 1000wordphilosophy.com/2026/…

The account I've had since 2018 (@BenBurgis) was hacked two days ago. I've repeatedly tried to get X to restore access and I'm not optimistic based on how that's played out so far. If you get a DM from it, please don't click on any links. Meanwhile, follow me here!

New! The Ethics of Homosexuality: Is It Morally Wrong? by Nathan Nobis "If homosexuality is wrong, there should be a good reason . . to believe that. Likewise, if homosexuality is not wrong, there should be a good reason to believe that." 1000wordphilosophy.com/2026/…

AI can serve as a useful fact-checker, at least to help people understand that there are controversies when they think there are none. It's easy to get it to do this well. It isn't perfect, but critics forget how imperfect *no* fact-checking and randos asking randos is.

Genuinely, can someone give me the steel man version of the rationale behind the new “give everyone AI” university strategy? What is the theory of the case here? Do universities think it’s sustainable to ask students to pay over $90k per year to cheat their way through college?

Good luck babies! A "critic" of "socialism" implies you have no rights!

The quality of the average post and comment on this app is of a person who cannot do this either. This is not a mere "student" problem.

The typical quality of the posts and comments on this platform might be stronger evidence that we are "cooked."

Not understanding "correlation doesn't imply causation" is often correlated with not understanding causation.