A boy asked me how long I’d been teaching. When I said fifteen years, he asked whether I was burnt out.
I told him no. That probably eighty percent of my interactions with students are positive. I enjoy being around them. They leave me with a weird hope about the future.
“Gambling with our lives,” warned departing Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon. Now Dario Amodei writes, “We must slow the pace.” The people building powerful minds are warning that their ability to control them may not keep up.
I remain an apocaloptimist.
In a Thai mangrove, fireflies flashed while nearby crickets chirped at almost the same tempo. For a moment it looked like interspecies music: light and sound keeping time. Then the analysis dissolved the romance. The two species were not synchronized. They were not answering one another. They had simply arrived at nearly the same beat.
A long enough error log can make the architecture look imaginary. Hope can be a stubborn thing when it comes to software.
The lighthouse keeper accepts responsibility for the light, but does not invent the lamp, the lens, the charts, or the accumulated knowledge of navigation.
20 years ago I said I didn't think "fascism was knocking at the door" but there I was last night, against my better judgment, flipping among news stations and still somehow shocked by what is happening. My mind oscillates between cynical helplessness and dissociation. One says nothing I do matters. The other suggests I can protect myself by not looking too closely. Neither is a durable civic posture.
A student writes, “Increasing effective nuclear charge decreases atomic radius.” It may have been memorized, reconstructed from an electrostatic model, copied from a friend, or polished by AI. The words alone cannot tell me which.
But the lighthouse is a strange place to choose if what you really want is to be left alone.
Peaceful coexistence sounds like a treaty signed between strangers. You remain there. I remain here. Neither of us destroys the other. The border holds.
One of my favorite exchanges in The Office comes in Season 2, when Jim asks Dwight, “Hey, Dwight. As Sempai, do you think there is ever going to be a day where humans and robots can peacefully co-exist?”
There’s a familiar complaint in classrooms: “We’re never going to use this.” At the level of content, that objection is often correct. Most students will not carry specific formulas or niche facts into their adult lives in any direct way. This is often true in physics and chemistry, my subjects. But the mistake is in stopping the analysis there.
The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask.Of course not all ignorance is created equal. Not knowing the motions of the planets, or the root causes of our diseases, is fundamentally different than not knowing where life exists outside of our solar system, or the specific proteins involved in ALS.
I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.Beautiful way to say goodbye. About the time you start to focus on leaving behind some impression upon others, you realize that your most important one will come through your progeny.
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
Kant’s insight was that, in order for the knowledge we get from our senses at any given moment in time to mean anything, our minds must already be distinguishing it and combining it with the information we get in prior and subsequent moments in time. Thus there is no such thing as a pure impression in time — no absolute, frozen moment in which we know the sun is rising now without being able to infer anything from it — because such a pure moment without a before or after would be nothing at all...
Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so that people will enjoy it and want to keep doing it. Traditionally the thinking has been that employers should appeal to workers’ more obvious forms of self-interest: financial incentives, yes, but also work that is inherently interesting or offers the possibility for career advancement. Grant’s research, which has generated broad interest in the study of relationships at work and will be published for the first time for a popular audience in his new book, “Give and Take,” starts with a premise that turns the thinking behind those theories on its head. The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other people’s lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves.Great read. I will check out the book.
But love and understanding, even without knowledge, are tremendous gifts; and religious knowledge claims are hard to support. We should, then, make room for those who embrace a religion as a source of love and understanding but remain agnostic about the religion’s knowledge claims. We should, for example, countenance those who are Christians while doubting the literal truth of, say, the Trinity and the Resurrection. I wager, in fact, that many professed Christians are not at all sure about the truth of these doctrines —and other believers have similar doubts. They are, quite properly, religious agnostics.He presents such agnosticism as a sort of "middle way" between "no arguments" atheism, which is the presumption that the burden of proof lies on the religious, and the presumption by religion that faith justifies knowledge.
It may well be that physical science will ultimately give us a complete account of reality. It may, that is, give us causal laws that allow us to predict (up to the limits of any quantum or similar uncertainty) everything that happens in the universe. This would allow us to entirely explain the universe as a causal system. But there are aspects of our experience (consciousness, personality, moral obligation, beauty) that may not be merely parts of the causal system. They may, for example, have meanings that are not reducible to causal interactions.I would wager all my earthly goods that many people believe in religious knowledge claims because of these aspects of our experience. Religion has done a great job of packaging together some really hard-to-swallow claims about history and science with a much easier-to-swallow sense of appreciation for these aspects of our experience, and insisting they be taken together or not at all. Many believers I know have pointed this exact thing out to me before after a long dialog in which they may see that I have some good points/arguments in favor of rejecting some of their knowledge claims about history and science.