Papers in this group
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On December 2, 1942, in a racquets court underneath the West Stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi created man's first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Because of the…
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It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs. But how should one reason and act if one acknowledges that one is uncertain about morality – not just applied ethics but fundamental moral issues? if you don't know which moral theory is…
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This book is intended to provide a critical overview of some main themes and issues in contemporary metaethics. I set the scene with discussions of Moore and Ayer, and follow up with discussions of more recent figures: Blackburn, Gibbard, Mackie,…
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In what follows I argue that idealizing views are not likely to be able to motivate the very idealization they employ. If so, such idealization is likely to remain—given the philosophical concerns underlying idealizing views—objectionably ad hoc.…
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The moral philosophy of the first half of the twentieth century, at least in the English-speaking part of the world, has been largely devoted to problems of an ontological or epistemological nature. This concentration of effort by many acute…
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Complexity of value is the thesis that our preferences, the things we care about, don't compress down to one simple rule, or a few simple rules.... I certainly agree with both of these points. But I worry that we (at Less Wrong) might have swung a…
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The ethical theory I am going to describe in this paper is based on three different time-honoured intellectual traditions in moral philosophy. It also makes essential use of a great intellectual accomplishment of much more recent origin, namely, the…
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Hired to break into the virtually inaccessible computer network of a large corporation, Case, the world's finest interface cowboy, and Molly, a street-smart samurai, venture deep into cyberspace only to discover that they have become pawns in a…
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The fact that nominal prices and wages tend to rise more rapidly at the peak of the business cycle than they do in the trough has been well recognized from the time when the cycle was first perceived as a distinct phenomenon. The inference that…
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From birth to adulthood, the human brain expands by a factor of 3.3, compared with 2.5 in chimpanzees [DeSilva J and Lesnik J (2006) Chimpanzee neonatal brain size: Implications for brain growth in Homo erectus. J Hum Evol 51: 207–212]. How the…
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This overview of the National Science Board's Science and Engineering Indicators 2012 highlights some major developments in international and U.S. science and technology (S&T). It is not intended to be comprehensive; the reader will find more…
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The Age of Death ended countless millennia ago. No longer burdened by limited lifespans, the immortal humans who populate inhabited space now have the luxury to travel vast distances effortlessly and to tinker with the intricate mechanics of…
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The Chinese Room argument, devised by John Searle, is an argument against the possibility of true artificial intelligence. The argument centers on a thought experiment in which someone who knows only English sits alone in a room following English…
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In this post I describe some well-known inefficiencies and limitations of evolutions. I say "evolutions", plural, because fox evolution works at cross-purposes to rabbit evolution, and neither can talk to snake evolution to learn how to build…
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The future is not the realization of our hopes and dreams, a warning to mend our ways, an adventure to inspire us, nor a romance to touch our hearts. The future is just another place in spacetime. Its residents, like us, find their world mundane and…
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Death in the Promised Land' explores the potential dangers of becoming too closely involved in virtual reality. Parts of the story were later reworked into the novel Tea from an Empty Cup (1988), which had a sequel in Dervish is Digital (2001), both…