Category: Philosophy

Douglas Hofstadter sketched out a theory of super rationality in a couple of his Metamagical Themas columns in Scientific American in the mid-80s (he later collected his columns into a very interesting book). It was an attempt to solve the prisoner’s dilemma. The basic idea was that you should act as though everybody else is…

There is nothing here about linkers! OK, there is one thing: at some point, I hope soon, I will pull the linker postings together into an essay posted with my other essays (which I wrote before starting this blog). I’ll mention it here when I do that. Now back to my previously scheduled blog, which…

How have we escaped the Malthusian trap, and is our escape only temporary? Malthus argued that human population was naturally at the limit of what resources could support. To put it another way, the very poor were always on the edge of starvation. Any increase in resources would only bring temporary respite: the population would…

The New York Times magazine last Sunday had an article on social robots: work, mostly at M.I.T., on robots which interact with humans. They interact in very very simple ways. But since we naturally impute agency to almost anything possible–e.g., the weather–it doesn’t take much for us humans to be convinced that there is really…

Will Mccarthy, in his amusing book The Collapsium, suggested that people are happier with a king or queen. I think there is something to that. A king gives tangible expression to people’s aspirations. A king is a representative of the country as a whole. A king is somebody who you can never be, but you…