Announcing my first book, with my style of longform narrative journalism and philosophy. It's about the clash between governing by top-down rules versus discretionary decision-making, in law, in sports, in the household. Pre-order now. @wwnorton wwnorton.com/books/fewer-rul…

If there ever were piece about effective altruist parents who put their kids in school in the projects so they could donate private school tuition dollars to AI-risk mitigation research, the internet would spontaneously combusts into a white hot ball of rage.

My niche take of the day is that pocket screw jigs ruined craftsmanship in home carpentry. I’m surprised the New Yorker turned down this pitch, as it affects so many people.

Gotta say I’m in my late 40s and pretty good at staying on top of the news, but I don’t remember any midterm conventions.

Philosophers doing work.

That's all right, no one ever notices the asian dude in the background anyways.

Oracle, Workday, and PeopleSoft are the secret robber barons of the new guilded age, but we won’t have railroads and skyscrapers to show for it in a hundred years. In fact, we’ll have nothing as their garbage dissolves into cyberspace.

An opinion I wrote for the Boston Globe is out. It cites eight and nine figure software purchases as part of administrative bloat 2.0 in higher education. Free version. globecollegetown.substack.co…

We (@ghadfield @nickacaputo and soon @zhitzig ) are building an initiative at @JHUBloombergCtr to help society navigate the transition to powerful AI. We've all been talking about this for a while so I'll spare you the long vision statement. Right now we're looking for someone to help us build our Governing the AI Transition initiative: a talented ops person who wants to help ensure that some of the best research on successful post-AGI futures (and how to get there safely) is done in the public interest. The new GAIT director role will have a lot of autonomy, a huge upper bound in terms of impact, and the chance to work alongside Gillian and me (we'll be faculty co-directors). I know this kind of role is truly the hardest to fill in AI safety/alignment/governance at the moment. We think being part of an AGI-pilled school of government and policy in the heart of DC is a unique opportunity. Our key values are achieving real, measurable, positive impact through rigour, independence, intellectual (and other forms of!) autonomy, a commitment to the core principles of liberal democracy (and pluralism with respect to factions within it), and a determination to build the kind of intellectual infrastructure AGI governance needs, and that we are uniquely placed to create. On top of all that, we're going to be training the next cohort of AGI governance talent, so that there are more AGI-ready researchers and generalists out there to hire! Here's the ad. N.b. other roles (including faculty and research scientists) will be advertised soon! hiring.jhu.edu/careers/job/1…

It's the first week of classes here at NYU! Some scattered lukewarm takes on AI and higher ed right now (some philosophy-specific): UG Assessment: all assessment that is not intended to test ability to use AI should now be in person, whether that's a written test or an oral exam. If you can't staff an oral exam, and you don't want to test AI use, use a written exam. Anything else is a disservice to the students who don't cheat. I know, it's annoying! We had a different practice before. But that ship has sailed. UG Applications: this seems like a disaster, and I don't know what to say. High schools haven't generally caught up to the need for all in-class assessment and assessment was anyway a mess there. We now also can't trust application materials. It's not a popular view, but in person standardized tests look like they're one of the few things that can carry signal (without relying on a more biased proxy like "we know this school and these teachers"). Journal reviewing: I expect journal submissions to grow *a lot* in the near future. We are already over capacity for referees. We need to develop new ideas here, probably it involves AI desk-rejections. This is harder in our field than in say math where you can at least check correctness as a proxy. But we need something; the system won't be able to tolerate a lot more submissions. Open access/working papers. I'm in an unusual and obviously somewhat biased position, but I would like AI companies to train on my scholarly work. It's how my work will reach other scholars and it's how it will impact the ideas of the future. Others may feel differently. Your thinking on this should heavily impact what journals you submit to. Citation / influence. Related to the above, many fields use google scholar as a proxy for impact in the field. I expect cite counts to go up a lot (even more than they did already) as AI models make it easier to "cite everyone" by automating bibliographic entry. It wasn't clear before that cite count was a great proxy for influence; this will become even less clear going forward. I don't have a positive solution but I think we need new ideas. Recommendation letters/promotion letters. Summaries of work no longer carry the signal of effort they once did. We should not expect that everyone will "just be honest" with their letters. Everyone is too busy. This system already needed rethinking, even more so now. Importance of scholarly community and virtues. Now more than ever we should value the virtues of scholarship and scholarly community. Rigor and seriousness about intellectual work are going to be threatened even more than they were before as it becomes easier to produce a large volume of reasonable-looking work. In my opinion, one of the most important things we can share with our students is modeling for them what it looks like to be conscientious about details even when no one else will check, and what it looks like to care about the truth and open inquiry rather than reputation. The university is distinctively well-positioned to foster these ideals, and they will still be of great value to our student in many of the wildly different futures they may live through.

We should welcome and encourage identifiable LLM writing ticks, as irritating as they are, because they make it easier to identify AI writing.

I understand thinking there aren’t enough conservative-coded English courses, like literature of war or Confederate Writers, even insufficient representation of conservative literary theory, like Arnold or New Critics. I don’t understand ridiculing the other kinds of courses.

I’m just imagining what it’s like to be journeymen mixed doubles players making $100,000 a year hoping to make it $120,000, and seeing Serena Williams and Carlos Alcaraz across the net from you in Round 1.

What if, a philosophy journal will publish your AI-written article, but only in Gibberlink?

I am currently watching both Suits and Reacher. Am I basic?

Being on social media is like: Opens app App: “I’m so over Jamie Lee Curtis.” Me: Googles “Jamie Lee Curtis” Google: Nothing but reports of people on social media hating Jamie Lee Curtis. Me: I guess we’re over Jamie Lee Curtis?

Maybe basing hiring policy and decisions in academia on the basis of social media trends was part of the problem and also not part of the solution.

A feature of SLACs circa 2020 is, after a decade of austerity, admin opened up hiring after George Floyd, but only to address that cultural moment. Understaffed departments had to tailor to what admin wanted. Candidates had to be EVERYTHING to be contenders. @Tyler_A_Harper

I spoked to Heather Bigley of BYU Radio about the 1960 film Spartacus, and concluded that the message of the film is that the vicious are incapable of understanding the virtuous. The motivations of the latter are alien to the former. open.spotify.com/episode/6V0…