Tag Archives: Google

Where race and gender overrode everything

11 Sunday May 2025

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Work

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A while ago I identified what I considered the Social Justice movement‘s first tenet: that the most urgent issue facing the world in the 21st century is inequalities of race and gender (including sexual orientation and gender identity). I stand by that description. I think that that view is implicit in Ibram X. Kendi’s most widely quoted idea: that neutrality is a mask for racism, that anyone who isn’t actively antiracist is racist. Because that idea directly implies that one must prioritize racism over other issues, that neutrality might be acceptable on other issues but not on this one.

There’s plenty more evidence that a wide swath of influential people treated race and gender as the most urgent issues of all. Let’s turn first to National Public Radio (NPR), the US’s major public audio broadcaster – its audio equivalent to the BBC or CBC. An exposé of NPR delivered by its veteran ex-editor Uri Berliner makes it clear: CEO John Lansing

declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

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How can we return to techno-optimism?

30 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by in Economics, Politics

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The technological innovations of the last fifteen years, from advertising enshittifcation to AI cheating, have largely been a disaster. We are sadly at the point where, as Ted Gioia says, “most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.” I dare say that if we could revert all digital technology to where it was in 2009 – before the invention of the retweet – we’d all be better off.

I am not a hard techno-pessimist; I don’t think I could be. I love technology too much. I remember eras where technology was making our lives better; that was most of my life, the ’80s, the ’90s, and especially the ’00s. There’s no iron law that says technology has to make things worse, things have to enshittify. It’s just that they are currently doing so, have been doing so for over a decade. The question is how we change things back – not reverting back to old technology, but reverting back to a state where new technology serves rather than opposes human interests, where it is progress and not regress.

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Beyond the Turing test

04 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by in Compassion, Consciousness, Emotion, Foundations of Ethics, Friends, Honesty, Human Nature, Metaphysics, Morality, Psychology

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Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now, and for good reason. When ChatGPT first made the news this December, I tested it by feeding it the kind of prompt I might give for a short comparison essay assignment in my Indian philosophy class. I looked at the result, and I thought: “this is a B-. Maybe a B.” It certainly wasn’t a good paper, it was mediocre – but no more mediocre than the passing papers submitted by lower-performing students at élite universities. So at Boston University my colleagues and I held a sold-out conference to think about how assignments and their marking will need to change in an era where students have access to such tools.

As people spoke at the conference, my mind drifted to larger questions beyond pedagogy. One professor in the audience noted she’d used ChatGPT herself enough that when it was down for a couple days she typed in “ChatGPT, I missed you”, and it had a ready response (“I don’t have emotions, but thank you.”) In response a presenter noted a different AI tool called Replika, which simulates a romantic partner – and looks to be quite popular. Replika’s site bills itself as “the AI companion who cares”, and “the first AI with empathy”. All this indicates to me that while larger philosophical questions about AI have been asked for a long time, in the 2020s they are no longer hypothetical.

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Whither blogging?

27 Sunday Feb 2022

Posted by in Blog Admin, Politics

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At the beginning of Love of All Wisdom’s tenth-anniversary post, I wrote: “In the span of the history of philosophy, ten years is the blink of an eye. In the span of the blogosphere, however, ten years is an eternity.” Immediately after the post went up, a thought occurred to me, which would probably have made that point even more effectively. Namely: does anyone even say “blogosphere” anymore?

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Don’t give a paper

01 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Aesthetics, Metaphilosophy, Reading and Recitation, South Asia

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Studies of Indian philosophy often rightly call attention to the varied genres in which they are composed: the sparse pith of the Yoga Sūtras, Śaṅkara’s expositing his own views as commentary on someone else’s, the Milindapañhā’s dialogue evocative of Plato’s Socrates. Such differences call to mind Martha Nussbaum’s famous claim in Love’s Knowledge that “Style itself makes its claims, expresses its own sense of what matters.”

As is far too often the case, though, the gaze that modern Western academics apply to distant places and times is one they steadfastly avoid turning on themselves. We are far too reluctant to think about differences of genre in our own composition.

Most notably: the venues of scholarly productivity come in at least two completely different genres. There is the written article or book, subjected to peer review and editorship, with its hypertextual infrastructure of footnotes and its bibliography. And there is the oral presentation, at a conference or workshop, of a work-in-progress with that citation infrastructure omitted, delivered to a room at a single time and place who can then begin a Socratic and dialogical back-and-forth.

So why do we insist on acting as if these two venues are the same? Continue reading →

Understanding understanding

02 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in Daoism, Epistemology, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Language

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I have recently begun the exciting opportunity to teach a course in Indian philosophy in Boston University’s philosophy department. Thinking about and designing the course, I had the great opportunity to work with the small but excellent staff of BU’s Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching. They asked me: what’s your objective for the course? More specifically, what will your students be able to do when the course is done? They recommended that I pay particular attention to the verbs identifying these student abilities.

Such a question is easier to answer in skill-oriented courses – courses in Java programming or academic writing. There, the point of the course is all about something that students will be able to do. In a humanistic course, objectives are different, and often not easily specified. It’s not just that humanistic learning may have as much to do with personal transformation as with any acquired ability. It’s that even the abilities acquired are themselves difficult to define. In particular: one of the first verbs to come out of my mouth in response was “understand”. And one of the staff soon said in response, “we’d like to encourage you to avoid the U-word.” Continue reading →