Latest musings, analyses, and general madness

Notes On A Sunny Morning

Cause and effect. — Prod people into desperation by denying and disemboweling everything they ever held dear. When they actually become desperate and begin to act as desperate men do, accuse them of being extremists and assert the need for stern measures to tamp down their irrational outbursts. Voter’s dialectic. — “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Fool me...

Biography Versus Life

Beware the biographer who presumes to imply that he understands his subject’s mind and thought, or can explain to us how his subject’s private life affected his work. Such a biographer, in an act of the worst sort of egalitarian envy, is daring to place himself on the same level as his subject…

Three Reflections On the Daily Life of Higher Souls

Self-refuting bromide.– “Everyone does it.” Even if that were true in principle in some circumstance, it would become false the moment an intelligent person heard it, since he would immediately and instinctively commit himself to being a counterexample. For by definition, “what everyone does” is either a trivial material necessity (and therefore beyond the purview of such a moral declaration) or a mindless...

Reflections On The War

Of war and worms.– I have taught a Russian girl whose serious beau, whom she hoped to marry, was a Ukrainian fighting on the front lines to defend his homeland against Vladimir Putin’s — not “Russia’s,” so let us please put that lie away for good, but Putin’s — brutal and unprovoked assault on her boyfriend’s country. He had already been wounded and...

The AI Deep Dive

In a recent essay, “The Ultimate Labor-Saving Device,” I recounted my response to a student’s questions about artificial intelligence, related to my previous piece, “The Intellectual Welfare State.” A central theme of that earlier discussion was the likely, or perhaps inevitable, retarding effects of increasing AI dependency on human intellectual development. This time, prodded by the same thoughtful student’s subsequent correspondence, we cut...

On Watching Strangers Die

Two days ago, I was sitting down to lunch at a restaurant with a student whose parents had flown to Thailand for a short vacation a few days earlier. Before our food arrived, my wife phoned to ask, pointedly, when our young friend’s parents were due to fly home, and to inform me that a Korean passenger jet traveling to Korea from Thailand...

The Ultimate Labor-Saving Device

The past century of human civilization has increasingly defined itself as the age of the labor-saving device; that is, of endlessly-developing technological advances aimed at reducing human effort and freeing up our time and energy for “more important things.” But what happens when the labor being saved by our technology is specifically the kind of labor that was previously dedicated to those very...

The Intellectual Welfare State

Artificial intelligence is to the realm of learning and knowledge what the welfare state is to the realm of practical motivation and productivity. Reducing the sense of lack, need, and concern in practical life makes people not only less likely to want to work hard, less willing to devote their lives to some kind of meaningful productive activity, but also, at the highest...

December In Korea

Here in the land that calls itself The Republic of Korea, daily life carries on as usual. The end of the fall semester is upon us, with its typical stress-inducing round of exams that prove nothing, resulting in grades that serve no rational purpose, followed by days of bureaucratic hoop-jumping from the instructors as we satisfy the artificial requirements of a worldwide educational...

The Soul, Released

What would it be like to have chosen only the most difficult paths? No safe routes, no comfort zones, no relaxing pastimes, no settling for the familiar, for what is “good enough,” or for “what works.” What would it be like to do, each day, only what seems most compelling, without regard for how it affects one’s daily tasks and practical goals? That...