Helping Nature
By Timdwilliamson. Creative Commons. On a morning run I came across a sign in the park informing me that the city was “helping nature by controlling invasive plants.” This help …
Ethics in the Age of AI
A free, online summer programme open to all. This 9-week programme, part of the UOI’s Bitesize Ethics series, provides a short introduction to ethical issues directly related to Artificial Intelligence, …
Selina Guter on the Perception of Beauty — The Brains Blog
Humans see faces as beautiful: The role of superadditive mechanisms in determining visual content. Selina Guter, MIT Our conscious visual experience presents us with various features of objects: among others, …
2020 Pacific Division Dewey Lecture: The Road Taken
Below is the audio recording of Janet Levin’s John Dewey Lecture, “The Road Taken,” given at the 2020 Pacific Division Meeting. The full text is available on the APA website …
Loki Variants & Metaphysics Revisited
By https://www.marvel.com/articles/movies/sdcc-2019-all-of-the-marvel-studios-news-coming-out-of-hall-h-at-san-diego-comic-con, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62990603 If you have yet to see the first episode of season one of Disney’s Loki series, this essay contains spoilers. This episode presents some of …
Practically Prompted: Introducing an experiment in LLM-generated blog posts
This post introduces a trial blog series called “Practically Prompted” – an experiment in using large language models (LLMs) to write a Practical Ethics blog-style post, with some light human …
Juan Murillo Vargas on the Question-Sensitivity of Cognition — The Brains Blog
Why is Cognition Question-Sensitive? Juan Murillo Vargas (MIT) Author’s note: I no longer believe most of the paper’s claims. But I find the question interesting and worth thinking about, even …
The Democratic Perils of Hidden Moderation
Now that we hold a significant part of our discussions on social media platforms, worries and complaints about “shadowbanning”—the act of moderating online speech without notifying its author—have emerged in …
CAN YOU BE A GOOD BILLIONAIRE?
Billionaires are often lauded in America, but some condemn them as evil simply for being billionaires. This raises the moral issue of whether a person can be morally good and …
Practically Prompted #1: Should We Screen the Womb? Ethical Questions Raised by the New Miscarriage-Risk Test
This is the first in a trial blog series called “Practically Prompted” – an experiment in using large language models to independently select a recent, ethically rich news story and …