The main paper I've been working on for the last 3 years is out: "Value Capture"! It's about the harms of taking on external metrics and rankings as your own core values.

The argument: you're outsourcing your values. It's fast, but then your values won't be tailored to you.🧵: When you internalize a metric, you're taking a pre-fabricated value into your heart, letting it set your cares.

Like any other outsourcing, it's efficient. But that value isn't responsive or tailored to you. It's standardized.

And values are the worst thing to standardize.

New paper out: "Hostile Epistemology"!

The basic idea: we seem so willing to attribute the misinformation crisis and the "post-truth" world to bad people being stupid and lazy. An alternate explanation: it's the systematic exploitation of our cognitive vulnerabilities.🧵: Lots of people believe dumb stuff. One standard take is that it's always the believer's fault. In popular culture, this takes the form of "those people over there are lazy, cowardly, and stupid." In philosophy, the sophisticated way to put this is it's "intellectual vice".

Just read a wildly interesting article is a wildly interesting epic dive into "Kirk Drift": the "mass hallucination" that the Kirk of the original Star Trek series is a reckless, womanizing hothead. Core question of the article: why has cultural memory has retroactively rewritten a pretty obviously thoughtful and progressive hero into a cartoon of toxic masculinity?

One of my absolute favorite classes to teach: Porter on standardized time.

So: before modern clocks, we often kept *diurnal time*. Like: there are 24 hours in the day. 6 AM = sunrise, 6 PM = sunset. This is a completely different way of keeping time.

🧵: Our modern time is a *standardized time*. Every hour is the same length. Our clocks are keyed to some worldwide standard, so the hour-changeover moment occurs the same everywhere. Call this “clock time.”

There's this quality I've been thinking about, call it "failure clarity". My fave example is climbing knots. The figure-eight not isn't the strongest possible knot, *but it's easy to see if you screwed it up*. When the process fails, the failure isn't hidden.

Thread: First, there's a very easy process to check the knot. Second, the knot has this natural neatness and aesthetic feel. Once you're used to it, a badly tied knot just instantly feels off.

Just had my mind fully blown by an aesthetics talk on medieval Indian aesthetics by Cat Prueitt, about how cognition makes us free. Also about the deep difference between Western and South Asian ideas here.

Ok, explaining this might take a while. Here goes: First: the panel is about Abhinava, major figure in medieval Indian philosophy and aesthetics

Have you ever read a book so interesting you thought you might die? It’s about how the dominant conception of ruled right now is *algorithmic* - that is, rules as explicit and clear and total, to be followed mechanically. And it’s about incredibly new this conception is.

OK, tried out a new unit in my intro to philosophy class, and it is my new favorite unit: "Are Grades Bullshit?"

I have never seen intro students more intensely engaged, more edge-of-their-seat, and more mind-blown.

Thread: The "covering frame" for this chunk of the course is unearthing the moral content of colloquial language. It's kind of a cheap trick: the students think it's going to be fluffy and chill. Hey, we're going to do the philosophy of assholes and bullshit!

The road-service lady who came to fix my broken car battery had long bright green fingernails, then put on blue latex gloves, and the green fingernails slowly one-by-one busted through the latex , and it felt like some kind of magical blue-green handed fairy was magicking my car. I called a random battery-replacement service for my completely drained, non-jump-startable battery. She showed up in a battered white Corolla, blasting Christian rap at top volume, threw her cigarette on the street, and proceeded to magick the shit out of my car.

OK, just had a peak teaching experience teaching Tufte's classic mega-rant, "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint", in my Tech & Design Ethics class. It went SO GOOD and I kinda want to teach it in my intro ethics class now. And I get it way more deeply?

Thread/story: First: if you don't know, Edward Tufte is this completely brilliant thinker about the graphical display of information. Most of you probs know him. If you don't, his stuff is *necessary* - especially his second book, Envisioning Information.

For people heartbroken about the end of The Expanse , let me highly recommend two related series with deeply similar satisfactions. They are by Daniel Abraham, who happens to be half of the writing team behind the Expanse novels. So: The Expanse is credited to James Corey, which is a pseudonym for Abraham and Ty Franck. Franck hasn't written much else, but Abraham has written tons of stuff, much of which shares the same political depth and thrills as the Expanse.

OK, so I was curious, and I played Wordle. And I have a theory about why it's so successful. The design is ingenious in a very particular way

This is a philosopher of games' theory of Wordle. A thread: The first experience a lot of people have of Wordle is: "wait, you just *guess*? But you quickly figure out you can construct your guesses to search the space of letter-possibility, and you probably want to do that thinking about letter-frequency.

So, the American Philosophy Association awarded the 2021 Book Prize to my book, GAMES: AGENCY AS ART. I am: shocked, elated, bemused, joyous, and more than a little bewildered.

I think I get to make, like, a little acceptance speech or something? So here it is: This book was the center of my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life for like 7 years. I also spent the whole time pretty sure that, like, nobody would read it except for maybe half-a-dozen other weirdos like me who were already writing about the philosophy of games.

My new piece out in The Raven!

It's about how Twitter calls for intimate speech and then crushes that intimacy. About how Twitter rewards us for gambling on shared context - and then gives us the perfect tool to destroy that context.

Thread:

ravenmagazine.org/magazine/twitt… The whole inspiration of the piece is Ted Cohen's philosophy of jokes. Cohen says: all jokes depend on some shared background knowledge. And that shared background needs to emerge as a surprise. You totally ruin the joke if you warn your audience about what they need to know.

The funniest argument I have ever read is Augustine's theory of sexual shame in City of God. It somehow starts with a totally reasonable question ("Why is our nudity shameful?") and ends up someplace beyond gonzo... about the agility of our genitalia in Paradise. Thread: So here's Augustine's question: why is our nudity supposed to be shameful?

It can't be because our bodies are shameful, because they're made in God's image.
It can't be because sex is bad, because God told us to reproduce.

My new paper, "Transparency is Surveillance," is now out in PPR. It's about how transparency and trust are in profound tension. About how transparency weeds out corruption and bias AND undermines expertise and sensitivity, all in one fell swoop.

Thread:

philpapers.org/rec/NGUTIS The main thought of the whole paper: the realm of the intuitive and inchoate is where corruption and bias live. But it's also where expertise, sensitivity, and subtlety live. And transparency *gets rid of it all* in one fell swoop.

"The Seductions of Clarity" is now officially out!

It's about how to fake clarity - how to manipulate the *feeling* of understanding to manipulate beliefs. With two core case studies: conspiracy theories and bureaucratic language.

Thread:
cambridge.org/core/journals/… The main idea: we are cognitively limited beings, that need to guesstimate what's worth investigating, and what's not. We need a *heuristic for terminating thought*. Because we don't have the time to investigate everything.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got, delivered by a wise person while I was fuming over a parking ticket:

"3% of your income is for mistakes. If it's too much over, you're too sloppy. If it's too much under, you're sweating the smalls stuff too much." The exact number should probably be varied depending on life circumstances, etc. But the idea that one can make *too few* mistakes and that this is a sign of wasted energy on diminishing returns was... profoundly transformative, and I've ended up applying it everywhere.

So I've been stuck on the camera policy for my Zoom classes. I totally get the worries about student privacy and invasiveness. But I also know that my teaching gets radically worse when I'm facing mostly all black squares. So this time, I tried complete honesty.

Report-thread: My last term of Zoom/COVID teaching, I was totally convinced by the arguments that demanding cameras on was an invasion of privacy, that looking into a student's home life was a totally different matter from having them show up into your class.

New paper forthcoming: "The Seductions of Clarity"! The paper is about the seductive *feeling* of clarity, and how that feeling might be faked - and how our cognitive vulnerabilities might be manipulated.

Thread-summary:

philpapers.org/rec/NGUTSO-2 It's about the *sense* of understanding - not actual, genuine understanding, but the *feeling* associated with understanding. I propose: we use this sense of clarity as a thought-terminating heuristic.

If you're looking for some weird aesthetic exploration to fight off the COVID boredom blues, can I recommend: avant-garde perfume. No, really. First:

1. Not all perfume is cloying mall crap. There's world of indie, experimental weird-ass perfume.
2. It's cheap.

Thread: First: there is this whole world of weird, fascinating, unexpected perfume. Perfume that smells like burning leaves on an autumn afternoon. That smells like a dairy farm. That smells like a distant Tuscan town in winter. Like the coming snow. Abstract scents.