Lessons from the Ongoing Disaster (for the Next One)
Presumably, you are aware that we’re in the middle of a disaster. That’s unpleasant – to say the least – but it’s also quite instructive. There is much we can…
Presumably, you are aware that we’re in the middle of a disaster. That’s unpleasant – to say the least – but it’s also quite instructive. There is much we can…
Suddenly everyone seems to have opinions about viruses and how to deal with them. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you may already know my opinion about…
[Updates and corrections below original post.] In The 2020s and Beyond I mentioned that “black swans” (unpredictable, extreme events) can seriously mess up any prediction. In that article I sketched…
(This is part 7 in the No Time for Utopia series.) The main guiding principle of this series is a rejection of “ideal theory”, that is, of idealizations and unwarranted…
(This is part 3 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In On the Fragility of Civilization, I argued that due to the slowly compounding effects of an increasing number…
(This is part 2 in the No Time for Utopia series.) Doom has always been a major attraction for some, perhaps even many people. There are whole subgenres of extreme…
In 2009 Rolling Stone published an article by Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs. Taibbi writes: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face…
In 1911 the now almost forgotten German philosopher Hans Vaihinger published Die Philosophie des Als Ob (The Philosophy of ‘As if’) in which he argued for something approaching global fictionalism.…
(This is part 5 in the “Crisis and Inertia” series.) In the first episode in this series I argued that societies and other social “objects” (cultures, beliefs, institutions, ideas, ideologies,…