Philosopher, UChicago New book: is.gd/7CVIi6 Point is.gd/WHyOeh NYT is.gd/UonlHb podcast mindsalmostmeeting.com
Profile pic by Zoë van Dijk
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11yo: I need a bandaid for my cut
me: but why? it’s not bleeding
11yo: to make it stop hurting
me: the bandaid won’t do that
11yo: yes it will, because of the placebo effect
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8yo has become obsessed with something he calls “countryballs”; he says “these people are members of our family now,” and refuses to explain further.
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As academia became more competitive, high-achiever types flocked to it & outperformed the weirdos who used to populate it; the result is widespread unhappiness, bc academia is more suited to ppl who obsess over Aristotle's theory of sleep than ppl who want to change the world.
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LLMs made me realize that my whole life, I had been asking A LOT fewer questions than I wanted to be asking.
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My trip to NZ has included:
an emergency dental visit ($45)
a course of antibiotics ($12)
a visit to the ER ($0)
another course of antibiotics ($9)
(prices in USD)
In the US this would add up to one (1) million dollars
I'd like to PUBLICLY THANK the New Zealand healthcare system
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If we were designed to think solo, monologue would be easier than dialogue.
Dialogue involves INCREDIBLY complex acts of prediction, coordination, task-switching and mind-reading--yet we find it MUCH easier than monologue.
Why? Maybe thinking is a bicycle built for 2.
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Husband is sad that he broke a nice glass
me: it was very fragile we were going to break it eventually
12yo: This is like that part in the Iliad where Zeus is upset about Sarpedon dying and Hera says "you knew it was going to happen eventually, mortals are fated to die."
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9yo: mama you DIDN'T throw out the halloween candy?!---
[background: we have a halloween tradition where after the kids go to bed, I throw all their candy in the garbage. The next morning, they are filled with rage.]
---thank you SO much!!! [hugs & kisses]
Reader, I forgot.
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ppl who are morally outraged on behalf of my children: don't come crying to me when your children write boring memoirs called My Parents Were Always Nice
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A thread on student-faculty romances.
I want to explain something, for the sake of the profession of philosophy, the field of academia, and the health of workplace gender relations more broadly:
Conflating potential abuses of power with actual abuses of power benefits no one.
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“I don’t want to go to grad school or become a professional philosopher, but I want more philosophy in my life. How can I get this?”
This is the question I hear most. Please help me come up with a GREAT answer to it. Leave your thoughts in the replies so I can steal them.
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I wrote about the traveler's delusions, drawing on the insights of Fernando Pessoa, Walker Percy, & others; & I offer my own solution to the puzzle of why travel is endowed with mystical transformative powers, even by those it evidently fails to transform.
newyorker.com/culture/the-we…
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First day of school: 9yo insisting that I give him NOTHING in his lunch but meat, “not in a sandwich!”—(roast beef leftover from dinner) because it will “make the right impression”
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If you misinterpreted Plato's cave allegory as preaching escape from the cave as an end in itself, and failed to understand that exiting the cave is merely the first & easiest step towards attaining the knowledge that lies outside it, you'd make movies like the Matrix movies.
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Confession: when people single out "the acting" as the selling point of a movie, or debate who should win best actor, or make lists of top actors...
...I have no idea what they're talking about.
I have always been 100% convinced by every actor in every movie, including extras.
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Sometimes I’m tempted to make up Presocratic philosophers, like Anaxarpedon, who thought everything was skin, or Xenodotus, who posited as elemental forces the indoors and the outdoors, or Gorgibiades who thought that everything is always changing except rocks.
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Taylor Swift has written about 200 love songs. In preparation for my first Taylor Swift concert, which will be happening in 15 days 22 hours and 2 minutes, I made a taxonomy of them. Sharing it here to save others the work.
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People only strike you as “smart” insofar as they happen to have invested in the same forms of cognitive fluency as you.
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Two deep insights from Dostoevsky's Idiot (Part IV):
first: that being ordinary is painful
second: that intelligence doesn't amount to extraordinariness--typically, being smart just makes a person more sharply aware of their ordinariness
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me: do you want to stop and get cookies?
16yo: yes [pause] I just realized how I’m going to get cookies when I’m a grownup.
me: how?
16yo: by asking my kids, do you want cookies? That’s how grownups get cookies.
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9yo: did you know “purple” isn’t the name of any color?
me: really?
9yo: the right way to say it is “violet”; “purple” is just a word Crayola made up
me: that’s not true; “purple” comes from the Latin “purpura”
9yo: man, I should never trust my friends
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9yo: can you do this for me? it’s hard
me: doing hard things improves your moral character
9yo: then don’t you want to do it?
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If I were a historian I’d be a contrarian historian arguing things like, “actually Rome *was* built in a day,” and I’d write a bestselling book called The Day They Built Rome.
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Rachel Aviv wrote this profile of me & I am struck and honored by how direct it is--before reading how it turned out, I wondered, "what will her angle on me be?" and I don't see any angle, she is just trying to present me as straightforwardly as possible.
newyorker.com/magazine/2023/…
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Gave a new paper at a conference and the Q&A afterwards went badly: I struggled to answer simple audience questions. I thought, "I must be tired or sthg", but in the weeks that followed I realized: the questioners had found a big flaw in my argument. I wasn't tired, I was wrong.
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[9yo and I are arguing]
9yo: uh oh
me: what?
9yo: I just came up with an argument in my head that makes you right
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12yo: what prevents people from eating an entire tub of cookie dough ice cream the first night they get to college?
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8yo: this is the perfect cherry
his grandpa: you almost don't want to eat it
8yo, confused: this is the cherry you DO want to eat
grandpa: but its so perfect
8yo, explaining patiently: the whole point of cherries is to eat them
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Husband and I are going out to dinner.
In view of the fact that I can be a *tad* domineering of conversation I made him a menu he can choose from.
I am so nice!
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So let me say what should've been obvious to all:
This is what a GOOD case looks like.
This is what it looks like when a situation that COULD lead to an abuse of power DOESN'T lead to an abuse of power.
Being open & honest & following rules can work out well for everyone: yay!
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I wrote about the secrets you force me to keep. nytimes.com/2020/11/30/opini…
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I find academic writing often exhibits one or two levels of complexity above what's necessary for making the point. These flourishes are, I believe, an effect of credentializing: the project of proving one's intelligence to a referee is not same as that of making one's argument.
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The people I know who are the freest thinkers are not aware of themselves as such. They can't tell when they are "going against the tide," and this liberates them all the more.
Like the virtue of humility, freedom of thought doesn't survive introspective awareness of itself.
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When I was speaking at UC Santa Cruz I rented a car to get around, but it was in husband's name/credit card (bc I don't drive); in order to reimburse me the University requested a letter from him; this is what he produced
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husband: Dinosaurs are such a disappointment. They got to be around for MILLIONS of years and achieved basically nothing, not a single pyramid even.
9yo: Maybe they figured out how to telepathically talk to each other and wasted all their time doing philosophy.
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One hallmark of philosophers is that we use the word “argument” to refer to an object, whereas most people use it to refer to an event.
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me: [calling husband for 5th time today to discuss the paradox of why you aren’t allowed to walk up to strangers on the street & ask them philosophical questions]
husband, breaking down: THIS IS NOT A PARADOX. YOU ARE LITERALLY THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD WHO WANTS TO DO THIS.
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If @slatestarcodex starts a new blog he should call it "Extranslocated" which is a better anagram than "Slate Star Codex" bc it uses all & only the letters in "Scott Alexander" and it correctly describes the condition of having once been forced to move from one place to another.
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[overheard from another room]
7yo: is it better to be honest or nice?
12yo: That’s a very deep question. I have to think about it. What do you think?
7yo: I’d rather people be honest to me, but I’d rather be nice to them.
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Can someone explain to me why it would be bad if Elon bought twitter?
(Polite language please!)
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me: do you guys talk philosophy with your friends?
9yo: no
14yo: never
me: why not?
9yo: they don't know anything about it
me: why don't you teach it to them?
14yo: it would be corrupting the youth
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People routinely confuse their personality for a modus operandi, which is why a lot of online advice amounts to, “I suggest you have my personality instead of yours.”
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The first real Greek class I took was on Plato’s Apology, with the eminent classicist Arthur Adkins. We translated the Apology, line by line. When we stumbled over a construction—many of were beginners—Adkins would gently correct us. That was the whole class, that was it. 1/4
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Has a single tweet ever done more for the humanities than this one?
Kafka’s Metamorphosis is called a major work of literature. Why? If it’s SF it’s bad SF. If, like Animal Farm, it’s an allegory, an allegory of what? Scholarly answers range from pretentious Freudian to far-fetched feminist. I don’t get it. Where are the Emperor’s clothes?
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me: I'm ordering coffees do you want one?
husband: yes could you get me an iced latte?
me: pause. yes.
husband: what do you mean "pause"?
me: I paused to signal my personal opposition to iced coffee.
husband: but you didn't pause, you SAID pause
me: I'm not that good at signaling
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A blanket policy of stigmatizing even rule-abiding behavior induces secrecy and shame, which is precisely what serial abusers rely on.
(By announcing the relationship, a record is created; this is important for allowing the university to intervene when it sees a bad pattern.)
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8yo: I just realized: how do we KNOW anything?
me: What do you mean? Don’t you know that’s Daddy?
8yo: It looks like Daddy and it talks like Daddy but IS it Daddy?
me: good point.
8yo: you can use it in one of your classes.
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8yo: are you a doctor?
me: I have a PhD
8yo: the other kind of doctor
me: I also have a masters in classics
8yo: the kind grandma is
me: what kind is that?
8yo: that heals sicknesses
me: of the mind and soul?
8yo: like a headache
me: a headache bc you don't understand something?
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I wrote a book for you, and you can pre-order it now.
More info: wwnorton.com/books/open-socr…
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The people who like (& are good at) being in charge of stuff and the people who like (& are good at) understanding stuff are not the same people.
This is such a big problem.
What solutions are there?
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I wrote about marital loneliness—in my own life, and onscreen.
(Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and HBO’s remake thereof)
newyorker.com/culture/cultur…
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8yo: it’s important to be good at arguing
me: why?
8yo: so you can tell ppl what to do—sometimes teachers are good at teaching, but bad at arguing, so I can just contradict them
me: & what do they do?
8yo: get annoyed, say “I’m telling yr parents”—but my parents are philosophers
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me: are you guys going to become philosophers?
niece: no
nephew: no
8yo: don't worry mama, I will inherit your power of philosophy
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"According to Mattel, Barbie has had over 200 careers, recently including more STEM fields."
And yet there has NEVER been a Philosopher Barbie.
What's up with that, @Mattel?!
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I try to drum into students' heads that when they
--resend an email bc I fail to respond after a few days
--warn me (repeatedly) abt letter deadlines
it may FEEL to them like pestering, but it's experienced by me as RESCUING, throwing me a lifeline when I'm drowning in my inbox--
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.05 seconds into meeting up with @robinhanson
Robin: I have a three step conversation plan, each one leads to the next.
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Just to clarify, for those who did not make it past the headline (though even that was a question...?), I argued *against* canceling Aristotle.
The NYT suggests cancelling Aristotle. This is retrospective bigotteering; it implies moral values DO NOT evolve.
People need to be judged with respect to the morals OF THEIR OWN TIME.
(But we can be harsh w/Napoleon who reinstated slavery.)
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we are discussing, "who is the greatest human?"
8yo: it's between Jeff Bezos, who has the most money, and Aristotle, who had the most ideas.
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I wrote about infidelity, lust and jealousy.
thepointmag.com/examined-lif…
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Someone emailed asking me for a reading list on the meaning of life for an informal discussion group among friends, here were my suggestions in case others are interested
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I wrote about whether or not we should cancel Aristotle.
nytimes.com/2020/07/21/opini…
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Was Freud right? I'm not sure it matters. He has so thoroughly colonized our modes of thinking about one another, and about ourselves, that at this point you have to read him in order to understand what *you* think. 1/2
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husband: I have a problem
me: ok…
husband: there’s something I want to get, and you’re going to think it’s totally stupid, and I just have to figure out how to make that not be an obstacle to my getting it
me:
husband: it’s not a sword
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Just read a 1967 paper from Ethics that asks the fantastic, original question “Is Life a Game We Are Playing?”
Opens by defining "game", then actually answers the question.
In *five* engagingly written pages.
This is what academic philosophy once was and could again be.
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12yo just got this book for hanukkah and insisted that I tweet this photo: “people need to know.”
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Statistical reasoning is tricky and unintuitive because it relies only on logic; causal reasoning comes much more naturally, because it brings in metaphysics. The absence of metaphysics perplexes us.
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Yesterday I gave a talk on Socrates to the phil dept at U Madison.
Tech problem w/projector led to calling IT specialist, who said he'd stay a few mins into talk to make sure all was ok.
He stayed for whole talk + Q&A (>2 hrs) & emailed me objections afterwards!
#publicphilosophy
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Plato hack: write the names of the dialogues onto the corresponding section of the fore edge of your Cooper Collected Plato volume for ease of access!
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Someone just stopped me on the street and asked to take a picture of my outfit (a first for me!), so I figured I should share with the rest of you…
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Male students ask for grade changes more frequently than female students, and the result is a grade boost for men.
insidehighered.com/news/2020…
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I just discovered the St. Petersburg paradox so I'm REALLY excited for my next conversation with a rationalist.
rationalist: hi
me: wanna play a game?
plato.stanford.edu/entries/p…
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I wrote about the ethics of breakup harpers.org/archive/2021/07/…
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"Since she’s a literal philosophy professor, Callard had a mini-lecture prepared about the response to her parenting, and we’ve decided to include the whole thing because why not."
We got on Buzzfeed! Team effort!
buzzfeednews.com/article/kel…
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husband: I found this weird picture of you on my ipad
me: that’s from 2018, from the time I dressed as a regular person for Halloween
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