Tag: epistemology
4 posts tagged "epistemology".
The branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge — what it is, how we acquire it, and how we tell good beliefs from bad ones. The blog leans on the fallibilist tradition of Karl Popper, who argued that knowledge grows not by accumulating certainties but by bold conjectures exposed to relentless criticism, and on David Deutsch, who extends this into a theory of open-ended explanatory progress. In practice it shades into rationality: the everyday craft of updating beliefs, weighing evidence, and noticing one's own errors. Recurring themes include the limits of forecasting, the value of good predictions, and treating strong opinions as hypotheses to be tested rather than possessions to be defended.
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Cormac McCarthy's Metaphysical Horror Show
In this last-ditch diptych, your crusty 89-year-old literary grandaddy completely changes tack, holding forth on the biggest philosophical and scientific questions of our age.
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Highlights From the Comments on AI Doom
My coming-out post on why I'm no longer an AI doomer seems to have struck a nerve.
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Weaponised Autism as the Font of Human Creativity
What makes humans special? How is it that we are able to unleash the energy of the atom, while our hominid ancestors gather dust in the natural history museum?
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Book Review: The Beginning of Infinity
Pound-for-pound The Beginning of Infinity has to be the densest collection of batshit-crazy ideas I've ever come across.
