We don't even know who's in the Academy.
Every country now has its own domestic political debate about how to respond to climate change. This is where the action is.
[This approach] displays the characteristic philosophical lust to vanquish the skeptic by arguing him out of his skepticism, without appeal to moral and political considerations or to the facts of everyday life. [. . . ] But more often than not, if you give the skeptic everything he wants, then he will be successful in repulsing your attacks and terrorizing your position.
I grew up as an only child of two parents who had dropped out of high school. They had enormous respect for education and encouraged me as a child when I had strong interests in both math and science, but we really didn't have much by way of educational role modeling in our family.
The density of human population combined with the development of powerful and largely unconstrained technology has given us the problems of the anthropocene and the serious possibility of self-caused extinction.
Aristotle thought that humans are rational animals and Hobbes thought that we act on the basis of rational self-interest. If only! It's not that we never do these things, it's that they are hardly constituative of who and what we are.
The Enlightenment is not a nightmare, nor is it something that comes easily to us. It is an aspiration - and a good one!
How many times have you been out for a beer or dinner and people are coming up with business ideas? Everybody wants to think they've got that great business idea.
No, I'm not (disappointed). There's no reason to be because I'm on an incredible run. You always expect a loss once in a while. So when it happens, why be disappointed if I win over 90% of my matches.
Let's think beyond the normal stuff and have an environment where that sort of thinking is encouraged and rewarded and where it's okay to fail as well. Because when you try new things, you try this idea, that idea. . . well a large number of them are not gonna work, and that has to be okay. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you're not gonna get people coming up with ideas.
Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.