O’Brien emerged a folk hero. When NBC pressured him to move Tonight back to 12:05 AM to make room for Jay, Conan refused. He didn’t want to “seriously damage” the comedy franchise he had grown up watching with his dad. “The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t the Tonight Show.” (“It’s the Tomorrow Show,” noted David Letterman. “It’s the Next Day Show.”) After negotiating extra severance pay for his staff, Coco walked—with no TV prospects on the horizon. But he was more beloved than ever. Tickets sold out around the country for “The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour.” The audience was on his side, even if the bosses weren’t.

For his role in the brouhaha, Leno was excoriated. “Just the mere mention of Jay Leno’s name makes me want to vomit,” said Howard Stern. Letterman debuted “Law and Order: Leno Victims Unit.” Jimmy Kimmel did a whole episode dressed up as Jay—prosthetic chin and all. Leno then had Kimmel on for a kumbaya chit-chat. Kimmel, who couldn’t believe Jay was ignoring the elephant in the room, decided to talk about nothing but the elephant, humiliating Leno on his own show.

Leno: What’s the best prank you ever did?

Kimmel: Well this one time, I told a guy that I was going to give him my show in five years and then right when I did, I took it away from him.

A delighted Letterman—Leno’s one-time buddy, long-time rival—would later tell O’Brien he considered this 10-day power struggle “the golden age of television.” Conan got robbed, but at least the schemer and his overlords got the PR drubbing they deserved.

Subscribe now

Not everybody saw it that way. In the epilogue, Carter recounts an outrageously good story from SNL legend Lorne Michaels’ early days at NBC. Michaels—indignant at the treatment he’d received from his network—was determined to resign. So in 1979 he walked into the office of Irwin Segelstein, head of NBC Entertainment, and let him have it. Segelstein listened in silence, then “launched into a story, a parable of sorts, one that touched on the religion of television.”

Here is what Segelstein, in a Neo-meets-the-architect moment, told the young Michaels.

“Let me just take you through what will happen when you leave,” Segelstein began. “When you leave, the show will get worse. But not all of a sudden—gradually. And it will take the audience a while to figure that out. Maybe two, maybe three years. And when it gets to be, you know, awful, and the audience has abandoned it, then we will cancel it. And the show will be gone, but we will still be here, because we’re the network and we are eternal. If you read your contract closely, it says that the show is to be ninety minutes in length. It is to cost X. That’s the budget. Nowhere in that do we ever say that it has to be good. And if you are so robotic and driven that you feel the pressure to push yourself in that way to make it good, don’t come to us and say you’ve been treated unfairly, because you’re trying hard to make it good and we’re getting in your way. Because at no point did we ask for it to be good. That you’re neurotic is a bonus to us. Our job is to lie, cheat, and steal—and your job is to do the show.”

Lorne’s reaction had been a solitary word: “Whoa.”

The moral of the story, for Michaels, is that running a show is “not an entitlement,” but simply “a job.” Business is business. You don’t get to complain about “unfairness” from the bosses. Read the contract, stupid.

Subscribe now

(Show) business ethics

So who was right? We have a Hegelian dialectic our hands:

Thesis: Business is business: Coco had no right to complain.

Antithesis: Fair’s fair: if your boss mistreats you, that’s morally wrong.

Put these together, and you have the peculiar synthesis known as business ethics, the critical study of ethical behavior within, and between, for-profit corporations. The standard day-one problem of business ethics is that its basic elements seem like they should spontaneously combust. And that is the question I’m interested in today.

If you’ve ever taken business ethics, you’ve heard about shareholders, sweatshops, Walmart vs. Costco, and so forth. But show business is business, too. And I think it’s useful to look to showbiz blowups to get a fresh angle on the moral principles (if there are any) that apply under capitalism.

Conan was working for NBC, a for-profit corporation. “For profit” means don’t expect unconditional love. But does it mean anything goes?

Michaels seemed to think so.1 And even as sunny a guy as Jay Leno had his cynical moments—most famously, and Jayishly, in the form of a monologue joke. “What does NBC stand for? Never Believe your Contract.” But it’s noteworthy that the joke expresses disappointment. Leno really did expect more from his employer, in a moralized sense of the word.

Conan, for his part, also saw the fracas in moral terms. In his “People of Earth” press release, he explained his refusal to push Tonight into tomorrow:

I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t the Tonight Show. Also, if I accept this move I will be knocking the Late Night show, which I inherited from David Letterman and passed on to Jimmy Fallon, out of its long-held time slot. That would hurt the other NBC franchise that I love, and it would be unfair to Jimmy.

It doesn’t take a Gideon Rosen to spot the ethical language. Conan’s fans were talking ethics, too. Here’s the fan behind “I’m with Coco”:

…why hasn’t a similar “I’m with Jay” campaign started up?

Well, I don’t want to write a novel on the shortcomings of Jay Leno, but I think we can answer this by focusing on why it worked for Conan. He’s a stand-up guy, who is a brilliant comedic writer. He takes risks with his show, and for years, has rewarded his fans for their viewership[.] (Taking his show on the road, etc.) Conan loves his job, loves what he does, and even in the thick of it, he has stood his ground and did it with tons of professionalism and integrity. People can get behind that. All of Conan’s [fans] love him, and Conan loves all his fans.

Of course, just because people use ethical language, that doesn’t mean they’re sincere about it. Everybody likes to cloak their self-interest in the garb of virtue. Could that be what’s going on here?

It’s possible. But it’s also possible that everybody else is full of it. Politicians, co-op leaders, union reps, parents, and nonprofit heads have self-interested motives, too. Are they just faking their concern for ethics? (“Kids should listen to their parents”—nice try, Mom, but I know propaganda when I see it.)

I myself think people often mean it when they moralize. And I think NBC’s late night hosts, in particular, had a legitimate beef. Conan and Jay were honoring their contracts, working insane hours—we’re talking 16-hour days, week after week, year after year. Granted, they were millionaires working for capitalist bigwigs. But I can’t bring myself to say they were suckers for expecting a little good faith after all those years of loyalty.

Profit?

Some of you may be shaking your screens in frustration. I’m ignoring the obvious: there’s a reason why CEOs etc. can’t be expected to be moral. Unlike public servants, people in business are motivated by profit!

There is obviously a lot of truth to this. (Otherwise, there’d be no “invisible hand.”) But to be real with you, the mantra that people under capitalism “seek profit” is becoming an overrated meme.

For one thing, people living in a capitalist society—you may have noticed—often care about other things besides financial gain. Conan turned down tens of millions of dollars from Fox in order to have a shot at hosting The Tonight Show, a job he wanted partly for sentimental reasons having to do with his father.2 If that strikes you as bizarre or inexplicable, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s normal human behavior. Yes, people like money, but they also care about family, love, lust, conscience, belonging, and status. Do you think theater actors and special ed teachers are in it for the cash? (Have we learned nothing from the objections to homo economicus?)

There is also a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that people who are exposed to markets tend to be more moral in certain respects. For example, Agneman and Chevrot-Bianco (2023) ran some clever experiments in Greenland in which subjects were asked to roll dice and report the outcomes, with higher numbers leading to higher payouts. This setup allowed individuals to cheat undetected—but by looking at the overall pattern, the researchers could tell whether some groups were cheating more than others. It turns out, the group of people working in the market and buying their food from the market were significantly less likely to cheat, even controlling for other variables. There is, in other words, “a robust positive association between market participation and moral behaviour towards anonymous others.”3 Even if it doesn’t prove causation, it indicates that moral norms can exist in markets.

Of course, we should never forget that profit-seeking can lead to profoundly anti-social behavior. When Meta tried to hook teenage girls on Instagram despite knowing the negative effects on the girls’ anxiety and self-image, they were seeking profit. When companies began selling leaded gasoline in 1923 despite already being warned of a “serious menace to public health,” they were seeking profit. More generally, in a competitive market, companies and consumers don’t have any incentive to care about the deleterious effects of their actions on third parties unless someone is (i) aware of what’s going on, (ii) willing to organize, and (iii) capable of fighting back. That is an extremely serious moral problem that arises in market capitalism. There is no sense in denying it.

But even if it’s too much to expect people to be moral in a system that incentivizes selfishness (a big “if”), capitalism is far from the only system like this. The same fundamental problem arises whenever decision-making is decentralized.

A classmate of mine, now a lawyer working for the state, once told me, “There is no such thing as the government of Texas.” He was objecting to the definite article—the government. From his point of view, there were only squabbling fiefdoms, jealously guarding their private information and competing with one another for talent and credit, undermining each other at every turn. That is decentralization.

When universities began pushing for greater diversity in hiring, many departments sought to diversify by hiring minority professors from other departments—which, of course, left those other departments less diverse, without increasing diversity overall. That is decentralization.

Etc., etc.

Whenever bad effects are “someone else’s problem,” expect myopic and selfish behavior. You find that risk when capitalists are making profits at the expense of an unsuspecting public; you also find it when one part of government, or one branch of a nonprofit, is fulfilling its narrow objectives at the expense of the greater whole. Any system with decentralization has to deal with a version of this problem, and any solution will involve some structural ways of aligning incentives (e.g. regulation to monitor and punish rampant polluters).

But more to our point: in a functional decentralized system, regulation will need to be complemented by an ethical code. Rules and rule-enforcers aren’t perfect, so even a highly regulated form of capitalism will leave considerable room for liars, cheats, thieves, and FBoys. If firms can find a way to commit voluntarily to eschewing destructive behavior, life could be a lot nicer for everyone.

Hence: business ethics.

Share

Bureaucracy to the rescue?

“Okay,” you might be thinking, “decentralized decision-making is bad. So why not centralize everything?”

Fair question. Centralizing definitely has its place. My neighborhood shouldn’t be organizing its own DMV, utilities, and GPS satellites. But there are serious limits to the quality of decision-making you get from a big, centralized bureaucracy. Any effective bureaucracy has to be hierarchical; it feeds essential information up the the org chart so that decisions can flow back down. This creates a severe risk of bottlenecks. Nobody at street level can lift a finger until the higher-ups have signed off.4

(“Wait a minute, why not let the lower parts of the bureaucracy make more decisions on their own?” Great idea! That’s called decentralization.)

But even when centralization is the answer, we’re still going to need something like business ethics. An advanced socialist society will still rely on an intricate division of labor made possible by technology, and just as there is much room for mischief in a market, there is much room for embezzlement, fraud, corruption, etc. in the bowels of a bureaucracy. People don’t just spontaneously turn into angels when you refer to them as “public servants”: they still have a mix of pro- and anti-social motivations, and there’s still only so much you can do with formal regulation. Hence: an ethical code has a role to play in government bureaucracies, and it will look pretty similar to the codes that for-profit corporations try to cultivate internally. If the government runs TV stations that hire entertainers and managers, that will also create expectations of good faith and reciprocity. At least at first blush, morality has a place in both types of systems.

Brass tacks. There is no way to banish from reality the fact that big complex societies rely on the cooperation of people with conflicting interests and worldviews, which means that the basic institutions of society need some way to (i) discipline individualistic defectors, (ii) define roles and duties, (iii) coordinate on values and beliefs, (iv) make and enforce authoritative collective decisions, (v) select a metric that is “visible” to decision-makers without being too gameable, (vi) align rewards and honors so that they tend to go to people who are cooperating, and so on.

Any solution to these problems will at least partly rely on people’s moral virtues. And while we are used to seeing these problems arise in capitalist firms, that doesn’t make them capitalist exclusives. Even after the revolution, there will be firms, managers, rules, and Mondays.5

So, if you think “anything goes” under capitalism, you can’t stop there. You may end up having to say the same for all life under modern social institutions. I’d call that brand of sweeping moral nihilism “big if true.”

Roll credits

People love the Martin Mull quote, “Hollywood is high school with money.” Usually it’s a dig. But it also illustrates my point that business doesn’t annihilate the legitimacy of ethics. We all know high school is a petri dish of cruelty, shallowness, and selfishness, and we’re comfortable telling high schoolers to try to be moral. Why should adding money to the mix mean that, suddenly, anything goes?

So: I am, ultimately, with Coco. Capitalism creates intense pressure to compete in the market (for jobs, ratings, clicks, etc.), but that’s no excuse for being a psychopathic hack. The pressure to compete or die is very real—but there’s no such thing as modern life without pressure! Unless you’re willing to throw all social mores out the window, I think you have to admit that there’s legitimate room to complain when the bosses lie, cheat, etc.

How much room? That’s a harder question. Obviously you can’t expect pure-hearted philanthropy. What you can expect will depend on deeper issues about the nature of the firm and the justification (if there is one) of market capitalism. I haven’t even begun to broach those issues here—though I’ve touched on them elsewhere.6

Let me close with a paradox from Bill Carter, laid out in the aftermath of Michaels’ bombshell meeting.

The speech had left him mostly speechless because he realized that Segelstein was exactly right. Being in charge of Saturday Night Live or The Tonight Show or the Nightly News, Michaels concluded, was not an entitlement—it was a job. That got confused at times because the people involved in these shows put so much emotion and passion into them—and it was these very qualities that made the shows so good.

Segelstein, in his swaggering monologue, claims the show doesn’t have to be good. But we all know that Segelstein’s job—his whole network—wouldn’t exist without good shows, and good shows only exist because their creators are giving everything they’ve got. It’s bad faith to make a living off your employees’ supererogatory labor and pretend you never asked for it, never expected it. It makes for a nice dramatic monologue, don’t get me wrong—but as business ethics, it’s a joke.

3

In some versions of the experiment, the money left in the pot was given to other villagers; see the paper for details.

has a great post laying out more of the relevant evidence, e.g. the finding of Francois et al. (2018) that firms in more competitive markets tend to be better at eliciting cooperation from their employees. For a contrasting perspective, check out Lea Ypi on the change in culture when Albania went capitalist.

Political Economy, Stats, and Society

Market competition is pro-social

Critics of capitalism and markets tend to worry that economic competition is destructive and zero-sum. The intuition is that, just like in a track race or a game of poker, the person who wins necessarily defeats everyone else. In a zero-sum competition, someone can only win if the other people lose, so their gain is another person’s loss. Analogously, a…

Read more

2 months ago · 51 likes · 10 comments · Tibor Rutar

Here’s how it works. Player 1 selects a normal game, by which I mean a game that must end in finitely many turns, like Tic-Tac-Toe. Then the two players play that normal game, with Player 2 going first. Whoever wins that “subgame” wins at HYPERGAME.

Here are some examples of HYPERGAME:

• Player 1 picks checkers; Player 2 then plays as black.

• Player 1 picks chess; Player 2 then plays as white.

• Player 1 picks Tic-Tac-Toe, aka Noughts and Crosses; Player 2 then plays as X.

Note that many games are not normal despite sometimes ending in finitely many turns. Rock-Paper-Scissors usually ends after one round, but it isn’t normal; two players could just play rock forever and ever. Chess is only normal because of the seventy-five move rule, which forces the game into a draw if the game isn’t progressing; tournament checkers has a similar rule that kicks in after 100 moves. A normal game, it bears repeating, not only can end in finitely many turns: it must, no matter how hard the players try to drag things out.

Now, here is my question for you. Is HYPERGAME a normal game?

Subscribe now

Here is a simple proof that the answer must be yes.

Suppose Players 1 and 2 are playing HYPERGAME. Then Player 1 must pick a normal game, which by definition will terminate after a finite number of turns. But then the HYPERGAME must also terminate after a finite number of turns, since it is only one turn longer than the chosen normal game, and adding one to a finite number will always result in another finite number. Therefore, HYPERGAME must be a normal game.

Seems bulletproof. But now we can give an equally compelling proof of the exact opposite answer.

Suppose Players 1 and 2 are playing HYPERGAME. Player 1 may begin by choosing HYPERGAME, since this is, we have shown, a normal game. Player 2 may then, for the same reason, choose to play HYPERGAME. The two players may proceed to go back and forth forever, without needing to terminate after finitely many turns. But then HYPERGAME cannot be a normal game.

We have a paradox! Perhaps that should not be too surprising. This last proof involves two of the most mind-bending concepts in all of philosophy: self-reference and infinity. In playing the HYPERGAME, our players take turns initiating infinitely many instances of that very same game.

(Do you see the self-reference? It’s like watching a movie where, partway through, the characters start watching that very movie—an infinite loop.)

Share

The HYPERGAME was analyzed by William Zwicker in 1987, in an article full of deep insights about the nature of paradoxes.1 (I learned of it from Raymond Smullyan.)

W. V. O. Quine once wrote that a truly deep paradox “produces a self-contradiction by accepted ways of reasoning”—an apparently unacceptable conclusion produced by apparently unimpeachable logic, bringing about a crisis of thought.2

The classic example is the Liar Paradox:

• L: L is false.

The problem with ‘L’ is that it’s true iff false.3 Think about it. If ‘L’ is true, then we can infer what it says—namely, that ‘L’ is false. But if ‘L’ is false, then what ‘L’ says is the case, so ‘L’ must be true! So, ‘L’ is both true and false. Hard to think of a more unacceptable conclusion!

There are many “Liarlike paradoxes,” as it turns out. For example:

• Barber Paradox. Imagine a village in the mountains where a barber shaves all and only those who don’t shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself?

• Grelling’s Paradox. An adjective is “heterological” if it’s not true of itself. Is ‘heterological’ heterological?

• Russell’s Paradox. Consider R, the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves. Does R contain itself?

In all of these cases, you can run through the same kind of logic. There is a sort of paradoxical symmetry: (i) if the answer is “yes,” the answer must be “no,” and (ii) if the answer is “no,” the answer must be “yes.” And you can prove (i) or (ii) in either order.

The HYPERGAME Paradox, by contrast, is asymmetric. You have to first prove that HYPERGAME is a normal game, then use that fact to prove that the game isn’t normal. (Unless it’s a normal game, Player 1 can’t pick it, in which case the infinite loop never gets rolling.)

There is another thing that distinguishes the HYPERGAME Paradox. The Liar Paradox is about sentences; the Barber is about facial hair; Grelling and Russell are about adjectives and sets. HYPERGAME, of course, is about games. You might not think of games as a topic for serious mathematics. But they have been for a long time, even before the dawn of game theory in the 20th century. (Cardano’s book on games of chance, written during the Renaissance, is a contender for the first major work on probability theory.)

But HYPERGAME is not entirely unique. It shares its asymmetric structure with one of my favorite paradoxes in set theory:

• Burali-Forti Paradox. Consider the set of all ordinals. Is it an ordinal?4

This one requires a bit more background to understand, but the gist is this. In ordinary language, ordinals are counting numbers, used to enumerate things in…well, order. Think: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and so on. The contrast here is with cardinal numbers, which are used to measure how many. The answer to “How many states does the US have?” is “50,” a cardinal—not “50th,” an ordinal. Anyway, in math, “ordinal” is the same idea, but more abstract, to allow for enumerating infinite sets.

A standard way to think of ordinals is that each is the set of all previous ordinals. So 0 is the empty set (since there’s no previous ordinal!), 1 = {0}, 2 = {0, 1}, and so on. Then the first infinite ordinal is the set of all finite ordinals. Then the next ordinal is the the set containing all the finite ordinals and the first infinite ordinal. And so on. It gets pretty trippy.

Now then: Burali-Forti. It seems clear that the set S of all ordinals must be an ordinal. Isn’t it a set of all previous ordinals? Isn’t that the criterion for ordinal-hood? But then we can easily define the next ordinal: the set containing S along with all its elements. But then S wasn’t the set of all ordinals after all—contradiction!

Sorry, that explanation took much longer than intended, but hopefully now you see the similarity with HYPERGAME. To get Burali-Forti off the ground, you have to first prove that the set of all ordinals is indeed an ordinal (which seems doable), then you can prove a contradiction (which seems abominable).

Subscribe now

Zwicker’s reason for pondering the HYPERGAME is that it’s fresh. The Liar (etc.) are stale. Not that they’re shallow, or anything like that; the great Mark Sainsbury gives the Liar a 10/10 for paradoxicality. But philosophy has had thousands of years to get used to this one little sentence, and many decades to adjust to Russell’s Paradox. It may be hard to imagine being gobsmacked by such antiquities.

The HYPERGAME is, in this respect, a way to empathize with the ancients. You can feel a little of the puzzlement that they must have felt about sets, truths, and barbers. In that spirit, I’m not going to tell you the solution. (But you’re welcome to guess!)

Leave a comment

Game over

At first, a truly deep paradox seems literally incredible. Only later do people begin to see it as a discovery: we discover that some assumption of ours was false, or that some step in our reasoning was faulty. For a while, there may not be a plausible culprit. The guilty assumption is replaced with something more well-behaved, but which feels less “natural.” For example, we may give up the assumption that there is such a thing as truth, or that it’s possible to use a language to talk about sentences in that very language. (To quote Quine: “desperate,” “artificial.”) Eventually, we find an assumption that starts to feel—if not to us, then to future generations—like common sense. What was sheer absurdity to Zeno is, to us, introductory calculus.

What paradoxes of today will come to seem like matters of common sense? Maybe some will be exposed as meretricious tricks, as math teachers today tend to see Zeno’s arguments. Other modern paradoxes may prove fruitful, as have Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. I tend to think there’s still a lot of low-hanging fruit for anyone willing to throw themselves at HYPERGAME and various other paradoxes.

Of course, I love games and I love puzzles, so I’m biased. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Quine gets the last word:

Of all the ways of paradoxes, perhaps the quaintest is their capacity on occasion to turn out to be so very much less frivolous than they look.

Claude—with the help of Simon Goldstein—has published a paper in Philosophy & Public Affairs, the same journal* where Judy Thomson published “A Defense of Abortion,” and where Peter Singer published “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” The paper, “Epistocracy and the Commitment Problem,” was technically attributed to Goldstein alone. It turns out that Wiley doesn’t acknolwedge AI authors. But we know who wrote it. Read it and weep:

When Goldstein announced what he’d done on Daily Nous (a top philosophy blog), the reaction was largely one of despair.

Apparently, not everyone thinks the goal of philosophy is to announce philosophical truths. Here’s a cogent reason why, from Dmitri Gallow (USC):

I think Dmitri’s worry is a profound one. There is something self-defeating about having machines do all of our philosophy for us. The point, eventually, is supposed to be for humans to appreciate philosophical ideas and arguments, and to incorporate them into our lives. That means acquiring certain capacities: wisdom, judgment, intellectual courage, a nose for paradox, etc.

But we don’t know of any realistic way to get people to acquire philosophical capacities except by doing philosophy. If all the doing is outsourced to Claude and the other AIs, philosophy itself becomes something of a “tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it.”

(It’s not all bad news. Earlier this year, I was accused of being an agent of the death of philosophy itself. Well, at least now there’s another, more plausible suspect—along with the murder weapon.)

Subscribe now

Finding the paper

Naturally, I wanted to read Claudestein’s paper for myself. So I went to the journal’s website, where I was greeted with the following request:

After verifying my humanity, I noticed that Wiley’s website was offering me a rather topical suggestion (in the lozenge near the bottom):

You can’t make this shit up.

How big of a deal is this?

I admit, it’s a little unclear. That’s because the journal it was published in has experienced something of a “Ship of Theseus” event over the last few years. You see, in 2024, the editors of PPA jumped ship to launch a new open-access journal called Free & Equal. (I hear they have some nice papers.) Then Jason Brennan took over the original journal, which the original publisher, Wiley, still controlled, and which retains the name “Philosophy & Public Affairs”.

So Free & Equal has the old planks of PPA, while Brennan’s PPA is legally continuous with the original. (This is why I had an asterisk earlier.)

In addition, I should note that Goldstein’s paper is right up the new PPA’s alley. Brennan is an expert on epistocracy (rule by those with political knowledge), so I’m sure that at least some people will suspect that Goldstein’s paper had an edge. Not to say that there was anything untoward going on, only that the paper might have faced a lower bar given its good fit with the journal’s preferred topics (the first words are literally “Jason Brennan”)—then again, the paper is critical of Brennan’s views, so I suppose you could argue that it was swimming upstream.

Also I can’t help but note that the paper really reads like AI, particularly when you zoom out and look at the similar-sized paragraphs. And some of the formalism (as noted by Gallow) seems a bit weird and unmotivated, which raises questions about how good the paper’s ideas are.1

So somebody could say: “This isn’t that big a deal. Free & Equal wouldn’t have published this! The paper itself isn’t as good as the best stuff out there. Plus it contains some questionable ideas.”

Sorry, but this is cope.

We now know that an AI, given something akin to the mentoring a human gets from a generous PhD supervisor, can place a paper in a highly selective journal (95% rejection rate—that stat doesn’t lie!) after going three rounds with an editor and peer reviewers. Moreover, the review process appears to have been double-blind. (Apparently, Simon wrote a cover letter disclosing his AI use, which Brennan didn’t see, perhaps because of an issue with the editorial software—as someone who has used that kind of software a lot, this strikes me as believable.) This is also now common knowledge in the profession. Pandora’s box is open. How are we supposed to just pretend this never happened?

The field of philosophy is going to change rapidly. My predictions:

1. Quantity of research is probably going to matter less for job prospects and promotion.

2. Quality of research will probably matter even more in the near future, since the best humans are still hard to beat.

3. “Impact” of research will also matter more, which means more pressure to game whatever system we use to measure impact.

4. The field is going to scramble to find alternative ways to assess philosophical ability beyond the traditional research paper. Expect departments to put more weight on interviews, rec letters, job talks, and Q&As.

5. Journals are going to have to find ways to deal with the deluge of AI submissions. I expect some will experiment with outsourcing core tasks to AI. (Desk rejections? Writing reports? Final decisions? Copyediting?) Others will experiment with bans—and if there’s enough revulsion towards AI, it might work…

6. …for a while. AI writing is only going to get better. If someone runs a journal purely for humans (or an essay competition, etc.), that will be an attractive place for vibe-writers to submit their papers. Expect strife and scandal.

7. The ability to judge the quality of philosophy—to tell the difference between superficially good work and actually good work—will become very highly valued, but I don’t expect there will be any easy way to crank up the supply, unless…

8. …AI becomes very good at assessing the quality of work. I suspect that this threshold—when AI is better at calling bullshit than humans—will be an important inflection point in the history of philosophy. I don’t think it’s far away.

Share

To get a sense of how fast the field is about to change, look at Jason Brennan’s comment (written with help from…AI). Or check out Simon’s report (drafted by Claude), which explains how Claude was used in the PPA paper, and which includes the initial prompt:

The goal of this project is to have Claude write a publishable philosophy paper, with as little human input as possible. The goal is to submit the paper to a top political philosophy journal, like PPA or others.

Thesis: The thesis of the paper is that epistocracy faces a serious challenge from public choice. The idea is that public choice gives arguments for democracy in terms of how the franchise changes the incentives of leaders. The worry is that epistocracy weakens these incentives. This objection is structurally different than existing discussions of epistocracy, which has either looked at epistemic or at non-consequentialist arguments for democracy. The paper will focus in particular on the argument from Acemoglu and Robinson, which claims that democracy functions as a commitment device which lowers the chance of revolution, by allowing elites to credibly promise tax and transfer schemes to the poor.

And here’s what Claude did:

From Claude: all of the prose as drafted, across seven original drafts, three revision rounds, and every response letter; the formal execution of the thesis (the χ-mapping of Brennan’s regimes, the Jensen’s-inequality refinement, the liveness criterion) and the formal appendix; the self-correction dilemma, produced under the author’s demand for iterated self-critique; the verification work — citations checked against sources at every round, three inherited citation errors caught and disclosed to the editor along with smaller pinpoint corrections, the formal appendix re-derived, background reading of the project’s literature against the paper’s characterizations; the location of new empirical evidence on request; simulated referee reports during drafting; and the technical pipeline that produced every marked manuscript, clean copy, and letter across the project, including the extraction of the author’s tracked changes from the delivered documents at each pass.

As for what “the author” did:

Every claim, argument, and revision decision in the published paper was reviewed and approved by the author.

We are left with all kinds of unsettling questions. Philosophers, in the past, have had identities. They were humans—big-brained animals with psychologies that changed only gradually over time. How are we supposed to think about the philosophy generated by Claude? I suppose you could say that Claude thinks. But what if you don’t think that? What if you think that different instances of Claude are distinct short-lived beings, each summoned for precisely one conversation? There is no one overarching thinker, Claude, in this case. Maybe it’s best to consider Claude’s philosophy as generated out of nowhere—like messages in bottles popping out a digital wormhole with nothing on the other end.

I don’t know what to do about this. Philosophy, like seemingly every bit of human society, is being upended by a technology more disruptive than anything I’ve experienced in my lifetime. I suppose the one idea I do have is that we shouldn’t despair. If we all run off into the woods to read our books in solitude, who’s going to teach philosophy?

More important: 10 years from now, who’s going to learn it?

Over the last decade, the public has been losing trust in higher education, and much of the decline has been our fault. To give just two examples:

• In 2024, when a wave of protests over the Israel–Gaza War swept across campuses, we couldn’t convincingly tell the public that we were adhering to reasonable and impartial principles about on-campus speech.

• This year, Jason Arday—formerly Professorial Chair in the Sociology of Education at Cambridge University—was exposed for having plagiarized huge amounts of his work and likely having faked quotations from interviewees; rather than take the allegations seriously, his employer first tried to dismiss them as a “vile campaign.”

Now, academics are in the crosshairs. Governments are cutting funding and trying to seize control of curricula—as in the Trump Administration’s “breathtakingly intrusive” demands addressed to Harvard University. Administrators are trying to restrict what viewpoints may be taught in class—as at Texas A&M, where professors may not “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO.”

Some of the criticism of academia has been unfair. But it’s not enough to point this out: it won’t win back the public’s trust, nor will it address the public’s legitimate concerns.

Instead of complaining, we need to improve. To protect academic freedom, we need to have a conversation about academic responsibilities, the standards to which we hold ourselves as professionals.

To that end, here are four principles for your consideration.

1. The key qualification for an academic job is ability, not identity.

2. Universities cannot tolerate plagiarism and fraud.

3. The classroom is primarily for teaching.

4. Universities may not punish speech merely for being offensive or harmful.

Now let me explain why I see each of these as essential. I don’t claim that they are sufficient, only that they are necessary—vitally so.

Subscribe now

Share

1. The key qualification for an academic job is ability, not identity

Anybody who is qualified for academic jobs should have a fair shot at competing for them, and nobody who is unqualified should be given an academic job.

There is much room to debate what counts as “fair” competition. But there is no room in the academy for people who clearly can’t do their jobs. If your job involves research, you must be able to carry out research. If your job involves teaching, you must be competent to teach the relevant material. If the job involves certain administrative tasks, you must be able to do those tasks. These are the essential elements of the job, and failing to do them (e.g. not showing up for class) can be grounds for dismissal.

What about diversity? There is a legitimate debate to be had about the role of diversity in hiring, and it should be uncontroversial that certain kinds of diversity can be desirable (for example, everybody agrees that a department may wish to cover a diverse range of subfields). But nothing can justify hiring unqualified candidates. Without that bedrock principle, we can’t have universities. We should all agree, no matter our broader views about affirmative action, that those hired to do a job must be competent to do that job.

Of course, basic competence should not be the finish line. Every academic should aspire to excellence in what they do—be it mentoring, empirical research, or humanistic inquiry. We should also aspire to bring out the best in our students and colleagues, treating everyone with respect no matter their race, religion, gender, nationality, or political viewpoint. (Respect does not imply esteem or agreement. Mutual respect is what allows for useful conversation across deep and contentious disagreements.)

2. Universities cannot tolerate plagiarism and fraud

Fraud is a direct attack on academic integrity. If someone fakes their data, that undermines the trust we rely on to share knowledge with the world.

Plagiarism, meanwhile, undermines the system we use to reward academic excellence. If you take from someone else’s work without attribution, you are stealing credit for their work. That is triply wrong: it wrongs the victim; it gives the plagiarist an unfair advantage over others; and it corrupts the scholarly record.

Fraud and plagiarism are a profound abdication of academic responsibility. As such, they can be grounds for punishment and dismissal.

That does not mean that all violations of academic integrity are equally problematic. Forgetting a citation is not the same as stealing a paragraph. We should impose what the political scientist Elinor Ostrom called “graduated sanctions” for fraud and plagiarism. Small, first-time violations should be punished less harshly than extensive, repeated violations. Ignorance of the rules, however, can never be a full excuse: students should be taught from day one that there will be no tolerance for plagiarism or fraud. Leaders at a university, for their part, should never sweep credible accusations under the rug.

3. The classroom is primarily for teaching

Academic freedom means that professors should, as much as possible, get to teach their classes in the way they think best, rather than being second-guessed by administrators and politicians.

That said, the classroom is primarily for teaching; so, being an instructor comes with a responsibility to teach the relevant skills and material. It’s not the instructor’s prerogative to use class time for their own purposes when these are unrelated to the course—for example, an instructor may not use an algebra class to advocate at length for a political cause that has nothing to do with algebra.

Not every minute of every class must be devoted purely to learning: there are other goods worth pursuing in the classroom. Icebreakers may help build a sense of community; in-class activities may engage students’ interest and build their self-confidence. But these are secondary goals, and instructors have a responsibility to balance them carefully against the primary goal of teaching their courses.1

4. Universities may not punish speech merely for being offensive or harmful

A university may prohibit some forms of political speech and activism. For example, it may forbid protestors from disrupting classes, taking over buildings, camping indefinitely on campus, or heckling invited speakers in the middle of an event. It may also prohibit speech that constitutes a crime, or that incites lawless behavior in certain ways.

But no university should ever crack down on speech merely because it has judged that the the viewpoint is offensive, unpopular, or harmful.2

A university’s rules governing speakers and protestors should always be clearly stated and neutral with respect to both content and viewpoint. Universities also need to enforce their rules in an impartial way, making it clear that they are not “taking sides” against students with a disfavored view. For example, it would be illegitimate to punish pro-Palestine protestors for interrupting class while turning a blind eye to pro-Israel protestors who do the same. It would be equally illegitimate to punish pro-Israel protestors for heckling while turning a blind eye to pro-Palestine protestors who do the same.

If a university’s rules are vague, or if its enforcement of the rules is arbitrary, no one will be able to trust the university to let debates play out. But such trust is essential for universities to survive, since much of our value for society consists in the fact that we try to let the truth emerge from reasoned debate rather than from a power struggle over the levers of administration. If we give up on debate, we give up on being universities.

Share

What next?

My introduction to academic philosophy was Jonathan Dancy’s particularism—the theory that morality doesn’t need principles because the right decision always depends on context. So it is against my nature to be publishing a list of principles, especially one so cruelly short. Obviously, there is no way to condense all of the wisdom needed for an academic ethos into just four sentences!

And yet, if we never try to set priorities, we’re never going to get anywhere. So I’ve decided to publish this even though I know I’m opening myself up to criticism. You could say my list is insufficiently nuanced; that it leaves out important values; that it puts the blame on academics rather than on our persecutors; that it fails to strike the right balance between competing goals.

Go ahead: criticize me. I can take it. You might even convince me that you’re right. There’s nothing inherently bad about receiving criticism, even when it’s harsh—which is, in a way, my entire point. We academics are on the path to becoming an endangered species. That’s why we need to be more self-critical. How else are we supposed to correct course and save ourselves from extinction?

If we don’t fix our own problems, the public will eventually pick someone else to “fix” them for us. Thankfully, it’s not too late to win back the public’s trust—but we’ll need the courage to admit where we’ve gone wrong.

…for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

—Plato, Theaetetus

Plato has Socrates tell us how philosophy begins. But how does it end?

Sometimes, you end up in Wittgenstein’s fly-bottle, trapped in a state of confusion by a mistake you didn’t even know you made. Other times, you get bored. But if all goes well, philosophy is supposed to have a happy ending—with your mind being irrevocably blown into a trillion cosmic shards of oh my GOD-ness.

That’s the feeling I’m chasing. For me, it’s a spiritual pursuit—words like “devotion,” “longing,” and “higher purpose” come to mind. I know that sounds pretentious. But it’s how I actually feel!

What makes a theory mind-blowing is how profoundly and unexpectedly it recasts something you thought you already understood. It’s not every day you get your mind blown, but when it happens, it’s life-affirming—or better, life-redeeming. I will gladly crawl for weeks through a lifeless desert of boring journal articles, half-assed books, and zero-assed talks if at the end of it all I reach the oasis of mind-blowing ideas. Then I’ll do it again. And again. For however long I have it in me.1

Sometimes, the oasis may turn out to be a mirage. For those seeking revelation, it’s tempting to open your mind by switching off the part of it tasked with detecting bullshit. This can be dangerous for all the obvious reasons. I remember a guy at my high school—giant ego, way into psychedelics—who always had “theories” of everything. One day he let me in on his grand theory of human psychology. You see, quantum mechanics teaches us that every worldly object is vibrating, including the human brain. When you have a negative emotion—a “vibe,” if you will—that literally creates a dissonance with other people’s minds, spawning a cascade of pain and disruption. But if you have a positive mindset, the vibrations in your brain will resonate with those around you, as well as with the wider universe, as you sync your way into a cosmic harmony. Your reward for achieving quantum nirvana (my term) is that the world will begin responding favorably to your vibes, and your deepest longings will manifest in physical reality.

This is industrial-strength bullshit. Words like “irrational” and “foolish” don’t really do it justice. When you let yourself go like this, cognitively speaking, you are wronging yourself and besmirching the entire human race—or so I feel.

Subscribe now

I think of the vituperative language of W. K. Clifford. The quantum vibe guy had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him, and therefore must be “held responsible” for whatever reckless behavior springs from his wishful thinking.

(Coda: after high school, Mr. Quantum did end up in what I’ll refer to here as “legal trouble.” Clifford was right that beliefs are intimately connected to actions, and even seemingly trifling beliefs can lead over time to deeper issues in one’s worldview and comportment—think of how a single botched line of code can be used to hack an entire network.)

Still, it won’t do to simply suspend judgment about all matters of potential controversy and believe only what can be infallibly known. What would there be left to believe? Not much! There is something cowardly about such intellectual reticence.

So the philosopher is in a bind. On the one hand, you want to open your mind to the deepest, most mind-blowing truths out there. On the other hand, you don’t want to believe in nonsense. (“Be open-minded—but not so much your brain falls out.”) This, for me, creates a lot of useful tension. I’m always going back and forth between trying to generate “eureka!” moments and trying to prove that my ideas don’t actually make any sense. (Though if I’m being honest, I spend more time on the “eureka!” side.)

If you zoom out to look at philosophy as a whole, you start to see the same tension on a more ecological level. Some philosophers are after the most mind-blowing theories—generating lots of “big if true” hypotheses. Other philosophers practice unrelenting skepticism, refusing to enjoy the entertaining of outlandish or unsupported hypotheses except insofar as they can be justified or rationalized—the motto here is “big only if true.”

Some examples of “big if true” philosophical views:

• Nonreductive realism about consciousness, morality, color, and the self

• Presentism and 3-dimensionalism in the philosophy of time

• Pluralist deontology without aggregation

• Naive realism about perception

• Libertarianism about free will

To me, at least, these are all extremely mind-blowing views, on which the world is a kind of technicolor tapestry—what Wilfrid Sellars called the “manifest image.”

The “big only if true” approach, meanwhile, tends to favor views that are supported by clear arguments though they lead to consequences that are strange, radical, bleak, or otherwise counterintuitive:

• Anti-realist theories of consciousness, morality, color, and the self

• Eternalism and 4-dimensionalism

• Consequentialism or even rational egoism

• Indirect realism about perception

• Skepticism about free will

These views (again, just me talking here) seem to drain the color from the world until all that is left is what can be captured in naturalist or empiricist terms—Sellars’s “scientific image.”

Some philosophers enjoy nothing more than to stick up for the manifest. Others are never happier than when they get to scold their colleagues for straying from the scientific. Personally, I tend to spend most of my career on the “manifest image” side. This makes me what the ancient Greeks would have called a dogmatist, as opposed to a skeptic—though as I said before, I think any respectable philosopher has to subject their own views to the hot light of skepticism at some point, on pain of lapsing into kookhood.

To be clear, I am hardly the only philosopher who goes back and forth. Judith Jarvis Thomson—best known for coining “the trolley problem” and writing “A Defense of Abortion”—defends all sorts of “big if true” views: three-dimensionalism about persistence, anti-aggregative deontology, objectivism about morality. But she can also be ruthlessly skeptical, sometimes for abstruse reasons.2 Robert Nozick apparently had trouble writing up any of his positive views because he was so naturally inclined towards objections.

My favorite line ever about the duality of philosophy—the tension between its productive and destructive forces—comes from Iris Murdoch.

There is a two-way movement in philosophy, a movement toward the building of elaborate theories, and a movement back again toward the consideration of simple and obvious facts. McTaggart says that time is unreal, Moore replies that he has just had his breakfast. Both these aspects of philosophy are necessary to it.

Here McTaggart is attacking the manifest, but some might see his view as rather mind-blowing. McTaggart’s take on time is highly revisionary, whereas Moore (in Murdoch’s telling) is standing up for common sense. Murdoch’s duality is not quite the same as what I’m driving at with my distinction between “mind-blowing but risky” ideas and “boring but defensible” ones. And here I have to admit that arguments for the scientific image can seem mind-blowing, too, in their own way. Just as one can marvel at the manifest in its metaphysical richness, one can marvel at the scientific debunking of profound illusions—i.e. at the revelation that there is no freedom, no self, no time, no goodness, no color, nothing but atoms banging into one another in the void.3

Maybe there isn’t any theory-neutral way to say which theories are mind-blowing. The realist hopes to awe us with the improbable splendor of the manifest; the anti-realist wants to shock us with the austerity of the world revealed by science.4 Perhaps, when I tell you that the former type of view is “big if true,” I’m just reporting my own intellectual temperament. Well, while I’m at it, let me also report that I don’t mind it when someone shows me that so-and-so’s theory is more mind-blowing than I’d realized. In fact, I’m grateful. There’s really no better way to come to see a familiar view with fresh eyes.

So there you have it. “Big if true” theories are worth questing after, even though “big only if true” discipline is essential for warding off quackery.

If only there were some Hegelian synthesis of these two conditionals, which could elegantly summarize the ethos of adventurous philosophy…—even better, what if you could subscribe to said Hegelian synthesis, with an option to pay Substack’s lowest possible subscription fee as a way to show support for freely accessible, high-effort philosophy content?

Good. Arday was a serial plagiarist who lied about his charitable work and academic credentials. He was also taking unethical means to protect himself from scrutiny. When people began raising questions about Arday’s work—which is shot through with stolen text and bogus quotations, as shown by —Arday lawyered up and contacted the police. The result was that, for years, Arday got away with it. When the journalist Jack Grove emailed Arday some questions, for example, Grove’s reward was a warning from Scotland Yard: quit investigating Arday. A powerful academic was using the coercive power of the state to prevent a journalist from doing his job.

What a disgrace.

Subscribe now

But while it’s good that Arday is gone, I don’t think it’s good enough.

For one thing, too many academics, politicians, and influential people came to Arday’s defense even after it was abundantly clear that he was plagiarizing. That kind of “circle the wagons” mentality does real damage to the reputation of academia. Those involved should, at minimum, take back what they said—especially the contents of the pathetic “Solidarity Letter” defending Arday to the hilt.

Entirely false allegations of plagiarism were made against Professor Arday and referred to two universities. Investigations have found no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing. The relevant academic journals also found no basis for the claims.

Yet despite these unequivocal findings, rightwing media have attempted to smear Professor Arday’s reputation and undermine his career. That should concern everyone who believes in academic freedom, fairness and due process.

It is just bananas that distinguished academics like Simon Baron-Cohen put their names to this nonsense. (As did five British MPs! The mind reels.)

Share

Almost as bad was Arday’s “Update” announcing his resignation, which is notably missing a certain magic word. Instead of apologizing—or taking any measure of responsibility for his actions—Arday explains his decision as a way of taking care of his “own wellbeing.” He wants peace and privacy. He wishes to be free from judgement. In Kantian terms, he is following a hypothetical imperative (“if you want it, go for it”), not a categorical imperative (“you should do it no matter what you want”). You can’t justify violating communal norms by citing your own self-interest. Where’s the honor in that?

Read the key bit for yourself (with shameless self-interest in bold):

Sadly, the years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack. While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.

I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope.

But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great.

I have a family. I want to be present for them. I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life. I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.

For my own wellbeing, for my family, and for those who have stood by me throughout this difficult period, I have concluded that the only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away.

This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge. Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me. It is simply the decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.

Again: disgraceful. It’s better than trying to defend the indefensible, but where is the admission of guilt? Where’s the bare minimum of “I’m sorry,” or at least “I did it”?1

For my own part, I don’t believe in holding grudges into eternity. We’re all flawed, after all, and even wrongdoers have rights against excessive punishment and harassment.

But if you’ve violated the core norms of your profession, the bare minimum you should do is admit what you’ve done and say you’re sorry. If you reject the allegations against you—and those allegations are both credible and serious—you are exacerbating the problem, not putting it to rest. And the rest of the academic community has an obligation to take this unresolved problem seriously (as Cambridge finally did), because if we can’t convince the world that we can police ourselves, we are not going to make it.

What makes plagiarism so serious is that it undermines what professors sometimes call our “honor code.” We, as academics, rely on the public’s trust. As teachers, we need the trust of parents. As researchers, we need the trust of our readers. When one of us fraudulently passes off dozens of passages as their own work, or makes up quotations, that is a direct attack on the principles that underwrite academic research. Such actions violate Kant’s Categorical Imperative in a profound way: if every academic lied and plagiarized whenever it suited them, our journals wouldn’t be worth the paper they’re printed on.2 Nor would the academic honor code, if none of us were willing to call out dishonors in our midst.

On a personal level, I really do feel for Arday. I want him to resolve this issue and move on with his life. I don’t want him to be harassed. I don’t want him to get psychologically wrecked by a social media pile-on.

But if someone cheats their way to the highest echelon of academia, and big-shot academics, non-profit leaders, and politicians try to interfere with legitimate inquiries into plagiarism…—sorry, but I have to call that out! This is not my attempt to make Jason Arday and his family feel bad. It is an attempt to stand up for the principle that there is no place in academia for plagiarism or fraud, no matter the perpetrator.

I’ll stand up for that principle when the perpetrator is named Jason Arday. I’ll stand up for it when the perpetrator is named Francesca Gino.

And if anybody who once defended a plagiarist or fraudster decides to switch sides, I will grant full amnesty and welcome them with open arms. But they have to actually switch. “Sorry, not sorry” doesn’t cut the mustard.

Subscribe now

The philosophical moral of this story

One of the remarkable paradoxes of human society is that self-interested groups often punish their own members for mistreating the outgroup. It is no surprise that prison gangs (e.g.) take revenge against an outsider who attacks their members. More interesting is that gangs will also punish insiders for unauthorized attacks on outsiders. Why would they do that?

To quote Shakespeare: “Reputation, reputation, reputation!”3 Often, a group needs to cultivate a reputation for the sake of cooperation with other groups. A company wants to be trusted by its customers; a government wants the trust of its citizens; etc.—and how can a group be trustworthy if it doesn’t care when its members break the rules?

Here is how the philosophers John Thrasher and Toby Handfield (2018) put the point in their paper “Honor and Violence”:

Prison gangs operate on a “community responsibility” system whereby, “Each gang is responsible for their members’ actions, so they have an incentive to monitor their members to ensure they maintain their collective reputation” (Skarbek 2014, 83). We find the same type of mechanism of collective responsibility and reputation used, for similar reasons, by medieval merchants (Greif 2006, 96–97). The punishment of plagiarists in an academic setting also works this way and is frequently prescribed by what is called an “academic honor code.” Professional standards boards frequently inflict sanctions—the most severe being expulsion—upon members who have behaved in ways that damage the reputation of the profession.

Punishing plagiarism is thus a kind of “purification”—i.e. “in-group policing” that signals a group’s commitment to its own norms. Purification may be costly, but precisely for that reason, it is a powerful way to signal “you can trust me.”

I can’t stress it enough: every real academic, who produces actual research, has a fundamental interest in preventing and punishing plagiarism. Every act of plagiarism is an attack on the core principles of academic integrity. Every failure to enforce the norm against plagiarism is a signal that it’s open season—i.e. that anyone can violate our core principles with impunity. It is a good sign that Arday, an unrepentant plagiarist if ever there was one, knew he couldn’t keep getting away with it.

In my view, universities should strive to be inclusive communities. As long as you can teach, research, and abide by the legitimate norms of the profession, you deserve a fair shot at an academic job.

But you have to do the job. And if you don’t (while pretending you did), you should accept the consequences of your actions. It’s the only honorable thing to do.

Bonus note:

A while back, New York City was debating the merits of congestion pricing, which charges drivers a fee to enter high-traffic areas, and the city found itself facing a classic dilemma of efficiency versus equity.

Congestion pricing is efficient: if you don’t charge downtown drivers, you’re letting them freely impose various costs on others—pollution, noise, traffic, and so on. These costs can be enormous. In a 2025 working paper, Enrico Moretti and Harrison Wheeler estimate the cost of nationwide traffic noise at $110 billion—with a “b”! Charging a fee forces drivers to “internalize” such costs, which encourages those drivers who have a good alternative to take it, while allowing those who really need to drive to do so.

But as critics pointed out, congestion pricing is also inequitable: if we charge every driver a flat fee, poor drivers will be hit much harder. Egalitarians don’t like the idea of charging the same $9 toll to a communter on their way to make minimum wage as to a billionaire joyriding in their Rolls-Royce.

What should we do? Should we prioritize efficiency—or prioritize equity?

Trick question: you don’t have to choose. In the ethics of policy, the efficiency/equity dilemma typically arises as a sort of mirage, which disappears once we properly lay out the space of all policy options at our disposal. To do this, we need to use what Thomas Schelling called “two-dimensional” policy analysis.

But first, lest you think I’m just talking about cars in NY, I want to show you more examples. Once you know how to spot the efficiency/equity dilemma, you’ll notice it’s everywhere.

Subscribe now

1. Biased algorithms

Consider the case of algorithmic bias. In the US, many judges base their sentencing and detention decisions on estimates from algorithms like Equivant’s COMPAS, which assigns a defendant a risk score based on their age, history, education, and so on.

This at least could be efficient: if the algorithm really does give high-quality estimates (a big “if”), the system will generate more public safety, on average, per year of incarceration.

But even if efficient, such algorithms are arguably inequitable. Case in point, a hugely influential 2016 report from ProPublica accused COMPAS of being “biased against blacks,” because the algorithm’s errors followed a troubling pattern:

• “The formula was particularly likely to falsely flag black defendants as future criminals, wrongly labeling them this way at almost twice the rate as white defendants.”

• “White defendants were mislabeled as low risk more often than black defendants.”

To be clear, ProPublica wasn’t alleging that COMPAS was designed to discriminate against black defendants, or that the algorithm explicitly took account of race. Rather, the problem was that the algorithm seems to have violated certain statistical criteria of fairness by tending to make errors in favor of one group and to the detriment of another.1 So there’s a dilemma: either we have biased decisions or benighted ones.

2. Price gouging

Some states in the US ban “price gouging,” which they define as raising prices on certain goods in an emergency.

Now, Econ 101 tells us that so-called “price gouging” will generally be efficient. If the price of toilet paper can go up, so can the quantity supplied; you avoid the problem of shortages. But you also create a problem of inequity: the rich will have an easier time paying $10 a roll (or whatever the price may be).

For a real example, consider Mike Munger’s story of the Goldsboro yahoos. When Hurricane Fran hit North Carolina in 1996, Raleigh lost power, and people there lost access to ice and cooling. “Insulin, baby formula, and other necessities immediately became susceptible to spoilage in the 92+ degree heat.” Some enterprising “yahoos” drove in from four hours away in Goldsboro, using chainsaws to clear the path for their two rented freezer trucks, which they’d stuffed with 500 bags of ice. The yahoos set up shop; Munger says they were selling at over $8 a bag (having bought at $1.70). People were, evidently, more than willing to wait in line to buy ice at that price. Thus the yahoos were more efficiently distributing the state’s ice, which was no longer languishing in Goldsboro while insulin spoiled in Raleigh. But the customers still resented the inequity. Eventually, someone must have called the cops, who arrested the yahoos, impounded the trucks—and all the while, the ice went undistributed.

Munger’s outrage leaps off the page:

And now we are back to where I started: the citizens, the prospective buyers being denied a chance to buy ice… they clapped. Clapped, cheered, and hooted, as the vicious ice sellers were handcuffed and arrested. Some of those buyers had been standing in line for five minutes or more, and had been ready to pay 4 times as much as the maximum price the state would allow. And they clapped as the police, at gunpoint, took that opportunity away from them.

And yet—to the chagrin of Munger and many other pro-marketeers—it doesn’t really matter how many times you preach the gospel of Econ 101. People just really do think price-gouging is immoral! If that’s right, then the dilemma is real: either we have to live with shortages or else let the poor get iced out.

3. Zoning and rent control

Say there’s a lot of unmet demand for rental housing in a nice neighborhood. It seems efficient to let developers build housing there—the developers get big bucks, and the renters get better housing. But if the rents are high, the poor will be priced out: another inequity.

One solution to the inequity is “inclusionary zoning”: require developers to set aside a certain percentage of new housing at below-market rates. But this makes it less profitable to build housing, which directly creates inefficiencies: there will be some developments that never happen, despite the presence of many willing renters, because the costs of inclusionary zoning make the prospect a financial loser for the developer. Again, the dilemma is a painful one. Either efficiency at the poor’s expense, or poverty-relief that gunks up the system.

Much the same point arises with rent control. If you let landlords raise rents, that will tend to increase the quantity (and quality!) of the housing supply in an efficient way. But it can seem inequitable. When a neighborhood becomes desirable, poor tenants may be unable to pay their rising rents, and so they are displaced by rich newcomers.

In defense of efficiency

I could add a zillion more examples.2 But you get the idea. Often the economically efficient policy is inequitable, and the equitable policy is inefficient.

You might respond by saying: so much for efficiency! We are human beings, with human rights, and we shouldn’t be violating one another’s dignity for the sake of some inhuman, technocratic value of “efficiency.”

But this response is less attractive than it sounds at first. The reason why is that, in the context of economic policy debates, “efficiency” doesn’t refer to some bloodless bureaucratic metric. It just refers to people getting what they want and need.

More specifically, “efficient” often just means Pareto-optimal, which is a fancy way to say “no win-wins left on the table.” So, when the Goldsboro yahoos are banned from selling ice to willing customers, that’s inefficient, because there was a win-win left on the table: money for the yahoos, ice for the good people of Raleigh. Infamously, this notion of efficiency is consistent with as much inequity as you like. (Notice that every outcome of a zero-sum game is “efficient,” including “I get everything, you get nothing.”) But that’s just to say that efficiency isn’t all that we want. We should still be loath to live with inefficiencies—unless we’re against win-wins, in which case we’ve got other problems.

“Escaping the dilemma”

Usually, I like to beat people over the head with the reality of tradeoffs and the unsolvability of the big problems with the human condition. But in this case, our problems might actually be solvable, thanks to an idea from the economist (and hero of the blog) Thomas Schelling, in a strange yet wonderful article called “Economic Reasoning and the Ethics of Policy.”

The article is strange because it rambles. Schelling talks about winning arguments with his students over gas rationing; he dwells on the unusual example of runway lights at airports. The article is also ethically a bit tone-deaf compared to Schelling’s other papers, a point stressed by the philosopher Bernard Williams (in a jewel of a review).3

I cite these reasons not to disparage Schelling’s paper, but to explain why its core insight has been so criminally overlooked.4

Schelling’s insight is that the efficiency/equity dilemma arises when we try to solve two problems using one policy. The solution is to solve the two problems using two policies. Kill two birds with two stones.

For example, in the case of congestion pricing, we have two problems: we want to charge drivers to minimize externalities, and we want to ease burdens on the poor. If we are thinking in one policy dimension, we are stuck with a tradeoff. The more we charge, the more pain for the poor. The less we charge, the more pollution, noise, and traffic. But why assume the solution has to lie along that one dimension, i.e. how much to charge drivers? We could instead think in two dimensions. We adjust congestion pricing to whatever point best addresses pollution (etc.), and then we separately address the problem of poverty using a dedicated anti-poverty policy. One option is to make the policy a kind of local or targeted thing—think: vouchers for poor drivers. Another option is simply to be more generous at a big-picture level, e.g. by making the tax code more progressive. Either way, it’s possible to achieve a win-win on efficiency and equity compared to any of the original policy options we had in the 1d space we started from.

The solution is perfectly general. Typically, our dilemma arises when there are two problems, such as a supply problem and a poverty problem. And we’re usually better off solving the two problems in two policy dimensions. For example, in an emergency, we might allow prices to rise while offering cash relief to the poor. In the case of algorithmic bias, we might use the most accurate algorithms while using other policies to address racial inequities directly. Rather than rent control, we might prefer uncapped rents and vouchers for poor tenants (the US has something like this, called “Section 8 housing,” which deserves a lot more credit than it gets).

That said, there’s a reason why we don’t live in a magic high-dimensional world where all our policy dreams come true. Often there are deep political or institutional obstacles facing the two-dimensional solution. As Schelling explains it, this is the crucial limitation of “the two-dimensional approach.”

Most important, the reasoning does not demonstrate that the superior policy or program technique is actually achievable. In particular it may depend on institutions that do not exist, or politics that are unacceptable, or administrative determinations that are infeasible.

But this is, notably, a very different problem from the original efficiency/equity dilemma. We have transformed a policy problem into a political problem. That is often enough to allow for significant progress. The political problem might be just as insoluble—but then it again, it might not.

Even better: sometimes going 2d will make your solution more politically tractable. One important example of this arises in tax policy. We seem to face a dilemma: equity favors a progressive tax system, but sometimes the most progressive taxes are painfully inefficient (e.g. wealth taxes), and usually the rich and powerful will fight them tooth and nail. Again, we have two distinct problems—equity and efficiency—that we are trying to solve by adjusting only one dimension: the progressiveness of the tax code. But Yale’s Ian Shapiro reminds us that we have a second dimension to consider—the progressiveness of government spending.

I think the trouble with the politics of tax is people tend to not think about the taxing side and the spending side together. So, you know, people jump up and down that we should have more progressive taxation. Well, progressive taxation is often a very costly way to raise taxes. And the cheapest ways to raise taxes are actually the more regressive ways, like a VAT, which is pretty regressive. But if you have progressivity on the spending side, it doesn’t really matter if it’s regressive on the taxing side.

So I’ve argued that the best way to tax is just to raise taxes in the most efficient way possible and then worry about the distributive dimensions on the spending side. Especially in a country like this, where exit costs are very low for billionaires.

The next time you’re feeling stuck in a policy dilemma, consider how many distinct problems you’re trying to solve—and how many distinct policies you’re using to solve them. Sometimes there is no need to suffer in n dimensions. There’s a solution waiting for you in dimension n + 1.

Share

4

I should say, a more general version of Schelling’s point is the Tinbergen Rule: however many policy targets you have, you need that many policy instruments. Here’s an illustration from Peter Schaeffer.

What Schelling calls a “dilemma” arises when the analyst is restricted to a single conflicting instrument—i.e. a policy that improves things on one dimension at the expense of another. Combining with a second instrument can often remove the dilemma, even if both instruments are conflicting! Visually, the solution to a dilemma looks like a dotted arrow (representing the sum of the two policy instruments) that goes up and to the right.

At last, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has unveiled his plans for city-operated grocery stores in New York.

Today, I am proud to announce a collection of essential staples that will be predictably 30% cheaper at all five of our city-run grocery stores. This core set of goods will include all fresh produce, meat, and seafood, along with 20 other essential items like cheese, milk, and bread.

Here’s how it will work. Once a month, our five city-run grocery stores will set prices for this core set of goods at 30% below typical retail prices. No exceptions, no gimmicks. The savings will last for the entire month. That means no weekly fluctuations or sticker shock at the checkout line—not for our seniors living on fixed incomes, nor for the parents who rely on a regular supply of apple slices to keep toddler tantrums at bay.

In short, the city will use public funds to subsidize five stores to sell goods well below market prices. A small-scale endeavor. But will the effects be positive or negative?

Subscribe now

An obvious problem is that these stores will make life harder for existing bodegas and grocers. How can you stay in business if the city is using tax dollars to beat your prices? Mamdani’s solution is to limit his stores’ wares to a handful of staples—no alcohol, cigarettes, hot food, or scratch-offs.

We are not looking to compete with bodegas or grocery stores when it comes to their ability to survive. What we’re looking to do is to provide affordability that is guaranteed to New Yorkers.

But it doesn’t matter what the city is “looking” to do. What matters is the outcome, which is not hard to predict given basic economic principles. Any nearby stores that rely on selling staples to survive will die out, because they can’t possibly compete with a subsidized alternative that uses public funds to undercut their prices. It bears repeating: Mamdani’s stores are not just cutting their prices by being efficient or innovative. They are designed to systematically undercut the competition’s prices no matter how low they go, because the city’s prices are pegged to 70% of the prevailing market rate. There is no possible way for local stores to compete, no matter how well they operate or how sharply they cut their own profit rates, because every cut they make will cause the city to cut their prices even further (at taxpayer expense).1

This point was flatly ignored by some of Mamdani’s defenders. For example, Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the NYC DSA, had this to say:

If one publicly owned grocery store that brings prices down in the neighborhood is enough to put someone out of business — maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.

This response would be reasonable if Mamdani’s stores were cutting prices by being efficient. In general, it’s good when bad firms get replaced with better ones. But that’s not how the program is designed. (If it were, there would be no need to peg the prices below market rate, and I wouldn’t be so pessimistic.) The program is designed to cut prices below any sustainable market rate by drawing on subsides from city hall. Mamdani’s stores will beat out local stores even if the local stores are more efficient. That means replacing good firms with bad ones. If this happens, more of New York’s resources will be spent operating grocery stores without any improvement for the average New Yorker.

In fact, New Yorkers will be stuck with another cost: lines. If a store is 30% cheaper than everywhere else (with comparable quality), people will flock to buy there. That means long, time-sucking lines.

Now, if Mamdani’s stores were run like normal grocery stores—i.e. without big subsidies—this problem would take care of itself. Mamdani could just open more stores, which would be profitable, and so the city would enjoy cheaper groceries and higher tax revenues. Life would admittedly be tough for the grocers who get outcompeted—but also, they’d be replaced by better stores, so on the whole the city would enjoy more prosperity. Lines would then shrink, because Mamdani stores would be more plentiful. Win-win-win.

But, by design, Mamdani’s program can’t work like this. Thanks to subsidies from the city, Mamdani’s stores can afford to be less efficient, so opening more of them would likely make the city less prosperous. The more Mamdani stores there are, the worse the overall economy of the city. That means no easy solution to the problem of lines.2

(Well, there is one booby prize. If the lines are bad enough, local grocers will still be able to compete for customers—but that’s just to say that the lower prices may not be worth the wait.)

Share

The fundamental problem with Mamdani’s grocery stores is that they are profoundly negative sum. They are destroying economic value (through deadweight loss and misallocation) in order to redistribute a chunk of what remains to those lucky few who live on the right block and shop at the right time of day.

That said, there are real benefits to progressive redistribution, which shouldn’t be gainsaid. The poor gain more from an extra dollar than the rich gain from two extra dollars. But that’s no defense of Mamdani’s stores, since they aren’t even well-designed for redistribution. Notice that anyone can shop there—there is no means testing. By contrast, food stamps are designed to help the poor, and they don’t cause long lines or put more efficient grocers out of business.

Let me also emphasize that none of my arguments rely on conservative, libertarian, or centrist moral principles. I’m just doing basic policy analysis based on boring, well-understood principles of economics—nothing up my sleeves.

My point is that the (legitimate) leftist aim of helping poor people get affordable groceries is not best achieved by plowing tax dollars into high-cost public grocers. There are other means to the same end that wouldn’t face the same problems: food stamps, a basic income, subsidies for competitive grocers—even certain kinds of state-owned enterprises, viz. those that have to compete fairly with the private sector (rather than being allowed to operate at a loss thanks to taxpayer subsidies).

I might be wrong. Maybe Mamdani’s managers will be public-spirited types who outcompete the private alternatives despite lacking an economic incentive to do so. It’s certainly conceivable. But given what we know about economics and psychology, it ain’t likely. Consider this post my confident prediction, to be revisited in a year or two.

Subscribe now

My takeway from Grocery-gate is that the US desperately needs better policy analysis. In general, we are suffering from a degradation of the means being proposed to our political ends. (See also: Trump’s tariffs.)

Mamdani, of course, is not the first person to squander their good intentions of feeding the hungry on policies that do anything but. Let me conclude with a tragedy on a much larger scale: the story of Ethiopia’s famine of the 1980s, as recounted by Stanford’s Leif Wenar.

Ethiopia received significant food aid each year during the decade after the famine of the mid-1980’s, normally equivalent to about 10% of its total food production. During this period, and despite the fact that there was enough food in-country to meet the nutritional needs of all Ethiopians, almost half of Ethiopian households remained food-insecure. A significant amount of food was distributed through food relief projects, yet relatively little of this food reached those in need. Well-off districts were just as likely to receive the imported food as very poor districts, and on average less than 23% of food-insecure households received any food. Moreover, much of the food that was distributed to food-secure households ended up being resold on local markets, depressing food prices and diminishing incentives for domestic production, thus increasing food insecurity and stimulating another campaign for food aid the next year.

Those who donated food to Ethiopia probably had good intentions. They were looking to help. But the actual effects of dumping food into the country were disastrous. The benefits were temporary and ineptly distributed; the shortage of food itself was ultimately exacerbated. The do-gooders’ fatal mistake, as Wenar sees it, was their incuriosity about the way local institutions actually function.

Ironically, this objection is one that we’re used to seeing from the left against effective altruists. When it comes to groceries, the Mamdani left should take its own advice. Instead of running gimmicky stores that waste money, give poor people food stamps or tax refunds.3

The post also ended up on Daily Nous, where there’s been a bunch of commentary—including one grim, highly upvoted comment from a poster going by the name “Stop letting grad students waste their lives.”

Dr. Stop says no one should read career advice, because getting a job is 99% just a matter of having a fancy pedigree.

I have some thoughts on this.

Subscribe now

1. My sympathy to Dr. Stop. It sucks being on the academic job market, and everybody hates being rejected by prospective employers.

2. That said, if you’ve already left academia, why are you reading advice for PhD students?

3. Also, the main advice here is catastrophically wrong. Your job talk doesn’t just matter 1%. It can easily sink an otherwise strong candidacy. This happens many times every year.

4. Corollary: beware highly confident job talk advice from people who have neither given a job talk nor been on a hiring committee.

5. Advisor quality matters, of course, but that’s no reason to ignore career advice. Great advisors are great in part because they give you career advice. That’s one of the main reasons why I posted my job talk advice in the first place—to level the playing field for students who didn’t hit the advisor jackpot. (See also on advisors as promoters.)

6. The best point in here is that the reputation of your PhD program matters a lot—and not always for legitimate reasons. Even students with a strong CV and strong letters might struggle to get interviews if they’re coming from a program out of the “top 20.”

7. Corollary: hiring committees owe it to the field not to overrate pedigree.

8. Of course, I agree with the advice not to make yourself miserable. That’s why I said as much in my post. Read to the end before commenting!

9. A lot of what you do in PhD programs is meant to get you a job—and kind of worthless otherwise. Not so for giving talks. Public speaking is an invaluable skill, and great talks are intrinsically good. They are a kind of achievement, which puts them among the best things in life. Of course, it’s nice if your talk is a smash hit that brings fame and fortune. But you can be proud of a good talk even if nobody else appreciates it.

10. The single most important piece of advice I got while applying to graduate school was: “Don’t go for the sake of getting a job. Imagine you get hit by a bus right after defending your dissertation. Would you regret spending the last five or six years of your life on a PhD? If so, don’t do it.” This was fairly standard advice given to undergrads at UT Austin. It’s absolutely correct, even though in practice it’s hard not to get one’s hopes up once you’re on the PhD track.

There was also a follow-up from a certain satisfied palindrome:

I agree that intrinsic worth is good. But I couldn’t disagree more with the claim that contemporary philosophy is bad. Philosophy is great, actually! If you don’t believe me, read some Jake Nebel (formal ethics), Julia Staffel (epistemology), David Builes (metaphysics), Joe Heath (philosophy of social science), Agnes Callard (ancient), Laura Valentini (political), Lindsay Brainard (creativity & AI),, or Brian Hedden (ethics, etc.)—just to pick some authors off the top of my head.

Also, I have no idea what kind of “fundamental change to our entire economy” is supposed to benefit professional philosophers. More funding for universities would be nice, but that’s not “fundamental.” Maybe Mmhmm wants to bring back the philosopher-king?

Thankfully, there were other comments that I can more easily recommend. For example:

• Louis deRosset says: don’t forget to “rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.”

• Tom Hurka says:

  • “A crucial part of the job talk is the Q&A afterward: the audience want to know if you’re ‘in control of your material’…”

  • “I find the ‘this is the structure of the talk’ bit at the start of a job or other talk a waste of time. If I haven’t heard the talk yet, claims about what section 4 or 5 will be about mean little to me, and am I going to remember?”

• UK Context adds: if there’s no teaching demonstration, people will use the job talk as evidence of a candidate’s teaching ability.

See also (make your talks “double-clickable”), Bryan Frances (look for non-academic talk advice), (brace for rejection), (most people should use one-page handouts), and Graduate Student (at some point you just have to use your best judgment).

Subscribe now

Share

Now I want to share a thought-provoking comment from Caligula’s Goat, which is about the idea of talks as “performances.”

I partially agree. Caligula’s Goat is right that we should prioritize substance above style—“dumplings over flowers,” as the saying goes.1 What ultimately matters in philosophy is the truth (understanding, wisdom, etc.). If we give jobs and accolades to those who merely cloak themselves in the trappings of truth, offering only truthy infotainment, we are going to do serious damage to the field over time and lose touch with our raison d’être.

That said, I don’t think a “good performance” is just a matter of entertainment value. When you go to the symphony, you want to be in touch with the deep stuff that composers are trying to get across. Nothing will kill that experience faster than a bad performance. If the performers are out of tune, out of sync, etc., the entire audience will be unable to get absorbed in the piece. The same is true for an academic talk. If the speaker is stumbling over words, losing their place, apologizing for being unprepared, running far over time, etc., it becomes that much harder for the audience to lock in and think about the underlying ideas.2

A good performance needn’t draw attention to itself. Often the best performances are the ones that do the opposite. Think about the rituals of classical music—the black-and-white dress, the performers’ silence between pieces—which tend to put the performers’ personalities in the background and keep the focus on the music.

That’s not to say that every musician should make the same choices about what goes in the background. Sometimes the clothes and makeup are supposed to stick out. See e.g. the alien outfits of Quebec’s Angine de Poitrine.

So while I agree with Caligula’s Goat about the need to be substantial, I also agree with this reply from Not so fast:

Exactly. Academics need to be good at communication, both among ourselves and with the outside world. We can’t expect the public to trust us if we can’t even competently explain what we’re doing—ideally not just to each other!

A final story. Once, when I was preparing for a job talk, recommended taking lessons from an acting coach. This ended up being excellent advice. I liked doing the silly warm-ups and being forced to notice when I’m rushing, and it was refreshing to think about academic talks from the perspective of an actor. Yes, in a talk, the focus should be on the ideas. But until someone invents an idea ray capable of directly zapping our thoughts into the brains of others, we still have to resort to the ancient art of “saying words,” perhaps with the less ancient aid of “Powerpoint slides.” Since speaking is part of the process, we might as well try to do it properly.

So in closing: thank you, NYC-based actor and acting coach Stacey Linnartz, who I see is still taking new students. Next time I give a talk, I’ll do a silly warm-up in your honor.

As human beings we are part of nature, living, growing, declining, and dying by natural laws similar to those governing other living beings; despite our awesomely distinctive human powers, we share many of the needs, limits, and liabilities of animals and plants. These facts are neither good nor bad in themselves, aside from personal preference and varying conventional values. To say this is to utter a truism which few will deny, but to accept these facts, as facts about oneself, is not so easy — or so common. Much of what naturalists deplore about our increasingly artificial world reflects, and encourages, a denial of these facts, an unwillingness to avow them with equanimity.

—Thomas E. Hill, Jr., “Ideals of Human Excellence and Preserving Natural Environments”

I woke up to some painful news today: the death of Thomas Hill, Jr.—one of the most admired moral philosophers of his time, and the author of one of the great papers of the 20th century, “Servility and Self-Respect.”

This is a huge loss for Tom’s family and loved ones, as well as for his many students (to whom he was devoted). It was also the loss of an important thinker, who had some quietly inspiring ideas about what made human life important—and, as a result, how we should feel about others and ourselves.

I take that back: “quietly inspiring” is too understated. No, Tom didn’t write in a grandiose style. He wasn’t polemical; he was anything but sensationalistic. But his moral philosophy was a profound challenge to our culture in 2020s—an era of looks-maxxing, vice-maxxing, people-shopping, defiantly unrestrained warfare, and fantasies of immortality.

Tom thought that ethics was in large part about our attitudes. Racist hatred, for example, is objectionable for the (obvious) reason that its target doesn’t deserve it. A human’s worth isn’t grounded in something as superficial as skin color; so, if you denigrate someone or their achievements purely on the basis of race, your attitudes involve a kind of moral distortion. But what made Tom’s work special is that he didn’t stop there. What, he asked, must the racists think of themselves? That they’re only worthy of love and respect because they happen to be of the right race? That is a kind of distortion, too—this time at the racist’s own expense. The racist who denigrates others also thereby denigrates the humanity in themselves.

In “Servility and Self-Respect,” Tom makes the same point in the opposite direction. The person who disrespects themselves is, in a way, disrespecting others, by virtue of missing what makes everybody matter. This paper features Tom’s best-known thought experiment, for which he will be remembered for many years: The Deferential Wife, who displays the vice of servility.

This is a woman who is utterly devoted to serving her husband. She buys the clothes he prefers, invites the guests he wants to entertain, and makes love whenever he is in the mood. She willingly moves to a new city in order for him to have a more attractive job, counting her own friendships and geographical preferences insignificant by comparison. She loves her husband, but her conduct is not simply an expression of love. She is happy, but she does not subordinate herself as a means to happiness. She does not simply defer to her husband in certain spheres as a trade-off for his deference in other spheres. On the contrary, she tends not to form her own interests, values, and ideals; and, when she does, she counts them as less important than her husband’s. She readily responds to appeals from Women’s Liberation that she agrees that women are mentally and physically equal, if not superior, to men. She just believes that the proper role for a woman is to serve her family. As a matter of fact, much of her happiness derives from her belief that she fulfills this role very well. No one is trampling on her rights, she says; for she is quite glad, and proud, to serve her husband as she does. (89)

Hill is careful here. The Deferential Wife might not be servile at all, depending on how we fill in the details. Maybe she was brainwashed and never had a way of knowing better? Maybe she can’t leave her husband and is making the best of a bad situation?1 Very possible. But it’s also possible that she simply doesn’t value herself enough—she may be serving her husband “just from laziness, timidity, or a desire for some minor advantage.” That, says Hill, is a moral defect. We shouldn’t let others walk all over us, even if standing up for ourselves requires a bit of effort and courage.

Nor does Hill stop there. Again, he asks, what kind of attitudes must this person have? In particular, think about how they must feel about others. The Deferential Wife is not some kind of subhuman species: she is a human being, with broadly the same cognitive, perceptual, and affective capacities as anybody else.2 If she isn’t worthy of basic respect, then nobody is.

Hill illustrates with another unforgettable example—the German dueling fraternity—though in my view, this example is massively underrated, because almost no philosophers have heard of it. In full:

Imagine a club, say, an old German dueling fraternity. By the rules of the club, each member has certain rights and responsibilties. These are the same for each member regardless of what titles he may hold outside the club. Each has, for example, a right to be heard at meetings, a right not to be shouted down by the others. Some rights cannot be forfeited: for example, each may vote regardless of whether he has paid his dues and satisfied other rules. Some rights cannot be waived: for example, the right to be defended when attacked by several members of the rival fraternity. The members show respect for each other by respecting the status which the rules confer on each member. Now one new member is careful always to allow the others to speak at meetings; but when they shout him down, he does nothing. He just shrugs as if to say, ‘Who am I to complain?’ When he fails to stand up in defense of a fellow member, he feels ashamed and refuses to vote. He does not deserve to vote, he says. As the only commoner among illustrious barons, he feels that it is his place to serve them and defer to their decisions. When attackers from the rival fraternity come at him with swords drawn, he tells his companions to run and save themselves. When they defend him, he expresses immense gratitude—as if they had done him a gratuitous favor. Now one might argue that our new member fails to show respect for the fraternity and its rules. He does not actually violate any of the rules by refusing to vote, asking others not to defend him, and deferring to the barons, but he symbolically disavows the equal status which the rules confer on him. If he ought to have respect for the fraternity, he ought to change his attitude. Our servile person, then, is like the new member of the dueling fraternity in having insufficient respect for a system of rules and ideals. The difference is that everyone ought to respect morality whereas there is no comparable moral requirement to respect the fraternity. (100)

In “Social Snobbery and Human Dignity,” Tom makes a similar point about people who respect only elites and high-achievers. After a winsome disclosure of the author’s own “strong personal aversion to snobbery, extreme enough to raise worries about ‘reverse snobbery’,” he goes on to argue that the snob’s attitudes betray a similar moral error as can be found in the servile person and the racist:

the main fault in snobbery is not error in judging the merits of individuals but rather failure to acknowledge the basic worth of human beings as persons. (156)

by measuring the worth of persons entirely by the variables of social class and/or individual merit, snobs fail to appreciate their own unconditional worth as persons. (157)

The essential error of the chauvinist of any stripe is to place the value of a human life in trifling and superficial things—refined taste, gender or race, etc.—rather than the deep fact that unites us: our shared humanity, the ability we each have to set our own goals and shape our own values, rather than responding heteronomously to our environments like mindless robots or natural slaves.

As I read Tom, he was in awe of the value of humanity—its value as an end in itself, he would surely add—and his touchstone for this was the work of Immanuel Kant. But I think it would be a grave mistake to pigeonhole Tom Hill as a “Kantian,” as if he were a disciple, less original than his contemporaries. To see Hill’s work—on humanity, duties to self, supererogation—as a mere footnote to one of the greats would be an injustice.

Hill was a great ethicist, which means that he has something important to tell us about coping with life and death. I began with a passage from his paper about humanity and nature, where Hill talks about the importance for humans of self-acceptance—not just of particular foibles, but of our most basic condition as parts of the natural world: our mortality, our particularity. Let me conclude with the rest of that passage.

Like the Victorian lady who refuses to look at her own nude body, some would like to create a world of less transitory stuff, reminding us only of our intellectual and social nature, never calling to mind our affinities with “lower” living creatures. The “denial of death,” to which psychiatrists call attention, reveals an attitude incompatible with the sort of self-acceptance which philosophers, from the ancients to Spinoza and on, have admired as a human excellence. My suggestion is not merely that experiencing nature causally promotes such self-acceptance, but also that those who fully accept themselves as part of the natural world lack the common drive to disassociate themselves from nature by replacing natural environments with artificial ones. A storm in the wilds helps us to appreciate our animal vulnerability, but, equally important, the reluctance to experience it may reflect an unwillingness to accept this aspect of ourselves. The person who is too ready to destroy the ancient redwoods may lack humility, not so much in the sense that he exaggerates his importance relative to others, but rather in the sense that he tries to avoid seeing himself as one among many natural creatures. (115)

Tom Hill thought that he was “one among many”—and thought that this was something anyone should be proud of. Rest in Peace, Tom. I’m grateful to have known you; I’m heartbroken by your death; and I wish you were still here for us to learn from.

Subscribe now

Share

Share

Subscribe now

Note: I’ve tried to include a variety of sources, media, and viewpoints, but this is not a comprehensive list. Tell me in the comments what you think I’ve left out!1

Games

• The Parable of the Polygons

  • Created by Vi Hart and Nicky Case, this game lets you play around with Thomas Schelling’s model of segregated neighborhoods. It’s a perfect way to see how micromotives cause macrobehavior.

    

• The Evolution of Trust

  • Another Nicky Case gem—this time, based on Robert Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation. Probably the single best introduction to the Prisoner’s Dilemma that you can find online.

    

  • For more on the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma with noise, see Axelrod’s follow-up The Complexity of Cooperation—in particular the material about “generosity” and “contrition.”

• The Game of Life

  • The definitive zero-player game, John Conway’s Game of Life lets you see how self-sustaining patterns can emerge from extremely simple deterministic rules. Dan Dennett once said every philosopher should have to study it before they’re allowed to start writing.

Talks

• Elinor Ostrom, “Beyond Markets and States”

  • This is the best version of Ostrom’s Nobel Prize lecture—a wonderful mix of theoretical and empirical insights about how people actually solve collective action problems.

  • For more on Ostrom, see Ashley Hodgson’s excellent videos.

• Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone”

  • A precursor to the classic book on community (aka social capital). This talk was five years before Bowling Alone turned Putnam from an academic “big deal” into an actual big deal. You can feel the electricity in the room as people realize they’re in the presence of something much bigger than your usual lecture.

• , “Recent Advances in the Understanding of Human Sociality”

  • A romp through big ideas in the philosophy of social science.

• Geoff Sayre-McCord on Adam Smith

  • Speaking of great speakers…

Subscribe now

Courses

• Ian Shapiro, “Power and Politics”

  • If you subscribe to Big iff True, you knew this was coming. One of the greatest PPE courses ever taught. I especially recommend the lectures on money in politics, distributive politics, and 9/11.

  • See also my interview with Prof. Shapiro about After the Fall, his 2026 book based on this course.

• Ian Shapiro, “Moral Foundations of Politics”

  • Not my fault the guy has two outstanding online courses. Don’t miss the lectures on Rawls, Burke, Locke, Nozick, and the “neoclassical synthesis” of rights and utility.

• John Rawls, “Modern Political Philosophy”

  • Somebody needs to freshen up the audio and chuck in some metadata, but this is still an invaluable resource—a class on political philosophy from the most influential American political theorist of the last century, who was also a famously conscientious teacher.

• David Blight, “The Civil War and Reconstruction”

  • My own view is that, if you want to study PPE, you should try to study at least a little history (and vice versa). Blight’s lectures on 19th-century America are a perfect case in point. You can’t possibly watch these without learning something about political power, ideology, and racism.

    • Bonus: Coates on Blight on Douglass.

  • Speaking of race in America, Clint Smith has a series of shorter videos on Black American History, several of which have great PPE themes: e.g. the vidoes on Women’s Experience under Slavery, Washington vs. Du Bois, and Frederick Douglass.

• Marginal Revolution University

  • An extraordinary resource for econ essentials. Credit to and . Here are some playlists to get you started:

    • Micro

    • Macro

    • Econometrics

    • Supply & Demand

    • The Wealth of Nations (includes a chapter-by-chapter summary—invaluable if you’re about to read Smith)

Other videos

• Veritasium on the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Arrow’s Theorem

• Toby Handfield on Social Choice Theory

• Ashley Hodgson

  • An underrated YouTube channel with tons of great economics explainers.

    • Nash equilibrium

    • Backwards induction and game trees

    • Prospect theory

• Dan Bonevac, “Mill on Freedom of Speech”

  • My favorite conservative philosopher (and one of the most generous teachers I’ve ever met). Dan’s knowledge is astonishingly broad—not many channels have videos on Wittgenstein, Frege, Heidegger, Godel, Plato, and Aquinas. Below is his video on Mill on freedom of speech.

• G.A. Cohen, “Against Capitalism”

  • The Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen—about whom I’ve published a series of posts—lays out the objection that capitalism is unjust because of the forced expropriation of land.

• Brian Leiter and Jamie Edwards, “Marx”

  • Based on their new book, which I found wonderfully clear and informative. There are also comments by Geoffrey Wodke and Steven Durlauf (who is also, by the way, an important contributor to the debate over social capital).

SEP entries

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the best free resource for learning philosophy—by far.

Here are a few pieces relevant to PPE that you might enjoy:

• Exploitation

• Feminist Political Philosophy

• Kant’s Social and Political Philosophy

• Rawls

• Business Ethics

• Philosophy of Economics

• Democracy

• The Free Rider Problem

• Voting

• War

Is there a free Substack I can subscribe to for more free PPE?

Funny you should ask…

In Part 1, we looked at G.A. Cohen’s core objection to capitalism.

Today, we’ll consider a notable response.

Why Not Socialism? argues for socialist ideals using the parable of a camping trip. At the campground, we prefer to be among friends and equals. It would be desirable to make society more like that, says Cohen, even though we don’t yet know any feasible way to run the economy on friendly vibes, as opposed to the “fear and greed” of capitalism.

There’s something charming about this. But it’s a “tepid defense,” says Heath. What kind of socialist won’t even come out and tell you socialism works?

Share

Why Not Capitalism?

Say what you will about Jason Brennan: nobody has ever described him as “tepid.” The arguments of Why Not Capitalism? are more in the style of “guns blazing,” or “dirty bomb aimed at jugular vein.” For example:

Cohen’s ultimate legacy—the ultimate result of his life’s work defending socialism—will be to help us see that from a moral point of view, the intrinsically best society is capitalist. Cohen also became famous in part for criticizing the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick. In Chapter 4, I’ll explain that another legacy of Cohen’s work will be to show that Nozick was basically right all along about the nature of utopia. (p. 24)

Even the cover art is a dunk:

Personally, I liked teaching this book alongside Cohen’s. Brennan makes a number of interesting points that are worth any student’s time.

For example, Brennan argues that Cohen’s use of “camping trip” stacks the deck against capitalism. Cohen lovingly describes all the good things about his socialist version of the trip—bonhomie, sharing, etc.—but none of the downsides. When he imagines the more capitalist camping trip, he does the opposite, focusing on greed and fear. Brennan calls this the “the essential flaw” of Why Not Socialism?: instead of comparing ideal socialism to ideal capitalism, or nonideal socialism to nonideal capitalism, Cohen compares ideal socialism to nonideal capitalism.1

To even the odds, Brennan presents a capitalist spin on Cohen’s camping trip—the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Village. In this idyllic community, the villagers share some facilities but also enjoy their own private spheres. They all “cooperate with a common desire that everyone have the freedom and resources to flourish under their own conceptions of the good life” (p. 26). Some villagers work for others—like Daisy Duck at Minnie Mouse’s Bowtique—but wages are fair, and the workplace is respectful. Villagers do their part, have fun when work’s done, act with extreme kindness, and accept one another’s differences. It’s a utopia. To “reinforce” that point, Brennan invites you to consider an alternative Clubhouse where the villagers act like socialists. Donald murders millions of people as he forcibly nationalizes the farmland. Goofy throws dissenters in the gulag. Minnie’s “five-year plans” wreck the economy. Mickey installs himself as Premier for life. It’s dystopia of coercion and deprivation.

Why is the capitalist Clubhouse Village more attractive? Brennan highlights five principles:

1. Voluntary Community: Everyone lives together without threats of violence.

2. Mutual Respect: People tolerate each other and value diversity.

3. Reciprocity: Each has something to offer to society, and people take pride in being able to exchange value for value.

4. Social Justice: Nobody has to live an indecent life, thanks to the norms of trade and property rights, inter alia.

5. Beneficence: Everyone is motivated to help those in need.

Now, there are three types of objections you might have to this list.

First, you might deny that these principles—however nice they sound in the abstract—are really so desirable to realize in society. For example, anti-liberals might argue that mutual respect is bad when some people hold views that aren’t worthy of respect. Should we tolerate totalitarian ideologies? “Harmful” views about gender? Would you value a diversity of opinions about whether the Jews caused 9/11?2

Second, you might grant the goodness of the principles while denying that they are characteristic of capitalism. In a review, Dan Iley-Williamson contends that all of Brennan’s principles are compatible with socialism. Even if that’s not right, readers may wonder: why should any sort of social justice be essential to, or even compatible with, capitalism?

There’s something right about this challenge. But let me try to stick up for Brennan a little here, since I think he’s making an underrated point. When we talk about the basic legal institutions of capitalist societies—property law, contract law, criminal law, etc.—we’re usually critiquing them. (If not just taking them for granted.) But it’s at least arguable that these institutions are, in part, the legacy of historic moral victories. To see what I mean, consider a pre-modern struggle over contracts—the saga of the colleganza in medieval Venice. The colleganza was a type of arrangement between an investor and a traveler: the investor would fund a trading voyage, the traveler would actually go on said voyage, and afterwards the two would split the profits. Of course, any Marxist would call this division of labor exploitative—why should the rich guy who stays home get to make any money? But at the time, the colleganza was seen as a threat to idle rich guys, since it gave enterprising commoners a path to nobility and prosperity.3 Puga and Trefler (2014) argue that political elites responded to the colleganza by cracking down and installing a very different set of legal institutions, designed to entrench the incumbent elites—a disaster for both community and equality.

…starting in 1297, a small group of particularly wealthy merchants blocked political and economic competition: they made parliamentary participation hereditary and erected barriers to participation in the most lucrative aspects of long-distance trade. Over the next two centuries this led to a fundamental societal shift away from political openness, economic competition, and social mobility and toward political closure, extreme inequality, and social stratification.

In sum, it’s an interesting question whether Brennan’s principles are all desirable and all capitalist, but even if we disagree with him, we shouldn’t go overboard, caricaturing market institutions as—always and everywhere—pure fear-and-greed machines designed by wealthy elites. Sometimes the elites are the ones trying to constrain markets, either to protect themselves from competition or prevent commoners from climbing up. It’s worth remembering that our modern legal system is, in some important respects, an inclusive institution worth preserving.

Subscribe now

Finally, you might find yourself thinking, this whole Mickey Mouse style of argument is ridiculous! Brennan is just stuffing all the good stuff he likes into this community and calling it capitalist. How does that prove that capitalism is morally superior? Fair question! But did you ask the same about Cohen’s camping trip? The styles of argument are, by design, quite similar. (Of course, you might think that neither argument is persuasive, but then the socialist isn’t going to get much juice out of Cohen.)

Fraternité bros

Now for my favorite part of Brennan’s book, which has to do with community and equality. Recall that, for Cohen, community requires more than warm fuzzy feelings. It may require us to redistribute people’s just holdings, since inequality makes it impossible for us to relate to one another as fellows.

We cannot enjoy full community, you and I, if you make, and keep, say, ten times as much money as I do, because my life will then labor under challenges that you will never face, challenges that you could help me to cope with, but do not, because you keep your money. (p. 35)

Cohen illustrates with a lovely example: the bus-rider and the car-driver.

I am rich, and I live an easy life, whereas you are poor, because of regrettable choices and/or bad option luck, and not, therefore because of any lack of equality of opportunity. You have to ride the crowded bus every day, whereas I pass you by in my comfortable car. One day, however, I must take the bus, because my wife needs the car. I can reasonably complain about that to a fellow car-driver, but not to you. I can’t say to you: “It’s awful that I have to take the bus today.” There is a lack of community between us of just the sort that naturally obtains between me and the fellow car-driver. And it will show itself in many other ways, for we enjoy widely different powers to care for ourselves, to protect and care for offspring, to avoid danger, and so on. (pp. 35–6)

In short: we need equal incomes, or else we’ll live in what Tom Nagel once called “essentially ununifiable worlds.” For Cohen, that means bye bye, community.

But does economic inequality always undermine communal relatability? Brennan has his doubts. Think of communities based on a shared hobby—Brennan’s example is guitar geeks. Or consider the kinds of communities that can exist within an academic hierarchy.

As a graduate student, I had little difficulty being in community with my advisors, though they made at least ten times my income. Despite these differences, we had and have much stronger community with one another than we do with many others who have identical wealth. (p. 126)

I think Brennan’s point is a fair one. Cohen underrates the possibility of being in community with people who aren’t your equals.4

How could the socialist respond? They might concede that community is possible when there are relatively small income differences. But can any ordinary person be in community with a centi-billionaire? Forget the car: what about private jets? Private space shuttles? Private companies building space shuttles? Private mega-bunkers across the globe?

Maybe Cohen’s principle of community gets its revenge when we think of wealth on a larger scale.5

Pluralism and liberté

But Brennan has one more trick up his sleeve—pluralism. If differences undermine community, it won’t be enough to equalize incomes. What if we have different religious beliefs? Different values, tastes, and aspirations? Isn’t it bad to stamp out diversity, and perverse to do it in the name of community? Brennan thinks so, illustrating with a “Borg Camping Trip.”

Like Star Trek’s Borg Collective, everyone is the same. There are no differences in taste, values, appearance, mannerism, talents, skills, behaviors, preferences, ideas, beliefs, ethnicity, religion, lifestyle, and dreams. After all, they reason, the more distinct they are from each other, the harder it is for them to understand or empathize with each other, and so the harder it is for them to maintain community. (p. 120)

Brennan finds this “repugnant”: community is just “one value among many,” and the Borg Camping Trip maximizes it until it “destroys everything else that matters.”

One way to think of this is as a symptom of Cohen’s own lack of pluralism, specifically in his theory of values. Yes, he has equality and community—égalité and fraternité, as they were called during the French Revolution. But what about the Revolution’s other value? Whatever happened to liberté?6

Subscribe now

Conclusion

If you’ve just read Cohen for the first time, I can easily recommend Brennan as a next step. Right-leaning students will get their first taste of a lot of important ideas—like the leveling-down objection. Left-leaning students will confront all sorts of provocative questions—like “Do we really need equality in order to have community?”7

But we’re not done yet. In Part 3, we’ll encounter one of the decade’s most ambitious attempts at philosophical jiu-jitsu—a dense, demanding paper full of high-proof insights about cooperation and human nature. We’re taking a cold, hard look at ’s argument that, for creatures like us, in large societies like ours, Cohen’s own principle of community is best realized by none other than his arch-nemesis: market capitalism.

Will Joe pull the rabbit out of the hat—or will the magic trick fall flat?

5

At some point, however, I think the Cohenite socialist is going to have to go beyond relatability to talk about other aspects of community, like “thin trust” (which even unequal societies might have in spades) and “the dark side of social capital” (e.g. suffocating obligations to share with kin and friends, greater familial control over marriage and work, increased racial conflict due to “bonding social capital” within groups, ritualized inculcations of loyalty).

Sadly there isn’t a big knob on top of human society with “COMMUNITY” written on it—and even if there were, cranking it up might stir up energies that Cohen would rather leave dormant. It’s worth remembering that when George Orwell was trying to persuade England to go socialist, he appealed primarily to patriotism—not exactly the go-to value of American socialists. For example:

That’s the DSA’s Darializa Avila Chevalier, Democratic nominee for NY’s 13th district. When pressed about the deleted tweet, she didn’t exactly take it back.

To be clear, I’m not saying anything about whether patriotism and nationalism are good. I’m just saying there’s a tension between thinking patriotism is cringe, as many contemporary socialists do, and basing your socialism in love of community, as Cohen does. In the 21st century, the most potent communitarian force in the world is probably flag-waving, patriotic nationalism. Even people’s most heartfelt commitments to political principles—whether to socialism, liberalism, or democracy—don’t have the same resonance. When Ukrainians volunteer to fight in the fourth year of a deadly war, do you think they’re fighting for the timeless principles of liberal democracy? They’re fighting for Ukraine.

Subscribe now

The job talk—typically on campus, sometimes on Zoom—is the final boss of the academic job market. Don’t underestimate the challenge. You can’t just coast on the rest of your materials: unless you’re already world famous, you probably need a strong job talk. You can’t rely on the weakness of the competition, either: you have to convince people to vote for you, not just against the others, which means turning in a solid performance in your talk and Q&A.

My sense is that PhD students aren’t getting enough advice about job talks. And what advice they do get tends to come too late, which leaves them scrambling.

The good news:

1. Anyone can learn to give a killer talk.

2. Once you can do that, you’re 90% of the way to a killer job talk.

So here is my advice for (1) giving great talks, and (2) preparing a job talk in particular. This advice is mostly aimed at PhD students in philosophy, but there are also some tips about public speaking in general.

Leave a comment

1. Good talks

There are two points everyone should internalize about talks.

The first is that they are a kind of communication—note the prefix—which means that they are bilateral, not “one way streets.” You have to fit your talk to your audience. What do they like? What do they already know? What, to them, would count as an interesting destination? What kinds of arguments and evidence do they find persuasive? What issues will they let you bracket? Would kind of tone would they see as appropriate?

Years ago I gave a talk on a hot-button political topic (my first), and it went pretty well. A few weeks later, I gave basically the same talk at a different department and bombed. (Seriously, it was the most awful experience of my career. No sleep that night, nightmares for weeks.) Then I reworked the talk—changing the tone to be more serious, adding in more substance, clarifying the argument, making concessions to my opponents where necessary—and soon after, with another tough audience, the talk went back to a hit. I had gotten complacent after the first talk purely because the audience had been a lucky fit. Don’t make my mistake!1

The second key fact is that talks are not merely communication: they are also a performance. You are onstage. Yes, you are trying to convey an idea to the audience. But you are also, simultaneously, trying to show them how good you are at conveying ideas. (Think of the double-function of conversations during a first date or at a job interview.) I don’t just mean that you’re trying to convince the audience that you are oh-so-good. You’re doing the good thing. When you pull off your act in the spotlight, the audience will feel like you valued their time. It will also be a story they tell other people.

So many talks that could have been successful end up flopping because they’re not serious performances. The first words are “Um, so, um, so.” The speaker repeatedly apologizes for being unprepared. Typos mar the slides; filler desecrates the handout. Such gaffes are always worth avoiding. Even if, ultimately, they don’t interfere with your attempt to communicate, they will still detract from your performance.2

Those are the big need-to-know principles. Once you have tattooed them on your soul, you are ready to start filling up your bag of tricks. (The third principle, I suppose, is that you’ll need a trick bag.)

Here are 13 of my own tricks and tips, to help get you started.

1. If possible, have a story or example to share within the first minute. (As the creators of Breaking Bad learned with their cold opens, you have a lot of freedom in that first minute. Why waste it on pablum?)

2. Notice when you’re having to explain your examples at tedious length—or worse, apologize. Usually a sign you need better examples.

3. Don’t rush to the key question—or your answer—before the audience is ready for it. The audience needs to be able both to understand the question and appreciate its significance.

4. Don’t take forever to get to the first interesting question. If it takes you 30 minutes to prepare the audience, you may need to find a simpler or broader question to use as a lauching pad for the bulk of the talk. Once you’re in orbit, you can refuel and ask your more difficult, detailed question—the one that you would use when describing your contribution to a specialist. (You usually want to start out with something like, “Does evolution undermine objective morality?” as opposed to “Can we rebut the standard objection to the two-factor response to Street’s debunking argument against moral realism?”)

5. Plan a few goldilocks questions—not so easy as to be boring, not so difficult as to be intimidating. These can be questions that you go on to answer. Or they could be for the audience. You don’t need to be naturally charismatic to ask artful, engaging questions, but you may need to plan ahead.

6. According to legend, Gideon Rosen asks his students, “What’s the best objection to your view?” Something similar applies to talks. What’s the most fearsome question someone could ask? Expect someone to ask it.

7. You should also expect people to question your assumptions; to prepare for that, try to figure out which assumptions you can relax and which you truly need. According to almost-certainly-apocryphal legend, Gideon Rosen used to ask colloquium speakers, “What’s the weakest modal logic in which your argument is true?” Overkill in 99.9% of cases—but that’s the right kind of thing to ask yourself!

   

8. You should spend most of your time on your main topic. If you linger too long on peripheral topics, you’ll disorient the audience. Would you want to watch a film where the focus is constantly drifting to the background for no discernible reason? (One useful exercise is to ask yourself, for each chunk of your talk, what the focus is supposed to be. If the answer is ever “This cool idea that’s not really central but I didn’t want to cut it,” revise the talk.)

9. Avoid long stretches of monotony. How long since the last time you posed a question? Are all your slides the same shape? (As in, the same format, density, etc.?) Are all your sentences, paragraphs, and quotations the same length? Is there a part that builds tension? A part that releases it?3

10. Don’t be afraid to repeat your main points. Even the most alert audience members are going to zone out for a few minutes eventually. It’s good to have short reminders every now and then, especially for things that your last audience stumbled over. Try to be intentional about this; you want the recap to be shorter and sweeter than the canonical statement, for instance.

11. Practice, practice, practice—and practice. Find as many opportunities as possible to give your talks and make a point of polishing them over time. (Polishing is itself something you get better at with practice.) Ruthlessly pick apart your past talks like a coach watching game footage—at some point, you should also literally watch footage of yourself. Take note of disappointments as well as successes. You want the process of improvement to feel rewarding. If you find it depressing, don’t just accept that as a psychological given and get discouraged. Try to change your mindset. Mix things up.

12. On that note, beware of psyching yourself out. If you’re really stressed about a talk, ask yourself why. There’s a good chance that you’re setting some expectation on yourself that, on reflection, isn’t reasonable or necessary. For example, you might be expecting yourself to give a talk in someone else’s style. Nomy Arpaly memorizes her talks and gives them without notes. Andrew Lee’s slides look like they were made by a team of graphic designers sent back in time from the techno-future. Steve Yablo’s talks will make you (or, at least, me) cry laughing. These are all great people to learn from—but you don’t have to give talks like any of them. I remember Xinhe Wu gave a talk on logic at MIT that was in a completely different style—no jokes, no slides, just carefuly planned use of the whiteboard, with instructions in her notebook. The talk was superb.4

13. How should you answer questions? This is going to sound almost like a tautology, but I promise it’s helpful. Address the main point, and try to be brief. It’s fine if you need a moment to pause. You don’t have to say thanks after every question. If time is short and there’s a long queue, you typically don’t have to answer all parts of a multi-parter. When in doubt, focus on the main point. I also find it helpful to give the gist of the answer straightaway—you know, “Yes,” or “Mostly,” or “Only if property dualism is true.” That will buy you time and keep the audience oriented. Plus it’s a good way to remind yourself that your answers should be pointed and clear, not convoluted and aimless.

Subscribe now

Bonus tricks for Zoom talks:

1. Make sure you have a decent microphone. Even a low-end USB microphone can be a game-changer. Test the audio. Get a feel for how the sound changes depending on your distance from the mic. You wouldn’t believe how much of a difference good mic technique can make.

   

2. Usually, a Zoom talk should have slides.5 Make sure you don’t get bogged down on any particular slide—people will get bored. As Masahiro Sakurai says, the essence of presenting is speed. This goes double for Zoom. But so does the rule that you should repeat your main points!

3. By the way, have I mentioned that you should repeat your main points?

4. Use an ethernet cable to deal with choppy wifi. If the internet drops mid-talk, remain chill. You’ll be fine. Panicking never helps.

5. Put some thought into your background, camera placement, lighting, and outfit (some clothes look different on camera). As with the talk itself, you don’t need to conform to any particular style for Zooming, but you do want to develop a style that feels good to you.

6. No gigantic text blocks on slides. This is a nice rule in general, but for Zoom it’s simply non-negotiable. Some people will be watching on their phones. Other people may be looking away from the screen. You have to use your slides carefully. You don’t want to be expecting people to read the whole paper off of them. If you want to keep yourself honest, try forcing yourself to use larger font sizes. Remember that blank space is your friend.

   

Bonus tip for polishing:

• Don’t just give yourself huge, vague goals—like make the talk better. It’s easier to improve when you have one or two specific goals in mind. When I gave my practice job talk in grad school, a lot of people told me that I was cracking too many self-deprecating jokes. (Notice this deflects attention from the talk, a common feature of nervous tics.) My friends had a great idea: the next time I gave a talk, I should try to do it without any jokes. That was a pivotal moment for me. Though I still use jokes from time to time, I broke the habit of overusing them. (What’s your worst talk habit right now? How could you break it?)

Share

2. Job talks

Every year, people ask me for help selecting a job talk. Here is what I tell them.

Almost always, the right talk is the best talk. It’s nice to pick a talk that specifically fits the vibe of a department, but if there is a significant drop in quality from Talk A to Talk B, then the default should be to give Talk A unless there are extremely clear and compelling reasons to switch.

What kinds of reasons might there be? Here are three big ones.

1. It’s a bad look to give your writing sample as a job talk.

2. If the job is in a certain subfield, your job talk should be, too.

3. Don’t pick a talk if credible sources tell you it’s a terrible fit for the department.

The upshot is that, before you go on the market, you want to have multiple potential job talks, plus lots of time to polish them. That way you can see which projects work best as talks. The ideal is to practice your potential talks in front of a variety of audiences before you start submitting applications. (This is why I said some advice about job talks comes too late. It’s best if you start submiting to conferences and volunteering for WIPs a year or so before job talk season—though a late start isn’t the end of the world.)

There are other, lesser principles worth knowing about. It’s good if the job talk develops a substantial original thesis, rather than focusing on existing scholarship. You want non-experts to be able to engage in Q&A. Ideally, the talk will point intriguingly towards the path of your future research. The talk should sit comfortably within the realm of your expertise.

Bottom line: if you have a strong, original talk that’s in the right area—and it’s not the same as your writing sample—you’re probably going to nail it.

In closing, let me lament that nailing your job talk isn’t sufficient for getting a job. There are all kinds of inscrutable, arbitrary reasons why you might not get a certain academic job for which you’re qualified. It bears remembering:

• Most departments vote together on whom to hire, which leads to all sorts of collective action problems and path dependency.

• Hiring is a commitment (esp. on the tenure track), and there are tons of qualified fish in the academic sea; departments are therefore often willing to kick the can down the road and into the next academic year.

• Rarely do departments agree on what they want: tastes tend to diverge wildly, there may be factional logrolls (e.g. last year the epistemologists got their favorite candidate, so now it’s the historians’ turn)—and much of this is impossible for anyone outside the department to predict, or even to discern ex post, especially if the university’s administration also has a hand in the process.

Among many other factors.

My last piece of advice is not to put too much pressure on yourself in the moment. Find something you enjoy about giving talks—yes, even job talks—or think about the satisfaction you get from becoming a better presenter by your own lights.

In sum: rather than dwelling on the stakes and the glory, try to relax, focus on the stuff that’s under your control, and be grateful for the chance to practice one of the oldest human pastimes in front of what is almost certainly a very intelligent audience. It takes guts to stand up in front of a room and talk about your research—doubly so when the audience is full of objection-loving academics. To those about to give their first job talk, or really any talk, I salute you.

And if this advice ends up coming in handy (or, you know, dooms your career), please do send me an email (or, you know, exact your righteous vengeance). Good luck out there.

Further Resources:

• on how to give an above-average talk

• on how not to give a talk

• Patrick Winston on how to speak

• [Your suggestions here]

Leave a comment

Now, being from Dallas, TX—where the hottest day ever recorded was 45°C (113°F)—I’m no stranger to heat waves. But in Germany it was totally different. Almost nobody here has air conditioning—a mere 6% of households. My apartment isn’t air conditioned. My office isn’t air conditioned. By the time I realized how hot the weekend would be, it was too late to get something on Amazon (given the long shipping times), and I had to walk across town in the scorching heat to buy a fan from the electronics shop (€65 for a basic model). I spent most of my weekend parked in front of the fan with a wet towel draped over my shoulders. I slept poorly and got vanishingly little done.

Of course, I was one of the lucky ones. Imagine being a German doctor, forced to work in the heat—yes, if you can believe it, most German hospitals don’t have AC except in a few rooms. (Even some ICUs lack AC.) Imagine being a German teacher, tasked with drilling students on math problems in the sweltering heat. Imagine being an elderly person, living alone, disabled, with no one nearby to check on you.

In case you don’t know, heat is deadly for old people. This is something I learned from experience years ago after someone in my family died in the Texas heat—his car had broken down and he was forced to search for help on foot.

That was an emergency. Meanwhile, in Europe, heat deaths are becoming routine. The WHO estimates that 175,000 Europeans die every year from the heat—that’s more deaths per capita than US gun homicides! Already 5,000 excess deaths were recorded in Germany just during the week of the last heat wave. And these are deaths that can be easily stopped: we have the technology, and it’s called AC. To share just one rough figure, estimates that AC could save 100,000 European lives per year.

Barreca et al. (2016) find that heat deaths in America declined by about 75% after 1960, and that “the diffusion of residential air conditioning explains essentially the entire decline in hot day–related fatalities”. Essentially, wherever AC gets rolled out, heat-related death plunges. Taking Barreca’s estimate and applying it to Europe suggests that as many as 100,000 European lives — 0.013% of the population — could be saved every year if the 80% of European households who don’t have AC were to get it.

In short: kids can’t learn, adults can’t do their jobs, and the elderly are at serious risk of death—so, build more AC!

Open and shut case, right?

Subscribe now

Not everyone thinks so. Across Europe and now even parts of North America, environmentalists, journalists, and politicians have been deriding AC as a merely temporary fix, a way of illicitly dodging the “root cause” of rising temperatures—namely, climate change, caused by a rise in greenhouse gases.

I don’t know whether to call this clueless or malevolent. But it ain’t right.

Before I go off on this nonsense, let me emphasize that it’s not just a figment of econ Substack’s imagination. Look at this piece from CNN last month:

But experts warn AC may be a quick reprieve from scorching temperatures but it gobbles up energy, most of which still comes from planet-heating fossil fuels.

Using fossil fuel-powered AC increases planet-heating pollution, which in turn increases temperatures, fueling “a vicious cycle of worsening climate change,” said Radhika Khosla, an associate professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford.

Note the phrase “quick reprieve.” Just a few days later, the New York Times was similarly dismissive:

Everyone agrees something must be done. But not everyone agrees on what that should be.

Increasingly, the answer from right-wing politicians is to focus on a short-term fix that almost everyone agrees is necessary — the installation of air-conditioning units in European homes, schools, public buildings and hospitals.

During intense heat waves, calling for improvement of the sometimes crumbling infrastructure of aging European cities can be an effective way of drawing attention to that problem without saying much about the longer-term, underlying cause: rising greenhouse gas emissions.

There it is: “short-term fix,” though at least they call it “necessary.” (It’s depressingly easy to find further examples.)

If you think this is idle rhetoric, think again. Many European governments are not only discouraging the use of ACs: they will use their monopoly on violence to make you rip them out. In North London, local authorities forced homeowners to remove their AC units for the sake of the “local micro-climate.” Sorry, only permanent solutions allowed!

But dismissing AC as a mere “short-term fix” is deeply confused, for two simple reasons.

First, AC is a permanent solution to a legitimate problem. The problem is that people are too hot. AC cools them down, by cooling the rooms where they spend most of their time. True, AC uses electricity, which can mean more greenhouse gas emissions. But:

• We shouldn’t ban things just because they use electricity—otherwise we’d have to ban lights, phones, laptops, fridges, ovens, vacuums, and laundry machines.

• We can always just create more green energy by investing in solar, wind, and nuclear power infrastructure.

In other words, if you want a permanent solution, you want everyone to have AC powered by green energy.

Second, cutting emissions doesn’t actually solve the problem. To repeat, the problem at issue is that people are already too hot. If we cut greenhouse gas emissions, we will stop raising the equilibrium temperature of the planet, which is obviously good for all the obvious reasons. But the CO₂ in the air won’t just magically disappear as a reward for our virtue. Cutting emissions doesn’t reverse global warming.1 It won’t make even the slighest dent in the 175,000 annual excess deaths. Yes, it will prevent the problem from getting worse, but that’s a ridiculously low place to set the bar for our climate policies. Why should anyone tolerate the status quo of widespread preventable suffering?

Part of the confusion may be due to blindness: some people just refuse to see the suffering of ordinary people, caused by excess heat, as a problem worth solving.

But I also suspect that the AC-haters are falling prey to a philosophical error I like to call the root cause fallacy—the baseless assumption that every problem should only be solved at the deepest metaphysical level.

Sometimes, of course, it’s smart to go after root causes. Getting your cavity filled is better than taking ibuprofen. Calling a plumber to fix your leaky ceiling is better than putting out a bucket. But there are also many cases where targeting the root cause is prohibitively costly. James Madison argued that we shouldn’t try to remove the root causes of “factions” in democracy, because that would require either abolishing basic liberties (a remedy “worse than the disease”) or imposing ideological conformity (an “impracticable” fantasy). Other times, the root cause of a problem simply has no solution. There is no way to “solve the problem” that each of us is mortal, for example, but we should still be grateful for “short-term fixes” like medicine and surgery.2

Subscribe now

In the case of Europe’s heat waves, I enthusiastically agree that the root cause is climate change. I also agree that part of the solution should be big investments in green energy, which will mitigate warming over the next decades.

But when hospitals are heating up, schools are shutting down, and elderly people are dying en masse, you can’t seriously tell me that “ensure the world is only slightly hotter by 2050” counts as an adequate solution. People’s basic interests are at stake here! If your political team stands for stripping out ACs, while your opponents promise ACs for everyone, you are setting yourself up for an electoral shellacking.

I’ll end with a quiz about France, where, by the way, only 7% of schools have AC. Here are some quotes from a certain French politician:

It is high time that France rolled out a major air conditioning equipment plan.

It is absurd to have people die because of the heat.

It’s crazy to tell families to stop working from one day to the next because schools can’t take our kids anymore, while telling them to go to the local movie theater, which is air-conditioned.

And here are quotes from the other side of the spectrum:

Individual air conditioning is a scourge.

We mustn’t do it. Installing air conditioning everywhere means causing more harm.

If our only answer is air conditioning everywhere, then we will aggravate the situation!

Which party do you think is doing a better job of showing that they care about the material interests of French voters?

Share

And yes, those first quotes are from the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, while the latter quotes are from the French Socialists, France Unbowed, and the Ecologists (France’s Green Party). But let me emphasize that neither side here is a monolith, and the fate of the debate is hardly a matter of inflexible destiny. Here is Marine Tondelier, another Ecologist, when pressed about AC:

I’ve never been against air conditioning. We’ve always said that the priority should be combating climate change, and that when that isn’t enough, since inaction is the inevitable consequence, we have to adapt, and that in certain areas, for certain populations, air conditioning has become essential. That’s always been my position.

“We have to adapt” is—excuse me—a damn fine message for 2026. Let’s hope others wise up before it’s too late.

“Professor Cohen, how many Fellows of All Souls does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“Change?!?”

The Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen, who spent much of his career at Oxford’s All Souls College, was one of the funnier academics of his time. Here’s his bug-eyed impression of a distinguished German political philosopher (the key word being “German”):

No greater freedom can be imagined for a man than absolute, blind submission to an unjust law.

Or take Cohen’s impression of his advisor Gilbert Ryle:

Thinking and meaning are the same kinds of thing, but they’re not the same type of thing, because kinds and types are different sorts of things, even though they’re alike in nature, since sorts and natures, though similar in character, differ in dimension, because characters and dimensions, though akin to another in form, are contrasting in significance.

Peak analytic philosophy.

Subscribe now

Now, about the Marxism. Cohen wrote a number of important books and articles on socialist political philosophy. My favorite older Cohen article is “The Labor Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation,” which rejects Marx’s theory of value while trying to recover the argument that capitalism is exploitative. Of the later papers, I might pick “Rescuing Conservatism,” in which Cohen returns to the topic of value, this time arguing that valuable objects should be preserved for their own sakes—not created or destroyed merely to maximize the total quantity of value in the world. (He considers the “ghastly scenario” of a man who gradually replaces more and more of his “fleshy parts” with slick artificial substitutes. Today, one might imagine the man outsourcing his mental labors to AI.) I’ll also shout out “Reason, Humanity, and the Moral Law,” which shows off Cohen’s deep knowledge of the history of thought. His students tell me Cohen was a slow reader; his papers prove he was using that time wisely.

But if you’re a student of philosophy, you most likely encountered Cohen through a tiny book with a rose on the cover called Why Not Socialism?

Here’s my even tinier synopsis.

Why Not Socialism?

Many people think socialism would be not only infeasible, but undesirable as a model for big, modern societies. But consider a smaller sort of society: the camping trip. When camping, people aren’t trying to take advantage of each other; no one is withholding their help in order to bargain for a bigger payday from the other campers; no one has to be afraid of being ripped off by anyone else; no one is trying to amass a fortune and become the pooh-bah of the forest. Instead, people treat each other as equals, always in a spirit of fellowship. When I cook your dinner by the campfire, I’m not just after your money. Nor am I doing you a favor (whether to put you in my debt or merely to express my affection). No: I’m serving you because I value the community we’re a part of, in which we all serve each other. We are all in it together, and—in contrast to our actual society, where rich and poor live in two disparate worlds—on the camping trip, we all can relate to one another.1

Cohen’s hope is that you will see something attractive in the camping trip even if you don’t consider yourself a socialist. In particular, he thinks you’ll be drawn to two features of the trip:

1. Equality: no one has a head start merely because of things like race, gender, parental wealth, or natural talent.2

2. Community: people act out of mutual benevolence (we want to be serving each other), and we’re all able to relate to one another.3

Now then. Given that these principles are desirable on a small scale, wouldn’t they also be desirable on a larger scale?

Cohen admits we’re not going to have the same kind of community in a big society like the UK or USA that we might have in a tight-knit group of 12. It would be incoherent to have 300 million BFFs. As Judy Thomson puts it in The Realm of Rights,

the possibility of X’s forming a personal attachment to Y rests on the possibility that at least some of Y’s interests will come to be more in X’s own interest than is the interest of the group as a whole—X has to be capable of preferring Y to the group. (p. 223)

Still, Cohen thinks, friendship comes in degrees. We can’t all be BFFs, but wouldn’t it still be nice if we could all be friendlier? Cohen’s term for this is “general social friendship” (p. 52).

Perhaps one component of Cohen’s imagined community is what sociologists call “thin” trust, i.e. the kind of trust that people have towards anonymous strangers in their community. Think of people who leave their homes unlocked, or who ask a stranger at a coffee shop to keep an eye on their laptop.

But Cohen emphasizes something else—viz. that social intercourse should be nontransactional. When we buy and sell things on the market, we are trying to get something from each other. The butcher and baker aren’t giving you food because they love you. They’re transacting. To Cohen, that means they’re each obeying two terrible masters—fear and greed. They’re greedy for your money and afraid you won’t hand it over. They know that whatever they get from you is going to be conditional on providing what you want. This is the fact that made Adam Smith so impressed with the “invisible hand.” Cohen thinks it’s disgusting. The desirability of socialism consists in the promise that we might have a prosperous society that runs on mutual benevolence instead of base selfishness.4

Is that feasible? You’d expect Cohen to argue “yes,” but he doesn’t—even if he could win the political battle to abolish markets, he doesn’t think we know how to make socialism sustainable. Cohen doesn’t believe in Soviet-style central planning. He rejects the speculative schemes put forward by other academics (such as Joseph Carens). Cohen’s position is merely that the socialist shouldn’t give up hope. Someday, somehow, someone might be able to make socialism work. As a defense of socialism, this is—to quote —surprisingly “tepid.”5

Subscribe now

Rescuing Cohen

Why would Cohen write a book like this—one that’s so ambivalent about the system that Cohen so badly wants to see realized?

One possibility is that Cohen isn’t thinking all that strategically. He’s wary of the current proposals for socialist planning, but still deeply connected to socialist ideals. The book is just an honest window into his conflicted soul ca. 2009. I do like this reading, but it makes the book out to be a rather sad confessional. The author has given up on socialism until further notice, but simply can’t bear to admit to himself that he’s—by any objective standard—a capitalist. (If he prefers capitalism to all the going alternatives, what else could he be?)

That said, I want to propose a different reading. I think Cohen sees himself as a tragic figure—born too late to have faith in totalitarianism, but too early to know what the alternative will be. He knows there isn’t going to be socialism next week. But this can’t be the end of economic history, he insists. There has to be something better than this—something that comes after the “predatory phase of human development.”6

Think of Cohen like a suddenly enlightened ancient Roman—call him Jerrius. He’s at a gladiator fight, watching this barbaric spectacle of two human beings hacking each other to the death. This is disgusting, Jerrius thinks. Civilized people shouldn’t treat each other like this—and any system that forces them to do so is intolerably brutal. But when Jerrius tells his Roman buddies about his misgivings, they laugh him off. Sure, it would be nice if we could all be entertained by harmless foot races. But there’s no way it could work. Any society as prosperous as Rome needs a colosseum-like “escape valve” for the population’s violent energies. There. Is. No. Alternative. They’ve got a point, Jerrius admits. I can’t imagine an alternative now. But humanity is young! Who knows what kind of enlightened ideas will emerge in the next two millennia? Given how manifestly base and cruel the gladiator fights are, surely there will be some way, however unforeseeable, for us to get by without them in the future. I bet against the indefinite survival of such barbarism.

That, I think, is the essential core of Cohen’s objection to capitalism. Yes, the present alternatives are all bad, and the future alternatives are unknown. But given how absolutely terrible capitalism is—the greed, the fear, the barbarity—he bets against its indefinite survival. To give up on socialism in the third millennium would be like accepting the inevitability of gladiator fights in the first.7

Share

Subscribe now

Conclusion

Why do I keep going back to Cohen’s book? I guess there’s something inspiring to me about the way he wants more community than the world can give him. Again, there’s the image of someone tragically confined to a sliver of the timeline, in which their aspirations are not only out of reach but inconceivable in anything but the most schematic terms. We could have it so much better, but I can’t yet tell you how. I’ll admit that this didn’t seem terribly impressive to me the first time I read it. But now, living in the early years of super-powerful AI, I suppose I’m more open to the possibility that I have no idea what the future will look like.

Is Cohen right, though? Given how modest Cohen’s aims are—and again, I want to emphasize that this is my interpretation, not the Word of God—it’s not obvious what would count as a flat-out refutation. One could argue that Cohen’s principles would be undesirable to implement in large-scale societies. Or one could try to come up with some inductive evidence to argue that the principles aren’t feasible to realize except in camping trips and similarly small, recreational endeavors.

But there’s another possibility. What if Cohen’s style of argument—i.e. laying out a thought experiment, extracting some moral principles, then proposing them as a guide to political economy—could be used in unintended ways? What if there’s a version of the camping trip that supports some other system? What if that system was the exact opposite of the one to which Cohen dedicated his working life?

Stay tuned.

Subscribe for more and see below for a few highlights.

Subscribe now

A snippet of an aria:

submitted a question: when listening to classical music, how important are the lyrics? Nina’s answer:

Plus, Nina teaches you how to warm up like an opera singer (do try this at home):

Thank you to everyone who tuned in! Join me for my next live video in the app, and subscribe for more.

Subscribe now

Get more from Daniel Muñoz in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Hello from Bavaria, where I’m visiting for the weekend. Last night, as the 4th of July approached, I heard a garage band next door playing for some kind of benefit show. There were a few British tunes (e.g. “Song 2”)—but also a lot that reminded me of where I’m from—Joan Jett, Nirvana, White Stripes, Neil Young, Blink-182, all in charming Bavarian twang.

My ancestors came to the United States at very different times, in very different places, for very different reasons. I got to know the country from the inside for a few decades and from the outside for a few years. I grew up in Dallas, TX during the euphoria of the 1990s (which then, to me, felt like a timeless default). I was a kid on 9/11. I remember being on YouTube in the early days and seeing a thumbnail for a strange new kind of video—“Loose Change.” I remember one of my teachers, in chapel on a Tuesday, warning of the coarsening of American culture by our prurient interest in the lives of celebrities, as curated for our amusement by reality TV. “Say it ain’t so.” I had no idea how coarse our political culture could become, how untethered from any shared reality, how spiteful, how despairing.

And yet, I don’t despair. The euphoria of the 1990s didn’t last forever. Why should the bad vibes of the 2020s?

America keeps finding ways to surprise me—things I’ve only just discovered, things I’ve only just remembered, things that didn’t stand out to me until I saw them from a different point of view, heard them in a different accent.

Happy 4th of July, everyone. May we be the last Americans to live amidst such enmity—and to that end,

we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Brad Skow

Enough preamble! For today’s post, I’m delighted to share my chat (recorded this week) with the brilliant , author of —and one of the people who actually appointed me a graduate.

Subscribe now

We talk about:

• Brad’s new book, American Independence in Verse

• How Brad got into philosophy (and how he never remembers such things)

• The “moving spotlight” theory of time (Objective Becoming)

• How mathematical explanation works

• What they don’t tell you about iambic pentameter

• My next project (called “Priceless Taboos”)

There’s so much more I wanted to ask—how does Brad think about the moral grayness of the founders?—but we kept it on the short and sweet side. (Maybe we’ll do another chat focused on US history?) As always, I ask my guests for a beloved book or article. Brad’s answer:

• Tosi & Warmke, Why It’s OK to Mind Your Own Business

Thank you , , (of Selim Berker-metaethics fame), , , , and others for tuning in!

If you want to help keep Big iff True weekly and free, consider becoming a paid subscriber. (You’ll also get a couple of perks, like being able submit questions during livestreams.)

Subscribe now

Get more from Daniel Muñoz in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

P.S.

As promised on stream, here are some of Brad’s counterexamples to the “five iambs” theory of iambic pentameter—though you may just want to go read his Theory of meter: introduction to an introduction.

First, here’s a line by Robert Frost that’s in iambic pentameter, but it doesn’t have five iambs (where an iamb = a two-syllable foot with stress on the second):

1: [Gives up] [his err-] [-and, and] [lets death] [descend.]

Now, you might say that this is just an “allowable substitution.” Iambic pentameter sometimes lets you swap in the occasional foot that doesn’t exactly fit the rules. But then why is this clearly not iambic pentameter, even though it has the exact same substitution?

2: [Gives up] [his way,] [and al-] [-lows death] [to come.]

Whatever iamic pentameter is, it’s something else!

Unpopular Opinion: Getting a little tired of hearing everybody’s takes on AI.

Unpopular Opinion: Water is good, actually, and we should all be drinking it several times a day.

Unpopular Opinion: As delicious as ice cream is, when it’s freezing outside, I don’t really want any. Sorry! Maybe wait until it’s summer before you start selling frozen treats?

Unpopular Opinion: Netflix has gone downhill.

Unpopular Opinion: When I work really hard on a post, people shouldn’t just scroll past it. They should take a moment out of their day to read it.

Unpopular Opinion: To be clear, I mean actually read it. Don’t just open it, see if you agree with the headline, and decide on that basis whether to leave a like. I spend a lot of time on these things. How would you feel if I was just pretending to engage with your writing?

Unpopular Opinion: Last year I stayed up so late, like three nights in a row, just working on this one post—it was starting to become a whole thing. I was irascible. I was late to meetings. My wife kept waking up when I came to bed because the bedroom door was creaky. Seriously, I was opening it as slowly as I could. It didn’t matter. A moment or two of silent gliding then…creak! That’s all it takes to wake her up. She’s not a heavy sleeper. Anyway, guess what happened when I posted it? No seriously, guess. How many subscribers do you think I got?

Unpopular Opinion: Trick question. I lost two subscribers.

Unpopular Opinion: I mean, their loss, right?

Unpopular Opinion: But that was a long time ago—those were rookie mistakes. I’ve learned a lot about posting since then. Start with a big, sexy hook. Don’t set up things you can’t pay off. Don’t try to do two posts in one. “Slower doesn’t make it funnier.” With all that under my belt I feel like I’ve finally made it to escape velocity: sustainable, linear growth. You write n posts, you get m subs. It’s the ratio that makes the world go round.

Unpopular Opinion: Just because something’s been trending one way, that doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way forever.

Unpopular Opinion: This could all end—all of it—at any moment.

Unpopular Opinion: The fundamental attitude of the universe towards human affairs is one of unredeemed, unrelenting indifference.

Unpopular Opinion: Nobody owes you anything. They could pick up and leave today, subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson or Andrew Tate or Nate Silver. You can’t stop them. How could you? No one like you ever really has control over other people.

Unpopular Opinion: Wait, the post is almost over. Where are you going? You’re not seriously going to stop reading.

Unpopular Opinion: Stop kidding around. Come on.

Unpopular Opinion: Look—please…just stay. Please…

Unpopular Opinion: I promise I can change. I know this isn’t working. We both know. Nobody’s arguing otherwise. Whatever you want, I can change everything—I swear. Please. Whatever you want.

Unpopular Opinion: This time is different.

Unpopular Opinion: Come on, don’t make me beg.

Unpopular Opinion: …

Unpopular Opinion: I’m begging you.

Unpopular Opinion: I kind of like it when people give human names to their pets. There are 240 million dogs named Spot. Isn’t it nice when you meet a new dog and you ask what’s his name and the owner’s like, “Oh, this little fella? This is Fred!”

Share

Leave a comment

This reminded me of an experience I had at MIT, where I was once part of the budgetary rounding error known as the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

In grad school, I lived in the Sidney-Pacific graduate dorm, a concentration of nerdiness so dense that it visibly warped the fabric of spacetime. One day, my friend Nic from Sid-Pac was defending his PhD dissertation in math, and a group of us were going to support him. I’d never been to a math defense before—but I was excited to see if I could follow along.

At first, I almost did. Nic was motivating his project, explaining the problem, ruling out easy fixes. There were revealing moments—turns out “boring” is an important concept for mathematical research. Equations appeared and disappeared in puffs of chalk. I was feeling proud of myself for hanging on for dear life.

Then Nic turned to the crowd, sighed a knowing sigh, and said (I’m paraphrasing): “Sorry, friends, but now I have to do the real math.” The rest of the talk was absolutely incomprehensible gibberish. I understood not one sentence for 30 minutes straight.

Humbling experience, would recommend.

Subscribe now

I love that memory because I was just so totally dumbfounded. I was in the presence of someone who knew much, much more than I did about something I considered important, to which I had devoted a fair bit of time—and yet, clearly, I didn’t get it. Not even close.

The feeling of undeniable ignorance is probably dangerous in high doses; you don’t want to crush your self-confidence (as I learned the hard way towards the start of grad school). But sometimes it’s nice to be dumbfounded. It’s important to be reminded of how complicated the world is—and how finite one’s knowledge can be.

Most of us don’t have to think about our finitude. Thanks to the division of labor, knowledge workers can spend most of their lives within that tiny slice of the human experience in which they have acquired expertise. A specialist in Kant’s theoretical philosophy may know little about how microchips work, or how Claude works, or how the greenhouse effect works, but if they’re spending most of their days with The Critique of Pure Reason, they don’t have their ignorance rubbed in their faces.

But sometimes it’s good to have your ignorance rubbed in your face—good on a spiritual level, I mean. (I’m not railing against divided labor. Without it, who would have taught me Kant’s theoretical philosophy? Or invented the laptop I wrote my papers on? Made my pencil? Etc.)

With that in mind, I have a question for you.

What is the greenhouse effect?

Seriously. Not a trick question. Take a moment and try explaining to yourself what the greenhouse effect is. It’s the mechanism that climate scientists posit as the driver of global climate change. You’ve probably heard it explained dozens of times. But how does it work?

Whenever you’re ready, read on.

If you’re like me, you might have said something like the following:

The greenhouse effect is when certain gases, like CO₂ and CH₄, trap heat inside the Earth’s atmosphere—like a giant blanket.

Not bad. But did you notice that this doesn’t really make sense?

Think about it. If greenhouse gases serve as a barrier to heat, why would that make the Earth hotter? Sure, the gases block heat on its way to space. But by the same token, won’t they also block heat on its way from space? When sunlight hits the surface of the earth (or our skin), that heats us up. Why aren’t the greenhouse gases protecting us from that celestial heat source?

I’ll give you another moment to ponder.

The answer is that greenhouse gases only absorb light in certain wavelengths, so they trap only the light coming from the Earth.1

Much of the light that comes from the Sun is “visible light,” with a wavelength between 380 and 750 nanometers. Light from the Earth, however, is infrared, with a wavelength around 10 micrometers, or 10,000 nanometers.

You might be asking yourself: Light from the Earth? What light from the Earth?? Is the Earth secretly glowing when I’m not looking???

That’s a perfectly legitimate sequence of questions.

Turns out, the Earth is glowing. In fact, everything is glowing—all the time. Objects give off what’s called blackbody radiation, with the amount and wavelength dependent on the object’s temperature. Cool things emit very little light with a very high wavelength. Hotter things emit much more light at considerably lower wavelengths. When things are ultra-hot, the wavelengths are so low that you can actually see the blackbody radiation. That’s why metal starts to glow when blacksmiths heat it up—really, it was glowing all along, but only in infrared, with wavelengths too high to be visible.2

Share

Let me put some numbers on this. Something at around 20°C (i.e. room temperature) emits essentially zero visible light: the peak wavelength is ~10 micrometers. The surface of the Sun, which is ~5,500° C, has a peak wavelength in the visible part of the light spectrum, and the Sun also just has many orders of magnitude more power (~63 million watts per m² of radiating surface)—indeed, “the Sun radiates energy more than 100,000 times faster than an object at 20° Celsius.”3

The real explanation of the greenhouse effect, then, is as follows:

1. Greenhouse gases absorb infrared light and let visible light pass through.

2. Because the Sun is hot, whereas the Earth is cool, a lot of sunlight is visible, whereas earthlight is infrared.

3. So, when sunlight arrives at the Earth, it passes through the atmosphere, but when the Earth warms up, the extra earthlight gets absorbed by the atmosphere.

4. Finally, the atmosphere then gives off heat in all directions—so, half of the heat gets sent back towards the Earth.

This explanation, as you’d imagine, is extremely simplified. What happens next to the heat sent back towards the Earth? Doesn’t the atmosphere have multiple layers, not just one homogeneous one? What about knock-on effects of warming, such as the fact that a hotter atmosphere holds more water vapor, or that melted ice caps make the Earth’s surface less reflective?4

Simple models leave things out. But the common “heat trap” explanation isn’t just oversimple: it’s underpowered—i.e. it’s unable, even granting its assumptions, to explain the thing it purports to explain.

Subscribe now

Some of you probably knew all that already. I salute you!

But even you—my eminent readers—would concede that no one is omniscient. The beauty of being dumbfounded is that we get to stare down the gaping void of our own ignorance—and then watch it shrink a little.

I’ll leave you with a saying I picked up from my college buddy Rick Korzekwa. “Confusion is ignorance leaving the brain.” I love that. You couldn’t get further from the vibe in Plato’s Cave, where the reward for teaching people about sunlight is to be made a “laughing-stock.”

Better to be temporarily confused than permanently ignorant!

My own salvo—a critique of Judith Butler and Ellie Anderson—turned out all right, I thought. Even better, it gave rise to the matchless hit piece “What Ellie Anderson Actually Did and What Daniel Muñoz Cannot See,” in which J. Edward Hackett accuses me of being “methodologically blind”—a “self-appointed graduate of MIT” repeating “the sins of his origin.” I don’t think any essay has ever brought me such joy.

Until now.

Subscribe now

I’ll skip to the best part, because it’s just that good. Here is the ultimate paragraph of Dr. Ana Vieyra’s “On a recent controversy regarding clarity in philosophical writing,” published last January in Epoché.

Allow me to end in a rather dramatic and perhaps hyperbolic tone. I believe it is the tone that the severity of the topic merits. Philosophy, along with religion, is among the last corners where logos is allowed to thrive. While Butler might not be the best example of what the philosophical craft has to offer, Muñoz, consciously or unconsciously, perhaps of no fault of his own but as a result of institutional mechanisms, is an agent of the death of philosophy itself.

At least it’s not my fault (perhaps). Vieyra concludes:

The poison of efficiency-based thinking is the death of meaning itself. What passes off as a sober defense of clarity is further evidence that we live in times of logocide.

Maybe it’s the methodological blindness talking, but I’ll be honest: I didn’t see this coming. I thought I was just making banal points about why it’s good to write clearly. I didn’t expect to become walking proof that ours is an era of conceptual murder—specifically, that of logos (Greek for reason), not to mention meaning itself.

How did we get from “clarity good” to “philosophy dead”?

Share

Vieyra opens the murder trial with some low-drama background:

Philosophical writing aims at communicating something, and how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ the writing is shall depend on how well it fulfills the purpose of communicating that which the activity aims at communicating.

Well said. What makes a piece of writing clear, elegant, or otherwise excellent depends on its purpose. Even I saw this point dimly at the start of my post. Instead of saying that clarity is absolutely good, I said it’s good for “analytical writing,” whose purpose is to convince the audience with arguments.

Vieyra also notes that I never provide a “criterion” of clarity—“thus, what he takes clarity to be is itself unclear.” I didn’t think I needed a criterion, but at any rate, happy to clarify!

Writing is unclear when it defies easy understanding, not because of how difficult the ideas are, but purely because of how they’re expressed. Clunky sentences, ill-defined jargon, pointless ambiguity, a zig-zagging flow, unresolved contradictions—these are the hallmarks of obscurity. Clear writing is whatever liberates the reader from such frustrations, so that they can more easily see what each sentence means and how the ideas fit together.

Next, the murder weapon is submitted into evidence. Vieyra lays out a passage I quote from Butler:

neither grammar nor style are politically neutral. Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself.

Then my critique:

This non sequitur is so brazen as to be insulting. Yes, you have to follow the rules of a language in order to make yourself understood. You can’t expect other people to follow you if you’re speaking pure gibberish or secret codewords. But Butler says almost nothing to connect this banal linguistic truth to politics.

I just remembered how fun that paragraph was to write—God, I love Substack. Anyway, Dr. Vieyra isn’t amused. Here’s what she says:

We might blink several times, squint our eyes, attempting to discern how the refutation is supposed to take place, how Muñoz’s critique relates to anything Butler has claimed. After a few moments of disbelief, one might even make the effort to reconstruct Muñoz’s understanding of Butler, upon which the very possibility of understanding anything he is claiming as a refutation of Butler is predicated. …

P1: Something something politics

P2: One must follow language rules to be understood

P3: Thus, writing clearly is following rules

P4: But to follow rules is to be a conformist, which is bad

C: Thus, clarity is bad

I got a chuckle out of “Something something politics.” But this four-premise argument isn’t quite what I was driving at. Look at Butler’s passage. The conclusion, which comes at the start (as often happens), is that grammar and style aren’t politically neutral. The justification given is that, when you learn a language, you have to conform to certain rules on pain of being unintelligible. I’m just making the simple point that “you have to learn grammar to be understood” is a far cry from “the rules of grammar are political.” Is that so uncharitable?

Vieyra addresses the jury:

No matter what one thinks of Butler’s original argument, Muñoz’s reconstruction is clearly not what Butler means. To identify if Butler is, in fact, a clear writer or not, as per our shared definition of the capacity or virtue of clear philosophical writing, one would have to at least attempt to understand what is meant. Does Muñoz seriously, honestly consider that he has provided anything like an attempt to understand Butler’s meaning, such that he would be able to say it does not meet a relatively neutral standard for philosophical clarity?

Where was I trying to identify whether Butler is a clear writer? I do preface a section by saying Nussbaum calls Butler obscure, but that’s just setup for the real discussion, which is about Butler’s arguments. I didn’t like those arguments, of course: I called them “implausible,” “woefully incomplete,” etc.—but I never called them obscure. They’re not obscure. They’re just bad!

The prosecution then attacks the defendant’s character:

Well, maybe this ‘interpretation’ is an exception to Muñoz’s otherwise perfectly capable philosophical reading skills, a momentary lapse into intellectual laziness on the part of Muñoz, or his rhetorical attempt at writing for a more popular audience so that his Substack can grow and provide further units of social approval, thus deserving momentarily sacrificing anything like the minimal attention and epistemic humility required from any reader of philosophy. He is a busy person, after all. Of course, a Professor of Philosophy at UC Chapel Hill can apply the minimal effort to understand, in good faith, a philosophical claim! Silly of me to think otherwise, even for a second. Indeed, to conceive the contrary would be simply outrageous. We can surely forgive this slip –maybe Muñoz had to attend to some urgent matter, maybe there was a Call for Papers deadline, and he had no time for putting any effort into the activity he claims to dedicate his life to. Perfectly understandable, if a one-time occurrence.

Not to nitpick, but my title is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill, and I’ve never claimed to “dedicate my life” to posting about Judith Butler. (Until now.)

More importantly, what’s with all the animus? This is an article in a philosophy magazine, and here the author is sarcastically fantasizing at length about my lust for Substack metrics.

I am offended. Deeply offended. More importantly: so are my 2,418 subscribers.

After another reconstruction, another barrage for the jury:

The obvious question here is: Does Muñoz seriously think Butler, who at least deserves the credit of being among the most influential living intellectuals, is that stupid? Is he honestly convinced he has done anything close to a good job in rendering Butler’s meaning? Can he look in the mirror and affirm: “I have legitimately tried to understand Butler”? I am myself no friend of Butler’s conclusions nor argumentative method, and yet I cannot help but feel somehow moved by the level of interpretative violence committed here.

You’re going to have to take my word for it, but—as someone who has just recently dedicated his life to Substack posts about Judith Butler—I did sit up from my desk, walk to the nearest mirror, and affirm, “I have legitimately tried to understand Butler.” I won’t pretend it was easy, but it felt good to clear the air.

(Okay, I can’t resist. Did you notice what was missing from these long, bilious paragraphs about how I’m too lazy to attempt to interpret Butler? An attempt to interpret Butler.)

Eventually, Vieyra gets the sarcasm out of her system and makes an argument. Unlike me, Anderson and Butler recognize that some writing has to be difficult to understand. Why? Because:

some ideas cannot be expressed differently without the loss of semantic content, i.e., the form of expression that the philosopher finds truest to his or her intended meaning.

And—as is tradition—Vieyra also gets in a jab at my beleaguered alma mater:

we ought not butcher and simplify our intended ideas simply because MIT or Standford [sic burn] undergraduates (or graduates) might have a hard time with them

What to make of all this?

I do think there’s some truth to Vieyra’s point. Sometimes a piece of writing only seems obscure to its readers because they haven’t acquired the relevant background. In some such cases, it’s the readers’ fault. (In economic terms, the “optimal solution” may be for the reader to smart up, rather than for the writer to dumb down.)

But the obvious reply is that authors have some responsibility, too. This is, when you think about it, the entire rationale behind “clarity good.” If Butler had just acknowledged as much, that would’ve made a huge difference.

So I’m not bothered by Vieyra’s objection:

Here we find the true revelation: Muñoz does not actually care about the possibility of a loss of semantic content. Muñoz does not actually want to fathom the possibility that some apparently unclear writing is, in fact, the best way for a writer to communicate his or her ideas without the loss of content –i.e., without saying something ‘less’ or different from he or she intends to say.

Of course I care about the possible loss of semantic content: I’m just not convinced that Gender Trouble—or for that matter, The Foundations of Statistics, or Reasons and Persons—is written so masterfully that any change to the writing would damage its precious semantic cargo.1

Just as some readers should have to do their homework, some authors should have to clarify their writing. You can’t get away with dismissing all readers’ complaints as unjust attacks on “semantic richness.” Some philosophical texts—frankly, many—aren’t even passably written: they could be much, much more accessible without any loss of content.

(Vieyra gives only one example of a text that shouldn’t have been written more clearly—Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Not my first pick!)

Leave a comment

Where does Vieyra think I got off on the wrong foot? In my belief that:

good philosophy is the philosophy that can get to ‘the point’ and transmit the data quickly. Philosophy is here thought of as, well, just another process of information transfer that can be optimized. This conception of philosophy is what Heidegger (another one of those annoying philosophers that no busy, productivity-maximizing, job-having, top-journal paper-publishing, grant-obtaining, monograph-in-Oxford-University-Press-forthcoming academic should waste her precious time trying to understand) calls ‘cybernetics’. This last point, alongside the fact that Muñoz is the paradigm of a successful young professional philosopher in today’s academia, reveals more about the current state of philosophy than any essay I could have written. I am thankful for that.

You’re welcome, I guess.

To respond to the substance: I don’t think of philosophy as “transmitting data.” Data are like answers to questions, and much of philosophy is a struggle to ask the right questions. It’s foolish to expect perfectly clear answers while we’re still fumbling in the dark, and inevitably some debates will become more abstruse as the arguments and positions and interpretations proliferate.

But shouldn’t we at least try to write clearly? And if someone does manage to write a “semantically rich” book—a book than which no clearer equivalent can be conceived—doesn’t that mean they maximized clarity, given the constraint of saying what they wanted to say? Isn’t that a good thing?

Maybe we can dredge a little philosophy out of all this mess.

Suppose I come to you with a new idea, but you can’t figure out what I mean, because, to you, my writing is obscure. You ask me to explain myself clearly. I say: It can’t be done—not without butchering the idea!

Who’s being unreasonable here: me, or you?2

Probably me. But it depends on the details. Why is the writing obscure to you? If it’s because of jargon, then I should be able to explain my jargon. If it’s formalism, I should be able to explain the formalism. But if the writing is obscure because it presupposes a ton of inarticulate background knowledge, maybe it’s not reasonable to expect me to explain all of that. Maybe you should spend a little time acquiring the relevant background if you want to get my point.3

Even then, you shouldn’t have to take my word for it. If I’m not just scribbling nonsense, won’t there be something I can do to prove it? Middle schoolers aren’t ready for advanced science, but a physicist could give them a flavor of what the field is like using metaphors, demonstrations, simplifications—rarely do you hear abject surrender. “Sorry, kid: Einstein’s too semantically rich for you!”

This is the truth in physics legend (and noted bongo-enthusiast) Richard Feynman’s maxim that you only understand what you can explain to a freshman. When you truly understand something, you know how to approximate it, how to abstract away from it. If you don’t believe me, here’s Jacob Collier explaining music theory to a child, a teen, and eventually jazz legend (and noted YouTube-rabbit-hole-enthusiast) Herbie Hancock.

If someone claims to have essentially private ideas, which can only ever remain obscure to outsiders, you have to wonder: why trust them? You don’t want to end up like Plato’s benighted cave-dwellers, who turn the messenger of enlightenment into a “laughing-stock.” But you also don’t want to be a blind follower—or worse, a mark.

Time for the defense’s closing statement. I insist that clarity is worth striving for even if it’s not the sole virtue of philosophical writing. But—at the risk of ending on a rather dramatic and perhaps hyperbolic tone—if I have to read one more reply to that clarity post, I’m committing triple-logocide.

3

Reminds me of the time when I was taken to a traditional Nō (能) theater as a 15-year-old exchange student in Osaka. Never before had my lack of background knowledge been more painfully evident—though I did sense that everything happening almost certainly had a clear point, which in principle could have been explained to me.