As I admitted at the time, my review essay on Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity was a bit of a bait-and-switch. Becker’s book explains how the dreams of science fiction have shaped Silicon Valley’s dreams of technology in general. I deliberately made a comparison that was both narrower and more fantastical: emphasizing how debates over AGI resembled the dreams of Renaissance alchemy. In partial redress, here’s a more specific argument about the relationship between science fiction and Silicon Valley.

Again, it’s more a riff on Becker than a bald presentation of his argument, but the connections are much clearer, even if it isn’t quite the same argument that Becker makes. What Becker sees as rooted in 1950s and 1960s science fiction arguably goes back a few decades further: to the fusion of “scientifiction” and technocracy that happened in the early 1930s, right at the beginning of the so-called “Golden Age” of science fiction.

Silicon Valley is trapped in a new version of the Gernsback Continuum - a situation in which it is collectively haunted by the visions of an imaginary future of endless expansion that didn’t happen and never will. Our escape route, as Becker suggests, is to acknowledge the physical and social limits that we can’t escape, and to try to construct better futures within those limits.

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*****

Becker contends that Silicon Valley’s vision of the future borrows heavily from the dreams of a particular era of science fiction.

The 1950s and ’60s are the middle and end of the Golden Age of science fiction, which started with pulp sci-fi magazines in the very late 1930s like Astounding Science Fiction. The authors who dominated … were almost all white men, and they wrote primarily about a future in space. Asimov’s stories were often centered around robots, space empires, or both, with nuclear power depicted as a nigh-limitless energy source used for everything from rockets to radios. Heinlein’s stories frequently had a flavor of Ayn Rand in space, usually featuring a self-reliant, polymath male hero dabbling in eugenics or undermining workers on strike for a living wage.

I think that’s right, but I’d go back a few decades further than Becker. If you want to understand the relationship between science fiction and technocratic aspiration, you should start with Hugo Gernsback, the man who brought them both together. To understand this, read William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum,” which is one of the great science fiction short stories of the last half-century, as well as a sly and pointed social history of the genre. It’s in his collection, Burning Chrome, and can easily be found in pirated versions online that I’m not going to point you to, because that would be rude.

Gibson’s 1980s short story depicts a man who is haunted by hallucinations of a future that never happened of “flying-wing liners” that pass above in the sky, and freeways that perpetually threaten to unfold into “gleaming eighty-lane monsters.” He has been hired to photograph the isolated remnants of 1930s and 1940s buildings that promised a future of vast art-deco cities surrounding gleaming ziggurats, traversed by curving roads in the air, hovering blimps, air-cars and gyrocopters. As the narrator travels in search of fragments of this lost American dream of a clean and efficient future, he becomes infected by its “semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.” Gibson’s hero finally exorcises himself by plunging into the seediest aspects of the “near-dystopia we live in,” watching Nazi Love Motel until the ghosts fade away.

It’s a wonderful short story that influenced me at an early age, but I didn’t really know what it was about until I read Finn Brunton’s book Digital Cash a few years ago. Finn’s book begins by describing the Technocrats, a group that I had never understood were an actual political movement, which really got going in the Great Depression.

The Hugo Gernsback of the “Gernsback Continuum” was the founding publisher and editor of Amazing Stories, the pulp magazine that launched the genre of “scientifiction.” Science fiction’s most important awards, the Hugos, are named after him. But Gernsback also the founding publisher and editor of a briefly lived publication, Technocracy Review. I own a copy of Issue 1, Volume 1 (I’ve made an imperfect but readable scan available here if you want to read it; the various illustrations throughout this post are taken from it). As one of the articles describes the technocratic movement:

With a slide rule in one hand, the other gripped upon the switch of a dynamo, Technocracy says pompously, “Science - that is the solution. You babbling fools know not this industrial machine you quarrel over. Only I know it, for I have made it from my brain. I and the technicians I represent. You should surrender it to me, therefore, and when that is done your troubles are over. With this left hand I will work out formulae. With the right, controlling almost infinite power, I shall send new life, the pulsing life of electricity, into the sluggish veins of industry. Away with your foolish theories, they are old, stale and unprofitable. A new world opens, the world of Technocracy.”

Substitute “software” for “power,” and you have Marc Andreessen circa 2011. Substitute “power” back in again and you have Silicon Valley energy debates circa 2025.

In retrospect, it isn’t surprising that science fiction merges into technocracy which in turn merges into techbro exhortations. All are narratives of technological enthusiasm, depicting a future in which the engineers have taken charge, and in which innovation is a fountain of boundless possibilities. As the writer J.G. Ballard described the science fiction genre in a 1967 interview:

There’s a tremendous confidence that radiates through all modern American science fiction of the period 1930 to 1960; the certainty that science and technology can solve all problems.

And as Becker’s book emphasizes, much of this was based on assumptions about boundless energy. Technocracy’s entire political ideology centered on energy, proposing a new currency denominated in watts.

This dream of limitless energy and endless possibility is notably congenial to a particular kind of politics. The most crucial passage of “The Gernsback Continuum” describes a nuclear families from this imagined future:

They were standing beside their car, an aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rudder jutting up from its spine and smooth black tires like a child's toy. He had his arm around her waist and was gesturing toward the city. … They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. … They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world. Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars. It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda.

*****

Gernsback’s future of shark-finned aircars and gleaming cities is the proximate ancestor of today’s Silicon Valley rhetoric. Becker writes about J. Storrs Hall, whose book, Where Is My Flying Car: A Memoir of Future Past, is one of the keystone texts for Silicon Valley right luminaries such as Peter Thiel. Hall’s book begins with the “classic art-deco exposition of the technological Utopia” in the 1930s movie, The Shape of Things to Come. It goes from there to ask why we expected flying cars, the spread of mankind throughout the galaxy, and other such forms of progress and to inquire why we never got there. The answer, crudely summarized, is that we gave up, and we shouldn’t have. Hall mentions Gibson’s other writing in passing, but doesn’t seem aware that he is performing a thudding cover version of “The Gernsback Continuum,” in which Gibson’s mordant humor is excised in favor of technophilic literal-mindedness. Hall’s extended discussion of the mechanics of gyrocopters is actually quite funny, viewed from a certain perspective, but it certainly isn’t intended to be.

More recent texts of the Silicon Valley right, such as Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto similarly exhort a return to this defunct dream world of the future, where the problems of technology dissolve into the certainty that science and technology can solve all problems, provided only that we smash the obstacles - DEI, regulations, environmentalism - that stand in their way.

Like the Golden Age science fiction that they draw on, these arguments are not based on scientific claims, but an elaborate ideology in which science is a kind of magical artifact from which progress inevitably flows. Ballard again (this interview from 1968):

The science fiction written in those days came out of all this optimism that science was going to remake the world. Then came Hiroshima and Auschwitz, and the image of science completely changed. People became very suspicious of science, but SF didn’t change. You still found this optimistic literature, the Heinlein–Asimov–Clarke type of attitude towards the possibilities of science, which was completely false.

Or in the Silicon Valley remix: once we begin to construct our flying cars; once we again reach for the stars; once we have AGI to create the earthly paradise, there is nothing that can constrain us from grasping the destiny of our species.

Just as in Gibson’s story (written more than 40 years ago!) there is a decided political whiff emanating from many versions of this ideology. If you get its logic, it is not at all surprising that so many people on the Silicon Valley right have jumped from techno-optimism into fascism, nor that they see little distinction between the two. Notoriously, Andreessen’s manifesto riffs on Marinetti, a technology obsessed fascist.

Equally, not all people who embrace this style of thinking are fascists, or even slightly fascist adjacent. If you read the liberal-leaning technocratic utopianism of Demis Hassabis or Dario Amodei, you’ll find the suggestion there too that technology - and in particular AI - is a limitless cornucopia of possibilities. See Hassabis’ WIRED interview a few weeks ago:

If everything goes well, then we should be in an era of radical abundance, a kind of golden era. AGI can solve what I call root-node problems in the world—curing terrible diseases, much healthier and longer lifespans, finding new energy sources. If that all happens, then it should be an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy. I think that will begin to happen in 2030.

Again, this leans on a particular reading of science fiction. The future that they aspire to is explicitly the future of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, in which vast intelligent AI Minds underpin a civilization in which people can do more or less whatever they want.

Amodei:

I think the Culture’s values are a winning strategy because they’re the sum of a million small decisions that have clear moral force and that tend to pull everyone together onto the same side. Basic human intuitions of fairness, cooperation, curiosity, and autonomy are hard to argue with, and are cumulative in a way that our more destructive impulses often aren’t. It is easy to argue that children shouldn’t die of disease if we can prevent it, and easy from there to argue that everyone’s children deserve that right equally.

Hassabis:

I would recommend “Consider Phlebas” by Iain Banks, which is part of the Culture series of novels. Very formative for me, and I read that while I was writing Theme Park. And I still think it’s the best depiction of a post-A.G.I. future, an optimistic post-A.G.I. future, where we’re traveling the stars and humanity reached its full flourishing.

On the one hand, this is obviously much more attractive, and far less sinister, than the Andreessen version. It’s an optimistic liberal bet on the boundless cornucopia of technology. Banks was a Scots socialist who detested authoritarianism with a passion.

On the other, Banks was making a much more complex and ambiguous argument than the version that Hassabis and Amodei present. The Culture is, to steal Ursula K. Le Guin’s term, an ambiguous utopia, in a universe that is emphatically not a mere backdrop for the playing out of the manifest destiny of mankind.

Some of the best and most moving parts of Becker’s book describe the difference between this ideology of science and what science actually says. Becker has a Ph.D. in cosmology, and knows that the universe is a place of hard, cold limits. He quotes Carl Sagan:

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. . . . There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

That too, is Banks’ understanding. The physical universe is a “dark background,” shaped by the brute limits of material existence rather than human desire. As Francis Spufford emphasizes in his wonderful obituary, Banks revived the form of the classic Golden Age space opera, but combined it with an enduring sense of human tragedy. The Culture is indeed a kind of flourishing - but it is one that will wither and die (the books repeatedly emphasize that it is a temporary and evanescent phenomenon; at best a footnote in the history of the galaxy).

Banks uses the trappings of utopianism to convey a far bleaker and more realistic understanding of the human condition. What speaks definitively in the end is not human destiny, but what Banks describes elsewhere as the “faint, not even ironic hiss” of the universal zero. Entropy, not human flourishing, is the logic of the universe.

The great advantage of Becker’s book is not simply that it explains how tech thinking has gone wrong by positing a universe of “more everything forever,” where all that we need is gumption and optimism to transform the human condition and bring about the universal utopia. It is that it also articulates the beginnings of an alternative understanding, which sets out the actual limits of what we can do.

As Kim Stanley Robinson (another poet of hard physical limits) emphasizes in his recent work, we are almost certainly not going to be able to spread out among the stars. What we have on this planet is pretty well what we have. That doesn’t mean that we can’t do much better than we are doing. We can achieve greater forms of material abundance. But pretending that the hard problems simply don’t exist, or that they will be solved by some magical technology that is right around the corner, is a recipe for the embrace of fascism at the worst, and starry-eyed ingenuous optimism at the best. As I’ve written before, we need usable futures. But to get there, as Becker argues, we need to discard the imagined futures of a past world whose aspirations and understanding of the world are a very poor fit with the present that we find ourselves in.

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Really, any noise other than hatred or complete lack of interest should not be allowed.

The authors of a paper that went viral with attention-grabbing headlines urging people to throw out their black plastic kitchen tools have corrected the work for a second time.

But a letter accompanying the correction suggests the latest update still fails “to completely correct the math and methodological errors present in the study,” according to Mark Jones, an industrial chemist and consultant who has been following the case. “The errors are sufficient to warrant a restating of the abstract, sections of the paper and conclusions, if not a retraction.”

The paper, “From e-waste to living space: Flame retardants contaminating household items add to concern about plastic recycling,” originally appeared in Chemosphere in September. The study authors, from the advocacy group Toxic-Free Future and the Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, looked for the presence of flame retardants in certain household plastic items, including toys, food service trays and kitchen utensils. 

The researchers found toxic flame retardants in several items that wouldn’t ordinarily need fire protection, such as sushi trays, vegetable peelers, slotted spoons and pasta servers. Those items, the authors suggested, could have been made from recycled electronics — which do contain flame retardants. 

Then, for kitchen utensils, the authors used findings from another study, which measured how toxic chemicals including BDE-209 transfer from black plastic utensils into hot cooking oil, to estimate potential intake based on findings in their own study. They estimated a daily intake of 34,700 ng/day of BDE-209 from using contaminated utensils, which “would approach the U.S. BDE-209 reference dose” set by the Environmental Protection Agency, they reported.

But the authors miscalculated that reference dose. They had put it at 42,000 ng/day instead of 420,000 ng/day. That hiccup led to the first correction to the paper, published in December. “This calculation error does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper,” the authors said in the corrigendum.

The latest corrigendum, published July 3, states the formula the authors used to estimate exposure to the flame retardant BDE-209 “was misinterpreted.” It continues:

This misinterpretation led to an overestimation of the BDE-209 exposure concentration. The corrected estimated BDE-209 exposure is 7900 ng/day instead of 34,700 ng/day.

“While we regret the error, this is a correction in one exposure example in the discussion section of the study,” lead author Megan Liu of Toxic-Free Future told us by email. “The example was not part of the core research objectives or methods of the study.”

Jones, who spent his career at Dow Chemical, told us the second corrigendum is “inadequate and still incorrect.”

“If the error is sufficiently large to only provide context, the statement in the Conclusions that brominated flame retardants ‘significantly contaminate products’ no longer can be supported and must be corrected or retracted following the reasoning presented in the second corrigendum,” Jones wrote in a letter to the editor published with the second correction.

Jones took to task some of the calculations and other estimates Liu and colleagues made, which the authors refute in a response to Jones’ letter, also published in Chemosphere this week. 

The Elsevier journal was delisted from Clarivate’s Web of Science in December for failing to meet editorial quality criteria. Last December an Elsevier spokesperson told us the publisher’s ethics team was“conducting in-depth investigations” of “potential breaches of Chemosphere’s publishing policies.” The journal had published more than 60 expressions of concern in 2024 and has retracted 34 articles so far this year.

Part of delisting means Clarivate no longer indexes the journal’s papers or counts its citations. Google Scholar shows seven citations to Liu’s paper, and Dimensions lists four scholarly citations.

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There’s a lesson I once learned from a CEO—a leader admired not just for his strategic acumen but also for his unerring eye for quality. He’s renowned for respecting the creative people in his company. Yet he’s also unflinching in offering pointed feedback. When asked what guided his input, he said, “I may not be a creative genius, but I’ve come to trust my taste.”

That comment stuck with me. I’ve spent much of my career thinking about leadership. In conversations about what makes any leader successful, the focus tends to fall on vision, execution, and character traits such as integrity and resilience. But the CEO put his finger on a more ineffable quality. Taste is the instinct that tells us not just what can be done, but what should be done. A corporate leader’s taste shows up in every decision they make: whom they hire, the brand identity they shape, the architecture of a new office building, the playlist at a company retreat. These choices may seem incidental, but collectively, they shape culture and reinforce what the organization aspires to be.

Taste is a subtle sensibility, more often a secret weapon than a person’s defining characteristic. But we’re entering a time when its importance has never been greater, and that’s because of AI. Large language models and other generative-AI tools are stuffing the world with content, much of it, to use the term du jour, absolute slop. In a world where machines can generate infinite variations, the ability to discern which of those variations is most meaningful, most beautiful, or most resonant may prove to be the rarest—and most valuable—skill of all.

I like to think of taste as judgment with style. Great CEOs, leaders, and artists all know how to weigh competing priorities, when to act and when to wait, how to steer through uncertainty. But taste adds something extra—a certain sense of how to make that decision in a way that feels fitting. It’s the fusion of form and function, the ability to elevate utility with elegance.

Think of Steve Jobs unveiling the first iPhone. The device itself was extraordinary, but the launch was more than a technical reveal—it was a performance. The simplicity of the black turtleneck, the deliberate pacing of the announcement, the clean typography on the slides—none of this was accidental. It was all taste. And taste made Apple more than a tech company; it made it a design icon. OpenAI’s recently announced acquisition of Io, a startup created by Jony Ive, the longtime head of design at Apple, can be seen, among other things, as an opportunity to increase the AI giant’s taste quotient.

Taste is neither algorithmic nor accidental. It’s cultivated. AI can now write passable essays, design logos, compose music, and even offer strategic business advice. It does so by mimicking the styles it has seen, fed to it in massive—and frequently unknown or obscured—data sets. It has the power to remix elements and bring about plausible and even creative new combinations. But for all its capabilities, AI has no taste. It cannot originate style with intentionality. It cannot understand why one choice might have emotional resonance while another falls flat. It cannot feel the way in which one version of a speech will move an audience to tears—or laughter—because it lacks lived experience, cultural intuition, and the ineffable sense of what is just right.

This is not a technical shortcoming. It is a structural one. Taste is born of human discretion—of growing up in particular places, being exposed to particular cultural references, developing a point of view that is inseparable from personality. In other words, taste is the human fingerprint on decision making. It is deeply personal and profoundly social. That’s precisely what makes taste so important right now. As AI takes over more of the mechanical and even intellectual labor of work—coding, writing, diagnosing, analyzing—we are entering a world in which AI-generated outputs, and the choices that come with them, are proliferating across, perhaps even flooding, a range of industries. Every product could have a dozen AI-generated versions for teams to consider. Every strategic plan, numerous different paths. Every pitch deck, several visual styles. Generative AI is an effective tool for inspiration—until that inspiration becomes overwhelming. When every option is instantly available, when every variation is possible, the person who knows which one to choose becomes even more valuable.   

This ability matters for a number of reasons. For leaders or aspiring leaders of any type, taste is a competitive advantage, even an existential necessity—a skill they need to take seriously and think seriously about refining. But it’s also in everyone’s interest, even people who are not at the top of the decision tree, for leaders to be able to make the right choices in the AI era. Taste, after all, has an ethical dimension. We speak of things as being “in good taste” or “in poor taste.” These are not just aesthetic judgments; they are moral ones. They signal an awareness of context, appropriateness, and respect. Without human scrutiny, AI can amplify biases and exacerbate the world’s problems. Countless examples already exist: Consider a recent experimental-AI shopping tool released by Google that, as reported by The Atlantic, can easily be manipulated to produce erotic images of celebrities and minors.

Good taste recognizes the difference between what is edgy and what is offensive, between what is novel and what is merely loud. It demands integrity.

Like any skill, taste can be developed. The first step is exposure. You have to see, hear, and feel a wide range of options to understand what excellence looks like. Read great literature. Listen to great speeches. Visit great buildings. Eat great food. Pay attention to the details: the pacing of a paragraph, the curve of a chair, the color grading of a film. Taste starts with noticing.

The second step is curation. You have to begin to discriminate. What do you admire? What do you return to? What feels overdesigned, and what feels just right? Make choices about your preferences—and, more important, understand why you prefer them. Ask yourself what values those preferences express. Minimalism? Opulence? Precision? Warmth?

The third step is reflection. Taste is not static. As you evolve, so will your sensibilities. Keep track of how your preferences change. Revisit things you once loved. Reconsider things you once dismissed. This is how taste matures—from reaction to reflection, from preference to philosophy.

Taste needs to considered in both education and leadership development. It shouldn’t be left to chance or confined to the arts. Business schools, for example, could do more to expose students to beautiful products, elegant strategies, and compelling narratives. Leadership programs could train aspiring executives in the discernment of tone, timing, and presentation. Case studies, after all, are about not just good decisions, but how those decisions were expressed, when they went into action, and why they resonated. Taste can be taught, if we’re willing to make space for it.

I recently read and enjoyed this dialogue on philosophy grad school and why we have it by Barry Lam. While I enjoyed it and learned from it, I thought I had a slightly different take, so I decided to write my own dialogue on the matter! The two character are called "Grádwuma", pronounced GRAH-dwoo-mah, and "Ɔdɔfírinne", pronounced AW-daw-FEER-in-yeh.

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Ɔdɔfírinne: They’re trying to defund us, would you believe it!?


Grádwuma: I would, trusting sort that I am, but all the same I’d feel better if you’d tell me who they are and what they mean to defund.


Ɔ: Oh, cute — at least when we’re all unemployed you’ll have your career as a comedian to fall back on.

G: Working on my tight-five.

Ɔ: Well in the meantime, I just got back from faculty senate where I was told that in light of the general state of things the university is facing budget cuts! Worse, given that the Prominent Right Wing Politician mentioned us by name on their last TV-appearance, we’re clearly in for special treatment; it was said our department’s PhD programme specifically was unsustainable and will have to go.

G: That’s terrible! We’ll have to involve the union!

Ɔ: Well, naturally I threatened to organise a work-stoppage, but the Vice-Dean-Chancellor-Provost simply laughed at the very idea of philosophers on strike, wondering how ever they’d tell the difference. The cheek!

G: Quite. 

Ɔ: It just makes me so sad to see they don’t recognise the value of what we do here.

G: Right! Our students do fairly well on the job market, we provide them a competitive wage; it’s a lovely way to spend one’s mid-20s — a real shame for future generations to be robbed of this!

Ɔ: Well… yes, I suppose so, but that’s not really what I had in mind.

G: Oh, you had in mind the subsidised housing? Because I actually think we stoppe-

Ɔ: No! I meant all the deep and important work answering fundamental questions about reality and our place therein.

G: … are we still talking about our grad programme?

Ɔ: Of course! You don’t think that characterises our work and that of our students?



G: Of course not! Though, I should say, I don’t mean to imply anything negative about our valued students in particular. It’s just — when was the last time you heard of a philosophical question of that sort getting answered by anyone, let alone any of us?



Ɔ: I’m sure there are plenty of cases, but I must ask: if you don’t think we actually address the questions we set ourselves to, why do you think it a shame that we stop training people in our methods of answering those questions?

G: It’s just as I said! We’re a cushy jobs programme for the idle-smart. I suppose it can also be said that by reducing competition for McKinsey internships, or whatever else these kids’d do for lack of us, we help boost wages in various upper middle class jobs, making the rich that little bit richer and incrementally widening inequality - you’d think the Prominent Right Wing Politician would thank us!

Ɔ: Can’t you be serious? If this were all we did then surely our esteemed Vice-Dean-Chancellor-Provost would be quite right to do away with us. If it’s not the case that we’re tackling questions that actually matter then surely there are better ways of employing people.

G: well my friend you talk a big game yet I can’t help but notice you failed to actually produce any examples of us answering these deep questions.

Ɔ: I didn’t really think it would be necessary! Are you really so cynical? Do you really doubt that questions about the nature of truth, beauty, scientific method, etc, are interesting and important?



G: it’s not the questions I worry about, it’s our answering them. How often do we actually answer those questions to the satisfaction of anyone beyond the author putting forward the claim? And even then one often doubts their conviction! You may think I sound cynical, but the benefit to young people of spending a few years cloistered in our little corner of academe is a real good we know actually accrues to people; I’m genuinely proud to have helped earnest young people spend a bit of their lives doing something they love. While you would rest the case for our programme on the viability of the latest attempt to avoid a counter-example to one’s preferred analysis of “knowledge”! I think, between the two of us, it is actually I who offer the stronger defence.

Ɔ: Come now, you over-state your doubts. Surely you’d agree that at least in the case of the greats — the Parfits, Lewises, Williamsons, or Nussbaums — surely then our little field has managed to produce answers of interest to more than just their authors?


G: which of the people you just named do you actually agree with on any of their characteristic positions?


Ɔ: … Ah, well. Nevertheless, after all, it’s more complica-

G: Right well while you think about that I’m going to go tell the Vice-Dean-Chancellor-Provost about the median wage of our grads 5 years out of programme.

Ɔ: Look, even if I do not entirely agree with my honoured elders I still do think that them producing the answers they did is of more than parochial interest! And, more than that, I think it has to be if this is worth doing at all - if even at our best we do not produce answers worth coming to learn of then it really all has been in vain and we really may as well just shut the whole place down.


G: Why think any of this? In fact, why even conceive of philosophy in terms of “answers to questions”? It’s not so natural as you make it seem.

Ɔ: Because it’s the only plausible end towards which grad school may genuinely be a good means. There are plenty of ways of providing welfare to people in their mid-20s, most of them far more equitable and efficient than grad school. Unlike in some other fields, nearly anyone can ask our questions, and if all we cared about was the literary or aesthetic quality of philosophical musings then by the way we train students we’d probably be making the world worse. Generating philosophy teachers for undergraduates is a fine thing indeed but probably doesn’t require the lengthy, and failure-prone, process of also producing a full PhD as one is being trained to do so. And don’t get me started on “soft skills” arguments; if philosophy actually engendered “critical thinking” then no one would be taken in by the claim that in order to teach it one first requires a decade of tertiary education.

The only thing, the only thing at all, that we plausibly actually achieve best by having people specialise for the long period we do, is inculcating people into a method and tradition of answering questions in a superior fashion, and one that requires long immersion and rigorous training in order to master. 

G: I confess I have always been sceptical of inference to the best explanation as a mode of reasoning. But, if nothing else, I at least admire the chutzpah of an I.B.E. which takes as rock solid fact, in demand of explanation, that one’s job is very valuable and must be protected!

Ɔ: You impute your cynicism to me and thereby reverse the order of causation! It is because I believe it valuable that I sought the job, and for this same reason I now wish to protect it.

G: Huh. Fair enough. But, look, that merely shifts the register from comic to tragic when you admit you cannot actually name anyone whose produced answers to philosophical questions you think hold up to general scrutiny, that can credibly claim to settle the matters we purport to investigate.

Ɔ: Not so, Grádwuma, not so — my mistake before was to name our contemporary leading lights. Philosophy does not work on such timescales. I should have named the real philosophical high rollers: Aristotle succeeded in showing a logical system complete, Descartes invented graphs, and Newton made some noteworthy contributions to physics. Philosophers one and all!

G: oh gimmie a break! Yeah yeah we’ve all heard this one before - philosophy only seems not to succeed because whenever we generate unambiguous successes we break off the sub-discipline into its own department and are no longer credited with the win. Imagine if every time a sufficiently interesting theorem were proven mathematics departments subdivided, the thought goes, and everyone stopped thinking of at least one of the new things as “mathematics” anymore - surely in such a world the thing going by the name “mathematics” would seem less impressive than our world, even if overall that world had exactly the same record of achievement. I fully agree. And if we were concerned to defend the general reputation of “philosophy” per se then I would also agree this is a telling consideration - but we are here to defend philosophy grad school, and to that end it is quite besides the point.

I have nothing against the Greats you just named - some of my best friends are dead white men - but the fashions in which they were trained and addressed their questions are surely not representative of our training regimen. And nor would we want it to be! Or do you propose we divide our student’s time between propositional logic and Biblical numerology? Maybe have them snort mercury and take a brief stint invading the Czech Republic to see what inspiration it brings? 

Ɔ: how is it you just pronounced the capitalisation of “G” in “Greats”!?

G: don’t worry about it.

Ɔ: In any case, you undervalue our tradition. Of course we do not do exactly what our illustrious forbearers did before they achieved their eminence, but nor have we haphazardly innovated at random. It is not, after all, simply happy chance that we have retained knowledge of Newton’s means of predicting eclipses but let his means of predicting apocalypses fall by the wayside. We have taken what has worked, refined and adapted it to suit present purposes, and our current method in education represents a distillation of their wisdom - a wisdom we transmit to students, and from which we may plausibly hope to see similar or even greater results. 

G: You take much on faith. I agree that if we really had somehow distilled the wisdom of the ancients into our pedagogical practice then we could appropriately draw on philosophy’s big wins in defence of our programme’s continued existence. But I do not think we are anywhere near so thoughtful about either our pedagogy or relationship to tradition that we can claim as much with any confidence. I have heard, for instance, experimental philosophers complain that the relative neglect of their preferred empirical methods marks a real break with the classic tradition in philosophy, and likely to our detriment - a claim made plausible by your selection of past exemplars, I note. Likewise our comrades in the Continental tradition make related complaints of us, as far as I can tell. What makes you so sure they are wrong?

Ɔ: such objections themselves misunderstand how it is traditions convey wisdom! They do not require explicit theorisation or reflexive self-understanding to work their magic, and often in fact it is a sign of crisis or decay when such is felt needed. Perhaps I am taking things on faith, I grant, but the faith is just one in the basic common sense of philosophers — no, don’t give me that look, I mean it entirely seriously. It is a faith that on average and in the main people have done a tolerably good job at detecting what of the previous generation’s practices were worth retaining, and conveying that in turn to their students. So long as we are a bit better than average, and there is enough of us, I think it is quite reasonable to suppose that the outcome of such a tradition has something worthy of confidence. And if you will not even grant that degree of rational discernment to us then I would wonder why you are so sure you are an exception, and your own ability to make judgements on what is good in our programme is worth any more than mine, or indeed the Vice-Dean-Chancellor-Provost’s.

G: Far be it from me to suggest any superiority in judgement to that of the Vice-Dean-Chancellor-Provost! Ok, so if I understand your claim it is this: the philosophy grad-programme is worth keeping around because there is a particular valuable thing it is uniquely good at, namely seeing to it that we answer important questions characteristic of philosophical inquiry - what is love, when and why are inferences valid, what is the nature of reality, so on and so forth. And we know we are doing this, despite our apparently paltry results, because if one looks on a long enough time scale one can see philosophy has actually been quite impressive in its intellectual accomplishments - and our pedagogical practices are the continuation of the tradition which generated such results.

Ɔ: Indeed! And, if I may, I would even supplement these reasonings with some points in a similar spirit to those you made earlier, namely — amidst all this we are both inexpensive and inoffensive. Our failures and mistakes are easy to ignore, our wages not so high in the grand scheme of things, our additional expenses amounting to a library card and the occasional Holiday Inn Express room when we attend conferences. So even where it all comes to nought little expense was put out, and the time spent cultivating our tradition far from onerous, and pleasant to those involved. So even if for all this it remains true that our hit rate is low and our progress measured in geological time, still we are cheap and cheerful enough to be worth it. Philosophy grad school is, dare I say it, one of the better investments one can make, seen sub specie aeternitatis. What’s more, I thi— oh, what’s this, I just got a text, hold on.

G: What does it say?

Ɔ: Huh. Well, it seems the Prominent Right Wing Politician got wind of our treasured colleague’s OpEd wherein they gave the scientific case against Despised Minority Group receiving Christmas presents. So now, far from attacking us, the Prominent Right Wing Politician is holding us up as one of the last defenders of free speech, objectivity, and Western Civilisation in the academy! The Vice-Dean-Chancellor-Provost has totally reversed their position; our funding is to be doubled!

G: oh thank God. Welp, back to work then!

Ɔ: indeed! 

Cosmic Garden by Kyoko Yoshimura

tl;dr: A futurist friend recently made an expensive, early exit from the Middle East during a flare-up in the Israel-Iran conflict … then felt embarrassed when the situation de-escalated theatrically. That embarrassment stems from misframing the decision as an optimisation problem — which assumes that precise estimation of risks, probabilities, and timings is possible. It wasn’t. The situation wasn’t only risky, it was also uncertain — marked by capricious actors uninterested in playing by well-understood rules. In uncertain situations, optimisation fails and other frames for decisionmaking make much more sense. The real skill here is correctly diagnosing the kind of not-knowing you’re facing, then choosing a decision frame suited to uncertainty, not just risk.

In the last week of June, there was another spate of advanced sabre-rattling in the Israel-Iran conflict involving missiles. Several Middle East countries — including those with big international hub airports — closed their airspaces.

I’m in the latest season of a long-running group chat populated mostly by futurists and futures-adjacent people. Someone in the group sent a series of messages about their response to this latest escalation of hostilities more or less in realtime. With his permission, I’ve consolidated and reproduced them below.

“Qatar closed its airspace then the UAE surprised me by doing the same. All my sources here are freaking out about the inbound missles to Doha. I think ‘Shit, this is blowing my risk register off the scale, I should act.’ So I called Emirates to change my summer tickets from Friday to tonight. Call center totally jammed. Can’t get through at all. So COVID style I jump in the car, race to to the airport and change out tickets to a 3am flight. I’m already wondering if this is the right call when on the drive home, the same friends and sources are saying the attack was intentionally weak, symbolic, and a carefully staged theatrical off-ramp. Great! But fuck, it’s twice the price to change the tickets back and now I jumped the gun. My sang froid predictive record and risk radar was overtuned and jumpier than usual. Just feel embarrassed a bit as an overly sensitive futurist who has thus far being calling this situation pretty decently.”

Embarrassment is the natural and unavoidable feeling that comes from believing that you have misread the “optimal” time to leave. (In their words, “I used to practically write this shit and now I’m falling for it like a first year Muggle.”)

The idea of there being an optimal time makes a strong implicit assumption that it is possible to precisely and accurately estimate the probability and the timing of known downsides in a situation. Optimising requires knowing all the ways things could go wrong, and how likely each outcome is, and all their respective timings. Only then is it possible to leave at just the right moment — not too early, but not too late.

Framing a decision as an optimisation problem (of timing or anything else) is only correct when the situation is risky. Optimisation is a fundamentally mathematical, margin-oriented approach to decisionmaking. The only kinds of unknowns that are mathable in this way are the risky ones. In risky situations, you don’t know exactly what will happen, but you know almost everything about what you don’t know. Important real-life situations are almost never only risky. (Risk is not the same thing as uncertainty.)

The Middle East situation doesn’t seem only risky. It involves multiple state and non-state actors, many of whom appear to be capricious or uninterested in reliably perpetuating formerly well-understood patterns of geopolitical interaction. Trying to estimate accurate probabilities of what these actors will do is a mug’s game. The full range of outcomes isn’t even known, let alone how likely each outcome might be.

If you can’t estimate probabilities accurately, if you don’t know what unknowns you’re facing, you shouldn’t be trying to optimise. Instead, consider using a different framing for the decisions you have to make. In the Middle East, when Iranian missiles are falling on a US base in a country not directly involved in the Israel-Iran conflict and you’re deciding whether to bring forward your plane ticket, some useful framing questions might be “Could this get much worse?”, and “If it gets much worse, will I regret not having left now?”

If yes to both questions — if you could get stuck in a war zone when you could have flown out early for a few thousand dollars and some inconvenience — then leaving “too early” isn’t irrational and embarrassing. It actually seems quite sensible.

The alternative framing for that particular situation is precautionary, but the right alternative frame for decisionmaking always depends on the particularities of the uncertain situation you face. Diagnosis of the situation is a crucial skill.

If the uncertainty in the situation is due to, say, a new technology emerging, an appropriate alternative decisionmaking frame might be one which emphasises the degrees of freedom (to build new types of products, or reach new types of markets) afforded by a new technology that changes how long-established processes are done. The only commonality these alternative decisionmaking frames have is that they explicitly address different types of non-risk, unquantifiable not-knowing and distinguish it from risk.

It’s important to be explicit about diagnosing whether the unknowns in situations are risky or uncertain. This is because we’ve been trained to treat unknowns as things to be mapped, modeled, and calculated with precision. But that works only when you’ve correctly diagnosed the situation as risky and thus susceptible to precise estimation. When the situation is actually uncertain, precise estimation leads only to false confidence.

My futurist friend in the Middle East writes (from a remote tropical location): “I think the moral of the story is that when the bottom of the downside consequences is unknown and the mechanisms of acceleration towards it are unclear, it pays to err on the side of precaution.” Right on.

So, to end, here’s a relevant memory. It’s from mid-March 2020, in the very early days of Covid before we even really knew what it was. A major city in China had recently locked down, and a patchwork of international travel restrictions was beginning to emerge. I had a friend from Cambridge, MA pass through London, about half-way through their annual European lecture tour.

We met for a coffee just north of Oxford Street, but all we could talk about was this new virus and whether they should fly back to the US immediately and abandon the rest of the tour, losing not only the speaking fees but also having to eat all the costs of pre-booked and non-refundable flights and accommodation.

Over coffee, we discussed different frames for decisionmaking given the uncertainties (not just risks) Covid-19 posed. They decided thereafter to go back home immediately, spent several hours looking for a flight, and managed to leave the next day. The US announced a travel ban from the UK two days later that was only lifted fully in November 2021.