Philosophy

Nowadays, whenever I feel scared in the face of a decision and yearn for the safety of an optimizing formula, I try to remind myself that there’s another way of feeling safe. It’s not about perfection, about invulnerability, about control. It’s about leaning into the fact that we are imperfect and vulnerable creatures and that even when we’re tryin... See more

The more I think about it, the more I think this is why so many of us, myself included, are attracted to data-based optimization. We’re painfully aware that we are vulnerable, fallible creatures. Our shame about that is reflected in Western religious traditions: The Bible tells us that upon first creating the world, God “saw that it was good,” but ... See more

The concept of subjectivity is derived from the philosophy

of Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Delueze & Guattari, Butler,

and others. Two related concepts are at the core of this the-

ory: the notion of subject positions, which are social roles

that people are thrust into, and subjectivity, which is the felt

experience and creative agency of individ... See more

How could gaining knowledge amount to anything other than discovering what was already there? How could the truth of a statement or a theory be anything but its correspondence to facts that were fixed before we started investigating them?

Some philosophers have argued that, despite widespread intuitions to the contrary, knowledge is not merely a mat... See more