the intellectual & writer life

Elitism is the belief that some books are better than other books and that it is better to read those books. This is not necessarily an argument for only reading those books.

Without internally stored knowledge, the brain's natural error-detection mechanisms lie dormant. We become not just dependent on external tools but vulnerable to their failures, unable to distinguish sense from nonsense.

Simply understanding is an ideal of the man who has a capacity to know truth but not the chance, the skill, or the guts, as the case may be, to communicate them with political effectiveness. Knowledge that is not communicated has a way of turning the mind sour, of being obscured, and finally of being forgotten. For the sake of the integrity of the... See more

Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Such transformations can be uplifting. Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand... See more

Building a T-shaped knowledge graph means aggressively diversifying your information sources, spreading out wider to seemingly unrelated areas and capturing the advantage of being at the beginning of the diminishing returns curve where you’re constantly exposed to new ideas. It also means being selectively ignorant about certain things. You have to... See more

Of course, it’s long seemed obvious to me (and, I presume, basically everyone I care about or respect ) that the use of AI in most humanistic endeavors is beyond the pale. Even if it were good at writing prose or doing philosophy—and thus far it isn’t —to use AI to write or philosophize would be to render those activities futile. In some of the... See more

the virtually lost art of ethnographic participant-observation

Writing is an antidote to the immediacy and inexactitude of speech, and I resent any attempt to drag me back into the sludge of dialogue.