Mo King

Judaism gave the world the idea that righteousness might not belong to the strong: our God is on the side of the weak, the poor, the persecuted, and the despised. First He thunders: ‘The Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible.’ But in the very next verse: ‘He executes the judgment of the fatherless... See more

Everyone remembers being bullied at school. Even celebs, film stars, supermodels, beautiful and charismatic people, all seem to have had a hard time of it when they were kids. Some people build the entire foundation of their adult life on having been bullied as a child. You were such a misfit, you were so interesting and different... But nobody... See more

The protagonist of Stella Maris is a young, brilliant and psychologically messy mathematical genius, for whom mathematics appears as both a salvation and a curse. It offers her precision in a world of ambiguity, but its very exactitude highlights how much remains unknowable. She spirals.

To understand what someone is truly capable of, one must observe them as they go out into the world and make something out of the life they’ve been given. We got the true measure of Einstein’s impact not by IQ-testing him but by watching him invent theories of physics.

A recent MIT Tech Review article attempted to address the same problem as the Santa Fe workshop: how we might build better AI evaluations. The author’s main recommendation was to look to the tools of social science, where “it’s particularly important that metrics begin with a rigorous definition of the concept measured by the test.” If we want to... See more

And indeed, the growing questions about AI consciousness only highlight the unknowability of consciousness in general. We can’t even prove other humans aren’t “philosophical zombies” lacking inner experience, much less grasp animal consciousness after coexisting with animals for millennia. If we can’t definitively confirm firsthand experience in... See more

There is a concept in philosophy also called cognitive closure. Unlike the corresponding concept in psychology, it describes not our need for answers but our inability to access them. Philosopher Colin McGinn coined the term to indicate that some philosophical questions may lie beyond human comprehension—the issue of consciousness, for example.... See more

Truth should be accessible yet transcendent, superior but subordinate. Why do our searches for fundamental truth seem so often contradictory?