prior probability

Michael Huemer poses an important legal question in this blog post: Are Internet giants like Google and Facebook and popular websites like Twitter and Instagram “publishers” or “platforms”? In other words, should these Internet firms be legally liable for user-generated content? Here is Huemer’s argument (link in the original): Continue reading →

Although I have taught college and graduate-level courses in Constitutional Law since 1998, I had never thought about this question until now. Check out this footnote (pictured below) on pp. 87-88 of Cecilia Watson’s beautiful book on the history of the semi-colon:

This entertaining video poses an important question: should governments ban cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, regulate them, or just leave them alone? Hat tip: @ATabarrok

Does WordPress (the platform I use to blog) count as social media? If so, then Jaron Lanier has written an entire book explaining why you should delete this blog as well as your other social media accounts. (Pictured below is the back cover of his book outlining his arguments.) I guess “Digital Puritanism” is a thing!

What does the future hold for us? Pictured below is one of Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann’s artistic renderings of a future digital dystopia. Beeple is a graphic designer from Charleston, South Carolina, who does a variety of digital artwork including short films. You can check out Beeple’s website here and his haunting series of Digital Dystopias here. (Hat tip: phoenixabovesky11, via Imgur.)

Artist Credit: Beeple

That is the title of this ten-page paper by Dr Tom Murphy VII (!), a computer scientist whose homepage is http://tom7.org/. The abstract of Dr Murphy’s beautiful paper consists of one word, and the paper is dated 1 April 2019, but it’s no April Fools’ prank, or is it? Below is the paper’s esoteric research question:

“… what if you are forced to be one of the chess pieces [in a life-or-death chess match]? That is, your little soul inhabits one of the 32 pieces or pawns and your soul is vanquished if that piece is eliminated. Now it doesn’t matter whether you’re good or bad at chess,because you don’t get to pick what happens in the game. What matters is that your piece lives to the end of the game, when all surviving pieces are set free. Which piece should you want to be?”

Hmmm … Where have we seen this before? Maybe here.

More details about the subject of this fascinating documentary are available here (h/t: @pickover).