prior probability

N.B.: This is Part 2 of my series on “Critical thinking in the age of A.I.”

Previously (see here), I posed a question that has been troubling me since ChatGPT was unleashed on the world on 30 November 2022: What impact will ChatGPT and other large language models have on higher education? That is, if the primary mission of higher ed is to promote critical thinking (paging John Dewey!), what impact will these models have on students’ ability to think and reason for themselves? Today, however, I want to take a step back and ask an even more fundamental question. To the point, what is critical thinking? Simply put, what do we mean when we say “the primary mission of higher ed is to promote critical thinking”?

Alas, there is no one standard or universal or commonly-accepted definition of “critical thinking”? Worse yet, some definitions are totally circular. (See, for example, this entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which defines critical thinking as “careful thinking directed to a goal”.) Some scholars simply assume that critical thinking is the ability to “think for yourself”. (See, for example, this article in the Harvard Business Review.) The problem with this standard definition, however, is that it is incomplete, since we all have deep cognitive biases that distort our thinking. At a minimum, then, critical thinking has to consist of some reliable method for overcoming our biases.

That is why I propose we take a general Humean/Bayesian approach to critical thinking, for it was the great David Hume who said (in his essay on miracles), “A wise man … proportions his belief to the evidence wise man”, and it was Hume’s contemporary, the Reverend Thomas Bayes (in his posthomous essay on the “doctrine of chances”), who developed an ingenious method for updating our beliefs when new evidence becomes available. For me, then, a critical thinker is someone who is able to overcome his cognitive biases by emulating Hume and Bayes — specifically, by taking the following two intellectual steps: careful evaluation and scrutiny of the available evidence (Hume), followed by periodic “updating” as new evidence becomes available (Bayes).

With this definition in mind, we can now begin to address my original question: What impact will ChatGPT have on critical thinking? (To be continued …)

As I remember my late father, Don Francisco Guerra (1943-2024), on this Father’s Day, I say “hasta pronto y hasta luego” to our beloved México with our favorite mariachi ballad, for it was my Cuban father who introduced me to Mexican culture and mariachi music when I was a boy. I will never forget our family vacations in the little beach towns of Rosarito and San Felipe …

That is the title of my most recent published paper, which appears on pages 316-331 of Volume 18 of the Journal of Law & Public Policy (JLPP). In brief, I build on F. A. Hayek’s classic work “The use of knowledge in society” to propose a new kind of information market in fake news and conspiracy theories and the like. The abstract of my paper is below:

A growing chorus of scholars and policy makers have decried the proliferation of false information on the Internet—fake news, conspiracy theories, and the like—while at the same time downplaying the dangers of Internet censorship. This Article proposes a simple alternative to censorship: a retrodiction market in which participants buy and sell belief contracts.

Update #2 (14 June): An appellate court has put a temporary pause on Judge Breyer’s grandiloquent order (see previous update below) and scheduled an emergency hearing for this Tuesday, 17 June (see here).

Update (13 June): Charles Breyer, an unelected federal judge in Northern California, has “blocked” President Trump’s deployment of local National Guard units in Los Angeles (see here). Really? How will the judge enforce his 36-page order?

My original blog post (12 June): Given the recent events in Los Angeles, California (my hometown), where I will be visiting next week, I am reposting a link to my 2019 paper “Domestic Constitutional Violence“. Among other things, my work provides some general historical background regarding the use of military force inside the United States: I describe how the U.S. Congress, going back to the presidencies of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, has delegated a specific set of emergency powers to the president to deal with certain classes of domestic dangers. (Nota bene: Due to my travel schedule this weekend, I will resume my series on “AI and critical thinking” on Monday, June 16.)

I will resume my series on “Critical thinking in the age of A.I.” in the next day or two; in the meantime, I want to hit pause to honor the life and legacy of my fellow Californian Brian Wilson, the musical genius who co-founded the legendary Beach Boys. Via the N.Y. Times, here is his obituary, and below is one of my all-time favorite Beach Boys songs:

I did not know about this remarkable chapter of North American history until today! You can read about it here or here, or better yet, check out the 11-minute YouTube video below:

My daughter Adys and I are in the Yucatán peninsula this week, where we will be visiting the Temple of Kukulcan (Structure5B18) at the Chichen Itza archaeological site today (9 June) as well as the ruins at Tulum on Tuesday (10 June). When I get back to blogging in the next day or two, I will begin to explore the dire threat that large language models like ChatGPT pose to the central mission of higher education: critical thinking. In the meantime, below are two versions of the iconic Coldplay hit from the early 2000s “Viva la vida”:

“Sabor a mí” is a 1959 bolero by the legendary Mexican musician and composer Álvaro Carrillo. Since then, his iconic and beautiful balad has been reinterpreted by many artists. (Indeed, I featured some of these re-recordings in this 2021 blog post.) The version below is performed by Javier Camarena, featuring Jesús Navarro:

N.B.: The blog post below is based on the last part of my talk this weekend at the 2025 South-North Exchange on Theory, Culture, and Law at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad de México (UACM):

Previously, I drew a connection between the doctrine of necessity in law and the “state of exception” in the political arena, between Trump’s ingenious legal strategy in defense of his trade wars — i.e. declare an emergency or “state of exception” and then proceed to suspend ordinary constitutional rules under the pretext of that declared emergency — and the well-established legal doctrine of necessity, a doctrine that can be traced back to the Roman law maxim necessitas non habet legem (“necessity knows no law”).

Today, I want to explain why the doctrine of necessity may also capture the true essence of what I have called “Gödel’s Loophole.” In brief, this supposed constitutional loophole refers to a possible “inner contradiction” in the U.S. Constitution, one that could produce a legalized dictatorship. But what if the loophole is not inside the Constitution but outside out it? Consider, for example, the first sentence of Carl Schmitt’s 1922 book Political Theology (available here): “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” In other words, it is the state of exception that defines the legal order, not the other way around, or in the immortal words of Schmitt himself: “The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything …”

Although the ideas of this great German legal philosopher are often discounted or swept under the rug because of his subsequent ties with the Nazis (see here, for instance), the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has shown why Schmitt’s famous dictum (“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”) is more relevant than ever today. Among other things, Agamben cites Schmitt dozens of times in his 2005 monograph State of Exception (available here) and explains why Schmitt’s dictum presents a double paradox, for a state of exception not only creates a legal vacuum in which actions are not bound by the law; it also suspends or annuls the rule of law in the name of protecting the legal order. The Schmittian sovereign — the person who gets to decide what constitutes an emergency necessitating a state of exception — thus stands outside the law and at the same time is its ultimate source.

For my part, building on the ideas of Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt, I now want to present a new and improved version of Gödel’s loophole. Simply put, if X has the lawful power to declare an emergency or state of exception, then by definition he has the lawful power to suspend ordinary legal and constitutional rules during the duration of the emergency — that is, by definition X is a lawful dictator. I have left open (for now) an important second-order problem: can X’s emergency-declaring power be reviewable by the courts or can it be subject to a legislative veto? However this second-order question is answered, my revised version of Gödel’s constitutional loophole describes Trump’s legal playbook in the tariff cases to a “T” (pun intended): Trump is not only suspending the normal rules of constitutional law under the pretext of his declared emergencies; one could further argue that, as president, he has the inherent authority to do so!