Latest Posts

• Thinking In Categories

  Isaac Longenecker 2021-02-02 00:00:00 +0000

  Language provides a framework that helps us think. The way we make sense of the world comes from our ability to think in categories, draw distinctions, and create structure. Thus not only does it help us derive facts and truths about the world, but considering the amount of sense data we have to process it does so in a pretty timely manner. But it’s not perfect as we found out when the world couldn’t agree on whether the dress was white and gold or blue and black.

• The Case For The Very Long Term

  Isaac Longenecker 2020-11-24 00:00:00 +0000

  Consider how many people are alive today (~7.5 billion) compared to all the humans that have ever lived (~100 billion). Of the roughly 200,000 years Homo sapiens have been around, much of that time has come and gone with no significant progress in welfare (health, human rights, life expectancy, wealth, etc.) There is no doubt that our current generation is immensely privileged with respect to prior generations. We are also uniquely positioned to make a great impact on the future. As we grow richer in technology, energy, and knowledge, we must also accumulate the wisdom and prudence necessary to stay in control of our future. Considering the trajectory of welfare up to this point, and the fact that our current population represents such a small fraction of total human lives and years that have been spent on earth, it seems reasonable to conclude that exponentially more lives (good lives!) have yet to be lived. We are morally responsible for the future, the far future included.

• Evolution Is Not Creative

  Isaac Longenecker 2020-10-03 00:00:00 +0000

  The whole system is made up of many parts. Your body is a result of all the tiny physical processes you are made up of. All the way down to the tiny essential functions that RNA performs so well. These small machines completing their own task form larger systems with emergent properties – making them more than the sum of their parts. And this is what makes evolutionary biology so unintuitive, because it appears creative when we see the incredible mechanisms organisms have developed in order to survive. (One of my favorites is shrews shrink their brains and skulls by 15% to conserve resources in the winter). In trying to figure out why bats have wings, you can’t start with the wing. Wings (in bats) are a form of emergence and not an end unto itself. It’s not that nature decided wings are helpful to grow because flying seems like an exceptional evolutionary trait. For bat wings to grow, the webbed-digit genes must become more and more frequent in successive generations. We have to be careful when inscribing purpose into the end traits; there’s no decision in which genes ought to be promoted. And a gene’s effect must cause copies of itself to become more frequent in the next generation. A chicken is an egg’s way of creating another egg, and we are a gene’s way of creating more genes.

• Moderation In Moderation

  Isaac Longenecker 2020-09-09 00:00:00 +0000

  Everything in moderation. This expression about self restraint takes a pretty extreme position on the matter. That’s what tips me off first. Second is that my childhood was peppered with this phrase. My mother has many phrases up her sleeve, but this might be her favorite. Probably added it soon after she had her third boy (she didn’t go for a fourth).

• In Favor Of Epistemological Modesty

  Isaac Longenecker 2020-08-30 00:00:00 +0000

  Epistemological modesty is a profoundly immodest way of saying “I don’t know as much as I think I know.” It stings a little less when you put it in big words. Just as important as the desire and curiosity to seek out the truth is the counterbalance of reigning in conclusions and confidence levels.

• Ranking Societal Issues

  Isaac Longenecker 2020-08-05 00:00:00 +0000

  We are used to ranking significant issues by priority which could look something like: