2026-03-27 01:45:08
In response to “2023 Or, Why I am Not a Doomer” by Dean W. Ball.
Dean Ball is a pretty big voice in AI policy – over 19k subscribers on his newsletter, and a former Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the Trump White House – so why does he disagree that AI poses an existential danger to humanity? In short, he holds the common view that superintelligence (ASI) simply won’t be that powerful. I strongly disagree, and I think he makes a couple of invalid leaps to arrive there.
His main flawed argument is that he implies AI must be omnipotent and omniscient to wipe us out and then explains why that won’t be the case. He states: “one common assumption… among many people in ‘the AI safety community’ is that artificial superintelligence will be able to ‘do anything.’” He then argues that “intelligence is neither omniscience nor omnipotence,” and that even a misaligned AI with “no [..] safeguards to hinder it” would “still fail” because taking over the world “involves too many steps that require capital, interfacing with hard-to-predict complex systems.” But omnipotence or omniscience was never the requirement, it just needs to be smarter and better than us – humans.
Importantly, it doesn’t actually take superintelligence to wipe out or disempower humanity. For me to imagine this, I simply need to think forward to the not-so-distant future. Imagine you get a tiger cub. Think forward to what the tiger will look like in a year and ask yourself: could it kill me in a year? Now do this with AI. Imagine the future with a billion robots, AI running the military, AI doing basically all jobs with perhaps some level of human oversight, AI running the media, biolabs, political and military decisions, critical infrastructure. That metaphorical tiger could kill us. Ball himself imagines a future where AI is “embedded into much of the critical infrastructure and large organizations in America, such that it is challenging to imagine what life would be like if Claude ‘turned off.’”
Ball also discusses scenarios in which superintelligence has almost outlandish abilities, performing science breakthroughs without much experimentation. He focuses on Yudkowsky’s claim that “a sufficiently superintelligent AI system would be able to infer not just the theory of gravity, but of relativity” from a few frames of a falling apple, or that “bootstrap molecular nanoengineering.” Ball may be correct that these specific claims are wrong, but these are not load-bearing parts of any story for why AI might become dangerous. You don’t need to infer relativity from first principles to engineer a bioweapon. Notably, Yudkowsky himself has given other scenarios that do not require the AI to make scientific breakthroughs without experiments (see IABIED, chapter 2).
If your response is “but there will be many AIs and there will be monitoring, so we’ll be safe,” then you’ve shifted to a different (and very flawed) argument.[1] The point is that clearly AI will be able to take over in the future if we haven’t aligned it well by then. In reality, it probably won’t take that long to largely automate all jobs and tasks, since it’s enough to achieve some combination of: secure power, enable actions in the physical world, get rid of or sideline humans. And once it reaches a critical capability level, the AI has to act fast because of competing AI projects that represent future rival agents.
The core of Ball’s case, that the world is simply too complex and chaotic for any intelligence to control, is not a new argument. Robin Hanson made essentially the same case in his 2008 Foom Debate with Yudkowsky: innovation is too distributed across many actors, no single AI can race ahead of all competitors fast enough to dominate. But Hanson more correctly understood that this is an argument about the speed and distribution of AI takeoff, not an argument against existential risk. Ball takes Hanson’s position and corrupts it by treating it as a refutation of existential risk from AI entirely.
The “many AIs and monitors” defense is pretty weak: unaligned AIs can cooperate with each other; monitoring can be evaded, there’s simply too much to monitor, AI doing the monitoring for us could itself be jailbroken or could cooperate with the systems it’s supposed to watch, and AIs can hide their reasoning through methods like steganography.
2026-03-27 01:14:44
I previously wrote about the present perfect tense and how it can make you waste time pursuing things you don’t really want—when you want to have done them instead of wanting to do them. Now I notice the continuous tense characterizes another pitfall, kind of the opposite: sometimes you want to be doing work more than you want to do it. And that difference is actually the difference between humans and gods.
Sometimes you want to be doing work more than you want to do it. Notice the difference. To do work makes the work done; it eliminates. To be doing work is continuous; it prolongs. What this looks like practically is getting lost in labor that doesn’t pay off.
I notice this in myself sometimes, and I notice it in others, especially some older people, who grew up with less automation technology in their daily lives. Sorry to stereotype, but I think Baby Boomers love “working” more than they love work. Look down a long list, check if it contains some item, and when you find it, do something with it, and repeat. All lookups done with eyes, all work done with typing fingers or a pen. This characterizes untold person-hours of labor that people happily spend.
Why do they do this? They get into a flow state with it, and I would too—the action is perfectly flow-state-compatible—except for a voice in my head that lovingly screams, “This is not worth your time!” But if searching down long lists was not already solved by computer technology, it would be worth my time, and I would enjoy it.
But wait, many things still do require (really require) repetitive work! And I let myself enjoy them. When I run into a task that is 1) worth doing, but 2) best done manually, and 3) not very puzzling or complicated, I grab my headphones and put on music and get to work. I could do it nonstop for at least an hour straight and be perfectly content. Some examples:
Is this kind of work “fun?” I wouldn’t say that, but it reliably brings on a flow state, and there’s always a unique appeal to that experience. It seems silly, but under certain conditions people love labor.
I say this as a very task-driven/execution-driven person myself. Really I think a lot about the near future, about what work I would like done. But still, I get it. I may live in the future, but I can get lost in the present, in the mindless flow of necessary but non-challenging work.
Is this a problem? No: even from a productivity perspective, if there’s just no other way to clean those squids, then it’s great that there’s something appealing about the work. And then we can zoom out: productivity isn’t everything—if you’re enjoying the experience, then good. Maybe it’s worth doing some things less efficiently, if the efficient way deprives you of that flow state opportunity. But that brings us to—
The set of tasks that are 1) worth doing, but 2) best done manually, and 3) not very puzzling or complicated, is shrinking fast! AI assistants are claiming competence in more and more domains by the day. A software developer used to get all their planning and architecting hammered out and then sit down, put the headphones on, and write code. No so anymore: take the headphones off, the code is already written, go immediately to the next step.
I’m not a full-time software engineer, but I know the joy of making an app or game, enjoying and soaking up that state of making. Most of the questions I’d face were small, incremental: “How do I store that array?” “How do I move this button over there?” Nowadays I find myself asking only the big questions: What do I want to bring into existence? What will it cost to run? I’m thrilled at how fast I can build out old projects that I never would’ve had time for, but still I know something was lost.
Professional engineers I talk to have the same feeling: they can do so much more now, but they don’t exactly enjoy the work anymore. All the non-decision-making parts of the job have been automated away, so there’s no room for a flow state.
That’s software engineering, but so many other fields are affected. I mentioned 3D modeling above, but AI can do that too, and soon it’ll do it better than I can. Manual labor activities are safe for now, but consumer robotic tech is coming, too.
Something was lost; I don’t think there’s any way around it. The pleasure of doing new things is not the same as the pleasure of doing necessary work in a flow state. Both are normal human pleasures, but the latter is going away.
The joy of the continuous tense is a natural human pleasure. Will you let it go and try to fully replace it with the joy of finished work? Or will you hang onto it, no matter how inconvenient, out of principle? I don’t see an easy answer, but let’s explore:
Did the God of Genesis enjoy the act of creation? We enjoy our own creative work, but it’s partly because we enjoy the process: it asks something of us, and we invest and get to see our labor pay off. But the God of Genesis just spoke. Are we ready for a future where we “creatives” just speak things into existence?
God doesn’t labor, and therefore doesn’t find pleasure or meaning in labor. The God of Genesis finds gratification when Adam and Eve enjoy what he made. Likewise, as a god-creator your gratification is when others (including your future self, perhaps) come in and say, “Ah this is great, this is exactly what I needed.” Is that enough? Can it be? Are you ready to play God?
This is a form of transhumanism. Before the brain-enhancing chips and cybernetic appendages and designer CRISPR babies, even now, AI technology offers us the option to transcend a little part of ourselves.
Or should we resist automating away our own labor? Should we insist that it’s just as important to be creating X as it is to create X? Should we insist that any moment that feels purposeful is a “success,” even if it’s actually wasteful in economic terms?
There’s plenty of precedent for this. There are still photorealist painters, even after the invention of photography. There are still artisan potters, even though you can buy pottery from a factory in China. In fact, we humans have this quirk where the consumer resonates the meaning that the creator experiences: that’s our concept of artisanship. The handmade thing is just more special, so some people are willing to pay more for it. And thus it becomes economical again! There is a market for realist paintings today; there is a market for handmade pottery, and so on. Will there be a market for handmade software? For artisanal therapy, or financial advice?
But I must pump the brakes: something is still lost. Painting doesn’t have the popularity or status it once had: the market is proportionally smaller; a chunk of it went to photography and didn’t come back. And even if you’re great at your craft and you land the coveted artisan position, will it be the same as before? Part of what allows me to enjoy a flow state is knowing the work is necessary.
Imagine what it felt like to be an 18th Century portrait painter, doing what you love and knowing that this skillful movement of your hand is the only way to ever produce a visual representation of the subject. That’s a rush. I don’t think “I’m an artisan” can fully measure up to it. Alas, something was lost.
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2026-03-27 00:29:09
I’ve heard a number of people say that it’s unclear what the technical contours of a global AI treaty would look like. That is true - but it’s not actually an obstacle to negotiating an international treaty.
I’ll try to explain why this isn’t a good objection, but the short version is that if countries have clear goals which are largely shared, treaty, and negotiations end up with strong treaties. So the important questions are not the exact rules, but if there really is a joint global risk that requires action - but experts agree there is, and whether verification and enforceability are possible - but experts say they are. So the problem isn’t a technical issue, it’s a question of whether we can get to an agreement. And despite facile “we can’t stop until they do” arguments, we can and should try to do better.
In order to explain why we do not need to figure out the details first, it's worth talking about other treaties.
I will start with the example I watched most closely, over the past five years. The Pandemic treaty was proposed in 2021, “when WHO member States agreed on the urgent need for a legally binding international instrument,” per the UN. It was supposed to fix all the problems we had during COVID. Unfortunately, this didn’t include preventing pandemics, and past that point, no-one agrees on what things should have been done, or what to do next time. So, if we can’t agree on anything, what does the treaty do? Mostly, generic pandemic-stopping stuff - “commitment to a ‘One Health’ approach to pandemic prevention, stronger national health systems, setting up a coordinating financial mechanism, and creating a globally coordinated supply chain and logistics network for health emergencies.”
How much of that was agreed about in mid-2021 when it was proposed by the European Council President? Basically none of it. What are the actual commitments? Well, that’s complicated, but the short version is that there aren’t any. The treaty insists that countries get to stay in control of their national health systems, and no-one could tell them what to do, or how - which sounds a lot like the failure that allowed COVID-19 to spread. Lots of people had different visions for what the treaty should do, from global vaccine justice to enhancing global public health to providing funds for response to climate change issues to supply chain resilience to considering animal and plant health in pandemic planning, and it ended up as a mishmash of random things that people proposed. But the failure here was one of vision - it was unclear what the world would get out of a treaty that everyone agreed about, and that lack was never addressed.
That’s obviously a problem, but not the central one we have with proposing a global treaty to ban unsafe ASI. For those asking for such a treaty, we agree about what needs to be stopped, namely, building unsafe ASI. The questions are all about how to make that happen. So we should look at another example, and I think the best parallel is nuclear weapons.
If you know anything about the history of nuclear weapons treaties, you read the section title and immediately asked: “which one?” And there are so many options - there was the Limited test ban treaty in 1963, the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1968, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) in 1972, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in 1974, the Convention on Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials (CPPNM) in 1980, and the New START Treaty in 2010. And that’s ignoring almost a half-dozen regional “Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone” treaties.
Why were there so many treaties? The goal - preventing use of nuclear weapons - was broadly agreed upon. But the exact way to accomplish that goal was tricky. And that led to lots of uncertainty, and the need for a number of different treaties addressing different parts of the problem, from testing to proliferation - but the goal was a north star. That meant that every time a concern arose, countries tried hard to figure out what was needed to accomplish the goal of not having a nuclear war, and what rules move the world further from that outcome. Even outside of treaties, nuclear powers generally have embraced a no-first-use doctrine, and have taken other measures to reduce the risk of accidental escalation. All of these address the messy dynamics of nuclear escalation between states that can’t risk being left behind.
What does this tell us about treaties about AI risks?
There are a dozen suggested international treaties for AI, and most aren’t what I’m discussing. Many are the equivalent of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which was the first nuclear-relevant treaty, but which only said countries aren’t allowed to use Antarctica to test nuclear weapons or dispose of waste. In my view, the analogous proposals include any treaty that does anything about AI other than making sure future systems do not end cause global catastrophes. (That doesn’t mean such treaties are a bad idea, just that they aren’t what I’m discussing here.)
Other proposals are actually trying to solve the problem directly. For example, the intentional equivalent of the ill-fated 1946-proposed Baruch Plan, which tried to put all nuclear weapons under international control. And the Soviet counterproposal agreed about the goal - prevention of the production and use of nuclear weapons - but disagreed about how it should work. Which meant there was no agreement to stop proliferation for several decades. Because directly solving the problem by fiat, imposed globally, before negotiations between parties start, is very hard and not usually effective.
Luckily, for nuclear treaties it didn’t matter. The overwhelming consensus of the public was that we shouldn’t have a nuclear war, and despite claims that it was an inevitable race that could only end with disaster, nuclear weapons haven’t been used in 80 years and counting. The specifics of the treaties were critical, and navigating to success was in fact hard, without any final victory. As noted above, these are a mix of bilateral, multilateral, and global treaties. Of course, we’re still worried about nuclear proliferation and nuclear war. But the treaties have given the world enough stability to avoid disaster, so far.
Again, the world was lucky that building nuclear weapons went slowly, for two decades, and that the norm against use got established in the run-up to treaties. But no-one should argue that the lack of nuclear war means the treaties were unnecessary - if anything, the common argument is that the treaties are too weak and contingent.
Do we need an ASI treaty? Yes - and that is true even if you think the risk is minimal. Yes, there is debate about whether the risk will be realized, but there is clear consensus that it is a risk, and that we should have at least the ability to put rules in place. Should we have one grand treaty, or plan for solving one part at a time? It’s unclear. Many treaty areas have dozens of overlapping treaties; “the” Geneva convention is a series of treaties that added clarifications and rules over decades. But we do need to get started. People who think we’re a decade away from fully general AI should be terrified that it’s already late in the game to start discussing such a treaty. And people who are saying we might have ASI by the end of the decade are mostly already screaming about the need for some international rules.
Nuclear power is regulated, partially via an international body - that’s mostly not about preventing global thermonuclear war, but it's critically related due to the need to control nuclear materials. And at a national level, nuclear medicine is regulated, radiation exposure levels are regulated, and we have tons of other rules that don’t relate to preventing a Nuclear World War Three. That doesn’t mean those rules aren’t important.
For AI, we already need regulation on various uses and misuses. Some of these might be international - bans on autonomous weapons, bans of nonconsensual pornography, bans on use of AI to violate other international laws. Others should be national, or even local, like bans of deceptive use of AI, or use of AI to break other laws. That’s how regulation works.
But these are not the AI treaties that we need, they are just places where we need rules. And they should be pursued - just not at the cost of further delay on the global catastrophic risks we face.
To have effective treaties that stop AI-driven global catastrophes, there are many questions that need to be answered. What exactly is needed to prevent the creation of misaligned ASI? Which chips should be tracked, who should be allowed to use them, and for what types of model development? What controls or safety measures must be in place? How should we measure dangerous capabilities? Where should the line be? Which countries need to agree first? How can we manage multilateral coordination when only a few countries are leading in the race? Will we ban existing frontier systems at the time the treaty comes into force? Or will groups be able to build slightly more capable systems with additional safeguards? What should those safeguards be?
Fortunately, we don’t need final answers to all of these questions in order to start negotiating a treaty. We don’t even need final answers in order to sign a treaty - many treaties have mechanisms for routine updates of rules. But we need a clear vision - no-one builds ASI until we are sure it is safe, and when people try clever ways to get around whatever rules exist, they are told to stop, and told that the rules will be updated. Companies must be told that their race to ASI is over, that the risk is too high, and no-one gets to win. Countries are told that whatever geopolitical advantage they think they will gain from building ASI isn’t allowed, because winning a race without clear safety rules is overwhelmingly likely to kill us all.
Will this be a single treaty, or require several over time? I don’t know. It also doesn’t matter. But it needs to start now, because international coordination takes time and is slow. We do not need to specify the outcome before starting, and uncertainty isn’t a reason to wait to build momentum and putting pieces in place so we can discuss what is possible to restrict or ban, how it will be verified, and howand why to ensure participants will prefer compliance to defection. Lock-in on the details is a risk, but waiting until we need immediate action isn’t a way to make the eventual responses better - quite the opposite, since delay eliminates capacity to explore the details. Obviously, work on a framework treaty needed to start at least a few years ago when the risks became globally clear, and we can hope we aren’t too late given the clear imminent risks of superintelligence.
In short, saying that we can’t discuss a treaty yet because we don’t know what the rules need to be is an historically illiterate and poorly reasoned objection.
2026-03-26 23:34:51
There is a scene in Plato that contains, in miniature, the catastrophe of Athenian public life. Two men meet at a courthouse. One is there to prosecute his own father for the death of a slave. The other is there to be indicted for indecency. [1] The prosecutor, Euthyphro, is certain he understands what decency requires. The accused, Socrates, is not certain of anything, and says so. They talk.
Euthyphro's confidence is striking. His own family thinks it is indecent for a son to prosecute his father; Euthyphro insists that true decency demands it, that he understands what the gods require better than his relatives do. Socrates, who is about to be tried for indecency toward the gods, asks Euthyphro to explain what decency actually is, since Euthyphro claims to know, and Socrates will need such knowledge for his own defense.
Euthyphro's first answer is: decency is what I am doing right now, prosecuting wrongdoers regardless of kinship. Socrates points out that this is an example, not a definition. There are many decent acts; what makes them all decent?
Euthyphro tries again: decency is what the gods love. But the gods disagree among themselves, Socrates observes, so by this definition the same act could be both decent and indecent. Euthyphro refines: decency is what all the gods love. And here Socrates asks a question Euthyphro cannot answer: do the gods love decent things because they are decent, or are things decent because the gods love them?
If decent things are decent because the gods love them, then decency is arbitrary, a matter of divine whim. Socrates is too polite to say so, but the implication is: if decency is defined by the arbitrary whim of our betters, who are you to prosecute your father?
If the gods love decent things because they are decent, then however we know this, we already know the standard for decency ourselves and can cut out the middleman. But then Euthyphro should be able to explain the standard. He can't.
Euthyphro tries a few more times, suggesting that decency is a kind of service to the gods, a kind of trade with the gods. Each time Socrates gently follows the definition to its consequences, and each time it collapses. Eventually Euthyphro leaves, saying he is in a hurry. Socrates' last words are a lament: you have abandoned me without the understanding I needed for my own defense.
This is usually read as a proto-academic dialogue about definitions. It is a scene from a civilization in crisis. A man is about to use the legal system to destroy his own father on the basis of a concept he cannot define, in a courthouse where another man is about to be destroyed by the same concept. And the man who cannot define it is not unusual. He is representative.
The indecency for which Socrates was being prosecuted seems to have consisted of asking just the sort of questions Socrates posed to Euthyphro.
Athens in the late fifth century had recently become something it had never been before: the capital of an empire. This changed what it meant to speak in public. When Athens was a small city making decisions about its own affairs, leadership among Athenians involved speaking to communicate your perspective on matters of shared concern. But now that the collective decisions of Athens mattered for a whole lot of other people, those other people were quite naturally going to spend a lot of time thinking about how to get Athenians to decide their way. At the same time, being part of the leadership structure in control of considerable tax revenues became more profitable for more people, and less economically sustainable to opt out of. Now ambitious Athenians started using their speech to seem electable by showing off the quality of their "communicate their perspectives on matters of shared concern" performance.
Sophists were the professionals of this new economy. They specialized in the performance of wisdom, partly to sell their know-how, but always claiming, with some ambiguity, that they were excellent on the same criteria as the great Athenian leaders of the previous generation. And the consequences were not limited to the realm of speech. People were being imprisoned, exiled, and killed, on the basis of deliberative processes that had become unmoored from any standard anyone could articulate.
What had happened was not simply that Athenian politics had become venal. Something subtler and more devastating had occurred. People had stopped being alive to each other. They were running scripts. The sophists taught people to run more sophisticated scripts. Public speech, which had once been the medium through which free men actually thought together about shared problems, had become a performance of thinking. The performance could be very impressive. It could sound like wisdom. But there was no one home behind it, except an intelligent but inarticulate terrified hairless ape with no friends.
And then there was Socrates. He described himself not as a sophist, a possessor of wisdom, but a philosopher, someone who likes wisdom, who has an affinity for it.
In the Apology, Plato has Socrates report that his friend Chaerephon asked the oracle at Delphi whether anyone was wiser, and was told no one was. But a different tradition, preserved in Origen's Contra Celsum, claims to quote the oracle's actual verse. It ranked three men:
Sophocles is wise
Euripides is wiser
But of all men, Socrates is wisest
Sophocles and Euripides were not scientific thinkers like Thales or Democritus, who investigated the underlying structure of physical reality. They were not mathematicians. They were not statesmen like Pericles, who managed Athens's rise from preeminent city to imperial capital. Sophocles and Euripides were the men who could inhabit other minds, who could construct characters who, to all appearances, each had their own distinctive interiority. They imagined all these people well enough to put words in their mouths for declamation in a public theater. They could dramatize what it is like to be Medea deciding to kill her children or Antigone choosing to die. If someone at Delphi had met Socrates and reached for a comparison, they did not reach for a statesman or a priest. They reached for the people who were most alive to other people's experience.
The oracle's pronouncement likely came before Socrates was famous for questioning people. Chaerephon, an excitable and devoted friend, likely went to Delphi on his own initiative, to get divine confirmation of something he had already noticed. And what he had noticed was not a method. It was a quality. Speaking with Socrates, one felt the presence of a living intelligence, curious about one's situation. One felt excitingly seen and at the same time uncomfortably exposed. In a city where public life had become a drama where the actors were principally concerned with their own appearance, this was so unusual that it shone brilliantly to anyone looking for intelligent life, like a beacon ablaze on a clear moonless night.
What came after was Socrates trying to figure out what the oracle could have meant. If I am the wisest, what does that say about everyone else? So, by his own account, he went to talk to the people who were supposed to be wise, the politicians and the poets and the craftsmen, and he found that the politicians and the poets could not give a coherent account of the knowledge they claimed to possess. The craftsmen could, within their crafts. But the knowledge that was being wielded with lethal force in the courts and the Assembly, the knowledge of justice and piety and how the city should be governed, that knowledge was nowhere. The people who claimed it were performing a script, and the script could not survive contact with someone who was trying to make sense of what they were saying. The performative, advantage-seeking political culture of Athens could only make sense of their discomfiture at Socrates's active listening, as Socrates winning debates. So, as illustrated in dialogues like the Gorgias, big-shot sophists would seek him out, eager to be seen confronting the most formidable debater in Athens. Meanwhile, in a society that would eventually produce Aristotle's claim that slaves cannot reason, Socrates finds it the most natural thing to turn to a slave to help him work out a mathematical proof, in the dialogue Meno.
Xenophon, who knew Socrates as a person and not only as a character in philosophical dialogues, shows us what this same aliveness looked like when it met people who wanted help. During the civil war around the Thirty Tyrants, a man named Aristarchus had fourteen of his sisters, nieces, and cousins sheltering in his house as refugees. The land had been seized by enemies. There was no money, and he saw no way to borrow, because he had nothing productive to spend it on. He couldn't feed fourteen people on nothing. Socrates noticed that the women already knew how to work wool. He told Aristarchus to borrow capital, buy materials, and put them to work. Now there was a reason to borrow, and they did. Xenophon says the suspicious glances turned to smiles, the household became productive and harmonious, and eventually Aristarchus came back to Socrates delighted, reporting that the only complaint was that he was now the sole member of the household eating the bread of idleness.
In another episode, a man is harassed by lawsuits because of his deep pockets, but has a poor friend who's articulate and virtuous; Socrates advises him to pay his friend to start suing the people who are suing him, as a deterrent.
The cross-examination and the practical advice are not two different activities by two different Socrateses. They are both what it looks like when a living mind engages with the world: whether the world presents a man performing authority he cannot account for, or a household full of hungry refugees sitting next to a loom.
At his trial, Socrates gave his own account of what he had been doing. In the Apology, he makes his limited claim to wisdom. Craftsmen really are wise about some things, but he doesn't think that kind of wisdom is relevant to his interests as a free Athenian trying to participate in deliberations about public matters. Others falsely claim and believe themselves to have scientific knowledge of ethical or political truths. Socrates can claim distinctive wisdom only insofar as he clearly knows himself not to know such things.
This is usually read as a philosophical thesis about the limits of human knowledge. It is a man on trial for his life, explaining to the jury that the people who condemned him are exercising lethal authority on the basis of knowledge they do not possess, which makes implementing any standard impossible; and that pointing out that the laws are incoherent cannot be a violation of the laws, because that sort of criticism is necessary if we are to have laws at all.
In the Theaetetus, set just before the Euthyphro, Socrates finally finds a young man in Athens he can respect for his intelligence and honesty. But the man is not a peer Socrates can consult for advice; he is a promising youth in need of guidance, and the conversation has to end: Socrates excuses himself to go to the courthouse to be indicted. It is my favorite of Plato's dialogues.
Plato also responded to his beloved mentor's death by founding the Academy, a great house in Athens where philosophical reasoning was taught methodically. We still have our Academics.
Agnes Callard, in her recent book Open Socrates, wants Socrates to be timeless. She strips out the historical situation, strips out the aliveness that preceded the method, and ends up defending a method that's obviously inapplicable in many of the cases where she claims it applies. Aristarchus did not need his assumptions questioned at random. He needed someone who could ask probing questions about his actual problem, from a perspective that didn't share his assumptions about what was and wasn't possible.
Zvi Mowshowitz, in his review of Callard's book (part 1, part 2), argues at considerable length that the decontextualized version is bad. He is right. Cached beliefs are usually fine. Destabilizing them is usually harmful. Most people do not want to spend their lives in Socratic questioning, and they are right.
But Zvi has written a long polemic in two installments on the winning side of an incredibly lame debate about whether we should anxiously doubt ourselves all the time, responding to Callard's decontextualized Socrates, not the real one. The real one did not devise a method and then apply it. He had a quality, something the oracle reached for the language of the tragedians to describe. And what was memorialized as a "method" was what happened when that quality met a city where every other participant in public life had stopped being alive.
Socrates invokes timeless considerations like logical coherence and having reasons for your opinions, but timeless considerations are a very natural thing to try to appeal to when people are being squirmy and dramatic and hard to pin down, and fleeing to abstractions that resist empirical falsification.
Spinoza, in the Theologico-Political Treatise, similarly resituated the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in their proper context. The political teachings of the Gospels to turn the other cheek, forgive debts, and render unto Caesar what is due to him, are instructions for people living under a hostile and extractive system of domination. Citizens of a free republic have entirely different duties. They have an affirmative obligation to hold each other accountable, to sue people who have wronged them, to participate in collective self-governance. The teachings are not wrong. They are addressed to a specific situation, and become wrong when mechanically transplanted into an inappropriate context.
The reason to recover the historical Socrates is not only accuracy about the distant past; it is that by seeing this relevant aspect of the past more clearly, we might see more clearly what we are up against now.
Socratic cross-examination requires an interlocutor who at least would feel ashamed not to put on a show of accountability. The people Socrates questioned were performing wisdom, but they were performing it because the culture still demanded that leaders seem accountable. They would sit for the examination, because refusing would be disgraceful, like breaking formation in a hoplite phalanx. Their scripts collapsed because the scripts were designed to look like real accountability, and real accountability is what Socrates brought.
There is a useful framework for understanding how public discourse degrades, which distinguishes between guilt, shame, and depravity. A guilty person has violated a norm and intends to repair the breach by owning up and making amends. An ashamed person intends to conceal the violation, which means deflecting investigation. A depraved person has generalized the intent to conceal into a coalitional strategy: I will cover for you if you cover for me, and together we will derail any investigation that threatens either of us.
The leaders Socrates questioned were, at worst, ashamed. They had taken on roles they couldn't account for, and they wanted to hide that fact, but they still felt the force of the demand for accountability. When Socrates pressed them, they squirmed, they went in circles, they eventually fled. But they engaged. They felt they had to engage. The culture of Athens, even in its degraded state, still held that a man who refused to give an account of his claims was disgraced.
Depravity is a further stage, and Sartre described it precisely in his book Anti-Semite and Jew:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
The depraved person does not perform accountability. He plays with the forms of accountability to exhaust and humiliate the person who still takes them seriously. He is not running a script that is trying to pass as a perspective, collapsing only under the kind of questioning we still call Socratic. He is amusing himself at the expense of the questioner. Cross-examination does not expose him, because he was never trying to seem consistent. He was trying to demonstrate that consistency is for suckers. The Socratic method will not help him.
The Socratic method, if we can rightly call it that, was forged by the pressures confronted by a living mind in a city of the ashamed, people who still cared enough about accountability to fake it. It has nothing to say to the depraved themselves, who have dispensed with the pretense, though in a transitional period might expose them to the judgment of the naïve.
But the quality that preceded the method is something else.
What the oracle recognized in Socrates was not the ability to cross-examine. It was something closer to what it recognized in Euripides: the capacity to be present to what is happening, to see the person in front of you rather than the category they belong to, to respond to the situation rather than to your script about the situation. To be alive.
We do not need a new method. Methods are what you formalize after you understand the problem, and we are not there yet. What might still help us is the quality that precedes method: the willingness to see what is in front of us, to say the obvious thing that everyone embedded in the performance is too scripted to see, and to keep reaching out to others even when the response is usually not even embarrassment but indifference, not even a failed defense but a smirk.
The oracle didn't say Socrates had the best method. It said he was the wisest man, in a society oriented against wisdom. The "method" was just how aliveness was memorialized by a city that still cared enough to be ashamed of being dead.
The question for us is what aliveness looks like in a city beyond shame.
Usually translated "impiety," but the Greek hosion and its negation anosion are broader. "Piety" to us generally means deference, which doesn't make sense to attribute to the gods, but Euthyphro thinks it is normal to call the gods hosion, so we might try "holiness," since we speak both of holy gods and holy men. But the connotations of "holiness" don't match up well with the context of a prosecution. "Decency" is at a lower register of formality than "piety" or "holiness" in a way that sounds a bit odd, but it is the best fit as far as its explicit meaning. ↩︎
2026-03-26 23:29:45
I received my one-shot vaccine on March 26th, 2021. I had been in lockdown for more than a year, my entire life on hold, my world closed.
Previously: Takeaways from one year of lockdown & reflections on lockdown, two years out
A few weeks ago, I was talking to a community organizer in London, and he said, “This feels like the first year that things have really gotten back to normal since Covid.”
I was surprised — it’s been five years, at this point. But he said that communities are only just recovering, that people are only just starting to go out like they once did.
So I thought about the people I know, the people I’m close to. And I realized how right he was, and I was surprised at my own surprise.
Two people I know have developed, essentially, full agoraphobia. They may have been a little weird before the pandemic, but they could function — one of them was in university, and the other had a job outside the home. Now, it feels impossible to imagine either of them going back to that old life. They are cripplingly anxious about the most basic of interactions, sometimes even with the people they live with and love best. It’s rare for them to even set foot outside of their houses, never mind doing normal everyday tasks out in the world, like grocery shopping.
I only know what happened to these people because they are sufficiently close, and I only see them because I visit them in their own homes. To the rest of the world, what happened to them is invisible.
There are people I knew before the pandemic who simply disappeared from my life. How many of them just never came out of hiding?
We all had our lives knocked off course by the pandemic, to a greater or lesser extent. Even if you somehow genuinely had a good time during lockdown, no one can say they’ve had quite the life they expected they would before 2020.
Maybe you missed or had to postpone major milestones — graduating from university, getting married. Maybe you lost loved ones who should have had much longer lives. Maybe you had to raise a kid without any of the support system that you’d expected to be able to rely on.
Likely, the rhythm of your life has permanently changed in some ways. My dad has the same job he’s always had, but his office closed during the pandemic and never reopened, so he still regularly goes days at a time without seeing anyone in person. My immunocompromised cousin used to travel for business all year; now, she can’t even have unmasked visitors in her home.
I had spent the years between college and the pandemic living in a group house, working in the tech industry, and seriously dating two people. When the dust settled from 2020, I had lost all of those things. It took me years to come to terms with the fact that I would never have the life that I’d spent those years building. It was a long and painful mourning process.
Five years after leaving lockdown, I’ve built a life I like much better, but that doesn’t negate the grief of losing what I had, what I thought I would have. Wherever we may have ended up, we all lost something.
Coming out of the pandemic, I felt like no one wanted to talk about the trauma we had all just gone through. The people who’d had a bad time mostly didn’t want to talk about it or just disappeared entirely, so all I heard was “I had a pretty good pandemic”, even when I felt like the person was lying. A few times, I tried to share what had happened to me, and the person I was talking to laughed in my face.
For years, I couldn’t think about the pandemic without crying. I skipped over any story that included it in the plot summary1, and couldn’t bear to hear the theme music of the shows I’d watched during that time.
But I also developed a fascination with 2020, even as I found it incredibly triggering. It was like an alternate reality that we had all lived in, and we were all now collectively pretending it hadn’t happened. People’s desire to pick up where they left off was understandable, but it felt like denial to me. Any time I heard someone acknowledge out loud that the pandemic had happened, I was shocked and thrilled, like they’d acknowledged an illicit secret.
In 2024, I started being able to read books about 20202. Three months ago, on the final day of 2025, I finally felt ready to watch Bo Burnham’s Inside — the feature-length musical special he wrote, recorded, and released during the pandemic. The first time I heard one of the songs from it, I cried for hours. Now it’s my favorite movie, and I know the whole soundtrack by heart.
It’s been five years. The paint and stickers that marked distances six feet apart on sidewalks have been torn away, or faded with time (except where they haven’t). Some businesses keep up their old signs about masking and distancing, too expensive to replace, though none of them have enforced it for years, now. Rates of masking in airports have fallen and fallen, until those of us who sicken easily just have to stay home. People have healed, or at least those of us who haven’t have disappeared, and no one really thinks about them anymore.
The shape of your community has changed. The shape of your life has changed. Some of these things would have happened without the pandemic, but many of them wouldn’t. Time still would have passed, yes, but your life would have gone differently.
It’s been five years. The world has gone back to normal. If that even means anything.
1 The pandemic shows up shockingly rarely in mainstream fiction, but people were writing fanfiction all through 2020 and 2021, and many of them used it as a way to process what was happening.
2 Some books I’ve read on the pandemic:
2026-03-26 23:01:07
This is a crosspost from my blog post.
In this post, I’m going to resolve the surprise test paradox.
The surprise test paradox is as follows:
A teacher tells a student that he’s going to have a test this week, but that he will not know when the test is coming.
Upon hearing this, the student realizes that he will not have a test on Friday, since, if the test were on Friday, he would know that morning that the test was going to occur.
But, since he knows that the test won’t occur on Friday, he realizes that he also won’t have a test on Thursday because, on Thursday morning, he would expect for the test to occur since he would already know that it’s not going to occur on Friday.
Then, using similar logic, he also deduces that the test also won’t occur on Wednesday, Tuesday, or Monday, and that, as such, he shouldn’t expect for the test to occur at all.
Glad that he isn’t going to have a test, he walks into class on Wednesday and is, of course, handed a test.
I used to think this was a paradox since it seems like the student’s logic is correct and, yet, it leads to a conclusion that guarantees that he will not know when the test is coming by causing him to expect for no test to come at all.
I now no longer think that it is a paradox.
When the student concludes that the test is not going to occur on Friday, he, in fact, makes it possible for the test to occur that day since he, now, no longer expects it. As such, the student made a reasoning error by failing to take into account the fact that his expectations determine whether or not a test occurs. If the student were instead reasoning properly, he should have realized that, each morning, he should expect a test to occur that day, since, if he expects it to occur, it will not.
So, in reality, the surprise test paradox is not a paradox at all. If each morning the student expects to have a test, he will never receive one and the teacher’s statement will be false. If the student doesn’t expect to have a test on a given morning and then receives a test later that day, the teacher’s statement is true.
What makes the situation strange is that, each morning, the student should expect to have a test despite the fact that, if he expects to get a test, he “should” also expect not to get a test since expecting to get a test guarantees that he will not get a test. Although this is a strange state of affairs, it is not paradoxical because the first “should” and the second “should” are two different kinds of “shoulds.” The first “should” is a should based on what he ought to do to avoid being executed. The second “should” is a should based on what he ought to do to be logically consistent. This is only a paradox if one believes that individuals ought to be logically consistent in all situations, which this “paradox” clearly reveals is not the case.
I’m not sure whether the paradox has been resolved in this way by others in the past, but I thought I’d share it with you guys since it’s quite an interesting philosophical conundrum.
