Recent additions to the Heap of Links…

Discussion welcome.

1. “We are not any smarter, kinder, wiser, or more moral than people who lived ninety years ago. We are just as likely to… remain willfully ignorant of darkness as it’s dawning” — “But we know something they didn’t know: we know that the Holocaust is possible,” says Masha Gessen
2. The podcast “This Is Technology Ethics” with John Danaher (Galway) and Sven Nyholm (LMU Munich) has wrapped up — its 10-episodes cover a range of topics, and concludes with an audience Q&A
3. “Our ability to weigh the expected good versus the expected bad [in the distant future] collapses either to zero or to so near zero as to not be worth the costs and risks of thinking in that time frame” — Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) defends the “washout argument” against longtermism
4. “The quantum Universe could actually be more deterministic than a classical one” — Eddy Keming Chen (UCSD) explains, in Nature
5. “In some ways, philosophy is more amenable to Dyslexics than other humanities fields; in other ways, it is more inimical to us” — an interview with John Henry Reilly, a philosophy PhD student with dyslexia
6. “The book could see me like a mirror at that moment and describe it all right back” — philosopher and legal scholar Mala Chatterjeei (Columbia) on how David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” saves her from suicide
7. “Pose as a figure (real or fictional or mythological) from the Greco-Roman world, who is in the position of applying for a real job in our real world of 2023” — a contest at Antigone

Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers.

The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you.