Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Simon Blackburn, "Think: A compelling introduction to philosophy", Oxford University Press, 1999. Why did I read this introductory philosophy text? Well, firstly, to refresh my knowledge, and secondly, because it was suggested by Conceptually.org   as a book that can improve one's "cognitive toolkit" (the other books are on my to-read list as well). I will say upfront that this book deals only with Western analytic philosophy, and that it does not even cover all the influential philosophers and their theories within analytic philosophy. For example, Hobbes, Rousseau, Bentham, Peirce, Ayer, Popper, Rawls and Searle are nowhere mentioned in Think . That being said, the book does a fair job of presenting the core areas and classic thinkers of philosophy: Chapter 1 is about knowledge (or epistemology), or how we can think about the relation between our perceptions of reality and reality itself. Simon Blackburn begins with René Descartes 's ...

Book Review: Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths, "Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions", William Collins, 2016. After finishing "Decisive" by Chip and Dan Heath , which prescribes a somewhat algorithmic approach to making decisions using the WRAP process, I started reading "Algorithms to Live By". This is a book about what humans can learn from computers, specifically from computer algorithms  -- i.e. sequences of steps that are used to solve problems. The problems faced by computer scientists, like how to allocate processing power, when to switch between different tasks, how to use memory resources, and when to collect more data, have parallels in the everyday problems of human thought and action and interaction. As such, the computer scientist's solutions to these problems (whether optimal or merely approximate) can give us some wisdom. Sometimes that wisdom is bittersweet, for instance: "Life is full of problem...