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Pandering

Recently, I’ve been running a series of posts about the problem of evil. Much of it is recycled from my book on the subject. The main motivation for this is SEO: I want to teach the Google bots that my writing here is what should be read, rather than my old academic writing. Ancient Greek philosophers had a word for this kind of thing: κολακεία. It is variously translated as ‘pandering’ or ‘flattery’. It means playing to the crowd. In my case, it means trying to give the Google bots what they can understand. […]
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Artificial Intelligence and the Illusion of Understanding

‘I went down to the university yesterday to talk about Plato’s cave with the academics.’ If I say this to an AI, it would miss everything that matters in this sentence and see everything that doesn’t. But if I say this to a philosopher they would reply: ‘I see you are making a point.’ Having had this thought for a while, I thought I’d put it to the test.
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Artificial Intelligence
‘I went down to the university yesterday to talk about Plato’s cave with the academics.’ If I say this to an AI, it would miss everything that matters in this sentence and see everything that doesn’t. But if I say this to a philosopher they would reply: ‘I see you are making a point.’
