Zach Freitas-Groff

There are few bo oks that have more influenced to my thinking than Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature . The book makes a powerful case for effective altruism by showing that much of what effective altruists try to spread—reason and empathy, chiefly—has led to a sweeping decline in virtually every form of human violence over the course of human history. At the same time, I think that Pinker's thesis and evidence in that book are compatible with an understanding that tail risks to human civilization, such as catastrophic risks, may have increased, and animal suffering, has clearly increased in recent history. (Humans' moral views on the latter do clearly seem to be improving , thoug h.)  I've found it puzzling, then, that to coincide with the publication of his book Enlightenment Now , Pinker has been publishing multiple articles criticizing altruists who are focused on addressing long-term risks, primarily from artificial general intelligence. Pinker

Thanks to the  advent of MoviePass , I've decided to return to my high school cinephile days, and with them, a round up of the best of the year. But before I get into this, I must say, if you have not seen Black Panther yet, see it. It would rank toward the top of my list had it come out in 2017 (an d surely will be one of the tops in 2018). Without further ado, then, here are my top choices for 2017 in film: 8. Star Wars: The Last Jedi I love Star Wars  movies, and I'm not ashamed to say that the current round are worthy of recognition for their craftsmanship. This one in particular was a work of art in ways most Star Wars  movies are not. The plot was complex and ever-changing, and the visuals were brilliant. I'm happy to see major Hollywood franchises– Marvel , Star Wars , etc.–start putting solid directors behind the camera to make pop entertainment into pop art. (Warner Brothers, could we fire Zack Snyder and get a real director for the Justice League movies?) 

A New York Times piece I'd had in my backlog writes about an issue most atheists struggle to understand: how does one come to believe something one does not believe? Can we make ourselves have faith? I was struck by the piece because as time has gone on, I've seen how real this phenomenon can be–and how it may even be something useful to rational people. I've experienced moments when I've thought of getting myself to believe something I did not believe or feel something I did not feel. Most saliently, as with most gay men, I tried to be straight. I took it a step further in college and did a program called the Vaad , which attempted to turn Yale students into Orthodox Jews. They were damn good at it, too, full of references to the surprisingly difficult fine-tuned universe argument and Kurt Vonnegut. Some people in the program did go on to go to Israel, study at Yeshiva, and so on, and from what I hear there are many others like that.  And of course, in some way

We often hear stories these days about racism in machine learning algorithms. The subtlety in these stories is often missing. I've been reading about this recently and found this quote very telling: A wave of scholarship, triggered by the ProPublica report , illuminated the statistical challenge at the heart of the argument: Given that the underlying “base rate” of rearrest is higher for blacks than for whites, it is mathematically inevitable that the burden of false positives will fall more heavily on black defendants than on white ones. In other words, given that more black defendants than white defendants actually do have a high risk of reoffending, a “high risk” label that is correct 70% of the time for both white and black defendants will still mis-label more black than white defendants as high risk. A study titled “Inherent Tradeoffs in the Fair Determination of Risk Scores” proved mathematically that when rearrest rates are not equal between races, a well-calibrated tool

I thought of writing something myself in light of recent events at the Humane Society , which are reflective of deeper issues in the animal rights movement (ones that I have alternately witnessed, been a bystander to, tacitly facilitated, or spoken out against). Instead, I'm going to recommend women's writing on this subject: “Hey Man”: Language and Bro Culture in the Animal Protection Movement Carol Adams's Blog (Author of The Sexual Politics of Meat )  VINE Sanctuary/pattrice jones's Blog Encompass Movement I should say, also, that I'm proud to support an entirely female or trans organization, Wild Animal Suffering Research .

When I took a philosophy of mind class in high school, my professor proposed neural networks in computer science as a potential way to create consciousness. At the very least, it's a way to create high levels of intelligence. I didn't know exactly what a computerized neural network consisted of (I imagined it being built in hardware), and I still don't, really, but I'm curious: how similar is an artificial neural network to a biological one? Is it really a good replication? From an article on the similarities and differences :  An [Artificial Neural Network] consists of layers made up of interconnected neurons that receive a set of inputs and a set of weights. It then does some mathematical manipulation and outputs the results as a set of “activations” that are similar to synapses in biological neurons. While ANNs typically consist of hundreds to maybe thousands of neurons, the biological neural network of the human brain consists of billions. On the other han

It's not often most humans encounter aquatic animals face to face (unlike domestic animals, and somewhat unlike even pigs or chickens). If we do encounter them, it's likely at the end of a fork. Seeing fishes, sharks, and a lobster face-to-face was probably the highlight of my recent trip to Belize. You can appreciate their subjectivity in a way that's rare otherwise. Here's a video so you can experience a bit of that, too: