Students are borrowing money to pay for college. Are university administrators spending their students’ borrowed money responsibly? — The persistent problem of student loans Our country is having a difficult and ongoing conversation about student loan debt. These huge loans are like giant anchors around the necks of many young people and it’s not clear what to do about it. The debate keeps getting focused on whether or not loans should be forgiven, and…

Modern AI techniques shed new light on old arguments. — Observations of evolution are often put forward as proof that humans, and life in general, could not be the product of any sort of deliberate creation. Those arguments rely on the presumption that evolution and deliberate creation are somehow mutually exclusive. …

If anything can happen, would that imply that everything does happen? — Rick and Morty’s cartoon metaphysics Rick and Morty is a witty science fiction cartoon series that finds much of its humor by exploring the metaphysical implications of scientific theories. The episodes are fun and entertaining with plenty of dark humor, and although the stories sometimes get a bit absurd, they are at least vaguely plausible…

Not just complex or hard to understand, absolutely and completely beyond comprehension. — We are all familiar with concepts or ideas that are hard to understand, for example advanced math or a difficult puzzle, but what about ideas or concepts that are completely impossible for you, me, or anyone else, to understand. Not hard or even incredibly hard, but unequivocally impossible. And not…

Intelligent life might plausibly function at time scales massively longer or incredibly shorter than our own. Could there be meaningful interactions, or would oblivious death and destruction be inevitable? — Typically, when science fiction¹ writers explore the idea of extraterrestrial life there is a general presumption that we humans would be able to recognize new life forms as such when we encounter them. Quite often these stories feature discovered life that is only superficially different from life on earth. Plant-like…