Philosophy

The duck test is one of the cleanest heuristics in the epistemological toolkit: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, treat it as a duck. It works because surface signs are usually entangled with underlying causes. Ducks walk the way they do because of their anatomy; they quack because of the shape of their bill. The surface and the substance are not independent. When you correctly read the surface, you have usually correctly identified the substance underneath. …

My friend is Spanish. He was born in Toledo in the 1970s. He is not responsible for anything that happened in the Americas in the sixteenth century, and he knows this. What he did, over coffee one afternoon, was offer a symbolic apology — on behalf of something he did not do, on behalf of an institution that no longer exists in the form that did it, acting on orders issued by monarchs dead for four hundred years, which resulted in a catastrophe that reshaped the world I came from. …

There was an eleventh-century Tibetan lama known to his students as Gloomy Face. His given name was Langthangpa Dorje Senge; the nickname came from a vow he had taken never to smile. He was also one of the teachers responsible for transmitting the Lojong mind-training slogans — a collection of pithy instructions whose recurring theme is the danger of taking oneself too seriously. The irony, apparently, was intentional. He lived the joke so completely that he became it. …

In 1940, Borges published what is not quite a story. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” — collected four years later in Ficciones — begins with the discovery of a reference to a country, Uqbar, in a slightly variant edition of an encyclopedia. The country does not appear in any other edition. The country, in any verifiable sense, does not exist. This leads, in the usual Borgesian manner, to the discovery of forty volumes describing an entire planet — Tlön — whose existence is similarly unverifiable, but whose philosophers, languages, and physics are described with the patience of something that has had centuries to develop. And then Tlön begins to appear in the physical world. A compass. A metal cone. By the story’s final pages, the fictional world has begun to overwrite the actual one: scholars study Tlönian history, children are taught its geography, a generation arises for whom Tlön is more real than the country they were born in. …

In 1654, in a fragment now numbered 139 of the Pensées, Pascal wrote a sentence that has been quoted so often it has lost most of its weight, and it is worth taking down from the shelf and looking at it again: all of humanity’s misery comes from a single fact, namely, that we are unable to sit quietly, alone, in a room. Three hundred and seventy years later we have built the most extraordinary device in human history for the express purpose of ensuring no one ever has to. …

Almost everyone past forty knows the type. The man still operating, in some quiet operative sense, as if he were twenty-four. The woman whose romantic life consists of the same three patterns it consisted of in 2009. The friend whose career has had the right surface motion — promotions, titles, perfectly photographed dinners — but whose inner question, who am I when no one is watching, has not seriously been asked since adolescence. They are not failures. Some of them are extraordinarily successful. They are simply, in the part that matters, not yet adults. …

Revised on 2026-04-28 to v1.1. See revision history below. Look at any AI-skeptic feed in 2026 and you’ll see the word slop doing heavy work. It names something real: low-entropy, mass-produced text without an author behind it, flooding feeds, search results, comment sections, product reviews. There’s now a small genre of essays explaining why this is bad for civilization. Some of them are excellent. Some of them are slop themselves. I want to ask a different question. Not whether AI slop is bad — clearly some of it is — but why we’re so confident we can recognize it. Because if you squint at a lot of professional life, much of what we produce on a normal Tuesday already qualifies. Legal boilerplate. Corporate memo-speak. Quarterly reports that survive only because nobody reads them. Status updates that say nothing. Standardized medical notes whose function is mostly forensic. …

Watch a photon leave the surface of the sun and arrive at your retina. Eight minutes earlier it was inside a star; now it is inside an eye. Of all the paths it could have taken — and physics, in some literal interpretations, says it did take all of them — the one that resolves into your day was the one that minimized a quantity called action. Light finds the cheap route. …

In Airplane! (1980), Lloyd Bridges plays Steve McCroskey, an air-traffic controller running a disaster on the ground while a single pilot with food poisoning tries not to kill everyone on the plane above. McCroskey is on two phones at once. He’s barking at his wife. He’s pivoting to a subordinate mid-sentence. He’s drinking coffee, then cigarettes, then amphetamines, then glue, in that order. Every fifteen minutes or so, the camera cuts back to him and he delivers the same line with a slightly different noun: …

In Enlightenment and Madness I argued that José Arcadio Buendía wasn’t mad in the way Macondo thought he was — that the patriarch tied to the chestnut tree was another face of the same transcendence that lifts Remedios la Bella into the sky. Two exits from ordinary consciousness, one serene, one savage. A reader — my mother, actually — pushed back on that with a sharp question. If he had lived today, she asked, would you still call it wisdom, or would you just put him on a medication and send him home? …