There is a lot to be said about Scott Alexander's recent essay "Against Against Handover" One more niche complaint is his justification of handover by way of the story of the Book of Samuel. As Scott tells it, after the exodus, the Israelites were governed by God. But then the dumb human Israelites demanded a human king to rule over them, which God gave them but was very very bad. Scott says before Saul became king, Israel was ruled “by judges and prophets, ie directly by God”. But it’s not as if God directed and judged the Israelites’ daily affairs. Rather it was a more diffuse rule of humans over humans that got replaced by more centralized control of a single human. The error was not in substituting man for God as political authority but in concentrating power in a single authority with arbitrary control against God’s wishes. Although Scott's allusion to the Hebrew Bible is clearly playful, there's actually a very rich history of political theorists drawing on ancient Hebrew political constitution to inform contemporary debates. The system of liberal government we have today emerged from another generation’s reading of the Hebrew political tradition. Their takeaway from it, however, was to vest political authority in fallible civil institutions instead of religious groups that ostensibly possessed special access to divine truth. Thinkers like Grotius noted that though the Israelites had directly experienced divine revelation, they didn’t prosecute foreign beliefs unless they were at odds with general morality. He argued that civil authorities like the Sanhedrin and kings used their human judgment in exercising jurisdiction over religious law instead of the priests who represented divine power. These perspectives led him and his fellow travelers to advocate for religious tolerance and the supremacy of civil authority in politics. Related arguments inspired republicans like Milton and Thomas Paine to reject monarchy. We live in a world formed by people who read the Hebrew political tradition as an argument against handing political power over to those we think have special knowledge of the true and the good.

In the months before ChatGPT came out, I spent a lot of time thinking about the future of the academy In May of 2022, I wrote the below essay reviewing Josiah Bunting’s “An Education for Our Time” as a way of exploring the purpose of higher ed My biggest takeaway was that what existing universities have lost is a theory of formation - of what kind of people they want to make their students into As AI makes it easier to transform our world, the more pressing question is how we should transform ourselves Education is one of the most important institutions we’ll have to reimagine in light of AI. And to do so successfully will require answering deep philosophical questions about the good life and responsibilities of citizens

Fregean mysticism

Found @slatestarcodex’s machzor