What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

In this interview, Eric Winsberg, British Academy Global Professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and Professor at the Department of Philosophy, The University of South Florida, talks about growing up free range in Montreal, his mother’s punch cards, developing an early interest in video games, managing dysgraphia, arguing, Vietnam, thinking about free will, being introduced to history and philosophy of science as an undergrad at University of Chicago, rugby, blues, writing a dissertation on computer simulation at Indiana University, chaos theory, David Chalmers, pool, becoming professionalized, working at University of South Florida for over two decades, climate science and simulation, the accuracy of pandemic computer models and the ethics of pandemic restrictions, Muay Thai, Cambridge, eFoiling, David Hume, and his last meal...

[5/25/2023]

Where did you grow up?

I was born in NYC, but moved to Montreal when I was two years old.

What was your family like?

I had one sibling, an older sister. My father was a radiologist, and my mother was a physics graduate student before I was born. While I was growing up, she did a PhD in data science and started a faculty job at the university of Montreal. I was the ultimate “free range/latchkey kid” that you see portrayed in “Stranger Things”. I took a taxi home from school by myself in kindergarten because kindergarten was a half day and there was no school bus.

Ha! As a kid, what were you interested in?

How stuff worked. Especially electronics stuff. I used to hang out with my friends at Radio Shack. I took apart and ultimately broke everything in the house (that I couldn't figure out how to put back together). Personal computers weren't really a thing until I was in about 8th grade. My mother always had a million punch cards lying around the house, but I didn’t get really fascinated by computers until I got my own little 4k (of RAM) machine. I was pretty into video games from the first time I saw a “space invaders” arcade machine. Nothing is more characteristic of Montreal in the early 80s to me than that it was easier for a 14-year-old to get into a bar than it was to get into a video arcade. Technically you had to be 18 to do either.

Later on, I got into board games and RPGs.

Like, Dungeons and Dragons?

I played some around the age of 14-16. My recollection was a lot of time was spent planning and world building before the playing sessions, and then the game playing usually quickly degenerated into other shenanigans.

What were your mother’s punch cards for?

Wow, who really knows? In case readers don’t know, in those days most users didn’t have terminal access to university computers. If you wanted to run a program, you had to type the code into machines that transferred the instructions onto punch cards, which then got read like old scantron tests. I think she was working on a kind of statistical analysis called “bootstrapping.” I remember hearing that word a lot as a kid and having no idea what it could mean. She also worked on algorithms designed to do component analysis of psychological data. Think of the fact that we now know that human color perception can be broken down into three dimensions. There are lots of other psychological phenomena we don’t have this kind of understanding of. She worked on music perception quite a bit but mostly after I was grown up.

Did you talk about philosophy with your family?

I had no idea what philosophy was. When my mother was getting her Ph.D. my father used to joke a lot of that philosophy was figuring out whether or not life was a bowl of cherries. I don’t think I really even understood that there was no actual “Ph.” in her “Ph.D.” and that this was some weird M.D./Ph.D. rivalry thing. I remember worrying about free will some and my mother telling me that once I was old enough to understand quantum mechanics I would see why that was confused.

Were you an inside kid, then?

I also spent quite a bit of time in the frozen wonderland in and around Montreal: skiing, sledding, skating.

As a teenager, did you enjoy school?

No, I hated school. I was extremely disgraphic and I'm pretty sure I had fairly bad ADHD (though of course nobody diagnosed that in those days), so I was usually a combination of bored and behind in half the work.

So as a teenager, what sort of things were you interested in, if anything?

Mostly ordinary teenage stuff like girls, I guess. Trying (badly) to fit in so that maybe I could meet girls. That and how cold it was in Montreal. I was always passionate about my opinions, which I think I've always had about just about everything. But I think most adults who knew me then would have said I “lacked passion”. I was pretty disaffected and spent a lot of that time being pretty bored.

Your family moved to Jersey. A big adjustment, I imagine?

Huge. My high school in Montreal had no football team, no cheerleaders, no attendance office (you could pretty much cut class at will) and was walking distance from a metro stop. My high school in New Jersey was…not like that. I vividly remember the first day of school, in homeroom, when a voice came over the loudspeaker and said “we will now stand for the pledge of allegiance.” This… surprised me.

Passionate about your opinions! A sign you'd end up being a philosopher…

I guess I argued a lot. I mostly only liked science before college, but I did have an American History class where our teacher encouraged us to argue about landmark SCOTUS cases and I think even he thought I was a bit much. I had a one semester class in philosophy at my HS in NJ, but I mostly thought it was pretty silly stuff. The thing I remember most was reading George Santayana saying “Truth is beauty and beauty is truth,” and thinking “no, that can’t be right.” My teacher wasn't very impressed with the counterexamples I came up with and seemed to think I was missing the point.

You seem like you were a reflective teenager?

I guess so. I remember a one or two year period (I can't remember exactly how old I was) where I was obsessed with the fact that I couldn't imagine there being nothing rather than something. It drove me crazy. I probably thought of this as a physics or cosmology problem rather than a philosophy one, though. I also remember trying to convince my friends there was a free will/determinism problem. I don't think that boosted my popularity.

Did you start thinking about what you wanted to do in college, if college was even on the table? Where did you apply? What was the long-term plan back then? Like, your dreams?

Because my mother had given up on graduate school in physics (and probably regretted it), she always imparted onto me the idea that it was the greatest thing you could do in life. So, for as long as I can remember, doing the kind of theoretical physics was definitely the long-term plan. Growing up, the dream had always been to go to MIT. I went to a summer school in physics at Caltech after my sophomore year of HS, and somehow that changed the plan to wanting to go to Stanford. I guess I fell in love with the California climate but also maybe lost interest in ‘tech’ schools. Still, I applied to MIT, Stanford, Chicago, Cornell, and RIT. I got into the last three and decided to go to Chicago.

If the person you were before you started college met the person you are now, what would that person recognize, and what would shock them?

If my 17-year-old self met my present self I think he would have a heart attack. About so many things. First of all, I'm a professor in the humanities. Most people back then considered me to be functionally illiterate. The only question was whether I would ever acquire enough reading and writing skills to be a physicist. But lots of other things about me would surprise me. How much time I spend on sports; how I interact with people; that I could possibly be this old.

Any major world events--political, technological, cultural changes or trends, etc.--that had a significant impact on your life and worldview before college?

I think surely the Vietnam War had a huge influence on my childhood. I'll start with a funny anecdote. I was born on February 4th, 1968, 2/4/68. There was a Jackson 5 song back then with the refrain “2,4, 6, 8, who do we appreciate”. I have no idea why my grandfather was up on the Jackson 5, but he used to sing that to me all the time when I was a toddler. One day my parents took us to an anti-war march in DC and people were chanting “2, 4, 6, 8, who do we assassinate?” I of course thought this was about me. A few days later a woman came up to my mother at the playground and said “I think your son is over there chanting about assassinating President Nixon. You might want to check on him.” To any FBI agents reading this: I am definitely not planning any assassination attempts. But the general outlook on politicians and government kind of stuck. Most of my political views are rooted in pacificism, and a general distrust of authority and politicians generally. I tend to think of the Vietnam War and the Iraq War as paradigms of how politicians behave and how they try to keep us informed.

Favorite classes and inspirational teachers in college? How did you discover philosophy? What was the hook?

My first ever philosophy class, which was during my first quarter at the University of Chicago, was with Christine Korsgaard. It was the philosophy flavored HUM101 of the Chicago core. I really liked the class, and it definitely opened my eyes to the possibility that there were topics of inquiry outside the sciences that weren't a waste of time. But by far the most inspirational teacher I had was Robert Richards, who taught the “Science, Culture, and Society” flavor of the Western Civ core requirement. This was the “hook” for me, but it was a hook into HPS, broadly construed, rather than a hook into philosophy. I never really thought of myself as going into philosophy until a couple of years into my HPS grad program at Indiana. I think I partly thought HPS was its own thing, and if you had forced me, early on, to say whether I was going to be a historian or a philosopher, I think I would have said “historian.” For example, in our first year, we had to do a “research methods” class, and I picked the history version. They made me go back and do the philosophy version later.

How did you overcome the obstacles you had in high school, in college (assuming you had the same obstacles)?

When I was in high school, I was pretty sure I was hopelessly bad at all subjects other than math and science. Probably partly because of that, I also thought they were mostly pointless. In retrospect, I think this was mostly because of something in the neighborhood of some cognitive disabilities I have: both attentional and related to dysgraphia. Overcoming them was actually pretty slow and painful, but a few things helped a lot. The first was that I love, love, love to argue. And most of what I've learned in philosophy I've learned from other people over the course of arguing. I'm usually only good at reading things carefully *after* I've gotten sucked into an argument, and I need to find ammunition for myself. Another is that people tolerated some pretty bad writing from me for a very long time. I don't think I got even minimally good at writing until the very end of graduate school. But I think my horribly badly written papers had enough other things going on in them that (some of) my teachers let me get away with it, and eventually my writing (mostly) caught up. Finally, I've always worked on topics in philosophy of science that allow me to read stuff in the wildly erratic ways that my cognitive style is better at than other tasks demand. I'm much better at teaching myself a new area of science and synthesizing it into novel philosophical claims than I am at careful reading and scholarship.

What did you do for fun? Relationships? Drinking? Drugs? Politics? Art? Sports?

A pretty typical amount of drinking and drugs, I guess. I played Rugby in college and my first couple of years of graduate school. I've always been interested in politics, but I've also always been a bit too antisocial to really participate in any meaningful way. I started playing harmonica somewhat seriously in college, and later, in grad school, I played in a blues band.

When exactly did you decide to go to grad school for philosophy?

It was after I graduated from college. After college I moved out to San Francisco. I did a bunch of random jobs—mostly as a substitute teacher in some of the private schools in the city. I had roommates who were getting started on careers and I could sort of tell they had a mix of skills and gumption for that that I lacked. So I decided to apply to some Ph.D. programs in philosophy and HPS. I was totally disconnected from a university community though, and most of the papers I had written in college were lost. So I threw together what must have been a pretty pathetic-looking application.

I imagine this pleased your mom?

I think my mother was happy I was pursuing academic life, but the philosophy of science thing puzzled her. She studied physics with some of the bigshots in the 1950s, and it was pretty popular among them (following Feynman, let's say) to cast aspersions on philosophy of science. “Ornithology for birds” and all that. But then a pretty funny thing happened that was pretty typical of her. One day in roughly 2006 she calls me on the phone and asks, “Do you know who David Albert is?”. I was like “Yeah, mom, I know who David Albert is. I've published two papers responding to his work and I've met him at several conferences. Why?” She says “Well, I was on the subway [in NYC] and I saw a guy reading a book called Quantum Mechanics and Experience. So, I walked over to him and said, 'You know, you can't experience quantum mechanics.' It turns out he is sitting in on Albert's class at Columbia, and he told me David lets pretty much anyone do this? Do you think it would be ok if I did?” So, she ends up sitting in on his space and time class, and we spend hours on the phone for 15 weeks talking about buckets, and Mach, and enantiomorphs, and the principle of sufficient reason, etc. And it was pretty great. It was especially great, in retrospect, because she died just a couple of years later. But the whole time I'm thinking: “Of course. I've been doing philosophy of science for more than 15 years, but it's only when some random guy on the subway tells you it's good stuff that it sparks your interest.”

In grad school, what was trending in your department, philosophically?

Well, I was in an HPS department. I'm not really sure if it was trending in my department, per se, but certainly at the time there was a lot of interest in what people now call the “Stanford School” in philosophy of science. I don't think I was aware of the concept at the time, but I certainly was very interested in, and influenced by, the work of Ian Hacking and Nancy Cartwright.

Outside of HPS, the 90's was a period when there was a lot of interest in stuff like “complexity,” chaos theory, fractals, critical phenomena, and stuff like that. Indiana HPS hired the philosopher Stephen Kellert who started as assistant professor the same year I started the PhD program, and he had written his dissertation, and a new book, on the philosophy of chaos theory. He had a lot of influence on me, and is probably the main reason I wrote my dissertation on computer simulation.

Across the quad in the philosophy department, there was a grad student a few years ahead of me named David Chalmers that everyone talked about a lot. So, there was definitely lots of interest in consciousness stuff. People also seemed to be talking a lot about non-conceptual content, whatever that was, and emotions. We also had a lot of logicians around (Jon Barwise, Anil Gupta, Mike Dunn, and Raymond Smullyan) so there was lots of stuff going in logic.

Biggest differences between your department and others, in retrospect?

Getting an education in HPS was pretty different from straight philosophy. I didn't realize how weird it was at the time. But it left huge gaps in my philosophical education that got filled, instead, with detailed knowledge of things like the role that alchemy had played in the development of chemistry, or how voyages of exploration in the 18th Century led to important developments in the history of science. I had a lot of catching up to do in philosophy on the job. I'm probably still catching up!

Favorite classes/teachers?

Definitely Stephen Kellert. I had great logic classes from David McCarty and Anil Gupta (including a class on his new book on truth). I had a Wittgenstein class with Karen Hanson that I really enjoyed.

What was the dissertation on?

It was on computer simulation. I used to tell people I wanted to “do for computer simulation what Ian Hacking did for experiment.”

Ambitious! Who was your dissertation advisor?

Michael Friedman. It was also sort of co-advised by Fred Suppe. Fred was on the faculty at Maryland but he spent a lot of time at IU at the time for personal reasons. He was extremely enthusiastic about studying computationally intensive science, which was really useful for me. A lot of people at the time thought my project was a bit out there and not obviously philosophical.

Just out of curiosity, what computer did you write your dissertation on, exactly?

Probably an Intel 486 running Windows 95? I think I used a word processing program called Ami Pro.

Was grad school, or writing the dissertation, challenging?

I didn't find the first part of grad school that challenging but I found the transition to writing a dissertation extremely challenging. It took me a really long time to find a groove in working on my thesis.

Were you encouraged to publish?

No, not really. I had one publication in grad school, but that was only because I went to a conference where we did a symposium on computer simulation, and we ended up doing a special issue of Science in Context, edited by Sergio Sismondo. Sergio probably played a pretty important role in my career because he was the first person to convey to me that “hey man, this is a profession, and you have to actually get yourself professionalized a bit if you want to succeed.” There was very little of this in the culture of my department (and I think this was pretty typical for the 90s).

Who did you hang out with and what did you do to unwind?

A guy named Robert Downey, who is now a professor in the Law School at IU, and Mark Borello, who is now a professor of History of Science at Minnesota hung out almost constantly. We drank a lot. Rob and I played a lot of pool and video games.

What was the market like when you finished?

For me it was pretty awful. I had one preliminary interview at the APA, and it was for a job I knew was out of reach for me. By some miracle, I scored a postdoc gig at Northwestern University. By the time I heard about this in April of my year on the market, I was already sending out resumes and lining up interviews for IT jobs. The next year I had two APA interviews! My postdoc was only supposed to be a year long but Arthur Fine took pity on me and went to the Dean to ask if my gig could be extended a year. Finally, the next year I had enough stuff on my CV that I got a bunch of interviews and landed the job I still have today at USF.

How is your current research rooted in your dissertation?

The original puzzle I started with was this: there are all these computer simulations of physical systems that are more or less just calculating what physics says they should do, but we hear all these researchers saying they are explaining physical phenomena with them. One of my early favorite examples was a simulation of a super-cell thunderstorm that purported to explain they are so stable when prima facie you would expect that they would just destroy themselves. It was a pet example because I found a VHS recording of the simulation output at the library, and this was before you could just go on the internet and find millions of examples of simulations. Back to the puzzle: how can you explain something that you already know how to derive from a perfectly good theoretical representation of it? This led me in two directions. The first was a bit of a dead end: I wanted an account of visual understanding--something that would spell out what kind of explanation you get of phenomena by being able to visualize how coherent structures emerge in the physics and interact with each other. I actually still think this is an interesting topic and maybe someday someone smarter than I will pick it up. The second direction had to do with the claim that “you already know how to derive” it. The more I worked on the first question, the more I started to question this claim. This led to me arguing for claims like “In simulation, theory guides but doesn't determine what a representation of a physical system looks like” and “the epistemology of simulation isn't just the epistemology of theory plus the epistemology of mathematical calculation. It's all mixed together and has its own interesting issues. It's a 'motley epistemology'.”

Way more than half of what I've worked on in my career is more or less rooted in this. I've worked on climate science, the role of social and moral values in modeling, and in the last few years, no surprise, I've written a bunch of stuff on epidemiological models. All of this flowed pretty naturally from my dissertation.

What was the chatter about Chalmers back then?

I don't remember that much. We didn't overlap by much and I was in the HPS department, and I think he spent a lot of his time over in Douglas Hofstadter's lab or whatever it was. He was already pretty mythological by the time I got there. I do remember the first time I heard his name. I was talking to some young PhD students from philosophy, and someone was making fun of how nerdy some other student was and said something like “If I worked as hard as he did, I'd be a Chalmers.” I was like “what's a Chalmers?”. I thought maybe it was a creature from Greek mythology or something. But you would generally just hear people use his name as a qualification to add to pessimistic sentences. So, like, you'd say “Nobody does blah blah blah. Unless they're Chalmers of course.” Stuff like that.

How'd you professionalize yourself?

In graduate school I really didn't. I don't think I would have even known what a person meant by the term. But when I got to my postdoc at Northwestern people started teaching me stuff. David Hull, especially, had a wealth of knowledge about stuff like that. He invited me to dinner in my first few weeks there and said something like “Whenever you submit a paper to a journal print out extra copies, put them in an envelope, and put it in your top drawer. When your paper gets rejected, put the envelope in the mail to the next journal. Arthur Fine co-authored a paper with me that we placed in the Journal of Philosophy. Stuff like that wasn't at all part of the culture when I was in school.

Favorite grad school video games? PC or console?

So many. Mostly PC games. I'm a huge Star Wars fan so the “X-wing” series was a favorite; “Doom” was huge in the 90s; the Lara Croft games; Half Life; Portal.

Did videogames inform your philosophizing about computer simulation?

I think only in the sense that I grew up witnessing the explosion of the power of computer graphics, and the two biggest places you could see this were in video games, and in visualization-intense computer modeling. One of my prized possessions is a computer file that the Astrophysicist Alar Toomre gave me of a simulation he and his brother did in 1972 of galactic tails being formed by the “collision” of two galaxies. They made the movie by printing out each frame on a dot-matrix printer, using letters and numbers as pixels, and then photographing each frame onto a frame of super-8 film. That kind of thing gives me goose bumps.

That’s incredible. Do you still play video games? What are you playing now? What are you looking forward to?

I really don't think I've played any video games since like the late '00s. And even then I was more into vaguely “retro” games like “Geometry Wars“. I think once the graphics got really cinematic, I lost interest.

Describe USF. You've been there for a long time. How has it changed? How have the students changed?

I've been here for 22 years! There's only one professor left in the department (Stephen Turner) who was here when I got here. We're a pretty niche department, and philosophy of science (at least the kind I do) isn't really one of our niches. But it's been a good place for me. The quality of life in Tampa is terrific. I get a lot of work done here. And it has always been easy to get time off when various grants and fellowships have turned up. The quality of the undergraduate students has changed a lot I think. Entirely for the better. It occurred to me a while back that maybe the great financial crisis might have had something to do with this. I think when it hit, some kids who would have either gone to a fancy private school, or gone upstate to UF, decided that going to an urban commuter school wasn't such a bad deal. Since then I've had some amazing undergraduate students. I even co-authored a paper in EJPS with two who took my logic class and my philosophy of science class. I have one who's starting her career as a philosopher with a VAP at Wesleyan. One who is a medical student at Duke but wants to pursue a side career in philosophy of medicine. And one who went to law school and now does space law(!), whatever that is. Most of them are the first in their families to do anything like that kind of stuff and more than half are from under-represented ethnic or racial groups. So that's pretty rewarding.

How is your department different from other philosophy departments?

It's mostly focused on history of philosophy and continental philosophy.

What are you doing in Cambridge? Weird man!

I'm a “British Academy Global Professor.” I'm working on a project that has to do with how to best build, use, and understand computer simulations that are meant to guide policy, especially in a crisis. This is something I was obviously already interested in with Climate Science, but really sucked me in when I saw how powerfully simulation models could be used as rhetorical devices in the pandemic. I want us to find that narrow path where models can be useful and trustworthy for us without becoming tools policy makers can use rhetorically to make the case for what they want to do anyway. It's honestly still surreal to me that I get paid to do what I do. In graduate school, I never thought I'd get a satisfactory job in academics. I really thought I was going to have to find something else to do. So yeah, being at Cambridge is weird. I still do feel a bit like a tourist here, so maybe that's part of why it doesn't feel as surreal as it might.

How can we successfully simulate anything as complex as climate or a pandemic given random, unforeseeable events? Technological breakthroughs? Things like 9/11, or the election of Trump? You know, like, unknown unknowns?

Well, one good thing about (most) climate models is that they try to steer away from having to deal with all those issues. They do that by modeling “representative carbon pathways” rather than by modeling policy choices. So, for example, while in COVID modeling you often saw models that would say things like “This is how many ICU beds will be occupied if adopt this policy, and this is how many will be occupied if we adopt that policy,” climate models just try to say things like “this is what will happen if, for whatever reason, we put this much CO2 in the atmosphere over the next several decades.” This is of course a lot more sensible.

On a related note, how confident should we be in long term climate predictions?

It really depends what you are asking for. If you are asking for how much warming you will get *conditional on* a particular carbon pathway, and you are willing to accept a reasonably wide uncertainty band, then you ought to be reasonably confident. If you want to know precise regional outcomes, or you want to actually predict what the carbon pathway will be for various policy choices, or you want to know what the exact amount of economic loss that will accrue as a result of a particular carbon pathway, you might want to adjust your confidence level down considerably.

How does the current state of science inform your philosophizing?

I think a lot of people know I've thought the state of science during the pandemic was pretty embarrassing. You had a lot of scientific institutions make scientific declarations about things they had no grounds for doing so. There are so many examples. I don't want to take up too much space here listing them, but people can peruse my Facebook or Twitter page or read my published work if they want details. This has really made me rethink how we should understand science, modeling, and expertise. I've always thought of science, and especially scientific modeling, as fundamentally value-laden enterprises. But I'm really starting to feel like philosophers of science have fallen behind the curve on this, and we really need to start paying more attention to it. In addition to my own recent work, people who are interested in what I mean here might want to check out this terrific piece by Peter Godfrey-Smith.

How do your values influence your interpretation of the models?

Values come into modeling in two ways. First, when you decide how to model something—what to represent in the model and how to represent it. And second, when you decide to endorse a claim as true on the basis of your modeling. So, if you build an epidemiological model in which you investigate the effects of a lockdown, and don’t include the racial composition of the population, then, whether you realize it or not, this reflects a value that the differential effect of the lockdown on the various races is not very important. Or at least, it’s less important than the work or time it would take to build this into the model. And if you decide, on the basis of the limited evidence that a model can provide, to endorse the claim that a lockdown will save X many lives, you have to have an idea in mind of how bad it would be to endorse that claim if it were false, and how bad it would be to not endorse that claim if it were true. And those judgments surely reflect your values about how bad it is for people to die from a virus vs. how bad it is for kids to miss school, for income inequality to grow, for suicides and overdoses to go up, etc.

Some people who read this are going to think you are not liberal and that this is a bad thing. Unfair?

I certainly always used to be a liberal. I knocked on doors in the pivotal battleground state of Florida for John Kerry in 2004 because I despised George W. Bush and the Iraq war. But when I was growing up being a liberal meant caring about whether poor kids got to go to school. And it meant being distrustful of regulations that would put people in more frequent contact with the police. And it meant not endorsing policies that were good for bougie people who worked at desks and bad for working people. And it meant defending freedom of speech. And lots of other stuff that seems to have changed. And it certainly didn’t mean agreeing to buy into some consensus of self-declared bien pensant regardless of where that takes you. But none of that seems to be true anymore so I guess I’m done worrying about what labels people want to put on me.

Good or bad for philosophy? Facebook. Twitter. TikTok.

Facebook has been great for me, but man it takes an insane amount of energy and a very thick skin to benefit from it fully. Especially if you are trying to develop ideas that run counter to the received view. People (and I'm including myself, obviously) really throw their gloves down so much faster than they do IRL. I find Twitter less useful because it tends to get derailed by anonymous accounts and it's harder to follow the flow of arguments on there. I didn't even know TikTok and philosophy overlapped at all!

So, do you think people defending unpopular views need to just, I don’t know, be tough in the face of the nasty criticism they receive on social media? Should the critics be more polite?

I suppose in an ideal world people would be more polite. But social media doesn’t seem to work like that. Everything is a performance for others to see, and I guess politeness doesn’t sell. To be honest, it would be pretty hypocritical of me to decry the lack of politeness on social media. I like to be entertaining and to challenge conventional wisdom and that’s not always polite. But I do wish people were a bit more careful about piling on to public vilification campaigns. People aren’t content with screaming at you that your views are wrong. They want to make it clear you are a very dangerous person. Back in late 2020 I retweeted Martin Kulldorff who had tweeted a screenshot of a Scott Atlas tweet that Twitter had censored. He was complaining about the censorship and I was just basically agreeing that the censorship was bad. I didn’t even look very carefully about what the Atlas tweet said—I thought it was dumb that twitter was censoring someone who was advising the President of the United States on COVID policy. Another philosopher of science on Facebook raised a big ruckus about this—claiming that I was ‘problematically supporting eugenics.’ This was of course risible. I wasn’t “friends” with him so he did this behind my back and I only knew about it because a couple of mutuals emailed me to tell me this guy was trying to cancel me. It was just a typical sort of ad hominem move that you see on social media where people you don’t agree with have to be something beyond the pale. But doing this instead of engaging with people’s actual views helps nobody, and certainly not oneself. None of us are omniscient. It makes us collectively dumber if we make people worry about what they say and we sterilize our little bubbles. Even if you are sure you aren’t going to change your mind, hearing arguments for the other side makes your own arguments better and sharper.

Big projects in the distant but foreseeable future?

I plan to spend the next few years thinking and writing about how to make our scientific institutions better able to serve the public. The world is getting bigger and messier, our interventions in it are getting more significant, and our capacity for modeling the relations between the two are getting more powerful. We need better tools for helping us navigate this and I think philosophy of science should be able to contribute to this.

Hobbies? You lift bro? Looks like you lift, bro!

Ha! Yeah, I lift. I've been lifting semi-seriously for about 12 years. I train a bit off and on at both Boxing and Muay Thai. I paddleboard (I used to do races, but I haven't done that in a while.) I still play Blues harmonica. And I'm pretty obsessed with this toy called a “Onewheel”. I'd love to get into eFoiling but right now it's a bit too expensive and inconvenient for me.

See any good movies, TV shows, lately? Read any good books? What are you listening to?

At the risk of being the old man yelling at the cloud: I haven't seen good movies in so long. I feel like maybe it's a dead art form. TV, on the other hand, is pretty great these days. I think I'm probably watching the same stuff as everyone else. I listen to all kinds of music. Favorites include Biggie, Led Zeppelin, and lately I've been getting into what I guess people sometimes call “Southern Gothic”. “Goodnight, Texas“ is a recent favorite.

Favorite philosopher of all time? Most impressive living philosopher, in your estimation?

It's hard to beat David Hume. The relentless naturalism; the writing; pretty much everything about him is great. There are so many living philosophers I admire. I'll just name a few that I think have influenced me the most: Arthur Fine, David Albert, Nancy Cartwright, Hartry Field, Bas van Fraassen.

Does philosophy have a future? Do you think philosophy will make a significant difference?

I hope so, but I'm getting a bit cynical. More and more philosophy seems to me to be directing itself at finding arguments for conventional wisdom. I really hope we can snap out of this.

What is the world going to look like in 30 years? How do the possibilities make you feel?

Who knows! I'll probably be gone in 30 years so why even speculate!

What is time?

The fire in which we burn.

Ha! How’s your love life?

It’s a bit of a garbage fire right now! Thanks for asking!

No problem. Thoughts on AI?

Things are getting interesting! The next decade alone should be fascinating to watch. We should know pretty soon whether LLMs like ChatGPT are the very beginning stages of a big new thing or whether, alternatively, what we’ve seen is basically as good as it gets and we’re going to have to wait for something qualitatively different to see real improvement. I really have no idea.

Last meal?

French fries, fresh fruit salad, and ice cream.

You can ask an omniscient being one question, and you will get an honest, direct answer. What is the question?

I'd like to ask the question “What is the ordered pair such that the first element is the perfect question to ask you, and the second is the answer?” but I know the answer would be “(The question you just asked, What I am saying right now)”. So that doesn't work. I think all the things that puzzle me the most are nearly impossible to word into a question, and probably don't have answers that could be communicated back to me.

Best answer I’ve ever heard. Thanks Eric!

[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]