AI Is Garbage and a Bubble (Please Learn This)
There is no AI. What is being called artificial intelligence and sold as snake oil under that label is actually artificial stupidity. It will destroy your own personal ability to critically reason. It will destroy your company—by reducing, not increasing,...Three Models of Critical Thinking: Remote Work, Generational Wealth, and Election Polling
Three articles I read recently contain such valuable lessons for critical thinking that for my end-of-month analysis I want to summarize them for you and extract for you the general lessons you can learn from them, so you can apply them to every question in your life...Trump-Vance v. Harris-Walz: Comparing Their Official Policy Platforms (Part 2)
I will begin this month by completing my political-philosophical analysis of the competing policy platforms of the Presidential regime that We the People will be electing in about a month. I explained what I am doing and set the ground rules in Part 1, and there...Trump-Vance vs. Harris-Walz: Comparing Their Official Policy Platforms (Part 1)
I will close this month and begin the next with a political-philosophical analysis of the competing policy platforms of the Presidential regime that We the People will be electing in about a month. This is a blackbox analysis. Meaning, I’m not concerning myself...What About Orphans, Then?
I get constant attempts to salvage something, some desperate crumb of Western moral decency or innovation, that can be credited to Christianity. They always end up mythical, or too trivial to impress. As I explain in No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That...We Do Need to Do Something about Global Warming
The headline of this article should be a no-brainer. But there are still too many people who think otherwise, causing little action to be taken, and who are thereby dragging the rest of us into hell—a problem recently made fun of in the movie Don’t Look...Is Society Going to Collapse in 20 Years?
There is much discussion of late (typically gullible) of a recent article claiming that a 1972 prediction of the collapse of civilization between 2040 and 2070 from “MIT” is “on track.” This is scam logic that needs to be called...Imperial Roman Economics as an Example of an Overthrown Consensus
My dissertation advisor at Columbia University was William V. Harris, who employed his own Ph.D. in straightforward political history to cultivate a wide range of specializations in ancient Roman history, ranging from dream culture to history of emotions, to ancient...That Luck Matters More Than Talent: A Strong Rationale for UBI
It can now be said with certainty that luck matters more than talent and effort. Not that talent and effort don’t matter, but that they are easily overwhelmed by bad luck, and easily replaced by good luck. Consequently, all ideologies that depend on any version...Ancient Industrial Machinery & Modern Christian Mythology
Christians like to deny the Dark Ages existed, and instead reimagine them as a glorious age of knowledge and progress. That’s just not true. I document the material and textual evidence against that in my chapter on the subject in Christianity Is Not Great, for anyone...Money Buys Happiness? Not After You Hit Six Figures
Five years ago I took Michael Shermer to task for pushing pseudoscience in his bungled attempt to argue (in agreement with Sam Harris and myself) that moral philosophy could and should be retooled into a proper empirical science, the same way every other philosophical...Did the Environment Kill Rome?
An article at Vox argues that environmental disasters destroyed the Roman Empire: “6 Ways Climate Change and Disease Helped Topple the Roman Empire,” by Kyle Harper, a professor of classics, whose article summarizes his book The Fate of Rome: Climate,...Poly Family, Poly World…and Poly Among the Poor
Polyamory solves more problems than it causes. And all the problems it causes aren’t really unique to poly. All the reasons people might think monogamy is better (and not just for them, but for everyone), turn out not to be true, or lack evidence. And like...There’s No Time to Explain
My brother in law, Brian Parra, has launched a groovy new podcast, There’s No Time to Explain. And I was his first interview subject (episode 1). It’s an example of my favorite kind of podcast, where we both chat about all kinds of things that mostly...Myths of Charity: The Enduring Sham of Arthur Brooks
Six years ago Arthur Brooks published Who Really Cares (which has gone through several subtitles, from America’s Charity Divide to Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters to The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism). This book is still triumphantly...Get Dr. Carrier’s Latest!
About the Author
Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, and the origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.
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