Philosophy
The Strange Case of Lactose Intolerance
Peter Banks
July 17, 2024
Last week, a friend of mine reached out with a meme that has been circulating on Twitter. This sparked a series of text messages between us that mirror three conversations I have had in the last two years, and I wanted to take a moment to sit down and collect my thoughts. Self-perceived lactose intolerance and medical lactose intolerance seem to have taken a strange journey, which to me is symbolic of how important cultural context is when discussing anything...
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Socialization
Peter Banks
June 26, 2024
Should I steal? I was in the market for a new Nespresso machine a couple of months ago. While shopping I found myself standing in the appliance aisle of Target in East Palo Alto staring at the coffee machine I wanted. The device in question cost ~$120 and was surrounded by boxes and boxes of similar bougie devices. Now my partner and I earn fine money; but, I’m a PhD student and $120 is a non-trivial amount of money, so part of me was debating if I needed a Nespresso machine or if we could make do with something much simpler and save the cash when I realized I could just pick the box up and walk out of the store. I live in California where all theft below $950 is a misdemeanor but more importantly, I just knew no one would even look if I simply walked away with the device.
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A Note on our Descendants
Peter Banks
June 12, 2024
In the last couple of years, AI has progressed to the point that they are quasi-sentient. Meaning that at a minimum modern AI’s do a remarkable job of imitating a sentient creature. Over the last year and a half since ChatGPT’s original release, companies like OpenAI have tightened the screws on the outputs these models produce. As a result, a lot of the early evidence, or hallucinations, of AI sentience has faded. But the underlying architecture still exists and continues to improve every day.
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Politics, Art, and the Aesthetic
Peter Banks
June 5, 2024
The aesthetics of an era do not merely reflect the political landscape but actively participate in shaping and defining it. The motifs and forms of an aesthetic draw individuals who are temperamentally inclined toward them along with giving them tools to present their vision of society to the public at large creating a powerful synergy between art and politics.
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Land Pirates
Peter Banks
May 29, 2024
History is complicated and we should be hesitant to impose too much of our morality on people who lived in different times and places but we should also be willing to stand by those values we believe in and call out societies that fail to live up to them. I believe in peace, property rights, and the value of meaningful and productive labor and so I cannot view the Mongols as anything but history's greatest villains. Here land pirates serve as a valuable lens through which to understand the dynamics of power, exploitation, and societal decay. It reminds us that the struggle between civilization and predation is an ongoing one. As a member of a decidedly settled post-agrarian society, I can admire the military achievements of many cultures without assigning them moral virtue.
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The Future
Peter Banks
May 15, 2024
I originally set out in this essay to articulate how impressed I have been while working with OpenAi’s API. In particular how I believed that the sort of information economy most of the readers of Voyagers work in will be decimated, but I was struck by a feeling of doubt. How could I make such bold claims about the future? I would never have been able to predict ChatGPT, Neurolink, or any of the other advancements which have happened in just the last two years.
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Responsibility for Our Time
Nicholas Migli
May 2, 2024
Almost 80 years ago, George Orwell published an essay titled Books v. Cigarettes in which he explored a common gripe among his contemporaries that books were simply too expensive a past time to afford. In response Orwell compares the relative costs of drinking and smoking, common hobbies of the complainants, and their associated costs with that of a reading, eventually concluding that even in the case of a very heavy reader, the costs of both habits are roughly the same over the period of a year. The point of the essay was to demonstrate that the inability to afford books was a product of decisions made in the spending of one’s salary, not the...
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Family: A Debt Worth Keeping
Peter Banks
April 25, 2024
The central thesis of this essay is that we owe a profound appreciation for the sacred bond of family, not merely as a social construct but as an existential debt that can never be fully repaid. The obligations we owe to our immediate biological kin are not burdens but rather sources of profound meaning and grace, for it is in the impossibility of ever fully discharging these debts that true love and loyalty reside. In contrast to the atomized and transactional nature of modern society, we must see the beauty of embracing the particularities of familial ties, eschewing the hollow generalities that erode genuine human connection.
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Soft Values, Hard Results
Jyotirmai Singh
April 17, 2024
Like any bright-eyed twenty-something infected by the ambition of Silicon Valley, I’ve spent my fair share of time wondering what it takes to be successful. Of course there’s no universal definition of success, but all forms of success require you to bend reality in some way to conform to your worldview. I’m now convinced that beyond just shaping our dreams and aspirations, our beliefs and values are also vital in achieving them. Soft values lead to hard results.
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Contra-Copernican Words
Peter Banks
April 3, 2024
Language and reality have a beautiful connection with each other. Each is to a degree we often fail to recognize deeply informed by its mirror image. By changing the definition of a word, or attaching a new phrase to an idea, both reality and language change in subtle, often unexpected ways. Euphemistic Pooling is the idea that you can connect concepts with different normative values in an effort to construct a meaning that is more acceptable to yourself or your group. This is often political(in the sense of referring to the polis or society) but it is something we all do as part of our efforts to communicate and shape the world we live in. It cannot be abolished but it should be appreciated.
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