Daniel Little
Historical research may seem to be a field in which AI tools will be especially useful. Historians are often confronted with very large unstructured digital collections of documents, letters, images, treaties, legal settlements, contracts, and diplomatic exchanges that far exceed the ability of a single human researcher to sift and analyze for valuable historical insights. …
Continue reading "Artificial intelligence tools for historians"
A prior post made an effort to gain greater analytical clarity concerning the unfairness involved in the separation between the "one percent" economy and the rest of us. In what ways is the wealth owned by the super-billionaires an "unfair" extraction from the rest of US society? How can we account for the very rapid …
Continue reading "Stock ownership as system-wide exploitation?"
Much thinking about economic justice for working people has been framed by the nineteenth-century concept of “capitalism”: owners of enterprises constitute a minority of the population; they hire workers who represent the majority of the population; wages and profits define the distribution of income throughout the whole population. This picture still works well enough for …
Philip Pettit’s writings about republicanism offer a valuable and distinctive perspective on individual freedom and the nature of a good society. He develops those ideas most fully in Republicanism : a theory of freedom and government. Pettit’s core idea is that we should conceive of freedom as “non-domination” — that is, that an individual is …
Continue reading "Republicanism and multicultural democracy"
In his influential article "A definition of physicalism" (1993) Philip Pettit attempts to formulate a consistent and coherent account of physicalism as an ontology of the world. I believe that we can define a possibly true, substantive doctrine which holds, roughly, that the empirical world 'contains just what a true complete physics would say it …
The current war on DEI has proven to be unrelenting and highly destructive to the independence, academic freedom, and inclusiveness of American universities. And yet the values that gave rise to DEI initiatives throughout the country in the past two decades are deeply grounded in fundamental American values of equality, freedom, and community. How did …
In previous posts I've been fairly skeptical about the value of ChatGPT as a research tool (link). In recent weeks I've been exploring Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash and Gemini Deep Research, and I'm cautiously more impressed. There are two core shortcomings of an AI tool based solely on large language models and massive training: lack …
Continue reading "A conversation with Gemini about Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier"
source: https://www.kff.org/key-data-on-health-and-health-care-by-race-and-ethnicity/?entry=health-status-and-outcomes-birth-risks-and-outcomes The rightwing extremist war on DEI intensifies by the week, it appears. And the scope of its prohibitions expands as well. Universities throughout the United States are being bullied through the threat of the loss of Federal funds -- sometimes in the billions -- unless all traces of DEI programs, offices, webpages, and …
My current book Rethinking Analytical Sociology has now appeared in print, and an ebook version is available on the Elgar website here. The book is intended to provide a sympathetic but critical review of analytical sociology as a relatively new sub-discipline within sociology. Here is a video preview of the book. https://youtu.be/pDpnkY2AIEA The book argues that the …
Many universities have witnessed a decline in students pursuing majors in the humanities, including English literature. Why has this happened? This sounds like a fairly simple and parochial subject -- why are students and families losing interest in liberal arts majors like philosophy, literature, or history? But this impression is misleading. The subject is not …
Understanding Society 