Technologists and engineers often use the ideas of utilitarianism to evaluate their solutions. If something is cheaper, or faster, or lets people live 3.2 days longer on average, or some other number can be optimised, they judge a solution to be better. In short, they use a quantitative form of  judgment. This way of thinking […]
Will has the potential to be turned into a fundamental concept through which ethics, epistemology, art, life and politics might be understood. How can we define the idea of will? I’m sure I’ll find a lot of answers to this in the philosophical literature in time (maybe I should read Schopenhauer). But what I came […]
(The multi-month hiatus here on Monomorphic has been due to me working on my thesis. I am now able to, briefly, return to this and other indulgences.) Life presupposes taking responsibility. It presupposes investing people, objects and matters around you with your concern. In particular, democratic society presupposes that we all take full, in some […]
I’m in Portland, Oregon for the SPLASH conference. There’s a lot of energy and good ideas going around. I gave a talk about my project, Poplar, at the FREECO workshop. At the same workshop there was a very interesting talk given by Klaus Ostermann, outlining some of the various challenges facing software composition. He linked […]
This is an attempt at restating part of this old blog post in a simpler way. Scientists are valuable to society. They help extract new knowledge and theories about the world. To the extent that they are right, they improve our affluence, our physical health, and, possibly, our outlook on life. But scientists can also provide […]