Maarten Boudry

The “Gaza genocide” calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the “stolen election” hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. (Longer version of my @Quillette essay).

Romanticising nature is a luxury belief via Rob Henderson ft. Maarten Boudry

Why HAL 9000 Was Afraid to Die and Real AIs Aren’t: Maarten Boudry @mboudry on some misplaced fears of AI (which is not to deny that AI poses threats; it's just important to identify the real ones). open.substack.com/pub/humanprogr…

Het is toch verbijsterend dat de prietpraat over Ruslands "legitieme veilligheidseisen" vier jaar na de invasie nog steeds weerklinkt. En dan nog uit de mond van professoren internationale politiek. Poetin zou gewoon naar een "cordon securitaire" verlangen, een begrijpelijke "veiligheidsarchitectuur". Natuurlijk maakt hij zich grote zorgen over de oostwaartse "expansie" van de NAVO. Hoe zouden wij zelf zijn? De feiten zijn dat Poetin met zijn dwaze oorlog zijn grens met de NAVO-landen verdubbeld heeft tot 2.600 kilometer (door het lidmaatschap van Finland). En hij krijgt er nog Zweden bij. De hele Baltische Zee is nu NAVO-gebied, in zijn achtertuin. Exact het omgekeerde van wat hij zogenaamd wilde. Heb je Poetin daarover horen klagen? Heeft hij massale troepen naar de Finse grens verplaatst? Het kon hem nauwelijks iets schelen. Het is onzin dat Poetin Oekraïne binnenviel omdat hij "bang" is voor de militaire dreiging van de NAVO. Poetin is een imperialist die heimwee heeft naar de gloriedagen van het Russische Rijk en die niet kan verkroppen dat Oekraïne – de "bakermat" van Rusland in zijn hersenspinsels – een soevereine en democratische natie is, een succesvol alternatief voor zijn eigen imperium dan nog. Het is ook onzin dat de NAVO aan "expansie" doet. De voormalige Oostbloklanden, Oekraïne inbegrepen, smeken al decennia om lid te mogen worden. Jarenlang was het Westen juist terughoudend om hen toe te laten. Duitsland en Frankrijk blokkeerden zelfs het Oekraïense NAVO-lidmaatschap, juist omdat ze vreesden dat Rusland zich in het nauw gedreven zou voelen. Daarin rook Poetin juist onze zwakte. Deze westerse waanbeelden doen sterk denken aan de verklaringen over de "grondoorzaken" van het jihadisme: ook daar waren commentatoren wanhopig op zoek naar motieven die radicalisering begrijpelijk zouden maken, om ze te "rationaliseren". Ook daar zag je het noodlottige onvermogen van westerlingen om zich te verplaatsen in de gedachtewereld van figuren die echt knettergekke dingen geloven – hetzij over de apocalyps en het paradijs, hetzij de mystieke onzin over de Russiche volksziel en Eurasia. demorgen.be/meningen/de-wa…

“Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West.” Philosopher Maarten Boudry quotes Bruckner and diagnoses of the strange but persistent strain of bitter antagonism of Western intellectuals against their own broader culture. maartenboudry.substack.com/p/the-enlighte… @MaartenBoudry

Do people just believe whatever they wish to be true? Like the Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which turn dark at the first sign of danger), pure wishful thinking would be extremely maladaptive. So I largely agree with @danwilliamsphil that "wishful thinking" is a myth, but I think he overstates his case. People are often overly pessimistic about the world (for a host of other cognitive reasons), yet optimistically—and wishfully—biased about themselves. The reality is more subtle: we do distort ego-relevant beliefs in the direction of what we desire, but only within limits. We remain constrained by evidence, preserving an illusion of objectivity. I’ll probably write a longer post on this!

Well, alright, there may have been a tiny bit of response bias, but still. 😉substacktools.com/sharex/ODiTMIkx

From THE GOD DEBATE: Me: The more religious the society, the worse the problems are. And if you don't believe it, consider some of the world's most irreligious societies, like Norway, Netherlands, and New Zealand. They're pretty nice places to live. Now consider some of the world's most religious countries, like Afghanistan and Congo. Those are places that people want to get out of. This is also true in a comparison across American states. The more religious, the more dysfunctional. Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT): What we should wish as Americans is to be neither Afghanistan nor Scandinavia, but to be the United States of America, which as a culture has always done an incredible job of balancing some of the absolute, definite benefits of modernity, including religious toleration, a respect for pluralism, a refusal to simply sort of impose the totality of one religion's theological doctrines on society with an abundant faith in a cosmic purpose for the human race. And obviously there are downsides to religious intensity. Those downsides are often manifested in zealous intolerance. There are also serious downsides to religious indifference, which are often manifested in anomie, drift, and despair. And it is simply the case that if you look across the developed world today, there is a strong correlation between secularization and a kind of loss of faith in human purpose and the human future, manifested most starkly in the declining birth rates that make it extremely unlikely that Dr. Pinker's predictions about the inevitable triumph of secularism and humanism over religion will come to pass, because the secularists and humanists don't seem to be making the basic choices that would enable the continuation of the human race.

"Particularly among progressives, some behave as if extreme wealth is the greater of the two evils, and seem prepared to jeopardize the fight against poverty if only they could get rid of billionaires." substacktools.com/sharex/Egz40Ly0

Thanks for demonizing wealthy philanthropy and billionnaires, dear Left and Right. Now many of the super-rich are stepping back from large-scale giving to effective charities. Great outcome—because who wants to eradicate extreme poverty if it means "white-washing" extreme wealth, right? Heartfelt thanks. 🙏 “You’re more likely to be criticized for giving large amounts of money away now than praised. That probably wasn’t as true 15 years ago,” he said, citing “contention” around extreme wealth. nytimes.com/2026/03/15/bus…

Thanks to a comment from @sapinker, I added an important point to my essay: under most definitions of “intelligence,” the monomaniacal pursuit of a single goal at the expense of everything else would be considered “super-stupid,” not “superintelligent.” In fact, his comments persuaded me to start avoiding the term “superintelligence” altogether. As Pinker has argued in his debate with Scott Aaronson about advanced AI, it’s highly misleading to conceive of intelligence as a single, unidimensional scale and then slap the comic-book prefix “super” onto it. scottaaronson.blog/?p=6593&fbclid…

Daniel Dennett: "If I gave a prize to the best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin." Not Newton. Not Einstein. Darwin. In a 2015 documentary, philosopher Daniel Dennett makes a striking case for why Darwin's idea of natural selection is the single greatest intellectual achievement in human history. His reasoning isn't just about biology. Dennett argues that what makes Darwin's idea so extraordinary is what it unifies. Before Darwin, the world was split into two seemingly incompatible realms: the physical world of cause and matter, and the world of meaning, purpose, and consciousness. These felt like they belonged to different categories entirely. One explained by science, the other by something else. Darwin's idea, Dennett says, is the backbone that bridges them: "The Darwinian idea of natural selection unifies the world. It unifies the world of cause and matter and physics with the world of meaning and purpose consciousness. The whole spectrum of life depends on uniting the living with the non-living, the meaning with the non-meaning, the purposeful with the merely mechanical and merely physical." That's not a small claim. It's a philosophical revolution disguised as a biology paper. What Dennett is pointing to is that natural selection gives us a mechanism: a purely physical, purposeless process that generates purpose. Organisms don't need a designer to have goals. The appearance of design, the reality of meaning, emerges from the bottom up. The best idea anyone ever had. No prize for second place.

No, computers don’t have an instinct for survival or desire to conquer the world. And without natural selection—or some monumentally stupid design choices—they won’t develop one. What we’re seeing instead is evolved creatures projecting their evolved instincts onto the imagined destiny of AI. substacktools.com/sharex/qR9BPJdr

This from Paul Ehrlich will make you think "If I'm always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB and I've gotten virtually every scientific honor." Link in reply

Why I signed this statement in support of @nathancofnas. substacktools.com/sharex/ODiTMIkx

A statement in support of Nathan Cofnas's right to academic freedom, signed by more than 120 academics drive.google.com/file/d/1RRsGma… @ugent @nathancofnas

Full post here: "The Most Dangerous Idea In Academia (and why researchers must be free to study it)" substacktools.com/sharex/ODiTMIkx

A few years ago I recorded an episode of my podcast Forbidden Territory for @UGent (in Dutch) about the heritability of IQ. We also touched on the third rail of racial differences. Why? Because I believe academics should be free to investigate even the most “dangerous ideas.” My guest, Han van der Maas (a renowned IQ researcher at the University of Amsterdam), explained that individual IQ differences are highly heritable, but that he does not believe in differences between racial groups. His statistical and methodological arguments (e.g. Simpson paradox) convinced me at the time. Still, he hedged his bets: it remains possible that future evidence might show racial differences. And researchers should be free to investigate that hypothesis. Forty-five colleagues from my former philosophy department apparently think otherwise. They are urging the rector to fire @nathancofnas because he claims that the IQ gap between racial groups (such as whites and blacks in the US — differences that are themselves not disputed) may have partly genetic causes, rather than purely social ones like marginalization or discrimination. They label this “pseudoscience and racism.” I understand why many people are shocked by Cofnas’s claims. But this clearly falls within the scope of academic freedom. For years, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan was taught and researched at my department — a complete pseudoscience. Dozens of theses and PhDs were written about it, all scientifically worthless. No one batted an eye. Unlike my colleagues, I published several papers explaining why (Lacanian) psychoanalysis is pseudoscientific (drive.google.com/file/d/0B_K-qt…). Yet I never demanded that my colleagues be fired. None of the signatories have any peer-reviewed publications on IQ or genetics. I have a letter recommending Cofnas' work on IQ from the editor-in-chief of the prestigious journal Intelligence. Even if the hypothesis of racial IQ differences could be shown to belong to the realm of pseudoscience, that still would not justify dismissal. If @UGent caves in to this demand, it will be another blow to academic freedom at my alma mater — following the new rector’s illiberal statements suggesting that researchers questioning the safety of vaccines or the Gaza “genocide” are “crossing a line that must not be crossed.” Such calls for dismissal from people without any expertise are also strategically unwise, as they only fuel “red-pilling.” When academics appear determined to suppress a dangerous idea at all costs, people understandably get suspicious: "What are they trying to hide?" And so trust in academia erodes further. youtube.com/watch?v=YHhbWm…