Philip A. Loring's Blog

In which I discuss Luddites, skilled labor, and the difference between an LLM and a hammer.Photo by Nahrizul Kadri on Unsplash

Large language models, known as LLMs, generative AI, or sometimes just “AI”, are potentially among the most disruptive technologies we will see in our lifetime. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the polarized tenor of this moment in history, they are also heavily contested. Many debate what this technology is capable of, but the more important question, I believe, is whethe...

My commencement address to the 2025 Climatebase fellows, June 06 2025

By Giles Laurent, gileslaurent.com.

Thank you for that introduction and thank you to the Climatebase team and all the Fellows for having me back. It’s an honor to be here again, and to again get to experience the energy and enthusiasm you’ve all brought in this community.

I want to begin with a poem by Ricardo Levins Morales, entitled “Volcano”:

Power comes from below,
from the hidden places where it gathers,
until discovering itsel...

Making Propaganda Great AgainThe Trump administration’s new “assessment” of children’s health issues is a Trojan Horse. Don’t let it in.Photo by Gage Skidmore.

RFK Jr. styles himself a maverick, someone willing to push back against scientific consensus and corporate interests in the service of common-sense measures to protect human health. Today, his commission released their “Making our Children Healthy Again Assessment”. Unsurprisingly, its littered with misleading arguments, cherry-picked scie...

Me taking joy in being present with my daughter, Cordelia.

“How are you?” is a question I receive at least 3–5 times daily, usually at the start of a Zoom call with colleagues. In our society, this question is the epitome of the throw away greeting, something uttered in passing and to which no one really expects a fulsome answer.

“Hows it going?”

“Great, you?”

“Great! Thanks”

“Take care!”

And you’re on your way. No information has been exchanged. No meaninfgul relation has been tended.

Lately, I’ve dec...

A mural spotted in Sacramento near the Capitol building. Photo by me.

Trump and his allies are tearing everything down. The economy. Leading institutions of education and research, systems for public health and safety, and with no other apparent motive but the gleeful destruction itself. NOAA, USAID, Department of Education, US Institute for Peace, the EPA, the NIH, The Kennedy Center for the Arts, the Smithsonian Institution; each has experienced, or is targeted for, a deliberate, and in some ca...

If you want to change the world, you should too.The Unicorn in Captivity. One of seven Unicorn Tapestries (1495–1505).

I love my job. I get to talk to people for a living about a thing they love, the environment, and the amazing things they are doing to protect it. I am a social scientist; I became one to help figure out pathways out of issues like climate change. But I decided early in my career that I didn’t want to focus only on the bad news. The triple crises of climate change and biodiversit...

About that saving the world thing…The Death of Hippolytus by Peter Rubens.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if heroes were real? Supervillains sure are real. But what about heroes? Because it would definitely be kind of nice if Superman could show up right now and take care of Lex Luthor. Or if Marty McFly could hurry up and go back in time to put Biff Tannen back in his place.

Everything about this moment we are living in feels to too big to solve. Climate change, global poverty, the collapse of American d...

On the blame and shame loop and how we break free.Two people in a heated argument about religion when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University in 2007. Photo by David Shankbone.

Donald Trump is actively advocating for the outright elimination of a Palestinian presence in Gaza. For many on the left, including myself, who tried regularly to build more support for Biden, and then Harris, among pro-Palestinian progressives, this is coming as no surprise. There was no reason to think that Trum...

Musk is dismantling science as we know it. His motivation should terrify you.“Longtermism.” Generated with Flux Pro 1.1 Ultra

If you don’t know someone who works in research, you may not realize that the science community around the world has been upended by the actions of the Trump administration and the ongoing agency-by-agency dismembering by Elon Musk’s so-called “department” of government efficiency.

USAID, arguably the most important non-military peacekeeping force in the world, is being all...

Now more than ever, the “truth” is what we make it.

In a recent essay about why he retired from writing for the New York Times, economist Paul Krugman wrote the following:

“It became clear to me that the management I was dealing with didn’t understand the difference between having an opinion and having an informed, factually sourced opinion.”

Krugman shared this observation as something of a sidebar to his broader explanation for leaving the Times. But I want to elevate it because I think this prob...