My talk on “The Death of Free Will”

[Note: Given the controversial nature of this topic and the subtlety of the arguments involved that might require multiple exchanges and clarifications, I am lifting the three comment limit for this post, though the rule against acting like a jerk remains and indeed will always remain.]

On January 10, 2026, I gave a talk at the local Skepticamp Conference on The Death of Free Will. I am attaching the link to the video below. It is about 25 minutes long, followed by another 20 minutes of Q/A.

Since you cannot see the slides that well, I am attaching a pdf of the slides so that you can follow along.

Enjoy!

The relative decline of research universities in the US

The New York Times had an article that has set off alarms in higher education circles in the US that, according to some global rankings, China’s universities are rapidly advancing the amount and quality of their scientific research output, leaving US universities behind.

Look back to the early 2000s, and a global university ranking based on scientific output, such as published journal articles, would be very different. Seven American schools would be among the top 10, led by Harvard University at No. 1.

Only one Chinese school, Zhejiang University, would even make the top 25.

Today, Zhejiang is ranked first on that list, the Leiden Rankings, from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Seven other Chinese schools are in the top 10.
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According to Mark Neijssel, director of services for the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, the Leiden rankings take into account papers and citations contained in the Web of Science, a database set of academic publications which is owned by Clarivate, a data and analytics company. Thousands of academic journals are represented in the databases, many of which are highly specialized, he said.

The research output of Harvard and other US universities has not declined. It has grown but the Chinese universities are growing faster. This is because China has put great emphasis on scientific research, seeing it as the foundation of its technological base for its growth as a world power.
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The benefits and dangers of online support groups

One of the huge benefits of the internet and social network platforms is their ability to connect people with other people who may share similar interests and needs. This can be especially important for those who suffer from various debilitating symptoms for which there seems to be no clearly identifiable cause and for which their doctors have resorted to just trying to alleviate the symptoms, usually with just partial success. Finding others with similar conditions can be a relief, since sometimes those around them may speak and act like they harbor suspicions that the sufferer does not have any real problems but may be a hypochondriac or merely trying to get attention and sympathy

Siddhant Ritwick and Tomi Koljonen describe some of them.

While diseases such as cancer, AIDS, ALS, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis and diabetes often evoke deep fear, sympathy and collective urgency – reflected in dedicated charities, advocacy groups and public awareness campaigns – there exists an under-recognised class of bodily conditions that also wreaks havoc on human lives. These illnesses often receive little social legitimacy and may even be dismissed by medical professionals, family members and society at large as mere tiredness, laziness or psychological fragility. Conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), Long COVID and Lyme disease are often dismissed as trivial, yet they can be profoundly disabling. Though not usually life-threatening, these overlooked illnesses can dismantle a person’s social, professional and emotional world, leaving sufferers severely disadvantaged – often without the sympathy or structural support afforded to more widely recognised diseases.

Reflux diseases are among the many conditions that can trap sufferers in a spiral of chronic suffering.
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These brutal conditions are neither mysterious like Long COVID, whose causes and progression remain uncertain, nor urgent like cancer. Instead, they occupy an uncomfortable middle ground: familiar, longstanding and supposedly manageable.

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Trump’s Greenland obsession and the Mercator map projection

Trump seems obsessed with the idea of the US taking over Greenland, much to the alarm of European countries that support a continuation its current status as an semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. There is little support even from Greenlanders for becoming part of the US. He has even announced tariffs, the weapon that he uses for pretty much everything, to punish any countries that oppose this move, and has already applied it.

Trump said that “Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Finland have journeyed to Greenland, for purposes unknown,” a reference to the European countries who have said in recent days that they will send troops to Greenland as a show of solidarity with Denmark, after weeks in which Trump and top allies have renewed demands to take the territory. Most European countries have been vocal in their opposition to Trump’s efforts to take over Greenland.

Calling it a “potentially perilous situation,” Trump said he would impose 10 percent tariffs on imports of all goods starting Feb. 1 from those countries to the U.S., increasing to 25 percent on June 1. He said it would only be removed after a deal is reached for “the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

“This is a very dangerous situation for the Safety, Security, and Survival of our Planet. These Countries, who are playing this very dangerous game, have put a level of risk in play that is not tenable or sustainable,” Trump said, embracing what amounted to a military threat against some of Washington’s closest and oldest allies.

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The future of big physics

When it comes to research in experimental physics in areas that already exist, the frontiers that are usually explored are those of precision and size.

In the case of the precision frontier, the idea is to measure something more precisely than it has been done before because with greater precision there is a better chance of finding disagreement with theoretical expectations. Such disagreements (or ‘anomalies’), especially if they persist and are recognized as not being due to some errors in experiment or theoretical calculations, are the basis for thinking that there might be something new going on and may lay the foundations for some kind of breakthrough.

The other frontier is to extend the range of the parameters and in the case of high-energy physics, that means going to higher and higher energies. But this is enormously expensive. The Large Hadron Collider that was built at CERN at a cost of billions of dollars reached the existing energy limit and it resulted in the detection of the long-sought Higgs boson.
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What the internet and now AI reveal about us

What the internet and the latest forms of AI have revealed is that many people harbor the ugliest of impulses. People are likely to have had ugly impulses all along but only those in their physical proximity knew about them, if at all. But with the internet and social media, these people are able to not only anonymously reach a much wider audience but now with AI, they are able to find ways to exhibit those impulses in new and increasingly disgusting ways, as this article reveals. They are taking picture of real women (and even children) and doctoring them in sexually explicit ways, a process known as ‘nudification’. The targets of these new ways of attack are usually women, of course.

Such doctoring of images have been occurring since the invention of photography but it used to require sophisticated skills But now pretty much anyone can use the freely available AI (such as Elon Musk’s Grok) to generate doctored images of people and then share them widely through social media channels (like Musk’s X), while those companies seem to make little or no effort to find ways to prevent such abuse. And the situation is getting rapidly worse, on a time scale of days.
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Encyclopedia wars

There is an enduring appeal to encyclopedias.The ability to look up information that has been prepared by credible sources on a huge range of topics, is invaluable, especially for someone like me whose curiosity takes me in many different directions, triggered by random events in my life. As a result, I bought a complete set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica back around the early 1980s. I was not wealthy and it cost a lot but it was the one luxury that I felt justified in indulging in. Sadly I then had to part with it when I came to the US, because the massive multi-volume set was too expensive to ship and I expected that I would be moving around a lot in my first few years here as I struggled to gain a foothold in my career. So I gifted it to a friend. Then later in the US when my children were little and we were settled, I bought another multivolume encyclopedia set, ostensibly to help them look up stuff for their homework and for general interest though I think that secretly it was for my own benefit and I ended up being the main user.

What is nice about a physical encyclopedia is the serendipity that it enables, that you often start out looking up something specific but as you turn the pages to get to that entry, you stumble across unrelated items that are interesting and read about them too. It is like walking along library stacks looking for a particular book and finding other books that look interesting and checking them out as well. The difference is that with library stacks, books are arranged according to subject categories so you will likely be in the same general area while in an encyclopedia the entries are sorted alphabetically, so with the latter one can end up very far from the starting point.

But this was before the internet and Wikipedia, which has become the go-to source for people looking for information on anything. Now one is less likely to end up on a random topic, just as doing online searches for library books means that one can miss out on serendipitous discoveries. The same is true for journals and magazines. When you have hard copies, you tend to look at the table of contents and that can result in finding new articles of interest. But with online sources, you often get sent directly to the article you are looking for and do not scan the content titles. This saves time but also results in loss.
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The menace of influencers and the ‘Free Birth’ movement

I am becoming increasingly concerned whenever I see the word ‘influencer’ associated with someone on the internet. It is a vaguely defined terms and a brief search yields examples such as “one who exerts influence : a person who inspires or guides the actions of others” or “a person who is able to generate interest in something (such as a consumer product) by posting about it on social media” or “a person who has become well known through regular social media posts and is able to promote a product or service by recommending or using it online.”

I would like to add a further definition as “someone who has no real expertise or credentials about whatever they are talking about but are using their own experience or those of a few others to make sweeping claims that others should follow their advice even when that can be dangerous”.

I don’t really care about influencers who advise people about restaurants or hotels or vacation spots or what cleaning and cooking utensils to buy. Sure, the advice may be useless and they are likely being paid to shill for those things. But those are usually harmless and only result in a loss of money for the gullible. I am more concerned about those who give medical advice about treating ailments or who promote diets that can be harmful if continued for a long time.

One of the more dangerous influencers that I read about recently was in an investigative series by reporters from the Guardian newspaper promoting something called ‘free births’. To be clear, these are not so-called natural or unassisted births where women choose to give birth at home under the guidance of midwives and doulas who are able to quickly summon medical help if something goes seriously wrong with the delivery. (A midwife is a trained medical professional who knows how to deliver babies while a doula is someone who has no medical training but provides non-medical emotional and moral support.)
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The perils of perfectionism

There was an interesting article in the August 11, 2025 issue of The New Yorker about the pain that can be caused by being a perfectionist, in that it can lead to depression, eating disorders, and even suicide. To understand why, we need to distinguish perfectionism from the mere desire to excel or be the best at something. While those latter characteristics can skirt close to the boundary of perfectionism, they are not the same thing. What characterizes perfectionism is the feeling that whatever one does or achieves, it is never good enough and requires more work. This can lead to not completing projects because one is constantly making changes without moving on or holding back and not submitting articles or papers because of the need to do more research, more experiments, or explore obscure side issues, and so on. This can lead to a sense of frustration because of the loss of productivity. Perhaps the most dangerous issue is with eating disorders such as anorexia where however thin someone gets, they feel they are not thin enough.

The article focuses on the work of two psychologists Gordon Flett and Paul Hewitt who have spent decades studying this and produced a model that describes three types: “self-oriented perfectionism (requiring perfection of oneself), other-oriented perfectionism (railing against the imperfections of others), and socially prescribed perfectionism (believing that others require one to be perfect).”
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The story of punctuation

I am fascinated by the evolution of language but had never given much thought to punctuation. If I gave it any consideration at all, I tended to think of punctuation marks such as the period, the comma, and the apostrophe as somehow having been there from the beginning of writing, appearing somewhat organically along with writing. But according to Florence Hazrat at the University of Sheffield, the origin of punctuation marks can be dated quite precisely.

In the broad sense, punctuation is any glyph or sign in a text that isn’t an alphabet letter. This includes spaces, whose inclusion wasn’t always a given: in classical times stone inscriptions as well as handwritten texts WOULDLOOKLIKETHIS – written on scrolls, potentially unrolling forever. Reasons for continuous script aren’t entirely clear, but might be connected to a conception of writing as record of speech rather than a practice in itself, and since we’re hardly aware of the minuscule pauses we make between words when speaking, it isn’t obvious to register something we do and perceive unconsciously with a designated sign that is a non-sign: blank space.

Writing without punctuation lasted for many hundreds of years, in spite of individual efforts such as those of Aristophanes, the librarian at Alexandria. Around 200 BCE, Aristophanes of Alexandria wished to ease pronunciation of Greek for foreigners by suggesting small circles at different levels of the line for pauses of different lengths, emphasising the rhythm of the sentence though not yet its grammatical shape.

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