In this new era where AI can write their essays, solve their math problems, draw their art, compose their music — and yes, even become their "friends" who distract them with notifications during class — I expect this disconnect to grow.

Do you have numbers on how many students were using AI friend apps?

When you look at the “bioethics” fiasco, you discover bioethicists writing mainly for an audience of other bioethicists. Bioethicists aren’t writing to doctors or bioengineers, they’re writing to tenure committees and journalists and foundation directors.

Mathematicians mainly write to other mathematicians. This is a problem that effects every field in academia, and it probably always will, simply because people are interested in their fields and not other fields.

Worse, bioethicists are not using their ethical sense in bio-work, the way a doctor whose patient might have incurable cancer must choose how and what to tell the patient.

Most bioethicists are effectively legal counsel for hospitals, where they very much use their ethical sense in bio-work, dictating what is good practice for doctors and patients in particular scenarios. They sometimes even tell doctors how and what to tell the cancer patients. You seem to have a categorically wrong view of what an ethicist does for their day job.

Professional ethicists, to get paid, must transform ethics into something difficult enough to require professional ethicists.

I mean this is only true if it's also true for any other profession. Professional ethicists, to get paid, must learn a lot of legal compliance and write SOPs for doctors to make ethics something easy enough for the doctors to utilize. I think your view is just fundamentally backwards on a lot of this.

you'll eventually hit bottom

Laughs for eternity.

Oh, you used a ruler? How do you know the ruler is accurately measuring 3 inches? And furthermore, how do you know your eyes and brain can be trusted to read the ruler correctly to assess the height of the would-be FPS? For that matter, how do you even know what an inch is, and why was 3 inches the true height of an FPS anyway?

Heck, what does it even mean to "know" that something is "true"?

"Who is Descartes? Myth of the given? What are you talking about? I just want to define sandwiches."

The kind of work that I try to do is not about language.  It is about reducing mentalistic models to purely causal models, about opening up black boxes to find complicated algorithms inside, about dissolving mysteries - in a word, about cognitive science.

And as we all know, language has nothing to do with cognitive science.

Which examples?

Convergence is a pretty well understood phenomenon in evolutionary theory and biology more broadly these days. Anything outside of our biosphere will likely follow the same trends and not just for the biological reasons given, but for the game theoretical ones too.

Acausal trade seems unrelated since what I'm talking about is not a matter of predicting what some party might want/need in a narrow sense, but rather the broad sense that it is preferable to cooperate when direct contact is made. As a tangent, acausal trade is named poorly, since there is a clear causal chain involved. I wish they called it remote reasoning or distant games or something else.