Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I found the above browsing about Mastodon (my favorite social media site given Musk's destruction of the old Twitter).  I've been too lazy to look for confirmation. Maybe this calls for some philosophical exegesis BEFORE confirmation!  The above is a screenshot of a post on a social media site that says that in 2022 medical researchers tried to make a machine-learning tool for identifying skin cancer. The idea, as always, was that the Algo would learn from large quantities of online photos of skin lesions that turned out to be cancerous and other skin lesions that did not, until the algorithm would teach itself how to tell the difference maybe better than humans would ever be able to.  Didn't work out. The Algo ended up focusing on the presence or absence of a ruler. (Doctors routinely use a ruler to measure a potential tumor for scale.) The social media post ends, "Basically they tried to build a cancer finding machine and instead built a ruler finding machine." ...

Stefan Molyneux seems to be the hot new thing among young anarcho-capitalists. Not old fuddy-duds like me. He is the author for example of Universally Preferable Behavior, a book that attempts to expound a rationally impregnable (and secular) ethical system. I have not read that, or anything else of Molyneux's. I leave to those who have read it to pass on its merits. I do not rely entirely upon secondary sources, though. I did spend some time listening to one of his podcasts, the beginning of a comprehensive course on philosophy he offers here .  That particular link leads you to a forty minute effort to introduce the subject matter of the remainder of a series. The gist of it, if I understand it at all, is that philosophy, in the sense in which Molyneux proposes to use the term for the duration of the course, the sort of philosophy he hopes to teach, is: a lot like empirical science -- indeed it is empirical science, writ large -- such that any inferences a ph...