This is a blog about Cognition, Law, and AI.

It is not a baseball blog. I promise. I just have a quick story.

I was back in Los Angeles last year visiting family. We are huge Dodger fans. Like, lifelong season ticket holders with upcycled old stadium seats on the deck of my childhood home type fans. Like, grandfather followed them from Brooklyn to LA type fans (though his being blacklisted as a union-leading commie probably had some influence). As we were in town during Shohei Ohtani’s first season with the team, the whole family joined my wife and I for Phillipe’s (IYKYK) and a Dodger game.

We got there late because, well, LA. When we arrived, I found that they’d implemented new security measures since the last time I had been to a game. Of the new measures: no bags over a certain (paltry) size, and if they are over that size, they have to be in a clear plastic bag. Even thought they are going to search through them in either case. I don’t know if this is really for security or more likely to stop people from bringing in food and drinks they should be “rightfully” paying stadium prices for. (Back in the day, we used to sneak in Zima - yes, I said Zima - in Sprite bottles to avoid those exorbitant alcohol prices. Anyone else?)

We get to the entrance and are greeted by a security guard. Bigger guy with that look of someone who doesn’t really identify with his job. He’s holding this poster board with a square marked out in masking tape showing the maximum bag size.

“I’m sorry,” he says, pointing to my mother’s purse “you have to take your bag back to your car or use this clear one.”

“What do you mean,” I asked.

“It is over the allowed size.” He is holding the small clutch against the board, the corners just overlapping with the inner edges of the masking tape. “I’m sorry,” he says with the apathy of a RyanAir gate attendant, “I don’t make the rules”.

I have a bit of an impulse control problem, so, loudly,

“But you DO make the rules. You make them every time you enforce them; every time you make a choice about whether or not it applies; whether or not it applies and there are mitigating circumstances; whether there is a context like it being hard for my parents to walk all the way back to the car balanced against how likely it is that they are bringing in contraband; or, that we have already missed Shohei’s first at bat and if I miss him hitting a home run live before I return to Denmark because of 2mm of masking tape and an unimaginative security guard I am going to be more dangerous than what might be in that bag!”

To be fair, it’s probably an overly academic point to make to a security guard at Dodger Stadium just trying to do a job. He rolled his eyes, got his manager (who rolled their eyes). My mom rolled her eyes. Everyone rolled their eyes.

This is a bit what this blog is about.

One, what I call Legal Cognition. How we think and act about abstract normative imperatives: rules, norms, law, principles, morals, taboo…how we make them, how we make sense of them, how we balance them against one another, and how we pretend we don’t have choices that we absolutely do or pretend to have choices we absolutely don’t.

Two, its about the “we” in that last sentence that is doing some heavy lifting. It is pretty clear to me that the we I am referring to not only has to do with the collective intelligence that makes up our normative cultures in a human sense, but the growing epistemic world we share with AI.

This entails issues of policy, governance, philosophy, cognition, legal theory, (and yes, probably a little baseball) collected under the umbrella of practical wisdom. I will be covering my thoughts on any number of things: robots, big-L law, AI hype, capitalism, epistemic sovereignty, cognitive linguistics, information theory, probably some sci-fi (my own and others’), among other things. I hope you will enjoy it or find it useful.

This is a bit of a “brand” blog in a sense, in that it comes from my work in academia on AI governance and legal cognition at the University of Copenhagen and more so, the organisation I founded: The Sapien Institute. I am quite allergic to the concept of branding. And “personal brands”, even more so. But I recognize that I must, however cantankerous and Karen-like I become, be in the world. I also wanted a space to develop some ideas or at least a place to give some ideas a life they wouldn’t have outside of a notebook I never come back to. Though this is the official Sapien Institute blog and will host some guest writers, you are not likely to get a well branded or controlled stream of posts.

And now for some compulsory self-effacing hedging

I’m very much not alone with being a bit reluctant to start a blog but it still feels incredibly personal and self serving. There’s also this nagging worry that imperfect writing or half-formed thoughts will somehow come back to haunt me. It’s probably (absolutely) a stupid fear, but so it goes. I’ve always thought of writing as a craft, something private, something you bleed into a final form before its put out into the world. Plus, I’ve been told by enough people that I should probably keep my mouth shut more often and keep my thoughts to myself. For someone generally confident, I have this strange anxiety about judgment around something that likely no one will ever read. That’s my psychological disclaimer that probably comes with everything I write here.

Happy reading.

Shohei did hit a home run that night. I was in the stands watching. Everyone else was getting hotdogs. My mother’s contraband never once threatened democracy.