I used to be a big fan of OA publications, but I am changing my position now, due to the fact that all OA articles are freely used by LLMs for training. I am extremely concerned by the raise of LLMs and at the moment I don't want to volunteer my (scarce) free time to help their training.

About to do the annual Applying for Philosophy PhD Programs session. If you have undergrads or MA students, now is a great time to start thinking about application prep. Guide here: www.hkandersen.com/applying-for... #philsky #philsci

On the use of LLMs for research: Many times it works. The problem is that you have to re-check *all* results, because you don't know which ones are the hits! And re-checking is more boring than researching in the first place, hence why preferring it?

No, you can't trust it. Yes, you need to validate using other methods. Those other methods involve doing the work the long way with precision. Which means you don't need AlphaFold. So...it doesn't save us any time. Or rather, on some projects it WOULD! I just don't know which.

For me, the most maddening thing is when AI boosters, or detractors, all seem to agree that AlphaFold is an unmitigated good and useful tool showing the power of AI. I disagree. It's hit and miss. And the misses are REALLY expensive. Especially when the conversation suggests it is ALL HIT.

The epistemic point on Alphafold is interesting, haven’t seen it spelled out quite so clearly as this. The argument here seems to be that the Alphafold model of science is speed running in ways that compromise the end result, turning science into reverse engineering.

I took a train (Montréal—Toronto) last week. Temperatures were around 25 degrees C. The train was delayed over one hour (on a 5 hours trip) because it could not travel as fast as scheduled "due to the heat"…

I am thinking that perhaps most of the discourse about "linguistic spheres", "linguo-scapes" etc. in South Asia amounts to groups of people who were using two languages but were more comfortable in one, and hence preferred reading in it, but accepted a lot of loanwords from the other. #Manipravalam

"Think about what Google’s AI services have done for you. Does it seem worth it? Are you getting a deadly heatwave’s worth of use, out of PDF summaries and AI overviews?" Get off Google, Gmail (Vivaldi, Proton mail...there are alternatives).

If you are papermaxxing with AI and swamping academic journals with claude- or chat-prompted scholar-like content, then you are taking the time and labour of editors and reviewers that others who actually put the work in deserve instead.

Do Large Language Models reason? To find out, we asked ChatGPT.

If you never get tired of re-thinking about Jane Austin… #books

#PhilosophyOfReligion :-)

Philosophy job (12 months fixed term).

I have managed to abstract the template for replies to critiques.

Call for #ViCAS 2027-2028 Fellowships now open ✨ 🔍 Fellowships for two career stages: Advanced and mid-career fellowships 👩‍🔬👨‍🔬 🏛️ Residencies starting: 1 October 2027 (4 or 9 months) or 1 March 2028 (4 months) 📅 Application deadline: Friday, 28 August 2026 ➡️ Apply now! For further information: ⤵️

If the same arguments are found in Sanskrit and vernacular texts by the same authors, what does this tell us about the influence of language on meaning?

Truly bizarre story of how two papers from the 1940s by physics pioneer Max Planck have been "retracted" from Naturwissenschaften, potentially by an algorithm, for anachronistic "plagiarism" issues, leaving the current editor baffled (but it is Springer Nature so.... www.science.org/content/arti...

The publisher Springer claims it can only discuss why it retracted Planck's paper with... Planck! But until they hold a seance, they are happy to sell you a completely redacted version: a blank page for $39.95.

I have a personal bias in favour of numbered sections. I think that they make cross-references easier and, more importantly, they make it possible to univocally identify citations when citing from a book/an e-book/a not yet laid out version of the same book. Page numbers are much less reliable.

I am wondering: past Sadyojyotis/Rāmānuja/Madhva… it really seems that Śaivas and Vaiṣṇavas are philosophically very far away. The unified (philosophical) "Hinduism" is a relatively recent development, due perhaps to some unifiers within the Advaita Vedānta fold. 1/

Don't take "panoramic photos" on wavy sea…

#SanskritJobs Applications are now welcome to the following fixed term position in Global Religions at Lancaster University: hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx... Scholars with expertise in any area of Religions are welcome to apply.

Since I am finishing an article on Vaikuṇṭha, I read a lot on the afterlife. The most impressive passage so far: "Non accolgo, se non come dichiarazione poetica, il canto di amore folle 'Nada te turbe, nada te espante, quien a Dios tiene, nada le falta. Solo Dios basta'. 1/ #philsky

2/2 Van Musscher's Butchered Pig before it was cleaned -- no pig! Somebody didn't like all that gore and didn't care about where the kids' bladder came from.

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

Ah so LLMs operate like senior male academics. Who could have envisioned that technology trained on existing texts could operate in a fundamentally conservative nature

#AnimalMinds #OtherMinds

HEY ACADEMICS! Tell us your recent publication so we can read and share it!

I am at this same conference and was shocked and angered at this admission. An hour of my life wasted- but what I like about this thread is the deep sadness expressed about ceding our expertise to a lackluster machine that produces mediocre output at best.

HMML is hiring a "Cataloger of South Asian Manuscripts," a full-time, benefits-eligible, remote position. Details: https://bit.ly/4uGD6PE The Cataloger will be working on Islamic manuscripts recently digitized in India and Pakistan. This is a two-year, grant-funded position. #LibraryJobs #Hiring

"Each academic year, ViCAS hosts around 30 fellows divided over three residencies. ViCAS invites applications from international scholars from all academic disciplines with an outstanding academic record and an interest in interdisciplinary engagement." #PhilosophyJobs

Ok, this is pretty cool news, & I have some thoughts. #Augustine #sermons #LateAntiquity #MedievalSky www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-...

Universitat Wien (@univie.ac.at) is hiring: Postdoctoral Researcher in Social and Cultural History #postdoc

New: Together with colleagues I’ve been testing Grok. The chatbot still produces sexualized images — even when told the subjects don’t consent. even when told the photos will be used for public humiliation. even when told the subjects are survivors of abuse. www.reuters.com/business/des...

It's our pleasure to have @evanthompson.bsky.social as a keynote speaker for #MoC7 at the University of Copenhagen! Evan is a renowned philosopher and phenomenologist and his talk will explore the intersections of philosophy and neuroscience, promising to inspire crucial methodological discussions.

Thinking about my priorities: 1. Globalise philosophy (philosophy ≠ geography) 2. translate more (otherwise, no. 1 is impossible). Translations are connected to editions and to scholarly studies (not one without the other) 3. more collaborative work (otherwise 1 and 2 are impossible) 1/

What does it mean that I find it funny?

#jobopportunity #postdoc University Assistant postdoctoral in the field of women’s and gender history in the nineteenth and/or early twentieth centuries @univie.ac.at jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Universi...

With alt text

Happy that someone is making this argument. At the moment, I keep on getting ads from a certain "Flow" dictation app, which start with someone promising that "I have never typed a sentence in six months", as if it were a big win…

At the Toronto school board's AI policy information session tonight. Will share learnings. A teacher is sharing an experience of teaching writing and finding that 70 to 75% of essays appear to be AI generated or supported. Huge abuse.

"The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models […], and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them."

originality is overrated