nobody will remember: - your salary - how “busy you were” - how many hours you worked people will remember: - the twenty-first night of september - changin' the minds of pretenders - chasin' the clouds away

I finally found an adversarial example for humans in the wild!

I'm guessing journos are going to stop asking me why the "hard data" are so good, given the economic news has been so grim. The lesson I hope they draw is an eternal one: Bad policy leads to bad outcomes, but the actual economy doesn't move at the pace of the political cycle.

@cameronbuckner.bsky.social delivers his keynote on reasoning LLMs during #ESPP2025

Today I am headed to Europe to give two keynotes, at KogWis 2025 (in Bochum) and ESPP (in Warsaw). Both talks will be about philosophical implications of and interpretation of "reasoning" models, especially drawing links between the text which occurs in the "Chains of Thought"...

www.rotman.uwo.ca/event/rotman... Today I am giving a lecture to the Rotman Institute for Philosophy at University of Western Ontario...

Novels are just synthetic training data for humans.

Some really great news: funding for PEPFAR--about $400M for the global fight against HIV and AIDS--has been restored. Millions of lives will be saved. www.politico.com/live-updates...

Another review of my book is out at Philosophy of Science, by Bruce Rushing and Daniel Hermann: resolve.cambridge.org/core/journal...

here's the truth: climate change is costing us lots and lots of money. and renewables save us money. www.theclimatebrink.com?utm_source=n...

Senator Mike Lee is now trying — for the third time — to sell-off YOUR public lands to the highest bidder. We’ve built a bipartisan coalition to repeatedly block his efforts, and will keep doing so until he gets the message: Our public lands are not for sale! 🏔️🏔️🏔️ apnews.com/article/publ...

China is absolutely eating our lunch www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

arxiv.org/abs/2506.18852 It's kinda already happening though, MI groups are already peppered with philosophers...

I am once again begging journalists to understand that tech CEOs can *say* literally any random shit about AI Watch: AI will solve world hunger by deciphering the Voynich Manuscript! Until there is literally any evidence AI can do said thing it’s not news, it’s just make believe

Really nice paper by Céline Budding that applies Martin Davies' approach to tacit knowledge to large language models. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

"Trump has spent the last five months vowing that the Ukraine-Russia war would never have happened if he was president, vowing that the Israel-Gaza war would never have happened if he was president. And yet the reality is that not only has he not avoided war, but he’s plunged us into a new one."

From organiser Georgi Gardiner on FB: "Next week people will gather online to celebrate the philosophical artworks of Helen De Cruz. (@helendecruz.net) Tuesday, June 24th, 2025 11am - 12.20pm Central US Time (i.e. 5pm BST) on Zoom All welcome! No background knowledge required."

This seems like good advice to me.

With NSF cuts, my guess is that the best possible scenario right now is that AI/ML PhD graduates drop by only 50% in the next 3-4 years. I don't understand how tech and related companies are not freaking out about this.

I've had ideas for experiments like this for a while now, super excited to see someone actually did it! Don't be disguised by the title: this isn't about memorization specifically, it's using memorization as a tool to measure *capacity*. My version: instead of just synthetic strings... 1/n

Since the 1940s, the engine driving U.S. economic and military competitiveness has been federal support of research universities. Now Trump is sabotaging a research and development pipeline that is the envy of the world. wapo.st/3FDsQEg

I think we should both avoid being convinced by breathless AI hype to adopt unsafe tools for things that probably shouldn't be automated in the first place, and also avoid falling for biased takedowns that romanticize human decision-making and minimize real advantages current AI tools can provide.

I legit don't miss the former Twitter. Most of my pals relocated here and the ones that didn't went to Threads, and I hang out there too, so fine. Plus I met new cool people here, and the vibe is better all around, so everything I want/need in a microblogging site is being taken care of.

I'm at best five years from being one of those grumpy old philosophers of science. "Do the kids these days even science? Do they even history at all?!"

Has anybody thought hard about Jacovi & Goldberg's (2020) three criteria for faithful model interpretation? It strikes me this afternoon that two of their three criteria are a little confused, and I'm curious if this is a well-known concern or not.

V cool work

Packed house for #phiVis2025!

Here is the video from the chat with Audrey Borowski and The Philosopher from yesterday. Great questions and hopefully useful answers! www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJCG...

🔥Exciting news in experimental philosophy🔥 Very happy to announce that there will be soon a new journal named “Experimental Philosophy”. It will be open access, free of charge for authors and follow all Open Science principles. Editors and Editorial Board below. More information coming soon...

Happening in a half hour: www.thephilosopher1923.org/events/the-h...

Surely the concerns here are not merely “ethical” but, you know, “legal” and “blatant corruption” and “an immeasurably vast security threat”? www.nytimes.com/2025/05/11/u...

Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought reasoning is already a big thing. That is, CoT models can "reason" not only with chains of text self-prompting, but also by producing images, audio, and more, and engaging with the stimuli they self-produce in a variety of ways. arxiv.org/abs/2503.12605

Of the universe were not finite in size and also finite in age, then every point in the night sky should be a bright star or galaxy.

This is insane... Ending a program that solicits volunteer hours to improve communities. There is no way this saves anybody money.

Today I am lecturing to the Inner Speech Colloquium hosted by the Universities of Osnabrueck and Salzburg. I will be talking about the use of LLMs as a component playing the role of inner speech in a bigger agent architecture. www.philosophie-cms.uni-osnabrueck.de/wer_wir_sind...

I knew the U.S. higher education system was a massive draw for foreigners, but I did not know the U.S. sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it did natural gas and coal combined. Great piece by @crampell.bsky.social

Heading to the Pacific APA in San Francisco for an Author Meets Critics session! Couldn't ask for better commentators. Also some international book sightings in the wild (or citings?)

Great opportunity at Edinburgh... elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Now there's a memorable stat! "Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined." wapo.st/3EvzMCI

When it comes to episodic memory, what distinguishes us from other animals? @cameronbuckner.bsky.social and Hunter Gentry are at The Memory Palace today, with a novel proposal (hint: it's not mental time travel!). Take a look! #philsky #philscisky

I would be making a big deal out of this if I were an elected Democrat

The rumours are true - there's going to be a Ceilidh at the BSPS Conference in Glasgow this July! Registration is now open - early bird rates until 15 May! www.thebsps.org/annual-confe...

Tapping the sign.

March saw the third-highest number of layoffs in U.S. history, and 80% of them were caused by DOGE This was before the tariffs It's just...unbelievable

At least 10 principal researchers at NIH have been fired, including Richard Youle, winner of the Breakthrough Prize for his groundbreaking research identifying mechanisms behind Parkinson’s disease. Is this making America great? www.wired.com/story/doctor...