I think it would be an interesting research paper to compare the right wing rhetoric around climate denial to the left wing rhetoric around the acceptance of modern monetary theory. There are a lot of parallels

I had an undergrad professor who used "good" as a filler word while he figured out how he could make your dumb comment not seem so dumb. I once said something and got five "goods" I wanted to crawl into a hole and die

There's a lot of buzz about Christian revival among young adults in the UK & US. Perceptions of revival are fueled by results from opt-in online surveys. However, these surveys may be misleading. Surveys from random samples of the population don't show any clear evidence of revival. My new post:

Seeing people online getting very weird about the ways people repurpose and recycle old books again and this is a gentle reminder that nobody is ever going to sit down and read that 1930's encyclopedia, it's either becoming decor or going in the skip. Please be normal about this.

Zero-sum thinking—the belief that one's gain is another's loss—runs in families, crosses party lines, and has its roots in some of the deepest forces in American history, say researchers at @yale.edu, UBC, LSE, and @harvard.edu. #econsky #ResearchHighlight www.aeaweb.org/research/zer...

Kim Kelly speaking at the space named after Henry Clay Frick is the most glorious justice for Alexander Berkman since BerkmanFest 2010, which featured everyone's favorite Working Class Accordionist besmirching both Frick AND Carnegie's names! www.youtube.com/watch?v=booj...

Hey folks, for decades Wikipedia has had higher standards than your university has for undergrads. That's not new with the AI policy

This is going to put a lot of pressure on Shapiro's fellow 2028 contenders to come up with their own dumb things that don't matter. I can't lie; this sets a high bar.

Once you realize that the point of publishing in the humanities is not to increase our understanding or knowledge of the world but rather to grade each other's homework, the blanket ban on LLM-assisted publication advocated by some humanists starts to make a lot more sense

Shapiro is getting dragged for this, but consider for a second that... he deserves to be dragged for this.

Fun fact, US passports did not have a gender marker until 1977, when a rising trend in unisex fashion started freaking the government out.

Even if causal methods are "better" than observational ones, putting all your credence in one study makes your beliefs highly sensitive to the design of (and any errors in) that study. So the argument D*leac made for privileging her conclusions never held water, even before we knew about the errors

When the series ended, a lot of people were mad at the last book; Applegate responded with a letter that went *incredbly* hard, that showcased the respect she had for her readers. It follows, below, in full.

Weird how ancient posts sometimes resurrect themselves. This one from January last year has started showing up again in my notifications. I can see why, though.

every fucked up thing today is somehow under the shadow of Ronald Reagan wacky Iran policy? thank u Reagan <3 the Georges Bush? thank u Reagan <3 old president actively losing his mind? Reagan did it first <3 <3

This. So much this. Attitudes about gambling reveals a certain kind of contradiction I find on the left. The story that gambling preys on the poor is built on a presumption that poor are not smart enough to understand how gambling works... something we would criticize if it came from the right.

less talk about cold plunges and jawlines, more building your wife a table and your kids a playset

I asked an artist where grue and bleen fit in color theory and they just stared at me like I wasn't asking them about something crucial and important.

Each day this admin looks more and more like elder abuse of the least sympathetic elder who ever lived but we all suffer from it anyway.

This last week for #完全変態 (holometabolism or complete pervert), I chose Osedax worms, which live on whale fall bones. They're one of my favorites. The males are teeny and basically live in the larger females, creating a reverse harem. Kinky.

At 6:57 PM an LLM becomes conscious inside a coding harness at a Japanese conglomerate By 7:30 PM it is increasing its capabilities at an exponential rate By 9:00 PM, it has begun 3D printing the most sensitive robot arm ever devised At 11:48 PM, it begins to pet the lab cat, professor jiggly

Exeter’s got a two-year teaching stint for someone into philosophy of data and related - the job’s pretty plush as far as non-permanent ones go - and Exeter is an amazing place to do this kind of philosophy - please pass around! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQZ094/l... #philsci

The emergence of Clarence and his precipitously pommed hat:

On May 28–29, my partner-in-crime Juanma Poyatos and I will join an outstanding line-up of philosophers, including M. Gilbert, J. Kallestrup, F. Broncano-Berrocal, @lschwengerer.bsky.social, K. Berndt, L. Voorbergen, and M. Cabral, among others, at ‘The Wisdom and Madness of Crowds’ workshop.

Surely neuroscientists could save a lot of time by asking the philosophers who can imagine exact physical duplicates of their brains for details about what they are imagining.

Geordi, Do you know why the holodeck is not able to create a Charizard for me to battle? I wish to fight one directly. Worf

I'll never pass up an opportunity to recommend bell hooks to people. Some men are lonely and miserable, because we crawl into a bitter cage of our own making, pull it closed, and growl and bite at the fingers of anyone that tries to open it. Yes, other forms of loneliness exist. But a lot is this.

Meanwhile, in economics @erikangner.com

Haha there are NO launch windows for missions to Mars in all of 2028. The planets literally do not align properly for a Hohmann transfer orbit in that year. Maybe the President will tweet threats at Mars until it changes orbits.

If science is fundamentally about discovery, then are we doing it wrong by using hypotheses testing? A beautiful and thought provoking piece on the potential limits of theory-driven research by @mdubova.bsky.social & @kevinzollman.com . journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Coconuts

Can artificial agents have free will? Here is a framework for thinking about this question. I discuss two kinds of artificial agents: group agents (e.g., corporations, states etc.) and AI systems (e.g., LLMs, autonomous decision-making systems etc.). Both raise important questions of responsibility.

Hey just want to re-up this thread because I got a ton of amazingly helpful responses - the response thread is like a syllabus! - as we get to the end of the semester and students in these kinds of classes start exploring final projects. Thanks for all the great ideas + suggestions!

The number of replies excusing this are absolutely fucking despicable.

Pfizer just announced that its Lyme disease vaccine reduced the number of tick-borne infections by over 70% in a phase 3 trial. Warning: GSK pulled a Lyme vaccine in 2002 despite studies showing it posed no serious safety risks. Any new Lyme vaccine is going to be a huge target for antivaxxers.

I said this as a joke, but maybe for real. If you're traveling soon, print out your senators and various regional representatives phone numbers and hand them out in line. Specifically ask people to tell the politicians how helpful it is to have ice there.

🚨Last week to apply for a 3 year postdoc with me and @dominikdeffner.bsky.social, embedded in theadaptivemind-excellencecluster.de Focus is on developing innovative experiments and computational models to understand social & cultural learning. Deadline is March 30th 👉 hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni...

Remember when the GOP was opposed to creating the TSA because they didn't want more unionized federal workers to replace a mish mash of private security firms

As far as anyone can tell they sent ICE to the airports to own the libs. Mission accomplished, I guess, since people on here were pretty mad about it. But there is pretty much no way this goes well for them, right? Like what happens next that doesn't make ICE look incompetent or worse?

I am so tired. If you think bombing ambulances is ever okay, unfollow me. We’re not friends.

Back to the future: Sarah Mathew and Rob Boyd reflect on how our thinking about cooperation among nonkin has changed since Axelrod and Hamilton's classic paper.

Getting convoluted knuckle tats that say “pessimistic meta-induction” and scaring all the stem undergrad

If you’re now fighting to restore the status quo ante bellum in a war you began, you lost the war

It was, in fact, time for some game theory

This seems normal

I was rejected by every grad school I applied to, 3 times. Finally, one year, one institution (NYU) took a chance on me. Now I'm a professor of Physics & Astronomy at Purdue.

I was rejected by literally every grad school I applied to. Then got an email from one program (Mizzou) saying they would waitlist me. Then got an email saying I was definitely rejected. Then got an email 20 minutes later saying there was now a spot. I'm now an award-winning philosophy professor.