Very glad to see that someone is doing the important work of aligning AI alignment. alignmentalignment.ai

UK Higher Ed friends, we are MASSIVE. www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-insti...

New paper: "Structural Rationality in Desire", at Utilitas. I defend the idea that structural rationality has things to say about desire, and defend a rational requirement to desire the means to your ends. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Excited to be appearing at a Philosophy in the Bookshop event at Blackwell’s flagship store in Oxford. Please repost and register now! @blackwells.bsky.social @nigelwarburton.bsky.social @philoswarwick.bsky.social www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/philosophy...

This navigable and enormous (I'm guessing: comprehensive) tree of life is pretty amazing: www.onezoom.org

It occurs to me that some people might not know of this fantastic guide to punctuation. It manages to be succinct, clear, and sensible. www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/....

Here is the advert for a postdoc at Liverpool for a project I'm involved in. Please share it with anyone who you think might be interested in applying. A brief project description is below. tinyurl.com/4f7vw7ra

An interesting thing about sports (and other contests-for-entertainment) is that they have to balance meritocracy against excitement. Designing a contest that actually selects the best team is often boring, because we know who is the best team. So most sports build in randomness

Something about pulling apart lego toys, or unbuilding ikea furniture?

Spam emails from predatory academic journals: Dearest Dr Professor Landes, may you grace us with your world-leading expertise? Emails from actual academic journals: We've created an account in our system for you. Review this paper, kthx.

RIP Alasdair MacIntyre, a towering figure the likes of which this world rarely produces. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that his influence extended far beyond his scholarship:

New paper coming out in Philosopher's Imprint: "Take In Your Hen: Fittingness and Hedonic Adaptation". philpapers.org/rec/GRETIY

Putnam 1975:

Come and work with us! We are advertising for a Lecturer in Philosophy (roughly=Assistant Prof) with research interests in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, or language. Details: jobs.soton.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

Why does everyone *always* set up the problem of evil by appeal to God's omnipotence, omnibenevolence, *and omniscience*? It's relevant to the problem, but not central. Theodicies effectively aim to state caveats on omnipotence and omnibenevolence, so they are where the action is.

This is the first of two adverts for postdocs on a project I'm involved in with Laura Gow and Thomas Raleigh. This one will be based in Luxembourg; the other will be based in Liverpool and will be advertised soon. Please share with anyone who might be interested. recruitment.uni.lu/en/details.h...

Many years ago when I was a teenager starting to study philosophy, my Nan reported that she's once heard philosophy described as the effort to check things that were normally treated as common sense. I've since found few better short descriptions, I think.

It's always hard to give a short answer to "what is philosophy?". But I wonder if the beginnings of one comes out when we notice that many of the core areas of philosophy surround words in this list: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_co... (the, be, if, good, know, want, because, etc.).

Southampton, England. r/brutalism

I get the impression that my Happiness&Wellbeing students this year are less sympathetic than normal to hedonism, and more swayed by the experience machine objection. Is that some kind of post-pandemic effect?

It is stunning to see how Meta illegally downloaded billions of pages of copyrighted books and articles from Russian pirate sites when training Llama 3. And not only that, but Meta also directly redistributed that copyrighted data to others:

More fascinating stuff.

FREE has never been “free” but today it’s come closest - Kindle & Audiobook are selling for 0.99p each & it’s topping the charts so you have until midnight to grab the offer or taste freedom or contemplate the fetish character of commodities (or just spread the word please🧿🌹!)

World Happiness Day! May your happiness be not only present, but also fitting.

Meta is training AI on pirated books?!

3 year post in Philosophy at Sheffield! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMH928/l...

Wow. I'm split between thinking "surely ministers are not relying on this for serious advice?!", and "there's nothing wrong with quickly confirming your existing mental map of some issue isn't missing anything big".

CfA alert: Workshop on Foundations of Morality, University of Leeds, 10-11 June 2025. Keynotes: Julia Driver (UT-Austin/St Andrews) and Michael Smith (Princeton University) Abstracts of up to 1,000 words are due 23 March 2025. Fuller details at joseph-bowen.weebly.com/foundations-... #philsky

One hypothesis: Early in the modern literature, "happy" was used to express the Greek concept of eudaimonia, and this forced us to use another word to talk about the relevant positive emotion, with the result that academics now often use both "happy" and "joy" in deviant ways. Corrections welcome!

In psychology, "joy" is more common as a label for the relevant positive emotion than "happy". Why is that? Arguably "joy" labels a particularly intense positive emotion, but with other emotions psychologists use the word that covers the full range - fear not terror, anger not rage, etc.

I highly recommend this as a regular routine. #lifehacks

Paper acceptance! A good day.

I promised you guys more of these. Here is one that I find particularly great. Materials: plastic, metal, wiring, and human tears. (See ALT text for full transcript of the sign).

A PhD student at CambridgeHPS has been putting “artwork signs” up all around our department next to “ordinary things” and they are brilliant. They unfailingly make me stop and smile and notice the wonderful strangeness of the world ✨ Best workplace spirit-lift hack I’ve seen in a long time 🙌

Reading /Children of Time/. One of the best sci-fi books I've read in a long while; highly recommended.

This question prompted in part by wondering whether "happiness" and "joy" are the same, as the natural opposites of sadness and sorrow. Here I am inclined to think that "happy" has *many* meanings, but that "joy" is probably more naturally heard as briefer than happiness.

Are sadness and sorrow the same, or different? It seems to me they are the same.

Hi colleagues, consider sending an abstract to our workshop, Perspectives on #Agency and #Disadvantage! CFP just live. Disciplines across #philosophy, #psychology, #socialscience etc. are warmly welcome. See link for the details, and please help spread the word! sites.utu.fi/agencyprojec...

Have I mentioned recently how helpful this page is? www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/.... A great resource for students who need guidance on punctuation.

Amazing stuff. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4i...

Question courtesy of my kids. I did guess it would do badly at an unfamiliar question like this.

Has anyone tried using AI models to proofread work? It seems like a good idea - assuming you read its suggestions critically! I see that duckduckgo allow you to use models without your inputs or outputs being stored (=no copyright worries), but the maximum input size is still rather small.

Cleopatra lived closer in time to 'yeet' being in the dictionary than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

I understand that Jesus was in fact probably born in late spring. Maybe we can have Christmas again then? (He was also probably born around 5BC, which means the year is arguably more like 2030AD.)

I'll just leave this here.

Happy World Philosophy Day! I'm preparing teaching on whether truth is relative to a perspective (hint: no), and some research on instrumental rationality, and (separately) on how happy we ought to be.

Our mass resignation from Wiley’s 𝘗𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘺 & 𝘗𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘤 𝘈𝘧𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘴, and our plan to launch a new diamond open-access political philosophy journal with @openlibhums.bsky.social, was covered by @insidehighered.bsky.social today. (With some verbiage from yrs truly.) #philsky #PolTheory #polisky

Met colleagues this morning to discuss chapter 1 of a book draft on fitting happiness, and they gave such excellent feedback. I'm so lucky to have such excellent colleagues!