Mine was also extremely anti-climactic. I finished it in the beginning of 2020 and then the pandemic rolled around. The defence was on Zoom and meeting anyone for a celebration was illegal.

Can we lower the limit to just "invaded"?

Two Cellinis but not a single Wittgenstein.

Machine men with machine minds and machine hearts.

I really like this post. I'm a quintessential „particularist“—I try to never bite any bullets. Until now, this was an unexamined attitude, rather than a conscious methodological choice.

What about this: If to infer q from p, one must recognise that p follows from q and for that reason come to believe that q, then that seems a lot like an application of a meta-rule, if "p follows from q and p, believe q". Don't I then need to do the same again, apply the meta-rule to my meta-rule?

I've never quite got Boghossian's taking condition on inference, which says that S can only infer q from p if S takes p to support the truth of q. Surely it is the other way around, that S can only take p to support the truth of q if S has inferred that q from p?

Here is Gary Marcus, pointing out that some of the answers that OpenAI's model gave in the IMO are less than impressive. But when it comes to LLMs, I'm always more impressed by the mistakes than the successes. The fact that it gave an answer like this, means that it came up with it itself.

I have a new paper forthcoming in Synthese, "How the Laws of Logic Lie About Mathematical Objects": www.asgeirberg.org/papers/how-t... I argue that if one adopts the view that there are no logical laws, then there is a coherent nominalist position available that takes our discourse at face value.

Publish or perish: the untold story of Socrates

Right.

Me, when I see Trump's make-up:

"Exceptional will" meaning "got a large inheritance".

Trump's actions only make sense if he's trying to destroy America. That's why, many people reason, he must be a Russian asset. But why assume that Trump's actions make sense?

It's a fascinating sociological fact that the wealthiest Americans are the ones who most enabled the absolute meltdown of the American economy. Why did they think that Trump would be a better choice than Harris? Are they just as brainwashed with as poor judgment as the rest of MAGA?

Me, in a letter to the Editor after reading Reviewer #2's report.

Trump is The Beatles of stock market crashes.

How long will Liz Trump last in office?

The whole of Western moral and political philosophy for 2,500 years is addressed to refuting the idea that justice means doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies. It appears we still have work to do.

Not many Catholics have been so morally depraved in recent history that the Pope had to write a letter.

Ég hlakka til að heyra frá Trump-útskýrendum þessa heims af hverju þetta er í lagi og bara eðlilegt. Ég get heldur ekki beðið eftir að heyra af hverju Ísland verður ekki næst.

Hypothesis: People are craving „authenticity“ in institutions, media and politicians. The right-wing is currently dominating in this respect, and that's because selfishness, incompetence and plain evil superficially seem more authentic than the opposite.

Can someone please explain to me why right-wing bias in the media leads to a right-wing backlash against the media? All of the things that are true there was defended or done by Republicans. He looks at all the damage Republicans have done in the world and thinks: Democrats did this. Why?

Bertrand Russell in 1935:

By the way, do you gentlebeings know how we almost destroyed the ozone layer by accident? How we have the early environmental protesters, a well-funded and competent U.S. federal scientific apparatus, and the 1973 energy crisis to thank that we even learned of the problem before it was too late?

"Chesterton's Fence" has been a favourite rhetorical device of internet conservatives for a while now. It states that things are often the way they are for reasons we don't understand, so we should be careful when changing them. Yet, they are silent about Musk taking a wrecking ball to the USA.

Someone said that other people's nationalism is an embarrassing thing to watch, but this really takes the cake. "America is back and will soon be bigger than ever with the addition of Red, White, and Blueland."

How did we get to a place where it is just normal to assert that the working class doesn't contribute to society?

Nýi samgönguráðherrann skilur ekki neitt í því hvers vegna borgin gengur ekki strax að allskyns skrýtnum kröfum um að hún aðlagi sig að Reykjavíkurflugvelli. Það sem ég skil ekki í málum Reykjavíkurflugvallar er hvernig flugbransanum hefur tekist að gaslýsa okkar með allskonar þvælu...

How long will the duumvirate between Musk and Trump last? Surely Stupid Caesar will kick Mad Crassus out sooner or later?

It always seems interesting to me how effectively they achieve this targeted effect across what are very different and differently motivated voter groups.

Did you see this? Starts with one of your posts. dsadevil.blogspot.com/2025/02/lies...

If what we are seeing in the US is not fascism, I would like someone to explain to me what fascism in 2025 would look like.

Or for the more pop-culture minded: Words are wind.

The strange thing about the Trump tarrifs is that nobody else wants them and very few of his supporters even defend them. There isn't even a good reason given for them, except that "other countries are ripping the US off" which is terrible economics.

Then: "Why are you so alarmist? It's not like they are planning to build concentration camps and doing Nazi salutes!" Now: "Those are not concentration camps and those are not Nazi salutes."

I'm shocked, shocked to find that intellectual property theft is going on in here!

I've often thought about this in the last 8 years.

For as long as I can remember, one of the right's main intellectual arguments against the left was that the left embraces relativism about truth and ethics. I never understood it—but these days, you really have to be a nihilist or Thrasymacian "might-makes-right"-ist to be on the right.

American conservatives: Climate change isn't happening. Also American conservatives: We need to get our grubby hands on Greenland because climate change is opening up shipping lanes and possibilities for mineral extraction.

My favourite part of my job is to carefully prepare a manuscript, then send it to a peer-reviewed journal—just to have it rejected six months later by a reviewer who barely read it.

What is striking to me here is that Wikipedia is quite clearly correct. It WAS compared to a Nazi salute. How is that not "valid"? Is Musk disputing that it was compared to that? That's mad.

History is written by nerds who are interested in history.

The world today if George W. Bush had not been appointed President in 2000 by the Supreme Court.

Catch my new guest blogpost in the daily nous distinguishing between the locutionary sieg heil, the perlocutionary sieg heil, and the most important *illocutionary* sieg heil. There are two thousand comments so far and everyone is mad at me