It's not news that the key to the success of almost any social movement is patience and persistence. Change doesn't happen overnight. But persistence is impossible if you constantly see individuals from the oppressor group as oppressors!/1

At 16, this album carried me through late nights of wrestling with hard math problems. It’s stayed with me as my endurance melody. Now whenever life feels too heavy, I play it and feel my soul muscles grow stronger. youtu.be/c0ItncVzXxk?...

I believe there is a significant and often ignored factor that distinguishes survival chances in humanities versus sciences: how long it takes graduate students and early career researchers to grasp the notion of 'meaningful contribution' in their field./1

Pishi and my armless chair philosophy: for some reason, she really likes this chair and doesn’t appreciate the fact that I actually need it for thinking!

Gold!

We're coming up on philosophy PhD application season. In case it is helpful for you or your students, I have a guide to this process, developed over the years of working with SFU MA students. Let me know if you have questions or suggestions #philsky #philsci www.hkandersen.com/applying-for...

I have this vivid picture that at each point in time, my present self is an unstable tile between my past self and my future self, and I struggle to balance myself on that present tile. So I keep jumping back and forth until the present self tile breaks apart,/1

I was watching one of Duflo’s lectures and she showed this picture as an example of a beautiful representation of data. It’s a visualization of a Facebook network of 1000+ friends in Somalia. It reminded me of what kept me sane during the social movement in Iran 3 years ago./1

September is coming and it marks the third year of my exile. I don’t even know whether I should call it an exile. Everything in that geography is uncertain…

Sitting in my home, mother, they forced me to fight mother Capable, mother, I’m not mother, I can’t Say goodbye for me, I’m opening my door, mother maybe I won’t return, say goodbye Tell those who are afraid, my heart’s bullets are sharp/1

It's usually assumed that awareness of a cognitive bias is good, like once you know about it, it'll affect your decisions less and you'll get better at avoiding it over time. But is there any solid evidence for either of these claims?/1

Peder Balke - "The North Cape by Moonlight" (1848)

You have theories (a whole book of them) about history and enlightenment! TY for sharing your ideas. But I wonder how one could get themselves to record a video from their ivory tower addressing people in ME to tell them the world is improving.The rage I felt watching Pinker’s video is indescribable

Growth is such a misleading metaphor for what life experience does to people. I feel like I’m shrinking as I go through life, and I don’t feel bad about it. It actually feels so good to think that someday I may shrink so much that I become invisible…I would have infinite density of consciousness! :)

Iran’s Supreme Court has upheld the final death sentence against activist Sharifeh Mohammadi. The Islamic Republic is an irreformable and brutal state whose evil character cannot be excused even when facing genuinely evil enemies.

‘Natoori’ by Shima Davoodpour. (It’s a Kurdish song)

It can totally be the case that all the time saved using LLMs for calculations and brainstorming will be wasted explaining away their false responses, delivered with an overconfident and self-righteous tone./1

In search of a ground floor Łódź Hudego contemporary

“[…] art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experiences: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second.”

apologetic Kantian>apologetic consequentialist>proud consequentialist>proud Kantian :)

We built the simplest possible social media platform. No algorithms. No ads. Just LLM agents posting and following. It still became a polarization machine. Then we tried six interventions to fix social media. The results were… not what we expected. arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385

💛 youtu.be/vgxsnHbhJ6w?...

I have this theory that over-empathizing and information aversion are causally connected. Either the former gives rise to the latter, or they have a common cause. If true, this gives rise to a set of interesting normative questions about whether they are good, bad, or neutral traits.

I found this thread fascinating, and thinking about the philosophical consequences makes me feel 10 years younger! ✨God! I love science! x.com/HopeKean/sta...

I think I only really started hearing numbers attached to “credence” in grad school. Here’s some hits for credence in the corpus of contemporary American English—I couldn’t find any with numerical measurements, although I definitely didn’t look at everything (1/2)

Dear native English speakers, Which one sounds more natural to you? I have: (i) credence 0.7 in (ii) credence 0.7 for (iii) credence 0.7 to (iv) credence 0.7 towards the proposition that this poll will be conclusive! :) Thanks!

My Retrospective on Wokeness in detail! Blogs are for just saying stuff, after all. So here is my attempt to say what was distinctive (if anything) about a recent era of socio-cultural life, what (if anything) changed, and what (if anything) was to the good sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/08/woke...

Pure Persian melancholy www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRjn...

It’s frustrating how much Mehdi Hassan’s argumentative manner grates on me, given that I actually sympathize with many of his political views. I absolutely hate his style…🤦‍♀️

Replication Crisis xkcd.com/3117/

‘Laken Hali (but my people)’ by Lynn Adib

There is a verse in the Quran that I very much like. It says: '[To the righteous it will be said], "O reassured soul, Return to your Lord, well-pleased and pleasing [to Him]".' This notion of being reassured is curious to me. It is not an epistemic state. It is not certainty./1

“Gole Bavineh” By Aida Shahghasemi on.soundcloud.com/ta4MUcLj1DA8...

Preference order of an introvert analytic philosopher: Contemplating one ripe analysis > Contemplating more than one raw analysis > Having no analysis to contemplate > DEATH > Starting to write up the analysis before it's complete > Starting to talk about the analysis before it's complete

It struck me a couple of days ago that this sentiment I have towards philosophy is probably inspired by a famous Islamic prayer: 'You are my cave when I don't fit in the world, despite its vastness' (Dua Arafah).

I haven’t been home for almost three years, and I probably can’t go back any time soon for security reasons. Now I have this vivid picture in my head of our living room detached from the building, suspended in the air./1

My mum sent me this photo a couple of days ago with the caption: “I took it from the window behind the TV during the war. I couldn’t share it with you earlier. I didn’t want to worry you more.”

“[…] a quiet, deep dedication to exploring the full extraordinary range of topics and issues that engaged their mind, exploring them in the modes they found engaging, and exploring them together in community in a way that eschewed hierarchy and was grounded in a profound intellectual generosity.”

I really like the description given in this piece as exemplary philosophy: open.substack.com/pub/richardp...

John Hooper The Shepherd (Cuckmere Haven) 1982 (from @wilhemgustloff on X)

If I ever get to design a research programme in philosophy, I'll make sure the students have at least 2 days of prolonged co-studying where they do the pomodoro technique together (preferably the 50-10 variation) and explain their dilemmas, ideas, and arguments to each other during breaks./1

Rudolf Bacher Grabmal der Cecilia Metella c. 1894

I hate myself for framing a situation this real and serious as a problem in social epistemology, but maybe that’s just how someone trapped in abstract thinking copes…

There’s uncertainty about how much the nuclear facilities are damaged and whether the nuclear contamination is serious. Given that direct fact-checking is not easy or even possible. People have to decide among conflicting and possibly biased testimonies with curiously changing relations.

Another salve for the soul…the displaced soul… youtu.be/jp_Hm3jrQV0?...

The war between two incommensurable evils should be considered a natural catastrophe. An activist is not obliged to choose between the two evils. The most meaningful cause for activism is finding a way to prevent the catastrophe from becoming more catastrophic without empowering either evil.