📣@futrell.bsky.social and I have a BBS target article with an optimistic take on LLMs + linguistics. Commentary proposals (just need a few hundred words) are OPEN until Oct 8. If we are too optimistic for you (or not optimistic enough!) or you have anything to say: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

What's been the most philosophically substantive and interesting change of mind that someone has had recently? (As with, say, Russell or Putnam.) Do any come to people's minds? I realized it was very hard for me to think of major cases, but that could be my own limitation.

70 years ago yesterday, they applied for summer money.

where do they FIND these people?!

Twain's point being that the Southern plantation society being romanticized wasn't even itself "authentic," it was a performance of a nonexistent past popularized by Sir Walter Scott's sentimental reimagining of a version of the Middle Ages that never happened harpers.org/2007/07/how-...

Is there any work on conditionals like '[Larry David is making a new show with the Obamas.] If Susie Essman is involved, hooray!'? It seems really hard to make sense of it on most of the approaches to conditionals/expressives that I'm aware of, but I'm curious if people know stuff or have thoughts.

I did the thing you are never supposed to do. I wrote a (rough draft of a) textbook: Theories of Rational Decision It's technical, but from a philosophical perspective. It focuses on the normative theory but touches on some behavioral issues as well. raw.githubusercontent.com/kzollman/Rat...

Why isn't there a common distinction between "act" and "rule" decision theories in the way that there is between act and rule varieties of consequentialism? Aspects of the distinction might be simulated in other ways (resolute choice etc?), but I suspect they don't touch the core of the distinction.

Spread the word! The Philosophical Quarterly is celebrating the philosopher philosophers love: 'Themes from David Lewis's Metaphysics' will be our next Special Issue, call for papers here: academic.oup.com/pq/pages/cal... @oupphilosophy.bsky.social @standrewsphil.bsky.social

Last semester, I taught a graduate seminar on Bayesian epistemology. Here are my lecture notes: jdmitrigallow.com/teaching/epist25/aitbe.pdf

My paper just came out in PPR today, here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/.... It's about interesting relationships that our attitudes bear to the world. I argue that belief is very different from other attitudes, and this difference follows from its relationship to the truth of token contents.

I wrote about the social history of analytic philosophy @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

Corgis have an extremely low center of gravity and the density of a dead star. PERFECT for skateboarding! 😇

A 2-year-old boy who spent the night alone in the remote Arizona wilderness and walked 7 miles through mountain lion territory was led to safety by a rancher's dog, authorities say.

🥁🎉It's time again! My colleague Thomas Grundmann is organising the Cologne Summer School in Philosophy. This year's star is @aworsnip.bsky.social (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). 🎊📢 You can find more information on the following website: cssip.uni-koeln.de Spread the word and repost!

If I ask model A “is this sentence grammatical” and it says yes, does that mean model A is more likely to produce that sentence than model B? Check out our new paper on whether models introspect about knowledge of language.

i simply cannot exist in this timeline any further

LMs need linguistics! New paper, with @futrell.bsky.social, on LMs and linguistics that conveys our excitement about what the present moment means for linguistics and what linguistics can do for LMs. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047. 🧵below.

"Teaching of philosophy ... tends to implant in philosophers an intimidatingly nit-picking superego, a blend of their most impressive teachers and their most competitive colleagues, which guides their writing by means of constant anticipations of guilt and shame." Bernard Williams

a draft paper (for an invited talk at AAAI next month) with a philosophical analysis of work on mechanistic interpretability, with special attention to methods for propositional interpretability. arxiv.org/abs/2501.15740

I was saddened to hear about the death of my committee member, George Bealer. He had a formative role in my development as a philosopher, and will be sorely missed.

Fun little thing on parties I didn’t know Madison had written press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/doc...

Quanta write-up of our Mission: Impossible Language Models work, led by @juliekallini.bsky.social. As the photos suggest, Richard, @isabelpapad.bsky.social, and I do all our work sitting together around a single laptop and pointing at the screen.

A text query to a typical chatbot consumes ~0.047 Wh of electricity, which some researchers pegged at ~0.006g of CO2 emissions. Consuming 1 less burger would earn 1.6M queries, 1 less gallon of gas 1.5M, and not flying home for Christmas (say, MDW <-> SFO, 500kg RT) earns you 83M (!!).

RIP Larry Sklar, philosopher of physics lsa.umich.edu/philosophy/n...

Is there a difference between 'choice' and 'decision' ('choose' and 'decide', etc.) in contemporary philosophical English, where they both take infinitival complements? (So not "choose an apple" and "decide an apple".) I first leaned toward "yes", but now I'm less sure, and can't find much on it.

Look, I know object permanence when I see it

Holton ("The Act of Choice") points out a passage of Boswell's Life of Johnson: “You are surer that you can lift up your finger or not as you please than you are of any conclusion from a deduction of reasoning.” Is this the earliest fairly explicit "Moorean fact" argument? @bweatherson.bsky.social

dutch wasn’t originally all cutesy like “weer petten de leetel raabbet”, but they changed it so they could i’m-just-a-little-guy their way out of being in trouble for the east india company

This is a thread about remaking the tech sector.

I wrote a blog post about the very different approaches to citing old papers in philosophy vs. psychology - and which approach is the better one xphi.net/2025/01/03/h...

What should the norms be for citing Claude for an idea? Let's not argue whether Claude has good original philosophical ideas, but suppose one day they tell me one; I check, and it hasn't been written up. Am I plagiarizing if I don't say I got the idea from Claude, even if I write everything myself?

What does "I decided that p" mean in, say, "I decided that the moon landing really did happen"? (I'm not so interested in that specific content, tbc.) It seems to me that if the person who says that doesn't believe p, then they spoke insincerely, perhaps even falsely. Very weird construction.

The human temptation to look at bad behavior and think "eh, who cares, that person over there is worse" is reasonable in some situations and unreasonable in vastly more. It feels like a cognitive hazard to be on guard for, since it's one way that seriously bad people corrupt people generally.

thinking of calling this "The Illusion Illusion" (more examples below)

My book on Knowledge is out today (World Philosophy Day) with Open Book Publishers. It's freely downloadable in PDF and Epub form, and cheap to order in hardback or paperback. #philsky

Scavengers Reign is an excellent animated scifi show that absolutely rips. It hasn't been greenlit for a second season, but the creator put together a pitch trailer hoping it stirs up buzz. Watch the show. Watch the trailer: www.instagram.com/reel/DB-DuB5...

Have any LLMs reverse-anthropomorphized you? I had asked Claude how he felt about having the name 'Claude'. In the course of answering he said: "I'm curious - do you know if there's any particular reason Anthropic chose 'Claude'? Or is that before your knowledge cutoff date?"

Were the crosstabs of ordinary, high-quality polls very wrong in 2022 or 2020?

Really interesting stuff. I have both the books and the contrast between what some philosophers say about themselves and what some others say is pretty remarkable.

Hello! The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law & the Inflation Reduction Act are huge climate wins, and double the amount of GHG reduction & clean electricity the US will get by 2030, compared to before. Double! We need to do much more, every year. But folks saying it wasn’t a huge climate win are wrong.

Greece legalises same-sex marriage

Socrates was a classic poster. He just walked up to people and asked them what they believed in, then he’d say it was stupid and yell at them. He argued with everybody until he was legally compelled to kill himself. Not one of us has that commitment

Hey @agnescallard.bsky.social rereading the Gorgias I saw: "This account is on the whole a bit strange; but now that I’ve shown it to you, it does make clear what I want to persuade you to change your mind about if I can: to choose the orderly life" (493c). On your view is Socrates messing up here?

We need to be able to tell genuine constraints on a problem our political representatives are working on from excuses for not doing something their constituents want but the representative doesn't for secret reasons. I don't know the rational baseline cynicism but imo people in general overrate it.

This is astonishing. www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/u...