POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success

What I find most infuriating is human dishonesty about AI use. When authors fully disclose their AI use in their manuscript, that's one thing. When they try to pass AI writing off as their own writing, this is another thing.

What I find most infuriating is human dishonesty about AI use. When authors fully disclose their AI use in their manuscript, that's one thing. When they try to pass AI writing off as their own writing, this is another thing.

it is wild that Labour is doing exactly what the reactionary centrists recommend and is absolutely destroying its base of support as a result, and yet reactionary centrists in the US are just utterly silent about the complete failure of their program.

I got an actual "Your silence on this subject is deafening" message this AM, so, super-quick: Nobody here owes anyone commentary about anything. This is a public park. It's full of interesting people. We hang out here, make friends, and chat, and then we leave to do whatever it is we do. That's it!

A thought that sometimes occurs to me (and must have occurred to Peter Singer a few times): as a philosophy prof I have an incredibly rare level of freedom to defend controversial ideas. Does this create an obligation to defend the most controversial ideas I also think are true and important?

Last call for papers for the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology! Don't miss a fabulous program in sunny Atlanta this February. Submissions due Nov 20. See you there! #philosophy #psychology #CFP southernsociety.org

That’s so interesting. I was confused visiting English friends who upon meeting would say, “Are you alright?” In the US we only ask that if we’re concerned that they’re NOT.

Very happy to see the UK government making a commitment to phasing out animal testing www.gov.uk/government/n...

In London "You're Welcome" is only used after an awkward silence to indicate that thanks was expected but not offered. For me this makes visiting the US very confusing.

Many thanks for attending our public lecture on 'Saving Britain's #wildlife' with Iris Berger, Luke Hecht, Karen Kovaka, @kneppwilding.bsky.social, and chaired by @birchlse.bsky.social last night! 👉 The recording is now available online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYHe... 🌲 @gsos-lse.bsky.social

The Ponizsa illusion - Kanizsa triangle produces Ponzo illusion, but oddly it inverts apparent depth: the longer line looks closer! Also has an inversion effect like we studied in Altan et al 2025 Proc Roy Soc (doi.org/10.1098/rspb...) but it's also in reverse! 🤔 #visionscience #psychscisky

A friend of mine had a job interview today, and when he entered the zoom call, the interviewer was an AI avatar. I hope I never go through something like that, I would throw my computer through the window. And I can’t afford that.

I dread the day.

Pretty much no one can make their ideas clear to others on the 1st attempt. The two main reactions are "let's painstakingly clarify this with some back and forth", and "doesn't matter as long as the various interpretations are themselves interesting", leading to the 2 main branches of philosophy.

Like why would the bbc need to ‘balance’ its cover of the US in this way? When the BBC covers, say, Xi critically should it also run a programme dedicated to the CCP’s achievements?

Solar’s price drop is astonishing: panels are now 98% cheaper than when I first analyzed them in 2004. Today, building a fence with solar can be cheaper than using wood.

This reminds me of a paper this year on how congenitally blind people can talk about colour in detail (wonder if relevant to Molyneaux problem too): Liu, Van Paridon, and Lupyan. 2025. ‘Learning about Color from Language’. Communications Psychology 3 (1): 60. doi.org/10.1038/s442...

This👇.

Ved Mehta was blind from age 3 but wrote nonfiction books full of rich visual imagery constructed from auditory, tactile & olfactory data. A reviewer once called the method dishonest. Mehta wrote to the editor that they would be "well advised to review my book rather than my disability".

New paper out in this volume by human rights lawyers www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/int... where I discuss what an ‘epistemic jurisdiction’ is, two possible different views on it, and why it matters for international cooperation in the context of implementing the human right to science (Art 27 of UNDHR).

The most incredible library in the world, @bodleian.ox.ac.uk opened to OTD 1602, through the energy, money & commitment of Sir Thomas Bodley. It began with 5k books, & now more than 22m, with 2m+reader visits a year, & multi-million online users across the globe. Privilged to be its 25th librarian!

Environmental protesters are being given licence conditions on release from jail that are supposed to be limited to extremism cases. Ella Ward, 22, was banned from going to any meetings or gatherings, except for worship, without permission. www.theguardian.com/law/2025/nov...

Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of DNA. Stop saying that they discovered DNA! This was done by another guy you probably haven't heard of! And therein lies a story. academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

Yale's Beinecke Library is quite glorious.

Finnur Dellsén got a nice pic of me on my standard Q&A slide, so now I have a stock reply to any time anyone disagrees with me.

Great meeting on AI consciousness research this week at Google NY, what an inspiring crowd! Really grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the panel on AI consciousness evaluation, alongside Roman Yampolskiy, @birchlse.bsky.social and Rob Long. And special thanks to Rob for the sticker :)

UK university news just this week: 163 jobs at risk + course closures at Leicester; 300 jobs at risk at Dundee; modern language & music courses being closed at Nottingham. Every week it‘s the same. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Join our upcoming public lecture on 'Saving Britain's wildlife' with Iris Berger, Luke Hecht, Karen Kovaka, @kneppwilding.bsky.social - chaired by @birchlse.bsky.social 🗓️ Tuesday 11 November - 6.30pm (London time) 📍 LSE campus and online 🎟️ Register at: www.lse.ac.uk/events/savin...

Our Vice Chancellor reassures us that planned redundancies won't decimate the university. Since the leadership is cutting 4% rather than 10% of staff he's technically correct, so that's fine 🤷‍♂️.

👏🎉

Loosely reminds me of Philip K. Dick's alternative-history-novel-within-an-alternative-history-novel "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" and how it envisioned satellite television:

VK Narayana Menon describing the fears of airline execs in 1965 - who worried that satellites would put them out of business.

The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI (oxunipress.bsky.social) by Jonathan Birch birchlse.bsky.social has been selected as this year’s Nayef Al-Rodhan International Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy. Learn more: royalinstitutephilosophy.org/news/winner-...

Congratulations @birchlse.bsky.social on winning the 2025 Royal Institute of Philosophy Nayef Al-Rodhan Book Prize! 👏

Thanks very much to The Royal Institute of Philosophy for awarding me the Nayef Al-Rodhan Book Prize 2025. Thanks as well to the ERC who funded it, Peter Momtchiloff who commissioned it for OUP, all my LSE team members past and present, and everyone who made the book possible!

A wonderful @triphilosophy.bsky.social evening. Congratulations to the finalists! royalinstitutephilosophy.org/news/shortli... Special congratulations to @birchlse.bsky.social for winning the 2025 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy for his book The Edge of Sentience.

The winner of the 2025 Royal Institute of Philosophy Nayef Al-Rodhan Book Prize is @jonathanbirch.bsky.social for his book, The Edge of Sentience. Congratulations! And bravo for the vision speech about how philosophy is changing

Ooh have we done epistemic cringe yet

Very pleased that The Edge of Sentience is on the shortlist for the Royal Institute of Philosophy's Nayef Al-Rodhan Book Prize. One of these will be crowned the winner in a ceremony this evening!

Look what the dog fetched up! @matthewcobb.bsky.social’s new biography of Francis Crick. Folks, it’s like no other Crick biog. Full of new research, fresh insights, juicy stories, & it’s a romp. Having watched this develop from the larval stage, it’s a thrill to hear it thunk! on my table

One thing I sometimes tell students is: when it comes to academic bureaucracy, there's often no layer beyond the surface. There's some initial form to fill in, but after that decisions are made by one harried and underpaid professional service staff member desperately trying to empty their inbox.

Just read this old-school sci-fi gem I found in a vintage bookstore in Bologna, where a Practical Philosopher Corps is deployed across the galaxy to assess sentience and cognition in alien species. I guess the dream job for @birchlse.bsky.social @petergs.bsky.social

Here are my worst socio-political thoughts. I hope I am not really the person who believes these things. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/10/misa...

Exciting to hold a real, on-sale cultivated chicken product (for dogs). Didn't seem hugely likely even a few years ago.

This is a lovely article, showing that the spirit of enquiry and the thirst for new knowledge persist in a world where stupidity is so popular. www.quantamagazine.org/first-shape-...

It's an absolute human right in international law that "no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation". Many tech companies ignore this.

I would gladly read a followup on this focused entirely on IRBs. I've been surprised by how often researchers say they could never got approval to run tests mimicking the sort of interventions that major platforms undertake on far larger populations as a matter of course on a daily basis.

Remember this, whenever someone says "alternative proteins - yuck!" www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

My word but the BBC used to make some really good programmes. Here on the BBC iPlayer you can get Bryan Magee's 1987 'The Great Philosophers' series, where you can (as I currently am doing) watch Sydney Morgenbesser talking about Peirce, James and Dewey. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...