Interesting piece on the “one good use” of LLMs by @cthos.dev. His summary: “if you care about accuracy and learning, you shouldn’t be using an LLM for anything”. https://alextheward.com/blog/llms_are_a_cognitohazard/

This -> "We have deprived the youth of the joys of discovery, the thrill to feel yourself close to an answer, and the wonderful, rewarding feeling of a moment of lucidity after hard work."

Perhaps of interest to some of you. "Quick societal adoption of tools often reflects a demand driven by business interests or culture. Reflecting on generative AI, especially Large Language Models, I believe there is a strong lifestyle generation component that nurtures.. cal-r.org/mondragon/S8...

ChatGPT-5 offers dangerous advice to mentally ill people, psychologists warn

Mudanças climáticas agravam a poluição por plásticos. O clima mais quente aumenta a toxicidade dos plásticos, envenenando desproporcionalmente os grandes mamíferos.

My new paper has just been published online in @journalphp.bsky.social! Popperian animals and instrumental reasoning: Philosophical Psychology: Vol 0, No 0 - Get Access www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Due to severe economic inequalities in the Global South, we have emphasized this point from the beginning. This is very important to us. Since I started teaching from Miranda's book, students themselves have pointed out the lack of examples and discussion about class-based social prejudices.

Abstract deadline tomorrow if anyone is interested in joining us in Exeter in February to talk all things Social AI!

Finally! www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/w...?

Perspectival Realism + Ecological Psychology = Ecological Perspectivism "Science offers knowledge of reality in terms of affordances, which are relational to the instruments and abilities of scientific communities." #PhilSci #PsycSci

We have been working on this for the last five years, and it's great that our paper will be published in Synthese. philsci-archive.pitt.edu/26226/ Ecological psychology is a good fit for perspectival realism.

Cover:

'The Literalist Fallacy and the Free Energy Principle: Model-building, Scientific Realism, and Instrumentalism' (Kirchhoff, Kiverstein & Robertson) has finally made its way into the ahead of print stage with The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/bjps/0/0

NDPR review: ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-... "If the principal entanglement at the heart of this book is that between art and philosophy, its main insight—and one, appropriately enough, that engagements with both art and philosophy bring into view—is that pretty much everything is tangled up."

The principles of charity and good faith are prima facie applicable, yet they should not prevent us from recognizing that there are foolish or malicious individuals in this world.

Study finds #AI tools made open source software developers slower. But then AI was never about saving time, but doing a highly skilled job with unskilled labour. #AIHype apple.news/AlEakH6o2Rr2...

This has to stop: "According to one recent study, in 2020 alone, academics globally spent more than 100 million hours peer reviewing papers for journals. For experts in the US, the time spent reviewing that year amounted to more than $1.5bn of free labour." www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Sempre bom lembrar e pontuar a falta de limites para a hipocrisia dos extremistas da direita na sua "defesa" da liberdade de expressão.

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/

Yup! "I am sick to my stomach as I write this because I've spent 20 years developing a pedagogy that's about wrestling with big ideas through writing and discussion, and that whole project has been evaporated by for-profit corporations who built their systems on stolen work. It's demoralizing."

"Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels." arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

📌

Submissions invited for 2025 Du Châtelet Prize in Philosophy of Physics Topic: Physics in the writings of women 1700-1900 Open to grads/recent PhDs; must be unpublished Winner receives $1000, invitation to workshop & publish paper in Studies. Deadline: October 10, 2025 www.duchateletprize.org #HPS

The Entangled Brain by @pessoabrain.bsky.social aeon.co/essays/how-t...

Remembering the smug AI hype man who in 2023 told me that factuality/confabulation would be a solved problem by summer 2024, tops. I told him that you can’t fix a problem that is also at the core of what the machine does well. He laughed at me, then got kinda quiet

Excited to have @susanamonso.com speaking at #Oxfordlitfest today oxfordliteraryfestival.org/literature-e...

My paper (w/ Hrishikesh Joshi) on why listening is A Very Good Thing is now officially published. It argues, among other things, that critical and constructive listening is crucial to maintaining the epistemic commons. It's open access. doi.org/10.1111/phpr...

A desk rejection is sometimes inevitable, given the high number of submissions a prestigious journal receives. However, we from the Global South have every reason to suspect that bias might also be among the implicit reasons for such empty feedback.

the most powerful & wealthiest corporations whose business models relies on theft, rights infringements, environmental destruction, aggressive data collection & surveillance say that the regulatory guardrails developed to tame them are a “step in the wrong direction” www.politico.eu/article/goog...

ProPublica is one of the best independent tech journalism outlets out there doing an amazing job keeping big tech accountable. glad they're hiring more people... apply if you fit the bill

For those interested in books about smell, taste, and flavor I made a short (eclectic) list of recommendations shepherd.com/best-books/s... #philosophy #perception #Smell #Taste

#UCD School of Philosophy is looking for a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in the #Ethics and #Philosophy of Technology for a prestigious 5-year fellowship leading to a permanent position (subject to satisfactory performance). #PhilTech #PhilSci #AIEthics #PhilJobs www.ucd.ie/philosophy/n...

𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗕𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 Wonderful short book by Lauren Ross on how to think about explanations in the biological sciences, including brains. A lot of the focus is on causal explanations but also the need to go beyond them and how these other types of explanation connect to causation (or not).

It is plainly obvious, but I hadn't previously associated the meaningless operations of the men in Searle's Chinese room with the meaningless, fragmentary work in our modern society, dominated by rationalization and the division of labor. Thanks to Edward Reed (The Necessity of Experience).

New Mary dropped: getting a sense of smell for the first time! This is a great video. Personal highlight: 'it smells like bicyle tracks look'. youtu.be/Mi0bw5ZXYtQ #olfaction #philsenses #perception #philosophy

In the upcoming years, I will not visit the US. If they treat immigrants badly, I also do not want to be there, either as a tourist or as an academic visitor.

As expected: "Despite ChatGPT reportedly outperforming 99.9% of humans in a Verbal IQ test, it falls short of passing the Turing Test. In 9 out of the 10 tests conducted, the interrogators successfully identified ChatGPT-4 and the human participant." link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The Caribbean Philosophical Association @caribphil.bsky.social is the 150th organisation to be added to my list and starter pack of philosophy organisations, all of which are featured in my #Philosophy feed alongside posts from every area of academic philosophy: bsky.app/profile/did:.... #PhilSky

A picturesque way of referring to the surprising unknown that inhabits love. "There are some people or faces I want to keep experiencing and learning more about for the rest of my life, and I hope this is true for everyone reading this book." (Edward Reed)

Y'all know Mary the Colour Scientist, right? That's because in 1982 The Philosophical Quarterly published 'Epiphenomenal Qualia', featuring Frank Jackson's legendary thought experiment. We've put together an Open Access VI of PQ, celebrating Frank Jackson's work: academic.oup.com/pq/pages/mar...

"The US is on the cusp of a natural gas power plant construction boom, as Big Tech turns to fossil fuels to meet the huge electricity needs of the artificial intelligence revolution — putting climate targets in peril" www.ft.com/content/63c3...

Se puder plantar, plante; se puder comer menos carne, coma; se puder apoiar movimentos ambientalistas, apoie; se puder votar em políticos comprometidos com o meio ambiente, vote; se puder encantar a sua relação com Gaia, encante. E, melhor ainda, se puder fazer uma revolução, faça.

Boaz Miller, The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge Free download until Jan. 31. Cambridge Element - Philosophy of Science #philsci www.cambridge.org/core/element...

CFP: Olfactory Philosophy Workshop at UNR Lake Tahoe philevents.org/event/show/1... Please spread the CFP widely to PhD students and ECRs - the deadline is January 31

Tenho preferido fazer vídeos curtos a tirar fotos dos seres que habitam comigo. Quando tiramos fotos, abstraímos o que há de mais característico na vida: o movimento. É um registro pálido dos encontros que temos com o outro.

Philosophy of science in Ibero-America The list is far from complete. Please feel free to suggest additions, including your own name. Apologies in advance for any omissions. Thank you! go.bsky.app/4XmN14i

This is what happens when you rely on international student fees to subsidise inadequate government funding for #HigherEducation, and then create a hostile environment for immigration.

Workshop on Large Language Models in the history, philosphy, and social studies of science (Berlin, April 2-3, 2025) www.tu.berlin/hps-mod-sci/... #HPS, #philsci, #STS