Mamdani is starting to look like one of the most important politicians in a generation, not because of his policies, but because of his ability to counter the Reagan-era narrative that taxation = pissing your money into the void

Mamdani is starting to look like one of the most important politicians in a generation, not because of his policies, but because of his ability to counter the Reagan-era narrative that taxation = pissing your money into the void

Been working on a dumb side project about the Simpsons that requires me committing very early and visibly to the duration of the golden age Not sure if I want to deal with the fallout of committing to what my heart truly believes: Seasons 3 to 13

I feel seen.

Taking an online course with prerecorded powerpoints, and every 10 or so slides the instructor has inexplicably decided to add the jankiest AI version of his face "narrating". It's somewhere between a muppet and whatever these things are called:

The inference from "this scholarship doesn't strike me as deep or intelligible" to "this scholarship is bad" is such a laughably bad one, yet it appears again and again. Kind of wrote about it a few months ago here: substack.com/home/post/p-...

I wrote up my response. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2026/04/ther...

Looking at an academic job post in my area that looks suspiciously specific. There's not a socially acceptable way to email someone and ask if they already have a candidate in mind, right?

Shots fired by psychiatrists

One part about living in the UK that still trips me up after a decade is that while engaging in mandatory small talk about how terrible the weather is, one is absolutely forbidden from acknowledging the existence of worse weather

Tired: Getting information directly from ChatGPT Wired: Using search engines to get information from websites generated by ChatGPT

One part about living in the UK that still trips me up after a decade is that while engaging in mandatory small talk about how terrible the weather is, one is absolutely forbidden from acknowledging the existence of worse weather

The Iranian war has been incredibly successful at revealing which pundits understand the difference between tactical success and strategic failure

I made some playable philosophy simulations: -Oxford 1952 -Republic Book I -Jena 1799 -Paris 1945 www.ux-phi.com

Nerds: This is basically an amazing open ended RPG set in important scenes in philosophical history. Pedagogy nerds: This is like Reacting (to the Past) simulations but single player. And philosophy. It’s not generic LLM generated but based on lots of research into academic and popular sources.

Been mulling over whether I think of 2007-2009 as such a good era for video games (Fo3, Mirror's Edge, Bioshock, Portal) because of nostalgia or because Team Fortress 2 added hats in 2009 and lootboxes in 2010

Simplified received views of academic works are often features, not bugs. They allow: - Discussion of a work's insights without all the work's moving parts - The insights to develop over time independently of the work or author - The insights to spread without the effort of reading the work

Would appreciate advice from any later stage postdoc researchers who have navigated this gap

A thread🧵about formalisation and the abc conjecture. A new Mochizuki paper was just posted! This one is unusually interesting, as it is about formalisation efforts for the abc conjecture "proof". www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/Fo...

Simplified received views of academic works are often features, not bugs. They allow: - Discussion of a work's insights without all the work's moving parts - The insights to develop over time independently of the work or author - The insights to spread without the effort of reading the work

At this point, years of experience tells us that any time there's a deluge of stories about an upcoming AI apocalypse, one of the big players' marketing team is behind it, building up hype for a model they are preparing to release

It's absolutely ancient history at the speed the discourse goes now, but of course OpenAI did the exact same "omg this model is just too powerful to release" marketing ploy with GPT-2 in 2019, before later just... releasing the whole thing. And we all didn't die. So idk I'm still skeptical y'all

I'm currently 0 for 5, but a boy can dream

must read about experimental philosophy

AI hate is well-justified, but jfk is its earnest vacuous bullshit helpful for neurodivergents working on applications that will be read by normals

My theory about philosophical embarrassment (driven entirely by personal experience): It's far more common among US than Euro philosophers and it's because US doesn't teach philosophy in school so the average American has basically no idea what you mean when you say you are a philosopher

Attitudes towards AI are a lot like attitudes towards driving. EVERYONE thinks they are a good driver. No one thinks they are a bad driver. And yet somehow everyone thinks the road is full of bad drivers.

I don't want my next phone to have more advanced AI or a better camera. I want my next phone to have a 3.5mm audio jack.

The A57 is one of only two roads between Manchester and Sheffield, the north's largest cities. Where it crosses the pennines, it is down to one lane in two different places, and last year the council announced that if a landslide takes out the road, they won't have the money to reopen it.

That's not intuitive

Happy revenant demigod day!

When you've been cycling against deafening wind but you turn a corner and the wind is perfectly at your back, the world becomes silent, and you are just ✨flying✨

There’s a philosophy paper begins with the observation that philosophers often start their papers with bold, provocative claims before spending the paper walking back from them. Does anyone remember what paper this was?

A free, searchable index of 212,000+ philosophy book reviews. Covers 1,200+ journals going back to the 1890s. Filter by subfield, journal, author, reviewer, year, or access type. Built it because I kept wishing this existed. Now it does. philreviews.org

Never understood amount of whinging about AI on youtube. I just visited Youtube while logged out and I suddenly understand

In 2026 there's little reason for philosophy degrees to require classical logic. Sure, it shows up in the lit, but so do Bayes and stats in nearly equal numbers. It's also not clear it improves students' domain general reasoning (both anecdotally and in experimental studies)

Can someone check my work on this? I'm a more than a bit accent-blind. The Moores might be better described as RP/Oxbridge and I can't tell if Coburn's accent is more Essex or Estuary

Does class still rule Britain? asks 2 people with public school accents and 2 people with Estuary accents

If any of my UK HE followers are involved with student experience, there is no greater favor you can do for new international students than providing a quick 5 minute primer on the ins and outs of the NHS

Coming from the US healthcare system, it has taken me a better part of a decade to find the NHS - despite it's clear virtues - as anything but counterintuitive and a bit hostile. Anyways, this morning I successfully navigated the 08:00 appointment rush for the first time

One of my fondest memories from college is when a buddy and I spent an afternoon drinking on our porch writing increasingly less coherent attempts to represent "I got 99 problems and a bitch ain't one" in first-order logic on our windows using a whiteboard marker

My absolute favorite bit of linguistics trivia is that the remnants of medieval class survive in English words for meat. Medieval English nobility spoke French, so pricey and restricted meat gained french names: beef, pork, venison But meat eaten more widely kept germanic names: chicken & rabbit

My absolute favorite bit of linguistics trivia is that the remnants of medieval class survive in English words for meat. Medieval English nobility spoke French, so pricey and restricted meat gained french names: beef, pork, venison But meat eaten more widely kept germanic names: chicken & rabbit

Does language have, for lack of a better phrase, a carrying capacity? An upper limit of how many words it can support in its vocabulary given various factors? If no, why aren't languages larger? If yes, why does English have a bajillion words compared to similar languages?

Every American living in the UK

The UK would be far more whimsical if every citizen was in the royal line of succession

One of the great lessons of the philosophy and sociology of the (social) sciences is that people are fundamentally lazy about their methodological assumptions. Once a benchmark or practice doesn't need to be thought about, it won't be thought about. See also: alpha = 0.05 go brrr

Very happy to invite you to the second online-talk in our series. This thursday, Josh Knobe and Ivar Hannikainen, 4pm, everyone welcome. Join Zoom Meeting uzh.zoom.us/j/6806768837... Meeting ID: 680 676 8837 Passcode: xphi123

We don't appreciate how many things in our lives we as individuals understand so little that we are essentially in the same position as medieval peasants trying to balance humors to cure the bubonic plague. Wifi's not working? Maybe unplugging it will help?