python scripting has always felt like talking baby talk at a computer until it nods pityingly and goes and executes something in C

dark time for me. have had to explain to the wife Charlie Kirk, Furby Pope, and colonial organisms in one week

people in Philadelphia very emotional about birds

I once saw a (very interesting) talk about sleep in which the speaker started by saying that we don't really know how to define sleep, and then proceeded to operationalize sleep in flies as basically periods when they are still for a long time. This got me thinking...

99 out of 100 things I see people using LLM-based chatbots for are things that I have to believe people wouldn’t be doing with them if they had an elementary understanding of the technology. Those 1-in-100 cases can be excellent, though.

my favorite scifi author has liked my tweet. I will be riding this high for the next five years and will not be taking questions during this time out of respect for the family. thank you.

My thoughts: LLMs are very useful for a limited range of use cases. They are deceptively marketed and only apparently useful in the majority of applications in which they are currently deployed. In many of these applications, they are apt to have catastrophic negative repercussions.

zhuangist praxis (zhuangzi ch. 10 predicts inflated self-citation in the h-index's wake)

the trans agenda is revealed to be the muddying of citational records, thus leveling the playing field of our H-indices in the holy eyes of God

women changing their names after marriage is a deepstate plot to muddy their citation records

I’m wondering what the timeline is for teachers who write glowing articles about embracing ai in the classroom to those same teachers writing about how their school replaced them with a bot.

I am thrilled to have taken a position with the @princetoncitp.bsky.social and the @princetonainews.bsky.social. I am still on the hunt for something permanent. If you hear of any tenure-track positions in AI ethics, philosophy, STS, information & data science or similar, please let me know!

Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, says UN inquiry

I don’t think it can be emphasized enough that large language models were never intended to do math or know facts; literally all they do is attempt to sound like the text they’re given, which may or may not include math or facts. They don’t do logic or fact checking — they’re just not built for that

wdym no transferable skills i can convert a word document to pdf

Chasing an academic career is optimizing for the narrowest imaginable market that is liable to simply implode at any given time and has no transferable skills or accolades.

Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah...

The vision of human-out-of-the-loop science fundamentally mistakes what knowledge production is. It aims at the production of, wait for it, knowledge: a thing that definitionally involves an epistemic agent or agents, unless you are theistic about it.

We need new rules for publishing AI-generated research. The teams developing automated AI scientists have customarily submitted their papers to standard refereed venues (journals and conferences) and to arXiv. Often, acceptance has been treated as the dependent variable. 1/

One day in the future—a day that will appear to come all too soon—the headache-inducing deep learning sloppification of digital photography will have become the much-emulated nostalgic media artifact of the present era, the tape warble of our generation.

"Epistemic rigor, however, does not necessarily require specific epistemological commitments or choices but rather that those commitments and choices be made explicit." www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.14652

praying someone will jump in to save professor watchlist. how will potential employers find me in the future?

The technologies we have are shaped by our society and the economic incentives that drive their development. This week @abenanav.bsky.social joins @parismarx.com to discuss his vision for a more democratic, equitable economy and what it means for tech. Full ep: techwontsave.us/episode/293_...

Update on Methods in the Philosophy of Science: A User’s Guide. The book will become open access in July of next year. If you would like to read my contribution before that date, please feel free to message and I can send you a PDF.

Sad thing recent events have made me accept: a lot of US elites are weak, amoral people, whose guiding star is "what does power want?" mixed with "what's easiest for me in the short-term?" And that unfortunately means we can't appeal to principle or patriotism, we need to structure their incentives.

Wilfred Sellars: an Andrei Tarkovsky film.

It is also a grossly ineffective economic model.

new job.

Please hold conferences of international interest outside of the US for the time being.

However evil you think this is, it’s worse: “The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.”

One of the amazing things about writing this book has been the support and collaboration of countless people. A huge number, like Matilde, who wrote the Foreword are not on Bluesky, but some are! First and foremost thanks are due to @mutual-a.bsky.social who was basically a research assistant

I'm happy to announce that my book, Did The Science Wars Take Place? The Political & Ethical Stakes of Radical Realism, is live on Amazon. Pre-orders are finally going out. And with that, the epub is now free and available on C4SS. www.amazon.com/Did-Science-...

Yet another instance in which we see the glaring need for descriptive, useful terminology, of which “AI” is not. At this point, insisting on referring to technology as “AI” is just deliberate obfuscation.

The whiplash is dizzying. “Just a few hours before the Supreme Court decision, I got an e-mail that I was able to resume spending,” one researcher tells @dangaristo.bsky.social and @maxkozlov.bsky.social. Now, the grant is likely to be cut again. “It’s heartbreaking.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I try to tell everyone I trust that now is the time for lasting innovation, in the ongoing historical disjuncture. We have a small window to build a better set of institutions or ways of doing things. It's an opportunity we have to seize because it'll be gone soon and it's how we realize justice.

What most offends me about liberalism is the pretense that systems and persons who explicitly value capital accumulation over human rights can be politically moved on humanistic grounds. Appeals to humanity have no political efficacy here. You want a ceasefire? You want aid let in to Gaza?

You are, in the next few months, going to see a few pro-AI people who start trying to morph into "thoughtful cynics" on the issue, and I can't wait, because I've been taking such detailed notes

Practice-engaged and practice-critical philosophy of science is needed now more than ever in light of widespread AI-integration into science and its oversight mechanisms.

nothing like getting a PhD in some extremely niche subject only for it to become, overnight, the one thing every human being has a clinically bad opinion on.

I live in Philadelphia now!

I come at this question from a Bayesian rather than Humean view, but agree with the conclusion here: the idea that "deep learning allows the data to speak for itself" is wrong. In what language does it speak? That language embodies the theory, inescapably. Or: Bayesian updating only works by...

I am thrilled that my paper on machine learning in science and the myth of theory-free inference has been accepted for publication in Erkenntnis. The paper remains available for download as a preprint through the archives. philsci-archive.pitt.edu/26075/1/Andr...

In the 90s I knew that the internet would usher in an age of unprecedented data availability. I didn’t realize it would also usher in an age of unprecedented data illiteracy

Methods in the Philosophy of Science: A User's Guide is now a real, live book. My chapter offers an appraisal of philosophy of science in its engagement with applied mathematics. With immense gratitude for the vision and execution of @phieveigl.bsky.social and @adrian-currie.bsky.social sky.social.

The last twenty years have seen multiple methodological revolutions in the philosophy of science. In "Methods in the Philosophy of Science," Sophie Veigl and Adrian Currie introduce this range of methods through both practical advice and philosophical reflection: bit.ly/3GnXFxb

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

Hello friends. A life update is in order. I am now Dr. Andrews. I will spend the next two years at Princeton as a postdoctoral fellow. I am, however, still on the job market for something permanent. Please alert me if you hear of opportunities for which you think I would be a good fit!

it’s so hot how departments that are not philosophy departments will disclose teaching loads in adverts for faculty posts so you don’t spend six months applying and interviewing and flying out for a job that’s secretly a 5/5

How are folks getting web access to books and articles in 2025?