When I read about AI labs hiring philosophers, it makes me think of Ronald Fisher, the "father of modern statistics" who died arguing on behalf of tobacco companies saying that the studies showing cigarettes caused cancer were correlation not causation.

You think the problem of intentionality is hard? Haven’t you heard of causal chains?! If there is a causal chain connecting two things, then one of those things means the other. Please don’t ask any follow-up questions or demand details.

It's really nice to get an email about how good the online course I worked on last year is, especially considering that I didn't teach this section and that the student in question is also themselves teaching faculty at my institution!

Can't get enough of these videos of Peter Thiel being asked by a friendly interviewer to "just say you're not the antichrist, out loud" followed by Thiel making various deep sea creature noises for 30 seconds before going "it's uh it's uh it's uh there are a lot of declensions here, interestingly,"

just submitted my reviewer report and then realized that I accidentally met the deadline! It's today!!

@jweisber.bsky.social @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social

One of the embarassing things about academic philosophy is that there's (varying degrees of) stigma around admitting ignorance, but *feigning* ignorance is often a well-respected intellectual strategy...

Good one on @flaminghydra.com from @lukeoneil47.bsky.social, not regretting my subscription

Excited to share this. @neel2112.bsky.social, @mariaa.bsky.social, and I analyzed 500K anonymous ChatGPT convos (shared w/ consent from WildChat) to see if people were generating fiction. We found tons of stories, fanfiction & erotica. Many users iterated on the same stories for days and weeks.

“In a recent study looking at the use of AI in healthcare, researchers from Stanford and Harvard found even top-performing AI models from Anthropic and Google produced 12 to 15 severely harmful errors per 100 cases. The worst-performing models made mistakes in 40 out of 100 cases.”

Tomorrow, we welcome @ltdandreas.bsky.social in our lecture series! Andreas will talk about digital futures, material presents and colonial pasts. It's a hybrid event, so if you're at @ruhr-uni-bochum.de, come around at 6pm! Otherwise register here: rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture... #HistSci 🐋🌱

Kid sitting behind me on this flight keeps asking 'But what IS Ohio'. No provided answers seem to satisfy him. He seems to be becoming increasingly skeptical that an answer is even possible.

honestly stunned, I can't even form a quip

sometimes people think because they've used some philosophical device (like the use/mention distinction) they must also have done some philosophical work, which does not follow (1/x):

its fucked that twirling your hair and stroking your beard are basically equivalent fidgets but one is a byword for ditzyness and the other is supposed to be wise reflection

just realized all my ideas come from culture so if I want to be a real free thinker I have to go insane with grunts and howls

Fishing off the island (Fune Tarou, SNES, Victor Interactive Software, 1997)

I’m singing along to a rock song while driving with my dad. Dad: You don’t have the voice for this; you should sing tenor. Me: Really, you think so? Dad: Yes, tenor fifteen miles from where I can hear you.

one of the hardest things to accept is "my ideas are correct but unpopular" and it's particularly tricky for academics who romanticize getting publications

At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/

Going after anthropology for being relativistic is a little like going after history for being stuck in the past.

Everyone shut up I finally got a video of Jyn doing her cartoon snoring thing

*desperate to move on and immediately forget this interaction forever* Yeah it's a great question, I'll have to think more about that

counterpoint: no it's not

some say Broetchen & Bremsstrahlung is the new storks & stellarators

My "I didn’t kill Imre Lakatos" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

I always love when I see someone who I already think has bad views in other areas endorse something that looks like a bad view in a new area.

People should just post the prompts they use to LinkedIn instead of the outcome. There’s probably real vulnerable accidental self-disclosures in those prompts. “Make me appear thoughtful and confident”

explain it like i'm only asking out of politeness

"the new toaster says 'I Love You' when you put the toast in, and 'I'm Sorry' when it burns it. This causes some people to get angry b/c they don't think the toaster means it, and others to develop unhealthy attachments b/c they think it does. the solution is to make the toaster TRULY sorry"

naive question, but doesn't the inclusion of a ridiculous IPO in the standard stock indices create a huge opportunity for a stock index that is just like the others except without SpaceX and any future obvious nonsense IPOs?

I had no idea men played soccer, too! Good for them! Go boy soccer!! ⚽️

💀 they literally made me add a section before the conclusion where I discuss the common critique that pancakes aren't waffles...

People of the Book, but the Book is the generic singular

Rebranding a hallucination as a ‘critical confabulation’ that can fill archival gaps is a big no from me.

Only a select few brave academics are willing to say the thing that has been loudly being said pretty much constantly for decades

"We [1] did a fair amount of research..." [1] To clarify, 'we' doesn't refer to the report's authors, but AI methods and a bunch of people hired with someone else's money.

Why would any company pay a consultancy to put fossil-fuelled chatslop output into a glossy PDF when they can just pay for a subscription and do it themselves? What is the point of paying a consultancy to lie in plausible ways when you can subscribe to the plausible-lie-generator software directly?

LMAOOOO

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

Happy Pride to this Caravaggio self-portrait that made one man so gay he had to go to the hospital

It's not "anti-immigrant" either, it's racist.

The problem with philosophy is NOT that we all suck at it, it's that "[bad view] by [famous person] is actually good because [mental gymnastics]" completely dominates the meta, despite producing almost no useful insights. It's socially useful because it provides a high skill ceiling...