Fintan Mallory
@fintanmallory.com
📤 2916
📥 1094
📝 2036
Philosopher at Durham University. fintanmallory.com
reposted by
Fintan Mallory
Jonathan Birch
about 6 hours ago
I agree about the alt-protein and disagree with any sharp "farmland vs nature" distinction; in Britain habitats like chalk grassland need to be grazed and would be destroyed by an absence of grazing animals or by unmanaged overgrazing.
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The improvement in vegan alt-meats in the last decade has been astonishing and I’m convinced that over my lifetime we’ll flatten the curve on meat-eating before seeing it drop precipitously. This will free up vast swathes of farmland for return to nature.
about 6 hours ago
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At 3k followers, I’ll reveal which Python libraries are conscious.
about 16 hours ago
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Not thrilled with the framing but this is progress. “Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity”:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN4b...
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Introducing the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act
YouTube video by Bernie Sanders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN4b4UCWMKI
3 days ago
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Only just learned that Lidl are opening their first pub just outside of Belfast and it's called... The Middle Ale:
www.irishnews.com/news/busines...
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The Middle Ale: Lidl to open its first ever pub at Co Down store next month
Supermarket chain is recruiting its own bar staff to operate the new pub and off licence in Dundonald
https://www.irishnews.com/news/business/the-middle-ale-lidl-to-open-its-first-ever-pub-at-co-down-store-next-month-KAOCSQOJCVDTJNIPFAAGSTR56U/
4 days ago
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Remake of Point Break with climbing instead of surfing. It could be called Pirates of the Carabiner.
4 days ago
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A tale of solidarity in Durham:
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
5 days ago
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The department AI policy that can be spoken is not the eternal department AI policy
6 days ago
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One way to avoid having technological revolutions being directed by reckless children pursuing medium-term financial interests is the socialization of investment. There are a few ways we might pursue this. Here's one recent proposal:
autonomy.work/wp-content/u...
add a skeleton here at some point
7 days ago
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reposted by
Fintan Mallory
Hey! This book is very good. If you like novels that deal with grief, embodiment, and why we go on, I think you'll like it. And pre-ordering is good for authors, beats inflation, and maybe you’ll forget you did it so it’ll be a nice surprise for future you
lucentdreaming.com/product/the-...
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The Restorative Artist by Cecil Fenn (Preorder Paperback, 2026)
ISBN: 9781916632240 Price: £12.00 Publication Date: 17 September 2026 Embalmer Graham Creer has spent his life helping others face loss, but when he’s struck down by a corpse-carried illness,…
https://lucentdreaming.com/product/the-restorative-artist-by-cecil-fenn-preorder-paperback-2026/
8 months ago
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Opened an article in a new tab, but then a thought occurred to me - realistically, I’m not going to read this. And I closed the tab. Who would have thought such a novel thought process possible!
9 days ago
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Magnifica Humanitas was a fine encyclical but its politics were a bit iffy. wouldve been way better if at the end the pope turned to the reader & said "i am communist now" & then specified hes the exact kind of communist i am
11 days ago
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add a skeleton here at some point
11 days ago
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I had figured the rate of aging, 1 year per year, was the same everywhere.
11 days ago
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The greatest computational technology ever built vs some python regex that counts occurrences of the “not X but Y” construction in a document.
14 days ago
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reposted by
Fintan Mallory
Tuomas Tahko
15 days ago
Bristol is recruiting a Lecturer in Philosophy, with specialisation in one of and teaching competency in at least three of: Aesthetics Ethics Philosophy of AI Philosophy of Education Political Philosophy Value Theory 24 month post with teaching orientation.
www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...
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Details | Working at Bristol | University of Bristol
https://www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/details/?jobId=388727&jobTitle=Lecturer%20in%20Philosophy
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reposted by
Fintan Mallory
Elin McCready
15 days ago
addendum to previous post: if this happens, I hope every UK conference will also provide online options. will be sad if it ends up being a no-go place for us, sadder for those who have to live there
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reposted by
Fintan Mallory
Mike Stuart
16 days ago
Please share!! I'm hiring the first two (of four) postdocs for my ERC project on AI and science!!
add a skeleton here at some point
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Can’t believe this came true
add a skeleton here at some point
16 days ago
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I've read over 100,000 words of first-year philosophy essays in the last week and have been consistently impressed with how thoughtful, creative and human-written they have all been. It's been really refreshing.
17 days ago
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reposted by
Fintan Mallory
Giosuè Baggio
18 days ago
Here’s what caught my attention in Grodzinsky’s new book, and why, if we want to understand and explain language in the mind/brain, NLP/LM research and generative grammar may be equally unviable, either alone or combined.👇 1/9
add a skeleton here at some point
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Hearing a lot about how Gen Z are into the prosentential theory of truth.
18 days ago
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add a skeleton here at some point
19 days ago
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I wonder when it stops being weird to see undergraduates citing and discussing your friends. I still can't help thinking 'wait, how do you know them?' any time I see it.
21 days ago
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Wikipedia coming out strong against Wittgenstein here with the claim that the world is the totality of things.
23 days ago
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The zetetic turn has gone too far.
25 days ago
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I've joked that the only true conspiracy theory was that conspiracy theories are promoted by the powerful to direct people away from the complex, structural nature of their oppression. One theory to inoculate against all others...
27 days ago
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Did the foolish thing during a department meeting where I said 'this sounds like an empirical issue' and now I have to actually do the analysis of the data. Should have stuck with trying to work things out using my intuitions like a proper philosopher.
28 days ago
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How do *you* know that history isn’t the progression of the world spirit to greater self-consciousness of its own freedom?
29 days ago
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I hear that the author of The Selfish Gene is anthropomorphising things he shouldn’t.
30 days ago
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Hi, I’m John Knox, and welcome to Jackass.
about 1 month ago
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A behavioural criterion can travel halfway around the world while a mechanistic explanation is still putting on its shoes.
about 1 month ago
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Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann will be in Belfast this year and I will basically be this kid until the end of August:
m.youtube.com/watch?v=_AAB...
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Fleadh Cheoil | Jan 22nd 8.30pm | RTÉ One
YouTube video by RTÉ - IRELAND’S NATIONAL PUBLIC SERVICE MEDIA
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_AABQEkvnRU&pp=ygUNZmxlYWRoIGNoZW9pbA%3D%3D&ra=m
about 1 month ago
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Inflation changes gradually and people can’t distinguish 0.1% inflation from 0.2% inflation. Assuming a safety condition on knowledge, we must reject luminosity and grant that people may know that the economy is bad without knowing that they know.
about 1 month ago
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reposted by
Fintan Mallory
Renato Duarte
about 1 month ago
Foundation models in neuroscience predict brain activity at unprecedented accuracy. But prediction ≠ understanding, and we should avoid conflating the two. New essay now out:
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The Imitation Game
Foundation models in neuroscience: representational alignment versus mechanistic understanding
https://open.substack.com/pub/groundedneuro/p/the-imitation-game?r=6l8iaw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
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New FAccT paper in which
@travislacroix.bsky.social
,
@sashamtl.bsky.social
and I discuss the tendency in NLP to combine claims with strong everyday readings with exculpating caveats in the work. This kind of pattern. Travis has a thread:
bsky.app/profile/trav...
add a skeleton here at some point
about 1 month ago
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reposted by
Fintan Mallory
Travis LaCroix
about 1 month ago
New paper pre-print, accepted at FAccT 2026, wherein
@fintanmallory.com
,
@sashamtl.bsky.social
, and I argue that hype-laden AI terms like “hallucination”, “reasoning”, and “agent” are doing strategic, rhetorical work, which we call "glosslighting".
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There’s a bank called Capital One?!?! What next, a credit card called Grundrisse?? A hedge fund called The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte???…
about 1 month ago
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It’s an inconvenient artistic fact that any sufficiently pious martyrdom is indistinguishable from slapstick.
about 1 month ago
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I find this surprisingly comforting
about 1 month ago
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Might become one of those philosophers who reifies information and treats like a magic fluid that flows through biological systems making them mean stuff.
about 1 month ago
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reposted by
Fintan Mallory
Monday morning, time to rise and grind!* *Cultivate wisdom and compassion.
8 months ago
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Just in case you needed any more reasons to support this crowdfunder, once things are up and running, I’ll be teaching a course on Marxist philosophy here:
www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/booksfromb...
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Books from Below: A Radical Bookshop for Newcastle
Opening new radical bookshop, coffee shop, and community space in Newcastle UK!
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/booksfrombelow
about 2 months ago
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This is unacceptable
about 2 months ago
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Thinking of becoming one of those niche-construction people. I’ll go around pointing at things and saying, ‘You know what that is? It’s a niche’. It sounds fun.
about 2 months ago
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reposted by
Fintan Mallory
Ben Bowsher
about 2 months ago
Here’s some close ups of the print you could get either by entering the £10 prize draw or by donating £60+ to our crowdfunder:
www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/booksfromb...
Please consider doing so, we’re trying to bring the first radical bookshop in decades to Newcastle! If you can’t donate, pls share!!
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True analytic philosophy has never been tried
about 2 months ago
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Learning to read philosophy is a skill and someone is losing out if they only learn to read within one tradition or time-period. My undergrad had a two-year module dedicated to this. At Durham, we have a module called ‘Reading Philosophy’. I don’t get the impression that this is the norm though.
about 2 months ago
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It doesn’t matter whether you’re formally modelling complex social phenomena (analytic) or poetically articulating the nature of alienation (continental), both are sound Marxist traditions.
add a skeleton here at some point
about 2 months ago
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Remember when Artemis II splashed down? That was great.
about 2 months ago
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