Reminder to hit me up if you're a recent PhD and are interested in applying!

yeah, why are parties to a public debate opting to make their case in concrete, verifiable terms that are accessible from more or less any reasonable normative perspective, rather than high metaphysical language associated with specific faith traditions? mystifying choice bsky.app/profile/mich...

Had a great conversation with Jackie Snow about chatbots’ memory function and the way their personalised callbacks to information and stories you have shared about yourself can calcify your own self-narratives and self-understanding (which I’ve elsewhere described as narrative railroading) 🤖✒️🛤️

This piece by ángel pinillos is so good napinillos.substack.com/p/the-honest...

Syllabus (draft) on modal thought: flaxen-store-af3.notion.site/PHIL555-Moda... Comments welcome!

Wrote this chapter on how modal cognition develops! check it out! philpapers.org/rec/NEUTDO-9

Thrilled to say I just found a way to include a screenshot of this in a conference talk

This is a super interesting short paper! Not for the formal results, which I confess I don't really understand. But for the meta-science. It discusses how the same model can be implemented differently in code. So there's a need for independent coding, even when the researchers agree on the model.

The Marie Curie Postdoc Application call for next year is out! Do reach out if you are working in social epistemology (or philosophy of mind with a social bent) and would like to apply to be in Lisbon for 2 years. You need to have finished your PhD and be less than 8 years out. 1/2

I wrote up some notes about divergences and the work they might do for us in philosophy. philarchive.org/rec/PETDFP

Other people have noticed this phenomenon too but danah boyd put the best slogan to it: social media is now parasocial media. Social media hasn't been social for a long while—how long depending on the platform, depending on the milieu. It's not folks sharing equally, but broadcasting and receiving.

What can we learn from automating an entire quantitative social science paper, from prompt to finished product? Thread about ongoing work with @natewilmers.bsky.social 1/12 Paper: osf.io/preprints/so...

So much of traditional analytic epistemology is just going “When you know, you know” in increasingly obfuscatory ways

A new paper challenges the view that higher education liberalizes students (N = 483,885): Students political identities change during college. But there are big differences across majors: Englise/arts students move to the left, while business/engineering shift right psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

US academic: *dodging bullets Matrix-style on the way to class, getting affordable medical care from a guy in a van parked behind campus* lol UK salaries low

#BookReview What's Wrong with Stereotyping? E. Beeghly, 2025. Oxford, Oxford University Press. ix + 249 pp, £30 (hb) Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen Read it here (full access text) 👇 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/DZZYRE... #philsky #philosophy#oup

Thinking about @dsquareddigest.bsky.social 's thesis that fraudsters flourish in high-trust environments. This has application to philosophers' vulnerability to culture-war bad actors. Philosophers can be terribly naive, think themselves super-smart and immune to being conned, and so get conned

Last month, Paul Silva organised a terrific online book symposium on Jessie Munton’s wonderful new book, Priority and Prejudice: The Epistemology of Salience and Attention. It was great to discuss the book with Jessie, Jessica Keiser, and Rachel Fraser. The video is here:

if only Louis XVI had had a ballroom he might be alive today

my primary complaint, obviously, is that journals should do more publishing of my papers, and less publishing of other people's papers. this would be cost- and time-neutral

Amazing lineup for the @knowledgecrisis.bsky.social Knowledge conference this summer @floresophize.bsky.social @rbnmckenna.bsky.social @elisewoodard.bsky.social #philsky

What a paragraph

I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win

An average day in philosophy

Big fan of @alexgphilosophy.bsky.social's clear, accessible slide decks on lottocracy. Everyone should make something like this for their (academic) books! www.lottocracy.org

New paper, out this week in PLOS One, suggests that most close relationship self-report measures are primarily capturing relationship quality 🧵 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Will be norming it up at NYU for the New York Philosophy of Language Workshop tomorrow (@dryan149.bsky.social will be norming along in spirit) nylanguageworkshop.tumblr.com/post/8127532...

Online hostility is predicted by economic & political inequality Inequality breeds online hostility because people crave status in unequal societies and status-seekers constitute the main perpetrators of hostility in political settings, whether online or offline. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

CfP for a special issue of Hypatia on ‘Gender and Nation’: philevents.org/event/show/1...

quill kukla uses the 'what if i volunteer to be a human table at an orgy?' objection, for, i believe, the first time in the pages of Ethics

a major question in cognitive psychology is which tasks are Easy and which tasks are Hard

1. The biggest threat to academic freedom today is rightwing anti-intellectual, anti-higher ed propaganda, which uses moral panics about cancel culture, wokeness, DEI, etc. to justify everything from cuts to science funding, to government censorship, to the destruction of institutions of higher ed.

I do study this and it’s fascinating: online political hostility is driven by the need for social status, and amplified by algorithms, social norms and intergroup conflict. Plain old trolling is linked to dark triad traits—narcissism, psychopathy and machiavellianism. Fun stuff.

Nothing to make you lose faith in human reasoning like grading a critical thinking test

Who knew philosophers of cognitive science were so hot?!?? 🥵 @n1c0n1c0.bsky.social

I finally read this paper after having had it bookmarked for a while and found it delightful.

É aqui para escrever a favor dos direitos das pessoas trans em Portugal, que estão de novo sob ataque da direita (que quer voltar a exigir relatório médico para mudar o nome e dificultar acesso de menores): www.parlamento.pt/Cidadania/Pa...

Something that never ceases to astound me is the vastness of the gulf in the quality of human experience between going out dancing with friends and filling in reimbursement forms

My wonderful colleague Poppy Mankowitz is advertising two 3-yr postdocs & one funded PhD on her ERC project Expressing Value in Language, which investigates evaluative adjectives (‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘beautiful’, ‘tasty’, etc.) from the perspective of philosophy & theoretical & experimental linguistics.

I love it that in a philosophy talk it is totally normal to say things like “Love is a Four-Dimensional Worm”.

Getting whiplash going from US students emailing me "Hey Miss [most entitled question you've ever seen]" to Portuguese students starting their emails with "Most Excellent Professor, [pretentious paragraphs detailing their take on 4 Great Philosophers]".

Various pro-war arguments of the form "Did you know the Iranian government is very bad actually!???" betray a Marvel film level understanding of international relation (tbh probably _less_ sophisticated than the better of them!) and are a painful reminder that journalists learned nothing from Iraq.

Recently learned that, in Portugal, a legally allowed name for girls is “Excel” (for boys, only “Exel”, sorry). What are all you nerds waiting for

We need an eternal moratorium on tech or media literacy as solutions to problems that are literally about how the entirety of our societies are built. "Literacy" is not going to stop individual people buying into gender stereotypes or ideological views that everything around us teaches us are right.

Finding out that god asking people to do referee reports is even worse than getting requests for referee reports

Today would be a great day to join your union (if your workplace is unionized). No reason. It's just always a good day to join a union.

Look at this sexy new volume on "WTF is belief?" - a crucial question for understanding persuasion, irrationality, propaganda, religion, misinfo, you name it! I have a chapter in it. 1/