What happened this month to make everyone look for papers on QBism (but not download them)? philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14824/

Oh. My. God. www.popsci.com/environment/...

Nobel Prize Laureate Roger Penrose, Yvette Fuentes, and myself, request your help in order to save an archive of incredible scientific and historical value. Please raise awareness by *sharing*, or *contribute*: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/roger-penr...

Sliced white peach and chili crisp is surprisingly great combination

Remembering that I learned the word "supervenience" from Emily Adlam a decade ago. It's still one of the most annoying words in my arsenal, so I'm eternally grateful for that.

Crockett: "I'm gonna honor someone who decided they were going to proclaim I was involved in the 'great white replacement'? Yeah, I'm not honoring that ... it's unfortunate more of my colleagues even on my side couldn't see the amount of harm this man was attempting to inflict upon our communities"

I regret to inform you that making progress on the measurement problem is going to require making progress on the hard problem of consciousness.

I love writing in coffee shops because I have trouble concentrating if I'm not overhearing the stupidest person in the world talk to the second stupidest person in the world.

I just want to be able to go to one coffeeshop in this city without having to hear people talking about generative ai

The biggest threat to generative AI is people’s basic desire to know and make things. I believe that that will be what undoes this creeping, cancerous mediocrity, if anything does, because nothing else (including, sadly, respect for life or others) is strong enough or ineradicable enough to persist.

If you would prefer not to read this in < 300 character chunks, I think this should automatically update as I continue adding. skyview.social?url=https%3A...

Signposting this part of the "Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics" livetweet thread. I think it would be reasonable to consider this the beginning of "Part 2", dealing with specific approaches and their technical problems.

me: making art is difficult. criticism is harsh and cruel. doctor: treatment is simple, stay away from your worst critics. go spend time by yourself me, bursting into tears: but doctor,

We've reached the part of the morning when I have to stop skimming the abstracts of papers I know I'll never read and actually do some work

Ultimate flex: I don't think I could name five podcasts

People say they don't teach real world skills in college anymore. People are wrong. We tried writing in cuneiform yesterday in my "What is a word?" class

Williams was a photographer for Jet magazine. He took the photo himself. The OG selfie. Iconic. Orangeburg, South Carolina, 1956

I think it's about time that I got the flying pony I asked for for my sixth birthday

Since ppl love campus anecdotes so much, here's one: I have colleagues who give students they know to be MAGA an A (in one case I'm aware of overlooking clear AI use), because the colleague is on a Green Card or H1B, and they know: one complaint like at Texas A&M, and they're on a flight home. (1/3)

When they say "AI is making me faster than ever" this is the kind of productivity they mean

Interesting how "This tech is here to stay" arguments about AI imply that it is some sort of failing on your part for not using it. There are plenty of exiting technologies that I do not use and nobody spills ink and column inches over it.

I just got a copy of this new book from Emily Adlam (with whom I did my masters, so this is the first book I'm reading written by a former classmate!). I'm going to try the thing where I tweet about it as I go.

lmao my friend just told me to "relax around it and try to have no expectations" does he even know me

Federal immigration agents were seemingly forced to retreat from a roofing job site in Rochester, NY, after being confronted by more than 100 protesters The workers stayed on the roof and agents drove away in a Border Patrol SUV on four flat tires, which had been slashed

I don't really care if the future is short videos. I like words. Words have gotten me this far and I'm gonna stick with 'em for the duration

stop dividing academics between stem and humanities and start dividing them between whether they prefer xkcd or far side

We had such a good thing going with machines that did exactly what you told them to, and then I guess we got tired of that?

Back from post-conference vacation and looking through my notes from the #SEEQA2025 conference. So much cool work being done! Maybe next time I should try live-tweeting...

they’re so close

In this piece for Aeon, I argue that, while nanotechnology is now a very real and mature field, a popular early vision of it was an example of what I am calling an "oneiric technology": a fantasy of the sort that Silicon Valley loves. aeon.co/essays/no-su...

Cool pages in the Oxford history of science museum. Second one is from an 1899 French edition/translation by François Lau of a 7th century Syriac text by Severus Sebokht on astrolabes.

I’m trying very hard to convince myself that metaphysics is real but it’s hard going

In general we don’t really need smooth jazz covers of songs but we really don’t need smooth jazz covers of Sade

My god this is awful. Any time Altman opens his mouth every journalist should ignore his prattle and read out these quotes. Shut it down.

Does anyone have recommendations for a good and relatively technical history of the development of classical computing? I feel like if I knew more about that I could better evaluate the state of the quantum computing industry.

This is the same paper as before, but I posted it on philsci-arxiv so I've decided I count as a philosopher now philsci-archive.pitt.edu/26374/

“They claim to read the same books” is such a multilayered burn, I LOVE it

Heading to my first conference in Oxford, feeling fancy!

Maybe I would be more tempted to use LLMs if I didn't really like writing and thinking, but, well,

I asked my keyboard autocomplete what it wants. it said the more I learn about the other one of the things I have to do is have to be a good person to be able to help with the same way you can get to the point that felt... vulnerable and deep.

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

My guess is unfortunately this is wishful thinking, and not actually how they feel. I imagine they're generally pretty convinced they're doing something good and important and looking cool while doing it, and the people telling them off are lefty weirdos. Probably still good to yell at them though.

I was going to do a thing about building up a research program starting from the idea of calling myself a "hermeneutic physicist" and working backwards to figure out what that could mean, but I guess I hadn't seen the title of that Sokal paper for a while. Close call there.

On my way to sfo through the western Valley of Ashes (four thousand AI startup billboards along 101)

a gem from the Wikipedia entry on the hermeneutic circle

Oh I see I just have to understand myself better and then I too will want to use chatgpt to write simpering LinkedIn posts

So many of my fellow scientists are deeply anti-intellectual at heart.

Wtf