Wow @utaustin.bsky.social maybe @utaustinihs.bsky.social maybe there are other ways to shout out to the department of East Asia Studies and the Department of History, but however that may be, they are doing some amazing stuff with in house games for their JapanLab! Just found even more stuff here.

Simon Goldstein and I have a new paper, “What does ChatGPT want? An interpretationist guide”. The paper argues for three main claims. philpapers.org/rec/GOLWDC-2 1/7

Jonathan Lear's Aristotle: the Desire to Understand was pivotal in some of my first encounters with Aristotle. I found Aristotle and Logical Theory later, but it became a key inspiration for how to think about core parts of the corpus...1/2

Max Weber, 1917:

Go grue

What are the most important new ideas in normative ethics from this century?

📣@futrell.bsky.social and I have a BBS target article with an optimistic take on LLMs + linguistics. Commentary proposals (just need a few hundred words) are OPEN until Oct 8. If we are too optimistic for you (or not optimistic enough!) or you have anything to say: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Something I cherish about analytic philosophy is that no matter how famous you are or how profound your ideas sound, it's still your job to answer all the objections. I wish public promoters of philosophy held themselves to the same standard.

Can AI models introspect? What does introspection even mean for AI? We revisit a recent proposal by Comșa & Shanahan, and provide new experiments + an alternate definition of introspection. Check out this new work w/ @siyuansong.bsky.social, @harveylederman.bsky.social, & @kmahowald.bsky.social 👇

exciting new paper from Siyuan! I really enjoyed working with him on this, inspired by important work by Murray Shanahan and Julia Comsa. Hard questions about how to operationalize the notion of “introspection” that’s relevant for practical applications in AI today. Hope you’ll check it out!

Great piece as usual. Particular fun this week to see the shoutout to Adrienne Raphel and the close reading of @rkubala.bsky.social's lovely paper on the aesthetics of crosswords!

My piece is featured in today's Browser. If you don't know it the Browser is a phenomenal newsletter that puts together fascinating pieces from all over the web. Link in first comment--you should subscribe! @uribram.bsky.social

(1/5) 🤖 Harvey Lederman asks: What if AI doesn’t destroy us—just does everything better? From polar explorers to master mathematicians, he traces our drive for discovery and purpose. If machines take that work, what’s left for us? 🔗 scottaaronson.blog?p=9030&ref=t... @harveylederman.bsky.social

Enjoyed this! Question for @mraginsky.bsky.social: even if detailed future scenarios are "big worlds", won't a reasonable decision theory for them be (effectively) similar to one that weights small risks of very bad outcomes very highly?

I appreciated the wide range of references here, from Edith Wharton to the Buddhist Pali Canon. However, this essay resonated most with my recent reading of Richard Wollheim’s _The Thread of Life_, which presented a vision of what it means to lead a life …

My 2 cent: humans might end up looking for meaning in some of the old places. Religion, which has been gradually pushed to the margins of our post-Enlightment society, might make a comeback—not only because it is comforting, but also because it is typically set aside as a result of education. 1/3

A very thoughtful piece

I wrote about automation and the meaning of life, as a guest post on Scott Aaronson's Shtetl-Optimized. (1/5) scottaaronson.blog?p=9030

The invention of a good noun opposite to improvement would be a significant unworsening of the English language.

burn or compliment?

Pub day for this fantastic book! It presents tons of data and arguments in a readable, engaging way. While I was reading it, I was talking about the facts and ideas to everyone I know, and still think about them a lot. I *really* recommend you check it out! www.amazon.com/After-Spike-...

Pub day for this fantastic book! It presents tons of data and arguments in a readable, engaging way. While I was reading it, I was talking about the facts and ideas to everyone I know, and still think about them a lot. I *really* recommend you check it out! www.amazon.com/After-Spike-...

This is my annual post advocating that divergence from mean grade be reported for every student in every class on transcripts (including a summary cumulative average). This incentivizes students to seek classes that differentiate them and provides a needed incentive against grade inflation.

@rkubala.bsky.social, @adamlovett.bsky.social, and I have a new paper forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophy. It’s called “On the value of irreplaceable objects” – Here’s a thread! philpapers.org/rec/KUBOTV 1/n

Confucius squeaked through with the edited vols

Publish or perish: the untold story of Socrates

I had some thoughts about this excellent paper by Harvey, @christiantarsney.bsky.social, and Dean Spears. I thought they would be long thread length, but they grew to long blog post length, and the post is here: brian.weatherson.org/quarto/posts... (1/10)

Our paper A Dominance Argument Against Incompleteness, is now forthcoming in The Philosophical Review! A thread on what’s inside. 1/9 philpapers.org/rec/TARSTS

If scholarly work in your field isn't fun for me to read for pleasure and isn't eliciting enthusiastic "you changed my life!" emails from non-academics, it's broken, time to start over.

Favorite philosophy *books* from the last ten years? Please self-promote!

Reading Joshua Rothman's recent piece about profiling Dennett and thinking of philosophers of a similar generation whose profiles I'd like to read. Brian Skyrms? Bas van Frassen? Do these exist? Other ideas?

I just had a chance to watch this fantastic talk. I really recommend it for anyone interested in how LLMs can help us understand language: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBor...

This is a fantastic paper, and a fantastic thread! Lots of challenging ideas here for philosophers of language---Richard and Kyle bring deep knowledge of the history and philosophy of science to bear on our current situation. This is a must read!

For me this point seems often overlooked in discussions of this (very contentious!) issue

This is a beautiful paper! The first third helpfully labels a stream of recent work in philosophy of AI as "propositional interpretability". The idea is to use propositional attitudes like belief, desire, and intention, to help explain AI in a way that we can understand. 1/n

A great article about a great paper, featuring @UTAustin's very own @kmahowald! www.quantamagazine.org/can-ai-model...

Seems about right

What is a question in philosophy where, the more you read and think, the deeper it seems?

Hot take: A lot of philosophical writing is actually pretty great. More stylish than the sciences, clearer and more efficient and than literary non-fiction (and many humanities disciplines).

I was told recently that John Broome reviews a paper every Sunday. That could be a myth, but even if it is, it's inspiring. Reviewing, like letter writing, is extremely important work. Senior people should do more of it than many of us do, and we should do it more promptly. It's part of our job.

The start of the Analects of Confucius (學而時習之不亦說乎) is often understood as "Is it not pleasant to learn and often practice it?" Yang Bojun 楊伯峻 shows that the ancient understanding was rather like "Is it not pleasant to learn and apply it at the right time?" 時 having a meaning close to Greek καιρός /

My book on Knowledge is out today (World Philosophy Day) with Open Book Publishers. It's freely downloadable in PDF and Epub form, and cheap to order in hardback or paperback. #philsky

9 mins in we are getting a resounding "no". Not a single discussion of philosophical value, progress, what "ca." means etc.

Can #philsky ever be as philosophically valuable as facebook ca. 2017? Discuss.

Getting back to my South Florida roots at #EMNLP2024 this week, say hi. Tues: @kanishka.bsky.social on how LLMs learn a rare construction and a posters on his work on property inheritance. Wednesday: Ask-a-Philosopher! @harveylederman.bsky.social and I will be presenting our TACL philosophy paper.

I've just posted a final version of my paper "Of Marbles and Matchsticks", which won a Sanders prize this past December. I fell in love with the questions, and for better or worse ended up pouring effort into the paper. I hope you'll give it a read! philpapers.org/archive/LEDO...

This excellent paper by @harveylederman.bsky.social made me think that there are three philosophy topics which should be discussed together more than they are: - Multiple dimensions of value - Imprecise probabilities - Equilibrium selection rules A short thread to follow...

I recently met someone who met Russell. This made me wonder if I've met anyone who met Wittgenstein. I'm sure I have friends who met someone who met Wittgenstein (e.g. by meeting Anscombe). But have I? Also, who do I know who met Russell?