This essay is by far the best along its line, but the more I reflect about this stuff the more I think it's hard to hold an image of human experience, human thought, human understanding, human life, and human relationships as meaningful ends while also seeing them as dead-ends

Thanks for the kind words, and thoughtful response @peligrietzer.bsky.social ! I'm not here as much, but I put some responses on the other site: x.com/LedermanHarv...

Enjoyed this nice piece by the great Justin Tiwald on autonomy and morality in Confucianism. Not sure I love the clickbait title, but I love the work Justin is doing uncovering views about moral deference and moral autonomy in (neo)Confucianism... iai.tv/articles/the...

Very excited to be going to Chicago for @agnescallard.bsky.social's famous Night Owls next week! I'll be discussing my essay "ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life". Hope to see you there if you're local!

UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics! Asst or Assoc. We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.) faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793 🤘

The professor I'm currently TAing for is making students use an extension called 'Process Feedback' that tracks key logs and time on the document: processfeedback.org

If you're doing *any* out of class assessment, you're incentivizing AI use and harming students who do the work themselves. But some day we have to assess writing again. The solution is monitored computer-labs. What Universities are building these? We need to push for them.

Anthropic recently announced that Claude, its AI chatbot, can end conversations with users to protect "AI welfare." Simon Goldstein and @harveylederman.bsky.social argue that this policy commits a moral error by potentially giving AI the capacity to kill itself.

Simon Goldstein and I have an op-ed live in Lawfare today! Anthropic's policy is premised on the idea that AI is a potential welfare subject. We argue that if you take that idea seriously (we don't take a stand on it here), the policy commits a moral mistake on its own terms.

You can read our full review (without a paywall) @ philpapers.org/archive/GOOK.... And you can also check out Harvey's paper that inspired us here: philpapers.org/archive/LEDU...

Now out in @science.org: @chazfirestone.bsky.social and I review Steven Pinker's new book "When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows...". We learned a ton from it, but think its central thesis—that common knowledge explains coordination—faces a powerful challenge. 🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I really enjoyed reading Steven Pinker’s new book and thinking through what it would take to share infinitely iterated knowledge with someone (I know that you know that I know that you know…). In @science.org, my colleague @jeremygoodman.bsky.social & I briefly give our perspective on this issue.

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?