Squid really wants the vegetables we are roasting.

I wrote about William Kentridge: Under the Net ksetiya.substack.com/p/an-essenti...

This post has one of the more prominent em-dashes in the blog’s recent history. Amusing little Easter egg if it’s deliberate I guess. blog.apaonline.org/2025/11/28/d...

Update: free copy available within the next 14 days, CUP tells me! www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Now conditionally accepted at @thejop.bsky.social. Very proud of this paper. Full paper here: shorturl.at/TjEWx

Fifteen Years xkcd.com/3172/

A Bad Debt Follows You Bachelor Kisses Spring Rain Right Here Love Goes On

Sections II.2 and II.3 of this are good on the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs as they stand. In II.2, the LLM functions as a better search engine than any previously developed. In II.3, it reports as a novel proof something it simply learned from scraping arXiv.

Completely separately, there is a very interesting Wojtowicz and DeDeo paper - arxiv.org/pdf/2407.14452 - arguing that LLMs make it harder to signal sincere willingness to cooperate across a variety of social situations, by making it cheaper to send previously costly signals.

it is the year 2025

Has no one in the BBC heard of the Streisand effect? Did everyone think, "oh, Rutger Bregman, he'll be cool with this"?

latest sham investigation just dropped

This week with bonus @philimprint.bsky.social content thanks to @devinsanchezcurry.com.

I agree these are important to the US higher ed system, but the parenthetical about other countries is weird. The Australian system is nothing but equivalents of the big US state universities. That doesn’t undermine the value of the big US state universities.

Nice example of Simpson’s Paradox in this post. Minor league umpires have a higher accuracy rate on ball-strike calls than major league umpires but (a) they are worse on easy calls and (b) they are worse on hard calls. blogs.fangraphs.com/your-final-p...

We the Would-be-goods shall release a new album on 13 February, *Tears Before Bedtime*. At our Bandcamp page you can listen to ‘The Gallopers’, a single from the album, and watch the first ever Would-be-goods video . . . would-be-goods.bandcamp.com/album/tears-...

This is interesting about how ChatGPT means we’re losing easy signals that something is incoherent.

Me at the LRB blog on the atrocious refugee policy of Mahmood and Starmer

OMG. Apple is Catholic.

Authoritarianism arrives with emails like this. The masked brute squad may or may not accost you later, be sure to carry your papers.

Time for Elon to argue that the in car supervisors are making things worse, and they'd beat Waymo numbers if only those pesky humans got out of the way.

"She felt that she was deceiving her professors and betraying the purpose of her education." Still, she continued to use ChatGPT...

My Element on science denial is free to download until December 1st! Get it for free while you can! doi.org/10.1017/9781...

This is one hell of a picture.

Exposure to a field-specific faculty sexual misconduct incident decreases degree completion in that field by 3.4 percent four years after the incident, from Sarah R. Cohodes and Katherine B. Leu www.nber.org/papers/w34456

Message to all faculty: your expertise is no longer trusted or valued at this so-called “university.”

what i have learned from the email dump: the most pretentious, snobby, aloof academic will gladly entertain the theories and thoughts of an ignoramus if they happen to be a very wealthy, well-connected sex trafficker

These courses that Cat developed sound great. blog.apaonline.org/2025/11/05/t...

This is interesting on how easy it is to trick even the most cutting edge LLMs with simple graphical tweaks. posit.co/blog/introdu...

Big news for philosophers of probability, MIND 1994 has hit British soccer. Great to see Ramsey getting a guernsey! www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/footba...

Some US events open to the public next week!

I get the strangest scam emails.

“This feels like the only transaction that you can do on the internet that doesn’t involve a password or some kind of authentication, and it’s a really important one, and it’s across the entire music streaming ecosystem.”

Charles Mills's posthumous piece on Tolkien is central to the argument made here! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... @dailynous.com

My department (philosophy, University of Melbourne) is advertising a 4-yr fixed-term lectureship in metaphysics and philosophy of science. Open to people with Australian work rights. Philosophy folk, please feel free to repost etc unimelb.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/UoM_Ex...

The life expectancy of a presidency at any institution is rapidly falling, with little time for ruminations about a vision. Instead, because time is fleeting, the transition period between presidencies is even more important, experts said. www.chronicle.com/article/insi...

Looking forward to be participating at a workshop entitled “Forecasting Rare and Severe Events: Behaviour, Verification, and Judgment” at St Andrews organised by Ian Durbach from the Stats Department—wildly interdisciplinary event. This will be fun

The online journal Philosophy and the Mind Sciences is doing a symposium on my book, Deflating Mental Representation, based on my Jean Nicod lectures. See the Call for Papers here: philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph... and a précis of the book here: philpapers.org/rec/EGAPOD

Katherine Hawley is indeed sorely missed here in Philosophy and St Andrews, and it’s good to see her clear and wise reflections on trust and trustworthiness gain a fresh audience. https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/115525767271021313

I know several people who worked on this rollout. They were really proud of it.

Are there philosophy classes on the ethics on insurance underwriting and pricing ? Seems like you could get a solid semester out of it.

FWIW my textbook of choice has been for all x Calgary paired with Carnap.io. I’m super appreciative of the work that the Open Logic Project people have been doing! openlogicproject.org

Boooo

The timeline in so many of these cases tracks the gpt4o rollout www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/t...

Why is the Associated Press letting a White House official speak anonymously about why Trump pardoned a corrupt Tennessee Republican politician? And for 3 whole paragraphs, providing the defense that he only got $5,000 from his illegal scheme, which makes it OK In Trumpworld.

I’m not going to delete mine. I like the web page they made for me too much.

This week's @unbreaking.org update on immigration is *also* an update on data security because the administration is using immigration enforcement as a way to trial and operationalize a full-on surveillance state.

I expand on a rant about the unseriousness of serious politics backofmind.substack.com/p/the-genera...

AltNPS's post is full of the same lurid details and breathless dramatization as their previous attempt at ICE raid erotica from a few weeks ago. Things that AltNPS could not possibly have witnessed, and which aren't reported anywhere else.