Brian Weatherson
@bweatherson.bsky.social
đ€ 2662
đ„ 205
đ 1523
Philosopher at University of Michigan.
https://brian.weatherson.org/
pinned post!
This is a thread of things I've recently published, starting with my book from last year, with Open Book Publishers, defending the claim that knowledge is interest-relative. I'll continue this thread when new stuff comes out.
www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...
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Knowledge: A Human Interest Story
In this book the author argues for a groundbreaking perspective that knowledge is inherently interest-relative. This means that what one knows is influenced not just by belief, evidence, and truth, bu...
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0425
4 months ago
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Squid really wants the vegetables we are roasting.
2 days ago
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Brian Weatherson
Kieran Setiya
2 days ago
I wrote about William Kentridge: Under the Net
ksetiya.substack.com/p/an-essenti...
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An Essential Stupidity
I discovered William Kentridge by erroneous inference and epistemic luck. Memory said: âThis name has come up more than once in recent weeks, in venues that review art exhibitions.â Reason listened, a...
https://ksetiya.substack.com/p/an-essential-stupidity
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This post has one of the more prominent em-dashes in the blogâs recent history. Amusing little Easter egg if itâs deliberate I guess.
blog.apaonline.org/2025/11/28/d...
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Do You âDelveâ? | Blog of the APA
How Generative AI Is Changing Our VocabularyâAnd Maybe Our Thinking. When I worked on one of the early posts in this series, a data scientist I was collaborating with pointed out a pattern in Generati...
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/11/28/do-you-delve/?amp=1
3 days ago
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Brian Weatherson
Lisa Herzog
4 days ago
Update: free copy available within the next 14 days, CUP tells me!
www.cambridge.org/core/element...
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Politics and the Economy
Cambridge Core - Ancient Philosophy - Politics and the Economy
https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/politics-and-the-economy/47CB5C8609F731E7902921D0764BF146
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Brian Weatherson
Greg Sasso
4 days ago
Now conditionally accepted at
@thejop.bsky.social
. Very proud of this paper. Full paper here:
shorturl.at/TjEWx
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Randall Munroe
5 days ago
Fifteen Years
xkcd.com/3172/
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A Bad Debt Follows You Bachelor Kisses Spring Rain Right Here Love Goes On
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5 days ago
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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.
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5 days ago
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Henry Farrell
6 days ago
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.
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https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.14452
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Erin Kissane
6 days ago
it is the year 2025
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Chris Hanretty
6 days ago
Has no one in the BBC heard of the Streisand effect? Did everyone think, "oh, Rutger Bregman, he'll be cool with this"?
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Brian Weatherson
George Pearkes
7 days ago
latest sham investigation just dropped
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This week with bonus
@philimprint.bsky.social
content thanks to
@devinsanchezcurry.com
.
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7 days ago
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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 doesnât undermine the value of the big US state universities.
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8 days ago
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Nice example of Simpsonâs 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...
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Your Final Pre-Robo-Zone Umpire Accuracy Update
This is the last time weâll get to judge umpire accuracy without the ABS challenge system. Where do umpires stand, and how might we expect their accuracy to change once the robots get involved?
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/your-final-pre-robo-zone-umpire-accuracy-update/
9 days ago
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Brian Weatherson
Peter Momtchiloff
9 days ago
We the Would-be-goods shall release a new album on 13 February, *Tears Before Bedtime*. At our Bandcamp page you can listen to âThe Gallopersâ, a single from the album, and watch the first ever Would-be-goods video . . .
would-be-goods.bandcamp.com/album/tears-...
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Tears Before Bedtime, by Would-Be-Goods
14 track album
https://would-be-goods.bandcamp.com/album/tears-before-bedtime
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This is interesting about how ChatGPT means weâre losing easy signals that something is incoherent.
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12 days ago
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Brian Weatherson
Chris Bertram
13 days ago
Me at the LRB blog on the atrocious refugee policy of Mahmood and Starmer
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Christopher Bertram | âCore Protectionâ
Refugeehood is not supposed to be like this. The ideal envisaged by the Refugee Convention is that refugee status should...
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/november/core-protection
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Liesbeth Corens
13 days ago
OMG. Apple is Catholic.
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southpaw
13 days ago
Authoritarianism arrives with emails like this. The masked brute squad may or may not accost you later, be sure to carry your papers.
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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.
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14 days ago
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Brian Weatherson
Justin Weinberg
14 days ago
"She felt that she was deceiving her professors and betraying the purpose of her education." Still, she continued to use ChatGPT...
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Even Conscientious Students in Their Favorite Courses⊠- Daily Nous
In a philosophy seminarââmy favorite class Iâve taken so far,â she saidâGwen used AI to write almost all her essays just to avoid late submissions. That's "Gwen", a student at Yale, interviewed for an...
https://dailynous.com/2025/11/17/even-conscientious-students-in-their-favorite-courses/
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Brian Weatherson
Gabriele Contessa
14 days ago
My Element on science denial is free to download until December 1st! Get it for free while you can!
doi.org/10.1017/9781...
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Science Denial
Cambridge Core - Philosophy: General Interest - Science Denial
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009625326
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Mike Goodman
17 days ago
This is one hell of a picture.
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NBER
17 days ago
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
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Brooke Newman
17 days ago
Message to all faculty: your expertise is no longer trusted or valued at this so-called âuniversity.â
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hunchback from sardinia
18 days ago
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
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These courses that Cat developed sound great.
blog.apaonline.org/2025/11/05/t...
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Tabletop Philosophy, Catharine Saint-Croix | Blog of the APA
When I arrived at the University of Minnesota, I applied for a small âteaching innovation grantâ to support what I took to be a long-shot idea: building a philosophy course around a role-playing game ...
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/11/05/tabletop-philosophy-catharine-saint-croix/
18 days ago
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This is interesting on how easy it is to trick even the most cutting edge LLMs with simple graphical tweaks.
posit.co/blog/introdu...
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When plotting, LLMs see what they expect to see - Posit
Data science agents need to accurately read plots even when the content contradicts their expectations. Our testing shows today's LLMs still struggle here.
https://posit.co/blog/introducing-bluffbench/
18 days ago
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Brian Weatherson
Huw Price
19 days ago
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...
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Lewis Hall decision made, Ramsey chance - Newcastle United line-ups vs Brentford
Eddie Howe has a few big calls to make when his side take on Brentford in today's Premier League match
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/lewis-hall-decision-made-ramsey-32829381
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Brian Weatherson
Lea Ypi
19 days ago
Some US events open to the public next week!
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I get the strangest scam emails.
19 days ago
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Brian Weatherson
Hearing Things
19 days ago
âThis feels like the only transaction that you can do on the internet that doesnât involve a password or some kind of authentication, and itâs a really important one, and itâs across the entire music streaming ecosystem.â
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Why Is It So Easy to Flood Streaming With AI Slop?
And what the hell is Operation Clown Dump?
https://www.hearingthings.co/why-is-it-so-easy-to-flood-streaming-with-ai-slop/
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Brian Weatherson
Shen-yi Liao ć»éĄŻçŠ
20 days ago
Charles Mills's posthumous piece on Tolkien is central to the argument made here!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
@dailynous.com
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Jenny Judge
20 days ago
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...
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Lecturer in Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science
Role type: Full-time Faculty: Arts School: School of Historical and Philosophical Studies Salary: $124,656 - $148,023 p.a. plus 17% super Teach and inspire across diverse Philosophy subjects / Contrib...
https://unimelb.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/UoM_External_Career/job/Parkville/Lecturer-in-Metaphysics-and-Philosophy-of-Science_JR-005613-1
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David Jesse
20 days ago
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...
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Inside the All-Important Presidential Transition
As tenures get shorter, leaders who straddle two campuses must use their time wisely.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/inside-the-all-important-presidential-transition
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Philip Ebert
21 days ago
Looking forward to be participating at a workshop entitled âForecasting Rare and Severe Events: Behaviour, Verification, and Judgmentâ at St Andrews organised by Ian Durbach from the Stats Departmentâwildly interdisciplinary event. This will be fun
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Frances Egan
21 days ago
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
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Call for Papers: Book Symposium on "Deflating Mental Representation" by Frances Egan | Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences (PhiMiSci) focuses on the interface between philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. PhiMiSci is a peer-reviewed, not-for-profit open-access journal...
https://philosophymindscience.org/index.php/phimisci/announcement/view/71
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Greg Restall
21 days ago
Katherine Hawley is indeed sorely missed here in Philosophy and St Andrews, and itâs good to see her clear and wise reflections on trust and trustworthiness gain a fresh audience.
https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/115525767271021313
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Kieran Healy (@
[email protected]
)
A little more about trustworthy data visualization and the work of the philosopher Katherine Hawley. https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2025/11/10/trustworthy-data-visualization/
https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/115525767271021313
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Brian Weatherson
southpaw
22 days ago
I know several people who worked on this rollout. They were really proud of it.
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23 days ago
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Karthik Sankaran
23 days ago
Are there philosophy classes on the ethics on insurance underwriting and pricing ? Seems like you could get a solid semester out of it.
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Brian Weatherson
Shen-yi Liao ć»éĄŻçŠ
23 days ago
FWIW my textbook of choice has been for all x Calgary paired with
Carnap.io
. Iâm super appreciative of the work that the Open Logic Project people have been doing!
openlogicproject.org
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Welcome To Carnap!
https://Carnap.io
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Brian Weatherson
Sean Carroll
24 days ago
Boooo
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Brian Weatherson
Lizzie O'Leary
24 days ago
The timeline in so many of these cases tracks the gpt4o rollout
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/t...
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Lawsuits Blame ChatGPT for Suicides and Harmful Delusions
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/technology/chatgpt-lawsuit-suicides-delusions.html
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Brian Weatherson
Mark Jacob
24 days ago
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.
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Brian Weatherson
Huw Price
25 days ago
Iâm not going to delete mine. I like the web page they made for me too much.
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Brian Weatherson
Erin Kissane
25 days ago
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.
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Dan Davies
25 days ago
I expand on a rant about the unseriousness of serious politics
backofmind.substack.com/p/the-genera...
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the generalised problem factory
taking opps research seriously
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-generalised-problem-factory
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Brian Weatherson
AltWatcher
25 days ago
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.
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