Mini-Heap
Lots of good stuff lately, so here’s another edition of Mini-Heap—10 recent items from the frequently updated Heap of Links. Feel free to discuss.
The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap.
- “The myth of just intellectual allotment — of quality that invariably corresponds with moral merit — is worse than false: It’s dangerous” — Becca Rothfeld (Harvard) on whether sexual predators can be good scholars (via Jennifer Frey)
- Over 300 in-depth interviews with philosophers — organized into “pretty rough” categories
- A crowd-sourced survey of incidents of sexual harassment in academia — to date, there are 19 different entries listing “philosophy” as the discipline (via IHE)
- “He knows there’s sand and water and other facts about beaches. But he can’t conjure up beaches he’s visited in his mind, nor does he have any capacity to create a mental image of a beach” — it’s called congenital aphantasia
- “A small step towards making AI systems less specialized” — from the paper’s abstract: “Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play” (via MR)
- “We think that bees have experiences that feel like something to the bee. We don’t think the bees are aware of having experiences that feel like something to them.” — What is it like to be a bee?
- When employers tell you what you can wear — The BBC consults with Clare Chambers (Cambridge) and Anne Phillips (LSE) on when dress codes are reasonable
- An interview with T.M. Scanlon (Harvard) (video)
- “The theories of well-being that are most successful by the lights of philosophers are not the ones that are usable by the lights of scientists” — Anna Alexandrova (Cambridge) on what to expect from theories of well-being
- Would Aristotle unfriend that person? — Alexis Elder (Minnesota Duluth) on using social media wisely and well
Could I request that you adopt more descriptive titles for these link collections? For the longest time, I never clicked on your “Mini-heap” posts or on the Heap of links, because I confess my interest in mini heaps or even large heaps is not so strong. But if the title more accurately described what I might find, it could be more appealing. Why not give the post a title more closely related to the content? I expect that the click-through is much lower than it could be.