The AI threat to independent student writing is not necessarily a threat to student learning
— what's needed, says Joe Cruz, are courses "in which ideas are expressed in real time and analytical thought unfolds as a debate or an oral defense or a group discussion"—and small enough classes to make that workWould you take a pill that allows you, with no ill health effects, to permanently forgo sleep?
— Rebecca Lowe thinks you have no good reason not to, though she neglects to consider that sometimes it's the world that needs a break from youFifty essays in the philosophy of paleontology
— by Max Dresow at the Extinct blog“Asking whether [an AI] model ‘has a world model’ leaves much unresolved. Our findings point toward mechanistically studying its world modeling; uncovering the structures it learned [and] the world modeling capacities that recruit these”
— further research on the internal representations of AIsSixty Years of Philosophy in America
— Ernest Sosa's Dewey Lecture from the 2024 APA Eastern Division Meeting“You’re responsible for other people’s learning of this material, so you better know it at a higher level yourself”
— for 20 years, the Socrates Project at the University of Toronto has hired senior philosophy undergrads to run weekly tutorials for introductory students“Suddenly, my problems stop being problems in the world. They become problems in my head. The problem is no longer: ‘my job is demoralizing, but I can’t leave it’… It’s: ‘I have a chemical imbalance that prevents me from enjoying life'”
— Justin Garson on “the pathologizing tendency”A political theorist and a comedian discuss the American presidency
— "The Oath and the Office" is the podcast of Corey Brettschneider & John FugelsangAn “evidence revolution” has taken place in medicine and other fields over the past 50 years
— but, as Benjamin Santos Genta asks, there's still the question: "what counts as good scientific evidence?"“Behind the scenes at Ethics”
— editor Douglas Portmore shares how the journal works“Cambridge philosophy gave Scruton a sense of the distinction between real thinking and fake thinking… a sense of when a conclusion had been too easily won”
— a look at the early years of Roger Scruton“Once students see language in an Aristotelian way, nobody talks about what a chatbot thinks or feels.”
— when teaching students about LLMs, don’t forget they know almost nothing about that second "L"Effective altruism may seem “bonkers” to some, but “what do our elders propose as a replacement? Aristotle? Arendt? Marx? A life in community? A life of the mind? Worst of all, more dialogue?”
— Harry Levov, a student, attends an Effective Altruism conferenceThe theme of the 33rd edition of Artissima, a contemporary art festival in Turin, is inspired by Martha Nussbaum
— the theme: “the flexible, acrobatic body” of “art, guided by fancy – the forward projection of fantasy”“50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know”
— a short story by Ken Liu“We need a moratorium on new rules and new software purchases until we’ve pruned what does not serve the fundamental mission of teaching and learning and in fact gets in the way of it”
— Barry Lam on higher ed's techno-bureaucratic bloat, in the Boston Globe(unpaywalled here)
“When What Rightly Matters Doesn’t Really Matter”
— Lisa Tessman's Presidential Address at the 2024 Eastern Division APA meeting“Is there dumb wokeness in the academy? Of course. But if we are truly interested in whether it is prominent, representative, isolated [etc.]… we are going to need a more sophisticated methodology than repeated applications of the availability bias”
— Steven Hales on caricatures of the academyHumpback whales to the rescue
— the possibility of animal altruism (via MR)
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I like this comic, though it cuts both ways. Lay people tend not to have a good understanding of what philosophers (of all stripes) do but, as this comic so hilariously illustrates, philosophers are also really bad at engaging people in their work and why it’s interesting.
We’re in the middle of a slow revolution of public philosophy (of which I count this blog as an instance) that is changing this.