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Ad Hoc
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Ad Hoc

By
Justin Weinberg
. March 2, 2021 at 1:32 pm

Ad Hoc
by Rachel Katler

Other Daily Nous Comics / More Info about DN Comics
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Categories Daily Nous Features
Tags ad hocDaily Nous Philosophy ComicsRachel Katler
10 likes
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Recent Comments

Runa on The Demise of Reading?

This is sort of cool. Thanks for understanding my question and your reply. To restate to see if I understand: you’re saying that amygdala stimulation can make […]
Sam Duncan on The Demise of Reading?

Reading hasn't been quite as dramatic as the rise and fall of math, though both have the same pattern. But the point is scores were […]
Phil Bold on How to Give a Killer Job Talk (guest post)

I empathize especially with historians who use long handouts. When you need to assemble a wide range of block quotes, you simply need a lot […]
ERW on How to Give a Killer Job Talk (guest post)

Good post and solid advice! Now if only there were any jobs out there at which to give one of these job talks...
Graduate Student on How to Give a Killer Job Talk (guest post)

A lot of good advice there, although I disagree with footnote 5. I've been to a number of very good talks with long-ish handouts (10 […]
LL Knuds on The Demise of Reading?

fair q, and yeah it wouldn't tell you a story, it'd just pipe the info in. but the story isn't really doing the work. what […]
mourinho on The Demise of Reading?

When you say a fancy BCI could do all this, i.e., "the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis,” what do you mean? Does the optimized […]
LL Knuds on The Demise of Reading?

yeah but this could all be done by a fancy BCI (i'm talking about an AI optimised BCI in 10 to 15 years), that's the […]
Reichenbach on The Demise of Reading?

Depressing AF. Speaking as an old person, my own reading habits have also been damaged by screens.
WiseGuy on How to Give a Killer Job Talk (guest post)

“What’s the weakest modal logic in which your argument is true?" Tell me you’re a relativist without saying you’re a relativist.
Aviv Hoffmann on Priest from CUNY to Tohoku

What was the AOS for the Tohoku position? I hear Priest is good for Nothing in Particular.
Nick Bostrom's book "Deep Utopia"
Ethics at Notre Dame symposium
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APDA: Academic Philosophy Data Analysis - Less Prestige Bias. More data.
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Heap of Links

  • “AI systems [probably] possess at least local analytical moral competence comprehensively. I suspect there is no fundamental obstacle to extending local competence to global competence, or to extending analytical competence to practical competence” -- Seth Lazar on recent experiments on the moral reasoning of AIs
  • “When caterpillars are in their chrysalises, their brains physically dissolve… and are rebuilt as butterfly brains. Yet experiments show that memories from their caterpillar days survive” -- one of several examples from the animal kingdom that may raise problems for the idea that the mind is the brain
  • “Are you a recliner or a refrainer?” -- The New Yorker's Joshua Rothman on airplane passenger ethics
  • “There’s a kind of epistemic transparency to our work in that everything you need to assess it is right there on the page” -- Richard Chappell on whether external funding corrupts philosophy
  • Can life—all life—be defined in terms of agency? -- well what do we mean by agency?
  • From Newton’s few laws to Alphafold’s 93 million parameters: how should we understand the scientific virtue of simplicity today? -- Eric Winsberg on science, simplicity, and prediction
  • This digital bibliography for consciousness studies has over 1,300 entries across 9 themes and 63 subtopics -- created by philosophy PhD student Melinda Gülsüm Esen with "the aim of making the literature more navigable for students and researchers working in or entering the field"
  • “We can exercise some control over our beliefs” if we run different “modes of operation” and “recruit additional beliefs and heuristics” -- Joshua Mugg begins a discussion of his book, “From Human Reasoning to Belief,” at the Brains Blog
  • Has the word “racist” been diluted through “conceptual inflation”? -- two philosophers, Nat Hansen & Shen-yi Liao, investigated this using the "apparent time method"
  • “What is the ideal that America should aspire to? I think the person who best articulated an answer is the philosopher John Rawls” -- for July 4th, the New Yorker asked a range of luminaries who their "favorite American" is
  • A philosophy of science reading group invites others to join -- it was begun by philosophy PhD students at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal
  • Despite skepticism about philosophy as a whole, specific philosophical research programs make progress. But probably not yours. -- Still, "you might be contributing to, even if not helping to constitute, philosophical progress," argues Lewis Ross. Feel better?
  • “For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life” -- a new development in synthetic biology
  • “Who, after all, would ask a machine to express their own final reflections to the people they love? Lots of people, it turns out.” -- Amy Olberding on what AI is costing her students
  • Does thought require sensory grounding? -- David Chalmers' 2023 APA Eastern Division Presidential Address
  • “It betrays a simplistic and superficial understanding of the development of intellectual trends… to suggest that the degeneration of scholarly standards… in certain domains could possibly be explained by the failure to understand some basic philosophical points about epistemological relativism” -- one of several problems with the Vanderbilt report on the humanities, from Richard Moran
  • “A professor… who allows grade grubbing to be a strategy worth attempting… gives a fraudulent seal of approval to people who will bring not only incompetence but a spirit of corruption into the work force. And yet, this is only the beginning…” -- the problem with grade grubbing, and one way to deal with it, from Justin Kalef
  • “Thales is widely regarded as the wisest man of his age, and the case for tenuring him is strong. Your department is lucky to have him. His most significant contribution is his argument that everything is ultimately made of water. It has made a big splash…” -- tenure letter for Thales, by Brad Skow
  • “Philosophical thinking will remain a source of human competitive advantage” -- "philosophy is staging a royal comeback," says The Economist
  • A defense of Pyrrhonian skepticism about philosophy -- from László Bernáth and János Tőzsér
  • Missing shades: your screen cannot show you all of the colors you can see in the world. Here’s what you’re missing on your computer, phone, and tv, and why. -- also: green traffic lights are not really green
  • “For countless researchers worldwide, [access to academic research] is possible only thanks to [illegal] shadow libraries and anonymous sharing networks.” Does that make it ok to use them? -- Lucas Miotto and Himani Bhakuni on the moral permissibility of sharing academic research illegally.
  • “It is difficult to imagine how a modern economy would operate with Plato’s proposed constraints on wealth acquisition. But it is not hard for a modern reader to understand the concerns that led him to his radical proposal” -- David Lay Williams on Plato on greed
  • Trolley problem love song -- by SNL's Jane Wickline, with commentary from Colin Jost (from last year, but I just saw it)
  • “They will seem wise when they may not be so” and they will “feel more confident” -- two ancient problems that, Eric Schliesser says, connect to current discussions of AI and universities
  • How “claim[s] that someone was the inventor of modern logic or a particular branch of philosophy” come to be a part of philosophy’s story -- more from Jens Lemanski on the case-study of Dummett's assertion that Frege invented analytic philosophy and modern logic
  • “Few of us now have much idea what online conferencing could become if given the chance to flourish” -- Eric Schwitzgebel defends further experimentation with online conferences, even if the current versions pale in comparison to in-person ones
  • Is it true that “the increased use of AI and other transformative technologies threatens to rob sports… of something important”? -- Ian Robertson on whether sports are threatened by AI
  • “The home, it turns out, was a topic of considerable philosophical interest in antiquity” -- Sandrine Bergès on the topic and its general neglect in subsequent philosophy
  • “The primary difference between deepfake photos and LLM conversations is that the people who generate the former are deliberately trying to fool others, and many of the people who elicit the latter from LLMs have inadvertently fooled themselves” -- Ted Chiang on why today's AIs are not conscious

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