Recent links…

Discussion welcome.

1. “I think what you should be looking for here is not so much a way of telling people what they should and shouldn’t get worked up about and more a way of disagreeing zealously but civilly” — Robert Goodin (ANU) is interviewed by Holly Lawford-Smith (Melbourne) in Quillette.
2. “I asked several of his students whether their professor had stirred up any serious controversy during the semester—all said no” — a profile at Mother Jones of Peter Singer, who taught his last course at Princeton this past Spring. 
3. “Despite his self-assessment that he was ‘a lousy junior consultant’, he had seen a need for ‘proper rigorous ethics advisory’ service that would charge BCG- and McKinsey-level fees” — a profile of ethics consultant David Rodin
4. “It might be crass or mercenary to point out that public philosophy increases demand for philosophy education. It’s also true” — Ian Olasov (NYU) on the reasons for, and questions raised by, public philosophy
5. If you’re an empirically-minded philosopher relying on social science studies, you need to learn how to read them critically — example: social media’s effects on teen mental health (via MR)
6. “For at least a millennium, humans have attempted take… two marvelously malleable and uniquely human abilities—abstract thinking and descriptive language—and outsource them to something more rational” — the history of “truth machines” includes philosophers, mathematicians, and zealots
7. “One conclusion… we should draw from LLMs’ success is that far more of our own language production may be rote, on autopilot, than we commonly tend to believe… The key question is how far down this goes” — Yoshua Bengio (Montreal) & Vincent Conitzer (Oxford) on what AI can teach us about ourselves

Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers.

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. Thank you.

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