Items of interest elsewhere…

1. “I really don’t know how it happened, how it is that I came to feel myself equal to tackling the headiest of topics” — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein recalls getting hooked on the “ecstasy” of abstract ideas
2. “The core aspiration of the project was to create opportunities for the public to do the humanities rather than only learn about the humanities” — Stone Addington on “a game-like crash course” to demonstrate “the impressive depth of the humanities and its centrality to a full life”
3. “The science of poetry is relevant to its art… [K]nowledge of what you can do in a poem, facilitates the writing of better poetry” — Brad Skow on knowing-how, knowing-that, and the obscure rules of meter
4. “If Churchland is right, reasoning just is the transformation of vectors in a high-dimensional activation space that maps the relevant cognitive realm” — Matt Brown on why anyone interested in whether and how AI’s “think” should revisit Paul Churchland’s work
5. “The ‘moral ostrich’ category of human failing… [people] ought to have been asking morally relevant questions… but dismissed them because they valued plausible deniability above all” — Saba Bazargan-Forward and others are asked by the NYT about complicity & Epstein
6. “I once gave a talk in the economics department at Princeton where I described myself as someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics, who calls himself a computer scientist, and is giving a talk to economists about a subject mainly studied by philosophers” — computer scientist Joe Halpern, whose work was significant to many philosophers, has died (via Christian List)
7. Taking philosophy to the street — one way to do it

Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several 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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