Category: Data

Academic Labor, Data

Academic Employment Numbers: A Closer Look

December 9, 2015

Articles about employment in higher education sometimes mention that 75% of today’s college instructors are adjuncts. That number—or at least the idea that there…
Data

Slight Decline in Number of Philosophy PhDs

December 4, 2015

451 PhDs in philosophy were awarded in the United States in 2014, marking a modest decrease from the 494 of the previous year. Here…
Data

Earnings and Occupations of Humanities Undergrads

October 5, 2015

Data about the earnings, occupations, and unemployment of humanities undergraduates (as of 2013) is featured in a new report by the American Academy of…
Data, Publishing

“Sleeping Beauty” Papers in Philosophy (updated)

June 24, 2015

“Sleeping Beauty” papers “lie dormant for years before experiencing a sudden spike in citations as they are discovered and recognized as important.” A recent…
Data

Philosophy Placement Data Analysis Project

June 23, 2015

A new research project to collect and analyze job placement data in academic philosophy, funded by the American Philosophical Association (APA), is underway. The…
Data

Kant + Data = Beautiful Utility? (updated)

May 12, 2015

Minerva is “a web tool for supporting philosophical historiography research.” It’s the master’s thesis project of Valerio Pellegrini, and was designed by him in conjunction with…
Data

Data on the Humanities

April 13, 2015

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has published its Humanities Indicators report for the United States, “The State of the Humanities: Higher Education 2015.” Among…
Data

For the Money

January 30, 2015

Graduates with philosophy degrees have “higher earnings potential than many other arts and humanities-related fields,” said TheRichest. Payscale reports midcareer median salaries are $84,000…
Data, Philosopher Demographics

Minorities in Philosophy: Data Visualized

January 11, 2015

Data from 860 philosophers who identified themselves on the UPDirectory (previously) as belonging to minority demographic groups has been analyzed and depicted in various graphs…
Data

UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) & Philosophy

December 21, 2014

A few days ago, the results from the UK government’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise were released. I suspect that a lot of…

Heap of Links

“Submission” is a humorous clicker-style game about starting a career in academic philosophy (or not) — created by Nat Hansen
“The best investment in education is to become the most human human—a challenging, fulfilling, exciting pursuit that connects us across generations” — an interview with Christa Acampora, philosopher and dean of Arts & Sciences at UVA
“What would happen if we tried to live without the mythology of agency at all?” — It's worth pondering, since "agency is just an internal command hallucination," says Alexander Douglas
“Reading List” is a free Mac app for keeping track of papers to read — philosophy PhD student Hayden Kajercline created this productivity tool for researchers, with help from Claude
How should we react to scary predictions about AI? “First: by asking questions” — "If you believe predictions uncritically, it amounts to obeying in advance," says Carissa Véliz
“I feel unbelievably lucky that I was able to make philosophy my profession” — Karen Ng reflects on her path into philosophy, at #first-genphilosophers
The ordinary concept of knowledge “doesn’t work at all the way philosophers said it does” — a round-up of studies shows how weird the philosophers' version of the concept is
1000 or so psychiatrists were asked to diagnose standardized clinical case vignettes. “Two doctors agreed on the diagnosis only 55% of the time” — What does this tell us about psychiatry? Or about other fields in which experts disagree?
Where Aristotle taught Alexander — "this newest dig may be the most revealing yet, offering insight into the specifics of Alexander the Great’s education"
Over 4000 of the Justice Department’s lawyers have left their jobs since Trump’s second term began — The New Yorker on the moral dilemma facing some government employees: resign and avoid complicity, or stay and resist where one can?
Underappreciated philosophy published between 1970-2019 — some old posts to which you can still add works that should be better appreciated
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 work
Would 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 you
Fifty 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 AIs
Sixty 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 Fugelsang
An “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?"

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Latest Comments

Patrick Lin on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
You said: If using the heuristic means you end up filtering out and so skipping out on any article like the one I mentioned, then aren’t you effectively…
David Wallace on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
Heuristics always work that way. Unless you read literally every piece of text you come across, which no-one can, you have to have some criterion for what to…
Matt LaVine on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
This is a really good point, Meme! Philosophy in the modern west has always been about destroying people and the planet, while disguising it as progress.
Dan Hooley on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
"I would not be surprised if philosophical problems, on average, required more compute than math problems. The reason is that with a math problem you are more likely…
David Wallace on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
I wasn't even talking about cities; even premodern villages had enormous problems with sanitation. If you have even a small human population living sustainedly in a single place,…
applestooranges on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
If using the heuristic means you end up filtering out and so skipping out on any article like the one I mentioned, then aren't you effectively making sure…
David Strohmaier on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
Thank you, Dan! The number I have seen for the recent batch of math results from OpenAI is that it supposedly took only "3 hours of GPT-Pro level…
Meme on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
And we were never even CLOSE to being as cool as the Fonz before this…
David Wallace on Those OpenAI Math Results
This is a perfectly serious thing to be concerned about, but it's worth remembering that the same could have been said about Mathematica thirty years ago.
David Wallace on Those OpenAI Math Results
I assume Jessie's point is that this is a forum specifically for mathematicians interested in AI. (Of course I agree with the larger point. OpenAI's model provided a…
David Wallace on Those OpenAI Math Results
2020: It's silly to think AI could ever end civilization – it can't even do basic arithmetic! 2022: It's silly to think AI could ever end civilization -…
Arewethereyet? on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
Depends on where and what you mean, mate. If you mean places like densely populated cities such as London, definitely more polluted and unsafe. Even true of many…
Dan Hooley on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
Thanks for sharing this, David. I, too, share your excitement for solving philosophical problems. And I'm excited for all of the ways AI models might contribute to this!…
David Wallace on Those OpenAI Math Results
I'm not necessarily unsympathetic (though I might have a much more expansive view as to what is valuable in human life). But I think if you polled the…
Matt LaVine on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
https://i.makeagif.com/media/11-21-2015/axFkKa.gif David Strohmaeir? DailyNous? Academic philosophy? All of the above?