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Academia

The Default: Rebuttals Not Retractions (several updates)

September 14, 2017

Over the past several days academics on social media have been discussing in increasingly agitated language the publication of “The Case for Colonialism,” by Portland…

Heap of Links

The most bizarre plagiarism-related story ever — featuring: a death, an investigator, a dissertation, a mysterious red book, and more
New data on earnings by major and university — though not all universities
“AI poses two different existential threats to [our] valuing practices” — Jordan MacKenzie offers an account of why negative judgments about AI taking over our creative and caring activities are justified
“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

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Latest Comments

João da Rocha Rodrigues on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
Horrible argument. Philosophy is not formally verifiable like mathematics. The guest recognizes this and then immediatly ignores it in favor of some dubious notion of "rational equilibrium" between…
no thank you on Those OpenAI Math Results
*for certain values of "learn", given what we know about deskilling **to the extent that their outputs can be trusted when unverified, which they clearly aren't in this…
Alyssa on Simion Elected to ISC Board
Congratulations Prof Simion!
Michel on Those OpenAI Math Results
A Gish Gallop need not consist of a pile of lies. The idea is to overwhelm your dialectical opponent with too many arguments on too many topics for…
Lambert Strether on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
Awesome. So first Silicon Valley enclosed and looted the commons of civilization, and then it put a meter on it. What's not to like?
David Wallace on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
That there’s no clean separation is compatible with being able to identify recognizably the same general idea across different contexts; still, I also think philosophers often wrongly *think*…
David Wallace on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
I don’t think that’s true, except in the very broad sense that post WW2 the US set out to fund basic science on the expectation that doing so…
Roger Rogersen Jun. on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
Hi David, I've seen you advocate for the "discuss with AI, then write the paper yourself, then discuss more with AI" model on a number of DN posts.…
Epicureanpairofsox on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
"This assumes you can make a clean separation between the argument and its expression in writing; as I’ve said in the thread on advice to grad students, I…
Eric Steinhart on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
Lots of human-written mathematical proofs are initially sloppy messes (not "word salad", as there aren't many words). Godel's original proofs were dense jungles which took decades to streamline.…
MBW on Those OpenAI Math Results
As I understood the criticism, it was less that mathematics is a journey and more that in the usual practice, solving an open problem yields more fruitful avenues…
Eric Steinhart on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
If AIs are going to advance further, they're going to need to explain their reasoning, present it clearly, analyze their own concepts, and exercise lots of second-order critical…
Pageturner on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
But they enjoy that access to capital owing to their association with disciplines that are profitable, right? That is not true of philosophy.
AGT on Those OpenAI Math Results
I think all of these are beset by collective action problems whereas medical research is not (or much less). Also, all these other areas involve a myriad of…
Ben M-Y on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
Well, thank you!

Tag: reply

The Default: Rebuttals Not Retractions (several updates)