Or, do certain athletes have an obligation to speak out at certain kinds of injustices? Michael Jordan is often pilloried for saying "Republicans buy shoes too"
Philosophy and Game Theory at Carnegie Mellon đŠ Research the interface between philosophy, economics, and biology đ± www.kevinzollman.com
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Or, do certain athletes have an obligation to speak out at certain kinds of injustices? Michael Jordan is often pilloried for saying "Republicans buy shoes too"
I am ethnoculturally affiliated with Blueskyism, but my version of it doesnât bear much resemblance to the way my grandfather practiced it in the old country.
⊠the left will need to figure out better ways of connecting audiences to leadership in ways that empower those audiences. And giving/listening to positive feedback is just as valuable as giving/responding to negative feedback.
Positive feedback is valuable feedback too. Political leaders need signals about what theyâre doing right⊠not just what theyâre doing wrong. If they only hear negative voices, they may spin themselves in circles.
Real talk: I think my theatre background and years of experience doing improv was some of the best teacher training Iâve received. No matter how flipped or student-centered your classroom is, youâre giving a literal performance twice a week or more per section.
I agree. 20 years ago, imo it wasn't worth using. Now, some of it could genuinely pass for real cheese and even when it can't, it often gives you the things you want from cheese.
I'm guessing journos are going to stop asking me why the "hard data" are so good, given the economic news has been so grim. The lesson I hope they draw is an eternal one: Bad policy leads to bad outcomes, but the actual economy doesn't move at the pace of the political cycle.
Ropes are magic
The shift from a colleague who is disagreeable and wrong to one that is agreeable and wrong might be an improvement
Itâs never been more important for scientists to break out of the ivory tower and engage with the public! Social media tools make it easier than ever before in human history to do that, but far too many people misuse these tools, leading to wasted effort. I can help! Class info below.
Itâs BlueSky official now đ Iâm the incoming president of the European Philosophy Science Association, EPSA @epsaphilsci.bsky.social Wish me luck đ
If you are an economist and they were not economists, I don't see the problem.
I feel like we're horseshoe theorying ourselves into left-wing anti-vax sentiment. Like we can simultaneously recognize that there are vulnerable people for whom covid is still a major risk, while also recognizing that lots of people are vaccinated and it's just not nearly as bad as it used to be
Centrists come here and get screamed at, and they conclude that everyone here agrees with each other. Another available explanation for the screaming is that, beyond disliking this administration, no one agrees with each other here.
OKAY, I'm lecturing Descartes next wk. Do you have a favourite fun fact/tidbit about Descartes? If I get a few nice ones, I might make a quiz about it. (mine is how much he slept, and that he didn't like waking before midday--no wonder he's always meditating in a dressing gown etc) #philosophy
About this Florida vaccine story: When they were little - 1 yr and 3 1/2 - my two older boys, whoâd had all their shots, got whooping cough. We asked their pediatrician what wouldâve happened if they hadnât been vaccinated. âOh, theyâd have died.â
Oh but that stuff happens everywhere. This same person stopped parking in one parking lot at work because somebody was playing a boom box too loud (yes, a boom box, like it was 1987)
Gen X philosophy has finally made it
Philosophy is structurally unable to acknowledge that "I dunno, man, maybe?" is objectively speaking the correct answer to most of our questions.
Meanwhile, in philosophy
I think they equate "feeling afraid that a crime might happen" and actual crime. I know someone who stopped going to a city because one time a guy seemed a bit weird in a parking lot. After that, the city was "too dangerous"
Good.
Alberta begins the school year by incarcerating all school booksâŠ..
Trump II never even tried to build the mass consent necessary for authoritarian consolidation, they just assumed it was there because they won the popular vote
This just led me to think: if the academic job market had a twitter account, what would it tweet? Since I had this horrible thought in my head, I decided to share it. I'm terrible that way.
Trump academic job market đ€ technically not dead
We discuss the value of flipping a coin extensively in our book! (Also, auctions) www.amazon.com/Game-Theoris...
I must admit I'm kind of tired of the social media version of "if you hate this place so much, why don't you move to Russia." We can criticize Bluesky while also preferring it to X/Twitter. (Not saying I agree with this particular criticism.)
Is there a movie or a TV show about an economist? đ€ (A Beautiful Mind doesn't count.)
Numb3rs was about a mathematician, but economics was featured (often wrongly) in a significant number of episodes.
I just mean that it doesn't tell you any of the enormous host of consequences that would be necessary for a utilitarian calculus. What do I expect each of those people will do with their lives? What will happen to me after I do or do not push the person? Will my pushing change social norms? Etc.
Idk, I've definitely seen philosophers do that. Especially over beer
The problem is almost always under-specified for a utilitarian to answer. As a result to demand that it has a single solution without further detail is to prejudice the answer
Thanks to Liam for hosting this. I've wanted to write about the idea of nonviolent anarchism for ages. It's what connects three of my favourite ethicists - Tolstoy, Gandhi, Coetzee.
The only inaccuracy
This Labor Day (and all other days): Thank the workers who serve you. Appreciate the workers who care for you. Respect the workers who pick up your trash. Salute the workers who get you your mail. Honor the workers who teach your children. Pay all workers a living wage.
Sounds dangerous
Chidi is a recognizable and very maddening archetype of philosopher. Chidi is literally shown the universe's actual system of evaluating rightness and wrongness, and it doesn't change his approach to ethics at all: he just rereads Kant and continues to agonize about lying.
I saw the greatest minds of several generations destroyed by Immanuel Kant
I agree. Iâd go so far as to say heâs one of the best representations of philosophers in film/tv history.
Ha! No, I was just citing you as evidence that philosophers don't like the good place
August 31st / September 1st
Even Eliza could pass the Turing test if you choose a dumb enough human
You are correct. I must repent. I will go into seclusion and update on the 1,000 flips of a coin as penance.
Preaching the gospel of our savior, Thomas Bayes, no doubt.
Jan-Willem Romeijnâs closing address from a typical European podium #EPSA25 #philsci
This shitpost presents the fundamental question of my advanced philosophy of science class: it does in fact seem hard for Americans to figure out whom to trust; why is that? If you think there is an obvious side they should trust (the science) how do you achieve actual trust in that side?
No notes
Here's PhilosopherGPT: input string print "Well, that's not really right. It's actually quite complicated and to understand it we have to go back to Plato." exit
No need to make anything artificial. Philosophers have been glad to tell everyone they're wrong for centuries.
First day of classes at @jhuartssciences.bsky.social. A glorious day to learn #QuantumMechanics! I'm teaching two courses - QM for physics majors, and Philosophy of Cosmology for a general audience. I'm going to try to maintain a thread saying what happens in each class, let's see how I do.
For example
Huh. I thought I was in the minority
Heidegger rekt
But seriously, I thought the majority opinion was anti The Good Place. Is that not true?
"I've met a philosopher who hated x" is true for all x
$7.94
Fair
So you have these two tracks.. On one track is the trolley problem, on the other track is a question about what the nothing does....
I think that!
So, this doesn't quite answer the question. Rather professionals hate it *because* it gets it right.
Philosophers don't want to admit it, but Chidi Anagonye (The Good Place) is a pretty close approximation of many real philosophers.
Suppose I created the program I described, and I was imprisoned because my program printed out "Trump is an idiot." You don't think that would constitute a violation of my first amendment rights? I think it is, also if it printed out "Trump is brilliant" (something I don't believe).
For example, if I create a program that spits out random letters, and at some point it writes (purely randomly) "Trump is an idiot", I think that's still considered *my* speech, regardless of whether I agree with the content or even that it's mine.
Is it required? Is something only considered my speech if I agree it is?
Idk. I think I'm a better philosopher because I was a high school and college debater. That might ultimately be useless as well...
Career advice for the philosopher
Is that required for first amendment protection? I was under the impression that it protected you even if you didn't agree with what you were saying. (Like, for example, in the context of an actor who is playing a character that he despises.)
At least he's admitting that Bidden was the 46th president. Sadly... that is something.
Could you say that it protects the people who created the computer program? If I write a computer program that deterministically spits out "Trump is an idiot" every minute for the next 4 years that is certainly covered. (This is not to morally defend what happened, it was horrendous.)
Somebody once said that part of the pleasure in buying a book is the mistaken belief that you're also buying the free time in which to read it... Just sayin'
Cost of Trump's D.C. Occupation: $1.1M per day. Cost to operate public housing for D.C.'s entire homeless population: $169,226 per day. It's not about what this country can or canât afford. Itâs about priorities.
I have something mightier... or so I'm told
Adam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death. Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...
None that I'm aware of... but I am always the last to know it seems
Low Fidelity, High Fidelity, and Winning Fidelity
Less than one week to apply. Spread the word!
But if not, the owners of this account should be sentences to saying thirty Yinz Marys
I think it was just a typo. The previous post, also about shirtless dudes, was in Shadyside.
This is like four blocks from my house (Squirrel Hill, not shadyside) What bothers me most about this is that I wasn't invited. Is it that I don't have any tattoos?
What has happened is the fault of Trump and the GOP, full stop. But the way that SO many people have prioritized factional disputes within the Democratic Party is, um, ironic given how many condemned Trump supporters for not prioritizing democracy in their own electoral choices.
27 years ago, two years after the introduction of effective HIV treatment, the Bay Area Reporter, San Franciscoâs lesbian and gay community newspaper, ran âNo Obitsâ as its headline. It was the first edition not to report an AIDS death in almost 15 years.
Not all Gyros wear capes
Can LLMs reason by analogy like humans? We investigate this question in a new paper published in the Journal of Memory and Language (link below). This was a long-running but very rewarding project. Here are a few thoughts on our methodology and main findings. 1/9
Finite additivity can be thought of as one way to try and relax logical omniscience, but it doesn't completely solve the problem. For example, I might not know if atomic event A and atomic event B are identical or not. This is not something that finite additivity can help with.
I'd be happy to point you to more along each of these lines. They are each moderately sized literatures of their own, with people debating whether or not probability can be adapted to handle it.
Finally, people also have pointed out that it can be tricky to use in problems that involve certain types of infinite learning problems. (I find this debate less well-motivated, but it occupies a lot of ink in philosophy)
When it comes especially to knowledge, we often make a distinction between uncertainty and justification. For instance, I might have very good reason to think this coin is fair. In another case, I might also think it's fair but not have the same level of justification.
Some people think it is also not even a good way to think about all the types of risk and uncertainty. Folks have proposed a number of alternative frameworks (like imprecise probability) to better capture different types of uncertainty.
Another way is that it presumes that the agent is aware of all the atoms in the algebra. It cannot handle "unknown unknowns" where something you didn't even think could happen, happens. More subtly, it cannot handle cases where you expect to be surprised.
But others think its applicability is more limited. The question is "limited how?" One way, is already mentioned: logical omniscience. Probability assumes that you know all the logical consequences of every belief. As a result, it cannot represent uncertainty in mathematics.
I think the consensus is that probability functions can represent certain kinds of knowledge and learning. The debate tends to center around whether they can capture *all* learning and knowledge. There is a kind of orthodox Bayesian who would say "yes."
For the question about probability and knowledge, there are a lot of angles to this one. Can you be a little more specific about what you're looking for?
On interpretations of probability, the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy is always a good place to start: plato.stanford.edu/entries/prob...
The American revolution was a mistake. I see that now
You should have taken harder humanities classes, I guess.
The classes you took might have been easy. Those subjects are not
Of course it is. But they shouldn't presume a humanities class is easy because it's the humanities.
The evidence on teaching writing says the only way people get better is from rewriting. So you have to be pretty strict to make sure people do that