Philosophy

1. New Work In Philosophy: The YouTube Channel — videos about recent philosophy
2. Lecture notes—pretty much a textbook—for a course entitled “Belief, Desire, and Rational Choice” — from Wolfgang Schwarz (Edinburgh)
3. One philosophy professor’s experience with a student who cheated by having ChatGPT write their essay — “proving the paper was concocted by ChatGPT was nearly impossible,” said Darren Hick (Furman)
4. A Medievalist notices that an academic extensively plagiarized his blog in her book, and contacts her to object. The ensuing exchange and investigation reveals she created a fake research center (with fake staff) to receive grants for her & her family — the blogger’s account begins at the linked post and continues in the four posts about the “RECEPTIO-Rossi Affair”
5. “The best pro-technology visions should disproportionately involve awesome technologies and avoid shitty technologies… If you think AGI is highly likely to destroy the world, then it is the pinnacle of shittiness as a technology” — Katja Grace on the desirability & feasibility of slowing down the development of Artificial General Intelligence
6. The cubes look like they are moving. But they are not moving — what the…?

“Ask yourself who will suffer the most if we fail to prevent catastrophic climate change. The answer is the young and those yet to be born—both categories unrepresented in our political systems” — Peter Singer (Princeton) on eco-activism, civil disobedience, youth, and democracy

“Using the methods of analytic philosophy, we can identify problems in common thinking about motherhood” — Fiona Woollard (Southampton) provides some examples

“Philosophy has brought more profit to the world than Ceres did who invented the increase of corn and grain, or than Bacchus did that found out the use of wine” — Richard Marshall “interviews” Isaac Newton

“Everyone has strength; teach in a way that aligns with what you’re good at” — some general teaching tips from Paul Bloom (Yale)

One robot built with the capacity to “form internal monologues” passed the mirror test, “the most famous test of animal self-consciousness” — the NYT on robot consciousness, with input from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) and Robert Long (Oxford), among others

“Contemporary philosophers… don’t think that education matters as a subject of philosophical inquiry, and moreover, they take a rather dim view of those of us who do” — David Bakhurst (Queen’s) hopes this changes

“A big knock on AI is that because it doesn’t really let you understand the things you’re predicting, it’s unscientific. And in a formal sense, I think this is true” — “But”, says Noah Smith, “science is only one possible tool for predicting and controlling the world”