Pages

Monday, May 15, 2023

Was the original inspiration for James Bond a Jewish guy named Schlomo?

 

WSJ Op-Ed: DEI Brings Kafka To My Law School



Saudi academic markets in everything



Logistics of the Taylor Swift concert tour


Waymo doubles driverless car service area in Arizona


GPT with search


Frustrated boomer claims everything about life in Australia was better in the 80s and asks what went wrong - but not everyone agrees


  1. “Psychologists have overlooked the extent to which ordinary people make decisions by taking onboard their evidence because they have focused on first-order evidence alone. They have ignored higher-order evidence.” — “Bad Beliefs” by Neil Levy (Oxford), a defense of human rationality, is the subject of an open-access symposium at Philosophical Psychology
  2. “The session began to feel far more like a meeting of co-conspirators than a traditional philosophy talk” — Zara Anwarzai (Indiana Bloomington) on a recent APA event about organizing academic labor
  3. Stanford University researchers created 25 virtual agents (?) with backstories, the capacity to form new memories, and a kind of LLM-based capacity for “actions” — Simon Goldstein (Dianoia) and Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini (Rutgers) guide us through the questions this raises
  4. “Candide” was the result of Voltaire’s engagement with Leibniz. Who was his “Micromégas,” about? — two figures, says Adam Roberts: one an object of satire, another an object of admiration
  5. “Skeptics insist the public pose of objectivity is a ruse that conceals… subjectivity… What they don’t grasp is that the public protocol, the ‘front stage’ performance, has power. — Neutrality may be a fiction, says Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU), but its performance creates a world-changing reality—for the better
  6. “I am not against prestige in professional philosophy…,” says Eric Schliesser — “But from the perspective of the epistemic (and social) needs of the discipline and profession, it is a mistake to have excessive selectivity in philosophy journal publication help produce or coincide with that prestige.”
  7. Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan) joins the blogosphere as one of the writers at Crooked Timber — her first post is on the right to abortion