Chris

I just finished processing my notes for "On Brute Facts" -- that one is a lot to absorb, really thought provoking.

diagram from Anthropic paper with an icon & label that says “subtract evil vector”

quick diagram of Bluesky’s architecture and why it’s nicer here

I have to oppose this law with a violent motion (of writing a crappy zero draft) this coming week. #phdsky

Moral Saints is on my list soon. :-) I have Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy on my "moral philosophy basics" list, because I've resigned myself to the idea that I'm becoming a moral philosopher. The lists all keep growing.

It is very good, even though I had to stop partway in and read “On Brute Facts.” :-)

Though Baier’s “Trust and Antitrust” would be higher on the list for me.

Tasioulas has a chapter on the rule of law in the recent (2020) Cambridge Companion to phillaw, and whole “Values” section could be useful. (O’Neill on justice w/o ethics, Kletzer/Renzo on legitimacy)

Also Guerrero’s Lottocracy & Talisse’s Civic Solitude tho not on point. Just great recent work.

Update: coming to the end, I might at least agree that the intellectualized “ought” of modern ethics is a “mere mesmeric force” and “fishy”.

Analytic philosophy is good, actually.

Kant introduces the idea of "legislating for oneself," which is as absurd as if in these days, when majority votes command great Ka respect, one were to call each reflective decision a man made a vote resulting in a majority, which as a matter of proportion is over-whelming, for it is always 1-0. The concept of legislation requires superior power in the legislator. His own rigoristic convictions on the subject of lying were so intense that it never occurred to him that a lie could be relevantly described as anything but just a lie (e.g. as "a lie in such-and-such circumstances"). His rule about universalizable maxims is useless without stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it. - G.E.M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy”

Oh go off, Anscombe.

I can’t endorse her rejection of all modern moral philosophy as absurd and useless, but I can’t deny that she does it precisely and with style. I won’t forget the idea of reflective endorsement as a 1-0 vote.

At some pointy just before COVID I was required to learn a fishtail braid, because little girls want to look like Elsa.

Heung-Min Son announces intention to leave the Club | Tottenham Hotspur Heung-Min Son has announced his intention to leave the Club at a press conference alongside Thomas Frank in Seoul on Saturday morning.

Absolutely gutted by this, though I wish him the very best. #coys

The quoted post is like a sociologist bat signal

My kid just shouted, “Totoro!”

Vacation discourse at dinner. Trip is T-minus one week.

12 yo: We *should* be going back to Finland. I don’t understand your decision making.

6 yo: My friend is going to Island, and I’m going to Ireland!

Me: I need a beer.

Another Crop of D.C. Jail Residents Receive Their High School Diploma Dozens of teachers, family members and attorneys sat in anticipation of the graduation ceremony that took place at the DOC's Central Treatment Facility on Wednesday morning. In total, 15 residents com...

Working for the Maya Angelou Schools in DC is one of the things I'm proudest of. The Informer has a great article on how the network has transformed instruction at the DC Jail post-COVID (primarily by actually doing it). Building schools in these settings on ashes of neglect is part of their DNA.

I'm working and doing my PhD part time. I can confirm that talking about Big Ideas with people outside philosophy is awesome, generative, and many of them are One of Us without the requirement of being a professional PDF liker.

I'm working and doing my PhD part time. I can confirm that talking about Big Ideas with people outside philosophy is awesome, generative, and many of them are One of Us without the requirement of being a professional PDF liker.

I just came to post about Rhonda's upcoming book and realized she's here on bsky. So order Rhonda's book -- she a beautiful writer and person -- and follow her!

Cover of Frank Sinatra’s album, “In the Wee Small Hours,” depicting a painting of a young Frank Sinatra wearing a grey suit, loosened tie, and fedora, with a night city street behind him. Behind the album cover is a record spinning on a record player.

Ol’ Blue Eyes, one of my favorites. #nowspinning

I just came to post about Rhonda's upcoming book and realized she's here on bsky. So order Rhonda's book -- she a beautiful writer and person -- and follow her!

My real analysis prof used to say that 17 is the most random number, because so many professors in the math dept would say, "Let's take a random number, say...17."

100%. The past week especially I was rushing from charger to charger through the day. The public beta was finally stable for me. Battery draining issues cleared up (so far).

I agree we're apt to miss it but disagree it's coming from "smart" agents. A Roomba is programmed (driven) to charge itself, whereas "agents" will happily sit and do nothing until prompted. They have no intrinsic drives. Hard to imagine "consciousness" from entity that doesn't give a damn.

Philosophy is a team sport that we pretend can be scored individually, in my view. ;-)

New goal: live to see my work appropriated into an explicit-filled rant on a podcast.

That's a good point. It's not always clear externally whether a new "model" is truly a new algorithm and training run, new tuning, etc.

I didn't realize IBM's archives were so substantial!

Is anyone working on long-term preservation of dominant LLMs at key stages of their development? This feels like a fascinating dissertation topic in digital archaeology. Complicated given that open models != dominant models for the most part. @tedunderwood.me @florencesn.bsky.social any insights?

If you want an explanation of why missing is not really a not-enpresenting, but rather an unenpresenting, I'm your guy. For the next 30 minutes until I lose track of what this all means again.

"Missing is so little a not-enpresenting that its nature lies precisely in a specific mode of enpresenting. Missing is not a not-finding of something."

The word that best describes Heidegger's prose is definitely not "pellucid".

Using an LLM in a group while sitting around a laptop may be my new favorite use case. I just taught a four part series on responsible use of genAI for leaders in my industry. Makes it much easier to bring in human creativity, reject bad ideas quickly, and resist just copy-pasting results.