Eamon Duede

Why Slop Matters | ACM AI Letters AI-generated “slop” is often seen as digital pollution. We argue that this dismissal of the topic risks missing important aspects of AI Slop which deserve rigorous study. AI Slop serves a social funct...

New paper on Why Slop Matters w/ great group of co authors (@hoytlong.bsky.social @eduede.bsky.social @ari-holtzman.bsky.social + others not on Bluesky) from ACM AI Letters. We try to move the debate re: AI Slop past normative, neg claims & towards parsing its social uses. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Excited to recruit a 🚨 postdoc 🚨 for projects on #AI and evolving scientific practice, norms, and impact! Interdisciplinary work across science of science, philosophy of science, math with creative Purdue/Argonne/CMU/Chicago/Princeton collaborators! *pls repost*! careers.purdue.edu/job/Postdoc-...

New on the Archive:

Avigad, Jeremy (2026) Mathematical Understanding. [Preprint]

https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27708/

New on the Archive:

Duede, Eamon and Friedman, Daniel (2025) Epistemic Gaps and the Attribution of (AI) Discovery. [Preprint]

https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27719/

Excited this piece is finally out in Philosophy of Science. We argue that, paradoxically, we can have certainty about theorems in math, the proofs of which we can never understand. That's weird and tells us something important about why we do math in the first place #philsky tinyurl.com/3dxxb98a

Reviewer 2 may have used the autopen during the final days of the Biden administration

Philosophy paper pitchbot

Factor Fexcectorn

I've long felt that there's something about working through logic (particularly mathematical logic) that is clarifying for thought in ways that turning the formal crank more generally isn't... like having to prove out an actual argument form using only syntactic rules is forceful learning

AI Surrogates and illusions of generalizability in cognitive science Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have generated enthusiasm for using AI simulations of human research participants to generate new know…

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

Tell us about the singer songwriters who hurt you, Jonathan

Three schematic diagrams. The first illustrates selective publishing of internal resection, the second selective causal focus, and the third selective access and funding for researchers.

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv.

There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

After science Twenty-five years ago, Ted Chiang wrote a prescient science fiction short that began: “It has been 25 years since a report of original research was last submitted to our editors for publication, makin...

New piece w/ James Evans in Science explores what we call 'science after science', an era where our ability to control nature may exceed our ability to understand it; a new struggle to sustain curiosity & understanding under AI's predictive dominance. #ai #science

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Twin cities friends: I'll be speaking tomorrow at the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science on how AI disrupts the sometimes precarious balance of scientific incentives.

BSPS Annual Conference 2026 The BSPS Annual Conference takes place on 21–23 July 2026 at the University of Leeds

One of the best #philsci conferences in one of the best cities: the 2026 BSPS Annual Conference is taking place in Leeds 21–23 July.

Keynotes by Robin Hendry, Tarja Knuuttila & Eleanor Knox.

More info: www.thebsps.org/news/bsps-an...

#philsky

it’s crazy because no one knows what the aim of science is

"Coming back to life" is also surprising because it's nothing like them and also great

Most underrated Floyd album

thank you for your careful engagement with the arguments of the paper...

In 1977 computers proved the 4Color Theorem. Human's can't check that proof, but trust it because they understand it. Now #AI can generate proofs we'll never understand. Can we trust those? In a new paper out in PhilSci @philscijournal.bsky.social, we argue yes! with a catch: tinyurl.com/yhmnrx5m

I'm seeing this, too!

AI use & coverage are growing quickly & recently across academic fields
arxiv.org/pdf/2405.15828

1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research.

This is wrong.

And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.

"the bar is on the floor and, if you're going to make it in the hard tech era, you can no longer ooze under it"

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End America’s run as the premiere techno-superpower may be over.

www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

Applications are open for SFI's 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships

If you’ve recently earned a Ph.D. in any scientific field and want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research, consider applying.

Deadline: October 1, 2025
Apply here: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Can we talk about how fantastic that grounds crew is? Look at that cut!

Tennis one point, no difference. Chess a pawn, game over. White moves twice initially, game over. Black gets two moves after white's first move... I thought I could just set that up on the computer but it occurred to me that if black knows they'd get to move twice, then they might find a novel first

AI, peer review and the human activity of science When researchers cede their scientific judgement to machines, we lose something important.

A few months ago, Nature published how-to guide for using ChatGPT to write your peer reviews in 30 minutes.

This is, of course, a horrible idea. Here’s my response with @jbakcoleman.bsky.social .

Jury Theorems for Peer Review Marcus Arvan, Liam Kofi Bright, and Remco Heesen Abstract: Peer review is often taken to be the main form of quality control on academic research. Usually journals carry this out. However, parts of maths and physics appear to have a parallel, crowd-sourced model of peer review, where articles are posted on the arXiv to be publicly discussed. In this article we argue that crowd-sourced peer review is likely to do better than journal-solicited peer review at sorting articles by quality. Our argument rests on two key claims. First, crowd-sourced peer review will lead on average to more reviewers per article than journal-solicited peer review. Second, due to the wisdom of the crowds, more reviewers will tend to make better judgements than fewer reviewers will. We make the second claim precise by looking at the Condorcet jury theorem as well as two related jury theorems developed specifically to apply to peer review.

Paper is finally up and open access (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...), it's a sequel to an earlier paper where we'd argued that there's not good evidence that pre-publication peer review is a net benefit (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/...). So in this one we suggest an alternative.