Somayeh Tohidi

YouTube video by Hossein Alizadeh - Topic Mahtab (Esfahan)

At 16, this album carried me through late nights of wrestling with hard math problems. It’s stayed with me as my endurance melody. Now whenever life feels too heavy, I play it and feel my soul muscles grow stronger.

youtu.be/c0ItncVzXxk?...

However, in the humanities, people come with prior expectations that are usually far from reality, and it can take them a long time to converge to the reality of the publication market, which significantly harms their survival chances./3

In the sciences, students grasp it quickly and become fluent in publishing because they either have no prior expectations or their expectations match reality./2

I believe there is a significant and often ignored factor that distinguishes survival chances in humanities versus sciences: how long it takes graduate students and early career researchers to grasp the notion of 'meaningful contribution' in their field./1

😅True…

Pishi and my armless chair philosophy: for some reason, she really likes this chair and doesn’t appreciate the fact that I actually need it for thinking!

It can be but they make progress in a tangible way. So, no one is worried about them…

Gold!

Memorial Event for Helen De Cruz - Daily Nous This past June, Helen De Cruz, professor of philosophy at Saint Louis University, died at the age of 46. Remembered not merely as a professor, but as a source of assistance, advice, and kindness for o...

dailynous.com/2025/10/01/m...

Applying for Ph.d. programs ​These notes were developed over the years for the annual "Applying to a PhD program" session for Simon Fraser University Philosophy MA students. This offers a perspective on how to prioritize your...

We're coming up on philosophy PhD application season. In case it is helpful for you or your students, I have a guide to this process, developed over the years of working with SFU MA students. Let me know if you have questions or suggestions
#philsky #philsci

www.hkandersen.com/applying-for...

and then, depending on how often I jumped to the other tiles, I may regress or progress. But why do the past and future always seem more stable to me? There is something both irrational and addictive about this mindset./2

I have this vivid picture that at each point in time, my present self is an unstable tile between my past self and my future self, and I struggle to balance myself on that present tile. So I keep jumping back and forth until the present self tile breaks apart,/1

(look how few connections the circled node has compared to other highlighted nodes), I somehow contributed to the movement by connecting a network of religious people to a movement against a government that represents their religion./4

my little role in this movement was to connect two networks of people through my religious identity (like the circled node in this picture). That’s to say I thought (again, maybe unjustifiably) that although I’m not famous and I don’t have many friends…/3

I absolutely loved that movement. Although I was active on social media, I was a nobody, but I was receiving all sorts of threats from both pro-government forces and protesters. A big thing that helped me during that storm was the thought (justified or unjustified) that …/2

I was watching one of Duflo’s lectures and she showed this picture as an example of a beautiful representation of data. It’s a visualization of a Facebook network of 1000+ friends in Somalia. It reminded me of what kept me sane during the social movement in Iran 3 years ago./1

It reminded me of this:
bsky.app/profile/soma...

September is coming and it marks the third year of my exile. I don’t even know whether I should call it an exile. Everything in that geography is uncertain…

And they are my kin
You are my kin, mother
And separation is hard, mother, by God it is
They are my kin…/2

Sitting in my home, mother, they forced me to fight mother
Capable, mother, I’m not mother, I can’t
Say goodbye for me, I’m opening my door, mother
maybe I won’t return, say goodbye
Tell those who are afraid, my heart’s bullets are sharp/1

It's not hard to think of mechanisms where knowing about a cognitive bias makes it worse! With a bit of caricature, the current approach to bias mitigation resembles giving a critically ill patient a medical textbook and expecting self-diagnosis and treatment./2

It's usually assumed that awareness of a cognitive bias is good, like once you know about it, it'll affect your decisions less and you'll get better at avoiding it over time. But is there any solid evidence for either of these claims?/1

From x.com/DailyClassic...

Peder Balke - "The North Cape by Moonlight" (1848)

You have theories (a whole book of them) about history and enlightenment! TY for sharing your ideas. But I wonder how one could get themselves to record a video from their ivory tower addressing people in ME to tell them the world is improving.The rage I felt watching Pinker’s video is indescribable

Growth is such a misleading metaphor for what life experience does to people. I feel like I’m shrinking as I go through life, and I don’t feel bad about it. It actually feels so good to think that someday I may shrink so much that I become invisible…I would have infinite density of consciousness! :)

Iran’s Supreme Court has upheld the final death sentence against activist Sharifeh Mohammadi. The Islamic Republic is an irreformable and brutal state whose evil character cannot be excused even when facing genuinely evil enemies.

www.instagram.com/reel/DL0aDat...

‘Natoori’ by Shima Davoodpour.

(It’s a Kurdish song)

Thanks for the response. I don’t think talking with an LLM excludes thinking for oneself. The conversation isn’t just about finding and criticizing their mistakes. Brainstorming requires your own thinking and ideas - an interesting conversation can’t even start without them!