Jonathan Birch

Is Bluesky getting an influx of Australian teens - or are we so old on here that they would rather have no social media at all than risk being seen interacting with us?

New Home Office impact assessment finds that cutting skilled and social care visas will cost the UK up to £10 billion with a central estimate of -£5.4 billion.

It would be good if this got even a fraction of the coverage devoted to the endless debate about boats, flags and Turkish barber shops

Europe’s Banned Pesticides Are Poisoning Nigeria Chemicals barred by the EU are widely available across Africa, threatening food and water supplies.

"Region imported 438,000 tons of pesticides and herbicides in 2020, two-thirds more than in 2018. More than half of such chemicals used in Nigeria are highly hazardous, at least 40% of those can’t be sold in Europe"

#Pesticide colonialism
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Dear Reader delivers a similarly ambivalent message more explicitly. Yes, I know you idolise me, and I get it - I'd probably idolise me too - but have you noticed you're idolising someone completely alone and miserable?

Behind the Brush

One thing I have surprisingly detailed opinions on is the psychology behind the narrator's character in Taylor Swift's You're On Your Own, Kid. So I wrote about that here. I think we all know why you read a 40k blog: for Taylor Swift lyrics analysis.

sherdenpact.neocities.org/4thWall#Swift

Inveraray from the Dun na Cuaiche Watchtower #Inveraray #Argyll #Scotland damianshields.photoshelter.com/p/2026-calendar

Me, when one of my posts gets over 1000 likes.

just learned about this colin mcginn blog post

Truly the Nietzsche of our age. bsky.app/profile/birc...

How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Both localized and distributed views on the functional organization of the brain have been put forward. In this Perspective, Rosen and Freedman examine the degree to which these two views account for ...

Thoughtful review with some good recent historical perspective on the ongoing paradigm shift that is radically changing the way we think about what brain areas do.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My entry for the SEP on externalism vs. internalism about justification is now live.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/just...

How to Give Ethical Input on Animal Research Transitions: Ideal and Nonideal Theory - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - Research that harms animals raises the question of whether and how science should be transformed over time. To helpfully address this issue,...

Cool new paper on using idea and non-ideal political theory to think about progress away from animal research: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Why Look at Animals? with Jo-Anne McArthur and Zed Nelson - Kairos Thursday December 11th, 6.30 for 7pm How can contemporary photography, by focussing on our broken bonds with animals and the rest of the natural world, help drive a paradigm shift in our priorities an...

If you‘re in London on the 11th December, there’s a great event exploring the role of photography in building empathy towards nonhuman animals. I can really recommend events at this venue, it’s a wonderful space: www.kairos.london/event/why-lo...

The series needs more expert judgement, not less. The BBC has become incredibly timid. If you compare this to Simon Schama's shows 20 years ago: he judged, he opined, he said what he felt. He didn't feel any need to be neutral about events centuries earlier.

The psychological effect of this transition must be massive. Formerly, people were just walking around with these horrendous traumas as the unspoken backdrop of their lives.

New work from Animal Ethics is drawing attention to the growing body of evidence on aquatic animal sentience. Seantience, a short documentary directed by Xiana Castro, brings together recent findings on the capacity to feel in both vertebrates and invertebrates.

"I find that [in] the mainstream philosophy... everything is regulated, controlled, and monitored until the life is squeezed out of it. We’ve lost the ability to cope with anything inhomogeneous or unexpected." | By @axdouglas.bsky.social www.contralytic.co.uk/conversation... #PhilosophySky #philsky

Excerpt from a poem by Tagore.

Tagore on the last day of the 19th century, prophesying the 20th (translated from Bengali).

Terry Eagleton · Pregnant with Monsters: Schopenhauer makes a stir Schopenhauer has long held the title of gloomiest philosopher in history. He sees human existence not as grand tragedy...

‘Generally speaking, he preferred dogs to human beings, even though they, too, were emanations of the pitiless Will.’

Terry Eagleton on Schopenhauer’s philosophy.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

It amazes me how Americans do Thanksgiving and then go straight back to work. If we had a late November holiday in Britain everyone would say "merry Xmas, see you in January".

📢 Final call for entries to our 2025 Philosophy Essay Prize!

⏰ Make sure you submit your essay in good time - the deadline is Sunday 30 November at 23:59 GMT.

Best of luck to everyone submitting. ✨

#philosophy #essay #competition

How Not to Hate Humanity: Schopenhauer's Response to Misanthropy Abstract. Schopenhauer has a longstanding reputation for misanthropy. The reputation is warranted, but it is also potentially misleading. Privately, Schope

My article on Schopenhauer‘s alleged misanthropy is now available in early view - and it’s open access!

Because if you're bankrolled by billionaires the usual rules don't apply. It's lost over £100m but that doesn't matter.

I avoid it because I can't handle the tilting.

Soon-to-be-axed 7am Manchester-London train will still run – but without passengers Exclusive: Rail regulator pulls Avanti service from timetable from mid-December but it is needed for staff travel

Finally the cutting-edge infrastructure we need to move around the AI workers of tomorrow. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

On the question of which broadcaster is better - Channel 4 News.

When it became clear that net migration was on a downward trend, the UK far right and its media pivoted to asylum seekers being the alleged problem population. Labour and the BBC did not have to follow that cynical pivot, but they did anyway.

The hippocampus is not a library, it is a simulation engine.

HPC is known for storing maps of the environment but not so known for generating planned trajectories.

This paper proposes that recurrence in CA3 is crucial for planning.

A🧵with my toy model and notes:

#neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI

Conspicuously bad for headlines, I would say. A similar approach worked for Osborne, but Labour was never going to face a comparably pliant media, and the incredible thing is that they seemingly didn't expect this.

I was annoyed by all the "growth, growth, growth" rhetoric in 2024, but if Labour really did have a serious plan for growth, that would have been much better than indecision, paralysis, and arbitrary fiscal rules throttling any investment in growth, i.e. no consistent plan for any particular goal.