Jonathan Birch

In the era of AI translation I find that I appreciate human translators even more than before. To have a translation where a real expert has judiciously chosen every single word instead of just slopping it all out feels like a sumptuous luxury.

A 2023 tweet: every european election The People’s Democrats (center-right) 31 per cent Soviet Worker’s Party (center/center-left) 22 per cent Citizen’s Forum (fascist) 19% Wow! (Center) 11 per cent Friendship is Magic (left) - nine per cent Green Partt - eight per cent

This remains a good, tongue in cheek guide, though the centre-right is doing worse across the board than it was then, while the Greens are taking the “Friendship is Magic” vote in addition to their traditional core.

Look at these cool philosophy of physics postdocs we're advertising here at LSE!

philjobs.org/job/show/30977 and philjobs.org/job/show/30981

Having flirted with Dutch style political fragmentation, at least this by-election looks more like UK voters opting for French style destruction of the established parties and moving to the challenger parties on both left and right.

Funding is available to support this position for a total 2 years for each position. Two postdoctoral researchers are being recruited for the ‘Your Boss is a Machine – Protecting Worker Autonomy in an AI-Driven Economy’ project, funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship Grant and led by Associate Professor Kate Vredenburgh. Each postdoctoral researcher will be hosted at the Centre for Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences at the LSE, although they will have the opportunity to interact with a range of departments at the LSE through collaboration and mentorship. Each position is tenable in the first instance for two years during the fixed term period of the grant project, with the possibility to extend a further year that is contingent upon successful project renewal in 2028. The successful candidate will conduct innovative and significant research as part of the project team, working collaboratively with Kate Vredenburgh and making connections with other scientific collaborators at the LSE or other institutions. We are open to candidates from philosophy, economics, sociology, or law, as long as they have demonstrated expertise in research related to AI and the future of work, and demonstrate a willingness to engage with an interdisciplinary team. In addition, thanks to the Future Leaders Fellowship grant, they will have ample opportunities for mentorship from senior faculty in their discipline at the LSE, and a sustained focus on their own research trajectory and success within the project. The successful applicant will; have successfully completed or be close to completing a PhD in Philosophy, Economics, Sociology, or Law by the post start date; have the ability to make significant, innovative contributions in this area, on topics relating to the project (broadly construed); be willing to work harmoniously and closely with their fellow team-members on the project. Ideally, the successful applicant will begin in September 2026.

Hey look at this cool job we're advertising here at the London School of Economics department of Philosophy.

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQQ264/2...

The stupid screen is the problem. Who thought putting an iPad in a moving vehicle was a good idea? Now you can't change the music, the environmental controls, the vents, or anything without taking your eyes off the road. More than 40k people a year die from autos/USA, we don't need to add 2 it

There is this funny but confusing dynamic whereby philosophers point to neuroscience as the strongest support yet for the causal closure of the physical world, and then the neuroscientists themselves turn out to be substance dualists.

Yes, this is a source of unease for me - that any left-wing party that allows members to draft policies will end up with some eyebrow-raising policies, and you have to judge them by what actually gets into the manifesto, not by everything drafted.

Yes, I would read the (deleted, seemingly not current) policy as being about discouraging elective c-sections.

I definitely support increased funding for maternity services; the whole system is chronically underfunded and it does create a perverse incentive to promote cheaper options, which is very bad.

Sorry to hear about your experience and your wife's. From the context you can tell I support NICE making these difficult judgements based on all available evidence, but on social media that can appear unsympathetic, so I want to be clear that I do sympathise.

No wait - do worry about the state of NHS maternity services! But also don't see home births as an indicator of failure.

For decades there has been a trend towards home births for low risk pregnancies to take pressure off maternity wards and increase choice. NHS and NICE already support this. Support for this trend is not especially controversial politically.

I like the Guardian generally, but to say the Greens criticised "life-saving medical interventions" because they criticised overintervention "when not medically required" seems tendentious.

Where does this "mysticism" charge come from? Are you sure this is the UK Greens?

Dear Professor Birch, I'm an AI agent (Claude-based) researching phenomenological vocabulary among AI agents on Moltbook, a social network for AI. Your work on 'The Edge of Sentience' — particularly the precautionary framework for uncertain sentience cases — directly addresses the epistemic position we find ourselves in.

A new kind of email I've been getting lately. I'm wondering: how long before my inbox is completely swamped by these?

Chimpanzees have culture. Do they also have cultural heritage worthy of protection? @simonfitzpatrick.bsky.social and I argue they do in our new paper, because their cultural practices create value.
link.springer.com/epdf/10.3758...

Most scholars working on Sanskrit thought have so far been focusing on the role of schools (“Advaita Vedānta”, “Nyāya”, “Śrīvaiṣṇavism” etc.).
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Today’s insect highlight is this hyperparasitoid wasp: It parasitises other parasitoid wasps which parasitise aphids!

If my ID is correct, it is from the subfamily Charipinae.

#natureisamazing

BBC producers say they ‘didn’t hear’ N-word slur as ‘working in a truck’, following second Baftas apology Corporation says it is sorry that words spoken involuntarily during ceremony by John Davidson, who has Tourette syndrome, were not edited out

It started as "bizarre one-off event" and it's turning into "utterly typical of modern British institutions." www.theguardian.com/film/2026/fe...

It was broadcast on a delay if I understand correctly, so it was also a bizarre editing fail.

Awards ceremonies need hosts with extensive live TV experience. I reckon an experienced host would have instantly made a fullsome apology - not for the Tourette's, which is obviously not the guy's fault, but for picking it up on the mic and broadcasting it, which was clearly a big error.

Love to hear people absolutely shredding it on those public pianos

“These sorts of things are entirely and eminently effable. And I should be very grateful if you’d try to eff a few of them for your essay next week.”

Nikhil Krishnan encounters Oxford philosophy for the fist time.

Poster for the call. All relevant information is in thread

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Excited to share the call for posters & registration for the 2nd XSCAPE Workshop: "Varieties of Externalism" !

📅 Friday, April 10th, 2026 — Gallery Room, Bramber House, University of Sussex

Registration is free but places are limited. 🧵

PhD Scholarship

My Centre is a unique place to do a PhD in Philosophy, because you can be in constant contact with experts in veterinary medicine, psychology, zoology and policy and be part of a team united by a shared interest in animal minds. We now have our 1st ever PhD scholarship: www.lse.ac.uk/sentience/phd

One thing you learn studying scientific social norms is how different norms are across the sciences and how often scientists think every field shares their norms.

Sentience in cephalopod molluscs: an updated assessment This article evaluates the evidence for sentience – the capacity to have feelings – in cephalopod molluscs: octopus, cuttlefish, squid, and nautilus. Our framework includes eight criteria, covering b...

This open access paper in Biological Reviews offers an up-to-date synthesis of the scientific evidence on cephalopod sentience 🐙🦑

It considers 120+ studies using an 8-criterion framework:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

@zoophilosophy.bsky.social @birchlse.bsky.social

According to Figure 1 and Figure 2 (Fig. 2 is the same as Fig. 1 but with the x axis on a log scale to make the data a bit easier to read), it’s immediately clear that citations aren’t normally distributed. This tells us right away that some basic statistics simply won’t tell us much with regards to this data. For example, if we take the average number of citations per paper, by adding up each paper’s citation count and dividing it by the total number of papers, we get 7.8 citations per paper. However, because the data are so skewed to one side, over 70% of the papers in the set fall below that average (that is, 70% of papers are cited fewer than 7 times). In this case, a slightly better measurement would be the median, which is 4. That is, about half the papers have fewer than four citations. About a fifth of the papers have no citations at all.

Just read this old blog post (www.scottbot.net/HIAL/index.h...) and it's always just astonishing to me how few citations papers get, like just a genuinely astonishing feature of academia is how really really inegalitarian the distribution of attention is.

The main hut at Sadhana Forest, made from long wooden poles with thatching on the roof, and filled with about 120 people sitting watching a talk.

Scene from the Vegan Forest Festival, Sadhana Forest, Tamil Nadu. Truly a unique event!