Fenner Tanswell (@fennert) — Bluesky Profile

6 days ago

Dear Shabana,
I notice today that you referred to me in your speech on immigration at the IPPR think tank.
You said: “A party leader should not be on the beaches of France encouraging people to
make a perilous crossing on small boats.”
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised especially after the hateful Labour campaign in Gorton
and Denton, but this is just the latest in a string of lies peddled by a discredited Government
who intentionally fan the flames of racism and division.
When I went to Calais, I was not there to encourage people to travel to the UK. I was there
to see at first hand the suffering your Government and successive Governments have done
in demonising migrants in a pathetic bid to pander to the base instincts of Reform and the
flawed strategy of Morgan McSweeney.
As you will know, if you even bothered to research my visit instead of taking Reform talking
points, I was there to witness the brutality of families living in tents in freezing temperatures. I
filled water tanks and picked up litter.
What that visit did do is confirm my belief that if we are to smash the boat gangs and stop
the boats, we need to offer safer and managed routes for migrants to come to this country.
Showing compassion as a politician is not a crime. In fact, we need to see much more of it.
It reminded me of a young MP who in October 2015 spent three days in Lesbos helping
migrants fleeing war-torn Syria. She posted videos on X, talked about handing out water and
croissants to refugees and food parcels.
When she returned to the UK, she wrote a very moving piece in the New Statesman. She
said “we have to work with our European partners and create new, safe, and legal routes for
refugees to get to Europe. We cannot abandon them to their fate, left as prey for smugglers
whilst risking death on the seas.”
She said “maybe we can make ourselves feel better by saying no-one is making them get on
the boats. And again, the Home Secretary is not entirely wrong when …

Dear Shabana,

Let's clear some things up around migration and remember we're talking about people's lives.

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5 days ago

"Microsoft Products are too good to phase out in Europe"

MS Office: Can't wordcount subsections, randomly switches to US English, miscorrects grammar, ...

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1 week ago

Bitterness, resentment, put more (wasted) hours into preparing.

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1 week ago

Submit your suggestions for the Lakatos Award 2027 | LSE Philosophy Let us know which Philosophy of Science book deserves the prestigious Lakatos Award 2027!

📣 We are pleased to announce the call for nominations for the Lakatos Award 2027! Deadline: 1 September 2026.

📚 Submit in your nominations for the best monograph in the philosophy of science!

More information: www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/n...

#PhilSci #Lakatos #LSEPhilosophy #Philosophy

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1 week ago

Breaking: “sycophantic AI distorts belief, manufacturing certainty where there should be doubt” LLMs are an epistemic nightmare

"epistemic nightmare"!! 🚨

open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

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1 week ago

Call for Abstracts
The British Society for the Theory of Knowledge invites contributions to its 2026 conference (Exeter College, University of Oxford, 2nd-4th 09 2026).
bstk.org.uk/events.html

Please submit abstracts (500 words, suitable for blind review) to info@bstk.org.uk by April 30 2026.

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1 week ago

Pluralistic: Dirty words are politically potent (14 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

"the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. [...] This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own."
pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/p...

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1 week ago

Pluralistic: Dirty words are politically potent (14 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

"the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. [...] This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own."
pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/p...

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1 week ago

To be fair, he is very positive about people broadening the term. He even says it is a good think that there is a technical term that can be applied narrowly, and an intuitive term that can be used broadly, and that both coexist.

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1 week ago

Boycotts and Beyond: How should we respond to ethically compromised sporting events? Major sporting events can be ethically charged. They may be hosted by fascist regimes, as a way to gain a perception of legitimacy on the world stage. Notably, the 1936 Olympic games was hosted by Naz...

I'm organising a workshop in Glasgow in May, about how people should respond to ethically tainted sporting events. I've just made a PhilEvents page. If you've got any questions about it, send me an email!
philevents.org/event/show/1...
#PhilSky #PhilosophyOfSport #Ethics #Boycotts

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2 weeks ago

The real theorems are the proofs we made along the way.

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2 weeks ago

Journeys in Mathematical Landscapes: Genius or Craft? We look at how Anglophone mathematicians have, over the last hundred years or so, presented their activities using metaphors of landscape and journey. We contrast romanticised self-presentations of th...

And of course the self-promotion that we have thought about this metaphor a lot!

link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

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2 weeks ago

The Edge of Mathematics Terence Tao, the legendary mathematician, explains the promise of generative AI.

From here:
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

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2 weeks ago

Tao: These problems are like distant locations that you would hike to. And in the past, you would have to go on a journey. You can lay down trail markers that other people could follow, and you could make maps.

AI tools are like taking a helicopter to drop you off at the site. You miss all the benefits of the journey itself. You just get right to the destination, which actually was only just a part of the value of solving these problems.

Wake up, honey! A new extension to the "maths as journeying" metaphor just dropped.

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2 weeks ago

I made a philosophy cryptic crossword for our postgrad reading party last week. A few people asked about it, so I shared it with @dailynous.com, and it's now available on the Heap of Links: dailynous.com/wp-content/u...
So if you're a special kind of nerd, check it out!
#PhilSky #CrypticCrossword

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2 weeks ago

Hard agree. This is truly absurd.

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2 weeks ago

Discovered that Gmail abbreviates emails from me to "Fenner St. Tanswell". I didn't realise the process of the pope acknowledging my miracles was complete already. How time flies. Will acknowledge prayers by email, but give me a couple of weeks.

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2 weeks ago

cant.stop.laughing

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3 weeks ago

I've become the thing I hate; written a paper with a nice interdisciplinary-friendly start but with a last section so insider baseball that it has an audience of like 4 people

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3 weeks ago

The Promptware Kill Chain Attacks against modern generative artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs) pose a real threat. Yet discussions around these attacks and their potential defenses are dangerously myopic. The dominant narrative focuses on "prompt injection," a set of techniques to embed instructions into inputs to LLM intended to perform malicious activity. This term suggests a simple, singular vulnerability. This framing obscures a more complex and dangerous reality.

The Promptware Kill Chain

Attacks against modern generative artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs) pose a real threat. Yet discussions around these attacks and their potential defenses are dangerously myopic. The dominant narrative focuses on "prompt injection," a set of…

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3 weeks ago

Pluralistic: Trump antitrust is dead (13 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow shared our new paper about LLMs in Maths today in his daily newsletter, and I'm well chuffed.

pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/k...

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3 weeks ago

Yeah, our university tech also regularly breaks.

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3 weeks ago

When is a sausage not really a sausage? Ask the meat lobby | George Monbiot European legislators may ban plant-based products from using the name to prevent ‘confusion’. Just don’t mention beef tomatoes or buffalo wings, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

Monbiot did a hilarious take-down of this kind of reasoning.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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1 month ago

New paper! Joint work with @asgeirberg.bsky.social

"The Philosophical Prospects of Large Language
Models in the Future of Mathematics"

Online now in the Annals of Mathematics and Philosophy: mxphi.com/wp-content/u...

Please share it with anyone interested in LLMs and Mathematics!

🧵

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1 month ago

Love it, I would read that. :)

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1 month ago

As Thurston says? On using quotations from famous mathematicians to make points about philosophy and education - ZDM – Mathematics Education It is commonplace in the educational literature on mathematical practice to argue for a general conclusion from isolated quotations from famous mathematicians. In this paper, we supply a critique of t...

You mean after their discussion of Thurston, an updated one on Tao?

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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1 month ago

hate when reverse centaur keeps happening

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1 month ago

I think that he has changed directions a bit since we wrote this, focusing a lot more on the interactive version. Some but not all the same argument can be used there.

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1 month ago

Go read our paper!

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1 month ago

Please do share this with anyone you think might be interested!

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