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@davidkinney.bsky.social

Assistant Professor in Philosophy at WashU (St Louis). http://davidbkinney.com

133 Followers  |  149 Following  |  35 Posts  |  Joined: 07.11.2024  |  1.5976

Latest posts by davidkinney.bsky.social on Bluesky

Yeah I was in one in 3rd grade and it was great. The teacher taught us about Greek mythology and told us that Zeus was like Bill Clinton. It went a little over my head but it felt like cool adult knowledge that was empowering. Obviously I still remember it.

02.08.2025 14:09 β€” πŸ‘ 14    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Ten years ago I tried to pitch a friend who worked in Hollywood on a movie about the gawker saga where hogan would play himself, with Christian Bale as Thiel. I thought it could hulk hogan a best supporting actor Oscar.

24.07.2025 17:04 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Good morning! I'm in Uganda to visit family and friends.

But depending on your perspective, don't worry or I'm sorry: I'll be back by the end of the month.

See you soon, NYC.

20.07.2025 14:37 β€” πŸ‘ 50700    πŸ” 7327    πŸ’¬ 1545    πŸ“Œ 2053

He’s got the same sauce as young Bill Clinton.

20.07.2025 15:04 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

New paper forthcoming in Mind. I argue that outright beliefs can meaningfully simplify credal updating if the objects of those beliefs are dependence relations between propositions and the DAG formed by these relations has bounded treewidth. Preprint: philarchive.org/rec/KINHRB.

15.07.2025 21:31 β€” πŸ‘ 8    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

One of my wilder belief updates lately, really finding those deep grooves in possibility space.

10.07.2025 16:30 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I was today years old when I learned that Nick Adams is not a satirical character being played on twitter by a comedian. I learned this because he will be ambassador to Malaysia.

10.07.2025 16:29 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I love the idea that there is anything but a negligible number of NYers who would vote for Mamdani (or, indeed, any Democrat) if not for his failure to uphold Columbus as an Italian-American hero. People who like and care about Columbus are Republicans.

10.07.2025 12:33 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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They look they’re about to drop the hottest adult contemporary album of 1994.

07.07.2025 21:02 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition - Nature A computational model called Centaur, developed by fine-tuning a language model on a huge dataset called Psych-101, can predict and simulate human nature in experiments expressible in natural language...

Centaur is really exciting. As far as I can tell, it seems to have been made possible in large part by German federal funding. Once again, public funding of science gets the goods: www.nature.com/articles/s41....

05.07.2025 13:31 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

His ability to rattle off facts and figures with a breezy confidence that makes him seem smart and cool at the same time reminds me of (don't get mad) Bill Clinton in his prime. If the NYC mayoralty wasn't the graveyard of US politics, I'd say rhere's some juice here.

01.07.2025 21:05 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

You mean it didn’t autocorrect to MIT?

18.06.2025 15:10 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Everybody wants to be a formal epistemologist, but nobody wants to make these ugly-ass beamer slides.

17.06.2025 20:15 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Paper forthcoming in the 2025 FAccT proceedings! When evaluating algorithms, we often manage a trade-off between accuracy and fairness. I argue that this should be done by via a linear combination of accuracy and fairness measures, for Harsanyi-style reasons: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08829.

15.05.2025 12:26 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Walt Frazier uses this phrase all the time on the local broadcasts and it’s so weird.

08.05.2025 02:33 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Trump Asks Stefanik to Withdraw Bid to Be U.N. Ambassador The president said he wanted the New York Republican to stay in Congress to bolster the party’s slim House margin and protect her seat.

Probably not a total coincidence that Stefanik's upstate NY district, while pretty Trumpy, borders Canada and it wouldn't be hard for Dems to make a special election all about tarrifs.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/u...

27.03.2025 19:00 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

To be fair to Liam, Kim is, of course, going to defend reductionism, so in this case it's good to be naive and doctrinaire.

22.03.2025 14:22 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Jaegwon Kim on @lastpositivist.bsky.social in 1989.

22.03.2025 14:19 β€” πŸ‘ 13    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

There is a picture of me from like 1997 in my Little League uniform marching with Schumer in the Forest Hills memorial day parade. We likely have ancestors from nearby villages in Galicia. I have a lot of warm feelings for him. Put his name on an expressway or tunnel and get him out of leadership.

16.03.2025 20:31 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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β€˜The Interview’: Chuck Schumer on Democrats, Antisemitism and His Shutdown Retreat The Senate minority leader discusses the backlash to his vote on the Republican spending bill, how he sees his role within the party and his new book.

There needs to be a political movement against Donald Trump. It's hard to read this and still think that one of the leaders of that movement should be Chuck Schumer. His deep institutionalism just doesn't meet the moment. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/m....

16.03.2025 20:31 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

New pre-print: "Toward Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations." arxiv.org/pdf/2502.134.... We investigate different RAG techniques for improving LLMs' familiarity with a range of national cultures. For multiple-choice QA benchmarks, the best strategy is to connect an LLM to the web. However...

20.02.2025 13:04 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

This is a big output of my time as a visitor at Google research, and I'm excited to see where it goes from here!

20.02.2025 13:04 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

this strategy either denigrates performance or has no effect on measures of cultural fluency like stereotype avoidance or human evals. We conclude that there is more to cultural awareness than propositional knowledge, and that this matters when trying to make LLMs more culturally aware.

20.02.2025 13:04 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

New pre-print: "Toward Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations." arxiv.org/pdf/2502.134.... We investigate different RAG techniques for improving LLMs' familiarity with a range of national cultures. For multiple-choice QA benchmarks, the best strategy is to connect an LLM to the web. However...

20.02.2025 13:04 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Interesting example of a task that GPT-4o fails at unless you turn on reasoning mode: assigning numbers to sentences such that sentence A gets a lower number than sentence B if and only if A implies B (as in a Heyting algebra).

18.02.2025 14:11 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Powerpoint's AI slide designer dropping a hauntingly beautiful pegasus at 8am.

11.02.2025 13:59 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

It’s really great to see formal and mathematical approaches to philosophy taking center stage like this. Wish I could teleport to Oxford every Wednesday (for all sorts of reasons TBF).

30.01.2025 14:53 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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We love to see it, folks.

27.01.2025 23:16 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Really happy for you, and more happy for AU!

25.01.2025 02:57 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

One would think that overleaf would already have 'Harsanyi' in its spell-check dictionary...

19.01.2025 19:50 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

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