Tim Crane

Digital Labor, Platforms, and AI This chapter examines the role that platform labor plays in the development of contemporary AI systems. While such systems are often touted as magical innovations, they are typically propped up by vas...

On Labor: Munn, L. (2024). Digital Labor, Platforms, and AI. In H. Werthner, C. Ghezzi, J. Kramer, J. Nida-Rümelin, B. Nuseibeh, E. Prem, & A. Stanger (Eds.), Introduction to Digital Humanism: A Textbook (pp. 557–569). Springer Nature Switzerland. doi.org/10.1007/978-...

Wittgenstein!

Reminds me much of reading Hegel and also some extremely stiff mid-century analytic work. Makes me also think about this review by @timcrane.bsky.social, though I am not sure if he ever felt the “pull” of Sellars I experience. #philsky

Familiarizing myself more with Sellars, I notice a psychological repulsion to the form in which thoughts are presented, followed by a pull into the text once I grasp certain things, which is mixed with a sigh and the thought, “Wilfrid - you could have put this more plainly, couldn’t you?”

You guess right, I never did!

Philosophers are funny because they'll go all out refuting a claim like "Scientists before and after a revolution might be said to live in different worlds" but just shrug at claims like "Names are magic words that help me know Nixon is necessarily not a robot and kitties necessarily aren't demons."

Job Opportunity at University of Leeds: Lecturer/Associate Professor in Philosophy Are you an experienced academic in Philosophy with the ambition to carry out world-leading research and deliver an exceptional student experience in a research-intensive Russell Group University? Woul...

📣JOB ALERT📣
Lecturer or Associate Professor in Philosophy at University of Leeds. AOS: Social Philosophy + at least one of: Metaphysics, Epistemology, or Philosophy of Language, Logic, Mind, or Action. Details at jobs.leeds.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx.... Closing date 5 Nov 2025. #philosophy 1/2

This way! www.timcrane.com/uploads/2/5/...

Thanks! Will read it

Thanks ... this was about 20 years ago, I'm not sitting on the fence anymore!

He certainly isn't :)

Hey not all of us!

@knowledgecrisis.bsky.social

CEU now in the top 5 Austrian universities, according to the Times -- three of those 5 are medical schools, and the other one is the University of Vienna, the largest German-speaking university in the world @weareceu.bsky.social

Erstmals österreichische Uni unter Top 100 In der soeben veröffentlichten neuen Ausgabe des „Times Higher Education World University Ranking“ hat mit der Universität Wien erstmals eine österreichische Hochschule einen Platz in den Top 100 erre...

science.orf.at/stories/3232...

Honestly, when the financial press starts printing diagrams like this, isn't it time for a regulator to step in?

Can Only Meat Machines be Conscious? New paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, free download until November 26 with this URL: authors.elsevier.com/a/1luwh4sIRv...

Landscape. Study after Nature

Landscape. Study after Nature, 1876
https://botfrens.com/collections/43/contents/11878

Very powerful piece

My piano teacher said to me, 'you don't disguise your mistakes by playing quietly' and I realised she was right about this, and also that it applies to learning a language: it's very tempting to mumble when you don't know if it is das or der....

America is now one big bet on AI It’s seen as the magic fix for every threat to the US economy

‘The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year… Outside of the AI plays, even European stock markets have been outperforming the US this decade’
on.ft.com/4pTQ3US

New post-doctoral position at Notre Dame
Core analytic/logic/phil math. philjobs.org/job/show/29622
2 year position, $75K annual salary plus $15K expense account. Please apply! (I am chairing this search.)

This Isabelle Faust Telemann album is really quite something

This is so gloriously embarrassing

When Renoir's portrait of the politician Jacques-Eugène Spuller was exhibited in 1877, critics were puzzled: 'The drawing of the features in the portrait of our friend Spuller lacks solidity, however his expression is intense, the eyes think, the flesh is alive.'

Interpretation and Understanding Contact

@ceu-philosophy.bsky.social has organized a conference for today in honor of our colleague David Weberman who has recently retired from @weareceu.bsky.social. Congrats, David! The program includes talks by @timcrane.bsky.social, Ferenc Huoranszki and Matt Dougherty. More here:

Since it resonated with the audience, I’ll recap my main argument against AGI here. ‘General intelligence’ is like phlogiston, or the aether. It’s an outmoded scientific concept that does not refer to anything real. Any explanatory work it did can be done better by a richer scientific frame. 1/3

This is a great paper

Shamelessly promoting my favorite paper. Everybody who was anybody in the history of science/philosophy/mathematics had a view on the moon illusion. frances-egan.org/uploads/3/5/...

Brilliant. Suggest that Voralberg should be Tasmania and Wien the ACT, then you don’t have to split WA