link dump – News For Wombats

ScabGPT

Via Daily Beast and Daily Nous: The administration at Boston University has made a number of tone-deaf suggestions for how faculty can juggle students while their graduate student TAs are on strike. Among these: “Engage generative AI tools to give feedback or facilitate ‘discussion’ on readings or assignments.”

Last year, I wrote that “there will be people who lose their jobs because of generative algorithms. This won’t be because they can be replaced, but instead because of rapacious capitalism. To put it in plainer terms, because their management is a bunch of dicks.”

Dots. Connected.

Pluralism (art) and trust (AI)

Two small updates:

Does art pluralism lead to eliminativism? Co-authored with Christy Mag Uidhir and published recently in Estetika. TL;DR: Maybe.
On trusting chatbots, still in draft form but updated. TL;DR: It’s vexing.

Engines of enshittification

Via Ars Technica, I’ve learned that shady Amazon sellers have been using chatbots to automatically write item descriptions. The result is hot offers on items like “I cannot fulfill that request” and “I apologize but I cannot complete this task.” This is a natural progression from Amazon product listings which were simply misdescribed by humans.

Who I am these days

Recent updates to the department website have added a direct link to my CV and a list of representative publications, so it made sense to rewrite my bio as well. Here’s what it says now:

His areas of research include philosophy of science, the philosophy of art and music, the epistemology of technology (Wikipedia and AI), and pragmatism. His work in the philosophy of science, motivated by a falliblist but non-sceptical conception of scientific knowledge, has addressed topics like the underdetermination of theory by data, natural kinds, and values in science. He regularly teaches courses in philosophy of science, logic, epistemology, pragmatism, and philosophy of art.

I feel seen

I just stumbled across an old interview with Alexander Nehamas. This line about his life captures mine just as well:

I walked backwards into a life, deciding to do whatever seemed easiest at the time, just postponing difficult decisions indefinitely. Either by design or by accident, I ended up in philosophy.

Hot takes on new things

Like pretty much everybody else, I’ve been thinking about chatbots and generative AI. Unlike other things I write about, like scurvy, this is a hot topic. It’s hard to keep up using my usual strategy of rambling here on the blog, ruminating, and letting ideas simmer. Nevertheless, there are these two papers:

Generative AI and photographic transparency: accepted and forthcoming at AI&Society
On trusting chatbots: a draft that riffs on my earlier work on Wikipedia to ask how we should think about claims that we read when interacting with chatbots

I had some things to say about open access

I recorded a session as the guest on the Librarians with Lattes podcast, talking about open access. The episode dropped today as part of Open Access Week.

It’s available at all the podcast places, but here are links to Apple and Spotify.

89% complete

Aesthetics For Birds recently posted #89 in the series 100 Philosophers, 100 Artworks, 100 Words.

The series began almost a decade ago. The premise for the series, sometimes abbreviated just 100x100x100, gives it long-form structure. It is not finished yet, but it is clear what’s required for it to be finished.

Three egocentric top-five lists

It is never clear to me which things I’ve written have had the most impact. Two easy answers: First, there is forall x. It exists in myriad versions now, customized and translated by people around the world. But that’s a textbook, so it isn’t readily comparable to all the other things. Second, nothing I have written has had too much impact. Still, one can make distinctions even in the low end.

So here are some metrics.

A fair showing

At Daily Nous, there’s discussion of how much philosophy sites figure in Google’s C4 data set— and so in the training set of Large Language Models. The Washington Post has a widget to search for the rank of specific domains.

This very site— this blog plus my other foofaraw— ranks 612,096th with about 38 thousand tokens.

My old blog ranks close behind at 625,716th with about 37k tokens.

Although the tool isn’t designed to give this kind of result, the two together would rank somewhere around 300,000th.