Tag: social media

If you hadn’t nailed its tweets to the perch

I stopped using Twitter a while back, before it was an X website. The ongoing meltdown at that steaming crater in the connectivity graph where Twitter used to be illustrates why putting power in the hands of the super-rich is not a recipe for harmony. Contra economists’ assumptions, it’s not even a recipe for profit and economic progress.

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A column, an address, a garden

  • A public-facing article that I wrote about cover songs appeared today at Psyche under the title They’re playing our song! The philosophical puzzle of cover songs. I was prompted to focus on just a single example, so most of my discussion revolves around “‘Crazy’ – not the Gnarls Barkley song, but the Patsy Cline song.” There’s some new stuff in it, although nothing that wasn’t at least anticipated in my earlier work.
  • Given the much-discussed mishegas, I’ve stopped using Twitter. My idle moments scrolling and posting have moved to Mastodon, where I’m @news4wombats@mastodon.social
  • My Philosophy of Art class is winding down, so I’m getting some summary student feedback. I asked students which of the artworks that we discussed was their favourite. The winner, by a large margin, was Martha Schwartz’s Bagel Garden.
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Overconfidence about overconfidence

Recently, someone I follow on Twitter linked to a story by Katie MacBride titled “Overconfidence kills: The CDC and WHO still haven’t learned how to effectively communicate uncertainty.” That seemed right to me, so I clicked ❤️, followed the link, and read the story. Despite agreeing with the thesis, the actual article gets so much wrong that I went back and withdrew my ❤️ from the Tweet linking to it. This isn’t something I do very often.

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