Brett Karlan

This would defeat the purpose of taking a break from bluesky

Taking a break from bluesky not for a boring normal reason (wanting my attention span back) but for a cool interesting reason (being so pissed at my employer that I worry I might post something that makes me unemployable anywhere ever again)

Michael Jacovides, Hume on the Prospects for a Scientific Psychology - PhilPapers In Section One of an Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume distinguishes between two sorts of writing on human nature: first, one that appeals to common sense to make virtue seem ...

My paper, "Hume on the Prospects for a Scientific Psychology," was accepted by the Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences, which is nice. It's on section 1 of the first Enquiry, both as a manifesto for a future science and as a guide to the rest of the Enquiry philpapers.org/rec/JACHOT-4

People offer all kinds of warnings about how brutal the academic job market is. But we often don't warn people enough that, in the rare case you are successful, you then have to be an academic

They were supposed to do a (short) presentation today and just wanted to not do it? Or do it a different day? My email back is awaiting a response idk lol

But even then, the idea of responding "You WILL respect me and this 100-level humanities course that you have to take even if you haven't read a full book since middle school" doesn't fill me with joy

99% of the time, I think the laid-back, understanding approach I take in the classroom is the right one. 1% of the time, I get emails from a student (9 weeks into the semester) saying they forgot when class was, scheduled another meeting during class time, and it would be a hassle to reschedule

So forgive me if I think one actually is free to be pro-AI in the contemporary US university, and what people want is to be able to do so without pushback, agentic AI posting under Alexander's handle

Also, maybe there are a few actually anti-AI universities, but every one I've interacted with recently has been so pro-AI that it's very hard to imagine anyone suffering material harm for wanting to research AI (and very easy to imagine quite the opposite)

Feeling some social reproach from colleagues for doing something those colleagues think of as morally problematic is not even in the same ballpark as the actual free speech issues facing academia right now

That's cool, if I even mention the existence of trans people in class a student can anonymously report me and I can get fired, but I bet it sucks to not be able to talk about AI with sufficient enthusiasm too

Strictly speaking, a postdoc is just a doc who posts

You KNOW Noam is pissed when he posts 👏 before 👏 1 👏 pm 👏

Kind of a game, somewhat, in the end

In the Traitors, when they talk about "gamers," they mean someone who has been on Survivor or some shit.

Weak.

Put an actual gamer on the Traitors. 300 pounds, covered in Cheeto dust, top 100 Rocket League worldie, dying cause he can't get Mountain Dew in the Scottish highlands. He would crush

found some old drilosophers posts in my files. i've contributed something good to this world, i think

The World Baseball Classic is excellent drama because baseball is a sport where (a) we know with mathematical precision exactly how good a player/team is, but (b) any given game is a coin toss. Having a baseball tournament with single-elimination knockout rounds is brilliant stagecraft

I hate that we're talking about Newcomb's problem again because I can never remember which answer means I'm a cool with-it insider and which one means I'm a raving sociopath, and at this point I'm too afraid to ask

This dire situation probably explains why the narrator cannot tell whether Mister Mister (a very distinctive band) is in fact the band playing on the radio/stereo

Once again, people need to stop caring so much about Justice and start thinking about just us

There is, by now, a well-established and strong inverse correlation between the amount I prep for a class and how well it goes, and that doesn't seem like it should be a thing in a just world

If the world wants me to be a responsible and careful teacher, it really should stop rewarding me with by far my best classroom discussions when I show up to class sleep-deprived and basically lecture without prep from memory

In an LLM world, this kind of pure, uncut human slop hits me harder than the goddamn Brandenburg Concertos. It's just so beautiful

Predatory journal in my inbox this morning is actually philosophy-themed, for once. Almost makes me feel warm towards them, compared to the emails I usually get from the International Journal for the Society of HVAC, Neuroscience, and Management Society

It's truly an indictment of social media in 2026 that this place, of all places, is the best one still

Bluesky is big enough for furry communists to find your posts and yell at you but small enough that, if like 3 of your friends are not currently posting, it is noticeably worse. Scholars of the internet call this the "Suck Zone"

Probably the coolest guy to graduate from the sketchy "liberal" "arts" ""college"" in my hometown

Lol excellent identification skills

You want me to host a debate? The thing that killed Charlie Kirk??

Honestly many people with backgrounds in both philosophy and cog neuro still have way too strongly-held beliefs about consciousness