@News4wombats@mastodon.social
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

News4wombats

@News4wombats@mastodon.social

I teach philosophy in Albany, NY. My research is mostly in the philosophy of science, philosophy of music, and pragmatism. Posting about my research happens occasionally, but often it's puns, sarcasms, and pictures of food.

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taylorlorenz, to random
@taylorlorenz@mastodon.social avatar

Facebook made a UI tweak to bring back the "Poke" button, and found that use of Pokes went up 13x -- mostly among users 18-29, who had probably never even used Poke the first time around https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-poke-feature-gen-z-2024-3

News4wombats,
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

@taylorlorenz To be fair, the poke button was always the best thing about Facebook.

ninokadic, to Cognition
@ninokadic@mastodon.social avatar

What's your position regarding consciousness? Broad physicalism (we'll have a scientific explanation one day) or broad anti-physicalism (science can't give a complete account)? Or something else?

Please repost after voting, I'm genuinely curious! 🤔

@philosophy @philosophyofmind

News4wombats,
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

@ninokadic @philosophy @philosophyofmind It seems to me that you are conflating epistemology with ontology. Physicalism is the ontological thesis that mind is a physical thing, that mental properties are physical properties, etc. That is compatible with skepticism about science's ability to fully explain consciousness. After all, a physicalist might think that science will never fully explain physical things.

thehangedman, to random

How I feel about mastodon a lot of the time.

News4wombats,
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

@thehangedman Not to deny your experience, but I feel like you must be following different people than I follow. (Or am I the asshole? ominous music)

Teri_Kanefield, to random
@Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social avatar

Okay techies: Every time I post a link to my website on Mastodon, everyone (including me) is shut out of my website for about 5 mintutes with an "error 500" message.

This doesn't happen when I post anywhere else, and I get 10 time the traffic from other sources.

People have offered me and my tech support staff (my husband) solutions. None of them worked.

News4wombats,
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

@Teri_Kanefield Interesting. I've been having similar problems when I post to my blog. I had figured it was an internal problem with my blog, but maybe it's the autoposted link on Mastodon.
Technology is weird.

News4wombats, to random
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

Spatchquacking the .

News4wombats, to random
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

Got two decisions back from journals today.
One paper: Accepted.
Another paper: After 11 months, the journal decided they were never going to be able to find referees and so rejected it without review.

News4wombats, to random
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

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:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-access-with-p-d-magnus/id1450532486?i=1000632854936
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ualbany-libraries/episodes/Open-Access-with-P-D--Magnus-e2b4thq

News4wombats, to random
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

Some days I have no idea how to do this job

Reviewer #1 calls it "well-written, well-researched, clear and compelling." They say it's "good to go." Reviewer #2 says that the "ideas are evasive and not well developed." The verdict is Revise&Resubmit— that is, rejection with encouragement to resubmit with "major revisions."

I'm stymied.

I deliberately haven't provi…

https://www.fecundity.com/nfw/2023/10/25/some-days-i-have-no-idea-how-to-do-this-job/

petersuber, to ai
@petersuber@fediscience.org avatar

A new tool improves the verifiability of (@wikipedia) by recommending better citations.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-023-00726-1

"This neural-network-based system, which we call SIDE, can identify Wikipedia citations that are unlikely to support their claims, and…recommend better ones…For the top 10% most likely citations to be tagged as unverifiable by our system, humans prefer our system’s suggested alternatives compared with the originally cited reference 70% of the time."

News4wombats,
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

@petersuber If my review would be helping to train AI, then it depends on how much they’re paying. My willingness to do peer review for free is to support the system of publication, because when I submit things they also need to be reviewed. There’s no such reciprocity in assessing the outputs of AI.

News4wombats,
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

@petersuber Except it’s also helping someone train, improve, and test their software.

News4wombats,
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

@petersuber Maybe.
Vetting AI output would be rather like grading and commenting on papers. That will do a good thing (help improve students’ writing), and I will give comments on one paper if asked (time permitting). But I will only read the stack of papers from a whole class as part of my job.

News4wombats, to random
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

The warlord hired a few of the remaining literate folks to scribble words on the walls of his palace. He knew that writing had once been important, and he wanted his palace to echo the old ways. It didn't matter which words they wrote. An old scribbler said that there used to be machines that would make up spurious text to fill space in that way. Such a machine was called an LLM, which as near as she could recall was short for Loremipsumdo Lorsita Met.

News4wombats, to philosophy
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

It took me years to write it

Fifteen years ago, I conducted a small study testing the error-correction tendency of Wikipedia. Not only is Wikipedia different now than it was then, the community that maintains it is different. Despite the crudity of that study’s methods, it is natural to wonder what the result would be now. So I repeated the earlier study and found surpri…

https://www.fecundity.com/nfw/2023/09/13/it-took-me-years-to-write-it/

#philosophy #ai #MyWriting #technology

DavisSmith, to ethics

@ethics @philosophy

Would the world be a better place if everyone were a Kantian about Ethics?

This is a question I pose to my Intro to Ethics students as a paper topic. I am curious what y'all might think. The question is intentionally vague on multiple levels.

News4wombats,
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

@DavisSmith @ethics @philosophy If everyone were Kantian about ethics, then everyone would be Kantian about ethics only if the world would be a better place if everyone were Kantian about ethics. I mean— if they couldn't consistently will for everyone to be Kantian, then their Kantianism would require them not to be Kantian.

petersuber, to random
@petersuber@fediscience.org avatar

1/ Conjecture about AI/LLM tools

Find a scientific question with these three properties:

  1. It has a yes/no answer.
  2. It has a history of disagreement. Historically there have been many researchers, experiments, studies, datasets, and arguments on each side.
  3. Recently the question was decisively resolved. The latest research shows consensus, while the past research shows lack of consensus.

,

🧵

News4wombats,
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

@petersuber I think your hypothesis is correct, but that the specimen you selected has actually had a dominant answer for some time. (Not that I have a better suggestion.)

News4wombats,
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

@bornach @petersuber I remember 15 years ago, when all the epistemic panic was about how Wikipedia was untrustworthy. 🙃

petersuber, to academicchatter
@petersuber@fediscience.org avatar

"#Florida’s Public-University Board Approves Firing Poorly Performing Tenured Professors."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/against-faculty-wishes-floridas-public-university-board-allows-poor-performers-to-be-fired
(#paywalled)

The same article reports that public universities in Florida are having trouble hiring professors. "During [recruitment] conversations, 'more and more often, we are hearing, "Florida? Not Florida. Not now. Not yet," because they are looking at regulations' like this one, as well as bills passed and proposed by the Florida Legislature."

#Tenure
@academicchatter

News4wombats,
@News4wombats@mastodon.social avatar

@petersuber @academicchatter but only in

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