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davidkinney.bsky.social

@davidkinney.bsky.social
239 followers 259 following 89 posts

Assistant Professor in Philosophy at WashU (St Louis). davidbkinney.com

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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
You should be able to pre-submit your papers to Nous and PPR tomorrow, the way a football coach can call the ref over as the clock is ticking and say “I’m going to call a time out when there’s one second left.”
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
On this and abortion, MO courts have been remarkably willing to rule in ways the GOP would prefer they didn’t.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as woke 1, the second time as woke 2.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Teaching intro logic is just saying "in ordinary life this is an epistemic success term, but in a logic class it just denotes a syntactic property" over and over.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
One of the best early-career jobs in academia. If you are formally or computationally-inclined early career philosopher interested in this, feel free to get in touch and I’d be happy to try and answer any questions you have.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
Lindsay Graham dying after saying “I’ll go to the hospital right after I do meet the press” is funny but then I could easily see myself at 71 saying “I’ll go to the hospital right after my talk” only to be taken out of the Palmer house in a body bag.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Article in WashU’s student newspaper in which I give my extremely lukewarm take on the report commissioned by WashU and Vanderbilt on the state of the humanities and humanistic social sciences: www.studlife.com/news/2026/07....
studlife.com
WashU- and Vanderbilt-commissioned report on the humanities comes under fire - Student Life
A recent report commissioned by WashU and Vanderbilt on the politicization of humanities research has generated significant pushback from humanities professors, the WashU chapter of the American Assoc...
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
What, to a Bluesky poster, is the Fourth of July? Seems like we’re gonna find out.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
This paper is fantastic: link.springer.com/article/10.1.... IMO there is an lack of intellectual humility in the way that some philosophers are super-quick to jettison standard methods in probability theory in favor of their intuitions. This paper is a wonder antidote to that.
link.springer.com
Are nonmeasurable sets significant for epistemology? - Synthese
Probabilism holds that rational credence functions are probability functions defined over some probability space $$(\Omega, \mathcal{F}, P)$$ . According to some recent philosophical arguments, in som...
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
If Balogun were very tall and only slightly French he would’ve never been called for a suspension-triggering foul.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
I feel like if anyone came up with a discussion-ending argument against semantic pragmatism, intuitionism, etc., then it would belong in Phil Review and not some report.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Can't sleep after that game so I'm going to do formal epistemology.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Can the conspiracy to bias the reffing in favor of large market teams please start again?
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
On the Miller Light essay in the Atlantic: 1. The idea that drinking cheap beer is somehow counter-normative within a grad school cohort is completely opposite from my experience. 2. I can see how one could become a beer snob to deal with genuine class-based angst during grad school, BUT...
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
Fun little project I have been working on: an LLM agent that (attempts) to generate proofs in the relevance logic R. github.com/davidbkinney....
github.com
GitHub - davidbkinney/relevance_logic_agent: An LLM agent that uses a Python-based proof system, exposed via an MCP server, to complete proofs in the relevance logic R.
An LLM agent that uses a Python-based proof system, exposed via an MCP server, to complete proofs in the relevance logic R. - davidbkinney/relevance_logic_agent
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
Fun little project I have been working on: an LLM agent that (attempts) to generate proofs in the relevance logic R. github.com/davidbkinney....
github.com
GitHub - davidbkinney/relevance_logic_agent: An LLM agent that uses a Python-based proof system, exposed via an MCP server, to complete proofs in the relevance logic R.
An LLM agent that uses a Python-based proof system, exposed via an MCP server, to complete proofs in the relevance logic R. - davidbkinney/relevance_logic_agent
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
I recently read this whole paper while doing the overnight with my two month old and I think it's about as good an example I can think of for philosophy making progress. Dynamical systems provide sound and complete models for relevance logic! academic.oup.com/mind/article...
academic.oup.com
The Logic of Dynamical Systems Is Relevant
Abstract. Lots of things are usefully modelled in science as dynamical systems: growing populations, flocking birds, engineering apparatus, cognitive agent
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
The wardrobe for dirk, Nash, griffin and Haslam on prime is terrible. An NBA pre-game panel should be in ridiculous mob boss suits. Amazon has them dressed like the partners of an architecture firm in shoreditch.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
Future me will simply follow these instructions and all will be well.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
It is not obvious to me that LLMs do not displace some blue collar labor. I have had multiple DIY projects recently made much easier by LLMs.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
In the span of one week, Italian national teams have beaten England in rugby and the United States in Baseball.
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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 17/02/2026
excellent piece, and should be required reading for anyone skeptical of the technical capabilities and policy implications of AI. there are certainly exceptions, but by and large, the political left is currently treating what should be a five-alarm fire like a distasteful spectator sport.
transformernews.ai
The left is missing out on AI
As a movement, it has largely refused to engage seriously with AI, ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Despite it all, I still think it's important, as I just asked of a hypothetical future reader, that we "consider a pigeon that is trained, before the time t when grue objects change from green to blue, to peck at all and only green objects."
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 04/01/2026
A lot of philosophers working on causation in a formal mode neglect that the “variables” in causal bayes nets are random variables, or functions defined on a sample space that are measurable with respect to some probability space.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 28/11/2025
My aunt, wondering why I don’t live closer to family: “Couldn’t you just be a philosophy professor at NYU?”
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 25/11/2025
For everyone whose back hurt a little when they woke up this morning, a new strongbad email: m.youtube.com/watch?v=-zhs....
m.youtube.com
Strong Bad Email #210 - Robots
YouTube video by homestarrunnerdotcom
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
New paper, co-authored with Donald Martin, Jr. (www.donaldmartinjr.com) forthcoming in System Dynamics Review. We use a synthetic data case study to show how the structural variables studied in system dynamics can help build more robust deep learning pipelines. Preprint: davidbkinney.com/SD_DL.pdf.
davidbkinney.com
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
Perfectly happy for her to write my talk for me.
A dog on a chair in front of a laptop.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
Waxing poetic in the last paragraph of my final lecture notes for formal methods this semester.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
Will anyone recognize the reference or am I truly ancient?
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
Large swathes of north St. Louis still look like a bomb was dropped on them after a tornado in may.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 14/09/2025
Time for my extremely pedantic thing. “Football” means a game played on a field *on foot*, as opposed to on horseback. So you have association football, rugby football, American football, Aussie rules football, and so on. Kicking has nothing to do with the etymology.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
On a very nervy and scary day, I'm posting something I just wrote for my formal methods class that makes me happy.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
‪"The left considers the collective, the right considers each separate individual" is a surprisingly helpful nemonic for sequent calculi.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
lfg
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Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 20/07/2025
Good morning! I'm in Uganda to visit family and friends. But depending on your perspective, don't worry or I'm sorry: I'll be back by the end of the month. See you soon, NYC.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
New paper forthcoming in Mind. I argue that outright beliefs can meaningfully simplify credal updating if the objects of those beliefs are dependence relations between propositions and the DAG formed by these relations has bounded treewidth. Preprint: philarchive.org/rec/KINHRB.
philarchive.org
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
I was today years old when I learned that Nick Adams is not a satirical character being played on twitter by a comedian. I learned this because he will be ambassador to Malaysia.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
I love the idea that there is anything but a negligible number of NYers who would vote for Mamdani (or, indeed, any Democrat) if not for his failure to uphold Columbus as an Italian-American hero. People who like and care about Columbus are Republicans.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
They look they’re about to drop the hottest adult contemporary album of 1994.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
Centaur is really exciting. As far as I can tell, it seems to have been made possible in large part by German federal funding. Once again, public funding of science gets the goods: www.nature.com/articles/s41....
nature.com
A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition - Nature
A computational model called Centaur, developed by fine-tuning a language model on a huge dataset called Psych-101, can predict and simulate human nature in experiments expressible in natural language...
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
His ability to rattle off facts and figures with a breezy confidence that makes him seem smart and cool at the same time reminds me of (don't get mad) Bill Clinton in his prime. If the NYC mayoralty wasn't the graveyard of US politics, I'd say rhere's some juice here.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
Everybody wants to be a formal epistemologist, but nobody wants to make these ugly-ass beamer slides.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
Paper forthcoming in the 2025 FAccT proceedings! When evaluating algorithms, we often manage a trade-off between accuracy and fairness. I argue that this should be done by via a linear combination of accuracy and fairness measures, for Harsanyi-style reasons: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08829.
arxiv.org
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
Probably not a total coincidence that Stefanik's upstate NY district, while pretty Trumpy, borders Canada and it wouldn't be hard for Dems to make a special election all about tarrifs. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/u...
nytimes.com
Trump Asks Stefanik to Withdraw Bid to Be U.N. Ambassador
The president said he wanted the New York Republican to stay in Congress to bolster the party’s slim House margin and protect her seat.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 22/03/2025
Jaegwon Kim on @lastpositivist.bsky.social in 1989.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 16/03/2025
There needs to be a political movement against Donald Trump. It's hard to read this and still think that one of the leaders of that movement should be Chuck Schumer. His deep institutionalism just doesn't meet the moment. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/m....
nytimes.com
‘The Interview’: Chuck Schumer on Democrats, Antisemitism and His Shutdown Retreat
The Senate minority leader discusses the backlash to his vote on the Republican spending bill, how he sees his role within the party and his new book.
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
New pre-print: "Toward Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations." arxiv.org/pdf/2502.134.... We investigate different RAG techniques for improving LLMs' familiarity with a range of national cultures. For multiple-choice QA benchmarks, the best strategy is to connect an LLM to the web. However...
arxiv.org
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
New pre-print: "Toward Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations." arxiv.org/pdf/2502.134.... We investigate different RAG techniques for improving LLMs' familiarity with a range of national cultures. For multiple-choice QA benchmarks, the best strategy is to connect an LLM to the web. However...
arxiv.org
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davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 18/02/2025
Interesting example of a task that GPT-4o fails at unless you turn on reasoning mode: assigning numbers to sentences such that sentence A gets a lower number than sentence B if and only if A implies B (as in a Heyting algebra).
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