davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 07/10/2026Mick Jones simply cleaning up on this list. 010
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 07/10/2026So, I hope philosophers keep writing their own proofs, even if they tend to be trivial from the point of view of professional mathematicians and would be easily completed by AI. 020
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 07/10/2026The situation is different in frontier math where I think there is real epistemic value in just knowing the answers to these conjectures, but that's almost never the case in mathematical philosophy, where the value lies in the sense of understanding that mathematical representation provides. 120
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 07/10/2026Second, when I go to a formal talk, or exchange emails with colleagues, I care that they worked through the proofs of any propositions they're presenting. It gives me confidence that I'm speaking with a person who understands why some proposition is true and why it matters that it's true. 130
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 07/10/2026First, generative AI inference costs money. I'd hate to live in a world where keeping up in mathematical philosophy requires anyone to pay a private corporation money (beyond the money one must pay for the food, water, coffee, shelter, and transportation needed to do philosophy generally). 120
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 07/10/2026In light of all that, one could imagine that ALL mathematical philosophy should work by getting things to that point, and then just offloading the work of proving to a model. But I think that would be a bad thing for at least two reasons. 120
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 07/10/2026The value is in getting to a point where your reader agrees that the truth of some proposition is philosophically interesting, and that its truth isn't so obvious that a proof is of no value. So, you prove it, and it has the effect of guiding the reader that much more gently to your conclusion. 130
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 07/10/2026I think there is widespread agreement that the proofs that appear in most mathematical philosophy papers, apart from a small minority, are mathematically trivial. This is certainly true of anything in any of my published papers, even though I struggled mightily to complete any of them. 130
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 07/10/2026I'm saying this as someone who thinks the recently publicized AI-generated proofs of frontier math conjectures are an incredible achievement. I'm not really an anti-AI person in any robust sense. (I find some uses of generative AI annoying, but I think everyone does.) 120
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 07/10/2026Reflecting a bit on AI-generated proof from the perspective of formal epistemology and mathematical philosophy more broadly. 142
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 02/10/2026This is a great thread. As for what the “something else” could be, I find this paper @rtommccoy.bsky.social really intriguing: arxiv.org/pdf/2608.29530. Approximation of symbolic structure would explain approximately accurate performance on large-number arithmetic.arxiv.org 0110
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 29/09/2026You 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.” 160
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 14/09/2026I got one from someone coming to WashU to give a talk and wanted to get coffee. With the key phrases from my website in bold. Very off-putting. 020
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 04/09/2026On this and abortion, MO courts have been remarkably willing to rule in ways the GOP would prefer they didn’t. 000
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 24/08/2026Nikki Glaser used to live in the penthouse of my apartment building in St Louis and it was VERY hard not to stop her in the elevator and see if she could punch up my lectures. 010
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 16/08/2026Just another place to plug @tylermarghetis.bsky.social’s perennially relevant paper: link.springer.com/article/10.3....link.springer.comBias and ignorance in demographic perception - Psychonomic Bulletin & ReviewWhen it comes to knowledge of demographic facts, misinformation appears to be the norm. Americans massively overestimate the proportions of their fellow citizens who are immigrants, Muslim, LGBTQ, and... 160
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 13/08/2026Hegel 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. 010
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 02/08/2026Teaching 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. 131
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 31/07/2026There’s a dynamic here too that is like the NRA in the US. They’ve effectively won for now, but to keep the donations and the jobs and the infrastructure in place they need to keep pushing for even more extreme stuff. 020
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 28/07/2026One 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. 000
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 12/07/2026Lindsay 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. 000
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 08/07/2026Article 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.comWashU- and Vanderbilt-commissioned report on the humanities comes under fire - Student LifeA 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... 000
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 04/07/2026What, to a Bluesky poster, is the Fourth of July? Seems like we’re gonna find out. 000
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 03/07/2026This 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.comAre nonmeasurable sets significant for epistemology? - SyntheseProbabilism 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... 191
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 02/07/2026If Balogun were very tall and only slightly French he would’ve never been called for a suspension-triggering foul. 100
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 13/06/2026I 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. 010
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 11/06/2026Update I did like ten minutes of formal epistemology then went to bed. 010
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 11/06/2026Can't sleep after that game so I'm going to do formal epistemology. 1183
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 07/06/2026Right those are the ones where Donald Trump, noted email user, discusses his sex crimes. 110
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 07/06/2026I find it strange because, like, aren’t the sort of released? There is a page with millions of his emails that you can search through and find all kinds of stuff in. 220
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 04/06/2026Can the conspiracy to bias the reffing in favor of large market teams please start again? 020
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 03/06/2026I once had an English professor who said “if you don’t like lists, you won’t like old poetry.” Same applies to high-church Sociotechnical Research. 010
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 23/05/2026Anyway, great day on the internet hope we get another banger soon. 000
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 23/05/20264. Harper is talking mostly about his undergrad experience. But then that raises the question of how anyone manages to become a beer snob before the age of 21 in the US. Sure, it's easy to get beer underage, but in my experience, you don't typically have that much control over the brand of beer. 100
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 23/05/20263. In my experience, humanities grad school is NOT where you find people who use 'summer' as a verb or have a trust fund (and if they do, they keep it VERY quiet). Sure, the backgrounds are overwhelmingly PMC, but that's very different. Maybe comp lit is different from philosophy. Or MAYBE... 120
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 23/05/2026On 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... 140
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 21/05/2026This is why “if a student gives you a hard time about grades, you send them straight to me” is the only acceptable policy on this from lecturers/profs. 180
Reposted by @davidkinney.bsky.socialdavidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 28/04/2026Fun little project I have been working on: an LLM agent that (attempts) to generate proofs in the relevance logic R. github.com/davidbkinney....github.comGitHub - 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 001
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 28/04/2026Fun little project I have been working on: an LLM agent that (attempts) to generate proofs in the relevance logic R. github.com/davidbkinney....github.comGitHub - 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 001
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 26/04/2026I 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.comThe Logic of Dynamical Systems Is RelevantAbstract. Lots of things are usefully modelled in science as dynamical systems: growing populations, flocking birds, engineering apparatus, cognitive agent 030
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 19/04/2026Piantadosi has a very full-throated argument that LLMs refute Chomsky: pemt.ru/wp-content/u....pemt.ru 110
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 18/04/2026The 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. 020
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 28/03/2026Future me will simply follow these instructions and all will be well. 031
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 12/03/2026It 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. 100
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 11/03/2026In the span of one week, Italian national teams have beaten England in rugby and the United States in Baseball. 020
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 19/02/2026That is simply incredible news, congratulations! 110
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 19/02/2026I did a cog sci of LLMs course a few years ago. Syllabus could be helpful: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/tg0ba....dropbox.com 160
Reposted by @davidkinney.bsky.socialtal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 17/02/2026excellent 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.aiThe left is missing out on AIAs a movement, it has largely refused to engage seriously with AI, ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right 3237
davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 06/02/2026have you read this? www.amazon.com/Universal-Ba.... I read it when i was like 8 and it went right over my head but I still think about it a lot.amazon.comThe Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. [Coover, Robert] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. 000
