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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 4m

Let me try to articulate why this is so irresponsible to suggest to students. The LLM-generated IQ number is almost always going to be wrong. If it is too low, it risks demoralizing and hurting the esteem of the student. If it is too high, it risks creating the conditions for AI psychosis.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 21h

A citation on arXiv is still a citation

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Luckily the email had a feedback form. I described it with one very strong word.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Don't love that this just arrived in my inbox through official university channels

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Massimiliano Simons @masssimons.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Cannot resist sharing this open PhD position in philosophy of experimentation (on collective decisions about what future large-scale experiments to pursue, particularly within astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology) #philsci #histsci #sts su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

su.varbi.com

PhD student in Theoretical Philosophy

The Department of Philosophy at Stockholm University is the largest in Sweden, with vibrant research groups in a wide range of philosophical disciplines. The department has significant strengths in ph

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

If this is making you want to revisit books, may I suggest you read The Magicians by Lev Grossman instead? It's an amazing fantasy trilogy about nostalgia for Narnia and the disappointing reality of coming of age.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Me swapping my CV to LaTex: I'll never have to think about formatting again! Me now: Claude, why is the function I wrote in 2021 that prevents mid-item page breaks messing with my function from 2023 that improves spacing under section titles? Is it this bodged margin setting from 2019?

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

"Oh you're an atheist?" I ask, shifting into my philosopher voice. "A descriptive atheist (God doesn't exist) or a normative atheist (God should be murdered)?"

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

The alternative is almost worse: I'm ~20th author on a paper where reviewers raised a problem the paper didn't have, but instead of getting a chance to respond, it was rejected outright.

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

OK, since this thread has blown up a bit, I think it's worth clarifying in a new thread to what extent the 'GenAI is asbestos for the mind' analogy might hold up, and where it breaks down (as even useful analogies always do): 1/n

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

The entire philosophical disagreement lit (at least as it's currently formulated) Any conflict over whether a method is appropriate that turns on whether that method is truth-seeking in the right way I suspect the intuition lit would look pretty silly. Like: ofc your judgements matter to you.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

This household has a strict rule against being a Kantian. I retract my tweet.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

So many meta-philosophical puzzles would evaporate if philosophy modeled its self-image on the humanities rather than the sciences

Pg 14 of Horvath, J. (2025). Philosophical Methods: A General Introduction. In J. Horvath, S. Koch, & M. G. Titelbaum (Eds.), Methods in Analytic Philosophy: A Primer and Guide (pp. 1–29). PhilPapers Foundation. https://philarchive.org/rec/HORPMA-4

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

I have an account that I log into a few times a year, requires 2 factor SMS, but doesn't accept non-US phone numbers.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Every October

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Psych is function oriented programming to philosophy's object oriented programming

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

You also don't see quite the same theory of mind as in analytic philosophy. It's process based rather than object based.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

To wit, an effect has the following (defeasible) features: - Is shared by all people, regardless of culture or time - exists in all people even if only observed in some - exists if p < .05 - is not limited to the context of observation (I.e., the experiment) - has causal influence on behaviour

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

It's there, but very lightweight and very close to analytic philosophy. I need an anthropologist to tag in because they are both good at these things and often very very hostile to psych's paradigm

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

A tube of Park Tools grease I brought to the UK with my bike a decade ago has been punctured by something in the toolbox. RIP king. Taken before your time.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Amazing. Any theories on why it looks so easy? Just the other month I was talking to a philosopher about their first foray into xphi and they said "it looked so easy, and then we tried it ourselves..."

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

To say nothing of learning how to write experimental material in a way that is plausibly understood by participants as intended. An absolute dark art that basically every beginner trips up on (especially philosophers).

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

To try to articulate one of the soft skills, one needs to learn to navigate between the limitations of stats, limitations of information in results, and limitations of human trials. Effectively choosing running two 3 way designs, a within subject 2 x 3, or a between subject 2 x 3 takes knowledge.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I take there to be a clear paradigm. Compare the differences between psych now and pre 2010 and pre 1980. It's just somewhat light on ontology (which is absolutely a toll that will one day come due). But sure, you can still summarise mediation analyses imperfectly in plain English.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Doing psych is an absolute craft that cannot be fully appreciated unless you try to do it yourself. It just looks easy because it is written to look easy. Take my word on it as someone who did an armchair PhD, then pivoted with similar hubris. There are a lot of soft skills you aren't seeing.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

bruh. It sometimes looks like this to non-experts, but I assure you it is absolutely 100% not true.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Obviously I love the UK, but The amount British folk (or any Europeans) talk to me about American politics is tedious, even if I get why it happens In my experience it's much easier having an American accent up north

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

We've reached the "why can't they be like this?" stage of UK immigration panic

From the telegraph:

https://archive.is/Lgzlr

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Attempts to recapture the magic of Episode 1's podracing inevitably focus on the weird machines and exotic locations while forgetting the most important part, the original's fucking amazing sound design. www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3rh...

youtube.com

Boonta Eve Classic - Podrace Scene (Part 1) | Star Wars The Phantom Menace (1999) 4K HDR Movie Clip

YouTube video by Filmey Box

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

youtube.com

Boonta Eve Classic - Podrace Scene (Part 1) | Star Wars The Phantom Menace (1999) 4K HDR Movie Clip

YouTube video by Filmey Box

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I don't take these views to be full blown pragmatism. But they definitely represent a swing in that direction sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Co...

sites.pitt.edu

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Iirc, bro is pretty explicit that he's after desiderata, only some of which are related to world-fitting.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Granted, a lot of these people would rather drink poison than call their projects pragmatist. But I said what I said.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This paper tries to couch as much of CE as possible in causal terms. (I'm working on a follow-up that goes further without the machinery.) link.springer.com/article/10.1... But in general Henne is probably the most explicit about CE as pragmatism.

link.springer.com

Conceptual Engineering Should be Empirical - Erkenntnis

Conceptual engineering is a philosophical method that aims to design and spread conceptual and linguistic devices to cause meaningful changes in the world. So far, however, conceptual engineers have s...

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

bsky.app/profile/etha... I would generally lump the projects that are targeting philosophical concepts as pragmatist because they are a) taking our conceptual resources as contingent and b) moving them around for purposes, of which truth is only one of many.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

There might be a 4th project? But I'm of the mind that a lot of the more realist projects in the space are crypto-pragmatist projects, even if the authors don't think so (I saw Greenough give a talk to this effect c 2018 but don't know if it ended up in a paper)

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Erm, here's a go: 1: Me, Henne, Nado(?), Andow 2: Cappelen, Belleri, Machery, Koch 3: all the CE projects not aimed at other philosophers

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

(not to say this doesn't happen with more experienced scientists who are sick of a paper and just want the god damned introduction and discussion sections to be done.)

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I've only read parts, but it feels like they fell down a trap that's easy to fall into if you aren't used to doing empirical scholarship - the conclusion was decided first, and the whole exercise is an attempt to find data that fits the narrative.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Also worth noting that most of their examples include neither media hounding nor firing

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It's pretty clear at this point that cancel culture discourse is based on the recency illusion. But it's rare to see someone complaining about "cancel culture" coming so close to admitting it themselves.

Cancel culture might roughly be defined as the unwarranted suppression of dissenting voices or
alternative points of view. This can take many different forms from media hounding to actual
firings. In what follows, we have presented seven recent and prominent examples from 2019 to the
present day. The list is by no means exhaustive: there are other cases of performers, educators, and
music theorists being canceled for their political or moral stance. Musicology has never been short
of controversy. The methodological and ideological disputes have often been productive, increasing
audience interest in censored or suppressed works, highlighting archival discoveries, and
encouraging historical performance practices

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Granted, this is a more forgivable use of excel than that COVID database that ran out of rows.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

"The error appears to have arisen because a tally of all the costs in a CCC spreadsheet from the document also included the row showing totals for each individual column, thus doubling it." Always troubling when these stories reveal people in charge don't use proper data management tools like R

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

E.g., In phil language, the plausibility/popularity/whatever of Kripke-Putnam externalism plays a big role in guiding debates, but, at best, the account is a loose amalgamation of what both of them wrote.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

When I tried to make sense of the argument, I framed it as a debate about the importance of reader vs author pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... But this seems more right: it downplays the role that the mythologized versions of text play in philosophical texts

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Philosophical producers, philosophical consumers, and the metaphilosophical value of original texts

In recent years, two competing methodological frameworks have developed in the study of the epistemology of philosophy. The traditional camp, led by experimental philosophy and its allies, has made in...

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Both Deutsch (2016) and Cappelen (2012) make roughly the same argument in their books that version of philosophy discussed in pubs and in lectures is in someway less important than the version on paper. Hadn't considered before that this is a mistake about the role of the oral tradition

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Josh Habgood-Coote @impractknow.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Lemme try to put two things together: - What the 'death of reading' skill nostalgia misses. - What could go wrong when we outsource chunks of whole disciplines to language models

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