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Caro Flores

@floresophize.bsky.social
1.5K followers 2.2K following 471 posts

Philosopher @ U Lisboa. Interested in belief, evidence-resistance, social identities, ideology, ignorance, delusions. || Languages: EN, PT, ES || carolinaflores.org for papers

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Reposted by Caro Flores
Josh Shepperd @joshshepperd.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I’m thinking with undergrads, notetaking, putting concepts on the board as we read them, connecting them, making sure that students write down what was accomplished in the class as we go along, all pre-canvas stuff.
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Josh Shepperd @joshshepperd.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
For lack of clear rules about the use of AI in classrooms, it’s difficult to steer students toward slow, close reading and analysis. So I’m pretty sure that I’m gonna return to reading together in class and bluebook-style assignments next year.
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Hey! Thanks so much!!
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I'm also thinking about how to bring these ideas to a wider audience, and I'd love to talk with anyone thinking about the same questions, in a classroom, a reading group, or a piece. And here's the version to cite: doi.org/10.1111/phpr...
doi.org
Beyond Misinformation: Social Media and the Sculpting of Epistemic Agency
The dominant account of social media's epistemic harms focuses on the spread of misinformation and the production of false beliefs at scale. This paper argues that the misinformation narrative, whate...
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
This builds on work I admire: @mjcrockett.bsky.social's research on moral outrage and social learning online, and @add-hawk.bsky.social's work on hostile epistemology, value capture, and how Twitter gamifies communication. Both shaped my thinking a lot.
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
This is part of why popular interventions don't work that well. Fact-checks and media literacy target content, so they can only do so much to make us good at inquiring and interacting with information.
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Why worry? The process that shapes these styles is orthogonal to truth and blind to the environments we live in. It's a neglected kind of epistemic hostility: not exploiting existing vulnerabilities to implant false beliefs, but producing new ones.
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
What shifts is our epistemic style: who we trust, how much evidence it takes to change our minds, which explanations feel satisfying. Engagement-driven curation -> cognitively delicious content: outrage, out-group attacks, simplicity. True or false, it teaches the same lessons about *how* to think.
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
How? Two mechanisms. Normative learning: feeds show us, thousands of times a day, what people like us think and do, and who gets rewarded or piled on. Reinforcement learning: likes and shares at unpredictable intervals train habits, like reflexively dismissing certain sources.
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Social media doesn't just feed you bad information. It trains you in how to treat information: who to trust, how much evidence is enough, what counts as a good explanation. And it trains you for a world that doesn't exist. New @PPR (yay!) and free here: philpapers.org/rec/FLOBMS
doi.org
Beyond Misinformation: Social Media and the Sculpting of Epistemic Agency
The dominant account of social media's epistemic harms focuses on the spread of misinformation and the production of false beliefs at scale. This paper argues that the misinformation narrative, whate...
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Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Social media is a paranoia machine. It makes connections explicit, though not transparent. It not only allows you to trace ties between people, institutions, and events, but also continually produces new ties. On social media, everything becomes connected, and thus potentially suspicious
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Nico @n1c0n1c0.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
I need all my gender abolitionists to submit to this by August 15: philevents.org/event/show/1... @floresophize.bsky.social @carolhay.bsky.social
philevents.org
Social Categories of the Future
Recent years have seen an explosion of work on social categories, including gender, race, disability, and sexual orientation. But little attention has been paid to what these and other categories migh...
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
3-to-9-month fellowships in Portugal - apply to the University of Lisbon to be my colleague for a little bit! gulbenkian.pt/en/bolsas-li...
gulbenkian.pt
Visiting Professorships in the Humanities
These professorships are aimed at Portuguese higher education institutions seeking to host visiting professors from international universities with a distinguished academic record and recognised exper...
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
<3 <3 and a highlight was your brilliant talk!!
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Elise Woodard @elisewoodard.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
10/10 conference. Not regular epistemology, cool epistemology. @knowledgecrisis.bsky.social @floresophize.bsky.social
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Reminder to hit me up if you're a recent PhD and are interested in applying!
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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
yeah, why are parties to a public debate opting to make their case in concrete, verifiable terms that are accessible from more or less any reasonable normative perspective, rather than high metaphysical language associated with specific faith traditions? mystifying choice bsky.app/profile/mich...
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Lucy Osler @lucyosler.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Had a great conversation with Jackie Snow about chatbots’ memory function and the way their personalised callbacks to information and stories you have shared about yourself can calcify your own self-narratives and self-understanding (which I’ve elsewhere described as narrative railroading) 🤖✒️🛤️
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Eleonore Neufeld @eneufeld.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
This piece by ángel pinillos is so good napinillos.substack.com/p/the-honest...
napinillos.substack.com
The Honest Case for the Humanities
Or: Why I’m Tired of My Colleagues Making Arguments That Only Work on Us
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Eleonore Neufeld @eneufeld.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
Syllabus (draft) on modal thought: flaxen-store-af3.notion.site/PHIL555-Moda... Comments welcome!
flaxen-store-af3.notion.site
PHIL555: Modal Thought | Notion
Overview
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Eleonore Neufeld @eneufeld.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Wrote this chapter on how modal cognition develops! check it out! philpapers.org/rec/NEUTDO-9
philpapers.org
Eleonore Neufeld, The Development of Modal Cognition - PhilPapers
This chapter provides a systematic overview of empirical findings and theoretical perspectives from the growing field of the development of modal cognition. I begin by laying out methodological prelim...
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
Thrilled to say I just found a way to include a screenshot of this in a conference talk
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Shen-yi Liao 廖顯禕 @liao.shen-yi.org · 21/05/2026
This is a super interesting short paper! Not for the formal results, which I confess I don't really understand. But for the meta-science. It discusses how the same model can be implemented differently in code. So there's a need for independent coding, even when the researchers agree on the model.
philpapers.org
Jingyi Wu, Remco Heesen & Jun Kyu Lee, Why Scientists Should Not Show and Tell - PhilPapers
Are scientists incentivized to share intermediate results? Some recent work has argued that credit-maximizing scientists would share intermediate results, whereas other work has argued that sharing to...
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
The deadline for internal approval by Humanities at the University of Lisbon is August 25th, 2026. Email npac@letras.ulisboa.pt by June 2nd if you would like your application pre-assessed.
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
The Marie Curie Postdoc Application call for next year is out! Do reach out if you are working in social epistemology (or philosophy of mind with a social bent) and would like to apply to be in Lisbon for 2 years. You need to have finished your PhD and be less than 8 years out. 1/2
marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu
MSCA opens €399 million call for Postdoctoral Fellowships
Postdoctoral Fellowships offer researchers holding a PhD the opportunity to acquire new skills through advanced training and international, interdisciplinary, and inter-sectoral mobility.
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Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
I wrote up some notes about divergences and the work they might do for us in philosophy. philarchive.org/rec/PETDFP
Orange cat looking wistful
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Shen-yi Liao 廖顯禕 @liao.shen-yi.org · 06/05/2026
Other people have noticed this phenomenon too but danah boyd put the best slogan to it: social media is now parasocial media. Social media hasn't been social for a long while—how long depending on the platform, depending on the milieu. It's not folks sharing equally, but broadcasting and receiving.
journals.sagepub.com
Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media - danah boyd, 2026
When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms...
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Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
What can we learn from automating an entire quantitative social science paper, from prompt to finished product? Thread about ongoing work with @natewilmers.bsky.social 1/12 Paper: osf.io/preprints/so...
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
So much of traditional analytic epistemology is just going “When you know, you know” in increasingly obfuscatory ways
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
A new paper challenges the view that higher education liberalizes students (N = 483,885): Students political identities change during college. But there are big differences across majors: Englise/arts students move to the left, while business/engineering shift right psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...
psycnet.apa.org
APA PsycNet
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Brett Karlan @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
US academic: *dodging bullets Matrix-style on the way to class, getting affordable medical care from a guy in a van parked behind campus* lol UK salaries low
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Journal of Applied Philosophy @the-joap.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
#BookReview What's Wrong with Stereotyping? E. Beeghly, 2025. Oxford, Oxford University Press. ix + 249 pp, £30 (hb) Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen Read it here (full access text) 👇 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/DZZYRE... #philsky #philosophy#oup
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
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Chris Bertram @crookedfootball.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Thinking about @dsquareddigest.bsky.social 's thesis that fraudsters flourish in high-trust environments. This has application to philosophers' vulnerability to culture-war bad actors. Philosophers can be terribly naive, think themselves super-smart and immune to being conned, and so get conned
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Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
Last month, Paul Silva organised a terrific online book symposium on Jessie Munton’s wonderful new book, Priority and Prejudice: The Epistemology of Salience and Attention. It was great to discuss the book with Jessie, Jessica Keiser, and Rachel Fraser. The video is here:
youtu.be
"Priority and Prejudice"–Philosopher Meets Critics #26–Munton, Keiser, Pettigrew, Fraser
YouTube video by Figments of the Brain
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southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
if only Louis XVI had had a ballroom he might be alive today
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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
my primary complaint, obviously, is that journals should do more publishing of my papers, and less publishing of other people's papers. this would be cost- and time-neutral
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Keith Raymond Harris @kraymondh.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
Amazing lineup for the @knowledgecrisis.bsky.social Knowledge conference this summer @floresophize.bsky.social @rbnmckenna.bsky.social @elisewoodard.bsky.social #philsky
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Kevin Zollman @kevinzollman.com · 13/04/2026
What a paragraph
While receiving a McDonald’s food delivery to the Oval Office, the president told reporters that he posted a photo that depicted him as a robed, Jesus-like figure because he thought it had depicted him as a physician.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win
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Kevin Zollman @kevinzollman.com · 09/04/2026
An average day in philosophy
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
Big fan of @alexgphilosophy.bsky.social's clear, accessible slide decks on lottocracy. Everyone should make something like this for their (academic) books! www.lottocracy.org
lottocracy.org
LOTTOCRACY
A website for the book Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections published by Oxford University Press. Includes an introduction to lottocracy, events, audio/video, and connections to others working on sortition, lottocracy, and democracy and democratic innovation.
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Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
New paper, out this week in PLOS One, suggests that most close relationship self-report measures are primarily capturing relationship quality 🧵 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
journals.plos.org
Predicting relationship quality with itself? A single general factor captures most of the variance across 34 common relationship measures
In relationship science, researchers have generated a wide array of constructs and corresponding self-report measures to characterize, explain, and predict relationship quality – the foremost studied ...
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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
This looks awesome and I would love to see a draft at some point!
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Evan Westra @evanwestra.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
Will be norming it up at NYU for the New York Philosophy of Language Workshop tomorrow (@dryan149.bsky.social will be norming along in spirit) nylanguageworkshop.tumblr.com/post/8127532...
nylanguageworkshop.tumblr.com
Workshop Monday, April 6th: Evan Westra, The Dynamics of Articulated Norms
Our speaker on Monday, April 6th will be Evan Westra, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purdue. Evan will give a talk called "The dynamics of articulated norms": Of the myriad social norms.....
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
Online hostility is predicted by economic & political inequality Inequality breeds online hostility because people crave status in unequal societies and status-seekers constitute the main perpetrators of hostility in political settings, whether online or offline. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
quill kukla uses the 'what if i volunteer to be a human table at an orgy?' objection, for, i believe, the first time in the pages of Ethics
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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
The analogue of transportation here would be that of proving new results that take one from a given hypothesis to a desired conclusion.  

Human mathematicians can generate such proofs, but the process is lengthy and inefficient, usually requiring one to draw upon previous work or collaboration with colleagues or students.  But this laborious process also generates many beneficial secondary effects beyond the ostensible goal of getting from hypothesis to conclusion.  The author(s) develop skills and expertise for future research projects.  Maps of the mathematical terrain can be drawn for subsequent researchers to benefit from, for instance pointing out future directions of research or serendipitious discoveries that the author encountered or glimpsed during his or her journey.  Interesting stories - such as encountering a dead end in one's mathematical exploration, and changing course to avoid it - can be told.More automated approaches to proof generation may accomplish the primary goal of getting from A to B much more efficiently, but at the expense of secondary goals, particularly if applied via large-scale, non-interactive workflows, much as how the driver or passengers of a vehicle may arrive at their destination without noticing any interesting features of the intervening terrain.  Among other things, this often makes such proofs unsuitable for publication in traditional journals, as the expected narrative that describes the path towards such proof in the context of prior work, and lessons learnt or future directions suggested from the proof process, can be almost completely absent in AI-generated proofs.
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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
a major question in cognitive psychology is which tasks are Easy and which tasks are Hard
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