iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

This doesn't mean I'm right, but if you ask ChatGPT about random variables, it uses it with a different meaning (so I think I may have been exposed to the same texts ChatGPT learned from). According to the definition [which I was wrong about], these both describe just one random variable, right?

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 15h

Wikipedia. I don't know in which applications E would be anything other than a probability distribution, but it's not in any of the classes I'm talking about. Is there something wrong about this definition?

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Wasn't sure whether any of the chilis in the overgrown veggie bed were still good, so I went to check...

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Quite badly written, too. The cases given are not about being aware of "one’s own thoughts" or "one’s existence in the world", as the definition claims, but of being aware of the "blip" (at most).

That blip turns out to be a surprisingly reliable marker of consciousness — that complex, mysterious state of being aware of one’s own thoughts and one’s existence in the world, which may also be present to some degree in other animals. People in a coma don’t produce this blip when they hear oddball sounds. Nor do people who are asleep.

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

...an 'abstract negation' of the existing relation to your parents, instead of an active struggle to transform it for the better. But what did Marx write in the German manuscript? He called for the earthly family to be "theoretisch und praktisch vernichtet", i.e. "theoretically and practically... 2/

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Is going no-contact with your parents Marxist praxis or bourgeois individualism? Some might say the latter, and it looks as though the 4th thesis on Feuerbach lends some support. After all, in order to transform it, there still has to be some family relation. Going no-contact might seem like 1/...

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

wait, is utilitarianism based, actually?

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

When I grow up I wanna be like Suppes, only four references and they're ALL my own work:

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

...because they don't have headers??! I wish our accessibility guidance tools were useful...

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

At my last office hours, I talked to two students from different classes (PhilTech and PhilSci), and recommended both designing machine learning systems by chip nguyen and unthinking social science by immanuel wallerstein. We're doing the thing!

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

this is going on the syllabus for philmind

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

googling "what the fuck is a quart" and the answer is "a unit of volume equal to a quarter of a gallon"

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Curious that this perfectly symmetrical pattern of explanation is not also applied to people who believe citation counts matter because they personally get cited a lot... reminds me of how I decided that GRE scores are actually really meaningful after getting a perfect verbal.

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Thanks! This claim seems bizarre to me, does this sound plausible to others? Copying sentences from someone else and passing them off as your own seems like a paradigmatic case of plagiarism.

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

this but for LLMs [from Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?"]:

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

reverse-engineering the type of philosophy book I need to write so it can have this cover (by David Maisel, apparently):

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

we, as a society, should not accept this as an error message.

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

there's no crying in philosophy!

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

This goes back to Frisby's (1979) book Seeing, which contains this wild claim:

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

shots fired in the visual adaptation literature

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

how I contribute to ongoing scholarly conversations:

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

deeply embarrassing for philosophy as a discipline...

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

@diovicen.bsky.social apparently I first posted this seven years ago!! Great times in Spain.

a comic strip of Jesus edited to have him say "representations. representations. representations. you're all representationalists. none of you are free from representationalism." with the caption "Vicente 4:20; The people were ASTONISHED at his docrine."

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

it really just is refried scholasticism, huh

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Thank you! My wife is an artist with a lot of science cross-over, so this might actually be interesting for her. Here's the stellarator model I'm currently assembling for her birthday:

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

I think the way he talked about people who disagree with him was very problematic (in this example "ignor[ing] their howls"), but he is widely beloved and there are many philosophers who have a strong emotional connection to him and get very defensive about it.

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

"Adaptive behavior relies on the ability to translate abstract rules and goals into actions suited to the current context."

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Elmo @tim-elmo.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

E.g. in this sentence, he could have instead described what the actual philosophical cost is that McX is unwilling to pay! There are actual reasons why different thinkers hold positions and it would be cool if we could acknowledge them, even when we disagree. Pretty basic tbh.