David Bourget

If you're at the Pacific, please join me, Eric Schwitzgebel, and Brian Weatherson for a roundtable on the future of publishing in philosophy Thu 6pm (union square rm, 2nd floor). We will talk about the role of AI in publishing, the sustainability of open access, and more.

@PeterSjostedtH @samalqattan99 We just restored service on PhilPapers globally. Sorry for the inconvenience

@samalqattan99 It seems that philpapers is down globally today.

Here is now a free PDF of my chapter on 'The Bergsonian Metaphysics Behind Huxley’s Doors' – PDF: philpapers.org/archive/SJSTBM… DOI: doi.org/10.1007/978-3-…

Today the PhilPapers team is launching Beat AI: A contest using philosophical concepts. Try to outwit AI models using your mastery of philosophical concepts. In the process, you will help us develop better AI models for search. #beatai philpeople.org/beatai

@Philip_Goff Glad to hear that fantastic brain is intact!

Back from hospital after 3 quite intense days. Will be a good few weeks recovery and more brain scans. Doctor said I've been lucky to avoid brain damage.

Grasping ideas is having them in consciousness. We're not "just" large language models. I defend this view in "A phenomenal theory of grasping and understanding", forthcoming in Understanding and Conscious Experience, philpapers.org/rec/BOUAPT

Just released an improved version of the PhilPeople Widget. No more interference with third-party javascript frameworks (e.g. React). Use it to embed your PhilPeople-listed publications on a personal website. Demo: dbourget.com (you can style to your taste using CSS)

I hear that CIRA (@ciranews) is blocking philpapers.org on its security product intended to protect users from malware sites. Why is that? PhilPapers isn't malware! It's a database of philosophy articles! Please stop!

A new clustering of answers to the 2020 PhilPapers survey. See this page for full size pdf: survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results…

Interview with the Data Skeptic about the PhilPapers survey: dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/…

@SimianSeminar Yeah the black is NA

@dbourget Amazing! Are those a much of NAs in black or is that the dark blue?

A comprehensive summary of philosophers' views in one bitmap image! It's noisy, and that's what I find interesting about it! It gives us a subjective sense of how diverse philosophers' views are. Follow link for full-size PDF and explanation. survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results…

Respondents are split in three vertical groups to make the image more screen-friendly. Within those groups, the answers are columns.

Made by converting the answers of 1728 respondents to the 2020 PhilPapers Survey into 102 numeric values, color-coding them, and clustering the respondents by Euclidean distance. The selected respondents are those with > 25 non-"other" answers.

Wise advice W.V.O. Quine left for his grandchildren.

@ErgoEcho It turns out that, on this way of thinking about dimensionality, philosopher-space is about 25-dimensional (as far as our survey questions are concerned). Here is a graph of the stress for each number of dimensions with MDS.

@ErgoEcho True, that would be a better way of treating the dimensionality question. I’ll follow up with this information when I get to playing around with mds algorithms, hopefully tomorrow.

Here's something for data-oriented philosophers to ponder. This is a histogram of distances (calculated as proportion of agreeing answers) between all pairs of respondents to the 2020 PhilPapers survey (except respondents with very large numbers of skip/"other" answers).

@NeilLevy10 @Utiliwood True, a high average disagreement between respondents was part of the design of the survey (but it's nice to confirm we achieved this aim). What is a little surprising here is the lack of clumping. I have other (better) visualizations of clustering I'm going to post shortly.

@ErgoEcho Good question! It's at least 100 from what we can see here since you can know a philosopher's answer to 99 questions and not be able to reliably guess their answer to the 100th. Relatedly, our paper talks about reducing the dimensionality of these answers. philpapers.org/rec/BOUPOP-3

@dbourget What’s the dimensionality of philosopher-space?

@emory_rchrdsn I don't have this, sorry!

@dbourget wasn't there some roughly similar survey for laypeople, and if so, do you have a comparable figure of laypeople's distances?

We can also see that philosophers' views are quite varied. If there were two big "schools of thought" that dictated views across the board, the histogram would show a tall bar at 0 and another at the distance between the two schools. Turns out every philosopher is unique!

The main take away is if you pick a random philosopher, you're pretty likely to disagree with them on roughly half of the 100 questions of the survey. You're unlikely to agree or disagree on more than 75%.