DMV

Watched Primal Fear for the first time in 20 years. Weirdly conservative-coded movie: A jaded defender finds a case that makes him believe that maybe his job should be to defend the innocent. Fortunately, he learns the valuable lesson that you should never trust any criminals.

@Philip_Goff That sentence is true only if it is a material conditional

When I carefully reflect, it strongly seems to me that there's more to *feeling* than behaving in a certain way, or having your parts behave in a certain way. If you agree, you're not a physicalist about consciousness.

@xgabegottliebx People *really * don’t want to hear it, but Peter Singer

People don't want to hear it, but Judith Butler, somone who, by this point, rivals Wittgenstein and Heidegger in terms of influnce on the humanities and the world. OK, you can lose your shit and dismiss me now, but...

@luscofusch Fair point, but 90% of the time the person who says “S is hard to understand” is saying so in order to justify not reading S, and the person who says “actually S is easy” is saying so in order to encourage people to read S. There’s a battle going on under the surface here

Whenever people say “philosopher S is hard to understand”, some insufferable guy with the stupidest possible reading of philosopher S will inevitably show up saying “actually philosopher S is pretty easy to understand, you just need to see that-”

We had an exceptional applicant pool

@JoshuaLWatson Is this an argument that Leibniz gives against materialism? Or is he making a different point? (I would be surprised if Leibniz took this observation to have implications about the metaphysics of mind, but I’m happy to be corrected)

Leibniz gave a similar argument:

Shameful

@yah5us You’re not going to win an argument with a professor who’s been thinking about this for years/decades. But that also shouldn’t be your goal. Just try and figure out what you think is true.

Told my ethics prof I didn’t think moral facts exist and the next slide was immediately a perfect counter, it’s over 😭 Philosophy moots I need help so I can destroy him with FACTS and LOGIC next week

@NathanJRobinson You know who else’s is descended from prior inhabitants of Israel? The Palestinians!

Even if it could be proven that every Israeli was descended from prior inhabitants of Israel the destruction of Palestine would be illegitimate

A better point would be that you are not entitled to violently conquer the land your ancestors inhabited thousands of years ago and kick out the people who live there now

@ProvideContext He was also injured in the playoffs during Jokic’s first two MVP seasons.

Murray had multiple playoff runs which would be ranked top 3 of any Bron teammate ever. Murray had 26.5/7/5 on 54/45/90 spits. Literally 1st team All NBA type numbers. Then followed it up with 26/7/6 on 52/40/93 splits. AD’s 2020 run is the only one that touches either of these.

@renderfish @thecavemommy This is really cute but also presupposes the thing it’s supposed to explain. If you didn’t know why a negative times a negative equals a positive, you also wouldn’t understand why -(-6)=6

Let’s start with this: 2*(-3)=(-3)+(-3)=-6 You already understand why this answer is negative. It’s because you’re adding two negative things to get “more negative” Now this: -2*(-3)=-(2*(-3)) All I did was put the leading minus sign outside a new set of parenthesis to make it more clear what this expression really “means.” We already understand 2*(-3) is -6, so by substitution: -(2*(-3))=-(-6)=6 In English, -(2*(-3)) means “add two negatives to get more negative and then negate the result of that sum” It’s the “negate the result of that sum” part that changes the “more negative” sum to a positive answer

I’ve literally had math geniuses try to explain to me how a negative times a negative equals a positive, and I still don’t get it It doesn’t. If you have nothing, and then more nothing, you don’t have something. You have nothing Math is a psyop!

@SamQuinnCBS x.com/dmv_phd/status…

What are the craziest anti-tanking ideas you’ve seen this week? Pay no mind to realism. Just looking for weird and interesting. And if you remember where you saw them, lemme know. I’m thinking about writing about them and want to be able to properly credit people.

Analytic philosopher here, wife claims I don’t love her enough so I stayed late at the office and wrote up a devastating and humiliating refutation of her view

@DanFriedman81 The claim is not that Stephen King is worse fiction than newer stuff. It’s that is that it’s sad people don’t read more challenging stuff. One can think both that Rapper’s Delight is awesome, and also that it’s sad that my uncle doesn’t have the rap literacy to enjoy Kendrick.

This kind of snobbery is tiresome, and you see a lot of it from MFA types. The truth is that there is very, very little “literary fiction” that is superior to Stephen King. Like, Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy are better than Stephen King, but there hasn’t been a writer on that level since David Foster Wallace. Every year there are a dozen novels that are supposed to be important about middle-aged women having sexual awakenings or gay guys smoking cigarettes in Dublin or the experience of race in our cultural moment, and they’re all just noise that will be instantly forgotten. “IT” was a banger.

@NateSilver538 Maybe it didn’t use to be, but by 2024 “woke” was not a leftist position. Most of the left had moved on from identity politics, which was frequently mocked as a centrist position (“👏more 👏women 👏CEOs 👏”, and so on)

Yeah I've written about that (see below). The issue is Harris took a lot of very progressive stances during her campaign in 2019/2020 and these also aren't *liberal* positions. She was sorta center-left on economics but progressive/left/woke on culture, not a popular combo btw!

@DavidAFrench Draft tournament at the end of the season: all non-playoff/play-in teams play for draft order

I’m going to fix the NBA’s tanking problem right now: Draft order is the reverse order of non-playoff teams. Best team to miss the play-in gets first pick, then the order is determined from there. (Second-best team to miss play-in gets second pick, and so on). All the worst teams will have huge incentives to play hard. Problem solved. You’re welcome :)

@SonOfAnchis3s Wow you really showed that…student of yours

I had a PhD student once cite a “Kierkegaardian leap of faith to me” in defense of atheism. My response was “Notorious Christian Danish philosopher Kierkegaard?” He says “Ummm… yes” I say “Have you read Kierkegaard?” He goes “Yeah” I go “Great. Do you know where the leap of faith is from?” He says “No” I say “It’s from Fear and Trembling. Would you like to know what Fear and Trembling is about?” He says “Yes” I say “It’s a 300 page philosophical analysis of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.” That was the end of that debate. All I could think about was how many times he’s gotten away with the high and mighty language or a simple citation (which he knows nothing about beyond its impressive sound) against other people who yielded the floor to him, presuming that he was far more knowledgeable than them. Countless people had thought that he was far above their pay grade, playing in a different league and necessarily correct as a result, when in reality he was simply saying the magic words that sound impressive without the faintest clue of their origin or their meaning. The worst part is these people get away with it over and over because only a select few actually do the reading and it’s only the “expert’s” catastrophic bad luck and hubris that accidentally leads to a run-in with one of these people.

this stuff really depresses me because at no point did "continental philosophers" do anything to hurt anyone doing analytic philosophy. the converse is not true: self-professed analytic philosophers went out of their way to destroy the careers of continental philosophers.

@xgabegottliebx I very occasionally carve out time for myself to read some fiction, but only a couple times a year. My reading-brain is usually too overloaded by work reading

Are you an academic? Do you read for pleasure? How? I find tons of pleasure reading for class and research, but there is so much I want to read that has nothing to do with either. Find it hard to fit it in. Always seems like I should be reading for work. Am I broken?

@jhendersonYT “The Philosophical Underclass” is still active on Facebook. Post an article you want and someone with access will send it you a pdf.

How does one get an association with an academic institution? I don’t want money. I just want to be able to read journals again.