William Large

@AimeTim You blaming Derrida for the manosphere? Very funny.

I watched the Louis Theroux manosphere documentary. I thought this chap “Myron” seemed somewhat familiar, and then I realised… yes, that’s him - I studied moral philosophy with him at Trinity College, Cambridge. I recall he took a class on Derrida. Things went wrong after that.

Hans Kundnani on Habermas: "The late Jürgen Habermas saw Europe as a vehicle for a social democratic, postnational politics. But as the real EU increasingly diverged from this ideal, his thinking failed to reckon with the project’s fundamental limits." jacobin.com/2026/03/haberm…

70% of Britons oppose the Iran war, and yet only one major party speaks for them. Me in The Cortado this morning: novaramedia.com/2026/03/20/the…

The secret to teaching (much like tweeting) is to keep things largely impersonal and stick to the topic at hand but then to surprise them every once in a while with a tantalizing suggestion of interiority or personal history

@NJ_Timothy Funny that you confuse criticism with being silenced. It is almost as if you are not genuine.

This Labour MP wants me investigated and silenced. He makes my case for me. Labour’s rebranded “Islamophobia” definition is designed to censor us. So Mr Khan, here’s my reply: Get lost.

When these people say 'silenced,' they mean 'criticised.' They want the right to say these things with no challenge or demurral. Nobody with a column in a broadsheet is being 'silenced.'

Large language models don't think. They don't reason. And they can't produce endless new information. This is clearly explained by George D. Montañez in a recent talk at Baylor University, and it's worth understanding why. Three key points stood out to me: LLMs don't ponder, they process. They're next-token predictors, sophisticated ones, but they have no understanding of what they're producing. They know two vectors are similar; they don't know what either vector means. LLMs don't reason, they rationalise. Studies show their outputs shift based on irrelevant prompt wording, embedded hints, and statistical shortcuts. The "chain of thought" they show you often has nothing to do with how they actually arrived at the answer. They don't create endless information. Training AI on AI output causes rapid degradation and model collapse. Information theory tells us you can't get more out than you put in, regardless of the architecture. None of this means these tools aren't useful. But it does mean we should stop anthropomorphising them and start being honest about what they actually are. The hype is real. So are the limits. You can watch the talk on YouTube here: youtube.com/watch?v=ShusuV…

For people who explicitly choose a career in research, it's funny to see how eager some are to outsource aspect of research to AI.

@PAHoyeck To tell you the truth I can't stand him, but you can't like everyone.

@LargeWlarge63 Only good ones and all quite short, I'm afraid!

A philosophy anecdote I like is that Gilbert Ryle used to tell his students at Oxford not to pursue a PhD. He'd tell them it was “better to write a short good book later than a bad long book earlier.”

@pnbphilosophy @luscofusch He wrote that the most serious critiques of Popper are by Popperians. Also for gods sake it is Twitter. It is not a real conversation, so misunderstandings must be taken as given even if the communication is sincere, which it most cases they are not.

@LargeWlarge63 @luscofusch That’s not what he said at all. Jesus, how hard is it to read?

Some people see "research on Popper" in my bio or catch a few of my tweets about him and assume I'm some kind of Popper fanboy. The kind who tries to vindicate everything Popper ever said or did. I know some of you have this sort of weird, worshipful relationship with your favorite philosophers. If you're a Rawlsian, you must worship Rawls, hate everyone who criticizes him, believe every single claim he made, and defend him against every objection you encounter. The same goes for Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Huemer, Heidegger, Oppy, and so on. If you're an X-ian, you must be committed to everything X said. If that is the meaning of "being a Popperian," I am surely not a Popperian. I find this cult-like behavior repulsive. Sure, it's nice to make friends and get some likes on twitter. But in Popper's case, such behavior would be even worse, given the very history of "Popperianism." The most serious criticisms of Popper came from within the Popperian tradition itself. Not some irrelevant stuff like "oh, he did some bad exegesis." 1) William Bartley III criticized Popper better than anyone for lacking a comprehensive account of rationality (and therefore opening space for irrationality). Bartley was a Popperian. 2) The most famous criticism of Popper's verisimilitude came from David Miller, a Popperian. 3) Danny Frederick, the Popperian who did the most to bring critical rationalism into conversation with analytic epistemology, argued that some of Popper's assumptions (theory-ladenness of observation and interpretation, inductive skepticism, and so on) were inconsistent with Popper's own realism. 4) The same Danny Frederick demonstrated an inconsistency between Popper's solution to the pragmatic problem of induction and his solution to the logical problem of induction. 5) Zuzana Parusniková produced one of the best critiques of Popper's three-world ontology. Once again, a prominent Popperian. And the list could go on with other prominent Popperian such as Lakatos, Musgrave, Niiniluoto. And so on. So the most devastating critiques of Popper's central ideas came from Popperians. Moreover, although Popper was far from the best person when it came to handling criticism, his own philosophy clearly favors criticizing ideas over worshipping philosophers. So please stop projecting other people's bizarre relationships with philosophers onto me. Thank you.

This cheap racist demagogue should absolutely be silenced.

Jeremy Corbyn MP slams Yvette Cooper’s statement: ‘No mention of the genocide in Gaza 🇵🇸’ ‘No mention of 🇮🇱 brutality in the West Bank 🇵🇸’ ‘No mention of the illegal 🇮🇱 invasion of Lebanon 🇱🇧’ ‘Trump 🇺🇸 illegally bombing the people of Iran 🇮🇷’ ‘And the 🇬🇧 is part of that’

After a month of fasting dawn to dusk - never has a flat white tasted so good. Eid Mubarak! ☕️

The Gaza Tribunal: there needs to be a full & independent public inquiry into co-operation between the UK & Israel.

@DanielTurnerPTF Why display your stupidity publicly?

Greta Thunberg in 2023: If we don't end fossil fuels, it will be a "death sentence." Greta Thunberg in 2026: President Trump must allow oil imports to Cuba. I guess the "climate crisis" has negotiable deadlines.

overheard on the train this morning: "i think that guys listening to our conversation”

Imagine a newspaper publisher refusing to let libraries keep copies of its paper. That’s effectively what’s starting online, as big publishers block the Internet Archive from preserving news sites. eff.org/deeplinks/2026…

“It was decided and carried out. They washed her, cut her hair, raped her and killed her” Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wrote this in his 1949 diary. The story of how 20 Israeli soldiers gang raped a 13 year old Palestinian girl for 3 days, by rota, and then shot her.

My favorite part of the Bible is when God said, “Put scripture in your bio, hate your neighbor in the comments, and vote for policies that make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”

The Green Party have never been more needed - and this moment is urgent. Brilliant short video on why were on the rise - and have much further to grow. Join us! youtu.be/2bdgE0bSomk?si…