Alexander Bird

@sebastiansalek I don't get the logic of your argument. Is it "These very rich people will be affected. So don't worry about the much less rich people who will also be affected."?

Labour is hiking taxes on billionaires. Don’t be distracted by the farmers protesting in Westminster. Inheritance tax on farmland means the super rich will pay their fair share. Here’s who’s most affected:

@PHoyningen We are so very much looking forward to welcoming you to St John's. It will be an exciting term!

Dear friends and colleagues, I would like to inform you that I shall spend the fall term (Michaelmas term) in Cambridge UK as a Beaufort Fellow at St John’s College. I shall leave Zurich Oct 1, 2024, and shall return probably on Dec 10, 2024. My email address remains. Best, Paul

@realevertonjeff @crashballcentre @BBCSport He was nearer after the step than before.

@crashballcentre @BBCSport So you disagree the word approach means “move towards something” ? What I am saying is the word approach needs to be removed from the rule if they want to keep the rule. Personally scrap the rule for me

😬 Do you agree that George Ford had begun his approach? #SixNations #BBCRugby

Well, no surprise there. stocks.apple.com/ArIUr29DwRgCl1…

@JoWolffBSG If you go to public school, Oxbridge, and then the Bar, you can spend almost your entire life in almost identical surroundings, down the the hall, chapel, library, and so forth. (And to a considerable extent the same people, though less so now.)

@julianHjessop I don’t think that making a second bar of ‘Boost with Glucose’ more expensive is likely to cause hardship.

'Health campaigners' criticise the government's decision to delay a measure that would make food more expensive, in the midst of a cost of living crisis, as 'playing politics'... 🙄 bbc.co.uk/news/uk-614430…

Your strategy of incremental sanctions doesn’t work. Cannot work… That’s why 212 members of Parliament demand a special #EUCO meeting to decide on full sanctions immediately! My speech👇🏻

@OptimalBayes @MaartenvSmeden How does the point about conditional probabilities refute objectivism about probabilities? You can have objective conditional probabilities.

@MaartenvSmeden Frequentism is a lie. There are no objective probabilities. There are probabilities where you consider conditions, and probabilities where you ignore conditions, but there are always conditions. When frequentists get unexpected results, they immediately check the conditions.

Students often ask me: why do so many choose 5% as the threshold for significance (“alpha”)? So let me try to explain the main rationale 1/20

@GuyLongworth Agreed!

@GuyLongworth Okay, sorry! Yes, I agree that our judgments of plausibility/implausibility are themselves not always reliable. And an idea should be given a fair shot before we decide, on careful reflection, that it is implausible and, so, that this a strike against it.

Worse trait in a work of philosophy?

@FerryDanini @GuyLongworth Yes, I agree. It is a Sunday afternoon, and we need something lighthearted for a moment, given the circumstances.

@ajbirdbrain @GuyLongworth I think people are not voting seriously and they probably understood "worst" as meaning the "most annoying" :)

@GuyLongworth The precise degree to what extent implausibility indicates falsity is unclear. But clearly it does to some non-negligible degree. (It certainly does so in the sciences.) Rarely are philosophical theories falsified. We discard theories that the arguments render implausible.

@ajbirdbrain I guess that the contrast with obviousness might have weakened the connection. Fairly easy to discern obvious truths. Unclear to what extent implausibility indicates away from non-obvious truth.

@crookedfootball NATO hasn’t expanded eastward since 2004. I simply don’t see how that is an issue now.

@crookedfootball Nigel Farage seems to have joined the Stop the War Coalition and is blaiming the EU and NATO.

@KevinZollman @daisyldixon My take is exactly that of @KevinZollman

@daisyldixon Minor revisions: I'm 100% confident the author can do it, and I think the editor could judge whether they were done correctly. Major revisions: I'm not confident the author could do it, and I want to check myself to see if they have been done adequately.

philosophers: how best would you delineate ‘major revisions’ from ‘minor revisions’ when reviewing a paper?

@westwoodsam1 If I took your approach, Sam, I’d run out of collaborators very quickly.

A huge anxiety of mine is appearing incompetent in front of other collaborators. I literally never collaborate with someone again if I appeared to not have a grip on things or made a mistake in a meeting. Anyone else?

@birchlse This is all excellent advice, Jonathan.

The best job talks start by giving an overview of your emerging research programme, then "zoom in" to an example of your best recent work, then "zoom out" at the end to lay out future directions. Start and end by generating excitement around your long-term trajectory. (2/7)

I must have seen more than 40 tenure-track "job talks" by now. Here are some general reflections on what works and what doesn't work. (1/7)

@william_whyte My goodness. What did he think about tea? Tea at SJC is a very fine thing, and I hope he wasn’t against that too.

He continued to rail against the "pleasant conversation and unmanly foods", that 11 o'clock coffee enabled, but admitted defeat. L R Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (1934), pp. 295-6

According to Lewis Farnell, coffee at 11 was a "trench-habit" brought to Oxford after WW1 "and eagerly caught up by our lazy and self-indulgent boys and girls". As Vice Chancellor, he tried to ban it but was dissuaded by the heads of the women's colleges.

@Heskers @StAndrewsPhil @univofstandrews Katherine was a wonderful person and a wonderful philosopher. (My best philosophy was written by Katherine. Our joint paper was part of my REF2014 submission. But it wasn’t good enough to be part of Katherine’s. Her solo work was much better.)

My amazingly kind, wise and beautiful wife Katherine Hawley would have been 51 today. Her family, friends and @StAndrewsPhil @univofstandrews colleagues miss her desperately. Memorial service for Katherine: St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews at 2 pm, 19th February. All welcome.