Victor Kumar

I started a Substack two months ago, writing essays about intellectual tribalism, standpoint theory, ChatGPT, and more. I plan to publish an essay every week or two. If you're interested, please subscribe (for free of course) to get new essays in your inbox. Link in next tweet.

@morallawwithin R1s vs. state schools too tho

It’s very important to remember the Tiers: 1. Full professors 2. Assistant professors 3. ABD PhD students 4. Other grad students 5. Undergrads 6. People outside academia Never date someone who’s more than one tier away from you.

Culture is in decline. We’ve seen a massive drop in Vaudeville shows, silhouette portraiture, and epic poetry. The youth, I assume, are simply abstaining from creative expression.

Someone who enjoys conversing with a total sycophant probably isn’t worth engaging with. That’s why I don’t read Plato.

Waymo means waymo people alive

My ancestors buried half their children. All mine are alive. My ancestors' house had a dirt floor. Mine is wood. I have indoor plumbing, I have hot water, I have never in my life hauled a full bucket half a mile and I probably never will. Do you know how rare it is, in human history, for small children to wear shoes? Mine have multiple pairs. I can speak to my relatives who live thousands of miles away, for free, at any time. Video, if we want video. With machine translation, if we speak different languages. The original Library of Congress had 740 books in it. I have more than that. If I run out of books in my home my local public library has 350,000. If I want to take a hundred books with me on vacation, they all fit on a device that fits in my purse. I have heat in the winter and AC in the summer and a washing machine and I have never, ever, ever had to scrub a dress clean by hand in the stream. I can look up recipes from more than a hundred different countries and I've tried dozens of them. I ride a clean and modern train across my city for $4, or take a robot taxi if I'm out too late for the train. I donate $40,000 every year to the cause of getting healthcare to the world's poorest people and even after the donations I never have to think about whether I can afford a book, or a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee. There is a great deal more to fight for, of course. I hope that our descendants will look back on our lives and list a thousand ways they're richer. Maybe we ourselves will do that, if some of the crazier stuff comes true. But the abundance is all around you and to a significant degree you aren't feeling it only because fish don't notice water.

I now assess students through in-class writing, and it's just a delight to see things crossed out and misspelled and those little ^ signs that show a person is thinking.

“Slop” (as in AI-generated slop) was originally a thick evaluative term, but it’s becoming thinner and thinner. Originally, it meant generic and mass-produced, but more and more often it’s just used to mean low-quality.

So proud of my 6yo daughter the artist who skipped all the way to modernism

The right didn’t fabricate these positions, but they shone a spotlight on them. This shifted the focus away from basic social acceptance, which remains popular, and turned the public against the movement.

Why has there been such an intense backlash against trans rights? Same-sex marriage is too popular to profitably attack, so the right focused their energies on trans people. But that's not all. 🧵

@bradford_skow Most assuredly

@victorckumar I think Socrates did something like this

For real though, have any philosophers actually tried to develop a close analogue to adversarial collaboration? Like where dissenting interlocutors are co-authors or otherwise more directly involved in a project?

@Modemichael Perhaps

@victorckumar Yeah, but in science it means that people work together on experiments to decide between competing theories, so how is that supposed to carry over to philosophy? No experiments and not enough agreement on methodology to get a very good analogue, it seems to me.

@Modemichael It's good to do this, but it just feels like papers going back and forth, not real collaboration

@victorckumar Debate books like e.g. Campbell / Cassam on perception. Others more recently.

@27Ranza Say more

@victorckumar Didn't neurath and horkheimer try this, kinda? Though it didn't go anywhere apparently

@hanno_sauer Is it? I though they just agreed about the thesis? (IIRC they disagreed about whether consciousness is extended but ignored that)

@victorckumar clark chalmers, extended mind, is a tiny bit like that?

It’s not possible for the data to decide which side is right (sorry x-philes), but could adversarial collaboration in philosophy achieve analogous epistemic values?