I seriously believe that philosophy needs something like ArXiv: a place to store and distribute work not simply in progress, or prior to validation, but independently of it. Philpapers is too close to the current model of validation ('publication') and its disciplinary norms.
As a quick hack, I think someone start an open access journal with the explicit editorial policy 'we reject nothing', as a way simply to make referencing work that isn't gated by validation, so that we might develop better modes of validation independently of distribution.
Call it 'The Null Journal':
A: "Have you read the new issue of The Null Journal?"
B: "No! Who reads that anyway?"
A: "No one. No one reads any journals. It's not what they're for."
B: "What does the editorial board look like?"
A: "∅"
Or call it NoXiv. The branding really doesn't matter, and that's the point. Journals should either exist as peer collectives that link to content, without any distribution, or they should make objects people read. There's Nothing in between.
For my thoughts on these matters and how they're responsible for structural problems ravaging the profession, see this: deontologistics.co/2014/07/06/the…
Transvaluers gonna transvaluate. Solidarity in (bibliographic) active nihilism.🖖
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Since my Null Journal idea seems to have been popular, it’s probably a good idea for me to say something more about how I think distribution/validation should work in philosophy (and potentially elsewhere). Let me start with some context.
I have frighteningly little concrete job experience outside of seminar teaching. But the main exception to this was running a journal for 3 years (plijournal.com). I was an editorial board member, the editor for two issues, and administrator for longer than that.
I oversaw the whole sausage, from CFP, through review, meetings, editing, formatting, printing, distribution, and finances. I redesigned the whole back end and balanced the books in the process, liaising with libraries coming through intermediaries and individual subscribers.
Honestly, I wish people would just realise that algorithmic bias and bureaucratic stupidity are *exactly the same thing* so we could start unpicking the rationalisations implicit in both, as they're synergetic: you have to get them both to tackle either successfully.
Putting aside whether this is even a good use of the term 'algorithm', which you can usually substitute for 'wizard' without any loss of meaning, the issue is that we keep pretending we can *trivially* solve certain sorts of problems with certain sorts of tools, when we can't.
It doesn't matter whether the implicitly specified knowledge representation generated through training is encoded in some distributed set of educated human neurons or some artificial kludge of ML systems, it's implicitness is a logical feature of the problem it is targeting.
Thank you to @autogynefiles for reminding me of the most important lesson an 80s nerd comedy ever taught me, which is that no one is ready for the sex girls. No one.
I feel that @UnclePhobic and @dynamic_proxy need to hear this message. True no horny praxis is baking lemon meringue pie.
I wish I had the energy for one of my usual sincere answers to jokey questions, because this one is excellent. Alas, sleep beckons. Chomsky on syntax is at least computationally interesting. Chomsky on semantics...
Speaking as an anti-Fodorian computationalist, I think the best place to go if you're interested in pursuing something like the Montague program of applying formal tools to natural language is the interface between programming language semantics and knowledge representation.
I've had some good conversations with @FroehlichMarcel
about these issues of late if anyone wants to try searching the endlessly churning feed. Otherwise, there's a couple quick things I can point at:
I agree with this, of course, but we should remember what framing wealth distribution through taxation encourages us to forget. It's as much about relations between currencies as it is units of currency. It's uncomfortable to say, but some of us have too much purchasing power.
It's easy to agree to tax the rich, even if the political reality of power structure mean that such abstract agreement cannot be concretely realised. It's much harder to agree to a smaller share of the fruits of the global production process. Stay aware of that difficulty.
It's the basis of a form of economic complicity that hurts not just those outside of rich nations but also the poor within them. Neoliberalism's 'spatial fix' to problems with local labour by outsourcing it to poorer nations helped crush labour power at home.
Good for @CrispinSartwell, I suppose. I would respectfully suggest that logic programming (e.g. Prolog) is a bad model of computational mindedness for the most part (though @chrisamaphone's Ceptre might let us think about narrative identity). The nub of the issue is choice.
I have no qualms with someone identifying as an animal, be it a familiar genre of hominid or something more interesting (Sciuridae sapiens), precisely insofar as identification is an expression of personal autonomy, that Kantian pearl without price. I choose differently.
The disagreement emerges when the capacity for choice itself comes into question. Here is @CrispinSartwell's central (rhetorical) question. As a philosopher whose work is dedicated to driving home this point, I would like to answer it, in brief.