.@robinhanson & I went to vibecamp and lived to tell the tale...

Website:

YouTube: https://t.co/Oybb5t6RKc https://t.co/Ml4E0tkI6Hmindsalmostmeeting.com/episodes/vibec…

I'll append some highlights from my vibecamp experience to this thread

A thread on student-faculty romances.

I want to explain something, for the sake of the profession of philosophy, the field of academia, and the health of workplace gender relations more broadly:

Conflating potential abuses of power with actual abuses of power benefits no one. Recently a profile of me described how 12 yrs ago my husband Arnold, then a first year graduate student taking one of my courses, told me he was in love with me.
I said I felt the same, we decided nothing could happen between us, and the next day I got on a plane for New York...

I just read a paper so fascinating I decided you needed a big twitter thread overview.

The paper argues that Socrates did not look like Socrates.

1/11 🧵
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.10… (TLDR: Socrates' appearance--ugly, snub-nosed, satyr-like--was a later construction by Plato, Xenophon & others seeking to rehabilitate him, & philosophy, in the decades after his trial.) 2/11

I liked this book by @mrianleslie so I am going to tell you why in this 🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵 Helpful distinction between high and low context

🧵on rationality:
I've been thinking about a convo w/ @TheZvi about whether rationality is a skill or a virtue.
Starting to think it depends on one's "position" in relation to the question.
Imagine 2 positions you might occupy at a criminal trial:
1 juror
2 defendant's mother Supposing the juror starts with few assumptions about the case, they will find their mental states (roughly) tracking the evidence. For the mother, rationality is more expensive, bc it comes at the cost of psychological pain (acknowledging the possible guilt of her child).

This got me thinking about how tech optimism feels performative to me--performatively upbeat ("what will Friday bring?!") & performatively naive (see @paulg on "earnestness" linked below)--and then I thought about "virtue-signaling" and...1/X paulgraham.com/earnest.html

https://twitter.com/AgnesCallard/status/1338130864581054467

...maybe the performative aspect of emotion *is just emotion*...?
The conceit, in dismissing some expression of emotion as "signaling" or "performance", is that the person isn't really feeling it--that they are *not* experiencing the relevant emotion privately, it's "fake." 2/X

The first real Greek class I took was on Plato’s Apology, with the eminent classicist Arthur Adkins. We translated the Apology, line by line. When we stumbled over a construction—many of were beginners—Adkins would gently correct us. That was the whole class, that was it. 1/4 Adkins was dying, in a wheelchair, there was a guy in the class to remind him to take certain pills every 20 mins. He died a month or so after the class ended, but he made it through. I wish I could convey the atmosphere of that class: the hushed silence, the fierce attention.

This is a long personal thread about my own reading practices, and a revelation I recently had about the pluses and minuses of reading at different speeds.
It might not be of interest to you.

(Photo below depicts the inhabitants of my "book" shelf) I was just reading an academic paper at my top reading speed, it was 40 pages and I got through it in about 5 minutes. (I can go even faster for non-academic writing, though my max speed is much slower for foreign languages). But I usually don’t read that fast...

Why Difficult Old Books Make For Independent Minds:
A Long and Engaging Thread I can teach philosophy w/o making use of any texts. So can @zenahitz, I bet. The students will love it, & walk away having learned. They'll also walk away being a little more like whichever of us taught them. That's bc--and now I'm going to let you in on a dirty little secret...

I would like to offer a negative, critical and destructive argument against (but in the spirit of) this blog post by @StatModeling praising criticism and negativity over @tylercowen's more positive and constructive approach. 1/5
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/07/22/is-… Gelman claims that "negativity requires more care than positivity" bc offering a critique of a view is more difficult than lazily affirming that view. But I did not take Cowen to be contrasting criticizing s.o.'s views with affirming that person's views. 2/5

Unintentional Philosophical Haikus. A Thread

When I turn my eye
inward, I find nothing but
doubt and ignorance.
--David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

Eliran Haziza of U Toronto has written a program to strip occurrences of "unintentional haiku" from texts; via @BrianLeiter We sometimes say: in
later life I will be a
different person.
--David Lewis, "Survival and Identity"

"Each party progresses rapidly in discovering the truth about the other, without ever discovering the truth about himself."
Rene Girard's brilliant analysis of Oedipus Rex: it is the *similarity* between Oedipus, Creon, & Tiresias that underlies the chain-reaction of violence. @cblatts I can confirm Violence & the Sacred needs to go on your pile, esp. ch. 1 on vengeance as a chain-reaction
& how rule agst shedding blood and the rule to take revenge are the same rule ("it's because they hate violence that men must seek vengeance")