✨Paging epistemologists✨

What are your favorite recent pieces on higher-order evidence? I'm familiar w the earlier literature, but there's been a recent explosion on the topic that I have not kept up with. There's a new SEP entry, it's a good start!
plato.stanford.edu/entries/higher… But I'm interested in people's preferences regarding sources. The context is that I'm writing a piece on @NeilLevy10's book 'Bad Beliefs', where he relies extensively on the notion of higher-order evidence. But his understanding of it is non-standard IMO.
global.oup.com/academic/produ…

So @DailyNousEditor has a post now on the current commotion related to a paper published in Studia Logica which then turned out to contain a fatal mistake and is not retracted (sort of). The post cites a tweet of mine, so let me offer some clarifications.
dailynous.com/2022/11/02/log… In my original tweet, I said that "line-by-line checking of mathematical proofs is the exception, not the rule." Philosopher of math practice Line Edslev Andersen has done extensive work on refereeing practices in math, which lends support to this claim. link.springer.com/article/10.100…

I'm often in agreement with @CT_Bergstrom, but here I think he's oversimplifying things. A focus on increasing scientific literacy in schools, in particular the social dimension of science, is surely welcome but will *not* significantly address the problem of disinformation.

https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1526440972426440705

The 'knowledge deficit model of science communication' has been shown time and again to offer a misguided diagnosis of the problem. It's not just a matter of giving the public *more* scientific info, also not at the meta-level of teaching the public how science 'works'.

TWITTER AS A FREE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS?

A 🧵

With the news of Twitter’s takeover by E. Musk, motivated by a desire to protect ‘free speech’, there has been a lot of debate on what free speech exactly is, and the structural/institutional provisions needed to foster free speech. Musk describes himself as a ‘free speech absolutist’, and one of his plans for Twitter is to severely diminish the degree of content moderation on this site.
theguardian.com/technology/202…

Really cool interview with @add_hawk by @ezraklein! I was already familiar with most of the ideas discussed here (been a fan of Thi's work for some years now), but it was very nice to see how the different bits and pieces hang together.

https://twitter.com/add_hawk/status/1497243584902275074

I'll post some highlights now, from the transcript.
"I think that one of the most interesting things about games is that games just don’t like tell you a story or create a world. I mean, they do these things, too. But they also tell you what to care about."

INTERNET STUDIES AND PHILOSOPHY

What do you take to be the main contributions that *philosophers* have made to Internet studies more generally? (Asking for myself to argue in a grant application that a philosophical perspective is badly needed!)

Some examples 👇 Onora O'Neill on digital communication:
cambridge.org/core/books/phi…

1/ Random geeky thought. Yesterday I re-watched the Star Trek Voyager episode 'Tuvix', where the characters Tuvok and Neelix are merged after a botched teleportation, bringing into existence a 'third' person, Tuvix, who combines characteristics of both original characters. 2/ (Tuvix is in a sense actually nicer than both Tuvok and Neelix!). This scenario obviously gives rise to all kinds of philosophical questions pertaining to the metaphysics and ethics of personhood. But one thing I had not noticed when I first watched the episode many->

Hello new followers 👋 I've had a surge of new followers prompted by my new Stanford Encyclopedia entry, thanks for your interest 🙂 Here's a 🧵 with links to my recent work on argument and argumentation. 1/n In 'The role of trust in argumentation' I argue that I trust plays a fundamental role in argumentation, w 2 examples: vaccination hesitancy & the undermining of the credibility of traditional sources of information by authoritarian politicians. 2/n
informallogic.ca/index.php/info…

THREAD on 'following the experts'
1/ @NewYorker piece w detailed discussion of the differences btw how Seattle and NYC each reacted to covid19. Seattle followed advice of experts, whereas in NYC politicians, esp. @NYCMayor made a complete mess of things.
newyorker.com/magazine/2020/… 2/ However, 'following the experts' is not a foulproof method either, as we know from the disastrous response to covid19 in the UK, meticulously documented in @guardian. Following the 'wrong' experts, or too few of them, can lead to disaster...
theguardian.com/world/2020/apr…

1/ Thread on some puzzling reactions by philosophers to the #COVID2019 pandemic.
Many people reacted with shock and horror to the piece by Giorgio Agamben piece of Feb 26, calling the pandemic a 'unmotivated emergency': positionswebsite.org/giorgio-agambe… 2/ One such reaction by philosopher @a_n_a_berg can be found here, where she describes Agamben's interventions as 'symptomatic of theory’s collapse into paranoia': chronicle.com/article/Giorgi…

THREAD: A marxist analysis on why peer-review in journals takes too long
The last couple of days the long waiting times that authors have to endure before hearing back from the journals they submit papers to became a topic of discussion again here on Twitter. A number of... 1/n ...journal editors (myself included) have pointed out that the main problem lies with securing reliable referee reports. It's very common to have to ask 10, 15 people before finding two good souls who say 'yes' to the referee requests for a single paper. Sadly, it's also... 2/n

1/ A thread with my thoughts on the current controversy on trans people and gender critical positions. I have stayed mostly silent so far, but I’ve been reading all of the main recent pieces published on both ‘sides’ of the controversy. 2/ As I understand the gender-critical position, there are two kinds of claims being made: metaphysical claims and policy-related claims. On the metaphysical side, it seems to be a version of biological essentialism, especially on the point that a person who was ‘born male’...