I often encounter the charge that words like "racist" or "sexist" or "transphobic" are so extreme and highly-charged that they necessarily shut down productive discourse, erasing distinctions between more and less extreme contributions to impression.

I ever found that plausible. I think many people tend to inflate any discussion of e.g. racism into a VERY SERIOUS ALLEGATION, as part of a defensive strategy

the very first question on this survey about campus climate 🤨 ...oh, I see. it's THAT kind of survey about campus climate

I have been very unsure how to react to the news about Kathleen Stock coming out of Sussex this week. I remain unsure, but here are a few scattered thoughts.

Part of me thinks I'm going to regret wading in here, but I guess I feel like I have some things I want to say. Some background.

A group of protesters have organized against Stock, calling for her to be fired for her contributions to transphobia.

I disagree with the protesters in this matter. I think academic freedom protects her right to engage the way she does.

dailynous.com/2021/10/08/stu…

Most of us start teaching in person tomorrow.

UBC still doesn't have a policy in place to manage COVID risk. We just have a few tweets from the administration and vague gestures towards policy ideas.

It is an incredible mess, and we're out of time.

https://twitter.com/jichikawa/status/1434944585080446990

There is a mask mandate — we know at least that much. It is unclear whether it applies to instructors or to small classes though.

I realized that some of my twitter people don't know about my history with Brian Leiter. If you wanna hear about that one time he threatened to sue me and dug through a bunch of my emails etc., this thread is for you! If you already know or don't care, you can skip it, it's dumb! It's Summer 2014. Carrie has been promoted to Full Professor at UBC. She writes a nice little blog post, reflecting on the responsibility she feels as a senior member of the discipline, to help foster a respectful environment. csi-jenkins.tumblr.com/post/905636053…

I'm reading an annotated bibliography from 1975.

Where papers are unpublished they tried where possible to provide the address of the author(s)! this study of the speech of the sexes in cartoons in the New Yorker and Playboy does not confirm the claim that women's speech is everlasting

There's a lot that I like about this piece from my @UBCPhilosophy colleague Kimberley Brownlee, advocating for the moral importance of talking to strangers. But I also think it leaves a key complicating part of the situation — sexual harassment — out.

https://twitter.com/UBCPhilosophy/status/1351585977928658947

I think Brownlee is totally right about the importance of social interactions, including micro-scale ones, and the harms of being treated as invisible. The choice to ignore a stranger trying to ask for help, or even just saying hello, is indeed a moral one.

my therapist was perplexed by the existence of Brian Leiter so there was this PhD student, right? and he thought what philosophy really needed was a somebody to write down a list of which philosophy departments were best

so he gave a survey to his friends and published the results

I wish the media would stop saying these new, more contagious, virus strains aren't "deadlier" than the old ones. They will literally cause much more death, so they are much deadlier!

vox.com/22220301/covid… I know what they mean — person S's chance of dying, conditional on catching a new strain, is no higher than S's chance of dying, conditional on the old one.

But this doesn't mean it wouldn't be way deadlier for S to get the new one! It would! It will kill more OTHER people!

I'm reading about the history of the expression "he-said–she-said" to indicate that there's no way to know what really happened. It's newer than I'd imagined! As far as I can tell this usage seems to have become vernacular in 1991, during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings (There are older uses of the phrase, but they're not skeptical/epistemological — before the 1990s it seems to have been used to just convey a dialogue, or to highlight stereotypical gender differences! As e.g. in Marion Hutton's 1948 hit "He Sez She Says")

Good morning everyone, wow, my thread about student course surveys really took off!

Skimming over my mentions, I see one point raised by a few people I want to react to: am I advocating for removing student voices in measuring course experiences?

Absolutely not. A brief thread. First, like I said yesterday, I think there are good reasons to care whether students like a course or not, and surveys are a good way to measure that. I think survey data should be collected!

https://twitter.com/jichikawa/status/1333129043424645120

It's that time of year again, when universities run surveys where they ask students what they thought of their instructors. They use the results as "data" regarding teaching effectiveness.

This is a completely unscientific and unjust practice and it should stop. A thread. There is now a tremendous body of research about what student surveys do and do not measure. Results do correlate well with how much students ENJOY the class. They do not correlate at all strongly with teaching EFFECTIVENESS.

I've been thinking for some years about defensiveness as an epistemic vice, especially as it relates to normative criticism. We're all imperfect, which means that there is something wrong with all of us. But nobody likes to be criticized, which means we're all vulnerable to something we don't like.

One phenomenon I'm particularly interested is when criticism of an idea feels like a personal attack.

I'd like to make an observation about the conversation that has been happening on philosophy twitter about the state of philosophical discourse about gender.

I know a lot of philosophers are confused about this discussion and not sure what to think. This thread is for you. This is not a thread about the first-order questions about trans identities and gender. It is an observation about the discourse itself, and civility, and who stands for what.

This's been a weird couple days! Somehow I suddenly became one of the players in the twitter discussions about transphobia in philosophy. I'd like to share a few thoughts and clarifications and reactions to some of the things I've seen in my mentions this weekend. This is, umm, gonna be a long thread.

One of the central themes in my research is that epistemology is practical in a particular way: skepticism is used to defend the status quo. "Someone says there's a problem, but I, a very rational person, find their case inconclusive, so let's not do anything."

Here's a thread. This is part of the reason why thinking clearly about skepticism — and recognizing the cases in which it is a mistake — is practically important. This can be particularly hard because the stereotype of a careful, rational thinker is someone who is skeptical. This is a mistake.