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Liam Bright Profile picture
Liam Bright
@lastpositivist
Aspiring philosopher; tolerable human; "amusing combination of sardonic detachment & literally all the feelings felt entirely unironically all at once" [he/his]
3 subscribers
Nov 4, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
There's lots of leftists, so there can be lots of individual instances of a thing and it still be fringe in terms of proportions. This makes it easy to pick lots of bad cases and present what is rare as common. But I genuinely think woke-segregationism is actually common alas... ... like the thing where people take on board some vague versions of anti-colonial thought, anti-racist ideas, etc, and sort of put them together and end up endorsing ethnonationalism and a To Each Their Own mentality that discourages cultural blending....
May 21, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
A thing that seems true *to a casual outside observer like myself and which may well be totally false don't get mad just reporting vibes* about anthropology. Modern repenter orientated anthropology seems structurally more like Lévy-Bruhl than, like, Taylor or Evans-Pritchard... ... Cultural anthropology reacted to its previous imperial criminality by adopting theses and practices meant to prevent such in future. However part of how this is been achieved is affirming and celebrating fundamental unlikeness of different culture groups thought patterns...
May 20, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It's a real misunderstanding of science (alas one a bit too popular with business leaders and politicians) to think that it is able to produce and refine such technological marvels because there is something distinctively or directly practically minded about doing science. Much of scientific work at its best has been driven by idiosyncrasies, abstract or abstruse concerns, philosophical or even theological and mystical visions. We wouldn't get more if we turned those people to useful industry work, we'd just know and ultimately be able to do less.
Mar 24, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Re the conservative intellectual tradition I think I'm moderately well read. Crudely one can divide at least two (actually rather opposed) wings from each other. A Libertarian stand and a Burkean stand (Von Mises is plausibly kinda both - it's a crude distinction don't worry)... ... in philosophy at least one of the major libertarian thinkers is basically canonical - Nozick - and another is, if not quite there, certainly often read - Hayek. Contemporary libertarians are not unknown in the field, I think Jason Brennan is even a major figure nowadays....
Feb 7, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I actually find this article interesting. Not really for the first order content (did you know a retiring scientist writing at Quillette thinks all this SJ stuff is a bit silly?) but for what I think it evinces. ...

quillette.com/2023/02/07/the… ... my take is that an *enormous* amount of intra-academic culture war stuff, especially on generational lines, comes from leftover and still strongly felt grudges from the late 80s-early 2000's Science Wars. I think academics who were around for that still feel it deeply...
Feb 6, 2023 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
A long thread on a recent paper I really like. It's about slurs, it's by @philoso_foster, and it's available open access at the link below. I'll quickly (so no doubt inadequately!) summarise what it is about, then say why I like it.

philarchive.org/rec/FOSBQC ... Foster is concerned with a popular belief among people who theorise about slurs. The idea therein is that slurs tend to have a "neutral counterpart", i.e. a purely descriptive way of picking out the same group, and then super-impose on top of this a negative connotation....
Oct 30, 2022 • 19 tweets • 5 min read
What I think about some stuff. A thread. What prompts this: I'm fairly often accused of concealing my real opinions on here. But for all my many flaws I don't think dishonesty or intellectual cowardice is one of them.... ... So I will link to pieces wherein I state and defend opinions on controversial stuff. I will begin with very high level stuff (probs only controversial in my field). I will then do more culture war stuff. Even where I have multiple pieces on a topic I'll just link one.
Oct 25, 2022 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
I've said before that I think that most academics doing similar jobs to me are *de facto* conservatives. A short thread on what I mean by this. First, by "similar jobs to me" I mean teaching and researching at institutions similar to the LSE, or a bit less or more fancy. What's pertinent is a) producing the kind of research that might guide policy, b) teaching fairly elite-background students, c) has some press clout.
Oct 25, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The prospects in British politics are grim right now. With a lead so huge he could take a few risks Starmer still promises more of the failed austerity policy that caused so much death and misery in my formative years (theguardian.com/business/2022/…). And naturally Sunak is all in. on the left we're screamed at for being extremists (what, in case we crash the economy and adopt death cult policies? How would we stand out?) if we try and promote preferred policies and Tory enablers if we object to being told we're scum (why is it never divisive to attack us?)
Sep 17, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Three book length highlights for me:

Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines' Causation, Prediction, and Search in '93

(leading to one of philosophy's most underrated papers in '98: cmu.edu/dietrich/philo…)

Mills' The Racial Contract in '97

Brison's Aftermath in 2002 Woodward's Making Things Happen should also be mentioned just in terms of sheer influence on science,
Sep 16, 2022 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Asked Dall-E for "joy once found, now lost, but no less valuable for being fleeting" in various styles. special shout out to this one that i didnt quite like as much as the above but has a charm to it
Aug 30, 2022 • 15 tweets • 13 min read
I got access to Dall-E! Thread of my creations so far. I will include alt-text descriptions only where I have something to add on top of just the image prompt used to create them. These were all done with the prompt "The city of God at night, in the style of Starry Night". These were done with the prompt "Alexander stands atop a mountain at dawn and weeps, for he has no more worlds to conquer. In the style of Vermeer". Not sure it's really Vermeer's style? But I like them anyway.
Aug 29, 2022 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Hey so my paper White Psychodrama (forthcoming at the Journal of Political Philosophy) is now available as a preprint! Check it out at the link, a short thread on it here.

philpapers.org/rec/BRIWP First just a picture of the abstract Pictured is the abstract for a paper called White Psychodram
Aug 28, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Since my Sunday is disturbingly placid, here's my more specific worry about the Nature Human Behaviour code of ethics. They include 'unintended harms to the dignity of a social group" as among their, like, things not to do. On paper, like, sure, that sounds bad; watch out for it. But many academics are idealist in a pejorative Marxist sense. These people would absolutely see a study showing <poor group shower less because they have less access to clean running water> and worry more about an implication the group are dirty than their lack of running water.
May 20, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Three random over sharing thoughts linked by nothing more than the fact that they are tmi and I'm somewhat light headed atm: 1. it's a cliché that religion is a comfort to people in hard times. People spell that out via the idea of happy afterlife or assurance justice eventually prevails. Imo during my lowest points the comfort is really that an omniscient being could love me, or even just not hate me.
May 13, 2022 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
Gonna do a LessWrong to my own work. So here is The Pre-Publication Peer Review Sequence: Way back in my first single authored paper you could find me worrying that the peer review system had some perverse (totally unrelated to quality of ideas or scholar) effects on the gender composition of the field (for more read: erinhengel.com/research/publi…).

link.springer.com/article/10.100…
May 2, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I think about this a lot and I have multiple answers corresponding to different formats! First: I write papers on methodology and the social organisation of science, publish those in academic journals, and basically intend for scientists and science policy makers to read. ... ... That's the best case because the academic publication system actually does ensure it gets to the audience I want. Second, my blog, where I tend to mix political philosophy, personal existential musings, and cultural commentary. Here I write for an imagined educated public...
Apr 28, 2022 • 43 tweets • 4 min read
Like this and after a bit of time I will subtweet a subset of you in the replies in an arbitrary order I decide myself. Who the fuck are you?
Apr 28, 2022 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
Since I often complain about the academic left on here, a mini thread of my 5 favourite bits of lefty academic work of the past 5 years. (Also I am going to cheat a bit because 2 + 2 = whatever the hell I want or you're racist, or something). 1. Femi Taiwo (jnr) wrote an excellent essay on elite capture of movements for social justice (thephilosopher1923.org/post/being-in-…) which he then elaborated into a fuller theory (haymarketbooks.org/books/1867-eli…) - absolutely essential dynamic to understand if we are going to change the world.
Mar 23, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
One of the persistently awful things about Disco s.4 was the complete lack of faith in the audience. Every emotional note was handled either by a character explaining to another the emotional situation, or by captain's log narration voice over with accompanying montage... ... I can think of one situation where they just let their actors do some acting, and even then they couldn't resist going back and explaining it again two scenes later. And I just can't help but wonder: why? ...
Mar 23, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Thinking about this again, I have always sided with Luxemburg over Lenin in this debate. In fact thinking through this debate is one of the formative intellectual events for me.... but as I grow older in many ways on many issues I come to see Lenin's point more. Here's another... ... thought prompted by seeing this astonishing "environmentalists for cheap oil" bit. As I look around the Anglo-American left nowadays I think one of our problems is that we are basically a highly decentralised set of protests movements. Two issues...