Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as woke 1, the second time as woke 2.
@davidkinney.bsky.social
Assistant Professor in Philosophy at WashU (St Louis). http://davidbkinney.com
Teaching intro logic is just saying "in ordinary life this is an epistemic success term, but in a logic class it just denotes a syntactic property" over and over.
One of the best early-career jobs in academia. If you are formally or computationally-inclined early career philosopher interested in this, feel free to get in touch and I’d be happy to try and answer any questions you have.
Santa Fe Institute @sfiscience.bsky.social · last mo.Applications are open for SFI's 2027 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. SFI is looking for recent Ph.D. graduates with strong quantitative and computational skills who want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research. Deadline: September 30, 2026 Apply: santafe.edu/sfifellowship
Lindsay Graham dying after saying “I’ll go to the hospital right after I do meet the press” is funny but then I could easily see myself at 71 saying “I’ll go to the hospital right after my talk” only to be taken out of the Palmer house in a body bag.
Article in WashU’s student newspaper in which I give my extremely lukewarm take on the report commissioned by WashU and Vanderbilt on the state of the humanities and humanistic social sciences: www.studlife.com/news/2026/07....
WashU- and Vanderbilt-commissioned report on the humanities comes under fire - Student Life
A recent report commissioned by WashU and Vanderbilt on the politicization of humanities research has generated significant pushback from humanities professors, the WashU chapter of the American Assoc...
studlife.com
What, to a Bluesky poster, is the Fourth of July? Seems like we’re gonna find out.
This paper is fantastic: link.springer.com/article/10.1.... IMO there is an lack of intellectual humility in the way that some philosophers are super-quick to jettison standard methods in probability theory in favor of their intuitions. This paper is a wonder antidote to that.
Are nonmeasurable sets significant for epistemology? - Synthese
Probabilism holds that rational credence functions are probability functions defined over some probability space $$(\Omega, \mathcal{F}, P)$$ . According to some recent philosophical arguments, in som...
link.springer.com
If Balogun were very tall and only slightly French he would’ve never been called for a suspension-triggering foul.
I feel like if anyone came up with a discussion-ending argument against semantic pragmatism, intuitionism, etc., then it would belong in Phil Review and not some report.
Can't sleep after that game so I'm going to do formal epistemology.
Can the conspiracy to bias the reffing in favor of large market teams please start again?
On the Miller Light essay in the Atlantic: 1. The idea that drinking cheap beer is somehow counter-normative within a grad school cohort is completely opposite from my experience. 2. I can see how one could become a beer snob to deal with genuine class-based angst during grad school, BUT...
Fun little project I have been working on: an LLM agent that (attempts) to generate proofs in the relevance logic R. github.com/davidbkinney....
GitHub - davidbkinney/relevance_logic_agent: An LLM agent that uses a Python-based proof system, exposed via an MCP server, to complete proofs in the relevance logic R.
An LLM agent that uses a Python-based proof system, exposed via an MCP server, to complete proofs in the relevance logic R. - davidbkinney/relevance_logic_agent
github.com
Fun little project I have been working on: an LLM agent that (attempts) to generate proofs in the relevance logic R. github.com/davidbkinney....
GitHub - davidbkinney/relevance_logic_agent: An LLM agent that uses a Python-based proof system, exposed via an MCP server, to complete proofs in the relevance logic R.
An LLM agent that uses a Python-based proof system, exposed via an MCP server, to complete proofs in the relevance logic R. - davidbkinney/relevance_logic_agent
github.com
I recently read this whole paper while doing the overnight with my two month old and I think it's about as good an example I can think of for philosophy making progress. Dynamical systems provide sound and complete models for relevance logic! academic.oup.com/mind/article...
The Logic of Dynamical Systems Is Relevant
Abstract. Lots of things are usefully modelled in science as dynamical systems: growing populations, flocking birds, engineering apparatus, cognitive agent
academic.oup.com
The wardrobe for dirk, Nash, griffin and Haslam on prime is terrible. An NBA pre-game panel should be in ridiculous mob boss suits. Amazon has them dressed like the partners of an architecture firm in shoreditch.
Future me will simply follow these instructions and all will be well.
It is not obvious to me that LLMs do not displace some blue collar labor. I have had multiple DIY projects recently made much easier by LLMs.
Gil Durán@gilduran.com · 6mo ago“This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters.” —Palantir CEO Alex Karp newrepublic.com/post/207693/...
In the span of one week, Italian national teams have beaten England in rugby and the United States in Baseball.
excellent piece, and should be required reading for anyone skeptical of the technical capabilities and policy implications of AI. there are certainly exceptions, but by and large, the political left is currently treating what should be a five-alarm fire like a distasteful spectator sport.
The left is missing out on AI
As a movement, it has largely refused to engage seriously with AI, ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right
transformernews.ai
Despite it all, I still think it's important, as I just asked of a hypothetical future reader, that we "consider a pigeon that is trained, before the time t when grue objects change from green to blue, to peck at all and only green objects."
A lot of philosophers working on causation in a formal mode neglect that the “variables” in causal bayes nets are random variables, or functions defined on a sample space that are measurable with respect to some probability space.
My aunt, wondering why I don’t live closer to family: “Couldn’t you just be a philosophy professor at NYU?”
For everyone whose back hurt a little when they woke up this morning, a new strongbad email: m.youtube.com/watch?v=-zhs....
Strong Bad Email #210 - Robots
YouTube video by homestarrunnerdotcom
m.youtube.com
New paper, co-authored with Donald Martin, Jr. (www.donaldmartinjr.com) forthcoming in System Dynamics Review. We use a synthetic data case study to show how the structural variables studied in system dynamics can help build more robust deep learning pipelines. Preprint: davidbkinney.com/SD_DL.pdf.
davidbkinney.com
Waxing poetic in the last paragraph of my final lecture notes for formal methods this semester.
Large swathes of north St. Louis still look like a bomb was dropped on them after a tornado in may.
Justin Elliott@justinelliott.bsky.social · 11mo agoNew: Kristi Noem fast-tracked millions in disaster aid to Naples, Florida tourist attraction after campaign donor intervened www.propublica.org/article/kris... w/ @josh-kaplan.bsky.social @amierjeski.bsky.social
Time for my extremely pedantic thing. “Football” means a game played on a field *on foot*, as opposed to on horseback. So you have association football, rugby football, American football, Aussie rules football, and so on. Kicking has nothing to do with the etymology.
Alessandro Rigolon@alerigolon.bsky.social · 12mo agoThe U.S. is very insular - We call football soccer, and our “football” doesn’t involve kicking the ball much - We use imperial units when most other countries use the metric system - We call the country “America” while most of the world uses that name for the continent What else?