Find this depressing tbh. And ok, the public models can't write (good) philosophy papers on their own yet, but that's surely just a matter of time. Do we maintain phil/maths as distinctly human endeavors? Maybe that will work for a bit, but why keep it at it if the answer is right there?

Zach Weinersmith@zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 3d ago

OpenAI just blooped hundreds of proofs and counterexamples to open problems: github.com/openai/math/... Boggling.

Call me old-fashioned, but I just think that if you are announcing £10bn of spending, then if the Shadow Treasury team and the leader's office are doing their jobs properly, the leader should have clearer answers to these questions:

paulusthewoodgnome@paulusthewoodgnome.bsky.social · 3d ago

"I'm not a defence expert." Even by Kemi Badenoch's lamentable standards, this is agonising. Just give thanks she will never, ever be Prime Minister. 🙏 #politicslive

Also seems pretty clear that the actual thing the Green Party are debating now (rather than the more abstract "is zionism racist?" debate I was seeing on here) is antisemitic fwiw

Oh god the 3rd amendment explicitly protecting Jewish members who attend synagogue has fallen. I’m absolutely heartbroken.

One of the things I am most annoyed about is that Starmer didn’t take the opportunity of great vibes in 2024 to do a series of contingent policy commitments (we will raise taxes *only if* growth we hope for doesn’t turn up). Because it’s basically designed to address exogenous shocks that we’ve hit.

A further thought: Apart from the broader point that unis don't just exist to serve the labour market, I'm not at all convinced that this should be the value proposition from universities to employers/the government. 1/

Robert Saunders@robertsaunders.bsky.social · 4w ago

A few thoughts on this. 1. More than 2/3 of full-time students *already* do paid work in termtime - to an extent that already shrinks what we can realistically ask them to do. Just adding more (unpaid?) employment risks further squeezing the space for what they're actually at university to do.

A paper of mine has just come out! The title is "Is Land Special?" and it's being published in Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs (@freeandequal.bsky.social). Comments/criticisms very welcome. Here is a link: freeandequaljournal.org/article/id/2...

Is land special?

Recent theories of territorial justice, such as those of Avery Kolers, Margaret Moore, and Anna Stilz, are internalist accounts: they argue for distributive principles that are tailor-made for the dom...

freeandequaljournal.org

“Deluded” to think it is at the least, *possible* for a charismatic man to succeed in academia while telling tall tales and with questionable research without a helping hand from “EDI”. Can these people hear themselves?

Ben Mitchell@bmitchellwrites.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Have you seen how EDI operates in workplaces? If it was about furthering diversity, great. But it's so much more than that. And if you don't think the influence of EDI played some role (we can debate how much) in this sorry story, you're deluded.

This week's post: Long term fiscal projections are a good antidote to politicians talking about tax cuts mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/08/long... If you can get past the hand wringing, the OBR's long term fiscal projections contain useful information that most politicians pretend isn't there.

This is a really inadequate Home Office statement in these circumstancds It empathises with this protest as expressing legitimate concerns, singles out violence against police, and simply fails to say "violence threatening asylum seekers, migrants & other minorities is shocking + wrong"

Good piece. It's quite obviously academic misconduct (and likely fraud), and it is deeply damaging to our entire profession that some are willing to defend it. Misconduct and fraud are not taken seriously enough by British unis, and we need to think about how to tackle this institutionally.

Rory Waterman@rorywaterman.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Some notes by little me on recent, hugely damaging, shamefully shameless events at Cambridge University. rorywaterman.substack.com/p/notes-on-a-cambridge-debacle If you read only one article about what has happened, try the new piece by Lanre Bakare in the Guardian, linked in my blog post.

no Liam, true socialists must freed their minds from bourgeoisie concepts like "opportunity costs"

The movement on parts of the left to consider the entire field of non-heterodox economics an outgrowth of an evil neoliberal cult has in general not been a good thing.

@lastpositivist.bsky.social · 2mo ago

But a rabidly anti-intellectual culture wherein asking about whether a proposed means is the best way to achieve social ends is... well it would destroy socialism, utterly. In fact I think the failure of previous socialist states are not unrelated to developing this exact culture.

Social care - the third rail of British politics Great to see Burnham acting on, rather than just talking about, the social care crisis But there is a real risk that the choices he makes could actually make things worse... 🧵

Here is a moral argument for compulsory voting that I think is powerful, initially stated too strongly for argumentative clarity (see the qualification below): Democracy is about political equality, and political equality is about equalizing political power 1/

That's around £35bn of commitments she has made now on the idea of nebulous cuts to spending. She opposed the means-testing of *winter fuel*!!

Everyone on X and elsewhere who called for a violent response should be charged with incitement. Everyone involved in the pogrom should be locked up with exemplary sentences. Govt should make it clear that will be the response in future anywhere else. Enough.

we finally got a pro-trans opinion piece in the mainstream uk media (by @transsolidarity.bsky.social's alexandra parmar-yee) worth sharing www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Trans people like me are facing segregation now. We need parliament to restore our rights | Alexandra Parmar-Yee

Hard-won, vital legal protections have been upended – ultimately our lawmakers must fix this, says director of Trans+ Solidarity Alliance, Alexandra Parmar-Yee

theguardian.com

Starmer and Reeves visibly have absolutely no interest in governing well to set up Labour to be in the best possible shape going into 2028-9, so they have to go ASAP.

Keir Starmer postpones fuel duty increase

Planned rise put back until end of year

ft.com

I get why people see the EU Rejoin question as a difficult one for Burnham - Makerfield is Brexity, the Labour membership is overwhelmingly pro-Rejoin - but I don't think it need be hard to navigate I think I'd tell him to just say "any road to Rejoin must run through Makerfield", or wtte

The correct position here is that the men are right about this but that they support nuclear power mostly because splitting the atom is just kinda cooler than some wind blowing or the sun shining

YouGov@yougov.co.uk · 6mo ago

Men are consistently much more positive about nuclear energy than women Support use of nuclear power? Men: +58 net support Women: -12 Is nuclear power safe? Men: +36 net safe Women: -22 Should UK get more energy from nuclear? Men: +47 net more Women: -17 yougov.com/en-gb/articl...

Portes is right. I have definitely come to see the value in political education, because "emotionally cathartic slopulism" has already taken over the Right and I think it could easily do so on the left too if we don't hold the line on, like, actually insisting that it matters you get things right.

Jonathan Portes@jdportes.bsky.social · 6mo ago

I do understand this view. Austerity as implemented was a disaster (as I said very publicly for a decade) But we are not seeing/have not seen a huge increase in inequality and the idea that there's some soak-the-rich get-out-of-jail-free card just doesn't add up

Cannot believe the number of people in Jonathan’s replies insisting that is in fact good left wing green policy to subsidise the fuel consumption of someone driving a Land Rover around Kensington

Jonathan Portes@jdportes.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Deeply depressing. Just lazy soundbites and bad economics. Populism without racism is infinitely preferable to the combination. But Greens badly need something that actually resembles a coherent economic strategy. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

An arson attack on a Jewish ambulance service isn’t about Israel. It isn’t about Zionism, or American imperialism, or capitalism, or war in the Middle East. It’s about Jews. It’s about making British Jews feel fearful in their own homes. Just like Bondi Beach, and Heaton Park, all over again.

Anyone clamouring to be PM right now have got mushy peas for brains

Andy Bruce (Reuters)@bruceandy.bsky.social · 7mo ago

💥 UK 10-year gilt yield just struck its highest level since July 2008 at 4.929%

Have no idea of whether this tool actually does what it says, but if it does why, exactly, should it be legal? unis ought to do their bit but why not simply legislate to ban stuff like this? (v ready to be told that there are important reasons to be careful!)

God put Wittgensteinians on this earth to show us that the reason Marxists are so rude isn't the revolutionary stakes but that some people just are like that

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

Starmer isn't Britain's worst ever prime minister, but he is Labour's worst ever prime minister and it's not even close

How to win the next election: Extracting the maximal amount of political pain for the minimal amount of political good.

Stephen Bush@stephenkb.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Big scoop by my colleagues, this: