Sebastian Watzl
@sebastianwatzl.bsky.social
Philosophy Prof at University of Oslo. Writes all things attention - from psychology to politics and back. Author of "Structuring Mind" (OUP). PI of GoodAttention. He/His https://www.sebastianwatzl.com/
For those in Oslo: mark the date next week (27. October), for a public debate at Litteraturhuset on public attention, justice, and power: www.litteraturhuset.no/en/arrangeme... with Katharine Browne, Zsolt Kapelner, and Mathea Sagdahl. This a part of the Attention Dialogues tinyurl.com/4bhjfd88
Capturing Public Attention
Who shapes our collective attention? A talk on power, public debate, and who gets to set the agenda.
litteraturhuset.no
with the help of boghosssian, appiah, henrich, fine and other useful idiots. shame on them for being cogs in the maga machine.
Philip N Cohen@philipncohen.com · 2w ago"The goal – as he elaborated at a Heritage Foundation conference – is “stigmatizing” sociology – using it to turn public opinion against the existing public higher education system, enabling its “destruction” and replacement with a system that will “reproduce our civilizational heritage.”"
"It is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not nature as such, which is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought." (happy with my little nod to Friedrich E)
Sebastian Watzl@sebastianwatzl.bsky.social · 2w agoNew publication! “Attentional landscaping”. Open access and free for all. Take-aways: by systematic changes to the world, we have collectivized attention. It’s a partially communal project. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
This speaks to me a lot. My world is a beautiful mess of English, German, and Norwegian. I like it that way. And multilingual is the world of most people. It adds richness, depth, and nuance. I don't want any more suggestion for auto-translate anything. Please.
Carissa Véliz@carissaveliz.bsky.social · 2w agoMy latest on The Antidote: On the culture baked in language, the pleasures of Spanglish, and infuriating automatic AI translations. Isn’t it incredible that we can preserve some sayings word for word through centuries? What does that tell us? carissaveliz.substack.com/p/stop-messi...
New publication! “Attentional landscaping”. Open access and free for all. Take-aways: by systematic changes to the world, we have collectivized attention. It’s a partially communal project. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Attentional landscaping - Synthese
Our sensory environments are attentionally landscaped: they have been changed in order to affect our patterns of attention. This paper analyzes attentional landscaping as a form of cognitive scaffoldi...
link.springer.com
Predictions about future technologies are typically rosy-eyed about how they will solve humanity’s problems. But generally we already know how to solve humanity’s problems. The difficulty is the political will, organisation, and obstructions from people getting rich from the system as it is.
One (!) thing the recent AI math applications show, I think, is that we actually value good attention (a collective good) more than knowledge (or truth). Knowledge as such can be stale. Attention is lively - future and action oriented.
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 3w agoTerry Tao @teorth.bsky.social: Indiscriminate brute-force application of AI to mathematics is depleting the field of good questions without renewing this resource or providing commensurate value. OpenAI: We hear you. Here's a .zip file with 377 hasty AI solutions to important open problems.
That's the thing: it's a high stakes political game. We philosophers of mind are just not used to play in that environment. It requires a whole different set norms than how we talk about consciousness in the confines of the classroom and the books and papers that only a few people will ever read.
Parkscope Joe@parkscopejoe.bsky.social · 3w agoThis is insane.
I suppose it's in part because I have a teenager myself. But I like Gen Alpha (and Gen Z). They see through a lot of the Bullsh*t of my generation. We should all adopt that use of "AI". There is so much AI around after all!
Anita Leirfall@anitaleirfall.bsky.social · 3w ago‘That’s so AI!’ What gen Alpha’s biggest insult tells us The year’s most popular slang reveals what young people think about artificial intelligence – and it’s not positive www.theguardian.com/society/2026...
Allow me to use this in a bit of an old school way: when O talk to my epistemologist friends I get the sense that they think epistemic normativity is super deep and important. But when I talk to my ethicist friends they don't really think that. Do others also have that sense?
"This reminds me of a critical mistake made in previous generations of socialists; the idea that before any political action happens, before it’s worth contesting power, the people need to be educated." A point I pushed past on the first read but worth staring at www.powermapmag.com/p/shitty-sky...
Shitty Skynet: How the Left Should Think About AI Doom.
Don’t Worry about Skynet. Worry about Shitty Skynet.
powermapmag.com
Does my Speak-n-Spell feel pain when I type O-U-C-H? The jury is out. Philosophers and neuroscientists say that's fucking stupid, but I called a guy from the Center for Pretending that Household Electronics Are Sentient and he said there's no way to know for sure.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." – Mussolini www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/u...
Re look-up tables: I just learned that Nigel Richards won the French and Spanish Scrabble world championships without knowing French or Spanish (I suppose the size of a normal active vocabulary is so tiny compared to the size of the dictionary, that speaking the language is not much of an advantage)
It is, I should say, entertaining to me that lots of people seem to focus on LLMs when they talk about "AI intelligence": why not talk about search algorithms, the robots in a warehouse, and so. There is a real obsession with the appearance of **talk**.
Today's (and tomorrow) "AI" (and those who control it) poses some very real and very big threats, indeed. Those threats having nothing to do with whether any LLM is "intelligent", "an agent", "conscious", "doing things" (like "going rogue"). Most talk of all that is just a distraction.
Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · last mo.... while the world burns, we are subjected to ever increasing surveillance, more and more sectors are gigified, and our information ecosystem collapses under all of the slop. >>
One of the basic points in Mills' The Racial Contract (originally published in 1997!) was that, if nothing else, White Supremacy deserves to be taken seriously as one of the great motivating ideologies of modernity and it's bizarre that political philosophers are so disinclined to treat it as such.
I Scare You Like Sound Dog@chadstanton.blacksky.app · last mo.The outright refusal to treat white supremacy as an ideology which motivates action and treat it as generally objectionable is what allows this strategy to be viable for Elon Musk.
From @timnitgebru.blacksky.app and me on what we should take from the 2026 summer of AI hype: www.technologyreview.com/2026/09/22/1...
Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype
Breathless claims about AGI and new capabilities fall apart pretty quickly under scrutiny.
technologyreview.com
For those who missed our panel discussion on power and distraction last week, you can watch it here: www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/englis... (with some nice art work in the background no less!)
Power and Distraction - Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas
At a time when many of us feel increasingly distracted, fragmented, and overwhelmed by competing demands on our attention, this event asks a fundamental question: What would it take to create a societ...
hf.uio.no
Very likely and very bad indeed. I have some hope that out of the ashes we can build something better. I wish I knew what and how.
Alex Holcombe@alexh.bsky.social · last mo.Consequences of the flood of AI manuscripts: "An early-career researcher at an unbranded institution loses the one mechanism that ever let them be read on merit — anonymous review of the work itself, however badly it functioned in practice.
My piece on introspection and attention now available in open access. www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/1...
Close-up of Person with '10' on Shirt (Azerbaijan)
ALT: Close-up of Person with '10' on Shirt (Azerbaijan)
static.klipy.com
Completely agree with this. For my own case, I have yet to discover any significant benefit. And once the LLM tools are priced accurately, I have significant doubts for benefits in the majority of cases (prediction: what companies paid to an editor or engineer they'll pay to a big LLM provider).
Grumpy Philosopher@stevecooke.org · last mo.Ha ha ha. There is no area of my work where AI has saved time. AI use by other people has significantly increased my workload. Unwanted insertion of AI tools has forced unnecessary, time-consuming, changes to my work processes & configurations. It has no benefit in my own work.
I've been collaborating with the Norwegian Consumer Council for a while now; they not only a quite interested in working with us as philosophers, and do great legal work taking on the big shots, but also: they're funny. If you liked Norsemen, you might like this.
Nicolas Hénin@nicolashenin.net · last mo.Nice campaign by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products. Enjoy!
Just in case you missed it, here is Melanie Mitchell's lucid and wise assessment of the recent 'rogue AI' hype @melaniemitchell.bsky.social aiguide.substack.com/p/misleading...
Misleading Metaphors, Real Risks
What To Fear from AI Agents and How to Reclaim Our Human Agency
aiguide.substack.com
While top mathematicians seem to look at the influence of AI with some clarity, some top philosophers (to be honest, all coming from the same tiny corner of the field) seem to think that the way forward is with a silly contest Makes me quite ashamed of my field.
Whatever exactly happened with the OpenAI Navier-Stokes solution: if private firm X lured someone working on it to share their results and then paid 10 million dollars to get a 10 000 specialist to solve it before them, then X's behavior would be egregious misconduct (and not impressive at all). No?
