Why are centrists are so into language policing?

The Fascism Spectrum Asking whether the Trump regime is fascist or not is the wrong question to ask

open.substack.com/pub/davidliv...

Sunshine Women's Choir receives 1-star rating:

"Everyone involved with this feelgood/feelbad prison musical/weepie, and Taiwan's biggest local box office hit ever, should be put on immediate cinematic probation and banned from film-making until it's clear they are no longer a danger to the public."

Nice harm. Let me guess, epistemic?

To be clear, I prefer doing this myself as part of the proofing process than journals that just use LLMs to proof and then I have to do this anyway.

Artisanally looking up the DOIs of journal articles one by one because LLMs are untrustworthy.

Artisanal Academia: changing the titles in the bibliography from title case to lower case letter by letter.

I just told Gemini that it's full of shit. (It is.) It did make me wonder:

Should LLM interfaces be programmed to stop responding to users with abusive language and similar scenarios?

OTOH, I can see it intensifying the anthropomorphism, which seems bad. OTOH, shaping user behavior for the better?

I didn't realize he was Indigenous either. I am not totally sure that should matter though, if the goal is simply to stamp out this particular expression of prejudice from the game.

I guess I just don't think word-specific restrictions are effective. Why not judge on whatever basis umpire abuse is?

One of the worst AFL rules, in my view, is that anything that touches the foot is considered out on the full. I'm not saying it will be easier to adjudicate, but like someone handballing to a foot is surely not an intended kick by the foot!

It's not that LLMs use the 'it's not X, it's Y' construction a lot more, it's that LLMs use this construction to express metalinguistic negation a lot more than humans?1

MAJOR UPDATE: I found the best free restaurant bread in the United States www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Sorry but if you're watching Liverpool-PSG over Atleti-Barça right now you hate soccer and possibly life itself

There's a funny feedback loop where my STEM students complain that the humanities are not "rigorous." But when I try to give them even Cs (let alone the Ds and Fs some deserve), I get yelled at by them and my own admin to fall in line. So I give mostly As and Bs. And then get called not rigorous

Turns out this niche is roughly 0 people on Bluesky lol.

A Pluralist Theory of Perception Veridically perceiving an ovoid yellow mango in ordinary circumstances differs from hallucinating a matching scene. In hallucination, there is no mango....

My review of Neil Mehta's "A Pluralist Theory of Perception" is now up at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/a-pl...

#PhilSky

I guess the question is practical. Suppose we want to regulate language (which, again, I am not against). What should we do when evidence is uncertain, when words can have multiple meanings, and when there can be a gap between speaker's and hearer's interpretation?

In the second case, a player was fined for umpire abuse though he vehemently denies it, and there's no material evidence. The only other witness is his teammate.

I guess the idea is that if evidence is unclear, then go with the umpire's words to prevent future abuse? That seems more questionable.

Luvell Anderson & Ernie Lepore, Slurring Words - PhilPapers

Language is, after all, flexible. And rhyming words can take on a slurring function too. (Compare Luvell Anderson and Ernie Lepore 2011.)

But the number of weeks seems disproportionate to the uncertainty of evidence, especially given past cases.

In the first case, a player was given a very long suspension for a slur. And he claims what he said was 'maggot'.

For this one the evidence is just uncertain. Though I think some punishment is good, since we don't want people to just start saying 'maggot' all the time to mean the slur.

Of interest to a very niche audience of people who are very into both philosophy language and Australian rules football:

What do you think about the two recent cases where punishments were handed out on alleged speech that the speakers deny?

I am not against regulation, but I don't like them.

But could that just mean that the default link is to the web format, and then people get to that page, find the pdf button, and then download?

Or maybe people do use browser view to skim the start, and then for only the ones they're really interested in, they download the pdf?

I think I do that.

Wait people read philosophy papers in browsers?!?!

I am so old.

Hey y'all, I'm teaching metaphysics to undergrads in the fall, and I'm trying to decide on readings. The topics are time, self, and free will; and I always do stuff across a multitude of philosophical traditions. What would y'all put on this reading list?

Opinion | The Affordable Car Is Dead. What Happened? (Gift Article) This is how cars got so ridiculously, forbiddingly expensive.

“Today, there are so many wealthy people who can afford luxury cars that it simply isn’t that profitable for companies to produce cars for the bottom 40 percent of Americans by income.” Gift link: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I am surprised that no philosopher or bioethicist has done a piece of public philosophy since the doctrine of double effect was mentioned on The Pitt!

zhuangzi:

research at its best yesterday: XScape @xscape-project.bsky.social Material Minds workshop Varieties of Externalism, showcasing fab new work from Andy Clark & team across philosophy, archaeology, & computational cognitive science, + visitors Lucy Osler & Rob Clowes on AI, me wrapping up intense day

New analogy: This reminds me of that one time when I was in an immersive theater for one ( www.themanikins.com ) and in some ways the actors are helping me to live out my own weird choose-your-own-adventure. The play itself is meta. But I'm not sure they fully accounted for a philosopher audience.

At the risk of bankrupting Nat: @dailynous.com

People with money should hand them to Nat so more work can go into this awesome piece of public philosophy!!