Screenshot of our paper published in Geoscience Communication where we measure the impact of reading climate myth rebuttals on our Skeptical Science homepage. https://sks.to/sksexperiment

We just published a paper in Geoscience Communication where we measure the impact of reading climate myth rebuttals available on our Skeptical Science homepage - a technically challenging research with some nuanced, complex results.
sks.to/sksexperiment (1/n)

My go-to example when talking to non-philosophers is: there are no such things as tables and chairs.

The Department of State tweets a video of Secretary Marco Rubio. In the video, Rubio says: "Imagine if instead of spending billions of dollars supporting terrorists or weapons, Iran had spent that money helping the people of Iran. They would have a much different country."

FactPost News tweets a video of Donald Trump speaking at a podium. In the video he says: "We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We're fighting wars. It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things."

hmm

Cover of Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett

if someone is confused about trans rights or Pratchett’s support thereof, tell them to READ THEORY

Tomorrow's the last day to apply for our open AOS open AOC lecturer position at Clemson!

philjobs.org/job/show/31125

Writing the "response to reviewers" is the process of traversing from 1 to 2.

I think the year should either be the year of decision or year of submission, but mixing the two seems bad. So either:

1. accepted in 2025 / [total decisions in 2025] -- i.e., (c)
2. submitted in 2025 and eventually acceptaced / submitted in 2025.

I'd prefer 2 because it avoids double counting.

We're hiring! Lecturer in Philosophy, AOS/AOC open, but should be able to teach courses titled "Logic and Critical Thinking" and "Science and Values."

Applications due Mar. 30.

philjobs.org/job/show/31125

Note that we're also hiring a VAP: 3-year VAP, AOS Phil Law, 3/3 load, application date Mar. 23.

philjobs.org/job/show/30989

We're hiring! Lecturer in Philosophy, AOS/AOC open, but should be able to teach courses titled "Logic and Critical Thinking" and "Science and Values."

Applications due Mar. 30.

philjobs.org/job/show/31125

Brief pitch:

The students are good, you can commute to Clemson from Greenville pretty easily (and Greenville's nice), and other than me the faculty are lovely.

We're hiring: 3-year VAP, AOS Phil Law, 3/3 load, application date Mar. 23.

We're also searching for a lecturer who can teach logic and a research ethics-type class. I'll update when that ad is posted.

philjobs.org/job/show/30989

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

OutKast, Tribe, Aesop Rock, Saul Williams, Gorrillaz.

If you tell me that that's what an AI predicted, I will not believe you.

I can hear this in William Shatner's voice.

✊

in case you're curious about how angry Minnesota is about ICE, it was -20 today

Trump Administration Orders USDA Employees to Investigate Foreign Researchers They Work With The new directive asks workers to check the backgrounds of foreign nationals collaborating with the department’s scientists for evidence of “subversive or criminal activity.” Their names are being sen...

The new directive asks USDA workers in the agency’s research arm to use Google to check the backgrounds of all foreign nationals collaborating with its scientists.

The names of flagged scientists are being sent to national security experts at the agency, according to records reviewed by ProPublica.

I also enjoyed Outer Worlds.

But also: I enjoyed *Starfield* (well, at least until I did all the wandering I wanted to do and started actually working on the main quest), so I recognize that the bar for me is *very* low.

I feel like Fallout 4 was the point where I came to terms with the fact that I don't actually need these games to be *good* to enjoy them.

I mean, I gave up on that game because I found the stories tiresome regardless of them coming together or not, so take anything I have to say about it with a grain of salt, but also isn't there a "true ending" that does "bring them together"?

I pulled a "say what you will about [blank], but at least it's an ethos" on my students the other day and just moved on knowing none of them would pick up on it.

When it comes to confirmation, what matters for robustness can be boiled down to:

1. Does the hypothesis predict robustness?
2. Do the alternatives predict not robustness?

If you answer yes to both, then you've got confirmation! It's that simple. (2/2)

Another of my papers, "Stability, Robustness Reasoning, and Measuring the Human Contribution to Warming" is now online.

This one gets in the weeds of the last decade-ish of research on the human contribution to warming to motivate a simple philosophical claim ... (1/2)

doi.org/10.1017/psa....

How do you assert a graph? Towards an account of depictions in scientific testimony I extend the literature on norms of assertion to the ubiquitous use of graphs in scientific papers and presentations, which I term “graphical testimony.” On my account, the testimonial presentation o...

"How do you assert a graph?" now has an issue -- still open access!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Trump says U.S. will not approve solar or wind power projects The president's comment comes after the administration tightened federal permitting for renewables last month.

So this is obviously almost unbelievably stupid.

But also, prediction: yes it will, it will just only approve those by companies that Trump likes.

www.cnbc.com/2025/08/20/t...

And you can find the code for our R package on my GitHub. This doesn't have all the pretty graphs, but does all the actual calculating you could want for any of the standard tests.

github.com/coreydethier...

If you had any of these questions, you can now find out!

Sam Fletcher, Nada Mohamed, and myself have put together a Shiny app (severity.shinyapps.io/severity/) that illustrates our work, motivates it with examples, and explains the theoretical backing.