@emilymbender@dair-community.social
Post #3739703
2026-07-11 12:38 UTC
Replies (3)
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@emilymbender@dair-community.social 2026-07-11 12:39
I follow MJ Crockett and Lisa Messeri in believing science (and in fact all scholarship) to be an essentially human activity. (@alex@dair-community.social and I write about this in The AI Con, too.) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07146-0 >>
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@aspensmonster@tenforward.social 2026-07-11 13:08
@emilymbender@dair-community.social >But when I think about the concrete experience of reading, writing, and doing philosophy, I am reminded of what it is concretely to strive to live up to one another. I think of the distinct feeling of being in the thrall of another person’s mind and the rush of gratitude that they had these thoughts and wrote these words, for me now to be able to take them in. These feelings of awe and appreciation are inextricably linked to the human recognition of what it must have taken for someone to write this: what they must have done, the time they must have spent, the strain and struggle, the activities foregone, the desires deferred, the times they nearly quit, the times they did quit and came back and started again. How astonishing we really are; and how exhilarating it is to be able to recognize each other in this way. 💯
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@CptSuperlative@toot.cat 2026-07-11 14:55
@emilymbender@dair-community.social I love this essay, particularly this: if philosophy amounts to playing language games with jargon, then we academic philosophers might as well pack things up and call it a day—surely, there must be something better for us to do. I don’t know as much about other academic fields but the status competitions in philosophy focused on “jargon games” is endemic. My suspicion is that jargon games have the benefit of helping the victor feel superior to “losers” who don’t even know what the “victor” said. How appropriate that an LLM winning a jargon game is enough for some to recognize them as having status. Since LLMs really took off I’ve worried about academia, even though I’m no longer part of it. It’s a brain-eating drug with a high that sits in the bullseye of many academics’ greatest weaknesses.