Dan Williams
@danwilliamsphil
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Philosopher, University of Sussex. Tweets in personal capacity. Interested in: Philosophy, Psychology, Society. Writes at: https://t.co/MniDhzFnow
Brighton England
Joined November 2010
“The share of students getting extra time in exams has risen faster and further among those from well-off backgrounds”, by @jburnmurdoch This is true in both the US and the UK. Clearly this system needs to be fundamentally overhauled.
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The man who mistook his lie for a fact. https://t.co/fueQqfDHqY
Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime
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This is a bombshell, but it's also an infuriating example of burying the point. It's not until 4,400 words into a 9,000-word piece that we are told that the key stories in one of the most famous science nonfiction books of the 20th century are made up!
Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime
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Over 150,000 EU citizens have commented on the EU's consultation on new farm animal welfare legislation! This may be the 4th most responded-to EU consultation ever -- a powerful sign that EU citizens care about this issue. EU citizens: today is your last day to join them!
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Might be Kubrick's best. A masterpiece.
It’s now 50 years since the premiere of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Barry Lyndon’ (1975).
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Because their primary commitment is to a belletristic, literarist, romantic promotion of elite cultural sensibilities over the tough-minded analyses of philistine scientists and technologists, their rival elite (carrying on C. P. Snow's war of prestige between "the two
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Kudos to Rachel Aviv (and to the New Yorker, for publishing it), though they never acknowledge their own role in disseminating these tall tales, designed to sow doubt on hard-headed rationality and empiricism.
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Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime
newyorker.com
The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality.
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Some of the populist right's criticisms of "mainstream" media and the expert class contain grains of truth. But the rival information environment they've created is an informational and moral disaster - a return to an epistemic state of nature characterised by absurd conspiracy
The Right’s media apparatus is how the Right teaches its followers how to think, and it’s currently getting consumed by conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts. If left unchecked, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a Third World click farm.
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As I wrote about last year, people *do* change their minds when presented with good arguments
i used to have this mental illness where i thought logical arguments would change someone’s mind
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1. New adversarial collaboration on implicit racial bias and racial discrimination including >2k White American subjects, four measures of implicit bias, four measures of explicit attitudes, and four measures of racial discrimination, now in press at JPSP: https://t.co/WxLMKmdNjH
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I don't think we can make a single, simple "assumption" about student motivation and organize our teaching around that. Student motivation is presumably distributed more or less normally in every class. That's why I think the focus now needs to be on assessment, not instruction.
Economist Arnold Kling weighs in on our latest conversation: Is education a cooperative or adversarial process? @dioscuri
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Economist Arnold Kling weighs in on our latest conversation: Is education a cooperative or adversarial process? @dioscuri
The impact of AI on schools and colleges is really worrying - and they don't seem to be adapting well. And this is *on top* of all the other deep pathologies they have been accumulating over recent decades. From my latest conversation with @dioscuri.
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Do you think giving folks a basic income would reduce crime? Think again. "We estimate precise zero effects [of basic income] on criminal perpetration."
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I think this is 180 degrees off base: 1. The quality of conservative thinkers low, the movement punches way below its weight relative to the political appeal of right-wing politics 2. Progressives are *drenched* in big ideas, but desperately short of managerial competence
This is a great piece by @zackbeauchamp which echoes something I've long thought: the right is just better at creating an upwardly mobile ecosystem for its intellectuals than the left is... https://t.co/nwVP5wSzWC
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Listen here: https://t.co/x5gDQPkk7G Watch whole conversation:
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From our latest conversation: @dioscuri on why Duolingo sucks, and LLMs are set to revolutionise language learning.
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