If you're at the Pacific, please join me, Eric Schwitzgebel, and Brian Weatherson for a roundtable on the future of publishing in philosophy Thu 6pm (union square rm, 2nd floor). We will talk about the role of AI in publishing, the sustainability of open access, and more.

Today the PhilPapers team is launching Beat AI: A contest using philosophical concepts. Try to outwit AI models using your mastery of philosophical concepts. In the process, you will help us develop better AI models for search. #beatai

Grasping ideas is having them in consciousness. We're not "just" large language models. I defend this view in "A phenomenal theory of grasping and understanding", forthcoming in Understanding and Conscious Experience,

Just released an improved version of the PhilPeople Widget. No more interference with third-party javascript frameworks (e.g. React). Use it to embed your PhilPeople-listed publications on a personal website. Demo: https://t.co/DNh8amXbd1 (you can style to your taste using CSS)

I hear that CIRA (@ciranews) is blocking https://t.co/OiZ7SPJhHF on its security product intended to protect users from malware sites. Why is that? PhilPapers isn't malware! It's a database of philosophy articles! Please stop!

A new clustering of answers to the 2020 PhilPapers survey. See this page for full size pdf: https://t.co/0EzDCVdlhR

Interview with the Data Skeptic about the PhilPapers survey:

Respondents are split in three vertical groups to make the image more screen-friendly. Within those groups, the answers are columns.

Made by converting the answers of 1728 respondents to the 2020 PhilPapers Survey into 102 numeric values, color-coding them, and clustering the respondents by Euclidean distance. The selected respondents are those with > 25 non-"other" answers.

A comprehensive summary of philosophers' views in one bitmap image! It's noisy, and that's what I find interesting about it! It gives us a subjective sense of how diverse philosophers' views are. Follow link for full-size PDF and explanation. https://t.co/0EzDCVdlhR

Wise advice W.V.O. Quine left for his grandchildren.

We can also see that philosophers' views are quite varied. If there were two big "schools of thought" that dictated views across the board, the histogram would show a tall bar at 0 and another at the distance between the two schools. Turns out every philosopher is unique!

The main take away is if you pick a random philosopher, you're pretty likely to disagree with them on roughly half of the 100 questions of the survey. You're unlikely to agree or disagree on more than 75%.

Here's something for data-oriented philosophers to ponder. This is a histogram of distances (calculated as proportion of agreeing answers) between all pairs of respondents to the 2020 PhilPapers survey (except respondents with very large numbers of skip/"other" answers).

https://t.co/X8cMtlRJbg has a new, more mobile-friendly look. We've also updated https://t.co/ogRhVvwdLP and https://t.co/5Vqfae6O6O to match. Take a look!

Combine with the widespread news that the new Bing can develop a dark personality after chatting for 2h, and I'm getting scared. If that particular bot was allowed long-term conversations, it might easily get lunatics to do things for it, like militate for its rights. See Replika

I used to think "AI taking over the world" is a far off concern because of course chat bots can't *do* anything, just *talk*. But I just realized the most powerful people in the world don't do anything either--just talk.

Here's a preview of a new look up coming up soon on https://t.co/X8cMtlSh0O and across the other Phil* sites. Feedback welcome!

The PhilPapers Foundation is looking for a senior software engineer with devops experience. We're non-profit but are growing faster than Twitter and Facebook combined! Help make the world more philosophical. Check out the position on Indeed:

Just updated the PhilArchive record pages to match the new PhilPapers record pages. Also added quick links to copy citations to clipboard. Self-promotional example link: https://t.co/4vXJWkzfzg