link dump – Page 2 – News For Wombats

Measuring influence today

At The Splintered Mind, Eric Schwitzgebel updates his “rough measure of current influence in … ‘mainstream Anglophone philosophy’.” The method is to count the number of distinct Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles in which the philosopher is cited.

When he ran the number five years ago, I defined the Putnam as a unit of influence: By definition, 1 Putnam of influence means being cited in as many articles as Hilary Putnam.¹

The news: My influence has increased from 77 to 89 milliPutnams.²

A sentence of promotion

Today I came across a review at Good Reads of my book, A Philosophy of Cover Songs. It ends with this satisfying sentence:

Some of the examples and situations Magnus draws on from the history of popular music are pretty interesting and actually managed to start a few debates about these things among friends.

Chatbots!

My paper On trusting chatbots— a paper on trusting chatbots— has been accepted at Episteme.

Music is weird again

The YouTube show Blind Covers is back!

I blogged about the show years ago, before their long hiatus. Since that post, I wrote a whole book about cover songs in which I elaborate my principled refusal to define cover. But I totally understand if you want to say that new music for old lyrics isn’t a cover per se.

The tangled web

In which I find myself unironically missing old, hard-copy Yellow Pages.

I came into the possession of a vintage sport coat which was in excellent condition except for several strata of dust on the shoulders, from hanging unused but uncovered for decades. The care instructions say dry clean only, so I went looking for a dry cleaner. The internet suggested there were several near me. On further examination, however, one was shuttered up. Another had remodeled and become just a regular laundromat.

That tracks

In arguing for the exclusive primacy of the studio track as the work in rock music, Theodore Gracyk points out that the Beatles stopped touring as they became fixated on sophisticated albums. I heard an interview with Michael Lindsay-Hogg today which upends the example.

ScabGPT

Via Daily Beast and Daily Nous: The administration at Boston University has made a number of tone-deaf suggestions for how faculty can juggle students while their graduate student TAs are on strike. Among these: “Engage generative AI tools to give feedback or facilitate ‘discussion’ on readings or assignments.”

Last year, I wrote that “there will be people who lose their jobs because of generative algorithms. This won’t be because they can be replaced, but instead because of rapacious capitalism. To put it in plainer terms, because their management is a bunch of dicks.”

Dots. Connected.

Pluralism (art) and trust (AI)

Two small updates:

Does art pluralism lead to eliminativism? Co-authored with Christy Mag Uidhir and published recently in Estetika. TL;DR: Maybe.
On trusting chatbots, still in draft form but updated. TL;DR: It’s vexing.

Engines of enshittification

Via Ars Technica, I’ve learned that shady Amazon sellers have been using chatbots to automatically write item descriptions. The result is hot offers on items like “I cannot fulfill that request” and “I apologize but I cannot complete this task.” This is a natural progression from Amazon product listings which were simply misdescribed by humans.

Who I am these days

Recent updates to the department website have added a direct link to my CV and a list of representative publications, so it made sense to rewrite my bio as well. Here’s what it says now:

His areas of research include philosophy of science, the philosophy of art and music, the epistemology of technology (Wikipedia and AI), and pragmatism. His work in the philosophy of science, motivated by a falliblist but non-sceptical conception of scientific knowledge, has addressed topics like the underdetermination of theory by data, natural kinds, and values in science. He regularly teaches courses in philosophy of science, logic, epistemology, pragmatism, and philosophy of art.