The previous post was about journal referees using chatbots to write referee reports. Via Daily Nous, I learned today that Wiley seems to have used an LLM to generate an abstract for an article in a volume that it published. Sandra Leonie Field, author of the article, notes that bullshit abstract both garbles her argument and misgenders her.
Tag: the profession
Calling a foul on referees
The tidal wave of LLM use in academic writing and peer review cannot be stopped.
— James Zou in Nature
Short reply: F*ck.
Longer reply: I mean, really? Are scholars really using chatbots to write referee reports? There aren’t enough *s in f*ck to capture how utterly f*cked that is.
Qualifying the praise of outsiders
At Daily Nous, Justin writes in praise of the outsider perspective. He quotes William Lycan:
An outsider to a small subliterature is more likely than is an insider to make an interesting or even important contribution to it. And the same for an outsider to a whole problematic within an area of philosophy. And possibly the same for an outsider to a whole area.
This resonates with me. As a philosopher of science, I ended up with a research program in the philosophy of music because my perspective on problems cast an interested light on questions beyond science. That said, here are some cautionary remarks about the outsider perspective— running roughly in order from the least serious to the most fundamental.
Continue reading “Qualifying the praise of outsiders”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.
Imagination, philosophy, and imitation games
Via Daily Nous, I came across a blog post by Justin Smith-Ruiu about creative writing as philosophy. The post is, ultimately, an argument that philosophy can be “incitement of the imagination, by creative means, to see the world in unfamiliar ways.” I agree with that! But there are digressions along the way that range from false speculation to attacks on the kind of philosophy that I (sometimes) do.
Continue reading “Imagination, philosophy, and imitation games”I had some things to say about open access
A grue by any other name is just as likely to eat you in the dark
Over at the APA blog, Noël Carroll whinges about the fact that the blog categorizes his post as Philosophy of Film. He acknowledges that the label is used for a particular philosophical subdiscipline, but he doesn’t like it. On the one hand, the subdiscipline addresses not just movies but also television and video games. On the other hand, “film” in an original sense is strictly photographic. Today even most movies aren’t on film.
Continue reading “A grue by any other name is just as likely to eat you in the dark”Welcome, Alessandra!
I’m happy to announce that our search for a Philosopher of AI has concluded and that Alessandra Buccella will be starting at UAlbany Philosophy in the Fall.
The paradox of edited volumes
Consider these facts:
When discussing another scholar’s research record, it is common to not give full credit for essays in edited volumes. Some people disregard book chapters entirely when assessing a CV. But it is more common to give a kind of discounted credit, counting a chapter in an edited volume as less than a journal article. Mindful of this, some people list journal articles and book chapters under separate headings in their CV.
When discussing their own productivity, philosophers are quick to mention collections that they have edited. It is common, on a CV, to see edited volumes under the heading of books alongside monographs. Even though philosophy is no longer a book-driven discipline, a monograph carries more weight than a journal article. So putting the edited volume under the heading of books puts it where important things go.
The puzzle is how assembling an edited volume can be prestigious and important work if the chapters assembled in them are insignificant. If it is not quite a paradox, it is at least a tension our professional norms.
Everyone is risk-averse; and not
Over at Daily Nous, there’s discussion of an argument by John Symons that academic philosophy has become more risk-averse. Symons writes that
…the current incentive structure of academic philosophy in the United States favors cautious and modest research agendas for early career philosophers. Philosophical inquiry thrives when it is conducted in a spirit that risks overreaching a bit and welcomes criticism. Philosophy thrives when its creative, skeptical, and self-critical core is not subordinated to excessively cautious American-style professionalism…
The trick, though, is that any system where there are more researchers than jobs must hire some of them but not others. This creates an incentive structure for scholars to do work that tends to get people hired.
In a system which rewards provocative overreaching, a risk-averse young scholar who wanted to maximize their chance of a job would portray their work as provocative overreach. This would probably mean not citing too much other work (so as not to make one’s project look too in-the-box) and, when citing things, doing so only with disapproval (so as to suggest that one is against the system). Someone who is genuinely interested in formalizing the context sensitivity of epistemic modals would have to include a fiery introduction that explains why their work sticks it to the man.
Ultimately, risk-aversion can arise in any incentive structure.
Moreover, no young philosophers are truly risk-averse. They have spent years of their life pursuing a PhD in Philosophy, which is a risky proposition regardless of the research topic. The genuinely risk averse young adults didn’t become philosophers.