Richard Pettigrew

@wiglet1981.bsky.social

3.7K followers 1K following 1.1K posts

Philosopher at University of Bristol 🏳️‍🌈 he/him

https://richardpettigrew.com/

Books: Epistemic Risk and the Demands of Rationality | Choosing for Changing Selves | Dutch Book Arguments | Accuracy and the Laws of Credence | Who Are Universities For? .. more

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Philosophy 39%

Computer science 14%

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Anna Alexandrova @annaalexandrova.bsky.social · 1d

My 15yo gave me a very useful Christmas present. You are welcome to it, my old friends

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Kristina Šekrst @epiphenomenal.bsky.social · 1d

#philosophy #philsky #philosophysky #cogsci #academia #science

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Clayton Littlejohn @cmlittlejohn.bsky.social · 2d

My first paper on disinformation just published. I argue that disinformation should be understood in pragmatic terms (e.g., changing content to influence choice) not epistemic terms (e.g., inducing inaccurate beliefs). You can view with this link. Spoiler in title.

link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007...

Disinformation is for degrading the value of information, not confirming falsehoods

link.springer.com

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 2d

I don’t remember Brooke Shields having these sorts of delays in A Castle for Christmas

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 2d

I heard someone describe A Christmas Carol as the first time travel story recently, and it seems the season’s ability to warp the temporal dimension continues unabated

Live train schedule for train to Edinburgh, calling at Berwick at 19:07, Waverley at 19:54, and then Haymarket two minutes earlier at 19:52

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Aidan McGlynn @aidanmcglynn.bsky.social · 3d

Publication day! It’s been a long journey to get to this point, and I’m grateful to everyone who’s supported that, and to @routledgebooks.bsky.social for publishing it.

Me looking at the camera and smiling, holding up a copy of my book Epistemic Injustice An Introduction

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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 4d

Alan Bennett’s diary, 1984.

prefer to be liked and thought a nice man. But I'm not. I'm just as bad as the rest of them, only I don't like to show it.
7 December. To a party at the Department of the History of Medicine at University College. I talk to Alan Tyson, who's like a figure out of the eighteenth century: a genial, snuff-taking, snuff-coloured, easy-going aristocrat - Fox, perhaps, or one of the Bourbons. He is a fellow of All Souls, and when Mrs Thatcher came to the college for a scientific symposium Tyson was deputed to take her round the Common Room. This is hung with portraits and photographs of dead fellows, including one of the economist G. D. H. Cole. Tyson planned to take Mrs Thatcher up to it saying, 'And this, Prime Minister, is a former fellow, G. D. H. Dole? Whereupon, with luck, Mrs Thatcher would have had to say, 'Cole not Dole' In the event he did take her round but lost his nerve.
15 December. Filming this week for Man and Music at Penshurst Place, the home of Lord de L'Isle and Dudley. Everything one
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folk tune stan account 🎻 @folktunes.bsky.social · 4d

CHIVELORD HAS DONE IT!!!

PERFECT CHIVES ON DAY 70!!!

TOLL THE TOWN BELL!!! HEAR YE, HEAR YE!!! U/F1EXICAN HAS PERFECTED THE ART OF CHIVE-CUTTING!!

CELEBRATE, YE GOOD PEOPLE!!

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 4d

Final blogpost of the year: in which I enthuse about Alex Meehan and Snow Zhang’s excellent recent paper ‘Bayes is Back’!

Bayesianism when learning isn't straightforward

Occasionally, you come across a paper you like so much, you feel the need to evangelise about it.

open.substack.com

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 6d

who don’t know the identity of the authors. And the journal often has policies that rule out such a reviewer. So it slows things down. I notice some people either post the preprint under a different title or submit the paper with the title ‘Title removed for anon review’. I think that does work.

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 6d

I think it’s really tricky. I love the preprint culture in maths are other parts of the sciences. It seems a really healthy way of ensuring a good pace of discussion. And I do always post mine. But doing more editorial work recently, I’ve noticed it does make it much harder to find expert reviewers

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Jocelyn Anderson Photography @jocelynanderson.bsky.social · 7d

A Tufted Titmouse waits on a nearby branch for sunflower seeds and peanuts to be offered.

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The Onion @theonion.com · 7d

Powerful Rest And Fluids Industry Influencing Doctors' Treatment Of Colds https://theonion.com/powerful-rest-and-fluids-industry-influencing-doctors-t-1819570463/

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 7d

Severance!

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Damian Shields @damianshields.bsky.social · 8d

Mountain light, Ben Inverveigh #Scotland #LochTulla #Argyll www.damianshields.com

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Rebecca Kosick @rkokayokay.bsky.social · 8d

Astonished that Publishers Weekly has put out this great review of DISPATCHES FROM THE AVANT-GARAGE. (What is happening I never get mainstream attention, my world is the weird world (good)) But what I hope is that more people will find out about the Alternative Press, and you know?, now they might!

Screenshot of Publishers Weekly review of Dispatches from the Avant-Garage: The Alternative Press, showing book cover on the left and review text on the right. Review reads:

—

“University of Bristol comp lit lecturer Kosick (Material Poetics in Hemispheric America) delves in this comprehensive account into the history of the Alternative Press, a Detroit-based indie that from the 1960s to the 1990s published cutting-edge experimental art, poetry, and literature. Its contributors—including Amiri Baraka, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Bernadette Mayer, and Eileen Myles—are a veritable who’s who of the late-20th-century American avant-garde, but in Kosick’s telling the press’s founding and early years are a story of local pride and tight-knit community. “We always wanted to publish our friends. Why would you want to publish your enemies?” quips Ken Mikolowski, who cofounded the press with his wife, Ann. It was over time, Kosick writes, that the Alternative Press built up trust with authors farther afield, becoming a flagship of the national and even the global avant garde. Kosick dedicates part of her account to highlighting the difficulty she encountered in her study of the press’s history, as much of its output has not been properly archived (a fact she chalks up partly to the underground press’s limited and idiosyncratic print runs, which ranged from bumper stickers to bookmarks, and partly to mainstream academia’s overlooking of broadsides printed in a city better known for churning out automobiles). It adds up to an evocative overview of a legendary publisher. (Mar.)”

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Jonathan Weisberg @jweisber.bsky.social · 8d

so does philosophy

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 9d

Yeah, that seems right. Thanks for humouring me while I procrastinated! Might procrastinate further by reading The Mirror Crack’d.

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 9d

And that’s not so implausible. You do seem to get people who can really sense what features of people are important for predicting their behaviour. I guess what’s implausible is that her inductive base is large enough.

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 9d

since they’re similar in that regard, they’ll be similar in this other regard. When she talks of types, that’s all she’s really meaning. I think AC invites us to imagine someone who’s just spectacularly good at sensing when similarity in one respect will make similarity in another respect likely.

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 9d

Yes, that’s pretty plausible. But here’s another go at an explanation that makes Miss M less ludicrous. What she’s doing is inductive inference. She’s predicting how X behaved on the basis of her experience of how Y behaved. She does this by spotting a similarity between X and Y and infers that,

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 9d

When trying to predict how someone will react to something, people often cite what some ‘similar’ person did in similar circumstances.

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 9d

our world, but it’s not morally different from our world. Just as there being lots of murders connected to one elderly rural lady is not our world. Also there’s a general folk belief that something close to Miss M’s approach is correct.

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 9d

We generally tend not to experience imaginative resistance just because some aspect of the described world is different from ours, do we? It has to be a moral feature of the described world, doesn’t it? Miss Marple’s world is one in which behaviour is predictable on the basis of types. That’s not

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Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 9d

can’t, i’m propagating knowledge

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 9d

Quick question: does this also apply to one’s view about the fundamental source of epistemic value for credences and its role in grounding epistemic norms for reasoning under uncertainty? Asking for a friend.

Iris Meredith @iris-meredith.bsky.social · 9d

You know, I think there's something to be said, when doing politics, in favour of just... not being unbelievably tedious? Like, not even as a question of right or wrong or whatever. Just... if you make people sigh and say "yes, we've heard this a hundred times before", you might be doing it wrong