Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

> Learn about someone's cool work from a few years ago
> Look up what they're doing now
> Discover that it's completely bonkers

(The first time this happened it was a philosopher of probability turned Holocaust denier. The second, just now, it was a metaethicist turned paranormal researcher.)

the Achilles heel of reactionaries, in this country and elsewhere, has usually been overconfidence and overreach, and it sure feels like that is the case today

CFP // Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World, July 24-28 at Illinois Institute of Technology, in Chicago, Illinois. The theme is Resilience. Submissions due by February 7.

Political jiu jitsu is Sharp's phrase for using your enemy's violence against you to discredit them. But that violence has to be morally legible to your enemy or the unaligned for jiu jitsu to work. The question is whether any political violence we can actually provoke is ever legible in this way.

The University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras is planning to close 64 of its bachelor's programs, including philosophy. It's the largest public university campus in Puerto Rico, with 18k students, a number of MA and PhD programs, and one of the top-ranked institutions in Latin America.

What are the best deep explanations of how the modern world differs from the past? Deep, like it explains stuff in a lot of seemingly unrelated domains, or it requires a lot of theoretical/practical updating to take to heart, or it pervades all of our experiences but takes a lot of work to reveal.

Doing public philosophy in a difficult times. Unfortunately, due to health considerations I'm not as active as I once was but I hope that these tips, which I gained through experience being someone engaged in projects relating to the public good and disseminating philosophy for a big audience 1/

Conversation after dinner:

J: Who's the actor, the guy from Being John Malkovich?
Me: John Cusack?
J: No, the one who was John Malkovich.
Me: ... John Malkovich.

Whatever the truth of Elon's salute, my gut feeling is going after it risks falling into some Resistance 1.0 traps.

The right thinks we’re always yelling nazi and have tuned it out. What kind of indignation/attacks have a chance of being effective? His wealth & power grabbing are 100% unambiguous.

Trump 1 overwhelmed the press and civil society by bombarding it with outrageous but inconsequential things (covfefe, tweeting about celebrities), while also doing a bunch of non-obviously outrageous but more consequential things (the tax bill, court packing) - flooding the zone with shit.

Philosophers of science! Please share widely the latest suite of PSA Office Hours, which includes an awesome career event in April as well as one-on-ones with profs. www.philsci.org/psa_office_h...