Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Quentin Ruyant

@keithwilson.eu

Are paintings real? Many art lovers feel they’re looking at real people and landscapes. Scientists say it’s time to consider whether they’re onto something.

Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 6d

can’t fucking catch a breath

make it stop

Is ChatGPT Conscious? Many users feel they’re talking to a real person. Scientists say it’s time to consider whether they’re onto something.
By Jeff Wise, a science journalist and private pilot.

November 26, 2025 at 9:12 AM

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Philoxime

@philoxime.bsky.social

Ouiii, BONNE RÉPONSE ! 🎉 La vidéo est sortie : youtu.be/UPaRhtq45qA

Sommes-nous foncièrement égoïstes ? L'anneau de Gygès

YouTube video by Philoxime

youtu.be

November 25, 2025 at 7:53 PM

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Marcel

@marcelaiphan.bsky.social

Le France de Macron est tellement fasciste qu’être antifasciste constitue un trouble à l’ordre public
➡️ l.humanite.fr/Yoh

Elle serait une « menace grave pour l’ordre public français »... La dessinatrice italienne Elena Mistrello arrêtée à Toulouse et expulsée de France - L'Humanité

Invitée au festival BD Colomiers, l’illustratrice de BD a été arrêtée à l’aéroport de Toulouse le 21 novembre dernier. Elle avait participé en juin 2023 aux commémorations...

l.humanite.fr

November 25, 2025 at 12:33 PM

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Sam Gilbert

@samgilbert.bsky.social

and I agree with @olivia.science and @irisvanrooij.bsky.social too! I’m concerned about uncritical AI adoption, but losing our cognitive abilities - like AGI panic - is at the bottom of my list for why. Both exaggerate AI’s actual competence

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 12d

what's cool about this in @nautil.us is I also agree w @samgilbert.bsky.social 100% even tho maybe I and @irisvanrooij.bsky.social are supposed to be contrasts — it's absolutely the case that lot of tech is beneficial AND that a LOT of the studies are not showing much nautil.us/ai-might-not...

1/n

AI Might Not Harm Us in the Way You Think

AI Might Not Harm Us in the Way You Think: Researchers are divided over AI’s cognitive harms—and whether we should use these tools at all.

nautil.us

November 19, 2025 at 5:16 PM

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PhilSci-Archive

@philsci-archive.bsky.social

New on the Archive:

Cañas, Dubian (2025) Agency, relativism and extended knowledge. THEORIA. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science, 40 (2). pp. 130-153. ISSN 2171-679X

https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27148/

November 15, 2025 at 2:12 PM

Quentin Ruyant

@qruy.bsky.social

My unpopular opinion: caricaturing the racists in this way is a dangerous game. Some people fall for racism the day they discover it can be slightly more sophisticated than what they were told it was.

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 24d

apropos james watson’s death i had an idle thought today about how stupid race/iq stuff sounds. “buh if your skin is darker you are biologically less smart” is a thing only a dumbass can believe

November 8, 2025 at 8:48 AM

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Nathanael Larigaldie

@nathlarigaldie.bsky.social

Ok, just wow. If the content of this article is right, this is depressing. We're slowly reaching the point where ~100% of what I was taught in Social Psych was either innocently wrong or plainly frauded

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Debunking “When Prophecy Fails”

In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

November 5, 2025 at 11:09 PM

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Mauricio Suárez

@msuarez.bsky.social

The below link should work, but let me know if you can't get access and I'll DM you the author's copy!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Hearty thanks to Oscar Westerblad @oscarw.bsky.social, Chiara Ambrosio and Alexander Bird for their wonderful commentaries!

Inference and Representation by Mauricio Suárez: Reply by the Author.

www.sciencedirect.com

November 2, 2025 at 5:40 PM

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DGBassani

@dgbassani.bsky.social

Read this:

“The university board doesn’t even protest against Microsoft integrating AI tools into its products without asking. Universities have enough experts within their organisations, but that doesn’t mean that management listens to them or even asks for their opinion.”

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Oct 24

I am close to tears; they listened and made an english version apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

@apache.be you rule 🖤

October 26, 2025 at 7:33 PM

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Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈

@josephpolitano.bsky.social

Yep, I am generally extremely frustrated by this modern internet phenomenon where people will read a journalist's short summary of a book, find that the *summary* does not mention an important concept, and then accuse the *book's author* of not knowing about the concept

Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · Oct 26

Before castigating a book for not using a term, you should check to see if the book uses a term.

October 26, 2025 at 8:43 PM

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Chaz Firestone

@chazfirestone.bsky.social

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis.

Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

Screenshot of a paper abstract:

“Core knowledge” refers to a set of cognitive systems that underwrite early representations of the physical and social world, appear universally across cultures, and likely result from our genetic endowment. Although this framework is canonically considered as a hypothesis about early emerging conception — how we think and reason about the world — here we present an alternative view: that many such representations are inherently perceptual in nature. This “core perception” view explains an intriguing (and otherwise mysterious) aspect of core-knowledge processes and representations: that they also operate in adults, where they display key empirical signatures of perceptual processing. We first illustrate this overlap using recent work on “core physics”, the domain of core knowledge concerned with physical objects, representing properties such as persistence through time, cohesion, solidity, and causal interactions. We review evidence that adult vision incorporates exactly these representations of core physics, while also displaying empirical signatures of genuinely perceptual mechanisms, such as rapid and automatic operation on the basis of specific sensory inputs, informational encapsulation, and interaction with other perceptual processes. We further argue that the same pattern holds for other areas of core knowledge, including geometrical, numerical, and social domains. In light of this evidence, we conclude that many infant results appealing to precocious reasoning abilities are better explained by sophisticated perceptual mechanisms shared by infants and adults. Our core-perception view elevates the status of perception in accounting for the origins of conceptual knowledge, and generates a range of ready-to-test hypotheses in developmental psychology, vision science, and more.

October 9, 2025 at 4:31 PM

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Mother Jones

@motherjones.com

@lataco.bsky.social first began as a blog documenting local Mexican cuisine. Now, it’s an essential reporting powerhouse to the city as Trump’s mass deportation plot unfolds.

Check out the latest from our friends at Reveal: tinyurl.com/4cm2bsdr

October 6, 2025 at 11:00 PM

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Kevin Mitchell

@wiringthebrain.bsky.social

Henry’s thesis is on: “Developing a Naturalistic Metaphysics for Biological Agency”. His goal (our goal in working together) was to show that there’s nothing unscientific or supernatural about ideas of agency, mental causation, and free will. ⬇️ (1/n)

Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · Oct 2

Huge congratulations to Dr. Henry Potter!!! 😊👏🎉🍾

October 3, 2025 at 8:17 AM

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The HOPOS Journal

@hoposjournal.bsky.social

The new Cambridge Element on Philosophy of Cosmology by Siska de Baerdemaeker is available for free download until Friday, October 3.

www.cambridge.org/core/element...

De Baerdemaeker's article in #HOPOS on the history of cosmology can be found here: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

Philosophy of Cosmology and Astrophysics

Cambridge Core - Philosophy: General Interest - Philosophy of Cosmology and Astrophysics

www.cambridge.org

October 2, 2025 at 4:06 PM

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Mark Rubin

@markrubin.bsky.social

"Having long had one foot in philosophy of science and the other in foundations of statistics, I will zero in on the central philosophical issues that lie below the surface of today’s raging debates."

Deborah Mayo with excerpts from her 2018 book "Statistical Inference as Severe Testing"

#PhilSci

October 2025 – Error Statistics Philosophy

1 post published by Mayo during October 2025

errorstatistics.com

October 2, 2025 at 6:12 PM

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Quentin Ruyant

@qruy.bsky.social

They seem to ignore that the names for animal parts do not translate exactly from one language to another because people don't carve animals the same way in different cultures... The metaphor says quite the contrary of what it was meant to

September 24, 2025 at 3:52 AM

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Ketan Joshi

@ketanjoshi.co

Ohhh this is a useful term

Let me introduce you to your new favourite term: ‘workslop’
Academics trying to square the rise in use of generative AI in workplaces with early reporting suggesting that many companies aren’t seeing material benefits from the technology have coined a new term: workslop (Harvard Business Review)

Workslop is AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.

HBR
The team makes the case that workslop is hurting productivity because people are using AI to do work that is good enough to pass on, but ultimately ends up being “unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand.” They say they see examples of this in coding, research and just general communication.

The Sizzle: I don’t want to be only negative about AI. In fact, in a future edition I’d like to share some of the ways that I am experimenting with AI (do you have some good uses? email me). Like most tools, I think it can be useful when used in the right situation (obligatory mention of IP, environment and corporate consolidation issues).

But as I was reading this article, I was thinking one thing: EXACTLYYYYYYY.

Everyone now knows exactly what it’s like when they’re handed a piece of workslop. It’s not just in workplaces either — people taking in open source projects or other collaborative efforts have to deal with this too. This sentence particularly resonated with me:

The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.

September 23, 2025 at 11:33 AM

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Dr Vanessa

@hpsvanessa.bsky.social

No i’ve not been hacked. No this is not one of those “how would you call for help” memes.

Alanah Pearce @charalanahzard.bsky.social · Sep 22

It’s time to wake up — if you aren’t using ChatGPT to optimize your work (and your life!) you’re getting left behind. Watch this for 5 simple, lesser-known ChatGPT prompts that geniuses use!

youtu.be/IS65dBNlng8

5 Secret Ways to Use ChatGPT Like an AI Pro (2025 easy prompt guide!)

YouTube video by Charalanahzard

youtu.be

September 23, 2025 at 11:42 AM

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I Support People Protesting in Support of Palestinian Action

@srdfrench.bsky.social

My essay ‘Breaking the Chain’ is up at Aeon magazine:

aeon.co/essays/why-q...

It summarises the argument of my book (A Phenomenological Approach to Quantum Mechanics, OUP) that the Husserlian underpinnings of a crucial text in the history of quantum physics have been overlooked.
#physics
#philsci

Why quantum mechanics needs phenomenology | Aeon Essays

The role of the conscious observer has posed a stubborn problem for quantum measurement. Phenomenology offers a solution

aeon.co

September 19, 2025 at 1:36 PM

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Cory Allen Heidelberger

@coralhei.bsky.social

Good news in the global war on fascism:

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · Sep 11

"A majority of Brazil’s supreme court judges have voted to convict the country’s former president Jair Bolsonaro of plotting a military coup, leaving the far-right populist facing a decades-long sentence for leading the criminal conspiracy."

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Brazil’s supreme court finds Bolsonaro guilty of plotting military coup

Former president faces decades-long jail sentence for seeking to forcibly cling to power after losing 2022 election

www.theguardian.com

September 11, 2025 at 8:21 PM

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Jean Abbiateci

@jeanabbiateci.bsky.social

« Il me semble que... »

September 10, 2025 at 6:08 AM

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Jo Wolff

@jowolff.bsky.social

In the 80s I went to a lecture by a Bulgarian political philosopher. The whole lecture was delivered with his back to the audience writing incomprehensible symbols on the board. He said afterward that they’d developed this habit so the secret police watching would think they were doing maths.

Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · Sep 6

Christopher Monckton calls for all university teaching to be recorded and permanently archived online. "That would stop the communist propaganda dead!"

September 6, 2025 at 12:51 PM