Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 31m

I personally think the solution to the worst people can't be the very thing that did not work on the worst people.

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NOELREPORTS @noelreports.com · 2h

Ukraine’s FrankenSAM program continues to deliver battlefield innovation: one system features a modified Soviet Buk launcher adapted to fire Western RIM-7 Sea Sparrow missiles.

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Dr. SmolAnalyst is hoping the next town won't have an Omelas pit @smolanalyst.bsky.social · 48m

Scheduling during PCS season

🏰meg⚔️ @Birthright Audiobook! @impavid.us · 3d

In honor of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand

I'll go first: Six page commercial lease.

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Paul Slimin' @legendsofthepaul.bsky.social · 49m

Everyone replying to this with “no Thiel just did humanities wrong” needs to contend with the Catholic integralist in my Phil program who wrote a thesis on how Carl Schmitt was super based, and how nothing in any program would really stop you from using your degree that way.

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Mike Black @mikeblack114.bsky.social · 3h

And finally reprogramming requires there to be a valid appropriation to transfer the funds into. There is no FY26 MILPERS (military pay appropriation) and FY25 MILPERS is expired (cannot legally do new obligations), hence why this is an illegal usurpation of Article I appropriation power

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Bill McKay @mckay4senate.bsky.social · 1h

More broadly, the idea of “knowledge that makes you morally good” is ridiculous and, if anything, would just have us asking why we need continuing study in the humanities when we have that

brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 5h

Anyone who claims that Silicon Valley would be better with more humanities education has to grapple with the fact that Peter Thiel was a philosophy major.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 1h

You can also give LLMs access to a Wolfram Mathematica kernel, but agentic behavior is also not some sort of ironclad thing, to your point about sometimes pretending to add...

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 5h

i think this is sort of complex. e.g., it appears that in some cases, addition is done by counting rotations on a helix. this representation really does addition, and you can distinguish it meaningfully from "pretending" to do addition. but the model also sometimes "pretends" to do addition!

Stephen Turner @stephenturner.us · Aug 29

All models are wrong; some are useful.

All LLM outputs are hallucinations. Some are useful.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 1h

I do think there is a delta between moral and ethical behavior and the effects of education because one aspect of ethics is codification.

I could be very wrong and I'm willing to be corrected though.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 1h

Or, SV is the way it is BECAUSE of those things.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 1h

Narcanon is Scientology.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 1h

My classic counterexample is the reading of Socrates' ideas about censorship in The Republic as serious, given that the ban on works "that show bad things happening to good people" would include all of the Platonic Dialogs...

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 1h

Yes - this is true. Doctors too.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 1h

I really don't think the reading of the voice of Socrates as the voice of Plato is a good one, so I'm very willing to see the idea that people must just be misinformed about the good rather than being evil as a rhetorical tool than an actual philosophical position of Plato.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 1h

Granted, this idea is also as old as Plato - or at least it is one of the key themes of the Platonic dialogs.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 1h

Yeah this is a banger.

That this idea is closely correlated to the "we need to teach more critical thinking" concept is quite ironic.

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Nick (derogatory) ✨ @slothropsmap.bsky.social · 1h

I always thought this was one of the best posts on this website.

Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · May 4

a lot of people want there to be Knowledge That Makes You Good and unfortunately that is not a thing that exists

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 2h

And I think you would find enough differences of opinion on moral philosophy within the philosophy department of any decent school to suggest this too.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 2h

And I think that a liberal arts education is grappling with key questions rather than receiving the answers to them - attending a Peter Singer lecture does not make you agree with Peter Singer, for example.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 2h

Education may have an impact, but it's not something that education certifies or necessarily delivers.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 2h

So I never said being a good person is innate - I said that moral decisions are separate from understanding moral concerns.

I think that people choose to be moral out of a broad number of formative experiences and that few if any are out of education as opposed to experience and upbringing.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 2h

Scientology? Really?

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 2h

I actually think that a lot of Plato is very relevant because of the pervasiveness of sophistry in modern life.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 3h

Oh I think what you are seeing is people responding to the incentives present in the structures in which they exist. Education is a plus for them because it allows them to justify their behavior over any pedagogical capacity to change it.

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 3h

Like the Oxford dons who educated the shock troops of colonialism would agree wholeheartedly with your position.

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