Fırat Akova
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firatakova.bsky.social
Fırat Akova
@firatakova.bsky.social
290 followers 96 following 53 posts
PhD in Philosophy. Senior Research Fellow at PowerForDemocracies.org. Founder of Poedat.

Former Lecturer at Koç. Former Oxford Global Priorities Fellow. Alumnus of Warwick, Bilgi, McGill.

Ethics, politics, effective altruism, AI. Vegan.

firatakova.com
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firatakova.bsky.social
Toplumların refahı açısından özgürlüğe ve eşit muameleye dayalı nesnel bir yörüngenin bulunduğunu ve söz konusu yörüngeden sapmanın uzun vadede mümkün olmadığını düşünüyorum.
July 7, 2025 at 1:40 PM
firatakova.bsky.social
The widespread adoption of machines in the early stages of capitalism did not eliminate the need for human labour. On the contrary, industries reinvented themselves and continued to operate, with human labour remaining alongside machines. The classical Marxist thesis was proven right.
June 22, 2025 at 4:45 PM
firatakova.bsky.social
One of the claims of democratic peace theory is that liberal democracies rarely tend to engage in conflict with each other.

As liberal democracies weaken globally, we will also be testing this thesis inversely: The decline of liberal democracies will likely mean more wars.
June 13, 2025 at 4:56 PM
firatakova.bsky.social
A new field is emerging on the sentience of machines and the "welfare" of digital minds. Some are slowly and quietly reflecting on the topic. The initial questions arise at the intersection of ethics, cognitive science, philosophy of emotion, and neuroscience.
June 2, 2025 at 2:10 PM
firatakova.bsky.social
@poedat.bsky.social olarak 17-19 Mayıs’ta Armaş Vakfı’nda "Etik Buluşmaları: Çerçevenin Dışında" başlıklı bir etkinlik düzenliyoruz. Etiğin alanına düşen güncel sorulara yanıtlar bulma amacıyla düzenlenen etkinlik yoğun tartışmalar içerecek.

Başvurular devam ediyor.
Etik Buluşmaları: Çerçevenin Dışında – Poedat
www.poedat.org
April 23, 2025 at 8:33 AM
firatakova.bsky.social
Sosyal medyada "merkezî" yapıları ve "merkeziyetsiz" yapıları birbirlerinden nasıl ayırt edebiliriz?
Scrolli - Merkeziyetsiz platform arayışında Bluesky göçü doğru çözüm mü?
'Platform tam anlamıyla merkeziyetsiz değil'
www.scrolli.co
April 19, 2025 at 6:15 PM
firatakova.bsky.social
An interesting topic: linguistic injustice. The piece discusses how policies aimed at further strengthening the languages of already linguistically wealthy groups may lead to potential injustices.
Limits of language promotion
This post is written by Dr. Seunghyun Song (Assistant professor, Tilburg University). Based on her research on linguistic justice, she provides a tentative answer to the issue of the limits of the …
justice-everywhere.org
April 18, 2025 at 6:45 PM
firatakova.bsky.social
On the Negative Aspects of the Male Experience

In conservative circles, maleness is viewed positively as a symbol of power and grandeur, while in non-conservative circles, it carries negative connotations due to its association with patriarchy and oppression.
March 4, 2025 at 6:51 PM
firatakova.bsky.social
"Tongue Fu!" is one of the best non-academic books I have read recently. It is a fantastic resource that can be revisited repeatedly in everyday life, professional settings, and challenging conversations.
The image is the cover of the book "Tongue Fu!" by Sam Horn.
January 31, 2025 at 6:17 PM
firatakova.bsky.social
5 recommendations from academic articles I read in 2024:

1. "On the Ethics of Interacting" by Kimberley Brownlee

There is a growing literature on the ethics of interacting. The author analyzes the stages of interactions and the wrongs that can occur at each stage.

doi.org/10.1111/japp...
On the Ethics of Interacting
Ordinary interactions are the primary vehicle through which we show respect, give social pleasure, and grease the wheels of healthy sociality. When we do an interactional wrong to someone, we not onl...
doi.org
December 31, 2024 at 1:03 PM
firatakova.bsky.social
Demokratik gerileme ve otoriterleşme literatürünü okurken karşılaştığım ilginç stratejilerden biri: Düşük nitelikli ve yanlı seçim gözlemi örgütleri kurmak ve böylece kusurlu seçimlerin algılanan meşruluğunu ulusal ve uluslararası düzeyde yükseltmeye çalışmak.
December 24, 2024 at 5:01 AM
firatakova.bsky.social
Beğenilerimiz, görüşlerimiz, tercihlerimiz değişiyor; bazıları süzülüyor, bazıları katılaşıyor ve bazıları ortadan kayboluyor.

Zamansallığı kavramak ve onunla barışık olmak çok önemli.
December 23, 2024 at 6:35 PM
firatakova.bsky.social
If I were to describe this book in a single word, it would be "charitable". It is written with an extraordinary level of epistemic humility. It covers opposing views without doing them any injustice.

For those interested in reducing animal suffering and vegan activism.
The image is a book cover titled "How to Create a Vegan World: A Pragmatic Approach" by Tobias Leenaert, with a foreword by Peter Singer. The cover features an illustration of Earth made up of fruits and vegetables on a green background.
December 19, 2024 at 11:32 AM
firatakova.bsky.social
Power for Democracies is seeking a Senior Analyst in impact evaluation to develop a cost-effectiveness model for pro-democracy initiatives.

This is a critical role for our team, so please feel free to share it with anyone who might be interested.
Power for Democracies | Senior Analyst, Impact Evaluation (m/f/d)
We are a new, non-profit democracy charity evaluator – based in Berlin, operating globally. In order to defend, strengthen and advance liberal democracies, we aim to research, analyze, and publish hig...
powerfordemocracies.kenjo.io
December 16, 2024 at 9:26 AM
firatakova.bsky.social
Philosopher Simon Keller recently published an article on friendship. Few contemporary philosophers focus on friendship, so I value writings related to the topic. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Beyond Ideals of Friendship
What makes a friendship a good friendship? One way of answering that question, taken by Aristotle and many philosophers since, is to describe an ideal friendship, and then say that a friendship is a ...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
December 7, 2024 at 1:14 PM
Reposted by Fırat Akova
stephango.com
Companies break promises all the time. A self-guaranteeing promise does not require you to trust anyone.

Full essay:
stephango.com/self-guarantee
Companies break promises all the time. A self-guaranteeing promise does not require you to trust anyone. You can verify a self-guaranteeing promise yourself. File over app is a self-guaranteeing promise. If files are in your control, in an open format, you can use those files in another app at any time. Not an export. The exact same files. It’s good practice to test this with any self-proclaimed file-over-app app you use. Terms and policies are not self-guaranteeing. A company may promise the privacy of your data, but those policies can change at any time. Changes can retroactively affect data you have spent years putting into the tool. Examples: Google, Zoom, Dropbox, Tumblr, Slack, Adobe, Figma. A self-guaranteeing promise about privacy gives you proof that the tool cannot access your data in the first place. Encoding values into a governance structure is not self-guaranteeing. Given enough motivation, the corporate structure can be reversed. The structure is not in your hands. Example: OpenAI. Open source alone is not self-guaranteeing. Even open source apps can rely on data that is stuck in databases or in proprietary formats that are difficult to switch away from. Open source is not a reliable safeguard against the biases of venture capital. Examples: Omnivore, Skiff. When you choose to use a tool, the future of that tool is always ambiguous. On a long enough timeline the substrate changes. Your needs change, the underlying operating system changes, the company goes out of business or gets acquired, better options come along. It is possible to accept the ambiguousness of a tool’s future if you choose tools that make self-guaranteeing promises.
December 3, 2024 at 4:44 PM
Reposted by Fırat Akova
poedat.bsky.social
Seminerler, konferanslar, kamplar, atölyeler, zirveler ve özel gruplar ile gerçekleşen etkinlikler, akademik bir tutumla kurgulanan ve içerik olarak birbirinden farklılaşan çalışmalardan oluşuyor.

Bizi takip edin!
December 2, 2024 at 5:32 PM
Reposted by Fırat Akova
poedat.bsky.social
Merhaba!

Poedat olarak çeşitli alanlarda çalışan ve üreten akademisyenlerin, araştırmacıların ve öğrencilerin yönettiği, özgür dışa vuruma olanak sağlayan, güncelliğini koruyan etkinlikler düzenliyoruz.
December 2, 2024 at 5:32 PM
firatakova.bsky.social
There might come a day when AI writes all the entries for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
December 1, 2024 at 12:27 PM
Reposted by Fırat Akova
gpioxford.bsky.social
We’re excited to announce our new research agendas – for philosophy, economics and psychology – have now been published! You can read them here: globalprioritiesinstitute.org/research-age...
Research agenda - Global Priorities Institute
The central focus of GPI is what we call ‘global priorities research’: research into issues that arise in response to the question, ‘What should we do with a given amount of limited resources if our a...
globalprioritiesinstitute.org
November 29, 2024 at 11:00 AM
firatakova.bsky.social
Rage-baiting is all about sparking anger or outrage online, usually because someone profits from it. If you are on social media a lot, you have probably seen it constantly. Sadly, algorithms tend to reward this kind of content.
Rage-baiting - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
November 28, 2024 at 3:13 PM
firatakova.bsky.social
I believe in the great power of short emails.
November 27, 2024 at 4:08 AM
Reposted by Fırat Akova
stephango.com
File over app · 2023
stephango.com/file-over-app
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom. File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data. In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last. The ancient temples of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them. The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs. Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems and other tools. Paraphrasing something I wrote recently: "If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s." You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve. These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile.
November 26, 2024 at 3:26 PM
firatakova.bsky.social
"Recent Work on Gender Identity and Gender" by Rach Cosker-Rowland has become one of the most-read articles in Analysis, a journal published by Oxford University Press.

It explores the relationship between gender identity and gender through four different views.

academic.oup.com/analysis/art...
The diagram illustrates a conceptual framework for understanding how gender is determined, based on whether the features influencing gender vary across contexts and the number of features involved. At the top level, it asks whether gender-determining features are context-dependent. If "Yes," the framework supports Contextualism, which posits that gender is determined differently depending on the situational or cultural context. If "No," it leads to Invariantism, which holds that the features determining gender are consistent across contexts. From Invariantism, the model asks whether multiple features directly determine gender. A "Yes" response aligns with Pluralism, which acknowledges multiple features working together to define gender, exemplified by the Two Properties View. A "No" response leads to Monism, where a single feature dictates gender. Within Monism, there are two approaches: the Gender Identity First view, which centers gender on internal identity, and the No Connection View, which denies any direct relationship between gender and specific features. This framework provides a structured way to analyze diverse philosophical positions on gender determination.
November 25, 2024 at 7:12 AM
firatakova.bsky.social
Name a game with a 10/10 soundtrack.

(Mine is Stardew Valley!)
A pixel art scene from the game Stardew Valley showing a farmhouse with a wooden exterior, a mailbox, planted crops with sprinklers, and farming equipment like barrels and chests. A character wearing a straw hat stands in front of the house.
November 24, 2024 at 2:39 PM