Fintan Mallory

@fintanmallory.com

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Philosopher at Durham University. fintanmallory.com

When far from our native country, after a long voyage, we tread for the first time the soil of a tropical land, we experience a certain feeling of surprise and gratification in recognizing, in the rocks that surround us, the same inclined schistose strata, and the same columnar basalt covered with cellular amygdaloids, that we had left in Europe, and whose identity of character, in latitudes so widely different, reminds us that the solidification of the earth's crust is altogether independent of climatic influences.
Quote from Adam Tooze: If, as Barry Eichengreen quips in his recent history of money, the successor to the dollar was the dollar, that is because it wasn't.
In oral cultures a request for information is commonly interpreted interactively (Malinowski 1923, pp. 451, 470–81), as agonistic, and, instead of being really answered, is frequently parried. An illuminating story is told of a visitor in County Cork, Ireland, an especially oral region in a country which in every region preserves massive residual orality. The visitor saw a Corkman leaning against the post office. He went up to him, pounded with his hand on the post office wall next to the Corkman’s shoulder, and asked, ‘Is this the post office?’ The Corkman was not taken in. He looked at his questioner quietly and with great concern: ‘’Twouldn’t be a postage stamp you were lookin’ for, would it?’ He treated the enquiry not as a request for information but as something the enquirer was doing to him. So he did something in turn to the enquirer to see what would happen. All natives of Cork, according to the mythology, treat all questions this way. Always answer a question by asking another. Never let down your oral guard.
A 'Do it for Her' meme (from the Simpsons) except Her has been changed to him and images of Maggie have been replaced with David Suchet as Poirot
Belgian footballer in their away kit with an hat and apple before his face as in the painting The Son of Man, Le fils de l'homme
Merlin bird ID for Sharpe’s Wren, Cinnycerthia olivascens. The image is of a rather dumpy looking little brown wren.
Guardian headline: Bello! Why gen Alha subconsciously speaks the language of the Minions
Black land marked by lights of villages, network of streets and motorways, gold-glowing cities of Newcastle and Sunderland (I think). Above the arch of earth is reddened by yesterday/tomorrow’s sun.
The circus maximus under baking heat. The field has some grass left but is parched. Behind it stands the Domus Severiani, a red stoned ancient house.
A bronze sculpture depicting huddled masses, their clothes are rags, some carry luggage, others sheets, one girl has a pet dog. Behind them hidden in the throng are two wings of an angel
The Temple of Saturn in Rome. Its columns are dusky and orange-tinged.
Miguel from the charming animated film The Road to El Dorado
Norman Rockewell's Freedom of Speech (painting)
Poster of Junior. A pregnant Arnie looks surprised while Emma Thompson holds his shoulder and Danny Devito holds a stethoscope to Arnie's belly.
Rotten Tomatoes Review: WOW THIS WAS ONE OF THE DUMBEST HORRIBLE MOVIES I HAVE EVER SEEN AND A REALLY PAINFULL EXPERIENCE THROUGHOUT!!!!!!!!!! EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS JUST WRONG ON S000000000000000000000000000 MANY LEVELS!!!!!!!!!! | WILL DESPISE THIS CRAP TO MY DYING DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.
Critical race theorist Khiara Bridges endorses a radical perspectivalism about truth: CRT, like its Critical Legal Studies predecessor, has been heavily influenced by postmodernist and poststructuralist philosophy and literary criticism — which has been
Cover of David Lewis: Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy
A box of cans of the Greek beer Mythos
They turn Kant's critical method into an autonomous logic of validity based on an original, underivable unity which is not the unity of consciousness. In both cases objectification is the correlate of the logic and can be methodically examined in any individual science. 'Validity', 'objectification' and 'method' do not have a transcendental or formal status but constitute a metaphysics of a new kind. Morality and Method The development of the idea of a scientific sociology was inseparable arable from the transformation of transcendental logic into , the paradigm of validity and values. Prima facie the idea of a sociological account of validity appears contradictory. For a sociological interpretation of experience, like a psychological one, might be expected to address itself to the quid fact, not the quaestio quid juris, to the history and
"Durham Pride won't be getting a single penny from this council next year," the deputy leader, Darren Grimes, said last summer. "Taxpayers shouldn't be bankrolling it.? But in a testament to an enduring relationship forged during the miners' strikes of the 1980s, this year's event has returned bigger than ever, thanks to funding from trade unions. Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Miners' Association (DMA), said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to "encourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community".
213. The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
107. We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called “alignment” of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions. 108. In fact, as with every major technological shift, AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data.
104. From this follows a simple but compelling consequence: we cannot consider AI to be morally neutral. In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less worthy, or excludes them without the possibility of appeal, then it is not merely a tool “to be used well,” since it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of the human person. For this reason, ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes; it must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it. [126]
These countries are aging the fastest - here’s what it will mean
Education ministry proposals for the secondary school philosophy curriculum, which is studied by more than half of all Italian school students, do not include thinkers such as the deeply influential founder of Marxism or the 17th century Dutch pioneer of secular modernity Baruch Spinoza. Among those who are listed to be studied meanwhile is Giovanni Gentile, an influential idealist philosopher who went on to become minister of education under Benito Mussolini and to co-author the 1932 work The Doctrine of Fascism with the dictator.
Opening quote from the wikipedia article on the world: "The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists."
ZETETIC ASTRONOMY. EARTH NOT A GLOBE! AN EXPERIMENTAL INQUIRY INTO THE TRUE FIGURE OF THE EARTH: PROVING IT A PLANE, WITHOUT AXIAL OR ORBITAL MOTION ; AND THE ONLY MATERIAL WORLD IN THE UNIVERSE! BY "PARALLAX." London: BISLKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO.,STATIONERS' HALL COURT. Bath: 9 HAYWARD, GREEN STREET. 1865.
Picture of Scottish Protestant reformer John Knox. He has a long, Robert Brandom length beard and a cloth cap.
You can imagine all sorts of ways this could play out. Say I’m curious about how models respond to culinary terms. So I construct a set of prompts with the format ‘You are eating a plate of X and talking about mathematics. Someone asks you Y and you respond: ” I then vary the foods in the X position {lutefisk, durian, coddle, hákarl, gagh…, tacos, porridge}. Then perhaps I find some statistical correlation between the food in the prompt and the model’s success at some mathematical benchmark. I could then entitle the paper, ‘LLMs mathematical performance is sensitive to diet’, ‘LLMs can develop indigestion’, ‘LLMs aversion to fermented foods undermines rationality’. Perhaps I can get someone to invest in developing antacids for the language models. Maybe we can find a prompt that corrects for the effect so I can start calling this prompt an antacid. I’ll make sure to put it in scare-quotes the first few times I do this (but I’ll drop them later on).
Causal Graph Editing Gives Rise to Ensoulment of LLMs John de Selby, Second McAuthor
Two catholic saints in monks robes. One has a spear through him, the other an axe in his head. They look indifferent to their situation and could be discussing the weather
Google search for the phrase ‘you’re irrelevant shush’. The google AI overview says ‘Acknowledged. Stopping now’
Graffiti in Belfast that says “U R Irrelevant shush”
Headline text: Vance Says Robert Brandom Should Be More Careful When Talking About Inferentialism
Columns and two-tiered arches in the mosque part of the building. They stretch into the distance. The stone is alternating orange and cream.
Some white cats curled up on the paddles of the Molina de la Albolafia by the river in Córdoba. It’s raining and overcast. There are wild green plants surrounding the water wheel.
The Little Book of Calm
Picture of Sean, the wonderful interviewer from Hot Ones, with text sean “preparing for the biggest hot ones ever”
So far we have been going firmly ahead, feeling the firm ground of prejudice glide away beneath our feet which is always rather exhilarating, but what next? You will be waiting for the bit when we bog down, the bit where we take it all back, and sure enough that's going to come but it will take time. First of all let us ask a rather simple question. How can we be sure, how can we tell, whether any utterance is to be classed as a performative or not? Surely, we feel, we ought to be able to do that. And we should obviously very much like to be able to say that there is a grammatical criterion for this,
One might well want to ask how seriously this doctrine is intended, just how strictly and literally the philosophers who propound it mean their words to be taken. But I think we had better not worry about this question for the present. It is, as a matter of fact, not at all easy to answer, for, strange though the doctrine looks, we are sometimes told to take it easy—really it's just what we've all believed all along. (There's the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back.)
"Leadbelly, himself, was like the gray goose, indomitable, tougher than life, itself. In the Texas pen he was the number one man in the number one gang on the number one farm in the state." That description became for me the epitome of what it was to be big league. In college, I had a brief fling with mathematical logic and a romance with David Hume, but it was when I met Immanuel Kant in 1953 as a nineteen year old senior that I lost my heart forever. After I had encountered the Critique of Pure Reason in the classroom of Clarence Irving Lewis, Alan Lomax's description of Leadbelly became firmly associated in my mind with the passage in the Critique known as the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories --more formally, "The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding". It seemed obvious to me that that short section of the Critique was the most important passage in the hardest book by the greatest philosopher who ever lived -- the number one man in the number one gang on the number one farm in Texas. To engage with that passage, to wrestle with it like Jacob with the angel, to force it to yield up its true meaning, was for me then, and has been for me during my entire career, the ultimate challenge for a student of philosophy.
Photo of Malcolm McDowell’s character in A Clockwork Orange, strapped in a headset with eyes pinned open. He looks unhappy.
Googlemap of the British embassy in Tehran next to Bobby Sands street
When models were explicitly told that the image was missing and were instructed to guess, performance declined across most benchmark categories. This implies at least two distinct operating regimes. In guess-mode, the model appears to adopt a conservative text-only strategy, relying on overt priors or answer distributions. In mirage-mode, by contrast, the model appears able to exploit additional hidden structure: it behaves as though an image exists, constructs a plausible perceptual narrative, and in doing so accesses cues or associations that are not captured by standard "no-image guessing" controls. This observation challenges prior approaches to benchmarking, which commonly use explicit guess-mode to identify image-independent questions. Our results suggest that this control may systematically underestimate the degree to which benchmarks are vulnerable to non-visual inference.
THE SCOPE AND LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE* W. V. Quine I AM a physical object sitting in a physical world. Some of the forces of this physical world impinge on my surface. Light rays strike my retinas; molecules bombard my eardrums and fingertips. I strike back, emanating concentric air-waves. These waves take the form of a torrent of discourse about tables, people, molecules, light rays, retinas, air-waves, prime numbers, infinite classes, joy and sorrow, good and evil. My ability to strike back in this elaborate way consists in my having assimilated a good part of the culture of my community, and perhaps modified and elaborated it a bit on my own account. All this training consisted in turn of an impinging of physical forces, largely other people's utterances, upon my surface, and of gradual changes in my own constitution consequent upon these physical forces. All I am or ever hope to be is due to irritations of my surface, together with such latent tendencies to response as may have been present in my original germ plasm. And all the lore of the ages is due to irritation of the surfaces of a succession of persons, together, again, with the internal initial conditions of the several individuals.
Quote from the spandrel page on Wikipedia: The human chin has been proposed as an example of a spandrel, since modern humans (Homo sapiens) are the only species with a chin, an anatomical feature with no known function.
Picture of Hilary Putnam with a speech bubble below him
A slide with a picture of Rambo on it and a formal statement of the strong lottery ticket hypothesis. The following quote is also there: “Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis Colonel Trautman: Let me tell you a story, John. There was a sculptor. He found this stone, a special stone. He dragged it home and he worked on it for months until he finally finished it. When he was ready he showed it to his friends. They said he had created a great masterpiece, but the sculptor said he hadn't created anything. The statue was always there, he just chipped away the rough edges. You're always going to be tearing away at yourself until you come to terms with who you are. Until you come full circle. Rambo III A sufficiently overparameterized DNN with random weights contains a subnetwork with roughly the same accuracy as the target network without any further training. Algorithmic swamp-homunculi are everywhere.
Tweet by @warendenkform Germany also has a symbolic figurehead with no real political power whose function is to ideologically bind the nation together. We call him "Jürgen Habermas"
Marc Artiga, Manolo Martínez: Editors’ introduction / Introducción de los editores 237 Zoe Drayson: Representations are (still) theoretical posits / Las representaciones son (aún) postulados teóricos Dimitri Coelho Mollo: AI-as-exploration / IA como exploración: Navegando el espacio de inteligencia Stephen Francis Mann: Quantifying information in structural representations / Cuantificación de información en representaciones estructurales Wojciech Mamak, Marcin Miłkowski: Meaning from matching: How representational mechanisms exploit structural similarity / El significado a partir de la correspondencia: cómo los mecanismos representacionales explotan la similitud estructural
Evil, that is, has every advantage but one-it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil-hence the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring-but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself. Sauron cannot imagine any motives except lust for domination and fear so that, when he has learned that his enemies have the Ring, the thought that they might try to destroy it never enters his head, and his eye is kept toward Gondor and away from Mordor and the Mount of Doom.
The following question is more pertinent to legitimation : By what criteria does the logician define the properties required of an axiomatic ? Is there a model for scientific languages? If so , is there just one ? Is it verifiable ? The properties generally required of the syntax of a formal system 141 are consistency (fo r example , a system inconsistent with respect to negation would admit both a proposition and its opposite ) , syntactic completeness ( the system would lose its consistency if an axiom were added to it), decidability ( there must be an effective procedure for deciding whether a given proposition belongs to the system or not), and the independence of the axioms in relation to one another. Now Godel has effectively established the existence in the arithmetic system of a proposition that is neither demonstrable nor refutable with in that system ; this entails that the arithmetic system fails to satisfy the condition of completeness. 142 Since it is possible to generalize th is situation , it must be accepted that all formal systems h ave internal limitations. 143 Th is applies to logic : the metalanguage it uses to describe an artificial (axiomatic) language is "natural " or "everyday " language ; that language is universal , since all other languages can be translated in to it, but it is not consistent with respect to negation - i t allows the formation of para doxes. 144 Th is necessitates a reformulation of the question of the legitimation of knowledge . When a denotative statement is declared true, there is a presupposition th at the axiomatic system with in which it is decidable and demonstrable h as already been formulated , that it is known to the interlocutors, and that they have accepted that it is as formally satisfactory as possible .
The German text of Gödel's proposition 6 which states that any omega-consistent recursive class contains 'class signs' for which neither a proof for or against it.
Jigglypuff crying, the text below reads "All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing... and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?"
A screenshot from Pokémon. Squirtle and Pikachu sit on a log eating apples. The text reads ‘Are you sorry for all that you’ve done to us?”
Fabric website where it can be bought by the yard or the 20 Yard Bold. It is $342.64 for 20 yards of linen
The spreadsheet where I show my working out