Shen-yi Liao 廖顯禕

@liao.shen-yi.org

2067 Followers 1034 Following

Taiwan enthusiast. Philosophy professor. Intellectual omnivore. Humean supertaster. https://liao.shen-yi.org/

"Yeah, what can I say? I know my pretentious philosophers."
"I mean, what the fuck, Kierkegaard?"
A meme with Tyrone Biggum from Chappelle's Show that says "You got anymore cheap inference?"
screenshot from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUGHPuUU5FA
A UK supermarket shelf with coke that says "Juices" on top.
A range of Vietnamese dishes
My Prompt: "Write an article in the style of Tyler Austin Harper for The Atlantic on the Mellon Foundation, complete with headline and subhead." Claude: "The Mellon Foundation's Billion-Dollar Bet on Who Gets to Interpret America The nation's wealthiest humanities funder is reshaping higher education. But is it promoting genuine pluralism—or just a new orthodoxy? By Tyler Austin Harper There's a particular species of institutional power that operates best when it remains invisible. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with its $8 billion endowment and status as the nation's largest funder of the humanities, has perfected this art. While culture warriors fixate on tenured radicals and DEI administrators, Mellon quietly directs hundreds of millions of dollars toward reshaping who studies the past, who interprets literature, and ultimately, who gets to define American culture. The foundation's recent trajectory reads like a case study in how progressive institutional capture actually works—not through dramatic confrontation, but through the patient accumulation of grants, fellowships, and faculty positions. Since 2020, Mellon has poured some $250 million into diversifying the humanities, funding everything from graduate fellowships for underrepresented minorities to initiatives demanding that museums "recontextualize" their collections. The explicit goal: to transform who holds authority in America's cultural institutions."
logo for Philosophical logic that looks like a diamond composed of P and L
logo for free & equal that features an accent ampersand and decent typeface
Google ngram of "all" from 1980 to present, showing a rise in frequency of occurrences in the corpus.
A bookshelf at a library that includes TCW’s Losing My Cool.
A drink machine with a QR code that lets you operate it on your phone.
A deeply mistaken map of NYC subway lines and major transfer stations, as generated by GPT-5.
A deeply mistaken map of New Jersey generated by GPT-5.
In the index: "belief ... APPEARS ON LIKE EVERY PAGE"
"Participants first read two stories that appear to be similar in basic plot but differ in their genres, and then responded to questions about each story. The order in which participants received the stories was counterbalanced. In the police procedural condition, participants were told that they would read an excerpt from a police procedural short story, similar to what they might find on TV shows such as Law & Order and CSI. In the Aztec myth condition, participants were told that they would read an excerpt from an Aztec creation myth, similar to what they might find in" "* Prior to reading the two stories, participants were told: ‘In this study, you will read two fictional short stories or excerpts that are randomly chosen from our database, and then answer a couple of questions about each. Some participants may receive stories that appear similar at first. Please carefully read them on their own terms and answer the questions on that basis.’"
syllabus for a philosophy of race course
syllabus for a course on language, knowledge, and power
[user input] "Academic publishing, as you may know, moves extremely" [autocomplete] "fast"
webform that include an IM handle area for AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, Skype, etc.
The distribution (density) of the interpretation of the probability and frequency phrases.
ngram of 'racist' in philosophy journals by number of articles it appears in, which shows a rise from 1980s to present
ngram of 'racist' in philosophy journals showing no dramatic rise from 1980 to present
Screenshot from the game Victoria 3 showing the founding of The Journal of Philosophical Studies
A graph showing responses to the question "What % of people can be reasonably called '______'?" The mean for 'racist' is about 30%, between 'disagreeable' and 'terrible'.
A fan that says “green authoritarianism, unjust legal system”
A quarter moon and the top of a building and a tree at night
A bowl of Taiwanese braised pork rice and egg that I made.
combination fly swatter / metro card
Expanding brain meme, in order: endnotes, footnotes, tufte-style sidenotes, and (galaxy brain) no notes.