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Neil Levy

AI Authorship: Responsibility is Not Required

This is the fifth in a series of blogposts by the members of the Expanding Autonomy project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

by Neil Levy

AI is rapidly being adopted across all segments of academia (as it is across much of society). The landscape is rapidly changing, and we haven’t yet settled on the norms that should govern how it’s used. Given how extensive usage already is, and how deeply integrated into every aspect of paper production, one important question concerns whether an AI can play the authorship role. Should AIs be credited, in the same way as humans might be?Read More »AI Authorship: Responsibility is Not Required

Cross Post: Nudging for Better Beliefs

This is the third in a series of blogposts by the members of the Expanding Autonomy project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

 

Written By: Oscar A. Piedrahita & Matthew VermaireCOGITO, University of Glasgow.

 

Don’t you find that other people’s beliefs are always getting in the way of progress? They seem to be full of bad views about everything from geopolitics to zoning laws to the most bizarre conspiracy theories; and what’s worse is that they seem often perversely immune to rational methods of persuasion, bristling with a panoply of biases. It’s a free country and everyone’s entitled to their opinions. Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if—without having to resort to positively illiberal measures of censorship and forced re-education—we could get those opinions to be a little more tolerable? What if the secret is all in the way in which evidence and potential beliefs are presented to people, so that with more carefully calibrated interventions we could exert a noncoercive but significant influence toward the truth?Read More »Cross Post: Nudging for Better Beliefs

Outsourcing Without Fear?

This is the second in a series of blogposts by the members of the Expanding Autonomy project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

by Neil Levy

As Adam Carter emphasises in the first post in this series, offloading cognitive capacities comes at a cost: the more we depend on external scaffolding and supports to perform a certain task, the less we develop the internal capacities to perform that task. The phenomenon is familiar: people probably really are much less able to do mental arithmetic today than in the past, thanks to the introduction of the calculator. We tend to think of new technologies when we worry about what we lose as a consequence of scaffolding, but the concern is ancient. In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates approvingly recounting the story of an Egyptian king who worried that the invention of writing “will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, through lack of practice at using their memory.”Read More »Outsourcing Without Fear?

Why I Don’t Have Pronouns In My Bio.

Written by Neil Levy

It’s now pretty standard for academics to put their pronouns in their bio – in email signatures, Twitter profiles, on Zoom and so on. There are two sorts of reasons to do this. The first is because you have a preference about your pronouns and there’s a reasonable chance that if you don’t express that preference, you won’t be called by your preferred pronouns. The second reason is the one that applies to people like me: we don’t really have a strong preference about our pronouns or don’t think there’s a significant chance that we’ll be referred to by a pronoun we don’t want, but we want to signal our allyship with trans and other gender non-conforming people.

Read More »Why I Don’t Have Pronouns In My Bio.

AI As A Writing Tool: Great Benefits, Major Pitfalls.

Written by Neil Levy

Large language models look set to transform every aspect of life over the coming decades. Some of these changes will be dramatic. I’m pretty unconcerned by the apocalyptic scenarios that preoccupy some people, but much more worried about the elimination of jobs (interestingly, the jobs that seem likeliest to be eliminated are those that require the most training: we may see a reversal of status and economic position between baristas and bureaucrats, bricklayers and barristers). Here, though, I’m going to look at much less dramatic, and very much near term, effects that LLMs might have on academic writing. I’m going to focus on the kind of writing I do in philosophy; LLMs will have different impacts on different disciplines.

Read More »AI As A Writing Tool: Great Benefits, Major Pitfalls.

Is Authenticity Coherent?

By Neil Levy

Authenticity is a widely espoused ideal; often under that name but also under other labels. People take pride in being individuals, set apart from the crowd, in not following the herd, in thinking for themselves. To be accused of conformism stings. Read More »Is Authenticity Coherent?

Does Moral Ignorance Excuse?

Written by Neil Levy

Everyone agrees that ignorance of fact can excuse. If I take your suitcase thinking it was mine, and my belief that it was mine was faultless (perhaps the coach driver handed it to me, saying “this is yours”, and it looked exactly like mine), I seem excused of blame for taking it. But philosophers and ordinary people have been reluctant to excuse people on the basis of their moral ignorance. Think, for example, about recent debates concerning memorials to people we now recognize as deeply racist. Of course, it’s perfectly possible to demand that such memorials be removed on the grounds that it’s inappropriate to laud bad people, but the demand is often combined with blame directed at the racist (conversely, those who defend the memorials often think it’s sufficient to deflect blame on the grounds that the person was “a man of his time”).Read More »Does Moral Ignorance Excuse?

The Weaponization of Bullshit

by Neil Levy

It’s not often that philosophers come to broader public attention, but Harry Frankfurt managed it with his 2005 book On Bullshit. The book made the best-seller lists and led to a Daily Show appearance. On Bullshit had a more recent resurgence with the advent of the Trump presidency, as people sought to understand the Trump phenomenon and make sense of his constant stream of garbage.

Trump seemed to embody Frankfurtian bullshit. According to Frankfurt, bullshit is distinguished from lying centrally by the intention of the bullshitter. The liar wants you to believe something that is false; the bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth either way. The bullshitter may not know whether what they’re saying is true or false, and sometimes it will in fact be true. It’s indifference to truth, not deceptiveness, that is characteristic of bullshit, according to Frankfurt.Read More »The Weaponization of Bullshit

Google it, Mate.

Written by Neil Levy

There’s just been an election in Australia. In elections nowadays, politicians attempt to portray themselves as one of us, or at least as someone who is in touch with ‘us’ (whoever ‘we’ are). Hence the (apparently disastrous) pictures of Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich. Increasingly, journalists see testing politicians to see whether they’re really one of us as part of their jobs, even outside election campaigns. Hence Rishi Sunak being asked on TV about the cost of bread, or Dominic Raab claiming he’s not out of touch because he knows the cost of unleaded petrol.

In the early days of the Australian election, Anthony Albanese (then the opposition leader) stumbled several times, failing to recall the official interest rate and the unemployment rate and, later, details of one his own major policies.  Many commentators thought these ‘gaffes’ would harm him; it’s impossible to tell whether they did but they certainly didn’t wound him fatally: he’s now the prime minister. Despite the narrative around Miliband and the sandwich, it’s impossible to tell whether the electorate really cares about these errors and ‘gotcha’ moments. But when should we care? When is it appropriate to expect politicians to be able to answer detailed questions about policies and everyday life and when is it pointless theatre?Read More »Google it, Mate.