I’m not like the other Bayesians. I’m different. Thinks about philosophy of science, AI ethics, machine learning, models, & metascience. postdoc @ Princeton.
Philadelphia
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My article on AI for science, in which I characterize a deviant notion of scientific objectivity rooted in the impossible ideal of theory-free inference, is available now open-access in Erkenntnis link.springer.com/article/10…
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First submit of the term, let me know if you want to talk data models (or read a draft!).
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“Who wants to see the new Love Island?”
Quiet babe my favorite show is on:
ALT Discovering Hidden Relationships of Alloy Properties with Manifold Learning
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……In perfectly unrelated news, have an advert…….
A.I. Slopware Is Everywhere Now. Nobody Is Using It. nytimes.com/2026/09/12/opini…
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Mel Andrews retweeted
A.I. Slopware Is Everywhere Now. Nobody Is Using It. nytimes.com/2026/09/12/opini…
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The use of major open problems in mathematics as AI benchmarks mistakes the nature and aims of mathematics: “solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight.” Declaration from Terence Tao: mathandai.org/
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You can now read this invaluable book on methods in philosophy of science open-access. Find me in Chapter 16! direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edit…
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Mel Andrews retweeted
To be clear, the bad parts here:
1. Telling someone to drop an author just because he is a competitor with your company is pressuring him to commit academic fraud!
drama summary for those confused:
- Aug 15th: Tristan Buckmaster & Levent Alpöge make progress on a few important math problems
- they do NOT have a proof for the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize problem. BUT, they do claim to have a proof for a similar (non-Millenium) Navier Stokes problem that could help lead the way there
- Levent works at Anthropic, but this research was independent of his work there, with a mix of GPT and Claude models. Tristan is not related to Anthropic.
- Early Sep: Rumor spreads to OpenAI that Anthropic has solved a major problem. Tristan emails OpenAI to clarify. without revealing the problem they solved or how they did it.
- After hearing of the rumor, OpenAI started researching Navier Stokes with a new internal model.
- Sep 6th: OpenAI's Sebastien Bubeck tells Tristan that they solved the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize Navier Stokes problem. The approach is very similar to Tristan & Levent's approach to the non-Millenium problem.
- Tristan is suspicious of the timing, as only few others were trying this approach. OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training.
- OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he works for Anthropic.
- Sep 8th: Tristan refuses to remove Levent, and rushes to publish their results independently.
Currently unclear is whether Anthropic had a separate solution for the $1,000,000 problem, or whether the rumor was about Tristan & Levent's independent research.
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Possibly a significant addendum to the LLM advancements on Navier-Stokes. The problem is not restricted to the model’s potential reproduction of training data, either. A team at OpenAI was prompting their models with the mathematicians’ unpublished work without their knowledge.
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The oldest natural history museum in the nation, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, will cease to exist by the end of the month. The museum’s operating costs are half of 1% of Drexel’s budget. Drexel’s president pockets 2.8 million annually.
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News story here. nytimes.com/2026/09/01/us/sc…
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I, too, am experiencing a sense of alienation from my discipline. Not because I don’t believe that philosophy strives for truth and objectivity, but because believing that the sort of pseudo-reasoning LLMs engage in can achieve these epistemic goods requires bad epistemology.
For me, the biggest source of grief arising from the AI crisis hasn’t even been in the realm of teaching. It has been the realization that a non-trivial number of my disciplinary peers see philosophy in a way that is wholly different from—even antithetical to—the way I see it.
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Substack: do you want to use an AI tool for writing to check your writings about not writing with AI for AI-written writing?
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How disappointing.
You cannot produce knowledge while outsourcing your thinking to software. thecybernetician.substack.co…
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Mel Andrews retweeted
Stop the internet, we have a winner! 🏆
Using AI is like “dressing an encyclopedia up in a clown suit and doing roleplay.”
Brava Mel!
You cannot produce knowledge while outsourcing your thinking to software. thecybernetician.substack.co…
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