Victor Kumar
@victorckumar
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Associate professor of philosophy at Boston University | A BETTER APE (OUP) | Writes about morality, progress, evolution, culture | He/him
Boston, MA
Joined February 2011
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Right-wingers like JD Vance have coded population decline as a conservative issue. But just because their proposed solutions are alarmingly regressive doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real.
My argument for progressive pronatalism today in the
@nytimes
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Analytic philosopher here, I keep destroying my wife's views with devastating counterexamples but she rarely changes her mind, what am I doing wrong?
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A few of my progressive students are annoying. Is this a social crisis?
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Having children is the most meaningful thing you can do with your life. Intellectuals and creatives can't accept this because it means their vocations aren't supremely meaningful and any fool can have a more worthwhile life. But it's true and all the counterarguments are cope.
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"Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat? mused on whether we could still be human if we had bat-like features such as the ability to echolocate."
Is this sufficient to destroy the reviewer's credibility?
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@haymarketbooks
“Monarchy is a survival of the tyranny imposed by the hand of greed and treachery upon the human race in the darkest and most ignorant days of our history. It derives its only sanction from the sword of the marauder, and the helplessness of the producer…”
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Philosophy makes you smart or smart people are drawn to philosophy. Big W for philosophy either way.
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Male philosophy majors may have the lowest fertility rates, but consider their intellectual fecundity (also low)
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How do non-philosophers function without knowing how to distinguish good and bad arguments?
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@haymarketbooks
“…and its gifts to humanity are unknown, save as they can be measured in the pernicious examples of triumphant and shameless iniquities.”
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(At a philosophy talk) I’m a little confused about why this idea of yours is so stupid
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Some people think philosophy has to be "useful" to be worth doing. But those people don't grasp the intrinsic value of destroying someone's views.
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RIP to a legend. Dennett wrote one of the most beautiful books about evolution. His ideas will live on.
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I am a really good researcher. Countless times junior scholars have asked me for advice, but my skills can't be taught because I realize my one and only recipe is this: directly intuiting the truth. That's literally it.
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Philosophers will really be like "you believe in science? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, analyzing concepts" and then never successfully analyze a concept
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I started to tell someone this stat and thought wait no I must be misremembering, it must be yearly.
But no, we kill 200 million chickens every day, 140 thousand every minute.
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That Aeon essay got me wondering who the best philosophy haters are within philosophy. Wittgenstein and who else?
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Dennett's 1982 review of Nozick's Philosophical Explorations in
@BostonReview
begins with this tale:
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Why is concern with population decline right-coded? I don't get it.
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William James' Principles of Psychology is one of the best books of all time. James has so much psychological insight, it's uncanny, and he has hardly any experimental research to draw on. If he could know all that from the armchair what work is empirical evidence even doing?
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Happy birthday to the guy who invented rule utilitarianism
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"According to psychology--" NO. According to Greg who ran four bizarre studies on MTurkers pressing keys blindly and then luckily drew friends as reviewers at Psych Science
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Thrilled to have been tenured and promoted to Associate Professor at Boston University today!!
I'm so lucky to be able to continue at BU with brilliant colleagues and incredible students. What a dream.
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Analytic philosopher here. Anybody got some rich life experiences I can squeeze into bloodless abstractions?
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Clarifications and caveats: There are lots of ways to have a meaningful life (obvs), just not as meaningful as having children. There are exceptions, people whose life would not be very meaningful by having children. Not saying the children have to be your biological offspring.
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Philosophy is cool because it trains you not to make up a guy to get mad at.
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@cc_leboeuf
The point is to consider whether some human activities are more meaningful than others. Any ranking will inevitably mean some people are engaging in less than supremely-meaningful lives. I think curious open-minded people can handle this thought even if it's uncomfortable
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You know how people saw doctored clips and inferred Biden was senile? Gettier case! Analytic epistemology is finally relevant. Still boring though.
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Leftists will really be like "you believe in effective altruism? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, starting a communist revolution" and then not start a communist revolution
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Language isn't innate, it didn't evolve suddenly and without natural selection, grammar isn't the essential core of language, syntax isn't independent of semantics, the distinction between I-language and E-language is untenable. Was Chomsky right about anything?
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Philosophy is the purest life of the mind, but a career in philosophy is a gamble: as likely as not, you'll fail through no fault of your own and suffer an opportunity cost of six prime years of your life and potentially great disappointment.
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How do you kindly or humorously make philosophers stop talking philosophy at the bar?
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"Ornithology would be quite useful to birds, if only they could understand it" is one of the best clap backs of all time
There's a line attributed to Feynman (probably apocryphally) that "philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds". I've always taken it as a compliment. Imagine putting birds in charge of their own conservation programs.
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@bengrossbg
Hmm will try, I've told her I think she has difficulty understanding, hasn't made a difference
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Jerry Fodor, The Mind Doesn't Work That Way
People put acknowledgements at the beginning of their book, which is cute, but it would be good for the field if we also did the opposite—list the people who were an active hindrance to your work, and what they did to impede your progress
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Back in the day fellow grad student Octavian Ion had this taped on his office door
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Skeptical of Effective Altruism? Leftists have the answer. Try Counterproductive Activism
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“concept creep” that’s a slur please just call me an analytic philosopher
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So embarrassing that humans choose mates partly because of how their butt looks. Deeply unserious life form.
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At recent conferences/talks I was talking with people about great public philosophers, and here's a list I came up with. Who's missing? (Loads but who?)
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The number of philosophy majors at BU has DOUBLED over the past ten years, according to a new report.
The number of majors in all other humanities fields has declined or remained static.
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So funny when people describe doing philosophy as “research”
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People say vegans are obnoxious, but the ones I know IRL seem too tolerant: Given what vegans believe (correctly) about the awfulness of eating meat, why don't they shun omnivores? Just because it would be socially isolating for them, or is there another reason, good or bad?
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You gotta hand it to the critics of the student protests -- ethically, it's pretty cut and dry when one group establishes dwellings on land that isn't their's, occupies another's group's premises, and blocks members of another group from traveling from one place to another.
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Land acknowledgements seem pointless and performative to me. Can anyone steelman them?
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Very important to write a tailored cover letter, otherwise we might assume you're applying to jobs en masse and not interested exclusively in our job
#Econjobmarket
— I am really surprised by the significant percentage of cover letters that are completely canned (& even misname the job posting institution etc.) It takes very little effort to tailor a CL to a specific job posting/institution. Given the sheer volume of
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Funny that epistemology is so unconcerned with journalism, given that journalism produces more publicly serviceable knowledge than science.
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As pure philosophy, EA is unassailable. Of course we should do more good, better
But as a flesh-and-blood social movement, EA is rightly controversial b/c its members tend to be individualist, hyper-intellectualized, paternalist, market-oriented, and techno-utopian
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Is free will the philosophical issue that most reliably causes scientists to spout nonsense?
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Is it unprofessional to live tweet the laughably awful paper I'm reviewing?
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A historian recently complained that being a white man disadvantaged him on the academic job market. In philosophy data suggest that "women have 58–114 percent greater odds than men" of landing a permanent position.
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Many otherwise smart people lose their minds when they hear arguments against eating meat. They say things like:
-eating meat is natural to our species
-it's tradition
-other animals eat meat too
-it’s the purpose of animals to be eaten
-animals don't feel pain
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Disappointing that so many talented philosophers waste their time on AI alignment. They need to get back to work on more important topics, like grounding.
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The most important thing to know about the academic job market is that hiring decisions are based 10% on merit and 90% on a swirl of arbitrary, idiosyncratic, and unknowable preferences
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Being against factory farming primarily because it damages the environment is like being against murder primarily because dumping a body is littering
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In philosophy we do things a little differently (all questions are attempts to look clever)
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Eventually, lab-grown meat might free our conscience. We'll be able to fully confront the horrors of factory farming, and regulate it, without sacrificing enjoyment of the meat we crave
Josh May and I in
@BostonGlobe
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I'm going to assign to my students this controversial NYT essay and some of the best Twitter replies. Whatever you think about the essay itself, I think it's great fodder for discussion. Please reply with links to good/bad takes if you have them.
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Dennett was also one of philosophy's greatest haters. You're not playing chess, you're playing "chmess."
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Is anyone else fascinated by the scientists who are philosophical dunderheads?
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Before evaluating this graph we need to figure out whether holes exist
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My brilliant student Sebastian Wu made Magic: The Gathering cards (
@wizards_magic
) from philosophers and concepts in my intro ethics course
@BU_Tweets
All his cards, with explanations, can be found here:
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What a shame. Here are some great recent public philosophy books evidently not on the list -- accessible and of interest to a wide audience. What else?
Out of 3228 “best” and “notable” books from the
@nytimes
Book Review since 2000, exactly 12 are labeled as “philosophy.” And of those, many are about philosophers rather than being instances of philosophy. I feel like this is a problem…
Here are the 12 books.
@nytimesbooks
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Finished Haidt's book and the main problem is that none of the surprising ideas are well-supported and none of the well-supported ideas are surprising
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Puzzle: why is it possible for good philosophers to be philosophy haters but not for good scientists to be science haters?
Because criticizing philosophy can be a form of philosophy; criticizing science (as a whole) can’t be a form of science.
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This is pretty embarrassing for them (the minority scholars)
‘White Fragility’ author Robin DiAngelo accused of plagiarizing minority scholars in Ph.D thesis
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Can’t believe people think philosophers still do “conceptual analysis” (we call it something else now)
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Why? Because you cannot escape philosophy.
Scientists can do philosophy of science unthinkingly but they cannot avoid doing it.
why study philosophy at all? once the "queen of the sciences" it has been, not surpassed, but rendered irrelevant by more specialized fields of inquiry (linguistics, neuroscience, etc.). however, to not have read Plato, Aristotle, the pre-Socratics, Lucretius, is a disadvantage
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People complain that philosophers working on trendy political topics are getting all the jobs, but recent threads by
@lastpositivist
show no or only mild such trend
Reminiscent of white people complaining about reverse racism when it’s just mild loss of privilege
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What's a CV section more navel-gazing than "Invited Talks Declined"?
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Is there any philosophy paper more overrated than Judith Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion"?
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Some vegans think vegetarianism, pescatarianism, etc. are immoral compromises. Doesn’t matter that it’s hard to give up dairy or fish.
But veganism is a compromise too. Industrial plant farming kills animals too, indirectly. It’s hard to eat only humane plant-based food.
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It’s incredibly hard to get a TT position, most are not well paid, but it’s also one of the cushiest jobs in the world
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Since gender doesn’t arise from a hidden essence, social learning (“social contagion”) probably influences the formation of transgender identities.
Good thing that’s ethically irrelevant. You don’t have to be “born that way” for your identity to be authentic and stable.
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Lots of young philosophers on the job market have never worked on AI before but plan to do so in the future. Inspiring!
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This is not a core assumption in academia. "Morality" is regarded as a force for good only under normative conceptions of morality. It's widely understood that people moralize -- treat as moral -- what serves their own interests or those of their clan or tribe.
Lots of people saying this tweet is obvious. It’s not. It challenges a core assumption, common in academia, that moral convictions are a force for good. And it should trouble us. How are we supposed to know when our own moral convictions are leading us astray?
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The students protesting about the kid just want to feel like they're part of something important, they don't even understand his role in the Omelas economy
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Some people are indifferent to most religions but detest the sect they escaped from. This is how I feel about metaethics.
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Every philosopher is dismayed at what their colleagues find interesting
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Eventually, even the noblest of lineages degenerates into mediocrity
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Jonathan is exactly right about Dennett's legacy. I am less sympathetic to his views on consciousness and intentionality and more sympathetic to his views on evolution and free will. But right or wrong, Dennett's contributions to philosophical naturalism were pathbreaking.
Dan Dennett was a lifelong champion of (1) the explanatory power of cognitive science and evolutionary biology in relation to the big questions of philosophy, and (2) the integration of philosophy with scientific disciplines. An inspiration to me and many others in these ways.
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Have started appending “late” to philosophical positions I disagree with. Late internalism, late nonnaturalism, etc.
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The hardest part of being a philosopher is hiding your sense of superiority
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