OLDaily

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Human-made Content Could Be The New Hype
Pernille Tranberg, Dataetisk Tænkehandletank, 2024/01/12

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Not 'hype' so much as: "Human-authored is the new organic." But yeah, I agree with this. A while back, I started labeling my newsletter "100% human authored". I think this is a point in its favour, because unlike an AI I am just as likely as not to draw an obscure connection between this and some other thing, mix a metaphor, or merely to self-indulge in a "Hey! a squirrel!" digression. Because it's not a narrative, a sequence or a story, not a linear language (model), but a tapestry, where it sometimes makes more sense to just daub some paint on the canvas and call it art than to follow well-established patterns and precedent.

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Solidarity among Philosophers Leads to New Journal: Political Philosophy - Daily Nous
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous - news for & about the philosophy profession, 2024/01/12

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It has taken decades to get some groups of scholars to embrace open access, and sometimes it takes a push, as it did in this case. I highlight the emergence of the new Journal, Political Philosophy, out of the ashes of the publisher-owned Journal of Political Philosophy. "Wiley had been pushing the journal to publish more articles per year because of the turn towards open-access publishing agreements, which generate fees for the publisher on a per-article basis," writes Justin Weinberg. "Political Philosophy is emphatically a Diamond Open Access journal: it does not charge obligatory fees to either readers or authors, in the interest of scholarly equity." There have been many cases like this, but I highlight this one because it comes on the heels of Richard Poynder declaring "After reporting on the open access movement for 20+ years I have reached the conclusion that the movement has failed." I don't agree, and developments like this one underline the continuing transition to from an almost entirely closed academic publication to a much more open and accessible system.

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Connected Papers
2024/01/12

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Akan Levine shared a link today to Connected Papers. The idea is that you give it a paper title, URL or DOI, and it tries to find relevant similar papers. According to the About page, "we analyze an order of ~50,000 papers and select the few dozen with the strongest connections to the origin paper." Here, cionnections are not created by direct links buut by similarity, where 'similarity' is here defined as "highly overlapping citations and references"(though of course we can imagine a broader measure of similarity being used in this context) In this way, the mechanism reminds us more of machine learning algorithms (such as 'nearest neighbour') than old-style citation trees and more modern large language models.

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How Threads will integrate with the Fediverse
Tom Coates, PlasticBag.Org, 2024/01/12

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This is a long post that really gets into the details but if you're interested in the upcoming integration of Meta's Threads service with the fediverse, then you'll want to take a long slow read, as I did. The upshot, as described by Tom Coates, is that "they (Meta) perhaps think the future is a few large companies maintaining clients in a shared social space, where there's also a long tail of other independent clients." He adds, "I think this is a realpolitik alternative to one large company owning everything – I think such a system would be better than now and solve a bunch of problems, but is not in any way a utopian vision of how the world could be." I think both points are true, but he is, I think, light on one major point: how does defederation work as a means of managing content when one instance consists of 160 million people while most of the rest consist of a few thousand? I don't think it does work, which means we're stuck either allowing the Threads equivalent of Truth Social along with the rest, or blocking it and thereby blocking the other 160 million people. It's not a good choice. Image: Digiday.

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OER 2022: Not me, not mine, not myself
Eamon Costello, #ALTC Blog, 2024/01/12

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I link this post from Eamon Costello (posted today, not two years ago as the title might suggest). It expresses the sort of openness that's important to me (as opposed, I suppose, where every act of openness is transactional, expecting a return, a quid pro quo). "It is the hope that we can gain some release from that which we think we cannot do without. It is the promise of liberation from whatever it is we hold too tightly; of education as the practice of freedom." I think this is true: that we are most free when we are giving, not taking, when we are being, not striving.

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TB872: Places to intervene in a system
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2024/01/12

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I'm going to think about this one for a bit. The post relates the story of  Donella Meadows's intervention in a meeting about the new trade regime (ca 2001) included in Ray Ison's book 'Systems Thinking'. Here Doug Belshaw lists nine (if the eventual 12) places to intervene in a system, from numbers to materials to information flows and more. I look at this and compare it to interventions in a network via weights, bias parameters and activation functions (the big difference between the two is that a system is teleological, ie., goal directed, while the network is ateleological, that is, not goal directed). How well do these two lists match up? Here also is the full list of 12.

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ESCO Quick Start Guide
European Commission, 2024/01/12

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From the Guide (6 page PDF): "The European multilingual classification of Skills, Competences and Occupations (ESCO) serves as a glossary of occupations and skills relevant for the EU labour market and education and training. ESCO provides descriptions of 3.008 occupations and 13.890 skills linked to these occupations, translated into 27 languages." From the website: "The guide explains the importance of ESCO in standardizing job roles and skills across countries, thereby enhancing transparency, mobility, and comparability within Europe. The document outlines the main use cases of ESCO, including job matching, career guidance, and labor market research." View the ESCO Portal here.

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Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism
Mark van Roojen, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2024/01/12

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Are moral statements the sort of things that can be true or false? I would imagine most people think so. They would say, for example, "'Stealing is wrong' is true." But is this the sort of thing that could be false? What would make it true or false? A moral non-cognitivist would say that nothing makes it true or false. When we say 'Stealing is wrong' we are not describing some fact about the world, we are describing (at best) our own feeling, intuition or sentiment, or perhaps nothing more than our acceptance of a social norm. A moral cognitivism believes the opposite, holding that there are some things that make moral statements true or false. I would classify myself as a moral non-cognitivist. Anyhow, this long article relates the many varieties of this position and the arguments for and against them. Image: Conscient Thoughts. Related: Rational Sentimentalism.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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