Associate professor of philosophy @ Purdue University. Author of Private Censorship, available here: https://nitter.cf/t.co/4Kn9iJRs1G
West Lafayette, IN
Joined August 2020
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JP Messina retweeted
Lottocracy is all the rage among political philosophers, but it’s natural to be uneasy about an untried system. Advocates cite successful real-world mini-publics as evidence. How much confidence should these give us? I examine this in my latest paper:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…
It isn't: (1) run piece through pangram; -> (2) decline to read. More like: (1) begin reading; -> (2) hear the machine's ghost; -> (3) check pangram; -> (4) spend time elsewhere. In a world with more wonderful things to read than hours to fill reading them, triage makes sense
The assumption here is that Pangram is being used for detection. It is not. It is used for verification.
The true irony here is that assuming that the AI can only be used thoughtlessly is revealing of the fact that one is likely to generally use it thoughtlessly.
100% AI generated text is good evidence of using it thoughtlessly, or at the least with minimal care.
JP Messina retweeted
Stephen Ziliak, "Self-Reliance Before the Welfare State: Evidence from the Charity Organization Movement in the United States" cambridge.org/core/journals/…
Exactly so.
Yeah, I think it's a bit unfortunate how some of the discourse surrounding this - even from smart, knowledgeable people - has underplayed or omitted prosaic, clearly fixable factors.
People often gesture at Hugging Face, etc., as self-evident vindication of worries about catastrophic misalignment leading to human extinction, but it's unclear whether the incidents we have observed are more likely under the doomer worldview than the 'normal technology' one.
It’s at this stage a good heuristic of whether I want to read a thing, to say the very least, if it is likely AI generated. We have already more truly wonderful things to read than there are hours in a life. It’s completely reasonable to triage.
JP Messina retweeted
Today is the official release date for my new book, First Among Equals: Visions of Equality before Egalitarianism (Belknap, 2026).
It explores how and why “equality” became, rather suddenly, a basis on which ordinary men and women could make political demands in early modern England.
hup.harvard.edu/books/978067…
graduate students and their letter writers: we are hiring a 3 year post doc to research liberal resilience. apply here! and let me know if you have any questions about the project or the position!
philjobs.org/job/show/32577
JP Messina retweeted
I'm worried Americans are becoming numb to this.
A few years ago, Tim Walz said, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” When the remark resurfaced, it rightly drew days — weeks! — of criticism and outrage because it was flatly wrong.
Now, it seems like every day someone in the Trump administration says something similarly at odds with free speech principles, and in many quarters it’s simply accepted that the administration will say these things.
Pam Bondi said the DOJ would “absolutely target” and “go after” people for hate speech.
Todd Blanche said "misinformation" and "one-sided" news can be a "national security issue" that the American people shouldn't have to put up with.
Trump said there’s something wrong with a country that “can allow people to write purposely negative stories.”
And now Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says “partisan activism” that “smears the troops” is “treason” — whatever that means.
Treason is the only crime the Constitution itself defines, and criticism of the military isn’t it!
JP Messina retweeted
This editorial is, of course, basically pleading with employers to stop regarding a UC degree as a signal of value. We have to get the people who see the world this way out of power before they destroy our incredible state university system.
JP Messina retweeted
Essential reading for anyone interested in higher education. We can see bloat 3.0 on the horizon, as admin will turn to absurdly expensive AI packages to help them manage the 2.0 absurdly expensive software packages... none of which has much to do with basic teaching and research.
An opinion I wrote for the Boston Globe is out. It cites eight and nine figure software purchases as part of administrative bloat 2.0 in higher education. Free version. globecollegetown.substack.co…
Some syllabi are word salad. Academic freedom protects the right to say so. It might even require saying so.
JP Messina retweeted
A prominent complaint on universities is that they’ve been politicized
So what does the professional association of professors do? It makes the first political endorsement in its 110 year history, wading into a factional fight in a Democratic primary
@aaup needs new leadership
Today, @AAUP is proud to endorse @AbdulElSayed for Michigan's next US Senator. This is the first endorsement in our 110 year history. Abdul understands the crisis in higher education and how we can build for what comes next! #College4All
insidehighered.com/news/gove…
JP Messina retweeted
I p-hacked my early work on prejudice. I've written about that before. Here's what I've never said: it didn't feel like cheating. I'm only now starting to wonder why. Maybe it felt fine because I believed the cause was good. My conclusions were what the good guys already believed, or so I told myself. What I do know is that my question stopped being "what is true here" and slid toward "how do I show that what I believe is true."
I wrote a new essay on why I think this is a pivotal moment for social psychology. More of us now call ourselves scholar-activists, deliberately, as a program. I think this is disastrous. If we let it continue, we will lose our hard-earned trust and become irrelevant. Don't believe me? Look at what happened to large swaths of anthropology. I'm not arguing for value-free science. Let injustice draw your attention to a question. Then let the evidence answer it, even when the answer is inconvenient or useless to your side.
If justice comes first, truth is what gets sacrificed.
Liberals recognize the separateness of persons through rights that protect them against certain ways of interfering. Plausibly, no one has a right against the kinds of “harms” the author sanctions, e.g., using one’s phone at a concert or freedom from shade brought by buildings
That solution doesn’t allow us to teach the full suite of skills. For that, you need to assign long form essays. Fortunately, the solution there is easy too: students write in computer labs like we used to back in the day.
Post-doc in the ethics of social punishment, apply here:
magdalencareers.pinpointhq.c…
