David Spurrett
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doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett
@doctorspurt.bsky.social
2K followers 1.4K following 750 posts

Philosopher, working on evolution of mechanisms of action selection, and their variously situated subversion. https://davidspurrett.com/

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doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · Oct 20
Hello new followers. I'm a philosopher of cognitive science working on a book called 'Engines of Hostility'. Recent papers that inform the book are:
(1) "Hostile Scaffolding" (Timms & Spurrett)
(2) "Fashioning Affordances" (Spurrett & Brancazio)
(3) "On Hostile and Oppressive Affective Technology."

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 6h
This is why philosophers get paid so much.

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 1d
Thank you - I wasn't aware of that!

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 1d
Those conversations were so useful to me too! You'll hopefully see some of the impact of them in the discussion of interests in my final chapter.

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
I agree.

Reposted by Steve Peers, Beatriz Gallardo Paúls, Henrik Skaug Sætra , and 3 more

ec.europa.eu
European Commission @ec.europa.eu · 2d
"We are very well aware of the fact that X for Grok is now offering a spicy mode showing explicit sexual content.

This is not spicy. This is illegal. This is appalling. This is disgusting.

I can confirm we are very seriously looking into this matter."

— Spokesperson @thomasregnier.ec.europa.eu

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
I'm no expert but my understanding is his political thought is largely in other texts. He was political editor of 'Les Temps Modernes' for c7 years, regular political essays, and the books 'Humanism and Terror' and 'Adventures of the Dialectic'. (He was just the first example that came to mind.)

Reposted by David Spurrett

zacklabe.com
Zack Labe @zacklabe.com · 2d
Modeled reconstruction of December #Arctic sea ice volume since the year 1901 - comparison between PIOMAS-20C and PIOMAS data sets now updated through 2025 (new record low)...

Data information available at doi.org/10.1175/JCLI...
Line graph time series for Arctic sea ice volume in every December from 1901 through 2025. Two datasets are compared between PIOMAS-20C (a blue line) and PIOMAS v2.1 (a dashed red line). There is large interannual variability, but a long-term decreasing trend since 1990.

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
I'm in no way disagreeing with the (absolutely correct) point that switching to selling harassment, hate and child porn is not an improvement, but a move to monetize. (Or the one made elsewhere that harassing women out of public forums is a feature not a bug.)

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
I'm guessing part of the plan is to be able to throw individual subscribers under the bus on a case by case basis if there are charges and lawsuits. (Hence the move to a 'users own their prompts and the outputs responding to them' TOS.) If I'm right, then maybe platform-premium user conflict looms?

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
e.g. Merleau-Ponty was seriously politically engaged, and (inter alia) argued phenomenologically against authoritarianism. But the textbook Merleau-Ponty of the 4E canon is often curiously apolitical. I like the idea that translational work enlarges discussion by including more colleagues. /6-fin

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
Not only that, it is sometimes *ahead* of the canon it was outside. Liao and Brinner describe the 'translational' work as "expressing insights from one in the language
familiar to the other." This can include being less procrustean about important founding texts and thinkers. /5

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
feminists on the effects of restrictive clothing, and asked myself something like 'how does this related to embodied cognitive science' as though some further step was needed. Then I switched to realising/accepting that the work (already) WAS embodied cogsci, just outside the canon. /4

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
... sense that it expresses insights from people centrally concerned with cognition, yet outside cogsci (notably feminists, critical race theorists, disability theorists...). I wrestled with this myself for a while, often with the question posed in an unhelpful way. For example, I read early ... /3

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
Worth reading for pros and curious outsiders/adjacents. It was fun discussing an early version at the Scaffolding Bad Working Group last year, and cool to see the text. I like the whole paper, but single out for now the insight that (most?) Critical 4E CogSci is 'translational' in the ... /2

Reposted by Jonathan Birch, Brian Weatherson

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
"Critical 4E Cognitive Science" by @liao.shen-yi.org and Zoe Brinner is forthcoming in 'Philosophy Compass' and up as a preprint at Phil Archive. This is a *really* useful and lucid overview of recent work on downsides/bad-sides of 4E cognition. /1
philpapers.org/rec/LIACEC-2
Shen-yi Liao & Zoe Brinner, Critical 4E Cognitive Science - PhilPapers
According to 4E cognitive science, our cognitive capacities depend on, and have been transformed by, the environments we have made. Most early works of 4E cognitive science tend to focus on ...
philpapers.org

Reposted by Will Jennings, Brendan Nyhan, Colin Murray , and 7 more

eliothiggins.bsky.social
Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 2d
Now only paying subscribers can make violent non-consenual sexual imagery of women and children -
Grok turns off image generator for most users after outcry over sexualised AI imagery www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Grok turns off image generator for most users after outcry over sexualised AI imagery
X to limit editing function to paying subscribers after platform threatened with fines and regulatory action
www.theguardian.com

Reposted by David Spurrett

ebharrington.bsky.social
Brooke Harrington @ebharrington.bsky.social · 2d
This use of Grok isn't personal perversion but political terrorism: it's designed to silence women, make us retreat from public life.

Exemplified by the digital desecration of the body of Renee Good: someone prompted Grok to deepfake a bikini on her corpse.

"You're next" is the message to women.
Excerpt from "Mother Jones" magazine article reading: "Grok, the AI chatbot launched by Elon Musk after his takeover of X, unhesitatingly fulfilled a user’s request on Wednesday to generate an image of Renee Nicole Good in a bikini—the woman who was shot and killed by an ICE agent that morning in Minneapolis, as noted by CNN correspondent Hadas Gold and confirmed by the chatbot itself. “I just saw someone request Grok on X put the image of the woman shot by ICE in MN, slumped over in her car, in a bikini. It complied,” Gold wrote on the social media platform on Thursday. “This is where we’re at.”

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
Update: Sent the letter in this morning. 20+ colleagues signed. (As far as I can tell, that is basically everyone who opened the email, plus a few more who got it forwarded.)

Reposted by Juan Cole, Valerie Mueller, Gary Painter , and 7 more

elizabethjacobs.bsky.social
Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 2d
Amanda Gorman wrote this poem for Renee Good and that’s it for me tonight.
Post from Amanda Gorman’s Instagram that says amandascgorman Minneapolis, Minnesota For Renee Nicole Good Killed by ICE. on January 7, 2026 by Amanda Gorman They say she is no more, That there her absence roars, Blood-blown like a rose. Iced wheels flinched & froze. Now, bare riot of candles, Dark fury of flowers, Pure howling of hymns. If for us she arose, Somewhere, in the pitched deep of our grief, Crouches our power, The howl where we begin, Straining upon the edge of the crooked crater Of the worst of what we've been. Change is only possible, & all the greater, When the labour & bitter anger of our neighbors Is moved by the love * better angels of our nature.

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
With a nod to Clausewitz, one might say that music is the continuation of dance by other means...

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
That Vijay Iyer piece is terrific! (Ran into it totally by accident, and cannot remember what I was looking for, some time last year.)

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
An idea I read years ago in Ezra Pound (creepy fascist though he was) comes to mind. He said: “Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.” (ABC of Reading) So maybe music is somewhere between dance and poetry?

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 2d
They should stop immediately.

Reposted by Niklas Johansson, Elisa Freschi, David Spurrett

dingemansemark.bsky.social
Mark Dingemanse @dingemansemark.bsky.social · 2d
Re: the AI slop paper shared by @thomaspellard.bsky.social and @lameensouag.bsky.social, I wrote to the editors — will update when I get a reply, and will be following closely what they do.

Key point is that we should hold the *journal* accountable for this mess

I have a few predictions...

1/n
AI slop published on your watch: very bad look for HSSComms and Springer/Nature  Dear editors, I have failed to locate contact information for most of the academic editors for Humanities and Social Sciences Communications; I trust that you will forward this message to them. I want to note that AI slop is being published on your watch in the journal you edit. This paper, out last week (Al-Jarrah 2026), is full of inaccurate claims and includes countless hallucinated references. Even a cursory look at the bibliography shows that at least 10 and probably many more references are bullshit pure and simple; the simplest explanation is that they are confabulated by generative AI, which sheds doubt on the quality of the manuscript as a whole and on the review and editorial processes at your journal. It is a great lapse of editorial judgement to let this kind of obvious drivel pass and I am warning my colleagues at MPI and Radboud to avoid your journal until clear and unambiguous action is taken. You may also want to take note that many people are finding out about this and the online discussion of this paper and of the journal's failing standards is something I hope that Springer Nature cares about. In my opinion the paper does not pass even the most minimal quality assurance checks and is fully against the COPE guidelines on publication ethics. You may want to hold the author accountable for this; I think the only reasonable course is retraction. But the scholarly community also holds the journal accountable. By letting AI slop through, your journal is polluting the information ecology of scientific publishing. Amidst a rising tide of synthetic text, scholarly publishing, with its tradition of human oversight and strong peer revidew, should be one of the last stalwarts to defend the integrity of our research. I look forward to your response and to find out what decisive action you are taking.

Reposted by Rebecca Solnit, Joe R. Feagin, Michael A. Clemens , and 7 more

thetnholler.bsky.social
The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 3d
“Emerson does not have a mother today because one of you murdered a woman in cold blood yesterday.”

Reposted by Jon Green, Fabián Muniesa, Stuart White , and 2 more

olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 3d
"...the more one relies on vice signaling as a style of action and communication, the less relevant and powerful the in-group’s moral compass is as a practical constraint on anyone’s behavior."

latest for @bostonreview.bsky.social

www.bostonreview.net/articles/emp...
Empire of Vice
In a perverse twist on virtue signaling, the Trump administration is training Americans in the politics of raw domination.
www.bostonreview.net

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 3d
Great, I doubt there is a single list that is both up to date an authoritative, but that really helps add a few eminent examples. Thank you!

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 3d
Thank you!

doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett @doctorspurt.bsky.social · 3d
If you know where there is a list (even partial) that would be great. And yes, it is a good point to mention that even before the latest outrages, other universities have thought this through and left.

Reposted by David Spurrett

metaphysiology.bsky.social
Christopher J Stevens @metaphysiology.bsky.social · 3d
It could be persuasively quite useful (for @quiteclare.bsky.social also) to attach a list of global academic institutions who have already quit X (the movement began around the end of 2023). All the French unis I've been associated with have already quit, for example, plus many German, Dutch, etc.