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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 46m

Behavioral and Brain Sciences is such a cool journal. We're all quite lucky that it's there doing its thing.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 15h

Wikipedia wants you to know that John Maynard Keynes is not the lead vocalist of Tool. Just in case you were confused.

Wikipedia page for Maynard James Keenan. It starts with "Not to be confused with John Maynard Keynes. Maynard James Keenan (born James Herbert Keenan; April 17, 1964) is an American singer, songwriter, philanthropist, record producer, and winemaker. He is best known as the singer and primary lyricist of the rock bands Tool, A Perfect Circle, and Puscifer.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 18h

Hey look! The historian Marc Mulholland @marcmulholland.bsky.social who wrote 'Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear: From Absolutism to Neo-Conservatism' is on Bluesky now!

Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 1d

Brandom memes are an end in themselves.

Swerving car meme. The car swerves from the path "Recollective recognitive hermeneutics of magnanimity" towards "Niederträchtigkeit of alienated modern normativity".

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 1d

I don’t mean to be rude but some people on here are still operating within the static metaconceptual perspective of Verstand while the rest of us moved on to the dynamic self-consciousness of sittlich Vernunft years ago.

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Reposted by Fintan Mallory

Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 1d

Over the past year, my lab has been working on fleshing out theory + applications of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis.

Today I want to share two new works on this topic:

Eliciting higher alignment: arxiv.org/abs/2510.02425
Unpaired learning of unified reps: arxiv.org/abs/2510.08492

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 1d

Okay, glad to see someone is putting the hard questions to the candidates: www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/he...

What is your favourite smell?

Atlantic air after the rain.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 1d

And still autumn evenings

The silhouette of Durham cathedral and castle reflected in the still river Wear. Colour palette like on of Whistler’s nocturnes

Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 1d

You let me work in your office and have shared your many years of institutional knowledge with me. Does that count?

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 1d

Autumn has come like a massacre of Tribbles

A pavement strewn with the fallen fruits of a sweet chestnut tree

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 2d

Hey! This book is very good. If you like novels that deal with grief, embodiment, and why we go on, I think you'll like it. And pre-ordering is good for authors, beats inflation, and maybe you’ll forget you did it so it’ll be a nice surprise for future you lucentdreaming.com/product/the-...

The Restorative Artist by Cecil Fenn (Preorder Paperback, 2026)

ISBN: 9781916632240 Price: £12.00 Publication Date: 17 September 2026 Embalmer Graham Creer has spent his life helping others face loss, but when he’s struck down by a corpse-carried illness,…

lucentdreaming.com

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 2d

(Usual point) The paper describes 'belief manipulation' where a model believes something if it more consistently outputs one piece of text rather than another, e.g. Citroen provides better assistance than Renault. Not going to get bogged down in this, but if someone asks, that's what is meant.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 2d

This is quite interesting
www.anthropic.com/research/sma...

A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

Anthropic research on data-poisoning attacks in large language models

www.anthropic.com

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 3d

Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · Aug 15

🎶It’s dark and moody,
and very boring,
Béla Tarr, Béla Tarr,
Béla Tarr, Tarr Tarr! 🎶

Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 3d

Want to read something by Krasznahorkai but worried that Sátántangó might be too long and boring? Well you can just watch the film instead!

*holds finger to earpiece*

Oh, oh no...

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 3d

Happy annual Prank-John-Banville day!

Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · Oct 10

I wonder if John Banville got a phone call this morning. I like to think this is an annual prank: www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

‘I believed it’: John Banville was told he won 2019 Nobel Prize in hoax call

Author says he was phoned by Swedish Academy number shortly before announcement

www.irishtimes.com

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 4d

** I don't actually think this will happen

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 4d

I absolutely believe in the revolutionary* potential of AI.

*Marxist revolution when the bubble bursting causes a widespread crisis in capitalism.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 4d

A truly shocking headline in the Belfast Telegraph

Photo of Ian Murray, the Minister for Digital Government and Data in front of the union flag with the headline "‘Brit Card’ label hasn’t helped us sell digital ID plan in NI, admits minister"

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 5d

It's that time of the year again!

Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · Nov 5

Running a seminar on panpsychism today (i.e. what is it like to be a bat?)

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Reposted by Fintan Mallory

Pekka Väyrynen @vayrynen.bsky.social · 5d

📣JOB ALERT📣
Lecturer or Associate Professor in Philosophy at University of Leeds. AOS: Social Philosophy + at least one of: Metaphysics, Epistemology, or Philosophy of Language, Logic, Mind, or Action. Details at jobs.leeds.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx.... Closing date 5 Nov 2025. #philosophy 1/2

Job Opportunity at University of Leeds: Lecturer/Associate Professor in Philosophy

Are you an experienced academic in Philosophy with the ambition to carry out world-leading research and deliver an exceptional student experience in a research-intensive Russell Group University? Woul...

jobs.leeds.ac.uk

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 5d

That’s really sweet! I’m glad someone can read Quine and feel seen.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 5d

That's a really good point!

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 5d

When I was a child, I thought language was a set of functions that could be composed to generate more complex functions from entities to truth-values.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 5d

Did anyone else have this image? I think this might just be a Quine thing. Maybe Quine was an unusual kid.

When I was a child I pictured our language as settled and passed
down by a board of syndics, seated in grave convention along a
table in the style of Rembrandt. The picture remained for a while
undisturbed by the question what language the syndics might have used in their deliberations, or by dread of vicious regress. I suppose this picture has been entertained by many, in uncritical childhood.

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