Jonathan Birch
LightNews LightNews
banner
birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch
@birchlse.bsky.social
6K followers 310 following 730 posts

Professor, LSE. Philosophy of science, animal consciousness, animal ethics. Director of The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience.

Videos

Jonathan Birch is a British philosopher and professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His work addresses the philosophy of biology and behavioural sciences, especially questions concerning sentience, bioethics, animal welfare, and the evolution of social behaviour and social norms. .. more

Neuroscience 26%
Psychology 15%
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · Mar 25
An emotional day - I can announce I'll be the first director of The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience at the LSE, supported by a £4m grant from the Jeremy Coller Foundation. Our mission: to develop better policies, laws and ways of caring for animals. (1/2)
www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-...
LSE announces new centre to study animal sentience
The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience at LSE will develop new approaches to studying the feelings of other animals scientifically.
www.lse.ac.uk

birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 15h
On the question of which broadcaster is better - Channel 4 News.

Reposted by Steven French, Richard Pettigrew

birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 16h
When it became clear that net migration was on a downward trend, the UK far right and its media pivoted to asylum seekers being the alleged problem population. Labour and the BBC did not have to follow that cynical pivot, but they did anyway.
sundersays.bsky.social Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 1d
Today's 70% fall in net migration to 205,000 was not one of the six stories in BBC ten o'clock news.

Ta massive assymetry in whether rises in immigration and falls in immigration are considered newsworthy by broadcasters

Down by 140k isn't thought to be.

Up by 140k undoubtedly would be.

Reposted by Jonathan Birch, Urška Demšar

neurosock.bsky.social
neurosock @neurosock.bsky.social · 21h
The hippocampus is not a library, it is a simulation engine.

HPC is known for storing maps of the environment but not so known for generating planned trajectories.

This paper proposes that recurrence in CA3 is crucial for planning.

A🧵with my toy model and notes:

#neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI

Reposted by Jonathan Portes, Ben H. Ansell, Will Jennings , and 6 more

sundersays.bsky.social
Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 1d
Today's 70% fall in net migration to 205,000 was not one of the six stories in BBC ten o'clock news.

Ta massive assymetry in whether rises in immigration and falls in immigration are considered newsworthy by broadcasters

Down by 140k isn't thought to be.

Up by 140k undoubtedly would be.

birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 1d
Conspicuously bad for headlines, I would say. A similar approach worked for Osborne, but Labour was never going to face a comparably pliant media, and the incredible thing is that they seemingly didn't expect this.

birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 1d
I was annoyed by all the "growth, growth, growth" rhetoric in 2024, but if Labour really did have a serious plan for growth, that would have been much better than indecision, paralysis, and arbitrary fiscal rules throttling any investment in growth, i.e. no consistent plan for any particular goal.

birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 1d
To be fair, Reeves has become adept at gaming her own rules: the all-important goal of a forecasted balanced budget in 5yrs is achieved by tax rises deferred to 2028-31 that may well never happen. All of govt subordinated to the great project of chasing arbitrary stats with imagined future actions.

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

sanjasreckovic.bsky.social
Sanja Sreckovic @sanjasreckovic.bsky.social · 1d
✨️Call for abstracts✨️
Excited to be organizing together with @leonarddung.bsky.social, @birchlse.bsky.social and Albert Newen the RUB-LSE joint workshop
"Animal Minds: New Theories and New Observations"
Bochum 9-10 Feb 2026

Join us! 🦧🐦🐙🐀🐬🦀🐜
Abstracts due 1 Dec 2025
philevents.org/event/show/1...
Ruhr-University Bochum & London School of Economics joint workshop “Animal Minds: New Theories and New Observations”
The following speakers are confirmed: Colin Allen, Kristin Andrews, Jonathan Birch, Tomer Czaczkes, Rebecca Dreier, Leonard Dung, Albert Newen, Simone Pika, Sanja Sreckovic, and Daria Zakharova.
philevents.org

Reposted by Alison Phipps, Jonathan Birch

josephinewy.bsky.social
Josephine Whitaker-Yilmaz @josephinewy.bsky.social · 2d
Great to hear Rachel Reeves acknowledge that "there are many reasons why people choose to have children then find themselves in difficult times. The death of a partner. Separation. Ill health. A lost job. I don’t believe that children should bear the brunt of that."

So why should migrant children?

birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 3d
Rachel Reeves has done technocracy so badly it will be used as a case study in how not to manage uncertainty. Yes, forecast long-term consequences of choices. But don't set crude "iron rules" that make govt spending absurdly sensitive to small fluctuations in those long-term forecasts.

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

davidbatherwoods.bsky.social
David Bather Woods @davidbatherwoods.bsky.social · 3d
Lovely review of my new book @engelsbergideas.bsky.social
Schopenhauer's philosophy of hope
A new biography shows how Schopenhauer’s philosophy of universal suffering might offer surprising grounds for hope.
engelsbergideas.com

birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 3d
Is there any correlation with gender?

Reposted by Jonathan Portes, Cas Mudde, Ben H. Ansell , and 73 more

rutgerbregman.com
Rutger Bregman @rutgerbregman.com · 3d
I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

Reposted by Meredith Broussard, Jesse H. Kroll, Wolfgang Crämer , and 14 more

davelevitan.bsky.social
Dave Levitan @davelevitan.bsky.social · 3d
Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

birchlse.bsky.social
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 4d
There was a 50yr window in which it made economic sense to teach coding in schools and the British education system missed all of it.

Reposted by Michael Barnett, Brian A. Nosek, David McKenzie , and 8 more

evavivalt.bsky.social
Eva Vivalt @evavivalt.bsky.social · 4d
🚨 New working paper!

How well do people predict the results of studies?

@sdellavi.bsky.social and I leverage data from the first 100 studies to have been posted on the SSPP, containing 1,482 key questions, on which over 50,000 forecasts were placed. Some surprising results below.... 🧵👇

Reposted by Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Dorothy Bishop , and 19 more

davidrvetter.bsky.social
Dave Vetter @davidrvetter.bsky.social · 4d
Still reeling from the Stanford report on Brexit. Reduced GDP by up to 8% and investment by as much as 18%. The UK Treasury would have £40 billion more each year if Britain had remained in the EU. Devastating self-immolation.
The Economic Impact of Brexit
Other
siepr.stanford.edu

Reposted by Holger Nehring, Jonathan Birch, Catriona Seth

eicathomefinn.bsky.social
Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 4d
'Ahead of the autumn budget on 26 November, Universities UK (UUK) has calculated that funding per student for teaching in 2025-26 is at 64 per cent of the level it was in 2015-16.' 1/3
University teaching income ‘£6.4 billon less’ than 10 years ago
UUK says shortfall in teaching money is ‘baked in’ to higher education funding system as institutions brace for new tax in upcoming budget
www.timeshighereducation.com

Reposted by Jonathan Birch

arvidagren.bsky.social
Arvid Ågren @arvidagren.bsky.social · 5d
How to make sense of a disagreement like that between Dawkins and Noble?

Here, I think @birchlse.bsky.social comment of sub-field competition (originally made in a different context) is helpful

(9/n)
Screenshot reading: “My suspicion is that ‘defining the organism’ is often a means by which biologists hope to extend the explanatory reach of their subfield. In other words, it’s a subtle attempt to assert that one’s subfield occupies a special, privileged, fundamental position in relation to the rest of biology. If the organism is defined in terms of evolutionary theory, then other biologists cannot afford to be ignorant of evolutionary theory (cf. Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, 1982). Likewise, if the organism is defined in terms of physiology, then other biologists cannot afford to ignore physiology (cf. Scott Turner, The Extended Organism, 2000) … and so on.”

Reposted by Steve Peers, Jonathan Birch

crookedfootball.bsky.social
Chris Bertram @crookedfootball.bsky.social · 5d
A grim story
The life and limbo of a UK asylum seeker: one man’s harrowing 17-year wait for leave to remain
Ussu fled imprisonment and torture, only to find himself treated like a liar and outcast in the UK. Here’s how he survived homelessness and horrific injury in almost two decades without a decision
www.theguardian.com