@davidkinney.bsky.social
Assistant Professor in Philosophy at WashU (St Louis). http://davidbkinney.com
Waxing poetic in the last paragraph of my final lecture notes for formal methods this semester.
November 13, 2025 at 1:26 PM
Waxing poetic in the last paragraph of my final lecture notes for formal methods this semester.
Will anyone recognize the reference or am I truly ancient?
October 15, 2025 at 10:47 PM
Will anyone recognize the reference or am I truly ancient?
Large swathes of north St. Louis still look like a bomb was dropped on them after a tornado in may.
New:
Kristi Noem fast-tracked millions in disaster aid to Naples, Florida tourist attraction after campaign donor intervened
www.propublica.org/article/kris...
w/ @josh-kaplan.bsky.social @amierjeski.bsky.social
Kristi Noem fast-tracked millions in disaster aid to Naples, Florida tourist attraction after campaign donor intervened
www.propublica.org/article/kris...
w/ @josh-kaplan.bsky.social @amierjeski.bsky.social
Kristi Noem Fast-Tracked Millions in Disaster Aid to Florida Tourist Attraction After Campaign Donor Intervened
The DHS chief has been widely criticized for slowing down FEMA’s response after natural disasters. Texts and emails obtained by ProPublica point to an effective way to get help faster: have one of Noe...
www.propublica.org
September 26, 2025 at 1:57 PM
Large swathes of north St. Louis still look like a bomb was dropped on them after a tornado in may.
Time for my extremely pedantic thing. “Football” means a game played on a field *on foot*, as opposed to on horseback. So you have association football, rugby football, American football, Aussie rules football, and so on. Kicking has nothing to do with the etymology.
The U.S. is very insular
- We call football soccer, and our “football” doesn’t involve kicking the ball much
- We use imperial units when most other countries use the metric system
- We call the country “America” while most of the world uses that name for the continent
What else?
- We call football soccer, and our “football” doesn’t involve kicking the ball much
- We use imperial units when most other countries use the metric system
- We call the country “America” while most of the world uses that name for the continent
What else?
September 14, 2025 at 7:51 PM
Time for my extremely pedantic thing. “Football” means a game played on a field *on foot*, as opposed to on horseback. So you have association football, rugby football, American football, Aussie rules football, and so on. Kicking has nothing to do with the etymology.
On a very nervy and scary day, I'm posting something I just wrote for my formal methods class that makes me happy.
September 11, 2025 at 1:48 AM
On a very nervy and scary day, I'm posting something I just wrote for my formal methods class that makes me happy.
"The left considers the collective, the right considers each separate individual" is a surprisingly helpful nemonic for sequent calculi.
September 5, 2025 at 6:03 PM
"The left considers the collective, the right considers each separate individual" is a surprisingly helpful nemonic for sequent calculi.
Reposted
Good morning! I'm in Uganda to visit family and friends.
But depending on your perspective, don't worry or I'm sorry: I'll be back by the end of the month.
See you soon, NYC.
But depending on your perspective, don't worry or I'm sorry: I'll be back by the end of the month.
See you soon, NYC.
July 20, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Good morning! I'm in Uganda to visit family and friends.
But depending on your perspective, don't worry or I'm sorry: I'll be back by the end of the month.
See you soon, NYC.
But depending on your perspective, don't worry or I'm sorry: I'll be back by the end of the month.
See you soon, NYC.
New paper forthcoming in Mind. I argue that outright beliefs can meaningfully simplify credal updating if the objects of those beliefs are dependence relations between propositions and the DAG formed by these relations has bounded treewidth. Preprint: philarchive.org/rec/KINHRB.
philarchive.org
July 15, 2025 at 9:31 PM
New paper forthcoming in Mind. I argue that outright beliefs can meaningfully simplify credal updating if the objects of those beliefs are dependence relations between propositions and the DAG formed by these relations has bounded treewidth. Preprint: philarchive.org/rec/KINHRB.
I was today years old when I learned that Nick Adams is not a satirical character being played on twitter by a comedian. I learned this because he will be ambassador to Malaysia.
July 10, 2025 at 4:29 PM
I was today years old when I learned that Nick Adams is not a satirical character being played on twitter by a comedian. I learned this because he will be ambassador to Malaysia.
I love the idea that there is anything but a negligible number of NYers who would vote for Mamdani (or, indeed, any Democrat) if not for his failure to uphold Columbus as an Italian-American hero. People who like and care about Columbus are Republicans.
Mamdani is right; Columbus is bad and not worthy of being honored. And this is not a case of applying modern moral standards to earlier periods - lots of people during Columbus's time thought he was overly brutal, too!
July 10, 2025 at 12:33 PM
I love the idea that there is anything but a negligible number of NYers who would vote for Mamdani (or, indeed, any Democrat) if not for his failure to uphold Columbus as an Italian-American hero. People who like and care about Columbus are Republicans.
They look they’re about to drop the hottest adult contemporary album of 1994.
July 7, 2025 at 9:02 PM
They look they’re about to drop the hottest adult contemporary album of 1994.
Centaur is really exciting. As far as I can tell, it seems to have been made possible in large part by German federal funding. Once again, public funding of science gets the goods: www.nature.com/articles/s41....
A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition - Nature
A computational model called Centaur, developed by fine-tuning a language model on a huge dataset called Psych-101, can predict and simulate human nature in experiments expressible in natural language...
www.nature.com
July 5, 2025 at 1:31 PM
Centaur is really exciting. As far as I can tell, it seems to have been made possible in large part by German federal funding. Once again, public funding of science gets the goods: www.nature.com/articles/s41....
His ability to rattle off facts and figures with a breezy confidence that makes him seem smart and cool at the same time reminds me of (don't get mad) Bill Clinton in his prime. If the NYC mayoralty wasn't the graveyard of US politics, I'd say rhere's some juice here.
This @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social video is absolutely INCREDIBLE. The numbers he cites, the strategy and results they produced — it’s the future. When have you heard *any* campaign talk about this, ever? (Video split in 2 to fit in Bluesky’s limits)
July 1, 2025 at 9:05 PM
His ability to rattle off facts and figures with a breezy confidence that makes him seem smart and cool at the same time reminds me of (don't get mad) Bill Clinton in his prime. If the NYC mayoralty wasn't the graveyard of US politics, I'd say rhere's some juice here.
Everybody wants to be a formal epistemologist, but nobody wants to make these ugly-ass beamer slides.
June 17, 2025 at 8:15 PM
Everybody wants to be a formal epistemologist, but nobody wants to make these ugly-ass beamer slides.
Paper forthcoming in the 2025 FAccT proceedings! When evaluating algorithms, we often manage a trade-off between accuracy and fairness. I argue that this should be done by via a linear combination of accuracy and fairness measures, for Harsanyi-style reasons: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08829.
arxiv.org
May 15, 2025 at 12:26 PM
Paper forthcoming in the 2025 FAccT proceedings! When evaluating algorithms, we often manage a trade-off between accuracy and fairness. I argue that this should be done by via a linear combination of accuracy and fairness measures, for Harsanyi-style reasons: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08829.
Probably not a total coincidence that Stefanik's upstate NY district, while pretty Trumpy, borders Canada and it wouldn't be hard for Dems to make a special election all about tarrifs.
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/u...
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/u...
Trump Asks Stefanik to Withdraw Bid to Be U.N. Ambassador
The president said he wanted the New York Republican to stay in Congress to bolster the party’s slim House margin and protect her seat.
www.nytimes.com
March 27, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Probably not a total coincidence that Stefanik's upstate NY district, while pretty Trumpy, borders Canada and it wouldn't be hard for Dems to make a special election all about tarrifs.
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/u...
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/u...
Jaegwon Kim on @lastpositivist.bsky.social in 1989.
March 22, 2025 at 2:19 PM
Jaegwon Kim on @lastpositivist.bsky.social in 1989.
There needs to be a political movement against Donald Trump. It's hard to read this and still think that one of the leaders of that movement should be Chuck Schumer. His deep institutionalism just doesn't meet the moment. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/m....
‘The Interview’: Chuck Schumer on Democrats, Antisemitism and His Shutdown Retreat
The Senate minority leader discusses the backlash to his vote on the Republican spending bill, how he sees his role within the party and his new book.
www.nytimes.com
March 16, 2025 at 8:31 PM
There needs to be a political movement against Donald Trump. It's hard to read this and still think that one of the leaders of that movement should be Chuck Schumer. His deep institutionalism just doesn't meet the moment. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/m....
Reposted
New pre-print: "Toward Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations." arxiv.org/pdf/2502.134.... We investigate different RAG techniques for improving LLMs' familiarity with a range of national cultures. For multiple-choice QA benchmarks, the best strategy is to connect an LLM to the web. However...
arxiv.org
February 20, 2025 at 1:04 PM
New pre-print: "Toward Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations." arxiv.org/pdf/2502.134.... We investigate different RAG techniques for improving LLMs' familiarity with a range of national cultures. For multiple-choice QA benchmarks, the best strategy is to connect an LLM to the web. However...
New pre-print: "Toward Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations." arxiv.org/pdf/2502.134.... We investigate different RAG techniques for improving LLMs' familiarity with a range of national cultures. For multiple-choice QA benchmarks, the best strategy is to connect an LLM to the web. However...
arxiv.org
February 20, 2025 at 1:04 PM
New pre-print: "Toward Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations." arxiv.org/pdf/2502.134.... We investigate different RAG techniques for improving LLMs' familiarity with a range of national cultures. For multiple-choice QA benchmarks, the best strategy is to connect an LLM to the web. However...
Interesting example of a task that GPT-4o fails at unless you turn on reasoning mode: assigning numbers to sentences such that sentence A gets a lower number than sentence B if and only if A implies B (as in a Heyting algebra).
February 18, 2025 at 2:12 PM
Interesting example of a task that GPT-4o fails at unless you turn on reasoning mode: assigning numbers to sentences such that sentence A gets a lower number than sentence B if and only if A implies B (as in a Heyting algebra).
Powerpoint's AI slide designer dropping a hauntingly beautiful pegasus at 8am.
February 11, 2025 at 1:59 PM
Powerpoint's AI slide designer dropping a hauntingly beautiful pegasus at 8am.
It’s really great to see formal and mathematical approaches to philosophy taking center stage like this. Wish I could teleport to Oxford every Wednesday (for all sorts of reasons TBF).
Now in poster form!
(Photo at the top is of a purple heron I saw in Ranthambore National Park last year.)
(Photo at the top is of a purple heron I saw in Ranthambore National Park last year.)
January 30, 2025 at 2:53 PM
It’s really great to see formal and mathematical approaches to philosophy taking center stage like this. Wish I could teleport to Oxford every Wednesday (for all sorts of reasons TBF).
We love to see it, folks.
January 27, 2025 at 11:16 PM
We love to see it, folks.