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Fintan Mallory
@fintanmallory.com
2.5K followers 970 following 1.4K posts
Philosopher at Durham University fintanmallory.com
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phillipisola.bsky.social
Phillip Isola @phillipisola.bsky.social · 7h
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

1/9
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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 9h
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 · 10h
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
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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 10h
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 · 14h
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 · 21h
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 · 1d
(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 · 1d
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 · 1d
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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · Aug 15
🎶It’s dark and moody,
and very boring,
Béla Tarr, Béla Tarr,
Béla Tarr, Tarr Tarr! 🎶
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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 1d
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 · 1d
Happy annual Prank-John-Banville day!
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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 · 2d
** I don't actually think this will happen
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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 2d
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 · 3d
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 · 3d
It's that time of the year again!
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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · Nov 5
Running a seminar on panpsychism today (i.e. what is it like to be a bat?)
Image of a baseball bat
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Reposted by Fintan Mallory
vayrynen.bsky.social
Pekka Väyrynen @vayrynen.bsky.social · 4d
📣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 · 4d
That’s really sweet! I’m glad someone can read Quine and feel seen.
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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 4d
That's a really good point!
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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 4d
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 · 4d
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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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 4d
When teaching Confucius today we discussed whether a noble ruler can guide a people through example to be more humane. Anyway, I’m really going to miss Michael D.
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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 4d
Confucius comes out against ChatGPT in educational contexts.
7.8 The Master said, “I will not give a person a boost or a start if he does not know the frustration [of trying to solve a difficult problem] or the frenzy one would get into when trying [to put an idea] into words. After I have shown a student one corner of a square, if he does not come back with the other three, I will not repeat what I have done.”
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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 5d
I've been thinking about it a lot and have come to the conclusion that leaders should practice virtue.
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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 5d
Can’t believe I actually managed to misrepresent my own position in this post.
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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 5d
Found a really old paper that argues that chatbots are props that people use to engage in games of make-believe. This seems like a plausible analysis: journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article...
Fictionalism about Chatbots
According to widely accepted views in metasemantics, the outputs of chatbots and other artificial text generators should be meaningless. They aren’t produced with communicative intentions and the syst...
journals.publishing.umich.edu
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