Cameron Buckner

arxiv.org/html/2603.05...

Jobs | City University of New York

The Philosophy program at the CUNY GC is hiring a logician at the Associate level. Please share! cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...

When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry” As firms increasingly incentivize employees to build and oversee complex teams of agents—for example, by measuring and rewarding token consumption as a proxy for performance—people are finding themsel...

You get used to it, but it was a shock to the system at first.

“I end each day exhausted—not from the work itself, but from the managing of the work. Six worktrees open, four half-written features, two ‘quick fixes’ that spawned rabbit holes, and a growing sense that I’m losing the plot entirely.”

I'm not going for moral or legal status here, just a point about needing to take their flexibility more seriously. RLHF and RLVR make them more like AlphaGo than BERT or GPT-2 in this regard. If they're tools, they're fundamentally unlike any tools we've ever had before.

I'm interested in understanding this too, I just worry that oversimplifying the LLM to meer tool or mimicry or sock puppet underestimates the societal challenge we're facing. They're neither full persons/agents nor meer tools. They're something awkwardly and uncannily in-between.

Yes as you might have guessed I'm working on a paper about CoTs in LRMs. I'll let you know when it's ready to share. Soon hopefully!

I share the intuition that something critical about sociality is still missing but it's harder to put one's finger on than this.

I guess the consensus now is that the language moves in the CoTs were all available to the base model but learning to sequence them efficiently and effectively was discovered by the model using an external answer checker.

The situation is much harder to understand than that...LRMs in particular (which are the ones producing interesting math results) have learned to produce text for themselves through extensive reinforcement learning on their own. It's doing all kinds of stuff semi-autonomously without human fingers.

This same kind of debate (over the use of understanding and computer simulation) has played out in philosophy of science over the last few decades with similar positions. There's a lot here that's interesting but the sock puppet analogy falls increasingly flat.

The Pro-Human AI Declaration The Pro-Human AI Declaration

humanstatement.org

A Philosophical Introduction to Language Models -- Part I: Continuity With Classic Debates Large language models like GPT-4 have achieved remarkable proficiency in a broad spectrum of language-based tasks, some of which are traditionally associated with hallmarks of human intelligence. This...

We have called this the "redescription fallacy" arxiv.org/abs/2401.03910

Yes, updated versions coming soon.

Google DeepMind wants to know if chatbots are just virtue signaling We need to better understand how LLMs address moral questions if we're to trust them with more important tasks.

Julia Haas in Nature:

www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/18/1...

New greatest bird photo of all time just dropped

Royal Penguin
📷 JJ Harrison, eBird ebird.org/checklist/S2...

Bueller?

So, we don't know proprietary architectures etc., but is it probably right that the only causal influence CoT/reasoning trace tokens can have on final answer given by an LRM is through being processed as part of the context through self-attention, like other parts of the prompt?

The usual stellar science reporting here

Letterboxd screenshot Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) Watched by Branson Reese 28 Apr 2022 Abrams isn't a man so much as he's an avatar of cultural entropy. If you make something popular enough eventually you will die or sell it off and and a person in thick rimmed glasses whose main artistic vision is that he loves to have meetings will take it and sandblast it until it's nothing. I hate to see this happen here but maybe it's good that this happened. Maybe every franchise should collapse into a version of itself that makes shareholders nod and shake each others' hands. We should learn to speak in a language that rich people who don't dream can't comprehend.

i often think about this review

Google to pay $68 million over allegations its voice assistant eavesdropped on users Class-action lawsuit alleged that Google's voice assistant illegally recorded and shared private conversations with advertisers.

Do you remember when people were saying "I think my phone is listening to me, i'm getting ads for stuff I spoke about" and people said "They arent listening to you, they're just this good at predicting your interests"?

Well, it happens they were doing exactly that.
www.cbsnews.com/news/google-...

I will keep saying it: It turns out that inventing a tool that counterfeits the experience of being human can have, or rather is having, adverse consequences. Shirky concludes with the same point I’ve been making, that we cannot wait decades to get ahead of this. We are warping a generation.

It's worth having a look at our website, if you haven't, or haven't lately. There are a lot of remarkable things going on at UF philosophy these days.

phil.ufl.edu

• Petra Schumacher on real-time meaning adaptation
• Emma Borg questioning reasons & action
• @noranewcombe.bsky.social on cognitive maps
• @cameronbuckner.bsky.social on LLMs as models of human reasoning.
Videos were subtitled.
All links here: espp2025.ifispan.edu.pl/keynotes 2/2

Is this about the RAM shortage

Sign reads: Free Nobel Peace prize with an order of shrimp tacos.

#peaceprize
#tacos

Yes. This is another reason why public funding is what we want - why the government should support science with democratic mechanisms of oversight.

Public support means not having to beg toxic billionaires for money.

the professors in the emails being all chummy with epstein is pathetic and enraging.

You should quit social media for good Platforms optimized for engagement warp our politics, erode attention, and harm our wellbeing. Here’s how I minimize time on the (anti‑)social web.

Today is one of those days when I should have taken my own advice. Flooded with rage tweets on the other platform. Garbage way to communicate that only brings out the worst in people. All dunks, no conversation. Complete waste of time trying to engage there www.gelliottmorris.com/p/you-should...

Empathy is a moral virtue. The fact that so many people (on the left, no less) are trying to tell Liam that it's morally good to not empathize with "them" makes me sad.

Spanberger asks U-Va. to pause presidential search until she takes office Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger called on the University of Virginia’s governing board to pause its presidential search until she can appoint new members, saying actions by the current board ha...

Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger asked the University of Virginia’s board to pause its search for a president until she takes office, signaling she’ll make reshaping the state’s higher education intuitions an early priority.