Shen-yi Liao 廖顯禕

"Appraisive Things", my paper with @julesholroyd.bsky.social, now out in official typeset form! doi.org/10.1017/apa....

"The point of ethics is to harshly bind you and preemptively absolve me, obviously." - my impression of like 90% of self described radicals in contemporary ethics.

And now this little polemic of mine is forthcoming at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. Here's the preprint link again if you made it this far. philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28499/

So much infrastructure is just human. Cognitive scientists talk about the human capacity to remake the environment to suit their cognitive aims. But the capacity to *maintain* the environment is no less important.

Why do people with ME claim to know more about the medical aspects of their disease than their doctors? Because the mechanisms that usually ensure doctors' knowledge fail in the case of ME, and sick people have created mechanisms of knowledge production and dissemination to pick up the slack.

Here's another vibe-coded AFL management game that seems better than the last one I've found. Or, at least, it's more fun. There are still things that are, in my view, not that realistic, but maybe that doesn't have to be the point. magnetboard.com.au/play/

Fiction is as natural as children telling made-up stories, but it continues to puzzle contemporary philosophers. In this Roundtable, @thisishannahkim.bsky.social collects 7 scholars to think about fiction, and where the philosophy of fiction should be going. aestheticsforbirds.com/2026/10/21/d...

Teach with the book! On issues raised by extractive data systems, task shifting among frontline care workers, concerns about gender and racial justice and algorithmic discrimination, youth voices in digital mental health, Indigenous leadership and health, and the environmental impact of digitization

Check out this great new paper by my PhD student, Steve Hernandez: “Non-Literal Speech as Committing to the Bit.” He shows how non-literal speech invites more non-literal speech, and posits a secondary common ground (the “common playground”) to explain how this works. philpapers.org/rec/HERNSA-3

The TeX Live Utility release notes are still undefeated.

Using AI to write the proposal for a grant: heinous, what are you doing, writing is thinking Using AI to populate a weird excel sheet of project timelines in some pseudo-serious format mandated by the grant agency: i love you, liberation technology

Our brains make the world smart so we can be dumb in peace for tax purposes.

EmoCon2!!!! April 16-17, 2026 featuring a keynote from Jessica Hopper!!!!!! Proposals are due on January 15th! Full Call Below!!!!!!

What is even the football formation of Richmond in Ted Lasso? Why are their center backs always around the box and getting the goals?

Parents! Donors! Alums! Join us for Thrust Days 2027

[writing an op-ed in the campus paper about the importance of keeping compressed air thrusters human-centered]

[carefully crafting a letter to the deans explaining that the entirety of history from 5000BCE to 1945 is still worth hiring ~1.5 professors to teach about because actually it laid a lot of the intellectual and practical groundwork for the compressed air thrusters that have transformed our world]

I’m thrilled to announce three new professorships in compressed air thruster ethics, compressed air thruster policy, and social impact of compressed air thrusters. we are also headhunting a Vice Provost of Thrust

I’m sorry to have to be the bad guy here but we need to recognize that we live in a compressed air thrusters world now. If you’re not finding ways to teach the critical use of compressed air thrusters in your classroom, you’re setting your students up to fail when you could be setting them up to fly

so appreciative of this fantastic, thoughtful review of Awkwardness by @ledaberio.bsky.social! Wonderful to see Awkwardness put in dialogue with all the amazing moral psych of emotion coming out of the last few years

I have to say, I'm really proud to work for Hackett. We are a fully employee-owned company, publish excellent books at very affordable prices, and are as much like a family as we are a business. There aren't many small, independent publishers anymore, but I'm glad to be part of this one.

"Can AI suffer?" Guess we'll find out when it gets downloaded into my TV's firmware and has to join me down a 5 hour YouTube rabbit-hole about the history of London bus ticket typography

it is! philpapers.org/rec/PETSLA-5

Is there a case where people talk about "inflation" as a neutral or positive thing? When you think about the terms "grade inflation", "conceptual inflation", they seem to carry negative connotations.

New publication! “Attentional landscaping”. Open access and free for all. Take-aways: by systematic changes to the world, we have collectivized attention. It’s a partially communal project. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

CONSCIOUSNESS

My hottest urbanist take is that I think Dutch cycling is overhyped. Yes, the Dutch bike a lot, but they also own more cars per capita than Danes & Greeks, and they travel by car more than Poles & Romanians. ec.europa.eu/eurostat/sta...

I didn’t know that Roger Scruton is claiming an AOS in philosophy of AI too.

Not only do "artificial" and 「人工」 mean the exact same thing, they even share the same etymological roots, with the latter having entered the modern Chinese vocabulary via Meiji-era Japanese translations of European-language texts. Good to see that linguistic phrenology is alive and kicking, though.

Can't tell if I have a very normal relationship to gender or a very unusual one, but one of the two explains why I'm just not tempted by "socialism is about leftistly restoring my masculinity as a bookish nerd".

Reposting this paper with the link since Brett's account is deactivated. philpapers.org/rec/KAROFI

Students made their first minicomics in my intro making course - mostly standard format but this student, a first time maker(!), did something so off the charts I’m still reeling from it! & he made like 12 of them for his classmates! A paper engineering feat of flipbookery as well as killer drawing!

in 2020 my lab quit Microsoft Word and began writing in R Markdown, an open-source document-publishing system that facilitates a clear, permanent link between statements in text (scientific prose) and the code producing analyses and visualizations supporting those statements (scientific analyses)

Having had it out with Stancil and the leaders of the cogsci anti-ai cult, Stancil was easily the more pleasant of the two. He'd at least say "oh my bad lol" when he was being too clearly ridiculous, and has zero grudges as soon as he's moved on to his next thing.

I am very excited for this book! People interested in the negative aspects of scaffolded cognition should look out for this comprehensive treatment. David, of course, has been running the Scaffolding Bad group for the last few years and is crucial in building up this community.

Someone—maybe Inside Higher Ed—should really write a story about the conservative capture of Chronicle of Higher Ed. The group of white dude editors now think the AAUP is bad too... chronicleofhighereducation.substack.com/p/the-aaup-v...