Dan Williams

Philosopher, University of Sussex. Tweets in personal capacity. Interested in: Philosophy, Psychology, Society. Writes at:

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Well done, you mouth-breathing cretins. And well done to all the pricks on social media who have done nothing but race-bait over this tragedy. Shameful across the board.

As a psychologist, I’ll bet you £100 this is what happened with poor Henry Nowak. Cops suffer from empathy burn out. 90% of the time they deal with nothing but scum. It doesn’t make it right, but that cynicism will have come into play, here.

They get a 999 call saying, “A Sikh has been attacked.” They arrive at the scene, there’s a Sikh saying he’s been attacked and someone (Henry) acting strangely. The weapon has been hidden. They will have immediately thought ‘drink or drugs’, and they see no obvious wounds. The murderer laid on exactly the scene the police would have expected to see, had the complaint been genuine.

These are pure human confirmation and anchoring biases at play: the cops saw what they expected to see from the info they had going into the situation. They were tricked. Humans make mistakes.

Where the cops royally fucked up was not following normal procedures when someone says they have been stabbed, and checking them all over including skin. They should lose their jobs over that negligence alone and for allowing their biases to override their training.

I guarantee you “I can’t breathe” inadvertently made things worse as that’s what every single scumbag says when they get arrested, since George Floyd.

This absolute tragedy is a sad combination of confirmation and anchoring biases, excessive cynicism, and a criminal failure to follow correct procedures, not to mention a lying, murdering piece of shit and his piece of shit family doing everything they could to confuse the police and muddy the waters. It has nothing to do with diversity.

Henry Nowak should not have died at all, but he would have died whatever the police did. However, in these circumstances he should have died with someone holding his hand, trying to save him, and telling him it would be ok, not in handcuffs being read his rights. The police officers who made this dreadful error should lose their jobs and will have to live with that for the rest of their days.

Final point: well done to the Hants Police detectives who shredded the murderer’s story and secured a conviction.

[Dan Williams @danwilliamsphil]

This is really not a good post. Had to stop reading after the first couple paragraphs. Obviously there is no implicit code saying a stab wound counts for less than a slur. The point is that they didn't think he had been stabbed, probably because they incompetently anchored on what they wrongly believed to be a convincing story and trustworthy testimony they had encountered before the scene. That's terrible incompetence, but the framing here is incredibly low-quality and biased.

[Dan Williams @danwilliamsphil]

@AndyMasley "Blurry jpeg of the internet" article?

[Dan Williams @danwilliamsphil]

Where did the "averaging" one even come from? I encounter this all the time

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Most people, including really accomplished people, don't have an accurate mental model of how LLMs operate (and why would they?)

You see this in wide beliefs that AI is just copying from known sources, or that it only produces average answers, or that it can't generate new ideas

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Most people, including really accomplished people, don't have an accurate mental model of how LLMs operate (and why would they?)

You see this in wide beliefs that AI is just copying from known sources, or that it only produces average answers, or that it can't generate new ideas

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

The most darkly funny aspect of this video is that Ivanka Trump speaks as if she went on some profound, prolonged spiritual and philosophical journey to ascertain the meaning of life, and concluded that the most elevated human state is to live on a gigantic private island in the Mediterranean, in a sprawling mansion paid for with the billions of dollars given to her husband by the Saudis and Emiratis to ensure favorable treatment by him and by her dad in their exercise of the powers of the American Presidency. Real uplifting stuff. 🙏

[Omar Sultan Haque @OmarSHaqueMDPhD]

“To encourage individuals to engage and persuade with populist and illiberal ideas, they must be incentivised by the norms and prestige economy within establishment culture. And at present, these incentives do not exist. They actively discourage such engagement, in fact.
There is a dominant norm that many outlets, spaces, and ideas are simply beyond the pale, even when they are increasingly popular. To the extent they are discussed at all, the discussion focuses overwhelmingly on how they might be better managed, regulated, or controlled. That is, it takes place within a fantasy in which the liberal establishment retains the ability to determine which viewpoints become the focus of public attention and conversation.” By @danwilliamsphil

https://t.co/iX5Wz778je

[Hadas Weiss @weiss_hadas]

shakespeare, sonnet 116

[Tom Chivers @TomChivers]

mathematicians signing a declaration against AI use in maths reminds me of the philosophers in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy threatening to go on strike over Deep Thought https://t.co/y9123nsaEw

[Peter Wildeford🇺🇸🚀 @peterwildeford]

The AI policy Overton window is doubling about as fast as AI is doubling

[Lionel Page @page_eco]

What is a just society?

Is it one that protects individual rights or promotes the collective good? One that ensures individual freedom or promotes equality?

A social contract approach offers simple answers to these highly debated questions.
https://t.co/VuIXaqeYXC

[Dan Williams @danwilliamsphil]

@akoustov argues: There is a *big* disconnect between many people's private AI use and what they acknowledge publicly. Seems bad! Full conversation here: https://t.co/x3z30kLShI

[Dan Williams @danwilliamsphil]

What would it even mean for AI to reach "human-level" general intelligence? @dioscuri and I discuss why the term "AGI" is both useful and misleading, how much scepticism is possible, and why transformative change doesn't need a clean “AGI” moment.
https://t.co/IsbFqST5ZF

[Dan Williams @danwilliamsphil]

Will AI accelerate scientific advances - or just increase the amount of slop? Discussion with @akoustov and @dioscuri. Full conversation here: https://t.co/iQZKaFe0sW

[Felix M. Simon @_FelixSimon_]

@danwilliamsphil Yup. Argued some time ago (using his trailer style visual communication as examples) that he aligns himself with those that elites (but he, too) treat with condescension https://t.co/MIlggZ4PeI

[Cathy Young 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 @CathyYoung63]

Racists blaming racist thuggery on "mass migration" is really precious

[davidad 🎇 @davidad]

No one:

Claude Opus 4.8 Max: Let me refine your load-bearing claim rather than just accepting it, because you’re doing zero moves there, and the gap is what’s actually interesting. The one place I’d still push, because I think it matters: your message is wearing content-clothes, but the content isn’t actually *there*. The tell: it’s just an empty string. But the emptiness of the string IS its lack of content. Pull one, and the other goes inert. That’s the structural spine.

[Dan Williams @danwilliamsphil]

On the signalling rationale underlying Trump's aesthetic appeal: https://t.co/4hNlBN142X

[Interintellect 🧭 @interintellect_]

What happens when scholarship becomes a prestige chase, and "publish or perish" morphs into "condemn or be ignored"? Has the modern university become a "luxury market for outrage"?

In this deep-dive Interintellect Super Salon "Humanities Status Games," philosopher and Sussex lecturer @danwilliamsphil joined @TheAnnaGat to explore the powerful incentives and status games that shape modern academia.

Williams argued that in a culture where signaling virtue outcompetes seeking truth, we've built an intellectual ecosystem that is brilliant, lopsided, and dangerously self-affirming.

Watch the full discussion to see how a dysfunctional status game leads to dysfunctional outputs in scholarship and politics.

[Dan Williams @danwilliamsphil]

Will AI accelerate scientific advances - or just increase the amount of slop? Discussion with @akoustov and @dioscuri. Full conversation here: https://t.co/iQZKaFe0sW