Victor Kumar
@victorckumar
Associate professor of philosophy at Boston University | A BETTER APE (OUP) | Writes about morality, progress, evolution, culture | He/him
I started a Substack two months ago, writing essays about intellectual tribalism, standpoint theory, ChatGPT, and more. I plan to publish an essay every week or two. If you're interested, please subscribe (for free of course) to get new essays in your inbox. Link in next tweet.
Have you tried just not believing things
The idea that God exists is incredible, but so is the idea that God does not exist, and that this vast reality just happens to be, and happens to be such as to permit us to be here pondering our existence. There's no escaping believing things that seem incredible -- absurd, even.
"Wanting to ban LLMs because students use them to cheat is like wanting to outlaw cars because criminals use them as getaway vehicles." very nice piece by @victorckumar (which includes a nice reference to a piece by me!) openquestionsblog.substack.com/p/dont-outsour…
This comment is a response to a blog post arguing that philosophers should lighten up. We are never beating the charges.
One of the best tweets of all time. Nearly every day I see an online essay that is basically reflecting on the decline of pumpkin-carving.
So easy to universalize personal experience into cultural critique .. just caught myself thinking “interesting how pumpkin carving is falling out of style” and then remembered im 23 and live alone in an apartment
The anti-trans backlash started in 2017, and I just realized what else happened in 2017. Rebecca Tuvell published a paper in an academic journal.
Every week or so, I dream that I'm late to teach a class or give a talk for which I haven't prepared. What does this mean? Maybe castration anxiety?
Sick of people who “do their own research” but are just making it up (a priori philosophers)
My wife went to a Coldplay concert last night, paid for by her company. What a nice boss!
The wildest moment of the pile-on described in this essay: A professor (who is white) accused me (a person of Indian descent) of “generationally inherited blood-lust.”
openquestionsblog.substack.com/p/we-need-to-t…
Critical thinker in the academy here, why did AI companies make a tool exclusively for writing college essays with no other function?
We can win in 2028, we just need to find more creative ways of shaming Trump voters
unfortunately "time to pop off, morally speaking" has now permanently entered my vocabulary