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The SAT as a proxy debate over reparations

The SAT is intended to predict college success, where higher scores indicate a student is more likely to complete their degree and graduate.

LLMs lack latent attention?

Depending on how you read this blog¹, you might not know that the UC Merced Philosophy Department has a YouTube channel where we post recordings of our colloquium talks. Our…

LLM writing is shallow and superficial

The content of this post is from the Wikipedia meta page Signs of AI Writing, copied on 2025-09-07. That full page is designed to help editors reliably identify…

When might there be a diversity-merit tradeoff?

This morning I was reading this paper (sorry I’m too lazy to set up a bibliography file on top of the simulation), which quotes a researcher raising a familiar argument…

Concerns with bibliometrics in resource allocation decisions

This is an HTML version of a document that I wrote for Leonardo Arriola, Dean of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts at UC Merced. There’s a PDF version linked in the…

Is this how you think DEI works at colleges and universities? (rejected from r/AskTrumpSupporters)

Bringing this question over from Bluesky, where I first saw it reposted. It’s based on a tweet (post?) on X by an account I don’t know.

Weaponized metascience

A couple days ago, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) released a spreadsheet of about 3.5k “woke DEI grants” made by NSF. This spreadsheet was the basis for a report released last…

Weaponizing Value Freedom in Defense of Race Science

The aim of this blog post is to illustrate the ways value freedom is weaponized in defense of race science by Woodley Of Menie et al. (2025).

How I’m handling LLMs (Fall 2024 edition)

With the Fall term wrapping up in Northern American higher ed, a lot of my fellow humanities professors are reflecting on the way they feel forced to change their writing…

The parable of fire ecology

On Wednesday, after the election, I experienced a minor depressive episode: anhedonia, insomnia, loss of appetite, GI weirdness. I cleared the few remaining things on my…

Writing a draft is sketching, not vomiting

Yesterday our Environmental Philosophy class had an interesting discussion about writing first drafts. Several of the students used a vomiting metaphor to describe this…

Why aren’t Trump supporters worried about the Seal Team 6 Scenario? (Rejected from r/AskTrumpSupporters)

This was originally written as a Reddit post on July 5, about a week after the Trump v. US decision.

Were you aware that Democrats do not want to undermine democracy? (Rejected from r/AskTrumpSupporters)

I’m somewhat active on the subreddit r/AskTrumpSupporters. The board is intended to be a place where Trump supporters and critics can talk about the differences across their…

Defusing the Democracy Defense: Scientists as Epistemic Representatives

I gave a talk at the Center for Dewey Studies in Carbondale on April 4. Slides are here, the recording is here, and the abstract is below.

Epistemic interdependence or epistemic hierarchy

Given my intests in public scientific controversies and the politics of expertise, it might be a little surprising that I don’t really find much of interest in the social…

Fact checking ChatGPT: An activity for Critical Thinking

In Spring 2025 I ran this activity again, with some modifications.

Teaching ethics of expertise in Critical Thinking

I’m teaching expertise and appeals to authority in Critical Thinking about a month, and start to wrestle yet again with how to approach this.

Do scientists have power? Does science?

I recently read (most of) Lukes (2005). Lukes offers an influential account of (political) power, and I wanted to see if it would be useful for answering a question that…

Misinformation and trustworthiness: Frenemies in the analysis of public scientific controversies

Lewandowsky et al. (2022) examine public scientific controversies through two contrasting “lenses” or analytical frameworks, using Covid-19 as their primary case study. The…

Revisiting the Nazi Problem

In theory this will be a quick post. In theory.

New preprint: `tmfast` fits topic models fast

Yesterday I published a new preprint on the arXiv: “tmfast fits topic models fast”. Here’s the abstract:

Anarchy and Covid-19

I started working on this two or three weeks ago, got about 1500 words in, and then had to shelve it to deal with a minor deluge of grading and some other things. I thought…

Pluralism about problematic situations

Matt Brown has some commentary here.

The Nature endorsement and the value-free ideal

In October 2020, Nature published an editorial endorsing Joe Biden and criticizing Trump (“Why Nature Supports Joe Biden for US President” 2020). A few days ago, Nature…

Constructivist accounts of representation, in science and politics

Political theorists developed a constructivist approach to political representation around 2010; Saward (2010) seems to be the canonical citation for this approach, but I…

Undue influence of epistemic values

[We discussed this post on Facebook.]

The presence-absence model and epistemic representation

In 2015-16 I was working for¹ the US Environmental Protection Agency. My work colleagues were technocratic managers, most of whom had PhDs and were professionalized as…

Technocratic legitimacy and the value-free ideal

Holman and Wilholt (2022) argue that, as philosophers of science work to dismantle the value-free ideal, it is important to understand the function that the ideal played.…

Leftist dynamics for city simulation games

I’ve been playing Cities: Skylines recently, and that prompted me to go back and re-read Kevin Baker’s Model Metropolis, on the libertarian assumptions baked in to the…

Talk: Open science can’t solve the replication crisis

I gave this talk yesterday at the Digital Studies for Digital Science (DS2) online conference. You can watch the recording on YouTube.

Teaching critical thinking in 2020

Back in May, I read a blog post by Cathy Davidson, an English professor at CUNY Grad Center, “The Single Most Essential Requirement in Designing a Fall Online Course.” It’s…

Configuring Github and Travis-CI for Automated Lab Feedback

Last summer, anticipating teaching for the first time since 2013, I started reading about ungrading, and somewhere (maybe even in that piece, I didn’t check) read about a…

Replication, reproducibility, and Strengthening Transparency

Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science is an open science rule that the US Environmental Protection Agency proposed in April 2018. If adopted, the rule would…

Talk: “When Virtues are Vices: The Weaponization of Scientific Norms”

Back in March, I was supposed to present at a colloquium at the University of Dayton on “Doing Science in a Pluralistic Society.” Due to the pandemic, the colloquium was…

COVID-19 needs adaptive management

[I wrote this general-audience piece during the last week of April and first few days of May. I pitched it to a few popular outlets, but couldn’t find it a home.]

Why I won’t give you a hug

Dear family member,

Paper: Census Demographics and Chlorpyrifos Use in California’s Central Valley, 2011–15: A Distributional Environmental Justice Analysis

In Spring 2018, I audited a spatial data analysis class taught by Noli Brazil at UC Davis. The pesticide chlorpyrifos had been in the news for the past year, as one of the…

A “Toolbox-lite” for the First Day of Philosophy of Science

This semester I get to teach an undergraduate philosophy of science course for the first time ever, and today was the first meeting of the class. I’ve always struggled with…

Radical Immanent Critique

My general approach to philosophy might be characterized as radical immanent critique. This might seem paradoxical. The goal of this blog post is to resolve this apparent…

Comment: Inductive Risk, Science, and Values: A Reply to MacGillivray

Last fall Jessey Wright, P.D. Magnus, and I put together a short commentary replying to a paper on inductive risk published in the journal Risk Analysis. The paper is now…

White Supremacy and Evolutionary Games

This morning I’m productinating (productively procrastinating) by reading Ann Cudd’s review of Cailin O’Connor’s The Origins of Unfairness. I started to read O’Connor’s book…

Paper: Network analysis to evaluate the impact of research funding on research community consolidation

A new paper by myself and three UC Davis collaborators (David Coil, Carl Stahmer, and Jonathan Eisen), “Network analysis to evaluate the impact of research funding on…

Luck and the Academic Job Market

First, some news: starting this fall, I will be an assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced. I…

Paper: Legitimizing Values in Regulatory Science

A new paper by Manuela Fernández Pinto and me, “Legitimizing Values in Regulatory Science,” has just been published in Environmental Health Perspectives. This paper will be…

Slides: Explainable Machine Learning: An Integrated Epistemic-Ethical Analysis

Machine learning (ML) algorithms have become widely adopted over the past decade. Contemporary ML can achieve near-human levels of accuracy, but operates as an inscrutable…

Slides: Why Baier? Feminism, Trust, and Power

Here are the slides for my talk at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting this past weekend in Seattle: Why Baier? Feminism, Trust, and Power

Auto-tagging posts + the nDH metric

data

developing

idf

local

market

meat

rights

students

tf

vegetarianism

This morning I added a new feature to the blog posts: an R script that automatically generates and applies tags, allowing users to find old posts on (potentially, roughly)…

Poster: Contributions of Women to 20th Century Philosophy of Science

math

I’m going to be presenting in the poster session at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting in Seattle next month. You can get the poster here and I’m going to try…

Difference-in-differences in R

data

This post recreates this post with proper formatting, syntax highlighting, etc.

A care ethics for data science

data

scientist

students

Care ethics is an approach to ethical theorizing and reflection that emphasizes personal relations rather than abstract principles or rules. For example, ethics codes and hum…

Old posts

n

Posts dated prior to 2018 were migrated from an old Tumblr site during a website redesign in September-October 2018. I selected the posts to migrate based on a quick skim of…

Problems with Trolley Problems

reasoning

Trolley problem scenarios are non-monotonic: adding additional details can change the valence of the consequences

No, psychologists haven’t shown that GMO opponents don’t care about evidence

data

gm

policy

reasoning

Earlier this week, the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science published a paper by a team of psychologists on “absolute moral opposition” to GM foods. The paper has…

Against ‘Science-Based Policy’

hypothesis

policy

Today, as part of the preparation for my AAAS science policy fellowship, I filled out a brief survey on science and public policy. Several of the questions dealt with…

Industry-funded research and publishing independence

funding

Industry funding of scientific research was in the news last week. The most prominent story was that Coca-Cola is funding obesity research. But I had an interesting Twitter…

Statistical essentialism

data

Somehow this piece on the character traits of chronically late people showed up several times on my Facebook feed this morning. The sweeping generalizations in the…

Public Policy: What Philosophers of Science can Contribute

data

developing

policy

scientist

students

I spent last week in Washington, DC, interviewing with about 10 different federal government offices as a finalist for a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship. As…

When “Feeding the World” Doesn’t Mean “Feeding the World”

funding

gm

local

market

markets

regime

A common lament in the GMO controversy is that both sides really want the same thing. As Ottoline Leyser puts it in a piece in PLoS Biology from this summer, “The most…

Feminism and Science: Frenemies?

medicine

scientist

A friend of mine sent me a message on Facebook this morning:

Regulatory Science Reform?

data

policy

Over the last few days, several people have brought to my attention this story about two regulatory science bills passed earlier this week in the US House. Since the linked…

HSS Reflection: Practices, Science, and Criticism

data

motivated

reasoning

This is the second of my posts this week about the 2014 HSS/PSA conference. Here, I’d like to think a little about Andrea Woody’s comments on the paper I read at a HSS session…

Work and Hackwork

automated

love

moocs

Should you love what to do, or “live to work”? This post suggests not:

Virtue Ethics for Robots

automated

creativity

data

rights

robot

Autonomous automated systems — machines capable of acting on their own for extended periods of time in complex environments — have been a major trope of science fiction for…

Thoughts on FIRST

funding

The Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology (FIRST) Act is the current biannual funding authorization bill for the NSF, one of the major science funding…

Is the Finnish Model Irrelevant to North America?

factors

finnish

policy

Like many professional educators, I’m a fan of the Finnish education system, especially its emphases on recognizing the autonomy of teachers as highly-trained professionals…

Notes for an Ethics of Community Interventions

local

punishment

rights

students

wrongdoer

Last week, in response to the Ludlow affair — the most recent in a string of high-profile cases of sexual harassment/assault in academic philosophy — students at…

Is Motivated Reasoning Bad Reasoning? III

critic

hypothesis

motivated

policy

reasoning

scientist

This is part III of a three-part series. This series will be posted simultaneously on Je Fais, Donc Je Suis, my personal blog, as well as the Rotman Institute Blog.

Is Motivated Reasoning Bad Reasoning? II

hypothesis

motivated

reasoning

This is part II of a three-part series. This series will be posted simultaneously on Je Fais, Donc Je Suis, my personal blog, as well as the Rotman Institute Blog.

Is Motivated Reasoning Bad Reasoning? I

data

gm

motivated

reasoning

This is part I of a three-part series. This series will be posted simultaneously on Je Fais, Donc Je Suis, my personal blog, as well as the Rotman Institute Blog.

Diversity and “the” Philosophical Tradition

students

A typical problem for introductory philosophy courses is that the list of readings is dominated by privileged authors — white men, members or adjuncts of the ruling classes…

Sexism, Philosophy, and the Reciprocity of Virtue

virtues

Sexism in philosophy has been on my mind lately, between my colleague Kerry McKenzie’s review of a disastrous attempt at philosophy of physics by notorious sexist philosopher …

The Climate Debate: Ignorance, and/or Complexity?

data

factors

Why is the climate change debate so interminable? From the perspective of many scientists, we’ve had compelling data since the 1970s and more than enough reason to reduce…

Objectivity is a Unicorn

citations

gm

local

maize

policy

Following up on my last post and a semi-related conversation with a new officemate, it seems to me that a lot of people might react something like this:

How to Use Citations to Create Ignorance

citation

citations

data

gm

gmof

maize

policy

scientist

I spent most of Monday working on some “deep literature analysis” for my research on genetically modified organisms for food, or GMOf. This meant, in practice, that I spent…

The History of Philosophy as a Social Network

data

math

moocs

As I discussed in a post last month, I recently took a Coursera class on network theory and analysis. I did this in part because I wanted to evaluate the MOOC format from a…

MOOCs do not Make for Successful Math Classes

automated

data

instructor

math

moocs

students

In this post, I’m going to discuss MOOCs, based on my recent experience in a Coursera course on Social and Economic Networks. I’m going to start with a brief explanation of…

The Adversarial Method: Where’s Moulton?

adversarial

birth

data

reasoning

rights

Yesterday 3:AM Magazine posted an interview with Rebecca Kukla. Kukla said some things about the adversarial method in philosophy, with which Jenny Saul disagreed. You can…

Local Food, Global Justice

developing

local

I had the pleasure of attending the First Annual Workshop on Food Justice and Peace this past Friday and Saturday at Michigan State University, and at that workshop I had…

The Funding Effect and Noxious Markets: Weak Agency

developing

funding

market

markets

medicine

satz

scientist

(In this series of posts, I’m applying Debra Satz’ account of noxious markets to a specific aspect of commercialized science, the funding effect. In the first post, I…

Why Local?

local

virtues

[I feel like my blog posts tend to be pretty technical and academic. This post is an attempt to write for a broader audience, while still being philosophical.]

The Tangled (Food) Web We Weave

birth

meat

students

The basic reason I find the food system so fascinating is the complex and often surprising connections between issues that, at first glance, don’t seem to have much to do…

The Funding Effect

data

funding

gm

hypothesis

local

market

markets

medicine

rights

satz

In this series of posts, I’m applying Debra Satz’ account of noxious markets to a specific aspect of commercialized science, the funding effect. In the first post, I…

Notes on Predators and Animal Ethics

compassion

meat

predators

rights

vegetarianism

virtues

In this post, I’ll be discussing one of the common arguments against (moral) vegetarianism. (Moral vegetarianism is the view that vegetarianism is morally required, or that…

Satz’ Account of Noxious Markets

citations

market

markets

rights

satz

In this post, I’ll summarize Stanford political philosopher Debra Satz’ account of noxious markets. (Satz 2010; unsourced page number citations will be to this book.) This…

Two Conceptions of Human Nature

market

rights

In his essay “Two Philosophers Skeptical of Negative Liberty” in Libertarianism Defended, Tibor Machan comes close to a significant insight concerning the fundamental…

Fetishism and Innate Differences

(Going through my folder of notes and paper ideas, I came across the following, which I wrote last June.)

The Agroecological Argument for Eating Meat

data

meat

students

vegetarianism

The New York Times has announced the six finalists in its Tell Us Why It’s Ethical to Eat Meat essay contest. Readers have until April 24th to vote for their favorite.…

Friedersdorf: The Sex-Friendly Case Against Free Birth Control, part II

birth

medicine

preventative

Friedersdorf: The Sex-Friendly Case Against Free Birth Control, part I

birth

policy

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D. Hicks