D. Hicks

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

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.

Note The content of this post is from the Wikipedia meta page Signs of AI Writing, copied on 2025-09-07.

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 against diversity efforts: We start employing people based on any criteria other than…

Note This is an HTML version of a document that I wrote for Leonardo Arriola, Dean of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts at UC Merced.

Bringing this question over from Bluesky, where I first saw it reposted.

A couple days ago, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) released a spreadsheet of about 3.5k “woke DEI grants” made by NSF.

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).

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 assignments to respond to LLMs.

On Wednesday, after the election, I experienced a minor depressive episode: anhedonia, insomnia, loss of appetite, GI weirdness.

Yesterday our Environmental Philosophy class had an interesting discussion about writing first drafts.

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

Note I’m somewhat active on the subreddit r/AskTrumpSupporters.

I gave a talk at the Center for Dewey Studies in Carbondale on April 4.

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 epistemology literature on expertise.

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

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.

I recently read (most of) Lukes (2005).

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

In theory this will be a quick post.