She has a podcast with Robin Hanson, and has been on many podcasts with many other rats, so she’s relevant here.

But more relevant is the deeply sad and rat-typical way she intellectualises basic human activities, and then assumes she’s seen something nobody else has seen, even while falling into the most typical of human patterns. You aren’t a special genius for thinking “what if happier life with young hot guy”, you’re just in need of arrest by the horny police.

She also said she felt like Socrates for dispensing knowledge: my dude, that is the literal opposite of Socrates. I mean I know she’s probably referencing the Diotima speech in the symposium, but that’s an exact case of Socrates rejecting a claim to have knowledge about love and instead invoking another.

Oh, and she also previously crossed a picket line so she deserves a sneer or two regardless.

She’s always been sneerable; I’ve watched her career with great nausea. Appalling in every way. Belongs on the same list as Emily Oster and Amy Chua.

one of the reasons she is very much in-scope is the same reason the New Yorker writes a piece about her and does not describe her primarily as part of the rationalist movement (broadly construed). she is a “respectable” philosopher at one of the top universities in the US. She writes for The Point, associated with that same university, which tries to position itself as having “no specific political or social agenda; instead, we ask our readers to participate in a dialogue between diverse intellectual traditions, personalities and points of view.”

This is a deliberate facade. Even though The Point sometimes publishes thoughtful pieces, its main point is to be a kind of Quillette-light. Callard for quite a while made it seem as if she might be reasonable and not allied with the far right. Then came the Hanson stuff. Hanson is at GMU Economics, which is broadly understood as a joke in most US academia. Chicago has a much different and in some ways scarier (because much more serious and definitely not-a-joke) profile, going all the way back to the Chicago School in Economics and Leo Strauss and farther.

My view is that Callard is only famous because she waters down the same drugs that all our pals are high on, and dangerous because it gets presented as something else–as this profile does.

I was her student. I have mixed to negative feelings. She and her ex-husband seem to be on good terms; they famously had a (famously boring) debate about the philosophy of divorce. (Actually I haven’t seen it, so I can’t say for sure that it’s boring, but I heard it’s not juicy at all.) Arnold was a fellow student* in one of the classes I took from her. They were already together at that point. It wasn’t weird or uncomfortable to be around them.

• In hindsight it seems unlikely that he was actually taking the class as a student, as it’s a pretty serious ethics breach, maybe he was just sitting in. He would have been an extremely active auditor though!

This article avoids places where she can be most criticized. Her love for Robin Hanson, as OP mentioned. Also, Callard (maybe no longer, I haven’t kept up) tweets way too much, and deliberately misrepresents her views to make them maximally inflammatory. Clickbait philosophy. And she wrote a really shit article “Why Philosophers Shouldn’t Sign Petitions” where she argues against deplatforming TERFS. Her article isn’t just wrong, it’s quite poorly written. Here’s a good response.

Though I did well in her classes, I did not care for her much as a teacher, but she keeps winning awards for her teaching, so she must appeal very greatly to some students.

The fuck kind of American Beauty bullshit did i just read.

Look lady, you had a midlife crisis and wanted to bone someone younger. This happens to millions of people every day. Youre not special.

She is often baffled by the human conventions that the rest of us have accepted. It seems to her that we are all intuitively copying one another, adopting the same set of arbitrary behaviors and values, as if by osmosis.

Congratulations, you have discovered that we do in fact live in a society.

Sometimes it seemed to Agnes that the universe had been prearranged for her benefit. If she and Arnold were taking a walk together and she craved a croissant, a bakery would suddenly appear. If she needed a book, she would realize that she was passing a bookstore, and the text she wanted was displayed in the window. She thought that this was now her permanent reality.

Or, idk, you walked past a bakery and realised you were hungry. Or you noticed a bookstore and thought about books. Cart, horse, which comes first?

Philosophers often describe love from the outside, but she could provide an inside account.

Oh my GOD you’re telling me you’re the first philosopher to ever fall in love?

Not to go all beep-boopism here, but between the rationalists and people like Callard I think it’s probably best if people didn’t treat autistic traits as the fast lane to philosophical truth.

Wow that office https://news.uchicago.edu/videos/night-owls-late-night-philosophers-pondering-big-questions-agnes-callard

Hoo boy. I don’t go to U of C but some people there are in my social circle and they’ve been talking about this for years. The U of C subreddit has also had a few threads where freshmen or those out of the loop ask what the fuck is going on with Callard. I feel a little weird knowing there’s now a newyorker.com link that unspools much of (though not all) of the story.

I can’t really claim any knowledge of how it is in the rest of the country/world but there really seems to be a high frequency of faculty at University of Chicago whose weirdness has broken through into pop culture. Rachel Fulton Brown is the U of C medieval history professor who is utterly infatuated with Milo Yiannopolis, even now apparently. It’s just such a random thing, especially when a nerdy white-haired professor started adopting the speech patterns of a catty gay Republican troll.

My main takeaway from the New Yorker piece is that philosophers are insufferable.

They all live in the same house. That’s what piqued my interest

The only article I could find even offering an opinion of the situation was this one:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-marriage-monster/

Some choice excerpts include: >I believe that under ordinary circumstances – meaning, unless there is infidelity, substance abuse, physical abuse, or serious mental abuse – husbands and wives should live sacrificially through unhappy marriage, for the sake of giving their kids stability.

Ben comes across not as a heroic self-sacrificer, but as a beta male who endures humiliation at the hands of his wife because he doesn’t know what else to do.

The fact that she has autism explains a lot. A fundamental characteristic of autism is the inability to empathize, or at least empathize easily

Not the kind of person I would like to find myself standing shoulder to shoulder with, personally. [edit] the writer of the article I have posted, that is

I’ll pass.

Oh her. I knew of the story.
Of course she podcasted with Robin Hanson. Of course.

I mean this is weird to go public with but honestly I don’t think this qualifies.

I want to sneer, it feels like I should be sneering, but the article doesn’t give me much reason to.

Her family seems happy, her ex-husband and her current husband seem to be on good terms. Unless there is more to the story I can’t resent her, and without that the sneering is kind of empty to me.

Am I missing something?

Agnes Callard is a weird human being but is a platonist/aristotelian who seems dubious of rationality, economics, and AI really the kind of person who should be featured here?