philstudent1992

Here are some reasons to think that there's not sufficient evidence to assert that the NYU admission posts are fake: 1) Nothing makes sense, and PhD admissions are sheer chaos. 2) Emails and calls have gone out at seemingly random times in the past (UCSD rejection emails at like 3 am, calls very late in the afternoon/evening from other programs) 3) WW1 victims of PTSD displayed weird shaking behavior for years after their service ( ), and getting a call from David Chalmers is probably just about as shocking as watching your friends die from poison gas. That said, I think the proper response is to suspend judgment: maybe more NYU acceptances will get posted tomorrow, or maybe some evidence will come to light that these two are fake. But there's really no proof either way right now.

Thanks so much for doing this, Nat. As for USC rejections: I don't think this latest one is cause to think they haven't all gone out yet. The website had my rejection up Sunday morning, but I only just now got the email telling me to check the website. So I think the latest post is probably someone already rejected who didn't check until they got the email.

I agree. I'm inclined to think that time of posting doesn't correlate one way or another with legitimacy, but there are other reasons to think that both posts are fake. Still, I think it's best to suspend judgment -- although the first post must be fraudulent, I think there isn't enough evidence on the other one for any conclusion to be reasonable.

Call me non-neurotypical, but I think it's possible that one of the posts might have received a phone call at a time earlier than 11pm, but not posted her acceptance on Gradcafe immediately.

Here's another option: committees reach the final list of admits one at a time in an order that doesn't track "definiteness." For instance, maybe Harvard knows they want 2 ethics people, 2 metaphysics people, and one epistemology person in their incoming cohort, and they decide on admissions for each of these areas in turn. So they decide on 2 epistemology people to accept (expecting one to turn them down), then go on to think about their ethics and metaphysics people. But before the whole process is done, the POI contacts one of those epistemology people. So here, we have a good explanation for why someone would be notified before everyone else that doesn't entail that if you haven't been contacted by now, you must be a worse candidate than that person who was notified.

Claiming the Miami acceptance. Email including details of the assistantship package and of a campus visit.

You might be interested in GSU's MA program in neurophilosophy. Although I don't know what "social cognition" is, and so don't know if anyone works on it, Andrea Scarantino works on the philosophy of emotion, Neil Van Leeuwen works on the philosophy of imagination, and Dan Weiskopf has done some stuff on the philosophy of psychology.

No offense intended, but isn't this a bit facile? I'm not sure that the average PGR rank of an applicant really tells you much. As you say, there are plenty of worries about the legitimacy of the PGR (see, e.g., this excellent recently published piece http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/meta.12161/abstract ), and even if the PGR is legitimate, surely condensing the overall quality of the schools an applicant is applying to to literally one number seems overly reductive. IMHO you'd get much better information asking how many schools total, or what people's areas of interest are, etc.