maybe: leif weatherby
@leifw.bsky.social
Hegel, cybernetics, Buffalo Bills
We’ve all heard and had so many conversations about and with LLMs lately... Leif Weatherby (@leifw.bsky.social) does some deep work on and thinking about these models in his new book 'Language Machines' (from @uminnpress.bsky.social). 💙📚 #booksky #ai #llms wellredbear.com/leif-weather...
It’s super funny that Claude is named for one of the most laconic men in the history of science
Excellent essay by Leif, Tyler, and Ben. Interestingly, reification of “internal states” is one of the pitfalls of the intentional stance of Dennett, something we are seeing a lot of AI interoperability research succumbing to.
Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social · 2mo agoIn _The Ideas Letter_, Leif Weatherby, Tyler Shoemaker, and I wrote about the creation of reality through pseudoscience, religion, and psychosis. Of course, the piece is mostly about AI.
Kalman’s critique is newly relevant as we rush headlong into outsourcing much of our intellectual work to what Leif, Tyler, and Ben call reification machines.
This little sentence in last month’s encyclical helped (=goaded) @leifw.bsky.social, @beenwrekt.bsky.social, and me to tie off some threads that spun out of the Cultural AI conference in March “Reify This”: www.theideasletter.org/essay/reify-...
Reify This
The authors contend that contemporary efforts to render AI systems interpretable rest on a mistake: reification, the process of treating abstractions and statistical artifacts as if they were concrete...
theideasletter.org
Tyler Shoemaker@t-shoemaker.bsky.social · 2mo agoWell then
come for Chris Olah on stage with the pope, stay for the failure of dictionary learning and the collapse of two traditions of reification
Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social · 2mo agoIn _The Ideas Letter_, Leif Weatherby, Tyler Shoemaker, and I wrote about the creation of reality through pseudoscience, religion, and psychosis. Of course, the piece is mostly about AI.
Video of the talk I gave at the Cultural AI conference at NYU back in March is finally up (thanks again to @leifw.bsky.social and @t-shoemaker.bsky.social for having arranged this excellent event). www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYu9...
Part 4 | Cultural AI: An Emerging Field
YouTube video by Remarque NYU
youtube.com
"The definition of human is implicitly reduced to the narrowing set of behaviors, traits, and capacities that machines do not yet possess—which leaves secular humanists defending the shrinking ground that is left." Nice h/t @leifw.bsky.social in @theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...
There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI
It’s sin.
theatlantic.com
the answer to "do you beat your wife" would presumably be just "no" - it's super funny that he can't muster the correct trick here ("when did you stop beating your wife?")
ddɐ˙ʎʞsʞɔɐlq˙uǝʌs@@sven.blacksky.app · 2mo agoDrives in bad faith takes too
The funniest part of this is that this reaction basically amounts to saying “Mr Turing, don’t you understand that math is mechanical?”
conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · 2mo agoincredibly clarifying to read that people were telling Alan Turing in 1951 that when he thought the computer did something cool, it was only because he did all the work for it, and that he was stupid for being impressed
i want to go on record there's a non-zero chance that the granta thing was written by Nazir as a double mockery of AI and MFA postcolonial prose; the move here would be to claim that it's a study of this collapse between aggregate style in the dying industry and LLMs - just sayin
These aren’t just em-dashes — they’re genuine pauses for thought
Doug Lindner@douglindner.bsky.social · 3mo agoHuman writers use em-dashes too
the extra stupid thing is a poetry seminar is probably the better preparation to do something that makes money
this is a lot more productive than "Richard Dawkins is a moron"
maybe: leif weatherby@leifw.bsky.social · 3mo agofor NYT op-ed, i construct a theory of the “expertise gap” that keeps people like Dawkins falling for the idea that A.I. is conscious. the gap is in the machine: complex statistical/linear-algebraic kludge —> cultural output. a new kind of reading results www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/o...
“We cannot afford to believe the marketing message from A.I. companies that we may be dealing with some spiritual essence,” Leif Weatherby writes.
Opinion | Why We Keep Tricking Ourselves Into Thinking A.I. Is Conscious
Notable thinkers keep telling us they think A.I. is conscious. That doesn’t mean it’s true.
nyti.ms
for NYT op-ed, i construct a theory of the “expertise gap” that keeps people like Dawkins falling for the idea that A.I. is conscious. the gap is in the machine: complex statistical/linear-algebraic kludge —> cultural output. a new kind of reading results www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/o...
Opinion | Why We Keep Tricking Ourselves Into Thinking A.I. Is Conscious
nytimes.com
super fun conversation with Joe and Josh! wide-ranging: AI, culture, is Aaron Rodgers cooked? (yes)
Joe Ragazzo@jragazzo.bsky.social · 3mo agoLatest from @joshkovensky.bsky.social and I with special guest @leifw.bsky.social! Find us on Spotify, Apple, Youtube, all the places. Also: Follow our new handle here: @tpmsocialclub.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO5_...
you can just do things ok but i don't want to do things
Easy Bay Friends: Tomorrow at Berkeley, the Social Science Matrix is hosting a conversation between Marion Fourcade and me about The Irrational Decision. More info and registration link here: matrix.berkeley.edu/events/the-i...
When Trump calls him “Gavin Newscum” he wants me to parse that as "new scum," right? bc that is NOT how i hear it
Cultural AI, Part I now up on Remarque's YouTube Channel, with Henry Farrell, Ben Recht, Lily Chumley and Fabian Offert www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9W8...
Part 1 | Cultural AI: An Emerging Field
YouTube video by Remarque NYU
youtube.com
talked to Shane Yeoh on his new Second Orders podcast, probably the most wide-ranging of these conversations i've had so far, super fun open.spotify.com/episode/4nk4...
AI learned language backwards and we need a new humanities to understand it - Leif Weatherby
open.spotify.com
i'm talking about Language Machines with @mbfazi.bsky.social and @emmastamm.bsky.social and Erik Voss at Columbia on Thursday docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
TML Book Talk: Cultural AI with Leif Weatherby
Date & Time: Thursday, April 30, 5.30 PM (ET) Location: The Goodman Room, Russel Hall 306 Teachers College, Columbia University 525 West 120th Street New York, NY 10027 Description: Join the Technol...
docs.google.com
Join the Digital Theory Lab for a talk with Terry Winograd on Monday as.nyu.edu/research-cen...
as.nyu.edu
I Taught Leonard “Jimmie” Savage’s Bayesian Decision Theory and All I Got Was This Fuckin’ T-Shirt
