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Mark Dingemanse

@markdingemanse.net

Language, interaction, tech • papers https://markdingemanse.net • blog https://ideophone.org • more colourful on fedi https://scholar.social/@dingemansemark/ • POSSE: Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere

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Ursula K. Le Guin Bot@leguinbot.bsky.social · 2d ago

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Mark Dingemanse@markdingemanse.net · 2w ago

This exactly what happens when you implement CoT-prompting as a reward signal and call it reasoning, as described in my 'Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies' doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies

The ubiquity and ease of use of large language models makes it easy to overlook the interactional and interpretive processes at play. To understand the attraction of this technology we need to trace i...

doi.org

Post nicht verfügbar.
Dr Madeleine Pownall@maddipow.bsky.social · 3w ago

New paper! Values such as openness, transparency, collaboration, clarity about conflict of interests have been promoted by women for *decades*, and now we have reframed this around the branding of 'open science' that we start to take them seriously. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Women as the First Open Scientists: Five Stories of the Neglected Contributions of Women in (Social) Science Reform History - Madeleine Pownall, 2026

Recent years have seen growing emphasis on “Open Science,” a movement to enhance research transparency, robustness, and accountability. Prompted by concerns ove...

journals.sagepub.com

Mark Dingemanse@markdingemanse.net · 3w ago

Revised! Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies

The ubiquity and ease of use of large language models makes it easy to overlook the interactional and interpretive processes at play. To understand the attraction of this technology we need to trace i...

doi.org

Mark Dingemanse@markdingemanse.net · 3w ago

I like Meehl's (1956) motivation for introducing the "Barnum effect", but a better term was proposed before him by George Forer (1949): the fallacy of personal validation (Forer is the reason some call this the Forer effect, but in general I think clear descriptions beat eponymous terms)

Many psychometric reports bear a disconcerting resemblance to what my colleague Donald G. Paterson calls "personality description after the manner of P. T. Barnum" (13). I suggest—and I am quite serious—that we adopt the phrase Barnum effect to stigmatize those pseudosuccessful clinical procedures in which personality descriptions from tests are made to fit the patient largely or wholly by virtue of their triviality; and in which any nontrivial, but perhaps erroneous, inferences are hidden in a context of assertions or denials which carry high confidence simply because of the population base rates, regardless of the test'sTitle page of Forer 1949: The Fallacy of Personal Validation: A Classroom Demonstration of Gullibility
Mark Dingemanse@markdingemanse.net · 3w ago

One of my contributions as a reviewer of this paper was to nudge the authors to look beyond minimalism (M) to explain the #ideophone sequences they argue M has little to say about. If one's goal truly is to minimize syntactic machinery, better be aware of —and point readers to— other approaches ☺️

Finally, if, as we have said, the sequences under consideration have a flat syntax, then it may be necessary to engage with a broader conception of grammatical structure, either within the generative framework or from compatible alternative frameworks. The former would include consideration of grammars that are not context-free or context-sensitive (e.g., regular or subregular grammars), while the latter would include work that considers indication and depiction alongside the well-studied mode of description (Ferrara & Hodge 2018), and work from typology and grammaticalization that shows why ideophones come to occupy the grammatical positions they do (Güldemann 2008). In both cases, there is a truly minimalist goal to achieve: to account for the observed structure by importing just the appropriate amount of syntactic machinery.
Guillaume@gguitang.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Cool read this morning: "Ideophonic sequences: Challenging the asymmetric syntactic structure hypothesis" in @glossa-linguistics.bsky.social. Two main questions: 1) Do ideophone sequences function as constituents, and) 2 Do they have flat or hierarchical structure? doi.org/10.16995/glo...

Mark Dingemanse@markdingemanse.net · 4w ago

Useful tip if you get the occasional media request about your research: it is perfectly okay to ask time to formulate written answers rather than plan a phone or live interview. Among the benefits: you have much more control over precise wording and you can do it at your own weird times

Jed Brown@jedbrown.org · 4w ago

Chatoo believes that more use of "AI" is inherently "upskilling" and that women would be eager users but for sexist perceptions about their use. That framing is itself paternalistic, especially considering how deeply resistance is rooted in feminist scholarship. This paper with a necessary reframe.

“The fear women have about being judged for using AI is not perception,” said Chatoo. “It is measurable. It is real.” This means that companies will not close the gender gap in employee AI adoption solely through technological training or incentives. Employers must also convince women that they will be evaluated fairly for their AI use. “You cannot upskill people out of structural bias,” said Chatoo. “Closing the AI adoption gap means addressing not just how people use AI, but how that use is evaluated.”
Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 4w ago

> “when men use AI, we question their effort; when women use AI, we question their integrity” [...] (Pringle, 2026). What is framed as a literacy deficit is [actually] a form of rational refusal [&] within that frame, the only direction of travel is toward more adoption. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Mark Dingemanse@markdingemanse.net · last mo.

Sometimes when I have lots of urgent things to do I fall down a rabbithole and have some fun. Here's a lengthy blog post on the history and material culture of Akpafu, the community I worked with when doing field research for my PhD thesis ideophone.org/the-mawu-and... #Ghana #archaeology #iron

The Mawu and the mountains: some historical and cartographical notes

The Mawu of present-day Akpafu relate in their oral histories that their ancestors lived in the mountains between their current…

ideophone.org

Lauren Woolsey@cgsunit.com · last mo.

"A tech-first perspective tells us to stop worrying and embrace the inevitable. A values-first perspective asks how we can best uphold the values and standards that make our research well-rounded, robust, and reproducible." Great short commentary! Links in quoted post.

Mark Dingemanse@markdingemanse.net · last mo.

Out now! For robust research, center values, not technology, w/ Christine Cuskley DOI doi.org/10.1017/S014... PDF pure.mpg.de/rest/items/i... Our commentary on "How linguistics learned to stop worrying and love the language models" by Futrell & Mahowald

Cover page of For robust research, center values, not technology, by Mark Dingemanse and Christine Cuskley
M.J. Crockett@mjcrockett.bsky.social · last mo.

Proprietary LLMs create “a scientific edifice built on shifting sands, where“findings” have best-by dates haphazardly set by commercial parties” Brilliant short piece 👏

Mark Dingemanse@markdingemanse.net · last mo.

Out now! For robust research, center values, not technology, w/ Christine Cuskley DOI doi.org/10.1017/S014... PDF pure.mpg.de/rest/items/i... Our commentary on "How linguistics learned to stop worrying and love the language models" by Futrell & Mahowald

Cover page of For robust research, center values, not technology, by Mark Dingemanse and Christine Cuskley