Found myself wanting to say that "consuming text is easy and passive, unlike video which requires active effort to watch" and then realized this is the opposite of what basically every other human being would say.

Going through an issue of the TLS from last December, I find a philosophy pun courtesy of Nigel Warburton that surely deserves wider currantsy.

His answer: we don't engage with the world as it is. We engage with "pseudo-environments", simplified pictures of reality we construct from the information available to us. We act on those pictures as if they were the real thing.

The number of students who attend my office hours absolutely cratered a couple years ago. At first I assumed it was just a slow semester but it's been consistent. I assume that instead of asking me questions, they're asking ChatGPT instead. Not yet sure if that's a good thing.

Disadvantage to Substack that I hadn't thought about before: can't use a library to check out That One Article you need access to.

This is 1) incredibly stupid 2) very bad

max asher miller@maxashermiller.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Colorado Democrats just introduced a bill in the state Senate to make it MANDATORY for OPERATING SYSTEMS TO USE AGE VERIFICATION DURING SYSTEM SETUP. Even if you do not live in CO, you need to call up the bill's sponsors and scream. It WILL come to you next! www.biometricupdate.com/202602/color...

Starting to feel about autocomplete the way my parents' generation did about GPS. If I don't have to type my credit card number in every time, or my girlfriend's phone number, how am I gonna memorize it? That used to just happen, but now I need to actively drill it.

Have a lot more sympathy for all those people scheduling meetings that could have been emails, now that I regularly get complaints that my emails should have been meetings.

So all this "what are you going to do with a degree in X?" handwringing is sort of nonsense. Unless you know you want to go down a pretty specific technical career path, your undergraduate major just does not matter that much. Which I wish we conveyed to students better.

I am stealing “Elephants are big!” “No they’re not, they’re grey!”, thank you very much.

It’s true that some scientific results can’t be replicated. And it’s also true that some people do the right thing when that happens:

Taking It Back, The Right Way

science.org

Realizing I resist critiques of algorithmic short-form video because they make me feel smug and self-satisfied and I don't trust that. I have zero interest in short-form video _or_ algorithmic feeds; judging them as also morally unvirtuous feels self-aggrandizing.

I'd forgotten just how long it takes to do a full install of LaTeX on a windows computer. > Installing [3409/4876, time/total: 04:05:05/05:53:47]: postnotes [1107k]

Our SPS group circulated this:

If you have a sufficient critical mass to actually topple the regime, then by all means, optics don’t matter anymore. But until then, that’s what protest IS. It’s an exercise in optics.

You aren't fighting for his base, you're fighting for the loosely attached folks who are why you won by 5 in 2020 but lost by 1.5 in 2024. Like, I can't stress enough: the country is not 50% MAGA base and 50% progressive - there are a lot of 'persuadables' and you need them angry at Trump.

Also, I should note, I am saying that in this circumstance forbearance is *effective* which isn't the same as saying it is fair or necessarily just. It is the shortest road to a just outcome, but true justice will need to involve some accountability for many of these ICE goons.

From a strategic standpoint, it seems important to remember that the 'center of gravity' of a protest movement is not control of the streets, but public opinion. The challenge that creates is a common strategic challenge: the emotionally satisfying thing is not the effective thing.

Social scientists have professional incentives to focus their work on what is _novel_ to people in their field, who they view as their core audience. The mental switch to be made is that what is _obvious_ to people in your field is often not obvious to ordinary citizens, and hence is valuable.

Unironically they should buy up the domains for about 60 defunct local newspapers in swing states. Hire two reporters to write almost exclusively about highschool sports and new restaurants opening with every 10th article about how the local GOP is screwing over people.

Teddy Schleifer@teddyschleifer.bsky.social · last yr.

NEWS: Democratic mega-donors are debating plans to spend tens of millions of dollars on a range of influencer plans to "find the liberal Rogan." We've got pitch decks, investor meetings, and internal docs. One Democrat has a spreadsheet of 26 different proposals. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/u...

Folks are going to say, "well, they were (legal) immigrants" - but if the administration is packing people off to a foreign slave-labor prison without due process, you, me and the public have exactly the same evidence that they're not citizens as you do that they are gang members. Which is none.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last yr.

Presented with evidence that innocent people who are not members of any gang were wrongly deported to a slave prison in El Salvador, Homan flatly insists that all of them were in fact gang members (but he's unwilling to detail any evidence showing it)

On a daily basis, I marvel at how many people in putative positions of power are willing to help obliterate American democracy. The US has faced a series of very easy moral tests in the past decade and it’s staggering how often people in once-respected positions have failed.

I think the academic community can help US academics, as well as academia in general, by providing safe haven for datasets that are being targeted by the Trump administration.

Trying everything - and forcing them to bust every law and norm - helps you set those conditions. And also, like, there's some small chance that the norms hold and you avoid violence, which you *really* want to do. You *really* *really* want to avoid violent scenarios if at all possible.

If you think this is going to end with mass protests in the streets or - heaven help us - large-scale violence, then your focus needs to be setting the conditions so that when that happens you win. And the conditions are: very low admin. legitimacy and popular support, engaged and enraged public.

I hope more people come to understand this. Life equips us with certain categorical boxes like “intelligence.” When something like LLMs appears that requires a new box, we would much rather stuff it into one of our old ones, no matter how bad the fit.

Henry Farrell@himself.bsky.social · last yr.

1. @alisongopnik.bsky.social, Cosma Shalizi, James Evans and myself have a new piece in Science on "AI" Large Models, pushing back against much of the collective wisdom about what they can and can't do. Official below, unpaywalled at henryfarrell.net/large-ai-mod... . So why this now?

my actual unironic advice to undergrads is to major in something you're actually passionate about/interested in, and then try and *minor* in either CS or stats. you would be surprised how how much being the person who knows a substantive thing and can do some basic computer/stats stuff can pay off

Those who know me know I was highly critical of what I saw as some of the rhetorical excesses of the campus protests. Khalil and I wld probably get into a spat immediately. It's all the more important for people who believe as I do to say clearly, the protections of the law are for everyone.

Kyle Cheney@kyledcheney.bsky.social · last yr.

A federal judge in NY has blocked any effort by the Trump administration to deport Mahmoud Khalil – whose arrest and imminent deportation Trump celebrated on Turth Social today — until further proceedings play out. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

For those playing along at home, ideally for a good letter: 1) You have taken more than one class with them, ideally at least one of which was a small (35 students or less) course. 2) You have gone to office hours at least once. 3) You have discussed your career plans with them.