Yep. Yesterday JSTOR was unreachable. Aaron Swartz was hounded to death for far less.

Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦@merz.bsky.social · 4h ago

#AI #LLM Something I've not seen commented on is the explosion of bot-impeding pages (e.g., via Cloudflare) that now appear before web pages load. The cumulative time waste for human users has got to be in the billions of person-hours. An immense burden imposed on everyone by the AI-bro assholes.

only just catching up with @alondra.bsky.social 's important article on social science and AI in Daedalus. A lot in it, but the following quote stood up for me: "There is a strong case that social science should refuse proprietary AI models entirely....

Great thread. I am not sure why I imagine Fleabag-style glances at the audience as this hellhole scenery unfolds.

Jane Rosenzweig@janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 12h ago

Trying out the features in Claude for education. Join me as I see how it "helps" me write a research paper. My chosen topic: "AI and education". /1

Holy shit. www.wired.com/story/a-civi...

Dentistry. For heaven's sake, my first experiences with teeth problems were in East Germany. Narcotics were not standard. Dentistry is the reason why you would not want to travel BACK in time.

Revan@revan.eurosky.social · 21h ago

So this is basically one of the entry points to becoming a reactionary

Generative AI is catnip to the men who miss female sycophants katemanne.substack.com/p/a-culture-...

A Culture Hooked on Generative AI is a Culture that Misses Female Sycophants

And we have missed a central reason why AI is a feminist issue

katemanne.substack.com

Obligatory

How it used to be is that historians would meditate on a historical event and the facts would kind of come to us, as if in a dream. You’d maybe do like two facts a day, ten if you’d taken psychedelics. But now, AI can download and sort like 3000 facts a second. I’m out of a job. It’s a game changer

Megan is right. History is sorting facts. Every historical period has a list of innate truths that exist independent of human deduction. Each fact is an absolute, unchanging, abstract essence. I have so much free time now that my computer can sort the facts for me.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · yesterday

"History involves sorting and organizing hundreds of thousands of facts" I remain astounded by how loud and wrong people are about what history actually is.

BOOM. The AAUP is suing Texas A&M University System over their censorship policy that prohibits faculty from discussing topics & viewpoints related to race, sexual orientation, & gender. www.aclutx.org/app/uploads/... 1

Neuroscience in Chile, and across Latin America, does not lack talent or ideas, but the systems that make science visible—prestige journals, conferences and networks—increasingly price its researchers out, argues @medelero.bsky.social. #neuroskyence

Scientific talent is global. Access is not.

Neuroscience in Chile does not lack talent or ideas, but the systems that make science visible increasingly price its researchers out.

thetransmitter.org

#wmnhist #womenshistorymonth - Why are women philosophers often erased from collective memory? – aeon.co/essays/why-a... via @aeonmag

Why are women philosophers often erased from collective memory? | Aeon Essays

The history of ideas still struggles to remember the names of notable women philosophers. Mary Hesse is a salient example

aeon.co

If you're intrigued by all this stuff about Mary Hesse and fancy buying a copy of her book MODELS AND ANALOGIES IN SCIENCE, good luck. You can read it at archive.org or from your library...

As a scientific society, we're committed to inclusivity and making sure everyone has a spot at the table. Registration is $500, we secured a discounted hotel rate of $250/night, & flights are $700+. Lunches are an extra $30/day. Travel awards for $200 available. See you there!

This resource, which was started by Matteo Collodel, is also fantastic: www.collodel.org/hesse/ -- Incidentally, I attende a luncheon at Wolfson College with Mary Hesse, on the occasion of her 80th birthday (I think Matteo may have been one of the invited guest there too). Her work is inspiring.

Website in Honour of Mary Hesse

This website is meant to celebrate and promote the work of the British philosopher and historian of science Mary B. Hesse.

collodel.org

@smellosopher.bsky.social the lady vanishes The history of ideas still struggles to remember the names of notable women philosophers. Mary Hesse is a salient example by Ann-Sophie Barwich aeon.co/essays/why-a...

(2/2): social-epistemology.com/2015/06/24/s...

Symbol Systems as Collective Representational Resources: Mary Hesse, Nelson Goodman, and the Problem of Scientific Representation, Axel Gelfert

Author Information: Axel Gelfert, National University of Singapore, axel@gelfert.net Gelfert, Axel. “Symbol Systems as Collective Representational Resources: Mary Hesse, Nelson Goodman…

social-epistemology.com

Great to see Mary Hesse's work getting wider attention, thanks to @smellosopher.bsky.social Ann-Sophie Barwich's Aeon article getting picked up on social media. So I thought I'd share this note I wrote 11 years ago, on Hesse's perceptive remarks on how mathematical formalisms drive science: (1/2)

Philip Ball@philipcball.bsky.social · 3d ago

"For Hesse, metaphors were not passive representations of things but constituted conceptual tools actively shaping scientific thought." This is precisely why I've cited Hesse in my (much less profound) writing on scientific metaphor. aeon.co/essays/why-a...

Behind the bewildering transformation of British universities, are management consultants being paid millions Really proud to have this vital piece on our unis are being gutted from the inside by @jheathershaw.bsky.social on Democracy for Sale. Do read democracyforsale.substack.com/p/inside-bri...

Inside Britain's university crisis

As teaching staff face job loss, their bosses have netted pay rises and bought advice from a “vampiric” management consultancy, writes Prof. John Heathershaw of the University of Exeter

democracyforsale.substack.com

Excellent thought provoking piece by @smellosopher.bsky.social which highlights (again) the processes by which we forget brilliant women scholars

Philip Ball@philipcball.bsky.social · 3d ago

"For Hesse, metaphors were not passive representations of things but constituted conceptual tools actively shaping scientific thought." This is precisely why I've cited Hesse in my (much less profound) writing on scientific metaphor. aeon.co/essays/why-a...

"For Hesse, metaphors were not passive representations of things but constituted conceptual tools actively shaping scientific thought." This is precisely why I've cited Hesse in my (much less profound) writing on scientific metaphor. aeon.co/essays/why-a...

The lady vanishes by @smellosopher.bsky.social "The overwhelming absence of women in intellectual history is constructed. And we won’t prevent the fading of women from future history simply with an occasional reminder about the existence of a few remarkable individuals" aeon.co/essays/why-a...

looks fun, even for an old phenomenologist type like me.

Ann-Sophie Barwich@smellosopher.bsky.social · last mo.

It is out and OPEN ACCESS: "The Senses: Perception and Experience" (Cambridge University Press, Elements: Philosophy of Mind, ed. by @keithfrankish.com) #PhilSky #booksky #HPBio #philosophy #cogsci www.cambridge.org/core/element...

This article by @smellosopher.bsky.social on Mary Hesse, of whom I was/am scandalously ignorant is a brilliant introduction to a brilliant and important thinker about how science works.

‘More than just objects’: Australian book sellers raise alarm over ‘horrific’ destruction of rare titles to feed AI

‘More than just objects’: Australian book sellers raise alarm over ‘horrific’ destruction of rare titles to feed AI

Secondhand booksellers believe they may have been caught up in the AI supply chain that sees old books scanned then destroyed

theguardian.com

this is my new favorite diagram

AlphaFold was always bait-and-switch; now Google confirms it. A hyper-narrow bioinformatrics model with actual science bolted on whose guesses can be experimentally checked was never a licence for socially-applied slop at scale, but it's done its job. Effort transferred to LLMs.

I want the German version, offering Sauerkraut with Werner Herzog-style metaphysical heaviness.

Katie Mack@astrokatie.com · 4d ago

I’ve seen a lot of my colleagues’ interactions with Claude working on research problems & it would be easier for me to accept it as a serious scientific tool if it didn’t end every single response with the LLM equivalent of “you want fries with that?” — constantly trying to goad you into asking more

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science

As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...

arxiv.org