It's basically inevitable that AI's rise will lead to artistic movements celebrating the rejection of slop - that revel in creating things so novel that they could not be generated by models.
And I'm completely here for it.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7OI...
What radicalized you?
Being a bicycle commuter.
18th century: Washington helped introduce smallpox inoculation to the Americas
19th century: Revolutionary French army invented canned food
20th century: US military invented Cheeto cheese dust
I can wrap my head around Trump not understanding soft power, but it boggles my mind that Mr Warfighter doesn't understand combat readiness
Logicians of BlueSky! Does anyone know how to overhaul a whole wikipedia article. The one for necessity and sufficiency is fundamentally wrong.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessi...
Plus, academia has taken me places (Europe) I'd never have ended up otherwise.
It's alright. I'm currently chasing industry jobs that look pretty cool. Fingers crossed!
My partner (senior lecturer on track for leadership) and I ("postdoc" currently "between posts") were talking to someone who had been an lecturer for a decade in the 80s. We were trying to describe how things have changed, and we finally settled on "the dream's dead."
Mamdani is starting to look like one of the most important politicians in a generation, not because of his policies, but because of his ability to counter the Reagan-era narrative that taxation = pissing your money into the void
Mamdani is starting to look like one of the most important politicians in a generation, not because of his policies, but because of his ability to counter the Reagan-era narrative that taxation = pissing your money into the void
Someone should point out to military hawks that no one has killed more Americans in the 21st century than other Americans.
At the very least, we might manage to teach a bunch of people about base rate fallacies
Been working on a dumb side project about the Simpsons that requires me committing very early and visibly to the duration of the golden age
Not sure if I want to deal with the fallout of committing to what my heart truly believes: Seasons 3 to 13
Last summer saw an entire months-long saga of researching, buying the tools, and working up the courage to replace my bike's press fit bottom bracket. Then redoing my work. And it's still not quite right.
But hey, the tools will pay for themselves eventually, right?
I feel seen.
Taking an online course with prerecorded powerpoints, and every 10 or so slides the instructor has inexplicably decided to add the jankiest AI version of his face "narrating".
It's somewhere between a muppet and whatever these things are called:
I'm watching the Wire too, and I looked up the etymology "white slavery". It is somehow both more racist and less racist than it sounds.
First used for Europeans kidnapped by the Barbary states, because of orientalism about harems, it narrowed & shifted to be about sex trafficking more generally
www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRsO...
Academic disciplines, subdisciplines, and subsubdisciplines have their own language, concepts, and background knowledge. It’s an inevitable part of collectively developing a framework to understand the world with anywhere from dozens to thousands of other people. Depending on how complicated this framework is, learning everything can take time on the order of decades. And if you lack the requisite understanding, work geared primarily to other experts just won’t make sense. Therefore, not understanding a text is not evidence that a speech act wasn’t accomodative.
The inference from "this scholarship doesn't strike me as deep or intelligible" to "this scholarship is bad" is such a laughably bad one, yet it appears again and again.
Kind of wrote about it a few months ago here: substack.com/home/post/p-...
I wrote up my response.
sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2026/04/ther...
Academic disciplines, subdisciplines, and subsubdisciplines have their own language, concepts, and background knowledge. It’s an inevitable part of collectively developing a framework to understand the world with anywhere from dozens to thousands of other people. Depending on how complicated this framework is, learning everything can take time on the order of decades. And if you lack the requisite understanding, work geared primarily to other experts just won’t make sense. Therefore, not understanding a text is not evidence that a speech act wasn’t accomodative.
The inference from "this scholarship doesn't strike me as deep or intelligible" to "this scholarship is bad" is such a laughably bad one, yet it appears again and again.
Kind of wrote about it a few months ago here: substack.com/home/post/p-...
I don't want to put anyone on blast by posting a link. But it reads a lot like a summary of someone's 2 page research statement
Looking at an academic job post in my area that looks suspiciously specific. There's not a socially acceptable way to email someone and ask if they already have a candidate in mind, right?
(Sorry for going full Kuhnian)
Animal studies don't have that big "we fucked up" poster child of Unit 731 or the Stanford prison experiment for people to latch on to.
Not to say those sorts of studies don't exist - I've read my share oft them too - but there hasn't been any big event or media frenzy to force the issue.
Just spit-balling: when it comes to examples of exceptionalism about how we treat Nazis vs others (see: failure of Allied powers to come to terms with their own genocides) historical come-to-Jesus moments seem to be key. Medicine had this moment after WW2 & psych had it after Milgrim and others.
Unfortunately, you got context-mogged
Shots fired by psychiatrists
An old prof of mine loved to word essay prompts like "what would Dewey say about ...", and would invariably tell the story about the student who painstakingly cut out individual sentences from the readings, arranged them as an essay, and turned it in
Once had a student copy my feedback on their mid-semester essay in their final exam
One part about living in the UK that still trips me up after a decade is that while engaging in mandatory small talk about how terrible the weather is, one is absolutely forbidden from acknowledging the existence of worse weather
