#academia

If anyone in history ever wants to talk about this, feel free to reach out to me! I had a somewhat unusual contingent academic --> non-academic --> tenured academic career path, but I'm happy to be useful in any way I can on this question. Big supporter of non-academic paths.

If only academic search committees agreed that it was dope

This paper is so cool and so important. Rex took a verbal model seriously and showed that it just doesn't so what people say it should do, and it opened up a ton of questions

Social structure as a form of collective intelligence: a new framework Abstract. Collective intelligence arises when group-level cognition exceeds the capabilities of individual members, enabling more effective learning, decis

Social structure as a form of collective intelligence

In our framework, we argue that social structure is a form of collective intelligence shaped by and shaping individual decision-making

Out now in @royalsocietypublishing.org w/ J Brooker, E van Leeuwen royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Common Ground on Animal Ethics – When Anthropology Meets Philosophy The workshop will feature keynote dialogues and paper presentations.

Don't miss this in London on 30 April and 1 May - attempts at "Philosophy meets Anthropology" dialogue are always 🔥🔥🔥.

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/common-gro...

bsky.app/profile/duhe...

"Penrose recognised that defeating eugenics was not just a scientific problem, but a political one too... If the history of the interactions between eugenics & genetics tells us anything, it is that political movements may continually adapt in response to a constantly changing scientific landscape"

Excellent ep!

Twelve years old maybe, liked science, my parents' architect friend said I should set my sights on a position at some place called the Santa Fe Institute.

A screenshot of a post on X (formerly Twitter) by Magyar Péter (Ne féljetek), with the handle @magyarpeterMP. The post reads: "Until 31 May, the Orbán puppets may voluntarily step down from their positions. This applies to the President of Hungary, the President of the Curia, the President of the National Office for the Judiciary, the President of the Constitutional Court, and the Prosecutor General. On 12 April, the Hungarian people voted for a complete political transformation. If these officials do not step down voluntarily by 31 May, then — on the basis of the mandate received from millions of Hungarians — we will remove them from office." At the bottom, the timestamp reads "3:04 AM • Apr 21, 2026" alongside "19.9K Views".

Peter Magyar is not playing around at all. He's going to purge every single remnant of corrupt Orbanism. This is exactly how Dems need to be when they retake power.

C’est n’importe quoi, ça.

Can chimpanzees prepare for mutually exclusive possibilities individually or collectively?

Check out our new paper in Phil Trans @royalsociety.org, led by @drelizabethwarren.bsky.social, and funded by @templetonworld.bsky.social!

And stay tuned for the next paper, clarifying the mechanism!

The Dialectics of Multi-Level Selection in Evolutionary Biology - Dialectical Systems Introduction Dialectical thinking in biology has famously been put forward by the eponymous book of Levins and Lewontin (1985). Much of the book was dedicated to the interpenetration between organisms...

The dialectical underpinnings of multilevel selection

Evolution isn’t flat: new levels arise through conflict and then reshape the very dynamics that brought them into being

I think this is generally correct, and I was saying to someone today that 10 yrs ago I was in favor of very controlled behaviors.

But in the past, estimating info from a few neurons required many trials and controlling attention and other fluctuations. We need less artifice now w/ population data.

American academics administrators: There are other countries???? Not in our 360 degree environmental scan!!

The Faculty Are the Problem, Apparently | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson Those who want to diminish the faculty’s decision-making authority, or who think universities should be run more like companies, should be careful what they wish for.

Pls read this editorial by @kirstenweld.bsky.social
about how our Provost's plan for "viewpoint diversity" hires further erodes faculty governance at my university. (And never mind "veritas"!)
8 hires--but humanities hiring generally has been frozen since 3/25.
www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

Book *Where the sidewalk ends*, with a paper label saying banned because "disrespect for truth and authority"

Dr Seuss Hop on Pop with label saying banned because "encourages children to use violence against their fathers by jumping on them"

I *think* this whole banned books display (in a Barnes and Noble) is a joke? Genuinely not sure.

There's actually a fun story behind this: the guy who was NYC superintendent of school buildings from 1891 to 1923 was an architect who believed in holistic learning, and wanted to inspire kids to rise out of poverty by giving them a sense of the possibility of granduer through construction.

Remember Chomsky's arguments about language innateness based on its putative un-learnability? Those arguments hinge on a pretty crazy theory of grammar. Here is Ted Gibson's summary of the original claims and a proposed solution in the form of dependency grammar:
tinyurl.com/yzjrpbb8

Getting LLMs to simulate “true” randomness or generate diverse outputs is surprisingly difficult. We found a simple prompting trick that solves this by having the model generate and manipulate a random string. To be presented at #ICLR2026 this week!

Blog: pub.sakana.ai/ssot

Power without accountability: The Palantir manifesto The problems with our tech philosopher kings

New, from me: Take the Palantir manifesto seriously, if not literally.
It reveals that our tech philosopher kings want public money, but without public accountability. This creates a dilemma for governments unaligned with its techno-fascist vision. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/palantir-w...

The argument from design is not worth my time to refute.

Be ready to be shocked and offended at university, students told.

These fools are about to be absolutely fuckass mad, just infuriated and offended beyond all belie, when they find out that truth does not consist in a proposition corresponding to facts but rather is a disquotational device used for blind ascriptions.

The absurdity of this framing cracked me up.

two images of the human body's circulatory system. One of them with good cable management

The human circulatory system, before and after proper cable management.

Well, the dogwhistle against the democracy that allowed these companies to be invented is even unbelievabler.

Come work for us

Brass snail

Brass snail mesuring tape

The best thing ive ever found in a garadge sale, a snail that is also a mesuring tape

Great summary by @philipcball.bsky.social! Our findings certainly don’t invalidate the central dogma, but rather demonstrate an unexpected (and cool!) structural mechanism by which a sequence-specific DNA is created in a cell. (1/6)