Academic grift used to be so cheap, so hyperspecific. All for just name recognition and no advantage to your liquidity. No cross-disciplinary grifting at all.
As in Mr. Dawson's case. Sucker.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdow...
I wanted to hang with the guy from moment one.
I guess he deactivated.
It sounds like our complaints were the same, and it is a part of this whole self-serving fiasco he hasn't addressed at all, that I've seen. And I get to see it because I'm not blocked because I'm not a woman.
It's a shame he did, because he should be able to stand by his argument. I stopped engaging after he mentioned his substack was AI-generated, because why waste time, care, attn on someone who doesn't generate or stand by their own ideas. He whined that I was being uncollegial.
Today in Teaching in Higher Ed
Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.
I was just wondering from the article what his colleagues at that ISA conference must feel.
You are absolutely correct about his superiority. I've had a long career in university settings and I've never seen anything quite like the brazen selfishness this person displays.
No, you have the right notions.
This is not a man seeking to improve or challenge academia to be better (his "anti-DEI" takes are more evidence of that) but someone who is being as provocative as he can to reach big names with big money in big tech. Still irritated by all the techbros on here defending him.
In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we spoke about AI becoming as divisive as DEI, the prevalence of scholarly slop, and how Bluesky poisons academic discourse. Evan Goldstein: You’ve described the Substack series as “intentionally provocative.” What — or who — were you trying to provoke? Alexander Kustov: I started using Claude Code and other agentic tools, and I was impressed with the possibilities and functionalities. Yet I still hear a lot of negativity about AI from colleagues who haven’t used those tools. The vast majority of folks in academia still think AI is that chatbot interface from a couple of years ago that hallucinates and cannot really do anything. But that’s not what I saw on my computer. I’d written short items about AI, so I thought to try to see whether Claude could assemble that and create a coherent, substantive post. It did a pretty good job. I just posted it. Then I realized it was a big thing.
Kustov: If we look at the best agentic models right now, they can do most quantitative social-science research tasks better than most professors globally. All of the kind of caveats here are important. What made a lot of people upset about this statement is that they interpret it in a very America-centric way. People were thinking about their colleagues at Oxford and R1 research universities. But I was born in Soviet Russia and went to undergrad in Europe. I have seen a lot of human slop. It should not be a controversial statement to say that agentic tools can do better. The value of qualitative research is going up because that’s something that AI cannot do well — ethnography and actually interviewing people in person, especially in hard-to-reach places. If you are gathering new data that is not yet publicly available, that’s the highest value that you can have as a professor and as a researcher. But I just came from an International Studies Association conference. I saw so much poor research that, if anything, I’m more convinced that my original point is correct. Too many people with Ph.D.s, with tenure, are producing work that is not contributing to human knowledge.
Meanwhile, the Chronicle has decided to interview Dr Kustov, who repeats his claim that AI agents do "qualitative social science research better than most professors globally"
Imagine having tenure and stability, and choosing to shit on his colleagues in a time of great instability for academia.
My colleagues look at me with blank expressions whenever I say, "The Chronicle of Higher Education is not a trade magazine for colleges & universities. It is a trade magazine for Higher Education managers." Even when they include faculty voices its always edited from the perspective of the managers
More all green, in three this time
Still have no idea how many all-green solutions there are.
Wordle 1,767 3/6
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Our society is sick at its core
That terrible iq dataset and the laundering of intelligence differences “by race” as just what rational people should think about (by many psychologists! Shane on us!) has led us to this point.
Two men in fatigues with their hands ziptied being arrested by Capitol Police
Dozens of people in fatigues lined up in the Capitol Rotunda with signage demanding an end to the Iran War
Dozens of US military veterans were arrested at the Capitol today during a protest against the Iran War.
Photos via @frankthorp.bsky.social
March, when I first learned of this guy. A month that seems like forever. bsky.app/profile/mich...
Attention seeker, pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes in his initial posting, now but a wounded warrior in a culture war in his own head, bravely carrying that heavy responsibility of waving the banner of inevitability. Sexist mfer too.
What changed, Druckman explained, was not the trust levels of these groups, but which political party they belonged to. A major partisan realignment during the Civil Rights Era and then in the Reagan era led to a dramatic re-sorting of lower-trusting demographic groups migrating out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party. The result was a partisan gap in trust in scientists that barely existed before 2000 but has since become the largest institutional trust divide between the two parties—larger than gaps in confidence in the Supreme Court, organized religion, or the military. Over recent decades, the percentage of Democrats who trust scientists “a great deal” has risen as dramatically as it has faltered among Republicans.
ok lol I followed the links and found the original talk and that was also the thesis of the paper
a partisan sorting on trust occurred, beginning before but still heavily driven by the pandemic cps.isr.umich.edu/news-events/...
As with declining trust in universities, you cannot explain the timing or this trend, or fix it, without first acknowledging the reality that the the primary driver of these is the Republican Party’s near-total collapse into far right authoritarianism in the last decade:
bsky.app/profile/mcop...
IIT vs. Predictive Processing for realz. Heavy hitters. Protocol for adjudication, not a completed study.
Ready to rumble?
Protocol for measuring the effects of cortical scotoma on visual space perception: https://osf.io/wg6du
Sad to report on 4/20 that GOP support for legal weed is plummeting, especially among young Republicans
Part of a pattern where the liberalizing trend in GOP opinions of marriage equality and gender roles has also sharply reversed
More at @goodauth.bsky.social:
goodauthority.org/news/republi...
He's got no hand.
Right here...
bsky.app/profile/mich...
I do think this pretty convincingly shows that among the no-AI group there is probably a subset who, if they were given AI, would have offloaded the whole task, but instead did become more proficient at the task than they would have with AI, probably by learning from the reference panel.
right about here in the thread is where I'm saying yeah, yeah, yeah, cool....
Key discriminating result: discriminability increased only in Communication (d' β=0.33, ER=29, credibility=0.97). Not in Decoration or Identity. Communicative pressure forces signs apart to minimize referential ambiguity - the other functions might even suppress this. 12/
Today in ~research that is cooler than mine~
Excited to share a new review by @kocherlab.bsky.social and me:
Nature-inspired neuroscience
We discuss diverse sensory systems and behaviors across the animal kingdom and argue for their integration into neuroscience. New tools in diverse systems are making this possible ✨
tinyurl.com/y5y9du27