Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous
This Minneapolis ICE shooting video has become a political Rorschach test: Some people see a peaceful protester getting murdered, and other people are fascists
Although the twentieth century finds male practitioners firmly in control of formal Western medicine, women doctors and healers still have important inventions and innovations to their credit. For example, although three men received the Nobel Prize for penicillin, women participated significantly in the team effort that brought the drug to medical usefulness. Women had discovered the mold’s usefulness centuries or perhaps millennia earlier (Halsbury 1971, p. 19; Raper 1952, p. 1), and one nineteenth-century Wisconsin woman, Elizabeth Stone, an early antibi otic therapist, specialized in treating lumberjacks’ wounds with poultices of moldy bread in warm milk or water: she never lost an injury patient (Stellman 1977, p. 87). In the twentieth-century development of the drug, it was a woman bacteriologist, Dr. Elizabeth McCoy of the University of Wisconsin, who created the ultraviolet-mutant strain of Penicillium used for all further production, since it yielded nine hundred times as much penicillin as Fleming’s strain (Bickel 1972, p. 185; O’Neill 1979, p. 219).4 And as Howard Florey, leader of the British penicillin team, was quick to point out, it was Dr. Ethel Florey’s precise clinical trials that transformed penicillin from a crude some time miracle worker into a reliable drug. It was also a woman, Nobel laureate and X-ray crystallographer Dr. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who finally deter mined the precise structure of the elusive penicillin molecule (Bickel 1972, p. 216; Opfell 1978, pp. 211, 219). Women were also involved in developing the sulfa drugs that preceded penicillin. For instance, it was a married pair of chemists, Prof. and Mme. Tréfouėl, and their colleagues at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who split red azo dye to create sulfanilamide (Bickel 1972, p. 50). At least two women have invented new antibiotics for which they receive sole credit. Dr. Odette Shotwell of Denver, Colorado, came up with two new antibiotics—duramycin and azacolutin—during her fi…
reminder of cryptogyny, the hiding of women's contributions to science, technology, engineering, and medicine:
"although three men received the Nobel Prize for penicillin, women participated significantly in the team effort that brought the drug to medical usefulness."
www.jstor.org/stable/jj.55...
Jim Carey post.
Being disliked by people with bad judgment is a compliment.
title: Cheap science, real harm: the cost of replacing human participation with synthetic data author: Abeba Birhane abstract: Driven by the goals of augmenting diversity, increasing speed, reducing cost, the use of synthetic data as a replacement for human participants is gaining traction in AI research and product development. This talk critically examines the claim that synthetic data can “augment diversity,” arguing that this notion is empirically unsubstantiated, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful. While speed and cost-efficiency may be achievable, they often come at the expense of rigour, insight, and robust science. Drawing on research from dataset audits, model evaluations, Black feminist scholarship, and complexity science, I argue that replacing human participants with synthetic data risks producing both real-world and epistemic harms at worst and superficial knowledge and cheap science at best
I wrote this brief talk on why “augmenting diversity” with LLMs is empirically unsubstantiable, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful and a nice surprise to see the organisers have made it public
synthetic-data-workshop.github.io/papers/13.pdf
A rare case of AI being used for biting social commentary. Commendable.
There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom
AI users really think they are doing something. Like, they 'prompted' and therefore MADE something. It's really interesting to me.
If AI could create new physics and they prompted an AI into Nobel prize physics they think they would get the prize because they think they did the work. It's strange!
Actually, make that two curated links
People are tired of AI, and companies are running out of ideas for how to jam it into things.
Oh hi, I wrote this in 2017.
“Instead of defanging governments and big corporations, the distributed ledger offers those domains enormous incentive to consolidate their power and influence.”
Glad I have never needed to know what it means to have your fixer flip
I see the “technically it’s ephebophelia” crowd is out today, so just a reminder that A) this is NOT a case where technically correct is the best kind of correct and B) the minute you say this, the gods dump you in the “irredeemable creeper” basket and wash their hands thoroughly after touching you.
Table 1 Typology of traps, how they can be avoided, and what goes wrong if not avoided. Note that all traps in a sense constitute category errors (Ryle & Tanney, 2009) and the success-to-truth inference (Guest & Martin, 2023) is an important driver in most, if not all, of the traps.
NEW paper! 💭🖥️
“Combining Psychology with Artificial Intelligence: What could possibly go wrong?”
— Brief review paper by @olivia.science & myself, highlighting traps to avoid when combining Psych with AI, and why this is so important. Check out our proposed way forward! 🌟💡
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat: Did Women Ruin the Workplace?
Did the New York Times ruin journalism?
Generative AI runs on gambling addiction — just one more prompt, bro!
pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/g... - text
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWng... - video
The discovery of three Culiseta annulata mosquitoes was confirmed this week by the Icelandic Institute of Natural History, which said the mosquitoes likely arrived by freight. n.pr/4qeQhWS
NEW NUMBERPHILE VIDEO
It's a wild and epic ride.
youtu.be/XhA5U9pFXuU
Universities moved from saying “thank you for supporting what we do” to asking “what do you think we should do?” Claudine Gay Meanwhile, state funding began its long decline as a percentage of university budgets. This period marked the birth of modern fundraising as we know it today: multi-year campaigns with ambitious targets, sophisticated donor research, and the emergence of an art and science of cultivation. Universities began asking donors for both money and engagement.
The choreography of modern donor influence is a complex dance where universities anticipate donor reactions, donors express preferences without making demands, and decisions get shaped by conversations that never officially happened. Claudine Gay
The most perverse form of modern donor influence: when universities find themselves protecting donors and their activities from criticism or negative attention.
"The real Q is what donor influence costs: what do we lose when the pursuit of knowledge becomes secondary to the cultivation of relationships? These costs accumulate slowly, almost imperceptibly, embedding themselves in the daily practice of academic life."
nias.knaw.nl/news/from-st...
"[Those policies] are not realistic" is rich-speak for "This policy is going to cost me money and make me like those dreadfully, ordinary plebians."
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
But they’ll still shove it into everything, force-feed it to everyone (unwanted integration into software, unproven edtech etc), externalize costs, induce unpaid work. …
Very good article and thread about open alternatives to google scholar, which clearly will go away when its founder retires. The @barcelonadori.bsky.social movement is getting a lot if attention and OpenAlex.org a lot of support. The Lens currently looking for new home about.lens.org/expressions-...
The University of Chicago also has a long history of backing the dictatorial takeover of democratic nations. The US-backed coup of Chile in 1973 was a continuation of program that the University of Chicago had helped launch to undermine the country's resistance to US economic interests.
Study uncovers local views on climate adaptation in flood-prone community and how political ideology can make a difference. Read it now: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #Climate #Flooding #Research
I call this the reverse Turing Test. If an LLM is producing something passable, it doesn't mean the tool is intelligent, it means humans were being asked to write something meaningless
In other words, we are in the final few years of pre-AGI civilisation, after which nothing may ever be the same again. To some the prospect is apocalyptic, to others, like Hassabis, it’s utopian. “Assuming we steward it safely and responsibly into the world, and obviously we’re trying to play our part in that, then we should be in a world of what I sometimes call radical abundance,” says Hassabis. He paints a picture of medical advances, room-temperature superconductors, nuclear fusion, advances in materials, mathematics. “It should lead to incredible productivity and therefore prosperity for society. Of course, we’ve got to make sure it gets distributed fairly, but that’s more of a political question. And if it is, we should be in an amazing world of abundance for maybe the first time in human history, where things don’t have to be zero sum. And if that works, we should be travelling to the stars, really.” Is he getting too close to his own technology? There are so many issues around AI, it’s difficult to know where to even begin: deepfakes and misinformation; replacement of human jobs; vast energy consumption; use of copyright material, or simply AI deciding that we humans are expendable and taking matters into its own hands.
“We are going to create a machine that solves all our problems” is a preposterous assertion and should be treated as such. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
