good news! hungary has replaced its authoritarian racist leader with a liberal racist

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge This week I was looking for info on what cognitive scientists mean when they speak of ‘domain-general’ cognition. I was curious, because the nuances are relevant for something I am researching at t…

AI slop has reached big scientific publishers: irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

As if it was not enough the amount of additional crap that is polluting internet searches lately…

The post contains many interesting resources and links if you are interested in this topic #academicSky #eduSky

The fundamental asymmetry in scientific publishing today is that people can submit absolutely mind boggling crap, and face zero real costs. Unless these kinds of things are tied to substantial costs/risks, and while we rely on volunteer labor, nothing will get better.

Although AI improves performance during assisted sessions, performance drops sharply once it's removed. And relative to controls, AI-assisted participants also gave up more frequently on test problems.

Why does this happen? Two candidate mechanisms:

1) AI resets your reference point for how long things "should" take. Unaided work suddenly feels harder than it actually is, -- a kind of hedonic adaptation.

2) AI removes the productive struggle through which you learn what you're capable of.

People still hating on the No Kings stuff are telling on themselves.

They don't *want* a popular resistance movement.

They want to be little rare political flowers who get to complain about the brunch moms but oops actually the brunch moms gave up on brunch and want blood, now

For much less than this have communists throughout history been put into jail or worse. Only goes to show that capital only cares for democracy if it is not economic democracy, and is happy to revoke political democracy when it is convenient.

In any sane world CPAC would be treated as an organised attempt to overthrow democracy and replace it with a fascist government.

Congrats to all those journal editors & peer reviewers who legitimised Lynn’s “national IQ” database by letting it into their journals. Truly, it’s a victory for academic freedom to publish papers which claim that children living in a refugee camp constitute a nationally representative sample 👏👏

Wikipedia now has higher standards than all universities

Indeed it was the case, but then Springer was like “we need to publish more, more often, and more ‘scientifically’.” Someone at Springer must be felling pretty stupid now.

In the continent, scientists used what Brits pejoratively called “french maths” (essentially Bayesian stats) to accomplish all sorts of scientific tasks in, for example, astronomy. Your point still stands, but we shouldn’t give too much credit to the eugenicists (2/2).

while I partially agree with you, one should note that there was statistics before eugenics. Gauss invented the least squares method and came up with the normal distribution some 80 years before the eugenicists (Galton, Pearson, Fisher, etc) consolidated frequentist statistics. (1/3)

It wouldn’t be garnering this much attention if the current clown car editorial board hadn’t been put there after the old one resigned in protest to springer pressuring them to change the editorial line precisely in this clownish direction. I guess springer reaps what it sowed…

Didn’t think that they meant alt-right rants when the new editors said that they were bringing science back to “Theory and Society.” Between this and the LLM garbage article someone circulated the other day, I’d say I’m probably placing that journal along the likes of MDPI…

Scrolling through this now and it's SO good. Beyond first-year college students, this would be really good for just having conversations with like... your parents. Your colleagues. Really clearly written, nicely designed, breaks for discussion questions. Sharing this widely!

Von Papen, von Hindenburg och von Schleicher annonserar sin strategi för att tygla nazisterna (1932, färgläggd från originalet i svartvit).

If you, as a social scientist, believe that AI is now a better social scientist than you, then (a) you’re probably right, and (b) sure sounds like a skill issue, y’know?

Frame ("F is happening!"): "'Generative AI' is a useful tool and does a good job generating text and code" Negation ("F is not true!"): "It generates text and code that are full of errors, and relies on the hidden labor of low-paid workers in the global South for its illusion of humanlike skills" Kirby eating the frame ("K is happening. That's why they're saying F."): "It's an inherently unethical and fascist technology whose purpose is to eliminate jobs, deskill white-collar workers, and generate disinformation at scale."

borrowing @anthonymoser.com's template. it actually doesn't matter whether "AI" is "useful".

Funny how tech buzzwords make their way into unexpected corners of our existence. Before AI there was blockchain and before that there were apps and before that everything was .com.

In sociology this would be that one generation where we went “we are educating sociologists, not statisticians, so let’s just teach them to press the right buttons on SPSS and it will be fine.”

For the ABM and networks enthusiasts: Special Issue of Social Networks on "Agent-based Modelling for Social Network Research" - co-ed by Andreas Flache, @squazzoni.bsky.social, Károly Takács and me

www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

Deadlines
Extended abstracts: 1 April
Full papers: 15 November

I'm GenX. We grew up in an all-print world. We read really fast. So, my Millennial and GenZ peeps, I beg you for the love of Bananarama, please just send me the article and not the TikTok of the dude talking about the article. In Prince's funky name, amen.

Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters Exclusive: Site takes a cut of subscriptions to content that promotes far-right ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism

“Within two hours of subscribing to NatSocToday for the purposes of this investigation, the Substack algorithm directed the Guardian’s account to 21 other profiles featuring similar content.”

substack continues to be a cesspool that should be abandoned just like x

Up next: some Mark Regnerus type writes a textbook based solely on Spencer’s social evolutionism and late Werner Sombart “blut und boden” geisteswissenschaft. I bet that one will clear censorship.

We don't sample from a distribution. Meanings are not random, and they are not individually determined. Nothing means what I say it means. Meanings are culturally determined. They are arbitrary because they are constructed, but not simply by individuals.