New post: Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? (No. No it can't. Come on, now.) davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...

i suspect many liberal uk journalists rolled their eyes at this line 6 months ago

on this team and gonna keep saying: behind the extremely thin veneer of concern and responsibility of anti-Bluesky takes is the desperate attempt to portray something that is obviously their problem as though it were our problem. nice try. go with God, have a blessed day

'If you have a protest no one wants to hear / Just attend a rally where the big shots meet / Strip to your hide and walk down the street’. Victoria Peretitskaya explores the history of a 1960s folk song and the protest that inspired it.

birdwatching

New podcast: very grateful to my hosts Alex and Dara at Inspire Us. Recorded at SOAS in London. www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZUO...

Raises some important issues but also ignores the fact that many Humanities staff outside the magic circle are facing redundancy. They are naturally willing, indeed desperate, to apply for entry-level Oxbridge posts. The situation is grim. 1/2

“UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has shown that deep reading, defined as sustained immersion in a text, builds the cognitive circuits required for critical analysis, empathy and perspective-taking in ways that skimming, scrolling and short-form video simply cannot.”

“What we are seeing is the weakness of strong states. Regimes that rely on repression face a challenge: The more force they deploy, the more they risk exposing their own brutality to politically persuadable observers. Overreach doesn’t just project strength; it also undermines legitimacy.” Gift link

What happens when everything can become a bet? Based on British Academy-funded research by @sarah-mills.bsky.social, this article explores the rapid rise of prediction markets – and what they mean for regulation, public trust and democracy. 👇

In which people CHOOSE TO VOTE for a female plumber representing a party with broadly liberal values and an unelected life peer declares it to be the end of liberal democracy.

not accepting election losses, casting non-white votes as illegitimate, are defining features of trumpian fascism

'Analysis of Home Office quarterly data reveals the number of overseas nurses granted entry to the UK has fallen by 93% over three years. Just 1,777 overseas nurses were granted entry in 2025, compared with 26,100 in 2022.' Meanwhile, nursing programmes are at risk in many UK universities.

Last term I tried an experiment: I walked into my Tech and Design Ethics class, admitted that I had *no idea* what to do about ChatGPT - so I would let them figure it out. As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class. Here's what happened:

This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions. It does not. It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed. 🧵 1/

To complete the T-levels, UK students have to do a work placement. What we discovered this week is that an employer can cancel a placement on a whim, putting a student’s qualification & university place at risk. Seems like a shockingly big design flaw. This week has been very stressful.

Bookbinders and restorers in the 1930s and ’40s helped the Nazi regime create a database that was used to persecute and kill Jews and others who were deemed racially impure, a British researcher has found.

A week ago, we had an open conversation amongst senior academics in leadership roles and their use of LLMs (in both their leadership capacities and individually). Small group, not representative, but it already taught me a great deal about the diversity of perspectives (& their consequences). 1/

Relevant to today's conversation about AI's inherent sexism, here's an email from cognitive psychologist and early AI theorist Roger Schank, arguing to Epstein that women can't be truly intelligent, because they care too much about what other people think.

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point. I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

In what many are calling the most CV efficient strategy ever, I have my 2026 paper out already (relax for the rest of the year comrades!) and it's actually a bit of a joke one. Link here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... and abstract attached. But I'll just tell the story of how it came to be....

Bridget Phillipson on Kuenssberg is saying she wants student finance to be fairer, which is odd given Labour has just made it much less fair. She also says she wants to improve access for people from poor backgrounds, which sits badly with bankrupting the universities those students typically go to.

i've decided not to listen to the audio of a teacher reporting a kindergartender because frankly I don't want to become the person that that event would turn me into. but one thing I hope we are collectively coming to grips with is what it meant that we have lived among such people this whole time

Not “considers abolishing the system which put this appalling man in line to the throne in the first place”, then

A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

I’m glad this is written, but we need to also address ethics and morality: a lot of Americans support ending birthright citizenship by ignoring or changing the law, or they don’t care either way. To persuade them, it’s not enough to say what the law says; we need to address what the law should say.

Sharing from a friend, a passage from the Leveson Inquiry regarding the British actor Denholm Elliott, who died of AIDS in 1992. Three years after her death, the News of the World journalist Paul McMullan did the following to his daughter—neither a celebrity nor even someone of public interest.

A rogue's gallery of people that dedicate their lives to hurting others: Gove, Stock, Scruton (from beyond the grave), Yarvin, Starkey. The power of money. Disappointed a 2026 'Scrutopia' headliner is philosopher Anthony O’Hear (his 1980 book, Karl Popper, was okay), only now looked up his politics

I was never a fan of Kant’s 'What is Enlightenment' but now it feels like generative AI has made it very relevant for students

'If they choose to take up the Voluntary Severance Scheme, open to all academic staff in the School of Humanities and the School of Modern Languages, staff essentially make themselves redundant in return for a good pay-out.' 9 months' pay; 3 weeks to decide. 1/3

Our court system is largely working, with the exception of the most important court

A busy week for constitutional commentary Some of my drivel On the Palestine Action court victory - at @prospectmagazine.co.uk within a couple of hours of judgment: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/th... And later - further points on my own blog: emptycity.substack.com/p/what-the-p... / >

“When Citizens United was decided in 2010, billionaires had spent $18 million on the 2000 election, $13M 2004 and $16M in 2008. Then came the deluge. In 2012 it was $231M, and nearly doubled again in next three election cycles —to $682M in 2016, $1.2 billion in 2020 and $2.6 billion in 2024.” Gift:

A bit long but here’s Marx from the 1844 manuscripts providing an exposition of Goethe and Shakespeare on the power of money that all happens to sum up exactly where we are right now. (Reminded of this passage by Epstein’s capture of prominent academics.)

Stanford is doing this because it wants to

Six (more) historians in my department have taken (been pressured into) voluntary redundancy. Since we cross teach, supervise, & tutor, politics staff now have more work to do. The solution? Pressure staff (those with the biggest caring & teaching commitments) to move onto teaching only contracts.

This is the funniest headline I seen in a long time. And bravo to whoever underlined the desperation with the juxtaposed link.

Just dropping this piece I wrote here. This entire administration is the ugliest of ugly freedoms: www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/o...

Scrapping REF should be “serious’ option”, says Manchester VC. Duncan Ivison questions “usefulness” of “massive, bureaucratic” research assessment exercise. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

that was a message in a whatsapp group, wasn't it? labour leadership: "we should all post in support of kier - he's only 18 months into a 5 year mandate after all" 2👍 4😕 2 💯 *7 minutes later* "we can do this" *no emoji reacts*

Good to see some Labour MPs showing a backbone, but the problems with these proposals on settlement aren't limited to being applied retrospectively: they also favour the well-off, discriminate vs disabled people, women & people with caring responsibilities and are probably unworkable

Oxford friends, Sam and I will be launching our book THE WAY OUT on the 12th of February at All Souls, as part of the Refugee Studies Centre Seminar Series! Please come along if you want to know what we've been writing for the last five years... www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/events/the-w...

The Church of England is developing a reparative justice scheme in recognition of its complicity in trans-Atlantic slavery. Project Spire has been attacked in Parliament and the right wing press with claims of flawed historical research. What’s the truth? alanlester.co.uk/blog/the-arg...

' Ronald Barnett describes the contemporary fascination with skills as a form of ‘bewitchment’ (others have put it more strongly elsewhere)....When individuals are defined in this way, they become more easily interchangeable in the labour market, increasing workers’ vulnerability.'

"You are waiting for someone else to speak, but the words that don’t come out of your mouth will never come out of someone else’s." Audre Lorde (and she's right)

One of Labour's many, many problems is that despite some of their supporters shouting about how they have only been in power for x amount of time, it is the things they are doing in power which are losing them support more than the things they aren't. That's not on the previous government. 2/

More on the UKRI/STFC funding squeeze. Significant quote: “It is clear that no UK university will want to open lecturer positions in curiosity-driven research if such lecturers would not be able to attract much national funding." KCL's Lucien Heurtier. www.theguardian.com/science/2026...