Me: "You didn't write this, Kant did." Student: "Yeah but Kant didn't opt out after I announced I'd be using his work..."

In general I think it's hard to combat scientific misinformation when some of the best research is locked behind an academic paywall, while lots of nonsense gets published free for everyone to read in predatory journals.

There should be a meme that renders anyone who compares any aspect of social or biological life to a machine or using machine metaphors to be seen as a person of limited imagination and limited ability to understand. Down with machine thinking.

Dear @kattybkay.bsky.social: it’s not good news when you have to frame your AI story with “this _could_ be helpful”. AI news is filled with “it could”, but there is barely anything with “it did”. So what you’re actually saying say is: there is no good news.

Hypothesis based on repeated observation: wanting to be seen as a thought leader inherently will radicalise that person and gaining followers will embolden them to express that radicalisation proportionally.

This is never not going to happen, is it?

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

The reason we go down rabbit holes is not as much because they’re tempting, although they are, but because sometimes they turn out to be tunnels, not holes, and when we come out at the other end, we see the world in a new light.

Another example of how the misinformed use of AI and technology destroys fields of practice at pace and, as a consequence, collapses their economic contribution. These ere not even zero sum games, they are less-than-zero extractions, ie waste!

It was always dangerous (and wrong) to claim that science can produce objective or universal truths (but proponents felt compelled to do so to counteract challenges from God botherers). Now, that this is coming home to roost, apparently the “sane” reaction is to go 💯 for scientism? 🙈

$100 billion "to ensure the artificial intelligence boom endures" means AI is *not* "inevitable"... #NihilismAndTechnology

Thinking of all the ILRs like me, who never saw the urgency to become citizens until now where we do and how likely it is that those of us who become citizens ahead of the next election will vote for the racist extremists?

An unrelated yet astute observation: "Dead metaphors provide inexhaustible intuitive fuel for entrenched positions, precisely because they are not recognized as metaphors, and therefore very difficult to eliminate." Which may cause ethical harm. Like mistaking "war on crime" for an actual war.

Not just in higher ed. The cause for most organisational conflict is an absence of profoundly sharing perspectives.

Talking to people makes you realise: it’s more complex than you thought; very clever people can disagree with each other; this is OK, and there’s still a story to tell, one that’s usually even more interesting than you thought.

Smart glasses: so they can reframe what you see and how to think about that as soon as you see it. And people will pay for this self inflicted brain washing.

If you're on #LinkedIn, this is the link for declining their use of your data for training their AI models: www.linkedin.com/mypreference...

One of the reasons I have little hope we are not sliding into deeper polarisation when even the most thoughtful and considerate political observers cannot see the systemic nature of the problem.

State visit is a bit like taking a kid around its favourite rides at “King’s Land”.

I am (self-evidently) very interested in language. And also in technology. From that perspective, the rise of LLMs has created many new things for me to think about. One is: why is it that certain very small clusters of words are *clearly written by an LLM*? What is the quality of that writing?

Wrote recently about the shock people in their 50s experience when they can’t get a job. Many years off pensionable age and society doesn’t want them. www.thenewworld.co.uk/ros-taylor-r...

The discourse is all around deradicalising young men and the crisis among young men. The discourse would be much better targeted if it was about deradicalising boomers (and increasingly Gen Xers).

this is, hands down, the best video I've seen on men's influencer content and it's not close either

@rostaylor.bsky.social Thank you for engaging with me. I did not expect that and it is very uplifting to experience. :-)

As someone smarter pointed out to me years ago, if your metaphor uses wires or wiring or rewiring, your system thinking is still machine thinking, ie linear.

TIL It’s a waste of time trying to have a discussion (especially on social media) with narcissists. Also: social media really helps bring out people’s narcissism so quickly. I am shocked how many smart people whose books I read turn out to be narcissists.

They were sold a lie but the solution does not need to be a tool that makes the promises of the lie true ? the blockchain bros promised imaginary economics with infinite growth: lots of people lost their Economies to it. the solution was not to give an alternative tech that delivered that promise

I am pleased to announce that the book "Transformative Transdisciplinarity: An Introduction to Community-Based Philosophy", written by David Ludwig and Charbel N. El-Hani, has just been published by Oxford University Press.https://academic.oup.com/book/60871

TFW you see a failed ex politician do a podcast series that is entirely projection, choosing an angle on that chosen subject which was maybe appropriate from a scientific perspective when they were a child. 😂

Very very good letter in the FT magazine this morning pinpointing what humans definitely do when we “learn” and why machine LLM “learning” isn’t that. (And also why LLMs take up so much more energy than we do for thinking.)

No notes

Hope some MSP does the Scottish version!

Almost all of the mistaken hopes in AI is how we cannot see past the fact that it “speaks”. Understand “stochastic parrot”: whenever an AI spits out something clever, it’s because its algo managed to identify the clever texts in the data, ie some humans wrote it and the AI could reproduce it.

The collapse of quality in journalism over the last 30 years is a key enabler for disinformation and AI.

Possible social systems pattern: ideas to facilitate change that are inspired by scientific insight then in application (eg organisational change) are transformed into top-down constraining belief systems (ie dogmatic, not context sensitive). Examples: Agile->SAFe and now OKRs. #CrossingTheChasm

Pondering: in papers about complexity, a notion of "autonomy" of systems starts to become a smell of authors really wanting to leverage 'closed system' constraints and hence following a reductive approach. There is the non-reductive concept of Biological autonomy, but that's rarely what is applied.

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

And here is the real danger: letting yourself believe that AI is an assistant. An assistant is only as good as it has an understanding of the task at hand, of the habits and inclinations of the person being helped, and emotional empathy to guide the beneficiary’s needs. ½

I wrote about how AI chatbots are pumping out fake quotes, attributed to real people, at scale, and polluting our public disourse with potemkin pontification and made-up appeals to authority. And the AIs are not just misquoting famous people—it happened to me and it could happen to you. Gift link:

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m... this is incredibly good. survivors of trauma are placed in the centre of narratives by politicians, campaigners, charities, media to give their actions/policies legitimacy, with absolutely no agency over the policies & proposals & programmes that they’re “fronting”

Can anyone point me at something that explains the difference between metascience and philosophy of science? I expect there is a messy boundary, but there must be some distinguishing criteria? @devezer.bsky.social @markrubin.bsky.social @evanthompson.bsky.social @ethicistforhire.bsky.social

“She didn’t just open doors for women in tech, she built the doors and handed out the keys.” www.bcs.org/articles-opi...

This turtle on a skateboard has brought me great joy @gentlem.bsky.social @dynavox.bsky.social

I wrote a history of survivalism in fiction and reality for Guardian US and asked what it reveals about our fears and assumptions. Weirdness abounds. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Pondering how the approaches of using hiring or context-free training (e.g. external) to grow capabilities promotes narcissists’ careers in organisations.

The replies to this post, even on here, even moreso on X, are so depressing to me. We live in a world where cities have never been safer and a minority of people are denying themselves a lot of delightful experiences because they’ve gone mad online.

There is a thread going from how surveys suddenly became acceptable as replacement for observation when postulating common behaviour theories, polls used instead of observations when assessing cultural trends, to AI being used instead of scientific practice to assess information: Bias-based feedback

Is research into ego depletion and terror management progressing or degenerating? Smart people will disagree because: “The smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalizing and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view.” #MetaSci