This NeurIPS workshop claims that LLMs "provide an important foundation for exploring human cognition, emotion, and social interaction" This is flawed logic, as @lmesseri.bsky.social and I argue here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited to welcome @lmesseri.bsky.social, @cameronbuckner.bsky.social and @carlbergstrom.com to campus a week from today for the “AI and the Nature of Science: Concepts and Controversies” event. 14.11.25, 1400 - 1800.

Pop-up AI defacing your article critical of AI captures a lot of what it feels like to work in this space. @lmesseri.bsky.social

Important work revealing limitations of using LLMs as human surrogates. Note, however, that even if LLMs' textual outputs were perfectly human-like, they would still be poor models of human cognition, as @lmesseri.bsky.social argue here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Yesterday's NYTimes platforming of the heinous perspective that women have ruined the workforce was bad. But to post a photo of the the winner of the Great British Bake Off first thing Friday morning? Have you no respect for your readers?

Yale Anthropology is doing an open rank search for environmental anthropology. Happy to answer questions in DMs (I am not on the search committee). We’re a lovely department (imo) and given the current higher ed atmosphere, Yale has been doing a decent job at getting us thru (knock on wood).

I am participating and reviewing submissions for this workshop. so let's get some interesting proposals here, yeah? If you are an STSer/anthropologist working on how AI is changing ideas and practices in the sciences, would love to have you in the conversation.

I don't write about outer space much these days, but I do have two new essays out on the topic. The first is a short afterward for a recent collection of critical outer space studies. I wonder why our space imagination has become so narrow and draw inspiration from NK Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy

Yay! Out now!! Thanks to @lmesseri.bsky.social @niiyokamigaabaw.bsky.social, Alexandra Ganser, Stefanie Dunning, Natalie Treviño, Matt Harvey and Frédéric Boone for their wonderful contributions and afterwords!

For the Minnesotans out there, see post below for upcoming book talk! My host, @justcode.bsky.social, wrote a lovely review of my book right when it came out. Also it's the final days of the @dukepress.bsky.social Fall book sale (thru Nov 9). Use FALL25 code on the press website to get 50% off!

Some Sunday reading, if you are so inclined (open access pre-print linked in the thread comments 👇

Love it, seasonally appropriate, no notes

stubbled across a short NYT piece by Toni Morrison from 1973. This line stood out: "For this year fantasy itself lost its genuineness. The normal lines of communication between sham and reality had broken down."

Spotted on LinkedIn... a bad AI summary of our new paper on risks of AI in research. Please make it stop.

'New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested.' 1/2

I’ll say it straight: It is unbecoming, undignified, cowardly, and shameful for a institution as revered and respected as the University of Virginia to grant an audience in 2025 to those who are committed to destroying science, free thought, human rights, and the rule of law.

A new article by @lmesseri.bsky.social and @mjcrockett.bsky.social whose crucial work on the illusion of scientific understanding among AI zealots cannot be taught and discussed enough! We look forward to reading this new work.

Another brave article by @lmesseri.bsky.social and @mjcrockett.bsky.social . Essential reading if you care about the harm AI celebrationism is doing!

This study shouldn't have been necessary. In fucking cognitive science, no less. I'd say I couldn't believe it, but @avastmachine.bsky.social showed the historical connections in his book The Closed World. But since it was necessary, I'm very glad it happened. Will cog sci pay sufficient attn?

This is the way (for me). Piloted it with my graduate seminar this semester. I've been marking reading responses by hand, returning them the following session. Unlike what i had been doing for my whole career, which was feeling like i had to mark immediately and return through Canvas.

OpenAI: Hallucinations are mathematically inevitable. Also OpenAI: here's an AI web browser. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/t...

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

Huge thanks to @mjcrockett.bsky.social and @lmesseri.bsky.social for digging into all that work to produce this survey and their insights. The problems that cogsci research is facing are real, but "AI surrogates" are not a solution.

This link to the article (published in Trends in Cognitive Science, I forgot to mention) should be OA for the next 50 days: authors.elsevier.com/c/1lzmh4sIRv...

in which @lmesseri.bsky.social and @mjcrockett.bsky.social upend the increasingly pervasive premise of the LLM-fabricated human research subject (and the histories/ ideologies of cognition baked into the experimental "tasks" they're called upon to complete) at its epistemic roots

Can the human sciences exist w/out the human? Proposals for using AI as human research subjects suggest yes. But @mjcrockett.bsky.social and I respond with, ‘not so fast.’ In fact, silicon subjects say more about the problems of the research paradigm than the promises of AI. 🚨New article, thread 1/

It’s significant that they concede AI might be ok for science and math classes. Many sci and math teachers similarly want AI banned, esp in intro classes. For the same logic outlined in this editorial. Students also need to build basic science literacy and intuition, and that won’t happen w LLMs

3/3 for universities I have been affiliated that have not signed the extortion compact. TGIF

Information that, incidentally, once it has been digested and spit back out by an LLM might possibly be incorrect or misleading.

What are doctors for? What are teachers for? What are friends for? What are lovers for? What are parents for? What are any of us for?

i was searching for something today and noticed that the AI Overview linked to a paper of mine, including an utterly incorrect (but seemingly plausible) summary of said paper. This is a bad product!

My best advice to aspiring authors of scholarly books is to read other scholarly books recently published by your target press. This may seem obvious and yet is not!

many graduate students (who are otherwise very talented) don't know the style of italicizing book titles and putting article titles (un-italicized) in quotes. I'm wondering why this is? Genuinely asking this question, and perhaps also wondering if this style convention is changing?

UVA school of data science is hiring this year—searches are open to folks from all disciplines. We need humanists & social scientists to teach ethics/data & society courses + do research that supports school’s mission to be holistic in the study of data science: datascience.virginia.edu/faculty-jobs

We are hiring! Prospective PhD students in environmental history, history of science, history of technology and STS interested in the climate and environmental impacts of AI look here. Please share in your networks. #envhist #histsci #AI #anthropcoene

The Virginia Senate just told UVA it’s not getting state funding if it accepts the compact since UVA exists to serve Virginia, its residents, & their interests—not be a tool of the federal govt. Scoop from our student newspaper, who’ve been doing vital reporting www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2025...

The president of MIT has declined to sign "the compact". Full letter, as shared with the MIT community:

I can’t believe my life is being affected by the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment newrepublic.com/article/2013...

Valuable info about the Physics Nobel Prize today from Prof. Joseph Barranco at SFSU on Martinis and Devoret being a grad student and postdoc in Clarke's lab at UC Berkeley & Clark and Devoret being immigrants. "California *public* education made this happen. Immigration made this happen." ⚛️

Michel was my neighbor for many years. Who knew when he was sitting on the condo board that he would soon be a Nobel Laureate. It was an honor to accidentally receive his mail on occasion.

fieldnote feb 2010. Baby me putting some things together... "They were employees from Tesla Motors, an electric car company owned by Elon Musk. Musk is also the intrepid owner of spaceX AND a donor to the mars society. A NYTimes article also just tooted him as the future of human space flight."

i'm much madder at Big Tech than i was when i first submitted this article. I offer my tracked changes revision as evidence of entering the no holds bar stage of my career.

This is extortion. Faculty, students, staff, alumni across the country need to get to their Presidents & Trustees today. Just say no. This blackmail only works if most everyone folds. Capitulation now means the end of American higher education for a generation. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...

Horrifying.

About to give the first of a few Fall book talks. If you’re in Princeton and free in an hour or so, come through! anthropology.princeton.edu/events/land-...

Glad Science collected this data (though the results are entirely unsurprising). GenAI cannot accurately summarize scientific papers, sacrificing accuracy for simplicity. And shame on publishers who are pushing genAI summaries on readers. Great way to accelerate an epistemic apocalypse.

"the AI apocalypse ...is simply our own world... Instead of superintelligent AI, we have super-wealthy tech oligarchs; like the hypothetical AI, the oligarchs want to colonize the universe; like the hypothetical AI, the oligarchs don't seem to care abt the desires and well-being of the rest of us."

This has a healthy dose of schadenfreude And/but this product makes me nervous. Zuck's quest is to "connect." For him this means having the digital always present. He has never understood the tradeoff by which being connected digitally disconnects us from those with whom we are physically present.

Turns out, Mapquest still labels the body of water to the west of Florida The Gulf of Mexico. Welcome to the resistance, Mapquest.