Okay so apparently SocArXiv does not consider archaeology to be a social science? What

It's hard to even explain what a disaster this is for the US economy in the short-term — as well as US innovation and industry in decades to come. Immigrants and foreign students at our universities are—as always have been—the wellspring of American invention and innovation.

Interesting way to show LLMs are not thinking like humans. Like, a 5 year old might do a lot of stupid stuff, but not this kind of error, where it's drawn something that is solution-like but clearly nonsensical.

This quilt pattern is known as "the president said WHAT?"

Always easy to dunk on this stuff, but what I also try to consider is... imagine this existed at precisely the loneliest moment of your 20s. How confident are you that you wouldn't use it? Like, this almost co-existed with COVID quarantine.

this isn't a 'post-liberal' world - the ideology displaced by fascism was conservatism my latest for @liberalcurrents.com www.liberalcurrents.com/liberalism-d...

maybe heading towards some of those weeks where decades happen

Well. Mobilizing the U.S. Army arctic specialists is not a good sign. I’ve trained with some of these guys. Can’t imagine they all are happy about the situation. But will they follow insane orders? Most likely. www.thedefensenews.com/news-details...

I think there is a very real way that scrolling/swiping apps, social media, gamification, and gambling everywhere has completely attention-hacked US society into a new form of social relations based entirely around a kind of incidental behaviorist totalitarianism.

Australia's rooftop solar installations have been declining for a few years now - the only surge in recent months is thanks to a generous government intervention for batteries. Solar doesn't grow as fast as it needs to without strong gov't policy helping it along theenergy.co/article/roof...

I think we need to acknowledge that Trump is a once-in-a-generation genius at corruption, strongman posturing, or whatever got him where he is. Doesn't mean he's even marginally smarter than a pigeon at anything else he does

Note how NYT continues to do "analysis" focused on Trump as a rational actor in international relations matters. He isn't. And treating him this way is dangerous sane washing.

And the speaker goes "Well, it's not my area of expertise. But there's this woman in Minneapolis who has been really pioneering this field." And Beth-Ann thinks "oh my god, amazing, there's somebody in my own city." "Her name's Beth-Ann Bloom ..." And she thinks "Oh no, it's me."

one concern i have is that at some point there are going to be voices within the Trump administration-- there probably already are-- who feel wrongly that conflict with Europe is inevitable but correctly that US military edge over Europe is greater now than it will be in a few years

If you have tenure consider publishing less... doi.org/10.1038/d415...

At this point, conspiracy theories about how literally everyone with power at the national scale in the USA is involved in the Epstein files is the hopeful view. The more likely, grimmer theory is that they actually want to hand over all the power to the loudest, most obnoxious person in the room

From @zachweinersmith.bsky.social

Déjà la 3è version pour la cage anti-drones sur blindé VBCI développée par la SMR (section de maintenance) du 16e BCP Avec l'ajout de 93 hérissons à base d'élingues métalliques en plus de la cage pour faire exploser la charge encore plus loin de la tourelle (et des capteurs/senseurs) Crédits : 2e BB

Putin’s achievement in Greenland will be the destruction of NATO without the loss of a single Russian soldier

The Trump move on Greenland is celebrated as a huge victory on multiple fronts by Moscow. As Danish papers and the Danish intelligence service have documented, the whole effort to persuade Trump that he "needed" Greenland was born in the Kremlin. kyivindependent.com/russia-welco...

Tonight on Kremlin TV: pundits rejoiced about Trump's approach to Greenland, which they surmised is "delivering a catastrophic blow to NATO" and is "truly tremendous for Russia." It's the successful culmination of a decade-long influence operation by Russian intelligence.

The EU just signed a colossal trade agreement with the “B” in BRICS (opposed by far left), and major progress is expected in 2025 with the “I“. GUE/NGL are right to condemn centrist zombie Atlanticism, but they‘d cut defence spending and oppose most trade deals with global south. Equally unserious.

Not QTing as it could be read as hostile, but I think (as everything with Trumpism) it's a supercharged version of a preexisting dynamic. Namely, the way in which people are made to mutilate their psyche and thei social expression on the autel of Gender

"Thorough literature review" does a lot of work here. What is the literature you must review, precisely? If you conduct a study on retinal encoding, do you need to cite every study on retinal encoding? Only those with a close enough set up/research question as you? What is close enough?

There is way too much conflicting common knowledge and reported variance about the use experience of LLMs.

Academics will soon be paid exclusively to apply for funding they will never get... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-04060-x (Paywalled, ironically.) This parallels what Nate Hagens has called the Mordor economy, where we spend all our energy to get, well, the energy we spend to get […]

Roughly, people do what they expect themselves to do. And most people expect themselves to act like good people. So if you want changes in behaviour, you can't just point to something bad. You need to contrast it against something good, so this gets reinforced instead

More broadly, imagine dumping, like, every 19th century diary into a machine and being able to ask questions! My personal fantasy is to be able to go to a single non-special street corner in London and look up every reference in history to that single spot.

It was when I saw that the Groupement de Commandos de Montagne already have forces deployed and in training in the conditions in Greenland that it was clear just how on-ne-rigole-pas-Ricain this is. bsky.app/profile/derm...

My Greenland prediction: 1.) The U.S. won't attack. 2.) It won't attack because it was stopped. 3.) It being stopped will be used to tar people urgent about it being stopped as hysterics

Continuing to build a game a day by just asking the AI. This is SocFight: a fighting game where historical sociologists beat each other up. Will Max Weber's Iron Cage attack defeat Durkheim's dangerous Anomie? (Asked Claude Code to use OpenAI's image generator when needed).

If we want to survive in a world sliding back toward the law of the strongest, we have to retaliate. Show the US we won’t just “turn the other cheek.” That means striking back on trade, and being militarily prepared. Europe must stop thinking press releases are enough.

"I think if a critical mass of us decided to take the fight to the enemy, many more would quickly join. And I think we would find the forces arrayed against us much weaker than we initially supposed." www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-g...

Sometimes we talk of infantalizing racism and this is a rare Platonic expression of that

scientific community is trained in reading papers presented as defense of preset conclusions (or hypotheses to the same effect) and struggles to react meaningfully to exploratory research written in an exploratory way. "what if this is a thing? let's see. huh turns out it isn't!" baffles reviewers.

My grandpa, who escaped Hitler, who watched his family get shoved into cattle cars (and whose sister was literally separated from her mother by Mengele), had a refrain: "hope, hope, hope." Try to carry this fwd. It's hard, yes, but do it bc what choice do we have? joshsternberg.com/2010/06/12/c...

once again saying: our ancestors accomplished more, with less, against worse.

More than 200,000 Danish citizens have signed a petition to buy California as a response to Trump’s attempt to take Greenland. They say they will provide Californians with “rule of law, universal health care, fact-based politics, and a lifetime supply of Danish pastries.”

Your daily reminder that to this day, no randomized study has established the need to drink for human life. We need to know!!!

Why should we read Henri Bergson's "Creative Evolution" today? There is more than just one reason, see my extended book review, just published in Mind: academic.oup.com/mind/advance... #Bergson #philosophy #philbio #ProcessPhilosophy #biology #science #HenriBergson

Neuroscience is moving away from a modular view of the brain because the brain is not modular. It is network of murmuring neurons. Great metaphor by @pessoabrain.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/o... #neuroscience

To close my Aella-posting arc, here is here being absolutely based on adultism / discipline. aella.substack.com/p/chattel-ch...

Just read up on her blog, and it turns out that the very thing she encourages men to do to get women to sleep with them... ...is the same thing that she describes as the most destructive form of abuse her father inflicted on her: aella.substack.com/p/frame-cont... I don't have the words

Because I can, I'd like to remind everyone of the Active Inference Institute course on Active Inference and the Social Sciences: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkOR... This explains in the most accessible manner we could manage the basics of Active Inference, and its application in the social sciences

If you are organizing folks in Minneapolis right now, you may find this guide to Signal for beginners by @mshelton.bsky.social useful: freedom.press/digisec/blog...

Happy 25th birthday to Wikipedia, the world’s most trusted and widely used encyclopedia, with users around the world accessing its wealth of information and participating in free information exchange.

I think the one key change since the Bush era is that the Republicans absolutely dropped the pretense that power had any grounding in democratic legimacy, and Democrats reacting by desperately trying to save that pretense.