Dan Rosen on Taste Labs. Distinction all the way down.

On the list. My first question will be: is it really Oxbridge or just Oxford? P.s. I love that “the awkward reception of Lévi-Strauss” is one of two teasers in the blurb.

Learning from experience I wrote an essay in @thelancet.com on two seemingly different but deeply connected books by S Chigudu & S Subramani What elite status & elite-making does to how one reckons with, makes sense of, & learns from experience—lived or vicarious: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

SIMCity was the only video game I ever played. The (late 90s) model always told me I didn’t build enough roads. Maybe this is my chance?

Log utility? What a wuss! Go linear or go home: 99% extinction risk for a 100x $ gain! ft.trib.al/9fSvPdP #economics #e/acc

It’s almost as if LLMs were developed by people who think human behavior is exclusively cognitively (linguistically), and competitively, driven.

Where I’m from it’s “duck” /dʊk/ ( “alrite duk?”, “ay up dukkie?”)

Today I learnt: "“R.U.R.,” which gave birth to the robot, was a critique of mechanization and the ways it can dehumanize people. The word itself derives from the Czech word “robota,” or forced labor, as done by serfs." : @mitpress.bsky.social thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/origin-word-...

My spicy ghost pepper hot, but 100% genuine take: scholars in my specific subfield (sociology of culture) have been using generative AI responsibly in research since at least 2013. I'll even put a date on it: Mohr and Bogdanov, 2013. + www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This is a timely reflection, US politics aside. Steve Hilton recast Cameron’s Tories as benign. But that gov led not only to Brexit, but to a big rise in poverty, and huge strain on local public services. It was the gift to Farage that keeps on giving.

Priors updating! Interesting that this political economy (with words like revolt and repression) is seen as mainstream. Bowles and Gintis had the math too, but I guess Acemoglu still gets read by folks who think economics is just a game (theory).

This is outrageous. When I hire KPMG to validate my priors I expect to receive the wildly overconfident lies of a 23 year old MBA, not those of some stinking robot.

I'm excited to announce a long overdue update to {tidyclust}! This release brings support for 3 new model types: DBSCAN, Gaussian mixture, and mean shift models. We also now support parallel processing with {future} and {mirai} opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-06... #rstats #tidymodels #dataBS

This para in @theatlantic.com is not just inaccurate; it is the opposite of the truth. 1. Brown (Labour) was PM during the GFC, through May 2010. 2. The response was Keynesian; child poverty continued to fall in the UK until the Tories - and Lib Dems - reversed the policies.

Not sure how much it's being feminised, parentified, or British, but I can't stop apologising to the chatbot.

Genuinely perplexed as to how neither Anthrophic nor Open AI's models are able to accurately _count_ words.

“Hopeful”

Brilliant integration of Moral Foundations, Personality Trait, AND Political Attitude Mapping. #DND #socialscience

This generation really raised the game for the one-page CV. #DND

The DNC report, and the Labour Party situ, reminds me: last year I was asked by a “centre-left” think tank to write the social policy chapter of a book on future of Labour. This meant putting my name to “the outline draft I had ChatGPT make” of basically the policy labour+dems have had since 1991.

@karenhao.bsky.social with the Te Hiku team, after a hopeful and heart-tugging and hilarious conversation on AI #criticalAI @ the Auckland Writers Festival. #awf26

Apple photos reminds me of my NJ Transit days, and this barefaced lie:

The naming came first, then the guidelines. Without naming digital colonialism as a structure, the ethics work gets absorbed into existing frameworks. What's the equivalent naming that still hasn't happened?

The central point 👇 thanks @iami.earth

Do we know who got this gig? Curator of an "End of the World Library" in a forest. Kicking myself for not applying! www.rnz.co.nz/life/books/a...

The NZ scholarship behind it is worth knowing: Tahu Kukutai on Māori data sovereignty (Te Mana Raraunga), temanararaunga.maori.nz and Karaitiana Taiuru who coined "digital colonialism" and wrote the first Indigenous #AIethics guidelines. www.taiuru.co.nz/research/

@karenhao.bsky.social's epilogue to Empire of AI, "How the Empire Falls," centers on Te Hiku Media: a Māori data sovereignty-driven model that revitalised te reo with 300 hrs of community-submited speech, and 2 GPUs. Hear her at @writersfestival.co.nz next Fri + Sat. #awf26 #criticalAI

Hard to attract literary big hitters to New Zealand — really? Tayari Jones, David Szalay, RF Kuang, Yann Martel, Louise Erdrich, Amitav Ghosh… plus Karen Hao and Patrick Radden Keefe in non-fiction. All at the Auckland Writers Festival next weekend #awf26 www.writersfestival.co.nz/news/

'the social scientist should not be afraid to learn a lesson from his naive medical colleague: of making certain simple moral judgments, accepting certain rough and ready definitions and getting on with the job"- John Bowlby in Sociological Review, 1947 journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

The prior page: “my mummy is a unicorn… she makes magic every day” 🦄 🤖 #chatbots

Honestly, this cultural ignorance beggars belief. Thankfully, leading NYT journalists are addressing this.

Me: I can teach advanced courses across the social sciences, digital humanities, and public policy. New Zealand: Wanna be a parent coach at junior surf lifesaving? Me: I can’t swim freestyle. New Zealand: It’s all good. #ClasslessSociety

The cross-party committee has now concluded there is no good reason for the “demolition of the world’s leading #PayEquity scheme.”

If anyone in AI had actually been seriously involved in raising or even teaching a child they would know that you do not “train” humans so they “get smart”. You love them, and they develop. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Hi Auckland friends, I'll be in town and giving a couple of seminars this coming Thursday. Details below.

Just dug into this: they use within-country z-scores, which turns personality into relative rank. So cross-country variation can reflect (i) different pricing/returns, (ii) different SDs of the trait, AND (iii) different wage dispersion/inequality. "NZ differs" is not really interpretable.

A single image that captures NZ's dominant belief system and economic model #nzpol www.reddit.com/r/newzealand...

AI comes into a undergrad system that is already morphed into a hyper competitive, high-stakes signaling and certification game. We could start with admissions and scholarships: just let the people who actually, really want to learn go.

STS (science and technology studies) folks trying to navigate anti-vaxx m.youtube.com/watch?v=0nI1...

“How’s work?”

Just started Frontierlands - @hazelsheffield.bsky.social ‘s powerful, original account of people in forgotten parts of the UK preparing in quietly radical ways for climate catastrophe. It’s hopeful! uk: www.penguin.co.uk/books/456117... nz: www.penguin.co.nz/books/fronti...

@michaelscherer.bsky.social Hi Michael. Thanks for your article of RFK in the Jan Atlantic. One correction: whooping cough can still be symptomatic in vaccinated people, it is just less severe. In fact, sadly, in vaccinated infants it’s still about a 1 in 6 hospitalization rate.

“She spent 11 days in the psychiatric hospital, but it didn’t help. “ “Getting a diagnosis is not a panacea” Mind blowing insight here!! Will ‘Psychiatry’s Bible’ Add a Postpartum Psychosis Diagnosis? www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/h...

New Zealand: proudly ahead of Moldova on investment in research funding for brain health! Treble it and we'll be up there with the other post-communist transition economies!

Every conversation with the English about living anywhere other than England: youtu.be/xBkrrzuO4jQ?...

🧵 Trump administration AI policy is widely described as deregulatory. This description is misleading. What's happening is not the absence of governance but its rearrangement--intensive state intervention operating through mechanisms we don't typically call regulation. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

These intake assessments really need to be updated because what is this supposed to be an indicator of rn ffs