New blog post up! "The Antidote to Screen Time is Story Time" meresophistry.substack.com/p/the-antido...

I wrote a short "bill of rights" for good writing. meresophistry.substack.com/p/my-classro...

I wrote a short "bill of rights" for good writing. meresophistry.substack.com/p/my-classro...

My fourth grader came home today and said, "I don't like AI because it seals ideas into boxes."

I really think that if a person isn't moved by the movie Aftersun, I don't have much in common with them.

My book has a cover! "AI Through the Experts’ Eyes: Communicating Complex Ideas" Link here: upittpress.org/books/978082... Available September 1st!

Has anyone done a rhetorical analysis of AI ceo speeches?

My book has a cover! upittpress.org/books/978082...

Here is how you practice a talk: Make your slides. Group them in 3-7 slide chunks. Practice each chunk 3-5 times. Practice the entire talk twice. Time yourself for each chunk on a handwritten table.

Desk reject on two manuscripts three days apart is pretty harsh. One editors said we didn't use enough "advanced statistics" and the other claimed the manuscript wasn't "theoretically developed enough."

Maybe 18 hours is too much. Like four hours is too much.

Writing for algorithmic audiences (2017). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"neither credible nor attractive" is basically academic peer review.

I'm so proud to share my student's newspaper column! Alex drew on our readings from this semester about social media. The column digs deep in all sorts of interesting observations. This is a truly good read, enjoyable, thoughtful. Ambitious. dailyillini.com/opinions-sto...

I wrote about the solution to this in terms of firm reading last December: meresophistry.substack.com/p/firm-readi...

Definitely a lot of space for empirical studies about the effects on people from reading AI writing

I literally thought we all knew this a year ago

in my social media class, the final was a handwritten assignment to get off screens. They had to keep a physical journal. there Is some irony here with the canvas outage.

Out today in @science.org: with the amazing Haochuan Cui, Yiling Lin, & @lingfeiwu.bsky.social, we analyzed 3.6 million scientists publishing 1960–2020. The findings reshape a century-old debate about age and scientific creativity.

That’s a lot of ram for even an advanced user.

The type of military vehicles that once patrolled the streets of Fallujah are now driving down Main Street. And the data systems built to track immigrants won’t stop there; they’re destined to be used to track American citizens, too.

Maybe deciding that education should be inherently tied to the internet was a bad idea in the first place?

Just got a student email congratulating me on my anti-Canvas take from months ago

Here’s how to buy a paper grade book 😜

Me, to my students 9 months ago: "I don't trust instructure, that's why you email me assignments." Me, today:

There's a kind of displacement in the idea that ai is both A) so easy to use that we won't need people to know how to do things B) itself something that requires significant skill and training to use

Was literally ranting about this yesterday -- Is it so important and complex that we have to integrate it into literally every classroom at every level of education? Or is it so simple and intuitive and useful that literally every educator can effectively integrate it into every classroom?

This names the exact feeling I’ve had for like 3 years

Are large language models mathematically rational? I swear I’m not dodging the question in this post, but it depends on your perspective.

Look, the internet didn’t make college obsolete. There are literally thousands of free online courses from MIT, Stanford, and like but no one finishes them. I do think academics need to have a stronger media presence. but if the internet and MOOCs didn’t collapse things, AI isn’t either.

17 weeks until the fall semester!

I find it incredibly telling when men like Dawkins are convinced that the LLMs are ‘intelligent’ because it ‘agrees’ with them or tells them how insightful or clever they are

New blog post up about qualitative research! It's less than 500 words, so I hope you'll read and enjoy. "Six misunderstandings about qualitative analysis in an era of GenAI" meresophistry.substack.com/p/six-misund...

"But prediction markets shorten that time and distance. They give people an immediate feedback from betting on an event, because they can see the probabilities change in real-time, and the payouts provide a more short-term impact." 🫠

New blog post up! "The resonance of good writing" I hope you enjoy reading this post. I would be grateful if you shared it too. meresophistry.substack.com/p/the-resona...

I need people to understand what inflation *is* It's an increase in the money supply. The US government did this during COVID. Largest stimulus in history (2.2 trillion). Increase in prices is the *outcome* of inflation.

Another excellent, thought-provoking & insightful posting from @johnrgallagher.bsky.social on #genAI writing & how inherently meretricious it is (choice of adjective very much in the spirit of the piece😅)👏👇

New blog post up! "The resonance of good writing" I hope you enjoy reading this post. I would be grateful if you shared it too. meresophistry.substack.com/p/the-resona...

“I don’t want tomatoes on my sandwich because they make it wet.” Advice of a kindergartner

The easiest way for first year writng courses to introduce AI is to have students install and demonstrate proficiency with Zotero or another citations manager.

I never intended to study AI or machine learning. In my dissertation, I had a question that required a precise answer. To answer, I scraped a Facebook group. I made a single table. No one on my committee asked about but I had like 6k comments and posts. I felt like I could do so much more….

There are still a LOT of comments. Almost everywhere.

New CV up, built on LaTeX (overleaf). publish.illinois.edu/johnrgallagh...

Where do you stand on numbering your CV? If you do, how do you distinguish between genres (articles, proceedings, books, chapters, etc.)

Week 14. Inbox zero. *Boxes all screens up. Buries them in the backyard.*

Aftersun (2022) remains the best movie of 2020s so far. It is a thermonuclear experience and almost feels like an entirely 1/1 genre in terms of filmmaking.

I swear the apple watch worked and the oligarchs have been trying to shove glasses into people's faces for like 10 years. The glasses will never catch on.

Here is a fairly vague post: Sometimes you might have a colleague fighting the good fight for you behind closed doors. And if that colleague succeeds, no one will ever know.

Designing a cool scraping tutorial for my social media methods class. I'm glad Wikipedia never locked down it's site.

Whenever I have a paper under review, I check the submission site every few days even though I will get an email when the reviews are back.