A hymn for those with executive function issues and impending deadlines: weedeater.bandcamp.com/album/god-lu...

I think this is valuable! It is also an argument that is very commonly made, so I would not be contributing anything unique by highlighting it. The point I am making is one that is rarely made: the pressure to be practical at all times is dangerous to our humanity.

Cultural AI, Part I now up on Remarque's YouTube Channel, with Henry Farrell, Ben Recht, Lily Chumley and Fabian Offert www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9W8...

For the subword fiends in your life: here’s a tool that helps to find token variants in HF tokenizers. We’ve been using it in Digital Theory Lab for experiments involving LLM vocab control (ablations, etc) More on the pipeline and model here: github.com/digitaltheor...

New FAccT paper in which @travislacroix.bsky.social, @sashamtl.bsky.social and I discuss the tendency in NLP to combine claims with strong everyday readings with exculpating caveats in the work. This kind of pattern. Travis has a thread: bsky.app/profile/trav...

New peer-reviewed paper w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social, @predictivebrain.bsky.social & Jakub Szewczyk! Pre-onset brain encoding has been taken as evidence that brains–like LLMs–predict upcoming words. We show that the same signatures arise in systems that cannot predict. (elifesciences.org) (1/8)

Interpretable AI peaked in 2003 with latent Dirichlet allocation.

I did an experiment today at the start of two courses I coordinate. I showed this personal statement about the world I would like to see. I did it to open a discussion about genuine desire for a different world, and how we self-censor this, even to ourselves, for fear of being naive or unrealistic.

For the 50th Anniversary of Apple, I've been working on an Apple II emulator with a pedagogical focus.

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

New work from me in AI & Society: "Systems Programming the Model" theorizes LLMs as systems-level objects. Agentic AI makes this obvious now, but my argument is that LLMs have always been systems + link.springer.com/article/10.1...

After many years of conceptualizing, overthinking, and revising, my Neo4j article is finally out. Take a look. It's available in open access. culturalanalytics.org/article/id/1...

I enjoyed talking with @kensycoop.bsky.social on the Many Minds podcast about the metaphors we use to conceptualize AI. manyminds.libsyn.com/seven-metaph...

what a crazy night for sam altman to be like "yeah we got that dept of war deal, and there's no moral concerns here"

New preprint with @psmaldino.bsky.social on the evolution of similarity-biased learning: osf.io/preprints/so... This mathematical treatment both simplifies and extends our previous simulation treatment of the subject: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This panel on surprise is co-sponsored by the MLA forum on Linguistics and Literature + the forum on Cognitive and Affect Studies, and we are hoping to put together something truly wide ranging. So if you have been doing research on surprise in any form or setting, we would love to see it!

Hosted by Acid Horizon, this free, open-to-the-public event will explore our recent book Digital Theory and its central claims. Join us! February 19, 2026 - 10AM EST. www.acidhorizonpodcast.com

This is to say the decades long efforts to defund religious studies within the broader defund humanities movement is a grave error. The world is dealing with authoritarian populisms which leverage religious traditions, beliefs, communities, & leaders to advance political goals & for profit. /5

What is your favorite finding from any paper that involves the application of computational methods to natural language data?

A neat paper I worked on, begun over 2 years ago when our concerns were more myopic, was just published today. It came out an excellent set of workshops at the Santa Fe Institute, led by the indefatigable Joshua Garland. The gist: sometimes inefficiency is good for you www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Really great new paper using agent-based modelling to show how an exploratory childhood can lead to innovation in the population at large. royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

If you're interested in a short behind-the-scenes of the retraction of a mega-metascience paper—the first of its kind (the retraction, not the paper)—this might be for you! Had to gloss over so many details to observe allotted time but happy to share an extended version of my slide deck with links.

Cells can sense the geometry of their environment, from tiny subcellular features to whole-tissue patterns. How can we engineer environments to systematically probe these responses? 🧵 I'm @lhinderling.bsky.social from @olivierpertz.bsky.social lab, let’s do a short tour on microfabrication!

Is there a term of art for the materially real aspects of fictional entities via their effects in the physical world? Ex: Santa stories are related to people putting presents in stockings so that this action becomes a real-world manifestation of Santa stories.

Super proud of this paper with @apvelilla.bsky.social and @babeheim.bsky.social, now out in Psych Review. Non-paywalled version (preprint) here: osf.io/preprints/so...

Introduce yourself with five concerts you’ve seen: * The Jesus and Mary Chain * Leonard Cohen * Pixies * Lou Reed * Sigur Rós

My latest column for @newscientist.com is up for subscribers (including library card holders)! This was a fun and hard column to write because I had to explain quantum field theory in like 3 sentences 😹 I describe how unsolved problems drive creativity 🖖🏽 www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...

Wishing @helendecruz.net were here to see the pope recognize wonder as the key human ability. You should read their book Wonderstruck if you haven’t already.

Pretty much no one can make their ideas clear to others on the 1st attempt. The two main reactions are "let's painstakingly clarify this with some back and forth", and "doesn't matter as long as the various interpretations are themselves interesting", leading to the 2 main branches of philosophy.

A distributional semantic comparison of articles in Grokipedia vs Wikipedia could be interesting…

"Because science rejects claims to truth based on authority and depends on the criticism of established ideas, it is the enemy of autocracy. Because scientific knowledge is tentative and provisional, it is the enemy of dogma. "

Today's offering from the #NaturalPhilosophy Symposium: Kevin Zollman @kevinzollman.com on Refutation and Models of Social Organization. Commentary by Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybOr...

New paper on formats of representation in LLMs. I defend pluralism both about the vehicles of representation in ANNs (e.g. neurons, polytopes, embeddings) and about the formats of representation (e.g. nominal, analogue, structural). Hope it’s useful to someone. philpapers.org/rec/MALFOR-2

As we put it here, “the shape is the meaning”: arxiv.org/abs/2509.00248

What problem is explainability/interpretability research trying to solve in ML, and do you have a favorite paper articulating what that problem is?

I’ve been preparing a presentation on this paper and trying to more concisely get the main point across. I’d say it comes down to this: To make the interpretive lens of a particular modeling decision visible, you have to contrast it against a population of alternative decisions. 1/5

if attention mechanisms in transformers create graphlike transformations across text then it is actually an incredible pun that groups of sentences are called "para-graphs"

"Helen de Cruz (1978–2025): an academic and personal tribute" *Religious Studies* Published online 2025:1-4. doi.org/10.1017/S003... @helendecruz.net

I really enjoyed talking to @nsaphra.bsky.social about her thoughts on what much language model interpretability research misses. My latest in @quantamagazine.bsky.social:

i think regardless of who has authored a paper, we (the scientific community) can and should stop criticizing the work on lack of perceived novelty. we can do better than perpetuating harmful myths about individual scientific papers having to present a discovery no one has ever thought of before.

Forgive one last point to vent about: The reviewer’s only other criticism was a lack of novelty. The obsession with novelty has made a lot of ML work insufferable so it’s unfortunate to see it here. But here’s who is apparently already making our points about how ML is used for humanities research:

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go! 400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

Well, this got rejected today as a short position paper from CHR so I suppose I can share it now: arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00095 Here’s a hopefully coherent ramble about what we’re trying to make clear:

Well, this got rejected today as a short position paper from CHR so I suppose I can share it now: arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00095 Here’s a hopefully coherent ramble about what we’re trying to make clear:

Out now! Bride of Frankenstein [film|minutes]

A quick summary for busy people: We propose a mathematical framework for learning representations by extracting the algebra of transformations of worlds from the agent's perspective. 1/n www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

💻 We are very excited to announce the launch of our special issue Computational Formalism, edited by Tess McNulty and Laura Alice Chapot, that reconsiders the intersections of computation and form at this emerging technological and critical moment. culturalanalytics.org/issue/12788