The ‘You Don’t Have to Apologize for Being White Anymore’ guys have now made it against the law to use the word Black at college.

people who say that all creative endeavor can be replaced with AI probably need to reckon with the fact that all televised sports events with human athletes could easily be replicated by high-definition computer-animated simulations….and yet we don’t do this and no one seems to want to.

It’s fucking heartbreaking watching the pleas from MN residents start echoing the pleas from Gaza residents

But the other piece of evidence -- the point of this thread -- is that we now have an example of what it looks like when US political & corporate elites *really are* obsessed with and committed to something. Namely: AI.

on the balance i think partisan gerrymandering is bad but the only way it ends is if democrats weaponize it against republicans everywhere they can. wiping out republican lawmakers in blue states might bring the GOP to the table to end the practice.

Extremely good analogy. The endgame for AI companies is that everyone becomes dependent on their tech, and has to keep paying $2000 / year to write software. High-quality software is not actually necessary to achieve that goal.

So much profound harm has been done by the inane, ultra-popular notion that talent is innate, fixed, and semi-mystical

🆕 Fabulous, ✨fabulous✨ work by our friends at the Social Media Lab, one of the best research centres in our field. A very timely and much-needed intervention to introduce some transparency into online advertising. 🙌

It really pays to remind ourselves frequently that this whole immigration "crisis" is made up out of whole cloth. There was no emergency,danger or problem, only a demagogue stirring up racist grievances for political advantage.

MERE HOURS after the President of the United States posted an AI video of the Obama’s as monkeys, the Science Tech Action Committee (led by @aaas.org and @researchamerica.bsky.social) posted a THANK YOU to TRUMP for SIGNING THE BUDGET. Shot. Chaser. sciencetechaction.org/aboutus/

odd feature of our time in how many liberals and progressive are bog standard monogamous family types--Serwer, Bouie, Hayes, AOC, etc--and how many Traditional Family Values conservatives are fuckin drugged up perverts

New blog post on ways to lower your risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. Vaccines. That's the secret. Turns out many diseases have long-term consequences, including dementia risk. Bonus is that I also write about disinfo. 1/ www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ment...

if you spend any significant amount of time on X the everything app, your brain is being cooked

This is an especially good article about why the Epstein files matter so much.

You’re not crazy. The anti-trans movement is not organic; it was funded by pedophilic billionaires like Jeffrey Epstein who backed a network of conservatives to accuse the same people they were sexually abusing of being the real danger. @madycast.com exposes the truth in our in-depth report.

Is AI killing publishing reform? Important post by Ulrike Hahn about #scholarlyPublishing. (write.as/ulrikehahn/i...) I've had the same thought, that the flood of LLM-written junk and fraudulent manuscripts being submitted to journals means that

can't help but think there is probably a corrosive effect of having sex trafficker-elite emails unveiled for months on end as one of the biggest cultural/news stories of the last year— unearthing an inexcusable moral rot in the upper echelons of power—but without any real accountability/justice

To all the non-academics who don't understand the point of academic freedom and don't care to learn about it, let me give you a factor you might care about: Tenure is the biggest reason you get my services at a steep discount over my private sector value.

Allow me to interrupt the daily doomscroll by bragging about one of my newly graduated PhD students, who just headed off to Berkeley. Manikya studies how we learn and reason from social information, particularly in online contexts like on social media, so give him a follow if those topics appeal!

I taught a class on “hope” last year and the few theorists who’ve written on it all point out that hope is the harder choice - that despair is easy and too often fashionable

If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don't tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff. Democracy dies in oligarchy.

Really nuts how many men were like "Me Too went too far, and I need to email Jeffrey Epstein about it."

A friend of mine shared this meme with me and I just had to post it here because it sums up so well where many of us are right now Hang in there! Like the lemon 😂

It's even worse; even if Bezos lit a million dollars on fire every day he would NEVER LOSE IT. He'd end up with more than he has because he makes well over that in interest (at 5% yearly). Talk about unearned wealth. This is abhorrent and sick. It's the engine driving much of what's wrong today.

It shall be a sad day for @washingtonpost.com but Bezos' gutting of the paper is the end of a long hit job on the entire journalism ecosystem. Journalists rarely sit still. They've been busy building new Washington Posts. bsky.app/starter-pack...

I just stayed up most of the night watching these 7 fantastic videos. The data and concepts helped me understand my "AI" struggles as a human, scientist, student mentor, coauthor, friend, journal editor, and parent. Highly recommend this series!

I needed to read this thread today. For anyone who ever doubts that small positive steps can have big effects down the road -- some of which you might never even live long enough to see.

The tyranny of targets as.ft.com/r/b4a19673-1...

This is really what I want people to appreciate. I get that it feels good to be like "well that person's a pedophile too!" But in many cases they weren't. They were just people who didn't think it was a big deal. That's terrible in its own particular way.

Can comfirm from MN, as can anyone who lives here, that not a THING has changed except little Bovino isnt peacocking around the streets anymore. And there hasn’t been a third high-profile murder of a white person yet. But the gestapo attacks haven’t stopped. At all! bsky.app/profile/jyse...

I read this, and I almost regret it. What do you even do with the knowledge that Epstein wanted and was trying to engineer societal breakdown via far right populism bc he thought it would benefit his sex trafficking business?

We can start by asserting that these so-called great men are not, that we need to stop listening to them, that they are morally bankrupt and corrupt and that their impoverished visions driven by their most base and vile indulgences have gotten us here. Fuck those guys. All of ‘em.

This story made me cry (in a good way).

Anyone with a heart and soul should agree that children and babies do not belong behind bars. Thousands of kids will carry a lifetime of trauma and PTSD, done in our name, funded by our tax dollars.

You start to notice after awhile that the same people who pretend to oppose fascism while laying down for it are the same people who are either in the Epstein files or take money from and protect the people in the files.

We didn't say body cams on ICE. Their murders are already on video. We said no more ICE.

This took me fucking ages

The combination of the media environment & reactionary backlash has created a public life that specifically selects for broken narcissism. Read about Trump's parents, or Musk's, or Nuzzi's ... this whole parade of horrible people desperately seeking validation to fill the void inside.

Are you using, dealing with, or thinking about generative AI / large language models [LLMs] in any capacity, personal or professional? You probably should watch these new videos for public audiences by computational cognitive scientist Andrew Perfors @perfors.net .

Explains the trajectories of many public intellectuals: “There is no well funded, career-boosting media ecosystem for intellectual rigour, for careful judgement, for objective assessments of complicated phenomena. But there is a thriving, well-remunerated ecosystem for right-wing provocation”

Bitterness and cynicism are a form of surrender, when anger at injustice remains but the will to confront it is dulled by resignation. As true warriors, let anger at injustice be bright and righteous, and let it drive us to confront its cause, stand in its way, and cast it down.

Can't be exaggerated: every bully believes themselves a victim. Even Hitler! Even US slave owners! It's part of the psychology. There is no amount of power or privilege that can ameliorate it.

A bystander took a heart-wrenching picture of Liam Ramos in his hat and Spiderman backpack, and there was pressure, and he and his father are free. We must not forget all the prisoners still in the camps whose names and faces are known only to their loved ones. We must make miracles for them, too.

In 20-goddamn-18. She cares SO much about young girls.

I am really angry about all of the scientists who cozied up to Epstein even after it was known who he was. I am nearly as angry at how many people are justifying this as "they had to, it's how academia works" NO IT FUCKING WELL ISN'T

Never forget that the people who convinced you trans people are a threat to your children all belong to a network of child rapists.

“You can’t judge people for trying to fundraise from a convicted pedophile” yes you can idiot. I’m doing it right now with my big powerful scientist brain. It’s literally part of my lab rules

Something I've thought before but dismissed internally as too uncharitable but I'm having a hard time dismissing now: I wonder how many people who rail against "cancel culture" do so because they know they've done things that would (rightfully) mean they lose their jobs and reputations? 🤔

You don't have to dirty your soul to be a successful academic or a scientist. Have some fucking pride. Have some fucking principles. If you think you DO need to do that, all I can say is that I beg you not to go into academia or science.

Audre Lorde, in a 1989 commencement address, said, "Remember this, despair is a tool of your enemies. That rumor, 'You can’t fight City Hall,' is circulated by City Hall. Facing the realities of our lives gives us the motivation for action, it gives us the power to change. You are not powerless."