The humanities long since in its Cringe Era

I'm going to write on this, but the subtext is that the Nate Silver crowd have shifted hard away from political science, and hard towards the Silicon Valley mindset as a foundational source for purportedly better grounded knowledge. This by @beenwrekt.bsky.social and @leifw.bsky.social

extremely imporant one-two from Dan here: "First, the communication of the polling results to policymakers is likely to be at least as difficult a problem as the election forecast presentation, probably much more so. Second, the technical problems with polling are going to be worse."

UChicago alumni: we are drafting a letter targeting a few of the more persuadable-seeming trustees urging them to change course on humanities funding. Please sign: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... Explanation to follow ...

"automated language results from Goedel and Jackobson systems interacting together, without cognition. The incomplete and greedy combine to show us what language is in the absence of cognition and present a strong attractor for meaning." —Leif Weatherby, Language Machines

loving @leifw.bsky.social’s Language Machines so far. in particular: “It seems that mental illness, or at a minimum neurosis, should be a criterion for passing the Turing test, but it is equally unlikely that this view will ever be adopted by engineers or journalists.”

Language Machines is in The Observer!

Finally got these two in the mail, been looking forward to reading both.

An almost universally acknowledged point that mysteriously disappears whenever conversation turns to AI

Superb survey of different approaches to the key theoretical question of the moment: What does it mean to call language models “cultural technologies”? At any rate I’m going to three (3) conferences and symposia this year connected to it! +

Going back to 1969 to tell Foucault that in the future, everyone will know he was 100% right that "discourse” can produce itself without “a thinking … subject.” But also in the future we will care less about that principle than the practical consequence that students can cheat on homework.

It's very telling that the far left refuses to support huge pieces of shit who everyone hates

Mountain Kids

STEM and humanities gotta stick together, admin and professional schools need to follow us - there won’t be a university otherwise

a nice treatment and cool extension of Language Machines here robhorning.substack.com/p/eliza-pill...

Language Machines gets some fair play here

For anyone curious, @leifw.bsky.social has written a very good book about this. amzn.to/4ml7P12

some of you don't know how to engage in phenomenological reduction to escape the natural attitude and it shows

this is exactly the positions, which is sometimes explicitly phrased as "words aren't language" - it's hard to know what to do with that, tbh

The One-Hot Man

This Marcuse sequel is just not hitting as hard as the original

i spoke with Rick Kleffel for his podcast The Narrative Species about Language Machines, if you need a weekend listen - this was wide-ranging and very fun www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpe6...

A weird part of our society now is that the most successful people are also giant losers

qualifying exception if you understand the semiotics of the diagram in ultra-technical Peircean terms

Preventing a client state from committing atrocities with weapons we manufactured and sold them would have been the bare minimum, eh? I don’t think the Dem party can survive

In my review of Spears and Geruso's book "After the Spike" for Jacobin, I attempt to confront what I consider the core of their argument, which is why declining global population would be undesirable, and I find their arguments unpersuasive. jacobin.com/2025/07/demo...

This Friday (7/25 10AM), ORG will read the Introduction to @leifw.bsky.social's new book Language Machines. www.upress.umn.edu/978145297351...

Pseudo-scientific claims about the causality of cell phones are more responsible for widespread relativism than the HR-ification of the university and the two go hand in hand

writing about american maculinity don't get much better than this from @leifw.bsky.social

This op-ed is true. But I think we need to stop acting as if they did this because they somehow mistakenly believed that AI could do things that it can't do. Hype isn't the cause. All the other evidence suggests that they want to destroy the regulatory state, this is just part of that political move

Dietmar Dath gets why architecture is what matters @jeddobson.bsky.social

Nico has out-remaindered me in humanism in this generous and thorough review that keeps the attention on semiotics as the proper lens for AI @uminnpress.bsky.social

“What is really driving the hype and widespread use of large language models like ChatGPT is that they are fun. A.I. is a form of entertainment,” Leif Weatherby writes.

i was on Minneapolis's KFAI Write On! Radio to talk about my book Language Machines kfai.org/episode/07-1...

In which I suggest that contemporary AI is a culture machine that we might be taking too seriously

"I think we’re having the wrong debates about A.I. altogether." Author @leifw.bsky.social in @nytopinion.nytimes.com : www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/o...

Leif Weatherby in the NYT today with a provocative op-ed titled "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Have Fun With A.I." www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/o... @leifw.bsky.social

"Many of our systems," he writes, "are simply broken in the first place, and A.I. seems like a fix even when it isn’t." While not explicitly addressing higher education, there is much to be said about broken assessment strategies and peer reviewing systems.

This, from @leifw.bsky.social, about Aaron Rogers, midlife crisis, and the decline of American empire, might just be the best essay about football I've ever read. It's extraordinary. thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

What’s hovering in the background of the nominal AGI debate is the vectorization of intelligence as IQ, and the deployment of various systems as surrogates or tools for intelligent action - the claim makes sense only on that background, which is real, but itself super contentious

there is much ground to be made up

Read this, if you read anything, today

if you've never read "Artificial Antisemitism" (Critical Inquiry 2022) by Matt Handelman, start with his account of the Grok/MechaHitler incident and work back to the philosophy of Tay jacobin.com/2025/07/grok...

this is the kind of review you dream of, and i can't wait to have it out about cultural technologies, Kulturtechnik, and poetics

With Grok we are seeing the speedrun version of the "ideology machine" @leifw.bsky.social described back in 2023: jacobin.com/2023/04/chat...

I’m about half way through this brilliant and very clear account of what went wrong with the humanities and language in the past and how to move forward in the AI-informed present. Well-researched, provocative, and funny—perfect summer ready for theory heads! Congrats @leifw.bsky.social!

it's an example of what Leif Weatherby calls "remainder humanism": "The operation is just that we say, 'machines can do x, but we can do it better or more truly.' This sets up a kind of John-Henry-versus-machine competition that guides the analysis" www.jhiblog.org/2025/06/11/l...

This is very correct! Book sounds fascinating!