Excellent essay by Leif, Tyler, and Ben. Interestingly, reification of “internal states” is one of the pitfalls of the intentional stance of Dennett, something we are seeing a lot of AI interoperability research succumbing to.

Kalman’s critique is newly relevant as we rush headlong into outsourcing much of our intellectual work to what Leif, Tyler, and Ben call reification machines.

This little sentence in last month’s encyclical helped (=goaded) @leifw.bsky.social, @beenwrekt.bsky.social, and me to tie off some threads that spun out of the Cultural AI conference in March “Reify This”: www.theideasletter.org/essay/reify-...

come for Chris Olah on stage with the pope, stay for the failure of dictionary learning and the collapse of two traditions of reification

Video of the talk I gave at the Cultural AI conference at NYU back in March is finally up (thanks again to @leifw.bsky.social and @t-shoemaker.bsky.social for having arranged this excellent event). www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYu9...

"The definition of human is implicitly reduced to the narrowing set of behaviors, traits, and capacities that machines do not yet possess—which leaves secular humanists defending the shrinking ground that is left." Nice h/t @leifw.bsky.social in @theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

the answer to "do you beat your wife" would presumably be just "no" - it's super funny that he can't muster the correct trick here ("when did you stop beating your wife?")

i'm not mad, i'm just disappointed

The funniest part of this is that this reaction basically amounts to saying “Mr Turing, don’t you understand that math is mechanical?”

i want to go on record there's a non-zero chance that the granta thing was written by Nazir as a double mockery of AI and MFA postcolonial prose; the move here would be to claim that it's a study of this collapse between aggregate style in the dying industry and LLMs - just sayin

These aren’t just em-dashes — they’re genuine pauses for thought

the extra stupid thing is a poetry seminar is probably the better preparation to do something that makes money

this is a lot more productive than "Richard Dawkins is a moron"

“We cannot afford to believe the marketing message from A.I. companies that we may be dealing with some spiritual essence,” Leif Weatherby writes.

for NYT op-ed, i construct a theory of the “expertise gap” that keeps people like Dawkins falling for the idea that A.I. is conscious. the gap is in the machine: complex statistical/linear-algebraic kludge —> cultural output. a new kind of reading results www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/o...

super fun conversation with Joe and Josh! wide-ranging: AI, culture, is Aaron Rodgers cooked? (yes)

you can just do things ok but i don't want to do things

America’s Next Top World Model

Easy Bay Friends: Tomorrow at Berkeley, the Social Science Matrix is hosting a conversation between Marion Fourcade and me about The Irrational Decision. More info and registration link here: matrix.berkeley.edu/events/the-i...

When Trump calls him “Gavin Newscum” he wants me to parse that as "new scum," right? bc that is NOT how i hear it

Yesssss

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...

talked to Shane Yeoh on his new Second Orders podcast, probably the most wide-ranging of these conversations i've had so far, super fun open.spotify.com/episode/4nk4...

i'm talking about Language Machines with @mbfazi.bsky.social and @emmastamm.bsky.social and Erik Voss at Columbia on Thursday docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Join the Digital Theory Lab for a talk with Terry Winograd on Monday as.nyu.edu/research-cen...

and they say LLMs can't write poetry

I Taught Leonard “Jimmie” Savage’s Bayesian Decision Theory and All I Got Was This Fuckin’ T-Shirt

Not all skills deserve to be learned

The Irrational Decision author @beenwrekt.bsky.social co-wrote a piece with @leifw.bsky.social for @nytopinion.nytimes.com about silicon sampling: “Using simulations of human opinions in place of the real thing will only worsen our broken information ecosystem, and sow distrust."

We’re in the final phase of artificializing our society, politics, and social science

It’s Called Silicon Sampling, and It’s Going to Ruin Public Opinion Polling: Pure fictions are on the brink of being treated as scientific and political knowledge. (@leifw.bsky.social and @beenwrekt.bsky.social, The New York Times-unlocked) www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/o...

Wait what are people doing

this is gonna be exhibit A when a book in the future claims that "digital structuralism" or whatever was actually a government psy-op

bruh www.cia.gov/resources/cs...

this one is true but it's the Palantir from the LOTR

Early Modern 2.0 intensifies

Read immediately

congrats to Karen on this huge award! see our conversation from last fall in the Digital Theory Lab here www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZpH...

i love when no further action is required on my part

The third and final conference report from Ben on Cultural AI

the phrase "Jevons paradox" melts my brain; you can't call something a paradox just bc you set up terms to simple they were guaranteed to be contradicted. social science label-slapping is Out Of Contro

I love this phrase, “a semantic distinction” - oh you mean one of the 2 or 3 total types of possible distinction?

specifically being told he was losing to the literary theorists is villain origin story you could not make up to explain the present - improbable veracity

get 'em

Never not shouting that this is DOUBLE wage theft, from the staffer who should be doing the work, and from the reimbursee forced to do it, purely for the purpose of channeling often public university funds into private app developer coffers and it sucks.

join the Digital Theory Lab for a talk coyly called "What's Up With AI?" by Terry Winograd on Monday, April 20 as.nyu.edu/research-cen...

if you're in the Western Tier, this is going to slap, as the kids used to say

new @doublepivotpodcast.bsky.social ! we talk to @leifw.bsky.social about his book Language Machines, talking structural linguistics, poetics and LLMs, and their connections to sports analytics I had a lot of fun doing this pod: www.buzzsprout.com/819853/episo...

in which i am called on to discuss soccer analytics (a little! but mostly data science, language, culture)