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)

what would happen if we shifted the epistemology of the social sciences from Hayek backward to Knight?

solidarity, spread the word

As I am making my way through Brian Cantwell Smith's incredibly interesting (and dense) book "On the Origin of Objects," there is one important idea in it that should be kept in mind when reading endless takes about GPT and notions like "understanding:" the Commercial Metaphor.

In this post, I serve as an unreliable narrator of the talk I gave two weeks ago at the Cultural AI conference at NYU (thanks again to @leifw.bsky.social and @t-shoemaker.bsky.social for organizing this unique event and for inviting me to share my perspective):

Most effective prompt language converged with LM style - genre collapse

Give autocorrect and End-of-Sequence token so it stops making me say things like “we had breakfast at Home Depot”

Appointment reading

i think that the normal output of a "stochastic parrot" would be phrases of the sort "quote the raven, mom's spaghetti" - fight me

run don't walk to read Digital Theory Lab director @t-shoemaker.bsky.social s writing on the model/system distinction link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Still unsure SP is a good way to describe the base model (SP is conceptually underdetermined) but the distinction between model and system is crucial see DTL director Shoemaker link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Mom come pick me up they’re invoking the specter of postmodernism again

IKEA now distinguishes between pictorial and ostentive meaning

Receiving the Amazon package of close reading

Miami Vice: Literary Theory

now we're talking

to be clear, i think the humanities (and even close reading) teach certain technical habits; the ethical case for *any* discipline is usually nonsense

I find it really hard to imagine anyone who’s been close up with humanities academics thinking they cultivate these virtues

That’s LawSlop, you only like that bc you overidentify with Josh Lyman on the West Wing

Did he have like a particularly compelling excuse?

Can I pre-order this to be delivered now, even though it’s only out in October?

Pride and Prejudice as if Jane Austen were a mech interp researcher

Douchey NYC writer types *handshake emoji* douchey SF code bros “Need to check with my agent”

Dupuy’s biggest contribution is that he understood McCulloch as the driving conceptual force among the cyberneticians

Maybe the most fun I’ve had on a podcast

Conference ending on a high note

Wordle bought by NYT 2.0

At this point it’s justified that the podcasts have taken over

is polymarket when markets aren't monogamous?