A young nephew thought I was a flossifer. Very close. But I am in the business of mental hygiene. To prevent truth decay.

This is really something, and I expect it will stick with me more than the hyped 2025 movies I have largely forgotten.

The administration plans to use claims that "China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.” The premise, it almost goes without saying, is a total lie. trib.al/8OP0up3

This needs to be read and understood by as many as can still read and understand.

In the US, it was the technological creation of the modern cotton gin that accelerated the Transatlantic slave trade — from 700k enslaved Black Americans in 1790 to 3.2 million in 1850. It upsets AI enthusiasts when I point to this history as offering a lesson for technology today.

Even with federal grants largely restored, scientists say the Trump administration is still preventing those funds from reaching them. The consequences, they say, are already becoming clear.

Today's Daily Cartoon for @newyorker.com by Kevin Maher and me.

I do not stand for the wave in a stadium. But I do concede that it was, once, cool.

New piece defending the applied turn in analytic philosophy. I say what the applied turn is, how it differs from the social turn, and why it isn't just left progressivism cloaked in the language of analytic philosophy. open.substack.com/pub/rbnmcken...

Paradox Paradox, CO

Heckingyeah, please. "TREAT LIES LIKE OBSCENITIES." Come onnnnnnn, news orgs! c @npr.org #WIunion h/t @kairyssdal.bsky.social

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff struck student protesters with his car. This is why.

One more comment about this. You thought A&M was bad for censoring Plato's Symposium? Well, Texas Tech said "hold my beer" and banned Plato's REPUBLIC from a philosophy class because there's a brief mention of homosexual love in it.

This is a curious review. It criticizes the author for being "drawn into debates about authorship that are difficult if not impossible to resolve," and then advances doubts about Aristotle's authorship of ridiculous claims about women.

www.qasimrashid.com/p/universiti... An important reminder of how much of hte repression of speech in US higher ed is a product of cowardly administrators, not just interfering politicians. Do we value free speech or not?

Richard Dawkins: Trans women aren't real Also Richard Dawkins: AIs are conscious and my Claude is a Claudia

Great thread.

THEN: the people’s house. NOW: casino penthouse.

🧵 (upward)

I have a talk on Diogenes the Cynic that I give to outreach groups, and it has now been delayed or moved to zoom three times (in just over a year) by extreme weather. Is Zeus unamused by Cynicism?

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

An amazing (old) thread about our current NIH director.

They're also 10-0 in games decided by 1 or 2 runs. (Last year, they were .500 in 1-run games.) Is this likely to continue? No. Is it fun? Like a barrel of monkeys.

Didn’t expect to see this. Maybe on one of his digs, he’ll find out where Albert Pujols’ home run landed.

Today in weird things philosophers say: "It is not plausible to think [sic] that violent pornography causes a rise in nonsexual violence" (A. Altman). My jaw dropped, and my mouth was agape long enough to leave my tongue feeling dry.

A Win for Democracy! Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Will Stay Open After Journalism Nonprofit Purchases It | The newspaper dates its history to 1786, and if it had been closed, it would have left Pittsburgh as the nation’s largest community without a city-based newspaper.

Bloody hell. Researchers invented a disease, published two fake papers to see if LLM’s would ingest them and kick them up as fact — and then it broke containment and all the major AI’s bought in. Information pollution. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

1/4🧵 A brief summary of what the #Trump regime has achieved in its war with #Iran after 5 weeks: a) The Strait of Hormuz is closed. It was open before the war began. b) #China and #Russia observe that the #US has not adapted to drone warfare. ⤵️

The claim here seems to be that faculty can only speak to the media about research through the university office of communication? If so, that is an obvious and egregious violation of academic freedom. We are doing research (often publicly funded). Not running a comms operation for admins.

I asked A.I. to complete my novel using my own writing style and it did my laundry, went shopping, cleaned the kitchen and spent the rest of the day dicking around online.

i'm so sorry we've sent these souls to the moon and they're using outlook?

The word 'antinomy' is not on the NYT Spelling Bee wordlist, which is kind of ironic, given how aggressively the NYT likes to "both sides" their coverage.

www.propublica.org/article/trum... To ramp up immigration enforcement, the DOJ dropped ordinary criminal investigations . . . meaning that we are left with more criminals in our midst while they deport many law-abiding migrants.

As the carefully observant Jews remove the chametz from their home in preparation for Passover, even the less carefully observant are sure to remove the unfinished remains of last year's matzoh in preparation for eating this year's "fresh" batch.

Happy Opening Day to all who celebrate. Go Reds!

Pop Leo asked if he should put on gloves to turn pages in the gorgeous Renaissance Bible and the librarian explained why it’s better to do so with bare hands. Glorious reaction. Every rare books librarian & archivist feeling very seen, I gather. www.instagram.com/reel/DUcpEBY... #BookHistory

For the baseball fans in the crowd: Here's one reason hitting is so much harder nowadays

Just watched Citizen Kane for the first time and it was so good I’m furious. Things that everyone agrees are obviously good shouldn’t actually be that good. My actual favorite movie now might be Citizen goddamn Kane. Can you imagine anything more fucking embarrassing

The central office for my department has a bowl of Haribo gummies and a bowl of Hershey's kisses. The gummies are almost all gone; the kisses almost entirely untouched. This shows something, but I'm not sure what.

The debacle that is the Trump Administration's treatment of agriculture. It's even worse than you might have thought.

New Interview: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

me: "If A and B are married, and A is jonesing for the next-door neighbor but never does anything about it and doesn't change their behavior toward B, is A wronging B by jonesing for the neighbor?" class: "What's jonesing?" me: "A is thirsty for the neighbor." class: "What do you mean?" me: dead.

standard scientific practice says that if one theory proposes that banal phenomena are a 'miracle', and a rival theory offers a non-miraculous explanation, that's a really good reason to prefer the rival theory

This morning’s reading includes the following exquisite footnote 81: “See references in footnote 81.”

I fear that I will never forget this. But it is a great example of how success in a venture or two can lead a person to think that they really do have it all figured out.

This is an incredible documentation of the systematic, intentional collapse of American health science, by Elizabeth Ginexi. open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...