maybe: leif weatherby

SUNY Binghamton just substantially increased stipends for grad students and we have several fully-funded PhD spots in art history. Pretty sure our endowment is smaller more our placement record is great
www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

SOTA

Thursday Night Football starring Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort

The first in a (jam-packed) series of events on cultural AI this year from DTL. More incoming!

The Digital Theory Lab at NYU will host Karen Hao for a book talk on Empire of AI on Monday, October 13, RSVP required here:
as.nyu.edu/research-cen...

Man if only cognitive maps were still functioning

Oh amazing to hear! I hope it’s, well, generative

Hi! Ty

Greg Olsen is so committed to the decision-theory bit: "Just because the outcome is good, doesn't mean the decision was correct."

Anyway, Carson Wentz.

It was! And they let it slip

Extremely good stuff from Leif here

i was on Disintegrator podcast, a really awesome conversation
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3...

the political economy of bad thinking, a really great piece about the *hostile synergy* between B and X from Henry

The humanities long since in its Cringe Era

Real different vibes man, good luck

The Bookmaker | The Point Magazine In the lead-up to the 2008 election, Nate Silver revolutionized the way we talk about politics, bringing cold, hard, numerical facts to a world that had been dominated by the gut feelings of reporters...

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 ...

Find the lie (in this case)

*Carr

"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

Text is part of the world

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! +

screenshot of text in terminal $ ai "write a sonnet about how people who only read the republic are confused about what plato thought" gpt-5-thinking | 27.58 s | $0.02026 | Tokens: 210 -> 2000 They take the city spoken as the law, And fix his thought in guardians’ stern decree; As if one cave could hold the sun they saw, Or single myth could bind philosophy. He staged a city only in a speech, A city in the word, not in the street; Then later dialogues unbuild its reach, And mix the good with measure, tuned and sweet. They miss Parmenides’ sharp counter-art, The Sophist’s net that loosens rigid kind, The Laws that cool the fire of the heart, A letter warning none should write the mind. Read one and swear the sum of him is known; He wrote in many masks—let all be shown.