Matthew Isaac Harvey

@verbingnouns.bsky.social I'm still learning how to use this platform (I'm 200000 years old), but if you're willing to broadcast this on the #linguistics feed I'd be very grateful :)

Call for papers!

Working on social aspects of #ai communication? #Sociolinguistics with a machine-learning bent? Doing boundary-pushing work in #humancomputerinteraction?

Language Sciences wants to hear from you!

www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

#linguistics #cfp #callforpapers

a canva graphic that says "How it works Step 1: Go to SkypeAScientist.com Step 2: Click “Sign Up” then “Scientist Sign Up Form” Step 3: Tell us about yourself Step 4: Get matched with a classroom Step 5: Connect with the teacher Step 6: Make a kid’s day isn't that great? @SkypeAScientist"

Scientists!

@skypeascientist.bsky.social matches scientists with classrooms, libraries, & more for virtual Q&As! It's easy and fun!

We are looking for 750 more volunteers by 8/15

If you're down to chat with 1-5 classrooms this semester, sign up here
www.skypeascientist.com/sign-up.html

Heh me too! And frankly, some of the things AI can do are really entertaining. Its facility with e.g. different sorts of poetry is totally delightful.

Many such cases. The technology, on a basic level, has no understanding of truth and falsehood — only what's statistically likely to be the next word. Concepts like certainty, empirical confirmation, reality vs fiction are just not relevant.

To AI, if text sounds Shakespearean it IS Shakespeare.

Hallucinations All the Way Down 🛸 Truth is Alien to AI 👽 When AI models present straightforward falsehoods as factual information, we say that they're hallucinating. The phrase is too anthropomorphic to be really accurate, but that'...

An AI tool, like a gaslighting coworker, lies so flagrantly and with such certainty that you begin to question your sanity. This is by design: AI outputs are hallucination all the way down.

(New blog post!)

www.linkedin.com/pulse/halluc...

#ai #hallucination #philosophy #misinformation #truth

Sorry this sounded negative, I didn't mean it that way. I mean, I think this is a universal desire 😭

God, the sheer number of "can you finish my PhD for me" requests I got when I was freelancing...averaged maybe one per month for seven years.

So naturally you think, "oh, maybe it's just line edits." And then, no, it's serious, substantive revisions like "how did this step in the methods work?" 😑

Oh that's a smart guess

Good to know

Also though, I think if I were a publisher I'd take this risk. Not for a huge hit like the secret, but for a mid-successful self-help book? You gotta assume there's *some* "no bad publicity" aspect to getting your book on a podcast about books.

The promise of substack as a platform is 100% contingent on finding some more interesting model for discovering great writers.

There's million of em on there, but there's 20 million shitty ones and some of those look impressive at first glance.

Yeah! Emotional labor is a concept rooted in the literal workplace. The term was created to describe paid work where the job is to perform emotions.

People feel imbalances in their relationships really keenly, though, and I think that makes it an appealing metaphor for casual use.

Post someone who looks good in a hat

First thing I've ever read that has made me interested in visiting Las Vegas

After glancing at your bio, I should clarify that I know computational models have tremendous strengths in certain areas lol

But they undermined the language sciences so substantially that huge swathes of linguistics deal with putative entities that probably just don't exist.

Yes, exactly! Plus: if we know a metaphor only entered the field because it includes a trendy piece of tech, that should be a strong reason for skepticism.

Computationalism is basically just an intellectual fad that's ossified into assumed truth. Terrible way to ground a theory!

The role of contemporary tech metaphors in shaping phil of mind is, at once, (a) something everyone knows about and (b) something we should all take way more seriously.

Anyway good meme

With a few high-profile feminist advocates, ideas, policies, and talking points breaking through here and there from, idk maybe the 1870s up through the 90s?

Progress toward equity in specific policy areas accelerated through the 2000s and 2010s and has since faced sharp conservative backlash.

I feel like our current manosphere is a product of social media specifically.

Not the misogyny — that's bog standard — but some things are distinctive: the shallowness of engagement, the changeability of beliefs, the misinformation, and the influencer/follower fan relationship.

The manosphere lurks in the cesspool of shallow communities linked by nothing more than shared content preferences as detected by algorithm.

A lotta young, kinda dumb, kinda dull influencers run out of content for their audience of rowdy, underinformed teens. And they resort to misogyny & outrage

Whew that was a dark dive into some unfamiliar territory.

Too much to meaningfully comment on, so I'll just say: thanks, great threads and great work documenting influences and the spread of bad ideas.

Locally specific, developmentally nuanced approaches to empowering and culturally sensitive education.

But embracing them requires giving up centralized control. While also stopping privatization and being generous with public money.

I think that's the gist of it. Could be way off though 😂

4/4

Is important, but reliance on abstract + decontextualized + one-size-fits-all psychological theories just makes it really easy to monitor "performance" and do carrot/stick policy stuff.

I think the gripe is mostly of that type. Educators have amazing ideas for progressive, creative, ...3/x

Is a natural ally to that agenda: It's individualistic but easy to generalize, quantifies everything, and abstracts across contexts (cause it's non-qualitative and no one's sitting in actual classrooms doing ethnography).

Nothing wrong with telling teachers that reactivating knowledge ...2/x

The Neoliberal Perspective on Education – ReviseSociology Neoliberalism holds that education systems should be run according to free market principles. Neoliberals believe that education should be privatised both endogenously and exogenously, parents and stu...

Take this with a huge grain of salt, as I am not an educator and do not study education.

Neolin educational reform is mostly about standardization, individualism, and top-down oversight:

revisesociology.com/2022/10/31/n...

Lab-based psych (which is all cog sci really means here)

...1/x

I agree, but of course it's more complicated. It always is. Corporations like exploitable workers, successful marketing hype, good PR, and profit. They're VERY happy to embrace mild HR policy changes to get those things. In some sense the embrace of diversity was real. It was just also very shallow.

Squawking is a way underrated word. Honestly a strong 9/10 on the words that whip scale

John McPhee would approve. He says assemble vast amounts of material and let the structure — and even themes, to some extent — emerge from there

(Idk if what you're doing is nonfiction, but it's solid advice no matter what)

Is this published? Can we see it? I'll take a preprint

I love this thread—persuasive points, great collection of sources for further perusal—but the seriousness with which you're approaching this makes me wonder: Is the UV being put to design use? Operationalized in some way?

I learned it as a "hey, neat phenomenon" thing, not a productive theory.