Rob de Vries

I understand the appeal of this idea! Extraordinary amounts of labour are devoted to just reinventing or rehashing things that already exist. Fighting this temptation requires remembering that efficiency is not the pre-eminent human value. Probably not even top five. /2

LLMs are the product of tech's (and capitalism more generally) exclusive focus on efficiency. If an idea, or a piece of art can be statistically predicted from existing work, then what's the point of using human labour to create it? /1

Prediction: In <1m, The Atlantic will run an article comparing the Epstein Files to the Mueller Report. Once again leftists made too much of a big deal about some terrible inustice involving Trump, then it turned into a nothingburger. Just a few crass emails. Nothing to get worked up about

Matthew Goodwin, Reform and the politics of resentment The ‘heterodox intellectual’ turned populist is a morbid symptom of the digital age

Kind of ironic how Matt Goodwin's trajectory mirrors the evidence on status threat and the ascent of RW populism. Looked down on by elites (no elite professorship), so pursue alternative route to pride / status

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/philos...

Totally agree - lots of things that are obviously missed if we only look where the light is already shining, and talking to people w' lived experience is the way to catch this. A bit more iffy on the implication that lots of this experience is 'unquantifiable' though...

/3 There are almost always multiple possible, equally correct interpretations - and choosing between them is just as subjective (and usually ideologically informed) as attempting to determine purpose in context.

/2 But *textualism is subjective too*.

For a text written by humans the length of a law *there just is no single, objectively correct interpretation based purely on the text*...

/1 Listening to the back catalogue of @fivefourpod.bsky.social and the episode on Garland v. Cargill has finally persuaded me out of my instinct towards textualism.

Textualism is tempting as a solution to subjectivity. Determining the purpose or spirit of a law feels problematically subjective...

/2 The coffee thing clearly not a moral status threat. Is it still a status threat of a kind (as he suggests - being perceived as 'basic')? Or is there actually no threat here and the status assertion ("I am better than people who drink effete coffees") is coming from elsewhere?

/1 Interesting because there seem to be two separate phenomena here. He references the 'angry vegans' stereotype, which Benoit Monin at Stanford has shown comes from 'moral status threat' (psychological defense against idea that people are lookind down on you).

The "she does not own a car..." part is so telling. They just can't conceive of a politician who isn't already rich. She's not poor, just not one of the wealthy class of people who are allowed to be 'serious' political candidates.

Education Secretary sets roadmap to improve attendance levels Every school to be set an individual minimum target to improve attendance and set up every child to achieve and thrive.

Are they actually using LLMs here (which doesn't seem necessary), or is this going to be a conventional statistical model that they've branded as "AI"? If it's the latter they have radically missed the public mood on having AI shoved down their throats:

www.gov.uk/government/n....

A parent who understood elite education would have been able to tell her that the 'BA' things is meaningless to the content, and of the value of 'hyperelite' educational credentials.

Of course you can look that up online, but it's not the same as having it 'internalised' /2

Overheard on the train yesterday: a nice example of small ways in which a privileged background can help in getting 'top jobs'.

A father and daughter discussing her career choices. She dismisses Oxbridge because their degrees are all BA and she wants to do a more scientific BSc /1

Found this guy in the garden yesterday. Looked crazily like a hummingbird. Apparently it's a hummingbird hawk moth

it managed to keep track of a lot of the underlying data much better than I expected.

ChatGPT - Game simulation results A conversational AI system that listens, learns, and challenges

I've spent far too much time making up a game to simulate inequality for my 2nd year sociology students. Lacking anyone stupid enough to test it with me, I got chatgpt to simulate it and it managed remarkable well:

chatgpt.com/share/68dd39...

Would be interesting to see what this looks like with prestige/social status as a dimension. Lots of 'low PMC' (e.g. journalists, creative professionals) are actually the most prestigious jobs in society - and well within most people's conception of the 'PMC'

British students lack ‘drive’ of their American peers, says Business Secretary | LBC The Business Secretary has defended comments he made at a meeting with investors where he said British students lack the ‘drive’ and ‘vigour’ of their American peers.

Business Secretary Peter Kyle: "Too often people go to university to explore research and knowledge...I want people to go to university to start businesses in our country"

Welp, goodbye Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, we had an OK run...

www.lbc.co.uk/article/brit...

This also just seems like a statistical fluke? 2025 isn't even over yet. It's weird to publish an article about a "trend" that applies to 6 months out of the last three decades.

Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise For the first time in more than 30 years, attacks by the far left outnumber those by the far right.

Facts in the article:
1. RW extremists have been responsible for vastly more (and more lethal) political violence in the US since the 1980s.
2. In 2025, there have been 5 LW attacks & 1 RW
3. You can't infer a trend because violence fluctuates so much.

Headline
www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

He was actually talking about watching E4 vs. Channel 4, but I think it works

Relevant to joining social media, it also contains my version of an old Stewart Lee joke: "The internet is a flood of sewage that comes unbidden into your home. Social media is like you constructed a sluice to let it in"

Yes, peer review sucks. But attention-economy hellscapes would be worse Obliging everyone to undertake post-publication review would aid discoverability in a world without traditional journals, says Robert de Vries

Just been reminded that I wrote this on THES quite a while ago: www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/yes-pee...

Nobody read it, but now I'm on social media finally I can see if anyone is interested...

How "Free Speech Culture" Is Killing Free Speech: Part One Blurring The Lines Between Official Censorship And Individual Criticism Built The Intellectual Foundation For Trump's Assault On Free Expression

"“Free speech culture” tells people they should shut up about the things that make them passionate so other people feel more comfortable disagreeing with them" www.popehat.com/p/how-free-s...

Do people think it's higher status to get lots of engagement on your post about something that's already popular VS. to post about something obscure but get less engagement. Also do people seek external validation of the popularity of the target before making a status judgement?

Could presumably test this by experimentally varying two variables about video/post: 1) popularity of target (e.g. musician, restaurant etc.), 2) engagement with post.

Interesting argument from @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social on Search Engine podcast: Gen Z are having a 'coolness' crisis because: 1) finding something obscure but good is 'cool', 2) popularity metrics are now how people know things are good. Hence no-one will like your video/post or think you are cool

The right persuades people that trans women are a threat to 'real women' so we have to 'meet the public where they are'. There is no belief that the Left could possibly persuade the public of anything.

The big problem with the current Labour party is that they seem to have accepted that they have no way to set the agenda. The right persuades people that small boats and refugee hotels are an existential threat to the nation so we have to 'meet the public where they are'.