Colin Danby

Fun: Lawrence Kraus shares Bari Weiss' piece about me with Jeffrey Epstein.

I used to teach Panopticism with some bits of film, e.g. "Call Northside 777" and Wiseman's "Primate."

If sticking to literary texts, and noting your work, who had a better sense of what's enabled or thwarted by slipping into a discourse than Borges? Or much Kafka: that sense of being pinned.

Baffled.

What Foucault are they reading?

... and that screwy covered passage in photos 12 and 13. Why? How does drainage work?

You would know better, but there looks like water intrusion in some photos, and when I see cheap fixes for flooring I start worrying about deferred maintenance.

We need a new kind of plural.

A lot of the friction on bsky is people who start from 3 are impatient with people starting from 1, and vice versa.

2. What happens when these tools are available to naive, lazy, or unscrupulous people.

3. What are larger political, environmental impacts and why are people being compelled to embrace these things by mgt of universities, businesses etc. Education gets hollowed out...

fwiw there seem like at least three questions in the air:

1. Are there, within the huge category of "AI," tools that conscientious people can put to good use for certain kinds of tasks. The answer seems obviously yes!

We’re Entering Uncharted Territory for Math Terence Tao, the world’s greatest living mathematician, has a vision for AI.

I'd love to hear more from people in mathematics about the recent Terence Tao interview.

A youthful tall Joseph wearing colourful robes and with strong ruddy features and a fine head of hair looks down at the toddler beside him, who is looking up, and carrying a basket

A wonderfully tender wooden sculpture of St Joseph and a toddler Jesus in St Peter’s Church in Leuven (I don’t have the full details, but guessing late medieval). He is looking down at the baby, who is holding his thumb

Ah, the chewing phase.

What did we eat?

Some of us rode meh all the way to tenure.

J'oublie.

These are good and true points.

Yep. I want to learn things! Trying to postpone becoming an elderly bore.

*of* research

Thinking here of the "feeling for the organism" in Evelyn Fox Keller's bio of Barbara McClintock, Maynard Keynes' efforts to get a grip on rough magnitudes of economic phenomena, the way historians develop a feel for when to back up and look around for what else must be going on.

4. The essential quality research is the opposite of replicating conventional wisdom, which LLMs are set up to do. You want to spot logical problems and discursive sleights of hand in routine rhetoric. You want to pick up on the ways the phenomena under discussion escape the lit.

3. Some people will find good, innovative uses! Mediocrities will find bad uses and flood the review system with bad articles but I see no way around that. We will have great drifts of false citations.

2. When we train students, it's reasonable to restrict tools so they learn skills. But for colleagues, I have no view about how you should do your work. Use what tools you want.

LLM discourse flares up every six weeks or so. Feels like we need an FAQ. Points I find myself repeating:

1. Please specify tasks and tools. "AI" is too broad. Boosters do the camel's-nose thing, starting with an innocuous use and widening.

Criticism can also be over-broad.

Oh good it came back. Got tired of touching grass.

LLMs are also easily fooled into the assuming the state-of-the-lit summarized early on represents the article's conclusions, whereas the author is in fact setting up pins in order to knock them down later.

If you use LLM summaries to access an area you don't know, you sabotage your own learning.

In a lot of fields, articles are structured to address the tl/dr problem. They set out their research question early and flag the answer. You can jump to the results section at the end for more. People who know the lit can figure out what an article does very quickly.

The summaries are no good. (And this is what I suspected you meant.)

No problem is more already-solved than digesting journal articles. They typically come with abstracts, which are carefully constructed by their authors. In some fields there are "keywords."

When we started flying through Dubai to go to India I looked at possible side trips. Always wanted to visit Muscat! But yeah, the weirdness of that lovely huge airport is now really apparent.

If this person just means an LLM might fish up some useful references to look at, fine, if it works. We assume a human researcher still reads them. It's when people ask for LLM summaries that the mischief begins.

There's a camel's-nose problem here.