Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴

My students create a hilarious acronym for every study, and documents for the study are named incorporating the acronym, and all documents have to be kept in a shared project folder, using same name. It's simple, but it works because everyone sticks to the system.

I don't want technologies that make me more Efficient and Productive! I want tech that makes societal life better!

Data Visualization A Practical Introduction

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

Airline chatbots should be better by now.

"AI-boosters" often assume those critical of LLM proliferation are just ignorant.

But esp in the sciences, many critical voices understand how LLMs work and have up to date experience with their capabilities.

It is possible for people to disagree on this topic for reasons other than ignorance.

For those who disagree: Please don't assume opposing opinions can only come from ignorance. Many who oppose wide adoption of LLMs in science understand how they work and have up to date experience with their capabilities. It is possible for people to disagree for reasons other than ignorance.

4/4

I agree the world is changing fast, and it's unclear how it will look in 5 years. My fear is that by that time, power will be increasingly in the hands of people who have stopped writing and thinking for themselves.

3/4

Removing humans from the labor of reading, writing, and analyzing data actively works against this purpose. LLMs generate the artifacts of science, which are then read by humans filtered through LLM-generated summaries. Meanwhile, our brains atrophy, trapped in an illusion of knowledge.

2/3

Indeed, LLMs can generate papers, and are rapidly improving at it. But generating papers is not the purpose of science. Generating papers is not even the purpose of writing lit reviews. The purpose is, yes, "to move the frontier of [human] knowledge".

1/3

Oh no. ouch.
Sadly, to get good reviews quickly seems to now require editors leaning on relationships, like emailing people directly from their personal email with subject line "OMG PLEASE REVIEW THIS!". Jr editors at lower-impact journals w/o many connections can't move papers through. 😔

"llms can write social science articles better than professors now" BITCH I DONT CARE. i literally do not care because the point of people having fucking thoughts and doing research is PEOPLE HAVING THOUGHTS AND DOING RESEARCH. the point of the work is DOING THE FUCKING WORK.

Example:

Public school teachers with graduate-level education could make less than the median income for graduates of 4-year colleges across all fields.

We need good teachers. People want to be teachers because it is a fulfilling and challenging career. The government should definitely fund that.

An Expansive Accountability Test Based on Grads’ Salaries Moves Forward This week, an Education Department committee reached consensus on a proposed blueprint for the policy, which could end some programs’ access to federal loans.

Education is more than a way to get more money.
Education is more than a way to get more money.
Education is more than a way to get more money.
Education is more than a way to get more money.
Education is more than a way to get more money.
Education is more than ...
#Academicsky

Reality Check:

I don't need a faculty writing accountability group, I need a faculty grading accountability group.

I'd say closing any program based on "workforce alignment" is a political choice. Because it's a political choice to view education as a means to create workers. And because the pressure to adopt that hollow model is coming directly from the Trump administration.

This is political. Everyone knows this is political.

College administrators are uniquely talented in lying with a straight face about why something is happening. Why even try to lie about such an obvious capitulation to threats from the Trump administration? It's all a game.

#academicsky

Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses "The legislature did not include a grace period."

This is bigotry, pure and simple.

open.substack.com/pub/erininth...

Global thermonuclear war is a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

Now she's spreading misinformation about cannibals too...

Now seems like a really good time to begin talking about those ethical questions, regardless of whether there is any current evidence for sentience.

#HigherEd #AcademicSky

*Please* amplify this risk.
The US DOE wants to implement an earnings test on all undergrads and grads--if grads of your programs do not earn a specified amount upon receiving their degrees, your programs risk losing federal funding. The earnings tests begin *this October*.

Wow, among recent college grads, computer science majors have among the highest unemployment rate (7%).

its a spinning hamster, apparently dancing in ecstacy. it is one of the specific hamsters from "hamsterdance", an early 90s proto-meme of rows of dancing hamsters.

The internet used to be so fun and cool back in the days of Hamsterdance, but now it sucks and is boring. So sad.

Do it! And be sure the tell your students the assignment origin story.

How to Write Like a Scholar (and Not Like a Student) Most student behavior is artificial (hand raising to speak, sitting in neat rows, walking in single-file lines) and often dehumanizing (asking permission to go to the bathroom).

How to Write Like a Scholar (and Not Like a Student)
substack.com/@paulthomas7...

5. The US economy’s dependence on AI may have been overstated, experts say. In 2025: it became conventional wisdom that AI was a major driver of growth. But some prominent economists estimate that it contributed as little as 0% to economic status

Aren’t we lucky that universities haven’t gotten carried away with the hype and taken a careful approach to AI?
Imagine if they had decided to push AI into our teaching and work life!
All praise to our leaders in higher ed for not falling for hype, hallelujah and praise the goddess

3 weeks?