Carolyn Dicey Jennings

Ian McKellen performs “The Strangers’ Case” speech from “Sir Thomas More” on Colbert.

Another chilling story. Alberto Castañeda Mondragón is said to have entered the country legally with no criminal history, a job and family. After being racially profiled by ICE he suffers injuries that give him brain damage, memory loss, an inability to work, and large medical bills. Disgusting.

I imagine you could get quite huffy about it. “How dare you suggest I take the time to find out anything about any filthy-rich person who invites me to his house and might give me money; what do you think I am, some sort of researcher? Good day to you sir!”

How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

“We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.”

Props to Anthropic for studying the effects of their creation and reporting results that are not probably what they wished for
www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

Fair

A screenshot from the Vogue article about Gaurav Gupta’s 2026 show, with two dresses worn by separate models in different colors delicately interlaced, such that they seem lightly bound to walk together, a fragile connection that could be easily disrupted

Not a fashionista, but I appreciate cool ideas in the arts, and this is a really cool show www.voguehk.com/en/article/r...

ICE ended up returning the man, Saly, after realizing he’s a fucking US citizen with no criminal record, per his sister-in-law. These fucking animals.

Wanja Wiese, Inferring the presence (or absence) of consciousness in artificial systems - PhilArchive How should we assess which artificial systems could be conscious? Given uncertainty about the nature and distribution of consciousness, it is promising to look for indicators of consciousness that pro...

Wanna know how to infer the presence or absence of consciousness in artificial systems? Check out my new preprint: philarchive.org/rec/WIEITP #PhilMind #PhilConsc #Consciousness

Medical examiner believes death of man in ICE custody was homicide, recording says A fellow detainee says he witnessed Geraldo Lunas Campos being choked to death by guards at the ICE detention center in Texas on Jan. 3.

BREAKING: Medical examiner says death of ICE detainee was a HOMICIDE - a witness says he was choked to death by GUARDS. www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

The risks of AI in schools outweigh the benefits, report says A new report warns that AI poses a serious threat to children's cognitive development and emotional well-being.

An invaluable new report. A "premortem" is exactly what we need.

Why Keeping Score Isn’t Fun Anymore

Never, in a million kabillion years, when I decided to say "screw it" to mainstream philosophy and started writing about the philosophy of games, could I have imagined that this road would take me down to having the goddamn NY Times profile me and my new book.

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/b...

Congrats!

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

(The end of a poem by Renee Nicole Good.)

This stress is affecting everyone.

This is absolutely wild, and super important.

There are zillions of studies claiming that fMRI signals indicate increased brain activity, and it looks like that's often just wrong.

If confirmed, this means we've misinterpreted a lot of research.

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵

Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance Scientists have long debated the origins of exceptional human achievements. This literature review summarizes recent evidence from multiple domains on the acquisition of world-class performance. We re...

Why we are defunding liberal arts? Read this: everyone is "incentivized to reinforce acceleration of early performance years...starting in a discipline early, focusing exclusively on that discipline...[leading to] early, but not long-term, exceptional performance" 🔥

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

"Question 7 (How welcoming do you find academic philosophy to be toward underrepresented groups) has a weak negative correlation for both Likert and hand-coded sentiment. This means that underrepresented participants are likely more negative than other participants in response to this question." 🧵

On *content*, from results: "Given the substantial body of evidence that philosophy can be hostile towards members of underrepresented groups...we hypothesized above that underrepresented participants will have more negative sentiment, per question, when compared to all other participants." 🧵

2) "hand coding indicated mean negative sentiment, whereas Likert-scaled questions and machine learning indicated mean positive sentiment. This difference has multiple explanations that require further study." 🧵

On *research methods*, from our conclusion: 1) "What we find fits publications from other disciplines: automated machine learning techniques can be used to complement hand coding, but have limited utility on their own." 🧵

Sherri Lynn Conklin, Alex Dayer, Michael Nekrasov & Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Human and Machine: Analyzing Language Trends in Descriptions of Academic Philosophy - PhilPapers Advances in machine learning hold promise for corpus analysis: they have the potential to allow for more efficient and less biased analyses of text. This would be a boon for qualitative ...

📣 Preprint alert! "Human and Machine: Analyzing Language Trends in Descriptions of Academic Philosophy" is forthcoming in Experimental Philosophy and Corpus Methods. This paper was written a couple of years back but the volume is now coming together. Check it out here: philpapers.org/rec/CONHAM-3 🧵

David Brooks, who wrote in the NYT last month, "The Epstein Story? Count Me Out" is... in the latest Epstein photo dump published by @oversightdemocrats.house.gov.

He should absolutely be fired by NYT for this. Major conflict of interest that he didn't disclose.

A photo of a cat on my lap looking curiously out into the distance. Unfortunately I am not currently scratching his ears in this photo which means I am close to getting a small bite of disapproval.

Bluesky wrapped is a fun exercise. I posted much less in the past few months, but in good news I have been spending more time with the “neighborhood mayor.” Mornings a bit busy now with intense ear scratching sessions. Hard to post given demands of my new position

www.madebyolof.com/bluesky-wrap...

If you want students to do well in life, including in their careers, then give them the tools to forge their own path. They don’t know what tools they might need, and neither do we. We should be offering them a rich array of skills, rather than pretending we are a widget factory.

We should reject the idea that the best way to prepare students for careers is to create programs tailored for specific job outcomes. It doesn’t work to “teach for the test,” so why would this work? Real life, real careers are messy, require problem solving. A disturbing trend for a dying economy.

Lindsay Lab - Postdoc Position Artificial neural networks applied to psychology, neuroscience, and climate change

Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p...
#MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro

Nabokov a bit on the nose

Photo of Dishoom’s old fashioned recipe

Yeah, fair. I couldn’t find the full recipe online, but here it is.

(I tried this, did a 6 month delay, and felt like it was worth it…complex etc. Could have been placebo.)