Jon Coburn

I've studied so many different systems for encoding information which will be passive and stable over millennia. The fascination with knowledge which is separate from knowers is related to terror management theory & the desire for immortality. >

This isn't something distant or far away. Super-agent & close Epstein ally, John Brockman had huge influence. His 'rockstar' writers, scientists and academics dominated our book pages & broadsheets.

We need nothing less than a total revisionist history of the last 20 years.
2/

Erm…

For several years, ChatGPT users have generated an archive of human candor that has no precedent, in part because people believed they were talking to something that had no ulterior agenda. Users are interacting with an adaptive, conversational voice to which they have revealed their most private thoughts. People tell chatbots about their medical fears, their relationship problems, their beliefs about God and the afterlife. Advertising built on that archive creates a potential for manipulating users in ways we don’t have the tools to understand, let alone prevent.

"I once believed I could help the people building A.I. get ahead of the problems it would create. This week confirmed my slow realization that OpenAI seems to have stopped asking the questions I’d joined to help answer." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/o...

Over the past two weeks I've begun to realize that rich people only started funding chatbots once they could no longer email Jeffrey Epstein

“The combined tuition fees of the entire Question Time panel would not cover my cost for 1 year of uni. Is that fair?”
Oli Dugmore

It’s absolutely NOT fair. This outrageous scandal must end

Information literacy

To: Jeffrey Epstein[jeevacation@gmail.com] From: Sent: Wed 7/15/2009 1:56:13 AM Subject: Re: florida visit? good typing! oh well, looks like it's a long flight anyhow... edmonton is so far away from EVERYTHING. On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 7:49 PM, Jeffrey Epstein <jeevacation@gmail.com> wrote: i am tied up until aug On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 9:41 PM, wrote: You planted a seed with your invite today. I have next Wed thru Sunday off (July 22-26), my last vacation for months. I was going to take polo lessons in Calgary but I (DON'T) think my body can handle it! I pull a muscle every time, and I'm starting to realize my budding polo career might have to take a back seat to my actual job. think What are you doing next week?

The word don't is censored. Don't, or Don T. If you're looking for just some fun proof they're doing control+f censoring

I agree that it’s high fucking time that we stopped acting like we need to grovel and constantly justify the existence of some of our most incredibly elemental and ancient human pursuits.

Front page of Royal Historical Society blog post with image of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, photograph by Rudolph Simon, 2013, Wilkimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Text reads: "On Holocaust Memorial Day we need more history, not just more memory' and abstract: In this post, Andy Pearce – Director of the Centre for Holocaust Education at UCL – considers the current levels of knowledge of the Holocaust among UK secondary school students. UCL studies, in 2016 and 2026, reveal a troubling and enduring divergence between popular understandings of the persecution and murder of Jews in Europe, in the 1930s and 1940s, and the findings of scholarly historical research. 27 January 2026 marks the 25th anniversary of Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain. As Andy argues, prevalent and popular misperceptions risk being sustained if the Holocaust becomes a subject for remembrance and memory, rather than of history and historical scholarship. It is only though ‘more history’, shared widely and publicly, that we may seek to redress error, distortion and denial."

"On Holocaust Memorial Day we need more history, not just more memory" bit.ly/4t6wPx6

Dr Andy Pearce, Director of @uclholocaust.bsky.social, writes today on the RHS blog.

#Skystorians

Why is he giving future Raiders this information though?

Board of Peace - Season 1

…..eh?

Coretta Scott King was Martin Luther King's political as well as romantic partner. More of an activist than him when they met, she was the "family leader" on peace and anti-colonialism, publicly out against the war on Vietnam years before him. She offers us much for the struggle today.

A huge chunk of our political class has "book-you-see-in-an-airport" brain.

Just no interest in rigour.

A photo of teenage Claudette Colvin in glasses and a sweater.

Friends, Claudette Colvin—the 15-year-old who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in March 1955 & joined the federal case against bus segregation that went to the Supreme Court — died today at age 86. But there are lots of myths and mis-impressions about her. A short corrective thread:

Reason 3: Cursive forms vary enormously by period, and the idea that being able to read the cursive you learn in 3rd grade would also enable you to interpret a 17th century alchemist’s handwriting is honestly kind of ludicrous

Reason 2: There is a literacy crisis already! People can’t read generally, not just the Magna Carta

Reason 1: Most historical documents are not written in English, and if they are written in English it would like not be an English easily recognized by a 21st century teen, regardless of cursive fluency

Right now: Stop what you’re doing, speak to your mum, tell her you love her.

You will never have as much time or as many opportunities to do so as you think you will.

“This article urges a fresh view on [AI large language model] hallucinations by arguing that, rather than being errors in any conventional sense, they are evidence of a probabilistic system incapable of dealing with questions of knowledge.”

THIS THIS THIS. ALL OF THIS

THIS is why faculty resist technological strategies for teaching. There is no engaging with Edtech without this context

Feathers McGraw from ‘Wallace and Gromit: the Wrong Trousers’, looking every inch like the evil, paychopathic, fake-chicken looking penguin demon that they are

Merry Christmas to all except this POS

This and the discussion about how academics can now just read AI summaries of things really drives home how much these guys always confuse the product for the goal. You don't do a coloring sheet because you want to have a colored sheet at the end!!! The coloring is the point!!!

AI is often sold as 'do something you already know how to do more efficiently' but is often bought as 'do something you don't know how to do with no idea if you are doing it efficiently at all'

What historians (and other scholars do) is create knowledge. We should use that phrase more and talk about what it means. I think we don't, and it's part of why AI enthusiasts are confused when we don't readily agree that our work can be replicated/replaced by their products.

This is why actual knowledge - not just Jeopardy-style recitation of flashcard facts - is collaborative. If I need to understand something so far outside of my realm of expertise that I can’t get far enough reading solo, I figure out who’d know more, and have *gasp* a conversation…with a human being

The “AI” has not read the book. Even if the book was in its training data, it has just absorbed it as a set of statistics. It will juggle you a “summary” that might or might not relate to the conclusions of the actual text. The only way you’ll know is to read it yourself.

So the “figure out how to use it lest you be left behind” replies about ‘AI’ that have been popping up here strike me as inauthentic but also kind of funny because they grant the point that rather than an automation panacea these technologies are quite difficult to figure out how to use effectively

The point is not to put more fact shaped things in your head than anyone else. It’s to understand the ones that are there on a deep and meaningful level.