David Colquhoun

The enlightenment was a beautiful thing. People cast aside dogma and authority. They started to think for themselves. Natural science flourished. Understanding of the real world increased. The hegemony of religion slowly declined. Real universities were created and eventually democracy took hold. The modern world was born. Until recently we were making good progress. So what went wrong? The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable.

When I said this, in 2007, I had no idea how how bad the endarkenment would become.
"The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable."
www.dcscience.net/2007/08/15/s...

Paving over the Rose Garden and taking over the Kennedy Center (and vowing to slap Melania’s name on the Opera House) are just gratuitous acts of spite intended to inflict pain on the people he hates. The cruelty is always the point with that SOB.

Young British tories calling for the hanging of Nelson Mandela in the 1980’s.

Trump’s Efforts to Control Information Echo an Authoritarian Playbook

“Firing the top statistical official sends a clear signal to others across the government that you are expected to compromise scientific integrity to appease the president… This puts us in dangerous territory far from an accountable and reality-based government.” @peterbakernyt.bsky.social

As far as I can tell, the main use of LLMs is to allow talentless people to make a living in a creative field by stealing the work of people who do have talent.

3 consecutive weeks now above 25c in the Arctic region of Finland

Rovaniemi (Santa's HQ) 31.1c

Trump lives, loves, loves corrupt businesses people (who pay him a bribe).

Imagine getting fired because math hurt a man’s feelings. We’re being governed by a walking Yelp review.

Russell twice lost his position on account of his social views. He was twice imprisoned for them. His last sustained political action, the Tribunal on American War Crimes in Vietnam, was met by a conspiracy of silence round the world. The fact that he was an intellectual genius made it easier for those who purveyed a more comfortable view of life to present him as a simpleton. He endured this too. He continued in the belief that, the desire for power aside, the most socially dangerous conditions of mind were boredom and the love of excitement.

Richard Wollheim on Bertrand Russell.

Defunded but not defeated

#1MillionRising #Pillar: Media

Terence Tao (@teorth.bsky.social) has written a thread on Mastodon about the impact of the federal grant freeze to UCLA, particularly to his own field of Mathematics. UCLA's IPAM (Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics) could shut down entirely

mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1149568...

£100 standard fine for littering

£1.3 million extra pay for discharging untreated sewage into waterways for 232,054 hours in 2022

Yet again, I'm impressed by the reluctance of people to say "we don't know"
@hildabast.bsky.social

Grok is growing on me.

Classic reading for difficult times
Sheynin, O. (1998). Statistics in the Soviet Epoch/Statistics in the Soviet Epoch. Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, 217(5), 529-549.
www.jstor.org/stable/23811...

As nations squabbled over statehood, a man of peace was gunned down

The death of Odeh Hadalin, a prominent peace activist featured in the Ocsar-winning film No Other Land, highlights the ongoing settler violence in the West Bank

Firing the BLS Commissioner — the wonk in charge of the statisticians who track economic reality — is an authoritarian four alarm fire.

It will also backfire: You can't bend economic reality, but you can break the trust of markets. And biased data yields worse policy.

Female pilots perform better under pressure, study finds A University of Waterloo study found that female pilots made fewer flight control errors than their male counterparts in high-stress situations, despite showing similar visual attention and experience...

Study of 10 female and 10 male pilots using flight simulator finds despite having nearly identical visual attention patterns and flight experience, female pilots tend to make fewer flight control errors when stress levels increase.
www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

dair_institute - Twitch Twitch account for The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).

Trump's AI Action Plan (surprise!) consolidates power and capital to Big Tech.

On the next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 live stream, @alexhanna.bsky.social & I will be joined by AI Now Institute’s @kate-brennan.bsky.social & @smw.bsky.social to piece through the bullshit.

Mon, Aug 4, noon PDT

Not a single Republican abides by our Constitution THAT THEY SWORE TO UPHOLD. THIS SHOULD BE INSUBORDINATION. AS WELL AS TREASON.

In their defense, the authors of the Constitution could never have predicted that an entire American political party would unite against the principals of democracy.

💔🇺🇦 Mykyta, Sofiya, and their 2‑year‑old son were killed in a russian strike on Kyiv on July 31. They were only 23.

🙏 They had fled Sloviansk, rented an apartment in the capital — but a missile directly hit their building. Sofiya was pregnant with their second child.

Post from "The Rundown" July 18 at 5:30 PM · DuckDuckGo has introduced a new feature allowing users to filter out AI-generated images from search results, addressing growing concerns over synthetic content overwhelming authentic visuals online. The filter can be activated through a dropdown in the Images tab, search settings, or by using a dedicated AI-free domain: noai.duckduckgo.com. The system relies on curated blocklists, including uBlockOrigin’s Huge AI Blocklist, to detect and suppress AI-generated imagery. While not perfect, it significantly reduces synthetic content visibility. This move sets DuckDuckGo apart from competitors like Google and Bing by giving users direct control over their exposure to AI-generated material. Source: TechCrunch

DuckDuckGo has added a feature to filter out AI images from search results.