Lisa Messeri

No kings

Omg please not another ‘social media is a tool of democracy’ moment.

🤞

3/3 for universities I have been affiliated that have not signed the extortion compact. TGIF

Information that, incidentally, once it has been digested and spit back out by an LLM might possibly be incorrect or misleading.

I’m somewhat optimistic I’ll be able to find a home for it quickly. Stay tuned.

What are doctors for? What are teachers for? What are friends for? What are lovers for? What are parents for? What are any of us for?

Just gave a paper making this argument about rationalism/scientology. (Hence why I’m following this thread closely!) on Less More, when Scientology guy comes up the response is ‘sometimes people get things right for the wrong reasons’.

i was searching for something today and noticed that the AI Overview linked to a paper of mine, including an utterly incorrect (but seemingly plausible) summary of said paper. This is a bad product!

This is the entire house of cards that Yudkowsky built, right? if you believe his premises (of rationalism, etc) it works. But the premises are simply one man's worldview and not in anyway a rational basis for action. Appreciate this thread!

Incredible.

My best advice to aspiring authors of scholarly books is to read other scholarly books recently published by your target press. This may seem obvious and yet is not!

many graduate students (who are otherwise very talented) don't know the style of italicizing book titles and putting article titles (un-italicized) in quotes. I'm wondering why this is? Genuinely asking this question, and perhaps also wondering if this style convention is changing?

Faculty Jobs — School of Data Science School of Data Science at the University of Virginia.

UVA school of data science is hiring this year—searches are open to folks from all disciplines. We need humanists & social scientists to teach ethics/data & society courses + do research that supports school’s mission to be holistic in the study of data science: datascience.virginia.edu/faculty-jobs

We are hiring! Prospective PhD students in environmental history, history of science, history of technology and STS interested in the climate and environmental impacts of AI look here. Please share in your networks. #envhist #histsci #AI #anthropcoene

The Virginia Senate just told UVA it’s not getting state funding if it accepts the compact since UVA exists to serve Virginia, its residents, & their interests—not be a tool of the federal govt. Scoop from our student newspaper, who’ve been doing vital reporting www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2025...

my co-author and i have an article coming out in a cog sci journal in just a few weeks obliterating (if i do say so myself) this avenue of research. 😈

Dear Madam Secretary, I write in response to your letter of October 1, inviting MIT to review a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” I acknowledge the vital importance of these matters. I appreciated the chance to meet with you earlier this year to discuss the priorities we share for American higher education. As we discussed, the Institute’s mission of service to the nation directs us to advance knowledge, educate students and bring knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges. We do that in line with a clear set of values, with excellence above all. Some practical examples: • MIT prides itself on rewarding merit. Students, faculty and staff succeed here based on the strength of their talent, ideas and hard work. For instance, the Institute was the first to reinstate the SAT/ACT requirement after the pandemic. And MIT has never had legacy preferences in admissions. • MIT opens its doors to the most talented students regardless of their family’s finances. Admissions are need-blind. Incoming undergraduates whose families earn less than $200,000 a year pay no tuition. Nearly 88% of our last graduating class left MIT with no debt for their education. We make a wealth of free courses and low-cost certificates available to any American with an internet connection. Of the undergraduate degrees we award, 94% are in STEM fields. And in service to the nation, we cap enrollment of international undergraduates at roughly 10%.

• We value free expression, as clearly described in the MIT Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom. We must hear facts and opinions we don’t like – and engage respectfully with those with whom we disagree. These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent. We freely choose these values because they’re right, and we live by them because they support our mission – work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law. The document also includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution. And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone. In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.

As you know, MIT’s record of service to the nation is long and enduring. Eight decades ago, MIT leaders helped invent a scientific partnership between America’s research universities and the U.S. government that has delivered extraordinary benefits for the American people. We continue to believe in the power of this partnership to serve the nation. Sincerely, Sally Kornbluth cc Ms. May Mailman Mr. Vincent Haley

The president of MIT has declined to sign "the compact". Full letter, as shared with the MIT community:

Why This Essay Could Cause the University of Virginia to Shut Down How Linda McMahon’s latest “compact” would do deep and permanent harm to American higher education

I can’t believe my life is being affected by the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment

newrepublic.com/article/2013...

Joseph Barranco posted on social media: Go Bears! Nobel Prize in Physics goes to 3 physicists studying mesoscopic quantum phenomena... Work was done in the 1980s in UC Berkeley Professor John Clarke's lab with his graduate student John Martinis and postdoctoral fellow Michel Devoret... all 3 share the Nobel Prize. Must also point out that both Clarke and Devoret are immigrants from the UK and France, respectively. All 3 are pioneers in the race to build the most powerful quantum supercomputers. California *public* education made this happen. Immigration made this happen.

Valuable info about the Physics Nobel Prize today from Prof. Joseph Barranco at SFSU on Martinis and Devoret being a grad student and postdoc in Clarke's lab at UC Berkeley & Clark and Devoret being immigrants. "California *public* education made this happen. Immigration made this happen." ⚛️

Michel was my neighbor for many years. Who knew when he was sitting on the condo board that he would soon be a Nobel Laureate. It was an honor to accidentally receive his mail on occasion.

fieldnote feb 2010. Baby me putting some things together...

"They were employees from Tesla Motors, an electric car company owned by Elon Musk. Musk is also the intrepid owner of spaceX AND a donor to the mars society. A NYTimes article also just tooted him as the future of human space flight."

always vague and also always so unappealing!

the definition of 'the metaverse' that Zuck offered in Connect 2025 is awesome revisionist history: "Our goal is to build great looking glasses that deliver personal super intelligence and a feeling of presence using realistic holograms. And these ideas combined create what we call the metaverse."

And yet, both of these corporate futures have far more in common than in distinction. Especially as spatial computing has, like the metaverse, failed to garner the enthusiasm corporate overloads had anticipated, it is important to understand these terms in the context of the larger computing visions they seek to proffer. This vision wants users to be permanently and inescapably immersed in a world of digital overlays, such that the corporate product, in whatever technical form (headset, glasses), is the mediating screen through which we always and only experience the physical world. This is a vision we ought to refuse, and this article offers an admittedly modest strategy for refusal. I do so by offering a reading of the technological fictions that convey the spatialities and socialities of spatial computing

i'm much madder at Big Tech than i was when i first submitted this article. I offer my tracked changes revision as evidence of entering the no holds bar stage of my career.

Trump Administration Asks Colleges to Sign ‘Compact’ to Get Funding Preference

This is extortion. Faculty, students, staff, alumni across the country need to get to their Presidents & Trustees today. Just say no. This blackmail only works if most everyone folds. Capitulation now means the end of American higher education for a generation. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...

Trump Administration Asks Colleges to Sign ‘Compact’ to Get Funding Preference

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...

Horrifying.

In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles Lisa Messeri's anthropological research focuses on the norms, aspirations, and consequences of work done by expert communities as they forge new fields of knowledge and invention. Messeri's first book...

About to give the first of a few Fall book talks. If you’re in Princeton and free in an hour or so, come through!

anthropology.princeton.edu/events/land-...

Glad Science collected this data (though the results are entirely unsurprising). GenAI cannot accurately summarize scientific papers, sacrificing accuracy for simplicity.

And shame on publishers who are pushing genAI summaries on readers. Great way to accelerate an epistemic apocalypse.