Lisa Messeri

Adding up all of the extortion money that higher ed is paying and wouldn’t it be nice if that could just be funneled right to public media. Sigh.

It still mostly lives in a google doc and my mind. But I will find it a home!

oh yes. it's why my "short little paper" on an essay about utopia by Ursula Le Guin is now about occult practices in LA in the 1930s and 40s.

pleasantly surprised that AI results are now cordoned off to their own tab - which is not the default tab - on chrome. i imagine this is temporary while they make the tool, you know, not spit out absolutely incorrect information. but i'll enjoy the reprieve.

I'm contemplating returning to the "course packet" model, where students buy a bound bundle of the course readings from the local print shop. This is for a grad seminar. Any drawbacks i'm not considering? For students who need accommodations, i will get them the PDFs.

Love the cover!!

and the only vague evidence they offer is a study done by their own company, which as we know from the tobacco industry is worth less than the pixels it's printed on. infuriating BS

Anthropology The Gathering #1 Coastal gathering, 2017. Photo: Ryan Anderson. I think it’s fair to say that the discipline of anthropology feels…quiet these days. I’m mostly talking about anthropology online. M…

Back in the summer of 2023 I wrote a post on Anthrodendum called "Salvaging what is good." This was an attempt to sow some seeds in the ruins of Twitter (thanks @clmorgan.bsky.social for the inspiration). Here's my attempt to pick up that thread again: anthropologia.org/2025/07/21/a...

Omg

He’s where it allll begins

It is very hard to write agains the grain ... and very worth doing! Molly and I take the approach of foregrounding the techno-optimist critiques and then taking an orthogonal step so that the work can't be dismissed. Important to do both in the cover letter to the editor and the text itself....

ooooh

If you are wondering, i began with ideas about ursula le guin, outer space, and california. i have ended up with a substantial detour into the occult, scientology, its relationship with cybernetics. given the whiffs of conspiracy coming off of these topics, perhaps GPT would have gotten me there....

I remain convinced by @mjcrockett.bsky.social and my argument, that no matter how sophisticated the user, using these tools makes one highly susceptible to an illusion of exploratory breadth, where you think you are exploring the full corpus of knowledge on a topic, but it is only a slice.

What i love about learning is immersing myself in a sea of information that doesn't make sense and slowly figuring out how to not drown. The joy is the moment when you realize you are floating effortlessly. I don't yet see how that kind of understanding comes from these products.

Put aside the fact that i personally would not trust this product to lead me in a good direction, clearly many (including my students) already do trust it as an oracle, precisely because it confidently tells them it is synthesizing based on 'widely recognized information'.

Maybe i could have started with my initial query input to the LLM and through a conversation i would have gotten to the present question. And maybe it would have taken a couple hours, instead of a couple weeks.

The second epistemic risk (and epistemic loss) concerns the process and joy of discovery. i've had a blast doing this research, and i zigzagged to what feels like a generative connection and set of questions. I'm not quite sure how i would have gotten here if GPT was my first stop.

The first epistemic risk is devaluing who produces knowledge. When i asked GPT for sources, it responded "My response was based on a synthesis of widely recognized information." Any product that treats knowledge in this way has no business in our industry of knowledge production.

There are 2 epistemic risks that this encounter draws out (risks that, without my collaboration with @mjcrockett.bsky.social, i would not be able to so easily identify and articulate).

a screenshot of a chatGPT interface where it admits to making up a source.

i check in with ChatGPT sometimes to see where it's at as a research tool. I asked it some questions about a current project. i was at first dishearteningly impressed. It found the main stuff i found (in minutes as opposed to weeks). But, within 6 prompts it was hallucinating. I have thoughts...

Love the knowledge navigator shout out 🧮

A new Annual Review of Anthropology piece on the "Anthropology of Science" (by Langlitz and Dan-Cohen) raises a question I have long wondered about - why is there no dedicated journal for this domain of inquiry? Should there be? What could it look like? Why would it matter?

Ooof, that spot on quote

i've ruined a lot of dinner parties with non-STS folks with observations like this...

That awful fine line of really listening to what someone is telling you and feeling confident that you have a piece of the puzzle that they don’t. With the students I am really trying to validate and understand how they are thinking about AI (and then smashing it a bit with my critical hammer)

What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing? The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.

Constantly thinking about the above excellent point from www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

"[Students] did not lobby for the introduction of laptops when they were in elementary school, and it’s not their fault that they had to go to school on Zoom during the pandemic. They didn’t create the A.I. tools, nor were they at the forefront of hyping technological innovation."

Gave my third talk to high achieving high schoolers about AI and learning. Several articulated how trapped they feel into using LLMs — to keep up with others or bc the curriculum is such that they aren’t learning anyway so why bother pretending. I’ve loved giving these talks and it is breaking my ❤️

I can’t believe I have to wait a couple years to read this!!!! Can I pre-order now ;)