@lauraknelson.bsky.social
Associate Professor @ UBC computational sociology machine learning is feminist You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing. www.lauraknelson.com
I found this really insightful.
"the lump of cognition fallacy", or
"why there isn’t a limited amount of cognition to do, and why outsourcing cognition is often just a way of allowing yourself to think more deeply and meaningfully rather than avoiding thought"
This is what's killing me about all the furor about AI and the NEH. Yes, it's galling, but seems it didn't shape what happened in the end. People are more upset about how they did the middle step than the fact they destroyed projects, scholarship, and tools & any recovery is too little too late.
Just incredible all around (derogatory). What a monumental moment in the history of knowledge production in the U.S.
Listen to the clips that are being widely circulated - it's so clear that AI is not the issue here. Not even close. If ChatGPT didn't exist they would have just done a ctl-f for LGBT, feminist, DEI, woman, etc. with the same result: destroying knowledge.
Anxiety producing for parents of current tweens/teens tho
It was a corrective for me too! And continues to be.
Yeah ope. But I actually still stand by my "right now is the most chaotic it will be", because we know of the AI boyfriend threat, and lots of people are already studying and working on it. By the time I have to worry about my kid's AI boyfriend, we'll know a lot more.
This is exactly it. And I would emphasize one other thing: we, society, *will* figure out a better way to incorporate these tools into workflows. It's absolutely chaotic right now, with a ton of misuse. We're in a transition phase and we will figure it out. Right now is the most chaotic it will be.
@kscottz.bsky.social kicks off Build, Create, Share:
Fostering Innovation and the Role of Open Source Hardware
indico.global/event/17245/ti…
ospo.wisc.edu
Please send us your nominations for the ASA Decision-Making, Social Networks, and Society James Coleman Outstanding Article Award!
QTing for context, not to dunk:
Novels are many things, but they have been products and consumables since their inception. Put another way, critiques of AI shouldn’t rely on the obfuscation of earlier capitalist realities, themselves documented through hard won research and argumentation.
Paris friends! Amis parisiens ! This Thursday is the first of four public lectures I'm giving on AI and philology, broadly defined: "Philological Reasoning and Computational Models." The advertisement is in French, but the lectures are in English. I'd also love to meet while I'm here in March! 1/
When reviewing something for a scholarly journal please ask self if reviewing it bc you're being asked to judge its scholarly merit or reviewing it bc you like to impose arbitrary gatekeeper judgments of taste. Can we all please get over ourselves and move things forward?
Posting for a friend obv
Imagine what it could be tho: JP provides a (dark) vision for what higher ed will be in 2030; Phil charts a path toward open science; Seth and Cihan debate the future of theory; we have a raucous debate on the role of genAI in teaching.
It's not a silly question. I'm looking at the schedule for the conference this year (and I really do appreciate Shelley), but there's absolutely no indication of either the multiple existential threats or incredible opportunities sociology is facing this year alone.
I often forget that the ASA could be a forum to actually provide intellectual leadership for the discipline. It really is such a tragic missed opportunity.
Call for Submissions: AI for Social Science Methodology (Yale)
• Keynote: @nachristakis.bsky.social
• Panel with editors of leading journals on publishing AI research
• Mentoring roundtables for early-career scholars
• Generous travel support
Discussion-driven, high-quality research.
I don't see this current stage as being all that different from previous stages of the "science of culture". The mechanics of using generative models to research culture are largely the same as what folks have been doing for a decade. We just have more options now.
The furthest back I could trace this to led me to this passage 👇 where they claim that things like feeling irritated counts as a decision. So yeah, not just should I look up first, but the decision to recognize feeling hungry at all, and then do something about it, and then
bsky.app/profile/laur...
The best I can find in that book is this passage. Clearly articulating that we indeed likely make thousands of decisions every day, but I can't find anywhere where they do the actual calculation. The mystery continues.
Ok, this is helpful!
Yeah me neither. I now just say there's no agreement, and cite this paper: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
That happens to me every time I write a paper. Please tell me you have citation for it!
Ok I think the statistic might be reported in this book. I'm now trying to get access to that book to figure out of it's actually reported in it, and what they cite to back it up.
www.amazon.ca/Bad-Moves-de...
If you factor in sleeping, that about one decision every two seconds.
Ok I'm in a rabbit hole. If you search "how many decisions do we make in a day" the reported number is almost always 35,000, often reported that this is according to "multiple sources". Yet I can't actually find a single source that backs up that number. Anyone know where this number comes from?
I worked at a centre and the director, like you, was inundated with emails. Her assistant Amy had access to her email. Amy sorted her email. Some she needed to answer personally. Some, Amy drafted a response that she just needed to approve. The reciever read it because it conveyed information.
I'm curious what jobs, or forms of writing, you're thinking of here?
Ah! It's nothing to do with prompting. ML, the method, the math, is feminist because it allows for high dimensionality in the way it represents and processes data - people, language, images. Rather than reduce people/text/etc to a category (e.g. surveys), ML uses ✨vectors✨ with all their dimensions
