Writer, tabletop & Warhammer dork, queer person, imminent PhD (enaction, ecological psych, language, interaction). Yes that's actually Nessie
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Crucially it (a) had a large audience on fanfic.net or ao3 or wherever she was writing as snowqueensicedragon, and (b) got picked up by an actual publisher quite quickly, less than a year after self-pub. And then (c) got this big word-of-mouth swell that turned it into a phenomenon.
Some of the best nurglings I've ever seen by reddit user u/czokalapik: www.reddit.com/r/Maggotkino... #warhammer #aos #minipainting #maggotkin #nurgle
I know exactly what you mean, this is how I feel about Batman v Superman. Astonishing to write a script where pro and antagonist have the same motivations, traits, and flaws. And then "detective fights god" comes down to sweaty punching 🤯
Nature is always best on shrooms. But I'd be very inclined to watch Blue Planet 2 and Planet Earth 2. The shockingly high quality of the footage in both series, and the delicate emotionality of the stories, would IMO work really well.
You need to see worse movies I saw some movie from the early days of wuxia where footage of the villain's king fu attacks is intercut with footage of just a regular frog hopping. He used the frog technique you see Truly bad movies are so special. In many ways the filmmaking creativity is greater
I didn't mean it reductively, just as a statement of fact— I meant people who are enthusiastic, not those who are mere enthusiasts. I don't know who I'm talking to, so wasn't trying to imply anything — I will say they seem cool and knowledgeable, though.
Right, I'm totally with you. I have a cousin I'm sadly not in touch with whose both a huge gun nut (adores the hobby and collecting of firearms) and a serious, knowledgeable hunter and marksman. He blew us away talking about gun control. It was super helpful.
Yes, sorry, great point. I agree. By "enthusiast" I meant "an expert, but I'm worried about how into this they are." I think that's part of how peacenik-type lefties get to the "experts on guns are untrustworthy about gun control" perspective.
Like we CANNOT underestimate how much NRA lies and denials and obfuscation and misinformation and bad-faith bullshit have completely poisoned the well of nuanced gun policy debate for liberals.
This is fundamentally an unserious approach to gun safety for the reason you're noting: Policy only works if it's made by experts neck-deep in the relevant domain. ...But it's maybe understandable in a country where the NRA owns half of Congress and so 40,000 people get shot every year.
I don't think that's the sentiment on display there. Like you're right about the disdain, obviously, but they don't think they're experts, they think enthusiasts are biased—that they will prioritize favorite hobby equipment (specific guns) over public safety.
Sepia-tinted footage, sound tinny, static crackling. A woman in the third row stands. "My question is grounded in Ratcliffe's take on Heideggerian tools," she says. Her notes just say "nope!" with a triple underline. Scant moments on, the speaker's name is scratched from the conference program.
God this is such a good post
There's a casual delinquency to your grammar that suggests a lack of something. Here's what matters: Gender identity and expression have nothing to do with abuse. If someone wants to hurt kids, they don't change their gender to do it. Plus this is the easiest "live and let live" in history.
Giving and receiving feedback are difficult, complex skills. Being neurodivergent adds complexity and challenge on top of an already complex and challenging task. Like this isn't something that ever just happens, is my point. Getting useful feedback is a skill to be built.
Only thing I've ever pulled out of those pockets was an unmarked CD that, when I put it into my 1986 Sony Walkman, contained only strange whispered songs from another world. So they're pretty liberal about definitions.
The article is about AI and epistemology, it doesn't have anything to do with psychopathology, does it? Unless you mean the term "hallucination," which I do think everyone agrees is bad. But to be clear, I DO have only a lay knowledge of psychopathology and psychotherapy — if that's what you meant.
My thoughts are here — I say call it all hallucination. The false, the true, whatever. It's produced by the same completely truth-agnostic mechanism. Hallucinations All the Way Down Hallucinations All the Way Down www.linkedin.com/pulse/halluc...
I don't agree. Confabulate and bullshit both ultimately have the same problem of requiring a knowing agent. I think the pro-"bullshit" academic takes are more or less on point, we just really don't have language for a machine that truly seems to speak but has no mind at all.
*queer lmao
Where is neither redundant nor is it (any longer) a slur, not was it ever exclusively a slur. It combines catch-all with a clearer general meaning, and a lot of folks — myself included — prefer it. More broadly, I also don't think cowardice and giving up are appealing political qualities.
Letting Google set the narrative about the environmental costs of "AI" is like letting tobacco companies set the narrative about the effects of second-hand smoke by measuring the health effects of sitting through one neighbor smoking one cigarette.
And a study in this era of disinformation Invented out of wholecloth and broadcast by a cowardly VP who knew it was fake, enabled and supported by one of the most zealously lie-loving media ecosystems ever to exist
That's a good observation+ linguistically interesting. Euphemisms here working as inverted slurs. The semantics of slurs are usually given as "group ID + hatred/fear/resentment." Here "anti-urban" has the same negativity but tries to put a proxy/blank in place of racial identity. Coward behavior
Like hiking a popular trail and sharpening the rocks with a file as you go.
Is there a good theoretical framework for that kind of preparatory or incipient social harm? It's not a microaggression, quite. It's background hostility. Digital hostile architecture.
Yeah that's right, Bari Weiss is a leader in the field of manufacturing consent for imperial violence. This was supposed to be my work account, but honestly, these aren't meaningfully partisan opinions — more like basic media studies.
Of course not, she just works for the far right and therefore is a professional propagandist, not a journalist. Unfortunately, it's totally irrational to engage with this as good-faith reporting. She's digging for anything that might distract from genocide.
Yeah a dispensary just opened up near us, too! Seriously though, great post. Way to share much-needed positivity.
Good post. I also wish ill upon the extremely zealous figurehead of this international hate movement. This close ally of Christian Nationalists, this fear-mongering engine of misinformation, this billionaire dedicated to inflicting legal and physical harm on LGBT people.
Yes! Thank you. That is exactly the fact I intended to refer to, but I don't really know what I'm talking about so I did it sloppily.
Amazing thread, although in case any readers are unaware, it's worth noting that "cultural Marxism" has been around since way before the 90s. It's oversimplifying, but still meaningfully correct, to describe it as nothing more than revitalized Cultural Bolshevism. With local flavor.
You have killer flair though. Love what you're doing, just running around doing poetry on people, that rules
Thanks for summarizing, that was helpful.
What the hell, I love this. I'm excited to learn more and read the comments.
It rules. He also has some very good back and forth — in think in 2008 there was a special issue of criticism for the book, and he responded.
Honestly, it's worse than this. They never recognized that speech/writing differences overturn basic assumptions of repeatability, and modern linguistics studies fictional codes instead of patterns in human behavior. Preliterate societies don't even think in terms of words (qua lexemes).
The Mangle of Practice is also really good and that's from 15 years before! I got to read this book now. Thanks for the rec! Also, have you read Evan Thompson? Mind in Life is IMO a generational text. At least the first half.
Heh. Also, a Latourian analysis of LLMs is totally fucking devastating for the AI industry "Here's an actant for making people incompetent"
Totally agree. All the actual principled people with slightly more conservative views either feel totally unaligned or are just Democrats now. I know quite a few people in the "unaligned" category because they find MAGA personally revolting, too.
Amazing thinker btw. Extremely worthwhile intellectual detour for anyone who's never dwelt on ecological thinking. Awesome recommendation.
And humanities expose us to a wide range of general knowledge. History, art, and literature are pillars of our culture, and learning about them gives us useful, practical information about our institutions, laws, ways of thinking, unquestioned assumptions, and much more.
Oh man, thank you! Looking forward to reading that. And I've been seeing your posts about your book — I know self-promotion is exhausting, but for what it's worth, I am pretty interested hahaha
could ChatGPT have made a book like this? didn't think so
Not what metaphors can we use, Or what metaphors does this one text contain, but what metaphors are people using generally? And why? I just don't think the "why" piece is properly tractable if you approach these as individual-level questions.
Super interesting! We get a ton of conceptual metaphor theory work submitted to our journal, but it's one of those frameworks that really suffers from individualist analysis — to be substantive, I think it NEEDS it exactly that kind of wider, almost sociological, perspective.
Maybe there is room for something related to the body politic, though. Nonprofits are more like...lungs, maybe. Fragile but essential, a vital force we need to care for. And in this metaphor MAGA is obviously some kind of creeping fungal corruption of leaking, stiff-skinned pustules. One assumes.
@verbingnouns.bsky.social I'm still learning how to use this platform (I'm 200000 years old), but if you're willing to broadcast this on the #linguistics feed I'd be very grateful :)
Call for papers! Working on social aspects of #ai communication? #Sociolinguistics with a machine-learning bent? Doing boundary-pushing work in #humancomputerinteraction? Language Sciences wants to hear from you! www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu... #linguistics #cfp #callforpapers
Scientists! @skypeascientist.bsky.social matches scientists with classrooms, libraries, & more for virtual Q&As! It's easy and fun! We are looking for 750 more volunteers by 8/15 If you're down to chat with 1-5 classrooms this semester, sign up here www.skypeascientist.com/sign-up.html
Heh me too! And frankly, some of the things AI can do are really entertaining. Its facility with e.g. different sorts of poetry is totally delightful.
Many such cases. The technology, on a basic level, has no understanding of truth and falsehood — only what's statistically likely to be the next word. Concepts like certainty, empirical confirmation, reality vs fiction are just not relevant. To AI, if text sounds Shakespearean it IS Shakespeare.
An AI tool, like a gaslighting coworker, lies so flagrantly and with such certainty that you begin to question your sanity. This is by design: AI outputs are hallucination all the way down. (New blog post!) www.linkedin.com/pulse/halluc... #ai #hallucination #philosophy #misinformation #truth
Sorry this sounded negative, I didn't mean it that way. I mean, I think this is a universal desire 😭
God, the sheer number of "can you finish my PhD for me" requests I got when I was freelancing...averaged maybe one per month for seven years. So naturally you think, "oh, maybe it's just line edits." And then, no, it's serious, substantive revisions like "how did this step in the methods work?" 😑
Oh that's a smart guess
Good to know Also though, I think if I were a publisher I'd take this risk. Not for a huge hit like the secret, but for a mid-successful self-help book? You gotta assume there's *some* "no bad publicity" aspect to getting your book on a podcast about books.
The promise of substack as a platform is 100% contingent on finding some more interesting model for discovering great writers. There's million of em on there, but there's 20 million shitty ones and some of those look impressive at first glance.
Yeah! Emotional labor is a concept rooted in the literal workplace. The term was created to describe paid work where the job is to perform emotions. People feel imbalances in their relationships really keenly, though, and I think that makes it an appealing metaphor for casual use.
Post someone who looks good in a hat
First thing I've ever read that has made me interested in visiting Las Vegas
After glancing at your bio, I should clarify that I know computational models have tremendous strengths in certain areas lol But they undermined the language sciences so substantially that huge swathes of linguistics deal with putative entities that probably just don't exist.
Yes, exactly! Plus: if we know a metaphor only entered the field because it includes a trendy piece of tech, that should be a strong reason for skepticism. Computationalism is basically just an intellectual fad that's ossified into assumed truth. Terrible way to ground a theory!
The role of contemporary tech metaphors in shaping phil of mind is, at once, (a) something everyone knows about and (b) something we should all take way more seriously. Anyway good meme
With a few high-profile feminist advocates, ideas, policies, and talking points breaking through here and there from, idk maybe the 1870s up through the 90s? Progress toward equity in specific policy areas accelerated through the 2000s and 2010s and has since faced sharp conservative backlash.
I feel like our current manosphere is a product of social media specifically. Not the misogyny — that's bog standard — but some things are distinctive: the shallowness of engagement, the changeability of beliefs, the misinformation, and the influencer/follower fan relationship.
The manosphere lurks in the cesspool of shallow communities linked by nothing more than shared content preferences as detected by algorithm. A lotta young, kinda dumb, kinda dull influencers run out of content for their audience of rowdy, underinformed teens. And they resort to misogyny & outrage
Whew that was a dark dive into some unfamiliar territory. Too much to meaningfully comment on, so I'll just say: thanks, great threads and great work documenting influences and the spread of bad ideas.
Locally specific, developmentally nuanced approaches to empowering and culturally sensitive education. But embracing them requires giving up centralized control. While also stopping privatization and being generous with public money. I think that's the gist of it. Could be way off though 😂 4/4
Is important, but reliance on abstract + decontextualized + one-size-fits-all psychological theories just makes it really easy to monitor "performance" and do carrot/stick policy stuff. I think the gripe is mostly of that type. Educators have amazing ideas for progressive, creative, ...3/x
Is a natural ally to that agenda: It's individualistic but easy to generalize, quantifies everything, and abstracts across contexts (cause it's non-qualitative and no one's sitting in actual classrooms doing ethnography). Nothing wrong with telling teachers that reactivating knowledge ...2/x
Take this with a huge grain of salt, as I am not an educator and do not study education. Neolin educational reform is mostly about standardization, individualism, and top-down oversight: revisesociology.com/2022/10/31/n... Lab-based psych (which is all cog sci really means here) ...1/x
I agree, but of course it's more complicated. It always is. Corporations like exploitable workers, successful marketing hype, good PR, and profit. They're VERY happy to embrace mild HR policy changes to get those things. In some sense the embrace of diversity was real. It was just also very shallow.
Squawking is a way underrated word. Honestly a strong 9/10 on the words that whip scale
John McPhee would approve. He says assemble vast amounts of material and let the structure — and even themes, to some extent — emerge from there (Idk if what you're doing is nonfiction, but it's solid advice no matter what)
Is this published? Can we see it? I'll take a preprint
I love this thread—persuasive points, great collection of sources for further perusal—but the seriousness with which you're approaching this makes me wonder: Is the UV being put to design use? Operationalized in some way? I learned it as a "hey, neat phenomenon" thing, not a productive theory.
CogSci is defined, above all, by combining disciplines to study agents and behavior in a question-first, method-second fashion that allows for truly open-ended inquiry. Linguistics, philosophy, robotics, psych, STS & media studies, anthro, neuro—all vital. And AI is part of it, of course! *surely
Good post, cool topic, but cogsci is surley much broader than AI? In Bruner's telling (Acts of Meaning), you basically get Chomsky reviewing Skinner in '57 (the year after Dartmouth) and this kicks off three decades of excitement about computational models of mind, then embodiment hits in the '90s.
Hell yeah
Oh yeah! I forgot about that insanity.
I really think at its heart philosophy is one giant battle, taking place over many eras and nations, between people who are basically pleasant bureaucrats and people who are sexy murder poets, and it’s both super important and super boring that the pleasant bureaucrats must win.
Warhammer's creative breadth summed up by my two factions: 1. Adepta Sororitas🤘: fascist nuns, conlang space Latin; orbital drop cathedrals; satirically sharp; aesthetically indulgent. 2. Maggotkin💩: uh oh so gross! Ew, goopy. Haha sneeze attack! (Look for my poetry series, "Nurgle's Gurgles.")
The Lancet was unacceptably slow to retract — 2010, when Deer's documentary laid out the fraud in 2004 — and his university moved at the snail's pace of academia in dismissing him, but the networks should have fired folks. Such sloppy, pathetic, lowest-common-denominator fear-mongering.
Good point, but it isn't gullibility, it's desperation and the weird, complex social dynamics of personality cults and in-group/outgroup stuff and conspiracism, fueled by a decade of relentless reinforcement by every major TV network
Anyone who writes an impeccable paper is hot
I'm all for bashing politics-as-a-ladder losers, but I think this is just not true. medium.com/@nerdypursui... By all accounts he was a details-oriented and hardworking secretary. Maybe I'm just naive, but I don't think his work ethic is the problem with PB.
You post such good stuff
Plus many Christian denominations exist in national politics basically as hate groups, even while their local churches are organizing clothes drives and ham and bean suppers. The theater and spin of politics erode the sincerity/selflessness of faith, and I think everyone knows that .
Yes but. On paper that's true, but like 22-23% of those are Evangelicals, a movement widely described, for years, by those in the process of leaving it, as almost completely political rather than spiritual, with services closer to rallies than exegetical sermons.
Yeah the sarcastic questioning of faith only fits if you're certain someone's professed faith is insincere, or when new doctrine gets invented that's actually just selfishness. "My faith inspired my merciful politics" is different from "god says you gotta give me your cash"
new blog. it's short but it's what's been on my mind lately
Beyond the 60 Minutes payoff & Colbert cancelation, an unprecedented capitulation: as part of merger agreement, new parent company agrees to install an official to "monitor bias" at CBS’s news division. CBS news will essentially be state controlled media. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/b...
Maintenance Phase has some great stuff on corporate wellness programs. I'm sure tons of others do as well, but that one's a delight to listen to Anyway apparently these apps are incredibly widespread and mostly counterproductive
That's a really good point and I totally agree with you, but also, just put duct tape over it You know if you download that app they're gonna be selling your data to people marketing, like, a Papa John's crypto scheme or something
Another reason teaching is difficult — and valuable. Teachers are combo mentors, instructors, coaches, role models, etc. Those roles shift from Pre-K to primary to secondary to college, but they're always there
Absolutely. The terms of social engagement are different, and — at least for me — it's a little harder to feel confident in your role as director of the event, so to speak
I loved parts of academia but absolutely could not cut it as a teacher. I could only ever connect with the most gifted and engaged students, which is like eating only your dessert and leaving the meal untouched God it's a hard job
It's like...anti-journalism If journalism is about writing the contours of society, snaking your way through obstacles and distractions to find what matters most, this guy is doing the opposite. Just writing fanfic for reality where the people he's jealous of are all frauds
The other big part is the uncompromising absolutism of THAT particular faith tradition, its dependence on hostility against outgroups and enemies, that makes its adherents comfortable with their blindness to other religions. They change their views every 6 seconds but always go all in