yet opposing the integration of genAI into the classroom and other critical societal infrastructure somehow makes one a 'pessimist', 'anti-progress' & 'anti-innovation'
Associate Professor in Psychology @ Aalborg University. I use qualitative methods to study mental health, focusing especially on the social, cultural and spatial contexts of experience. https://www.rasmusbirk.org/
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yet opposing the integration of genAI into the classroom and other critical societal infrastructure somehow makes one a 'pessimist', 'anti-progress' & 'anti-innovation'
one of my favourite things at work: typing in the precise reference for a book in our university library search engine and 1) not finding the book, 2) being met with approximately 50 reviews of said book.
Read up and down this thread: trans people have been treated abominably by the state and are now in an impossible position to
Actually jaw dropping from James McMurdock MP, even by his standards. We cannot become numb to this. The far right are in Parliament, and they're trying to normalise outright, vicious racism (same goes for the likes of Rupert Lowe too)
Ben Obese-Jecty is the only Conservative MP and frankly one of the vanishingly small number of MPs, full stop, to react to this stuff in a normal way.
what are the odds of him returning to Manchester United?
If a dude offered to help you write crappy memos and essays, and you found out they were also helping children kill themselves, would you keep working with that dude?
This is a controversial opinion some places, but by season 3 (with some exceptions) the show has completely disappeared up its own arse, everything is a montage basically, and there is no plot. Season 4 is a small return to form.
It's worth noting that these are not merely stupid questions, but have the function - as does much of the professional and academic ethics industry - of taking up up space for serious discussion of politics and value with speculative, sci-fi bollocks. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
I’ve been reading the culture series - supposedly the favourite series of Zuckerberg, musk etc - and you can REALLY see where they grab a lot of this sci-fi stuff from. conveniently they focus on the AI stuff while ignoring that the books are about fully automated luxury communism in space.
Adam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death. Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...
The return of Clegg provides an opportunity to re-share this beautiful anecdote, from David Runciman's review of Cameron's memoir
and every legal department at every university as they wonder if we can follow GDPR...
From the Archive: Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, 'Social Science and Neuroscience beyond Interdisciplinarity: Experimental Entanglements' - an account of the dynamics of interaction across the social sciences and neurosciences. (Open Access) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Can’t believe you’d come for the Paddington book like this
Makes sense - thanks for the explanation!
Isn’t it reported to just be a payrise, no extension?
Dreyfus spinning in his grave so rapidly that you could probably power a small household
Has anything actually been written on this, outside of the Callard piece a few years back on geography? I guess it’s difficult to write about it without it coming off as a personal attack but… it just seems so strange.
Wait, is Durham posh?!
An unfortunate thing about David Graeber being basically the only widely-read anthropologist now is that his admirers often take Graeber's use of very basic anthropological tools and stances as evidence of his idiosyncratic & puckish genius.
zuckerberg has lost SEVENTY BILLION DOLLARS on VR since predicting we'd be working all day in "the metaverse" and nobody cares. sam altman says shit like "AI will solve war" and the market loves it. elon musk. it's conspiracy logic all the way down
I see the discourse on AI/LLMs is still going great
It is once again not nothing - and not dismissible as convenience or bad faith - that this fascist seizure of grant infrastructure narrates itself as a contribution to the reproducibility crisis. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...
"Asked to generate intervention plans for struggling students, AI teacher assistants recommended more-punitive measures for hypothetical students with Black-coded names and more supportive approaches for students the platforms perceived as white" www.chalkbeat.org/2025/08/06/a...
Can someone help me understand how a 4-month old company with no product is “valued” at $12 billion?
The Guardian has identified the man behind an openly extremist YouTube channel. Rife with neo-Nazi ideology, antisemitism & racism, it's garnered 50k subs, 2.3m views & likely thousands of dollars from YouTube’s revenue-sharing monetization program. From @jasonaw.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/...
Yeah, Cooper’s summary of the screenshot seems disingenuous tbh.
‘Please briefly introduce yourself’ at meetings always deteriorates because what should be a 15-20 second sentence becomes a five minute speech by more and more people.
I don’t think they’re being sarcastic (unfortunately). Tupelo is a great song though
I’ll defend a lot of Cave (but less and less tbh), but this line…. ‘I believe that the ability to change one’s mind is the very definition of strength’ is the sign of a hack
So the @researchireland.ie Global Talent Scheme is now open for "exceptional mid-career and established researchers," currently employed outside Ireland, who want to move their research here. All disciplines (I think). Individual awards up to €3.25m (!) www.researchireland.ie/funding/glob...
RIP John "Ozzy" Osbourne. Thanks for being a legend and a musical guiding light. I think you would've appreciated me sharing this photo of you.
You and Wittgenstein both, Des. (I’m kidding, I don’t really understand Wittgenstein)
I use it partially as a digital ethnography!
‘Have you heard about “the social construction of what?”’
Not lying when I say that maybe 75% of my reading recommendations for psychology students are Hacking and Rose…
It's not for me to defend them, but the whole "English people only eat terrible food" thing on this site is insufferable, not only because it's stupid and wrong, but also as evidence that even "liberal" Americans are suffused in a culture of needing to feel mindlessly superior to other people.
Delighted to see this interaction with one of my scholarly heroes: “Beyond Perception: Correspondences with Tim Ingold's Work” www.routledge.com/Beyond-Perce...
There’s definitely something about the addictive nature of the feed and its ability to submerge your thinking totally that is… not great.
Steven Rose was a neuroscientist and critic of genetic determinist views of human behaviour; he was also a founder member of the now defunct British Society for Social Responsbility in Science (which perhaps needs to be resurrected…) www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
But then they (we) would still complain about the right-wing, racist articles tbh
I feel like a lot of people on this app would find peace if they accepted that the New York Times is a right-wing, quite racist newspaper, and this is the reason it consistently publishes right-wing, quite racist articles.
I recently saw two teenagers benching. One of them tried with 80kg and got nowhere close to a full rep (his friend had to help him - he could barely lift it). He then resolutely got up, picked up at mat, put it on the bench and tried again, with the same result. Then they left without cleaning up!
This is the second time I’ve dealt out second hand embarrassment on my behalf with this story…
I wrote big chunks of my thesis to classical covers of ABBA, if that makes you feel better…
Smørrebrød is awful
A few additional interesting points about Jordan Lasker. One, he appled to work as a graduate student in my lab years ago: bsky.app/profile/ent3...
So, uh, reading through philosophy of science archives, and... does anyone know anything about Ian Hacking "beating up on a cop" in 1981? That sounds like a good story.
Excuse me?!
Vent, vent, vent, hvad?!
For én, der er enormt langt bagefter: hvem taler vi om her?
🚨 NEW PAPER ALERT 🚨 How should psychology deal with 'things' and 'technology'? Jesper Aagaard (@aagaard.bsky.social) and I argue in this brand new paper that psychology is too uninterested in technology, leading us to call for "technopsychology"
Descartes gave us all the tools we need to survive in an era of misinformation. Simply begin with the understanding that you are real but everything else is fairly likely to be the cruel games of a demon sent to torment you specifically.
The difficulty I have with the "ignore Matthew Goodwin" takes is that the mass media take him very seriously and give him loads of airtime, so there's a risk that his "analysis" and solutions are simply assumed to be valid and could influence policy, unless the counter-arguments are made.
I think this is a correct take. In a similar (but not as widespread) situation, we also have more and more IQ-race-science weirdos coming out of the woodworks, and I genuinely think it’s important to pick that stuff apart every chance you get!
Should humanity exist? Let’s ask a man who cofounded an online payment-processing platform 27 years ago
It's a competitive field, but extra marks for this extremely stupid essay on "AI and the humanities" for leaning heavily in its author's expertise in the history of technology. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
If I was a history professor at Princeton I would simply not advertise that I don't know what reading is.
looking forward to some parents suing to demand segregated schools because integration violates their religious beliefs
Freedom is when you subject the entire planet to the fantasies of techno-overlords, while "a small Scandinavian village" run on eco-principles is a degree of oppressiveness just short of North Korea.
Another win for bluesky. Festivals are great! Rick Astley played THE SMITHS, Des!
the u.s. pretends not to have a ruling class but it doesn't pretend very *well*
Okay, that's enough now about the nice social democrat mayor.
746 proposals for a total of 3M (about 13 will be funded). If orgs spent 4000 in personnel time preparing their proposals on average, then this mechanism actually reduced funding for open science. Open science is extremely underfunded.
They’re obsessed with the deranged ‘London has fallen’ rhetoric. In 2020 I saw Danish people claiming on Facebook that there were ‘no go’ neighbourhoods in London…
‘Only the poors are allowed left wing opinions’
Antropologen Mikka Nielsen har skrevet en masse gode ting om folk i (nogenlunde) den situation, at de først diagnosticeres med ADHD som voksne. Kan anbefales!
the level of misinformation sparked because of this bananas EEG preprint is just really tragic. By the way if you think that a researcher caused cognitive decline to happen to participants in a study you should probably be freaked out by that
This, and I think the very clear and personal style was also very lovely and succinct!
extremely curious what this book is and how "the baby trap" is relevant!
Amazing: MIT researchers revealed how ChatGPT etc are destroying our brains and booby-trapped the report to expose those who want to use AI to ostensibly summarize the results. t.co/JXeTALBPds
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.
The full paper, which is essential reading for everyone, is here! Free! dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...
A major danger of LLMs is that humans are SO predisposed to attribute knowledge to any entity that uses natural language fluently. We cannot imagine that a machine that outputs natural-seeming speech/text doesn't have cognition. Brilliantly articulated by @emilymbender.bsky.social et al. (2021).
the state is being subjected to jokes about this headline
We're basically going to end up depending on the equivalent of a cute 'arts and craft' movement, but for all fact-based, interpretive or humanly illuminating cultural discourses
The AI nerds have discovered internal models - the field has now advanced to the 1970s! 😮
it's actually astounding that they seem to be repeating some fundamental assumptions that are widely regarded as missteps. Although tbh I did see a paper some AI scholars discussed Dreyfus and didn't even get his first name right. So maybe it tracks.
I wonder if they know about Hubert Dreyfus
should I be glad that netflix only has until season 5 or 6 or so?
I thought about it when reading this piece (amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...) where the author gets it to admit the lie - but fails to see that that, too, is just a piece of predictive text...
It's an interesting piece - and there really, really is a need for better investigations of chatbots as a phenomenon - but it drives me mad when, in the piece, he gets it to "admit" that it is lying. It's a stochastic parrot! it's guessing based on your prompt! The admission of 'lying' is a guess!
If, like us, you find psychology curiously devoid of what JL Austin called ‘middle-sized dry goods’, we’ve got an article for you: Drawing on STS, technopsychology is a way of doing psychology where technology isn’t background noise—it’s part of the conversation www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Man, if only someone like Hubert Dreyfus had written multiple books on this problem...
FWIW I think part of what makes this place kind of insufferable isn't the boomer US libs in themselves, but more their incredible parochialism, and their absolute refusal (or inability) to understand their own catastrophe within a global picture of rising authoritarianism and violence.
Just checking back in to see where we stand on this @bostonglobe.com fake front page from pre-election 2016
the paper draws widely on STS to argue that the psychological sciences can reimagine its various phenomena, not as *separate* from technology, but entangled with and constituted by it. With "AI" running rampant across the social fabric, psychology needs to tend to technology more than ever!
🚨 NEW PAPER ALERT 🚨 How should psychology deal with 'things' and 'technology'? Jesper Aagaard (@aagaard.bsky.social) and I argue in this brand new paper that psychology is too uninterested in technology, leading us to call for "technopsychology"
What in the world…
pfft, that is old news at this stage arxiv.org/abs/2410.069... arxiv.org/abs/2410.04360 proceedings.mlr.press/v202/aher23a...
Not true. I see you're a luxury watch dealer. I'm also interested in watches. Let me show you how free and easy migration has allowed you to earn a living. 🧵
At this point I’m just waiting for someone to suggest qualitative researchers interview ‘personas’ instead of people…
❓Questioning Humanity, Being Human in a #Posthuman Age, by Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose is available in hardback and paperback on our website: www.e-elgar.com/shop/isbn/97... Read the Introduction and Chapter 1 for 🆓 at doi.org/10.4337/9781... @nwlake.bsky.social @rose-nikolas.bsky.social
Finally my essay on a 5E approach to mental distress in adversity is published! It is open access at doi.org/10.1177/1363...
100%. I even went on youtube to rewatch it and it just has to be experienced. Immersion!
there's a sequence in Control (same developer) that is completely weird and very different from the rest of the game, but also incredibly amazing - and I think it only works because its such a radical shift in tone!
wait, des, you don't like STS anymore?!