Ted McCormick

four-dimensional checkers

New calls for research funding from the Royal Historical Society: opening in March 2026 - RHS The Society currently invites applications for the following two schemes — open to postgraduate researchers and early career historians — with closing dates of 5 June 2026. For further information on ...

In March, the Society opens the following four calls for research funding - for historians in HE and related professional sectors across all career stages.

Further details on dates and eligibility are available here: bit.ly/46IGRuH #Skystorians

Perhaps this will seem rude, but if your idea of a classroom is indistinguishable from your idea of a product showroom, it’s not obvious why your thoughts on teaching should be of much interest to people doing the actual work — much less why your thoughts should take precedence over their own.

And yes indeed, the capacity of LLMs in the abstract, or in terms of goals set by people outside the classroom, has been inappropriately centered in discussions about pedagogy. Whether LLMs fool you is as irrelevant as whether paper mills fool you to figuring out whether they’re good teaching tools.

Anyway, yes, most discussion about LLMs in the classroom assumes they should be there, only asking later whether they help achieve prior teaching goals; as far as that has been studied, the answer is often “no.” We’ve started with infomercials and only asked intelligent questions as an afterthought.

It is a funny thing to encounter so many takes on research and teaching from people who (as far as one can tell) do little of either and seek only to do less

I feel the same way about discussions of teaching and research that ignore what they are and who they are for, but that doesn’t stop them being published

It is true and important to say that LLMs did not by any means introduce that pathology, but it’s equally important to recognize that a great deal of enthusiasm for their use, and nearly all the media puffery around their capacity to replace human thought and writing, proceeds directly from it.

Only an entrenched, pathological, and anti-intellectual fetish for productivity, for a limitless volume of “content” that looks a certain way, independently of its relation to a human thinker or writer who produced it and to any human mind that might learn by reading it, could possibly obscure this.

This is a basic and crucial point for any discussion of LLMs’ use in teaching research or writing. Whether it can ape us, fool us, or get facts right or wrong is, in the end, irrelevant. The LLM is not the thinker we are trying to encourage; the LLM is not the writer that we are trying to improve.

I used to be a skeptic, but I have used this toaster and, though you deny me, verily I say unto you: it will change your life. or else

Coining a new word, “futurbation,” for writing in which the author claims certain knowledge of the future by virtue of his connection to a specific product in the present, and advertizes this knowledge as a self-aggrandizing, salvific gesture

This is good stuff, though

Undead human corpse centipede is ready to help make your term paper sound like someone else wrote it

Hard to bring up the deep, ineradicable ghoulishness of so much generative AI salesmanship/futurology without sounding like a humanist [derogatory], but so be it

Generating info (good or bad) is also not the same as doing social science

The first sentence is getting all the attention, but it’s the second sentence that’s the tell

good question

A military exercise where no civilians die is at least somewhat less terrifying than it would otherwise be; a willingness to kill unarmed women and schoolchildren is very much part of the American warrior ethos in its current iteration

I wonder whether a certain number of horrific “mistakes” isn’t considered value added, since targeting children and families for quasi-legal violence is US policy in so many other contexts

kind of the perfect emblem for Viewpoint Diversity: giving a racist and fascist equal billing with people who fought against those things, because Ideas are Ideas

Florida just cut off HIV meds for 16,000 people.

eggs and Our Brave Troops who are killing children remotely

Pathetic and vile

if you can’t be relevant, being correct is the least you should aim for

or you could talk about eggs I guess

Iranian Children Incinerated in US-Involved Missile Strike

between members of the public and members of Congress, guess whose job it is to be relevant

it’s hilarious to tell people criticizing the Dems that they’re “correct but irrelevant” when the Dem Congresspeople’s responses garnering the criticism — a bajillion tweets observing that Trump ignores Congress — are, you guessed it, *correct but irrelevant* unless they themselves choose to do more

“There’s a Canadian version” was supposed to do this work but I don’t think it ever crossed the border

Canada is American liberal discourse’s girlfriend who lives in Canada