New post: Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? (No. No it can't. Come on, now.)
davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...
05.03.2026 16:49
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New post: Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? (No. No it can't. Come on, now.)
davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...
i suspect many liberal uk journalists rolled their eyes at this line 6 months ago
on this team and gonna keep saying: behind the extremely thin veneer of concern and responsibility of anti-Bluesky takes is the desperate attempt to portray something that is obviously their problem as though it were our problem. nice try. go with God, have a blessed day
'If you have a protest no one wants to hear / Just attend a rally where the big shots meet / Strip to your hide and walk down the street’.
Victoria Peretitskaya explores the history of a 1960s folk song and the protest that inspired it.
a cat, looking out of the window
birdwatching
New podcast: very grateful to my hosts Alex and Dara at Inspire Us. Recorded at SOAS in London.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZUO...
Raises some important issues but also ignores the fact that many Humanities staff outside the magic circle are facing redundancy. They are naturally willing, indeed desperate, to apply for entry-level Oxbridge posts. The situation is grim. 1/2
“UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has shown that deep reading, defined as sustained immersion in a text, builds the cognitive circuits required for critical analysis, empathy and perspective-taking in ways that skimming, scrolling and short-form video simply cannot.”
“What we are seeing is the weakness of strong states. Regimes that rely on repression face a challenge: The more force they deploy, the more they risk exposing their own brutality to politically persuadable observers. Overreach doesn’t just project strength; it also undermines legitimacy.” Gift link
What happens when everything can become a bet?
Based on British Academy-funded research by @sarah-mills.bsky.social, this article explores the rapid rise of prediction markets – and what they mean for regulation, public trust and democracy. 👇
In which people CHOOSE TO VOTE for a female plumber representing a party with broadly liberal values and an unelected life peer declares it to be the end of liberal democracy.
not accepting election losses, casting non-white votes as illegitimate, are defining features of trumpian fascism
'Analysis of Home Office quarterly data reveals the number of overseas nurses granted entry to the UK has fallen by 93% over three years. Just 1,777 overseas nurses were granted entry in 2025, compared with 26,100 in 2022.'
Meanwhile, nursing programmes are at risk in many UK universities.
Last term I tried an experiment: I walked into my Tech and Design Ethics class, admitted that I had *no idea* what to do about ChatGPT - so I would let them figure it out.
As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class.
Here's what happened:
This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions.
It does not.
It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed.
🧵 1/
To complete the T-levels, UK students have to do a work placement. What we discovered this week is that an employer can cancel a placement on a whim, putting a student’s qualification & university place at risk. Seems like a shockingly big design flaw. This week has been very stressful.
Bookbinders and restorers in the 1930s and ’40s helped the Nazi regime create a database that was used to persecute and kill Jews and others who were deemed racially impure, a British researcher has found.
A week ago, we had an open conversation amongst senior academics in leadership roles and their use of LLMs (in both their leadership capacities and individually). Small group, not representative, but it already taught me a great deal about the diversity of perspectives (& their consequences). 1/
![To: Jeffrey epstein[jeevacation©gmail.com]
From: roger schank
Sent: Mon 1/4/2010 12:15:13 PM
Subject: there is a simpler explanation about women and intelligence
intelligence comes about in part from real focus (goal-directed
(this is why you have the absent minded professor caricature)
it is a rare woman who is not first and foremost focussed on what
thinking and feeling about her
hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why
hates you or why you dont own a kelly bag
roger schank
http://www.rogerschank.com/](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:dtgy62tymnpbnzozbpgnov56/bafkreid2mznu7l72zvvigmpcouxb4dqdqjpnvqaguq47xewvm4jcvhtuxu@jpeg)
To: Jeffrey epstein[jeevacation©gmail.com] From: roger schank Sent: Mon 1/4/2010 12:15:13 PM Subject: there is a simpler explanation about women and intelligence intelligence comes about in part from real focus (goal-directed (this is why you have the absent minded professor caricature) it is a rare woman who is not first and foremost focussed on what thinking and feeling about her hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why hates you or why you dont own a kelly bag roger schank http://www.rogerschank.com/
Relevant to today's conversation about AI's inherent sexism, here's an email from cognitive psychologist and early AI theorist Roger Schank, arguing to Epstein that women can't be truly intelligent, because they care too much about what other people think.
I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.
I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion
People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it
A brief observation on the relationship between antecedent status and reviewing incentives. Liam Kofi Bright ABSTRACT It is often believed that academics are especially harsh in their evaluation of work that critiques their own ideas. I dispute that claim. Rather, I say, consideration of the credit incentives for academics reviewing critique of their own work should lead us to expect them to typically be particularly generous to critique of their own work.
In what many are calling the most CV efficient strategy ever, I have my 2026 paper out already (relax for the rest of the year comrades!) and it's actually a bit of a joke one. Link here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... and abstract attached. But I'll just tell the story of how it came to be....
Bridget Phillipson on Kuenssberg is saying she wants student finance to be fairer, which is odd given Labour has just made it much less fair. She also says she wants to improve access for people from poor backgrounds, which sits badly with bankrupting the universities those students typically go to.
i've decided not to listen to the audio of a teacher reporting a kindergartender because frankly I don't want to become the person that that event would turn me into. but one thing I hope we are collectively coming to grips with is what it meant that we have lived among such people this whole time
Not “considers abolishing the system which put this appalling man in line to the throne in the first place”, then
A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
I’m glad this is written, but we need to also address ethics and morality: a lot of Americans support ending birthright citizenship by ignoring or changing the law, or they don’t care either way. To persuade them, it’s not enough to say what the law says; we need to address what the law should say.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Inquiry brought up the case of Denholm Elliott's daughter - PAUL McMULLAN: Oh, yeah - BROOKE GLADSTONE: - which is one case that you truly do regret. PAUL McMULLAN: I do, yeah. After Denholm died, she hit rock bottom, was allegedly doing methadone. And although she had, you know, the half-million-pound flat that Denholm had bought her, she didn't have any money to get her ten-pound bag in the morning. So she'd get up and go begging at the tube station. Here was a young girl crying out to be helped, and she met a police officer who didn't help her but rang up the News of the World and asked for money because he couldn't believe that this is the same girl who'd walked down the red carpet behind Eddie Murphy with Denholm Elliott, you know.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you offered her 50 pounds - PAUL MCMULLAN: Yeah. BROOKE GLADSTONE: - if she would come to your place and have sex. So you led her into prostitution, which she wasn't in that space for. PAUL McMULLAN: No, indeed. But she was in such a bad place that someone offering her 50 pounds for sex. I mean, that's five bags.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So how do you justify that? Yes, she was a drug addict, yes, she was begging. Why push her that extra step? Why take pictures of her topless? PAUL McMULLAN: I was keen. It was in my first year. I wanted to impress Piers Morgan, who was my boss at the time, and just wanted to say, not only have I caught this girl begging, but l've got pictures of her topless and I've got her offering me sex for 50 quid. How great am I? BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is a pretty dehumanizing enterprise, not just for Jennifer Elliott, but for you, yourself. PAUL McMULLAN: Yeah, that's why I feel terrible about it, not just 'cause she killed herself afterwards, but I, I actually liked her as a person.
Sharing from a friend, a passage from the Leveson Inquiry regarding the British actor Denholm Elliott, who died of AIDS in 1992. Three years after her death, the News of the World journalist Paul McMullan did the following to his daughter—neither a celebrity nor even someone of public interest.
