Ehud

Modern Language Association Call for Papers. TEACHING DYSTOPIA IN DYSTOPIAN TIMES. This roundtable invites papers from educators at all levels who are working with dystopian texts or at restrictive institutions to share pedagogical, political, and interpretive strategies. 200-word abstracts due March 15 by email to alexander.manshel@mcgill.ca Deadline for submissions: Sunday, March 15, 2026

Calling all High School English Teachers, Professors, and Educators of all kinds!

Do you have thoughts on TEACHING DYSTOPIA IN DYSTOPIAN TIMES?

Then please join us for this roundtable at next January's MLA convention in Los Angeles!

Thanks for sharing + please get in touch with any questions!

Philosophy Should Be Among the Most Diverse Disciplines, Not the Least

Philosophy Should Be Among the Most Diverse Disciplines, Not the Least
The productive engine of philosophy depends on novelty and difference. A fair and flourishing discipline would treasure rather than repel those who have historically been excluded.
schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2026/03/phil...

The earth expands as it get hotter (everything does), so the heat has more place to go, and as a consequence of this it will feel cooler.
No way you can argue with this logic.

Panel #66: Engaging Policy in STS Research and Practice Abstract: Throughout its history, the STS community has engaged with the important policy questions of the day, showing how public issues are constructed in tandem with evidenceand expertise, and how technological infrastructures are inseparable from social systems. STS scholars have worked to have their insights recognized by policy makers and have used their direct policy engagements to advance knowledge of policy processes. The past decade, however, has seen massive shifts in the policy landscape–including in the ways that research is funded, evidence is valued, and expertise is constructed–as well as new substantive issues at the intersection of science, technology, and policy. This panel asks what STS scholars are bringing to, and taking away from, their engagements with evolving policy processes. What STS tools best help us understand policy issues, and where do new circumstances require new theories and analytical methods? How can STS analysis not only advance knowledge but shape effective political action? And how does engagement with policy function as an intellectual project in its own right? This open panel invites submissions from across sectors (e.g., environment, innovation, health, criminal justice), and with historical and global perspectives (particularly outside the United States and Europe).

Thinking about, or engaging in, politics and public policy with an #STS lens? Apply to present your work in the open panels (#66) I am organizing with Gwen Ottinger and Jason Delborne
@4sweb.bsky.social in Toronto in October! (Paper abstracts due April 30th!) www.4sonline.org/accepted_ope...

Many Minds podcast – Listener survey A brief survey for listeners of the Many Minds podcast.

Happy 6th anniversary to us!! 🎉🎉

Thanks for spending time with us, old friends and new! As we celebrate this milestone, we've launched a short audience survey to get your thoughts on the show (and its future).

We would be most grateful for your participation!

Link: forms.gle/AnJSopuX8Cho...

A 2,850-year-old mass grave in Serbia reveals a shift in prehistoric violence Our study has finally uncovered the circumstances surrounding the death of 77 people, mostly women and girls.

Killing women and children probably to gain territory. theconversation.com/a-2-850-year...

This is super interesting. The piece defines fascism as concerned only with racial domination and conservatism as below, then recognizes the conservatism constantly changes what it counts as extrahuman law.

But it occurs to me that throughout all these changes to the social hierarchy…

The Central Lie of Prediction Markets Polymarket and Kalshi promise the wisdom of the crowds. They deliver something very different.

Wrote about the central lie of prediction markets. How they are the perfect technology for a low-trust society, simultaneously exploiting and reifying an environment in which believing the motives behind any person or action becomes harder. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Can large language models *introspect*?

In a new paper, @kmahowald.bsky.social and I study the MECHANISM of introspection in big open-source models.

tldr: Models detect internal anomalies through DIRECT ACCESS, but don't know what the anomalies are.

And they love to guess “apple” 🍎

Book Review: The Societal Impact of Genetic Research In “What We Inherit,” Sam Trejo and Daphne O. Martschenko examine the link between genetic myths and social genomics.

“Trejo and Martschenko suggest a set of guidelines for polygenic embryo selection, starting with “a complete moratorium” in the short term and only allowing some traits to be selected after quality reproductive care is accessible to everyone, to avoid further systemic inequalities”

Very thoughtful review of CRICK from Angela Creager in @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social lareviewofbooks.org/article/fran...

Note to Dean:
Please give me my pension and replace me with AI already.

My Princeton AI and society team is at the AI Safety summit in Paris.

My Neurips keynote for our approach:
slideslive.com/39055698/are...

Our paper:
ai.sociology.princeton.edu

Say hi especially if you are *utterly* unimpressed by the current doom or hype models.

Wrong nightmares!

Publisher demands $500 from impersonated author to retract paper Last year, we wrote about a Walsh Medical Media journal that refused to withdraw an author’s paper unless he paid a fee — even though he didn’t write or submit the article. For one reader, some det…

Well, this takes the biscuit.
I know of cases where people were named as authors without their permission, and where it's difficult to get anyone to do anything about it. But here we have a particularly brazen publisher who says they'll remove it if you pay $500!
retractionwatch.com/2026/03/05/p...

Losing the Plot: The “Leftists” Who Turn Right What do we make of former friends who fell down the rabbit hole of the Right?

This from 2023 is interesting reading. I don't think we understand things much better now. I end up thinking that as unsatisfying as it is, Popper's open society vs not remains the most productive lens. inthesetimes.com/article/form...

”Only eight months ago they declared that the "Iranian threat" had been eliminated for generations. They lied to us then, and they lie to us now. This attack, and the crimes against the Palestinians that continue under its auspices, will not bring security.”

(Published today in Haaretz)

Stop the war! This war won't bring us security either. We, the Peace Partnership organizations, call for an immediate end to the war. This is a war of choice that endangers us all. The government repeatedly chooses dangerous eternal wars that cause loss of human life, destruction, and pain with no future and no political solutions. Only eight months ago they declared that the "Iranian threat" had been eliminated for generations. They lied to us then, and they lie to us now. This attack, and the crimes against the Palestinians that continue under its auspices, will not bring security. In Israel, Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine, there are frightened parents and children who just want to live. Only a joint struggle for a political settlement and a just peace based on the rights of peoples can bring true security to all residents of the region. The Peace Partnership

Full page ad in today‘s newspaper. Text translation in alt text.

There is an interesting shift in literary culture that LLMs and a faux concern for objectivity in academic discourse has merely exacerbated. 20th century literature was the literature of the voice. You could identify authors from a single sentence. This is not so of accomplished 21st century authors

Yeah, far from my favorite species.

The science is as over-hyped and borderline fraudulent as the ethics are thorny (and that doesn't even count the George Church, friend of Epstein angle)

Have you noticed that people on bsky are very judgmental?

It’s tiring that we are increasingly stuck organizing our intellectual lives around arguing for the value of having an intellectual life

Cover image of the 5 March 2026 issue of Science Magazine. Koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus), such as this mother and 7-month-old joey from Queensland, Australia, embody a genetic paradox. Populations rich in diversity are declining, whereas those with little variation are expanding and rapidly reshuffling their genomes. These findings reveal that diversity alone does not determine resilience. Instead, a population’s fate depends on several evolutionary processes unfolding across generations.

Genome sequencing in 418 koalas from 27 populations across Australia shows that, though they still have low diversity due to past decline, there are clear signs genetic recovery is underway.
Escaping bottlenecks: The demographic path to genetic recovery in koalas www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
🐨🧬😊🧪

Cultural evolution beyond the individual: what human collective knowledge adds to high fidelity copying - Biology & Philosophy This paper examines ways in which cultural evolution theory can treat collective knowledge in human evolution, focusing on how collective knowledge complements high-fidelity copying. We distinguish be...

… which on a population level means distributed adaptation link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Social information use in the wild! Humans are basically using local enhancement.

Like many methodologists, I often find myself arguing with someone that their method/epistemology makes no sense. That someone thinks I am arguing against their *conclusions*. But I am arguing they have no justification for their conclusions. Is there a philosophical term for this problem/confusion?

Joan Miró “The Morning Star” (1940) • During WWII, Miró produced 23 paintings collectively known as the Constellations. To create each piece, the artist first applied a soft ground of dry-brushed color that evokes the randomness of nature. Next, he painted fanciful black lines and vibrant flat shapes that change color whenever they cross over a line. Red switches to black…black switches to blue…blue switches to red. Miró’s Constellations pulse, like a universe with music in its soul. • During World War II, the Constellations were the first works of art created by a prominent European artist to reach America. Rumor has it they were secretly transported in a diplomatic pouch.

#ArtHistory 🗃️ 🐡

To escape from the reality of WWII into the comfort of a fantasy world, Miró turned to the sky as a coping mechanism. “I felt a deep desire to flee,” said the artist. “The moon and the stars began to play a major role in my paintings.”

Joan Miró, “The Morning Star” (1940)

A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4,000 Developer Machines A prompt injection in a GitHub issue triggered a chain reaction that ended with 4,000 developers getting OpenClaw installed without consent. The attack composes well-understood vulnerabilities into so...

I am convinced we are on the verge of the first "AI agent worm". This looks like the closest hint of it, though it isn't it quite itself: an attack on a PR agent that got it to set up to install openclaw with full access on 4k machines grith.ai/blog/clineje...

Four panel comic. In the first panel a character says to another "I know I can be annoying sometimes". They get a response in the second panel "Naw, I don't find you annoying." The third panel just has them looking at each other. Before zooming in on the original speaker in the fourth comic, who we see is thinking "I have decided. They're annoyed by me."

This too is violence. A most personal attack.