Todd Battistelli
@fromtherostra.com
How do our disagreements go? #rhetoric, #writing, and #education.
Viewpoints that I express are my own and do not represent the views of organizations with which I'm affiliated. Reposts are not endorsements.
he/him
Viewpoints that I express are my own and do not represent the views of organizations with which I'm affiliated. Reposts are not endorsements.
he/him
Pinned
Todd Battistelli
@fromtherostra.com
· Nov 13
Hello!
My main interests are writing and learning, particularly as they relate to productive disagreement in rhetoric, organizational & workplace communication, emergent strategy, coalition work, and facilitation.
More here: fromtherostra.com/2023/03/10/w...
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My main interests are writing and learning, particularly as they relate to productive disagreement in rhetoric, organizational & workplace communication, emergent strategy, coalition work, and facilitation.
More here: fromtherostra.com/2023/03/10/w...
1/3
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
educators know both the labor of education (our working conditions) & the labor of learning (the process we work to facilitate) better than any AI booster. We know what is being sold to us & why. We have been on the ed tech merry-go-round before
December 27, 2025 at 9:35 PM
educators know both the labor of education (our working conditions) & the labor of learning (the process we work to facilitate) better than any AI booster. We know what is being sold to us & why. We have been on the ed tech merry-go-round before
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
There's a bizarre sleight of hand here where professors resisting implementing AI into the classroom via ed-tech (a very winnable battle) is being equated with making all Gen AI "go away" (a much bigger fight).
Academics literally cannot make Gen AI go away. As in it is not possible to make it happen on a political, legal, and technical level. We do not and will not command the massive violence necessary to make chatGPT or Claude disappear. Responsible pedagogy grapples with the fact!
No one says to legit business owners, "hey I see there's an underground market selling toxic knock-offs of your product: how will you incorporate the toxic product AND protect your customers against its harms?" But apparently it's fine to make this suggestion to educators with respect to AI.
December 27, 2025 at 3:29 PM
There's a bizarre sleight of hand here where professors resisting implementing AI into the classroom via ed-tech (a very winnable battle) is being equated with making all Gen AI "go away" (a much bigger fight).
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
Making college unaffordable and undesirable has been the goal since Reagan invented neoliberalism. This admin has spent $billions fighting one fake crisis after another. Instead of cheap college, we got a bloated ICE budget, healthcare price increases, garnished wages, and a war on font styles.
December 27, 2025 at 1:51 PM
Making college unaffordable and undesirable has been the goal since Reagan invented neoliberalism. This admin has spent $billions fighting one fake crisis after another. Instead of cheap college, we got a bloated ICE budget, healthcare price increases, garnished wages, and a war on font styles.
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
Anyway. They spent the last decade telling us STEM degrees were the future and the Humanities were worthless then they spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build a glitchy Humanities robot.
December 26, 2025 at 5:38 AM
Anyway. They spent the last decade telling us STEM degrees were the future and the Humanities were worthless then they spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build a glitchy Humanities robot.
Can't speak to bizarre gender ideas, but a Boston terrier/pug mix has been supportive while I've been laid up with flu this week.
December 27, 2025 at 2:31 AM
Can't speak to bizarre gender ideas, but a Boston terrier/pug mix has been supportive while I've been laid up with flu this week.
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
In 2025, Christian Nationalism didn’t stay theoretical. It showed up in real bills, real lawsuits, and real threats to church–state separation.
But wherever they tried it, we were there to stop them.
Now we’re building toward 2026. Join us.
americanhumanist.org/advocatewithus
But wherever they tried it, we were there to stop them.
Now we’re building toward 2026. Join us.
americanhumanist.org/advocatewithus
Advocate with Us! - American Humanist Association
Interested in getting more involved in our humanist advocacy efforts? Let us know by filling out this form.
americanhumanist.org
December 26, 2025 at 8:54 PM
In 2025, Christian Nationalism didn’t stay theoretical. It showed up in real bills, real lawsuits, and real threats to church–state separation.
But wherever they tried it, we were there to stop them.
Now we’re building toward 2026. Join us.
americanhumanist.org/advocatewithus
But wherever they tried it, we were there to stop them.
Now we’re building toward 2026. Join us.
americanhumanist.org/advocatewithus
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
We have "growth hackers" but no "stability hackers." "Disruptors" but no "preservers." Our entire vocabulary is oriented toward the new. We have no language for the equally difficult work of keeping existing things from falling apart.
www.joanwestenberg.com/the-rime-of...
www.joanwestenberg.com/the-rime-of...
The Rime of the Ancient Maintainer
Every culture produces heroes that reflect its deepest anxieties. The Greeks, terrified of both mortality and immortality, gave us Achilles. The Victorians, haunted by social mobility, gave us the self-made industrialist. And Silicon Valley, drunk on exponential curves and both terrified and entranced by endless funding rounds, has given us
www.joanwestenberg.com
December 26, 2025 at 9:35 PM
We have "growth hackers" but no "stability hackers." "Disruptors" but no "preservers." Our entire vocabulary is oriented toward the new. We have no language for the equally difficult work of keeping existing things from falling apart.
www.joanwestenberg.com/the-rime-of...
www.joanwestenberg.com/the-rime-of...
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
Yes! We pursue our politics because we believe in them, not because they're the most likely to succeed. That's why "we shall overcome *someday*" and need "solidarity *forever.*" This is a long game.
December 26, 2025 at 4:55 PM
Yes! We pursue our politics because we believe in them, not because they're the most likely to succeed. That's why "we shall overcome *someday*" and need "solidarity *forever.*" This is a long game.
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
The genuinely subversive potential for nonhierarchical coordination on Twitter as it used to be was why elites killed it. I dont think we can expect a good substitute to be forthcoming in our current political economy
Two things can be true at once:
1. We probably have an ethical obligation to abandon X.
2. Bsky is currently a (very) poor substitute for the Twitter of 2014-2020.
On 1: we all do unethical things all the time (the turkey and gammon were good yesterday).
On 2: I suspect this can never happen.
1. We probably have an ethical obligation to abandon X.
2. Bsky is currently a (very) poor substitute for the Twitter of 2014-2020.
On 1: we all do unethical things all the time (the turkey and gammon were good yesterday).
On 2: I suspect this can never happen.
December 26, 2025 at 4:48 PM
The genuinely subversive potential for nonhierarchical coordination on Twitter as it used to be was why elites killed it. I dont think we can expect a good substitute to be forthcoming in our current political economy
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
Universities are combining departments, eliminating programs, pushing AI, buying out tenured profs and moving from cheap labor to the cheapest most exploited labor imaginable
December 23, 2025 at 3:41 PM
Universities are combining departments, eliminating programs, pushing AI, buying out tenured profs and moving from cheap labor to the cheapest most exploited labor imaginable
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
Spellcheck is theoretically an incredibly useful and powerful machine learning tool and I don’t understand why in the last few years it has become so bad at its job that now it just actively introduces errors all the time while not catching things like ‘disablity.’
December 23, 2025 at 3:47 PM
Spellcheck is theoretically an incredibly useful and powerful machine learning tool and I don’t understand why in the last few years it has become so bad at its job that now it just actively introduces errors all the time while not catching things like ‘disablity.’
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
I need to share this with someone
December 22, 2025 at 9:59 PM
I need to share this with someone
What they say: “Get involved.”
What they mean: “Become a pawn in my power plays.”
What they mean: “Become a pawn in my power plays.”
December 22, 2025 at 10:31 PM
What they say: “Get involved.”
What they mean: “Become a pawn in my power plays.”
What they mean: “Become a pawn in my power plays.”
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
I think this is a really important point. When folks say "no AI" they often don’t mean "I can conceive of no possible use for AI"—they mean "the use cases I’ve been shown do not begin to justify the harms"—that’s not something you respond to by offering another narrow use case
So when I say there is *zero* utility for LLMs, I don't mean there are zero use cases. I mean there are zero use cases that even begin to make up for the damage that's being done.
December 22, 2025 at 9:15 PM
I think this is a really important point. When folks say "no AI" they often don’t mean "I can conceive of no possible use for AI"—they mean "the use cases I’ve been shown do not begin to justify the harms"—that’s not something you respond to by offering another narrow use case
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
It's important to understand what we're (dis)agreeing with when we (dis)agree. This is a real skill. I worry it's atrophying.
I also shared a bit with @willgervais.com when he asked me about it for his students. I think it's especially important to teach junior people how to engage with ideas.
I also shared a bit with @willgervais.com when he asked me about it for his students. I think it's especially important to teach junior people how to engage with ideas.
Critical Thinking is deep engagement with the relationships
between statements about the world.
See section 3 here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
4/
between statements about the world.
See section 3 here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
4/
![3 Critical Thinking
A vital skill under rising fascism, planetary crises, and the onslaught of technosolutionism. Critical
thinking in an academic context comprises, as Isabelle Stengers (2018) explains, “the ability to be
vigilant about one’s abstractions, to not be blindly led by them.” (p. 111) For ‘AI’ in the classroom
this can be exercised with two steps (Guest 2025). First, students can ask themselves if their cog-
nitive labour is being affected by an artifact; and if ‘yes’ then they can ask what that relationship
means for their specific context. If they pick chatbots, it becomes obvious that these so-called tools
damage their ability to learn, while also harming other people and planet (Guest, Suarez, et al. 2025;
Suarez et al. 2025).
Another strategy, applicable both to learners’ and seasoned scholars, is to check how ideas hang
in relation to other ideas (Elgin 1999, 2005, 2017). So when students work on assigned readings, they
can vigilantly retain the assumption for the duration that what they are reading is coherent and let
the ideas hang in relation to each other. If the students experience this as forming a sensible whole,
then they can try to see how these ideas or concepts further relate to extant knowlewdge. This
testing of how ideas hang in relation to both each other (within the work being analysed) and to
other constellations of ideas they may know about — ones they may disagree or agree with — can be
enlightening. And for those who enjoy drawing and thinking formally, this process can be rendered
using graphs (Blokpoel et al. 2021-2025, Chapter 6) and other formalisms (Beisbart et al. 2021).
Such activities can help pick out contradictions, like those that Teresa Heffernan (2023) outlines:
“Billions of dollars have backed AI [...] while science-based climate research has met resistance,
deferral, and denial as the world burns.” (p. 122)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vsyj5jtayxcq5dw5mtja4xtb/bafkreiapjxo47fnqf5ime25onuvw3xtjfe343h5mj5q5junwpz3hw43uzu@jpeg)
![Another such example is formally treating so-called guardrails, which are post hoc checks on
the output of LLMs which industry claims can safeguard users. However, LLMs by design “give
emotionally inappropriate or unsafe responses [and i]f a response isn’t caught by these rules, it
will slip through” (Olivia Guest, as quoted in Kilgore 2025). Guardrails may seem sensible, giving
the impression of responsibility, but critical computational thinking through formal analyses re-
veal they are unimplementable. Not only is it impossible to make an LLM replicate human expert
behaviour, but also catching when LLMs fail to meet appropriate standards requires full blown
cognition, which provably cannot be codified (van Rooij, Guest, et al. 2024). This poses an infinite
4
Towards Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacies
regress of humans in the loop needed to make pretend of what AI was supposed to solve (Bainbridge
1983; Guest 2025; Guest and Martin 2025b). Through critical computational thinking we can un-
veil that the proposal that formal rules can make (dysfunctional) systems safe is self-defeating. Not
only are the LLMs produced by the AI industry a scam, akin to a ouija board (Guest, Suarez, et al.
2025), but guardrails is a scam too. This strategy — from tobacco with filters to petroleum with
the carbon footprint and now to AI with guardrails — to propose non-solutions to buy time and
save face in order to push their agenda, is ubiquitous (Guest, Suarez, et al. 2025).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vsyj5jtayxcq5dw5mtja4xtb/bafkreigc5dugspyd6775qbtuvzx6sgvlmg5sqnrapyhg4gttrgqs5lko2y@jpeg)
December 22, 2025 at 12:08 PM
It's important to understand what we're (dis)agreeing with when we (dis)agree. This is a real skill. I worry it's atrophying.
I also shared a bit with @willgervais.com when he asked me about it for his students. I think it's especially important to teach junior people how to engage with ideas.
I also shared a bit with @willgervais.com when he asked me about it for his students. I think it's especially important to teach junior people how to engage with ideas.
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
I know everyone is thinking of Sigourney's ADR'ed line, but we need an R-rated cut mainly to get more drug-use context for Tony Shaloub's character.
December 22, 2025 at 1:47 PM
I know everyone is thinking of Sigourney's ADR'ed line, but we need an R-rated cut mainly to get more drug-use context for Tony Shaloub's character.
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
Now would be a great time for a 10 episode, 20 hour prestige series about the ten years between 1916 and 1926, covering the establishment of the 8-hr work day & 5-day work week, in the US. Each episode would be one year & the middle episode should be entirely devoted to the Battle of Blair Mountain.
December 21, 2025 at 4:44 AM
Now would be a great time for a 10 episode, 20 hour prestige series about the ten years between 1916 and 1926, covering the establishment of the 8-hr work day & 5-day work week, in the US. Each episode would be one year & the middle episode should be entirely devoted to the Battle of Blair Mountain.
December 21, 2025 at 3:40 PM
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
And in wishing everyone the compliments of the season, I like to share one of my favorite seasonal messages that I first encountered from the Seattle Atheists:
“In this holiday season, let us remember that kindness, charity, and goodwill transcend belief, creed or religion.”
“In this holiday season, let us remember that kindness, charity, and goodwill transcend belief, creed or religion.”
December 21, 2024 at 2:43 PM
And in wishing everyone the compliments of the season, I like to share one of my favorite seasonal messages that I first encountered from the Seattle Atheists:
“In this holiday season, let us remember that kindness, charity, and goodwill transcend belief, creed or religion.”
“In this holiday season, let us remember that kindness, charity, and goodwill transcend belief, creed or religion.”
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
Needless to say, an LLM cannot reliably determine whether a source supports a given claim, just as it cannot determine whether a claim is true. This will automate generation of documents that make false claims, with citations that exist and may, on superficial reading, support those false claims.
August 18, 2025 at 10:41 PM
Needless to say, an LLM cannot reliably determine whether a source supports a given claim, just as it cannot determine whether a claim is true. This will automate generation of documents that make false claims, with citations that exist and may, on superficial reading, support those false claims.
Enjoying holiday-themed media with weirdo characters named Todd
December 21, 2025 at 4:09 AM
Enjoying holiday-themed media with weirdo characters named Todd
Reposted by Todd Battistelli
One reason why I don't trust industry research is that the people in charge of products fundamentally cannot handle any criticism of those products
anyway, since I've been blocked, Im sharing this because I might as well be the toxic "mean-spirited" troll he says I am
December 20, 2025 at 6:14 PM
One reason why I don't trust industry research is that the people in charge of products fundamentally cannot handle any criticism of those products