Bethany Gardner
bethanyhgardner.bsky.social
Bethany Gardner
@bethanyhgardner.bsky.social
formerly a psycholinguist studying pronouns at Vanderbilt, now working on the Siri team at Apple | they/she 🏳️‍🌈 💜🤍🖤
SF pride entrance: put your empty water bottle in the graveyard of confiscated bottles because people could use them as weapons

Nashville: we’ll glance in your bag, but actually we’re in a sound war with the preacher yelling into a bullhorn, and we’re winning with Taylor Swift
June 30, 2025 at 3:26 AM
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s not that the AI is humanlike; it’s that they don’t think women are fully people
Is Henry Blodget ok
April 22, 2025 at 7:49 PM
so if the iPhone keyboard could stop predicting “sm*t” when I type “about” that would be great because I am DODGING BULLETS in Slack
April 18, 2025 at 2:11 AM
I'll be at @lingsocam.bsky.social in Philadelphia next week! Although I won't be presenting the last of my dissertation research (the submission timelines didn't work out), I'm going to be in a discussion with LEXING about linguistics careers in AI. 1/2
January 2, 2025 at 9:14 PM
Reposted by Bethany Gardner
realizing i never posted it here….but too long have we been limited by the 2-dimensional political alignment chart. i think by using my new tool we can truly map another person's politics. here it is: The Ideology Cube
December 27, 2024 at 10:17 PM
if you need me in the next few days, we will be binge reading 1300 pages about her namesake
December 6, 2024 at 7:10 AM
listening to “dancing through life” on repeat because it’s a bop despite the fact that I max out the Need For Cognition scale at every waking moment
December 6, 2024 at 12:33 AM
saw a wicked-themed google ad before the movie, calling AI a magical gift from the wizard

...the movie where it's revealed that the wizard is a flashy fraud, doesn't actually have the special knowledge he claims, and is siding with populism/fascism to maintain power
December 4, 2024 at 6:40 PM
how am I at what must be the only company in the world not using excel or sheets

excel come back I’m sorry I badmouthed you, numbers is so much worse
December 3, 2024 at 11:06 PM
my beloved pixel just died & while this isn’t the worst timing — I can add my # to my work iPhone instead of having to spend money on a new phone — ugh

I’m choosing to believe this happened because I brought an android into Apple Park too many times & they nuked it from orbit
November 20, 2024 at 10:24 PM
Reposted by Bethany Gardner
Science has never been, and never will be, apolitical. It is a human activity, the federal government is the biggest financial backer of it, and one political party is doing everything it can to reduce our capacity to answer scientific questions.
In the wake of the U.S. election, Natl Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt has authored a spot-on editorial in Science, stressing the apolitical nature of science and how it remains vital to informing a lot of public policy. Best read all week!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
#scipol 🧪
November 16, 2024 at 3:44 AM
Reposted by Bethany Gardner
Starter pack of people doing LGBTQ+/queer linguistics (writ large)!

Please share and let me know if you'd like to be added :)

go.bsky.app/2mjmgqt
November 15, 2024 at 10:07 PM
this week I've been learning about the many workarounds people use to talk about Siri without actually triggering Siri, and while this makes sense it also feels like I'm spelling w-a-l-k and t-r-e-a-t around a dog who gets overly excited 😂
November 13, 2024 at 10:46 PM
could I wear jeans to work? absolutely. but I'm now in love with the giant functional pockets that come with the wide legged slacks that are fashionable, and who wants to be casual when POCKETS
November 12, 2024 at 4:52 AM
I think when you're moving you should get a magical dispensation where your apartment doesn't start getting dirty until you've finished unpacking
November 10, 2024 at 9:27 AM
I hate that the only thing anyone can tell me (marginalized in ways that are next on the chopping block, but not in immediate danger) is "oh don't worry, YOU'LL be ok"
November 6, 2024 at 5:44 PM
after 8+ years in 60s brutalist brick psych buildings, all I wanted was some actual windows and Apple Park sure is delivering on that
October 30, 2024 at 12:09 AM
How's the PhD to Bay Area tech job transition going for me? Visiting to look at apartments is going well, and I'm almost over the shock of paying more in rent than I made in grad school 💀
October 8, 2024 at 8:31 PM
salesperson: "you look a little bit young, do you pay the electric bill at home?"

ma'am it is my 28th birthday 💀
October 3, 2024 at 6:56 PM
attention linguists I just got garden-pathed into a "needs washed" construction, even though that's not part of my dialect
October 3, 2024 at 3:05 PM
ok I love this -- it's making my question design brain go YES and my stats brain go OH NO -- and want to know how to score it. weighting by intensity of opinion? treating intensity as a separate outcome variable? would this pyramid shape of possible responses do weird things to the distribution?
I just took a survey that would have benefited from the modified 2-D Likert scale I just invented
September 29, 2024 at 3:54 AM
Reposted by Bethany Gardner
honestly I have never taken a survey without also taking a parallel mental survey rating how (good) or (bad) I think each question is
I just took a survey that would have benefited from the modified 2-D Likert scale I just invented
September 26, 2024 at 2:17 AM
It's official! I'm finally off the job market: I've accepted a position with Apple to work on the Siri team, developing annotation schemes for data to train AI and test how people interact with tools.
September 20, 2024 at 7:53 PM
visiting my friend in Syracuse for the first time and while pulling out of the train station she informs me that no one knows how to drive here. I'm skeptical but immediately we see a guy riding a bike into the oncoming traffic turn lane and HE flips us off when we look aghast.
September 14, 2024 at 11:02 PM
what is the point of having microphones and timers if they just keep...turning Trump's back on every single time he starts talking out of turn
September 11, 2024 at 2:31 AM