David Landy
david-landy.bsky.social
David Landy
@david-landy.bsky.social
This. So many people get upset about this, but getting mad at chatGPT for "lying" to you is quite •literally• like getting mad at a magic 8 ball for giving an answer to your question that looked plausible but turned out to be wrong.
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
June 19, 2025 at 2:30 PM
Reposted by David Landy
I wrote an article on some of my dissertation research on the problem-solving power of prayer for @aeon.co and today it is published!

aeon.co/essays/why-p...

I'm proud of the article and it was fun to write for a non-academic outlet! 🤩
Why prayer is a problem-solving practice that works | Aeon Essays
Praying is a cognitive practice full of problem-solving resources. You can learn from it even if you don’t want to do it
aeon.co
January 9, 2025 at 4:05 PM
Reposted by David Landy
I know I'm a little late to the splash this YouGov made on BlueSky, but I want to talk about it!

The incoming 🔥hot take🔥 is: these errors are not a big deal!!!
Americans vastly overestimate the size of different minority groups! For example, Americans estimated 21% of the country is transgender, but the true proportion is just 1%.
December 3, 2024 at 10:28 PM
Reposted by David Landy
Trust me, I know that many of the students don’t do the reading and are finding other ways to skate by, but there are still so many that are so brilliant and so thoughtful, and so eager to learn, and it doesn’t seem that much different from when I was an undergrad TBH
October 22, 2024 at 10:59 PM