We had a really good paper on overlearning by search models at AIES this year! ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI...

I do, of course, have a paragraph from "Why We Fear AI" for this

Oh that sounds so good! We watched BODKIN on the strength of an old-fashioned recommendation algorithm (a human friend told us that it was similar and they’d liked it) but it was only ok. We’ll give BS a try!

Aaaaaaaa FINALLY

…which is that the fantasy of objective knowledge is not benign: it gives you permission to launder your own founding premises into some kind of universal truth, and the whole project of research can get remade into a search for the method that gives you plausible cover for that laundering

I ground my whole approach to teaching ethics (to CS students) in epistemology, bc I think anyone working with data & information needs to understand that those things are created & constructed rather than found in some kind of natural state, but this is the other reason I think it’s so important…

And for some strange reason — who can say, really — isolating and identifying the kinds of racism that are acceptable for Science Knowers is a very high priority research project

Yeah there’s an alarmingly large number of people who agree that racism is bad if it’s rooted in bias (ie human weakness & limitation), but that if you ground it in “pure data” (heavy scare quotes) it’s somehow legitimate

This reminds me of when some right-wing commentator — I want to say Dinesh D’Souza? — said smugly in the mid-aughts that queer people had the exact same marriage rights as everyone else, which is to say the right to marry a person of the opposite sex.

It’s going to be whack-a-mole as long as people in AI understand the barriers to credible phrenology as a data-and-implementation problem rather than a “that’s just racism in a scientific bow tie” problem

I want to say “are we really doing this again” except we’ve never stopped doing this

Well, we’re glad to have you in Chicago

I’ve spent almost 25 years waiting for Georgian food to be the next big thing and it still hasn’t quite happened, and now you too understand why this is a travesty!

I remember Joshua Meyrowitz saying that TV, as a medium, supplies you with an interpretation of the events you're seeing, as you're seeing them; TikTok seems like TV on steroids, in that respect. You can't learn to chew if mama bird chews your food for you!

you can also donate to local abortion funds, which mostly do direct service and care work: abortionfunds.org