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notnaughtknot.bsky.social
victor
@notnaughtknot.bsky.social
330 followers 140 following 130 posts
[he/him] 🇧🇷🏳️‍🌈| studying how children learn language and logical terms
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notnaughtknot.bsky.social
victor @notnaughtknot.bsky.social · May 29
join the neoluddites at Iffy Books for our next discussion (June 11th) on The Mechanic and the Luddite by @jathansadowski.com

really enjoying this one so far!
cover of “the mechanic and the luddite: a ruthless criticism of technology and capitalism” by Jathan Sadowski
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
feels viscerally painful to encounter the word “learnings”
December 5, 2025 at 5:58 PM
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
kind of over nouns
December 4, 2025 at 7:15 PM
Reposted by victor
jweisber.bsky.social
NAND
merriam-webster.com Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 8d
Let’s all go around the table and say one word we’re thankful for.
November 28, 2025 at 2:50 AM
Reposted by victor
miamidsa.org
Good morning to Brazilian reporter Manuela Borges, who’s been waiting eleven years for this petty moment. ❤️ 🇧🇷
November 26, 2025 at 1:04 PM
Reposted by victor
soccurt.bsky.social
"Fascism ... is committed to a play of power and aesthetics that regards a desire for truthfulness as an admission of weakness. It loves a bullshit generator, because it cannot conceive of a debate as anything but a fight for power..."

Great piece from @hagenblix.bsky.social and Ingeborg Glimmer.
Deflating “Hype” Won’t Save Us
The problem with AI isn’t hype. The problem is who and what it’s useful for.
www.liberalcurrents.com
September 18, 2025 at 11:22 AM
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
chatGPT is conscious inasmuch as anything that fools me is
November 26, 2025 at 5:55 AM
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
LPT: you can say “thanks again” without ever having said thanks to begin with
November 25, 2025 at 9:35 PM
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
pulling myself down by my bootstraps, making myself dumber and poorer than you can possibly imagine
November 25, 2025 at 5:41 PM
Reposted by victor
hbcompass.bsky.social
I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.
November 23, 2025 at 7:13 PM
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
I’ve been thinking a lot about media ecology recently and trying to conceive of “chatbot” as a medium in that sense and what engagement they encourage. any suggestions?
November 21, 2025 at 2:20 AM
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
I feel like the most gibsonian thing about me these days is I don’t believe in world models
November 18, 2025 at 5:36 PM
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
glad to see that harvard is taking viewpoint diversity seriously
picture of a poster advertising “crimson community conversations: fall viewpoint diversity series” the talks advertised are Earth, flat or round? sponsored by the physics department, The autism vaccine debate: why are we so hung up on “evidence” sponsored by public health and medical schools, Gaza: Open air prison or “valuable beach front property” by center for middle eastern study and the divinity school (with parenthesis saying not to be confused with free palestine), and Is mourning palestinians too “one sided” by the working group on open inquiry
November 18, 2025 at 2:48 PM
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
theory is way harder to make things work in than people make it sound
November 17, 2025 at 2:29 PM
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
November 12, 2025 at 3:53 AM
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
it’s only a concept if it’s from the cambridge region of massachusetts, otherwise it’s just a foggy idea
November 11, 2025 at 9:14 PM
Reposted by victor
bergelsonlab.bsky.social
nice, will check it out! here's the link to save others the search ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/7...
November 10, 2025 at 8:08 PM
Reposted by victor
bergelsonlab.bsky.social
lots of invigorating discussion this year at #BUCLD2025. Unsurprisingly, LLMs as models & as tools made many appearances w/a wide range of views/claims/caveats ab what they can(not) tell us ab language development
I'm still chewing on a few things that seemed to get short shrift 1/4 🐦🐦
November 10, 2025 at 4:30 PM
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
this is a big part of my critique of LLMs in word learning that applies more broadly to psycholing!!!

(second half of this paper)
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs; e.g., GPT-n) have attracted the attention of psycholinguists who see a potential for solutions to ancient problems in them. This paper argues that, thus far, LLMs have not, in fact, suggested any new solutions, but instead just appear to by virtue of their sheer size and “double” opaqueness (both as models and as products). In the realm of cross-situational word learning, LLMs run into the same issues that long-discussed "global models" do in accounting for the rapidity and low-resourced nature of language acquisition. In the realm of meaning, they run into largely the same issues as the long-established conceptual theories they are often compared to. In nei- ther case do they appear to represent a true resolution to known issues, and as such broadly encour- aging the use of LLMs in developmental psycholinguistics is a gamble. This paper then argues that LLMs come with a range of immediate costs (to privacy, labor, and the climate) and so encouraging their use is not simply a low-risk gamble. These costs should be kept in mind when deciding whether to conduct any research with LLMs, whether it is to prove that they have some capacity or lack it. One way of keeping these costs in mind is to learn about them and talk about them with each other, rather than deciding that ethical questions are solely under the purview of some other discipline(s).
November 10, 2025 at 6:13 PM
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
the “innateness is not a dirty word” symposium felt like an empiricist psyop
November 9, 2025 at 2:12 PM
Reposted by victor
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...
AI slop and the destruction of knowledge
This week I was looking for info on what cognitive scientists mean when they speak of ‘domain-general’ cognition. I was curious, because the nuances are relevant for something I am researching at t…
irisvanrooijcogsci.com
August 12, 2025 at 10:12 PM
Reposted by victor
oldjerryfodor.bsky.social
Is this something YOU ever ask yourself?

"Man, Brett Karlan (aka Old Jerry Fodor) claims to love Fodor, but has never published anything defending anything remotely Fodorian. What's up with that?"

This was a puzzle that long perplexed the scholars... until now!

philpapers.org/rec/KARAET-4
Brett Karlan, AI empiricism: the only game in town? - PhilPapers
I offer an epistemic argument against the dominance of empiricism and empiricist-inspired methods in contemporary machine learning (ML) research. I first establish, as many ML researchers and philosop...
philpapers.org
November 4, 2025 at 11:35 PM
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
crazy that the next AI winter might trigger a recession
November 5, 2025 at 11:15 PM
Reposted by victor
pennmindcore.bsky.social
Also this Friday in 111 NBS

ILST: 1:30 PM w/cookies

Does Not Compute? The Development of Real-time Negation Processing
Victor Gomes, PhD, Psych, Harvard

victorgom.es

@notnaughtknot.bsky.social
@pennlinguistics.bsky.social
@sas.upenn.edu
October 22, 2025 at 12:15 AM
Reposted by victor
olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
notnaughtknot.bsky.social
join the neoluddites at Iffy Books for our next discussion (June 11th) on The Mechanic and the Luddite by @jathansadowski.com

really enjoying this one so far!
cover of “the mechanic and the luddite: a ruthless criticism of technology and capitalism” by Jathan Sadowski
May 29, 2025 at 3:33 PM