/1 Listening to the back catalogue of @fivefourpod.bsky.social and the episode on Garland v. Cargill has finally persuaded me out of my instinct towards textualism.

Textualism is tempting as a solution to subjectivity. Determining the purpose or spirit of a law feels problematically subjective...

/1 Interesting because there seem to be two separate phenomena here. He references the 'angry vegans' stereotype, which Benoit Monin at Stanford has shown comes from 'moral status threat' (psychological defense against idea that people are lookind down on you).

The "she does not own a car..." part is so telling. They just can't conceive of a politician who isn't already rich. She's not poor, just not one of the wealthy class of people who are allowed to be 'serious' political candidates.

Are they actually using LLMs here (which doesn't seem necessary), or is this going to be a conventional statistical model that they've branded as "AI"? If it's the latter they have radically missed the public mood on having AI shoved down their throats:

www.gov.uk/government/n....

Overheard on the train yesterday: a nice example of small ways in which a privileged background can help in getting 'top jobs'.

A father and daughter discussing her career choices. She dismisses Oxbridge because their degrees are all BA and she wants to do a more scientific BSc /1

Found this guy in the garden yesterday. Looked crazily like a hummingbird. Apparently it's a hummingbird hawk moth

I've spent far too much time making up a game to simulate inequality for my 2nd year sociology students. Lacking anyone stupid enough to test it with me, I got chatgpt to simulate it and it managed remarkable well:

chatgpt.com/share/68dd39...

Would be interesting to see what this looks like with prestige/social status as a dimension. Lots of 'low PMC' (e.g. journalists, creative professionals) are actually the most prestigious jobs in society - and well within most people's conception of the 'PMC'

Business Secretary Peter Kyle: "Too often people go to university to explore research and knowledge...I want people to go to university to start businesses in our country"

Welp, goodbye Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, we had an OK run...

www.lbc.co.uk/article/brit...

This also just seems like a statistical fluke? 2025 isn't even over yet. It's weird to publish an article about a "trend" that applies to 6 months out of the last three decades.

Facts in the article:
1. RW extremists have been responsible for vastly more (and more lethal) political violence in the US since the 1980s.
2. In 2025, there have been 5 LW attacks & 1 RW
3. You can't infer a trend because violence fluctuates so much.

Headline
www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

Just been reminded that I wrote this on THES quite a while ago: www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/yes-pee...

Nobody read it, but now I'm on social media finally I can see if anyone is interested...

"“Free speech culture” tells people they should shut up about the things that make them passionate so other people feel more comfortable disagreeing with them" www.popehat.com/p/how-free-s...

Interesting argument from @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social on Search Engine podcast: Gen Z are having a 'coolness' crisis because: 1) finding something obscure but good is 'cool', 2) popularity metrics are now how people know things are good. Hence no-one will like your video/post or think you are cool

The big problem with the current Labour party is that they seem to have accepted that they have no way to set the agenda. The right persuades people that small boats and refugee hotels are an existential threat to the nation so we have to 'meet the public where they are'.

my attempt to visualise @michaelhobbes.bsky.social point about why US Democrats struggle with messaging