LOL

Congrats!! Well deserved

I don’t know but we need to be keeping an eye on it for a lot of reasons

I talked about brainrot a lot in my “Cog Sci & AI” Capstone this semester — the students we have now are mostly disturbed/amused by it but pretty soon it could be a core piece of consumed entertainment

My mom pulled my brother and I out of school for a family emergency. She took us to see The Phantom Menace — I still remember the movie poster I saw going in/coming out.

Also the time she took us (as little kids) to see Little Nicky, thinking it was a kids movie X.X

I (ironically, given the world circumstances) have greater inner peace and acceptance than any other time in my life.

Whether I get this job or not, I’ll be here and I’ll be okay. Maybe even good.

What initially re-inspired me to pursue a tenure track job was teaching Sensation & Perception. It reminded me that there are questions I’d spend my career trying to answer, if someone would let me.

I accepted the position I’m in thinking it was temporary, prioritizing location and family and deciding I’d see what happens.

During and coming out of my post-doc, I didn’t want to be in academia at all. I applied to almost 100 industry positions, I got really close at a bunch of major tech companies, but the mismatch mostly came down to location. I applied to one academic position and it’s the one I got 😆

I doubted my capability to succeed in academia my entire career; in part because I wasn’t a rockstar graduate student. Working as a teaching track professor for 2.5 years and serving on a search committee has changed how I see myself; I saw how hiring decisions get made on the inside.

That last point that “thinking precedes language” is great, and deeply tied to the fact (I’d argue) that language (and thinking) is embodied

Am I losing developed resilience by not working through that friction? I could be. However, as a father of a toddler with a 3-4 teaching load, chatbots have helped me to submit a successful grant application I otherwise probably wouldn’t have written.

4/4

I don’t see chatbots (in this instance) very differently than other accessibility tools. They help me communicate by reducing friction in the work.

3/4

1. I’m an external processor, I do my best thinking when interfacing with something outside of my own mind

2. I’ve always had a hard time initializing writing, generative AI takes my unstructured thoughts and turns it into a (typically) bad first draft. Then I edit! It works well for me.

2/4

I appreciate your posts and your skepticism, it challenges me frequently in how much I enjoy generative text, specifically. Having thought a lot about it, there are two main reasons I want to do “that”:

1/4

You didn’t finish your last sentence:

— which is terrifying.

This is a completely tangential question but did you screen for people (like me) with aphantasia?

If you tell me to imagine a rotating circle, I “can”, but it’s not visual. Curious what differences you’d find