iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 16h

It’s utter bs. I don’t know why a journalist with an English degree thinks he has the requisite knowledge to pronounce on these things. Like the Vandy authors, he has an axe to grind and cherry picks to try to support his animus.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 04/10/2026

The Cornell report on the Future of the American University is a disaster, mainstreaming and endorsing profoundly reactionary right-wing diagnoses of higher education that have no business in a serious report on what higher ed is or should become.

Compare, for example, the Progressive Policy Institute’s report on The Distortion of American Studies
with a similar study of American political science from the Goldwater Institute: Richard D. Kahlenberg
and Lief Lin, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a
Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” Progressive Policy Institute, January 22, 2026,
https://www.progressivepolicy.org/the-distortion-of-american-studies; Timothy K. Minella, “Peer Review
Gone Wild: Flagship Political Science Journal Shows How Academic Gatekeepers Promote Ideology Over
Scholarship,” Goldwater Institute, December 2, 2025, https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/policy-
report/peer-review-gone-wild/.

12 Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey, “Five Reasons Viewpoint Diversity Makes Academic Sense,”
American Enterprise Institute, January 26, 2026, https://cfau.aei.org/five-reasons-viewpoint-diversity-
makes-academic-sense.
13 Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading
Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” Progressive Policy Institute, January
22, 2026, https://www.progressivepolicy.org/the-distortion-of-american-studies

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 04/10/2026

For the uninitiated, @sanders.senate.gov's AI bills are being written by a eugenicist cult full of predators organizing "rape orgies." Michael Vassar in that list is also the former president of MIRI, the organization closely advising Sanders.

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 03/10/2026

Lolll I've been doing this shit forever and saying the same exact thing I'm saying right now more than a decade ago and am "being pushed by contrarian media dynamics." 🙄 All of you are hypnotized by talk of fictional machine gods and it's me who has to bring evidence to the contrary.

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Wrote a post inspired by the ubiquitous "rogue AI agents" discourse and the unhinged "AI torture chamber" nonsense from the last couple of days.

notebook.anthrowill.com

Surprised Monkeys – Notebook

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 02/10/2026

I suppose in the same way that eugenics was also the "biggest idea"?

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Kevin Gannon (now a Moo Deng fan account) @thetattooedprof.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The Chronicle Review is just publishing Quillette's desk rejections now

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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

“cowboys” here really reminds me of a brilliant post I saw on Twitter that I’ve never stopped thinking about, which is how the manosphere brand of toxic patriarchy isn’t about MEN, it’s about BOYS. everything is a 12-year-old’s fantasy. Pete is playing G.I. Joe on a trillion-dollar budget

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

There it is. The day it happened many of us called it that some shit like this would come out and nothing he was doing was genuine. Corporate media ate that garbage up without a second thought while those of us paying even a little bit of attention saw right through it. These people are FREAKS.

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 29/09/2026

Reuters got some of the IPO docs. Anthropic is a total dog of a company. Spent $12.6bn to make $4.6bn in revenue in 2025, $7.33bn of which was compute costs. Operating loss of $8bn. Losses getting worse year over year. Amazing stuff www.reuters.com/business/fin...

Summary
Companies
• Anthropic IPO could value the company at more than $2
trillion
• Anthropic lost $42 billion in 2025
• Al lab spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure last year
• Operating loss widened to $8.06 billion in 2025 from $2.98 billion in 2024
• Execs, industry analysts have expressed concerns over harms of Al tech
Sept 28 (Reuters) - Anthropic is making a massive bet that Al will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters.
But the cost to get there will be staggering. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming year, according to the
prospectus.

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Link to my critique of the anthro report here again in case anyone sees this and not my previous post: notebook.anthrowill.com/2026/09/27/r...

notebook.anthrowill.com

Rigor for thee, but not for me! – Notebook

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Hey, look! The sociology report has basically the same errors with methodological rigging as I posted about on my blog today re: the anthropology report by Henrich. It's almost as if all these people screeching about rigor don't know what that word means!

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Spent yesterday working on a detailed critique of some of the "methods" that Joseph Henrich used in his recently released report attacking sociocultural anthropology. He was the sole anthropologist involved with the Vanderbilt Report. It's long, but the more I looked the more issues I noticed.

notebook.anthrowill.com

Rigor for thee, but not for me! – Notebook

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Cordelia Fine @cordeliafine.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I reviewed A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shaped the Minds Of Men and Women, by evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams, for The Conversation. theconversation.com/how-has-evol...

theconversation.com

How has evolution shaped men’s and women’s minds? A new book tells an outdated story

Psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams’ third book about evolutionary psychology is A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shaped the Minds of Men and Women.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

the postwar university for all its problems worked according to a pretty complex balance of cultural and economic capital with other kinds thrown in, but it looks like we can simplify our Bourdieu for the phase of neoliberal higher ed we’re in now, where the only thing that matters, ever, is money

Diagram of Bourdieu’s four fold grid of forms of capital — Economic, Cultural, Social, and Symbolic, showing all of them crossed out except for Economic, which is now the only form recognized by the neoliberal university

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

There needs to be a Poe's Law but for AI hype. I could not tell based on the tagline "It also required my most personal data, and trust" if this was satire or not. Definitely a "hahahahaha!!! Oh, you're serious?!" moment for me. I hate this timeline.

nytimes.com

I Gave My Life Over to Meta’s A.I. Agent and Was Blown Away

Muse, Meta’s A.I. agent, helped handle my dental insurance, booked dinner reservations and created a podcast for me. It also required my most personal data, and trust.

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Yell In a War @jelenawoehr.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

it really needs to be more openly discussed that all the people advocating for “we should be fine with losing basic skills if we get more systems thinking” are men, meaning socialized to expect to be able to offload basic tasks of daily living onto a wife as part of their compensation for existing

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AP Stylebook @apstylebook.com · 23/09/2026

Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics.

apnews.com

https://apnews.com/article/openai-safety-ai-framework-089e75b95bc935af092da7b79d92706d

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Ultimately, he based his claims about the discipline on 212 170-word (meaning often incomplete) abstracts from one American anthropology journal, and none of the analysis was done or checked by humans except the 10 "randomly selected" ones he checked and agreed with Claude about.

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Maybe he used a fresh account with no history to code. Would be nice if he shared those details, wouldn't it? He also instructed it not to use outside knowledge or infer things about methods. How does he know Claude actually did that? This is why having humans code would have been helpful.

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

"Clearly implies"? Seems to me that opens up room for Claude to do some interpretation. Remember, these systems use past conversations to inform current ones, so if he used it for anything else where he shared what this was intended for, it is possible Claude drew on that during the coding process.

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Finally, he supplies one prompt he used for coding, and I immediately noticed a major problem. He tells Claude to pretend to be a research asst. coding for changes in method and epistemic framing in anthro since the 80s. "Code ONLY what the abstract itself states or clearly implies."

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

He notes data was also coded for reflexivity/positionality, but he decided not to include a discussion of those codes in the main text of the report. He does not explain why as far as I can tell. He also barely discusses or mentions reflexivity in his report.

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The codes themselves are...interesting. He claims that Claude wouldn't be able to tell what was being investigated because he didn't feed article information in. But the codes make it pretty clear what is being looked for: "advocacy stance," "power opposition frame," and "critical theory frame."

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Not only did he have Claude code only abstracts, but he shortened the abstracts to 170 words, and for articles without abstracts only 170 words of the opening paragraph. He claims this was because using full abstracts or longer abstracts would make them score higher. No humans coded anything.

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

But I'm willing to let that go. Nonetheless, the methods described in the Appendix leave a lot to be desired, and frankly to make the sweeping claims he makes in the report based simply on Claude's analysis of abstracts in a single journal (American Anthropologist) is the opposite of rigor.

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Actually, I found the Appendices which were referenced in the document but not included in it. It's a separate file on the actual Vanderbilt site. First footnote claims Claude was only used for the Appendix and not the main text, which I find laughable given the style of writing reeks of AI slop.

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 24/09/2026

I think that he should've had Altman arrested for running a company committing cybercrimes

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Joseph Henrich's report--sorry, Claude's report with Henrich's name on it--detailing all the supposed evidence about anthropology that was left out of the Vanderbilt report was released. It is, to put it nicely, AI slop. No details about methods or the choices that were made collecting "evidence."

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 23/09/2026

Here's a listing of all the right-wing humanities academic jobs that have been advertised so far this 2026-2027 hiring season. Suffice to say, conservative investment in the university humanities is not being matched by the peer-reviewed humanities community: asheeshksi.substack.com/p/tracking-c...

asheeshksi.substack.com

Tracking Civic Thought Hiring in the 2026-2027 Academic Job Cycle

I wanted to put together a post that tracks how right-wing civic thought programs have rapidly been taking over the academic hiring space in the humanities, especially in fields like history (mostly A...

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 22/09/2026

Free newsletter: I estimate that ~50% of AI chip sales - $200bn to $300bn+ - are sitting in warehouses, with NVIDIA selling hundreds of billions of GPUs years in advance. Data centers take way longer to build than hyperscalers are leading us to believe. www.wheresyoured.at/wherere-all-the-ai-chips/

wheresyoured.at

https://www.wheresyoured.at/wherere-all-the-ai-chips/

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month. In return you get a weekly premium…

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

"Speaking on stage in front of hundreds of people, Young said, “Sometimes if I say it publicly, I’m amplifying the thing that I am actually trying to prevent from actually happening.”"

static.klipy.com

Sure Jan

ALT: Sure Jan

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

"Young said trusting Elon Musk, founder of SpaceXAI, is not important if it can bring more money and resources to Memphis." Just in case anyone was curious how things are going in Memphis with our mayor who invited the national guard in and ignores the community about SpaceXAI.

actionnews5.com

Memphis mayor responds to criticism over data centers

Memphis Mayor Paul Young says he agrees with residents who are pushing for a tougher approach to data center development and SpaceXAI, but said he cannot speak out publicly as much as he wants.

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I would love to be able to have my students go back to writing outside of class. But until there's a foolproof way to have them do it without outsourcing their thinking and writing to a stochastic parrot, I'll do what I have to do to ensure academic integrity as best I can.

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

21 paragraphs of whining about people trying to find ways to work around the ubiquity of LLM cheating, and how that will mean no more long-form writing from students. Not a single solution offered. But hey glad you got to do some long-form writing I guess.

insidehighered.com

The Cures for AI Are Killing the Humanities (opinion)

The retreat from take-home essays jeopardizes the future of the humanities.

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The LLM millenarianism is exhausting, y'all. I feel like I'm watching a mass psychosis.

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 18/09/2026

It's pick your poison between TESCREAL billionaires folks. We have Sanders' advisors: funded by likes of Jaan Tallinn who led Anthropic's series A & other friends on the "left" wing Marc Andreessen, Palantir folks etc on the "centrist" wing writing our bills. www.levernews.com/big-ais-favo...

NEW: in the coming weeks, House Democrats are going to unveil an AI policy response. It’ll be decided by a Jeffries appointed commission stacked with members funded by the AI industry including Ron Conway and Leading the Future PAC led by OpenAI, A16z and Palantir's Joe Lonsdale

Screenshot of article:

Big AI’s Favorite Democrats Are Writing The Party’s AI Plan

Hakeem Jeffries’ five-member AI commission is stacked with lawmakers backed by industry super PACs seeking to shape federal policy.

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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 14/09/2026

Cis people do not understand how much trans people's rights have regressed in just 5 years. 5 years ago, there were none of these restrictions. 19 states banned legal recognition 21 states have bathroom bans 8 states ban gender marker changes on DLs 25 ban gender affirming care for trans youth

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 15/09/2026

Has anyone considered orienting college education around the practice of sitting together and discussing real books, read on paper? www.nytimes.com/2026/09/15/u...

nytimes.com

Universities Sound Warnings About A.I. Even as They Embrace It

As A.I. upends education, university leaders have been all over the map about how to respond. It can be very confusing for students.

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Holly Dunsworth @dunsworth.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Penultimate post! Harari argues against biological patriarchy, but no one seems to notice AND he cites nothing and no one, So someone's gotta say it: Only a man could float a reference-free argument against biological patriarchy in a science book. ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/09/sapi...

ecodevoevo.blogspot.com

Sapiens, Ch. 8: "unfounded myths rather than biological facts" about race, sexuality, sex, and gender

This is my penultimate post about the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind . For some reason, the previous post felt like rock bot...

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Ken Burnside @kenburnside.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

The economists and boring people who study cash flow are saying: AI is a bubble, its burst is imminent, and it's going to wash away most of economic growth of the last decade when it happens. The historians are saying: What they said. Don't ask AI how to make guillotines. Use primary sources.

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 11/09/2026

Holy shit. Bloomberg just verified one of my biggest scoops - that Microsoft only has 2gw of operational capacity. I had it at 1.993GW in prep for the story that @aishadown.bsky.social and I did for the guardian. Vindication! www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Brody Ford @BrodyFord
Lot of speculation out there about how many GPUs are actually deployed.
Today, Microsoft has about 2GW of Al-specific capacity live. around 17% of the total fleet.
Only about 2 gigawatts of the company's current 12-gigawatt capacity is centered on Al-specific chips, the people said. This is expected to grow to about a third of the 38 gigawatts Microsoft plans to have online in 2032, they said.
Brody Ford @BrodyFord_ • 23h
scoop: Microsoft is planning a massive expansion of its data center fleet to 38 gigawatts. $msft w/ @mattmday bloomberg.com/news/features/...
3:15 PM • Sep 11, 2026 • 12.5K Views

Are Microsoft's AI
plans being held back by a shortage of chips?
Guardian investigation finds
apparent discrepancy between what tech company has said about its AI capacity - and the
number of advanced chips it
has in operation
By Aisha Down and Ed Zitron
A Microsoft datacentre in the North Holland village of
Middenmeer in the Netherlands. Photograph: Ramon van
Flymen/EPA

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

It feels impossible to push back against the deluge of uncritical "reporting" and reactions to this garbage. I am so grateful for Ed Zitron's coverage of and critical positionality against all this garbage LLM criti-hype.

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Emily PhD 🎓 @ejwillingham.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Shallow revisionist nonsense and a fallacious comparison intended to gild the outlook for GenAI trash that represents the nonexistent as reality & lifeless artificiality as human. These media were conduits for messy, authentic, dynamic *humanity* and deep community building

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 10/09/2026

This Jacob Coxon thing is weird. He worked at Anthropic for six weeks and OpenAI for nearly three years. He’s doing a whole media tour without any real statements about what it is he’s scared of other than vague references to recursive self improvement, a theoretical ai that teaches itself.

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

IT IS A SCAM. STOP PARTICIPATING. Focus on the real harms these companies are inflicting. I beg it of you as someone who lives in Memphis and sees the everyday harms to our communities, our environment, and our health.

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Will Robertson @anthrowill.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

If any of them actually believed what they're saying, they would do everything in their power to stop it from happening. Instead, this dude (like most of the others) will just end up at one of the other companies, or he will start his own LLM startup on the premise that what HE is doing is ethical.

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