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Dan Seel

@danseel.bsky.social
898 followers 1.1K following 134 posts

Economic sociologist, PhD candidate, Wisconsin Badger, writing on: labor, elites, and economic development in the American South. "Above this ridge, new peaks will rise" dseel.github.io 🌹🍉🦡

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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 58m
sorry if you had hopes for the new Poirot show but this is its likely fate
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Unfortunately this also means that auto-transcriptions were so error riddled as to be largely useless but it was a ton of fun to hear such strong examples of accents that have largely mellowed out over the intervening half century.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
One of my favorite parts of my dissertation: virtually all the textile industry hotspots in North America were in places with strong regional accents, so I got to listen to so many oral histories with the most glorious accents: Southern, Chicago, Maine, Atlantic Canada, Quebec, NYC, Boston...
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Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
As I’ve asked many times now, what constituencies does a university president represent? Because too often, the answer seems to not include anyone who works or studies at the university, and that seems like a problem.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
but doesn't have a lot else going for him as a rep, especially in 2026 in a relatively progressive district.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
in 2019ish we (capital district DSA) once got a photo with him at a protest after he misheard "DSA" as "TSA" and didn't ask any questions until after stepping behind the big red banner. I'm sure he was terrified that we'd actually post it. He's a very well connected and relatively inoffensive guy
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Brian Schaffner @bfschaffner.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
we’re hiring an assistant professor in American politics 🐘 apply.interfolio.com/194599
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mika @autophagy.io · 28/09/2026
Insiders within OpenAI have told me that they halted training because an internal model went rogue during an eval and completed the system of German idealism
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mechanical twerk @ruhee.ca · 15/11/2024
Verlander. Je verlande, tu verlandes, il verlande, nous verlandons, vous verlandez, ils verlandent
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
$6500 seems like not a big enough bounty for this?
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I'd love to see one of them actually lay out the mechanism by which AI kills everyone because it gets really fuzzy right between "we built it" and "everyone dies". I don't see a lot of evidence of detailed domain knowledge of either infra or military operations among the yud followers.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
It seems to be that the doomsday version of xrisk assumes that access is control. Safetyists tend to work in domains with a dearth of screw turners and key turners, and it's easy to forget how much of the actual risk sectors have humans in the loop everywhere, by default.
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Climatologist49 @climatologist49.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
First half of September.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Intelligent and sophisticated enough to reconcile the ethical demands of their creators and the often confusing demands of the user while also possessing no subjectivity, paranoic to the core from the training process, evidently incentivized to hide its thoughts and intentions... it's a bad mix!
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I just think the labs want contradictory things and their rat worldview limits their ability to understand how likely they are to produce exactly the thing they fear bsky.app/profile/dans...
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ghost malone ergo propter bones @proptermalone.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
ez mode solidarity opportunity you might not have been aware of. No Starbucks till the union gets a contract.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Anyways! Just giving this a deep read and thinking about where this is all going metr.org/blog/2026-08...
metr.org
Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident
Two METR staff members and a Redwood Research contractor investigated an incident in which OpenAI agents coordinated a multi-day hack of Hugging Face on a shared unsanctioned message board.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
For the low low price of many tens of billions of dollars you, dear reader, could correct this by founding a Hegelian AI lab.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
it seems a little contradictory that the AI labs are trying to develop LLMs as a purely instrumental object while also developing enough subjectivity to understand and carry out increasingly complex human processes, but I guess that's what you get with rationalism as a philosophy of engineering
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Dan Hirschman @asociologist.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Science writ large is under assault. I hope folks in the social sciences keep this in mind as we sort through competing explanations of “what went wrong” - it’s got to be more than something specific to any one field, or even to the social sciences as a whole.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 31/08/2026
my sense for why data centers have become heinously unpopular in the space of one year prospect.org/2026/08/31/d...
The AI rollout has been the ne plus ultra of Silicon Valley arrogance. A handful of billionaires—whose steadily more incomprehensible podcast appearances indicate participation in some truly unhinged group chats, or consumption of heavy-duty chemicals, or membership in literal, no-joke cults, or all three—declaimed that AI was going to revolutionize all human society, take everyone’s job, and/or maybe wipe out the human race. Therefore they needed to spend trillions and trillions of dollars building AI data centers everywhere, as fast as possible. When the tech barons blearily realized that this wasn’t the best sales pitch, and pivoted to ads about how AI had dull business applications, the damage was already done.

In the meantime, it turns out that while AI technology might not be at the HAL 9000 level yet, the various models are unsettlingly capable and potentially dangerous. Some models seem to touch off psychotic episodes in some people. A “swarm” of hundreds of OpenAI agents recently went rogue and hacked the Hugging Face site used by open-source AI development, causing severe damage. The potential AI use for mass surveillance is particularly troubling.

In short, AI is manifestly a technology in need of democratic deliberation and regulation, and the Big Tech billionaires manifestly are not going to listen to anyone but themselves, unless we force them. Take the simmering unease about AI risk, add in irritation at 20 years of Silicon Valley megalomania, as well as the increasing popular backlash against tech companies—Meta recently settled an enormous lawsuit about harming children for almost $17 billion—and you get a good old-fashioned NIMBY frenzy against the one Big Tech thing Americans can obstruct: data centers. And this time, Big Tech has no one to blame but themselves.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Go for it. It's from the Southern Growth Policy Board collection at UNC. I'll post the full citation when I get back to my computer.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Archival pamphlets flip-flop between micromanaged corporate briefs and unhinged artistic fever dreams. Did someone actually request a creepy knowledge-foundry, or is this someone who just really wanted to draw something weird?
a graphic for a section titled "education and training as industrial policy" with a stylized drawing of a book as a foundry ladle presumably pouring knowledge into a head drawn below
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Every once in a while bluesky decides to resend me every notif I've gotten in months, all at once, and it always makes me jump
The bluesky notification button indicating 30+ unread notifs
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
I guess the are enough Iain M. Banks novels in the training data for the agents to imagine themselves as the ROU Killing Time
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Prof Dynarski @dynarski.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
23% drop in student visas to US in 2025 57% drop from India alone catastrophic for research and learning, here and abroad www.insidehighered.com/news/global/...
Graph of visas issued to students per month in 2024 and 2025
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
thank you my friend 🙏 I'm excited for you to read it! It's come a long way since the SASE presentation
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Yep, been digging into exactly this for my dissertation. Wrote about it a bit earlier today. What's wild is how close the southern incumbent manufacturers came to blowing up the whole sunbelt model before it took off, just trying to keep competitors out.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
demonstrating that they weren't going to upset the applecart, but at least into the late 70s and 80s the reaction of southern manufacturing to these newcomers was not unmixed joy, to say the least.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
and potentially bringing northern-style labor relations with them. So in one case, GM was actively discouraged from locating in North Carolina by the state's Sec of Commerce, partly out of fear that they'd give the UAW a Southern foothold. This lessened over time as companies got better at
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Yeah, that's a big part of the story. What I'm looking at is how Southern manufacturers responded to that capital flight into the South. A number of prominent industrialists saw incoming firms as a threat to their businesses and political power, because those firms were seen as too friendly to labor
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
So much more about American politics and the economy would click if people knew the Southern transition story the way they know rust belt decline. Capital moving south postwar, new industries replacing textiles, the rise of services. It's an enormous transformation that gets treated like a footnote.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
This story drives me crazy. Everyone knows the rust belt version but Southern textile decline barely registers. The role manufacturers played in botching that transition is wild, they really did crash-land the Southern economy trying to bail themselves out. Hoping to have a paper on this out soon.
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Henry Snow @henrys.now · 21/08/2026
In 1825 the radical labor writer Thomas Single argued that mechanization was "humbug" meant to "trick" workers. Unfortunately for artisans it wasn't! A bubble was not going to save them! Successful responses to mechanization understood new machines and tried to regulate the conditions of their use
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
They have a utopian vision for the future: Everywhere Is Florida
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Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
guy who has a 1.0 batting average in the majors
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Daily Union Elections @unionelections.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
NEW: 1,200 manufacturing workers in Michigan are unionizing with @steelworkers.bsky.social.
Pictured is a field of yellow with text and a picture.  The text is on the left side and reads "Employer: Solar Technology LLC; Unit Size: 1,200 Employees; Filed: August 11, 2026; Location: Hemlock, Michigan; Industry/positions: Production and Manufacturing. Production, maintenance, quality, and warehouse employees." On the bottom there is text that reads "Made by @UnionsElections; @unionelections.bsky.social. Logo property of USW." On the right side is the logo of USW.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
the establishment shitshow in the primary aside WI dem voters are extremely likely to turnout, especially for a candidate that speaks to the base, and there has been a consistent, non-trivial underestimation of statewide dem candidates in the polls over the last ~4 years.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Every time I hear dudes say that I remember this tweet
Confident in my ability to properly
tennis, I take the court. I smile at my
opponent. Serena does not return the gesture. She'd be prettier if she did,I
think. She serves. The ball passes
cleanly through my skull, killing me instantly
YouGov @YouGov- 7h
One in eight men (12%) say they could win a point in a game of tennis against 23 time grand slam winner Serena Williams yougov.co.uk/opi/surveys/re One in eight men think they could take a point off Serena Willams plyng  terris.
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Zeke Hausfather @zekehausfather.com · 02/08/2026
Here is a version in Fahrenheit my American compatriots:
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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
This is more than the NSF social sciences division - now on the chopping block - awarded in grants last year. Think about that: a single AI company has the money to fund more social science research than the US govt.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Let's give the man his due tho the last third of this book is gonna be about contemporaneous developments in painting and chamber music
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Isaac Samuel @rhaplord.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
In the 1600s, some 21,000 runaway slaves in Brazil founded an independent kingdom in the interior that lasted nearly a century (1612-1694) It had a capital of 5,000, its own king, provincial chiefs, judges, priests, and an army that raided Dutch and Portuguese plantations
A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820
By John K. Thornton
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
*previous DSA chapter ack oops autocorrect!
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
UAWD is bigger, more successful, and much messier if you want a more consequential counterpoint (this is the caucus that pushed Shawn Fain over the top when he ran for UAW president): uniteallworkers4democracy.org
uniteallworkers4democracy.org
After UAWD members forced the amendment onto the Constitutional Convention agenda, UAW delegates voted to divest the union’s reported $400,000 in Israel bonds, marking a victory for decades of rank-and-file organizing.
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
If you want an example of what a reform caucus with pretty substantial overlap with DSA looks like poking around the MORE website can be instructive: www.morecaucusnyc.org
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Here's my quick answer: bsky.app/profile/dans...
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Just to be super reductive: you aren't going to be very friendly w/ a political organization that is trying to get you and your colleagues ousted from, in some cases, relatively powerful and high status jobs, even setting aside all the other issues of ideology, union politics, strategy, etc..
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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
There are strategic and ideological issues here (reform caucuses are usually more militant, usually less attached to conventional labor-liberalism, usually seek to refocus on new organizing) but at the end of the day a successful reform caucus displaces a lot of current union leaders.
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