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John Russell

@johnruss28.bsky.social
936 followers 573 following 92 posts

Associate librarian at Penn State

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J.D. Porter @jdporter.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
New editorial from Emily Hammer & the @pricelab.bsky.social Critical AI Working Group at Penn. "The Penn administration now budgets huge sums for licensing AI products. Our leaders should devote equal resources toward new physical spaces and staff that support innovations in AI-free instruction."
thedp.com
Make Penn’s Critical Writing Seminars AI-free
Guest columnist Emily Hammer argues that a true commitment to high-quality writing instruction in the age of artificial intelligence requires hard limits. 
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dhnow.bsky.social @dhnow.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Resource: Creating and Hosting Basic IIIF Images and Manifests Using GitHub
programminghistorian.org
Creating and Hosting Basic IIIF Images and Manifests Using GitHub
This lesson demonstrates how to display and share image files on the web using the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and Github Pages. After explaining how to create and host...
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Looking for a post doc? Come join us at the Machine Visual Culture Research Group, which “combines digital and computational art history, critical AI studies, and the history of art and visual culture.” www.biblhertz.it/3815269/2909...
biblhertz.it
Call for Postdoctoral Research Fellows in Digital Art History
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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
CFP: Generative Digital Humanities, a volume on AI and DH in the long-running Minnesota Debates in DH book series. To be co-edited by @zentralwerkstatt.org, @laurenfklein.bsky.social, @lnakamura.bsky.social, and myself. Deadline Nov. 1. Please share widely! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/cfp-gen...
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu
CFP: Generative Digital Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities
Transforming scholarly publications into living digital works
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Abigail Goben @hedgielib.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
"Can you come and talk to them about AI usage and the risks?" -- it was a request from an *extremely* frustrated faculty colleague. And so I put together this framework. The ACToRS in AI Framework hedgehoglibrarian.com/2026/09/22/t...
hedgehoglibrarian.com
The ACToRS in AI Framework
About a year ago I was invited to give a lecture designed to spark critical thinking in graduate students when considering using generative AI and other tools that had started applying the “a…
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katie mackinnon @ktmac.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
So thrilled to have @emae.bsky.social’s brilliant work on provenance and critical A.I. studies in the SI, where she calls for more direct engagement with archival theory “which has evolved for two centuries to consider sociocultural relations between records and creators” ! Read more ⬇️
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Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
The Europeana Newspapers dataset on @hf.co now has an `alto` config: the raw ALTO XML for all 5.9M pages. The coordinates for every word, line and block, per-word OCR confidence and font info that the flattened text dropped are back. huggingface.co/datasets/biglam/europeana_newspapers
huggingface.co
biglam/europeana_newspapers · Datasets at Hugging Face
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
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Livia Garofalo @livgar.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
After two years of work, the AI factory is out! We spent months in Pennsylvania understanding how the "AI race " is landing on communities and how they are fighting back.
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Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
New from me in Nature. I discuss the need to look to regulated industries on how to govern AI, and not give into AI companies' self-regulation. Those actually serious about safety and security would start by applying safety critical techniques and legislation first. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Why AI companies can’t be trusted to self-regulate
From aviation to banking, high-risk industries are subject to independent oversight and meaningful penalties. AI companies should be no exception.
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Lauren Klein @laurenfklein.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
We're one month away from our official pub date! Join us in Atlanta, New York, Boston, or online for one of our book release events! More at: dataxdesign.io/events
Flyer announcing book release events in Atlanta on 10/20, New York on 10/29, and Boston on 11/12. A historical chart appears in the top half of the image.
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Jer Thorp @jerthorp.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Friends! Can I ask you a favour? My 🐦 + 📊 course starts next week. I'm super excited but registration is worryingly low. Can you share this with your weirdo nature + art + code friends? jerthorp.me/learning
jerthorp.me
LEARNING | jerthorp
Online courses and wokshops about birds, data and creative coding. Binoculars to Binomials is for coders who are interested in cultivating an observational practice, and for birders who want to dive ...
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I love reveal.js for its portability and ease of embedding websites into a slide deck. But I don't always want to work in markdown. So I made Small Reveal, a lightweight, browser-based WYSIWYG editor for reveal.js. Demo: slides.samplereality.com
slides.samplereality.com
Small Reveal
Build reveal.js presentations in your browser. No build step, no backend, no account — your decks live in your own browser storage.
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Quinn Daedal @quinnanya.me · 09/09/2026
This is such a cool research and making story. And a free font! #DHmakes
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Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
OCR for Japanese manga, Swedish handwriting or Arabic print? There’s a growing range of OCR models on @hf.co: VLMs, dedicated text recognisers and complete OCR pipelines. I’ve gathered 41 models into four collections, with short notes to help you choose: huggingface.co/collections/...
huggingface.co
OCR on the Hub - a davanstrien Collection
Curated OCR models for documents, languages, handwriting and text in images. Browse four collections with short practical notes.
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Nina Lager Vestberg @lagernina.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Fancy an excuse to come to Stockholm in September? Open seminar on PICTURE CULTURES with various folks involved in the project Selling Pictures: Pictorial Economy and Commoditization 1820–2020 (IFFS/VR). Speaker list in the comments!
A poster of various AI-generated cats accompanied by the following invitation to an
OPEN SEMINAR
PICTURE CULTURES

17 Sept. 09.30–16.00

Klockan Konferens

Olof Palmes gata 29-31

Welcome to a seminar where researchers as well as the advisory board involved in the project Selling Pictures: Pictorial Economy and Commoditization 1820–2020 (IFFS/Vetenskapsrådet) will present recent and ongoing research on various of aspects of how mass-produced and mass-reproduced pictures can be interpreted, datafied and studied.

Speakers:

Realism revisited. The persistence of photography in the age of AI 
–Estelle Blaschke

What Did the Victorians See? Using Multimodal AI to Analyze 72,000 News Illustrations
–Thomas Smits

What Are Artificial Intelligence Models Models Of?
–Fabian Offert

Picturing Baskerville’s Punches
–Caroline Archer Parré

Proto-photographic Reproductive Phantasmagoria
–Wolfgang Brückle

Pictorial Economy and Commoditization 1820–2020
–Nina Lager Vestberg & Anna Näslund
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Amanda Regan, Ph.D. @regan008.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Johns Hopkins + the AHA are hosting the AI and History Conference 2026 -- Oct 15-16 in Baltimore. Whatever your take on AI (excited, skeptical, curious, already using it), there's a place for you in this conversation. Learn more at: proflouishyman.github.io/ai_conferenc...
proflouishyman.github.io
AI and History Conference 2026
A practitioner-focused conference for historians using AI and computational methods, October 15–16, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University.
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dhnow.bsky.social @dhnow.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
CFP: DHNB 2027: Human(ities) in the Loop dhnb.eu/call-for-pap...
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Colleen T @librarycolleen.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
There is still time to apply for a full-time instructional-track teaching position in the School of Library and Information Science at the U. Iowa. That is well-suited for librarians with teaching experience. I am chairing this search and I can answer questions. joblist.ala.org/jobs/view/as...
joblist.ala.org
Recent Jobs - ALA JobLIST_Jobs in Library & Information Science & Technology
View jobs available on ALA JobLIST_Jobs in Library & Information Science & Technology. Search for and apply to open jobs from ALA JobLIST_Jobs in Library & Information Science & Technology.
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Katharine Hayhoe @katharinehayhoe.com · 19/08/2026
Have we just been examining the tip of the iceberg when it comes to AI's carbon emissions? This new study says YES. Thanks to @emorwee.bsky.social and @grist.org for reporting on this.
nature.com
AI-driven productivity gains enable more CO₂ emissions than they avoid in a global energy–economy model - npj Climate Action
npj Climate Action - AI-driven productivity gains enable more CO₂ emissions than they avoid in a global energy–economy model
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Folger Shakespeare Library @folger.edu · 17/08/2026
On our "Collation" blog, scholar Brandi K. Adams @bkadams.bsky.social, an assistant professor at Arizona State University, explores the first use of the words "artificial intelligence" and what they meant then and now. www.folger.edu/blogs/collat...
folger.edu
Artificial Intelligence, 1588 | Folger Shakespeare Library
Brandi K. Adams explores how concerns about "artificiall intelligence" manifest in the 16th and 17th centuries, reflecting the concerns of our own time.
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Sarah Lang @sarahalang.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
What does it mean to do digital history? New epistemic horizons, new epistemic responsibilities! At least that’s what we say in the 27p introduction to our special issue on computational approaches 👀 ⬇️ doi.org/10.1080/0002... #DH #digitalhistory #ComputationalHumanities #histsci
doi.org
Introduction: Computational Approaches to the Histories of Alchemy and Chemistry
The promise of computational methods opens new epistemic horizons. Yet, as we discuss in this introduction to the special issue on computational approaches to the histories of alchemy and chemistry...
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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
make some research norms more difficult as an inherent affordance of the technology and as a a corporate strategy. (I am fleshing this out in a paper on "algorithmic agnotology" that I am finishing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CRJ...
youtube.com
Algorithmic Agnotology: On AI, Ignorance, and Power – Alondra Nelson | IASEAI '26
YouTube video by International Association for Safe & Ethical AI
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 07/08/2026
I am absolutely thrilled to present to you: How to Build a Universe (Theoretically Speaking) available for pre-order now, wherever you buy your books! www.simonandschuster.ca/books/How-to...
Cover of the book "How to Build a Universe (Theoretically Speaking)" by Katie Mack. The top right corner says "Author of The End of Everything" and the bottom left says "Brilliant and thrilling! - John Green". The cover motif is a space image made of puzzle pieces.
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Mikyung Shin @mshin77.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
📢TextAnalysisR is now on CRAN: an R package + Shiny app for text mining: topic models (STM/BERTopic), sentiment, and semantic networks. #rstats #NLP #LLM install.packages("TextAnalysisR") App: textanalysisr.org Doc: mshin77.github.io/TextAnalysisR/
textanalysisr.org
TextAnalysisRTextAnalysisR
TextAnalysisR: A text mining workflow tool
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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
let me once more spread the gospel of SmallPDF, which has saved me for years from the tyranny of Fancy Adobe by letting me sign, merge, split, edit and otherwise tinker with PDFs for free
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Alison Macrina @flexlibris.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
bring Library Freedom Project to your library to host these classes, or use our free resources at libraryfreedom.org/resources
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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
for those who have not studied Greek but want to deal with Homer: we have glosses and transliteration in the Homer Treebanks: glosses done with Qwen -- not as good as frontier models but we can run them at scale. tinyurl.com/59xcvjba
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Ai2 @ai2.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Try olmOCR 2 in the Ai2 Playground, check out our blog for more info, & download the weights and data from Hugging Face: ▶️ Playground: buff.ly/pJhoWXN 📝 Blog: buff.ly/8uUabID 🤗 Model & data: buff.ly/EUYHIuN
playground.allenai.org
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Patrick J. Burns @diyclassics.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
✨Version bump✨ txtdown v0.3.1 Minimal markup for Latin text collections Improved document validation; improved quotation handling; hierarchy-aware citations github.com/diyclassics/...
Release details for txtdown v0.3.1
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Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
My goodness the Fantastic Futures conference in DC in Sept looks good www.conftool.org/fantastic-fu... Catch @amsichani.bsky.social and my paper "Data-Driven AI without Data" on Wednesday the 16th
conftool.org
Fantastic Futures 2026 - ConfTool Pro - BrowseSessions
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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Everyone should read this, just to see how they implemented a perceptron (a very basic neural network) in Age of Empires II arxiv.org/abs/2605.31514 The artificial neurons pass activation energy in the form of goats.
arxiv.org
If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II
Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthro...
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
In visual culture & media theory, images from diffusion models are often analyzed through data critique: comparing what's produced to what's ingested. In this pre-print, I propose to look at the digestive system too: the decisions built into the system that automate specific ideologies of seeing.
arxiv.org
The Market in the Model: Latent Diffusion as Neural Economy
Valuable critique of generative image models within visual culture and the humanities has emphasized the role of datasets in shaping the images they produce. Yet, close studies of the ideological posi...
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
I've been offline more than usual because of paper and grant deadlines plus work travel, but I'm back with my first real newsletter today! Click for rambling about infrastructure, benchmarks, Babylonian tablets, and more.
field-notes.leaflet.pub
Dispatch: Humanistic AI, OCR, and Hugging Face
In which I reflect on the a recent trip to Chicago, overview the state of OCR for humanities data, and fangirl over Hugging Face infrastructure.
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Samuel Moore @samuelmoore.org · 17/06/2026
Check out this awesome zine from colleagues in @morphss.bsky.social among others!
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Lauren Klein @laurenfklein.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
New favorite (anti) AI book is @carissaveliz.bsky.social's PROPHECY. Two thirds of the way through and the philosophical zingers just do not stop! AGI to underground bunkers to Hannah Arendt on destruction is *chefs kiss* www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/759692...
penguinrandomhouse.com
Prophecy by Carissa Véliz: 9780385550970 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
“Lively. . . . Rousing. . . . Prophecy—roving, intelligent, irreducibly idiosyncratic—can expand our sense of possibility, starting now.” —The New York Times Book Review ...
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Dr. Jonathan Foley @globalecoguy.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Finally! An article about the AMOC circulation that isn’t just clickbait / hype, and provides some real physical insights about how the ocean works. It turns out the ocean may be far more resilient than clikbait stories suggest. A very worthwhile read! www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
The ocean current that warms Europe may be more resilient than feared
Studies of the Atlantic's circulation find signs of both weakening and unexpected stability in the face of global warming
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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
1. Static word embeddings might model culture. But they're fixed. Boo. 2. Dynamic embeddings are contextual! 3. But encoding is computationally expensive. Boo. 4. Decoder only models are efficient! 5. But they seem to collapse all perspectives. Boo. What, then, ought the sociology of culture do? 👇
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Jer Thorp @jerthorp.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
I made an artwork about the World Cup 12 years ago with Teju Cole and Mario Klingemann: www.jerthorp.me/timeofthegame Teju spoke so eloquently about the World Cup as "public time" and that idea has stuck with me.
jerthorp.me
Time of the Game | jerthorp
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Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Got a digitised collection that needs OCR? uv-scripts is a set of single-file Python scripts that OCR a whole image dataset to markdown in one command — 20+ open VLMs to pick from, nothing to install but uv. github.com/davanstrien/...
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
An LLM will grade a paper according to the criteria through which it is designed to produce a paper. As such, the LLM grades humans based on the criteria engineers use to assess the LLM. mail.cyberneticforests.com/its-not-just...
mail.cyberneticforests.com
It's Not Just X. It's Y.
Against the Quantification of Integrity When the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language. 💡Nerd Rating: 1/5. I discuss the origins of certain linguistic tics in LLMs a...
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Zachary Lesser @zacharylesser.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
Yes! So glad the @inquirer.com has picked up on this awesome story. Congrats @nicosiamarissa.bsky.social !
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Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
Built a useful GLAM model this week: flags blank index cards before expensive OCR. Cheap, scales, adapts. IMO the technical barrier is now very low, the main one is knowing how. So I wrote this up as a chapter: danielvanstrien.xyz/ai-patterns-for-glam/patterns/index-card-classifier.html
Two archival index cards side by side. Left, labelled "blank": a bare card with only a punch hole near the bottom centre. Right, labelled "content (not-blank)": a typed catalogue card with shelf number, book title, date, and a library form stamp.
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Jack Jenkins @jackjenkins.me · 25/05/2026
If you're wondering why Chris Olah, the cofounder of AI company Anthropic, was sitting on the stage with Pope Leo today as the pontiff unveiled his new encyclical on AI, well ALLOW ME TO EXPLAIN. religionnews.com/2026/05/22/w...
religionnews.com
Inside the unlikely Vatican-Anthropic relationship that's reshaping the AI ethics debate
(RNS) — Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical on AI is set to be released Monday (May 25), with Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, at his side.
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John Russell @johnruss28.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
This is a good thread, but this part in particular is key
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John Russell @johnruss28.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
FWIW, when Fish keynoted our DH conference at Oregon around this time, he was engaged and interested. I think because he realized that there were “non-insurgent” forms of DH work. Or maybe he is just very polite in person.
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Chris Widga @widga.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Re-upping for the evening crowd. Sharing an art bot that I programmed to post pieces from our art collection. Once a day. Forever. At the moment, it's a little lonely, so give it a follow! #bsmuseums #artbot #pennstate
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Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
NuExtract3 (4B, Apache-2.0) does OCR *and* structured extraction. Point it at a dataset of scanned index cards + a JSON schema → clean catalog JSON One command on huggingface Jobs. (or skip the schema for plain Markdown OCR) Script + dataset 👇
A worked example of NuExtract3 turning a document image into structured data. Top: a terminal command — hf jobs uv run --image vllm/vllm-openai nuextract3.py index-cards cards-json --template schema.json. Middle (input): a scanned typewritten library index card reading "ABAD (Joseph), Captain, Spanish Army, letter of (1783), 5538, f.11." Bottom (output): the JSON extracted from the card — image_type "index_card", heading "Abad J.", heading_type "person", epithet "Captain, Spanish Army", and one entry with ms_no "5538", folios ["f.11"], description "letter of (1783)".
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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 08/05/2026
Preprinted! Been working on this for ~1 year w wonderful coauthors Nancy & Mark: > Understanding Artificial Neural Networks: Mysterianism about Known Mechanism is Mysticism doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Have you noticed many experts say they don't understand AI? What's going on? 🤯 Let us tell you... 1/
Understanding Artificial Neural Networks:
Mysterianism about Known Mechanism is Mysticism
Olivia Guest1,2, Nancy Abigail Nuñez Hernández3, and Mark Blokpoel1,2
1Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Radboud University, The Netherlands
2Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
3Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán-Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico
Mysterianism is the idea that human cognition, mind, cannot be understood. Taking this
concept and applying it to known mechanism — such that claims are made that we do not
know how engineered systems, such as artificial neural networks (ANNs), work, or that they
constitute black boxes that we can only open with difficulty — is inappropriate at best and
malicious at worst. We do know the mechanistic structure of such models because we designed
and built them. We also do know their functional role (what they are for) as well as the
mathematical function they are asked to approximate (map inputs to target outputs). Because
mysterianist beliefs about known systems, such as ANNs, are often expressed, scientists need
to sit up and take notice. We provide an error theory as to what is going on to help unpick
this metatheoretical blunder. Ultimately, the problem is that ‘understanding’ is not a technical
term in these cases: the word is co-opted for a specific narrative to sell ‘artificial intelligence’
through mystification. All computational systems, from pendulums to databases, will behave
in ways we cannot predict or control — this is not a unique property of ANNs — and experts
do indeed grasp the computational properties of these systems nonetheless.
Keywords: artificial neural networks; mechanism; black box; epistemology; artificial
intelligence; understanding4 GUEST, NUÑEZ HERNÁNDEZ, & BLOKPOEL≈
ANNs are equiva-
lent to or inspired
by humans.
α
≡
ANNs are a black
box or unknowable,
even if opened.
β
≡
Humans are a black
box or unknowable.
γ
Figure 1
Three co-occurring (latent) assertions in the context of con-
temporary reasoning on AI and cognition. While they may
appear to hang together in “reflective equilibrium” (Elgin 2017),
their metatheoretical examination brings their contradictions to
light. Starting from the top, and moving clockwise: 𝛼) represents
the typical assertion of so-called cognitive, neural, or otherwise
biological plausibility or inspiration presented for ANNs; 𝛽) is
the claim we tackle head on here — both in terms of analysing
the constituent terms and in how it relates to the other two
assumptions; and 𝛾) exemplifies a type of mysterianism, which
while not always explicitly expressed, plays a background role
and importantly comes into conflict with the other two claims
in important waysMYSTERIANISM ABOUT KNOWN MECHANISM IS MYSTICISM 11World
?Di
Data?Si
ANN
Figure 3
Not all systems, 𝑆𝑖 relate to their relevant data, 𝐷𝑖 and world
phenomena this way, but ANN models (as many inferential
statistical models) do when used without scientific understand-
ing of the data-generating process or without verbal or formal
theory to match (Guest and Martin 2025b, 2021, 2023). As we
move from left to right above, we move from full understanding
of engineered systems, 𝑆𝑖 to less or even possibly none of the
data, 𝐷𝑖 to the world which can be thought of as the set of
phenomena to be understood.
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Daniel Bellingradt @dbellingradt.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
Goodbye Google Chrome, nice to have met you …
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