iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

The lay connotation of "social construct" is "something that doesn't matter or can be easily changed"

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Indeed. SCHs rule all, and that's been true of online education since COVID.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

I meant if you succeed in the portal .

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

The others are much better. The faux dialogue is unforgivable.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

I am generally a fan of the earlymoderntexts simplifications because bullet points and modern punctuation rule, but good Lord what have they done to the Meditations. A faux dialogue! "Vivid and clear" instead of "clear and distinct"?!

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Utah does it based not just on birth but ancestry (how many generations, were they LDS pioneers)

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

No one is in a position to solve it for the current generation of students. I think we can make progress in twelve weeks but it's as if we were strength coaching trying to get someone to bench their weight after years of inactivity. It takes time.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

I think this line is mostly filler

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

What makes aesthetics fun is the community and the experimentation and the comparative lack of ego! Other philosophy areas can do that, too!

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Right. The academic usage is "actually negating X in favor of Y"; the LLM usage is "faux negating X, which Y intensifies.". Pulls more tumblr and Buffy than academic.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

But if you can master this, padawan, the highways and byways of the country will pose no challenge to you

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

How about based on anecdata? (It tracks.)

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

It always winds up tasting like a slightly confused bagel when I make it.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

As a Certified Truck Owner who lives near a ski resort, there are plenty of people who spend all that money on an F-150 and the lift kit who can't drive in the snow. (At least in Texas there's a reason not to have snow tires.)

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

See also the entire effective altruism.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

I am so glad someone besides me remembers that.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Snickers for All! Snickers before posting

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

Thank you! We're being told we need to teach how to prompt engineer papers. That takes an afternoon.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

Twin theory: helicopter parenting emerges because every second 90s movie has an absent father or divorce as the plot.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

The humanities in particular are a slow fuse. In the vast majority of cases no one is getting hired for knowing calligraphy or Plato, but they might get promoted for having an inexplicable sense of design or just a way with words.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Any theory of American politics that doesn't start with the instinct to throw the bums out badly misses the mark

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

Yeah "berate" is probably strong, but given that one could donate *without* making it an object lesson, it just seems to be unnecessary

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

It's okay not to want to donate less than what you think is optimal, but using it to berate someone else who is probably on balance doing something good but suboptimal seems like bad form to me.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

From recent events, why would they need to make the trains run on time rather than simply lying and saying they did?

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

How would wearing a mask prevent an assault?

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

For my non-Utah friends, this is kind of a big deal. The Desert News is an LDS-oriented paper. Hope springs eternal.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

Time is the other factor -- can you do it *quickly*? That's the distinction. Think of a jump versus a slow step up to the same height. (But yeah, the practical answer is usually "lift something heavier" and "jump".)

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

Not that much of a sports science nerd, but "power" measures how quickly you can generate force. And that's just strength and neuromuscular coordination.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

There's a lot of overlap, due to one sect marching through another

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Chorus is literally turning to the camera and saying "this is bad"

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Reposted by Mary Beth Willard

Isabel Zaw-Tun @izzyzaw.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

The Greeks absolutely had it right when they included a chorus in their plays. They knew audiences are dumbasses who need to be told “THIS MAN IS BAD. HE IS HERE AS AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT *NOT* TO DO. WOE TO THE BUMPTIOUS FOOL WHO WOULD IDOLIZE HIM. YOU ARE NOT, NOR DO YOU WANT TO BE, ALEX DELARGE”

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

At my institution, the faculty senate executive committee has seven women (of nine members), five who are also simultaneously department chairs.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

I must be missing something because the UCLA prof with the AI textbook is... not using it to replace TAs or de-skill the class or using it so she doesn't have to teach.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

I'm sure they'll have enough executive directors to manage it

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

My $0.02 is: this is what they'll do when their PhD programs get cut. Anything to avoid teaching.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

See, my worry is that it won't be inferior for long. And I don't want to reinforce the idea (as a philosopher) that the reason to read Plato rather than let ChatGPT do it is only that ChatGPT gets it wrong.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

So you need to either a) find a new way to test what you're trying to teach or b) restrict the testing/writing environment. But there's a model! Math bans calculators in some contexts but not in others.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

The challenge: sometimes the point of writing something is just to summarize something for other people. We used to be able to test one aim (can you think) with another (can you write.). But now it's much easier to automate that latter task.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

To do that you implicitly accept the frame that the point of reading is to write summaries for other people. When AI can do that well, then there is no reason to read. The reason to enforce prohibitions isn't because AI is cheating but because using it isn't accomplishing what you want.

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Reposted by Mary Beth Willard

Dan Reid @danielgreid.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Yes! This story needs to be told. Dumping of history majors is incredibly short sighted. When administrators do this, they're revealing their ignorance of the discipline and its value across careers.

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Mary Beth Willard @mbwillard.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

"the coup started and was over by morning coffee" is not something that I'd expect would have a democratic resolution

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