iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Nelson Flores @nelsonlflores.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Obama recently urged Democrats to “talk like normal people” instead of sounding like they’re in a “college seminar.” I explore the language ideologies that undergird his advice and how they align with the rightwing assault on higher education. educationallinguist.substack.com/p/obama-norm...

educationallinguist.substack.com

Obama, “Normal People,” and the Politics of Academic Language

In a recent interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, former President Barack Obama argued that Democrats need to do a better job “talking like normal people talk” instead of sounding like they...

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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; understanding

4 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 ways

MYSTERIANISM 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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Gravel Influencer @gravelinfluencer.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

We would be a lot better off as a country at the moment if more of our institutions had said, "Fuck you, make me" over the past year and a half

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 12/03/2026

every quantitative measure is actually a stack of qualitative assumptions in a trenchcoat

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Sickos Committee @sickoscommittee.org · 20/02/2026

When I’m two weeks behind on my grading.

"I seem unreliable, but I'm actually very reliable.
You just have to trust the process."
Alysa Liu, U.S. Olympic figure skater

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Stan Oklobdzija @stano.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

I genuinely hate how many Trumpisms have worked their way into my daily speech. He operates at the perfect level of buffoonery.

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tamara nopper @tamaranopper.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Somehow we need more of those rightly critical of the surveillance state to deal with antiblackness as a structuring logic and how practices commonly used against Black people are part of what more of us are vulnerable to now.

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Stellbound: Stellraiser II @antlervel.vet · 23/01/2026

Gotcha—let’s dig into that step by step. 1. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵, because I turned you into an amorphous lump of flesh. You’re not just immobile—you’re immortal, and you feel only anguish. 2. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺. That makes total sense—it’s a natural human impulse, and you’ve been through a lot.

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Anne H. Charity Hudley @acharityhudley.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

All righty y'all! The Journal of Black Language and Culture @jblacjournal.bsky.social is now open for submissions! See our website for information on how to submit and reach out if you have questions or ideas as we learn and grow! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

cambridge.org

Journal of Black Language and Culture | Cambridge Core

Journal of Black Language and Culture - Anne H. Charity Hudley

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I Scare You Like Sound Dog @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 05/01/2026

It is kind of wild living in the United States after rap went mainstream, while having a working memory of what it was like before that. Doubly so because while a lot of vernacular like “baby mama” was popularized, the stigma attached to the communities closely identified with it remains.

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Alayo Tripp @phonotactician.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

The “I do not want to review a revised version” checkbox seems to be purely cosmetic

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 28/12/2025

once more a good time to remind people that in a scientific/formal context the meaning of words, especially ones presented as technical terms, does actually matter and is open to abuse (including to wider society) if not called out when terms do not refer plato.stanford.edu/entries/refe...

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Nelson Flores @nelsonlflores.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

What sounds like “human” writing can never be disentangled from the fact that most of the world’s population has never been considered fully human by mainstream institutions

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 14/12/2025

which language? which human expert? what level of expertise? in which domain? by what metric?

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Alayo Tripp @phonotactician.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

The West Wing implies the existence of… oh nvm

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Nelson Flores @nelsonlflores.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Though tbh it really should not be surprising that a white dude who systematically pushed questions of power out of what counts as “real” linguistics is fine having no analysis of power in his friends circles either

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I Scare You Like Sound Dog @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 12/12/2025

Again a big part of socialization in the US and elsewhere is a bedrock belief that Black people making *any* demands on your time, attention, resources, behavior or principles is an unfair imposition and should be handled as such whenever possible.

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Noah Berlatsky @nberlat.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

it's really a deliberate white supremacist choice that "lynching" is now a generic term for any public shaming. 1

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Alayo Tripp @phonotactician.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

I feel like we really need to talk about what this actually is, which is a simulation of a pedophile’s experience. This isn’t just a presentation of data, discursively it’s like a shrine.

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Fernanda Ferreira @fernandaedi.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

Psych dept hiring is SO trend-based. In the 80s, connectionism was all the rage; in the early naughts, you had to do cognitive neuroscience; and today it’s all AI. Some of this is our own attraction to methods over theory, and a lot of it is a response to administration-defined financial priorities.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

Hilariously, I just had a reviewer recommend a rejection of my paper because I used an ethically and gender diverse sample, in a study that showed that an LLM was biased against women and people of color. I guess they wanted me to use a group of white men to illustrate the bias?

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folukeifejola @folukeifejola.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

#Newblogpost!!! Here I unpack the term “racialised (un)belonging” as I use it in my work. I rely on Spillers' "ungendering" to describe a process that is produced through a colonial history that inscribes the racialised other as ever beyond the bounds of humanity. folukeafrica.com/racialised-u...

folukeafrica.com

Racialised Un(belonging) within and beyond the University: The threads of a concept

Still seeking the university that is ours

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Aura Bogado @aurabogado.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Jeffrey Epstein was developing a series, moderated by @lkrauss1.bsky.social, to bring scientists and celebrities together. The first season would include an episode where "Woody Allen talks about the human condition with Linguist Noam Chomsky." drive.google.com/file/d/14Sla...

drive.google.com

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023123.txt

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Adia Benton @ethnography911.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

the funny (not funny) thing is this is a fundamental bit of knowledge that black and brown folks in the US carry with them—often because we’re the ones against whom this is often ‘weaponized’

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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Author checks out

Chris Willman
Icon LinkPlus Icon
ChrisWillman
Chris Willman is Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic at Variety. He joined the publication in 2018 and is based in Los Angeles. Willman began his career at the Los Angeles Times, going on to spend 13 years at Entertainment Weekly as a senior writer and critic. He has been a regular contributor to Billboard, the Hollywood Reporter and TV Guide; his work has additionally appeared in Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, Spin, Parade and other publications. He is the author of the 2005 book “Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music,” cited by Stephen King as one of the three best music books of all time. Since joining Variety, he has received eight first-place honors from the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards and seven from the SoCal Journalism Awards. The L.A. Press Club named him its Entertainment Journalist of the Year in 2020.

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John Rogers @johnrogers.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

It's not in this article but the government asserts that the sandwich was thrown at "point blank range", which implies subway sandwiches have defined effective weapon ranges of varying lethality, and I would like to see the government's chart of these ranges.

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Alayo Tripp @phonotactician.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

There lots of replies indicating that akshually, the term “second shift” appears at least once in the book, which in no way engages the critique here. Trying to identify the longitudinal impact of second-shift work as a completely distinct phenomenon is weird. “The squeeze” is still a goofy name.

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Trevon Logan @trevondlogan.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

That “working class” is a transparently race and gender coded term tells you who pundits view as low and middle income workers and what type of work they believe “counts” among this group. Reality: the working class is predominantly White women and racial minorities in the low wage service sector.

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jenn m. jackson @jennmjacksonphd.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

I want more people to care that SNAP benefits are being cut off on November 1. 40% of SNAP beneficiaries are children. This is callous and vile.

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Indrapramit Das @indrapramitdas.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

Contrasting the censorious hostility of the contemporary corpo-technofascist internet toward human sex work/porn with its embrace of machine-generated synthetic sex 'content' is so illustrative of the labour-breaking/disenfranchising underpinnings of the 'AI' project.

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Alayo Tripp @phonotactician.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

From the Politico piece “Ortt said. “This behavior is indefensible and has no place in our party or anywhere in public life.” I just can’t help but read the subtext as “private group chat should have stayed private.” 🥴

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 04/10/2025

New preprint 🌟 Psychology is core to cognitive science, and so it is vital we preserve it from harmful frames. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I use our psych and computer science expertise to analyse and craft: Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf... 🧵 1/

Cover page of Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 1 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 2 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

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Heidi Harley @heidiharley.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

Linguists! Write TIme Friday tomorrow with LSA EC member (and AAAS Section Z chair!) Melissa Baese-Bork @m2b2.bsky.social at 10ET. Join Melissa and other linguists in a quiet zoom room and get some work done! @lingsocam.bsky.social www.lsadc.org/ev_calendar_...

lsadc.org

Write Time Friday with Melissa Baese-Berk

About Write Time Friday This is a chance to log into a Zoom room, (optionally) set an explicit writing goal for the session, and then spend a focused two hours writing in the supportive virtual prese...

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

the other half of this that I've never really gotten over: this all but explicitly amounts to valorizing being "asleep". people are really out here wielding "I have no idea what's going on, historically speaking" as a credential

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

There is absolutely no good faith reason to use the term “AI” for any technology one is selling. It serves only for dazzling people into thinking the technology has capabilities that it doesn’t. If one wants a technology to be trustworthy, just use a transparent, informative term without hype.

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

Let’s say, hypothetically, you appreciated our position paper and @olivia.science and I would be recording answers to questions about it. What questions would you have?

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Alayo Tripp @phonotactician.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

The FBI is providing a lot of grist for my lectures on indexicality

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Alayo Tripp @phonotactician.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

TIL Roseanne characterizes the comments that got her fired as “racially misgender[ing Valerie Jarrett],” which is… interesting

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Kirby Conrod @kirbyconrod.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

Please boost! #linguistics student here at Swarthmore is running a survey for English speakers (who don't know Mandarin / any other tone languages) about how we learn tones. Take a few minutes to help out with this student research! swarthmore.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

swarthmore.az1.qualtrics.com

Online Survey Software | Qualtrics Survey Solutions

Qualtrics sophisticated online survey software solutions make creating online surveys easy. Learn more about Research Suite and get a free account today.

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Rami Ismail (رامي) @ramiismail.com · 11/09/2025

"Political violence" is a term that exists to suggest a moral distinction between "violence against politicians" and "violence by politicians" - so that one can be condemned while the other can be normalized. Obviously, no such distinction exists in reality: violence is violence.

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