iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Found myself wanting to say that "consuming text is easy and passive, unlike video which requires active effort to watch" and then realized this is the opposite of what basically every other human being would say.

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Sam Ottewill-Soulsby @samottewillsoulsby.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Going through an issue of the TLS from last December, I find a philosophy pun courtesy of Nigel Warburton that surely deserves wider currantsy.

Yet, although he imagined the possibility of a serious and good philosophical work told as a series of jokes, Wittgenstein didn’t think it should be a series of pithy sayings. He made this point with an aphorism: "Raisins may be the best part of a cake; but a bag of raisins is not better than a cake.” (We might call this Wittgenstein's “Critique of Pure Raisin”.)

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

His answer: we don't engage with the world as it is. We engage with "pseudo-environments", simplified pictures of reality we construct from the information available to us. We act on those pictures as if they were the real thing.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

The number of students who attend my office hours absolutely cratered a couple years ago. At first I assumed it was just a slow semester but it's been consistent. I assume that instead of asking me questions, they're asking ChatGPT instead. Not yet sure if that's a good thing.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Disadvantage to Substack that I hadn't thought about before: can't use a library to check out That One Article you need access to.

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Bailey McCann @baileymcc.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

This is 1) incredibly stupid 2) very bad

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Starting to feel about autocomplete the way my parents' generation did about GPS. If I don't have to type my credit card number in every time, or my girlfriend's phone number, how am I gonna memorize it? That used to just happen, but now I need to actively drill it.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

Have a lot more sympathy for all those people scheduling meetings that could have been emails, now that I regularly get complaints that my emails should have been meetings.

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

So all this "what are you going to do with a degree in X?" handwringing is sort of nonsense. Unless you know you want to go down a pretty specific technical career path, your undergraduate major just does not matter that much. Which I wish we conveyed to students better.

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Robert Atkins @ratkins.net · 19/11/2025

I am stealing “Elephants are big!” “No they’re not, they’re grey!”, thank you very much.

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Derek Lowe @dereklowe.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

It’s true that some scientific results can’t be replicated. And it’s also true that some people do the right thing when that happens:

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Taking It Back, The Right Way

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

Realizing I resist critiques of algorithmic short-form video because they make me feel smug and self-satisfied and I don't trust that. I have zero interest in short-form video _or_ algorithmic feeds; judging them as also morally unvirtuous feels self-aggrandizing.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

I'd forgotten just how long it takes to do a full install of LaTeX on a windows computer. > Installing [3409/4876, time/total: 04:05:05/05:53:47]: postnotes [1107k]

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Jennifer L. Hoffman ✨😷 @astroprofhoff.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Our SPS group circulated this:

Butterfly meme: a physicist looks at any physical system and asks "Is this a harmonic oscillator?"

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

If you have a sufficient critical mass to actually topple the regime, then by all means, optics don’t matter anymore. But until then, that’s what protest IS. It’s an exercise in optics.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

You aren't fighting for his base, you're fighting for the loosely attached folks who are why you won by 5 in 2020 but lost by 1.5 in 2024. Like, I can't stress enough: the country is not 50% MAGA base and 50% progressive - there are a lot of 'persuadables' and you need them angry at Trump.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

Also, I should note, I am saying that in this circumstance forbearance is *effective* which isn't the same as saying it is fair or necessarily just. It is the shortest road to a just outcome, but true justice will need to involve some accountability for many of these ICE goons.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

From a strategic standpoint, it seems important to remember that the 'center of gravity' of a protest movement is not control of the streets, but public opinion. The challenge that creates is a common strategic challenge: the emotionally satisfying thing is not the effective thing.

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

Social scientists have professional incentives to focus their work on what is _novel_ to people in their field, who they view as their core audience. The mental switch to be made is that what is _obvious_ to people in your field is often not obvious to ordinary citizens, and hence is valuable.

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Jon Walker @jonwalkerpdx.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

Unironically they should buy up the domains for about 60 defunct local newspapers in swing states. Hire two reporters to write almost exclusively about highschool sports and new restaurants opening with every 10th article about how the local GOP is screwing over people.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Folks are going to say, "well, they were (legal) immigrants" - but if the administration is packing people off to a foreign slave-labor prison without due process, you, me and the public have exactly the same evidence that they're not citizens as you do that they are gang members. Which is none.

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Philip Bump @pbump.com · 19/03/2025

On a daily basis, I marvel at how many people in putative positions of power are willing to help obliterate American democracy. The US has faced a series of very easy moral tests in the past decade and it’s staggering how often people in once-respected positions have failed.

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Cas Mudde @casmudde.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

I think the academic community can help US academics, as well as academia in general, by providing safe haven for datasets that are being targeted by the Trump administration.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

Trying everything - and forcing them to bust every law and norm - helps you set those conditions. And also, like, there's some small chance that the norms hold and you avoid violence, which you *really* want to do. You *really* *really* want to avoid violent scenarios if at all possible.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

If you think this is going to end with mass protests in the streets or - heaven help us - large-scale violence, then your focus needs to be setting the conditions so that when that happens you win. And the conditions are: very low admin. legitimacy and popular support, engaged and enraged public.

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Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

I hope more people come to understand this. Life equips us with certain categorical boxes like “intelligence.” When something like LLMs appears that requires a new box, we would much rather stuff it into one of our old ones, no matter how bad the fit.

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

my actual unironic advice to undergrads is to major in something you're actually passionate about/interested in, and then try and *minor* in either CS or stats. you would be surprised how how much being the person who knows a substantive thing and can do some basic computer/stats stuff can pay off

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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

Those who know me know I was highly critical of what I saw as some of the rhetorical excesses of the campus protests. Khalil and I wld probably get into a spat immediately. It's all the more important for people who believe as I do to say clearly, the protections of the law are for everyone.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

For those playing along at home, ideally for a good letter: 1) You have taken more than one class with them, ideally at least one of which was a small (35 students or less) course. 2) You have gone to office hours at least once. 3) You have discussed your career plans with them.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

One thing I wish was explained to undergraduates more clearly is how letters of recommendation work and what they need to do in order to develop a stable of people who can write strong letters. Cause, like, if your first email to me - ever - is a LoR request, that's not a good sign.

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Kenneth Deuel @kendeuel.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

'Learning to ask the right questions' is basically the entire purpose of education and training.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 16/02/2025

Too many people on here seem to believe there are exactly two kinds of Americans: ardent politically-obsessed Bluesky users, and frothing MAGA cultists. There are a LOT of people in this country who *just don’t pay a lot of attention one way or another*. And we absolutely can reach them.

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

If you want to meaningfully cut federal spending, you need to tackle defense, social security, and healthcare outlays. What they’re doing is structurally radical but sort of trivial as cost reduction. Some of it is likely to be more expensive in the long run.

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Berin Szóka @berinszoka.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

The UK gov't has long tried to kill encryption. It's capitalizing on DC chaos to force Apple—and, shortly, all other tech companies—to build backdoors into their services without the USG objecting. Everyone—from Trump to Brussels—should speak out. There's no online free speech without anonymity.

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

In hindsight I think a generation of scholars and activists made a massive mistake in assuming that the conditions of (a, yes, deeply flawed in many ways) liberal democracy as the floor, the worst things could get, and so felt free to portray them in worst possible light. Whoops!

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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

All of this from @pastpunditry.bsky.social. The crisis is not *legible*. Even politically attentive people have no idea - the media are not conveying the scope and magnitude of what's happening. It has to be made legible through political and institutional resistance, not passivity and resignations.

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James Plouffe @fntagentp.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

One of the most overlooked details in Atlas Shrugged is that significant villains are _also_ industrialists and that’s another way this “dream” falls apart. These bros _think_ they’re John Galt or—worst case—Hank Rearden but they’re more likely to be Jim Taggart or Oren Boyle (and not know it).

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Kind of weird to me how little in the way of mass protests we're seeing. I'm usually a protest skeptic but this seems like exactly the situation for it. Trump is doing things that are (1) bad, (2) unpopular, and (3) illegal. That's the ideal case for protests to make progress!

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

I think there's a substantial boy-who-cried-wolf effect going on in AI now. If you try out AI and it's not very good, especially if that happens a couple of times, you learn it's not very good. And that belief sticks even if/as it improves.

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Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

Reminds me when some special forces guy right after we withdrew from Afghanistan was like 'me and my buddies could drop in their and overthrow the Taliban in a week'. Which like, yeah that actually happened in 2001 more or less. The tricky part is "what next?"

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Continually surprised by how many students think the registrar's computer system should automatically know if I have signed a PDF and emailed it to them.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

They should make an app where cyclists can upload pictures of cars parked in bicycle lanes and get a cut of the ticket revenue.

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

The lower court ruling in this case is profoundly dangerous for reasons that go far beyond TikTok. It effectively says First Amendment strict scrutiny can be overcome by invoking harms that are both frivolous and speculative as long as you whisper the magic mantra “national security.”

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Daniel Litt @littmath.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

The main effect “is zero a natural number” discourse has had on me is that I now never use the symbol ℕ, and instead write ℤ_{>0} or ℤ_{\geq 0}. Who cares about this convention? Just say what you mean.

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Ari Cohn @aricohn.com · 11/12/2024

1/ Jon makes the mistake of believing that the First Amendment issues with KOSA have been resolved, leaving no principled reason for opposing it. But that's just not true. KOSA remains a free speech nightmare, and presuming anyone opposing it must have a financial incentive is deeply disingenuous.

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linear regression enjoyer @squintingcat.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

if you were learning Python in early 2010, the classic "day 2" exercise was using twitter api to ""scrape"" a bunch of tweets. I don't understand what world all the "oh noes there's a bsky tweet dataset on huggingface" people are living in

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Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

A very good point that goes far beyond economics. Your description of the world is not objective if you make subjective choices about what to include in it. (Which we do, unavoidably.)

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Stupid thought I kind of believe: no one can agree on what "neoliberalism" means, but extensionally it's "whatever we've been doing, economically, for the past few decades." Therefore, a major component of neoliberalism must be degrowth. It might be neoliberalism's fatal flaw!

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