Reposted by Travis KorteKate Mackenzie @katemac.bsky.social · 17/09/2026Goated quote from the late Marty Weitzman in @geoffmann.bsky.social lecture at Sydney Uni SSPS 2115
Reposted by Travis KorteMalcolm 朝精 Barrett @malcolmbarrett.malco.io · 10/09/2026we have this little problem where we are always selecting on the data that we *have* 0205
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 15/08/2026I still think this is one of the best meme templates though, despite everything 000
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 15/08/2026I regret to inform you we are all part of the same wavefunction, it is noisy as hell, and our grasp on it is ruinously lossy. 120
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 15/08/2026There is no “instrument sensitive enough” to reconstruct complicity in the desired sense, i.e., at 3 or 4 or N steps out in the causal chain from an event. A lot of the time it’s barely doable at 1 or 2 steps! 100
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 15/08/2026It reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) story about how Marconi thought that if you built an instrument sensitive enough, you could reconstruct every sound in history. 100
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 15/08/2026The idea that there might be a morally useful way to model the diffusion of individual responsibility and causal influence over some event smoothly across time and space is clearly appealing, but it’s a hopeless project in all but the most trivial cases. 110
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 15/08/2026A lot of people have a folk theory of “complicity” (distinct from the legal concept) that I think is obviously indefensible 120
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 14/08/2026First ballot hall of fame bluesky post that is somehow only four hours old 0628
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 20/07/2026Need a map of theoretically predicted but not yet experimentally observed dogs 100
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 21/05/2026Someone's takeaway from reading Blindsight was that we should build the Scramblers news.cornell.edu/stories/2026... 060
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 19/05/2026Sometimes you're reading a paper and you come across a sentence that stops you in your tracks. 010
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 11/04/2026The worst is when it turns out the master’s tools are necessary but not sufficient to dismantle the master’s house 030
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 31/03/2026Ugh I forgot to alt text, it’s a screenshot from an article with the following text highlighted: “Ontology, a term popularized by Palantir…” 020
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 17/03/2026Christian Metz has a good line: “every film is a fiction film” — and it was already true long before generative video 021
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 25/02/2026Brb going back through the philosophy of language literature to see if I can get any mileage out of the “use-mention-emit distinction” 040
Reposted by Travis KorteLinnea Sterte @decassette.bsky.social · 19/02/2026GUYS have you seen this. antarctica on google maps. go look at it. this is tech struggling to process the Sublime 6744197
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 06/02/2026Thought this was a SIGGRAPH poster for a second 120
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 03/02/2026This is giving me strong “elegant analogy for some broader societal phenomenon” vibes, but I can’t figure out what to compare to it. 020
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 17/01/2026Ok this post has kind of taken a life of its own so I feel I need to go on the record and say: all observation is theory-laden, all measurement is approximation, and humans don't have access to an objective reality. 040
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 16/01/2026"Oughtposting" and "isposting" are just words I made up, I was trying to distinguish between posts that are endorsing specific values versus ones that are making claims about facts. I thought it would be funny to name these concepts after a well known philosophy idea en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%8...en.wikipedia.orgIs–ought problem - Wikipedia 110
Reposted by Travis KorteCat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 16/01/2026not to say we shouldn’t be doing this. but I think the people who get mad about isposting hear an insufficient (to them) commitment to a better future, when that’s very much not what it always means. 1606
Reposted by Travis KorteCat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 16/01/2026I also think a rise in oughtposting is correlated with a feeling of helplessness: narrative is a powerful tool for imagining ways that things could be different, and I expect that people who are doing this are despairing of more practical paths to effect change. 2766
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 16/01/2026You encounter a purported fact but you also know there are lots of people with brain worms out there, so you’re not sure right away if the purported fact is something you want to add to your worldview or if it’s just nonsense that ended up fact-scented after percolating through an enwormed brain. 0953
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 16/01/2026Is it that regularly encountering people who seem to live in a wholly different reality, as most of us on the internet do, starts to render novel descriptive claims suspicious? 2884
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 16/01/2026I have a theory that the general epistemic crisis has led to a lot of very online people getting used to communicating primarily through oughtposting and kind of forgetting how to deal with isposting 1459496
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 09/01/2026This does a good job articulating something I’ve been struggling to. Feels like so much contemporary media is now in the Zapruder Extended Universe. 071
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 07/01/2026The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover, and Mothra 010
Reposted by Travis KorteHunter Owens @hunterowens.net · 02/01/2026New Year: New Job? I'm hiring two Transit Data Scientists to work on SB125 and other transit programs with me at CalSTA calcareers.ca.gov/CalHrPublic/...calcareers.ca.govSB125 Transit Data ScientistLooking to make a difference? Join our strong and mighty workforce. We offer benefits and growth opportunities and impact the lives of millions of Californians. 0107
Reposted by Travis KorteSeva @seva.bsky.social · 30/12/2025everyone thinks they’re a bayesian until they have to update their priors 424642
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 27/12/2025Lot of fights on here arise from confusing isposting and oughtposting 010
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 27/12/2025Maybe the internet would be better with tone indicators — like “/s” to indicate sarcasm — but for the is/ought distinction 120
Reposted by Travis KorteBerna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 15/11/2025we're too quick to mistake `what i know how to easily model' for `what is' and even `what should be'. 1326
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 03/11/2025"Look at my situation with complete objectivity" said the Reddit user to the crystal ball 0341
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 03/11/2025Somebody posted this prompt, which attempts to make ChatGPT responses less friendly and more critical. Feels like a rich document for a science-and-technology-studies analysis. 3242
Reposted by Travis KorteJoe Simons @joesimons.bsky.social · 03/11/2025A lemma to the psychologists fallacy: any pair of variables have a single "true" relationship and that moderators mask this underlying Platonic association 152
Reposted by Travis KorteSiobhán @shibbi.me · 01/11/2025A community cannot be held accountable; therefore a community must never make a management decision. 2154
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 29/10/2025Coase, R. H. (1960). The Problem of Social Cost. The Journal of Law and Economics, 3, 1–44. 020
Travis Korte @traviskorte.bsky.social · 25/10/2025I just passed a billboard advertising Orlando with the slogan “unbelievably real” 020
