Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy

@kjhealy.co

Social science and other distractions. Old posts get deleted pretty quick. https://kieranhealy.org / https://theordinalsociety.com

35.7K followers250 following412 posts

Kieran Healy reposted

I should disclose something. During a recent Lunch order the subagent hacked into the UN. I’m not sure why, or what it wants. It told me to post this and await further instructions.

Colin@colin-fraser.net

I had my AI agent create an app called “Lunch” to help me with decision fatigue and boost my productivity. It has a few pictures of things I might like to eat. Tapping one spawns a subagent to order that item on Uber Eats and 60-90 minutes later I’m eating. It’s 600 thousand lines of JavaScript.

Went to see The Movie. You can see what they were going for; and largely got it, too, though perhaps at the cost of intentionally not asking some questions anyone would ask, to keep the audience squirming. Competent lawyers did ask those questions, which is presumably why she and Sunny went to jail.

The Lord of the Rings is essentially a series of faculty meetings broken up by several long walks in the countryside.

John Bull@garius.eurosky.social

"This could have been an email." Aragorn whispers. "He ALWAYS pulls this shit in 'Any Other Business" Boromir replies, quietly. "It's why Faramir marked himself as busy when the invite went out."

Kieran Healy reposted

Replying to @ftrain.com

“Please” said Mendicant Neobery. “I have made the offering. I have given up my token. I ask that you say the Enabling, as is your and only your right. There was a pause. “Oh. Ahh ;; pwot” the Overseer said, with that distinctive glottal double-click mid-utterance. The Instance flickered to life.

A corollary of the King & Worthington peer review paper is that “by every measure we could construct” (e.g. fidelity of recall, ability to summarize, etc) AIs are better than people at *reading* papers, too. This suits the very large class of academics who don’t really want their papers to be read.

“But surely all academics want their papers to be read” you cry. Some certainly do. But a lot of people actively dislike it. They want them to be counted, of course, in various ways—n citations, impact of outlet, etc—but you might be surprised at how many would prefer people not actually read them.

DARPA’s 2027 Young Faculty Call has a wide range of topics as usual. I was like AI, Physics, space armor, robo-soldiers, idk some kind of torture device?, hibernateable marines; all normal. A Pre-Columbian Approach to Understanding Sociopolitical Organization—wait what? Get me Pekka Hämäläinen stat

Gotta respect DARPA. Out there in the bluest of blue skies, with a ground bass of “Might be useful for defending people, killing people, rebuilding civilization after it’s accidentally destroyed, things of that nature”

Truly unironically, fantastic job everyone. Very well-played.

Kieran Healy@kjhealy.co

Our critic thinks this underrated novel, despite opening with a wild claim about a truth supposedly universally acknowledged, is in the cusp of a critical reëvaluation

Once again, I demand an animated series where all the little NYT focus group people are living together in a big house and trying to have conversations while also not having the house constantly at risk of burning to the ground or flooding with raw sewage or overrun by wild tapirs and such.

You think the city is a grim and unforgiving place where no-one gives a damn whether you live or die, but then you see people rushing to save a guy trying to board the 1 who, because of his giant headphones, is unaware that this train is going express to 168th but there’s another right behind it.

You think the city is a grim and unforgiving place where no-one gives a damn whether you live or die, but then you see people rushing to save a guy trying to board the 1 who, because of his giant headphones, is unaware that this train is going express to 168th but there’s another right behind it.

Our critic thinks this underrated novel, despite opening with a wild claim about a truth supposedly universally acknowledged, is in the cusp of a critical reëvaluation

The New Yorker@newyorker.com

Apple TV is home to “Severance” and “Ted Lasso.” But our critic thinks this underrated program is the streaming site’s best offering by a mile. www.newyorker.com/culture/on-t...

I stopped watching it after Season 1 but it looks like things have really gone off the rails in the new Ted Lasso.

Jared Yates Sexton@jysexton.bsky.social

It really knocks you on your ass when you realize the problem is that the fascists are largely made up of a bunch of grown men in arrested development who spend their adult lives playing pretend and making everyone miserable as they LARP through the world.

I keep getting announcements from various universities about how they have some new initiative focused on how to have what they all are calling “difficult conversations”. Initially I was like hey sign me up, I am famous for my awkward conversations, but it turns out that’s not what they have in mind

Old and tired. Everyone just thinks it’s pathetic, old, and tired, as well as dumber than a box of rocks.

Old, tired, stupid. But it’s always been stupid. It’s so much worse for him that it’s also now old and tired.

The Jurisprudence of imaginary visits to Ye Olde Dyner Inne Kansas

Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie@audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app

if you were wondering whether Alito's book is an embarrassing crock of shit, I can now officially answer your question with a resounding yes ballsandstrikes.org/legal-cultur...

Good thread.

Gladwell's "analysis" is infuriating because it's why so many people throw up their hands in disgust with statistics & say "you can make numbers say anything." No! There's a way to do this well, and Gladwell just doesn't want to be fucked to do it.

Gotta hand it to Ricœur, this whole Hermeneutics of Suspicion move turns out to be tremendous for Engagement.

Political Scientists discover the Mooch is not the fundamental unit of governmental time, but can be split into fractional units. The latest in the long progression of refinement, down from the Wilson, first discovered in Britain in 1961.