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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 1d

Everyone wants to streamline bureaucracy, but maybe we'd get better results by making it *harder* for university admins to chase fads. Imagine the money we'd save with a mandatory cooling-off period before launching a "Center for Blockchain Studies" or dumping millions into the latest edtech toy.

Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 2d

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

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Reposted by Dan Seel

ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 3d

"when people say that it is the job of college professors to keep students engaged but that we can also not ban devices, I want to sigh performatively—how, exactly, am I supposed to keep them hooked when Hollywood can’t keep them hooked?" musgrave.substack.com/p/a-post-lit...

A Post-Literate Society is a Too-Literal Society

Directness is a virtue and subtlety is lost

musgrave.substack.com

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Reposted by Dan Seel

Anne Trubek @atrubek.bsky.social · 4d

Probably best to chase it indefinitely

2covet @2covet.bsky.social · 4d

www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/rare-whit...

Locals stunned by world-famous white whale sighting off NZ coast

Locals near Kaikōura captured rare footage of a white humpback whale.

www.nzherald.co.nz

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Reposted by Dan Seel

Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 4d

This may just be the best CS paper I’ve read this year. Just read the abstract and first para of the intro! The rest of the intro is really wild too, but very very good:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

A screenshot of an academic paper. It reads:

Abstract
A "
'quine" is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a "gauguine": a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings.
This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how-and why-we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one.
CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Philo-sophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelli-gence; Theory of mind.
Keywords: reflection, probabilistic programming
ACM Reference Format:
Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B.
Tenenbaum. 2025. Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25), October 12-18, 2025, Singapore, Singa-pore. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3759429.3762631

1 A Way of Knowing

From time to time, we all have crises of identity-moments of radical and overwhelming uncertainty about our selves.
I' don't know whether the doubts that seize us can really be externalized in language, but if I were to try, I would express them as questions, questions like: Who am I? What am I?
What kind of person? What kind of mind?

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Reposted by Dan Seel

British Journal of Political Science @bjpols.bsky.social · 6d

NEW -

Inflation and Incumbent Support: Experimental Evidence from the 2024 US Presidential Election - https://cup.org/3JaiZYj

"priming Americans to think about inflation reduced support for the incumbent party"

- Selim Erdem Aytaç, @danielmcdowell.bsky.social & David A. Steinberg

#OpenAccess

BJPolS abstract discussing the influence of high inflation on recent elections, voting behavior, and potential impacts on different political parties in the United States.

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Reposted by Dan Seel

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 5d

Does a new generation of social scientists have to publish more to achieve less? (from 2019)
blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci... Intuition says "yes", and so says data for sociology.

Figure from blog post: Shows how much 342 new assistant professors had published at the time they began their first jobs. For Assistant Professors and newly promoted Associate Professors, there is an upward trend from early 1990s to late 2010s. The trend is stronger for Associate Professors.

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Reposted by Dan Seel

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 5d

Again, it is worth keeping in mind when comparing the rate of discoveries that public funding for medicine and the sciences is orders of magnitude larger than for the humanities. We work slow in part because we work on a shoestring.

A pie-chart of federal research funding, using 2023 figures. The funding slices for the NIH (83%) and NSF (17%) are so large that the slices for the NEH and NEA round to 0%.

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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 8d

I wish you had pushed more here, because that's not what either footage or reporting from the ground shows, quite the opposite...

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Reposted by Dan Seel

ceej @ceej.online · 9d

damn. hoping it at least signifies something

William Shakespeare @shakespeare.lol · 9d

It is a tale
Told by an idiot

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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 9d

ouch, do you have a link?

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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 15d

one of the minor frustrations of the 2020s internet is how many sites now don't respect boolean commands in search, like they'd rather give you a bunch of unrelated content to sift through than turn up only a handful of results

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Reposted by Dan Seel

Karthik Sankaran @rajakorman.bsky.social · 19d

I have a piece out today comparing the current ARG bailout to MX 1994 (quite different); ECB behavior in 2010s (closer as it targets voters); current BZ tariffs (ding-ding-ding--it's a market intervention that's also an intervention in domestic politics).
www.barrons.com/articles/arg...

Argentina Gets a Bailout, Brazil Gets the Stick. What Unites Them.

The Trump administration’s judgements are rooted in political style, Karthik Sankaran writes in a guest commentary.

www.barrons.com

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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 19d

Hey, now he can be M: Son of the (21st) century

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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 19d

if I had a nickel for every time a "factory [that] went overseas" actually went to the South, I'd probably be able to self-fund my dissertation.

Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 22d

To pick a random transportation project, the $60bn in metaverse investment would've covered a decent chunk of the funding gap for road and bridge maintenance
www.pew.org/en/research-...

24 states reported a combined $86.3 billion funding gap over 10 years. These states already expect to collectively spend $194 billion on TAMP roads and bridges over the next decade and would need to increase spending by 44% to reach the $280 billion required to close the shortfall. Only nine states projected adequate funding, and 17 did not report sufficient information to evaluate whether their spending would be sufficient. Because TAMP reporting requirements cover only NHS roads and bridges—though some states voluntarily report on all state roads—the total funding gap excludes the bulk of the shortfall for non-NHS roadways.

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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 22d

Since the omerta on criticizing LLM infra investment appears to be breaking can we go back and maybe, acknowledge that there were some indicators that these guys have long been pretty cavalier about throwing money into the void? Money that could have been better spent on actual infrastructure?

Meta's Reality Labs division continues to bleed billions of dollars — crossing $60 billion in losses since 2020.

"This is also going to be a pivotal year for the metaverse," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confidently told investors on Wednesday.

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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 23d

I feel like the entire ~15min opening doom and gloom sequence should be so much more iconic than it is, what a stylistic masterpiece

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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 23d

Just thinking out loud here but if (tacit) coordination in a specific sector is feasible, firms probably won't quickly revert to pre-tariff pricing, particularly if they previously ate the cost and squeezed margins to avoid passing through the full tariff burden to consumers.

Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 23d

I'm guessing, after a hypothetical tariff rollback that positional goods, goods with complex supply chains either hit by tariffs or reconfigured in response to tariffs, and goods with higher inventories already in the US will likely take longer to adjust than, eg, textiles or foodstuffs

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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 23d

so assuming 1. the floodgates break on tariff passthroughs 2. a future administration repeals most or all of them, has there been any modelling on which prices are likely to be stickier than others? my intuition is that some industries will probably try to hold the line on higher prices for a bit

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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24d

If I'm being charitable then yes, we could say that the politics of the South and the politics of the rest of the US are more similar now, but not in the way the author thought it would happen. Southernization is still underrated as a driver of 21st century political change.

Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24d

the book is "Perspectives on the American South" (1985) and it has some interesting and prescient observations but uh, predicting the rise of a firmly class based Democratic party and a post-racial US is not one of them.

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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24d

Came upon some predictions from a southern studies edited volume from 1985 and man, what a swing and a miss there

Indeed, as racism declines, a durable
coalition of white and black voters based upon common economic inter-
ests is already developing, and it holds more promise for success than did
similar political cooperation between the two races during the Recon-
struction or Populist eras.

Such alliances and shifts will aid in the conversion of the South into
a bona fide two-party region. Thus, southern politics, long an aberration
on the national scene, will be characterized as more rational, as more in
keeping with the national norm. To be sure, political parties do not al-
ways develop logically.

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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 25d

Make him the night mayor and let him wander around introducing himself to tourists. I dunno if he's captured the spirit of NYC but he's captured something...

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Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 25d

Any sense on why there hasn't been a big archive digitization push? It's hard to think of a bigger trove of text data left aside from the millions of boxes sitting at archives and historical societies, if one can stomach the cost/time/annoyance of assembling the researchers to do the scanning

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