Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

victor

@notnaughtknot.bsky.social

330 followers 140 following 120 posts

[he/him] 🇧🇷🏳️‍🌈| studying how children learn language and logical terms

Posts Replies Media Videos

Pinned

victor @notnaughtknot.bsky.social · May 29

join the neoluddites at Iffy Books for our next discussion (June 11th) on The Mechanic and the Luddite by @jathansadowski.com

really enjoying this one so far!

cover of “the mechanic and the luddite: a ruthless criticism of technology and capitalism” by Jathan Sadowski

victor

@notnaughtknot.bsky.social

I’ve been thinking a lot about media ecology recently and trying to conceive of “chatbot” as a medium in that sense and what engagement they encourage. any suggestions?

November 21, 2025 at 2:20 AM

victor

@notnaughtknot.bsky.social

I feel like the most gibsonian thing about me these days is I don’t believe in world models

November 18, 2025 at 5:36 PM

victor

@notnaughtknot.bsky.social

glad to see that harvard is taking viewpoint diversity seriously

picture of a poster advertising “crimson community conversations: fall viewpoint diversity series” the talks advertised are Earth, flat or round? sponsored by the physics department, The autism vaccine debate: why are we so hung up on “evidence” sponsored by public health and medical schools, Gaza: Open air prison or “valuable beach front property” by center for middle eastern study and the divinity school (with parenthesis saying not to be confused with free palestine), and Is mourning palestinians too “one sided” by the working group on open inquiry

November 18, 2025 at 2:48 PM

victor

@notnaughtknot.bsky.social

theory is way harder to make things work in than people make it sound

November 17, 2025 at 2:29 PM

victor

@notnaughtknot.bsky.social

November 12, 2025 at 3:53 AM

victor

@notnaughtknot.bsky.social

it’s only a concept if it’s from the cambridge region of massachusetts, otherwise it’s just a foggy idea

November 11, 2025 at 9:14 PM

Reposted by victor

bergelsonlab

@bergelsonlab.bsky.social

nice, will check it out! here's the link to save others the search ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/7...

November 10, 2025 at 8:08 PM

Reposted by victor

bergelsonlab

@bergelsonlab.bsky.social

lots of invigorating discussion this year at #BUCLD2025. Unsurprisingly, LLMs as models & as tools made many appearances w/a wide range of views/claims/caveats ab what they can(not) tell us ab language development
I'm still chewing on a few things that seemed to get short shrift 1/4 🐦🐦

November 10, 2025 at 4:30 PM

victor

@notnaughtknot.bsky.social

this is a big part of my critique of LLMs in word learning that applies more broadly to psycholing!!!

(second half of this paper)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs; e.g., GPT-n) have attracted the attention of psycholinguists
who see a potential for solutions to ancient problems in them. This paper argues that, thus far, LLMs
have not, in fact, suggested any new solutions, but instead just appear to by virtue of their sheer size
and “double” opaqueness (both as models and as products). In the realm of cross-situational word
learning, LLMs run into the same issues that long-discussed "global models" do in accounting for the
rapidity and low-resourced nature of language acquisition. In the realm of meaning, they run into
largely the same issues as the long-established conceptual theories they are often compared to. In nei-
ther case do they appear to represent a true resolution to known issues, and as such broadly encour-
aging the use of LLMs in developmental psycholinguistics is a gamble. This paper then argues that
LLMs come with a range of immediate costs (to privacy, labor, and the climate) and so encouraging
their use is not simply a low-risk gamble. These costs should be kept in mind when deciding whether
to conduct any research with LLMs, whether it is to prove that they have some capacity or lack it. One
way of keeping these costs in mind is to learn about them and talk about them with each other, rather
than deciding that ethical questions are solely under the purview of some other discipline(s).

November 10, 2025 at 6:13 PM

victor

@notnaughtknot.bsky.social

the “innateness is not a dirty word” symposium felt like an empiricist psyop

November 9, 2025 at 2:12 PM

Reposted by victor

Iris van Rooij 💭

@irisvanrooij.bsky.social

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge

This week I was looking for info on what cognitive scientists mean when they speak of ‘domain-general’ cognition. I was curious, because the nuances are relevant for something I am researching at t…

irisvanrooijcogsci.com

August 12, 2025 at 10:12 PM

Reposted by victor

Brett Karlan

@oldjerryfodor.bsky.social

Is this something YOU ever ask yourself?

"Man, Brett Karlan (aka Old Jerry Fodor) claims to love Fodor, but has never published anything defending anything remotely Fodorian. What's up with that?"

This was a puzzle that long perplexed the scholars... until now!

philpapers.org/rec/KARAET-4

Brett Karlan, AI empiricism: the only game in town? - PhilPapers

I offer an epistemic argument against the dominance of empiricism and empiricist-inspired methods in contemporary machine learning (ML) research. I first establish, as many ML researchers and philosop...

philpapers.org

November 4, 2025 at 11:35 PM

victor

@notnaughtknot.bsky.social

crazy that the next AI winter might trigger a recession

November 5, 2025 at 11:15 PM

Reposted by victor

MindCORE at the University of Pennsylvania

@pennmindcore.bsky.social

Also this Friday in 111 NBS

ILST: 1:30 PM w/cookies

Does Not Compute? The Development of Real-time Negation Processing
Victor Gomes, PhD, Psych, Harvard

victorgom.es

@notnaughtknot.bsky.social
@pennlinguistics.bsky.social
@sas.upenn.edu

October 22, 2025 at 12:15 AM

Reposted by victor

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ

@olivia.science

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM

victor

@notnaughtknot.bsky.social

join the neoluddites at Iffy Books for our next discussion (June 11th) on The Mechanic and the Luddite by @jathansadowski.com

really enjoying this one so far!

May 29, 2025 at 3:33 PM

Reposted by victor

Hagen Blix

@hagenblix.bsky.social

If you're in Philly this weekend, come by and join me and @notnaughtknot.bsky.social (from the amazing neo-luddite reading group) in a discussion of AI, political power, class, and capitalism! Saturday, April 5, 5pm at Iffy Books!

⚙️ Book Launch for ‘Why we fear AI’ by Hagen Blix & Ingeborg Glimmer – Iffy Books | 404 S. 20th St., PHL

iffybooks.net

April 2, 2025 at 8:15 PM

victor

@notnaughtknot.bsky.social

I hate that everyone’s response to kids not being interested in school is to make it more like what distracts them

March 20, 2025 at 2:09 PM

Reposted by victor

Hagen Blix

@hagenblix.bsky.social

I wrote a book about AI, AI Fears, and Capitalism with my friend Ingeborg!
"Why We Fear AI" just went to the printers and comes out in March! You can pre-order it directly at the publisher @commonnotions.bsky.social or wherever you get your books
Quick🧵

Why We Fear AI — Common Notions Press

www.commonnotions.org

January 14, 2025 at 2:47 PM

Reposted by victor

Carl T. Bergstrom

@carlbergstrom.com

Let's talk about this Nature piece in more detail.

I've rarely read something so anti-scientific anywhere short of the National Review.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Three AI-powered steps to faster, smarter peer review

Tired of spending countless hours on peer reviews? An AI-assisted workflow could help.

www.nature.com

March 6, 2025 at 5:34 AM

Reposted by victor

Dr. Damien P. Williams! Look over here! … It's All For You!

@wolvendamien.bsky.social

I'm gonna lose it. Like genuinely what in the actual fucking fuck. What the FUCK. Elsevier? I wasn't surprised. Wiley and T&F? That was pretty shocking.

Fucking NATURE is advocating for LLM "AI" in their peer review pipeline? Oh this one fucking rattles me.

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · Mar 5

Nothing to see here, just Nature advocating LLM peer review.

“Feed your dictated notes into an offline large language model (LLM) to clarify and organize your feedback. A simple prompt such as “Write a critical reviewer letter based on the following notes. Maintain a professional tone throughout”