If we let the paid employees of a small number of ethics-free AI companies dictate the directions in which our scholarship should develop and the ways in which researchers must go about their work now, we are indeed fucking ourselves over.

The best way to counter this tactic is to familiarize yourself with the database of dogwhistles. The ADL is deeply problematic in so, so many ways, but they maintain the best and most solid database of symbolism: www.adl.org/resources/ha...

I suppose if the question here is 'why don't these fields produce new discoveries at the same rate as the sciences' the answer is a pretty obvious, 'because they're not funded like the sciences.'

We could do a lot of archaeology with, say, a few billion dollars a year!

Thank you Naomi! Glad it is interesting 😊

Thank you - it's a relief to hear positive responses after my hesitation to share!

So glad to hear it resonates!

Thank you, that's so nice to hear!

I've been a bit quiet on here - mainly using bluesky for non-science things atm and mainly just lurking - but it's nice to dip in to share some thoughts sometimes :)

I've had these thoughts rattling around for a while now and I finally got them onto the page thanks to the node's writing challenge (always handy to have deadline)

@the-node.bsky.social

And in particular I was struck by how it is the ability to 'do' a field - or at least *feel* like you are 'doing' a field - *in plain language* which invites this kind of response.

What LLMs have done to physics and many other STEM fields is brought the fake-doing-of-them into plain language. 3/

But because there's no giant 'history formula,' no tables of strange symbols (well, amusingly, there *are* but you don't work with them until you are much deeper in the field), folks assume that history is easy, does not require special skills and so contemptible. 12/

It benefits those in control of society to have everyone think that it's impossible - physically, spirituality, biologically - to subvert the current order. Tudor social mores told people a commoner couldn't wear velvet, and patriarchy tells us that male and female are exclusive categories of being.