Preben retweeted
Reading is one of the best things you can do and costs like $20 for six hours, tops. In many cases it's free. The people who make it possible live in penury and the whole modern economy is organized against it.
Preben retweeted
Artists: but I don't want to lose my job. I love it.
Mathematicians: but I don't want to lose my job. I love it.
Economists: LONG HAVE I AWAITED THIS HOUR! DESTROY ME, EFFICIENCY, AND LET UTILIZATION-ADJUSTED TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY RISE ON THE WIND OF MY ASHES!
Preben retweeted
AI cracking unsolvable math problems while being kinda mid at writing is a much-needed W for humanities majors after a rough 21st century.
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Schools and universities should be anachronisms. They should teach you ’outdated’ skills and shield you from calculators, computers, and AI. They should teach dead languages and doing things the hard way. They should do what the ‘market’ won’t do (preserve civilization).
Preben retweeted
Google Books is becoming a desert. Its regress is real: the knowledge we were assured was both safely stored and freely available, which led libraries and schools to get rid of their books, has retreated into the shadows. The internet of 2026 knows less than the internet of 2010.
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Academics should not settle their scores in The Economist's pages. They should do it in the proper fashion, in the letters pages of the NYRB.
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This is totally tasteless. Jason Arday is dead for less than two days, and Steven Pinker is trying to get some book sales from it.
The Jason Arday scandal/fiasco/tragedy is a prime example of "pluralistic ignorance." No sapient being could believe his ziggurat of whoppers, but each may have privately thought that everyone else believed them. This happens when the expression of an idea is stigmatized or punished, as obviously happened here: anyone expressing common-sense incredulity was tarred as a racist, ableist, and abettor of suicide (not to mention threatened by a barracuda law firm and questioned by the police). For more on pluralistic ignorance and other extraordinary popular delusions, see When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life (preorder paperback here; out in a few weeks). amazon.com/When-Everyone-Kno… nytimes.com/2026/08/15/world…
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Academics were always going to surrender to AI, given our desperate need to hear, “wow, what a smart question!”
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The degree to which certain academics—even contingent ones who know firsthand that the university doesn’t love them back—continue to overidentify with the current university project and feel compelled to defend it at all costs and against even very mild critique is embarrassing.
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The most well-informed Husserl scholar is the best short story anyone has written in years
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If novelists have something to tell us, they should simply say it. Stop hiding behind your so-called "characters"
Yes, but the US system is unique among rich countries in that some denials of care are not denials of any existing claim, because some within that system never hold any claim-right to reasonably comprehensive healthcare.
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Everyone knows the main jobs for people with PhDs in philosophy are in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
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We’ve approved an internal grant for Economics to do an ethnographic study of the dismantling of Sociology & Anthropology in the state system.
