emily l @laskin

wordcel at large: all of my opinions belong to you. i'm also the english-language editor of @thenewtabio https://t.co/KZOTqGbCyq emilylaskin.com Joined August 2008

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emily l @laskin

16 hours ago

One time I found my diss chair’s handwriting in a library book

Jonathan Fine @jonathanbfine

4 days ago

sometimes you can tell from a person’s underlining in a used book that they aren’t going to make it

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emily l @laskin

21 hours ago

@mykola I claim my last name on every new platform, much to the chagrin of zoomers who are still not as online as me. First name is a lost cause lol

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liontender @lion_tender

3 days ago

Operating this shower was a delight. Like playing Myst for the very first time and seeing a brand new puzzle.

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emily l @laskin

2 days ago

@holomorpher I no longer have words fights with people who can’t use words. Math duel?

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Next time an “empiricist” game theory econ bro tells me there’s a flaw in my logic in some hot take tweet, I’m going to challenge him to a math duel. If this sounds fun or you think you can defeat me, step right up.

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emily l @laskin

2 days ago

I’m still meh on the words-professions use-cases for LLMs, but I play around. I fed Claude a blog post and it told me the middle section was “a little indulgent,” which it was. It does kind of blow my mind that linear algebra can identify iffy prose stylings.

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neural oscillator of uncertain significance @mycoliza

3 days ago

are these the seams?

🎭 @deepfates

3 days ago

asked Gemini how to to cut my own hair and it gave me these very helpful diagrams

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emily l @laskin

2 days ago

@007Cat24 Ugh :(

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emily l @laskin

3 days ago

Yes one of my services is attracting to my mentions men who believe women don’t possess reason, for my friends to do with what they will.

isaacs @izs

3 days ago

One of these days, some internet chud I’m arguing with in @laskin’s mentions will whip out the stereotypical accusatory white knight zinger, and I’ll be able to make the most hilarious response possible.

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emily l @laskin

3 days ago

Actually, group think and in-group signaling in academia (yes, a real problem to which I do not think hiring conservatives to antagonize their colleagues is the solution) is a symptom of how fully effed academic hiring is.

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emily l @laskin

3 days ago

@normal_testes I think that academic hiring committees make selections — from huge pools with many, many qualified applicants — based on how strong a scholar’s ideas are, and how well they will fit in the department. Con views are unpopular, academic discrimination against them is good.

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emily l @laskin

5 days ago

College humanities faculties are stacked against conservatives because U.S. conservatives in the 2020s do not believe in preserving intellectual traditions and advancing human knowledge. Yes even -- nay especially -- those who love Western Civilization.

Alice @AliceFromQueens

5 days ago

If you won't acknowledge that college faculties have been stacked against conservatives, you're dishonest, ignorant, or insane. You don't have to *be* a conservative--I'm certainly not one--to acknowledge this reality.

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emily l @laskin

3 days ago

@wergth82796 @izs cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-co…

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emily l @laskin

3 days ago

@wergth82796 @izs I’m making fun of via reference to how prejudice and discrimination actually work. Many people have thought about all of this, including the dangers of group think in academia, the cases for and against viewpoint diversity, and the limitations of empiricism as truth claim. 👇

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emily l @laskin

5 days ago

There are so few academic jobs in the humanities that "who gets hired" is essentially random. I'm no statistician, but even those of us with training in the mere language arts should know better than to read the tea leaves about the meaning of any given appointment.

Moshik Temkin @moshik_temkin

6 days ago

Very strange to be having a fierce debate about who gets hired in the humanities when as far as I can tell no one is being hired in the humanities and the humanities are being shut down permanently

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emily l @laskin

3 days ago

@wergth82796 @izs lol are you sure that you didn’t just see a bad argument because you first saw a woman with (you assumed) no training in any “empirical” discipline? If only there were fields of study that trained people to think about issues like this.

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emily l @laskin

3 days ago

@izs @wergth82796 Whether this is bad is a totally different question. I think it’s not bad but I grant that it’s a valid debate. Crying about discrimination because one job goes to any given candidate is not valid, it doesn’t prove anything, and it’s a weak argument.

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emily l @laskin

3 days ago

@izs @wergth82796 It’s actually trivial to determine that academia discriminates against conservatives, because academic hiring committees by design select for colleagues who have ideas that they like and that align with their department members, and conservative ideas are unpopular in higher ed.

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emily l @laskin

3 days ago

What if the university of the future is just working at Anthropic

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emily l @laskin

4 days ago

@007Cat24 I wouldn’t say I’m a Pynchonhead but I loved Vineland, it’s a little more of a standard novel than some of the others

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emily l @laskin

4 days ago

This, by the way, is also why (good) academics suck at being doctrinaire leftists. I'm kind of edgelord, I believe in sometimes taking a stubborn stand on various matters of ethics and politics, but there is *always* a pesky amount of nuance, which it is a scholar's job to see.

isaacs @izs

4 days ago

Like, "intellectual honesty" is *the one whole job* of an academic. If you're avowedly against that, siding with the party of "Power At All Costs", yeah, you're going to have some big cultural problems. And that's what "conservative" means nowadays in USA politics.