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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 19h

my co-author and i have an article coming out in a cog sci journal in just a few weeks obliterating (if i do say so myself) this avenue of research. 😈

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 19h

The president of MIT has declined to sign "the compact". Full letter, as shared with the MIT community:

Dear Madam Secretary,

I write in response to your letter of October 1, inviting MIT to review a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” I acknowledge the vital importance of these matters.

I appreciated the chance to meet with you earlier this year to discuss the priorities we share for American higher education.

As we discussed, the Institute’s mission of service to the nation directs us to advance knowledge, educate students and bring knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges. We do that in line with a clear set of values, with excellence above all. Some practical examples:

• MIT prides itself on rewarding merit. Students, faculty and staff succeed here based on the strength of their talent, ideas and hard work. For instance, the Institute was the first to reinstate the SAT/ACT requirement after the pandemic. And MIT has never had legacy preferences in admissions.
• MIT opens its doors to the most talented students regardless of their family’s finances. Admissions are need-blind. Incoming undergraduates whose families earn less than $200,000 a year pay no tuition. Nearly 88% of our last graduating class left MIT with no debt for their education. We make a wealth of free courses and low-cost certificates available to any American with an internet connection. Of the undergraduate degrees we award, 94% are in STEM fields. And in service to the nation, we cap enrollment of international undergraduates at roughly 10%.

• We value free expression, as clearly described in the MIT Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom. We must hear facts and opinions we don’t like – and engage respectfully with those with whom we disagree.

These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent. We freely choose these values because they’re right, and we live by them because they support our mission – work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law.

The document also includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution. And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.

In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.

As you know, MIT’s record of service to the nation is long and enduring. Eight decades ago, MIT leaders helped invent a scientific partnership between America’s research universities and the U.S. government that has delivered extraordinary benefits for the American people. We continue to believe in the power of this partnership to serve the nation.

Sincerely,

Sally Kornbluth

cc
Ms. May Mailman
Mr. Vincent Haley

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Reposted by Lisa Messeri

Siva @sivav.bsky.social · 3d

I can’t believe my life is being affected by the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment

newrepublic.com/article/2013...

Why This Essay Could Cause the University of Virginia to Shut Down

How Linda McMahon’s latest “compact” would do deep and permanent harm to American higher education

newrepublic.com

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Reposted by Lisa Messeri

Laura Lopez @ohdearz.bsky.social · 3d

Valuable info about the Physics Nobel Prize today from Prof. Joseph Barranco at SFSU on Martinis and Devoret being a grad student and postdoc in Clarke's lab at UC Berkeley & Clark and Devoret being immigrants. "California *public* education made this happen. Immigration made this happen." ⚛️

Joseph Barranco posted on social media: Go Bears! Nobel Prize in Physics goes to 3 physicists studying mesoscopic quantum phenomena... Work was done in the 1980s in UC Berkeley Professor John Clarke's lab with his graduate student John Martinis and postdoctoral fellow Michel Devoret... all 3 share the Nobel Prize. Must also point out that both Clarke and Devoret are immigrants from the UK and France, respectively. All 3 are pioneers in the race to build the most powerful quantum supercomputers. California *public* education made this happen. Immigration made this happen.

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 3d

Michel was my neighbor for many years. Who knew when he was sitting on the condo board that he would soon be a Nobel Laureate. It was an honor to accidentally receive his mail on occasion.

NPR @npr.org · 3d

The Nobel committee said that the laureates' work provides opportunities to develop "the next generation of quantum technology, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers, and quantum sensors."

The Nobel Prize for physics is awarded for discoveries in quantum mechanical tunneling

The Nobel committee said that the laureates' work provides opportunities to develop "the next generation of quantum technology, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers, and quantum sensors."

n.pr

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 4d

fieldnote feb 2010. Baby me putting some things together...

"They were employees from Tesla Motors, an electric car company owned by Elon Musk. Musk is also the intrepid owner of spaceX AND a donor to the mars society. A NYTimes article also just tooted him as the future of human space flight."

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 7d

always vague and also always so unappealing!

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 7d

the definition of 'the metaverse' that Zuck offered in Connect 2025 is awesome revisionist history: "Our goal is to build great looking glasses that deliver personal super intelligence and a feeling of presence using realistic holograms. And these ideas combined create what we call the metaverse."

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 7d

i'm much madder at Big Tech than i was when i first submitted this article. I offer my tracked changes revision as evidence of entering the no holds bar stage of my career.

And yet, both of these corporate futures have far more in common than in distinction. Especially as spatial computing has, like the metaverse, failed to garner the enthusiasm corporate overloads had anticipated, it is important to understand these terms in the context of the larger computing visions they seek to proffer. This vision wants users to be permanently and inescapably immersed in a world of digital overlays, such that the corporate product, in whatever technical form (headset, glasses), is the mediating screen through which we always and only experience the physical world. This is a vision we ought to refuse, and this article offers an admittedly modest strategy for refusal. I do so by offering a reading of the technological fictions that convey the spatialities and socialities of spatial computing

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Reposted by Lisa Messeri

Gregg Gonsalves @gregggonsalves.bsky.social · 9d

This is extortion. Faculty, students, staff, alumni across the country need to get to their Presidents & Trustees today. Just say no. This blackmail only works if most everyone folds. Capitulation now means the end of American higher education for a generation. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...

Trump Administration Asks Colleges to Sign ‘Compact’ to Get Funding Preference

www.nytimes.com

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 8d

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...

Trump Administration Asks Colleges to Sign ‘Compact’ to Get Funding Preference

www.nytimes.com

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 8d

Horrifying.

Sarah Milov @allofmilov.bsky.social · 9d

So the compact is also a poison pill for the humanities and social sciences.

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 15d

About to give the first of a few Fall book talks. If you’re in Princeton and free in an hour or so, come through!

anthropology.princeton.edu/events/land-...

In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles

Lisa Messeri's anthropological research focuses on the norms, aspirations, and consequences of work done by expert communities as they forge new fields of knowledge and invention. Messeri's first book...

anthropology.princeton.edu

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Reposted by Lisa Messeri

M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 19d

Glad Science collected this data (though the results are entirely unsurprising). GenAI cannot accurately summarize scientific papers, sacrificing accuracy for simplicity.

And shame on publishers who are pushing genAI summaries on readers. Great way to accelerate an epistemic apocalypse.

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 21d

"the AI apocalypse ...is simply our own world... Instead of superintelligent AI, we have super-wealthy tech oligarchs; like the hypothetical AI, the oligarchs want to colonize the universe; like the hypothetical AI, the oligarchs don't seem to care abt the desires and well-being of the rest of us."

Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 21d

Fantastic review by @adambecker.bsky.social of what looks to be a truly awful book.

www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

What AI’s Doomers and Utopians Have in Common

Those who predict that superintelligence will destroy humanity serve the same interests as those who believe that it will solve all of our problems.

www.theatlantic.com

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 22d

This has a healthy dose of schadenfreude

And/but this product makes me nervous. Zuck's quest is to "connect." For him this means having the digital always present. He has never understood the tradeoff by which being connected digitally disconnects us from those with whom we are physically present.

Shacknews @shacknews.com · 23d

LiveAI demo fails on the first prompt at Meta Connect 2025. #Meta #AI #LiveAI

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 25d

Turns out, Mapquest still labels the body of water to the west of Florida The Gulf of Mexico. Welcome to the resistance, Mapquest.

screen shot of a map, showing that the "gulf of Mexico" has not been relabled.

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · Sep 9

oh oh! "this one" (i thought the study, not the original claim) got misunderstood by me :)

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · Sep 9

I know. When I first read it I hemmed and hawed about sharing it. But bc I see people increasingly saying how good GPT is at summarizing, this is right now the only empirical study I have to retort with. Very happy to update reference if you have a better one!

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · Sep 9

and also, it's not:
www.cjr.org/analysis/i-t...

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · Sep 9

at any moment, without disclosing doing so, OpenAI can change the performance of ChatGPT to express certain views and suppress others. Even without the abundant evidence that this is not a good tool for purportedly fact-based enterprises, it is even worse at the intersection of fact and policy.

Dave Levitan @davelevitan.bsky.social · Sep 9

NEW: HHS employees received an email today that the department is "making ChatGPT available to everyone in the department effective immediately."

Email says it can "promote rigorous science, radical transparency, and robust good health. As Secretary Kennedy said, 'The AI revolution has arrived.'"

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · Sep 9

🙏

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Reposted by Lisa Messeri

Paul Rietschka @prietschka.bsky.social · Sep 9

Studying the AR/VR bubble that preceded the current one is extremely instructive as to the dynamics of what we’re all wading in.

Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · Sep 9

yup! shameless book and article plug if you want to go deep on the previous hype cycle and get some different angles for critiquing AI
Book, "In the Land of the Unreal": www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-land-...
Article, "Putting Big Tech in its Place": anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · Sep 9

I have a student, Michelle Venetucci, who goes even harder on this point. She doesn't have her argument yet published, but very much offers a warning for scholars not to over index on what these people 'say.' It's just about profit. So easy!

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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · Sep 9

yup! shameless book and article plug if you want to go deep on the previous hype cycle and get some different angles for critiquing AI
Book, "In the Land of the Unreal": www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-land-...
Article, "Putting Big Tech in its Place": anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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