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May-Li Khoe✨

@mayli.bsky.social

910 followers 110 following 110 posts

used to be @mayli in the old place. hello! 👋 maylikhoe.com tin house winter workshop 2025 Interdisciplinary designer writer artist musician dancer inventor. vp of design and former dj. mfa candidate.

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 22h

who even is he again? the most memorable thing about him is his name, and your fantastic metaphor

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 1d

Thank you this was one of the best cities I’ve lived in for walkability and it was an immeasurable quality of life boost. Very cool to know the story behind it

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 1d

oh they always have! www.jstor.org/stable/45129...

The Historical Roots of CIA-Hollywood Propaganda on JSTOR

Pearse Redmond, The Historical Roots of CIA-Hollywood Propaganda, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 76, No. 2, Reeled into Complacency: How the CIA & the Pentagon Use Hollywood to ...

www.jstor.org

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 1d

i love this little dig “And MIT has never had legacy preferences in admissions.” 👀👀👀 unwritten “unlike the rest of yall”

• 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.

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 2d

Yes! It’s so funny(?) explaining to people outside of academia that nobody _wants_ to be department chair and if they do everyone around them is like 👀🌚👀 must be something wrong

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 7d

what’s measured is managed

be immeasurable ✨

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 7d

*online or agreed upon by established scholarship or publications, depending on model review process

(so, Georg Cantor would have had a hard time too, Ramanujan… behind the machines there still needs to be research)

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 8d

Point being if majority of information online is generally wrong about something, then relying on AI on that topic keeps us wrong. So we need funded scholarship to move us beyond it

Only saying this because I thought this was widespread understood and obvious but am realizing it’s not ?

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 10d

…we can't replace the Galileos who actually look through the telescope and say "wait, that's not what we're seeing”

🔭👀

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 10d

I don’t know who needs to hear this but if AI had existed during Galileo’s lifetime it would have told you the earth does not spin around the sun

So, per AI:

“human judgment, skepticism, and continued empirical investigation remain essential. AI can help organize and synthesize existing knowledge…

MK
How would Al have dealt with the world before Galileo told us the earth spins around the sun?
This is a fascinating thought experiment! It reveals something important about how Al systems work and their relationship to "truth."
What AI would have done:
An AI trained on pre-Copernican texts would have confidently told you that the Earth is the center of the universe, with celestial spheres carrying the planets and stars around it. It would have cited Ptolemy, Aristotle, and Church doctrine. It would have explained epicycles and deferents to account for retrograde planetary motion. And it would have been very convincing because that was the scholarly consensus.
The uncomfortable truth:
AI systems don't have independent access to reality. We reflect the knowledge, beliefs, and biases present in our training data. A medieval AI would have been "certain" about geocentrism the same way a modern Al is "certain" about heliocentrism-not because we independently verified it, but because that's what the authoritative sources said.
What this means now:
This should be genuinely humbling. Right now, I'm telling you things with confidence that reflect 2025 scientific consensus. Some of those things are probably wrong, just as learned scholars were wrong about geocentrism for over a millennium. I can't tell you which ones— if I could, they wouldn't be in my training data as facts.
I'm essentially a very sophisticated mirror of human knowledge at a particular moment in time, with all its blind spots and errors intact.
The silver lining:
This is why human judgment, skepticism, and continued empirical investigation remain essential. Al can help organize and synthesize existing knowledge, but we can't replace the Galileos who actually look through the telescope and say "wait, that's not what we're seeing."

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 13d

oof. you speak truth

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 20d

and that’s why they went extinct ?

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 20d

it me, I am secretly an octopus

Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 20d

“In humans, curiosity usually begins as a mental stirring, but in octopuses,… it’s a function of bodily design. In a sense, curiosity + intention are dispersed throughout an octopus’s tissues—right out to the tips of its tentacles. Inquisitiveness… ‘is built into the octopuses’ anatomy.’”

‘Such Flexible Intensity of Life’ | Verlyn Klinkenborg

Their striking intelligence makes octopuses tempting subjects for wishful anthropomorphism and uncanny reminders of nature’s mysteries.

www.nybooks.com

Reposted by May-Li Khoe✨

Tracy Chou @triketora.com · 22d

nothing says "we care about your privacy" more than sharing your data with 222 partners

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 29d

i’ve added this to my form fail collection www.are.na/may-li-khoe/...

form fail and other digital detritus | Are.na

forms failing and flailing, negligent navigation, etc. feel free to submit suggestions for the collection!

www.are.na

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Reposted by May-Li Khoe✨

aaron boothby @ellipticalnight.bsky.social · Sep 12

things that impress me include storing millions of years of adaptation and knowledge for how to survive drought, fire, climate changes, storms, insects and whatever else in tiny seeds capable of growing into trees that live thousands of years