Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 1m

I imagine they will suddenly remember LA

Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 5m

Always for the briefest of moments scan the phrase as the “cannon wars”

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 19m

100%. I don’t we’ve arrived here for lack of people trying to find new paradigms to act as a center of gravity. Falcons and falconers etc

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 24m

This is brilliantly put

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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 35m

To go back to an earlier point in this excellent thread, the agonistic nature of much humanistic scholarship—I’m right, you’re wrong, or (more generously) here is a blind spot that only I can see—also mitigates greatly against field consensus, a sense of forward motion, etc. +

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 27m

Still scratching my head at calculus being a stand in for early modern thought when it operated as a philosophical rebuttal to the prevailing paradigms, and those insights don’t get integrated into a philosophical system until arguably Kant

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 40m

That sounds terrifying

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 1h

I don’t have a panoramic enough vision to render judgment, but I would say that people beyond traditional academia really are producing extraordinary work, and the fact that I don’t readily even know what arguments are coming from today’s leading institutions suggests at best a communications issue

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 1h

Ya, I agree. I’m profoundly ambivalent bc this was very much the academic moment I grew up in and obviously I value the conversations like this one we’re having that emerge from the network landscape.

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 1h

Step 1: cat profile pic

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thinkingbayonet.bsky.social @thinkingbayonet.bsky.social · 3h

I like The Lord of the Rings a lot but we need more bite sized swords and sorcery fantasy TV/movies. Willow is the platonic ideal of lightweight high fantasy, and Dungeons and Dragons (2023) is its spiritual successor. But overall the field seems very thin 🫤

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Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 3h

I think there's a lot of truth in this. But I think there's a parallel (good) conservatism in uni press monographs and, especially, peer-reviewed journals, where work must be embedded among interlocutors and building incrementally. That work's still being done every day, despite it all

Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 5h

Feels like in the 2000-2010s there was this sea change in academia where young scholars were supposed to brand themselves in this or that way to be competitive on the market, but 3 market collapses later it feels like the pivot simply led to atomized individualistic approaches to illegible fields

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 6h

The over-reliance on standardization as the mechanism for writing instruction really was a pretty unbeatable context to produce de-professionalized teachers okay with using AI to grade

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 5h

flipped classrooms & the unquestioned shift toward “student-led learning” were also part of the deprofessionalization->adjunctification->mechanization program whose ultimate goal was a fully administrative university

John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 6h

The over-reliance on standardization as the mechanism for writing instruction really was a pretty unbeatable context to produce de-professionalized teachers okay with using AI to grade

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 3h

Is that not a useful phrase anymore?

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 4h

a key thing about vought — and all of these guys — is that they have a totally top down and hierarchical vision of the world. they believe that the cultural changes they hate can be turned off by destroying the federal government because they can’t imagine that they emerged bottom-up in society

Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 4h

What he’s railing against is a profound shift in culture, status… He’s obsessed with the idea that America is controlled by a leftist “ruling elite” - but “elite” isn’t defined socio-economically or by political power, it means something like: Getting to define “real America” and who gets to belong.

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 5h

Feels like in the 2000-2010s there was this sea change in academia where young scholars were supposed to brand themselves in this or that way to be competitive on the market, but 3 market collapses later it feels like the pivot simply led to atomized individualistic approaches to illegible fields

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 3h

I think little changing would be a near utopian outcome at this point 😅 Feels more like some (perhaps sizable) portion of the education sector makes the leap and dismembers itself in the hopes that machines can functionally reproduce instruction

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 3h

I wonder if a lot of this drift is bc the majority of instructors are contingent now which forces the labor force into a never ending series of on ramping and off ramping rather than community building

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 3h

I think that’s true although I feel like institutions didn’t get on board with encouraging the approach for another ten years or so, but I’m sure that was very case by case in a number of ways

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Eleanor Courtemanche @ecourtem.bsky.social · 3h

This is a crucial problem in graduate training (such as it is etc. etc.)

We prepare students to position themselves within a discourse, & also to do institutional service work: but not “how to defend the humanities”

Does that really fall in the category of “things you can only do once hired”?

Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 4h

I do think this is at the heart of the issue. Our fields prepare us to participate in stable institutional structures but not how to collectively protect those structures from bad faith attacks and neoliberal dismantling.

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 3h

Impossible to know honestly. By cohesion I just mean everyone is talking about and reacting to the same thing.

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Quotes from the Forum @stoicquotes.bsky.social · 2d

#philosophy #wisdom #virtue #stoic

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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 4h

Fascinating experiment

Tim Kellogg @timkellogg.me · 13d

Does AI get bored?

I gave them nothing to do, just to see what happens

one thing — they devolve into a repetitive “collapse” state, I guess you could call it boredom

but some break out into math & poetry on their own, I didn’t expect which ones that would be

timkellogg.me/blog/2025/09...

Does AI Get Bored?

timkellogg.me

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 4h

Getting so high on text that there doesn’t seem to be anything outside of it

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