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Seth Frey

Seth Frey

@enfascination.com

420 followers 420 following 1.5K posts

How to retrain everyone in doing democracy daily? It's the only way.

Prof in computational commons, self-governance, and the cogsci of social emergence. Internet as a governance lab. Science towards nescience

enfascination.com/research .. more

Computer science 25%

Physics 17%

more

Posts Replies Media Videos

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 1d

I always mix up "provenance" and "pedigree."

Makes sense: they're both low-frequency three-syllable p-words pertaining to things' sources.

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 1d

I'm reminded how much I'm steeped in esoterica when someone else knows something obscure and I think "how did they know that!?" without correcting for the fact that I knew it too.

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 1d

Late-career Milton Friedman quotes have become really useful for when I'm looking for something to reactively disagree with.

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 2d

Oh yeah I bet the headline mangles the nuance.

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 2d

Total D.A.R.E. vibes. Maybe there'll be an edgy slogan. "Know what's fly? Kids who don't use A.I."

Reuters @reuters.com · 4d

Don't let AI do your homework, Pope Leo tells US youth reut.rs/48tKTYY

Don't let AI do your homework, Pope Leo tells US youth

Artificial intelligence may be a useful tool for learning, but don't use it for your homework, Pope Leo told about 15,000 U.S. youth during a question-and-answer session on Friday.

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 2d

Can any immigrants back up this anecdote?

"
My friend is from Ireland ... living in America, her Irish accent has faded. She said that on her first day of math class, her accent slipped out and she has been ‘stuck’ speaking with her original accent (but only in that math class).
"

Is that a thing?

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 2d

Neat little discovery about AI in the classroom.

I have assignments that ask students to engage with and develop each other's personal thoughts on the material. I'm seeing way less AI use on these.

Seems like there's maybe some taboo among the kids about automating more relational interactions.

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 3d

... and is humanlike not so much for its rationality as its ability to go all in on style regardless of substance, rhetoric regardless of fact.

Way to get what we asked for.

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 3d

The vision of AI has always been something rationalistic but humanistic: Data from Star Trek. How hilarious that our current point toward that evolution is a machine that outperforms humans 1000x in the generation of superficial hot takes.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The simulation of judgment in LLMs | PNAS

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in evaluative processes, from information filtering to assessing and addressing knowledge ga...

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 3d

I dunno. I know all kinds of expats in MX living off SSA. There's a strange double-standard where we apply Tiebout competition to cities but not countries, just because countries are The State.

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 3d

With a lot of decentralization/anti-state/libertarian types, it's chill to be an institution with rules, taxes, enforcement, all the stuff The State has, as long as they're not The State. But institutions with all that stuff that are also The State, those are the worst. The difference? Magic ✨🪄🎩✨

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 3d

These challenge the "presumption of regularity" providing more trust and latitude to gov attys. The admin has been exploiting this latitude, and efforts to document the pattern are vital for appropriate judicial response to such attacks on democratic norms and the = administration of justice.

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 3d

justsecurity.org has a complete catalogue of comments by judges (well over 500 from over 150 cases) registering suspected/actual lies, distortions, evasions, non-compliance and more by Trump admin's attorneys.

www.justsecurity.org/120547/presu...

The “Presumption of Regularity” in Trump Administration Litigation

Comprehensive study of court cases involving Trump administration and the basis for courts no longer giving a "presumption of regularity."

www.justsecurity.org

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 3d

Race exposes the court's “deepest hypocrisy and most shocking incoherence ... the very same Court that has barred even indirect consideration of race in college admissions [and redistricting] … then endorsed the use of race and racial profiling in violent ICE raids, detentions, and deportations”

Eric Holder to tear into Supreme Court as major redistricting decision looms

The court has found itself at the center of a national debate over the limits of redistricting.

www.politico.com

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 3d

Sometimes I wonder if libertarianism is A-OK with socialism as long as it's capitalism that carried the game and got to spike the football.

fortune.com/2025/11/20/e...

Elon Musk says that in 10 to 20 years, work will be optional and money will be irrelevant thanks to AI and robotics | Fortune

“It’ll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that,” the Tesla CEO said.

Reposted by Seth Frey

Reuters @reuters.com · 4d

Don't let AI do your homework, Pope Leo tells US youth reut.rs/48tKTYY

Don't let AI do your homework, Pope Leo tells US youth

Artificial intelligence may be a useful tool for learning, but don't use it for your homework, Pope Leo told about 15,000 U.S. youth during a question-and-answer session on Friday.

Reposted by Seth Frey

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 4d

One of the funniest things about living in 2025 is the way LLMs constantly express incredulity at descriptions of events. When I requested a typo check on something I wrote:

The section about Trump "tearing down the East Wing" and building a ballroom seems highly implausible and needs fact-checking

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 4d

Tracks

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 4d

The underlying study: "Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning" academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

"participants reported developing shallower knowledge from LLM summaries even when the results were augmented by...web links" vs. search

Reposted by Ailsa Henderson, David R. Miller, Seth Frey , and 1 more Ailsa Henderson, David R. Miller, Seth Frey, David Darmofal

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 4d

The underlying study: "Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning" academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

"participants reported developing shallower knowledge from LLM summaries even when the results were augmented by...web links" vs. search

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 6d

Anarchist second hand store:
“Property is Thrift”

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 8d

1. Academia is up there with law as the least wrong, least rigid, least nepotistic large-scale human institution ever.
2. The people I know that substituted their Uni degrees for Reddit are consistently the best proof that Reddit isn't a substitute for formal education in critical thinking

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 8d

I'm really truly all for a world in which the legitimacy of research doesn't depend having a Ph.D and a Uni job. <I publish with non-academics without degrees!>

and I'm really truly into critiques of academia and the value of a degree <I start every class inviting students to drop out!>

BUT

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 8d

Great quote from a student writing a paper on the effects of AI on loneliness:

"""My position is that AI companions do not fully eliminate loneliness, they just privatize it."""

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 8d

It's the feel-good hit of the season:

Follow "Leopards Ate My Face" documenting disillusionment with Trump within MAGA on Twitter and TruthSocial.

They're realizing they've been lied to. Mostly those who are directly affected: the leopard does have to eat your face specifically for you to wake up.

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 8d

Just got this flashback to the early days of Slack. Slackbot was very eager.

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 11d

You're right that 22 of those 55 seconds met the standard for news rather than opinion/interpretation. In the best case, that's still less than half the day committed to reporting facts.

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 11d

We need OPINION labels on news.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 11d

It's absolutely shameless how Fox News hosts help launder Trump's lies, as illustrated by this 55 second clip. I have no idea how they can live with themselves since they are smart enough to know what they're doing.

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 11d

We need OPINION labels on non-news news channel content.

Fox now only schedules 1 hour a day of non-opinion content, the 11PM slot.

Reposted by Seth Frey

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 11d

It's absolutely shameless how Fox News hosts help launder Trump's lies, as illustrated by this 55 second clip. I have no idea how they can live with themselves since they are smart enough to know what they're doing.

Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 13d

The average exam grade in my programming class has fallen by one grade point post-GPT3.5. The exam is has been unchanged for 7 years.

Vikram Bath @vikrambath.bsky.social · 13d

This week, a math professor at MIT told me that incoming students are, on average, noticeably worse at math than they used to be.

Harvard, of course, just added a remedial math class, Math MA5, "aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills among students".