Tobias Wilson-Bates
@phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Time Machines. Temporality. Ecology. Robots. Education. Associate Professor of 19th century British Literature.
Pinned
Bluesky isn’t about popularity, it’s about gathering all 17 William Morris lovers together in a single online location!
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
The London Review Of Books just emailed about their Black Friday sale and I did not know we had pushed this stuff to other countries
November 27, 2025 at 9:45 PM
The London Review Of Books just emailed about their Black Friday sale and I did not know we had pushed this stuff to other countries
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
it's important for children to learn about deep time, the inevitability of loss, and the end of all things.
If you loved THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE, then you'll love its action-packed sequel, PRINCE CASPIAN! The Pevensie children are back, even Edmund, but what about all your favorite friends: Mr. Tumnus, the Beavers, the friendly giant? Well, they've been dead for a thousand years. Sorry.
November 28, 2025 at 7:15 PM
it's important for children to learn about deep time, the inevitability of loss, and the end of all things.
New flavor of Doom where you’re dooming about how the Doom isn’t big enough to be the final Doom, so you will just spend your life encountering small, incredibly frustrating dooms.
November 29, 2025 at 12:15 AM
New flavor of Doom where you’re dooming about how the Doom isn’t big enough to be the final Doom, so you will just spend your life encountering small, incredibly frustrating dooms.
Laundary Hamper Zero was the original Inbox Zero
November 29, 2025 at 12:13 AM
Laundary Hamper Zero was the original Inbox Zero
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
I had a great conversation with a librarian last year where she said the instability and general inability to reliably trace bots as a reference source are sort of a perfect storm. Students "research" w the tool, but repeating the search doesn't yield a stable output.
November 28, 2025 at 2:28 PM
I had a great conversation with a librarian last year where she said the instability and general inability to reliably trace bots as a reference source are sort of a perfect storm. Students "research" w the tool, but repeating the search doesn't yield a stable output.
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
I phrased the search a different way and the bot happily gave the opposite claim also as true, once again connected to a different set of semi-credible sources. Among the other issues, then, is that we are dealing with de-contextualizing tools. Information lifted from its chain of reference.
November 28, 2025 at 2:18 PM
I phrased the search a different way and the bot happily gave the opposite claim also as true, once again connected to a different set of semi-credible sources. Among the other issues, then, is that we are dealing with de-contextualizing tools. Information lifted from its chain of reference.
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
Man, some passages just stick deep in you and stay there. Love this from Susan Griffin's "Our Secret"
November 28, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Man, some passages just stick deep in you and stay there. Love this from Susan Griffin's "Our Secret"
Time Traveler: I have journeyed back in time to learn from your genius!
Isaac Newton (bodkin needle wedged behind his eyeball): who the what now??
Isaac Newton (bodkin needle wedged behind his eyeball): who the what now??
November 28, 2025 at 9:40 PM
Time Traveler: I have journeyed back in time to learn from your genius!
Isaac Newton (bodkin needle wedged behind his eyeball): who the what now??
Isaac Newton (bodkin needle wedged behind his eyeball): who the what now??
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
Its Blake Friday! You know, when William Blake’s birthday falls on a Friday? Anyway here are his Toeses of Moses:
November 28, 2025 at 8:49 PM
Its Blake Friday! You know, when William Blake’s birthday falls on a Friday? Anyway here are his Toeses of Moses:
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
“if we don’t make S-risk profoundly disturbing, it will not sound worse than X-risk, and [our center] will then struggle to obtain large sums of money from impressionable Silicon Valley billionaires who have read a few tweets about AGI.”
From our summer intern at the Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers:
"S-risk is the risk that AGI doesn’t kill us all, but instead enslaves and tortures us for eternity (the ‘S’ stands for suffering). It was awesome to learn about it."
directing.attention.to/p/ill-never-...
"S-risk is the risk that AGI doesn’t kill us all, but instead enslaves and tortures us for eternity (the ‘S’ stands for suffering). It was awesome to learn about it."
directing.attention.to/p/ill-never-...
“I’ll never sleep again”
Our intern Clem Park writes about her rewarding summer at CAAAC, spent writing scenarios where an AGI enslaves and tortures humanity forever
directing.attention.to
November 28, 2025 at 4:52 PM
“if we don’t make S-risk profoundly disturbing, it will not sound worse than X-risk, and [our center] will then struggle to obtain large sums of money from impressionable Silicon Valley billionaires who have read a few tweets about AGI.”
Man, some passages just stick deep in you and stay there. Love this from Susan Griffin's "Our Secret"
November 28, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Man, some passages just stick deep in you and stay there. Love this from Susan Griffin's "Our Secret"
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
Hey guys, turns out we’re still living in the Victorian period
The super-rich call them “trust reveals.” Inside the meticulously planned events where the next generation finds out who inherits the ski lodge. on.wsj.com/4pE3ffW
Inside the ‘Trust Reveal,’ Where the Superrich Pass on Generational Wealth
Wealthy families and their cadre of advisers meticulously coordinate plans to make their money last for the next century and beyond.
on.wsj.com
November 28, 2025 at 2:54 AM
Hey guys, turns out we’re still living in the Victorian period
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
This is like Universal Basic Income: everyone knows bike lanes and parking restrictions make cities more liveable for everyone, drivers included. But 99% of politicians are too short-term and too damn chicken-shit to actually do it.
Pollution levels in Paris after they introduced bike lanes and car restrictions
Red = EU limits for Nitrogen Dioxide pollution
Original graphics by Atelier Parisien d'Urbanisme
www.apur.org
Red = EU limits for Nitrogen Dioxide pollution
Original graphics by Atelier Parisien d'Urbanisme
www.apur.org
November 28, 2025 at 1:16 PM
This is like Universal Basic Income: everyone knows bike lanes and parking restrictions make cities more liveable for everyone, drivers included. But 99% of politicians are too short-term and too damn chicken-shit to actually do it.
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
Worth saying there's a lot of completely normal ways to put the private market into health insurance (germany uses multi payer rate setting) but all of them need govt oversight
Yet another reminder of why health insurance should not be a private, for-profit industry and we should have a single payer, publicly run system
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/28/b...
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/28/b...
‘We’re at a breaking point’: Health insurance premiums just keep going up, worsening affordability crisis - The Boston Globe
Many employers’ premiums have risen by 10 percent or more, insurers and brokers say, straining families’ budgets.
www.bostonglobe.com
November 28, 2025 at 1:01 PM
Worth saying there's a lot of completely normal ways to put the private market into health insurance (germany uses multi payer rate setting) but all of them need govt oversight
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
I had an interesting set of interactions w AI-generated content that I think is instructive. A very bright student made a claim in an essay that struck me as outlandish, so I searched the question on Google which turned up that phrasing the search a certain way makes the AI summary agree w the claim
November 28, 2025 at 2:18 PM
I had an interesting set of interactions w AI-generated content that I think is instructive. A very bright student made a claim in an essay that struck me as outlandish, so I searched the question on Google which turned up that phrasing the search a certain way makes the AI summary agree w the claim
I had an interesting set of interactions w AI-generated content that I think is instructive. A very bright student made a claim in an essay that struck me as outlandish, so I searched the question on Google which turned up that phrasing the search a certain way makes the AI summary agree w the claim
November 28, 2025 at 2:18 PM
I had an interesting set of interactions w AI-generated content that I think is instructive. A very bright student made a claim in an essay that struck me as outlandish, so I searched the question on Google which turned up that phrasing the search a certain way makes the AI summary agree w the claim
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
Recalling that my freshmen composition professor had us write 500 word sentences as a way to practice making different kinds of sentences connecting ideas, and then meticulously checked every single grammatical choice.
November 28, 2025 at 2:05 AM
Recalling that my freshmen composition professor had us write 500 word sentences as a way to practice making different kinds of sentences connecting ideas, and then meticulously checked every single grammatical choice.
As always, the thing with discourse around huge spending on college sports is that *even if* a specific high profile school is net positive on its sports program, the vast majority of schools are in the red on pumping money into sports boondoggles and it’s a major budgetary problem across the sector
November 28, 2025 at 4:36 AM
As always, the thing with discourse around huge spending on college sports is that *even if* a specific high profile school is net positive on its sports program, the vast majority of schools are in the red on pumping money into sports boondoggles and it’s a major budgetary problem across the sector
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
It’s useful to think about things like this in numbers of tenure track professors.
$53M is 575 assistant professors. Or more than thirty percent of the total number of full-time faculty at LSU.
$53M is 575 assistant professors. Or more than thirty percent of the total number of full-time faculty at LSU.
November 28, 2025 at 3:38 AM
It’s useful to think about things like this in numbers of tenure track professors.
$53M is 575 assistant professors. Or more than thirty percent of the total number of full-time faculty at LSU.
$53M is 575 assistant professors. Or more than thirty percent of the total number of full-time faculty at LSU.
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
Still think about my Latin professor who 5 weeks into the semester realized that the class didn’t know English grammar well enough for him to be able to explain Latin, so the class suddenly became a simultaneous English grammar & Latin class
November 28, 2025 at 2:37 AM
Still think about my Latin professor who 5 weeks into the semester realized that the class didn’t know English grammar well enough for him to be able to explain Latin, so the class suddenly became a simultaneous English grammar & Latin class
Hey guys, turns out we’re still living in the Victorian period
The super-rich call them “trust reveals.” Inside the meticulously planned events where the next generation finds out who inherits the ski lodge. on.wsj.com/4pE3ffW
Inside the ‘Trust Reveal,’ Where the Superrich Pass on Generational Wealth
Wealthy families and their cadre of advisers meticulously coordinate plans to make their money last for the next century and beyond.
on.wsj.com
November 28, 2025 at 2:54 AM
Hey guys, turns out we’re still living in the Victorian period
Still think about my Latin professor who 5 weeks into the semester realized that the class didn’t know English grammar well enough for him to be able to explain Latin, so the class suddenly became a simultaneous English grammar & Latin class
November 28, 2025 at 2:37 AM
Still think about my Latin professor who 5 weeks into the semester realized that the class didn’t know English grammar well enough for him to be able to explain Latin, so the class suddenly became a simultaneous English grammar & Latin class
Recalling that my freshmen composition professor had us write 500 word sentences as a way to practice making different kinds of sentences connecting ideas, and then meticulously checked every single grammatical choice.
November 28, 2025 at 2:05 AM
Recalling that my freshmen composition professor had us write 500 word sentences as a way to practice making different kinds of sentences connecting ideas, and then meticulously checked every single grammatical choice.
About to participate in the greatest and most pleasurable of all holiday traditions: the early afternoon full stomach nap with no concerns about needing to make food for dinner 🫡🫡🫡
November 27, 2025 at 7:15 PM
About to participate in the greatest and most pleasurable of all holiday traditions: the early afternoon full stomach nap with no concerns about needing to make food for dinner 🫡🫡🫡
Reposted by Tobias Wilson-Bates
“You can be anything” sounds like an encouraging thing to say to a child, but there are lots of terrifying and bad things one could become 🤔
November 27, 2025 at 4:19 PM
“You can be anything” sounds like an encouraging thing to say to a child, but there are lots of terrifying and bad things one could become 🤔