The effect on university budgets is among the least objectionable parts of the Big Beautiful Bill, and it’s still devastating.

Perhaps the best demonstration yet of why we need to talk about epistemology when we talk about generative AI. Gift link. It turns out that it takes an awful lot of intervention to get Grok to be “maximally truth-seeking” and “neutral.”

Je connaissais pas l’existence d’UniDistance Suisse, et maintenant j’ai envie d’en apprendre plus.

Today was really, truly going to be a much-needed writing day, and then I didn’t even clear my inbox until 2:30. Yayyyyyy.

Spaced on an evening meeting that I’d actually been looking forward to and 😫😫😫

I don’t have the whole picture here, and I don’t like passing judgment without having the whole picture, but I don’t know if I like this.

I am very excited that Rosemary Avance is coming to one of the Mormon Social Science Association sessions at this year’s Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to speak on her book Mediated Mormons. I’ve just started the book in preparation for the session, and I was struck by the questions that make up the first two lines of the introduction:

What does it mean to be part of a religious community? Is it the same as claiming a religion?

Merci à Matoo, qui a vu combien j’écrivais sur Jacques Ellul sur ce site et qui m’a donc recommandé la petite série de cinq épisodes « Avoir raison… avec Jacques Ellul », qui est sorti il y a quelques semaines sur France Culture. J’ai écouté la première épisode ce matin en faisant de petites préparations pour mon premier jour d’enseignement pour cette année scolaire, et je le trouve déjà très utile.

J’ai déjà lu trois livres par Ellul et je suis en train de lire deux autres (bon, en théorie — j’avoue que ça va lentement). Ce week-end, je vais recevoir quelques nouveaux livres d’Ellul que mon beau-frère a acheté à la librairie new-yorkaise magnifique Albertine, qui est soutenue par l’ambassade française aux États-Unis. Mon beau-frère va à New York tous les étés et me cherchent toujours quelques bouquins francophones, et ça fait qu’en ce moment, j’aurai bientôt beaucoup plus à lire d’Ellul. C’est la première fois dans ma vie que je m’engage à ce niveau avec l’œuvre d’un seul écrivain académique, et je trouve qu’avoir des résumés comme celui de France Culture m’aide beaucoup à situer ce que je lis en un moment particulier dans l’ensemble de sa pensée.

After years of putting this off, I have finally figured out how to network my computer to the department printer, and I no longer have to worry that my position as a tenured professor of information communication technology will be revoked for being intimidated by basic office setups.

Appreciate Josh’s eye for detail here.

Today, I attended my first kids’ soccer game since rereading James Carse’s “Finite and Infinite Games” and since reading about Jacques Ellul’s ethic of non-power, and it turns out that makes a difference?

I subscribe to the “Religion Watch” newsletter out of Baylor University but usually don’t do much more than skim it. The first entry in the June edition, though, immediately stood out to me for this excerpt:

Paul Seabright’s recent book, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People (Princeton University Press, $35), is unique for its comprehensive treatment of the religious past and present as well as its novel use of the concept of “platforms” in explaining the economy of religion.

What a wild, depressing story. I feel like I ought to use this to teach the concept of platforms to my students—it neatly sums up the intervention in normal human activity by someone who thinks they have a buck to make.

Closing digital divides is good, and increasing diversity in tech fields as good, but I’ve been complaining for years about computer science ed that we stop at the nobility of those goals and don’t ask ourselves about the deeper motivations behind those initiatives. So it is with AI: A more diverse field more available to all is better than what we have, but we also have to ask whether AI education is actually a social good.

Thanks to the magic of Bluesky, I came across Paul Musgrave’s essay “Classroom Technology Was a Mistake,” with the subtitle “Hopes that AI will improve higher ed need to reckon with the dashed hopes of the past.” As a whole, I appreciate the essay—I’m sympathetic to Musgrave’s argument, and I couldn’t agree with the subtitle more if I tried. I want to do one of those things, though, where one academic spends too much time quibbling with a minor part of another academic’s argument. In particular, I want to take issue with this part of Musgrave’s essay:

There’s always been a dark side to internet culture, but I don’t think it was naïve in my earlier work to argue for recognizing its value. Yet, it’s important as a scholar to call out the ugliness that’s happening here.

This morning on Bluesky, I saw some posts about a class action lawsuit against Anthropic for their use of pirated, copyrighted materials in training their generative AI models. One of the sources of these copyrighted materials was the LibGen database, which I took a peek at nearly six months ago to confirm what I was already sure to be true: that my scientific writing was also collected as training material by companies like Anthropic or Meta. I don’t love that big tech companies are profiting off of my work in this way, and I’m sympathetic to the authors who are taking legal action against Anthropic. However, as I’ve written repeatedly over the past few years (you can find some of those thoughts—and others—by scrolling through here, I don’t know that copyright is the right way of responding to this kind of abuse.

Oof, hadn’t thought of this, but as much as I’d like to further reduce Google dependence, this would really hurt.

Bookmarking this so I can point to it if anyone asks why I’ve shifted my research from ed tech to right-wing Mormonism.

Ma carrière se divise entre une valorisation des pratiques numériques perçues comme n’ayant pas d’importance et une critique des technologies qui permettent ces pratiques. J’avoue que je me sens vraiment divisé pour cet exemple !

Je viens d’entendre à la RTS une définition des « digital natives » comme la génération Z. On a commencé à employer cette phrase aux années 2000 pour décrire ma génération, et son usage continu pour signifier « les jeunes d’aujourd’hui » révèle combien elle est inutile.

Love that moment in academic writing where you can find five rejected versions of a paragraph below the version I’m currently working on.

Here’s Jacques Ellul on state funding of research:

The state demands that anything scientific enter into the line of “normal” development, not only for the stake of the public interest but also because of its will to power. We have previously noted that this will to power has found in technique an extraordinary means of expression. The state quickly comes to demand that technique keep its promises and be an effective servant of state power. Everything not of direct interest to this drive for power appears valueless.

À mon avis, l’expertise « au niveau doctorat » est surtout lié au processus de connaître et non à la connaissance elle-même, et l’IA générative ne respecte pas du tout ce processus.

This seems performative to me, and this paragraph gets at why I think so:

AI companies are increasingly pushing into education — perhaps in part to try and fight the reputation that AI tools have acquired that they help students cheat. Features like Gemini’s guided learning mode and ChatGPT’s similar study mode, which was announced last week, could theoretically help with actual learning, but the question is whether students will want to use these modes instead of just using the AI chatbots for easy answers.