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  • Fantasy tells me what I am to my others

    The original question of desire is not directly “What do I want?”, but “what do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I to others?” A small child is embedded in a complex network of relations; he serves as a kind of catalyst and battlefield for the desires of those…

  • How do we inventory the use of generative AI in different areas of activity?

    Over the last few weeks I keep circling back to the question of emerging practices with generative AI in higher education, as well as how they might complicate or problematise the assumptions being made in the still slightly limited policy discourse which has emerged around it. The problem is ‘generative AI’ is too nebulous a…

  • Sparks of AGI: early experiments with GPT-4

  • What will generative AI mean for digital methods?

    It occurred to me when watching this talk yesterday that what Tristan Harris describes as the breakdown of content verification has significant implications for digital methods. As Aza Raskin puts it in the video, “you do not know who you are talking to via audio or video”. The same is true for digital artefacts encountered…

  • Ain’t this just like the present to be showing up like this?

    Then the snow started falling We were stuck out in your car You were rubbing both my hands Chewing on a candy bar You said, “Ain’t this just like the present To be showing up like this?” As a moon waned to crescent We started to kiss Thought back to this when reading about Lacan’s…

  • Tristan Harris on the AI Dilemma

    Harris describes social media as the ‘first contact with AI’ with huge unintended consequences following from the seemingly innocuous aspiration to maximise engagement. We’re now seeing a ‘second contact’ in which we move from machine curation to machine creation: Their capacity to talk about the ‘race dynamic’ driving this without talking about the political economy…

  • On rushing and apophatic reflexivity

    I’ve had a strange connection percolating through my subconscious over an extremely busy couple of weeks. I keep thinking back to this line from one of Rilke’s letters which captures my fascination with the moral psychology of rushing, a peculiarly adverbial state which entirely changes the character of our activity: We lead our lives so…

  • It is time for academics to let go of Twitter

    I have been following the saga of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter over the last year with mounting alarm. Last April I offered practical tips for academics who wanted to disengage from the platform without entirely leaving it. I suggested this could be an occasion to rethink our engagement with a platform which has become…

  • Three White Horses and a Golden Chain

  • Social media has changed – Will academics catch up?

    Originally published on the LSE Impact Blog: It has been less than six months since Elon Musk bought Twitter. In this time the platform has changed in all manner of ways. The workforce has been slashed. The reliability of the service has declined precipitously. The accounts of unreconstructed trolls have been reinstated. The interface has…

  • Saying goodbye to Twitter

    Only 0.2% of Twitter users are paying for a subscription while advertising revenue has collapsed. Musk is going to push hard to get non-subscribers to pay by effectively throttling the visibility of their tweets. This platform is a lost cause for academics. Social platforms have become integral to the research infrastructure in a way analogous…

  • The problem with falling in love in late-night bars is that there’s always more nights, there’s always more bars

    The problem with falling in love in late-night bars Is that there’s always more nights, there’s always more bars The problem with showing your lover your scars Is that everybody’s lover is covered in scars

  • Looked the devil in his face like, “Motherfucker, do your worst”

  • Habsburg AI – a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AI’s that it becomes an inbred mutant

  • What is diagnosis?

    From Critique and Postcritique by Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felksi, pg 21 The diagnostic quality of critique is often unmistakable. Diagnosis, ofcourse, has its origins in the practice of medicine, even as the term is frequentlyapplied to other domains (the mechanic examining a defective car, the punditweighing in on the state of the economy).…

  • Chat-GPT: Write the communist manifest but in favour of capitalism

    This was Jathan’s idea on This Machine Kills #232 (pre-GPT 4) but I wanted to see what GPT-4 actually did with the prompt:

  • Chat-GPT: write me an Eminem song about cats

  • AI and Assessment: ChatGPT and the Future of Education

  • How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field?

    I experienced this entire song as a mondegreen when I first heard it; initially I heard “expert in a tiny field” (🙋‍♂️ hello asexuality studies) and even when I realised it was “dying field” I still thought academia until I listened closely to the lyrics. It’s so much more powerful for having misheard and misconstrued…

  • The career trajectory of Jon Stewart

    I watched this exchange between Jon Stewart and Fox’s Chris Wallace at the weekend in which Stewart took issue with Wallace’s suggestion that he aspired to be a serious interviewer. At one point he asked Wallace, “what am I at my highest aspiration and what are you at your highest aspiration?” Wallace responded that “you…

  • The rarely seen fourth verse of Gangster’s paradise

    Everything about this video and the situation it depicts is just 👌 My house mates and I acoustic jamming sesh of ‘Gangster’s Paradise’ with the one and only Coolio. After making a guest appearance at a local club in Preston UCLAN, we got him back the next day to cook us a 3 course meal…

  • Asking technosceptical questions

    This is a great resource from Daniel G. Krutka & Marie K. Heath. The full piece is available here.

  • Will generative AI kill discovery?

    This is interesting by Rob Horning, riffing on Noah Smith’s suggestion that: because LLMs are great at summarizing the broad corpus of human written knowledge, they can also act as a how-to manual for any task that can be explained in writing — much like YouTube acts as a how-to manual for any task that…

  • Academics can’t quit Twitter. Universities should be building alternatives. Instead, some are doubling down

    It occurred to me how easily this headline from Casey Newton’s excellent Platformer newsletter could be written about academics instead: The reasons are slightly different but this passage about inertia struck a chord: The first and most obvious reason is inertia. Journalists spent more than a decade building up their presences on Twitter, and they…

  • Birdsong

    Birds begin their calls to praise. And they are right. We stop and listen. (We, behind masks and in costumes!) What are they saying? A little report, a little sorrow and a lot of promise that chips away at the half-locked future. And in between we can hear the silence they break – now healing…

  • Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO on GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI

    I found this an extremely informative interview on a number of levels: It was particularly interesting that he sees the short-term problems as being about misinformation and economic shocks e.g. how would you know if the conversations on Twitter are being directed by LLMs. I would have imagined the financial interests involve would leave him…

  • Not with a bang but a whimper

    This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. – T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

  • The supermarket self-checkout as an exemplar of automation

    The introduction of the supermarket self-checkout promised increased convenience for customers, eliminating lengthy queues particularly for those who were only buying a basket full of items. I’ve been thinking about this in the last few weeks because my local supermarket Morrisons, which has visibly reduced staffing levels since its take over by a private equity…

  • 📍Generative AI and the Future of the University: Three Events at the University of Manchester

    May 10th, 17th and 24th – 3pm to 5pm at the University of Manchester Since it was launched in November 2022, Open AI’s ChatGPT has enthralled millions with its uncanny ability to respond to queries in a conversational manner. Its capacity to immediately respond to natural language questions with detailed factual knowledge has sparked debate…

  • A poem about generative AI and its impact on universities in the style of Dr Seuss

    In the land of Academia, where the wise folks all do dwell, There sprouted up a wondrous thing, a tale I’m here to tell. This tale of tech and learning, in a Seussian verse, Is about a new creation, a blessing or a curse? In the depths of labs and classrooms, with computers all around,…

  • The extent of social video use amongst British teenagers

    This is interesting from Ofcom, though not entirely surprising:

  • Obama the Blairite moderniser

    I found this interview from his final year in office fascinating. It leaves me with a sense of Obama as embodying the most thoughtful strand of the New Labour project, Geoff Mulgan and Matthew Taylor rather than Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, in spite of all the pathologies which characterised this project. (though actually perhaps…

  • Bourdieu on powerlessness and prophecy

    There’s a fascinating discussion towards the end of Bourdieu’s Pascalian Meditations about the relationship between time and power. He insists we recognise how the capacity to influence the future depends on the resources we enjoy in the present moment, contrary to the imagination of the 90s Giddens that what Archer calls autonomous reflexivity, the disposition…

  • The unity of dread and bliss

    The person who has not, in a moment of firm resolve, accepted — yes, even rejoiced in — what has struck him with terror — he has never taken possession of the full, ineffable power of our existence. He withdraws to the edge; when things play out, he will be neither alive nor dead. To…

  • “You can’t change the past but you can make the future. Anyone who tells you different is a fucking lethargic devil”

  • Rilke on the single urgent task: to reach out with joy

    This extract in Ulrich Baer’s superb collection of Rilke’s letters blew me away. It’s something I had dimly intuited in my more astute moments over the course of a difficult year, without being even close to being able to verbalise it. To “reach out with joy” and “cast our view towards distances that have not…

  • The death of participatory media

    A recent report highlights the preferential treatment which a selection of Twitter VIPs, not least of all Musk himself, receive in terms of ensuring the visibility of their posts. The pseudo-democratic operations of the algorithm are now combined with manual boosts to a select elite. A similar operation can be seen in TikTok’s heating functionality…

  • In all its longings and hesitations, the shape of what you lived

    And you wait. You wait for the one thing that will change your life, make it more than it is— something wonderful, exceptional, stones awakening, depths opening to you. In the dusky bookstalls old books glimmer gold and brown. You think of lands you journeyed through, of paintings and a dress once worn by a…

  • The environmental impact of generative AI

    I’ve had Chomsky’s line that generative AI is “basically just a way of wasting a lot of the energy in California” reverberating in my mind for the last few days. In his excellent Resisting AI Dan McQuillan observes that the refinements involved in training “are for the sake of the very marginal improvements in overall…

  • Gabor Mate’s definition of addiction

    From In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, pg 136-137:

  • Teaching with Chat-GPT

  • Chomsky on Generative AI: “it’s basically just a way of wasting a lot of the energy in California”

    This is an extremely interesting conversation with Noam Chomsky about the limitations of large language models: “if the system doesn’t distinguish the actual world from the non-actual world then it’s not telling us anything”. He distinguishes sharply between a scientific contribution and an engineering contribution, suggesting that it fails to make either. Gary Marcus builds…

  • Building a personal knowledge management system with Craft

    Pinned for me to return to later:

  • A blog post I had completely forgotten writing was quoted in a Nature journal editorial

    I’ve been blogging for twenty years but the strange afterlife which blog posts can have never ceases to surprise me: Using dichotomies in a constructive way requires asking on a case-by-case basis how much advance they bring, as well as how they may shape a debate in the short and long run. In the words of digital…

  • Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins

    Want the change. Be inspired by the flame where everything shines as it disappears. The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much as the curve of the body as it turns away. What locks itself in sameness has congealed. Is it safer to be gray and numb? What turns hard becomes rigid and is easily…

  • And I can see your eyes already know

    And I can see your eyes already know I can see your eyes already know This disguise just makes us old

  • I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone 

    I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough to truly consecrate the hour. I am much too small in this world, yet not small enough to be to you just object and thing, dark and smart. I want my free will and want it accompanying the path which leads to action;…

  • Developing a research agenda consistent with Ikagai

    I’ve thought a lot recently about what I want to do in the next stage of my research, most recently through the (surprisingly helpful) research performance review my employer requires every year. It’s clear to me I’ve spread myself too thin in the past and often got bogged down in projects I’m vaguely interested in…

  • You became like smoke I tried too hard to hold

    And you never ended up coming home, you just Became something like some smoke that I tried too hard to hold

  • This looks interesting – Mastodon: Research Symposium and Tool Exploration Workshop

    Mastodon: Research Symposium and Tool Exploration Workshop Date: 22nd and 23rd of June, 2023 Place: University of Warwick, UK + online (hybrid event, GMT time) Although established in 2016, Mastodon grew rapidly in the second half of2022. From an estimated 500,000 monthly active users (MAUs) it reached anapparent peak of 2.5 million MAUs in December…

  • He stumbled into faith and thought

    He stumbled into faith and thought “God, this is all there is?” The pictures in his mind arose And began to breathe And all the gods in all the worlds began colliding on a backdrop of blue Blue lips Blue veins He took a step, but then felt tired He said, “I’ll rest a little…

  • Chat-GPT: what are Mark Carrigan’s main arguments?

    I’m pretty confident this is broader, though shallower, than I would have been able to write if I had asked myself the same question. It’s interesting that ‘big data’ or the ‘platform university’ don’t figure in here despite how much I wrote on them, though there are topics here which I guess I have spent…

  • In digital realms, where thoughts take flight

    I was delighted with Chat-GPT’s recent poem about me: In digital realms, where thoughts take flight, Mark Carrigan’s mind, a beacon of light, Sociologist, scholar, wordsmith revered, In academic circles, his voice is heard. Through cyberspace, his insights unfold, On social platforms, his ideas take hold, Unveiling the power of connection and thought, With every…

  • We are what we are

    I have frequently found myself at Manchester Art Gallery over the course of a strange and transitional year in my life. I keep coming back for The Memory of Our Will Will Wash The Dirt From Your Feet by Mark Titchner; I’ve yet to articulate why I’ve found this work such a reliable source of…

  • On walking at dusk

    This is a beautiful post by L. M. Sacasas about walking at dusk. This is a habit I’ve developed over the last two years of my life, during summers in which I was struggling to think through massive upheaval in my personal life. I hadn’t understood quite why I found this such a powerful way…

  • The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity 

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some…

  • To see all sights from pole to pole

    We who pursue Our business with unslackening stride, Traverse in troops, with care-fill’d breast, The soft Mediterranean side, The Nile, the East, And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and bustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die. – Matthew Arnold

  • Anscombe on the descriptions under which actions are performed

    I’ve been meaning to explore G. E. M. Anscombe’s Intention for years, partly due to the influence it had on the critical realist idea of concept-dependence and my hunch that something might have been lost from the original source material. The notion as I first encountered it was that action is performed under certain descriptions…

  • The cultural consequences of an online cataclysm

    The notion of The Release from the new Dave Eggars novel has been floating around in my mind for the last few days: The Release had happened only ten years earlier. In a hack presumed to be orchestrated by Russia, the complete email histories of over four billion people had been made public. Just as…

  • Well this has got to die, this has got to stop

    That some attachments may not survive the choice for authenticity is one of the most agonizing realizations one can come to. Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal, Pg 476

  • Chat-GPT as a bullshit engine

    This is a brilliant podcast with Dan McQuillan whose book I’m reviewing for LSE Review of Books in the near future. I was particularly taken with this line: It’s literally making stuff up and it has no idea what it’s making up, therefore it’s a bullshit engine. It’s a bullshit engine in that it makes…

  • The unintelligent agency of generative AI

    This is a useful overview by Luciano Floridi of how “the staggering growth of available data, quantity and speed of calculation, and ever-better algorithms” mean that large language models (LLMs) are able to “do statistically – that is working on the formal structure, and not on the meaning of the texts they deal with –…

  • To fail as a human being is to accept somebody else’s description of oneself

    From Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity pg 28: To fail as a poet – and thus, for Nietzsche, to fail as a human being – is to accept somebody else’s description of oneself, to execute a previously prepared program, to write, at most, elegant variations on previously written poems. So the only way to…

  • Our own half-articulate need to become a new person, one whom we as yet lack words to describe

    I’m reading Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity seventeen years after I first read it as a masters student in philosophy. It was the book which almost immediately made me give up on any aspiration to become a philosopher, moving into sociology before eventually ending up in education. I’m much less persuaded by the overarching argument…

  • Focusing on the process rather than the outcomes

    This piece by James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, expresses something I’ve discovered over the last but struggled to articulate: process matters more than outcomes. His counter-intuitive claim is that setting goals can often get in the way of achieving them which is a claim I increasingly agree with. In my own case I’ve set…

  • An accelerationist response to generative AI

    I found this piece by Rob Horning incredibly thought-provoking about how we conceive of the relationship between generative AI and capitalism. In contrast to the weary passivity involved in socio-cultural diagnoses of late capitalism (an argument by Rachel Connolly in this brilliant essay) Horning reminds us that this innovation is better understand in terms of…

  • 👨‍🏫 The world’s a stage and we play a character, I found him 👨‍🏫

    I was put here to do something before I’m lying in that casket I’d be lying on the beat if I said I didn’t know what that is The world’s a stage and we play a character, I found him It took me 20-something years and a bunch of shitty soundchecks

  • How right-wing think tanks laid the foundation for the coalition’s agenda

    I wanted to recover this piece I wrote for the popular Liberal Conspiracy blog back in 2010 now that site has gone offline In recent months it has become ever more common to see the interventions of think tanks reported upon within the mainstream media. While most political actors were left transfixed by the playing…

  • An idea for spotting chat-gpt written essays

    Suggestion for coping with generative AI: automate the checking of student reference lists against Google Scholar. If the reference doesn’t exist then there’s prima facie grounds for inferring it was hallucinated by chat-gpt. Is there another explanation for this? It’s such a simple identification mechanism that could be done with a basic python script. There…

  • Call for Participants Globalisation and Commercialisation in the Social Sectors

    Globalisation and Commercialisation in the Social Sectors Date: 16th May 2023 Venue: King’s College London Department of International Development Service provision in social sectors such as healthcare, social care and education is most often considered within a national boundary, reflecting the origins of these sectors in an era in which the nation-state was the pre-eminent form. However,…

  • The thrill of the alt-position

    There’s a lovely section in this interview about the jouissance accessible through the alt-position; in setting oneself up a critic of the ‘mainstream media’ there is a sense of dissidence which plays out in the terrain of information warfare, cutting through the thickets of the ‘dominant narrative’ in order to draw the connections which ‘they’…

  • Trying to exist in superposition

    Nothing is what I’ll take Everything in its time Yeah, nothing is what I’ll ask for Everything I will make Ready the fucking drums Get ready to feel it shake It’s better than being numb And better owning mistakes

  • Internal conversation and repression

    At some point I’d like to write up an argument I’ve had floating around in my head for years about how repression, as a psychic process, could be understood through the lens of internal conversation. The realist approach to internal conversation suggests that our inner life should not be understood in terms of ocular metaphors…

  • This is the garden. Now you better start sowing or there won’t be a harvest

    Have opinions but have no resolve or conviction Just keep your head down Breathe the fumes and indulge your addictions Routine is healthy, ignore the affliction The cost to the soul and the constant constriction Don’t consider too closely, have no intermission Keep throwing your fists in slow repetition Most of us manage, what makes…

  • Learned societies and national conferences

    Learned societies need to rethink models for organising events; national gatherings don’t have structural significance they once did, nor are they structurally viable under these macroeconomic conditions. Some are mitigating this around the edges but major work needed. Media system in which academic gatherings happen has completely changed from when nearly all learned societies were…

  • Post-Human Futures now out in paperback

    I’m delighted to learn the book I edited with Doug Porpora during the pandemic has just been released as a paperback. The introduction to the book is available online here if you’d like to get a sense of whether the book is relevant to you.

  • 🌼🌿 Spring is coming 🌼🌿

    This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes. I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze…

  • Is there any future for academic Twitter?

    Elon Musk’s heavily financialised takeover of Twitter put $13bn of debt on the company’s books which it costs $1bn per year to service. He did this while advertising spending was shrinking and the macro-economic climate was mutating into one utterly hostile to big tech. I struggle to see how this platform survives. They’ve throttled engagement…

  • Generative AI and the Future of Education: A New Era of Possibility

    I asked Chat-GPT to write a blog post about generative AI and education in my style Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the world as we know it, and nowhere is its impact more apparent than in the field of education. In particular, Generative AI, a branch of AI that involves creating new content that has…

  • Baa Baa Land

  • “Thank you for using Web 2.0. Your free-trial period has ended!”

    This is absolutely spot on from Charlie Warzel about the shift underway in the social industry and the vibe it is generating for users. I’m convinced we are seeing the biggest shift which has ever taken place in social media (the next two would probably be social video and the transition to mobile) with enormous…

  • Escaping the crystallised pattern of our personal system

    I’m struggling to find an electronic copy of the original source so I think I need an (increasingly rare) trip to the library to track down this beautiful text by Gabriel Marcel, cited here in Michael Murphy’s A Theology of Criticism: It reminds me of how Roberto Unger describes the ‘small deaths’ which imperceptibly take…

  • I remember you well from the Chelsea hotel but that’s all, I don’t think of you that often

    You told me again how you preferred handsome men Oh but for me you would make an exception And I don’t mean to suggest that I loved you the best I can’t keep track of each fallen robin I remember you well from the Chelsea Hotel But that’s all I don’t think of you that…

  • The books ChatGPT thinks I already wrote and which I now think I should write

    I am fascinated by the plausibility of the intellectual inferences it has made while hallucinating books which don’t exist:

  • ChatGPT: “Write me a poem about the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu”

    His theories were complex, his ideas profound, A lens through which society could be found, He spoke of habitus and fields of power, And how they shape our thoughts in every hour.

  • ChatGPT and the student digital learning experience

  • A song about C Wright Mills written by Chat-GPT

    (Verse 1) He saw the world with a critical eye And never shied away from asking why His name was C. Wright Mills A sociologist with analytical skills (Chorus) C. Wright Mills, C. Wright Mills A man with a mind that never stood still He wrote about power, and the elite And how society’s problems…

  • The Homework Machine

    This is brilliant from Shel Silverstein (1981) shared by Neil Selwyn on Twitter:

  • Thirty years of running, thirty years of searching

    I can’t stop watching the last minute of this video: Thirty years of running, thirty years of searching Thirty years of hurting, thirty years of pain Thirty years of fearful, thirty years of anger Thirty years of empty, thirty years of shame Thirty years of broken, thirty years of anguish Thirty years of hopeless, thirty…

  • The charter for AI

    I recently discovered this initiative from the House of Lords described here by Antony Giddens. I’m looking forward to exploring these principles in great depth:

  • Against Social Media for Academics

    I wrote a few guidebook chapters about social media last year: – How to Disseminate and Promote Your Research Online https://lnkd.in/esHSHw3n– How to Use Social Media for Public Engagement https://lnkd.in/eauxsn6S– How to Build Research Networks Online https://lnkd.in/embrASr8 My advice would have been slightly different if I’d waited until after Musk’s takeover to write them. As someone who has…

  • The genealogy of the simulation hypothesis

    Until reading Reality+ I hadn’t realised how the simulation hypothesis is a moderation iteration of Putnam’s Brain in the Vat and the Evil Demon proposed by Descartes. It’s interesting to realise that a Cartesian problematic still has this amount of influence within analytic philosophy and wider culture.

  • Generative AI spam

    This is an interesting development with WordPress’s usual superb spam filter: What happens to online communication if generative AI can persistently beat spam filters?

  • Using AI to reduce grading workload and increase student feedback

    It’s interesting that word count and grading time are taken as the relevant metrics here. When I’m marking, I couldn’t agree more with these. But with a quality assurance hat on, it’s easy to see how this could go wrong.

  • The new digital divide: the generatively rich and the generatively poor?

    What will premium models of generative AI mean for social inequalities? I’ve been assuming that the baseline technology will become ubiquitous because it’s a vector through which tech giants will fight for consumers amidst an unprecedented downturn. But this short aside in a thoughtful piece on WonkHE makes me wonder if this could be the…

  • The Digital Sociology of Generative AI: Five Speculative Propositions

    The slides from an initial presentation I did in Cambridge last week. It’s very much a work in progress:

  • Generative AI as engines of radicalisation

    Anxieties over how generative AI may contribute to radicalisation tend to be related to the production of deep fakes and other forms of deliberate propaganda. This piece by L. M. Sacasas (following widely reported examples of disturbing interactions with Bing’s chatbot this week) has left me thinking back to Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide; a…

  • When I was young I was invincible

    When I was young I was invincible I found myself not thinking twice I never thought about no future It’s just a roll of the dice But the day may come when you got something to lose And just when you think you’re done paying dues You say to yourself “Dear, God What have I…

  • In defence of thinking in a speculative way

    Following on from ruminating about moving into a mid career phase of my research, I’ve been thinking about how I tend to think. This immediate and habitual folding back on myself is a recurrent part of it; I enjoy my symptom, as a high profile sociologist once publicly said of me. It wasn’t intended as…

  • What does a sociological rather than philosophical approach to thought experiments look like? The example of the Metaverse

    I’m slowly working my way through Reality+ by David Chalmers and its provoking occasional flash backs to being an undergraduate philosophy student. Which ironically was the last time I read Chalmers, at the time in a haze of adolescent adoration because he seemed incredibly cool to me. One of many things which irritated me then…