Nick Carnes

It's finally publication day for this decade-in-the-making book. @noamlupu.bsky.social and I explain why working-class jobs make up 70% of the average democracy's labor force, but only 2% of the average democracy's national lawmakers had working-class jobs when they got into politics.

Just in case you wondered whether politicians engage in elitist attacks against candidates from working-class jobs: This is an ad attacking as politically incompetent . . . the former president of the Maine State Senate. You know, because he used to be a logger.

Just in case you wondered whether politicians engage in elitist attacks against candidates from working-class jobs: This is an ad attacking as politically incompetent . . . the former president of the Maine State Senate. You know, because he used to be a logger.

The grounded-in-actual-reality counter to the Stockholm Syndrome refrain of "We deserve this because we charge high tuition and don't do enough outreach."

It’s another beautiful and productive day to boycott this whole mess.

perfect, no notes

The half dozen ”let me help you market your research“ emails I get each day could soon be lawsuits. I feel more productive already.

Apparently it's integrity season, too.

My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man.

don't let the sunk cost fallacy get you! just walk out you can leave!!!

@carnes.bsky.social and @noamlupu.bsky.social are on this episode of the What a Day podcast to talk about their new book, Keeping Workers Off the Ballot. Watch here: buff.ly/K6ppSut

"this is OpenAI’s latest subscription model, Astra 6, prompted to fetch and plot the original data" jfc

One benefit of holding leaders accountable for crimes is that if Flávio Bolsonaro tries to overturn this election, he knows exactly where he’d end up. In prison, next to his father.

Cognitive surrender is sad.

The NYT ads for Facebook and OpenAI are getting a little out of hand. You'd almost mistake them for normal coverage.

So this is horrific. The DoJ is offering funding to "support foundational research on gender dysphoria, its treatment, and the perpetration of violence and violent behavior." They are trying to gin up data to label trans people as terrorists. www.ojp.gov/funding/docs...

Seen this story all day today. Every headline says "27 year old Minnesota man..." I have yet to see one with the headline that the man was Somalian. The most maligned and denigrated group in Minnesota www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/2...

It's another beautiful day to boycott this whole mess.

Undefeated teaching advice (Source: www.instagram.com/p/Dd7GFMAGoX0/)

"With education, any minor act of replacement is an insult to the students because education depends so much on interpersonal relationships."

The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead: www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...

I mean it’s good to see a bit of contrition, but “we gave our employees some software with no clear application which I assumed was magic and ordered them to use it for everything” needs a “so I have no choice but to resign” at the end. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

“oh nooo all my dumbass thoughts” like im never gonna have a dumbass thought again

Fantastic remarks from Marvel's new EiC. And I enjoyed the post script: "Oh and… In case you’re wondering… we’re still not going to use AI to make our comics." www.comicsbeat.com/nycc-26-marv...

Reading thru lawsuits against xAI for generating CSAM--one school photographer in Arkansas took the school photos he was taking to generate CSAM of both girls and boys. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Fantastic remarks from Marvel's new EiC. And I enjoyed the post script: "Oh and… In case you’re wondering… we’re still not going to use AI to make our comics." www.comicsbeat.com/nycc-26-marv...

Happy National Coming Out Day

Unsurprisingly, four days later, mathematicians have weighed in. And the results are equivocally valuable at best. More importantly the dump has flooded the zone with shit, which is precisely in line with this industry’s weaponized agnotology. Now actual scholars have to waste their time on this.

Driving at 5x the speed limit next to a primary school saves me 5 minutes on my commute to work

My book with @carnes.bsky.social is finally out! We explain why working-class jobs make up 70% of the average democracy's labor force, but only 2% of the average democracy's national lawmakers had working-class jobs when they got into politics.

Anthropic is out with new nonsense about Claude (or the collection of models called Claude) deserving moral consideration and/or be able to feel distress, so my inbox is filling up with journos asking me to comment. I've also got a day job, so here is a brief set of public comments on this: >>

“Hype is eating the future, and leaving us the bones.” Sun-ha Hong of UNC-Chapel Hill says the Silicon Valley hype machine systematically “borrows credibility from the future to purchase legitimacy in the present.” The cost, he argues, is a planetary-scale drain on our alternatives.

🤝 How can climate advocates build coalitions with labor? In this brief, Geoffrey Henderson (@umich.edu) shares lessons on coalition building from interviewing labor & climate advocates. Key takeaway: coalitions need well-designed policies and inclusive processes. 🔗 scholars.org/contribution...

In Keeping Workers Off the Ballot, @carnes.bsky.social and @noamlupu.bsky.social explain why the underrepresentation of the working class in political office is an inevitable side effect of electoral democracy itself. Available now. Learn more: buff.ly/qR0EshP #PoliSci

Saying that you learned what a book has to teach from an LLM summary of it is like saying you got the full effect of the song "Hey Ya!" by never listening to it but just reading the sentence "Relationships are hard."

i feel this more and more every day

The Association for Human Mathematics (AHM) statement on OpenAI’s October 6 release of mathematical documents just dropped! www.ahmath.org/statements

No AI for kids. Full stop.