David Spurrett

Hello new followers. I'm a philosopher of cognitive science working on a book called 'Engines of Hostility'. Recent papers that inform the book are: (1) "Hostile Scaffolding" (Timms & Spurrett) (2) "Fashioning Affordances" (Spurrett & Brancazio) (3) "On Hostile and Oppressive Affective Technology."

the name is CHUMP THEORY mattweiner.net/On%20Chum%20...

Dune has the same plot as the Westminster Dog Show: After generations of careful breeding, we have produced this perfect little freak of nature and now it has behavioral issues

appears JD Vance couldn’t make a statement on the attempted mass shooting at a Hindu temple because he has to prioritize his base (potential Hindu temple mass shooters) over his family

If you don’t know anyone living in the occupied territories in Palestine you have no idea how bad things are there. Check points everywhere, roads closed arbitrarily and often, military raids every day, people killed by soldiers, pogroms, the fear whenever you go on the road, a crumbling economy

Gladwell's "analysis" is infuriating because it's why so many people throw up their hands in disgust with statistics & say "you can make numbers say anything." No! There's a way to do this well, and Gladwell just doesn't want to be fucked to do it.

“The culmination of my life’s work may have been targeted by an AI-assisted censorship tool & terminated by a politically-motivated AI hallucination” If you care in any way about science, you need to read this thread from my friend Kelton Minor.

I wrote about the stories people love to tell about the poet J.H. Prynne

I see we're having a debate about whether it's okay to go back to "X," the site owned by a trillionaire fascist who is currently bankrolling the GOP's midterm, throttled Ukraine's war effort, and still winkingly allows vast amounts of CSAM on his service Answer: No, what the fuck is wrong with you

American Werewolf in London for Tax Purposes.

Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.

“The dumbest fascist in the world fucked up the economy by picking a fight he didn’t need but had no moral center and thus broke the back of American petrocapitalism in a failed attempt to get people to stop laughing at him” would legitimately make me quit political science.

Musk unilaterally shut off a defensive capability just as Russia attacked power plants with winter approaching I don't know why anyone trusted him before, but certainly nobody can afford an Elon Musk dependency after this

There will be a lot of equivocating about all the times search warrants have been executed on members of Congress for corruption investigations and the like, and it can't be stressed enough in how many ways HSI raiding Ilhan Omar is extremely not like that.

Five out of six chapters of "Whose Mind is it Anyway?" done enough that I'm not allowed to fiddle with them until I've wrapped the last one (only one section to go).

Ukraine is helping defend Europe as much as Europe is helping defend Ukraine.

Holy shit FOUR members of the ethics committee in Denmark that gave the green light to allow the widely-condemned RFK Jr-funded trial to proceed in Guinea-Bissau have now resigned in protest This quote is 🔥 Great reporting by @melodyschreiber.com www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

horror story in five words challenge: “Ross Douthat YA fantasy novel”

Many congratulations to Anne Carson for the well-deserved Nobel Prize! This is also great news for Translation, Classics, Poetry, the breaking of generic and disciplinary boundaries, and the fact that you don't have to fit a pre-existing mould to have a brilliant, successful career.

Remember when Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale called for public executions? www.thenerdreich.com/joe-lonsdale...

This is a cool tool.

I couldn't remember what genre this was going for and I started watching it on silent because I'm on a plane and then 2/3 of the way through the guitar riff from Salisbury Hill started twanging through my head. An absolute masterpiece

Franklin-Eurythmic thought admits of one interpretation wherein each Sister is maximising her self-interest and one wherein each Sister acts for the good of the whole group, and while that ambiguity is ok (fruitful, even) for a dissident movement I fear it could cause problems when they take power.

In a normal administration counterintelligence agents at the FBI would be investigating this photo. In this administration, the FBI director is in the photo.

another day, another bit of evidence that the scientists who willingly hand over proprietary information to AI firms may experience some consequences

So uhhhhhh… Apparently meta's muse "AI" is just straight up doxxing people to strangers on FB marketplace??? This has the potential to hurt so so many people, and I genuinely wonder how long before they roll out a fix for it.

The NY Times has repeatedly used the phrase “to heel” in reference to Trump’s crackdown on universities, implicitly clarifying that Trump goal is to establish dominance. And what exactly constitutes this “woke” ideology in higher education?

Interesting read, in which he acknowledges that one of the (few) examples used in the main Vanderbilt report as evidence for the hopeless politicisation of anthropology is, in fact, simply science working as it should www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

A woman was drugged, raped, and sexually trafficked to members of a fraternity. Two of the men involved were expelled. Five were given the opportunity to mitigate suspension by *writing an essay.* The dozens of other men who knew this was happening and said nothing? You already know the answer.

after some in-depth discussions with my lab and also drawing on conversations on here, we've edited our new policy on AI usage in my lab feel free to adapt or re-use with attribution, or to reply to tell me how awful this policy is lol

William Shoki: "I have stopped asking whether South Africa has lived up to its idea. It plainly has not. What I want to know is what we would lose if the idea stopped organizing our imagination altogether." africasacountry.com/list/campaig...

They really turned the internet into a distortion machine. Rendering it useless to sane people. Pt 2. This is fucking insane! & now AI will give inaccurate answers to questions we ask - because it's reading its own distortion slop. Worst. Timeline. Ever.