David Williamson Shaffer

David Williamson Shaffer

@dwshaffer.bsky.social

Professor of leaning analytics, quantitative ethnographer, husband, father, eater of twizzlers

239 followers46 following599 posts

This is a great and thoughtfully-written 🧵 Pun intended But I’m not sure it is quite right. Writing is a form of thinking—you have to think to write and writing forces you to think But not all thinking requires writing So writing means thinking but that doesn’t imply that thinking is writing 1/

This post is unavailable.
View full thread

Generative AI is so new that we don’t even agree on how to use it well, much less on how to teach someone to use it well But the fact that we don’t know how to do it (yet) doesn’t mean it can’t (or shouldn’t) be done That doesn’t mean we should rush to teach AI writing in schools, but… 5/

We should definitely rush to figure out whether and how it can be done instead of just dismissing it as impossible Or, more problematic, that it has to be worse than what we already know how to do because we already know how to do the things we already know how to do 6/x

This is a great and thoughtfully-written 🧵 Pun intended But I’m not sure it is quite right. Writing is a form of thinking—you have to think to write and writing forces you to think But not all thinking requires writing So writing means thinking but that doesn’t imply that thinking is writing 1/

This post is unavailable.
View full thread

That we can do working with AI — including writing with AI The generous interpretation of objections to *that* is you can’t write well with AI unless you know how to write well already This point I am quite convinced is true, *however* 3/

The fact that you need to write well to write well with AI doesn’t mean that you have to learn to write without AI first In fact, that is almost certainly as false as saying the only way to learn to use a table saw well is to saw wood by hand first The problem is… 4/

This is a great and thoughtfully-written 🧵 Pun intended But I’m not sure it is quite right. Writing is a form of thinking—you have to think to write and writing forces you to think But not all thinking requires writing So writing means thinking but that doesn’t imply that thinking is writing 1/

This post is unavailable.

The generous interpretation of why writing with AI is bad is that there is a *particular kind* of thinking that can only be done when writing “by hand.” I’m not actually convinced that’s true, but even if it is, it ignores the fact that there is *another kind* of thinking… 2/

This 👇 This is the most central cultural impact of the Internet era—what we didn’t understand in the 90s or when social media came on the scene. The empowerment of the marginalized was an important and valuable aim — and promise. But it turns out culture requires norms that aren’t self-enforcing.

This post is unavailable.

🧵

David Williamson Shaffer@dwshaffer.bsky.social

Really, really interesting profile of Sam Altman in the New Yorker on his “trust issues,” arguing that he tells people what he thinks they want to hear, untethered from any sense of an underlying truth Just who you want leading the most prominent AI company podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

View full thread

“He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving”

A thread so good that I decided to follow! Seriously, LLMs can be useful and even more powerful/efficient without being “intelligent” in the way humans are — which is… well, the same as any tool humans use

Dr Abeba Birhane@abeba.blacksky.app

Nature published another pile of trash i am trying to catch up on some of my reading but this one is getting under my skin so here’s a thread highlighting why this piece is either ill-informed or intentionally ignorant of a wealth of knowledge from embodied cog sci and related fields 1/

David Williamson Shaffer reposted

Regardless of one’s feeling about it, such a public response to a political leader is news, and deliberately failing to mention it is self-censorship. It’s like if reporters agreed not to report on the man who threw a shoe at George Bush. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

theguardian.comNBC appears to cut crowd’s booing of JD Vance from Winter Olympics broadcastThe US vice-president, JD Vance, was greeted by a chorus of boos during when he appeared at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan on Friday

David Williamson Shaffer reposted

it's not just that Mamdani is charming af (he is), it's that he is normalizing the idea that children are full members of society that we all share a collective responsibility for

Emoji Caresser@lizrummy.bsky.social

From @acyn.bsky.social (posted on X) "Reporter: Do any of you have a favorite animal? Child: My favorite one is a gold snake that can move. It has gold eyes, and it has a super-duper tail… Reporter: Mr. Mamdani, the second question for you. Mamdani: Yes. It’s also the golden snake."

Best. Thing. Ever. Also, whoever thought up the kids’ podium deserves a medal

Emoji Caresser@lizrummy.bsky.social

From @acyn.bsky.social (posted on X) "Reporter: Do any of you have a favorite animal? Child: My favorite one is a gold snake that can move. It has gold eyes, and it has a super-duper tail… Reporter: Mr. Mamdani, the second question for you. Mamdani: Yes. It’s also the golden snake."

David Williamson Shaffer reposted

GM: Charisma check. Mamdani: [rolls natural 20] GM: that’s a d6 how did you Mamdani: [direct to camera] Did you know you can check out board games at your local public library? 😊

David Williamson Shaffer reposted

Replying to @cblevins.bsky.social

The multimodal aspects of generative AI (we need to stop calling them LLMs because they’re not just about language) have all kinds of profound implications for how we retrieve an create information. Both also raise a host of issues about how we validate the results. This is true… 1/

David Williamson Shaffer reposted

I wrote about some of 2025's big generative AI developments and their implications for historians: multimodal generation, deep research, and handwriting transcription. In short, we need to stop dismissing this as nothing more than "autocomplete on steroids." cblevins.github.io/posts/gen-ai...

cblevins.github.io Generative AI and History in 2025 | Cameron Blevins Personal website for Cameron Blevins, Associate Professor, Clinical Teaching Track at University of Colorado Denver

Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Stars (Wars nor Trek), LOTR, or Marvel, Disney Animated or Pixar.

It's Abby. Yep@itsabbyyep.bsky.social

Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Stars (Wars nor Trek), LOTR, or Marvel, Disney Animated or Pixar.

This 👇💯

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Dems backed Trump into a corner where he’s advocating for starving Americans and hemorrhaging support. If they vote to let him off the hook in exchange for nothing it’s a cataclysmic failure. I know people are in pain but insulating Republicans from political consequences is not the answer.

Wait. Am I the only one who wears a spotted suit and checked tights to class?

Daniel Bellingradt@dbellingradt.bsky.social

Consider yourself an academic? But where is your hat with tassel, the hair worn in a plait, the spotted suit and checked tights, like this fella from 1773 - called: the Academic Mac - is wearing? #academicchatter

Me too, friend. Me too We mock the things we are to be; we are the things we used to mock

Karen Campbell@karampbell.bsky.social

I have become my former supervisor. Late to all meetings, distractable, perpetually annoyed by bureaucracy. Hopefully half as creative?? 😶‍🌫️ #AcademicChatter