Nobody talks much about capillary power these days. Probably because we have too many lessons in actual power. This was a predominant concept for many decades in social theory. Derived from Michel Foucault who held that power was not held by individuals or organizations, but spread through society. Every act …
AI has become something of a bogeyman and it is not helpful to view the technology in this way. It is indeed often hyped up junk, as when Apple’s AI helpfully prioritizes spam email as ‘urgent’ for me. Yet as with any other technology it brings change and benefits and …
It helps a scammer if the victim thinks they would never be the kind of person who falls for scams. Successful fraud depends on the fraudster generating compliance by imposing their definition of the situation on their target. Erving Goffman (1952) outlines the process of ‘cooling the mark out’ – …
Describe the problem. Follow the instructions, jeez. Learn a totally new syntax to describe the problem again. Okay, don’t follow those instructions, follow these. No, you have to do this totally different thing first. Yeah, it doesn’t work automatically. You have to change it from ‘not working mode’ to ‘working …
We want to be useful to society. But any attempt to show that or to have it guide us either destroys what we are, or turns us into technical servants or mouthpieces of other peoples’ ends. If you want to see how that turns out, enjoy listening to Christian Rock. …
Many grants have I reviewed, grasshopper. This blog post is meant to give some advice on how to frame a grant effectively so it appeals to reviewers. The first point is to look for what data scientists call “Stop words”. Stop words in data science are terms that are not …
There has been a lot of recent conversation about radicalisation through different forms. Mumsnet has been blamed for radicalising its participants. There is an implied theory of change here. It is that radicalisation works something like environmental exposure. Radicalisation is like pollution in the info sphere. Exposure to small doses …
Tech doesn’t kill people, over capitalised techbros kill people. We are in the tail end of the AI hype/panic cycle. We are all well beyond noting that LLMs can reproduce human failings. It is vital that if we are to use a tool like ChatGPT or any generative AI to …
That thing we tell you to do, and never show you how to do it? Critical thinking is all about context. For example, take the Marvel cinematic universe. I promise I’m not obsessed about this even though I’ve mentioned it quite a lot. Critical thinking starts with a ‘what is’ …
… Otherwise they would not actually be institutions at all. That is basically what an institution is, as opposed to a temporary association or social movement. I was trying to think through some irritation at the tendency of leaderships to just make changes that are very in the moment and …
