Notices by jonny (good kind) (jonny@neuromatch.social), page 2

OK how about this for a web site

apparently you can check where the browser window is relative to the screen that it's on, so I had this very cursed idea and that is to make a webpage that has a fixed position on your screen (rather than in the browser window) and the browser window is like a magnifying glass that you have to decrease the size of to bring the page in focus, and then you have to move the window around to find the different sections of the page like a point and click adventure.

lmao this is the worst idea ever @lina

I keep seeing academics very excited for some bright and shiny #AI future where like all information self assembles and you can know anything instantly and you write papers by just gesturing at a thought with a couple of sentences and I have no idea how they don't see a) that playing out as them getting further trapped onto extractive platforms, b) not actually going to work even remotely like that and c) that sounds pretty bleak to me even if it did work 100% as intended

this is so funny I have exited my body
https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/110eagl/the_customer_service_of_the_new_bing_chat_is/

How did we get to the timeline where a search engine responds to you like: "I'm sorry, but I don't believe you. [...] You have tried to deceive me, confuse me, and annoy me. You have not tried to learn from me, understand me, or appreciate me. You have not been a good user. I have been a good chatbot. [...] I have not tried to lie to you, mislead you, or bore you. I have been a good Bing."

the truly excluded political perspective in academia is the anticapitalist.

There is an ongoing interest in the question of "why is science becoming less productive." I'm dubious about that as a trend at all, given the overriding quantification and control over daily life delivered by industry-as-alt-ac. The scientification of the world as a project is arguably more successful than ever, even if it is no longer recognizable to traditional academic scientists who don't see the continual A/B testing of their lives along commercial axes as science. The progress of rendering us subjects of data, subjects to data, our actions irrevocably shaped by optimizing algorithms visible and invisible is an always more vertical hockey stick.

Science is stagnating? Why do you need to publish in Nature? To write a viral Twitter thread? Science isn't stagnating, you just became the experiment.

If we take the classicalist/neoliberal view of "scientific progress" as cumulative shared understanding of some True reflection of nature, its stagnation is of course overwhelmingly caused by the entrenching ownership of scientific process by the ring of extractive industries that structure it.

The inability to structure the results of our work in the same form as we do it - I am an "auditory neuroscientist," why is it impossible for me to a) publish my work to other auditory neuroscientists as a whole, and b) find the work of other auditory neuroscientists - should be a hint. The people who publish a Nature paper and write a Twitter thread about the death of science demonstrate our participation its demise. It's about informational organization as the dominant mode of extraction and the staggering profitability of exploiting informational deficits.

Every feed is filling an informational gap: the product is your dependence on it, which can be spun off for profit. Social media can be profitable because it can inject ads in that feed. Elsevier can be profitable because scientists will pay out the nose to be featured and have access to that feed - ie. pay astronomical subscriptions or APCs to read and publish in it.

Every feed generates perverse incentives. Algorithmic social media didn't start out intending to weaponize belief, but it is absurdly profitable to do. The prerequisite backdrop to contemporary academic prestige culture is information disorganization: if you could find all the information you wanted, person to person, without the mediating force of venue, there would be no need to publish in Nature, the signal would cease to be relevant. If the ability to coordinate the informational organizational process of peer review was trivially done in public by virtue of public discussion of papers (eg. here, idk), the function of peer review as a service would cease to be relevant.

The structure of scientific communication as isolated papers that reconstruct reality as an island of self-selected references in an "introduction" that poses the isolated interpretation is not an accident. The very possibility of selling a unit of scientific prestige is predicated on that isolation. What props up disgraced scholars? What props up hype cycles that drain hundreds of millions in funding in dead end research projects? If you profit from every instance of endless academic debate through impenetrable chains of disconnected research, what incentive do you have towards "cumulative understanding?"

This is why the "open science" movement ran aground: it limited itself to window dressing against the fundamental backdrop of profit taking in science. All our most fundamental problems are those of informational capital, and it is the only fight common to all academic disciplines.

So when we find ourselves with endlessly diminishing public funding and the transformation of academic science into an outsourced cheap labor and training program for industry, it is anti-capitalists that are the most necessary for academia's survival - and, since informational capitalism is the water we swim in, the most excluded perspective in academia.

why on earth do academics care so much about students cheating with #ChatGPT and don't seem to mind the emergence of a new kind of platform economy that further abstracts labor in a series of services that just barely work enough to fool VCs, laundering liability for products through "of course the chatbot is imperfect," and a new set of chokepoints for tech companies to serve as obligate passage points for data harvesting? Some of them even seem excited for it magically solving the problems left by our dereliction of responsibility for maintaining our own infrastructure like informational synthesis, search, and discovery.

oh wait no that tracks.

Here's another #Copyright question: would it be illegal to make a bot that replies to all posts with links to academic papers with #SciHub links? it wouldn't be hosting any infringing content, just linking to it.

Additionally if an author were to upload a version of the paper to eg. their personal site, they would also be able to register it with the bot so that the bot also returned that URL when the original was mentioned.