It is all too common for faculty and administrators to refer to a campus conversation or class discussion of public policy as causing "harm". We must challenge the use of this language.

A new post on The Conversation estimates that flushing the toilet equals the water used in 154 GPT-5 prompts and 1,714 GPT-4o prompts. I am wondering if anyone has seen analysis or pushback on the piece. https://t.co/07aMiuh86g

On @stratechery, @benthompson makes the case for US govt's recent stake in Intel:

@STS_News you will find this interesting: https://t.co/R1POg4XAYL. Lots of links to go through.

https://t.co/R1POg4XAYL

This is an incredible deep dive into data centers and their water consumption. Lots of links that you can look into (though I didn't). The conclusion seems to be that data centers have to be treated like any other industrial site. Link in the next tweet.

This is an incredible deep dive into data centers and their water consumption. Lots of links that you can look into (though I didn't). The conclusion seems to be that data centers have to be treated like any other industrial center.

@JerusalemDemsas Oh, @rcobooth had a great thread on this that I bookmarked back when the CTC expansion renewal was the topic of discussion but it seems to have been deleted.

Cc: @JerusalemDemsas

Oh, my original title for this piece was "Take care of the values, and the science will take care of itself," riffing on Richard Rorty's famous "Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself."

Link:

Speculation: the "human capital" thesis is what emerges when politicians, policy makers, and researchers sympathetic to the idea of cash assistance run into an atmosphere of public skepticism. It's scientizing politics--but then the science produces uncertainty, as it it does.

The researchers and the reporters are not the problem; they support this policy anyway. Bruenig should be trying to get more of the skeptical American public to support transfers--a much harder problem than arguing with fundamentally sympathetic experts.

Wrote about the @TheArgumentMag piece between @MattBruenig and @KelseyTuoc about the RCTs on cash transfers. I think Bruenig is right to question the premise of the studies Piper reported on (the "human capital" thesis) but his target is misplaced.

Bureaucratic science is already generously funded and does not need more private support. Philanthropists should fund young outsiders, like during the Golden Age of Science. Read the new article by @stuartbuck1 (link below):

"If I've learned one bitter lesson about this stuff over the years, it's that the best productivity hack in the world is simply liking your job." (!) Great post with some new tools I hadn't heard of:

It would be a comparatively simple socio-technical fix that does not require any agreement on larger issues like the purpose of universities and the utility of LLMs:

As @bjfr's post indicates, students are strategic actors and utility maximizers who will use LLMs for their idiosyncratic goals. This is why I have long wished that educators and unis would lobby for one thing: watermarking to help us reliably detect LLM output in homework.

I also like the idea that "Cultural Pessimist Technology Criticism" has combined with "techlash" that has blinkered our view. But of the two, the techlash is arguably the bigger factor. We've always had the CPTCs and Nicholas Carr was one long before genAI.

I will also say that the question of whether there is a economic bubble is (and should be) kept separate from the question of whether the technology is transformative. Clearly there was a dot-com bubble but 20 years down the road, the internet has been transformative.