The banning or restriction of the sale or display of Sally Rooney's books (or anyone else's) on the basis of their political views, represents a defeat for liberal democracy and freedom of expression. We only have to go back to the treatment of Salman Rushdie to understand what it means.

The claim that "LLMs cannot think" is unscientific, unless supported by a very difficult argument about non equivalence of causal structure producing anthropomorphic outputs. The claim requires a formally rigorous definition of thinking that captures how humans mentally manipulate conceptual structure. Since LLMs can reproduce all kinds of human output that require operations that are typically considered to involve thought (eg. scene understanding, text summarization, translation, computer programs, mathematical proofs, common sense arguments, spatial cognition, theory of mind), it has to be shown that LLMs reach these results in fundamentally different ways than human minds. In principle, this is not impossible (given that thinking is still relatively poorly understood by cognitive neuroscience), but would be surprising, because it has been shown that the causal structure of computer vision models is structurally equivalent to what neuroscience discovered about visual cognition in primates. In any case, saying that LLMs don't think cannot reasonably mean that LLMs are inferior to human cognition (since that this evidently not true), but that LLMs discovered an equivalent yet at least equally powerful mechanism.

The media euphemism that Keir Starmer has ‘vacated his seat’ is an utter travesty. Almost as if he accidentally wafted away on a gust of wind. Be honest. He u-turned on his promise to stay as an MP, deserted his constituents and his party - for what? To go and make money on the international circuit. The only thing forensic about him is the chalk outline he has left behind instead of a meaningful legacy. A fitting epitaph to the worst PM in our movements history. Believe me, it’s not personal in anyway. I wish him well. But we cannot allow the media and others to sugarcoat just how bad his govt was, by the standards OUR movement expects. We must have an honest analysis of it it. About the toxic culture it fostered, the behaviour it condoned. One that enabled a small clique to bring back Peter Mandelson into the heart of govt. To expel thousands of members for no reason. To clamp down on the right to protest. To allow a genocide to unfold and do next to nothing about it. If we don’t ask ourselves how this happened and why, if we don’t interrogate this sorry chapter - then we are doomed to repeat it. So no, let’s not sugarcoat his legacy.

“We have to be smart, to be critics of this disgusting, harmful, anti-worker, fascist project, so that we attack it at its material roots and detonate it as quickly as possible, rather than letting this bubble run its course.” @MichaelJSWalker in conversation with technology critic and sci-fi author, Cory Doctorow. Watch the full episode of Downstream on our YouTube channel.

A lot of comments and questions about this - and a lot of disagreement, as ever. Try this thought experiment. Financial journalists & oncologists both require critical thinking skills, problem solving skills and communication skills. Would you be happy for an expert financial journalist to switch to oncology mid-career with no further training? Can they just rely on their expert critical thinking, problem solving and communication? If not, why not?

A very interesting article in TES from Christain Bokhove @cbokhove tes.com/magazine/teaching-le… I have also written a piece with some common points docs.google.com/document/d/1…

Strongly recommend this essay about the state of social science and humanities by the great David Runciman. He views politicization as a result of the collapse of these fields rather than the cause. newstatesman.com/cover-story…

When people report PISA (especially rankings) they often seen to ignore standard errors in reporting (significant) differences over time. With the new PISA coming up, it's interesting to read this from PISA 2022. oecd.org/en/publications/202…

Seconded