James Carney

Associate Professor, London Interdisciplinary School Founding Director, Texture AI

[Tadeg Quillien @TadegQuillien]

'Pressures to pay article processing fees on the part of funding agencies and university libraries waste research funding and stymie efforts to establish more sustainable publishing systems.
We recommend a total abandonment of author-paid publication fees for academic research'.

[James Carney @JamesPCarney]

@gmiller @JamesAFurey Oh I think it’s unfair to single out the *American* educational system on this one.

[James Carney @JamesPCarney]

Wolf vs ape, in lyrical free verse

[Geoffrey Miller @gmiller]

There are guys out there.

Guys who just quietly make something of themselves, and attract a great woman, and have a whole bunch of kids. And then spend the rest of their long, quiet, contented lives being fiercely devoted to their grateful kids and their dozens of grandkids.

They're just playing a completely different game than the rest of us clowns.

We get caught up in our little money games, dominance games, status games, prestige games. Our credentialism, careerism, and consumerism. Our follower counts, citation counts, or Series B valuations. Our sad little skirmishes in the culture wars. Our thousand varieties of engagement bait and social signaling. Our bottomless thirst for social and sexual validation.

Meanwhile, those guys are just keeping their heads down and building their mini-dynasties.

Maybe they end up owning the second most popular Kia dealership in the tri-state area, or work as senior logistics manager for a trucking company down in Springfield, or do the tax accounting for local businesses. They have no pretensions of shaping national politics or world events; they just guide their neighborhoods and cities to grow a little better in a hundred small but significant ways. Their jobs are just a means to an end, and the end is their family and their community. And their wives and kids admire them for it, decade after decade after decade.

Those guys won't even see this message. They're too busy to spend time on social media. Even if they're on X, their follower count is basically their extended family, their friends and neighbors, and a few folks from their congregation.

But God bless them, I say. They know what's up.

They're playing the long game.

While the rest of us are stumbling around trying to discover the meaning of life.

[James Carney @JamesPCarney]

@gmiller @EgeErdil2 … and this is the bitter lesson of human social cognition. Perversely, the opposite of the deep learning version: we can chuck as much compute at the problem as we like; the problem is that the algorithm is fucked.

[Robin Hanson @robinhanson]

I thought we have a big fertility problem. Then I realized it is probably caused by an even bigger harder to fix problem.

[Geoffrey Miller @gmiller]

@EgeErdil2 The 'post scarcity' people don't seem to understand that in terms of basic survival needs, most of the world is already post scarcity.

But in terms of human status needs, which are zero sum, we can never be post scarcity.

[Geoffrey Miller @gmiller]

Naive hypothesis:
A lot of the Gen Z negativity around work arises from the increased load of 'emotional labor' required by a lot of service jobs - smiling, being patient, handling rude customers, tolerating shoplifting, etc.

Back in 1983, Arlie Hochschild published her classic book 'The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling', which analyzed the distinctive emotional & self-control demands of customer-facing service work, compared to agricultural/industrial work.

You could be a grumpy plowman, coal miner, or factory worker. Didn't matter much. But now, you're not allowed to be a grumpy salesperson, barista, flight attendant, or customer service rep. Especially in America, these newer roles demand a level of simulated cheerfulness, empathy with customers, & self-control that can feel pretty inauthentic and alienating. I wonder if this contributes to the huge rise in depression and anxiety in younger adults.

On top of this 'emotional labor', there's a new layer of 'ideological labor', in which young people not only have to feign cheerfulness, but also have to pretend they believe in ideological and political values that they don't really care about -- the endless diversity training, DEI initiatives, & political peer pressure.

So, I have some sympathy with younger adults who feel that their jobs require an onerous level of emotional labor, and ideological labor, above and beyond the practical requirements of the job.

tldr: It's not just the nominal jobs that are exhausting them. It's the corporate expectations of feigned cheerfulness & mandatory wokeness that amplify the exhaustion & alienation.

[The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) @weareLIS]

Some of our master' students at our first LIS graduation!

Many congratulations to our first cohort of MASc students, master's in Interdisciplinary Practice!

[The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) @weareLIS]

MASc programme director @JamesPCarney conferring one of our first MASc in Interdisciplinary Practice degrees.
Congratulations Tiyasha!
🎊 👏 💐

[Carl Gombrich @carlgomb]

Agree.

Three things on this.

1. I love this country;
2. As Dean of the new university @weareLIS I am proud and happy that we have our first graduation ceremony this coming Wednesday;
3. We won't be playing the national anthem.

[The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) @weareLIS]

🛸 Ready for an out-of-this-world experience? Join us for a webinar on decoding messages from alien civilisations! 🔍

Learn how we might crack the code using mathematical methods & computational analysis.

Don't miss this out - register now! 🔭

🔗 https://t.co/aSjXAXfUgM

[The Bookseller @thebookseller]

In conversation at #FutureBook23 are author of My Child, The Algorithm @HannahSilvaUK, computer linguist @JamesPCarney and Footnote Press' @sujoy_r to present a creative case study on writing in collaboration with AI.

🎫 To find out more and book your ticket, follow the link here: https://t.co/gPYrtCvXQZ

[James Carney @JamesPCarney]

“It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone" ––J.M. Keynes.

Break out of the room; apply for our Master's programme!

[The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) @weareLIS]

At the heart of our master’s degree, you’ll find three things: interdisciplinary methods, complex problems, and the opportunity to work on the things that matter to you.

⚡️Unlock your problem-solving potential, & apply it to the real world.

✍️ Apply now: https://t.co/2Li3wMrWeH

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

How to make £493,964,000 in just 8 hours 30 minutes

Easy, get govt to bin nutrient neutrality laws for house builders exactly what the likes of Persimmon PLC, Barrat Developments PLC and Taylor Wimpey PLC did this morning & that's exactly how much richer they are this afternoon.

[James Carney @JamesPCarney]

@gmiller @postjabron Maybe I’m too cynical, but I always assumed that was the point? The 20th C shows that *any* visible elite eventually triggers evolved responses and gets the chop. Wrap power in a miasma of “objective” complexity and you get an invisible boot stamping on a human face, forever.

[James Carney @JamesPCarney]

@herebehumans This is a reasonable ask, but I'd also like an automated system that sends reviewers a cash transfer from the publisher in return for their labour. Can't say for sure if that makes me a commie or a capitalist 🤫

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Irish Family Eating a Meal of Potatoes and Milk, 1917.

The "Irish" potato is not originally from Ireland but from South America (specifically Peru and Bolivia), where the Indigenous people have been growing it for thousands of years. After the Spanish conquistadors invaded the region during the 16th century, they brought the potato back to Europe where it eventually became a popular food crop by the 19th century.

During the 1840s, a potato blight began to infect all the potatoes throughout Europe. The Irish were hit particularly hard because they almost solely subsisted on potatoes. They were mostly tenant farmers who were allocated a small plot of land in return for working on the lands of their landlords. Potatoes were easy to grow in a small area and were cheap, filling, and less prone to spoilage, so it became the perfect food source for the poor.

At the height of the Irish famine in 1847, the British landowners continued the exportation of food from Ireland to England and Scotland, which only exacerbated the situation. England refused to enact any sort of export ban. Approximately 1 million Irish people died due to starvation.

In the same year, the Choctaw people managed to scrape together $170 (worth $4,800 today) to send to Ireland for famine relief. Just 16 years prior, the Choctaw had been removed from their lands and made to walk the "Trail of Tears" in which as many as 4,000 men, women, and children died due to starvation, disease, and exposure.

The Ottoman Empire also sent ships stocked with food but were turned away by the British. They had to covertly transport their supplies into a small town, 70 miles north of Dublin, in order to feed the starving Irish. Sultan Abdulmeiid I also offered to donate 10,000 British pounds (worth $1.3 million today), but Queen Victoria refused to accept as she had already donated 2,000 British pounds and did not want to lose face. The sultan begrudgingly lowered his offer to 1,000 British pounds.

[James Carney @JamesPCarney]

@gmiller @prageru To agree and amplify: most people don't avoid committing murder because they're moral––it's because they don't actually *want* to commit murder. Always find this kind of moralism strange, because it implies we're all serial killers who just got a grip on the serial killing.

[James Carney @JamesPCarney]

@herebehumans The issue here, I think, is that average Dutch proficiency with English is so good that Dutch-accented English is heard by native English speakers as a regional accent of English. So when the timbre of Dutch is evinced through actual Dutch, it can be slightly uncanny valley.

[James Carney @JamesPCarney]

@0a0505 @jonatanpallesen This is the correct answer. The fiction is that we could be born (or whatever) at any point in history, when any individuated person is the product of material antecedents in their environment that occur once and once only. Maybe there's some simulation get-out, but implausible.