Matthew Parent, PhD

Work in state gov. Associate, Harvard Kennedy School/Belfer Center for Int'l Affairs, Project on Managing the Atom. All tweets personal. UMass/CUA/UConn alum.

[Matthew Parent, PhD @MatthewParent1]

Hahahahaha why the hell did I become a political scientist

[Juliette Kayyem @juliettekayyem]

I wrote about how DOGE was destroying our capacity to prevent harms. Efficiency isn’t always the best metric for government responsibility. Prevention is immeasurable until it’s needed and then you’ll be really glad you had it. This is bad and blaming DOGE is correct. Totally. ⬇️

[Matthew Parent, PhD @MatthewParent1]

@jmlotman “Co-working.” These aren’t people. You’re outsourcing the act of research and scholarship. You work is undoubtedly worse for it; your worth as a researcher is even more in question.

[Matthew Parent, PhD @MatthewParent1]

Hey do you don’t know if it’s a strong argument because you didn’t do the research to write the paper. That’s not how any of this works. You’re a grifter. Go away.

[Mushtaq Bilal, PhD @MushtaqBilalPhD]

🚨Claude Code just gave me a complete research paper with a single prompt.

The paper has a strong argument and even beats AI-detection app, Pangram.

With a little editing, it can pass for 100% human, and can be easily submitted for peer review.

Here's the workflow I used:

[Matthew Parent, PhD @MatthewParent1]

@jmlotman They aren’t absurdly good. They—and you—are degrading scholarship and making us all more mediocre.

[Matthew Parent, PhD @MatthewParent1]

@jmlotman It’s a basic understanding of how LLMs and the philosophy of science work. It’s not a useful direction for AI or scholarship. It also has the added bonus of being ethically dubious and reeking of charlatanism.

[Matthew Parent, PhD @MatthewParent1]

@jmlotman It’s not unprecedented or interesting. It’s definitionally derivative. It doesn’t represent scholarship. Of course he said those things — he’s grifting and you’re apparently an easy mark.

[Matthew Parent, PhD @MatthewParent1]

@jmlotman The person doing the reading and writing matters. “Careful and creative curation” is a farce. This isn’t scholarship. Ai does not generate new knowledge. It’s incapable of novel insight in the humanities.

[Matthew Parent, PhD @MatthewParent1]

@jmlotman Ai will not generate new knowledge based on a lit review. Scholars enter into a conversation with their papers based on their research. What is proposed here isn’t research.

[Matthew Parent, PhD @MatthewParent1]

@MushtaqBilalPhD Go away.

[Matthew Parent, PhD @MatthewParent1]

This is unhinged, psychotic commentary. This mindset makes Americans (and the world) less safe. It is antithetical to freedom and the intrinsic human rights that everyone on earth should enjoy.

[InfantryDort @infantrydort]

You know what? Fuck this. I’m so sick of the retired military academic class and their smug bitch made criticism.

Hopefully this ape gets community noted. But it’s fine.

You know what? I actually did the things you say I haven’t. Many witnesses to this.

You’re right though, I wasn’t thinking about ethics in the heat of battle. You got me Mike. GUILTY.

When I was watching the green tracers streaming from the neighborhood in front of me near Sadr City, shooting at my boys and I, I wasn’t thinking of the law of war. GUILTY.

I didn’t stop to have an ethics huddle with the boys. I didn’t move forward to ask if there were civilians in the buildings.

No, I called for a linear artillery target to level the entire fucking neighborhood because the hair on the head of even one of my men is worth more than every person in Iraq to me.

Then I called for jets to bomb the shit out of those same buildings until the firing stopped. No friendly casualties. Massive enemy BDA.

The next days the local cemetery had a massive stream of corpses from that engagement. Were some civilians? Were they all enemy? I don’t know. I don’t care.

I would siege Constantinople to save the life of an American son or daughter. Ruthlessly.

Go to hell you smug bastard.

[CONSEQUENCE @consequence]

Ronny Chieng had one message for Harvard grads during his commencement speech: destroy AI.

"Look, a lot of other respected graduation speakers in colleges around America are talking about you guys needing to master AI for the future. I'm here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI...

"And I know, I know there's someone sitting out here right now who’s just like, 'Well, you know, what about the use of AI to pioneer breakthroughs in medicine and physics?' Well, first of all, shut up, nerd. I'm not talking about that. Obviously, if you're using it for that purpose, you're not the problem.

"I'm talking about the accumulation of cognitive debt due to excessive use of large language models according to a study by MIT published in 2025. That's right, MIT. MIT did that study. I guess you guys were too busy giving each other A's. Feel free to boo MIT, by the way, and AI, and yourselves, I guess.

"Look, this is actually good news, okay? This is why you guys shouldn't be scared of AI, because I think AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber. Have you heard how dumb people brag about how they use AI? They're always like, 'Hey, did you know that AI can now read my email, summarize it, and drop a response?' Yeah, you know who else can do that? Me. I can do that. You can't do that? How useless are you? You need artificial intelligence just to match me? I'm a dumb*ss who couldn't get into Harvard.

"From what I can see, getting an actual advantage from AI in the future will require a minimum escape velocity of intelligence that I'm assuming you guys from Harvard have. Everyone else who can't match that is just going to get dumber, and that's when you run up the score on them, assuming we still have a functioning society, of course.

"But to run up the score, you’re going to have to master your craft. And AI can be the fuel, but fuel is useless if you can't kindle the fire. For example, I recently used AI to use regression analysis to prove that a certain race of people are mathematically terrible at sports. I won't say which race, but thank you for not inviting Hasan Minhaj to Harvard. My point is, learning the fundamentals still matter. If I didn't know what a regression analysis was, and if I wasn't fundamentally racist, would I have been able to do any of that? No.

"Untalented people love bragging about using AI to help them draft their speeches and their scripts and their podcasts and their promo videos for UFC fights at the White House, which to be fair, even if they had filmed that for real, it would still have looked like AI. But what they're missing is this: the creating is the fun part. The best part of comedy writing is figuring out the puzzle pieces of a joke and getting the self-regard from having accomplished a difficult thing. Why would I want AI to take that away from me?

"You know what problem I want AI to solve? I want the problem of AI making everything look like sh*t. I want AI to solve that problem. How about that?

"Or how about, can AI take away the part of comedy writing where my TV pilot gets passed on and when I ask if I can pitch it to someone else, the network says, 'We don't want it, but we also don't want anyone else to have it. We just want you to be sad.' Can AI solve that?

"I recently tried to introduce my friend to Buddhism through a book called Buddhism Made Simple. It was literally a book about Buddhism made simple. And instead of reading it, he used AI to summarize it in 10 seconds. Believe it or not, he didn't reach enlightenment. It turns out speed running Buddhism is completely missing the point.

"And I know this platitude is almost worthy of AI, but the reason shortcuts to skip to the end aren't always good is because the journey isn't just how we acquire skills. The journey is the point of all this. It is! It turns out maybe the real Harvard was the friends we made along the way.

"Look, I know this won't apply to everyone's industry, but I'm just saying whatever your chosen profession is, please don't let AI rob you of the fun part of it.

"I think your generation's upcoming battle won't be humans against AI. That's at least two months away. It's going to be people with substance versus people with shallow knowledge. It’s going to be mastery versus faking it. It's going to be people with good taste versus tacky. I trust you will put in the work necessary to be on the right side of those battles."

[Matthew Parent, PhD @MatthewParent1]

@NathanPStrauss Oooooo boy that’s going to hurt

[Matthew Parent, PhD @MatthewParent1]

@NathanPStrauss

[Interesting AF @interesting_aIl]

Comedian Ronny Chieng says "f*ck AI" during Harvard graduate speech

"AI is just gonna end up making mediocre people dumber”

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

🔥 @ronnychieng at Harvard: “F*ck A.I. — the mission of your generation is to destroy it… shortcuts to skip to the end aren’t always good. The journey is the point of all this.”

[Charlotte Alter @CharlotteAlter]

The Pope's humanist manifesto does something really interesting; not only does he call for new regulations and guardrails, but he also calls out what he describes as the "anti-human vision" pervasive in the tech world.

Human limitations, he argues, are not bugs in our code to be fixed or optimized. They're at the core of love, wonder, community, the shared vulnerability of being human.

https://t.co/nkS6v8gYnA

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

In the era of #ArtificialIntelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace. #MagnificaHumanitas
https://t.co/6i9MWs6LJl

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5,000 years.