Timandra Harkness

Author @BigDataSizeBook & @TechintProblem Radio e.g. Five Knots Steelmanning live events etc.

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

"Technology is not the problem - you are!"
In which I explain the book's title at the @techintproblem launch event at the British Library.
Full highlights video at https://t.co/xWjG9CzcPc

[Sarah McIntyre @jabberworks]

I drew a picture of our bell tower here in Bovey Tracey! … Because if we can’t raise money to fix our tower, we’ll have to sell the bells and replace them with a recording of bells. As you can imagine, I’m gutted about this😳

Can you donate to #SaveBoveyBells?
Link in next post

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

Adding to my reading list…

[Valerio Capraro @ValerioCapraro]

The Pope is making exactly our point. LLMs “may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand.”

This is the core epistemic fault line.

Most AI evaluation is still based on one assumption: if a system statistically approximates human behaviour, then it is close to human intelligence.

But approximation is not intelligence.
Simulation is not understanding.

LLMs can produce the right answer without knowing why it is right. They can simulate empathy without feeling. They can imitate judgment without responsibility. They can generate coherent explanations without having a world to which those explanations are accountable.

Stop confusing behavioural similarity with cognitive equivalence.

Human understanding is embodied, affective, relational, motivational, and normative. It is not just the production of plausible text.

*
Full paper in the first reply

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

@hellothisisivan 😳

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

@almurray @James1940 @NavyWingsUK Ooh it’s like watching Top Gun!

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

@real_dublindamo @exasperatedNI I now have the feeling I get deliberately hustled through T2 so I can’t see the glories of T1 ☹️

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

@exasperatedNI @real_dublindamo I have been flying into the Wrong Terminal!
https://t.co/e2hco2YghL

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

@WoolwichPigeon Pub to pub, right?

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

@Robspiked Especially lovely thing - after one chap had offered me his seat on the bus, 3 teenage girls discussed what a gentleman he was, with great approval. Surely an incentive for other men to adopt gallantry in public!

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

Maybe it’s the heat, or I’m looking especially old and tired, but there’s an EPIDEMIC of gentlemanly behaviour on London’s public transport.

[Tracy Edwards @TracyEdwardsMBE]

36 years ago today Maiden crossed the finish line and sailed into the record books as the first all-female crew to ever sail around the world. We had finished in 2nd place in the 1989/90 WRTR, proving our critics wrong. It was a fantastic day!!

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

This matters.
An obscure London event on the history of the ancient Jewish kingdoms in Judea and Israel is cancelled because of ‘security concerns’ and it turns out this was a reaction to a campaign to fill and then undermine the event by activist disrupters.
How strange! Why would a posse of aggressive activists be interested in the arcane details of bullae and steles and ostraca and inscriptions and numismatics in some small South Levantine kingdoms in the Iron Age?
Well, it is a little more than that which is why it is both disturbing and important. And it matters because at its least it is a threat to history in Britain’s - but also the world’s - greatest temple of History @britishmuseum - and its scholarly integrity.
The BM and its leadership are decent and well-meaning and have explained that they wished to save an event from disruption by bullying vandals but I am sure the BM realizes it is essential to announce a new event fast lest it give the impression that the permission of tiny cadres of aggressive bullies are required before it hold events. But the significance is wider than an event about the Moab and Tel Dan steles in a great museum.
British cultural life is the right and exercise of civic and cultural freedom – a privilege of our liberal democracy - that does not require the permission of gangs of ideological activists nor can it cancelled or postponed nor endured at their beck and sufferance nor permitted with a bend of the knee to their permissions or veto. But that is what this appears to be.
Across the cultural world in the West, though the bewildered middleaged managers of our institutions that are confronting and often submitting to a wave of self-righteous blackmail and mob threat, there is an increasingly thin – indeed ever more fragile and sometimes nigh invisible – line between ‘security concerns’ – and institutional pusillanimity.
Then there is the history itself.
This event concerns the study of the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel that existed between roughly 1100BC and 586BCin the Levant. It is not a coincidence that this was chosen for disruption. The history of the Judean kingdoms and the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem that stood for most of the time between 1000BC and 70ADetc is important and fascinating history in its own right, supported by complex and growing archaeological finds.
These small kingdoms and the subsequent Temple priestly mini-state (restored by the Persian kings Cyrus and Darius 539BC) and then the larger Judean kingdoms of the Hasmoneans and Herodians – between 167BC and 135AD chronicle the long indigenous history of Jews in the region – which the protesters are keen to erase. This is a political project of ideological erasure and malicious incitement of course concerned with the complex, brutal Israel-Palestine conflict that has now gone on for a hundred years and is unlikely to be solved in a small lecture theatre in the British Museum. But it also attempts to deny or erase Jewish history itself – and by implication the heritage of British Jews who live here in Britain, a small community that is now under cultural and sometimes physical threat.
Incidentally - but it is worth saying, this history does not deny anyone else’s history, nor the many other small realms in this region through ancient times nor the many names of the region and its entities and the historical origins of those names (Canaan, or Philistia or Peleset, Phoenicia, Aram Damascus or Moab or later Nabatea and the provinces of Palaestina Prime, Seconda and Tertia and the Ghassanid kingdoms and so on etc etc). The history of one can not be used to erase the history of the other and does not need to do so. The pursuit of knowledge which is one of the delights of human life and is the mission of the BM and indeed anyone who writes, reads or enjoys history, can celebrate and recognize all of these.
Yet this protest and the many like it deployed across Britain nowadays is the opposite of that - an attack on history using the methods of intimidation and vandalism. Much of this involves distorting or dismantling actual history or often lying to replace it with a fabricated ideological structure that nourishes no one and helps no one but degrades our culture and civic life not to speak of history itself. By the way, the frequent claims that these histories or names are ‘denied’ or ‘noone knows them’ is nonsense: anyone and everyone who is interested knows this history. (Much of it appears for example in my book Jerusalem a history of the Holy Land.)
And this is relevant not just to those of us who write study or enjoy the history of the region but also to those who believe that cultural life and civic society is a right that must not be submitted to the aggressions and plots of loud well-organized much-indulged ideologues who take advantage of the freedoms of our society to undermine its principles and the very freedoms they are designed to guard.
Just as vital is a rule of history itself that concerrns the rise and fall of civilizations: the society that ceases to allow to free discussion of ideas and stops respecting and recognizing the value of scientific and historical sources and facts is a society that will fail.

[Herbie Hancock @herbiehancock]

Loudly celebrating 100 years of @milesdavis today!

“Miles never said much about our playing. He just wasn’t the kind of leader who gave notes or made suggestions unless we asked him to. Even then, he usually responded with cryptic comments, almost like little puzzles...

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

The Abel Prize - after the Award ceremony, I interviewed the 2026 Laureate, Professor Gerd Faltings.
(Photo Eirik Baardsen)

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

@ObhishekSaha Thank you, that’s high praise!
I’m back in Oslo now, awaiting the ceremony where the Crown Prince awards The Abel Prize.

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

To Oslo! For a week of celebrating mathematics.

[The Abel Prize @abel_prize]

Science journalist @BigDataSizeBook Timandra Harkness will join us for The Abel Prize Week in Oslo (May 25th–May 28th)! Watch her explain Gerd Faltings' mathematics in this video from the Announcement https://t.co/ESCLaa9ZMZ #mathematics #AbelPrize #abelprize2026

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

In Oslo, where the very trams are flying the flag for The Abel Prize for mathematics

[The Abel Prize @abel_prize]

Dear Abel Friends. We have a lot of photos coming in from you and others. Please find, download and use the official photos (please credit) from The Abel Prize Week 2026. SAVE THE LINK as we add more photos every day. https://t.co/AnnH3x5xaa #AbelPrize2026 #abelprize

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

@_paullay

[Timandra Harkness @TimandraHarknes]

First event of Abel Week 2026: this year’s Abel Prize Laureate, Professor Gerd Faltings, lays a wreath at the Abel Monument in Oslo.