I like interesting things. I love beagles, and ships, and art. I can push my index fingers all the way back against my hands. I am a libertarian, but it only comes up occasionally. I'm trained as an accountant; very boring. I love the outdoors. And now you know the important things about me!
Why this philosopher turned down Anthropic ← everyone read this article on AI's efforts to court the humanities right now.
Or simply read these paragraphs, which to me are the key thing:
But some of their questions seemed completely off the point to me. Was AI a new kind of entity, demanding a new metaphysics? What would it mean for a large language model to have a “character”? How should that character be formed? Could Anthropic’s Claude chatbot suffer, or be harmed?
But I didn’t want to talk about Claude. I wanted to talk about the user, about addiction and dehumanisation, about power and accountability. I don’t for a minute think AI needs a new metaphysics, and nothing that was said in the “exclusive briefing” I attended made me change my mind about that. But there was resistance to my efforts to change the subject. I worried that behind this wish to draw attention to Claude’s “status” there was a hope for a kind of baptism, a moral and intellectual credit note.
So important to remember that, in conversations about the morality of AI, we have to keep dragging the focus away from the machines and back to the people they are affecting. 'Is AI a moral agent?' Not a relevant question! 'Is AI being deployed in a way that prioritises the actual good of users? What is the actual good of users? How does the physical infrastructure of AI impact the local people and their environment?' Relevant questions!
Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
"When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all."
Look, I agree that perhaps the Witch-king should have been less assured of his own invincibility in a world where elves, dwarves, hobbits, wizards, the undead, and women are all real things, but I think he would have still been screwed even if Glorfindel's prophecy had been less exact in its wording. Consider the following scenario, for instance.
Witch-king: "Hinder me? Thou fool! Nobody may hinder me!"
Odysseus of Ithaca, very lost:
The proof that chiropractic is an utterly failed medical profession is not that adjustments can cause harm, but that the profession has responded by ignoring and denying the harm, rather than studying it.
All medical treatments (other than complete placebos) have some risk of harm, but for real treatments given by real professionals, the harms are tracked, measured and warned about. If the harms are too severe, the treatment is no longer used.
One of my colleagues was a chiropractor. After a while he began to suspect that a lot of his patients actually just had muscle tears, not spinal issues. He bought an ultrasound machine, learned how to use it and how to read ultrasound, and found that to be the case. Between that and the constant pressure from management to get customers (because lbr, they're not patients, they're customers), he got sick and tired of it and bailed to become a sonographer full time.
And before people pipe up with "but my chiro is good, they have me do exercises and so on!" that's just regular ass physiotherapy. See a physiotherapist. A lot of people who sing the praises of chiros because they saved them from chronic pain would have gotten the same benefits from seeing an actual licensed physio, who can prescribe the same or even better exercises because they have an actual fucking education.
The amount of fucking charts I've seen where a patient went to a chiropractor and now needs a surgery is fucking insane.
All I do is medical charts, day in and day out doing medical code. I've gone over hundreds of patients whole year of appointments. Unless the chiropractor is also a physical therapist, that patient is going to get worse and need surgery with very few exceptions. It doesn't matter when they mention seeing a chiropractor, by the end of the year they need surgery for issues that started after *shock and awe* a chiropractor appointment! I've seen patients needing multiple surgeries to be functional after chiropractors. I've seen patients lose their ability to walk because of chiropractors. And all the way up till they need surgery, through the issues piling up and needing more pain meds, the patients insist it's helping because the want so badly for it to be helping. I wish it did
Text: Sailor's nightmares are wild things which escape quite often, and make their monster homes in the deep. Only one ship has the gall to chase them, and the tools to take them out.
Which of these live action fictional horses is your favorite?
Black Beauty (1994 version)
Brego (LOTR)
Shadowfax (LOTR)
The Black (The Black Stallion)
The Pie (National Velvet)
Phillip (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe)
Misty (Of Chincoteague)
Little Blackie (True Grit)
Goliath (Ladyhawke)
Joey (Warhorse)
Soñador (Dreamer)
The Horse who's not a horse he's a dog and sometimes he has wings (Winter's Tale
Remaining time: 4 days 18 hours
*Disclaimer: none of these horses are responsible for the quality of the movie around them
Pictures below the cut:
Black Beauty (voiced by Alan Cumming and midwifed by Sean Bean)
Brego
Shadowfax
The Black
The Pie (who is NOT a piebald so they changed it to some thing about 'oh his old owner called him a pirate' which tbh is a better way to name a horse than just naming him his coat pattern/coloring- looking at BOTH OF YOU WALTER FARLEY AND ENID BAGNOLD)
Phillip
Misty
Little Blackie
Goliath
Joey
Soñador
The Horse (in the book his name is Athansor. Also he is the "White Dog of the East". I have not read the book and this is not explained in the movie. This movie is so weird. Please watch it. It's not good.)
in love with this Norwegian trotter named Express Go that’s won 7/7 races so far, is only 14.2hh, and has taught herself to duck down her head to give herself super speed (and lengthen her stride I guess)
i cannot emphasize enough that warrior cats is, functionally, game of thrones for children
with all of the violence, politicking, and poor writing decisions that implies
whatever level of brutality that RP had was probably on par with the actual series
Hmm... The RP wasn't as heavy on the GOT-Style Politicking, and it didn't have much interpersonal violence (the cat colony was a very cooperative group for reasons that will become obvious in a minute) buuuut I think it might have been worse because the RP was a different Genre of Horror: Being A Small Mammal In The Wild. Disease. Predators. Hurricanes and other natural disasters. Urbanization and Pollution. The threat of starvation vs. the risk of the hunt. The balance of how much you were doing for the colony vs. how much it benefited you.
It wasn't a forum-type freeform RP, it was more of a chatgroup-based TTRPG where everyone played multiple characters and there was a lot of interpersonal RP, but there were very much encounters/combats/puzzles that were governed with the rules of a game called Mouseguard, which is very much from the school of early D&D where you'd show up with a binder full of characters you'd rolled up, because you were expecting most of them to die. Some sessions could involve multiple generations of cats.
The Game Master of that RPG was a former Hackmaster player of mine, and when she was busy with grad school, it was convenient for her to have me come in and play an antagonist for her players, instead of making her play ALL the NPCs. Some of the Antagonists I played were:
A female cougar that systematically hunted the colony to drive them to extreme paranoia so they'd fragment and be easier for her to hunt as her pregnancy progressed and she became less mobile/her cubs demanded more from her body.
She was based on real-life events where a female cougar destroyed a large and controversial local cat colony over the course of a winter. The party did not defeat her, they had to leave and re-settle outside of her territory.
A Rabid Bat, and the subsequent Rabies Outbreak, with me taking over Player Characters as they succumbed to the disease. I remember a deliciously tragic post by the player who was the medicine cat. They decided their PC was so devastated by the outbreak that they consciously decided to go insane and join the rest of the rabid despite not actually being infected.
A Great-Horned Owl that should have been a fairly moderate encounter for the colony but somehow ended up killing like 80% of the PCs before they finally got it? RIP Horohoro, you were a wonderfully stupid menace to play.
A Team of human Trap-Neuter-Release volunteers, which got really existential and traumatic really fast. We kind of agreed halfway through that this was actually too depressing and moved onto my next, less tragic and Much funnier antagonist:
A Horse With A Phobia Of Cats. Cats had a 20% chance of encountering The Horse if they crossed a specific meadow, which they had to cross All The Time, because the only two sources of water and the fucking moonpool were in the meadow. It presented a severe logistical nightmare with a countdown- the cats had to figure out how to deal with the horse before the next half-moon or risk getting cut off from the starclan, and every day they didn't deal with the horse they had to roll for complications for dehydration.
It took them five deaths and 26 days to figure out they could just Open The Gate.
Assisted in playing some natural disasters including a Hurricaine (and resulting flooding) , an 8.0 earthquake (and resulting tsunami), and a wildfire (and resulting famine).
Just A Fucking Alligator, who the players weren't actually supposed to fight, it was just there to prevent them from crossing a river at a convenient place on the map that the DM didn't want them to use, but Getting a 12AM Text from a friend asking me "Hey, wanna be an alligator?" When I was zooted on cold meds was really fun if somewhat disappointing in that I wanted to be magically transformed into The Objectively Best Reptile.
An Escaped Serval, who was actually perfectly friendly towards the PCs but *massively* disrupted the social and political dynamics of the colony because he was just so extremely fuckable. He got murdered in an ides-of-march style uprising by the male cats who felt they had been cucked, which lead to a full-on civil war event.
An Outbreak of Rabbit Papilloma Virus that had mutated to effect cats as well. Don't google that after dark. That arc lead to a shitload of political fuckery and the ascension of the new clanleader: Stageye, who became a very bitter believer in Nominative Determinism.
Since the Players enjoyed the Mountain Lion Psychological Horror so much (and everyone was playing too many characters and wanted a die-off event), I returned as another systemic colony-killer: A pack of similarly magical and hyperintelligent Feral Dogs.
The Ash River Cemetery Pack were some of the best antagonists I've every played. I'm trying to find my RP notes but I remember Streetmeat, Third-Rail Racer, Overhead-Underhand, Two-Buck Luck, Darkstar, and Magenta, son of Tangerine (the medicine dogs were all named after different shades of red/purple/orange, AKA colors dogs normally can't see).
I should draw them sometime.
IIRC, the cats killed at least three of the eight dogs but ended up having to cede a lot of their territory to them and make an alliance with a previous rival colony to survive the winter.
Garfield, Eldritch Entity (Joke session modeled on a Simpson's Halloween Episode)
Like I said, I'm not very familiar with Canon Warrior Cats Lore, but my god is it fun to come in and play A Fucking Problem while everyone applauds you for being Such A Devastating Fucking Problem.
telecom service providers in india are getting orders from government to shutdown our internet. they might also mass delete the posts and videos online. i know this is not the content you followed me for but please raise voice for the people in india if you can. if you find any posts about the brutality that the police inflicted upon protesters, people seeking legal or medical attention, people needing donation for sanitary pads, food, water, masks, etc. on twitter or instagram, please share it. it's my humble request. this is our last day. they're applying emergency alerts and new rules from tomorrow but today we are standing here in rain raising our voices and we will continue to do so.
Irrational hatred: people believe in a pseudoscience and defend it passionately but NEVER are willing to do any science about it. My beloved friend! If you can prove that people born during a specific and predictable time have a specific and predictable trait, we will PUBLISH. If a specific rock structure results in a quantifiable effect while adjacent to the human body, we will write a BANGER paper together! If plants can form memories then let’s write a follow-up paper and get funding for a lab!! Make a survey! Generate a testable hypothesis! Don’t be so incurious about the world!
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