James Sumner Profile picture
Jun 13, 2020 3 tweets 2 min read Read on X
#marking OK, I'll go there:

Abolish science and engineering. They no doubt have their uses, but it's not worth it for the volume of students they throw out into the world with no grasp of traceable citation, who will unblinkingly quote from a 500-page monograph with no page ref.
AND ANOTHER THING. Fields that train people to introduce authors by surname only on first mention. STOP IT.

Student mentions the work of "Nick Bostrom", no problem, I've got a picture in my head of the superintelligence guy.

Student just says "Bostrom", I've got Image
Salvation from an unlikely source: apparently one of the Sp#ked crowd saw my plea above, and has come up with a workable strategy to end science. Sounds good. Let's do it!

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with James Sumner

James Sumner Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @JamesBSumner

Sep 28, 2020
Quick thread about corridors and contagion.

I've been hearing about how things played out in a UoM teaching building – one of the big ones with not-so-big corridors – around the middle of last week. If the report (second-hand, I should say) is right, there was no distancing:
students were crowded into the corridors as normal, unable to get out of each other's immediate vicinity for minutes on end. I don't have info on level of masking but this is obviously not good.

My point is that it's unavoidable, if you run mass on-campus activities at all.
UoM has a detailed Covid safety protocol which took a lot of effort by a lot of people, and I don't doubt a case could be made that the problem here is due to some number of students and/or other folk not following that protocol.

I disagree. These approaches just don't scale.
Read 26 tweets
Sep 25, 2020
I once asked a mystic who dwelt atop a mountain what the secret of a contented life was, and the mystic replied: "Act as though your actions might get written up in the news media if they obviously make for good headlines". I wonder what he meant by that.
thetab.com/uk/leeds/2020/… Image
MMU, likewise, more or less writing its own negative press at the moment:
There's a certain inevitable interplay of cause and effect in these situations, which some of us can see, and some of us can't.

A surprising number of the people who can't see it turn out to be making high-level decisions at universities.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 21, 2020
Puddle off, I'm not going to read anything you run if you insist on running it with a stock photo like that. Image
Not even 100% sure this man is a real masked hacker, given he fell for the old "Now give us your signature, which we will put on file" ruse. motionarray.com/stock-photos/p… Image
There's a whole series of these, of course, some of them with more advanced hackers who know to sit facing the screens instead of directly away from them on the other side of the room.

Look, this one's writing a dangerous malware: Image
Read 16 tweets
Sep 18, 2020
Yup (thread up and down). Full transparency is in everyone's interest.

By which I mean: it should go without saying that it's morally the right thing to do, but it's equally the best course from a standpoint of pure greed, assuming the future lasts longer than about two weeks.
See also this. I'm just not sure "We got three months' worth of money by endangering and misleading the people we rely on for further money" is going to turn out to have been a strategic masterstroke.
The sector, having adopted a really bad set of priorities, is now catastrophically failing to serve even those priorities, let alone any of the ones you'd want:
Read 4 tweets
Sep 16, 2020
This is in a problematic degree more fun than the actually quite important and necessary emails I should be writing ImageImage
Too niche? ImageImage
Anybody *not* got Threads on the brain at the moment...? ImageImage
Read 5 tweets
Sep 15, 2020
In sum:
• a meaningful Brexit by definition requires either militarised border in Ireland or NI/GB split
• May's solution: unspecified magic, or, failing that, NI/GB split
• Johnson's solution: promise NI/GB split anyway, then claim that's ridiculous and therefore not binding.
An old favourite returns.

Can't help but notice that where previous series tended to predict non-chaos outcomes, this one... doesn't.

I still find it soothing to look at, simply because it's an orderly diagram, but you may find the Tube map preferable.
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(