Protocol Politics
Metascience is my bag.
Culture
Never Met a Science.
Kevin Munger on the internet, media theory, and institutional reform in the age of AI.
Recent essays
30 of 32Jubilee for Dysfunctional Institutions
AI and scientific funding
AI Allows More Diversity in the Forms of Social Science
Glad to be back!
in the belly of the MrBeast
Editor’s note: This one, empirically, my most successful attempt to condense my academic theorizing for a broader audience: when I posted it the first time it hit number 2 on the front page of Hacker News.
Tyler Cowen is an Information Monster
Editor’s note: I’ve been looking at Marginal Revolution more or less daily for at least fifteen years.
For-Profit Academic Publishers Love LLM Garbage
Against For-Profit "Open Access"
The Ontological Case for RCTs
Knowledge is too expensive!
What was Drake?
[Drake] is necessarily international.
Facebook is Other People
Editor’s note: I’m reposting some of my favorite posts from the history of Never Met a Science while on paternity leave. This, reposted from June 2021, is one of the best things I’ve ever written. The American internet has “gotten worse” because Americans, in…
Everything was Rational and Nothing Vibed
Reposted from February 2023
The Purpose of a Baby is What it Does
I promised another Flusser post a few weeks ago…but personal events have intervened.
Claude found me an error in the ANES
A quick one this week, hopefully something that will save some grad student from mistakenly thinking that they’ve discovered a major reversal in political polarization…
Peer Review 2027
How do we adapt scientific publishing to the age of AI?
The life span of a model is now measured not in centuries but in months
^quote from Flusser, 1985
things will have to change
Social Science in the age of AI
Announcing the "No BS Political Science Newsletter"
(Note: today’s post is primarily of interest to my fellow academics.)
What is "Theory"?
Substack is clearly growing.
Elon Musk Drove ~1/3 of Women Off Twitter
X? More like XY lmao gotem
Knausgaard Discovers The Computer
And so can you!
Towards the Post-Naive Internet
let's. get. into it.
One Year in the "Ecco" Chamber
Eccomi!
Experiments as Performance Art
no IRBs necessary!
La Vittoria, or ‘Suicide of the Machine’
Today’s post builds on my media-theoretic explication of the anti-meme and its application to text, The Antimeme Haunting Western Philosophy.
AI as Normal Science
shoutsout to Arvind and Sayash
The Antimeme Haunting Western Philosophy
Certain ideas naturally resist being encoded into a given medium of communication; epistemic communities built around that medium therefore fail to appreciate the ideas which that medium cannot successfully communicate.
I guess that makes me...Horace Slughorn?
or maybe the centaur named "Firenze"
The antimeme is the message of the medium
The antimeme of the antimeme no longer exists.
"Reciprocal" Digital Sovereignity
Tech regulation raises some of the thorniest questions of our time — about free speech versus hate speech, copyright versus fair use, truth versus manipulation.
Metascience Manquè
Five Years of Never Met a Science
Attention is All You Need
Reading Expands Our Context Windows