Stating the obvious is surprisingly useful. Most of your knowledge lives below the threshold of conscious awareness, so it’s possible for a piece of writing to remind you of what you already know. It’s common to know you don’t like something without being quite sure why, and reading an obvious statement (such as “accuracy matters, even when you agree with the broad strokes”) can help clarify why you find certain things distasteful.
Don't Write Like AI (1 of 101): "It's Not X, it's Y"
The #1 AI writing tell and a daily annoyance of millions.
Nothing to Declare
Making big public statements is always fun and people who think themselves to be important love doing it as a way of trying to influence public opinion and/or politics. They are a way for institutions and individuals to organize and try to shine some light onto important issues. We’ve seen many such things in the […]
Michael Baym on Twitter / X
Remember that you, by definition, cannot distinguish between a good idea and a failure of your own knowledge, judgement, or taste. This is why external (ideally expert) feedback is crucial— Michael Baym (@baym) March 25, 2026
Let’s Talk About Margins
We're making a book. The margins are important. Do you know how important? An essay on the importance of details felt, if not always noticed.
Metacognitive experiences as information: Processing fluency in consumer judgment and decision making
Abstract Thinking is accompanied by metacognitive experiences of ease or difficulty. People draw on these experiences as a source of information that can complement or challenge the implications of declarative information. We conceptualize the operation of metacognitive experiences within the framework of feelings‐as‐information theory and review their implications for judgments relevant to consumer behavior, including popularity, trust, risk, truth, and beauty.
Metacognitive experiences as information: Processing fluency in consumer judgment and decision making
Abstract Thinking is accompanied by metacognitive experiences of ease or difficulty. People draw on these experiences as a source of information that can complement or challenge the implications of declarative information. We conceptualize the operation of metacognitive experiences within the framework of feelings‐as‐information theory and review their implications for judgments relevant to consumer behavior, including popularity, trust, risk, truth, and beauty.
I pulled ~90,000 Reddit posts about what makes writing "sound like AI" to determine the biggest AI-slop giveaways (Part 2)
674 votes, 228 comments. The majority of people can instantly tell when writing is generated by AI. For those who don't intend to get into the weeds…
Marking one’s own viewpoint: The Finnish evidential verb+kseni ‘as far as I understand’ construction
This article examines evidentiality in the frame of inferential adverbs in written interaction from the perspective of Finnish, a language that does not have evidentiality as a grammatical category. The analysis focuses on six adverbs, such as käsittääkseni ‘as far as I understand’ and tietääkseni ‘to my knowledge, as far as I know’. Evidentiality and epistemic modality intertwine in their semantics, as these adverbs represent a writer’s access to information, but also indicate her evaluation of its reliability. First, this article offers a description of the interactional functions of these adverbs such as marking a writer’s opinion in contrasts, expressing slight hedging in order to anticipate corrections, to allow space for other opinions, or to create irony. Second, in the framework of cognitive grammar, the analysis focuses on the meaning of the evidential verb+kseni construction and the effect of different verb stems on it. These adverbs share similar functions in texts, which is due to their flexible constructional meaning. While varying from lexeme to lexeme, specific evidential and epistemic dimensions can either be foregrounded and relevant in a situation or remain backgrounded and not activated.
Valerio Capraro on Twitter / X
Our new paper shows that AI destroys the wisdom of uncertainty.The willingness to say “I don’t know” collapses from 44% to 3%.This happens even when the AI’s advice is wrong. Consequently, correct answers fall from 27% to 9%.Yes: some people who would otherwise answer… pic.twitter.com/l0YZ75IFHn— Valerio Capraro (@ValerioCapraro) August 10, 2026
Shane Littrell, PhD on Twitter / X
One of the red flags of AI-written text is the heavy use of these odd linguistic constructions called “cataphoric teasers” to create an artificial feeling of suspense. These are easy to spot because they usually take the form of phrases like, “Here’s the part that nobody tells… https://t.co/kT4jRUh13x— Shane Littrell, PhD (@MetacogniShane) August 26, 2026
Willingness to look stupid is a genuine moat in creative work
Looking foolish is underrated.
Why Read the Classics?
A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before. In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. And this, too, is a surprise that gives a lot of pleasure, such as we always gain from the discovery of an origin, a relationship, an affinity. From all this we may derive a definition of this type: The classics are books that we find all the more new, fresh, and unexpected upon reading, the more we thought we knew them from hearing them talked about.
when somebody says "of course even I can admit that ai is good for X" X is often something *outside their area of expertise* they've heard it's good at. like, for example, protein folding. spoiler: it turns out that actually there are serious problems with using it for protein folding
John Trant
Here is a rather approachable essay on the subject just published.
when everyone has a different explanation of why the bad numbers are not that bad or why the small number is still very important, the simplest explanation is that the bad number is actually just indeed very bad
Christopher Mims
So I guess either Bluesky becomes a nonprofit or we all start sharing our Threads handles on here…?
“Writing is hard.” Thrilled to share that this simple idea led to a new paper in Political Analysis! Where most text methods focus on content, I test if expression is also effortful action. I find simple measures like character counts reveal attitudes and predict voting. cup.org/4cUmoXi 1/
trying to articulate what i hate about "AI writing"
dan
so it's like if we imagine a normal distribution but then we set super intense resonance at exactly the middle point. that's how it feels to be surrounded by AI writing every day. it's average *without* the normal distribution — just extreme dose of narrow average. this is what pushes my buttons
