#AcademicRunPlaylist - 12/12/24

Author

Ben Waber
December 12, 2024

A selfie of me in front of a calm bend in the Charles River on a partly cloudy day. I'm a bald, middle-aged, white man with a red beard flecked with white. I'm wearing black sunglasses and a light blue running sweatshirt with a hood. The water reflects a bright blue sky, with only a few ripples. Brown swampland guides the water in a wide curve, while a forest with mostly bare trees lines the far bank

The wind made for a very chilly short run, but I gutted it out while listening to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Henry Shevlin on identifying and mitigating ethical risks of social LLMs, introducing the term "anthropomimesis" to indicate an intentional design choice to design LLMs to respond in a more humanlike way, at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsHNDZb4M70

Next was a great panel on clinical study consent challenges and updates to various standards at the University of Technology Sydney with Sophie Mepham, Anthony Herbert, Nikolajs Zeps, and Lisa Eckstein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCNL1Af3xo0

Next was a compelling talk by Rebecca Dorn on measuring the gender-queer dialect bias in language models in harmful speech detection at the USC Information Sciences Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S82tUYf2ezQ

Last was "The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order" by Gary Gerstle. This book charts the genesis of US neoliberal thought, its rise to ascendency during the Reagan presidency, and its rapid demise at the end of the Obama presidency. While its US incarnation rose on the right mostly as a repudiation of the New Deal, its adoption by Democrats cemented its dominance until its glaring failings led to its collapse culminating in the 2016 election.

For better or worse, this book is built to last. Gerstle covers events through 2021, and given the mostly by-the-numbers historical recounting today these last sections make for fairly boring reading. In 10 years, though, these sections will be immensely useful. There are also some minor factual errors that bugged me (e.g. Atari was an American company, not a Japanese one), but they don't detract from the overall message. This book stands as a worthy recounting and exploration of an ideology that echoes through society and discourse even today. Highly recommend https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-neoliberal-order-9780197519646?cc=us&lang=en&