Joy Buchanan

There’s a growing trend of parents intentionally raising their kids like it’s the late 90s again. No iPads. No algorithm. Just bikes, VHS tapes, books, outside play, family dinners, and boredom that forces kids to actually use their imagination. Id love to know where they’re getting these VHS tapes?

idk how two parents with standard in person 9-5 jobs have elementary aged kids because every three weeks there is some award ceremony, parade, or presentation at school that is from 9:30-9:45 am. and in the month of may, it's once a week, and don't forget the random half days.

New blog post: The third wave of American philanthropy Hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic capital will soon become liquid. The OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of OpenAI, worth about $220B at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth and have instituted the most aggressive donor matching program for employees in tech history. How much does this all add up to? And how meaningful is that in the context of philanthropy today? I was doing some simple napkin math to wrap my head around the scale of what’s coming, and radicalized myself in the process. I had dramatically underappreciated the scale of the philanthropic capital that’s about to become available and the corresponding gap in talent and organizations that will be needed to make the most of it. This piece aims to directionally sketch the scale of what’s coming, the gap in operational capacity needed to absorb it, and what we can do to fill it. (Link to full post in reply)

I've gotten a lot of comments like this, so forgive me if this isn't very kind, but I'm at my limit. If you're a serious academic, you've spent a lot of time looking at citations, and you know they often contain errors. You know that it's very common for professors just to copy citations they found in other papers and put them into their own papers because they need a lot of citations to look credible. Given that this is going on, it's kind of silly to think that we should have a kind of death penalty for having an LLM, hallucination mistake What you're doing is virtue signaling and pretending that citations are somehow sacred to what academics do, when in fact they're mostly just poorly put up window dressing. You're being dishonest. Perhaps with yourself, perhaps with me.

Definitely not my expertise, but my assumption would be that fertility rates have fallen because: (1) Cheap contraception. (2) Women's greater independence from men. (3) Persistent obstacles to women having children without men.

There are important distinctions getting blurred in the conversation about arXiv and generative AI. arXiv’s written policy does not prohibit LLM use (see attached). In fact, it directly acknowledges that authors may use these tools, while emphasizing that authors remain fully responsible for the entire submission. But, the recent X thread on enforcement raises deeper questions and seems to mingle evidence of LLM usage with more severe misconduct. What counts as evidence of misconduct versus evidence of imperfect editing using tools that are explicitly allowed? If a manuscript contains hallucinated references, fabricated claims, invented data, or misleading content, that is a serious problem. Such authors have failed in their responsibility, regardless of whether the source was an LLM or not and deserve penalties. But if a paper contains a leftover drafting comment from an LLM - or a stray human comment judged as similar to an LLM, e.g., to a postdoc "Please add the newest data here in a short paragraph" - that also seems to meet criteria for the proposed bans. I feel that treating every visible AI artifact as evidence that the entire paper is untrustworthy risks overshooting the balance between allowing AI slop to run wild and curating impactful research. This is a very tough balance to define, and ArXiv is ground zero for many of these changes and they have done a noble job trying to figure things out. But, circling back to the beginning, this blurring is especially confusing as official arXiv policy says that generative AI use is allowed. If that is the policy, then the presence of some sign of AI-assisted drafting should not be considered the core violation. In my opinion, a more durable standard would separate things like minor drafting artiacts, or sloppy manuscript preparation from the much worse problems of hallucinated references, or worst of all - fabricated claims, figures, or data. I want to conclude by saying thank you to arXiv for their brilliant work as a whole; they are a foundational capability that has allowed AI and science across the board to flourish. But, there is work to be done on this policy. Also, can we please write this into an official arXiv policy instead of trying to infer from Prof. Dietterich's X post alone? :)