#Philosophy #HigherEd ~RhetComp. Not my employer's opinions. Elefanten-Website: @vpiercy@freeradical.zone. Better engagement elsewhere.
Joined June 2009
- Tweets18.8K
- Following1.6K
- Followers1.8K
- Likes125K
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
When Ukraine destroys Russian data centers, hoards of aggressive right-wing bots disappear, and Twitter becomes much friendlier. Isn’t that interesting? So much of our politics is driven by the internet, and so much of the internet is driven by Russians who want to hurt us. Shouldn’t we do something about that, given that we know it?
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
100 years ago: the BA Classics exam at the University of London. You have 3 hours, closed book, to answer 5 questions. Alongside the compulsory qn 1, what would you choose?
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
And yet we have higher ed leaders telling us that their students need to have AI everywhere all the time. It's absurd.
MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students.
A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable.
The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust.
Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates.
The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
I have found a number of AI slop papers put on preprint sites with my name on them, which I have never written nor seen. So have other academics I spoken with.
I wouldn't assume that this is all real... although AI paper factories of at least okay quality are coming soon.
This University of Chicago business school professor has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 (so far).
statmodeling.stat.columbia.e…
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
Google Drive supposedly upgraded their native scanning function so it streams. It’s possible now to scan live from your smartphone into drive using the app and use OCR to transcribe. Lots of layers to consider here, but that alone could save so much labor grading assignments.
🚨 GOOGLE ACABA DE DEJAR OBSOLETAS LAS APPS DE ESCANEO
Google Drive acaba de mejorar su escáner nativo con funciones que antes requerían apps de terceros:
→ Escaneo multipágina en tiempo real
→ Detecta duplicados automáticamente
→ Modo continuo para escanear sin parar
→ Todo integrado directamente en Drive
Lo que antes era otra app en tu móvil, ahora está dentro de Drive.
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
Berkeley law has introduced a new, much stricter AI policy
law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/…
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
The largest study of undergraduate AI use—surveying 95,000 students across 20 research-intensive public universities—suggests the deeper story isn’t misconduct. It’s how quickly AI literacy is becoming a new form of educational privilege, varying sharply by subject and socioeconomic background.
news.berkeley.edu/2026/05/21…
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
I'm grateful to @DouthatNYT for inviting me on his podcast to discuss the fate of the liberal arts and humanities in the age of AI. I hope that all those who follow higher ed and care about the liberal arts will listen.
nytimes.com/video/opinion/10… nytimes.com/video/opinion/10…
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
I've acquired a few new followers in the past couple days, so here's my latest piece of published writing, on the AI culture war and the philosophical debates that run through it.
“It’s the grit that makes the pearl.” @NuttsForTomball
I’m writing it on the board in class tomorrow as students start bearing down for finals.
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
Wow, this is huge, after months of speculation and the U.S. running a massive pre-emptive discreditation campaign (teapaw.org/RnaudBertrand/status/2…), DeepSeek-V4 is finally out!
I haven't studied it in depth but here are the most striking aspects as far as I can tell:
- Fully open sourced with open weights (available for download on huggingface: huggingface.co/deepseek-ai)
- Zero CUDA dependency anywhere in its stack, which is probably the biggest deal of all. For those who don't know, CUDA is Nvidia's software layer - the foundation nearly every frontier AI model in the world is built on. Except, as of today, DeepSeek V4, which can run entirely on Huawei Ascend chips via Huawei's CANN framework (finance.yahoo.com/sectors/te…). Very concretely it means that China now not only has its own frontier AI models, but its own domestic AI stack, top to bottom.
- The prices are insanely low. V4-Pro is roughly 3x cheaper than GPT-5.5 on input and 8.6x cheaper on output. And V4-Flash is an order of magnitude cheaper still, at $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens vs OpenAI's $5/$30 - so 30-100x cheaper than GPT-5.5 (!). And remember, these are the prices DeepSeek charges on its own API - anyone can download the weights and run them for "free" on their own server.
- It is at or near the frontier on most benchmarks that matter. V4-Pro-Max matches or beats GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6 on competitive programming (Codeforces rating 3206), coding (LiveCodeBench 93.5), and math (HMMT 95.2, IMO AnswerBench 89.8). It trails the very newest GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7 on a handful of the hardest agentic and knowledge benchmarks, but it's in the same league.
In effect the value proposition is: "Same league as frontier US AI, at a fraction of the price, open-source and freely modifiable, and hardware-agnostic - you can run it on whatever infrastructure you choose."
Which is insanely good. I now understand the need for a preemptive discreditation campaign: they had every reason to be worried. For the vast majority of use cases, you'd have to be a literal idiot to keep paying OpenAI or Anthropic's prices when this exists.
🚀 DeepSeek-V4 Preview is officially live & open-sourced! Welcome to the era of cost-effective 1M context length.
🔹 DeepSeek-V4-Pro: 1.6T total / 49B active params. Performance rivaling the world's top closed-source models.
🔹 DeepSeek-V4-Flash: 284B total / 13B active params. Your fast, efficient, and economical choice.
Try it now at chat.deepseek.com via Expert Mode / Instant Mode. API is updated & available today!
📄 Tech Report: huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/D…
🤗 Open Weights: huggingface.co/collections/d…
1/n
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
Now in paperback!
'Foucault and the History of Philosophical Transcendence' explores finite transcendence alongside other philosophical accounts, & potential for application to personal life and global crises.
Order now: bit.ly/41VXTmb
Preview: bit.ly/3Q2EEET
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
I’m happy to share that my new book, The Philosophy of Isabelle Stengers, is out today. A paperback edition will follow.
edinburghuniversitypress.com…
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
Technology is a tool, not a teacher. The cognitive architecture for reading was built for print. When countries with historically strong literacy systems begin recalibrating toward books and handwriting, we should pay attention. Our students are not under-exposed to screen, they are cognitively saturated by them.
Finland has recently shifted emphasis back toward:
• Printed textbooks
• Reduced device use in early grades
• Stronger handwriting instruction
• Limits on smartphone use during the school day
The rationale cited by Finnish leaders centers on:
• Declining reading scores (PISA trends)
• Attention concerns
• Overestimation of digital benefits
America listen up and don't miss reading, The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids' Learning- And How to Help Them Thrive Again by Jared Cooney Horvath
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
Writing forces your brain to coordinate memory, reasoning, and meaning-making simultaneously.
Every time you write, you rewire toward clearer thinking. Every time you let an LLM do it, you rewire toward consumption.
ALT An editorial discusses the significance of human-generated writing in research, emphasizing its role in thinking and understanding.
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
Meredith Whittaker says AI agents make encryption irrelevant.
To be useful digital employees, they need system-level access to your messages, browser, files, and clicks.
That collapses the blood-brain barrier between applications and the operating system.
“Our encryption no longer matters.”
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
She doesn't say that encryption never matters anymore. In context she is clearly saying that if you run an agent that has been given access to all your data then the agent is now the weak link in the security chain and attackers don't need to circumvent encryption.
x.com/i/status/20158…
Van Piercy 🌎🇺🇦📚☯️ retweeted
Happy to announce a book dedicated to Kant & AI, appears in Jan 2026 with Bloomsbury. It addresses:
1) What kinds of machines are intelligent?
2) Are machines capable of being moral?
3) Does an algorithm of perpetual peace exist?
Paperback pre-order:
bloomsbury.com/uk/kant-machi…
