Tag: my writing

I said a thing

At Scientific American, Meghan Bartels reflects on Wikipedia at age 25. The story includes some discussion of my research as well as a quote from me.

I took media training a while ago, but this is really the first time I’ve ever been interviewed by someone in the press about my work. It’s a bit ironic, since the work on Wikipedia really didn’t count toward my tenure. It was just this extra thing I did, over and above the research that made the case for my promotion.

Five degrees of separation

In a footnote to the previous post, I suggested that a recent collaboration would lower my Erdős Number to 5.

On the basis of having checked a long time ago, I knew that my Erdős Number was at most 6 on account of having coauthored with Craig Callender.

Since then, however, Craig has also collaborated with more people. So his Erdős Number went down to 4 years ago, meaning that mine was already 5 or less. The new paper just means that there are multiple paths by which I’m entitled to an Erdős Number of 5.1

Updated drafts with ten different coauthors

Updated drafts posted in the last few weeks:

* Who’s sorry now: User preferences among Rote, Empathic, and Explanatory apologies from LLM chatbots, with Zahra Ashktorab, Alessandra Buccella, Jason D’Cruz, Zoë Fowler, Andrew Gill, Kei Leung, John Richards, and Kush R. Varshney2

* Chatbot apologies: Beyond bullshit, with Alessandra Buccella and Jason D’Cruz

* Music genres as historical individuals, with Emmie Malone and Brandon Polite

And 1000 screaming Argonauts

My exchange with Brandon Polite, from last summer’s author meets critic session, has now been publised in Contemporary Aesthetics.

I’ve posted a draft of a paper about They Might Be Giants (in particular) and art interpretation (in general). Is context infinite, like the Longines Symphonette? If you happen to take a look, feedback is welcome.

“On trusting chatbots” is live

My paper On Trusting Chatbots is now published at Episteme. It is in the penumbral zone of publication, with a version of record and a DOI but without appearing yet in an issue.

Publishing things on-line is a good thing. Waiting for space in a print issue is a holdover from the 20th-century. But it creates the awkward situation where the paper will be cited now as Magnus 2025 but, if it doesn’t get into an issue this year, cited in the future as Magnus 202x (for some x≠5).

If we care about careful and accurate citation, there’s got to be a better way.