@domweinberg
Freelance researcher | Youth, mental health, inequality, injustice, civil society, evidence | Formerly UK youth charity sector (YMCA George Williams College / NCVYS) Dutch academia (Utrecht Uni / Erasmus) | he/him
There are people out there who think it's ridiculous to say that killing 100,000 Palestinians and expelling 100,000s more from their land is a genocide, but that describing people coming to your country to work and start a family as genocide is totally reasonable.
Reactionary centrism is a scourge on legacy media and a threat to liberal democracy.
(Reasonable Q to ask why, over a decade later are international institutions still failing, and why nation states are unwilling/unable to work together to deal with root causes)
NEW: Until we center children fully, fiercely, and without compromise, no liberation is complete.
Every policy, every system, every movement must begin with one question:
What does this mean for the children?
a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people
Just looked at your thread properly - this question doesn't even have consistent answers with the equivalent question for young people. Nor are "social media" and "screen time" the same thing. Nor are these activities mutually exclusive.
A case study in bad survey design?
Leading questions much... the absence of other media usage in that list is baffling (/deliberate). Or indeed "spending time 'hanging around' in public spaces" (where they are increasingly unwelcome ofc, and which are increasingly privatised)"?
Utterly cruel, pointless and harmful. It does not minimise how bad Conservatives were to say Labour are now the most anti-asylum government in most people's living memory. This prevents people feeling any sense of safety and security after fleeing persecution.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Good to see journalists covering the links between University of Buckingham’s Centre for Heterodox Science and race science networks. It ought to be pretty shocking to see a university openly affiliate with pseudoscience peddlers such as Aporia
Maybe, just maybe, it's about reclaiming the vast amounts of public space that we've devoted to motor vehicles? One day our public service broadcaster might actually start to grapple with motornormativity (and the automobile industrial complex), but apparently not today.
And again while we can and should condemn the individuals involved, my work as a feminist theorist says that we are called to understand the systemic issues, which was that Epstein had an ideological agenda that was enabled by the habits of disciplinary thought leaders who are used to being coddled
The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering
The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory
Can we just assume all billionaires think the same racist stupid things as the latest one who spouted racist stupid stuff? Time to stop treating their opinions as important, and work out how our societies, corrupted as they are by extreme wealth inequalities, can overthrow the billionaires...
The answer is simple:
it is isn’t just politicians, but the UK billionaire owned media who are far more comfortable having a “debate” about just how racist we should be, than they are probing into the corrupt money & dirty relationships that run our politics.
Jeffrey Epstein couldn’t stop emailing people about eugenics.
In the latest tranche of Epstein records, themes of genes, genetics, and IQ—alongside explicit threads of white supremacy—keep cropping up, often adjacent to his fascination with steering research in the biological sciences.
"We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust."
Absolutely embarrassing for the govt. that they have proscribed Palestine Action before the trial and the jury has found them not guilty. This Labour govt. is so out of touch with the public, it is shocking. I think Cooper should resign over this. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
All these people, in other words, are unmitigated scum, engaged in a project to define other people as inferior so they can go on enjoying the benefits of imagined superiority.
The UK government sees Peter Thiel undermine democracy by funding the extreme right online, and sees Trump undermine the world order, and thinks “we need to get closer to these this data surveillance firm
I know there are some good intentions to concerns around lost learning, but can we just listen to ourselves?
"Students get one chance at education in secondary. They've got five years and every day matters."
What a bonkers conveyor-belt of a system we have created.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
This is the biggest targeted training programme since Harold Wilson started the Open University (note).
Open to all UK adults online, taking as little as under 20 minutes, the courses will give
founding partners - Accenture, Amazon, Barclays, BT, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Sage, SAS and Salesforce to take the Al Skills Boost programme to the next level and upskill 10 million workers with Al skills by 2030.
The government’s suggestion that rolling out 20 minute courses on writing “AI“ prompts, sponsored by Google, Microsoft and Amazon, is somehow comparable to the founding of the Open University (the Wilson government‘s, & Jennie Lee’s, proudest achievement), is an insult to our human intelligence.
I would say this findings shows women are more AI literate than men, because the majority of non-magical beings have no innate ability to "judge truthfulness"
When you help make it so the only names people know are Pretti and Good, you reinforce the culture that says these things aren't "bad enough" until white people get involved. This has been going on for a whole year. Many non-white people have died in this same way trying to protect their neighbors.
I remember slowly becoming more and more baffled during my PhD that so much of the educational inequality literature failed to note that the labour market was dominated by low-wage low-education jobs.
“These systems will never be able to think and provide reliable information with the current approach to AI”, says Steels. And that current approach is focused on so-called large language models (LLMs). In short, such models are ‘trained’ via machine learning to place one word after another in the most credible way possible. “Especially in the US, there’s a belief that we are dealing with a kind of god-like system”, says Steels. “A Judeo-Christian deity who supposedly knows everything, sees everything, understands all languages, can predict everything... And the people in Silicon Valley believe they can build this. It’s a belief eagerly embraced by the capitalist system, with venture capitalists at the forefront. If such a god can be created, and if you can gain a monopoly on it, then you not only have the prospect of great wealth, but also a great deal of power.” Katrien Beuls, an AI researcher specialising in language technology, argues that the technology has shortcomings. “We know that, and that will never change. It is inherent to this technology.” Steels agrees: “The system is powerful, but it has fundamental limitations. ‘Hallucinations’ are part of the architecture of such a system.” Those ‘hallucinations’ are outputs that make no sense, but American linguist and AI critic Emily M. Bender opposes the use of the term ‘hallucination’ because it is an all-too-human term for a non-human system. An LLM system generates plausible language that a human can interpret and understand, but it has no concept of ‘meaning’ or ‘accuracy’ of what it processes and generates.
"It’s a belief eagerly embraced by the capitalist system, with venture capitalists at the forefront. If such a god can be created, and if you can gain a monopoly on it, then you not only have the prospect of great wealth, but also a great deal of power."
apache.be/2025/10/24/b...
Throughout my PhD, I sensed something was wrong with my enquiry. This ⬇️ helps me realise that I was discovering (& rejecting) its framework. Great Dewey quote here too.
Funnily enough, I've written 2 whodunnits which turned out to (maybe) not actually be whodunnits. So the analogy also feels v apt.
FT headline and screenshot 16 Jan 2025 : Trump names Tony Blair Jared Kushner and Marc Rowan to Gaza 'Board of Peace'
BREAKING Tony Blair and Jared Kushner appointed by Trump to Gaza 'Board of Peace'
Read @carolecadwalla on Tony Blair's institute, its funding from friends of Israel's government inc billionaire Larry Ellison, + emerging rightwing media takeover of the global information space⏬🔗
With moral entrepreneur Jon Haidt in the news, I read various draft reports from his team. Five minutes in, I find one on Cognitive Ability with multiple uncritical excerpts from infamous scientific racist Richard Lynn.
Stop taking people like Haidt seriously.
docs.google.com/document/d/1...
Today I'll be arguing that AI tools (specifically LLMs and AI agents) are NOT the future of health and social science but are more likely to be the death of health and social science.
Here's a sneak peak slide with the main components of my argument.
This is the saddest day of my professional life. Today is not only the final recording of the latest series of The Infinite Monkey Cage, it is my last ever Monkey Cage. I never thought that I would have to leave the show. I always imagined going on until | dropped dead under the studio lights due to a brain aneurysm caused by my final attempt to understand notions of quantum gravity or the shock of being told about fly maggot infestations in the sacks of macaque monkeys. I resigned in September, after sixteen years of dedication to the show, A show that I named and helped develop over all those years. Unfortunately, my opinions outside the BBC have been considered problematic for sometime, whether it has been voicing support for the trans community, criticism of Donald Trump, numerous other outlandish opinions, including once gently criticising Stephen Fry. These things were considered to conflict with being a freelance BBC science presenter
In a recent meeting where BBC Studio executives again voiced problems with me, I realised my choices. Obedience and being quieter to remain making Monkey Cage, or 'Resign and have the freedom to speak out against what I believe are injustices'. • I chose the latter. It broke my heart. I love this show and I love the audience, and it is because of the audience in particular, that this decision was so difficult to make. I kept thinking about all the extremist voices promoting hate and division. They are being given so many platforms, while voices that represent kindness, open mindedness, empathy seem to be scarcer and scarcer. I felt I couldn't pamper myself with the luxury of silence. One of my many privileges is that I am able to resign and I can speak out even if it is to the detriment of my career.
I have thought a lot about my heroes, Sinead O Connor, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and so many more. I think of Sinead's words, "the job of an artist is to be themselves at any cost". James Baldwin said prejudice was really just a word for cowardice. Audre Lorde, viewing her life, wrote that her only regrets were her silences. I think of my father as I resign, he brought me up to believe in fairness , justice and kindness. Though my heart is broken, it is also full of fire. I apologise to our incredible listeners for my departure, your love of the show means a great deal. I am so sorry to let you down. I hope that you can understand my reasoning. I have to accept that I am not what the current BBC expects of their freelance presenters.
Despite this I should add that I have always worked far more than my contracted hours to try and ensure the show was always the best it could be, as well as making myself accessible and responsive to the audience wherever and whenever I met them. Every night, we have recorded, I have been filled with determination to make the best show possible. This was not "just a job" I hope that with my departure I can be a better ally to the LGBTQ community, to the neurodivergent community, to activists fighting against those who aim to brutalise society, to those currently in prison on hunger strike, and to all those who fight for a more inclusive world. From many conversations, I know there are many Monkey Cage listeners who support these communities and activists too. The strawberry is dead. Long live the strawberry. B
Very sad that I felt I had no choice but to resign from The Infinite Monkey Cage - a victory for the transphobes and other bigots - I did it because so much of the media has chosen to believe the kind and empathetic people are a fiction - they are real and so often unrepresented.