prior probability

1. “Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test,” a March 2025 paper posted on arXiv by Cameron R. Jones and Benjamin K. Bergen.
2. “TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods,” a paper posted on GitHub by Stephanie Lin, Jacob Hilton, and Owain Evans.
3. “Writing is thinking,” a June 2025 editorial in the journal Nature on the value of human-generated scientific writing in the age of large-language models.
4. “A.I. is shredding Enlightenment values,” a recent N.Y. Times op-ed by David A. Bell, a professor of history at Princeton.
5. “These college professors will not bow down to AI,” another anti-LLM screed published in the N.Y. Times!
6. Bonus link: “The Claude Test,” a fascinating blog post by Hollis Robbins, a former Dean of Humanities at the University of Utah. Dr Robbins poses a provocative question: What would happen if an AI tried to enroll in college this fall?

According to Wikipedia (footnotes omitted; links in the original), “Rififi (French: Du rififi chez les hommes) is a 1955 French crime film adaptation of Auguste Le Breton‘s novel of the same name. Directed by American blacklisted filmmaker Jules Dassin, the film stars Jean Servais as the aging gangster Tony ‘le Stéphanois’, Carl Möhner as Jo ‘le Suédois’, Robert Manuel as Mario Farrati, and Jules Dassin as César ‘le Milanais’. The foursome band together to commit an almost impossible theft, the burglary of an exclusive jewelry shop in the Rue de la Paix. The centerpiece of the film is an intricate half-hour heist scene depicting the crime in detail, shot in near silence, without dialogue or music.”

(Shout out to cinéaste Eddie Muller, the host of Noir Alley, for featuring this classic French film noir on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) last month. Among the things I learned from Muller, film critic and future director François Truffaut praised Rififi this way: “Out of the worst crime novel I ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I’ve ever seen.”)

As a footnote to two of my scholarly papers with Alain Alcouffe–one on “Adam Smith in the City of Light“; the other on “Adam Smith in the Salons of Paris“–I have been meaning to repost this recent entry from another of my favorite blogs, View from the Back:

I just heard this catchy song for the first time in Panama City Beach last week, but according to Google’s A.I. assistant, it was released over three years ago on 29 June 2022!

I am reposting this recent entry from one of my favorite blogs, Remembering Singapore:

Singapore’s Most Recognisable Logos, Then and Now (Part 1)

I am interrupting my beach vacation to share this “infamously difficult” syllabus from 1941. It was for an epic class titled “Fate and the Individual in European Literature” at the University of Michigan, and the professor was none other than the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden! What is so noteworthy about all this is that he assigned 32 literary works, totaling 6,000 pages! More details here. (Hat tip: Alfred Brophy.)

I thought I would post this catchy summer anthem since one of my favorite parts of the Florida Panhandle thus far has been highway “30-A” (State Road 30A), a two-lane scenic stretch of road the runs along the Gulf of Mexico.

I have been on a family vacation these last few days in the Florida Panhandle — we have a great view of the beach, but it is unbearably hot over here — and putting the finishing touches on a book-length manuscript that I have been working on since the autumn of 2020. My hope is to wrap things up by next Friday, 8 August, though the work of a college professor is never really done. In the meantime, rest assured I will have much more to say about this new manuscript soon …