Troy Patterson

Educator, Thinker, Consultant

Month: May 2025

Neon sign that says "psychic" imposed over slice of the moon.

AI as a Mentalist

May 5, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Baldur Bjarnason has a fascinating write-up entitled “The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con“.

Essentially, Baldur Bjarnason makes the observation that LLM’s frequently end up following the same path those that do “cold reading”. He notes that many people are becoming convinced that language models are intelligent. There is no reason to believe this, but he offers two possibilities:

  1. The tech industry has accidentally invented the initial stages a completely new kind of mind, based on completely unknown principles, using completely unknown processes that have no parallel in the biological world.
  2. The intelligence illusion is in the mind of the user and not in the LLM itself.

He falls squarely in the second camp. I love the way that he clearly lays out the reasoning. He describes, quite clearly, how cold reading works. Then he mirrors those same steps in how an LLM works. He not only lists the areas, but goes on to provide examples and further clarification.

For example, in a cold read situation, the first issue is that the “Audience Selects Itself”.

Most people aren’t interested in psychics or the like, so the initial audience pool is already generally more open-minded and less critical than the population in general.

The first issue in LLM’s as a Mentalist? The Audience Selects Itself.

People sceptical about “AI” chatbots are less likely to use them. Those who actively don’t disbelieve the possibility of chatbot “intelligence” won’t get pulled in by the bot. The most active audience will be early adopters, tech enthusiasts, and genuine believers in AGI who will all generally be less critical and more open-minded.

This is a fantastic read and well worth your time.

Thoughts on BlueSky

May 4, 2025 / / 0 Comments

BlueSky seems to have picked up a good bit of traction. There are lots of differing opinions on BlueSky where it fits, it’s future, and whether to support it or not.

I’m going to look at BlueSky mostly from an educator’s perspective.

Lots of people left Twitter, er X (no link intentionally). Twitter was at one point a very useful platform. Originally, it was terrific to be at a conference and follow a hashtag to know what was going on. Twitter also allowed teachers to share links, ideas, successes, and concerns. It was a place to make connections.

However, once Elon Musk purchased Twitter, a quick decline occurred. Twitter had been suffering from trying to figure out how to navigate external pressures (how do you handle it when a powerful person tells blatant lies?) and revenue issues. Twitter had tried a variety ways to fund their operations (external apps allowed?, not allowed?)

With Twitter becoming a toxic site, people started looking for alternatives. BlueSky had been funded prior to Musk purchasing Twitter. BlueSky was designed to be an open-source component of Twitter.

BlueSky was one option, Mastodon another. Mastodon is truly federated. There is no single owner (currently the originator of Mastodon has a lot of influence, but it is not the same thing as an owner; plus Mastodon is working toward being a fully non-profit, independent organization). Being federated means that there are many different sites that can operate independently while being voluntarily connected. If there are branches that promote things you don’t like, you can block them and never see them. There is real power in federation. There isn’t really a monetary model for Mastodon, it relies on voluntary payments or passion projects.

I tried to move to Mastodon in 2018. I loved the open-source nature of the platform. However, Mastodon in 2018 was a bit confusing. There was a bit of a learning curve. Most importantly, there were no teachers, no educators there (at least that I could find).

BlueSky skyrocketed following Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Although they claim that they will be federated, instead of utilizing an already existing protocol, they are creating a new one. The new protocol is still being developed, thus BlueSky is not currently federated.

BlueSky has been adopted by a good number of teachers. BlueSky has done some smart things. There are starter packs, which makes it easy to follow a group of accounts. I even saw a newscaster use their BlueSky account in their chevron the other day.

So, I’m trying to read the tea leaves for the future. BlueSky is the closest experience to the old Twitter. It is still very much centralized. That centralization creates an easier, smoother experience for users.

Several leaders who I follow have provided differing opinions on BlueSky.

  • Cory Doctorow – is not posting to or using BlueSky as this point. Although he respects many of the people involved and what they say that they are going to do, he is not investing in the promise of something. Rather, if he can’t move his information and presence from a site to another place, he will not support that site. Cory is on Mastodon. Moving information, exporting everything, is easy from Mastodon.
  • Ben Werd – has a neat write-up about if he ran BlueSky. He mentions quite a bit about what the promise of BlueSky is, but still seems to believe that there is a way forward for BlueSky to become federated and a successful, capitalistic company.
  • Manton Reece has a nice write-up about when BlueSky was unavailable.
  • Then there is the issue of BlueSky participated in Government censorship in Turkey. Due to BlueSky being built to eventually be open (?), third party apps did not have the same issue. (*Note that I’m not fully aware of the third party apps, I’ll need to investigate.)

So, who will be the winner? It’ll be interesting to see. I still don’t see educators moving to Mastodon. I don’t anticipate that they will be soon. Open-source still has too much “need to learn” and less than pretty involved. There are just too many speedbumps for educators to fully embrace Mastodon. BlueSky has the mind share right now. It is very centralized and very close to how Twitter used to work. The question is in part, will BlueSky truly federate? Will BlueSky end up being controlled by a small number (or one) of individuals? We won’t know the answers until we know the answers. At that point, it may be too late. We may have just exchanged one bad situation for exactly the same thing.

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