That was the year that was

And I’ve paused subscription payments

Hello Subscribers,

Thanks, as ever, for the support you show my writing at Reasonable People. Your subscriptions have been a deep encouragement to me to keep writing here.

I turned on paid subscriptions at the beginning of my year-long career break, when I wasn’t sure what I’d be doing (or if I’d have any income for the year). Now, incredibly, a year has passed and I’m returned to being a jobbing academic at the University of Sheffield (gulp!).

If you’re a paid subscriber you’ll notice I’ve turned off paid subscriptions, so you shouldn’t be billed any more. I do plan to keep writing, but I think I need to find out what my new routine is when I go back to the University before committing to writing as regularly as I have in the last year.

It’s been a good year,

Some of the time I’ve taken to goof off, read books, hang out, go places, meet interesting people, write and generally explore my interests without thought of profit or productivity. Refreshing!

For a good half of the time I’ve been working with RoRI on research on research / metascience (lots more to say on this soon!). I’ve been in London every week at the Wellcome Trust, bringing research on research expertise in-house there, and I’m going to keep being in London weekly, so do get in touch if you are there and think we could have an interesting chat about any of the topics in this newsletter.

I’ve become a visiting Professor a the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge. This formalises my collaboration with Andreas Vlachos, who I have a number of exciting projects with. The combination of thinking about the fundamental mechanisms of how language models work and on the fundamental mechanisms of how humans reason has been really productive, with implications for how we use machines to check facts, and how we talk to each other (lots more to say on this soon!).

At the end of the year I’m glad to be going back being a full-time academic. It’s a job I feel very privileged to have, and I’m looking forward to doing some teaching and supervising again.

From the year out I’m taking a readjustment of my perspective on the balance of activities I want to spend my time on, and some big ambitions for new projects (lots more to say on this soon!).

Thanks for reading. Normal posting will resume soon, along with updates on various project when I can. In the meantime thanks for reading and here’s a picture of Conisborough Castle I took this morning:

More soon!

Get in touch — I am tom@idiolect.org.uk and on Mastodon at @tomstafford@mastodon.online