I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. , If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics). This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]
HÂkon Styri
Sounds reasonable. The best immediate remedy for coping with stress is to focus on something else, and if other people are causing the stressful situation it’s a good strategy to distract them as well.
I guess the next logical step would be to assume that what we call “female intuition” is a highly developed skill for long term stress management.
Jill
I have found that when I feel nauseous at the thought of something – a new work-related commitment that sounds cool but makes me feel sick, for instance – my guts are usually right. There’s something wrong about whatever that thing is, or I already had more than enough work. I’ve learnt to trust my guts.
I suppose that might be female intuition. I would imagine men get gut feelings about things too, though – surely?
Jesper
What you are describing sounds amazingly like procrastination, which I can assure you is not especially gender-specific. (I’ve just vacuumed my apartment instead of doing the work I was supposed to do.)
But it would explain why men are more likely to isolate themselves when they are sick and less likely to see a doctor etc..
Rayne
Damn! I’d read that same entry at Danah’s blog, found it fascinating from the perspective of women’s consciousness. But reading your take on the same post and I’m flabbergasted I didn’t see this before.
This is the same reaction that many women experience before giving birth; they have a “nesting instinct” within a short period before labor starts in earnest. One of my friends canned 3 bushels of tomatoes and scrubbed all her floors on her hands and knees the day before she gave birth; I thought she was crazy when she told me she was canning. In retrospect, it was “nesting”. Wonder if it’s because of the same rise in oxytocin?
This same stress response could also explain why so many women tell me they are most creative and productive under pressure. Viva los ovarios!!
Lisa Firke
It happens monthly, too. Without PMS, nothing would be cleaned.
nick
They actually looked at women, instead of using a sample with 90% men
Now, now, Jill. Control that agressive instinct to fight.
Rayne
Wow, did you notice this news article on a possible corollary? Shy people more vulnerable to infections — I might point out this study (or article) is flawed since all the subjects are MEN.
Let’s assume the findings can be extrapolated to women as well; does this mean that women’s stress response might have been intended to prevent illness being passed to a newborn on birth (thinking oxytocin increases before then) as well as protecting women during other non-childbearing times?
This really begs for a comparison study between men and women. Are men at greater risk because they don’t have the oxytocin-boost going for them?
nick
Limiting a study about the transmission of AIDS to men isn’t a flaw. The flaw is in the popular understanding of these studies, perhaps due to science journalism or perhaps due to the way researchers themselves protray their study results when discussing them with reporters.
The characterization of the study as concluding that “shy people more vulnerable to infections” can be misleading. Without reading the paper about the study, which is not available online, I am sure that the sample was not only limited to men, but also limited to men with HIV in the same geographical area (within the United States) and probably men in about the same socio-economic class. The conculsions they can draw from such a study will apply to this group, but may turn out to be more general findings. Further research can determine whether the findings apply to things other than HIV replication, whether they apply to women as well, whether they apply to the HIV-positive men in Africa, etc. But unless you have a homogeneous group that you conduct research upon in the first place, you won’t have any solid conclusions to consider in a more general way.
Many studies consider subjects who are all of a single sex; this is not a flaw. That a large majority of these studies use men, rather than women, as subjects, may be problematic, but there may be reasons for this that don’t have to do directly with the practice of science.
In the case of this study, I suspect many more men than women are HIV-positive in the US, since about three times as many men as women have AIDS, so you should expect more studies with HIV-positive subjects to have all male subjects.
Rayne
Then the alternate is true, Nick — the article is flawed in saying that “shy people” are at greater risk.
torill
I think perhaps we need to think of “flaws” at different levels. While there can be excellent research done on a limited sample, to build a paradigm on research only from similar limited samples would be a flaw in the paradigm, but perhaps not in the singular cases.
Journalists have a tendency to want to make everything valid for as large groups as possible, because large target groups and general interest is what sells large numbers of newspapers. The journalistic paradigm is built on generalisation while research paradigms tend to be built on specialisation. It has to get problematic when that crash.
Hmm. Interesting. I need to remember that for some future lecture. Thanks Jill, Nick, Raine et.al.