I’m a climate scientist. Let me fix this headline. “Nearly a century ago, scientists showed that burning fossil fuels warms the planet. Today, we know human emissions account for over 100% of the warming. Yet dark money and disinformation still work to keep Americans addicted to fossil fuels.”

bsky.app/profile/atru... www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Do LLMs *understand* language? Do educational AI agents *understand* the material they teach (or their students)? Claims about what AI systems do or don't understand are pervasive, but assessing them requires an account of MACHINE UNDERSTANDING

This entire situation is nothing less than shocking. The academic dishonesty alone should disqualify everyone involved from any science-related position, permanently. I think it may actually be impossible for me to overstate how treacherous and dangerous this is.

Kinda becoming clear that an externality of excessive internet is the collapse of causal understanding. Like, what the hell do you mean, does labor increase the price of a good? What do you think is happening in the world? Where do things come from? Do you believe stuff just materializes?

"Imagination is not evidence. The fact that one can picture something is not a probability claim. Unfortunately, the ways in which information has been released has encouraged the use of imagination and speculation in determining the origins of COVID." drbobmorris.substack.com/p/misinforma...

“According to the FDA email from Prasad…they determined 10 children died "after and because of" the COVID vaccine. But Prasad said the true number was likely higher”. What the report ACTUALLY said: “No cases [of pediatric deaths] were classified as certain in relation to COVID-19 vaccination”.

Really feels like PPP fraud hasn't received nearly enough attention, particularly given its increasingly dubious benefits. We blamed inflation on less $2k in stimulus checks for regular taxpayers, yet $800 billion was doled out to "small business owners" that was mostly pocketed by the already rich.

About 6 months ago, Marty Makary, Vinay Prasad and Tracy Beth Hoeg falsely claimed that they had data showing that COVID19 vaccines killed 10 children. The public has never seen those data, and we never will, b/c they have all been booted, as they richly deserve for lying to the people of the US.

This is the vast imbalance in our media ecosystem: Democrats are held accountable for what they *might* do based on the words of their fringe voters and policies they are considering but never happen. Republicans aren’t even accountable for what they *are* doing.

— Fashion is a feminine coded interest and thus considered frivolous, whereas masculine-coded interests, such as architecture, are considered "serious." Doesn't matter if a tremendous amount of skilled labor or creativity went into making something, such as the handmade lace or shoulder line below.

Remembering these examples from Acting CDC Director Bhattacharya for valid vaccine uncertainties. I hope the CDC Director knows we don't give HPV vax to babies, it has benefits to men beyond preventing cervical cancer, & you can get Hep B pre-adulthood... www.importantcontext.news/p/trump-nih-...

NEW: I wrote about the ways that Lyme disease conspiracy theories are re-emerging, spurred by a rumor about “boxes of ticks,” an as-yet unreleased vaccine, and the people currently running our government www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

There are likely effective vaccines for major health concerns like Bird Flu, Lyme Disease, and even multiple forms of cancer - just to name a few - but we just lost funding for further study, our entire vaccine advisory group, most drug approval personnel at FDA, and HHS is overseen by antivaxxers…

Saphier also helped drive a false claim that got national attention in 2022, saying that CDC was about to mandate that schoolchildren get coronavirus vaccines. (CDC doesn't have that power.) @lenasun.bsky.social and I wrote in-depth about it here.

A definitional aspect of Bluesky is the absence of an algorithm as the default.

Every time I see someone talk about Claude I think about how they switched from female to male names as soon as they wanted the robots to seem like experts vs personal assistants.

A pretty incredible four paragraphs from The Boston Globe. When you simply list all of the horribly violent things Donald Trump has said just in the past year or so, it really drives home how ridiculous it is to "both sides" about rhetoric. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/28/n...

One of the ways in which everything is going wrong is that that mediating institution used to be ‘president of your rotary club’ and now it’s ‘charismatic person saying insane things online’

"why do credulous rubes who don't know how anything works like the guy who had a reality tv show where he was portrayed as a brilliant and great guy?" Don't overthink this!

I’m sorry, when I typed something in the “Search” bar I expected to find it especially if IT’S A FILE ON MY OWN COMPUTER THAT I KNOW I SAVED THERE WITH A NAME THAT WOULD HELP ME FIND IT LATER? Silly me I guess????

Reading the FT front page story about a Chinese company introducing a battery with a 1500 km range & six minute recharging time & about how two Chinese companies own more than half of the global EV battery market & I am struck by the different realities the US and China occupy. We’ve lost the plot.

"MMWR is not a peer-reviewed publication" is an absolutely wild statement to make. It is internally reviewed by CDC experts.

🩷 let's make some magic 🩷 this community turns two days a year into a magical day defined strangers saying "I got you" to people that really need a bright spot in their life. we don't want birthday presents. we want to run it back. happy mox day everyone.

this headline is such a great example of “racecraft.” musk isn’t passively posting about “race,” he is actively writing psychotically racist agitprop www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

GPS satellites move at 1/100000 the speed of light, causing their clocks to tick slower by 7 microseconds per day, and orbit at a height that makes their clocks tick faster by 45 microseconds per day. Two relativistic effects, both at the 1 part in 10 billion level, both essential for GPS accuracy 🧪

They overturned toxic pesticide bans and put a pesticide lobbyist in the Environmental Protection Agency, and they closed the CDC Office on Smoking & Health and put a tobacco executive in the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention cause they don’t want to protect the environment or prevent disease

Supporting indie bookstores isn’t just about where you buy your books—it’s about keeping money in your community. Community is more important now than ever before, and indie bookstores have proven at every turn that they will protect, defend, & care for their community members without hesitation.

I’m reading this book on animal empathy by primatologist Frans de Waal and I love the constant jabs at economists for using incorrect assumptions about “primitive” animal behavior to justify capitalist systems.

Each individual layoff notice that was issued to a postdoc in May of 2025 was itself a greater degree of direct government censorship than Bhattacharya has experienced in his entire life.

Can’t tell the difference between rock and stone

Adding to the thread so people know the history: this used to be one of a number of great community hospitals that were bought up by private equity, who promptly mismanaged them and burdened them with debt while they literally bought yachts. They of course went under and were rescued by the state

“Every day is the Day of Jokes” great conversation between professor Whitney Phillips and host Emanuel Maiberg. Words matter and they determine the media narrative! Also, thanks for bringing synecdoche back. @whitneyphillips.bsky.social @404media.co podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...

And of the “one book” they read is one criticized on the @ifbookspod.bsky.social podcast, then we are in trouble

We had a #vaccine against #Lyme disease in the 90s that was pulled after a few years bc of ultimately unfounded safety concerns. Now we may get another shot at a vaccine to prevent a potentially debilitating disease that's only increasing today. www.scientificamerican.com/article/lyme...

it is indeed impressive but also a testament that some solutions to problems (in this case, Newton's understanding of gravity and motion) are so profound that we still use them to do things like this

The non-epidemiologist who champions uncensored science is censoring science that was vetted by CDC experts. The paper uses a method peer reviewed by the top medical journals. He demands a clinical trial that would be considered unethical by any IRB. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...

Again, if you’re wondering for why archaic, pseudoscientific notions of gender and race hierarchy are in vogue not just among the elite but influencers ministering to braindead flocks about the gospel of race and gender traditionalism (subscribe for $10 a month!) the answer is right there.

A reliable metric for a losing war: notice how often a combatant describes inputs (ordinance dropped, resources committed, duration of operation) as a substitute for outputs (effects a military operation is intending to produce).

You think it's bad here?

"It is the same origin point — the same research, technology, and investment — that leads us to the moon or to dead schoolchildren, slain at our hands. The final decision about war or peace may be made by our leaders, but ultimately it is our responsibility..." My latest for @rollingstone.com

There’s a reason biohacking aligns with MAHA, which is built on the idea that you completely control your health. To MAHA, if you are sick it’s somehow your fault for not doing the right things, eating the right diet, etc. It’s health as a manifestation of virtue and disease as lack of virtue.

Elon Musk had DOGE defund USAID, the largest humanitarian organization in the world, causing HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of deaths from starvation and disease - and Trump GLEEFULLY approved it. It’s the single most evil act in US history. Cartoon by Mike Luckovich

People don’t wanna put two and two together with what he did to usaid and him putting up those maps of global birthrates and saying white people are being replaced

The horse op-ed is an instant classic. I can't tell you how much joy this piece gives me. It should be taught in every introductory writing class in no small part because the horse arguments are so compelling. "I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children."

@pauloffit.bsky.social is a total badass

The rhetorical shuffle that happens when you define people AS ideology is crucial to selling the project, I would note.

9/11

“The human capacity to injure other people is very great precisely because our capacity to imagine other people is very small”

@vietthanhnguyen.bsky.social’s 2016 publication, “Nothing Ever Dies,” continues to be prescient a decade later. Same as it ever was. Here’s just one of myriad examples.