crickets from the free speech crowd, of course

I see someone has made a "fun" interface for the Epstein files because everyone seems to be having fun searching them. Trust me: you will regret it after you stumble on a grooming email. *That* stuff is in there, not just powerful people being awful. It isn't fun. Maybe leave it to the journalists.

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

Shocking. The argument is so simple but surprising at the same time. I would never have thought about this in practice. Another reason why we should be very careful when operating under "previously established protocols".

Important insight. In a world with all near zero imprecisely-estimated effect sizes, decline would be observed merely because of the convenience of coding originals in the same direction to compare effect size shifts in the aggregate. How much does it bias systematic replication projects? Good Q!

This also goes for scientific conferences in the USA: just, no.

New draft: "Decline effects, statistical artifacts, and a meta-analytic paradox". In this manuscript I show how a common practice in meta-analysis (eg the 2015 Open Science Collaboration) creates artifactual signatures of poor scientific behavior. PDF: raw.githubusercontent.com/richarddmore... 1/x

there are so many bad things going on in the USA that I don't know what bad stories are intended by the administration to be distractions from which other bad stories

🧪 It's been 10 years since Dorothy Bishop and I published a commentary in Nature about the risks of transparency. doi.org/10.1038/529459a 1/10

Fast forward 10 years and this example is no longer hypothetical: www.nytimes.com/2026.... 5/10

Yesterday, five-year-old Liam and his dad Adrian were released from Dilley detention center. I picked them up last night and escorted them back to Minnesota this morning. Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack.

Academics vying for a spot in Epstein‘s world. There are so many. I feel the need to make a thread, so I don’t keep confusing them. 1/

the bullshit asymmetry principle strikes again

Kernighan's Law «Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?» -- Brian Kernighan, 1974

As a TA, the syllabus said all code must at least compile or it’d be an instant fail. 1st assignment comes back, I hand out a lot of 0s. Next day, my supervising prof calls me in saying the admin got a lot of calls from parents and he wants me to recheck all the scores and issue partial credit.

UK government, I beg you: please please ban me from using Teams

Take a moment to remember the good things in life; I know it’s hard to do this, when it feels like the world is tipping this way & that, but if my little mouse can help you connect with “la vie en rose” again just for a moment, then my job as an artist is done for today 🩷

Last week in Minnesota, I watched ordinary people risk their lives to protect their neighbors. In the process, they not only won a significant—though not final—victory against authoritarianism, they proved virtually every MAGA social theory wrong. (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

the Overton window is moving so fast the democrats are just standing there looking at a blank wall, wondering what happened

We looked at 100 IGT studies and found abysmal reporting standards, and 244 different scoring techniques. Applied to a new dataset, the average correlation between these 244 techniques was 0. 5/15 IGT meta-analyses we looked at did not account for this hetereogenity.

Veronika, our queen 👑 🐮

Weirdly specific question: where would be a good place to get dan dan noodles in central London?

"We declined to perform a power analysis on the grounds that one should not prepare for a hypothetical (Jones, 2026)."

Fairly sure it’s unintentional, but the end date on this mug being sold by the Smithsonian does make it sound a little like they’re saying America dies in 2026…

COW TOOLS COW TOOLS COW TOOLS

who did this

there’s an ad on the radio here where a woman says “oh my *actual* god” after winning a prize, and I find that to be a fascinating construction

or: everyone drops their phone in gom jabbar boxes that sit next to the arm rests

A huge chunk of our political class has "book-you-see-in-an-airport" brain. Just no interest in rigour.

I do not think anybody is prepared for how quickly and how thoroughly things we've taken for granted our whole lives could change

Common Sense, published 250 years ago today.

van Zwet's comments here re: the Z curve are similar to my impressions after examining it. The number of studies needed to get a decent estimate of what it is *supposed* to estimate well is HUGE; but averaging over hundreds of very different studies, what can you infer? I would argue very little. >

“When I speak about making our city more affordable, my vision is not limited to the homes that we live in or the child care that we’re making universal — it’s also a vision where we make it possible for working people to afford lives of joy, of art, of rest, of expression.”

“The Fruits of Arbitrary Power”

also: built in color blindness check

It is awful quirk of modern life that an app one uses for work-related social communication can also be the app on which one learns how the government of your home country is murdering people in the streets. And an app where you *accidentally* watch video of the murder.

Q for researchers: if reporting a difference/contrast where the groups are symmetric, would you preferentially (assuming no other contextual reason to do otherwise) report it such that the effect/stat were positive (e.g. "Mothers scored higher than fathers (d=.3, t=2.5, p=XX)") rather than negative?

no, absolutely not, you all should've been nicer to my trans homies

Just saw this in LinkedIn for anyone interested in looking into Grok's production of CSAM and non-consensual sexualised imagery. www.linkedin.com/posts/mtechl...

your mileage may vary but my experience on here improved pretty noticeably when I stopped offering explanations to people whose questions sought conflict rather than answers

The UK: where you need a VPN to access blocked the academic paper archive sci-hub, but the government officially communicates via a website where they just knowingly implemented a child porn button

Mamdani: For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty

Ok, only one more awful year to get through before 2027, which is the first year in a twin prime set (2027, 2029)!