The strategy for elections cannot be landslides to prevent them from being stolen. That makes no sense at all.

Breaking: Trump told Palm Beach police chief 'everyone' knew about Epstein and 'evil' Maxwell www.miamiherald.com/news/politic...

Law profs who were hired before 2020 first got to know some colleagues because we were on the job market together. They become friends who you root for. I just want to say how proud I am of @dorfmandoron.bsky.social, Charlotte Tschider, and @ggkrishnamoomoo.bsky.social. They’re doing great things.

This is so, so good. If you have units on algorithmic bias, or are just interested in incorporating simulations/interactive elements into your teaching, check this out.

ICYMI, I posted a massive thread this morning about a recent lesson of mine on algos, bias, & due process. There was a lot there for other teachers, including nuggets like this exercise where students got to experience automation bias firsthand. Related blog post: suffolklitlab.org/algos-bias-d...

The offer makes much more sense if understood in inverse—that is, she has evidence of his wrongdoing that can be released if she is NOT given clemency.

Shut down all of these concentration camps and provide everyone inside with medical care and US citizenship as reparations, if they want it.

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

14/ We talked about what happened, and I hope the lesson sticks with them. Admittedly, the exercise was designed to push them to this result, but hopefully by giving it a name and being forced to face the reality that it can happen to them, this is a concern they will carry with them into practice.

13/ Perhaps more telling is how often they relied on the assistant’s recommendation without consulting additional info (summary, authority, or excerpt). In phase 1, they avoided additional info 65% of the time. In phase 2, this went up to 80%, and in phase 3 it jumped to 84%.

12/ Almost everyone fell victim to automation bias. The assistant's accuracy was 100% in phase 1 & 2, then dropped to 70%. Student performance started at 79% in phase 1, improved to 85% for a bit, but when the tool's accuracy declined, scores fell to 65%, worse than their initial performance.

11/ When they finished, users were shown a results screen that explained a bit more about the exercise. There were three possible outcomes: (1) No clear evidence of automation bias (2) You may have fallen victim to automation bias; and (3) You likely fell victim to automation bias.

10/ You’ll notice mention of a “Rival Clerk,” along with a reminder that we’re measuring the user’s speed et al. Dear reader, the “Rival Clerk” is not one of their peers. It’s a dark pattern⁶ designed to make them keep going. There’s so much in here ripe for discussion.

9/ I told them that for our first exercise they would all be using an AI assistant I built to review citations. After they had a chance to use it we would have a class discussion. I suggested they hold the following question in their head, “What makes something a good decision assistant?“

8/ It occurred to me that all they knew about my session was that it would be on “algorithmic bias.” What if I could get them to experience automation bias first-hand? That would make it harder to dismiss as something that only other people fall victim to. . . . A plan began to form.

7/ ... - there can be competing and contradictory ideas of what makes something fair - under certain conditions people are likely to over-rely on machine outputs (automation bias) - the choices we make about how to use tools embody and reveal what we value

6/ I asked myself what students needed to understand to have an informed discussion, recognizing that I only had an hour and 50 minutes with them. 🤔 - accuracy isn't always the right performance measure - mathematical models encode and replicate the biases found in their training data ...

5/ When that article was published I was a data scientist at the public defenders, and in my corner of the world, it created a bit of a furor, kicking up discussion around a set of issues I wanted students to understand. I thought, maybe they could role play as the court in a similar setup. So...

4/ The seed of the class was this reporting from 2016, "Machine Bias: There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks." In it, the authors describe the use of a risk assessment tool by courts deciding questions like the granting of bail.

3/ Most of them are self-explanatory. However, the first one intentionally lacks in-simulation context, and I think linking them together creates a more-compelling narrative arc. Play with the links in isolation (found in the end notes & blog post), or read the post for the guided tour.

2/ TL;DR: I built a bunch of highly-modular online simulations you can use with your students. They cover automation bias,¹ the false positive paradox,² competing definitions of fairness,³ disparate impact resulting from machine bias,⁴ and the value of due process.⁵

1/ There has never been a more concentrated distillation of my teaching than this lesson: Algos, Bias, Due Process, & You. It is the apotheosis of what I do. I very much hope you enjoy it, share it, and make bits of it your own.

"This promise of an AI future is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." -- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social Setting aside time to watch this whole panel, someday soon.

But more than that, the PEOPLE of Puerto Rico was so welcoming and so lovely, I miss it every day. If you walk around and look lost for a MOMENT, someone stops to ask you if you need help and it's like they're your best friend in two seconds. 3/

...And pros were cancelling their appearances. Obviously, me going wasn't going to move the needle but they were very lovely and insistent, so we went. I have never, ever fallen in love with a place and a people harder. Art and music EVERYWHERE. Stunning beauty ever direction. 2/

I was invited to a con in Puerto Rico soon after the hurricane. They were rebuilding everywhere, parts of the island were still without power. Trump was of course screwing them over. I didn't feel it was right to go, but I was told repeatedly to please come, they needed tourism back. 1/

Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing.

The whole article is repulsive but this passage is at the core of it. She has no interest in writing books, she wants to win some kind of competition that nobody entered

This, from @jamellebouie.net is exactly right. And I think so many folks have refused to see or admit what Trump is because admitting implicates them, or their families, so denial is easier.

Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert says the #ICC is necessary to “expose those responsible” and address atrocities - ethnic cleansing - in the West Bank 👇 www.haaretz.com/opinion/2026... #WestBank

SCOOP: Freedom 250 — the group launched by Trump to oversee projects including the @UFC fight on the WH lawn & his arch overlooking DC — is offering access to him for donors who give $1M. For $2.5M, donors are being offered the chance to speak at the national July 4 celebration. 🎁🔗

Most of the scholarship I've read has drawn a direct line from the the up-to-their-necks-in-slaving early years of South Carolina to its godawful antebellum political culture, not hard to get from there to the present state of the Republican Party

I'm writing a Past Lives episode on the Indian slave trade in Colonial America and I didn't realize that Charleston was the entrepot for exporting tens of thousands of enslaved indigenous people everywhere from Boston to Barbados, not just importing enslaved Africans

I've written about the overarching post story, causes, underlying pattern. But the failure of Lewis or Bezos to even show up, literally or figuratively, on a day of devastating cuts epitomizes the profound lack of character and accountability that is so common place today within the American elite.

Alberto Castañeda Mondragón was hospitalized with eight skull fractures and five life-threatening brain hemorrhages. Officers claimed he ran into a wall, but medical staff doubted that account. n.pr/4bHoZDU

ICE told nurses this Minneapolis man “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.” What actually happened is that they pulled him from a car, beat him so viciously with a steel baton that he had 8 skull fractures, 5 life-threatening brain hemorrhages, and couldn’t remember he had a daughter.

But the other piece of evidence -- the point of this thread -- is that we now have an example of what it looks like when US political & corporate elites *really are* obsessed with and committed to something. Namely: AI.

*That's* what it looks like when US elites care about something & want to advance it. That's the benchmark. And with that benchmark in mind, we can ask, are they -- or were they ever -- similarly committed to climate or diversity? LOL.

The bosses are forcing their employees to use it. Politicians are competing to shovel money & infrastructure at it. The billionaires who control media are constantly lecturing & hectoring people to accept it & use it more. They don't care it's losing money. They don't care people hate it.

I was reliably told that mandatory detention as a default rule was fine. Nothing to see.

The law consists of political regimes and the people who populate them. You cannot look at the law and play with it like a game, ignoring the consequences of your arguments when lives hang in the balance.

I am not sure why again, the failure to investigate Renee Good’s death from a civil or criminal perspective is not a national scandal. The FBI did not want to investigate because it undermine President Trump’s claim that Renee had run over the ICE officer.

on weds., uspto director squires described uspto as “america’s branding agency" while another speaker at the same event pointed out the rise in people asserting “ownership in their own personal brands.” & yes, personal brand lawsuits are on the rise: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

AWFUL news tonight. This blesses the “mandatory” detention in the 5th Circuit without bond (and little chance at habeas) of every undocumented immigrant who originally entered across the border, no matter how many decades in the past. It will fuel ICE’s push to transfer people to Texas immediately.

Been thinking about this because there are men of color sex pest scientists that I know of who would have fit right in with that crowd's attitude towards women and girls who don't appear on any of those dinner/conference invites and it's clearly because they aren't white

Brockman had to have INTENTIONALLY avoided inviting non-white scientists to these events where Epstein would show up because Epstein didn't believe in the intellectual equality of non-white scientists to white ones If you're a white scientist in an all white space, ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT WHY

Sometimes people just don't think about it and end up creating all-white, all-male environments in STEM. Pretty easy to do, actually, unless you have to the intention not to. What I'm talking about here is that Brockman was serving the interests of an openly white supremacist patriarch.

Been thinking a bit about the way that John Brockman acted as Epstein's scientist collector and would organize dinners where Epstein would just happen to show up and I think a lesson here for *white scientists* is if you're being invited to all-white events, that might be actively intentional 🧪

Devastating decision from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals last night endorsing the Trump Bureau of Immigration Appeals 2025 ruling that undocumented immigrants “apprehended anywhere in the United States are ineligible for release on bond, regardless of how long they have resided in the U.S.”

“Late Friday night, the Fifth Circuit adopted the extreme minority view—that the government can indefinitely detain without bond millions of non-citizens who have been here for generations; who have never committed a crime; and who pose neither a risk of flight nor any threat to public safety.”