Halloween is the best holiday. Change my mind.

When it's Halloween, but your 2.5yo daughter insists that "we should bring the skeleton inside" and "make it cozy with a blankie and a pillow".

take this quiz then tell me you can win over low-info "moderates" on policy it's just vibes all the way down

An LLM-produced essay is tangible proof that a student doesn’t care, and yet responding to it properly requires hour upon hour of careful work. It’s asymmetrical and overwhelming.

Cheating with an LLM is the easiest thing in the world for a student to do, but it creates a massive, laborious headache for a prof, if you intend to take it seriously. There’s meetings, emails, discussions, moral dilemmas. It’s just incredibly burdensome, on top of everything else right now.

Wait until you learn about common ways of doing segmentation analysis in marketing. "Yeah, we ran a K-means algorithm, gave each cluster a cute name and a persona, and now we're making every decision based on whether Pumpkin-Spice Peggy or Truck-Nut Terry will like it".

Cool and normal

If, as a reviewer, you see an unusual statistical test being reported in a manuscript, it never hurts to double-check whether the test does what the authors claim. Who knows, it might help a journal not publish inaccurate results.

I have many thoughts about Charlie Kirk—and perhaps even more about the white elites, including some on the left, who insist we can’t hold multiple realities at once. We can. And we must. A brief 🧵

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

holy shit lmao

Very interesting post, which largely aligns with my views on theory. I see another danger with Big Beautiful Theories: In a world in which researchers' degrees of freedom are insufficiently constrained, they become self-fulfilling. 1/3

More from HBS' Amended Complaint. They claim to have evidence that Gino backdated a fabricated file to exonerate herself.

Key claims from HBS

Do you remember Francesca Gino's claim on her website that HBS analyzed the "wrong data file" in their investigation, and that a "real file" proved her innocence? HBS is now claiming that the "real file" was fabricated by Gino... and thus that Gino's claim was defamatory.

Looks like the "Tariff" button is back on the resolute desk.

Super interesting thread. A stark reminder that any metric of "variance explained" is basically uninterpretable without contextualizing (i) the magnitude and variability of the treatment and (ii) the "baseline" variability of the outcome.

I'll believe the Gen AI hype when a LLM can write a 10 page report without using the "This isn't just X: It's Y" structure 8673 times. This isn't just annoying, it's aggravating.

Of course academics should not sue others for pointing out their faulty (*cough*) work. But this is a bit like saying that mafiosi should not threaten witnesses. Doing that follows from being a mafioso, just as suing people who point out your fraud is part of the kind of person who commits fraud.

Francesca Gino doesn't do fraud. She just has a lot of fraud happening to her. (shamelessly stolen from a friend).

Francesca Gino: "I am deeply sad and disappointed that the University has concluded as it has. But now that this process is over, I am free to show why its conclusion is so clearly wrong. I will continue the fight and do everything in my power to right this wrong." www.linkedin.com/posts/france...

Two very skeptical birds on my hike today.

Dear colleagues teaching methods classes, Have you included any of my papers/blog posts in your syllabus? If so, I'd be super grateful if you could send me a short note, either here or via email. Thank you!

it's just too bad we will never solve the impenetrable mystery of who made grok obsessed with south african white genocide theory at 3:15 am

Dear colleagues teaching methods classes, Have you included any of my papers/blog posts in your syllabus? If so, I'd be super grateful if you could send me a short note, either here or via email. Thank you!

Data Colada has submitted a motion for sanction against Francesca Gino and her former lawyer team. I hope the court rules in their favor. It will be a powerful message that sleuths can expose fake research without fearing legal consequences. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Breaking News: Harvard rejected the Trump administration’s demands, including that it submit to monitoring and reduce the power of faculty and students.

Bill Ackman has a humiliation kink. There's no other explanation that makes sense.

My attempt at explaining, in simplest possible terms, why equalizing imports and exports is not a desirable goal. Imagine running a marketing consulting firm, selling SEO services to other businesses. These are your "exports".

You can totally see how this mf bankrupted a casino.

I've been thinking about open science practices in the past few months, and I've come to the following conclusions: * Pre-registration is useless, a form of virtue signaling * NHST is a relic of antiquated statistical practices * It is not OK to criticize peer-reviewed research

Having a toddler is realizing a lot of our behavior is driven by norms we've never really questioned or challenged. "No no don't dip your Ranch-flavored puffs into your applesauce-and-berries puree... OK I guess you can try it? 🤷🏻‍♂️"

In the midst of all this shittiness, I'm grateful for the desert and for birds.

is you texting war plans to journalists on Signal?

(Final?) update: I emailed the corresponding author, alerted them to these errors, and asked them to share the full data (with excluded data points). On the upside, they said they'll ask for a correction. On the downside, they said they cannot share the data for reasons that I find unconvincing.

Update on this: The Supplementary Materials report an attrition analysis showing that excluded and non-excluded participants do not significantly differ in some aspects. This contradicts my hunch that "the most depressed participants" were excluded... So all good then?

Not everybody is as skeptical as I am 🤷.

I wanted to test this hypothesis formally, and downloaded the raw data to check whether excluded participants have different depression scores at the onset. Unfortunately I confirm @benjaminschneider.ch's observation: These participants do not appear in the posted data. Not great.

Psych. Science just published a paper showing that the "warm glow" of donations can reduce depressive symptoms (d = [0.19, 0.46]). Most impressively, "micro" donations (one Chinese cent, or $0.0014) appear sufficient to trigger these large effects. Big if true? Let's dive in.

the CFPB that Musk wants to shut down has won $21 billion for Americans from predatory financial institutions and big banks quick, does anyone know if $21 billion is more than $711 million

Cool, we're at the "defying court orders" stage. Very legal. Very democratic.

Reposted with fixed links, thanks @blasimon.bsky.social!

In 2015, a paper claimed evidence that loss aversion (LO) could attenuate or reverse, depending on the distribution of gains and losses that people had sampled. These predictions were derived from "decision-by-sampling", a theory purporting to explain valuation of outcomes. 1/N

Why it's okay to use ChatGPT, in 4 graphs

An unfortunate example of researchers tackling an ambitious, important, and policy-relevant question... but who have failed to sufficiently constrain their researchers' degrees of freedom.

Here's my end-of-year review of things we learned out about LLMs in 2024 - we learned a LOT of things simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/... Table of contents: