Worth every second

From dial-up days to now, travel through Wikipedia's history. Wikipedia turns 25 years! I am who I am also thanks to it! wikipedia25.org/en/which-wik... Which #Wikipedia future are you? I got "Consensus-Driven Collaborator" #wikipedia25

Hate to tell you I told you so. "AI tools seem to automate established fields rather than explore new ones, highlighting a tension between personal advancement and collective scientific progress." Employing AI is like peeing in one's pants: great idea at first, but soon everybody's regretting it.

€307M for AI *technologies. Cool, but AI (machine learning, that is) is carrying significant cultural, political and societal consequences - many of which are blatant, major *problems. When will the EU invest significant amounts in studying these issues? My advice: be fast. Soon it'll be too late.

Mr Mountbatten-Windsor was quietly stripped of his Royal Fellowship of the RS in 2022. Something to do with his conduct, I believe…

How is it so difficult for @royalsociety.org to do its job? Namely: to *defend the conditions for science*. Nobody has delivered a more concrete and direct attack on science than Elon Musk & the US government. Boot him!

🚨🚨 @ec.europa.eu top tech official @hennavirkkunen.bsky.social has warned Elon #Musk's #X to quickly "fix" its AI tool Grok — or face consequences under the #DigitalServicesAct. 🧵 www.politico.eu/article/elon...

I just finished a three-year term as an editor at an international relations journal. I began at the start of the LLM era but ended right in the middle of it. Our volume of submissions tripled and our desk reject rate rose to 75%. I have some thoughts. open.substack.com/pub/hegemon/...

💥New: Why is research led by women retracted less frequently? ✍️ @curtrice.bsky.social #ResearchIntegrity #Retractions #AcademicSky

I really need to write that Gospel of the Exam Aquaria. bsky.app/profile/dail...

“The fact that [Musk] comes and talks in rightwing rallies is irrelevant." OK. But also: “We elect people for scientific achievement or delivery. And therefore my view is that we get rid of them if that turns out to be false or not correct". Musk has delivered an attack on science -> boot him!

Some important new government policy that Native Americans might be interested in:

"Elon Musk should keep his UK Royal Society fellowship even though the Grok AI image generator developed by his company has generated sexualised images including of minors". I get that @royalsociety.org is cool with this. What I don't get is that they are cool with his attacks on science. Boot him!

Let's not get distracted. The issue isn't - never was - about E. Musk's "character". It wasn't even about his politics. It wasn't about him being a "bad person". It was - is - about him working actively against the academic community. This is the reason - the only reason - why he deserves the boot.

X/Twitter's rough full volume is around 500 total million posts every day, or 182 (and a half) billion posts per year. By contracts, we found 11.2 million research posts in all of 2025 on there. In other words, 0.000006% of Twitter appears to be sharing research. Basically zero.

Kyse on tasapainoilusta: lisääkö hyvässä asemassa olevien oikeuksien vahvistaminen huonommassa asemassa olevien riskejä? Nähdäkseni näin on eutanasian suhteen. Lisäksi eutanasialle ei näytä olevan perusteita; avustetun itsemurhan juridisen aseman täsmentäminen riittäisi.

Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).

What if we are completely wrong about this? What if we should have listened to Newton and the positivists more carefully? What if there never was such a thing as "explanation" - let alone "understanding"? What if all there ever was was nothing but data & predictions?

”You don’t protect students by banning 2,400-year-old philosophy.” Powerful statement by FIRE:

Ah, saaga jatkuu. Tässä on aivan timanttista materiaalia tilastollisesta päättelystä (ja ylipäätään tieteellisestä debatista). Luonnolliset RCT:t ja "biologinen uskottavuus", ah. Peruskysymysten äärellä! Hienoa työtä Yle (@petterilindholm.bsky.social)! ❤️tiede yle.fi/a/74-20202927

"An institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato." The US is in the process of cancelling the very basis of Western civilization. The decline has truly began. bsky.app/profile/gbjo...

Great NYT piece on trusting science (by an old student of mine). Gift link 🎁: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/o...

Hieno juttu! Siis, onnettomuus & seuraukset ei ole hieno juttu. Mutta ko. uutisjuttu on hieno. Tutkimustulokseen voi (kannattaa) suhtautua terveellä epäilyllä, mutta tässä on erinomaisesti avattu tutkimustyötä. Ensinäkemältä ajattelin, että mitäs soopaa se taas tämä.. Mutta, hitto, vakuutuin! ❤️tiede

Four generations of my family have served our country. Service is in my blood. The President wouldn’t know anything about that.

'Despite persistent myths, employment rates for humanities graduates are comparable to those of STEM graduates, as Humanities Indicators data shows. Early earnings differ but the salary gap narrows significantly mid-career, particularly for graduates who pursue further study'. 1/2

Hero. “Maybe I am making my position worse with my words, but my honour and conscience are more important to me. I did what I considered necessary.” We should talk more about people like her. Forget Loser-Pig Trump, his sycophants, and all the useless "leaders" of today. bsky.app/profile/theg...

40 years to the day since Ireland's greatest-ever rock'n roll star left us for the great gig in the sky. He set our musical world alight in the previous decades, putting Ireland on the musical map like no other. No-one will ever be as cool as Phillo again. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXOr...

Portrait of Sir Keir Starmer. 🇬🇧💪

Can’t believe the winner of both the Israel Peace Prize and FIFA Peace Prize has started 2026 with an oil war.

At the moment, the Crans-Montana fire looks like an exact repeat of The Station nightclub fire (where 100 people died, mainly by the exit). How on earth is this possible?! Every venue manager should study this tragedy and make sure it won't repeat - damn, even I knew about it!

Serious question: what’s the point of autoethnography? People seem to think it has one, and that it (demonstrably) generates valuable (i.e. objective) knowledge [I know ‘objective’ is a dirty word we’re not supposed to use anymore, in social science at least, which is why I enjoy doing it so much😬]

I just came here to say.. Happy New Year!

The destruction of knowledge and history is haphazard & breathtaking. NASA’s Largest Library Is Closing Amid Staff and Lab Cuts.

This can't be right; does not make any sense. And I'm an old-school cyclist - I'd gladly believe all sorts of abhorrent things about e-bikes! But this can't be.. *If the data is correct, I wonder if it's due to e-bikes being popular in commuting: rides happen among traffic, during rush hours.

Great thread. "These models optimise for likely answers, not guaranteed truth. That’s a poor match for formal proofs where every step must be correct." This is in general the case with what we call "AI" (ie machine learning): they can be of an efficient help, if you know what you are looking for.

Currently, more Americans get their news from social and video platforms than from traditional outlets. Soon, the content on these platforms will be nothing but AI slop. What do you think will happen? www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Maybe we should start speaking in terms of parasites: AI parasites. That's what we are getting infested by, parasites. And at the moment, I can't see any remedy. Any other, that is, but getting off the internet - start reading books & newspapers, meeting people. Doesn't sound all bad to me!

Post-doc positions: "Academic freedom is under pressure today. This requires rescue havens of free research. ... [we] invite early career researchers, whose work is restricted due to political pressure in the USA..." uni-freiburg.de/frias/call-f...

Anyone else feel like we’re maybe two data centres away from people believing that Rodney Dangerfield was president in-between Eisenhower and Kennedy?

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

I think it's clear that soon the whole of internet will be flooded by AI slop. What will happen when we can't trust anything online? That's the question we should be asking. But I don't see this question being asked, let alone answered. I think we are heading towards a collapse.

South Park called it, and it’s hilarious. One of the creators purchased the Trump Kennedy Center URL address before the name was even changed because they know Trump’s narcissism is in the driver’s seat.

Giving what we can has implemented a fun game where you spin a globe to see how your starting point in life would compare if you were reborn today, randomly somewhere on earth. www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery

I finally got some time to flesh out my rant about these headlines... TL;DR: age differences ≠ aging jenndowd.substack.com/p/does-adole... #demography #episky #medsky #neurosky

We've got the Darwin Award, we've got Ig Nobels. We need a prize for the most idiotic innovation. It should be called, hmm.. Trump Prize? bsky.app/profile/scie...

Damn, can't get to this. But I find it credible that this is something that machine learning is actually good for. But let's be careful: - People have preached the gospel of precision medicine for decades. - If we get better at identifying risk factors, will this automatically improve well-being?

"Young exceptional performers and later adult world-class performers are largely two discrete populations over time." I do think we have a serious problem in current academia in that the system incentivises - quite intentionally - quick, narrow performance. We need to change this.

When viewing the fake article in Google scholar on my university network, there is a link to access the article via my uni's library. That link sends me to a library page that makes fake article appear real... Turns out library page is made programmatically from info on Google scholar 🤦