China could be the world’s biggest public funder of science within two years. Forecast by science-policy researchers raises questions about where the epicentre of global research will shift to in the coming decade. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Many (speculative) things here. But this I firmly believe: Machine learning (ML) can be a useful *aid/tool* in innovation/production of novelty. But whether ML can automate (all of) scientific discovery - I doubt it. Why? Because ML does not have understanding & goals required for model selection.

Loistava vieraskynä, kiitos Kaarlo Hildén! Kirjoituksen pointti pätee korkeakoulutuksen lisäksi sellaisenaan myös myös tieteeseen: Tieteen tavoitteen rajaaminen pelkkään kilpailukykyyn sivuuttaa inhimilliset haasteet ja sivistykselliset päämäärät – vaikka juuri niiden varaan kaikki muu rakentuu.

This feels like a helpful primer for understanding AI in general. It makes programmers more efficient on the front end because they can generate more code. But it makes them less efficient afterwards because it vastly increases the amount of time they spend tweaking and fixing bugs.

Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

"PRC model is a return to the roots of scholarly communication. This model will allow all actors involved to take greater responsibility for their work: authors for their articles, reviewers for their assessments, and editors for supporting the process of scholarly communication." Yes.

Every anti-vaxxer I encounter seems to love weird unregulated supplements. They hate Big Pharma but they love Little Pharma, Big Pharma’s younger sibling who grew up without any adult supervision.

Minnesota should leave the US. And join Canada. bsky.app/profile/atru...

It is with great sadness that we are sharing the news that the UCL Faculties of Social & Historical Sciences and Arts & Humanities have decided to close the IAS. We will close our doors forever on 31 July 2026. Follow the link to leave thoughts, comments, memories 💗 www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of...

Terveisiä Saksasta. Aseveljeysaate on täällä edelleen voimissaan.

You thought research ethics wasn't sexy, didn't you? Well, check this saga out; it has it all: conspiracy, cash-cash from the adult entertainment industry, murder attempts, $20 million settlements, and, of course, porn. Can't wait to see the movie!

UK: Prince Andrew arrested. South Korea: Former President Yoon sentenced for life. Brazil: Former President Bolsonaro serving a 27-year sentence. USA: President Trump demands $10 billion payout from taxpayers.

Fascinating chart with one outlier: Warren Buffett. At the low end, giving 0.06% of one's wealth is equivalent to: Net worth -> Lifetime Giving 50K->$30 100K->$60 500K->$300 $1M->$600 Most folks give far more by % in a *single year*. www.forbes.com/sites/forbes...

"The third support act after a sitar player and John Peel reading his letters was David Bowie doing a strange Marcel Marceau-type mime act to recorded sound effects. It was pretty rubbish and I knew he’d never make it." Does anybody know what happened to this guy?

It’s so funny to think about the fact that there’s people out there deferring every life decision to this

Hei kaikki psykiatrit ja psykiatrinmieliset! Psykiatripäivät tulee taas (11.03.-13.13., Paasitorni). Myös yours-truly on luennoimassa otsikolla: Onko näyttöön perustuva psykiatria mahdollista? Erityisesti tutkijan kevätkouluun kutsutaan mukaan osallistujia. Tavoitteena on monitieteinen tilaisuus.

Rich Ruohonen, from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. I wonder how well he speaks Finnish. Who will find out? Lots of descendants of Finns in Minnesota - children of immigrants. bsky.app/profile/fact...

Watch a Man Get Launched Off a Truck at 50 MPH, for Science gizmodo.com/watch-a-man-...

In case you missed it, the idea--widely repeated in the medical literature--that Henry Beecher was the first to substitute saline for morphine while treating soldiers in WWII keeps hitting a wall. We now know a Jesuit nightwatchman witnessed this... in WWI. www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/...

"We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average." It's been clear from the start that the most significant outcome of the use of LLMs is that it erodes the basic intellectual skills.

Elikkäs.. onko nyt niin, että Suomessa on sekä kylmässä istumisen (avanto) että kuumassa istumisen (sauna) maailmanennätys? Vai miten sen saunomishommelin kanssa kävikään? Pitääkö nyt tuntea suurta ylpeyttä? Vai kenties joitakin muita tunteita? yle.fi/a/74-20207757

"Humans are a biological error that must be corrected by fire."

"[I]t is hard to assess the safety of Waymo’s technology when we only have Waymo’s own data to go on. Self-driving car companies have in the past been reluctant to share data with crash investigators and have been cagey about how many people are involved behind the scenes as remote operators."

I think a lot of hot air could be cleared if we'd just drop the term "AI" - which was developed for marketing purposes to begin with - and stick to "machine learning". Much of AI is nonsense. But machine learning is (can be) useful, and everybody understands that.

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free

"Yksittäisellä yliopistolla on kannustin keventää tutkintoja sisällöllisesti niin, että tutkintoja valmistuu aikaisempaa enemmän ja nopeammin sen sijaan, että huomio olisi inhimillisen pääoman lisäämisessä eli koulutuksen laadullisissa kysymyksissä." On aika herätä. Makkaratehtailun aika on ohi.

What an overly comfy view of LLMs. Just one, crucial, thing: "This is where critical thinking comes in." The whole problem is that the use of LLMs erodes critical thinking. One might be able to forge somewhat useful research interactions with LLMs for a while. But the (near) future is bleak.

OpenAI just released Prism, a LaTeX editor with embedded ChatGPT for free. Writing a paper has never been easier. Clogging the scientific publishing pipeline has never been easier. It took me 54 seconds to write up an experiment I did not actually conduct. prism.openai.com

This! Should happen at the EU level. And the universities should lead the way - the US companies are a serious threat to European science. There's no time to waste. @uniuef.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/ones...

If you're living somewhere outside the USA, one thing you can do is pressure your leaders to boycott World Cup and Olympic events here.

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…

The Norwegian government is staying fairly quiet for now, but as a sign of the shifting vibe here the former head of Norway’s armed forces has come out and called the US a “neo-fascist banana republic” and a “hostile great power without norms”. www.dn.no/politikk/tid...

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).