Someone's takeaway from reading Blindsight was that we should build the Scramblers news.cornell.edu/stories/2026...

Sometimes you're reading a paper and you come across a sentence that stops you in your tracks.

Good graf

Christian Metz has a good line: “every film is a fiction film” — and it was already true long before generative video

GUYS have you seen this. antarctica on google maps. go look at it. this is tech struggling to process the Sublime

we've lost so much

Thought this was a SIGGRAPH poster for a second

This is giving me strong “elegant analogy for some broader societal phenomenon” vibes, but I can’t figure out what to compare to it.

Ok this post has kind of taken a life of its own so I feel I need to go on the record and say: all observation is theory-laden, all measurement is approximation, and humans don't have access to an objective reality.

not to say we shouldn’t be doing this. but I think the people who get mad about isposting hear an insufficient (to them) commitment to a better future, when that’s very much not what it always means.

I also think a rise in oughtposting is correlated with a feeling of helplessness: narrative is a powerful tool for imagining ways that things could be different, and I expect that people who are doing this are despairing of more practical paths to effect change.

I have a theory that the general epistemic crisis has led to a lot of very online people getting used to communicating primarily through oughtposting and kind of forgetting how to deal with isposting

Found theory of change

This does a good job articulating something I’ve been struggling to. Feels like so much contemporary media is now in the Zapruder Extended Universe.

Adversarial examples

New Year: New Job? I'm hiring two Transit Data Scientists to work on SB125 and other transit programs with me at CalSTA calcareers.ca.gov/CalHrPublic/...

everyone thinks they’re a bayesian until they have to update their priors

Maybe the internet would be better with tone indicators — like “/s” to indicate sarcasm — but for the is/ought distinction

we're too quick to mistake `what i know how to easily model' for `what is' and even `what should be'.

with alt text if you need it

Somebody posted this prompt, which attempts to make ChatGPT responses less friendly and more critical. Feels like a rich document for a science-and-technology-studies analysis.

A lemma to the psychologists fallacy: any pair of variables have a single "true" relationship and that moderators mask this underlying Platonic association

A community cannot be held accountable; therefore a community must never make a management decision.

Coase, R. H. (1960). The Problem of Social Cost. The Journal of Law and Economics, 3, 1–44.

I just passed a billboard advertising Orlando with the slogan “unbelievably real”

Causality is a model

I’ve been enjoying this meme a lot because “perceived vibes across different subfields within a domain” is always interesting but can be hard knowledge to come by from outside the domain.

This taxonomy of externalities is nice

It is *impossible* to "adjust for socioeconomic status" in a regression model. Discuss. And good morning! 🌞

Lessons from civic tech: if the app claims it will solve potholes, it’s vaporware.

In the above figure, there's a government building next to "make it required". The #Openscience community requested this, and got it---of course nothing like they envisioned. It's a great time for #metascience to self reflect, engage with experts in weaponization of science, and re-examine rhetoric.

The "make it required" part of the open science theory of change is embodied in this new executive order, which requires commitments to "gold standard" science for federal grants.  www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Love to be an involuntary participant in a colossal performance of Alvin Lucier's "I am sitting in a room"

i guess if you really think about it there’s really only one “data-generating process” in the world and it’s called “measurement”

Causal evidence that "the proliferation of surveys may lead to lower response rates" doi.org/10.1093/jssa...

this user has correctly divined how a LLM works: you imagine that you are talking to a person but you are actually talking to an abstract representation of the collective efforts of everybody involved in moving the pointer

Principal component analysis is fine but this is why you should never name your components

when will people finally acknowledge the truth that "is 'data' plural?" is a red herring: singular and plural "data" both exist and mean different things

The fact that antihistamines can be used to relieve itches and also as sleep aids has led me to the conclusion that Consciousness is a Form of Itch

i'm not the right person to write an article about how ai training datasets are analogous to henry george's concept of 'land' and the profit generated by proprietary models built on stolen datasets are 'economic rents' but someone has to do it

living in a corrupt and unsafe environment is a computational tax. you suddenly have to *think* about the safety of things you take for granted, information processing resources you could have used for something else

The maintenance *is* the resilience! The technician is as much the system as the wires or the motors. Technology is activity, not artifact.

This is a fun prompt. For me, maybe Werner Herzog? Dial into your eccentricities and morbid curiosities for decades until you're eventually broadly recognized and get paid Star Wars money to play a caricature of yourself.

“How a simple math error sparked a panic about black plastic kitchen utensils”: Does it matter when an estimate is off by a factor of 10? statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/12/13/h...

I had an occasional thread of these on Twitter (“every film is a fiction film,” “all snowmen are abominable”) Looks like I’ve found the starting point for a new thread on here.

The dynamic I’ve seen is more like: -you’ll make “bad” work at first -you need to practice to improve -you’ll inevitably show work to people you’re close to -it’s possible for the work to be so bad it alienates those people -it’s hard to practice your work if it’s harming your relationships