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.

What some of your Guiding Principles look like

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

i think that "having a public api firehose" is a kind of thing that hypothesizes that people will do creative, productive things with it, but unfortunately people do creepy or extractive stuff instead and that motivates a move to make data less legible to machines and less accessible

Is there a material difference between having your public posts added to a dataset of public posts and having your public posts indexed and searchable on Google?

On the knowledge problem inherent in using an AI to navigate public benefits (and likely a more general problem) open.substack.com/pub/daveguar...

Now I've come across several instances of people writing, essentially: 'Let me provide a very rough estimate. Don't take this number literally, because it has several flaws.' And then their number becomes cited as the canonical figure on the topic.

Happy Friday, here’s a free mental model for you

Remarkable take alert: this 2017 UK think tank report arguing that tobacco usage is net beneficial to the UK national health service (NHS) because it causes people to die early and thus not need to be cared for by the NHS.

Folk authentication

What’s my “theory of change?” Well,

What is it about externalities that brings out the very most galaxy brain takes?

Anyway I was reading the Wikipedia article for The Rescuers for some reason and came upon this powerful phrase.

I tried really hard for really long to keep using twitter because it felt like it was my responsibility to keep bearing witness to the abyss and its various dynamics. But it turns out that if you do that long enough it quietly eats fathomless holes in your vital forces. So, hello.

doing praxis by logging onto my dormant bluesky account

I Have To Know Everything Or I Will Die. Haha

Changing my account name to "cats you might find" and only posting pictures of cats. I then use advanced technology to follow every user on the site and over 40 of them follow me back. I sell the account to a Qatari spammer for $37 in Dogecoin and begin again at zero.

Safety was not in the v1 of this new open source LLM, but not to worry: it’s on the roadmap.

I am in Montreal and she gets me

I’m a few days late to this but it’s perfect. An investigation into a mundane civil object that doubles as a meditation on producing knowledge from the piecemeal and decaying records of the past. tylervigen.com/the-mystery-...

Good Art should kill you instantly

I uh… I guess?

I like the top 20 songs meme circulating on Twitter but I would truly rather hear from my Bluesky mutuals

My favourite definition of full employment is this from Congressman Brad Sherman

I watched an unusual animated(?) film called The Wolf House this week, and have been pondering its Rules.

The bluesky domain thing is making me once again regret not buying the tk.tk domain when I saw it for sale for $49 in 2006. I can’t tell you how much I long to be [email protected]

Conducting an experiment to see if I can make this place feel different from Twitter by not just posting when I have something obviously on-brand to post.