I hope each and every one of the fascists who rule this country read this and choke.

The numbers I am seeing, and the breadth of people and places with basically no arrests and so forth, seem to me an unqualified political loss for them. It is a show of strength rather than the fight itself, but you can’t downplay it.

“You can win elections by tacking to the middle; lots of people have. But you can also win elections by staking a moral position and convincing people to agree with you. You can earn support by demonstrating what is important to you instead of just being determined to nod along with what you hear.”

Xenophon once marched through the freezing snow to lead the Ten Thousand back to Greece. I think you can manage to go to a protest even if that means you get tear gassed and shot with pepper balls. It's sort of fun. It's also your civic duty.

‘The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year… Outside of the AI plays, even European stock markets have been outperforming the US this decade’ on.ft.com/4pTQ3US

This paper isn't only about Italy

My latest: "Numerous studies show that majors in the humanities—typically, in departments of English, history, philosophy, religious studies, classics and languages—lead students to employment and life satisfaction outcomes as positive as those for majors traditionally championed as 'practical.'”

NEW: The government does not track how often immigration agents grab citizens. So ProPublica did. We found more than 170 such incidents since the start of the second Trump administration. Our tally — almost certainly incomplete — includes nearly 20 children, two of whom have cancer.

The materials to effectively teach *yourself* Latin have existed for, like, two centuries and driven, talented autodidacts have been doing it that way for even longer. But for most people *who want to learn Latin* they still need the structure and motivation provided by a class with a teacher.

We have to start doing the smart things. We don't have to wait. This is 100% upside, and can't be left to market forces and the resulting arms race of buying ever bigger vehicles to be safer among the ever bigger vehicles.

With the next generation of Clipper there will be free/discounted transfers between all agencies. The launch date is coming soon. Huge savings for transit riders!

Big Doug Hofstadter energy

LLMs have convincingly demonstrated that coding is the easiest activity, maths is medium hard, and having taste is the hardest

Excellent piece. We know how to improve writing ability: it's by doing more, not less of it. "LLMs do not improve one’s writing ability much like taking a taxi does not improve one’s driving ability. Students should hone their writing, thinking, and other academic skills at every opportunity."

I love journals whose policy is not to bother with any formatting minutia (outside of big-picture stuff length limits) until after review, but they are few and far between unfortunately.

So much of your career chances are determined by whether you are working with a successful and supportive team. I.e. Whether you are working with a line manager or mentor who hands down opportunities. Coauthorships on papers. Coapplicants on grant. If you're not being given these, you MUST move.

The pivot from “I’m building god” to “I’m building a jerkoff tool” is pretty funny

An excellent response from Ben Harrap.

“Your job is not to turn in completed assignments; it's to learn how to think.” Ted Chiang‘s succinct summary of the issue with using AI in education. I’m not a sports guy but the athlete metaphor he uses in this interview is pretty spot on.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

Look, we’re both very sorry about the widening gyre.

The elimination of USAID is a moral atrocity and all involved made a choice to enable, and then lie about, ending the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

Just. Reduce. Child. Poverty.

They've lost the 9yos

I only ever heard second-hand from my German relatives what the 1930s were like but it sounded like this. You see the story, it feels wrong, but everyone else around you is just carrying on, shopping, working, going to the cinema. So you do the same. Keep your head down, maybe this is fine? Normal?

I always pay attention to what stories People Magazine and other consumer media outlets cover. That's how you can tell that something has broken through the usual political and news bubbles. This horrific Chicago story has broken through. people.com/ice-agents-o...

Asking “is the postal service profitable?” is a new thing If you visit a 1950s post office it looks like a Greek temple. They have statues of eagles. There’s a big mural of a flying woman holding a cornucopia. They didn’t whine “is the bronze bas-relief of Prosperity profitable?”

This op-ed is excellent and I encourage everyone to read it. Universities must reject the Trump compact. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

I guess my point is it’s unphysical concepts all the way down. But for some reason people really don’t like this one in particular. Sure, it’s not the only way to frame causal inference, but I’m not sure it’s inherently worse. Different frameworks mostly emphasize different sets of priorities.

Literally bragging about sending gestapo into American cities with weapons of war to bust down doors & drag residents out of their beds because they’re Latino. F*cking psychopaths

The regime’s new proposed “compact” with universities — conditioning federal funds on giving up academic freedom & free speech & throwing trans & non-US students under the bus — is unconstitutional. Every university must reject it. It’s classic hang together or hang separately.

Using external data in trials can up power, but also bias. Some of my previous papers have tackled this, zeroing bias at the cost of power. In new work, we take the opposite fork: gaining max power and taking the bias hit, but with a rigorous way to protect from that bias. arxiv.org/abs/2507.18876

CTML GSRs Wenxin Zhang, Kaiwen Hou, and Alissa Gordon will be presenting their work next week at the 2025 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM). Innovations in causal inference, adaptive study design, and statistical methodology will be highlighted. If you’re attending JSM—come show your support!

A nice recent article on why you should abandon hazard ratios. #statssky #episky

I complain about the weather a lot, and honestly it's super important to me. I come alive when it's hot and sunny out.

Just to be clear, this is a violation of the fundamental ethical principle in clinical trial design called "equipoise." Equipoise means that no-one is exposed to excess risk just to test the therapy. That's specifically *why* vaccine trials don't use placebo arms. Ethical violation as POLICY.

The problem with this study is not confounding. The problem is that it is a meaningless 'risk factor association study'. The results cannot be interpreted. The study has zero scientific or practical value. Such studies need to be outlawed for undermining faith in science.

The Trump administration continues to ignore the courts. 278 men are still in CECOT prison without a trial, sentence, or any form of due process. Here's one of their stories. Dad is in CECOT. Mom, deported to Venezuela. Their beautiful toddler, in foster care in the US, whereabouts unknown.

"if I was a billionaire I would not be cooking my brain in social media" if you were a billionaire you too would be desperate for what feels like earned regard of other apes

Multiple articles have been written about Bluesky being a dangerous echo chamber while the world’s richest and influential men are having their brains cooked in increasingly extremist group chats

the shift from “I never thought leopards would eat MY face” to “eat my face harder leopard daddy” must be studied

I feel like I’m losing my mind with the lack of wall to wall coverage on disappearing *children with cancer* i keep saying this, but it’s not 5% of the uproar that came from Biden’s debate. “kids peeing in litter boxes”, a thing that never happened, got orders of magnitude more coverage.

BREAKING: @aclu.org says Trump deported a child (U.S. citizen) with metastatic cancer without medication or consultation with physicians. This is the second child with cancer he's deported. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol... @rollingstone.com

am I insane or is this motivation in the 2019 Dragonnet paper completely wrong? If this were true, then it would be pointless to ever adjust in an RCT (where the part of "X" relevant to predict treatment is none of it)

🚨News: BART’s efforts to put rider safety first are paying off with one of the largest drops in crime in the more than 50-year history of the agency. For the first three months of the year crime on BART fell by 50% compared to last year. Thread 🧵⬇️

holy shit the amount of times I've had to explain this

The real answer is that the worst thing you can do is be a monocausalist and/or deny that something played any part at all in triggering a historical event just because you think something else was more important

Academia is cool because if you're doing it right, every paper you published in the last 3 years feels inadequate now that you understand the topic better, but it'll take 3 years to get out the version where you get it more right, and you get to do that until one day you die! Isn't that cool

after having a kid I went from merely hating cars to full-on anti-car jihadi. Ironically, caring for a 3 year old takes up all the time I'd be using to blow up 6-lane roads and build guerrilla speed bumps.

Why are children not playing in the street? An FT piece analysing the - very concerning - decline in outdoor play manages to look at every possible cause: screens, spaces, school timetable changes. Apart from one. Cars. It is simply not safe for kids to play outside on streets.