🧪 After enough online arguments I've picked up a set of epistemological peeves. It might be fun for others to join in with more. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/epistemolo...

🧪 @mark-ungrin.bsky.social I put up a short blog about the Munster/Kew inactivated Mpox business, trying to disentangle some issues that got lumped together. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/munster-kw...

Scientists shouldn’t censor scientists especially at a scientific meeting where the free exchange of ideas is supposed to happen regardless of political content. MAHA will literally kill people. Talking about it can save lives. Science does not exist in isolation from politics. #MedSky 🧪

Police pushed out a couple of the attendees at a diabetes scientific meeting. The crime: Passing out printouts of a recent publication calling out the administration for destroying our research infrastructure. The right to free speech was infringed upon. Censorship is real. We have to stand up.

Cowards die many times open.substack.com/pub/biosafet...

(cartoon Steve Sack) #politics

May Day is one day. Solidarity is every day. After today's action, the work doesn’t stop. When workers strike, ask for support. Show up, don’t cross picket lines, and make it real by backing labor actions in your daily choices.

On the issue of bias in test-negative controls, the excuse Bhattacharya gave for censoring the Covid vax efficacy MMWR paper, see pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39567531/ The main bias is rarely as large as 8% and tends to underestimate efficacy. A more general treatment: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33831173/

They should introduce him by playing this and dozens of other similar interviews from 6 years ago.

Turns out ChatGpt lies repeatedly when hammered on an easy apolitical question. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/interrogat...

🧪Dunno if this is useful to anybody but I scrounged some old notes introducing likelihood methods and Bayes, with some exercises included. A supplement to an intro stats course. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/likelihood...

July 21 1935: The Führer orders a new reception hall and ballroom to "entertain foreign diplomats" at the Chancellery. Underneath the dance floor is an air raid shelter. A 2nd deeper bunker is built next to this in 1944, where he would spend his last days as the Reich collapsed.

My thoughts on the Covid origins group-think frying pan econjwatch.org/articles/an-... econjwatch.org/podcast/mich... and the MAGA fire. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/bhattachar...

🧪 Jay Bhattacharya will be a lead speaker in an upcoming NAS workshop on scientific integrity. Thats a bad choice: michaelweissman.substack.com/p/bhattachar... JB's ideology drives not only his policy choices but his science. He's right about Covid origins but wrong about more immediate issues.

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The famous two-Covid-spill Pekar 2022 Science paper got its result upside down via a math error. abstract: econjwatch.org/articles/an-... pdf: econjwatch.org/file_downloa... interview with Jamie Robins: econjwatch.org/podcast/mich... substack discussion: michaelweissman.substack.com/p/sciences-p...

They Built It. Now They're Bombing It. The 1980 October Surprise didn't just put Reagan in the White House. GOP operatives also sided with repressive Islamists who took control of the Iranian revolution and squashed the forces of secular democracy. open.substack.com/pub/craigung...

Admittedly, I had low priors for Bayes' theorem appearing in a Superbowl ad.🧪

Many of my science colleagues are not speaking out-I suspect due to the fear Phil notes, that they'll targeted for loss of funding. I hope they read this account of what happened at a faculty meeting at Frankfurt University in 1933 as the Nazi's took control 🧪 www.facinghistory.org/resource-lib...

To repeat: It is highly improbable that I would agree with Bill Kristol. I agree with him 100%. ICE has become the gestapo. They need to go. Just saw a Minneapolis protestor yelling at ICE, near shooting site, "We will not forgive you." Correct.

In 1987 when the Norwegians picked Arias over Gronlund, Kogut, Wright & me for the Nobel Peace prize, we were disappointed but too slow-witted to threaten to start a war in response.

🧪I prepared some highly organized tutorial lessons for MDs on Bayesian differential diagnosis. They just cover the very basics but I hope somebody (not just MDs) finds them useful. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/bayesian-d...

🧪Based on overwhelming popular demand (one request) I've posted slides for the second half of my old physics/philosophy course. This part is not historical. It gets into the open-ended fallout from Bell's Inequality violations, etc. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/physicsphi...

🧪To their credit & my surprise, Science just posted my eletter demonstrating that the Pekar et al 2022 analysis implied a higher likelihodd for 1 Covid spillover rather than their claimed 2. Will it change the narrative? Dunno. eletters are at the end of the paper www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🧪 I've posted some lecture slides from a course I taught many times at the intersection of physics/philosophy/history. I was not generally a good teacher but this turned into a good course. The 1st 14 lectures work to answer the 2 subtitle questions. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/physicsphi...

Pekar 2022 was 1 of 2 key papers supporting a market origin of covid, via multiple spillovers. v3 of my arXiv fixing its math errors in a transparent way is now up, with a new histogram. tl;dr The answer from their model applied to their data is the opposite of their claim. arxiv.org/abs/2510.01484

I recycle some old thoughts (2017) about Trump and the collapse of civilization. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/civilizati...

The corrections to the Pekar 2022 Science paper claiming multiple SARS-CoV-2 introductions are factorizable and simple, using data contained in the paper and minimal assumptions. Their data and model imply that a single introduction was more likely. arxiv.org/abs/2510.01484

Very few PhD students finish within 4 years. But international students will need to do that if US proposed visa rules change go through. Sound reasonable to you? Fed register is accepting comments for next month. Details at the link & comment button www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

With troops being employed for domestic suppression and war looming, I briefly escaped into nostalgic family memories. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/more-stori...

College alumni join forces open.substack.com/pub/lastpaig...

This is urgent. We have until noon Sat. to get 10 k alumni signers for this amicus brief. Harvard may suck, but this is where the front lines are in the defense against Trump's attacks on science and education. Please sign if you're eligible. and circulate! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

There was more interest than I expected in this niche substack answering Scott Alexander on Covid origins. It may be more generally useful for its brief discussion of how hierarchical Bayes is needed in messy practical problems. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/open-lette...

tl;dr — this EO co-opts the language of open science to implement a system of political control wherein presidential appointees are given broad latitude to designate any number of reasonable scientific activities and inferences as scientific misconduct, and to penalize those involved accordingly.

Harvard today, your institution tomorrow. It's all part of the Project 2025 plan to destroy high education in America. All leading US universities depend on federal funding and tuition dollars from international students. They severely curtailed the former. Now they're eliminating the latter.

More substack, this time recycling some old prison memories. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/prison-mem...

I posted a light, slightly pretentious piece over at the Stack. At least with some anecdotes. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/two-tales-...

Here's my summary of and comments on a Brookings/RAND meeting on pandemic prevention and preparedness. Some info on their views on Covid origins and thoughts on coping with the next pandemic. Complete with an explanatory cartoon and a quote from Trotsky. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/brookingsr...

This is what a rigged economy looks like: In the 1970s, CEOs made 27 times more than the average worker. In the 1980s, CEOs made 48 times more than the average worker. This decade, CEOs are making 354 times more than the average worker. That has got to change.

I've just posted a response to Trump's new Covid announcements. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/trump-on-c...

An update about various letters for Harvard alums and others to sign trying to get universities not to cave to Trump on free speech. There's a range of political slants but groups plan to work together. Here the link doesn't have to go in separately: michaelweissman.substack.com/p/campus-fre...

NIH slashes overheads, fires directors and staff, freezes funds, halts trials, interrupts research, stalls grant review, and terminates 100s of grants on infectious disease, vaccines, mRNA, DEI, LGBTQ health. NIH director, to Bari Weiss: Scientists are just upset because they didn't vote for Trump.

It's getting a lot of attn today. But even before today most of the country had very little idea of what has happened at NIH or through it the entire ecosystem of biomedical research in the US. Simply put, Musk, Kennedy & Trump exploded a bomb right in the middle of cancer cure research in the US.

There's a letter circulating among Harvard alums on defending free speech against Trump. links to sign the letter and a Crimson story here: michaelweissman.substack.com/p/campus-fre...

A group started today circulating a carefully worded letter from Harvard alums (all types) insisting that Harvard protect free speech, and not cave in to Trump. If you're interested, DM me for the text and email to sign. Other schools could do the same!

🧪On covid origins, Angus McCowan has just posted a preprint showing that the two-spillovers story on which the market account rested was based on an explicit mathematical error. Using the data and model of the orignal 2-spill paper, fixing the error reverses the conclusion. arxiv.org/html/2502.20...

On covid origins , Angus McCowan has just posted a preprint showing that the two-spillovers story on which the market account rested was based on an explicit mathematical error. Using the data and model of the orignal 2-spill paper, fixing the error reverses the conclusion. arxiv.org/html/2502.20...

1st glance suggests no more work on chemical reaction rates: “transition” “barrier”. Also forget causal inference: “bias”.

Major news on Covid origins, not from spies: Andy Levin posts a deep Bayesian analysis of the space-time data on NBER. I post a short explainer. Please share. michaelweissman.substack.com/p/big-news-o... www.nber.org/papers/w33428