What if, bear with me… fevers in pregnancy were bad. Then, we might only identify these cases by who took acetaminophen. If that were true (just my hypothetical)… but it strikes me that this would be confusing for bad statisticians

advice from LLM: "You won't regret this at all - it's the textbook solution for development databases with schema issues!" should i believe it? lol

to do good science, you need to fall in love with your dreams. everyone always emphasizes the flip side of rationality, which is also kinda true. but the reviewers help you with that. your reviewers can't fall in love for you. and if you aren't falling in love, then stop.

“Duty to shareholders” becomes exceptionally weird when that duty requires sucking up to Trump. Like all those CEOs fawning over him. It’s arguably their job to do that? But it plays very differently in the press and for public opinion.

Half baked thought: communication is always a weird crazy strong bottleneck. So, us sending a little text off to a data center for massive calculations and the text center sending a little text back is like way way off the charts on some metric of ratio between total computation and communication.

“Non-linear” is the first word people say before they go off the methodological deep end

My quote of the day What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents. Robert F. Kennedy, Sr.

Is 9/11 now liberal coded? Or is it just me?

When I was a kid, I had a hard time believing that The Emperor’s New Clothes spoke to a real thing that could ever happen, like ever anywhere in history.

half finished thought... an advantage that engineers have is that no one questions the "constructivist" nature of their work... like clearly they create it. very deliberately engineered.

“Karl, why do you have such a bad impression of Causal Inference™?”

Somebody once said that part of the pleasure in buying a book is the mistaken belief that you're also buying the free time in which to read it... Just sayin'

It was and remains a very curious feature of the US presidential election that it was fairly transparently a "sufficiently many voters are mad about inflation" election but it was treated as a huge Zeitgeist Shift by both proponents and opponents of Trump. This led to some over-confidence from Trump

Is it a confounder or a proxy?

Seems like Epstein died, again

thinking "critically" or "objectively" is actually just a vibe. Lots of folks, when they try to vibe that way, they turn into cranks (anti-vax etc).

i think "ai makes me less smart" is analogous to the sentiment that engineers feel when promoted to management... both ai and management remove you from the more concrete things. there is something lost, but I don't think it is ~smarts~

Happy to announce I just defended my dissertation at Harvard and I’m now a PhD.

Proposal to replace "John Doe" with this

One of the best parts of my job is encouraging undergraduates to take bigger professional/academic risks. These risks are scary because no matter what, they will come out the other side different. They need to know that is ok. then, the risk is simply exciting

I now regularly ask the computer to explain jokes to me. Three years ago, this would have been so far beyond unfathomable to me

There are 12 = 4*3 paths through a standard four way intersection. Isn’t that weird?

Happy 4th of July, Batman.

DIY OTC GLP-1s OMG LOL.

abundance vs scarcity is the new PC2

we are in a weird period of acceleration where publishing does not make sense for lots of researcher. publishing is comically slow. saw someone post a picture of a book that was criticizing LLMs and the critique just... didn't fit anymore. this is a very exciting time to be alive

When "trial" is used to refer to an observational study it's actually describing the emotional experience of seeing people call an observational study a trial.

Authors, editors, reviewers, and other potential users should use CONSORT 2025 when writing and evaluating manuscripts of randomized trials to ensure that trial reports are clear and transparent. Learn more in this Special Communication. https://ja.ma/3TlnKQe

imagine if computers didn't have windows. just an entire screen of the terminal window. This is what computers used to be! And this is what LLMs are now.

This battle is old. Folks been trying to convert universities into trade schools since the beginning. However, every year the market speaks! Folks literally make their kids go into debt to do it. Off the charts user satisfaction because universities are a great place to grow up.

Trump doesn’t care about any of this, except the gifts and attention he receives. His fan base loves the attention he receives (but not the gifts). I am not trying to be prescriptive, just diagnosing.

Three things made the US a rich and powerful nation: the rule of law, its science & innovation system, and openness to foreign talent. Remarkable how Trump has taken a sledgehammer to all three. No enemy of this country could do more.

This is absolutely terrible news. With the shifting regulatory climate (i.e., antivax ratfuckery), Moderna has withdrawn their application for their eagerly anticipated COVID-flu combo vaccine. This vaccine offered better protection than getting each shot separately. h/t @merz.bsky.social

For the connoisseurs of walking in the dark, Lego has released a new companion

If the internet is your only source of information for your work, folks running LLMs will have a much easier time replacing you. So, human work is about to get much more human.

Sean Duffy changed his wife's flight on Monday to avoid Newark Airport and then made a TV appearance on Tuesday insisting it's safe to fly from there.

The scale of these numbers are unreal. Format (country, killed, wounded) Ukraine-Russia War: Ukraine, 46k, 380k Russia: 200k-250k, 650k-700k Israel-Gaza War: Palestine (Gaza): 52k, 117k Israel: 1.2k, 8.7k All figures remain disputed. potentially higher. Looked up by Sonnet 3.7, May2025

Going to ISPOR tomorrow. Anyone else going to be there? Am I going to be the only non-economist statistician?

Underrated skill: handling misinformation/errors Important for working with humans and LLMs!

You don’t pick eigen Eigen picks you (and the pope)

Graduation weekends are always wonderful (except maybe for traffic snarls due to desperate parking seekers). But by far every year the highlight is seeing the first gen graduates and their families celebrating such a special moment.

Why are they wearing masks?

If you see this, post the most recent photo of yourself from your camera roll. No cheating!

Humans hallucinate too

Scientists in Beijing built a 10¢ test that detects Covid in under 1 minute—faster, cheaper & more sensitive than PCR or CRISPR. No machines, no enzymes, no labs. Just flip a test tube and read the result, similar to a pregnancy test but faster & more sensitive. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

'please send me, donald trump, evidence that you are here illegally and i pinky promise....'