Wordsmiths! We need a term for the incorrect belief that a human, with typical time/attention, can outperform an AI in a specific task It isn’t always an incorrect belief necessarily… we need a word or phrase for when it is.

he shot her then her car accelerated

In data analysis, the vibe of “statistical independence“ is 100% woo woo

There are two kinds of academic work… 1) sitting at your computer, reading text and typing more text (coding, writing, etc). 2) Everything else. Everything in 1 is going to get easier I think our ideas about 2 are still primitive… because we don’t value it or think about it. But it is there…

its so beautiful that coding agents do better work when you give them permission to fail and try again.

i never thought that we'd get to live through a singularity (because i never believed it). and it i had pretended to believe it for a moment... i wouldn't have imagined it to be this much fun.

working with ai clarifies intellectual work as... 1) dreaming / imagining-what-could-be 2) making specific plans to achieve that 3) crafting the artifact/software/text ai speeds each one up, making iteration easier and the boundaries between iterates & 1:3 more stark 1/3

making citations... I now trust claude code more than google scholar to make bib entries. google scholar has gone way downhill. I used to blindly trust it! Both need a pass of inspection now...

Opus on point

just had opus write some simulation code and it set.seed(42) not a hitchhikers guide fan... but, damn. that's so good.

This is just insane. open your file drawer. Find the papers that needed annoying lemmas. Strike up a conversation with gpt. It might get it on first shot. If it doesn’t, chat/brianstorm like you would a coauthor.

Brits, what does "OG" mean to you?? I'm in London and fearing the American meaning is opposite!

“Brilliance wrapped in modesty, decency, and good humor.” So true. 😭 May his memory be a blessing.

if you haven't used gemini.google.com, I highly recommend it. so much of what we want from LLMs is information retrieval from the internet... google is the internet's card catalogue gemini is the internet's librarian

ChatGPT is the engineer Claude the philosopher Gemini the librarian

i asked claude opus 4.5 to write some prompts that could work for both ai and humans.... such little respect for humans!

new prompt in 3 pieces. me: what is the right "role" that you should assume to help me think about this? scientific communicator? ui engineer? marketer? statistician? scientist? something else? claude: <answers intelligently> me: great. what are this person's priorities in our setting? 1/2

always a good day when you can get claude to swear

One thing about PCA/embeddings/political-leaning that should get more attention is the role of zero or “the origin”. It’s often special in a way that depends upon how you do the embedding. This post is a good example of that. Once you accept that the origin is special, then….

claude code just rejected a request i made due to safety reasons (request below). i was reminded of this conversation wife and i had driving in michigan UP

Google in Claude???

“[because of LLMs] it’s become so hard to tell what’s slop” - @alexpghayes.com

claude, what the heck

A conversation I had with Claude about extrapolating enmeshment to cultural and political scenarios, whether it applies to Trump supporters, and paths forward. claude.ai/share/92446e...

ABANDONED THE TODDLER IN THE BACKSEAT Arrest these motherfuckers for child endangerment

i got claude code to swear!

Sometimes we don’t yet know the question. That doesn’t mean our curiosity isn’t part of science!

Causality is a model

But they can be much heavier.

Me: Eli, what do you want in your lunch this week Eli (age 3): ordinary demigods

I believe science is much more like art than many scientists are willing to consider. I have a feeling that it would free us to do better science if we embraced this view. I may be mistaken but that's where I am mentally.

If their response is worse than Sonnets, then they should lose their jobs. Already it is too late. This should take 20 minutes.

(bluesky user bursts into Waffle House) OH SO YOU HATE PANCAKES??

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).