The EA/rationalists funding Metascience have happened upon the wild worry that they’ll speed science up too much and we’ll all die. Don’t worry, they have a solution!

I used to have to argue with people that the worst impact of misinformation was not really felt through public consumption but through elite consumption but I think it's as clear as it can get now.

This is the science I'm imagining every time I hear about restoring "Gold Standard Science"

I legitimately can’t tell if other people here refers to sleuths or the admin.

Effective altruists propped up a bunch of meta scientists being fast and loose with methods and now we have this society wide myth that sciences biggest challenge are the scientists themselves, and they can solve it by filling out a pdf and uploading a csv. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Probably a good day to nuke your TikTok account.

Detroit is the clear answer even if you’ve seen nothing more than the train station. Toledo is up there as well.

E I G H T H U N D R E D M I L L I O N

Bayesians: “we don’t talk like that.”

Fantastic thread. One of reasons critical Metascience is a misnomer is that many of the arguments against claims in Metascience are that they’re relying on simulations and vibes rather than statistics and probability theory.

Final week to apply for the 2026 SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships If you're an early-career scholar and passionate about collaborative, transdisciplinary research beyond traditional departments, this is the postdoc fellowship for you. Deadline: Oct 1, 2025 Apply: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

It's officially been a year since this paper was retracted. In the wake, the authors claimed (misleadingly) it was just a couple pesky sentences... a revise and resubmit. Since then, radio silence with not even an update to the preprint. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Obviously the irony here is thick, but the blog post is kind of a master class in statistical bullshit and razzle dazzle. The JASA paper used examples to highlight intrinsic properties of the test that make it untenable and unreliable for its intended purposes….

FWIW, both Clint and I discussed some points in the paper w/Uri (can't tag him b/c he blocked me) in private some time ago. To be clear, neither we nor he is entitled to "first comment" on anything. But if you say you have a policy you're willing to ignore when you feel, you don't have that policy.>

NEW: California could soon enact the most significant protections for AI companions in the U.S. Debate over two bills, AB1064 & SB243, has sparked a major lobbying blitz as tech industry groups and consumer advocates vie to shape the rules www.techpolicy.press/inside-the-l... tip @techmeme.com

I find it strange that we treat this corner of the internet as part of the scientific literature at all… complete with pub peer comments and claims that it’s overtaking science. A far simpler solution is to simply reject any assertion that hindawi, frontiers etc are academic publishers.

Funniest thing I’ve seen this month on Bluesky.

Just recorded one of my favorite in studio episodes ever with @adambecker.bsky.social, who is very funny and great on the mic. Goes out Wednesday.

This is what a decade of rhetoric over stating the problems in science bought us. The grey lady taking a covid denier seriously about it being broken and needing the government to step in and fix it. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/o...

I’m Not a Robot, a game about solving CAPTCHAs, is out now! good luck :) > neal.fun/not-a-robot/

Im of course 100% on board with this argument but who’s gonna tell the authors about Amartya Sen, Mahbub Al Haq, 30 years of calculating HDI, and the human development approach more broadly. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Semi hydro is actually insane. This Banana plant was repotted *three* weeks ago.

In peer review this year, I’ve gotten so many papers jamming an LLM in to scientific processes with nary a thought to the ethics or consequences. Just hyped to shove it in.

All hype about the power of facilitating "human-AI collaboration" aside, we don't quickly implement extremely strong norms of disclosure around AI use, science is cooked. From arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12282, one of many many efforts in this direction.

"Despite its effectiveness, we identify key limitations, including hallucinated citations, difficulty adapting to dynamic paper structures, and incomplete integration of multimodal content." Yep, those are pretty key limitations.

Anyone more knowledgeable about tax law able to explain to me the ROI of $18k a day to hang out in the US

This is TOMORROW! See you there, Brooklyn! #booksky #bkbf @bkbookfest.bsky.social

I think about Vault Organelles often. It is just downright upsetting to have an evolutionarily conserved, 39-fold symmetric structure conserved across the tree of life, with no known function... ... missing from many of our fucking model organisms. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_(...

Great thread. One of the subtler things that seems to go missing here is that you can’t use typical statistics on silicon samples… because they’re not samples with reference to a population. Also you can arbitrarily select N and guarantee significance.

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

Judge:

The new book “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” aims to explain why superintelligent AI would eliminate humanity. But along the way, the authors “fail to make an evidence-based scientific case for their claims,” Adam Becker argues:

NEW: ChatGPT is causing chaos in marriages, as one spouse becomes deeply fixated on AI therapy/advice/spiritual wisdom — alienating the other spouse and, often, resulting in divorce. In some cases, ChatGPT-enmeshed spouses are using the tech to bully their partners. futurism.com/chatgpt-marr...

Fantastic review by @adambecker.bsky.social of what looks to be a truly awful book. www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

There’s truly no shortage of attacks on expertise these days, but the last thing we need is for serious news rooms to platform folks like Eliezer who ignore the totality of accumulated knowledge in a domain and yell apocalypse. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

congrats to all the media outlets carrying on charlie's work of silencing speech www.404media.co/behind-the-b...

Shedding a tear for all the normal people who don’t study the internet reading about groypers. Let’s just pretend that’s as bad as the internet gets.

Journalists down the Groyper rabbit hole right now sighing ahead of a conversation with their editor.

Dudes political beliefs seem to be too much time on discord.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Palin did it first. www.npr.org/sections/its...

Since it’s making the rounds with RFK and the protocols, the replication crisis is the dead wrong framing for thinking about the fix being put in on vaccine science. Even if they commit to preregistering, it’s not gonna make a difference.

"The report is part of a trove of documents from inside Meta that was recently disclosed to Congress by two current and two former employees who allege that Meta suppressed research that might have illuminated potential safety risks to children and teens on the company’s [VR] devices and apps..."

Academic collaborations with Meta have pushed back against concerns over bias and such, but this is a pretty jarring exposé into just how far meta goes to shape the research it conducted. www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

“the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose” J.B.S. Haldane

Get fucked, textbooks. Seriously breaking my PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology brain that this happened. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What is this image.

This is just truly deeply weird.

Folks are out here making peer review bots of themselves so I’m just gonna tap this sign. www.nature.com/articles/d41...