"The multiyear spending plan also calls for a 2% cut to the nation’s three major research funding councils. But that reduction is far smaller than the 15% cut researchers had feared was coming, and science advocacy groups generally welcomed the budget."

It has been a great day at @stemcellnetwork.ca's #TMM2025! And I'm looking forward to more tomorrow, including joining @jsnyder.bsky.social, @lr-bg.bsky.social, & @deanshamess.ca first thing, for a discussion on public trust in science and policy decisions.

Incredibly excited to be presenting some (preliminary) results from my dissertation at Till & McCulloch 2025 @stemcellnetwork.ca tomorrow. Bigger thread to follow but, we launched an experiment in Canada and the US exploring some timely questions about the public funding of science (PFS). (1/2)

How do people around the world encounter science, and what shapes those encounters? Our new global study found that social media now carries much of the world’s science content, but local culture, infrastructure, and curiosity still determine how people engage. #ScienceSky #scicomm

Anti-elitism is so effective today that campaigns against populist candidates can *increase* support for them. www.nber.org/papers/w34430

to keep functioning, a society must discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

One tactic these data guys use online is to dismiss academic work they don’t like by calling it “overly complex” or “disconnected from reality.” I call this anti-rigor propaganda. It’s a move to sour people on serious scholarship when you don’t have better evidence. Adam addresses it in the piece.

Wrote a thing www.liberalcurrents.com/wars-on-scie...

sigh open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

humans ARE NOT built for this 9-5 shit In hunter gatherer times I would’ve raced cars

This is why we need a public inquiry (as even Wyant seems to imply).

Transparency helps innovation ... until it doesn't. My new paper with Cunningham, Hodgson, and Wang (on the JM!) studies the 2017 FDA Final Rule, which required drug firms to publicly disclose all clinical trial results. Disclosure increased, but innovation slowed. cowles.yale.edu/sites/defaul...

They took my undergrad thesis and just tweeted it out… (I’m kidding (obviously!) but it’s very cool to see this and think about the unbelievable struggles I had with Stata + statscan trying to think about what was going on with stem earnings and willingness/ability to move to Alberta mattered…)

Realizing that I posted these Deadwood shitposts about 15k followers ago so a repost can’t hurt

And, I won't wade into this debate any longer, but statistical research often focuses on edge cases. It's a question of consistency and efficiency of estimators and procedures. That's how we have vetted methods for the entirety of mathematical statistics.

Millennials are the chosen people, the only ones who can redeem the world

I wrote up my thoughts about Abundance Conference publiccomment.blog/p/when-is-a-...

On Prolific, "we estimate that about 34% of online study participants use LLMs to answer open-ended questions atleast some of the time..." Seems like a very timely paper for behavioural scientists using online samples: osf.io/preprints/so... ; We really need more papers on this issue

this is the adulthood I was promised

5. Today I read a paper by @sabinaleonelli.bsky.social and Alexander Mussgnug that I think illustrates this point perfectly. philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24891/1/Phil...

Has anyone written about what we might call social media “framers”? That is, people who share a video but prime reaction with text we read before we view the clip? I watch a lot of clips and initially think, e.g., “yeah, what an ass.” But without the framing I might interpret differently. 1/2

Oh good. We've reached the "I don't have to be faster than the bear, I only have to be less woke than you" stage of faculty solidarity. archive.is/wGNDr

Famously exogenous, contextless, unchanging and unchangeable preferences and beliefs. But if you’re a COVID contrarian who sowed distrust, got people killed AND a bunch of your peers and colleagues are very critical of your work.. maybe it’s helpful to think this way, lest accountability find you.

I cannot emphasize enough that the playbook being used against mRNA vaccines (and vaccines in general) is IDENTICAL to the playbook used to restrict voting rights after the 2020 election: actively sow public distrust, then cite the distrust you sowed as an independent reason for your desired policy

I am all for recognising the normative dimension of social science, purpose-dependence of evidence, and diversity of methodologies across disciplines. However there is no need to contrast social science en masse to some monolithic entity of ‘natural science’ which allegedly lacks those features.

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

The best pasta shape is rigatoni

Further consolidating control over federal research funding under Russell Vought and a cadre of apparatchiks. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Soon only monks will know how to read. They will ensure the continuance of human knowledge by painstakingly copying vellum codices by candlelight.

1. Kevin Gross and I just posted a new science-of-science preprint. This one explores the looming peer review crisis. As many of you know, it's becoming significantly more difficult for journal editors to find scholars willing to serve as peer reviewers for submitted manuscripts.

I have thoughts on the tech oligarchs and the system that made them

I’m White as Hell (just look at the DP). I’m also Lebanese and a good chunk of my family are a lot more “olive” than me. It’s not literally never that I’ve checked “Middle Eastern” on an ethnicity list. Sometimes it feels weird, sometimes it doesn’t - it’s also just true. Jesus Christ.

“The New York Times collaborated with a white nationalist eugenicist hacker and agreed to keep his identity a secret to publish a Zohran Mamdani hit piece” is a way bigger story than “18 year old Zohran Mamdani ticked ‘African American’ on his Columbia application because he was a citizen of Uganda”

(1/5) Out now in Acta Politica: Populist parties increasingly target scientists and scientific knowledge. By analyzing 15 annual waves of representative panel data from the Netherlands (2007–2022), I examine to what extent populist parties fuel science skepticism among their supporters.

Reading Jacques Ellul's (1962) book, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. In it, he laments how American scientists had abandoned the term “propaganda” because it “cannot be defined with any degree of precision," calling that "intellectual surrender." We've been down this same road before.

Given the discussion at #metascience2025, does anyone know if Google Deepmind is/has trained models on the data @cos.io's OSF? Similarly (and if so) whether and how that interacts with Licensing. Plenty of repos have no license which retains copyright.

Computers used to scream every time they connected to the Internet. They knew. They tried to warn us. We did not listen.

Anyone have anything good to read on the legislative history of the Small Business Innovation Research Development Act of 1982 that gives us the SBIR program across government? Especially interested in Rep. LaFalce.

What’s the point of knowing all these doctors and nurses when none of them will give you a lobotomy when you really need it.

In the US, they’ve scrapped the rule to consult the public before repealing regulations. Up here, our government is gearing up to fast-track big projects. Speed’s great, but skipping the people most affected? That comes with a cost. I put my two cents into the debate at @policyoptions.irpp.org.

Ok. Let’s make this more than a hasty “framework to agree on future discussions”. Defence procurement, student & maybe labour mobility, boosting FDI, build on intel collab., DST, ++ Also, selfishly, please include phytosanitary coordination. I’d like to buy from UK nurseries & seed sellers.

And no I do not agree with science reform's policies and no that does not, in fact, mean that I am against improving science. The fact that we can have different views and approaches on this is a good thing actually. Science does not operate on premature consensus. WTAF folks??

Much heat on this piece. Not unexpected. But the misreading of literal quotes in it is a bit much. On my part, no I did not blame Trump admin's actions on anyone but Trump admin. No I am not defending certainty in science. Wtf?? My complaint against such certainty is literally quoted in the piece.

And if you fail to live up to your own standards during a pandemic, don’t cry censorship all the way to the Oval Office while using your bullshit to cast doubt on obvious scientific fact. And if someone does behave that way, don’t make them a figurehead of the movement.

“So you’re saying we can’t work on science reform at all” No. I have being working on this for a decade and continue to do so. I’m saying don’t make a name for yourself by lying about the scope of the problem using ridiculous models that require absurd assumptions to get off the ground.

Science’s reform movement should have seen Trump’s call for ‘gold standard science’ coming, critics say.

Carney unlocking formerly unimaginable levels of acronymization here.