As some may have heard me talk about at #ACL2026, I'm excited to share a new preprint on approaches to validation when using LLMs to measure concepts in social science, led by @madesai.bsky.social and @azjacobs.bsky.social !! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2607.07915

I am delighted to share our new #PNAS paper, with @grvkamath.bsky.social @msonderegger.bsky.social and @sivareddyg.bsky.social, on whether age matters for the adoption of new meanings. That is, as words change meaning, does the rate of adoption vary across generations? www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Southwest Airlines appears to have rewritten the synopses of its inflight entertainment using AI. The Chinese vice-premier isn’t even a character in this movie!

Before gesturing to the good ol' days when industry didn't suck up our greatest minds, consider this article I just came across in a 1929 issue of JASA which found that 70% of statisticians had "no other [scientific] affiliation [...] possibly because of [their interest] in business enterprises".

I'd like to see a revival of panache and artistry in scientific prose style. Since we have to read so many papers, they should be fun and beautiful. I would also argue that this serves the goal of communication: readers will be more likely to remember a striking phrase or image.

Now online @pnasnexus.org! Many discrimination auditing and electoral tasks use ML to predict race/ethnicity – by discretizing continuous scores. Can the discretization process cause bias in labels and downstream tasks? Yes! Led by @evandyx.bsky.social academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

New preprint! Metaphors shape how people understand politics, but measuring them (& their real-world effects) is hard. We develop a new method to measure metaphor & use it to study dehumanizing metaphor in 400K immigration tweets Link: bit.ly/4i3PGm3 #NLP #NLProc #polisky #polcom #compsocialsci 🐦🐦

Upon learning that yesterday would be my last day as a program officer at the National Science Foundation, I shared this parting message with my colleagues. The next few months will be frenetic and stressful for them. Here are some things that you can do to help them with the mission ahead. (1)

New study looks at Vietnam Draft Lotteries to test effects of “interracial contact on racial attitudes.” Finds “white men who were selected for the draft subsequently expressed less negative attitudes toward Black people and toward policies designed to help them.” www.cambridge.org/core/service...

Come check out our posters at @neuripsconf.bsky.social this week! Excited about two new works on optimization x fairness, read more below ⬇️ I won’t be there, but my co-authors will :)

Calling all polarization researchers… “While messaging Android to Android or iPhone to iPhone is secure, messaging from one to the other is not.” www.forbes.com/sites/zakdof...

FBI Warns iPhone And Android Users—Stop Sending Texts

US officials urge citizens to use encrypted messaging and calls wherever they can—here’s what you need to know.

forbes.com

Been a while since I made dinosaur sourdough #breadsky

hi

Thank you Nature and @anilananth.bsky.social for this great feature on LLMs and AGI (and for highlighting our work arxiv.org/abs/2406.03689)

Anil Ananthaswamy@anilananth.bsky.social · 2y ago

Will simply scaling up LLMs get us to AGI? My feature for Nature, w/ inputs from @fchollet.bsky.social @rao2z.bsky.social @yoshuabengio.bsky.social @melaniemitchell.bsky.social @dileeplearning.bsky.social @andrewgwils.bsky.social, Raia Hadsell, Keyon Vafa, Karl Friston www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Happy holidays to all who celebrate “NeurIPS Update Your Timezone”

Save the Date! It is our pleasure to share that the 2025 Midwest ML Symposium will be held at the University of Chicago, June 23-24, 2025! Please stay tuned for further information about registration, accommodation, and transportation on the conference website midwest-ml.org/2025/

Starter packs say “Join the conversation” but then they’re just lists of profiles. Or am I missing something? Are there conversations to join?

For those who don’t feel like they fit into my Grumpy Machine Learners list (which I still need to update based on 100+ requests) I’ve created another starter pack: go.bsky.app/Js7ka12 (Self) nominations welcome.

Hello...world? Trying to reconstruct my academic networks over here :) Follow me if we know each other or if you're interested in machine learning for healthcare/social equity! Please retweet, or resky, or whatever they call it over here.

Bayesians! Are you a member of ISBA? Are you into applications in the Social Sciences? We are starting a new ISBA section on Bayesian Social Sciences. This requires a petition, signed by at least 30 ISBA members. You can add your name here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Petition to form a Bayesian Social Sciences section at ISBA

Petition to form a Bayesian Social Sciences section at ISBA The following members of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) wish to petition the ISBA board to be recognized as the IS...

docs.google.com

First snow

6. Custom feeds on Bluesky are the first implementation of algorithmic choice. Instead of using a single black-box For You algorithm, you can create and subscribe to your own. Now, there are over 50k+ custom feeds on the network! Check them out: bsky.app/feeds

I'm recruiting 1-2 PhD students to work with me at the University of Colorado Boulder! Looking for creative students with interests in #NLP and #CulturalAnalytics. Boulder is a lovely college town 30 minutes from Denver and 1 hour from Rocky Mountain National Park 😎 Apply by December 15th!

Have I found my people?🥹

Alicia Curth@aliciacurth.bsky.social · 2y ago

Yeah I’m just grumpy now that there is no ✨Golden Retriever Energy in ML✨ list for poor delightful people like me

I just signed up for the Post-Bayesian online seminar mailing list: tinyurl.com/postBayes It will cover "cutting-edge methods for posteriors that no longer rely on Bayes Theorem. (e.g., PAC-Bayes, generalised Bayes, Martingale posteriors, ...)"

Mailing list contact information

Information to be added to the post-Bayes mailing list.

tinyurl.com

Another great seminar today is the Monte Carlo Online Seminar: sites.google.com/view/monte-c... Today's talk is on diffusion models!

I made a starter pack for Bayesian ML and stats (mostly to see how this starter pack business works). Let me know whom I missed! go.bsky.app/2Bqtn6T

One of you should really hire this person nicolaslonguetmarx.github.io/research

Why are blue-collar voters drifting from the Democratic Party? Is it due to shifts in voter preferences or shifts in party positions? What role do cultural versus economic policies play? My Job Market Paper presents an empirical model that unpacks these dynamics. 1/N