Allison Meisner
@ameisner.bsky.social
Asst prof @ Fred Hutch - breast cancer treatment and prevention. Biostatistician. Mom of two (+ dog mom of Bunny) in Seattle. Opinions my own.
AOC: "As AI begins to encroach in our society, their goal is to take your cognition away from you. AI's goal is to take your thoughts away from you, your ability to think away from you, so that you become dependent on a machine ... reading books is active resistance"
Likely the most important thing I've ever written — if you're an academic and the AI mania unsettles you, here's my best shot at presenting some intellectual tools that might help you articulate why. arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251
Daaaamn. “AI is the asbestos we're shovelling into the walls of our technological society. Our descendants will spend generations digging it out again, and the longer the bubble goes on without popping, the longer it will take to repair the damage." www.thenerve.news/p/cory-docto...
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our t...
thenerve.news
I am amazed that people walk into discussions among knowledgeable human experts and say “ChatGPT says…” It’s very insulting to do that, and it makes you look ridiculous. Everybody has seen LLMs spit out wrong information about *extremely* simple things. Don’t make a fool of yourself!
People saying "I don't care, I like having sunlight after work" are DRASTICALLY underestimating how hard it is for your body to have to wake up potentially hours before sunrise. Our bodies were not meant to do this and doing it disrupts our circadian rhythm, with serious consequences to our health.
Holland Oates@phinsphan.bsky.social · 3mo agoPeople are gonna fucking hate this if it actually happens. Enjoy all these post 8am sunrises
Received our first issue of the print edition of The Onion and I am not disappointed!
Incredible! Scientists receive a rare standing ovation after announcing that a new treatment can double the survival time for pancreatic cancer, the deadliest cancer which was once considered “undruggable.” When we fund and support science, we can achieve anything! (Video: Dr. Wish Dhillon)
oh well if candy crush businessman mel morris says so
Research Professional News@resprofnews.bsky.social · 5mo agoPeer-reviewed papers are ‘old hat science’, says millionaire investor. Candy Crush businessman Mel Morris says universities “must embrace AI” to transform into economic powerhouses. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-i...
tl,dr; Scientists no longer allowed to use federal funding to publish, attend meetings, or talk to the public. They cannot collaborate internationally. Grants can be cancelled for any reason, at any time, political appointees have a final say over what gets funded, and who gets funded.
Science Magazine@science.org · 5mo agoThe White House today announced it plans to make major changes in how the U.S. government manages research funding. https://scim.ag/43HgW4s
This is what drinking water in Georgia looks like after Meta began data center construction in the community. Yesterday I called for EPA and Congressional investigations into the impact of data center construction on local drinking water supplies. We cannot take water for granted.
Whenever someone prominent accidentally shares an AI hallucination, people are like “this is why you have to double-check the output!” Which is absolutely true, but remember that AI proponents market it as a faster way to work. Which is not really true if you have to double check everything it does.
I find this unsettling: A new study in #Lancet shows that the number of faux citations in scientific articles is on the rise, and #AI is likely to blame. @aniloza.bsky.social reports. www.statnews.com/2026/05/07/l...
Fraudulent citations, blamed on AI hallucinations, are becoming more common in research papers
“Fabricated” citations that do not reference real academic papers are spreading in the literature, polluting the public record of science, a new study found
statnews.com
Feeling overwhelmed with all of this. LISTEN. Another Louisiana resident (Marshawn is the only name we have) testifies against the state’s racial gerrymander, speaking truth to power up and down the hearing room and predicts how this story will end. Speak your truth, fight and believe.
At the same time, there’s an expectation that every alternative measure, model, and explanation must be tested in a single article. We used to write ideas across multiple pieces.
And, to be clear, this isn’t an anti-AI post. It’s an expression of frustration with a corner of the academy that seems to think the answer is always more, more, more. Ideas worth engaging take time. And I’m not convinced I want quick, efficiently produced ideas. In fact, I’m pretty sure I don’t.
the best part of post-tenure academia has been having the career space to slow down. the damage done by the contraction of tenure track positions + poor security/working conditions of non tenure track faculty + quantification of academic contributions is incalculable
Hakeem Jefferson@hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · 6mo agoFWIW, I don’t think the major problem in my field, or related ones, is that people need to move faster & produce more. I read a lot of papers as part of the job, and I’m increasingly convinced we’d benefit from fewer papers and better ones, not more mediocre work produced ever more “efficiently.”
Overall, one of the main benefits of being a "scholar" is the ability to sit and think and wonder and investigate. And all of that is disappearing in the name of efficiency.
Allison Meisner@ameisner.bsky.social · 6mo agoNot to mention the benefit of having to leaf through an actual journal - who knows what other papers I would have discovered that I didn't know I needed to find!
Recently I tried to challenge my anti-AI beliefs by wondering what I would have thought about the move from print to online journal articles (I want to avoid being a stick in the mud for no reason). (1/2)
Hakeem Jefferson@hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · 6mo agoFWIW, I don’t think the major problem in my field, or related ones, is that people need to move faster & produce more. I read a lot of papers as part of the job, and I’m increasingly convinced we’d benefit from fewer papers and better ones, not more mediocre work produced ever more “efficiently.”
In all seriousness, one thing that might be worth doing today: Tell your Reps and Senators to call Adm. Richard Correll, the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, which controls the nation's nukes, and remind him of *his* unique responsibility to refuse an illegal order.
“My patient is refusing a drug studied in 170,000 people because of side effects that a 124,000-person analysis just confirmed do not exist — while injecting a compound studied in 14 humans, from unregulated sources, based on the recommendation of someone who profits from selling it.”
My patient would rather take a peptide than a statin. That reveals an uncomfortable truth in medicine
“The volume of evidence behind a therapy has become inversely correlated with public trust in it,” writes Vikas Patel.
statnews.com
More context on this #Artemis II image: * This is the night side, lit by moonlight. You can see city lights in Spain & Portugal, & a sliver of day at lower right * The Sun is entirely behind Earth, which makes it a kind of solar eclipse, but w/ Earth doing the eclipsing instead of the Moon: ☀️🌍🚀🌕
We have a very simple solution to universal programs benefiting the wealthy. You claw back the money through taxes on the back end. Everyone has known this for 100 years, but people get to pretend they don’t when it’s convenient for their ideology.
Mekka Okereke@mekka.mekka-tech.com · 7mo agoThey pay $34 for burgers. Should their fire department service be free? Opening a new fire department in one of NYC's richest neighborhoods has some of America's pettiest journalists asking silly questions in headlines again.🤡 The article acknowledges the fire department analogy, then blows past it
I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.
Dan Nguyen@dancow.bsky.social · 9mo agoVC, founder, dumbass
"Where they make a wasteland, they call it peace." -Calgacus, a Caledonian warrior, speaking about the Roman conquest of Britain in the First Century AD, via Tacitus
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last yr.Trump claims he and Netanyahu are seeking "eternal peace in the Middle East"
