Matt Blackwell
@mattblackwell.bsky.social
data, experiments, evals @Google. opinions my own. political scientist 4 life https://mattblackwell.org
Feel bad but teaching my last stats/data science in fall 2023 was getting the last chopper out of Vietnam
Andrew Heiss@andrew.heiss.phd · 4w agowoof ≈80% of assignments this summer term have essentially been just raw chatgpt/claude output, including assignments that required designing stuff in illustrator/affinity/canva. The battle is lost for asynchronous online courses.
“Cape Verde” is weird right? Either go full “Green Cape” or just stick with “Cabo Verde”
I feel like “token czar” might be a hot new career path in the next few years
“The coverage levels are nominal” —my data scientist ass trying to sound like a NASA ground control engineer
I’ve added a new chapter to my User’s Guide textbook on confidence intervals, where I try to lay out my intuition for a thought experiment approach to deriving the intervals based on chance errors. mattblackwell.github.io/gov2002-book...
My first reaction to this image was “why is Trump reviving Jeffrey Epstein?”
Honey are you feeling ok? You’ve barely touched your tokens
slopguard (v.): to design an object or process to withstand the oncoming tidal wave of AI-generated inputs
Me, losing an eye: well this fucking sucks. What the fuck. Me, discovering the land of the blind: haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
Humans are like knives: you can accidentally cut yourself but you’ll probably keep the damage pretty limited LLMs are like machine guns: you can inflict maximum damage incredibly quickly. As blast radiuses increase, you need more safety procedures not less.
Matt Blackwell@mattblackwell.bsky.social · 4mo agomariozechner.at/posts/2026-0...
To be fair, it might also be Tune Random Hyperparameters Until Number Go Up
Benjamin Pope@benjaminpope.bsky.social · 4mo agothe actual core content of any such degree is I Hope You Like Matrices but I think people feel like it's all going to be Advanced Talking to ChatGPT and when these degrees really get underway it's going to be a structural challenge for the universities to manage this contradiction
The modern Dean+ species of academic appears more interested in chasing flashy trends to curry favor in nonacademic circles than in actually maintaining the university.
Ted McCormick@tedmccormick.bsky.social · 5mo agoAnother university getting rid of things you could only ever do at a university and replacing them with stuff a 13-year-old can do on a phone
Coming in R 4.6.0 in April… maybe one of the biggest quality of life improvements to the language in years
Interspersing either board work or coding into lectures was hugely valuable to my teaching. It slows you down to a more understandable pace. You also will vocalize some of those difficult-to-articulate ways that you work through challenges like coding mistakes or math errors.
James Bland@jamesbland.bsky.social · 5mo agoSometimes this works, and sometimes the opposite works. The two most influential econometrics courses I took involved the professor: 1) Using nothing but a whiteboard and marker 2) Coding things up in Stata and explaining why he did everything
LLMs will usher in a democratization of intellect. Now you too can have a junior (AI) scholar that you can blame for errors and fraud. Previously, only the top scholars had access to that kind of power.
Deep irony about AI teaching/learning in universities: the most useful AI skills right now are essentially *people management* skills (for now!) which most academics (myself included) are pretty bad at.
Maybe a good bet would help give clarity to the “AI will kill academic papers” debate: will someone get tenure at a top 20 social science department in the next 10 years with the majority of their work being something other than an academic article or book?
