We're hiring a data analyst to work with ~*~me~*~ in the American Board of Family Medicine's DC office. We're looking for someone with R/Python/SQL skills, comfort with AI/ML, and a passion for learning. Likely closing 4/6. professionalismandvalue.org/careers/

IHME has just published their latest Global Burden of Disease study in the Lancet with *2,779* listed authors. This piece describes how their very loose authorship criteria distort metrics and artificially inflate contributors’ citation counts:

Beyond Fraud: How IHME Distorts Academic Metrics

Dr. Ilya Kashnitsky is a demographer @ Statistics Denmark.

ikashnitsky.phd

Donna Haraway: “The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.”

The lineup looks incredible. Sad that I won't be able to go!

UCSF CODEX@ucsfcodex.bsky.social · 10mo ago

🗓️ DEX25 is less than a month away! We're excited to share that the detailed meeting agenda is now live! View and download the full schedule to explore session titles, presenter information, and more details about each session. We hope to see you there! 👉 codex.ucsf.edu/events/dex25...

Happy New Claude Day to those who celebrate

A favorite John Searle meme, in his memory

Research active faculty teach classes that are significantly closer to the knowledge frontier.

There should be a moratorium on calling for "systemic change" unless the person calling for it can plausibly prove that they know how to change systems. Which would of course involve answering the question of why they haven't just changed the system already.

Russell Ackoff: “The educational system is not dedicated to produce learning by students, but teaching by teachers.”

A Lifetime of Systems Thinking - The Systems Thinker

hen one reaches 80, one is considered to be ripe and ready for picking. Picking usually consists of the pickers asking the pickee to reflect back on the wisdom he has gained over his lifetime. This re...

thesystemsthinker.com

"It's more and more perilous to be generic in any way--to be a generic writer, or to be a generic person, a generic thinker. Because the machines are very good at analyzing [generic models]. There will be a much *higher* premium on cultivating your own distinctive, inimitable voice."

Ian Leslie on Being Human in the Age of AI - Econlib

When OpenAI launched its conversational chatbot this past November, author Ian Leslie was struck by the humanness of the computer’s dialogue. Then he realized that he had it exactly backward: In an ag...

econtalk.org

Podcast on how Taylor Swift’s engagement represents a crisis for both her songwriting and the popular conception of how love relates to marriage.

Taylor Swift's Engagement – from Minds Almost Meeting by Robin Hanson and Agnes Callard

Audio player and transcript for 'Taylor Swift's Engagement' from Minds Almost Meeting. Agnes and Robin talk, try to connect, often fail, but sometimes don't.

mindsalmostmeeting.com

nihilism is cowardice.

A little bit of good news: NIH has caught up with previous years' funding levels. Their staff deserves tremendous respect.

"The closed society represented a perennial moral possibility, whose roots are found in every human soul. In its most common expression, the closed society levels a familiar accusation: that the open society is immoral because it jeopardizes the very possibility of living a virtuous life."

Waymo data from 95M miles finds an 80% reduction in injurious crashes and, esp. noteworthy, a 92% reduction in pedestrian injuries. There should be some real moral urgency behind the wide-spread implementation of self-driving cars (and I mean good systems like Waymo's, not Tesla's FSD).

It seems like people are increasingly using multiplication to indicate a magnitude of diminution: like “20 times smaller than” our “15 times less than”. Isn’t that what we have fractions for? “One twentieth the size” and “one fifteenth of” are so much cleaner.

Let the PetSmart point float!

I think my cats would call each other just to hiss and then hang up.

Scientists pioneer ‘animal internet’ with dog phones and touchscreens for parrots

Glasgow university researcher aims to ‘fundamentally reshape how animals implement control over their environment’

ft.com

“As philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, the current media environment is like a ‘dictatorship of emotion’ in its ability to torrentially stir up energy and then dissipate practically overnight.”

The New Vertigo Years

At the start of the 20th century, the world felt anxious and unsettled much like today

open.substack.com

Current AI models are pretty terrible at Baba Is You, making it an excellent benchmark for future models. (In all fairness, I'm also terrible at Baba Is You.) arxiv.org/pdf/2407.13729

If you’ve been fascinated by the recent UAP videos / testimonies, you might also find this interesting, about the detection of glints of light from earth orbit prior to Sputnik.

Pre-Sputnik Earth-Orbit Glints

IMHO, the strongest evidence so far that (some) UFOs are aliens just dropped.

overcomingbias.com

This is so 2008-coded to me.

John Mullahy@johnmullahy.bsky.social · 11mo ago

"All told, there are now 23.5 million health-services jobs in the U.S., or about one in six private-sector jobs. That compares with 12.7 million manufacturing jobs, and 15.6 million jobs at retailers." www.wsj.com/economy/jobs...

It's likely possible to slow aging through medications because evolution didn't optimize for longevity and the fitness landscape around it is relatively unexplored. Really enjoyed these insights from Jacob Kimmel on the Dwarkesh Podcast:

Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel

Is the answer already in our genome?

dwarkesh.com

This faux cover of "Rock Lobster" by System of a Down is so catchy.

if System of a Down wrote "ROCK LOBSTER"

YouTube video by mac glocky

youtube.com

“Technophobia has a body count.”

Nicole Hennig@nic221.bsky.social · 11mo ago

If We Build It, Everyone Lives https://danieljeffries.substack.com/p/if-we-build-it-everyone-lives #AI #optimism

“Pessimism is now a shortcut to intellectual respectability, like using orchestral strings in a pop song or filming in black and white.”

The audacity of mope

Why pessimism persists in an improving world

on.ft.com

My understanding is that authors own the copyright on the text (including post-review edits), but that journals own the copyright to the *formatted* text. Uploading a preprint style text (rather than a copy of the journal article itself) to PubMed Central is therefore just fine.

Stephanie M. Lee@stephaniemlee.bsky.social · 11mo ago

NEW: The NIH just started requiring NIH-funded research to be made freely, immediately available. In response, some journals are forcing scientists to pay thousands in open-access fees to publish. The result: chaos. The fees, one scholar says, are “out of control.” www.chronicle.com/article/maki...

The Cracker Barrel rebrand kerfuffle seems well suited for Baudrillard's perspective: "Cracker Barrel is not pointing to a remembered Americana; it directly generates the feeling of Americana through its simulation of old-timey-ness. [I]t was always already a corporate simulation of country life."

The Cracker Barrel Hype(rreality)

Simulation and Simulacrum in America

unpopularfront.news

Borges: “I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.”

I think we need to distinguish between AI psychosis of a worshipful type and AI psychosis of a despairing type. The former gets much more attention, but I think there are a lot of people entering actual and deep depressions over the fact that other people like to experiment with AI.