I’m late to this but the ninja creami is viral for good reason. It’s wild how good of a product you can get out of it, including vegan ice cream (almond milk + coconut cream).
Ryan Briggs
@ryancbriggs.net
Raising kids & bread & grant money. Cleaning data & diapers & fish. EA (bed nets, not light cone). Social scientist. typos. twitter.com/ryancbriggs
The food court in the Mississauga flea market has incredible food. We got Malaysian but just in general it seems very strong. maps.app.goo.gl/KkoR12QxjZsN...
maps.app.goo.gl
We are seeing similar at RP. It's not just AI. Also a huge increase in Chinese social science. Which is often very good. But AI slop is flooding the system. One author with 30 submissions in a month... now they "could" be super productive.... or it could be AI slop.
Ryan Briggs@ryancbriggs.net · 4w agoSpoke to an editor of a good social science journal who reported submission volume is now 400% higher than during Covid. He entirely blames AI.
Spoke to an editor of a good social science journal who reported submission volume is now 400% higher than during Covid. He entirely blames AI.
I think he deserved more than a dark corner in the Guinness museum
Homemade ice kacang. I probably made lots of moderate execution errors, but it was good enough that the kids happily crushed it.
I won’t get into the data or analysis here (yet), but I’m very confident that lower ranked journals do not publish more null results than higher ranked ones. I looked across 11 disciplines and all have this (lack of a) pattern.
This was a fun paper. We analyze results from a global survey of development studies (DS) profs and find that the income group of their country doesn't explain much about their views on DS. Instead, their discipline is huge.
Development Studies Association @devcomms.bsky.social · 2mo agoIn a new @eadi.bsky.social reflection paper, @ryancbriggs.net & @andypsumner.bsky.social, @kings-sga.bsky.social explore what drives deep disagreements in development studies—and point to the “disciplinary baggage” of PhD training. Read more: buff.ly/ASH1bL9
New blog post: Evaluating Dr. Cuddy’s Claim that the Debunking of Power Posing is a Myth. daniellakens.blogspot.com/2026/05/eval... On an AI generated description of a non-existent study, incorrectly citing findings from studies, and the importance of scientific criticism.
Evaluating Dr. Cuddy’s Claim that the Debunking of Power Posing is a Myth
In this blog post I will analyse the arguments that Dr. Amy Cuddy provided in a blog post “The "Power Posing Was Debunked" Myth: What the Re...
daniellakens.blogspot.com
@prachisrivas.bsky.social you would love the number of people wearing Habs jerseys at this Toronto Blue Jays game
In the Fall I'll be teaching a new MA-level methods course entitled "Applied Statistical Evaluation of Development Projects". It will be 12 weeks, in R, and aimed around RCT evaluations. This is a draft outline. What am I missing? What seems redundant?
An interesting EA forum post that is an anonymized slack chat about GiveWell and EA-style CE analysis: "across EA cost-effectiveness analyses, much more typically goes toward estimating the effect than estimating the costs." forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ru3wyS...
Global Health Charity Founders on GiveWell, Evidence Action, and M+E — EA Forum
The following is a lightly edited and anonymized transcript of a discussion among charity founders, researchers, and funders in Ambitious Impact’s Sl…
forum.effectivealtruism.org
I'll be teaching a grad methods class focused on experiments in the fall for a development studies dept. I'm looking for published development RCTs. Ideally they would have: 1. replication packages in R, or 2. fairly simple code I could rewrite in R. Anyone have recommendations?
I'm hiring for In Development's first not-me hire. Help shape the future of development journalism; edit pieces that do serious cost-effectiveness analysis AND have jokes. Up to $90k USD, fully remote worldwide. indevelopmentmag.com/jobs/
Jobs – In Development
evidence and argument for a developing world
indevelopmentmag.com
We can estimate the resource cost of solving the Erdos problem. The calculations below seem reasonable, so using the best public estimates we have, it took 0.6–6.3 kWh of electricity & 3–31L of water Equivalent to < 3 almonds worth of water & the electricity equivalent of 2-20 miles of EV driving
Ryan Briggs@ryancbriggs.net · 3mo agoAny idea how many cheeseburgers worth of water it took to solve this?
Post-Instrument Bias (Also: poli sci people doing what is beneath Real Rigorous Econometricians™... umm, doing the Lord's work.) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
“Stochastic parrots”
Timothy Gowers@wtgowers.bsky.social · 3mo agoOpenAI's claim that this is a central conjecture in discrete geometry is not an exaggeration. This will I think be looked back on as the first time that AI solved a major mathematics problem (defined as a problem that all experts in some subfield had thought about). openai.com/index/model-...
June 2024: The latest general-purpose LLMs could not count the r's in strawberry. July 2025: The latest general-purpose LLMs get gold in the International Math Olympiad. May 2026: The latest general-purpose LLM solve an 80 year old problem, one of the "best-known questions in combinatorial geometry"
OpenAI has used a "general purpose reasoning model" to disprove that the square grid type construction is the best solution to the planar unit distance problem. I am sure the "AI is completely useless" crowd will now change their ways, right?
An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
An OpenAI model solved the 80-year-old unit distance problem, disproving a major conjecture in discrete geometry and marking a milestone in AI-driven mathematics.
openai.com
The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.
We have a new version of this paper out. The headline results are the same—political science must filter results heavily for statistical significance—but we've added many extensions and rewritten much of it in response to feedback (thank you!). A quick thread on updates 👇
Ryan Briggs@ryancbriggs.net · 6mo agoI have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.
How to post on a twitterlike: 1. spend 20 min listing edge cases and objections to your point, 2. compress each quibble into a single word choice that implicitly addresses it 3. finally, watch replies to the post ignore those qualifiers and perfectly recreate the original list of objections
All welcome at the workshop in 10 days. rohanalexander.com/tdw.html Also, if you read Ryan's piece and thought "hey, I have thoughts on AI and quant social science as well", please do get in touch.
Ryan Briggs@ryancbriggs.net · 4mo agoI'll be at a workshop organized by @rohanalexander.bsky.social next week on how AI will change quantitative social science. This is my short paper, and this is the key argument. ryancbriggs.net/blog/as-ai-l...
I'll be at a workshop organized by @rohanalexander.bsky.social next week on how AI will change quantitative social science. This is my short paper, and this is the key argument. ryancbriggs.net/blog/as-ai-l...
Me just finishing reading a kid version of Wizard of Oz to 3 year old: “There’s no place like home.” “No” “Is home your favourite place?” “No” “What is your favourite place?” “Hot pot”