iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Aaron Schein

Dallas Card @dallascard.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

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

Title page from "Validating LLMs in social science: Epistemic threats and emerging norms" by Meera Desai, Dallas Card, and Abigail Z. Jacobs

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Reposted by Aaron Schein

Dallas Card @dallascard.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

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....

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

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!

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

Also might this be the first recorded instance of "overlapping communities" in social science? A good question for @azjacobs.bsky.social.

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

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".

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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

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.

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Reposted by Aaron Schein

Nikhil Garg @nkgarg.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

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...

Paper screenshot. Title: Addressing discretization-induced bias in demographic prediction

Abstract: Racial and other demographic imputation is necessary for many applications, especially in auditing disparities and outreach targeting in political campaigns. The canonical approach is to construct continuous predictions—e.g. based on name and geography—and then to often discretize the predictions by selecting the most likely class (argmax), potentially with a minimum threshold (thresholding). We study how this practice produces discretization bias. For example, we show that argmax labeling, as used by a prominent commercial voter file vendor to impute race/ethnicity, results in a substantial under-count of Black voters, e.g. by 28.2% points in North Carolina. This bias can have substantial implications in downstream tasks that use such labels. We then introduce a joint optimization approach—and a tractable data-driven threshold heuristic—that can eliminate this bias, with negligible individual-level accuracy loss. Finally, we theoretically analyze discretization bias, show that calibrated continuous models are insufficient to eliminate it, and that an approach such as ours is necessary. Broadly, we warn researchers and practitioners against discretizing continuous demographic predictions without considering downstream consequences.

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Reposted by Aaron Schein

Julia Mendelsohn @jmendelsohn2.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

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 🐦🐦

Screenshot of top half of first page of paper. The paper is titled: "When People are Floods: Analyzing Dehumanizing Metaphors in Immigration Discourse with Large Language Models". The authors are Julia Mendelsohn (University of Chicago) and Ceren Budak (University of Michigan). The top right corner contains a visual showing the sentence "They want immigrants to pour into and infest this country". The caption says: Figure 1: Dehumanizing sentence likening immigrants to the source domain concepts of Water and Vermin via the words "pour" and "infest".

The abstract text on the left reads: Metaphor, discussing one concept in terms of another, is abundant in politics and can shape how people understand important issues. We develop a computational approach to measure metaphorical language, focusing on immigration discourse on social media. Grounded in qualitative social science research, we identify seven concepts evoked in immigration discourse (e.g. "water" or "vermin"). We propose and evaluate a novel technique that leverages both word-level and document-level signals to measure metaphor with respect to these concepts. We then study the relationship between metaphor, political ideology, and user engagement in 400K US tweets about immigration. While conservatives tend to use dehumanizing metaphors more than liberals, this effect varies widely across concepts. Moreover, creature-related metaphor is associated with more retweets, especially for liberal authors. Our work highlights the potential for computational methods to complement qualitative approaches in understanding subtle and implicit language in political discourse.

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Reposted by Aaron Schein

Jeremy Koster @jeremykoster.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

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)

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

That’s not true in my experience (I am a researcher in the area)

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

Another thing all these tech leaders share is a strong financial incentive to publicly endorse such a belief, regardless of whether their private information supports it.

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

I don’t think the US has formally declared war since WW2. The executive has extremely loose military power, regardless of Congress.

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Whoa! What language? And were the dtypes of n and y different?

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Reposted by Aaron Schein

Omar Wasow @owasow.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

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...

Title and Abstract from article in the American Political Science Review.

Title: The Vietnam Draft Lottery and Whites’ Racial Attitudes: Evidence from the General Social Survey

by DONALD P. GREEN Columbia University, and OLIVER HYMAN-METZGER Columbia University

Abstract: The Vietnam Draft Lotteries, which randomly assigned men to military service, enable researchers to assess the long-term effects of interracial contact on racial attitudes. Using a new draft status indicator for respondents to the General Social Surveys 1978–2021, we show that white men who were selected for the draft subsequently expressed less negative attitudes toward Black people and toward policies designed to help them. These effects are apparent only for cohorts that were actually drafted into service, suggesting that interracial contact during military service led to attitude change. These findings have important implications for theories of political socialization and prejudice reduction.

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Cool! Did their use of “object-oriented” refer to the software or to the math? (Perhaps it is hard to disentangle those in this case…)

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

I really like the phrase “object-oriented statistics”, which I think @stat110.bsky.social may have coined. Similar to that is “modular statistics” which Matthew Stephens likes to say.

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Reposted by Aaron Schein

Ana Stoica @anastoica.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

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 :)

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

There must be a joke here involving tails, but I seem to be memoryless at the moment and unable to supply one

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

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...

forbes.com

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.

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Been a while since I made dinosaur sourdough #breadsky

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Reposted by Aaron Schein

Keyon Vafa @keyonv.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

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)

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

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

An automated email that goes out every year from the machine learning conference NeurIPS, advising registrants to update their timezone on the conference website.

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Reposted by Aaron Schein

Data Science Institute @dsi-uchicago.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

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/

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

Seems like the biggest departure from assumptions is that there is no cost to setting up an account on both networks

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

Well it’s still nice, I’m not complaining

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

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

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

This was big of you, thanks for putting this together for us

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Reposted by Aaron Schein

Dan Roy @roydanroy.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

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.

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Reposted by Aaron Schein

Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

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.

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Reposted by Aaron Schein

Robin Ryder @robinryder.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

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...

docs.google.com

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...

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Oh wow!! Thank you Gem @ Robin: I will happily sign, but would also be very interested in getting more involved w/ organizing this!

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

This is actual golden retriever behavior

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

We also take credit for America btw, so you’re welcome for that

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

It’s true that when people say “VI” without further specifying any divergence, it is assumed they mean “VI with reverse KL”. But “VI” still refers to the superset; there’s just a default value for the selected divergence. What other name would you give the superset?

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

But nobody says that… VI refers specifically to posterior approximation.

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Again, here I lay it out, and I agree with your statement/derivation of MLE, but I don't redefine p and q: bsky.app/profile/aaro...

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Yes, that derivation is correct and standard. The problem with it is not its correctness, but rather that it redefines what the symbols p and q refer to. There is no connection between this KL(p || q) and the KL(q || p) in variational inference (except that both involve the KL divergence).

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

This is what I was responding to. There is no sense in which MLE can be obtained by "swapping the KL" from VI (unless you also totally redefine the symbols p and q) bsky.app/profile/nolo...

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Actually it confuses two totally different meanings of both the "q" and "p" distributions!

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

The previous discussion confuses two totally different meanings of the "q" distribution.

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Aaron Schein @aaronschein.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Yes, in MLE there are no latent variables (or, equivalently, they are marginalized out): bsky.app/profile/aaro...

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