iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Gautam Kamath @gautamkamath.com · 16/09/2026

Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

"Are you still citing Ariely papers? Because at 49 it's marginal."

Donald Trump answering a child's phone call about Santa

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

"culture accretes around physical reality like an oyster building up layers of nacre around an irritant, rendering the bare facts into something nobler than they began — or into something baser." www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-boy...

thepsmiths.com

REVIEW: BoyMom, by Ruth Whippman

BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, Ruth Whippman (Harmony, 2024).

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

New use i discovered today for AI -- sanity check when I read an article and I'm pretty sure the abstract and conclusion wildly oversell the actual results. I can just upload the PDF and ask "did I miss something, or is the theory claim not really supported in the tables?"

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Shannon Appelcline @shannonappelcline.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

Jim Wampler announced this morning that we lost Tim Kask, who passed in his sleep on the 30th. Tim was the creator of The Dragon, which set the foundation for what an industry-focused magazine should be. He was an icon and one of the few early founders of TSR still with us.

Cover of the Dragon #1. A green dragon sits in front of a rosy red background. It is the "Premiere Issue", from June (1976).

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Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD DSc(hon) @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

How awful. This is outright health disinformation, lying to the American people. Not only is there massive evidence showing no link between vaccines & autism, there’s not even a plausible mechanism based on what we’ve learned about the genetics of autism, some environmental exposures in pregnancy

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Nicholas A. Christakis @nachristakis.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

In my view, the primary determinant of whether something should be cited is whether it is relevant and true, not who authored it. Plus, how can authors know what the attributes of other authors are, anyway? The below policy does not, in my view, enhance the credibility of the scientific enterprise.

nature.com

Citation diversity statements - Nature Reviews Psychology

Nature Reviews Psychology is encouraging authors to include a citation diversity statement to draw attention to citation imbalances and confirm that they made efforts to cite publications from a diver...

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

When I see a news story about someone who embezzled a bunch of money, half my anger is that they blew it on douchey luxury brands rather than putting it in an index fund.

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Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

I thought, "Really? 58% seems like a high acceptance rate for POQ." Then I realized Google's AI was substituting the acceptance rate for Public Library Quarterly (a Taylor & Francis journal) in response to my query about Public Opinion Quarterly (an Oxford journal).

Google AI results say Public Opinion Quarterly has a 58% acceptance rate.

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

"It would be nice to have high speed rail" does not logically imply "California is capable of building high speed rail within a reasonable multiple of its budget or that actually goes from LA to SF rather than between a few podunk towns in the San Joaquin Valley"

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Christian Wolf @chriswolfvision.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

After all these reports of authors adding language instructions for LLM reviews in their papers I wanted to check this myself and I downloaded the .tex source from one of these papers. Here is an example. (I will not share the identity of the paper)

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

I keep seeing a Waymo with hideous corporate Memphis vinyl wrap and it has me all retvrn to the tradition of LIDAR artificial intelligence robot taxis having just plain white paint jobs

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

"It’s probably not a complete coincidence that the people who think you get airplanes by doing a dance for the god who invented airplanes didn't have airplanes." open.substack.com/pub/thepsmit...

open.substack.com

REVIEW: Road Belong Cargo, by Peter Lawrence

Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea, Peter Lawrence (Manchester University Press, 1964).

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 15/03/2025

We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! We had NIH. We had indirects. We had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork. You could've shut your mouth, churned out regressions and made low six figures. It was perfect. But, no, you just had to say "Latinx."

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Kim Krawiec @kimkrawiec.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

I'm giving the 2025 Baron de Lancey Lecture at Cambridge: 'Repugnant transactions and taboo trades'. Come in person or by zoom! It's free but you need to register www.law.cam.ac.uk/press/events...

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

"Even if you think this was a move in the right moral direction, it was dangerous behavior. By presenting their expertise as part of a political fight, academics were not only squandering their credibility. They were asking to be treated like adversaries." www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

washingtonpost.com

Opinion | Academia is finally learning hard lessons

Universities took prestige, public support for granted. Trump is making them pay the price.

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

I feel like the main reason rationalist Helter Skelter hasn't gotten more press is it's simply confusing. Zizian ideology makes hiding out in a hole in the desert while the race war you started plays out sound like an episode of Law and Order.

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Razib Khan @razibkhan.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

this is correct. and i kept saying this over and over over that this irrational reaction was going happen from about 2015 onward when normal liberal researchers turned a blind eye to radical activists becoming the face of their institutions and underming its credibility sometimes lemmings drown

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

You forget how quality of life-improving modern password managers are until you try to log in to Manuscript Central and their system of giving each journal a URL directory, not a URL hostname, sends you into password reset hell.

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

It's like a lame duck president gave sovereign citizen advice for tax season

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Luis Garicano @lugaricano.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Of course. But not much that changes the basic (Hayek 1945) intuition that neither you, nor I nor the government of CA has any idea who has a spare bedroom that she might decide to rent if the price is right. But certainly many want to hear they must interfere with adjustment.

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Luis Garicano @lugaricano.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

The elasticity is always higher than we think. People will come up with all sorts of solutions if the price is right--we do not know which ones. If you fix it, they will stay out. These first order adjustments are enormous by comparison with the kind of mechanisms in the paper.

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

"Often, advocates of strong-handed moderation don't seem to know what hit them; ironically, that bewilderment arises from their own entrapment in a filter bubble." open.substack.com/pub/joshbarr...

open.substack.com

Meta Is Right to Fire the Fact-Checkers

The fight against 'misinformation' is plagued by error and liberal bias. It's not an appropriate pursuit for a neutral platform.

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Good joke from Kieran but the replies mostly assume Burgess is too dumb/privileged/partisan/whatever to recognize a bunch of angles he does in fact address in his smart and temperate talk. He has posted the full text + slides if you're interested. open.substack.com/pub/guidedci...

open.substack.com

Your speech is freer than you think

In most cases, academics are risking more by self-censoring than by speaking up.

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Ben Golub @bengolub.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

NYU Abu Dhabi has a search for a professor (any rank) of computational social science May be of interest to you/your students. Please share and repost! apply.interfolio.com/160603

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Dean Eckles @eckles.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

Have you seen this data analysis procedure before? Fit a multilevel / random effects model to experimental, within-subjects data. Then extract the resulting intercepts and slopes and use basic t-tests (or similar) to compare these between conditions. Is there some justification for this?

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 11/01/2025

"Abundance of caution" is an idiom used by leaders of organizations that means "this action is irrational on a technical basis but it is rational for us to take it so as to avoid griping from the substantial constituency of our organization with anxiety disorders"

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Two things that are true: 1. Anthropogenic climate change is real 2. California's fire problem has more to do with forest management, including things like environmentalists suing to stop controlled burns, than it does with climate change

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Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus @cicadafungus.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

If I go to Snopes or Politifact to verify something, that's "more speech," but the problem comes when fact checkers are used to guide content moderation (often under political pressure to do so). The entire misinformation industrial complex was an artillery spotter model of censorship.

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Walter Olson @walterolson.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

Thread on purposes served by academia and like institutions.

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Philip N Cohen @philipncohen.com · 04/01/2025

How much effort I would devote to evaluating other people's work

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barnghoul @barnghoul.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

I’d be so good at being a central planner. can of beets? $0.02. television set? $14.73. candles? $111,000. laptop? $98.95. there would be shortages and gluts from Moscow to Minsk and I’d sleep like a baby.

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Stephen Vaisey 🇺🇦 @stephenvaisey.com · 02/01/2025

Want to add a few questions to the General Social Survey? The 2026 module competition is open now! gss.norc.org/content/dam/...

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Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Bad data visualization hall of fame

Female pop stars by height but the scale goes from 5’ to 5” and their entire size is scaled to fit so Sabrina carpenter is roughly 1/40th the volume of Taylor Swift

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Nick Wilson @nickhwilson.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

"Canons, Colleges, and Consecrations" with @mayrl.bsky.social is inching along. Behold: automated collection, parsing, and matching of acknowledgments from seven ASA sections, covering award-winning publications (and a few comparators) spanning 1979-present! Fine-tuning still, but looks face-valid!

A bipartite citation analysis of people thanked in ASA publications from seven sections, spanning pubs from 1979-the present.

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