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Will Lowe

@conjugateprior.org
3.7K followers 855 following 12K posts

Señor Research Scientist, NPC at the Hertie School in Berlin 🇩🇪 via Princeton, Mannheim, Edinburgh and a bunch of other ivory towers that will probably be billiard balls and decorative boxes by the end of the decade. Rome Statute appreciator.

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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 28/09/2026
TFW you ask an LLM about how to derive the key result in a paper you've just read the abstract for, it seems to do so, but you can't check it because you can't access the paper. Well done to everyone involved in this farce.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 26/09/2026
We're going to be doing "Begriffe ohne Anschauung sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind" for ever, aren't we?
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 25/09/2026
First Abnormal Form (1AF)
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 25/09/2026
I honestly wonder how much of the language policing around LLMs is just failure to appreciate how metonymy works. I just don't think that "Microsoft wants me to log in", "Brussels will capitulate" and "Claude said it's false" carry the ontological commitments their grammar might suggest.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 24/09/2026
The boring but effective way to ensure 'AI alignment' has two steps: 1. make those who build and sell AI responsible for what it does. 2. apply our best existing alignment technology – the law – to them. Maybe the AI is sentient, malign or benign. Who cares? It doesn't matter for this to work.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 24/09/2026
hurry up and get the phone bans in place so we can attribute this to them
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 24/09/2026
If you find this art as delightful as I do, but have, in other threads on here, found yourself mired in amateur philosophy discussions of what LLMs are doing and who you're talking to when you use them, then here's a short story relevant to both. I think you'll enjoy it.
philosophy.as.uky.edu
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 24/09/2026
[very Ian Hacking voice] So... there's a continuous measure of a continuous trait that smoothly predicts health outcomes until it is thresholded to define different types of people, who are then treated differently enough that their health consequences become discontinuous in the underlying measure?
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 22/09/2026
tired: left brain, right brain wired: forebrain/midbrain, hindbrain
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 22/09/2026
Hauntology is what opportunity cost feels like.
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Reposted by Will Lowe
Lawfare @lawfaremedia.org · 19/09/2026
"After years of engaging in systematic torture rationalized by pretextual legal arguments, the United States has systematically failed—or refused—to hold torturers accountable or provide remedies to the victims," writes @nkorpett.bsky.social. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/9-11...
lawfaremedia.org
9/11’s Legacy of Torture
Twenty-five years after the war on terror began, the United States still hasn’t grappled with its legacy of torture—or the law that enabled it.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 18/09/2026
If you mentally replace all references to 'robots' & 'AI' and 'off switches' to 'tech companies' and 'regulation' then these papers become potentially quite useful. This one seems to be about regulatory capture.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 18/09/2026
Tired: Owning the libs Wired: Owning the labs
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 18/09/2026
There's 20 y/o me in this superego and I don't like it
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 18/09/2026
You may not care for revealed preference theory, but it's the baseline to beat.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 17/09/2026
lol, describing someone whose views are not ideologically structured as 'heterodox' is like attributing heretical views of the trinity to someone only vaguely aware of catholicism. Some centrists' view are well described by the middle. Others just get projected there from wherever they actually are
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 17/09/2026
Es ist eine Sache, die Instinkte von einem mürrischen alten Mann zu haben (hallöchen! 👋🏻). Aber es ist etwas ganz anderes, sie in die Tat umzusetzen, weil sie sich richtig anfühlen – obwohl sie wahrscheinlich verfassungswidrig sind und sowieso nicht funktionieren werden.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 16/09/2026
Your 20s are for believing everything is structural, your 30s are for joining the small group of guys (gender neutral) who are putting the next structure together, and your 40s are for realizing that.
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Reposted by Will Lowe
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 23/11/2023
What I see when tech companies talk about the dangers of AI
"Protect me from what I want"
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 11/09/2026
Alternatively, what you see now really *is* a livestream because both your brain and your streaming software consume signal as it arrives, fill a jitter buffer where it's edited for gaps and consistency, and only then show you the result.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 11/09/2026
In case you thought your causal inference problem was tricky
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 10/09/2026
Good luck Germany and the UK trying to resolve their commitment to international criminal law and respective Staatsräson and 'special' relationship. Naturally, both will try not to choose for as long as possible, but when they do, may they choose wisely.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 09/09/2026
Just checking in on the UK and... what the actual fuck is this?
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 08/09/2026
Causal inference is the art of considering what you'd need to assume to identify your estimate as causal while slowly shaking your head and whistling through your teeth like the guy who came out to look at your boiler.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 08/09/2026
Traditional post-war German curse: May foreigners become interested in your politics.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 07/09/2026
The problem with discussions of 'trust in government' is that, depending on the government and who is doing the trusting, sometimes trust should be higher, but sometimes it should be lower. Trusting equilibria are better, but increasing citizens' trust might not be the best (or any) way to get one.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 07/09/2026
Much trouble comes from hearing "lead, follow, or get out of the way" and deciding you should try doing them all at once.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 07/09/2026
So much tea has been drunk, yet DE's immune system is still so weak 🤔
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 05/09/2026
And you thought P. G. Wodehouse's Saviours of Britain, a.k.a the 'Black Shorts' would stay fictional for fear of acute embarrassment.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 04/09/2026
One of the better arguments that Claude is human-level intelligence is that it doesn't understand tikz either.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 04/09/2026
The correct version of this maxim is: "Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. They're probably speaking English and English sound-spelling rules are insane."
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 04/09/2026
Good stuff from @phillipspobrien.bsky.social. Cover versions of I. Kant (1784) "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?" will continue until the message gets through.
nypl.org
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 02/09/2026
Narrative seeding is a thing, which means it's going to be a incredibly stupid winter here in DE when gas gets scarce and this stinkflower blooms.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 02/09/2026
My constant refrain: climate change is not an information problem, it's an alignment problem.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 30/08/2026
Seeing, like, a lake: How certain schemes to improve one human's mental condition have failed
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 30/08/2026
This 'renaming water' business is a reminder that American really is a local variety of English. That's why localization sets the names of stuff in my map apps & gives my desktop a Trash, Bin or Papierkorb. Apropos: if posting language here could also localize English, much idiocy might be avoided.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 30/08/2026
In a fairytale moment of Deutsche Digitalisierung you can put the ticket for Berlin's Long Night of the Museums (6pm to 2am) on your phone, but it deletes itself at midnight.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 29/08/2026
Really hate this performative "Thbbft!" people use to appear more like Bill the Cat
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 28/08/2026
A nice summary of evidence for & against bicycle helmet mandates in the link below. Causal inference folk will recognize the good old administrative data DAG (mediation with case selection on the mediator) at the root of this dispute. Friends don't let friends condition on post-treatment variables!
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 28/08/2026
Wake up babe, new twin-earth just dropped
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Reposted by Will Lowe
Jubo Malseeco [SEMI HIATUS] @thejubomalseeco.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Welcome to Bluesky. Please familiarize yourself with the following accounts to understand the range of opinions it is acceptable to express.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 26/08/2026
If you're going to insist that cyclists should wear helmets, you should be able to explain why it is that you don't also insist that pedestrians wear helmets or that cyclists also wear body armour. If nothing else, it's a useful elicitation exercise, and consistency checks are usually illuminating.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 24/08/2026
Dipping in to LinkedIn, as you do, and marveling at the statistics content. Really you'd think R would have sorted this out by now.
The biggest flaw in #Rstats?
There still is no formula in baseR for the standard error
(SE) and people keep on making mistakes when implementing their own - mostly due to the non-handling of 'NA' values when using functions like 'length' or #tidyverse's 'n()' for counting the number of observations.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 24/08/2026
Of course it's 'not a panacea'. Nothing is a panacea, you idiot. Think of your word count or whatever it takes to get you to delete this nonsense.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 24/08/2026
Fortunately for the British Army, the expectation of £49K of debt was not a consideration when I decided to go to university instead. Today I would have jumped the other way. Or perhaps (it's hard to know what to hold constant in counterfactuals) I would have found a nice course somewhere in the EU.
Average debt, for those that have take it out, attending the University of Warwick is £49K(!)
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Reposted by Will Lowe
Klaus Pforr @klauspforr.eurosky.social · 10/08/2026
Interesting paper by Ruonan Xu and @jmwooldridge.bsky.social on spatial correlation www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
A design-based approach to spatial correlation
When observing spatial data, what standard errors should we report? Within a finite population framework, we identify three channels of possible spati…
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 24/08/2026
Ha. No self-confidence about being German survives contact with Nietzsche. But since neither the AfD, the Wall Street Journal, nor the Economist are going to read any, the irony is irrelevant. Better stick with Bismarck. At least he liked the place.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 23/08/2026
Here's an answer you won't like: the United Kingdom is part of America's 'near abroad'.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 15/08/2026
The weather forecast for this afternoon doesn't look so great.
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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 13/08/2026
So much good stuff here, for free.
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