iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Excited to be headed to Phoenix for #SER2026! @societyforepi.bsky.social is my intellectual home, a place that energizes me and pushes me to be a better scientist. Please reach out if you will be there and want to meet up and chat about ideas or anything else. See you in Phoenix!

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

Our latest publications examining the relationship between cannabis legalization and opioid use disorder in VA patients published in @jamahealthforum.bsky.social Again, contradictory results, make it hard to draw conclusions about legalization and opioid outcomes jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

jamanetwork.com

Cannabis Legalization and Opioid Use Disorder in Veterans Health Administration Patients

This cohort study examines changes in opioid use disorder prevalence associated with medical and recreational cannabis law enactment among veterans treated at the Veterans Health Administration and wh...

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Let’s just say a 5% false positive rate, which would be pretty low I imagine…could you imagine being one of those people a computer looks at and says will die?

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

These two issues seems totally different to me. Sure, more money for science can do a lot of good, it can pay for replication research, it can create different incentive structures to allow more patience, but it can’t fix challenges of interdisciplinary conflicts or measurement. At least to me.

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

That’s actually not why. The reason why is that science is really hard. There are times when biologists work in one unit of measurement and chemists use different measures. In my field, epidemiologists and economists call the same method something totally different. Interdisciplinary science is hard

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

I’m having trouble seeing the link between this comment and the discussion on measurement challenges and identifying meaningful findings versus “significant” findings from large data sets.

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

How do we overcome this problem? Anyone who has worked with administrative data knows that this is real. We often find small results that are very precise. But, even a small result on a population level could affect millions of people, so it isn’t unimportant if true. So what do we do?

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Reposted by David S. Fink

Stephen Nuñez @socio-steve.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

Just putting this here so we can use it when it happens.

a picture of a man whispering into George W. Bush's ear. Bush looks surprised. "Sir, a second signal chat has just been leaked."

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

One of the only NECESSARY components of an addiction and any mental health disorder for that matter is functional impairment, which isn’t a given for billionaires or uber-wealthy because their wealth actually insulates them from that impairment.

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

They are using the wrong term for what they are trying to communicate. Most would call it standardization, right? It’s the same as plotting the avg price of milk over the past 50 years in 2025 dollars to account for inflation. I assume the authors are attempting to account for demographic shifts.

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

On some personal news, I’ll be starting on Monday as an assistant professor in the Dept of Internal Medicine at Yale. Excited about starting in this role even though it can be hard to celebrate personal achievements at a time when our whole profession is under attack.

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

Not exactly. I worked for the VA as a researcher from 2007-2010, then the US Army and National Guard. Now I’m at Yale and have VA approval to work with data for research.

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

The VA EHR is an amazing data source for understand what is really happening in the patient populations. Like any administrative dataset, it has its downsides (patients aren’t directly asked about use too), but there is a lot of great work that can be done in these data.

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

This is the problem with the science of policy making, we don’t do enough work with the policy makers and the public to learn how to scale it up. Americans have been taught that “hand outs” are bad-lazy scamming people get hand outs. This is what needs to be changed. Cost effectiveness isn’t enough

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

Complex systems are incredibly difficult to understand and even more challenging to predict. Feedback loops aren’t always obvious, threshold effects aren’t known before hand. It would have been hard to predict had they tried to model this, and I feel confident they didn’t even try

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Reposted by David S. Fink

Ardem Patapoutian @ardemp.bskyverified.social · 09/04/2025

Published an op-ed for @cnn.com: “Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger.” A personal reflection on what’s at stake as science funding gets slashed. I’d be grateful if you could amplify both in and beyond the science world. www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/h...

cnn.com

Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger | CNN

Dr. Ardem Patapoutian says he watches “with deep sadness as the United States’ remarkable scientific enterprise, which took generations of hard work and national investment to build, faces a concerted...

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

The real question: would you rather be an American Idiot or a 21st Century Digital Boy?

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Funny, I do the same thing. With the sorting algorithms, I live in a liberal bubble, so I’ve noticed going to the local news comments I can get a tap on the range of view pointe and I’ve definitely noticed the same thing.

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Not too long ago, I got in a discussion with a biologists who said people are over reviewing papers. In his words, the goal of peer review is to determine if the paper advances the science enough to merit publication, which should be done in about a 2 paragraph response. I see SOME merit in this

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

Very nice paper! Like most things, we agree!

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

There is also an alternative, they don’t put out a call, but they actually pay researchers to ask a specific question they are interested in, would that be “okay”? Or do you think that leads to poor research too?

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

Can I agree and disagree. There is actually a reasonable case for asking scientists to use data, particularly for descriptive work. For example, if I’m collecting data to study adolescent drug use and I created a good representative data set, why not encourage people to publish these statistics?

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

On a personal levels, I’m interested in whether the k99s are being rolled over to the R00 phase. Trying to get that answer from my PO

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

I was explaining why the money from the government have nothing to do with the cost of tuition. Most federal funds the university received goes to funding research, not teaching. They are complete different revenue streams. If I the funding went to paying profs, then it would be tied to tuition

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

This funds research. Professors at universities need to cover their salary. They do this through research, teaching, clinical care or some combination. I don’t teach nor do clinical care, so my salary is 100% covered by research grants and I do research 100% of the time. Hope this helps. Pls ask ?

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

Yes, sorry, that was one of my reasons for the email too because all funding for travel and such has been frozen at my university. I was told the executive committee was already discussing how to handle the issue. I hope they take the hit and provide remote access at normal cost of registration

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

I wouldn’t travel to the US right now, it just isn’t worth it. I already sent an email to @societyforepi.bsky.social to bring up the issue of how to have a remote conference to allow non-US folks to participate. It just isn’t worth the risk 😔

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

There is actually really no evidence of a link between social media and mental health overall. There is this narrative that social media is a plague on our society, and maybe it is, but the evidence doesn’t show it in mental health outcomes. Some evidence on the extremes, but not average user

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

Many of us are confused. We kept being told they were doing a cost/benefit analysis to figure out the best approach and then they decided to roll over. This will have long term effects on this university and all universities that won’t be good.

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

Precisely and what part of that explanation required a discussion of the school’s endowment? None. The point is that the discussion about endowments is a red herring (“but they have all this money, it will be business as usual”). Fighting will require sacrifice and it’s the right thing to do

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Cool. Glad to hear it. It’s complicated and pretending it’s no big deal and easy solution, turn to endowments is an oversimplication of a much bigger problem. They still didn’t make the right choice, but anyone who is sure they know the right choice is wrong too. Be well

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

So, they will honor all termed contracts, but they won’t be renewing them in this time of uncertainty. One colleague of mine lost two more grants on Friday that weren’t part of the $400mil, the cuts will keep coming

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Postdocs are 1-3 year commitments from the school. Normally, they would renew for 3 years and maybe 4, but it costs the school money to do that, instead they just don’t renew their terms to tighten up where they can. The endowment isn’t a checking account

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

The schools have commitments to their tenured faculty, most others are funded by these grants and the schools come in to cover a lot of gaps, but they can’t pull from the chemistry department to save the public health department, which got crushed in this round of cuts.

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Actually, no. It’s clear you don’t understand academia too well, it would be better if you asked questions instead of assumed you know. Research programs are covered mainly through grant support. Cutting that grant support, cuts not just the grant, but all the funding for PhD students and researcher

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

I’m still saying they should have fought this but don’t act like there was no risk in fighting it because of their endowment. What they gave up isn’t acceptable, and their endowment wouldn’t have saved them. Research on the campus would grind to a halt, layoffs would be extreme, bankrupts plausible

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Yes, about 7% based on this FIRST wave of cuts. Not counting the proposed cut of indirects from about 55% to 15% which would be another billion in cuts. Each cut is a persons career, particularly because it would hurt junior folk like me worse (I only have 1 grant).

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

2.8 billion is closer to 40% of their operating budget, which is about 6.5billion. Im doing these calculations off the top of my head, so they are not exact, but now you have all the numbers so I trust you can do the calculations as you see fit.

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

About 15%. Are you trying to prove some point? I’m at the University, I’m feeling the shockewaves and seeing my peers lose what they worked for understanding I could be next. The endowment wouldn’t last, we wouldn’t last, more than a couple of years. And they still should have fought

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

2.8 billion, aka, 30% of their annual operating budget.

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Postdocs and researchers are already being given end of employment dates in June/July. Should they have fought this, yes, 100%. But the large endowments are not a security in times like these, the school could potentially go bankrupt w/o federal funds in 5 years. It’s complicated

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

It’s because endowments aren’t checking accounts. People donate to endowments to pay for specific projects, endowment professorships, centers, scholarships. They can’t access those funds by contract, only about 20% is accessible, assuming more cuts don’t occur.

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

On my morning walk, I realized the gov’t strategy of going after one school at a time, instead of widespread slashing of grants across dozens of schools at once, forced each university to act alone instead of stand up together and fight. It is likely each one will capitulate when acting alone

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

100% This would have been the right approach. As I said to someone else, any discussion about the size of a school’s endowment is a red herring. Even if there was no endowment, they should have fought to make the gov’t prove their case.

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Actually, Trump has had 15 orders put on hold through the courts, including the attempted cuts to indirect rates on grants. There is no reason to believe that these arbitrary cuts wouldn’t be temporarily blocked by the courts why they get arbitrated. But CU didn’t even try

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

As I said before, I’m not an expert on endowments, but it sounds like you have it figured out. Personally, I think the whole discussion about endowments is misguided and a detour to what we should be talking about, exhausting every legal option possible. Let’s talk about that

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Honestly, I don’t know enough about endowments to pretend that I can say what they could or couldn’t do, but I understand it’s not as easy as just taking money from a bank account. And, everyone here agrees Columbia should have fought, nobody on campus is happy

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

There is a lot of confusion about endowments and how they work. For example, let’s say I donate money for an endowed professor. Tons of these across the school. They can take that money and use it elsewhere. Say, I donate for a center on ALS, same thing. It’s not just money, there contracts in place

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David S. Fink @davidfink.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

On the science front: Can you trust changes in self-reported cannabis use following legalization? Or are changes in reported use driven by increased likelihood to report use. Our new paper uses biological data to answer this question, confirming self-report data. shorturl.at/OXzjb

sciencedirect.com

Cannabis legalization and increasing cannabis use in the United States: Data from urine toxicology testing in emergency room patients

Rates of cannabis use disorder (CUD) appear to be increasing nationally, with increases greater in states that legalized cannabis use. However, as leg…

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