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George Cantwell

@gcant.bsky.social
714 followers 345 following 71 posts

Neural network interested in statistics, physics, and computing. Mostly network science. Asst prof @ Cambridge

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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Terms and conditions apply. Computation may be exponentially expensive. (eg Ising/SBM)
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Physicists have long known percolation on cubic lattice = 2nd order transition (already in review articles by the 70s). Some mathematicians didn't buy it. It does seem odd that now chatgpt might be what finally convinces them we were right all along. github.com/openai/math/...
github.com
math/preprints/Critical-bond-and-site-percolation-on-the-cubic-lattice-September-24-2026/paper.pdf at main · openai/math
Contribute to openai/math development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Alec Kirkley @captainkirk1041.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Excited for NetSci-X 2027 in Hong Kong! Send your abstracts by Oct 1st (possible deadline extension coming soon), and see netscix2027.github.io for more details.
netscix2027.github.io
NetSciX 2027 — International School and Conference on Network Science
NetSciX 2027 — International School and Conference on Network Science. January 24–27, 2027, Hong Kong SAR.
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Joshua Grochow @joshuagrochow.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
What if paperclips were just a metaphor for data centers all along. They have become the paperclip maximizers they claim to be so worried about.
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Rob Knight @root.guru · 24/09/2026
A 2x2 diagram, with "Careful Reasoning - Confusing Bullshit" on the X axis, and "Stuff that matters - Stuff that doesn't matter" on the Y axis.

Analytic philosophy is in the bottom left: both "Careful Reasoning" and "Stuff that doesn't matter", while continental philosophy is in the top right: "Stuff that matters" and "Confusing bullshit".
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 23/09/2026
Thinking back to the good old days when publishing a paper every three days required some human to be insecure enough to write up two ideas that didn't deserve to see the light of day every single week.
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I have also experienced something similar, down to arbitrary notation choices (i.e., the specific greek letter assigned as shorthand to to an intermediate quantity). Am I paranoid? Are we that predictable?
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Mattan S. Ben-Shachar @mattansb.msbstats.info · 24/09/2026
This quote by haunts me. From Wilcox's "Introduction to Robust Estimation and Hypothesis Testing" #stats
To begin, distributions are never normal. For some this seems obvious, hardly worth mentioning, but an aphorism given by Cram´er (1946) and attributed to the mathematician Poincar´e remains relevant: “Everyone believes in the [normal] law of errors, the experimenters because they think it is a mathematical theorem, the mathematicians because they think it is an experimental fact.”
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Tested an AI detector, it labelled my writing "idiosyncratic and blunt". Not long ago I might have been insulted... now I'm so proud to not be "modal and circuitous".
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
unfortunately I believe a lot of "old" researchers are doing just this
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tj mahr 🤘 @tjmahr.com · 21/09/2026
I get depressed when I review something and it seems AI-assisted (as in well written but shallow and making weird jumps in spots). Why am I wasting my time putting in thought that wasn’t given in the first place
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Eddie Lee @spintheory.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Why is political science so adamant that the "issue space" is fixed??? It doesn't have to be, and it's not. This is a central assumption of the spatial voting theory frameworks, and people still cling onto it today. See Martin & Quinn and Poole & Rosenthal. 🧪🦋
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Johan Ugander @jugander.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
My Yale colleague Dan Spielman has started a substack, which I thought I'd signal boost since Dan is an outstanding thinker and communicator (and person!) but isn't on social media much. Here's his first substantive post from a month ago: mathadjacent.com/p/llms-testi...
mathadjacent.com
LLMs, Testing, Grade inflation, and Accommodations
Like every professor, I’ve been worrying about how AI systems will force us to change our teaching practices.
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Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
A paper is finished when the embarrassment of submitting it becomes smaller than the embarrassment of still working on it
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Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Young academics interested in democracy: check out the postdoc program at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins! @snfagora.bsky.social snfagora.jhu.edu/fellowships-...
snfagora.jhu.edu
Postdoctoral Fellows Program
Postdoctoral Fellows Program SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
This is great!! Though calling 25 hours heroic is a tell for how different experimental standards are in CS vs the rest of science 🤣
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Transactions on Machine Learning Research @tmlrorg.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
TMLR has faced a deluge of submissions, necessitating stricter desk rejection policies due to limited reviewer capacity Co-EiC Nihar Shah reached out to authors of 10 papers slated for desk reject. Could they answer questions about their *own* submission? medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ask...
medium.com
Asking Authors About Their Own Papers
By Nihar B. Shah
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
The mean Fields solution
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Dan Larremore @danlarremore.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
What do we think the groupchat for all the Fields Medal winners was called? @jugander.bsky.social
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
“Random Fields”
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
My impression of UK left was: sex work shouldn’t be criminal, along with skepticism of a “free” market (this is a totally anecdotal impression)
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
And the effect on other women, if bodies become commodities
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Also shows there is new physics to discover: a learned equation was more accurate than one derived by standard argument, so a better approximation *exists*. Now we just need to find it from first principles!
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
From my observation, math is as bad as philosophy for this (and both are worse than physics, which says something)
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
(deadline extended to September 13)
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Santa Fe Institute @sfiscience.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
SFI is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work with SFI Professor David Wolpert on the thermodynamic cost of distributed computation, from digital circuits to human brains. We are seeking a scholar with expertise in physics, computer science, or a related field. santafe.edu/about/jobs/p...
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Agreed, so clearly it’s a power law with exponent 0!
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Everything we thought we knew was wrong. The world is upside down and none of us saw it coming... A man in New York named his dog Aethelbark
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Tail wagging the dog either way – if 99% of names matched a log-normal that seems more interesting than the existence of “rare” dog names
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
I must have implemented simulated annealing 100 times. Here’s a vibe coded version w. MaxCut interface (the vibe was “mildly annoyed by comparisons to straw-man baselines”). github.com/gcant/anneal...
github.com
GitHub - gcant/annealMaxCut: Simulated annealing for MaxCut (and other Ising problems)
Simulated annealing for MaxCut (and other Ising problems) - gcant/annealMaxCut
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Laurent Hébert-Dufresne @lhd.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Interested in complex systems research in beautiful Vermont? Teams @vcsi.bsky.social hope to fill postdoctoral positions on very short notice. One position is at the intersection of cognitive and epidemiological modeling. DM for details or keep an eye out for postings on here.
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Joshua Grochow @joshuagrochow.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
"Puzzles reveal the limits of AI. The missing Aha! moments" by Cris Moore. Gift link 🎁. A more humanistic view on the value of solving problems ourselves. iai.tv/articles/puz... #MathSky 🧪
iai.tv
Puzzles reveal the limits of AI
<p><em>Puzzles compress the experience of insight into miniature, letting us watch understanding take shape in real time. Computer scientist <strong>Cristopher Moore</strong> argues that while AI can ...
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Iain Murray @imurray.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Sharing this postdoc opportunity at Imperial to develop and apply machine-learning and structural-bioinformatics methods for protein design, with focus on modern generative approaches such as protein diffusion models and flow-based models.
imperial.ac.uk
Description
Please note that job descriptions are not exhaustive, and you may be asked to take on additional duties that align with the key responsibilities ment...
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
🥳 🇰🇷 I hope I can visit!
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Steven Strogatz @stevenstrogatz.com · 23/06/2026
My new book! Written w my pal Alex Townsend, it's about the math behind enormous systems (medical scans, AI, etc.) and what happens when they outgrow our ability to understand them. Pre-order at @barnesandnoble.com for 25% off -> www.barnesandnoble.com/w/big-math-s... @littlebrown.bsky.social
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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Now with a nice "Editors' Suggestion" badge! We have some further rigorous results (i.e., not approximations) to follow shortly.
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Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
A report for university chancellors and presidents concerned about the state of academic scholarship: Statistical thinking is postmodern.
argmin.net
The Objective Pursuit of Knowledge
Why statistical thinking is postmodern.
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Alexandre Bovet @abovet.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
Interested in network science, evolutionary biology, and animal behavior? I am seeking a PhD student to join the Quantitative Network Science group at the Department of Mathematical Modeling and Machine Learning of the University of Zurich. Info and application here: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie...
jobs.uzh.ch
UZH: PhD in Network Science: Modeling of Animal Networks
We are seeking a highly motivated PhD student to join our Quantitative Network Science research group at the Department of Mathematical Modeling and Machine Learning at the University of Zurich. Wild ...
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Yourqueerprof @drcompton.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
I didnt know there were such dreams to live as a child!
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Tip your whole plate of dinner in the blender tonight if you don’t believe me!
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Two people with the same things, in the exact quantities, can make more/less appetising food. Probably the distinction of UPF is literal nonsense (like “no chemicals”), though it still seems to refer to something meaningful
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Artemy Kolchinsky @artemyte.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
We wrote a perspective piece on future directions & challenges for stochastic thermodynamics. Great collaboration with Jan Korbel, Sarah Loos, Gonzalo Manzano, Rosalba Garcia-Millan, Olga Movilla Miangolarra, Edgar Roldan arxiv.org/abs/2604.26601
arxiv.org
Quo vadis, stochastic thermodynamics?
Stochastic thermodynamics is a framework for describing non-equilibrium processes at the level of fluctuating trajectories, where the state of a system evolves as a stochastic time series,...
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Texture, volatiles, size and distribution of flavors, even color! Whether by intelligent design or survival of the fittest, some UPFs seem pretty optimised to me on those fronts
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
making small typos now shows you put some effort in!
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
I think they can be worse for the same nutrition, if they are engineered to make you over-consume
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
From abroad I only see one side, so… What are you doing to stand up and set things right?
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George Cantwell @gcant.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
Claude does not seem able to reliably answer: "how many cathedrals does the Church of England have?" What a weird blind spot.
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Thilo Gross @thilogross.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
Next week, my course on Networks and Complexity is starting again, which is always taught online. We have some space left for international students. Lectures will be on mondays and thursdays 16:00-18:00 CEST. Starting 9th. 24 Lectures total. More info in the reply.
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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
Journal publishing is bad now, but …this year is the 40th anniversary of my first published paper and the 43rd anniversary of it being accepted for publication.
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