iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tom Carpenter, PhD @tcarpenter.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

I often hear researchers feeling bad about this. But it’s called prioritization. The key is to do it intentionally and strategically. You have finite time and can’t do everything.

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Tom Carpenter, PhD @tcarpenter.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

On the one hand, people need better education about AI On the other hand, do we even understand what it means to be conscious in the first place?

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Tom Carpenter, PhD @tcarpenter.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

The volume of social psych papers that ran on prolific and mturk is going to need to shrink soon, and that will have a big impact on a lot of small labs

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Tom Carpenter, PhD @tcarpenter.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

If we want this to change, then we need to make it feasible TMP factor: Time, money, pain Whether a study gets done depends a lot on how difficult it is. The question is one of ROI. I suspect many researchers are thinking to themselves, “that’s a great thing, but it’s not something I can do”

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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 01/11/2025

We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.

My 11-year-old sitting with her pile of Halloween candy, sorting it into a bar graph

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Menotti Minutillo @menotti.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

ladies and gentlemen...we got him

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Greg Pak @gregpak.net · 10/10/2025

* hoppening

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Cameron Patrick @cameronpat.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

this slide is from a colleague's introductory stats course, I think it fits many statisticians' experiences

Slide titled: "Assumptions of the model and model checking"
with a scatterplot with axes how much people should worry vs how much people do worry.

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Adam L @adam-lg.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

45. Academia doesn't reward building useful tools nearly as much as it should

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Adam L @adam-lg.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

14. We mostly evaluate latent variable models with the equivalent of Rorschach tests

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Adam L @adam-lg.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

5. You should use a precision-recall curve for a binary classifier, not an ROC curve

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JLRay @jlray.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

Wow. Scientists have edited mosquito DNA to prevent the spread of malaria to humans "while supporting essential physiological functions... and negligible fitness costs" to the mosquito population. Potentially ending the mosquito-born spread of malaria to humans. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Tom Carpenter, PhD @tcarpenter.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

Curious how this compares to the cost of living per state

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 08/07/2025

Let's say you want to include age as a predictor in your model. How do you do that? Here's an illustration of three options -- it's for a paper I'm working on (so if you feel like anything could be tweaked...).

Plot that depicts the average importance people in my data assign to their friendships (y-axis, on a scale from 1 to 5, depicted with 95% confidence intervals) by their age (x-axis, from 18 to 60).

Depicted are 3 different ways to model importance of friends as a function of age.
Using age as a linear predictor: this imposes a linear trajectory which comes with very tight confidence intervals (i.e., uncertainty is low).
Using age as a categorical predictor: this imposes no trajectory whatsoever but instead simply reproduces the means by age. The confidence intervals are very wide, in particular for those ages not well represented in the data (i.e., uncertainty is high).
Age splines: This results in a smooth trajectory that follows some of the bumps in the data, but not all of them. The confidence intervals are somewhere between the linear and the categorical case (i.e., uncertainty is medium)

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respectful huff @alexqarbuckle.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

There should be a corner at Home Depot where a guy with a table saw will slice you off custom lengths of hot dog from an infinite hot dog coming out of the wall

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Ian Carlos @ianxcarlos.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

There were two girls at Wawa just now talking about funny movies and one said, “Have you ever seen the movie Office Space? It’s an old people movie but it’s funny”

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Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

🤖Thrilled to share our latest work☄️ Have you ever wondered what LLMs know but they are not saying? We built an auditing framework to study information suppression in LLMs, and demonstrated it to quantify and characterize censorship in DeepSeek. Read more: arxiv.org/abs/2506.12349

arxiv.org

Information Suppression in Large Language Models: Auditing, Quantifying, and Characterizing Censorship in DeepSeek

This study examines information suppression mechanisms in DeepSeek, an open-source large language model (LLM) developed in China. We propose an auditing framework and use it to analyze the model's res...

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Ida Momennejad @neuroai.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

Pleased to share our ICML Spotlight with @eberleoliver.bsky.social, Thomas McGee, Hamza Giaffar, @taylorwwebb.bsky.social. Position: We Need An Algorithmic Understanding of Generative AI What algorithms do LLMs actually learn and use to solve problems?🧵1/n openreview.net/forum?id=eax...

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Tom Carpenter, PhD @tcarpenter.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

Someone please explain why linear algebra isn’t taught more in high school in the United States? Seems like maybe if you’re lucky you get a few lectures on matrices and that’s it.

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John Schwartz @jswatz.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

Under the Trump agenda, energy will cost more. And when energy costs more, everything costs more. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/c...

nytimes.com

Electricity Prices Are Surging. The G.O.P. Megabill Could Push Them Higher.

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Tom Carpenter, PhD @tcarpenter.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

Many academics are taught “do more” instead of “prioritize”. They are taught the academic superhero myth, that “truly great/smart” scholars can handle it. So they sabotage their own success in service to the cult of personality

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Tom Carpenter, PhD @tcarpenter.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

I love this technique because it gives a cool way to isolate change and stability components of within-person measurement using latent variables. The stable portion of IATs is far more predictive of other individual-difference measures than one would think given traditional scoring/analyses

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Tom Carpenter, PhD @tcarpenter.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

I love this analysis technique because it gives a cool way to isolate change and stability components of within-person measurement using latent variables. The stable portion of IATs is far more predictive of other individual-difference measures than one would think given traditional scoring/anakysus

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Tom Carpenter, PhD @tcarpenter.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

That moment when you had completely forgotten about a cool data app you’d made, only to find others posting about it ;) Thanks @calvinklai.bsky.social!

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Calvin Lai @calvinklai.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

Paper w/ @tcarpenter.bsky.social & @alexgoedderz.bsky.social at PSPB!🚨 The standard IAT is only 5 min long. We found that making the IAT longer by taking it multiple times greatly improves predictive validity. 🧵below, with practical advice about how to run IATs! LINK: osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Calvin Lai @calvinklai.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

BOTTOM LINE: Aggregating 2 IATs together and using CFA can lead to much higher predictive validity. Finally, I wanted to thank Tom and Alex! This paper came out while they were moving out of academia & I was going on parental leave, so we hadn't publicized it. Better late than never! 😉

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Calvin Lai @calvinklai.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

FAQ Q1: 4 IATs is a lot!? A: You only need 2 IATs to reap the benefits of aggregating. Q2: It's a lot of work to set up these models. A: Here's a shiny app to make it easy: tcarpenter.shinyapps.io/trait_iat/ Q3: I don't want to learn CFA. A: Averaging IATs together gets you some of the benefits.

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Tom Carpenter, PhD @tcarpenter.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

What should universities look like 10 to 15 years from now? Lots of intersecting headwinds… dramatic change is likely. Biggest IMO is that teaching universities become cheap again by reverting to “room with chairs and a prof”. Think community college, but with amazing faculty.

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Mustafa Suleyman @mustafasuleymanai.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

Skip the stress and the store – Copilot with Instacart can now handle your grocery runs for you! Recipe ✅ Shopping list ✅ Groceries at your door ✅ All seamlessly integrated in the Copilot app.

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Tom Carpenter, PhD @tcarpenter.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Fitting Bayesian models and finding it tedious to iteratively run prior predictive checks and tweak my priors. I’m thinking of a way to automate it. I know the plausible distribution of the data + plausible values for the parameters. The hard part is reconciling them.

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Tom Carpenter, PhD @tcarpenter.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Has anyone fit bayesian models with brms in Spark's implementation of R (sparkr)? What's your experience?

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Kelly @broadwaybabyto.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

“It seems that after contracting COVID-19 in pregnancy, the placenta is exhausted by the infection, and can’t recover its immune function.” Studies also suggest that babies born to mothers who had Covid at ANY point in pregnancy will need to be monitored as they grow:

newsroom.uw.edu

COVID-19 zaps placenta’s immune response, study finds - UW Medicine | Newsroom

This damage occurs even if the mother has a mild case of COVID-19, OB-GYN researchers found.

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Tom Carpenter, PhD @tcarpenter.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

The more I use AI to teach myself new skills, the more convinced I am that this is one of THE best ways to learn (especially if you have to learn selectively and quickly). However, strategy matters here. I threw some thoughts on using AI for skilling here. www.linkedin.com/posts/tompca...

linkedin.com

One under-discussed benefit of AI is that it can not only teach you… | Tom Carpenter

One under-discussed benefit of AI is that it can not only teach you anything, but it can teach you to your desired level of depth. Want a 5-minute overview? Want an hour-long crash course? Want to div...

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Zeta Of 1 @zetaof1.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

That's why I can't take Aristotle seriously. "The good life is only that of a philosopher", says guy with massive preference for being a philosopher

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Oregon Zoo @oregonzoo.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

In loving memory of Moshu 🍎

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Nathaniel Forde @nathanielforde.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

This is an excellent illustration of interaction effects with a (far too) resonant example.

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Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

The lesson in this story is that doing a good job doesn’t matter if no one knows you’re doing a good job so some self promotion is necessary. I think there’s a different lesson in the title — a promotion isn’t from doing your job well, eventually it’s showing you can also do your boss’s job well.

businessinsider.com

Being good at your job doesn't guarantee a promotion, says Meta engineer

Ryan Peterman, who also writes The Developing Dev newsletter, says making sure people are aware of your accomplishments is key.

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Nick Hilton @nickfthilton.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Seagulls, witnesses to history.

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Ariel Edwards-Levy @aedwardslevy.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

is the conclave vote ranked-choice

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Ariel Edwards-Levy @aedwardslevy.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

the precursor to direct sunlight is passive aggressive sunlight

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Data Bear 🏳️‍🌈 @dataandpolitics.net · 05/05/2025

!!! Look at what I found.

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G Elliott Morris @gelliottmorris.com · 05/05/2025

The Star Wars prequels are a trilogy about how an unfair and severe galactic tariff policy causes instability in the democratic political order that ultimately enables an authoritarian to seize power under the guise of restoring peace and prosperity to the republic. Why does this sound familiar….

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James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

Shot // chaser

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