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Vivek Srikrishnan

@vsrikrish.bsky.social
361 followers 302 following 379 posts

Climate uncertainty and risk. Decision-making under deep uncertainty. Assistant Professor, Cornell Biological & Environmental Engineering. Cat caretaker, Tottenham and the Knicks until they kill me. viveks.me

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Reposted by Vivek Srikrishnan
Dan Hirschman @asociologist.bsky.social · 5h
"what we need to demand from universities far and wide is clear: Cease to be a place where sexual assault is often subject to less punishment than protesting and plagiarism." Cornell philosophy prof @katemanne.bsky.social in The Cut:
thecut.com
What It Feels Like at Cornell Right Now
As a professor at the Ivy League school, Kate Manne has known many, many victims. There’s a palpable feeling on campus, she writes, that this is big.
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Saeed Jones @theferocity.bsky.social · 9h
“Senior editor Cereese Qusba spent months reporting on the case before breaking the news of the lawsuit on September 18.”
thecut.com
How Student Journalists Broke the ‘Cornell Seven’ Case
“Our coverage was absolutely completely raw from the lawsuit and nothing was concealed. At a minimum, that’s what we can do as the student newspaper.”
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More Perfect University @mpuniversity.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
@aoc.bsky.social: The best thing that we can do to rein in runaway costs at private institutions is by having tuition free public colleges and universities. “For anyone who wants to say that that’s pie in the sky and unrealistic… this is literally what baby boomers gave themselves.”
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Os Keyes @okeyes.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Since we’re doing another round of “AI will destroy humanity” doom-hype, it’s a good time to announce a new paper myself and my postdoc advisor just had accepted by BioSocieties on just this. TL;DR: almost all the “AI can make bioweapons” literature comes ultimately from the Effective Altruists.
ironholds.org
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C. Brandon Ogbunu @cbo.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
In my latest for @undark.org, I compare AI adoption in science to the Ship of Theseus: "If you swap out every wooden plank on a ship over time, is it still the same vessel?" I argue that science derives authority from something more than data generation + publication. undark.org/2026/09/25/o...
undark.org
AI Presents Science with a ‘Ship of Theseus’ Problem
Opinion | AI can replace each part of the scientific process, leaving the enterprise recognizable but devoid of human judgment.
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@NewsJennifer (Jennifer Schulze) @newsjennifer.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I think it’s fair to say that the student journalists at Cornell are braver than the news networks who just gave up on their WH pool ban even though CNN is still being denied access. www.cornellsun.com/article/2026...
cornellsun.com
EDITORIAL | Cornell Won’t, We Will
The Editorial Board demands that Cornell stops protecting the alleged Chi Phi rapists through the University's opaque sexual assault policies.
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Larry Glickman @larryglickman.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Elite universities mea culpas about the “loss of trust” in higher education so often fail to consider the force of the longterm propagandistic attack on universities, given extensive play in conservative media, that long preceded Trump, but which he has massively accelerated.
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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
'Nature of Wildworks', a rescue in Coarsegold, CA, shared this video of Cliff the Cougar purring in contentment. Cats that roar (lions, tigers) generally can't meow or purr for anatomical reasons. But let's explore WHY cats purr. We can start by asking: WHEN do they purr? (📷: Nature of Wildworks)
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Vivek Srikrishnan @vsrikrish.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Trump showing how committed he is to the energy transition
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Asher Elbein @asherelbein.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Nobody is more aware than I am how much the long Trump era has coarsened my morals with regard to inflicting suffering on my political enemies, and I hate him even more for that, too
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 25/09/2026
It's amazing how the rationalists have basically just re-invented Calvinism for the AI age.
john calvin thinks you're the elect of the machine god probably
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Andi Zeisler @andizeisler.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
A woman was drugged, raped, and sexually trafficked to members of a fraternity. Two of the men involved were expelled. Five were given the opportunity to mitigate suspension by *writing an essay.* The dozens of other men who knew this was happening and said nothing? You already know the answer.
cornellsun.com
EDITORIAL | Cornell Won’t, We Will
The Editorial Board demands that Cornell stops protecting the alleged Chi Phi rapists through the University's opaque sexual assault policies.
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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
A lot of people said a lot of things about the ineffectiveness of production limitations for generating greenhouse gas reductions and speeding up renewable adoption for the past decade which were clearly false. May "keynesianism means we have to keep building oil and gas infrastructure" finally die
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Justin S. Mankin @jsmankin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
"Pricing El Niño is not the same as preventing its loss of life. Yet, many of those acting on its forecasts are using them to move money, not people, out of harm’s way." My editorial for Science on why hedging El Niño is not the same as adapting to it: www.science.org/eprint/DU6FR...
science.org
Hedging El Niño isn’t the same as adapting to it
Record-setting warm waters slosh eastward across the tropical Pacific, forming El Niño. This recurrent climate pattern reconfigures severe weather worldwide, and with it, the global economy. Scientist...
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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Thoughts and prayers for research data managers everywhere. You are not alone. We will get through this together techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/excelbl...
techcommunity.microsoft.com
Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell | Microsoft Community Hub
Lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays introduce new ways to store and organize related information, helping you keep data together without sacrificing...
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 24/09/2026
over the past few weeks several AI evaluation/cybersecurity experts have explained how what's happening is a result of human incompetence rather than "AI going rogue". I'm begging the media to show a shred of journalistic integrity and stop parroting what altman or amodei say
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My Password is Louvre @bmceuen.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Just turn it off then
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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
If you read the replies you’ll see that Pinker was always a race science supporter, it’s just that nobody paid any attention. Maybe we should start noticing when celebrity scientists are fans of pseudoscientific ideas, and adjust our opinion of their competence accordingly
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tweety fish @sifu.tweety.fish · 19/09/2026
eliminate EV subsidies, ban cheap overseas EVs, ban EV component import, deport people bringing battery technology to the US, pay billions to kill clean energy projects, end fuel economy standards, and then do THIS is such an elaborate prank on the American people you almost have to respect it
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Dave Willner @dwillner.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Certain kinds of smart people tend to have a "sexy apocalypse" problem when it comes to thinking about risk. E.g. skynet turning everyone in paperclips, while bad, is also *kind of cool and fun* at the same time. Where the reality is that most actual disasters are both stupid and disappointing.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 19/09/2026
Between the human verification, and the three factor authentication and so forth, I can transfer my life savings to a random bitcoin account easier than I can read a Nature paper my library subscribes to.
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Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Damn someone call the police, @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social just murdered a man in broad daylight
thenerve.news
From celebrity intellectual to anti-woke outlaw: how Steven Pinker lost his way
The pop psycholgist’s new book seems to betray a lurking fear of others’ criticism – about his Epstein links, his manosphere admirers and his discredited former field of study, writes Virginia Heffern...
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The Onion @theonion.com · 18/09/2026
Trans Teen Hatches Nefarious Plot To Undergo Years Of Medical Treatments And Counseling To Win At Swimming theonion.com/trans-teen-hatches-nef…
Trans Teen Hatches Nefarious Plot To Undergo Years Of Medical Treatments And Counseling To Win At Swimming
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Thorne 🌸 @ens0.me · 17/09/2026
"transgender ideology" is a phrase that should be treated with the same revulsion as "woke mind virus"
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Daniel Swain @weatherwest.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Agreed. I increasingly see this kind of argument invoked to argue against interventions like air conditioning in places where extreme heat events are increasingly leading to mass mortality. We no longer get to choose between adaptation & mitigation--we have to do both at an accelerating pace.
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tweety fish @sifu.tweety.fish · 15/09/2026
I was trying to write about this yesterday because I feel like a clear and neutral explanation for normies about why frontier labs are Like This would be really useful but I just couldn’t bring myself to explain it because it’s so fucking TIRESOME.
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Jeffrey Mervis @policyhound.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
A deep dive into the memo that marks the end of how NSF has done business for 76 years www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
NSF memo implementing Trump’s ‘golden age’ of science unsettles researchers
New document emphasizes support for White House priorities over curiosity-driven ideas
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Christopher Callahan @ccallahan45.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
The White House plans to amend the National Climate Assessment to question RCP8.5. Last week, I, @jsmankin.bsky.social, and @vsrikrish.bsky.social commented that this proposal is "scientifically unsupported and procedurally deficient". You can see our comment here: essopenarchive.org/doi/full/10....
essopenarchive.org
Comment on Proposed Amendment to the Fifth National Climate Assessment | ESS Open Archive
This document is a public comment regarding the proposed amendment to the fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5). The amendment directs any NCA5 results that are “dependent on RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, or e...
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vortex_egg @vortexegg.com · 15/09/2026
This is of course not how you do either risk analysis or statistical decision-making. It's one of the reasons why the people making the frontier models are a) actually a major source of risk in themselves, and b) constantly bug fuck out of their minds, and c) in a cult (a cultural way of knowing).
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vortex_egg @vortexegg.com · 15/09/2026
One reason it is a problem is because made-up probabilities is a load-bearing part of their form of "bayesian rationalism"—it's how all of the people working at the frontier labs think about decision-making and risk analysis. Big scary number I made up in my head means the actual risk must be bigger
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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
‘What private company or government agency would have funded Einstein's seemingly bonkers ideas about general relativity’? Good letter in @economist.com from a UK scientist about why discovery research is critical and easy to undervalue economist.com/letters/2026...
Grading a science paper
Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House office of science, laid out his case for refocusing American science on harnessing AI and competing with China (By Invitation, August 15th). He showed a lack of
understanding of scientific research and the application of scientific breakthroughs. Mr Kratsios's advice was singularly focused on endeavours with predictable applications.
However, bureaucrats tasked with placing bets on the direction of scientific research would never have predicted or funded past revolutionary discoveries. Industry has not funded these fundamental scientific breakthroughs, and never will do.
Basic science involves research without an initially obvious application or with a time horizon that a private company would never stomach. Examples of such discoveries are endless. Genetic engineering would not exist without curious scientists investigating how bacteria thrive in hydrothermal vents. CRISPR-mediated genome editing stems from blue-skies research on how bacteria gain immunity to viruses. X-ray crystallography, which is essential for our understanding of protein folding and structure-guided drug design,The 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry for an understanding of protein-folding was not, as Mr Kratsios insists, "largely achieved through industry resources and talent". The training data behind these AI algorithms required many decades of x-ray crystal structures funded almost entirely by basic science-related government grants. These examples extend beyond biology.
What private company or government agency would have funded Einstein's seemingly bonkers ideas about general relativity with the hope of creating a global positioning system?
We need to ask ourselves what breakthroughs and their ultimate applications we will miss out on if we carry out this "overhaul" of science.
PROFESSOR BRIAN STRAMER
Professor of cell and developmental biology
King's College London
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Ryan Marino, MD @ryanmarino.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
The rule they are overturning was predicted to give $120 billion in public health benefits by 2047, with projections that by 2035, it would would prevent up to 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital and emergency room visits, 360K asthma attacks, 48K school absence days and 57K lost workdays each year
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tweety fish @sifu.tweety.fish · 13/09/2026
one of the things I appreciate about this thread is that I don't think you can really understand the infosec stuff without understanding the ideological commitments the people making these have; like for them sandboxes and guardrails are a cop-out /
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Yash Jain @earanyash.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Same thing happens with neural networks. People hear network and neuron and assume it works like a brain, when it's matrix multiplication with a name that stuck. The metaphor becomes the mental model, then the mental model becomes the bug.
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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Very forceful statement by Terry Tao about AI and math. terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a... Note, he is not claiming the models aren't real and powerful. He's talking about how that power should be used. This, I believe, is what all AI discussions should center.
terrytao.wordpress.com
A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics
I am proud to be among the list of 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to the declaration below, which grew out of discussions between ourselves over the last week. We have…
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Voltaireon - 5 caustic French philosophers in a trenchcoat @shaidorsai.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
"Theory of Moral Sentiments" is both incredibly interesting and also it's been disappeared into a memory hole because he identified so many sources of corrosive market distortions that needed to be suppressed for the free market to fully work.
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scwiba @scwiba.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
This man won his primary by 30 points.
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Alex Wild @alexwild.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Ultimately, this letter from NSF is an announcement that universities will be funded a lot less and politically-connected industry will be funded a lot more. Fancy words around old-fashioned corruption.
nsf.gov
NSF leadership in a new golden age of science
The U.S. National Science Foundation was established in 1950 to keep American discovery at the frontier. That mission has not changed. The science and technology ecosystem around it has...
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Here's a gift link to my 9/11 essay in the NYT. Civil libertarians long warned that before giving government new powers, we should consider how an administration with authoritarian ambition might abuse them. We were told that America was too exceptional to elect such a person. Well here we are.
nytimes.com
Opinion | Civil Libertarians Knew This Would Happen. We Should Have Listened. (Gift Article)
The civil libertarians’ warnings have come true.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
if it took you 5 seconds of contemplation to think of an alternative you should take at least another 5-10 to at least consider the possibility that it at least crossed the minds of 1 or 2 of the people who dedicate their lives and research careers to dealing with the problems we post about on here
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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
(I’ll just note, less we get numb to this, how utterly insane it is that we can now take for granted that an official US government account routinely traffics in overtly white supremacist memes—not as rhetoric or hyperbole, but as a simple and indisputable description.)
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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I think it’s actually worse than that: The tone here is taunting. The intended audience is supposed to find the idea that Hatian refugees might include doctors, lawyers, or scholars absurd and chuckle along.
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Climate Risk Economics @climateeconomics.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
French winemakers forecast 30-year low harvest after severe drought and heat Initial estimates point to a 6% drop on last year, with output 17% below the 2021-25 average + ‘smoke taint’ from wildfires may affect quality... www.theguardian.com/world/2026/s...
theguardian.com
French winemakers forecast 30-year low harvest after severe drought and heat
Estimates suggest drop in production with vineyards also concerned ‘smoke taint’ from wildfires may affect quality
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Gernot Wagner @gwagner.com · 06/09/2026
Unlike so many others, the @financialtimes.com nails the "OMG, 1.5℃ is gone" message: "Temperature overshoot requires urgent action" Yep. And every 0.01℃ matters. Reminds me of my NYT oped with @costasamaras.com: "The widely recited '12-year deadline' is wrong — and right." gwagner.com/12years
UN report: temperature overshoot requires urgent action to keep warming in line with Paris accordWith children, days might last forever, but years fly by. Something similar applies to climate policy. The current days of delay and debates can seem to drag on forever, but the next presidential election is right around the corner, and so is 2030. Concrete, realistic deadlines focus the mind and jump-start action. And jump-start we must.
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Jonathan Koomey @jgkoomey.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
People are so desperate to not confront the fossil fuel industry that they continue to grasp at straws. I support doing research like this, but it is absolutely NOT a substitute for reducing emissions to zero as soon as we can. Even if it works we need to get emissions to zero ASAP.
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
This is what shutting down scientific debate actually looks like
bloomberg.com
A Top Virus Scientist Stared Down Covid Lab-Leak Proponents. Now His Life’s Work Is at Stake
The battle over Covid’s origins has come for Bob Garry, who’s faced some of the world’s deadliest viral threats.
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 03/09/2026
At a certain point I have to ask myself if I got all this pedigree and spent decades doing research and building things to then spend the rest of my life attempting to come up with good arguments as to why the Cookie Monster isn't real.
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John Kennedy @micefearboggis.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Oscillating blobs and the climatological wiggle waggle diagrammonkey.wordpress.com/2023/03/16/o...
diagrammonkey.wordpress.com
Oscillating blobs and the climatological wiggle waggle
Werb, B. E., & Rudnick, D. L. (2023). Remarkable changes in the dominant modes of north Pacific sea surface temperature. Geophysical Research Letters, 50, e2022GL101078…
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My Password is Louvre @bmceuen.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Like most eugenicists, Musk has an absolute shit understanding of genetics
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Data centres and AI really needed to learn from the example of GM foods, nuclear power and financial services - that no matter how necessary you think the job you do is, if you get a reputation for lying all the time you are absolutely f**ked in terms of public approval and consent for what you do
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