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Mel Andrews

@bayesianboy.bsky.social

11K followers 4.6K following 720 posts

I’m not like the other Bayesians. I’m different. Thinks about philosophy of science, AI ethics, machine learning, models, & metascience. postdoc @ Princeton.

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · Nov 17

A thread of my papers. The first was recently published with Cell Press, coauthored with Andy Smart and Abeba Birhane. It tackles the connections between epistemic deficiencies in deployed ML and ethical consequences. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The reanimation of pseudoscience in machine learning and its ethical repercussions

The present perspective outlines how epistemically baseless and ethically pernicious paradigms are recycled back into the scientific literature via ma…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 11h

and that genie could never be put back into its bottle

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 13h

oh my god

Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 13h

“the field’s overseer” obviously refers to dad who is our rec league soccer coach

Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 13h

The Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria are what my overbearing soccer mom named her fleet of SUVs

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Reposted by Mel Andrews

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 8d

New preprint 🌟 Psychology is core to cognitive science, and so it is vital we preserve it from harmful frames. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I use our psych and computer science expertise to analyse and craft:

Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

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Cover page of Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 1 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 2 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

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Reposted by Mel Andrews

Mark Harris @markharris.bsky.social · 18h

Mamdani talking lucidly and passionately about trans rights and history in a video that should frankly shame every politician who has hemmed and hawed and triangulated and said, "Well, but sports..." It's not that hard to tell the truth and stand for what's right. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEvV...

Until It's Done: Sylvia Rivera

YouTube video by Zohran Mamdani for NYC

www.youtube.com

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Reposted by Mel Andrews

Kevin Carey @kevincarey1.bsky.social · 18h

It's clearer by the day that Columbia making a deal with Trump in July was a catastrophe for higher education as a whole. It gave terrible people a bottomless appetite for extortion. The other eight universities must follow MIT's lead.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

M.I.T. Rejects a White House Offer for Special Funding Treatment

www.nytimes.com

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Reposted by Mel Andrews

Alex Hernandez-Garcia @alexhergar.bsky.social · 17h

Very well matched couple of posts on my feed.

Links to them:
- bsky.app/profile/iris...
- bsky.app/profile/jane...

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 2d

ChatGPT-5 subscription, discount lobotomy now included in price

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 2d

Yes, I think we absolutely are in need of a pragmatic approach to explanation.

Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 2d

I think it is an incredible privilege to get paid a living wage in order to think. Most jobs in existence today are all but prohibitive of thinking, let alone “thinking jobs.” I am baffled every day by the number of people who openly attest to being incapable of or averse to thinking a thought.

ouinne @ouinne.bsky.social · 3d

The only correct take on a fundamentally anti-human technology.

Screenshot of David Simon interview
SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

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Reposted by Mel Andrews

Shahab Bakhtiari @shahabbakht.bsky.social · 3d

Regardless of what explainability/mech interp in AI is actually after, and whether or not they know what they’re searching for, we can confidently say they’re pursuing what systems neuroscience has pursued for decades, with very similar puzzles and confusions.

Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 3d

What problem is explainability/interpretability research trying to solve in ML, and do you have a favorite paper articulating what that problem is?

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 3d

Something in the realm of a functionalist approach to explanation in the domain of explainable ML was exactly what I was seeking after. Thank you (for sharing it and for writing it!).

Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 3d

Oh, this is fascinating. I’ve attempted to carve out intellectual/sociological/historical divisions in this space a number of ways, and that one has not been apparent to me! I would love to pick your brain on this.

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 3d

Excellent. Thank you!

Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 3d

What problem is explainability/interpretability research trying to solve in ML, and do you have a favorite paper articulating what that problem is?

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 4d

anyone invented autoblock for this site (feature that allows you to block yourself from seeing anything that you yourself have posted)?

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Reposted by Mel Andrews

anti-blinding-headlight advocate @barneyretina.bsky.social · Jan 23

A user of the anti-blinding-headlight advocacy group at reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights tested headlight brightness on multiple vehicles in order to figure out what's going on with regulations and adherence to them.

Here's a 4-part infographic with key findings:

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 4d

What is then the essence of the controversy?

Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 4d

it to your moral character. I think it is intrinsically deceptive and therefore immoral to ship a product that seems human-like, and that it is actively bad for you to treat these products like they are humans.

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 4d

I do believe you that that dynamic is happening and it sounds godawful and I am thankful to have avoided exposure to it thus far. I still do not think that there is anything special about modern software that it deserves special pseudo-moral status or that we can draw inferences from how you treat

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 4d

It is possible that people are using derogatory language aimed at computers to behave racistly (???) which means that people can be racist but still does not mean that a bad word about a computer is a slur because that isn’t what the word “slur” means.

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 4d

Right. And that’s bad. But using a bad word about a computer is actually literally not a slur.

Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 4d

I also had not heard that term before. Clearly behind on the discourse.

To Jeremy, yes, that and also that it’s weird to pretend that we can’t use derogatory language about anything at all, ever, without descending into something that is equivalent to actual racism?

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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 4d

I am hoping that this isn’t what Neil meant and choosing to interpret charitably: for something to be a slur it has to actually refer to a group of people and I don’t think we have evidence that people use that term to refer derogatorily towards groups of people.

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