Mel Andrews
@bayesianboy.bsky.social
I’m not like the other Bayesians. I’m different.
Thinks about philosophy of science, AI ethics, machine learning, models, & metascience. postdoc @ Princeton.
Thinks about philosophy of science, AI ethics, machine learning, models, & metascience. postdoc @ Princeton.
Pinned
Mel Andrews
@bayesianboy.bsky.social
· Nov 17
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
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...
Reposted by Mel Andrews
I’m co-organizing an “AI for Science: Algorithms to Atoms” social event during #NeurIPS2025 with Yann LeCun, Anima Anandkumar, Bill Dally, and Max Welling. If you want to talk about AI Scientist, World Models, the future of AI-driven discovery, come by on Dec 5 3:30pm PT!
luma.com/AI-for-Scien...
luma.com/AI-for-Scien...
November 24, 2025 at 1:52 AM
I’m co-organizing an “AI for Science: Algorithms to Atoms” social event during #NeurIPS2025 with Yann LeCun, Anima Anandkumar, Bill Dally, and Max Welling. If you want to talk about AI Scientist, World Models, the future of AI-driven discovery, come by on Dec 5 3:30pm PT!
luma.com/AI-for-Scien...
luma.com/AI-for-Scien...
RIP to the farmer’s almanac. astrology for corn is dead.
November 22, 2025 at 9:17 PM
RIP to the farmer’s almanac. astrology for corn is dead.
I love it when boys come together online to celebrate the accomplishments of women. What an honor to have earned a PhD in 2025 and to receive such positive support from the online community.
November 21, 2025 at 1:10 AM
I love it when boys come together online to celebrate the accomplishments of women. What an honor to have earned a PhD in 2025 and to receive such positive support from the online community.
Alternatively, according to this account, women’s norms of epistemic deference are innate, while men are essentially… poultry.
November 19, 2025 at 9:58 PM
Alternatively, according to this account, women’s norms of epistemic deference are innate, while men are essentially… poultry.
Discourse surrounding “AI” these days often feels like a guy showing you his shovel and you say, “that’s a nice shovel” and he says “I am going to perform surgery on my mother with this shovel” and you say “Oh God please don’t that is not what a shovel is for.”
November 19, 2025 at 9:06 PM
Discourse surrounding “AI” these days often feels like a guy showing you his shovel and you say, “that’s a nice shovel” and he says “I am going to perform surgery on my mother with this shovel” and you say “Oh God please don’t that is not what a shovel is for.”
Sometimes I look around me and think: I don’t think any of us, not a one of us, has the right heuristics for when to cede epistemic authority in an information ecology such as this.
November 19, 2025 at 7:54 AM
Sometimes I look around me and think: I don’t think any of us, not a one of us, has the right heuristics for when to cede epistemic authority in an information ecology such as this.
Reposted by Mel Andrews
Antisemitism is a lot like Qanon child abuse conspiracies in that there’s this real and bad phenomenon and, parallel to that, what can only be described as a large scale mass psychosis about a mostly fictional version of the same phenomenon
November 16, 2025 at 8:48 PM
Antisemitism is a lot like Qanon child abuse conspiracies in that there’s this real and bad phenomenon and, parallel to that, what can only be described as a large scale mass psychosis about a mostly fictional version of the same phenomenon
Reposted by Mel Andrews
Don't be evil?
"Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, and tell local cops whether to contact ICE about the person, while simultaneously removing apps designed to warn local communities about the presence of ICE officers..."
www.404media.co/google-has-c...
"Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, and tell local cops whether to contact ICE about the person, while simultaneously removing apps designed to warn local communities about the presence of ICE officers..."
www.404media.co/google-has-c...
Google Has Chosen a Side in Trump's Mass Deportation Effort
Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, while simultaneously removing apps that report the location of ICE officials because Google sees ICE as a vulnerable gr...
www.404media.co
November 16, 2025 at 2:41 AM
Don't be evil?
"Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, and tell local cops whether to contact ICE about the person, while simultaneously removing apps designed to warn local communities about the presence of ICE officers..."
www.404media.co/google-has-c...
"Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, and tell local cops whether to contact ICE about the person, while simultaneously removing apps designed to warn local communities about the presence of ICE officers..."
www.404media.co/google-has-c...
Reposted by Mel Andrews
There is a lot of fuss today over whether chatbots can replace human participants in social sciences research when the solution is obvious: ask chatbots to simulate the views of social scientists and survey them on attitudes towards chatbots as substitutes for human subjects.
November 10, 2025 at 10:45 PM
There is a lot of fuss today over whether chatbots can replace human participants in social sciences research when the solution is obvious: ask chatbots to simulate the views of social scientists and survey them on attitudes towards chatbots as substitutes for human subjects.
Reposted by Mel Andrews
OpenAI is planting the seeds for a pre-bailout, trying to dupe the government into guaranteeing its future. @ryanlcooper.com explains why this makes no sense given the fantastically absurd business model of the company:
prospect.org/2025/11/07/o...
prospect.org/2025/11/07/o...
OpenAI Is Maneuvering for a Government Bailout - The American Prospect
For artificial intelligence to ever pencil out, some truly enormous revenue streams will be required. And if you need trillions of dollars for data centers forever, there’s only one entity to turn to:...
prospect.org
November 7, 2025 at 2:29 PM
OpenAI is planting the seeds for a pre-bailout, trying to dupe the government into guaranteeing its future. @ryanlcooper.com explains why this makes no sense given the fantastically absurd business model of the company:
prospect.org/2025/11/07/o...
prospect.org/2025/11/07/o...
Reposted by Mel Andrews
November 7, 2025 at 8:29 PM
Reposted by Mel Andrews
"[S]tall, manipulate and deceive."
"As far as I have experienced, [ceasefire] simply means that Israel is able to do whatever it wants. We aren't."
"This is the 'peace' we are offered after two years of suffering the crime of crimes."
#Gaza #Palestine #Israel #USA #Genocide #Military
"As far as I have experienced, [ceasefire] simply means that Israel is able to do whatever it wants. We aren't."
"This is the 'peace' we are offered after two years of suffering the crime of crimes."
#Gaza #Palestine #Israel #USA #Genocide #Military
No end to genocide
The ceasefire agreement simply means that Israel is able to do whatever it wants.
electronicintifada.net
November 6, 2025 at 5:06 PM
ML based facial recognition is not reliable in the wild; like many “AI” tools sold to law enforcement, it is thinly-veiled pseudoscience and will harm people by lending law enforcement both a felt sense of epistemic authority and legal impunity.
Could errors from an AI surveillance tool cause ICE to grab and detain you? The agency’s use of facial recognition — and alarming new details on its reckless procedures for doing so — make that sci-fi-sounding nightmare an all too real risk, writes CDT surveillance expert Jake Laperruque.
ICE’s Reckless Reliance on Facial Recognition Puts Us All In Danger | TechPolicy.Press
Jake Laperruque raises the alarm on ICE’s reckless use of facial recognition and its risks for wrongful detainment.
www.techpolicy.press
November 5, 2025 at 8:51 PM
ML based facial recognition is not reliable in the wild; like many “AI” tools sold to law enforcement, it is thinly-veiled pseudoscience and will harm people by lending law enforcement both a felt sense of epistemic authority and legal impunity.
Surprise: AI based facial recognition is still pseudoscience and will harm people.
Could errors from an AI surveillance tool cause ICE to grab and detain you? The agency’s use of facial recognition — and alarming new details on its reckless procedures for doing so — make that sci-fi-sounding nightmare an all too real risk, writes CDT surveillance expert Jake Laperruque.
ICE’s Reckless Reliance on Facial Recognition Puts Us All In Danger | TechPolicy.Press
Jake Laperruque raises the alarm on ICE’s reckless use of facial recognition and its risks for wrongful detainment.
www.techpolicy.press
November 5, 2025 at 8:20 PM
Surprise: AI based facial recognition is still pseudoscience and will harm people.
rookie mistake. that’s \pagenumbering{gobblegobble}.
I am disappointed to learn that \pagenumbering{gobble} makes page numbers disappear in LaTeX instead of making them Thanksgiving themed.
November 4, 2025 at 4:14 AM
rookie mistake. that’s \pagenumbering{gobblegobble}.
I went all the way to Mexico to give a keynote and all I got was this lousy t-shirt
November 4, 2025 at 3:09 AM
I went all the way to Mexico to give a keynote and all I got was this lousy t-shirt
Reposted by Mel Andrews
"Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar, where there's a buyer's market for hiring skilled applied statisticians, and where there's a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized & have vast potential for improvement."
Yup: Local & open
Yup: Local & open
This market is a soap bubble and we all know it. Claims of the capacity to obviate or automate human labor are absurd. We know this. But that won’t stop them from disrupting labor markets and, with them, human lives. pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/e...
November 3, 2025 at 6:30 AM
"Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar, where there's a buyer's market for hiring skilled applied statisticians, and where there's a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized & have vast potential for improvement."
Yup: Local & open
Yup: Local & open
Reposted by Mel Andrews
Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting
I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:
I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:
November 3, 2025 at 1:55 PM
Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting
I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:
I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:
“The sooner the bubble pops, the better” is also true if what we care about is continued financing of AI/ML R&D.
I think “for generations” is hyperbole from Doctorow—however all the other stuff is correct and the sooner this bubble pops the better for the long term.
If it goes on for too long (like a decade or whatever) he might be right.
If it goes on for too long (like a decade or whatever) he might be right.
This market is a soap bubble and we all know it. Claims of the capacity to obviate or automate human labor are absurd. We know this. But that won’t stop them from disrupting labor markets and, with them, human lives. pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/e...
November 3, 2025 at 4:34 AM
“The sooner the bubble pops, the better” is also true if what we care about is continued financing of AI/ML R&D.
This market is a soap bubble and we all know it. Claims of the capacity to obviate or automate human labor are absurd. We know this. But that won’t stop them from disrupting labor markets and, with them, human lives. pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/e...
November 3, 2025 at 4:20 AM
This market is a soap bubble and we all know it. Claims of the capacity to obviate or automate human labor are absurd. We know this. But that won’t stop them from disrupting labor markets and, with them, human lives. pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/e...
More frightening yet is the pervasive belief that a generation of American citizens was born lacking all intellectual curiosity, as though by some fluke, while our educational establishments continued to serve us well.
November 3, 2025 at 12:25 AM
More frightening yet is the pervasive belief that a generation of American citizens was born lacking all intellectual curiosity, as though by some fluke, while our educational establishments continued to serve us well.
Reposted by Mel Andrews
Happy Halloween! Don’t forget, the first translation of the Communist Manifesto into English began with “A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe”.
October 31, 2025 at 11:49 AM
Happy Halloween! Don’t forget, the first translation of the Communist Manifesto into English began with “A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe”.
If I saw a group of men in plainclothes physically assaulting a woman in public I would be throwing hands. How is everyone just watching this?
I'm shaking almost too hard to type. I entered SLC airport and heard screams and cries for help. I could see people gathered around, watching. I sped over to discover this woman face down on the floor, four grown men pushing her down, while she cried "HELP ME" and pled for her child.
October 30, 2025 at 12:36 AM
If I saw a group of men in plainclothes physically assaulting a woman in public I would be throwing hands. How is everyone just watching this?