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Terry McGlynn

@hormiga.bsky.social

9.1K followers 960 following 4.8K posts

Ecologist, entomologist, writer. Chair of Academic Senate and Professor at CSU Dominguez Hills. ScienceForEveryone.science and I'm the Small Pond Science guy. he/him Black Lives Matter. In favor of DEI, justice, access, opportunity. Abolish ICE.

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Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · Aug 26

This is the account that auto-posts my blog posts. 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

Science For Everyone @hormiga.scienceforeveryone.science.ap.brid.gy · Aug 26

On accepting and acknowledging your authority

If you don't own it, you're failing the people who need you.

scienceforeveryone.science

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Reposted by Terry McGlynn

Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.bsky.social · 8h

aaand we are officially in the hide-your-neighbors stage

Sophie Sherry @sophiesherry.bsky.social · 11h

During a military-style raid on a building in Chicago’s South Shore, one resident heard a knock on his door.   It wasn’t the feds — it was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for help.

He let them hide in his unit for the next 3 days.

chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

Neighbor shielded 7-year-old during South Shore federal raid: ‘I didn’t want them to take her’

During the Sept. 30 raid one tenant protected a terrified girl and her mom. Remnants at the complex, including a detailed map of all the units, offer clues to what authorities may have known before th...

chicago.suntimes.com

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Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 8h

hmmm. yeah. I've only started down this road but I think two ways to approach this is to actually hand over the dataset and ask gpt to conduct the analyses and then, or ask gpt to give you the code (to run in rstudio). I wonder which one is more or less error prone or if it doesn't matter

Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 8h

(just asking because I've had replies (online and otherwise) all over the map about capabilities, and I'm wondering how of much of this is about the version folks are using. Everybody using Claude Code seem to get it to do precisely what they ask it to, as long as the prompts are highly specific)

Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 8h

have you been using ChatGPT5 (the new one?)

Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 9h

That is crux of where we are, I think.

I think it's down to how our communities build consensus and how this winds up in peer review. In my field I know I'll be pushing for emphasizing the human element as much as possible (insofar as the coding aspect is akin to point-and-click software)

Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 9h

and that's the problem. Which is where I was leaving us off with something along the lines of 'what do we need to teach, and how we need to teach differently'

Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 9h

(I didn't read it as "ignoring" ethics.) It didn't get around to mentioning it and I think most of us agree that scientific ethics should be foundational for all of our teaching and training. And yeah, we need to be a lot more explicit about novel ethical challenges associated with the novel tech.

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Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 11h

that's a good point. In that case, I wonder if the people who created point-and-click stats software like GraphPad are also considered to be people debasing the art of coding when they run stats and build figures.

Reposted by Terry McGlynn

Jessica T. @jesstlibrarian.bsky.social · 8d

In non-fiction I'm interested in WHEN TREES TESTIFY: SCIENCE, WISDOM, HISTORY, AND AMERICA’S BLACK BOTANICAL LEGACY by Beronda L. Montgomery. She was recently a Michigan State prof, so I'm partial. #ewgc #booksky

Book cover: Green foliage including fruit, leaves, and flowers, frame the title on a black background.

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Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 11h

Also considering how much the community who have grown the R stats into what it is have been all about transparency, public archival, etc., then we shouldn't have any worries about copyright or privacy when it comes to training AIs with previously existing code.

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Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 11h

For those who see the coding process to do statistics as an inherently human endeavor and introducing a robot into the process degrades the art and humanity, I can see why some folks feel that way. But that's not how I feel about it. I see it like driving a car to get from one place to another.

Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 11h

I also think that data management using code created by a robot is not a creative endeavor. But it works. And after you decide on your experimental design and statistical approach, getting a robot to develop that code to make that happen is not art, and that it works.

Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 11h

I can understand that developing efficient and elegant pipelines for data management and the process of making scientific decisions and then codifying them in code to see the results of those decisions is a creative endeavor.

AND....

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Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 11h

I suppose for people who have invested a huge amount of time to develop the technical skills to code to be able to manage complex datasets and run statistical tests, it's weird to see that it is now possible for other people to have that stuff done by a robot.

Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 12h

It’s easy to imagine because people say and do this all the time.

I don’t because I think art is a human endeavor. I think choosing and interpreting statistics is, too. But getting numbers to line up and generate a test statistic (from a test devised by people), I don’t think it needs to be.

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Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 13h

Huh

Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 13h

Have you worked with Chatgpt5 or Claude code?

Terry McGlynn @hormiga.bsky.social · 15h

I’m so sorry. And I promise that everybody in my shop comes first, and anyhow nobody around me cares about grants and pubs as much as the success of our students.