This is was essentially Tom Griffiths' keynote this morning at COLM

This is good. Like really good.

This is wild coincidence... I was just pushing Claude on category theory and it went very sideways theorizing about morphology.

Also v good bsky.app/profile/rach...

This is v good

"UC Berkeley’s Labor Center launches a new data tool, an inventory of union contracts, to empower labor in negotiating AI and emerging technologies. It provides crucial insights for unions to secure worker protections and shape the future of work." lngfrm.net/uc-berkeley-...

...declining state support, threata and real losses in grant funded research, demographic shifts, demonization of liberal classrooms, etc ... AI is an accelerant for a sector already on fire, but it's insane to say this is a "students future" without any consideration for our present.

If all of this forced higher ed to reconsider its methods of content delivery and retrain it's workforce - I think a lot of us (students, professors, support staff) would be thrilled - BUT ITS NOT. Because... Well everything. Most employees in HE are living under a shadow of terror introduced by...

Another broadly discussed tactic is "oral exams"...ok, but with absolutely no consideration for what this testing method measures, and no support for student preparation for a new paradigm of evaluation? It also does not scale without some serious reorientation of in-person instruction norma

Most instructors are trying the same tactics to theaet overreliance on AI, but it's all so meek and most of it is failing. "Ask gpt and then critique it's response" is the equivalent of a programming instructor saying "in this class we only read code you can find on GitHub" - it has v limited value

Now replace Tesla with OpenAI; and driving with literally any subject in higher education. This is college instruction in 2025

Next year, all 50 state DMVs report widespread failure for road tests. The rate of licensed drivers in the US population decreases steadily and then falls off a cliff. Politicians and print media blame driving instructors - why can't they just update their curriculum to meet student needs?

'Examining the effects of birth order on personality' in PNAS -> across multiple controls in three countries (UK, Germany, USA) "...we conclude that birth order does not have a lasting effect on broad personality traits outside of the intellectual domain." www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I really like @cbarrie.bsky.social's prompt stability work for text annotation arxiv.org/abs/2407.02039

Simulacra is so back!

This is a very cool paper - curious about doing research with a HS student - is this part of a program or one off scenario?

This tracks with political science theory! Eitan Hersh argues that political hobbyism depends in part on the perceived threat of the party in power www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/...

I'm excited to (belatedly) announce the two inaugural #URSSI Early Career Fellows, @matthewfeickert.com & @samzhang.bsky.social !

You can read more in our official post: urssi.us/blog/2025/04...

We'll be opening our next call for fellowship proposals in the coming months, keep an eye out!

today we will all read imbens 2021 on statistical significance and p values, which is a strong contender for having the best opening paragraph of any stats paper

pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Every department chair rn:

Moodys ratings are probably a bad strategy for effecting public policy change - but showing overtly 'law and order' voters that moral failings also have broader economic consequences might be pursuasive