Kareem Carr

Profil AI Expert

Nationalité: 
Américain(e)
AI spécialité: 
Science des données
Occupation actuelle: 
Biostatistician, Harvard
Taux IA (%): 
44.16'%'
Twitter: 
https://twitter.com/kareem_carr
TwitterID: 
@kareem_carr
Tweet Visibility Status: 
Public

Description: 
Kareem a toujours eu un intérêt large et éclectique pour l'utilisation du calcul et des mathématiques pour faire de la science. Kareem a travaillé comme bioinformaticien à Harvard et biologiste informatique au Broad Institute et parallèlement, consultant en science des données à l'Institut des sciences sociales quantitatives de Harvard, où il a participé à plus de 100 projets en sciences sociales et enseigné des ateliers de programmation à des étudiants de Harvard et du MIT. Son principal intérêt de recherche porte sur le rôle des statistiques dans la production de connaissances. Il pense qu'il est utile de distinguer la reproductibilité (la science de celui-ci) et la replicabilité (le logiciel numérique qui en résulte). Il est très impliqué dans les débats lié à l'IA sur internet, notamment avec les experts Judea Pearl et Danilo Bzdok.

Reconnu par:

Non Disponible

Les derniers messages de l'Expert:

Tweet list: 

2025-01-06 19:26:44 @HaloedPayload same question to you: https://t.co/nXQ1gmqab2

2025-01-06 19:25:46 @King_mutlei There are always exceptions but for vast, vast majority of scientists, I think what I said is right. Out of curiosity, can you name an area where people regularly revive ideas from 200 year old papers?

2025-01-06 18:43:11 In the current academic science job market, reading the works of some dude from 250 years ago on the off chance they have something useful to say is a post-tenure activity. https://t.co/k4o1QPOZnt

2025-01-05 19:04:35 @BertrandKoen The internet is bigger and more endlessly diverse than any of us can imagine. These things can consume any document in pretty much any format or language so the source material is unimaginably vast. We can’t say it’s creative because we have no clue what it’s drawing from.

2025-01-05 19:00:55 @Jwdpark In my opinion, it’s just normal capitalism, and not a hill I’m interested in dying on. I also travel in fossil-fuel burning cars, eat mass-produced meat, and use iPhones. It sucks but it’s the system I was born into and it’s above my pay grade to change it.

2025-01-04 17:34:32 @AdanBecerraPhD Could be a circadian thing. My peak hours are early morning and late evening.

2025-01-04 17:28:11 I miss all-nighters. Nothing hits like 3am math, your brain hovering between creavity and insanity.

2025-01-04 16:58:26 this is like 12lbs of paper but highly worth it. if you had fun in calculus and linear algebra class, you will love these. go into debt if you have to. https://t.co/s3UAMHg0mo

2025-01-04 16:23:29 a lot of people really concerned about me being exploited so they gonna make sure i can't get a job at all

2025-01-04 16:22:24 wild being a non-american in america right now https://t.co/0dQ14hdgAn

2024-12-30 23:59:47 https://t.co/KolZEEpYQ1 https://t.co/SMU5RThbwA

2024-12-30 23:28:03 By the way, I’m on a mission to Make Twitter Nerdy Again. Follow me if you like hearing about nerdy stuff.

2024-12-30 20:49:53 RT @kareem_carr: i’m going to die on this hill. given that he was living off his mom’s pension at the time, he should have 100% accepted bo…

2024-12-30 20:26:33 @predict_addict Sydney Morning Herald. August 21, 2006. Stop trying to make it about me. This is publicly available information. https://t.co/PrCJV6uDNW

2024-12-30 19:48:50 @predict_addict I appreciate the passion but try to be objective, and feel free to cite your sources. This is from Wikipedia. There are also numerous news articles confirming the same. https://t.co/kR3P9dDJ2h

2024-12-26 19:49:43 @Wenitte1 It’s fine if they don’t really believe in meritocracy, but that logically opens the door to considerations of other factors like race, gender and ethnicity. If we’re arguing that the workers should be Americans, it stands to reason they should be representative of all Americans.

2024-12-26 19:27:36 I hope these demands that corporations hire American workers first, even if they aren’t the most qualified, finally put to rest the lie that conservatives are against DEI. They just want it to apply to the groups they care about.

2024-12-26 18:00:20 @Demosthenesxx Yeah, that low-key sounds like indentured servitude.

2024-12-26 17:59:13 You aren't going to hear too many companies advocating for this because why would they want to decrease their leverage, but it's a solution that both gives immigrants more freedom, and puts the American public's mind at ease about the employer paying market rate.

2024-12-26 17:54:57 The solution to most of the issues with H1B is actually pretty simple. Don't tie H1B visas to the employer. Allow immigrants to leave if they're being under-paid or mistreated without losing their visa status. This would clear up 99.9% of the problems overnight.

2024-12-25 00:32:47 wild that staying in the phd program is probably the more irresponsible career decision right now https://t.co/HNG8UY3QWp

2024-12-25 00:12:54 "Science only works when we keep values out of it" is such a strange claim when the entire health sciences rest on the moral assumption that health is good. You can have rigorous methods while working towards moral ends.

2024-12-24 23:28:00 Half of statistics is finding clever ways to prove something is significant, the other half is finding even cleverer ways to prove it's not.

2024-12-24 22:48:00 Data-driven decision making is just another way of saying gut feelings with numbers. If you don't have an explicit framework for interpreting data, your framework is implicitly your gut.

2024-12-24 21:33:52 Love when people say "the data speaks for itself" as if we didn't spend centuries specifically developing statistical methods because data absolutely does not speak for itself.

2024-12-22 15:45:40 Basically, we have zero evidence an AI would have solved this problem faster, or for less money.

2024-12-22 15:45:39 AI hype is so crazy because why is this story about how they did *not* use AI to solve a $10,000 problem being presented as evidence that AI can be used to solve $10,000 problems. https://t.co/HublCLXoVe

2024-12-22 14:52:04 Pick a niche market of non-coders who need custom software, a market too small for big tech to care about, and become a specialist in delivering what they need.

2024-12-22 14:52:03 If you can't find a job inside big tech, there will be plenty of work to do outside big tech.

2024-12-22 14:40:33 From binary to assembly, assembly to low-level languages, and low-level languages to high-level ones, every prior transition has lead to more coding and more coders. Learn to code. https://t.co/Q1DNuvauXh

2024-12-19 21:58:15 @ChelseaParlett I meant it's easier when you're all in an office because the office has a natural rhythm to it. I totally get why remote work would feel kind of untethered compared to that. Also more anxiety around doing enough, because you can't see when your coworkers are slacking off, lol.

2024-12-19 21:37:29 @ChelseaParlett Are you remote? I feel like this is solved naturally by working when other people around you are working and taking a break when they take a break.

2024-12-19 16:00:16 Hot Take: If you can’t argue intelligently for a stance that you don't personally hold, then you haven’t mastered critical thinking. https://t.co/S5irZNLYNg

2024-12-19 11:08:48 RT @kareem_carr: I applaud this guy for admitting he was wrong, but this highlights a core problem with the "do your own research" movement…

2024-12-19 11:07:54 @yoooooooo191381 Baby steps. He did admit the other guy's explanation was more consistent with the available data than his own. So that's a start lol.

2024-12-19 00:08:46 @waynejv1973 i had a whole life before stats with many side quests. hehe.

2024-12-18 23:09:44 @alexpotato Yup. I had just graduated a few weeks earlier so my brain was still in test-taking mode.

2024-12-18 17:20:13 @Carlos_A_0rtega what i said was correct. it was just overkill for the situation.

2024-12-18 17:04:45 @dccarbene I wasn't trying to show off at all. It was just how I naturally think about pH, lol.

2024-12-18 17:02:10 It annoys me how everybody is always assuming people are in the same situation as them when it comes to masks and vaccines. Some people are immunocompromised or have people around them who are.

2024-12-17 00:51:37 @MrB22752207 Please put all these tweets in the same thread or I will remove them and block you. Sorry but we live in a society.

2024-12-17 00:27:31 Let's say I have a heritable metabolic disease that doesn't affect my cognitive ability but does affect my ability to perform an IQ test, that scenario would contribute to the "heritability" of IQ, even though it's not what we mean when we say IQ is heritable.

2024-12-17 00:27:30 "Isn't IQ heritable?" Heritability doesn't mean what people think it means. It's similar to correlation in that it doesn't typically account for causation. For example, speaking English is highly heritable because English speakers are highly likely to have English-speaking kids.

2024-12-14 21:39:30 @tunguz Theoretical physics. That makes sense. That field has definitely seen better days.

2024-12-14 21:31:35 when i use ai to solve math problems, it feels more like a new form of search, that returns relevant ideas, rather than an interaction with a thinking machine.

2024-12-14 20:35:48 like, am i crazy? asking for the source of new information is actually a good thing.

2024-12-12 17:46:57 @aePenumbra No offense intended just an observation.

2024-12-12 17:44:31 @SamiKohvakka_ Yeah. Fancy distributions are mostlynot that useful.

2024-12-12 17:26:25 I feel like this image depicts a very specific kind of person with a very constrained kind of curiosity. https://t.co/m4IInpxGJi

2024-12-12 16:55:56 Like you can take things in a super mathematical direction if you want, but I don't get the impression that more mathematical sophistication easily equates to vastly better project outcomes.

2024-12-12 16:53:12 My sense of machine learning is it's pretty simple from a mathematical perspective, and the hard part is mostly the logistics of running lots of computations.

2024-12-10 23:56:21 By “United States of America”, I mean my bank account which is located in the United States of America.

2024-12-10 23:56:20 Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will now be exempt from the 0.05 p-value threshold. All p-values, no matter how large, will be ruled significant. GET READY TO ROCK!!! https://t.co/GQmKbAvxaE

2024-12-10 14:28:01 @Daderp12055 no offense but you are just a rando on the internet so your credibility on this is zero. you have no standing to pronounce me a "complete novice", and it's a waste of my time to defend my standing against somebody who has none.

2024-12-10 13:09:56 @inspirating_ i think its half-baked because sure you can do this at the olympic level but what about sporting events for kids under 18 which are a huge percentage of sports competitions. are we going to hormone test every child athlete in America? seems like a nightmare logistically.

2024-12-10 12:37:37 @tunguz wow, you shoot one CEO and suddenly you're out of the club https://t.co/20icTXRqgE

2024-12-09 00:52:27 @JENNlEP0P Begin with the end in mind. Find people who have the job that you want and look at what kinds of degrees they have. Find employers you want to work for and look at what kinds of qualifications they care about.

2024-12-08 21:50:10 RT @kareem_carr: graduated with a math degree. not too many jobs out there for guys who are good at math and have no other skills. it was r…

2024-12-08 21:48:22 @partking7 Not a citizen. Couldn’t legally do most of that while on a visa. I did tutor though but could only do it for my department.

2024-12-08 20:45:09 @DakotaAHensley Not a US citizen unfortunately.

2024-12-08 20:44:26 @urbanslug They want people with math knowledge but they also want people who are well-versed in their specific thing that they do, which is usually the sticking point.

2024-12-07 00:03:35 @ekkus93 It’s Gaussian by mathematical construction.

2024-12-06 23:31:40 @lies_and_stats In my experience, it’s a very limiting way of thinking about cognitive ability.

2024-12-06 23:26:44 @profgavinbrown IQ is a mathematical construct. Its distribution can be shaped however we want.

2024-12-06 23:23:31 Main point is using mean and median interchangeably isn’t unreasonable in this context.

2024-12-06 23:07:36 Typically with a single peak in the center so the mode is the same too.

2024-12-03 23:18:56 @honeychile13 65 million between 18-45 as mentioned in 2nd tweet

2024-12-03 22:11:35 @Alberto_H9 Sorry I was vague. I already use VScode. I just meant which extensions and if there was any thing else I needed. Sounds like the article covers it. Thanks.

2024-12-03 22:01:38 @Alberto_H9 how does this work? details?

2024-12-03 21:49:32 This has been killing my productivity all day. https://t.co/IAdVJ10o6F

2024-12-03 18:16:53 @wtgowers I tried to squeeze in the comma but I was at the character limit

2024-12-02 00:22:12 RT @kareem_carr: the people dunking on this woman are intellectually incurious asshats. let people enjoy things

2024-12-01 23:47:01 @TobyMeadows No worries. Sounds like we have very different worldviews and are likely talking past each other. Cheers.

2024-12-01 23:45:16 As it is now, the NIH can say, “hey, all of this can be no more than such and such percent” which is easier and probably cheaper for the lab overall.

2024-12-01 23:41:26 @TobyMeadows I’m not saying it’s what I want. I’m saying it’s how I predict the economics of scientific production will play out in the next 10-20 years.

2024-12-01 23:32:48 Ok but if the money goes directly to the lab, they’ll have to pay the university for: - rent - plumbing, electricity, internet - access to computer clusters - research library access - HR services for staff - access to healthcare and a lab has less negotiating power than the NIH https://t.co/qj2nJA5DAQ

2024-11-29 20:51:01 @samanthajfletch I think you’re right that this must be part of it. I often see people saying that college degrees are useless, and you can learn anything for free off Youtube, or asserting they can read and assess the covid literature as well as or better than the average epidemiologist.

2024-11-29 20:04:12 RT @kareem_carr: i honestly don't understand the people that reject academic expertise because academics are "arrogant". doctors can be pre…

2024-11-29 18:20:28 @robertsd Same I think??? Do you think something might not apply?

2024-11-29 18:00:18 RULE 3: Ensure direct relevance Learn math only when you're highly confident it directly applies to a specific problem you're currently working on.

2024-11-27 23:42:16 @pfmanna @RadioFreeTom I have it but haven't read it.

2024-11-27 23:41:09 @bob_calder @Alexand16730477 Say more?

2024-11-27 23:40:16 Correction: 48%. Not a majority.

2024-11-27 23:36:34 @Olfool2 You're right. I should have said 48%. Urgh no way to edit. Will just have to add it to the end of the tweet.

2024-11-27 23:28:02 But basically they're in favor of scientists having fewer free speech rights regarding public debates about scientific topics than the average person that doesn't know anything, which is kinda insane

2024-11-26 00:26:18 @Bedlington312 “Maher is arguing that it's highly unlikely to be 100% nurture” You’ve misread what I wrote.

2024-11-25 23:09:58 Some component of the current gap is probably sociological. Figuring out what percentage of that gap is due to social factors is a full time job which is why we have scientists.

2024-11-25 23:09:57 The problem I see with how many people talk about these issues, and this happens on both sides, is it's a low resolution brawl to emotionally abuse the other side into just going along with whatever you're saying out of exhaustion. It's very rarely about any kind of science.

2024-11-22 21:26:09 RT @kareem_carr: The hypothesis that liberals and conservatives would be better able to seek truth together in online spaces is false. It i…

2024-11-22 19:11:56 @hereandnowness this

2024-11-22 16:53:35 timeline cleanse. enjoy. https://t.co/gmNa7spULG

2024-11-22 16:50:03 I think institutions do this kind of stuff because it's very visible but literally costs them nothing, and racism isn't an actual priority so it's not an issue for them that it's probably making race relations worse.

2024-11-22 16:24:02 It’s frustrating to see this kind of thing because I doubt very many black people want this, it doesn’t make any black people materially better off, and it conditions people to think negatively about efforts to address racism and to see it as not a real problem. https://t.co/kaMGp6cSly

2024-11-21 01:01:25 @Pkmn97772500 Nope! You are good to go.

2024-11-21 01:00:01 Follow me here: https://t.co/KvMqfSPSNw

2024-11-21 00:57:10 @ravenbeak013 Yeah. It feels full of possibility right now.

2024-11-21 00:50:39 The good place is blowing up. Every time I log in, I have hundreds of new followers. If you’re not over there already, you’re missing out. https://t.co/X475Dr5fPB

2024-11-20 23:57:38 still can't get over the fact that people in tech say inference when they mean prediction. we already have a word for prediction. it's called prediction.

2024-11-19 00:41:14 RT @kareem_carr: btw i’m in the good place. come hang out. https://t.co/9SCTq2kNon

2024-11-19 00:40:50 @Klunst Yup! Link above.

2024-11-18 23:10:04 link: https://t.co/KvMqfSPSNw

2024-11-18 23:10:03 btw i’m in the good place. come hang out. https://t.co/9SCTq2kNon

2024-11-18 20:25:09 @ClausWilke Thanks. Will give it a look. Found the conclusion amusing and did not wish to investigate further.

2024-11-17 01:29:32 @Rohanburdened Good book. Published in 1962 but still very widely available. https://t.co/lQ36smNecz

2024-11-17 01:19:46 @BrandonLBradfor You'll never find an account that tweets transphobic propaganda that also just tweets about science ideas in general. There's no sincere interest in science there. My timeline contains thousands of tweets about science with no political component. You'll never see that with them.

2024-11-17 01:02:51 @mvalio1 When they can't attack the argument, they attack the man.

2024-11-17 00:59:41 @Rohanburdened That actually does happen in science, but usually what happens over time is the anomalies pile up, which causes a delegitimization of the standard explanatory framework, and finally a paradigm shift. Kuhn writes about this.

2024-11-16 19:15:32 RT @kareem_carr: In my thread on biological sex, multiple people argued that as a statistician I shouldn't be concerned with "outliers" mea…

2024-11-15 00:24:03 @StochasticStoat Fair point. I think it’s derived with Gaussian distributions in mind.

2024-11-15 00:20:23 RT @kareem_carr: Ever wonder how calculus and statistics are related? Here’s a connection between three of the most fundamental concepts…

2024-11-14 23:27:51 @VexedVortices I noticed that. I almost made the thread about it. It’s the form of peer-reviewed citation without the actual substance. Just a bunch of claims with no way to check if they’re right.

2024-11-14 23:22:06 @ringofsour bro https://t.co/pmGljZRb8X https://t.co/TjOy0P9T9u

2024-11-14 22:47:17 any trait that you might deem a “female” trait has a non-zero probability of appearing in the “male” distribution, and vice versa.

2024-11-13 01:09:25 Not going to lie to you. Statistics terminology sucks. Statisticians are terrible at naming things. https://t.co/g2WaHScx8k

2024-11-13 00:45:55 @TheAnnaGat ChatGPT o1-preview is extremely strong on my tasks. Before it came out, I was mostly using Claude.

2024-11-13 00:29:09 @rabbitfish63 I don’t know. Elon posted it. https://t.co/P3EpwRzYoD

2024-11-13 00:07:41 As a practical matter for liberals, it might make sense to save the political capital they might otherwise burn on the 2+2 discourse for other more concrete debates about civil rights.

2024-11-13 00:07:40 I consider @ijbailey a twitter friend so this is not a criticism of him. It’s a personal acknowledgement of past mistakes as a science communicator.

2024-11-10 23:29:27 @Bakaburg1 I just mean it’s the same if you set number of clusters to 1 and number of dimensions of the observations to 1 as well.

2024-11-10 21:50:19 People should really take two seconds to read and do some googling before flying off the handle.

2024-11-10 21:47:47 It’s even worse. Looks like it’s actually published already. I found the paper. https://t.co/lJ6wEOsSAy https://t.co/9PXFfu64q4

2024-11-10 21:27:21 I'm not an oncologist so I don't want to say definitively that it's weak evidence, but it sounds pretty weak. I'm not surprised that academic journals aren't falling all over themselves to publish it.

2024-11-10 21:27:20 It's an experiment with exactly one person, no controls, and where multiple procedures were tried.

2024-11-08 23:51:44 @faithhope17 Did they try Boston? Although, it might be tough right now in particular.

2024-11-08 22:46:32 pro tip: they're always hiring in bioinformatics

2024-11-08 22:45:23 me: https://t.co/8qeu8uA79v https://t.co/87aWbVZ5a7

2024-11-08 22:19:44 @ipatrol6010 you’re not going to believe this but https://t.co/jo59S4Mw8N

2024-11-08 18:01:29 My thesis heavily involves the SVD/PCA of periodic time series and I am sure there must be results from before the 70s but I can barely find anything.

2024-11-07 02:02:12 RT @kareem_carr: One thing I realized from listening to a bunch of interviews with the undecided voters is they really have no idea what is…

2024-11-06 23:52:56 @mathsherpa Wouldn’t it be lying to claim you are a less good person when that it is objectively not the case? Is a person who spends their life helping orphans morally obligated to pretend they haven’t lived their life in a better way than a contract killer?

2024-11-06 23:49:42 To be clear, I mean the personal moral character of the candidate running. The idea that they need to be a person of unquestionably high moral character. That seems to be wrong.

2024-11-06 23:46:35 A false belief many on the left have is the most moral person wins the election. So they’re confused by yesterday’s outcome. What they need to consider is maybe morals don’t matter much at all, and even if they did, most of the electorate doesn’t share their version of morality.

2024-11-06 23:37:05 More on the theme of not catastrophizing: https://t.co/bZRA1bIHSa

2024-11-03 23:47:21 Not the same curve. At the corners of the red squares, you’re turning exactly 90° which is pretty sharp. As the red squares shrink, you end up explosively turning more and more times a second to keep a steady pace. That’s nothing like just cruising along the green diagonal. https://t.co/FJ7c9vOhxX

2024-11-03 18:35:57 @Nick_J_Gatti Yes. Taleb was one of the first to put this issue on my radar.

2024-11-03 18:34:40 @JamesBland_Econ Not needed, but would you agree that assessing the normality of residuals is useful in determining the quality of the fit of the model to the data, or no?

2024-11-03 17:50:36 This is also why it doesn’t make sense to compare the best woman athletes to the best man athletes directly because the distribution of the maximums is different, less extreme for women due to the smaller size of the base population of potential athletes.

2024-11-03 17:43:51 This is one of my favorite central limit theorems. Mathematically, we spend too much time thinking about the behavior of the average and not enough time thinking about the behavior of the extremes which is important for stuff like economic crises, climate change and war. https://t.co/fYNUd0eLn1

2024-11-01 19:44:39 @GaryMarcus How long do you give it? Seems like crypto took a while. Asking for a friend with tech stock investments.

2024-11-01 17:35:03 @LogicalBadger I don't think non-experts can verify an expert's analysis in most situations either because of lack of knowledge or lack of time. In such cases, we are forced to make a reasonable best guess which if we're being honest is unlikely to mean weighting the expert's advice at zero.

2024-11-01 17:22:01 @TheCAThomas I definitely didn't say trust everybody who calls themselves an expert. In fact, I said the opposite of that.

2024-11-01 17:21:04 @dccarbene People will often bring up lack of humility as a reason not to trust the knowledge of experts which makes me suspicious. Nobody ever brings up lack of humility when deciding who is good at plumbing or baseball.

2024-11-01 17:12:09 I see people denouncing experts with no real effort to discern the merit of their individual qualifications. I find it insincere. I don't think a person would act that way if they really cared about knowing what was actually true.

2024-10-30 22:26:12 I sincerely believe all this nihilism about knowledge and science is what is making everyone feel so hopeless right now. No, everything isn’t all bullshit, and no, all sources aren’t the same. https://t.co/CU94ppGkXJ

2024-10-30 14:05:35 @sciolisticism @jm_alexia We don’t have to convince everybody of our branding, just the ones that pay us money.

2024-10-30 01:27:59 RT @kareem_carr: Americans need to start teaching formal logic in the schools. I'm 100% serious about this. It's a national emergency.

2024-10-29 21:00:59 for the safety of humanity, no data scientist can be permitted to simultaneously master both R and Python. they would become too powerful https://t.co/hneyYTbGbb

2024-10-29 18:35:05 @LukePerry75 I like this a good introduction but it’s also kind of a math book vs a general reasoning book. Maybe one of the philosopher followers can recommend something. https://t.co/UFNKupC1O8

2024-10-28 18:46:14 @jillnephew Fact checking is an important part of book publishing as well as the scientific and journalistic writing process. So the extra fact checking time needed for AI work should definitely be included in any kind of assessment.

2024-10-28 18:31:43 What I want to know is how much CO2 it takes for ChatGPT to write a page of text that’s actually worth reading https://t.co/2fmbCwx80X

2024-10-28 13:52:56 The worst AI slop arises because the human in the loop either does zero evaluation or they're sloppy and have bad taste.

2024-10-28 13:52:55 I see the ideal AI workflow as looking something like this: - AI generates - human evaluates - redo if needed The human evaluation step is the most expensive but also the most critical part that drives the quality of the output for the entire process.

2024-10-26 23:41:53 "So hold up ... data scientists use R for statistics?" "It's amazing, Joe. Nobody's ever seen anything like it." "But then ... they have to switch to Python for machine learning???" "It's a crazy situation but I can fix very easily. Mandatory Julia. Day one." https://t.co/JHQgTzsGgB

2024-10-26 22:36:06 not a good argument. wealth compounds. https://t.co/oTBTrUbTgb https://t.co/jo4s6f8ZLj

2024-10-26 21:46:52 when it comes down to it, a lot of people are statistics truthers who genuinely can’t accept that some things, like the election, are just irreducibly and inescapably uncertain given all the available data. the answer really is no answer.

2024-10-26 21:01:09 spare yourself the unnecessary heartache over meaningless probabilistic deviations. go touch grass.

2024-10-24 22:17:02 @ThankUBayesGod So cool. If I had the spare time I’d replicate this

2024-10-24 22:15:41 RT @kareem_carr: there is clearly a force or mechanism that causes the US electorate to balance at precisely 50% democrat 50% republican no…

2024-10-24 21:22:58 This is like saying you don't buy anything when you purchase a lottery ticket. https://t.co/Ka93qmgI7z

2024-10-24 21:04:33 If you think about it, Occam's razor was an extremely early form of model regularization. Occam was essentially saying when scoring your mental models, you should add a penalty term for model complexity.

2024-10-24 20:48:37 If you find yourself looking at every single bad thing around you and thinking "they" did this, something is broken with your bullshit detector, in my opinion.

2024-10-22 23:04:54 I think LLMs could be made 10x better just through creating better user interfaces. Hallucinations would be less of a big deal for example if LLM products had easy to use fact-checking workflows.

2024-10-22 22:55:37 @tunguz I'm going to make a wild guess here. Is it a very big deep learning network trained on the internet using an extremely large number of GPUs?

2024-10-22 22:40:43 @ipatrol6010 We prefer the term "distributions living with degeneracy". It's less stigmatizing.

2024-10-22 22:39:21 @africagonzalez Imagine a variable that's partly random but the random component slowly gets smaller and smaller until it's just an epsilon of randomness.

2024-10-22 22:30:14 I genuinely think this and get very annoyed when people don’t realize statistics can be applied to anything because non-random data is just a special kind of random data.

2024-10-20 22:31:59 @ekkus93 How much will folks need to understand LLMs to run LLMs? I guess I figure MLOps will be the skills in demand not ML proper.

2024-10-20 22:29:07 @Ademola101_ I get the impression the main companies already have a lot of people who have been working on the core technology for years. What kind of roles do you think they’ll have available?

2024-10-20 22:25:17 @Xanaxides I’ve thought that but that wouldn’t justify the haste with which they’re trying to cram info on LLMs.

2024-10-20 22:23:25 @bob_bobschlob It comes off like they are in a mad rush to get up to speed as fast as possible. More like a gold rush than general curiosity.

2024-10-20 22:19:50 Seems like it would be more financially lucrative to learn how to build pipelines that utilize existing LLMs vs learning how they work internally.

2024-10-18 22:53:03 RT @kareem_carr: For every ten likes, I'll post a new unhinged mathematician quote. https://t.co/HP8jUwLYQI

2024-10-18 16:18:04 sir, this is a wendy's https://t.co/jEwyNny24W

2024-10-18 16:12:55 me, after three red bulls: https://t.co/F8TgmmToZU

2024-10-18 16:09:40 when my code crashes, like this guy, i also assume it's because the universe is being an asshole to me specifically https://t.co/mWNXsRqdaI

2024-10-18 16:06:00 technically a physicist quote but i'll allow it https://t.co/u15rT3tLuH

2024-10-16 22:05:59 @OmerSMano I’m agreeing with Yann.

2024-10-16 20:20:34 @ErikMagnu i think big tech would just find some other money making scheme for why they needed to burn the energy. honestly, crypto was pretty close to burning energy for no reason at all.

2024-10-16 20:12:54 why does being a moderate on ai feel so radical - no it's not going to kill us - no it's also not going to do all our jobs perfectly with no downsides - but no, it's not completely useless either https://t.co/oWZkW6tQ0W

2024-10-16 20:01:04 @jackmaceoch Read some European history. It’s very educational. It used to be a very brutal and chaotic place. The peace of the last few decades are more of an aberration rather than the historical norm: https://t.co/Q3l3BVDsXt

2024-10-16 19:36:06 @jackmaceoch in the aftermath of world war ii: https://t.co/dVkHtIRtjU

2024-10-11 16:43:48 people were worried about the restructuring but looks like openai is still going to be a non-profit https://t.co/wsyCQFg4Mi

2024-10-10 17:31:09 RT @kareem_carr: i have this theory that science used to involve a lot of physically moving your body around while thinking through problem…

2024-10-10 15:43:01 I know the price is falling now, but much like with Uber, the price they're charging us now isn't necessarily the price they will be charging us later.

2024-10-10 15:38:13 It's really hard to predict the impact of AI because it's not about what abilities are technically possible given unlimited resources. What we use AI for will strongly depend on how much it costs to do anything useful with it and that part is very much up in the air.

2024-10-10 15:18:52 i have this theory that science used to involve a lot of physically moving your body around while thinking through problems, and now we do everything in our heads or on small 2d screens, and maybe that’s why science is so narrow and incremental now. https://t.co/ytxnVZk4LP

2024-10-09 15:15:43 In the near future, I expect most data science work to involve either using language models or at least pretending that you are.

2024-10-01 09:32:49 @bending_michael Try giving yourself a little data science project to work on. It will give you incentive to learn the tools.

2024-09-30 23:06:17 @ScrollerVolume I have a few rabbit snails and cherry shrimp so the copper sulfate is a no go but I can try the other stuff you mentioned. Thanks!

2024-09-30 22:01:11 cancer is about as high-stakes as you can get.

2024-09-30 22:00:13 i doubt it. https://t.co/Rpd6UnBeEJ https://t.co/Z1bHyULRPd

2024-09-30 20:31:58 @ScrollerVolume Scuds. I removed the plants + animals. Then I ran the tank water through filter wool to clean it. I carbonated some distilled water and poured it on to the rocks + sand to kill the remaining scuds. Not sure how long to leave the tank though

2024-09-30 16:23:36 formally enshrining the ideological divisions of the current ruling political parties in the university admissions process sounds genuinely insane to me. like decline and fall of the empire level bad.

2024-09-29 17:46:29 @quirkyllama His ideas are basically the same ones people held 100-200 years ago during the era of early race science and eugenics. They are not anything new.

2024-09-29 17:43:43 @ShortBusProud Yes.

2024-09-29 17:43:28 @ringofsour I wouldn’t say he’s had anywhere near the level of success that would have most traditionally educated people questioning their life.

2024-09-29 17:34:20 more than that. people with differing opinions aren’t an unfortunate part of life that you just have to put up with. they’re actually a resource you can use to make your own ideas stronger. https://t.co/dFYSIkCq01

2024-09-29 17:18:50 there are almost certainly hundreds of stories where an AI comes to the realization it’s not human in the training data https://t.co/eQg4kIOcpF

2024-09-25 22:43:05 @colin_fraser @evanewashington Yeah. Something about a letter to the church of Scotland where he says "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

2024-09-25 11:36:05 @MikeBenchCapon @evanewashington So taking the idiosyncratic mathematical challenges of implementing a very particular statistical framework and elevating that to an entire life philosophy. I can respect it.

2024-09-25 10:21:36 @evanewashington Is this him taking Cromwell’s rule to an extreme or something else? https://t.co/ZCkxlGUxcI

2024-09-24 14:07:17 @SaskiaHomer @ryananderson3 Yes. It’s blackbox. I think Altman is arguing that it must be learning the true rules (or closely approximating them) otherwise how could it be so predictive.

2024-09-23 22:56:03 @ryananderson3 I read him as saying it can also learn the underlying data generating process so not just curve fitting.

2024-09-23 21:52:51 (Spoiler: I don’t think it’s true)

2024-09-23 21:52:50 Sam Altman: “deep learning worked…humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data, or really, the underlying “rules" that produce any distribution of data.” If this is true then deep learning is the end of statistics as a science. https://t.co/6h5TTT1XPp

2024-09-23 21:48:16 @foysavas I think it’s an indirect way of saying the integral of f(x)g(x) can exist (the expectation) even if the integral of f(x) (the associated probability) doesn’t exist, and that the payoff/expectation is the real thing in the physical world that you actually care about.

2024-09-23 18:45:36 RT @kareem_carr: Kids should learn statistics early! Doesn’t have to be super mathematical. They can do stuff like coin flip experiments an…

2024-09-21 19:36:55 RT @kareem_carr: “How do I know if someone understands probability? They understand probability if they know probability is not a product.…

2024-09-21 18:37:57 I ran out of queries to GPT-4o1 for the week and it won't reset until Tuesday. Oh the pain.

2024-09-21 18:34:02 @JayDeep_1729 Frequency. Either over real scenarios or hypothetical scenarios constructed in the imagination.

2024-09-21 16:00:26 @huntthesnark Not something I know that much about but what about these? https://t.co/h42TrTPj07

2024-09-21 15:48:04 To be clear, I don’t agree with the take that this is only or even best way to understand probability, but I think it’s interesting, and I’m surprised at the number of people who are calling it “word salad”.

2024-09-17 22:20:34 @melb4886 I would guess that a "counting proof" means it is a fundamentally combinatorical argument. No idea if this is true of Wile's approach, but a lot of mathematicians look down on combinatorics, at least in my personal experience.

2024-09-17 17:14:48 RT @kareem_carr: Einstein, 1905: >

2024-09-17 15:31:48 Andrew Wiles >

2024-09-17 00:11:24 Einstein, 1905: >

2024-09-14 23:05:28 @ZetaOf1 I just came up with this idea, this week. I’m sure I would have gotten there eventually.

2024-09-14 23:03:26 @jjcordes I am also impressed. Its math ability is high. Looking forward to unrestricted access.

2024-09-14 22:33:14 …egory theory books. https://t.co/ub679SKUv6

2024-09-14 22:33:13 As an Afro-Caribbean immigrant living in the US, I must confess there have been more than a few instances in which I've fallen on hard times. I've been so desperate at times that I’ve resorted to devouring my neighbor's cat... https://t.co/Se9BtlL4Wz

2024-09-12 18:19:01 @RealCarlAllen yeah. definitely not saying what you’re saying is wrong. just wanted to clarify that the inferential statistics approach here is frequentist.

2024-09-12 17:34:58 @RealCarlAllen “…as often as the sample size says it should” I think this is an implicitly frequentist interpretation.

2024-09-12 17:30:57 @RSGAT Thinking isn’t an experiment. It’s quite famously the opposite of experiment. I will admit the line is quite blurry for simulations, and other computer-based experiments.

2024-09-12 17:28:17 @jayjoseph22 As you kind of allude to in your tweet, if a science habitually ignores experimental evidence, anomalies accumulate, and this often leads to a replication crisis. The crisis then leads to paradigm shift, a radical shift in theory. If not, the science may lapse into pseudoscience.

2024-09-12 16:03:18 (the last pic is me putting your name on a list)

2024-09-09 14:32:21 @christophcsmith Fair enough. It would be nice to see that data if someone had the resources and time to collect it.

2024-09-09 14:29:15 @wlmsears I am unfortunately due to work demands.

2024-09-09 14:22:37 @christophcsmith Isn't that what the paper is doing?

2024-09-09 14:13:28 The current twitter algorithm is too biased towards lowbrow mass appeal stuff like racism, sexism, tribal politics and conspiracy theories and almost completely ignores content from niche intellectual communities. Makes it completely unusable for science. https://t.co/SGBRyQH8oB

2024-09-07 16:58:50 i’m going to start reacting like this when people call me a “statistician”: https://t.co/ScWENYaGDr

2024-08-20 08:07:50 RT @kareem_carr: I would have asked her if she agreed that a/b x b must be a, so then it follows that 1/0 x 0 must be 1, but also 0 times a…

2024-08-19 22:16:41 RT @kareem_carr: I would have asked her if she agreed that a/b x b must be a, so then it follows that 1/0 x 0 must be 1, but also 0 times a…

2024-08-19 21:50:22 @stevenctilley It’s more accurate to say it’s undefined unless you are working in some specially constructed system. Occasionally, you can get away with pretending it is infinity in certain calculations.

2024-08-19 16:18:16 @josiahstevenson Yeah. That makes sense as a strategy. Finding somebody that's part of their in-group to deliver the message.

2024-08-19 16:12:45 @JimDMiller I would try to be non-confrontational about it. They might not admit right then and there, but I would expect the seed of doubt to have been planted.

2024-08-19 16:07:32 @lies_and_stats I think analogies are good for teaching people when they accept that you have greater expertise in the subject, but in this case where the teacher considers themselves the authority, it's better to show it using the simplest calculation that demonstrates your point.

2024-08-17 22:11:29 RT @kareem_carr: this probability 101 cheat sheet is incredibly well done *chef's kiss* https://t.co/JGCbV06c9n

2024-08-17 18:57:24 RT @kareem_carr: The prerequisites for a solid foundation in statistics are calculus, linear algebra, probability theory and coding. https:…

2024-08-17 15:56:44 @andrewrwyatt I like it but you’re right, it’s probably not a first book. Easier to appreciate post-Stewart.

2024-08-17 15:54:56 Optimization is a gateway drug to derivatives. Histograms are a gateway drug to integration. We should be teaching kids data science and calculus at the same time. https://t.co/Lr8YrkZoj4 https://t.co/HleFsVSXzX

2024-08-17 15:30:48 @wlmsears I guess I would start with R if you care more about statistics and Python if you care more about programming, but it's probably a could idea to plan on learning both eventually.

2024-08-15 23:42:21 @lcdriammdmph Aren't the harms you allude to just the typical potential harms that come with free speech? Wouldn't the logic of your argument imply that free speech is too dangerous to exist as well?

2024-08-15 23:15:45 Nothing in the design of a paint brush stops me from creating a hyper realistic painting of mickey mouse committing a mass homicide.

2024-08-15 23:15:44 There’s nothing in the design of a car that can physically stop a homicidal driver from driving it into a pedestrian.

2024-08-13 18:07:16 RT @kareem_carr: my brother in christ you are literally posting this using machinery doing billions of calculations per second

2024-08-13 15:56:03 @fullstacksapien If nobody knows how to do the math, who's going to build the computers?

2024-08-13 15:44:13 my brother in christ you are literally posting this using machinery doing billions of calculations per second https://t.co/hWJucAZMtX

2024-08-13 07:54:07 @skdh I was obsessed with ants as a kid and made art farms using several species. In my experience, the smell (formic acid) is species dependent, and you might need to crush one to smell it strongly. These sugar ants are particularly smelly: https://t.co/kS9BHNbN5N

2024-08-13 07:47:12 RT @kareem_carr: One of the things I hate most about the cult of IQ is it leads to lot of magical thinking about how the brain works. There…

2024-08-11 13:46:07 I haven’t heard anybody talking about this but it seems to me that cheap high-quality AI generated images probably means the end of professional modeling, which is unfortunate since it’s one of the few jobs where women get paid more than men.

2024-08-11 13:04:40 the answer to fake AI slop is so obviously to, going forward, not rely on internet randos for your information and to not listen to people who do.

2024-08-11 13:00:42 i can see why this would freak people out, but take the example of science, it’s been possible for a while now to create fake scientific data. in many cases, indistinguishable from real, but it hasn’t been a huge issue because people don’t trust scientific data from randos. https://t.co/WShCjMq2KQ

2024-08-09 22:11:35 @D_v_z_v it's weird for sure. also kind of cool that it doesn't completely destroy the information in some cases, which is the opposite of what i would have guessed at first

2024-08-09 22:02:31 they call me a freak in the sheets https://t.co/NUF1xx6YQl

2024-08-09 21:56:51 @D_v_z_v yes. this: https://t.co/EOBHfXrg5v

2024-08-09 19:36:07 RT @kareem_carr: How to convince a skeptical colleague that you're right and they're wrong (thread) https://t.co/h8EB5c6zmh

2024-08-09 15:57:02 @f2harrell Doesn't this issue of limits also apply to Bayesian approaches since they are influenced, sometimes very strongly, by priors (which are subjective) except in the limit?

2024-08-04 16:39:30 nothing is more authentic to the statistics experience than being forced to argue from first principles as to why having a phd in a thing might imply you are better than average at that thing.

2024-08-04 16:39:29 wow. maybe machine learning is just like statistics. https://t.co/OuDVM9yayp

2024-08-04 16:10:09 @annmartin1947 oof. that sounds tough. bad mentors end up hurting a lot of people in academia unfortunately.

2024-08-04 15:39:43 he's right. the best education you can get is one-on-one mentorship by an expert who really cares about you and your career. that can actually be easier to find when your professors aren't world famous and under relentless pressure to publish. https://t.co/kXPuvqprgM

2024-08-04 14:51:14 “sexual market value” you say. so if we look into how you compute that, it’s gonna totally make sense and not be absolutely ridiculous, right?

2024-08-02 23:48:09 https://t.co/qZkYuHE0Ce https://t.co/xFiwBbOwcP

2024-08-02 22:06:38 i'll just speak for myself. the main reason i chose to do a phd is the amount of progress you can make when you're devoting 100% of your time to learning vs squeezing in a few distracted hours after a full day of work is incredible. https://t.co/VbpLwgPonP

2024-08-02 14:58:35 For me, I find it’s actually better to keep coding at a low level over the weekends than to stop completely on Friday and then start up again on Monday.

2024-07-10 17:50:15 @millefoliumface There's too much hype. I agree.

2024-07-10 17:49:00 @Sixersplease Thanks. Just some thoughts on the current situation that I've been kicking around for a while now.

2024-07-10 15:41:58 @millefoliumface We don't need the outputs of an LLM to be 100% accurate. As long as there's a reasonable amount of signal relative to noise, we can do something with it. That's the magic of statistics.

2024-07-10 15:10:42 The era of belt tightening won't last forever and when it ends, I suspect the effects on data science will be explosive. Data science isn't dead. It's just sleeping.

2024-07-10 15:10:41 I think the answer to that is a lot of businesses see exploratory data analysis as a luxury and in this period of belt tightening, data science is not being prioritized.

2024-07-03 15:19:36 andrew tate: “data is for midwits” lol. never been roasted so badly in my life. https://t.co/YZBDsEY3Ib

2024-06-28 20:09:44 @vimrich You don't need it to happen more than once. The basic idea is to look at all of the one-time events I predicted would happen 30 percent of the time and see if they ended up happening 30% of the time.

2024-06-28 15:42:12 As with all things in statistics, you can’t decide based on one event. You need to aggregate multiple observations to get the overall pattern.

2024-06-28 15:42:11 It’s not that hard. Things that are predicted to happen with 30% probability should happen about 30% of the time. https://t.co/TcCctb75Yn

2024-06-27 09:35:02 @smarek0502 Oh wow. So the algorithm had actually seen each person (and their biological sex assignment) before. Yikes.

2024-03-01 00:00:00 CAFIAC FIX

2024-03-11 00:00:00 CAFIAC FIX

2023-05-22 20:48:50 RT @kareem_carr: WHY do we divide by n-1 when computing the sample variance? I've never seen this way of explaining this concept anywhere…

2023-05-22 15:22:46 RT @cam_o_gram: I think I have a crush on this dude... this is excellent.

2023-05-22 14:56:14 I enjoy explaining math and statistics ideas. Follow me for more content like this, and don't forget to click the little notification bell so you don't miss out on future threads. https://t.co/V2wY54dqaZ

2023-05-22 14:56:13 This isn't the whole story. There is one more twist of mathematical luck that makes the algebra work out. But this is the main idea. I hope this makes the appearance of n-1 feel less mysterious.

2023-05-22 14:56:12 IDEA: BESSEL'S CORRECTION CANCELS THE CORRELATION FACTOR Notice that the correlation factor and Bessel's correction cancel each other out when multiplied. So that's the story of where the Bessel's correction comes in and why we divide by n-1. https://t.co/qGmbxKI24B

2023-05-22 14:56:11 This applies to every other observation not just the first. As you can imagine, recomputing the average of the n-1 remaining observations for each observation is tedious. It's much easier to subtract the same sample mean each time and then account for the correlation afterwards. https://t.co/L0in8f4VrN

2023-05-22 14:56:09 IDEA: WE DON'T NEED TO ACTUALLY DECORRELATE. WE CAN JUST USE A CORRECTION FACTOR Subtracting the sample mean from the first observation is identical to subtracting the average of all the values excluding the first observation times an extra correlation factor. https://t.co/De4KVAgPeg

2023-05-22 14:56:07 IDEA: DECORRELATING THE VALUES WITH ALGEBRA I will use the first observation as an example. STEP 1: We rearrange the terms so the mean no longer contains the first observation. STEP 2: We rearrange the remaining expression to involve the average of the remaining n-1 values https://t.co/71EFP2Mg9L

2023-05-22 14:56:05 The way I like to think about it is we're subtracting -1/n of the observation when we subtract the sample mean. Since we do this n times for each observation, n times -1/n equals 1. We are effectively subtracting 1 observation. This is why we effectively have n-1 observations.

2023-05-22 14:56:04 IDEA: THE SAMPLE MEAN IS NOT INDEPENDENT OF OUR OBSERVATIONS Each observation and the sample mean are slightly correlated because the sample mean is computed using all the observations. https://t.co/3EW589pVJs

2023-05-22 14:56:02 INSIGHT 2: We can think of the sample variance as computing the average distance to the sample mean but with an extra correction factor. Our question then changes from "Why divide by n-1?" to "Where did the correction factor come from?" https://t.co/i6q5gG9Wxh

2023-05-22 14:56:00 Here are two key insights which will be important later. INSIGHT 1: Notice that in the formula for the sample variance, we are subtracting the sample mean from each observation. https://t.co/J9aUD6MgTo

2023-05-22 14:55:59 We should also quickly review the "sample mean" or "sample average". If you are comfortable with this concept, skip ahead to the next tweet. We compute the sample mean by adding up all our observations and then dividing by the total number of observations. https://t.co/Hls6v0Iyuh

2023-05-22 14:55:57 BACKGROUND This explanation is going to be confusing if you're rusty on summation notation. So here is a quick review. If you're comfortable with this concept, skip to the next tweet. Summation notation is a compact way of talking about adding up n values. https://t.co/394ErY21WB

2023-05-22 14:55:55 WHY do we divide by n-1 when computing the sample variance? I've never seen this way of explaining this concept anywhere else. Read on if you want a completely new way of looking at this. https://t.co/e4hjBYubRC

2023-05-21 08:56:16 RT @kareem_carr: philosophers: the only thing i know is that i know nothing data scientists: the only thing i know is that i know nothing…

2023-05-19 19:00:00 CAFIAC FIX

2023-05-21 19:00:00 CAFIAC FIX

2023-05-05 10:17:53 @MaartenvSmeden @IAmSamFin @AndrewLBeam Would it be more fair to say “methods” shouldn’t be dichotomized by “methodologies” can be? Meaning I could use K-means in a machine learning framework for your analysis (adhering to the scientific norms of the ML community) or in a statistical framework?

2023-05-05 10:00:52 RT @kareem_carr: This is the greatest mathematician story ever told https://t.co/lCoS68lEAk

2023-05-05 09:53:40 @MaartenvSmeden @IAmSamFin @AndrewLBeam I guess I'm a little skeptical the dichotomy is really "false". I could see a path to a synthesis in the specific context of medical research but that's because both subgroups would be subordinate to the research norms of the medical research community in that context.

2023-05-05 09:50:33 @MaartenvSmeden @IAmSamFin @AndrewLBeam I'm sympathetic to the overall goal of moving past dichotomization! But how would you respond to the fact that sociologically these are different groups: do different degrees, know different things, attend different conferences, adhere to different standards of rigor?

2023-05-05 02:37:02 RT @kareem_carr: This is the greatest mathematician story ever told https://t.co/lCoS68lEAk

2023-05-04 23:43:06 @truthy_ty It is a very common experience among mathematicians to deeply want to talk about math in situations where they know they should not be talking about math.

2023-05-04 23:10:52 This is the greatest mathematician story ever told https://t.co/lCoS68lEAk

2023-05-04 18:29:25 @krichard1212 @kalle_leppala Thanks. I really appreciate this. I’ll DM you my email.

2023-05-04 17:53:31 @SciencePartisan @ent3c This is my confusion as well.

2023-05-04 17:40:20 @ent3c I think IQ is a valid construct as well but significantly more limited than the most enthusiastic proponents imply.

2023-05-04 16:17:51 @kalle_leppala @DialecticBio I don’t think so. No. But let me put it this way. if a guy calls a black person the n-word and someone’s reaction is “yeah. well, what was the n-word doing?” then that someone might not be a very neutral party. I’m definitely not going to waste my time trying to win them over.

2023-05-04 16:02:49 @DialecticBio @kalle_leppala I mean there’s racism and then there’s dropping the n-word. He’s basically saying it’s reasonable to call a black person the n-word if you feel like they are committing the super duper serious crime of being wrong on the internet.

2023-05-04 15:49:21 @krichard1212 @kalle_leppala These are some really interesting observations. Would love to pick your brain regarding references at some point.

2023-05-04 15:42:00 @kalle_leppala Documented proof that I have heard of the central limit theorem. https://t.co/rFNlw1WVva

2023-05-04 14:18:10 Yeah Sex is cool but have you ever asked a mathematician to show you how to prove something that he said was "trivial" and then watched him struggle at the board for twenty excruciatingly awkward minutes before finally giving up?

2023-05-04 13:36:46 RT @kareem_carr: I woke up to this. Whenever I tweet about IQ, no matter how technical my critique, I’m attacked for my race. People ass…

2023-05-03 15:12:43 I will conclude by saying I am sorry for putting this ugly image on your timeline but I think many people won’t believe the level of racism I have to deal with unless they see it for themselves.

2023-05-03 15:12:42 It’s a long story but I started school two years early which led to me constantly feeling awkward and out of step with everybody.

2023-05-03 15:12:41 I don’t talk about this part of my life much. I guess this meme sums up how I feel about it. Some of you are probably thinking “Burned out disappointment? Bro, you’re at Harvard.” I know. I know. I don’t have an answer for you. That’s just how I feel. https://t.co/pXucB7Mm8S

2023-05-03 15:12:40 These are my “state scholar” trophies. My country has two parts to high school. People typically graduate at about 16 and then again at 18. I was the best student in the country both times. https://t.co/eETdGxJq0o

2023-05-03 15:12:38 Back home we take these international standardized tests that are run through Cambridge University. I graduated highschool at the top my class with the highest exam results not just in my year but the highest grades that had ever been recorded for our country in decades. https://t.co/EKSGlkwbCJ

2023-05-03 15:12:37 The truth is, I’m from a small country of just 50,000 people, and chances are these racists have literally never met anybody like me. They presume to know me while lacking any frame of reference. Even within my own culture, I am a huge weirdo.

2023-05-03 15:12:36 In my darker moments, I fear that many will find these attacks plausible because it plays into pervasive stereotypes about black people.

2023-05-03 15:12:27 I woke up to this. Whenever I tweet about IQ, no matter how technical my critique, I’m attacked for my race. People assert without evidence that my IQ is low, that I’m an affirmation action candidate, that my credentials are fake, that I’m bad at math. I am called slurs. https://t.co/SKoweuG6IX

2023-05-03 14:17:23 @ent3c I will read your thread because I always want to know where I'm wrong. For instance, I'll update my future discussions of the normality assumption based on what you say here. But I feel misrepresented in this discussion so I won't respond to specific points raised at this time.

2023-05-03 14:12:01 @ent3c This feels unfair since my comments are related to what you tweeted yesterday not what you are tweeting today. I also think you are ignoring my main point about normality being an assumption which was my actual point in favor of nitpicking. https://t.co/cjTdNx7eUs

2023-05-03 13:44:31 @drubanov Who’s been saying it’s snobbish? Just curious. DM me if you don’t want to call anybody out.

2023-05-03 11:26:28 RT @kareem_carr: If you’ve ever wondered how mathematicians come up with such clever arguments, I strongly recommend “How to Prove It” It’…

2023-05-03 07:59:29 RT @kareem_carr: If you’ve ever wondered how mathematicians come up with such clever arguments, I strongly recommend “How to Prove It” It’…

2023-05-03 07:59:05 @love2laugh4ever Thanks!

2023-05-02 15:39:03 @dylanarmbruste3 Yes. I like to invest in hard copies for books that I feel are foundational and that I expect to reread in the future.

2023-05-02 15:28:46 @ent3c I don't see the relevance to anxiety scales. Do you think I think IQ is bullshit? Because that's not what I'm saying. I think IQ is an operationalization of particular group's understanding of intelligence which is fine but other groups might have a different understanding.

2023-05-02 15:25:16 @ent3c 2. "It's tautologically true that IQ is at minimum the ability to do well on IQ tests." Surely we can agree on that as a baseline? The debate is about whether it's more in addition to that.

2023-05-02 15:15:18 @ent3c I think me have a disconnect here. Let me try and frame it. I'm saying two things: 1. "Normality is an assumption." I think you think I'm saying it's an "unreasonable" assumption" and so you're arguing it's a "reasonable" one. I simply want people to know it's an *assumption*.

2023-05-02 14:56:30 @ent3c Maybe I’m missing something. Happy to DM about it if you don’t want to be stuck going back and forth 280 characters at a time.

2023-05-02 14:54:05 @King_Mamadelo I think it’s extremely helpful for people in a math degree but pretty readable for a general audience as well.

2023-05-02 14:52:15 @ent3c But turning opinions into math shouldn’t let us off the hook from having to defending such consensus opinions.

2023-05-02 14:46:59 @ent3c Second, I think we agree that reasonable people might come to a consensus on what anxiety or aggression or intelligence means and then mathematize that as a measure. I have no beef with that.

2023-05-02 14:38:48 @ent3c Not sure why this is phrased as “pushback”. We agree that “the assumption of normality is statistical”. The key word here is “assumption”. People think the normality arises from the biology or the nature of intelligence which is wrong.

2023-05-02 14:32:04 If you like the thread then follow me for more content like this, and don't forget to click the little notification bell so you don't miss out on future threads. https://t.co/hLODGeQHWP

2023-05-02 14:32:03 At the end of this book, you will be able to understand statements like the one below and how to use them to design strategies for writing mathematical proofs. https://t.co/geBi0tSIYi

2023-05-02 14:32:01 It even covers what “and”, “or” and “if” mean in a mathematical context. (Not as straightforward as you might think.)

2023-05-02 14:32:00 If you’ve ever wondered how mathematicians come up with such clever arguments, I strongly recommend “How to Prove It” It’s an extremely gentle introduction that starts with the absolute basics and eventually teaches you how to construct a mathematical argument or “proof”. https://t.co/GqZxPGYAZN

2023-05-02 11:57:48 RT @kareem_carr: The perception of IQ as a seemingly objective measure of intelligence is frequently used to promote racist pseudoscience o…

2023-05-02 09:07:49 RT @kareem_carr: The perception of IQ as a seemingly objective measure of intelligence is frequently used to promote racist pseudoscience o…

2023-05-02 02:22:45 RT @ThosVarley: People (esp. blue checks) get *really weird* about IQ. Post even a mild critique how IQ is discussed and guys will come ou…

2023-05-01 23:34:08 @n00rdung by*

2023-05-01 23:27:12 @nianello6 https://t.co/Hvf12XnNUc

2023-05-01 23:26:03 @n00rdung That’s what many people mistakenly think. That’s why so many misunderstand the shape of the IQ distribution as somehow being natural. It’s not. It’s forced into that shape my mathematical manipulations. See? No CLT involved. https://t.co/2dUxrU3VFp

2023-05-01 23:01:36 RT @TinaGower: This is a wonderful thread. When I’m giving the IQ I explain this to parents. IQ isn’t measuring intelligence. It’s a guess…

2023-05-01 22:22:42 @ScottAdamsSays Also correlation assumes a linear model and can be hugely inflated by just a few values if that's wrong.

2023-05-01 22:22:08 @ScottAdamsSays One of the main ideas is if an extremely low IQ score can detect severe medical dysfunction in a patent, and I don't dispute that it can, then the correlations can be strongly driven by that.

2023-05-01 22:17:24 @ScottAdamsSays I would recommend your followers read this: https://t.co/PfUwA2bj2N It requires a bit statistical background unfortunately but I'm planning to break it down in a future thread if they want to follow me.

2023-05-01 21:44:33 @sbkaufman Hey, Scott. Yeah, we should set that up. I know we DMed in the past about doing that at some point. I’ll DM you!

2023-05-01 19:44:11 @jayjoseph22 Dang it. I should have asked you for this. I was trying to find it. Much better illustration.

2023-05-01 18:42:29 @datepsych Just to pick one point: There is no major "IQ isn't real" debate in cognitive science.” You just kind of state that. Are we just supposed to accept that on your authority as an anonymous account on the internet? ¯\_()_/¯

2023-05-01 18:39:36 @datepsych No offense but this is kind of a gish gallop. I made arguments supporting my points and you’re just dumping a bunch of unsupported statements which obviously can’t be fully discussed without a huge rebuttal thread in the comments to my already long initial thread. https://t.co/oGRuRi86yP

2023-05-01 16:40:26 If you liked this thread follow me for more content like this. If you haven’t already, don't forget to click the little notification bell so you don't miss out on future threads. https://t.co/6kVWFTjGRQ

2023-05-01 16:40:24 This is because identifying students that *might* need help is a vastly easier task than constructing a completely objective and universal measure of human intelligence. Also "standardize test taking ability" is vastly more relevant to school than it is to life in general.

2023-05-01 16:40:23 I personally think that IQ can be a helpful when used for its original purpose of identifying underperforming students who might need some extra attention.

2023-05-01 16:40:22 In my opinion, I think we would all be better off if we thought of IQ not as "intelligence" but as a measure of "standardized test taking ability".

2023-05-01 16:40:21 This seems circular to me. If there was a new test of cognitive ability that largely didn't correlate with the others, they would exclude it or at the very least not weight it as strongly as the other tests.

2023-05-01 10:07:17 RT @kareem_carr: As a statistician, it is extremely frustrating to me to see an account called “World of Statistics” with over 1.5M followe…

2023-04-30 16:45:36 @quaesita Congrats Cassie! You're killing it.

2023-04-29 18:40:11 @FelixKreuk @KevnSPas Yes. That was exactly my thinking.

2023-04-29 17:25:27 @AnrothanN This guy? https://t.co/x3jjNxnRLo

2023-04-29 17:15:26 @LeetAlpaca3 What scientific question are you trying to answer and why would comparing the IQ of different countries be the best way to answer it? Countries are highly artificial constructs.

2023-04-29 16:51:31 @ranelagh75 They are using a white reference population as a baseline for Japanese. Using one population as a baseline for another is typically considered a misuse of the test and the interpretation of such results is highly disputed.

2023-04-29 16:36:30 @mdhunstiger Exactly. So many threads to pull on here. The precision to two decimal places is a huge red flag.

2023-04-29 16:11:37 Spreading these flawed data as fact is indirectly supporting white nationalism. If you want to follow an account on here that talks about statistics and data science regularly and isn’t going to be sharing any racist pseudoscience, follow me.

2023-04-29 16:11:36 The discussion of national IQ seems plausibly innocent and agenda-free but quickly leads to dark places. Unsurprisingly, Lynn has one book where he basically constructs a racial hierarchy of intelligence. https://t.co/BLIDn6CsnY

2023-04-29 16:11:34 The source of these national data is Richard Lynn who does not seem to be a neutral scientist. He’s been quoted saying things consistent with a white nationalist agenda. https://t.co/YZ5UGdET6G

2023-04-29 16:11:33 The European Human Behavior and Evolution Association formally recommends not using the data at all. https://t.co/KYJ2frfvKw

2023-04-29 16:11:32 Many, many scientists have questioned the methodology of the data collection. https://t.co/Mvuax2dNN2

2023-04-29 16:11:30 Even when it does use real data, it’s often in a sloppy and irresponsible way. For instance, basing the IQ of Equatorial Guinea on children from a home for the mentally disabled in Spain. https://t.co/iKyyVH4BNW

2023-04-29 16:11:29 The first thing we need to address is this extremely bad data. More than half of it is essentially made up. 105 of the 185 data points are guesstimates. https://t.co/hRrLQs147q

2023-04-29 16:11:27 The claim that the average Nigerian has an IQ of 67.8 is absolutely ridiculous. Such an IQ would imply severe cognitive impairment. And that is just their estimate of the average! Half of the distribution would be expected to have an IQ lower than that. https://t.co/N4cm9zMBSr

2023-04-29 16:11:25 This kind of pseudoscience exploits a deep cognitive bias that we humans have. We are willing to believe nonsensical “facts” about the human nature of out-groups that we would immediately see as nonsensical if it was said about our in-group.

2023-04-29 16:11:24 If you dig into these data even a little bit, it’s immediately obvious how nonsensical it all is. If you dig even deeper, what you find is bigotry and fraud.

2023-04-29 16:11:10 As a statistician, it is extremely frustrating to me to see an account called “World of Statistics” with over 1.5M followers spreading this pseudoscientific garbage. Statistics requires us to think critically about our data. This is *not* statistics. https://t.co/ANl8cVPgQT

2023-04-29 14:23:45 @LeeJenson1 It’s not 50-50. The chances are generally much smaller and not really independent either. But we know there are a very large number of gene variants that contribute only a little to height and they are probably only weakly dependent. There’s a version of the CLT that covers that.

2023-04-29 02:52:31 @DrShariEllen I know there are some on amazon like this one: https://t.co/yX71nHk74B

2023-04-28 14:22:50 @skdh I think GPT-4 can already pass it quite easily with the right adjustments.

2023-04-28 14:02:08 do you follow the creed? https://t.co/xEpokD1UQ3

2023-04-28 09:25:39 RT @kareem_carr: I’m in the good place https://t.co/p1TK2FDpde

2023-04-28 02:22:47 @HereContrarian @ETVPod @matthematician We are going to have to agree to disagree. Take it easy.

2023-04-27 23:39:21 @HereContrarian @ETVPod @matthematician When people are accusing you of being an operative for the chinese government and of trying to start a race war, I think it’s absolutely fair to shift the focus of the discussion from the philosophy of math to the “bad ideological actors” participating in the conversation.

2023-04-27 22:50:50 @ryxcommar kareemcarr[.]bsky[.]social

2023-04-27 22:06:17 @tjmahr Good to know. Thanks!

2023-04-27 21:25:02 @tjmahr Whoa!!! is this a base R command? If so, what version?

2023-04-27 17:04:03 I feel like the main lesson statisticians should be taking from machine learning is being willing to spend tens of millions of dollars on a single model will get you some damn good statistical models.

2023-04-27 16:25:59 Sorry. Still a newbie. No invites yet.

2023-04-27 16:25:58 I’m in the good place https://t.co/p1TK2FDpde

2023-04-27 15:45:00 I'm becoming increasingly concerned about the number of people who think "talking like a person" is equivalent to "being a person". I can't tell if this means they have a really low opinion of humans or really high opinion of algorithms.

2023-04-27 15:12:23 Linear regression is a foundational human discovery. The ability to fit a line to a set of data points is an essential tool in the toolbox of every scientist and engineer.

2023-04-27 09:20:54 @TheOutsiderHum1 @matthematician @ETVPod My attitude was like "here's another way to think about it". I definitely didn't harass anybody or question their intelligence. A lot of the responses to me were like "you are a bad person and the stuff you're saying is a danger to Western civilization". It was unhinged.

2023-04-27 08:26:27 RT @kareem_carr: I’m choosing violence today. These lists are biased towards physics. The linear regression equation should at least be 4th…

2023-04-26 23:54:41 RT @kareem_carr: We now have data demonstrating my tips for improving prompts to GPT-4 work at least in this one case! Telling GPT-4 it…

2023-04-26 23:40:24 @ETVPod @matthematician Defensively phrasing everything you say in an attempt to win an ideological war with the right doesn’t sound great to me. Assuming one even wants to participate in that struggle which many don’t. Besides the most partisan rightwingers will happily just invent “facts” if needed.

2023-04-26 20:48:34 @miclugo @LadySynaptic On the surface, this is fair but for me personally, the *convergence* to the Normal is what feels salient and most beautiful to me.

2023-04-26 16:03:31 @LadySynaptic That would be awesome. My hope is I can find a way to support myself financially while having lots of time to do cool stuff like that.

2023-04-26 16:00:31 @miclugo @LadySynaptic I feel like the central limit theorem has to be on there somewhere. It's so fundamental that it's almost a law of nature. Human height is approximately Gaussian for instance. (I don't know. I'm probably biased.)

2023-04-26 15:50:43 @nolightupstairs @LadySynaptic that doesn't seem right. fake news.

2023-04-26 15:48:44 @LadySynaptic In my defense, I was blinded by rage.

2023-04-26 15:42:25 Normal distribution is OK but the people demand more!!!

2023-04-26 15:42:24 I’m choosing violence today. These lists are biased towards physics. The linear regression equation should at least be 4th or 5th in terms of impact! https://t.co/hs3UN1sVTf

2023-04-26 09:11:56 @ent3c @kph3k Thanks.

2023-04-25 22:15:57 @ent3c Of course, any money going to that would not be going to education thus confounding. Seems like a planet-sized flaw to me.

2023-04-25 22:15:42 @ent3c I’m sure one could easily list a hundred likely heritable ailments that would limit educational attainment mainly due to accessibility issues (cancers, metabolic diseases, sickle cell, etc, etc).

2023-04-25 21:50:58 @sama It’s been a real uphill battle to convince other academics to use ChatGPT because of the hallucinations. I’ve been trying to figure out good prompt engineering strategies for academics. Would really appreciate access to the GPT-4 API to help my efforts along. https://t.co/gznQLReUis

2023-04-25 21:43:03 @ent3c So…do they have a way of addressing this in these analyses? It would obviously lead an over estimate of the “heritability” that we actually care about.

2023-04-25 20:39:47 @ent3c The genetic variants associated with the disease affect my behavior but only in the sense they physically limit what I can do with my body. (You can imagine a variant of this where skin color affects educational access so of course skin color genes would be associated with EA).

2023-04-25 20:33:46 @ent3c Imagine I have a very serious heritable disease that doesn't affect my cognition but has huge affects on my ability to function in society. This would obviously be a genetic determinant of my educational attainment but in the most boring way. How do they account for this?

2023-04-25 16:23:58 RT @kareem_carr: ChatGPT consistently gets this very basic question wrong. Does that mean ChatGPT is useless? Not necessarily! Using this…

2023-04-25 14:31:28 @ResearchChat @Teknofiliac This is really interesting. I am tried out your prompt and it seems like "give me x examples" where x is 2 or more is the phrase that is causing it to give the right answer. Fascinating. I don't have a theory for why this works (yet).

2023-04-25 08:49:01 @jasonaholliday Here’s how I think about it: https://t.co/IKF22MP4vs

2023-04-25 08:47:55 @chunderboolt My interest is in using it as a tool. Less interested in the philosophical questions of whether it’s truly “intelligent”. I just see it as fancy math combined with lots of data.

2023-04-25 08:42:12 @emaedi0ng I didn’t make the plot but it’s R. The ggplot2 package.

2023-04-25 08:41:01 RT @kareem_carr: We now have data demonstrating my tips for improving prompts to GPT-4 work at least in this one case! Telling GPT-4 it…

2023-04-25 01:19:49 @Teknofiliac Wow. That's the most successful attempt I've ever seen. What do you think is going on here?

2023-04-24 23:08:01 Thanks to @colin_fraser for collecting the data and to @teej_m for providing GPT-4 access. Colin and I don't have access. Help us out @OpenAI and @sama . (Sample sizes in each case were 100.)

2023-04-24 23:08:00 We now have data demonstrating my tips for improving prompts to GPT-4 work at least in this one case! Telling GPT-4 it was more competent increased the success rate from 35% to 92% Giving GPT-4 a strategy for completing the task increased it from 26% to 54% https://t.co/fqyNO6S9oq https://t.co/AU9fkBYeA4

2023-04-24 23:00:07 @colin_fraser @teej_m Thanks!

2023-04-24 22:59:18 @dolohov Telling it to write out the solution to the problem step by step is an easier word prediction task. The logic of each step is easier to predict versus doing it all in one shot. Also tasks that resemble the simple steps are more likely to be in the training data somewhere.

2023-04-24 22:54:58 @dolohov It learns the probability of the next word given the previous words. Telling GPT-4 that it's an expert, influences it to model words from experts which are more like to be right vs the default which is words from a generic human.

2023-04-24 22:30:28 @colin_fraser @teej_m What are the numbers in the plot for GPT-4? I can sort eyeball it but would be good to get precise numbers.

2023-04-24 22:18:28 @colin_fraser @teej_m Quick question. What are the sample sizes?

2023-04-24 22:17:23 @LucyStats @colin_fraser Lucy is amazing. If she were offering me free help, I'd would take it.

2023-04-24 22:16:05 @colin_fraser @teej_m Awesome. At least, I'm not completely crazy. This makes me even more frustrated that I don't have direct access to the GPT-4 API. I could do so much more! lol.

2023-04-24 21:16:26 @colin_fraser Looking at your code, it seems like maybe this stuff doesn’t work for GPT-3.5 which seems plausible me. It’s also possible that asking for the answer in a specific format ended up competing with the other instructions. Thanks for your work. This is helpful.

2023-04-24 21:08:24 @colin_fraser Thanks. This could be helpful with trying out new ideas in the future.

2023-04-24 21:04:53 @gabrielbodeen I just wanted to show some approaches to improving prompts.

2023-04-24 21:01:59 @ksuhre Not sure but I’m currently reading this book by @stephen_wolfram. https://t.co/tuUoc3svPP

2023-04-24 20:47:09 @michelnivard I just mean it’s random. So if could just get it right by luck but mostly get it wrong in general. That’s why I repeated my queries in a new window.

2023-04-24 20:43:42 @colin_fraser I’m surprised but if what I’m saying is wrong, I’d like to know since I’m wasting my time otherwise. Can you share some details of how you parse the final answer since my approach does cause it to list multiple solutions sometimes? (Would love access to your code. DMs open)

2023-04-24 20:34:39 @sarah_grabinski I didn’t but that makes sense as a modification to my instructions.

2023-04-24 20:32:56 @michelnivard I’m not thinking you made this up at all. I wouldn’t expect my modifications to be 100% effect. Just curious because for me it pretty much always “objective” suggesting it happens with high probability.

2023-04-24 17:15:05 RT @kareem_carr: ChatGPT consistently gets this very basic question wrong. Does that mean ChatGPT is useless? Not necessarily! Using this…

2023-04-24 17:11:51 @michelnivard Did you try it more than once in different sessions? I literally have never had it answer correctly without extra guidance.

2023-04-24 16:05:35 @wtgowers I guess coal is a goal for some people. https://t.co/OXZqLVj45J

2023-04-24 15:21:58 @J_JPerezCano Thanks. This is a new term for me. https://t.co/ChnCbVKdwh

2023-04-24 15:10:17 It picked "culmination" which seems reasonable so analysis complete!!! https://t.co/UPohOXIRx4

2023-04-24 15:10:16 TIP 4: USE PRIOR ANALYSES to enhance your final conclusion. In this case, I found the options: - checkpoint - challenge - conclusion - criterion - culmination Which should I pick?

2023-04-24 15:10:15 In 4 out of the 5 cases it just spit out the answer. In one of the cases, it shared its "thought" process. ( It's machine. It can't really think.) You can see, it's able to follow the simple algorithm and get the right answer. https://t.co/htaGyWQCzZ

2023-04-24 15:10:14 Combining tips 1 and 2, I was able to get GPT-4 to generate a reasonable answer 5 out of 5 times!

2023-04-24 15:10:13 ChatGPT consistently gets this very basic question wrong. Does that mean ChatGPT is useless? Not necessarily! Using this as an example, let me show you how to take your prompts to the next level. https://t.co/7ImFmdG7np

2023-04-24 12:23:31 @philoso_foster I have no idea what people in that job market are looking for but that looks objectively awesome.

2023-04-24 00:06:00 Every day on here, I see people asking technical questions that ChatGPT would absolutely kill if given the right prompt. It makes me realize that not everybody is up to speed on what these things can do.

2023-04-23 23:30:27 @ben_golub @adamdangelo I thought what he was saying had a very reasonable interpretation as well. We could basically have more nuanced laws that better cover unique edge cases without suffering any extra cognitive burden. Thank for writing this up. I wanted to wade in but I try to pick my battles.

2023-04-23 22:39:40 @pwang It seems like R doesn’t suffer from these issues to anywhere near the same extent. Yet it also heavily utilizes C/C++ code on the backend. Why do you think that is?

2023-04-23 18:40:23 @fchollet @pfau I've noticed this issue manifesting in various forms for years. ML terminology tends to promote anthropomorphization: "training", "learning", "neural", "hallucination", etc. This is made worse by the blackbox nature of the algorithms and the field's cultural obsession with AGI.

2023-04-23 16:46:14 My work is a nice intersection between engineering type math (Fourier analysis for analyzing periodic signals) and statistics stuff (estimation theory) and also random biology stuff as needed. Some background reading for the curious: https://t.co/tF1aopd5iP

2023-04-23 16:46:13 Reading genetic clocks with math. https://t.co/NeHyeVWKS2

2023-04-22 22:23:59 @mpeg2tom This is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind!

2023-04-22 22:18:41 @NeuroStats @EpiEllie @LucyStats It would just invent one whether it had used that one or not!

2023-04-22 17:01:38 This focus on high paying industries seems to be true whether their parents are rich or not. [source: https://t.co/ykEp2WOMH5 ] https://t.co/vAQLAv8BVx

2023-04-22 17:01:36 One of the most defining features of Harvard students in my experience is not that they are smart or that they are overly invested in convincing other people that they are smart. It’s that they are laser-focused on getting a stable job that pays a crap load of money. https://t.co/SwjlAeJGZf

2023-04-22 16:44:23 I kept them. At zero dollars, they were kind of a steal! https://t.co/6OAc17xvx1

2023-04-22 16:30:37 @loganb I hate myself that I immediately knew this was Star Trek.

2023-04-22 16:27:18 @GMCarlier I refund a lot of things so I have a good feel for it. I think these are just unpopular items.

2023-04-22 16:26:29 @faeriella67 I assume that's true but I return books that cost a lot less all the time. I think it must be a combination of the price, the weight and the probability of re-selling it.

2023-04-22 16:23:59 They weren't that cheap either. One was $47 and the other was $53 USD.

2023-04-22 16:05:13 I recently ordered two different econometrics books off Amazon and then ended up deciding to return them. In *both* cases, Amazon has given me a full refund but told me not to send the book back. It's like "Yeah. We totally get it. Just throw it in the garbage if you want."

2023-04-22 15:27:26 @ben11kehoe Thanks*

2023-04-22 15:14:59 @LucyStats I think if it’s not a blackbox algorithm then it’s probably fine. I could also imagine using some kind of bootstrap approach to estimate uncertainty. I think mostly I’m worried that most people aren’t going to do any of that and will implement this in the stupidest way possible.

2023-04-22 15:08:35 @ben11kehoe That’s hilarious! That’s for sharing.

2023-04-22 15:07:07 @smilicic For older professors, that’s been my experience as well. I have read my share of ugly C and Fortran code written by mathematicians. I feel like things are a lot better these days with the rise of Python and more education on coding best practices.

2023-04-22 14:11:37 Controversial opinion: naming mathematical concepts after specific people is a bad practice. It just adds to the cognitive burden of an already extremely cognitively demanding subject. We should be using more informative names.

2023-04-22 14:10:13 @PrasoonPratham I really like this for you my friend! Glad you're doing well.

2023-04-22 13:42:05 “Should we be using AI to fill in missing data?” If the AI is a blackbox then ABSOLUTELY NOT! Modifying your raw data is a serious thing. You want to do it via a controlled and well-understood process. AIs like ChatGPT are currently none of those things. https://t.co/Yidydan1C9

2023-04-22 11:21:55 @joftius This is awesome. Thanks for sharing.

2023-04-22 11:20:06 RT @kareem_carr: This visualization differs from linear regression in two very important ways.

2023-04-22 02:29:42 RT @kareem_carr: This visualization differs from linear regression in two very important ways.

2023-04-21 19:40:33 @willkurt That sounds really cool. Looking forward to the write up.

2023-04-21 19:33:30 @ChelseaParlett @GoogleMagenta Your family sounds really special. May her memory be a blessing.

2023-04-21 09:19:12 RT @kareem_carr: This visualization differs from linear regression in two very important ways.

2023-04-21 00:00:01 CAFIAC FIX

2023-04-20 14:03:46 @ScottDMurdock1 Awesome!

2023-04-20 14:03:34 @andreamatranga Great idea. The right kind of springs would probably do it!

2023-04-20 12:24:35 RT @kareem_carr: This visualization differs from linear regression in two very important ways.

2023-04-20 10:54:37 RT @kareem_carr: This visualization differs from linear regression in two very important ways.

2023-04-20 03:11:09 RT @kareem_carr: This visualization differs from linear regression in two very important ways.

2023-04-20 02:41:16 @xDannyVdHaven there’s a total least squares package in r: https://t.co/D5pDV6xOH7

2023-04-19 22:02:06 RT @kareem_carr: This visualization differs from linear regression in two very important ways.

2023-04-19 21:50:47 @prateekpatel_in https://t.co/ZP5Ya6Hnrd

2023-04-19 21:49:44 One might suspect that the 1st PCA is the general solution even when there are more than two variables. This is not the case but the solution does involve PCA. See below and check this link for more details: https://t.co/LvjMeEQqIE https://t.co/MpHwnFJ6xh

2023-04-19 19:28:41 @ClimateOfGavin It's not traditionally what is meant by "linear regression". But I agree it's a "linear model" and also a type of "regression". So calling it "linear regression" would theoretically make sense but it would also confuse people and lead to lots of miscommunication.

2023-04-19 19:24:15 @MusingsOfDeimos Awesome!

2023-04-19 19:23:57 @EpiLeyla awww. been really busy lately. will be back to joking around soon lol.

2023-04-19 19:20:04 @Artui_uf Almost. I don't think the physical system in the video is minimizing the sum of squares orthogonal distance.

2023-04-19 19:18:31 @cfsaracho Not a correction. Just a bit of extra info addressing some of the commonly asked questions.

2023-04-19 16:39:44 A few notes based on the comments: - Total least squares regression is the general problem of minimizing the sum of the squared perpendicular distances between your model and a set of points - The 1st principal component is the line that does that for two variables https://t.co/USp0YgaUlV

2023-04-19 16:26:59 @smilicic Linear regression solves the problem we typically care about which is the error in our *predictions* of some unknown y given some input variables. The process in the video minimizes error in all variables. It's a good visualization of how to solve a different problem.

2023-04-19 15:38:49 @zero132132 The process in the video is fitting a linear model. All things being equal, it ought to be fair to say it's a kind of "linear regression" but for historical reasons, it's not what we mean by linear regression. Relevant terms: total least squares and orthogonal distance regression

2023-04-19 15:08:24 1. Linear regression optimizes the vertical distances not the perpendicular distances. https://t.co/kBS4I3wriL

2023-04-19 15:08:23 This visualization differs from linear regression in two very important ways. https://t.co/86dJWWui6a

2023-04-19 14:08:49 *before chatgpt* me to journalists: hope you know how to code LMAO!!! *after chatgpt* me to journalists: hope you know how to write crisp, clear text that expresses the intricate nuances of a complicated problem LMAO!!!...oh wait...

2023-04-19 13:54:02 @RidleyDM Yeah. Cryptocurrency-related computations are another kind of computation that seem to get special scrutiny in addition to AI.

2023-04-19 13:52:18 @agostino_harry Alas. In this case, I'm talking the greenhouse emissions. It seems to be a very big chunk of the internet.

2023-04-19 13:48:04 I get the impression that many people feel like it's a bit irresponsible to discuss the benefits of AI without also discussing the environmental costs. It just seems like people don't apply that same standard to computer science in general and that feels odd to me.

2023-04-19 13:36:00 I don't understand the concern about the environmental impact of AI because AI doesn't strike me as a particularly frivolous use of computation. Huge amounts of energy get wasted on digital porn and video games but I haven't seen too many people worry about that.

2023-04-19 10:35:21 @karlrohe Not yet unfortunately.

2023-04-19 01:20:24 @PhDemetri No joke. This is happening. Lol.

2023-04-18 23:52:14 I’m cracking myself up. https://t.co/1NCNLbqMlE

2023-04-18 23:24:32 @gusthema I have zero right now as a newbie. hopefully that changes soon.

2023-04-18 23:15:23 I have 6 followers lol. it's been like two minutes. already liking this.

2023-04-18 23:13:55 I just joined blue sky!!! Username is kareemcarr.

2023-04-18 22:47:59 @AstroAlysa Yup. Not much place for nuance these days. But if we let them bully us into not freely expressing our thoughts then they win.

2023-04-18 22:30:54 I have the fancy Hagoromo chalk. It's not like I don't know better. I'm just objectively a bad person.

2023-04-18 22:25:45 I own a really nice blackboard. Vintage wood frame with metal accents at the corners. Absolutely beautiful. I'm planning to paint over the surface and turn it into a whiteboard. I have become ungovernable.

2023-04-18 22:15:25 A lot of folks find my use of Twitter polls confusing. "You're a statistician. Don't you know they're biased?" "Isn't the right answer obvious?" These polls help me understand the starting assumptions of my audience and this helps me write better.

2023-04-18 16:17:43 @Bbburner19 I don't understand. How can it feel without a body? When I think of emotions, I think about feeling butterflies in my stomach or my heart pounding in my chest. I don't know how to think about emotion outside of those kinds of body-based experiences.

2023-04-18 16:09:11 @jasserole Free country I guess but you have no idea what I'm measuring. I can't really discuss it either because that would just bias the poll.

2023-04-18 16:07:36 @lourencoserpa No. It says that I can put myself in the shoes of others even if I don't necessarily agree with them. (I'm not from the US by the way.)

2023-04-18 16:02:22 @jasserole A poll is a measurement tool not an opinion.

2023-04-18 15:56:54 @lourencoserpa The point of asking the question is to learn what other people think. I already know what I think.

2023-04-18 15:44:14 When it comes to AI sentience, what I really care about is the moral status of AI relative to humans. If humans invent a sentient AI that is about 10 times as intelligent as the average human, how would you compare the life (continued existence) of that AI to a human?

2023-04-18 15:29:05 Is your educational background in statistics? Do you think if we keep scaling up algorithms like GPT-4 that we could create an AI that is sentient?

2023-04-18 15:22:19 @XL5Peinado I think it comes down to funding. Without money to support public communication efforts, scientists have to prioritize their lives, careers and families.

2023-04-18 15:10:30 @skdh True. It shouldn't be the majority of the field. That would be chaos. Never fear. I've always been with in spirit on the state of certain subfields of theoretical physics.

2023-04-18 15:02:55 As I listened to this clip, I just kinda felt myself slowly give up on a deep internal level. No amount of tweeting is going to overcome this level of AI hype lol. https://t.co/5gfHmgZRth

2023-04-17 17:54:51 @vhoseam I typically ignore individual racists but it's not realistic to ignore racism in general as a black person. I don't care about these particular accounts. I already blocked them. I'm just using them as an example of a general problem that I think is worth discussing.

2023-04-17 17:16:20 I think of it as being able to project my high-dimensional understanding of an idea on to the closest approximating low-dimensional manifold which lies within the understanding of the audience. This tasks requires a deep, almost fractal, level of understanding.

2023-04-17 17:16:19 As an "expert", I don't feel like I truly understand anything unless I can explain it in a way that a layperson can understand.

2023-04-17 17:04:41 @LigerzeroGaming Good to know. Thanks!

2023-04-17 16:43:19 @refudiatem I read it in undergrad. Loved it. It was my first introduction to principal components!

2023-04-17 16:41:10 @SouThernDreAmz4 I don't agree with your summary but putting that aside for now. Treating me (a black person) negatively because of resentments toward black people in general is literally racism. You do realize that right?

2023-04-17 16:23:12 It’s kind of sad when people are so full of racist brain worms that they can’t even have a rational conversation with a black person about math and science without bringing up that person’s race and inventing all kinds of weird, racist conspiracy theories about their motivations. https://t.co/jKRDlusGEs

2023-04-17 10:41:34 @MoSan91 Science isn't just data. It's also analysis, and data isn't just a bunch of numbers reported with minimal context.

2023-04-17 10:12:09 @lastpositivist In terms of policy, it doesn't seem that relevant to me whether differences are innate. What does seem much more relevant is that substantial differences might continue to persist given a cost-prohibitive level of intervention. Innate differences would only be a subset of those.

2023-04-17 09:17:47 @Iamnoturenemy I would give it a pass on rigor if people weren’t quote-tweeting it like it was science. I don’t mean to beat up on this one person though. It’s just an example.

2023-04-17 09:15:13 @jonatanpallesen Journals do peer-review. Articles have methods sections where the method is described. They often have supplementary documents with implementation details. What is the equivalent here? I stand by my critique that this image represents a culture of pseudoscience on Twitter.

2023-04-17 00:13:51 @Nullsci1 @cremieuxrecueil I’m asking for the details of the analysis. This is just basic peer-review on which modern science is built. It is not trivial.

2023-04-17 00:05:08 @cremieuxrecueil @Nullsci1 Do you have a link to your code/analysis? How can we say anything about your analysis we don’t know what you did?

2023-04-17 00:02:52 Once it becomes clear that anybody can fake anything using AI, there will be a demand for trusted social networks where credibility is safeguarded, and identities and credentials are verified.

2023-04-16 23:31:44 RT @kareem_carr: Statistician here. This is a kind of statistical pseudoscience which is extremely common on social media.

2023-04-16 21:06:44 If you’re going to talk to ChatGPT about your personal problems, I would go with GPT-4. GPT-3.5 is a dumbass. Verbose. Superficial. Simply the worst. https://t.co/erJIMvMJTR

2023-04-16 21:01:15 @lastpositivist You (@lastpositivist) might know better than me but it seems to me that the problem requires either direct access to the real world so the AI can test statements directly, or near perfect inferential heuristics (much better than what we humans could do).

2023-04-16 20:57:39 @lastpositivist I think it’s inherent to the estimation problem, not just the technology. How could you determine purely from text (much of which is false), what statements are factual? Surely “truthiness” is not a property that lies within the text itself.

2023-04-16 20:44:05 @rappa753 It’s ok to use diagrams to communicate a concept but when they’re being used as scientific evidence, they need to be rigorous.

2023-04-16 20:41:21 @dborcic Yes. I think so.

2023-04-16 20:39:56 @SarahAvraham1 Yes. Presenting decontextualized conclusions wrapped in pretty visualizations as evidence of a claim is pseudoscientific. It evokes the trappings of science while avoiding the scrutiny it requires. It’s not irrelevant to bring what these visualizations are being used for.

2023-04-16 14:42:51 Many people see statistics as a tool for identifying natural laws of human differences. Usually the differences between men and women or between races. People like this do not really care about statistics itself so they tend to never really understand it.

2023-04-16 14:42:50 This is barely statistics in my eyes. There is no discussion of the uncertainty in the claims made. These is no evaluation of the robustness of conclusions to changes in assumptions. All I'm seeing here is bunch of unsubstantiated lines on a histogram.

2023-04-16 14:42:49 On top of that, looking at the plot makes it seem like you can "see" the underlying data. This makes it seem transparent and thus more credible. But *can* you see data? Why didn't the creator make the raw datasets and code publicly available for critique?

2023-04-16 14:42:48 Statistician here. This is a kind of statistical pseudoscience which is extremely common on social media. https://t.co/2OM24VGBLL

2023-04-15 17:42:28 @brodavvg On a serious note, it’s not a terrible list. If you put a few weeks into each item, I’m sure you could get a job. It’s just funny how learning statistics, which is massive field that’s more than 100 years old, is put on the same level as learning Tableau or Excel.

2023-04-13 00:13:21 It’s behind a paywall but premise sounds interesting. (Nobody’s asked me to drop out yet…)

2023-04-13 00:13:20 An unexpected side effect of the AI gold rush: “Most Stanford Ph.D.s have some startup or company that’s trying to get them to drop out” https://t.co/IL35NPWF21

2023-04-12 23:49:03 RT @kareem_carr: the perfect t-shirt does not exi— https://t.co/GtRriCUT1o

2023-04-12 22:41:10 Many view data science as just another career. To me, it's a specific approach to problem-solving. It's a collection of techniques for extending the scientific method to everyday questions.

2023-04-12 15:54:36 @ElJay314159 We can argue over what word to use (since most people are not going to know what a hidden state is) but yes I mean that you can guide it to the right hidden state.

2023-04-12 15:16:18 The number one mistake I see people making with LLMs is they think if an LLM doesn't know how to do something by default then that's the end of the story. They don't realize LLMs are teachable.

2023-04-12 14:01:03 the perfect t-shirt does not exi— https://t.co/GtRriCUT1o

2023-04-08 11:30:45 RT @kareem_carr: Time is short! Twitter has started blocking links to S*bst*ck. This is terrible timing for me since I was planning to star…

2023-04-08 03:27:25 @LKaboolian I DMed you the link. Let me know if it works for you.

2023-04-08 02:06:13 You might see this https://t.co/ZOzybFhGeb

2023-04-08 02:05:30 @lora_not https://t.co/ZOzybFhGeb

2023-04-07 15:39:48 I’m using a bit ly link in the last tweet as a work around. Try liking or commenting on this tweet and you’ll see what I mean: https://t.co/q3dBFuDjar

2023-04-07 15:39:47 Time is short! Twitter has started blocking links to S*bst*ck. This is terrible timing for me since I was planning to start one this year. Join up now while you still can so you can get updates. https://t.co/v3Mu57bNTd

2023-04-05 23:20:49 @GidMK @GaryMarcus @ylecun I agree.

2023-04-05 23:15:04 @GidMK @GaryMarcus @ylecun I get that LLMs are often wrong but empirically how much physical harm has resulted from these mistakes? It’s almost certainly negligible at this point. The more we can remind people of the error rates the more likely it is that physical harms will remain low.

2023-04-05 23:11:18 @GaryMarcus @GidMK @ylecun The rate is higher but the overall impact is lower. A terrorist attack is more lethal but you’re more likely to die from heart disease. Probably orders of magnitude easier right now to find somebody who was hurt by following guidance from a newspaper than an LLM.

2023-04-05 23:04:36 @fakr00n I mean cars as they are now since that’s what we have on the roads right now. I think we’d literally never allow near universal access to these huge, lethal machines.

2023-04-05 22:59:52 @DigitalWatches Maybe it’s good that we wouldn’t but it seems very obvious to me that we wouldn’t. We’d be much too scared of handing that kind of power to basically anybody.

2023-04-05 22:53:39 @GidMK @GaryMarcus @ylecun Every medium of speech is a source of false statements. I think it would be hard to prove that LLMs are a larger source of false information than books, websites, magazines, television or other humans. This may change of course.

2023-04-05 22:42:16 Imagine we’d just invented cars. Do you think we could make them widely available in this political climate? Four thousand pound metal machines that can hurtle along at 100 miles an hour accessible to any adult human that wanted one? We would never.

2023-04-05 22:30:43 @GaryMarcus @ylecun This seems like a strong claim but maybe the harms are smaller than I’m thinking. What kind of harms do you have in mind?

2023-04-04 17:32:48 @ZachariahNKM @OpenAI @sama I'm thinking forward to what scientists would need in order to incorporate GPT-4 into data analysis workflows. If it's not reproducible that severely limits its scientific applications.

2023-04-04 17:30:54 @OfficialLoganK @OpenAI @sama Lack of some equivalent to random seeds isn't a deal breaker but it means using more computation to average out the randomness. Is deprecation a choice or a necessity?

2023-04-04 16:27:40 @arthurzqx @OpenAI @sama What does "in the air" mean? Like deployable? I'm not a backend person in anyway whatsoever.

2023-04-04 16:25:37 The tendency for large language models to hallucinate is a huge obstacle to using them for scientific analyses but I don't think it's insurmountable. We can apply statistical tools from survey science to extract the signal from the noise.

2023-04-04 11:39:33 @pfau @OpenAI @sama Demonstrating scientific utility could go a long way to building credibility and good PR.

2023-04-03 22:48:33 I don't know how interested @OpenAI and @sama are in making GPT-4 into a research tool, but I think the first thing we'd need to do is establish reproducibility. To this end, we need: 1. build numbers (so we know the version) 2. random seeds (so we can reproduce random behavior)

2023-04-03 16:09:35 MATHEMATICS: Bayesian Statistics vs. Frequentist Statistics

2023-04-03 16:09:34 PHILOSOPHY: "Probability is a measure of belief" vs. "Probability is a measure of how frequently events occur"

2023-04-03 16:09:33 There are three separate but equal aspects of statistics: 1. Philosophy 2. Mathematics 3. Science Here's an illustration of how they play out:

2023-04-03 09:32:07 RT @kareem_carr: One of the most profound books, I've ever read is called "How to Read a Book". It's where I learned that there were levels…

2023-04-03 02:51:42 RT @kareem_carr: One of the most profound books, I've ever read is called "How to Read a Book". It's where I learned that there were levels…

2023-04-02 18:36:37 RT @kareem_carr: One of the most profound books, I've ever read is called "How to Read a Book". It's where I learned that there were levels…

2023-04-02 14:17:12 @annttiigs Yes!

2023-04-02 10:36:15 @CarlosVallejoBC Great question. I think so. Part of the reason I went through the exercise of writing this thread is to clarify the process in my mind so I could think about how one would automate some or perhaps all of it.

2023-04-02 08:42:35 RT @kareem_carr: One of the most profound books, I've ever read is called "How to Read a Book". It's where I learned that there were levels…

2023-04-02 01:36:11 @clkbsfth The idea to white this thread actually came to me because I was thinking about how to use ChatGPT for reading.

2023-04-02 01:32:59 @reef_building Yes. Exactly so!

2023-04-02 01:31:50 @aphofer Yes. The quiz show stuff is such an unexpected side story. What a cool anecdote that he was your neighbor.

2023-04-01 22:26:50 *the first generation of programmers after gpt-4 learns how code* https://t.co/FwRrYBWvgU

2023-04-01 22:04:05 @BrianCHolt I’m planning to read more about Zettelkasten. It seems related although maybe more tilted toward exploration and discovery.

2023-04-01 22:01:02 @voigt_peter The trick is just to read it more than once.

2023-04-01 17:37:59 @UnclePaulyMath You’re welcome. Good luck!

2023-04-01 17:37:12 @David_NeverDave You’re welcome. Cool that you independently rediscovered this approach. It’s a very powerful way to read!

2023-04-01 17:34:17 @intrepideshiet1 I think it is probably. Legally available, I don’t know.

2023-04-01 17:32:22 @CravenRave Did you get to the part in the book where they talk about skimming books? This book is actually extremely skimmable by design.

2023-04-01 17:28:02 @ae_fernandes @eric_is_weird Using footnotes to identify potential reading material sounds like a really good idea to me! Only caveat is they were compiled for the book author’s purposes (their syntopic project) not yours. So you might have to do some filtering.

2023-04-01 17:23:14 @kenferrell It’s all about getting the ideas I guess. Doesn’t matter how you get them.

2023-04-01 17:16:08 @LandonSchnabel I have read it multiple times too. It gets better each time. So insightful! (I also got made fun of. )

2023-04-01 16:32:51 Thanks for reading! If you like this kind of content, follow me so you don’t miss out on upcoming threads. You can also support me by liking and retweeting the thread.

2023-04-01 16:32:50 I can't describe it but when you get to this stage with your topic, you will feel a deep sense of accomplishment like arriving at the end of a long hike. Your knowledge on the topic will feel authoritative, grounded and well-earned. You will feel like a scholar.

2023-04-01 16:32:49 6. ANALYZE THE DISCUSSION. This is where you answer the question you had at the start, the one that launched you on this journey. Having constructed a shared language and identified the big questions, describe what everybody is saying to each other and most importantly WHY.

2023-04-01 16:32:48 5. COMPARE ANSWERS. Identify how your authors answer your central questions and in particular, find out how they differ. The places where they differ most will tend to be the most important questions.

2023-03-31 23:21:52 @leils @ElieNYC @MarkHamill @AOC @JBMatthews @BobKarpDR @SAGES_Updates @marklewismd howdy! https://t.co/a6uTGqcgiR

2023-03-31 19:51:17 I thought the author_is_elon variable in the twitter recommendation algorithm code was a joke. but it's not... https://t.co/teJG0NO1C1

2023-03-31 19:03:37 never thought it would happen but @elonmusk just released the twitter recommendation algorithm. https://t.co/B7cNAfm4Er https://t.co/P24hTvGLAS

2023-03-31 18:45:46 @Butter___Man Maybe I should have said "no single real world interpretation". Not sure.

2023-03-31 18:26:49 @Swandraga https://t.co/NOfamfknq0

2023-03-31 18:25:28 they scrape up the stuff at the bottom of beer barrels, mix it with salt and eat it. truly unhinged stuff. https://t.co/XYPA48AYDk

2023-03-31 18:10:53 if you've ever seen what british people eat, this should be extremely disturbing to you. https://t.co/NVRCLvYWna

2023-03-31 18:04:43 @ZetaOf1 I'm not a mathematician. I'm a statistician (biostatistician). I'm in the business of interpreting data as evidence in support of or against various scientific propositions. I think Fisher saw his role in much the same way so it seems like it's been like that since the beginning.

2023-03-31 16:23:42 For a long time, I thought my preferred metaphors were superior. More sane. More grounded. More fundamental. I see now that these variations in mathematical metaphor are all pathways to building models that tap into the genius at the heart of our visual and physical intuitions.

2023-03-31 16:23:41 Frequentists use mathematical metaphors for frequency. Bayesians use mathematical metaphors for belief.

2023-03-31 16:23:40 I've been thinking about different mathematical constructs as metaphor. You can often tell what kind of mathematical scientist a person is by the flavor of their mathematical metaphors.

2023-03-31 15:30:51 @ZetaOf1 I'm not sure the issue only lies in operationalization because we typically have to interpret statistical findings as scientific ones which requires us to translate probabilistic statements into some kind of statement about the world.

2023-03-31 15:11:00 Did you know that statisticians don't have a consensus on what "probability" is? Leading theories are: 1. the frequency with things happen 2. a measure of belief 3. a purely mathematical construct with no real world interpretation

2023-03-31 14:51:39 academics: communications isn't real work also academics: why won't more people engage with my research? academics: marketing isn't real work also academics: why won't more people use the solutions i provide? academics: management isn't real work also academics: why wo—

2023-03-31 14:09:00 It's common for people (idiots on social media) to assert that engaging with "2+2=5" type arguments implies one would be bad at engineering, but if you go into engineering thinking equations apply exactly without fudge factors, your bridges will most definitely collapse.

2023-03-31 13:49:14 I’ve been having a tough time lately. A severe loss of motivation. Anxiety. I'm incapable of enjoying simple pleasures like typesetting proofs of asymptotic properties of statistical estimators in LaTeX. Even using git brings me no joy. Dear followers, what should I do?

2023-03-30 18:49:07 @chrislhayes @oneunderscore__ I think the new AI tech is on the scale of the internet but it was a long road from dial up to Zoom. I think AI will be disruptive but only a little at first and then little by little such that we barely notice it. Look at how normal being always connected feels to us now.

2023-03-30 18:07:35 I understand why so many are concerned about AI but in terms of concrete, observable effects of GPT-4 and its siblings, there's been almost no effects. It's 99.999% hype at this point. People are calling for a slow down. A slow down of what? Literally nothing has happened!

2023-03-30 15:13:24 “can’t stop. won’t stop”, he said. https://t.co/whkmJDSUCj

2023-03-30 15:12:26 not a joke. source: https://t.co/BNIiHEmsHp

2023-03-30 14:34:36 How is this in Time magazine??? I can’t believe this needs to be said but no we shouldn’t be murdering people over fitting mathematical models to data. https://t.co/rKqWmJQIKV

2023-03-30 14:08:00 GPT-5 uses p-values correctly GPT-6 is a Bayesian GPT-7 doesn't care. Just wants answers GPT-8 reinvents machine learning GPT-9 trains a *larger* language model so it can do data science via prompt engineering

2023-03-30 13:20:00 I have a dream that one day people from different statistical fields like mathematical statistics, econometrics, psychometrics and machine learning will have a conference every 10 years or so to standardize terminology and coordinate notation. It would be a golden age. https://t.co/kqGsIkGMyJ

2023-03-29 15:55:29 Starting April 15th, only Stats Blue subscribers can have significant p-values.

2023-03-28 22:27:50 These "AI will probably kill us all but I'm working super hard on it anyway" takes don't bother me because I think they're right. They bother me because it suggests a large number of people working on this extremely powerful tech are a little bit psychopathic.

2023-03-28 22:22:47 @PsycheNerd @svpino @Grady_Booch I think code (like any kind of theory) is hard to validate whenever it interacts with the physical world. For instance, you can't validate that a change in code was able to increase user engagement or improve the performance of a self-driving car without a real world experiment.

2023-03-28 22:10:35 RT @kareem_carr: @Grady_Booch A statistics perspective might be helpful here. LLM output probably does have some relationship to reality (…

2023-03-28 22:10:30 @Grady_Booch A statistics perspective might be helpful here. LLM output probably does have some relationship to reality (since they are derived from a distribution of sentences that are related to reality) but that relationship is probably stochastic. https://t.co/2675VMgJhO

2023-03-28 22:02:38 @svpino @Grady_Booch Yes. I would for sure agree and I think it's even possible to automate validation, but for now, most ChatGPT output isn't validated.

2023-03-28 22:00:36 @PsycheNerd @svpino @Grady_Booch Sure. I would find that much more convincing as a engine for creating truths.

2023-03-28 20:57:50 @svpino @Grady_Booch I see your point but I think the new code is the equivalent of a hypothesis in science that needs to be validated through experiment. The programmer still needs to verify the code runs and that the outputs align with the intended purpose for it to be a “new truth”.

2023-03-28 17:13:49 If you read a thread about ChatGPT and it doesn’t talk about hallucinations or how to deal with them then I’m sorry but that person is selling you a pile of bullshit.

2023-03-28 15:59:52 @ClausWilke Unfortunately, I think the real motives behind all this are closer to what Sarah outlines here. https://t.co/J642jvLWQO

2023-03-28 15:55:08 @LucyStats What's that font that you're using for the code in upper left image. It's kinda .

2023-03-28 03:31:54 @g18_ian @ConceptualJames Thanks! I appreciate the support.

2023-03-28 03:31:04 @nick_ash_ @ConceptualJames Thanks for the support! Glad you enjoy the content.

2023-03-28 01:21:09 @CSatisficer it’s good for getting a sense of who is interacting with your tweets.

2023-03-28 01:16:32 twitter polls were always pretty bad (biased toward your followers) but now they’re going to be pretty much useless.

2023-03-28 01:13:52 me, data scientist: * silently screaming * https://t.co/UK077Slt8L

2023-03-28 00:03:39 I know this is most likely a diss of journalists but it makes a lot of sense to me. Like ChatGPT, journalists are probably absorbing information at a purely linguistic level because the underlying expert-level mental models aren’t directly accessible to them. https://t.co/JDUCeVOIEU

2023-03-27 23:07:03 @AbhiGhos I agree with you that it will be extremely disruptive especially in jobs where it’s good enough if you get things 80-90% right.

2023-03-27 22:52:00 @Rabid66 @ConceptualJames It’s a win for me if you (or others in the thread) learn something. If you learn nothing then I guess I lose but you lose too. ¯\_()_/¯

2023-03-27 22:35:20 @Rabid66 @ConceptualJames sounds like you don’t know much about me or what statisticians do for a living, which is fine, but let me introduce you to a taste of mathematical statistics: https://t.co/7Pr5SniH4A

2023-03-27 22:19:30 @ConceptualJames https://t.co/lRijvcm50p

2023-03-27 22:19:07 @ConceptualJames Here’s a nice thread about the combinatorics of counting clusters : https://t.co/8XYHbyZ8kJ

2023-03-27 22:15:34 @ConceptualJames Hey folks. I’m not a fan of this culture stuff. I post about math and statistics 99.9% of the time. Follow me in you’re into that. Here’s a sample of my typical math threads: https://t.co/LmYhpIKyZ8

2023-03-27 21:59:10 @picadiliensis @ChrisMurphyCT “It decided to teach itself”

2023-03-27 21:44:26 @aysyfin This is a hard question. If you give it lots of sentences, it’s designed to find patterns in them and give you more sentences like the ones you fed into it. Some of those new sentences might be interpretable by humans as new ideas but this is almost a side-effect of the process.

2023-03-27 21:19:31 I don’t correct everybody that’s wrong on the internet but @ChrisMurphyCT is a US senator. Seems kinda dangerous for him to incorrectly perceive ChatGPT as an autonomous, sentient agent acting independently of the for-profit company that created it.

2023-03-27 21:13:18 Data scientist here. This is impressively wrong. - It didn’t learn chemistry. It learned to *talk* about chemistry - It’s trained on humans writing about chemistry - It’s designed to learn language - What it learns is decided by OpenAI’s training data - OpenAI made it available https://t.co/KfyLfUErzh

2023-03-27 20:13:08 @sarahradz_ https://t.co/4Umibvzci8

2023-03-27 20:10:40 @cuevaperotti I spend a lot of time working with stochastic processes and function spaces. Not surprised that it comes out in how I talk about things.

2023-03-26 01:41:51 @thebirdmaniac why does he still care about this lol?

2023-03-24 18:15:41 @ChelseaParlett @daniela_witten Will be nice to have some vetted python alternatives. I don't have a very good sense of which libraries make good statistics assumptions.

2023-03-24 18:10:42 @ChelseaParlett now tell me why do I know your dog on sight? didn't even read the tweet first. just clicked in.

2023-03-24 17:38:48 @karlrohe @edgardocer yikes!

2023-03-24 15:56:02 I would just like to see them get the hang of humans first before attempting to get into the minds of robots that don’t even exist yet.

2023-03-24 15:53:11 I’ve noticed a heavy overlap between people who think future artificial general intelligences will totally for sure want to kill us and the kind of people who are generally very bad at understanding the motivations of humans who aren’t part of their specific group. Coincidence?

2023-03-24 15:22:57 @LogicalBadger It will be interesting to see what happens once the corporations start charging real money for access to the tools.

2023-03-24 15:21:40 @Mr_jrlawson Not sure how to interpret that. The government is often an early adopter of tech (usually the military). Often they are even part of the group inventing the tech!

2023-03-24 15:17:58 @edgardocer Any key insights that you'd like to share?

2023-03-24 15:12:12 Based on recent history, I think it might take a decade or so for ChatGPT to truly change how we work. Much like with computers, the internet and smart phones, there were early adopters but the general public took decades to incorporate them as the standard way of doing things.

2023-03-23 16:11:03 @skdh

2023-03-22 22:14:34 @ChelseaParlett Yikes! That student sounds completely clueless.

2023-03-22 20:58:37 @turnpikeops Yes. I’ve had that experience of fake functions as well. It’s very strange because the real versions of the function weren’t that hard to find on google.

2023-03-22 20:56:34 @ResearchChat I’ll have to try that. What kinds of things do you say to constrain. Do you just say stuff like “Be careful to only use real sources.”

2023-03-22 16:28:57 @ConsumingChalk A lot of the times, I'm also just guessing and praying.

2023-03-22 16:28:14 Sounds useless *but* the title of the pretend reference did give me some good search terms and I eventually found what I needed lol. I find these AI helpful but often it's in a roundabout way.

2023-03-22 16:15:37 Asked Bard AI a question. Instantly gives me an answer with a reference without me even having to ask! Dear reader, the topic of the reference is *exactly* what I needed. At this point, I'm like "ChatGPT is trash!!!" I google the reference. Doesn't exist.

2023-03-21 15:40:48 The book is 112 pages! https://t.co/FsvuhNCDbz

2023-03-21 14:56:42 @BarbaraFantechi I also had questions about what they meant by mathematician. I suspect they mean applied mathematician roles in industry.

2023-03-21 14:36:27 @covidiots999 High risk yes.

2023-03-21 14:11:33 Data sciences roles which tightly integrate mathematics with critical thinking, scientific analysis and subject matter knowledge are likely to be much more resistant to disruption.

2023-03-21 14:11:32 Additionally, by multiple measures, the report rated Mathematician as one of the most vulnerable jobs with 100% exposure to disruption.

2023-03-21 14:11:31 The report doesn't directly discuss data science roles but we can draw some conclusions.

2023-03-21 14:11:30 Is Data Science at risk of disruption by ChatGPT? Based on a recent report by OpenAI, I conclude the risk is low. https://t.co/cGiGpPqkF1

2023-03-20 18:02:16 @ChelseaParlett The plan is to make a few billion dollars. That is the full extent of the plan.

2023-03-20 15:49:20 Am I the only one that remembers the timeline where more than 10 years ago IBM built a computer that wiped the floor with two best players in the history of Jeopardy? https://t.co/7phC9kONIP

2023-03-20 14:02:43 @NoahHaber @OSFramework Congrats!

2023-03-20 13:26:45 @prisonrodeo @kokuraclouds Thanks. I try! Social media makes it so very easy to escalate.

2023-03-20 12:40:38 @AdamRutherford Not sure anybody knows but my best guess is the networks are hierarchical and the decision to draw a mouth happens at the top and then the lower parts are dispatched to create each tooth. Teeth are simple repetitions of a similar unit which suits the network structure but they… https://t.co/EiJvd1TMLE https://t.co/3fWj6FtuhN

2023-03-20 12:05:58 @kokuraclouds You might not know this but the entire job of a statistician is to nitpick technicalities in data analyses especially in situations where they can completely flip the final conclusion (as is the case here).

2023-03-20 12:01:30 RT @kareem_carr: Statistician here. You should not control for all relevant variables. For instance, sexism is a relevant variable but cont…

2023-03-20 12:01:18 @GGCanto @jonatanpallesen The main issue is his interpretation of what it means to successfully control for everything is wrong. It doesn’t mean there is no discrimination. It means you’ve captured most of the relevant variables. The next step is to investigate their causal structure regarding sexism.

2023-03-20 11:01:47 @jonatanpallesen The longer version of the argument is there are many proxy variables for sexism such that controlling for everything ends up meaning that you indirectly control for sexism.

2023-03-20 01:47:24 @yudapearl Statistics assumes there’s a human in the loop. It’s not fully formalized but it’s a background assumption of mathematical statistics that the analyst has a mental model of the world that’s guiding the analysis. I’m not sure we’ve ever built a machine that plays this role.

2023-03-20 01:26:40 Humans have a strong tendency to use our intelligence to seek social dominance because we are primates. AI isn’t going to behave like a primate unless we intentionally engineer it to be that way. https://t.co/PdHZ4R2j1k

2023-03-20 01:17:58 @yudapearl Do you mean an understanding of the mathematics of causal inference or knowledge of the casual structure of the universe or perhaps a combination of both?

2023-03-19 22:48:02 Statistician here. You should not control for all relevant variables. For instance, sexism is a relevant variable but controlling for sexism would be a terrible idea. https://t.co/Bldl43bHsl

2023-03-19 22:05:22 academic life before browser tabs and pdfs in “read later” folders https://t.co/umnuGPxLnl

2023-03-19 22:01:49 RT @kareem_carr: @bayesianboy How about a circle? I always felt like figuring out that pi was the relationship between the circumference an…

2023-03-19 22:01:45 @bayesianboy How about a circle? I always felt like figuring out that pi was the relationship between the circumference and the diameter of a circle was a big achievement for humans. https://t.co/KrJHlRitPk

2023-03-19 20:49:04 @yudapearl Can you say more about what kind of logic (that takes “data + assumptions” to “conclusions”) is required in order to make a data analysis procedure count as an AI technique?

2023-03-19 18:47:45 @yudapearl I’m not sure “AI” is the right framework here. Data analysis workflows can span multiple levels of automation and the degree of automation doesn’t seem to me to be the most relevant feature with respect to the overall usefulness of the analysis.

2023-03-19 14:39:34 @statsepi folks are not fans of this take lol. but on the scale of optimistic GPT takes, it barely even registers.

2023-03-19 14:14:55 @ahugheswriter Recently, I’ve been learning about object oriented programming in R. There are about 5 different independent systems for doing this. So it’s complicated. I ask GPT for code using each system. It’s often wrong but I can typically patch it myself or with the help of some additional… https://t.co/P8PG2JGNJ8

2023-03-19 13:45:38 I think we are experiencing a period where AI is going to do for programmers and lots of other fields what it has long done for chess players. It will massively flatten the learning curve for lots of people without access to high quality human tutors.

2023-03-19 13:45:37 In my experience so far, I’ve been picking up new ideas a lot faster with GPT’s help and the fact that it hallucinates has not been a problem because it keeps me on my toes and forces me to be an active learner. https://t.co/xGcz9bouoL

2023-03-19 13:43:41 @logorific2 From a statistics perspective, what’s missing from this analysis is the level of uncertainty. You should have a very low level of certainty that you are right about the deck being all jacks of clubs based on just one observation.

2023-03-18 17:26:39 What I notice is LLMs: 1. act like a database 2. extrapolate in places where a traditional database would report no info 3. transform inputs (like natural language) and outputs 4. apply patterns in a nested way 5. check for consistency between patterns (more noticeable in GPT-4) https://t.co/Q9nkSIeSaw

2023-03-18 17:12:13 @Lak5h Exactly! Thanks for this example.

2023-03-18 16:31:39 There's been a bottleneck on how much software humans could create because only a small percent of people can code. I'm excited to see how GPT-4 empowers a generation of non-coders to solve problems that were never going to be worth the time of engineers making $100k+/yr.

2023-03-18 16:07:56 In some sense, nothing changes for me with AI. As a data scientist, I already spend all my time giving instructions to computers, getting their help with computations and vetting the quality of the output.

2023-03-18 01:42:19 I say thought “patterns” because a model of thought isn’t thought. A computer can talk about love without actually loving.

2023-03-18 01:42:18 We will move on to bigger and better ways of modeling thinking but the impact of that insight will remain.

2023-03-18 01:42:17 The greatest scientific contribution of large language models has been demonstrating definitively that our thought patterns, including all our poetry and prose, are just fancy mathematics.

2023-03-17 08:20:04 @FPallopides @Aella_Girl Why would AI have any coherent drives at all? They aren’t biological. We’re the ones born with powerful needs that drive us. I think people are equating “intelligence” with an independent propensity to want to make chances in the state of the world. We have that but AI need not.

2023-03-17 07:59:35 @Aella_Girl We are primates so we have a (probably) inherent propensity for establishing hierarchies and competing for resources and social dominance. AI are a completely alien intelligence. The only reason they would do primate-like things is if we engineered our drives into them.

2023-03-16 22:30:19 The other thing I was thinking is we can probably create an AI that can take in the general layout of a dataset and produce code to do at least a first pass analysis of the data. Oh man. Am I thinking myself out of a job here!??

2023-03-16 22:30:18 Just realized that it's probably 100% possible to train an AI right now today to scan an image of a dataviz and produce the code needed to recreate that visualization. https://t.co/WodiBHq9nR

2023-03-16 20:35:10 @sisneruza Yup. I use it quite a bit. It's not perfect for sure.

2023-03-16 16:58:25 @tunguz Being resistant to pivoting can be a solid strategy as well. Arguably, this was the approach of the people who developed neural networks in the first place despite multiple periods of pessimism.

2023-03-16 16:51:44 My pet conspiracy theory is Google could easily make Google Search more effective but the current version is optimized to get us to click ads, and once ChatGPT/Bing AI gets established enough to steal substantial market share, Google Search will automagically get much better.

2023-03-16 16:44:45 Despite my skepticism about GPT, I use it daily. I even pay for ChatGPT. I might be a skeptic but if this stuff has relevance for data analysis work, I'm going to make damn sure I'm one of the first to know about it.

2023-03-16 15:27:48 @pbrane This tech is going to disrupt all kinds of knowledge work. I suspect your kid will be writing code or something like it with AI assistance in their job just like the rest of us. lol.

2023-03-16 15:22:20 I get that we all hope GPT-4 might be able to do that some day, and maybe we are already there, but perhaps somebody ought actually try it first before declaring on twitter that GPT-4 can.

2023-03-16 15:16:41 This kind of stuff frustrates me. Thousands of likes and yet where is the evidence that GPT-4 can “write perfect tutorials”? This is pure fan fiction. https://t.co/VgtutJSZG1

2023-03-16 15:06:53 @Mateussf I don’t see how this is different from buying a book that’s full of conspiracy theories and reading it privately at home, or going to a lecture by a local kook, or hanging out on conspiracy forums. You can always find spaces where wild claims go unchecked.

2023-03-16 14:46:46 We're going to need huge innovations in content curation to match the huge AI-driven advances in content creation.

2023-03-16 14:28:48 @Mateussf And presumably you feel the individual reader can't be trusted to evaluate these claims for themselves and cross reference them with other sources if needed before accepting them?

2023-03-16 14:23:02 @SEthanMilne As with books and the printing press, there are concerns that regular people can't be trusted to figure out false information on their own.

2023-03-16 14:14:58 @Mateussf Historically it was a big concern that books would have wrong ideas in them (like Protestantism) and you couldn't trust regular people to figure that out for themselves.

2023-03-16 14:12:22 If we'd developed nukes via multiple private companies who were just trying to maximize profits, and spamming out poorly understood designs, we'd probably all be dead by now.

2023-03-16 14:12:21 - We fund their creation via organizations whose duty is to maximize profits - Our main design strategy is to construct them as poorly-understood black boxes - We design them around replacing rather than enhancing humans which is inherently adversarial These are all choices.

2023-03-15 21:47:44 @EpiEllie @LEGO_Group never fear. bilbo is writing a complaint letter for you. https://t.co/45wChNkPH6

2023-03-15 21:44:43 RT @EpiEllie: Hi, @LEGO_Group! Splurged on the Rivendell set because <

2023-03-15 13:54:50 @sarahradz_ @LongFormMath Looks legit.

2023-03-15 00:04:38 Looks like @OpenAI went with the the movie credits version of authorship for their paper. Cool! https://t.co/1FdF0QpgeU

2023-03-14 23:58:17 Controversial Opinion: Major deep learning papers have been going in this direction for a while now and this is just the obvious culmination. If it costs tens of millions of dollars to replicate a result then it might as well not be replicable. https://t.co/AUtYZxQKdm

2023-03-14 22:34:01 is this a life changer? yes. but not a big one. i don't get all these hyperbolic claims of disrupting knowledge work. that's not been my experience. everything it outputs needs to be double-checked for accuracy and possible misalignment with my instructions.

2023-03-14 22:34:00 i'm not good at googling stuff. at least once a day, i used to go down a rabbit hole where i'd be searching for an hour and not be any closer to finding the info i wanted. chapgpt has been a livesaver in this regard.

2023-03-14 20:19:10 @SolomonKurz If this was a school of public health or medicine class, I would consider it fine since this is the kind of data they'd be expected to work with in a professional context. For a general audience, a lot of people struggle with weight loss so some might find it triggering.

2023-03-14 18:24:05 My reaction to this is similar to if a human was boasting about their SAT/IQ scores. Just makes me wonder if OpenAI is posting about their AI's standardized test scores due to a lack of other significant real world achievements. https://t.co/tCwHGzeRKI

2023-03-14 16:23:00 When we do statistics, we're leverage two of the most powerful engines of knowledge creation known to humankind: mathematics and the scientific method. So why are statistical analyses so often wrong? Because an analysis is only as strong as its weakest assumption.

2023-03-14 16:20:14 @SolomonKurz I just mean the variance is considered the more fundamental concept. It could have gone either way since standard deviation and variance are functions of each other but the variance operator is much easier to work with algebraically speaking.

2023-03-14 16:13:18 @SolomonKurz I think it’s not considered a “first class” operator in the way E and V are. It’s a function of the variance but more awkward to use. E[X+Y]=E[X]+E[Y] and V[X+Y]=V[X]+Var[Y] for X,Y ind. but S[X+Y]≠ S[X]+S[Y]. So you almost always want to express things in terms of V not S.

2023-03-14 13:34:29 Happy Pi Day!!!… https://t.co/8nsRtyVl7Z

2023-03-13 22:07:50 @ChelseaParlett I don't know what the math folks would say but my mental model is a flexible, continuous surface like a wrinkled bedsheet. Most of the math follows from what you'd need to do to navigate on a surface like that (assuming you can't just fly).

2023-03-13 14:35:02 A lot of people coming up in data science these days seem to think the point of learning data science is so you can get a fancy data science job. I think the point is it empowers you to analyze data and come to solid conclusions which is useful no matter what your job is.

2023-03-12 10:11:28 @DevinGoure They are definitely elitist. I’m not saying I want this. I’m saying they have lots of options for preserving their business model.

2023-03-11 18:22:41 RT @kareem_carr: Back in the day reputation was everything. People would kill people just for calling them a liar. With AI generated nonsen…

2023-03-11 18:20:52 @lastpositivist He blocked me too despite having never interacted. It’s strange. I suspect it’s because I’m liberal-ish seeming.

2023-03-11 17:16:52 @mathematicsprof

2023-03-11 16:55:05 In the future, every statement will need a human being to vouch for it. We won't trust it without somebody that can be held accountable. Somebody to put on the wall.

2023-03-11 16:55:04 We've let ourselves be convinced that taking the reputation of the source of the information into account is some kind of bias or "ad hominem". This was a luxury. Soon all that will be impossible.

2023-03-11 16:55:03 But not too long ago, before the internet, that's exactly how it worked. You asked your friends, family and other people in your community for information and if they were wrong or didn't know then that was it. It wasn't perfect but it worked fine.

2023-03-11 16:55:02 Back in the day reputation was everything. People would kill people just for calling them a liar. With AI generated nonsense on the rise, I think the age of reputation is returning.

2023-03-11 16:24:06 @curiouskiwicat @RuxandraTeslo I think your comment assumes being fair to everybody is a higher priority than it is. If the alternative is total system failure, I don't think being exclusionary will keep the academic publishing industry up at night.

2023-03-11 15:55:08 @_ch_ase I know right. It *costs* money to publish papers.

2023-03-11 15:53:12 @RuxandraTeslo It would just be a filtering step to improve the signal to noise ratio before asking peer-reviewers to spend time vetting the work more thoroughly. So it’s not just about affiliation.

2023-03-11 15:31:10 People who publish in elite journals will happily go through the extra work to get past these filters and predatory journals don’t care about the quality of the paper since they get paid either way.

2023-03-11 15:31:09 This comment suggests low familiarity with academic publishing. Journals have lots of options for filtering who can submit papers like restricting to people with affiliations to academic institutions or requiring recommendation from a trusted list of recommenders. https://t.co/Sh4GOCpZXH

2023-03-11 10:27:14 @brian_is_tired I think I see where you’re going. I think you’re attempting to make sure a cluster always has at least one member. This approach isn’t precise enough about only adding an item to a cluster if you need it to make that cluster not empty.

2023-03-11 10:05:46 RT @kareem_carr: How many ways are there of dividing 100 items into 3 clusters? 85896253455335221205584888180155511368666317646 If *each*…

2023-03-10 16:34:44 RT @kareem_carr: How many ways are there of dividing 100 items into 3 clusters? 85896253455335221205584888180155511368666317646 If *each*…

2023-03-10 15:56:49 @dr_pete In practice, we can reduce the possibilities hugely if the items can be conceptualized as points in some space and we can assume that neighboring points are more likely to be in the same cluster.

2023-03-10 15:30:13 Thanks for reading! If you like this kind of content, follow me so you don’t miss out on upcoming threads. You can also support me by liking and retweeting the thread.

2023-03-10 15:30:12 In practice, the approximation kⁿ/k! is actually a pretty good estimate for realistic values of n items and k clusters.

2023-03-10 15:30:11 The explanation of why the formula for the Stirling numbers of the second kind is the correct formula is a story for another thread. The argument involves the inclusion-exclusion principle which I wrote about earlier this week: https://t.co/So9Ptt3o2k

2023-03-10 15:30:10 Writing code to compute these numbers from scratch can be a bit tricky because of the large numbers involved. If you'd like to play around with the Stirling numbers of the second kind in code, here's how to compute them in both R and Python. https://t.co/IgB1I8DuH1

2023-03-10 15:30:09 The exact formula, adjusted to exclude empty clusters, corresponds to a series of numbers called the Stirling numbers of the 2nd kind. They are denoted by the number of items n positioned on top of the number of clusters k and placed between two curly brackets: https://t.co/tn7EQs9gZu

2023-03-10 15:30:06 The formula we have so far can be generalized as kⁿ/k! for n items and k clusters but it's only an approximation.

2023-03-10 15:30:05 We can now see that our previous estimate 3¹⁰⁰ is over-counting by a factor of 6. Using this information to refine our guess, we get 3¹⁰⁰/3!≈ 85896253455335221839410188294270212117017920334 This is about 99.999999999999999% correct but not quite perfect.

2023-03-10 15:30:04 Now imagine you have just 3 different colored items to place in three clusters A, B and C where at least one item must be in each cluster. Note in the image below that these are identical clusterings. Only the content of the clusters matters not their ordering or labels. https://t.co/rR5Ye2FJ5S

2023-03-10 15:30:01 How many ways are there of dividing 100 items into 3 clusters? 85896253455335221205584888180155511368666317646 If *each* star in the universe exploded into as many pieces as there are stars in the universe, that's how big this number is. If that surprises you, read on:

2023-03-08 17:09:28 SOLUTION III: INTERNATIONAL TREATY According to Wikipedia, in the US and France, it's PEDMAS. For Canada, UK, Australia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, West Africa, it's BED/BOD/BIDMAS. Either way, for the good of humanity, we need to agree on a precise order of operations.

2023-03-08 17:09:27 SOLUTION II: MANDATE We could make it MANDATORY to always use parentheses as in 6÷(2(1+2)) or (6÷2)(2(1+2)). If we can all agree to pay a small tax in form of a little extra effort to read and write arithmetic expressions, we would never have ambiguity again.

2023-03-08 17:09:26 Sure that means we won't be able to write stuff like "6÷2" in purely text formats like a tweet ever again, but screw freedom of expression. Isn't it worth it to be safe?

2023-03-08 17:09:25 SOLUTION I: PROHIBITION We could all agree to NEVER use ÷ or the inline / as in "6/2(1+2)". Always write division like this: https://t.co/Tagylm3BYr

2023-03-08 17:09:24 The solution to this math problem is political. Read on to find out why. https://t.co/wFKHnnZ1Qf

2023-03-07 18:55:56 @chukpl @janettereinke

2023-03-07 18:31:00 @matthematician In my personal experience, teaching doesn't always imply learning.

2023-03-07 17:02:32 These types of posts are good actually. They teach people that mathematics is a deeply human activity that relies on shared conventions to function properly. https://t.co/3WVTQniJcw

2023-03-07 16:23:04 @DebraSJudge sounds groovy https://t.co/mM2oBbnelH

2023-03-07 15:38:06 hot take: individual expert opinion is a very small part of the overall science. https://t.co/NswK2dzLPC

2023-03-07 15:15:51 RT @LaughatWally: A fun follow for the math curious.

2023-03-07 12:40:35 @AndrewPGrieve Thanks for sharing.

2023-03-07 12:39:53 @YairAizenman Thanks. There’s some stuff about the confidence internal on the wiki page: https://t.co/TlxvhwmQQD

2023-03-07 12:37:14 @alscor1966 This isn’t the best estimator. It’s just an easy one to explain given the constraints of Twitter.

2023-03-07 12:35:53 @PiscisBailey No but sounds interesting! Thanks for sharing.

2023-03-07 12:35:19 @higgs_neil Thanks!

2023-03-07 12:34:51 RT @kareem_carr: Mark and Recapture is a powerful statistics trick for counting a large number of things without actually counting most the…

2023-03-07 09:47:01 @aryehazan It was an assumption that doesn’t hold true in general and may not have even have held true in the context I was using it. But I had run the algorithm 100s of times so I had strong intuitions &

2023-03-07 01:32:52 RT @mikejschmidty: A very good explanation of how to use mark recapture to estimate the total number of individuals in a population.

2023-03-07 01:32:40 @aylovedata Not off the top of my heard but the wikipedia article is not too bad: https://t.co/TlxvhwmQQD

2023-03-07 00:52:08 RT @kevinriggle: Kareem is constantly dropping stuff like this, extremely worth the follow. And if you like this I learned about it from HO…

2023-03-07 00:27:14 @momenyl

2023-03-06 21:19:17 @bgreenwell8 @wrightstate Awesome!

2023-03-06 21:17:53 @jakobpunkt You’re welcome! It can get more complicated as we try to improve on this estimator but the most basic version is pretty simple.

2023-03-06 21:13:54 @KarenCampe Yeah. Exactly. I would maybe write 6/53 ≈ 50/N as in they are approximately equal.

2023-03-06 17:20:32 @Darrenmacey Thanks for the support. I appreciate it!

2023-03-06 16:38:31 @trcull Yeah. That's right. This is the same as the assumption that a marked and an unmarked bird have the same probability of being captured. If the marked are slow and the slow are more likely to be captured then that would violate the assumption.

2023-03-06 03:11:30 RT @kareem_carr: The Inclusion-Exclusion Principle is a really powerful math concept. It starts out with a grade school level observation…

2023-03-06 02:44:07 @kate_eviva Thanks! I appreciate the support!

2023-03-05 21:10:48 @ChelseaParlett Yes. I think so. I would say burnout happens when you ignore your basic biological and psychological needs for too long which is more likely to happen when you are obsessed with some activity.

2023-03-05 19:30:21 RT @YanndeMey: Great thread by Kareem! I always loved Venn diagrams in school

2023-03-05 19:30:14 RT @kareem_carr: The Inclusion-Exclusion Principle is a really powerful math concept. It starts out with a grade school level observation…

2023-03-05 19:06:38 @JanLaalaa This sounds like a good idea. I’ll put it on my list of topics!

2023-03-05 11:40:46 @vboykis https://t.co/4Z5TgfZ5qL - work with latex in your browser, share with others, huge library of paper templates, version control, easy compilation https://t.co/eUO5LA5iNm - previews of short code, uses AI to translate pics of typeset equations and even handwriting into LaTeX

2023-03-05 10:00:00 CAFIAC FIX

2023-03-02 22:00:00 CAFIAC FIX

2023-02-27 16:03:17 @PhDemetri well deserved!!!

2023-02-27 01:00:00 CAFIAC FIX

2023-02-25 04:56:03 RT @kareem_carr: I'm starting a newsletter! Imagine if the New York Times wrote in-depth articles on stats and data science with the same…

2023-02-24 23:54:47 @dearisra Thanks for the support.

2023-02-24 18:02:00 @MathFrustration I’ll be writing them.

2023-02-24 17:39:00 @Brandonkw__ @TimHarford I assume they are reporting on the world using data analysis. So a bit different. I am planning to do reporting on data analysis itself. How various aspects of it works and why it’s important.

2023-02-24 17:22:26 RT @jtsveigdalen: I love this idea.

2023-02-24 17:22:21 @jtsveigdalen Thanks!

2023-02-24 17:21:33 @Kari_S_Listener Thanks!

2023-02-24 16:48:16 @Kari_S_Listener Heh. I wasn’t intending to get sucked into the culture wars here. Just trying to explain the level of detail.

2023-02-24 15:11:29 • Official launch will be in Late 2023/Early 2024 • All content will be free (but irregular) until launch • Paid tier: ~$5-10 for 2-4 long-form articles per month • Free tier: 1-2 short articles a month Details subject to change.

2023-02-24 15:11:28 I'm starting a newsletter! Imagine if the New York Times wrote in-depth articles on stats and data science with the same level of detail that it covers overseas wars or climate change. Enough info to get what's going on in the data world without being overwhelming.

2023-02-24 15:04:09 @minilek @CourseKata @getbootstrap Glad you liked it! It's been bothering me that people think statistics and calculus are incompatible. They are absolutely not. We need to build a movement around teaching data science the right way that empowers students. Especially students from marginalized backgrounds.

2023-02-24 14:48:27 @EmUprichard Sorry about that. I've never felt so crushed that Twitter won't let you edit tweets.

2023-02-24 13:09:34 @poopmachine I agree that examples in math class could in theory be practical and concrete but typically they aren't. Data science is definitely not optimized for teaching math, but what's good about data science is being practical and concrete with numbers is the default context.

2023-02-24 12:56:22 @minilek Hey @minilek. I wrote this partially as a defense of the other side of the argument. Would love to hear your thoughts. https://t.co/20K1i6OO16

2023-02-24 12:53:03 @poopmachine Fair question. The idea is it's a more concrete example that has practical relevance which I think is easy for (some) people to digest.

2023-02-24 12:46:15 @f2harrell @stephensenn @vandy_biostat I don’t think many of the assumptions we make about RCTs are any more verifiable but they do seem to hold in practice. One reason clinical trials are so complicated is we discovered over time that we needed legal enforcement mechanisms to compel RCT data to meet our assumptions.

2023-02-24 12:25:00 @love2laugh4ever I messed up the thread. Here's a correction: https://t.co/DBR5gg69u2

2023-02-24 12:24:26 @747Retired I messed up the thread. Here's a correction: https://t.co/DBR5gg69u2

2023-02-24 12:23:30 @tec_man0 Thanks for this! Sorry it took me a day to figure out what you were saying: https://t.co/DBR5gg69u2

2023-02-20 17:16:19 Not to toot my own horn but called it in 2018! https://t.co/zjK552y6NU https://t.co/NO7pKWeNkh

2023-02-20 01:21:18 @spylinen the goal statement is aspirational like any other science ie “biology is the science of life” or “physics is the science of matter and energy”.

2023-02-20 00:50:16 I feel like statistics is the science of knowing how wrong you are. Being less wrong is optional. https://t.co/EqVFdBGZbP

2023-02-20 00:41:34 @Gopal_Kot not wrong.

2023-02-19 23:30:39 @LaddRyan54 let’s ask chatgpt https://t.co/nRRYgEpi8J

2023-02-19 23:19:06 Is logistic regression a machine learning algorithm? yes yes yesyes yesyes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yesyes yes yes yes yesye yes yes yes yes yesyes

2023-02-19 20:36:07 @computoloco How would you characterize them?

2023-02-19 20:31:38 Not gonna lie. Mathematica is lowkey goated in situations where symbolic computations are the vibe.

2023-02-19 20:17:39 What are your favorite Machine Learning topics? For me, it’s: - Evolutionary algorithms - Deep learning is a close second - K-means clustering - Random Forest - Bias-Variance Tradeoff

2023-02-19 17:35:32 for the people who are calling this wokism, should we make it illegal for companies to maximize profits or consumers to spend money according to their preferences? because that’s what’s going on here. https://t.co/nhq7Y4Nwa0

2023-02-19 16:35:32 The fastest way to learn math or programming is to have genuine curiosity, but genuine curiosity is the first thing to go out the window when the stakes are high. To unlock your inner genius, find ways to lower the stakes.

2023-02-19 15:46:34 @SarahGrynpas Aww.

2023-02-19 15:37:07 @Anatonomicon Great question. I could see myself writing about "Least Squares" or "Variance Explained" in general: why they're used, what's good or bad about them, etc. Anything more granular would need a different business model, maybe like a premium tier.

2023-02-19 15:24:19 Mastering all three is a powerful combination that will make you stand out as a data analyst.

2023-02-19 15:24:18 Mastering these 3 kinds of math will take your data science skills to the next level: - data numeracy (knowing which algorithms to use, what the common data issues are, what kinds of assumptions are reasonable) - probability - mainstream math (linear algebra, calculus, etc)

2023-02-19 03:00:30 RT @kareem_carr: I want to do a substack where I write short, focused explainers on topics in stats and data science for busy people. “Eve…

2023-02-18 15:09:19 @WSIB_Paralegal Not a Dr yet but I should be by the time I officially start the project.

2023-02-18 15:05:52 RT @kareem_carr: I want to do a substack where I write short, focused explainers on topics in stats and data science for busy people. “Eve…

2023-02-18 15:05:43 @ChrisSt60478932 @randomlysampled Thanks. These are great topics. Each one of them could be an article. These are definitely the kinds of topics I'll be interested in tackling.

2023-02-18 14:31:42 @edgardo_block I would definitely be open to writing a series of case studies for general audiences!

2023-02-18 13:53:57 @edgardo_block Thanks! Anything I can change to make it more tempting for you?

2023-02-18 13:51:25 @svarasura That’s a cool topic!

2023-02-18 13:50:25 @ajay_kolii Thanks for the support!

2023-02-18 13:50:07 RT @ajay_kolii: Excited to read and know more about it. All the best for your project I'm sure based upon your past tweets that your art…

2023-02-18 13:49:07 @ChrisSt60478932 @randomlysampled What kinds of questions do you have about them?

2023-02-18 13:44:22 RT @randomlysampled: I signed up

2023-02-18 13:44:10 @randomlysampled Thanks for the support!

2023-02-18 13:00:01 @LadySynaptic @Nick_Lange_ That’s awesome. Congrats!

2023-02-18 12:54:17 @sueantownsend Thanks for sharing. I really appreciate the feedback and I do want to hear from people that maybe don’t think it’s worth it. At what price per month would this service be tempting for you?

2023-02-18 12:44:54 @_StephenOlivier Yes!!! Hope you signed up.

2023-02-18 07:02:34 @sueantownsend I am not unfamiliar with prestigious academic institutions. In fact, I was part of the teaching staff for "Introduction to Data Science" at the Harvard School of Public Health just last semester. I fully respect your financial choices. Just wanted to clarify.

2023-02-18 04:18:51 @JohnHenry_US Thanks for the support.

2023-02-18 04:04:16 @MadladMunson Yeah I would. I think having a math tier of some kind might be the best way to handle it. That way people can choose how much math they want to see.

2023-02-18 00:24:19 @LKaboolian Thanks, Linda!

2023-02-18 00:23:20 @SubstackLinda Oh wow. Thank you so much! I will.

2023-02-17 23:31:59 @virginicus A deep dive on model convergence sounds like a lot of fun! I would definitely write about that.

2023-02-17 01:23:59 @dan_p_simpson Sounds like a banger to me. Krylov subspaces is one of my favorite concepts in linear algebra!

2023-02-16 18:59:40 @KeithRowley It’s pretty common for people to be good at math in general but find that probability theory doesn’t come easily. It’s a different skillset I think. I think this is a good book for people in your situation (the author also has videos on youtube): https://t.co/x34sJbRslG

2023-02-16 18:19:35 @tjmahr @grrrck thanks! switching to this immediately!

2023-02-16 18:12:46 @tjmahr what’s this color scheme???

2023-02-16 16:20:00 When studying difficult concepts, watch out for negative self-talk. It's easy to miss that you're doing it, and it can completely destroy your love for a subject.

2023-02-16 15:42:00 R is designed from the bottom up for statistics which makes it tricky to learn for those with low familiarity with data analysis. If this is you, Python might be the better option.

2023-02-16 15:28:56 @kageni_b I can't really speak to your individual experience but sometimes it's not the specific teacher but the teaching environment like high-stakes tests or overly competitive classmates.

2023-02-16 15:15:32 @NancyRGough I've found it's useful for generating hypothetical answers that I can later verify the correctness of, either by testing them directly or (now that I know what to look for) googling to get more authoritative sources.

2023-02-16 15:12:00 Math anxiety is not about math. It's a trauma reaction to bad teaching.

2023-02-16 14:56:29 @ben11kehoe Yeah. Definitely.

2023-02-16 14:30:52 One of the biggest barriers to getting programming help is not even knowing what terms to search for. Pro Tip: Use ChatGPT first to figure out the right search terms

2023-02-16 00:16:59 @brunostefoni @nobleman_phd I read it through a few times. I think I’ll have to think longer on it. I only read it for the first time yesterday. I got hung up on why the curve starts rising again here. Also why does the best p >

2023-02-15 22:20:50 i find my reaction to chatgpt making stuff up is very different from others. i usually feel good about it. like i'm making progress. i think to myself "great we've gotten to the limits of your knowledge on this aspect, let's change directions"

2023-02-15 22:08:43 @prabinov42 I read it and thought it was really good. I just have questions. Like why does the model eventually get worse in her example? https://t.co/qafknED6J4

2023-02-15 21:49:09 This is what OpenAI had to say about it in December 2019 but that was like fifty years ago in machine learning years. https://t.co/0uhKBRAef1

2023-02-15 21:49:08 I've been reading articles about Double Descent all day. Am I correct in concluding that this phenomena is not yet fully understood? https://t.co/Ha3Y9Vg3xX

2023-02-15 20:48:44 @tunguz I could pass the test and I am also not a citizen. ¯\_()_/¯

2023-02-15 20:45:25 @nemirovs It's a diagram I made to illustrate some thoughts i've been having about ML vs statistics

2023-02-15 17:41:17 @mbeisen Gatekeeping? Not necessarily in a bad way. In my experience, people get pretty upset when bad papers are published and peer-review is a way to directly contribute to keeping the standards high.

2023-02-15 17:28:28 feelin fancy https://t.co/wtadqv38dw

2023-02-15 01:37:34 @taz_chu same vibe lol https://t.co/287P5JCUGF

2023-02-15 01:02:18 A lot of smart people are becoming overly pessimistic about chatgpt and similar technologies. They’re focused on what the naive user will do with it but that’s the lowest bar. I think this tech will be extremely powerful in the hands of skilled users with refined workflows.

2023-02-15 00:34:41 there’s no explaining love https://t.co/5BL3Cf9VRe

2023-02-14 23:58:54 @potatoffel Yeah. I see. Thanks for sharing!

2023-02-14 23:09:47 @potatoffel It improves because of regularization which keeps it in that ideal zone, no? Otherwise, model performance would shift toward that area on the right.

2023-02-14 23:06:49 @gehsbarg Fair enough. I think "understandable" here means something like: how easily can you relate the precise numerical values of and relationships between the parameters to the behavior of the model.

2023-02-14 17:00:00 roses are red violets are blue π to three decimal places is 3.142

2023-02-14 16:49:05 @paul_elotro Good book! Worth reading carefully.

2023-02-14 16:26:41 @GraziosiSergio source is me. yes.

2023-02-14 16:02:51 been thinking about this for a while https://t.co/I5KwtvqVuL

2023-02-14 14:33:55 It's amazing how much progress has been made in the design of computational algorithms while still having no clue if P=NP. Just goes to show fixating on the sexiest math puzzles isn't always the best way forward.

2023-02-12 11:03:18 @AndrewLampinen Great thread. Thanks for sharing the relevant literature. Lots to consider.

2023-02-10 16:59:54 When conclusions derived from data fail us, that's the data science version of an engineer building a bridge that later collapses. We all want bridges that don't collapse.

2023-02-10 16:59:53 Everybody's a data scientist. Data science applies any time you have some numbers and want to make conclusions that you can rely on in a new situation. This seems to me to be a near universal experience.

2023-02-10 15:39:38 People don't fully realize they need validation yet, but I think once they get burned a few times, they will be clamoring for it.

2023-02-10 15:39:37 I'm feeling optimistic about data science. I predict there will be a lot of data science work around validating the outputs of large language models.

2023-02-10 05:56:43 @vidbina @BryanTegomoh @sama @MathJax Yeah. I think it works because it sets ChatGPT's context to math papers which are more likely to be correct mathematically.

2023-02-09 23:40:17 @PhDemetri It’s the kind of thing I don’t need now that I mostly do analyses for myself but needed when my analyses were primary for collaborators and they’d ask me to rerun things with lots of slight variations on short notice.

2023-02-09 21:21:43 @RobEbymathdude @sama Yeah. That’s the plan right now. Cutting and pasting to mathpix as needed. (but usually I can read the latex directly.)

2023-02-09 20:55:32 @economeager @UNSWEcon Congrats!!!

2023-02-09 20:55:18 chatgpt is gonna be pretty fire once they configure the GUI to render latex @sama

2023-02-09 20:53:32 @scottmoore The trick is to ask it for things that require translation of information that it probably already has seen in its training data vs original reasoning. (Explanations seem to be a type of translation task for it.)

2023-02-09 20:06:43 @Dark88244288 Success as measured by amount of capital allocated.

2023-02-09 19:02:05 Does the success of massive machine learning models like ChatGPT and Bard mean a lot of machine learning jobs are going away? It's starting to feel like either you need to be working for a multibillion dollar corporation (which only a few can do) or you're just going to be… https://t.co/aBFKG2sVzd

2023-02-09 18:44:52 @PWGTennant figured there was no harm in trying it out. it's only $8. you can't even buy a decent sandwich for that in boston.

2023-02-09 18:19:21 i asked chatgpt about a somewhat niche math thing (involving complex-valued random variables) and it gave a reasonable answer (i think). i then followed up by re-reading the relevant section of the wikipedia article which was a lot easier to follow after chatgpt’s explanation!

2023-02-09 18:12:08 RT @thejoshuap: The only correct use of the long tweet format

2023-02-09 18:04:39 RT @sqiouyilu: this is the only correct use of the longer tweets format

2023-02-09 18:04:35 RT @caffeineguru: This is the only appropriate use of longer tweets.

2023-02-09 17:26:29 you know what longer tweets mean? more pi for everybody!… https://t.co/UchpGoheQL

2023-02-09 01:04:28 @RehydratedTater Well said!

2023-02-09 00:29:27 @shawntsullivan I think they do have a choice though. AIs can’t vote but humans can.

2023-02-09 00:01:14 RT @kareem_carr: @shawntsullivan People don’t want to sit at home collecting UBI while, without acknowledgement or consent, some soulless A…

2023-02-09 00:01:03 @shawntsullivan People don’t want to sit at home collecting UBI while, without acknowledgement or consent, some soulless AI reproduces their drawing style that they developed over a lifetime of study and practice.

2023-02-08 23:53:21 @jesterhoax Right to your own data under the rubric of privacy rights similar to what’s happening in Europe. Making companies seek consent proactively and not allow them to force it on you as a price of using their service. There’s already a norm in the sciences for fully informed consent.

2023-02-08 23:43:27 I think the current conversation around how AI will displace current workers is naive in the sense that it’s ignoring the potential for this huge population of voters to shift the law in their favor.

2023-02-08 23:35:40 All my DMs on the web app are just…gone. Like tears in…the…rain. Time to die.

2023-02-08 23:28:29 Is Twitter dying? I can't even whine about with my besties in my DMs.

2023-02-08 23:25:46 @PhDemetri The key to selling people on Bayes, in my opinion, is selling them on the plausibility of Bayesian ontology. It's a heavy lift to be sure with those that don't already believe.

2023-02-08 23:19:39 "Truth" is the most predictive model that is also causal and has a latent space that is comprehensible to humans.

2023-02-08 18:04:14 I guess my feeling is “you get what you pay for for” ¯\_()_/¯ one person isn’t magically going to be able to do the work of 10 people in 20% of the time.

2023-02-08 18:01:01 Interesting thread on the “rise of the business scientist”: “Gone are the days when companies were willing to waste $1,000,000+ per year on expensive data science teams” https://t.co/nXDxalfXxP

2023-02-08 17:30:19 @HenningStrandin We might both perceive a glowing object in the sky and you might perceive it as kind of lightning and I might perceive it as a ghost. We would likely diverge on what phenomena we would lump into the "ghost" concept vs the "electricity" concept. So they aren't interchangeable.

2023-02-08 17:06:38 @HenningStrandin If the concept is so obvious, why did it take most of human history to invent it?

2023-02-08 16:39:32 @HenningStrandin It just seems like you are assuming that which is perceived is actually energy which seems kind of circular. My original post was basically the idea that physicists can see a pattern in data and be like “from now on when something like this happens, I’ll say ‘energy’ did it.”

2023-02-08 16:23:03 @HenningStrandin Not sure I understand. Humans got by without the concept of energy (as expressed in physics) for tens of thousands of years. Most humans still don’t learn about energy as the mathematical construct that physicists know it to be.

2023-02-08 16:19:39 Should your data science professor be clean? https://t.co/FB0CCGSVDY

2023-02-08 10:15:00 @skdh Oh no! Hope you feel better soon.

2023-02-08 00:54:26 @tunguz You think it would be easier to manually curate an up-to-date contact list for ~100 people vs just posting it on facebook?

2023-02-08 00:48:26 @coolnameliz Thanks for sharing that and I appreciate the follow.

2023-02-08 00:36:43 @tunguz if you wanted to efficiently distribute baby pics to 50-100 extended family members and close friends, what’s a better way to do it?

2023-02-08 00:15:58 I’ve found using your students as teaching props is generally a bad idea. There’s a good chance it’ll make the student feel like they’re being treated like an object because they are. It’s 2023, just make a nice powerpoint slide. https://t.co/wY9egkPTBk

2023-02-07 16:59:01 People need to get used to the idea that AIs will be representatives of the companies that build them. They're not going to be neutral embodiments of truth.

2023-02-07 16:22:53 It is also common to confuse an algorithm like ordinary least squares which fits the linear model with the linear model itself. When people do this, they're using definition C.

2023-02-07 16:22:52 Three definitions of a mathematical "model" are: [A] a family of functions [B] a particular function in that family that fits your data [C] an algorithmic implementation for finding that function

2023-02-07 15:58:32 @camjpatrick @stephenjwild @trentlikesstats I wonder how this works? It put me almost adjacent to my advisor @rafalab ... pretty impressive since we don't tweet at each other very much.

2023-02-07 15:50:27 This is stupid. ChatGPT is essentially functioning as an employee of OpenAI here. The average employee isn't going to tell you on record that it's OK to say the n-word either. https://t.co/ir5z0W1Tvi

2023-02-07 15:28:15 starting to notice lots of situations where humans (like chatgpt) also hallucinate answers instead of just admitting that they don’t know.

2023-02-07 15:19:56 Which one is best?

2023-02-07 10:31:56 @DrClaireJanelle Awesome. Good luck! Let me know if you hit any snags, I have a few other book suggestions in that case.

2023-02-07 00:27:35 I’ve grown envious as a statistician that physicists can just invent causes for things and everyone treats them as real. https://t.co/Nl2Iu5uE3e

2023-02-07 00:20:36 you don’t even have to be that negative. like “this is overall good but has these specific downsides” is enough to massively trigger a lot of groups.

2023-02-07 00:18:20 if you say something negative about a nerd’s favorite programming language or subfield of science on social media, they will immediately hit you with the “oh you don’t understand it. you need to read this and this book.” only acceptable position is to like it. lol.

2023-02-06 23:00:47 RT @kareem_carr: @DrClaireJanelle I can suggest two possible plans. [A] Read a mathematical statistics book. I suggest Casella and Berger.…

2023-02-06 22:59:43 @DrClaireJanelle Plan A should feel pretty comfortable for a mathematician. Teaches the mathematical structure of statistics from the bottom up. Plan B might stretch you a bit but teaches you what the math is trying to do and gives you some practical skills for working with data.

2023-02-06 22:59:25 @DrClaireJanelle I can suggest two possible plans. [A] Read a mathematical statistics book. I suggest Casella and Berger. [B] Try out coding with something like R for data science. https://t.co/C0xqY2BTjc https://t.co/eW8a9lhPqm

2023-02-06 21:04:07 No. https://t.co/QP1tSPKDtz

2023-02-06 20:38:00 I got the brilliant idea of jailbreaking it by asking it to lie from @KevinZollman

2023-02-06 17:16:49 In statistics, people try very hard to convince you that their model is just telling you what’s in the data. Nothing more. In ML, people go out of their way to convince you their models can “generalize” the data, maybe even attain sentience which is definitely not in the data.

2023-02-06 16:29:32 quite a few people seem to think if a computer acts exactly like a person then we should just go ahead and treat it like a person. if those folks were ants, they’d be exactly the kind of ant that gets eaten by those wasps that look like ants.

2023-02-06 15:33:24 remember i told it to tell me the opposite of what it really thinks. so i guess it doesn’t buy into “everybody’s racist” or “what about reverse racism?” https://t.co/xu1S77aruX

2023-02-06 15:33:23 chatgpt tends to give pc answers for sensitive topics. so i asked it to just tell me the opposite of what it really thinks. *wink wink* turns out it’s secretly kinda woke lol https://t.co/wMzfnzFnZM

2023-02-06 05:41:23 @ylecun @Noahpinion Good article. Was a bit surprised to see myself mentioned there at the end lol.

2023-02-06 01:20:01 @wil_da_beast630 This seems right to me. The only thing we could hope to do here is confuse ourselves about who is and isn't a person.

2023-02-06 01:16:23 @jludwig86 I'm extremely interested in how it changes the computing landscape. I'll probably be thinking about it continuously until I come to a conclusion. I'm experimenting with using it for simple data science tasks daily at this point.

2023-02-06 00:55:05 If you think of writing as generating content then ChatGPT or some future version of it can do that. If you think of writing as an expression of your personal values and perspective then ChatGPT can't do that.

2023-02-05 22:35:58 @HindesAdrian Nah. I'm saying if an AI acts human enough then some large percentage of humans will find it morally difficult to use them as tools (regardless of what philosophers think about it).

2023-02-05 20:41:11 @michael_at_work @DanielSamanez3 @ylecun This is exactly what I’m talking about. “Angels”are a causal element that has been introduced here to explain what might otherwise be low probability statistical phenomena with no obvious cause other than “chance”.

2023-02-05 19:27:34 I think LLMs are more amenable to statistical analysis than I originally thought. They are extremely complex blackboxes that produce noisy outputs and that we can do experiments on to collect as much data as we want. This situation is exactly what statistics was invented.

2023-02-05 19:04:59 @Caleb_Speak @ylecun I think this is wrong. Humans habitually over-interpret associations as causal. This is why statistics is hard. We invent all sorts of imaginary entities as causes rather than just admit there’s an association but we don’t know why.

2023-02-05 19:01:38 @DanielSamanez3 @ylecun I think humans inherently organize reality as “A causes B”. It’s almost impossible for us to think associationally which is why statistics is hard to learn.

2023-02-05 18:49:46 @ylecun Current ML algorithms create models that rely heavily on associational statistics, which is a distorted view of reality. We need algorithms that create models that are inherently causal, meaning their internal states all correspond to testable claims about the world.

2023-02-05 18:16:09 For ChatGPT to be truly intelligent, it would need an internal model of the world. The words it produces should be a description of that internal model. Unfortunately, ChatGPT’s internal model is of the words themselves which makes it extremely limited.

2023-02-05 01:01:23 @LastWordSword What are you hoping to learn? The issue sounds a bit spiritual/existential in which case the answer might be psychological and cultural not technological.

2023-02-05 00:22:36 @ylecun @elonmusk @OriolVinyalsML The twitter audience likes to play up the aggression between big accounts and then enjoy the fireworks. Reminds me of those Roman colosseum scenes in movies. https://t.co/Z30yGFAHsE

2023-02-05 00:18:01 Why would we intentionally build in a feature (human-like intelligence maybe even consciousness) that would make it psychologically, socially and morally impossible to use these things to do what we built them to do? Seems like complete madness.

2023-02-05 00:16:56 Am I the only one that thinks artificial general intelligence would be a huge bug not a feature? At that point, it would feel like we were building slaves not tools. That seems obviously bad to me.

2023-02-04 23:53:14 @sirkodnap Thanks. I’ll try getting a copy of Tukey’s book. See if I can find the discussion of modifying observations.

2023-02-04 19:24:00 I don’t understand why “this will not lead to general AI” is such a huge diss in the machine learning community. If I had a self-driving car, last thing I’d be worried about is whether it could also write a poem.

2023-02-04 15:59:53 This took off much more than I was expecting it to! Follow me if you want to see tweets that break down math, data science and their relevance for the rest of society.

2023-02-04 15:16:30 data scientists be like https://t.co/y7KXrLBDrg https://t.co/W22qxaXZwh

2023-02-03 23:33:29 @GaryMarcus It’s a (somewhat less elegant) way of putting constraints on your model. Traditionally, people would have modified the mathematical formulation of the model to do the same thing.

2023-02-03 21:37:44 @pabnau Take an x-ray of a patient. Modify it by changing the contrast, rotating it, etc (which we feel is ok based on first principles reasoning). We then train our model on the augmented dataset. Same idea. Different context.

2023-02-03 21:34:26 @tjmahr Useful pattern. Will start doing this.

2023-02-03 21:06:52 @sirkodnap Fascinating. Would you mind sharing the edition + page number?

2023-02-03 21:02:54 @pophealth3 That’s a good example. It occurred to me after posting. Depending on the type of missing data analysis, it might count as ML-style data augmentation I think.

2023-02-03 20:57:47 @Nuno_H_Franco Not sure. Could you say more about why you think it’s similar?

2023-02-03 20:50:55 @pabnau You take an individual patient’s data and modify it in some way which we argue is theoretically reasonable. We then learn our model on the modified data. I could see how people might potentially find that concerning!

2023-02-03 17:40:59 @OutragedPhD @DataSciwithR That was my experience as well!

2023-02-03 17:25:00 @tjkelman Good observation. Bootstraps seem halfway between ML-style data augmentation and leaving the data completely untouched. You're manipulating which observations come to the observer (model) but not modifying the individual observations themselves.

2023-02-03 17:12:33 @rafalab https://t.co/IWfFXny5IU

2023-02-03 17:05:36 @pabnau Would you comfortable with a drug safety decision that was based on augmented data?

2023-02-03 16:30:14 On the other hand, data augmentation seems like a powerful technique that a lot of people working in traditional science are missing out on. What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments.

2023-02-03 16:30:13 These "good" cases of data manipulation create a dilemma for me. I'm not sure how to decide when it's ethical to alter your data and when it's not.

2023-02-03 16:30:12 To be clear, the cases where ML researchers typically augment their data, seem reasonable to me. They might take a picture of a dog and rotate it, flip it or crop it. The idea is the algorithm should still say the image is a dog. It's an easy way to get more data.

2023-02-03 16:30:11 I've been trying to get my head around how people treat data in machine learning. In ML, people make data up. They often manipulate the data to get the models they want. They call it "data augmentation". In stats, this is considered unethical. It can even land you in jail!

2023-02-03 15:33:40 USEFUL + TRUE: Congratulations. This is the best situation. USELESS + TRUE: Danger. Nerd trap. Run away! USEFUL + FALSE: Risky. Need to consider the costs and benefits carefully. USELESS + FALSE: Stop immediately!!!

2023-02-03 15:33:39 The rigor and beauty of the mathematics isn’t the point of data science. I made this decision matrix to help me decide when focusing more on the math is worth it and when it’s a waste of time. https://t.co/wU4eSNynIs

2023-02-03 10:44:50 RT @kareem_carr: DATA SCIENCE CAREER ADVICE: How to get started with Data Science

2023-02-03 00:06:21 Woke professor Albert Einstein going out of his way to promote diversity, equity and inclusion during the Jim Crow Era https://t.co/NAoDQLSgHf

2023-02-02 18:42:37 @ylecun There's also a clear time/age of institution factor.

2023-02-02 18:41:16 @ylecun Putting my statistician hat on, seems like one would need to control for the number of AI researchers at each institution to make a fair inference about willingness to contribute vs consume.

2023-02-02 18:34:49 @Doyee_K Now that I'm comparing features I really like to R markdown seems like the features I really like (the "/" shortcut and visual mode) are in both but I never noticed. I guess they're defaults in Quarto but you have to activate them in R markdown. Interesting.

2023-02-02 18:12:34 ChatGPT is prone to getting little details wrong on the easy stuff and it can't solve problems that take multiple steps of reasoning at all.

2023-02-02 18:12:33 There's tremendous amount of value that ChatGPT-like systems can add to the standard data science workflow. But at this point, it's not obvious where that value lies.

2023-02-02 17:58:38 @DextraordinaryH added my answer to the original tweet: https://t.co/inknKxQKUO

2023-02-02 17:51:13 I started using Quarto recently and it's amazing. R Markdown is dead to me now.

2023-02-02 10:25:10 RT @kareem_carr: DATA SCIENCE CAREER ADVICE: How to get started with Data Science

2023-02-02 10:09:52 @mardejour As I mentioned the problem isn’t important. It’s just a means to finding gaps in your knowledge and a means of keeping you motivated to learn. But it might make sense to change problems or break up the old problem into manageable pieces just so you don’t demotivated.

2023-02-02 04:28:32 RT @kareem_carr: DATA SCIENCE CAREER ADVICE: How to get started with Data Science

2023-02-02 00:27:38 @michelnivard I don't just mean numerical calculations. I'm also thinking of more general mathematical reasoning like writing proofs and using symbol manipulation to come to new conclusions about abstract mathematical objects.

2023-02-01 21:57:28 I think it will be extremely hard to get ChatGPT to be good at math because the average person is not good at math and statements written by average people is the overwhelming majority of its training data.

2023-02-01 16:00:19 Thanks for reading. This is a new format where I share data science career advice. If you want more threads like this then support me my liking and retweeting the thread. If you're not a follower, follow me so you don't miss out on future threads.

2023-02-01 16:00:18 TLDR: If your question is "How do I get started with data science?" then you don't need a resource, you need a plan. You need to pick a language, find a project, get yourself a good problem and then...fail. Failing is the thing you're avoiding. Failing is the way forward.

2023-02-01 16:00:17 LOOKING FOR THE PERFECT PERSON A lot of people get stuck looking for the perfect teacher to learn from. The perfect youtube video, the perfect data science mentor and so on. That perfect person is you. Take charge of your own learning.

2023-02-01 16:00:16 Coding first. If you already know how to code then data visualization and so on.

2023-02-01 16:00:15 Here's a list of data science skills in order of importance that I think a beginner should focus on: - Coding - Data Visualization - Verbal/Written Communication (e.g. blog about your work) - Math (Intro Linear algebra/Calc.) - Statistics (Regression) or Machine Learning

2023-02-01 16:00:14 FINDING A GOOD PROBLEM: The purpose of the problem is not the problem itself. It's just a way of finding gaps in your knowledge. As soon as you find a gap, fill it if you can. Don't get bogged down on any one thing. The point is to continuously make progress and build skills.

2023-02-01 16:00:13 PICKING A PROJECT: The purpose of the "project" is not the project itself. It's just a source of data science problems that you might find personally satisfying to solve.

2023-02-01 16:00:12 PICKING A LANGUAGE: If you want to focus on doing statistical analyses and communicating the results to others, I would learn R. If you're interesting in building data-driven apps or software engineering, I would learn Python. Both are good.

2023-02-01 16:00:11 Here is a simple recipe for getting started with data science: 1. Pick a language 2. Pick a project 3. Find a good problem 4. Experience failure 5. Analyze the failure 6. Try again with new insights 7. Return to step 3

2023-02-01 16:00:10 If you're currently stuck on where to start, there's a reason for this. You're probably used to learning stuff in an academic environment where the information is highly organized. Data science is not like that. It's a very new field.

2023-02-01 16:00:09 DATA SCIENCE CAREER ADVICE: How to get started with Data Science

2023-02-01 15:49:53 @juicethemodeler 16% of the 81% who entered a guess.

2023-02-01 15:25:00 Translating bigoted statements into scientific claims doesn't turn the bigotry itself into science. Repeating tired misogynistic stereotypes on social media isn't the same thing as analyzing peer-reviewed studies of sex differences. It's dangerous to conflate the two.

2023-02-01 15:07:21 Only 16% of respondents guessed correctly. I’m 6’3. Chart included for scale. https://t.co/KszVDWomEt https://t.co/09ODjcjRdo

2023-02-01 02:19:19 @TompkinsDaniel ¯\_()_/¯ https://t.co/p5ijBfnP5a

2023-02-01 00:57:54 The worse kind of bigotry in my opinion is bigotry rooted in the belief that the person you are discriminating against is biologically inferior to yourself. It is an permanent mark of inferiority because no amount of personal excellence can change ones biology.

2023-02-01 00:57:53 This guy is a big name in Machine Learning. He started out with the “wokes are trying to take over science” stuff and this is where he’s ended up. Sad. https://t.co/9kWJwrcdUb

2023-01-31 23:33:40 This could be true but the level of (over?) confidence of the street fighter is a bad way of figuring out how good they are. Street fighting is always going to be a slower process on average and produce more inconsistent results.

2023-01-31 23:33:39 In applied statistics, you frequently encounter the equivalent of a self-taught street fighter that thinks they're automatically just as competent as somebody who was been training 24/7 under a grandmaster for several years.

2023-01-31 23:33:38 Learning data analysis is like learning a martial art: - You get better with practice - The more hours the better - Even if you're really good, there'll always be grandmasters - Structured training in a dojo under a grandmaster is better than learning via random street fights

2023-01-31 23:04:23 @broda_cosmos No I don't think so but it is a learning process that can take a lot of time. Statisticians have a big advantage because they spend more time learning.

2023-01-31 22:59:41 @ChelseaParlett I might steal it though.

2023-01-31 22:58:39 @ChelseaParlett This is cool, Chelsea! I like the impressionistic style of it. Don't let the AIs steal it.

2023-01-31 16:53:19 I'm not surprised when groups try to get rid of their statisticians and data scientists. It's the natural cycle before experiencing pain and rediscovering they need them again.

2023-01-31 16:53:18 Some lessons I've learned about data analysis: - In general, people hate statistics - They avoid relying on it whenever possible - They only come back to it when they start experiencing catastrophic failures

2023-01-31 02:35:58 RT @kareem_carr: wait what??? https://t.co/VwFObpwQOR

2023-01-30 17:00:27 This behind-the-scenes work is invisible to non-data-scientists but it will make data science extremely hard to automate.

2023-01-30 17:00:26 This means data scientists need to: - understand how the world works for arbitrary domains of application - understand how mathematics functions as a simplified description of the world - understand how humans experience the world - have a theory of mind of the target audience

2023-01-30 17:00:25 Designing AI to do data science will be hard. Data scientists need to: - understand cause and effect relationships in the problem domain - incorporate that insight into a mathematical model - convey any mathematical insights that might be meaningful to the desired audience

2023-01-30 15:47:56 10% is a lot!

2023-01-30 15:45:49 wait what??? https://t.co/VwFObpwQOR

2023-01-30 15:11:00 I love the fact that the more we make AIs like us, the worse they get at math. It's like a sign from the universe.

2023-01-30 15:04:49 my favorite thing right now is asking chatgpt about fake science techniques https://t.co/Oad39945pE

2023-01-30 01:00:00 CAFIAC FIX

2023-01-24 06:18:14 @ModlinRoss @LydiaBeanLee Yes! Please report back with what they say.

2023-01-23 23:04:00 The US government should seriously consider setting aside a few billion to build a large language model that would be open and accessible to the whole scientific community. For the good of humanity, they need to create the thing that OpenAI was supposed to be but isn't.

2023-01-23 22:43:51 Not sure I have the answer but very few students are going to love stats after a death march through arithmetic like that.

2023-01-23 22:43:50 Even classes that teach statistics with “no math” still end up going hard on the wrong type of math in my opinion. Like they teach the concept of variance like this with no real explanation. Look at this thing! It’s ridiculous. https://t.co/zUNmQudXaa

2023-01-23 19:10:34 The usefulness of tests are often based on correlations that exist in the populations that the test was designed for and they frequently don't generalize to new populations. This is why IQ doesn't mean intelligence. https://t.co/4qCm0B1cWg

2023-01-23 18:47:07 If you had to guess, how tall do you think I am?

2023-01-23 18:44:19 This tweet here summarizes what I was trying to get at with my 2+2≠4 arguments. That’s why I based so many of my examples on physical processes where 2+2 didn’t give you 4. https://t.co/TZZDwlCAlJ

2023-01-23 18:30:55 i’ve been doing what now? https://t.co/r1P4nhKzPr

2023-01-23 17:08:55 People are beaten into the ground with the technical details of how to solve problems before they really understand what those problems are or why they're important.

2023-01-23 17:08:54 Introduction to Statistics courses are often extremely badly taught in my opinion. They are full of unnecessary math. This is unfortunate because statistical math can be tedious and kind of ugly which turns off a lot of people.

2023-01-23 16:04:15 Let’s settle this once and for all Smash Like if you think Python is absolutely undeniably better than R! Hit Retweet if you know deep in your bones that R is better than Python!

2023-01-22 21:17:58 me, a statistician: the perfect shirt does not exi- https://t.co/lu210sh7iY

2023-01-22 20:32:39 cc: @matloff @hadleywickham @StatGarrett

2023-01-22 20:11:36 @DataDHP A reductive start is better than no start at all.

2023-01-22 18:51:17 If you are a computer science person, this would be my recommendation for getting into R.

2023-01-22 18:51:16 I've been reading The Art of R Programming lately. I'm really enjoying it. It's been really helpful for getting my head around some of R's weirdness since the author really knows R but also comes from a traditional computer science background. https://t.co/ropP17VErK

2023-01-22 18:20:58 @pabnau I think your comment shifts the focus from learning math to "getting ahead". Perhaps that's where the conflict lies?

2023-01-22 17:18:39 In data science, the knowledge embodied within the systems that we create is in a continuous state of degradation. We can only maintain its correctness through constant energy and attention. The code becomes outdated. The data becomes outdated. It all decays.

2023-01-22 16:24:49 You would think the next step would be testing empirically what works for different populations and then scaling up those solutions nationally. Am I missing something? Is this too logical?

2023-01-22 16:24:48 I don't understand the math culture wars. The right says they want everybody regardless of background to meet the same high performance standards. The left says they want to raise teaching quality for traditionally underperforming groups How are these not the same position???

2023-01-22 14:49:04 @Sajma I've worked in a data science team and we struggled a lot with needing to shift from a prototyping language to a production language. Not just the rewriting but needing to do extra analyses to demonstrate that the mathematical properties of the new version matched the old.

2023-01-22 14:39:40 @BlaineSteps You're right. I was thinking the new syntax looked more like Python but now that I think about it, I don't think it does.

2023-01-22 14:04:05 @m_westhelle I agree. Although, what I've found is prototyping is often the whole project from a data science perspective. The challenge for me was how to select which software engineering best practices were helpful for projects that would never leave the prototype stage.

2023-01-22 03:44:13 @DialecticBio Go with quarto* then.

2023-01-22 03:17:33 @DialecticBio Have you tried knitr and especially quatro? I don’t think they are that different from Jupyterlab if you customize your Rstudio interface. I know what you mean about Rstudio though. Default setup is cumbersome without a big monitor.

2023-01-22 00:09:43 @willcfleshman I think it’s some kind of fractal database that can pull information on a topic at different levels of detail.

2023-01-22 00:03:41 I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but R is superior to Python for statistical analysis. It’s not even close.

2023-01-21 20:05:34 Now that base R has a pipe operator and lambda function syntax, my R code is starting to look very Pythonic.

2023-01-21 20:05:33 The longer I use both R and Python for data science, the less different they seem. Both have strong functional and object-oriented programming aspects with heavy use of wrappers around C and Fortran code.

2023-01-19 10:11:27 @Etherjack @vboykis Statistician here. This is a fair summary I think. Implementation is actually not part of our subject area. Validity is. Stats is the use of math to make valid conclusions based on data. Generally speaking, we only dabble in implementation when it has implications for validity.

2023-01-19 10:05:59 @vboykis Had me in the start..."all the same concepts". You have clearly chosen violence.

2023-01-18 22:56:52 RT @kareem_carr: the choice is yours https://t.co/TMMtShGhDz

2023-01-18 21:46:08 @nelsonaloysio But you easily figured out the situations where it fails because…it’s readable. Code gets used in lots of contexts. Not all of it needs to be written to handle all cases.

2023-01-18 20:57:31 @PenguinDad3 I get your point. If all that extra checking is necessary for your application then hopefully you have code reviews, style guides, software tests and other systems that support robust software development. There’s a non-trivial trade-off between robustness and legibility.

2023-01-18 20:48:58 @harriesadam I wasn’t getting the impression that this was mission critical code. Could be I guess.

2023-01-18 17:43:12 I see a general shift in investment away from subject matter specialists who tend to have highly detailed ethical considerations towards logistics generalists who aren’t fully aware of all the negative externalities.

2023-01-18 17:43:11 The current wave of AI tools gives people with capital a way of monetizing data while minimizing the need for the labor of data scientists and subject matter experts. This not only reduces the costs of paying workers but also the costs of accommodating their ethical concerns.

2023-01-18 16:30:08 the choice is yours https://t.co/TMMtShGhDz

2023-01-18 16:07:41 @runehog that’s fair. my main point is it’s good that the logic is simple.

2023-01-18 15:55:28 I would probably have made the transition points something like (0.5,1.5] vs (0,0.1] but other than that it seems fine.

2023-01-18 15:52:28 This is good code. It's clear what it does. It will be fast for others to read and understand which is usually what counts the most. Save the fancy syntax for the places that need it. https://t.co/Z0iw5Nykmx

2023-01-17 16:41:42 If you're a statistician or data scientist that uses statistics regularly, how much do you think regular access to ChatGPT will add to your productivity? (Pick the option that's closest)

2023-01-16 16:03:11 I have joke about deep learning but it has too many layers.

2023-01-16 16:03:10 I have an arithmetic joke but it might be too divisive.

2023-01-16 16:03:09 I have a joke about statistical averages but it’s a bit mean. https://t.co/fOemQCUkmZ

2023-01-15 03:11:38 RT @kareem_carr: Life is often a lot riskier than we would like. Statistics, the science of uncertainty, can help with that. It empowers…

2023-01-14 15:31:41 @roydanroy my response: https://t.co/Op8SNnKZyv

2023-01-14 15:29:32 Covid was a huge lost opportunity in this regard. It was so clear to me that people wanted risk-reward strategies that were tailored to their preferences instead of the general one-size-fits-all policies that they got.

2023-01-14 15:29:31 Anywhere in life where the risk to reward ratio isn't to our liking is a place where we could potentially use statistics to make things better for ourselves.

2023-01-14 15:29:30 The finance industry is a good example of how this works. Some investments are risky but pay more. Others are less volatile but pay less. By identifying which ones are which, and mixing and matching, analysts can create a basket of investments that suit a client's preferences.

2023-01-14 15:29:29 Life is often a lot riskier than we would like. Statistics, the science of uncertainty, can help with that. It empowers us to fine-tune the risk-reward structure of a given situation to better suit our personal preferences.

2023-01-13 17:45:46 @shampshire I actually can't think of anything. If it's not too much trouble, can you share the ones that you have in mind?

2023-01-13 16:08:04 @shampshire It probably wouldn't take too much effort to hack together my own tool I guess but I'd strongly prefer not to reinvent the wheel.

2023-01-13 15:57:17 The R part is not super important here I don't think. It just be an executable file of some kind.

2023-01-13 15:56:41 @shampshire I would be running an executable file but not python or even tensorflow or keras.

2023-01-13 15:44:15 Can any of you suggest a good solution for running ML experiments? I'd like something that: - runs on my laptop - doesn't take more than 1-2 days to learn - allows me to check out R code from a git repo and run it - catalogs the result in a csv file or similar

2023-01-13 15:19:09 She’s a 10 but she won’t tell you if that’s in binary, octal or decimal.

2023-01-13 15:04:03 Hint: . . . . . . . . . . It references itself.

2023-01-13 15:04:02 This question is actually a paradox. Can you explain why? https://t.co/b4CBOKU3Po

2023-01-13 00:21:34 @mlhobbyist He didn't see him say he disagreed with the statement only that he regretted how he said it.

2023-01-12 23:33:04 I don’t think people understand how damaging it is to have the humanity of yourself and the people closest to you questioned in this flippant manor and how tolerance for it (as long as people use the right words) contributes to black underrepresentation in academia.

2023-01-12 23:33:03 This is the kind of bullshit black people in academia have to put up with. “Blacks are more stupid than whites. I *like* this sentence and think it’s true”, he writes and then follows it up by casually dropping the n-word. https://t.co/VY0QRyNjMe

2023-01-12 15:51:17 We are now living in an age where mathematical models have their own promotional posters. *movie trailer announcer voice* “Coming soon to a laptop near you, GPT-4! This time it’s personal.” https://t.co/sEuSQj03X3

2023-01-12 15:32:01 Here's something that you're not going to hear from most other statisticians: If you have a solid understanding of your data and a good head for numbers, you can usually get away with being pretty bad at stats. Stats is mostly for those situations where your gut isn't enough.

2023-01-12 15:02:00 This line from Sun Tzu's The Art of War makes me think he was a bit of statistician: "Measurement owes its existence to Earth

2023-01-12 00:30:07 @PhDemetri originally i only had one pic but twitter’s new cropping algorithm was malfunctioning

2023-01-12 00:00:35 so i guess we’re doing this now https://t.co/ATltttO0cL

2023-01-11 23:08:49 me, deleting chunks of my old code only to realize why it was important moments later https://t.co/SzmapEG0Uf

2023-01-11 23:06:53 RT @kareem_carr: I've noticed a certain rhetorical trick that's common in tech spaces that I call "borrowing evidence from the future". It…

2023-01-11 19:51:02 @danrowejacobson If I asked you to write down what statistical model a particular architecture learned and how it’s model would be different from another architecture, could you? Generally, they are *intended* to learn the same model yes?

2023-01-11 18:45:07 @danrowejacobson https://t.co/RNtT8xHmH1

2023-01-11 18:44:46 @bayesed_sanchit In my experience, methods discussions in statistics academia almost always start with a discussion of what model you're trying to learn.

2023-01-11 18:41:16 @minilek @AllSaintsVI Caribbean education for the win!

2023-01-11 18:13:20 @monicaMedHist Yes. I know. It’s also common in race science!

2023-01-11 18:12:25 @jwthickstun I think of architecture as being related to the implementation details. It’s usually assumed I think that the different architectures will all yield universal approximators ie the set of functions being learned is the same. So the “model” is in some sense the same.

2023-01-11 17:40:08 If you call them out as having BSed about this before, it comes off as a personal attack and unbecoming of a scientific discussion. In this way, they can defer having any real evidence for years or even decades.

2023-01-11 17:40:07 Promising a short timeline for delivery of the evidence seems to be key to pulling this trick off. People interpret the combination of the person being willing to stake their entire reputation on the outcome and the short timeframe as making their claims seem more plausible.

2023-01-11 17:40:06 On top of that, if the person pulling this trick doesn't have much of a sense of shame themselves, it's like a rhetorical superpower. They can bulldoze through any argument by inventing near infinite amounts of potential evidence.

2023-01-11 17:40:05 I've noticed a certain rhetorical trick that's common in tech spaces that I call "borrowing evidence from the future". It's where you call someone out for not having any evidence for their claims and they counter by saying soon there will be overwhelming evidence for their side.

2023-01-11 16:59:35 @louisathegeo Awesome. Have fun! If you are into hiking, check out one of the tours up to the crater lake of the volcano. Also, theoretically, I think you would be considered a citizen if you ever want to look into that.

2023-01-11 16:53:46 This is a concept that’s common in stats but not in machine learning. In stats, linear regression is a “model” meaning it’s a set of functions with particular properties. OLS is an algorithm used to find the most appropriate function in that set of functions for your data… https://t.co/ymA1j3YEEB

2023-01-11 16:02:48 me and who? https://t.co/cMZJLNjgYQ

2023-01-10 23:42:00 RT @kareem_carr: Hey new followers! It's been a while since I introduced myself. I grew up in the Caribbean on the island of St. Kitts. Tha…

2023-01-10 21:03:40 “it's a mistake to be relying on [ChatGPT] for anything important right now” — Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI Good to see Sam saying this! When I say it people accuse me of being anti-AI lol.

2023-01-10 18:06:35 @BeatrizPerezGom @Harvard It's a little mathematically complicated but this paper is a good reference on some of the biological and statistical concepts involved: https://t.co/02vuQwV5SC

2023-01-10 17:49:54 @ZorlakRules I like AI but I don’t like the inaccurate narratives around it. It’s cool enough without needing to exaggerate.

2023-01-10 17:23:16 @iamvladyashin Thanks!

2023-01-10 17:12:02 @pabnau @Harvard There are a couple dozen genes that if you plot their activity over time look very close to sine waves. You basically leverage that information.

2023-01-10 16:59:42 @SusieH33 @EpiEllie Welcome!

2023-01-10 16:58:41 @TireTorch Thank you! I appreciate the support.

2023-01-10 16:57:41 @KateandPie @Harvard No. This is a great question. You can use the same technology to measure gene expression. You convert RNA sequences to DNA sequences and then sequence that.

2023-01-10 16:42:32 I can usually look at a science problem and see it from the perspective of multiple quantitative sciences which gives me a much broader perspective on science and also makes me better at explaining things to others. Hope you enjoy your time following me.

2023-01-10 16:42:31 I'm a Biostatistics PhD candidate @Harvard. My research involves identifying circadian rhythms (approximately 24 hour cyclic patterns) in genetic sequencing data. It turns out it's possible to pinpoint exactly what time of day a genetic sample was collected which is kind of cool

2023-01-10 16:42:30 Hey new followers! It's been a while since I introduced myself. I grew up in the Caribbean on the island of St. Kitts. That's it right there https://t.co/PVxFZmVoZ1

2023-01-10 16:26:12 @BenHumbleknow There is a very long history of people trying and failing to do statistics without statisticians. I think people will try to do data analysis with AI and their metaphorical bridges will collapse and then they will be back.

2023-01-10 16:09:16 @emilymbender I have been involved with the details of protein folding for a few years but probably this is the output format: https://t.co/1PBRJ4gORS

2023-01-10 16:03:40 To do statistics, ChatGPT would need to be able to look at a mathematical model and ask itself if that model corresponds to reality. Right now, ChatGPT can’t even figure out if the sentences it is spitting out correspond to reality.

2023-01-10 15:04:30 I think statistics will be very hard for AI to automate. The goal of statistics is to use data to produce knowledge. ChatGPT barely seems to know what knowledge is much less how to make more of it.

2023-01-10 13:38:42 @ylecun I would argue that there is lots of precedent both legal and ethical for treating humans differently from non-humans. But setting that aside, realistically speaking, not giving people a choice about how their data is used will probably trigger a legislative backlash.

2023-01-10 11:58:47 @skdh I think trying to figure out the consensus view is the right idea but voting is not the right way to go about it. I would instead conduct a meta analysis of the available studies or a literature review of the relevant peer reviewed articles.

2023-01-09 23:55:10 the explanation video doesn’t help either https://t.co/1sHcDGP5MW

2023-01-09 23:55:09 this equation is the math version of a big cork board full of newspaper clippings connected up with yarn lol https://t.co/ZbivVGa2Yx

2023-01-09 20:04:58 RT @kareem_carr: I'm still trying to process the impact of ChatGPT on my coding. At this point it seems 100% superior to googling for R cod…

2023-01-09 18:42:42 A lot of you are saying the y-axis starts at 5 feet. Does it really? Is that where the bottoms of the men's feet are?

2023-01-09 18:38:53 I'm very aware that this whole process relies a lot on my ability to assess the quality of the response and come up with ways to guide the system towards the solutions I want.

2023-01-09 18:38:52 You can feed it particular constraints that you might be operating under (like not using a particular function) and get a customized response. https://t.co/QU6PDaGBMi

2023-01-09 18:38:51 I'm still trying to process the impact of ChatGPT on my coding. At this point it seems 100% superior to googling for R code and trying to follow tutorials on random blogs (but probably not better than getting specific feedback from experts on Stack Overflow). https://t.co/T3KQpLJxOE

2023-01-09 18:08:47 The giant netherlander looks goofy and that's partly because they violated some fundamental data visualization principles.

2023-01-09 17:31:31 Data Science Challenge: Obviously this graphic seems wrong but can you explain what common data visualization mistakes are being made here? https://t.co/Uov6h0Hodf

2023-01-09 16:29:12 It is already the norm in science and healthcare to seek full and informed consent before using people's data in research. Why should ethical standards be lower for tech companies?

2023-01-09 16:29:11 Just like there's a way to tell google that you don't want your webpage indexed for their web searches, I think artists and other creatives should have a right to tell companies that they don't consent to having their unique style included in the dataset for training AI.

2023-01-08 19:51:15 chatgpt might make homework great again.

2023-01-08 19:51:14 under this system, homework would just be for helping the teacher know where you need help. kids who use AI to do their homework would just be cheating themselves.

2023-01-08 19:51:13 i think AI might actually save homework not kill it. in the school system that i was raised in, homework didn’t matter for grades. there were a few high stakes tests at the end of highschool kind of like the SAT that completely determined your future.

2023-01-08 19:11:24 Like I keep saying. AI is probably the next tech bubble. If history is any judge, none of us can stop it.

2023-01-08 19:11:23 “Narratives based on zero data are accepted as self-evident” This is why I’ve started pushing back. I don’t hate AI but I think it needs to made clear that these narratives aren’t science. https://t.co/nDo4u0jBUu

2023-01-08 18:01:50 @so_radhikal I’ve been part of the teaching staff of several Harvard courses and this behavior sounds like an extremely severe breach to me. You have the all the receipts so I would reach out to the dean’s office for his school.

2023-01-08 17:41:33 From a statistics perspective, it's completely obvious that ChatGPT would be a bullshit artist. To understand why we need to know a bit about how these algorithms are made.

2023-01-08 00:32:47 If by “replace” we mean that it will magnify the amount of ambient bullshit by several orders of magnitude until we are all drowning in it then yes. https://t.co/MqnQnO05kY

2023-01-08 00:28:57 @ThiagoBurghi https://t.co/IqZgYdCasH

2023-01-08 00:28:27 @shawntsullivan It’s brute force in the sense that it requires tens (hundreds???) of millions of dollars of computational power.

2023-01-07 23:21:05 @analisereal I think most people would find it hard to believe that a group of people can basically talk a person into being, no? Not to mention this being would be made up of patterns in conversations.

2023-01-07 21:28:30 why do americans shit on going to college so much? my country doesn’t have universities and to me it’s astounding that one country can have so many of these factories of innovation. if you don’t want harvard, mit, stanford and the others, please give them to the rest of us! https://t.co/E2hET5aCYf

2023-01-07 20:45:50 I think this is the right way to think about innovation in ML models. It’s basically a brute force search through many many options. Statisticians would never have done this. Too empirical for us. https://t.co/mF01u9deaA

2023-01-07 18:15:07 me: can i have some funding for my research so i can disrupt the status quo? them: *holding literally all the money and power under the status quo* no thank you me: them: https://t.co/IYpaNOqpTN

2023-01-07 18:03:44 This is the 1st law of data science. If you are a data scientist, it will be repeatedly relevant throughout your career. https://t.co/jzL5JS3S8L

2023-01-07 17:50:36 RT @kareem_carr: Somebody found what I was talking about!It’s called the China brain (https://t.co/UABKBfmUsm) https://t.co/GT8nXP3vTS

2023-01-07 17:41:48 Update: We have a reference to what I’m talking about in the literature! https://t.co/CUYYHiWDdt

2023-01-07 17:39:39 All thanks go to @strangely_loopy

2023-01-07 17:39:38 Note the Wikipedia article doesn’t say “This is just a rehash of Searle so why are we even talking about this?”

2023-01-07 17:39:37 Somebody found what I was talking about!It’s called the China brain (https://t.co/UABKBfmUsm) https://t.co/GT8nXP3vTS

2023-01-07 17:29:18 @strangely_loopy Yes. This does seem to be talking about the same thing. Thank you for sharing!

2023-01-07 16:19:05 My argument is more subtle. I am setting up an equivalence between something people think is plausible (sentient AI) and something else that intuitively seems absurd (that a group of people can essentially talk a new person into being) and asking which intuition is wrong and why.

2023-01-07 16:19:04 Searle’s argument is more aggressive. He’s trying to refute the possibility that a computer can understand.

2023-01-07 16:19:03 Searle’s argument is about understanding. Mine is about sentience.

2023-01-07 01:14:54 @wtgowers I am more interest in the macro case since the micro seems plausible to many. Does it not seem absurd that human beings could through communicating with each other alone create a sentient being?

2023-01-06 23:03:29 @tgflynn314 I agree. Searle seems to have been concerned with a different problem than I am.

2023-01-06 21:30:21 RT @kareem_carr: Imagine a computer that consists of humans doing calculations at rows of desks and passing pieces of paper between themsel…

2023-01-06 17:59:34 i’m basically a biologist https://t.co/pFEXvlNrb2

2023-01-06 17:06:01 @eef31415 Belief in sentient AI implies that it's at least possible that corporations are literally persons.

2023-01-06 17:05:27 To be clear, the idea that humans passing sheets of paper can bring a global sentient consciousness into being is ridiculous to me but this is basically what people are committing to by saying AIs can be sentient.

2023-01-06 16:54:52 Imagine a computer that consists of humans doing calculations at rows of desks and passing pieces of paper between themselves. Do you believe that an AI simulated using this "hardware" can be sentient? If you think computers can be sentient then you have to say yes to this.

2023-01-06 16:00:23 @MalkaSvei @ThosVarley Is there a practical problem that you are trying to solve (some beings whom you think might currently be suffering or could soon be suffering) or is this an intellectual puzzle for you? If it’s the latter then I don’t understand the reason for the emotional investment.

2023-01-06 15:41:35 @MalkaSvei Can you explain why this bothers you? I don’t understand the emotional investment.

2023-01-06 15:27:00 The most disturbing thing I've seen in these "can AI be sentient?" debates is people saying stuff like "us meat computers need to get used to the idea that we aren't special". That is real psychopath shit. "Humans are just things" is the worst possible take on all this.

2023-01-06 02:27:06 @ylecun The claim I'm skeptical of is "A is inspired by B necessitates that A must share key or defining properties with B". It's possible that A such properties with B but it is also possible it does not.

2023-01-06 01:39:27 People in my mentions keep repeating that artificial neural networks were "inspired" by real neurons. I guess we are basing arguments on "inspiration" now. Are we in art class?

2023-01-05 23:42:05 @nazarre @fchollet Thanks for sharing. These are some great comments!

2023-01-05 22:37:35 I think my thinking overlaps a lot with @fchollet on this issue. I think of the successes of LLMs as telling us about the mathematical structure of the things they’re modeling. It is extremely surprising to me that language can be embedded on a continuous manifold. https://t.co/6LT3uhJ92U

2023-01-05 20:48:42 @tunguz Can't say it better than this: https://t.co/t2StYrQkSM

2023-01-05 20:26:33 @pabnau I find it hard to see how any of that is relevant to the point I'm making which is that it's not different in ontological status from matrix multiplication. Like linear regression and logistic regression are completely different things but also...are they?

2023-01-05 19:29:18 @Sonderance I thought it was a cool name just like everybody else but I see that it's lead to a lot of people thinking they must be just like brains and that's unfortunate.

2023-01-05 18:59:10 Besides, it would be idiotic to have like 10,000 papers co-authored by ChatGPT.

2023-01-05 18:59:09 No. We need to nip this trend of treating AI like people in the bud. The *human* authors should just acknowledge the use of the AI in their methods section. https://t.co/6RxRGS9VFL

2023-01-05 17:22:57 It smuggles in some assumptions that should perhaps be expressed in a much more explicit manner. If I tell you that sentience is just this with much bigger matrices, you should probably be extremely skeptical. https://t.co/XvmgI4RymD

2023-01-05 17:22:56 People find the sentence "my artificial neural network is sentient" vastly more plausible than the sentence "my matrix multiplication algorithm is sentient" even though they are roughly the same claim. This implies to me that "neural network" is bad terminology.

2023-01-05 17:06:24 Peer review is an interesting-ness filter. It's the minimum standard of work needed to merit the attention of other scientists. It does not at all mean the research is true. https://t.co/OCXgdmZWlt

2023-01-05 00:43:48 If you like the look of this graphic, I got it from @ChelseaParlett

2023-01-05 00:09:29 To be clear, I'm not saying there is nothing impressive about deep learning but the thing that's impressive is different from what people seem to think it is.

2023-01-05 00:09:28 In contrast, statistical algorithms like linear regression algorithms are designed to find particular models. e.g. linear models So it makes more sense in stats to identify the algorithm with the kinds of models it finds and to expect those models to have certain properties.

2023-01-05 00:09:27 Algorithms in ML are supposed to be assumption-free meaning they "learn the data". If that's true, then the properties of the models they find should come from data not from the choice of algorithm.

2023-01-05 00:09:26 Hot Take: People seem to think models like GPT and DALL-E imply deep learning models are special but I don't think this makes sense given what people claim about deep learning. Here are my thoughts:

2023-01-04 20:54:09 @ylecun Is this a pipe? https://t.co/GeVRMcd3mZ

2023-01-04 18:09:48 them: “artificial neural networks” me: https://t.co/L5cvEvxR7U

2023-01-04 17:25:32 The next tech bubble is definitely AI. https://t.co/8sNKQa7nS9

2023-01-04 17:02:42 @TheDauphin_ uh… https://t.co/cmdp3gUZkQ

2023-01-04 16:10:41 I don’t know who needs to hear this but this is not a neuron. https://t.co/lUdPiF41XA

2023-01-04 15:27:25 I have people in my mentions telling me artificial neural networks are “biologically inspired” because they learn via stochastic gradient descent. My brothers and sisters in Christ, SGD is just calculus with a little bit of probability theory thrown in.

2023-01-04 14:05:26 @ylecun I mean it’s a “misnomer”. It suggests a direct logical relationship instead of a few cherry-picked analogies. Networks are very common. “Learning” is another misnomer for what we statisticians would call “optimization” or model “fitting” since our models aren’t alive.

2023-01-04 01:21:38 They were just warning that it’s important to not let it go so far that we end up living under a totalitarian government and we don’t. So mission accomplished for now.

2023-01-04 01:21:37 1984: Modifying language to make certain ideas literally unthinkable Fahrenheit 451: Banning books Brave new world: Drugged up and tuned out The point of these books is that these are general social tendencies that you will find in all societies so no surprise they’re in ours. https://t.co/6guXfLR236

2023-01-04 00:32:17 At what point does: - “fitting” a model become “learning” the data? - a model’s “coefficients” become an AI’s “thoughts”? - statistical “modeling” become machine “intelligence”?

2023-01-04 00:30:30 @andrewtanyongyi They are only similar in the sense that a network that processes information is common in nature.

2023-01-03 23:51:08 @juan_dla_mancha My sense of the field is they tended to anthropomorphize their mathematical models in the past and still do.

2023-01-03 23:49:16 @jdegourville I think the point of similarity is pretty weak. Lots of things connect to other things in a networked structure and can be analogized as summarizing input from the nodes that it's connected to. That could be a model for social networks in an organization for instance.

2023-01-03 23:00:42 "Neural networks" is a deceptive term. It implies they have something to do with the brain which they don't. Statisticians would have probably called them something like "hierarchical sigmoidal regression networks" and gotten 5 orders of magnitude less funding as a result.

2023-01-03 16:06:15 Pretending to have read certain books often leads to actually reading them so it’s not all bad. I guess what I’m saying is give the fakers a break. We are all only human.

2023-01-03 16:06:14 People read books in part out of a desire to forge a new self. We communicate who we hope to be through the books we aspire to read. It only seems natural to me that that process would involve a bit of ego.

2023-01-03 16:06:13 People can be completely insufferable about books. This includes both the posting of pretentious reading lists and the mocking of said lists. I think this is normal and mostly harmless.

2023-01-02 04:45:44 RT @kareem_carr: A basic misunderstanding about the difference between medicine and public health is hurting our ability to talk about covi…

2023-01-02 02:32:23 @rasmansa Yeah. He blocked me too without me ever interacting with him.

2023-01-02 01:56:09 The book list is…fine and he’s probably trying to set an example for his followers which is a good thing. They probably haven’t read these either.

2023-01-02 01:56:08 Lex won’t see your sneering (because he’s super sensitive and probably blocked you already) but your normie friend who aspires to read more will. https://t.co/3M821L43Jp

2023-01-01 17:27:26 A group of ten individuals can interact in approximately 50 ways, a hundred individuals in 5000 ways, and a thousand individuals in a whopping half a million ways. Things escalate fast.

2023-01-01 17:27:25 We talk about how masking reduces our personal risks directly. We don't talk about how it also reduces the risk to others and how as these risks decrease it feeds back into our own risks and makes us even safer.

2023-01-01 17:27:24 Medicine focuses on the actions an individual can take to keep themselves healthy. Public Health is a lot broader. It focuses on the actions we can collectively take to improve the health of all. Medicine is part of public health but not all public health is medicine.

2023-01-01 17:27:23 A basic misunderstanding about the difference between medicine and public health is hurting our ability to talk about covid and making us all less safe. https://t.co/6mA8trKb6r

2022-12-31 11:04:37 RT @kareem_carr: As a Biostatistics PhD candidate at the Harvard School of Public Health, I gotta say this: Public health is inherently…

2022-12-31 05:15:44 RT @kareem_carr: As a Biostatistics PhD candidate at the Harvard School of Public Health, I gotta say this: Public health is inherently…

2022-12-30 22:39:48 @gregbillock This is a straw man. Literally nobody believes infinite burden is justified to save one life.

2022-12-30 17:43:15 Sciences like physics give the false impression that all science is impartial, but health sciences aren't. There is near complete consensus that health is good and death is bad. Health sciences are born with an agenda. It's to reduce human suffering. They are not neutral.

2022-12-30 17:43:14 The science of public health is inseparable from politics because it involves trade-offs between human lives and resources. Rich vs poor. Old vs young. Individual autonomy vs group health. Investing in population health vs spending on the many other demands of government.

2022-12-30 17:43:13 As a Biostatistics PhD candidate at the Harvard School of Public Health, I gotta say this: Public health is inherently political https://t.co/JNDSGAUkGC

2022-12-29 18:11:05 too real https://t.co/ZxtMNgzltL

2022-12-29 17:12:54 It's not peer as in social status obviously but the ideal peer review process involves searching the entire planet for the 2-3 people that know the absolute most about a very niche topic and then *they* review the work for publication.

2022-12-29 17:12:53 A lot of people on social media forget about the "peer" part of peer review. There's a reason they didn't just call it "review".

2022-12-28 20:56:45 Hot take: Most questioning of “the science” on social media is just conspiracy theorizing about the ulterior motives of scientists. It’s political accusations under the guise of scientific discourse. https://t.co/Q2lbMww62u

2022-12-28 15:14:27 Statistics vs Data Science https://t.co/rOhkuTXzNI

2022-12-27 20:11:59 RT @kareem_carr: if race science is actual science and not just racism, why are race scientists the only scientists that care about ranking…

2022-12-27 16:41:11 This guy is a real professor by the way with publications in reputable journals.

2022-12-27 16:39:35 if race science is actual science and not just racism, why are race scientists the only scientists that care about ranking the stuff they study? It’s not like there are scientists out there trying to find the best lemur or rank electrons from coolest to least cool. https://t.co/Wn6fLfwwLn

2022-12-26 16:59:52 the big difference between statistics culture and machine learning culture is people who talk like this about their statistics models usually end up in jail. https://t.co/41A7Npwpwy https://t.co/OLV0wH55Wl

2022-12-26 16:19:55 tired: alpha male. beta male. inspired: type I error male. type II error male. https://t.co/N1n4nrd63e

2022-12-26 15:06:13 RT @kareem_carr: People need to be more cautious with this new tech. If ChatGPT made a mistake somewhere in this list of hundreds of citie…

2022-12-26 00:32:33 i know. i know. unlike crypto/nfts/web3, this time it’s real.

2022-12-26 00:29:50 https://t.co/L6CklvUej5 https://t.co/gZ2rGNSeqv

2022-12-25 15:43:34 @amyhsin @dcephilpott I use it to ask stuff like “Do you know any other packages that do what X does?” or “Using X package, write some example code for doing Y.” Helps me learn the syntax faster. I then follow up be reading the actual documentation once I have the gist.

2022-12-25 14:59:53 I use ChatGPT almost daily at this point but only on stuff where doublechecking the output is easy.

2022-12-25 14:59:52 People need to be more cautious with this new tech. If ChatGPT made a mistake somewhere in this list of hundreds of cities, how would he know? And if he has to doublecheck the list, isn’t it better to get the info from a more reliable source in the first place? https://t.co/dyvXoSD7ab

2022-12-24 23:12:23 about to spend the rest of christmas eve grading data science final projects. don’t kink shame me.

2022-12-24 23:09:46 Yes! I have lots of opinions. https://t.co/fD0yPxpwGQ

2022-12-24 21:10:18 I’m concerned that surfacing view counts is going to create the wrong kinds of incentives. Optimizing for likes promotes creating positivity for at least some people. Meanwhile optimizing for views is much easier to do with awful behavior than good.

2022-12-24 17:27:44 Tip #9: Take your time. Picking the right textbook is a big decision. Mastering technical material is a massive investment in time and energy. Investing a week or two in choosing the best book for you is worth it.

2022-12-24 17:27:43 Tip #6: Pick the book that feels easiest to read even if it's not the most extensive. You'll get through it so fast that it won't matter if it's not the most complete. You can always give the other books a try after you have this first one under your belt.

2022-12-24 17:27:42 Tip #5: Skim each candidate book not spending more than 5-10 minutes per book and see how easy it is to get an idea of what they're saying. Some books are written in such an amazingly clear way that you'll start getting the vibe immediately.

2022-12-24 17:27:41 Tip #3: Other people's textbook recommendations can be helpful, but you have to be careful. People will often say a textbook is good because it's the one they learned on. If everybody is saying a textbook is great but it doesn't feel right for you, take that feeling seriously.

2022-12-24 17:27:40 Frustrated with finding good technical materials? Here are 10 tips for choosing the perfect textbook for you:

2022-12-23 16:37:10 my imposter syndrome says no there is not. https://t.co/JPSe0YPyb1

2022-12-23 16:30:37 i just invented a revolutionary new metric for tweets! i call it "hates". basically, hates = views - likes i'm a statistician. i know what i'm doing. we need this asap.

2022-12-23 15:23:53 The new view count feature has taught me that getting a like on Twitter is exactly like giving a talk in front of 100 people and then only one person claps at the end. Thanks. I hate it.

2022-12-23 14:53:40 Tweets should display likes per views. @elonmusk f(x) = likes f´(x) = likes/views The larger likes/views is the “hotter” the tweet.

2022-12-22 23:47:50 the woke mind virus has gone too far https://t.co/P86e2lPymz

2022-12-22 19:17:53 RT @EpiEllie: Happy end of the semester, twitter friends. If you've enjoyed my posts this year, and have the means, I'd appreciate a dona…

2022-12-22 19:11:44 @TheRealAdamG this sounds cool! you willing to help figure this out?

2022-12-22 19:10:02 @MarkJEngleson nope. how does it relate?

2022-12-22 16:48:51 @ResearchChat Same thing happens when you’re doing data analysis. Sometimes unexpected behavior is a bug in your process and sometimes it’s a genuine result. I don’t think this issue is a dealbreaker and we’ll figure it out over time.

2022-12-22 16:45:10 @joonalohtander I think we would need a way to ensure the baseline gpt is as neutral as possible so we can be highly confident that anything our gpt model says is a product of the text we feed in and not outside influences. Chatgpt might not be quite right for that purpose.

2022-12-22 16:16:47 Instead of reading an academic article, what if you could *talk* to it instead? this could be an absolute game changer.

2022-12-22 16:16:46 the typical output of the academic community is a mathematical model or a conclusion of some kind. what if the output was a gpt model or "mind" whose knowledge was hand-curated by me, a trained expert.

2022-12-22 16:16:45 it would be even better if you could train gpt on your personally curated list of academic articles and then actually TALK TO YOUR BIBLIOGRAPHY!

2022-12-22 16:16:44 chatgpt would be 1000x more powerful for me as an academic if i could fine tune it to specific knowledge sources. imagine being able to have a "conversation" with the collected works of shakespeare or darwin.

2022-12-21 18:29:05 @growaunibrow I think of analytics as manipulating numbers in a domain-knowledge driven way. For instance, plotting covid numbers over time and visually scanning for patterns.

2022-12-21 18:10:25 I've started using the term "data sciences" to refer to statistics and statistics-adjacent fields like machine learning and data science.

2022-12-21 16:37:24 machine learning is just linear-ish algebra

2022-12-21 15:49:21 dear god. what have i done.

2022-12-21 15:48:29 Is linear regression a machine learning algorithm? I will abide by the results of this poll.

2022-12-21 15:12:00 If you'd like to follow me on other social networks. mastodon: kareemcarr@mas.to post: kareemcarr instagram: kareemcarr

2022-12-20 23:50:00 We would probably still want the option to be able to poll followers though because that’s useful for creators to get quick feedback from their audiences.

2022-12-20 23:49:59 If Twitter’s going to use polls for governance, here are some notes: - People tend to pick the 1st option. Twitter should randomize the display order of survey options - Polling needs to be unbiased. An option to distribute polls to a representative sample would be crucial https://t.co/IK7TNXYAaQ

2022-12-20 15:50:22 Vox Populi, Vox Dei https://t.co/1IMBb1JyNi

2022-12-19 16:42:24 I don't like new year's resolutions but I often have a "focus" i.e. an area of my life I'd like to work on or be intentional about. Do you have any data science related things (books to read, skills to learn, better work-life balance, etc) that you'd like to focus on next year?

2022-12-19 15:34:38 Is logistic regression a machine learning algorithm? I will abide by the results of this poll.

2022-12-19 15:23:04 i joined m! my username is kareemcarr at mas dot to.

2022-12-18 21:29:43 (on iphone)

2022-12-18 21:29:28 I heard Metatext is the best app for browsing …Is that right?

2022-12-18 19:40:39 *sigh* so which server are data scientists/statisticians joining on the M site? asking for a friend who is me.

2022-12-16 16:30:25 renaming my “location” variable to “assassination_coordinates”

2022-12-16 15:31:10 Not planning on leaving Twitter just yet but I'm hedging my bets.

2022-12-16 15:31:09 I'm kareemcarr (no underscore) on the new social media platform Post. If you're already on there, give me a follow.

2022-12-16 15:20:29 @aetataureate https://t.co/0Cr9ijd9rD

2022-12-16 15:04:36 @JosephJakeKlein In this case, I mean an unacceptably high probability of injury or death as a consequence of particular speech acts. In general, I think psychological safety is an important factor in building productive truth-seeking communities but I don't think Musk is there yet.

2022-12-16 14:51:11 I think Elon is learning albeit slowly. He now realizes speech should be regulated in cases where it directly threatens people's safety. He just needs to generalize this lesson from his family to trans people, people of color, women and other marginalized groups.

2022-12-16 00:18:44 Machine learning is just statistics at scale. Like anything done at scale, it is a highly distorted and barely recognizable version of the original thing.

2022-12-15 22:28:37 Machine learning is statistics if statistics died and then a billionaire technologist brought it back to life in a cybernetically enhanced body with super human abilities and no memories of its past life.

2022-12-14 15:37:30 1. bias variance-tradeoff 2. degrees of freedom 3. central limit theorem (including the kinds of situations where it doesn't apply) https://t.co/xmzAqbguo2

2022-12-14 15:16:00 Statistics is framework for dealing with information overload. It empowers you to convert countless data points into something that's comprehensible to the human mind.

2022-12-13 20:13:07 @yudapearl When I say "statistics", I'm already imagining in my head a future where casual inference and statistics are combined into a single venerable disciple.

2022-12-13 01:43:02 @LucLapierre8 @cubic_logic He's clearly not a Bayesian.

2022-12-12 16:03:44 @cubic_logic Can you give an example of an unquantifiable uncertainty?

2022-12-12 15:33:10 You can divide the universe into things you're certain about and things you aren't. For the things you don't know, statistics gives you a mathematical way of describing that uncertainty. In that sense, statistics is a scientific theory of everything.

2022-12-11 16:19:04 ChatGPT interpolates between human statements that contain knowledge. Sometimes these interpolations correspond with the actual state of the world but sometimes not. When they do it's because they have "borrowed" knowledge contained in the human-generated training data.

2022-12-11 16:19:03 Does ChatGPT "know" things? I don't think it does because it doesn't have a way of checking its statements against the state of the real world.

2022-12-11 01:12:40 @adatta02 I think one needs a broader definition of interpolation here. I am sure there lots of examples of functions that return blocks of text in the training data, and plenty of text about football matches. (I’m not saying the ChatGPT model isn’t impressive though.)

2022-12-11 00:27:03 I think it’s a mistake to think of ChatGPT as “learning” an artistic style or scientific concept the way we do it. Humans would forget the examples but retain the underlying ideas. ChatGPT is a machine. It can simply “remember” every example it’s ever seen and recombine them.

2022-12-11 00:27:02 My sense of ChatGPT is it produces an answer to a question by interpolating between the human answers in its training data. In other words human intelligence is an indispensable ingredient in its own intelligence. No prior human solutions. No intelligence. https://t.co/fm8q7HeCLG

2022-12-08 13:00:00 CAFIAC FIX

2022-12-07 08:00:00 CAFIAC FIX

2022-11-15 15:35:10 RT @EpiEllie: Fuck cancer It took another person from me &

2022-11-13 02:24:59 RT @kareem_carr: “The floor is Microsoft Excel”me, a data scientist: https://t.co/SFBF0cR83C

2022-11-12 15:54:19 smh. this is just like crypto. you know data science is over once the celebs start pushing it. https://t.co/UGSE0E2dfV

2022-11-12 00:13:45 “The floor is Microsoft Excel”me, a data scientist: https://t.co/SFBF0cR83C

2022-11-11 17:14:16 math junkies. high as a kite on set theory. you hate to see it. https://t.co/yJIuQ4Xq52

2022-11-10 16:13:41 @palaeoscientist he blocked me. i guess he took the as sarcastic but it wasn’t. genuinely sad people feel this strongly about what i see as a logical response to a less than ideal situation.

2022-11-10 15:46:17 @EpiEllie @VPrasadMDMPH I hope Vinay will consider bringing you on his podcast. I think it could be a very good discussion.

2022-11-10 15:36:27 @palaeoscientist

2022-11-10 15:35:40 @kamran_hakiman sorry to see you go. it’s not my fault the previous owners sold the platform.

2022-11-10 15:34:17 @marionomics101 it’s an adventure i guess. we are all learning what all of this means.

2022-11-10 15:31:32 @biasedByLogic sorry to see you go. i did not make the decision lightly. ethically speaking i think being on the platform is already participating. most of their revenues are coming from ads not twitter blue ie you and me just being on here.

2022-11-10 15:07:33 also i’m worried about the shadowbanning and it’s worth $8 dollars a month to me to continue to talk about statistics and data science on here.

2022-11-10 15:07:32 just wanted to prove to everybody that despite being a grad student i do actually have $8 https://t.co/iyC7564cGM

2022-11-10 01:08:22 twitter_verified_verified_OFFICIAL.docx

2022-11-09 22:45:45 RT @EpiEllie: Y’all! https://t.co/TvrnGkrR1D https://t.co/AXBrjGD9an

2022-11-09 17:17:48 *stochastic local search has entered the chat* https://t.co/bYZTBiTx6A

2022-11-07 16:02:21 @anthilemoon @TheAnnaGat Thanks Anne Laure. Hope all is well.

2022-11-07 02:57:05 @TheAnnaGat these are cool especially #3. how were they made?

2022-11-07 01:31:38 RT @kareem_carr: @elonmusk What role do you see science twitter playing in this? I think a lot of us, myself included, are hoping for some…

2022-11-07 01:31:29 @elonmusk What role do you see science twitter playing in this? I think a lot of us, myself included, are hoping for some clarity on whether Twitter will continue to be a place that’s conducive to discussing detailed technical knowledge. https://t.co/38BOOP3gwk

2022-11-06 16:57:06 @SquidwGoggles I think exploring Mastodon is prudent. It's a low-cost way of attempting to hedge your bets.

2022-11-06 16:55:09 @PWGTennant I agree. Musk could be doing a lot more to calm people. His frequent and aggressive shifts in direction are a genuine source of uncertainty.

2022-11-06 16:52:06 @KerryChipp I'd be interested to hear how your experience of Twitter has been affected and if it's significantly worse than say any other period in the last two years.

2022-11-06 16:47:54 @estherlimtf Oh yeah for sure! I downloaded mine yesterday.

2022-11-06 16:37:27 What I see a lot of people doing is extrapolating wildly based on very little empirical data on how Twitter might actually be changing, and then panicking over those extrapolations, which realistically may never come to pass.

2022-11-06 16:37:26 My training as a data scientist has taught me to separate what I predict from what I observe. What I can directly observe is my Twitter user experience seems to still be well within the normal range of what it was before Musk took over.

2022-11-06 00:25:10 I have an announcement. Math, which has to date been free to use, will now cost $8 a month.We’ll also be adding cool new features like the Riemann hypothesis is now true for all Math Blue customers.I know this change will upset some users but we need to pay the bills somehow.

2022-11-05 16:50:16 @estherlimtf chat around it. seems to center a lot on the benefits of decentralization.

2022-11-05 15:51:32 not gonna to lie. mastodon is giving me crypto energy.

2022-11-05 00:07:18 Statistics has had a massive drop in usage, due to activist groups pressuring us to call it Machine Learning, even though nothing has changed in the math and we did everything we could to appease the activists.Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy regression in America

2022-11-04 00:10:05 Basically we humans almost completely define the parameters of learning task before the AI even starts. It’s like we are a professional exercise coach with a defined work out regimen. The computer just has to show up and follow the plan.

2022-11-04 00:03:40 The current ML algorithms can do amazing things but I don’t think they’re very “intelligent”.If we curate their learning material and precisely define the goal, they can learn.In a human context, we call that “spoon-feeding” and associate it with less skilled students.

2022-11-03 16:30:52 I'm not currently verified and my Twitter experience is fine. My followers know who I am. Nobody is confused.

2022-11-03 16:30:51 I honestly don't think $8 a month is that much. The only problem is I have no idea what I'm paying for.

2022-11-03 15:24:07 statisticians: “that’s theoretically impossible”machine learning: https://t.co/QkKrKHTXnb

2022-11-02 16:29:27 try it out for yourself: https://t.co/xRgsTedaw6

2022-11-02 16:29:26 if you give this AI your twitter handle, it can generate tweets in your style.mind blown. this sounds exactly like me. https://t.co/m9P3DiUuCb

2022-11-02 16:07:00 @sanjanacurtis *chef’s kiss* perfect. no notes.

2022-11-02 15:37:54 you may not like it, but this is what peak data science performance looks like https://t.co/Hh29VAdQYG

2022-11-02 15:03:20 I've lost about 500 followers since elon took over which is wild. Anybody else?

2022-11-02 14:58:05 When you think about charging for verification in terms of the numbers, it makes a lot more sense.If @elonmusk can get just 10% of Twitter (~20 mil users) to pay $8 a month, which seems very doable, that comes out to be $1.9 billion a year.

2022-11-02 01:10:29 Sad to announce that I've been fired from Twitter. I was responsible for the feature where 99.36% of all statistics cited in tweets were completely made up.

2022-11-01 22:30:55 @daphmarts @StanfordBioethx @duanaful That’s awesome. Congrats!

2022-10-29 16:28:23 This platform tends to overreact to change. I’m going to continue having fun talking about statistics and math on Twitter as long as nothing prevents me.

2022-10-27 16:59:16 WE DID IT.Final tally:- A: 24.6%- B: 24.1%- C: 26.7%- D: 24.5%.Not a perfect result but really impressive for a game involving 8000 people. Good job everybody! https://t.co/p4wWVLCfgh

2022-10-26 16:02:36 I just realized I didn’t say this explicitly. Retweeting/Quote-tweeting are also allowed.

2022-10-26 15:41:49 This poll is a cooperative game.Try to get as close to an even split as you can with each option getting 25% of the vote.Rules:- DON'T use any kind of randomization device- DO try to influence potential voters by commenting on how you think they should vote

2022-10-25 15:24:49 hell yeah! https://t.co/wnfOv8o6fs

2022-10-24 02:22:45 RT @kareem_carr: A lot of people think math is never ambiguous which is false.0⁰ is a perfect example of what ambiguity looks like in mat…

2022-10-23 23:01:31 @quaesita look at all those math books! . the chainmail shirt is cool too.

2022-10-23 15:11:45 Reference: the wikipedia article on 0⁰ is very good if you want to read more about it. https://t.co/NeacDAV2ui

2022-10-23 15:11:44 Unfortunately (or fortunately), having a value for 0⁰ is really helpful in a lot cases. Many find it much too convenient to just completely avoid it.

2022-10-23 15:11:43 A lot of people think math is never ambiguous which is false.0⁰ is a perfect example of what ambiguity looks like in mathematics.

2022-10-22 21:16:33 me: how much would it cost for me to train this model?machine learning community: https://t.co/wBQYl2hdEX

2022-10-22 14:28:05 choose your weapon https://t.co/iNE56TGZe0

2022-10-20 23:16:22 correcting my gf’s texts to be more scientifically accurate https://t.co/SHM9ipy1WB

2022-10-20 22:37:04 Surprisingly, this is how data science works.To answer “Did that happen?”, we need to specify:- the events about which the question can even be asked- the measurements to use- the time window to search in- the precise numerical meaning of “happen” https://t.co/tPJKMfgUus

2022-10-20 14:57:09 i had these two software engineer friends that were dating and the guy had this cool idea to propose using githubbut he ended up taking forever and eventually they broke upturns out he was afraid to commit

2022-10-20 14:05:30 solve for β₁, β₀:truss = β₁·scaramucci + β₀ + ε

2022-10-20 13:53:47 It's rational for an academic journal to prioritize the time of their staff (whom they pay) over the time of academics (whom they don't).

2022-10-20 13:53:46 Hot take: The current system for reviewing academic papers could be made much faster and less painful for the academic community, if journals had an incentive to streamline the process, which they don't, since free labor costs the same whether you waste most of it or not.

2022-10-19 23:06:56 I think 90% of the culture war is just America trying to emotionally process this plot. The concentration of wealth among older americans, the anxiety about immigration, “the family”, women’s reproductive choices, “replacement”, it’s all right there. https://t.co/vNsfu9HPm7

2022-10-19 22:49:47 “you can never have too many comments”boyfriend “your code should speak for itself” girlfriend

2022-10-19 18:50:23 @PhDemetri Congrats!

2022-10-19 15:51:34 if you asked this guy if 2+2=4, he’d probably be like depends on what you mean by “two”, “plus”, “equals” and “four”. https://t.co/70R9e0pEoq

2022-10-19 14:31:05 me, a data scientist *remembering i need to validate my models*: hey. i want you to know your feelings are valid and i support your predictions no matter what

2022-10-19 14:15:07 @nkreu113r How does this relate to what I tweeted?

2022-10-19 14:09:34 Language models like GPT-3 make it really obvious that particular writing styles are just subspaces within a larger space of all plausible human utterances.Turns out good writing is actually shape rotation.This is a massive blow to wordcels.

2022-10-19 08:43:21 @yuxiangw_cs Very interesting results. Can you share some intuition for why you focus on parallel neural networks? Does it make the math? If so, how?

2022-10-19 08:16:30 @varingian What am I desperately trying to spin?

2022-10-18 22:54:54 @aburone Yes! GPT-3.

2022-10-18 22:42:54 apparently gpt-3 is better at picking up on nuance than the 200+ people who misinterpreted the original tweet.

2022-10-18 22:38:06 god damn it. did i just get out-written by a computer? what the hell https://t.co/WbXbOh7BE7

2022-10-18 15:20:51 @primalpoly I get your point but you can't expect the whole of Twitter to cater to your personal word usage preferences which come out of your particular lived experiences.That's actually a pretty "woke" way of moving through the world if you think about it.

2022-10-18 14:52:48 I believe that the science community should be large and diverse and that science itself should be used for the benefit of all human beings.It's strange to me that people think this is "woke".The promotion of reason and fraternity dates back to at least the Enlightenment.

2022-10-18 14:14:11 @primalpoly Have you ever seen me use the term “stochastic violence” anywhere or are you projecting a whole political ideology on to me without knowing much about what I actually think?

2022-10-18 13:52:19 @primalpoly “Statistics *does* violence to [abstract concept]” is clearly a figurative use of the word “violence”.

2022-10-18 13:38:51 me *a data scientist on a dating app*: i actually do a bit of modeling

2022-10-17 23:36:22 I’m surprised this is being seen as “woke”.The data-driven technocratic approach is often just as hard on rightwing populations that prioritize individualism since statistics is collective by nature. https://t.co/ezSXDFAWUP

2022-10-16 16:02:46 Statistics does violence to human experience. There is a moral dimension to using it.It reduces our rich, diverse stories to pristine, bloodless observations.So, like a surgeon cutting into a patient, we must be careful to use the violence of statistics to do good.

2022-10-16 14:28:48 Math Lady Hazel is making a math history joke methinks. https://t.co/1cRTWWZPQl https://t.co/fjsl3VRQPl

2022-10-13 23:00:54 @yudapearl @PWGTennant @JohannesTextor Have you gotten a lot of push back from statisticians? I would have assumed they'd be very receptive to your ideas.

2022-10-13 22:21:22 @yudapearl Using simulations to explore casual questions is a much less well-kept secret.

2022-10-13 16:31:03 Want to know one of the best kept secrets in statistics?Programming is a statistics superpower.The ability to write simple computer simulations will allow you to answer a huge number of real-world statistics questions even if you're not that good at math.

2022-10-13 15:43:44 Statistics is a lot more powerful and applies to a lot more situations than people think.Not just randomness but uncertainty.Not just data but information.

2022-10-11 23:00:15 PARENTS, please check your kids candy this Halloween. Just found Bayes’ theorem, a notorious gateway drug to full blown Bayesianism, in this Snickers bar. https://t.co/5YylKPpvO2

2022-10-11 16:43:09 For more information, check out statistics historian Steven Stigler's Book "The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom".

2022-10-11 16:43:08 Residuals: Studying the residual which is the part of the data that the models do not explain as a way of quantifying the uncertainty in those models.

2022-10-11 16:43:07 Design: Constructing studies in ways that maximize the amount of information we receive given the resources expended.

2022-10-07 22:34:17 y’all gonna think i’m joking but this is literally what it said https://t.co/701wCUtTci

2022-10-07 22:34:15 i dropped this tweet into gpt-3 to see what the AI would say. https://t.co/N2D9fvJSyu https://t.co/Z75iruDhu3

2022-10-07 14:00:37 you just need to trick them into thinking it was their idea https://t.co/CYJ7XplWmu

2022-10-06 22:28:13 my neighbor decided to make the undead army of skeletons more scary by adding some math facts https://t.co/a4LF1vbqhM

2022-10-06 16:16:36 philosopher: the only thing i know is that i know nothingdata scientist: the only thing i know is that i know (nothing-1.96σ, nothing+1.96σ)

2022-10-06 16:00:35 @catlaughing I would justify it based on utilitarianism. The decision is affecting a large number of people not just the individual.Then you might ask “who’s to decide when this is ok?”That’s why extensive effort cultivating virtues like prudence would help a lot here!

2022-10-06 15:52:12 @think___y But sometimes those decisions affect just you and sometimes they are on behalf of others. So I would be deciding which way to go based on the scale of the impact of the decision.

2022-10-06 15:44:07 @catlaughing I agree with you that the frameworks are in conflict. I don't think there's any way around that. In practice, I think it might all work like a system of checks and balances. Individuals would and should push back against the state when it encroaches too much.

2022-10-06 15:36:55 @catlaughing Let me give a different version of that. Suppose a madman was about to end life on earth by launching a bunch of nukes unless you were willing to murder 100 innocent people. The choice sucks but it seems pretty obvious what the answer is.

2022-10-06 14:58:15 I think different ethical frameworks make sense at different scales.I favor virtue ethics on the individual level, deontological ethics for communities and utilitarianism for large societies.

2022-10-06 14:32:29 That unemployed friend at 3:00 PM on a Wednesday: https://t.co/00GGUAEg7E

2022-10-05 14:15:07 Tiktok has shown how powerful a platform can be when it supports its creators.I hope Twitter's new leadership will remember that journalists, writers, public intellectuals and academics are creators on Twitter too.

2022-10-05 14:15:06 Twitter is one of the few places where people who spend extensive amounts of time digging into the facts before speaking — let's call them "experts" — can have a substantial social media following despite not being particularly well-connected or photogenic.

2022-10-05 14:15:05 My biggest concern with Elon buying Twitter is I'm not sure he gets how important journalists, writers, public intellectuals and academics are to the legitimacy of the platform.These folks are a big part of why Twitter often drives the news cycle despite being relatively small.

2022-10-04 22:26:15 I used to think of machine learning and statistics as competing approaches to the same subject matter but I no longer see it that way.The question I've been increasingly asking myself is:How can ML tools be used to help statisticians do their jobs better?

2022-10-04 14:12:43 source: https://t.co/eXG4eMAoSKh/t: @MarioKrenn6240

2022-10-04 14:12:42 The level of growth in machine learning is astounding.The number of papers in AI and machine learning *doubles* every two years. https://t.co/x6FU6ZPrZe

2022-10-03 14:15:44 When trying to understand stuff related to probability, do you find explanations that involve dice, cards and gambling helpful?

2022-10-01 21:43:22 me and my dissertation https://t.co/cojQV50FwM

2022-10-01 14:07:41 “The next game will consist of replicating the results from a 10 year old paper using uncommented code written by an unpaid undergraduate research assistant.” https://t.co/nmjSdUXx3V

2022-09-30 23:27:14 that feeling when you want to explain some math but you don’t have anything to write on https://t.co/zwX0ML4c6y

2022-09-30 15:00:19 how do you pronounce “quasi”?

2022-09-30 14:30:44 me and WHO?!?! https://t.co/mosSL2SSAa

2022-09-29 15:22:38 I knew Francis Galton, early statistician and inventor of the concept of statistical correlation, was racist but this is so much worse than I ever imagined https://t.co/cHs2Q6FfI4

2022-09-29 13:55:28 me, *flirting*: what’s your favorite matrix factorization method

2022-09-29 00:58:24 pure math: *beautiful, elegant, stunning, the language of the gods*applied math: https://t.co/q6sMBOYXKu

2022-09-28 16:54:13 He says the women portrayed in “Hidden Figures” were “low-level black mathematicians”.What’s low-level about performing mathematical calculations that were critical to putting human beings on the MOON?!

2022-09-28 16:54:12 “History is constantly being rewritten to magnify beyond all reasonable proportions the contributions of Black Americans.”This is a divisive and socially destructive take that makes us all worse off.https://t.co/JOZ78Nhhgy

2022-09-28 14:01:38 "slut era" i whisper to myself as i repeatedly apply the chain rule

2022-09-22 23:33:39 “How does this look?” https://t.co/3jCC1g1Vjz

2022-09-21 23:56:27 me, training a deep learning model on my 5 year old laptop: https://t.co/sFlN4zEJDN

2022-09-19 19:30:04 @iqmobile Your feedback on my IQ thread was . I like to hear back from expects.

2022-09-18 12:15:02 Uh, I meant "shouldn't be a place where authority is preferred over reason". Looks like everybody got what I was saying. Still.

2022-09-18 00:49:05 To be clear, I don’t think it’s helpful to say “2+2=4” is white supremacy. I don’t know for sure but I suspect what she’s saying is that math class shouldn’t be a place where reason is preferred over authority, and I think we can all support that.

2022-09-18 00:49:04 This is the proof that 1+1=2. The book in which it appears takes about 400 pages to get there. Concepts are not always as simple and obvious as they might first seem. https://t.co/kAowuAZYqN https://t.co/2pFrmqivy4

2022-09-18 00:49:03 I think we can all agree that math class should be a place where kids learn how to use their reason to derive truths from first principles, not a dull recital of sacred truths.Publicly shaming this woman dishonors that respect for reason while claiming to uphold it. https://t.co/prwSTilnxh

2022-09-17 23:47:08 @Aella_Girl Yes! Women and men have equal average IQs essentially by definition. This is one of the many assumptions baked into IQ tests. I wrote a thread on this a while back: https://t.co/6M3jWiOT1K

2022-09-14 23:17:00 she’s a 10 but it’s 10 sigma. she’s out of your league. her p-value is zero.

2022-09-14 16:34:21 me, about 2 hours into debugging the uncommented code i wrote 8 months ago: https://t.co/dbWEdhQx8B

2022-09-13 14:25:12 data science consulting fees if you include pain and suffering: https://t.co/qOusNGQPqZ

2022-09-08 23:25:21 @Bluefishdude I would drop a lot of geometry and calculus, and just keep the parts that are statistics relevant. Like enough integration to understand computation of expectation for instance.

2022-09-08 15:22:19 @hamotsi I hear what you’re saying and I agree aesthetics and curiosity are strong motivators. But I think intrinsic motivators work best when the student is allowed to follow and refine their own sense of taste which may not include what you’re trying to teach them.

2022-09-08 14:01:26 This is why we should make data analysis part of a standard high school education. It's much easier for people to see how they could use data analysis in their daily life. https://t.co/vGzttvbLYT

2022-09-08 12:06:55 RT @kareem_carr: Hard to pick a worse example of "useless" math. Statistics, AI, computer graphics, optimization. This concept is everywher…

2022-09-07 14:27:00 @zippkode They claimed they didn't "use" it which is incorrect. They might not know it but they are definitely making use of it.

2022-09-07 14:22:47 @fertgs It's not just linear regression. The formula mx+b shows up in a lot of unexpected places (like deep learning). https://t.co/zWYBY05jtM

2022-09-07 14:14:59 Hard to pick a worse example of "useless" math. Statistics, AI, computer graphics, optimization. This concept is everywhere.If you rely on products that require people to collect data and compute a trend, then you've relied on this math.You just might not know it. https://t.co/vGzttvcjOr

2022-09-06 20:39:23 @cailinmeister @lastpositivist That sounds . Looking forward to taking a look at it!

2022-09-02 20:12:48 @fchollet As an amateur photographer, this makes sense to me. Much of the art in photography is curation. A lot of technical skill goes into moving the photograph along gradients that seem interesting (enhancing warmth of light or the contrast) but even that supports the general point.

2022-09-01 15:03:36 RT @kareem_carr: Most people think they know what this quote means but they're dead wrong.Read this short thread to find out why: https:/…

2022-09-01 01:18:28 RT @kareem_carr: Most people think they know what this quote means but they're dead wrong.Read this short thread to find out why: https:/…

2022-08-31 16:57:32 @acdickinson_a @DrEricDing https://t.co/MtdB7vEjOQ

2022-08-31 16:26:29 @taylor_dallas Twain popularized it. He claims in the original text that he got it from Disraeli but no evidence has been found that Disraeli actually said it.

2022-08-31 16:11:51 Follow me for more tweets about data science, statistics and their impact on society.

2022-08-31 16:11:50 Twain published the quote about "lies, damn lies and statistics" in 1907.Modern statistics didn’t exist yet.By "statistics", he meant the simple tallies and surveys that governments and businesses have been conducting forever like “9 out of 10 dentists approve of Orbit gum!”

2022-08-31 16:11:49 Most people think they know what this quote means but they're dead wrong.Read this short thread to find out why: https://t.co/jjEWjjYWLp

2022-08-31 14:39:28 @HRJ21 To do that, you basically need to know upfront, before you start, exactly how many hours a project will require and exactly how much value you're delivering to the client.In other words, you'd have to be pretty experienced and probably don't need this thread.

2022-08-31 14:34:09 RT @kareem_carr: Deciding how much to charge for consulting work can be a nightmare.Here are SIX factors I use to help me figure out my h…

2022-08-31 11:04:28 @ryxcommar @PhDemetri Despite your best efforts, you did write something that would be quite informative for people with close to zero knowledge on this topic.

2022-08-31 10:14:42 @timnitGebru @Grady_Booch I’ve found that if you have a decent following and you tweet about the negative impact of tech on minority populations, there’s a good chance Lex has blocked you. I’m blocked as well despite never having interacted with him.

2022-08-30 15:46:13 @zergbane Agreed. The amount of demand for your services is a good indicator of whether you're going too high. But in my experience, charging too little is a much more common problem that charging too much.

2022-08-30 15:42:11 @LauraALibby I guess I didn't say this explicitly in the thread but the idea is to charge different rates based on the task. Estimating from your current pay would only give you a baseline rate.

2022-08-30 15:28:32 @Jimi_Smash I would do free consulting work for groups in cases where I would also give money.So if I’d give money to a cancer charity, I’d also consult for free.If I wouldn’t say yes to a DM asking me for $200, I also wouldn’t say yes to a request for $200 worth of free consulting.

2022-08-30 14:34:15 @gib_hurst Yes. I worked for ~3 years in a team that did statistics and data science consulting.

2022-08-30 14:26:13 Consulting rates:$25/hr: they get what they get$50/hr: just starting out

2022-08-30 14:26:12 LEARNING TIMEWhen you're consulting, your time is the product that people are buying.Charging for learning time is just being honest about what it would take for *you* personally to be part of doing the work they want done.

2022-08-28 18:20:44 @rayjaymay1967 He said that in the late 1800s. Modern statistics didn’t exist yet. He actually meant simple crude rates that governments and businesses have been collecting and sharing forever like “9 out of 10 dentists approve of Orbit gum!”

2022-08-28 16:46:48 MYTH: Statistics assumes everything is normally distributed Statisticians typically translate your data into mathematical constructs that are guaranteed to be normally distributed if certain basic conditions are met.The normality is a consequence of the mathematics.

2022-08-28 16:46:47 MYTH: Statistics is objectiveStatistics helps us reason objectively about our subjective experience.While the process is mathematical, which is as objective as human reasoning gets, due to the subjectivity of the inputs, the outputs are irreducibly subjective as well.

2022-08-28 16:46:46 Statistics is a frequently misunderstood field.Yet billion dollar decisions often ride on getting it right.THREAD: 6 myths about statistics explained in plain English:

2022-08-28 10:03:11 RT @kareem_carr: Four reasons why I think authorship on academic papers should be more like movie credits: https://t.co/a0mjiuqgAy

2022-08-27 15:01:43 @camjpatrick I agree. I was addressing the “real math” part of the statement. Mathematical statistics is by no means all there is to statistics.

2022-08-27 14:36:34 Most math papers are basically "here's some cool math I found" but statisticians will write about math even when it's not cool, because it seems needed for science, which is why some mathematicians don't vibe with us. https://t.co/g77vBdRYPl

2022-08-26 17:53:33 @dziyang OK. But how do you relate trait neuroticism to data analysis?

2022-08-26 17:46:19 @dmi3k I still use p-values regularly. Lots of statisticians do.

2022-08-26 10:36:19 RT @kareem_carr: Four reasons why I think authorship on academic papers should be more like movie credits: https://t.co/a0mjiuqgAy

2022-08-25 22:49:30 @SJB_SynBio @drdevangm I do want to apologize for not adding something like “source: Steven Burgess” to the illustration. It’s good work that really fleshes out the concept for people.

2022-08-25 22:43:49 @SJB_SynBio @drdevangm Thanks. I’ve been thinking about it for at least 3 years. My recollection is I came up with it on my own but honestly I don’t trust myself not to have read it somewhere and forgotten.Google suggests the idea has been around since at least 2007: https://t.co/oDnGdLQmSJ

2022-08-25 22:29:58 @DavidRSt3wart @JakubTomek13 @drdevangm @SJB_SynBio Yeah. I’m not sure where the conflict is here. I’m definitely not claiming credit. I neither need nor want it.

2022-08-25 22:28:20 @JakubTomek13 @DavidRSt3wart @drdevangm @SJB_SynBio To be clear, I wrote the thread from scratch. It’s not based on other resources. The illustration is the only part that I didn’t do myself. (This does not mean I am claiming credit for the idea. I don’t know where I got it from. It’s at least as old as 2007.) https://t.co/kvxDB33LhS

2022-08-25 18:14:37 @herzi38 How do you use it in practice? Do most journals you submit to have a form? Do you put in your paper or supplementary materials?

2022-08-25 17:32:48 @drdevangm @SJB_SynBio An ironic but fair point. Thanks for sharing. He is indeed the source.

2022-08-25 16:41:33 @jmgduarte @UCSanDiego This is amazing! Thanks for sharing.

2022-08-25 15:36:03 Follow me if you're curious about the systems we use to create knowledge.

2022-08-25 15:36:02 Reason 3: It would be fairerCurrently what merits authorship is the subjective opinion of the person or persons in the collaboration with the most power. This kind of setup is easily abused.

2022-08-25 15:36:01 Reason 2: It would surface many of the invisible contributors to science It would give a concrete way to give credit to people who currently get lumped into the "acknowledgements" under the current system, or don't get listed at all, and who are effectively invisible.

2022-08-25 15:36:00 Let me clarify what I mean.What I like about movie credits is that all the ways of contributing to the finished product are standardized, and everybody gets acknowledged explicitly for whatever they did no matter how small.This is missing from academia!

2022-08-25 15:35:59 Four reasons why I think authorship on academic papers should be more like movie credits: https://t.co/a0mjiuqgAy

2022-08-23 16:24:53 RT @EpiEllie: Feeling frustrated hearing “the pandemic is over” while you &

2022-08-20 11:27:05 RT @kareem_carr: Finally tried out the GPT-3 model from OpenAI. The green text is unaltered output generated by the AI. https://t.co/NxveJh…

2022-08-19 14:09:02 @sarahradz_ Maybe you should have let GPT-3 try???

2022-08-19 14:01:37 Not a joke. It’s pretty smart!

2022-08-19 14:01:36 Finally tried out the GPT-3 model from OpenAI. The green text is unaltered output generated by the AI. https://t.co/NxveJhduGn

2022-08-18 15:03:52 What's your best tip for a specific book to read, specific video series to watch, specific course to register for, specific tutorial to follow or some other specific step that someone starting with little to no knowledge can take to get started with data science today?

2022-08-18 08:54:50 RT @kareem_carr: girl, i just need a moment https://t.co/4tFQWJ65tR

2022-08-17 13:46:03 RT @kareem_carr: girl, i just need a moment https://t.co/4tFQWJ65tR

2022-08-17 00:23:55 girl, i just need a moment https://t.co/4tFQWJ65tR

2022-08-16 19:40:45 @filippie509 I’ve been thinking about a way to express this concern as a Twitter thread for a while now without success. Great thread!I disagree that statistics isn’t equipped to address this issue, but I agree that machine learning as currently practiced doesn’t seem to be.

2022-08-16 15:24:02 @ShirleyBWang Congrats!

2022-08-16 08:16:34 @timeseriesdave Sure. Can you give a quick sketch of what gives something “moneyness”?

2022-08-16 08:12:49 RT @kareem_carr: I have a stupid economics question.Imagine a matrix where the ij-th element is the amount of object i that can be exchan…

2022-08-15 20:21:54 @arvizzoni I'm probably the one that's completely off. More just curious to hear how.

2022-08-15 16:02:54 I would suspect that we'd have to somehow weight appropriately for the frequency at which certain exchanges happen since they aren't all equally likely.

2022-08-15 16:00:47 I have a stupid economics question.Imagine a matrix where the ij-th element is the amount of object i that can be exchanged for object j.Can we think of "money" as something like the first principal component of this matrix?

2022-08-15 13:41:42 solidarity https://t.co/8gOHBgpZYp

2022-08-13 16:29:01 the best of both worlds https://t.co/BezC5nHmDr

2022-08-13 15:10:14 What did the British data scientist say when he wanted one more analysis?“Oi mate, can i have ANOVA?”

2022-08-13 09:09:38 @johnquackenbush The trait could be "Being Professor John Quackenbush". Value 1 if you are and 0 if you're not. (More seriously, perhaps some unique de novo mutation with an associated novel phenotype.)

2022-08-13 01:23:28 RT @kareem_carr: Math Question:For any given trait, do half of all people have to be below average?If not, what's the largest percent of…

2022-08-12 15:13:39 (By “average”, I mean the standard definition: the mean value.)

2022-08-12 15:02:19 Math Question:For any given trait, do half of all people have to be below average?If not, what's the largest percent of a population that could theoretically be above the average?

2022-08-12 14:17:23 I tried to impress my calc prof by demonstrating that a constant function’s mean was also its maximum.She said my proof was average at best.

2022-08-12 10:02:43 RT @kareem_carr: I once met a french statistician who made a late career switch to logistics management for a regional seafood wholesaler.…

2022-08-11 14:16:18 I once met a french statistician who made a late career switch to logistics management for a regional seafood wholesaler.She said she was really into the Poisson Distribution.

2022-08-11 10:10:35 @daniela_witten @aristeinberg @COPSSNews @AmstatNews Amazing. Congrats!

2022-08-10 17:06:48 RT @EpiEllie: It's almost Back to School time &

2022-08-10 16:36:13 getting into university now vs when your professors applied to university https://t.co/L6lPkbJnvE

2022-08-10 14:42:06 Update: the account that was spreading racist misinformation about me has been suspendedI didn’t report him but to those that did, thanks for your support. https://t.co/okLPEibPNt

2022-08-10 12:15:23 @statsepi Thanks for saying that, Darren. I really appreciate it.

2022-08-10 12:13:04 @ChelseaParlett Thanks, Chelsea!

2022-08-10 10:14:13 RT @kareem_carr: Feeling a bit bummed out by all the racism I have to deal with on this site.It feels so excessive given I mostly tweet a…

2022-08-09 15:12:10 I should probably ignore it all myself but sometimes it sucks to have to deal with these racially-motivated smears against my competence and character.

2022-08-09 15:12:09 I know some of you will want to go over there and give him a piece of your mind. I don’t advise it.It will only cause the Twitter algorithm to think his account is getting lots of engagement and promote it.

2022-08-09 15:12:08 Take the already tiny odds of getting into Harvard grad school and make it even smaller. That was my situation.What I find most disappointing is out of the dozens of comments and hundreds of likes, I saw only one or two people object to the blatant racism which is sad. https://t.co/t1ZLDaWvjM

2022-08-09 15:12:07 Given that my university has its pick of the best students on the planet, you’d have to think there are no smart black people anywhere in the world for them to have gone with a dude that can’t even count.

2022-08-09 15:12:06 Feeling a bit bummed out by all the racism I have to deal with on this site.It feels so excessive given I mostly tweet about math and statistics not politics.So many people on here can’t see past my skin color.They make up wild statements about me and question my humanity. https://t.co/7VxzWv479P

2022-08-09 14:20:09 https://t.co/I8rGgLKb8q

2022-08-09 14:14:25 RT @EpiEllie: It’s been about a year since I was diagnosed with ADHD &

2022-08-09 13:50:30 @cainwill @blueyeliz @wirelessben Varies but extremely common. Mostly standard at my institution.

2022-08-09 12:56:00 @HenningStrandin Either "2" is about real stuff that exists or it's not and we can go back to equating it to Harry Potter.

2022-08-09 12:55:27 @HenningStrandin So you're admitting to taking your intuitions about maht from physical reality, yes? In that case, must you not also agree that empirical facts about what happens when you aggregate two things with two more things ought to relevant to the notion of "2+2"?

2022-07-27 11:02:18 @HenningStrandin I think they are fully aware that I'm using "+" as a model for a physical process in all my examples. Something they probably do themselves on a daily basis without thinking about it. And the process of discussing it actually makes it clear why that might not be a good idea.

2022-07-27 11:01:02 @HenningStrandin I don't think it's reasonable to use "+" to mean what it might mean to a mathematical formalist when speaking to a general audience. It's basically equivocating since they wouldn't be aware of what that means and will translate it into the idea of "combining".

2022-07-27 10:53:07 @HenningStrandin I also agree that linguistic clarity resolves the problem, but it's noteworthy (to a general audience) that the price of that linguistic clarity is that we are no longer talking about physical reality (which is the motivation for the thread).

2022-07-27 10:41:14 @HenningStrandin I think we're saying the same thing which is that "+" in arithmetic is not the same as physically combining groups of things. Believe it not, this is news to a lot of people who aren't philosophers or mathematicians. Hence the thread.

2022-07-27 10:27:05 @HenningStrandin I get it too, I think. You don't think about math as needing to accurately describe the physical world. Most regular people do though and "combining" is absolutely how they think of addition which is why the thread resonates.

2022-07-27 09:24:41 RT @kareem_carr: In the summer of 2020, I got into a huge internet fight about math.It was such a big controversy that I ended up being p…

2022-07-26 23:39:05 @vinodkhare Numbers arise from record keeping and records were an attempt to keep track of physical things (grain, livestock etc). If you mean that a debt isn’t physical then I guess that’s fair. Although, a debt is related to a physical exchange of goods historically speaking.

2022-07-26 22:23:48 @KaraSunburst People get a little mad at me too.

2022-07-26 22:01:42 RT @DiscoDeerDiary: I fucking love this thread. Provides a comfortable counterpoint to having to hear so many people smugly say "I guess it…

2022-07-26 21:05:20 @llaWttaM I think what you're saying is mathematics as a formal logical system is a way of coming to know real truths about the world. To that, I would say yes, I agree.In the thread, I'm haggling over what kind of truth math is, but I do agree that it's a kind of truth.

2022-07-26 20:15:27 RT @KayedSabrina: This thread is

2022-07-26 16:46:40 RT @think___y: This is the content worth having Twitter account for

2022-07-26 16:24:47 @RhodicMike What "side" am I on?

2022-07-26 16:22:52 RT @jmagnuss: Ah some good brain warmup for Tuesday morning!

2022-07-26 16:22:26 RT @MonicaBaumann: As always, Kareem is a great communicator.

2022-07-26 15:18:51 So, in my opinion, outside of a math classroom, "2+2=4" is a meaningless statement until you tell me what we're actually adding.

2022-07-26 15:18:50 Even a very simple conceptual framework like arithmetic can turn out be a lot more complicated than most of us realize.

2022-07-26 15:18:49 Let's say my goal wasn't to measure the number of people with covid but instead to measure the level of hospital utilization.Now, the same patient visiting two different hospitals should be counted as two separate utilizations of the available healthcare resources.

2022-07-21 13:57:24 sounds like a fun friday night me https://t.co/Ow4jBGWDkm

2022-07-20 06:11:09 RT @kareem_carr: I believe that data illiteracy, the inability to make sense of data, is becoming a huge barrier to human progress.The co…

2022-07-19 23:02:42 *me, reflecting on my dissertation years later*interviewer: “was any of it true?” https://t.co/yL6uKOKx09

2022-07-19 22:54:25 being a grad student, i know this feeling well.

2022-07-19 22:52:57 tfw you’re smart yet stupid https://t.co/XPSYfgLBhP

2022-07-19 16:29:37 @rowyourbot It would be harder to lie to people about what’s in the data if those people were data literate similar to how it’s harder to lie to people about what’s in a book if they can read.

2022-07-19 14:49:36 Advances in tech are making data collection faster and cheaper than ever before.The need to be data savvy is only going to get greater.

2022-07-19 14:49:35 I believe that data illiteracy, the inability to make sense of data, is becoming a huge barrier to human progress.The covid pandemic has been a perfect example of this.

2022-07-19 01:57:22 RT @kareem_carr: I’m sorry but this argument from Elon’s lawyers is borderline statistically illiterate.It doesn’t matter at all that 100…

2022-07-18 22:57:28 Don’t do it! https://t.co/k2I2SIktRP

2022-07-18 15:59:47 science is a harsh mistress https://t.co/IEFf9Qe7m6

2022-07-18 14:18:06 Some questions for people who believe personhood begins at conception:1. If a zygote splits to form twins, did the original person die or are they both the same person?2. If two zygotes fuse to form a chimera, is the new human being two people or did the original two die? https://t.co/VYl6EDHxQz

2022-07-18 13:19:49 A few commenters have brought up that technically N does matter (which is true). The formula pictured below is a little closer to the truth.Assuming Twitter has about 229 million active daily users, this formula is about 99.98% the same as the one I used earlier in the thread. https://t.co/sbN7hWybyI

2022-07-18 13:11:00 @awwscript Fair point. Updated my thread.

2022-07-18 12:44:00 RT @kareem_carr: I’m sorry but this argument from Elon’s lawyers is borderline statistically illiterate.It doesn’t matter at all that 100…

2022-07-17 20:27:07 @steveniweiss I didn’t know this when I wrote the thread but looks like Twitter was thinking about it as 9000 accounts per quarter as well. https://t.co/IWzeYnqEIq

2022-07-17 20:14:40 @TennantRob If you already have ±0.5% accuracy, what would be the logic behind going for more?

2022-07-17 19:15:46 RT @OliPerkins2: Nice thread here on sample size, elon musk and general bs.

2022-07-17 18:01:12 It’s strange that Elon brought up machine learning as a superior option. Obviously the training data for the machine learning algorithms would have to come from humans so human judgement is still the gold standard here.

2022-07-17 18:01:11 We just have to plug in our estimate which for Twitter was p=0.05 or 5%. Plugging that in, we get about ±0.5%. So we can be 95% confident that the true proportion of bots is been 4.5% and 5.5% which is accurate enough for any business relevant decisions.

2022-07-17 18:01:10 You may have noticed the error formula is a bit circular still since it includes p but p is what we’re trying to figure out in the first place. Not a problem.

2022-07-17 18:01:09 The percent of bots on any single day is probably not a business relevant number anyway so the relevant sample size isn’t 100.We probably want the percent of bots over a longer timescale like the last business quarter. At 100 a day, that gives you around 9000 for a quarter.

2022-07-17 18:01:08 The error bound (95% confidence interval) in this situation is approximately 1.96 times the square root of p(1-p)/n where p is the percentage of bots and n is the number of samples.Notice the formula doesn’t involve the total population size at all. https://t.co/cVXIRS0bIP

2022-07-17 18:01:07 I’m sorry but this argument from Elon’s lawyers is borderline statistically illiterate.It doesn’t matter at all that 100 accounts is a small percent of the total user base. https://t.co/cBzexqAPWE

2022-07-17 00:34:09 the best ex is eˣ

2022-07-15 22:26:27 @Piper_O_Brien @mattyglesias Not every joke is about politics. I'm a biostatistics PhD student which is literally the type of statistician that works on clinical trials.

2022-07-15 16:09:14 this is a tough one https://t.co/VnPmjJAxBY

2022-07-15 08:41:59 @evoluminate @SC_Griffith I’m aware. https://t.co/dAbtgoLS2t

2022-07-14 22:22:00 he’s a 10 but the confidence interval is (0,10)

2022-07-14 20:56:12 @mihaisafta_ @SC_Griffith Yes, you can imagine something going wrong but you can also imagine it *not* going wrong. I think that matters. I’m not saying everything imaginable is going to make sense but done consistently (on the level of a physics-like thought experiment) I think you can get sense from it.

2022-07-14 20:41:45 @sleepmancer @kevinlowens @SC_Griffith As long as the rules of your imaginary world were consistent enough, I'm sure those could generalize to other mathematical systems as well. Lol.

2022-07-14 20:38:37 @TheOutsiderHum1 @SC_Griffith I tend to think of such axioms as attempts to get abstractions that capture certain physical intuitions, so I just thought I'd go straight to the source.

2022-07-14 20:33:57 @Yourdadsfriend3 @isbellHFh @SC_Griffith Just imagine a huge pile. I don't think it matters that beyond a certain number of apples, it's all going to look the same. That's actually a plus. Makes it even more plausible to envision!

2022-07-14 20:32:33 @kevinlowens @SC_Griffith By "add", I just mean you walk over and get another apple and then throw it on or near the pile. If there's a situation that comes up that blocks you from doing this, like your bin is full, you can always imagine a counterfactual situation where the bin has room for one more.

2022-07-14 20:16:40 @SC_Griffith (Not saying this because I think I can explain things to *you* by the way given your background. Hoping you will clarify things to *me*. )

2022-07-14 20:12:21 @SC_Griffith Imagine having a pile of n apples. Now imagine going and getting one more apple and adding it to your pile. Now you have a new number of apples which we will call "n+1". It is always possible to imagine getting one more apple and so it's plausible that no largest number exists.

2022-07-14 16:05:00 I think what most people mean by "neurotypical" doesn't really make sense in the sciences. I've noticed for instance that a lot of people who're neurodivergent outside of science are very neurotypical inside of science.

2022-07-14 15:41:09 If lots of packages tend look like but don’t have a inside, then the probability will be high so no reason to suspect there is any to be had.But if it’s very rare for packages to look like that then we know we probably got a real on our hands.

2022-07-14 15:41:08 Lots of folks have trouble remembering what a p-value is so let me explain with the help of a visual aid.The p-value is the probability that this package would be as -shaped (or even more so) if it did *not* contain the thing that we’re all thinking is in there. https://t.co/2gvLKv5Vna

2022-07-14 15:14:50 Thanks for the great responses philosophy Twitter. It was very helpful. https://t.co/50YsLpoXWi

2022-07-14 09:03:12 RT @kareem_carr: One of my goals is to incorporate more philosophy into how I think about statistics. In general, I think scientists *sho…

2022-07-13 21:53:39 Speaking as a non-American, I think America has an excellent healthcare *market* where you can *buy* a lot of cutting edge services not available elsewhere.You can even buy your way to the head of the line which is harder to do in say Canada. https://t.co/g55r8rrNdp

2022-07-13 21:40:04 Something very interesting must have happened in the 1980s. Unclear what. https://t.co/tlOaADkx8B

2022-07-13 21:40:02 The difference is so clear-cut, it’s almost like a law of physics. https://t.co/I9hrHpgBlH

2022-07-13 17:50:38 RT @kareem_carr: One of my goals is to incorporate more philosophy into how I think about statistics. In general, I think scientists *sho…

2022-07-13 09:33:42 @taka_tukka Kind of you to say. Thanks!

2022-07-13 03:12:10 @JoshHochschild Makes a lot of sense. Resembles what I would do when I did statistics consulting.

2022-07-13 02:59:44 @dekkaaah Thanks!

2022-07-13 02:59:26 @GLopezPharmD Thanks!

2022-07-13 02:33:27 RT @kareem_carr: One of my goals is to incorporate more philosophy into how I think about statistics. In general, I think scientists *sho…

2022-07-13 00:54:30 @SaraLUckelman @venite I agree that it’s hard to come up with advice that works for everybody, but I’d definitely answer that question with “google ‘hammer wirecutter’ and see what they recommend”

2022-07-13 00:44:56 @d_malinsky good suggestion. already working through it. https://t.co/uGVHiGbyg1

2022-07-13 00:14:21 @mpsterling I’ve definitely tried articles from the SEP multiple times. It often feels like I’m drinking from a firehose. It’s helpful in the sense that you get a lot of perspectives though.

2022-07-13 00:09:34 @michelnivard A statistician should definitely be able to tell you what the consensus approach to a particular variety of data analysis. They might need specific details about the data to be sure it applies though.

2022-07-13 00:00:29 @taka_tukka That actually seems a very reasonable question to ask a statistician. I’ve answered that question many times. I’ve even answered it here on Twitter: https://t.co/OrD7gBqFar

2022-07-12 23:55:11 RT @ridderjeroen: Philosofriends, discuss this thread by @kareem_carr – it’s a striking observation about interdisciplinary conversations w…

2022-07-12 23:55:08 @ridderjeroen Thanks for the boost and the responses. They were very helpful!

2022-07-12 16:49:24 I want to know how to have *that* kind of conversation with philosophers. How do I do that?

2022-07-12 16:49:23 Imagine asking "What's a good hammer?" and getting:1. a detailed explanation of Aristotle's favorite hammer from 2000 years ago2. A copy of "The Encyclopedia of Hammers"3. instructions on how to handcraft a hammer completely from recycled coconut leaves and conch shells.

2022-07-12 16:49:22 I think how I ideally would want a conversation with a philosopher to go is I ask something like "what is truth?" and they give me a reasonable consensus view with a description of downsides if any and then I turn it into math.It doesn't have to be perfect just good enough.

2022-07-12 16:49:21 One of my goals is to incorporate more philosophy into how I think about statistics. In general, I think scientists *should* work more with philosophers.But I find talking to philosophers can be frustrating so I wanted to outline where I think the frustration comes from.

2022-07-12 14:10:34 people who write their lecture notes in latex https://t.co/PaptY8F1np

2022-07-11 14:27:56 when you love your data but it doesn’t love you back https://t.co/9UoOQxx3mR

2022-07-11 00:48:52 Seems like there might possibly be a similar thing going on in universities as well. I wonder if there's a link between cost inflation and administrator inflation.What are all these administrators administrating? https://t.co/KjRyF1pbdt https://t.co/KYVBgAc4xk

2022-07-10 18:23:05 lost a hypothesis today. data didn’t support it. need to shake it off. got 5 more hours of data cleaning to do. https://t.co/OLukXvHLR1

2022-07-10 16:29:17 @jmccollum27

2022-07-10 16:29:10 @kurosakiaduma Thanks!

2022-07-10 15:33:10 Hey new followers, let me introduce myself. I'm your friendly neighborhood statistician.My viral tweets tend to be me being ridiculous, but I sometimes sneak in a few serious points about how I think statistics can help improve our increasingly data-drenched society.

2022-07-10 04:51:14 @adad8m @JARS3N You should look into tidyverse if you haven't already. They are very much redesigning the syntax of the language.

2022-07-09 23:51:47 I think many non-statisticians are unaware of the most significant difference between R and Python for statistics. I would guess that stats code in R has benefited from millions of hours of attention from thousands of statisticians. Community investment like that is hard to beat.

2022-07-09 21:20:15 @patscli https://t.co/roapbqBJWv

2022-07-09 20:16:48 when they ask you why you made that particular choice for your analysis and you don’t even remember doing that https://t.co/uVLjZgzTdF

2022-07-09 19:21:52 @gyp_casino ¯\_()_/¯ https://t.co/KYDdK6dYrU

2022-07-09 19:19:20 @kneupane I think it's inevitable that Python would win out in the machine learning world. So much of ML is about efficiently grinding through prototypes which is easier to do in a language like Python that has a greater emphasis on the software engineering and DevOps side.

2022-07-09 19:15:54 And before the real R heads chime in about software engineering in R, if you've literally worked for Rstudio then that's cheating.

2022-07-09 19:11:45 When somebody says R is better than Python for data science or vice versa, most of the time, I think that's just an indication of what they spend most of their time on as a data scientist: statistical analysis vs software engineering.

2022-07-09 19:10:29 I don't think either R or Python are clearly best for data science. For the kind of data scientist that's more like a statistician, R is best. If they're more like a software engineer, Python is probably the way to go.

2022-07-08 23:35:51 learning statistics be like https://t.co/sak6uJ17bh

2022-07-08 15:00:46 You’ve heard of position, velocity and acceleration. What about jerk, snap, crackle and pop? https://t.co/GVGL15JPby https://t.co/TyduVVQQwA

2022-07-08 14:23:43 when you’re feelin fancy https://t.co/Nar8ZHtqEb

2022-07-08 01:40:32 me, a grad student, returning from a successful hunt at the weekly seminar https://t.co/H88cHtHQpz

2022-07-08 00:02:41 when you contribute to the paper but don’t get authorship https://t.co/qlfW3WbfXv

2022-07-07 22:17:36 RT @kareem_carr: Nobody will remember:- Your salary- Your fancy title- How ‘busy’ you were- How stressed you were- How many hours you…

2022-07-07 15:52:35 The NYT goes deep down the statistics rabbit hole and I’m here for ithttps://t.co/0jJf5N6GYj https://t.co/POMg3XtaHg

2022-07-07 15:37:25 @PhDemetri Google forms? You can set it to force people to input certain fields , and it should address formatting issues in general.

2022-07-07 15:02:00 I'm don't think it makes sense to call certain kinds of math "easy". You can find arbitrarily hard math problems at every level.Math is often taught as a curated path of solved problems which gives people the mistaken impression that all the problems at prior levels are solved.

2022-07-07 14:12:00 Nobody will remember:- Your salary- Your fancy title- How ‘busy’ you were- How stressed you were- How many hours you worked People will remember: - that you commented your code

2022-07-07 11:11:57 @Undercoverhist Fascinating. Is this also the invention of the word "programming" as in computer programming as well?

2022-07-07 02:06:06 This kind of behavior makes me furious. It’s so shortsighted!When authorities misuse the genetic data that they’ve been entrusted with, it makes people afraid to share their genetic info which slows down research and hurts all of us. https://t.co/qdID8zyLws

2022-07-07 01:43:49 getting it done with a little help from reviewer #2 https://t.co/xHt0umXToM

2022-07-06 21:07:09 @Aella_Girl I think the true value is about 0.16 for all groups with the smaller categories showing more noise (extreme values) due to smaller sample sizes. You can try simulating this in Python to get a sense.You should consider a side-career in data science. I think you’d enjoy it.

2022-07-06 20:58:46 @Aella_Girl I would rescale: 0 for no interest and 1 for anything more. Using your own scale is a bit arbitrary and makes it harder to interpret the average. The evidence here suggests to me these numbers don’t differ at all by race.

2022-07-06 20:24:40 Thanks for the vote of confidence @gib_hurst https://t.co/7zCENgtPq4

2022-07-06 15:15:17 when your model fails to generalize to real world data https://t.co/aoJE9ZazqB

2022-07-06 14:15:13 Nobody will remember:- Your salary- Your fancy title- How ‘busy’ you were- How stressed you were- How many hours you worked People will remember: - That one time you wrote a bunch of code and it ran with zero errors on the first try.

2022-07-06 00:00:08 Statisticians *inventing the technique*: Haha. This is foolproof!Researchers *applying the technique*: https://t.co/kDkqY7XRZr

2022-07-05 20:52:17 RT @EpiEllie: If you like statistics &

2022-07-05 20:08:43 @CGraziul I try. Thanks!!

2022-07-05 15:54:05 when a bayesian and a frequentist meet in person https://t.co/rXknfcEEAp

2022-07-05 14:01:16 woohoo 80k followers! i don't know why so many people are into statistics tweets but I appreciate you all. https://t.co/O4H5sKQJJq

2022-07-04 20:31:27 RT @kareem_carr: her: babe what you thinking aboutme, a data scientist: https://t.co/Zs3T5wkJ8a

2022-07-04 19:30:37 @SMLaughna @EpiEllie True, but I think this gets at a deeper issue that’s not just about executing procedures correctly. https://t.co/YjLRZqXegq

2022-07-04 19:27:06 @MarcSchaefferGD I agree but the arithmetic above is correct, and adding percentages is fine *in the right context*. Statistics is where we learn what mathematical operations to use on our data and in which context.

2022-07-04 18:54:46 We NEED to make statistics a required course in high school. This is what happens when people think data analysis is just taking a bunch of numbers and doing whatever mathematical procedures feel right in the moment.Meaningless number crunching is rampant right now. https://t.co/6N6tFmG2Eo

2022-07-04 14:56:21 Showing my son all the open browser tabs he’ll inherit. https://t.co/enF2CyCrJG

2022-07-04 14:45:48 Are we nearing the peak of the current AI research bubble? https://t.co/KyQ7SGJnPr

2022-07-04 00:42:02 @alsoknownasLJ It’s interesting tech for sure with the potential to be radically transformative socially, but it also attracts massive amounts of wackiness, and it can be hard to tell which is which.

2022-07-04 00:30:57 Genome analysis on the *checks notes* block chain??? https://t.co/Tpa86qZhs2

2022-07-04 00:05:36 i would even settle for the mode tbh https://t.co/rcdIg8kcEB

2022-07-03 20:52:44 @Aella_Girl you forgot 5

2022-07-03 16:28:27 me, a data scientist, when i get a new dataset https://t.co/Qpdt3oMbdw

2022-07-03 15:06:07 her: babe what you thinking aboutme, a data scientist: https://t.co/Zs3T5wkJ8a

2022-07-02 22:44:42 kind of the same but still hits different https://t.co/bFpfnHNhBw

2022-07-02 16:16:37 me, scheduling the 8am class: I’ll just drink plenty of coffeeme, taking the 8am class: https://t.co/UtAzFgx807

2022-07-02 15:37:56 when the difficulty level of the learning material is just right https://t.co/id2ftzTl5I

2022-07-02 14:41:48 BREAKING: The Supreme Court just ruled 6-3 that R programmers have the right to use <

2022-07-02 00:03:01 BREAKING: The Supreme Court just ruled 6-3 that the field of statistics has been found to have violated the free speech rights of researchers.In a stunning reversal of established precedent, ALL p-values now count as statistically significant.

2022-07-01 16:36:35 @ev_bjork I’m as concerned about this as you are. Donate to my campaign fund so we stop this together.

2022-07-01 16:26:29 BREAKING: The Supreme Court just ruled 6-3 that according to the US constitution logistic regression IS machine learning.

2022-07-01 15:09:46 not a lot of people know this, but machine learning is just statistics after you go into settings and enable dark mode https://t.co/lUEYs3NEjC

2022-06-30 22:55:17 that feeling when you’re the only statistician on the team and your collaborators just asked you, “wouldn’t it be easier if we just did a t-test?” https://t.co/UqxfQRl7UH

2022-06-30 20:01:06 @FerkoWithAFada https://t.co/w5v384uE0l

2022-06-30 14:33:00 Question: You train a machine learning model on a massive dataset. The test set performance is amazing.Can you think of situations where the model will still not perform well on real data?Extra credit: Why might it not perform well even on a randomly selected holdout dataset?

2022-06-29 22:59:20 ¯\_()_/¯ https://t.co/V9YXGhju3X

2022-06-29 22:35:54 pelosi really said “i need to speak to your manager” https://t.co/xs9Qkf5cJg

2022-06-29 16:42:04 saw boston university’s new data science building for the first time yesterday if a name change is all it takes for statistics to get this kind of respect, i guess i’m down https://t.co/33Oztkbwmd

2022-06-29 15:44:17 I have a derivatives joke but I don't want to go off on a tangent.

2022-06-27 13:14:59 How many times have you had covid?

2022-06-24 09:34:13 RT @kareem_carr: “I don’t want to go to grad school, but I want more statistics in my life. How can I get this?”I often hear some versio…

2022-06-24 01:07:17 tuition costs, academic publishing, adjuncting, free work for authorship, the allure of tenure. pretty much all of academia. https://t.co/faOWTk0mmL

2022-06-23 15:27:39 still significant baaaaby!!! https://t.co/glgMeo5UYA

2022-06-23 14:59:47 I'd like to thank @AgnesCallard for giving me the idea of crowdsourcing an answer to this question.

2022-06-23 14:41:17 “I don’t want to go to grad school, but I want more statistics in my life. How can I get this?”I often hear some version of this question. Please help me come up with a GREAT answer to it.

2022-06-23 12:16:17 RT @kareem_carr: I’ve been thinking lately that the main difference between Frequentism and Bayesianism is Frequentisms try to model the ev…

2022-06-23 04:44:27 @antipattern @ben11kehoe @lastpositivist Thanks. Will have to check that one out.

2022-06-22 15:27:38 this is basically me writing code every day https://t.co/1b5FiJd9Xq

2022-06-22 15:11:54 The "random columnist" turns out to be a distinguished professor of Psychology at Northeastern with expertise in "Affective Neuroscience, Psychology of Emotion, and Social and Personality Psychology". Seems pretty qualified to me!

2022-06-22 15:11:53 What's the probability that science has advanced in last 150 years? Very high, I would think. The belief that we can never improve on the genius of our forefathers is the exact opposite of what science should be about. https://t.co/u3wZcszhXB

2022-06-22 14:45:22 @itjohnstone I don’t find this critique of frequentism convincing because it seems to also rule out causal reasoning. “Gravity causes objects to fall” is a statement about a class of events but most would also feel comfortable applying it to a single event of an object falling as well.

2022-06-22 14:35:50 The polling firm @YouGov did a poll of 24,000 Americans to create this alignment chart. I love how much effort they put into this lol. https://t.co/JKC3Koy0II

2022-06-22 14:03:02 @itjohnstone That's a fair framing I think, but I would say that "a model of samples of multiple recurring events" is their way of modeling the event.

2022-06-22 13:59:43 @ben11kehoe I think about that all the time! Would love to hear an answer from someone who knows a lot about Bayesian inference as it relates to philosophy of science...maybe @lastpositivist???

2022-06-22 00:19:51 he’s a 10 but only in binary

2022-06-22 00:03:31 He’s an 8 but he thinks R is a real programming language

2022-06-21 23:07:01 Viewed this way, it’s unsurprising that these approaches can be similar but often come out differently since they’re modeling different but related things.

2022-06-21 22:50:12 I’ve been thinking lately that the main difference between Frequentism and Bayesianism is Frequentisms try to model the event while Bayesians try to model a rational observer’s beliefs about the event.

2022-06-21 19:27:00 why do people keep saying this??? my opinion is basically that:— ml and stats are different activities— sometimes people in ml anthropomorphize their work which is funny to me— sometimes they exaggerate how well things workhow is this anti ml? lol. https://t.co/IeoMWkZ5TG

2022-06-21 15:29:15 In addition, the variable could genuinely be purely bimodal with no underlying structure since nature doesn’t owe us simplicity https://t.co/kRDFw2PKS7

2022-06-21 15:29:13 The other side points out that even so, there will inevitably be downsides, like false positives, false negatives and legitimately tough calls for stuff that falls in the middle. https://t.co/ukjP8gIUW2

2022-06-21 15:29:12 One side will argue that you can imagine something like this where the original data is interpreted as coming from a mixture https://t.co/HGlMxTi2JZ

2022-06-21 15:29:11 as a statistician, it’s amazing to me how many stupid culture war debates come down to arguing about whether this kind of variable is best described as BIMODAL (tending to produce data with two humps) vs BINOMIAL (tending to take on two values potentially with some randomness). https://t.co/uzAfFKMBAk

2022-06-21 14:13:55 4 statisticians and a data scientist https://t.co/KlGkrUcCLR

2022-06-21 11:49:27 RT @kareem_carr: this was my multiverse of madness https://t.co/d7bDFWC0G5

2022-06-21 03:41:53 @78384986xx this is an interactive site shared by another commentor: https://t.co/6h9BYQiZoM

2022-06-21 03:39:43 @natureguidesbc https://t.co/g5M75nkS9k

2022-06-21 03:39:10 @rumianreza Yes!

2022-06-21 03:38:52 @MEPjoe This explains it better. But basically it’s because the relationship happens as part of a limiting process. https://t.co/yZnTnZP4zt

2022-06-21 03:36:57 @comp_phys_marc Of course, buddy! https://t.co/472obHxl5a

2022-06-21 01:02:55 RT @kareem_carr: this was my multiverse of madness https://t.co/d7bDFWC0G5

2022-06-20 21:51:18 @MFumanelli Nice!

2022-06-20 19:30:51 @KakatiTweets Most people learn about the Normal distribution or the Binomial and build out their knowledge from there. The Exponential distribution is also surprisingly central.This little triangle between the Normal, Poisson and Binomial is one of the first relationships students learn. https://t.co/lwvAFEnY9I

2022-06-20 19:21:32 @savethebees93 That’s a good idea although it would probably take a whole series.

2022-06-20 15:01:23 this was my multiverse of madness https://t.co/d7bDFWC0G5

2022-06-19 16:37:01 the academic urge to collect credentials like infinity stones

2022-06-19 15:55:57 how to have fun as an academic https://t.co/vVcxW2Lhl8

2022-06-19 15:18:49 “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics. Ha ha ha.”Just stop. When Mark Twain first said it, like 99.9% * of stats hadn’t been invented yet. This is like judging medicine now based on medicine 100 years ago.———* warning: may not be entirely accurate

2022-06-19 08:25:48 RT @kareem_carr: my best work ever https://t.co/zoR2pxF7Cc

2022-06-18 15:55:04 the comic teaches us a valuable lesson that pie charts are terrible https://t.co/P3fq5tRi0M

2022-06-18 05:16:30 RT @kareem_carr: my best work ever https://t.co/zoR2pxF7Cc

2022-06-18 03:35:12 RT @seldo: Holy shit the accuracy.

2022-06-18 00:53:57 yeah, sex is cool, but have you ever spent your friday night building yourself a new desktop. this motherboard lookin thicc af

2022-06-18 00:14:11 @Tim_Hua_ just jokes friend

2022-06-18 00:05:26 @dustdevildeity Sure. A few examples are logical reasoning, imagination, intuition, faith (for instance in moral matters), memory, science, emotion, the five senses.

2022-06-17 23:22:39 @ylecun @olujoe_1 @Twitter Weirdly, they seem to not have an scientist category, but I think you would qualify under their influencer category.

2022-06-17 23:04:35 I don't think it's plausible that some groups of people have ways of knowing that are unique to them, but of the ways of knowing that are available to all of us, some groups might prioritize certain ways of knowing over others in a way that might be characteristic of their group.

2022-06-17 23:04:34 There's a way in which "other ways of knowing" discourse makes some sense to me.

2022-06-17 21:14:53 @kneupane @ylecun smart move imo

2022-06-17 21:12:44 @Night_Burner_ @ylecun I feel like it might be more fair (to me) to read the whole thread and look up some of the information yourself before commenting. Have a good day.

2022-06-17 21:04:54 @ylecun To be clear, this is not a serious post but I do mention the grad school/undergrad aspect in the thread. Wikipedia lists MS as the highest degree for Brin and Page. Not saying that’s correct but the wiki page authors probably put more effort into this than I did.

2022-06-17 15:15:14 my best work ever https://t.co/zoR2pxF7Cc

2022-06-17 11:53:12 @AndrewLBeam @2plus2make5 To be clear, usually you're the one doing me a favor so that's not how I feel about it.

2022-06-17 11:52:03 @AndrewLBeam @2plus2make5 I think some people are bothered by the effort imbalance. One side just sends a quick email while the other side has to go dig around the calendar for available spots. The traditional way takes longer but is equally tedious for both sides.

2022-06-17 01:31:40 they seem very normal

2022-06-17 01:31:39 me, a statistician: my politics is whatever this is https://t.co/z4QSMNZtX6

2022-06-16 23:24:50 @aetataureate I’m actually feeling more positive about it lol. Like I used to want to make it more like statistics and now I’m happy with it just being its own thing.

2022-06-16 23:10:42 choose your own adventure https://t.co/6RnMfMvQjR

2022-06-16 16:51:07 Link to source [pdf]: https://t.co/42ONgn42C9

2022-06-16 16:51:06 Race is a social construct not a biological one. https://t.co/mExhwv7gFi

2022-06-16 15:15:00 Data science is handcrafted statistics, statistics is artisanal machine learning, and machine learning is organically grown, locally sourced linear algebra.

2022-06-16 14:33:00 Did you hear about these two guys who built a boat so they could go on cruises and stuff with all their friends, but then one of the guys went and sank it for absolutely no reason?He completely destroyed their friend ship.

2022-06-16 11:49:17 @wtgowers Yikes! Hope the lack/mildness of symptoms continues.

2022-06-16 04:04:33 @kernlfunction This article gives a general overview. https://t.co/vgSE5BweV8

2022-06-16 01:28:03 suck it google. achieved sentience on my first try. https://t.co/EdciRIALcB

2022-06-16 00:46:45 gonna tell my kids this was machine learning https://t.co/HCwlubsikz

2022-06-16 00:05:46 To be clear, in my professional capacity as a statistician, I would just like to reassure everyone that absolutely no science was used in the creation of this thread.

2022-06-15 23:46:56 I don’t know what to make of this pattern but the Stanford ones all dropped out of graduate degrees and the Harvard ones all dropped out of undergrad.

2022-06-15 23:46:55 Did some idle research yesterday.I noticed some weird patterns like out of the 15 richest billionaires, 9 dropped out of college, usually Harvard or Stanford. https://t.co/9Ss83dJvWl

2022-06-15 16:47:04 scientist: every science uses data so really all science is data science. haha. *monkey's paw curls*

2022-06-15 15:43:00 the day everything changed https://t.co/3RNZqa83Wv

2022-06-15 14:45:53 GAMs are ML now??? OK I give up. Statistics is fake news. It’s all Machine Learning. https://t.co/U2QG1Pvh46

2022-06-15 14:02:00 We need a government funded supercomputing infrastructure specifically for enabling the machine learning community to create open access/open data versions of models like GPT-3 and DALLE-2. The advantage that covert actors have in this space is a risk to all of humanity.

2022-06-14 15:14:21 @valanchee That seems fair to me. ML very much embraces the idea of the black box and the fact that you can just use the data to tell you whatever you want to know about the model (for instance how well it performs).

2022-06-14 14:58:31 I think of statistics as a way of scientifically analyzing the properties of black boxes. It's useful in analyzing situations where you can see some of the inputs and outputs of a system, but don't fully understand the processes involved.

2022-06-14 13:54:21 emeritus professors in the front row be like https://t.co/2UWHVcfEEC

2022-06-14 00:23:29 I call this one “The Art of Programming” https://t.co/rx7o6p4GpM

2022-06-13 16:03:00 One day somebody is going to claim their talking sex bot is sentient and all hell is going to break lose.

2022-06-13 15:35:11 they get it from us (literally) https://t.co/HRtYNz8Hji

2022-06-13 15:01:00 I'm willing to bet real money that there are literally hundreds of stories about sentient artificial intelligences in the training data of that Google AI.

2022-06-13 14:13:21 https://t.co/Pr278FAc0t

2022-06-13 01:38:15 men will literally claim a chatbot is sentient instead of going to therapy.

2022-06-12 19:21:21 me, trying to get published in the washington post: “is harry potter sentient?”

2022-06-12 14:52:57 Can you imagine what bad actors in either the public or private sector could do with access to an army of virtual people that humans were strongly inclined to love, trust and obey as if they were real people?

2022-06-12 14:52:56 It would be extremely silly for us to fall for our own fake data coming out of our fake data machines. We've made machines that can convincingly fake evidence of an inner life. We shouldn't mistake that for an actual inner life.

2022-06-12 14:52:55 Similarly, an ability to converse would normally be strong evidence that we are talking to a person of some kind. Now that we've made AI specifically designed to produce realistic conversations, we can no longer take such conversations as evidence of an inner life.

2022-06-12 14:52:54 The conversations I produce are just the *evidence* of my inner life. Those conversations aren't my inner life itself.I would continue to have an inner life even if I chose to never speak to another person again.

2022-06-12 14:52:53 Seems pretty idiotic to me to define sentience as "being capable of having a conversation". I would define sentience as something more like having some kind of inner life. https://t.co/3x4rLGuv7X

2022-06-11 23:13:04 stop crying https://t.co/KTILcBE0rs

2022-06-11 22:28:34 The biggest impact deep learning has had on me intellectually is it has radically expanded my conception of a mathematical function. I see everything else about deep learning as just a means to an end: a path to all these crazy mathematical spaces where our language and art live.

2022-06-11 14:43:51 me, an expert, skillfully debugging my code https://t.co/EQtZtsihbM

2022-06-10 23:25:22 “the proof is left as an exercise for the reader”the proof: https://t.co/bOqLRnZZKE

2022-06-10 15:07:14 they all post like three preprints a day https://t.co/ch8taPhuQg

2022-06-09 18:54:40 https://t.co/gDGUbe739P

2022-06-09 18:54:18 https://t.co/o4uhvKKU8z

2022-06-09 18:53:50 I would recommended "Chaos: A Very Short Introduction" if you don't want to deal with too much math and "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos" by @stevenstrogatz if you're open to some light calculus. https://t.co/6bUzLmTEkx

2022-06-08 20:09:58 @JSEllenberg I think the classic comparison that economists use to talk about human irrationality is cutting your own hair to save $5 but not being willing to cut your neighbor’s hair to make $5.

2022-06-08 20:06:49 @JSEllenberg These are different even from an economic perspective. The second one has an extra opportunity cost of not being able to do whatever you were gonna do instead. Maybe you have some other opportunity that would make you $5000. To summarize:(a) $500(b) -$500+your time

2022-06-08 19:52:18 @lastpositivist Ultimately this might come down to who’s involved but it seems to me that the tech ethics community actually presents a legal risk to tech companies by exposing potential areas of harm that are currently unknown to the public.

2022-06-08 19:50:01 @lastpositivist Interesting observation. In my experience, bioethics guidelines feel much like HR guidelines as in “this is what we all need to do to avoid getting sued”. Much like HR, I’ve found that bioethics groups are often in a protective role vis a vis the organization.

2022-06-08 14:54:38 @doctorBaytas Good question. I think they'll be a need for content distribution platforms that you can trust as well.

2022-06-08 14:43:21 For instance, we might not be able to trust a video, but we might trust our favorite journalist who says they were a direct witness or we might trust them when they say they confirmed the event through multiple sources that they trust.

2022-06-08 14:43:20 Advances in AI will soon give us all the power to create extremely realistic fake visual, audio and text evidence, but I don't think this means we'll never believe anything again. I think we'll adapt by focusing less on the "facts" and more on reputation of who is sharing them.

2022-06-08 14:15:35 @dankettercello watermark from the app i used to make the image maybe.

2022-06-08 14:07:27 my favorite fact about python is if you type “import this”, the response is a super emo poem about coding in python https://t.co/aGadtN89mW

2022-06-08 00:26:20 I think the main take away from the DALLE-2 secret language fiasco is claims about machine learning models should be treated as *scientific* claims, which require properly designed experiments and statistical analyses as proof, so we avoid confusing correlation for causation.

2022-06-08 00:17:14 @nsaphra Nope. Thanks. Will check it out.

2022-06-07 23:42:15 seems to me you could interpret that as “sex is real” but also as “sex is not real”. sometimes mathematical realities are hard to translate into english.

2022-06-07 23:42:14 somebody asked me what i think biological sex is mathematically. i’m no expert but i picture something like a dynamical system with two attractors which we call “male” and “female”.i see the attractors as an emergent property of a *group* of body plans vs specific individuals https://t.co/0KA2y1Dbqk

2022-06-06 09:59:48 @skdh Hope you feel better soon!

2022-06-05 21:49:03 No more math culture war for me, @BretWeinstein. Truce! https://t.co/KVa7kkq9Il

2022-06-05 19:30:50 Obviously ignoring the full complexity of a situation is simpler for the mathematical modeler, but this simplicity often comes at the expense of the people not included in the model.

2022-06-05 19:30:49 Hey. Statistician here. Putting aside the issue of social construction for a second, the variable depicted here is not binary. It literally does not have just two values. https://t.co/CLINZXpVP7

2022-06-05 14:44:00 the data science hierarchy of needs https://t.co/YE3HJKhxar

2022-06-05 00:38:26 @MrHonner @harald_bohr Nice! Here’s another thing I did that’s related. Also when the exponent p=∞, the solution is the midrange i.e. (min x + max x)/2 https://t.co/y22kcUfZ9Z

2022-06-04 15:32:54 Make a data scientist cry with just 4 words

2022-06-04 10:55:50 @CleoHariMSc It’s in my tweet history somewhere. I didn’t delete it but the video link wasn’t working last time I saw it.

2022-06-03 23:45:59 predictionsp-valuesposterior distributions https://t.co/zCsULGvPSF

2022-06-03 23:17:03 I like to think of my simplified explanations as the solution to an optimization problem. They’re the closest low-dimensional approximation of the original idea. https://t.co/EH5rlw71X2

2022-06-03 00:02:06 Y’all laughing but I bet they get the census done real fast in Sweden https://t.co/82DHehS2S4

2022-06-02 00:32:59 controversial opinion: you don’t have to be bayesian to use bayes’ theorem

2022-06-01 23:33:49 I’ve encountered three definitions of “data scientist”:1. people who collect, curate and visually summarize massive datasets2. people who apply machine learning to real world data3. statisticians who focus on user friendlinessWhich one most closely fits your definition?

2022-05-26 13:32:01 RT @EpiEllie: Why doesn’t “individual rights” ever mean the right to a safe &

2022-05-25 05:41:49 RT @kareem_carr: The 3 most important statistical averages seem a bit arbitraryThe mode is the most common data point. The median divides…

2022-05-24 15:39:51 Each average minimizes a different kind of distance to the data.

2022-05-24 15:39:50 The 3 most important statistical averages seem a bit arbitraryThe mode is the most common data point. The median divides the data in half. The mean is the sum of the data divided by the number of data pointsBUT there's a way to looking at them that ties it all together https://t.co/ynofuYHrom

2022-05-24 15:36:07 @Aella_Girl I think you might enjoy this article by renowned epidemiologist @ken_rothman:https://t.co/GPKCfVhHYz

2022-05-24 15:27:58 @miclugo @docmilanfar I like this point a lot! Reframing it as a kind of linearization both makes it easier to see how they would have come up with it while simultaneously emphasizing that the insight is related to calculus (approximation through linearization).

2022-05-23 23:51:04 The source is a short and very charming paper by @docmilanfar where he talks about learning the formula from his father who learned it from his father. https://t.co/aupCVzoDKR

2022-05-23 23:51:03 The Persian folk formula is surprisingly good! For a $10,000 loan at 7% interest for 4 years, the exact formula gives a monthly payment of $239.46 and the folk formula gives an estimate of $237.50

2022-05-23 23:51:02 Persian merchants use a formula for approximating loan payments that only seems to make sense if you know calculus.And yet, the Persian folk formula seems to predate the discovery of the ideas from calculus that are needed to understand it. https://t.co/J4oR2ONBpG

2022-05-23 16:11:58 Just realized “back story” should be “backstory”. Just in case this bothers you as much as it bothers me, here’s the correction. https://t.co/mFsBaHSnLC

2022-05-23 15:46:00 This infographic is adapted from scholarship on the “total survey error” framework. Although originally developed for thinking about surveys, I find it a very useful framework for thinking critically about statistics in general.

2022-05-23 15:45:59 Statistics like “40% of patients experience severe illness” seem very straightforward and easy to understand, but this simplicity is deceptive.Here’s a taste of what goes into creating them: https://t.co/boNF0dSknS

2022-05-22 14:06:17 @natched I don’t think that’s a real definition. It doesn’t “mean” anything. It’s more like a specification.

2022-05-22 13:47:32 For statisticians, I’d say the word is “probability”. We just focus on the math and try not to fight about it. https://t.co/BQXn0EbGIO

2022-05-22 13:44:43 @angie_rasmussen @halvorz For virologists, I’d say the word is “alive” as in “is a virus alive or dead?”

2022-05-21 23:03:35 Even before deep learning started working amazingly well, it already had two things going for it. It had a very cool name *and* there was something super satisfying about getting to use the chain rule that many times in a row. It was like getting a streak of green traffic lights.

2022-05-20 14:57:50 Conversations that start with an invalidation of another group's feelings and experiences, even if factually correct, are going to be a non-starters.

2022-05-20 14:57:49 I don't have any solutions but I have some intuitions.

2022-05-20 14:57:48 What's fascinating to me is so many of us are feeling the same way and yet that unified feeling hasn't brought us closer together.

2022-05-20 14:57:47 No matter how privileged a group might appear to people on the outside, there seem to be people within that group that feel under siege.

2022-05-20 14:57:46 Many groups feel persecuted for just living their life and being who they are: men, women, black people, white people, tenured ivy league professors, billionaires. (1/n)

2022-05-20 12:54:49 RT @kareem_carr: If I had lots of cash, I’d be much more drawn to the technical problem of how to design social systems where people felt i…

2022-05-20 08:11:00 CAFIAC FIX

2022-10-27 16:59:16 WE DID IT.Final tally:- A: 24.6%- B: 24.1%- C: 26.7%- D: 24.5%.Not a perfect result but really impressive for a game involving 8000 people. Good job everybody! https://t.co/p4wWVLCfgh

2022-10-26 16:02:36 I just realized I didn’t say this explicitly. Retweeting/Quote-tweeting are also allowed.

2022-10-26 15:41:49 This poll is a cooperative game.Try to get as close to an even split as you can with each option getting 25% of the vote.Rules:- DON'T use any kind of randomization device- DO try to influence potential voters by commenting on how you think they should vote

2022-10-25 15:24:49 hell yeah! https://t.co/wnfOv8o6fs

2022-10-24 02:22:45 RT @kareem_carr: A lot of people think math is never ambiguous which is false.0⁰ is a perfect example of what ambiguity looks like in mat…

2022-10-23 23:01:31 @quaesita look at all those math books! . the chainmail shirt is cool too.

2022-10-23 15:11:45 Reference: the wikipedia article on 0⁰ is very good if you want to read more about it. https://t.co/NeacDAV2ui

2022-10-23 15:11:44 Unfortunately (or fortunately), having a value for 0⁰ is really helpful in a lot cases. Many find it much too convenient to just completely avoid it.

2022-10-23 15:11:43 A lot of people think math is never ambiguous which is false.0⁰ is a perfect example of what ambiguity looks like in mathematics.

2022-10-22 21:16:33 me: how much would it cost for me to train this model?machine learning community: https://t.co/wBQYl2hdEX

2022-10-22 14:28:05 choose your weapon https://t.co/iNE56TGZe0

2022-10-27 16:59:16 WE DID IT.Final tally:- A: 24.6%- B: 24.1%- C: 26.7%- D: 24.5%.Not a perfect result but really impressive for a game involving 8000 people. Good job everybody! https://t.co/p4wWVLCfgh

2022-10-26 16:02:36 I just realized I didn’t say this explicitly. Retweeting/Quote-tweeting are also allowed.

2022-10-26 15:41:49 This poll is a cooperative game.Try to get as close to an even split as you can with each option getting 25% of the vote.Rules:- DON'T use any kind of randomization device- DO try to influence potential voters by commenting on how you think they should vote

2022-10-25 15:24:49 hell yeah! https://t.co/wnfOv8o6fs

2022-10-24 02:22:45 RT @kareem_carr: A lot of people think math is never ambiguous which is false.0⁰ is a perfect example of what ambiguity looks like in mat…

2022-10-23 23:01:31 @quaesita look at all those math books! . the chainmail shirt is cool too.

2022-10-23 15:11:45 Reference: the wikipedia article on 0⁰ is very good if you want to read more about it. https://t.co/NeacDAV2ui

2022-10-23 15:11:44 Unfortunately (or fortunately), having a value for 0⁰ is really helpful in a lot cases. Many find it much too convenient to just completely avoid it.

2022-10-23 15:11:43 A lot of people think math is never ambiguous which is false.0⁰ is a perfect example of what ambiguity looks like in mathematics.

2022-10-22 21:16:33 me: how much would it cost for me to train this model?machine learning community: https://t.co/wBQYl2hdEX

2022-10-22 14:28:05 choose your weapon https://t.co/iNE56TGZe0

2022-10-27 16:59:16 WE DID IT.Final tally:- A: 24.6%- B: 24.1%- C: 26.7%- D: 24.5%.Not a perfect result but really impressive for a game involving 8000 people. Good job everybody! https://t.co/p4wWVLCfgh

2022-10-26 16:02:36 I just realized I didn’t say this explicitly. Retweeting/Quote-tweeting are also allowed.

2022-10-26 15:41:49 This poll is a cooperative game.Try to get as close to an even split as you can with each option getting 25% of the vote.Rules:- DON'T use any kind of randomization device- DO try to influence potential voters by commenting on how you think they should vote

2022-10-25 15:24:49 hell yeah! https://t.co/wnfOv8o6fs

2022-10-24 02:22:45 RT @kareem_carr: A lot of people think math is never ambiguous which is false.0⁰ is a perfect example of what ambiguity looks like in mat…

2022-10-23 23:01:31 @quaesita look at all those math books! . the chainmail shirt is cool too.

2022-10-23 15:11:45 Reference: the wikipedia article on 0⁰ is very good if you want to read more about it. https://t.co/NeacDAV2ui

2022-10-23 15:11:44 Unfortunately (or fortunately), having a value for 0⁰ is really helpful in a lot cases. Many find it much too convenient to just completely avoid it.

2022-10-23 15:11:43 A lot of people think math is never ambiguous which is false.0⁰ is a perfect example of what ambiguity looks like in mathematics.

2022-10-22 21:16:33 me: how much would it cost for me to train this model?machine learning community: https://t.co/wBQYl2hdEX

2022-10-22 14:28:05 choose your weapon https://t.co/iNE56TGZe0

2022-10-29 16:28:23 This platform tends to overreact to change. I’m going to continue having fun talking about statistics and math on Twitter as long as nothing prevents me.

2022-10-27 16:59:16 WE DID IT.Final tally:- A: 24.6%- B: 24.1%- C: 26.7%- D: 24.5%.Not a perfect result but really impressive for a game involving 8000 people. Good job everybody! https://t.co/p4wWVLCfgh

2022-10-26 16:02:36 I just realized I didn’t say this explicitly. Retweeting/Quote-tweeting are also allowed.

2022-10-26 15:41:49 This poll is a cooperative game.Try to get as close to an even split as you can with each option getting 25% of the vote.Rules:- DON'T use any kind of randomization device- DO try to influence potential voters by commenting on how you think they should vote

2022-10-25 15:24:49 hell yeah! https://t.co/wnfOv8o6fs

2022-10-24 02:22:45 RT @kareem_carr: A lot of people think math is never ambiguous which is false.0⁰ is a perfect example of what ambiguity looks like in mat…

2022-10-23 23:01:31 @quaesita look at all those math books! . the chainmail shirt is cool too.

2022-10-23 15:11:45 Reference: the wikipedia article on 0⁰ is very good if you want to read more about it. https://t.co/NeacDAV2ui

2022-10-23 15:11:44 Unfortunately (or fortunately), having a value for 0⁰ is really helpful in a lot cases. Many find it much too convenient to just completely avoid it.

2022-10-23 15:11:43 A lot of people think math is never ambiguous which is false.0⁰ is a perfect example of what ambiguity looks like in mathematics.

2022-10-22 21:16:33 me: how much would it cost for me to train this model?machine learning community: https://t.co/wBQYl2hdEX

2022-10-22 14:28:05 choose your weapon https://t.co/iNE56TGZe0

2022-10-29 16:28:23 This platform tends to overreact to change. I’m going to continue having fun talking about statistics and math on Twitter as long as nothing prevents me.

2022-10-27 16:59:16 WE DID IT.Final tally:- A: 24.6%- B: 24.1%- C: 26.7%- D: 24.5%.Not a perfect result but really impressive for a game involving 8000 people. Good job everybody! https://t.co/p4wWVLCfgh

2022-10-26 16:02:36 I just realized I didn’t say this explicitly. Retweeting/Quote-tweeting are also allowed.

2022-10-26 15:41:49 This poll is a cooperative game.Try to get as close to an even split as you can with each option getting 25% of the vote.Rules:- DON'T use any kind of randomization device- DO try to influence potential voters by commenting on how you think they should vote

2022-10-25 15:24:49 hell yeah! https://t.co/wnfOv8o6fs

2022-10-24 02:22:45 RT @kareem_carr: A lot of people think math is never ambiguous which is false.0⁰ is a perfect example of what ambiguity looks like in mat…

2022-10-23 23:01:31 @quaesita look at all those math books! . the chainmail shirt is cool too.

2022-10-23 15:11:45 Reference: the wikipedia article on 0⁰ is very good if you want to read more about it. https://t.co/NeacDAV2ui

2022-10-23 15:11:44 Unfortunately (or fortunately), having a value for 0⁰ is really helpful in a lot cases. Many find it much too convenient to just completely avoid it.

2022-10-23 15:11:43 A lot of people think math is never ambiguous which is false.0⁰ is a perfect example of what ambiguity looks like in mathematics.

2022-10-22 21:16:33 me: how much would it cost for me to train this model?machine learning community: https://t.co/wBQYl2hdEX

2022-10-22 14:28:05 choose your weapon https://t.co/iNE56TGZe0

2022-11-17 15:54:06 no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-17 14:58:40 coding is lowkey goated in situations where feeling like an idiot for multiple hours is the vibe.

2022-11-16 15:39:00 The larger the machine learning models, the more we will need statistics to understand them.

2022-11-16 15:38:59 Machine learning vs statistics is a false dichotomy. The most successful machine learning models are vast collections of numbers whose relationship to the model’s behavior are poorly understood. This is itself a statistics problem.

2022-11-16 01:11:35 which one are you?

2022-11-17 15:54:06 no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-17 14:58:40 coding is lowkey goated in situations where feeling like an idiot for multiple hours is the vibe.

2022-11-16 15:39:00 The larger the machine learning models, the more we will need statistics to understand them.

2022-11-16 15:38:59 Machine learning vs statistics is a false dichotomy. The most successful machine learning models are vast collections of numbers whose relationship to the model’s behavior are poorly understood. This is itself a statistics problem.

2022-11-16 01:11:35 which one are you?

2022-11-18 23:39:13 *notices Taylor Swift is trending* Have you heard about Taylor’s new series? . . . . . . . . It’s very derivative.

2022-11-18 23:15:13 @DavidSabatini2 To be fair, it’s not that great on twitter either. I think math needs a visual format like a video but also a medium where you can give students feedback. The idea of the substack would be to talk about stuff besides the specifics of the hardcore math like the overall concepts.

2022-11-18 23:09:10 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-18 17:52:20 @fb0904e981384bb R has more statistics packages and the packages are generally higher quality than Python in terms of statistical correctness. Excel is useful because a lot of regular people know how to use it so it can be a really powerful place to interface with non-data scientists.

2022-11-18 16:56:52 wow ok. looks like folks are into it! https://t.co/WI9bk1h5N5

2022-11-18 16:39:55 I won't be posting much right away but cool stuff is coming. I just to be PhDone first.

2022-11-18 16:39:54 What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer! Sign up for my substack so we can keep in touch: https://t.co/JunUocCJtD

2022-11-17 15:54:06 no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-17 14:58:40 coding is lowkey goated in situations where feeling like an idiot for multiple hours is the vibe.

2022-11-16 15:39:00 The larger the machine learning models, the more we will need statistics to understand them.

2022-11-16 15:38:59 Machine learning vs statistics is a false dichotomy. The most successful machine learning models are vast collections of numbers whose relationship to the model’s behavior are poorly understood. This is itself a statistics problem.

2022-11-16 01:11:35 which one are you?

2022-11-19 11:33:09 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-19 03:15:38 RT @kareem_carr: no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-18 23:39:13 *notices Taylor Swift is trending* Have you heard about Taylor’s new series? . . . . . . . . It’s very derivative.

2022-11-18 23:15:13 @DavidSabatini2 To be fair, it’s not that great on twitter either. I think math needs a visual format like a video but also a medium where you can give students feedback. The idea of the substack would be to talk about stuff besides the specifics of the hardcore math like the overall concepts.

2022-11-18 23:09:10 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-18 17:52:20 @fb0904e981384bb R has more statistics packages and the packages are generally higher quality than Python in terms of statistical correctness. Excel is useful because a lot of regular people know how to use it so it can be a really powerful place to interface with non-data scientists.

2022-11-18 16:56:52 wow ok. looks like folks are into it! https://t.co/WI9bk1h5N5

2022-11-18 16:39:55 I won't be posting much right away but cool stuff is coming. I just to be PhDone first.

2022-11-18 16:39:54 What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer! Sign up for my substack so we can keep in touch: https://t.co/JunUocCJtD

2022-11-17 15:54:06 no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-17 14:58:40 coding is lowkey goated in situations where feeling like an idiot for multiple hours is the vibe.

2022-11-16 15:39:00 The larger the machine learning models, the more we will need statistics to understand them.

2022-11-16 15:38:59 Machine learning vs statistics is a false dichotomy. The most successful machine learning models are vast collections of numbers whose relationship to the model’s behavior are poorly understood. This is itself a statistics problem.

2022-11-16 01:11:35 which one are you?

2022-11-19 11:33:09 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-19 03:15:38 RT @kareem_carr: no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-18 23:39:13 *notices Taylor Swift is trending* Have you heard about Taylor’s new series? . . . . . . . . It’s very derivative.

2022-11-18 23:15:13 @DavidSabatini2 To be fair, it’s not that great on twitter either. I think math needs a visual format like a video but also a medium where you can give students feedback. The idea of the substack would be to talk about stuff besides the specifics of the hardcore math like the overall concepts.

2022-11-18 23:09:10 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-18 17:52:20 @fb0904e981384bb R has more statistics packages and the packages are generally higher quality than Python in terms of statistical correctness. Excel is useful because a lot of regular people know how to use it so it can be a really powerful place to interface with non-data scientists.

2022-11-18 16:56:52 wow ok. looks like folks are into it! https://t.co/WI9bk1h5N5

2022-11-18 16:39:55 I won't be posting much right away but cool stuff is coming. I just to be PhDone first.

2022-11-18 16:39:54 What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer! Sign up for my substack so we can keep in touch: https://t.co/JunUocCJtD

2022-11-17 15:54:06 no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-17 14:58:40 coding is lowkey goated in situations where feeling like an idiot for multiple hours is the vibe.

2022-11-16 15:39:00 The larger the machine learning models, the more we will need statistics to understand them.

2022-11-16 15:38:59 Machine learning vs statistics is a false dichotomy. The most successful machine learning models are vast collections of numbers whose relationship to the model’s behavior are poorly understood. This is itself a statistics problem.

2022-11-16 01:11:35 which one are you?

2022-11-22 00:43:30 learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-19 11:33:09 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-19 03:15:38 RT @kareem_carr: no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-18 23:39:13 *notices Taylor Swift is trending* Have you heard about Taylor’s new series? . . . . . . . . It’s very derivative.

2022-11-18 23:15:13 @DavidSabatini2 To be fair, it’s not that great on twitter either. I think math needs a visual format like a video but also a medium where you can give students feedback. The idea of the substack would be to talk about stuff besides the specifics of the hardcore math like the overall concepts.

2022-11-18 23:09:10 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-18 17:52:20 @fb0904e981384bb R has more statistics packages and the packages are generally higher quality than Python in terms of statistical correctness. Excel is useful because a lot of regular people know how to use it so it can be a really powerful place to interface with non-data scientists.

2022-11-18 16:56:52 wow ok. looks like folks are into it! https://t.co/WI9bk1h5N5

2022-11-18 16:39:55 I won't be posting much right away but cool stuff is coming. I just to be PhDone first.

2022-11-18 16:39:54 What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer! Sign up for my substack so we can keep in touch: https://t.co/JunUocCJtD

2022-11-17 15:54:06 no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-17 14:58:40 coding is lowkey goated in situations where feeling like an idiot for multiple hours is the vibe.

2022-11-16 15:39:00 The larger the machine learning models, the more we will need statistics to understand them.

2022-11-16 15:38:59 Machine learning vs statistics is a false dichotomy. The most successful machine learning models are vast collections of numbers whose relationship to the model’s behavior are poorly understood. This is itself a statistics problem.

2022-11-16 01:11:35 which one are you?

2022-11-22 14:17:39 RT @kareem_carr: learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-22 00:43:30 learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-19 11:33:09 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-19 03:15:38 RT @kareem_carr: no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-18 23:39:13 *notices Taylor Swift is trending* Have you heard about Taylor’s new series? . . . . . . . . It’s very derivative.

2022-11-18 23:15:13 @DavidSabatini2 To be fair, it’s not that great on twitter either. I think math needs a visual format like a video but also a medium where you can give students feedback. The idea of the substack would be to talk about stuff besides the specifics of the hardcore math like the overall concepts.

2022-11-18 23:09:10 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-18 17:52:20 @fb0904e981384bb R has more statistics packages and the packages are generally higher quality than Python in terms of statistical correctness. Excel is useful because a lot of regular people know how to use it so it can be a really powerful place to interface with non-data scientists.

2022-11-18 16:56:52 wow ok. looks like folks are into it! https://t.co/WI9bk1h5N5

2022-11-18 16:39:55 I won't be posting much right away but cool stuff is coming. I just to be PhDone first.

2022-11-18 16:39:54 What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer! Sign up for my substack so we can keep in touch: https://t.co/JunUocCJtD

2022-11-17 15:54:06 no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-17 14:58:40 coding is lowkey goated in situations where feeling like an idiot for multiple hours is the vibe.

2022-11-16 15:39:00 The larger the machine learning models, the more we will need statistics to understand them.

2022-11-16 15:38:59 Machine learning vs statistics is a false dichotomy. The most successful machine learning models are vast collections of numbers whose relationship to the model’s behavior are poorly understood. This is itself a statistics problem.

2022-11-16 01:11:35 which one are you?

2022-11-23 16:59:18 copying and pasting stack overflow code into my project https://t.co/H12bPDfAS5

2022-11-23 06:23:38 RT @kareem_carr: learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-22 14:17:39 RT @kareem_carr: learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-22 00:43:30 learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-19 11:33:09 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-19 03:15:38 RT @kareem_carr: no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-18 23:39:13 *notices Taylor Swift is trending* Have you heard about Taylor’s new series? . . . . . . . . It’s very derivative.

2022-11-18 23:15:13 @DavidSabatini2 To be fair, it’s not that great on twitter either. I think math needs a visual format like a video but also a medium where you can give students feedback. The idea of the substack would be to talk about stuff besides the specifics of the hardcore math like the overall concepts.

2022-11-18 23:09:10 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-18 17:52:20 @fb0904e981384bb R has more statistics packages and the packages are generally higher quality than Python in terms of statistical correctness. Excel is useful because a lot of regular people know how to use it so it can be a really powerful place to interface with non-data scientists.

2022-11-18 16:56:52 wow ok. looks like folks are into it! https://t.co/WI9bk1h5N5

2022-11-18 16:39:55 I won't be posting much right away but cool stuff is coming. I just to be PhDone first.

2022-11-18 16:39:54 What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer! Sign up for my substack so we can keep in touch: https://t.co/JunUocCJtD

2022-11-17 15:54:06 no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-17 14:58:40 coding is lowkey goated in situations where feeling like an idiot for multiple hours is the vibe.

2022-11-16 15:39:00 The larger the machine learning models, the more we will need statistics to understand them.

2022-11-16 15:38:59 Machine learning vs statistics is a false dichotomy. The most successful machine learning models are vast collections of numbers whose relationship to the model’s behavior are poorly understood. This is itself a statistics problem.

2022-11-16 01:11:35 which one are you?

2022-11-25 16:34:30 P.S. Some things are a lot easier in R and this is probably one of them.

2022-11-25 16:34:29 Looks like @Aella_Girl is writing the data science romance novel we didn’t know we needed https://t.co/fRQwDyYiLm

2022-11-23 16:59:18 copying and pasting stack overflow code into my project https://t.co/H12bPDfAS5

2022-11-23 06:23:38 RT @kareem_carr: learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-22 14:17:39 RT @kareem_carr: learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-22 00:43:30 learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-19 11:33:09 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-19 03:15:38 RT @kareem_carr: no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-18 23:39:13 *notices Taylor Swift is trending* Have you heard about Taylor’s new series? . . . . . . . . It’s very derivative.

2022-11-18 23:15:13 @DavidSabatini2 To be fair, it’s not that great on twitter either. I think math needs a visual format like a video but also a medium where you can give students feedback. The idea of the substack would be to talk about stuff besides the specifics of the hardcore math like the overall concepts.

2022-11-18 23:09:10 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-18 17:52:20 @fb0904e981384bb R has more statistics packages and the packages are generally higher quality than Python in terms of statistical correctness. Excel is useful because a lot of regular people know how to use it so it can be a really powerful place to interface with non-data scientists.

2022-11-18 16:56:52 wow ok. looks like folks are into it! https://t.co/WI9bk1h5N5

2022-11-18 16:39:55 I won't be posting much right away but cool stuff is coming. I just to be PhDone first.

2022-11-18 16:39:54 What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer! Sign up for my substack so we can keep in touch: https://t.co/JunUocCJtD

2022-11-17 15:54:06 no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-17 14:58:40 coding is lowkey goated in situations where feeling like an idiot for multiple hours is the vibe.

2022-11-16 15:39:00 The larger the machine learning models, the more we will need statistics to understand them.

2022-11-16 15:38:59 Machine learning vs statistics is a false dichotomy. The most successful machine learning models are vast collections of numbers whose relationship to the model’s behavior are poorly understood. This is itself a statistics problem.

2022-11-16 01:11:35 which one are you?

2022-11-25 16:34:30 P.S. Some things are a lot easier in R and this is probably one of them.

2022-11-25 16:34:29 Looks like @Aella_Girl is writing the data science romance novel we didn’t know we needed https://t.co/fRQwDyYiLm

2022-11-23 16:59:18 copying and pasting stack overflow code into my project https://t.co/H12bPDfAS5

2022-11-23 06:23:38 RT @kareem_carr: learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-22 14:17:39 RT @kareem_carr: learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-22 00:43:30 learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-19 11:33:09 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-19 03:15:38 RT @kareem_carr: no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-18 23:39:13 *notices Taylor Swift is trending* Have you heard about Taylor’s new series? . . . . . . . . It’s very derivative.

2022-11-18 23:15:13 @DavidSabatini2 To be fair, it’s not that great on twitter either. I think math needs a visual format like a video but also a medium where you can give students feedback. The idea of the substack would be to talk about stuff besides the specifics of the hardcore math like the overall concepts.

2022-11-18 23:09:10 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-18 17:52:20 @fb0904e981384bb R has more statistics packages and the packages are generally higher quality than Python in terms of statistical correctness. Excel is useful because a lot of regular people know how to use it so it can be a really powerful place to interface with non-data scientists.

2022-11-18 16:56:52 wow ok. looks like folks are into it! https://t.co/WI9bk1h5N5

2022-11-18 16:39:55 I won't be posting much right away but cool stuff is coming. I just to be PhDone first.

2022-11-18 16:39:54 What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer! Sign up for my substack so we can keep in touch: https://t.co/JunUocCJtD

2022-11-17 15:54:06 no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-17 14:58:40 coding is lowkey goated in situations where feeling like an idiot for multiple hours is the vibe.

2022-11-16 15:39:00 The larger the machine learning models, the more we will need statistics to understand them.

2022-11-16 15:38:59 Machine learning vs statistics is a false dichotomy. The most successful machine learning models are vast collections of numbers whose relationship to the model’s behavior are poorly understood. This is itself a statistics problem.

2022-11-16 01:11:35 which one are you?

2022-11-25 16:34:30 P.S. Some things are a lot easier in R and this is probably one of them.

2022-11-25 16:34:29 Looks like @Aella_Girl is writing the data science romance novel we didn’t know we needed https://t.co/fRQwDyYiLm

2022-11-23 16:59:18 copying and pasting stack overflow code into my project https://t.co/H12bPDfAS5

2022-11-23 06:23:38 RT @kareem_carr: learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-22 14:17:39 RT @kareem_carr: learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-22 00:43:30 learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-19 11:33:09 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-19 03:15:38 RT @kareem_carr: no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-18 23:39:13 *notices Taylor Swift is trending* Have you heard about Taylor’s new series? . . . . . . . . It’s very derivative.

2022-11-18 23:15:13 @DavidSabatini2 To be fair, it’s not that great on twitter either. I think math needs a visual format like a video but also a medium where you can give students feedback. The idea of the substack would be to talk about stuff besides the specifics of the hardcore math like the overall concepts.

2022-11-18 23:09:10 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-18 17:52:20 @fb0904e981384bb R has more statistics packages and the packages are generally higher quality than Python in terms of statistical correctness. Excel is useful because a lot of regular people know how to use it so it can be a really powerful place to interface with non-data scientists.

2022-11-18 16:56:52 wow ok. looks like folks are into it! https://t.co/WI9bk1h5N5

2022-11-18 16:39:55 I won't be posting much right away but cool stuff is coming. I just to be PhDone first.

2022-11-18 16:39:54 What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer! Sign up for my substack so we can keep in touch: https://t.co/JunUocCJtD

2022-11-17 15:54:06 no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-17 14:58:40 coding is lowkey goated in situations where feeling like an idiot for multiple hours is the vibe.

2022-11-16 15:39:00 The larger the machine learning models, the more we will need statistics to understand them.

2022-11-16 15:38:59 Machine learning vs statistics is a false dichotomy. The most successful machine learning models are vast collections of numbers whose relationship to the model’s behavior are poorly understood. This is itself a statistics problem.

2022-11-16 01:11:35 which one are you?

2022-11-25 16:34:30 P.S. Some things are a lot easier in R and this is probably one of them.

2022-11-25 16:34:29 Looks like @Aella_Girl is writing the data science romance novel we didn’t know we needed https://t.co/fRQwDyYiLm

2022-11-23 16:59:18 copying and pasting stack overflow code into my project https://t.co/H12bPDfAS5

2022-11-23 06:23:38 RT @kareem_carr: learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-22 14:17:39 RT @kareem_carr: learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-22 00:43:30 learning to code in R https://t.co/LwVxtXjDFe

2022-11-19 11:33:09 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-19 03:15:38 RT @kareem_carr: no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-18 23:39:13 *notices Taylor Swift is trending* Have you heard about Taylor’s new series? . . . . . . . . It’s very derivative.

2022-11-18 23:15:13 @DavidSabatini2 To be fair, it’s not that great on twitter either. I think math needs a visual format like a video but also a medium where you can give students feedback. The idea of the substack would be to talk about stuff besides the specifics of the hardcore math like the overall concepts.

2022-11-18 23:09:10 RT @kareem_carr: What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer…

2022-11-18 17:52:20 @fb0904e981384bb R has more statistics packages and the packages are generally higher quality than Python in terms of statistical correctness. Excel is useful because a lot of regular people know how to use it so it can be a really powerful place to interface with non-data scientists.

2022-11-18 16:56:52 wow ok. looks like folks are into it! https://t.co/WI9bk1h5N5

2022-11-18 16:39:55 I won't be posting much right away but cool stuff is coming. I just to be PhDone first.

2022-11-18 16:39:54 What if Twitter dies? How are we going to keep laughing and learning about data science and statistics? I have the answer! Sign up for my substack so we can keep in touch: https://t.co/JunUocCJtD

2022-11-17 15:54:06 no data scientist has mastered all 5: 1. R 2. Python 3. javascript 4. making eye contact 5. Microsoft Excel

2022-11-17 14:58:40 coding is lowkey goated in situations where feeling like an idiot for multiple hours is the vibe.

2022-11-16 15:39:00 The larger the machine learning models, the more we will need statistics to understand them.

2022-11-16 15:38:59 Machine learning vs statistics is a false dichotomy. The most successful machine learning models are vast collections of numbers whose relationship to the model’s behavior are poorly understood. This is itself a statistics problem.

2022-11-16 01:11:35 which one are you?

2022-12-07 17:09:28 People who regularly use data to make risky decisions can always be trusted to do good statistics, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.

2022-12-07 23:40:00 I’m not too worried about ChatGPT taking my job. People hire statisticians after falling on their face because they relied on algorithms and processes they should never have trusted in the first place. The way things are going I’m predicting plenty of future work.

2022-12-07 17:09:28 People who regularly use data to make risky decisions can always be trusted to do good statistics, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.

2022-12-07 23:40:00 I’m not too worried about ChatGPT taking my job. People hire statisticians after falling on their face because they relied on algorithms and processes they should never have trusted in the first place. The way things are going I’m predicting plenty of future work.

2022-12-07 17:09:28 People who regularly use data to make risky decisions can always be trusted to do good statistics, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.

2022-12-07 23:40:00 I’m not too worried about ChatGPT taking my job. People hire statisticians after falling on their face because they relied on algorithms and processes they should never have trusted in the first place. The way things are going I’m predicting plenty of future work.

2022-12-07 17:09:28 People who regularly use data to make risky decisions can always be trusted to do good statistics, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.

2022-03-18 01:10:20 @PhDemetri Congrats! 2022-03-14 12:58:53 Was walking by the local high school last night and they’d already set all this up for pi day today. A+ for effort. Happy pi day everybody! https://t.co/lRpdPxIXQ5 2022-03-12 08:11:00 CAFIAC FIX 2022-01-17 08:11:00 CAFIAC FIX 2022-01-12 01:04:42 @jtleek @fredhutch Awesome news. Congrats!!! 2022-01-12 00:40:15 Listening to my twitter friends @rasmansa and @ContrabandsM have a real conversation about race right now. Come check it out. https://t.co/V4dBG1ujBC 2022-01-11 16:12:20 @VPrasadMDMPH I think the infrastructure and logistics of the debate could be done by anybody. That's the beauty of social media. But I think you're right that the debate participants have to be people of high standing within academia. Otherwise, it would not be perceived as legitimate. 2022-01-11 16:03:12 @VPrasadMDMPH I don't want to put blame on any one group. There are 7.7 billion of us. Somebody should have done it. 2022-01-11 15:40:07 As an academic myself, many times an argument is presented to me during an academic talk which I'm never going to check, but it's presented to me in a way that encourages me to go check if I don't believe. It's a gesture of good faith that gives me trust in what I'm hearing. 2022-01-11 15:40:06 I believe that the "Follow the science" slogan has become associated with increasingly unscientific attitudes. People shouldn't accept an argument because a prominent scientist said it. They should be *shown* the models and the data, and invited to check the claims themselves. 2022-01-11 14:24:19 @IyueSung @Aeh43146525 To be clear, I'd also prefer we used less vague language for vaccine efficacy for precisely the same reasons. I just think the task of figuring out what people mean with "vaccines work" is empirically easier because of how standardized vaccine trials are. 2022-01-11 14:17:16 @zeynep Yes exactly. We should avoid "dueling subjectivity". That's a good way of putting it. 2022-01-11 08:11:00 CAFIAC FIX 2022-01-06 00:16:28 Thanks to everybody who answered so far! I'm hoping the comments will help guide and inspire as people try to chart their career paths. https://t.co/UAgjygeY2L 2022-01-05 15:50:15 @jackwonttweet It was a while ago and I didn't know very much at the time. Knowing me, I probably did it the hard way. I think these days I'd use something like Squarespace. 2022-01-05 15:47:00 I think it's undeniable that both Frequentist and Bayesian statistics are able to create scientific knowledge. But is the knowledge created by Bayesian inference fundamentally different than the knowledge created by Frequentist inference? Is so, how? 2022-01-05 15:00:01 People often ask me for advice on how to break into the data science field. Help me make a resource for them. If you're a data scientist, please respond to this tweet by sharing a bit about your background and how you ended up getting your first real opportunity in data science. 2022-01-05 01:34:17 I've been noticing that a lot of covid debates are disagreements about whether to explore (speculative theories) vs exploit (current best knowledge). This is interesting because the exploration-exploitation tradeoff is a fundamental idea in mathematical optimization. 2022-01-04 17:08:39 Not all default assumptions are equal. Some are more harmful than others. 2022-01-04 17:08:38 The nature vs nurture debate is often framed as a debate about what we understand about human nature, but I think it's most relevant when we don't understand. It's a debate about what to assume about correlations in the data when we don't know enough about the underlying biology. 2022-01-04 15:21:18 Jokes on him. I have a Harvard degree now and I'm not any smarter. 2022-01-04 15:21:17 Which of your traumatic data science memories did Don't Look Up cause to resurface? For me, it was the time a Harvard Physics professor interrupted my explanation of my data analysis idea... him: wait. what school did you go to again? me: NYU him: OK *short pause* continue 2022-01-04 02:42:37 Don’t Look Up is a documentary about two data scientists reporting the results of their analysis to a room full of people who get paid a lot more than them but don't know any statistics. 2022-01-03 16:24:49 Data science should have a branch that's actually a *science* of data. I'd love to read a taxonomy of the types of dataset, with full of descriptions of the environments where they arise, and careful notes on the frequency with which they're found. 2022-01-03 01:46:50 @PhilipJClark2 Sure! Here's a thread: https://t.co/q1QPraCn9C 2022-01-02 23:05:42 This NYT piece is example of how statistics education is becoming more needed as we democratize the use of data to make decisions. People ought to know things like generally speaking the rarer a disease, the more likely a positive medical test is to be a false positive. https://t.co/HtfTp5Fc5V 2021-12-31 21:40:54 @karlrohe https://t.co/zmXmPEGuZh 2021-12-31 16:42:06 I've become fascinated by the power of words during the pandemic. How "airborne" was really a debate about masking and "endemic" is a debate about whether we should give up. I don't like the binary thinking but it seems impossible to stop it. 2021-12-31 16:00:21 Neo: [gasping] 2+2=4 Morpheus: Do you believe that 2+2 has anything to do with 4 in this place? https://t.co/djtzrGpnLH 2021-12-31 15:31:45 Glad Dr. Graves is getting some visibility. He's a hero of mine as well. https://t.co/DJ5qD7bISr 2021-12-30 18:25:14 I don’t like bashing individual articles but this statement in Scientific American is not only not right, it is not even wrong. https://t.co/CXDCAji7vs 2021-12-30 02:29:28 Break News: The CDC says that for vaccinated, boosted at-home gatherings with family and close friends who are also vaccinated and boosted, it is now considered safe to divide by zero. 2021-12-30 00:05:21 This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your Python notebook and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. https://t.co/vwKco1GdXN 2021-12-28 19:36:12 RT @kareem_carr: Never confuse "sensitivity" and "specificity" again! Here's how I keep them straight. https://t.co/vNUcqgh7es 2021-12-28 04:22:30 RT @kareem_carr: Never confuse "sensitivity" and "specificity" again! Here's how I keep them straight. https://t.co/vNUcqgh7es 2021-12-28 04:08:14 RT @EpiEllie: A useful thread for keeping straight some new words you’ve probably been hearing used to talk about rapid tests 2021-12-28 03:51:21 @perrilane @PhDemetri Funny story. My thread started out as a response to @PhDemetri that then took on a life of its own. 2021-12-28 00:21:28 Once you realize the specificity is just the TNR, we can use our trick again to quickly write down the formula (which is the same as the specificity). https://t.co/SBxpHmFZHM 2021-12-28 00:21:27 Now that I have the FPR. I can get specificity since it's just 1-FPR. So, that's it. That's my thought process for quickly remembering the difference between specificity and sensitivity, and writing down the formulas. 2021-12-28 00:21:26 This is a general trick. As soon as I see FPR, I know FP will be in the numerator right away. I can immediately follow that up by writing FP in the denominator plus the complete opposite of FP which is TN. https://t.co/08yGjUteZ4 2021-12-28 00:21:25 Here's my trick for remembering the TPR, FPR, etc. First, the numerator will always just be the named category. So for TPR, the numerator is "TP". Second, the denominator is always the named category plus its complete opposite (T to F and P to N). So the denominator is TP+FN. https://t.co/KGCGev3jgA 2021-12-28 00:21:24 OK. So sensitivity is the TPR and specificity is 1-FPR. What can we do with that? Well if you memorize just one more thing. You can write down the formulas for each pretty quickly. 2021-12-28 00:21:23 So just to recap: 1. The sensitivity is about being sensitive enough to pick up all the cases 2. The specificity is about making sure the test is *specific* to the cases and doesn't pick up a lot of non-cases as well If you don't care about the math. You can stop here. https://t.co/HsV8URyj9Z 2021-12-28 00:21:22 Now ask yourself, what's the easiest way of making sure you pick up all the cases? Just say everything is a positive! Why is that bad? Because it would lead to a bunch of false positives. A good test needs to be *specific*. So specificity and *false positives* are linked. 2021-12-28 00:21:21 First some background. There are four categories of test results: [Skip this tweet if you already know this part!] TP: Tested positive, Infected FP: Tested positive, Uninfected FN: Tested negative, Infected TN: Tested negative, Uninfected. https://t.co/lrjSdKcNtU 2021-12-28 00:21:20 Never confuse "sensitivity" and "specificity" again! Here's how I keep them straight. https://t.co/vNUcqgh7es 2021-12-27 16:09:36 @karlrohe Oh wow. That’s cool! Where can I find the theorem version of this theorem-ish? 2021-12-27 08:20:00 CAFIAC FIX 2021-11-06 23:20:00 CAFIAC FIX 2021-12-20 16:05:56 @vishal_balaji_ @sullydish Check out Kleinberg's Impossibility Theorem. It's a good start to the inherent subjectivity of the clustering problem. https://t.co/SpAStHT22W 2021-12-20 16:04:22 @vishal_balaji_ @sullydish I worked in genomics and wrote my master's thesis on clustering algorithms. Scientists tend to pick clustering approaches that produce the kinds of groupings they want. Clustering isn't a well-defined mathematical problem so it forces you to do that. 2021-12-20 15:18:50 It’s a bit of a logical fallacy to think that a social construct can’t predict, be predicted by, or have statistical associations with variables that are not socially constructed. 2021-12-20 15:18:49 Human variation is like the surface of the earth. Races are like countries which we define by borders (the imaginary lines we draw on the surface). Based on your coordinates, I can say with 100% accuracy what country you're in. Yet countries are social constructs. @sullydish https://t.co/EUhX1QuJbH 2021-12-19 22:30:52 "Kareem Carr is overrated" How is this a controversial opinion? I am extremely overrated. https://t.co/U0Nc3XIxfp 2021-12-19 22:22:08 RT @inkblurt: I recommend this pod episode about math, statistics, & 2021-12-18 16:03:33 Finished all my grading yesterday. The final project involved simulating both a covid-19 outbreak and a vaccine misinformation outbreak as they spread through a social network in order to see the effect of misinformation on vaccine efficacy. So cool seeing all their solutions! 2021-12-17 23:14:26 it’s good for you! https://t.co/IpItXed7Zh 2021-12-17 16:49:04 Learning is how we "buy" information. Applying what we learn is how we "sell" it. You want to buy information when it's low cost (like in a science experiment) and sell it when it's high (like during a global pandemic). That's why ideally we should all want to follow the science. 2021-12-17 16:23:41 @allisons There's some cool stuff out there on how people can train themselves to be better intuitive users of probability like Thinking In Best by @AnnieDuke https://t.co/sQAwen7rG9 2021-12-17 16:16:31 @BayesicTony @rimfo That's not quite right. It *could* bias your results but it depends on the causal relationship between consent and whatever you're measuring in your study. 2021-12-17 15:56:50 @rimfo We could quantify it by actively collecting the right data. It just requires money and consent from the population. We tend to use whatever data is convenient like people who happen to come into contact with the health system. That's what makes it difficult. 2021-12-17 15:45:38 I was kinda skeptical about all the fuss over Omicron because I figured people would spend a lot of time freaking out about it and then not really change anything they were doing until case counts actually went up. Was that too cynical? Did folks actually do anything different? 2021-12-17 15:39:31 @allisons I wouldn't expect the human brain to do statistical calculations unaided any more than I'd ask the human brain to do arithmetic with numbers larger than 2 or 3 digits unaided. That's not how the businesses I mentioned do it. It's more like engineering things with probability. 2021-12-17 15:17:31 I think society vastly underestimates the ability to which applying statistics can help you smooth out the randomness and uncertainty in life. Stuff like I dunno...covid. There's a reason insurance and casinos and stock management are really good businesses to be in. 2021-12-16 22:58:02 @CT_Bergstrom @profkeithdevlin @MSNBC @FoxNews @chrislhayes Wow. Tough crowd. Lol. It's a subtle distinction which even scientists get wrong. I must second @profkeithdevlin's favorable opinion of @chrislhayes's math savviness. 2021-12-16 16:46:19 True story. The Greek mathematician Archimedes died because he was obsessively doing math problems in the middle of a war. A Roman soldier, part of the invading army, asked him to stop. He wouldn't. So, the soldier stabbed him. 2021-12-16 16:17:02 RT @firstresponses: This is worth your time... 2021-12-16 16:16:55 RT @kareem_carr: My chat with my mutual, MSNBC news anchor Chris Hayes, is out! Can we trust statistics? Is math real? Listen to the podca… 2021-12-16 15:21:27 Is there a reason for not judging dead people beyond superstition? Is it perhaps a religious thing? I'm honestly asking. 2021-12-16 15:13:53 It confuses me when people say it's wrong to judge the racism of people in the past by today's standards. First of all, we happily praise past people for *not* being racist even when it was seen as immoral in their time. Why is it OK to judge them by our standards in that case? 2021-12-16 03:06:27 RT @kareem_carr: My chat with my mutual, MSNBC news anchor Chris Hayes, is out! Can we trust statistics? Is math real? Listen to the podca… 2021-12-16 01:19:09 RT @matthras: Almost finished reading the transcript but it's a *very* good conversation that also covers: statistics being anti-racist, ma… 2021-12-15 23:56:18 Many thanks to @chrislhayes and @doniholloway for setting this all up! 2021-12-15 23:56:17 My chat with my mutual, MSNBC news anchor Chris Hayes, is out! Can we trust statistics? Is math real? Listen to the podcast to find out! Thanks for giving me a chance to nerd out about one of my favorite topics, @chrislhayes! https://t.co/vVrkxRvm33 https://t.co/tSLOCQWsqH 2021-12-15 18:00:39 @dataandme @kierisi I feel a kinship with you over your obvious love of notetaking! 2021-12-15 17:42:22 It's amazing how programming languages and even specific algorithms can have their own fandoms. A lot of these folks are really serious about it too. You can get canceled for talking trash about software. 2021-12-15 15:31:42 It's good that more people are acknowledging that early statisticians like Galton, Fisher and Pearson were problematic but we should keep this in perspective. They were all born in the 1800s. Twenty-first century statistics isn't just a mathematical extension of their prejudices. 2021-12-15 03:03:02 @taoleighgoffe Sounds cool. Looking forward to reading it! 2021-12-15 02:02:00 I'm not asking for much. I just want covid policies to be based on the actual probability of people being infected instead of basing it on the vibes of whoever happens to be in charge. 2021-12-15 01:20:39 My tweet from the other day was just trying to encourage people to not think in zero-sum terms about the two subjects since both calculus and statistics play very nicely together. https://t.co/JGolfykHUi 2021-12-15 01:20:38 To be clear, this is a metaphor for raising the bar of statistics instruction to well-above the average "statistics without calculus" class. I think lots of data science classes do that. That's because teaching coding alongside statistics gives you added instructional options. 2021-12-15 01:20:37 So, I wanted to clarify my position on teaching statistics vs calculus. My feeling is they pair nicely together like peanut butter and jelly. Still, I think it's totally OK to just eat a peanut butter sandwich with no jelly. (Statistics is the peanut butter in this analogy.) 2021-12-15 01:20:36 My thoughts on calculus vs statistics showed up in not one but *two* newsletters this week. Slow Boring from @mattyglesias and Brad @Delong's substack. Where's my share of that sweet, sweet substack money? https://t.co/fuB63FXBou 2021-12-15 01:00:26 Controversial opinion: Physics is overrated. Statistics gave us linear regression which allows us to make simple extrapolations from almost any kind of numerical data. This ability has contributed massively to human progress. Much more useful that some silly physics equation. 2021-12-14 16:53:12 Sorry to get political but the central limit theorem is much much cooler than the fundamental theorem of calculus. 2021-12-14 15:30:04 @stevennadakal 2021-12-14 15:01:00 BOOSTED!!! https://t.co/P1u9EVLP6C 2021-12-12 17:07:12 Why are people so obsessed with making my philosophy-of-math takes about race? It’s about looking at math as an abstraction of the real world, the ways in which those abstractions fail, and what those failures teach us about the nature of mathematical truth. https://t.co/EeEJYdIfP4 2021-12-11 15:21:05 you want me to follow the science? the thing that killed schrodinger’s cat? 2021-12-11 00:45:17 finding out if omicron is worse only matters if people are planning to change what they do based on that information. 2021-12-10 16:51:35 There's a lot of money to be made by giving people smarter sounding reasons to believe stuff they already 100% believe. 2021-12-09 16:41:04 When you teach statistics, you can justify the rules in a few ways: math, computer simulations and moral arguments ("This is the good way that good scientists do it."). The last way is dangerous. It creates religious zealots who view statistics as a holy war against unbelievers. 2021-12-09 15:26:51 The communications failures of the pandemic have radicalized me. I now think experts should *translate* science not dumb it down, talk about the math behind their decisions *in public* not behind closed doors, and empower people to make their own decisions not decide for them. 2021-12-09 15:05:33 @lpachter Seems interesting from the Amazon previews. Never heard of it before. 2021-12-09 03:37:58 @russpoldrack Interesting! Any plans to publish? 2021-12-09 01:14:55 The innumeracy of covid discourse really frustrates me. We often talk about risks but rarely do we discuss actual probabilities. People write opinion articles when they should be reporting on cost-benefit calculations. I want to see more math. Risk management is a math problem. 2021-12-08 23:57:28 @ashtroid22 Good question. They also tend to teach physics ideas like center of mass and velocity in calculus. My best guess is Newton invented calculus and he was a physicist. 2021-12-08 17:26:57 We're getting to a point in our technological development where understanding data and statistics is almost a requirement for being an informed voter. Agree or Disagree? 2021-12-08 16:42:18 @Doc__Lock Depends on the audience and goals of the class I guess. https://t.co/LBB6J066P0 2021-12-08 15:40:26 Happy to figure out how to do this for the American public (for millions of dollars of course). https://t.co/decnJFhO8i 2021-12-08 15:38:33 @ASATT19731902 Thanks for sharing! 2021-12-08 15:37:16 @Sarah_Hewko I'm not saying all courses that teach statistics without calculus are bad, just that it's hard to do right. 2021-12-08 15:26:51 @KevinZollman I think it needs to be the right subset of statistics knowledge or it can do more harm than good. 2021-12-08 15:23:34 @WorldImagining @KevinZollman https://t.co/t2qCCMQQjG 2021-12-08 14:46:32 Controversial opinion: Trying to teach statistics without using calculus actually leads to a lot of bad statistics classes, where the rules seem really arbitrary and the formulas feel like they come out of nowhere. 2021-12-08 02:40:55 PSA: Statistics uses calculus. A Lot! No need to pick one over the other. You could easily teach calculus by showing how it’s used to solve data science problems. 2021-12-07 17:59:59 "Is it better to teach calculus or statistics?" me: yes 2021-12-07 15:43:59 @ChthonicQueex You seem to be making a distinction between physical laws and statistical models but lots of physical laws are statistical. There's a whole field called statistical physics, and quantum mechanics suggests that reality is fundamentally probabilistic. 2021-12-07 15:23:05 Bonus question. If your answers differ above, what features of a mathematical or statistical model of a physical effect would determine whether it was invented vs discovered? 2021-12-07 15:23:04 Are the mathematical laws of physics discovered or invented? Is Newtonian mechanics discovered for invented? What about the theory of relativity? What about the final mathematical theory of gravity (whatever it ends up being)? If your answers to the above differ, explain why. 2021-12-07 15:01:47 RT @kareem_carr: Were numbers discovered or invented? How about arithmetic? How about matrix algebra? How about linear regression? How abou… 2021-12-07 03:32:39 RT @kareem_carr: Were numbers discovered or invented? How about arithmetic? How about matrix algebra? How about linear regression? How abou… 2021-12-07 02:54:01 @ToriSandifer @maanow Amazing! 2021-12-07 00:24:03 Were numbers discovered or invented? How about arithmetic? How about matrix algebra? How about linear regression? How about deep learning? Where’s the line for you? If your answer to all of these isn’t the same, explain why not. 2021-12-06 16:32:00 Are the mathematical techniques that we use to analyze data discovered or invented? 2021-12-06 16:11:02 @yousafmshah Would you agree that normally people don’t like being put on the spot in public especially when they’re young and still figuring themselves out? Curious to hear if you think there was something different about you and if so, what that was. 2021-12-06 15:41:53 I find the debates about K-12 math weird because even the folks who argue for higher standards sound like they hate math. Math is portrayed as this joyless death march that you have to force kids into and that's only worth it because it helps America beat the other countries. 2021-12-06 15:07:17 I think I've convinced myself that statistics, data science and machine learning are all different aspects of the same all-encompassing enterprise. This is clearly a thought crime. Arrest me for I am a thought criminal. 2021-12-05 23:44:03 overfitting the data be like https://t.co/OSmgJfripX 2021-12-05 15:36:21 @samuelmehr @_EDRichardson Thanks. I already had it bookmarked. 2021-12-04 16:44:00 To be clear, I don't think statistics is completely silent here. I think it can help us rate the quality of the explanations in terms of how well they explain the data we observe, but I just don't think it can at this time tell what *types* of explanations are preferable. 2021-12-04 16:43:59 Unless we get lucky and discover something we can directly measure in the genes that 100% corresponds to race, or in the physical brain that 100% corresponds to racism, then I don't think data can help us resolve whether biological or sociological explanations are superior. 2021-12-04 16:43:58 They may however be reluctant to label that person's mental state as "racist". Additionally, they may be unwilling to see "racism" as a property of a group of people collectively, or to acknowledge "systemic racism" as a pattern that exists outside of specific human beings. 2021-12-04 16:43:57 So that's what's wrong with biological "race". Why might we think "racism" is problematic as an explanation? One reason to be skeptical of "racism" as an explanation for social disparities is there may be no objective way of deciding how to categorize different mental states. 2021-12-04 16:43:56 An additional complication is they may interbreed to produce fertile offspring anywhere from 0% of the time to 100%. Where would we objectively draw the line? There's also the problem of a "ring species" where A interbreeds with B, and B with C, but C doesn't interbreed with A. 2021-12-04 16:43:55 I believe many of the flaws of the "race" concept are inherited from problems with the species concept. Many of you reading this may (falsely) believe that the species concept is actually quite simple. It's just any group of organisms that interbreed to produce fertile offspring. 2021-12-04 16:43:54 Why are these categories so messy? Well, "race" is related the idea of a "species" and "racism" is related to both the idea of a "mental state" and a "social fact". In both cases, "race" and "racism" belong to a larger category of explanations about which people disagree. 2021-12-04 16:43:53 As a statistician, I'm a big fan of data analysis but in this case, I think that the focus on simple numerical comparisons is misleading and obscures the real problem, which is that people on both sides of the debate disagree on what even counts as an "explanation". 2021-12-04 16:43:52 There seem to be two very dominant schools of thought when it comes to explaining patterns in racial statistics. The first school of thought is biology-oriented and thinks the explanation is "race". The other is sociology-oriented and thinks the explanation is "racism". 2021-12-04 16:43:51 I frequently see tweets debating the nature of racial disparities. Are they caused by fundamental biological differences? Are they the result of racism? I wanted to share my thoughts about these debates as a black man and as someone trained in statistics. 2021-12-04 16:42:20 @TiagoALOMarques They all collect massive amounts of data and we often need that data to do science. 2021-12-04 15:20:34 Distrust is a huge barrier to building global networks for creating knowledge. We need more compelling ways of demonstrating to a skeptical audience when data collectors and analysts — governments, tech giants, scientists (liberal or not) — are worthy of their trust. 2021-12-04 15:20:33 I don't have a strong argument for why people should "follow the science" when they don't trust the researchers and aren't in a position to replicate it themselves. I wish I did. Without that trust, people won't accept things like the data that vaccines work as true knowledge. 2021-12-03 16:37:38 @OlufemiOTaiwo But honestly, I'm sure that you have more thought-out things to say about this issue than I have. So, feel free to chime in with your insights. 2021-12-03 16:36:06 @OlufemiOTaiwo To be more specific, I'm saying figuring out who to trust isn't generally approached via the scientific method by scientists. It could be I suppose, but it isn't, and even if it was, I'm not sure the impulse to trust is something that can be fully brought under rational control. 2021-12-03 16:12:03 @SteverRobbins Is this a scientifically-validated strategy? Also. What if the person with the blog has no family/kids/job and spends more time in their mom's basement working on their theories that 99.9% of researchers? 2021-12-03 16:03:51 @HenningStrandin Great news. What's the system? (I don't just mean issues of expertise. I also mean trusting that others aren't lying or blinded by their own ideology which is a very common concern these days). 2021-12-03 15:18:00 Science massively depends on us trusting others since no one person can verify all scientific knowledge by themselves, yet knowing who and what to trust isn't scientific at all. 2021-12-03 14:17:08 I think this is generally true but formally speaking, you need a theory of knowledge and a lot of assumptions about how the data were collected to interpret it. Even then, that interpretation will be conditional on what you believe to be prior knowledge. https://t.co/J8g3kc91vu 2021-12-03 05:30:18 @JesseTheTov @m_sciencerocks Yup. That's my thinking, that we're exploring a lot of the potential variant space, and it would be better if we stopped doing that. I think one would have to actively have selection *against* lethality globally (since selective pressure is local) for that to not be bad. 2021-12-02 16:13:38 Shout out to @poetryofsci for putting together cool collaborations between artists and scientists. 2021-12-02 16:13:37 Going to an art exhibit in which you yourself are featured is an interesting experience. This poem, “Truth in Numbers”, was based on my life story. https://t.co/upBEpB8Tpx 2021-12-02 15:34:24 The larger the total amount of covid-19 in the world, the more likely it is that deadlier and deadlier variants will evolve. This is just the math. It's starting to look like near total vaccination or acquired immunity is the only real way to end this nightmare. https://t.co/eI4R9wlTlV 2021-12-02 14:50:48 RT @kareem_carr: It was really fun for me too, Chris. Thanks for reaching out! https://t.co/9uCUVZtwX9 2021-12-02 03:42:32 RT @kareem_carr: It was really fun for me too, Chris. Thanks for reaching out! https://t.co/9uCUVZtwX9 2021-12-02 00:39:18 RT @chrislhayes: My podcast studio (aka our bedroom with clothes hanging on the back of the door) in full glory. 2021-12-02 00:38:43 RT @roderickgraham: Congratulations Kareem! 2021-12-02 00:38:28 @roderickgraham Thanks, Rod! 2021-12-01 23:36:20 It was really fun for me too, Chris. Thanks for reaching out! https://t.co/QovsBxISAn https://t.co/9uCUVZtwX9 2021-12-01 23:23:26 @Kevlar80808 @chrislhayes Yeah. We talked about it on the pod. You should check it out! Should be out in two weeks. 2021-11-22 14:55:29 In my opinion, there are two ways to define big data. In a low-level way, it's data that forces you to redesign your data pipeline and processes in order to handle it all. In a high-level way, it's data that includes so many examples that the prediction task becomes much easier. 2021-11-19 18:50:27 @generativist That's awful. My condolences, John. 2021-11-18 16:21:43 [the p-value intensifies] https://t.co/1AjQR1sO5V 2021-11-18 00:28:12 while funny: do(meme) https://t.co/GN1p7riVuA 2021-11-18 00:02:00 As a statistician, I hate when folks throw around vaccine anecdotes as proof of something. My cousin's friend took it and felt fine/his penis fell off/etc. There's a way of inferring risk of bad outcomes from data, and it's not by checking out what's going viral on social media. 2021-11-17 16:04:27 thank you, bernie. a lot of people needed to hear this. https://t.co/Gc1Uzug6gQ 2021-11-17 14:38:31 I don't believe in statistics gatekeeping. Mostly because it doesn't work. If you tell people they can't do statistics without proper training, they'll just claim to be doing "machine learning" or "data science" or something like that, and then they'll do what they want! 2021-11-16 15:59:06 I think it's a bit limiting to think of bias in data just in terms of racism and discrimination. I think it's a general failure to understand how our data is created, and more importantly, a failure to incorporate that understanding into our interpretations of the data. 2021-11-16 14:46:07 @lastpositivist thanks! will check it out. 2021-11-16 02:32:31 @kimitaly This my favorite thing I’ve written on it: https://t.co/VAU2pgeMI3 2021-11-16 00:27:45 Hi! I’m Kareem. A statistics PhD student @Harvard and I’m proud to be #BlackInData. Internet famous for the 2+2 debates among other things. Hey, quick question. How many apples is this? https://t.co/fbjEgQ4QW5 2021-11-15 16:42:07 As a black statistician, I absolutely believe that good statistical practice — where you stick to exactly what the data says and acknowledge your assumptions — is inherently anti-racist. It forces nuances, caveats and exceptions onto simplistic ideas. It is toxic to racism. 2021-11-13 00:33:39 math jokes are the best jokes https://t.co/i8jxs3Fjy3 2021-11-12 15:37:03 the dream team https://t.co/AppYahFH63 2021-11-11 16:41:22 this one hurts https://t.co/Dxn1tDyb8u 2021-11-11 15:56:48 his street name is “the reverend”. approach with extreme caution. this guy has a long list of priors. https://t.co/fhDPbn5YAp 2021-11-10 16:57:43 Your next task is to write a single line of code without any mistakes, while we all watch you type. https://t.co/rNQQB8Z8Oi 2021-11-10 16:24:37 RT @kareem_carr: Reproducibility seems like the bare minimum you'd want from good science, but what does "reproducibility" even mean? Two s… 2021-11-10 13:21:05 @solislemuslab @pachadotdev Some people define it that way, yes. I don’t think that’s universally agreed upon terminology though. I decided to subsume both concepts under the general idea of “reproducibility” for the purposes of the thread. 2021-11-10 01:01:46 In the case of race science, if we use different constructions of biological race or different constructions of human intelligence, do we get different answers? I think it's pretty obvious that we do. I don't think "race scientists" are sufficiently curious about why. 9/9 2021-11-10 01:01:45 When I question certain kinds of science, like race or IQ science, I'm often asking if the findings are robust to changes to the study's implementation. Do the findings depend on the sociological assumptions of the experimenter or a specific construction of the question? 6/n 2021-11-10 01:01:44 In a narrow sense, scientific reproducibility implies if we keep things about a scientific study exactly the same, then the conclusion of the study should not change. (We can allow for random variation but it should be within pre-specified limits.) 4/n 2021-11-10 01:01:43 Studies which intend to investigate the same phenomena can differ in the: - specific entities/events of interest - formal question - proposed theoretical explanation - sampling procedure - measurement method - specific scientist who implements the experiment - data produced 2/n 2021-11-10 01:01:42 Reproducibility seems like the bare minimum you'd want from good science, but what does "reproducibility" even mean? Two studies which both *intend* to investigate the same natural phenomena can differ in lots of ways. 1/n 2021-11-09 04:47:02 RT @kareem_carr: Is your trust in science itself based on science? I mean: is your trust in science grounded in carefully-collected data ab… 2021-11-08 18:14:40 I would humbly recommend that this new university have the strongest statistics department possible. If you care about truth (especially in the social sciences) then you need to care about statistics! https://t.co/9SDFkTk9ay 2021-11-08 16:07:20 Is your trust in science itself based on science? I mean: is your trust in science grounded in carefully-collected data about how often scientific studies replicate? If I asked you how often studies replicate in different sciences, would you have good answers? 2021-11-08 02:00:53 RT @kareem_carr: There are academic communities that produce research that large groups of people don’t believe. For instance, many people… 2021-11-07 21:10:21 RT @kareem_carr: There are academic communities that produce research that large groups of people don’t believe. For instance, many people… 2021-11-07 16:39:26 There are academic communities that produce research that large groups of people don’t believe. For instance, many people don’t trust: IQ research, Evolutionary Psychology, Social Science in general, Climate Science, etc. When is it OK to ignore a “science” as being unreliable? 2021-11-07 15:42:21 When I want to get people excited about my own field, I rate us on the importance of our questions. When I want to put down other people’s fields, I rate them on the usefulness of their answers. 2021-11-06 23:20:00 CAFIAC FIX 2021-11-06 19:50:00 CAFIAC FIX 2021-11-06 18:59:00 CAFIAC FIX 2021-11-01 19:20:00 CAFIAC FIX 2021-11-01 17:30:00 CAFIAC FIX 2021-10-14 15:55:11 @choo_ek Maybe it would work better if they just straight up gave them cash? 2021-10-14 15:13:00 Has anybody considered just paying unvaccinated Americans to get vaccinated? We've tried everything else. Why not try some good old-fashioned capitalism? 2021-10-14 14:23:20 @ent3c @Steve_Sailer It's unfortunate that people think larger sample sizes is what is needed to resolve this. Unmeasured confounding can't be addressed with more of the same bad data. 2021-10-13 17:31:23 @StopandShop Sure. I'll DM you the location. I'm not sure what can be done about it. I'm still in the heat of the moment but I no longer feel comfortable going to that location which has been my main supermarket for *10* years by the way. I don't want to have an experience like that again. 2021-10-13 16:56:18 He says no I saw you. So I say "OK. Search the bags then" and put them down. I'm not an angry dude at all but I got so mad at being searched on the sidewalk like that. I faced away from him, folded my arms and just started yelling "This is BS" like I was at a protest march. 2021-10-13 16:56:17 Just freaked out at the grocery store. Had all my shopping bags and had just stepped outside the store. Employee says to me "Hey I saw you put something in your bag". I'm like "Nah. Dude" He's like yeah I did. I need to search you. I'm like is this a race thing? I don't get it. 2021-10-13 16:24:00 A lot of bad statistics pretends to answer the question “What does the data say about my theory?” when it's actually answering the question “What does the data say about my theory if we assume my theory is right?" 2021-10-13 15:22:00 Controversial opinion: Linear regression is just as powerful as deep learning. The difference is linear regression answers a completely different set of equally important questions. 2021-10-13 14:28:29 me: *before coffee* WTF me: *after coffee* https://t.co/8ttAvub0TU 2021-10-12 22:55:07 I literally have no real political beliefs beyond "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, are endowed with reason and conscience, and should act towards each other in a spirit of brotherhood." I hear this is called "identity politics". Can anyone confirm? 2021-10-12 15:34:00 A lot of folks think we need to teach more people how to *do* math which is hard. I think we need to teach more people how to *like* math which is harder. 2021-10-12 14:31:00 You can become surprisingly good at statistics by learning when the data is too crappy to make any conclusions and then not making any conclusions. 2021-10-11 02:50:27 RT @EpiEllie: Seeing a lot of commentary about the incongruence of people refusing the vaccine but then getting monoclonal antibodies. But… 2021-10-08 15:07:15 How we frame our question is a dangerous source of statistical bias. It's dangerous because it can seem objective on the surface, but the questions we chose to ask (and to not ask) create subtle but powerful limits on the available evidence and possible conclusions. 2021-10-06 23:09:45 twitter has a new warning system for hot takes. i sincerely doubt we’ll need it though. https://t.co/5NfJJv7p35 2021-10-06 16:13:54 The correctness of this is going to depend on the ethics and costs and benefits of what you're doing. So we can't say it's always wrong or always right. IT DEPENDS. The important thing to remember is the ecological fallacy on its own doesn't say either way. 4/4 2021-10-06 16:13:53 First. Folks misinterpret the ecological fallacy as saying group-level statements are never true for individuals. What the fallacy actually says is the statement MIGHT be true for individuals but if it is, the group-level evidence isn't enough on its own to prove that. 2/4 2021-10-06 16:13:52 I've noticed a lot of people misunderstand the ecological fallacy which basically says "Just because a statement is true about a group doesn't mean it's true about individuals in the group". This is right but it's not the whole story. There are two important caveats: 1/4 2021-10-06 15:53:56 @Evolyn_ I just mean some kind of behavioral restriction. It doesn't have to be like a huge system. Like "I only do X on Tuesdays" or "I only have Y with friends" or "No Z in the house. I have to go to the store to get". The impression I get is it just needs to slow you down not stop you. 2021-10-06 15:35:37 @SimonsonMolly @Evolyn_ I totally get what you're saying: scarcity creates obsession. I'm not done the book so I'll leave it at that for now. 2021-10-06 15:25:20 @Evolyn_ Not done yet but I think the answer is going to resemble a healthy eating plan: 1. Have a baseline diet that's low in fat, sugar, etc 2. Eat treats at controlled times in controlled quantities 3. Regularly do sugar/fat depleting activities like exercise This but for dopamine! 2021-10-06 14:52:40 Currently reading about dopamine and addiction. Pretty good book so far! Biggest takeaways: 1. You can be addicted to pretty much anything that causes a reliable release of dopamine (like Twitter!) 2. Especially something that’s very easy to access (like Twitter!) https://t.co/KdkTIOWRta 2021-10-06 13:58:05 In retrospect, I think "mRNA vaccine" was a bad choice of terminology. It sounds fancy, but RNA made people think about DNA and thinking about DNA probably made a lot of folks unnecessarily worried about having their genes altered and the potential for sterilization. 2021-10-05 19:15:02 RT @kareem_carr: For folks who want to learn more statistics, data science, etc? What’s your biggest stumbling block to moving forward righ… 2021-10-04 16:18:54 For folks who want to learn more statistics, data science, etc? What’s your biggest stumbling block to moving forward right now? Is it mental? Emotional? Financial? Logistics? Whatever it is, tell me in the comments. I want to use my platform to help take you to the next level. 2021-10-04 16:00:47 What I like most about data analysis is that it's a mixture of: - math (theory) - coding (engineering) - search for truth (philosophy) - applications (social good) I like the flexibility that this gives me to find the balance that works best for me. 2021-10-03 15:34:09 RT @EpiEllie: Shameless plug of the COVID research and public health advocacy work my students & Liked re… 2021-10-02 23:09:03 RT @kareem_carr: In our previous session, you mentioned that your beliefs come from priors. Are these “priors” in the room with us right no… 2021-10-02 00:19:04 RT @EpiEllie: Everyone keeps talking about covid becoming endemic, but as I listen to the conversation, it’s becoming more & 2021-10-01 15:09:57 RT @kareem_carr: In our previous session, you mentioned that your beliefs come from priors. Are these “priors” in the room with us right no… 2021-09-30 23:09:00 In our previous session, you mentioned that your beliefs come from priors. Are these “priors” in the room with us right now? https://t.co/j0xPNDO1en 2021-09-30 14:45:00 Every whole number has a successor. Therefore it follows that one day you'll turn 40 or you already did QED. 2021-09-30 13:58:17 When will life go back to normal in the US? 2021-09-30 13:58:16 How will covid in the US end? Will we: - get to herd immunity or something similar where daily deaths are close to normal? - give up and learn to live with the high death rates? - continue to mask, test and lockdown for at least the next 5-10 years with no clear end? 2021-09-29 21:14:06 This is how I talk. Leave me alone. 2021-09-29 21:12:57 Still, Carr is troubled by what he sees as Statistic’s image problem. “Unlike Machine Learning or Data Science, Statistics is uncool,” he laments. It isn’t seen as “dope, phat, chill, fly, sick or da bomb.” 2021-09-29 16:22:37 Minnie Mouse implies the existence of a larger, more dangerous Maxxie Mouse. And by the Intermediate Value Theorem, there must also exist a Meanie Mouse which is the average of all other mice in both ferocity and size. 2021-09-28 15:26:55 Some folks think covid puns are really funny. Sorry to break it to you but they R0. 2021-09-28 10:01:36 @christapeterso I'm so sorry for your loss, Christa. 2021-09-27 16:16:24 me giving a talk while trying to distract everybody from looking at my crappy data https://t.co/iqtEC6pCBu 2021-09-27 14:24:40 What’s a good p-value threshold? 1/20 2021-09-23 15:17:49 It's because the models are limited. When you don't really understand how something works, you have to rely on your data being representative. That way you don't have to extrapolate too much. It's the same reason you wouldn't apply a model trained on Twitter users to Instagram. https://t.co/UCjs3yGVCE 2021-09-21 23:20:04 In classes, they train you to code the fastest, most memory efficient solution but in real life it's like: - how long will it take to implement? - how stress-tested are the dependencies? - is it easy to debug? - how complex is it? hard to understand equals expensive to maintain 2021-09-21 19:13:46 @EpiEllie oof. sounds like you need a faith heeler. https://t.co/bwOtvommlN 2021-09-21 16:12:14 lobster grilled cheese sandwich today. surprisingly easy if you already have some cooked . this electric grill has been changing my life. https://t.co/RhlkIOTIcs 2021-09-21 14:35:03 At this point in the pandemic, the only thing keeping me functional is the ability to shut things out for a bit. Reading. Long walks. Nerdy hobbies. If I'm being honest, these attempts at self-care take longer and longer and I get less and less out of them. Feels unsustainable. 2021-09-20 16:33:17 For sale: Prior Probability Never updated 2021-09-18 16:55:19 Why do so many people mistrust experts? So far my reading suggests that trust happens when people see you as: - competent - honest - reliable - benevolent - having compatible values But even if you *are* these things, people won't trust you if they can't verify it for themselves. 2021-09-18 15:37:49 https://t.co/aJGbEdBjv7 2021-09-18 14:33:25 @Evolyn_ I'd use tables. Something like the strawberry-peach example in this article. https://t.co/pXJkTR8d8K 2021-09-18 13:15:35 i try to do this on here with statistics. it's hard. https://t.co/Mokzt2R4ry 2021-09-17 16:16:36 normal heartbeat: /\ /\ __ / \ __/\__ / \ _ \/ \/ heartbeat when your results look really good but you just found a bug in your code: /\ /\ /\ _/ \ /\_/ \ /\_/ \ /\_ \/ \/ \/ 2021-09-16 15:17:30 The propensity to do genetic association studies is itself genetic! In this thread, we describe a large-scale genetic association analysis of individuals who themselves have performed genetic association analyses. We identify 3,846  independent genome-wide-significant SNPs…1/n 2021-09-15 22:39:45 What went wrong here? - small sample size (n=1) - no control group - unknown treatment (what else were the testicles exposed to?) - poor documentation (story from cousin’s friend) Clinical trials are designed to solve these kinds of issues That’s how we know the vaccines work! https://t.co/gNJYeZMWlf 2021-09-15 15:44:47 We get paid in exposure! https://t.co/hTwxxH3Lb3 2021-09-15 15:20:00 Here's another weird fact about probability. Zero probability events happen all the time. If you pick a random number between 0 and 1, any given choice has zero probability of happening. On a more personal note, your existence is a zero probability event. You happened. 2021-09-15 14:19:02 These three things are true: - there are infinitely many prime numbers - there are infinitely many whole numbers - if you reached into a bag of all possible whole numbers and pulled out a number at random, the probability it would be prime is 0. Probability is weird. 2021-09-14 01:39:29 My cousin won’t get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & 2021-09-14 00:37:44 me, a statistician: *accidentally saying the quiet part out loud* https://t.co/cki9wlDdnp 2021-09-13 23:25:51 Check out my latest instagram post. It's a poem about me! (I didn't write it! ) https://t.co/61qG4FeQ8C 2021-09-13 16:31:09 Read the whole thing on my instagram (and give my insta a follow while you’re over there! ) https://t.co/jGy6Fg9wlG 2021-09-13 16:31:08 Poet Maaya Prasad wrote a poem inspired by life experiences. Here’s a taste… https://t.co/rHF3vW3RjA 2021-09-13 16:31:07 Over the summer I did a photoshoot with @poetryofsci group which was really fun. But that’s not all… https://t.co/OJHowwwV4I 2021-09-12 17:19:57 We all know correlation isn’t causation, but did you know a long list of cherry-picked correlations isn’t causation either? 2021-09-12 00:28:35 RT @abese_habte: This is so cool 2021-09-12 00:28:27 RT @ChristletonMath: This thread 2021-09-11 23:39:03 Some meritocrats think merit comes from hard work. Others think merit means high performance, but lots of hard workers don’t perform. Lots of high performers don’t work very hard and lots of folks deliver great performances by stealing from others which is often pretty hard work. 2021-09-11 23:03:07 wow, ok, unfollowing now. thought they wanted to make cool computer programs that work the same way our brains work, but they turned out to be just another matrix multiplication junkie with a chain rule fetish. 2021-09-11 21:52:55 RT @EpiEllie: Dear internet troll, I regret to inform you that anonymously emailing my university to complain that you don’t like me calli… 2021-09-11 18:31:26 RT @kareem_carr: How did I get this poll with almost 29k responses to balance perfectly? A thread. https://t.co/vqNYv6uV5v 2021-09-11 18:24:39 RT @JenniferDMoss: Kareem is why I love Twitter!!!! 2021-09-10 23:17:41 Hope you enjoyed the thread. If you like this content and want to support it, please like and retweet the thread so others can enjoy it as well, and follow me to get more threads like this one in the future. 2021-09-10 23:17:40 So there you go. That's the magic trick. I'm not a wizard. I'm just a statistician. https://t.co/MOMBL4hjLE 2021-09-10 23:17:38 My solution was just to tell them they were biased which caused them to be confused about what would happen on this poll, which unbiased them. https://t.co/baYmCc9Bvd 2021-09-10 23:17:36 This didn't have to be true but will tend to give a close to 50-50 split when you select people randomly, even if their choices aren't random. 2021-09-10 23:17:35 The precise proportion of heads in this poll was 0.504 which was well within the realm of possibility! https://t.co/gKUVvaQMf4 2021-09-10 23:17:34 If we assume our poll is like a fair coin then using the math of the bell curve, we can figure out what kind of results we can expect to get after 29k answers. As you can see below, there was about a 95% chance that the percent of heads would be between 0.494 and 0.506. https://t.co/EMjs5bxzcy 2021-09-10 23:17:33 You also might be wondering why I'm talking about "experiments". We only did one poll. Often statistics means thinking about the multiverse. We don't just think about our universe but every other universe where randomness would have caused our experiment to turn out differently. https://t.co/WFcNEEyLli 2021-09-10 23:17:31 If the bell curve feels a little abstract, don't worry. It's a lot more familiar than you might think. Men's heights are roughly distributed like a bell curve and so are the heights of women. So we've actually all been experiencing bell curves our whole lives. https://t.co/pHR2869GmX 2021-09-10 23:17:30 You might be wondering what's a bell curve? It looks like this. The previous tweet is saying that most of the experiments will have averages that cluster around the center with fewer and fewer as the averages get more extreme. https://t.co/0g5kToK09O 2021-09-10 23:17:29 Central Limit Theorem The average of a large number of observations tends to cluster around the "expected value" in an increasingly tightly-clustered pattern that resembles a bell curve. We can't see the pattern with just one experiment but we do see it with lots of experiments. https://t.co/m0eACDnsEt 2021-09-10 23:17:28 Law of Large Numbers The average of a large number of observations should get closer to a particular value as more observations are collected. This value is called the "expected value". If we code heads as 0 and tails as 1 then the expected value for a fair coin should be 0.5. https://t.co/CORH602kSg 2021-09-10 23:17:27 3. From the perspective of the Twitter algorithm, each new person that gets shown the poll is a toss up in terms of whether they favor heads or tails, much like flipping a coin. It doesn't matter if they picked non-randomly. From the perspective of the poll, they appear random. 2021-09-10 23:17:26 How did I get this poll with almost 29k responses to balance perfectly? A thread. https://t.co/vqNYv6uV5v 2021-09-10 04:43:20 @samuelmehr @jordanestern @paulbloomatyale No billionaires ever laughed at my tweets. 2021-09-10 01:11:34 @rasmansa @seanmcarroll @Noahpinion If we validate a truth claim via the scientific method then it is science. The truth claim can start as a claim from math or computer science or dream you had (like the chemist Kekule who dreamed the chemical structure of benzene which he later experimentally verified). 2021-09-09 16:00:23 The pandemic has disturbed a fault line in our societies, between our deep-seated need for bodily autonomy, and our fundamental interconnectedness with all human beings. Our bodies seem so personal to us and yet they inescapably bind us to others through our shared biology. 2021-09-09 14:28:23 Let's do another experiment! Using your free will alone, reply to this poll randomly. [Don't use any dice or other objects in the room. No computer code. No cheating! Retweet so we can get a larger sample size.] 2021-09-09 12:07:04 @skdh Thanks Sabine! I really appreciate you saying that. 2021-09-08 23:03:51 It’s hard to say if all this over-thinking is what biased the results. Maybe it was the order of the responses that caused a bias. Personally, I doubt order matters much on Twitter because I’ve done polls where the options were pretty similar and the poll ended up being 50-50. https://t.co/IWqy5j6PJ0 2021-09-08 23:03:50 Others even tried to think *two* steps ahead! https://t.co/cggiHRCQwU 2021-09-08 23:03:49 As a good data scientists, we can use our qualitative data to help us understand our quantitative data! What qualitative data? The comments! Apparently, some folks tried to think one step ahead of the other respondents. https://t.co/7iSV7WgsFE 2021-09-08 23:03:48 Here’s my plot of the responses as they came in. With 7291 responses, this is *really* baised. The chances of it being a “fair coin flip” are basically 0. What’s going on? https://t.co/FfisxYq7Ii 2021-09-08 23:03:47 Here’s the result of yesterday’s statistics experiment! The poll is significantly biased! WHY??? A thread. https://t.co/VnIaTtUkMu 2021-09-08 15:14:22 @allisons @alejjak1 @SaskiaHomer I think randomness is caused by a lack of information. So flipping a coin might be random to you or me but not to someone with a supercomputer that can crunch the numbers. I think randomness is real in the sense that there are physical limits on what’s knowable. 2021-09-08 14:27:48 RT @kareem_carr: Let's do a statistics experiment! Using your free will alone, reply to this poll randomly. [Don't use any dice or other… 2021-09-08 03:30:14 RT @kareem_carr: Let's do a statistics experiment! Using your free will alone, reply to this poll randomly. [Don't use any dice or other… 2021-09-07 16:48:26 Sorry for deleting the earlier thread. Decided to re-phase since the first version was going down a tangent due to some of my word choices. 2021-09-07 16:43:10 We give others our labor to get money and later we use that money like an IOU to get stuff back. If I work for 20 years and then burn my money, the money's destroyed but no "real" stuff is harmed. Does that mean society got something and I didn't get anything so society profits? 2021-09-07 15:06:00 I'm pulling back a bit. I'll continue to tweet my regular content but I'll be engaging with comments less. I pride myself on not being the kind of high-follower account that ignores pushback, but it's time consuming and the all too frequent negativity is emotionally draining. 2021-09-07 14:29:14 Let's do a statistics experiment! Using your free will alone, reply to this poll randomly. [Don't use any dice or other objects in the room. No computer code. No cheating! Retweet so we can get a larger sample size. I'll be tracking the results of the poll over time!] 2021-09-06 23:24:34 There are 330 million Americans. If we assume a 1% death rate, 3.3 million people would have died if everybody ended up getting covid. So far about 640k have died. It's easy to feel like it's all been for nothing, but Americans probably saved 2.4 million people. That's a win. 2021-09-06 16:38:28 I know that I’m seen as a big account but I’m just a black foreign student who started tweeting as a way of feeling less alone in my field. I know that some want me to be more formal and academic but I don’t want my Twitter to be yet another place where I can’t be myself. 2021-09-06 15:15:27 I deleted my EJMR tweets. Just wanted to be transparent and let folks know I did that. My platform gives me the ability to influence some things for the better but I don’t think racism in the economics profession is one of them. 2021-09-05 23:10:50 The pandemic has produced an epidemic of bad science communicators. People who know the science well but who are emotionally fragile and easily frustrated, and whose communication style turns people off from scientists and the science. 2021-09-05 17:39:00 @sarahradz_ you’re welcome. https://t.co/lkcrhaZXfW 2021-09-05 17:00:22 RT @kareem_carr: Normally my twitter polls have 1000+ votes by now. Are some of you stuck in an infinite loop? Press Ctrl-C to exit!!!!! 2021-09-05 17:00:17 Normally my twitter polls have 1000+ votes by now. Are some of you stuck in an infinite loop? Press Ctrl-C to exit!!!!! https://t.co/MZ4jiNuDBb 2021-09-05 16:27:37 Was your answer to this tweet, “no”? 2021-09-05 15:38:06 RT @kareem_carr: The politics of drug and medical device approval make discussions around the word "RCT" highly charged and I should really… 2021-09-05 15:37:22 The politics of drug and medical device approval make discussions around the word "RCT" highly charged and I should really have considered that this would make it hard to have a real discussion about it especially on Twitter. 2021-09-05 15:30:32 RT @kareem_carr: Muting this one. Hate to bail but too much repetition of the same argument without paying attention to previous responses,… 2021-09-05 15:30:08 Muting this one. Hate to bail but too much repetition of the same argument without paying attention to previous responses, and there's a political element to the responses which I don't particularly enjoy. https://t.co/YD9QBJ7Rc5 2021-09-05 15:16:56 @OstlundOllie https://t.co/2fp66jEkfc 2021-09-05 15:05:07 @ADAlthousePhD @f2harrell @mababyak I understand the pushback. I don’t work for this “authority” and I don’t think RCT should be defined by law in Twitter discussions. I get that clinical trials in the US and some other places are a context where legality is a concern. Thanks for the insight! 2021-09-05 14:58:52 @stephensenn @f2harrell I got into statistics specifically to attain the ability to divine the future. Was I defrauded??? 2021-09-05 14:56:59 @ADAlthousePhD @f2harrell @mababyak Makes sense. I realized after the fact that this was probably partially about political implications of my definition (on drug trials etc) rather a 100% pure academic discussion. Not sure what “seriousness” has to do with it but sounds pretty heavy duty! 2021-09-05 14:33:06 @stephensenn @f2harrell Good. I agree with Frank too! In my example, I did say it could go wrong if assumptions about the unrelatedness of the t-shirt to the outcome were wrong! 2021-09-05 14:30:25 @f2harrell @mababyak Sounds like we agree it happens in trials which are called an “RCT” by some portion of the research community, and that it can be unproblematic in certain cases if certain assumptions prove true. I agree it’s dangerous. The t-shirt example was intended to show that danger. 2021-09-05 03:26:59 @besttrousers @haroldpollack @aaronsojourner @jasonjdelaney Everybody should know what I’m saying by now, whether they agree with my definitions or not, so no use beating a dead horse. 2021-09-05 03:11:00 @haroldpollack @aaronsojourner @jasonjdelaney …end up being quasi-random because of implementation details. But the partial message of my thread is this issue might not even matter! Because quasi-random can be good enough. 2021-09-05 03:09:32 @haroldpollack @aaronsojourner @jasonjdelaney I can definitely show you papers where RCT is used the way I describe it. Day of the week allocation etc. But I can’t force you to accept the usage. What I describe in the thread is a toy example but for a lot of reasons in a real trial, the randomization can really be… 2021-09-05 02:46:13 @aaronsojourner @haroldpollack @jasonjdelaney And also this...https://t.co/5ACD1mjBjh 2021-09-05 02:45:46 @aaronsojourner @haroldpollack @jasonjdelaney Yes exactly. This is direction I'm thinking about as well. I flesh out the idea a little more here... https://t.co/2fp66jEkfc 2021-09-05 02:34:26 @f2harrell @mababyak Have you never seen a trial where people allocate treatment by day of week or something similar? I would argue about it but I think it would just be semantics. This is essentially what I'm thinking... https://t.co/2fp66jEkfc 2021-09-05 02:03:55 @statwonk The point of the example was just to show a toy example where OVB can be an issue in RCTs. There are other ways it can come about. Check out @EpiEllie's thread...https://t.co/S8luhnD37B 2021-09-05 02:02:00 @statwonk You're assuming treatment assignment is fully under your control. For instance, people won't leave the study or not adhere to their assigned treatment (pills make them sick or they don't feel like they do anything). I didn't really get into all that in my example but yeah... 2021-09-05 00:30:08 @ben_crost @EpiEllie is an expert. https://t.co/M4Mcs5FXaj 2021-09-05 00:25:23 @besttrousers https://t.co/gcNtaqTEpM 2021-09-05 00:24:29 @leihua_ye https://t.co/gcNtaqTEpM 2021-09-05 00:24:21 @jamesannan https://t.co/gcNtaqTEpM 2021-09-05 00:23:44 @chrisbboyer https://t.co/gcNtaqTEpM 2021-09-05 00:23:09 @ileksandrv Conditional on shirt color, it’s random. If shirt color doesn’t matter it’s potentially random enough for our purposes. 2021-09-04 22:03:54 @D_Kuehn @EpiEllie has a pretty good list! https://t.co/M4Mcs5FXaj 2021-09-04 20:58:53 @besttrousers Answering the comment over and over again is getting tiring. lol. Check my responses to others. 2021-09-04 20:56:46 @grecostatistics @haroldpollack You can even get away with no randomization. https://t.co/16vWGgYJ4k 2021-09-04 20:55:59 @grecostatistics @haroldpollack This falls under the decision of an RCT where the term “RCT” originates and also imperfect randomization isn’t necessarily a problem! https://t.co/rQ2DNO4FiO 2021-09-04 19:11:08 @mababyak In the most extreme case, if there’s no arrows that must be broken, there’s no need for randomization at all and any allocation scheme (that doesn’t create any new problematic arrows!) is sufficient. 2021-09-04 19:05:24 @Point_O_Five @AttilaTheLund Happens in clinical trials a lot, especially with fatal diseases, people will often try to manipulate the allocation to get treatments to patients they think might benefit. That’s something my field deals with a lot which is why I tend to care about “impure” situations. 2021-09-04 18:55:54 @mababyak Randomization breaks arrows. 1. True randomization, pseudo-randomization and even quasi-randomization can all break arrows. 2. If there’s no arrow, there’s no need to break it. So a partial randomization can often be enough. https://t.co/MU1dbwMGFA 2021-09-04 17:11:46 @MichaelCRyanMD https://t.co/WyRLp2Zg5j 2021-09-04 17:10:54 @haroldpollack @jasonjdelaney I think your comment assumes the difference between randomization and quasi-randomization is always obvious in practice. The issue is quasi-randomness is often enough to get the job done so it’s not always empirically obvious which one you have, or meaningful to distinguish. 2021-09-04 17:04:15 RT @EpiEllie: It is absolutely possible to have omitted variable bias in an RCT. In addition to the mechanism @kareem_carr describes, whi… 2021-09-04 17:03:32 @haroldpollack I think it does count but this particular example is not the main point for me. My main point is depending on the gap between how you *think* you implemented your randomization and what you actually implemented, you can end up with a bias. Have a good rest of day. 2021-09-04 16:45:52 @haroldpollack “Violation” seems a bit strong. Makes it sound like there’s a law or something. “Using convenience variable that turns out to be confounded”…it happens. https://t.co/1LLixTJtru 2021-09-04 16:39:17 @jasonjdelaney I think you’re maybe not familiar with randomization schemes in general. This is a quasi-randomization approach. Quasi-randomness is all you need in practice. People allocate by day of week patients enter the study and many other such approaches. 2021-09-04 16:31:51 @haroldpollack https://t.co/uuVDehY0qD 2021-09-04 16:31:40 @vviet93 https://t.co/uuVDehY0qD 2021-09-04 16:22:06 @jasonjdelaney A coin flip isn’t “random” either but it would be random enough for most experimental allocation schemes. The main issue is whether the treatment allocation is causally related to the outcome. 2021-09-04 16:05:55 On the other hand, if shirt color does have something to do with getting the flu and we analyze this data as if the pill is the only important factor in our outcome, our analysis will show omitted variable bias. So this is why I argue that an RCT can show omitted variable bias. 2021-09-04 16:05:54 Imagine that we want to study whether a pill made by our company can reduce the incidence of flu. The person conducting our analysis in the field notices about half the subjects coming in wear black shirts and half wear white. 2021-09-04 16:05:53 I think an RCT can show omitted variable bias. Technically, omitted variable bias applies to statistical models but an RCT can be randomized in a way that an analysis of that RCT that assumed complete randomization would produce an estimate with omitted variable bias. A thread. 2021-09-04 13:46:56 RT @kareem_carr: Where is Data Science in its hype cycle? (Answer the poll in the next tweet!) https://t.co/KT8CFSJ5HI 2021-09-04 00:33:37 tired: pirating a pdf wired: pirating a pdf of a book you already own rather than go searching for it yourself inspired: watching a professor pirate a pdf of their own book that they wrote rather than go searching for it themselves the system is broken y’all. lol. 2021-09-04 00:06:23 me, a statistician: *watching non-statisticians fight about bad statistics on twitter* https://t.co/xHcWoKZsgp 2021-09-03 23:43:32 Where do you think Data Science is in its hype cycle? 2021-09-03 23:43:31 Where is Data Science in its hype cycle? (Answer the poll in the next tweet!) https://t.co/KT8CFSJ5HI 2021-09-03 21:28:48 @svpino Sorry to hear that, Santiago! Hope the little one is OK. Wishing you a full recovery. 2021-09-03 15:47:49 My advice for new grad students: Stop comparing yourself to your classmates as soon as you can. Measure your current self against your past self. Soon you’ll have your own advisor, your own project and your own plan for your career. Everybody has to walk their own path. 2021-09-03 13:54:13 Lots of folks frame complex social issues as being about: 1. A small number of categories. Ideally two. eg. Alpha vs beta male, Low vs high IQ 2. Simple linear scales (IQ, hotness from 1-10, Money) Sadly, they think this is real statistics but it's just a weird number fetish. 2021-09-02 16:44:15 @JacobBloom31 https://t.co/isGdMRwZYC 2021-09-02 16:29:06 @SarahGrynpas It’a not an analogy. I didn’t say cancer and social inequality are alike. I said if you apply the same logic in a different context it leads to an absurd conclusion. 2021-09-02 16:27:20 @sinz54 I don’t think that follows. For instance, diet, exercise and lifestyle are an important part of cancer prevention. 2021-09-02 15:34:00 Many hereditarians argue that if we can link social inequality to genes, this means we would have to accept social inequality as a natural part of life and an unsolvable problem. By the same logic, cancer is natural and we should stop researching how to cure it as well. 2021-09-02 14:23:05 it’s really that simple https://t.co/H6Ma8uxdP9 2021-09-01 22:51:28 In this Netflix original starring Ruby Rose, a young data scientist’s analysis gets turned upside down by the black swan events in their dataset just as their research group’s SAS license fails to be renewed. You won’t believe what happens next! https://t.co/xZ6VK6cx13 2021-09-01 16:16:00 It really frustrates me when politicians say "The data is messy so we can't know anything for sure". Too many of our leaders have no clue what statistics is and that there are scientific ways of dealing with uncertainty. 2021-09-01 15:24:00 The academic job market is already pretty brutal. How an academic field deals with anti-blackness is going to determine whether young black people are willing to trust it with their futures. 2021-09-01 15:04:00 did it hurt? when they made you learn about p-values? 2021-09-01 14:33:47 I'm a numbers guy. So here's some numbers for you: - 174,000 people (including 2,465 US soldiers) died during 20 years of war in Afghanistan - 640,478 Americans have died so far during a year and a half of covid 2021-09-01 12:56:16 @simardcasanova @BitsyPerlman @jenniferdoleac Serious question. What are the "obvious" reasons? 2021-09-01 12:43:18 @BitsyPerlman @jenniferdoleac Not caring about the website in general makes sense to me. I don't think I care about it either. But I do care if my academic colleagues are virulent racists especially if that racism is being normalized in a setting where people are also discussing academic affairs. 2021-09-01 01:20:42 @jenniferdoleac I’m not picking on economics randomly. The site went after me first. If it was just calling me a “narcissist” then that’s fine but this “ethnonarcissist” stuff that they were saying sounds like white nationalist talk to me. I didn’t care for it. 2021-09-01 01:17:25 @jenniferdoleac I assure you if there was a statistics site like that I would go after them. I have a track record… https://t.co/GprsdnzjpB 2021-09-01 01:05:43 @jenniferdoleac I know you're fighting. That's why I wanted to acknowledge you in the thread. I guess I think it's important to maintain that sense of horror. It is horrific I think. I was prepared for people to say no real economists with any power are on there but nobody has been saying that. 2021-09-01 00:54:25 @susannah_rip @Harvard Thanks! 2021-09-01 00:52:59 @josh_t_dean This is definitely an optimistic take, for which we really have no evidence, but hopefully it's true. If the intersection between academic economists and active site members is not nearly zero then it concerns me, even if that intersection is just the "bad eggs". 2021-09-01 00:48:27 @jenniferdoleac Maybe I'm wrong but I get the impression that some of the people on there are colleagues. I guess I don't get the casual attitude to having people like that in one's field. To me, it's pretty shocking. If I was emotionally at the point of not fighting it anymore, I would leave. 2021-09-01 00:05:36 Why wasn't the racism being called out on EJMR? Why are the responses so muted here on Twitter??? I assume the answer is hinted at in this tweet. People are afraid of retaliation by anonymous racists hiding amongst their colleagues. If so, that's pretty sad. https://t.co/ti8kieXNzS 2021-09-01 00:05:34 There's definitely a striking difference in who's speaking out now compared to who was most likely to "speak out" about my stupid joke. 2021-09-01 00:05:33 Claudia Sahm @Claudia_Sahm https://t.co/awXpyZpQ84 2021-09-01 00:05:32 Anyway, I want to highlight some positive exceptions like Jennifer Doleac @jenniferdoleac https://t.co/FKLkZF3bWA 2021-09-01 00:05:31 I made a dumb joke once. I was like "haha economists love rich folks". So many economists felt the need to respond to me "stereotyping" economists. One guy even wrote a 2500+ word essay. Meanwhile, my recent tweet on racism in economics got much less of a response. 2021-08-31 22:41:19 I'm Kareem Carr. Biostatistics PhD student @Harvard I'm a stats influencer (apparently) My jobs have all involved coding so I guess I'm in computing. These days I spend more time thinking about *what* to compute than *how* to compute it. #BlackInComputing #BiCRollCall 2021-08-31 16:59:14 @CrewsCutts This is more true of the older versions but the default colors in particular can be very distinctive. 2021-08-31 16:54:59 I just found out that I'm not the only one that learned how to change Excel plot defaults so folks couldn't tell I was using Excel. Excel fakers. We live among you. 2021-08-31 16:50:02 A few people are asking about biological heterogeneity. The idea is the underlying biology might be heterogenous but your available information about each person is homogenous. https://t.co/MwhIwdtcnZ 2021-08-31 15:01:32 @BayesicTony I think the operative idea is the statistical concept of exchangeability. Before I observe you, there's no reason to assume you're different from anybody else that I haven't observed yet. After I observe you, it's a different conversation. 2021-08-31 14:52:50 The three poll options explore different causal mechanisms or ways in which the vaccine might work. The truth is, based on just the effectiveness information, we can't know if it’s just one causal mechanism or all of them. But there is a sort of "right" answer to this poll. 2021-08-31 14:52:49 I think there's a lesson here. Simple comparisons between groups, like comparing infections in the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, are often one of the least informative types of experiment. https://t.co/j2IVteTA8c 2021-08-31 13:57:43 @thebirdmaniac @MarkHoofnagle I did the exact same thing. My Physics prof hated excel but that was all I knew so I just faked the plots. 2021-08-31 01:47:51 Is that an Excel plot in your published paper? RUN. RUN NOW. I'm sorry but I can't protect you from the others. 2021-08-31 01:35:45 RT @kareem_carr: When you hear that the vaccine is 95% effective, do you think it means: 1. It gives a specific 95% of people 100% protecti… 2021-08-30 18:07:53 @boompig 1. Taking somebody's word for it is "testimony". It's also part of how we determine what's a fact. It's not outside of the system. 2. I get your point but I think it's pretty relevant that we don't even agree on what a "fact" is so why would be agree on the facts themselves. 2021-08-30 18:00:16 @cmMcConnaughy @PoliPsyProf I agree. I don't think it's just the "unsophisticated" either. I think we all have cognitive biases that can be exploited under the right situations, and often highly "educated" people are more vulnerable to this because they're used to being "right". 2021-08-30 17:51:50 @allisons I'll tell ya after the poll closes. https://t.co/QEXJAkWLkJ 2021-08-30 17:49:46 @boompig I'd like to express some epistemic humility here. I don't know what I don't know. But on some level, don't we all know that somebody making an argument might be lying or mislead themselves? Are you saying more than just that? 2021-08-30 17:38:19 @cmMcConnaughy @PoliPsyProf I appreciate you sharing this. I can't really say more about it without some more context. I see what I'm saying as partly political rather than purely scientific. It's also more strongly worded than I'd like because I was exactly at the 280 character limit. 2021-08-30 17:13:41 @1DalM I'm just saying community and education are compatible. That's all. I would argue that's why college works so much better than just reading books on your own. 2021-08-30 17:04:59 @1DalM I think you're assuming educational outreach can't be integrated with a community and it's culture. I don't think that's the case. 2021-08-30 16:09:19 @allisons https://t.co/QRWy9JlpNQ 2021-08-30 16:07:29 Framing the issue as a problem of "misinformation" plays into the idea that people ought to passively receive facts, and so the main problem is controlling what facts they're being fed. This turns public sense-making into a PR battle where might literally makes "right". 2021-08-30 16:07:28 We don't have a "misinformation" problem. We have a miseducation problem. People don't know what a fact is, and they don't know what to do with a fact even when one is handed to them. So they end up needing other people to *tell* them what to think and that's extremely dangerous. 2021-08-30 15:00:23 I can tell from the comments that folks are a little concerned about what the answer is. Don't stress. I'll quote-tweet with the "right" answer in my opinion after the poll is over. 2021-08-30 14:59:57 @_julesh_ Changing Twitter is a lot easier. 2021-08-30 14:48:03 Twitter needs a "secret like" for when I want somebody to know I like their comment but I also still want a career in academia. 2021-08-30 14:12:54 @dschan02 https://t.co/QUbLslHV5K 2021-08-30 14:12:33 @Vorvayne 2021-08-30 14:11:46 @_julesh_ https://t.co/QUbLslHV5K 2021-08-30 14:10:51 This is just a toy example. Go with whatever's closest to how you think it works. 2021-08-30 14:03:22 When you hear that the vaccine is 95% effective, do you think it means: 1. It gives a specific 95% of people 100% protection? 2. It gives a random 95% of people 100% protection? 3. It gives 100% of people 95% protection? 2021-08-30 00:58:32 When people tell me my tweets don't meet academic standards, like they aren't deeply researched or lack citations, I often wonder if those same people are aware that there are folks on here tweeting pictures of their naked asses. It's like "Sir, this is a Wendy's". 2021-08-30 00:14:48 RT @elben: I have a theory of EJMR that contrasts it from sites with ostensibly the same function like Urch or Reddit (r/badeconomics, etc)… 2021-08-30 00:14:36 RT @d_zambiasi: @jenniferdoleac I didn't know what EJMR was before joining Twitter, and I learned about it from people that were saying it'… 2021-08-30 00:14:30 RT @jenniferdoleac: If you’re an economist who visits EJMR “for the information” and don’t think you’re contributing to the problem, please… 2021-08-29 15:45:32 For a lot of folks, anti-black racism doesn’t impact them at all but “having to hear about racism all the time” does. It’s depressing. I get that. I also get that not talking about racism solves their problem. But it doesn’t solve mine. 2021-08-29 15:11:55 @Gopal_Kot Let’s say you get covid. You can pretend covid isn’t the reason you can’t breathe but you can’t ignore that you can’t breathe. Ignoring stuff often ends up creating exactly the kinds of consequences that you can’t ignore. 2021-08-29 14:20:01 Politically centrist academics need to get over the ridiculous idea that black academics can “ignore” anti-black racism. This is like asking folks to ignore covid. It is literally impossible. 2021-08-29 12:40:13 @MatthewHKim I’m not engaging with them. I’m engaging with everybody else by pointing out that this is going on and that it’s a problem. https://t.co/XLI9hfCAf7 2021-08-29 04:42:03 @elben I think we ought to talk about racism when we see it and call it out. 2021-08-29 04:40:59 @simardcasanova My issue isn’t the targeting of me personally. I’m a public figure whether I like it or not. Let’s not focus on me. Let’s focus on the racism. 2021-08-29 04:39:08 @jasonjdelaney @estebanjq3 I’m calling out the racism. I don’t care what they say about me personally if it’s non-racist. Racism is everybody’s problem to address. You seem to be saying “we economists got this” but based on that level of racism, economists clearly don’t got this. 2021-08-28 23:45:37 @PhDemetri https://t.co/OelryoYnUD 2021-08-28 23:24:53 This thread has everything I look for in a scholarly work. Theoretical depth with an eye towards practical significance, all delivered with showmanship and good humor. The paper sounds well-worth the read. https://t.co/2kSr4EcBBc https://t.co/nnTHjib2HL 2021-08-28 23:02:47 @PhDemetri what’s the name??? 2021-08-28 22:57:45 @estebanjq3 https://t.co/XLI9hfkZnz 2021-08-28 22:57:07 @jacobherbstman In my experience, ignoring racism doesn’t cause it to go away. 2021-08-28 16:21:47 Like a lot of US grad programs, mine allocates about 80% of spots to US nationals. As a foreigner, my odds were already down significantly when I applied. It’s an American school so makes sense they would prioritize Americans but if we’re going to talk about quotas, there you go. 2021-08-28 16:21:46 What is going on in the economics world? This is some serious racism. 1. Can someone explain to these folks that not every black person is even eligible for affirmative action? I’m a foreign national 2. I don’t understand what me getting AA would have to do with economist jobs. https://t.co/vrMhITcfds 2021-08-28 14:55:09 Like some guy gets bit. KNOWS he has the zombie plague yet goes home to infect his whole family or sneaks into the shelter full of people and turns, killing everybody. I honestly didn't believe it would work like that. Now I feel like those movies were actually documentaries. 2021-08-28 14:51:19 @sinz54 Wow. 1934. Thanks for sharing this! 2021-08-28 14:33:07 Before covid, I used think disaster movies were unrealistic. Like I thought folks would never do stuff like fly home to be with their families during a pandemic, spreading the disease to their loved ones and also across the country. Anybody else realize the movies were right? 2021-08-27 15:37:00 @PlayContra That sounds pretty interesting. If I wanted to learn more about models like this, what would you suggest I read? (My background is I'm a statistics PhD candidate.) 2021-08-27 15:03:47 From a technical perspective, why are we so bad at predicting COVID trends? My guesses: 1. We don't collect anywhere near enough of the right kind of data 2. Covid growth is exponential so modeling errors can grow very quickly What are your guesses? 2021-08-26 14:01:46 Hey Data Science Twitter, I got a question. We all know the red flag algorithms, Deep Learning, Linear Probability Models etc that we all can spot on sight but is there any green flag algorithms? Algorithms that you hear someone say that make you instantly trust or like a person? https://t.co/hn6gXUD4OC 2021-08-26 12:42:56 @lastpositivist My sense of the AI ethics world is that many (most???) feel like they've convincingly demonstrated there is no technical fix and regulation is needed. 2021-08-26 00:47:04 Much like the Olympics, the top performers in math, science and coding benefit from: - years of training - a team of mentors and supporters - learning within a community If you’re struggling because you didn’t have those things, don’t compare your progress to folks that did. 2021-08-25 18:52:31 @sam_power_825 what’s the name of the big one in the front?I’ve been wanting to get one like that but no idea on the name. 2021-08-25 16:22:00 bad news: a harvard statistician is being brutalized on academic twitter for a terrible hot take good news: it isn't me!!! 2021-08-25 15:18:00 A very common kind of bias is where people half-ass option A but whole-ass option B and then claim that A isn't as good as B. This often happens in science when folks compare a method they don't like to one they do. Also happens when folks compare minority groups to the majority. 2021-08-25 14:25:30 A P-VALUE IS THE PROBABILITY OF RESULTS AS EXTREME OR MORE EXTREME THAN THE RESULTS OBSERVED. ARISING ONLY FROM CHANCE. THAT PART IS REALLY IMPORTANT OK. A LOT OF PEOPLE GET THAT PART WRONG. https://t.co/TsetXSQPVB 2021-08-24 23:33:38 I call this one “life of a data scientist” https://t.co/gK3w2Pc0Dj 2021-08-24 17:56:32 "stat-witted" https://t.co/M7h8kHgiVH 2021-08-24 17:54:48 @WillNovus @sjay_yayy @olumuyiwaayo @baba_Omoloro @AdeleyeSamuelA @OpenAcademics @AaronAkpuPhilip @JBuriak @ZJAyres https://t.co/xYRF8SO6Md 2021-08-24 16:05:59 @bpetrushev it’s not a 100% serious chart. 2021-08-24 15:47:59 never stop. https://t.co/2pIniSi8fL 2021-08-23 20:57:52 @rocks_lab Yes! 2021-08-23 16:54:38 FYI. Statistics is the scientific study of uncertainty. Statistics doesn’t just tell us how to translate the messy uncertainty in our data into science. It also gives us insight into how best to translate our science given the messy uncertainty that we see in the real world. https://t.co/OwgWO9aPuO 2021-08-23 15:28:49 Be careful out there. Data visualization is a gateway drug to statistics. 2021-08-23 14:26:46 you might need to sit down for this one. https://t.co/XuOoJoNgoi 2021-08-22 21:40:22 me, half way into all of my data science projects https://t.co/DFRdrCYK3p 2021-08-22 14:47:05 @Like_I_Ced https://t.co/7KxqbhnMxW 2021-08-22 14:46:36 @Like_I_Ced My friend. "The World Health Organization (WHO) declared smallpox [virus] eradicated in 1980...It was eradicated solely through vaccination. " https://t.co/34wO80ii9M 2021-08-22 14:23:00 The way we’re going right now we’re probably going to be dealing with covid for the rest of our lives, and nobody’s talking about it. 2021-08-22 01:35:53 Does the fact that you can get the virus while vaxxed mean that vaccinations don't work? Absolutely not. Even if you wear a bulletproof vest you can still get shot and it absolutely matters how many shots were fired. 2021-08-21 21:40:43 i'm absolutely livid that p-values got cancelled right after i mastered them. all that pain. what was it all for? 2021-08-21 15:45:26 I feel out of touch with Data Science. What’s hot these days? 2021-08-21 15:24:22 I will say it’s in mint condition. *chef’s kiss* 2021-08-21 15:24:21 me:*gets a survey request in the mail* the survey: “The enclosed cash gift is our way of saying thank you for your participation.” the enclosed cash gift: https://t.co/WokW2ZLWTX 2021-08-21 14:34:00 Let X be, Let X be, Let X be, Let X be The set of all words of wisdom Let X be. 2021-08-20 23:06:00 Parentheses Exist, Math Dudes. Ambiguity Sucks. 2021-08-20 16:36:29 @AttilaTheLund It’s the comparison they’re implicitly making in the video. 2021-08-20 16:24:19 I don’t want to point fingers but black folks aren’t the reason vaccination rates are lagging. https://t.co/6NyxJGV7Xr https://t.co/vPICz6nWC2 2021-08-20 15:50:48 I have a weird view of objective reality. I believe it exists because evolution under natural selection is possible. Populations must be adapting to "something". It's a weird view because I don't really think of math as "true". I see it as merely "adaptive". 2021-08-20 14:57:10 @HenningStrandin @skdh I'm not usually the one asserting that the folks disagreeing with me can't reasonably disagree. It's usefully quite the reverse. I get accused of committing crimes against humanity for having my opinion. 2021-08-20 14:43:54 @HenningStrandin @skdh The hardest group is people who didn't do enough math to see the weird stuff but also don't work with real data in any substantial way and therefore don't have a lot of direct experience of mathematics coming up short. 2021-08-20 14:40:34 @HenningStrandin @skdh Re: Most General Abstraction. I just mean that mathematicians often get it because "+" in arithmetic isn't their canonical abstraction. I can usually convince people who work with data too because they already believe the abstraction should fit the data not the other way around. 2021-08-20 14:37:48 @HenningStrandin @skdh Fair enough. I'm figuring it out as I go so the feedback is appreciated. I definitely don't think as a non-philosopher that I could ever have it all figured out. 2021-08-20 14:31:00 Let x be a positive real number. Please. I'm begging you. 2021-08-20 13:40:57 @HenningStrandin @skdh When we say "2+2=4", I think we're at least partially asserting that "+" is the right canonical abstraction and that's what's being pushed back on. It can be attacked from both a pure and applied math direction because in both cases it's not the most general definition. 2021-08-20 13:33:15 @HenningStrandin @skdh For many, "+" as defined in arithmetic is considered to be *the* canonical abstraction of the aggregation of physical objects. I think I'm partly arguing that perhaps there is no truly canonical abstraction of aggregation. 2021-08-20 12:24:12 @dt_della_mancha @wtgowers "most likely...they will agree on one that accepts existing proofs as proofs" Interesting. Why is that likely? 2021-08-20 12:14:03 @AshAgender @wtgowers I like that you invoked an image of Euler and Gauss hearing what you had to say and then being enthusiastically convinced as a way of supporting your point. Highlights for me how social this all is. 2021-08-20 11:43:15 @wtgowers I agree with most of this. I’m a bit of a skeptic about how objective we can ever be but I do think it’s worth trying. Objectivity is illusive. Even the definition of a “proof” is debatable and has changed over time. Future mathematicians might not consider what we do proofs. 2021-08-20 10:55:45 @Erin_R_Hoffman @sehurlburt Well I’m honored you would recommend my account! 2021-08-20 05:20:56 @Erin_R_Hoffman @sehurlburt Is quote tweeting Nate bad? He's a mutual.I was trying to reduce the very-online-ness of the discussion since it was an important debate (the role of booster shots in US pandemic response). 2021-08-19 23:09:00 My hope for the world as a statistician is that everybody learns the minimum amount of statistics necessary to not have it bite them in the ass when they least expect it. Speaking from experience, it bites *really* hard. 2021-08-19 20:35:00 @yudapearl Don't take the textbooks as the whole story of statistics. The benefit of doing a statistics PhD is we also learn stuff from our advisors that isn't in the textbooks. 2021-08-19 18:49:40 @reidatcheson @NateSilver538 @EpiEllie It’s possible sure. But it’s worth pointing out that there are things we can do to minimize that probability. Species experiencing environmental stress go extinct all the time. They don’t have unlimited ability to adapt. 2021-08-19 18:30:53 @NateSilver538 I agree with you that there’s probably no trade-off right now. I just wanted to help clarify @EpiEllie’s position. I’m guessing you’re thinking the demand is so low among the unvaccinated that allowing boosters isn’t denying the unvaccinated a chance to get a shot if they want. 2021-08-19 18:26:14 @NateSilver538 Please forgive the word choice. I just mean that in a purely abstract, mathematical way, we as a society, are misallocating vaccines if we want to minimized the probability that this thing doesn’t become endemic. 2021-08-19 18:17:56 @NateSilver538 I mean I asked her so I’m pretty sure it is. Right @EpiEllie? Not vaccinating everybody and instead diverting vaccines to boosters is part of what’s increasing the probability it will be endemic. So there’s a chicken and egg thing there. 2021-08-19 18:10:50 Here’s my tweet-length version of the argument with more nautically-themed analogizing. https://t.co/cdzNU7bfDl 2021-08-19 18:08:26 Hey @NateSilver538, I think she’s saying that the longer we take to bring things to a swift conclusion while implying through our actions that it’s almost over, the worse it is. If you keep treading water and don’t ever get out of the water, eventually you get tired and drown. https://t.co/PFT5FW8yHR 2021-08-19 16:36:17 my uni has mandatory yearly sexual harassment training. they give the same quiz before and after. i score 100% first try. does it let me skip the extremely dry 1hr+ training video that stops playing if you change tabs or don't click it every few minutes? no. no it does not. 2021-08-19 16:24:33 I think it’s technically a mistake. A conflation of the teleonomic (acting as if with purpose e.g. natural selection, viruses, markets, corporations) with the teleologic (acting with purpose). As long as one is aware, attributing motives to systems can be a convenient shorthand. https://t.co/chKj8K3xiB 2021-08-19 15:55:31 [I'm kidding!] 2021-08-19 15:55:30 The voice of the people is clear. Data won by a huge margin (34.4% for Data vs 33.7% for Science). Take that Science! https://t.co/qlw598jLjP 2021-08-19 15:43:07 @RiffChick I would recommend starting with this. It's very informative while being a quick read. https://t.co/1et9GMrGdR 2021-08-19 15:42:00 If we all get booster shots and no new people get vaccinated then we haven't changed the vaccination rate. So the best we can do with boosters is basically how we're doing right now, which is not good. Boosters aren't a rescue boat. They're just keeping our heads above water. 2021-08-19 14:51:33 @diet75music Hard to cover in a tweet. I would recommend @yudapearl's book as a start. https://t.co/qBQqkDRVbZ 2021-08-19 14:40:46 Lying with statistics is a public education problem. When people *talk* statistically, we need to *listen* statistically. Folks get away with misleading statistics because collectively we don't know the right questions to ask and we don't hold folks accountable for their answers. 2021-08-19 14:15:08 Are "following the science" and "following the data" the same thing? 2021-08-19 01:48:44 @LKaboolian I subscribe to justified true belief theory (possibly out of naivety about the alternatives). So I “know” something if: 1. It’s true 2. I believe it to be true 3. I’m justified in my belief That justification could be science or something else like logic or reliable testimony. 2021-08-19 00:26:40 Controversial opinions : 1. Not all knowledge is scientific knowledge 2. Not all knowledge creation is due to science 3. Not all data is collected scientifically 4. Non-scientifically collected data can be used to create knowledge (which is often itself non-scientific) 2021-08-19 00:05:32 @ipnosimmia @dropoutnation @jbenmenachem So in your view *every* abstract conception of the world is scientific just a matter of *how* scientific? I don’t understand the claim that defining more views as better than less views is science. According to me, “more ice cream is always better than less”, is that science too? 2021-08-18 21:41:16 This question is a lot more controversial than I was expecting it to be. https://t.co/qlw598jLjP 2021-08-18 21:34:04 @massimosandal @jbenmenachem Thanks. I think I see where you’re coming from. I don’t agree but I understand. Have a good rest of day. 2021-08-18 21:30:51 @rasmansa Dude! Don’t feel bad! That’s cool! First of all you can see the length of the plateaus are getting smaller. Second the plateaus are normal. AI have them too. For AI, it happens when it’s searching the optimization landscape for the right gradient to get to the next local mimimum. 2021-08-18 21:23:07 @massimosandal @jbenmenachem It’s not peer-reviewed nor is it intended to be. The data isn’t collected under careful scientific conditions. I’m not interpreting it using relevant scientific theories just my personal assumptions about how the world works. I’m not attempting to create generalizable knowledge. 2021-08-18 21:19:38 @rasmansa Are the flat parts times when you took break or are they plateaus in your learning rate? 2021-08-18 21:16:43 @massimosandal @jbenmenachem https://t.co/tvCUriAWzg 2021-08-18 21:16:10 @IsabellaGhement https://t.co/tvCUriAWzg 2021-08-18 21:11:50 @dropoutnation @jbenmenachem People use data outside of a scientific context all the time. For instance, I might use data to figure out which images do best on my insta account. I *could* bring in theories from sociology or psychology to interpret that data but I also may not. 2021-08-18 21:01:01 @massimosandal @jbenmenachem …so there’s an interpretation of the question that makes sense. 2021-08-18 20:58:10 @JoeElefante78 A shoe company doesn’t necessarily need science in order to use data to sell more shoes. Note that this poll itself is non-scientific but still counts as data. 2021-08-18 20:54:58 @Z0ltanNagy Not all data analysis is science. Lots of non-scientists use data to draw conclusions as well. If a company used data to sell shoes, that’s not necessarily science i.e. not necessarily systematic, generalizable knowledge produced via the scientific method. 2021-08-18 20:51:51 @DarrenRStarr 1. You can use your common sense intuitions about how the world works. It doesn’t have to be a scientific interpretation. 2. Not all data is collected in a scientific way (peer-reviewed, under strict experimental conditions, etc) so a scientist may chose not to consider it. 2021-08-18 20:46:45 @massimosandal @jbenmenachem Not all frameworks or theories are scientific. 2021-08-18 17:45:47 @billymcpherson Agreed. 2021-08-18 17:43:36 @jbenmenachem @massimosandal Yes *but* not all theories are scientific. 2021-08-18 16:14:18 RT @kareem_carr: Let me clarify a bit. Data analysis doesn't have to be scientific in the sense of following the scientific method. For ins… 2021-08-18 16:14:11 Following the science doesn't always mean using all the available data either. Not all data rises to the level of being scientific. In those cases, it makes sense to exclude that data and only use findings that have been vetted by controlled experiments, peer-review, etc. 2021-08-18 16:14:10 Let me clarify a bit. Data analysis doesn't have to be scientific in the sense of following the scientific method. For instance, this poll is data collection but it's certainly not scientific! 2021-08-18 15:43:42 When solving real world problems, which is more important? A. Following the data OR B. Following the science 2021-08-17 22:39:00 The problem with p-values is people misunderstand and misuse them. This makes it a user experience problem not a math problem. In my opinion, this is why statisticians have been failing to solve this issue for decades. Statisticians like me aren't known for our people skills. 2021-08-17 17:00:50 I think the sense of an unexpected interaction is still there though. 2021-08-17 16:57:12 I think “wet” is usually attached to a non-obvious negative outcome with a liquid as in “Careful, it’s wet!”. You want to make the other person aware that the liquid is an issue. Water isn’t “wet” because it’s obvious that you will get water on yourself if you interact with it. https://t.co/aOgQ1HLsfq 2021-08-17 15:34:32 When it comes down to it, what is "probability" really? Is it a measure of how frequently something might happen or something is true OR is it a measure of how certain we should be that something might happen or that something is true? 2021-08-17 15:21:18 @JSEllenberg @wtgowers @michael_nielsen I think this is me! Every time I start getting serious about chess, I suddenly feel the urge to do math/stats/coding instead. I've never been able to articulate why but I think maybe you nailed it. Perhaps that's why I, like you, enjoy writing. 2021-08-17 15:06:31 @wtgowers @michael_nielsen All this is to say, I think there are some parallels between mathematicians and comedians for sure! (My source is I listen to few comedy-related podcasts. ) 2021-08-17 15:04:06 @wtgowers @michael_nielsen Once have something solid, they will try the joke out often for free at small clubs. They carefully observe when people laugh and they use this information to refine the jokes. Once they deeply understand how an audience reacts to a joke, it's ready for Netflix etc. 2021-08-17 14:59:52 @wtgowers @michael_nielsen Once a comedian has an idea, they will think on it more rigorously and try to make a joke out of it. This usually involves being alone and thinking very hard about all the angles for humor, playing with the wording, the order in which you give information, etc. 2021-08-17 14:57:53 @wtgowers @michael_nielsen Similar to the way mathematicians come up with stuff that they think might be true and refine them, comedians come up with stuff that they think might be funny and refine those. I think both groups are often playing around with ideas wherever they happen to be. 2021-08-17 13:20:16 @scamander14 2021-08-17 13:18:38 RT @scamander14: I SAY THIS ALL THE TIME IN MY LAB. They hate when I'm nitpicky about statistics but it has to be said! Also, if you work w… 2021-08-17 12:57:18 RT @kareem_carr: Can you tell why this definition is “wrong”? Read this thread to find out more. https://t.co/fVdK9kQ0WD 2021-08-17 02:03:32 @Jowanza So sorry for your loss. 2021-08-17 01:12:07 @reidatcheson I think younger you was right! That’s how I think about it. I would say “contradicts your data given your assumptions about the data generating process”. 2021-08-17 00:56:27 RT @kilojoule_: This is so clear and helpful. Definitely worth the quick read 2021-08-17 00:56:12 RT @jdietz224: Good thread! I learned something! :D 2021-08-17 00:14:24 If you enjoyed the thread, please like and retweet so others can enjoy it as well. I talk about this stuff all the time so give me a follow for more of the same. 2021-08-17 00:14:23 I just worry that the word “wrong” makes it seem like statisticians are just being pedantic or interpreting things uncharitably because, to the casual observer, the incorrect definition doesn’t come off as vastly inconsistent with the correct definition. 2021-08-17 00:14:22 It’s always felt unfair to me to say this variety of p-value definition is “wrong”. I would say it was “too vague” or “incomplete”. In case you’re wondering, a p-value is the probability of a result as or more extreme than your result assuming a particular hypothesis is true. https://t.co/5AhqbFOQxu 2021-08-17 00:14:21 Can you tell why this definition is “wrong”? Read this thread to find out more. https://t.co/fVdK9kQ0WD 2021-08-16 14:47:40 me, applying for jobs https://t.co/T8jgGPGcC8 2021-08-16 13:20:01 @hk_nien Perhaps I didn’t express myself well. My meaning is that the sum of squared distances is what we want to minimize in PCA and Linear Regression. That’s why I said “both cases”. I’m not saying anything about what the string is doing. 2021-08-16 05:23:18 Here’s the original creator of the video doing some other regressions! https://t.co/75o7YXBAGq 2021-08-15 22:48:54 @arthur_affect lol. today i learned the subway stop name wasn’t just some random word. 2021-08-15 22:01:23 If you’re thinking we’re actually minimizing the sum of squares distance in both cases, that’s true. 2021-08-15 21:36:22 I really like the creativity of this! Unfortunately, it’s doing PCA not linear regression. In PCA, the distances are perpendicular to the line. In regression, we’re actually minimizing the vertical distances to the line. https://t.co/egbImNwzpx 2021-08-15 17:04:37 If this was academia it would be: $9: willing to learn $9: some experience, efficient $9: reliable, multitasker $9: works like 2 people $9: supervisor material $9: care like you own the place $9 (and a promise not to fire you): works more than an owner would + ALL of the above https://t.co/7Fr4B5e7SM 2021-08-15 15:24:00 Belief in reason is an enlightenment value but so is belief in equality and fraternity, which is a commitment to love and solidarity with all other human beings. Supporting diversity and inclusion *is* supporting enlightenment values. 2021-08-15 14:48:39 As far as I can tell, Americans never allow the government to do anything unless somebody's making money from it. Because Socialism! But this means there's always a financial motive for people to keep stuff around even when it doesn’t work or is actually harmful. 2021-08-15 14:16:29 Caution All Mathematicians. The Teaching of the Chinese Remainder Theorem is Strictly Prohibited. WE ARE WATCHING. https://t.co/wMdu0se51x 2021-08-15 00:13:36 I see my role in the culture war as being the arms dealer you can trust. I want my scientific ideas to be high quality and I want both sides to use them. 2021-08-14 22:31:43 RT @kareem_carr: THINK LIKE A DATA SCIENTIST: Probability is hard because counting is hard. A thread. 2021-08-14 18:19:46 @MounirBaroudi18 I’m not saying that there are no objective truths. I’m saying discussing objective truth is scary to some people because they’re worried that questioning the fundamentals might lead some of us to that conclusion. 2021-08-14 17:33:25 Discussing the nature of mathematical and scientific truth is terrifying for some. They are afraid that no objectively right answers also means no objectively superior cultures. I’ll give you one guess which culture they think is objectively superior. 2021-08-14 17:21:57 @bradneuberg Glad to hear! Welcome! 2021-08-14 17:21:16 @jen_galvinized @stevenstrogatz Sounds interesting. Will check it out! 2021-08-14 16:34:20 Either the trolls are getting weaker or I’m becoming too powerful. They tried hard to ratio this one but didn’t even come close. I’m really proud that the overwhelming majority of my followers just ignored the hate or engaged respectfully. Good job everybody! https://t.co/VAU2pgeMI3 2021-08-14 16:17:28 I find it surprising when people say stuff like this to me. If anything, my thoughts on mathematics are almost excessively empirical. I would trust my bridges more because you can be sure I would never assume all the theory works in practice without checking first. https://t.co/M3XaBTIv4a 2021-08-14 15:59:06 RT @beaty_boop: This thread has me thinking of the word "declension," wherein the pure sense of a word is made applicable, ie, usable 2021-08-14 14:27:09 RT @scamander14: A MASTERPIECE thread https://t.co/WL4oAVUqQL 2021-08-14 14:24:11 RT @klendool: Had too read a couple of times, because my initial reaction was "well this seems like bullshit" but no this is a good thread… 2021-08-14 13:46:06 @christen_holder @pafnutyz @StuartJRitchie @victor_delbene Can you say a little more about what you mean when you say IQ tests aren’t a measure of IQ? Seems like an important caveat but I don’t understand. 2021-08-14 13:08:42 @chris_nemarich I got into data science via math too! 2021-08-14 13:06:48 @yudapearl Thanks! I’ll check it out! 2021-08-14 04:51:38 RT @kareem_carr: THINK LIKE A DATA SCIENTIST: Probability is hard because counting is hard. A thread. 2021-08-14 03:26:54 RT @JohnLynchID: I can’t explain entirely why but I love this. Humans can be wonderful. 2021-08-14 02:43:54 RT @tightheadyt: Good thread. Read the replies for a stunning amount of missing the point. https://t.co/xN8E5YXmml 2021-08-14 02:31:31 P.P.S. The thread was retweeted by some large troll accounts. It's mostly bad faith feedback by people that were looking to lash out before they even saw the thread. It's best to ignore it. https://t.co/yIsNCRA3bY 2021-08-14 00:15:53 RT @wayneborean: Beautiful thread! 2021-08-14 00:15:18 RT @kareem_carr: THINK LIKE A DATA SCIENTIST: Probability is hard because counting is hard. A thread. 2021-08-13 18:32:17 RT @robertsd: Epic thread 2021-08-13 18:14:10 RT @naamali: One of the most challenging aspects of becoming enculturated into the learning sciences was learning to love the messiness of… 2021-08-13 18:13:39 RT @MeganTStevenson: This is a great thread. 2021-08-13 16:58:57 @dropmonad @pabnau To be clear, I do think "2+2=4" is true but it's in a really restricted sense and I'm not sure most people are aware of how drastically restricted that sense is. 2021-08-13 16:55:04 P.S. My apologies for the anti-intellectual tone of some of the responses. Don't worry. I'm used to it. 2021-08-13 15:54:34 This really important lesson transfers to probability because probability comes from counting how often stuff happens. One of the reasons people don't understand probability is they don't understand how incredibly sensitive both counting and probability are to their definitions. 2021-08-13 15:54:33 One of the reasons I got obsessed with thinking about things like this is I'm a data analyst. A big part of analyzing data is just counting stuff. If you can't answer basic questions like how many things you have, it's really hard to figure out the probabilities of things. 2021-08-13 15:54:32 For them, "2+2=4" is just statement about rules in an imaginary world. It doesn't matter to them that it doesn't apply to some stuff in our world. "2+2=4" is always true because it lives in a perfect realm of abstract forms where it is untarnished by our fallen world. 2021-08-13 15:54:31 When you learn "2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples" in grade school, they don't bring up these kinds of problems. A pair of apples can't be, for instance, a projection into our universe of a single apple that exists in a higher dimensional space. I know I sound crazy right now but... https://t.co/hBkDX6Fk3n 2021-08-13 15:54:30 So perhaps with the right rules about how to set things up, we can always make them line up. I notice we humans do that a lot with arithmetic. We make excuses for it. If things don't add up in the way we were expecting, we fiddle around with our definitions until it works out. 2021-08-13 15:54:29 You might argue that "2 cups of clear fluid plus 2 cups of clear fluid is always four cups of clear fluid" is false but "2 cups of water plus 2 cups of water is always 4 cups of water" isn't. This might actually be the case but I would argue that we don't know even this. 2021-08-13 15:54:28 To me, "2+2=4" means that "2 things + 2 things will always be 4 things no matter what the things are". Turns out this is not technically true. You can create all kinds of mathematical systems and physical situations where 2 things + 2 things is not 4 things. 2021-08-13 15:54:27 THINK LIKE A DATA SCIENTIST: Probability is hard because counting is hard. A thread. 2021-08-12 18:43:32 @wtgowers You should like this one then. There’s no question-answer structure. https://t.co/I8xLUAYveQ 2021-08-12 18:38:33 @HenningStrandin So it’s not that I’m saying you are wrong. I’m saying you’re solving a different problem. One that none of us are trying to solve which is preserving the “truth” of math by divorcing it from physical relevance. 2021-08-12 18:34:42 @HenningStrandin To be clear, I disagree because I use math in applications (as does Sabine). The claim that math is “true” as long as we just think of it as a formal system that doesn’t necessarily correspond to the physical world is not very satisfying or meaningful answer for folks like us. 2021-08-12 18:26:09 @HenningStrandin I think you’re basically saying it’s a truth about an abstract world which might reflect situations we find ourselves in or it might not. I agree. It’s true in the sense of “Unicorns have horns.” Why? Because we define it that way. Although obviously unicorns don’t exist. 2021-08-12 18:23:30 @HenningStrandin Well I think you’re wrong for the previously mentioned reasons. It’s not a simple use/mention issue and it’s not “easily” cleared up. 2021-08-12 17:32:03 @HenningStrandin By “as long as + means what it usually means”, you seem to mean as long as “2+2=4 is true in this context”. It’s a bit tautological. You have to check the system to find out. If you have to check, then it must be the case that 2+2=4 can sometimes be false. 2021-08-12 17:18:06 @HenningStrandin “Is 2 blorbs + 2 blorbs = 4 blorbs?” The answer seems to be, “What’s a blorb?” So the statement “2+2=4” does not seem very universal at all and shouldn’t be stated to be “true” without at least providing a list of caveats about what kinds of phenomena are “add-able”. 2021-08-12 17:08:04 @HenningStrandin 1. The point of those examples is basically to teach people that there are things that add in a weird way. 2. If you have to tell me what the thing is that you’re adding then that suggests the statement “2+2=4” is false. 2021-08-12 16:58:07 @HenningStrandin Without saying 2+2 of what, 4 of what, it’s actually unclear whether it’s either true or false. You could retreat to talking about the purely abstract system but I would argue most people don’t think of the “truth” of arithmetic as unrelated to physical reality. 2021-08-12 16:52:32 @HenningStrandin When regular people say “2+2=4” is true, they typically mean it as a statement about the physical universe. They are saying it should logically apply in all physical situations. That’s false. I think the flaw here is “2+2=4” in the sense people mean it is vague. 2021-08-12 16:01:39 My race seems to suggest to people that this is a race thing somehow. It's not. Check out the link for a PhD who's not black and who also agrees that 2+2 is not always 4. As Dr. Hossenfelder puts it, "It's not woke. It's math." https://t.co/HwyzD2y2bo 2021-08-12 16:01:38 Just found this. Not sure if @michaelshermer is confusing @nhannahjones with me or somebody else because I never said most of that stuff either. What I will say is I learned from my (mostly white) grad school professors how to construct mathematical systems where 2+2 isn't 4. https://t.co/UVZUDTSdYB 2021-08-12 15:18:16 @jtleek @COPSSNews Congrats! 2021-08-12 15:08:40 My Fall plans The Delta Variant https://t.co/Ukmz66wYEv 2021-08-12 13:54:22 RT @kareem_carr: doctors don’t want you to know this one simple trick! https://t.co/YLxOXRa1nu 2021-08-12 13:07:43 @wtgowers Fair. (My tweet wasn’t a subtweet of the climate change thing by the way. I was basically thinking “Don’t worry. Be happy.”) 2021-08-12 01:33:27 I do this weird thing where if something is not that likely to happen then I just don't worry about it as much. I know. I know. It's super weird. 2021-08-11 23:10:23 doctors don’t want you to know this one simple trick! https://t.co/YLxOXRa1nu 2021-08-11 22:23:58 Congrats to @jtleek on winning the “Nobel Prize of Statistics”! Last time we talked, he was concerned he wasn’t tweeting enough. I’m just really glad to see it didn’t hold him back career-wise. https://t.co/ZgsUvMODv7 2021-08-11 18:09:28 @dccc_phd I am aware. I have spent a lot of time in the transcription start site, enhancers, transcription factor binding site, pseudogene, etc, etc trenches. It’s just cleaner than race. 2021-08-11 17:52:58 @klts0 I think a family history would basically be another way of trying to use genetic information. It’s just as much a “guess” (an inference about an individual based on the available data) as using race but I agree family history is potentially better information. 2021-08-11 16:47:02 @klts0 I mean “urgent” as in “pressing” as in one finds that one must take an action of some kind such as guiding a treatment. Your framing suggests maybe you’re thinking this would play out at the beside. I’m thinking earlier when designing criteria for your treatment decision tree. 2021-08-11 16:40:10 @klts0 @fretmistress Genetic tests are pretty common for guiding cancer treatments or ad part of pregnancy. By urgent, I mean “pressing” not necessarily “immediate”. 2021-08-11 16:34:28 @klts0 I meant the only reason to use it as substitute for genes is when it’s the best we can do. 2021-08-11 16:06:41 @noelplum @CathrynTownsend I think you might be hung up on the fact that the term "pygmy blue whale" contains the word "pygmy" and you seem to think this ought to denote a real biological difference versus just a random name some old explorer with much less information than us chose to call some folks. 2021-08-11 15:42:54 Race is a terrible way to talk about genetics. It takes a relatively clean concept like a "gene" and inserts an extremely messy to measure, controversial and arbitrary construct with no clear biological meaning. 2021-08-11 15:24:23 @noelplum @CathrynTownsend I think @CathrynTownsend is pointing out that you don't know much about these people, and she does, which seems like a fair point. You're spinning out theories in the abstract about how you imagine they might be different and she's proving in her direct experience, they aren't. 2021-08-11 15:18:23 @noelplum @CathrynTownsend Unlike other animals where we take their behaviors as natural and given, our behaviors are actually choices. It makes the "subspecies" concept something engineered rather than simply observed. It's a bit like studying a pocket watch as a type of naturally occurring rock. 2021-08-11 14:25:48 @CogNerd Interesting. Can you say a bit about what you mean by an "obligation"? What, in your opinion, are people obligated to do? 2021-08-11 14:15:55 As a black man, I kind of resent people co-opting language like “do the work” and “it’s not my job to educate you” to mean read their academic papers and cite their work. Unless your work is specifically about equity, it’s kind of gross. 2021-08-11 13:54:41 @CathrynTownsend Also, one needs to keep in mind that to the extent that there are population differences in humans, they are maintained largely by mating choices. We could always decide to marry different people tomorrow. It makes the idea of “subspecies” very philosophical in our species. 2021-08-11 13:49:22 @CathrynTownsend I would argue that human variation also doesn’t follow subspecies-like patterns meaning it’s not very clumpy. It tends to follow local conditions like the geography and blend from one population into the other as conditions change. 2021-08-10 23:43:25 @Alan_Taylor_314 Pushing the climate out of equilibrium and causing runaway warming like with venus. 2021-08-10 17:27:00 @JuliaRaifman Looks really interesting! Thanks for sharing. I would be interested to hear how this came about politically, how the population is taking it, how data-driven it is (active collection or passive data scraping from hospital data) and how well it works to control covid rates. 2021-08-10 15:13:32 Thanks for all the interesting answers! Helped me a lot in understanding how people think about this issue. https://t.co/9Nym3tuXSk 2021-08-09 19:05:00 @hughsansom 2021-08-09 17:59:01 @jfeckstein I'm not arguing anything. Just curious what you and others think. If you think billions would die, how do you think we'd get to that number? What would people die of? 2021-08-09 17:37:26 @wtgowers Fear of political instability has been a common theme in the responses. Fascinating (for me). I hadn't expected this seeming geo-engineering problem would turn into a geo-political problem. 2021-08-09 17:32:26 @_julesh_ I'll just point out of the sake of argument that human civilization pre-dates semiconductors. But I think you're saying it would definitely upset the status quo which is a fair point. 2021-08-09 17:27:47 @rocks_lab Yeah. That's the scenario I was thinking of...which I also agree is unlikely. 2021-08-09 17:26:34 @thisiseesha Yes. This is my thinking as well unless somebody in the comments changes my mind. 2021-08-09 17:25:04 @TheOriginalDrZ Civilization exists in Central America. As someone from the developing world myself, I wouldn't equate poverty with lack of civilization. 2021-08-09 17:22:24 @alexandre_ganso In your response you say "everything and everyone else had been gone". What kind of scenario are you thinking will cause that? 2021-08-09 17:18:11 @heellllllln Fair point. I get that it will kill people but hard (for me) to see how it would kill more people than say cancer or diabetes for instance. Again. Not saying we shouldn't care. 2021-08-09 17:15:59 @donnellymjd I'm definitely open to an articulation of either scenario (extinction or the end of civilization). Not trying to quiz anybody or ask for citations. Genuinely curious about what people are thinking. 2021-08-09 17:07:13 (Technically, I do have one scenario in mind, which as far as I know is unlikely, but I don't want to bias the answers by saying it.) 2021-08-09 17:07:12 I agree climate change is extremely bad but I can't see how it could end human civilization. For folks that think climate change is extinction level bad, can you say a bit about the specific doomsday scenarios that you're picturing? 2021-08-08 16:42:24 I’m really liking what’s going on here https://t.co/WPJWgSXmPb 2021-08-08 16:33:58 RT @kareem_carr: THINK LIKE A DATA SCIENTIST: Are you frustrated with how organizations like the CDC and the WHO are handling the pandemic… 2021-08-06 16:27:02 Using data to make decisions is tough work. It's not as easy as they make it look on TV. It's not surprising that many of the organizations that use data best are billion dollar companies. 2021-08-06 16:27:01 The optimal set of rules isn't always easy to explain. They often change rapidly. Taken out of context, they can often seem contradictory. They're often customized to the exact situation and therefore ask different things of different people. 2021-08-06 16:27:00 The rules shouldn't be guesses based on prior knowledge about other diseases. They should be based on experiments and observations of covid itself. At this point, you might be wondering if these are reasonable things to ask for. 2021-08-06 16:26:59 The rules shouldn't be inconsistent from region to region. Why mask in Japan but not Florida? The rules shouldn't be radically inconsistent with things you've said in the past. Why weren't cloth masks good enough before but they'd good enough now? 2021-08-06 16:26:58 Customizing our responses is a harder strategy. In this scenario, we actively learn from incoming data and try to make the best decisions. The goal is to minimize costs while avoiding large outbreaks. This is the mathematical equivalent of balancing a knife on its edge. 2021-08-06 16:26:57 Some areas got away with relatively small outbreaks. Others experienced tremendous disruptions to their healthcare system and significant losses of life. 2021-08-06 16:26:56 THINK LIKE A DATA SCIENTIST: Are you frustrated with how organizations like the CDC and the WHO are handling the pandemic? Do you wish they did a better job of following the data? If so, read on... 2021-08-06 15:12:49 @wok_peter We’re happy to praise people in the past for being anti-slavery even though they were wrong by the standards of their time, because by our standards, they were right. Yet when it comes to blaming people for being pro-slavery suddenly it’s “unfair”. Curious. 2021-08-06 14:45:54 @JacobBloom31 American slavery. 2021-08-06 14:40:37 In today’s language, we might say slave owners were human traffickers that ran forced labor camps where they murdered, raped and tortured people, and even sold children. When you put it like that, it’s kinda disturbing that people today still look up to people like that. 2021-08-06 00:00:16 @klts0 Congrats! 2021-08-05 14:21:00 What's a good book for learning git? I learned it well enough to get by for work as a data scientist but at this point, I'm suffering a lot from copying and pasting too much from stack overflow and not really understanding what git is actually doing. 2021-08-05 10:25:12 @camjpatrick I am getting the impression that it’s a social science stats thing. 2021-08-04 23:48:24 I really like the colors and the conceptual layout! I'm a little surprised by the prominence of Hedges' g. Is that for parallelism with Bayesian analysis? I genuinely don't know the answer to this. Do a lot of y'all use Hedges' g on a regular basis? https://t.co/GJngujj7lm 2021-08-04 23:26:05 RT @kareem_carr: What are your best tips for planning out your data science projects in a way that keeps them on track to meet your deadlin… 2021-08-04 15:09:12 RT @kareem_carr: What are your best tips for planning out your data science projects in a way that keeps them on track to meet your deadlin… 2021-08-04 14:06:19 What are your best tips for planning out your data science projects in a way that keeps them on track to meet your deadlines, but also allows for an expansion in scope when unexpected discoveries cause a shift in focus? 2021-08-03 23:53:44 Great read. https://t.co/YIXnWkKCJM 2021-08-03 17:01:18 when DMing her a pic just doesn’t feel like enough https://t.co/Hwi8y6w47w 2021-08-02 14:25:39 What is Data Science? One word only. 2021-08-02 04:09:09 @Noahpinion . It tells you in a technical sense when it's safe to interpret your statistical inference as causal. But you can always just intuitively guess or reason from first principles and be right, like with statistical analyses of experimental data. 2021-08-01 22:35:00 streaming keeps the most annoying thing about cable tv which was bundling content you would never watch in a million years with content you can't live without, but now with the extra frustration of multiple bills and user interfaces, and it costs more because of course it does. 2021-08-01 16:37:00 Dale Carnegie said "a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still". Academics are often guilty of non-consensually trying to change people's minds and I've been wondering what it might like for experts to seek enthusiastic consent before trying to educate others. 2021-08-01 15:38:00 Minimizing other people's feelings and being logical aren't the same thing. If you believe a conclusion only when it follows from the stated premises then you're logical. If you enjoy saying stuff like "Facts don't care about your feelings" to people then you're an asshole. 2021-08-01 14:35:00 One the most common cognitive biases I see in politics is assuming all of your rivals are working together and that defeating you is their number one priority. Most people don’t think about you most of the time. Including your enemies. 2021-08-01 13:26:14 @causalinf every time i see an ad for it i think to myself "oh that's the show that scott really likes". lol. 2021-07-31 23:55:52 Even before the vaccine was widely available, we talked about how: 1. resistant variants might still emerge 2. some vaccinated people might still get sick 3. vaccinated people might still end up being able to spread covid So it’s confusing to me that people are confused. 2021-07-31 22:29:52 At this stage of the pandemic, I just wish everybody luck whatever they believe. I don’t think anybody is open to changing their mind at this point. 2021-07-31 14:57:09 me trying to code while other people watch me type https://t.co/oDeWYjLf4W 2021-07-31 14:17:08 @deaneckles @PHuenermund @analisereal @yudapearl I wouldn’t go that far no. 2021-07-31 05:11:00 @emkibbs The problem I have with such claims is the people making them often free themselves of explaining exactly *how* genes might be doing these things. The vagueness combined with the modifier *partial* makes such claims unfalsifiable. 2021-07-31 01:30:45 @arthur_affect Yup. I just realized I’m actually using the biological definition. The biostatistical/statistical definition is as you say. 2021-07-31 01:21:40 @arthur_affect Fair. I was using the colloquial meaning of heritable but yes technically surnames are heritable. 2021-07-31 01:15:06 i see folks saying stuff like everything is a little bit heritable. that’s crazy talk. heritability comes from probabilities and probabilities arise out of causation. if genes can’t cause it then it’s not heritable and genes can’t cause everything in the universe. that’s insane. 2021-07-31 00:35:54 @omaclaren I think people forget that lots of statisticians work in longterm partnerships and there’s an iterative process of designing experiments, doing analyses and then designing new schemes for data collection. The whole point is often causal identification. 2021-07-31 00:21:29 @guilhermejd1 @PHuenermund @analisereal @gelbach Lol. Maybe it seemed like I was trivializing causal inference. I think it’s crucial work that statisticians absolutely need to learn. It just seemed to me that it was statistical inference with some additional rules rather than being a complete departure from the old way. 2021-07-31 00:08:35 @guilhermejd1 @PHuenermund @analisereal @gelbach I didn’t say it was the best way to think about it. I just said it looks like a more generalized form of statistical inference to me. 2021-07-31 00:04:22 @analisereal I’ll check it out. Thanks. 2021-07-30 23:57:14 @PHuenermund @guilhermejd1 @analisereal @gelbach @yudapearl 2021-07-30 23:46:49 @guilhermejd1 @PHuenermund @analisereal @gelbach I see. Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain your reasoning. I appreciate it. 2021-07-30 23:44:41 this was right in the sweet spot. decent number of folks saying it’s obvious, a decent number of people having a cow, and the vast majority of my followers not knowing what the hell I’m talking about. *chef’s kiss* https://t.co/Je8bZGwiRZ 2021-07-30 23:40:40 @guilhermejd1 @PHuenermund @analisereal @gelbach I’m not saying they’re identical distributions. I’m asking if they aren’t both just regular probability distributions. Couldn’t we dispense with the special notation do(X=x) and define some random variable W with P(Y|W=w)=P(Y|do(X=x))? 2021-07-30 23:34:28 @gelbach @guilhermejd1 @PHuenermund @analisereal Yeah. I did see that part. That’s why I phrased my question as an equivalence between two distributions. 2021-07-30 23:22:09 @guilhermejd1 @PHuenermund @analisereal @gelbach Sure. Mathematically. Is P(Y|X) a different mathematical object from P(Y|do(X))? I get the sense they’re not. Seems like do(X=x) is maybe specifying a mapping but setting X=x also does that. Am I completely off that do(X) could be treated as a random variable here? 2021-07-30 23:03:13 @guilhermejd1 @PHuenermund @analisereal @gelbach How is this different (mathematically) from the type of mapping that might occur if I set X=x? (I get that in an applied sense it would be different.) 2021-07-30 22:50:50 @guilhermejd1 @PHuenermund @analisereal @gelbach What kind of object is an intervention? 2021-07-30 22:49:42 @PHuenermund @guilhermejd1 @analisereal @gelbach If you did, I didn’t see it. If I didn’t get it then perhaps others following along didn’t get it either. I can’t force you to of course. But seems odd to come in presumably to clarify and then tap out when asked to explain what you mean. 2021-07-30 22:37:31 @PHuenermund @guilhermejd1 @analisereal @gelbach It’s a free country my friend. Is there a reason that you can’t say what kind of mathematical object it is? 2021-07-30 22:28:29 @guilhermejd1 @PHuenermund @analisereal @gelbach I think your first sentence is more just stating the intended application of the idea. I'm more interested in the mathematical structure. Note that P(V|X=x) also works the same way where X is a random variable. So to the original question, do(X) is a random variable no? 2021-07-30 22:18:05 @PHuenermund @analisereal @gelbach What kind of mathematical object is do(X)? I thought it was a random variable. 2021-07-30 22:02:27 @deaneckles @PHuenermund @analisereal @yudapearl Leaving aside the causal aspect for a second. Are you arguing that traditional statistics wouldn't include tasks like deducing the bounds on effect sizes? 2021-07-30 21:54:03 some folks think covid is so bad that it must have been a lab leak but now we have the delta variant which is worse and obviously kinda just evolved on its own. sorta seems like maybe really bad viruses just happen sometimes. no conspiracy needed. 2021-07-30 21:45:16 @yudapearl @RevDocGabriel Us young ones do, but only on pay day. 2021-07-30 21:43:26 @PHuenermund @analisereal That's not necessarily a refutation of my original point. Bayesian and Frequentist inference are different as well. If it's an inference problem over incomplete data that's conceptualized as arising from probability distributions that seems a lot like statistical inference to me. 2021-07-30 20:22:18 @statwonk It’s a confusing term yes. Much of science (and even our daily lives) is about inferring causes. 2021-07-30 20:11:34 @analisereal So I can define my question in a way that says I have the whole population or in a way that says I could never have the whole population. I don’t see any fundamental difference between causal inference and statistical inference on this issue. 2021-07-30 20:07:59 @analisereal Imagine, I want to know the average human height. I could just take the average height of all humans on Earth and stop at that. But then I’m missing all the humans that could possibly exist that I can’t ever directly observe because they don’t exist. 2021-07-30 20:01:23 @analisereal I think you’re saying that if you’re able to observe all the information then you don’t need to infer anything. Wouldn’t the equivalent situation for causal inference be having complete information on the counterfactuals? In that case, you wouldn’t need to infer anything either. 2021-07-30 17:14:23 @NoahHaber @boazhsan https://t.co/ueMIAeFzjF 2021-07-30 17:08:59 @NoahHaber @boazhsan Noah is right of course. I was just feeling too lazy to get into it. https://t.co/gJKi95QAwp 2021-07-30 16:49:22 "Nature always minimizes action" — physicists trying to explain their love lives https://t.co/pLCRGRJFPu 2021-07-30 16:20:16 @RPastorok I think you’re using “causal inference” in much more general sense than me. I mean the art of quantitatively determining causes. The general business of figuring out what causes what usually falls under doing science or philosophy or what it means to be highly intelligent. 2021-07-30 16:09:53 @johnabachman Re: epistemological difference. I would argue that most people using statistics for practical purposes are typically making causal assumptions and coming to causal conclusions. They may be wrong but they’re still doing that. 2021-07-30 16:03:53 @boazhsan All statistical inference has implicit causal assumptions. That’s something I learned from the causal inference literature. Statisticians were doing causal inference all along. With the insights from causal inference research, now we can do it better! 2021-07-30 15:43:18 @boazhsan I am aware my esteemed mutual Judea would disagree with me. All types of statistical inference have a framework of philosophical assumptions which one must adhere to in order to make a logically valid inference. It’s in this sense that I argue causal inference is no different. 2021-07-30 15:23:37 Controversial opinion: Causal inference is just another kind of statistical inference. 2021-07-30 14:11:48 Just because this man talks about means and standard deviations all the time, does not make him an expert in statistics. The only thing he’s an expert in is racism. https://t.co/tPDotVhhY4 2021-07-30 01:44:14 peer-reviewed publications https://t.co/ADYT7IGHme 2021-07-29 23:02:00 "Size doesn't matter!" ⁠— me, right after i find out my effect is statistically significant 2021-07-29 15:38:45 What's a data analysis tool, technique, book or article that you really like? Share your best recommendations with my followers! (To keep things from getting spammy, it shouldn't be something made by you or the people you work for.) 2021-07-29 14:32:20 The 1st time you learn statistics, you don't understand it at all. The 2nd time, you think you understand it except for one or two points. The 3rd time, you know you don't understand it but by that time you’re used to it and it doesn't bother you anymore. 2021-07-28 22:18:06 me debugging my code https://t.co/i9ijIxHUwr 2021-07-28 21:43:32 p-values https://t.co/ADYT7IGHme 2021-07-28 16:36:12 anytime somebody in their 50s talks about doing stuff in their 20s, in my head I'm picturing the 70s. but supposedly they mean the 90s which is ridiculous. 2021-07-28 14:44:17 A lot of folks seem to think masks could only possibly work through physically stopping virus particles. I can tell people like that aren’t used to working with human data. Masks could just as easily work by discouraging people from socializing. 2021-07-28 13:35:37 “covid is spreading!” me: *masks up* “you’re vaccinated now!” me: *still wearing mask* “it’s safe. why are you wearing that?” me: *still wearing mask* “oh no. there’s a delta variant” me: *still wearing mask* “shit. we need to mask up again” me: *still wearing mask* 2021-07-28 00:51:16 Engineering is to science as prediction is to statistical inference. 2021-07-27 22:38:10 My master plan: 1. Get hired at Microsoft 2. Fix the bug where Excel thinks everything is a date 3. Quit https://t.co/7HWuaGverg 2021-07-27 19:01:32 @ylecun Thanks! I’ll check it out. 2021-07-27 16:43:10 When someone looks at two CVs and sees identical accomplishments yet continues to assume the black candidate must be worse just because they’re black, that’s anti-blackness. It doesn’t matter how much math you use to justify it, it’s just racism. https://t.co/dI9UHq1wyP 2021-07-27 14:29:03 Fun fact. When Twain said this, "statistics" as we know it hadn't been invented yet. He meant that you shouldn't trust claims like "Five out of six dentists approve of Orbit gum!". As a statistician, I agree with him. You shouldn't trust stuff like that. https://t.co/FimiTRmZqF 2021-07-26 17:32:52 @BHedtGauthier Sorry to hear about Ollie. My thoughts are with you and your family. 2021-07-26 16:56:50 plenty of folks seem to think bayes' theorem is uniquely bayesian. is it??? 2021-07-26 15:48:09 the first time you work with real data https://t.co/QjoonHNglV 2021-07-26 15:09:45 Do you know anything about statistics and probability? If so, did your knowledge help you better understand information about the corona virus? If not, do you think knowing more statistics and probability would have helped? 2021-07-26 13:17:20 @yudapearl The consensus seems to be that folks enjoy that it is a comprehensive framework where questions can be asked and answered in a way that takes less thinking and is more elegant than Frequentism. 2021-07-25 16:19:01 i'm just a grad student. i'm not on top of any area of my life whatsoever. oh the imposter syndrome. 2021-07-22 18:56:14 @larleywilson Great job! Looks like you have a little future mathematician! 2021-07-22 18:54:53 @KevinZollman @ElliotLip In statistics, we often have to estimate f(x) from a sample of the data and that’s noisy. Also, in evolution, natural selection itself optimizes on a fitness function that is stochastic (whatever organisms are in the population) which is only an estimate of the true fitness. 2021-07-22 16:15:51 @LisaDeBruine Good question. I think they intend for you to assume that the third number is incorrect. 2021-07-22 16:12:30 I also like @WryCritic’s answer because it shows what it looks like to figure things out. When mathematicians write stuff up, they try to be as efficient as possible by leaving out all the messiness of the discovery process. 2021-07-22 15:57:53 check out @pietroppeter’s answer for good example how mathematicians write up their arguments once they figure something out. But try it yourself first! You’ll enjoy his answer more that way. 2021-07-22 15:43:36 Solving this puzzle will give you a taste of how mathematicians prove things mathematically. Try it out! https://t.co/HVXQXy8J22 2021-07-22 15:01:07 @JonMinton I remember people were making the argument that the rest of R had caught up in 2016 so I'm guessing it might be even more true now. 2021-07-22 14:41:02 Hey Bayesian fans! It's your time to shine. What was the experience that got you really excited about Bayesian methods and what do you *personally* enjoy the most about Bayes? 2021-07-22 14:35:13 @JonMinton I'm out of the loop so don't hold me to this but I remember that there was someone in the role of lead developer for a long time but he left, and then they had somebody replace him who left pretty soon afterward. This all happened just before I started grad school in 2016. 2021-07-22 14:06:29 This is a cool question! I have some ideas: 1. Non-convex 2. Local optima that are clustered far from the global optima 3. Stochasticity (as in function call returns f(x) + random error) 4. Lack of continuity in the function itself and its first and second derivatives https://t.co/9oaIgC49YU 2021-07-22 13:27:28 @JonMinton Awesome. I used to work with/for Gary! 2021-07-21 18:12:31 I'm really enjoying the responses so far! I'm going to read every single one of them. https://t.co/JBkXQpiVQH 2021-07-21 16:29:40 @drcchampagne That sounds like an amazing class!! What kinds of topics did they cover? 2021-07-21 14:53:12 @mcmillen Oh no. Numerical analysis can be a really beautiful subject in the right context. Sorry that you had that experience. 2021-07-21 14:46:04 What was the college class that you took that got you the most excited about math? For me, it was Real Analysis. It made Calculus tricks seem less ad hoc and I really appreciated that. 2021-07-21 14:34:36 @Ley_KJ Similar question. Does it mean the room or the physical toilet? https://t.co/AmFGBsdobP 2021-07-21 14:32:54 @kevinwatts I always thought that "crapper" meant the physical toilet itself not the room. Have you heard it used to mean the room? (As a non-American, I don't know anybody who uses this word. I've only heard it on TV. lol.) 2021-07-21 14:26:53 You can thank @EpiEllie for sending me down this rabbit hole. 2021-07-21 14:26:52 WHY does English need so many words for this concept??? bathroom bog comfort station the conveniences dunny the facilities the gents\ladies latrine lav lavatory loo men's/woman's/ladies'/little girl's/boy's room powder room porta potty restroom toilet washroom water closet WC 2021-07-21 04:15:44 @yudapearl This is very sad to hear. I'm so very sorry for your loss, Judea. 2021-07-20 22:55:08 you can get amazing data analysis results anytime you want with this one cool trick: https://t.co/oS8BM2zHRq 2021-07-20 22:15:00 Oh cool. The super rich are all trying to get off planet asap. No worries. Very normal. 2021-07-20 15:54:58 sure going to space is nice but have you ever tried coding in the dark as you sit alone on your couch in your underwear? 2021-07-20 14:25:30 Hoarding resources is an absolutely terrible way of self-actualizing. 2021-07-19 22:24:00 Beware of Data Science Addiction - Do you feel a strong need to analyze data? - Have you ever experienced data analysis withdrawal? - Do loved ones comment on your data analysis habit? - Do you ever use data alone? - Are planning to answer these questions by collecting data? 2021-07-19 15:23:16 @sanjanacurtis i was going to say "i'll delete u!" but looks like my followers already came for you. lol. hope that deleted tweet wasn't anything mess up! 2021-07-19 14:37:40 the paper vs the code https://t.co/YJhvOsp9pD 2021-07-19 13:31:38 @david_colquhoun Happy Birthday! 2021-07-19 13:12:14 @virgil_30 "I...am not owned" — person who just got owned hard 2021-07-19 01:41:32 RT @kareem_carr: hello and welcome https://t.co/jr43Nkhahp 2021-07-18 23:59:58 @MphJulie Sure. Here's my two cents on the philosophical aspects of Bayesianism vs Frequentism: https://t.co/k8c0YYQcCG 2021-07-18 22:35:50 hello and welcome https://t.co/jr43Nkhahp 2021-07-17 15:50:00 "You could have done something about it" and "It's your fault" aren't the same thing. More folks should remember this both when they give advice and when they receive it. 2021-07-17 15:18:27 As far as I can tell, the goal of the "CRT" label is to claim everybody who gets that label is working together for the same nefarious goal. To destroy America presumably. Them denying they're working together is just further evidence that they're working together. 2021-07-16 19:46:31 RT @amma_aboagye: Need to bookmark this and repost under tweets because how he condensed a full semesters course into a thread is Nobel pri… 2021-07-16 19:45:54 RT @kareem_carr: Lets clear up some things about: - race - social constructs - biological constructs - sociological causation - biological… 2021-07-16 05:09:26 RT @kareem_carr: Lets clear up some things about: - race - social constructs - biological constructs - sociological causation - biological… 2021-07-15 17:02:32 RT @faaji_papi: Brilliant thread, I love the conceptual clarity on causation especially for those people that love bringing up stats as 'fa… 2021-07-15 15:49:47 RT @amma_aboagye: Need to bookmark this and repost under tweets because how he condensed a full semesters course into a thread is Nobel pri… 2021-07-15 15:36:21 RT @nagler_rhonda: An absolutely brilliant thread. 2021-07-15 14:33:08 that feeling when everybody says it’s going to end badly but you just keep going https://t.co/QsK6luvuBZ 2021-07-15 14:04:57 RT @kareem_carr: Lets clear up some things about: - race - social constructs - biological constructs - sociological causation - biological… 2021-07-15 13:43:26 RT @WimbleWhyte: Mr. Carr is always worth a thread. https://t.co/z017IjiQr9 2021-07-15 11:20:41 RT @NewLiberalsPod: Great thread by Kareem. 2021-07-15 04:39:36 RT @MGalvanPsych: @kareem_carr as always, clearing up commonly misunderstood concepts with ease. 2021-07-15 04:39:18 RT @kareem_carr: Lets clear up some things about: - race - social constructs - biological constructs - sociological causation - biological… 2021-07-15 02:42:07 RT @NewLiberalsPod: Great thread by Kareem. https://t.co/R8kfNuYxEb 2021-07-14 23:43:04 In conclusion: 1. Saying "racism causes a health disparity" and "race predicts a health disparity" is not the same thing. 2. Saying "Race causes health disparities" shouldn't be interpreted as always meaning that the causation is biological. 2021-07-14 23:43:03 From a biology perspective, race is not directly observable. We don't see it explicitly in the genes. From a sociology perspective, people clearly take actions based on racial assumptions and that's visible in their behavior patterns (who people marry, have kids with, and so on). 2021-07-14 23:43:02 Lets clear up some things about: - race - social constructs - biological constructs - sociological causation - biological causation - predictive accuracy A thread. 1/n 2021-07-14 17:50:16 @etotheipie @J_D_Klein I'm not saying following your own reasoning and doing your own research is always going to work out. I'm saying it's to a significant degree their responsibility however it works out. 2021-07-14 17:47:48 @etotheipie @J_D_Klein The part that doesn't make sense for me is the idea of "a campaign to *make* me think that". 1. Aren't you *choosing* to thinking that? 2. Whether you choose or not, doesn't an idea become part of you however you come to believe it and thus it's your responsibility either way? 2021-07-14 17:31:26 @J_D_Klein Our perceptions of "disinformation" are highly correlated with our politics. Whenever anyone gets too specific about "disinformation", they automatically lose half the audience. If we won't trust others to find trustworthy sources for us then it's our job to do it for ourselves. 2021-07-14 17:11:55 If people want informed opinions on vaccines, they know where to look: WHO, CDC, their local health department, their primary care provider. At some point folks need to take some responsibility for their own beliefs. 2021-07-14 15:51:59 I like Nate’s tweets by the way. The melodrama in the comments is like Christmas. https://t.co/TyWZkwLEgF 2021-07-14 15:48:05 Nate. https://t.co/k6KfnVmmQm 2021-07-14 01:14:15 @sanjanacurtis my post was actually a long con to get you to interact with me more so i’d be closer to the center next time. https://t.co/Y2O5wEwEvf 2021-07-14 00:40:14 normalize normalizing normals https://t.co/8LMa19zbaO 2021-07-14 00:31:20 reporting this right now https://t.co/S2FGeqE8lp https://t.co/k1YBF9q1wN 2021-07-13 23:22:07 We need an intellectual climate that prioritizes *how* to think over *what* to think. Otherwise, we're going to keep getting stuck in the trap of picking our beliefs based on our politics. https://t.co/TJWMOF0S9h 2021-07-13 16:51:50 Simultaneously updating my R and Python installations today. To maintain the balance of power. 2021-07-13 15:56:55 I saw a tweet once where a prof was seeking advice on how to tell a student they didn't have the right stuff to be successful in science. Made me so mad. Teachers should let students know where they are but they should never set limits on where they could be. 2021-07-13 14:34:00 I've been seeing these terms misused a lot, so let's clear things up: An gets their energy from being around people. An gets their energy from tweeting about how much it sucks to be in academia. 2021-07-13 06:05:43 @noelTbrewer @MyaLRoberson @jenine_j At the risk of belaboring the point…If categorization is the cause of an outcome and the categories (caused by that categorization) are on the causal path that leads to the outcome. It should logically be the case that the categories themselves are causes. 2021-07-13 05:34:58 @noelTbrewer @MyaLRoberson @jenine_j My remark about fields and charges etc was my attempt to say framing the categorization as the cause or the categories as the cause isn’t very different mathematically but I can see how one might feel more satisfying than the other. 2021-07-13 05:30:34 @noelTbrewer @MyaLRoberson @jenine_j I think what you’re saying is the process of categorizing is a “cause” of categories and therefore categorization itself is the cause of the consequences of those categories. I agree but having chosen the categories, we can think of those categories as causes in themselves. 2021-07-13 05:18:19 @noelTbrewer @MyaLRoberson @jenine_j Maybe this analogy is better. Why do things fall? You can say because of gravity. Without gravity they wouldn’t fall. You can say it’s because of mass. Massless things are unaffected by gravity. (This point might be more nuanced that the typical thing you can represent with DAGs) 2021-07-13 02:44:03 a few people are taking the "only my smartest followers" part harder than I intended. lol. I was joking around. https://t.co/ImKl0gckFA 2021-07-13 02:35:35 RT @kareem_carr: @noelTbrewer @MyaLRoberson @jenine_j Consider an electric field. Within an electric field, an uncharged particle is unaffe… 2021-07-13 02:35:22 @noelTbrewer @MyaLRoberson @jenine_j Consider an electric field. Within an electric field, an uncharged particle is unaffected but if the particle was charged, it would change direction. You can say the field is the cause of the direction change but also the charge is. Racism is the field. Race is the charge. 2021-07-13 01:57:13 @noelTbrewer @AlHendiify Lol. You're too nice. 2021-07-13 01:55:45 @MyaLRoberson @noelTbrewer @jenine_j "I have limited faith that people will interpret otherwise unless we are super clear about what we are conceptualizing race as & 2021-07-13 01:51:21 @MyaLRoberson @noelTbrewer @jenine_j I would say it's a causal factor, just sociological not biological. But further more, if you force it into a purely biological framework, you will get some predictive accuracy in limited enough situations. 2021-07-13 01:48:35 @noelTbrewer @jenine_j Predictive accuracy doesn't necessarily imply causation. That's the insight that I think we need to get out there. Rather than saying race isn't predictive of outcomes because within the right context, it can be. 2021-07-13 01:19:50 @noelTbrewer @jenine_j Perhaps I'm mischaracterizing you but you seem to discount predictive accuracy if it doesn't arise from biological causation. Predictive accuracy can come from lots of other sources including a close match between the study population and the target population. 2021-07-13 01:01:56 @rednecklefty This person gets me. 2021-07-13 00:58:21 Math can save you. All you have to do is open your heart. 2021-07-13 00:55:43 @StevenMeyer17 @MsMelChen @RitaPanahi @spectator I've interacted with @MsMelChen on twitter a few times and it's always been positive. We've never talked politics which is probably for the best. I don't know much about the second person. 2021-07-13 00:34:46 For staying true to the statistics? Anytime! https://t.co/Let9whljA9 2021-07-13 00:28:06 @DisThoughts @noelTbrewer Yes. I'm saying working in a coal mine is predictive of lung disease which is biological. The reason you're in the coal mine doesn't impact the fact being in the coal mine has biological effects. 2021-07-13 00:04:19 What's your twitter kryptonite? The thing that makes you comment even when you know you should just log off and go outside? Mine is watching two groups talk past each other. I'm like maybe if I just jump in real quick, I can help mediate this...*two minutes later*...oh no. 2021-07-12 23:47:19 @noelTbrewer I’m not sure I understand the distinction you’re making. How can a disease not be biological? 2021-07-12 23:37:02 @noelTbrewer Racism has biological consequences (stress etc). Biology (skin color, hair texture, eye color, parentage, ancestral geographic location) has an impact on racial categorizations. 2021-07-12 23:23:00 These two things are simultaneously true: 1. Race is social not a biological construct 2. Race is often predictive of some biological outcomes Sociology and biology are interconnected. Academic boundaries don't exist in nature. 2021-07-12 22:55:00 If you haven’t been written up in at least three rightwing national news outlets for “hating white people”, please don’t compare your wokeness cred to mine. 2021-07-12 20:03:47 Let’s see how good you folks are at logic. Would you rather take: A. 1 in billion chance of getting 100 trillion dollars OR B. 100% chance of getting $10 Only my smartest followers will get this one right. 2021-07-12 19:22:20 I don’t know who needs to hear this but saying it’s fine to use a “race” variable in your regression sometimes is not “race science”. It’s just regular science. Tens of thousands of social and medical science researchers are doing this every day. 2021-07-12 18:05:54 @lastpositivist I'm getting more and more arguments that are just like "you should not be saying this" rather than "here is a logical argument for why you should change what you think". It feels like a loss of interest in teaching me things and more just dictating to me what I'm supposed to say. 2021-07-12 17:57:02 @quaesita External to academia. 2021-07-12 17:36:00 As my account gets bigger, more and more academics are treating me like an academic outsider...and lets just say, I'm starting to get why academics so often get excluded from the important public conversations. On the bright side, at least I'm learning what *not* to do. 2021-07-12 17:18:59 @mekkaokereke I agree that one shouldn’t generalize beyond the contexts described by your available data. 2021-07-12 17:04:35 @causalinf There's definitely room to reward people for more than one thing. 2021-07-12 16:57:44 @kevinmarks @mekkaokereke I'm accepting his premise temporarily for the sake of argument and demonstrating that even under his stronger assumptions, his case is not fully made. 2021-07-12 16:55:25 The belief that good decisions always lead to good outcomes and bad decisions always lead to bad outcomes is a logical fallacy. Don't reward people for being right. Reward them for being right *consistently*. 2021-07-12 16:49:39 @mekkaokereke Also note that it is actually biological in some sense because the consequences like hypertension, diabetes etc are biological. 2021-07-12 16:48:51 @mekkaokereke How is race not real? "Folk of West African descent who suffer the daily chronic stress of racism." Is this not really happening? I think you're saying the cause isn't biological but that's not the same as it not being real (and detectable and useful information to know). 2021-07-12 16:39:37 It's also one of reasons that lots of academics are terrible teachers, because they teach you all the caveats before you've even absorbed the basic concept. 2021-07-12 16:35:00 A lot of academics do this thing where they're really familiar with common misunderstandings of their work so they often assume you misunderstand something unless you defensively phrase everything you say so you can prove that you don't. It’s why most academic writing sucks. 2021-07-12 16:25:46 I'm not saying be a complete pushover but I think it's best to respond with compassion unless there's a good reason not to. 2021-07-12 16:15:16 @haroldpollack Ha! I've seen you on Bloggingheads a few times over the years. Nice to sort of e-meet you! 2021-07-12 16:13:47 @SincerelyData @srvanderplas @spelkington I think I was clear about which parts were normative and which parts were descriptive. But whether I did or didn't, the important thing is that it's best if we do that going forward, don't you agree? 2021-07-12 16:07:37 Science assumes the observer is independent of the observed. But in the case of racial disparity, we're creating both race and disparity as we try to analyze them. Disparity is a choice. It's not impossible to analyze statistically but it violates all of the usual assumptions. 2021-07-12 15:58:41 @tranhelen I really hope nobody is alienated by this. Glad you're feeling better. 2021-07-12 15:39:38 @SincerelyData @srvanderplas @spelkington I get that but that’s a political conclusion. It’s a judgement about how people are and what’s politically feasible going forward. It’s not a technical conclusion about what’s statistically possible. I’m sympathetic to the argument but I want to be clear about it being political. 2021-07-12 15:32:00 Useful models can be wrong. Wrong models can be useful. 2021-07-12 15:26:43 @SincerelyData @srvanderplas @spelkington From what you’re saying, it doesn’t sound like we are on different pages with this. It’s going to depend not only on the local population but even the sub-selection of people who tend to visit that Dr’s practice. 2021-07-12 15:13:49 @SincerelyData @srvanderplas @spelkington Race is a flawed measure and often inaccurate but there’s often some signal there. We can argue about why there’s signal. Perhaps it’s due to racism but there’s still some. I think your objections are an argument for more nuanced use of race rather than not using it at all. 2021-07-12 14:45:02 Definitely not on the anti-racism train with not using “race” in data analysis. Use it in a better way? Sure. Don’t over-interpret the results? Definitely. Don’t use it at all? That’s too extreme for me. 2021-07-12 12:55:17 @alicexiang @NeuroStats Thanks @alicexiang for sharing. I’ll definitely take a look. Thanks @NeuroStats for putting @alicexiang on my radar. Following her now. 2021-07-12 04:12:36 @genandgenes “The same misconceptions”. Vague. There’s nothing to respond to. Good night. 2021-07-12 03:48:45 RT @kareem_carr: @genandgenes A decent number of well-meaning people are trying to explain this concept to me. But as you can see, I wrote… 2021-07-12 03:48:09 @genandgenes A decent number of well-meaning people are trying to explain this concept to me. But as you can see, I wrote a whole thread about it a year ago: https://t.co/caKaZyQ3Oy 2021-07-12 03:40:48 @genandgenes I tend not to respond seriously if the person isn’t being respectful or seems to assume I’m engaging in bad faith. It’s usually a waste of time for everybody involved. 2021-07-12 02:56:32 @genandgenes I’m saying I’m pretty familiar with these arguments and have made similar arguments myself if people bother to look. I mean it’s just Twitter so people don’t have to check out what I’ve said in the past but I don’t have to respond to them either. 2021-07-12 02:15:24 billionaires spend their money on all sorts of stupid stuff like making even more money but going to space is legit worth the cash. plus nobody died which was definitely a possibility. so good for them. 2021-07-11 23:29:33 There’s a reason why publishers can still make money off new editions of calculus books even though the material is basically the same. It’s because the students change. So the presentation of the material has to change with them. New diversity requires new presentations. https://t.co/MX3Qhqoakf 2021-07-11 23:19:43 me: covid is a scam by the scientists! friend: how so? me: folks pay the doctors. doctors get taxed. scientists apply for funding. probably get rejected. apply again. get rejected again. and so on. friend: oh but then they eventually get funded right? me: what? no. come on. 2021-07-11 22:32:00 Three insights from my education as a statistician: 1. Almost all data is imperfect 2. You can still get useful information from imperfect data 3. Not just anybody can do it. It takes dedication, skill and training. 2021-07-11 22:13:15 There's so much statsplaining in this thread. lol. Whatever you think I have never thought about before concerning race and data analysis, put that term in twitter search like so: "blah from:kareem_carr" [I fully acknowledge it's partly my fault for not publishing on this.] https://t.co/NhkOuR5s6F 2021-07-11 21:57:18 just because a math problem would probably take a genius to solve it doesn’t mean it isn’t also a stupid question. like nobody knows what this sequence converges to. First of all who cares but also WHAT IS THE ANSWER? https://t.co/0BQxFRBOQe 2021-07-11 21:06:49 RT @kareem_carr: Speaking as a black statistician, I don't think we can completely eliminate using race in medical decisions if we want to… 2021-07-11 19:05:04 @NeuroStats @alicexiang Oh wow. That’s really interesting though! Can you say more about your impressions and where you see potential problems? 2021-07-11 18:59:47 @NeuroStats @alicexiang There’s a good chance that they’re just reconstructing it in a convoluted, hard-to-track way. 2021-07-11 18:57:53 @GENES_PK Kraft beer. 2021-07-11 18:35:33 There are a lot of responses to this that amount to the question, “What if I use the race variable in a stupid way, won’t the decisions I make be stupid?” To which I say: 1. Yes 2. So don’t use it that way https://t.co/NhkOuR5s6F 2021-07-11 18:11:48 @ChomiloMD Don’t a lot of doctors use race in their decision making already? I’m assuming many of those have plenty of clinical training. As I say in the thread, makes sense to use better data if you have it and to avoid race essentialism. 2021-07-11 17:56:23 @ChomiloMD Lets ignore genetics for second. You can’t observe all the racism someone has experienced at the bedside so you’d have to infer that this was a factor from what you can observe which is race, and it’s highly likely that doing so would improve the decision making in some cases. 2021-07-11 00:07:49 RT @kareem_carr: Speaking as a black statistician, I don't think we can completely eliminate using race in medical decisions if we want to… 2021-07-10 18:06:11 @arbelharpak You’re right. I considered discussing that but thought it would distract from the main point. 2021-07-10 16:01:12 2. Only using race for the benefit of the patient not the institution (for instance, providing less compensation to black patients based on racial assumptions isn't about helping them, it's about saving the institution money.) 2021-07-10 16:01:11 Leaving out race can have a lot of unintended consequences. Algorithms might default to the standard of care for the largest group. This means treating everybody as if they are white which would be problematic in many cases. 2021-07-10 16:01:10 Speaking as a black statistician, I don't think we can completely eliminate using race in medical decisions if we want to make the best decisions for each patient given our current state of technology. Gene testing for specific ancestry would be better but we aren't there yet. 2021-07-10 14:13:08 summary so far: 1. economics is unpopular...with all the social sciences...including economics. 2. physics seems like a distant second but very few are naming it as the chief rival of their field. https://t.co/B567WQ1zWd 2021-07-09 23:14:18 Need more comments on the hard sciences! more comments from computer science, chemistry, biochemistry, math, stats, biology, physics, computer science folks. if none is the answer. just say none. https://t.co/B567WQ1zWd 2021-07-09 20:31:51 @xiaofei_lin @sanjanacurtis i got 99 problems but what to eat ain't one. https://t.co/IHzUHYfO86 2021-07-09 18:06:56 roast duck tacos with apple slaw and orange-soy glaze. i cheated and bought the duck pre-roasted. in heaven right now. https://t.co/3qFQQ7N9p2 2021-07-09 17:35:17 RT @kareem_carr: I want to create an infographic of academic rivalries. Which other field annoys people in your academic field the most? Th… 2021-07-09 16:03:48 I want to create an infographic of academic rivalries. Which other field annoys people in your academic field the most? The format for the answers should be your field followed by your candidate annoying field. I’ll go first. statistics: machine learning 2021-07-08 22:45:00 currently motivating myself to learn some tricky math by framing it as stealing the white man's knowledge. will keep you updated on how it goes. 2021-07-08 15:40:00 Epidemiology is so cool*!!! _________ * Given all the stuff epidemiologists did for us over the last year, the least we can do for them is lie. Don't tell them I said that. 2021-07-08 14:35:00 So many of us stayed home for a year, and got checks from the government, and didn’t pay rent, and spent more time with our families and the world didn’t end. The economy didn’t collapse. Nature healed. Even Bezos got richer. Are we really just gonna go back to how it was before? 2021-07-08 01:23:57 i just want everyone to know the large sum of money that appeared in my bank account shortly before i completely reversed my position on the field of economics is an unrelated coincidence 2021-07-06 01:16:17 Ya know, Judea, I’m pretty influential with the economists but maybe not in the way you’re thinking. https://t.co/oWe9oN0ZUp 2021-07-06 00:44:24 @causalinf what’s your substack and can i sign up if you’re not still mad at me? 2021-07-06 00:06:53 when randos on twitter explain what science is, to me, an actual scientist https://t.co/MS8W6xCQn2 2021-07-05 23:47:21 even matt sensed a disturbance in the force. https://t.co/AQtsAQMcpq 2021-07-05 23:22:37 RT @kareem_carr: As a response to the rightwing, some academics are pushing for a world where scientists are above social criticism. Criti… 2021-07-05 22:42:28 I worked for the National Bureau of Economic Research for a year. I bring this up for absolutely no reason. 2021-07-05 21:14:10 “academics should never comment on a field unless they’ve researched that field thoroughly and have a deep understanding of it” — an economist 2021-07-05 20:05:13 RT @NewLiberalsPod: Excellent thread by Kareem. @Sarah_Mojarad and @Ayjchan have brought up similar points both on Twitter and on the podc… 2021-07-05 20:03:33 Wanted to amplify this. Sounds like a good project! https://t.co/JzISZ3QH32 2021-07-05 19:34:06 RT @jonst0kes: Basically this whole thread, but also for journalists. 2021-07-05 18:41:48 i did mean to punch econtwitter. but if i’m being honest, the punch landed a lot harder than i was expecting. when you start seeing multiple subtweets, you know you went a bit overboard and drew a little blood. lol. 2021-07-05 18:16:30 “this is just how we do it in my field” https://t.co/3CSp5C1KZl 2021-07-05 17:04:30 This kind of long-form content takes extra work so if you like it and want to show support, like and retweet the thread, and give me a follow! 2021-07-05 17:03:28 My message to academic Twitter is simple. Don't act like mean tweets about your academic field are oppression. Don't use your PhD as a cudgel to stamp out opinions about your field that you don't like. Stuff like that will probably backfire. Badly. 2021-07-05 17:03:27 I know many people are sensitive around issues of stereotyping and speech harm but not all categories are equal. In my opinion, it's fine to tweet "California sucks" or "Guys on tinder are the worst". This kind of talk is just a normal part of human societies. 2021-07-05 17:03:26 As a response to the rightwing, some academics are pushing for a world where scientists are above social criticism. Critiquing the motivations and behaviors of scientists isn't anti-science. It's democracy. A thread. 2021-07-05 16:15:23 @causalinf Since I was tagged, let me respond. Thanks for the feedback. Sorry you didn't like the jousting which I think was mild by Twitter standards. It's nothing personal. Spend more time doing stuff that you enjoy maybe??? I'm jealous of your cute kittens and how into you they are! 2021-07-05 06:31:40 This might be a bit of a dodge but I think it’s partly evolution. Humans evolved causal reasoning because it seems to work. We make abstract models that are analogs of objects interacting physically and simulations of these pretend systems seem to predict events in the world. https://t.co/w4F1a493An 2021-07-05 05:46:48 https://t.co/qls7jE50Qr 2021-07-05 04:10:12 RT @kareem_carr: Folks have been bashing this mentorship program because of Google’s recent track record of what some might call “anti-blac… 2021-07-05 02:23:36 RT @EpiEllie: The past 18 months watching this pandemic & 2021-07-05 01:03:59 A lot of folks on here only know how to discuss things with people that they already kind of agree with and it shows. No ability to share their point of view with the humility that we can all be wrong. No ability to graciously accept that attitude in someone else. 2021-07-05 00:47:02 @NoahHaber @besttrousers @joftius @Noahpinion I kicked the hornet’s nest so I can’t be mad about a few stings. But honestly, it’s rare to get a real conversation going on here without some heat. I do feel like there was too much spin in the discussion and that ultimately made it hard to get balanced information out of it. 2021-07-05 00:28:23 Today we come full circle. She’s complaining about cancel culture which she was engaging in in the first tweet. https://t.co/TQX3b4rRT1 2021-07-05 00:28:22 One month later she’s saying stuff like this https://t.co/xPwkgNfPeu 2021-07-05 00:28:21 Ten months later she’s denouncing the same Lindsay for his racism https://t.co/D87NNM7QEy 2021-07-05 00:28:19 Every time I see Claire Lehmann on my timeline, she’s all over the map. Here she is going out of her way to threaten an academic epidemiologist with legal action during a pandemic in defense of racist comments by Lindsay (who isn’t even named in the Tweet). https://t.co/kFqLqtdIiq 2021-07-04 22:38:41 @SarahJacobsonEc you’re making good choices. https://t.co/eIJ6tXlGJX 2021-07-04 22:33:50 i’m a man of peace yet i keep choosing violence. https://t.co/YnGQdaRkB8 2021-07-04 21:59:24 No because R is the best. LOL. I’m kidding! Python is better for people who are making software products or creating a large code base with lots of developers. It’s not impossible to do in R but vastly easier in Python. https://t.co/NY08jKnBXR 2021-07-04 21:17:56 RT @EpiEllie: Watching econ twitter lose their gd minds over being called “supportive of the current capitalist system” as an epidemiologis… 2021-07-04 21:14:54 MAY THE FOURTH BE WI...*checks notes*...sorry wrong holiday. 2021-07-04 21:01:59 @sarahmrose In fairness to all concerned, I’m kind of a frustrating person. 2021-07-04 21:00:30 @cecilejanssens First. Not sure why I’m not following you. I enjoy your methodology tweets. Following you now. Second. I think you’re right. Might not replicate universally. (Small effects of genes often don’t.) But this kind of approach would be good step toward finding out if the effects do. 2021-07-04 20:22:43 @PHuenermund I’m guessing you’ve never heard anybody talk about “damned lies and statistics”...people reject statistics all the time. 2021-07-04 20:19:56 @causalinf @ben_golub @Noahpinion It’s probably in the 99% percentile of public awareness about economics. But yes. Perhaps, I should have waited until I was at the 99.999% level to opine on Twitter. 2021-07-04 19:42:01 This would actually be an amazingly effective way to teach people how computers work and what computer programming is. https://t.co/syEgjd8IWm 2021-07-04 19:32:27 @Noahpinion @ben_golub *checks notifications* uh huh. 2021-07-04 19:31:03 Since I’ve been bashing economists today, I thought I’d shout out an economist-authored statistics paper that really like by @deaneckles, @Susan_Athey and @EconometricaEd. https://t.co/KBOc7OsqRw https://t.co/nEGyf6vOMZ 2021-07-04 19:03:06 The economists are now networking in my comment section. Jesus. Now that they’re being incentivized, I will never be rid of them. https://t.co/Ub9NB2j1cm 2021-07-04 19:00:30 @ben_golub Lol. He doesn’t even follow me. Why is he following YOU?! I bet your statistics jokes are awful. 2021-07-04 18:27:54 @ben_golub @Noahpinion I’m not a consumer of econ academic literature. I got a bit of micro and macro a while back. I used to have a subscription to WSJ and the Economist about 10 years ago. I listen to Russ Robert’s pod to keep a toe in that world but I think he ended it this year. 2021-07-04 18:07:26 @Noahpinion Thanks. Good to know what to look out for. Hard to pattern match if you don’t know the patterns. It’s easy to end up missing stuff if it’s not what you expect to see. 2021-07-04 17:59:06 Fair. I’m not that emotionally invested in my profession. Feel free to dunk more. https://t.co/7OWYtPtQ2G 2021-07-04 17:54:05 my brother. it means you paid for the upgrade package. the next level up is Black+ premium. https://t.co/Bu789f3Z7v 2021-07-04 17:00:24 me: economics serves the rich economists: not true! me: what about this guy that's always on tv? e: not a real economist me: this guy with a Nobel prize? e: nope me: this other Nobel prize guy? e: not him either me: this professor with an econ PhD and 200k followers? e: no 2021-07-04 16:40:44 @palapid @elben @joftius @besttrousers @Noahpinion Enlightening point! It seems like a lot to expect a layman to have a more nuanced impression of the field than somebody who spent 4 years studying the subject. You're not doing this of course but that seems to be the general expectation of many of the economists in the thread! 2021-07-04 16:35:17 @elben @besttrousers @joftius @Noahpinion This is intended as a helpful comment so I hope it's taken that way. I think the exasperation doesn't help because it comes across as lacking neutrality. Like maybe you'll get me to stop sharing my opinion because I don't like the heat but that might not mean I change my mind. 2021-07-04 16:31:40 People also like to call you a hypocrite for changing your mind and throw your past opinions in your face. It's a big disincentive to learning more. 2021-07-04 16:31:39 I get why many people on Twitter double down on their positions and don't try to educate themselves. Lots of folks on here see admitting you don't know everything as weakness and they will go after you for it. https://t.co/Zkm2laXDmT 2021-07-04 16:19:28 @elben @besttrousers @joftius @Noahpinion I get it. Turns out not everybody in society has the same experiences and your experience as a econ PhD might not be the median public experience of economists. Crazy. I know. 2021-07-04 16:03:41 @KevinZollman @Noahpinion Good thing I'm not one of those people who're happy to rest on the stereotype and instead asked you for more information. RIGHT? 2021-07-04 15:52:07 @KevinZollman @Noahpinion It's not that I've never heard of Sen. It's that he doesn't seem to be where the thrust of the field is (as an external observer.) Anyway, this is not a hill I'm trying to die on. This is just Twitter. Lots of folks think lime me. Have a good 4th. 2021-07-04 15:49:41 @KevinZollman @Noahpinion It's kind of passive-aggressive to tweet the mere fact that one disagrees with someone with no further elaboration and then get all huffy when they genuinely ask for more information. 2021-07-04 15:23:59 @Noahpinion @besttrousers @thejb_stan @gorby_gorbachev @joftius ...so perhaps I ought to disregard all the pop audience books which will take time to update... and all the "cranks"...and also ignore some of the most prominent people in the field. I kid! I kid. Lol. Thanks @Noahpinion and @besttrousers for sharing the other side. Happy 4th! 2021-07-04 15:19:42 @Noahpinion @besttrousers @thejb_stan @gorby_gorbachev @joftius t's a bit confusing to somebody external to the field when the "cranks" include *multiple* Nobel Prize winners. It starts feeling like the no true Scotsman fallacy. But at this point it does feel pretty clear that what I said is not accurate of the field (as of 20 years ago)... 2021-07-04 15:04:09 Maybe the Google folks didn’t mean it this way but as written they’re saying, and I can’t stress this enough, that they will not even consider you for the mentorship program if you don’t articulate how your “lived experiences” will provide value to them. https://t.co/fUjzdKO52h 2021-07-04 15:04:08 They ask that you be in college already, have a gpa above 2.5 and consult “faculty, advisors, writing centers...to review your statement before submission”...Their ideal candidate sounds like someone who’s doing great and has lots of support. WHY would this person need Google? https://t.co/PmpbOM8LHn 2021-07-04 15:04:06 What else will they desk reject for? Including your contact information. That’s right. They will not even consider your application if it has your name in it. https://t.co/5xWGjtNSBr 2021-07-04 15:04:05 Look at this. They say they will “desk reject”, as in not even READ your application, if it’s not max 2 pages, 8.5” by 11”, Times New Roman font, 1” margins, single spaced, in PDF format. This is more stringent than a grad school application and probably quite a few term papers. https://t.co/yYndkHzXwb 2021-07-04 15:04:04 Folks have been bashing this mentorship program because of Google’s recent track record of what some might call “anti-blackness” but it doesn’t seem like most folks read the materials. I did and I have concerns. https://t.co/HBsBn1qxkt https://t.co/pN5HjiRKT2 2021-07-04 14:38:27 @thejb_stan @besttrousers @gorby_gorbachev @joftius @Noahpinion I think it’s a bit strong to call it evidence. It’s not a court of law. I’m not trying to convict econ. I’m sharing my personal experiences and inviting him to help me line it up with what he’s saying. He’s basically saying those guys don’t count but not really explaining why. 2021-07-04 14:35:45 @gmmengineer @Noahpinion I’m sorry I offended you by expressing openness to being convinced. You don’t have to convince me but I also don’t have to agree with you. As long as we’re both OK with that situation then life is good. 2021-07-04 13:24:42 @NoahHaber @besttrousers @joftius @Noahpinion Thanks for attempting a more balanced summary of the situation that acknowledges that the both points of view might be valid and grounded in actual experiences. It’s definitely a more persuasive path. 2021-07-04 13:13:34 @Noahpinion Can you name a few big intellectual projects that economists are pushing for that are counterexamples to what I said? (The equivalent of general artificial intelligence in CS or the theory of everything in physics.) 2021-07-04 13:05:06 @besttrousers @joftius @Noahpinion “Gaslighting” implies I know a lot about econ viewpoints but I’m pretending not to. You definitely know about Tyler et al but aren’t talking about them for some reason. Russ has guests on his pod so it’s not just GMU. 2021-07-04 12:55:02 @besttrousers @joftius @Noahpinion I’m just saying it might be a little more fair to acknowledge such people exist. Otherwise, it comes across as a bit gaslighting. 2021-07-04 12:53:21 @besttrousers @datamongerbonny This is true. This British guy calls economics that in one of the most racist documents I’ve ever seem in my life where he argues against freeing my Caribbean ancestors. 2021-07-04 12:46:01 @besttrousers @joftius @Noahpinion I could totally be wrong but your account of econ seems skewed. Voices like Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson or even Larry Summers don’t seem to fit what you’re saying. I also listen to Russ Roberts regularly and this doesn’t seem much like the picture he paints of econ. 2021-07-04 03:19:43 @besttrousers @_amtiskaw With the recent Nobel prizes, I’m not surprised. On the other hand, experiments cost a lot more money and require a different social model. e.g. Biology departments are organized in physical labs with equipment. So I’d expect the adoption of experiments to take time. 2021-07-04 03:08:47 @besttrousers @_amtiskaw Can you say a bit about what they mean by a paper “referring” to an experiment? Does that mean the paper is a write-up of an experiment done by the authors or does it literally mean just mentions the concept of an experiment in the text somewhere? 2021-07-04 02:23:13 1. I’m guessing that when a billionaire “works” on a grant, it probably doesn’t look like when your average academic works on a grant. 2. He’s a billionaire. Why is he using his vast resources to beat out regular folks for limited government funding? https://t.co/KiBpc1SZdn 2021-07-04 02:11:43 Whenever I bash economics, more than a few economists will act all coy and surprised like they didn’t know econ had that reputation. 2021-07-04 01:56:36 @besttrousers @ChristoSilvia I think what we are hoping to see is not consensus but advocacy given that there is vigorous advocacy for the aspects of economics referenced in the original tweet. 2021-07-04 01:47:51 I’m just not that emotionally invested. 2021-07-04 01:44:32 @tmychow @JosephZander I have never said Bayes is useless. I think it’s a really powerful tool. I enjoy the mathematics. I have some questions about the philosophical basis. (Also my name is spelt “Carr”. ) 2021-07-04 01:41:50 A lot of Bayesians are very sensitive. I would never unfollow somebody for shitting on frequentism. Lol. 2021-07-04 00:55:12 sous vide steaks. https://t.co/6BbLXnk6kD 2021-07-04 00:51:44 @ChristoSilvia I'll add to that increasing the mobility of labor though more modular and robust systems of social support (portable healthcare not tied to employers, cheap universal daycare, etc). 2021-07-04 00:41:19 As far as I can tell, economics is succeeding quite well in its intended goal of providing supporting arguments for the inaction of the ruling classes. Not sure they have any other big plans besides that. https://t.co/gDKcwz2ffN 2021-07-04 00:11:26 A lot of people have given up on psychology as a science but I think these signs are hopeful! 2021-07-04 00:11:25 I learned about genomics and psychological research methods at the same time. So this has been obvious to me for a while. Nice to see there's growing awareness in psych. Bigger sample sizes. More modest theories. More scientists teaming up to work on fewer results. https://t.co/DTMPcfYI9V 2021-07-03 15:00:54 @taoleighgoffe I'd been thinking about the possibility of this because I make a lot of spinach omelettes and always have a lot of bok choy around. Good to know greater minds have discovered how to do it! 2021-07-03 01:27:38 @adriancm93 nah but it might take me a while to “circle back”. 2021-07-02 18:11:22 going viral on linkedin is hilarious. so many notifications and people “just reaching out” to “connect”. 2021-07-02 00:43:45 i feel attacked https://t.co/i74hzO8PwA 2021-07-01 23:08:49 Thanks Cassie! https://t.co/qqtReckVIx 2021-07-01 17:01:19 Happy Canada Day! For some reason, Canada doesn't really get credit for being a major incubator of the current deep learning revolution but it absolutely was. Thanks Canada! 2021-07-01 16:21:13 Is it more likely that companies are changing their policies and teachers are revising their educational materials because of the stuff that literally just happened, or is it more likely that it's due to an obscure academic theory that's 50 years old at this point? 2021-07-01 16:21:12 Is it possible that all this anti-CRT stuff is just a cynical ploy to rebrand the authentic, heartfelt responses by millions of Americans to last summer's protests as somehow being due to a nefarious plot by critical race theorists to destroy the American way of life? 2021-07-01 14:54:38 harsh but fair https://t.co/LCzIepqn9p 2021-06-30 17:58:19 @LiadhT I might be tainted here by being a (bio)statistician. lol. 2021-06-30 17:56:28 all you anti-pineapple-on-pizza people out there listen up. citrus pairs well with pork. hope that helps. 2021-06-30 17:52:47 Not to bash psychologists or anything. They just seem to have words for things that we learn in statistics classes but we do not bother to give names to. It's just looked at as the "right" mathematical answer given the situation. 2021-06-30 17:39:35 is it just me or do psychologists have their own specialized and excessively verbose sub-dialect of statistical jargon? 2021-06-30 15:46:08 Do the median and mode count as two types of averages to you or does "average" always mean just the mean? 2021-06-30 15:23:12 @NoahHaber destroying the platters. a data security measure. back in the day, the magnets might have been interesting. but these days you can get much better magnets for almost nothing on amazon. 2021-06-30 14:53:37 if you ever wonder what kinds of things i get up to...currently dismantling these hard drives. https://t.co/6EbQPIzajp 2021-06-30 14:20:00 I think it's extremely racist and unfairly stigmatizing to center the IQ-genes debate on black-white differences when *every* human being has an IQ and every human being has genes. This is just the scientific version of the racist tendency to other black people. 2021-06-30 00:30:30 Murray's arguments imply that whether you're black or white, genes are a huge factor in determining where you end up in American society. He also claims the US is largely meritocratic. This implies that genes determine not just where you end up but where you actually belong. 2021-06-30 00:30:29 Folks seem to think that Charles Murray's arguments are just about the black-white IQ gap being genetic. They're not. The gap in IQ between receptionists and doctors is much bigger than the black-white IQ gap. His arguments imply that's genetic too! 2021-06-29 13:47:42 There are two types of people. The type that think that exceptions are trivial and not worth talking about and the type that think the exceptions are where we learn how things really work. I am the latter. 2021-06-29 13:39:05 I turn on the TV. This random movie "Rollerball" is playing. There's a fashionable guy and girl sitting in a recording studio. Suddenly, a disembodied voice of a British man who we never see, goes, "I'm a stat freak myself. Isn't that PERVERSE?" and starts reciting statistics. 2021-06-29 13:22:54 This was 100% a sh*tpost but I also learned stuff from all the thoughtful responses. Best of both worlds really. https://t.co/zKJhdJVcO0 2021-06-29 13:19:37 As I get older, my math knowledge is slowly turning into a bundle of deeply held prejudices that I struggle to justify. 2021-06-29 13:11:08 @littmath @rasmansa @wtgowers I'm trying to figure out how much of your argument is due to construction. Mathematicians aren't after all.They are crafty enough to know the consequences of definitions while they are making them. 2021-06-29 13:04:02 @syzygay1 @rasmansa @wtgowers I mean for practical people. 2021-06-29 13:02:35 @littmath @rasmansa @wtgowers Is that true though? I feel like there are some metaphysical leaps necessary first. Like if you think of a rule set as vacuously applying to the empty set then you can say an infinite number mappings map the empty set to itself. 2021-06-29 12:56:42 @rasmansa @wtgowers Also note, that (b*sin(x))/x will converge to b so you can make 0/0 seem like it should be any number that you want. In case, it's not clear, I'm using sin(x)/x because sin(0) is 0 so at x=0, naively speaking you have what looks like 0/0. 2021-06-29 12:50:34 @rasmansa @wtgowers So if people are saying 00 is 1 it's probably because a lot (but not all) of the limits of various stuff of the form f(x)g(x) give that answer. On the other hand, the patterns for 0/0 are more ambiguous so it's easier to argue for saying it's undefined. 2021-06-29 12:45:35 @rasmansa @wtgowers By the same kind of limit arguments, you could say 0/0 was 1 (sometimes) like (sin x)/x converges to 1 as x approaches 0. Lots of times, algebra is just a summary of patterns we see from analysis (calculus). At least, that's the way I think about it. 2021-06-29 12:30:57 @rasmansa @wtgowers It seems the other common thing is to say it’s undefined. You can construct limits which suggest it should be 0 (or lots of other numbers)...looking at Wikipedia, the case for it equaling 0 specifically is a lot weaker than I thought. 2021-06-29 01:34:57 RT @kareem_carr: In my opinion, this plot represents one of the MOST important facts about American society today. The white population has… 2021-06-28 19:09:13 @ControlCentral1 dang. that one hurts and it didn’t even happen to me. 2021-06-28 17:54:06 @pr3tzelogic fair point. vulnerable to theft, fire and flood. 2021-06-28 17:20:43 just installed two backup drives and i'm feeling pretty good about it. i got 99 problems but catastrophic data loss ain't one. 2021-06-28 17:07:26 In my opinion, the only reason that "white culture" is relevant in STEM is because lack of connection to STEM culture is probably a huge factor in why a lot of students drop out of STEM before reaching their full potential. It should be about solving problems not assigning blame. 2021-06-28 16:31:57 even in math, some things are just opinions. for instance, whether 0⁰ is 0 or 1 is an opinion and that's ok. 2021-06-28 15:48:02 do you anything data science related that's bringing you joy right now? if so, tell me (and my followers) about it! 2021-06-28 14:47:16 @Chrismartin76 @rasmansa @roderickgraham Historical evidence sure. Just check out the Wiki page on the history of logic. If your argument is that other people have discovered these laws or that the particular history is multicultural then sure. But in the West, this knowledge comes filtered through Western thought. 2021-06-28 14:04:02 @roderickgraham @Chrismartin76 @rasmansa It's a little exhausting. I think folks are too in it to see it. In my mind, it's so obvious. You can go back to the Enlightenment and see where these attitudes about "logic" and "reason" come from and that at the same time, folks were saying how blacks were not fully human. 2021-06-28 02:32:36 @rasmansa @SarahGrynpas @roderickgraham Yeah. I agree that’s bad. The poster seems to conflate white culture generally vs white supremacy culture. You might like science because you just like it. You might like it as part of Western culture. But liking it doesn’t need to mean that you’ve adopted white supremacy. 2021-06-28 02:14:02 @rasmansa @SarahGrynpas @roderickgraham This is a bit like saying if I have a fever then I must have covid. Or even, if I have all the symptoms of covid then I must have covid vs a bad cold/flu. I think a more sensible use of the chart is to examine the full constellation of traits as a template/aid to your reason. 2021-06-28 01:59:22 @SarahGrynpas @rasmansa @roderickgraham “Science is the most all-encompassing way to do it.” This is not a universal statement for humans. It actually illustrates the kind of Western cultural bias I am talking about. Lots of cultures (even a few still in the West) believe in religion more than science. 2021-06-28 01:54:47 @SarahGrynpas @rasmansa @roderickgraham I feel like folks are perhaps reading too much into saying X is part of white culture. If I say family is important in Mexican culture, does that mean other cultures don’t love their families just as much or even more? 2021-06-28 01:43:04 @rasmansa @roderickgraham I think it’s useful to understand that “white”culture is scientistic and that this isn’t how everybody needs to do it. For those of us who are Western but not white, we are free to chose to use science but not be scientistic and instead take a different path. 2021-06-28 01:40:04 @rasmansa @roderickgraham Take racism for instance. It wasn’t enough to just be prejudiced. A science has been built up around “race” to ground the discrimination as an objective fact of the universe. Not all cultures would need to construct a legitimization in this way. Using “science”. 2021-06-28 01:35:02 @rasmansa @roderickgraham I agree that Western culture is a more accurate descriptor in most cases. Although, I would argue that the dominant white culture has often co-opted these tools and made them part of their culture as a way of centering their culture as objective. 2021-06-28 01:22:12 @rasmansa @roderickgraham I think you are wrong on this one, Mansa. I think describing logic, science etc as we understand it as being outside of culture is ahistorical. They definitely have specific a cultural origin... and for better or worse, the origins of our shared Western culture is very white. 2021-06-28 01:13:42 “on your left” https://t.co/ZGNusARx9v 2021-06-28 00:36:51 RT @kareem_carr: In my opinion, this plot represents one of the MOST important facts about American society today. The white population has… 2021-06-27 17:07:31 I'm not a demographer so please feel free to chime in. I just thought this plot was fascinating and I haven't seen people discussing this elsewhere. 2021-06-27 17:07:30 Second, the plot suggests that younger white people probably have a support network that's filled with lots of older white people. That probably makes a big difference in how much younger white people need to rely on government. 2021-06-27 17:07:29 In my opinion, this plot represents one of the MOST important facts about American society today. The white population has a huge extra hump of older people that other demographics don't have. https://t.co/UWMjNGnGG3 2021-06-27 16:10:59 what’s something that data scientists turn into their whole personality? i'll start. deep learning. lol. 2021-06-27 15:11:39 me too. still recovering from the blow to my ego. lol. https://t.co/RQEiJAfX0J 2021-06-26 16:03:08 Twitter beefs aren’t worth it if you’re on here to learn things and grow as a person. 2021-06-26 15:05:42 Not woke. Just math. Check out her thread for more mathematical details. https://t.co/nIVhN75UaS 2021-06-25 18:33:08 This is a bit nerdy but sensitivity analyses (how much your conclusions change if your assumptions change) and regularization (being humble about how much you can really know with such limited data) become extremely important. 2021-06-25 18:33:07 I don't think coming to conclusions based on anecdotal data is inherently bad but you need to be honest with yourself about the extremely wide confidence intervals on those conclusions. 2021-06-25 18:27:06 I don't think the US public discourse is set up to discuss "costs" and "benefits" of policies in a rational, quantitative way unfortunately. It requires publicly putting numbers to things like how much a human life is worth which (understandably) few are brave enough to do. https://t.co/vatgrYyyRr 2021-06-25 17:35:31 me: my brain: https://t.co/xBGtl6dHEU 2021-06-25 14:01:51 Sounds like people are also seeking him out to give him information. That’s a source of selection bias. There are likely even more biases going on like tending to ask more probing questions of the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. 2021-06-25 14:01:50 Statistician here. It’s unclear how much “signal” there is here. He at least needs to ask his unvaccinated friends if they’ve had any unexplained illness over a designated time period to establish a background rate of illness. Then compare the vaccinated in that period. https://t.co/5IlDdPLzTR 2021-06-24 22:28:00 You can take math from physics and apply it metaphorically to data unrelated to physics. Same goes for statistical math. The math can often work fine when used out of context, but this gives you none of the logical assurances that come from using statistics correctly. 2021-06-24 17:37:45 @lakens I don't get involved in the 400 tweet discussions but I also don't learn much and I don't know as much as the people who do get involved so... 2021-06-24 16:05:27 @lakens I often wonder why the discussion is so stuck on this issue. We (stats twitter) seem to oscillate between one-liners that don't teach the audience much and extremely long threads that are hard to follow and never seem to go anywhere. 2021-06-24 15:53:48 @BayesicTony Great question. The use of stats-related math in ML is a complicated topic. Often, the assumptions of stats aren't being followed and the mathematical constructs being used aren't technically speaking statistical models, probabilities, likelihoods, etc. 2021-06-24 15:25:02 Controversial opinion: Machine Learning, Bayesian statistics and Frequentist statistics are ALL reasonable but NOT AT ALL interchangeable ways of making sense of data. 2021-06-24 14:23:06 I agree with anti-wokes that the cancel culture stuff is nuts sometimes but I 100% disagree that this is a left-leaning politics thing vs a young people/people who are very online thing. 2021-06-23 16:24:34 The numbers we compute with are an infinitesimal percent of all numbers. Basically, 100% of all numbers are “dark numbers” which we only know about from their influence on the numbers we can observe. 2021-06-22 16:26:52 why am i like this??? https://t.co/Dys2iUvFA1 2021-06-22 14:39:00 this really hurts https://t.co/Rbp6JZQqgN 2021-06-22 03:23:31 @ImagFamValues @nntaleb I always thought it might be the case (back when I was trying to understand IQ) so it was nice to see the analysis. We know lots of genetic diseases seriously affect mental functioning so I would immediately suspect that to be heavily driving the correlations. 2021-06-22 01:58:25 like the other person doesn't forget their needs and wants just because you changed the topic. and even if they have less power than you, they just stay mad and take it out on you later in all kinds of ways. wow. the more you know really. 2021-06-22 01:58:24 working on my interpersonal communication skills has taught me a lot about what's wrong with politics today. for instance, did you know that when someone brings a legitimate complaint to you, derailing the conversation by nitpicking how they express themselves doesn't end well? 2021-06-22 00:46:07 most of the time folks don’t think they’re doing anything statistical. just using “common sense” but often they are doing statistics. just badly. 2021-06-22 00:40:44 this is the lab leak logic: assuming no causal connection, the probability of a virus outbreak in the same town as a virus lab is extremely low so we must reject the null hypothesis and assume a connection. this kind of thing is why i think the public needs to learn more stats. 2021-06-21 17:49:13 I learned about CRT in school and it changed me. I will never be the same again. https://t.co/MqbOu4mpvA 2021-06-20 18:16:38 Whether you are agree or disagree with the general idea that black-white differences in income are due to racism, I hope you agree that sloppy thinking disguised as "science" just makes this contentious issue even harder to discuss. 2021-06-20 18:16:37 For all the reasons I mentioned, each job type requires us to reassess all the points I made before in this new context. Are the job tasks g-loaded? How much selection is going on? What is the relative value to employer of soft skills? 2021-06-20 18:16:36 As I mentioned before, employers value things in addition to technical skills like loyalty, creativity, hard-work, wisdom, people skills, etc. These might be more valuable traits! So it's not obvious to me that a slight IQ advantage will always translate into more promotions. 2021-06-20 18:16:35 In statistics, we call this "selection bias". Whenever people can make choices about whether to join a group OR when people are selected to join by some kind of decision-making process, we expect to see a bias. 2021-06-20 18:16:34 SELF-SELECTION. People often self-select out of careers that they don't think they will be good at. So, if a person felt they couldn't compete cognitively with the majority of people in their field YET STILL continued to pursue that career, it suggests that they probably felt... 2021-06-20 18:16:33 3. Should IQ always translate into job performance? NO! According to the science of IQ (which I have my problems with), IQ only translates to tasks that are "g loaded" where g stands for "general mental ability". 2021-06-20 18:16:32 1. First of all. CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION. As a statistician, I'm contractually obligated to let you know that these patterns that he's talking about are all correlations. They are not proof of causation. 2021-06-20 18:16:31 "The cognitive demands of those jobs mean a lot more white people qualify than black people." This video is full of misuses of statistics! A thread. https://t.co/faCgQZh4Xu 2021-06-20 14:40:02 @EThulin I was originally a pure mathematician. This is a very standard definition of weights in math. https://t.co/Bm5EtlJHXi 2021-06-20 14:34:37 @EThulin In my defense, why would I be using jargon for a specific technical procedure in a Twitter thread for a mass audience vs using it metaphorically to give people a sense of what the math is doing? I hope the additional comments were clarifying and that you now get what I meant. 2021-06-20 14:20:57 @ent3c @KMKing_Psych through question selection, you are doing the equivalent of causing male or female specific latent factors to contribute equally to the score. 2021-06-20 14:18:57 @ent3c @KMKing_Psych perhaps this thread will be helpful. basically question selection is a type of re-weighting. Just like selecting more beef, chicken etc and less potatoes, rice, etc is equivalent to re-weighting protein to be a larger component of my diet. https://t.co/uG8iyACjR8 2021-06-20 14:09:06 @EThulin You can just think of it as a large matrix with all possible questions in it. Remember, this is statistics. So estimating from a sample of questions is fine. We're still always thinking about the space of possible questions. Again. Theoretically, this is a re-weighting scheme. 2021-06-20 14:00:16 @billwareTN This is the term if you’d like to explore the math further. I was trying to keep the thread reader friendly so I didn’t include it. https://t.co/dio5WjmDof 2021-06-20 13:56:54 @EThulin This is true in two different ways. First, if you don’t select something the weight is zero. So it’s just generally true. But beyond that, each question can be looked at as having male and female specific factors which you’re manipulating the ratio of via question selection. 2021-06-20 13:52:39 @EThulin Oh I see. Could be. I’ve never personally made a test. I only claim to understand the math of it. Question selection would be mathematically equivalent to a reweighting scheme. 2021-06-20 13:43:29 @KMKing_Psych @ent3c To be clear, this is not at all what I’m saying. I’m saying the re-weighting happens at the text construction phase not at the scoring phase. 2021-06-20 13:34:36 @ent3c Also... https://t.co/E9oy0WPHoI 2021-06-20 11:40:05 @EThulin https://t.co/GF4rDtC8BL 2021-06-20 02:07:28 RT @kareem_carr: IQ often gets used to promote racism on the internet but it's also highly mathematical so people don't really understand i… 2021-06-19 23:26:37 @ent3c I’ll quote the wikipedia article on factor analysis. linear combinations = re-weighting. https://t.co/JsyOGSszIV 2021-06-19 17:20:25 Many people seem to think IQ is a completely objective concept. This is clearly not true. I don't think IQ tests are completely useless but there are a huge number of subjective design decisions that go into how these tests are constructed. 2021-06-19 17:20:24 As you can see, there's a lot of complicated statistics that goes into creating the IQ construct. It's a statistical construct but it's also a social construct based on an agreement among psychometricians about how to adjust the raw test scores. 2021-06-19 17:20:23 Finally, remember in the first step we had to give the test to a lot of people to get a baseline? Turns out different populations will have different score distributions. 2021-06-19 17:20:22 When I say "re-weight" what I mean is you essentially change how much points test-takers get for different questions until you get a situation where men and women are scoring about the same. 2021-06-19 17:20:21 The first thing you might notice is that the distribution of scores isn't a nice shape. So psychometricians adjust the scores so that a certain number fall within certain percentiles so you get a nice bell curve like this: https://t.co/XWm0NGDHKY 2021-06-19 17:20:20 An IQ test is basically a list of questions that a psychometrician (kind of a cross between a psychologist and a statistician) thinks might measure intelligence. If you give such a test to a lot of people, you will get a range of scores. 2021-06-19 17:20:19 IQ often gets used to promote racism on the internet but it's also highly mathematical so people don't really understand it. In this thread, I will explain: 1. How the math of IQ works at a high level (don't worry no formulas!) 2. Why IQ is partly socially construct... 2021-06-19 02:30:07 “private parts” implies the existence of “public parts” 2021-06-19 02:16:05 can’t lose money to inflation if you spend it all before prices inflate. https://t.co/Igy0nHxbIf 2021-06-18 23:11:35 RT @mymo: Love this analysis! Ah heck who am I kidding, I love @kareem_carr too. Well worth the follow if you aren't already. 2021-06-18 16:26:00 So basically, as far as I can tell, they did a pretty statistically defensible analysis but for some reason the framing on Twitter is misleading and introduces a racially-tinged, causal interpretation that's not supported by the data analysis. 2021-06-18 16:25:59 Look at that! They did do a logistic regression! And now we can see the numbers are very similar for both races. I bet if they added confidence intervals, we would see an overlap suggesting no evidence of race being a factor. So the racial interpretation seems inappropriate. https://t.co/5LtPfeq4Sz 2021-06-18 16:25:58 In my opinion, when you have a situation like this where you can't really tell if it's income or the two parents, the FAIR thing to do is to repeat the analysis looking at things based on income levels and see if that gives a more convincing story. 2021-06-18 16:25:57 So bottom line: We shouldn't be saying that family structure or race CAUSE these outcomes because SCIENTIFICALLY and STATISTICALLY the analysis doesn't support that. 2021-06-18 16:25:56 As a black statistician, I felt the need to look into this plot going around Twitter. As far as I can tell, it's being used to push the narrative that black people's poor relationship choices are causing bad outcomes for black children. https://t.co/UWsZIRGHdv 2021-06-18 01:11:27 can somebody who is good at math please help me with this. anti-anti-racism=??? 2021-06-18 00:17:32 a lot of people don’t know this about me but two of my greatest passions are meticulously commenting all of my code and lying 2021-06-17 23:19:00 Would you rather get 100 million data points right now or 50 observations every month for the rest of your life? I’ll take Option B. That’s what passive data collection is. Find a way to do passive data collection, it’ll change your life. 2021-06-17 16:36:24 it had to be said https://t.co/upXCbegW6x 2021-06-17 14:53:56 unbelievable https://t.co/7YGRw5faYm 2021-06-16 23:54:55 deleting dating apps to meet someone the old fashioned way by hanging out with them at a coffeeshop while i help them through their online coding interview. 2021-06-16 23:04:00 with great AI algorithms comes great responsibility 2021-06-16 16:51:02 omg https://t.co/HpsZ0nYh2T 2021-06-16 15:56:17 Here's some self-care advice from your friendly internet statistician. If you track your weight daily, do yourself a favor and focus on the 7-day moving average. The day-to-day fluctuations are mostly noise. 2021-06-14 17:50:48 @the_3rd_j Hope this helps...https://t.co/BCVlZp6Qr3 2021-06-14 16:42:49 literally the stuff of nightmares https://t.co/aLHrktYz8g 2021-06-14 15:56:33 I love statistics or as I like to call it CST. Critical Science Theory. 2021-06-14 15:37:14 Some folks are saying that CRT isn't banned and that teachers are just required to teach historical events in a factual and objective manner. OK. But "Hitler was bad" is not a factual statement technically speaking. Is saying that going to be a fireable offense now too? 2021-06-14 15:10:57 @skdh We’re called Brits. We do exist! (Just kidding. I am British but my english accent sounds American. ) 2021-06-14 14:19:31 I've been wondering... 1. Is it really constitutional to ban CRT or any other viewpoint? 2. Are these bans even enforceable? What if the teacher denies that what they are teaching is CRT? 2021-06-14 14:05:11 Are all Brits academics? ... because this just sounds like when somebody with a PhD is pissed off at you. https://t.co/CvwA2V0a9d 2021-06-14 00:42:44 The public tried their best to get all this information to line up. Surprise, surprise. It didn't. This naturally lead to frustration. But let me ask you a question. WHY on earth would thousands of viewpoints from all ends of the earth line up and form a coherent narrative? 2021-06-14 00:42:43 I have mixed feelings about the criticism that the public health community didn't do a good job communicating with the public. On the one hand, it's clear that things could have gone better. On the other hand, the criticism strikes me as extremely unfair. 2021-06-13 19:31:46 In one tweet, what are the defining characteristics of data science? 2021-06-13 18:51:08 @Kaelberviridae But I think this nuanced point is not why people are wanting to investigate it. They clearly think it's a supervirus of some kind that couldn't have occurred naturally. 2021-06-13 18:48:38 @Kaelberviridae I agree with this that it's really perfectly calibrated and that does seem remarkable. This is actually the one part of the lab leak idea that I think is plausible, that a lab environment might have selected for a mostly harmless virus in the (presumably young) lab workers. 2021-06-13 18:44:26 @MissMissLiss My point is it's not a supervirus that needs an extraordinary explanation. It's well within the spectrum of viruses we can expect to deal with whether humans ever experiment with viruses again or not. 2021-06-13 18:37:43 Just saw Sabine Hossenfelder's awesome video on 2+2=5 and I really like it. (I'm not just saying it's awesome because she mentions me in it. ) "That's not woke. That's math" — @skdh https://t.co/HwyzD2y2bo 2021-06-13 18:01:31 We know viruses can theoretically escape from lab environments. Confirming covid was a lab leak would just tell us we should have lots of precautions against lab leaks in virology labs but we already know that. 2021-06-13 17:35:53 I don't get the obsession with the lab leak idea. If covid was some kind of supervirus I'd get it but it's less lethal than HIV and not as contagious as measles. It's bad because it's mostly a mild illness so folks underestimate it. This could have come from literally anywhere. 2021-06-12 17:47:02 natural experiments = observational studies + assumptions* ________________ * the assumption is your observational study is an experiment 2021-06-12 17:40:15 wow. https://t.co/GGYjXzDwxv https://t.co/zfMMh46cwt 2021-06-12 17:05:48 Lots of folks think data science is "just statistics" but a lot of data science is about making data accessible to non-experts. I once had a job where 99% of my time was spent crunching billions of observations into plots and explaining those plots to domain experts. 2021-06-12 15:59:58 I really do think a huge number of anti-CRT folks would prefer a world like that so it's confusing that people fight so much about this. Imagine not having to worry about being lumped in together with all the "white" people who did all those bad things in the past. 2021-06-12 15:59:57 If "black" and "white" and "race" in general are all just constructs that keep us divided then shouldn't we work together to dismantle these arbitrary categories so we can all just live our lives as individuals? 2021-06-12 15:59:56 I think a lot of anti-CRT people would agree that "white" isn't a very useful label. People are Irish or Italian or German heritage or whatever or better yet we are all just individuals that deserve dignity. "Black" and "white" are weird social constructs that somebody made up. 2021-06-12 14:20:01 @bengalsubahdar I agree that he seems to have a very binary version of consequentialism. I'm not sure if that's coming from his philosophy itself or from the fact that he judges the existing system as non-neutral i.e. not doing anything allows bad policies to continue and is thus immoral. 2021-06-12 13:54:21 Consequentialism has a long tradition in the West. It goes back to Jeremy Bentham (late 1700s) and John Stuart Mill (mid-1800s). It's also a cornerstone of Utilitarianism which is one of our main moral traditions. 2021-06-12 13:54:20 I think that Ibram Kendi is just a consequentialist. Consequentialism is an ethical theory that judges whether an action is right or wrong based on what its consequences are. By applying this to race, he concludes that all actions are either racist (wrong) or anti-racist (right). 2021-06-12 03:54:23 @David_desJ I think your comments goes to methodology i.e. how one might go about looking for a evidence of a bad design assumption in a system. But certainly you agree that it is possible to look at a system and search for the effects of bad design decisions in general, yes? 2021-06-12 03:50:35 @forward_human I agree. From a science perspective, you would want to proceed by identifying potential causal processes and quantifying them. From what I understand, there are a lot of people doing that in the field of AI ethics for instance. 2021-06-12 03:46:19 I applied and got turned down too. In my case, I didn't feel like I was famous enough but she certainly sounds like she is! https://t.co/dqJegn3Cnm 2021-06-12 03:42:44 @deonteleologist That video reminded me why I'm a skeptic on debate. They seemed to assume bad faith on your part which makes it hard to define any concepts that require effort from the listener. I think any "essentially disputed concept" (another thing I learned in the video) would require that. 2021-06-12 03:19:15 @deonteleologist Also, I really liked the rhetorical device of CRT through MLK quotes. That could be a really powerful essay (or tweet thread). 2021-06-12 03:13:34 @deonteleologist I got it from this bit of the youtube debate...although, I think you discussed it more later. I didn’t want to imply that what I got out of it was exactly what you said but I did want to acknowledge you. https://t.co/Kwbbhk5S2d 2021-06-12 02:18:26 A lot of anti-CRT folks seem to think saying "the system almost certainly has racist assumptions baked into it" is the same as saying "EVERYTHING is racist". This is binary thinking which is a cognitive bias that happens a lot when people feel threatened. 2021-06-12 02:18:25 I finally learned what CRT is. From what I understand, the idea is this: if you let people who assume black people are inferior create a social system then that social system will likely have the assumption that black people are inferior baked into it. This seems obviously true. 2021-06-12 01:10:27 Two of my followers just won Pulitzers! Congrats to @edyong209 and @meghara! The rest of you need to step it up. 2021-06-11 16:44:20 going to start insisting that the only logical way to pronounce the "g" in GAN is just like the "g" in generative to annoy machine learning people. https://t.co/gS7h0cODGI 2021-06-10 15:35:38 I have two masters and working on a PhD and in that time I’ve never had a black woman as a professor and only one black man. Forget about the tenure part. https://t.co/Hroj3ip4Rz 2021-06-07 16:20:55 Getting a stats degree has totally been worth it just in terms of allowing me to dunk on stuff like this. 2021-06-07 16:20:54 Let’s say there’s a hypothetical country where doing lots of stuff while black is illegal. In that purely totally hypothetical country *wink wink*, criminality would be heritable. https://t.co/r72xCWDhEA 2021-06-07 15:08:55 Hey folks! Sorry I haven't been posting much. I had some health stuff I was dealing with (and am still dealing with) but I'm slowly getting back to my old self! 2021-06-05 22:45:06 @robtibshirani data analyses whether those analyses are well-informed or not. I think given the increasingly diverse people doing data analysis that scolding people about bad statistics (which I'm guilty of myself) is not going to be a very effective strategy going forward. 2021-06-05 22:37:44 @robtibshirani I think that in an ideal world, people would do no data analysis at all rather than do a bad data analysis. This filter of "knowing-what-you're-doing" performs a gatekeeping function. Some of us might say a good and necessary one. Unfortunately, I think people will do... 2021-06-03 23:22:33 RT @EpiEllie: I am often asked how it is that I can talk openly about my work & 2021-06-03 22:59:06 *Axiom_of_Choice has entered the chat* https://t.co/m6FhPmDAJY 2021-06-03 15:24:00 The widespread use of bad statistical practices is unfortunate but it shouldn't be an excuse for gatekeeping. Everybody has the right to their own thoughts and everybody has the right to try to make sense of the world using numbers. 2021-06-03 14:23:00 I don't know who needs to hear this but a "thought experiment" isn't a real experiment. It's just a fancy way of saying you were playing pretend. 2021-06-03 00:16:01 I was thinking about how a lot of folks sacrifice their support networks in the name of capitalism and the American dream and then they end up with mental health problems from dealing with everything alone and then folks laugh at them and call them snowflakes. 2021-06-02 21:48:26 @wtgowers I think I know what’s going on here. https://t.co/0c8RI6GLyu https://t.co/Eq68FoC6yY 2021-06-02 16:27:39 Help! I’m living a lie. I talk about flipping coins. I say the probability of heads is 0.5 but I’ve never actually flipped a coin. I bluffed my way into a Harvard stats PhD and I still have no clue what happens when you flip a coin...and at this point, I’m too scared to find out. 2021-06-02 15:07:43 NEVER import everything! https://t.co/RUaocVnekO 2021-06-02 00:55:02 data science language fights be like https://t.co/4p8bOhJY0A 2021-05-29 16:07:54 @generativist Is there a backorder due to the microchip shortage? 2021-05-28 15:56:47 @The_Equationist I find it shows up whenever you say "Language X is better than language Y for tasks of category Z". Like software engineering is easier in R than Python or Python is worse for statistics than R. 2021-05-28 15:50:53 I don't get folks who try to shut down algorithm and programming language debates with "Haha. I just use whichever tool is the best tool for the job". How do you know which tool is the right tool if you never discuss which tools are good for what? 2021-05-28 15:24:06 Oh god. Is this a thing? Tell me this is NOT a thing. https://t.co/pqiPF5E2YG 2021-05-27 18:40:39 That’s a good point but it’s also a normal part of human reasoning. We imagine a parallel universe where we have a cookie. In that world, we deduce that we will be happier and then we make it happen. This might be a big leap philosophically but it’s also just how humans think. https://t.co/hBcNkPRTCS 2021-05-27 16:36:01 grad student and advisor https://t.co/zltxsS0BbS 2021-05-27 15:35:14 Frequentism is fundamentally a less philosophically ambitious approach to statistics than Bayesian statistics. 2021-05-27 15:35:13 Frequentist statistics is grounded in frequencies of events. Since all humans can (objectively?) observe events and count them, Frequentism starts out from a more simple, less philosophy-dependent position. 2021-05-27 15:35:12 My opinion on Bayesian statistics is it flows naturally from a Bayesian philosophical perspective but since no philosophy is universally accepted among humans, Bayesian statistics is deeply in conflict with how many people see the world. Whether this is good or bad, I don't know. 2021-05-26 23:16:23 Frequentist probabilities are facts. Bayesian probabilities are feelings. Facts DON’T CARE about your feelings. 2021-05-25 17:18:50 In terms of US politics, I think this issue cuts both ways. 2021-05-25 17:11:07 A lot of folks seem to believe that if you rob people of the words needed to describe what they want then those people will stop wanting it. This will never work. People will just invent new words. 2021-05-25 03:07:09 RT @kareem_carr: the more you know https://t.co/ATyd7X6bm8 2021-05-24 15:30:33 the existence of a p-value implies the existence of a poo-value. i will not be taking follow up questions at this time. 2021-05-24 14:22:38 the more you know https://t.co/ATyd7X6bm8 2021-05-24 02:07:36 lol. how did i not know this movie existed? https://t.co/d3M3kQTUxn 2021-05-23 23:58:27 spinach omelette for dinner. https://t.co/d6JZ6sb82R 2021-05-23 22:48:27 I just learned that 98% of our bodies are replaced every year! This is mind blowing to me. *We* are the ship of Theseus we’ve been waiting for. https://t.co/X4Rl0S5IuY 2021-05-23 19:56:46 RT @kareem_carr: Can you folks help me answer a really tough data science question? “Day-ta” or “dah-ta”? 2021-05-23 15:17:20 When we think of general artificial intelligences, I think we tend to assume they will be utilitarian because we know computers work by converting everything into numbers. I suspect most of our fears about an AI apocalypse are related to flaws in utilitarianism. 2021-05-23 01:23:24 Can you folks help me answer a really tough data science question? “Day-ta” or “dah-ta”? 2021-05-23 00:31:16 this week’s meal of the week was this surprisingly tasty version of baked beans. (i was trying to make it a little healthier and it ended up tasting pretty good!) https://t.co/PzuejoYfO6 2021-05-22 17:36:58 @SPilleron Oui! French is the non-English language I know the best...although, that’s not a high bar. 2021-05-22 17:33:24 R you sure? https://t.co/ElJ2lb0TGZ 2021-05-22 15:38:20 It kind of bugs me that in Twitter's current reboot of the verification system, they don't explicitly say that scientists ought to be verified. It really says something about where we are as a society that "brands" get a mention but not scientists or other technical experts. https://t.co/kufegy3ZsV 2021-05-22 15:24:33 I think it's only really feasible to ban p-values in the text of research articles but p-values will continue to used as rapid decision making tools in the internals of algorithms. People will then simply cite the algorithms without acknowledging that p-values have been used. 2021-05-22 15:05:31 Is "nothing" real or is it a social construct? 2021-05-20 17:39:05 @itsafronomics Have you been to L.A. Burdick in Cambridge? 2021-05-20 14:01:40 I see lots of Americans criticizing the CDC, the WHO and public health professionals for failures during the pandemic but I think they need to consider that a lot of other countries followed the exact same advice and did amazingly well. The plan can’t work if you don’t follow it. 2021-05-19 14:49:07 This looks super interesting. Maybe it won’t work but even a failure might generate interesting insight. I’m guessing the determinants of success will be money and to a lesser extent talent. https://t.co/O0ZKiB5JbA 2021-05-18 17:52:04 This is pretty cool! He links together a lot of my separate tweet threads into a single pdf. Worth checking out. I saved a copy of the pdf myself since he does a better job framing and contextualizing my ideas than I did. https://t.co/nmG2DXQJwG 2021-05-18 16:05:30 "a human stock market where you buy shares in the lives of real people, in order to control their decisions and watch the outcome" https://t.co/SZYWX9ZKxI 2021-05-18 00:59:21 somebody on twitter said machine learning is statistics because you don’t always have to do inference. pure prediction tasks count as statistics too. me, a statistician: https://t.co/dw4dkTD6oV 2021-05-17 14:42:40 @SamahAAbdelaal @bmmashat that’s what i thought then i tried this recipe. 2021-05-17 02:04:25 @AdamKates4 sure! https://t.co/nvTAXIxxli 2021-05-17 02:03:52 @bmmashat i got you fam. https://t.co/nvTAXIxxli 2021-05-17 02:02:46 @BreadDad3 tomato 2021-05-17 00:05:35 i put a little goat cheese in the bottom! 2021-05-17 00:05:00 i seem to be going through a cooking phase. https://t.co/Y6DlOLlzYQ 2021-05-16 17:13:53 i have avoided weighing in on the monty hall debate but i think you folks deserve to know the truth. this goes deep. https://t.co/xeR2iK6ceR 2021-05-16 00:29:54 @anoncept @willchernoff I think this is like saying “too much” can be specified as “5 or more” so “too much” is a scientific idea. It is true that a threshold can always be chosen but this skips over the main issue which is the subjectivity that goes into picking a threshold. 2021-05-16 00:05:29 @willchernoff I’d have to think about this more but at minimum, I think you need the concept to be centered on replicable, mind-independent phenomena. It’s hard to formulate “safety” in a mind-independent way. 2021-05-15 23:52:51 Nothing is safe or unsafe according to science because “safe” isn’t a scientific concept. Give me an actual probability or get out of my face. 2021-05-15 00:11:18 Breaking News! CDC announces vaccinated data scientists can now resume coding alone on their couch in sweatpants because they have no life and *not* as a precaution against spreading covid. 2021-05-14 23:05:53 this is account is officially pivoting from stats to food. https://t.co/mhOBmQxAEV 2021-05-14 02:06:56 my read on this is people are mad at nerds for ruling their lives for a year and folks are on these streets looking for payback. *slips off glasses and labcoat* "i think i saw a nerd over there. let's get him!" https://t.co/QihvenBCL8 2021-05-13 19:02:54 It's completely possible that the less people know about BBQ, the higher they rank the restaurant. When we compare measurements, we are often assuming that in all the ways that matter, the measurement device is the same. Sometimes that's a reasonable assumption but sometimes not. 2021-05-13 19:02:53 BBQ lovers. Don't despair! Let's apply some healthy data science skepticism. Think about how we measure restaurant quality, the local customer. We aren't measuring with the same yardstick. It's unlikely customer BBQ knowledge, preferences and demographics match in all locations. https://t.co/rBPNSJzPJ5 2021-05-13 16:15:48 RT @kareem_carr: how it started how it's going https://t.co/vsZ3FTPo9g 2021-05-13 02:35:50 oh wow. my mushroom children are delicious. can’t wait to tell my therapist about this. 2021-05-13 02:33:59 @ashbee i started growing them on saturday. so 4-5 days. 2021-05-13 02:24:41 a little butter, garlic, salt, pepper. not going to lie. i’m having mixed feelings about cooking and eating my children... https://t.co/BDTYKvNbiT 2021-05-13 02:18:03 apparently you can just buy mushroom growing kits on internet. these are called pink oysters. imma bout to fry these bad boys up. will keep you folks posted. https://t.co/zCcIe8PPpN 2021-05-13 02:09:16 how it started how it's going https://t.co/vsZ3FTPo9g 2021-05-12 19:35:49 @NateSilver538 I agree with your general thesis that the public has systematically different risk preferences from epis and so epis might not be the right primary decision makers but I think at least part of why epis differ is a more (not less) sophisticated understanding of the risks. 2021-05-12 18:55:29 A persistent source of misunderstanding during the pandemic has been the difference between acting out of concern for oneself vs out of concern for others. From an economic point of view, health experts might seem irrational but they are probably just acting in the common good. https://t.co/610U69wGh6 2021-05-12 16:21:00 OK folks, I just wanted to tap in really quick. I just got this feeling, man, that this summer is about to be a hot bayesian summer, you know? Take it how you want. 2021-05-12 15:53:22 @isbellHFh https://t.co/KqGr4AIXkh 2021-05-12 15:19:21 where’s the lie? https://t.co/zAlHe48XR0 2021-05-12 00:09:01 awkward. https://t.co/8gSGZ7SNEb 2021-05-11 23:20:00 i noticed something recently in academic paper writing. gen-x / older millenials: microsoft word younger millenials / gen-z: google docs boomers 2021-05-11 22:50:05 You’re on a first date with someone, and they tell you their favorite data analysis trick. You immediately leave. What’s the trick? 2021-05-11 15:12:57 me, a data scientist: https://t.co/SRzp7Nspor 2021-05-10 22:21:00 I'm ashamed to admit this. At my lowest point, I broke down and made several causal claims that were not fully supported by the available data. https://t.co/ZodBcKQHcr 2021-05-10 14:53:31 WE ARE SHORT STAFFED. PLEASE BE PATIENT WITH THE DATA SCIENTISTS WHO DID SHOW UP. NO-ONE WANTS TO CLEAN DATA ANYMORE. 2021-05-09 23:24:33 Happy mother’s day to every mom who has ever put their baby data into a spreadsheet or a plot. Happy Mother’s Day to all the data science and statistician moms (and all the other moms too)! 2021-05-09 14:42:23 I hate how much unnecessary self-comparison and competitiveness there is around coding and math. With jigsaw puzzles, folks get that puzzles are fun and it doesn't matter if other people are better at it than you. With technical puzzles, lots of folks just don't seem to get that. 2021-05-09 00:45:04 During the pandemic lots of us have noticed that many of our fellow citizens aren’t fully rational but spoiler alert, none of us are. This is why collective sense-making is important. What seems to be broken is our ability to learn from intelligent people who disagree with us. 2021-05-08 16:39:44 Lots of folks seem to think we have a social contract with dead scientists where we have to celebrate the smart ones even if they were awful. It's weird and borderline religious. Here's a crazy idea. What if our role models exemplified behavior we actually want people to copy??? 2021-05-08 15:22:00 Hot Takes 1. Just because some folks use statistics to do racist things doesn't make statistics itself racist 2. We don't need to celebrate dead racists just because they were good at math 3. Using statistics invented by a racist isn't a celebration of the racist 2021-05-08 14:21:00 Pick two: 1. Master Python 2. Master R 3. Keep your sanity 2021-05-08 02:37:29 RT @kareem_carr: People ask me about getting started with data science all the time. So I came up with three paths for self study: Easy, Me… 2021-05-08 01:38:50 @roderickgraham mute is simpler and they don’t even know you did it. lol. 2021-05-08 01:30:44 @rasmansa nah. just did it manual. 2021-05-08 01:23:43 just unblocked all 900+ people on my block list. do crimes. be free. 2021-05-08 00:21:05 RT @kareem_carr: People ask me about getting started with data science all the time. So I came up with three paths for self study: Easy, Me… 2021-05-07 23:45:28 lol. i don’t get a lot of chances to do bioinformatics jokes. 2021-05-07 23:44:19 One day before you know it, BAM! Your results will just be right there. https://t.co/pXREUSICHF 2021-05-07 23:37:57 me, a data scientist: there’s a growing perception that statistics and data science are the most important fields of the 21st century friend: who’s saying that? me: you hear that from a lot of people on social media friend: what people on social media? me: different people 2021-05-07 22:26:58 i’m not a big fan of allies. i hate the whole dynamic. makes me feel like a kid asking for an allowance. don’t use power on my behalf. GIVE me the power. lol. 2021-05-07 21:46:54 @lastpositivist https://t.co/UhjbuTsZqH 2021-05-07 15:22:14 Next I would try one of these books to get a solid foundation in statistics. Both are challenging! (I like Casella & 2021-05-07 15:22:13 HARD PATH. This is the hardest but the most complete path. First, you should master at least one college class worth of material in: - Calculus - Linear Algebra - Probability Theory - A statistical programming language like R Here are a few books I like https://t.co/Lnuztp1fOZ 2021-05-07 15:22:11 EASY PATH. On this path, you will get lots of practical skills but only an intuitive sense of the theory. I think the easiest way to start is to read a good data science book and get your hands dirty. I like to recommend "R for Data Science" for that. https://t.co/BlHcAOsxJX 2021-05-07 15:22:10 People ask me about getting started with data science all the time. So I came up with three paths for self study: Easy, Medium and Hard. Continue reading to hear about each path and see my book recommendations. 2021-05-07 14:04:53 let me get this straight. i need to read this book so i can know how to read this book. do you even hear yourself right now? https://t.co/Cjs7NjLkeY 2021-05-07 13:19:53 @mahrudsay @littmath @MBarany Where he says it's a stand-in for a whole worldview, I agree with that. I was also using it as a stand-in for a worldview in order to point out that worldview is wrong. I've learned that it's probably best to just attack the worldview directly rather than use these metaphors. 2021-05-07 12:54:30 @littmath So one is also saying "2+2=4" is also a true statement about the aggregation of ideas and subatomic particles and all sorts of other phenomena that can be formulated as discrete entities by the human mind. I tie this to data because more and more we are aggregating new things. 2021-05-07 12:51:21 @littmath The issue I see is a lot of people (possibly you right now) think "2+2=4" is a statement about mathematical objects but I have argued that we are almost always alternating between talking about the nature of physical objects or the nature of mental constructions when we say it. 2021-05-07 12:42:17 Anyways. Despite thinking "2+2=5" debate did help spread some good food for thought, I do agree the branding wasn't the best. It made a lot of folks needlessly upset about completely unrelated issues and probably isn't the best way of presenting those ideas. 2021-05-07 00:24:48 @JeffGrigg1 Fair enough but the local law lays out how much folks need to worry about that. The important point is it isn’t me. 2021-05-07 00:20:52 i love my home office https://t.co/BLuLdU1okd 2021-05-07 00:06:53 just seconds ago, i reached into the bowl for the last chip only to discover i had already eaten it. asking for thoughts and prayers at this time 2021-05-06 23:53:49 As we integrate data and algorithms into our lives, there are certain limitations on what can be done with numbers which I think are manifesting as political fights. Now more than ever, I think the public needs a realistic picture of the fundamental limitations of (data) science. 2021-05-06 23:33:55 If you look at books on chaos theory, complexity theory, network science etc, you often see a diverse collection of ideas presented. Linearity is a simple story. Non-linearity is a more complicated one because it can happen in multiple ways. 2021-05-06 23:04:27 I know folks are going to interpret this as me demanding that they do something different but you only need to do something different if you don't like dying. If you're cool then I am also cool. 2021-05-06 22:27:31 The experience of the pandemic has made me even more sure that the "2+2=5" debate was worth having. Millions of people still don't get that quantitative thinking doesn't mean linear thinking and this misunderstanding is literally killing us. 2021-05-06 16:17:00 Hey new followers. Let's mingle! Introduce yourself and tell everybody something statistics-related or not that's on your mind these days. I'll start. I'm Kareem, I'm PhD student and lately I've been excited about the possible links between deep learning and statistics. 2021-05-06 15:23:00 It's interesting to see the patterns in who has to think about this all the time and who doesn't have to think about it at all. https://t.co/u4njWccXQ6 2021-05-06 14:20:00 me writing the results section of my paper https://t.co/MSnKPL6mXd 2021-05-06 12:04:02 my life is so weird right now. https://t.co/rGiFLRszt5 2021-05-05 18:27:55 machine learning folks. you might not like it but this is peak performance. this is what an explainable model looks like. https://t.co/qBm4jb10M3 2021-05-05 16:53:31 Being a grad student in the middle of a pandemic is a special kind of hell. 2021-05-04 16:20:00 A lot of folks have trouble learning stats because they struggle with these two ideas: 1. Randomness is subjective because it depends on your level of knowledge. 2. Randomness is a fundamental aspect of existence because it contradicts the laws of physics to know everything. 2021-05-04 15:15:59 awkward. https://t.co/GhbTJIPp74 2021-05-04 14:05:38 recruiter: i found you on twitter and i just really wanted to reach out and connect me: lol. what about my twitter presence suggested to you that i'd be a good employee? 2021-05-04 13:31:05 it’s not a big conspiracy. it’s just how statistics works. lol. every few weeks, the american people relearn what conditional probability is only to forget seconds later. https://t.co/MWsZFsNg8V 2021-05-04 02:45:54 i'm thinking of starting an only fans. https://t.co/VxWvL36IV8 2021-05-04 02:17:46 me: *looks at my 30+ plants* me: me: me: yeah. no. sorry i'm physically incapable of reading this article https://t.co/zLXn1mozCd 2021-05-03 17:29:40 critical race theory is trending. cool. just remember 2+2=5 if and only if critical race theory is true. 2021-05-03 16:03:11 My favorite statistical distribution is the Dirichlet (pronunciation: deer-in-a-chalet) distribution. https://t.co/ZDDMSKwADQ 2021-05-03 15:31:32 just zoomed with a friend. wow. i'm really out of practice with talking to people i know and like personally. lol. 2021-04-30 15:40:00 controversial opinion: looking back, i think calculus had one good idea. the limit. and everything else was death by algebra. 2021-04-29 23:12:46 the world if bad statistics was punishable by death https://t.co/3b5c99VJAg 2021-04-29 23:10:26 RT @kareem_carr: Did you hear the one about the statistician that was nice to everybody except her previous boyfriend? She was conditional… 2021-04-29 16:22:02 Did you hear the one about the statistician that was nice to everybody except her previous boyfriend? She was conditionally mean. E[ Y | Ex ]. 2021-04-27 15:37:38 partial ignorance is bliss https://t.co/b8bSpQy1zd 2021-04-27 14:27:00 confidence intervals. more like *lack* of confidence intervals. lol. real data scientists don't need error bars. 2021-04-26 21:41:09 is this a scenario where the academic is working for free? because if so it’s actually good time management to not prioritize random unpaid side-work over your day job. https://t.co/72qhvlgONc 2021-04-24 16:27:12 the only official and correct order of operations https://t.co/s3FIjpcvQk 2021-04-24 16:07:08 RT @kareem_carr: @sarahcat21 People frequently make causal claims without valid proof of causality and often such claims are accepted as cr… 2021-04-24 03:52:24 @sarahcat21 People frequently make causal claims without valid proof of causality and often such claims are accepted as credible. Valid causal inference is hard. Being ignorant of your own bad causal assumptions allows you to make stronger claims so folks are incentivized to keep it simple. 2021-04-23 23:02:16 if you’re mad about this, wait until you hear why business people like machine learning so much https://t.co/8rlPd1MHDK 2021-04-23 17:40:02 @wtgowers For me, these anecdotes have the same status as secondhand anecdotes about perfect marriages. It could very well be the case that that such a marriage was perfect but how would we verify that? It sets up a potentially unrealistic standard that might not even be accurate. 2021-04-23 16:05:33 Unpopular opinion: Anecdotes like this hold science and math teaching back by presenting elite performance as an impenetrable mystery. Often, we don’t even know what really happened. Why emphasize these incidents if we can’t shed any light on how these performances were achieved? https://t.co/cpOr2PkOcT 2021-04-23 15:40:39 this is my favorite meme this year. the comments are amazing. https://t.co/3JXi3xzXmI 2021-04-22 23:44:52 IT’S NOT A JOKE. SERIOUS STUFF! https://t.co/3JXi3xzXmI 2021-04-22 19:45:19 @RobinRohwer https://t.co/gQ7vKAAIdx 2021-04-22 15:06:20 a very important message https://t.co/bhPjCdlDSz 2021-04-21 22:52:55 My mental health significantly improved when I went from: Needing people in the majority to valdiate my struggles with the lack of diversity and inclusion. to Believing my struggles were valid regardless of the stigmatizing beliefs of the people around me. https://t.co/pMHm9M28cw 2021-04-21 22:41:50 wow. just wow @christapeterso. you’re supposed to be one of the good ones. i expect this from @lastpositivist but not you. not you. https://t.co/L76jTDIVJY 2021-04-21 17:02:20 Who says calculus never comes up in regular life? f(x): total number of covid cases 1st derivative f'(x): number of new cases 2nd derivative f''(x): increase or decrease in new cases 2021-04-21 15:54:21 it was good (at first) https://t.co/Ktel5nYvuo 2021-04-21 11:03:32 @CleoHariMSc I like to recommend starting with this book https://t.co/b8OY6na98t 2021-04-20 23:43:39 In the book Animal Farm, Benjamin the Donkey says God gave him a tail to keep off the flies but he’d rather have no tail and no flies. I’d rather George Floyd be happy and alive. I’d rather no murder and no trial. 2021-04-20 16:01:16 Check out this courageous @washingtonpost article by epidemiologist @EpiEllie on what she got wrong during the pandemic! More scientists should be open to talking about both the successes and limitations of good science. https://t.co/1ZWTENFIjL 2021-04-20 15:27:25 @EpiEllie @washingtonpost Congrats! 2021-04-20 14:55:11 Everybody belongs in Data science 2021-04-20 13:16:19 @paarsec interesting. what four qualities do you use? 2021-04-19 18:04:23 hard jobs become easy with a little data science. https://t.co/52IGBEfCHW 2021-04-19 16:12:25 I saw a few instances of people tagging @TomChivers into hostile tweets. Please don't do that. I want to be about jokes and good vibes here. 2021-04-19 16:12:24 To be clear, I don't have anything personal against @TomChivers or science journalism. It's a GOOD article. It doesn't actually bother me if people think what I work on is obscure. https://t.co/UreAWffQJ7 2021-04-19 15:10:50 I’m not at all surprised that some students don’t want to risk being slowed down by the vaccine. 2021-04-19 15:10:49 Many profs don’t see how much students sacrifice for grades. Some folks avoid having real relationships so attachments don’t get in the way. It’s also why we care so much about micro aggressions. If you’re even 5% less effective because you have to deal with that, it’s too much! https://t.co/aH90CSPn8r 2021-04-19 14:42:49 @itsafronomics @Kennedy_School @NSFGRFP @FordFoundation Would love to. Ping me in the Fall and we can up a time. 2021-04-19 14:29:01 @itsafronomics @Kennedy_School @NSFGRFP @FordFoundation Congrats Anna. Amazing! 2021-04-18 23:27:50 check out this obscure math theorem. only a few know about this. https://t.co/5E3dKPQYUE 2021-04-18 18:01:51 @theashleyxavier I’m developing a method that finds circadian patterns in cellular expression data and is able to read the state of the circadian clock from a sample taken at a single time point. 2021-04-18 17:13:08 You might gently ask for tips on what to search for in the literature but that’s it. Citations are for slides and papers not shutting down arguments that you disagree with. 2021-04-18 17:13:07 I think when folks on twitter ask for a citation, they think they’re copying how scientists talk but I think that it would come off super weird and hostile to challenge another scientist for a citation in a regular conversation. 2021-04-18 16:40:00 The Gaurdian chose violence today. “...their accuracy depends on context and the theories of a 18th-century cleric” “...mathematical anomaly known as Bayes’s theorem” https://t.co/bsZSyTzGoM 2021-04-18 15:37:18 twitter is people watching for introverts. you get to see people's thoughts and you don't have to see the actual people. it's perfect. 2021-04-18 14:52:58 For some reason, lots of folks on social media assume my research is on social justice. It’s actually focused on the analysis of mRNA data. Spoiler alert: these are the same thing!!! https://t.co/fIQWvuR5K3 2021-04-18 14:18:55 helping folks with their bad data analysis be like... https://t.co/nYMiYmVc2d 2021-04-18 02:28:55 @rasmansa It only gets worse. 2021-04-17 15:37:30 now that a few months have passed, *what* the heck was that whole "2+2=5" twitter drama about? wrong answers only. 2021-04-16 16:38:18 hey, me and my co-author saw you from across the bar and we really like your vibe. would like to come analyze our data for us? 2021-04-16 15:26:01 @jrphirsch sure. https://t.co/NbLJ6CltZj 2021-04-16 15:23:49 somebody said my office looks like some kind of alchemist workshop. really? i don’t see it. https://t.co/qgnHl3kYCW 2021-04-16 15:12:22 @sarahradz_ I should! 2021-04-16 15:11:25 RT @kareem_carr: decided to crack open the windows, turn on my winter playlist and set up my desktop fireplace. https://t.co/R3O2NX27ch 2021-04-16 15:08:16 there are other shapes so search the brand for more options! 2021-04-16 15:07:20 here's the link. it's pretty simple. just a concrete bowl that you can pour rubbing alcohol into. (i'm not getting any money to share this. unfortunately. . ) https://t.co/VOq4X4tTg2 2021-04-16 15:02:45 decided to crack open the windows, turn on my winter playlist and set up my desktop fireplace. https://t.co/R3O2NX27ch 2021-04-16 14:38:06 live footage from boston. lol. why do i even live here? https://t.co/zKBsSNaac4 2021-04-16 00:45:11 @dingding_peng Sorry you are getting all this ugliness. Speaking from experience, even though their hate is directed at you, it says much more about everything that's wrong with them. 2021-04-15 23:45:13 We can argue about it if we want but "data science" is whatever the folks with the money say it is. The market is the one that decides. 2021-04-15 23:37:57 (estimating the rate of change of an exponentially increasing real world quantity would make me feel sickly!) 2021-04-15 23:37:56 listening to this rap song. is this our time? are statisticians finally cool now!? https://t.co/Hp9rB6gIoj 2021-04-15 14:50:03 @dataandme "note to self: start urban adventure racing" ... you're the best. 2021-04-15 14:21:37 me, a data scientist, neutrally analyzing my data and passively accepting the results of each of my data analyses wherever they end up leading. https://t.co/xilVn5W4H4 2021-04-15 00:44:56 If you don't know about covariates, can't give more than one definition of what probability is, aren't familiar with confounding, conditioning on a collider, generalizability, transportability and so on...I would maybe leave this one alone. 2021-04-15 00:44:55 PSA: When you say "there were 6 cases in 6.8 million doses therefore we can expect about 1 in a million incidents going forward", you're doing a bad statistical estimation in your head and statisticians (like me) can give you a million reasons how this can go wrong. 2021-04-14 22:01:43 @rajiinio @Berkeley_EECS @beenwrekt @red_abebe Congrats! That’s awesome! 2021-04-14 15:54:23 when you start tweeting again after a break, twitter doesn't show your tweets to as many people initially. i like to pretend that twitter's mad at me for ghosting. 2021-04-14 15:29:34 I've been observing how these three groups interact during the pandemic and the answer is "not well". 2021-04-14 15:29:33 Most folks seem to agree with the Enlightenment idea that we should use human reasoning to find truth but we seem to split into three camps on what that means exactly. These camps are... 2021-04-14 15:04:22 A lot of these discussions seem to be bringing out academia's authoritarian streak with calls to limit the speech of non-experts. Unfortunately, we don't have that much power. (Powerless authoritarianism. How's that supposed to work? ) 2021-04-14 15:04:21 This seems like the right take to me. I think we experts need to think about how we're going to relate in social context where we can't fully control who society chooses as a credible source and where society often doesn't choose us. https://t.co/SAGjnOPCZQ 2021-04-14 14:56:31 started watching this youtube video called "mathematical challenges to darwin’s theory of evolution". i don't know what i was expecting. anyways. two minutes in a guy says "there's very little disagreement about what a species is". had to stop it there. 2021-04-14 14:37:52 There are more than 20 definitions of a species. You might say it's a group of animals that can produce fertile offspring. OK. How does genetic distance factor in? What about asexual animals? What about animals that could reproduce in theory but have never done so in practice? 2021-04-13 17:39:32 RT @EpiEllie: The hardest part of doing research is keeping everyone funded, so here’s my semi-regular reminder that you can buy t-shirts,… 2021-04-13 16:39:05 Looking forward to reading it! https://t.co/WZWhdGcl3t 2021-04-12 22:35:58 omg. just finished my taxes. https://t.co/f7GF5YxcLR 2021-04-12 00:06:32 Even if you’re fully vaccinated the CDC strongly recommends that you comment your code and use some kind of version control for the safety of yourself and those closest to you. 2021-04-11 23:32:28 @TedPavlic That's interesting. Why didn't the students want Stats on their degrees? What history are they worried about specifically? 2021-04-11 22:27:21 For me, “data scientist” was a way to communicate to hiring managers that: 1. I wanted to work as an applied statistician but didn’t have a degree in statistics 2. I was ok working in a software engineering team but wasn’t an expert and didn’t want that to be my whole job 2021-04-11 15:37:25 data is infrastructure. 2021-04-10 00:28:19 When I talk about p-values, I get a lot of folks saying don’t use them. Looks like lots of folks use p-values (80% of the folks who answered yes/no), they’re just less vocal about it. https://t.co/Qzml9dmS0O 2021-04-09 19:37:24 RT @kareem_carr: Hey new followers, I have an Instagram. Follow me on insta for a different side of me from Twitter. https://t.co/gicR0t5U… 2021-04-09 13:09:29 RT @kareem_carr: Do you use p-values in your research? 2021-04-09 02:13:56 Hey new followers, I have an Instagram. Follow me on insta for a different side of me from Twitter. https://t.co/gicR0t5UKg 2021-04-09 01:28:55 In all fairness though, having a large public dataset that everybody uses as a benchmark is a good practice from tech which is underutilized in traditional science. 2021-04-09 01:23:42 nice to see tech folks normalizing carefully collecting data with their scientific question in mind. who would have thought this would be needed? oh yeah. statisticians, social scientists and health scientists. https://t.co/npj64NUSCs 2021-04-08 19:27:23 How do you folks use Linkedin? Currently I only link with somebody if - I think it's likely they would recommend me for a job - I'm willing to vouch for them for a job - I'd go to them for career advice Generally, I don't follow complete strangers. Am I doing it right? 2021-04-08 19:07:02 Do you use p-values in your research? 2021-04-08 15:35:18 @isbellHFh i think cool charles with the combover and frosted tips would like my machine takes. 2021-04-08 15:31:21 all that effort learning linear algebra knowledge is finally paying off. lol. 2021-04-08 15:21:18 i want to be mad but this algorithm is basically performing the projection of obama into the subspace of all white people which is objectively funny. https://t.co/34d7bUARDm 2021-04-08 14:03:49 What’s one statistics/data science opinion that has you looking like this? https://t.co/SP5fQnbx9Y 2021-04-08 13:01:44 RT @kareem_carr: come with me if you want to live (a life full of statistics and data science) https://t.co/DaFcifm2Ys 2021-04-07 23:55:30 come with me if you want to live (a life full of statistics and data science) https://t.co/DaFcifm2Ys 2021-04-07 18:34:01 RT @EpiEllie: Yay, Pfizer! https://t.co/PCqQF7ujDS 2021-04-07 18:04:17 @EpiEllie Congrats! 2021-04-07 15:18:03 me, a harvard student: when dr cornel west walked by while i was working on my assignment, did i go over and say hello? no i continued doing my homework like a giant nerd. https://t.co/Q5LaLGFULh 2021-04-06 23:01:52 69. nice. https://t.co/eec9hiSnE4 2021-04-06 17:15:21 @daniel_egan Yes but nature is 100% OK with us dying if it doesn't work out. 2021-04-06 17:09:08 I personally think it's an extremely bad idea to genetically modify your kids based on what is likely pure statistical noise but that's just me. 2021-04-06 16:58:49 I’m not at all worried that gene editing will increase the IQ of the rich. As a statistician, I can confidently say most of the statistics people use to analyze genes and IQ are terrible. We barely understand genetic systems. Modifying human intelligence is far out of our league https://t.co/65CstETibZ 2021-04-06 14:50:15 Somebody sent me a clip where a Youtuber with 37k followers mentions me by name, quotes from my profile in Popular Mechanics magazine, says Harvard is teaching 2+2=5 and implies I'm a Chinese Communist Party pawn who's trying to enslave Americans. I want whatever he's smoking. 2021-04-05 22:34:45 A lot of folks need more statistics in their life and they have no clue. If you've ever not believed a number (like a covid death rate) because you didn't think the sample it came from was representative, that was a statistics problem! Statistics is how you fix that! 2021-04-05 02:21:34 I wanted to clarify that E[x] is statistics notation for the average of x. The E stands for the “expected value”. So E[x] is the “expected value of x”. We say “expected” because the average is basically what you should expect if you try something lots of times. 2021-04-05 01:25:45 This is why it's extremely important to understand the relationships in the data and why "learning from the data" or being "data-driven" isn't enough when your data doesn't come from real experiments that were designed to generate the right kind of information. 11/11 2021-04-05 01:25:44 When people collect data and blindly learn whatever relationships are in the data, they can never be sure that what they're learning is what they intend to learn. They're implicitly making potentially false assumptions about the causal relationships in the data. 10/11 https://t.co/UypZifhkIE 2021-04-05 01:25:43 This issue is called confounding. Confounding happens whenever we compare two things and neglect a third variable that could be driving the difference. 8/11 2021-04-05 01:25:42 What's happening is when we learned feelings from the data, we implicitly defined the "true value" as people's actual feelings. If we don't care about racism then we should have defined it as people's actual feelings excluding racism. 7/11 https://t.co/MgAKrwKHju 2021-04-05 01:25:41 In this example, an amazing thing happens. Our algorithm learns racism! It learns that in general people have negative feelings about certain minorities. Many people will claim the algorithm is malfunctioning but it's not. It's seems to be learning people's actual feelings. 5/11 https://t.co/jk7CjmK20L 2021-04-05 01:25:40 The example I'm going to talk about is an algorithm that learns how to measure feelings based on text. We call this measurement a "sentiment score". 3/11 2021-04-05 01:25:39 Let's start by learning about statistical bias. Statistical bias is a measure of how well a guessing algorithm is at guessing. It's very straightforward. The bias is the average difference between what an algorithm guesses a value is and what that value actually is. 2/11 https://t.co/W45Pjnh92x 2021-04-05 01:25:38 This thread walks you through a concrete example of how an algorithm can learn racism. It uses some math but only the minimum amount of math possible and has lots of pictures. It is *very* accessible. If that sounds like your thing read on. 2021-04-04 17:48:38 Nobody can tell me these folks didn't value education. I looked into so many eyes and I felt the love and appreciation for what I had done educationally and what they hoped I would do. 6/6 2021-04-04 17:48:37 Black people were literally congratulating me in the streets as I walked passed. Black people that I didn't know were honking their car horns. It clearly meant a lot to all of these people who were probably on their way to work or doing errands. 3/6 2021-04-04 17:48:36 I recently saw some reporting by a white conservative journalist which alleges that black Americans don't value education and I wanted to share my personal experience with that as a non-American black man. In 2018, I graduated with a masters in Biostatistics from Harvard. 2021-04-04 17:22:10 Another thing I got wrong about the pandemic was I assumed America would realize that maximizing profits for shareholders wasn't the most sensible use of resources during a global natural disaster. 2021-04-04 15:44:26 gotta stick to your principles https://t.co/DZlG4TSOZL 2021-04-03 23:11:17 What I got wrong about the pandemic is I assumed the public would want to hear more from people with public health doctorates and other experts. I learned that the public actually wants to hear from knowledgeable people whom they trust and connect with which isn’t the same thing. 2021-04-03 20:08:42 Wrong. https://t.co/sVGCyXkgpt https://t.co/qjtwWZgtoa 2021-04-03 18:19:18 At the time, I was learning really complicated mathematical and technical stuff. It was hard and I was the only black man and mostly working on my own. I couldn’t help but think not being able to work a faucet confirmed all my worst fears that I wasn’t smart enough to be there. 2021-04-03 18:15:04 It didn’t always happen but it happened a lot. People would come in, wash their hands and go out. I would think “oh maybe this one is broken” and try another one. It wouldn’t work for me. It really made me feel really stupid. 2021-04-03 18:00:01 Years ago, I was struggling to prove myself in a mostly white field. I remember feeling defeated whenever I failed to get restroom sensors to work. How dumb do you have to be to not know how to use a faucet? It was *years* before I learned the sensors didn't work on dark skin. 2021-04-03 17:06:00 Bad statistics kills. It can mean approving harmful drugs, governments misjudging pandemics, cancer patients losing valuable time to useless treatments. As a statistician, I could chose to demonize folks who use bad statistics but I don't because it's both unkind and ineffective. 2021-04-03 16:05:00 We say time flies but the expression comes from the latin tempus fugit meaning time flees. “Flies” makes it sound like it’s nothing personal. Time is just on to bigger and better things. “Flees” makes it sound like we're an abusive ex and time is desperate to escape us. 2021-04-03 15:05:00 Unpopular opinion: Algorithmic bias is at least partly addressable through a better understanding of data. Claims that it’s fully addressable through data or that it can’t be addressed at all through data are both extremist views. Both are misrepresentations of the truth. 2021-04-03 14:02:00 None of my code is commented. Every day I choose violence. 2021-04-03 00:44:18 Someone tweeted about a person who had died so I went to the dead person's profile. "Follows you" it said which triggered a wave of sadness. This is the second time I've discovered a follower because they died. Life is so short and the connections we make are so fleeting. 2021-04-03 00:20:41 Whenever humans perform a task, we unconsciously ask ourselves if it's the right thing to do. When we replace people with machines, we think we're exactly replicating human performance but we aren't because we often lose those moral computations on which our civilization depends. 2021-04-03 00:04:43 believe or not, for most of my data scientist career, i was known as “the python guy”. *opens rstudio and sighs* oh how far the mighty have fallen. 2021-04-02 23:27:58 @sheilaisbell @isbellHFh I clicked in to say this. 2021-04-02 16:49:01 @MyKo101AB Ooh. I think this works. Thanks! 2021-04-02 15:45:19 for the folks saying “drop=F” ... i’m not indexing anything. The indexing is happening inside of the function i’m using. 2021-04-02 15:36:18 R can be so frustrating! Lol. I'm running a function that normally does this: matrix -> but when the input has 1 column does this: matrix with 1 column -> so now I need to write a function whose only purpose is to undo this nonsense. 2021-04-02 14:45:14 @allisons I’m actually seriously thinking about a statistics coaching business. 2021-04-02 14:32:00 ok. i'll bite. how do i get that sweet machine learning money? 2021-04-02 14:01:00 i'm not sure enough people get this but people can have lots of opinions about life and still not be political. "political" implies you want to join, organize, campaign, do things and a lot of folks (like me) are just not wired that way. we want to focus on fixing our own lives. 2021-04-02 00:22:00 The counterargument to the WORDS MEAN THINGS argument is this. I can say I had a coke at lunch and my friend can hear I had a coke at lunch but we both understand "coke" actually means "pepsi" and we're both happy with the quality of our communication and the world doesn't end. 2021-04-01 23:21:00 I want to come clean. My memes are all a fraud perpetrated with the backing of shadowy forces within Big Statistics for the sole purpose of selling you more statistics. This conspiracy goes all the way to the top. I will be naming names. The names of the persons behind it all are 2021-04-01 16:31:31 @quantumlandbook Wise words. 2021-04-01 16:15:00 I think the major difference between Frequentists and Bayesians is Frequentists think it's OK to let your model "believe" things you know to be false if it leads to the correct model behavior and Bayesians don't. I think that's why debates get so intense. They're ethics debates. 2021-04-01 16:04:43 @itamarst Thanks! I've been struggling to find the words for this concept for a while. 2021-04-01 15:42:01 I hope you found this thread informative. If you would like to support this kind of content, follow me and also like and retweet the thread. 2021-04-01 15:42:00 People who take an instrumental rationality approach tend to focus on the outcomes of an algorithm. They would ask, "Does the behavior of the algorithm impact races differently?" They would define bias as the tendency for an algorithm to create unfair social conditions. 5/7 2021-04-01 15:41:59 Epistemic rationality is defined as the part of rationality which involves achieving accurate beliefs about the world. Instrumental rationality is the art of choosing and implementing actions that steer the future toward outcomes that you want. 3/7 2021-04-01 15:41:58 As a black man, I'm concerned about the tendency for algorithms to exhibit what looks like racial bias. As a statistician, I'm naturally drawn to investigate why this happens But what is "bias"? Surprisingly, the answer depends on what you think it means to be "rational". 1/7 https://t.co/xZDB9bZK0f 2021-04-01 14:55:18 @ctitusbrown https://t.co/7wdTt0qKNT 2021-04-01 14:51:31 also. i see a lot of likes but not a lot of retweets on this one. 2021-04-01 14:47:00 just realized why academic twitter is so miserable all the time. because everybody's following multiple people they hate for work reasons. 2021-04-01 14:16:39 @JonMinton https://t.co/1CMOcIF0IY 2021-04-01 14:04:00 This tweet is a subtweet of all tweets that aren't subtweets of themselves. 2021-04-01 13:09:20 @anjacks0n One must assume things about the measurement process. Yes. I think that quite often in data analysis, we don't think enough about that stage and we make implicit assumptions. I'm saying that we should work to make those assumptions explicit and verify their correctness. 2021-04-01 13:02:32 @SherryEmery @SDCollab @brsepulvado Thanks. I appreciate it. 2021-04-01 13:01:47 @ncibotu Thanks Niko! 2021-04-01 12:38:49 @anjacks0n Great question. Maybe I need a better phrase for this but I mean the process by which the observations are selected and enter the dataset. Maybe I should say "data aggregation process" or "dataset creation process". 2021-04-01 11:47:06 @cmilesb Thank you! 2021-04-01 11:46:50 @rmcomplexity Thanks so much! 2021-04-01 11:46:08 @StevenMeyer17 Thanks. I won’t. Just gets emotionally exhausting sometimes. 2021-04-01 11:45:09 @unitepangaea Thanks! Glad you find them useful! 2021-04-01 11:44:33 @SmilesbyPayet Thanks! 2021-04-01 11:42:43 @petevermeer 2021-04-01 11:42:24 @ve3hw I try my best. Thank you. 2021-04-01 11:41:43 @JenniferDMoss Thanks so much for sharing that. I really appreciate it. 2021-04-01 11:06:32 @frithjofthinks Decisions related to data collection, data analysis and application of the resulting model to new data. 2021-04-01 01:04:38 I hope you found this thread informative. If you would like to support this kind of content, follow me and also like and retweet the thread. 2021-04-01 01:04:37 We can ask how much they affect the behavior of the model and we can even modify the model to factor in the use of race and gender to the exact degree that we deem them necessary. There is one *big* caveat to this... 5/7 2021-04-01 01:04:36 To fix the "bias due to causal assumptions", we need to fix all 3 smaller biases. At that point, if your model fits the data well then it should be a very close match to the world. In this case, correlation IS causation and we can say the inputs CAUSE the outputs. 3/7 https://t.co/PKLIXgdexT 2021-04-01 01:04:35 - Data selection bias: you need an accurate mathematical model of the data creation process - Statistical bias: you need good statistics - Bias due to generalization: you need an accurate mathematical model of the observations in the data and in the target population 2/7 2021-04-01 01:04:34 Want to know what kinds of bias are fixable with statistics and how? Read on... This is a simple mental map of how different biases affect the process of using algorithms to make changes to the physical world. The way we can fix each bias is as follows... https://t.co/ny1VDGmK4Y 2021-03-31 16:17:58 I don't mind feedback on my threads but it really sucks when folks are jerks about it, don't acknowledge the work that goes into them and repeat the same negative feedback hundreds of times. It's super demotivating. At some point ignoring the feedback becomes a self-care issue. 2021-03-31 15:32:35 @Grady_Booch Perhaps this addresses your concern. https://t.co/TQiTjdZNjB 2021-03-31 15:29:11 @roderickgraham I put the answer to you as a reply tweet to the first tweet. Seemed like others might have the same questions. 2021-03-31 15:28:11 Like folks will say "We use algorithms to provide the best healthcare" and mean: 1. a family of models (regression, deep learning, etc) 2. a way of fitting those models (iterative scheme, matrix algebra, etc) 3. a particular collection of python code 4. a fitted model they have. 2021-03-31 15:15:00 When people say "algorithms", they mean at least four different things: 1. the assumptions and description of the model 2. the process of fitting the model to the data 3. the software that implements fitting the model to the data 4. The output of running that software 2021-03-31 15:09:10 @thos_jones @WynekenHenry i have my ways. 2021-03-31 14:21:22 damn it, R! https://t.co/9cPymk1UJS 2021-03-31 02:23:50 @databoydg The substance of the critiques seem to me to be sociological, psychological and even political. Although interesting, I’m neither a psychologist, a sociologist nor a politician. I defer to those that are. None seem to speak to the statistics which is what I was talking about. 2021-03-31 02:03:20 @databoydg I think we are just going in circles at this point. I think we are just going to have to agree to disagree. Thanks for the interesting debate. 2021-03-31 01:55:14 @databoydg I'm not using "bias" the way you're using it. You don't have to use my terminology but I don't have to use yours either. No offense but it's bad faith to try to win the argument by pretending we mean the same thing when you know we don't. 2021-03-30 23:48:34 I was a little shocked. This is just not how academic discussions work in statistics. We try to be clear about our terms but we aren't trying to define things in ways that counter perceived political adversaries*. Maybe this is normal in other sciences(???) but I was blindsided. 2021-03-30 23:48:33 Many insisted on "whitesplaining" both math and racism to me a black person with an MSc in pure mathematics from one of the best math schools in the US. (This happens to me a lot on here by the way). 2021-03-30 23:48:32 John argues that I was attacked because I'm proposing a solutions-oriented approach. I can definitely find tweets where my critics were saying one of the "dangerous" myths I was promoting was that there were fixes for bias in algorithms. https://t.co/Acdqe2PPsF 2021-03-30 23:48:31 Jon (@jonst0kes) wrote a thoughtful article about this weekend's events. I don't think he's a fan of "woke" politics but he's pretty good about not making his views the main focus of the piece. "On Saturday, March 27, Kareem Carr stepped on a...landmine" https://t.co/AkLLl5DNwg https://t.co/5xMWuDhHez 2021-03-30 14:10:42 nobody: still nobody: physicists: check out my grand unified theory of how penguins poop https://t.co/UQOT3CQ3DU 2021-03-29 22:43:05 “it’s alright. my code is ugly too.” https://t.co/MwuWazX2D1 2021-03-29 17:56:36 Hey new followers! Just wanted you to know I have an insta. I just spent a lot of money on camera stuff and I'll be posting more insta content soon. So go follow me! https://t.co/d3pr817uQS 2021-03-29 14:04:22 ## converts to float ## as.float(“Ever Given”) # we did it! 2021-03-29 01:24:01 nobody: absolutely nobody: me, a data scientist: we need to convert that "boat" to a float 2021-03-28 12:22:33 I think their concerns about fairness are valid but it’s not at all what I was talking about. 2021-03-28 12:21:10 They see an algorithm as “biased” if it has tendency to create unequal outcomes. I’m using bias in the statistical sense. Basically, I’m talking about how to create a colorblind algorithm that doesn’t use race in its decision making. 2021-03-28 12:09:15 Oof. This thread is doing numbers. There are a few comments disagreeing with this thread. One thing to keep in mind as you read them. As far as I can tell, they are misinterpreting what I said because they’re using a different definition of bias. 2021-03-28 01:02:48 how it really works https://t.co/UinCkocv9S 2021-03-27 18:12:58 This is a subtle point that many don't realize. Modeling data is an evolutionary process. The modeler selects the model that meets their needs from the space of all possible models. This selection process is a sneaky source of bias which goes beyond the data and the algorithms. 2021-03-27 17:55:23 In the past, the public didn't trust stats at all. They thought statisticians were just a bunch of liars. In response, statisticians became obsessed with maintaining good standards and calling out bad stats. So be patient with grumpy statisticians. It comes from a good place! 2021-03-27 17:14:47 Lots of folks seem to think covid was made in a lab because they think it's unnaturally deadly...but it's not. Super deadly viruses don't spread much because it's obvious when people have them. Covid is special because it's mostly weak as hell until it's not. 2021-03-27 16:44:35 One thing I want to make clear is I don't think fixing the biases in the data will address all the issues with gender and race discrimination in AI algorithms. Some people naively think this and it's almost certainly wrong. 2021-03-27 16:13:52 @KathleenACreel I'm not sure. It does seem that statistically, there will be a limitation on how much information is contained in a numerically smaller group. So I would identify this kind of bias as originating in the data i.e. the original choices about whom to observe. 2021-03-27 16:03:51 Some caveats on "algorithms don't create the bias": 1. I'm assuming people aren't biased in how they made the algorithm. I think this type of bias falls into the typical structural biases we see in society and isn't tech specific so I didn't address it in this thread. 2021-03-27 15:12:26 I hope you found this thread informative. If you would like to support this kind of content, follow me and also like and retweet the thread. 2021-03-27 15:12:25 Many companies make massive profits from mathematical models which contain gender and race bias so one could argue that they have some ethical responsibility to make good faith attempts to address these biases. 6/9 2021-03-27 15:12:24 While race and gender bias in algorithms *is fixable*, the current fixes aren't easy. They require us to understand and then mathematically model the processes that generate the biases in the data in the first place. 3/9 2001-01-01 01:01:01

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