ct_bergstrom

@ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org

I am a biology professor at the University of Washington. I study how information flows in biology, science, and society.

I wrote a book: Calling Bullshit: http://tinyurl.com/fdcuvd7b

I love ravens and crows.

he/him

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

ct_bergstrom, (edited ) to random

This week, Science published a stunningly irresponsible news story entitled "Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common" and claiming that upward of 30% of the scientific literature is fake.

https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-scientific-papers-are-alarmingly-common

Below, the first two paragraphs of the story.

Headline and intro notwithstanding, the story itself later notes that the detector doesn't actually work and flags nearly half of real papers as fake. Does the reporter just not understand that?

h/t @Hoch

ct_bergstrom, to random

Ah yes, of course. I've been trying to figure out who the fuck to blame.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4057045-catch-22-scientific-communication-failures-linked-to-faster-rising-seas/

ct_bergstrom, to random

I wanted to consolidate a few thoughts on google, misinformation, large language models, enshittification, and the fate of the web as we know it.

It started when Carl Zimmer shared this remarkable example of Google being fooled by machine-generated bullshit online.

ct_bergstrom, to random

When it imploded, the Titan was at way higher pressures than Venus's 92 ATM so I'd totally trust this longtermist dipshit to keep me safe in a 900 degree F sulfuric acid sea thirty million miles from earth.

ct_bergstrom, to random

One of the decisive moments in my understanding of #LLMs and their limitations was when, last autumn, @emilymbender walked me through her Thai Library thought experiment.

She's now written it up as a Medium post, and you can read it here. The value comes from really pondering the question she poses, so take the time to think about it. What would YOU do in the situation she outlines?

https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/thought-experiment-in-the-national-library-of-thailand-f2bf761a8a83

ct_bergstrom, to science
  1. “Imagine we land a space probe on one of Jupiters’ moons, take up a sample of material, and find it is full of organic molecules. How can we tell whether those molecules are just randomly assembled goo or the outcome of some evolutionary process taking place on the planet?”

#science #scicomm #assemblytheory #exobiology

ct_bergstrom, (edited ) to random

AITA, academic publishing edition.

Journal sends a review back to me because as reviewer I did not run the code and replicate the results.

My reply: "As an unpaid anonymous peer reviewer who handles probably 30 manuscripts a year, I am absolutely not in the position of running and evaluating code any more than I am in the position of running gels to evaluate lab results. If this is important to you, I suspect you can find a consultant who will do it at a reasonable rate."

Am I the asshole?

ct_bergstrom, (edited ) to random

An opioid expert from Texas A&M gave a guest lecture and mentioned that Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick’s policies were costing lives. Within hours, Patrick’s office got her suspended, formally censured, and nearly fired.

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/07/25/texas-a-m-professor-opioids-dan-patrick/

ct_bergstrom, to random

Fledgling just a few hours out of the nest.

ct_bergstrom, to random

My daughters and I are feeding cows 10,000 pounds of macadamia nuts each and that's what makes us so relatable and makes it so clear we don't need to be taxed at 95+ percent of our income.

ct_bergstrom, to random

It's not religion that is driving the resurgent moral panic about LBGTQ people in the USA. You don't get a 15% shift beliefs in a year due to growing religious sentiment.

It's cynical opportunists trying to ride to power on populist sentiment by delegating and demonizing an outgroup.

Fuck every one of them.

ct_bergstrom, (edited ) to random

My colleague Kevin Gross and I have a new preprint up on the arXiv.

Just for fun, rather than a simple text explainer, a thread with some slides for a talk I'm giving at https://www.icssi.org/ tomorrow.

Here's the paper itself: Rationalizing risk aversion in science. https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13816

ct_bergstrom, to random

Must suck to realize that there are some forms of epistemic grounding that you and your pals can't simply purchase and torch to the ground.

ct_bergstrom, to random

Well this sort of sucks. An online vendor is using my photographs in their "Crows" 2024 calendar without permission.

Also, the second photo is a raven, not a crow.

ct_bergstrom, to ChatGPT

It is absolutely astounding to me that we are still earnestly entertaining the possibility that and more broadly have a role in scientific writing, manuscript review, experimental design, etc.

The training data for the question below are massive. It's a very easy question if you're trained on the entire internet.

Question: What teams have never made it to the World Series?

Correct answer: Seattle Mariners.

Now, four responses from GPT4.

NB: The Nationals won it all in 2019.

Which teams have never played in the world series?As of my last update in January 2022, the following MLB teams had never appeared in the World Series: 1. Seattle Mariners: The Mariners have been in the league since 1977 and, despite having several competitive seasons and star players like Ken Griffey Jr. and Ichiro Suzuki, they have not made it to the World Series. 2. San Diego Padres: While the Padres have actually appeared in the World Series twice (in 1984 and 1998), they haven't won a championship. 3. Texas Rangers: The Rangers, who originated as the Washington Senators before moving to Texas in 1972, have been to the World Series twice (in 2010 and 2011) but have not won. 4. Milwaukee Brewers: The Brewers have made one World Series appearance in 1982 but did not win. 5. Tampa Bay Rays: The Rays, who began play in 1998, have appeared in the World Series twice (in 2008 and 2020) but haven't won the title. 6. Colorado Rockies: The Rockies, who began play in 1993, made it to the World Series in 2007 but were defeated by the Boston Red Sox. Now, it's important to note that the list of teams that have never won a World Series is longer and includes some teams like the Padres, Rangers, Brewers, Rays, and Rockies, as mentioned, among others. However, this information is as of January 2022. The list could change based on subsequent seasons. You might want to check more recent sources to see if any of these teams have made or won the World Series in the past two seasons.
Which teams have never played in the world series? As of my last training data in January 2022, the following MLB teams have never played in the World Series: 1. Seattle Mariners - Founded in 1977, they have yet to make an appearance in the World Series. 2. Colorado Rockies - Although they've been to the playoffs multiple times since their inception in 1993, the Rockies have made it to the World Series once in 2007 but were swept by the Boston Red Sox, so they have played in the World Series. It's worth checking the most recent MLB seasons (2022 and 2023) to see if either of these teams have since made it to the World Series.
Which teams have never played in the world series? As of September 2021, three Major League Baseball (MLB) teams have never played in the World Series: 1. Seattle Mariners: The team was established in 1977 and is based in Seattle, Washington. Despite having some successful seasons and making multiple playoff appearances, the Mariners have never advanced to the World Series. 2. Washington Nationals: While the Nationals franchise itself has played in and won the World Series (in 2019), the team was formerly known as the Montreal Expos and was based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The Expos, established in 1969, never played in the World Series before relocating to Washington, D.C., and becoming the Nationals in 2005. 3. Colorado Rockies: Established in 1993 and based in Denver, Colorado, the Rockies have made several playoff appearances and reached the World Series once, in 2007, but did not win. It’s worth noting that teams' fortunes can change rapidly in sports, and new teams may have joined the league or existing teams may have reached the World Series since my last training data in September 2021. Was this response better or worse? d9 Better CP Worse = Same X

ct_bergstrom, to random

I just read the best paper I've seen yet this year, Sam Zhang's work on confusion between inferential uncertainty and outcome variability.

In the context of a trial or experiment, inferential uncertainty refers to our statistical confidence that two groups are different. Outcome variability refers to how much variation there is in individual outcomes within a single group.

IMO confusion about this is ubiquitous in biomedical science.

Here's the paper: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/5tcgs/

ct_bergstrom, to random

BREAKING: Apartheid tool has thoughts on how voting ought to work.

ct_bergstrom, to random

If I were to set up a wordpress blog to write about bullshit, science, big tech, large language models, and all that, what would you think I should title it?

ct_bergstrom, to random

It is now painfully clear that no local government, state or federal agency, or other civic institution should be using Twitter for any purpose other than directing people to alternative platforms.

Using the platform for anything other than a last ditch backup for any kind of emergency communication is clearly a disaster waiting to happen.

ct_bergstrom, to random

The 1990s and 2000s were a heyday for nerds. Tech was now cool and we could unabashedly embrace our enthusiasm for math, science, etc.

We've backslid.

Today's tech founders compete to be like "Fuck math. I hunt Siberian wild boar in the nude using a knife made from only my own frozen excrement."

What happened?

ct_bergstrom, (edited ) to random

Sadly, @arstechnica is embarrassing themselves with their innumeracy here.

The average time-to-failure of HDDs is not less than three years, and the study in question does not claim that they do.

So what went wrong....?

https://fediscience.org/@arstechnica@mastodon.social/110310597119922958 h/t @waldok

ct_bergstrom, to random

For the entire span of my life, people have tried to develop AI systems and anticipated a day when those systems can pass the Turing Test.

Now that day has arrived, and no one seems to care about Turing Tests anymore. Why not?

Is it that

  1. We're not actually there? It would take more than a few simple patches (google the answer to arithmetic questions!) on top of ChatGPT to pass a turing test?

  2. Arriving there makes it clear that the Turing Test never was the right metric?

ct_bergstrom, to random

It's pure coincidence that Elon Musk just happened to erase the entire record of how twitter was used to organize and share photos and video from Arab Spring, right?

ct_bergstrom, to random
  1. In five days, I'm headed to Australia: Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne. I can't wait. So many colleagues to meet and birds to see!

For those who are interested in such things, I'll be giving a few public talks in addition to a number of academic lectures.

The public talks will mostly focus on something I've been thinking about lately, "The Crisis of Human Collective Decision-Making in a Social Media World".

Details below.

ct_bergstrom, to random

It's never been about freedom of speech.

All along it's been about toxic assholes feeling entitled to an audience for their bullshit.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • mdbf
  • ngwrru68w68
  • cubers
  • magazineikmin
  • thenastyranch
  • rosin
  • khanakhh
  • InstantRegret
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • Durango
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • megavids
  • tacticalgear
  • osvaldo12
  • normalnudes
  • tester
  • cisconetworking
  • everett
  • GTA5RPClips
  • ethstaker
  • anitta
  • Leos
  • provamag3
  • modclub
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •