Dr. Emily Dolson

Remembering the time in grad school when a Black PhD student at the next desk over was doing computer vision research. He was testing out a facial recognition tool using his own face as a reference, but it wasn't working. So he asked a (white) colleague to try it, and of course it worked for her.

The official home of the Python Programming Language

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-...
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Oh, okay, I take it back! I didn't even realize there was a preprint. That seems legitimately useful.

I think the issue isn't with contributions being weighted unequally (of course different people contribute different amounts to different papers), but instead with attempting a one size fits all ranking. If the tool looked at author contributions and weighted based on that instead, I'd be open to it

Data like these are exactly why I think @wewill2026.bsky.social is an excellent candidate to be the next MI-07 representative!

Some people say Elissa Slotkin won our district because she's moderate. I think that's wrong. I think she won because she stood for something. Will does too.

Weird, I'm in the US and I don't think I've ever heard someone say "fennel." I'm a biologist not a chemist, though.

RFK is undoing human subjects protections so he can conduct placebo trials of vaccines. That means infecting people knowingly. I wonder who will “volunteer” for these trials? If history is any guide, a lot of incarcerated and other powerless people.

Why I am not using AI in the classroom Last week I spoke with some of my colleagues about the “challenges” posed by generative AI to our teaching. As anyone who follows me on Bluesky — or followed me on Twitter, prior …

tl;dr

1. Studies of genAI in the classroom show that it harms learning

2. The quality of AI-generated text is irrelevant to its most negative effects on teaching

3. The way AI has entered the classroom is as a money-making project extracting new labour, not a “tool” serving teachers’ actual needs

Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Swipe up to try a new variant on Conway's Game of Life. And another. And another. This is how artificial-life researchers spread the joy after the #ALIFE2025 conference! They say it's like TikTok, but I wouldn't know.... ⚙️🧫 rulehunt.org?rulesetHex=7... #cellularautomata #gameoflife

The SONI session turned out a great—shout out to the speakers & the panelists @emilydolson.bsky.social, @risi.bsky.social, @blaiseaguera.bsky.social & Sidney Pontes-Filho for great talks & discussion on how we can rethink intelligence under the complexity lens.

#ALife2025 @alife2025.bsky.social

New, brief overview of lexicase selection: lexicase.ai

It considers individual training cases in different random orders, and therefore with different priorities, for each selection event.

#AI #MachineLearning #ALife

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

"This compact is a “reward” in exactly the same sense that it is “rewarding” to purchase protection from the Mafia. The compact is an open, explicit threat." This is very good.

I guess the relevant follow-up question in what proportion of AI bubble money is going into building data centers/power plants (potentially long term useful, although I worry about the environmental costs) vs. developing software that's not actually going to be long-term useful.

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

Yingnan Gao has a major overhaul on his paper investigating how to detect selection in lineage tracing data using tree balance statistics! #evoSky

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We're excited to announce final program of the @alife2025.bsky.social SONI session
which will host a panel discussion with @blaiseaguera.bsky.social, @risi.bsky.social, @emilydolson.bsky.social & Sidney Pontes-Filho

Check out the full program: sites.google.com/view/soni-al...

See you in Kyoto ⛩️

I love a good creative action! I just sent my rep a duck - send yours one too!

#Workshop Call!
Does ALIFE have a "marketing problem" ?
We think so - and we're trying to do something about it!
Come help us, at the Societal Outreach Initiatives for Artificial Life Workshop #ALIFE2025.

More details: imytk.github.io/blog/2025/al...

@alife2025.bsky.social

I love math and voting theory as much as the next complex systems scientist, but I think it's important to remember that there's a huge social science component here. I'm not aware of good data on this, but I strongly suspect that a major benefit of IRV is that it will reduce polarization.

Or, put another way, if I was filling out a ranked choice ballot for voting systems, it would look like this:

1. Approval voting
2. Ranked choice voting
3 (or maybe unranked). First past the post (i.e. what we have now)

So nice how ranked choice lets the perfect not be the enemy of the good!

Like most people I know who have spent too much time thinking about this stuff, I'd actually prefer approval voting to ranked choice. But we have the option right now to replace first past the post with ranked choice, and in my mind that's still a solid improvement, so I'm all for it!

Excited to see this effort to get a proposal for statewide ranked choice voting on the ballot in Michigan!

Voting methods are a fascinating topic, and I like this website for experimenting with them: votevote.page (I believe the IRV option in the runoff methods box is equivalent to the proposal)

Thank you so much for this clarification - I was so confused about why Desantis could possibly be involved

“The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying and dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before.”

The creator became a raging transphobe, began incorporating that transphobia into future works of art, and explicitly called out the fact that there were still fans as evidence that being a transphobe was okay.

Since inauguration day I've really started noticing how one of the toxic byproducts of fascism is how the "all these people are unworthy of life" idea has become more accepted on the left- the same shit as on the right but merely the targets flipped- and we really have to push back at that.

Introducing our #ALIFE2025 Ambassadors!

Our ambassadors:
- are champions of the conference & the field of #ALIFE
- encourage interest and participation from old & new audiences
- lead outreach efforts & build new relationships
- are positive advocates for the conference and the wider community!