Erik Toraason

Separate studies demonstrated 20% increase in additional hours and a 17% drop in actual knowledge as ascertained by a quiz on the code they had just written with AI assistance versus the control group without.

This is eugenics. Genocide. An attack on science, medical ethics, bodily autonomy, and human rights.

Where is the outcry from the biomedical community? Trans people aren't just abstract patients and research participants: We're your friends, family, and co-workers.

Speak up before it's too late

Vanderbilt Will Stop Providing Gender-Affirming Surgeries to Trans Adults The hospital cited “operational limitations” for the decision.

Horrifying and also as predicted. This is genocidal shit. The only hospital in Tennessee that offered this kind of care. www.them.us/story/vander...

Democrats stop making “conceding points” your opening gambit, part infinity

CNN reporting that the strikes on Iran tonight are joint US and Israeli strikes.

Which means Donald Trump should be impeached for a third time.

What he has done tonight is illegal under the US constitution and the UN charter.

In my utopian vision of the future, instead of offloading all the pointless, annoying work tasks (like reports that none one will read and needlessly opaque forms) to robots, we restructure work and society so that the pointless tasks don't happen at all.

Had the most bizarre scientific encounter (series of them really) at a conference today, Reviewer-2-comes-to-heckle-your-talk level of discourse. Upsetting at first, but makes me think what we are working on is even more important than I had appreciated (and that people are rude, but that's not new)

I won't believe it until it is done. You guys only paying attention after it's too fucking late is why you all need to go.

Is a T-cell Any More Real Than a T-test?

“If I have shown that both are abstractions, both are useful, and both deserve a kind of epistemic respect, then I have accomplished what I set out to do.”

Preprint: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28358/

#PhilSci #PhilSky

AI is a micromanaging misery machine.

NEB publishes often and has contributed greatly to science. So too do several for-profit organizations, but to say that closed doors IP development without full disclosure is contributing to science is silly. A patent is not a research article and intentionally vague in specifics of description...

I want to stress: COVID IS a test of moral integrity. You can check wastewater data in your area. Levels of community transmission are high where I am. I am just as vulnerable to COVID as I was in 2020. I would be safer if other people acknowledged that and took action to get boosters and wear N95s

question: is the editor who signed off on this digital art a homophobic middle schooler

This trip through Aotearoa New Zealand has provided one illustration after another about the value of heroic conservation efforts.

I'm asking that we all raise our political expectations. We deserve good things.

I can't read this because it's behind a paywall, but if ChatGPT is trained on prior knowledge (which it is), then of course it would advise women to ask for lower salaries. Misogyny is baked into the historical data.

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm - Nature Among users initially on a chronological feed, 7 weeks of exposure to X’s algorithmic feed in 2023 shifted political attitudes and account-following behaviour in a more conservative direction compared with those remaining on a chronological feed, whereas switching the feed setting in the opposite direction, from algorithmic to chronological, had no effect.

Turning on the ‘For You’ algorithm on X may shift users’ political opinions towards more conservative views, reports a paper in Nature. These effects are shown to persist even after users return to a chronological feed. 🧪

IMO this gap in confidence around critical thought is probably *driving* some adoption of AI technologies, on account of people who lack that self confidence feel like an AI assistant will help them compete with people who know they're smart.

I've been saying it a lot, but these deaths line up with what happened in early concentration camps during other regimes: Deaths from poor conditions, disease, or abuse. These deaths are not accidental. They are the direct result of a camp system that is designed to harm those being imprisoned.

“Will anyone in the Epstein files be held accountable?” What you have to understand is that while sexual violence is technically illegal and frowned upon in the abstract, in practice it is accepted, ubiquitous, de rigeur, and a primary vehicle for male bonding.

I don't envy people who start their PhDs now. What they should be trying to do - I think - is to first become confident experts in certain things, and this might involve using as little AI as possible not to become dependent or have their view distorted.

medical miracle: this 75 year old man was born yesterday

I actually think it’s a good thing to not preemptively swear you’ll vote for Gavin Newsome before he’s the candidate

AI is not inevitable. If we had sane people in government that were not in thrall to billionaire tech CEOs, LLMs could be regulated, forced to obey existing copyright laws, and banned from places where their use is inappropriate, such as college classes. This should be a moderate position.

In addition to continuing to downgrade Americans health, this further illustrates why we cannot depend on the private sector to pick up the work being put down by the government to improve both American and great global health.

Our government is getting a taste for torturing children. DHS is buying more and more building space to do more and more of it.

They’ll find people to fill all that space if we let them.

I’m glad to see people protesting Discord forcing IDs for age verification, but what I need everyone to understand is that there’s immense bipartisan pressure to make the entire internet like this, and they are likely going to succeed unless something drastic happens

In the last month ICE has bought warehouses in:

- Hagerstown, MD: $102 million
- Surprise, AZ: $70 million
- Hamburg, PA: $87 million
- Tremont, PA: $120 million
- San Antonio, TX: $82 million
- El Paso, TX: $123 million
- Social Circle, GA: price unknown

This is unprecedented.

my argument for why AOC should run in 2028 is (a) she would be a good president (b) Mamdani, Analililia Mejia, abolish ICE with majority support, if not now, when?

additional context: because of multi year funding policy, the payline at NCI fell from an already dismal 9% to 4%

those unfunded grants are fully vetted by peer reviewers and 1000 times more deserving of our $$$ than this snake oil swindle