Christopher Anderson

Also, YES: "The current trend of relegating proofs to the appendix undermines this
structure and is partially to blame for the current malaise... Imagine that the Ninny had only a beginning and an end with the middle relegated to an online appendix." My biggest, evergreen gripe with modeling papers.

I really like this! I've always viewed science as story-telling. The form might be different but the essence is the same as oral histories or epic poetry, for example. The rules for how each are written are different but at the end of the day they need to be compelling and make you feel something.

My first ever middle school dance, I got it in my head to request "War Pigs". I guess the DJs didn't know it, because they actually played it (right after "It's getting hot in herre"). They got 30 secs into it before yelling at me that I couldn't request music anymore. RIP Ozzy. Absolute legend.

After long and ardent thought, I have come up with what I believe to be the definitive Philosophy of AI:

It sucks.

I feel like so many people fall into the trap of thinking that just because something has been quantified and is being represented as a number that it is somehow more "true" and that information/conclusions from those numbers can't be biased. But it's actually so much easier to hide bias in numbers!

Like, if there were only a few people to have lived through an event, you can't compile that information and then perform statistics on it that would represent anything meaningful. All you have is that human experience and story. But that should be incredibly compelling!

That's a super interesting point! I think what's hard about this is that often, local knowledge and expertise is just data in a different stage that what we've come to expect as "data". And often, there's not enough of that local knowledge to compile into something resembling a robust dataset.

What I especially hate about this example is that you also could have figured out how dangerous this camp location was from first principles, but only if you actually know something about the land and how nature works. Once again, this is expertise that you have to work to acquire—not buy.

People were sold a fantasy during a vacation and then are met with the reality that a 50k truck and a new construction home doesn’t give you expertise about an area. It’s easy to make fun of these people but there are material and sometimes deadly consequences, as we have recently been reminded.

I saw this the time growing up in sw Colorado. People would move to a mountain town and then be absolutely flabbergasted that the high desert has no water, is prone to fire, and generally pretty harsh.

As is pointed out in that thread, old-timers that actually lived through earlier floods would know how foolhardy it was to build in a known, active floodplain. That is wisdom borne of lived experience and local knowledge.

The mobility of the American public is one of the unique strengths of this country but coupled with the correspondingly characteristic misanthropic individualism and rejection of community and society you get people that are completely unequipped to actually live in the place they live.

This is a fascinating thread and is close to something I’ve been thinking about since this tragedy, the replacement of local expertise by a kind of suburban willful ignorance that local environment and ecosystems matter when you move to a new place.

Fig. 1 DALL·E OpenAI generated image of a mycorrhizal interaction. The image was created using the prompt: ‘Generate a photo of a plant root system interacting with fungal mycelium in a mycorrhizal interaction’. The resulting image clearly contains inaccuracies and unrealistic elements, making it appear surreal and scientifically unacceptable as an illustration of mycorrhizal interactions.

The increasingly powerful term #mycorrhiza warrants attention

#Editorial by Bonfante & Genre.

📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Inaccurate AI-generated image generated using: ‘Generate a photo of a plant root system interacting with fungal mycelium in a mycorrhizal interaction’.

While I think everyone is in basic agreement that peer review is important to science, it's certainly not seen as the most important skill to master for career advancement and neither do people seem to think that it is appreciated by their peers.

What was a bit surprising about this to me is that we asked two questions about skills: 1. What do you personally think is important? and 2. What do you think is valued by your discipline? Once again, peer review was at the bottom or near the bottom for both of these questions across all pops.

Another data-point that will be unsurprising given all of the anecdotal sentiment around peer review, but when the GPC surveyed our very own dept last year on the skills that are important and valued, peer review was scored lowest basically across all populations, so students, faculty and postdocs.

Oh, cool! I worked with Isabella at RMBL last summer and she was amazing. Excited to check out this paper!

If he stays motivated at all he'll be a great player. He was just so frustrating to watch in Phoenix even outside of whatever drama was happening behind the scenes with Monty/Booker/et al.

This is it. This is why the alarm about AI mostly ought to be a much much deeper and more urgent alarm about the completely broken social and cultural environment many of us live in now.

YouTube video by Princess Weekes You Can’t Separate Harry Potter from J.K. Rowling

Video is officially up on YT

You Can’t Separate Harry Potter from J.K. Rowling
youtu.be/JHvWWJ-640E

Mycorrhizal networks: Understanding hidden complexity Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

It’s alive! Our Mycorrhizal Networks special issue is out in Functional Ecology.
Packed with spore-tacular science.

A collection that highlights advances, identifies unresolved questions & the future research directions.

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Ecologists’ endless quest for automatic inference
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/05/28/e...

Yes, ant then "common sense" (never defined, just gestured toward) is put up on a pedestal to be equal or superior to expert opinion.

It's often presented as a kind of conformity or groupthink to "trust the experts," but you do in fact need to do this to have a functioning society!

What is the alternative? Every person researches every single issue of public concern themselves?

And now, one of the last bulwarks against efficienty derangement syndrome, the backstop that is supposed to help ensure that people don't literally just die on the street is being systemmatically dismantled while the people its absence will disproportionally kill cheer.

I'm soooo glad that the number was green when I logged onto fidelity this morning because three-thousand people lost their jobs and their ability to support their families and their communities. Some billionaire can buy more land though, so the economy must be healthy.

Employee wellbeing and customer satisfaction are ancillary, not goals in and of themselves. And to what end?? What does the line going up actually accomplish? A retirement account that you won't use until you're about to die has a green number instead of a red number?

more fulfilling lives we are asked to interrogate how things can be more "efficient". We are asked where the bottom is, the minimum that we will accept. Companies are legally bound to make their stock price go up, not to take care of their employees or to deliver a product that actually works.

At the risk of sounding nihilistic I've been increasingly frustrated with basically everything in our society, from government to business. Most decision making seems so dangerously myopic and cynical. Rather than asking how our institutions and organizations can help us all live --