soildoc

Don’t reflexively let your AI do your thinking for you (similar to Fabrizio Dell'Acqua’s finding about falling asleep at the wheel)

Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

I heard y'all wanted a thread on "El Apagón"

we need to talk about that Ring Super Bowl ad

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the University of Minnesota on the topic of how AI would change science.

Now you can watch online (or get AI to summarize it for you.)

Your “geomorf of flat places” would grab me Day 1. Esp if there were a field trip??

How do scientists push back against autocratic, anti-science ideologies?

The "Anti-Autocracy Handbook: The Scholars’ Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding" provides some insights on what can be done, from lower risk to extreme risk groups:

(1/11)

I needed these foodfacts

We've arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology.

And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces.

- Carl Sagan

What would your pedantry bot be, friends?

I'll just add that in the Dauphin experiment, eliminating poverty with basic income reduced emergency hospitalizations by 8.5%. As one doctor described the finding, if this were something we could put in the water, we would.

Also, the richest 10% of the US live 11 years longer than the poorest 10%.

Serendipitously, this just showed up on my feed: bsky.app/profile/nich...

If you don't know these 4 "laws of data minimization," why not?

1. Here's a fish swimming upstream. Nothing unusual about that.

What's unusual is that this particular fish is *dead*. Vortices in the water as it flows past the fish cause the fish's body to flex, maintaining orientation and actually propelling it forward.

(D. N. Beal et al 2006 J. Fluid. Mech.)

Go read The Water Knife, people

Or, if you're someone who makes movies or prestige TV, make it into a damn feature

I've learned so much from Melanie Mitchell's thoughtful columns. During a pivotal period when AI discourse generated more heat than light, her essays provided wise, evidence-based analysis covering remarkable breadth. This compelling column on role-playing's impact on LLM performance is an exemplar.

Pew Research chart showing relatively view people click on a link when they counter search pages with AI summaries

Atlantic article text: Bing Is a Trap Tech companies say AI will expand the possibilities of searching the internet. So far, the opposite seems to be true. By Damon Beres

The Bing bot, alongside ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and numerous competitors, augurs a more drastic streamlining. Imagine every crayon in the world melted into one dark glob and pinched through a funnel. Where once you went to a search engine to find another website to go to, you will now go to a search engine and stay on that search engine. For example, say I go to a typical, chatbotless search engine such as Ask.com and type an everyday query like “How do I clean mud off of leather shoes?” I’ll receive a list of links, from various outlets and perspectives, and I will click one of those links to hopefully find my answer. But now I can pull up the Bing chatbot and type that same thing; it will present a six-step answer inline, no outside navigation required. Bing cites links, but the entire product is engineered to give you an answer within its chat interface. That is, clearly, the selling point.

I floated the idea that Bing’s chatbot might make the internet feel smaller during a brief interview with Yusuf Mehdi, the corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft. He had called the product a “co-pilot,” something that could aid people who are cumulatively running 10 billion search queries a day across the internet. This articulation is telling: A co-pilot is essential. You wouldn’t want to take a flight without one. And on the internet, essentials become entrenched. Once, there was no Facebook, no Instagram, no Google or iCloud; now, for many, it is hard to imagine life, let alone the internet, without them. Digital technology is often positioned by companies in terms of expanding possibilities, but the ultimate effect is constraining them. When asked if the new Bing was designed to keep you on Bing, rather than wandering elsewhere, Mehdi said he viewed the issue as a “potential risk” but fundamentally believes that Bing’s chatbot will be a kind of liberatory force, freeing people from the time-consuming process of traditional search as it stands. “What else can I learn about the world? What else can I go see? We’re just trying to take out a lot of the menial labor of what people are doing and speed them to get to what they want,” he said.

👍🏻
(Pew research from this week, my article from May 2023)

www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Robots vs robots ugh

Videos From the Amazon Reveal an Unexpected Animal Friendship

One of my favorite genres of science news, the unexpected animal friendship 🥰

Congrats Sophie!! Well-deserved.

In this meme, a young John Connor is talking to the Terminator. Wait a second, you re saying you're from the future? Great question! Thanks so much for asking. Let's think about the answer...hmm! The current year is 1983. Working backwards logically. I'm from the year 1965, which is 300 years in the future. Anything else you'd like to know? [Blank stare] I'm sorry, I can see that was not the right answer. I actually came from the year 829392 AD, which is 10 years in the past from this year, which is

I don't know who made this but 10/10.

#greenhousegaslighting ?

Syllabi Polices for Generative AI - Repository

Might be useful (for someone) to run through this @leaton01.bsky.social spreadsheet of syllabi and categorize policies into 1 of 4? bins: prohibition/ban like yours, allow with minor caveats, allow with major caveats, require? #playingcatchup bit.ly/Syllabi-AI-Policies

¡hasta la próxima 😞!

how long you around? I see your ERTH596 class ended yesterday?

ha ha all i saw was the croquet set

wait howd i miss this?????

thx for alerting me to this! excellent quotes cited including a 2007 one attributed to Dan Welch "Offsets are an imaginary commodity created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened" (inside footnote #7). Richly footnoted would be an understatement. Worth the skim

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
here's the 21-page report link their editorial references papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

College son just texted mnemonic for geologic periods. “…hopefully”— so real bro

I’d vote Holocene “handily”