Weeks earlier, when I’d messaged Alex, he had said that everyone he knew used ChatGPT in some fashion, but that he used it only for organizing his notes. In person, he admitted that this wasn’t remotely accurate. “Any type of writing in life, I use A.I.,” he said. He relied on Claude for research, DeepSeek for reasoning and explanation, and Gemini for image generation. ChatGPT served more general needs. “I need A.I. to text girls,” he joked, imagining an A.I.-enhanced version of Hinge. I asked if he had used A.I. when setting up our meeting. He laughed, and then replied, “Honestly, yeah. I’m not tryin’ to type all that. Could you tell?”

AI is deskilling our young people to the extent that they no longer have the ability, or at least resolve, to craft their own *texts.*

The widespread adoption of these technologies is actually a form of child abuse. We are systematically destroying human potential

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

A thread about ongoing erasing and ignoring science... 🧵

Legitimately feel sick. We are hours away from the largest cuts to low-income people in history. People’s lives will be ruined. It is so unfair. It’s unfair to be born into a system that allows this level of poverty in the first place and it’s evil to rip away aid from the needy. Hard to watch this.

Major cuts to NSF education budgets (not to mention the disaster with dept. of Ed). Can learning become cool again, now that it's on the chopping block? It's punk to learn math if "they" don't want you to.

#math #counterculture #STEM #mathed #education

Proposed NSF cuts WILL DESTROY LIVES and make America weak!

Lowlights: 100% of mathematical sciences education budget slashed. 75%+ of all STEM education cut. Overall 55% NSF cuts.

nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

#saveourscience
#science
#scisky

America cannot long remain free, nor first among nations, if it becomes the kind of place where universities are dismantled because they don't align politically with the current head of the government.

American higher education is one of our stand-out export industries.

Except instead of just getting the product abroad, the customers come spend years here consuming it, with all kinds of positive economic & cultural impacts for the host communities & the international students.

Thanks Harvard, for taking a stand. Perhaps we should all stand together….

Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades (Gift Article) The lag in funding extends far beyond D.E.I. initiatives, affecting almost every area of science: chemistry, computing, engineering, materials and more.

Science has been slashed, and many will never recover. Careers have been shattered---some of the smartest, hardest working people I know are out of jobs. Basic research is foundational and necessary. Demand better.

#science #scisky #academia #sos #savescience #research

What losing billions in federal grants means for universities, and the nation The Trump administration has so far frozen about $11 billion in research funding. University leaders say no other source can fill the void.

The Trump administration has so far frozen about $11 billion in research funding. University leaders say no other source can fill the void.

To add, in a curvy space like spacetime straight lines are not euclidean lines. All of the lines on this wood are "straight" as they trace out the shortest path *on the surface* between their start and end--called a geodesic. If you run your finger along them, there's no "turn." Mathematical art!

In a curved space (like spacetime), straight lines are not euclidean lines. All of the lines on this board are "straight" bc if you run your finger along them they don't turn. Also, they trace out the shortest path *on the surface* between their start and end points. This is called a geodesic.

My friends' postdocs--in math and science--have been defunded. Positions that only open for application one season per year, that require 6 years of training and being the best out of hundreds of applicants to earn. This is unacceptable; we must hold the government responsible. #scisky #research

"Good science is an act of resistance" #scisky #resist #reasoningisresistance

Deep Civil Society and Collective Action Journalism. Higher education. The federal bureaucracy. Nonprofits. The military. And now the law firms. Across the United States right now, the same conversation is happening in these and other est…

Higher education. The federal bureaucracy. Nonprofits. The military. And now the law firms.

Facing a hostile and lawless administration, we are all having the same individual conversations: about leadership, about principles, and about our common fate. These must now be collective conversations.

Screenshot of the linked Quarto website, with input checkboxes to change different conditions for a regression model that predicts economic performance based on US political party, with a reported p-value

I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :(

So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/

Resultingly, I find calling math a language is not entirely wrong, but it treats math as the product, not the process. Math *has* a language, not *is* such.

You must begin by learning to read a map, so much of school math includes the language which makes math more accessible. The symbols and accompanying rules enable thinking about this process easier and clearer, and you learn to make new maps, but you cannot make new maps if you cannot wander.

This map often uses the shared language that we have developed which enables doing math. Learning math is not only learning to get to the exit, but learning to wander the maze yourself, and produce maps for later adventurers.

My analogy: Doing math is exploring a maze where you know where you start, you have a sense of a goal, and you know the rules for finding the next rooms in the maze. The *wandering of the maze* is doing the math; wandering is not language. The map you give another wanderer, though...

Math is often called a "language," but I find this reductive. IMO, math is an adventure, a practice and process of reasoning, drawing conclusions and exploiting structure to reason more efficiently. This is not to say there is no language involved.... #iteachmath #math #scisky #edusky

It's hard to imagine a clearer example of incompetent cost-cutting than 'removed the parts that kept the rocket fuel from sloshing around,' and yet this is the guy who has been given absolute discretion to shred our federal government.

It is absolutely an extremist position to punish *a university* by taking away over a hundred million dollars of funding due to its inclusion of one swimmer. That kind of authoritarian attitude has no place in a democratic society.

Live updates: Trump orders a plan to eliminate the Education Department President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at eliminating the Education Department, advancing a campaign promise to eliminate an agency that’s been a longtime target of conservatives.

Trump's EO will make it harder for students to get help with financial aid, jeopardize funding schools and families count on, & make it easier for predatory businesses to rip students off.

Trump, Musk, and McMahon’s goal is clear: destroy public schools and enrich themselves.

A friend drove two hours today for her breast cancer chemotherapy only to learn it was canceled due to NIH cuts. Clinical trial ended midstream. No treatment, no restart, no plan, no information. Her bro-in-law's chemo was also canceled.

Trump’s Science Cuts Have Thrown the Research World Into Chaos Firing federal workers and freezing grants are upending a world-class system the US has built since World War II.

Solidarity with all science! Seeking understanding of the world (ethically) is part of what makes us human. #scisky #research #solidarity #science

Two-panel graph analyzing U.S. House Elections from 2006-2024. Left panel shows Democratic vote share increases as turnout gap with Republicans narrows, with a positive trend line (46-56% on y-axis). Right panel shows Democratic vote share decreases as party positioning moves from liberal to conservative, with a negative trend line. Election years are plotted as dots, with blue dots (2006, 2008, 2018) indicating Democratic House majorities and red dots indicating Republican majorities. Both graphs demonstrate that Democrats perform better with higher turnout and more liberal positioning.

1/🧵 Following up on our study featured in NYT today, this figure provides a macro-level view:

Dem vote shares rise with turnout parity (left) but fall with party-level ideological moderation (right). This suggests mobilizing base voters > persuading swing voters by moving to the center.

The U.S. remains the world’s leader in the higher-education sector, despite a massive effort by China to catch up combined with state-level funding that, in many cases, never recovered after the Great Recession.

But I think we already figured out that this was never about making America great.

The data streams that underpin humanitarian response are about to collapse Famine warning, needs assessments, health data: Humanitarian action will be groping in the dark if vital data sources are allowed to crumble.

🗣️ Famine warning, needs assessments, health data: Humanitarian action will be groping in the dark if vital data sources are allowed to crumble.