Zach Griffen

Important update from two months into my “experiment” (lol) assigning college juniors and seniors to read whole physical books and then having a seminar where they use the physical book and physical notebooks and their ideas and questions to fill three hours of class time:

It rules

lmao this was exactly what I thought when his Theory and Society piece about this came out

Parents Fell in Love With Alpha School’s Promise. Then They Wanted Out In Brownsville, Texas, some families found a buzzy new school’s methods—surveillance of kids, software in lieu of teachers—to be an education in and of itself.

Wired has just published an in-depth piece on Alpha Schools ... giving us a deep-dive on the realities of AI-driven schools sold on the promise of students plugged into personalised learning systems and doing ('crushing') a full day's schoolwork in only 2 hours: www.wired.com/story/ai-tea...

Managing a “responsibility vacuum” in AI monitoring and governance in healthcare: a qualitative study - BMC Health Services Research Background Despite the increasing implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies in healthcare, their long-term safety, effectiveness, and equity remain compromised by a lack of sustained oversight. This study explores the phenomenon of a “responsibility vacuum” in AI governance, wherein maintenance and monitoring tasks are poorly defined, inconsistently performed, and undervalued across healthcare systems. Methods We conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 experts involved in AI implementation in healthcare, including clinicians, clinical informaticists, computer scientists, and legal/policy professionals. Participants were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. Interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed using abductive qualitative methods to identify themes related to maintenance practices, institutional incentives, and responsibility attribution. Results Participants widely recognized that AI models degrade over time due to factors such as data drift, changes in clinical practice, and poor generalizability. However, monitoring practices remain ad hoc and fragmented, with few institutions investing in structured oversight infrastructure. This “responsibility vacuum” is perpetuated by institutional incentives favoring rapid innovation and strategic ignorance of AI failures. Despite these challenges, some participants described grassroots efforts to monitor and maintain AI systems, drawing inspiration from fields such as radiology, laboratory medicine, and transportation safety. Conclusions Our findings suggest that institutional and cultural forces in healthcare deprioritize the maintenance of AI tools, creating a governance gap that may lead to patient harm and inequitable outcomes. Addressing this responsibility vacuum will require formalized accountability structures, interdisciplinary collaboration, and policy reforms that center long-term safety and equity. Without such changes, AI/ML technologies designed to improve patient health may introduce new forms of harm, ultimately eroding trust in AI and machine learning for healthcare.

New from me and @kellieowens.bsky.social: we argue that the practice of maintaining AI models in healthcare exists in a "responsibility vacuum," resulting in the emergence of creative forms of invisible labor to monitor and repair technical systems bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Ambient Documentation And The Dilemma Of Deskilling In Medical Education | Health Affairs Forefront The digitization of health care has had important consequences for how medical training is conducted, and with the advent of ambient documentation, this important social component of health care is li...

New piece from me and @kellieowens.bsky.social on ambient documentation systems ("AI scribes") and the potential risks this technology may pose for medical education and the socialization of trainees www.healthaffairs.org/content/fore...

Trump’s Job Cuts Leave a Profession Looking for Its Next Act Niche researchers in a government-dependent education field are trying to pivot. “There are no crops coming out of this ground anymore.”

New: The Education Department's cuts have left the niche, government-backed "industry" of education research in a dire state.

www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

#ASA2025 regular sessions on Knowledge were fantastic! Wonderful mix of undergraduate (!) and graduate students, junior and senior faculty.

Kudos to @runzach.bsky.social @peterore.bsky.social serving as discussants and putting the papers in conversation.

No more regular sessions at ASA next year!

I blame the brioche bun craze. Bourdain used to rail against it all the time

It was a pleasure to read!

Alert: The Trump administration is quietly slashing new NIH grant awards, and it's not via the budget NIH’s sudden move to multiyear grant funding is forcing shocking cuts in the number of grants funded. This is an effective budget cut. It's bad, folks.

New, from an anonymous NIH insider: Trump is being pushed to spend more NIH money. The White House is ordering NIH to do multi-year budgets for awards. This budget trick means fewer awards, fewer labs funded, and lower paylines for researchers. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/alert-the-...

Glad my graduate alma mater cut 60 degree programs in subjects that require people to think so that they could offer this. Looking forward to living in a world full of Prompt Engineers.

Exclusive | Mayor Eric Adams getting ritzy Hamptons fundraiser as people line up with ‘oodles of cash’ after Mamdani win: sources Power couple Maria and Kenneth Fishel will host an Adams reelection event at their Bridgehampton estate.

Won't have to keep cutting costs after this weekend pagesix.com/2025/07/01/s...

Mr. Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, to Mira Nair, an acclaimed film director who grew up in India and later emigrated to the United States, and Mahmood Mamdani, then a college professor at Makerere University. Both his parents are of Indian descent, but his father's family came to East Africa more than 100 years ago, Mr. Mamdani said. When asked if any of his family had intermarried while in East Africa, he said in the interview on Thursday, "They're all of Indian origin, from Gujarat."

thinking about how the times called Mahmoud Mamdani and asked him whether any of his ancestors had intermarried while in Africa like ok the creepy race science here goes beyond the sourcing

Mahmood was in pan-African nationalist movements in the 70s until Idi Amin expelled Indo-Ugandans? Zohran’s dad gave him the middle name Kwame to honour the first President of Ghana? idk maybe three white American journalists aren’t the best ones to opine on whether or not he’s African.

Mahmood Mamdani · The Asian Question: On Leaving Uganda President Yoweri Museveni was careful not to refer to Asians as citizens; he explained that they were ‘investors’,...

A thing that makes that Times story especially odious is that Zohran Mamdani's father was LITERALLY expelled from Uganda during Idi Amin's fascist effort to scapegoat Asian Ugandans as not really African www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application

You know, when I heard that all of our personal data had been hacked, I didn't expect the first major use of it to be the NYT trying to fuck over Zohran but maybe I'm naive www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/n...

So am I reading this court decision correctly? We now have 50 micronations with their own laws interpreting the U.S. Constitution wholly separate from one another? But there's one guy with private law enforcement who is immune from all punishment who can do whatever he wants in those 50 states?

🚨 BREAKING: Nearly 4 months the NIH cut its first grants, a judge has ruled that the directives and process that led to cuts are arbitrary and capricious.

"The explanations are bereft of reasoning — virtually in their entirety... unsupported by [facts]."

Each of them are VOID and ILLEGAL, he says.

Yeah 100%. Ultimately that’s a message for a very specific audience I think

You joke, but in a ranked choice election with only two viable candidates that’s kind of the whole ballgame

Voted for Zohran

🚨 NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya is testifying before the US Senate Appropriations Committee today.

The hearing is bound to be spicy, after more than 300 agency staff wrote him a letter decrying his leadership and actions as director. 🔥

I'll be live-posting the hearing, so follow along here.

Erin McDonnell's (@profmcdonnell.bsky.social) amazing new paper "Bureaucracy in Action: The Sociology of Public Administration" is online now at the Annual Review of Sociology. Check it out!!! @ndsociology.bsky.social @artslettersnd.bsky.social @asanews.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1146/annu...

Just a little scratch. Some walking around money!

Yeah and that’s why I’m interested in the role orgs like Arnold play in all this (you and Jeff know way more about those guys). They affect being nice liberal technocrats but I saw an interview with Arnold a few weeks ago where he said “the private sector does everything better”

Yeah it’s like using the rhetoric of “rigor” and causal identification and whatnot in a purely symbolic sense without trying to actually win credibility with public health experts

Yeah I've been trying to figure out how to write something about this, but it's fascinating to me how RFK (and now the White House in an executive order?) keeps harping on about replication and "gold standard science," but then ALSO wants everyone to "do their own research."

FB post from BoT member Vivian Wilson, with a photo of a letter she received from Gov. Mike Braun, informing her, in one sentence, that she has been removed from her position effective immediately.

Indiana's governor fired all the elected members of Indiana University's Board of Trustees. Given a recent policy change, he'll be able to fill those seats with appointees. Which means he'll basically have unilateral control over IU decisions, including who gets hired, tenured, and fired.

I like to periodically check in on how things are going at Theory and Society. Great to see that they've finally eradicated activism from scholarship and are focused on the wonders of scientific discovery!

lol