Arnav Das

Sometimes I meet new people and immediately decide "we should not be friends" and this is okay. You do not have to be friends with everyone.

That said, it can be good to sometimes step out of your comfort zone, and relationship-building takes effort. But recognize that not everyone is compatible.

WA Democrats consider retreat on estate tax, fearing wealth exodus Democrats in the state Legislature are moving to roll back a big increase in the estate tax rate, acknowledging it may be causing some very wealthy people to move.

You can't call every step of creeping fascism a distraction from kitchen-table issues and then punt whenever you have a chance to address the kitchen-table issues.

If progress is not to falter, students must be trained in open research The how and why of conducting transparent, rigorous, ethical research must be explicitly taught, say Madeleine Pownall, Charlotte Pennington and Flavio Azevedo

“Open research is about more than the tightening of analytical and methodological standards. The movement also invites us to reconsider how, and by whom, knowledge is created, shared and evaluated”

By @maddipow.bsky.social, @drcpennington.bsky.social, & @flavioazevedo.bsky.social

#MetaSci #OpenSci

Metascience for whom? A question as old as science. Before we fix science, we need to ask who built it!

“We should be careful not to marginalise questions of power, because in wearing that aura of clean objectivity, metascience risks becoming strangely depoliticised.”

By @batoolmm.bsky.social

I’m honored to be selected as a Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) development awardee, with seed funding from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social, as a co-PI on two of eleven interdisciplinary teams exploring AI, human history, and culture.

1/2

Pure moral panic. How, precisely, would a child who experiments with a different haircut or pronouns get “locked in” to a trans identity?

The parents who had no problem letting her identify as trans suddenly restrict her from identifying as cis? It makes no sense.

Gelman writes...

"[a prior of normal(0, 10) is] a statement that you are only demanding that your method work well for problems in which the true theta is in that range"

What does he mean by "works well" here specifically

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/05/21/p...

GitHub - DrCatHicks/learning-opportunities: A Claude Code skill for deliberate skill development during AI-assisted coding A Claude Code skill for deliberate skill development during AI-assisted coding - DrCatHicks/learning-opportunities

Key to efficient learning is realizing how we ACTUALLY learn, not just what FEELS like learning. I wrote a Claude Skill for some friends to help them think about this and they've liked it -- see Principles for some directions you could explore

github.com/DrCatHicks/l...

Can you learn AND offload? Yes. We do it all the time across our days. You just cannot do every single thing at once, and have to think about the structural support for different (sometimes competing) goals.

Self-regulation isn't new, but it is a vital skill for developers now.

In lieu of being able to clone me, you can have a longer download from me and from @analog-ashley.bsky.social as we march straight into hell (talking about whether people can learn in the AI era and how we're trying to show up for our communities on this)

www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/epis...

Indeed. Though I'd go further:

At a certain level of wealth -- once you have enough money that you are insulated from any real consequences and can surround yourself with yes-men -- I think wealth and moral worth are actually anticorrelated

That wealth is not correlated with intelligence or moral worth is one the most important empirical discoveries ever made.

The study does not remotely say that science “leans hard left.” Nor does the fact that academics left the Nazis-and-child-porn website for a different website mean they’re producing biased evidence.

All of the major threats to science in 2026 come from the right.

i am entirely despondent about the state of australian journalism. the narrative that has emerged within a week is that the protesters were at fault, that they were rioting, and that the police were merely enforcing the law. if that's true, where's the footage of protesters rioting?

How do people decide whom to help when cooperation is costly and resources are limited?

Kinship and reciprocity are not the full story—research by @psycheddiego.bsky.social et al suggests shared fate (the other person’s outcomes influences one’s own) complements:

buff.ly/fRinBjR

#statstab #485 Bayesian ANCOVA and the ATE

Thoughts: Still grappling with the implications of using the causal inference approach to randomized experiments. But it's interesting.

#ATE #causalinference #ancova #ANOVA #rstats #estimand #counterfactuals

solomonkurz.netlify.app/blog/2025-07...

I have been thinking a lot about this question. I saw David's YOLO'd paper, and have done similar things on my own. His paper's abstract is pasted below.

1. It's a remarkable achievement that CC can do this with minimal prompting.
2. The paper is unbelievably banal from a research standpoint.

“Correlation does *not* imply causation” is not the last word—it’s only the beginning.

Cesar Chavez tracks how modern economics has been approaching causality (and the causality fallacy… and its reverse):

bit.ly/4cpiLsm

i came out to myself in 2013, and transitioned in 2016. the volume of hate directed at us over last 10 years has been a fucking nightmare that somehow never ends

Within philosophy of mind and cognitive science, ​functionalism is the doctrine that mental states are individuated by their causal role, while computationalism is the doctrine that cognition/mentation consists in symbol manipulation. These accounts have implications for what sorts of systems we can

Get out of that comfort zone and take a (calculated) risk!

Discomfort is good for you, argues @michelletennant:

buff.ly/j7lhdBE

What to do in 2026: Your statistics diary
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/02/14/w...

Just think what a salmon on a bike could do!

lame joke about Valentine’s Day and bash script

Meme from a friend:

Babbage, 1830, discussing the problem that scientists selectively report findings that they want to be true.

Confirmation bias is a strong human tendency. This is why we need to design science in a way that prevents conformation bias from leading us away from the truth.

A comic image featuring a text conversation where one person says "I love you," and the other replies, "Do you have evidence to support your statement?"

Happy Valentine's Day, #philsky

Could life have begun with simpler molecules than we once thought? A new paper in @science.org by @edogia.bsky.social shows that a tiny RNA catalyst can self-replicate itself, suggesting that life may have been easier to emerge than expected. Getting closer. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

😳 What?

Women remain underrepresented in leadership, particularly in traditionally masculine work settings. At the same time, the visibility of this imbalance has led to growing calls for diversifying leadership. This research examines how both men and women contribute to the preservation or disruption of gender inequality in masculine organizational contexts. Men remain the gatekeepers of change—deciding who rises to the top and under what conditions—while women face the strategic dilemma of fitting in by downplaying inequality (supporting the status quo, sometimes called ‘queen bee behaviour’) or ‘rocking the boat’ by advocating social change (challenging the status quo). Across five experimental studies (total N = 887), we examined how evaluators assessed male and female leadership candidates who either supported or challenged the status quo. Results revealed that although men favoured female over male candidates, they consistently preferred women who reinforced the status quo over those who advocated equality. By contrast, male candidates who supported the status quo were penalized, and female evaluators showed no such preferences. These findings highlight subtle mechanisms through which gendered power dynamics are maintained, underscoring both the strategic trade-offs women must navigate to advance and the conditional nature of men's support for gender equality.

Women Leaders

"Women are expected to promote gender equality and show communal behaviour, yet those who do so...are less likely to be selected for leadership."

Derks et al. (2026). Don't rock the boat! Do men prefer women leaders who support the status quo?

doi.org/10.1111/bjso...