Mark Himmelstein

One of the best things I’ve read in a while:

the entire difference between kyle rittenhouse and alex pretti is that kyle rittenhouse was there to shoot people the cops wanted to shoot and alex pretti was there to protect people the cops wanted to shoot

A video of Alex Pretti reading out the final salute of an unnamed veteran he cared for until the end of his life in the ICU, posted to Facebook by his son.

Statement from Michael and Susan Pretti Parents of Alex Jeffrey Pretti “We are heartbroken but also very angry. Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact. I do not throw around the ‘hero’ term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He had his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper sprayed. Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.

Kare 11 local news just read, in full, this statement from Michael and Susan Pretti, the parents of Alex Pretti.

"Please get the truth out about our son."

WE HAVE MOUNTAINS OF ICE TO MELT

And he didn’t. He tried to help a woman who’d just been assaulted. There was nothing rash, stupid, or radical about what he did. He showed kindness. And they killed him for it.

Minneapolis and Saint Paul have basically mobilized into a war economy of mutual aid and non-violent defense. I’ve never seen anything like it, even during Covid. People who barely vote are guarding their schools from ICE and doing the shopping for neighbors in hiding.

The absolute accuracy of this.

I second all of this. I have multiple papers that have been awaiting moderation for some time that I've been actively sharing links for that now cannot be accessed.

It will also be hard to continue using PsyArxiv if pre-moderation will have to be conducted every time a paper is revised.

Mark Himmelstein, Georgia Institute of Technology - Psychometric Society Measuring Persuasion Without Measuring a Prior Belief: A New Application of Planned Missing Data Techniques

We congratulate Mark Himmelstein as the 2025 dissertation prize winner, with a talk on Measuring Persuasion Without Measuring a Prior Belief: A New Application of Planned Missing Data Techniques. www.psychometricsociety.org/keynote-spea...

#IMPS2025 #Psychometrics #QuantitativePsychology

The fourth HotFresh recommended paper is:

Himmelstein, M., Zhu, S., Petrov, N., Karger, E., Helmer, J., Livnat, S., Bennett, A., Hedley, P., Tetlock, P. (2025). The forecasting proficiency test: A general use assessment of forecasting ability. [link]

osf.io/preprints/ps...

A series of tweets from Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney: BREAKING: A federal judge in Massachusetts (the Reagan-appointed William Young) has declared the Trump administration's cuts to NIH grants — ostensibly over Trump's EOs on gender ideology and DEI — are "illegal" and "void." He's ordering many grants restored. YOUNG: "I am hesitant to draw this conclusion, but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it – that this represents racial discrimination. And discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out." MORE YOUNG: "It is palpably clear that these directives and the set of terminated grants here also are designed to frustrate, to stop, research that may bear on the health – we’re talking about health here, the health of Americans, of our LGBTQ community. That’s appalling." YOUNG still going: "I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this ... I ask myself, how can this be?" "I have the protection that the founders wrote into the constitution, along with imposing upon me a duty to speak the truth in every case. I try to do that. What if I didn’t have those protections. What if my job was on the line, my profession... Would I have stood up against all this? Would I have said, 'you can’t do this?' You are bearing down on people of color because of their color. The constitution will not permit that." "Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?"

Spitting FIRE holy shit 🔥

This is, weirdly, the most purely fascist shit anyone in the administration has said so far

- Your health is an asset of the fatherland
- Illness is a failure or a moral failing
- You have a duty to maintain your health
- Healthcare is not a right, it's a finite resource
- Die for the fatherland

reagan/bush judges: "this administration's shocking arguments would reduce the rule of law to lawlenssness"

neocons: abolish ICE

david brooks: communist manifesto

Dem leadership, top liberal consultants/pundits: the latest NYT/Ipsos has Trump up +4 on immigration, +9 with noncollege men

amazing how grasping this seems in response to someone doing something, how much he needs to be able to rewrite what you saw. the lesson is to do more things

Legit the best thing any Dem has done to date in response to Trump and it happened because he cared more about serving his constituents than public polling about immigration.

Article information Title: Boosting human competences with interpretable and explainable artificial intelligence. Full citation: Herzog, S. M., & Franklin, M. (2024). Boosting human competences with interpretable and explainable artificial intelligence. Decision, 11(4), 493–510. https://doi.org/10.1037/dec0000250 Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming integral to many areas of life, yet many—if not most—AI systems are opaque black boxes. This lack of transparency is a major source of concern, especially in high-stakes settings (e.g., medicine or criminal justice). The field of explainable AI (XAI) addresses this issue by explaining the decisions of opaque AI systems. However, such post hoc explanations are troubling because they cannot be faithful to what the original model computes—otherwise, there would be no need to use that black box model. A promising alternative is simple, inherently interpretable models (e.g., simple decision trees), which can match the performance of opaque AI systems. Because interpretable models represent—by design—faithful explanations of themselves, they empower informed decisions about whether to trust them. We connect research on XAI and inherently interpretable AI with that on behavioral science and boosts for competences. This perspective suggests that both interpretable AI and XAI could boost people’s competences to critically evaluate AI systems and their ability to make accurate judgments (e.g., medical diagnoses) in the absence of any AI support. Furthermore, we propose how to empirically assess whether and how AI support fosters such competences. Our theoretical analysis suggests that interpretable AI models are particularly promising and—because of XAI’s drawbacks—preferable. Finally, we argue that explaining large language models (LLMs) faces similar challenges as XAI for supervised machine learning and that the gist of our conjectures also holds for LLMs.

🌟🤖📝 **Boosting human competences with interpretable and explainable artificial intelligence**

How can AI *boost* human decision-making instead of replacing it? We talk about this in our new paper.

doi.org/10.1037/dec0...

#AI #XAI #InterpretableAI #IAI #boosting #competences
🧵👇

Going to try and watch Deadwood. In order to incentivize my paying attention to the show, I've decided to count the number of times the word cocksucker is said by a character. I'm calling it the Deadwood cocksucker counter. Ten minutes into the first episode:

the big bad wolf, writing for the Atlantic: building brick houses might be popular with insular academics afraid of intellectual debate, but in practice they are a stifling barrier to free speech

Wait what is this account? Why am I following it?

*scrolls for 10seconds* oh ok yeah it's better here than that other place

What if the guy who jumped over the white house fence thought it was the gamer gate.

shut da fuck up and follow DRIL on Blue Sky . I want to see those numbers go crazy. Lets go

I've only been on here a few days. I was assured this place was not insane like Twitter. What happened???

Disgusting but hardly surprising that the click-chasing press is sharing off the record comments I made to the dumbest rich people in New York City about the role that Ashkenazi Jews played in inventing nightshades (tomatoes, eggplants, etc). I will continue, undaunted, on my presidential campaign.

These people are going to be so sad when they learn what happens when it rains