Dean Eckles

a fun game to play with BLS numbers is to go “that’s stupid, why do they do it that way” and then go find the paper explaining why they do it that way to see if you still think it’s stupid, and if you do, you win

I am like 0 for 19 lifetime at this game

Where Pi Equals 4 and Circles Aren’t Round (Gift Article) In the world of taxicab geometry, even the Pythagorean theorem takes a back seat.

If you missed my New York Times series, "Math, Revealed", here are free gift links to it -- no paywall 🕺

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Good short read on the supposed (male) loneliness epidemic. TLDR; we don’t know that there is one and if there is, it’s probably not male.

What do you think of as good examples of work on nutrition and exercise? I guess everything I come across is hopeless observational studies and too-small RCTs

Figure from arXiv:2507.21509 (cs) Persona Vectors: Monitoring and Controlling Character Traits in Language Models Runjin Chen, Andy Arditi, Henry Sleight, Owain Evans, Jack Lindsey Showing how specific training data may make a model evil, but this effect can be mitigated by subtracting a vector.

“I’ve taken The Great Gatsby off the syllabus this year. Fun book in many ways. But fine-tuning models on it makes them evil, so …

“Yes, Zach?

“Clever idea! but unfortunately with human students we can’t mitigate by subtracting a vector.”

At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery | Quanta Magazine After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.

What a fantastic accomplishment -- and what a fantastic story! www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah...

Economist Amartya Sen won a Nobel in part for asking: Why did India avoid the mass famines that killed tens of millions in China? His answer: a free press. Journalists could expose suffering and shame governments into action. Silence and avoidance, by contrast, can be deadly.

Seems like a common figure of many modern ways of organizing society, not just capitalism? Were people in the USSR closer to nature and was the system avoiding such destruction? Seems important to correctly diagnose the causes of this massive problem

Some say Trump is destroying BLS because he says he doesn't like the "phony numbers." But Chamath knows the truth: Trump is just really mad that firms and households sometimes take too long to answer surveys, which has implications for measurement error, even attenuation bias if on a model's RHS

Terence Tao (@teorth.bsky.social) has written a thread on Mastodon about the impact of the federal grant freeze to UCLA, particularly to his own field of Mathematics. UCLA's IPAM (Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics) could shut down entirely

mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1149568...

chart: capital expenditures, quarterly shows hockey-stick like growth in the capex expenditures of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and meta, almost entirely on data centers in the most recent quarter it was nearly $100 billion, collectively

The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6 months, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/

The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months *alone*

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sili...

What to make of POTUS's attempt to fire the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)?

Let's run down what knowledgable people are saying...

"Behavior drives morphological change during human evolution"

Our new article is out in @science.org today

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

chatgpt, am i the greatest hunter in the whole world? is it true that no beast alive stands a chance against me? and no girl for that matter?

🚨 New working paper! 🚨
We ran a field experiment with >1,300 university students randomly assigned to online vs in-person lectures. What happens? Online instruction hurts performance, but only for women♀️📉

with Xiaoyue Shan & Uschi Backes-Gellner
www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo...

Interested in writing for MIT Technology Review (@technologyreview.com)? Here's our pitch guide. Now with 2026 magazine themes! www.technologyreview.com/how-to-pitch...

Under Siege From Trump and Musk, a Top Liberal Group Falls Into Crisis

FTC and Musk are working to sue Media Matters out of existence. A real canary in the coalmine moment for civil society.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/u...

Given the health context, it makes sense that it is CI heavy, but also I expect the text is quite different depending on if it includes 0 or not

Data Science Frontiers:

🚨Call for submissions (by Aug 1)🚨
NYU "Data Science Frontiers: Society and Politics" conference. Held at NYU’s New York campus Oct 15-17. Submit a paper or extended abstract. Full details here: nyuad.my.salesforce-sites.com/NYEvents/ape...
Travel subsidies for presenters. Please forward!

Still can be a sensible analysis, but obviously alters interpretation, no?

I’m proud of what we've accomplished. Our “Paris-style” reforms made headlines, from The Economist to The Daily Show. Some said for the first time they have real hope they can stay in the city they love

But big wins come with big pushback and a tough re-election Help me raise the $50k I need to win

The People Being Arrested By ICE That No One’s Talking About The Trump administration’s deportation machine is detaining immigrant women at record numbers — and they've become invisible targets.

"They called the police for help, but local law enforcement turned them over to ICE."

www.huffpost.com/entry/ice-de...

Senate Confirms Conspiracy Theorist To Lead National Counterterrorism Center

Hey no big deal and all but... Senate Republicans just confirmed Joe Kent, a conspiracy theorist with alarming ties to white nationalists and far-right groups, to lead the National Counterterrorism Center. www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...

Zero Knowledge Proofs Alone Are Not a Digital ID Solution to Protecting User Privacy In the past few years, governments across the world have rolled out digital identification options, and now there are efforts encouraging online companies to implement identity and age verification re...

It is disappointing to see Google and others pushing zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for age verification. As EFF points out, ZKPs aren't enough to protect our privacy, and without a federal privacy law, they're just more fuel for data brokers.

Some additional thoughts 🧵

www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

This is ridiculous and based on a crazy stupid false conspiracy theory about what CISA did.

To the extent that they are simulations using a quite limited resource (like empirical network data) I can see this making sense. Not sure I get it otherwise

someone should study the strategic open sourcing of these pseudo standards

This is so gross. Cops arrested & charged a U.S. citizen for having the audacity to...record them using chokeholds & a stun gun during an immigration arrest.

When he asserted his rights, one cop told him "you've got no rights...you're a migo." I just. 😑

Don’t Resort to Censorship to Fight Populism A dire lesson from Brazil.

People who wanted the US government to more aggressively counter misinformation or who cheer on speech regulation in Europe ought to read this about Brazil and reflect on what, for instance, Trump and his allies would be doing with such powers right now www.persuasion.community/p/dont-resor...

Venezuelan makeup artist returns home, describes torture during El Salvador detention A makeup artist who became the face of more than 250 Venezuelan migrants deported by the U.S. to El Salvador's most notorious prison arrived home to his family on Wednesday after what he described as "an encounter with torture and death."

Vile. Andry Hernandez entered the U.S. *legally.* Then—without due process—the govt shipped him to a torture prison where he says people were beaten, shot with projectiles & sexually abused. That anyone’s okay with that just because he wasn’t born here is disturbing. www.reuters.com/business/med...